Murder At Yosemite Read online

  Sometime that evening, in fact, Ken did stop the van, and made a telephone call. It’s all right, he assured Steve after hanging up. Your mom knows you’re with us, and she says it’s all right if you go with us. After that, things became hazy to Steven; it was difficult to stay awake and alert; he drifted in and out as the van drove on through the night, tires rhythmically humming over the narrow asphalt roads. Over low hills, past barren fields, on into the night toward a destination Steve could only wonder about—when he had the energy to think.

  Dawn came, and Steven found himself with the two men in some sort of trailer home, a place he’d never seen before. Now Ken explained everything to him: Steven was to go with Ken from now on: Steve’s mother Kay and father Del didn’t want him anymore, they couldn’t afford him. In fact, Ken said, a court had awarded custody of Steven to him, and from now Ken would take care of him. Still, Steve felt disoriented, drowsy; was it really possible that he wasn’t wanted by his mother and father? What had he done to make them not want him? But in his disoriented condition, anything seemed possible. Steven went back to sleep, and when he awoke again, the van was on the move once more.

  * * *

  For Kay and Del Stayner, the first inkling that something had happened to their seven-year-old came the evening of December 4, when Steven never made it home from school.

  After the usual calls to neighbors and Steven’s playmates, the Stayners called the Merced Police Department to report Steven missing. The department put out the word to patrol officers to be watchful for a wandering seven-year-old. When the morning of the fifth came without Steven having been found, the officers of the department had to confront the likelihood that little Steven Stayner had been abducted. So, too, did Kay and Del Stayner. Who could have done such a thing? Given the Stayner family’s financial circumstances—Del was a maintenence worker at a Merced-area food cannery—ransom was almost certainly not the motive.

  For the Merced authorities assigned to investigate the case, the prospects of Steven’s longterm survival appeared grim. Every year across the United States, Sergeant Bill Bailey knew, hundreds of children Steven’s age simply vanished, the all-too-vulnerable prey of traveling pedophiles. By far the most common outcome of such abductions was repeated rape, followed by abrupt homicide, covered up by a shallow grave that most likely would never be discovered. Indeed, it was the lucky ones whose graves were found; most such victims were never heard from again.

  Because the town of Merced—then about 35,000 residents—was located on one of California’s major north-south highway connectors, U.S. 99, the possibility that Steven might be hundreds of miles away from home within just a few hours of his disappearance was quite real. Major roads from Merced lead in every direction—south to Los Angeles, east to San Jose and San Francisco, north to Sacramento and Oregon, and east to Yosemite and Reno and places still farther away.

  The first task was to canvass the route Steven normally used when walking home from school. But interviews with residents along the streets turned up nothing.

  If the kidnapping wasn’t for ransom—that seemed unlikely, since Del and Kay hardly had the kind of money to make it worthwhile—the most likely motive for the kidnapping was sexual. To cover that possibility, someone pulled the records of known sex offenders in the Merced area, and prepared to interview them.

  Flyers with Steven’s photograph and the circumstances of his disappearance were distributed, and publicity was arranged in the local news media. A check of traffic and parking citations was made on out-of-area vehicles with the idea that some known pedophile may have been passing through Merced at the time Steven disappeared. Finally, Bailey and his subordinates put out the word on the national law enforcement system’s Teletype: boy missing; please call if located; please call if any homicide victim matches our description.

  * * *

  Only someone who has experienced the unexplained disappearance of a child can imagine the feelings of a couple like Del and Kay Stayner in the days and weeks after December 4, 1972. A day that had begun as normally as any other in a cheerful, well-adjusted household had, by nightfall become a frightening, nearly unfathomable threat. Even the darkness and chill seemed malevolent.

  Was Steven lost? Was he hurt? Was he hungry? Cold? Frightened? Was he in pain? No matter how calm reason told the Stayners to be, those and other questions stabbed repeatedly into their thoughts. Where was their seven-year-old? The very absence of information magnified the fears and the pain of the Stayners, who wavered between the hope that somehow Steven would miraculously turn up, and the despair that even as they waited, someone, somewhere was doing horrible things to their son, things they were helpless to prevent.

  At first, Kay was afraid to leave the house, for fear that Steven or someone might call with information on his whereabouts. The not knowing was driving her crazy; Del took to driving around the streets and highways near Merced, looking for clues to his son’s disappearance, a loaded shotgun beside him on the seat.

  The very uncertainty of the event, surrounded as it was by phantasms of trauma imagined and the impossibility of repressing hope, transformed the Stayner family overnight; things would never be the same as they had been before December 4. In a matter of hours, Del and Kay were transmuted from the supporters of their children to victims; and the remaining children were subtly altered into the supporters of their parents—a difficult transition for anyone, but arduously hard for four normal preteens with their own needs. At one stroke, the missing Steven had become the missing center of his family, the black hole around which everyone and everything else revolved, and for which there were no answers.

  Indeed, for Del and Kay to look at the others—oldest son Cary, 11, and the three youngest—was to wonder: whatever had happened to Steven? What would Steven be doing now, if it, whatever it was, had never happened?

  Steven became the unmentionable wound at the center of the Stayner family, the gaping hole in the fabric of their relations; in some ways, at least initially, it would have been kinder if Steven’s body had been found, because at least that way, the family could go on. But the blank wall of information about his fate, as if he existed and then ceased to exist for no apparent reason, loomed ever larger in the Stayner household: something not to talk about because talking about it didn’t do any good, but something never to forget, even as the years unfolded without a single clue as to whatever had happened.

  TWO

  The week of Christmas of 1972 found Steven Stayner sharing a small cabin in Yosemite Valley with Ken and his small friend. Most of the time, Steven stayed inside with either Ken or the small man, who seemed to take turns going out for hours and then coming back. It snowed much of the time, and while Steve wasn’t exactly sure where he was, he guessed that he was somewhere in the mountains. From remarks made by Ken and the small man, Steven guessed they were in Yosemite; he was slightly familiar with the park, because his grandfather lived there.

  But where in the park? The place was huge, Steven knew. Somehow, Steven learned or guessed that Ken and his little friend had something to do with the main lodge in the center of the park. But Steven wasn’t sure exactly where it was, or how to get there. The cold weather, the snow, and the fact that he was kept under nearly constant observation discouraged him from trying to find out where he was, and to bring attention to his plight. And then there was Ken: the first night after they arrived at the cabin, Ken sodomized Steven; when Steven cried and tried to resist, Ken told him that if he didn’t submit, Ken would kill him and bury him so he would never be found.

  Later—much later—questions were raised about Steven’s apparent docility when taken from his former life. Why didn’t Steven simply run away from his abductors? Why didn’t he try to get help, by all later accounts, only a few hundred yards away at Yosemite Lodge?

  While these might seem outwardly reasonable questions in hindsight, they ignore the central fact of the relationship between an older man and his child-victim. At that point, Ken held
complete power over Steven: led to believe that his parents didn’t want him and that they had approved Ken’s actions, assuaged by Ken’s occasional kindness, cowed by the threats to kill him if he didn’t cooperate, rendered guilty and ashamed by Ken’s sexual assault, lost, uncertain of his place in the world, even of his own family, confused by the rapidly unfolding events, Steven was essentially brainwashed. Slowly, Steven came to understand that whatever happened, his own fate was bound irrevocably to the man who would now claim to be his new father, the man who called himself Ken.

  Based on later events, it’s also reasonable to assume that Ken dosed his newfound ward with soporifics such as sleeping pills, leaving Steven lethargic and confused during these first few critical weeks.

  Ken was hard for Steven to figure out. Just when he decided that Ken was mean, Ken would surprise him with affection or approval. Ken gave Steven a little dog; Steve named the dog Queenie, and the dog became his best friend.

  The week’s cold front, the snow, and the advent of the Christmas holidays kept visitors to the park at a minimum in the two or three weeks Steven was at the cabin; even if Steven had been fully aware of his surroundings, there were other events afoot in Yosemite that conspired to draw attention away from Ken, his small friend, and the sudden arrival of Ken’s new “son.” Many of the park’s rangers, in fact, were busy trying to locate the remains of a couple who had just committed suicide by jumping over Yosemite Falls. Having left their clothes and identification at the top of the falls, a man and a woman had leapt into Yosemite Creek, been swept down the stream to a 1,400-foot freefall, and ended by smashing into a built-up cone of rock-hard ice below the falls. Most of the man’s shattered body had been recovered; all that was found of the woman was a portion of leg, and it was decided to wait until spring to look for the remainder of the corpse. Truly, the park could be an unforgiving place.

  Shortly after Christmas, Ken apparently decided it was time to move on. He quit his job as a bookkeeper at Yosemite Lodge and packed his new “son” and his “son’s” little dog into the van, and drove out of the park for the last time. He also told Steven that he now had a new name: from now on, he was Dennis—Dennis Parnell—and Ken was to be “Dennis’s” father, Ken Parnell. “Dennis” was to make sure to call Ken “Dad” from this day forward.

  * * *

  Over the next few years Ken and “Dennis” wandered around northern California, traveling from town to town as Ken looked for work, usually odd jobs. Slowly “Dennis” adjusted to the nomadic lifestyle, and in time came to see Ken as “Dad,” just as Ken demanded. The life he’d had in Merced before December 4 began to grow dim; the true reality was the gray van, Queenie, and “Dad,” along with the regular sexual assaults, which “Dennis” eventually came to see as something that came with the territory of living with “Dad.”

  The towns came and went as “Dennis” grew older: first Santa Rosa, but that was too crowded for Ken, so they moved farther up north to Ukiah; from Ukiah, to the small north coast town of Noyo, where Ken took up with a woman named Barbara and her small son, about five years old. Together the four lived in a converted bus, with Barbara selling Bibles to make ends meet.

  Throughout this time, Ken enrolled “Dennis” in local schools; to all outward appearances, “Dennis” was what he seemed—the son of Ken, a single father; indeed, there was nothing in either the boy’s or the man’s behaviors to indicate that anything was other than normal. In fact, Ken joined both the local Eagles lodge and the Grange, and ran the Eagles’ weekend flea market; Ken also tended the bar at the lodge, at least until the state’s Alcoholic Beverage Commission wanted his fingerprints; that was when Ken decided he was too busy to work the bar anymore.

  By the time five years had passed, “Dennis” had become nearly accustomed to his relationship with his “dad”; whatever memories he retained from his former life in Merced were hazy, almost dreamlike. He knew his real name was Steven, but he also knew that his real last name of Stayner was somehow a threat to “Dad,” and by extention, himself; at some deep psychological level, “Dennis” knew that whatever happened, he and “Dad” were bound together, and that if something bad happened to “Dad,” something bad would also happen to him. So “Dennis” kept his “dad’s” secret, and kept to himself.

  And it wasn’t as if Ken was mean to his “son;” indeed, he was generous, even caring, and often indulgent. Ken gave “Dennis” wide latitude, sometimes even more than “Dennis” thought proper. By the time he was 12, “Dennis” was allowed to smoke and drink and keep his own hours; it was as if “Dad” trusted his “son” completely, so inextricably was the pair bound up in their shared secret.

  Eventually, Ken and “Dennis” had to leave the converted bus shared with Barbara when someone pointed out that the storage of fuel containers on the outside of the bus constituted a fire hazard. The landlord who had rented them the space told them they would have to move on. Barbara and her child went their way, and Ken and “Dennis” went theirs. Eventually Ken and “Dennis” moved to a one-room, unelectrified cabin on a ranch near Manchester, California, on the north coast, not far from Point Arena. “Dennis” attended Point Arena High School nearby, and Ken got a job in Ukiah, working as a night bookkeeper at Ukiah’s largest hotel, the Palace. While Ken slept, “Dennis” went to school every day, smoked when he wanted to, drank when he wanted to, got into occasional fights at school, a few scrapes with the law over petty vandalism, and generally kept to himself in the small cabin, seeing “Dad” every afternoon just before Ken left for work in Ukiah. It wasn’t much of a life, but it was pretty much everything “Dennis” knew, except that his real name was Steven, and that he and “Dad” shared a terrible secret, one that he couldn’t share with anyone, and especially not the police.

  UKIAH, CALIFORNIA

  DECEMBER, 1980

  THREE

  It was Valentine’s Day. “Dennis”/Steven was 14 years old; half of his life had been spent with Ken Parnell, his “dad.” Indeed, life with Ken, hardscrabble and as hand-to-mouth as it was, was normal; it was as if that other life, so many years ago in the barely remembered town of Merced, had only been a dream.

  For some time, Ken had been thinking about adding to his “family.” Now 48, on at least two occasions Ken had taken “Dennis” with him to Santa Rosa to scout for a potential new “son.” On both occasions, “Dennis,” troubled by “Dad’s” intentions, had contrived to distract or otherwise interfere with Ken’s plans to acquire a new “donation.” Eventually Ken decided it was too expensive to keep driving to Santa Rosa. He began to look for a possible “son” a little closer to home, in this case, Ukiah, where he normally worked the night shift at the Palace Hotel.

  So, too, had Ken decided that “Dennis” couldn’t be relied upon to help entice another addition to his “family.” “Dennis’s” heart wasn’t in it, Ken apparently decided; he began grooming another teenager, a Ukiah high school student, to help him in his quest.

  On the rainy afternoon of February 14, 1980, five-year-old Timmy White was walking from his kindergarten class at Ukiah’s Yokayo Elementary School to his sitter’s house three blocks away. A gray van pulled up to the side of the street, and a young man wearing running shoes and a baseball cap got out and pulled him into the vehicle. An older man was behind the wheel, Timmy saw.

  After forcing a dose of sleeping pills down Timmy’s throat, the man behind the wheel began to drive, Timmy was to recall later; at some point the van stopped and the other man, the young one with the baseball cap, got out. The next thing Timmy knew, the van was pulling up to a school, and another person got into the van—“Dennis.” “Dennis” seemed surprised to find him in the van, Timmy thought. The van drove on, eventually coming to a small, isolated cabin on a ranch in the foothills. Timmy was drowsy, but he noticed that the place seemed surrounded by untended pigs.

  Just as happened more than seven years earlier in Merced, the small Ukiah Police Department turned out en masse to search for Timmy s
hortly after his disappearance, often working double shifts in searching for evidence of his whereabouts. Just like their Merced counterparts in 1972, the 22-member Ukiah department canvassed every house on Timmy’s presumed route to his sitter’s, scoured storm drains and abandoned refrigerators, summoned helicopters for aerial surveillance and canine units for a trace of his scent. One of Timmy’s kindergarten playmates was hypnotized, as was her mother; lie detector tests were given to Timmy’s mother, stepfather, and babysitter—all to no avail. It was as if Timmy had simply disappeared from the face of the earth.

  The search for Timmy was compounded by a drenching rain that began around Valentine’s Day and was to last for nearly two weeks.

  * * *

  For the next two weeks, as police 40 miles away searched vainly, “Dennis” kept Timmy company, reading him comic books and playing with him; Timmy begged “Dennis” to help him get away from Ken, at least when Ken wasn’t around; by this time Ken had cut Timmy’s blond hair and dyed it brown. But that wasn’t all that had changed in Ken’s little self-created “family.”

  As the first week unfolded after Timmy’s kidnapping, the bonds of secrecy that for so long had locked Steven/“Dennis” into the conspiracy with Ken began to fray. Until Timmy’s arrival, it had been just Ken and “Dennis,” joined together for good or bad; each had secrets on the other, and that tended to keep their worst sides in check. Steven/“Dennis” had somehow over the years adjusted to this situation, and indeed, didn’t even really dislike Ken. But seeing Timmy’s misery at being removed from his own real family awoke long-dormant feelings inside Steven. He could see the pain the separation was causing Timmy, and was reminded of how he himself had felt half a lifetime before. And Steven knew it was just a matter a time before Ken would decide to assault Timmy, just as he had Steven years before.