TWENTY-EIGHT

Rowlands’s 6:00 P.M. report dropped like the bombshell it was on the assembled media in Sacramento. While they all knew that the FBI believed it had evidence connecting Stayner to all four murders, and there were reports from “sources close to the investigation” that Stayner had confessed, here was an actual in-person confession to a reporter.

Rowlands soon found himself the center of attention of a number of national news shows, including Good Morning America, Burden of Proof, and others. In each, Rowlands explained how Cary Stayner had personally confessed to him.

This, of course, was a defense attorney’s worst nightmare: not only had a prime suspect waived his rights to an attorney, he’d given a taped confession to the authorities, had re-enacted the crimes on videotape, and had even spilled his guts to a television reporter. Could the situation be any worse?

Nevertheless, a week later, at his arraignment in U.S. District Court in Fresno, Stayner pleaded not guilty to the murder of Joie Armstrong; it was apparent that two different cases would have to be brought against Stayner, one in federal court for Joie’s murder, and another in state court for the murders of Carole and Silvina, and the kidnapping-murder of Juli Sund. Because those crimes had either taken place or began in El Portal, that made Mariposa County the most likely venue for the Sund-Pelosso prosecution.

In the meantime, law enforcement officials were digging through their unsolved case files, looking for similar murders to those of Joie Armstrong and Juli Sund; the decapitation motif was striking to many experts. Some said it indicated a powerful desire on the part of the killer to utterly control the victim; by cutting off the head, the victim would never be able to harm the killer ever again.

A number of similar cases cropped up in police files, including one decapitation murder of a woman near Lake Don Pedro, and a second close to nearby New Melones Dam. A third decapitation case was noted in Santa Barbara; what all this meant was that investigators would have to go over Cary Stayner’s life for the previous 20 years with an excruciating attention to his exact whereabouts on specific dates. Indeed, many experts doubted whether the Sund-Pelosso murders were Stayner’s first, as he claimed to Rowlands. The reality of serial killers was that most started far earlier than their late thirties.

And there was yet another mystery to be linked to Cary Stayner. In December of 1990, Del’s brother Jesse had been found shot to death in his house in Merced. Cary had been at work at the time, but some now wondered whether that killing, too, was the work of Cary Stayner.

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Stayner’s assertion to Rowlands that none of the Sund-Pelosso victims was sexually assaulted turned out to be a lie, as most experts who study such killings predicted it would.

In fact, as was soon reported by a variety of news outlets, the usual “sources close to the investigation” contended that Stayner admitted raping Silvina Pelosso before killing her, and that he forced Juli Sund to perform oral sex on him for hours prior to leaving Room 509 of the Cedar Lodge early in the morning of February 16. Doubtless, too, Stayner had been seeking to have sex with Joie Armstrong when he attempted to overpower her; her fighting back made it impossible to remove her from the scene, which in turn led to his eventual capture.

In many ways, much of Stayner’s life—at least as it was uncovered by investigators and news media in the aftermath of his arrest—fit the model of a typical serial killer, at least as defined by the FBI’s behavioral sciences unit: Stayner had few, if any intimate friends; he drove an older vehicle that wasn’t that well maintained; he held (and probably preferred) menial jobs that placed little responsibility on him; he liked to expose himself to women; and most of all, he cultivated the mask of sanity so well that nearly everyone who thought they knew him believed he was a “normal guy.”

Also typical of serial killers was the rage Stayner expressed toward women; and while many experts doubted strongly that the rage began at the age of seven—which was four years before Steven Stayner’s kidnapping—it is possible that male rage toward women begins at an early age. Many studies of psychopathic personalities in prisons have indicated that the essential “bonding” that needs to take place between mother and child never occurred in the case of psychopathic personalities, for whatever reason. The small child is utterly dependent on the parent for food, care, and most of all love. Thus the “abandonment issues” referred to by some experts have in fact engendered rage by males toward females that dates back to the earliest years of consciousness.

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And what of Dykes and Larwick, the central “rogues” who had occupied so much of the attention of the TOURNAP people from almost the outset of the case? Larwick, of course, had denied any involvement in the crimes from the beginning; as for Dykes, “sources close to the investigation” reported that Dykes now admitted that he’d been fooling the investigators all along, partly by using what the investigators had asked him, partly by guessing, partly by weaving real, if irrelevant, things into the mix, and partly by finding out from pals on the outside what the FBI was asking them.