Cary Stayner Sentenced to Death for the 1999 Murders of Three Yosemite Sightseers
The judge broke down before condemning Stayner for killing Carole Sund, her daughter Juli and their friend Silvina Pelosso. He was already serving life for a fourth murder.
Published
The details were so harrowing that the judge had to leave the courtroom to compose himself. When he returned, on December 12, 2002, he sentenced Cary Stayner to death for the murders of three Yosemite sightseers.
Santa Clara County Superior Court Judge Thomas C. Hastings accepted the recommendation that the jury had made in October, after a three-month trial. "The circumstances of this case are horrendous and devastating," he said before announcing the sentence. He rejected a defense motion for a new trial, which claimed that three jurors had failed to disclose that they had been molested as children, finding that Stayner, 41, had received a fair trial and that the evidence of his guilt was overwhelming.
Stayner, a former maintenance man at the Cedar Lodge motel outside Yosemite National Park, killed Carole Sund, 42, her 15-year-old daughter, Juli, and their friend Silvina Pelosso, 16, a visitor from Argentina, in February 1999. A San Jose jury convicted him of three counts of first-degree murder on August 26, 2002, with special circumstances that included kidnapping Juli Sund and sexually assaulting the two teenagers. Five months after those killings, he murdered Joie Armstrong, 26, a Yosemite nature guide. He had pleaded guilty in federal court to her murder and was serving a life sentence.
His lawyers argued that years of mental illness, his own molestation at age 11 and the 1972 kidnapping of his younger brother, Steven, had driven him to a break with reality. Jens Sund, Carole's husband and Juli's father, faced Stayner in court. "I just wish he would step up and take his punishment now," he said. Under California law, the death sentence was automatically appealed.
California prison records list the date of the crimes as February 15, 1999, while the trial evidence placed the killings over the night of February 15 and the morning of February 16.
Sources
- Yosemite killer sentenced to death / Terrible details of Stayner case stun even the judge, San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate)
- Stayner guilty of 1st-degree murder / Former handyman could now face death penalty, San Francisco Chronicle (SFGate)
- Condemned Inmate List, California Department of Corrections and Rehabilitation