Steven Stayner (front right) pictured with his older brother, Cary (center).Photo: hulu
Decades after the Stayner family dominated the news cycle, they are back in headlines once more following the release of Hulu’s newest true crime docuseries.Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Storyrehashes the series of horrific events spanning the ’70s, ’80s and ’90s that captivated a nation — and destroyed a family.
Before the Stayners became one of the most recognizable names in the true crime genre, they were a modest family based out of Merced, Calif. At the helm were Delbert and Kay Stayner, with three daughters and two sons in tow.
But in 1972, the family would begin a traumatizing and highly publicized journey that spanned 30 years. “This family captured the imagination of the public for decades,” newscaster Ted Rowlands, who covered the Stayners throughout his career, recalls inCaptive Audience.
“You can’t make a movie about something like this happening,” Kay says in the first episode. “It doesn’t.”
Steven Stayner’s Abduction
On Dec. 4, 1972, the Stayner family’s low profile permanently changed when 7-year-old Steven Stayner, the middle child, was abducted walking home from school. He was given a new identity — Dennis Parnell — and for seven years endured sexual abuse at the hands of his captor.
During that time, Delbert and Kay struggled to move on without answers about what happened to their son. “It affects every aspect of your life,” Kay recalls in the show. For the first two or three years of his absence, she refused to leave the house unattended in case Steven called. Delbert, she says, would drive through the hills looking for makeshift graves and follow suspicious vehicles with hopes of locating Steven.
“The only good part about him being missing,” Kay says, “is there was always hope that he would be found.”
In March of 1980, her hopes came true. Steven, then 14, unexpectedly turned up at a police station in Ukiah — several hours north of Merced — alongside another missing boy, 5-year-old Timmy White.
Steven Stayner holds Timmy White.AP Photo/Sal Veder
A Hero Is Born
One night, he and Timmy snuck out while their abductor was working and they hitchhiked to Ukiah. When authorities realized who Steven was the Stayners were called to come see him, and the grand reunion was met with fanfare.
“What more could you ask for?” Kay says. “He came home.”
But from that moment on, Steven would never escape the spotlight.
Even outside of press conferences he held with family members and Timmy, the cameras didn’t turn off. Television crews followed him through the school hallways, watched him at home and looked for any update on his current state as he assimilated back into his life as Steven Stayner.
“There’s a lot of things I wish we’d done differently,” adds Kay, struggling to decide if they should have done more to protect his privacy. “I wanted to share Steve’s homecoming with the world. I wanted to share the happiness we had, the good outcome, but then that had a bad side too.”
“We wanted to go back to our normal lives,” Steven’s younger sister, Cory Stayner, tells theCaptive Audienceproducers. “Kind of hard to do that when you got the cameras everywhere though.”
Steven Stayner with wife, Jody, and kids, Ashley and Steven Jr.John Storey/Getty
Steven’s Final Years
Amid the mayhem, Steven learned to live with the publicity, for better or worse. By 19, he had wed Jody Edmondson — a girl whom he met at the butcher shop where he worked — and started a family. Soon, the couple had two children: Ashley and Steven Jr., both of whom weigh in throughout the docuseries.
“He was a good dad, he was a good family man,” Jody remembers. “It came natural to him.”
“He became a husband and a father and then he had to knuckle down and decide what he was going to do with his life,” Kay says. Soon enough, an opportunity presented itself: Screenwriter JP Miller wanted to write a made-for-television movie about his life.
Kay had reservations about the movie, fearful that Hollywood would sensationalize his story — a fear that wasn’t totally unfounded — but Steven grew excited at the idea and wanted to move forward.
“It was the biggest deal in Hollywood,” says Corin Nemec, who portrayed Steven as a teenager. “I think every actor that was worth their salt wanted to be that character.”
“I know that Steven was really happy about the way that it turned out,” Jody says, adding that his press interviews tied to the movie helped him finally open up about the abuse he faced as a child. “That’s what was making people start talking about it with Steven, all his interviews and this movie. That was his therapy that helped him through everything.”
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But the night before the Emmys, Steven’s life was tragically cut short on his way home from work, on the motorcycle that he used his Hollywood money to buy. He was killed in a hit-and-run crash, at the age of 24.
“There was a lot of people at the funeral, and there was a lot of media there,” Jody says in a somber voice. “It always seems like when something happens in our family, the media is there.”
Cary Stayner Taints the Family’s Legacy
In 1999, three tourists vanished in Yosemite National Park. Much like Steven’s, their disappearance shocked the nation and dominated headlines as investigators frantically searched for them. Soon after, two of the women’s bodies were discovered in a charred vehicle, and later, the third victim was found dead.
Months later, a fourth woman was murdered and decapitated in the park, leading authorities to believe they had a serial killer on their hands. Then, investigators made a connection: Cary Stayner, Steven’s older brother, worked at the lodge where three of the victims had stayed, and was soon deemed the sole suspect in the murders.
“My mom and my stepdad sat us down, and they said, ‘We have to talk to you, we have to tell you guys something. It’s really important,'” Ashley remembers. “My mom said, ‘You know the girls that went missing? They found out who did it.’ I was really excited, I was like, ‘Oh my gosh, finally.’ And then she told me that it was my uncle Cary.”
“To realize that the monster that did that was your own family, like, that’s crazy. That’s a crazy realization. Because I hated the person who did that,” Ashley says. “You know, bad things happen to everybody, but for our family, it’s unreal.”
“We’ve had things happen in our family, and we’ve dealt with the media. But this was something, totally different,” says Jody.
Looking back at what drove Cary to do something so heinous, the Stayners are stumped. 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.")
But many experts and loved ones say he had longstanding fantasies about harming people, and that his actions were in no way tied to how he felt about his younger brother having the spotlight.
“Cary was unwell … since he was a toddler, as far as I know,” Cory says. “He was off. Anybody and everybody who met him will tell you that.”
Regardless of his intentions, Cary’s actions hurt his family all the same — and took another son from Kay’s life.
“My mom still struggles every day. I still don’t think it’s sunk in that it happened to us,” Cory says.
In the same episode, she asks: “How much more could happen in our lives in one lifetime?”
Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story, offering an emotional, behind-the-scenes look at the Stayner family, is now available for streaming in three parts on Hulu.
source: people.com
