I Know My First Name Is Steven (27 page)

But the extensive sexual assaults her son had suffered were never, ever a subject discussed with Steven by Kay, or Del, or Steve's sister Cindy, who recalled: "I've never talked to Steve about that. During the trials people would ask me questions, and I had to tell them that I really didn't know. I never really talked to him
. . . no one
talked about 'it.' My parents really wouldn't talk about
'it.' "

In the spring of 1980, Steve, with his family's approval, optioned his story to a Hollywood television production company on behalf of ABC-TV. This brought him $25,000, but because of the Stayners' problems with the fictionalization of the script, the story was never produced and by 1984 the option had lapsed . . . and Steve had spent all his money.

Steve's fifteenth birthday on April 18th, 1980, was a
bright, happy occasion with an appropriately magnificent celebration. "It was a big blowout!" Steve grinned. "We went out to the lake and had a barbecue. I got all kinds of clothes, a new ten-speed bike, a calculator, and a fifty-dollar gift certificate for Stephanie's on the Mall. I had a lot of my friends there and practically the whole family came."

Chapter Eleven

The Investigations

"The value of taking Parnell off the streets forever is so obvious. "

The Merced police department investigation of Steve's 1972 kidnapping was severely hampered by the more than seven years that had passed, the two hundred miles that separated them from Mendocino County, and particularly the less than professional efforts of some of their brother lawmen in Mendocino County, most especially the Mendocino County District Attorney's investigator Richard "Dick" Finn. According to former Mendocino County Chief Criminal D.A. George McClure, Finn was a public servant who always considered his personal agenda first and foremost. And McClure's boss, former Mendocino County District Attorney Joseph Allen, said, "I can say that Finn generally was a guy who had a reputation for playing his cards very close to his chest. I can recall the incident where George was in trial on Parnell and discovered to his amazement that Finn had evidence
that George didn't know about. George talked to me about that later and said that he found that real surprising."

Early on it was Finn who took complete charge of the investigation of Parnell's kidnapping of Timmy White and on the whole provided little cooperation to his fellow lawmen from Merced. Finn was hired in September 1975 by then-D.A. Duncan James and by the time Joe Allen took office in January 1979 Finn had achieved civil service tenure. Said Allen tersely, "It certainly is true that Finn primarily interviewed Steve. It certainly is true that Finn primarily interviewed Timmy White. It certainly is true that Finn handled our relations—not exclusively—but the majority of the phone calls, contacts, back and forth with both the Stayner family and the White family."

It seemed especially odd to Merced Officers Lunney and Price that Finn didn't follow up on their discoveries that Parnell had committed hundreds of sexual assaults on Steve as well as a number of sexual assaults on Steve's young male friends during his four-year residence in Mendocino County. In fact, even though they detailed their findings to Finn on several occasions, the investigator seemed unconcerned about their information. Also, it was strange to Lunney and Price that instead of involving himself in this very major case, Allen was rarely in his office and delegated almost total responsibility for running the office to Finn while Allen himself spent a great deal of his time shooting pool at the Forest Club bar across the street from the Mendocino County courthouse.

Joseph Allen is a chunky, genial man who sports a bushy mustache and a brazen—friends called it col
orful—manner both inside and outside the courtroom. Joe, as he prefers to be called, is the sort of person even a stranger would find it difficult to address as "Mr. Allen." As the former Mendocino County Public Defender, he gained the attention of the local news media with his flashy, unconventional behavior.

As the P.D., Joe thought that his next career step should be running for District Attorney. He did, was elected, and took office in 1979. But Joe quickly found that he did not enjoy the prosecutor's role nearly as much as he did being the flamboyant counsel for the defense. Said Ukiah Police Chief David Johnson, "In the courtroom Joe is probably the most articulate man on his feet. He is sharp! But he does have different, unorthodox ways sometimes. He's a character!"

In Merced, Lunney and Price had been used to working with the county's efficient District Attorney, Pat Hallford, a true straight arrow who had been an F.B.I, agent for sixteen years before leaving the Bureau, getting elected D.A., and running an effective operation "by the book." Now they were having to conduct an investigation in another county by riding along on the coattails of what they thought was a disorganized district attorney's office.

Said Lunney: "Speaking about Mendocino County, those guys whipped through it [the first search of the remote cabin] and they didn't know what they were doing on the search warrant. They didn't know what they were looking for . . . they just went through it in a breeze. Here's Timmy White . . . he's been held for
a short period of time. But we knew our case was going to be a lot more difficult because it wasn't an open-and-shut thing."

On Thursday, March 6, Lunney and Price drove back to Mendocino County to seek much-needed evidence for their case against Parnell. On their way north they began building their case by stopping in Santa Rosa and picking up copies of Dennis's school records. And they did the same in Willits, Fort Bragg, Mendocino City, and Point Arena. Although their trip lasted just three days, through long hours and dogged determination they were able to gather considerable evidence against Parnell.

During their first search at the desolate Mountain View Ranch cabin—the one organized and actually conducted by Finn—Lunney and Price had just one very confused, disorganized hour to try to locate and gather evidence. But on this second trip the Merced officers were surprised when they arrived and Finn presented them with a broad search warrant for the Mountain View Ranch to speed them on their way. This time it was just the two of them and they invested five diligent hours scouring the cabin, barn, and out buildings at the ranch. Unfortunately, though, the ranch had been just about picked clean of evidence by a number of reporters who spent the days after the initial, March 2nd search poking through the cabin, barn, and sheds. The ranch had remained unsecured since the Finn party's hasty departure the previous Sunday morning.

As a result of this, two reporters made very interesting
discoveries. First, while searching the barn a reporter from The
San Francisco Chronicle
came across Parnell's nude photographs of Steve and Jeff Norton. He gave them to Duke Stornetta who in turn handed them over to Ukiah Police, and the photos eventually made their way back to Merced. But this series of exchanges destroyed the photographs' value as evidence against Parnell, since it no longer could be proved that he had taken them. Second, Miranda Dunn of KPIX-TV in San Francisco was going through the unlocked cabin when she noticed an open, huge jar of Vaseline on Parnell's nightstand. She thought it peculiar and later asked a blushing lawman what it might have been used for.

Lunney and Price went to Point Arena and searched Parnell's town apartment at The Garcia Center. There they found two sparsely furnished rooms. Next they went to Comptche, where Parnell had an old trailer set up as a storage shed. In it they found boxes of old junk and records, receipts for phone bills, and his parole papers.

While they were in Comptche, Lunney and Price interviewed people who had known Dennis and his father and in doing so stumbled onto a veritable nest of stories about Parnell's sexual assaults of Dennis's male friends. Said Lunney: "One boy's mother [George Mitchell's mother, Joann] was very upset about it. We told her that we would pass it along to the proper authorities. You see, by law we can initiate an investigation in the county of Merced, and we can go anywhere that investigation leads us. But if we come across another criminal act during the time we are conducting our investigation in another county, then we
have to turn that information over to the proper authorities in that county. And that is what we did with the information we got about Parnell sexually assaulting these other boys. [Finn] should have gone after [Parnell] on those sexual assaults up there, but he didn't."

Joe Allen vociferously claimed that Finn had never told him anything about Parnell sexually assaulting boys other than Steve . . . and that Finn had minimized that by saying "damn little" about the kidnapper's sex assaults on the teenager.

Also, George McClure—who prosecuted Parnell—said that Finn never told him anything about Parnell sexually assaulting boys other than Steve. However, McClure did acknowledge that he had acted on Finn's recommendation not to prosecute Parnell "so as to protect Steve" for what Finn had told him were only "a few sex assaults" on the boy.

According to Mendocino County Sheriff's Department Sgt. Dallegge, in the early 1980s Mendocino County law enforcement had a strange attitude about prosecuting adults who were accused of sexually assaulting children: "Back then—the time I took over as [child sex abuse] investigator—you could catch a guy for sexual assault on a child aged fourteen and if you could get him for first offense and put him in county jail and get him convicted, you were lucky. I worked sex crimes and I couldn't get the District Attorney to prosecute. You know,
they wouldn't even file [the case]!"

In fact, on their third investigative trip to Mendocino County, Lunney and Price continued to uncover more boys who had been victims of sexual assaults by Parnell. And each one of these boys had dark hair and
were between the ages of nine and fourteen years old at the time Parnell assaulted them. As he had done in George Mitchell's case, Lunney filled out detailed reports of each incident and personally handed them to Dick Finn. But as with the Mitchell case, neither Lunney nor Price was aware that Finn nor any other Mendocino County law enforcement officer ever investigated these alleged assaults. In addition not a one of the dozen or so peace officers the author interviewed in Mendocino County knew for certain what had happened to the information that Finn had received. Finn himself, when asked, was vague and noncommittal.

However, George McClure believes that Finn put this evidence in the "short, two-drawer, locked file cabinet that sat behind his [Finn's] desk. Nobody else had access to it. Not even Joe Allen. I remember one day I was upset and had to get some evidence for a case of mine that was in that file cabinet. And the head secretary and I went to his desk and tried to find a key and there were several keys in [Finn's desk], but not a key to that file cabinet."

About Finn's personal, secure file cabinet, Joe Allen recalls, "It was one of those keyed file cabinets that would protect your papers in case of fire. I remember one time that George had to get some evidence for trial out of that cabinet. Finn was out of town and was the only one who had a key to it. So we had to let the charges against the defendant be dropped. That was his file cabinet and what he did or didn't have in there he kept fairly close to his chest."

In early March of 1980, several days after Parnell's arrest, fellow Palace Hotel employee Irene Cook went to see him in the Mendocino County Jail. Cook had a four-year-old son, Charlie, in whom Parnell had taken a very keen interest. Said Cook, "It was good for Charlie having Ken around. Young boys need a daddy. Ken did some good for Charlie, when he was there. My daughter didn't like him, though. She said there was something strange about him."

Concluded Cook, "His interest in my boy grew. Charlie started calling him 'Daddy Ken.' One time he asked Ken, 'Are you my daddy?' And Ken said, 'I'd like to be.' "

Two days after Lunney and Price's return to Merced at the end of their second trip to Mendocino County, on Monday, March 10, they went to talk to Steve again, but the teenager still denied there having been anything untoward about Parnell's relationship with him. But Lunney and Price knew better, and by early April their persistence finally paid off when they confronted Steve with the nude pictures of he and Jeff Norton and Steve admitted to them that Parnell had indeed sexually assaulted him . . . not once but hundreds of times over the more than seven years he had lived with the man. Said Steve, "For the first month after my return, Parnell was thought of as somebody who was looking for a family without having to be married. Then the nude pictures showed up. That's when Pat Lunney called me into the police station and started asking me about sexual abuse. At first I denied that there was any. Then Lunney asked me again, but I
told him 'No' again. Then he said, 'Well, I've got a guy who says different and he will go and say it on the witness stand.' That's when I confessed and told him all that happened. From there I went to the D.A. [Hallford] and I had to tell it to him."

Since in California the statute of limitations for sexual assault on a child was and still is three years—and Parnell had left Merced County with Steve seven years earlier—charges against Parnell for his assaults on Steve would have to cover the period from 1977 to 1980 and have to be filed in Mendocino County. Therefore, Lunney and Price took both Steve's sworn statements about these assaults and Steve himself to Finn at his office in Ukiah and requested that Finn investigate Parnell for all eighty-seven sexual assaults on Steve which the Merced officers had by then documented. Also at this meeting the Merced officers personally handed Finn additional copies of their reports of several sexual assaults on Mendocino County boys in the trailer at Comptche.

"Yeah, we had the pictures of the one kid"—actually the nude photographs of Jeff Norton and Steve—"and we had a bunch of other people saying things," Finn said. "We knew that if we went into Comptche, we could come out with a whole shitpot full of sex assaults. We knew that! But we had a real situation there: small town, small department, small budget. We did the best we could. Everybody knew what was going on. And if anybody was a victim, they would have told their parents and talked at that time and come forward rather than us having to go in and dig them out.