I've resolved it with your help, see below:

if ($line =~ qr|$owner\s+(\d+).*$processName|)

The line above wound up being the winner.

The line I was parsing is below, however it is abbreviated because the other JVM params and classpath show up after that. That's why the trailing $ didn't work. Don't know why the whitespace character before the processName didn't work.

firtdev3 23052  0.3  0.3 5914496 419300 ?      Sl   12:41   0:29 /opt/
+streets/vendorLib/java/linux/jdk1.7.0_45/bin/java -DprocessName=STP_I
+NBOUND_INTERFACES.3
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