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In the dead of winter, when snow dusts the granite peaks of the Sierra Nevada and the night temperatures drop below freezing, the Cedar Lodge is often nearly deserted, with most of the staff on hiatus until spring. Last February, Stayner was still living in his room above the lounge when he saw Carole and Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso arriving in their
bright-red Pontiac Grand Prix rental. The trio of tourists had spent a long day admiring El Capitan, Half Dome, and other granite monoliths, ice skating in Curry Village in the Yosemite Valley, and taking snapshots along the Merced River Gorge. "The girls were happy," remembers Carole's father, Francis Carrington, who spoke to them on the telephone that
day. "They were having the time of their lives." They had dinner at the Cedar Lodge restaurant and then strolled back along dimly lit pathways lined with wooden statues of bears and bald eagles to room 509, in the far west wing of the hotel.
Based on what Cary Stayner told the authorities in his confession, this is what happened next. Around 11 p.m. Stayner, who was carrying a toolbox with duct tape, rope, a knife, and a gun hidden inside, knocked at the door of 509 and identified himself as the motel handyman. There was a leak in the room above, he explained, and he needed to check whether
water was dripping through the ceiling. Suspicious, Carole Sund looked around and confirmed that there was no sign of a leak. But Stayner kept pleading with her through the locked door. Finally she let him in. Stayner chatted with her, fiddled around in the bathroom for a minute or two, and then emerged brandishing a gun.
He told Carole and the girls not to panic. He had only come to rob them, he said. Then he bound and gagged them with duct tape, placed Silvina and Juli in the bathroom, and turned to Carole Sund, who was lying on the bed. Silently, quickly, he strangled the woman with a rope. He took her car keys, dragged her corpse out to the dark, deserted parking lot,
and heaved it into the trunk of the Pontiac. Stayner then separated the girls, killed Pelosso the same way, and placed her body in the trunk alongside Carole Sund's.
Around four o'clock in the morning, Stayner carried Juli Sund outside and put her in the front seat of the Pontiac. She still didn't know her mother and Silvina had been killed, Stayner told the FBI. At some point he removed the tape from her mouth. He drove west along the Merced River Canyon, unclear about his exact destination, making "small talk" with
his captive.
Just before dawn Stayner turned off the two-lane road near the town of Moccasin and parked in a deserted parking lot. He lifted Juli from her seat and carried her up a steep hill toward the Don Pedro Reservoir overlook. He told the FBI that Juli had asked him to carry her because of the cold and indicated that he had lifted her in his arms in the manner
of a bridegroom carrying his bride across a threshold. A law-enforcement source says that Stayner's account may reflect his own distorted hold on reality: "It fit in with his fantasy that there was some relationship between him and Juli." Upon reaching the overlook, Stayner said, he grabbed his victim from behind and drove his knife blade across her throat.
He hid her lifeless body, with its head nearly severed, in the underbrush.
Stayner ditched the car a few hundred yards down a little-used logging trail off California 108, walked two miles into Sierra Village, and telephoned for a cab after dawn. The cab driver, Jenny Paul, was bemused by the haggard-looking man who asked to be driven to the Yosemite Lodge (the former workplace of his younger brother's abductor), a 90 mile,
$125 trip. She never reported the trip to the police until after Stayner's arrest, but months later she remembered an unusual conversation that transpired along the route.
"Do you believe in Bigfoot?" her passenger asked.
"No," she replied.
"You should," he said, "because he's real."
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