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    Murder At Yosemite: The Stunning True Story of a Horrific Handyman and the Brutal Murders of Four Nature-Lovers
    Murder At Yosemite: The Stunning True Story of a Horrific Handyman and the Brutal Murders of Four Nature-Lovers
    Murder At Yosemite: The Stunning True Story of a Horrific Handyman and the Brutal Murders of Four Nature-Lovers
    Ebook221 pages3 hours

    Murder At Yosemite: The Stunning True Story of a Horrific Handyman and the Brutal Murders of Four Nature-Lovers

    By Carlton Smith

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    About this ebook

    ***Please note: This ebook edition does not contain the photos found in the print edition.***

    Amidst the breathtaking natural beauty of Yosemite National Park, four terrifying killings took place. For months, law enforcement officials were stumped by the deaths of three tourists: Carole Sund, her teenaged daughter Juli, and a family friend, Silvina Pelosso. But when they found the decapitated body and head of 26-year-old naturalist Joie Ruth Armstrong, they were led to one man: 37-year-old handyman Cary Stayner.

    Stayner was arrested at a California nudist colony and soon admitted to all four killings, claiming he'd had urges to kill women for thirty years. And Cary's twisted impulses were not the only tragedy of the Stayner family. At the age of seven, his younger brother Steven was abducted by a pedophile and forced to live with the man for seven years, until he escaped. His story was told in a TV movie called "I Know My First Name is Steven." Steven would ultimately die in a motorcycle crash at twenty-four.

    What are the odds of one family suffering such astounding tragedies? What would compel a seemingly pleasant, clean-cut man to brutally attack and gruesomely kill four innocent women? Did he act alone? Or was his a false confession? Bestselling true crime author Carlton Smith searches for the shocking answers in Murder at Yosemite, this fascinating account of murder and madness.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherMacmillan Publishers
    Release dateNov 11, 2014
    ISBN9781466885004
    Murder At Yosemite: The Stunning True Story of a Horrific Handyman and the Brutal Murders of Four Nature-Lovers
    Author

    Carlton Smith

    Carlton Smith (1947–2011) was a prizewinning crime reporter and the author of dozens of books. Born in Riverside, California, Smith graduated from Whitman College in Walla Walla, Washington, with a degree in history. He began his journalism career at the Los Angeles Times and arrived at the Seattle Times in 1983, where he and Tomas Guillen covered the Green River Killer case for more than a decade. They were named Pulitzer Prize finalists for investigative reporting in 1988 and published the New York Times bestseller The Search for the Green River Killer (1991) ten years before investigators arrested Gary Ridgway for the murders. Smith went on to write twenty-five true crime books, including Killing Season (1994), Cold-Blooded (2004), and Dying for Love (2011).

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    • 4/5
      The book starts with the abduction of Steven Stayner from Merced, CA which is very close to Yosemite National Park, on December 4, 1972. He was a prisoner of a pedophile for seven years. The murders covered in this book began in February 1999. The man arrested for these murders was Steven’s older brother Cary Stayner.After covering the abduction and briefly touching on what life with his ‘false’ dad was like, the effect his abduction and return had on his family in general, we get to the murders. The is rather detailed in describing the investigation, into what would turn out to be the wrong suspects, this leads to questions about the lead FBI investigators and speculation that had the FBI not focused their investigation in the wrong direction, the fourth victim would still be alive. This is just speculation of course, there was no reason for Stayner to be suspected. He had legitimate reason to be at the hotel where the victims were staying.Unfortunately the book was published before Stayner went to trial, I found the results of the trial at Crime Library. I have also listed them below. Some friend of mine thought the book was boring. I don’t agree with them, but if you like trial details and investigation details as opposed to historical details you might not like this book.Since the fourth murder was in the park, Stayner was tried in Federal court.On 2/11/2000 the Feds declared their intention to seek the death penalty.July 12,2000 a federal judge ruled that the government could seek the death penalty.September 15, 2000 Stayner plead guilty and confessed to the murder of Joie Armstrong thus saving his life.In the trial for the other three murders:August 26, 2002: Stayner was found guilty.September 16, 2002: Stayner was declared sane.October 9, 2002: Jury recommended death. Appeal is automatic.That is all the information that was on that site. Considering how long the appeal process is for death-penalty cases, I wouldn’t be surprised if Cary Stayner is still on death row. Also, some of the details in the Crime Library account and this book are different. Not hugely different however.

      1 person found this helpful

    Book preview

    Murder At Yosemite - Carlton Smith

    PROLOGUE

    EL PORTAL, CALIFORNIA

    YOSEMITE NATIONAL PARK

    FEBRUARY, 1999

    The killer knew his terrain. For several years he had studied it, observing those who checked in and checked out, as they unpacked and repacked the trunks of their cars, changing clothes, showering—he liked to think about that—then dining in the restaurant, so clean, so fresh, so … youthful. The next day they’d drive into the park; maybe he’d see them again, but probably not.

    They were part of the landscape, the brown young girls with their backpacks, their finely toned muscles, their energy. They came and they went; it didn’t matter, really. In some ways they were all the same, even as their clothes and colors changed; they were innocent, which was what he craved. He knew what his secret heart desired, even if he couldn’t tell another soul.

    The sprawling lodge was almost like home to the killer. He knew its geography like he knew his own body. There was the main administration building with its lobby and gift shop; there was the restaurant and bar, with the glittering blue pool behind, in summer always worth watching. There were the sprawling, boxlike complexes of rooms, upstairs and down, 206 in all, in six separate buildings inching up the slope toward the mountain behind.

    And across the highway was the river. Rushing through its narrow canyon, bouncing over arrays of broken granite slabs and stones, the Merced was a constant, almost living thing: bright, merry, mischievous in its own way, the world’s largest gravel-making machine. On its banks, shaded by trees, one could find a hidden beach, where one could strip off everything, and try to become one with the mystical landscape.

    All in all, the killer loved El Portal: there was work, there were familiar faces, there was a sense of security, a place that had become home. He might be faceless, but he was the permanent one, the one who was there year-round, just like the gigantic gray cliff faces in the awesome park farther up the bouncing river: Yosemite.

    Yosemite: for most of his life, it seemed, Yosemite had been some sort of lodestone, subtly drawing him, or at least influencing his fortunes and that of his poor, tattered, tragic family. Who knew what the place’s power was, or where it came from? But it called to him, summoned him, in a deep way he did not completely fathom. It was light, it was air, it was darkness; and in some part of his mind, the killer knew the park was menace, although he could never explain how, or why. It was freedom, and it was nature; and true nature was as savage as it was unpredictable.

    As he was …

    *   *   *

    You could drive into the park—it almost seemed sacriligious to call it a park when it had nothing in common with the tamed swatches of greenified ground that most Americans called parks—and almost immediately be overwhelmed by the grandeur of the bowl of the valley, surrounded on all sides by towering cliffs, decorated by enormous waterfalls descending thousands of feet to the valley floor. It was why the tourists came, of course, nearly 4 million each year. Every day, tens of thousands streamed up the narrow road along the banks of the Merced, and into the canyon, by bus, by car, by bicycle, even on foot. And all of them gawked, craning their necks at the gigantic cliffs and the waterfalls that glistened down their sheer faces.

    In his mind, the rubberneckers were trespassers, an evil necessary for him to survive, to live, but seen as a temporary infestation of the true park, the true beauty of the valley. In a way, the tourists were nothing more than moving objects, and unnatural ones at that. He had the same sort of feeling for the visitors that one might have for a herd of cattle that belonged to someone else.

    None of them knew, or would ever understand, what Yosemite meant to him. It was seared in his soul, and would always be so tied up in the pain, the guilt, the anger, the sorrow of his life that no one would ever guess at the forces raging inside of his placid exterior. It went back a long way.

    MERCED, CALIFORNIA

    DECEMBER 4, 1972

    ONE

    A Monday afternoon, cloudy, sometimes rainy, altogether too cold. Overnight, an Arctic front of frozen air had rushed down into California’s Central Valley, plunging temperatures on the ground into the low forties. Little Steven Stayner, seven years old, was on his way home from school as the twilight gathered and the icy wind picked up. No one gave much attention to the second-grader as he made his way on a familiar shortcut past a service station on Yosemite Parkway toward the familiar house on Betty Street, where Steven lived with his mother Kay, father Del, and four brothers and sisters. Other things were happening in the world that day, some of vital interest to many nations, still others that would loom even larger to one nation in the months to come.

    Halfway around the world from that gray December day in the small valley town of Merced—mercy in Spanish—a man named Henry Kissinger was sitting across a negotiating table with a Vietnamese diplomat named Le Duc Tho; both men were trying to fashion an agreement that would bring more than a decade’s fruitless, bloody war to an end, a conflict that had transfixed the nation as no other in a

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