When the ego overwhelms him or the person has a weak ego, he manifests the oppressive feelings in the form of gruesome and macabre murders.
Organized vs. disorganized crime
Serial killers are either disorganized in the way they commit the crime or exhibit an organized pattern. The psychiatrists and investigating officers use the assessment of the victims, crime scene and the evidence from forensic investigation to arrive at the behavioral and personality traits of the killer.
An organized offender leads an ordered life and has an above the average intelligence. He is involved in skilled employment and generally competent socially. An organized killer does not leave the weapon used for killing, fingerprints or blood behind that may lead to him. According to studies, killing is his reaction to the stressful events he faces in life.
A disorganized killer does just the opposite. He leaves the place of killing in disarray. This type of killer is opportunistic and kills the victims close to his residence. He is of below average intellect and socially inadequate and struggles to maintain any type of social relationships. This limited contact with conventional society makes it easy for the killer to resort to criminal behavior.
As you can see Charles Ray Hatcher’s personality started at infancy through a troubled childhood onto an adult life where he couldn’t keep a permanent job for long. The social disadvantage present in him resulted in impaired self-control and other traits that any law-abiding person has. Socialization helps a great extent in curbing such anomalies.
While the psychological analysis of a serial killer is frightening at the outset it is also intriguing and makes one wonder if the situation could have been rectified. Although many theories and research into the psychological aspect of serial killers is underway, no concrete theory is present to explain it fully.
From the days of Jack the Ripper to the present day serial killer suspect Devin Howell, the criminology and sociological pattern is analyzed continuously to understand the psychology of the killer. The analyses in many cases have helped deter the criminal actions and in future may fully intervene saving many victims in a timely fashion.
Cary Stayner:
The True Story of The Yosemite Park Killer
by Jack Rosewood
Historical Serial Killers and Murderers
True Crime by Evil Killers
Volume 4
Copyright © 2015 by Wiq Media
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED
No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, scanning, or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Table of Contents
Introduction
A legacy of abuse
An abduction heard ’round the nation
A triumphant – but not happy - return
An invisible boy
Resentment only grows
Clues to a future killer?
Chapter 1: A monster in the making
One brother disappears, another brother changes
A born predator?
Fleeing to paradise to escape demons
An obsession with Bigfoot
A second tragedy
Chapter 2: Signs of mental illness begin to show
Chapter 3: Stayner’s first three victims
Theories abound
Meth addicts in the focus
Chapter 4: February 15’s hours of horror
Bad romance
Hiding the evidence
Chapter 5: A gruesome discovery
A move made in true serial killer fashion
Talk of the town
Following the wrong lead, chasing the wrong suspects
Chapter 6: Stayner’s last victim fought hard to survive
Officers arrive at the scene
A gruesome discovery
A fight for her life
Strong and determined
A Valentine to an angel
Others remember the joy of knowing Joie
Chapter 7: Closing in on Cary Stayner
Giving feds the slip
A familiar hideout
Listening with rising horror
Tricks up his sleeve
Shock, surprise and sorrow
Remembering Cary Stayner
Too good looking to kill?
Chapter 8: Stayner’s TV confession
Another reporter’s chilling tale
Chapter 9: Stayner – and his victims – have their day in court
A plea deal spares Stayner the death penalty
Stayner’s family finally shows emotion
Stayner’s indictment leads to volatile courtroom
A second trial, a second chance at death
Considering mental illness
Fate – and a father – kept girl from becoming a victim
Expressing his sorrow
Family braces itself for grisly details
Considering a fair sentence
Chapter 10: The aftermath
More books by Jack Rosewood
A Note From The Author
Introduction
Born in Merced, California, an agricultural town in the San Joaquin Valley known as the Gateway to Yosemite, Cary Anthony Stayner always loved the woods.
He was raised with his three sisters, Cindy, Jody and Cory, along with his younger brother Steven in a small green house on the edge of town. The lower-middle-class neighborhood was not far from the railroad tracks, but the family cooled off in the California heat under an elm tree that shaded the front yard and in an above-ground pool that took up much of the back.
His father, Delbert Stayner, was a mechanic who worked at several local canneries during the harvest season, while his mother, Kay, ran a day-care business while juggling work as a lunch lady at several area high school cafeterias.
They spent summer months on family camping trips, traveling to numerous national parks including the nearby Yosemite.
In school, Cary got pretty good grades, and after school, he played outfield on the Merced school baseball team.
It would seem on the surface that everything was quite normal with the Stayner clan, but those who knew them well say it wasn’t really so.
“There is just something, you know, off with that whole family,” a friend of the family told Esquire magazine after the Stayners landed in the news.
A legacy of abuse
Kay, who was born into a Roman Catholic family, attended a boarding school where she had been physically and emotionally abused, which caused her to reject the church and turn toward the Mormon religion for guidance.
Still, the damage had been done, and she later told author Mike Echols that “she just couldn't get into the hugging and kissing” that was part of being a warm, loving parent.
She was, Echols said, “in a perfunctory sense, very concerned about their being fed and clothed, but she was not touchy-feely. She was not physically affectionate.”
On the other hand, the children’s father, Delbert, was perhaps a bit too affectionate.
Delbert was ordered into treatment after being accused of sexually molesting one of his daughters, an act that would be the first inkling that something was very amiss in the Stayner household.
A family tragedy that would earn national attention would only worsen the already troubling situation.
An abduction heard ’round the nation
In 1972, the family’s youngest son, Steven, was abducted by convicted pedophile Kenneth Parnell. It was a few days before Christmas, and Steven was lured into Parnell’s vehicle with a question about whether or not his mother might be interested in donating to a charity.
Steven told Parnell she likely would, so Parnell offered to give Steven a ride home so he would not have to walk the rest of the way in the sleet.
Instead of taking Steven home, however, they went to Parnell’s small rented cabin at Yosemite Lodge where he worked, and Steven was told
that his parents had moved and had signed over custody to Parnell. The man who told Steven to call him “Dad” bought the boy a puppy – Steven named her Queenie – and began years of abuse that involved Steven being brutally sodomized almost every night.
Meanwhile, his parents were grieving the loss of their son and struggling to maintain hope that he was still alive.
“I more or less closed up,” Kay told People magazine. “I didn't leave the house for a year, and if I had to, someone else had to be there in case Stevie came home. I chose to believe he was alive.”
Delbert, however, handled things differently.
“I went berserk for a time,” he said in the same People interview. “I’d ride around in my pickup with a sawed-off shotgun on the seat in case I saw someone with Stevie. I began to suspect everyone had something to do with it — friends, neighbors, even family members. If a child dies, you bury the child. With a missing child, you have a knot in your chest that never leaves.”
For seven years, Steven lived as a sex slave, until Valentine’s Day of 1980, when Parnell – having decided that Steven was too old for his perverse sexual tastes - abducted 5-year-old Timmy White, grabbing him up so quickly that the boy dropped his paper hearts in a ditch along the road leading to his babysitter’s house.
Steven, then 14, was terrified for the little boy, and when Parnell left for work, he grabbed Timmy White and they hitchhiked until they found themselves at the Ukiah police station.
A triumphant – but not happy - return
Steven Stayner was a hero, and he received a hero’s welcome when he made it back to Merced, where he was depicted in a large photo above the fold of the front page of the Merced Sun-Star being embraced by Kay and Delbert.
It was March 2, 1980, and Cary Stayner – who had silently prayed every night for this brother’s return - was coming home from a camping trip in Yosemite with some friends when he heard the news of his brother’s escape from the clutches of a madman.
He later told reporters he was so excited he “almost drove his car into the Merced River.”
That excitement didn’t last.
After Steven’s triumphant return home, his story made national news. He had become a celebrity of sorts, and his notoriety would only grow after the release of the TV miniseries “I Know My First Name is Steven,” inspired by the statement written by Steven while with the Ukiah police.
Linda Shertz, who lived two doors down from the Stayners, said when Steven returned home, the entire family turned its focus to him, to the detriment of everyone else.
“Everything they did and everything they had, it was about Steven,” she said.
Cary, whose father had long hinted that the 11-year-old could have prevented the kidnapping if only he’d followed his usual routine of walking home from school with his brother and sisters, was again shoved aside while the attention turned toward his brother.
An invisible boy
When Steven made his long-awaited return back to the little green house on the edge of town, it was to the bedroom that he and Cary had shared, but had since been Cary’s alone.
“I think it must have really affected Cary,” said Michael Kollman, a neighbor of the Stayners for 20 years. “When Steven came home, Cary was kind of put on the back shelf. He was in the background always.”
So much in the background was Cary that he was almost invisible, said Echols, who wrote the book “I Know My First Name is Steven,” which was adapted into JP Miller’s screenplay. In it, Echols told of a stunning event that occurred on a night he had joined the family for dinner.
“After (Kay) walked back to the stove after setting the table, Steven remarked to her that she had forgotten one place setting. ‘Who?’ she said, and Steven pointed over to his brother. ‘Oh yes,’ she said. ‘Cary.’”
Resentment only grows
“We never really got along well after he came back,” Cary told Miller, who also spent time with the family researching the 1989 miniseries. “just little things, but they kind of irked me... The way I see, just about anybody would have done the same thing in his shoes. [But] his head was all bloated out. All of a sudden Steve was getting all these gifts, getting all this clothing, getting all this attention. I guess I was jealous. I’m sure I was.... I was the oldest and all that. Then all of a sudden it’s gone. I got put on the back burner, you might say.”
Steven too struggled with issues within the family.
The family disapproved of therapy – it was for the weak, Delbert and Kay believed – so neither Steven nor any of the other children were allowed to see a therapist to talk about their feelings regarding Steven’s abduction or the childhood sexual trauma some of the others had experienced.
For Steven, it could not have helped that after he testified against Parnell at trial, the pedophile who claimed to have sodomized Stayner more than 3,000 times over the seven years he held him, only received five years in prison, a sentence less than the time he’d held Steven captive.
“I returned almost a grown man and yet my parents saw me at first as their 7-year-old. After they stopped trying to teach me the fundamentals all over again, it got better. But why doesn’t my dad hug me anymore? Everything has changed,” he said in an interview with Newsweek magazine. “Sometimes I blame myself. I don't know sometimes if I should have come home. Would I have been better off if I didn't?”
A few weeks after the miniseries was released, Steven Stayner was dead, his motorcycle colliding with a vehicle in a hit-and-run, and again, Steven was the focus of everyone’s attention.
Clues to a future killer?
On the surface, it might seem as if that childhood trauma that ended in tragedy might have been the catalyst for what would transform Cary Stayner from a nature-loving young man with a flair for cartoons into a cold-blooded serial killer.
In truth, it had been there all along, simmering beneath the surface long before the Stayner family gained national attention when Steven went missing, and again when he returned.
Cary had already spent more than a decade fantasizing about killing women, something that became part of his imaginary life at age 7, four years before his brother went missing.
Chapter 1: A monster in the making
Born Aug. 12, 1961, Cary Stayner was three when he was diagnosed with trichotillomania, a disorder that causes its sufferers to compulsively pull out their hair.
Mental Health America describes it as “an impulse control disorder, along the lines of pyromania, kleptomania and pathologic gambling.”
Within a few years’ time, he was harboring fantasies of killing the checkout clerks at the grocery store when he went shopping with his parents.
He would sit in the car and watch them through the window as they rang up groceries, increasingly troubling thoughts swirling through his head.
Those dark fantasies only grew when he became the first child in the Stayner family to be molested.
Just before Steven’s abduction, Cary was sexually abused by his uncle, Jesse Stayner, an incident that was predicted long in advance but shoved under a rug, since no one came to the rescue of Uncle Jesse’s young victims.
“Although (the uncle’s) sexual proclivities were well known to Cary's older male cousins, he was nevertheless allowed to take boys for overnights in his tiny apartment,” psychiatrist George Woods would later testify in court.
One night during a sleepover, the uncle showed Stayner and his cousin nude pictures of young girls, then the uncle and Stayner went to sleep in the uncle’s bed.
In the middle of the night, Stayner woke up to find the uncle removing his underwear and attempting to molest him.
One brother disappears, another brother changes
The uncle was later convicted of the crime, but if there was any attention paid to Cary for the potentially life-shattering event, it would be over in a flash as attention turned toward his brother later that year.
His disappearance crushed the family, changed it, and made everything seem
topsy turvy and unreal.
“Before Steve disappeared, I always thought my dad was like the Rock of Gibraltar,” Cary said. “Never trembled at all. All of a sudden, this one day, Dec. 4, 1972, my little brother is gone, and my dad is crying all of a sudden. Never saw my dad have a tear in his eye in my whole life. All of a sudden, life changed.”
And there was Cary, right in the middle of it, trying to make sense of a world that had suddenly gone as mad as the fantasies that were already swirling in his head.
“It would have helped if they'd gotten some therapy, but you just didn't think of it back then,” said his aunt, Anna Jones. “You told yourself you were strong and you could handle it.”
But in reality, no one really handled it, and the four kids remaining in the Stayner house became like ghosts in a house filled with heartbreak.
“Maybe the other kids didn't get as much love as they should have because of all the pain and sorrow,” Jones said.
For Cary Stayner, his feelings of being invisible and ghostlike stayed with him from home to school.
He was enrolled in gifted classes at Merced High School, where his classmates voted him “most creative” for cartoons he’d drawn for the school paper, but even at school, he was somewhat invisible.
According to Esquire magazine, his name was misspelled in almost every one of his high school yearbooks, even the year he was on the yearbook staff, and was listed as Carry Stayner. Cary was in the back row for the photo, staring at the floor. The next two years, he was called Gary.
He tried to get people to call him Anthony, his middle name, but that never took.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 34
