Kenneth Parnell, who took Steven Stayner from Merced street and Ukiah boy 8 years later, dies at 76

One of the North Coast's most notorious kidnappers and pedophiles died of natural causes in prison, state officials said Tuesday.

Kenneth Eugene Parnell, 76, died Monday night at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, corrections officials said.

Parnell kidnapped Steven Stayner, 7, from his hometown, Merced, in 1972 after offering the boy a ride. He held him for eight years, renamed him Dennis Parnell and made the boy call him "dad."

They lived in motels and trailer parks in Santa Rosa and on the Mendocino Coast in the 1970s.

After Parnell kidnapped 5-year-old Timmy White in 1980 as he walked from a Ukiah elementary school, Stayner went to Ukiah police, saying he didn't want the younger boy to suffer the same abuse.

The kidnappings were the subject of a book and TV movie titled "I Know My First Name is Steven."

Though Stayner said he had been regularly abused, sexual molestation charges against Parnell were dropped when a court ruled the statute of limitations had expired.

Parnell served five years of a seven-year prison sentence before being paroled in 1985 to Berkeley.

Stayner was reunited with his family, but died in a 1989 motorcycle crash at age 24.

It was another chapter in decades of tragedy for the Stayner family.

Steven Stayner's uncle was murdered in 1990. His brother, motel handyman Cary Stayner, was convicted in 2002 and sentenced to death for kidnapping, sexually assaulting and killing a Eureka woman, her teenage daughter and a family friend during a trip to Yosemite National Park in 1999.

Cary Stayner also pleaded guilty to killing a Yosemite naturalist. He is on Death Row in San Quentin Prison.

Meanwhile, Parnell got into trouble again in 2003 when he offered the sister of his former caretaker $500 to deliver a 4-year-old boy to his Berkeley apartment. She instead went to the police and he was arrested and charged with conspiracy to steal a child.

Prosecutors described it as the "last hurrah" of an aging pedophile.

Parnell was convicted the following year and sentenced to 25 years to life in prison by a judge who called him "a poster child for the three-strikes law."

Parnell's attorney argued for leniency, saying his client had been molested as a child. But the judge said he represented an extreme danger to children.

He noted Parnell's long history of predatory behavior, which included a conviction for sodomizing a 9-year-old boy in Bakersfield in 1951.

A corrections spokeswoman told Associated Press on Tuesday that Parnell had been ill for some time and died in a prison hospice.

You can reach Staff Writer Clark Mason at 521-5214 or clark.mason@pressdemocrat.

com.