I Know My First Name Is Steven: The Abduction of Steven Stayner

True Crime Campfire

In classic literature—and in soap operas, too—there are a lot of families who become lightning rods for misfortune. Sometimes it really strains your suspension of disbelief—like, come on, one family could never go through this much tragedy. But every now and then, a family just seems to be haunted by something sinister. From February through July of 1999, the bodies of four women turned up around Yosemite National Park in California—all brutally murdered and mutilated. The killer was a handsome, likable guy named Cary Stayner, who confessed to the four murders once they had him in custody, and is suspected of quite a few more. And during his confession, the investigators realized why his name had seemed familiar to them. Cary was the brother of Steven Stayner, kidnapped by a pedophile in 1972, forced to change his name to Dennis and held captive for years, until one night in 1980 when he walked into a police station and said, “I know my first name is Steven.” That case captured the world, with books and documentaries covering Steven’s years-long ordeal and the courage of his escape. Now, nearly 20 years later, the Stayner family was once again in the throes of a nightmare. Would Cary have become a serial killer if his brother had never been kidnapped, or was that evil always lurking inside him? It’s a Shakespearean tragedy of a story, and we’ll be telling it in two parts. This is part one--the abduction of Steven Stayner.
Big thanks to Mike Moran of the Confessional Podcast for doing much of the work/research on this one!
Sources:
All That's Interesting: https://allthatsinteresting.com/steven-stayner
Wikipedia: Kenneth Parnell
The Crime Reel: Part 1 of 2: Steven Stayner. The Troubled Lives of the Stayner Brothers
Casefile (podcast): Ep. 154, Steven Stayner
This Is Monsters (podcast): The Story of Kenneth Parnell, the Kidnapping of Steven Stayner
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