by Echols, Mike
By this time Parnell had happily realized that living in Santa Rosa fulfilled his expectations perfectly: he had neither seen nor heard any newspaper, radio, or TV accounts of the kidnapping since his arrival and therefore felt the danger of his son's identity being discovered was almost nonexistent; he had a good job, earning him good money; his life with Dennis had settled into what was for him a happy routine; and he had a live-in sex partner who compliantly satisfied his perverted sexual needs and provided him an entrée to other young boys. Indeed, so confident was Parnell about his life in Santa Rosa that he occasionally treated his son and himself to a meal at the Denny's Restaurant on the freeway from San Francisco . . . an odd choice in that it enjoyed a considerable traveling clientele from all over California.
While living on Sonoma Avenue, Ken sold his Rambler American and in its place purchased an even older beige station wagon of unknown make. Dennis remarked that the wagon was a klunker. In late fall 1973 Ken tricked some Mexicans into buying it at the K-Mart parking lot, the local informal Saturday morning car mart Said Dennis, "Then the Mexicans decided that they didn't want it and they tried to get their money back, [but] they were stuck with it. Then he bought an old blue-and-white two-door Ford which he kept for about a year and a half. He changed cars pretty often."
As Christmas 1973 approached, reporter Janice Cruickshank of the Mercury in San Jose (California) traveled to Merced to interview Kay. Wrote Cruickshank: "The only unique thing about Steve, she [Kay] said, was that he got along well with everyone. 'His friends included older children as well as younger ones. He loved babies, and dogs, and kitty cats and anything that was alive,' she recalled." Cruickshank continued: "There are reminders of Steven everywhere in the Stayner home. He liked to write his name, his mother laughingly recalls. Then with a slight crack in her voice, she said, 'He had his name written on fences, outside walls, in his bedroom. So we don't scrub too many walls—we don't paint, either.' "
As to hope for Steven's return, Kay concluded: " 'Sure, I know that there is a fifty-fifty chance that Steven is dead and that at any time they could come and say, "Well, we found him—it's not good, but we found him—at least you know." I pray that if he is dead, please let us know, because this not knowing is enough to drive you insane.' "
Chapter Five
The Parnell Family
"You know your dad's a faggot?"
In 1973 Barbara Matthias's husband, Bob, was a blue-collar worker with the City of Santa Rosa Street Department, a man of average height with a muscular build . . . and a man who frequently drank to excess. An amateur watchmaker who haunted local flea markets, Bob invited Ken to join him that fall in what soon became a mutual interest, spending their weekends going from one peoples' market to another in Sonoma and Marin Counties while back at home Barbara took care of her four children still at home—Lloyd, 4; Kenny, 8; Vallerie, 11; Christy, 12—and Dennis. Two older boys whom Dennis never knew—Robert,Jr., and Gary—were in jail: one for dealing drugs, the other for manslaughter.
Rather quickly the two men became close friends, though Ken wasn't a heavy drinker like Bob. Dennis said that Ken was a light social drinker who never touched anything stronger than wine, and that rarely; when he did drink, a couple of beers in the literal sense were his preference and self-imposed limit. An entertaining, candid fellow with a folksy manner of speech, Bob was gaunt and balding when the author interviewed him in late 1984. He admitted that back in the 1970s he had been a heavy drinker, but was quick to add that those days were long gone. However, remembering those days, Bob particularly recalled Ken's omnipresent craving to get rich quick and the several soured business deals Ken convinced him to go halves on: "Ken had a saying, 'One of these days I'm gonna make it rich!' And I would kind of look at him and say, 'Well, Ken, more power to you. If I can make a damn good living, I'll be satisfied.'
One of the various money-making schemes in which Ken involved Bob was a cattle feed lot on Bob's single acre in Santa Rosa. This happened the winter of '73-'74 when, against his better judgment, Bob went in with Ken and bought two calves to fatten for sale. It was very cold, and the would-be feed lot operators didn't provide any kind of shelter for the animals. But Ken wasn't concerned, said Bob. Then one morning Bob went out to check on their investment and both calves had died of exposure.
Like a raconteur on a roll, Bob chuckled with the author before launching into his tale about the feckless Ken buying scores of old, broken TV sets with plans to repair them and then sell them at a profit, pointedly remarking that it didn't concern Ken that neither of them knew a thing about electronics, let alone TV repair. They took the sets to a TV repair shop for an estimate and the owner told them the sets were all beyond repair. Bob said, "But then Ken wanted me to go in with him and buy the parts anyway, and I says, 'I don't want no part of that!' "
The next spring, undaunted but now a solo act, Ken decided to start a lawn-mowing service. He got started by purchasing an old rope-start mower of Bob's. "I sold it to him and showed him how to crank it," Bob recalled, " . . . told him to pull the rope away from him. But, no, Ken had to do it his way. He pulled the rope straight up and busted himself in the lip and split it from there to there wide open! I had to run around the side of the house 'cause I just couldn't help laughing. Then he comes around and says, 'Goddamn, Bob! How bad is it?' And I says, 'You better go see a doctor. You're gonna need some stitches.' Then I went in the house and thought, 'How stupid can a guy get?' "
But even that wasn't the end of it, for several days later, after having his lip sewn up, Ken went to Bob and told him that he had broken the mower's starter rope and needed his friend's help to install a new one. Said Bob, "I told him it is simple . . .just like that [he snapped his fingers]. But when he tried to do it himself, he got the rope all wound around it and we had to use a knife to cut it off and start all over again."
Dennis recounted that in 1974 Bob often came home drunk: "Bob liked to go out to the bars with his buddies and get toasted and come home and beat up on Barbara. But he was nice to his kids when he was drunk. Boy! He was the nicest guy in the world!
"One time he came home drunk while Barbara was babysitting me and he got to ranting and raving while he was taking off his boots. They [the boots] were just sitting there on the floor, and he went and kicked them like he was going to kick up a storm . . . like all the way across the room and through the wall! But the boots just went, 'bloop . . . bloop,' and fell over on their sides. They didn't go nowhere. Then he just fell down on the floor with them.
"His kids and me started busting up laughing, and he says, 'What are you laughing at?' And he called me over and says, 'Dennis, you know I love you like my own son. You know that radio and tape recorder I gave Kenny? Well, I'm gonna give you one, too.' And then he stumbled down the hall into the back room where he kept all his flea market stuff, and pretty soon he came out with the biggest reel-to-reel tape recorder and radio that I'd ever seen and gave it to me. And I thought that that was pretty neat!"
Ken's relationship with the Matthiases developed to where Ken occasionally acted as a surrogate parent and babysat and disciplined the children when Bob and Barbara went out. But Bob's drinking and his beatings of Barbara got so bad that one night Ken intervened. When he did, Bob responded, " 'Ken, you just stay out of this!' "—Dennis recalled—" 'This is a family matter. I know you like the family, but this is between me and my wife!' Then Bob turned back to Barbara and slapped her a couple of times and started yelling at her."
Forawhile Ken's frequent presence had a somewhat calming effect on Bob, but after yet another late-night beating, Barbara left. Ken learned of it by phone minutes later and got in his car and went looking for her, stopping her as she walked along Santa Rosa Avenue. He took her to El Tropicana Motel and rented a room for her, but a few days later Barbara went back to Bob.
But the Matthiases' marital problems were rapidly coming to a head. Bob had entered into business deals with Ken and lately Bob had allowed Ken to park his rickety
old cargo trailer in the Matthias' drive and work on it there. But there was a point at which Bob drew the line, recalling: "One day I came home and there he was, sitting down next to Barbara with his arm around her, and I got mad. I had tried to help him, let him use my tools and everything, but I wasn't gonna let him use my wife, too.
"So I put my hands on my hips and I says, 'Ken, get that trailer out of here. I don't want to see it in here anymore.' So he backed up his car and got it out. And as he was doing that, I says, 'I don't want my wife babysitting for you anymore, either.' " But Barbara did continue to keep Dennis.
In February 1974 Ken lost his job at the Holiday Inn because, a lifelong chain smoker, he refused to abide by the new no-smoking rule at the front desk. Pressed for money, he soon took an early morning motor delivery route for the Santa Rosa Press-Democrat. Dennis recalled that at first Ken made him get up well before dawn every morning and accompany him on his rounds, but the eight-year-old grew weary of this and asked his dad to let him sleep in. Reluctantly Ken agreed. "But," Dennis ruefully recalled, "I made the mistake of saying something about it one day when I was over at Kenny's and Parnell was picking me up. I just said, 'I get to stay at home by myself at night' And with that, Parnell very politely rapped my head with his knuckle, and then later after we had left he explained why. He said that I shouldn't be telling them stuff like that because they might tell welfare or a social worker and they might come and take me away from him."
Earnings from the paper route weren't enough, and after barely four months in the spacious rental house, on the last day of February 1974, Ken, Dennis, and Queenie had to move out. As usual, Ken was behind in his rent, and all he could manage was yet another aging motel room with one double bed which, as before, father and son shared. This time they were at the Holiday Motel, again south of town on Santa Rosa Avenue, low-rent lodgings frequented by welfare families and poverty-level transients. But there was one positive thing about the move in that it put Dennis back in his favorite school, Kawana Elementary, and back in the classroom with his best friend, Kenny Matthias.
Finally finances got so bad that one night Ken walked Dennis to the pay phone in front of the motel and used some of his scarce cash to place a long distance call to Murph in Yosemite. By then Murph had quit depositing money into the blackmail account, but until he lost his Holiday Inn job this had not concerned Parnell. Now broke and unemployed, he decided to again try and extort money from Murph.
Remembered Murph: "Parnell called me up, and as we was talking he put Dennis on the line, and he said, 'Hi, Uncle Murphy!' And then Parnell got back on and asked me to start putting money in again. I told him, 'What are you trying to do? Do you want me to give you money the rest of my life?' Then I said to him, 'I ain't sending you nothing else, Parnell. I can't afford it!' And I hung up." It was their last contact for six years.
During Easter break in 1974, eight-year-old Dennis was visiting the Matthias home when a twelve-year-old friend of Christy Matthias's tried to get Dennis to have sex with her, the first time that he had been so propositioned. "She called me into the girl's bedroom," Dennis recalled, "and asked me if I had ever done it before, and I didn't answer her. Then she asked me if I would go out to the barn with her and 'get it on.' I gasped and said, 'No!' and that was it. And then Kenny started making fun of me about it when he found out."
Late that spring Ken landed a desk clerking job at El Tropicana Motel and soon thereafter moved him and his son back to the Pelissier Motel on Mendocino Avenue, a slight step up from the Holiday Motel. Then late one night Bob came home drunk and beat up Barbara again, and for a few days Ken again rented a room for her at El Tropicana. But Ken and Dennis had their lives reordered after Bob's next beating of Barbara. Once again Ken put her up at El Tropicana before asking her to move in with him and Dennis . . . into a room with one double bed at the Pelissier Motel. And she did.
Dennis said that at first the three of them just slept together, but then one night Ken and Barbara went out and left Dennis in the room by himself. Remembered Dennis: "They came back a little tipsy and they were obviously feeling horny. I was in the same room watching TV, but without paying any attention to me they got undressed and got into bed and started having sex with each other. Then Parnell told me to come over to the bed and he made me undress and get into bed with them. He rubbed my dick until it got stiff and then he rolled me over on top of her and she reached under me and put my dick in her. Then Parnell told me what to do—to go up and down—and I did. I stayed on top of her for a couple of minutes and then I said I was through and got off. Then I got dressed and just sat and watched TV while they went at it some more."
Years later Dennis told of his embarrassment about having had sex with Barbara: "I was their [Barbara's children's] best friend and we were like brothers and sisters, and she was their mother, and it wasn't right! I felt guilty when I was around them."
In late June the Holiday Inn rehired Ken as a day desk clerk with the strong stipulation that he not smoke while on duty. The position paid much better than did the El Tropicana, and with his increased wages Ken bought a sixteen-foot travel trailer for his little family's new home and moved it to the North Star Trailer Park, still another of the seemingly endless locations he chose on Santa Rosa Avenue. So, after just three weeks back at the Pelissier, Ken, Dennis, and now Barbara moved into their very own tiny new home, and from that point forward Ken and Barbara represented themselves and Dennis as a family . . . man and wife, and son. This arrangement could possibly have added some degree of normalcy to Dennis's life, especially had Barbara's children come with her, but they remained with Bob. This was just as well, though, for the small trailer had only one bed, a double in which the three of them slept together . . . and on eight additional occasions, Dennis said, these two amoral adults participated in a menage à trois with the nine-year-old boy they represented to others as their son . . . himself.
During the eighteen months the trio lived together, Dennis says that Barbara met almost all of Ken's sexual needs and that Ken never had sex with him while she was present: "That was the only reason I put up with her. I did not like her. She was the sort of person that was real stupid but thought she knew everything. But I thought that as long as she was around, Parnell wouldn't be fucking me. In fact, I thought that if she stayed around forever, he wouldn't have sex with me ever again." Unfortunately, Dennis's assumption was only partially correct, for while Ken and Barbara lived together, Ken did engage in sex with his son four times when Barbara was gone or when he and Dennis went somewhere alone. Also, Parnell continued to egg on Barbara to have sex with Dennis while he played the voyeur.
Bob, however, did not consider his marriage with Barbara over. One hot July night a loud, truculent Bob unexpectedly showed up at Ken's trailer drunk as a skunk and looking for trouble. He tried to pull Barbara outside, but Ken got between them, swiftly pinned Bob to the ground, and hollered to Barbara to call the cops from a neighbor's home. The Santa Rosa Police responded and hauled Bob to the drunk tank.
It was also about this time that Ken took Dennis out of California for the first of three times, just the two of them driving to Reno, Nevada, where Ken tried his book-learned techniques at the blackjack and craps tables while Dennis stayed in their hotel room under the watchful eye of a sitter Parnell hired from a Reno service. A few days later Ken and his son returned to Santa Rosa flat broke.
That fall, as the three of them slept together in the tiny trailer's sole bed, Barbara grew weary of having to share it with Dennis—at least when asleep—and so she asked Ken to build a small single bed into the trailer wall for their son. He obliged and, crude though it was, the new bed relieved Dennis's anxiety somewhat, though it did not dramatically improve the family's cramped living conditions.
Dennis was always adequately clothed by Parnell, but he wasn't happy with Parnell's eclectic tastes. Most of Dennis's wardrobe consisted of worn boys' clothes from Ken's extensive collection of used apparel which he bought compulsivel
y at flea markets: outerwear of doubleknits and imitation satins in bright colors, the racetrack tout's wardrobe which Ken himself preferred. Said Dennis in 1984, "Today, I wouldn't be caught dead in about ninety percent of what he got for me to wear!"
Finally Ken got so deep into the flea market scene that, when he lost his job at the Holiday Inn for a second time—he still refused to stop smoking at the front desk—he opened his own flea market. Called The Ad Market and located in downtown Santa Rosa, next door to the Greyhound Bus Station, Ken tried his damndest to make it provide a living for himself and his little family by wheeling and dealing in, as Dennis exasperatedly put it, "used junk." But it didn't work, and after two months Ken closed up and found a minimum-wage job as a greasy-spoon fry cook at a diner near the run-down Holiday Motel.
That fall Dennis entered the fourth grade at Kawana Elementary in the same room as his best friend, Kenny Matthias, now his stepbrother . . . sort of. But one day after school Parnell walked up behind Dennis as he sat in a field beside the trailer park, idly lighting one match after another. He marched his son inside to punish him, but when Ken went to get a belt Dennis quickly stuffed paper down his pants. He didn't do a good job of it, though, for Parnell saw the paper and made him remove it before he gave his son seven or eight licks across his bottom. This dampened Dennis's interest in playing with fire for a while, even though it fascinated him; however, it is quite likely that Dennis's fascination had a darker catalyst . . . Ken's frequent sex assaults on the by-then nine-year-old.
With his son back at Kawana Elementary, Ken resumed his daily telephone calls to the school secretary, Eleanor Lindvall, to advise her of that day's particular after-school arrangements for Dennis. "It was unusual for anyone to call daily to make such arrangements for their child," Ms. Lindvall remarked, "but I recall Mr. Parnell calling about these arrangements more in the fourth grade than when Dennis was a smaller child." As Parnell explained these calls to one Kawana teacher, "Dennis might be picked up by some weirdo on the street. You never can be too careful, you know!"