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Within a few weeks of their arrest, Parnell and Murphy were charged in connection with the kidnappings of Steven Stayner and Timmy White. Because the crimes occurred in different counties, there would be two different trials, Parnell for Timmy’s kidnapping in Mendocino County, and Parnell and Murphy for Steven’s kidnapping in Merced County.

After preliminary hearings on both cases in both counties, defense lawyers for both men asked that the trials be moved from each county; the pre-trial publicity in both Ukiah and Merced was too intense for either man to receive a fair trial. Eventually both cases were transferred to Alameda County, in Oakland, California.

Nearly two years after Steven and Timmy walked through the rain to Ukiah, Parnell was found guilty of kidnapping and conspiracy in the abduction of Steven Stayner; that followed by several months his earlier conviction for kidnapping Timmy White. Steven Stayner was the star witness against both Parnell and Murphy, as Timmy was against Parnell in the Ukiah case.

Parnell was sentenced to serve up to seven years for kidnapping Timmy, but because of a quirk in the state’s sentencing law, he could only get 20 additional months for the kidnapping of Steven. The quirk meant that Murphy, who was consistently portrayed by both prosecutors and his defense lawyers as Parnell’s dupe, would have to serve a longer sentence than Parnell for Steven’s kidnapping. In all, the way things would work out, Parnell would serve fewer years in prison for his crimes than Steven had spent as Parnell’s “son.”

*   *   *

As for Steven Stayner, his short-lived reunion with his family soon metamorphosed into a more arm’s length relationship. It simply wasn’t possible for him to return home as if nothing had happened. School became increasingly difficult for him; occasionally, Merced Police Sergeant Jerry Price would run into Steve around town, and while on the surface things seemed fine, Price sensed there was a lot going on beneath the surface.

“There were a lot of secrets there,” Price recalled later; and why not?

Bit by bit, Steven learned to tune out the past, the way he’d done for so many years when he was “Dennis.” He wrapped himself up in television shows, in books, his motorcycle.

Whatever ambitions Steven might have had as a second-grader were long gone, somehow ground up in the lost years. As the 1980s unfolded, Steve took a job as a pizza deliverer; it was enough to be content. Steve met a girl, and they were married; two small children followed. Still, he had relatively few friends; for that he blamed Parnell.

“I’ve always shied away from people,” Steven told a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle in May of 1989, “because any (male) friend I ever had, Parnell made advances toward,”

The occasion of the interview was the imminent broadcast of a made-for-television movie about his kidnapping and escape—“I Know My Name Is Steven,” which was to be broadcast that month on NBC.

It had been more than 16 years since the kidnapping, nine since he’d walked to freedom with Timmy White, and yet Steven Stayner was still something of an unwilling celebrity. He had tried to pass the intervening years in obscurity, but the past still came back. Still, Stayner said, he was slowly coming to grips with what the years with Parnell had done to him. For one thing, he said, he learned to erect walls to keep people from getting close to him.

“I was protecting Parnell,” Steven told The Chronicle’s Torri Minton. “I was protecting myself. I didn’t want anybody to know what was going on. I made up excuses why my friends couldn’t stay the night with me, why we couldn’t do certain things with Parnell, like go camping. It was one lie right after another.

“What I did not want to do was have someone find out that my life was not normal, that it included sexual abuse, which I was trying to hide. To hide that I had to protect Parnell.”

Getting out of high school before graduation (he left in his senior year) was a tremendous relief, he said. No one greeted him with the remark, Oh, you’re the one who was … Out of school he was just another person, someone no one knew.

Steven wasn’t entirely happy with the way the made-for-television movie portrayed him, he said. Yes, it was true he was rebellious when he first returned home, and had trouble with curfews and other such parental rules; but it wasn’t true that he was rude and insulting to Del and Kay. The movie showed him arguing a lot with his parents, but that wasn’t really his way; rather than argue, he’d just shut off, the way he did with Parnell.

If anything held promise in his life, Steven added, it was the love of his wife and children, three and two years old. They accepted him for who he was, no questions asked: just a normal dad.

*   *   *

So, a happy ending for Steven Stayner—right?

Tragically, it was not to happen. Less than two months after the movie about his return from oblivion was broadcast, Steven Stayner rode his motorcycle broadside into a car that abruptly turned in front of him. He was killed instantly.

The car’s driver was uninsured, and fled the scene—a fatal, senseless, hit-and-run accident that claimed the life of a boy who had only just begun to live.

By that time, the Vietnam war wasn’t even a memory for a new generation, Henry Kissinger was in retirement, Richard Nixon was a respected elder statesman, Judge Sirica was dead, the Watergate burglars were either evangelists, trivia questions, or radio hosts, and the best part of nearly a whole decade was a blank to the family of Kay and Del Stayner and their remaining children. Kenneth Parnell had been out of prison for two years.

But the park at Yosemite still beckoned.