SUSPECT THREW FBI OFF TRACK.

Byline: Evely Nieves The New York Times

He said he had dreamed of killing women for 30 years before he found his moment this February, when a middle-aged woman and two teen-agers on a sightseeing trip to Yosemite National Park happened to take a room at the motel where he worked as a janitor.

He killed all three women, Cary Stayner told a television reporter on Monday night. Then he laid low, escaping suspicion of the FBI when he was interviewed later in February by its agents, who then focused on a group of ex-convicts as suspects.

But last week, he said, he could no longer resist the temptation to kill again, and he decapitated a 26-year-old Yosemite naturalist, Joie Ruth Armstrong.

In a 25-minute jail-house interview in Sacramento only hours after he was charged in federal court there with the murder of Armstrong, Stayner told the reporter, Ted Rowlands of KBWB-TV in San Francisco, that he had fantasized since childhood about murdering women and had killed these four ``because they were at the wrong place at the wrong time.''

The interview was conducted off-camera and reported Monday on the late news. In it, Rowlands reported that Stayner said he planned to plead guilty to the Armstrong killing when he is arraigned in Fresno on Aug. 6 and that he also wanted to plead guilty to the other killings, with which he has not yet been charged.

Rowlands said Stayner, a 37-year-old janitor at the Cedar Lodge in El Portal, on Yosemite's western edge, had given a detailed account of how he had killed Carole Sund, 42, her daughter, Juli Sund, 15, and their friend Silvina Pelosso, 16. Their disappearance from the Cedar Lodge on Feb. 15 generated a vast investigation and national headlines.

Stayner, whose only prior arrest was for marijuana possession, told Rowlands that he had tricked the three women into letting him into their room and had then held them at gunpoint.

Pair strangled first

He said he had strangled Carole Sund and Pelosso there, put their bodies into the trunk of their rental car and then made Juli Sund drive with him as he searched for a place to kill her and dump the bodies.

Hours later, he said, he killed Juli Sund, by slashing her throat so fiercely that he nearly severed her head, and dumped her body near a creek. He then left the rental car, with two bodies still in the trunk, at the remote community of Long Barn, a two-and-a-half-hour drive east of El Portal, and took a taxi and a bus back home.

He did not sexually abuse any of his victims, he said.

Two days later, he said, he returned - not only to burn the car but also to retrieve Mrs. Sund's wallet, which he used to throw the FBI off his track by dumping it off a highway in Modesto, about midway between El Portal and San Francisco.

The tactic worked. When Mrs. Sund's wallet was found in Modesto, both the FBI and local law-enforcement officials set up command centers at a local hotel and began focusing on suspects in the Modesto area. Several men with long criminal records have been held in connection with the case for months, and a federal grand jury has been hearing testimony since April from associates of those in jail.

Other suspects in custody

Until Sunday, when it announced that Stayner had been arrested in the decapitation of Armstrong and was now ``the prime suspect'' in the February slayings, the FBI had maintained that all the people involved in those earlier killings were in custody, albeit on unrelated charges.

In addition to the television interview, two previously reported FBI affidavits say that Stayner has confessed in detail to all four killings, describing facts about the crimes that only someone involved could have known.

In the interview, Stayner also told of involvement of a different kind. At the time Juli Sund's body was found, six days after the discovery of the two other victims, the authorities said only that they had been led to the body by a tip. Stayner said on Monday night that the tip had come from him, in a letter he had written the FBI telling agents where to look for the body. He had someone else, unaware of his spree of killing, lick the envelope for him so that his DNA could not be traced, he said.

On Tuesday, an FBI spokesman, Nick Rossi, declined to comment on the affidavits and refused to confirm or deny any statements Stayner ``may have made.''

Stayner's arrest, and confession, has brought new scrutiny to the investigation of the case. James M. Maddock, who is in charge of the FBI's Sacramento office, said that the agency will be examining what, if anything, might have been done differently.

In his confessions, both as described in the affidavits and by the television station, Stayner said he took pains to throw officials off by wetting towels in the women's room in the Cedar Lodge to make it seem as if they had been there the day after he had killed them.

Stayner's family was the victim of a terrible crime when he was 11. Stayner's younger brother, Steven, was kidnapped in their hometown of Merced, and was held for seven years by a sexual molester. When his abductor showed up one day with a new victim, Steven and the younger boy escaped. Eight years later, in 1989, at age 24, Steven was killed in a motorcycle crash.

Fantasies since 7

Reports by local news organizations have been filled with speculation that Steven's ordeal may somehow have led his brother to perpetrate violence against women. But in the interview, Stayner said that he had fantasized about killing women since he was 7, years before his brother was kidnapped.

On Tuesday, Stayner's father, Delbert Stayner, said that he still could not believe that his son had committed the killings. ``Maybe someone threatened him into confessing,'' he said in a brief telephone interview, his voice breaking.

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Photo: Investigators in this file photo from March search the torched remains of Carole Sund's rental car for evidence near Sierra Village, Calif. Cary Stayner is a suspect in the killing.

Al Golub/The Modesto Bee