I Know My First Name Is Steven (17 page)

"Damon and I were standing right near the door and Dennis was standing back a little ways," Butler continued. "Damon is a real exuberant kind of person, he just kind of comes up . . . kind of overpowering. And Dennis acted a little frightened. He kind of moved back from me, very shy, and he had kind of a funny little smile on his face. I asked him. 'Do you ever have the opportunity to visit with your parents?' He kind of shrugged his shoulders and said, 'No.' And at that time I thought it was rather strange, but so many other strange things happen in Mendocino County relative to children and parents, the relation
ship that they have. I should have followed through on that, because I really thought an awful lot about it. But somebody interrupted, and there were other kids waiting around for them to go out and play, and they just took off.

"But I remember going into the teachers' lounge and talking about it with some of the other teachers. And I heard from some other person on the staff—I'm not really sure who it was—that the story had been repeated at least one other time," Butler concluded.

Both Damon and Dennis later insisted that this incident never happened. However, among his peers Gerald Butler has a reputation as an honest, straightforward teacher with a sharp memory . . . and at least one other teacher, Bill Patton, recalled hearing Gerald tell of the incident in the teachers' lounge on that day years ago.

In the large Mitchell family Dennis was closest to his agemate George. On occasion George's mother kept Dennis during Ken's out-of-town trips, and when Ken dropped by to pick up Dennis he always paused a few minutes to give this handsome boy with brown hair some extra attention. One day Parnell gave the twelve-year-old a ride home from school . . . alone. As usual, Ken had told his son to take the bus. On the drive to Comptche, George asked Ken if he would buy a pack of cigarettes for him and Ken responded, "Sure, if we could have a little fun tonight."

Said George, "I didn't know what he meant by that, and so I said, 'Sure!' "

Dennis was home when they arrived, and within minutes Parnell was serving the boys beer. George recalled that after three apiece, Parnell told the boys,
"Take off your clothes. We're going to dance around, just fart around."

Recalling his naive, bewildered feelings, George said, "I thought we were just farting around, some kind of game, you know. And then Ken went into the bedroom and told me to come in there and I did. And he was just standing there naked . . . aroused. And he had this open jar of Vaseline in his hand and he wanted me to get up on the bed." But, George insisted, Parnell did not have sex with him, although when he went home George told his mother that Parnell had raped him.

According to a police report Joann Mitchell later made about the incident, George obeyed Parnell, got up on the bed, and was mounted and sodomized by Parnell. The report concluded, "She was positive that the incident had occurred. He [Dennis] and George had become somewhat intoxicated, and that at this time Parnell engaged in sodomy with George."

Dennis, however, knew full well what was going to happen to his friend from the time Parnell opened the first beer, but when his father called George to the bedroom, Dennis admitted years later he just sat naked in a living room chair, his head buried in a book. He said that he had "always" kept quiet when Parnell invited his friends over. "I just kind of figured that if he was fucking them he wouldn't be fucking me."

Parnell's sodomizing George became common knowledge around Comptche, but as usual the taciturn residents kept it to themselves, once again adhering to the local "live and let live" code lest, perhaps, their own idiosyncratic behavior be scrutinized.

In the eighth grade Dennis was regarded as a quiet, slightly below average student. Teacher Bob Krebs
coached him in several sports and described Dennis as "a very fierce competitor, but a very quiet type of fierce . . . very intent, and very good, but he was not the take-charge, quarterback-type kid. He was somewhat withdrawn but was not reluctant to participate."

Krebs also related that among the parents of students in Dennis's school Parnell wasn't the only father who sexually abused his child. He recounted a number of cases—far too many, considering the small population base—including one involving a girl in Dennis's class who was known to have been involved sexually with her father from the age of six until she was well into her teens.

That case and the others were confirmed by Mendocino County Sheriff's Deputy Sergeant Daryl Dallegge, who in the early to mid 1980s was his department's professionally trained expert in the investigation of sexual abuse of children. At the time Ken and Dennis were living in western Mendocino County, Dallegge said that he knew them but had heard nothing about Parnell's sexual assaults.

Kim Peace said that soon after Ken and Dennis moved to Comptche, Parnell invited her to his home, but that she hadn't felt welcome. "I didn't like the way that Ken was looking at me. He has this strange look he gives people, and that scared me. He was doing that to people that were there, like Donnie Mitchell and Alan Stenback"—then handsome, dark-headed thirteen-year-olds—"and so I left and never went back." Also, Kim described the interior of Parnell's home as being dirty and not well kept. About Dennis's personal cleanliness she remarked, "He wore his clothes for days and days and days. But I don't
think anyone ever said anything to him about it . . . Comptche people are kind of like that."

But when asked, Dennis blamed his lack of clean clothes on Ken's slatternliness, saying, "Parnell hated to have to do laundry. He'd rather wear clothes over and over than to have to wash them."

As the years passed, the subject of Steven's kidnapping didn't arise very often between Parnell and Dennis. As for Parnell, he had always been very insistent that his son forget about it because, Dennis said, "He wanted me to get it off my mind. He didn't want me to think that I had been kidnapped. He wanted me to think that I had been given to him by the judge. But I got to wondering about that."

In the late spring of 1978, when he was thirteen, Dennis went to a party with a group of older Comptche teenagers where he drank beer and Jack Daniels, smoked marijuana, and then began to prattle on about his true past. One of the teenagers present, Kurt Poehlman, recalled, "This party was over at Beak's land. Dennis was next to the fire and he just started crying. He said, 'I want to go home.' And nobody really understood him—he never explained himself—but he didn't mean back to Ken's." Alan Stenback was present, too, and he recalls events as did Kurt . . . as did Donnie Mitchell, George Mitchell, Lori Macdonald, and many others who were also there.

When the author confronted Dennis with these recollections in June 1984, he denied ever having told
anyone anything
about the kidnapping, the sexual assaults, or his own family back in Merced.

Throughout 1978 Ken remained in his unassuming bookkeeping position at Wells Manufacturing where
he was, said Angela Peterson—an older, now-deceased Comptche lady friend—"the original Mr. Milquetoast." But in early 1979 Ken got so upset over his low pay and lack of benefits that he quit and took a similar job at Eastman Trucking Company in Fort Bragg, a change which again required his making a daily round-trip commute over the crooked Comptche-Mendocino City Road and up the Coast Highway.

As Dennis got older, Parnell's sexual interest in him waned and he began actively seeking younger boys to satisfy him. One such lad was Ricky Frietas of Fort Bragg, the handsome ten-year-old son of first-generation Portuguese immigrants and a cousin of Dennis's friend Joe Gomes. Ricky had known Dennis and Ken casually when they lived in Fort Bragg, but when Ken saw Ricky in Fort Bragg one day he lusted for the youngster and had Dennis invite him for the weekend. Dennis complied and telephoned the lad, telling Ricky that Ken would pick him up on his way home from work the next Friday. Recalled Joe Gomes, "Ricky said that Ken had tried to offer him money for sex with him. He said that it happened at the trailer, and Ken offered him five dollars for some kind of sexual favor, but Ricky wouldn't do it. And after that he never went there again."

In the late spring of 1979 Ken happened to spot a classified ad in the
Wall Street Journal
for a rural cabin and acreage in northern Arkansas, and, sight unseen, he scraped together the $1,000 down payment and mailed it to the owner. Then, early that summer, on impulse he loaded Dennis into his Maverick and the two drove cross-country to see the place.

Pointedly avoiding Utah, Ken went through Las
Vegas—where he stopped to gamble—then into Arizona and onto Interstate 40 through New Mexico, Texas, and Oklahoma before entering Arkansas at Fort Smith and heading to the cabin just outside the small Izzard County town of Mount Pleasant. Once they had arrived, Dennis irately recalled, Ken insisted on having sex with him: "He had both oral and anal sex with me there.
*
But at that time we were just beginning to drift apart, sort of like a man and wife after they've been married for a while. And the sex was slow in tapering off. At first it was maybe once a night. Then once a week. And then it would, maybe, stop for a week. Then it would go maybe three times a week. It was just sort of whenever he felt like it."

In early July of 1979 the
Ukiah Daily Journal
carried a story about the discovery of the bodies of a young teenage boy and girl in shallow graves in the dense redwood forest along Highway 20 about ten air miles from Comptche. A few days later, without telling anyone, Ken suddenly and inexplicably moved out of the mobile home, hooking up and loading his trailer before quickly driving off with Dennis and Queenie to an isolated caretaker's cabin on the unoccupied Mountain View Ranch in extremely remote southern
Mendocino County, fifty road miles from Comptche.
*

Dennis was very upset by the move. "Living in Comptche, I thought, 'Why not leave well enough alone?' I never wanted to leave there because I was happy. But then we moved. I was very upset. I cried all the way to the cabin when we moved."

Chapter Seven

Mountain View Ranch

"The man seemed to be really interested in the boy. "

The caretaker's cabin on the desolate, unoccupied Mountain View Ranch is twelve miles from the nearest community . . . twelve narrow, twisting, frequently wet, fog-shrouded miles of blacktop leading to California 1, the famed, scenic Coast Highway, and the small unincorporated coastal settlement of Manchester, home to a few hundred widely scattered residents, many of whose homes are surrounded by slanting cedar-tree windbreaks as they cling to windswept cliffs above the pounding Pacific surf. Four miles south and directly on Highway 1 is Point Arena, the commercial center for southwestern Mendocino County. With five hundred people and a slightly Bohemian character it boasts a handful of restaurants, two gas stations, a grocery store, a weekly newspaper, a picture show operating weekends only, a motel-lodge, and an eclectic assortment of small businesses besides the area's public schools. Thus it became the town most often visited
by Ken and Dennis after their move to the remote Mountain View Ranch.

The ranch is owned by the Stornetta brothers, Charlie, Leslie ("Duke"), and Bill, all over sixty and descendants of nineteenth-century Italian immigrants. The ranch's modest headquarters house sits vacant next to the caretaker's cabin on the infrequently traveled Boonville-to-Manchester roadway. However, in summer the brothers occasionally rotate stays there to escape the seasonal fog that smothers their main ranch house at the mouth of the Garcia River north of Point Arena.

As Ken drove down the coast from Comptche, Dennis asked about their new neighbors and was shocked to learn that there were none. They would be the only people living on the ranch's 4,400 acres of hilltop pasture, woodlands, and valleys. Turning off the Coast Highway they passed the homes of a dozen residents, the only people living along the road to the ranch save the hippies secreted back in the woods at the Land of Oz commune on the north fork of the Garcia River. For Dennis this desolation was confirmed as they approached the ranch through a bleak, uninhabited landscape of grass-covered hills, scattered cedars, scrub oaks, and occasional redwoods.

As Ken's tired, overburdened old Maverick wheezed pulling the trailer cargo of possessions and pets over the last hill, the teenager sadly drank in the forlorn expanse of gamma grass dotted occasionally by grazing sheep. When he saw the cabin he could hardly believe his eyes: they were going to live in a small, old, weather beaten wood cabin with faded streaks of white paint.

There was no drive, so Ken parked on the road's
shoulder. Dejectedly Dennis got out and waded through waist-high grass around the cabin with Parnell to carry their clothing and personal possessions into their "new" one-room home.

Immediately across the road Dennis spied the gray, heavily weathered old barn, adjacent sheep-shearing shed, and holding pens. But on the trip up from the coast Dennis had seen only one other car and the silence was almost deafening. As Dennis soon found out, he could count the day's total of cars and trucks passing the cabin on his fingers and toes.

Recalled Duke Stornetta, "I was looking for a caretaker because we had some thieves rob some stuff out of the barn. And I run into Louis Vinciguerra on Mountain View Road, up at the ranch, and he says, 'I would like to live there in that cabin.' So then he decides that he wasn't interested, but he said this fellow he knew in Comptche was looking for a place. So Parnell, he called me and made an appointment and met me at the ranch. He looked at me and says, 'Yes, this is just what we want. We have chickens, and we have rabbits, and I have a young boy. I'll start moving in.'

"When he came back with his belongings, he had Dennis with him, whom he introduced to me as his son, and they set up living there. I thought it was father and son all the time. The boy had a lot in common with his so-called father . . . both were quiet. They kept to themselves and they had few friends. They were just like drifters living there."