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  CONTENTS

  Title Page

  Copyright Notice

  Dear Reader

  Epigraph

  Author’s Note and Acknowledgments

  Map

  Prologue

  Merced, California December 4, 1972

  Chapter One

  Chapter Two

  Ukiah, California December, 1980

  Chapter Three

  Chapter Four

  Chapter Five

  Interlude, 1980–1989

  Chapter Six

  El Portal, California February, 1999

  Chapter Seven

  Chapter Eight

  Chapter Nine

  Chapter Ten

  Chapter Eleven

  Chapter Twelve

  Chapter Thirteen

  Chapter Fourteen

  Long Barn

  Chapter Fifteen

  Chapter Sixteen

  Chapter Seventeen

  Chapter Eighteen

  Chapter Nineteen

  Chapter Twenty

  Chapter Twenty-One

  Chapter Twenty-Two

  Chapter Twenty-Three

  El Portal June 21, 1999

  Chapter Twenty-Four

  Chapter Twenty-Five

  Chapter Twenty-Six

  Chapter Twenty-Seven

  Chapter Twenty-Eight

  Chapter Twenty-Nine

  Chapter Thirty

  St. Martin’s Paperbacks True Crime Library Titles by Carlton Smith

  Copyright

  Dear Reader:

  The book you are about to read is the latest bestseller from the St. Martin’s True Crime Library, the imprint the New York Times calls “the leader in true crime!” Each month, we offer you a fascinating account of the latest, most sensational crime that has captured the national attention. St. Martin’s is the publisher of perennial bestselling true crime author Jack Olsen whose SALT OF THE EARTH is the true story of one woman’s triumph over life-shattering violence; Joseph Wambaugh called it “powerful and absorbing.” Fannie Weinstein and Melinda Wilson tell the story of a beautiful honors student who was lured into the dark world of sex for hire in THE COED CALL GIRL MURDER. St. Martin’s is also proud to publish critically acclaimed author Carlton Stowers, whose 1999 Edgar Award-winning TO THE LAST BREATH recounts a two-year-old girl’s mysterious death, and the dogged investigation that led loved ones to the most unlikely murderer: her own father. In the book you now hold, MURDER AT YOSEMITE, veteran reporter and bestselling author Carlton Smith looks at a series of brutal murders at one of our most famous national parks, a case that has received international attention.

  St. Martin’s True Crime Library gives you the stories behind the headlines. Our authors take you right to the scene of the crime and into the minds of the most notorious murderers to show you what really makes them tick. St. Martin’s True Crime Library paperbacks are better than the most terrifying thriller, because it’s all true! The next time you want a crackling good read, make sure it’s got the St. Martin’s True Crime Library logo on the spine—you’ll be up all night!

  Charles E. Spicer, Jr.

  Senior Editor, St. Martin’s True Crime Library

  Yosemite: for most of his life, it seemed, Yosemite had been some sort of lodestone, subtly drawing him, or at least influencing his fortunes and that of his poor, tattered, tragic family. Who knew what the place’s power was, or where it came from? But it called to him, summoned him, in a deep way he did not completely fathom. It was light, it was air, it was darkness; and in some part of his mind, the killer knew the park was menace, although he could never explain how, or why. It was freedom, and it was nature; and true nature was as savage as it was unpredictable.

  As he was …

  —from Murder at Yosemite

  AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Yosemite National Park remains one of the nation’s greatest natural treasures: a huge expanse of fragile alpine wilderness, spectacular gray granite escarpments, majestic waterfalls descending thousands of feet to a valley floor so pristine that its earliest visitors considered it the closest thing to Eden left on Earth. Each year, nearly four million people visit the park for camping, hiking, swimming and rock climbing; many, in fact, do little more than gape at the awesome scenery, one of nature’s monuments to the power of the planet to create and redefine itself over the eons of its existence.

  The abrupt, mysterious disappearance of three women among those four million annual visitors in the early months of 1999 transfixed two nations; it wasn’t just that they vanished without any reasonable explanation, although that was peculiar enough. It was the fact that they had disappeared at the very doorstep of one of the country’s most impressive symbols of our civility, an outdoor wonderland where usually the most threatening reality is the prospect of hungry bears conducting car prowls for inadequately sealed sack lunches, or the occasional traffic jam.

  But the vanishing of Carole Sund, Juliana Sund, and Silvina Pelosso during the night of February 15, 1999 from a motel at the park’s gateway raised the prospect of another, far more deadly threat; violence of man against woman, and in such a place of beauty it seemed particularly obscene. And because of the nature of the victims—innocents, people who had done nothing more than attempt to enjoy themselves while basking in nature’s glory, just as millions before them had and will again—America turned its collective eye on Yosemite Park and wondered: would it ever be safe to go to any of our national parks again?

  As an FBI agent later put the events in perspective, Carole, Juli, and Silvina represented good, people doing innocent, happy things; and the very fact that they had fallen victim to random, mindless violence struck a chord in all of us. In the most visceral way, it told us that none of us was truly safe, no matter where we were. In short, what had happened to Carole, Juli, and Silvina could have happened to any of us, and it made us all recoil.

  It was the peculiar nature of Carole, Juli, and Silvina’s disappearance that was to affect the events that followed. One evening they were there, doing normal things, eating hamburgers and watching videos; the next morning they were simply gone, along with all their luggage and their rented car. No one knew what had happened to them, and there was not a shred of visible evidence left behind to hint at their fate.

  The complete absence of any clue as to what had befallen the trio in turn prompted law enforcement to adopt unusual tactics. Pressed by the families of the missing to mount an all-out search, augmented by monetarily significant rewards, the Federal Bureau of Investigation actively sought the assistance of the public in helping to develop leads. That, in turn led to an unusually cooperative relationship between the FBI and the news media, at least at the beginning. Indeed, the way the disappearance of the trio and the subsequent events unfolded is as much a story of the relationship between law enforcement and the news purveyors as it is a story about an investigation’s progress and the dreadful events that were subsequently revealed. For that reason, this book stands as much as a critique of the performance of the news media as it does an accounting of the events that ended in tragedy.

  Because of this, I have tried as much as possible to explain not only the events surrounding the disappearances, but also the reasonings behind the FBI’s actions, as well as those of the news media; indeed, the two all-too-often mixed together, at times with good results, and at others with ill.

  After the awful trut
h of what happened was revealed, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies came in for considerable criticism, much of it from the formerly cooperative news media, for a number of decisions and assumptions that were made during the investigation. Having relied upon the FBI as their primary authority in the beginning, the news media’s subsequent criticism of the agency was to seen a bit jaundiced. In truth, given the circumstances it initially faced, the FBI did pretty much all it could do. It was only after specific evidence was developed that a viable pathway of investigation emerged. That the pathway led publicly to a series of suspects who may not have been directly involved in the events was simply thorough police work, and an investigative tack that would have been taken by any law enforcement agency in America, given the circumstances; that the names and the focus of the investigation became public, and the public was led to believe that a resolution was at hand was far more the result of news media excesses in the climate that had previously been created than it was the fault of the FBI. As the FBI repeatedly pointed out, it wasn’t they who named names and advanced theories as to what had happened; instead it was the news media, caught in the ever-shortening gap between rumor and the rush to report.

  Indeed, given the lengths the confessed perpetrator went to in covering up his crimes, it is doubtful that any solution would have been possible to the disappearance of Carole, Juli, and Silvina, except through events surrounding a later murder: that of park naturalist Joie Armstrong. It was Joie’s stout if futile resistance to her attacker that made the solution to the crimes finally possible. In that sense, Joie Armstrong stands as the real heroine of the murders at Yosemite.

  Special thanks are due here to a variety of individuals who significantly assisted in the preparation of this accounting: Charles Spicer, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, was as helpful and supportive in this project as he has always been with others, and under the particularly difficult circumstances of a story that was still unfolding even as it was being written. So too, was Joe Cleemann of St. Martin’s Press, whose assistance in arranging the often arcane logistical details is gratefully appreciated. Jane Dystel of Jane Dystel Literary Management was instrumental in the arrangements that made this accounting possible, and I thank her as well.

  Additionally, the help of former Merced Police officers Jerry Price and Gary Starbuck was invaluable in helping reconstruct the quarter-century-old events that played such a significant role in the eventual disappearance of Carole, Juli, and Silvina. Television reporter Ted Rowlands of Bay Area stations KNTV and KBWB provided vital insight into the circumstances of his exclusive jailhouse interview with Cary Stayner; indeed, Rowlands’s dogged persistence in the performance of his job despite repeated rebuffs stands as an outstanding example of journalistic enterprise.

  Finally, let me express grateful appreciation to Marvin, Margit, and Erica Stuart of Madera County, whose support at a difficult time in the preparation of this book was instrumental in its completion.

  Carlton Smith

  San Francisco, California

  September, 1999

  PROLOGUE

  EL PORTAL, CALIFORNIA

  YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

  FEBRUARY, 1999

  The killer knew his terrain. For several years he had studied it, observing those who checked in and checked out, as they unpacked and repacked the trunks of their cars, changing clothes, showering—he liked to think about that—then dining in the restaurant, so clean, so fresh, so … youthful. The next day they’d drive into the park; maybe he’d see them again, but probably not.

  They were part of the landscape, the brown young girls with their backpacks, their finely toned muscles, their energy. They came and they went; it didn’t matter, really. In some ways they were all the same, even as their clothes and colors changed; they were innocent, which was what he craved. He knew what his secret heart desired, even if he couldn’t tell another soul.

  The sprawling lodge was almost like home to the killer. He knew its geography like he knew his own body. There was the main administration building with its lobby and gift shop; there was the restaurant and bar, with the glittering blue pool behind, in summer always worth watching. There were the sprawling, boxlike complexes of rooms, upstairs and down, 206 in all, in six separate buildings inching up the slope toward the mountain behind.

  And across the highway was the river. Rushing through its narrow canyon, bouncing over arrays of broken granite slabs and stones, the Merced was a constant, almost living thing: bright, merry, mischievous in its own way, the world’s largest gravel-making machine. On its banks, shaded by trees, one could find a hidden beach, where one could strip off everything, and try to become one with the mystical landscape.

  All in all, the killer loved El Portal: there was work, there were familiar faces, there was a sense of security, a place that had become home. He might be faceless, but he was the permanent one, the one who was there year-round, just like the gigantic gray cliff faces in the awesome park farther up the bouncing river: Yosemite.

  Yosemite: for most of his life, it seemed, Yosemite had been some sort of lodestone, subtly drawing him, or at least influencing his fortunes and that of his poor, tattered, tragic family. Who knew what the place’s power was, or where it came from? But it called to him, summoned him, in a deep way he did not completely fathom. It was light, it was air, it was darkness; and in some part of his mind, the killer knew the park was menace, although he could never explain how, or why. It was freedom, and it was nature; and true nature was as savage as it was unpredictable.

  As he was …

  * * *

  You could drive into the park—it almost seemed sacriligious to call it a park when it had nothing in common with the tamed swatches of greenified ground that most Americans called parks—and almost immediately be overwhelmed by the grandeur of the bowl of the valley, surrounded on all sides by towering cliffs, decorated by enormous waterfalls descending thousands of feet to the valley floor. It was why the tourists came, of course, nearly 4 million each year. Every day, tens of thousands streamed up the narrow road along the banks of the Merced, and into the canyon, by bus, by car, by bicycle, even on foot. And all of them gawked, craning their necks at the gigantic cliffs and the waterfalls that glistened down their sheer faces.

  In his mind, the rubberneckers were trespassers, an evil necessary for him to survive, to live, but seen as a temporary infestation of the true park, the true beauty of the valley. In a way, the tourists were nothing more than moving objects, and unnatural ones at that. He had the same sort of feeling for the visitors that one might have for a herd of cattle that belonged to someone else.

  None of them knew, or would ever understand, what Yosemite meant to him. It was seared in his soul, and would always be so tied up in the pain, the guilt, the anger, the sorrow of his life that no one would ever guess at the forces raging inside of his placid exterior. It went back a long way.

  MERCED, CALIFORNIA

  DECEMBER 4, 1972

  ONE

  A Monday afternoon, cloudy, sometimes rainy, altogether too cold. Overnight, an Arctic front of frozen air had rushed down into California’s Central Valley, plunging temperatures on the ground into the low forties. Little Steven Stayner, seven years old, was on his way home from school as the twilight gathered and the icy wind picked up. No one gave much attention to the second-grader as he made his way on a familiar shortcut past a service station on Yosemite Parkway toward the familiar house on Betty Street, where Steven lived with his mother Kay, father Del, and four brothers and sisters. Other things were happening in the world that day, some of vital interest to many nations, still others that would loom even larger to one nation in the months to come.

  Halfway around the world from that gray December day in the small valley town of Merced—“mercy” in Spanish—a man named Henry Kissinger was sitting across a negotiating table with a Vietnamese diplomat named Le Duc Tho; both men were trying to fashion an agreement that would bring more than a decade’s f
ruitless, bloody war to an end, a conflict that had transfixed the nation as no other in a generation.

  Far less noticed was the action taken in a federal court in Washington, D.C., where a judge was sowing the seeds for the eventual destruction of a presidency.

  “This jury,” said Chief U.S. District Court Judge John J. Sirica, “is going to want to know, what did these men go into that headquarters for? Was the sole purpose political espionage? Was there financial gain? Who hired them? Who started this?” And with those questions, still not completely answered even today, Judge Sirica set into motion the events that would eventually cause the scandal called Watergate.

  Those were two of the largest events of the times, more than a generation removed from where we are today; the fate of a small boy in a small town would gather comparatively little notice, for all its tragic consequences so many years later.

  Little Steven turned toward home, a warm, welcoming cocoon just three blocks away. Out of the corner of his vision he saw a nondescript, gray van pull up on the street beside him. A small man got out, holding what looked to be religious leaflets. Would Steven’s mother be willing to make a donation to the church? the man asked. Steven didn’t see any reason why not. After all, the Stayner family was always willing to help others in need, that was just the way they lived. The little man offered to give Steve a ride home. Steven got in the van. It was the last time anyone saw a boy named Steven Stayner for more than seven long years.

  * * *

  Just what happened to Steven on that cold day in December in 1972 could only be pieced together later—much later—drawing on Steven’s understandbly cloudy memory, and the recollections of those who made Steven himself the “donation” they sought.

  Steven recalled that aside from the little man who had first approached him with the leaflets asking about a donation, there was a second man in the van, this one behind the wheel. This man was larger and older than the little man, and seemed to be in charge. Steven soon learned that the older man’s name was Ken. Ken drove the van farther and farther away from Betty Street and Steve’s house; he told Steve they would soon telephone Kay to let her know everything was okay.