by Echols, Mike
That first fall Dennis started smoking marijuana as a sixth grader at Mendocino Middle School. A friend, Ronald Harris, had asked him "to stay the weekend" in the tiny coastal village of Elk, and after breakfast Saturday morning the two boys set out to explore the nearby abandoned beach houses. While wandering about they encountered a fellow classmate who had just got his weekly allowance of weed from his parents.
The three boys stopped at the largest of the abandoned houses, a ghostly two-story vine-covered structure with a crumbling garden wall. Inside the house they took cover from the onshore wind and smoked up the lad's pot. A neophyte at "blowing dope," Dennis said the other boys had to show him how. After that, Dennis admitted that he smoked it during school hours, all the time. "Whenever we didn't have any, we'd just make a pot raid to one of our neighbors'. There was always someone who had it growing."*
At home Dennis stuffed his marijuana into 35-mm film containers and then hid them inside the mobile home's heating vents. Parnell never did discover this, but Dennis said that he was always afraid that he would. "Parnell told me that if I was ever caught smoking pot he'd tear my ass up. That's how strongly he was against it at that time . . . until he found out that he could make some money selling it."
A retired nurse, Ruth Hailey, nearly got Dennis in trouble with Parnell over pot. A short, stocky, elderly lady, Ruth was always tending to the business of others. "She has a good eye for a pot smoker," said Dennis. "She thought that my experience with pot was known to Parnell, and she mentioned it to Parnell by accident. I wasn't around at the time, but Parnell brought it up to me. I denied it, of course. He was satisfied with that. I always told him what he wanted to hear. He was slightly gullible and a pretty easy individual to fool. I got very good at telling a lie, but not really lying . . . just sort of bending the truth. That's what made it easy for him to believe me."
During Dennis's first year in Comptche the John Peace family lived directly across Flynn Creek Road from the Macdonalds and Mitchells and Dennis quickly developed a close platonic relationship with their thirteen-year-old daughter Kim—she later married his friend Joe Gomes—which lasted until well after she had moved to Caspar on the coast and he had left Mendocino County. Kim's mother Sherry quickly took on the role of surrogate mother to this "motherless" boy. But from the start her husband sensed something very odd about Dennis and his "father." "Dennis was strange," John said. "There was always something different about him. He never could confide in me. I knew something was wrong sexually. I knew that, but I didn't know what it was. In other words, he [Dennis] felt it—whatever it was—was wrong. But Dennis was really close to my ex-wife. He would spend time talking to the wife.
"And Parnell, he was always fairly strange. I never could understand why, when he would take off to see his mother—which I thought was Dennis's grandmother—he never would take Dennis with him. But Comptche, I mean, just living out in the middle of no place with a lot of squirrelly people, we thought that Parnell was just one of 'em."
"Because of the sexual abuse, I was always scared of Parnell," Dennis recounted, "and a lot of time I felt violence toward him. The sex was just whenever he felt like it. It was really quite fast, actually. When he was in the mood, we did it . . . just took a couple of minutes and it was over. Boom! I was dressed and out the door! The anal intercourse was painful. Parnell screwed me about a hundred times, and about half the time he split my butt. It hurt, but he just ignored me. It was like in the case of a man raping a woman. The man is not thinking about the woman's feelings. Parnell had a split personality. When the urge hit him he was somebody different. And after he'd done it with me, he always just went on like nothing had happened. We'd sit down and have a meal or something . . . just do what we'd normally do. But due to the sex abuse, I really didn't look to Parnell for any attention. I did look to friends and my friends' parents for the attention I needed . . . at least to some extent to Mrs. Peace. Really, I tried to stay away from Parnell as much as possible. However, there were times when I really made my presence known to him because no one else was around."
Occasionally Parnell would take Dennis into Fort Bragg for pizza and pinball at the Pizza Place, and periodically Tyne Cordeiro invited them to a meal at her home. Usually these were holiday feasts when the widow entertained other older single women friends who, interestingly, were Parnell's choice for adult companionship. Tyne and her friends would dote on Dennis. One Thanksgiving, at her home, she said, "We fixed a big turkey and I tried to get everybody to carve it, and Ken said he didn't know how. Then Dennis said, 'I can carve that turkey! I've watched them do it on TV.' And Dennis got up there and, by golly, he carved that turkey! He did a beautiful job on it, too."
At work Tyne said Ken was a quiet, proficient bookkeeper, totally unobtrusive in his habits. "He wasn't a very outgoing person," she remarked. "We always used to set around and talk—you know how you set around and talk about people's backgrounds? Well, he'd only go so far and then he'd clam up. And he never did invite any of us into his home, although he stopped here [at her house] many times."
But Ken's dearth of hospitality did not extend to his ersatz son's young male friends. He often invited them to the trailer home without telling Dennis. On one occasion, he'd invited twelve-year-old Kenny Matthias who, though he lived in Caspar, attended the same school as Dennis. At Parnell's suggestion, Dennis asked Kenny to spend the weekend, Dennis telling Kenny that he and Parnell would pick him up at his house after school. Then, when Dennis got home from school, Parnell arranged for him to go to another friend's for the weekend, telling Dennis that he would call Kenny and cancel the weekend. But Parnell didn't call Kenny. Instead, he went and picked up the boy, not telling him that he was to be his guest for the weekend.
"When we got to Comptche," Kenny said, "I saw Dennis wasn't there, and I asked Ken where he was, and he said, 'Dennis is over staying the night at a friend's house.' Then I said, 'Well, why am I here?' And he didn't answer me." The two went into the mobile home and just sat around and talked for a while. "Finally," Kenny recounts, "it was getting late and I said I was getting kind of tired, and he said, 'Well, hit the hay.' So I went in and took a shower and when I come out of the shower I had just my underwear on. And Ken picked me up and threw me over his shoulder and said, 'I want to fuck you!' And I said, 'No you're not! I won't let you! You just let me down!' And I was frightened. He put me down and I went in the other room and shut the door and sat down and thought about the situation while I smoked a couple of cigarettes, and finally went to sleep. The next day I told him to take me home and he did.
"The next time I went over, I made sure that Dennis was there, and that night when we went to bed I told him what had happened. Then he said, 'We've already had sex with each other.' Him and Ken. And he spilled his guts to me and told me that Ken was sexually molesting him. He told me that he didn't want to do it, but Ken would force him to . . . that Ken had done blow jobs on him and had anal sex with him, too.
"Dennis seemed upset about it, like he didn't want it to happen, and I said, 'Why don't you turn him in?' And he said, 'I can't. He's my dad.' "
In the spring of 1978, after a heated argument with John Allen, Barbara loaded up Kenny, his sisters, and brother Lloyd—then nine—and went to Ken's in Comptche for a few days. One day, however, everyone except Lloyd, Kenny, and Ken went shopping in Fort Bragg. Alone with the boys, Parnell took full advantage of the situation, tricked Kenny into removing his shirt, started rubbing the boy's shoulders, and then quickly slid his hand over Kenny's stomach and down inside the boy's briefs, where he grabbed Kenny's privates. Immediately Kenny jumped up and ran outside, leaving his little brother Lloyd alone with the now-aroused Parnell.
Parnell wasted no time in forcing the frightened boy into the master bedroom, locking the door behind him, and forcibly stripping off the crying child's clothes, removing his own clothes, and ordering the naked boy to "Get on the bed!" Scared out of his wits, Lloyd did as told, "Face down!" he tearfully recalled.
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br /> When Barbara and her children returned to Caspar, Lloyd and Kenny told their mother and stepfather that Parnell had sexually assaulted them. Barbara telephoned the Mendocino County Sheriff's Office and reported both incidents but, she said incredulously, "The sheriff didn't believe it!" However, Barbara had no further contact with Parnell and Dennis.
William "Bill" Patton was Dennis's sixth-grade teacher. A balding, courtly, well-educated conservative man who is somewhat out of his element in Mendocino County (having settled there years before the 1960s influx of hippies and liberal freethinkers), the retired teacher recalls a great deal about Dennis's years at Mendocino's grammar and middle schools. "I remember it was rather unusual because he didn't have any records, but during that time the whole society was breaking down . . . [Dennis] was just a little kid that said very little out of line."
In 1977, during the spring of his sixth-grade year, Dennis went on Patton's four-day class trip to San Francisco, where they stayed at the Presidio Boys' Club, saw the Giants play the San Diego Padres in Candlestick Park, went to the Exploratorium and Golden Gate Park, and ate dinner at a restaurant in Chinatown. Never once, Dennis emphasized, did he even think about trying to get from San Francisco to Merced; "I was having too good a time."*
While living in Comptche, Parnell continued to make trips to Bakersfield to visit his mother; and whether because Mary really didn't know about Dennis, or because of some newfound fear of risking discovery of the boy's true identity, Ken always left Dennis behind with the Macdonalds, the Mitchells, or the Peaces. When Lori Macdonald asked him why he didn't go to see his grandmother, Dennis responded, "She would get mad if I went down there."
During Dennis's stays with Judy Macdonald, she was put out with Ken for allowing his son to smoke—something that she did not permit her children to do—and it especially irked her that Ken would even hand her money for Dennis's cigarettes. Also, she couldn't understand why Ken allowed Dennis the freedom to come and go as he pleased, again very much unlike the way she ran her own family.
In the summer of 1977 the Peace family moved out of the rambling red house across from the Macdonalds and Mitchells and relocated in Caspar. Kathryn Vinciguerra and her playwright husband, Louis, moved into the house with her twelve-year-old son from a previous marriage, Damon Carroll. Damon and Dennis had known each other casually at school, but Damon's move to Comptche marked the beginning of a "best friend" relationship between the two. Kathryn said that one day Damon brought Dennis home with him, introduced him, and pointed out that he lived down the road. "I felt all right about the relationship," she said. "However, I did feel that Dennis was odd . . . you know, there was something in his eyes." Also, she revealed the rather startling knowledge that "from Dennis's information, his parents were separated and his mother and a brother and sisters lived in Merced." But she never questioned Dennis or Ken about this.
From the fall of 1977 and on through 1978 and into 1979, Dennis and Damon—a handsome boy with brown hair—spent the night with each other nearly every other weekend. Also, Ken frequently took the two boys to the movies in Fort Bragg, beachcombing along the Pacific Coast, and out for pizza. And when Damon stayed at Dennis's, they would stay inside but a short while before Dennis would suggest that they go somewhere together. Years later, when told of Parnell's sexual assaults on Dennis's young friends, Damon paused and professed shakily, "Perhaps it was because he knew my parents real well. But he never did anything at all to me. He never tried to take any nude pictures of me . . . nothing." Indeed, both boys asserted Parnell never did "try anything funny" with Damon. But Damon hesitated again as he recalled with awe, "Dennis never left me alone there with Ken."
But another of Dennis's seventh-grade classmates was not so lucky. Jeff Norton was a good-looking brunette without a father. True to form, Parnell arranged for Jeff to spend the weekend with Dennis and then picked Jeff up after school while Dennis rode home on the school bus. Driving along the winding road to Comptche, Parnell asked Jeff, "Can I put my dick in your hole?"
A shocked Jeff responded, "I don't have a hole."
Countered Parnell, "You know what I mean," and offered the twelve-year-old some money for the upcoming county fair. But, according to the 1980 police report about the incident, Jeff successfully rebuffed Parnell's proposition.
After supper that night Parnell threw a little beer party for Dennis and Jeff and then took advantage of their drunken state to take nude photographs of them with his Polaroid camera. Said Dennis, "Toward bedtime I took a shower and Jeff took a shower. That's when we had the pictures shot. . . in the shower. We both posed for them in the nude. There were no sex acts."
However, these weren't the first nude pictures of Dennis that Parnell had taken, for when he'd originally bought his Polaroid, he'd had Dennis pose for several nude photographs and then kept them, Dennis recalled, on the coffee table in their living room, often pointing them out to the boy. "He didn't care what I thought about them . . . it wasn't important to him," Dennis spat angrily.
Beginning with their residence in Comptche, Ken got in the habit of giving his ersatz son the most expensive Christmas and birthday gifts he could afford. One Christmas he gave Dennis a motorbike. Another Christmas he gave him a brand-new $300 ten-speed bicycle. By this time Ken had also begun to buy more fashionable adolescent clothes for his son: "Levi jeans, cords, new-style shoes, and a lot of T-shirts with logos on the front," Dennis happily recalled.
During Dennis's last two years in Comptche his friendship with Damon blossomed into a Tom Sawyer-Huck Finn alliance. Reflected Damon with obvious joy, "We'd go skinny-dipping at the pothole. We'd try fishing sometimes, but we never really caught anything 'cause we'd get rowdy. We'd have rock fights, apple fights . . . we just did whatever thirteen-year-olds did in Comptche in the summertime!"
As chief of the local fire department, Larry Macdonald could testify to that, since one day he found the two "playing with matches and lighting these little bundles of grass . . . lighting them and then putting them in these little wheels and letting them roll down the hill and laughing." Macdonald phoned Dennis's dad about this and Ken's response, "Boy, I'll check into it right now and see what's going on," sounded weak to Larry. A similar call to the Vinciguerras resulted in Damon's getting grounded for weeks.
A few days later Macdonald drove by the trailer home of Ruth Hailey. Ruth was a talkative elderly woman who wore heavy, bright red rouge and hats that would rival those of Bella Abzug. He saw Dennis smoking a cigarette on a roof that he was helping reshingle. "I mentioned to Dennis he should be real precautious [sic] about putting it out, and I said something about him getting scolded for playing with fire the other night, and he says, 'Oh, no! I didn't get scolded. Ken just told me that there was some concerned people.' And I often wondered what the extent of Ken's scolding was."
During the whole of Ken's residency in Comptche he tried first one and then another part-time, door-to-door sales job. For one he sold scented artificial flowers—announcing to several of his acquaintances that he was going to be "the area sales manager" for them. Later he sold Mason Shoes. He'd even had stacks of business cards imprinted with the name of his planned bookkeeping service—"A Aardvark Bookkeeping—Parnell's Bookkeeping—Over 25 Years' Experience." Nothing seemed to work.
During the 1970s the Comptche Store—a country store lacking only the cracker barrel—was operated by Art and Elsa Stoughton, and there wasn't much that went on in and around Comptche that got past them. When Ken's door-to-door sales efforts failed he used his purple and white '68 Ford Maverick—having sold his previous car, a Chevrolet Impala, during hard times in Fort Bragg—as collateral to borrow $2,000 from the couple to set up the bookkeeping service. Said Elsa, "And we thought, 'Well, you know, he was a nice guy and [we] might give him a boost and help him along.' "
Interjected Art, "We loved him!"
The couple found Ken to be eccentric, but that didn't bother them one bit, since he fit in perfectly with their other acquaintances in
Comptche. But, Elsa remarked, "I noticed that Ken never did have any men friends. It was always ladies. Ken went out of town a lot, and whenever he did, he left Dennis here with someone. And the main thing I can say through seeing him was that he loved that boy. He loved him and was so thoughtful of him that if the youngster wanted something, he got it. And I never doubted for a moment that Dennis was his son."
Not only were the Stoughtons convinced that Ken and Dennis had a wholesome father-son relationship, but Louis Vinciguerra, Damon's stepfather, remembers this: "There was a part of their relationship that I saw that was supportive . . . there was a giving and a concern. And I don't think that is something that you just put on because you are with people. That's what makes this thing so paradoxical [sic]. I mean, this is going to be a challenge for people to accept it. They don't want to see that side of it."
Concurred Damon, "Ken demonstrated a lot of affection toward Dennis, and the affection seemed to be reciprocal. To my knowledge, Dennis had nothing but admiration for Ken, and he acknowledged him to be his father."
But Damon's and Dennis's seventh-grade teacher at Mendocino Middle School, Gerald Butler, a stocky, jovial, rural renaissance man, tells a chillingly bizarre tale which hinted that Damon knew the truth about Dennis and Ken. "There was quite an extensive article in Junior Scholastic about lost children, missing children. We read it together and discussed it . . . had quite a discussion about it, and the bell rang for recess and most everybody went outside. But Damon and Dennis stayed by the door and Damon said, 'You know, Dennis claims that he was taken away when he was real young, and his parents said that they didn't want him anymore.'