Read I Know My First Name Is Steven Online
Authors: Mike Echols
I Know My First Name Is Steven (19 page)
When the New Year began Parnell ended his sex acts with his son—"on about January third or fourth" Dennis recalls—but increased his efforts to kidnap a new, younger sex partner and possibly, it had begun to appear, rid himself of Dennis.
Steven's second-grade school photograph from Charles Wright Elementary School in Merced, California (1972).
(Courtesy of the
Merced Sun-Star)
Steven (in the middle, behind Santa Claus) attends a friend's birthday party. This was the last picture taken of him before he was kidnapped (December 3, 1972).
Steven scrawled his name on his family's garage wall December 1972 . . . the day before he was kidnapped by Kenneth Parnell.
Del and Kay Stayner pose for the author outside the Fishermen's Grotto Restaurant on San Francisco's Fisherman's Wharf on March 4, 1980, just two days after Steven returned home.
Parnell is sullen in this mugshot taken by Ukiah Police shortly after his arrest on March 2, 1980.
Edward Ervin Murphy smokes a hand-rolled cigarette in his cluttered third-floor room in the residential Hotel Covel in downtown Modesto, California.
The service station in Yosemite Parkway in Merced, California, where Parnell and Murphy kidnapped Steven on December 4, 1972 . . . just three blocks from Steven's home. The station wagon is parked in the same spot where Parnell drove up and convinced Steven to get into his car.
Parnell lived in the Curry Company's dorm F (employee housing) in Yosemite National Park. He hid the boy in his room there for several days.
Nineteen-year-old Steven poses in the doorway of room 18 at the Tropicana Motel in Santa Rosa, California, where he and Parnell spent their first Christmas together in 1972.
Steven revisits the old rental trailer where he lived with Parnell at the Mt. Taylor Trailer Park in Santa Rosa, California.
Registered as "Dennis Parnell" in sixth grade, Steven (last row, fifth from the right) poses for this class photo. Four of the other boys in his class were victims of Kenneth Parnell's attentions as well.
(Courtesy of Bill Patton.)
Steven had lived as "Dennis Parnell" for five years when this seventh-grade school picture was taken.
(Courtesy of the Stayner Family.)
Kenneth Parnell and his "son," Dennis, pose for a photo at the home of his landlady, Tyne Cordeiro, near Comptche, California, in 1978.
(Courtesy of Tyne Cordeiro.)