by Echols, Mike
The owners of the Harbor Trailer Park, husband and wife Leroy and Dorothy Neilson—no relation to the Nielson whom Parnell robbed in Salt Lake City—also found Barbara and Ken somewhat strange. Said Dorothy, "Barbara was a rather queer bird. She complained constantly of men peeking in the shower in order to see her take a shower in the public facility. She wouldn't use the bathroom, but rather urinated right at the rear of their trailer."
Remarked Leroy, "Parnell was very slipshod in the hours he kept at his shop. He was very erratic, opening and closing at his convenience rather than the public's." It was this attitude about business which cost Ken the position of manager for Mr. Neilson's flea market when the job opened up and Ken applied.
That first summer Parnell caught Dennis playing with matches, this time trying to set fire to a field atop a cliff overlooking the Pacific surf. Dennis recalls, "I was out in this field where the grass was real dry. Plus, it was a non-burn day. I had a clump of grass in my hand and I was trying to set it on fire.
"So Parnell comes out there and says, 'Dennis! What are you doing?' I jumped up and dropped the matches. He came out to where I was and saw the pile of grass and the matches and says, 'What have I told you about playing with matches? Go back to the trailer and wait for me.' And I went back to the trailer and he came in and he gave me this big lecture about what happens when little kids catch places on fire and the trouble they get into with the fire department.
"Then he says, 'Now, I'm going to blister your ass!' And he took off his belt and said, 'Bend over!' And this time he made sure that I didn't have nothin' in my pockets. And he went at it . . . hit me eight or nine times . . . hard, too!"*
That fall Dennis enrolled in Miss Friend's fifth-grade class at Dana Grey Elementary School on Chestnut Street. On the enrollment form dated September 2,1975, Ken listed himself as Dennis's father and "Barbara Parnell" as Dennis's mother, and Ken admitted as much to the author in 1984: "I may have represented her as my wife in the [school] registry over on the coast." Also for the first time, Dennis's real middle name, "Gregory," was spelled out on a school form, and as before, his actual date and place of birth were listed.
As a ten-year-old in Fort Bragg, Dennis was rather independent, often spending Saturdays wandering around this just-right-sized town for a boy his age, buying and chewing fist-sized wads of grape-flavored bubble gum, gazing in shop windows, watching the "Skunk" trains (so named for the noxious fumes their gas-electric engines emit) arrive and depart from the local depot, and nosing around the commercial and sport fishing docks in Noyo Harbor.
It was on such a Saturday, with Barbara busy minding the Bible Book Store while Ken made his social mark at the Eagles' Lodge, that the police picked up Dennis and Joe Gomes for shoplifting. While they were in the Ben Franklin five-and-dime, Joe dared Dennis to slip some Silly Putty into his pocket. The two then casually strolled out the front door and a clerk and the store manager nabbed them.
The police arrived, put Dennis in the back of their cruiser, and delivered him to Barbara—who identified herself as his mother—at the Bible Book Store, where they told her what he had done. "It was the first time I had come into contact with the police since I had been kidnapped," Dennis recalled, "but I wasn't thinking about saying anything to them about that. I was extremely scared of having been caught shoplifting. My mind wasn't into, 'Oh, boy! There's a cop! All right! I want to tell him that I was kidnapped and I'm going to go home!' Well, shit, I was worried about, 'Oh, no! My ass is going to get whipped!'
"But when Parnell got there he gave me this big bullshit line about good people and bad people. What he did is, he took a piece of paper and drew a black line and he says, 'You see this line? This line represents all the people who have committed a crime. The empty space on either side is the people who have not. You have now been added to that black line. Now, how do you feel about that?' And I told him, 'Well, everybody does that! It was just a little thing . . .just a little toy!' But I didn't say anything about him being a part of that black line. I wasn't out to be killed! No thank you!"
There was insufficient demand for a religious bookstore in rustic Fort Bragg, let alone one run by business and church neophytes like Ken and Barbara, and when Mary finally cut off her son's supply of money, the business's days were numbered. Struggle as he might, Ken knew this was a losing proposition. Finances were so tight there was not even money for much-needed school clothes for Dennis and, said Barbara, "[Ken] called up his mother on the phone and begged her for money. I was standing right there when he made the call. He just said, 'I need money for clothes for the kid.' And I assumed that she knew about it, because she didn't question him. She just said, 'I'll send you two hundred bucks . . . would that help you out?' And he says, 'Yeah.' And she did send it, because I was there when the check came in the mail." Although Mary maintains that she knew nothing about Dennis living with Ken—and Dennis concurred—did she, perhaps, think that "the kid" was one of Barbara's children?
In the spring of 1976 Barbara's divorce from Bob—who had remained with their children in Santa Rosa—came through, and with it she gained custody of her four youngest children: Lloyd, Kenny, Vallerie, and Christy, and suddenly an ill-prepared Ken found himself the head of a family of seven. It was a rowdy brood and far more than he had bargained for, especially in terms of the attendant financial responsibility. To begin with, there was absolutely no way the seven could live in a sixteen-foot travel trailer, so Ken bought an old, motorless, converted school bus which in the past was painted a dusky, noxious shade of blue, a remnant of the hippie exodus to Mendocino County in the 1960s. It could sleep eight on crude wood berths slung under the windows, and there were, after a fashion, cooking and dining facilities, plus a primitive bathroom with a shower that at best sprinkled one with a few drops of cold or warm water, depending on whether it was winter or summer. But the Neilsons were not about to allow such an eyesore to mar the decorum of their establishment, and when Ken and an Eagles' Lodge brother unexpectedly showed up towing the bus—prepared to exchange it for the travel trailer—Mr. and Mrs. Neilson rushed from their office protesting the monstrosity and Ken had to find another place for his enlarged family's new home.
Fortunately, there was such a place nearby. Below the spectacularly high Noyo River Bridge, in the malodorous fishing village of Noyo, the Anchor Trailer Park had a collection of pickup campers, old house trailers, motor homes, and a couple of similarly converted school buses—though none as ghastly a hue as Ken's.
Located on a tidal flat between two cliffs, Noyo had air heavy with the unmistakable smell of the predominant local business, yet it was a fascinating place for the kids and it wasn't long before Dennis and Kenny and a couple of their friends went for a day's fishing on a raft—and failed to return by dark. Upset, Barbara wanted to call the sheriff, but at first Ken wasn't at all keen to do so. He was worried, she said, but had her wait a while before allowing her to call the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office. After she did call and a deputy arrived, Barbara said, "Ken was kind of worried because he was walking back and forth and smoking more and more cigarettes. Then, while the deputy was talking to Ken, here came Dennis and them. They was cold and wet and everything else, and I just let Ken talk to the deputy and I took them inside to get some dry clothes on."
In prison, when the author recounted Barbara's version to Ken, the prevaricator bristled, "I wanted Barbara to call the sheriff! There was no question there! For me, believe it or not, there was a difference in me facing whatever penalties I might have [for kidnapping] and Dennis's life! He was out fooling around in the ocean . . . Okay? . . . so I had to face that situation . . . right? . . . to tough it out and hope that I could explain anything that came up!"
It was while living in Noyo that Barbara's eleven-year-old son, Kenny, was first propositioned by Parnell. One day Dennis and Kenny were sitting on a dock shooting the breeze when out of the blue Kenny said, "You know your dad's a faggot?" Unnerved that someone knew, an embarrassed, shocked Dennis l
ied and denied any knowledge of such a thing. But Kenny persisted and went on to tell Dennis that Parnell had grabbed his balls and tried to get Kenny to fellate him. Dennis ignored Kenny's accusations; for the time being, the subject was dropped and nothing was said to Barbara.*
When the Bible Book Store went out of business, it put additional strain on an already strained relationship between Ken and Barbara. But Ken explained the rift to Dennis by saying, "Well, sexually I can't relate to her [anymore]."
Soon thereafter Barbara took a job washing dishes at The Captain's Cove, a fried-fish restaurant on a cliff overlooking Noyo Harbor, and it was there that she met John Allen, the self-described former drug agent, and fell for him. Compounding family matters, Dennis and Christy had a knock-down-drag-out fight: Christy accused Dennis of stealing things from her, and Dennis countered by screaming insults at her. But when the hitting and kicking started, Barbara drew the line: for her this was the last in a series of problems, and she and her children moved out, leaving Ken and Dennis.
The split occurred when school ended in early June of 1976. Barbara and her brood immediately moved into John Allen's own small trailer in the tiny coastal hamlet of Caspar, a few miles south of Fort Bragg, while Ken and Dennis remained in the old blue bus at Noyo. Dennis said that the bus was not very clean, that it smelled and was cramped. But almost unbelievably, it had served as home to that odd family of seven for nearly six months. Then, in celebration of Barbara and her kids' departure, Ken took Dennis with him on another trip to Reno. Again he unsuccessfully tried his luck at the gaming tables while Dennis—wishing he was old enough to go out onto the casino floor—roamed their hotel alone.
After a few days in Reno the father and son drove back to Noyo and the old blue bus. On their arrival Parnell undressed and had Dennis do the same before he fondled the boy's genitals "as foreplay to his having sex with me," Dennis sighed. Then, as Parnell caressed the eleven-year-old's naked privates, he forced his son to reprise the humiliating act of fellatio and put his open mouth over Parnell's naked, erect penis. With Barbara gone, Parnell's frequent sexual abuse began again, and Dennis faced a dilemma: even with his dislike for Barbara, he would have preferred putting up with her ignorance and the occasional sex acts with her just to have had her around to satisfy Parnell sexually rather than his having to submit to his father's almost daily requests for oral and anal intercourse.
As Dennis said years later, "From the start I recognized my situation"—being kidnapped and sexually abused by Parnell—"as life-threatening, and I knew that I had to do what he wanted me to do. When he first forced me to suck him off, I knew that he might kill me if I didn't do it. There's some times that you just have to go along with things. You have to learn to never say never, because you never know when you're gonna have to do something just to survive."
Two hundred miles away, Del and Kay were going through yet another version of their own private hell. Kay's father had picked up and fed a starving, mentally deficient young man whom he then took to meet Steven's parents. Said Del, "I told the kid the story about Stevie and how much easier it would have been if Stevie had just gotten sick and died . . . that we could accept death because that is a part of life. You know, if we had had his funeral and his little body had been dedicated and we would know where he was at, we could go visit his grave.
"So after a while this kid goes off down to Bakersfield and goes into the Salvation Army down there and tells them this story, that he killed Stevie and buried him off somewhere in the hills. And, of course, they called the Merced Police and they brought him back up here. Then he tells them where he's buried Stevie, and it's out toward Cathy's Valley, out beyond the cannery.
"And so the police took him out there with a backhoe and they start digging up the place he said he buried him. And the police was keeping it all real hush-hush, but somebody from the Sun-Star found out about it and came out to the cannery where I was working and asked me about it. I got so damned upset that I was bawling and I tried to stick my hands through the wall. But then they didn't find nothing; he confessed that he had just made up the story because he'd felt sorry for us."
In late June Ken was hired as the bookkeeper at Wells Manufacturing, a small, family-run dental equipment factory near the tiny Mendocino County community of Comptche, thirty miles southeast of Fort Bragg. Ritchie Wells, the owner, was pleased to find as competent and detail-oriented a bookkeeper as Kenneth Parnell. But he was a devout Baptist and would have been aghast had he known about his new employee's criminal convictions, not to mention Parnell's continuing sexual assaults on the quiet, well-mannered boy Wells thought was Ken's son.
For a month Ken commuted along the marvelously scenic coast highway, California 1, south along the Pacific headlands from the Noyo River to the nineteenth-century New England-style village of Mendocino City where, just after crossing the Big River, he turned east into the 200-foot-tall redwood forests that smother the rolling hills between the sea cliffs and the relatively open Comptche area.
Dennis said that he felt it was primarily Mendocino County's beautiful scenery that attracted Ken to the area in the first place and that it was only later that Parnell realized that he had happened onto an area peopled by some of the most liberal, free-thinking individuals in a state known for an excess of such folk. However, Ken discovered early on that most coastal Mendocino County inhabitants observed few social constraints, on the whole allowing their neighbors to do just about what they wanted so long as they didn't infringe on or dictate their lifestyle to anyone else.
Chapter Six
Comptche, California
"I never wanted to leave there because I was happy."
In late July 1975 Ken rented a spacious double-wide mobile home from fellow Wells employee Tyne Cordeiro, a move which placed him just a mile from his work. Ken was well aware of Dennis's love of country living, and since he seemed to do things to please his "son," it was no surprise that he moved himself, Dennis, and Queenie to this strange, remote, rustic little hamlet. Ken had learned during his first few weeks at his new job that the two hundred folks in Comptche might gossip about their neighbors, but on the whole they let others live their lives as they pleased. Whereas Fort Bragg is the most conservative town one will find in the coastal half of Mendocino County, Comptche's population is as independently minded and diverse in personal philosophies as one could find anywhere in California.
The hamlet has a country store with a couple of gas pumps out front, a tiny post office, a Grange Hall, a volunteer fire station, a primary school, and The Chapel of the Redwoods, the Baptist church which Ken's employer, Ritchie Wells, built with locally cut redwoods as a gift to his community. Situated in a small logged-over valley 200 feet above sea level, Comptche is a world apart from the damp, foggy, breezy coastal weather in Fort Bragg and along the Mendocino coast where summer rarely sees thermometer readings above the mid 80's. In Comptche—just 15 air miles inland but protected by coastal hills—temperatures of over one hundred degrees are common in the summer.
After picking up his mail at the post office, Ken drove south along Flynn Creek Road for less than a quarter mile before he turned left onto a dusty, bumpy private road which took him over a hill, past a rustic, unpainted wood residence with a few marijuana plants growing among the tomatoes, and past Tyne Cordeiro's mobile home, and then pulled up in front of the rambling trailer which he and Dennis would come to call home for the next three years. Once Dennis went in he was thrilled to see that he had a bedroom of his own, furnished with a dresser, double bed, desk, and chair. It was Dennis's first room of his own since the short stay in the house in Santa Rosa. In addition, Comptche offered a growing boy countless trees to climb . . . so many that "at Comptche there was too many trees for [Parnell] to keep me out of," Dennis laughed in joyful recollection.
Dennis remembers his years in Comptche as filled with almost constant outdoor activities. "I spent a normal life at Comptche. I went through school, I played on the football team, I went thr
ough the routine of marijuana that kids experience, and I experienced my first date as every kid has experienced. I had a lot of friends. I loved the place! I didn't think too much about my own family back then. I was afraid I might end up at a boys' home, so, really, I thought, 'Why don't I leave well enough alone?' "
While living in Comptche, Ken and Dennis raised their own meat—rabbits, pigs, and chickens—and grew their own vegetables in the community plot provided by the Wells family. Ken put up much of what they raised in a huge chest-type freezer he'd bargained for at a flea market. In that way they didn't have to spend much for store-bought groceries, and therefore, Dennis said, ground beef for his favorite food, hamburgers, became a rare store-bought treat.
Farther out Flynn Creek Road lived lumberjack Ronnie Mitchell, his wife Joann, and their eight children, five sons and three daughters. It wasn't long before Dennis and the three youngest boys—"Babe Ronnie," 13, George, 11, and Michael, 8—became constant companions. Just across a valley pasture from the Mitchell clan lived Larry and Judy Macdonald, their two daughters, and their toddler son. Larry was a carpenter, a community leader, an officer in the local Grange, and Chief of the Comptche Volunteer Fire Department; and their oldest daughter, Lori, an olive-skinned tomboy, soon became Dennis's first girlfriend.
On Dennis's first date ever, Lori's parents chaperoned them, taking them to a movie in Fort Bragg. "I can't remember what we saw because I was too nervous," he chuckled. "Her parents sat right behind us." Dennis and the Mitchell boys spent the long, hot summer days frolicking naked in the cool water of the "pothole" in Flynn Creek. One day, unknown to the boys, Lori saw them from her house a couple of hundred feet away. As soon as they were in the water, her brunette hair flying in the wind, Dennis laughed, "She came up on us and we just stayed in the water. She said, 'I can see your bare butts shining when you run around on the bank. You better be careful or someone's gonna see you from the road.' Then she asked me to go swimming with her, too, but I wouldn't go skinny-dipping with her."