Transcript for Steven Stayner’s abduction changes family’s life forever: Part 2
?????? December 4th, 1972. Steven Stayner was abducted on highway 140 in the city of Merced by individuals driving in an older-model white buick. And they’re driving east, towards yosemite. Parnell lives most of his life in yosemite, in the lodge. He kept Steven in his room for about a week after that. He kept giving him this cough syrup to sedate him. I think that parnell felt that the more confused and sedated that he could keep Steven in for the first several weeks, the better chance he stood to erase his connection back to his own family. When Steven didn’t make it home from school, his parents immediately were alerted. Merced was the lead police department, and so they really mounted a large effort to search. And they searched. And there was just nothing there. It happened here at this corner and it was such a classic situation. The kind against which parents are constantly warning their children. Next morning, there was an empty desk in the class at Charles Wright school. When he was missing, it rocked the Stayner family.ab??a un it hurt the family dynamic. And it crushed del Stayner. He just becomes a broken man, really. Kay becomes even more distant, more aloof. She’s sort of raising her children almost robotically. Kay and Delbert became colder to their other children. Cary was very upset. I heard stories about him going out and wishing on a star, that his brother would come home. Maybe he had some guilt, because I believe he was supposed to have been with his brother. Delbert kind of saw Steven as his real son, and Cary kind of felt abandoned, neglected. A few weeks after he kidnapped Steven, parnell pulled up stakes and he started drifting around California. They moved first to Santa Rosa. They would stay in fleabag motels, a crappy trailer or a broken down house. Steven Stayner had a new father figure, and it was Kenneth parnell, who, by day, was his father, and by night was his rapist. Parnell told him that his name was gonna be Dennis parnell, and he enrolled him in school. And the school failed to get the records. Those were the days where you’d get a copy of a record. You know, there was no e-mail. In the summer of 1976, it’s been four years since Steven was told Ken parnell was his father. Parnell and Steven ended up in the little town of comptche, California, which is in mendocino county. Comptche was really tiny. It had maybe a post office and a general store. And he kept him on the grounds in a trailer. So this is where Ken parnell used to live many years ago. It’s a good place to hide. It’s a long ways from anywhere out here. Nobody knew what was going on behind closed doors, and that this wasn’t a father and son at all. By this time, I’m pretty certain that parnell felt I’ve got him emotionally locked in. So he knew this kid was going nowhere. From all outward appearances, he’d adjusted to his new life. There was no school out there, so every day he had to get on a bus and ride for 30 minutes. This picture just describes what he looked like. His personality, his hairdo, his flannel shirt, his smile. My name is Lori and Steven Stayner was my boyfriend in high school. He was spunky. You could see that he wanted to play and be with kids and be Normal. Growing up with him consisted of a lot of fishing, riding bicycles. He sort of reminded me of shaggy from “Scooby-” he had the same haircut and same shape of face. He made his way into getting into athletics in his freshman year of high school. He had a level of maturity to him that most of the kids didn’t have, and I think part of that was, you know, he was already smoking cigarettes. A lot of kids had freedom, but not his kind of come and go as he pleased. Which makes me wonder, why didn’t he just leave? The answer is that Steven now has attached to parnell on some parental level, and that’s still his dependency day in and day out for food, clothing. And let’s face it. It sounds like parnell basically let him do whatever he wanted to do as far as drugs, alcohol. And so his comfort level now has set in. Because of the sexual abuse, I think that played into it, too. He knew that wasn’t Normal. I don’t think that he wanted to have other people know about it. In some ways, it was just easier to go along with what was happening to him. Steven still has a reality that he has a real family someplace else. We were walking home and he started crying. He said, “I want to go home to my real home.” We just let it go. We had been drinking some beer and, you know, kids. While Steven is a freshman at mendocino high school, some 300 miles to the south, his brother Cary was an upperclassman at Merced high school. He was Cary Stayner, the kid who had his brother kidnapped. There was a pall over him. He was actually voted most creative. Cary was very well known for his drawings. I think he was a very, very good cartoonist, especially with the humor. He would always wear a hat, every time you would see him. He was wearing a hat because he was compulsively pulling his hair out. Emotionally, Cary had a tough time during his childhood. I don’t remember Cary ever having a girlfriend, and I never saw him with a girl. Cary started acting wildly inappropriately towards females. He exposed himself to one of his sister’s friends. It seemed as though he had a compulsion with trying to get close to women or be sexual with them. But he was unable to develop any sort of interpersonal relationships with any women. There’s a surreal contrast in this. You have one brother who’s been subjected to just unspeakable horror for years, but by all appearances he’s a happy-go-lucky, jovial kid with a girlfriend. You have the other brother who’s left at home. And it wasn’t that he was just a loner. He was a bit of a creepy loner. So, in 1979, Steven’s now 14, he’s been with parnell for seven years, and parnell then moves him to a very new, remote location. Then he can, in his mind, stay one step in front of law enforcement. Ken parnell takes Steven to this small, little town called Manchester, kind of along the coast of northern California. Ken is looking for another prepubescent boy. Steven knew what was gonna happen. And Steven knew that that was wrong. And he was gonna end that. What Steven would do in response would make him world famous.
This transcript has been automatically generated and may not be 100% accurate.
