Carole Sund was forty-two. Her daughter Juli was fifteen. Silvina Pelosso was sixteen, an exchange student from Argentina staying with the family. In February 1999 the three of them took rooms at Cedar Lodge in El Portal, just outside the Highway 140 entrance to Yosemite National Park, and they were last known to be there on February 15. When they did not arrive in San Francisco as planned, Carole Sund's husband reported them missing.
The handyman at the lodge talked his way into their room saying he had come to fix a leak, and killed all three. On March 18 the burned-out shell of Sund's rented Pontiac was found with two bodies in the trunk, so badly burned they had to be identified from dental records. Carole Sund had been strangled with rope and shot. Silvina Pelosso had been raped and shot. About a week later the police received an anonymous note with a hand-drawn map. Across the top someone had written "We had fun with this one." At the place it marked investigators found Juli Sund. She had been raped and her throat had been cut.
Cary Anthony Stayner was born in Merced on August 13, 1961, the first of five children of Delbert and Kay Stayner. From the age of three he was treated for trichotillomania, the compulsive pulling-out of hair, and the bald patches it left got him badly bullied at school and kept him in a baseball cap. He was bright enough to be placed in accelerated classes, drew cartoons for the school paper, and was voted the most creative student in his graduating class at Merced High School.
On December 4, 1972, when Cary was eleven, his seven-year-old brother Steven was abducted by a child molester named Kenneth Parnell and raised as Parnell's son, first in Mariposa County and later in Mendocino County. Steven escaped in 1980 at fourteen, bringing another of Parnell's victims, a small boy named Timothy White, out with him. The story became a book and, in 1989, the television miniseries I Know My First Name Is Steven. Cary, who was eighteen when his brother came home, later said he had felt neglected while his parents grieved and overshadowed once Steven returned. Steven married, had two children, and died in a motorcycle accident in 1989.
After his arrest Stayner told the authorities his fantasies about abducting and killing women went back to the age of seven, before his brother was taken. After school he installed windows for a glass company and fantasized about driving a truck into the building, killing everyone there and setting it on fire. He tried to kill himself with carbon monoxide in 1991, was admitted to a psychiatric hospital in 1995 after what he called a nervous breakdown, and was arrested in 1997 for possession of marijuana and methamphetamine, charges that were later dropped. That year he was hired as the handyman at Cedar Lodge.
The lodge murders went unsolved for five months, and the investigation looked elsewhere. The FBI concentrated on a group of local men with criminal records. Detectives did interview the motel's employees, Stayner among them, but he had no criminal history, stayed calm, and was not treated as a suspect.
Joie Ruth Armstrong was twenty-six and worked as a naturalist for the Yosemite Institute. On July 21, 1999, witnesses saw a blue 1972 International Scout parked outside the cabin where she was staying. The next day her body was found, decapitated. The vehicle was traced to Stayner. FBI agents John Boles and Jeff Rinek found him at the Laguna del Sol nudist resort in Wilton, and he was arrested on July 24 and taken to Sacramento. There he confessed not only to Armstrong's murder but to the killings of the Sunds and Silvina Pelosso, and said he had thought about doing such things for thirty years. Evidence in his vehicle tied him to Armstrong.
Armstrong had been killed on federal land, so her murder was tried first, in federal court. To avoid a possible death sentence he pleaded guilty in 2000 to premeditated first-degree murder, felony murder, kidnapping resulting in death and attempted aggravated sexual abuse resulting in death. At sentencing he broke down and apologized. "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." Armstrong's mother wept as she listened, and said afterward that she believed he meant it. He was sentenced to life without the possibility of parole.
The state case was tried in Santa Clara County on a change of venue, and there he pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. His lawyers described a family history of sexual abuse and mental illness and pointed to his obsessive-compulsive disorder, and to the fact that he had asked for child pornography in return for his confession. A psychiatrist, Dr. Jose Arturo Silva, testified that he had obsessive-compulsive disorder, mild autism and paraphilia. On August 27, 2002, a jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances and one count of kidnapping, a separate sanity phase found him sane, and the penalty verdict was death. He moved for a new trial a month later and was refused.
Investigators have said he may have killed before. His paternal uncle, Jesse Stayner, forty-two, was shot dead with his own shotgun in his Merced home on December 26, 1990, while Cary was living with him; the killing was never solved, and after his arrest Cary claimed the uncle had molested him around the time of Steven's kidnapping. The FBI looked at the 1994 death of Sharalyn Murphy, twenty-four, whose headless and handless body was found near Vallecito, because of its similarity to Armstrong's. Authorities have also reviewed the 1994 death of Denise Smith near Don Pedro Reservoir, the 1996 disappearance of Michael Madden, twenty, on his way to a campground near Sonora, and the case of Patricia Hicks Dahlstrom, a former member of a Merced church whose leader, Donald Gibson, was convicted of sex offenses in 1981; she vanished on her way to Yosemite in 1982, and remains found in the park were identified as hers in 2021. Stayner is known to have attended Gibson's trial. He has never been charged in any of these cases.
The state appeal took twenty-four years. He argued that his confession had been coerced, that judicial bias had tainted the proceedings, that the venue should not have been changed, and that the court had wrongly excluded further evidence about what his brother's abduction had done to him. The jury had heard some of that and not the rest.
In late April 2026 the California Supreme Court denied it. Chief Justice Patricia Guerrero wrote for the court in an opinion running to two hundred and eighty-three pages, identifying potential errors at trial but concluding that none of them required the judgment to be reversed. Justice Kelli Evans wrote separately, taking the view that the death sentence had come out of an unfair trial.
He was held at San Quentin from 2002 to 2023. Under the program that dismantled the condemned unit there he was moved to Pelican Bay State Prison at Crescent City, near the Oregon border, where he remained under sentence of death as of May 2026. No execution date exists, and California has carried out none since 2006.