A Tragic Odyssey to Yosemite

Night after night, in a ritual he shared with no one, a 10-year-old Cary Stayner stood beneath the same spot in the sky, found his lucky star and whispered a wish:

“Wherever my little brother is tonight, bring him home safe and sound. Please bring Steven home.”

On a cold and rainy December afternoon in 1972, Cary Stayner, oldest brother and protector, discovered that 7-year-old Steven had vanished while walking home from school. He had disappeared on a rural highway that ran through their farm town of Merced and ended in Yosemite National Park. It would take seven years before Cary’s wish came true and Steven came home, only for his big brother to discover the terrible truth.

Steven had been abducted by a Yosemite motel worker, a pedophile named Kenneth Parnell who, through a combination of stealth and brazenness, had eluded an FBI manhunt at the park and spirited Steven to a new life in Northern California, one filled with sexual horrors.

Now, 27 years later, in the dark of night, Cary Stayner stood on the same road leading to the same park, a hotel worker just like Parnell. In an eerie echo of the predator who had changed his family’s fate, Stayner allegedly calculated a series of crimes that would overshadow even the media sensation caused by his brother’s disappearance, heroic return and eventual tragic death.

Like Parnell, Stayner would outwit authorities for months, almost playing with them, until his capture and stunning confession last week to killing four women in the shadow of the park he and Steven so loved.

On this February night, he would later confess, Stayner stood in the hallway of the Cedar Lodge motel, just outside the park, hiding a gun and a rope as he knocked on the door of Room 509.

Inside were three tourists, a mother and her 15-year-old daughter and a young family friend, whose movements Stayner had been watching since they drove up the day before in a bright red 1999 Pontiac Grand Prix.

Whoever answered the knock found the good-looking, soft-spoken handyman on the other side.

What happened next--and in the weeks and months to follow--has been pieced together through the accounts of investigators, federal authorities and Stayner’s confession to the FBI and to a television news reporter. His alleged crimes have captured the nation’s attention, frustrated the FBI and raised questions about an investigation that employed scores of federal agents and local officers, FBI criminal profilers and the FBI crime lab--and somehow still managed to overlook Stayner until he was accused of committing a fourth murder last week.

Those who know the tightknit Stayner family trace a path that began long before the killings. They describe a bucolic life in the farm fields of the San Joaquin Valley, filled with weekend fishing and boating trips to the lakes and streams below the park with his father and mother and four siblings, a life ruptured one day out of the blue by a man trolling for young boys.

It was beside one of those lakes, New Don Pedro, that Stayner said he returned to dump the body of his 15-year-old victim, whose neck had been cut from ear to ear, the head almost severed.

This week, his father, Delbert, a simple man who worked most of his life at a local cannery and is described as salt-of-the-earth by friends and neighbors, could not talk about the crimes his son has confessed to without recalling the crime that still shadows their lives.

Steven’s ordeal became the basis of a book and TV movie, “I Know My First Name Is Steven.”

“Thank you for all your support since Dec. 4, 1972, when you helped look 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,” he said.

It was Delbert who had passed on his love of the backwoods and camping to his oldest son, Cary. If he was brokenhearted by the image of his son desecrating an area that had become almost religious for the family, the lake and foothills, he did not let on in his few muffled statements to TV cameras.

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

A Knock on the Door

Carole Sund had settled in for the night at Cedar Lodge on Feb. 15, Presidents Day. What a trip it had been--the snow-covered meadows, the cathedral of cliffs. Juliana, her 15-year-old daughter, frolicked on skates that day on a frozen pond with Silvina Pelosso, 16, a family friend visiting from Argentina. Now, after a meal of burgers at the lodge’s 1950s-style diner, the threesome nestled in their room with some rental movies. They were to leave the next morning. They never had a chance.

After the busy Presidents Day weekend, Cedar Lodge had emptied. Nearly all the tourists had headed home. It was near 11 p.m. The far corner of the complex where Room 509 was situated was deserted when the knock came on the door.

Stayner had been watching them, he told investigators. He talked his way inside with a practiced ruse: There was a repair that had to be made. Once the door was opened and he was safely inside, he changed his face and pulled out a gun. Carole, a 42-year-old supermom who deftly juggled work and philanthropy and four children, may have figured their only chance was to comply. Even if she had screamed right then, it’s not likely that anyone would have heard her. Investigators later would find no signs of a struggle.

The three women were bound and gagged. He separated them from one another. Stayner told investigators he strangled Carole, then Silvina, with a length of rope. He would show one odd bit of mercy. He said he kept Juliana far enough away that she was spared the horror of watching her mother and her friend die. As Juliana cowered, he dragged the two bodies to the trunk of their rental car, covered by darkness.

He forced Juliana into the car and disappeared up the highway, driving for more than an hour through the darkness of the Sierra. Finally he rolled down the switchbacks to the New Don Pedro Reservoir, a serene spot filled with childhood memories.

Stayner pulled into a paved overlook just beyond the tiny enclave of Moccasin Point. In the still night, he dragged Juliana from the car, up a narrow trail, over a rise and out of reach of any headlights. Stayner told investigators that he sexually assaulted her, then slit her throat. It was a savage cut, almost severing her head, and that’s where he left her body.

He drove on into Tuolumne County, deep into the hills. At the first real break in the scattered cabins along the highway, Stayner pulled onto a dirt logging road, intent on dumping the car--with the other bodies still in the trunk--in an isolated reservoir at the base of the valley. But the car wedged on a tree stump, refusing to budge. As dawn approached, he fled.

Stayner walked the mile or two back to civilization and called a cab. Jenny Horvath was a bit surprised by the tired-looking, mussed man willing to pay $125 to get back to Yosemite. He dozed for part of the way, but awakened to talk about trucks, tell her he had been abandoned by friends and argue with a ranger at the park’s front gate to let him in for free.

Once inside, he asked Horvath if she believed in Bigfoot.

No, she did not.

You should, he told her, because he is real.

She dropped him at Yosemite Lodge, the same motel where the man who had kidnapped his brother had worked as the night auditor. Horvath went to use the restroom before the trip back, then was surprised to see Stayner still there in the lobby, gazing at pictures on the walls, as if lost.

Two days passed before authorities mounted a search for Carole Sund and her companions. Eventually it would become one of the biggest hunts in California history, spurred in no small measure by aggressive efforts by Sund’s family, who offered $250,000 if the three were found alive.

Authorities would use planes and helicopters and search dogs and teams on snowshoes, but not a sign of the red rental car was found along any of the roads leading from Yosemite.

Back home in El Portal, Stayner had a front-row seat for it all. As the search began, he drove back up to Tuolumne County and set the rental car afire to hide any evidence, he told investigators. Eager to throw off the cops he knew would eventually come, Stayner said he grabbed Carole Sund’s wallet inset, bursting with credit cards, and threw it onto a Modesto street. A high school student turned it in to the police.

Sund’s disappearance, they realized, was no accident. This was foul play. They called in the FBI.

Stayner was right there when agents swarmed Cedar Lodge. Early on, he helped them gather up samples of blankets, opening up each room for the agents. They questioned him two times, but never figured this caretaker, right under their noses, as a suspect.

The FBI’s vaunted criminal profilers arrived and, after pondering the particulars, came up with a startling theory: It was a car accident that doomed the trio. California FBI officials promptly sent them packing back to Washington.

The task force, made up of nearly a dozen local officers and 40 FBI agents, focused instead on another employee at the motel with a history of violence and sex crimes. But though the suspect twice flunked a lie detector test, agents could never quite find the evidence to make a case.

Around mid-March, when the burned-out rental car was discovered by a target shooter in Tuolumne County, the FBI investigation turned toward a group of Modesto prison parolees with a penchant for methamphetamine use. A sweep by investigators pulled in more than half a dozen suspects. They looked most intently at two half brothers, seasoned ex-cons who had reacted violently in recent standoffs with police. FBI agents wondered if they reacted so irrationally because they had something to hide.

Stayner helped investigators with the next major break in the case. He penned a taunting, anonymous letter to agents telling them right where Juliana’s body could be found beside the lake, according to his confession. To throw off the FBI, he etched a few random names on the paper--as if it had been beneath another page in a pad--and referred to the Sund killers as “we.”

The letter was sent to the FBI’s Modesto office in mid-March, and was a road map to Juliana’s body.

But the discovery only fueled the FBI’s case against the Modesto suspects. The FBI crime lab found that acrylic fibers at the crime scene matched those found in vehicles belonging to the half brothers. One of the brothers then implicated himself in numerous statements, sources said, telling authorities that he had participated in the killing of Carole and helped dispose of Juliana’s body. The suspect confirmed that the matching fibers had come from a blanket used to hide the teenager’s body.

The task force may have put too much credence in the lab report, however. The fibers came from an orange acrylic blanket--not exactly a rare find--and one high-ranking FBI official now says that the match was of “almost zero significance. . . . Nobody attached a lot of weight to it.”

But the task force stayed on the multiple killer theory, although the meth abuser who had confessed was waffling about his role, sources said. His statements and accusations against others veered wildly, causing concern about his reliability. Agents pressed ahead, looking for the physical clues they would need to make a case.

But the FBI and local prosecutors felt confident enough that in early June, right as the summer tourist season was kicking off, they publicly announced that they believed all the suspects were in custody on charges unrelated to the trio’s slayings.

There were other mistakes.

After the Sunds’ car was found, agents didn’t bother to check with the cab company that had given Stayner a ride the morning after he dumped the rental. It never occurred to them that a killer would take a taxi away from the crime scene in the Sierra Nevada. Horvath, the taxi driver, also didn’t put two and two together and report her odd, early morning passenger after the case swung right into her home territory.

Stayner, still living in his apartment above Cedar Lodge restaurant, figured he had gotten away with the triple murder, he later told investigators.

But he said he couldn’t stop himself on July 14 when he spied Joie Armstrong.

The 26-year-old environmental educator was alone that evening at the home she shared with her boyfriend and another roommate in Foresta, an enclave on the western edge of Yosemite.

Stayner allegedly attacked Armstrong as she was packing her car for an out-of-town getaway. She fought back mightily, leaving a trail of evidence and throwing her killer off course. The stealth Stayner had employed so carefully in stalking the Sunds and Pelosso was shattered, sources said. In his haste, the killer disposed of Armstrong’s beheaded body in a stream nearby, leaving fingerprints in the house, footprints and car tracks outside.

On Saturday, investigators confronted Stayner at a Sacramento County nudist colony. He went quietly, almost as if he was waiting for them. His confession, sources say, poured out of him, as he calmly admitted to hunting down and killing the four women. On Monday, he again confessed, to a TV reporter, saying that he had dreamed of killing women for 30 years.

Members of the task force, chastened by the turns and missteps in their five-month investigation, haven’t completely bought Stayner’s insistence that he acted alone. He has been charged with Armstrong’s murder, and authorities in Tuolumne and Mariposa counties will meet next week with federal officials to discuss charges in the Sund-Pelosso slayings. Authorities also are piecing together Stayner’s movements for the past two decades, trying to determine whether he might be involved in other unsolved slayings.

In his jail cell earlier this week, he reportedly asked the TV journalist if someone might be interested in making a TV movie about his life story, as was done with his brother’s.

Gifts for His Missing Brother

In the seven years between Steven’s abduction and his return, Cary Stayner kept his brother close to his heart, family and friends say. Kay Stayner, their mother, seemed to shut down, becoming distant and cold, they said. Delbert, always full of love, tried to compensate, but he too was having a hard time. After work, he’d sometimes disappear into Steven’s room and Cary would find him there, rifling through the drawers, sniffing Steven’s clothes.

Every Christmas, each of the children would buy and wrap a gift for Steven. When he didn’t return home by New Year’s, the gifts would go into a closet. After seven years, the closet was full.

Steven escaped from Parnell on March 1, 1980, in Ukiah. He told police there that he had forgotten his last name, recalling only that his family used to call him Steven. He arrived in Merced the next day, a Sunday, to a media horde swarming on the Stayners’ front lawn. It was international news, the saga later ranking as one of the top 10 stories of the year, and it would end tragically nine years later with Steven’s death in a motorcycle accident.

The evening Steven returned, in the modest living room, Cary and the other children brought out the gifts that had been gathering dust in the closet, and Steven opened each one.

That night, Cary had a hard time going to sleep. He sneaked into the living room, where Steven was asleep on a bed made of pallets. “I stayed up a long time just looking at Steven while he slept and listening to him breathe,” Cary told author Mike Echols, who wrote “I Know My First Name Is Steven.” “I just couldn’t believe that my brother was finally back home again.

“You know, I went outside that night and I walked several blocks and then looked up at the stars and started to wish on one again,” he said. “But then I remembered that Steve was back home and so I thanked the star instead.”

Times staff writer Eric Lichtblau and correspondent Richard Chon contributed to this report.