Highlighted Crime
Story of the Week -
On March 18, 1999, the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina
Pelosso are found in a charred rental car in a remote wooded area of Long Barn,
California. The women, along with Sund’s daughter Juli, had been missing since
February when they were last seen alive at the Cedar Lodge near Yosemite
National Park. Juli Sund’s body was found thirty miles away a week after the
car was found.
The mysterious disappearance of the three women had drawn
national attention and landed them on the cover of People magazine. Compounding
the mystery, Carole Sund’s wallet had been found on a street in downtown
Modesto, California, three days after they had disappeared. Police and the FBI initially focused their investigation
on a group of methamphetamine users in Northern California. This changed in July
when Joie Ruth Armstrong, a twenty-six-year-old Yosemite Park worker, was
brutally killed and decapitated near her cabin in the park.
The discovery of her body led investigators to Cary
Stayner, a thirty-seven-year-old man who worked at the Cedar Lodge motel, where
the Sund’s were last seen. Stayner was tracked down and caught at a nudist
colony in Northern California. Stayner confessed to the murder of Armstrong and
then surprised the detectives by admitting that he was also responsible for the
murders of the Sund’s and Pelosso.
Stayner had been on the other end of another high-profile
crime years earlier. His younger brother, Steven, was abducted in Merced when
Cary was eleven years old. Steven Stayner was held for more than seven years by
a sexual abuser, Kenneth Parnell. Following his escape, a television movie, I
Know My First Name is Steven, dramatized the incident. Steven Stayner died in a
tragic motorcycle accident when he was twenty-four. The family saw further
tragedy when Jesse Stayner, Cary and Steven’s uncle, was shot to death in 1990
during a bungled robbery attempt. Stayner pleaded guilty to the Armstrong
murder in 2001. He was convicted of the other three counts of murder in 2002
and sentenced to death.
Check back every Monday
for a new installment of “This Week in Crime History.”
Michael Thomas Barry is the author of seven nonfiction books
that includes In the Company of Evil
Thirty Years of California Crime 1950-1980 and Murder and Mayhem 52 Crimes that Shocked Early California 1849-1949.
Visit Michael’s website www.michaelthomasbarry.com
for more information. His books can be purchased from Amazon through the following
links:
