I Know My First Name Is Steven (18 page)

The cabin had a potbellied wood stove for heat, a propane gas water heater and cookstove, and indoor water, though the shower was out back and the toilet
an old-fashioned outhouse 25 yards behind the cabin at the edge of the thick, dark wood . . . and there was no electricity for miles around, the nearest being nine miles away toward the coast, so at night they used kerosene lanterns for light. However, there was a telephone for what seemed to Dennis their only link to the outside world. But there was no television to watch while they lived at the cabin since Parnell procrastinated about putting up an antenna and using a car battery for power as did the Pipers, their neighbors a mile down and a quarter mile off the road to the coast.

Ken's impetuous trip to Arkansas the previous month had lost him his job at Eastman Trucking in Fort Bragg, and he was still unemployed when he made this latest move. Soon, though, he found a job as the graveyard desk clerk for The Palace Hotel, a restored nineteenth-century inn in downtown Ukiah, the distant Mendocino county seat. It was a job that Ken grew to like even though it required an hour-long commute inland through Boonville along forty twisting miles, over two coastal mountain ranges, with only four miles of straight pavement on the whole route.

As usual, Ken was a quiet, unobtrusive employee. One of the few fellow employees he met during the seven months he worked at The Palace Hotel was Robert Sandkila, the hotel barber, who remarked of Ken, "Suddenly he was here and he had come in to get a haircut. He never had much to say at all. I only cut his hair, maybe, once a month. He was very low-keyed, very unusual. . . never had anything to say. Just came in and did his job and then left."

After three years in the Mendocino City Schools—the longest he had ever attended a single school
system—Dennis was very upset about leaving that comfortable environment with his friends, and in short order he convinced Parnell to allow him to attend Mendocino High School's ninth grade. At first Ken accommodated Dennis by making a point of dashing home early each morning to take him part way to school in Mendocino City. "I told Parnell that he could drop me off at Boonville and I'd hitchhike to school. He said, 'Fine.' And so that's what I did. I usually did whatever I wanted." Also, Dennis was dead set against transferring to Point Arena High School because, he said, "They had a lousy football team. Mendocino had a good football team." And that fall Dennis tried out for and won a starting position on the Mendocino High freshman football team.

Dennis was very proud of this, his first and last involvement in organized school sports, and Ken even attended some of the games, remarking, "I don't recall he was as aggressive as some of the other players."

But when football season ended Ken refused to continue his five-times-a-week mad dash from Ukiah through Boonville to the cabin and then, with Dennis, back to Boonville again, and so Dennis had to transfer to Point Arena High School in mid November. However, this arrangement presented its own transportation problems, since the Point Arena school bus ended its route where the power lines did, nine miles down the road to the coast. Because of this, during the fewer than sixty school days that Dennis was registered at Point Arena High he was absent more than twenty.

Even though he was there for less than forty days, Dennis's teachers at Point Arena gathered an accurate
yet sketchy assessment of their laconic new student. World history teacher Rose Gartner remarked, "Dennis was very quiet. He had good manners and seemed to be fairly interested in things. [In class discussions] he was interested in what we were saying, particularly when we were having chats about family life, but he usually didn't add anything to the conversation."

Dennis went out for basketball, but his lack of dependable transportation ended that. Said basketball coach Don Genasci, "We tried to get him involved, but it was very hard because he was such a shy boy. [But] I saw him and his dad having dinner at a restaurant one day, and they were talking and seemed to have a good father-son relationship. The man seemed to be really interested in the boy."

Soon after Dennis had enrolled at Point Arena High School, Ken went to downtown Point Arena and rented apartment 6, a cramped second-floor flat in a shabby old building grandly called The Garcia Center, a structure whose first floor boasted the town barber shop and a snack bar-newsstand. Ken planned to use the apartment as an office for his bookkeeping service but he never did get it going, and since they didn't use their television set at the cabin Parnell took it to the flat and tied it into the building's community antenna, thus providing Dennis with a hideaway to which he occasionally retreated when playing hooky, whiling the days away watching "soap operas, game shows, and old movies."

Their neighbors, the Pipers, thought Ken and Dennis odd. They were never invited into the caretaker's cabin, and when they dropped by to give Dennis a ride to school the teen would always be waiting outside for
them, rain or shine. William "Billie" Piper assessed Ken Parnell as one of the strangest, most secretive people he had ever met, and said that when Ken did talk to him he wouldn't look him in the eye. "Then, as soon as I turned away, he'd look right at me. It would make me feel kind of funny in a way."

Perhaps this was because of the
real
reason Parnell had moved to the Stornettas' ranch: according to former Mendocino County D.A. Joe Allen and his Chief Deputy D.A. George McClure, Ken had actually been hired by Duke Stornetta to guard the brothers' hidden commercial plots of marijuana, which they grew in secluded areas of the Mountain View Ranch. McClure went on to say that during the 1970s and early 1980s some members of the Stornetta family were known to be cultivating cannabis and that the area's resident deputy sheriff had an income "many times greater than could be accounted for by his salary, although his usual public explanation was that he had been a very shrewd real estate investor."

The officers continued their story by saying that in Mendocino County in those days old-timers and newcomers alike who grew pot were arrested,
except
for the old-timers who grew it in the area under the jurisdiction of that particular deputy. Also, the lawmen told of a close relative of the Stornetta brothers, their cousin Henry ("Stogie") Stornetta trying to hire someone to kill his wife. Stogie's plot was uncovered, and this led to an investigation in which the same deputy sheriff opened Stogie's safe under a court order, dutifully reporting to the judge that he found "no drugs and nothing unusual . . . just fifty to two hundred thousand dollars in fifties and hundreds."

Stogie was tried and convicted and served time in prison, but one of these two former peace officers facetiously mused about the source of Stogie's cash and about the purpose to which Parnell had put the good wages he'd more than likely received for services rendered to the Stornettas.

Duke Stornetta liked Parnell's strange, quiet son and often took Dennis along with him when he went deer hunting or was out in the fields putting out salt for his sheep. But, he said, "The boy would never talk. He'd answer my questions, but I could never make him talk first. . . he'd just answer my questions. Even Parnell, you know, he almost never spoke. If you would see them out in the yard at the cabin and say hello, off they would go . . . [Parnell would] just turn and walk in the cabin with the boy. Parnell was a very peculiar type of fellow, but I never realized what he did to the boy."

Behind the cabin's closed door Parnell was still committing fellatio and sodomy on Dennis, but the frequency was continuing to decline as his sexual attraction to younger boys increased. Dennis said that while they lived at the ranch Parnell tried several times to coerce him into helping to kidnap a boy from Santa Rosa. But Dennis adamantly refused to help, although it wasn't long before Parnell found one of Dennis's friends who was willing to help him kidnap a new son-
cum-sex
partner.

Sean Poorman and Dennis had known each other since the seventh grade, but the two had never been really good friends. But Dennis got to know Sean better while he was hitchhiking to school in Mendocino City, since he and Sean rode the Mendocino school
bus from Elk, the village where Sean lived. A dark-haired teenager, ruggedly handsome Sean Poorman lived with his mother, Chris, his two brothers Shea and Jim, ten and thirteen, and Henry K. "Hank" Mettier, Jr., their mother's live-in boyfriend, in a rented redwood-shingled house next to the power station on the Philo-Greenwood Road at the edge of Elk.

Shea and Jim were much brighter and more socially adept than their brother Sean, a slow learner who was easily frustrated in the classroom and in most social situations. According to Sean's sworn statement, Mettier was a small-time drug dealer, having previously been arrested and convicted for selling pot in Marin County. Now, though, his operation was much more discrete . . . and lucrative.

During the fall of 1979 Damon Carroll and Sean came to know each other better and better, and one day Damon took Sean home to meet his mother, but Kathryn Vinciguerra immediately developed a dislike for Sean and his relationship with her son. "Sean was older," she said. "He was very manipulative of Damon, and Damon kind of put Sean on a pedestal. Damon was just fetching, and would do anything for Sean. Sean was definitely the leader." Kathryn did not involve herself in picking her children's friends. However, her son's friendship with Sean was different. "I did have a dream, and it was quite vivid, about Sean having a devilish personification, and I felt very strongly that it was not a good relationship for Damon. I felt that I had to communicate it to Damon, and I did so, and a little later on Damon came to me and told me that he did understand and respect my intuition about Sean."

Kim Peace also got "bad vibes" from Sean: "Sean's brother, Jim, was a very nice guy. They were best friends. But Sean was a troublemaker and into drugs . . . always cutting school, always getting in trouble with the law. And Jim was quite the opposite. He never was in trouble."

Sean first became acquainted with Parnell in November of 1979. Said Damon, a witness to their first meeting: "They went down to the beach and talked privately. It was really strange, because Ken was bringing Dennis to spend the weekend with me and Sean. As soon as they showed up Ken said, 'Sean, I've got something to talk to you about.' And they went down to the beach and talked for a while. And it was strange, thinking what would Ken have to do with Sean, 'cause Ken really didn't know him that well."

Dennis recalls that this occurred when Ken realized that he could make money selling marijuana that he probably took surreptitiously from the Stornettas' crop he had been hired to guard. In another twist Sean said that that fall he had learned about Dennis having been kidnapped years before by Parnell and that when he told Mettier, Hank had seemed extraordinarily interested in it.

The relationship between Sean Poorman and Ken Parnell grew in mid November when, invited by Dennis but at Ken's insistence, Sean came to the cabin to spend the weekend. Said Sean, "Ken picked me up in front of the Elk Post Office. I didn't even want to go, but I had to be polite. I didn't feel like going all the way back up in the sticks. And Parnell picked me up and started talking about how he wanted me to sell some marijuana for him. Then he got into this busi
ness of how he wanted a kid. I said, 'Why don't you adopt one?' And he gave me some reason how he couldn't do that . . . it was too much of a hassle, he had to pay out some money. He said he would just like to find some kid who doesn't have a home, whose mother and father don't like him anymore, and he's thinking about running away from home.

"And I got the impression that this guy was weird . . . he's telling me how he wants a kid, just pick him up off the street and bring him up here. He wanted a little kid, about five or six years old. He wasn't putting me on, either. He was really serious cause he whipped out a fifty-dollar bill from his wallet and kind of waved it in my face and said, 'You help me find a kid and this is yours.' And I says, 'Well, I'll do my best.' I thought it was cuckoo; I mean, I thought maybe I should hit him up for a hundred," Sean laughed.

When Parnell and Sean got to Manchester, Parnell stopped at the general store and bought a fifth of Jack Daniels and then drove straight to Point Arena High School, picked up Dennis, and took both boys to the Pirates' Cove drive-in for hamburgers, fries, and Cokes. Although while they ate there was no conversation about selling marijuana or kidnapping little boys, Parnell quickly brought up both subjects again once they were on the road to the cabin. According to Sean, Dennis had told Ken that he, Sean, would be a likely person to hire to "strong-arm some kid and bring him to the cabin." On the way to the ranch Parnell explained to Sean just how he wanted the kidnapping accomplished . . . even to the point of handing Sean a bottle of the Nytol sleeping pills with which
he was to dose the intended victim. Sean slipped the pills into his pocket and later used them himself.

About sunset the trio arrived at the cabin and Ken gave the boys the fifth of Jack Daniels and told them to enjoy it while he sacked out for a nap before driving to his graveyard shift at The Palace Hotel. Although Dennis occasionally drank beer and hard liquor on his own, beginning that night Parnell not only allowed his son to drink whiskey in his presence but often purchased it for him.

When Ken returned the next morning he woke the groggy teenagers from their alcohol-induced slumber and drove them to Elk, dropping Sean off at the post office before taking Dennis south to Point Arena High. All the way into Elk, Ken reminded Sean of his offer: "Fifty dollars for a kid, and another twenty if you bring this kid up in a couple days." And Dennis saw Ken hand Sean a bunch of dime baggies of pot to sell when he got out at Elk, admonishing him not to spend the proceeds.

For Dennis, Christmas 1979 was quiet and very melancholy. For the first time in several years he found himself repeatedly thinking about his own parents, brother, and sisters in Merced, and sorely wishing that he was back there with them.