Cary Stayner

• 1. Introduction

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  Cary Stayner is an American serial killer whose crimes began to surface in March 1999, when police near Yosemite National Park received an anonymous note. It held a hand-drawn map, and across the top someone had written, "We had fun with this one." The map pointed to a body. The man later convicted of the killings behind it worked as a handyman at a motel just outside the park, and the press came to call him the Yosemite Park Killer. His story reaches back to his own childhood and to a famous kidnapping inside his family. This documentary asks how a calm employee slipped past detectives at first. It asks what shaped him, and how investigators finally caught him. It also asks how two courts judged his state of mind, and how many other people he may have harmed.

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• 2. A Brother's Shadow

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  Cary Anthony Stayner was born on the 13th of August 1961 in Merced, California, the first of five children of Delbert Foy and Kay Stayner. He had three sisters and a younger brother, Steven Gregory Stayner.

  On the 4th of December 1972, seven-year-old Steven was abducted by a child molester named Kenneth Parnell. Parnell held him in Mariposa County, 38 miles from home, and later in Mendocino County. Steven escaped at the age of 14, together with another of Parnell's victims, Timothy White.

  Cary later said he felt neglected while his parents grieved. Steven's return brought massive media attention, and a television miniseries about his ordeal followed in 1989, titled I Know My First Name Is Steven. It was based on a true crime book of the same name. Cary again felt overshadowed. Steven went on to marry and have two children, and he died in a motorcycle accident in 1989.

  Many people believe the kidnapping fed Cary's violence. Yet after his arrest, he told authorities that he had been fantasizing about abducting and murdering women since he was seven years old, before Steven was taken. He said that around that age he had exposed himself to a friend of his sister who was staying at the house.

  That claim was his own account, made to authorities, and it left investigators with a question about which events in his life actually mattered.

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• 3. Troubled Years

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  At the age of three, Stayner was diagnosed with trichotillomania, a condition involving compulsive hair pulling, and he was put on medication. The condition kept affecting him through high school. The bald spots it caused made him a target of severe bullying, and he felt he had to wear a baseball cap all the time.

  Teachers and classmates also noticed his intelligence, and he was placed in accelerated classes. He contributed cartoons to the school newspaper at Merced High School. At 18, his graduating class named him the "most creative" student.

  After graduating, he found work as a window installer at a glass company. There he developed a fantasy about ramming a truck into the building, killing everyone inside and setting the business on fire.

  In 1991, he tried to kill himself with carbon monoxide. In 1995, he was admitted to a psychiatric hospital after claiming a nervous breakdown, and he was released after treatment. In 1997, he was arrested for possessing marijuana and methamphetamines. Those charges were eventually dropped, so no conviction followed him into the work that came next.

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• 4. The Cedar Lodge

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  In 1997, Stayner was hired as a handyman at the Cedar Lodge motel in El Portal, California, just outside the Highway 140 entrance to Yosemite National Park. All of his confirmed victims were people he met there. Between February and July 1999, he murdered at least two women and two teenagers.

  On the 18th of March 1999, searchers found the charred remains of a rented Pontiac. In its trunk were the bodies of Carole Evon Sund, who was 42, and 16-year-old Argentine exchange student Silvina Pelosso. The fire had burned them beyond recognition, so they were identified through dental records. Sund had been strangled with rope and shot, and Pelosso had been sexually assaulted and shot.

  A week later, police received the anonymous map. Investigators followed it and found the remains of Sund's 15-year-old daughter, Juliana, called Juli. She had been sexually assaulted, and her throat had been cut.

  The three had stayed at the Cedar Lodge shortly before they vanished on the 15th of February. Detectives began interviewing the motel's employees, and Stayner was one of them. He had no criminal history and stayed calm throughout, so police did not treat him as a suspect. For the next several months, nothing pointed back to him.

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• 5. The Arrest

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  On the 22nd of July 1999, searchers found the body of Joie Ruth Armstrong, a 26-year-old naturalist who worked for the Yosemite Institute. Eyewitnesses said that on the previous day, the 21st of July, a blue 1972 International Scout had been parked outside the cabin where she was staying.

  Detectives traced that vehicle to Stayner, and he became the prime suspect. FBI agents John Boles and Jeff Rinek located him at the Laguna del Sol nudist resort in Wilton. He was arrested there and taken to Sacramento for questioning.

  During the interrogation, Stayner shocked the agents. He confessed to killing Armstrong, and he also confessed to the murders of Pelosso and the Sunds. Nobody had expected him to admit to the earlier killings, which investigators had not yet tied to him.

  His own vehicle gave investigators physical evidence linking him to Armstrong.

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• 6. Two Courtrooms

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  Armstrong's murder came first, in federal court, because it occurred on federal land. To avoid a possible death sentence, Stayner pleaded guilty to premeditated first-degree murder, felony first-degree murder, kidnapping resulting in death and attempted aggravated sexual abuse resulting in death.

  At the sentencing hearing, he suddenly broke down in tears and apologized. "I wish I could take it back, but I can't," he said. "I wish I could tell you why I did such a thing, but I don't even know myself. I'm so sorry. I wish there was a reason. But there isn't. It's senseless." Armstrong's mother cried as she listened, and afterward she said she believed the apology was genuine. The court sentenced him to life in prison without parole.

  In state court, Stayner pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to the other murders. His lawyers argued that the Stayner family had a history of sexual abuse and mental illness. They pointed to his obsessive-compulsive disorder, and to his request for child pornography in return for his confession. Dr. Jose Arturo Silva testified that Stayner had obsessive-compulsive disorder, mild autism and paraphilia.

  The jury still found him sane. On the 27th of August 2002, it convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances and one count of kidnapping. He received a death sentence that year and has been held in the Adjustment Center on death row at San Quentin State Prison since 2002.

  He remains there today, though California has carried out no executions since a 2006 court ruling over flaws in how the state administered capital punishment.

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• 7. Unanswered Cases

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  Investigators have said they think Stayner may have more victims than the four he is known for. Their reasoning is that similar offenders began killing at far younger ages.

  Patricia Marie Hicks Dahlstrom, 28, last contacted her family in September 1982, after moving to Merced from Washington State. She belonged to the San Anda Apostolic Church, founded by cult leader Donald Gibson, which was found to have carried out sexual assaults under religious pretenses. After Gibson was convicted of four sex offenses in 1981, Hicks left the group. Her roommate last saw her taking public transportation to Yosemite National Park.

  In June 1983, a severed arm and hand were recovered in the park, and a skull turned up nearby in 1988. In April 2021, genetic genealogy identified the remains as Hicks. Stayner is known to have been acquainted with Gibson and to have attended his 1981 trial. Authorities believe he may have killed Hicks in retaliation for her testimony against Gibson.

  On the 26th of December 1990, Stayner's paternal uncle, 42-year-old Jesse Jerrold Stayner, was shot to death in his Merced home with his own shotgun. The case was never solved. Cary had been living with his uncle, and he became a suspect after his later arrest. He claimed his uncle had molested him around the time Steven was kidnapped.

  In October 1994, severed human hands were found near the New Melones Reservoir. On the 13th of December 1994, a headless and handless torso turned up in trees off Camp 9 Road near Vallecito. A forensic pathologist determined that the hands belonged to the body. In December 1995, the remains were identified as 24-year-old Sharalyn Mavonne Murphy. Her head has never been found. The FBI examined her death because it resembled Armstrong's murder. Authorities also reviewed the case of 34-year-old Denise Smith, whose decomposed body was found in a 50-gallon burn barrel off Jacksonville Road near Don Pedro Reservoir in December 1994.

  Michael Larry Madden, 20, set out on the 10th of August 1996 to meet friends at Sand Bar Flat Campground in the Stanislaus National Forest near Sonora. He left his family's home around 5:00 a.m. His companions arrived at the agreed spot at 2:00 a.m. on the 12th of August and found no sign of him. Authorities have considered that he may have been one of Stayner's victims.

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• 8. On Screen

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  The first major television treatment arrived in 2002, when an episode of American Justice covered the case. In 2011, an Investigation Discovery series, FBI: Criminal Pursuit, devoted an episode titled "Trail of Terror" to the investigation and arrest. Two years later, the British series Born to Kill? traced his path from student to convicted murderer in an episode called "Yosemite Park Slayer." The Court TV series Mugshots, now on TruTV, also made an episode, titled "Cary Stayner - The Cedar Lodge Killings."

  In 2018, the Reelz channel aired an hour-long documentary called Yosemite Park Killer. On the 26th of January 2019, ABC News broadcast a 20/20 episode on the two Stayner brothers titled "Evil in Eden." HLN followed on the 30th of August 2020 with two parts of How It Really Happened, "The Yosemite Murders: The Missing Women" and "The Yosemite Murders: The Evil Side."

  The Australian true crime podcast Casefile released the first of two episodes on the 31st of October 2020, titled "The Yosemite Sightseer Murders." The second came out on the 7th of November 2020. Earlier that year, the podcast had done an episode on Steven Stayner's kidnapping.

  In April 2022, Hulu released a three-part documentary, Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story, focused on the lives of both brothers. Fiction has touched the case too. In Season 5, Episode 19 of Criminal Minds, the character Dr. Spencer Reid mentions Cary Stayner.

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