I Know My First Name Is Steven

by Echols, Mike

  You can learn more about BAM by visiting their Web site at http://www.shadow-net.com. And if you have children using the Internet, they can learn how to become safer on the Internet by visiting BAM's "For Kids Only" Web site at http://www.shadow-net.com/forkids.html.

  And sadly, children continue to be kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered. One young life lost to such damnable acts was that of ten-year-old Anthony Michael Martinez, of Beaumont, California, who was kidnapped on April 10, 1997. You can help find the man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered him by visiting BAM's Web page, http://www.shadow-net.com/nam.htm. Another young life lost was that of beautiful Christina Marie Williams, a thirteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped from my hometown of Monterey, California, on June 12, 1998. You can help find the men who kidnapped and murdered her by going to http://www.shadow-net.com/kidnapped.htm.

  Always do whatever you can to help protect the children. Thank you!

  Cary Stayner: The Yosemite Serial Killer

  Late on a quiet June afternoon in 1984, this author, Mike Echols, kidnap victim Steven Stayner, 19, and Steven's brother Cary, 23, sat talking around the kitchen table at Del and Kay Stayner's new home on Mirror Lake Drive in northeast Merced, California. The brothers' mother, Kay, divided her time between preparing dinner for the family and their guest, chatting with the three at the table, and setting the table for dinner.

  When she had finished setting six places at the table, Kay returned to the stove to stir the beans. After surveying the table Steven suddenly remarked to his mother in his slow, distinctive way of talking, "You forgot one."

  The spoon still in her hand, Kay turned and queried her second son, "Who?"

  Without pause, Steven pointed to his brother Cary and said with a smile, "Cary!"

  Kay looked quizzically at Cary and then said, "Oh . . . Cary."

  Sadly, that is the way it was for the ruggedly handsome oldest son of Del and Kay Stayner after his younger brother returned to his family on March 2, 1980. Steven had returned home after spending seven years, two months, and twenty-eight days as the "son" and unwilling sex partner for his "father," previously convicted kidnapper-child molester Kenneth Eugene Parnell.

  Steven's return marked the decline of attention and family prominence for Cary. But during an interview in his jail cell in late July, 1999, Cary reportedly asked a TV journalist if someone might be interested in making a TV miniseries about his life story, as was done with Steven's life.

  Steven's ordeal became the basis for the first edition of this book and the Lorimar/NBC-TV miniseries, which was also I Know My First Name Is Steven—a miniseries that continues to be shown two to three times a year.

  While Steven was missing, Cary attended a Hoover Intermediate School program for gifted students. He was so good at drawing that while he was attending Merced High School he was the cartoonist for the school paper, The Statesman. His journalism teacher Sharon Wellins remembers an exam that Cary apparently failed to study for. At the bottom of the blank page, Cary had drawn a picture of a little man holding a picket sign that read, "Unfair test."

  But much of the time, Cary hung back alone. His male friends started going out with girls, but no one recalls Stayner ever having a date in spite of his good looks. And some remember disturbing incidents involving Cary as a teenager. In an interview with the San Francisco Chronicle, Victoria Flores-Tatum recalls that he "was very frustrated at all the publicity Steven was getting." And she remembers a dark occurrence involving her. When she was 14, she attended a sleepover with Cary's sister Cindy. Victoria said that Cary crept under her cot as she slept and reached up and touched her breasts. She was startled awake and told him to go away, but a few minutes later, Cary reappeared in the doorway stark naked and just stood there. Victoria told him to go away and he did.

  After graduation from Merced High School in 1979, where his classmates voted Cary the "most creative" senior, he drifted through a series of relatively menial jobs, hauling furniture, exterminating insects for a pest-control firm, working for an aluminum company, and finally going to work for the Merced Glass and Mirror Company. There he worked with Mike Marchese, who recalls about Cary, "He'd say a woman was nice looking and he'd go so far as saying it would be nice to get together with her . . . but nothing ever came of it."

  Marchese remembers a day a few years ago when he found Cary slamming his fist into a piece of plywood and bleeding from cuts on his hand. "He said he felt like he was having a nervous breakdown and said he was all nervous and didn't know why. He said he felt like getting in his truck, driving it into the office, and killing the boss and everyone else in there and torching the place.

  "I told him he might have a chemical imbalance, and he said, 'I have been told I have, but nothing's ever been done about it.' "

  As he stated in an interview with the Los Angeles Times, company owner Gordon Ekas drove Cary to a Merced psychiatric center, where he was counseled. But soon thereafter, Stayner came into the Merced Glass and Mirror office, picked up his check, and never came back. Instead, in the summer of 1997, Cary Stayner took a job as a maintenance man at the Cedar Lodge in the tiny mountain community of El Portal on California Highway 140 near the entrance to Yosemite National Park—the same highway his brother Steven had been taken along when he was first kidnapped in 1972.

  Cary was so highly trusted by Cedar Lodge owner Gerald Fischer that Fischer allowed his children to work alongside the new handyman as he repaired plumbing, arranged pool furniture, and took care of many other tasks at the large, busy motel.

  But his apparent difficulty in getting along with the opposite sex continued. Cary's friend Jake Jones, who works at the Yosemite View Lodge a few miles from Cedar Lodge, said that Cary never talked about dating any specific woman. And once, when Jones was telling him about his own four-year relationship, Cary expressed surprise. Recalls Jones, "He said, 'Four years? Man, I never had a relationship that lasted more than three weeks.' "

  But apparently Cary did associate with some females. Nancy Wilson of the Yosemite View Restaurant, where the wiry Stayner often ate, said Stayner identified himself as a "sun worshiper" to teenage girls he met. And one evening in early July, 1999, Wilson went to the Merced River at the Two-five Beach, where Stayner often smoked marijuana and sunbathed and swam in the nude. And she said, "He asked me if I wanted to get high. I said no."

  But when he was arrested, Cedar Lodge Restaurant's manager Lisa Hansel said, "It really affected a lot of us that this monster could be walking around amongst us . . . so trusted! How could we have missed someone we felt was part of our family? Everyone living in this community knew and embraced this monster who was capable of such horrors!"

  But instead of working at the Cedar Lodge during the busy summer tourist season, Cary Stayner spent his 38th birthday locked up by himself in a jail cell in Fresno, California, having been arrested on July 24, 1999, for the July 21, 1999, decapitation murder of 26-year-old Yosemite National Park naturalist Joie Armstrong . . . a murder to which—along with the February 15, 1999, kidnapping-murders of Eureka residents Carole Sund, her daughter Juliana, 15, and the Sunds' family friend Silvina Pelosso, 16, from Argentina—he confessed later that same day, shortly after he was arrested by the F.B.I. at the Laguna del Sol nudist colony outside Sacramento, California.

  As Cary Stayner confessed to television news reporter Ted Rowlands of KNTV-TV and KBWB-TV: "I am guilty. I did murder Carole Sund, Julie Sund, Silvina Pelosso, and Joie Armstrong. I wish I could have controlled myself and not done what I did."

  In the week following Cary's arrest, his father Del, a simple man who worked most of his life as a machinery mechanic at canneries around Merced and who is described as salt of the earth as you can get, could not talk about the crimes his son Cary confessed to without recalling the crime that still shadows their lives: The seven-year-and-three-month-long kidnapping of his second son, Steven Gregory Stayner.

  Said Del, "Thank you for all your support since December 4, 1972, when you helped l
ook for Steve. You helped celebrate his return in 1980; you helped mourn his death in 1989. Now we must ask you for our privacy during this terrible tragedy."

  It was Del who had passed on his love of the backwoods and camping to his oldest son, Cary.

  But if he was brokenhearted by the image of his son desecrating an area that had become almost religious for the family—the lakes and the foothills of the Sierras—he did not let on in his few muffled statements to TV cameras and reporters from behind his closed screen door in Merced.

  "The Cary we know is not capable of these crimes," Del Stayner said. "We love you, Cary. You will always be loved by your family."

  Beginning with the arrival of the white man in the middle of the 19th century, the Yosemite Valley has had a homicidal history. It was home to American Indians for thousands of years before the Mariposa Battalion—part U.S. Calvary and part vigilante group—entered the Valley in March of 1851 and all but wiped out the Ahwahneechee Indians under Chief Tenaya in a bloody battle perpetrated by the Battalion.

  A dozen years later, President Abraham Lincoln set the Yosemite Valley aside as a protected park. And not long thereafter, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson visited it and wrote, "This valley is the only place that comes up to the brag about it—and exceeds it." And it is this assessment and not the almost 150 years of violent killings with which most of today's visitors—up to 20,000 a day in the summer—would surely agree.

  On President's Day, 1999, Carole Sund, her 15-year-old daughter Juliana, and 16-year-old family friend Silvina Pelosso from Argentina had hamburgers for dinner in the 1950s-style diner at the Cedar Lodge in El Portal, California, near the entrance to Yosemite National Park. And then, for what they did not know would be their last night alive, they retired to their motel room at the Cedar Lodge.

  During the day the girls oooed! and ahhed! at Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, the snow-covered mountain meadows, and skated on a frozen pond in Yosemite, where they posed for the last photographs ever taken of them.

  After the busy holiday weekend, almost all of the tourists had left the Lodge when at about 11:00 P.M. Cary Stayner knocked on the door to Room 509 in a remote corner of the nearly deserted motel.

  In a detailed statement to one investigative journalist, which appeared in the San Francisco Examiner, the San Jose Mercury-News and other news media, the 37-year-old motel handyman admitted he had been watching the three females, and when Carole Sund asked who was there, Stayner responded, "Maintenance. There's a leak behind the wall in your bathroom that I need to repair." Carole opened the door and pleasantly greeted the maintenance man, who returned her kindly greeting by pulling out a pistol, pointing it at her, and assuring her that if she kept quiet no one would get hurt. Apparently thinking that the man would rob them and then leave, the frightened mother of four believed him, and along with her daughter Julie and their friend Silvina, she complied with Stayner's orders.

  By his own admission, Cary Stayner bound and gagged the three and then separated them from one another. Then he took some rope and strangled Carole and then Silvina out of sight of Juliana. After he placed their bodies in the trunk of Carole's red rental car, he returned to the room where he forced her to perform oral sex on him for hours.

  Then, he drove Juliana and the bodies of her mother and her friend for over an hour through the Sierra darkness before pulling into a paved overlook near Moccasin Point at New Don Pedro Reservoir, a lake where he and his family repeatedly camped and fished as he grew up.

  Forcing the terrified 15-year-old out of the car, Stayner dragged her up a trail and over a rise so that they were out of range of the headlights of any cars. Then he stopped, sexually assaulted Juliana, and slit her throat so savagely that he almost severed her head. Afterward, he calmly left her body on the trail, walked back to the rental car, and drove into Tuolumne County, where he pulled onto an old dirt logging road.

  His plan was to ditch the car in an isolated reservoir he knew about, with the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso still in the trunk. But in the dark, he high-grounded the car on a tree stump and couldn't get it to move.

  Frightened by the arrival of first light, Stayner walked two miles back to a phone and called a cab to come and pick him up for a ride back to Yosemite. When driver Jenny Paul arrived she was surprised that the casually dressed, "decent-looking" man with a backpack, who was "beat tired" and "didn't look like he'd slept," was willing to pay $125 for the cab ride to Yosemite.

  Paul said Cary told her that friends had abandoned him. Then he fell asleep in her cab on the drive. Toward the end of the trip, he awoke to talk about trucks and to point out a cabin where he said he once saw Bigfoot, the legendary mountain ape-like creature. "I told him I didn't believe in Bigfoot," Paul said, "but he said, 'Oh, you should! You'll see!' "

  When they arrived at the entrance to Yosemite National Park, the passenger argued with the ranger about paying the $35 entrance fee, insisting that he worked in the park and was therefore exempt from paying it. But when Stayner refused to tell the ranger who exactly he worked for, the ranger insisted that he pay the fee, he did, and Paul drove him on into the park.

  As instructed, she delivered Cary to the Yosemite Lodge, the motel where Kenneth Eugene Parnell had worked at the time he kidnapped Cary's brother Steven. Paul went inside to use the restroom before the trip back, and when she came out, she spied Cary in the lobby staring at the pictures on the wall, as if lost.

  Reports indicate it took two days before law enforcement began searching for Carole and Juliana Sund, Silvina Pelosso, and their red rental car . . . believing all the while that they had been the victims of an auto accident. Soon the search moved into high gear when the Sund family offered a $250,000 reward for finding the trio alive.

  The search was one of the most extensive in California history and eventually involved airplanes, helicopters, and even search dogs and teams on snowshoes. But no trace of Carole Sund's red Pontiac Grand Prix rental car could be found.

  Back at his cramped apartment at the Cedar Lodge in El Portal, Cary Stayner watched the search begin and then drove his baby blue International Scout back to Tuolumne County, took Carole Sund's wallet, and then torched the rental car.

  In an apparent effort to confuse investigators, Stayner then drove to Modesto and dropped Sund's wallet—chock-full of credit cards—on a Modesto street, where a high school student found it and handed it over to police.

  This discovery alarmed investigators and led them to believe that there had been no automobile accident—rather, that the trio's disappearance was due to foul play.

  The F.B.I. was called in and agents were soon swarming all over Cedar Lodge, where handyman Cary Stayner had worked for two years. When Stayner volunteered to help them, F.B.I. agents accepted his offer, and Stayner opened up each room for them to inspect and even gathered samples of acrylic blankets so that the fibers could be examined and identified at the F.B.I. Crime Laboratory in Washington, DC.

  But despite the fact that F.B.I. agents interviewed him twice, they did not arrest this quiet, unassuming caretaker could possibly be a suspect.

  In mid-March, a target shooter discovered Carole Sund's burned-out rental car and investigators found Carole's and Silvina's charred bodies inside the trunk.

  Soon the F.B.I. turned its investigation toward a group of Modesto prison parolees known as "cranksters"—ex-cons with a history of methamphetamine use. In short order, a half dozen other suspects were pulled in, including a pair of half brothers who violently reacted in standoffs with police. F.B.I. agents thought their irrational behavior might have been prompted by their need to hide something. And they believed that they did have the men responsible for the murders in custody, but lacked sufficient evidence to charge them in those murders.

  Soon thereafter, an anonymous letter arrived at the Modesto F.B.I. office; it led investigators to Juliana's body. Stayner now admits he wrote that letter to throw investigators off the trail, even etching random names on the page abo
ve the one on which he wrote the letter and referring to the murderer as "we."

  These events only served to fuel the F.B.I.'s case against the Modesto "crankster" suspects, especially when the F.B.I. crime laboratory discovered that acrylic fibers found in the half brothers' cars matched those found in blankets at the crime scene that Stayner helped agents gather. And then one of the half brothers told agents that he had participated in the murder of Carole Sund and helped to dispose of juliana's body and that the matching fibers had come from a blanket used to hide the teenager's body.

  But the F.B.I. may well have put too much credence in the F.B.I. Laboratory's report since the fibers came from an orange acrylic blanket—not exactly a rare find—and now an F.B.I. official has acknowledged the match was of "almost zero significance. . . . Nobody attached a lot of weight to it."

  Also, the F.B.I. could have performed a simple investigative check of the trip records of cab companies in the area, such as those of the Courtesy Cab Company in Sonora, for which Jenny Paul drove. The record shows that this was not done.

  Further, even though the half brother who had confessed began backing away from his confession and his other statements grew increasingly suspect, the F.B.I. pressed ahead, trying to gather the evidence that they would need to make a case against those they had arrested around Modesto.

  Then in June, 1999, Sacramento-based F.B.I. Agent in Charge James Maddock and task force chief in investigating the kidnapping-murders of the Sunds and Pelosso announced to news media, "I do feel that we have all of the main players in jail."

  When Cary Stayner heard this announcement, he was still living and working at the Cedar Lodge and he must have figured that he had gotten away with the triple murder.

  On Wednesday, July 21,1999, Stayner drove into the small enclave of Foresta on the western edge of Yosemite National Park and saw 26-year-old environmental educator Joie Armstrong packing her car for a trip. He later said that when he realized that she was alone he couldn't resist attacking her. But this time, his chosen victim fought back so viciously that Stayner was forced to leave clues everywhere, including fingerprints and footprints in her house as well as distinctive tire tracks from his baby blue International Scout, a vehicle with different tires and treads on each of its four wheels.