FIVE

All those adjustments still lay in the future, however, as the news media’s focus on the Steven Stayner story turned on the man who had claimed to be “Dennis’s” father for so many years, Ken Parnell.

People in Ukiah and Noyo who had known Ken Parnell for the previous five or six years were shocked to discover that not only was he not “Dennis’s” father, he was a suspected kidnapper and child molester. He just didn’t seem the type, nearly everyone agreed. Even the Mendocino County District Attorney Joe Allen—who would have to prosecute Parnell for kidnapping Timmy White—tended to see the situation rather more benignly than circumstances seemed to warrant.

“It seems he wanted to build a family for himself without going to the trouble of getting married,” Allen told reporters the day after Parnell’s arrest at the Palace Hotel.

This was, indeed, putting a charitable interpretation on Ken’s actions over the past seven years: making it seem as though Ken’s only real sin was that he loved children as much as any man.

That Parnell loved them differently, however, quickly became apparent when police and reporters began delving into Ken’s background.

*   *   *

If anything, Ken Parnell had had an even harder life than Steven Stayner, it soon became apparent; indeed, in one way, Parnell’s predilection for stealing children and “adopting” them was a clear manifestation of his own inner yearning for normalcy—a normalcy that could never be possible given Parnell’s own upbringing.

Born in the Depression year of 1931 in west Texas near Amarillo, Parnell was the only son of a man who had deserted his family when Parnell was five years old. Two years later, Parnell’s mother took her seven-year-old son to Bakersfield, California, where mother and son lived in poverty, and Kenneth Parnell began embarking on a series of self-destructive acts.

At the age of eight, Ken focused a bright beam of light into his eyes for so long his vision was damaged; a few years later he attempted to pull all his teeth out, and on several other occasions he attempted to commit suicide.

At the age of 13, in the middle of World War II, Ken was lured into a car by an older man and sexually assaulted.

As the war wound to a close, Parnell began a series of homosexual affairs with older men, and got into repeated trouble with the law by setting fires and stealing cars.

In retrospect, Parnell’s actions seem to have fit a classic pattern: deprived of his own father, and feeling worthless, Parnell got the attention he craved from male authority figures by acting either badly or seductively. The principles of juvenile psychology and the principles of child development then being in their infancy, the system reacted to Parnell the way it did with most “bad” kids from poor homes: branded an incorrigible and a mental misfit, Parnell was institutionalized.

A psychiatrist, Dr. Richard D. Loewenberg, who began treating Parnell in his mid-teens, noted that Parnell had developed “a peculiar tendency to search for trouble and punishment.”

Doubtless at least some of this “peculiar tendency” related to Parnell’s often tempestuous relationship with his mother; Loewenberg came to conclude that if Ken’s mother’s fondest wish were granted, her troubled son would simply run away, never to be seen again.

It was perhaps with that goal in mind that Ken, at 18, married a Bakersfield girl he had met in high school. The young couple had a daughter, but the marriage soon foundered.

Driven by desires he had trouble understanding, in March of 1951, Parnell kidnapped an eight-year-old Bakersfield boy by pretending to be a police officer, drove him to an arroyo outside of town, sexually assaulted him, and then drove him back to town. Parnell later admitted that he thought of killing the boy to conceal his crime, but then thought better of it. Bakersfield police had little difficulty identifying Parnell, and Ken was arrested. Loewenberg, in an assessment for the court, termed Parnell a “sexual psychopath,” as did two other doctors retained by the court.

Quickly convicted, Parnell’s marriage to his high school girlfriend disintegrated, and Parnell was sent to San Quentin State Prison for a four-year term. Released for the first time in 1955, Parnell violated his parole, and was returned to San Quentin for another year before earning a second release in 1956.

Parnell next wandered to Utah, where, in 1960 he was arrested for holding up a gas station three blocks from the Mormon Tabernacle in Salt Lake City. Convicted again, Parnell was sentenced to five-years-to-life at the Utah State Prison in Draper, Utah.

In 1967, Parnell was released on parole, with the proviso that he leave the state of Utah within 48 hours and never return.

This skeletal outline of Kenneth Parnell’s background, however, leaves out some of the most important aspects of his personality: Parnell was peculiarly gifted with the inborn talent of most psychopaths to seem what others wanted to see in him; he was at his best with children and less intelligent adults, who trusted him as a steady, seemingly kind, reasonable, and mature adult. In fact, Parnell, like many psychopathic personalities, was an adroit manipulator of others.

This talent in part accounted for Parnell’s success in convincing a diminutive little night janitor employed at Yosemite Lodge to help him entice Steven Stayner into the van in Merced back in 1972.

This was the “little man” Steven recalled, who had asked him if his family wanted to make a donation. Under questioning from Lunney and Price, Steven was able to remember that the little man was barely five feet tall, smoked heavily, and that he worked as a janitor at the lodge. Using an array of lodge employee photos, Steven was able to pick the janitor as Ken’s accomplice without hesitation.

Price and Lunney went to Yosemite, where they arrested the man without incident. The janitor expressed relief that he’d finally been caught; in fact, helping Parnell kidnap Steven Stayner was the only crime he’d ever committed in his life, and it had preyed on his conscience for seven years.

“Thank God it’s over,” the janitor told Lunney and Price. “I’m really glad that kid is safe.” He hadn’t talked to Parnell since 1973, when Parnell wanted money, he said, and he’d had no idea where Parnell had been for the past seven years.

Still, it was clear that Parnell was something more than the garden variety sexual psychopath; after all, it is the rarest of child molesters who want their victims to call them “dad.” Here, in fact, is a clue to the inner workings of Parnell’s twisted mind: while he craved the sexual relationship he forced upon his victims, that wasn’t all. What Parnell also wanted was something he’d never had for himself: a father, a role model, a family; and if he had to steal children to create this image in his own mind, the roots of his pathology were at least explicable, if unforgiveable. In Steven Stayner, Kenneth Parnell had for seven years something he’d always yearned for: a family, an ongoing relationship in which he was the head, a relationship he could control and take the inner and outer satisfaction in, to help him play the role he’d never had in his own life: “Dad.” It was only when Steven Stayner began to grow up that “Dad” decided he needed a new son.