Kenneth Parnell

Kenneth Parnell
Mugshot from the California state sex offender registry
Born	Kenneth Eugene Parnell (1931-09-26)September 26, 1931 Amarillo, Texas
Died	January 21, 2008(2008-01-21) (aged 76) Vacaville, California
Known for	Kidnappings
Children	2

Kenneth Eugene Parnell (September 26, 1931 – January 21, 2008) was an American convicted sex offender, known infamously for his kidnapping of seven-year-old Steven Stayner in Merced, California.

Parnell was born in Amarillo, Texas, during the region's fabled dust bowl era which coincided with the Great Depression, to Cecil Frederick and Mary Olive (Pollard) Parnell. He later moved with his mother, his two half-sisters, and a half-brother to Bakersfield, California. Parnell was raised mostly without his father, who abandoned the family when Parnell was six. He spent much of his adolescence in and out of juvenile hall and mental institutions.

In March 1951, Parnell was arrested for sodomizing a young boy, as well as for impersonating a police officer (Parnell had used a fake deputy sheriff's badge which he had purchased from an Army-Navy surplus store). He was convicted of the crime in 1952 and sentenced to almost four years in prison. While receiving treatment at Norwalk State Hospital, he cut a lock from a clothes room window and escaped, staying free until February of the following year, when he was finally apprehended in Albuquerque, New Mexico.

In a January 15, 2000 interview with East Bay Express journalist Katy St. Clair, Parnell said that he kidnapped and molested the boy because his wife was pregnant and that he "had to find another outlet." Parnell claimed to have been married three times, but only two records of his marriages are known to exist. He married Patsy in 1950, who gave birth to their daughter the following year. They divorced in 1957. Later that year, Parnell married Emma, a woman 10 years his senior. She too gave birth to a daughter soon after their union.