I Know My First Name Is Steven (22 page)

On her way to work that Valentine's Day morning, Angela dropped her son off at school. At 11:50
A.M.
Diane Crawford called to speak with Angela at work, but since she was on a long-distance call, Angela had a fellow worker tell Diane that she would call her back shortly. A few minutes later Jim walked in with sandwiches for their lunch. Still on the long-distance call, Angela scribbled a note to Jim telling him to call Diane.

"Jim went out to the outer office and dialed Diane's phone number," Angela recalled, "and he was talking to her, and I could hear him, and I finished my phone conversation and hung up. And he walked to the door and said, 'Timmy's not home from school yet. I'm going to go track him down.' And I said, 'Okay.' "

At that point Angela was not worried about her son, reasoning that since it was Valentine's Day, he had probably stayed late at school for a class party and
Diane would be calling her shortly to let her know that he had just arrived.

Angela suddenly became concerned, however, when she looked at her watch and realized that Timmy got out at 11:30, not 12:00, as she had first thought, and it was now after 12:00. Said she, "Then I scribbled a note to pin on the door for my assistant because we never close the office for lunch, and I locked up and left. I drove by Diane's house on the way to the school, and she was standing at her window and she shook her head no, and so I didn't even bother stopping, I just went on up to the school."

When Angela arrived at Timmy's school she went straight to the principal's office, where she found the principal telling jim that Timmy's class had gotten out on time. At this Angela begged Jim to call the police, but the principal asked her to wait while he went outside and checked a nearby field where children sometimes played. "But when he went out," Angela said, "I told Jim, 'No, let's call the police,' because Timmy wasn't an adventuresome little boy and he wouldn't have gone off with a friend or anything.

"So we called the police from right there. They really didn't know what to do . . . they took the information, but that was really about it. And so we started driving around town as soon as we got back to the car. And we turned on the car radio and we heard Tim's description over the radio right away. It was real fast because Diane had called the local radio station right away . . . as soon as Timmy hadn't arrived.

"We kept driving around and looking and going back to Diane's house, and then Nickie got out of school and we made sure she got to Diane's, and we
were just driving around and around, and it was drizzling and it was an awful day. [Ironically, this was almost identical to the weather the day of Dennis's kidnapping.] We were just driving and asking and looking and trying to see if anybody had seen Timmy."

Jim and Angela drove for hours that afternoon, asking everybody they saw if they had seen Timmy, occasionally returning to Diane's, checking their home, and then resuming their driving and searching.

At 4:00 a policeman flagged them down and asked them to go to the police station to file a report on Timmy's disappearance. When they arrived at the station, Chief Johnson met them but he had nothing new to tell them and, after making a detailed, disheartening report on their missing son, a dejected Jim and Angela returned home.

At that time Angela's British parents were on holiday in the States, and after a visit with her sister in Los Angeles were making a sightseeing auto trip up the California coast. They were to arrive in Ukiah in a day or two, but now it was imperative that they be reached immediately. Through her sister, Angela located them at a motel in Morro Bay and, on hearing the news, they drove 350 miles through the night to be with their daughter and son-in-law.

Angela described her emotions and routine while Timmy was missing, "I remember my parents coming, and then I really don't remember that night after that. But you know, when Tim was gone, I slept well the entire time. [Usually] I'll get up three or four times in the middle of the night to use the bathroom . . . it's just habit with me. But when Tim was gone, I used to sleep all through the night. I wanted to go to bed
early, and I would sleep well. Then when I would wake up I would feel rested. You know, I never dreamt anything, but when Timmy came back, I went through a period when I'd wake up crying."

Added Jim, "I slept well, too. You know, I was mentally exhausted at night, and Angela thought at one time it was a defense mechanism—get to sleep and you can't think about it or worry about it—and you sleep."

Angela had an extension of her home telephone installed at her office and went back to work the next week, as did Jim . . . but, she said, "I really didn't want to because I was so afraid that, even if you resume your regular life, it is like you're resuming it with out Timmy and everybody would forget. And I didn't want to get back to normal because I didn't feel normal. But I couldn't mourn him because I didn't want to think anything had happened to him. It was awful."

Usually, Diane Crawford stood on her front porch and watched for Timmy when he was due home from school, but she couldn't see more than the last fifty feet of Luce Street that Timmy walked down before turning onto her street, and Timmy's kidnapping had occurred hundreds of feet up the street. As she recollected, "I had other little kids at that time, and we would just wait until he came home so we could have lunch together. And when he didn't show up on time, I went up to my corner three times . . . but I didn't see anything that day. No panic, though, because I thought, well, it's Valentine's Day. And, too, he was a slow walker. But then about ten minutes 'til twelve—which would have made him about ten minutes later than he had ever been before—I phoned Angie at her office."

On Saturday, February 16, two days after Timmy disappeared, tracking dogs were brought up from Sacramento to scour the ten-square-block neighborhood between Yokayo Elementary and the Crawford home, but they couldn't pick up a scent because it had rained the previous three days. Then the trackers took the dogs into Diane's home to sniff out the closets and under the beds, but they couldn't detect Timmy's scent; and even a circuit with the dogs south of Ukiah along the Russian River near Timmy's home was equally fruitless.

"I continued to babysit, but the kids were upset," Diane said. "It was a real helpless feeling when Jim and Angie would come by to get Nickie, or phone me, and they hadn't found Timmy. But. . . well, what else can you do?" Diane sighed.

Besides the tracking dogs, Smith Air Service provided a helicopter for Ukiah policemen searching the remote hills west of town, but the persistent rain repeatedly washed grease from the rotor's bearings and cut the flights short. Radio and television stations from Ukiah to San Francisco alerted their listeners and viewers to Timmy's disappearance with information and photographs of the blond five-year-old. Also, some newspapers were very helpful, whereas others wouldn't help at all. Said Angela incredulously, "They wouldn't run a picture, and we had to pay money to have it done!"

Within a couple of days Jim and Angela's schedule at home had settled into a routine of addressing envelopes to mail out Missing flyers of their towheaded son with the faithful help of relatives and neighbors. Said Jim, "Every day we'd go out and drive some
where, watch the river . . . " he trailed off. "We stayed around our house and around the city. Then we'd stop and go back home and start up writing letters and sending out posters again."

Beginning with the first night, Parnell had Timmy sleep with him. Timmy did not like it, even though, as he recalls, he always wore underpants or pajamas and Parnell never even attempted to fondle or molest him. But Timmy felt very strange sleeping next to this man he did not know, the odd man who had kidnapped him.

Before the kidnapping Parnell had tried to employ a babysitter "for a small child" in Ukiah. However, everyone with whom he spoke turned him down because of the distance to the cabin. Therefore, each day Timmy was left alone in the cabin from the time Dennis left for school until Parnell returned from his graveyard shift at The Palace Hotel. Usually, though he did not like doing it, Dennis followed Parnell's instructions and gave his "little brother" a Nytol sleeping tablet just before he left for school. But Timmy recalls rarely sleeping after Dennis departed: "Mostly I just sat there. I saw the phone, and I thought about trying to get away, but I didn't because I was afraid that Parnell would do something to me." (But Timmy could not have used the phone for Parnell kept a dial lock on it.) However, Timmy does not recall any sexual abuse, fondling, or photographs—nude or otherwise.

Dennis was afraid Parnell would sexually assault Timmy while he was at school, and so he began returning from Point Arena High School at noon each
day. Confirmed Duke Stornetta, "One day, while Parnell had the little boy there, I passed Dennis as I was driving from Ukiah to our place on the coast. It was about twelve noon, and he was walking up the hill by the coast, so I turned around and went back and gave him a ride to the cabin. I says, 'Dennis, how come you aren't in school?' And he says, 'I didn't feel like going to school . . . I'm going home.' "

Billie Piper remarked, "Dennis was pretty regular going to school until he got mixed up with that other boy. Then, I'd take him to school and he'd come right back." One day, after he had noticed Dennis returning home about noon, Piper said he drove by and, "There was a small boy playing on that little hill by the cabin. And Dennis was out on the side of the road about half a mile away on his bike. Parnell's car wasn't at the cabin, but I figured maybe they had a friend visiting out there, and maybe the friend had a little boy."

As with Dennis years before, Parnell decided that one of the easiest ways to alter Timmy's appearance was to dye the boy's distinctive hair . . . from platinum blond to dark brown. So, eleven days after the kidnapping Parnell stopped in Ukiah at Thrifty Drug on his way home from work and bought a bottle of dark brown Clairol Nice 'n' Easy hair coloring. When he arrived home, Timmy was asleep. He woke him up. Timmy says, "He told me that he was going to dye my hair so people wouldn't recognize me and take me back." After he was finished, Parnell walked Timmy out back to the shower stall and had the youngster bathe and shampoo his hair.

Parnell kept Timmy hidden at the cabin the whole
time. But after changing Timmy's hair color, Parnell felt confident enough about the disguise to take the boy with him to pick up Dennis at Point Arena High. When Dennis got in the car, Parnell smirked to his oldest son, "How do you like his hair?"

Hurtful memories flooded his mind as a not-pleased Dennis responded through gritted teeth, "It's all right, I guess."

"Well, I don't think it's dark enough." Parnell superciliously smiled. "I got some more dye at the house and we're gonna dye it again."

"That's nice," Dennis parried with angry sarcasm.

Then Parnell surprised both boys by asking, "You want to go to Pirates' Cove and have a hamburger?"

"Sure!" was their joint response, and off they went.

A Point Arena friend of Dennis's, Marsha Beall, remembered the incident. "My cousins own the Pirates' Cove and one of them, Darla Reynolds, said that when they came in she looked at the little boy and she thought, 'Wow! He really resembles that little boy in the newspaper [referring to Timmy's picture in
The Ukiah Daily Journal].'
But you know how you think of something and then you take a second look and go, 'Oh, but I don't want to get involved.' "

Also, a couple of days after the dinner at Pirates' Cove, on February 27, Kim Peace saw Dennis and Timmy sitting in Parnell's car in the parking lot at the Manchester General Store. Then, that same evening, when she saw Timmy's picture in the newspaper, Kim recalled, "I kept thinking to myself, 'Where had I seen that little kid before?' And then it finally dawned on me that that was the little kid I had seen with Dennis in the parking lot in Manchester!"

Like Dennis before him, Timmy spent some of his time playing with small plastic toys Ken had bought at a flea market. But when Dennis was home the two often went across the road to the barn to feed Dennis's rabbits and chickens, climb the trees, and play hide-and-seek inside the barn and around the shearing shed and holding pens. As the two boys got to know each other better, Dennis told Timmy about his own life. Recalled Timmy, "He said he was my age and he got kidnapped by Parnell." And that, said Timmy, really scared him, for he couldn't even imagine himself as old as Dennis and still living with Parnell.

Dennis felt that sooner or later Parnell would sexually assault Timmy, and so the teenager began carrying his Bowie knife strapped to his side or hidden inside his boot. Ironically, Parnell was also concerned about the little boy's welfare and warned Timmy "Not to go with anyone and not to talk to strangers."

By the fourth day of his ordeal Timmy remembers that he considered Dennis to be "like a big brother" and he trusted the teenager enough to ask him to take him home. Dennis agreed to do so, but persistent rains and a lack of vehicles along the Boonville to Manchester road out front, plus Parnell's daytime presence at the cabin, caused a number of delays in Dennis's planned effort.

In Ukiah the investigation continued. But police had no clues and were at a virtual dead end trying to solve Timmy's disappearance. Detective Sergeant Dennis Marcheschi, now in charge of the investigation, said, "I think I probably lived with his family dur
ing that time, going over all his habits, where he went, what kind of food he enjoyed, his sleep patterns . . . I don't think there was anything about Timmy that I didn't know.

"Then, toward the end of the second week, Dick Finn from the D.A.'s office flew with me to Los Angeles to interview Timmy's natural father down there, and we spent the next four or five days contacting and interviewing every family member in the L.A. area. The Ventura County sheriff's office even gave us an office and all of the help in the world. They set up communications with all the family members, too. But still we had absolutely zero."

Filled in Chief Johnson, "In the meantime we had the sheriff's Aero Squadron activated, and they flew thirty-five or forty hours searching for Timmy. The creeks were running pretty good at that time and so they were searched, but still nothing. He had absolutely vanished right off the face of the earth. No ransom note had showed up, and we had searched everywhere and found nothing. So it became pretty apparent at that point that it was a kidnapping and not just a disappearance."