Cary Stayner was a maintenance worker at the Cedar Lodge, a motel in El Portal just outside the western entrance to Yosemite National Park. He lived in an apartment above the motel's restaurant and bar. In February 1999, three guests disappeared from Room 509: Carole Sund, 42, of Eureka, California; her daughter Juli, 15; and Silvina Pelosso, 16, a family friend from Argentina. For five months the FBI and local agencies searched for the people responsible, and most of their attention fell on other men. Stayner had been interviewed once, as a possible witness, and was not treated as a suspect.
In July 1999 Joie Armstrong, 26, an instructor for the Yosemite Institute, was killed near her cabin in the park. Stayner's vehicle had been seen nearby. On July 24 FBI agents found him at a resort in Wilton, south of Sacramento, and drove him to their Sacramento office, where he confessed to all four killings. He pleaded guilty in federal court to Armstrong's murder and was sentenced to life without parole. A Santa Clara County jury convicted him in 2002 of the three Cedar Lodge murders, found him sane and chose a death sentence. On April 30, 2026, the California Supreme Court affirmed that judgment.
Stayner is a Merced native, according to the Merced FOCUS. Little of his early life is known beyond the defense evidence at his trial and what the news reported.
His family's life was changed in December 1972, when his younger brother Steven, then 7, was abducted in Merced. Steven Stayner was a child victim of kidnapping and abuse. He was held for about seven years by Kenneth Parnell, who had offered him a ride home, and in 1980, at about 14, he walked into the police station in Ukiah with a 5-year-old boy whom Parnell had also taken. Steven was hailed as a hero, and his story became the television film "I Know My First Name Is Steven." He returned to his family, married and had children, and died in a motorcycle crash in 1989, at 24. Parnell served a short prison term for the kidnapping; he was later imprisoned for trying to buy a child and died in custody in 2008, Fox News reported.
A childhood friend of Cary's, Mike Marchese, told ABC News that Cary seemed to feel guilty about his brother's disappearance and wished on stars for his return. A writer who had known Steven as a child wrote in Salon in 1999 that the two brothers had been very different and had not really grown up together.
At trial, family members, teachers, church and school friends described Cary Stayner as quiet, kind, polite and something of a loner. He was a talented cartoonist who drew for his school newspaper and yearbook. Witnesses also described compulsive hair-pulling, troubling dreams, headaches, psychiatric problems and an obsession with Bigfoot. A former neighbor who saw him almost every day from 1979 to 1986 testified that he spoke of headaches.
The defense psychiatrist at the sanity phase, Dr. Lynn Alison McInnes, described a family history of mental disorders, a dysfunctional home and early trauma: Steven's abduction, return and death, a threatened suicide by his father, and abuse within the family, including molestation of Cary by an uncle. When Cary was 29, the uncle he was living with was murdered. On the first anniversary of that killing, he attempted suicide. The killing of his uncle has never been solved.
From 1993 to 1995 Stayner worked at a glass shop. In July 1995 one of the owners found him red-faced and in tears, his knuckles bloody from punching plywood, and drove him to the county hospital. The owners and other workers later testified that he had never been violent or aggressive toward women. He then drifted before settling near Yosemite, ABC News reported, and he worked at the Cedar Lodge for about two years. Coworkers there testified that he did not seem like a man who would prey on women or children. He drove a blue-and-white International Scout with mismatched tires, a vehicle he had owned for about ten years; testimony at trial was that no one else in the area drove one like it.
He told investigators after his arrest that his sexual compulsions had grown worse in late 1998, and that he had considered harming a woman he was dating and her family, though he did not act on it. He put together what prosecutors called a "kit": duct tape, rope, a knife and a gun.
Carole Sund lived in Eureka with her husband, Jens, Juli and their three younger children. As an exchange student in Argentina in 1973, she had met Silvina Pelosso's mother, and the two families stayed close. Carole founded the local chapter of CASA, the court-appointed special advocates who speak for abused and neglected children, and was active in adoption groups. Her mother described her as outgoing and as the organizer of family gatherings; a family friend called her a "super mom," and the Eureka schools superintendent remembered her as one of the district's most admired volunteers. "We need to not just remember (Carole and Juli) as murder victims but for the lives they led," the local CASA director said in 1999.
Juli Sund was a cheerleader; her squad had placed fifth and sixth at two state tournaments in Stockton the weekend before the trip. Her grandmother described her as outgoing, kind and thoughtful. Her father said she was much like her mother and had two wishes: to own and drive a car, and to have a boyfriend. She had kept a scrapbook that included a flier about a missing Eureka High student.
Silvina Pelosso came to Eureka from Argentina in December 1998 to stay with the Sunds and was due to go home in March 1999. Her mother described a good student who loved the outdoors, raced as a competitive roller-skater and was close to her family. At trial her father described her as tenacious and adventurous.
On February 12, 1999, the three flew to San Francisco, where Carole rented a red Pontiac Grand Prix from Avis. They planned to attend a cheerleading competition in Stockton, spend two nights at the Cedar Lodge, and then meet Jens for a trip to Arizona. On February 14 they checked into Room 509. They rented a VCR and videotapes, and the desk clerk remembered talking with them about the film "Jerry Maguire." On February 15 they spent the day in Yosemite and returned to eat dinner at the lodge's restaurant. That was the last confirmed sighting.
The account of what happened that night comes from Stayner's own recorded confession to the FBI, as summarized by the California Supreme Court. He said he chose the room because no man was with the three guests. He knocked on the door, said he needed to check a water leak, and once inside drew a gun and bound all three with duct tape. He strangled Carole Sund, and then strangled and suffocated Silvina Pelosso. He kept Juli in the room for hours.
Before dawn he drove Juli in the rented Pontiac to Vista Point, above the Don Pedro Reservoir in Tuolumne County, and killed her there with a knife. He covered her body with brush. He returned to the car, put the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso in the trunk, took 200 dollars from Carole's purse and threw away evidence. He left the Pontiac in the forest and took a taxi back toward Yosemite on February 16; the driver, from Sonora, later identified him. On February 18 he went back and set the car on fire. He scratched the words "we have Sarah" into it to mislead investigators. He told the FBI that his main worry afterward was getting to work on time.
On the morning of February 16, a manager's call to Room 509 went unanswered. A housekeeper found wet towels on the bathroom floor; a pink blanket and a pillow were missing. The three did not arrive at San Francisco International Airport that day. Jens Sund, whose own flight had been delayed, flew to Phoenix, and on February 17 the family reported them missing.
A Mariposa County deputy found no damage to the door or windows of the room. On February 19 a middle school student found Carole Sund's wallet in Modesto. On February 20 the room was processed for fingerprints. The FBI set up a multi-agency task force with the Modesto Police Department, the Stanislaus County Sheriff and others, and its hotline was taking about 300 calls a day by late March. Carole's parents, Francis and Carole Carrington of Modesto, posted rewards for the women's safe return and for information about the car.
On March 3, FBI Special Agent Anthony Alston interviewed Stayner at the Cedar Lodge as a possible witness. Stayner said he had been out of town and had not seen the missing women or their car.
On March 18 a man came across a burned car on a remote dirt road off Highway 108 near Long Barn, northeast of Sonora. He took its fallen red license plate home and called police. The next day FBI Special Agent Chris Hopkins found two bodies in the trunk. They were later identified as Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso; Carole was identified through dental records. A pathologist found that they had died before the fire. Investigators recovered a rope, a purse, camera equipment, an Avis key and Juli's shoes, and an arson expert concluded the fire had been set weeks earlier. Juli was still missing.
On March 24 Agent Alston received a letter at the FBI's Modesto office. It held a hand-drawn map of the Vista Point area at Don Pedro Reservoir and the words "We had fun with this one." Stayner's right thumbprint was later found on the stamp. On March 25 agents found Juli Sund's body near Moccasin Vista Point, along the reservoir off Highway 120. Her grandmother said the family had been "desperately hoping" she was alive. "You give up," she said. "This big hole is going to be in your life forever."
In Eureka, schools brought in crisis counselors. Jens Sund told a news conference that he wanted justice "within the means of the law." He said, "I don't think a father should have to write their daughter's obituary." In April 1999 the Carringtons gave 200,000 dollars to create the Carole Sund/Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation, to post rewards for families of missing or murdered people who could not afford to do so themselves. A trust fund was opened at Bank of America in Silvina Pelosso's name to help her family.
By April 1999 the investigation had settled on a group of ex-convicts and methamphetamine users in the Modesto area. CBS News reported on April 8 that a federal grand jury in Fresno was hearing witnesses and that agents were focusing on four men, among them two half-brothers, M.L. and E.D., both with long criminal records. The burned car had been found near the boyhood home of one of them. Both denied any part in the killings; M.L. told a Fresno television station from jail that he had taken a polygraph and given a DNA sample. The FBI would not confirm that anyone was a suspect.
None of these men was ever charged with the Sund and Pelosso killings. In July 1999, the day Joie Armstrong's body was found, the FBI said her death was not connected to the Sund case and that the key suspects in that case were in jail on unrelated charges. Within days that position had collapsed. Senator Charles Grassley, who oversaw the FBI as a subcommittee chairman, compared the case to that of Richard Jewell, the guard wrongly suspected in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing. "Apparently somebody made a mistake, didn't they?" said Francis Carrington.
Joie Ruth Armstrong was an environmental science educator for the Yosemite Institute, now called NatureBridge, which runs outdoor programs for students. She lived in a cabin in Foresta, a small community inside the park. NatureBridge remembers her as full of laughter, creativity and spunk, with a strong wish to improve the world around her. In her own words, quoted by the organization: "My passion lies with teaching children about their environment, and I have dedicated all of my efforts toward it." A close friend had promised to teach her rock climbing, and she had promised in return to teach her friend how to balance rocks.
On July 21, 1999, at about 6:30 p.m., Armstrong called the wife of her supervisor to say she would bring some equipment over. She never arrived. When the woman went to the cabin about an hour later, the front doors were open and no one answered. Armstrong was due at a meeting in Marin County at 10 p.m. and did not appear. At about 7:20 p.m. a witness saw a blue-and-white Scout near Foresta.
Between 10 and 10:30 that night, Ranger Don Ramsey came upon a man standing beside a broken-down blue-and-white International Scout on Highway 140 with his thumb out. The man said he had car trouble, and Ramsey drove him to the Cedar Lodge. It was Stayner.
On July 22, Ranger Mark Harvey took the missing-person report. At the cabin he found Armstrong's white truck, the doors open, and signs that someone had been packing a day pack. That afternoon searchers found her body in a nearby creek. The autopsy found that she had been killed with a knife.
That evening a National Park Service special agent saw Stayner driving the Scout and interviewed him. Stayner said the Scout was unusual, that a ranger had given him a ride after it broke down, and that it had not been in Foresta. He told the agent to contact him at the Cedar Lodge the next day. On July 23 he did not show up for work, the first time in more than a year that he had missed it. He closed his credit union account and sold a television and a VCR to a coworker for much less than they were worth.
On July 24, 1999, FBI agents found Stayner at the Laguna del Sol nudist resort in Wilton, south of Sacramento, where he had been a repeat visitor. A person at the resort had recognized his name and alerted authorities, and security staff watched him until the agents arrived, ABC10 reported. Stayner later wrote a letter to the woman who turned him in.
The agents were Special Agent Jeffrey Rinek and Special Agent John Boles, with a supervisor, Kenneth Hittmeier. When they approached, Stayner stood and put his hands on his head. Boles handcuffed him for safety. The agents told him he was not under arrest and put him in an FBI car for the 90-minute drive to Sacramento. Rinek read him his Miranda rights, and the trial court found that he answered, "I prefer not to talk now." The two men then talked casually. Stayner raised his brother's kidnapping, and Rinek told him he agreed that the kidnapper's sentence had been too short. "We were two guys that didn't know each other," Rinek told CBS Sacramento in 2023. "I don't judge people, so when they talk to me, they feel comfortable."
At the FBI office in Sacramento, the agents advised Stayner of his rights again. He signed a waiver and gave a recorded confession. He admitted first to killing Joie Armstrong, and Rinek said he seemed to feel a sense of relief afterward. He told the agents he had taken her at gunpoint, bound her and driven away with her, that she jumped from his vehicle, and that he caught her and killed her with a knife before returning to the body.
Before he would talk about the Cedar Lodge killings, Stayner tried to bargain. He asked for illegal material to take to prison, for reward money to go to his parents, and to be held in the new federal prison at Atwater, near his family. The agents told him that giving him such material would itself be a crime, and he agreed that his demands amounted to extortion. Before the demands were settled, the agents asked for a detail only the killer would know, and Stayner described the anonymous letter and its map. The agents urged him to be a "standup man." He then confessed to the Sund and Pelosso killings without receiving anything he had asked for, and said he had been planning such crimes for more than a year. Rinek said Stayner "wanted her to be found" when he mailed the map to Juli's body.
On July 25 Stayner led agents to a bag containing the pink blanket missing from Room 509 and to Vista Point, where a knife was later found. The roll of duct tape he showed them matched tape found on Juli's ankle. The same day, the taxi driver called the FBI. A search of the Scout on July 28 turned up a roll of duct tape and a backpack with a gun. The tape matched tape at the Armstrong scene, and his sandals and the Scout's mismatched tires matched marks found there.
On July 25 the FBI charged Stayner with Armstrong's murder and named him only as a suspect in the Sund and Pelosso case, because federal officials wanted to rule out accomplices first. "Mr. Stayner is a suspect in the murders," an FBI spokesman, Nick Rossi, said. On July 26 Stayner told a television reporter in a jail interview that he alone had killed all four women.
Armstrong was killed inside a national park, so her murder was a federal crime. Stayner pleaded not guilty in federal court on August 6, 1999, and on September 22 to added charges of kidnapping and attempted sexual assault. The government sought the death penalty. Because of the publicity, prosecutors and the defense agreed that he could not get a fair trial anywhere in California, and Seattle was proposed as a trial site. U.S. District Judge Anthony W. Ishii ruled that prosecutors could present evidence about the Cedar Lodge killings at the Armstrong trial. Mariposa County prosecutors asked Attorney General Janet Reno to let the state case go first and were refused.
Instead the case ended in a plea. Stayner, his lawyer and federal prosecutors signed an agreement on September 6, 2000, and on September 13, 2000, before Judge Ishii in Fresno, he pleaded guilty to kidnapping Joie Armstrong, attempting to sexually assault her and killing her. Prosecutors had weighed her family's wishes; her mother, Lesli Armstrong, had said she would prefer not to sit through a trial. Under the agreement Stayner would be sentenced to life without parole, would pay 10 million dollars in restitution to a fund in Armstrong's name so that he could never profit from the case, would meet her family if they asked, and would never "speak to anyone, write to anyone, or communicate to anyone about the death of Joie Ruth Armstrong," apart from testimony and talks with his lawyers. His lawyer, Assistant Federal Defender Robert Rainwater, said, "A young woman died in the prime of her life."
Judge Ishii sentenced him to life without parole later that autumn. Stayner, 39, sobbed in court. "I gave in to the terrible dark dreams that I tried to subdue," he said. "I am sorry and ashamed." He turned to Lesli Armstrong. "I wish I could take it back, but I can't," he said. "I wish I could tell you why I did such a thing, but I don't even know myself." He said nothing about the Cedar Lodge killings. Lesli Armstrong wept during the hearing and said afterward that her family was devastated but that she might one day forgive him. "I will not live my life festering with anger, hatred and vengeance," she said. "I won't do that." His parents sat in the front row.
On October 20, 1999, the Mariposa County district attorney, Christine Johnson, charged Stayner with three counts of murder, with special circumstances that made him eligible for the death penalty. Judge Richard L. McMechan sealed the supporting affidavit. Stayner's federal sentence cleared the way for the state case. Late in 2000 he pleaded not guilty in Mariposa Superior Court, with Jens Sund watching. "I was repulsed because of what he did," Sund said; unlike his wife's parents, he said he was not pressing for a death sentence. Silvina Pelosso's parents, Raquel and Jose Pelosso, opposed the death penalty.
Judge Thomas C. Hastings of Santa Clara County, who had presided at the Polly Klaas murder trial, was assigned to the case. The small county had never handled a case of this size, its court executive said, and in early 2001 it drew protests by requiring reporters to be fingerprinted for press credentials. Mariposa County had spent 940,000 dollars on the case by mid-2002 and expected to spend at least 2 million more, most of it to be repaid by the state.
The trial was held in Santa Clara County Superior Court in San Jose. In April 2002 Judge Hastings closed parts of a hearing on suppressing evidence, over objections from news organizations. The defense had moved to have Stayner's statements to the FBI, and a confession he gave a Bay Area television reporter, thrown out, and lost; both went to the jury. Shortly before trial the defense renewed its request to move the case, citing a survey in which 92 percent of potential jurors had heard of it and 69 percent thought Stayner probably or definitely guilty.
Stayner pleaded not guilty and not guilty by reason of insanity. The trial opened in mid-July 2002 in three possible phases: guilt, sanity and penalty. The prosecutor was George Williamson; the lead defense lawyer was Marcia Morrissey. Prosecutors listed 153 witnesses. None had seen the killings, but some could place Stayner at particular times and places, among them the Sonora taxi driver.
The defense conceded that Stayner had killed the three and asked the jury to find second-degree murder, which would have ruled out a death sentence. Its experts described a disordered brain. Dr. Jose Arturo Silva, a forensic psychiatrist, diagnosed a personality disorder, several paraphilias and an anxiety disorder, and cited Stayner's attempt to bargain for money and pornography as a sign of poor social judgment. Dr. Ruben Gur, a neuropsychologist, said MRI abnormalities reflected poor emotional processing and difficulty telling thoughts from reality. Dr. Joseph Wu said PET scans suggested a brain injury consistent with conditions including schizophrenia and obsessive-compulsive disorder, and Dr. Monte Buchsbaum agreed. The prosecution's expert, Dr. Alan Waxman, questioned the PET machine and the methods and found no abnormality. An FBI fingerprint examiner testified that latent prints from Room 509 and the Vista Point scene did not belong to Stayner, and a document examiner said there was too little handwriting to say whether he wrote the letter.
At the defense's request, the jury heard the part of the taped confession in which Stayner bargained for child pornography. He had said on the tape that he could not be happy in prison without it. Morrissey had earlier opposed playing it in open court. The part of the tape about Joie Armstrong was not played.
In closing, Williamson called the insanity defense "goofy" and "loopy" and said Morrissey had to "blow smoke" because the facts did not support her. He pointed to the kit Stayner carried and to the detail of his own account. Morrissey argued that Stayner had been psychotic.
After about five hours of deliberation, on a Monday in late August 2002, the jury convicted Stayner of three counts of first-degree murder and one count of kidnapping. He showed no emotion. The jury found true special circumstances of multiple murder, kidnapping murder, attempted rape murder, forcible oral copulation murder and burglary murder, and found that he had personally used a deadly weapon and a firearm; it found the robbery-murder special circumstance not true. "It's a vindication of our feeling that this definitely is a death penalty case and that it was a horrendous crime," Carole Carrington said. "My personal feeling is, he knew exactly what he was doing when he did it," said Francis Carrington.
At the sanity phase, a Cedar Lodge coworker testified that Stayner had told her of visions, and Dr. McInnes testified that he suffered from psychosis and intrusive thoughts he could not control, that he had believed in the months before the crimes that he was receiving messages about a coming apocalypse, and that he had been seen mumbling to himself at the lodge the day before. The prosecution called the forensic psychiatrist Park Dietz, who said Stayner understood what he was doing and knew it was wrong. Dietz pointed to the planning: the kit, the effort to avoid leaving fingerprints, the choice of victims, the ruse at the door, the cleaning of the room, the remote site, the burning of the car and the attempts to mislead investigators. Stayner had told Dietz he knew his acts were illegal and wrong. On September 16, 2002, the jury found him sane, after less than four hours of deliberation.
At the penalty phase the prosecution relied on the crimes themselves, on testimony from the families and on the Armstrong murder. Silvina's mother, Raquel, described her friendship with Carole and the collapse of her family. Silvina's father, Jose, said he had nearly taken his own life after learning of her death. Carole Carrington spoke of the family's hope that Juli was alive and of Juli's warmth, and Francis Carrington described the search and Juli's two wishes.
The defense called his parents, three sisters, an aunt, a cousin and friends, who described his childhood, Steven's abduction and death, the murder of his uncle and his mental health. Dr. Silva diagnosed a pervasive developmental disorder, obsessive-compulsive disorder, paraphilias and a stress disorder of the post-traumatic type, but said Stayner had not lost the ability to tell right from wrong. Dr. Fred Berlin, an expert on sexual disorders, said he was beginning to lose touch with reality and acted under extreme mental disturbance. Jail officers from Mariposa, Fresno and Santa Clara counties described him as polite and cooperative, and the psychologist Craig Haney rated his likely adjustment to prison as excellent. The defense also pointed to his remorse: an apology letter to Juli, tears when he spoke of her, and his plea and apology in the Armstrong case.
The jury returned a death verdict in October 2002. At sentencing in December 2002, Carole Carrington told the judge, "I'm just horrified when I think of what happened in that room." Francis Carrington said, "I'm so proud of the way Carole and Juli lived, and I'm so ashamed of Stayner." Judge Hastings rejected defense claims of juror misconduct and denied the motions for a new trial and to reduce the sentence. He became emotional and left the bench for a time before imposing sentence. He sentenced Stayner to death, plus a consecutive term of 45 years. Delbert Stayner, the defendant's father, called the proceedings a "kangaroo court." Outside the courthouse, Jose Pelosso was teary-eyed but smiled.
A California death sentence is appealed automatically to the state Supreme Court. Stayner's appeal, People v. Stayner, No. S112146, was pending for more than two decades. His appointed lawyer, Andrew Parnes, raised claims about the confession, the arrest, jury selection, juror misconduct, evidence rulings and the constitutionality of California's death penalty law. In a supplemental brief filed November 14, 2025, he argued, relying on the court's 2021 decision in People v. Nieves, that Judge Hastings had shown bias against the defense throughout the trial: excluding much of the mitigation evidence, scolding defense counsel in front of the jury and treating the two sides unequally. The court heard argument in Sacramento on February 4, 2026, and granted Parnes 45 minutes.
On April 30, 2026, the court affirmed the judgment in its entirety. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero wrote the opinion, joined by Justices Corrigan, Liu, Kruger and Groban and by Justice Adams of the Court of Appeal, sitting by assignment. "We have assumed error, but found no prejudice," the court wrote.
On the confession, the court held that the statement "I prefer not to talk now," read in context, left open talking later; it did not decide whether this was an effective invocation of the right to silence, because even assuming it was, Stayner made no incriminating statements in the car. It upheld his written waiver in Sacramento and found the confession voluntary. An agent's offer of counseling, and a remark about safe housing in prison, were not promises made in exchange for a confession, and the court found no coercion. It held that the conversation about his brother was one of many topics and unrelated to the crimes, and that the handcuffs on the drive were for safety. It found probable cause for the arrest in the tire tracks, his missed work and the cheap sale of his belongings, which gave "reasonable ground for believing that defendant was involved in the murder of Armstrong." It upheld the exclusion of an expert on interrogation methods, rejected the claims of judicial bias, noting that friction between judges and lawyers is inevitable in long trials, and found no reversible error in jury selection.
Justice Kelli Evans concurred in part and dissented in part. She agreed that Stayner had been "found to have committed three murders with five special circumstances after a fair trial," and would have affirmed the guilt and sanity verdicts. But she concluded that the penalty phase "was not, under our precedents, fair." The prosecutor had asked a corrections expert whether prisons "employ young female staffers," the defense was not allowed to follow up, and the prosecutor relied on the point in closing argument, leaving Stayner "defenseless" on future dangerousness, which she called "one of the most significant" factors for a jury. She wrote that at least two seated jurors had not disclosed on their questionnaires that they had been molested and had drawn on those experiences when weighing evidence of his own childhood molestation. "I would affirm the guilt and sanity verdicts but reverse the death judgment and remand for further proceedings," she wrote.
Stayner also filed a petition for a writ of habeas corpus in March 2026, the North Coast Journal reported, and it must be resolved before an execution date could be set. No ruling on it, and no further review of the April 2026 decision, had been reported by October 2026.
Stayner was held at San Quentin State Prison for years after his sentencing; ABC10, ABC30 and CBS Sacramento placed him there from 2002 to at least October 2023. California has since moved all condemned prisoners off San Quentin's death row. As of May 28, 2026, he was held at Pelican Bay State Prison in Crescent City, the North Coast Journal reported. Executions in California have been on hold since Governor Gavin Newsom's moratorium of March 2019, and the state's last execution was in 2006. As of May 18, 2026, there were 573 condemned prisoners in California.
Francis and Carole Carrington's reward foundation posted 152 rewards in 30 states, totaling more than 1.1 million dollars, by the time the U.S. Department of Justice's Office for Victims of Crime gave them a National Crime Victim Service Award in 2003. The foundation credited its rewards with helping to catch 17 murder suspects. Later its executive director, Scott Webb, told ABC30 that it had posted 3.5 million dollars in rewards in more than 540 cases in 47 states, including the Laci Peterson case in Modesto and the Sandra Cantu case in Tracy, before the Carringtons, then in their 70s, announced they could no longer fund it.
Joie Armstrong's family and friends created the Armstrong Scholars program at NatureBridge, which began in 2000. Each summer a group of young women aged 15 to 18 spends about ten days backpacking in the Yosemite backcountry with two women educators. Two of her friends founded an organization called Balanced Rock in 1999, named for the promise she and one of them had made to each other.
The case drew wide criticism of the FBI for the months spent on other men while Stayner, already interviewed, went on working at the Cedar Lodge. It has been revisited in television programs, including ABC's "20/20" in 2019 and a CBS series in 2023 in which Rinek discussed the confession. Rinek also wrote a book, "In the Name of the Children." He told CBS Sacramento he has not stayed in contact with Stayner, because doing so would "betray what I did."
Proven by final judgment: the first-degree murder of Joie Armstrong, with her kidnapping and the attempted sexual assault (federal guilty plea, 2000). Proven by jury verdicts, affirmed on automatic appeal in April 2026: the first-degree murders of Carole Sund, Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso and the kidnapping of Juli Sund, with five special circumstances. The state habeas petition filed in March 2026 had not been reported decided by October 2026.
Other killings: CBS Sacramento reported in 2023 that investigators had examined Stayner in five other killings dating back to the 1980s, including his uncle's, and that he has never been charged in any of them. Rinek said he did not believe Stayner had killed others. Salon wrote in 1999 that he might have killed his uncle; no charge or official finding has followed.
Accomplices: in July 1999 the FBI said the involvement of others was still being evaluated. Stayner told agents and a television reporter that he acted alone, and he was the only person charged.
Accounts differ on several details: the federal plea was in September 2000, not 2001 as one 2026 report says; one 2026 report says a separate jury convicted him of Armstrong's murder, but he pleaded guilty; one AP item dated the confession to February 1999, when it was July 1999. Steven Stayner's death is described as a motorcycle crash, a hit-and-run collision and a drunk-driving crash. Parnell's prison term is given as five years in one account and seven in another. Stayner's hometown is given as Merced in most accounts and Atwater in one wire report.
Cary Anthony Stayner grows up in Merced, California.
December 1972: his brother Steven, 7, is abducted in Merced.
1980: Steven, about 14, reaches the Ukiah police station with a younger boy Parnell had taken.
1989: Steven Stayner dies in a crash at 24.
Cary's uncle, with whom he is living, is murdered when Cary is 29; a year later Cary attempts suicide.
1993 to 1995: works at a glass shop; July 1995 hospital visit.
By 1997: working at the Cedar Lodge, El Portal, where a coworker knew him from that year.
February 12, 1999: Carole Sund, Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso fly to San Francisco.
February 14, 1999: they check into Room 509.
February 15, 1999: last seen at the lodge restaurant; killed that night and the next morning.
February 16, 1999: they miss their flight; Stayner takes a taxi back toward Yosemite.
February 17, 1999: reported missing.
February 18, 1999: Stayner burns the rental car.
March 3, 1999: FBI Agent Alston interviews Stayner as a possible witness.
March 18 to 19, 1999: the burned car is found; the bodies of Carole Sund and Silvina Pelosso are recovered.
March 24 to 25, 1999: the map letter reaches the FBI; Juli Sund's body is found near Don Pedro Reservoir.
April 1999: a federal grand jury in Fresno hears evidence about other men; the Carringtons found their reward foundation.
July 21, 1999: Joie Armstrong is killed in Foresta; a ranger gives Stayner a ride that night.
July 22, 1999: her body is found; a Park Service agent interviews Stayner.
July 23, 1999: Stayner misses work.
July 24, 1999: FBI agents find him in Wilton; he confesses in Sacramento to all four killings.
July 25, 1999: charged federally with Armstrong's murder; leads agents to evidence.
October 20, 1999: charged in Mariposa County with three murders.
September 13, 2000: pleads guilty in federal court in Fresno to Armstrong's murder, kidnapping and attempted sexual assault.
Late 2000: sentenced to life without parole; pleads not guilty in the state case.
July 2002: state trial opens in San Jose.
August 2002: convicted of three first-degree murders and kidnapping.
September 16, 2002: found sane.
October 2002: jury returns a death verdict.
December 2002: sentenced to death by Judge Hastings.
November 14, 2025: supplemental brief on judicial bias.
February 4, 2026: oral argument at the California Supreme Court.
March 2026: habeas corpus petition filed.
April 30, 2026: California Supreme Court affirms; Justice Evans dissents as to the death sentence.
May 28, 2026: reported held at Pelican Bay State Prison.