I Know My First Name Is Steven (33 page)

"I don't know that this is a case [where] they should have even allowed Steven to make the decision, because we're talking about a lot of other kids besides Steven. So there's a lot of finger pointing going on, and I'd like to point my finger at Mendocino County. The problem is, the sexual abuse did occur in their
jurisdiction. And sexual abuse ought to be a crime anywhere! But they didn't press Parnell, because if they had, Parnell would be in prison for another fifty years!"

Chapter Fourteen

Closure

"I fought too hard for those seven years to make it to give up now. "

In February of 1982, with the trials over, the news media's focus on Steve and his family moderated, but the teenager still had major problems to tackle, not the least of which was passing his classes so that he could graduate from Merced High School the next year. At first he missed classes for the interrogations by Merced Police and the Merced D.A.'s Office, then he was absent for appearances on
Good Morning America, The Today Show,
and other national and local television shows, and finally he had to be excused to testify at both trials, all of which added considerably to his already marked academic weaknesses. Furthermore, Del and Kay had still not decided whether they would treat their son as a seven-year-old—thereby trying to pick up where they had left off in 1972—or as an adolescent male standing on the very edge of manhood.

Compounding things for Steve was his parents' continuing opposition to his receiving professional counseling. Many family friends felt it reasonable that a boy kidnapped and forced to live for seven years as a pedophile's sex partner could not help but have serious psychological problems. But the fact that the whole family was not prepared emotionally for Steve's return and reintegration into their midst caused daily problems which, though not immediately evident, held major consequences for the family years later. "I've never talked to Steve about that," Cindy Stayner said, referring to Parnell's sexual assaults. " . . . People would ask me questions, and I had to tell them that I really didn't know. I never really talked to him . . .
no one
talked about
'it.
'My parents really wouldn't talk about
'it.' "

Since his return to Merced, Steve had maintained a reasonably good front . . . or so it appeared to those outside the family. But all was definitely not well, and most difficult for Steve was his inability to work through his feelings about those seven-plus years he spent with Ken Parnell as his "father". . . years he would have spent with his own family but which he had now lost forever.

Four years after coming home, while Steve traveled around Merced and Mendocino Counties being interviewed by the author, he spoke of a desire to meet with Parnell face to face, "to ask him why he ripped me off. People are always asking, 'What would you say to Parnell if you ever saw him?' . . . 'Do you have any feelings toward him?'

"I told them straight out: 'I spent seven years with him . . . he treated me well . . . he looked after me. I
thank him for keeping me alive.' And I am grateful to him for that.

"Then I went on to tell them that I hate him with a purple passion for stealing seven years of my life. The reason I said that is because when I got home my mom and dad, brother and sisters, told me about all the things that they did while I was gone. It's just that I hate him for stealing the time, the time that I would have been there and I would have had the experiences."

Steve characterized his relationship with Kenneth Parnell as a genuine love/hate relationship . . . one which he has never been able to resolve in his own mind and one which he never felt comfortable talking about with his parents.

One summer night in 1984 Steve tried to bring this up with his parents at the kitchen table and ended by telling Del and Kay that he wanted to go to Soledad Prison to talk with Ken. Del and Kay didn't even respond; they just stared off into space. Then, when they did begin to talk again, they pointedly ignored their son's statement as if he had never made it.

Therefore, the author understood when Steve prefaced many of his revelations about his relationship with Parnell with: "I'm going to tell you something, but don't say anything about it to my parents. Let them read it in the book."

When he returned home it was quite apparent to Steve's parents that his morality and personality had changed considerably during his seven-year odyssey with Parnell. Family members said he was much quieter and more reserved and tended to keep his own counsel more than had the seven-year-old who disap
peared in 1972. "Due to my experiences with Parnell, I like to be alone with my own thoughts. In fact, I do this a lot, like I did when I was with Parnell. I'm not as easy with other people."

As a seven-year-old, Stevie had been inseparable from Del; after his return home, they found themselves screaming angrily at each other almost daily. Steve's use of pot was the cause of many such quarrels, for that was one thing that Del refused to brook in his house. But Steve didn't want anybody, his own father included, telling him what to do. He wanted to smoke pot, drink beer and Jack Daniels, drive cars fast and recklessly, and stay out all night if and when it suited him. In short, Steve wanted to do what he wanted to do when he wanted to do it.

Later, when Steve turned eighteen and received the $25,000 TV-movie option money and the $15,000 reward for returning Timmy, there were rumors about Steve dallying with harder, more expensive drugs. Perhaps this accounted for the tremendous sums he occasionally withdrew from his bank account, as much as $1,000 in a single day, said Cindy, with nothing to show for it a day later. There were many who tried to get Steve to invest some of his money. But continued Cindy, "No, no, he had to take it all out and buy a car . . . blow it on his friends. It was gone in three months!" To Steve's credit, he did loan Del $2,000 for Cindy's wedding.

Cars—to be exact, three of them in less than a year—were a passion for Steve, but he wound up wrecking two of them. "When I was sixteen—just two weeks after I got my license—I wrecked one of my cars when I hit a parked car. I got charged with making an illegal lefthand
turn. And I've gotten all kinds of speeding tickets . . . maybe about ten. I just can't remember all of them."

When word got around Merced that Steve had been sexually assaulted by Parnell, most people failed to understand that it had been forced on Steve. Steve remarked that some asked, "Is Steve gay?" while others maliciously went around telling his classmates, "Steve
is
gay," and "Steve
let
Parnell do that stuff to him!" This provoked brother Cary, sisters Cindy and Jody, and many of his classmates to run interference for him, Steve happily recalling one incident at Merced High School: "I heard one guy say I was queer, and he almost got his ass beat. . . not by me, but the whole class got up and was ready to take him on. Having that happen felt good enough to make me forget what the guy said!"

Heterosexually, Steve hit the ground running when he returned home. In 1984 he bragged that as a fifteen-year-old in 1980 he had had scores of girls clamoring to date him. Also, he shyly told about his first heterosexual intercourse, right after his fifteenth birthday. "She was the same age. It happened in the rocket at Applegate Park. They have a little rocket. . . well, it's not a little rocket . . . it's a rocket that you climb on. Straight up to the top there's a little cone. And you sit there and there's a little steering wheel. I used to climb that when I was little.

"So we went up there—me and Liz—and it was kind of funny. The sucker was not very stable, either. So . . . it was quite late, actually . . . and it was her first time, too. There was a little bit of awkwardness for her, and there was a little for me, too, in the way to approach
it.
And at the time I didn't think anything about what had happened to me with Parnell. I was just concerned about what was going on right there. And when we started doing it, that rocket started wobbling back and forth. That was funny!"

But it was a one-night stand for the pair, Steve saying that he had his first, serious relationship later with a girl named Laura. They had a very close, very active relationship, Steve remembered, but the on-again, off-again variety. "We were supposed to [get] married .. . but I broke up with her. [She claimed] she was pregnant three times, but I tossed her off like a wet rag, literally. I mean, I didn't care. It was really easy to do that. It's just something I can do." But deep inside it was an apprehensive Steve who went from girl to girl and did everything he could to allay the disturbing local rumors about his sexuality.

At eighteen, shortly after finishing his senior year in high school—without graduating, because he had failed several courses—Steve moved from home into a rented house trailer (which he shared with his cousin, David Higgins) in a mobile home park in At-water, a town of 20,000, ten miles northwest of Merced. There Steve enjoyed his first true independence since his return to Merced. By then he had gone through the entire $40,000 he had received and had nothing but his dinged, dented gold Pontiac Trans-Am to show for it. So he went to work in a meat-packing plant, bagging hamburger for fast-food restaurants, and spent his spare time completing his high school General Equivalency Diploma.

In 1984 Steve still frequently smoked marijuana, but by then he had given up alcohol. As a high school
senior he suffered a potentially fatal reaction to a drinking bout, serious enough to tear his stomach lining, cause severe internal bleeding, and require hospitalization for several days. This scared him so badly that he swore off beer, wine, and hard liquor, although his one-to-two-pack-a-day cigarette habit continued.

Cory—eleven when Steve returned and thirteen when he moved out—missed him terribly as she grew into adolescence. In June 1984 Cory told the author that she wished Steve would come to see her more often, though during her softball team's season that summer Steve attended several of her games and thus made this adoring youngest sister very happy. After one of those games Steve drove Cory home and then sat with her at the kitchen table and with genuine brotherly concern and interest rehashed the game's high points with her. After he left, Cory lamented, "We all have a lot of laughs when we're all together, but now it's getting where everybody is just going and growing and we never have the time together that we used to have."

Before she knew about the sex assaults her brother had suffered, Cory said, "I used to just feel like going up to Parnell and saying, 'Thank you for keeping my brother alive and healthy.' " But now that she knows about the assaults, she says, "Somebody that does that must be insane. I mean, they are sick! And they should be somewhere where they are not around somebody that they could do that to."

In June 1984, on a trip to Mendocino County with the author to retrace his life there, Steve ran into a rude, obnoxious man who knew who Steve was and had the audacity to approach him and ask that he tell
him all about the sex acts Parnell had committed on him. Admirably, Steve firmly but politely declined to do so, and as we drove away, Steve commented: "He's the first one that's ever come right out and asked like that. . . nobody ever asks anything sexual." But Steve did admit that whenever the subject of homosexuality comes up, he feels himself quickly building up walls deep inside.

During his first two years back at home, Steve exhibited behavior that upset his grandfather, Bob Augustine, who remembered his grandson as a nice, courteous, active boy; but on Steve's return he saw a sarcastic, discourteous, disrespectful stranger. Said Bob in 1984, "He is simmering down a bit now. He seems to be normal. . . anyway, I've learned to accept it. He was a good kid before, and he is still a good kid. I'm just curious as to how much harm has been done."

Kay talked with the author about pedophiles who just sexually assault their victims (as opposed to the rare ones who kill them). "Because of Steve's abilities, it wasn't him [who was killed]. His whole make-up is probably why he survived . . . 'cause he is a survivor. And he has the ability to put up this wall, and I can see him doing that. I know he does it. And if that's what it takes to survive, it's the thing to do.

"I think that maybe we did a good job of raising Steve so that he was malleable, you know, he was the type of kid who, when he was presented with a set of circumstances, he just lived with them. You don't become unglued just because things aren't going the
way you want them to go. Maybe that's how come he's a survivor.

"I've wondered about whether or not Steve was just the lucky one, and if there were others that just never made it."

"All I know is that it wasn't me that was killed, and I'm thankful," Steven said. "I'm sorry that stuff like that does happen, but to be realistic, it's been happening since the dawn of time. Some people may think that it's something new, but it's just. . .
I know better. "

Finally, summing it all up, Steve said: "But I think that my survival has a lot to do with the way I was raised the first seven years of my life. And I can't let what happened to me with Parnell get to me. I fought too hard for those seven years to make it to give it up now."

In June of 1985 Steven married Jody Lynn Edmonson, the woman he'd met the summer before, in a private Mormon service in Atwater, California. Del, Kay, Cary, Cindy, Jody, Cory, and Steven's new wife's parents and grandparents were in attendance. In December that same year Jody gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Ashley. In May of 1987 Jody delivered their second child, a son they named Steven Gregory Stayner II. They call him Stevie.

For a while Steve worked as a self-employed landscaper while he dreamed of becoming a deputy sheriff. A happily married young couple, he and Jody lived briefly in his old home on Bette Street, where Steven's scrawled signature is still visible on the garage wall.

In 1986, over Easter weekend, the entire Stayner family camped out at Lake Shasta in northern Cali
fornia. "It was sorta' like old times," Steve remarked happily.