Merced is the kind of place where residents pride themselves on being free from the urban ills that beset Los Angeles and San Francisco. But in December 1972, the Stayner family's own sense of security was disrupted forever, with results that many believe helped shape the person Stayner became. Cary's younger brother, seven-year-old Steven, disappeared without a trace one afternoon while walking home from school alone down the Yosemite Highway. The distraught parents became consumed by the quest to find him. They put up billboards, passed out leaflets, consulted psychics, and according to family friends were never the same again. Kay, a Roman Catholic who raised her family as Mormons, became cold and distant, seldom displaying physical affection toward her children. Delbert was openly devastated by the loss of his favorite son. Cary, who was 11 when his brother disappeared, would sometimes find his father rummaging through Steven's dresser drawers, weeping. Steven had been "the apple of his father's eye," a close family friend says. Mike Echols, author of the 1991 book I Know My First Name Is Steven, about the Stayner case, wrote that Delbert once chewed Cary out for painting over the name "Steven" that his younger brother had scratched into the garage door.

From the time Cary was a small boy, the Stayner family vacationed together in Yosemite and the surrounding high country—piling into the family van and driving 60 miles east to camp, fish, and hunt in the mountains. Cary entered his teen years as an avid and accomplished outdoorsman. In high school, he also found a measure of self-expression as the cartoonist for the high school newspaper, the Statesman, showing so much promise that classmates assumed he would someday draw his own comic strip professionally. His cartoons are scatter-
ed throughout the 1979 high school yearbook: humorous caricatures of his fellow students playing tennis, done with a deft style and a cheerfulness that offers no insight into the mind of a future serial killer. But aside from those flights of fancy, Stayner is remembered as shy and self-effacing. In a yearbook photo of the Statesman staff, Stayner is half-obscured in the back row, his skinny frame in a slouch, his head covered by a baseball cap. Jack Bungart, the paper's sports editor, once tried to engage him in a conversation about his brother. "He made it clear that he didn't want to talk about it," recalls Bungart.

On March 2, 1980, Cary Stayner was returning from a camping trip in Yosemite with friends when he heard a radio report that 14-year-old Steven had escaped from his abductor and would be arriving in Merced that afternoon. Cary later told reporters that he "almost drove his car into the Merced River" in excitement. That day Steven came home to a hero's welcome and moved back into the tiny bedroom he had shared with Cary. Cary's euphoria over his brother's return soon faded. Steven became a celebrity: There was national newspaper and television coverage, as well as a book and a TV miniseries chronicling Steven's seven years as the sex slave of Kenneth Parnell, a drifter, convicted pedophile, and former employee of the Yosemite Lodge, inside the national park. Cary simmered, silently. In an interview with J.P. Miller, a screenwriter who spent a long period with the Stayners doing research for the 1989 NBC miniseries, he vented his frustrations about his brother: "His head was all bloated out," Cary told Miller. "We never really got along well after he came back. All of a sudden Steve was getting all these gifts, getting all this clothing, getting all this attention. I guess I was jealous. I'm sure I was.... I got put on the back burner, you might say."

By then Stayner, in his early twenties, had abandoned any ambitions he may have had. "He showed me his cartoons," Miller says. "I said, 'Why don't you submit some of this stuff to colleges? Maybe you'll get a scholarship.' He said, 'No, I don't think they'd like this stuff.' He didn't feel he had a chance. He stayed in his room and smoked grass, and he went out camping in the mountains with his pals. The mountains were the only place where he could have some freedom to feel like a person and take control of his destiny."