In a well crafted Hulu true-crime docuseries, the family of Steven Stayner looks back on his abduction, his escape and the strange twists of fate that followed.
Steven Stayner, the 14, gives a piggyback to ride Timmy White, the boy he rescued while fleeing their kidnapper, Kenneth Parnell, in 1980.
Steven Stayner Documentary
Hulu’s Captive Audience: A Real American Horror Story revisits all these events, mostly from the surviving Stayner family members’ perspectives.
Director Jessica Dimmock’s three-part series doesn’t adopt the explicitly revisionary lens that has propelled most contemporary true crime productions, which often reclaim survivors’ perspectives or reveal criminal justice failures.
Widow
In 1985, Stayner married 17-year-old Jody Edmondson, with whom he had two children, a daughter Ashley and a son, Steven Jr.
Who Kidnapped Steven Stayner?
Kenneth Parnell is most notoriously known for the kidnapping of Steven Stayner, but he was an active child sex predator long before that 1972 abduction.