I Know My First Name Is Steven Read Free Page A

Police Department that night, Dennis Gregory Parnell was on the way to becoming Steven Gregory Stayner again for the first time in more than seven years. As he said at the beginning of that statement, "I know my first name is Steven, I'm pretty sure my last name is Stainer [sic]."

Chapter One
    Steven Gregory Stayner
    "He was always just like a puppy dog."
    Just north of the monstrous urban sprawl of greater Los Angeles, after Interstate 5 climbs over Tejon Pass, California 99—a freeway in its own right—angles off to the right and begins its descent through sparsely covered arid hills into Bakersfield, the city that pins the southern end of the vast, flat, agricultural San Joaquin Valley. The boyhood home of New York Giants' football great Frank Gifford, Bakersfield was also the boyhood home of Kenneth Parnell. Mary Parnell, Ken's octogenarian mother, still lives in Bakersfield and attends the Assembly of God Church, where as teenagers these two dissimilar boys played basketball on the same church team in the late 1940s. But as a young man Parnell had interests other than sports, and at nineteen he was arrested, tried, and convicted of kidnapping and sexually assaulting a nine-year-old boy. After court-ordered stays in two state mental hospitals—from which he made three escapes—this diagnosed sexual psychopath was sentenced to prison and effectively banished from the blue-collar community of hard-working, patriotic American families with young children.
    Outside Bakersfield, semis with empty trailers rush northward to pick up their loads of carrots, cucumbers, peaches, watermelons, and other produce from the huge commercial farms that blanket the valley floor. So ubiquitous are these trucks that at harvest time they choke all four lanes north and south as they hurry to and from Delano, Earlimart, Visalia, Kingsburgh, and scores of other farming towns familiar across the United States as points-of-origin stamped on produce crates and boxes.
    At 65 mph and more, the agricultural traffic rumbles up California 99 and slices through the southwest edge of Fresno, the largest city in the Valley, before rolling on north through Madera and Chowchilla—known since 1976 for its own infamous kidnapping, that of an entire schoolbus full of children. Another twenty miles north is Merced, a modest city of fifty-thousand middle-class citizens, much like those in Bakersfield, 160 miles to the south. During the summer many tourists exit onto California 140, Yosemite Parkway, and head east eighty miles to the cooler Yosemite National Park, thousands of feet higher in the ruggedly beautiful Sierra Nevadas.
    On Yosemite Parkway, one block past the Red Ball Gas Station at Jean Street, is Shirley Street. Down Shirley a short block, left on Dawn a block, and then right onto Bette for a long block—in a neighborhood of older, lower-middle-class homes with small, well-tended front yards and young children—is number1655, a pea green frame house shaded by a huge elm tree, its large root running just under the sidewalk and heaving it up several inches, thus providing a ramp of sorts for the tykes who furiously pedal their Big Wheels up and down the pavement.
    In 1972 it was the home of Delbert and Kay Stayner and their five children, including their middle child, then seven-year-old Steven, an active, almost buck-toothed boy with a slight mask of freckles.
    In a house barely a quarter mile from the Southern Pacific Railroad tracks, the Stayners and their brood escaped the dry, blast-furnace heat of San Joaquin Valley summers in their backyard swimming pool—one of the few luxuries they allowed themselves—where they could hear the railroads' vegetable and fruit expresses thundering through town headed to markets far and near.
    At five feet ten, Del is just slightly taller than his wife, Kay, and with a lean build and a deeply lined, suntanned face, he looks every bit like a man devoted to hard outdoor physical labor who could easily be a