Against Their Will

by Nigel Cawthorne

  “Hold it,” said Zablocki, thinking it was a gun. Then, reassured, he let Esposito go about his business.

  When Esposito was done, Zablocki crawled through. Reaching the dungeon, he called out Katie’s name. She responded from the box. He let her out, helped her down, and hugged her. Then, sensing freedom, she scurried out of her prison.

  Up in the office, Esposito had broken down. Katie did her best to comfort him.

  Varrone turned up to take her to the precinct. On the way, she opened a plastic bag she was carrying. It contained $500 that Esposito had given her. At the station, she was interviewed. She revealed that, though Esposito had touched her between the legs, he had not violated her.

  When Katie’s family arrived, Varrone thought it might be a good idea for her to see Linda and Marilyn. He was overruled by social workers, who insisted that Katie should have counseling first. After all, Marilyn was a negligent parent. She had not denied Sal Inghilleri and John Esposito access to her daughter even though she had accused both them of sex crimes. As a result, Marilyn was forced to give the Child Protection Service temporary custody of her daughter.

  Katie was taken to Schneiders Children’s Hospital, where she was given a checkup and a hot bath, then put to bed. After that, her access to TV was strictly limited. She was not allowed to watch the news or any shows that might concern her kidnapping.

  Esposito was charged with three counts of first-degree kidnapping, six counts of first-degree sexual abuse, one count of endangering the welfare of a child, and one count of making a false statement to the police. He pleaded not guilty.

  After a plea bargain that spared Katie the ordeal of having to testify, Esposito was sentenced to fifteen years. Katie did testify against Sal Inghilleri, who was sentenced to twelve years for molestation. He was paroled in 2006, but was subsequently arrested for violating the conditions of his parole and returned to jail, where he in died in 2010.

  While Marilyn Beers made money out of the media coverage of her daughter’s kidnapping, she failed to regain custody of Katie and was later arrested for insurance fraud. Linda Inghilleri’s application for custody also failed. It was judged that, as she was not a blood relative, she had no claim. Katie was raised by a foster family and went on to do well in school.

  Chapter 9

  Steven Stayner—The Subjugate “Son”

  IN 1972, DELBERT AND KAY STAYNER and their five children lived at 1655 Shirley Street, Merced, California, not far from Yosemite National Park. Their middle child, Steven, was a regular seven-year-old with buckteeth and freckles. The family had moved into a ranch house with an almond orchard attached five years before so that the children could benefit from growing up in the countryside. They kept cows, goats, and pigs. Steven particularly loved this rural idyll, running free with his collie dog, Daisy.

  Del would take the kids fishing at the nearby lake and go camping at least once a month. The kids also had a backyard swimming pool.

  By September 1972, Steven had settled in at Charles Wright Elementary School. In the mornings, the eldest child, Cary, a sixth grader, would reluctantly shepherd her three younger siblings, Steven, Cindy, and Jody, the twelve blocks to school. However, at 2 p.m. each afternoon, Steven walked home alone. The others did not get out of school until later.

  That November, Steven got into trouble with his parents for going straight from school to the home of a friend without asking permission first. The lecture he got had no effect. He continued to do it and, on Friday, December 1, he earned himself a whupping. That Sunday, he went to a Christmas party and told Santa that he wanted a GI Joe set, repeating the request to his father when he got home.

  The following day, December 4, Steven went to school as usual. His mother, Kay, was going to the store to buy some auto parts that Del needed. It began to rain, and she decided she would pick her son up from school to make sure he went straight home.

  Eighty miles to the east, Yosemite Lodge’s kitchen cleaner Ervin Edward Murphy had missed the daily bus to Merced that left at 8 a.m. His friend, Kenneth Eugene Parnell, the night auditor at the Lodge, offered him a ride into town in his white Buick. While Murphy bought some Christmas presents in the Merced Mall, Parnell picked up some gospel tracts. He claimed he was studying to become a minister. They drove across town. Then they saw some children on their way home from school. Parnell stopped and told Murphy to give out the tracts.

  Parnell claimed that there were a lot of battered children in the area. He wanted to take in underprivileged children, as he could do a better job of bringing them up than their parents, and he told Murphy to pick up one of the boys to be his son. Murphy was sympathetic. Both he and Parnell had been abused as children and had often talked about it.

  Kay was held up at the auto parts store. When Steven came out of school at 2 p.m., it was raining. He was not expecting his mother to pick him up, and he started walking home alone. Parnell had dropped off Murphy, who was handing out the gospel tracts. Most of the kids just took one and rushed off. But Steven stopped to talk. Murphy said that he was gathering donations for the church and asked whether his mother might want to give something. Steven said he was sure she would. They lived about three blocks away. Murphy said that the minister would give him a ride there. Parnell pulled up, and Steven got into the car. Murphy got in the front, and they took off.

  When they reached Shirley Street, Parnell drove right by. Steven mentioned this, but Parnell said they were going to his place first. He could call his mother from there to see if he could stay the night. Soon they had left Merced, and there was nothing Steven could do about it, except sit back and enjoy the ride. Murphy knew that there was something wrong, but Parnell was happy. He had spoken to two children in the Mall, but had said they were not suitable. Steven was perfect for what he had in mind. Besides, he had done nothing wrong, he thought. The child had gotten into the car perfectly willingly.

  Later Parnell said that he had specifically picked Steven to be his “son.” In a chance encounter with the mailman who delivered to Shirley Street, he discovered that Steven had been beaten. Parnell would rescue him from this abuse.

  Kay Stayner had turned up at Charles Wright Elementary at 2:10 p.m. There was no sign of Steven. She drove home, looking out for him along the way. When she arrived home at 2:20, she asked Del if he had seen Steven. He had not. Perhaps Steven still had not learned his lesson.

  At 3 p.m., Del and Kay went back to the school to pick up Cary, Cindy, and Jody. There was still no sign of Steven. As they drove home, Del grew angry, believing that Steven had disobeyed him again and gone to his friend’s house. However, when they got home and phoned Steven’s friends’ parents, the boy was nowhere to be found.

  By 4 p.m., the Stayners were scouring the neighborhood. At 5 p.m., when the search had proved fruitless, Del called the police. Meanwhile, Kay called Steven’s teacher, got a list of the names and phone numbers of all the pupils in the class, and began calling each family on the list.

  The police arrived and retraced the route Steven would have taken home. Then they began ringing doorbells along the way. Only an attendant in the gas station nearby remembered seeing Steven walk by sometime before 3 p.m. He was heading in the direction of home, and she had seen no suspicious characters hanging around.

  At 6 p.m., reserve officers and the local Boy Scouts were called in to search the area. By then it was so cold and wet that there was hardly anyone on the streets. Local radio station KYOS put out a description of the missing boy. The Stayners’ other children were sent to stay with friends, while Del was out with a flashlight searching a local junkyard, fearfully opening the doors of rusty fridges.

  By then Steven was some fifty miles away in a small cabin Parnell had rented in Cathy’s Valley. Inside, there were toys and Steven began playing with them. He asked whether he could take some of them home to his brother and sisters. This made Parnell angry, but then he got down on the floor and played alongside the boy.

  At dinner, Steven ate the food h
e was given, including the green beans, which he hated, because he was afraid that he would be beaten otherwise. He was then told to take a shower. Afterwards, while Murphy dozed in a chair, Steven was told to drop the towel and climb into the cabin’s one bed, naked, alongside Parnell. That night, Murphy recalled, Parnell had oral sex with the child.

  When Steven could not be found, the police broadened the investigation. They asked Del whether he had killed his son. He said he had not and agreed to undergo a polygraph test. The following morning, a telephone extension was installed at the Stayners’ to monitor any ransom demand, and Del and Kay were told to pick up their mail by the corners in case they were sent a ransom note; there might be fingerprints on the envelope. Missing person fliers were printed. Steven’s picture appeared in the local paper, and an all-points bulletin went out across the state. That night, Del rode up to Cathy’s Valley to tell Kay’s father that his grandson was missing. Coincidentally, Del’s father-in-law lived in a trailer park not two hundred feet from the cabin where Steven was being held. He might even have seen a white Buick traveling the other way, back down toward the highway. On the front seat there were two men. Between them was a seven-year-old boy, but his head would have been down below the level of the dashboard.

  After driving Murphy home, Parnell took Steven to a remote spot where he forced the boy to fellate him. The crying child begged Parnell to take him home, but Parnell held his head in place. He informed the terrified boy that this was what he wanted him to do from now on. Then Parnell drove back to the Lodge where he worked. He undressed Steven and put him to bed in his room on the third floor of the Lodge, before going to work.

  In the morning, when Murphy had finished cleaning the kitchens, Parnell sent him to check on Steven. When the boy awoke, Murphy gave him some food. Parnell then turned up. After Murphy had gone, Parnell fellated Steven once again.

  While Steven suffered at the hands of Parnell, he did not blame Murphy. Indeed, he liked “Uncle Murphy,” who bought him comic books. While Parnell made Steven go to the toilet in a bucket in the closet, Murphy sent him to the communal toilets, which felt much more normal.

  The following Sunday, Parnell took Steven and Murphy back to the cabin. He had seen some of the TV coverage of Steven’s disappearance, but was confident that little attention would be paid to it in Yosemite and Cathy’s Valley.

  Back in Merced, the police began checking on known sex offenders in the area. Parnell had a conviction from 1952. He had posed as a policeman, using a fake badge, to pick up young boys and sodomize them. He had served nearly four years. In the early 1960s, he went back to jail for a robbery in Utah. However, when he returned to California, he never registered as a sex offender as required by law.

  Later, when the park rangers checked the payroll at Yosemite Lodge against the FBI’s list of sex offenders, Parnell was overlooked. The Lodge paid employees on alternate weeks, and his name did not appear on the payroll the week they checked.

  Had Parnell’s name come up, it would have raised flags for plenty of other things on his record.

  Parnell had been born in Texas in 1931. When his parents split up when he was five, he already showed signs of mental disturbance and tried to pull his own teeth out with pliers. His mother moved to Bakersfield, California. There, one of her lodgers induced the thirteen-year-old Parnell to perform fellatio on him. Soon after, the boy set fire to a field. The psychiatrist who examined him recommended he be sent to juvenile hall. When he was released, he stole a car. He was then sent to a secure school, where he engaged in homosexual practices with other boys. Released again, he was arrested for public sex acts of a homosexual nature—homosexuality was still a crime back then. He went back to jail for stealing another car. He escaped and made his way back to Bakersfield because he was attracted to a boy there, he said.

  Back in jail, Parnell tried to kill himself by drinking disinfectant. This landed him in a mental hospital. There had been other suicide attempts. He escaped and stole another car to take him back to Bakersfield to see the boy he was so taken with. That landed him back in jail until he was seventeen. In May 1951, he abducted a nine-year-old boy, took him to a remote spot, and sexually assaulted him both orally and anally. It crossed his mind to kill the child so there would be no witness to the crime, he said. Instead he drove him back to the hospital where he had abducted him. The boy told his father what had happened, and Parnell was arrested.

  Parnell admitted everything. He had stripped the boy naked. The child cried and fought back, but he sodomized him and ejaculated in his mouth. This was what he had planned to do from the start, he said. He even admitted that he considered killing the child, but decided against it. Parnell’s wife was pregnant at the time, he said: “She was just too big for me, I guess, and I had to find another outlet.” Before the case went to trial, Parnell was examined by three psychiatrists, one of whom had seen him on six previous occasions. They found him to be a sexual psychopath who was a danger to others, and recommended that he be confined to an institution. He was sent to a psychiatric hospital for evaluation. They found him to be a sexual psychopath without psychosis—that is, he was legally sane. So he was returned to the county jail. In court, he was sentenced to five years to life. The judge remarked that he was dangerous and should be kept in jail for a long period.

  Parnell was sent to San Quentin. When he came up for parole after three and a half years, he was released on the condition that he undergo psychiatric treatment. He went back to jail for violating the conditions of his parole, but was released in 1957.

  Convicted for robbery in Salt Lake City in March 1961, he was sentenced to five years to life, but was released in September 1967 on the proviso he never set foot in Utah again. He then worked a series of jobs as a short order cook, before turning up at the Yosemite Lodge, where his application form mentioned nothing about his prison record or his spells in mental hospitals.

  Parnell, Murphy, and Steven returned to Yosemite Lodge on Sunday night, then went back to the cabin in the morning. Murphy was to look after Steven there while Parnell went to visit his mother in Bakersfield. On the way, Parnell drove through Merced, even stopping at the gas station where the attendant had seen Steven heading home the week before. He studied Steven’s description in the missing person flier for tips he could use to disguise the boy.

  Parnell’s mother gave him a Manchester terrier puppy. He took it back to Steven, who named the dog Queenie. Then Parnell put the boy on his lap and told him that he had been to see a judge who had given him custody of Steven, as his parents could no longer afford to keep him. From now on, Steven was to call Parnell “Dad” and the boy would be known as Dennis Gregory Parnell. Gregory was already Steven’s middle name, one of the details Parnell had picked up from the missing person flier.

  This was little comfort. Steven was confused and started crying. What about his brother and three sisters? Parnell said he should forget them. Parnell said that Steven must resign himself to the idea that his family did not want him anymore.

  Parnell then quit his job, saying his mother had a heart attack. He spent the rest of the week in the cabin with “Dennis,” whom he kept naked. With Murphy at work, Parnell was at liberty to molest the child at will. He cut the boy’s hair and dyed it brown. He then dressed the boy in second-hand clothes and let him play outside, within sight of his grandfather’s trailer.

  Over the next week, Parnell frequently indulged in oral sex with his young captive. But worse was to come. On December 17, he removed the boy’s clothes and explained what he was going to do with him. Then he lay the child face down on the bed, put Vaseline on his anus, and sodomized him.

  He gave the crying child some sleeping tablets and crawled into bed with him. While the boy slept, Parnell fondled his buttocks and his genitals, and masturbated over and over again. In the morning, Parnell learned that Steven’s grandfather lived nearby and decided to move on, first trading his white Buick for a Rambler American.

  Parnell needed m
oney. He got Murphy to bring his final paycheck over to him, then blackmailed the simple-minded kitchen-cleaner into paying part of his wages into Parnell’s account by threatening to report him as Steven’s kidnapper.

  Passing through Merced again, this time with Steven in the car with him, Parnell headed for Santa Rosa, in Northern California, where they checked into a hotel as father and son. The following day, they moved into another anonymous motel where Steven spent his first Christmas away from his family. Parnell bought him a Hot Wheels race track set, a toy rifle, and a toy bow and arrow. Other presents were waiting for him at home where the Stayner family had the first of many bleak Christmases without their precious child.

  Parnell had now saddled himself with the problems of being a single parent and had to hire a babysitter to look after his Dennis when he was out looking for work. But first he had to indoctrinate the child with a backstory he could relate if asked about his family background.

  After Christmas, Parnell got a job as a front desk clerk in the Santa Rosa Holiday Inn, and a child named Dennis Parnell was registered at Steele Lane Elementary School. Parnell gave Steven’s correct date of birth. His place of birth, he said, was Merced, but he put down Yosemite Elementary as his former school.

  Steele Lane Elementary was in the Bellevue Union School District. That month, the school district’s office received a letter and a sheaf of missing person fliers from Del and Kay Stayner. But Steele Lane Elementary never received any fliers; they were consigned to the trash at Bellevue Union School District’s office. When Parnell and his “son” moved on, the form sent to Dennis Parnell’s next school noted: “Steele Lane did not receive any records from former school.” Subsequent schools did not insist on receiving these records. Nor did they ask to see Dennis Parnell’s birth certificate.

  Steven was not happy at his new school, but this only made him more dependent on Parnell. Soon they made a pretty convincing father and son. Parnell even wrote to the California Department of Human Resources asking for financial assistance now that he had a son to support. The department checked out his previous employers, but in the end the request for financial aid was denied.