True Crime Stories Volume 4: 12 Shocking True Crime Murder Cases (True Crime Anthology)

by Jack Rosewood

  Once they arrived at Laguna del Sol, the manager – waiting at the gate – directed them to the restaurant where Stayner was eating.

  While many of the other patrons were nude, Stayner was dressed in a short-sleeved shirt, shorts and his often-present baseball cap, and according to Rinek, looked just like Tom Laughlin in the 1971 movie “Billy Jack.”

  When Stayner realized the FBI was there, he stood up and put his hands over his head, said Rinek, which was odd behavior for someone who was just being questioned.

  On a formality, Rinek read Stayner his rights, then they headed back to FBI headquarters.

  “All we knew is that we were to retain him for interview, so I offered to drive him there, then drive him back to Laguna del Sol when he was done,” Rinek said.

  As they drove, Rinek realized he recognized Stayner’s name, and remembered then the abduction of Steven Stayner. He asked Stayner if he could ask about his brother, and Stayner agreed.

  The conversation, Rinek later said, was relaxed as they drove back to the office in El Portal.

  “During the car ride, something happened with Cary Stayner and Jeff Rinek in terms of developing some sort of significant rapport and bonding,” said Hopkins. “They developed some sort of trust between the two of them.”

  When they got there, Stayner posed for mug shots, his arms folded in front of him, his skin tan from lounging beneath the California sun.

  “Somebody asked me if I thought that he did it, and ‘I said, naw, this guy couldn’t be it,” said photographer Steve Grube. “’This guy’s too nice a guy.’”

  Because they had arrested Stayer before he’d had a chance to finish his breakfast, they ordered a pizza.

  Both the pizza and the person who was set to administer a polygraph test arrived at the same time, and Rinek asked Stayner which he would rather do first.

  Stayner asked if they could skip the polygraph, and asked Rinek if the two of them could talk alone.

  “That began the what in the wide, wide world of sports is going on?” Rinek later said.

  Stayner then dropped a bombshell.

  “I feel like I’m a bad person,” he told Rinek. “I feel like I’ve done bad things.”

  And after taking a bite of what he said would likely be his last delivery pepperoni pizza, Stayner started talking.

  It was as if a floodgates of sorts had opened, and as investigators interrogated Cary Stayner, his horrifying story came tumbling out, a twisted tale of nonchalant murder, committed almost on the fly even as he described the incidents as years of fantasy come to life.

  Initially he had intended to kill his girlfriend and her daughters, one 8, the other 11, he said, a crime he’d planned for the day after Valentine’s Day, but when a caretaker showed up unexpectedly at the 10-acre property where they lived, he chickened out, he said.

  He had already packed his murder kit, however – a backpack filled with items including a rope, a roll of black duct tape, a gun and a long, serrated knife – and although it would be a year before his desire to kill again simmered to the surface, it was there, reminding of his need to use it.

  When Carole and Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso checked into the Cedar Lodge, then settled into their remote room in a section of the lodge that otherwise was empty, the vulnerable women were too delectable for Stayner to resist.

  “Well, it is so weird, Jeff,” he said. “I love life so much. I can breathe, I can wake up and see the sun. I like my friends. I can’t tell you why this happened. One minute I’m thinking great thoughts and world peace and the next minute it is like I could kill every person on the face of the earth.”

  He talked about his drive to Yosemite to search for Bigfoot, and told him that we he ran into Joie Armstrong instead, he decided to abduct her.

  He told them about his conversations with Joie Armstrong about his Bigfoot sighting before he pulled his gun on her and forced her into her house.

  “Initially, investigators thought it was a crime of passion because it had been so personal,” said Stacy Finz, a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle who wrote extensively about the case, “but later came to the conclusion that it was because he was angry at how hard she had fought him.”

  “He then told Rinek that he would tell investigators about his role in the Sund-Pelosso murders, as long as they met a few of his conditions.

  He would talk, Stayner said, if he was housed in a federal penitentiary near Merced and if his parents were given the reward money offered by the family of his Cedar Lodge victims. He also wanted what he called a “good-size stack” of child pornography, including photos and videos, especially children who had been involved in crime scenes.

  “It’s very sick, I realize that,” Stayner said. “Maybe because I never got to see it, these (killings) happened.”

  The agents said no to all three requests, but Stayner still talked.

  He told them about his packed murder kit, which he had at the ready because “he was looking forward” to using it.

  He got his chance when he saw Carole Sund and the two girls through the window of room 509.

  “I didn't see a man in the room, so they were vulnerable. Easy prey,” Stayner said. “I went back to my room and got my backpack with my kit.”

  Before he knocked on their door, however, he knocked on the doors surrounding their room – “to desensitize them to the knock on their door,” he said.

  “Before I knocked on their door, I was knocking on the doors around their door,” he said. To the imaginary patrons, he’d yell “Maintenance,” then would open the doors, walk in, wait a few minutes and slam the door loudly enough that Carole Sund and the girls might hear.

  “Then I finally ended up at theirs.”

  Listening with rising horror

  The conversation continued, but Rinek’s head was buzzing with the realization that he had been right all along – that the Modesto meth users had nothing to do with the case, aside from the fortuitous find of Carole’s Social Security card from the wallet Stayner had tossed away to throw them off the track.

  Being right, though, was little consolation.

  Joie Armstrong might not have been dead if his direct supervisors, including Maddock, had taken his protests seriously.

  He turned his attention back to Stayner’s macabre story.

  “I knock on their door. (Carole Sund) opened up the curtain and looked out,” Stayner said. “I told her we have a water leak problem. She didn’t wanna let me in. I said, ‘OK, no problem, ma’am, I'll just get the manager and we’ll relocate you to another room.’ Then she agreed to let me in.”

  Rinek asked Stayner if he forced his way in, but he maintained his handyman role, first walking into the bathroom and checking for the imaginary leak.

  “I walked in there, made it look authentic,” he said. “I was walking out of the bathroom. That's when I pulled the gun out.”

  He told the three women he needed to get out of the country, and needed their car and all their money.

  He then talked about casually strangling Carole Sund before hiding her body and torturing the two teenage girls.

  “I put Juli on the bed and the Pelosso girl on the other bed and cut their clothes off,” he said over pepperoni pizza that had long grown cold. “There was a lot of little pieces of cloth on the carpet.”

  They then drove to Lake Don Pedro, where Stayner carried Juli out of the car to the spot above the water.

  “I wished I could keep her,” Stayner told Rinek. “I took the knife out of my back pocket. I bunched her hair up in a ponytail on top of her head and pulled her head back and told her I loved her and I slit her throat."

  Juli didn't die immediately, and Stayner said she motioned for him to finish the job.

  Rinek then asked Stayner if he felt any emotions during the killings.

  “There really wasn't any -- very little feeling,” he said with a sigh. “I had no feeling.”

  Instead, Stayner said he felt in control.

&nbs
p; “I just felt like I had a little more power for once,” he said.

  Tricks up his sleeve

  Stayner unleashed his power in numerous ways.

  Before he sent the letter and map to help FBI agents find the body of Juli Sund, he said he paid a kid $5 to spit in a container so he could use the saliva to seal the envelope.

  “He had watched these crime forensic shows,” said Finz, “and knew that it was a good way to put somebody else’s DNA into the mix.”

  “Everything we recovered from the anonymous letter was staged,” said Hopkins. “The only thing on the envelope that belonged to the offender was the fingerprint.”

  As he talked, Stayner told Rinek he was probably going to get the death penalty.

  Rinek agreed that it was a real possibility, then made a promise to Stayner that in return for his confession, he would drive to his parents’ home to tell them the news of their son’s arrest, so they wouldn’t have to hear it on the evening news.

  “The one thing I don’t want them to see you as is the type of person that would take Steven and hold him for those years,” he told Stayner after the grueling interrogation was over. “You are not like those people. Those people had no conscience -- they didn’t do what you are doing.”

  Shock, surprise and sorrow

  With Stayner’s confession in hand, the FBI backtracked, then, making a public announcement about Stayner’s role in not only Armstrong’s death, but also the Sund-Pelosso murders.

  “During the last 24 hours, we have developed specific information linking Stayner to the Sund-Pelosso murders,” FBI agent James Maddock announced, months too late to save the life of Joie Armstrong. “Whether he is solely responsible or whether others were involved is an issue we'll resolve as quickly as we can in light of the information we've received in the past 48 hours.”

  He was asked if he felt the FBI could have prevented Armstrong’s killing, and Maddock said, “I've struggled with that issue for the last 24 hours and continue to do so. I'm confident we've done everything that could be done. I look forward to the day when I can share the details of the investigations from start to finish.”

  Not everyone would be so sure, including the disillusioned Jeff Rinek.

  Remembering Cary Stayner

  As the news of Stayner’s arrest got out around the Merced and Yosemite area, there was a lot of talk by those who knew him, usually coupled with surprise.

  He was normal, friends and neighbors later said, although a bit quiet and somewhat of a loner.

  “I knew both of them. I’d play basketball with them, hang out with them,” said Tim Tatum of Cory and his late brother Steven. “Cary was pretty much a loner. He did his own thing. He smoked cigarettes. He stayed away from most of the other kids.”

  The description is echoed by Stayner's co-workers and friends at the Cedar Lodge after their former colleague was arrested.

  “He seemed like a nice guy. He would joke around with us workers, but he was also kind of quiet,” said Albert Sanchez, who worked with Stayner on a month-long gardening project in the months before the murders. “I don't think he did it. In the little time I worked with him, he just seemed like a regular person.”

  According to Jesse Houtz, co-owner of Cedar Lodge, Stayner would hang out at the bar, usually drinking a rum and coke, but wasn’t really the life of the party.

  “He’s a nice guy. He’s never caused any problems," Houtz said after the arrest. “He knew everyone and talked to everyone, but I can't say anyone was his best friend or not.”

  The manager at Cedar Lodge, Gerald Fischer, also liked Stayner, and said he was totally reliable. “He was quick to step up to the task at hand,” he said. “I mean, if you had a problem, he'd be right there.”

  Most people expressed surprise about Stayner because of one interesting fact – something that shapes most of our opinions, whether right or wrong. Stayner didn’t look like a serial killer. Handsome and outdoorsy, he didn’t look like a criminal at all.

  And for Tim Bazar, a public defender who represented one of the men arrested in Modesto, he hopes that the Stayner case was illuminating for the FBI.

  “I would hope that one of the things they would tell their agents is, ‘Look criminals aren't necessarily a group of people who look a particular way.’ People who commit murders, don't necessarily look like murderers,” he said.

  Too good looking to kill?

  Because Stayner was handsome and outdoorsy, he didn’t fit people’s perceived profile of a murderer, and he was overlooked, much like Ted Bundy, who confessed to killing at least 30 women in four states. Bundy was able to lure them to his car by flirting, and because he was good looking and charming, girls almost always took the bait. (Later, close friend Ann Rule, who was inspired to become a true crime author after the arrest of Bundy, with whom she once worked at a suicide prevention hotline, said, “For a long time I was holding out hope that he was innocent, that somehow this all was a terrible mistake. And it wasn’t just me. It was all the people who worked with him.”)

  In his statement to the FBI agents about the Armstrong killing, “Stayner provided details about the crime that are not generally known outside law enforcement, and which corroborate his confession," the affidavit said.

  Back at Cedar Lodge, employees were shocked to learn that Stayner had been arrested in the case.

  “When we talked to people about Cary Stayner, they said he was very nice, he was a very good worker,” said Hopkins.

  The lodge issued a statement, and said “we are surprised and dismayed” that an employee was possibly involved in the killings.

  “We treat our guests as we would our own families, and any harm to them distresses us,” the statement said. "The management and employees extend their heartfelt sympathy to the families of the victims in these cases."

  “It really affected a lot of us that this monster could be walking around among us, so trusted,” said Cedar Lodge’s restaurant manager Lisa Hansel in a follow-up to “I Know My First Name is Steven” that delved into the continued trouble the Stayner family faced. “How could we have missed someone we felt was part of our family? Everyone living in this community knew and embraced this monster who was capable of such horrors.”

  Former classmates also expressed surprise over Stayner’s arrest.

  “I just remember him as a nice guy,” said Denise Smothers Rust, who sat behind Stayner in history class and liked to watch him draw. “There would have been a lot of other creepy guys in school I thought would have done something like this, but not him.”

  Lynnea Shertz, who grew up two houses down from the Stayners, from the beginning had a hard time believing her former neighbor could commit such a horrible act.

  “We figured he would be a cartoonist by now,” she said. “I’m just shocked that he would be involved in something like this.”

  Even a police officer from Merced, when asked for Cary Stayner’s criminal history, remembered him as the brother of Steven Stayner, and had a hard time associating him with the gruesome crimes.

  “It was a shock,” said Merced’s assistant sheriff, Henry Strength.

  Chapter 8: Stayner’s TV confession

  After he confessed to police, Stayner agreed to be interviewed by San Jose TV reporter Ted Rowlands, despite a gag order from the FBI that Stayner either didn’t know about, or didn’t care about.

  So with a sheet of Plexiglass between them Stayner immediately began telling the stunned newsman about his horrific crime spree.

  “He just took one sigh and went into it,” Rowlands remembered. “He started by confessing to all of the Yosemite murders. He said he killed the Sunds, Carole and Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso on February 15.

  “He said that he had been fighting back urges since he was a kid, basically,” Rowlands added. “He said because of voices in his head, and thoughts in his head the past 30 years, he couldn't help himself, so he acted again, and killed Joie Armstrong, last week.”

  According to R
owlands, Stayner said in the taped interview – the cameraman was on another gig and couldn’t make the impromptu confession – that when he encountered Armstrong in the woods, he “lost control of myself and lost control of her, and when all this started out... I had no intentions of cutting her head off.”

  It was a terrible death for a girl who was so vibrant and had so very much to look forward to as she and her fiancé became more settled into their rustic lives in Yosemite.

  But her death was not in vain, Rowlands said, and she truly did save other victims.

  During the interview, Rowlands asked Stayner if he would have kept killing if he had not been caught, and the handyman was quick to nod his head.

  “Definitely. I would have killed until I was either caught or killed myself,” he told the stunned reporter.

  “I asked him he had anything to say to the family,” Rowlands said. “He said ‘I’m sorry that they were where they were when they were.’”

  Another reporter’s chilling tale

  As soon as she heard about the arrest of Cary Stayner, Mary Ellen Geist, a radio reporter based in San Francisco at the time, realized the close call she might have had while at the Cedar Lodge covering the Sund-Pelosso murders.

  One night, after a workout in the pool to help shake off the horror of the story, she headed to the hot tub to wind down, although she was somewhat irritated that a man had beaten her to it and she would not be alone.

  “I sat down and he turned right to me and said, ‘Hello, my name is Cary Stayner,’” Geist said in an interview with the San Jose Mercury News. “What creeps me out the most is I'm there covering the Sund-Pelosso case. There are teams of FBI agents and reporters right around the corner, and he's calm as a cucumber.”