I Know My First Name Is Steven

by Echols, Mike

  Heterosexually, Steve hit the ground running when he returned home. In 1984 he bragged that as a fifteen-year-old in 1980 he had had scores of girls clamoring to date him. Also, he shyly told about his first heterosexual intercourse, right after his fifteenth birthday. "She was the same age. It happened in the rocket at Applegate Park. They have a little rocket. . . well, it's not a little rocket . . . it's a rocket that you climb on. Straight up to the top there's a little cone. And you sit there and there's a little steering wheel. I used to climb that when I was little.

  "So we went up there—me and Liz—and it was kind of funny. The sucker was not very stable, either. So . . . it was quite late, actually . . . and it was her first time, too. There was a little bit of awkwardness for her, and there was a little for me, too, in the way to approach it. And at the time I didn't think anything about what had happened to me with Parnell. I was just concerned about what was going on right there. And when we started doing it, that rocket started wobbling back and forth. That was funny!"

  But it was a one-night stand for the pair, Steve saying that he had his first, serious relationship later with a girl named Laura. They had a very close, very active relationship, Steve remembered, but the on-again, off-again variety. "We were supposed to [get] married .. . but I broke up with her. [She claimed] she was pregnant three times, but I tossed her off like a wet rag, literally. I mean, I didn't care. It was really easy to do that. It's just something I can do." But deep inside it was an apprehensive Steve who went from girl to girl and did everything he could to allay the disturbing local rumors about his sexuality.

  At eighteen, shortly after finishing his senior year in high school—without graduating, because he had failed several courses—Steve moved from home into a rented house trailer (which he shared with his cousin, David Higgins) in a mobile home park in At-water, a town of 20,000, ten miles northwest of Merced. There Steve enjoyed his first true independence since his return to Merced. By then he had gone through the entire $40,000 he had received and had nothing but his dinged, dented gold Pontiac Trans-Am to show for it. So he went to work in a meat-packing plant, bagging hamburger for fast-food restaurants, and spent his spare time completing his high school General Equivalency Diploma.

  In 1984 Steve still frequently smoked marijuana, but by then he had given up alcohol. As a high school senior he suffered a potentially fatal reaction to a drinking bout, serious enough to tear his stomach lining, cause severe internal bleeding, and require hospitalization for several days. This scared him so badly that he swore off beer, wine, and hard liquor, although his one-to-two-pack-a-day cigarette habit continued.

  Cory—eleven when Steve returned and thirteen when he moved out—missed him terribly as she grew into adolescence. In June 1984 Cory told the author that she wished Steve would come to see her more often, though during her softball team's season that summer Steve attended several of her games and thus made this adoring youngest sister very happy. After one of those games Steve drove Cory home and then sat with her at the kitchen table and with genuine brotherly concern and interest rehashed the game's high points with her. After he left, Cory lamented, "We all have a lot of laughs when we're all together, but now it's getting where everybody is just going and growing and we never have the time together that we used to have."

  Before she knew about the sex assaults her brother had suffered, Cory said, "I used to just feel like going up to Parnell and saying, 'Thank you for keeping my brother alive and healthy.' " But now that she knows about the assaults, she says, "Somebody that does that must be insane. I mean, they are sick! And they should be somewhere where they are not around somebody that they could do that to."

  In June 1984, on a trip to Mendocino County with the author to retrace his life there, Steve ran into a rude, obnoxious man who knew who Steve was and had the audacity to approach him and ask that he tell him all about the sex acts Parnell had committed on him. Admirably, Steve firmly but politely declined to do so, and as we drove away, Steve commented: "He's the first one that's ever come right out and asked like that. . . nobody ever asks anything sexual." But Steve did admit that whenever the subject of homosexuality comes up, he feels himself quickly building up walls deep inside.

  During his first two years back at home, Steve exhibited behavior that upset his grandfather, Bob Augustine, who remembered his grandson as a nice, courteous, active boy; but on Steve's return he saw a sarcastic, discourteous, disrespectful stranger. Said Bob in 1984, "He is simmering down a bit now. He seems to be normal. . . anyway, I've learned to accept it. He was a good kid before, and he is still a good kid. I'm just curious as to how much harm has been done."

  Kay talked with the author about pedophiles who just sexually assault their victims (as opposed to the rare ones who kill them). "Because of Steve's abilities, it wasn't him [who was killed]. His whole make-up is probably why he survived . . . 'cause he is a survivor. And he has the ability to put up this wall, and I can see him doing that. I know he does it. And if that's what it takes to survive, it's the thing to do.

  "I think that maybe we did a good job of raising Steve so that he was malleable, you know, he was the type of kid who, when he was presented with a set of circumstances, he just lived with them. You don't become unglued just because things aren't going the way you want them to go. Maybe that's how come he's a survivor.

  "I've wondered about whether or not Steve was just the lucky one, and if there were others that just never made it."

  "All I know is that it wasn't me that was killed, and I'm thankful," Steven said. "I'm sorry that stuff like that does happen, but to be realistic, it's been happening since the dawn of time. Some people may think that it's something new, but it's just. . . I know better. "

  Finally, summing it all up, Steve said: "But I think that my survival has a lot to do with the way I was raised the first seven years of my life. And I can't let what happened to me with Parnell get to me. I fought too hard for those seven years to make it to give it up now."

  In June of 1985 Steven married Jody Lynn Edmonson, the woman he'd met the summer before, in a private Mormon service in Atwater, California. Del, Kay, Cary, Cindy, Jody, Cory, and Steven's new wife's parents and grandparents were in attendance. In December that same year Jody gave birth to their first child, a daughter, Ashley. In May of 1987 Jody delivered their second child, a son they named Steven Gregory Stayner II. They call him Stevie.

  For a while Steve worked as a self-employed landscaper while he dreamed of becoming a deputy sheriff. A happily married young couple, he and Jody lived briefly in his old home on Bette Street, where Steven's scrawled signature is still visible on the garage wall.

  In 1986, over Easter weekend, the entire Stayner family camped out at Lake Shasta in northern California. "It was sorta' like old times," Steve remarked happily.

  But later that same year personal problems related to Steven's kidnapping and tumultuous return home finally took their toll on Del and Kay's marriage, and they separated. Two years later, however, these loving parents who had shared so much suffering reconciled and moved together to Atwater. Del still does maintenance for a local cannery, and in 1987 he finally saw his Stevie get baptized into the Mormon faith.

  Cindy and her husband, Rick, live in Modesto, where she works in a bank and he is a maintenance mechanic for another cannery where Del once worked. They, too, have a young son.

  Cary, still single, works as a glazier in Merced.

  Jody Stayner, Steven's sister, married a cabinetmaker, Grant, and in June 1986 she had their first child, a boy.

  In early 1989, Lorimar-Telepictures produced the miniseries "I Know My First Name Is Steven." At the time Steven was working for the Pizza Hut in Merced, but he was given a leave of absence and served as an adviser for the filming and appeared in the production as one of the policemen who reunited Corky Nemec—the actor who portrayed the teenaged Steven—with his on-screen parents. NBC Television premiered the miniseries to critical acclaim in May of that same year. In A
ugust of 1990 it was retelecast by NBC, and by 1991 it had been shown in over three dozen foreign countries, including Australia, Brazil, Britain, Germany, France, Italy, and Yugoslavia . . . a new record for a miniseries.

  Although it meant his return to the public eye, the miniseries gave Steven the opportunity to make a number of talk-show appearances on behalf of his cause: missing and sexually abused children. Also, as Steven told the author, he felt a great sense of relief once the miniseries was televised " . . . 'cause people now know what really happened to me." With the miniseries hoopla over, Steven returned to the Merced Pizza Hut as its new assistant manager.

  The afternoon of Saturday, September 16, 1989, Steve ended his shift at the Pizza Hut but hung around with a friend in the back to smoke a couple of marijuana cigarettes. Shortly before 5 P.M. Steve mounted his new Kawasaki motorcycle for the fifteen-minute ride to his home in Atwater. As he rode north along rain-slick Santa Fe Drive directly in front of Richwood Meats—the meat packing plant where he had worked in 1984—migrant worker Antonio Loera, driving a friend's car with which he was not familiar, pulled in front of Steve and stalled.

  A car traveling alongside Steve was able to stop and avoid Loera's car, but Steve kept going, crashed into the driver's door, and was thrown forty-five feet from his motorcycle. He was rushed to Merced County Medical Center, where at 5:35 p.m. he was pronounced dead of massive head injuries. The helmet he normally wore had been stolen three days earlier.

  Perhaps equally sad is the fact that Steven's last years continued to be filled with reckless driving. At the time he was killed he had no driver's license. It had been suspended for the third time in his young life due to his having yet again racked up a number of traffic tickets.

  But Steven will be remembered as a very loving, affectionate father to his young, now-orphaned son, Stevie, and daughter, Ashley. A large heart-shaped wreath on his casket read simply "Daddy."

  Five hundred people attended Steven's funeral service at the Church of Latter Day Saints' (Mormon) Merced Stake Center on September 20, 1989. The author was there, as were Harold Kulbeth, Jerry Price, Pat Hallford, and scores of radio, newspaper, and TV reporters. And two of the pallbearers were Dennis's old friends from Mendocino County, Damon Carroll, and tall, slender, fourteen-year-old Timmy White.

  After the eulogy, Steven's sister Jody delivered an emotional good-bye to her brother, remarking that he had "brought our broken-hearted family back together again" before adding "even though he has passed into another life, we're so very grateful that he went as Steven Gregory Stayner, our brother."

  Then she tearfully concluded, "We will always remember you and will never forget you; but remember, this is not good-bye, this is until we meet again."

  Kenneth Eugene Parnell was paroled from Soledad Correctional Training Facility at dawn, Friday, April 5, 1985, an early release due to his light sentence and his excellent behavior while in prison. Because there had been numerous death threats, two parole officers surreptitiously drove him to a boardinghouse in a residential section of Berkeley.

  Much to his consternation, Parnell's parole was extended to two years rather than the usual one. His parole officer checked on him "five or six times a week, including Saturdays and Sundays," he could not leave Alameda County; he had to attend regular counseling sessions; and he could not be in the company of children.

  On April 5, 1987, Kenneth Eugene Parnell completed his strictly supervised parole and became a free man: he is free to drop out of sight, to travel wherever and whenever he pleases, to live however he wants, and to associate with anyone he chooses . . . even young boys.

  Author's Epilogue

  Pedophilia—the sexual attraction of a man or a woman to a child—has existed since the beginning of recorded history as a dark blotch in the fabric of adult-child relationships. In fact, of all the criminal acts perpetrated by adults on children, sexual assault of children is by far the least known, least discussed, and least understood. Sadly, though, in a few gut-wrenching cases, these assorted crimes against children have coalesced into sickening, gruesome outrages by Art Bishop (Utah), Ted Bundy (Utah, Colorado, Florida), Arthur C. Goode (Florida, Maryland, Virginia), John Wayne Gacy (Illinois), John Joubert (Nebraska), and others of their ilk whose nauseating crimes are covered year in and year out in our newspapers and magazines and on our televisions and radios.

  At the F.B.I. Academy in Quantico, Virginia, Behavioral Unit Agent Kenneth Lanning observed that most pedophiles are gentle and nonviolent with children. The glaring exceptions are those cases which catch our attention, such as the 1980 abduction and brutal murder of John and Revé Walsh's six-year-old son, Adam, apparently committed by homosexual serial murderer Ottis Toole, who first admitted and then recanted his guilt for the atrocity.

  After his son's death, Walsh left his lucrative hotel-management career in south Florida and goaded and badgered the U.S. Congress into founding and funding the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children in Washington, D.C. At Colorado State University, in an address to a conference of law-enforcement officers, social workers, and other professionals who work with missing and sexually exploited children, Walsh movingly told of the disappearance of his son from a Sears store where Adam had gone with his mother; the ensuing futile search for his son, which cost him many thousands of dollars; and his shocking realization that looking for a missing child in the U.S. is not top priority for law enforcement agencies. Walsh also bared his soul as he recounted his and his wife's gut-wrenching horror when a Florida detective called to tell them that Adam's head had been found floating in a canal 120 miles from his home. (The rest of the Walsh's six-year-old son's body never was found.)

  Of that day Walsh said: "That was the day I found out in the worst way that there is a lot we don't know about missing children. It has often been called a national tragedy. I say it is a national disgrace. A country with the resources that we have, and what we haven't done for our children is a disgrace. The figures are staggering. Everyone says it is an epidemic. We say it is the tip of the iceberg. We are just starting to see it. It is nothing new. It has always been there. It is something we haven't wanted to deal with . . . something we have wanted to bury our heads in the sand about, and say it only happens to the other guy.

  "I think we disadvantage our children by teaching them to respect authority figures. In many cases those authority figures are the people who hurt kids because, in cases of sexual assault, the estimates are that seventy percent of the people that molest children are people that they know and many times [they] are a figure of trust and authority."

  He went on to recount a conversation about missing children which he'd had with the Broward County (Florida) Coroner. Walsh said: "He was a doctor and a lawyer and an expert with this type of thing. He said, 'Right now on the morgue tables we have a dozen unclaimed bodies. Four of them are adolescent girls, and, in fact, one of them is only nine years old. The rest of them are between eleven and fifteen. A couple of those girls I have had for six months. I don't want to bury them. I know somebody is looking for them.'

  "He said there is no system to exchange information in cases like this. He said we guesstimate that coroners and pathologists have maybe between four and five thousand unidentified dead to bury every year in this country. In any given year, hundreds and hundreds of these are children."

  Walsh's fervor rose as he continued: "Lots of people don't love children as much as I do. They use them. They abuse them. They molest them. They use them in child pornography. They use them in child prostitution. They murder them and leave them in fields and streams and in canals all over this country.

  "I testified before Congress—I don't know how many times; I lost track. But a man begins to choke when he realizes the scope of the problem. The first few times I was asked to testify, I was asked the same question: What are the statistics? I went to Cornell University's law library and sat there day and night, researching microfilms, trying to garner the national statistics on missing
children. I researched the F.B.I. uniform crime reports. They keep records of crimes against Americans, I thought. But, in categories for crimes against children, well, there just weren't any there. For instance, in homicides of children, they were lumped into homicides of adults."

  After his address, I interviewed Walsh at length about his work and asked his advice to parents about protecting their children. From his extensive experience, he said, "I urge people to take videos of their children, because when the media comes that night [when a child is missing] and says, 'we will put it on TV,' the parents can choose to do that. And that can help to find their missing child. [But] a second aspect of that is, imagine the nightmare of spending the rest of your life searching for your child and never having known that his body is buried in another state. Not because he wasn't entered into the National Crime Information System—that should be done—but because you didn't have the identifiers. . . . Parents can put their children's fingerprints, dental charts, recent pictures, videos, everything in a safe deposit box. But if they have a misconception that this makes their child safe, it is a ludicrous misconception, because this is just a matter of prevention, awareness, and attention."

  Concerning adults who work with children, Walsh's ire rose as he remarked: "It is a nightmare that we don't do background checks on these individuals. Big Brothers and Big Sisters say damn well they should check the backgrounds of their volunteers, even if they might lose some volunteers."

  A major concern of Walsh's is the handling of abused children by social service departments, principally their return to abusive parents. "We have tens of thousands of children that were returned by a social service worker that was underpaid, underskilled, undertrained. A family court judge said, 'Let's keep the family intact.' I personally believe those children are a lot better off alive in the foster care system than dead of a broken neck or broken back within their own home. It is as simple as that.