He passed, allowing investigators to turn their attention back to Modesto, where the wallet was found.
Meth addicts in the focus
Nestled in the Yosemite Valley, Modesto has a high volume of drug users, and for some reason serves as a magnet for early parolees who gravitate to the city after they are released from prison.
It was not so far-fetched, then, for authorities to think that Carole and the girls might have seen something they shouldn’t have, and paid for it with their lives.
At least it would not have been, if they had not last been seen headed to room 509 with video-taped movies in their hands. And it would be there that they would meet someone much more dangerous than a Modesto drug dealer, particularly because he didn’t look like a monster.
Chapter 4: February 15’s hours of horror
At around 11 p.m., Cary Stayner knocked on the door of room 509, interrupting a relaxing evening for Carole Sund, her daughter Juli and their Argentinian exchange student Silvina Pelosso. Unbeknownst to them, he was carrying a backpack filled with duct tape, rope, a knife and a gun in his hand.
He told Sund, who initially didn’t open the door for Stayner, despite his having identified himself as the motel handyman, there was a leak in the room above them and he wanted to check for any water dripping from the ceiling.
Sund checked the bath and reported no leak, but Stayner persisted, and eventually she let him in.
He spent a minute or two in the bathroom before emerging with his gun.
He told the trio that he had only come to rob them, and bound and gagged them with the duct tape he’d also hidden in the backpack containing his murder kit.
He put the two girls in the bathroom, then strangled Carole Sund with a rope while she was lying on the bed.
“I didn’t realize how hard it is to strangle a person,” Stayner said later in his taped confession. “It’s not easy. I had very little feeling. It was like performing a task.”
He dragged Sund’s body outside and placed it in the trunk of the rented Pontiac Grand Prix, then went back into the motel room where the two girls waited.
He cut the girls’ clothes off and tried to get them to perform sex acts on each other, but Silvina could not stop crying.
Stayner said he became so irritated by her sobs that he took her into the bathroom and strangled her while she knelt in the bathtub.
Although at one point Stayner said that none of his victims had been sexually assaulted, he then raped Juli both in the family’s motel room and the room next door, toward the end just forcing his flaccid penis into her mouth, gagging her as he struggled to regain his erection.
He then turned his focus to the crime scene.
After stuffing Silvina in the trunk with Carole Sund, Stayner packed up the trio’s belongings so it would appear as though they had left without stopping to check out.
“It felt like I was in control for the first time in my life,” said Stayner, who thoroughly cleaned up the crime scene, wiping his hairs from the bedsheet to remove any trace of his time in the room.
He left wet towels behind so that later, motel workers would think the three had showered and checked out.
Bad romance
At about 4 a.m., five hours after the ordeal had begun, Stayner carried Juli, naked and wrapped in a motel blanket – the only clue Stayner would leave that would tie the incident to the motel room - to the front seat of the Pontiac, where she was oblivious that her mother and friend were dead in the trunk.
While he drove along the Merced River Canyon, he removed the duct tape from Juli’s mouth and the two made “small talk,” he later said in his confession.
“I didn’t know where I was going or what I was doing,” he said. “I just kept driving and driving.”
Just before dawn, Stayner turned off the two-lane road at Lake Don Pedro and carried Juli to a clearing that overlooked the water, comparing it to a husband carrying his new bride over the threshold.
“She was a very likable girl,” he said. “She was very calm. I told her I wished I could keep her.”
Instead, he raped her again, “told her I loved her,” and slit her throat, driving the knife so deeply into her throat that he almost severed her head.
He hid Juli’s body in some brush and drove the car — with the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso in the trunk — as far as he could into the forest.
He then called a cab back to Yosemite Valley, paying the $150 fare for the 90-mile trip with money he’d stolen from Carole Sund’s purse.
The cab driver, Jenny Paul, later remembered her passenger, who’d asked to be driven to Yosemite Lodge, where his younger brother’s abductor had once worked, and the strange conversation they’d had along the way.
“Do you believe in Bigfoot?” her passenger asked.
When she told him “no,” he responded, “You should. Because he’s real.”
He might as well have been talking about the bogeyman.
Hiding the evidence
For the FBI agents, the main focus was initially the missing Grand Prix, which about the same time Jens was calling park rangers to let them know his wife was missing, Stayner was dousing with gasoline and setting on fire.
To further throw investigators off his trail, he then drove to Modesto, where he tossed Carole Sund’s wallet into the street, leading them down the wrong trail for at least a month.
Meanwhile, the family offered a reward that led to new, albeit false, leads.
“I just hope that somebody out there seeing this information on the television calls,” said the family, which offered a $250,000 reward for any information into the disappearance, and later upped the reward to $300,000.
Sister Gina, 13, read a poem at a gathering in Modesto: “Deep in my heart I know something my mind does not want to learn. I try to stay strong because I know that’s what you’d want your baby to be, but, Mommy, I don't want you to leave me.”
“When something like this happens, you have no idea what to do,” said Carole’s father, Francis Carrington. “It almost becomes like an obsession, you have to find out what went on.”
FBI agents, who nicknamed the case “TourNap,” short for tourist kidnappings, tossed around a few theories, and Jeff Rinek focused on Wells Fargo bank records, in part because someone using Carole Sund’s Social Security number had made suspicious calls to Carole’s bank in hopes of withdrawing some money.
Rinek attempted to trace the calls, which he hoped were a true lead in the case.
It was almost a month into the investigation, and authorities knew it was unlikely that a car accident had claimed the lives of the three women.
“We feel almost certain that the women were the victims of a violent crime,” said FBI special investigator James Maddock. “We are now focusing on one theory that we believe to be the most likely scenario.”
In one of the things the bureau actually got right in the investigation of the Sund-Pelosso disappearance, they believed that the crime occurred at or near the Cedar Lodge, and they ramped up efforts to find any available clues.
While no one from the motel recalled seeing anything out of the ordinary the night the women disappeared, they couldn’t discount it.
Employees at the El Portal lodge – including Stayner, who took the FBI on a tour of the place to do a count of the pink blankets – were questioned.
Two employees, including one reportedly seen changing the lock on the door to Carole Sund’s room the day of their disappearance, were given polygraph tests, and although one of the two failed his test, there was no evidence to link him to the crime, and it didn’t progress further.
Stayner, who according to one point expressed frustration over the FBI’s intense hunt for the three women, and asked “Why didn't the FBI ever search for my brother?” - was not even on the radar as far as FBI agent were concerned.
Even as Francis Carrington was feeling shivers run up his spine when he caught Stayner’s eye, the FBI saw nothing off about the
handyman, and he was quickly ruled out as a suspect.
“Stayner looks like any normal person, like talking to a neighbor,” reporter Ted Rowlands said. “He looks completely normal.”
Of course, he was anything but.
Chapter 5: A gruesome discovery
About a month after they went missing, a hiker discovered the incinerated Grand Prix, which was identified by a partial bit of license plate. A purse containing a credit card, two cameras with undeveloped film and a receipt from the Cedar Lodge restaurant detailing the trio’s last meal.
When the hiker reported the find, Francis and Carole Carrington had just walked into the FBI office, and heard agents take the call.
“The vehicle was parked on a downhill embankment off of what looked to be some kind of old forestry road, an old logging road,” said Tim Reed of the Tuolumne County Sheriff’s Department, adding that although it was only a short distance from the road, it was obscured by foliage growth that made it impossible to spot from the road.
“When the car becomes located, that’s when everything changes,” said Rinek. “Then you just get this bad feeling, hoping against hope that it’s not what you think it is.”
When investigators opened the trunk, they found two badly burned bodies, although both dental records and DNA tests would be required to identify the bodies.
The location suggested that the area was well known to the killer.
“The FBI...believes that the killer knows the area of abandoned gold mines well enough to hide the car off a spur road where locals dump old refrigerators, cars and washing machines,” according to Newsweek magazine. “And well enough to know that the smell of a burning car would likely not attract attention because the air often reeks from people burning their garbage. Unsettled locals are starting to whisper about possible murderers in their midst.”
For the family, the find, while not totally unexpected, was a nightmare.
“This announcement, however prepared you think you are, it’s still extremely hard,” said Francis Carrington after the bodies were identified as Carole and Silvina. “We thought we were prepared, and of course, we weren’t. The shock really hit us hard. You feel so helpless.”
The family showed photos from the roll of film – pictures of the trio’s vacation including a photo taken of Carole and one of the girls sitting on their beds in their hotel room at about 10:30 p.m. on Feb. 15 - as they waited for news about Juli.
A move made in true serial killer fashion
Meanwhile, Stayner was growing cocky.
And like many serial killers - some of whom will turn up at crime scenes, a face in the background keeping an eye on the investigation, while others sending chilling note after note like the notorious Happy Face Killer, Keith Hunter Jesperson, who was responsible for the deaths of at least 8 women - he sent police a letter telling them where to find Juli Sund’s body.
It included a map detailing where the body was located, along with the words, “We had fun with this one,” another attempt to throw police off the trail by implying more than one person participated in the crime. Later, police would learn that Stayner also paid someone $5 to spit in a cup so he would not leave his own DNA on the envelope.
“Most bad guys don’t want their victims found,” said Hopkins. “Now we have the offender telling us where to go to find the third victim, and so that was very interesting behavior on his part to help us, meaning that he had some sort of affinity for this victim.”
Police and FBI agents followed the map, along with cadaver dogs, and found Juli’s body beneath a vast blue sky, leaning against a yucca tree, grass and leaves partially covering her up.
Stayner’s cousin, Kathy Amey, watched the news reports with growing horror.
“You want to know why,” she said. “Why did you take such an innocent life, someone so full of life? I remember saying several times ‘I hope that they find the monster that’s responsible.’”
She had no idea the it would be someone she was so wary of as a child, the teen cousin whose strange, overly-sexualized behavior made her check the shades and the locks every time she went into the bathroom.
With new evidence in hand, the FBI and local police focused attention on the letter. There was a partial fingerprint, as well as a very high concentration of DNA on the flap of the envelope, which after testing suggested it was of Hispanic origins.
It was also something to throw them off the trail, despite the pink fibers found on Juli’s body that returned their attention to the pink blankets on the beds at Cedar Lodge.
Talk of the town
There was a lot of talk about the murders in the Yosemite area - How could there not be, after all? - including at the Cedar Lodge.
There, the bartender didn’t hesitate to say what she thought should happen to the person who’d killed the three visitors.
“They should take him and tie him to the back of a truck,” said Darla Zeke. “And then they should drag him along the road until his flesh gets all chewed up and his skin gets torn off, and then let the maggots go to work on him.”
“Yeah,” said Stayner over his rum and Coke. “Yeah, they should do that.”
It was all just regular conversation, and no one imagined that the killer was sitting alongside them, working with them, drinking with them and talking about the crime.
Following the wrong lead, chasing the wrong suspects
With no real clues in the motel room aside from a missing blanket and pillow case, there just wasn’t much for the FBI to go on.
“Nobody ever came up with the one piece of evidence that convinced us we were on the right track, so this was a real whodunit,” said one frustrated agent.
Meanwhile, investigators began rounding up locally-known criminals from the Modesto area where Carole’s wallet was found, incarcerating them on various parole violations in hopes of locking up the killer at the same time.
According to the Fresno Bee, they focused most intently on four people:
Michael “Mick” Larwick, 42, of Modesto, a known meth user from Modesto who grew up near the site where the car containing the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso was found. He was in jail after shooting a Modesto police officer, leading to a 14-hour standoff. His criminal record was a long one, but Larwick denied having anything to do with the Yosemite murders.
Eugene “Rufus” Dykes, 32, also of Modesto and Larwick’s half-brother. He was also arrested in March, and had a criminal record that includes sex crimes and weapons convictions. Although he originally denied any involvement in the murders, later, in hopes of cutting a deal related to other charges, he falsely implicated himself in the Cedar Lodge murders, and said he and his half-brother had abducted the three women from Room 509.
Billy Joe Strange, 39, an El Portal parolee who worked at the Cedar Lodge lounge and restaurant. He was arrested when he reported to his parole officer with alcohol on his breath, but denied any involvement in the triple homicide. The FBI wanted Strange arrested in the case.
Darrell Gray Stephens, 55, Strange's roommate. Stephens had a 1978 conviction for rape and robbery, and was arrested for failing to register as a sex offender. He also denied any involvement in the incident.
The FBI was fairly certain that they had their murderer behind bars, and said as much in an announcement to the general public.
To reporters, the FBI said acrylic fibers found near Juli Sund’s body and analyzed at the FBI lab in Washington linked both Larwick and Dykes to the case. Self-incriminating statements made by Dykes and a lack of an alibi for both men cemented the theory.
In June the chief of the FBI's Sacramento office, James M. Maddock, confidently announced that “we have all of the main players in jail, but we are in no rush to charge them.”
Rinek, on the other hand, was not so sure.
He was hesitant to look to the Modesto list for their suspect, and had a feeling that authorities were headed in the wrong direction.
He said as much to his supervisor, and
in response, he was soon replaced as head of the case, in part, Maddock said, because of his messy paperwork.
Rinek nearly quit his job in frustration, but later – when Cary Stayner made mistakes and was ultimately pegged for the murders – he would be very glad he didn’t.
A handful of other people were arrested including Rachel Lou Campbell, 36, of Modesto, who was arrested on charges of theft totaling $365,000. When she was arrested, she had Carol Sund’s checking account and ATM numbers, which suggested to the FBI that she was connected to the crime.
“They basically told the public, ‘Don’t be worried, we’re confident the people who were behind the Yosemite murders are behind bars,’” Rowlands said.
The two meth addicts – one of whom had confessed to the crime – were still the prime suspects, and they were locked up tight.
And that might have been what later would allow Joie Armstrong to let down her guard and talk to Stayner about his Bigfoot sighting.
Chapter 6: Stayner’s last victim fought hard to survive
At 26, Joie Ruth Armstrong was living a life many of us only dream about.
The redhead worked at Yosemite Institute, teaching kids about nature, and was living with her boyfriend-turned-fiancé, Michael Raffaeli, and another friend at Yosemite National Park.
It was a busy time of the year as the days headed more deeply into summer, and life was busy for Armstrong, who led children on nature hikes, and helped them develop the same deep love and appreciation for the natural world that she herself shared.
“I love it here in this house,” she wrote to her friend Kim Fox in Florida earlier in the summer, according to Outside Magazine. The two women had met while both attended neighboring high schools, and had become fast friends.
True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology) Page 36