Steven Stayner

This 1989 American television miniseries about kidnap victim Steven Stayner was first broadcast by NBC on May 22 and 23, 1989. Screening rights were sold to a number of international television companies including the BBC, which screened the miniseries in mid-July of the following year; later still, it was released as a feature-length movie. It starred Corin Nemec in the title role as Steven and also starred Cindy Pickett, John Ashton, Arlis Howard, Ray Walston, Pruitt Taylor Vince, Gregg Henry, Stephen Dorff, Beth Grant and Bryan Cranston. Nemec and Walston would go on to work together again, first in the TV series Parker Lewis Can't Lose and again when Nemec played Harold Lauder and Walston played Glen Bateman in the television adaptation of the novel The Stand (1994) by Stephen King.

The film revolves around the true story that begins in 1972 with the abduction of seven-year-old Steven Stayner, who was snatched on his way home from school by a known pedophile Kenneth Parnell. Steven was then kept as the man's son for seven years and forced for endure systematical sexual abuse at the hands of his kidnapper. He finally managed to escape when Parnell abducted a five-year-old boy whom Steven was determined would not suffer as he had. However, upon his return to his real family-- who never gave up that he would be reunited with them one day-- Steven found it hard to adjust as he had no understanding of what it was to be part of a loving family. Liberties were taken with the story and the fictionalized parts bothered the real family after it was released.

The actual Steven Stayner has a small role as one of the officers escorting the character of Steven through the crowd and media to return to his family. The real Steven was paid $30,000 for the movie. He died in a motorcycle accident shortly after this movie was released on the night before the Emmy Awards, the film was nominated for four Emmys. He was 24, with a wife and two children. Timmy White, the young boy Steven saved, later became a Los Angeles County Sheriff's Department Deputy. He died on April 1, 2010, at age 35 from pulmonary embolism. Steven's father, Delbert Stayner, died on April 9, 2013, at his home in Winton, California. He was 79 years old. Steven Stayner's brother, Cary Stayner, would go on to murder four women in and around Yosemite National Park in 1999. He was convicted of three counts of first-degree murder with special circumstances and once count of kidnapping in 2002. As of 2023, he is on death row at San Quentin Penitentiary in California, though there have been no executions in the state since 2006.