“Captive Audience” Revisits Steven And Cary Stayner’s Stories

Stayner’s 1972 abduction was originally treated like a local news item about every parent’s worst nightmare. His mother, Kay, had been late to pick him up at school, and instead of walking safely home, he vanished. The media covered Stayner’s disappearance at the time, and occasionally revisited it on anniversaries, but as the years went by, it seemed less and less likely that he would be found.

Then, after Parnell kidnapped 5-year-old Timothy White, Stayner waited until Parnell was gone one night to break out and help White avoid his same fate. When the story made the press, Stayner became a national hero. The series includes archival footage of the police press conference about White’s rescue, and of Stayner’s reunion with his family, which became heartwarming morning news content.

We don’t get Steven’s contemporary perspective on what those years were like in Mendocino; he died in a motorcycle accident in 1989. But a former classmate who attended junior high with him breaks down as she describes how he walked the halls in a hunched manner that revealed how much pain he was in. Other schoolmates recall the teenager having access to drugs and alcohol.

Without Stayner’s perspective, though, we’re mostly left to guess about what it was like being thrust into the spotlight as a survivor of childhood sexual abuse. In the archival interviews we see, Stayner possesses a kind of eerie calmness. At the time, childhood sexual abuse wasn’t openly discussed in the mainstream, and Stayner’s family members also seem unable to explicitly grapple with the legacy of the abuse; for instance, Kay refers vaguely to “what happened,” and his sister, Cory Stayner, says she wished she hadn’t asked Stayner about what had happened given the gruesome nature of his descriptions.

One wonders what it was like for Stayner as local news reporters followed him around to his first day back at school after his reintegration with his family, and then covered Parnell’s trials. Still, he chose to be a consultant for I Know My First Name Is Steven. His mother says she thought it was a bad idea, but she points out that he was married by then and needed money.

The making of the NBC TV miniseries is enmeshed in both the documentary and the family’s own memories of the events. We hear tapes of the writers and director strategizing about how to tell the family’s story within the conventions of network television, and the actors who played Steven and Cary reenacting some of the scenes and transcripts with filmmakers.

There’s a compelling quality to the actors’ renditions and the present-day reactions to the story, and the documentary’s blending of the real and the televisual highlights the artifice that went into retelling the story. Kay and Cory Stayner recall that the movie made the family more working class than they actually were, and we hear the director talk about adding drama to the story by making Stayner’s father, Del, more aloof and Kay more emotional.

The two-part series, in which Stayner himself played a cop involved in the rescue, was watched by 40 million Americans. And in the background of all this was Stayner’s older brother, Cary.