Yosemite Valley
Half Dome
Sunset At Horsetail Falls
Paradise
Missing since February 15 from their room at the Cedar Lodge in El Portal (last seen renting videotapes at the establishment's front desk, a $250,000 reward is offered for information as to their whereabouts), just outside the park, subjects of a search for weeks that has included hundreds of FBI agents, local police, National Park rangers, California Highway Patrol officers, search dogs, and helicopters, the fate of three tourists, Carole Sund (42) of Eureka, California, her daughter, Juli (15), and Juli's visiting friend from Argentina, Silvina Pelosso (16), is determined when a hiker finds a burned-out Pontiac Grand Prix on a back-country logging road near the northeastern edge of Yosemite. It is the red rental car in which the trio had been hoping to explore the wonders of the region, and inside the vehicle's trunk, authorities discover the bound and charred remains of the older Sund and Pelosso (the bodies are burnt beyond recognition and are officially identified using dental records of the two women). Her throat slashed, Juli Sund's corpse is found days later after the FBI receives an anonymous letter, sent by the killer, with a crudely drawn map showing where she can be found in the heavy underbrush off an overlook of the nearby Don Pedro Reservoir ... and a cold-hearted message, "We had fun with this one." A monster is stalking Yosemite National Park!
Carole, Juli, And Silvina
Silvina & Juli
Juli & Carole Alongside The Merced River
Cedar Lodge Complex
Crime Scene
Don Pedro Reservoir
Investigation begun, evidence is gathered and analyzed (, and individuals in the vicinity questioned, including the entire staff of the Cedar Lodge. One member of the staff is quickly eliminated as a suspect in the murders due to lack of a criminal record, his calm in answering probing questions, and the fact that he is a member of a family that has itself been the victims of a monster, resort handyman Cary Anthony Stayner. Returning home from school in 1972, Stayer's younger brother Steven Gregory (7), is abducted in Merced, California by pedophile, Kenneth Parnell ... he will be sexually abused by Parnell, and a Parnell girlfriend, until he is fourteen-years-old, when, with another of their victims, recently kidnapped Timothy White of Ukiah, California, Stayner leads the pair to freedom and a return to their homes. A tale of survival and heroism in the face of horrific conditions, the Stayner name becomes known internationally by way of a true crime television mini-series on the subject called "I Know My First Name is Steven" (it will receive four Emmy nominations) and subsequent book of the same name by Mike Echols. And the tragedies don't stop with Steven kidnapping ... after escaping Parnell (he will die behind bars in Vacaville, California at the age of 78) and being reunited with his family, Stayner is teased at school (eventually quitting), drinks frequently (Parnell had allowed him to drink and smoke), and is finally kicked out of the family abode, before he marries in 1985, fathers two children, counsels children and their parents on personal safety, becomes a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, and then dies in a motorcycle accident at the age of only 24 in 1989. Additionally, an uncle in the Stayner family, Jerry, one Cary Stayner had been living with, had been murdered in 1990 (never officially "solved," authorities now believe he was murdered by his nephew, the same nephew that will one day accuse his relative of sexually abusing him when he was only eleven).
Steven Stayner
Predator Parnell
Free - Brother Cary In Hat In
Background
Through June there are no arrests for the killings because it appears the murderers are ex-convicts and methamphetamine users who have both had trouble with the authorities before, Michael Larwick and his half-brother, Eugene Dykes, and that are already in custody at the Modesto County Jail (Larwick for shooting a Modesto police officer, and Dykes for drug possession and parole violations). Both men are linked to the killings by acrylic fibers analyzed by the FBI lab in Washington D.C., and by incriminating statements made by Dykes ... gathering more evidence, it seems it is only a matter of time before the men will be charged for the deaths of the Sunds and Pelosso. The course of the case all changes however when the decapitated body of 26-year-old Yosemite Institute naturalist, Joie Ruth Armstrong (her head is found 27 feet away), who led kids on hikes into the wildnerness, is discovered on the afternoon of July, 22, near the cabin she is sharing with her fellow naturalist boyfriend, Michael Raffaeli, and a roommate, in the hamlet of Foresta, California (late for a weekend visit to Sausalito, her friends there have contacted the authorities).
Armstrong
A fourth murder within five months of three others, this time there is no mystery has to what has happened ... at the cabin (one of thirty in the area mostly used by employees of Yosemite National Park) a neighbor reports sighting a blue and white 1979 International Scout parked there the day before, and there are tire tracks and footprints left behind. Be-on-the-lookout alert issued, authorities soon discover the vehicle in question parked along the Merced River, about 12 miles from the western entrance to the park, while below, along the rocky banks of the river, its owner, smoking a joint, sunbathes in the nude ... Cary Stayner. Marijuana confiscated, Stayner identifies himself, gets dressed, and is not arrested ... at first. Crime scene evidence matched to photos of Stayner's ride, police and FBI agents arrest the Cedar Lodge handyman two days later while he is eating lunch at one of his favorite haunts, the clothing optional Laguna Del Sol resort near Sacramento. Booked in Sacramento on suspicion of murder, Stayner confesses to the murder of Armstrong, and surprising his captors, the February killings of the three women, and it quickly becomes clear that the 38-year-old man has mentally not been playing with a full deck of cards for a very long time (though he is denied, he at first requests access to child pornography in exchange for his confession).
Armstrong
The Armstrong Cabin
Crime Scene
Born to Delbert and Kay Stayner in the town of Merced, California (known as "The Gateway to Yosemite") on August 13, 1961, Cary grows up in the middle-class community with a father that is a mechanic and a mother that runs a day-care business and serves up hot meals at local high school cafeterias, and is a member of a family of three sisters and a younger brother ... a family that is forever disrupted by the 1972 kidnapping of Steven and the family's attempts to deal with it's missing member. Seemingly normal despite the trauma, Cary becomes an accomplished outdoorsman, and a cartoonist of merit that many in his high school class predict will one day make his mark in the world of entertainment. Not to be though ... when his brother returns to the family he soon grows jealous of his celebrity, he begins smoking pot, sees himself as a loser, and begins talking incessantly of having seen Bigfoot. And there is his dark side ... at seven, while out shopping with his mother, he fantasizing about slaughtering the supermarket cashiers, later claims to have been sexually abused by his uncle Jerry (the man Stayner is living with in his twenties when he is shotgunned to death, supposedly the work of a never found vagrant), pulls out his hair compulsively (which he covers up by frequently wearing a baseball cap), often creates doodles of naked girls, and has a nervous breakdown at his Merced Glass and Mirror job in which he pounds on a piece of wood until his hand bleeds and thinks about driving his truck into the office, killing everyone inside, and then torching the structure. Finding new work as a handyman at the Cedar Lodge (he lives in a rented room above the resort's 1950s themed restaurant and lounge), his violent fantasies become real on the evening of February 15, 1999.
With His Young Brother, Steven
High School Yearbook Photo
Stayner
Having decided on Valentine's Day to kill a waitress at the Cedar Lodge he has become friendly with, along with the woman's two daughters (a potential witness being on the grounds where the women live saves them, and after Armstrong's murder, he will go looking for them, but they are away visiting family), a bloodlusting Stayner changes his plans when he returns to the lodge and spots three other women in a room by themselves on the far west wing of the complex. At around 11:00 in the evening, carrying a toolbox that also includes duct tape, rope, a knife, and a gun, Stayner cons his way into the women's room, #509, claiming he is there to check whether water from a leak on the floor above is dripping through the ceiling. Pulling his gun and telling the women to remain calm as he is only there to rob them, bounds and gags the women with duct tape, places the two teenagers in the bathroom, then strangles Carole Sund with the rope and deposits her body in the trunk of the women's rental car. After separating a crying Pelosso from the younger Sund, he rapes and strangles to death the Argentinian, before also placing her in the trunk, Those murders accomplished, he sexually assaults Juli Sund, tidies up the crime scene, and then around 4:00 in the morning, drives off in the Sund's rental with his still bound captive swathed in a pink Cedar Lodge blanket. Arriving at Don Pedro Reservoir, he rapes Juli again, brushes his victim's hair, tells her he loves her, then cuts her throat and disposes of the body, before finding a secluded area to leave the Pontiac. Car ditched, he makes a two mile hike to Sierra Village, where he calls a cab to return him to the Cedar Lodge ... two days later he returns to where he abandoned the Pontiac and torches the vehicle. Mystery created (he also drops Carole Sund's wallet on a street in Modesto to create confusion), when he does not become a suspect and others are arrested for his crimes, he decides to go after Armstrong months later. Gun, duct tape, and a strangling coming again after Stayner abducts Armstrong from her cabin (after getting close to her by asking about Bigfoot sightings in the area), his fourth murder goes south when the naturalist is able to escape out of the monster's car and leads her killer on a failed flight through the forest along Crane Creek, attempting to reach a friend's cabin a few football fields away ... 150 yards into her flight, Stayner catches her and attacks her so viciously that her head comes off.
Monster In Custody
Stayner
Finally placed on trial in 2002, Stayner will plead not guilty by way of insanity (Dr. Jose Arturo Silva will testify that Stayner has mild autism, an obsessive-compulsive disorder, and suffers from paraphilia, a form of intense sexual arousal to atypical objects, situations, fantasies, behaviors, or individuals), but after a three month trial, will be found guilty of the murders of the Sunds and Pelosso (for a life sentence, he pleads guilty to the murder of Armstrong). On Thursday, 12/12/2002, in the Santa Clara Superior Court, Judge Thomas C. Hastings, after announcing the circumstances of the case are "horrendous and devastating" (at one point during the trial the judge will have to leave the courtroom to compose himself in his private chambers ... he returns red-faced and misty-eyed) will sentence the killer to die in the San Quentin death house for his crimes. Immediately remanded to the Adjustment Center on death row of the San Quentin Penitentiary, due to a state law that mandates every death sentence be reviewed, a 2006 court ruling finding flaws in the way that capital punishment is administrated in the state, and a plethora of judges, lawyers, governors, and other politicians unwilling to justly apply state law, two decades after his crimes, Stayner sadly remains alive with a host of other murdering desperadoes, suckled on the tit of the California taxpayer.
A Last Happy Moment
Remembered!
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