The Shadow Brother

In February 1999 Carole Sund drove to Yosemite with her fifteen-year-old daughter Juli and Silvina Pelosso, a sixteen-year-old exchange student from Argentina who was staying with the family. They checked into the Cedar Lodge in El Portal, just outside the park. The motel’s handyman, Cary Stayner, had a master key to every room.

The three were killed on February 15. Stayner burned the rental car with two of the bodies inside and abandoned it in the Stanislaus National Forest, where it was found in March. An anonymous note with a crude map led investigators to Juli’s body near Lake Don Pedro. For five months the FBI concentrated on a group of Modesto parolees while Stayner kept working at the lodge. In July he abducted Joie Armstrong, a naturalist, from outside her cabin at Foresta and cut her throat in the trees nearby. A park firefighter had noticed his Scout there the evening before, and he was arrested three days later. He confessed to all four murders.

Stayner pleaded guilty in federal court to Armstrong’s murder in 2000 and received life without parole. A Santa Clara County jury rejected his insanity defense, convicted him of the three Cedar Lodge murders in August 2002, and he was sentenced to death that December. On May 1, 2026, the California Supreme Court upheld the conviction and sentence.