EUREKA, Calif. -- A grief-stricken but defiant Jens Sund says the killer of his wife, Carole, his teenage daughter, Julie, and a family friend, Silvina Pelosso, should expect no mercy from his family.
"I'll personally pull the switch," Sund vowed. "I believe in capital punishment. And I believe whoever is responsible for this deserves to die."Sund said the discovery of Julie's body last Thursday on a vista overlooking a reservoir in the foothills -- six days after the bodies of her mother, 42, and Silvina, 16, were found stuffed in the trunk of a burned rental car -- allows him and his three other children to seek closure to a family tragedy that began to unfold last month.
Although the fate of the missing trio from Eureka is now known, six weeks after they mysteriously disappeared on Feb. 15 while on a trek to Yosemite National Park, many questions remain unanswered. Still unknown is when and where they were abducted, when they were separated and who killed them.
For Jens Sund and his surviving children, it has been a tortuous time. "It's very difficult. Sometimes it's almost unbearable, but we have to go on," he said on Sunday in an interview that broke his public silence.
He said he has no plans to visit the sites where the bodies were found.
"We will mourn them here. This is our home," Sund said.
When the FBI called to tell him that her body had been found in the trunk of the rental car, Sund said it was devastating. "Even though I had had weeks to expect the worse, it hit me very hard," he said. He bundled up his children and retreated to a cabin at a ranch along the Mad River owned by Carole's parents, Carole and Francis Carrington.
"There's no telephone or television. We heat with a wood stove. It's always been a very special place for all of us," Sund said. "There's cooking to do. Household chores to be done. I go to my office now and then. But sometimes I feel like I'm just going through the motions."
By appearing on ABC-TV's "Good Morning America" and NBC's "Today" show on Monday, Sund said he hoped to further the youth programs his wife worked for. "People keep asking us what they can do. I know Carole would want to help the children," he said.
Distributed by N.Y. Times News Service