Steven was 7 years old. He believed him.
Parnell took him to a remote cabin in Catheys Valley — 38 miles from Merced. He told Steven his new name was Dennis Parnell. He enrolled the boy in school under that false name and obtained a fake birth certificate. For the next 7 years, Steven Gregory Stayner simply ceased to exist.
His parents, Del and Kay, never stopped searching. They posted flyers. They followed dead-end leads. They lived in a grief with no resolution — no body, no answer. Just a missing boy and a world that had moved on.
Meanwhile, Steven was being abused by Parnell while appearing, from the outside, to live a normal life. He attended school. He made friends. A girl named Lori Duke dated him and later said he was funny and full of life. She had no idea who he really was.
Here’s what makes it worse: Parnell knew Steven was getting older. And older boys no longer interested him.
By 1980, Steven was 14. Parnell told him he was going to find a younger child. Steven had been used before in kidnapping attempts — but he had secretly sabotaged every one. He let children run. He looked incompetent on purpose. He was protecting strangers from inside a captivity no one knew existed.
But on February 14, 1980, Parnell used someone else. A teenage friend of Steven’s named Randall Sean Poorman grabbed 5-year-old Timothy White from outside his home in Ukiah, California. Timmy was kicking and screaming as he was dragged into the car.
He was 5 years old. He cried constantly. He begged to go home.
Steven watched. And something inside him broke open.
He later said that Timmy’s crying was what finally moved him to act. Steven remembered being that boy — 7 years old, scared, told his parents didn’t want him. He decided: this child was not going to live the life he had lived.
For weeks, he planned carefully. On the night of March 1, 1980, while Parnell left for his overnight job, Steven woke Timmy up. Took him by the hand. And at 1am, the two of them walked out into the dark and began hitchhiking toward town.
A stranger gave them a ride.
They arrived at the Ukiah Police Department in the early hours of March 2, 1980. An officer looked at the teenager standing at the counter, holding the hand of a child reported missing 17 days earlier. He asked for the boy’s name.
Steven said: “”””My name is Dennis Gregory Parnell. But I know my first name is Steven.””””
It took a moment for anyone to understand what was happening.
Steven Stayner had walked in to return one boy — and accidentally revealed that he himself had been missing for 7 years.
Both children were reunited with their families that same day. Parnell was arrested within hours at the Palace Hotel in Ukiah, where he was working his night shift. Tried and convicted in 1981 of kidnapping both boys, he received a sentence of 7 years.
He served 5.
Less time in prison than he had kept a child captive.
The public fury was immediate. A man who stole 7 years of a child’s life would walk free in just 5. Steven went home to Merced, but home was not a simple thing. He was 14 and had missed everything — birthdays, holidays, the ordinary days that make up a childhood. His siblings had grown. And so had he, in ways no one could undo.
He married Jody Edmondson in 1985. They had 2 children. He cooperated with a book and a TV miniseries, because he wanted the world to understand what happened to children like him.
On September 16, 1989, Steven Stayner was killed in a motorcycle accident in Merced. He was 24 years old. He had been free for just 9 years.
The 5-year-old boy he saved, Timothy White, grew up to become a sheriff’s deputy. He dedicated his life to protecting others. He passed away on April 1, 2010, at age 35.
2 boys walked into a police station at 1am. 1 had given up his own freedom — again and again — to spare other children his fate.
Most people only know the headline. Few know who Steven Stayner really was: a boy who was told his family didn’t want him, and who spent 7 years proving that love for a stranger can be just as fierce as love for your own.
Share this with someone who needs to know — that courage doesn’t always look like strength. Sometimes it looks like a 14-year-old boy, alone in the dark, holding the hand of a child he just met.”” “
See more on the next page
