Cold Open:

The Yosemite Killer! And the Abduction of Steven Stayner. That’s what we’re Sucking today.

Some think Cary Stayner might have been able to avoid his dark urges if some horrible events hadn’t happened to him and around him as a child.

Key word: might.

Cary Stayner was born to seemingly normal middle-class parents Delbert and Kay Stayner in Merced, California, in 1961. And Cary seemed to have had a fairly normal upbringing until, when he was eleven, two things happened: he was molested by an uncle and his little brother, Steven Stayner, was abducted by notorious pedophile and kidnapper Kenneth Parnell, who kept Steven and molested him for seven years.

Seven years.

While these years were absolutely more horrific for Steven, it was also seven years of Cary living in an emotionally broken home. A home where his parents didn’t pay attention to him and the media was constantly covering his brother’s kidnapping. Where neighbors and classmates stared at him and asked about his brother. Seven years of that.

Cary found respite in Yosemite National Park, camping and hiking in the mountains. It was the only place he felt at peace, even after Steven was returned to the family.

Then there would be even more tragedy. Steven would die young in a motorcycle crash. And Cary’s uncle would get murdered - a case that’s still unsolved - while Cary was living with him.

Then Cary would kill four women in the spring and summer of 1999. And then thankfully, he’d be caught before killing at least three others he’d already made plans to murder.

Was Cary Stayner always destined to be a killer? Or did his brother’s abduction, and his molestation, and his Uncle’s murder all combine to push him him over the edge?

And what the Hell went on during his brother’s seven year long abduction? What was Kenneth Parnell doing to him? Who is Kenneth Parnell?

Two Sucks in one episode today. Really three. The kidnapping of Steven Stayner, the story of Kenneth Parnell, and the murders committed by Steven’s brother Cary, on another true crime edition, of Timesuck.

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTRO

I. Welcome!

A.Happy Monday:

Happy Monday Meatsacks!

Welcome to the Cult of the Curious.

Be glad you’re last name isn’t Stayner this week. Or, if it is, hopefully you’re not related to Cary Stayner.

If you are - be glad you’re not like, a sibling or parent.

Or - if you are - holy shit. Sorry your family experienced so much tragedy.

I’m Dan Cummins, Suck Nasty. Your Suckleberry. And you are listening to Timesuck.

Hail Nimrod, Lucifina, Bojangles, and Triple M. And Hail you, you beautiful bastard.

Recording again in the Suck Dungeon out of Couer d’Alene, Idaho - weather has been NICE and it lifts my spirits.

Happy to be alive today. Happy to be telling a tale of tragedy, and not living through one.

Thanks for all the kind messages about the Papa Ward Suck from last week.

Not sure why there seem to be technical difficulties with that episode. It’s like a bunch of pollen, or onions, got mixed into the rss feed somehow. Lots of reports of that episode fucking with people’s allergies and eyes.

Lot of grandparent love coming out of the messages. I’ll share some in today’s updates.

B.Merch: Emu war “No Mercy” shirt and 14 oz stainless steel water bottle in the store at Bad Magic Merch dot com.

Sweeeeeeet.

The picture Logan made of a militant Emu cracks me up.

All kinds of fun stuff at Bad Magic Merch dot com! Thanks for supporting us there. Love seeing all the pics of you wearing Bad Magic Merch.

C.Additional Announcements:

Still waiting, as of recording this on March 18th - for our Cult of the Curious Private Facebook Page to return - sent in more review requests and it’s still down.

If it’s still down when this episode drops, we’ll be setting up a back up page.

All of us here at Bad Magic got together to discuss and explore any alternative options... and sadly, there isn’t any. Well, yes... there are of course alternatives but they aren’t nearly as robust as Facebook and we don’t see it being remotely as active if we just jump ship at this time.

So here’s the plan... we are going to start a “Cult of the Curious 2” group page if the original is still down. If the original COTC page makes it out of review later, we will close off the new second page and go back to the original page with over 26,000 members.

You can bet your ass that when a worthy competitor arrives - given they aren’t just as strict as Facebook - we will readdress this topic at that time... but for now, we are staying with Facebook as our main community page.

TimeSuck’s brand of humor and the topics we cover make the FB morality police REAL nervous. They are all about sacrificing free speech for hate speech right now. Not what I’d do, but not my company either.

We’ll to do our best moving forward to follow Facebook’s vague guidelines and keep whatever COTC page we happen have at the time up and running!

Doing our best to navigate all this. Guide us through the rapids, Nimrod!

D.Segue to Topic:

And now, let’s add another serial killer to the ever-growing list of Timesuck true crime murderers.

IS Cary Stayner actually a quote, “serial killer?” Or just a regular ol’ dirt bag murderer? Wikipedia says he’s a serial killer, some docs say he’s a serial killer. Some true crime junkies say no.

Cary killed four people in two separate attacks. Maybe five in three separate attacks if you think he killed his uncle which many do, BUT, he was never charged for that murder and never confessed so we can’t count it as far as killer definitions go.

According to the FBI, the term “serial murder” means “the unlawful killing of two or more victims by the same offender(s), in separate events.”

And by that definition, Cary Stayner is just BARELY a serial killer.

However, some other agencies put the threshold at three victims in separate incidents, which Cary would not fit - unless you really think we should count the uncle.

And then you have to factor in my dad. How many of Stayner’s victims were actually killed by my dad? Or by your dad? Where was your dad in 1999? Mine was in peak physical condition working, quote, “out of town”, a lot.

Interesting.

But seriously - back to the TECHNICAL definition of a serial killer.

In 1998, a federal law was passed by the United States Congress, titled: Protection of Children from Sexual Predator Act of 1998. This law includes a slightly different definition of serial killings, stating: “The term ‘serial killings’ means a series of three or more killings, not less than one of which was committed within the United States, having common characteristics such as to suggest the reasonable possibility that the crimes were committed by the same actor or actors.”

Cary DID kill four victims - obviously more than three. But, he didn’t technically kill his victims in three SEPARATE killings, since three of the woman were all together and were killed as part of one incident.

Kind of.

He killed two of those women, then abducted the third, who he then killed a short time later. https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder

The more I think this out, the more I think… he WAS technically serial killer.

Certainly not nearly as prolific a killer as many of the other dirtbags we’ve covered, but, he had he not been caught when he was, he definitely would’ve killed more women. He admitted as much.

Dude showed no signs of wanting to slow down or stop. He apparently almost killed three additional women the day he was arrested.

And now before I go further, I feel like I need to hit a button. The - “we are definitely past announcements, past segueing into the topic and are now definitely talking about the topic” button…

PAUSE TIMESUCK INTERLUDE

II.Intro/Establish Premiss:

Cary Stayner. His story is one of both tragedy and brutality. He was both a victim and victimizer.

Was his role as victim related in any way to his transformation into victimizer? Or merely a coincidence? There’s been a fair amount of speculation about this due to the abduction of his brother coupled with his own molestation.

Cary was molested by his uncle Jerry at a sleepover months before his brother would go missing.

And then, before he even really had time to process his own victimization, he was certainly again victimized in a way by a pedophile he never met - the one who kidnapped Cary’s brother Steven and held him for seven YEARS - seven years of Steven’s parents seeming to ignore any needs of Cary's - too wrapped up, first, in their own powerful grief over Steven’s loss, then wrapped up in their joy of having their lost son returned to them, then, not that many years later, again wrapped up in their grief over his death.

Cary grew up in a physically intact but very emotionally broken home.

Doesn’t justify any horrific deeds he committed. But how much is it all connected?

Many years later, Cary became the victimizer - a man who killed in cold blood, taking the lives of four women— two teenagers, a woman in her forties, and a twenty-six-year old who, by all accounts, were nothing but forces of good in the world.

Did what happened in Cary’s childhood turn him into the monster he became? Were those events, collectively, the straw the broke the camel’s back and turned the camel into a killer?

Or - would Cary have turned into a killer anyways?

Had his brother never been kidnapped, had his parents been more emotionally supportive, more in favor of the therapy he clearly needed - would Cary’s story have turned out pretty much the same, or totally different?

To think about that is to think about the power of nature versus the power of nurture. Free will versus determinism.

As most of us know, the overwhelming majority of people who were molested or otherwise abused in their childhoods do NOT go on to molest others or behave criminally in other ways.

But on the other hand, many of the killers we’ve covered DID have horrible childhoods that were marked by sexual, emotional, and physical abuse.

So maybe these events didn’t TURN them into killers, but - what if those events DID flip a switch on in their dark brains that would’ve otherwise remained in the “Thank Fucking God This Hell-Switch Is Off” position?

Interesting to think about.

III.Introduce Episode Structure:

Before I do more than just pontificate and talk out of my ass about a bunch of dark “I wonder ifs…”, let’s first get to know Yosemite National Park, where Cary Stayner’s murders would take place - a park that was Cary’s happy place for years before he committed the murders he’d be caught for.

And then we’ll get more familiar than you’re probably going to want to with Kenneth Parnell - the dirtbag who kidnapped Cary’s brother and began molesting and raping him shortly after Cary himself was molested.

Our look into Kenneth will basically be a timeline before today’s main timeline.

We’ll finish out this Suck with our main Timeline beginning with Cary Stayner’s birth, leading up to and then past his conviction for four murders.

Let us BEGIN!

We head not to Yosemite.

A. Yosemite:

Yosemite, obviously, is the place the press would base Cary’s murdering moniker, “the Yosemite killer,” off of.

What if it actually hadn’t been, though? What if Cary was called the Yosemite Killer because he was just a HUGE fan of the Yosemite Sam cartoon character?

PLAY AT :32, STOP AT :46 - https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=rzi1fkmJ09M

GOD I still love me some Yosemite Sam! He ain’t no mamby- pamby!!!! Whatever the Hell that is. Little guy plum FULL of hip, yip, yaw!

Bojangles loves Yosemite Sam as well. Sees the same fighting spirit in him.

Yosemite was, long before he’d commit some gruesome killings there, Cary’s refuge - the only place where he felt himself, where he could drown out the noise of his family’s grief and the media attention about his brother and maybe drown out his own violent instincts as well.

I have not been to Yosemite National Park - and every time it comes up I kick myself for not having made more effort to do so.

Yosemite encompasses a vast area of mountain paths, alpine wilderness and redwood forests, one of the most beautiful scenic attractions in America.

Situated on the eastern edge of central California, it’s just 77 miles northeast of Fresno, just 80 miles east of Modesto. It’s about a three hour drive, depending a lot of course on traffic, from either Sacramento or San Francisco.

Surrounded by National Forest on all sides, National Forest that extends far to the north and south for miles and miles and miles, it’s a large park at 748,436 acres, which is nearly 1.2 million square miles.

Over three million square kilometers.

It’s almost exactly the size of the state of Rhode Island.

Yosemite is known for giant, granite cliffs, scenic waterfalls, clear streams, massive groves of giant sequoias, mountains, meadows, glaciers, and a lot of bio-diversity.

95% of the park is raw wilderness.

And, like Yellowstone, it claims to be America’s FIRST national park.

SO WHO’S LYING??? Which National Park is a no-good, double- crossing, sneaky, lying, good-fur-nothing, low-down, dirt-diddlin’ son of a bitch!?!

Maybe neither.

I’m not sure what all that was about.

While Yellowstone IS technically the first OFFICIAL national park in the US, Yosemite WAS actually protected first. As far as protected land goes - or land set aside for recreational use for the public by the American government - Yosemite is older.

Mountain Man Jim Bridger first reported the sites of Yellowstone to other white settlers after an 1856 exploration - and almost no one believed him. When he talked about giant geysers and boiling mud and brightly colored springs hot enough to fry a fish in, people seriously thought he was full of shit.

How frustrating would that be? To see all the beauty of Yellowstone and not be able to share it with anyone without having them think you’re just spinning a yarn.

(Mountain Man Jim Bridger, drunk) “Hell itself rises near the surface, I tell ya! Seen it with my own TWO EYES! The mud bubbles, the ground roars, and the water boils! You can swim in a river in the middle of winter, five feet of snow on the banks, and feel like you’re in a heated Roman bath! Geysers shooting steam and mud FIVE HUNDRED FEET into the air, I tell ya - why…

(Tavern Owner) “Ahhhhhhh shut up Jim…. you’re drunk again!”

(Mountain Man Jim Bridger) “Dag nabbit, Billy - I seened what I seened, I tell ya!”

(Tavern Owner) “Uh-huh. And I seened the Queen’s underpants! Did ya seen flying pigs in his magical place of yours, Jim? Did ya swim with any mermaids in that heated river that only flows through your fabricating head?”

(Mountain Man Jim Bridger) “Ah, suffering succotash! Stop laughing, dag nabbit! This is why Jim Bridger lives alone in the Mountains!!! Towns are just full of doubters and fools!”

Yellowstone wasn’t really explored properly with interest from the US government via some expeditions until 1869 and 1870, and then the landed was protected federally by congress in 1872. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yellowstone_National_Park

By 1869, Yosemite was already well known to the US government. California’s gold rushes had brought prospectors and settlers into the area of Yosemite in the 1850s.

When early naturalists expressed concerns that California settlement could destroy the unique habitat of Yosemite, President Abraham Lincoln signed the Yosemite Valley Grant Act, Senate Bill 203, on June 30th, 1864. The legislation gave California the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.”

This Grant, while not technically making Yosemite a National Park - we didn’t have national parks yet - it did open the door for Yellowstone Park’s establishment eight years later. And it, for all intent and purpose, it made Yosemite a state park. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yosemite_National_Park#History

Yosemite as a National Park was created on October 1st, 1890, but the State of California retained controlled the land because the US still didn’t have that national park service to administer protected federal lands - the National Park Service wouldn’t be created until 1916, when control of Yosemite shifted from the state of California to the US federal government.

And a portion of the natural beauty of the Sierra Nevada mountain range, several peaks rising up over 14,000 feet above sea level, has been officially federally protected ever since.

Yosemite offers an abundance of activities and sightseeing destinations

The Valley is a seven mile wide canyon with incredible rock formations, including El Capitan, the world's tallest granite monolith - the cliff portion of this rock formation is roughly 3,000 feet from base to summit, and it’s one of the world's top rock climbing destinations.

Half Dome is another popular sight-seeing stop. A granite dome at the eastern end of Yosemite Valley also popular with climbers - and I just checked out a video on Youtube of two maniacs skiing down it.

It mad my stomach hurt just to watch.

No part of me understands how extreme skiers or snowboarders jump into the mountains of places like Yosemite and just hope they can make it down the cliff.

Yosemite Falls is the largest waterfall in North America with breathtaking views. It drops a total of 2,425 feet from the top of the upper fall to the base of the lower fall.

The park is also known for its Giant Sequoia trees, which are estimated to be over 3,000 years old. Some of these trees are over 130 feet tall.

So, you get it. Yosemite is…. VERY pretty. Full of hiking trails and fishing spots and camp grounds and lots of open land. https://www.nationalparks.org/explore-parks/yosemite-national-park

And Cary Stayner would work and kill at the Cedar Lodge motel in El Portal, California, just outside the Highway 140 West entrance to Yosemite. It’s just over ten miles from Yosemite Village, where about 1,000 park staff and park contract workers generally live.

El Portal is a “census designated place” of about 400 people. Couple hotels, a small general store, a gas station, post office, community center, little school, etc.

And prior to Stayner’s crimes, El Portal never really made the news. On its wikipedia page, Carl Stayner’s crimes are the only thing mentioned other than basic statistical info. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/El_Portal,_California

For many, Stayner’s crimes brought a deep, nagging fear to life - that way out in the woods - a killer could easily slip in, kill, and then sneak away.

Before he was caught, his crimes felt like some sort of real life 80s slasher flick. A real Jason Vorhees could be out there in the woods, ready to come out of Crystal Lake and slash young women to death at any moment.

Important to note, though, that Stayner’s crime were and still are the exception to the rule.

By and large, national parks are VERY safe.

According to an article written in 1999, after Cary’s crimes, of the four million visitors to Yosemite in 1998, just 15 were victims of violent crimes, a 70 percent drop from six years earlier.

Homicides in America’s 54 national parks are rare; indeed, 64.5 million visitors thronged the parks in 1998, and remarkably, there were no murders. Before Cary’s last victim’s death, the last known homicide inside Yosemite's boundaries had occurred in 1987, when a man pitched his wife off a precipice to collect on her insurance policy.

He didn’t get away with it. He seems to be a real idiot.

Stevie Allen Gray, when he was 24 years old, a former Lemoore Naval Air Station sailor, took out numerous life insurance policies on his new bride, Dolores Guadalupe Contreras Gray, also just 24, immediately after they got married in August of 1987.

And then this killer did NOT have any patience. He only waited around for four months before taking his bride to Yosemite, showing her a beautiful vista, and then pushing her off a cliff.

He did that on Dec. 5th, 1987.

And then, when the insurance companies decided not to pay out because they found Dolores “falling” off a cliff on a hike with the man who had JUST taken out multiple life insurance policies on her a few months back to be a wee bit SUS - as the cool kids say - Stevie sued them.

And his lawsuit drew the attention of the FBI.

He brought that shit on himself.

And while Dolores death was initially ruled as accidental, that classification was soon changed to homicide, and Stevie was charged, tried, and found guilty of first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison. https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1990-01-31-mn-857- story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1999/03/31/horror- haunts-a-place-of-beauty-where-3-women-died/8ca0a2e6- ae2c-4034-b29a-3e9895b84a16/

In cases like Gray’s, I’m amazed what people think they can get away with sometimes.

How did he think taking out several life insurance policies on his new, 24-year-old bride worth a total payout of $500k, and then going hiking with her and having her fall off a cliff - or get pushed - was not going to look suspicious?

Weird for him to take out that much life insurance on her when they were both 24 in the first place! The only people who think it’s a good idea to do shit like that are insurance agents. Or people easily tricked by insurance agents. Or people who want to murder you for your insurance payout.

I have life insurance on me - over a million dollars worth. Two policies. One where the kids are beneficiaries. And one where my wife Lynze is. And they make sense because our livelihood is ENTIRELY dependent on me staying alive. I die and Bad Magic Productions, currently, just goes away.

These two were just twenty-four years old, no kids, and starting out in their careers. Dolores dies, and Stevie goes back to how his life was just a few months back when he was not married.

Her death wasn’t gonna put him in a half-million dollar hole.

If you’re 24, and your spouse wants to take out multiple life insurance policies on you right after you get married - MAYBE it’s nothing - maybe they’re just an overly paranoid person or, again, someone easily manipulated by life insurance salespeople - OR - MAYBE they’re thinking about killing you.

Anyway - this murder took place twelve years before Stayner’s killings. In between - a dozen years of no murders in the park. That we know of.

Sounds like a pretty safe place, like all national parks.

According to a statistician at the University of Florida, the odds of being murdered in a national park in 1995 were about one in 20 million - less than the odds of drowning in one's own bathtub.

So worry less about getting killed in a park - and worry so, SO much more about drowning in your bathtub. That rubber ducky wants you and everyone you love and care about dead.

Refocusing.

Until the Yosemite murders, perhaps the most terrifying crime against women in any of America’s national parks occurred three years before Stayner’s killings - in late May of 1996, when two experienced backpackers, Julianne Williams, 24, and Lollie Winans, 26, were knifed to death at their campsite a few hundred yards off the Appalachian Trail in Virginia's Shenandoah National Park.

Julie’s dad notified officials the women were missing on May 31st.

The two women had been out for a five-day circuit hike in the park when they were attacked; no suspect has been arrested in their killings.

Lollie was found inside the couple’s tent. She’d been gagged, her hands and ankles bound with duct tape, and her throat had been slit. Julie hands had also been bound. She’d also been gagged, and her throat also slit.

Neither had been sexually assaulted, but both were found partially undressed. Julie's body, along with her sleeping bag and sleeping pad, were found "approximately 30-40 feet away, down a little embankment".

If you don’t know where your dad or my dad was on May 31st, you my want to notify the FBI. https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror https://www.farandwide.com/s/national-park- deaths-7c895bed3dd04c99#:~:text=Murders%20%26%20Homicides ,times%20random%20acts%20of%20violence https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1563/cold-cases.htm

But seriously - while these killings were obviously tragic - they are also outliers. Murders in national parks are very, very rare.

The National Parks system and the FBI maintain open files for unsolved cases of either missing or murdered people.

There are currently 29 people, including Julie Williams and Lollie Winans, listed on the US National Park Service’s Cold Case webpage.

Of all those cold cases, only a few are obvious crimes with a body and evidence of foul play.

Eerily, in a majority of investigations - such as the disappearance of Chiricahua National Monument Ranger Paul Fugate - the victims seem to vanish into thin air.

Fugate vanished on January 13th, 1980, at the age of 41. No trace of him has ever been found. He was working in the monument’s visitor center on the day he disappeared. At about 2PM that day, he left the building to hike a park trail and was never seen again.

Investigators suspected foul play early on, but could find no clues regarding to what the Hell happened to his body. No scrap of clothing, no blood, nothing.

Aliens? Sasquatch? Lemurians popped out of their dimension into ours and snatched him?

For a lot more National Parks facts, including murders, random deaths, disappearances, supposed cryptid sightings and more - spookiness, be sure to check out Timesuck 131 - National Park Mysteries.

Let’s shift gears to Cary’s brother’s disappearance now.

Yosemite was Cary Stayner’s happy place.

The man who cast one of the darkest shadows over Cary’s life that drove him to seek a place like Yosemite to find solace, was Kenneth Parnell.

Get ready to get real, REAL fucking mad. If you don’t believe in Hell, get ready to wish it existed so you find satisfaction in believing this cold-blooded, perverse motherfucker is down there burning into nothing just to be rebuilt to burn anew.

Today’s Suck is really two Sucks in one. And Kenneth Parnell is the first one.

B. Kenneth Parnell:

Parnell was a truly disgusting and deplorable dirtbag who changed Cary Stayner’s life dramatically - and nearly destroyed the life of Cary’s brother Steven, whom he abducted and raped for seven years.

In some ways, Parnell might have been at least partially responsible for Cary becoming the monster he became.

Kenneth Parnell was born on September 26th, 1931, in Amarillo, Texas, during the region’s dustbowl era, to parents Cecil Fredrick Parnell and Mary Olive Parnell.

Born just a year before Papa Ward. And born into similarly impoverished circumstances. But what a very, VERY different life he chose to lead.

I imagine Kenneth not being born the traditional way, and instead, literally being shit out into a cess pit. And then he climbed out of the shit, like a monster, and his mother found the little living turd and took pity on him and raised the actual piece of shit as if he were a human.

Kenneth’s father was an alcoholic and his mother was a religious fundamentalist.

He came up during the Great Depression and later moved with his mother, two half-sisters, and a half-brother to Bakersfield, California after Parnell’s father had abandoned the family when Kenneth was six in 1937.

The separation of his mom and dad - his mom took the whole family west on the Santa Fe railroad and his dad stayed behind and never saw the family again, apparently - GREATLY upset young Kenneth.

Kenneth spent several hours pulling out four of his teeth with a pair of pliers. "My recollection of the day of separation—just as any kid would obviously be, I was upset. I wanted to go with my dad, and of course I didn't. I just simply did not want to leave where I was at. I didn't want to come to California. Children tend not to want to have their world upset," he said in a prison interview.

They sure don’t Kenneth. One way of upsetting a child’s world, one could argue, would be to kidnap a kid at the age of seven and then sodomize them for seven fucking years straight, like you did to Cary Stayner’s younger brother, Stephen.

Too bad you didn’t pull out enough teeth to somehow bled to death that day.

Harsh, I know. But feels appropriate knowing what I know about this guy.

After a few years in Bakersfield, where Kenneth’s mom worked as a nurse’s aide, she took the family to Texas, to Waxahatchie, just south of Forth Worth.

They lived there for three years where she was able to save enough money to move her brood back to Bakersfield in early 1944 and buy a boardinghouse.

And then in the Spring of 1945, one her boarders befriended the slender, troubled thirteen-year-old Kenneth, and, after establishing a degree of fatherly trust in the fatherless boy, coerced him into engaging in fellatio.

And this act would leave a LASTING impression on Kenneth. It seemed to flip a switch on inside of him.

Years later, the groomed would become the groomer and do the EXACT same thing to other children.

Kenneth’s anger over being molested led to him setting fire to a pasture soon after this encounter. He got caught and taken into custody, and locked up in Bakersfield Juvenile Hall.

A psychiatrist who examined him at the time, Dr. Richard D. Lowenberg, recommended temporary placement for Parnell in the Juvenile Hall "in the hope that his marked emotional immaturity mixed with his sophisticated disposition toward perversion might be overcome."

His perverse disposition would NOT be overcome.

After several months in Juvie, still thirteen year-old Kenneth was released in the early summer of 1945.

That fall, shortly after his fourteenth birthday, Kenneth stole an automobile, was arrested, and, after a court hearing, was sent to the California Youth Authority's Fred Nelles School in Whittier, a residential facility for juvenile male offenders.

Parnell would be imprisoned there from October 1945 to February 1947, during which time, he later reported, he engaged in homosexual behavior both passively and actively. He said that’s just how things were there. Sometimes you were the raped, sometimes you were raper.

His sexual identity is now cemented in savagery. This will not bode well for many going forward.

Upon his release from Whittier in 1947, fifteen-year-old Kenneth returned to live with his mother in Bakersfield.

Just ten months later, in December of 1947, now sixteen-year-old Kenneth was quote "arrested as a homosexual"—as the cringe-y legal record of the time put it - for public sex acts.

No word on the age of whoever he engaged in these acts with was. Or if it was consensual. I doubt claims of homosexual rape were taken real seriously back then since America was extremely intolerant towards homosexuality at that time.

Released to his mother's custody, just two months later Parnell stole another car and landed in the California Youth Authority's Lancaster facility.

Two weeks after being locked up, he escaped, returning to Bakersfield, wanting to return there, by his own later admission, because he was sexually attracted to a young boy he’d seen.

Dude’s only sixteen-years-old himself now, and is already a hardened sexual predator.

Shortly after arriving back in Bakersfield - within days of arriving, he’s arrested again. No word on whether or not he found or harmed that boy.

Now he was placed in the Kern County Jail in Bakersfield, where he attempted suicide by drinking disinfectant.

After emergency treatment at Kern General Hospital, Parnell was sent to the state mental hospital at Napa, northeast of San Francisco, for ninety days. And before the ninety days were up, Parnell escaped AGAIN. This time he went to San Francisco, where he stole another car, and returned to Bakersfield to again try and find that young boy apparently. He was quickly re-arrested, again not sure if he found that kid or not - and he was returned to the Lancaster facility, where he remained until his release as a seventeen-year-old in May of 1949.

Ken now returns to Bakersfield and movs back in with his mother, and a few months later he began a series of short-term jobs, first as a kitchen worker at Kern General Hospital, then as a stock boy for Smith's Market, and later as a stock boy for the local Sears, Roebuck store.

Then in mid-1950, Parnell, just eighteen now and still living at home, gets married to Patsy Jo Dorton and she, too, moves in with Ken's mother.

And within a year, Parnell had been charged with another sex crime.

On March 20th, 1951, Parnell, driving his mom’s black Chevrolet coupe, he approaches three young grade-school boys playing near Kern General Hospital. Flashing a fake deputy sheriff's badge he had bought at a Bakersfield Army-Navy surplus store that morning, he talks one of them - little nine-year-old Bobby Green - into accompanying him.

He then drives the kid East of Bakersfield to a remote area in the Kern River Canyon where he sexually assaults him multiple times, and then he casually drives the terrified kid back to where he picked him up in Bakersfield and lets him out.

Immediately, young Bobby ran home and tearfully told his parents what had happened, and within a day, Parnell was arrested again, charged with three felonies revolving around the kidnapping of and sodomizing of a minor.

His defense attorney tried to plead that Parnell needed rehab more than he needed incarceration, and he was evaluated by a court appointed psychiatrist, Camarillo State Hospital's Dr. Nash.

And Dr. Nash said, "It is the examiner's opinion that this prisoner is a definite psychopathic personality with well-defined homosexual drives, and as such has a tendency and predisposition to commit sexual offenses to a degree constituting him a menace to the health and safety of others, and it is recommended that he be committed to a suitable institution for the care and treatment of this disorder, namely psychopathic personality and sex psychopath."

At the age of just nineteen, Parnell has been declared a sexual psychopath.

He was sentenced to only four years in prison, of which he served three and a half years, despite escaping from two different psychiatric hospitals while awaiting sentencing.

Three and-a-half years. For impersonating an officer to sodomize a nine year-old AND escaping incarceration twice after his arrest.

Three-and-a-half years AFTER numerous sex-crime convictions as a juvenile, and an arson conviction, and two convictions for stealing cars. And numerous escapes.

And people have been in prison for decades for selling weed.

Robert Platshorn, leader of what the DEA once dubbed the "Black Tuna Gang," spent the mid- to late-'70s smuggling weed into the US from Colombia before he was busted in 1978. Authorities accused him of importing as much as 500 tons of pot, and he was sentenced to 30 years in prison, 28 of which he served until he was released on parole in 2008. https://www.salon.com/2012/10/29/ ten_worst_sentences_for_marijuana_related_crimes/

Guy who can’t stop trying to fuck kids? Three and a half years.

Guy who brought great times to tens of thousands of people who love pot? 28 years.

It’s almost like a lot of the people who decide what the laws are, are fucking idiots or something.

In a 2000 interview about the 1951 crime, Parnell would say he’d kidnapped and molested that boy because his wife was pregnant and he’d “had to find another outlet.”

I hate his wording choice. He HAD to find another outlet. Couldn’t just jerk off, no sir!

Wouldn’t it be great if human brains were wired in way where, if you followed through on some urge to rape a kid, your next urge would be an overwhelming desire to take your life? No prison terms necessary for pedos - they just removed themselves from the population.

Just a thought.

Here’s another one.

I think the government should run a national pro-masturbation campaign. Too many dirty motherfuckers out there committing too many heinous crimes, claiming to be motivated by basic horniness.

What if reducing horniness reduced sex crimes?

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Look. I don’t know if more masturbation WOULD actually lead to less sex crimes. BUT - at least it makes the defense of “But I was so horny!” even more absurd than it already is.

Anyway, Kenneth Parnell would be released in 1955 after his bullshit sentence. After he and his wife have a daughter while he was in prison.

He was released on the condition that he receive regular psychiatric treatment, and then he just didn’t do that… and he didn’t suffer ANY consequences.

He DID get in trouble for violating parole by leaving San Francisco, where he’d been released and returning to Bakersfield to be with Momma!

He went back behind bars for a months, then got out and had his parole agreement transferred to Bakersfield and moved back home.

In early 1957, he got divorced from his first wife, Patsy Jo, and then that August, he remarried to Emma Naoma Schaffer, and he had another daughter with her.

Thank God he wouldn’t stick around to parent any of his kids. I doubt this dude was above molesting his own kin.

In the summer of 1960, he moved to Ogden, Utah with his second wife and second daughter. He already had completely abandoned his first daughter.

He holds up a gas station with a revolver soon after settling in. No shots were fired and he made away with $150. But not for long. He was quickly arrested.

And then in 1961, he was sentenced to five years to life for robbery and one to ten years for grand larceny. LOT more punishment than he received for kidnapping and sexually assaulting a young child. Doesn’t seem right to me.

He was sent to the Utah State Prison at Draper, south of Salt Lake City.

And shortly into his sentence, his second wife divorced him. He’d never see her or his second daughter again either.

He got his GED in prison, and he was released in September of 1967. And also - kicked the fuck out of Utah.

Seriously. Part of his release condition was to live and never again enter the state of Utah.

Haha.

I didn’t know states ever did that! It doesn’t happen anymore, but states, when there were fewer civil rights laws and the ones that did exist weren’t enforced as often, could make banning you part of your release conditions.

Thirty-six Parnell now headed to Phoenix where he worked as a short-order cook at a greyhound track. He claims he left that job to work as a cook for the Playboy Club that existed in Phoenix at the time but have just been bullshitting.

In a later prison interview, he said he got married for the third time in 1968 but wouldn’t say to whom.

By 1972, he was back with momma in Bakersfield. It seems his third marriage was over by now. Momma must have been OVERJOYED to have her sweet, baby dirtbag boy back under her roof.

Things wouldn’t work out with Momma for long and he’d move out a few weeks later.

Maybe she frowned on baby boy looking at kiddie porn, or leering at kids at the park, or dressing up in a little schoolboy outfit and singing and dancing in the living room,

(Ken) “I’m a little teapot, short and stout, here is my handle, here is my spout.”

(Momma) “That’s enough, Kenneth! You’re NOT a little teapot, you’re a forty year old pedophile ex-con who can’t keep a woman around whose abandoned at least two kids that I know of. Get out! Out of my house!” https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/inside-the-monster/ Content?oid=1069138

On March7th, 1972, Kenneth drove from Bakersfield up to Yosemite National Park. 170 miles almost due North.

Leaving his lengthy criminal and psychiatric history off of his job application, he was hired by April to be the night auditor at the Yosemite Lodge.

Guessing they would’ve for sure not hired him had they known who he really was.

(Manager) “So it says here you’re a sexual psychopath and predator not above a little armed robbery…. (awkward pause but then excited) Not afraid to play by your own rules!! That is EXACTLY the kind of guy we’re looking for here at the Yosemite Lodge!

Eight months later, on December 4th, 1972, Parnell will abduct Cary Stayner’s seven-year-old brother, Steven.

He abducted him when he should have still been in prison.

To pull off Steven Stayner’s abduction, Parnell enlisted Edward Ervin Murphy, a coworker at the Yosemite Lodge.

Murphy has been described in sources as a “drifter” who was “slow witted” and easily manipulated by Parnell. Not sure if it’s true or not, but, some sources claim that Parnell convinced Murphy that he truly wanted a son to raise as his own. To raise to grow up and be a good Christian man.

A former coworker of Parnell and Murphy at the Yosemite Lodge, Ralph Lerkin, would later describe Murph, as those who knew him called him, "as the kind of person that if you needed twenty-five dollars, and he only had twenty, he would give you the twenty that he had and then go out and borrow another five dollars to give to you."

So maybe he was a good dude. Just simple. Maybe.

Or maybe Murph was a dirtbag too and just hid it like so many do.

Dirtbag or fool, Murph approached Steven on his way home from school.

Acting on instructions from Parnell, Murph passed out gospel texts to boys walking home from school that day. He spotted Steven and walked up to him, claiming to be a representative of a church that needed donations.

He asked if Steven’s mother would be willing to donate anything to the church, and Steven said she probably would. Murph then asked Steven where he lived and if he could take Murph to his house.

Steven agreed, and then Parnell pulled up in a white Buick. Steven got into the car, thinking he was headed home.

His family wouldn’t see the poor seven-year-old again for seven years.

Parnell first took Steven to a cabin in Catheys Valley, about 60 miles from the Yosemite Lodge, where Parnell worked, and 22 miles north of Steven’s home in Merced.

Merced is 81 miles and about a two hour drive from the Yosemite Lodge. Merced’s sixty miles from El Portal, where Steven’s brother Cary Stayner would later work and kill.

The very first night, after presenting Steven with a Manchester Terrier puppy he named, Queenie - a puppy Parnell’s mother had just given Kenneth - Parnell began molesting Steven. Forcing him to perform fellatio on him over and over again.

And then he began full-on anally raping the sixty pound child thirteen days later, on December 17th.

Steven was so young, he didn’t understand what was happening to him, he’d say later. He didn’t even know what sex was. Didn’t know he was being molested. He stated later, after his abduction, that it was just scary and confusing, but he didn’t actually understand how “wrong” it was.

Steven repeatedly told Parnell that he wanted to go home, to which Parnell now replied that his parents couldn’t afford to keep him anymore and a judge had given Parnell legal custody.

Again - this kid is SEVEN. First or second grade age.

Parnell began calling Steven “Dennis Gregory Parnell,” keeping Steven’s real middle name and and real birthday when he would later enroll him in various schools.

After a few weeks, the two moved away from Catheys Valley? Why? Because Parnell found out that, in one Hell of a coincidence, Steven’s maternal grandfather had just moved into a trailer about two hundred feet from the little red cabin he rented.

Holy shit. If Steven would’ve seen his grandpa, if he would have screamed, and screamed loud enough, his grandpa may have heard him and seven years of Hell would’ve been reduced to a few weeks.

The two moved frequently around California. They first drove to Santa Rosa - just over fifty miles north of San Francisco.

For eighteen months they bounced around the Santa Rosa area between ratty motels, and low income slums, usually paying by the week while Parnell worked a series of menial labor jobs or as a short order cook, leaving Steven wherever they were staying.

He was too young and had been too manipulated to leave. He didn’t know where to go. Parnell had convinced him a judge really had given him custody and that his family really had been okay with that.

His first Christmas away from his family, Parnell bought him presents. He opened wrapped gifts. A toy gun, a toy bow and arrow, and a Hot Wheels Race Track set.

Really fucking with his mind. His provider and the predator that constantly bounced back and forth between father-figure and rapist.

Parnell soon started hiring babysitters to watch Steven while he worked.

Before the first one arrived, Ken indoctrinated Dennis with some Parnell family background, though not the complete truth, and Parnell cautioned Dennis to never, ever say anything to anyone about his being taken from Merced or the by-then almost daily sexual abuse, threatening Dennis with a severe spanking and being locked up in a children's home should he ever say anything about their secrets.

After Christmas, Ken began working as a day front desk clerk at the Santa Rosa Holiday Inn.

On January 2nd, 1973, he registered his son in the second grade at Steele Lane Elementary School in the Bellevue Union School District. He’s pulling off his evil fantasy. Everyone thinks this kid is his actaul son.

By this time, Parnell had brainwashed Steven into really thinking he was Steven’s adoptive father.

The following school year, Parnell actually went over to the home of the parents of a kid who’d been picking on Steven and stuck up for him.

So strange. He was still continuously raping him. But also, protecting him in some instances and even spoiling him.

He soon let Steven start drinking at an early age and allowed him virtually to come and go as he pleased. https://historycollection.com/6-famous-kidnapping-cases/2/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-09-22-vw-766- story.html

Sometime in mid-1974, Parnell brought a woman home he’d known for about a year. He and Steven had recently moved and she and her husband Bob were neighbors.

Steven was even friends - best friends - with her son, Kenny.

And now, one night, this woman, Barbara Mathias, after separating from Bob, came home drunk with Kenneth Parnell and Parnell made his nine year old fake “son” have sex with her.

My God. Now he’s being shared with other pedophiles.

Barbara and Kenneth would live together for eighteen months. And according to Steven, Barbara raped him on nine separate occasions during that time.

As Steven entered puberty, in late 1974, Parnell now began to look for another child to kidnap, telling Steven he wanted to “build his family.”

So fucking gross. How much do you hate this dude now?

Kenneth tried to get Steven to facilitate the kidnapping for him, but all their attempts mysteriously failed, after which Parnell would berate and sometimes beat Steven for being “incompetent.”

Now, young Steven began to seriously question his origin story with Parnell.

He began to think the story about a judge awarding Parnell custody of him was bullshit. He began to understand that Parnell was a kidnapper, and that he’d been kidnapped.

Years later in interviews, Steven would admit to intentionally sabotaging Parnell’s attempts to kidnap other children.

After a botched kidnapped attempt outside of the Santa Rosa Boys’ Club, Kenneth, Barbara, and Steven who now has identified as “Dennis” for quite some time, move 80 miles north to Willits, a small town in Mendocino County.

Willits has around 5,000 people and - random trivia - on October 16th, 1867, Election Day that day year, the long-running local family feud between the Frost and the Coates families came to a head. One family was for the Confederacy, and one was pro-Union.

And, near the voting booths, they got to jawing with each other, and then talk turned into fisticuffs, and then soon some guns were drawn and the brawl turned into a downtown shootout, leaving four Coates’ family members and one Frost family member dead and three others wounded. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Willits,_California

Yip, yip, yaw! Hogfolk, dogfolk! That’s one Hell of a Family Feud match. Too bad they couldn’t have just gone on a game show and competed against each other in a team trivia matchup.

In Willits, Steven/Dennis enrolled in a new school. He was in 4th grade, and by the end of that year, he knew for sure what Parnell was doing to him and how truly wrong it was.

He knew what rape was, what sodomy was. What was still frequently happening to him.

Due to Parnell being unable to hold down a job in Willits, the trio than moved to Fort Bragg in Mendocino County. 34 miles west, right on the Pacific coast. Another town of around 5,000 people.

In Fort Bragg, Steven would get arrested for shoplifting when he was ten. It was the first time he’d come into direct contact with police since he’d been kidnapped. He’d say later he didn’t even consider reporting Kenneth for kidnapping and raping him - he was too worried about how hard he’d get spanked with a belt for being caught shoplifting.

In the Spring of 1976, our other pedophile, Barbara, had her divorce with Bob finalized and got full custody of her for youngest children - one being Kenny, Steven’s former best friend. And now they're all living together in Mendocino County.

Kenneth soon tries to molest Kenny, and Kenny fights him off and tells his mom. Soon afterwards, but not RIGHT afterwards because Barabara was also a dirtbag piece of shit, Barbara and her kids move out and by July of 1976, it was just Kenneth and Steven again.

Now alone with Parnell once more, the rapes became much more frequent.

Soon, Ken and Steven move again, just 30 miles north to Comptche [com chee], California. A little “census-designated place” on the coast. Only around 150 people. But a fair amount of other little communities all around it.

The two would live here for over four years. And Steven later said he loved his life in Comptche [com chee].

He said, “I spent a normal life at Comptche [com chee]. I went through school, I played on the football team, I went through the routine of marijuana that kids experience, and I experienced my first date as every kid has experienced. I had a lot of friends. I loved the place! I didn't think too much about my own family back then. I was afraid I might end up at a boys' home, so, really, I thought, 'Why don't I leave well enough alone?”

Steven loved MOST of his life in Comptche [com chee]. He didn’t love it ALL, because, of course, the sexual abuse continued.

He’d say of this time, years later:

"Because of the sexual abuse, I was always scared of Parnell, and a lot of time I felt violence toward him.

The sex was just whenever he felt like it. It was really quite fast, actually. When he was in the mood, we did it . . . just took a couple of minutes and it was over. Boom! I was dressed and out the door!

The anal intercourse was painful. Parnell screwed me about a hundred times, and about half the time he split my butt. It hurt, but he just ignored me. It was like in the case of a man raping a woman. The man is not thinking about the woman's feelings. Parnell had a split personality. When the urge hit him he was somebody different. And after he'd done it with me, he always just went on like nothing had happened. We'd sit down and have a meal or something . . . just do what we'd normally do."

My god. It’s been going on for four years now. And started when he was seven. What Parnell has been doing to Steven has just become his normal. What an incomprehensibly evil and selfish thing to do to a child.

Kenneth also molested some of his Kenneth’s friends. At least three. And he took nude pictures of a fourth. He took nude pictures of Steven too. And he propositioned several other kids. And tried to kidnap others. And he didn’t get in trouble for ANY of it.

By mid-1979, Ken’s sexual interest in Steven, now 14, was waning and he began to look again for another kid to kidnap. And he again tried to get Steven to help him.

The two moved to a nearby place called Mountain View Ranch in 1979 near Boonville, Ca, 21 miles southwest of Ukiah.

That fall, Steven became a freshman at Mendocino High School. Even though it was 40 miles away, it was where his friends were.

Dennis tried out for and won a starting position on the Mendocino High freshman football team. And Ken, still of course pretending to be his dad, went to home games and cheered on the kid he’d kidnapped almost seven years earlier, and had been abusing ever since.

Late in 1979, after football season, tired of driving Steven to Mendocino, Steven transferred to the much closer Point Arena High School.

Ken tried to talk Steven into kidnapping numerous kids in Santa Rosa.

And when he kept refusing, Ken did talk a friend of Steven’s into helping him - a kid named Sean Poorman. Why did Sean agree to help him other than for some extra money? I have NO idea.

Locals from the area at the time seem to paint Sean as a troubled kid who maybe sold drugs - a kid many local parents didn’t want their kids around. Was Ken molesting Sean? Grooming him in some way? Maybe. Probably I would think. But never proven.

On February 14th, 1980 - Valentine’s Day - Parnell and Sean Poorman kidnap five-year-old Timothy White in Ukiah, California.

And this kidnapping finally motivated Steven to escape.

He didn’t want to see a young boy go through what he had to go through, and he decided to bring Timothy back to his real parents.

On March 1st, 1980, while Parnell was away at a night security job he’d just recently taken, BEFORE he’d raped five-year old Timothy White, Steven left with Timothy and hitchhiked into Ukiah.

Steven didn’t know Timothy’s home address, so instead, he had Timothy walk into a police station and ask for help without him.

Once inside the station, Steven told police his story. The whole story. An exhaustive search of missing child posters and several interrogations confirmed that Steven was the missing child he was said he was.

Steven's written police statement, given in the early hours of March 2nd, included the following:

"My name is Steven Stainer [sic]. I am fourteen years of age. I don't know my true birthdate, but I use April 18, 1965. I know my first name is Steven, I'm pretty sure my last is Stainer [sic], and if I have a middle name, I don't know it."

By daybreak the following morning, Parnell had been arrested.

Again.

The nightmare was over for Steven and Timothy. Both children were reunited with their families.

And now - get ready to get more upset, meatsacks.

Justice will NOT be served.

Kenneth Parnell was tried for kidnapping Stayner and White, but NOT for ANY of the sexual abuse he committed. NONE of it.

Why?

Basically, it sounds like the Mendocino District Attorney at the time had shit for brains.

It sounds like a lot of people REALLY fucked up Parnell’s case, actually.

And some of the laws at the time on the books were super fucked up as well.

The Merced County District Attorney’s Office, where Steven had been kidnapped, and initially raped, when interviewed later, said that they were led to believe that the Mendocino County DA’s office - where the trial would take place - would prosecute Parnell for his many sexual assaults on Steven, assaults committed in their jurisdiction.

The Merced Police Department had interviewed Steven after he was returned home to the Stayners.

And they documented, based on Steven’s confessions, evidence of Steven having been raped 87 times.

BUT… and this is so ridiculous - because of a crazy three year statute of limitations having passed on the initial Merced County rapes, since Steven had been kidnapped for seven years, they couldn’t prosecute THOSE rapes.

Basically - Parnell was rewarded for being really, really good at kidnapping.

Had he have stayed with Steven in Merced County, and been caught after raping Steven for two-and-a-half years, he would’ve been sent to prison for life. No question. No possibility of parole.

But since he took Steven out of the county, and kept him away for more than seven years, they couldn’t legally prosecute him for crimes committed there.

And the Merced police department was then furious when Parnell wasn’t prosecuted for the sex crimes by Mendocino Country’s DA well within the statute of limitations.

Why weren’t those crimes prosecuted?

Mendocino County Chief Criminal DA George McClure said, essentially, that Mendocino County District Attorney’s Investigator Dick Finn FUCKED this case. That he was terrible at his job. That he had no balls.

When McClure learned that Merced Police had provided Finn with evidence of Parnell's 87 separate sexual assaults on Steve plus evidence of sexual assaults on nearly A DOZEN other boys, he angrily told Mike Echols, the author of the book, I Know My First Name Is Steven - the source of a lot of this info on Parnell - that Finn never shared any of this with him prior to deciding what charges to hang on Parnell. He said: “If in fact these assaults happened, and if there was sufficient evidence there that I could put on a good case, then I would blame whoever it was that was supposed to give them to me . . . and the person . . . was Dick Finn."

McClure said Finn thought the kidnapping charges were much easier to convict on than the pedophilia charges.

He said that Finn said to him about the sexual assaults: "we not go any further on it because we probably aren't going to be able to do anything much anyway."

He thought it would be really expensive and ultimately not land any convictions. And it seems like everyone else around him, at least looking back with hindsight, thinks he’s crazy to have thought that.

And because Parnell was no charged with any sex crimes, and only charged with two counts of kidnapping, and because at the time in California the MAXIMUM sentence for kidnapping was seven years AND both kidnapping charges would run CONCURRENTLY instead of consecutively, this motherfucker only was sentenced to prison for seven years in 1981.

Seven… years.

He’d only serve five. Less time than he’d kidnapped Steven for.

How truly disgusting. What a colossal failure by the system.

Edward Murphy - ol’ Murph. Ol’ Murph Dog - Parnell’s accomplice from Steven’s orignal kidnapping, was sentenced to five years imprisonment and paroled after two years.

Sean Poorman, Steven’s teenage friend who helped Parnell in Timothy’s kidnapping, was sentenced to a term in a juvenile work camp.

And Barbara Mathias, Parnell's girlfriend, the one who allegedly raped young Steven nine times, was never charged with shit.

She cooperated with authorities in Parnell's trials to avoid any charges.

What an insult to the victims.

We have to change the way people can cooperate with authorities to avoid punishment.

If the punishments for hurting kids were much, MUCH more severe - for example, being pulled apart by a team of horses, or slowly being skinned alive, or being really, really slowly lowered into a giant boiling cauldron - - then the plea bargain could be not as severe as THAT, but still pretty fucking hardcore.

Like, you testify against your pedo friends and ONLY end up with life in prison. Or ONLY get sent to the electric chair.

Just another thought.

Because he got out after just a few years, Parnell’s life of misdeeds didn’t stop there.

Of course they didn’t. Our fucked-priorities-having criminal justice system let out a monster, and - to no one with half-a- brain’s surprise - he continued to be exactly what he was - a monster.

In January of 2003, finally away from the prying eyes of his parole officer, Parnell was arrested YET AGAIN. For guess what?

He tried to coerce his caregiver into buying him a four-year-old boy to molest.

He just kept going younger.

Parnell was, at this time, 71 years old. He was in poor health. He was suffering from diabetes and emphysema. He was suffering from other ailments brought on by a stroke. He needed almost 24-hour-a-day nursing care in the cluttered apartment in the 2600 block of Mathews Street he lived in, in Berkeley.

He was, on a whole, BARELY alive. But his evil dick? The most alive part of him by far. On the edge of death, he STILL wanted to fuck more kids.

The caregiver, Diane Stevens, was aware of Parnell's past and cooperated with police in setting up a sting operation that would lead to his arrest.

She pretended to have a lead on a kid who didn’t exist. Hail Diane Stevens!

According to Stevens’s later testimony, Parnell requested that the child have a “clean” rectum, which indicated EXACTLY what this pile of shit had in mind.

Jesus. Dude was a heinous, evil dick that just happened to have a body attached to it.

Parnell paid $100 for a birth certificate and had $400 with him for the completion of the transaction when he was to receive the child on January 3rd, 2003.

Parnell was arrested that day.

He told authorities, “I wanted a family.”

Guy had a REAL WEIRD notion of what a family was.

Parnell was convicted yet again on February 9th, 2004, on the charges of attempting to purchase a child and attempted child molestation.

Didn’t get charged with a sex crime in Steven Stayner’s case. DID get charged with a sex crime in this instance even though the child he wanted didn’t actually exist. Hopefully an indication of better sex offender laws than their used to be.

The prosecution successfully argued that objects of a sexual nature and pornography found in the apartment, along with Diana’s testimony, were enough to prove that Parnell's intentions were criminal - and sexual - in nature.

Prosecutor Tim Wellman - very familiar with the Steven Stayner case - argued his case before the jury by showing a slideshow of Steven Stayner marked “1,” then of Timothy White marked “2,” and a blank screen marked “3” to show the child that would have been abducted if the police hadn’t been notified.

Wellman said Parnell “was looking for one last hurrah. One last Steven Stayner, one last Timmy White.” https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/inside-the-monster/ Content?oid=1069138&showFullText=true

Parnell remained incarcerated until his death on January 21st, 2008 at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, California. He died of natural causes, at 76 years old.

He’d finally been sentenced to 25 years to life under California’s three strikes law.

Which is great, but, you could’ve gotten that same sentence for selling Molly and LSD. You could've gotten caught selling Molly to music festival attendees three times, and received the same sentence as someone who has kidnapped and repeatedly fucked three different little kids.

Good job, court system. Makes a lot of sense. Glad really important decisions are being decided by our best and brightest minds.

LUCKILY - the three strikes law in California was modified in 2012 to not be as harsh - Proposition 36 “revised the three strikes law to impose life sentence only when new felony conviction is serious or violent.” https://ballotpedia.org/ California_Proposition_36,_Changes_to_Three_Strikes_Sentencing_Ini tiative_(2012)#:~:text=The%20Three%20Strikes%20law%20will,for% 2025%20years%20to%20life.&text=FOR%20DANGEROUS%20FELO NS-,Prop.,violent%20felons%20off%20the%20streets

https://www.sfgate.com/hdn/hrlm/p/fastly_redirect.html? dm=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfgate.com%2Fbayarea%2Farticle%2F Sex-offender-Kenneth-Parnell-dies-in-Vacaville-3231527.php

Okay - done with Kenneth Parnell now. Crazy how insane all that was and it doesn’t have anything to do - DIRECTLY - with the Yosemite Killer, Cary Stayner. But “indirectly” - I think it has a LOT to do with the Yosemite Killer. Although Cary Stayner wasn’t legally one of Kenneth Parnell’s victims - he definitely was a victim of Kenneth Parnell. A man he never met.

It’s so easy to just mention “the families” of victims and leave it at that. Do we truly think about the psychological toll that a murder - or seven years of rape and molestation - takes on someone who was close to the victim?

IV.Midroll Break Here:

Now - after all that - a true crime suck all to itself - let’s get into the real meat of today’s tale, in our Timesuck Timeline….

PAUSE

…right after today’s sponsor break.

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NOW - let’s meet the Yosemite Killer.

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PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE INTRO

V. Timesuck Timeline

https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/stayner-cary.htm https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror

1. August 13, 1961: August 13th, 1961.

Cary Stayner is born in in Merced, California, an agricultural town of around 65,000 people that sprawls across the eastern flank of the San Joaquin Valley and calls itself the Gateway to Yosemite.

As of the 2010 United States Census, Merced County’s population was 255,793, up from 210,554 at the 2000 census and the total area of the county is approximated 1,980 square miles.

Google says roughly 280,000 live there now.

The City of Merced is the County seat and its largest city.

The county derives its name from the Merced River, or El Río de Nuestra Señora de la Mercedes - The River of Our Lady of Mercy.

It was named in 1806 by an expedition headed by Gabriel Moraga, which came upon it at the end of a hot dusty ride.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merced,_California https://www.co.merced.ca.us/1874/Living-in-Merced-County

And Cary would grow up in a pretty idillic, largely blue-collar Merced community, despite what happened to his brother.

Stayner, his three sisters, Cindy, Cory, and Jodi, and his younger brother Steven were raised in a little green-shingled house on Bette [bet] Street, in a lower-middle-class neighborhood at the edge of town.

We weren’t able to find birthdates for Cynthia, Cori, and Jodi. Very, very little is written about them.

Even the book on Steven that would go on to be adapted to a TV miniseries - I Know My First Name is Steven, doesn’t mention his sisters.

A Cary Stayner true crime biopic, titled “The Yosemite Park Killer,” also doesn’t mention them. I had to look at their dad’s obituary - and Steven’s obituary - and one of them being mentioned in an LA Times article to confirm that they for sure even existed.

Cory and Steven’s father, Delbert Stayner, was a mechanic who worked for various canneries and made a solid middle-class paycheck.

Their mother, Kay, ran a day-care business and worked at food- service jobs in high-school cafeterias.

https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror

2. April 18, 1965: Three and a half years after Cary is born, on April 18th, 1965, his baby brother Steven Stayner is born.

And around this time, well before Kenneth Parnell enters the picture, Cary starts to show signs of mental instability. He began nervously pulling his hair out and ended up wearing a hat to hide it.

Stayner was diagnosed as having trichotillomania, an impulse control disorder that causes people to pull out their own hair.

The disorder is classified under Obsessive-Compulsive and Related Disorders and involves recurrent, irresistible urges to pull hair from the scalp, eyebrows, eyelids, and other areas of the body, despite repeated attempts to stop or decrease hair pulling.

Other mental health disorders people with trichotillomania often have are anxiety, depression, and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

High-stress levels tend to trigger trichotillomania.

Was little Cary SUPER stressed out a new boy showed up in the family and took some attention away from him?

Maybe.

Was he stressed out about something else going on at home?

One source - a biopic written about Cary by Jack Rosewood, says that, while the Stayner mom Kay was emotionally distant and not affectionate, the children’s father, Delbert, was perhaps a bit too affectionate.

Delbert was ordered into treatment after being accused of sexually molesting one of his daughters. He was, apparently never charged - but, if true - this accusation doesn’t show up in any other source I can find - maybe things weren’t as idyllic as they seemed in the Stayner household. https://www.psycom.net/what-is-trichotillomania

Trichotillomania would be the first of many mental disorders experts would diagnose in Cary.

By the time he was 38 years old, a doctor had testified during his trial stating he had "more than 20 signs of mental illness." The doctor went on to report various disorders they believed Stayner suffered from, including narcissistic personality disorder and schizophrenia.

And unfortunately for young Cary, clearly struggling with some of thoughts - his parents were real, real against therapy. Yes, they took him to see someone when he pulled almost all his damn hair out.

But, in general, Delbert saw wanting to go talk to someone about your feelings as a sign of weakness.

Cary’s aunt, Anna Jones, who lived nearby, said: “It would have helped if they'd gotten some therapy, but you just didn't think of it back then. You told yourself you were strong and you could handle it.”

I bet the overwhelming majority of American, blue-collar familes weren’t big on therapy back in 1965.

Unfortunate, sure, but also for sure typical of the time.

Outside of some extreme hair-pulling, Cary’s early childhood seemed to be free from any major traumas.

Starting when Cary was a small boy, the Stayner family vacationed together in Yosemite and the high country surrounding it often - they’d pile into the Stayner family van and drive 60 or so miles east to camp, fish, hike, and sometimes hunt in the beautiful mountains.

3. 1968ish: Around late 1968/early 1969, according to what Stayner later told investigators - as well as a news reporter - he started fantasizing about killing women.

He recalled a particular incident while shopping with his mother, musing about shooting all of the store employees.

BUT - couple potential problems with this memory. First - he was, when he reported this, really trying to get out of life in prison by getting an insanity defense plea. He had a lot of motivation to convince the judge he’d been suffering from pathological murderous impulses for years.

And second - I thought fantasizing about killing people going back to early childhood was normal? C’mon! Say it is. I’ve been doing that shit my whole life and I have YET to kill anyone.

Gosh Dang. NOT JK, actually.

People can be really, REALLY fucking annoying, and I’m not ashamed to say I find tremendous joy in thinking about eliminating strangers from the planet on a daily basis.

I find it cathartic. Kind of like physical masturbation can, I think, help prevent from making a terrible sexual decision, like cheating on your partner - some mental murder masturbation can keep you from stabbing the fuck out of some asshole at the bar who can’t seem to keep his drunk ass from bumping into you over and over again and not acknowledging it.

Then again, this may just be him beefing up his eventual insanity defense for his crimes.

A cousin of Stayner's, Ronnie Jones, would later remembers Stayner being anti-social around girls when he was younger. He wondered, years later, if this indicated that maybe Cary was having dark thoughts about women. He said he’d doodle pictures of naked girls in a notepad.

Jesus. Am I Cary Stayner!?!

When I was in grade school, I ALSO was anti-social girls. They made me so nervous. And I drew naked girls in a notepad.

Not sure what was going on with Cary. My impulse to doodle naked girls came, I’d like to think, less from some pathological type of perversion and more from an inability to find porn in my tiny Idaho hometown. I had to literally make my own. Hail Lucifina? Weird, maybe, but - A for effort?

Later, Cary and Cousin Ronnie would frequent the Merced River together.

And, as Ronnie would remember it, when Ronnie would run down to skinny dip with the girls, Cary refused to join him.

Why was that? Did he know that if he took his close off around some naked girls, he wouldn’t be able to restrain himself from killing them?

Orrrrrr - did he have a tiny Ed Kemper micro-peen ween and he was embarrassed?

(Kemper) “MOTHER! Why is he dragging my MicroPeen into this episode? Does he forget I am still alive - incarcerated at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville and could escape any day and put his head on STICK mother!?!”

Maybe Cary did have murderous impulses - dark desires towards women when he was a kid.

OR - maybe he was just a typically awkward boy.

4. 1972: When Cary was eleven, in late 1972, his somewhat idyllic childhood comes to an end.

His uncle Jerry Stayner molests him.

Psychiatrist George Woods would later testify in court during Cary’s trial for murders that,“Although (the uncle’s) sexual proclivities were well known to Cary's older male cousins, he was nevertheless allowed to take boys for overnights in his tiny apartment.”

What the Hell’s going on in this family?

Dad goes to counseling for some type of molestation situation with at least one of his daughters. And now we learn there’s a known sexual predator in the family - Uncle Jer-Bear. Who the boys are heading over to have sleepovers with.

Uncle Sleepover! Always suspicious to me.

Is that sexist of me because he’s dude? Would I care as much if it were a sleepover with an Aunt? Nope. I would NOT care as much. Why? Mostly because of stats. The math don’t lie.

According to Raace dot org - Race Against Abuse of Children Everywhere - an estimated 80-90% of offenders are male, while 10-20% of offenders are female.

https://www.raace.org/statistics-information

According to a 2019 Conversation dot com article, referencing numerous studies, current research suggests that only between 1% and 9% are women. https://theconversation.com/what-the-jeffrey-epstein-case-reveals- about-female-sex-offenders-123423

Overwhelmingly, a lot more Uncle Sleepovers have kid-diddling on the list of activities than Auntie Sleepovers do. Which really sucks for all the good uncles out there. I’m sure the overwhelming majority of uncles are safe. Still - gonna want to give those lone wolf Uncles some extra eye-balling before you pack your kids’ sleepover bag for their house.

Sexist or not - I never let my kids stay the night with only a dude other than their stepdad - who is a good guy. But even with him - I grilled my kids about good touches, bad touches all that shit. SO many times.

Which might be paranoid but I don’t care.

I’m totally okay with my kids thinking I’m paranoid and crazy if it makes me feel safer.

Anyway - at the sleepover - Uncle Jer-Can’t-Keep-His-Ween- Clean showed Carl and his cousin nude pictures of young girls, and then he invited the two young boys to sleep in his bed with him.

And then in the middle of the night, Stayner woke up to find the uncle removing his underwear and attempting to molest him.

Cary was able to get out of bed and avoid what could have been worse, but, the incident was still serious and traumatic.

Uncle Jerry was charged and later convicted for child molestation.

And then, whatever attention was paid to Cary in regards to this event, it was over in a flash.

If he needed therapy, which I imagine he did after this - he didn’t get it. If he needed to talk to his parents, doesn’t seem like he got that either.

Just weeks later, all the family’s attention would turn towards his brother’s disappearance.

Source: Cary Stayner: The True Story of the Yosemite Park Killer by Jack Rosewood.

5. December 4, 1972: Then, on December 4th, 1972, as you learned earlier, Cary’s little brother, seven-year-old Steven Stayner is abducted by Kenneth Parnell.

Cary is eleven.

Cary’s childhood friend, Mike Marchese, later said in 1999 that after Steven’s kidnapping, "Cary was very upset. I heard stories about him going out and wishing on a star, that his brother would come home. I believe he was supposed to have been with his brother. So I believe that there was some guilt with Cary on the fact that maybe he felt a little responsible.”

God. Think about that! Think about the guilt an eleven-year-old feels when he was supposed to walk his little brother home from school, doesn’t, and then he goes missing.

Guessing his parents yelled at him more than a few times over this. What does that do to your eleven-year-old head?

Shortly after Steven didn’t make it home from school, after exploring the route he took between home and school, his parents sounded the alarm. They called the police. They searched and searched. Posters are put up all over the place. Steven’s picture is shown on the news. It’s a big story around Merced. A parent’s worst nightmare - kid goes missing on the way home from school. Volunteers look all of the place. There’s an intense search for weeks. Flyers are put up for months.

But as we know -they found nothing.

Now, for the next seven years, the only traces of Steven Gregory Stayner in the Stayner family home are snapshots and memories. Recollections of a quiet, sweet boy who had once tended a fallen owl and liked to ride dad’s tractor on a family almond ranch near Snelling.

They put up billboards, passed out leaflets, consulted psychics, and according to family friends - they were never the same again.

How could you be?

Cary later said, “Before Steve disappeared, I always thought my dad was like the Rock of Gibraltar. Never trembled at all.

All of a sudden, this one day, Dec. 4th, 1972, my little brother is gone, and my dad is crying all of a sudden. Never saw my dad have a tear in his eye in my whole life. All of a sudden, life changed.”

Cary’s mom, Kay, born Roman Catholic who left the church over being emotionally and physically abused in a Catholic boarding school and then joined the LDS faith and had raised her family as Mormons, became cold and distant, seldom displaying physical affection toward her children. She lost herself in her sorrow and her faith trying to make sense of it all.

“I more or less closed up,” Kay later told People magazine. “I didn't leave the house for a year, and if I had to, someone else had to be there in case Stevie came home. I chose to believe he was alive.”

Delbert was openly devastated by the loss of his son. According to some - his “favorite” son.

He said in the same People interview. “I went berserk for a time. I’d ride around in my pickup with a sawed-off shotgun on the seat in case I saw someone with Stevie. I began to suspect everyone had something to do with it — friends, neighbors, even family members. If a child dies, you bury the child. With a missing child, you have a knot in your chest that never leaves.”

Cary, would sometimes find his father rummaging through Steven's dresser drawers, weeping. Delbert once chewed Cary out for painting over the name "Steven" that his younger brother had scratched into the garage door.

Cary’s aunt, Anna Jones, said that the four kids remaining in the Stayner house became like ghosts in a house filled with heartbreak. “Maybe the other kids didn't get as much love as they should have because of all the pain and sorrow,” she said. https://abcnews.go.com/US/steven-cary-stayner-tale-brothers- horror-heroism/story?id=60529944

Around this time, Cary starts acting out a bit, especially towards women. He exposes himself to one of his sister’s friends. Not sure what her age was. Not sure how serious this was, either. Kids do weird shit.

And of course he’s acting out. Who wouldn’t act out a little? And his parents don’t seem available to talk to him about anything. And he’s not seeing a therapist.

Cary’s place to escape the emotional pain of his brother’s disappearance, his emotionally distant family, and anything else he was dealing with - was to head out into nature. By the time he was a teenager, he was an accomplished outdoorsman - and his favorite outdoor destination was Yosemite.

He also spent a lot of time on his drawings.

In high school, he also found a measure of self-expression as the cartoonist for the high school newspaper, the Statesman, showing so much promise that classmates assumed he would someday draw his own comic strip professionally.

His cartoons were featured throughout the 1979 high school yearbook: humorous caricatures of his fellow students playing tennis, looking cheerful and silly.

He was voted “most creative” at his school.

And I get the feeling his parents didn’t really give a shit about his doodles.

Martin Purdy, a friend of the both the Stayner brothers, remembered Cary as “kind of a quiet guy. Our days would be - just get on our bikes in the morning and go to the park. Hang out with friends or skateboard,” Purdy told ABC News.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/steven-cary-stayner-tale-brothers- horror-heroism/story?id=60529944

Classmates also remembered him as shy and modest. He also had NO interest in talking about his brother.

Why would he want to talk about that?

(Teen Douchebag) “Hey, Steven! Mind if I sit next to you to eat? So like, your little bro is like, still missing, right? Like for years now? So what do you think dude? Probably dead? That’s what I think. Weren’t you supposed to walk him home from school or something? Sucks dude. I’d feel like shit if that was me. Do you feel like shit? What’s wrong, man? You seem sad. Oh - you don’t want to talk about one of the most painful memories in your life? Weird. Whatever, dude. You’re bumming me out. I’m outta here.”

6. March 2, 1980: March 2nd, 1980. Steven is reunited with his family at fourteen years old. Cary is eighteen. He graduated high school about nine-months earlier and is living at home.

Cary was returning from a camping trip in Yosemite with friends when he heard a radio report that 14-year-old Steven had escaped from his abductor and would be arriving in Merced that afternoon.

Cary later told reporters that he “almost drove his car into the Merced River” in his excitement to see the brother he’d assumed for years had been dead.

Can you imagine that? Holy shit. Thinking you’d lost someone - a child, a sibling, a parent, whoever you’re close with - for SEVEN YEARS… and then hearing that they just showed up at the house?

That day, Steven came home to a hero's welcome and moved back into the tiny bedroom he had once shared with Cary long ago.

The contrast between the two brothers was evident almost immediately. Despite going through hell and back, Steven was cheerful and engaging, a people-pleaser who was outgoing and very willing to talk about his experience.

Cary was quiet. Sullen and a brooder.

Steven, despite having been subjected to continual horror for years, is by all appearances a happy-go-lucky, jovial kid who soon has a girlfriend. He’s outgoing and quick to smile.

Cary is the opposite. Not quick to smile. Shows no interest in girls, no interest in most people. He has a small circle of friends and outside of that is a loner. https://abcnews.go.com/US/steven-cary-stayner-tale-brothers- horror-heroism/story?id=60529944

And these two brothers - who were close before Steven was taken, do NOT become as thick as thieves upon Steven’s return. There’s tension between them. Almost immediately.

First, there was the massive media attention to deal with; a true crime book and TV movie, both titled I Know My First Name is Steven, were made about the ordeal. Within days of his return home, Steven was on Good Morning America.

His parents were over the moon to have their kid back. Of course they were. It was the non-stop Steven parade at the Stayner house hold.

And it all left Cary feeling jealous.

In an interview with J.P. Miller, a screenwriter who spent a long period with the Stayners doing research for a 1989 NBC miniseries, he vented his frustrations about his brother.

“His head was all bloated out,” Cary told Miller. “We never really got along well after he came back. All of a sudden Steve was getting all these gifts, getting all this clothing, getting all this attention. I guess I was jealous. I'm sure I was.... I got put on the back burner, you might say.”

And then, in the midst of getting all this attention, Steven starts acting out and having problems at home.

After returning to his family, Steven had trouble adjusting to a more structured household. He’d been allowed to smoke, drink and do as he pleased when he lived with Parnell.

In an interview with Newsweek shortly after his escape, Steven said, “I returned almost a grown man and yet my parents saw me at first as their 7-year-old. After they stopped trying to teach me the fundamentals all over again, it got better. But why doesn't my dad hug me anymore? Everything has changed. Sometimes I blame myself. I don't know sometimes if I should have come home. Would I have been better off if I didn’t?"

So fucked up about his dad.

This not hugging shit is mentioned in several sources and interviews. Makes me sick. Steven said his dad could barely look him in the eye, and was NOT affectionate at all with him once he heard what Parnell had done to him.

True or not, Steven seemed to interpret his dad’s emotional distance as disgust regarding the sexual acts he’d been involved in.

How fucked up. Steven is now being emotionally re-victimized. Made to feel shame over shit he never wanted to happen to him. Dude was a hero to save that other kid, little five year old Timothy White. And his dad can’t even bring himself to hug him?

Steven’s parents were also not supportive of their abducted son getting any counseling after coming back home. Not good.

He said his father told him he “didn’t need any.”

Steven also ends up being bullied by other children at school for being molested and eventually, because of this - drops out.

How tragic is that? Kids can be such pieces of shit. You get molested for seven years and then your dad won’t hug you or look you in the eye and ALSO kids at school mock you for being molested.

Meatsacks - we can be so cruel.

Steven began to drink frequently, and was eventually got kicked out of the family home before he turned eighteen.

Meanwhile, for Cary, the mountains became more and more of a refuge. He'd become depressed towards the end of high school. He didn’t really pursue a career as a cartoonist. He didn’t want to go to college. A former friend said it was like he’d just decided he was a “loser” even though his peers saw so much talent in hm.

He sat around in his room and smoked weed a lot, waiting for the next camping trip, where he could be back in the Great Outdoors.

He drifted through a series of relatively menial jobs for the next eighteen years, hauling furniture, exterminating insects for a pest- control firm, working for an aluminum company - and then finally going to work for the Merced Glass and Mirror Company.

There he worked with Mike Marchese, who’d later recall 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."

People also thought it was odd that Cary never had a girlfriend because he seemed to like girls, and he was smart, talented, and ruggedly handsome.

They didn’t know he suffered from Erectile Dysfunction and was incredibly embarrassed by it. And that it led to awkward feelings towards women.

And it may have led to a lot of anger towards women. More limp dick rage. Echoes of Chikatilo.

(Chikatilo) “What is big deal? So he have soft shame cock? Why he not go to doctor? They have many treatment now. You should get it taken care of. No need to suffer and bring misery to others… JK! It is too fun to wrassle!”

Huh. Thought Chikatilo had really evolved into a better being for a moment there.

7. 1985: In 1985, Steven Stayner, now twenty, marries 17-year-old Jody Edmondson. They’d dated for a year beforehand. The two would go on to quickly have two children together, Ashley and Steven Jr.

They also struggled financially, as many young people do - especially young parents. They lived first with Jody’s parents, and then with cousins in their mobile home, with three jobs between them.

Despite these hardships, things seemed okay. Steven seemed to be getting his life together. More than Cary was, actually.

He worked with child abduction groups, spoke to children about personal safety, and gave interviews about his kidnapping.

Good for him! How fantastic. Using what happened to him to help others avoid the same fate. About as noble as it gets. Dude was a hero. Hail Nimrod!

Steven wanted to make sure nothing like what had happened to him ever happened to any kid again.

Accompanied by his mother, Kay, Steven testified before the Ways and Means Committee of the State Assembly on one bill that would increase penalties for kidnaping children, and another requiring parents to have their children fingerprinted.

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-09-22-vw-766- story.html

He also joined the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints, becoming a Mormon like the rest of his family - he’d obviously not been going to church with Parnell - and he got a job he liked at Pizza Hut.

8. May 22, 1989: On May 22nd, 1989, the made-for-TV movie, I Know My First Name Is Steven, airs.

And while 24 year-old Steven is being treated as a bit of a local celebrity, his 27 year-old brother Cary is getting way into… Bigfoot.

Yup. Around this time, Cary claims to have had an interaction with Bigfoot.

Said he saw it in Yosemite.

Bet you didn’t see that coming.

He surprises friends and family members by claiming to have seen Bigfoot - the legendary half-man, half-ape of the Pacific Northwest that the Indians of British Columbia had called Sasquatch.

A desperate attempt to direct some attention away from Steven and onto himself?

Uh oh. Someone’s knocking on the Suck Dungeon door. Yes?

PUSH DOOR OPEN BUTTON

(David “Giant Stone Balls” Childress voice)

“Um… yeah… resident Cryptologist David Childress here. I would not rush to the speculative conclusion that Cary lied about seeing Sasquatch in some kind of misguided fame-grab.

Second to Washington state, you should know that California has the most total reported Bigfoot sightings in the United States.

Many, MANY Sasquatch sightings have been reported in Yosemite, thought by some to be the home of the most Bigfoot activity in the world. He could’ve also mistaken the Fresno Nitghtcrawler, another humanoid Cryptid oft-spotted in Yosemite for being uh….

(me) David, I keep telling you that I never hired you to be our resident cryptid expert.

(David) “Yeah, sure, I realize it’s more of a volunteer…”

(Me) David, please wait out in the hall. We can talk about this later.”

(David) “Yeah, sure. No problemo.”

DOOR CLOSE BUTTON

Sorry about that, everyone.

Cary did suddenly got WAY into Bigfoot.

His cousin, Kathy Amey, said Cary spoke about Bigfoot all the time. "He absolutely knew that it existed. You couldn't have told him anything different."

Another family member who gave an anonymous interview said: “I remember when he first had told me and my brother of what he had seen, he would go very blank in the face as if he was being very serious or like somebody was watching him. He would tell us about the smell the creature had and that it was a lot bigger than him. We were very young but we knew he wasn’t playing a joke on us. I remember when I went to Camp Green Meadows in the 6th grade he told me to stay close to all the teachers and no matter what, don’t go out at night. He never really seemed the same to me after he had seen Bigfoot.”

The weird way that Cary talked about the creature made it difficult to know whether he feared it or identified with it.

So, so strange.

9. September 16, 1989:

Tragedy then strikes again on September 16th, 1989 - just over a month after Cary’s twenty-eighth birthday - when his younger brother Steven dies.

Just before 5 PM, Steven was finished with his shift at Pizza Hut at 16th and G streets.

It had been raining heavily. His manager, Todd Smith, suggested he drive the franchise’s pickup home and stay dry.

Steven reminded Todd that his license had been suspended and that an accident in the truck might not be good for Pizza Hut business. He declined the offer.

So he rode off down Santa Fe Drive on his motorcycle.

At 4:55 PM., three miles later, and at less than the posted 55- m.p.h. limit, he rammed into a car that, according to California Highway Patrol investigators, pulled into the street ahead of his cycle.

At 5:35 PM, at the Merced Community Medical Center, young Steven Stayner was declared dead.

His skull had been fractured and he’d died from massive brain trauma.

The driver of the car? - none other than the man who’d abducted him all those years ago - Kenneth Parnell.

That sexual predator had been released from prison several years earlier, recognized Steven, and pulled out in front of his motorcycle. He’d be charged with manslaughter and would serve 60 days in jail.

JK! No - that’s too much. It wasn’t Parnell. That piece of shit was living free though in 1989.

No, the driver was identified by officers as Antonio Loera, an employee of a tomato-packing company - and he fled the scene.

He later surrendered in Tijuana, was returned to the US and was arraigned on felony hit-and-run and manslaughter charges.

It was a sad, reckless, and ironic end for Steven.

He died driving a motorcycle he was not licensed to operate. A blue-and-white, 1989 Kawasaki EX-500. He wasn’t wearing a helmet.

He bought the motorcycle with a some of the $30,000 he’d received for signing over the rights to his story for I Know My First Name is Steven.

Five hundred people attended his funeral.

Timmy White - the kid Steven had saved when Timmy was just was five, was now 14-years-old, and he was a pallbearer.

One of Steven’s sisters, Cindy, said at his funeral that she kept waiting for the telephone to ring.

“Someone will say it’s OK, Steve is here and he’s alive,” she said. “Because that’s what happened before.”

Jody, his twenty-year-old widow, was left with two children and her husband’s troubled legacy. She found solace in the fact that Steven wasn’t hurting any more from past trauma. She chose a special inscription for her husband’s casket: “Going Home.”

https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-09-22-vw-766- story.html

10. 1990: The following year, in 1990, twenty-eight year-old Cary is now living with Uncle Jer.

Yes, THAT Uncle Jer. Uncle Sleepover. Uncle Jer Bear. Uncle Jer-Can’t-Keep-His-Ween-Clean

How weird is that? What WAS going on in this family? He’d living with the guy that was convicted of trying to molest him as a kid.

Cary had settled into a job repairing windows for Merced Glass and Jerry was a truck dispatcher for a hay company.

Later that year, in late December, just before Christmas, 42 year- old Jerry was found sprawled dead in his bedroom with a shotgun wound to the chest.

Cary was questioned about the killing - he was the one who found his body when he came home from work - but he had an alibi: he said he had been at work when the shooting took place - and he was not considered a suspect.

Not at the time.

Police focused their investigation on an unknown vagrant whom Cary claimed was lurking around the house shortly before the killing. The vagrant was never found, and the murder went unsolved.

After Cary's later arrest for four murders in Yosemite, police began looking into the possibility of Cary being responsible for Jerry's death.

https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror

11. 1991: In 1991, Cary attempts suicide by carbon monoxide inhalation and was unsuccessful.

Did he receive any kind of psychiatric care afterwards?

We don’t know.

12. 1996: The next five years, there isn’t much to report on.

Cary spends a lot of his time alone when he wasn’t working at the Merced Glass and Mirror company.

He goes to Yosemite National Park as much as he can to look for Bigfoot.

Not even kidding.

What a weird detail.

We’ve gone over a lot of serial killers now on Timesuck. I can’t recall ever covering one before who was real into Bigfoot or any other cryptids.

A psychiatrist who later examined Cary said that Cary thought that Big Foot was tied to meaning of life.

Ohhhh-kay.

Then, in 1996, the maybe-not-terribly-mentally-stable Steven loses his shit.

A former coworker, Mike Marchese, went out into the yard of Merced Glass and Mirror to find Cary slamming his fist against a piece of wood and bleeding from cuts on his hand.

Mike asked him what was up and Cary says that he felt like he was having a breakdown, that he was nervous and he didn’t know why. He said he felt like getting in his truck, driving into the office, killing everyone there, and then burning the place down.

Mike then told him he might have a chemical imbalance, and Cary said, “I have been told I have, but nothing's ever been done about it.”

I was hoping he’d say, “I don’t have a chemical imbalance, MIKE! Bigfoot does! He’s the one who wants me to kill everyone. Don’t you see!?! Don’t you SEE!!?!?!”

Company owner Gordon Ekas caught wind of what went on, and he personally drove Cary to a Merced psychiatric center, where he was counseled.

And then soon thereafter, Stayner came into the Merced Glass and Mirror office, picked up his check, and never came back.

He told former coworkers that he was thinking of moving to Santa Cruz to pursue a cartooning career.

But unfortunately for his future victims, he’d never do that.

Instead, after either not being able to get another job around Merced, or not trying too - he headed to his happy place - Yosemite.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/steven-cary-stayner-tale-brothers- horror-heroism/story?id=60529944

13. 1997: In 1997, Cary Stayner heads to the little town of El Portal, just outside the park. That little “census designated place” we went over earlier.

Now thirty-five - he drove his car, a 1972 pale blue International Scout - to El Portal before even looking for a job. He soon found one at the Cedar Lodge, just seven miles outside of Yosemite, a sprawling complex of rustic pine bungalows that straddled the Merced River.

He’d begins working there as a handyman.

Cary rented a room above the Cedar Lodge Restaurant & Lounge, a 1950s-themed diner with red Naugahyde banquettes and a vintage jukebox, and did odd jobs around the motel

He was "a cool guy" who mixed easily with the rest of the staff, according to a waitress at the diner. "At night we'd all hang out, watch a video in somebody's room. He was totally likable. He was ordinary."

No. No he wasn’t.

https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror

14. 1998: Sometime in 1998, Cary starts to date a woman whose daughter later did an ABC interview, going by the name of Lenna.

Lenna didn’t mention the name her mother.

Lenna was just 10 or 11 years old when her mother began a relationship with Cary. Her mother was a waitress in the restaurant below the apartment where Cary lived, and he seemed like a safe person to be around to Lena’s mother, Lena, and Lena’s younger sister.

He brought the girls illustrations he'd drawn himself and bought them new Beanie Babies, a popular toy in the '90s, each time he'd see them, she said. Lenna said he also taught her and her sister how to dive.

https://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-recalls-moment-family- learned-target-1999-yosemite/story?id=60364987

Lenna said he was like a "big teddy bear" toward her and her sister.

"He was just our friend. I loved Cary. My sister and I adored him. ... My sister and I would be walking up the driveway and we’d see Cary Stayner coming up in his Scout, and jump in the truck and he’d give us a ride up to our house," she said.

Lenna said she could only remember one occasion in which Cary Stayner had made her feel uncomfortable. They were at the Merced River, she said, when he started removing all of his clothes.

Why did he do that? She didn’t say. But we’ll learn why soon. Cary was having some dark, DARK fantasies about Lenna, her sister, and their mom.

Lenna’s mom was also the first real girlfriend Cary seemed to have ever had. That co-worker of his back the at Glass Company said that one time, when the subject of girlfriends came up, Cary said he’d never dated a woman for more than a few weeks.

Lenna would recall later that Cary always carried a backpack, which authorities later described as containing his "murder kit." It contained a gun, duct tape and a knife.

And she wold learn later that she very nearly avoided Cary using the backpack’s contents on her.

After Cary Stayner's arrest, Lenna said FBI agents contacted her mother.

"The FBI went in and spoke with my mom privately to let her know that Cary Stayner had confessed to initially wanting to kill my mom, and rape and kill my sister and I," Lenna said. "My mom was extremely shocked. That's when our lives were flipped upside- down. ... My mom went off the deep end, and um, harbors a lot of guilt. I don't blame my mom at all. Nobody could have known."

Holy shit! Some Teddy Bear Cary Stayner was. How much would it fuck with your head to hear that? That this dude your mom was dating - who you looked up to - wanted to rape and kill you and your sister and to kill your mom.

The family learned from the FBI that Cary Stayner had nearly killed them on three separate occasions.

The day he’d gotten arrested for four murders, Cary Stayner had gone looking for them but Lenna and her sister just happened to be at their grandmother's house.

Had they been home with their mom, his confirmed body count would have jumped from four to seven.

15. February 1999: In February of 1999, around two years after showing up in El Portal, Stayner is still working at Cedar Lodge, living in his room above the lounge.

Thinking a lot about squatches.

On the 14th, Valentine’s Day, he sees Carole Sund, 42, and her daughter Juli, 15, arriving in their bright-red Pontiac Grand Prix rental with Juli’s friend Silvina Pelosso, 16, an exchange student from Argentina.

Carole had planned the fateful trip to Yosemite National Park two months in advance. A reward to her daughter for her doing well in school. Her husband, Jens, stayed home with their three other children.

They picked up a flashy red rental car at the airport and made their way to Yosemite.

https://www.nateferguson.com/sund.html

It was the dead of winter, and the Cedar Lodge was mostly deserted, with much of the staff on hiatus until the spring.

At Yosemite, they spent a long day admiring El Capitan, Half Dome, and other granite monoliths, ice skating in Curry Village in the Yosemite Valley, and taking snapshots along the Merced River Gorge.

At some point, Carole talked to Jens on the phone. Carole said they were planning to go through the park again, but had concerns about construction at the entrance. The conversation lasted less than four minutes.

It’d be the last time Jens would speak to his wife.

https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-yosemite-murders/12/

The three women had dinner at the Cedar Lodge restaurant and then strolled back along dimly lit pathways lined with wooden statues of bears and bald eagles to room 509, in the far west wing of the hotel.

That same day, Cary Stayner has stalked four young girls staying at Cedar Lodge with the intention of abducting, raping, and killing at least one of them.

But he ended up backing off, because they were accompanied by a man.

He’d decide on targeting Carol, Juli, and Silvina after all after spying on them through a window.

16.February 15, 1999: The next day, on February 15th, 1999, Cary puts a horrific plan into action.

At 11 PM, Cary, who was carrying a toolbox with duct tape, rope, a knife, and a gun hidden inside, knocked at the door of 509 and identified himself as the motel handyman.

There was a leak in the room above, he explained, and he needed to check whether water was dripping through the ceiling.

Suspicious, Carole looked around and said that there was no sign of a leak. She refused to let him in.

He told them if he couldn’t come in and fix it, they’d have to move to a different room, and not wanting to deal with that hassle, Carole let him in. Cary chatted with her for a moment, fiddled around in the bathroom for a minute or two, and then walked back out brandishing a gun.

He told Carole and the girls not to panic. And sadly, then didn’t.

He had only come to rob them, he said.

Then, he bound and gagged them with duct tape, placed Silvina and Juli in the bathroom, and turned to Carole Sund, who was lying on the bed.

Silently, quickly, he strangled her with a rope. He didn’t sexually assault her. It wasn’t part of his dark fantasy.

He took her car keys, dragged her corpse out to the dark, deserted parking lot, and heaved it into the trunk of the Pontiac while the two teens were still bound and gagged in the bathroom.

"I didn't realize how hard it is to strangle a person,” Cary would later coldly and calmly say on a taped confession. “It's not easy. I had very little feeling. It was like performing a task.”

After stuffing Carol into the trunk of her rented Pontiac Grand Prix, Cary ripped and cut the clothes off the two girls and led them back to the bed.

He commanded them to perform various sexual acts on each other, and they didn’t comply. They were terrified and crying. He became so irritated by Silvina's sobbing that he led her back into the bathroom and then quietly strangled her as she knelt in the bathtub.

He then sexually assaulted Juli in the family's motel room and in the room next door - where he took her to use the bathroom, not wanting her to see Silvina's body.

He tried to rape her but was not able to penetrate her as he was unable to get an erection.

That damn Erectile Dysfunction. He’d probably been stewing on it for years. And his impotence seemed to fill him with a murderous rage.

Finally, he left Juli on a bed, tied up and watching TV, while he cleaned up the crime scene and dumped Silvina in the car trunk with Sund, and arranged the room so it appeared that the women had checked out and left.

"It felt like I was in control for the first time in my life," Stayner later said on the tape.

His cleaning of the room was so thorough that he even got all of his hairs off of the bedsheet.

Later, an FBI agent asked him why he did that, and he replied: "I watch the Discovery Channel.”

https://the-line-up.com/yosemite-killer

17. February 16, 1999:

a) 4 AM: Roughly five hours after the attack began, at about 4 AM the next morning, February 16th, Stayner wrapped Juli, naked, in a pink, motel blanket and drove away in their rental car with her bound in the passenger seat.

"I didn't know where I was going or what I was doing," he said later to investigators. "I just kept driving and driving."

Along the way, he came to like Juli, who told Stayner her name was Sarah.

"She was a very likable girl," he said. "She was very calm."

Liking her didn’t make him not want to kill her though.

With dawn approaching, Stayner turned off at Lake Don Pedro and carried Juli up a worn dirt path to a small clearing overlooking the water. "I told her I wished I could keep her," he said.

That is some creepy shit to say.

He then sexually assaulted her again. No word from the sources on the state of his impotence during this attack.

Then, this maniac brushed her hair and fanned it out on the ground beneath her head.

He said he then, “told her I loved her,” and cut her throat.

She made a hand gesture to him after he cut her, which he interpreted as her asking him to finish her off, and he looked away while she died over the next 15 to 20 seconds.

At least that’s what he said.

Did she really gesture to him? I doubt it. I REALLY doubt she wanted him to “finish her off.” Strongly assuming some of this shit only happened in his head.

"I didn't want her to suffer the way the other two did," Stayner said.

Not sure that’s true. He drove the knife so hard into her throat he almost decapitated her.

After hiding her body in the thicket he drove the car - with the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso in the trunk - as far as he could into the forest.

He then walked two miles into Sierra Village, and telephoned for a cab after dawn. The cab driver, Jenny Paul, was bemused by the haggard-looking man who asked to be driven to the Yosemite Lodge.

She never reported the trip to the police until after Stayner's arrest, but months later she remembered an unusual conversation that transpired along the route.

"Do you believe in Bigfoot?" her passenger asked.

"No," she replied.

"You should," he said, "because he's real."

He paid the fare with $150 he'd stolen from Carole’s purse.

These Bigfoot details kill me.

Cary wouldn’t get the insanity plea he’d hoped for at his upcoming trial, but he was clearly, as I once heard some kid say growing up, “nuttier than squirrel shit.”

b) Morning: The inn staff claimed that when they cleaned room 509 the next morning, on Feb. 16th, they had detected no evidence of foul play. Check-out had been done in advance and the keys were left on the room desk, as was customary.

Jens Sund, Carole’s husband and Juli’s father, had scheduled to meet them at the San Francisco airport that evening on his way to Arizona.

While he attended his meeting in Arizona, his wife, daughter, and her friend were going to tour the Grand Canyon.

He did not find his wife at the airport and assumed she had flown ahead.

18. February 17, 1999: The next day, on February 17th, Cary returns to Carol’s rented Pontiac Grand Prix with a can of gasoline. After scratching "We have Sarah" on the hood with a pocket knife, saying “we” to throw off investigators, Stayner lit the car on fire.

Then he drove two hours west and dumped Mrs. Sund's billfold insert on a Modesto street corner to further fool police.

And it would work. Just like his brother Steven had vanished 27 years earlier, now three women had vanished.

Several days after the Sund's and Pelosso's disappearance, a wallet, driver's license, and credit cards belonging to Sund were found, but there was no sign of the women or their Pontiac Grand Prix rental car.

As the last days of February soon stumbled into March, the public still hoped the women would be found safe. In Modesto, a march and vigil were held for the missing persons.

Unofficially, Jens Sund offered a $250,000 reward for information that would lead to the to the return of the missing women. After a couple of weeks, he upped the sum to $300,000.

Mrs. Sund's parents, Francis and Carole Carrington, appeared on television's Good Morning, America, to entreat the prayers of Americans and their help in locating their daughter and the children.

19. March 19, 1999: Over a month after the murders, Carole Sund's rental car is located on March 19th, 1999. Two charred bodies are in the trunk— Sund’s and Pelosso's.

A hiker had discovered the vehicle in the mountains of Stanislaus County, over 30 miles from the lodge where Stayner abducted them.

The same week the two bodies were found, an anonymous letter was sent to the FBI with a hand-drawn map. The disturbing note, later determined to have been identified as written by Stayner, read, “We had fun with this one."

Again with the “We” to make investigators there were at least two attackers. Also - he paid a young hispanic guide to spit into a cup, and used that spit to seal the envelope, which further threw off the FBI. They ended up looking primarily at hispanic suspects for weeks because of this.

The map he sent led police to an overlook at the Don Pedro Reservoir, several miles from the logging trail where the car had been found.

There they found Juli Sund’s corpse.

A massive manhunt is now launched to catch the murderer or murderers.

For several weeks, hundreds of FBI agents, California Highway Patrol officers, and National Park Service rangers combed Yosemite's rugged backcountry - and the adjacent Stanislaus [stan-is-laws] National Forest - with dogs and helicopters.

Two dozen FBI agents commandeered part of the headquarters of the Stanislaus Hot Shots, a forest fire–fighting squad based in the old gold-rush town of Sonora, to sift through the little evidence they had been able to collect.

TV crews and reporters swarmed over the Yosemite area and descended on the Modesto Holiday Inn, where the families of the missing tourists maintained a vigil.

A task force rounded up suspects, arrested several known sex offenders, drug users and ex-convicts with a record of violence from within a 75-square-mile area between Modesto and Sonoma.

The police figured that the killer of the three women was someone familiar with the area. Whoever was guilty had successfully maneuvered a Pontiac through rugged terrain - ravines, lakes, dense woods and country roads.

They thought only a native would have been aware of the site where the car was eventually abandoned.

The March 29 edition of Newsweek reported: "The FBI...believes that the killer knows the area of abandoned gold mines well enough to hide the car off a spur road where locals dump old refrigerators, cars and washing machines. And well enough to know that the smell of a burning car would likely not attract attention because the air often reeks from people burning their garbage. Unsettled locals are starting to whisper about possible murderers in their midst."

By mid-April, The FBI came to believe that the key players in the sightseer slayings had been arrested and were in jail on unrelated charges.

Although not named in print at the time, these names have since been published by the Fresno Bee:

* Michael "Mick" Larwick, 42, of Modesto, part of a vagabond group of methamphetamine drug users and friends centered in the Modesto area.

* Eugene "Rufus" Dykes, 32, also of Modesto and Larwick's half- brother. He has a long criminal record including sex and weapons convictions.

* Billy Joe Strange, 39, an El Portal parolee who worked at the Cedar Lodge lounge and restaurant, where the murdered women were last seen. He was arrested when he allegedly reported to his parole officer with liquor on his breath.

* Darrell Gray Stephens, 55, Strange's roommate. Convicted in 1978 for rape and robbery, he was jailed March 14 for failing to register as a sex offender.

* Daniel Neal Cummins, 45. My dad. Loves the outdoors. Would’ve been right at home in Yosemite. Supposedly living 800 miles away between Riggins and New Meadows, Idaho at the time, but, because he couldn’t account for his whereabouts in February, and because he also didn’t know for certain what he’d been doing and where he ‘d been when so, so, SO many other people had been murdered in the 70s, 80s, and 90s - at LEAST - he’s considered as a prime suspect.

JK.

That running dad gag hasn’t worn thin for me yet.

By the end of June, while no one had been charged, the FBI were sure they had the person or people responsible for killing the three women.

Obviously, they did not.

https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/stayner-cary.htm

Meanwhile, at the Cedar Lodge, Cary maintained a cool facade, even escorting FBI agents from room to room so they could gather fiber samples.

The only time he seems to have commented on the killings, says a female coworker, was the afternoon he cast an annoyed glance at a pair of FBI agents having lunch in the diner. "Why didn't the FBI ever search for my brother?" he muttered.

Interesting. Did he maybe think he could get away with what he was doing because he didn’t think law enforcement was that good at catching people due to how they never found his brother?

20. July 21, 1999: On July 21st, 1999, four months after Stayner killed three women and had seemingly gotten away with it, he decides to kill again.

Joie Armstrong, who grew up in Orlando, was one of the most popular members of the Yosemite Park staff: a bright, energetic young woman who led kids on hikes through Yosemite's backcountry, sharing her knowledge about the park's history and indigenous plants, animals, and insects.

Armstrong and her boyfriend, Michael Raffaeli, another instructor, commuted a few miles to the Yosemite Institute from their pine cabin, which they called The Green House.

Conditions at The Green House were primitive—they chopped their own firewood for heat and hauled water up to drink from Crane Creek—but Armstrong was content.

"I love it here in this house," she wrote to a friend in Florida earlier in the summer. "I love Michael with my soul and every last cell in my body. I love the big meadow with all its daisies and incredible history."

On the morning of July 21st, Joie Armstrong arrived at the Yosemite Institute around 8 AM, worked a normal day, and drove the five miles home.

Her boyfriend and her other roommate were away.

Aware of the murders of the three tourists at the Cedar Lodge, she had told colleagues at the Institute that she'd worried about spending a night alone at her isolated cabin.

Just before dusk, as she packed up her car for her trip to Sausalito, a blue-and-white International Scout came down the dirt road toward her house and stopped.

According to his confession, Stayner stepped out of his vehicle, approached Armstrong's pickup truck, and said hello.

Stayner apparently attempted to put the wary young woman at ease by asking if she had ever seen Bigfoot in the area, adding that he had once spotted the creature in the fields just beyond her cabin.

What a weird fucking way to try and put someone at ease.

What a weird thing to think.

(Cary - thinking) “C’mon Cary. Think, think, think! Put her at ease! What do normal, non-murderers talk to women about? Car batteries? No. She doesn’t seem like the car battery type. DAMN IT, CARY! Car batteries are BORING. Soft pretzels? Maybe. Lot of people like soft pretzels! Especially ones covered in big chunks of salt with warm cheese dip. This is good. This is going somewhere………. WAIT! How about BIGFOOT! Everyone loves to talk about Bigfoot. That cab driver, she liked it when I talked about Bigfoot. My family, not so much - but THEY’RE DICKS!! This will work. This will definitely make her think the man she is talking to is NOT CRAZY.”

(Cary - speaking now, clears throat) Excuse me, ma’am! Did you know that Bigfoot lives around here. Oh yeah. I’ve seen him! Lots of people have. You can smell him! He’s real stinky.”

Cary really was a bit out of his mind.

PUSH DOOR OPEN BUTTON

(David “Giant Stone Balls” Childress voice)

“Um… yeah… David Childress here again. Stayner is right about the smell. Sightings of the large, 7 foot to 11 foot tall bipedal creature are often accompanied by a foul, skunk-like odor that…

(Me) Back in the hall, Dave.

(David) “Yeah, sure. No problemo.”

DOOR CLOSE BUTTON

Sorry about that.

When Cary realized Armstrong was alone, and with his Sasquatch jibber jabber not exactly making her want to invite him into her cabin, he pulled a gun and ordered her inside the cabin, where he bound her hands and gagged her with duct tape.

Then he ordered her back outside.

In the gathering darkness, he shoved her into the front seat of his Scout and began to drive back up the road.

Then, at a parking area where the dirt track from her cabin joins the Forest road, Armstrong managed to open the Scout's passenger door and leap out of the moving vehicle.

Pretty bad ass! Hail Lucifina!

She staggered to her feet and began running through the brush and trees along Crane Creek, heading toward a cabin where friends lived just a few hundred yards away.

Stayner jumped out and crashed through the woods in pursuit.

Armstrong made it 150 yards before he caught her. Grabbing her from behind, he drew a long knife and quickly cut her throat, and then he slashed her again and again and again until he had completely decapitated her.

He dumped the body in the drainage ditch and discarded the severed head 40 feet away.

Investigators initially thought Armstrong had been killed by someone she knew - that it was a crime of passion. They thought that because of the anger and rage displayed through the killing it must have been someone she had some sort of relationship with. Nope. Stayner was just furious she’d tried so hard to escape from him.

Because there had been so much noise and chaos, Cary left the scene of the crime in a hurry and left several clues behind, including tire tracks from his vehicle as well as his footprints.

Cary returned to his Scout and fled back up the road toward the Yosemite exit.

He didn't get very far.

On El Portal Road, a few miles short of the Cedar Lodge, his vehicle broke down, and he flagged down a ride from a passing Yosemite park ranger.

The ranger later recalled that Stayner had been easygoing, affable, and calm. Nothing seemed strange.

Damn. Just cut someone’s head off with a knife and now he’s easy going and chatting it up. Likely talking more about Bigfoot.

(Ranger) “Car broke down, huh? Any idea what the problem is?”

(Cary) “If I had to guess, I’d say Bigfoot probably was messing around under my hood, looking for some parts for his time machine or something, probably just knocked a hose loose or something. HAHAHAHAHA! I’m not crazy!”

https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror

21. July 22, 1999: The next morning, Thursday, July 22, Dr. Desmond Kidd, Yosemite National Park's medical director, had just finished a busy 24-hour shift at the park's clinic—it was, after all, the height of the summer tourist season—and the 36-year-old physician was beat.

He was looking forward to heading back to the log cabin he shared with other park employees in Yosemite Village, but as soon as he got back, his pager went off.

A park dispatcher asked him to join a search for a missing person —a search, the dispatcher said, "with law enforcement implications."

Kidd was told that Joie Ruth Armstrong, an ebullient, strawberry- blond naturalist at the nearby Yosemite Institute and a casual acquaintance of Kidd's, had been planning to spend the weekend visiting friends in Sausalito.

Armstrong had never shown up, and her friends feared something had happened to her.

Turning left off the main Yosemite highway, Kidd steered his Jeep down an unmarked road into Forest: 30 cabins, inhabited mostly by park employees, scattered across the bottom of a wooded glen.

The area was cordoned off with yellow police tape.

Joie’s white pickup truck was still parked in the driveway, packed with luggage for her trip.

Having decided to begin their search in the immediate area, the squad split up into five groups. Kidd and four other members of the search party walked the woods along Crane Creek.

Beneath the hot noonday sun, they bushwhacked through dense brush, watching for rattlesnakes and looking for signs of Joie.

After only a few minutes, Kidd spotted a key ring glinting in the sun. Just beyond it lay something else: a woman's body, clad in a white T-shirt and blue jeans.

As Kidd drew closer, he noticed something that nearly made him gag. “Jesus,” he said, and ran back to the ranger in charge. “We have an 11-44,” he said, using the police code for a dead body.

“And she's been decapitated.”

Unsurprisingly, Armstrong’s beheading spread fear through Yosemite.

Park rangers received a flood of phone calls from parents and youth group leaders asking if certain areas of the park should be avoided.

Requests for guided hikes—especially from women—rose sharply.

And then authorities got a lucky break.

A park employee had noticed a blue and white 1979 International Scout parked near Armstrong's house the night of her death.

On the afternoon of July 22nd, the day Joie’s body was discovered, two rangers spotted the Scout, parked on the shoulder of California 140 in the Merced River Canyon, about 12 miles from the western entrance of the park.

Descending to the rocky riverbank, one of the rangers, accompanied by a Mariposa County detective, came upon a handsome, solidly built man smoking a joint and sunbathing in the nude.

No big deal. Just chilling out naked in the woods. Soaking up some sunshine. Keeping his eyes peeled for squatches.

The man calmly identified himself as Cary Stayner and said he was employed as a handyman at the Cedar Lodge.

I think he did put some clothes on to introduce himself, but I like to imagine he stayed naked and also talked about Bigfoot a lot with his dick swinging around.

The officers confiscated his marijuana and let him go.

No arrest for the joint. Nice work. I like these officers.

Shortly after this encounter, FBI investigators compared tire tracks at the crime scene with some photographs of Stayner's treads— and they got a perfect match.

They had their guy. A naked, murdering, Bigfoot freak.

https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror

22. July 24, 1999: On July 24th, Cary Stayner is arrested at the Laguna del Sol “clothing optional” resort in Wilton, California.

More nudity.

Dude gets arrested at a fucking nudist colony. How great is that?

This place is still in business. And still nude. Looks nice.

Police discovered Cary there, eating breakfast, and asked if they could talk to him.

(Officer) “Cary Stayner, we need to talk to you. Would you mind putting some clothes on? Or maybe at least covering up your dick with that copy of Squatch-Hunter Monthly? Thank you.

What was that ma’am? No, I’m not a stripper in a cop suit. I’m a real cop.

Ma’am? Please stop pulling down on my zipper.

Sir!! - that’s not a prop - that’s a real gun.

Hey! You! With the nipple rings. No - not you - other nipple ring guy. Mind opening the door for us?

Ma’am!! Ma’am, please stop trying to motorboat me with your tits. I’m on official business.”

Stayner goes with the officers to the nearest FBI office, recognized him as the brother of Steven Stayner on the way and built up some repoire, and then Stayner almost immediately confessed to Joie Armstrong’s murder.

He then said he had a role in the Sund and Pelosso murders, and he’d tell them whatever they wanted to know, but first he wanted, quote, a "good sized stack" of child pornography as a condition of his confession. Photos and Videos. Ideally, naked kids quote, “involved in crime scenes.”

What the fuck? I interpret that as pictures and videos of naked, dead kids. He actually asked for this shit.

And he apparently asked for this in the same way you’d ask for a cheeseburger.

He also told the FBI agents that maybe if he’d had more access to kiddie porn, he wouldn’t have killed anyone.

Then he asked to be held before his trial down in Merced.

And he wanted his parents to get the reward money the husband of one of the women he murdered had offered for clues to her whereabouts when she was listed as missing.

And the FBI agents were like, “Nope. That’s crazy. Get the fuck out of here with all of that.”

And then he just fully confessed anyway.

He also told the FBI that he had fantasized about hurting women since he was a child and that he had been unable to stop his compulsion to kill.

For five months, Cary had been living under the noses of investigators—fixing leaks and handing out bed linens at the Cedar Lodge until the urge to murder had struck again.

Agents had interviewed Stayner twice in the early stages of the probe but had dismissed him as a suspect.

And he’d been interviewed before for possibly killing his uncle and had been dismissed.

He seemed like too nice a guy, too ordinary, they said. Not only that, but Stayner's background—his own family had been victimized by a similarly monstrous crime—made the idea that he had become a violent predator almost unimaginable for them.

23. August 6, 1999: Two weeks after his arrest, on August 6th, 1999, Cary Stayner shuffled into a courtroom at the U.S. District Courthouse in Fresno to answer federal murder charges.

His parents, Delbert and Kay Stayner sat motionless, hand in hand, eyes fixed on their son as he stood before the federal magistrate, clad in a yellow prison jumpsuit, his wrists and ankles shackled, and entered a plea of not guilty—a strategy that left the door open for an insanity defense.

His mother cried softly and rested her head against her husband's chest. Their son, grim-faced, avoided any eye contact with his parents.

Holy shit. Their first kid gets kidnapped and is missing for seven years. Then he shows up at home one day. Then he dies young in a motorcycle accident roughly a decade later, and now - their only other son, confesses to killing four women in Yosemite.

In a letter to the Fresno Bee that he sent from his jail cell in mid- August, Stayner wrote that "I truly am very sorry" for the pain he had caused and said that he hoped to sell the rights to his story to Hollywood to compensate the victims' families.

How much you want to bet his idea for a movie about all this involved Bigfoot? Heavily.

24. 2001: Cary’s trial begins in 2001.

During his trial, he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity, due to various psychological problems. A doctor testified during Stayner's trial and said he had autism and obsessive-compulsive disorder.

Stayner's lawyers also argued that Stayner allegedly had to deal with sexual abuse in his past, which could have played a role in him becoming a murderer.

Dr. Jose Arturo Silva testified for the defense during the third week of Stayner's triple-murder trial in San Jose.

The Stanford-educated psychiatrist spent more than 21 hours interviewing Stayner in jail and more than three hours talking with Stayner's parents, who live in the Central Valley. In addition, he sifted through five fat binders containing the defendant's medical history, which included interviews with friends, acquaintances and the FBI.

Silva said Stayner, like his father, suffers from paraphilia, a sexual disorder in which individuals become aroused only by inappropriate objects or fantasies.

And like his mother, Stayner suffers from depression.

Lot of shit going on in this family.

https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Stayner-called-mentally- impaired-Psychiatrist-2789309.php

25.August 27, 2002: On August 27th, 2002, Cary Stayner is found sane and convicted of four counts of first degree murder.

26. December 2002: In December of 2002. Cary Stayner asks for a new trial on the grounds that none of the jurors were molestation victims. It’s not granted.

I’m surprised he didn’t also complain that none of the jurors were squatches either.

27. December 12, 2002: Stayner receives the death sentence on December 12th, 2002.

Stayner is currently on death row at San Quentin State Prison in California. Although the state of California TECHNICALLY still has the death penalty, California Governor Gavin Newsom extended a moratorium on the death penalty in 2019.

California hasn’t executed any inmates since 2006.

It's far more likely Stayner will die of old age than be executed. He’s currently 59.

28.January 21, 2008: On January 21, 2008, Kenneth Parnell dies in prison.

May his soul, if he has one, never find peace.

29. August 28, 2010: On August 28th, 2010, a statue of Steven and Timothy White was dedicated in Applegate Park in Merced.

The statue showed a teenage Steven with Timmy in hand while the two of them escaped their captivity.

I love it.

Sadly - neither Steven nor Timmy lived to see this statue.

On April 1st, 2010, Timothy - who’d become an LA County Sheriff’s Department Deputy - died of a pulmonary embolism at the age of only thirty-five.

https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/us/11white.html

https://paulaslater.com/sculpture/steven-stayner-missing- childrens-memorial/

PAUSE TIMESUCK TIMELINE OUTRO

VI.Recap:

Crazy story, right?

A tragedy double-header starting with Kenneth Parnell and his fucked- up pedo-desires.

First the kidnapping, seven years of Steven Stayner being raped, then the Stayner family being reunited only to see Cary and Steven drift apart as brothers, then Steven dies in a motorcycle accident, then Cary probably kills his uncle, then he moves away to Yosemite and kills four women.

Are the Stayner’s cursed?

Cary Stayner - What an odd life he’s led.

He went from a shy, artistic boy who missed his brother to a cruel, Bigfoot-believing murderer who killed four women - brutally. One of them after sexually assaulting her AFTER he’d killed her mother and her friend.

Were those final four murders preventable?

Would Cary not have become such a monster if he hadn’t been molested, if his brother hadn’t been kidnapped? If he’d been raised in a more emotionally stable home?

He said he’d had murderous urges since the age of seven, before his brother was kidnapped. And if that was true - would he have found some way to deal with those urges if he’d had a different childhood?

How much nature and how much nurture goes into the making of a serial killer?

Could YOU, sweet Meatsack, have been a Ted Bundy or a Cary Stayner or an Aileen Wuornos had your childhood took some different turns?

Not fun to think about, but, could a certain sequence of tragic events in our childhoods turned any one of us into serial killers?

I think maybe it could. So much of who we are is formed by the way we’re raised - by who were raised by - by what happened to us in our identity forming years.

Throw in a couple of really, really dark curveballs, and who could you have ended up as?

I don’t know. I imagine your nature would have to also be pretty dark to end up going where Cary Stayner did.

Time for Today’s Top Five Takeaways.

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS INTRO

VII.Top Five Takeaways

1. Number One: Number one! Pedophile Kenneth Parnell harmed a lot more people than those he abducted. Those he raped and molested. He also harmed Cary Stayner, the Stayner parents, and countless others.

He kept Steven Stayner for seven years but ultimately only served five years in prison for it. Motherfucker.

2. Number Two: Number two! Cary Stayner killed four women in four months in the spring and summer of 1999. He stalked his victims before making sure that there wouldn’t be any others around them to protect them, then killed them brutally.

He sexually assaulted two young girls before he killed them. He also nearly or fully decapitated two of the four women he killed.

3. Number Three: Number three! Cary Stayner really believed in Bigfoot. He even talked about Bigfoot to the cab driver who was driving him back after he dumped Juli’s body.

What the fuck?

4. Number Four: Number four! After seven years of continual abuse, Steven Stayner got away from Kenneth Parnell because he didn’t want to see another boy, Timothy White get taken advantage of like he’d been.

And then Timothy became an LA Sheriff’s Deputy, putting himself in danger in order to protect others.

Two bright spots in such a dark story.

5. Number Five: Number five! New info! Cary Stayner was sentenced for his crimes in Yosemite National Park, but did you know there is a legal theory that you could literally get away with murder in part of another US national park?

Yellowstone National Park is almost entirely within Wyoming, but a slither of it reaches into those other two states, and the Idaho part is where the danger— or opportunity — is thought to lie.

Brian C. Kalt, a law professor at the Michigan State University College of Law, had a good look at this region, and published an academic paper entitled “The Perfect Crime” back in 2005.

In it, Kalt wondered about a hypothetical place where there were not enough eligible citizens to form a jury and theorized that there could be no trial and therefore no punishment for major crimes in that area. He later realized that there was such a place: the Idaho section of Yellowstone National Park.

Say you decided to murder someone in the Idaho section of the park. If you’re caught, you’d be arrested and taken to Wyoming to be tried.

The US Constitution, however, demands that any trial should be held in the state where the crime itself was committed, which in this case should be Idaho.

So you demand your Constitutional right to be tried back in Idaho, where they then take you. A local jury would be called up, BUT - Amendment VI states that the “impartial jury of the state and district wherein the crime shall have been committed” is required – and in this case, the state is Idaho but the district is Wyoming.

That means that the only people available for the jury must live in that Idaho section of Yellowstone. But absolutely no one lives there.

As its federal land, no one’s allowed to live there, either. Unless you allow them to try you in Wyoming, then legally you cannot be tried at all.

No known felonies have yet to be committed in this Zone of Theoretical Lawlessness.

I doubt you could get away with murder there, BUT - if you just HAVE to murder someone in the US - that’s probably the place to do it.

But don’t do that. You know I’m saying that’s a good idea, right? Good.

Just JK’ing a little bit there. Just thinking crazy thoughts.

https://www.atlasobscura.com/places/yellowstones-zone-of-death

PAUSE TOP FIVE TAKEAWAYS OUTRO

VIII.Final Announcements

A.Episode has been sucked!: The Yosemite Killer and the Abduction of Steven Stayner has been SUCKED.

So much drama and tragedy centered on one family, that before Steven’s abduction, seemed so normal.

B.Thank you to Timesuck Team:

Thank you to the Bad Magic Productions Team for all the help in making Timesuck! Queen of Bad Magic Lynze Cummins, Reverend Doctor Joe Paisley, the Script Keeper Zaq Flannary, Sophie “Fact Sorceress” Evans, Bit Elixir, and Logan “Art Warlock” Keith running BadMagicMerch.com and working on our socials along with Liz Hernandez!

Thanks to Beefsteak and the “Mod Squad” keeping Discord fun!

Congrats to the Raven Queen - currently in the lead of round nine of Timesuck Trivia with 4245 points. New round starts on Monday, April 5th. C. Next Episode Preview:

We stick with true crime next week on Timesuck.

We get dark.

We get smelly.

We get pretty much COVERED in pig shit with Robert Pickton, one of Canada’s most prolific serial killers. The “Butcher of Vancouver” AKA the “Pig Farmer Killer.”

As the son of pig farmers who didn’t give two shits about personal hygiene or their kids getting a solid upbringing, Robert first turned to butchery as a living, and then turned to a very different kind of butchering.

This guy is so weird and disturbing and cartoonishly horrific, he doesn’t feel real. Feels like a B Horror movie villain come to life.

He’d ultimately be arrested in 2002 and the subsequent investigation of his house of horrors would yield evidence of NUMEROUS other murders, ultimately leading to his being charged with 26 murders. He’d dispute that, though. He’d tell an undercover agent that he’d killed 49 women— one shy of his goal of 50.

And who were these women?

They were the women that polite society preferred to ignore. They were women struggling with drug addiction who had turned to sex work for money to fuel their addictions. Many of them were struggling with homelessness. They lived in Vancouver’s Eastside Downtown, which rapidly became Robert Pickton’s hunting grounds.

He’d then take them back to the pig farm where they would meet their doom… and maybe be incorporated into some pig meat that MAY have been sold to and consumed by Vancouverites.

Yep.

How could such a thing happen? How did Robert get away with it for so long? What in God’s name was happening at his nightclub “Piggy’s Palace”?

This ridiciculous story in next week’s deep dive into the disturbing world of Robert Pickton.

D. Segue to Timesucker Updates: And now let’s head on over to this week’s Timesucker Updates!

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES INTRO

IX.Timesucker Updates

1.Kicking things off with some positivity now. Inspired Meatsack Justin Sostre writes:

HEY FUCK FACE

Awesome, now that I have your attention I can continue!

The main thing that I want to say is thank you.

As I'm writing this, I'm listening to the Viktor Frankl/2020 Wrap Up episode.

I started listening to Timesuck in November of last year. You have been one of my favorite comedians since at least 2010, or whenever Crazy with a Capitol F came out, but for the longest time I refused to listen to Podcasts, because I thought the idea of someone just talking for hours would be stupid and boring... how wrong I feel now.

All my work days are now filled with tales from all over the world and throughout history. I'm writing this email because I finally feel like I have a direction to shoot for in my life. I recently came to the Cult - when it was still in existence - about going through a hard time and one of them pointed me to a book, Man's Search for Meaning. I'm a slow reader and kept putting it off for a few weeks, but decided to get the audiobook. I listened to it last week and now I feel like I can look at my life a bit more accurately. I'm still in the pursuit of my "why", but I think I've narrowed it down.

As I was listening to the Frankl suck... I got to the point where you mentioned Grandpa Ward passing and needless to say my allergies were severely acting up - fortunately, I was already home from work when this happened. That's when I had to stop the episode and try to write in.

My father passed away 5 years ago December 29th. He was an amazing man that gave his kids and wife all that he could and so much more. Most of this time I've felt lost and not sure what to do with my life since he left. I feel like I have been living without any purpose. Slowly the haze has been lifting through this time and I can feel myself becoming more of the person I was before I lost him. I am also lucky to have found someone that pushes me to become the best version of myself and was part of the reason I got back to feeling like my old self, my beautiful girlfriend, Megan (trying to get her into Timesuck, but she really enjoys Scared to Death, so at least there's that).

Even though I didn't listen to the podcast when it started I did listen to your comedy all of the time and I wanted to say thank you.

Thank you for being such a bright light in this world. Your dark comedy gave me more than I can ever truly put into words. And this podcast has filled my heart with hope. Well... now that I'm dehydrated from all the allergies, I'm going to finish the episode and become a Space Lizard! I've been waiting a while to do that because I wanted to catch up... I'm basically there (what is big deal?). Thank you for reading my ramblings! Hail Nimrod! Praise Lucifina! Glory be to Michael MotherFucking McDonald!

Sincerely, Justin Sostre (Just-In Sauce-Tree)

PS Please do another Shroom Suck

PSS If you've ever looked into Paul McCartney is dead... That would be an interesting suck... in my humble opinion

Haha. Thanks Justin! Glad you’re on the path to finding your Why. We did get into the Paul McCartney is dead conspiracy on the Secret Suck and I think in an upcoming episode of Timesuck we’ll explore that and also numerous other celebrity- based conspiracies.

Glad you find Megan - she sounds like a great influence. And sorry about your dad. I’m sure he’s proud of you for taking charge of your life and your happiness as much as any meatsack can.

And yes. Shrooms. I need to get more and recalibrate my mind again for summer.

2.Next up - happy Sucker Karina Hammond has a great update to share. She writes:

Dear Suck Master, I'll keep this short and sweet. The waste of oxygen named Joseph Dunc was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer. Hail Nimrod and let's hope it's painful.

Yes. Hail Nimrod! That dirtbag is not expected to make it past the summer. This past Fall he was diagnosed with terminal brain cancer and he is choosing not to receive treatment. He is STILL writing the occasional blog post, and in his most recent one, from January - he continues to not think about his victims at all. 80% of the post is about how rude the guards are and how the nurses don’t seem to care about him.

Yeah buddy. They don’t. You’re a fucking monster. You belong back in the dirt from whence you came. Soon, one less child killer will still be breathing.

3. Super Sack Matt Lee had an allergy attack last week at work. Let’s hear about it:

Dan. You son of a bitch. I just finished listening to the Papa Ward suck at work. Bad Move. I made it all the way to the end then lost it. Mind you, I’m a fabricator/special effects tech for Stranger Things and typically consider myself to be pretty tough.... Fast forward to me listening to this episode and here I am crying like a bitch in the middle of the FX shop.

Hearing the way you reminisce and tell stories about Papa Ward really brings me back to my family’s story and my Pawpaw. All the things I didn’t get to say to him before he was taken from me, all the things I never got to ask him, the fact that he never got to meet my daughter. I’ve since retreated to the bathroom to ugly cry and to tell you that I hate you for this but also to thank you for making me think back on so many fond memories. 3/5 stars. loyal space lizard, creeper, dummy Matt Lee from Atlanta.

Thanks, Matt. It IS good to remember, isn’t it? Even when it’s painful. Helps keep the dead with us. Keeps them alive in some sense.

Glad you had a good Pawpaw. It’s a special thing. Sorry about the ugly cry. Someone probably just was eating an onion near you or something. Probably wasn’t emotion. You’re good.

4. Super Sucker Avery Metcalf now his own Grandpa tales to share. Avery writes:

Dear Dan, I felt compelled to write you after listening to the Ward Hall Episode. My condolences to you and your family.

I frequently listening to TimeSuck during early morning drives to the boat ramp and long days on the water for bass fishing tournaments. The reason I'm writing today is my grandfather past away January 3rd, 2020 at the age of 89. To say that was a tough way to start 2020 is an understatement.

My grandfather Aubrey James Metcalf Sr. had a lot of similarities with your grandfather that was worthy to share. Aubrey was born in 1930 in Stillwater, Oklahoma during the depression to a large family of siblings, was always very frugal, never complained, and valued hardwork and family.

He was always telling stories of the old days while driving me around on Saturdays going to garage sales and fishing excursions. My favorite was when his uncle acquired an old run down Model T Ford in the mid 30’s when he was 5-6 years old.

It was my grandfathers job to wind and crank the engine and one day he forgot to put the crank up and the crank sticking out of the front caught a pot hole and launched the engine completely out of the front. He said this was the only time he ever heard his dad cuss, yelling "fuck" .

Always thought that was funny.

He met my grandmother Ann and were married at young age. Then he joined the Air Force during the Korean War and was stationed in England and had many more stories about being a hillbilly yankee in England. He returned to be a bricklayer in which he retired from in 2000 at the age of 70. There is not a brick building in the Tulsa area in which he didn't seem to have worked on or knew who built it. He would always remark about building that school, church, or high rise or know the ole fella that did. He was a life-long union man and a blue dog democrat - he believed in the social programs of the great depression.

He also didn't go to church believing that a good god would understand the good life he lived. He went to every sporting event my cousins, and siblings had, he was always there. He would always make everyone the best chocolate milkshakes anytime we came over. What I wouldn't give to have another one of those. He always had a calm demeanor and would always start a conversation with a story. Always laughing and say "anyhow" to change directions of the conversation. My cousins and siblings and I have so many fond memories of playing in the yard and running down the trail to the big pond to fish and play hide and seek. He and my grandmother Ann would frequent the casino in town. That was their entertainment and I would always drive by seeing there blue minivan parked up front. I know this is running long but I just had to relay the message. I was brought to tears listening to the end of the podcast were your Grandmother and Grandpa talked about you. My wife and I just had our first baby girl several months before Aubrey passed away. Thank God they got to meet. Aubrey is missed in our family immensely and everyone always talk about him and get togethers are not the same without him. Thank you for taking the time to read this. Have a blessed day! - Avery Metcalf

Thanks, Avery! You have a blessed day as well. Damn. Sounds like Aubrey Metcalf was one helluva man. Building shit that would last a lot longer than any of us will all around Tulsa. Making those grandpa milkshakes that don’t taste the same when anyone else does it.

Hell yes. His legacy lives on with you and yours. Hail Nimrod.

5.One more. With some comedy mixed in. This is fantastic. Silly Sucker Joe Crabb was reminded by my grandpa’s weed prank on Buckhorn of a prank of his own. He writes:

Hello suckmaster!

I just wanted to say that I thoroughly enjoyed the suck on Papa Ward last week. I lost my grandpa February of 2020, and your grandpa reminded me a lot of my grandpa. He was a very hard worker, he loved his family more than life, he was blunt yet kind, and he had a dark sense of humor like me.

I really enjoyed the prank that he pulled on his neighbor. I also enjoyed the prank you pulled on Kyler that you talked about of S2D a few weeks ago. I wanted to share the best prank I have ever pulled, so that you could expand on that one, because they are similar in nature.

My son is autistic, and one thing that is pretty common with people with autism is being a flight risk. I can't tell you how many times I have seen articles on young children with autism getting away from their family and drowning, which is my worst fear because my son loves water, but can't swim yet.

I lived in the country with a big pond in front of my house, so it was a real fear.

I do swear I am getting to the prank.

Because of this fear, we got an Alexa for the house, and smart switches for the doors. So, when the door opens, the switch triggers the Alexa to send us a notification that the door is open.

You can do all sorts of stuff, like even have it tell you a joke when the sensor is tripped.

Well, my family went to Disney World in Florida, and I am from Indiana, so we drive, because that's what Midwesterners do.

Our friend was watching our house and feeding our cat while we were gone that week, and while we were on the road, I had a brilliant idea. I can control that Alexa from my phone. And our friend is terrified of birds. Can't handle them.

So, I set up the Alexa to play nature sounds whenever the door is opened.

She got there to feed the cat that night, and thought there was a bird loose in the house with her. She yelled at my cat to do her job and get the bird. I was a little proud of her, because she put on her big girl pants and searched the house trying to find the bird, and then when she walked past the little speaker in my living room, she noticed the sound got louder. I received a text that just simply said, "you're a dick."

I didn't do anything the next day to give her a false sense of security, but the next day, I cranked it up a notch. I set it to play Killswitch Engage's "When Darkness Falls" at full volume.

For some reason, Alexa decided to help me out a little because there was a delay, just long enough for her to get to the kitchen before the sound of Howard Jones started screaming through the house.

She threw her phone, hit the deck, and her heart rate went so high it registered on her FitBit.

Then, I got a call from her, "MAKE IT STOP!!" I told her to tell Alexa to stop, and proceeded to laugh until it hurt.

She sent her 6-year-old daughter in the next day first to test the waters, and I had it set to play "Let it go" from frozen, so her daughter was just singing along when she walked in.

By far, the best prank I have ever done. I only wish I had thought of it before I left so I could have set up a camera.

Love the show, and rest in peace to papa ward. Seems like he was an amazing meatsack.

Joey

Holy shit, Joey. That is so good. I don’t have an Alexa or any of that, so I didn’t even know all of that was possible. I feel like you just inspired so many other people to also fuck with their friends.

I need to fire off another prank. I always want to prank Lynze but I don’t want the retaliation. And I got Kyler last time. Monroe. Might have to target her. You’ve given me a lot to think about Joey. Thanks for the laughs.

And thanks for all the grandparent messages, everyone. I’m sure I’ll share more next week.

PAUSE TIMESUCKER UPDATES OUTRO

X.GOODBYE 1.Thanks for listening to this Bad Productions Podcast, meatsacks.

Please don’t abduct anyone this week, maybe keep your excited Sasquatch talk to a minimum, and keep on sucking.

OUTRO BUTTON

PRIMARY SOURCES:

Book: “I Know My First Name is Steven” by Mike Echols.

Book: “Cary Stayner: The True Story of the Yosemite Park Killer” by Jack Rosewood. https://www.fbi.gov/stats-services/publications/serial-murder https://www.nationalparks.org/explore-parks/yosemite-national- park https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror https://www.farandwide.com/s/national-park- deaths-7c895bed3dd04c99#:~:text=Murders%20%26%20Homici des,times%20random%20acts%20of%20violence https://www.nps.gov/orgs/1563/cold-cases.htm https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/inside-the-monster/ Content?oid=1069138 https://historycollection.com/6-famous-kidnapping-cases/2/ https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-09-22-vw-766- story.html https://www.eastbayexpress.com/oakland/inside-the-monster/ Content?oid=1069138&showFullText=true https://www.sfgate.com/hdn/hrlm/p/fastly_redirect.html? dm=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.sfgate.com%2Fbayarea%2Farticle% 2FSex-offender-Kenneth-Parnell-dies-in-Vacaville-3231527.php https://murderpedia.org/male.S/s/stayner-cary.htm https://www.outsideonline.com/1889286/yosemite-horror https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Merced,_California https://www.co.merced.ca.us/1874/Living-in-Merced-County https://abcnews.go.com/US/steven-cary-stayner-tale-brothers- horror-heroism/story?id=60529944 https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1989-09-22-vw-766- story.html https://abcnews.go.com/US/woman-recalls-moment-family- learned-target-1999-yosemite/story?id=60364987 https://www.nateferguson.com/sund.html https://www.cbsnews.com/pictures/the-yosemite-murders/12/ https://the-line-up.com/yosemite-killer https://www.sfgate.com/bayarea/article/Stayner-called-mentally- impaired-Psychiatrist-2789309.php https://www.nytimes.com/2010/04/11/us/11white.html https://paulaslater.com/sculpture/steven-stayner-missing- childrens-memorial/