I Know My First Name Is Steven (38 page)

As Cary Stayner confessed to television news reporter Ted Rowlands of KNTV-TV and KBWB-TV: "I am guilty. I did murder Carole Sund, Julie Sund, Silvina Pelosso, and Joie Armstrong. I wish I could have controlled myself and not done what I did."

In the week following Cary's arrest, his father Del, a simple man who worked most of his life as a machin
ery mechanic at canneries around Merced and who is described as salt of the earth as you can get, could not talk about the crimes his son Cary confessed to without recalling the crime that still shadows their lives: The seven-year-and-three-month-long kidnapping of his second son, Steven Gregory Stayner.

Said Del, "Thank you for all your support since December 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."

It was Del who had passed on his love of the backwoods and camping to his oldest son, Cary.

But if he was brokenhearted by the image of his son desecrating an area that had become almost religious for the family—the lakes and the foothills of the Sierras—he did not let on in his few muffled statements to TV cameras and reporters from behind his closed screen door in Merced.

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

Beginning with the arrival of the white man in the middle of the 19th century, the Yosemite Valley has had a homicidal history. It was home to American Indians for thousands of years before the Mariposa Battalion—part U.S. Calvary and part vigilante group—entered the Valley in March of 1851 and all but wiped out the Ahwahneechee Indians under Chief Tenaya in a bloody battle perpetrated by the Battalion.

A dozen years later, President Abraham Lincoln set
the Yosemite Valley aside as a protected park. And not long thereafter, philosopher Ralph Waldo Emerson visited it and wrote, "This valley is the only place that comes up to the brag about it—and exceeds it." And it is this assessment and not the almost 150 years of violent killings with which most of today's visitors—up to 20,000 a day in the summer—would surely agree.

On President's Day, 1999, Carole Sund, her 15-year-old daughter Juliana, and 16-year-old family friend Silvina Pelosso from Argentina had hamburgers for dinner in the 1950s-style diner at the Cedar Lodge in El Portal, California, near the entrance to Yosemite National Park. And then, for what they did not know would be their last night alive, they retired to their motel room at the Cedar Lodge.

During the day the girls
oooed!
and
ahhed!
at Yosemite Falls, Half Dome, the snow-covered mountain meadows, and skated on a frozen pond in Yosemite, where they posed for the last photographs ever taken of them.

After the busy holiday weekend, almost all of the tourists had left the Lodge when at about 11:00
P.M.
Cary Stayner knocked on the door to Room 509 in a remote corner of the nearly deserted motel.

In a detailed statement to one investigative journalist, which appeared in the
San Francisco Examiner,
the
San Jose Mercury-News
and other news media, the 37-year-old motel handyman admitted he had been watching the three females, and when Carole Sund asked who was there, Stayner responded, "Maintenance. There's a leak behind the wall in your bathroom that I need to repair." Carole opened the door
and pleasantly greeted the maintenance man, who returned her kindly greeting by pulling out a pistol, pointing it at her, and assuring her that if she kept quiet no one would get hurt. Apparently thinking that the man would rob them and then leave, the frightened mother of four believed him, and along with her daughter Julie and their friend Silvina, she complied with Stayner's orders.

By his own admission, Cary Stayner bound and gagged the three and then separated them from one another. Then he took some rope and strangled Carole and then Silvina out of sight of Juliana. After he placed their bodies in the trunk of Carole's red rental car, he returned to the room where he forced her to perform oral sex on him for hours.

Then, he drove Juliana and the bodies of her mother and her friend for over an hour through the Sierra darkness before pulling into a paved overlook near Moccasin Point at New Don Pedro Reservoir, a lake where he and his family repeatedly camped and fished as he grew up.

Forcing the terrified 15-year-old out of the car, Stayner dragged her up a trail and over a rise so that they were out of range of the headlights of any cars. Then he stopped, sexually assaulted Juliana, and slit her throat so savagely that he almost severed her head. Afterward, he calmly left her body on the trail, walked back to the rental car, and drove into Tuolumne County, where he pulled onto an old dirt logging road.

His plan was to ditch the car in an isolated reservoir he knew about, with the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso still in the trunk. But in the dark, he
high-grounded the car on a tree stump and couldn't get it to move.

Frightened by the arrival of first light, Stayner walked two miles back to a phone and called a cab to come and pick him up for a ride back to Yosemite. When driver Jenny Paul arrived she was surprised that the casually dressed, "decent-looking" man with a backpack, who was "beat tired" and "didn't look like he'd slept," was willing to pay $125 for the cab ride to Yosemite.

Paul said Cary told her that friends had abandoned him. Then he fell asleep in her cab on the drive. Toward the end of the trip, he awoke to talk about trucks and to point out a cabin where he said he once saw Bigfoot, the legendary mountain ape-like creature. "I told him I didn't believe in Bigfoot," Paul said, "but he said, 'Oh, you should! You'll see!' "

When they arrived at the entrance to Yosemite National Park, the passenger argued with the ranger about paying the $35 entrance fee, insisting that he worked in the park and was therefore exempt from paying it. But when Stayner refused to tell the ranger who exactly he worked for, the ranger insisted that he pay the fee, he did, and Paul drove him on into the park.

As instructed, she delivered Cary to the Yosemite Lodge, the motel where Kenneth Eugene Parnell had worked at the time he kidnapped Cary's brother Steven. Paul went inside to use the restroom before the trip back, and when she came out, she spied Cary in the lobby staring at the pictures on the wall, as if lost.

Reports indicate it took two days before law enforce
ment began searching for Carole and Juliana Sund, Silvina Pelosso, and their red rental car . . . believing all the while that they had been the victims of an auto accident. Soon the search moved into high gear when the Sund family offered a $250,000 reward for finding the trio alive.

The search was one of the most extensive in California history and eventually involved airplanes, helicopters, and even search dogs and teams on snowshoes. But no trace of Carole Sund's red Pontiac Grand Prix rental car could be found.

Back at his cramped apartment at the Cedar Lodge in El Portal, Cary Stayner watched the search begin and then drove his baby blue International Scout back to Tuolumne County, took Carole Sund's wallet, and then torched the rental car.

In an apparent effort to confuse investigators, Stayner then drove to Modesto and dropped Sund's wallet—chock-full of credit cards—on a Modesto street, where a high school student found it and handed it over to police.

This discovery alarmed investigators and led them to believe that there had been no automobile accident—rather, that the trio's disappearance was due to foul play.

The F.B.I. was called in and agents were soon swarming all over Cedar Lodge, where handyman Cary Stayner had worked for two years. When Stayner volunteered to help them, F.B.I. agents accepted his offer, and Stayner opened up each room for them to inspect and even gathered samples of acrylic blankets so that the fibers could be examined and identified at the F.B.I. Crime Laboratory in Washington, DC.

But despite the fact that F.B.I. agents interviewed him twice, they did not arrest this quiet, unassuming caretaker could possibly be a suspect.

In mid-March, a target shooter discovered Carole Sund's burned-out rental car and investigators found Carole's and Silvina's charred bodies inside the trunk.

Soon the F.B.I. turned its investigation toward a group of Modesto prison parolees known as "cranksters"—ex-cons with a history of methamphetamine use. In short order, a half dozen other suspects were pulled in, including a pair of half brothers who violently reacted in standoffs with police. F.B.I. agents thought their irrational behavior might have been prompted by their need to hide something. And they believed that they did have the men responsible for the murders in custody, but lacked sufficient evidence to charge them in those murders.

Soon thereafter, an anonymous letter arrived at the Modesto F.B.I. office; it led investigators to Juliana's body. Stayner now admits he wrote that letter to throw investigators off the trail, even etching random names on the page above the one on which he wrote the letter and referring to the murderer as "we."

These events only served to fuel the F.B.I.'s case against the Modesto "crankster" suspects, especially when the F.B.I. crime laboratory discovered that acrylic fibers found in the half brothers' cars matched those found in blankets at the crime scene that Stayner helped agents gather. And then one of the half brothers told agents that he had participated in the murder of Carole Sund and helped to dispose of juliana's body and that the matching fibers had come from a blanket used to hide the teenager's body.

But the F.B.I. may well have put too much credence in the F.B.I. Laboratory's report since the fibers came from an orange acrylic blanket—not exactly a rare find—and now an F.B.I. official has acknowledged the match was of "almost zero significance. . . . Nobody attached a lot of weight to it."

Also, the F.B.I. could have performed a simple investigative check of the trip records of cab companies in the area, such as those of the Courtesy Cab Company in Sonora, for which Jenny Paul drove. The record shows that this was not done.

Further, even though the half brother who had confessed began backing away from his confession and his other statements grew increasingly suspect, the F.B.I. pressed ahead, trying to gather the evidence that they would need to make a case against those they had arrested around Modesto.

Then in June, 1999, Sacramento-based F.B.I. Agent in Charge James Maddock and task force chief in investigating the kidnapping-murders of the Sunds and Pelosso announced to news media, "I do feel that we have all of the main players in jail."

When Cary Stayner heard this announcement, he was still living and working at the Cedar Lodge and he must have figured that he had gotten away with the triple murder.

On Wednesday, July 21,1999, Stayner drove into the small enclave of Foresta on the western edge of Yosemite National Park and saw 26-year-old environmental educator Joie Armstrong packing her car for a trip. He later said that when he realized that she was alone he couldn't resist attacking her. But this time, his chosen victim fought back so viciously that Stayner
was forced to leave clues everywhere, including fingerprints and footprints in her house as well as distinctive tire tracks from his baby blue International Scout, a vehicle with different tires and treads on each of its four wheels.

On Saturday, July 24, investigators confronted Stayner at the Sacramento County nudist colony in Laguna del Sol and arrested him. Almost like Ervin Edward Murphy—the accomplice who had helped Kenneth Eugene Parnell kidnap his brother in 1972—Cary Stayner went quietly as if he had been expecting them. And within hours, Cary Stayner confessed to having stalked and murdered all four females, claiming that he had been dreaming of committing such mayhem since he was just seven years old.

Accordingly, investigators not only have Stayner's confessions, but they know that he knows too much about the crimes and that there is too much evidence to back up his statements for him not to be the killer: He knew what was taken from the Sunds' and Pelosso's room, the conditions of the bodies, and the fact that knives were used in the killings—all details that had not been released to the public.

And in an interesting twist it wasn't until Paul saw Cary Stayner's face on TV the night of July 25 that she recognized him and chillingly learned that he had confessed to the four murders. "I didn't know who he was until I saw his picture on TV. I said, 'Oh, my God! That's him!' "

Controversy surrounds the F.B.I.'s handling of this case. Some law enforcement authorities say that the
F.B.I. should have looked closer at Cary Stayner when they interviewed him and then used him to gather evidence at the Cedar Lodge in February, 1999, shortly after Carole Sund, her daughter Juliana, and their friend Silvina Pelosso disappeared.

The flaws in the Bureau's investigation seem best illustrated by statements made by Agent in Charge, Maddock. In June, 1999, he said, "I do feel that we have all the main players in jail, but we are in no rush to charge them." On July 25, the day after Cary Stayner was arrested for the murder of Joie Armstrong and indeed confessed to that murder as well as those of the Sunds and Pelosso, he stated: "I had previously expressed a belief that the key players in that case were already in custody on unrelated matters. That was my sincere belief based on the results of intensive investigative efforts and the best information available at the time. I have asked myself whether we could have done anything differently that might have prevented the murder of Joie Armstrong, [but] I'm confident we've done everything that we could have done."

Senator Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) has sharply criticized the F.B.I.'s handling of the case, saying, "Homicides have never been the F.B.I.'s strong suit. Perhaps the F.B.I. should stick to what it does best: investigate complex white collar crimes."

Besides initially dismissing Cary Stayner as a suspect, Grassley said, the Bureau rushed to judgment in claiming the killers of the Sunds and Pelosso were in custody, "raising the specter once again of the 'Richard Jewell syndrome.' " (Jewell was the security guard whom the F.B.I. falsely accused of the 1996 Olympics bombing in Atlanta. The F.B.I. later recanted.)