There are plenty of things to worry about while traveling, without adding being brutally murdered into the mix. But it happens more often than you’d think, even in places that seem like paradise. Read on for terrible tales of vacations gone terribly wrong.
Cary Stayner had a rough childhood. His younger brother, Steven, was kidnapped and held captive by a child molester for seven years, his brother Steven died at age 24 in a motorcycle accident. A lot of people endure family tragedies, most people don’t become serial killers, like Cary Stayner did though he later admitted he’d dreamed of killing since he was just seven years old.
His original plan was to kill his girlfriend and her daughters, but when he lost his nerve, he targeted strangers, tourists who were staying at a motel where he lived and worked just outside of Yosemite National Park, the Cedar Lodge. He had spent many nights in the park on camping trips and was familiar with the area. His victims were 42-year-old Carole Sund, her 15-year-old daughter, Juli, and 16-year-old Argentinian exchange student Silvina Pelosso. Stayner’s actions, explained in the words of his confession (which was played at his trial) were nothing short of monstrous:
The weekend before the February 1999 slayings outside Yosemite, his murderous fantasies had become so intense that he prepared a murder/rape kit containing a rope, a roll of duct tape and a serrated kitchen knife, and later a gun and camera.
He zeroed in on Carole Sund and her two teenage charges. He tricked them into letting him into their room by posing as a maintenance man. Brandishing a gun, which he would later tell Juli Sund was unloaded, he bound and gagged the three on the room’s two beds. He took Carole Sund into the bathroom, strangled her, then put her in the trunk of his car.
Then, according to his taped confession, he ripped the clothes off the teenagers and sexually tortured and assaulted them for some time, including trying to get them to perform sex acts on each other.
After six or seven hours, Stayner said on the tape, he was frustrated by the girls’ lack of cooperation and his own inability to maintain an erection, and he took Pelosso into the bathroom and strangled her. He put her body in the trunk with Sund’s.
Then he again sexually assaulted Juli Sund, then took her to a point near Lake Don Pedro where he slashed her throat and threw her off the roadside.
After the killings, Stayner burned the car which held Carole and Silvina’s bodies, and toyed with authorities, sending a letter to the FBI with a map indicating where Juli’s body had been dumped with the caption “We had fun with this one.” He also dropped Carole Sund’s wallet in Modesto, 80 miles away, in a bid to further confuse law enforcement.
But his “fun” wasn’t over. Stayner continued working at the Cedar Lodge, having escaped suspicion in the triple murder case. His urge to murder boiled up again in July 1999, when he came upon Joie Armstrong, a 26-year-old naturalist who worked at the Yosemite Institute and who happened to be alone in the isolated cabin where she lived. In his frenzy, he decapitated her.
Stayner was captured thanks to a witness who’d spotted his truck near Armstrong’s cabin, and he soon confessed. He was found guilty of the four killings and is still on California’s Death Row.
Mugshot of Cary Staner
No comments:
Post a Comment