Man Is Suspect in Both Yosemite Murder Cases

Federal authorities have arrested a 37-year-old motel handyman in the grisly murder of an environmental educator at Yosemite National Park and said Sunday that he is a suspect in the highly publicized abduction and killings of three women sightseers earlier this year.

Cary Stayner faces arraignment today on a single murder charge for the killing of Joie Ruth Armstrong, 26, whose beheaded body was found near her home last week at the park’s western edge.

Investigators said they believe that Stayner played a role in the slaying of Carole Sund, her 15-year-old daughter Juliana and family friend Silvina Pelosso, 16, who vanished in February from the Cedar Lodge, an El Portal motel where Stayner worked as a maintenance man.

“We have developed specific information linking Stayner to the Yosemite sightseers’ murders,” James Maddock, the FBI special agent heading the investigations, said at a news conference. He added that with Stayner’s arrest, “we believe that no other person involved with any of these murders is still on the loose.”

Stayner, who rented a room over the Cedar Lodge’s restaurant, was questioned by the FBI after Sund and the two girls disappeared in February but was never considered a suspect, Maddock said. He refused to elaborate at the Sunday news conference.

The arrest was a surprise turn in the 5-month-old investigation of the sightseer slayings. Before the weekend, the FBI had homed in on a loose-knit group of ex-convicts from the Modesto area with a history of sex crimes and methamphetamine use. Stayner was never on the target list.

Maddock said he had spent many hours of introspection since Stayner’s arrest, questioning whether the FBI could have done anything to prevent Armstrong’s killing.

“I’ve struggled with that issue for the last 24 hours and continue to do so,” he said.

But he added that given the huge pool of FBI agents and other resources devoted to the case and the dearth of evidence or solid witnesses to work with, “I’m confident we’ve done everything that could reasonably be done.”

Cedar Lodge, hunkered along the Merced River as it winds down from Yosemite, is only a few miles from Armstrong’s home in the Foresta community, an enclave of about 30 cabins in an area not frequented by tourists. The nonprofit group, the Yosemite Institute, that employed Armstrong maintains its main office and some worker housing in El Portal.

Maddock said Saturday that it remains unclear whether Armstrong knew Stayner.

FBI investigators said more than a month ago that they believed they had the main suspects in the Sund case in custody on other charges.

Maddock said investigators are now trying to determine if Stayner is connected to any of the men the FBI had previously targeted, but so far have no link between them.

Aside from the Modesto group, authorities took into custody two other El Portal men, both Cedar Lodge employees with violent criminal records.

But whether Stayner might have acted alone or in concert with others remains an open question that investigators want to resolve “as quickly as possible,” Maddock said.

Francis and Carole Carrington, parents of Carole Sund, said they felt some closure with the announcement of an arrest.

“It’s better to know than let your imagination work on you,” said Francis Carrington, Carole Sund’s father. “We hope this is brought to a just end. That’s all we can ask for.”

He expressed sadness for Armstrong’s family, saying that “like Mr. Maddock, I feel bad we couldn’t resolve this sooner and perhaps save someone. What I hear about Joie is she was just a wonderful gal.”

Stayner, a muscular 6-foot-1 man who often wore a baseball cap and frequented a nude beach just down the Merced River from El Portal, had only one prior arrest. Authorities say he was arrested in 1997 for possession of marijuana for sale.

He grew up in Merced and Atwater, side by side farm towns along California 99 in the Central Valley. The family history was checkered by tragedy. His uncle was shot to death in Merced in 1990.

His younger brother, Steven, is best remembered as the victim of a harrowing criminal abduction. Steven Stayner was kidnapped in 1972 on a Merced street and raised for seven years by a drifter who sexually abused him.

The youth escaped from abductor Kenneth Parnell in 1980, but died in 1989 at the age of 24 in a hit-and-run motorcycle accident.

After attending high school in Merced, Cary Stayner worked for several years at C&S; Glass in Atwater. Sandy Cox, whose husband owns the firm, couldn’t believe this latest news, especially after the FBI had given the impression weeks ago that it had all the suspects in custody.

“We’ve known Cary since he was a little boy,” Cox said. “And we have a hard time believing this. It just doesn’t match up. Out of respect for his family and the victim’s family, we don’t want to say any more.”

Neighbors said Stayner’s parents, who buttoned up the house after his arrest late Saturday evening, had lived in a subdivision composed of neatly spaced mobile homes for about a year. They described the parents as quiet and friendly, always on the go camping or doing other activities.

In El Portal, acquaintances said Stayner was a bit of a loner, but never a trouble maker. He would often go into the Cedar Lodge bar to gulp down a bowl of soup or, on occasion, have a rum and coke, but little more.

Stayner told some friends that he got drunk easily and sometimes sick from it. When a tipsy tourist was buying rounds at the Cedar Lodge, Stayner once reluctantly accepted a drink and told an acquaintance that he felt bad later.

“He was a nice guy, an average Joe,” said Parker Bevington, a 15-year-old gas station attendant. “He didn’t do anything to make us feel uncomfortable. He joked around. He asked us how our day was. . . . He doesn’t seem like the kind who would do something like that.”

Sixteen-year-old Aaron Ludwig, who was born and raised in Portal, said he had spoken to Stayner on several occasions, mostly while visiting his mother, a waitress at the Cedar Lodge.

“He seemed like a nice guy, fun to talk to. There was nothing to even vaguely suspect him of something like this,” said Ludwig, who manages the town’s Chevron station. “We would sit back and talk about how business was, what it’s like working down there, just normal chitchat.”

Ludwig said Stayner rarely spoke about his family or what had happened to Steven.

“The only time was when foreigners would come in and he’d start telling them, ‘Yeah, my brother’s famous, he’s been on television,’ ” Ludwig said about tourists who came through the town. “But he never really told people who his brother was, that he was Steven Stayner. I found out through my mom.”

Ludwig said Stayner was open but seemed not to hang out with any particular group of people.

Stayner began work at the Cedar Lodge in August 1997 and was laid off last January because of a seasonal slowdown in business. Stayner was rehired March 20, a day after the bodies of Carole Sund and Pelosso were found in the trunk of their rental car in a remote Tuolumne County forest, more than 90 miles from El Portal. Juliana Sund’s body was discovered a week later in a thicket near a reservoir far from the park.

Authorities took Stayner into custody at a Sacramento County nudist resort Saturday morning after a guest heard his name on a TV newscast and alerted the FBI.

He was last seen in El Portal on Thursday evening. Earlier that day, FBI agents had questioned him and searched his car, friends said.

After an lengthy interrogation, Stayner was arrested late Saturday night and a federal magistrate in Fresno signed a complaint against him Sunday morning alleging one count of murder in a federal park. The crime can carry the death sentence, the FBI’s Maddock said.

Armstrong was last seen alive Wednesday in the Yosemite Institute’s offices inside the park. She was supposed to make the long drive to visit friends in the Bay Area that night but never showed up.

Rangers began a search the next day around her home in Foresta. Armstrong’s body was found a few hundred feet from her home. Her car was loaded with belongings for the trip.

Times staff writers Dave Lesher, Carla Rivera and Hugo Martin contributed to this story.