A Shade Of His Brother

By Steve Lopez/Merced

They lie awake at night, Cary Stayner's relatives do, casting for reasons to believe their own denials. In the world they try to build, Steven found happiness after his return at age 14 from seven years as the sex slave of a pedophile, and there is no connection between that made-for-TV drama and last week's sequel, in which older brother Cary confessed to four horrific murders in the vicinity of Yosemite National Park. The world they build is clean, the family normal. But then they wonder, Did Cary kill Uncle Jerry too?

The chain-link gate outside the dusty gray mobile home of Steven and Cary's parents, Delbert and Kay Stayner, was padlocked last week, and the blinds were shut tight. But relatives and other acquaintances opened a window on three decades of Stayner-family horrors, and when they did, Cary stood in the darkest corner of his family's misery, quiet, withdrawn, forever sketching the world he wanted to see.

Cary, the motel handyman and champion underachiever who was arrested at a nudist colony, said in a jailhouse interview that voices told him to kill Carole and Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso in February and Joie Armstrong just two weeks ago. That he had fantasized about killing women since the age of 7. That they ought to make a movie about him, same as his famous brother. A movie about a would-be artist who became a serial killer, torching two of his victims and decapitating another.

"It crossed my mind that maybe this was Cary's way of competing with his brother's notoriety," says Tony Dossetti, Merced's chief of police, who in 1980 was the cop who told the Stayners their son Steven had been found. It was a discovery that ultimately delivered, to the Stayners' front door, a screenwriter on a research mission. Twelve years later, that writer still holds the tapes that offer a glimpse into the mind of a killer.

The moment that crystallized JP Miller's feelings about Cary Stayner, now 37, came in 1987, when the morose young man of 24 reluctantly showed him his prized pencil drawings. Miller spent countless hours with the Stayners preparing to write I Know My First Name Is Steven, the NBC mini-series based on the Steven Stayner kidnapping case. "I kept at him, and eventually he kind of confided very shyly this dream he had. He wanted to be an artist," Miller says. He saw no second coming of Picasso in the sketches but said to Cary, "'Why don't you send them off to some colleges? Maybe they'll give you a scholarship.' He said, 'No, it'd never happen.' You could see that he'd made up his mind that he was a loser."

Last week, as a growing pile of news clippings gave shape to the profile of a monster, the Stayner family, reeling under the dust-bowl version of the Kennedy curse, was adamant about one thing. "And please quote me on this," said a relative. "The thing with Steven is not at all related to any of this with Cary."

But when Miller dug through his New Jersey office last week for transcripts of his recorded conversations, he found what could be called a voice of dissent. It was Cary's voice, carping about having to share his bedroom upon Steven's return in 1980, and wondering why Steven got such a hero's welcome for leading a younger boy named Timmy White to freedom from the same skeevy abductor.

Miller: For seven years that had been your bedroom by yourself, right?

Cary: Yeah, and all of a sudden, no longer.

Miller: And he didn't have very good manners about it?

Cary: It was just that "I'm Steven Stayner," and his head was all bloated out... just little things, but they kind of irked me... The way I see, just about anybody would have done the same thing in his shoes... We never really got along that well after he came back... All of a sudden Steve was getting all these gifts, getting all this clothing, getting all this attention. I guess I was jealous. I'm sure I was... I was the oldest and all that. Then all of a sudden it's gone. I got put on the back burner, you might say.

But Cary's feelings of resentment and alienation had hardened long before his brother's return. Of his father, he says, "Before Steve disappeared, I always thought my dad was like the Rock of Gibraltar. Never trembled at all. All of a sudden, this one day, Dec. 4, 1972, my little brother is gone, and my dad is crying all of a sudden. Never saw my dad have a tear in his eye in my whole life. All of a sudden, life changed."

Of course it did, says Anna Jones, Cary's aunt and Delbert's sister. Delbert and Kay were after nothing more than a small-town stake in a Central Valley farm community, Delbert punching a clock as a mechanic, Kay grabbing whatever service jobs she could find. It wasn't easy or grand, but it was a life, and in an instant, it was gone.

"It would have helped if they'd gotten some therapy, but you just didn't think of it back then," says Jones. "You told yourself you were strong and you could handle it... Maybe the other kids didn't get as much love as they should have because of all the pain and sorrow."

In some ways, Steven's return to Merced was the beginning of another tragedy. He had lost any chance of a normal life, and in 1989, nearly 10 years after he came back, he was killed in a motorcycle crash.

"He told me he just gunned his bike through intersections without stopping... I think he was living with an awful lot of shame and disorientation and just didn't give a damn," Miller says. "He had this compulsion to prove he was a real man, so he got married and all that stuff. But he felt that his life was ruined and he was never going to get it back together."

Cary, when he felt the same way, always had a place to go. Merced calls itself the Gateway to Yosemite, and from the time he was a teen, that was his escape. He and his cousin Ronnie Jones would fish, hike and explore caves. "He never had a steady girlfriend," Jones says, "but I know he had sex with girls, and he'd always doodle in his notepad and make these naked women." Jones remembers something odd, though, about Stayner's reaction to women who didn't live in his notepad world. "We'd go swimming up there, pull up and see a bunch of women swimming naked, and I was down that hill pulling my clothes off, and Cary was hanging back. I'd have to say, Come on, what are you doing?"

Ronald Turco, a homicide detective and psychiatrist in Oregon, says such reticence fits the profile. A serial killer often feels "a profound sense of rejection, usually along maternal lines," and creates a fantasy world in which he has complete control of the fantasy. "If he'd jumped in with those women, he'd not have had control. On equal terms, he can't cut it. On a date, for instance. It doesn't fulfill the fantasy of control."

The FBI, which has not done its finest work in the case, got blistered by critics last week for dismissing Stayner as a suspect and blithely announcing that men already in custody on unrelated charges were responsible for the Sund-Pelosso murders. A few weeks after that announcement, Joie Armstrong was dead, Cary Stayner was in jail, and the feds were finally connecting the dots.

Their next task will be helping local officials study a decade's worth of unsolved murders and disappearances to assess Stayner's possible involvement. Atop the list will be the murder of Jesse ("Jerry") Stayner, shot with his own gun in 1990 while his nephew Cary was living under the same roof.

"The only reason I could figure him doing it is if our uncle knew something about him," said Ronnie Jones.

Such as?

"That he had maybe killed someone else."

--With reporting by Michael Krantz/San Francisco

With reporting by MICHAEL KRANTZ/SAN FRANCISCO