In one passage, Stanko wondered if a nation’s morality could be judged by how it treated its prisoners. Stanko wrote that the United States was number one in the world in prison population, and that the subject of the American corrections system was polarizing and frequently sparked heated debate.
Huff did some research online and learned that the book received a handful of reviews after its release in 2004. Critics agreed that the best part was Stanko’s input, as he vividly personalized the prisoner experience.
The book seemingly offered a strong voice to activists seeking prison reform, but was a less than satisfying read for anyone seeking entertainment. Every strand of prose was braided with self-pity.
Great pains were taken to establish each prison indignity and humiliation. Maybe the self-centered nature of Stanko’s writing was of little concern to those whose tub he thumped, but to Joe Six-pack it seemed like a lot of whiny verbiage—e.g., his living space was six and a half by eleven; he had to defecate in front of his cell mates, who were larger and of a different race. For twenty-three hours a day, there was no way to get away from his cell mates, except on weekends when it was twenty-four hours a day. And cell mates wouldn’t leave him alone. All that stress and psychological punishment built up inside a man. A prisoner could release that pressure only through communication and interaction with cell mates. And it didn’t always go well. One fight, and a cell could become a “battlefield.”
Just as bad was the neglect that prisoners endured from their captors. One night, Stanko broke his pencil and had to wait four days for a new one. He worked his way through the system. Every time they moved him from one prison to the next, he was shackled all over again, to men imprisoned for similar crimes. Even if he qualified for one job, they gave him another, according to their needs rather than his. Most guys pulled cafeteria and yard duty.
A lot of blah-blah-blah for an argument that could be rebutted so simply: Prisoners aren’t supposed to like prison. In fact, the idea is to make the prisoner as miserable as possible so he won’t want to come back.
“Be thankful you have an f’ing toilet” was the effective, and largely unspoken, rebuttal to Living in Prison’s theme.
As all of this was going down, following the case on television was Penny Ling, who was lying on a hospital bed, a clean white bandage covering her stitched throat.
It occurred to her that Stephen Stanko wasn’t acting like a man who was hunted. He was going to bars, partying with gusto with people who moments before had been strangers.
Maybe, she thought, he wasn’t in a hurry because he didn’t know about the quantity of publicity he was receiving. Maybe he hadn’t seen a newspaper, hadn’t watched the news. The types of places he was hanging out in usually had sports on the TV.
Maybe he thought she was dead, Penny wondered. Maybe he was taking his sweet time running away because he didn’t know he’d left a living witness.
The joke was on him!
STANKO SIGHTINGS
While talking heads blabbed about Stephen Stanko, providing twenty-four-hour news channels with lots of time-consuming, if not repetitive, programming, the message that a killer was on the loose was getting through, loud and clear. Every black pickup struck fear into the heart of the Lowcountry.
Police across South Carolina girded their collective loins, realizing that manhunt-oriented wild-goose chases were going to blend with the usual busy array of complaints: suspicious behavior, domestic disputes, drunks, crank phone calls, vandalism, and false alarms.
Midafternoon on April 11, a man called and said he was a former employer of Stanko’s and now his home’s burglar alarm was going off. He was afraid it was Stanko “comin’ to get” him. A thorough search turned up no Stanko, no burglar of any kind, and what triggered the alarm remained forever undetermined.
Sarah Rock, of Myrtle Beach, called the cops saying she saw Stanko that morning at the Hardee’s in Charleston, the one on Coleman Boulevard, and he was wearing a green T-shirt with BIKE OBERFEST on the front.
Some callers were bonkers; others serious and real—but unhelpful. A Myrtle Beach woman called and said, “Stanko used to live” with her. That statement sounded provocative, but it turned out the woman meant she was a landlady and had rented Stanko a room some months earlier. She had no idea where he was, or had been since he moved out. If they found him, they should try and collect the back rent he owed.
Roger N. Goode (pseudonym), of Best Buy in Myrtle Beach, called Horry County police and said that Stanko had been in his store looking for a job. Goode heard he was an ex-con, politely declined, and recommended he see human resources at the Best Buy in Fayetteville, where maybe there was an opening. This looked to the responding officers like an excellent lead, until Goode said this happened in October of 2004, six months earlier.
At four o’clock on the afternoon of April 11, a fisherman called the Myrtle Beach Police Department (MBPD) and said he’d seen the “wanted person” getting out of a black pickup. The truck was now parked in the Holiday Inn parking lot across the way. He was calling from the Fifth Avenue South beach access, just east of the Whispering Pines Golf Course and the Myrtle Beach International Airport.
The fisherman said he’d watched as the guy got out of the truck and began to walk south along the beach. He was a white guy, wearing a white tank top, blue jeans, and sandals.
Several officers reported to the scene immediately. There were two black pickups in the hotel lot, one a Ford, one a Nissan, not a Mazda to be seen. Simultaneous to this, officers searched the beach, south of the parking lot, and came back empty.
The cops found the fisherman and took his pertinent info. He was Thomas Hunt (pseudonym) and he lived in an apartment on Mitchell Street. In his brief written report of the incident, Officer Timothy J. Taylor wrote that the complainant appeared drunk and mistaken.
Hysterical phone calls came in from out of town as well. A driver on the Ohio Turnpike thought he saw Stephen Stanko, too. The witness’s name was Mike Conrad and he saw the subject late on the afternoon of April 11 at Turnpike Milepost 100, not far from Clyde, Ohio.
Taking the call for the Ohio State Highway Patrol was Trooper E. A. Weaver. Conrad told Weaver he’d gotten a pretty good look at the guy’s vehicle. No, no, it wasn’t a black pickup.
“It was a black Eagle Talon, with rust on its front,” Conrad said. It wasn’t the vehicle the suspect was presumed to be driving, but who knew? He could have switched.
Conrad got suspicious when the guy did a really weird thing, a criminal thing. He parked his vehicle, got out, removed a New York license plate from the rear, and replaced it with another plate. He couldn’t see what kind of plate it was. The guy got back in his vehicle and was last seen “hauling ass” southbound on the Ohio Turnpike.
The subject, Conrad said, was wearing a camouflage jacket, gray jeans, and appeared disheveled. He wore glasses, had brown hair. That was all he remembered.
Weaver asked why Conrad hadn’t called right away (several hours had passed since the witness saw the subject changing his license plate). Conrad apologized, saying he went home and put on CNN. He wanted to get a look at the killer’s photo on TV one more time so he could be sure.
At five-thirty on the afternoon of April 11, someone resembling Stephen Stanko was spotted driving erratically across South Carolina. A witness named John Fickling was returning to Columbia, South Carolina, from a visit to Sunset Beach, North Carolina, just north of North Myrtle Beach. Sitting beside him was his fiancée, Teri. The subject was driving a black pickup truck, and Fickling first noticed him when he saw him in his rearview mirror, repeatedly trying to pass the car behind him. Fickling’s first thought was that the guy was nuts and to give him a wide berth.
Asked to give the precise-as-possible location of the sighting, Fickling said that he and the subject both had just turned off Highway 410 onto Highway 417. The witness explained that he liked to keep to the back roads rather than Interstate 20 because he didn’t like all tha
t traffic. At one point, while stopped by a disabled car and a tow truck on the road, with the pickup behind him, Fickling took a closer look. The man in a hurry was in a black Mazda. He was 99 percent sure it was a Mazda. The truck was not willing to wait out the light and pulled onto the shoulder to pass Fickling on the right and roar away. At that point, he noticed there were two people in the truck. Fickling apologized for not getting the license plate number.
On April 11, Investigator Anne Pitts called the Boca Raton Police Department (BRPD) and spoke to Officer B. C. Allen. Pitts said they’d gotten a call up there in Horry County from a Boca Raton resident who reported seeing Stephen Stanko in Spanish River Park.
The eyewitness was Caroline Smith (pseudonym), twenty-six years old, who lived in an apartment on North Ocean Boulevard, right by the ocean. Smith said the previous day, at five-thirty in the afternoon, she was on the beach, right across the street from where she lived, when she was approached by a white male. This was at the public beach access to the park, and the guy was walking north.
She described the subject as approximately six feet to six-three. Average build. Light brown hair, no glasses, clean shaven, pitted complexion, wearing a white buttondown shirt, beige shorts, carrying a bottle of sunscreen and a small black case resembling a shave kit.
The man asked her if she had the time and tried to strike up a conversation with her about the difficulty he’d had finding a parking place. Told her he worked in a funeral home. Said his name was David.
Smith found the man’s behavior odd and became increasingly uncomfortable. There were few people on the beach at that hour. “I made an excuse to leave, and I did,” Smith told Pitts.
On the morning of April 11, Smith was visiting foxnews.com when she saw Stephen Stanko’s photo. She thought he resembled the man on the beach. She couldn’t be sure. Similar age, but no glasses. She also thought his hair was lighter brown. But she thought it was worth making a phone call. No, she had no idea what kind of vehicle the man on the beach drove. She didn’t see, and he didn’t mention. And no, the man on the beach had no apparent injuries.
Pitts informed the Boca cops that they had to take every sighting seriously, and there was reason to think Stanko had headed south. There had been other sightings, Pitts said, in the Jacksonville area, near Middleburg. In reaction to the report, Boca police released a BOLO for Stanko and the black Mazda pickup.
Boca police followed up on the sighting by checking out the public beach access area off North Ocean Boulevard. Nearby was the Sea Ranch Club of Boca. Police asked if their surveillance cameras might have recorded something useful. The club replied that no such surveillance footage existed, and their private security staff provided only “limited patrols” of the club’s exterior. Boca police canvassed the area but found no one who recalled seeing Smith’s chatty stranger.
April 11 had brought many false leads, and as it turned out, April 12 was just as bad. Stephen Stanko look-alikes were coming out of the woodwork. One of the first calls of the day came from the father of a Florida woman who had been chased by a man outside a Miami Beach club. The father told police his daughter subsequently saw Stanko’s picture on TV. She turned “white as a sheet and freaked out.” She was sure it was the man who chased her. Of course, he was long gone now.
At Coastal Carolina University, campus hysteria hummed along unabated. Kathryn Donohue, a CCU student who waitressed at Ruby Tuesday, reported that at about seven o’clock the previous evening she’d seen Stephen Stanko. After her shift was through, she saw his picture on a campus flyer and she was certain it was the same guy.
“He was with another person,” she told campus police, a person who was ambiguous in terms of gender. Androgynous. At first, the waitress thought the person was a man, based on the dress, actions, haircut. When she got up close, she could see that it was actually a woman.
It was the female who paid the check. With a credit card. The man and woman didn’t talk to each other during their meal, and spent most of the time looking out the window as if they were waiting for someone.
The credit card provided a lead by which police could establish that the man with the he-she friend was not the guy.
Stephen Stanko was nowhere near CCU, Miami Beach, Boca Raton, Jacksonville, Columbia, Clyde—or Myrtle Beach. He wasn’t in any of the places witnesses said he was.
CNN, MSNBC, and Fox News kept showing Stanko’s photo, dwelling on the perverse and sadistic details of the Ling crimes. The result was predictable, and for a time, Stanko was spotted even more often than Elvis.
So where was he? Despite the media saturation, the real Stanko was playing a real-life game of “Where’s Waldo?” blending like a chameleon into a crowd of similitude.
With that much notoriety, the law enforcement agencies directly involved (Georgetown County, Horry County) were being inundated with not only tips from people eager to be an eyewitness, but offers of help from the outside.
One volunteer, who repeatedly e-mailed the Horry County Sheriff’s Office (HCSO) during the manhunt, was a fellow by the name of Johnny Johnson (pseudonym), who claimed to be a private investigator who had been doing “pro bono” intelligence work for the law enforcement agencies of the world ever since 9/11. The guy had found a handful of e-mail addresses that, he said, belonged to Laura Ling. He recommended that Ling’s Internet activity be investigated for clues that might help the manhunt. Cyber investigators followed up on the lead and found the following entry on one membership website that read: Hello, my name is Laura Ling. I’m 43 years old from USA. I speak English. My marital status is divorced. Nothing uncommon there from a middle-aged single woman. And no help at all with the manhunt.
Stephen Stanko’s coauthor Gordon Crews told WBTW-TV in Florence, South Carolina, that if he knew Stanko, the man would not be taken alive.
“I don’t see him giving up,” Crews said. “I don’t see an easy resolution to this at all.”
TV news smelled the fear and played to it. A psychologist explained how spree criminals on the run were like terrorists.
“Domestic terrorists,” he said.
Sure, a couple of lives had been lost, but the greatest product of the killer’s spree was mass fear. You couldn’t blame TV, the psychologist said. People had the right to know.
Throughout the Southeast, Tuesday morning, April 12, 2005, would have been a good time to rob a bank. Police forces were preoccupied with the manhunt, and everything else could wait.
The tension in the Lowcountry seeped not just into CCU, but into the region’s public schools as well. Beth Selander, the principal at Seaside Elementary on Woodland Drive in Garden City Beach, sent a mass e-mail to her students’ parents, stating that there had been a double homicide that was being investigated by local police, and that there were several rumors about other incidents that the principal, in her position to know, knew were only rumors and had no basis in fact.
She sent her employees a checklist of safety reminders. Number one set the terse tone:
1. Lock all exterior doors to your school and position someone at the front door to monitor entrance into the building.
The list said children should not go outside for the remainder of the day, and promised that when school was over, security would check the entire building before leaving for the night.
She asked all parents to do their part in dealing with these nervous times—to take every precaution to keep their children safe, yes, but also to help their children feel more secure, and to reduce anxiety rather than fuel rumors.
ARREST
Dana Putnam was still in a pretty good mood regarding the weekend’s turn of events on Tuesday morning, when the phone rang. It was her mother with sobering information.
Mom said she’d just read an article in the morning paper. The article was on page 5B, and Dana should look at it right away. It was about a man named Stephen Stanko who had murdered two and severely injured a third, a teenage girl whom he’d also raped.
The Feds got invo
lved because he committed his crimes in South Carolina and had perhaps fled the state. The Feds had a $10,000 reward out for the guy.
The article said the guy was a braggart who loved to talk about being an ex-con and how it had turned him into an advocate for prison reform. Dana felt the hair on her arms stand on end. Her mother continued.
In the newspaper article, the police were candid about their lack of information. They didn’t have a clue where he was headed. In the article, Horry County police lieutenant Andy Christenson said, “He could be anywhere in the United States.”
That meant he sure as hell could be in Augusta, Georgia, Dana’s mom thought.
In the paper, Lieutenant Christenson noted that Stanko had relatives in Fayetteville, North Carolina, but there was no indication that he was heading there. Those relatives had been contacted and had no knowledge of his whereabouts.
Wherever he was, the cop added, he was very dangerous. The article discussed the fact that Stanko had done eight-plus years in prison, and that he really did author a published book.
The report revealed Stanko’s recent work record, which was less than stellar. He didn’t seem to have the attention span to hold down a steady job. He was driving a stolen pickup truck, and they gave the year and make.
But the clincher was the photo that accompanied the article. “That’s your Stephen Christopher,” Dana’s mom said.
Dana didn’t argue. The weekend had been too good to be true, so it only made sense that it wasn’t. She took a deep breath and drove to the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office (RCSO), where she told Sheriff Ronnie Strength her story.
Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Page 8
