Steven Stayner

There aren't many true crime documentaries that are crazier then 'Captive Audience' on Hulu. Before you press play, here's what you need to know about ...

Stayner passed away on September 16, 1989, a day before I Know My First Name Is Steven lost the Emmy to War and Remembrance. He is survived by his wife and kids. Captive Audience makes the argument that Cary Stayner’s murder spree was a cry for attention to differentiate him from his kidnapped brother. At the age of 71, he tried to convince his caregiver to buy him a four-year-old boy. In February of 1980, Parnell, with the help of one of Stayner’s teenage friends, kidnapped five-year-old Timmy White. Stayner waited until Parnell left one night before he took White and hitchhiked to Ukiah, Calif., to return the boy to his parents. In an attempt to avoid the death sentence, he pleaded guilty to premeditated first degree murder, felony first degree murder, kidnapping resulting in death, and attempted aggravated sexual abuse resulting in death. This was a story the media would later report, initially claiming that Parnell kidnapped Stayner because he wanted a child of his own but didn’t have one. He said he believed Parnell’s claim that he wanted to abduct the young Stayner so that he could raise him in a more religious environment. On the afternoon of December 4, 1972, Steven Stayner was approached by a man on his way home from school. Parnell told Stayner that he had legal custody over him and that his parents didn’t want him anymore. On the first night of the abduction, Parnell molested Stayner. Thirteen days later he began to rape the seven-year-old boy. Steven Stayner was the third of Delbert and Kay Stayner’s five children. That kidnapping is the first detail in a story that would come to involve Stayner’s heroic return to his family, an Emmy-nominated miniseries, and a serial killer.

He Was Abducted As A Child. Then His Brother Became A Serial Killer. A new Hulu miniseries thoughtfully explores a family's surreal life in the true crime ...

Kay and Cory Stayner recall that the movie made the family more working class than they actually were, and we hear the director talk about adding drama to the story by making Stayner’s father, Del, more aloof and Kay more emotional. Still, the three episodes are compellingly bound together by the emphasis on the family’s remembrances, and their experiences living in the shadow of the family lore around Steven’s story. We hear tapes of the writers and director strategizing about how to tell the family’s story within the conventions of network television, and the actors who played Steven and Cary reenacting some of the scenes and transcripts with filmmakers. The 1999 murders of four women near Yosemite National Park were already a big story before Cary Stayner confessed in an FBI interview. At the time, childhood sexual abuse wasn’t openly discussed in the mainstream, and Stayner’s family members also seem unable to explicitly grapple with the legacy of the abuse; for instance, Kay refers vaguely to “what happened,” and his sister, Cory Stayner, says she wished she hadn’t asked Stayner about what had happened given the gruesome nature of his descriptions. Since the advent of breakout crime podcast Serial and Ryan Murphy’s 2016 TV series The People v. Instead, by foregrounding the voices of the Stayner family, including Steven Stayner’s mother, son, and daughter, it hints at themes like intergenerational trauma and the distortions and consolations of storytelling. Then 10 years later, in one of the most improbable twists in the annals of true crime, the Stayner name made headlines again when a string of murders in Yosemite became a national mystery. When the story made the press, Stayner became a national hero. Stayner was held by Kenneth Parnell, who had previously been convicted of sexually abusing a child, in Mendocino County for the next seven years, given a new name and life, and gaslit into forgetting his family. In the archival interviews we see, Stayner possesses a kind of eerie calmness. One December afternoon in 1972, 7-year-old Steven had been walking home in Merced, California, when he was coaxed into a stranger’s car with the promise of a ride home.

The new Hulu docuseries Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story takes an intimate look at this tragic, terrifying and touching saga about a family ...

How does it feel to be "brought through the experience of feeling a deep sympathy for a family, for a mother, and then to have a sudden left turn?" He also seemed angry at the driver who fatally crashed into him and ticked off by the light sentence given to Parnell, a free man at the time. "I was really struck by the impact that Steven had in the years he was living as Dennis," series director Dimmock told E! of revisiting that unfathomable part of his childhood. "None of the women were sexually abused in any way," Cary told KBWB's Ted Rowlands, who goes over the surreal interview in Captive Audience, after admitting that he was guilty of all four murders. He wasn't wearing a helmet and he was pronounced dead of a skull fracture at a nearby hospital. Parnell died in 2008 in prison at the age of 76 while serving a 25-years-to-life sentence for solicitation to commit a crime, trying to buy a human being and attempted child-stealing. "Police say that Stayner seemed fond of Parnell, who he said 'spoiled' him...Stayner was defensive about Parnell in his talks with police and reluctant at first to reveal his name. Parnell made Steven go by "Dennis Parnell," and as they moved from town to town in California he posed as the boy's father and enrolled him in school. "I brought in Timmy because I didn't like what was happening," Steven explained to the Santa Rosa Press Democrat, a variation of what he told police and reporters for a long time afterward. She later insisted she had no idea that "Dennis" wasn't Parnell's real son, that he even had a birth certificate for the boy. Murphy had a stack of religious pamphlets and, explaining that he was collecting money for his church, offered the boy a lift home. "And then they're the family of the perpetrator of the worst possible thing.

Steven Stayner is both a kidnapping victim-turned-national hero. He's also the brother of a serial killer.

The film continues to show the collateral damage of Stayner's kidnapping even after his death, as his older brother grow up to become a predator. As the docuseries shows, Stayner finished high school and settled down with Jody Edmondson, whom he met while working at a butcher shop. So, two weeks after White’s kidnapping, Stayner fled on foot along with the young boy and then hitchhiked to safety, a journey that thrust the two kidnapping survivors into the national spotlight.

CAPTIVE AUDIENCE: A REAL AMERICAN HORROR STORY on Hulu is a new true-crime documentary series in three parts. Full Series Review >

In the years between, a TV movie was made, dramatizing the events of Steven’s kidnapping, captivity and heroic escape. It’s such a sad and crazy ride, but telling this story (both that of Steven and Cary) in a sober way is important. It began with the abduction of Steven Stayner near Yosemite in 1972, and it ended 27 years later when his brother confessed to four murders a few miles away. The fact that this Hulu docu-series has the tagline (or subtitle, if you will) of “A real American horror story” is extremely appropriate. Episode 3 is all about Cary Stayner and this is when the story turns even darker. Jessica Dimmock is the director of this docu-series and does an excellent job of highlighting the important elements while leaving room for personal details as well. For this reason, we get Corin Nemec – who played Steven in the TV series – to read Steven Stayner’s answers from a transcript. For the record, Steven Stayner died in a hit-and-run accident when he was just 24 years old. Ten years after the TV series about his brother Steven Stayner was aired on TV to record-breaking ratings. His story was made famous in the TV series I Know My First Name Is Steven (1989). They speak very candidly about how and why the story is told in this manner. It’s a documentary series in three parts and every one of those three episodes is fascinating in its own right.

People were drinking a lot of milk, and what better way to put the image of a missing child into the minds of Americans? Steven Stayner was 7 years old when he ...

According to People Magazine, on September 16, 1989, Steven was heading home on his motorcycle from his job delivering pizza when a "car pulled out of the driveway of a migrant-labor camp along the highway." The movie was called I Know My First Name Is Steven, after the first thing that Steven said when they made it to the police. In August of that year, a statue was erected in Merced, honoring Steven and Timothy. The two men told Steven that they could just call his parents when they got to where they were going, to see if it was OK if he spent the night. The New York Times reported that Timothy died of a "pulmonary embolism" on April 1, 2010. It was then that Steven took advantage of his absence by grabbing Timothy, hitchhiking back to Ukiah, and heading straight for the police station. It didn't take long for Steven to realize that the car was not going to his house, so he let the men know that they'd driven past where he lives. Steven revealed the details of his kidnapping during a March 1980 interview on Good Morning America. While walking home from school, Steven was stopped by a man he didn't know, who asked Steven if he or his mother would be interested in donating something to a church. A week later, Steven began calling one of the men, Kenneth Parnell, dad. Parnell also told Steven that his new name was Dennis. Steven probably didn't think twice when Kenneth Parnell approached him on the street and asked him a few questions. It was at this moment that a car pulled up next to them both, and they got in.

Hulu documentary Captive Audience revisits the tragic story of Steven Stayner in 1972 – what happened to the young boy and where is the perpetrator now?

Over the next four years, he worked at Pizza Hut while lecturing about personal safety at schools. While Parnell was working as a night security guard, the children hitch-hiked to Ukiah, California, Timothy’s home town. When he didn’t return home, Steven’s parents – Delbert and Kay Stayner – alerted the authorities but there were no leads.

Abducted at the age of 7, a teenage Steven Stayner was finally returning to his family in Merced, California. Neighbors, well-wishers, gawkers and the media ...

“That’s unheard of,” Nemec says in the series. A week after his abduction, Steven was told to call Parnell dad and that he had a new name, “Dennis Parnell.” “I Know My First Name Is Steven” aired in two parts on May 22 and 23, 1989. He was real calm,” Jody says in the series. “He was a good dad. He then told Steven that he went to court and had “gotten possession” of him. “And so when the police asked me if there was any abuse involved or anything, I denied that there was any.” He was a good family man. A lot of alcohol and a lot of pot.” “At the beginning he sort of, like, brainwashed me to believe that my parents didn’t want me. “Steven’s suffering was so on display.” There was even a hit TV miniseries based on his story called “I Know My First Name Is Steven,” which came out in 1989.

"Captive Audience" on Hulu tells two tragic true crime tales, the first of which revolves around the abduction of Steven Stayner.

He also struggled re-acclimatizing to the structure of family life after Parnell had allowed him to smoke and drink. Steven Stayner would drop out of school due to the bullying he received. He had tried to get Stayner to help him, but Stayner deliberately sabotaged the kidnappings. Stayner agreed, but the man took him to his cabin in Catheys Valley instead. Stayner agreed, and a man named Kenneth Parnell pulled up in his car and offered him a ride home. Little did Stayner know when that miniseries aired on NBC that he would have just a few months to live.

Kenneth Parnell is most notoriously known for the kidnapping of Steven Stayner, but he was an active child sex predator long before that 1972 abduction.

In 2003, he was once again arrested in connection with a kidnapping, when an elderly and sickly Parnell tried to get his caretaker to buy a 4-year-old boy for him in Berkeley, California, the Associated Press reported in 2004. In 1981, he was convicted of kidnapping both boys and sentenced to seven years of state prison time. However, he only served three years in prison for that offense.

Years after Steven Stayner escaped captivity as a child, his older brother, Cary Stayner, killed four women. The brothers' conflicting legacies captivated ...

"Cary was unwell ... since he was a toddler, as far as I know," Cory says. But a few quotes Cary had previously told media in the midst of his brother's fame led some to wonder if he was a disgruntled, jealous brother. (Remarking on people calling his brother a hero, Cary once said, "The way I see it, just about anyone would have done the same thing in his shoes." Months later, a fourth woman was murdered and decapitated in the park, leading authorities to believe they had a serial killer on their hands. "It was the biggest deal in Hollywood," says Corin Nemec, who portrayed Steven as a teenager. He was killed in a hit-and-run crash, at the age of 24. "It always seems like when something happens in our family, the media is there." "Kind of hard to do that when you got the cameras everywhere though." I wanted to share the happiness we had, the good outcome, but then that had a bad side too." "I wanted to share Steve's homecoming with the world. "You can't make a movie about something like this happening," Kay says in the first episode. "He came home."