Cary Anthony Stayner was born in Merced, California, on August 13, 1961. In 1972 his seven-year-old brother Steven was abducted and held for seven years by a man who raised him as his son; Steven escaped in 1980, bringing another abducted boy with him, and the case became a book and a television film, I Know My First Name Is Steven. Steven died in a motorcycle accident in 1989. An uncle Cary lived with was shot dead in 1990. Cary Stayner grew up as the other brother in a household organised around a missing child and afterwards around a famous one, and his own account of himself returned to that constantly.
By 1999 he was a handyman at Cedar Lodge in El Portal, just outside Yosemite National Park. In February, Carole Sund, her fifteen-year-old daughter Juli and Juli's sixteen-year-old Argentinian friend Silvina Pelosso were staying there. He talked his way into their room saying he had come to fix a leak, and killed all three. Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso were left in the boot of the burnt-out hire car; Juli Sund was found weeks later, and an anonymous letter directed the FBI to her. The California press called him the Yosemite Park Killer.
The FBI initially concentrated on a group of local men with criminal records and publicly indicated the case was solved. On July 21, 1999, Joie Armstrong, a twenty-six-year-old naturalist working in the park, was killed at her cabin, and a witness had seen a blue pickup. That led to Stayner within days.
He was arrested on July 24, 1999, and confessed to all four killings, saying he had fantasised about it for thirty years. He pleaded guilty in federal court to the Armstrong murder in 2000 and received life. He was convicted in state court in Santa Clara County in August 2002 of the three lodge murders and sentenced to death, and remains under that sentence in California.