Yosemite Murderer Sentenced to Death

A former motel handyman was sentenced to death Thursday for murdering three Yosemite National Park tourists in a 1999 crime that spread fear throughout California until he was arrested for beheading a nature guide six months later.

Cary Stayner, 41, was ordered to die by lethal injection in state prison, a fate that could be decades away on the nation’s most congested death row.

Judge Thomas Hastings became emotional and abruptly left the bench before imposing the death sentence reached by a jury in October. Victims’ relatives and jurors who had returned to the courtroom also wept.

Hastings rejected defense claims of juror misconduct and said there was overwhelming evidence against Stayner. He said the killings had taken a devastating emotional toll that justified execution.

Stayner was convicted of murdering Carole Sund, 42, her daughter, Juli, 15, and their Argentine friend, Silvina Pelosso, 16, during a trip to Yosemite in February 1999. The jury rejected an insanity defense.

“I’ve never seen anything that’s so close to black and white and evil and good as Stayner and our children,” said Francis Carrington, the father of Carole Sund and grandfather of Juli. “I’m so proud of the way Carole and Juli lived, and I’m so ashamed of Stayner.”

The case automatically will be appealed to the state Supreme Court.

Stayner’s father, Delbert Stayner, said outside court Thursday that his son had been deprived of a fair trial by a “kangaroo court” and a judge who ignored defense arguments.

The strongest pieces of evidence against Stayner were his own words to the FBI when he was picked up for questioning in July 1999, after the headless body of nature guide Joie Armstrong was found near her cabin in the park.

In a tape-recorded confession that lasted hours, Stayner discussed how he had fantasized about killing and saw opportunity Feb. 15, 1999, when the tourists were alone in their room at the Cedar Lodge, where he worked.

Stayner tricked his way into the room, bound the three with duct tape and then killed them, strangling the mother and Pelosso and then molesting Juli before driving her to a reservoir in the Sierra Nevada foothills and slashing her throat.

It was more than a month before the charred bodies of the elder Sund and Pelosso were found in the trunk of their torched rental car, which had been abandoned in a forest. A week later, Juli’s decomposing body was discovered under brush on a hillside.

As the crimes went unsolved, terror swept the Central Valley and the rugged Sierra Nevada, casting a shadow over Yosemite’s serene image.

Stayner, 41, who is serving life in federal prison without parole for murdering Armstrong, is under an order to be returned to federal custody, defense lawyer Marcia Morrissey said.

But a spokesman for the state Department of Corrections said the harsher sentence would probably force Stayner to be transferred to state custody.