I Know My First Name Is Steven

by Echols, Mike

  In silence the trio slid past the Boonville Airport (where Dennis had once wanted to attend Anderson Valley High School's popular pilot training program), turned south onto California 128, and drove into Boonville, where the Mexican abruptly pulled up near The Horn of Zeese Restaurant and went to check out his friend's car. During this stop Dennis winced as he briefly considered the likelihood of his dad discovering him with Timmy. He had brought along his Bowie knife just in case, but the thought of actually having to use it sent shivers down his spine. Then, suddenly, they were moving again.

  They went south to Highway 128's intersection with 253 where, as Dennis had anticipated, the driver turned north and left the Anderson Valley behind as they chugged over the coastal range's rolling hills before dropping down into "deep valley," or Yo-kia, as the Pomo Indians called it before it was Anglicized to "Ukiah."

  As they came down the last hill into Ukiah, it hit Dennis hard for the first time: "It's me against the world. I'm alone now. There's no one to turn to and no one to help me make the decisions."

  Dennis had told the Mexican that he and his little brother were traveling from Point Arena to their new home in Ukiah, and as they drove into town, Timmy whispered to Dennis that he wanted to go to his babysitter's house and that they should get out near The Bottle Shoppe . . . and that was where Dennis had the driver drop them off.

  Sixteen days earlier Timmy had left his half-day kindergarten class at Yokayo Elementary School for the daily walk to his babysitter's house. But he never made it, and his babysitter, Diane Crawford, had waited in vain for her charge, not knowing that Dennis's dad, Ken Parnell, had snatched Timmy from the sidewalk.

  Now, at nine o'clock Saturday night, Dennis and Timmy walked west from State Street to Diane's house on South Avenue, but no one was home. At this point Dennis told Timmy that he would escort him to the Ukiah Police Station, but Timmy refused, saying he knew where he lived and that that was where he wanted to go. The kindergartner pointed Dennis south along South State Street, but when they reached its intersection with freeway U.S. 101 out of San Francisco, Timmy became confused. Even though they were headed in the right direction, the boys were still five miles from Timmy's house.

  But Timmy insisted that Dennis take him home, and so they continued a little farther south along the freeway's shoulder until they reached the Boonville exit, where Dennis became convinced that they were lost and finally talked Timmy into allowing him to take him to the police station. The weary pair turned around and trudged nearly two miles back up South State Street until they reached The Palace Hotel, where they turned down East Standley Street.

  In taking this route, at a little past eleven o'clock that night, Dennis Parnell passed the hotel where his dad was working his first night as the security guard. Dennis had his dad's latest family addition with him, but fortunately, the three of them did not meet, and it would be early the next morning before Dennis would see his dad again . . . and then under very strained circumstances.

  Dennis stopped at the corner of Main and East Standley, where he instructed and encouraged Timmy to continue alone to the Ukiah Police Station just three-fourths of a block away, tell them his name, and, Dennis assured the frightened little boy, the police would see that he got home. Then the fourteen-year-old watched as his little brother slowly made his way to the station's front door, opened it a crack, began to cry, and then let go of the door and ran back to his big brother.

  Inside the station, Officer Bob Warner had seen the little dark-haired boy come to the door, open it, and run away. This was suspicious for that hour of the night, and he went to the door and watched as the child ran up to a much older boy across the parking lot. Fearing that the boys would run away if he approached them on foot, Warner radioed for a patrol unit.

  Within two minutes Officer Russel VanVoorhis pulled his cruiser up beside the two boys, stepped out, and asked the older of the two what the younger boy's name was. Replied Dennis, "Timmy White." Recognizing that as the name of a local five-year-old blond boy who had been missing for over two weeks, a surprised Officer VanVoorhis squatted next to the dark-haired little boy and asked his name again, just to be sure. "Timmy White!" came the crisp reply.

  Two hundred miles south, in Merced, California, as they had for over seven years, Delbert and Kay Stayner went to bed knowing the whereabouts of only four of their five children. In another room of their home, eleven-year-old Cory cried herself to sleep over the long-ago disappearance of her brother, Steven, who would be fourteen now . . . if he was still alive. And, as she had done for most of her life, Cory prayed that Steven was safe and that he would come home soon.

  In Ukiah, Officer VanVoorhis straightened himself up to address the older boy, but before he could speak, Dennis said, "My name is Steven Stayner, and I've been missing from Merced for seven years."

  Even though he misspelled his name in his initial written report for the Ukiah Police Department that night, Dennis Gregory Parnell was on the way to becoming Steven Gregory Stayner again for the first time in more than seven years. As he said at the beginning of that statement, "I know my first name is Steven, I'm pretty sure my last name is Stainer [sic]."

  Chapter One

  Steven Gregory Stayner

  "He was always just like a puppy dog."

  Just north of the monstrous urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles, after Interstate 5 climbs over Tejon Pass, California 99—a freeway in its own right—angles off to the right and begins its descent through sparsely covered arid hills into Bakersfield, the city that pins the southern end of the vast, flat, agricultural San Joaquin Valley. The boyhood home of New York Giants' football great Frank Gifford, Bakersfield was also the boyhood home of Kenneth Parnell. Mary Parnell, Ken's octogenarian mother, still lives in Bakersfield and attends the Assembly of God Church, where as teenagers these two dissimilar boys played basketball on the same church team in the late 1940s. But as a young man Parnell had interests other than sports, and at nineteen he was arrested, tried, and convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a nine-year-old boy. After court-ordered stays in two state mental hospitals—from which he made three escapes—this diagnosed sexual psychopath was sentenced to prison and effectively banished from the blue-collar community of hard-working, patriotic American families with young children.

  Outside Bakersfield, semis with empty trailers rush northward to pick up their loads of carrots, cucumbers, peaches, watermelons, and other produce from the huge commercial farms that blanket the valley floor. So ubiquitous are these trucks that at harvest time they choke all four lanes north and south as they hurry to and from Delano, Earlimart, Visalia, Kingsburgh, and scores of other farming towns familiar across the United States as points-of-origin stamped on produce crates and boxes.

  At 65 mph and more, the agricultural traffic rumbles up California 99 and slices through the southwest edge of Fresno, the largest city in the Valley, before rolling on north through Madera and Chowchilla—known since 1976 for its own infamous kidnapping, that of an entire schoolbus full of children. Another twenty miles north is Merced, a modest city of fifty-thousand middle-class citizens, much like those in Bakersfield, 160 miles to the south. During the summer many tourists exit onto California 140, Yosemite Parkway, and head east eighty miles to the cooler Yosemite National Park, thousands of feet higher in the ruggedly beautiful Sierra Nevadas.

  On Yosemite Parkway, one block past the Red Ball Gas Station at Jean Street, is Shirley Street. Down Shirley a short block, left on Dawn a block, and then right onto Bette for a long block—in a neighborhood of older, lower-middle-class homes with small, well-tended front yards and young children—is number 1655, a pea green frame house shaded by a huge elm tree, its large root running just under the sidewalk and heaving it up several inches, thus providing a ramp of sorts for the tykes who furiously pedal their Big Wheels up and down the pavement.

  In 1972 it was the home of Delbert and Kay Stayner and their five children, including their middle child, then seven-ye
ar-old Steven, an active, almost buck-toothed boy with a slight mask of freckles.

  In a house barely a quarter mile from the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, the Stayners and their brood escaped the dry, blast-furnace heat of San Joaquin Valley summers in their backyard swimming pool—one of the few luxuries they allowed themselves—where they could hear the railroads' vegetable and fruit expresses thundering through town headed to markets far and near.

  At five feet ten, Del is just slightly taller than his wife, Kay, and with a lean build and a deeply lined, suntanned face, he looks every bit like a man devoted to hard outdoor physical labor who could easily be a character from a Steinbeck novel. A folksy, entertaining spinner of tales, Del enjoys people. His favorite subjects are his family, his friends, his work, and the San Joaquin Valley. Inside or out, he is never without a stained gimmie cap, emblazoned with a farm equipment or fertilizer logo, which hides his ever-increasing baldness. Almost a decade older than his wife, Del was born during the Great Depression in dusty, remote Farmington, New Mexico. After the war, while he was still a teenager, his family moved west to California so that Del's father, Tal, could find work in the expanding agricultural industry of the San Joaquin Valley.

  A robust young man, Del worked in the Valley's fruit and vegetable fields himself until his late twenties, when he struck out for northern California and found a job as a laborer at a sawmill in the isolated hamlet of Hyampom in Trinity County. He soon met pretty, black-haired, olive-complexioned Mary Katherine "Kay" Augustine, the eighteen-year-old daughter of local dairy and truck farmer Bob Augustine and his wife, Mary. After four years away from home at a Roman Catholic girls' boarding school in Redwood—four years away from boys, too—Kay had graduated and returned. Quiet but headstrong, she was immediately struck by this no-nonsense man boarding near her home. After a courtship of just a few weeks, she and Del married on July 1, 1960.

  In November the couple moved south to be near Del's family in Merced. With the fruit and vegetable canning season almost over, Del was lucky to find work as a year-round machinery mechanic for the Consolidated Canners & Growers (CC&G) fruit and vegetable packing plant east of Merced on California 140. Del and Kay settled into a small rented house on Charles Street, where they were content with their simple life: nearby relatives, like-minded friends from CC&G, and, in August of 1961, their firstborn, a son they named Cary. Then, at roughly two-year intervals, while Del worked and Kay ran the household, the couple had four more children: a daughter, Cindy, in October 1963; a second son, Steven, in April 1965; a second daughter, Jody, in January 1967; and, after they moved from Merced, their last child and third daughter, Cory, in November 1968.

  What the couple craved was a country setting in which to raise their growing family, and in early March of 1967, the lure of rural life led them to buy a modest almond ranch in northern Merced County, near the small agrarian community of Snelling. Del proudly moved his growing family into one of the two older frame houses on the twenty acres of gently rolling land and began dry-farming his orchard of hundreds of almond trees, selling his small crop to the Blue Diamond Cooperative. Even though the ranch required his almost constant attention, Del continued his full-time job at the CC&G plant twenty miles away. It made for eighteen-hour days six days a week during a canning season which corresponded with Del's own harvest season.

  Stevie—Del's pet name for Steven—was a dynamo of a little boy who loved being outside with his father as Del pruned, sprayed, and harvested his almond crop. Reminisced Del, "When he was small, Stevie wanted to go everywhere I went. I wouldn't let him ride on the tractor when I was goin' under the trees because the al-mond"—Del's distinctive pronunciation of the word—"branches was so low I was afraid he was goin' to get hit in the face. But he'd walk behind, and he'd just keep on walkin' . . . he'd walk miles following me. Then, when I'd come in from work and lay on the couch and watch TV, Stevie would come and curl up with me on the couch and I would bite him on the ear and he'd laugh. He was always just like a puppy dog."

  Kay, as much family manager as mother, remarked that Steven liked to follow Del around, because "Papa did all the exciting things . . . and me, all I would say was, 'Go clean your room, go wash your face, go blow your nose.' "

  Agreed Steve, "Yeah that was me. I was just like a puppy dog. Everywhere he went I wanted to go. That's why me and him did a lot of things together when I was little . . . a lot of things happened to us together." Years later Steve recalled his family's life at the ranch as the most idyllic period of his childhood: "I loved it. I could go just about anywhere I wanted with my dog Daisy."

  "Yes," Kay recalled with a smile, "he still talks about his Daisy. She was a collie. All of the kids went with us to pick her out, but Steven considered her his. Daisy would run through the orchard with him and fetch a stick and play with him and wrestle with him on the ground. Daisy was the kind of dog that you picked up and loved. And at the ranch we never did have to worry about anything happening to Steve, because we had twenty acres of almond trees around us, and he could have been missing for three hours and we wouldn't have known it."

  Having experienced a surfeit of Catholicism during her four years studying under the nuns in Redwood, Kay had deferred to her husband in the matter of the family's religion. Del's great-grandfather had marched to Mexico with the U. S. Army's Mormon battalion, which had fought under General Zachary Taylor in the Mexican-American War, and Del had been raised in a family with a Mormon faith as resolute as that of their pioneer forebears. Through the 1960s and into the early 1970s a solid, participatory Mormon faith was an integral part of the Stayners' family life. Steve's sister Cindy fondly reminisced that even when they lived at the ranch, twice a week they drove the twenty miles each way to services at the Mormon Stake in Merced, there not being one in Snelling. "Mom and Dad didn't make us go, we always liked it and wanted to go."

  Kay laughed as she joyously recalled her family's rural life: "It was your average ill-run agricultural operation. But the kids did have fun there. We had cows, goats, and pigs . . . the pigs we were constantly chasing down the road. At one time we tried to raise some calves, but we didn't grow any feed, because there was no irrigation on the place, so we really didn't do it economically. And then we raised chinchillas. It was some success . . . we bought two. One died and the other ran away."

  But the days of the family's bucolic existence on the almond ranch were numbered. Del's struggle to dry-farm the almonds by himself and work for CC&G finally took its physical toll on him. One morning in 1970, while he was shaving in the bathroom with Stevie at his side, he suffered a slipped disk, passed out from the pain, and fell to the floor. Kay called an ambulance to take her husband to Mercy Hospital in Merced, where he underwent back surgery. The incident so terrified Stevie that for many years afterward he thought his beloved dad had suffered a heart attack.

  When he got home from the hospital a few weeks later, Del somehow found the intestinal fortitude to continue his single-handed dry-farming, but he soon thought it wise to take on a partner. He asked his good friend and cannery coworker Mac Scoggins to join him, and Mac and his wife Sandy and their three children soon moved into the other house on the ranch. Kay and Sandy had been good friends for as long as Del and Mac had, and both women relished their new lives as farm mothers watching their children grow up and interact with each other. Even though the Scoggins' offspring were older than Steven, he played with them as much as he did with his own brother and sisters. Kay remarked that her son was so amiable that he would mix well and fit into any group of children with ease, regardless of age, adding, "He never did anything really out of line. He was just normal . . . an ordinary boy who would drive you crazy asking can he please do something."

  But Del recollected an occasion when Stevie and Cindy failed to ask. "They was about three and five, and here was this cap and they got it off and here was this hole where the cap had been, and so they figured that they had to find somethin' to put in it. So they found a lot of sand
and gravel in the driveway, and they just had a ball. The next mornin' I couldn't figure out what the heck was wrong with my truck. It wouldn't run . . .just sat there and idled . . . They was standin' there watchin' me cleanin' it up. Then Cindy said, 'Stevie put that stuff in there.' And he said, 'No, not me. You put that in there.' And they tickled me so much that I never did spank 'em, I got to laughin' so hard. I just sent them inside."

  As Steven got older he continued his affectionate me-and-my-shadow relationship with his father. The two of them went on frequent hunting or fishing trips, or Stevie just rode around with his "Papa."

  "Naturally," Steve fondly said, "I was around my dad a lot and, of course, I loved my dad and I admired him."

  The exceptionally dry summer of 1971, coupled with the property's scant irrigation, forced the Stayners and the Scoggins to reluctantly sell their ranch and move back into Merced. It was a sad day for Stevie and his dog Daisy when his family moved to the house on Bette Street. Years later Kay told of Daisy's unhappiness after the move. The collie had had the run of the ranch and its considerable acreage on both sides, but on Bette Street she found herself confined inside the fenced backyard and she paced around its perimeter until she wore a path into the grass. Then one day Kay took her children to the local zoo and they saw a wolf pacing back and forth along the front of its cage, just as Daisy did. This so disturbed Kay that when they returned home she talked with her children and they all agreed it would be better to give Daisy to friends living in the country.