‘My Heart Is in This Reward Fund’

Francis and Carole Carrington had lived a very peaceful, very private life. But then they faced the unthinkable. Their daughter and granddaughter, along with a family friend, turned up missing on a trip to Yosemite, only to be found murdered a month later in a case that riveted national attention.

Instead of crumbling in grief, the Carringtons discovered solace in perpetual motion, first in trying to find their loved ones, then in fighting to discover who killed them.

“We lost a daughter, a granddaughter and a friend,” Francis Carrington said, reflecting on the anguished six months since the trio vanished from a lodge outside the national park. “If I wasn’t careful, I could have lost our whole family. If we wanted to let this ruin our lives, it might have.”

Now they want to help others. The prime suspect in the Yosemite murders, motel handyman Cary Stayner, is in custody. But the Carringtons aren’t done yet.

Francis Carrington, the 66-year-old patriarch of the tight-knit Eureka clan, talks these days of taking time off from the real estate management business he so carefully nurtured over the decades. He wants to devote his energies to a foundation the couple has established that provides reward money so that other families can see a resolution of unsolved cases.

Carole Carrington, petite and unfailingly polite, jetted back East to Washington, D.C., last week, telling her family’s story to a congressional committee considering an extension of hate crime status to violent acts that specifically target women. She also appeared on NBC, ABC and CNN to promote the same cause and the family’s new foundation.

All the attention is so different than their lives before.

Though blessed with wealth from a family real estate venture that has been buying and selling property for a century, the Carringtons much preferred the warm embrace of family to the hubbub of the country club set. For them, happiness on the cusp of retirement was tending the gardens on their remote ranch and shepherding the family business, anonymous in a downtown Eureka building with no sign outside.

Then in February, their daughter, Carole Sund, vanished on vacation, along with her 15-year-old daughter, Juliana, and friend Silvina Pelosso, 16. Without hesitation, the Carringtons threw themselves into the fray.

They joined early search parties and offered rewards for clues. They overcame a natural reserve to draw nationwide media attention to the missing trio--doing an interview with Diane Sawyer one day, talking with local newspaper reporters the next. They passed out fliers, worked the phones, did whatever it might take to force a break, any break, in the case.

And they resolved not to allow themselves to be broken.

A few weeks after the disappearances in mid-February, the Carringtons took part in a vigil for their 42-year-old daughter, granddaughter and Pelosso, a family friend visiting from Argentina.

United by tragedy, a dozen families with missing relatives joined the Carringtons for the march, along with scores of sympathizers. They took turns at a microphone telling their stories. Some hadn’t seen their missing loved ones in a decade, had never recovered a body. Some talked of how their lives had been ruined, how it consumed them night and day.

The Carringtons were feeling the same tugs. Later, when the first two bodies were found, the couple grieved publicly, Francis Carrington weeping before TV cameras at the family command post in a Modesto Holiday Inn while his 64-year-old wife embraced a friend.

Then, amid the mourning, they tried to make something positive out of the trauma.

The couple started by establishing the Carole Sund / Carrington Memorial Reward Foundation, kicking off the fund-raising by putting up $200,000 of their own savings.

Reward money, they reasoned, had helped early on with a break in the Yosemite murder investigation. A $250,000 reward for the trio’s safe return had grabbed media attention. That publicity, they believe, helped lead to the discovery of the women’s rental car by a target shooter in a Tuolumne County forest. Jim Powers, who recognized the torched vehicle because of news accounts, received a $50,000 reward from the Carringtons.

The foundation, based in Modesto, the town where the Carringtons spent so many sleepless nights waiting for word, has already put up more than $100,000 in reward money for more than a half-dozen homicide or missing person cases, mostly in California.

“It’s very difficult in the aftermath of tragedy to find anything good about life,” said Marc Klaas, who endured the 1993 abduction and murder of his daughter, 12-year-old Polly, a case that ushered in California’s three-strikes law. “It helps to have a full plate when you get up in the morning, knowing what you’re doing will create a legacy for your child.

“God bless them. My heart goes out to them. They’re doing an absolutely fabulous job. This reward fund fills a real need.”

And the Carringtons have a success story. Last month, $10,000 in reward money from the foundation led to the arrest of a suspect in the March shotgun slaying of a young man in the Central Valley town of Grayson. Stanislaus County Sheriff Les Weidman wrote the Carringtons, saying the foundation already is serving “a vital role in assisting law enforcement officers.”

“I have to keep my hand in the business, but my heart is in this reward fund,” Francis Carrington said. “It’s the only thing we can do. You’d like to turn the clock back, but you can’t.”

Law enforcement experts say the privately financed reward fund for the less fortunate is unique.

“They just have this resilience that is remarkable,” said Kelly Huston, a Modesto police officer who worked with the Carringtons. “They can’t bring their family back, but they are trying to make something positive of it.”

Huston recalled how Francis Carrington asked for help to put on a news conference a few days after the trio vanished. The shy millionaire didn’t want the spotlight. Huston had to prod, explaining that a personal story would help generate public interest. Francis Carrington reluctantly agreed.

The interview requests came again and again, and the Carringtons--along with Carole Sund’s husband, Jens, and his brother, Ken Sund--stepped forward.

“They would sit back and say, ‘If you think it’ll help with the case, we’ll do it.’ It’s the same way with this reward fund,” Huston said.

The couple’s calm was displayed in recent days, after the July 21 murder of naturalist Joie Armstrong led to Stayner’s arrest and the revelation that the FBI had apparently targeted the wrong suspects in the slayings of Sund, Juliana and Silvina.

Congressional critics and others battered the FBI, but the Carringtons have stood by the team of agents that worked the case for months. The couple still harbors doubts that Stayner acted alone, but said FBI agents did all they could to crack the case, running down thousands of leads.

“This was just something that none of us could have expected,” Carole Carrington said. “I can’t fault them. Monday morning quarterbacking is a lot easier than when you’re on the field.”

But she and her husband said they are particularly galled at the odd apology Stayner offered to the families of victims during a jailhouse interview. The suspect said he was “sorry their loved ones were where they were when they were. I wish I could’ve controlled myself and not done what I did.”

The Carringtons don’t accept it.

“It was a non-apology apology,” Carole Carrington said. “Like it was their fault. I think it was the poorest example of an apology I’ve ever heard.”

For more information or to contribute: Carole Sund / Carrington Memorial Reward Fund, 1508 Coffee Road, Suite H, Modesto, CA 95350.

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Times staff researcher Tracy Thomas contributed to this report.