The Stockton serial shootings, also known as the Yosemite murders, were a series of murders that occurred from February to July 1999 in and around the Stockton and Yosemite National Park areas of California. The shootings claimed the lives of four people and injured six others, causing widespread panic and fear throughout the region.

The first victim, 42-year-old Carole Sund, her 15-year-old daughter Juli Sund, and their 16-year-old Argentine friend Silvina Pelosso, were tourists from Eureka, California, who were visiting Yosemite National Park. On February 15, 1999, they checked into the Cedar Lodge just outside the park’s western entrance. They were reported missing on February 19, 1999, after they failed to meet with relatives in Fresno.

Their bodies were discovered on March 19, 1999, in the trunk of their rental car, which was found burned out in a remote area near Long Barn, California. All three victims had been bound and gagged, and Juli Sund had been sexually assaulted before the car was set on fire.

The second shooting occurred on March 27, 1999, when 26-year-old park naturalist Joie Armstrong was shot and killed in her cabin in Yosemite National Park. Her body was not discovered until three days later.

On July 21, 1999, a fourth victim, 26-year-old naturalist Julie Sund’s friend Joie Ruth Armstrong from St. Helena, was murdered.

In the wake of the shootings, law enforcement officials launched a massive manhunt for the killer or killers responsible. In August 1999, they arrested Cary Stayner, a former motel handyman at the Cedar Lodge where the Sunds had stayed. During questioning, Stayner confessed to the murders and led investigators to the site where he had buried the remains of Joie Armstrong.

Stayner’s motive for the killings remains unclear to this day, though he told investigators that he had suffered sexual abuse as a child and that his brother, Steven, had been kidnapped when they were boys and later murdered by a child molester.

In 2002, Stayner was convicted of the murders and sentenced to death, though he is currently on death row and has not yet been executed. The case remains one of the most high-profile and notorious serial killings in California history, and it has had a lasting impact on the Stockton and Yosemite communities.

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