A born predator?
Behind the scenes, he was already a predator, and at 16 reportedly touched the breast of a neighbor girl during his sister’s sleepover before exposing himself to her.
A cousin who spent much of her time at the Stayner house remembered other things about Cary that would have made anyone uneasy.
“He used to pretend he would hypnotize us,” said Kathy Amey. “Then he would ask us to take off our clothes.”
He also would hide behind masks and peep into the bathroom window in hopes of catching her or one of his sisters changing clothes. It caused Amey to always make sure the blinds were shut and the door was locked when she was in the room.
“You always knew he was somewhere,” she said. “Always watching.”
Around the same time, his fantasies had evolved into women being gang-raped, according to researchers at Virginia’s Radford University who created a timeline of Stayner’s life.
Fleeing to paradise to escape demons
For Stayner, the only place where he felt safe was the tranquil woods, rocks and waterways of Yosemite.
There, he and his cousin Ronnie Jones would hunt, fish and explore the caves tucked amid the granite formations that towered around them.
They also would go swimming, where they often encountered women swimming naked beneath the pines and yucca trees surrounding the park’s river.
“I was down that hill pulling my clothes off, and Cary was hanging back,” Jones later told Outside magazine. “I’d have to say, ‘Come on, what are you doing?’”
Although he had an intense focus on sex, he was rarely seen with a girlfriend, causing friends to wonder why he was so reticent with women.
They didn’t know – and how could they – that Cary had erectile dysfunction, and had trouble sustaining an erection. It led him to be shy and awkward with women, and more comfortable with younger, inexperienced girls, even as he grew older.
Instead of focusing on flesh-and-blood women, Cary created his dream girls on paper, where he drew doodles of naked women to take the place of real-life ones.
The notepad doodles were probably Cary’s biggest disappointment.
“Cary’s ultimate dream when he was growing up was to be an artist,” said his childhood friend, Matt Cone.
In fact, almost every one of his former friends and classmates who talked about him later, after it was all over and Cary was locked up on death row, they said they’d always imagined him as a cartoonist, reliving his glory days with the high school newspaper on a much more prestigious, lucrative scale.
But by the time his younger brother, Steven, escaped from his abductor, Cary had already given up that dream, was still jealous of the attention his brother received.
“I was never a very motivated kid,” Cary said. “I had a lot of things going on in my head. It was always easier not to succeed.”
By the time he was 24, the young man who had been described as a quiet loner in high school was both shy and sullen, with very little hope for his future, according to Miller, who was best known for “Days of Wine and Roses” as well as the Charles Manson story “Helter Skelter” when he began researching “I Know My First Name is Steven.”
Miller recalled his attempts to draw Cary out, sitting around the Stayer home.
“I kept at him, and eventually he kind of confided very shyly this dream he had. He wanted to be an artist,” said Miller, who suggested the budding cartoonist send his work to a few colleges in hopes of landing a scholarship.
“He said, ‘No, it’d never happen.’ You could see that he'd made up his mind that he was a loser,” Miller added.
An obsession with Bigfoot
If art wasn’t to be the thing that would help Cary Stayner stand out, then maybe one his finds in the woods of Yosemite would be the thing that made the difference.
According to family and friends, Stayner was adamant that in the woods of his favorite national park, a place he’d visited countless times as a child, he’d seen Bigfoot, the legendary apelike creature also known as Sasquatch.
The large, hairy creature has been sighted in North America for centuries, and is described as being between 7 to 11 feet tall and weighing several hundred pounds. Sightings of both male and female versions of the creature have been reported, along with reports of a foul, skunk-like odor that accompanies the beast.
Only seen in grainy photographs or documented through footprints, the legend of Bigfoot has been talked about since the mid-1800s, although the idea of Bigfoot gained the most attention in 1967 after a short 16mm film was released showing what was believed to be a female Bigfoot, slinking away into the woods.
Taken in Bluff Creek, California – now considered the Bigfoot capital of the world for sightings - by Roger Patterson and Bob Gimlin, the film instigated arguments within the Bigfoot tracking community over whether it was a hoax or not, given that Patterson had announced to friends that he was going into the woods to capture Bigfoot on film, along with the tidy profit Patterson made from the footage.
It was perhaps that short, fuzzy film – shot just a few years before Cary Stayner was born – that inspired his seemingly obsessive interest in Bigfoot.
“He talked about Bigfoot all the time,” his cousin, Kathy Amey recalled. “He absolutely knew that it existed. You couldn't have told him anything different.”
Another family member, who spoke anonymously online, wrote: “I remember when he first had told me and my brother of what he had seen, he would go very blank in the face as if he was being very serious or like somebody was watching him. He would tell us about the smell the creature had and that it was a lot bigger than him. We were very young but we knew he wasn’t playing a joke on us. I remember when I went to Camp Green Meadows in the 6th grade he told me to stay close to all the teachers and no matter what, don’t go out at night. He never really seemed the same to me after he had seen Bigfoot. So to me, maybe that’s what drove him mad. You never know.”
Much later, Stayner’s Bigfoot obsession caught the attention of reporter Ted Rowlands, to whom he gave a taped confession after his FBI confession and subsequent arrest.
He was talking about his fourth and final murder, a sloppy scene so peppered with clues that there was no way Stayner wouldn’t be caught.
He told Rowlands that he’d only encountered his victim, red-headed naturalist Joie Armstrong, outside her primitive cabin, “because he had seen Bigfoot there.”
"I guess that's why I kept going back," Cary says. "To relive the experience."
Later, he described his Bigfoot sighting to Esquire magazine, going into vivid detail about the sounds it made from within the brush when it wandered past him.
The sound was “a horrible shriek, like a woman screaming through a bullhorn right next to the car. And it went on for a long time. And then it faded away to this low growl,” he remembered.
A second tragedy
In 1990, as a young adult, Cary Stayner was living with his uncle, Jesse, in a house with an orange tree in the front yard.
Jesse taught him how to install windows and windshields and hired him at his company, C&S Glass.
Cary was raising home-grown marijuana in a closet, according to Esquire magazine, and had an illegal cable converter that he hooked up whenever his favorite ultimate fighting was on TV.
It was Christmastime in 1990 – another Christmas ruined by the unimaginable - when Stayner’s uncle came home early from work and surprised an intruder.
When Cary himself came home from work, he reportedly found his uncle lying dead in the doorway, surrounded by a pool of blood from the gunshot wound he’d sustained from his own shotgun.
According to one cousin, despite the dubious history between Stayner and his uncle, Stayner was ruled out as a suspect – he had been at work at the time of the shooting, so he had a solid alibi – but accused numerous family members of committing the crime.
“I have heard from a family member that worked closely with police on Jesse’s
murder that all along they have known who did it but just couldn't prove it in court,” said one cousin in an online thread about the case.
Still, Cary never escaped suspicion, and later, after his string of murders came to light, people were even more suspicious since the murder of Uncle Jesse remained unsolved.
Stayner’s cousin, the one he had spent so much time with wandering Yosemite as a child, wondered if perhaps Uncle Jesse died for a dark reason only he and Cary knew.
“The only reason I could figure him doing it is if our uncle knew something about him,” said Ronnie Jones. “[Like] he had maybe killed someone else.”
Chapter 2: Signs of mental illness begin to show
Cary Stayner was always considered troubled, given his obsessive desire to pull out his hair, his voyeuristic tendencies, his adamant certainty that he’d seen Bigfoot in the woods of Foresta, a cluster of cabins nestled within Yosemite National Park.
But one day, his longtime friend Michael Marchese, a guy who grew up with Stayner in Merced and got to know him better in high school despite his shy, quiet side, went outside into the yard at Merced Glass and Mirror – an auto glass replacement and window company where they both worked – and found his friend in the middle of what could only be described as a psychotic episode.
The night before, Stayner had said as much to Marchese’s common-law wife, Sprout, in effect predicting his breakdown.
On this day, he was slamming his fist against a piece of plywood, and had been doing so for a period of time, given the blood flowing from cuts he’d inflicted on his hand.
“He said he felt like he was having a breakdown and said he was all nervous and didn't know why,” Marchese told the San Francisco Chronicle. “He said he felt like getting in his truck, driving into the office, and killing everyone in there and torching the place.”
Marchese told their boss, who packed a bleeding, despondent Stayner into his truck and drove him to a Merced psychiatric center.
Stayner saw a therapist who recommended group therapy, but the shy, retiring Stayner decided he didn’t want to share his dark secrets in front of a group of people.
Instead, he went back to his former workplace to pick up his last paycheck and told his old co-workers that he was thinking of moving to Santa Cruz to finally pursue a cartooning career.
But rather than the liberal, artsy community of Santa Cruz, he headed back to the woods, and after a few odd jobs, including an attempt at establishing a medical marijuana dispensary, found himself in El Portal, west of Yosemite National Park.
There, he landed a job as a handyman at the Cedar Lodge, a motel/restaurant featuring pine cottages along the Merced River. The out-of-the-way lodge was surrounded by pine trees and towering rock formations, and it was a beautiful place to settle down.
Stayner rented a room above the diner, and started to grow accustomed to his new life.
According to a waitress at the diner, Stayner was “a cool guy” who was happy to hang out with the other employees, watching videos in each other’s rooms.
“He was totally likable,” she said. “He was ordinary.”
The waitress, however, had no idea that Stayner was just this close to fulfilling the fantasies of murder he’d harbored since before his brother Steven was kidnapped.
And it would be at Cedar Lodge, where Stayner lived even when he was laid off as a handyman during the quiet winter months, where he would ultimately bring those fantasies to life.
Chapter 3: Stayner’s first three victims
Cedar Lodge was quiet on Valentine’s Day, 1999. The temperatures dipped below freezing at night in Yosemite, so tourists were less likely to venture into the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
The place was nestled into a bit of valley, surrounded by towering pine trees and the sloping hills of the High Sierras.
It was remote and beautiful, and Carole Sund, 42, her daughter, Juli, 15, and their 16-year-old Argentinian exchange student Silvina Pelosso were enjoying the quiet beauty of the area without the bustle of so many other visitors.
They had checked into Cedar Lodge after driving from the University of the Pacific, where Juli had competed in a regional cheerleading competition and toured the campus to see if it would be a good fit for her after she graduated from high school.
They had arrived early at Cedar Lodge in a red Pontiac Grand Prix rental car, and spent the day taking in the sights, including Yosemite’s grand La Capitan and the Merced River Gorge before stopping to go ice skating in Yosemite Valley’s Curry Village.
“The girls were happy,” said Carole’s father, Francis Carrington, who had spoken to them on the phone in the midst of their adventures. “They were having the time of their lives.”
The trio had dinner at the Cedar Lodge restaurant – the girls ate cheeseburgers, Carole had a veggie burrito - before returning to their room, number 509, to watch the movie they’d rented, “Jerry McGuire,” and relax after the day’s events.
Carole, who managed several of her family’s shopping centers while juggling charity work, called her husband, Jens, to confirm when they would meet at the San Francisco Airport the next day.
They had planned to go from San Francisco to Arizona to visit Jens sister, part of their plan to show Silvina as much of the United States as possible during her year-long stay. There, they had planned to see the Grand Canyon.
When Jens arrived at the airport the next day, he was a little bit late, and Carole and the girls weren’t there. Because his wife was so organized - “Carole was a very meticulous record keeper,” Jens later said. “She never does anything that was spur of the moment because she has too many things going on.” – he thought he’d gotten the times wrong, or something, and he went on ahead to Phoenix, expecting to find them there.
“(Jens) did not find his wife at the airport and assumed she had flown ahead,” according to Time magazine columnist Robert F. Howe. “She was not in Phoenix, either, but he played a round of golf there the next day.”
When she still had not attempted to contact him, he started making some phone calls.
His first, to the rental car agency, revealed that the ladies had never returned the rented Pontiac nor notified the anxious agency that they were looking to extend their agreement.
Jens called the Cedar Lodge, only to learn that they had apparently checked out without leaving their room key at the front desk.
He immediately contacted park rangers and police to let them know something was wrong.
Theories abound
Rangers initially thought that Carole might have lost control of the rental car while driving – “We did have some rain, and there were pretty poor driving conditions,” a ranger said – and a widespread search of Yosemite was launched.
The first point of interest was the motel room, which luckily had not yet been cleaned due to the limited staff on hand during the off season.
Officials processed the scene – vacuuming up hair and fibers, pulling up the carpet and dusting for prints. In the room with two queen beds and a pink upholstered loveseat, they discovered one pink blanket was missing, along with a pillow case. The key was in plain sight, sitting on the dresser next to the TV.
Still, it didn’t look like the scene of a murder.
“The beds weren’t turned over, the furniture wasn’t askew,” said special agent Christopher Hopkins of the FBI, called in because one of the missing, Silvina Pelosso, was an Argentinian national. “The towels and rags in the bathroom appeared to have been used as if someone had showered and left.”
It was the missing blanket and pillowcase that caused concern.
“Carole Sund wouldn’t take those kind of things,” Hopkins said. “She never took anything from a hotel room.”
She also wouldn’t have left behind the bag of souvenirs that still sat next to the refrigerator.
So they turned back to the missing vehicle, keeping the Cedar Lodge motel room where the trio had last stayed on the front burner.
“Ca
role would tell everybody where she was,” said her father, Francis Carrington, “so I got in my car to drive up to the lodge. On the way up I saw highway patrolmen searching the side of the road, so I knew the search was in full swing.”
Hundreds of people began scouring the rugged territory of Yosemite in search of the rental car Carole had been driving, and although they ultimately turned up 27 stolen cars, none of them were the Grand Prix.
While they were looking for the vehicle, they heard that Carole Sund’s wallet – or at least part of it, containing some credit cards and her ID, had been found on a back road in nearby Modesto.
“After the wallet showed up in Modesto, then it became very strange,” said KTVU reporter Ted Rowlands. “It really became a mystery.”
And it worked to help throw even seasoned FBI agents off their game, who turned their focus away from the Cedar Lodge and focused primarily on the Modesto area.
“The wallet changed everybody’s feelings about what was going on in the investigation, because let’s face it,” said Jeff Rinek, initially the lead FBI investigator on the case. “People don’t part with their wallets willingly because that’s their identity. To find elements of this woman’s identity in an intersection some distance from where they were is cause for concern.”
The FBI had set up shop at a Modesto hotel room, where they poured over evidence while TV crews buzzed around the region in hopes of learning what leads the FBI agents were following.
Jens Sund and Carole’s parents, Francis and Carole Carrington – a prominent real estate family from Eureka, California – moved to Yosemite and began conducting their own investigation from their hotel room at the Modesto Holiday Inn.
Jens was initially considered a suspect in the case, because he – unlike the emotionally distraught Francis Carrington – was calm and showed little emotion, and was called in for a three-house interview that included a polygraph and questions about that golf game he played in Phoenix before calling authorities in.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 35
