New Hulu Series Goes Inside a Family’s Hell: One Child Abducted, Another Turned Serial Killer

Captive Audience is the story of a family beset by unthinkable misfortune, and the way in which one tragedy may have served as the catalyst for another. Yet more intriguing still is the Hulu docuseries’ investigation of the fundamental—and potentially deleterious—role that the media played in exacerbating this clan’s circumstances.

Formally intertwining fiction and reality with impressive subtlety, director Jessica Dimmock and executive-producers Joe and Anthony Russo’s three-part affair (April 21) is an aesthetically assured and inescapably chilling look at a hopeless tangle of fact and fantasy, and the horrors, and unanswerable questions, it begat.

Viewers of a certain age will likely remember Steven Stayner, thanks to NBC’s two-part 1989 TV movie about his ordeal, I Know My First Name is Steven. That blockbuster program starring Corin Nemec (which garnered nearly 40 million viewers) was a heavily hyped and discussed small-screen event, memorable for its portrait of both child abduction and the ensuing difficulty of post-kidnapping re-adjustment into society. Much of that popularity was due to Nemec’s celebrated lead performance.

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However, it also was the result of Steven’s unique nightmare, which began on Dec. 4, 1972, when as a 7-year-old second-grader, the Merced, California, native—the youngest of five children to Kay and Del Stayner— was convinced by two men to get into their car while he was walking home from school, and promptly dropped off the radar of friends and family. Steven’s disappearance was a brutal blow to his loved ones, and though it became national news, no promising leads ever materialized, leaving Kay, Del and their other children to go on with life while clinging to the hope that Steven might eventually reemerge.

Amazingly, that day did come—seven years later. On March 1, 1980, Kay and Del were visited by a police officer who delivered the news they’d been longing to hear: Steven was alive and well. He had, they soon learned, been living 260 miles away in Comptche, California, with his abductor, Kenneth Parnell, under the alias Dennis Parnell; his true identity was unknown to his neighbors, girlfriend and teachers, many of whom appear in Captive Audience.

It was “a miracle,” albeit a puzzling one, not least because Steven had apparently resigned himself to his new existence as Kenneth’s prisoner. His motivation for fleeing, in fact, had nothing to do with his own well-being, or the habitual sexual assault he suffered at his captor’s hands; rather, he’d finally been driven to escape by Kenneth’s procurement of another stolen child, 5-year-old Timothy White, whom Steven took with him on a lengthy hitchhiking odyssey to freedom.

Steven’s return was met with excitement and glee by his parents and siblings, as well as by hordes of media cameras eager to capture every moment of his reunion. Reporters crowded the family’s front lawn, snuck into Steven’s new high school, and followed the Stayners everywhere, determined to milk this happily-ever-after for all it was worth. Even once the furor died down and Steven got married to sweetheart Jody—with whom he had two kids, Ashley and Steven Jr.—the attention persisted, sparked by Steven’s decision (against his mother’s wishes) to allow a TV movie to be made about his saga. I Know My First Name is Steven was a phenomenon, earning four Emmy nominations. Alas, before he could fully bask in that acclaim, Steven was killed in a random traffic accident, bringing to a close a story that had captivated the nation.

Captive Audience employs a typical array of non-fiction material, including photographs, home movies, news broadcasts, and interviews with, among others, Kay, Ashley, Steven Jr. and Steven’s sister Cory. Far more fascinating, however, is its juxtaposition of matching verité and I Know My First Name is Steven footage, sometimes from shot to shot, such that the two feel like warped reflections of each other.

Further embellished by audio recordings of conversations between the TV movie’s writer J.P. Miller and its producer, as well as new sequences in which actors Nemec and Todd Eric Andrews (who played Steven’s brother Cary) read Miller’s old interviews with Steven and Cary, director Dimmock’s series smartly highlights the messy intersection of truth and Hollywood make-believe, with the former directly inspiring the latter, which in turn fashioned a myth that became, for most, something akin to the official record.

That dynamic became additionally complicated in 1999, when four hikers were brutally murdered in nearby Yosemite National Park and the culprit was revealed to be none other than Cary Stayner, who worked as a local mechanic at the Cedar Lodge where three of his victims had been staying, and who swiftly confessed to the crimes. Many deduced that Cary had been motivated by a lifelong need for attention, which he had lost—to his great anger and resentment—when Steven had magically reappeared out of thin air and become his family’s, and the world’s, prime focus.

Captive Audience doesn’t shy away from that notion; old TV news images of Cary lurking in the background while Steven addresses onlookers impart an eerie chill, and many of the series’ participants contend that Cary never successfully resigned himself to second-fiddle status. They surmise that, to him, horrific murder—involving abduction and rape—could have seemed like a natural way to land himself on the front page.

Easy answers aren’t Captive Audience’s main concern, though; instead, director Dimmock introduces a host of thorny ideas without attempting to devise a pat conclusion that will neatly tie everything together. Mitigation specialist Michael Kroll, who worked for Cary’s defense, argues that the killer suffered from a range of mental issues, and sister Cory admits that everyone knew “Cary was unwell … he was off.” Whether I Know My First Name is Steven, and the overwhelming media coverage that Steven received, proved a corrosive force that propelled Cary down a lethal path is unknowable. Yet the troubled looks on everyone’s faces—from Nemec and Andrews to Ashley and Steven Jr.—suggest that nothing good came from any of this, other than a host of comforting fairy-tale dreams that ended in doom.

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