Park Predators - The Predator

Episode Date: July 21, 2020

In the winter and summer of 1999, a serial killer struck four times in the span of six months inside Yosemite National Park. His spree of brutal murders left FBI agents and local law enforcement searching for leads across the state of California. Taunting letters from the perpetrator revealed clues about this killer’s twisted mind. Authorities and the victims’ families could never have imagined that this sinister slayer, Cary Stayner, whose family name was once known across the nation, was operating right beneath their noses. Sources for this episode cannot be listed here due to character limitations. For a full list of sources, please visit https://parkpredators.com/episode-4-the-predator/ Park Predators is an audiochuck production. Connect with us on social media:Instagram: @audiochuckTwitter: @audiochuckFacebook: /audiochuckllcTikTok: @audiochuck

Hi park enthusiasts, I'm your host Idelia D'Ambra and today we're taking you to one of North America's most well-known national parks, Yosemite National Park. Yosemite is best known for having one of the tallest waterfalls in the world, Yosemite Falls, and along with that there are tons of towering granite rocks, lush valleys, and what feels like never-ending forests of giant sequoias that shoot up into the sky. One really amazing spectacle of this park is how sunlight plays tricks on what you see. There are specific times of day where the notorious granite monolith El Cap is lit up blood red and fiery orange, and those colors show up because of how the sunlight reflects off of the rock face and a nearby waterfall. Millions of visitors from around the world come here every year to see that site and others, but the story I'm going to tell you involves a group of women visiting the park in 1999. What happened to them and the investigation that followed would be as tricky to understand as the illusions the sun casts on El Cap itself,

and the colors of blood and fire really were flowing from Yosemite at the hands of a homicidal predator who'd been lurking in the mountains of California for decades. This is Park Predators. In February 1999, Carol's son's life was as normal as anyone could hope for. Married for 21 years with four kids, Carol was happy being a stay-at-home mom and active in charity work, while her husband, Jens, worked as the president of Carol's family business. According to the San Francisco Examiner, Carol and Jens had adopted the three youngest of their four children from Argentina. And while they were down there, they made good friends with the Peloso family. In fact, their teenage daughter, Julie, became such good friends with the Peloso's teenage daughter, Silvina, that in 1999, when Silvina decided to study abroad in America, it was a no-brainer that she'd stay with the Sun family in Eureka, California.

One weekend in February, Carol got a great idea for an outing with the girls, a chance to show Sylvina and Julie a place that was super special to her, Yosemite National Park. Now, Carol had a soft spot for the park since she and Jens had honeymooned there some 21 years before. Now, after decades of marriage, a biological daughter, and three adopted children, Carol wanted to share this special place with Julie and Sylvina. So Carol booked a room at the Cedar Lodge Motel, not far from the park's visitor center, and they rented a sedan to drive her on the park in. The entire trip was scheduled to just be about four days long,

but it would be much longer before each of them would return home. On February 15th, Carol, Julie, and Sylvina didn't show up to a prearranged pickup location at the end of their four-day trip. They were supposed to meet Carol's husband at the San Francisco airport, but Carol and the girls never showed up. Jens knows this is really weird and out of the norm, so he calls Carol's parents, and they all alert law enforcement and beg the National Park Service rangers to search for Carol and the teen girls. Obviously, the first place they checked was the hotel they had been staying at, but none of the women were there.

For a moment, I'm sure the r and the family had the thought or the hope that maybe the girls were just out somewhere or worst case, they'd gotten into a car accident and just needed to be found. Missing along with the women was their bright red Pontiac Grand Prix rental car. And as hours passed, the thought that an accident was to blame for their disappearance became a hard hope to hold on to. Investigators checked the women's hotel room, and they found all of their personal belongings, like clothing and their travel bags, left inside. Carol's parents really panicked when they learned about this information because it made no sense for Carol and the girls to be gone without that stuff.

They wouldn't just leave it behind. It's at this point law enforcement agencies from all over start to mobilize and work to track down the missing rental car. They put out a poster with the pictures of all three women, and that went out to park employees and all of the visitors in the surrounding area. It took several hours for Jens and Carol's parents to make their way to Yosemite because they had to pack up the couple's other children and get there. Word of Carol, Julie, and Sylvina's disappearances spread fast across the country, and by the time Jens made it to the park and the Peloso family arrived from Argentina, the story was national

news. Local newspapers, TV stations, and network news stations flocked to the Yosemite Visitor Center to get updates on this investigation. And almost immediately, Carol's parents held a press conference alongside law enforcement, asking anyone for information. Police announced that they wanted to know if anyone had seen the women while out sightseeing in the previous days. At that press conference, police also announced that they had established a tip line and volunteer group to help in the search. Now, while all this is going on, it's a lot of chaos for these families, but they tried to keep busy, tried to do everything they could to find their loved ones.

But the more time passed, it became harder and harder to even wrap their heads around what was going on. Yosemite was not a place where this happened. Within days of the women vanishing, agencies brought in a lot of resources. This included hundreds of volunteers, tracking dogs, and even helicopters were used to comb through the mountainous terrain. Four days into this search, authorities in the town of Modesto, California, located Carol Sun's wallet on a residential street. of Modesto, California, located Carol's son's wallet on a residential street. Inside of it were all of her credit cards, but there was no money. Police see this as a really good lead, and they work it, interviewing people on that street and trying to figure out how Carol's wallet had gotten dumped so far from where they'd been. But until they found them, it was just another mystery.

Search crews and law enforcement agencies are spread out in areas all around Yosemite, but authorities set up a base of operations near the small town of Sonora, California. And as I talk about the search for these women, I have to tell you that my husband and I actually spent a day and night of our honeymoon in Sonora. And even though our Airbnb was really cute and all, and the rustic downtown area was adorable, this part of California overall was nothing spectacular. There isn't much in or around this town except a lot of trees and highway, and I got a sense when we arrived for our stay that no one really goes far from town because it's kind of sketchy elsewhere. While I was there,

I read it in a local newspaper and it had a police blotter for that week. And just skimming through it, it seemed like most of the crime in and around Sonora was related to drugs and burglaries. I didn't see any bulletins about murders or missing people, which makes me think that the local agency there might not really have been equipped to handle a case

of this magnitude at the time in 1999. As it stands right now in 2020, the department is super small and was likely even smaller back then. They have a police chief, one lieutenant, two sergeants, and 10 police officers, bringing their total force to 14 people. They patrol three square miles of the town and 4,700 full-time residents. And the crime stats on their website show that they respond to less than a few hundred incidents every year. All the data I could find was that they rarely have a homicide. But oddly enough, they do report a few arsons every year, which is interesting.

It wasn't until mid-March, one full month after the women disappeared, the families got their first real lead, but it was terrible news. Carol's son's rental car had been found by a hiker. It was located in a thick wooded area near Sonora, not far from the investigation's command post, but it was several hours away from the Cedar Lodge Motel, where Carol and the girls had been staying. At first, investigators were hopeful that this might be a really big break, a clue to lead them to the whereabouts of these missing victims. However, this clue would be one of the last in their search for them. The car had been burned through and through, but there were two bodies in the open trunk bed. When authorities arrived on scene, they confirmed with their own eyes what the witness

had told them. But there was a problem. Their search wasn't totally over because, though three people were missing, only two bodies were found in the back of the trunk. And because the car was burned so badly, they couldn't identify those bodies right away. But by looking at one of the victims, it was clear it was an adult female. The other was a teenage girl. Investigators felt sure it was Carol and either Sylvina or Julie, but which one wasn't immediately known. After assessing the bodies, the coroner ultimately determined the women in the trunk were Carol and Sylvina. The medical examiner was able to tell that they had been strangled before being burned in that car. According to ABC News, not far from the burned-out vehicle, authorities found some boots, the car keys, and a camera.

Now, this camera proved to be a crucial piece of evidence, because when detectives developed the film, they found recent pictures of Carol, Sylvina, and Julie. The images showed the women's trip, including spots they'd spent time sightseeing within the park. Some of the photos showed Sylvina and Julie bundled up together, sitting at overlooks above the Yosemite Valley. There were even pictures of the girls doing cartwheels and handstands inside the Cedar Lodge Motel. When investigators looked at the time stamps on the pictures, they saw that they had been taken over the period of the few days that the women were supposed to be enjoying their trip.

So investigators knew that they had been hiking and they were doing all the things that they had wanted to do inside of the park. But the photos gave no help to authorities as to where Julie was. And no one could answer that baffling question of what had happened to all of them. What was the motive? and where was Julie? Police had no idea that within two weeks, that question would be answered by an anonymous letter received by an FBI agent in Modesto, California. The letter that came to the FBI agent was like something out of a movie. It was just a taunting letter that had a crudely hand-drawn map with it. The map had a message written on it that said, quote,

We had fun with this one. Along with that sinister message, the writer drew general markers on the map designating prominent points in California, like Route 120, which is a long road that hugs the National Park. The map also noted a large body of water just south-southwest of the town of Sonora, called the Don Pedro Reservoir. This could have been a cruel hoax, but because Carol and Silvina were discovered so close to Sonora, investigators wanted to check out the marker near the reservoir right away.

Using cadaver dogs, searchers combed that area around the reservoir, and it didn't take them long before they found Julie's decomposing body. She was about 40 miles from where her mom and friend were disposed of in the burned-out car. And despite her advanced stage of decomposition, the coroner was able to tell that she had been killed in that spot where she was found, right there on the embankment, and her killer had slit her throat with some sort of large knife. Now, you would think at this point with three bodies identified that the case would heat up, but unfortunately, leads in the investigation just started to stall. Police turned their attention to where Carol's wallet had been found, hoping that would lead them in a better direction. After the victims were identified, investigators began receiving

some reports about suspicious people in the town of Modesto, people who may have a connection to the murdered women. Then a few weeks after that, authorities dropped a bombshell. According to ABC News, police had rounded up suspects, including convicted sex offenders, career criminals, and one man who reportedly gave a false confession to the killings. And it seemed at least to outsiders looking in like the crimes were on their way to being solved. People's fears began to subside and visitors started returning to Yosemite. But through the month of April, a lot of these individuals police had looked at were cleared or found to be unrelated to the crimes.

By summer, police had developed even more suspects and they actually arrested two brothers who had criminal records and they accused them of the murders. But ultimately, it was found that those guys had nothing to do with the murders and they too were eventually released. But I think, you know, whether based on that arrest or just what police were telling the families, everyone kind of thought that maybe multiple people were involved. Yen's son even

told reporters from the San Francisco Examiner that he believed several people could have been involved in his wife and daughter's murders. He theorized that the people responsible were likely involved in a growing and unfettered methamphetamine trade in the California mountains. He told one reporter, quote, because of the way the rental car was dropped off in the woods, someone else would have had to been there to drive away another car. Not only that, someone would have to have been really whacked out to steal $100 and then just kill them. It seems like it was planned out, the way the car was hidden and burned. Somebody who was just psychotic wouldn't bother about hiding the car and hiding the evidence. But after all of their investigation,

authorities were getting nowhere to support that multiple perpetrator theory, and the Modesto leads really brought them back to square one. So they decided to regroup and re-looked at their investigation, starting all the way back at the Cedar Lodge Hotel. Initially, they'd interviewed everyone who was staying there and those that had been working there in the time frame that Carol and the girls had checked in. That in itself was a huge undertaking, trying to vet all of the hotel's employees, their schedules, and tracking

down customer records of who had checked in and who had checked out during Carol and the girls' stay. And as they're in the middle of this painstaking task, their worst fears are realized. A killer had struck again in Yosemite. On July 22nd, the Marin County Sheriff's Office gets a call from a woman who says her friend, Joey Armstrong, didn't show up to a visit. The caller is worried that something has happened to Joey because she lives in Yosemite National Park, and there were three murders there just a couple of months ago. At the time, Joey was working as a naturalist for the park and she was required to live in a cabin inside of the park's boundary so that she could be close to her work. So on July 21st, when she was scheduled to drive and meet

her friend for a few days and didn't show up, that sent off alarm bells. As soon as they get this call, law enforcement puts resources together to start looking for Joey. The first place they go is her cabin inside of Yosemite. And when they arrived, they saw signs of an apparent struggle right away, and Joey wasn't there. Items were strewn around the front porch and inside of the cabin. Also in the driveway area, there was a pair of broken sunglasses and a red mechanic's hat. in the driveway area, there was a pair of broken sunglasses and a red mechanic's hat. Probably most ominous of all was that Joey's car was still parked in the front, and it looked like it was packed, ready to go for a trip. When investigators looked down around the car,

they saw some visible tire tracks that suggested another car had arrived there and left very quickly. Deputies fan out, and they start slowly walking around the woods near the cabin looking for any sign of Joey. They were looking for anything that could suggest which direction she had headed, if someone had taken her, and where that car had gone. But it was the search in the woods where deputies would find the woman's decapitated body just laying partially in the brush and partially in the water. Joey's head was laying next to her body, and it was clear to investigators that she hadn't been dead long. Law enforcement is looking at this, and they see it, and they feel strongly that she's been murdered, and she likely

died on the previous day, July 21st. Obviously, authorities can't help but make a connection between Joey's murder and their previous cases from a few months earlier. All of the victims were women. All of them had been murdered and dumped in the woods. And Julie's son and Joey's murder in particular had a lot of similarities. Both of them had their necks cut, but the only noticeable difference was that Joey had been decapitated. Investigators quickly theorized all of these victims had likely died at the hands of a serial killer. Profilers came in from the FBI and they began making connections between all of the victims' manners of death and what a potential

suspect would look like and act like, but they did not confirm this openly to the public and in fact never confirmed to anyone that they were linking the cases. Once the FBI got involved, they started looking at Joey's case from the start because her murder had happened clearly within the boundary of the National Park. Carol, Julie, and Sylvina's murders were technically state law enforcement cases because they had disappeared outside of the park's boundary. As the FBI starts investigating Joey's case, they come across a witness who says on July 21st, they'd seen a vehicle at Joey's cabin around the time of her murder, and it wasn't Joey's. After hearing the description of the make and model of that car, detectives felt like they remembered its description.

It was one from someone they had interviewed before. The car belonged to one of the Cedar Lodge Motel's employees, a handyman named Kerry Stainer. The first time any investigator had sat down with Kerry as they were going through employees at the Cedar Lodge Motel, he hadn't raised any flags. He was a clean cut guy and he had no history of violence. But with this new lead in hand with Joey's case, the FBI knew they needed to talk to Carey again. So they go to him, and they question him, and they even searched his truck, but they didn't find anything connecting him to Joey's murder, so they just had to let him go. At the time, Carey was 37 years old, and he was working at the hotel roughly an hour and a half drive from his hometown of Merced, California.

The more they looked at him, detectives were convinced Carey was connected to all four of the murders in the park. Aside from having no criminal history, Carey fit the profile of the type of perpetrator they were looking for. He was single, kind of a loner, held a steady job working at the Cedar Lodge Hotel, and he was someone who had flown under their radar. But probably most damning of all was that he could have had access to all of the victims. Because he grew up in that area of California, they also knew that he had an extensive knowledge of Yosemite Valley, better than most transient workers who weren't from California. And then there was that witness who described the car at Joey's cabin

and the fact that that car matched Carrie's. The FBI was just determined, so they went to talk to Carrie again on July 23rd. But this time they couldn't find him because he hadn't shown up for his scheduled shift at the Cedar Lodge Hotel. It's at this point they put a bolo out on him. And the next day, they received a tip that he was at the Laguna del Sol nudist camp in Wilton, California. A person at the bar inside the resort had seen the bolo poster for Carrie and called the authorities saying that he was there.

When FBI agents arrived to that camp on July 24th, they found Carey tucked into a back booth at the bar, and as soon as these agents walk in, Carey stands up and lifts his hands and surrenders. He gets in the car with the agents and agrees to speak with them. Over the next few hours, he does something completely out of character for the squeaky clean, seemingly normal motel handyman. He confesses to FBI agent Jeffrey Reinick that he had killed Joey Armstrong, Carol, and Julie's son, and Silvina Peloso. But first, he demanded that FBI agent Jeffrey Reinick allow him to view child sex abuse material of little girls before he would give a full confession. Kerry demanded to view both pictures and videos while being interrogated. He began putting conditions on his confession and

wouldn't cooperate with the FBI agent until his demands were met. Kerry said he assumed the FBI office would have the sex abuse material in their evidence somewhere. This request disturbed the FBI agents and their supervisors deeply, and they told Carey that they had no authority to grant his request. This was a tense moment because the FBI was at a breaking point of getting this guy to cooperate. They needed him to provide incriminating details and fill the holes of the murders they were unable to find physical evidence for or connect the dots. Cary's confession with full details was critical. In the end, the FBI didn't allow him to view the materials, and after a lot of time in silence and self-pity, Cary decided to

finally confess everything. He started by detailing the day that Joey Armstrong had disappeared. He admitted that he was driving his car to an area near a river where he just happened to look over and see Joey. He told investigators that she was packing her car, looking like she was preparing for a trip, and after watching her walk in and out of her cabin a few times, he realized that she was alone. Kerry says he approached the cabin and took Joey by surprise and held her at gunpoint. He then bound her with duct tape and gagged her and forced her into his car.

While they were driving, he said Joey jumped headfirst through the window of the backseat of his truck and started running, but her feet were so tightly bound with duct tape that she didn't get very far. He eventually caught up to her and dragged her by

her leg into the woods and she was fighting him the entire way. When he put the knife to her throat the first time, she tucked her chin down to try and prevent him from slitting her throat. He said he just tightened his grip, dragged her further down a hill to a creek, and dug the knife into her neck so hard she finally went limp. He said after this attack, he tried to cover his tracks, but said it was so difficult to hide the trail of blood with pine needles and dirt. He then went back to his truck and decided to go to the creek again, where he dragged her body down and cut her head off.

He said he tried to hide the head in some reeds, but briefly considered actually keeping it. After recapping these gruesome details of Joey's murder, Kerry confessed to murdering Carol's son, Julie, and Sylvina earlier that year. He said he was able to enter their hotel room at the Cedar Lodge by saying that he was there to fix a leak in a pipe in the room above them. And at first, Carol said no way and asked Kerry to leave, but he kept on and was adamant that the leak needed to be fixed and it was his job for the hotel to do it. Finally, he says Carol gave in and let him go check out the leak in the bathroom, but it's there that he admitted to

pulling a gun on the women. Then he sexually assaulted both teenage girls and strangled Carol. He said for the most part during the entire attack, the women were quiet, but Sylvina began to be upset and cry and get hysterical. So then he strangled her too. He said he bound their hands and feet with duct tape and first loaded Sylvina and Carol's bodies into the trunk of the rental car, but kept Julie alive riding in the passenger seat. I can only imagine the terror that was going through Julie's mind at this point. Carey said he left her in the car and returned to the hotel room and even wet the towels in the bathroom after removing the bodies to make the housekeepers think that when

they came in the next morning, the women had been there and stayed the night. He said after they left the hotel, he drove Julie to the embankment near the Don Pedro Reservoir and slit her throat. After that, he dumped the rental car in the woods near Sonora and doused it with gasoline, tossing out some items that were inside of it into the woods. He said after ditching the car, he later went to another nearby town and called a cab from a payphone. That cab driver picked him up, and when they asked why he was so far into Yosemite without a car, he said that some of his friends had abandoned him and he just needed a ride. As he's giving his full confession to the FBI agents, he reveals that Carol, Julie, and Silvina

weren't his original intended victims. He was originally going to kill a woman he had been dating and her two young daughters, but that plan was thwarted due to someone else being around when he wanted to commit the crime. He also revealed that after he saw investigators had found Carol and Sylvina in the burned out car, he drove to Modesto, California to plant Carol's wallet as a distraction for police. He also said he was the person who wrote the letter to the FBI with the directions on where to find Julie. After confessing, Carey eventually led investigators to the areas where he had thrown out pieces of evidence linked to all of the victims. Those items included a knife he'd used

and other items that were involved in the crimes. After the murders, he'd gone to the areas of the Yosemite woods and thrown them as far into the trees as possible, but only he knew where they were located. In his book, FBI agent Reinick revealed that Carrie's request to view child sex abuse material and his ability to detail the murders without any sign of remorse was merely a window into understanding the deviant nature of Carrie's psychology. Reinick said that during his conversations with Carrie, it was revealed that Carrie had been sexually molested and abused, and that kind of abuse littered the Stainer family going back as far as five generations. And it was later determined that Carrie was sexually molested by his uncle growing up,

and his father had molested his own three daughters, Carrie's sisters. his uncle growing up, and his father had molested his own three daughters, Carrie's sisters. Eventually, Carrie became a peeping Tom, spying on his female neighbors and his cousins, his sisters, and videotaping them secretly. By the time he was 11 years old, he would have been a full-blown sexual deviant. In addition to all of this sexual abuse, mental illness also streaked through the Stainer family. These were all things psychiatrists later found to be true while assessing Cary's mental state leading up to his murder trial. But the one thing everyone agreed upon that may have been a major turning point in Cary's life and his psychology occurred when he was a boy, something that thrust his family into the national spotlight under very similar circumstances as he found himself now.

This major thing was the abduction of his younger brother, Stephen, and a nationwide missing persons investigation that would go unsolved for years. Many years before Kerry sat in front of FBI agents confessing to the sexual assault and murder of the four women in Yosemite. He had another interaction with law enforcement, but it was way back in 1972, and this time Carrie was on the other side of things. Back then, Carrie's brother, seven-year-old Stephen Stainer, was kidnapped while walking home from school in the family's hometown of Merced. For seven years, the family had no clue what happened to Stephen or where he was,

and it was a case that totally stumped law enforcement. As the years passed, more and more people just assumed Stephen was dead. After this kidnapping, the Stainer family just sort of imploded, and because Stephen's parents had so many other children to care for, their efforts to try and bring him home or search for him were limited. We're also talking about the early 1970s at this point, and the resources and systems that law enforcement agencies had back then to locate missing children are nowhere near what they have in place today. And it wouldn't be until 1980 that

the family got an answer to what happened to their son, and it was more shocking than anyone could have expected. According to the Modesto Bee, on March 1, 1980, two police officers pulled over when they saw two boys roaming in a neighborhood. The boys looked lost, and police wanted to see if they needed help, but they were stunned by what they heard. The older boy tells the police officers that he and the younger boy were being held captive, and he had been in captivity for seven years. After that long, he said he couldn't remember or had trouble remembering his real name, but he told authorities, I know my name is Stephen.

These police officers are shocked, and when they get the boys to safety, they learn exactly where Stephen had been for the last seven years. Stephen said one day while walking home from school, he was approached by a man who said his name was Edward Irvin Murphy. Murphy told young Stephen that he was collecting money donations for the church, and being the nice boy that Stephen was, he told the man that his mother Kay would probably be interested in donating to his cause. Murphy offered to give Stephen a ride home, and the two got inside Murphy's car, but Murphy didn't take Stephen home that day. Instead, he drove him to

a cabin in Northern California and delivered him to a man named Kenneth Parnell. Kenneth Parnell was a known pedophile and child molester in California at that time, and for the next seven years, Parnell held Stephen captive, brainwashing the young boy into thinking his family no longer wanted him. And as a massive missing persons case, trying to locate Stephen gripped the state of California. Somehow no one knew where Stephen was or who he was with. Kenneth went on to abuse Stephen until he was 14 years old. He would continually tell him that his parents weren't looking for him, he wasn't missed, and he wasn't even wanted. And Kenneth would be the only one to care for him. By the time Stephen was in his early

teens, Kenneth felt confident enough that he had brainwashed Stephen so well, he even let him attend public school day after day, year after year. Parnell made sure to give Stephen a new name so no one would know who he was, and the boy that was once known as Stephen Stainer became Dennis Parnell. and the boy that was once known as Stephen Stainer became Dennis Parnell. And all the while, while attending grade school in California, Stephen didn't reveal to anyone that he had been kidnapped. On the outside, Stephen developed a reputation as being an overall happy kid. He was well-liked by his peers and even had a high school girlfriend. Nobody knew he was being held captive by a pedophile,

and he never told anyone that he was a little boy who'd been missing for seven years, and he had a family out there looking for him. By the time Stephen turned 14, Kenneth had kidnapped another child in California. This boy's name was Timothy White. That's who Stephen was later with on the day he was picked up by police in 1980. According to the Modesto Bee, five-year-old White was picked up the same way Stephen had been. He was walking home from school and was approached and made to get into a car. Parnell, too, began indoctrinating White, telling him he couldn't go home because no one wanted him.

Fast forward to when Timothy and Stephen ran into those police officers, and it was right then and there that Stephen decided he couldn't see Timothy go through the same pain he had experienced at the hands of Parnell. Stephen attempted to walk Timothy back to the neighborhood that Timothy had been abducted in, but he couldn't remember the location of the little boy's house, and he got all turned around. That's when he gave up. Fearful they'd alert Kenneth by being late, so Stephen told Timothy to head to the nearest police station and he would return to Kenneth's home. But just then, call it luck or

fate, those police officers pulled up. Stephen's story of survival became a national and international news story overnight. He was reunited with his mother, father, and his siblings, and one famous news photo shows Stephen arriving with police to meet his family after being rescued. Right in the background between a smiling Stephen and a crowd of reporters and police is the face of his older teenage brother, Carrie, staring on at him. Carrie was just 11 years old at the time that Stephen was abducted, and after Stephen never came home, Carrie became like any older sibling would be, deeply confused and hurt that his brother had just been taken. The reunion of the Stainer family was dubbed a miracle, and the news media could not get enough of it.

Stephen was also named a hero because he'd been brave enough to get Timothy White away from the clutches of Kenneth Parnell. Kenneth was later arrested, and he served roughly five of the eight-year sentence in prison for the crimes against Stephen and Timothy. After he was released from prison for those crimes, Kenneth was later caught and convicted of trying to buy a child. For that offense, a California court sentenced him to life in prison, and he died of natural causes in prison at the age of 76 in 2008. But Stephen Stainer continued to live his life free of Kenneth Parnell, and he even got married and ended up having two kids. According to the Modesto Bee in the Los Angeles Times, in a twist of fate, Stephen was later killed in a motorcycle accident in 1989 at the age of 24. According to the Ukiah Daily Journal, Timothy White, the five-year-old boy

Stephen Stainer had saved, became a Los Angeles County Sheriff's deputy, but he too also died young at the age of 35. He suffered a pulmonary embolism in 2010. By the time 1999 rolled around and Kerry was on trial for four murders, Kerry's mother and his father testified in court. Both of them admitted to withdrawing themselves from their other children after Stephen was abducted. Kerry's dad admitted outright to telling Kerry that, quote, his real son was gone, and that in the years that Stephen was missing, he undoubtedly had pushed Carrie away. Carrie's mother said on the stand that her father told her to view Stephen's kidnapping as a good thing because it was less children to worry about, feed, and clothe. She went on to say that her father told her to refrain from crying or

showing emotion about Stephen's kidnapping because she would come across as a crazy or hysterical woman, just like her mother. When Carey's confession was played in court, he was quoted as saying that he fantasized about killing women since he was a child. But during the trial, his defense attorneys argued that he suffered from mental illness and being sexually abused. He was disturbed, they said, because he had never overcome the trauma of his brother Stephen's kidnapping. Carey's defense attorneys argued vehemently that he suffered brain damage and emotional trauma from his family's history of sexual deviancy and abuse.

During the years that Stephen was abducted, Carey was left to himself. Many of his family members didn't have the emotional capability of showing him natural affection. They said he grew up with a warped sense of sexuality and grew to have the inability to understand love. The deep, dark secrets of the alleged abuse from family members was completely overshadowed by Stephen's story and his heroic return to the family. But the jury deliberating Kerry's case didn't believe that demons from his past could solely be to blame for his actions. They weighed the evidence and despite his defense, convicted Kerry for all four of the murders in Yosemite. In 2002, he was sentenced to death and he is now 58 years old, still sitting on death row in San Quentin

Penitentiary in California, the furthest place from the beautiful American outdoors as you can be. The Sund and Peloso families remained close and were often seen together embracing one another during the murder trial. In the years after Carrie's conviction, Yen's son told reporters that he thinks of his wife and daughter every day. He's found peace in knowing they'll be remembered for all of the good things they did while they were alive. Park Predators is an AudioChuck original podcast. This series was executive produced by Ashley Flowers. Research and writing by Delia D'Ambra, with writing assistance by Ashley Flowers. Sound design by David Flowers,

with production assistance from Alyssa Gastola. You can find all of our source material for this episode on our website, parkpredators.com. So what do you think, Chuck? Do you approve?