I Know My First Name Is Steven (10 page)

As their visit drew to a close Mary surprised her son by presenting him with a gift to remember her by: a six-week-old female puppy from her Manchester Ter
rier bitch's litter. Ken mumbled his gratitude for his mother's generosity, gently wrapped the trembling black and tan puppy in his doubleknit plaid sport coat, and tenderly cradled the tiny form in his arms as he carried her out to his car for his return trip to Cathy's Valley.

Ken completed the 370 mile round trip early that evening and proudly entered the cramped little red cabin with the tiny puppy hidden inside his gaudy coat. Murph was sleeping on the lawn couch, and Steven sat forlornly in a corner playing with his toy canoe and plastic Indians. Parnell's entrance startled the boy, but Murph continued to doze when Ken called Steven to him and grandly presented the puppy to the boy as his own. Overjoyed, Steven immediately named his new pet "Queenie" and profusely thanked his captor. Ken smiled cheekily to himself, for this was
exactly
what he had expected and it set the stage for the plan he had cannily concocted during his return drive from Bakersfield.

Parnell sat down in the cabin's single, ratty, overstuffed chair and gently lifted the seven-year-old onto his lap. Tenderly he stroked the boy's hair as he began a skillful lie about having gone to court that morning where a judge had given him custody of Steven. Parnell also lied to Steven saying that his parents didn't want him anymore because they couldn't afford to take care of him. The kidnapper then completed his story by telling the numbed Steven that he was now his son, his name was now Dennis Gregory Parnell, and from now he was to call Parnell "Dad."

Tears of protest welled up in the thoroughly confused little boy's eyes as he indignantly contradicted
Parnell's story and demurred about staying with his captor because, he insisted, his mom and dad needed him at home. What was more, the hurt, shocked little boy blurted that he had three sisters and a brother and his mom and dad wanted him to help with them. Coldly Parnell corrected, "Well, I don't think that they really need you right now."

By then he was bereft of his own family, and years later Steven recalled with visible emotion how he at that point began the slow, painful resignation to his new life as Dennis Gregory Parnell . . . but, he made it infinitely clear, he never, ever forgot his family back in Merced.

The next afternoon long shadows stretched across the brown, grass-covered hills at Cathy's Valley as Parnell, Dennis, and Murph piled into the Buick to return to Yosemite. Murph had to clean the Lodge ovens that night; however, Parnell had decided to fold his tent, as it were, quit his job, and depart for points as yet unknown, even to himself. When they arrived at Yosemite Lodge, Parnell asked Murph to wait in the car with Dennis while he went inside and told his boss that his mother had suffered a heart attack—an out-and-out lie—and therefore, he continued his fabrication, he was quitting his job and returning to Bakersfield. When he returned to the car Parnell told Murph what he had done and that he was going to move but that he would spend the rest of the week at the cabin with Dennis. Then he dropped Murph off at his employees' cabin before driving himself and Steven back to Cathy's Valley.

Night fell during the pair's return trip, and with it the darker side of Parnell's twisted relationship with the boy he now called his son resumed, for as soon as they had entered the musty tourist cabin Parnell made Dennis remove all of his clothes. With the child naked, the now-aroused Parnell experienced a frisson as he feverishly began fondling the shivering second-grader's genitals as a prelude to yet another session of forced fellatio with Dennis. With Murph at work, Parnell again felt free to molest his frightened young captive.

The next morning after breakfast Parnell called Dennis to him and, without explanation, sat the frightened boy on a camp stool, wrapped him from neck to toe in an old bed sheet, and trimmed his new son's hair with a pair of sheers until it had lost its shaggy look. That finished, Parnell walked Dennis to the chipped old sink and dyed his son's hair a dark brown. After rinsing and drying the boy's hair Dennis's new dad perfected the charade by restyling his son's hair into a parted fashion quite unlike the soup bowl look evident on the "Missing Juvenile" flyers. Years later Dennis visibly tensed as he recalled his having been too terrified to ask his captor a single question. Parnell then walked Dennis and Queenie outside to play in front of the cabin, less than three hundred feet from the highway to Merced and within sight of Dennis's maternal grandfather's trailer. With Dennis dressed in flea market clothes and the tonsorial transformation complete, Parnell cockily went back inside and took a nap.

Parnell spent the balance of the week reading his get-rich-quick books and figuring ways—some illegal
but appealing greatly to his cupidity—to make money, plotting his next tactical move with Dennis, and having oral sex repeatedly with his resident child-sex partner-cum-son. But even for Parnell this routine quickly became tedious.

The wickedest side of Parnell's perversion with his young son surfaced the night of December 17, 1972, Dennis bitterly recalled. Parnell again made his son remove all his clothes and, Dennis recalled, "explained what he was going to do to me and that there was going to be some pain involved." Immediately Parnell made the naked, scared, sixty-pound second-grader lie face down on the bed while he himself undressed, then mounted and spread the boy's small buttocks apart and roughly smeared Vaseline deep inside the immature anus and onto his own by-now-erect penis. Without pause Parnell roughly thrust his engorged member deep inside and painfully sodomized his crying, confused young sex partner. After his organ had completed its orgasm inside the seven-year-old, Parnell withdrew, wiped himself off, and gave his sobbing young son a couple of Nytol sleeping pills. Then the pederast turned out the light and pulled the sheet and blanket up over his own naked body and that of his young son. Throughout the night Parnell snuggled his own naked body against that of his son as he excitedly fondled the boy's small buttocks and genitals and masturbated himself again and again.

Of that first time Parnell raped him, Dennis acerbically recalls: "There was a lot of fear and confusion. I was
very
confused. I didn't know what was happening. I'd never seen anything like that before. I mean, that's
the age when you still think that Mr. Stork brings the little babies. It was
real
confusing.
Real
scary!

"I knew it wasn't right mainly because it was never done to me [before]. My father didn't do it! I just basically thought that it was something sorta' normal that I never had known about before. And it
hurt.
It hurt a lot, and I kept crying . . . but Parnell just ignored me and kept on doing it."

The next morning Parnell awoke early and left his son to finish his drug-induced sleep. When he returned a few hours later he found Dennis engrossed in play with Queenie. While gone, Parnell had traded in his old possibly recognizable white Buick and, using some money given him by his mother, bought an equally old but unknown and better-running white Rambler American.

Parnell told his son that they were going on a trip. Unknown to Dennis, while exchanging automobiles the previously complacent Parnell was startled to learn of Bob Augustine's—Dennis's maternal grandfather's—recent relocation: he had moved his house trailer to Judy's Trailer Park, just a few hundred feet from the little red cabin. Said Murph succinctly, "Parnell decided to split." Although Bob's grandson had never visited him there, and neither one knew of the other's proximity, Parnell was taking no chances. He was anxious to leave the San Joaquin Valley where Dennis had been born and had spent all of his young life with his own family and head for northern California.

In response to a phone call from Parnell, Murph hitchhiked to Cathy's Valley that afternoon and brought with him—as the ex-con had instructed—
Parnell's last paycheck and some blank signature cards to open a new savings account at the Wells Fargo Branch Bank in the Yosemite Valley. Parnell had hatched a scheme to blackmail the simple-minded kitchen cleaner by threatening to identify him as
the
kidnapper unless Murph agreed to deposit a portion of each of his own paychecks into this new account; and since he no longer had a job, Parnell could certainly use the money, for he further dictated to Murph that only he would make withdrawals.

Then, shortly before dusk on Monday, December 18, 1972, Dennis Gregory Parnell climbed into the Rambler's front seat with his puppy, Queenie; his new dad and rapist, Kenneth Parnell, climbed into the driver's seat; and they both waved good-bye to Murph and drove off.

From Soledad Penitentiary in 1984 Parnell boasted that he drove Dennis "right through Merced" that night. However, Dennis is certain that they traveled north through Mariposa and then northwest toward Mt. Bullion. But then the seven-year-old fell asleep for the balance of the trip, apparently through Oakland, across the Richmond-San Rafael Bridge, past San Quentin Penitentiary, and another fifty-five miles on north to Santa Rosa.

It was long after ten
P.M.
when "Kenneth E. Parnell and son" registered at the Tropics Motel on Santa Rosa's south side and were assigned to room 18. Parnell parked at the door and tenderly carried his sleeping son inside. Gently, he laid Dennis on the bed, undressed the boy down to his briefs, and covered him up. Santa Rosa was the Sonoma County seat, the heart of the fabled California wine country, a small yet bus
tling city of 50,000 . . . and an innocuous middle-class "hometown" that Parnell had carefully and shrewdly chosen.

When they awoke the next morning, Parnell took Dennis to a nearby café for breakfast. As they walked back from breakfast Dennis saw the cracking stucco walls and weathered, tilted signs that typified the Tropics and its equally dilapidated neighbors along Santa Rosa Avenue, former tourist courts that dotted this backwater that had once been U.S. 101. Now bypassed by the freeway from San Francisco, they languished as low-income transient accommodations by the week or by the month, cramped accommodations which would serve as Dennis's home for most of the next eighteen months.

Four days later, fearing that someone might discover them, Ken moved himself and Dennis to another aging motel, the Pelissier, across town on quiet Mendocino Avenue. It was a family-type place, clean and run by an accommodating yet reserved Pakistani family . . . just right for the anonymity Parnell sought. It was amid the sparse furnishings of room 16 at the Pelissier that Dennis spent his first of eight Christmases away from his own family, quietly opening the three presents from his new dad, a toy rifle, a toy bow and arrow, and a Hot Wheels Race Track set, playing idly with them as Ken smugly sat back, lit a cigarette, and watched the holiday fare on TV.

Christmas was bleak at the Stayner home in Merced. Everyone in the family bought and wrapped a special present for Steven, partly because they still considered
him a very real part of their family, partly because they felt that doing so would somehow help to bring him home. But it didn't, and Christmas was very sad.

Del couldn't bear to see his other children opening their presents without his Stevie there and so he slipped quietly into his room and cried as he talked to Stevie's picture, asking his son where he was and when he would be coming home.

Being a single parent was difficult for Ken. When he wasn't in prison, he lived a bachelor's life, going and coming as he pleased. But in Santa Rosa he always hired someone to stay with Dennis while he went job-hunting and, later, when he worked. Usually he got sitters through a local babysitting service, but 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 work as a day front desk clerk at the Santa Rosa Holiday Inn. On January 2, 1973, he registered his son in the second grade at Steele Lane Elementary School in the Bellevue Union School District, stating on the enrollment form: Name, "Dennis G. Parnell"; Date of Birth, "April 18, 1965"; Place of Birth, "Merced, California"; Former School, "Yosemite Elementary,
Yosemite National Park" . . . a real school, but one never attended by Dennis Parnell or Steven Stayner. That same month the Bellevue Union School District Office in Santa Rosa received the following letter:

Mr. and Mrs. Delbert Stayner

1655 Bette Street

Merced, California 95340

County Superintendent of Schools:

Would you please distribute the enclosed bulletins to all primary schools in your district? Hopefully we are sending enough; if not, please let us know.

George Hogan, Special Consultant, Office of the Chief Deputy, in Sacramento, suggested this as a means of getting the bulletins to all schools.

Steven may not be in school, but a child may have seen or heard of Steven in his or her neighborhood. We must cover any and all possibilities.

We appreciate your cooperation and thank you for any help.

Sincerely,

[signed] Delbert
&
Kay Stayner

A copy of this letter and bulletin (i.e., the "Missing Juvenile" flyer) never reached Steele Lane, and it was
years later that Del and Kay learned that the letters and bulletins they had so hopefully sent were thrown in the trash at the Bellevue Union School District Office, as well as at many other California school district offices. But an anonymous Steele Lane Elementary School office employee wrote on the back of a form forwarded to Dennis's next school: "Steele Lane did not receive any records from former school." However, like Steele Lane, the next school also failed to insist on receiving his records, and this brief note was the extent of concern for Dennis G. Parnell's lack of records and a birth certificate shown by any of the half-dozen public schools he attended as Kenneth Eugene Parnell's son.