KIDNAPPED* ON THE TRAIL

A would-be thru-hiker hit the Pacific Crest Trail to change her life. She knew about the natural hazards. It was the human threat she never saw coming.

- BILL DONAHUE

AT FIRST, he seemed like a nice guy. “He struck me as solicitous,” Kira Moon said. “A giving, caring person. You got the impression he was service-oriented.” James William Parrillo, 53, had an intriguing past, as well. He said that he was a retired Navy SEAL and that he’d worked as a deepsea diver for Greenpeace. He was fairly wealthy, too, he added in an understated way. He’d just sold a home in Santa Cruz for $4.5 million. He didn’t have access to the money just yet, however—it was still in escrow—and he was in physical pain. In a windstorm earlier that month, March 2018, he’d been blown off a cliff in Mt. Laguna, California, he told Moon. He’d broken some ribs and punctured a lung.

So now Parrillo, an impeccably neat, balding man, 6’1” and lean, with a salt-and-pepper goatee and a steady, shark-eye gaze, was temporarily living, along with Moon and a dozen other would-be thru-hikers, at Carmen’s Garden, a Mexican restaurant in Julian, California, 77 miles from the southern terminus of the Pacific Crest Trail, where Moon had begun her hike 10 days before. Did anyone wonder why a professed multimillionaire was crashing at a cheap hippie restaurant? Well, the vibe at Carmen’s was loose and trusting. By day, the hikers waited tables and washed dishes. In the evening, they quaffed beer, then unfurled their sleeping bags to sleep clumped close together on the floor. The vague scent of unwashed human pervaded the room, along with the easy, good-humored kinship that imbues so many hiker gatherings. Moon felt happy, at ease. She began to like James Parrillo—and in time, it seems, he sensed this.