Why Sex Offender Kenneth Parnell Only Served 5 Years After Abducting Steven Stayner

On February 2, 2004, Alameda County Deputy District Attorney Timothy Wellman summed up the Kenneth Parnell case as follows in his opening statements:

“The case is not complicated. It is not a mystery. On January 3, 2003, the defendant attempted to buy a 4-year-old child, a child he planned to keep and a child he knew had been kidnapped in order for him to get that child.”

Wellman called the defendant a child predator who wanted a young boy to serve as his own personal sex toy, basing his observation on Parnell’s decades of criminal history.

Parnell was born in 1931 in Amarillo, Texas, at the height of the Depression. His mother was a rigid, fundamentalist Christian, and his father was an alcoholic who abandoned them when Parnell was 6.

According to Mike Echols, author of I Know My First Name Is Steven, Parnell was so distraught when his father left, he pulled out four of his own teeth with pliers.

Parnell and his mother eventually moved to Bakersfield, Calif, where she ran a boarding house. Echols wrote Parnell was sexually assaulted at age 13 by one of her boarders, and by his teenage years, he was in and out of juvenile hall for car theft and arson.

Clinical and forensic psychologist Dr. Leslie Dobson tells A&E Crime + Investigation she believes Parnell was already a psychopath as a child, as exemplified by pulling out his teeth.

“When people are abused, they will often self-harm, but not to that extent,” she says. “That’s so extreme.”

So extreme, she says, it shows how Parnell needed high levels of stimulation to feel anything.

“He was already showing criminalistic behaviors and lack of remorse,” she explains. “But what stands out in his case is that he wanted power.”

In 1951, he kidnapped and sexually assaulted a 9-year-old Bakersfield boy. He was convicted of the crime and sent to San Quentin State Prison for three years.

By the 1960s, Parnell was a registered sex offender and escaped from psychiatric institutions twice.

Then, on December 4, 1972, Parnell abducted Steven Stayner while he was walking home from second grade in Merced, Calif. Stayner later told ABC News he was “stopped by a man along the street” who asked him if he or his mother wanted to donate to a church. Parnell had an accomplice named Ervin Murphy who lured Stayner into the car.

Once the two had Stayner, Parnell drove them from Merced to a little red cabin in Catheys Valley. The men told Stayner his parents said he could spend the night with them and eventually that his parents couldn’t afford to keep him anymore.

Dobson calls that behavior “very, very extreme coercive control and manipulation” and believes Parnell “took away the whole life and schema that Steven had.”

During a span of seven years, Stayner had a distorted parent-child relationship with Parnell, where he was repeatedly subjected to sexual abuse and psychological manipulation. He forced Stayner to change his name to Dennis Parnell and enrolled him in school under the false name.

“He normalized the sexuality and manufactured his dependency on him,” Dobson says. “It was the only world that this boy knew.”

Parnell essentially gaslit him, Dobson explains, which is common among sex offenders. “They know it's wrong for a while, but then they eventually start to lie to themselves to justify abusing children,” she explains. “It’s called cognitive distortion. They make sense out of what they're doing, like ‘I'm teaching him how to have healthy sex.’”

Parnell harmed children by overpowering them as an authoritative figure. Dobson says he was likely emotional stunted from his own childhood abuse and calls him “the definition of a pedophile.”

“As Steven aged out, [Parnell] brought in a very, very young child, so he was very clearly interested in the prepubescent,” she says.

Dobson is referring to 5-year-old Timothy White from Ukiah, Calif. Parnell kidnapped Timothy with the help of one of Stayner’s friends in February 1980 when Stayner was 14.

Stayner knew what would happen to Timothy if he didn’t step in. According to Echols, while Parnell was at work, Stayner took Timothy and hitchhiked to Ukiah. There, the pair went to a police station and told investigators who they were, though Steven still had trouble turning in Parnell.

Parnell was arrested and convicted for kidnapping both boys, but he served just five years of an eight-year sentence—the maximum at that time. Charges for sexually abusing Stayner were dropped when an appeals court ruled the statute of limitations had expired. Parnell was released on parole in 1985, and Stayner died in a motorcycle accident four years later.

When Parnell was 72 in January 2003, he was arrested again for attempting to purchase a young boy. He’d been begging his caretaker, Diane Stevens, to acquire a young boy for him in exchange for $500. She ultimately went to the police, and they set up a sting in which Parnell was arrested.

Prosecutors argued that Parnell intended to keep the child and sexually abuse him. “You could see from his criminal history that he was a notorious child predator,” Wellman, chief assistant city prosecutor for Pasadena, Calif, tells A&E Crime + Investigation of Parnell. “He served less time than Steven was held hostage. Sometimes criminals age out and are no longer a danger, but that certainly was not true for Kenneth Parnell.”

Wellman says he believed Parnell was looking for “one last hurrah”—one last Stayner. Parnell was charged with three felonies: solicitation to commit kidnapping, attempted purchase of a human being and attempted child stealing. He pleaded not guilty.

Establishing intent was important to the case, Wellman explains, because Parnell never technically told Stevens to “kidnap” a child, only that he’d pay her $500 for one. The case used testimony and evidence to show that Parnell had a history of sexual assault of boys by kidnapping them first.

“The defendant keeps repeating himself and how he gets little boys,” Wellman said in his closing argument.

Ultimately, Parnell was convicted on all three counts and sentenced to 25 years to life under California’s three strikes law.

“At the time, California law allowed prosecution for three strikes on a third felony, if the two prior strikes were considered serious or violent felonies,” Wellman says. “Our office was very selective on which cases would go three strikes, but we believed that Parnell warranted the three strikes prosecution.”

Parnell died in 2008 while serving his sentence at the California Medical Facility in Vacaville, Calif.

Parnell’s kidnapping of Stayner became an example of how a child could be missing in plain sight, and law enforcement, first responders and even school systems could fail to connect the dots. California introduced the Sexually Violent Predator Act (SVPA) in 1996, which requires high-risk offenders to be sent to a state mental facility after they serve out their prison term, to prevent a predator like Parnell from ever being released.

Parnell’s heinous crimes—particularly those against Stayner—raised national awareness about stranger abductions and child exploitation, as well as sentencing failures, thanks in part to the book and TV miniseries I Know My First Name Is Steven.