I Know My First Name Is Steven

by Echols, Mike

  Driving south past the school they saw their intended victim, delicate, platinum-blond, five-year-old Timmy White walking with classmate Christy Ryan. Parnell drove to Luce Street, made a quick left turn, headed east a short distance, and then made a rapid U-turn in his Maverick, coming to a stop by the curb.

  Watching his prey carefully, Parnell anxiously reminded Sean of his role: get out, fake checking the right rear tire, ask for Timmy's help, grab Timmy, quickly get into the backseat with the boy, and close the door behind him as Parnell sped off. Sean did almost as instructed: when Timmy walked by alone, he asked him to hold the tire's valve stem to keep it from leaking air. Timmy emphatically said "No!" and continued on his way.

  Not wanting to go after the boy, Sean went back to the car. But Parnell screamed and cursed at his accomplice to "Get the kid!" and so Sean ran after Timmy. Timmy ran too, but he was no match for the teenager. When Sean caught up to him the five-year-old had tightly wrapped his arms around a chain-link fence along the sidewalk, but Sean quickly slipped his arms under the youngster's and violently wrenched the little boy from the fence, ran back to the car carrying him, and threw the screaming, kicking child through the car's open right-hand door and onto the backseat.

  Slamming the door behind him, Sean swiftly covered Timmy with an old green blanket as Parnell drove off, stopped briefly at the corner, turned right, drove directly past Timmy's school, and made another quick right to South State Street, down which he accessed the freeway and a short distance later the road to Boonville.

  Timmy asked Parnell and Sean what was happening and where they were taking him. Parnell told him his mother was sick and in the same instant Sean said that they were taking him to a dentist. Timmy was confused by their conflicting answers but didn't ask anymore questions because he was afraid.

  By the time they reached the freeway, Sean had given Timmy a sleeping pill and fruit punch to wash it down. Then he made the frightened little boy lie back down while he himself hunkered below the car's windows.

  Less than thirty minutes later, southwest of Boonville on the Mountain View Ranch Road, Parnell roared up behind Duke Stornetta, who was taking his time, headed in the same direction. Said Duke, "Parnell passed me this side of Boonville—you know where the high school is?—and he was just a-flying. And so I stepped on it and I said to myself, 'I wonder what he is in a hurry for?' And as far as I could tell, it was just him alone. And when I got to the cabin, he was already gone into the house. You know, I didn't see him . . . he just outran me."

  When Parnell reached the cabin he carried Timmy inside while Sean followed with the black briefcase Parnell had bought for him. At the kitchen table Sean quickly loaded his briefcase with two bottles of Jack Daniels that Parnell had given him in partial payment for his role in the kidnapping. Then he departed the cabin, leaving behind the black Peterbilt "gimmie" cap Parnell had made him wear during their crime, the teenager's only disguise.

  Thirty minutes later, at the crest of the hill just past the Pipers' place, Sean flagged down Billie Piper for a ride to the Coast Highway. Remarked Billie, "He talked about the movie he was watching on TV with Parnell the night before. I mean, I don't think the kidnapping fazed him a bit, I really don't. He was a kid who to me looked like he was out of it all the time."

  Without a word to Timmy, Parnell removed the terrified boy's clothes, put them in a sack, hid it in the closet, and dressed his new "son" in blue pajama bottoms and a brown shirt bought at one of the garage sales . . . apparently deciding not to disguise Timmy as a girl, his original plan for the little girl's clothes he'd bought. Then he laid Timmy down on his bed for a nap and stretched himself out beside his new son. As three o'clock approached, Parnell got up, carried Timmy out to the Maverick, and drove down to the coast to get Dennis.

  "Parnell picked me up down at the bus stop, and that's when Timmy was in the back of the car," Dennis recalled. "He was asleep. I looked and just said to myself, 'Sure, ah ha . . . box springs, ah, yeah . . . right.' I didn't say nothin' to Parnell, and he didn't say nothin' to me, either. We just drove up to the cabin, I got out and walked up to the cabin, and Parnell went around and took Timmy out and brought him back inside and laid him on my bed."

  With Timmy stretched out on his bed, and Dennis having only a spring-sprung couch on which to relax, seeds of jealousy were quickly sown in Parnell's oldest "son." Dennis selected a book from the stack Parnell had bought for him and, seething, flopped down to read it. At supper, Dennis recalled: "I was kinda' disgusted with the fact that Timmy was griping about what was being served. We was having a type of cube steak and mashed potatoes and white gravy. And Timmy didn't like the white gravy—'I don't like white gravy, I like brown gravy!'—and Parnell didn't like that either. So I ate my dinner real fast and then I went out to the barn. That was my place out there, at the barn. I'd just sit out there, or climb around in the trees, or I'd go down to the creek, or go around to the other side of the mountain and eat some apples. I'd go along the trails in back of the cabin because by then I hadn't even gone on all the trails. I liked going through the woods."

  By the time Parnell and his two "sons" had returned to their cabin, all hell had broken loose back in Ukiah. A professional in every sense of the word, steely-blue-eyed Ukiah Police Chief David Johnson said of the series of events, "We got the call about twelve-thirty that day from Mrs. White saying that her son had not arrived at the babysitter's house. So we sent an officer down to take an initial report. Then we had two or three officers in the area looking for the kid, but not really too seriously until about three o'clock, when it was evident that maybe something had really happened to him."

  At this point additional officers were pressed into the search; and as time passed, off-duty officers, then reserve officers, and by dark even police cadets were busily combing Ukiah's neighborhoods. Timmy's steps were retraced to the point where he and Christy Ryan had parted at the intersection of South Dora and Luce. "From that point on," Chief Johnson sighed, "it was an absolute mystery as to what happened to him because nobody saw anything. No one heard anything, even though there were people living there. One woman was ironing clothes by her front window right where it happened, but she didn't see a thing, didn't hear a thing. And it's actually incredible that no one saw what happened."

  Timmy lived with his mother, Angela, an attractive, vivacious, blond native of England, and her slender, stoic second husband, Jim White. Timmy had one sister, Nicole, aged six. Timmy's mother and Jim had at first lived together several years and, when they married the previous year, Jim had adopted both children. Their home was seven miles south of Ukiah on Blue Oak Drive in middle-class Russian River Estates. Also the previous year, Angela began work at the Mendocino County Board of Realtors and Timmy began kindergarten at Yokayo, the public elementary school almost across the street from St. Mary's, the Roman Catholic school where Nicole was a first-grader. The previous fall the Whites had found a small private day care center run by Diane Crawford in her home on South Street, just a few blocks from their children's schools and a short walk for Timmy after his half-day kindergarten class.

  On her way to work that Valentine's Day morning, Angela dropped her son off at school. At 11:50 A.M. Diane Crawford called to speak with Angela at work, but since she was on a long-distance call, Angela had a fellow worker tell Diane that she would call her back shortly. A few minutes later Jim walked in with sandwiches for their lunch. Still on the long-distance call, Angela scribbled a note to Jim telling him to call Diane.

  "Jim went out to the outer office and dialed Diane's phone number," Angela recalled, "and he was talking to her, and I could hear him, and I finished my phone conversation and hung up. And he walked to the door and said, 'Timmy's not home from school yet. I'm going to go track him down.' And I said, 'Okay.' "

  At that point Angela was not worried about her son, reasoning that since it was Valentine's Day, he had probably stayed late at school for a class party and Diane would be calling her shortly to let her k
now that he had just arrived.

  Angela suddenly became concerned, however, when she looked at her watch and realized that Timmy got out at 11:30, not 12:00, as she had first thought, and it was now after 12:00. Said she, "Then I scribbled a note to pin on the door for my assistant because we never close the office for lunch, and I locked up and left. I drove by Diane's house on the way to the school, and she was standing at her window and she shook her head no, and so I didn't even bother stopping, I just went on up to the school."

  When Angela arrived at Timmy's school she went straight to the principal's office, where she found the principal telling jim that Timmy's class had gotten out on time. At this Angela begged Jim to call the police, but the principal asked her to wait while he went outside and checked a nearby field where children sometimes played. "But when he went out," Angela said, "I told Jim, 'No, let's call the police,' because Timmy wasn't an adventuresome little boy and he wouldn't have gone off with a friend or anything.

  "So we called the police from right there. They really didn't know what to do . . . they took the information, but that was really about it. And so we started driving around town as soon as we got back to the car. And we turned on the car radio and we heard Tim's description over the radio right away. It was real fast because Diane had called the local radio station right away . . . as soon as Timmy hadn't arrived.

  "We kept driving around and looking and going back to Diane's house, and then Nickie got out of school and we made sure she got to Diane's, and we were just driving around and around, and it was drizzling and it was an awful day. [Ironically, this was almost identical to the weather the day of Dennis's kidnapping.] We were just driving and asking and looking and trying to see if anybody had seen Timmy."

  Jim and Angela drove for hours that afternoon, asking everybody they saw if they had seen Timmy, occasionally returning to Diane's, checking their home, and then resuming their driving and searching.

  At 4:00 a policeman flagged them down and asked them to go to the police station to file a report on Timmy's disappearance. When they arrived at the station, Chief Johnson met them but he had nothing new to tell them and, after making a detailed, disheartening report on their missing son, a dejected Jim and Angela returned home.

  At that time Angela's British parents were on holiday in the States, and after a visit with her sister in Los Angeles were making a sightseeing auto trip up the California coast. They were to arrive in Ukiah in a day or two, but now it was imperative that they be reached immediately. Through her sister, Angela located them at a motel in Morro Bay and, on hearing the news, they drove 350 miles through the night to be with their daughter and son-in-law.

  Angela described her emotions and routine while Timmy was missing, "I remember my parents coming, and then I really don't remember that night after that. But you know, when Tim was gone, I slept well the entire time. [Usually] I'll get up three or four times in the middle of the night to use the bathroom . . . it's just habit with me. But when Tim was gone, I used to sleep all through the night. I wanted to go to bed early, and I would sleep well. Then when I would wake up I would feel rested. You know, I never dreamt anything, but when Timmy came back, I went through a period when I'd wake up crying."

  Added Jim, "I slept well, too. You know, I was mentally exhausted at night, and Angela thought at one time it was a defense mechanism—get to sleep and you can't think about it or worry about it—and you sleep."

  Angela had an extension of her home telephone installed at her office and went back to work the next week, as did Jim . . . but, she said, "I really didn't want to because I was so afraid that, even if you resume your regular life, it is like you're resuming it with out Timmy and everybody would forget. And I didn't want to get back to normal because I didn't feel normal. But I couldn't mourn him because I didn't want to think anything had happened to him. It was awful."

  Usually, Diane Crawford stood on her front porch and watched for Timmy when he was due home from school, but she couldn't see more than the last fifty feet of Luce Street that Timmy walked down before turning onto her street, and Timmy's kidnapping had occurred hundreds of feet up the street. As she recollected, "I had other little kids at that time, and we would just wait until he came home so we could have lunch together. And when he didn't show up on time, I went up to my corner three times . . . but I didn't see anything that day. No panic, though, because I thought, well, it's Valentine's Day. And, too, he was a slow walker. But then about ten minutes 'til twelve—which would have made him about ten minutes later than he had ever been before—I phoned Angie at her office."

  On Saturday, February 16, two days after Timmy disappeared, tracking dogs were brought up from Sacramento to scour the ten-square-block neighborhood between Yokayo Elementary and the Crawford home, but they couldn't pick up a scent because it had rained the previous three days. Then the trackers took the dogs into Diane's home to sniff out the closets and under the beds, but they couldn't detect Timmy's scent; and even a circuit with the dogs south of Ukiah along the Russian River near Timmy's home was equally fruitless.

  "I continued to babysit, but the kids were upset," Diane said. "It was a real helpless feeling when Jim and Angie would come by to get Nickie, or phone me, and they hadn't found Timmy. But. . . well, what else can you do?" Diane sighed.

  Besides the tracking dogs, Smith Air Service provided a helicopter for Ukiah policemen searching the remote hills west of town, but the persistent rain repeatedly washed grease from the rotor's bearings and cut the flights short. Radio and television stations from Ukiah to San Francisco alerted their listeners and viewers to Timmy's disappearance with information and photographs of the blond five-year-old. Also, some newspapers were very helpful, whereas others wouldn't help at all. Said Angela incredulously, "They wouldn't run a picture, and we had to pay money to have it done!"

  Within a couple of days Jim and Angela's schedule at home had settled into a routine of addressing envelopes to mail out Missing flyers of their towheaded son with the faithful help of relatives and neighbors. Said Jim, "Every day we'd go out and drive somewhere, watch the river . . . " he trailed off. "We stayed around our house and around the city. Then we'd stop and go back home and start up writing letters and sending out posters again."

  Beginning with the first night, Parnell had Timmy sleep with him. Timmy did not like it, even though, as he recalls, he always wore underpants or pajamas and Parnell never even attempted to fondle or molest him. But Timmy felt very strange sleeping next to this man he did not know, the odd man who had kidnapped him.

  Before the kidnapping Parnell had tried to employ a babysitter "for a small child" in Ukiah. However, everyone with whom he spoke turned him down because of the distance to the cabin. Therefore, each day Timmy was left alone in the cabin from the time Dennis left for school until Parnell returned from his graveyard shift at The Palace Hotel. Usually, though he did not like doing it, Dennis followed Parnell's instructions and gave his "little brother" a Nytol sleeping tablet just before he left for school. But Timmy recalls rarely sleeping after Dennis departed: "Mostly I just sat there. I saw the phone, and I thought about trying to get away, but I didn't because I was afraid that Parnell would do something to me." (But Timmy could not have used the phone for Parnell kept a dial lock on it.) However, Timmy does not recall any sexual abuse, fondling, or photographs—nude or otherwise.

  Dennis was afraid Parnell would sexually assault Timmy while he was at school, and so he began returning from Point Arena High School at noon each day. Confirmed Duke Stornetta, "One day, while Parnell had the little boy there, I passed Dennis as I was driving from Ukiah to our place on the coast. It was about twelve noon, and he was walking up the hill by the coast, so I turned around and went back and gave him a ride to the cabin. I says, 'Dennis, how come you aren't in school?' And he says, 'I didn't feel like going to school . . . I'm going home.' "

  Billie Piper remarked, "Dennis was pretty regular going to school until he got mixed up with that other boy.
Then, I'd take him to school and he'd come right back." One day, after he had noticed Dennis returning home about noon, Piper said he drove by and, "There was a small boy playing on that little hill by the cabin. And Dennis was out on the side of the road about half a mile away on his bike. Parnell's car wasn't at the cabin, but I figured maybe they had a friend visiting out there, and maybe the friend had a little boy."

  As with Dennis years before, Parnell decided that one of the easiest ways to alter Timmy's appearance was to dye the boy's distinctive hair . . . from platinum blond to dark brown. So, eleven days after the kidnapping Parnell stopped in Ukiah at Thrifty Drug on his way home from work and bought a bottle of dark brown Clairol Nice 'n' Easy hair coloring. When he arrived home, Timmy was asleep. He woke him up. Timmy says, "He told me that he was going to dye my hair so people wouldn't recognize me and take me back." After he was finished, Parnell walked Timmy out back to the shower stall and had the youngster bathe and shampoo his hair.

  Parnell kept Timmy hidden at the cabin the whole time. But after changing Timmy's hair color, Parnell felt confident enough about the disguise to take the boy with him to pick up Dennis at Point Arena High. When Dennis got in the car, Parnell smirked to his oldest son, "How do you like his hair?"

  Hurtful memories flooded his mind as a not-pleased Dennis responded through gritted teeth, "It's all right, I guess."

  "Well, I don't think it's dark enough." Parnell superciliously smiled. "I got some more dye at the house and we're gonna dye it again."