American homicide victim along with her mother Carole and her friend, Silvini Pelosso who was visiting from Buenos Aires, Argentina. The three women were last seen on February 15th, 7:35 PM at a restaurant near Yosemite National Park at the end of their vacation trip, after which they disappeared.
Julie at 14 was very much like her dynamic mom. A sophomore at Eureka High School, she was in the orchestra, a joiner and doer. The eldest of four kids, she managed her younger siblings, Jonah, Gina and Jimmy. In late 1998, Silvini Pelosso arrived for a three month visit and the family plunged into hospitable activities; Disneyland, San Francisco, the Carrington ranch – and then Yosemite, one of California’s wonders.
With the disappearance of the three women, for weeks, hundreds of federal and state investigators and volunteers scoured the steep ravines and deep lakes of the Sierra backcountry, using helicopters, radar and rescue dogs, without turning up a clue. On March 18, they found the scorched shell of Carole’s car with two bodies in the trunk, burned beyond recognition. The third body was found later, with no suspects and no reason for the brutal crime, leaving two families not only in grief but in hopeless bewilderment.
On 7/24/1999, police picked up Cary Stayner, a handyman living nearby to the Cedar Lodge in El Portal at the western edge of Yosemite. He had lived and worked at El Portal since 1977. At the time of the disappearance of the three women, he had been questioned and released as the FBI focused their investigations on several other suspects. He was arrested while staying at a nudist colony near Sacrament and he confessed to the murder of the three park sightseers, Carol and Julie Sund and their friend Silvini Pelosso. The women just happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time. During questioning the end of August, the old the FBI that he had sexually assaulted Silvini Pelosso and Juli Sund before killing them.