I Know My First Name Is Steven (26 page)

Steve's return brought tremendous joy to Del, but the previous seven years had taken a serious toll on him. During his son's absence he had lost his deep faith in God and severely curtailed his practice of the Mormon faith. Explained Del, "I believe in God, but as a father I got mad at Him after four years. You're not supposed to, but He hadn't brought my son back!" Then Del angrily reflected on his son's years with Parnell. "It really affected our lives. We are not the same people we were before Stevie disappeared. After two or three years, Steve had accepted that kind of life"—with Parnell—"and he had a ball. He had a lot of friends. He had a lot of fun up there. This guy bought him funny books and all kinds of stuff, and Steve ate that up. When Steve was in the sixth grade, the damn guy even bought whiskey for him! So, Steve had a lot of stuff he would have never gotten if he was at home. But he would have had his family!" he cried.

After regaining his composure, Del added: "But most of the time that Stevie was gone, I had this hurting. I guess I was just about half crazy or something. . . I don't know. I'd take my anger out on Kay, my children, and I couldn't get along with anybody. I was tore up inside. I can't explain it except that I hurt all the
time, and I know when Stevie came home, the hurting stopped."

A few blocks away that night, Ervin E. Murphy and his friend and fellow worker Pete Galessor registered at a motel. They were in Merced to enjoy their usual Sunday-Monday weekend, and early the next morning the pair walked down Yosemite Parkway to Carrows Restaurant for breakfast. On the way in, Pete bought a
San Francisco Chronicle,
and while they were eating he suddenly exclaimed, "Hey! Get this!"

"Then," said Murph, "he read this article to me about Steve and Parnell and the whole bit. I didn't say anything to him . . . not even on the whole way back to the park."

Based on their initial interview with Steve, Lunney and Price knew that there had been a second man involved in his abduction, but Steve had been reluctant to provide them with additional information. So, the next day, Monday, March 3, the two officers picked up Steve and drove him to the police station for an in-depth interrogation. It took several hours of questioning before the teenager told them that the mysterious second kidnapper's name was "Murphy," that he wore eyeglasses, worked "in Yosemite," and early on had stayed with Steve and Parnell "in a little red cabin on the road to Yosemite."

With this information, Lunney telephoned Lee Shackleton—in 1980 still Yosemite National Park's Chief Law Enforcement Ranger—and asked that he research National Park Service and Curry Company employment files for anyone working there in Decem
ber of 1972 with the first, middle, or last name of "Murphy." This time Shackleton cooperated promptly and within hours Lunney and Price had photographs of two Murphys.

Late that afternoon Lunney and Price went by the Stayners' home and showed Steve the photographs they had received from Shackleton. With no hesitation Steve picked out Ervin Edward "Murph" Murphy, and the officers returned to the station to plan their arrest of the simple-minded kitchen worker.

That evening, as Steve, Cory, and his parents drove to San Francisco for an overnight stay before their Tuesday, March 4, appearance nationwide on
Good Morning America
from ABC-TV affiliate KGO-TV, Lunney and Price departed for the two-hour drive to Yosemite. There, with backup from park rangers, they waited in Yosemite Lodge's kitchen for Murphy to arrive for his graveyard shift. Right on time at 10
P.M.
Murphy showed up and was promptly arrested for what was the very first time in his life.

But Murph was expecting them. "At five o'clock Tuesday morning I left my cabin and went over to the lodge and got a newspaper and read it myself. And the paper said that they were looking for an accomplice, so, more or less, I knew that they were looking for me. So I went on to work that night and I'm just starting to work when they came in and picked me up and I told them all about it. It was a relief to know where the kid was and that he was alive and not hurt or anything. He could have been dead! And I finally got it off my chest that I knew Parnell had kidnapped the kid, but at the same time I hadn't wanted to get myself involved."

The short, friendly, yet lonely little man paused and reflected a minute or two before adding somewhat sadly, "One time, years before that, I tried to call up the Merced police department, and the phone just rang and rang, and then when the lady answered I was still a little scared, and so I just hung up and went over and got drunk instead."

Before leaving Yosemite, Lunney and Price took Murph to his cabin one last time, where the dejected man sat on his glasses and broke them. With Murph's permission, they searched through his meager possessions. Among the things they found were science fiction novels and books on the occult. Lunney asked him if he read a lot, and Murph replied, "Yes, but a lot of it is way over my head. I had to quit the Book of the Month Club." Then they drove Murph to the Merced County Jail and booked him.

The next day, Wednesday, March 5, Murph was arraigned in Merced County Court for conspiracy in the kidnapping of Steven Stayner, with bail set at $50,000 . . . much more than Parnell's $20,000 bail in Ukiah. The Curry Company offered to provide Murph with private defense counsel—an offer he did not accept—but The Palace Hotel in Ukiah made no such offer to Parnell.

The arrest was a great shock to Murph's friends and fellow workers at Yosemite. They had always seen him as a little strange but perfectly harmless. Yosemite Lodge night auditor Nanette Ketterer—who, ironically, had Parnell's old job—recalled Murph telling a bizarre story to her in 1979 of how he befriended a runaway boy. He'd said that he'd lodged him in his employee cabin for several days, given him money for
food, paid for phone calls to his parents, and, finally, bought the boy a bus ticket home. Then, Murph had told her, he was surprised to receive a "thank-you" letter from the parents with thirty dollars enclosed in appreciation for his help. But Murph had never told his cabinmate this story, and it was probably just his attempt to assuage his guilt for having helped Parnell kidnap Steven so many years before.

Also on March 5, Lunney and Price drove Steve out of Merced along Yosemite Parkway and California 140 to retrace the route that Parnell took with Steven and Murphy to Cathy's Valley. They found the little red cabin where Steven had spent portions of his first two weeks with Parnell and the two officers talked with the teenager again about his life experiences with Parnell.

Even though Steve continued to characterize his relationship with Parnell as a very normal one, Lunney and Price suspected Parnell had sexually abused Steve, for within hours of the kidnapper's arrest Ukiah Police had teletyped for and received Parnell's complete criminal history, including details of his 1951 arrest and conviction for kidnapping and sexually assaulting nine-year-old Bobby Green in Bakersfield. Ukiah Police had shared this information with the Merced officers, and so both jurisdictions knew from the start the potential crimes they were dealing with in Timmy's and Steven's kidnappings.

With Steve's safe return to Merced, Chief Kulbeth reflected on his department's lengthy search for him: "Certainly, in that seven-year period of time we made thousands of inquiries and arrests. There was always something you could do, even if it was just talking to people over and over and over. The case was kept alive.

"The Stayners are stable, down-to-earth people . . . I think they are great people. Over the seven years I don't think Delbert ever lost the hope that someday Steve was going to turn up alive. And for a long period of time Kay believed that, too, but then I think she slowly started losing a little faith."

He concluded pragmatically: "We didn't necessarily try to talk them into believing that Steve was dead, but in some way we wanted to condition them to the possibility that if he did turn up tomorrow in a grave someplace, for example, it would not be a total shock."

The chief concluded, "In my twenty-nine years on the department we devoted more time, more energy, and more manpower to Steven's case than probably any other case I can recall."

On Easter, April 6, Del, Kay, Steve, and his three sisters drove to Ukiah in their camper, their first trip to Mendocino County since Steve's return home. The trip's main purpose was for Steve to receive the $15,000 reward check from the Timmy White Fund for returning Timmy. A ceremony was held at two o'clock that afternoon in Ukiah's City Park, where Timmy was hoisted onto a chair to present the check to Steve. After brief remarks by Steve, the Stayners paid a short visit to Timmy's home before driving on to Comptche, where they met Steve's friends from his relatively happy three-year stay in the tiny backwoods community.

Recalled Kay, "The area was beautiful. The people up there were nice people . . . they're just not city people. The Mitchells were real eye-openers. They use a
Pacific Gas & Electric cable reel for a dining room table, and that's just not normal . . . just not ordinary."

Next the Stayners called on Damon Carroll and his family. Kay said that Damon is a "very intense kid. He is bright. He's a nice kid. What I mean by intense is he does sorta make sense sometimes, and other times you think, 'Boy! This kid's
deep!
He must know something I don't, because he doesn't always make a whole lot of sense.' He tends to be off in his own little world. And Damon told me that Steve had told him that he had been kidnapped while they were in Comptche. Steve hasn't recalled any of that, but if he was doped up on marijuana, high on that stuff, he wouldn't remember."

After spending Easter night in Comptche, the Stayners drove south through the small redwood forest communities of Navarro and Philo, turning southwest at Boonville and going to the Mountain View Ranch, a place Kay found "wild, desolate, and beautiful." They spent a couple of hours there looking over the place and visiting with the Pipers and Duke Stornetta.

Recalled Duke, " [When] the detectives brought Dennis to the cabin to get his stuff, I said, 'Now, you've got chickens and you got goats—penned up there in the barn—and you got rabbits. What are you going to do with them?' And he says, 'Eat 'em! I'm going home!' That's what he said, it is. And he left everything . . . " Then, when they returned at Easter, Duke said that Steve convinced his parents to let him take his favorite goat back to Merced in their camper.

After a month getting reacquainted with his family, Steve enrolled in the freshman class at the East Campus of Merced High School immediately following the Easter break. At the time, Principal Joseph Reeves was quoted in the
Sun-Star
as saying, "We are all going to turn ourselves inside out to help him, for one of the best things we can do is let the kid forget it. If he can handle this, he can handle anything. He can handle life."

But there were problems, Del recalled. "He was called a lot of bad names . . . gay, punk, all that kind of shit. He almost got into a fight A lot of that stuff was at school, but there was some of it at a skating rink he went to."

And people were still asking the same question they had asked when Steve had first returned home: "Why didn't he ever run away from Parnell?"

Prior to his later evaluation of Steve for the Merced County District Attorney's Office, Psychiatrist Robert Wald of San Francisco was quoted in an article in the
San Francisco Chronicle
shortly after Steve's return home as saying, "Kids as young as the Stayner boy characteristically struggle with a lot of growth problems, behavior conflicts with parents, and feelings of guilt and shame. It takes no stretch of the imagination why a youngster might succumb to the blandishments and attention of a stranger, someone immature himself, who knows how to appeal to such a child."

In that same article, child psychiatrist Dr. Marjorie Hays said: "It's understandable that a child of seven could believe something like that. There's a textbook name for it, the
family romance syndrome.
It comes when a child suddenly develops an interest in the outside
world and begins to devalue his parents and fantasizes that he was adopted and doesn't really belong to them. Normally, the attitude passes. With this boy, he might be just a normal kid who had some colossal bad luck."

At the end of the article, an unidentified psychologist was quoted as saying, "I'm sure the older boy felt tainted and damaged all along, but he couldn't leave because of the low self-esteem he may have developed. It was easier for him to mobilize himself on behalf of rescuing someone else."

Cindy remembered his sibling rivalry with Cary. "Cary was living at home when Steve came back and they argued and feuded all the time. They are both the kind of persons that think when they are right, they stick to it. They're not going to give up. And Steve, when he thinks he's right, I mean, he's right. You can't argue with him! Steve is very stubborn at times . . .
very stubborn."

Steve had problems making male friends; virtually his only one was his cousin, David Higgins . . . but he did have a lot of girlfriends. Ever concerned about others' perceptions of his sexual identity, Steve recalled, "I went through a lot of girlfriends starting as a freshman. Some were in the eighth grade and some were as old as nineteen."

After Steve's return home, many of his Mendocino County acquaintances went to Merced to visit him and his family. First it was Damon. He went down and spent several weeks with the Stayners that summer, driving Kay crazy with his moodiness and his habit of jumping over her furniture.

But the real shocker came the day Kay opened her front door and discovered on her porch Barbara Mat
thias (the woman who'd molested Steven with Parnell), her son Lloyd, and a television news crew. Barbara had been promised several hundred dollars by the TV station for her help in arranging an "exclusive" interview with Steve and his family, and she had shown up out of the clear blue. Kay lost no time in slamming the door in her face.

About the visit, Kay said, "I was just
boiling.
I can't put my feelings into words . . . not printable, anyway. I just feel that people like her should be put away for good." And in the same way Mendocino County failed to investigate or prosecute Parnell for his sexual assaults on Steven and his friends—Barbara's sons included—they exhibited the same lack of concern about Barbara.