AUTHOR’S NOTE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Yosemite National Park remains one of the nation’s greatest natural treasures: a huge expanse of fragile alpine wilderness, spectacular gray granite escarpments, majestic waterfalls descending thousands of feet to a valley floor so pristine that its earliest visitors considered it the closest thing to Eden left on Earth. Each year, nearly four million people visit the park for camping, hiking, swimming and rock climbing; many, in fact, do little more than gape at the awesome scenery, one of nature’s monuments to the power of the planet to create and redefine itself over the eons of its existence.

The abrupt, mysterious disappearance of three women among those four million annual visitors in the early months of 1999 transfixed two nations; it wasn’t just that they vanished without any reasonable explanation, although that was peculiar enough. It was the fact that they had disappeared at the very doorstep of one of the country’s most impressive symbols of our civility, an outdoor wonderland where usually the most threatening reality is the prospect of hungry bears conducting car prowls for inadequately sealed sack lunches, or the occasional traffic jam.

But the vanishing of Carole Sund, Juliana Sund, and Silvina Pelosso during the night of February 15, 1999 from a motel at the park’s gateway raised the prospect of another, far more deadly threat; violence of man against woman, and in such a place of beauty it seemed particularly obscene. And because of the nature of the victims—innocents, people who had done nothing more than attempt to enjoy themselves while basking in nature’s glory, just as millions before them had and will again—America turned its collective eye on Yosemite Park and wondered: would it ever be safe to go to any of our national parks again?

As an FBI agent later put the events in perspective, Carole, Juli, and Silvina represented good, people doing innocent, happy things; and the very fact that they had fallen victim to random, mindless violence struck a chord in all of us. In the most visceral way, it told us that none of us was truly safe, no matter where we were. In short, what had happened to Carole, Juli, and Silvina could have happened to any of us, and it made us all recoil.

It was the peculiar nature of Carole, Juli, and Silvina’s disappearance that was to affect the events that followed. One evening they were there, doing normal things, eating hamburgers and watching videos; the next morning they were simply gone, along with all their luggage and their rented car. No one knew what had happened to them, and there was not a shred of visible evidence left behind to hint at their fate.

The complete absence of any clue as to what had befallen the trio in turn prompted law enforcement to adopt unusual tactics. Pressed by the families of the missing to mount an all-out search, augmented by monetarily significant rewards, the Federal Bureau of Investigation actively sought the assistance of the public in helping to develop leads. That, in turn led to an unusually cooperative relationship between the FBI and the news media, at least at the beginning. Indeed, the way the disappearance of the trio and the subsequent events unfolded is as much a story of the relationship between law enforcement and the news purveyors as it is a story about an investigation’s progress and the dreadful events that were subsequently revealed. For that reason, this book stands as much as a critique of the performance of the news media as it does an accounting of the events that ended in tragedy.

Because of this, I have tried as much as possible to explain not only the events surrounding the disappearances, but also the reasonings behind the FBI’s actions, as well as those of the news media; indeed, the two all-too-often mixed together, at times with good results, and at others with ill.

After the awful truth of what happened was revealed, the FBI and other law enforcement agencies came in for considerable criticism, much of it from the formerly cooperative news media, for a number of decisions and assumptions that were made during the investigation. Having relied upon the FBI as their primary authority in the beginning, the news media’s subsequent criticism of the agency was to seen a bit jaundiced. In truth, given the circumstances it initially faced, the FBI did pretty much all it could do. It was only after specific evidence was developed that a viable pathway of investigation emerged. That the pathway led publicly to a series of suspects who may not have been directly involved in the events was simply thorough police work, and an investigative tack that would have been taken by any law enforcement agency in America, given the circumstances; that the names and the focus of the investigation became public, and the public was led to believe that a resolution was at hand was far more the result of news media excesses in the climate that had previously been created than it was the fault of the FBI. As the FBI repeatedly pointed out, it wasn’t they who named names and advanced theories as to what had happened; instead it was the news media, caught in the ever-shortening gap between rumor and the rush to report.

Indeed, given the lengths the confessed perpetrator went to in covering up his crimes, it is doubtful that any solution would have been possible to the disappearance of Carole, Juli, and Silvina, except through events surrounding a later murder: that of park naturalist Joie Armstrong. It was Joie’s stout if futile resistance to her attacker that made the solution to the crimes finally possible. In that sense, Joie Armstrong stands as the real heroine of the murders at Yosemite.

Special thanks are due here to a variety of individuals who significantly assisted in the preparation of this accounting: Charles Spicer, my editor at St. Martin’s Press, was as helpful and supportive in this project as he has always been with others, and under the particularly difficult circumstances of a story that was still unfolding even as it was being written. So too, was Joe Cleemann of St. Martin’s Press, whose assistance in arranging the often arcane logistical details is gratefully appreciated. Jane Dystel of Jane Dystel Literary Management was instrumental in the arrangements that made this accounting possible, and I thank her as well.

Additionally, the help of former Merced Police officers Jerry Price and Gary Starbuck was invaluable in helping reconstruct the quarter-century-old events that played such a significant role in the eventual disappearance of Carole, Juli, and Silvina. Television reporter Ted Rowlands of Bay Area stations KNTV and KBWB provided vital insight into the circumstances of his exclusive jailhouse interview with Cary Stayner; indeed, Rowlands’s dogged persistence in the performance of his job despite repeated rebuffs stands as an outstanding example of journalistic enterprise.

Finally, let me express grateful appreciation to Marvin, Margit, and Erica Stuart of Madera County, whose support at a difficult time in the preparation of this book was instrumental in its completion.

Carlton Smith

San Francisco, California

September, 1999