by Echols, Mike
In Merced, Del still had deep suspicions that a lot of people knew something about his Stevie's disappearance but weren't talking. One day he had his family out for a drive when he spotted a man idly—ominously, to Del—standing beside a mound of dirt at the roadside. This so upset Del that he turned around and drove back and, much to the embarrassment of his family, parked across the road and stared at the stranger. Startled, the man got into his car and drove off. Del then went to the police and tried to get them to dig up the mound to see if Stevie was buried there, but they would not do it and for years afterward Del felt that just maybe that man knew something about his Stevie's whereabouts.
Kay's parents divorced, and her mother, Mary, moved in with them on Bette Street. As another Christmas approached, this kind lady did her best to keep the family's, and especially her son-in-law's, spirits up by playing excitedly with her grandchildren, but it just didn't work. Finally, on Christmas Day, Del internalized all he could before again retiring to his bedroom to talk to Stevie's picture, cry, and sniff his lost son's clothes.
Del reminisced morosely years later, "I kept all of his clothes. I wouldn't let none of his clothes be thrown away. And I would take them out and smell them. I just wanted them close to me. I had his little shoes and socks—and maybe someone would think it was silly—but I would smell them just to see what his little body smelled like."
That Christmas in Santa Rosa Dennis thought a lot about what Parnell had told him, that his family had not been able to afford to take care of him and that that was why the judge had sent him to live with Parnell. "Maybe he is right," Dennis recalled having thought to himself at that time. "Still, it was a compromise. I never did give up hope of returning home to my family someday."
At school just before Christmas Dennis and his classmates made cards for their parents, his own green-and-red construction paper card to Ken reading, "Merry Christmas to Dad from Dennis." Just before school was out for the holidays Ken and Barbara accompanied Dennis to school to see him in the Christmas play. Dennis doesn't remember the part he played, but he does recall Ken and Barbara introducing themselves to his teacher as "man and wife."
During the Christmas holidays Dennis recalled that Parnell attempted—with his help—to kidnap another boy, driving him to Santa Rosa's Codding Town Shopping Mall and instructing Dennis to go up to a particular boy near his age. Said Dennis, "Parnell watched a particular kid for fifteen or twenty minutes, and after he made sure that the kid wasn't with anyone, he said, 'Go over to that kid.' And I went over to the kid and said, 'Hey, have you seen a kid around here about so high with blond hair?' And he said, 'No.' And I said, 'Thank you.' And then I went to Parnell and told him, 'He doesn't want to go with me.'
"Parnell didn't get mad. We just stayed there and tried for another one! And we did this for two whole hours! He wanted me to try and approach the kids because he thought that he would stand out as a man going up to a boy and asking him questions and stuff, so he never took the chance. He always put me or somebody else up to it."
With Barbara present, Christmas 1974 slightly resembled Dennis's Christmases past in Merced in that he got several gifts and there was someone besides Ken with whom he could share the joys and pleasures of the holiday. But Dennis longed for his own large family 160 miles to the south, even though by the time the holidays had ended, Dennis's life with Barbara and Ken had smoothed out. . . except, that is, for the rare, totally abnormal, coerced heterosexual intercourse with his "mother." But Dennis kept quiet, saying nothing to anyone about that side of his relationship with Barbara.
In the spring of 1975, at Ken's urging, Dennis joined the Santa Rosa Boys' Club where he often swam, played ping-pong, and enjoyed the company of other boys. But one day when Ken and Barbara picked him up at the club, Parnell asked Barbara to lure a certain young boy into the car with them. Barbara did exactly as Parnell had instructed her and didn't ask any questions, but when she approached the car with the boy, the lad hesitated. Sensing trouble, Parnell shouted at Barbara to hurry and get into the car. She obeyed and the trio quickly drove home in silence without the boy, as if nothing had happened and, even though Dennis and Barbara do not recall Ken ever saying anything more about the episode, soon thereafter Parnell pulled up stakes in Santa Rosa.
On the last Sunday of October 1984, the author tracked Barbara to a remote mountaintop in rural northern Mendocino County, where she then lived on twenty rugged, wooded acres with her common-law husband, John Allen, and youngest son, Lloyd. A Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputy provided detailed directions to the place but refused to escort the author "cause John raises 'funny stuff up there and you never can tell what he'll do."
The road to the property is seven desolate miles of unsigned, rutted track, and that Sunday afternoon thick fog hid the mountaintops while fat fingers of the brume wafted down through the many small valleys crisscrossing the road and enveloping the road's sole traveler. The property itself was crudely fenced and posted with homemade signs reading "No Tresspassing [sic]" and "Tresspassers [sic] will be shot." Once across the cattleguard, a drive wound around a quarter-mile maze of derelict wrecked trucks, autos, and abandoned farm and road machinery with a backdrop of dark, forbidding pines, ending at an old, twenty-foot-long decrepit house trailer that looked as if a final lurch had left it in that position.
At some point in the dim, distant past the now-peeling trailer had been painted a bilious light green. One end of the trailer poked from the fog-shrouded pine forest and was surrounded by several dark forms low to the ground, forms which quickly found their voice as the author braked to a halt. . . they were large, mangy, vicious guard dogs. Another equally decrepit house trailer sat a short distance away, and beyond it were a couple of small metal sheds, one of which had still more loudly barking guard dogs chained to it. All in all, the scene was one of an ethereal Tobacco Road West.
Except for the dogs, the place appeared totally deserted. Soon, though, a gangling, gaunt teenaged boy emerged from the bilious green trailer and shouted above the din to ask what the visitor wanted. The author shouted back an introduction and explanation and thus met Barbara's then-sixteen-year-old son, Lloyd. The boy shushed the dogs and said that Barbara and John—"my parents"—had gone to San Francisco, but that the author was welcome to talk with him inside the trailer which, it turned out, was the small family's home.
The inside was dirty and trashy, a thin layer of dust-covered frying grease coating doorknobs, light switches, walls, cupboards, the floor, the ceiling . . . everything one touched or saw. The kitchen counter, chairs, and a small, rickety old dining table were all piled high with refuse, unwashed dishes, and food-encrusted pots and pans. There was no running water, telephone, or electricity, although a cluttered shelf held a small battery-powered black and white TV flicking a pro football game. The forlorn-looking teenager invited the author to sit with him on his narrow wood bunk slung along the trailer's wall and watch the game.
The author began his interview and over the next two hours this kindly, soft-spoken young man with milk-white skin and finely chiseled features enunciated his answers slowly and with some hesitation. (Later Lloyd's mother confirmed the author's suspicion of the child's slight mental retardation.)
A good deal of the interview involved Lloyd's telling with moving honesty about Parnell's sexually assaulting him as a nine-year-old and his still-evident emotional grief over this. Once again the author found himself both touched and angered by the long-lasting emotional damage Parnell's insatiable lust for young boys had caused.
On Halloween the author returned and met Barbara and her common-law husband, John Allen. But before John would allow his wife to be interviewed, he sharply interrogated the author while he himself sat on the toilet. Finally emerging from the trailer's tiny bathroom, John—a rough-and-tumble, self-described former federal drug agent with broken front teeth and matted hair—pointed to several bulletholes in the ceiling and told the author that he had put them there with his AK-47 (a grimy finge
r pointed to its location under Lloyd's bunk) "when I got pissed with a fellow who asked too many questions.
"Now," he commanded the author, "you go get your tape recorder and interview Barbara." Warily, the author did so.
With a hard face wrinkled well beyond her forty-odd years and strands of black hair hanging over an almost toothless smile, Barbara looked every bit the backwoods woman she now is. Illiterate—a fact which she unsuccessfully attempts to hide—and lacking most of the social graces, she is a talkative person who, during the author's two hours with her, offered some arresting observations about Parnell's interest in Dennis's agemates. "Ken used to tell Dennis to make friends with other boys, but Dennis would say, 'No, I don't want to make friends with those kids.' And one time a bunch of boys were walking up the street and Ken asked Dennis, 'Do you know those boys?' And Dennis said, 'No, not really.' Ken was always looking at boys, but everybody looks at kids, I guess."
Probably because of the botched kidnapping attempt at the Boys' Club, Dennis didn't get to finish the fourth grade at Santa Rosa. Just a few days after that incident, Ken, Barbara, and Dennis pulled up stakes and moved very suddenly to Willits, eighty miles north in remote, peculiar Mendocino County. "Never-Never Land," one lifelong county resident calls it. For months Ken had been unemployed in Santa Rosa and no job awaited him in Willits, but for whatever reason, he had hitched up his sixteen-foot travel trailer and moved his family to the Quail Meadows Trailer Park on U.S. 101, just north of Willits.
Located in the northeastern quarter of the Redwood Empire—famed for its gigantic redwood trees and the scenic California & Western tourist railroad from Ft. Bragg on the coast—Willits is a quiet little town of three thousand in bucolic Little Lake Valley, and it gave Dennis his first taste of life in a small town. But there was no vacation from school for Dennis: Parnell checked him out of Santa Rosa's Kawana Elementary on May 12 and the next day enrolled him in Brookside Elementary in the Willits Unified School District . . . again a school district to which Dennis's real parents had sent their plaintive form letter and a supply of "Missing Juvenile" flyers. But once again, it was a school where their mailing had been thrown away.
Dennis said that it was while he was in Ms. Tuppman's class at Willits that he first learned what the word "homosexual" meant: "You always know pretty much what your vocabulary is at a certain age, and [it] was around the end of my fourth grade year in Willits when I started knowing what 'faggot' and 'dyke' meant, and I started calling people that. That was when I started knowing that the sexual aspect of what Parnell was doing to me was wrong. I had figured out that it was probably wrong, but I knew that Parnell always did what was wrong. Therefore, if he knew it was wrong, and he was still doing it, he didn't care.
"If I came up to him and confronted him with it, there might be trouble, and I wasn't looking for trouble at that age. In fact, I've never been the type who would say, 'Hey! Hold it here! You're doing something wrong here!' I've always been the quiet type. I'd say in kind of a small whisper, 'Did you know you're doing something wrong?' First of all, I don't like arguing with people, and I avoided discussing anything sexual with Parnell. I was afraid that if I did say anything about sex he'd just want to do 'it' again.
"Anything to do with sex was always hush with me. If Parnell was around and any of my friends came to our place and mentioned anything about sex, or used the term 'faggot,' I just gave them a dirty look and said, 'Hey, let's go . . . let's get out of here.' "
In Merced, Police Sgt. Jim Moore was still working Steven's case and had now turned to checking reports of unidentified children's bodies that had been discovered from California to New England. "Luckily," he recalled, "none of them were Steven. But you know, you continue to look for the child, but from past experience you also know the possibility that he might be dead."
Lt. Bill Bailey, Sgt. Moore's supervisor, added, "In fact, we got calls from the Midwest, and even a police sergeant working a murder case of a little boy up in Maine called us up, but it wasn't Steve."*
Shortly thereafter Merced Police Sgt. Leon Martinez replaced Moore as the Juvenile Department Sergeant and he remembers his own investigation leading to many cases of physical and sexual abuse of children that the department would not have known about otherwise: "When I was put in charge of the investigation the case was getting a bit old and therefore we were following up all kinds of leads. It led us to a lot of other situations involving juveniles being sexually abused by adults. I thought, 'It just doesn't happen here.' But, my God, the weirdos that surfaced here!"
Try as he might, Ken couldn't land a job in Willits, and it was only thanks to his mother's beneficence that his little family remained financially afloat. Lessthan a month after arriving in Willits, Ken again hooked his travel trailer to his old Ford and he, Barbara, Dennis, and Queenie chugged west, toward the coast. It took nearly half a day for the overburdened, frequently overheating car to crawl over twisting California Highway 20, up and down hills blanketed with towering redwoods, into and out of occasional fog banks, the spooky, desolate, uninhabited forests making a profound, lasting, sinister impression on Parnell.
In Fort Bragg, Ken quickly found a home for his family at the Harbor Trailer Park, high on a cliff over-looking the mouth of the Noyo River and the Pacific Ocean. To Dennis it was a beautiful, idyllic location, and with the exception of Yosemite National Park, by far the best in terms of natural beauty in all the time he had lived with Ken.
With a population of 4,500, Fort Bragg is the second largest town in Mendocino County, a pleasant, mostly blue-collar town with a large Georgia Pacific Mill turning out lumber, plywood, and other wood products from redwood and Douglas fir logs trucked in from throughout the region. Tourism is a major local industry, and there are scores of motels and restaurants catering to sightseers and rail buffs who come to enjoy the dramatic northern California coast and ride the renowned California & Western "Skunk" tourist trains round trip to Willits.
In the 1850s Fort Bragg drew its first immigrants from the Portuguese Azores, immigrants who first worked at the area's pioneer lumber mill and later used some of the large trees themselves to build family fishing boats. Today one of the largest concentrations of Portuguese on the Pacific Coast continue this fishing industry in both Fort Bragg and the nearby picturesque fishing village of Noyo.
Ken spent weeks trying unsuccessfully to find a job and then made one of his infrequent trips to Bakersfield to visit his mother. As usual, he left Dennis and Barbara behind. Once at Mary's, Ken convinced her to underwrite his plan to open the Fort Bragg Bible Book Store and to buy her son a brand new Chevrolet Impala. Even though Dennis never met Mary Parnell, he said that from what Ken told him she is a very frugal yet financially well-off woman, having managed to save money from her World War II boardinghouse operation, invest it, and then add to it money from Ken's half brother, at one time the president of an oil company. But when the author asked Ken about this in 1984, he would neither confirm nor deny this information, but rather showed consternation that it was known. Said he angrily, "I won't verify or deny anything in those regards! One way or the other! Just let it stand at that!"
To a certain extent, starting the Bible Book Store was not all that foreign to Ken, who explained, "I usually don't discuss it, but I've had a lot of study in the Bible. I have taken extensive courses—and I'm not going to get into detail—but I have held a minister's license and a Doctorate in Bible degree. I've had times when I wanted to get into the religious field, and it weighed out in the bookstore. Financially, of course, it was a disaster." Ken's boasting notwithstanding, the author found no evidence of his ever having received a minister's license or a college or seminary degree.
About Ken's Bible knowledge, Barbara said, "On Sundays he used to sit down and read the Bible to us. And one day he was saying something about a certain part of the Bible and Dennis says, 'Well, why don't you get the Bible down and read it to us?' And Ken says, 'I know it all by heart.' So I says to Dennis, 'Well, there's t
he Bible right there. Get it and see if he does know it by heart.' And so Ken told us the page and the paragraph and such, and then Dennis follows along and then he says, 'He does know it by heart!' "
So, with neither of them attending church, Barbara illiterate, and Ken a convicted kidnapper and pederast, and both of them practicing perverted sex acts on their nine-year-old son, albeit at different times, this very odd, amoral couple opened the Fort Bragg Bible Book Store in a rented A-frame just across Highway 1 from the mobile home park where they lived in a sixteen-foot travel trailer.
Dennis recalls that Ken often left Barbara to handle the store alone and that she was unable to make out receipts and give change for the sales she handled while he was gone. During these times Ken was usually drinking with his buddies at the local Eagles' Lodge, where he was soon a well-liked, well-known member and where for several years he led the membership in sales of tickets to their annual pitch-till-you-win dungeness crab feeds, their annual fundraiser. At the election of officers in 1976, Ken was chosen treasurer. He held this post for nearly three years, until the membership decided that they should bond their treasurer; fearing his criminal past would be exposed, Ken resigned the post.
A good friend of Dennis's back in the late 1970s, Joe Gomes described the scene at the Fort Bragg Bible Book Store. "They had a full stock: Bibles, pencils with scriptures on them, and different types of religious pictures . . . but not many customers." Also, Joe recalled that Ken and Dennis " . . . always seemed like they were trying to hide something. I knew Barbara and Ken weren't really married. Dennis told us that, and he called Barbara his 'Mother-friend.' But—you know the way kids get together and just talk about everything?—well, we'd go down to the river a lot and just sit and talk, but Dennis never opened up to anybody and let them know about the past."
