Three women are murdered at Yosemite


Year
1999
Month Day
March 18

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, Califonia. 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 Eugene Dykes, Michael Larwick, and a group of methamphetamine users in Northern California. However, all these leads went up in smoke 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 Sunds 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 Sunds 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 pled guilty to the Armstrong murder in 2001. He was convicted of the other three counts of murder in 2002 and sentenced to death.

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Bodies found in Yosemite serial killer case


Year
1999
Month Day
March 19

On this day in 1999, law enforcement officials discover the charred bodies of forty-two-year-old Carol Sund and sixteen-year-old Silvina Pelosso in the trunk of their burned-out rental car, a day after the vehicle was located in a remote area several hours from Yosemite National Park. Cary Stayner, a handyman at the lodge where the women were last seen a month before, later confessed to their murders as well as those of two other women.

On the evening of February 15, 1999, Carol Sund of Eureka, California, along with her fifteen-year-old daughter Juli and their family friend Silvina Pelosso, from Argentina, were staying at the Cedar Lodge in the town of El Portal, California, near Yosemite. Cary Stayner later confessed to investigators that he entered the women’s room on the premise that he needed to fix a water leak and then strangled Carol Sund and sexually assaulted the two teens. He later killed Silvina Pelosso and put her body, along with Carol Sund’s, in their rented Pontiac Gran Prix. Stayner then drove Juli Sund to Lake Don Pedro, near Mocassin, California, where he slashed her neck.

After the women were reported missing, police questioned Stayner but didn’t believe the clean-cut handyman, who had no history of violence, was involved. Instead, the investigation focused on other employees at the Cedar Lodge as well as suspicious persons in the town of Modesto, where Carol Sund’s wallet was found in the street several days after her disappearance. (Stayner would later confess to dropping the wallet there to mislead police.) On March 18, 1999, a man found Carol Sund’s rental car in a secluded area 100 yards north of Highway 108, near Long Barn, California. The following day, March 19, investigators arrived to open the car trunk, where they discovered the badly burned bodies of Sund and Pelosso. On March 25, after receiving an anonymous tip (which Stayner later confessed to sending), police located Juli Sund’s decomposed body in an isolated location less than an hour away from the rental car. At that time, Stayner was not a suspect in the case.

Then, on July 22, 1999, the decapitated body of Joie Armstrong, a twenty-six-year-old Yosemite naturalist was found near her cabin in Yosemite’s Foresta region. Investigators, who believed she had been murdered the previous day, questioned Stayner and searched his truck, but let him go. Deciding they wanted to speak with him further, authorities tracked down Stayner on July 24 at the Laguna Del Sol nudist camp in Wilton, California. Later that day, in a surprising confession to FBI agent Jeff Rinek, Stayner admitted to killing the Sunds, Pelosso and Armstrong. During his trial, Stayner’s lawyers argued he suffered from mental illness, childhood sexual abuse, and the trauma of his brother’s kidnapping. In 1972, Stayner’s seven-year-old brother Steven was kidnapped by a child molestor and held captive for more than seven years before he managed to escape. Steven later died in a 1989 motorcycle accident. Cary Stayner was convicted in all four murders and sentenced to death.

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