Recently convicted of four murders in the Yosemite Valley area, Stayner was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole. Stayner confessed under police questioning to killing Carole Sund, her daughter Juli, Silvina Pelosso, and Joie Armstrong. The FBI was slow to focus in on Stayner as the killer, and some still believe he did not act alone. Nobody paid much attention to Cary Stayner until his arrest in 1999 for the murder of Armstrong; before that, the celebrity in the Stayner family was Cary's brother Steven, whose seven-year ordeal in captivity was given heavy media coverage. Steven was kidnapped in 1972 by pedophile Kenneth Parnell, who changed Steven's name to Dennis Parnell and enrolled him in school as his son. Steven's story was made into a book and a TV movie, and Cary took to introducing himself to people as "Steven's brother." But he was not as modest or easygoing as he seemed to his family and community. Even as a child, Cary Stayner suffered from an impulse control disorder called trichotillomania (compulsive hair-pulling).

He felt neglected after Steven's return to the family in 1980, when Cary was nineteen, and Steven's subsequent death in a traffic accident piled even more stress on the family. Cary Stayner's trial generated remarkably little interest from the media after his confession was made public. The TV movie about the miraculous return of Steven Stayner to his family is still occasionally aired, though it is now obvious that there were no happy endings for the Stayners.

If one were unfortunate enough to be harassed by the ghost of Ted Bundy, it would probably manifest as a huge, voracious black hole. Bundy had significant insight into his own mind, perhaps because he thought about little else; he talked about feeling like there was a black hole inside him. For a compassionate view of how this black hole formed and functioned in the guise of a respectable and appealing young man, Ann Rule's book The Stranger Beside Me is the best resource. Rule was friends with Bundy when she started covering his murders as a true-crime journalism assignment, before she knew the identity of the killer she was writing about. It was only when faced with the indisputable evidence of the match between bite marks on a victim and Ted's dental chart that Rule could be convinced of his guilt; when she came to this horrible realization, she had to leave the courtroom to vomit.

In contrast, Dr. Robert Keppel's interviews with Bundy, transcribed in his book The Riverman: Ted Bundy and I Hunt for the Green River Killer, portray Bundy as a completely unappealing, pathetic person. I recommend reading both of these books for a good overall idea of who Bundy was. They dissolve certain myths about Bundy and about serial killers in general, namely that the typical serial killer is brilliant and charming. Bundy was perhaps both these things on occasion, but his IQ was about average and his charm quickly disappears in the interviews with Keppel. His most consistent qualities were arrogance and insecurity. Bundy was executed in 1989, with the total number of his young female victims officially 11-- but estimated at possibly 35 or more. He tended to bash their skulls while they were unconscious or had their backs to him. So much for demonic fearlessness.