Murder at Yosemite: The Stunning True Story of a Horrific Handyman and the Brutal Murders of Four Nature-Lovers

by Carlton Smith

Overview

***Please note: This ebook edition does not contain the photos found in the print edition.***

Amidst the breathtaking natural beauty of Yosemite National Park, four terrifying killings took place. For months, law enforcement officials were stumped by the deaths of three tourists: Carole Sund, her teenaged daughter Juli, and a family friend, Silvina Pelosso. But when they found the decapitated body and head of 26-year-old naturalist Joie Ruth Armstrong, they were led to one man: 37-year-old handyman Cary Stayner.

Stayner was arrested at a California nudist colony and soon admitted to all four killings, claiming he'd had urges to kill women for thirty years. And Cary's twisted impulses were not the only tragedy of the Stayner family. At the age of seven, his younger brother Steven was abducted by a pedophile and forced to live with the man for seven years, until he escaped. His story was told in a TV movie called "I Know My First Name is Steven." Steven would ultimately die in a motorcycle crash at twenty-four.

What are the odds of one family suffering such astounding tragedies? What would compel a seemingly pleasant, clean-cut man to brutally attack and gruesomely kill four innocent women? Did he act alone? Or was his a false confession? Bestselling true crime author Carlton Smith searches for the shocking answers in Murder at Yosemite, this fascinating account of murder and madness.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781466885004
Publisher:	St. Martin's Publishing Group
Publication date:	03/26/2024
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	264
Sales rank:	325,679
File size:	617 KB

About the Author

Carlton Sith is the author of the title Murder at Yosemite.

Carlton Smith (1947–2011) was a prizewinning crime reporter and the author of dozens of books. Born in Riverside, California, Smith graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, with a degree in history. He began his journalism career at the Los Angeles Times and arrived at the Seattle Times in 1983, where he and Tomas Guillen covered the Green River Killer case for more than a decade. They were named Pulitzer Prize finalists for investigative reporting in 1988 and published the New York Times bestseller The Search for the Green River Killer (1991) ten years before investigators arrested Gary Ridgway for the murders. Smith went on to write twenty-five true crime books, including Killing Season (1994), Cold-Blooded (2004), and Dying for Love (2011).

Read an Excerpt

Murder at Yosemite

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By Carlton Smith

St. Martin's Press

Copyright © 1999 Carlton Smith
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-4668-8500-4

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CHAPTER 1

A Monday afternoon, cloudy, sometimes rainy, altogether too cold. Overnight, an Arctic front of frozen air had rushed down into California's Central Valley, plunging temperatures on the ground into the low forties. Little Steven Stayner, seven years old, was on his way home from school as the twilight gathered and the icy wind picked up. No one gave much attention to the second-grader as he made his way on a familiar shortcut past a service station on Yosemite Parkway toward the familiar house on Betty Street, where Steven lived with his mother Kay, father Del, and four brothers and sisters. Other things were happening in the world that day, some of vital interest to many nations, still others that would loom even larger to one nation in the months to come.

Halfway around the world from that gray December day in the small valley town of Merced—"mercy" in Spanish—a man named Henry Kissinger was sitting across a negotiating table with a Vietnamese diplomat named Le Duc Tho; both men were trying to fashion an agreement that would bring more than a decade's fruitless, bloody war to an end, a conflict that had transfixed the nation as no other in a generation.

Far less noticed was the action taken in a federal court in Washington, D.C., where a judge was sowing the seeds for the eventual destruction of a presidency.

"This jury," said Chief U.S. District Court Judge John J. Sirica, "is going to want to know, what did these men go into that headquarters for? Was the sole purpose political espionage? Was there financial gain? Who hired them? Who started this?" And with those questions, still not completely answered even today, Judge Sirica set into motion the events that would eventually cause the scandal called Watergate.

Those were two of the largest events of the times, more than a generation removed from where we are today; the fate of a small boy in a small town would gather comparatively little notice, for all its tragic consequences so many years later.

Little Steven turned toward home, a warm, welcoming cocoon just three blocks away. Out of the corner of his vision he saw a nondescript, gray van pull up on the street beside him. A small man got out, holding what looked to be religious leaflets. Would Steven's mother be willing to make a donation to the church? the man asked. Steven didn't see any reason why not. After all, the Stayner family was always willing to help others in need, that was just the way they lived. The little man offered to give Steve a ride home. Steven got in the van. It was the last time anyone saw a boy named Steven Stayner for more than seven long years.

* * *

Just what happened to Steven on that cold day in December in 1972 could only be pieced together later—much later—drawing on Steven's understandbly cloudy memory, and the recollections of those who made Steven himself the "donation" they sought.

Steven recalled that aside from the little man who had first approached him with the leaflets asking about a donation, there was a second man in the van, this one behind the wheel. This man was larger and older than the little man, and seemed to be in charge. Steven soon learned that the older man's name was Ken. Ken drove the van farther and farther away from Betty Street and Steve's house; he told Steve they would soon telephone Kay to let her know everything was okay.

Sometime that evening, in fact, Ken did stop the van, and made a telephone call. It's all right, he assured Steve after hanging up. Your mom knows you're with us, and she says it's all right if you go with us. After that, things became hazy to Steven; it was difficult to stay awake and alert; he drifted in and out as the van drove on through the night, tires rhythmically humming over the narrow asphalt roads. Over low hills, past barren fields, on into the night toward a destination Steve could only wonder about—when he had the energy to think.

Dawn came, and Steven found himself with the two men in some sort of trailer home, a place he'd never seen before. Now Ken explained everything to him: Steven was to go with Ken from now on: Steve's mother Kay and father Del didn't want him anymore, they couldn't afford him. In fact, Ken said, a court had awarded custody of Steven to him, and from now Ken would take care of him. Still, Steve felt disoriented, drowsy; was it really possible that he wasn't wanted by his mother and father? What had he done to make them not want him? But in his disoriented condition, anything seemed possible. Steven went back to sleep, and when he awoke again, the van was on the move once more.

* * *

For Kay and Del Stayner, the first inkling that something had happened to their seven-year-old came the evening of December 4, when Steven never made it home from school.

After the usual calls to neighbors and Steven's playmates, the Stayners called the Merced Police Department to report Steven missing. The department put out the word to patrol officers to be watchful for a wandering seven-year-old. When the morning of the fifth came without Steven having been found, the officers of the department had to confront the likelihood that little Steven Stayner had been abducted. So, too, did Kay and Del Stayner. Who could have done such a thing? Given the Stayner family's financial circumstances—Del was a maintenence worker at a Merced-area food cannery—ransom was almost certainly not the motive.

For the Merced authorities assigned to investigate the case, the prospects of Steven's longterm survival appeared grim. Every year across the United States, Sergeant Bill Bailey knew, hundreds of children Steven's age simply vanished, the all-too-vulnerable prey of traveling pedophiles. By far the most common outcome of such abductions was repeated rape, followed by abrupt homicide, covered up by a shallow grave that most likely would never be discovered. Indeed, it was the lucky ones whose graves were found; most such victims were never heard from again.

Because the town of Merced—then about 35,000 residents—was located on one of California's major north-south highway connectors, U.S. 99, the possibility that Steven might be hundreds of miles away from home within just a few hours of his disappearance was quite real. Major roads from Merced lead in every direction—south to Los Angeles, east to San Jose and San Francisco, north to Sacramento and Oregon, and east to Yosemite and Reno and places still farther away.

The first task was to canvass the route Steven normally used when walking home from school. But interviews with residents along the streets turned up nothing.

If the kidnapping wasn't for ransom—that seemed unlikely, since Del and Kay hardly had the kind of money to make it worthwhile—the most likely motive for the kidnapping was sexual. To cover that possibility, someone pulled the records of known sex offenders in the Merced area, and prepared to interview them.

Flyers with Steven's photograph and the circumstances of his disappearance were distributed, and publicity was arranged in the local news media. A check of traffic and parking citations was made on out-of- area vehicles with the idea that some known pedophile may have been passing through Merced at the time Steven disappeared. Finally, Bailey and his subordinates put out the word on the national law enforcement system's Teletype: boy missing; please call if located; please call if any homicide victim matches our description.

* * *

Only someone who has experienced the unexplained disappearance of a child can imagine the feelings of a couple like Del and Kay Stayner in the days and weeks after December 4, 1972. A day that had begun as normally as any other in a cheerful, well-adjusted household had, by nightfall become a frightening, nearly unfathomable threat. Even the darkness and chill seemed malevolent.

Was Steven lost? Was he hurt? Was he hungry? Cold? Frightened? Was he in pain? No matter how calm reason told the Stayners to be, those and other questions stabbed repeatedly into their thoughts. Where was their seven-year-old? The very absence of information magnified the fears and the pain of the Stayners, who wavered between the hope that somehow Steven would miraculously turn up, and the despair that even as they waited, someone, somewhere was doing horrible things to their son, things they were helpless to prevent.

At first, Kay was afraid to leave the house, for fear that Steven or someone might call with information on his whereabouts. The not knowing was driving her crazy; Del took to driving around the streets and highways near Merced, looking for clues to his son's disappearance, a loaded shotgun beside him on the seat.

The very uncertainty of the event, surrounded as it was by phantasms of trauma imagined and the impossibility of repressing hope, transformed the Stayner family overnight; things would never be the same as they had been before December 4. In a matter of hours, Del and Kay were transmuted from the supporters of their children to victims; and the remaining children were subtly altered into the supporters of their parents—a difficult transition for anyone, but arduously hard for four normal preteens with their own needs. At one stroke, the missing Steven had become the missing center of his family, the black hole around which everyone and everything else revolved, and for which there were no answers.

Indeed, for Del and Kay to look at the others—oldest son Cary, 11, and the three youngest—was to wonder: whatever had happened to Steven? What would Steven be doing now, if it, whatever it was, had never happened?

Steven became the unmentionable wound at the center of the Stayner family, the gaping hole in the fabric of their relations; in some ways, at least initially, it would have been kinder if Steven's body had been found, because at least that way, the family could go on. But the blank wall of information about his fate, as if he existed and then ceased to exist for no apparent reason, loomed ever larger in the Stayner household: something not to talk about because talking about it didn't do any good, but something never to forget, even as the years unfolded without a single clue as to whatever had happened.

CHAPTER 2

The week of Christmas of 1972 found Steven Stayner sharing a small cabin in Yosemite Valley with Ken and his small friend. Most of the time, Steven stayed inside with either Ken or the small man, who seemed to take turns going out for hours and then coming back. It snowed much of the time, and while Steve wasn't exactly sure where he was, he guessed that he was somewhere in the mountains. From remarks made by Ken and the small man, Steven guessed they were in Yosemite; he was slightly familiar with the park, because his grandfather lived there.

But where in the park? The place was huge, Steven knew. Somehow, Steven learned or guessed that Ken and his little friend had something to do with the main lodge in the center of the park. But Steven wasn't sure exactly where it was, or how to get there. The cold weather, the snow, and the fact that he was kept under nearly constant observation discouraged him from trying to find out where he was, and to bring attention to his plight. And then there was Ken: the first night after they arrived at the cabin, Ken sodomized Steven; when Steven cried and tried to resist, Ken told him that if he didn't submit, Ken would kill him and bury him so he would never be found.

Later—much later—questions were raised about Steven's apparent docility when taken from his former life. Why didn't Steven simply run away from his abductors? Why didn't he try to get help, by all later accounts, only a few hundred yards away at Yosemite Lodge?

While these might seem outwardly reasonable questions in hindsight, they ignore the central fact of the relationship between an older man and his child-victim. At that point, Ken held complete power over Steven: led to believe that his parents didn't want him and that they had approved Ken's actions, assuaged by Ken's occasional kindness, cowed by the threats to kill him if he didn't cooperate, rendered guilty and ashamed by Ken's sexual assault, lost, uncertain of his place in the world, even of his own family, confused by the rapidly unfolding events, Steven was essentially brainwashed. Slowly, Steven came to understand that whatever happened, his own fate was bound irrevocably to the man who would now claim to be his new father, the man who called himself Ken.

Based on later events, it's also reasonable to assume that Ken dosed his newfound ward with soporifics such as sleeping pills, leaving Steven lethargic and confused during these first few critical weeks.

Ken was hard for Steven to figure out. Just when he decided that Ken was mean, Ken would surprise him with affection or approval. Ken gave Steven a little dog; Steve named the dog Queenie, and the dog became his best friend.

The week's cold front, the snow, and the advent of the Christmas holidays kept visitors to the park at a minimum in the two or three weeks Steven was at the cabin; even if Steven had been fully aware of his surroundings, there were other events afoot in Yosemite that conspired to draw attention away from Ken, his small friend, and the sudden arrival of Ken's new "son." Many of the park's rangers, in fact, were busy trying to locate the remains of a couple who had just committed suicide by jumping over Yosemite Falls. Having left their clothes and identification at the top of the falls, a man and a woman had leapt into Yosemite Creek, been swept down the stream to a 1,400-foot freefall, and ended by smashing into a built-up cone of rock-hard ice below the falls. Most of the man's shattered body had been recovered; all that was found of the woman was a portion of leg, and it was decided to wait until spring to look for the remainder of the corpse. Truly, the park could be an unforgiving place.

Shortly after Christmas, Ken apparently decided it was time to move on. He quit his job as a bookkeeper at Yosemite Lodge and packed his new "son" and his "son's" little dog into the van, and drove out of the park for the last time. He also told Steven that he now had a new name: from now on, he was Dennis—Dennis Parnell—and Ken was to be "Dennis's" father, Ken Parnell. "Dennis" was to make sure to call Ken "Dad" from this day forward.

* * *

Over the next few years Ken and "Dennis" wandered around northern California, traveling from town to town as Ken looked for work, usually odd jobs. Slowly "Dennis" adjusted to the nomadic lifestyle, and in time came to see Ken as "Dad," just as Ken demanded. The life he'd had in Merced before December 4 began to grow dim; the true reality was the gray van, Queenie, and "Dad," along with the regular sexual assaults, which "Dennis" eventually came to see as something that came with the territory of living with "Dad."

The towns came and went as "Dennis" grew older: first Santa Rosa, but that was too crowded for Ken, so they moved farther up north to Ukiah; from Ukiah, to the small north coast town of Noyo, where Ken took up with a woman named Barbara and her small son, about five years old. Together the four lived in a converted bus, with Barbara selling Bibles to make ends meet.

Throughout this time, Ken enrolled "Dennis" in local schools; to all outward appearances, "Dennis" was what he seemed—the son of Ken, a single father; indeed, there was nothing in either the boy's or the man's behaviors to indicate that anything was other than normal. In fact, Ken joined both the local Eagles lodge and the Grange, and ran the Eagles' weekend flea market; Ken also tended the bar at the lodge, at least until the state's Alcoholic Beverage Commission wanted his fingerprints; that was when Ken decided he was too busy to work the bar anymore.

By the time five years had passed, "Dennis" had become nearly accustomed to his relationship with his "dad"; whatever memories he retained from his former life in Merced were hazy, almost dreamlike. He knew his real name was Steven, but he also knew that his real last name of Stayner was somehow a threat to "Dad," and by extention, himself; at some deep psychological level, "Dennis" knew that whatever happened, he and "Dad" were bound together, and that if something bad happened to "Dad," something bad would also happen to him. So "Dennis" kept his "dad's" secret, and kept to himself.

And it wasn't as if Ken was mean to his "son;" indeed, he was generous, even caring, and often indulgent. Ken gave "Dennis" wide latitude, sometimes even more than "Dennis" thought proper. By the time he was 12, "Dennis" was allowed to smoke and drink and keep his own hours; it was as if "Dad" trusted his "son" completely, so inextricably was the pair bound up in their shared secret.

(Continues...)

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Excerpted from Murder at Yosemite by Carlton Smith. Copyright © 1999 Carlton Smith. Excerpted by permission of St. Martin's Press.
All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
Excerpts are provided by Dial-A-Book Inc. solely for the personal use of visitors to this web site.

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Table of Contents

Contents

Title Page,
Copyright Notice,
Dear Reader,
Epigraph,
Author's Note and Acknowledgments,
Map,
Prologue,
Merced, California December 4, 1972,
Ukiah, California December, 1980,
Interlude, 1980–1989,
El Portal, California February, 1999,
Long Barn,
El Portal June 21, 1999,
St. Martin's Paperbacks True Crime Library Titles by Carlton Smith,
Copyright,