World's Most Evil Killers - Season 2, Episode 14 - Cary Stayner - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-On March 2, 1980, 7 years after he had been kidnapped by a pedophile, 14-year-old Steven Stayner returned home
to his family in Merced, California. -Cary later had said that "There was clearly
a number-one son in the house. I was pushed aside, and I was left, you know, to fend for myself."
-Tormented by his brother's ordeal and twisted by the abuse he claimed to have suffered as a child,
Cary Stayner became a serial killer. -When he's 7, he starts to have these fantasies
of capturing and killing women. -In 1999, in the Yosemite National Park in California,
he kidnapped and brutally murdered four women. -He said he couldn't contain himself,
that there was no way that he could stop this urge to kill. -The cold-blooded murder of four innocent women
makes Cary Stayner one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ For 5 months in 1999,
fear pierced the peace and tranquility of Yosemite National Park in California. In that time, one man abducted four women.
He allegedly raped two of them and viciously murdered them all. -Yosemite is one of those places.
It's the crown jewel of national parks in the United States, and the idea that these women were possibly murdered
after visiting a national park, specifically Yosemite, really unnerved people. -Then, on Saturday, July the 24th, 1999,
investigators arrested a handyman at a local lodge, Cary Stayner. The 37-year-old was the prime suspect
in four monstrous murders in the national park. While in custody in Sacramento, California,
he pulled a major surprise. -While he's being held, somehow he's able to get a 25-minute interview with a local news crew,
and while they're on a break from questioning him, he confesses to the news crew
before he even confesses to the FBI. -He told his version of events to a local TV news reporter,
Ted Rowlands. -The interview was conducted in a room. We were separated by glass and used telephones.
He picked up the phone, and the first thing he said to me was, "I want you to contact Hollywood producers,
and I would like a movie of the week made about my story," and I thought, "Movie of the week?
This is the same thing that his brother, Steven, had had made about his story." Immediately struck me as, "Wow. Okay.
This guy is thinking about his brother." He immediately went from asking for this movie of the week
to a full confession. The first things out of his mouth after asking for the movie of the week was,
"I am guilty. I killed Carole Sund, Juli Sund, Silvina Pelosso. -But Stayner adamantly denied that he had sexually assaulted
the women that he had murdered. -Cary Stayner has got quite a strong narcissistic strand
to his personality. He didn't want to be seen as the sexual predator that he actually was.
He wants to be this tough, dangerous predator, this hunter, and that's inconsistent with the label of a rapist
or a sex offender. The roots of narcissism are very often in shame, and I think that's very much what shaped Cary's famous life,
that he feels ashamed of who he is. He feels ashamed of what he's experienced. -Stayner's story began nearly 60 years ago.
-Cary Stayner was born in August 1961, in Merced, California. His father, Delbert, was a Korean War veteran,
a stiff staff sergeant who married his mother. Together, they had five children,
three girls and two boys. Close family, but there's not much doubt in my mind it was also an abusive family.
It was dysfunctional. -According to a defense psychiatric report, even his mother claimed to have been abused as a child.
-This family do have quite a dark history when you look behind the closed doors,
so there's a multigenerational history of abuse going on. -There were early warning signs that Cary was having problems
coping as an infant. -When he's 3 years old, he starts engaging in a behavior called trichotillomania,
and this basically refers to hair pulling. This is really concerning stuff because you have
a 3-year-old child who is, essentially, engaging in an act of self-harm. This suggests, to me, that this was a young lad
who really was trying to take back some power, take back some control over something
that he felt he didn't have control over, and this was the way that it was manifested.
-Age 7, Cary formed violent fantasies about women. -He told me that he had memories
going all the way back to his childhood, when he was in his family car in the supermarket parking lot
fantasizing about killing and tying up the female checkers. Thinking that he was that young and having these urges,
if right, really is a window into his world. -But when he's 7, he starts to have these fantasies
of capturing and killing women, and for me, that suggests that he's got this idea from somewhere.
He's equated violence and sexual violence with power somehow. -Growing up, Cary and his brother, Steven,
7 years younger, shared a room. -Cary's younger brother, Steven, was absolutely the apple of his father's eye.
He was the single one, if you like, in the family of five children that the father identified with.
-Then, when Cary was 11 years old, tragedy struck the already troubled Stayner family.
-The decisive moment in Cary's young life came in December 1972 when he was aged 11, and his younger brother,
Steven, then age 7, was abducted by a pedophile and kept for 7 years. -This is something that has a devastating effect
on the family, so this family member has gone, and what do you do? To have something like this happen during your childhood
is going to have a devastating impact on you, especially yourself having experienced sexual abuse.
-Stayner would later claim that his Uncle Jesse sexually abused him when he was a child.
-For children who experience these types of things, they feel like nowhere is safe for them,
nowhere is secure for them because your family is supposed to be your sanctuary.
-The impact that abduction had, not just on the Stayner family as a whole, but also on Cary, was catastrophic.
Cary's father, Delbert, was distraught, absolutely distraught, would cry, would blame Cary for not looking after his brother,
would say, "Oh, he's the one son I really loved." Those vital years between 11 and 18
were lived in the shadow of the disappeared Steven, a kind of almost unimaginable torture, torment.
-Adding fuel to the fire that was raging within Cary, his father heaped responsibility onto the young boy's shoulders.
-I think he was perhaps, to a degree, blamed for the fact that Steven had gone missing,
and his parents would say to him, "Make sure that you watch your sisters." So he's charged with the monitoring and the surveillance
of women, of girls, at quite a young age, and he's having quite a heavy adult responsibility
placed on him. -Then, on March 2, 1980, Cary's kidnapped brother, Steven, suddenly returned home.
-As if by magic, Steven escapes from his captor along with another little boy and reappears.
If there could be said to be one single moment or trigger for what became his killing spree,
it was almost certainly the return of his brother in 1980, when Cary was nearly 19.
-Anxiously there to greet him, his parents, three sisters, and 18-year-old brother, Cary,
Steven Stayner had escaped with a much younger boy, 5-year-old Timmy White. -Steven Stayner's story made international news.
It was a little boy that escaped captivity from a pedophile and basically single-handedly was responsible
for saving himself, saving another child, and putting a pedophile behind bars, so Cary Stayner's brother, Steven, was a hero.
-After 7 years, Parnell thinks that Steven is really getting a bit too old for him.
He is a pedophile, and so he tells the boy he's got a replacement, a little boy called Timmy White who was 5 years old.
Steven realizes that this cannot be right. -He rescued that child and got out of there
and went to the police, and he said, "I know my first name is Steven," and that later became a book and a movie,
and the U.S. was captivated by this story of this young man who, you know, overcame all this terrible abuse
and then put his life on the line to save this 5-year-old child. -The TV movie called "I Know My First Name is Steven"
was quickly made. -Cary Stayner was home during all of this, watching his brother get all these accolades
and had all of the attention of his despondent parents, who had been so sad for 7 years with a missing child.
They were now elated to have their little boy back, and I think it affected Cary a lot.
-Cary later said that. He said, "I felt like my parents -- There was clearly a number one son in the house,
and that was Steven, and so I was pushed aside, and I was left, you know, to fend for myself."
-Steven's appearance on "Good Morning America" with his parents further spurred Cary's simmering rage.
-Delbert is seen hugging his son, something that he's seemingly failed ever to do
to his elder brother, Cary. Never showed much affection, but all of a sudden, Delbert is reunited with, in a way, the golden youth.
There is no doubt in my mind that this made Cary Stayner incredibly angry. -He's not known for being Cary.
He's known for being the brother of the boy who went missing. That's not going to have a good impact on you.
That is going to really devastate your own sense of your identity. Here's a man who is spiraling out of control.
He's going towards something, but we don't quite know what that is yet. -Steven's return only heightens the feeling
that his elder brother has of being somehow a shadow in the Delbert family life.
-Then, on September 17, 1989, 9 years after being reunited with their son, Steven, the Stayner family
was once again blighted by tragedy. -When Steven returned, the tragedies for this family were far from over.
So Steven got married, and he had children, but he was killed in a hit-and-run accident
only as a young man, so his life was quite brutally ended. -Steven's untimely death sparked a descent for Cary
into the dark side of his personality. -Ironically, when Steven was killed in the car accident,
Cary was sharing a house with his Uncle Jesse and working for a local mirror-making company.
Steven's death was the trigger for Cary Stayner to escalate to violence. -In 1990, Cary's Uncle Jesse was found dead
in the house they shared. Cary Stayner later claimed as part of his defense that his uncle sexually abused him as a child.
It led some to suggest that Stayner may have had something to do with his murder,
but at the time, no one was charged. -When you look back at the circumstances surrounding Uncle Jesse's death,
it was believed that he was killed by a drifter who was around the property, but that individual was never actually identified
and convicted of that particular murder. -Cary Stayner was questioned about it and was a suspect,
but was not tried for it, and Cary Stayner told me that he did not commit that murder.
-By 1991, Cary Stayner was working at the Merced Glass and Mirror Company. On the surface, all seemed fine, but that would be short-lived.
-He is liked by his workmates. He's regarded as approachable, as kindly. You could trust him with anyone.
You might leave your children with him. He's absolutely -- couldn't be a nicer man,
and yet, underneath that, beneath the surface, Stayner is profoundly challenged, unbalanced,
a man at war with himself, at war with his own desires, at war with his own fury at what's happened to him,
at the way he's grown up. -In 1995, Cary Stayner's rage boiled over. -One of his coworkers come across him one day,
basically pounding his fist into a plank of wood and saying that he feels really anxious.
He feels really nervy and scared and that he feels like going and killing all of his coworkers.
He's seen by a psychiatrist, but he doesn't receive any ongoing treatment. It's considered, "Okay. This looks like it was a one-off."
-He became more and more isolated. His parents then moved away from Merced where he had been born and brought up.
Then he was left on his own. His Uncle Jesse was dead. His brother was dead. He had left the job he'd had for quite some time.
-He decided that he was going to go off the radar. He was going to go and live in the woods.
This guy was going off the grid. -In 1997, Cary Stayner was hired as the resident handyman
at the Cedar Lodge Motel in the Yosemite National Park in California. -At the same time, gets a room above the diner
in the hotel upstairs. Now, it's quite a big motel, 50-plus rooms, plenty of coming and going, rather beautiful.
It was on the edge of Yosemite National Park. -At first, all seemed to be going well for Cary
in this new picture-perfect setting. -Everybody loved this guy, all of his coworkers,
his supervisors. Everybody said, "This was the nicest guy." -You know, he fits in with this, this laid-back
kind of hippie lifestyle of a guy who kind of is quite transient and goes from job to job,
and you just let people be who they wanted to be, so I think he fitted right in.
-But unbeknownst to those around him, the affable handyman was at war with himself.
-His only respite was hiking in the woods, and he developed an appetite for nude sunbathing.
I suspect that he was having difficulty controlling his own sexual desires and that perhaps nudity and nudism shared with others
was a way of coping with that. He was desperately trying to keep himself under control,
and there's no doubt, in my mind, of that. -Stayner spent more and more time alone in the woods
indulging his peculiar habits. -Cary Stayner's other occupation, apart from hiking and nude sunbathing,
was smoking marijuana, which he did on a regular and persistent basis. Now, I am not for one moment
suggesting that inspired him to kill. I am not linking one with another. What I am saying is it probably further underlines
the imbalance in Cary Stayner's personality. -Stayner became obsessed with Bigfoot,
a mythical beast that, legend has it, inhabits the forests of America's Pacific Northwest.
-He's firmly convinced that Bigfoot does exist, and, indeed, becomes almost obsessed with Bigfoot
and finding Bigfoot. -I think in terms of what Bigfoot represents for Cary Stayner, it's that childish kind of pursuit
of the monster under the bed. You quite enjoy talking about it. You quite enjoy the feeling of kind of fear
that you know isn't real fear because you're actually safe. He hasn't felt the ability to have a safe space
in which to nurture these kind of, these scary monster-type stories. So I think that's why that comes out when he's an adult.
He's not had the opportunity to do this as a child. -Bigfoot was what Cary Stayner was when he wasn't an affable,
likable person. Bigfoot was the real Cary Stayner. I think that's where the obsession lay,
and I think the whole concept of his obsession with Bigfoot was his obsession with his own dark side.
There was the Cary Stayner that was eventually to emerge into the light. Somewhere inside, he was harboring this other personality
which sometimes he simply had to let out. But by the time we've got to the end of 1998,
we have a man who is fraying, is the word that jumps into my mind. It's as if he's quietly coming apart,
but he's coming apart steadily, increasingly, and how does he cope with that? Up until that point, he's done everything he can to,
quote, control himself. "I've got to be in control. I've got -- My father would want me to be in control.
That's what we are supposed to do." -So he got a job as a maintenance man, and this is where I think
he starts to spend a lot of time on his own. He's thinking. He's ruminating. And I think it's only going to go one way now.
-By 1999, hippie handyman Cary Stayner was a serial-killing time bomb. On February the 14th, Valentine's Day,
he was primed to explode. Stayner's victims --' a mother, her teenager daughter,
and her young friend. Yosemite National Park, California, USA. It was the low season, and there were only a few tourists around.
Would-be serial killer and handyman Cary Stayner was working at the Cedar Lodge motel,
and all seemed fine. -He's struggling to control himself, struggling to be what his father would have wanted him to be,
struggling to be all right when he wasn't, and you suddenly have, literally, an explosion.
-I think when we look at the time that he starts killing, he is not in a good place.
He's quite chaotic. He's quite disorganized. He's smoking a lot of marijuana, and we know
that this has an impact on people's perceptions, on their thinking, their train of thoughts.
-On Valentine's Day, Stayner struck. -Quite by chance, he sees a mother, daughter, and the daughter's friend
pull into the parking lot of the Lodge in a red Pontiac Grand Prix. They've rented it.
Her name was Carole Sund. Her daughter was called Juli, and her daughter's friend from Argentina was visiting,
an exchange student called Silvina. -Silvina was 16 years old, and Juliana was just 15.
-Stayner told me that he knew that they were the only occupants in the entire building
and that he noticed them earlier in the day and that one of his fantasies that he had been thinking about
was to capture and torture two young girls. -He's been spending quite a lot of time on his own.
He's been smoking quite a lot of marijuana at this point in time, and he's confronted with this happy family,
this happy family that he's never had. -He knocked on the door and said, "I'm the maintenance man,
and we have a problem in the bathroom. Could you let me in to fix it?" -It's 11:00 at night at this point.
Carole is cautious. She says, "Hang on a minute." Doesn't open the door, and she goes back.
Stayner's on the other side of the door. "No. There's no leak. I can't see anything."
"No. I know, ma'am. I've got to come in. I've got to -- You've got to let me in. I'm absolutely --
I'll lose my job, you know, if you don't let me in." Stayner is very persuasive.
Carole Sund makes the fatal mistake of opening the door. -As soon as he got into the room, he pulled out his gun.
He took Silvina and Juli, the teenagers, and put them in the bathroom, locked the door
and then came out and strangled Carole Sund in the hotel room. -Stayner had killed her.
He took her body and dumped it in the trunk of the family's rented car. He then returned to the room.
-Brought both girls out and began to sexually assault them, we later found out. He then killed Silvina Pelosso after she started screaming
and was not cooperating with him. He took Silvina's body, then, and put it into the trunk along with Carole's,
came back and spent a few hours sexually abusing and torturing Juli Sund inside the hotel room.
-And now the fantasy really comes to life. Stayner has convinced himself that he has some kind of relationship
with the 15-year-old Juli Sund. She is somehow an object of his affections. She is to be cherished in the mad fantasy world
that he's created for himself. -Then he said he decided to take Juli out in the early morning hours before the sun came up,
put her in the car and drove with the bodies in the trunk. -Behind the wheel of the rental car,
Stayner headed east out of the park. -He ended up taking Juli to a reservoir called Lake Don Pedro
which is about 90 miles from Yosemite. It's very remote. -They drive in the Pontiac Grand Prix
to a local beauty spot with a view. The sun comes up, and he picks Juli Sund up out of the passenger's seat of the Pontiac
as if she were his bride and he were the bridegroom. He carries her to this vantage point and sits her down.
-Around sunrise, Stayner slit the girl's throat. -He left her to die on this hillside.
Now he had to get rid of the car. -Stayner dumped the rental car with the dead bodies
of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso in the trunk. He then called a cab to take him 90 miles back to the Lodge.
Then, in a bizarre twist, the taxi driver later gave a telling insight into the man
who just committed a series of murders. -He says to the female cab driver, "Do you believe in Bigfoot?"
on the way back to the motel, and she says, "No," and he says, "Well, you should."
And in my view, that's an indication, a firm, clear indication, that Bigfoot is the dark side of Cary Stayner.
-The serial killer was dropped off back at the Cedar Lodge motel, and he acted as if nothing had happened.
-Back to the motel, back to work, Stayner, careful, careful man, has cleaned the room.
I mean, he is the motel's handyman, after all. He's made sure not to leave any traces.
The Pontiac Grand Prix is gone. The room is clean. -Two days went by, and still nobody suspected a thing.
-No one raises any alarm. Carole's husband tries to track her down, but thinks she's just making away.
They were going to meet at San Francisco Airport. -Concerned that he had not covered his tracks sufficiently,
Stayner returned to the car. -A few days later, he drove back there, found the car and brought with him gasoline.
He took evidence out of the car and then torched it. From there, he decided to throw the FBI off
by taking Carole Sund's wallet and drive it to Modesto, which was in the other direction.
-Four days after their disappearance, the women were finally reported as missing.
Then, when the wallet was found 4 days later, 8 miles away in Modesto, California,
the authorities suspected foul play. -The wallet was found by somebody who was just walking down the street,
picks it up and takes it to the police. As soon as they found that wallet, the case changed immediately
from a missing-persons case to a criminal case. -The investigators focus their attention on finding the car
that the women had rented for their trip. -It was a red Pontiac, so this gave investigators something to search for,
and because this took place at a national park, it had immense attention, not only from the media,
but from the American public. -The entire staff working at the Cedar Lodge were questioned within days of the murders,
including the genial handyman, Cary Stayner. -The FBI said that he seemed stoic and calm as can be,
but to him, he said his heart was racing. He was nervous, and he was convinced that the FBI was going to be coming back
to arrest him at any moment. -A month went by, and the women's bodies had still not been found.
-The women had vanished, and the case was getting cold. Then the next break happened.
The car was located by a local man who was out hunting in the woods. Inside the trunk of the car were two bodies,
Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso, and the car was burnt to the point where their bodies were unrecognizable.
In fact, they had to use DNA testing to positively identify them. -In Cary Stayner's case,
he left the bodies in a car for 2 days, and then he set fire to it. So we've got two problems here, really.
We have the fact that the bodies are starting to decompose, and then we've got the effect of fire.
That sort of fire is really quite ineffective at destroying a body, so it is a challenge to the forensic investigators,
but by no means one that can't be overcome. -But Stayner was far from being considered the prime suspect.
-By this time, Stayner is -- You know, how could he possibly be an object of interest?
I mean, "I may work at the hotel, but all sorts of people work at the hotel." And, in fact, the local police drag in all sorts
of potential villains, you know, drug dealers, local armed robbers. They've got about seven or eight possible suspects,
and at one point they even say, "I'm sure we've got, you know, the perpetrator in custody."
-He comes onto the radar of the investigation, and he's actually quite helpful with the investigators.
He shows them around the lodge. He answers their questions, and I think, at this point in proceedings, he does, I think,
enjoy that feeling of being close to the investigation, of knowing how much or how little the police know themselves,
and I think this is something that he feels that he's going to get away with. -But the body of 15-year-old Juliana Sund was still missing,
and in yet another extraordinary turn, Cary Stayner wrote a letter to the FBI. -Stayner becomes so confident, and, indeed, in a way
so arrogant that he decides to write the FBI to tell him where they can find Juli's body
and draws them a little map and tells them, "We had a lot of fun together." -Two weeks after the car was found, the FBI got the letter,
went out to this spot in a reservoir, and there, lo and behold, was Juli Sund's remains.
-The 15-year-old girl's decomposed body was found hidden in the underbrush by the Merced River in Modesto County.
-When the facts came out about the condition of Juli's body, the fact that she had been murdered, cut,
her neck almost cut off, that put this case into a whole nother realm. When the details of Juli's murder
and the brutality of that murder was released, that sent another shock wave through the region
because people now knew that these women were not only murdered, but brutally murdered and possibly tortured.
-But serial killer Cary Stayner was not done yet. Soon he would strike again, and this time
Stayner would do it with even more terrifying ferocity. ♪♪ By the end of June 1999, police had discovered the dead
and mutilated bodies of three women. They had been viciously murdered in the Yosemite National Park, California.
They were found dumped in the woods about 80 miles from the Cedar Lodge motel where they had been staying.
But the killer, Cary Stayner, the handyman at the same motel, was not even a suspect.
-The FBI was convinced that they had the killers in custody. They believed that they had solved the case,
and they were just working on getting more evidence because they truly believed that these methamphetamine users
and dealers were responsible, even though the real killer was sitting at the hotel
where those girls were the whole time. -Three months passed. No one comes knocking on Cary Stayner's door to arrest him.
Stayner has remained undetected, uncharged, still the affable handyman at the Cedar Lodge motel.
-But it was only a matter of time before Stayner would kill again. -The balm that I think he felt
from the killings of Carole and her daughter and her daughter's friend was wearing off,
and I think he felt that he needed another victim. -On July 21, 1999, Stayner found his next target,
26-year-old Joie Ruth Armstrong, a park worker. -She was one of these girls that just loved
being out in nature, and you could see it in her face, big smile. Her mother talked about how happy
she was to have this position and how happy she was to be living in one of the most beautiful places in the world.
-Joie was loading her car outside the cabin in the forest where she and fellow park workers stayed.
The location was about a 30-minute drive from the lodge where Stayner was based.
-Stayner would say that once he realized she was alone, something clicked in him.
He said that he was in an area that he often went to because he had seen Bigfoot there.
-And I think they struck up some kind of conversation about working in the park, and here he's got
another opportunity that's presented itself to him. -She was by herself. She's getting ready to go meet some mates for a hike
up in Northern California, so she was packing her car in Yosemite Valley getting ready to leave when Cary Stayner noticed her.
He approached Joie with his gun, forced her inside her house and put duct tape around her mouth and her hands
and got her into his car and was taking off to kidnap her, but she was able to jump out of the car and run for her life.
-But taped and bound, she did not get far. -She was unable to outrun Stayner, so he was able to park his car,
run around, and tackle her and grab her. -He absolutely loses his temper, and he attacks her
so violently that he effectively decapitates her, cuts her throat, but so violently
that it effectively separates her head from her body. -He told the FBI that there was so much blood on her head
that when he looked at it, he couldn't even see her face. -We have an escalation of what he's doing.
He's abducted her. He's bound her. He's gagged her, beheads her. At least we can say it would be a very rapid death at the end,
and a very brave young woman to try and escape from such horrible circumstances.
-This time, however, Stayner had sealed his own fate. -Ultimately, that's the murder that leads back
to the other three. Had he not committed that fourth murder, I don't know that he would have been caught.
-The next day, on July 22, 1999, an alert park ranger found Joie's body. It was clear that the current suspects were,
in fact, innocent. -When Joie Armstrong turned up dead, it didn't take long for the FBI
to tell the public that, indeed, they were wrong, and the real killer was still out there.
This now re-ignited the entire case, and it took it to another level. The idea that a young woman was decapitated
inside the park was unnerving to everyone, and now it was all hands on deck because there was a murderer on the loose.
-A blue and white 1979 International Scout was seen parked near the scene of the crime.
Of the afternoon of the 22nd of July, two park rangers looking for the car in fact found 37-year-old Cary Stayner.
-One of the things that he liked to do in the park was go find a spot along the river and sunbathe naked.
So after killing Joie Armstrong, he went to one of these spots and was out sunbathing naked
when two park rangers came across and talked to him, confiscated his backpack, and let him go.
-Stayner was interviewed again at the Cedar Lodge. Again, he was allowed to be free.
They took samples and photographs of his tires to match tire tracks at the scene,
but they allowed Stayner to stay free for another day. -With the net closing in, Stayner fled.
-After matching the tire tracks, the FBI went back to arrest Cary Stayner at the Cedar Lodge.
When they got there, he was gone, so they put out an all-points bulletin. -The FBI found him on July the 24th, 1999,
just 48 hours after his fourth murder. -Somebody had seen the news reports that they were looking for Cary Stayner,
and there was a photo of him, and lo and behold, he was at a nudist camp up in the Sacramento area.
So he had driven from Yosemite to this nudist camp and was just sitting at the restaurant at the nudist camp
when the FBI came to interview him a third time with the intent of taking him into custody.
-By this point, I'm absolutely certain in my own mind that Stayner knew he was going to be caught and was,
in fact, quite happy to be caught. I think, in a way, he had acknowledged that he was
so badly distorted as a personality that he wanted to be incarcerated. -When Stayner was arrested,
Ted Rowlands got the call that changed his life, and the exclusive confession that he was able to secure
helped to convict a serial killer. -I was alerted by my station that an arrest had been made in Joie Armstrong's murder,
so I immediately went to Sacramento. I went to the jail to see if I could get an interview with Stayner.
So I asked the jailer if they would call up and inquire whether he would be open for me to come up and interview him,
and the jailer called up to the cell block and received word that Stayner did not want to talk.
So I decided that I was going to keep asking, and I ended up spending the day going back and forth
from the courthouse to the jail and harassing the jailer. "Please call up. I'd like to see if he'll talk to me now."
-Eventually, the reporter's persistence paid off. -I remember walking back into the jail
thinking to myself I was wasting my time, and the jailer looked at me like, "Ugh. You're back."
And I said, "You know, one more time, can you just ask him one more time if he'll talk?"
And the jailer got off the phone and said, "By God, he's going to talk." And immediately I froze and thought, "Oh, my gosh."
Within 2 minutes, I was on an elevator going up to the prison tier, and I could see through the glass.
I could see Cary Stayner go out of his cell and start walking towards me and coming right up to the glass,
and there I was 3 feet away from this serial killer, and we were talking face-to-face
using a telephone going back and forth. -Stayner coldly admitted to the four murders
that he had committed in the Yosemite National Park. -From the moment he walked in,
he was rigid and very clinical the way he spoke. His voice didn't go up or down.
There was little or no emotion. Even when he talked about the murders, his demeanor was just detached.
-Cary Stayner confessed, but despite evidence to the contrary, he refused to admit to key elements of the crimes.
-He admitted to the murders, but he glossed over the details. In fact, he lied. He lied about some of the story to me.
He told me that he never physically abused or tortured any of his victims. I think he lied to me because he wanted to take credit
for the murders, but he was embarrassed about the torture and the sexual assault,
and he didn't want the public to know about that. -I think a killer who confesses is sometimes
getting some of it off his chest, but who's to say, for example, that Cary Stayner hadn't killed again?
Did he kill other people? It's entirely possible. -And I asked him, also, to give the families a message.
"What would you say to the Sund, Pelosso, Armstrong families?" And he said that he would like to tell the families
that he's sorry that their loved ones were where they were when they were, and that, to me, was really haunting
because what he was really saying was, "I couldn't help myself. There was nothing I could do about it."
It seemed as though he was trying to convince me that he was somehow a hero for resisting for 30-plus years of his life,
saying that he had had these urges to torture and kill women since he was a 7-year-old child.
It was a way to articulate that this demon inside him was too powerful. -Cary Stayner was eventually tried and convicted
on four counts of murder as well as additional felonies. He was sentenced to death on December the 12th, 2002,
and is now behind bars in San Quentin State Prison, California, awaiting the death penalty.
-There is nothing sympathetic about this man. He is, and remains, a monster, thankfully,
not able to commit further murders. If part of Cary Stayner saw himself as Bigfoot,
it was the part that went hiking in the wilderness. He was the monster in the woods.
He was the man whom everybody should be afraid of, but, of course, he didn't present that to the outside world
working as a handyman in a motel, but that's what he thought he was, and that's what he became.
-The savage and senseless murders of four innocent women in the pristine environs of the Yosemite National Park
in California marks Cary Stayner as one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

In 1999, California handyman Cary Staynor raped and murdered four young women. Obsessed with Big Foot, he became the monster in the woods.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Cary Stayner became a serial killer after childhood trauma, murdering four women in Yosemite National Park in 1999.

Key points

Cary Stayner's Confession. In a shocking twist, Cary confessed to a news crew before the FBI.
Cary Stayner's Dark Transformation. After his brother's return, Cary Stayner spiraled into darkness, ultimately becoming a serial killer.
The Return of Steven Stayner. Steven Stayner's escape from captivity made him a hero, but it left Cary feeling neglected.
The Brutality of Juli's Murder. The details of Juli Sund's murder shocked the community, revealing a brutal crime.
Stayner's Confession. Cary Stayner confessed to the murders but downplayed the torture involved.
The Arrest of Cary Stayner. Stayner was finally arrested after a series of murders, leading to his conviction.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

This family do have quite a dark history when you look behind the closed doors.

Commentary on the Stayner family's abusive background.

4:57WatchJul 20, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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