I Know My First Name Is Steven (37 page)

I completed my interview with John Walsh by asking him, "Why do you continue going around the country talking about missing and exploited children?" His answer surged forth like a flood.

"Why do I continue? It is not the best thing I could be doing for my family right now, but I will point out one thing: Adam didn't have a chance. The system let Adam down. Who the hell is going to go out and battle for the new Adams? I want to tip those scales for those little people. I will never be able to understand how this country has allowed these crimes to be perpetrated to the tremendous extent that they have.

"This is no longer a catharsis. It is no longer therapeutic for me. I need to be with my family. I probably need a week off. . . I probably need a
day
off! I probably could use a good night's sleep. But I know what is happening. I know as I land in a different city every day. I see the slides of the mutilated and raped children . . . the horrible things that are done to them. The public doesn't see it. Juries don't see it in many cases when they should. I see it and I know what is happening. I know how terrorized they are. I can feel it! I interview them and talk to them.

"I had eleven little girls give me a plaque in Colo
rado . . . sexual assault victims with tears in their eyes. Double victims of the system. They said, 'Thanks for speaking out for us and helping us. We want some justice in the system.'

"I know that nightmare . . . what a child goes through when they are sodomized, tortured, raped, murdered. . . .
You have just got to do something to stop it."

Right now, today,
we must begin to care about the safety of our own children, our relatives' children, our neighbors' children, and even strangers' children
by being ever-vigilant about the backgrounds, motives, and interests of all persons with whom they come into contact, never forgetting that over eighty percent of all sexual assaults on boys and girls are perpetrated by persons they know.

Further, we must make certain that
all children are protected by being educated about the dangers of sexual assault and kidnapping
and by making certain that they truly have someone whom they can trust and turn to whenever they feel so threatened. And we must call, lobby, speak to, and write to our elected officials to force them to pass laws which both adequately incarcerate and attempt to treat pedophiles while at the same time effectively keeping them away from children. We have been given the responsibility to care for and protect children and, therefore, we can do no less.

* * * * *

Since this book was first published in late 1991—outside of the terrible crimes that Cary Stayner has now confessed to—some interesting things have oc
curred and developed due to my researching and writing
I Know My First Name Is Steven.

As a result of researching and writing this book and publicity for it in late 1991 and early 1992, I became an aggressive child advocate. In January of 1992, I went undercover in San Francisco and infiltrated the North American Man/Boy Love Association—NAMBLA—for NBC-TV affiliate KRON-TV, which, in turn, led to additional coverage on NBC News, CNN, and
Geraldo Rivera.
This led to the gay and lesbian community—initially in San Francisco but soon spreading nationwide—to slam the door on this nefarious organization of child sex predators and child pornographers. And this led to their membership plummeting from a high of over 4,000 members to fewer than 400 today. In fact, at the 1994 Gay Pride Day Parade in San Francisco, gay community leaders told me that televangelist Jerry Falwell could march in the parade with greater impunity than could an acknowledged member of NAMBLA. (You can read the full story in my Author's Epilogue in my second book,
Brother Tony's Boys
[Prometheus Books, 1996: Amherst, NY].)

As for Kenneth Eugene Parnell, Steven's kidnapper, after completing his parole in 1987 he went to work as a night watchman for a boys' home in Oakland, California. But his background and criminal record remained undiscovered until the Lorimar/NBC-TV miniseries of
I Know My First Name Is Steven
premiered in May 1989. He was fired and forced to move out of his apartment in the Oakland suburb of Berkeley. Once again Parnell folded his tent and disappeared.

Although he was required to do so because of his 1951 Bakersfield, California, kidnapping and sexual
assault conviction of nine-year-old Bobby Green, Parnell did not notify law enforcement authorities of his change of address. In 1995, a private investigator located Parnell for the author. I went to his house and, surprisingly, Parnell welcomed me, proudly showing me a boy's bicycle and toys just inside his front door, saying, "I've got to keep up with the younger generation, Mike!"

I called and gave Parnell's address to the Berkeley Police and the Alameda County Sheriff's Office. Parnell was not prosecuted for failing to register his new address. Over the new few years, I kept in regular touch with Parnell in an attempt to keep track of him, occasionally taking him out to eat and interviewing him repeatedly. During one interview, Parnell challenged Steven's remark that he had sexually assaulted Steven "over 700 times," the child sex predator correcting his then dead victim with, "Steven never was very good at math. It was more like over 3,000 times."

During these interviews, Parnell repeatedly reacted with shock and stuttered and coughed whenever I asked him about the murdered children's bodies found buried in Mendocino County—crimes that have never been solved. And he reacted the same way during an August 1999 dinner and on-camera interview with reporter Steve Noble of TV's
Inside Edition
and staff writer Lance Williams of the
San Francisco Examiner,
remarking disingenuously: "I know who killed and buried those two kids, but I can't remember his name right now." And these two children and their murderer all have yet to be identified.

The sum of all of these experiences led the author to found the proactive, nonprofit, tax-exempt child
advocacy organization Better A Millstone, Inc. (BAM). Calling itself "the Internet eyes and ears for law enforcement," BAM is composed of a group of Internet-savvy child advocates who lurk on-line and gatherintelligence and information about Internet child sex predators and child pornographers and then provide same to law enforcement around the world. Thus far BAM has helped in the identification and arrest of over sixty such criminals.

You can learn more about BAM by visiting their Web site at
http://www.shadow-net.com
. And if you have children using the Internet, they can learn how to become safer on the Internet by visiting BAM's "For Kids Only" Web site at
http://www.shadow-net.com/forkids.html.

And sadly, children continue to be kidnapped, sexually assaulted, and murdered. One young life lost to such damnable acts was that of ten-year-old Anthony Michael Martinez, of Beaumont, California, who was kidnapped on April 10, 1997. You can help find the man who kidnapped, raped, and murdered him by visiting BAM's Web page,
http://www.shadow-net.com/nam.htm
. Another young life lost was that of beautiful Christina Marie Williams, a thirteen-year-old girl who was kidnapped from my hometown of Monterey, California, on June 12, 1998. You can help find the men who kidnapped and murdered her by going to
http://www.shadow-net.com/kidnapped.htm
.

Always do whatever you can to help protect the children. Thank you!

Cary Stayner: The Yosemite Serial Killer

Late on a quiet June afternoon in 1984, this author, Mike Echols, kidnap victim Steven Stayner, 19, and Steven's brother Cary, 23, sat talking around the kitchen table at Del and Kay Stayner's new home on Mirror Lake Drive in northeast Merced, California. The brothers' mother, Kay, divided her time between preparing dinner for the family and their guest, chatting with the three at the table, and setting the table for dinner.

When she had finished setting six places at the table, Kay returned to the stove to stir the beans. After surveying the table Steven suddenly remarked to his mother in his slow, distinctive way of talking, "You forgot one."

The spoon still in her hand, Kay turned and queried her second son, "Who?"

Without pause, Steven pointed to his brother Cary and said with a smile, "Cary!"

Kay looked quizzically at Cary and then said, "Oh . . . Cary."

Sadly, that is the way it was for the ruggedly handsome oldest son of Del and Kay Stayner after his younger brother returned to his family on March 2, 1980. Steven had returned home after spending seven years, two months, and twenty-eight days as the "son" and unwilling sex partner for his "father," previously convicted kidnapper-child molester Kenneth Eugene Parnell.

Steven's return marked the decline of attention and family prominence for Cary. But during an interview in his jail cell in late July, 1999, Cary reportedly asked a TV journalist if someone might be interested in making a TV miniseries about his life story, as was done with Steven's life.

Steven's ordeal became the basis for the first edition of this book and the Lorimar/NBC-TV miniseries, which was also
I Know My First Name Is Steven
—a miniseries that continues to be shown two to three times a year.

While Steven was missing, Cary attended a Hoover Intermediate School program for gifted students. He was so good at drawing that while he was attending Merced High School he was the cartoonist for the school paper,
The Statesman.
His journalism teacher Sharon Wellins remembers an exam that Cary apparently failed to study for. At the bottom of the blank page, Cary had drawn a picture of a little man holding a picket sign that read, "Unfair test."

But much of the time, Cary hung back alone. His male friends started going out with girls, but no one recalls Stayner ever having a date in spite of his good
looks. And some remember disturbing incidents involving Cary as a teenager. In an interview with the San
Francisco Chronicle,
Victoria Flores-Tatum recalls that he "was very frustrated at all the publicity Steven was getting." And she remembers a dark occurrence involving her. When she was 14, she attended a sleepover with Cary's sister Cindy. Victoria said that Cary crept under her cot as she slept and reached up and touched her breasts. She was startled awake and told him to go away, but a few minutes later, Cary reappeared in the doorway stark naked and just stood there. Victoria told him to go away and he did.

After graduation from Merced High School in 1979, where his classmates voted Cary the "most creative" senior, he drifted through a series of relatively menial jobs, hauling furniture, exterminating insects for a pest-control firm, working for an aluminum company, and finally going to work for the Merced Glass and Mirror Company. There he worked with Mike Marchese, who recalls about Cary, "He'd say a woman was nice looking and he'd go so far as saying it would be nice to get together with her . . . but nothing ever came of it."

Marchese remembers a day a few years ago when he found Cary slamming his fist into a piece of plywood and bleeding from cuts on his hand. "He said he felt like he was having a nervous breakdown and said he was all nervous and didn't know why. He said he felt like getting in his truck, driving it into the office, and killing the boss and everyone else in there and torching the place.

"I told him he might have a chemical imbalance,
and he said, 'I have been told I have, but nothing's ever been done about it.' "

As he stated in an interview with the
Los Angeles Times,
company owner Gordon Ekas drove Cary to a Merced psychiatric center, where he was counseled. But soon thereafter, Stayner came into the Merced Glass and Mirror office, picked up his check, and never came back. Instead, in the summer of 1997, Cary Stayner took a job as a maintenance man at the Cedar Lodge in the tiny mountain community of El Portal on California Highway 140 near the entrance to Yosemite National Park—the same highway his brother Steven had been taken along when he was first kidnapped in 1972.

Cary was so highly trusted by Cedar Lodge owner Gerald Fischer that Fischer allowed his children to work alongside the new handyman as he repaired plumbing, arranged pool furniture, and took care of many other tasks at the large, busy motel.

But his apparent difficulty in getting along with the opposite sex continued. Cary's friend Jake Jones, who works at the Yosemite View Lodge a few miles from Cedar Lodge, said that Cary never talked about dating any specific woman. And once, when Jones was telling him about his own four-year relationship, Cary expressed surprise. Recalls Jones, "He said, 'Four years? Man, I never had a relationship that lasted more than three weeks.' "

But apparently Cary did associate with some females. Nancy Wilson of the Yosemite View Restaurant, where the wiry Stayner often ate, said Stayner identified himself as a "sun worshiper" to teenage girls he met. And one evening in early July, 1999, Wilson went
to the Merced River at the Two-five Beach, where Stayner often smoked marijuana and sunbathed and swam in the nude. And she said, "He asked me if I wanted to get high. I said no."

But when he was arrested, Cedar Lodge Restaurant's manager Lisa Hansel said, "It really affected a lot of us that this monster could be walking around amongst us . . . so trusted! How could we have missed someone we felt was part of our family? Everyone living in this community knew and embraced this monster who was capable of such horrors!"

But instead of working at the Cedar Lodge during the busy summer tourist season, Cary Stayner spent his 38th birthday locked up by himself in a jail cell in Fresno, California, having been arrested on July 24, 1999, for the July 21, 1999, decapitation murder of 26-year-old Yosemite National Park naturalist Joie Armstrong . . . a murder to which—along with the February 15, 1999, kidnapping-murders of Eureka residents Carole Sund, her daughter Juliana, 15, and the Sunds' family friend Silvina Pelosso, 16, from Argentina—he confessed later that same day, shortly after he was arrested by the F.B.I. at the Laguna del Sol nudist colony outside Sacramento, California.