Dennis McDougal - The Yosemite Murders

During the last week of June 1999, I set out from Los Angeles in my trusty old Ford Explorer to retrace the last known movements of a Eureka, California, woman and two teens during their fateful, final visit to Yosemite National Park.

Just three months earlier, the bodies of 42-year-old Carole Sund, her 15-year-old daughter Juli, and family friend Silvina Pelosso, a 16-year-old Argentine exchange student, had all been found some ninety miles north of Yosemite. The three tourists had last been seen alive in the pastoral setting of Yosemite Valley in mid-February, apparently vanishing into the thin mountain air after they had checked in at the Cedar Lodge motel in El Portal, just beyond the northwestern boundaries of the National Park.

What began as a routine missing persons report turned into a frantic family search that, within days, had escalated into a massive FBI-supervised canvassing of the entire Yosemite Valley and its surrounding area. Before it was finished, the air and land search encompassed more than five hundred square miles. Satellite trucks and mobile news vans materialized in El Portal like a swarm of hungry ants. But after a week of false trails and crossed fingers, the ants began to disperse. There would be no happy ending. Only the family and a few loyal friends stayed on to maintain the desperate vigil.

When the bodies of the three women were found a month later, the TV trucks and news reporters returned en masse, asking a new set of questions and introducing a whole new layer of mediathis time, with a Spanish accent. Televisa and Univision both joined the array of U.S. networks and newspapers that broadcast the unfolding tragedy. Silvina Pelosso, whose charred remains turned up in the trunk of an immolated rental car along with those of Carole Sund, was from a prominent Argentine family, and now Latin American voices were joining the chorus of angry and bewildered U.S. citizens who demanded to know: How could this have happened in Yosemiteperhaps the only public gathering place in America that can still pass for Hallowed Ground?

If you grow up in California, Yosemite is holy. It is Mecca to outdoorsmen and indoorsmen alike. Every desk-bound, urban-dwelling, child-rearing hack or harridan who has ever experienced the spiritual hunger to return to nature, even if just for a weekend, will invoke the image of Yosemite's natural beauty in their mind's eye. Yosemite renews. It is the true magic kingdom. Along with the Ansel Adams vistas of Half Dome, El Capitan, Glacier Point, and all of the other sights, smells, and sounds that make this valley one of the seven wonders of world tourism, the waters themselves that trickle from permanent ice packs high in the Sierra Nevadas and pour into the Merced River seem somehow sacred. And while Yosemite, Vernal, Bridalveil, and Nevada Falls should never be mistaken for the mystical spring at Lourdes, they are just as brimming with the stuff of life majestic reminders of the ethereal and eternal wonder of Nature.

To defile Yosemite is surely as great a sin as spitting on the Shroud of Turin, despoiling the Islamic shrine at Medina, or shouting anti-Semitic curses at Jerusalem's Wailing Wall. To spill blood into the waters of the Merced is as foul an act as defecating in a baptismal font.

Murder at Yosemite is no less a desecration than murder in Eden.

While I am an author and journalist by profession, I took personal umbrage at the blasphemy in Yosemite. I wanted to know from the very first report of the Yosemite murders what kind of monster could wantonly destroy innocence in the persons of Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso, silence the sweet strength and maternal presence of Carole Sund, and do it all within the cathedral canyons of Yosemite. Careless hikers and foolish high-country campers die here every year by way of trail accidents or exposure to the extremes of heat and cold, but almost never at the hand of another human being. Yosemite's last reported homicide prior to the Sund-Pelosso murders happened nearly twelve years earlier, when Navy veteran Stevie Allen Gray pushed his wife over a precipice in December 1987, in order to collect a $500,000 insurance policy he'd bought shortly before her death. Even that mercenary horror made more sense than the killing of three innocents on a pilgrimage to Yosemite.

The deaths of Carole and Juli Sund and Silvina Pelosso were utterly without reason. I had to understand. I got in my truck and I drove.

The last week of June was hotexceptionally hot. The San Joaquin Valley topped out above the 100-degree mark every day. Even higher up in the mountains, at the El Portal entrance to Yosemite, the temperature still sizzled in the 90s.

I stopped first in Fresno to visit Charley Waters, an old friend who edits the Fresno Bee, and to make two new friends: Kimi Yoshino and Matt Kreamer, reporters who had been covering the Sund-Pelosso case for the newspaper. There were lots of leads and a host of ex-cons who had been jailed as possible suspects, but no solid answers yet on how or why the three women had died. Still, Kimi told me that the prevailing feeling was that it was only a matter of time before the grand jury that met each Thursday morning in Fresno's federal courthouse would begin issuing indictments.