Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  When she learned of his violent rampage, she became terrified. “He does have a personal vendetta against people who he think wronged him, and I’m sure I was on that list, somewhere along the way,” Liz explained.

  Cooper finished his Stanko segment with an interview of Stanko’s coauthor Dr. Gordon Crews, who said he’d found Stanko to be an easy guy to work with. Dr. Crews described reading the first draft of Stanko’s book, and being impressed with the prisoner’s philosophy and articulation. He said he found Stanko’s writing fascinating and “signed on immediately” to be a part of the project.

  Of course, taking into consideration subsequent events, Crews felt he should revise all of his previous opinions. For the past few days, Crews had been learning new things about Stanko—bizarre, incredible things. Crews had Stanko characterized in his mind as a model prisoner who was toiling to let the outside world know what it was like on the inside. The book, as Crews saw it, was a cry for reform, and Stanko was the lead crusader.

  It never—seriously, never—occurred to Crews that Stanko would return to his violent ways once out. It was mind-blowing. How wrong could a guy be?

  He’d seen Stanko as depressed, yes. Violent, no.

  “You could tell that depression was setting in,” Crews said, “because he kept describing himself as, you know, kind of getting slapped down constantly. Nobody wanted a convicted felon working at Best Buy with them. The last time I spoke with him, he was very depressed, on the verge of giving up.”

  Crews said he had a great deal of sympathy for Liz Buckner, because he knew how convincing Stanko could be, and couldn’t blame her at all for falling under his spell. He was glad, in retrospect, that nothing confrontational had occurred during the writing of the book. Knowing what he knew now about the crimes that sent Stanko to prison the first time, he could see the pattern repeating itself. He would put on a façade designed to accomplish whatever it was that he wanted to accomplish—whether it had to do with acquiring money or sex, a job or a relationship. If he was confronted with his lies, confronted strongly, he resorted to violence.

  (Crews and Liz later appeared on the same segment of the Greta Van Susteren show on Fox News. Although she regretted it later, Liz was given an opportunity to address Crews and she really blasted him. She wanted to know how a person who had committed the crimes that Stephen had committed against her could be allowed to use that experience to make a profit. In retrospect, she was railing against the system, but Crews took the brunt of it. And she did later feel bad about her misdirected anger.)

  After finishing with Anderson Cooper, Gordon Crews stuck around and appeared later in the evening on the same network, this time being interviewed by “former prosecutor turned media wolverine” Nancy Grace, who implied he was a vulture for trying to make a buck off Stephen Stanko’s previous crimes, a criticism Crews couldn’t help but liken to the pot calling the kettle black.

  He told Grace that his becoming Stanko’s coauthor was the publisher’s idea, since Stanko was an inmate and Crews a scholar. He said he put in three and a half years on the project that became Living in Prison, both writing his own section while helping to hone Stanko’s already-impressive prose.

  Crews said that Stanko was brimming over with confidence and enjoyed painting himself as a new breed of writer. Like Truman Capote or Hunter Thompson, he was going to create a genre of writing.

  It sounded maybe like Crews was describing someone perfect, but no, Stanko’s faults were always in evidence as well. The professor thought the inmate had a lot of talent, but he sometimes came on too strong. He had none of the humility one might expect to see in an individual who’d spent years behind bars.

  Grace asked if, during the entire time the professor and the inmate worked together, had Stanko ever discussed the details regarding his kidnapping charge. Crews replied that Stanko had not. Looking back on it, Crews said, Stanko’s range of topics when they communicated was extremely narrow.

  If Stanko referred to his crime at all, he called it “white-collar,” combined with a “domestic dispute,” just one of those spouse things that got out of hand. He’d been stressed because of work and they had a fight. Certainly nothing worthy of a ten-year sentence.

  Grace wasn’t impressed with Crews’s naïveté.

  PEOPLE ARE MEAN

  In all spectacular murder cases, there were many players, and the media and public underwent a natural process of separating the good guys from the bad guys. In this case, a misperception had placed Dana Putnam in some people’s eyes on the list of bad guys. The reason? She had aided and abetted and heaven-knows-what-elsed the killer.

  The negative blowback took Dana’s supporters by surprise. Those who loved her—and there were many—were stunned by this interpretation of the facts. She had the misfortune of being in the thick of a sensational news story. Public figures had long understood that it was a mistake to read about yourself on the Internet, or listen to call-in radio shows when you are the topic, but Putnam was unprepared for the reckless criticism of strangers.

  In hindsight, she should have known there would be a negative reaction—some people had their minds in the gutter. When that reaction came, the loudest barks wouldn’t necessarily come from the smartest dogs.

  Putnam was criticized for taking a liking to the guy she met at her birthday party, for being nice to him and giving him a place to stay at the tail end of a long night of drinking. She hadn’t seen through the con man’s con, and for this, she was to be held accountable? People were just mean.

  Her friends—as well as clear-thinking strangers—saw Dana correctly as one of the heroes of the story. After all, she was the person who supplied the information that led to Stephen Stanko’s arrest.

  Plus, her kindness ended his flight and kept him in one place. Her actions, keeping Stanko calm and focused on a “strangers in the night” romance, might even have prevented additional violence.

  Back when Dana was still answering questions, she was asked how she felt. She said it made her feel good, great, that the world was now a safer place.

  “I feel like God had chosen me to bring him down,” she explained.

  Good feeling or no, Dana despised notoriety. She did not like her name on the front pages of newspapers in this, or any other, context. She stopped answering reporters’ questions, which she felt would only fuel the publicity fire.

  By April 13, public criticism had gotten so bad that Janice Putnam agreed to speak to the press and address the unexpected controversy.

  Spitting fire, the mother said, “My daughter may not want to talk about what happened, but I do.” Janice said it hurt her soul to see and hear her daughter’s character sullied and rubbed in the dirt. “They are just slamming her, instead of praising her for getting this guy off the street,” she said. People thought that Dana knew the guy was a psycho sicko and was nice to him, anyway, and that wasn’t even close to what had happened. The guy was a con artist. Didn’t they get that? Her daughter was conned—conned by a master. “It is just so upsetting with everybody making it seem like she is a scumbag and hangs out at lounges. And she is not that way at all.” It was the people who called those radio talk shows who were the worst, spouting slanders against her daughter without knowing any of the facts, without knowing their butts from holes in the ground.

  At least, the police had been nice. In Augusta, law enforcement authorities had gone on the record to say they believed Dana to be a hero and recommended that she receive the $10,000 reward that the Feds had put up.

  Janice knew that, no matter how public opinion went—and she could only hope that people would start being nice—Dana’s ordeal was far from over. She couldn’t just close her eyes and make it all go away. Someday there was going to be a trial, and it was going to start all over again. Dana would no doubt have to testify, and there would be cross-examination during which she would be asked heaven-knows-what. She didn’t invite him home to have some sort of illicit affair. She was trying to prevent a traged
y by getting an intoxicated man off the roads. How was she supposed to know he was a creep?

  She assured everyone who might hear or see her words that she and her daughter were in complete agreement that they wanted “this man” put away.

  “He was a real con artist,” Janice said, adding that it would be a few weeks before her daughter learned if she qualified for the $10,000 reward.

  Dana’s father, Charles Putnam, also leapt to her defense, publicly stating that his daughter was merely “doing what a good citizen would do.”

  Greg Rickabaugh, of the Augusta Chronicle, called the federal police to find out the status of that reward money. He was told by Deputy Kenneth Shugars that Dana Putnam had been asked to fill out paperwork. Until that was done, the Washington office couldn’t determine if she qualified.

  EXTRANEOUS MATERIAL

  Solicitor Gregory Hembree was a thorough researcher. He tried to read every document pertaining to the case, but he had not read Stephen Stanko’s journals in their entirety. He’d read enough to get the gist, and he would be shocked if there was anything in there that he would not have anticipated.

  The comedy act that Stanko wrote was lame, based on a bizarre premise that free people and prisoners have basically the same feelings and concerns.

  There was the serial killer research, which was pretty interesting preceding, as it did, a murder spree. Then there was the anti–law enforcement stuff in which Stanko was being persecuted unjustly. It all got to be the same, and he stopped reading. Stanko was always the hero, and that turned the veteran prosecutor’s stomach a little bit.

  Hembree decided not to use the serial killer stuff in his case. What he’d read made it seem like the work of an intelligent but amateur criminologist. There was nothing overt to indicate premeditation. Maybe he had whacked Laura and Penny over the head in imitation of Ted Bundy, and maybe he had used knots to bind his victims, which he’d learned from BTK, but he didn’t put it in writing. Plus, there was no indication in Stanko’s crime spree that he had learned any expertise, or any lesson at all, from his hours of researching serial killers.

  When the time came, Stephen Stanko had been a hotheaded killer—disorganized, even—not the cool customer he might have hoped to be. For all of his intelligence, he had not been that clever—leaving a living witness, botching his bondage first try, and fleeing in a thoroughly traceable manner.

  Also, the solicitor was thinking only in terms of the evidence he needed to get the lethal needle in the monster’s arm. The serial killer material and the comedy act were extraneous to the case he intended to prove beyond a reasonable doubt. Stanko’s actions vividly spoke for themselves.

  Hembree thought the manhunt went well. Because Penny Ling survived, the BOLO went out many hours earlier than Stanko thought it would. That was the key. If only police had included Henry Lee Turner on their list of people who needed immediate protection, he might still be alive. But it wasn’t anyone’s fault. There were too many directions for Stanko to go. He had ripped off and angered many people.

  In many cases when a killer was on the run, police could assume that he would contact someone he knew, a friend or family member. But this killer had forged new relationships so quickly, he didn’t need to return to the familiar, and could head anywhere. There were a lot of potential targets that deserved protection before Turner.

  Financial woes were only part of the problem, the prosecutor understood. When you looked at Liz and Laura side by side, you saw the pattern. Hembree was convinced that in both cases some sort of rejection by a woman started the violence. It was a typical personality trait for criminal men: the inability to take no for an answer.

  Gregory Hembree also took a look at Stephen Stanko’s family, to see if there were any indicators of what might have caused him to kill. But he saw no clear answers. He’d dealt with people from really messed-up homes, mind-bogglingly messed up, and Stanko’s upbringing couldn’t compare. Stanko’s youth was normal.

  The solicitor grew up in a military household himself and heard no stories about Stanko’s youth that wouldn’t have described accurately a whole generation of welladjusted Americans.

  “Some families make the Stankos look like Leave It to Beaver,” Hembree said, evoking a wholesome 1960s TV show. Stanko’s dad was ex-navy, kind of old school, ran a tight ship, but that might describe a million households in America.

  “Shoot, we’ve had whole generations of people growing up with their daddies like that,” Hembree said.

  A million dads are noncommunicative to a degree, or have some difficulty expressing affection, but their children do not turn into murderers. Maybe William Stanko’s expectations for his sons were a little high.

  “But it wasn’t like he was beating the crap out of his children or anything,” Hembree said.

  Hembree checked out Stanko’s siblings. None of them turned out a train wreck. They were pretty normal, with normal ups and down and range of success. The solicitor could see the house-fire death of Stanko’s older brother as a contributing factor to his personality disorder, but he couldn’t see it making him a killer.

  Stanko’s worst crimes were all misogynistic, not logically caused by a male sibling’s death. It was more likely that Stanko saw his entire existence as spin control.

  He killed to let the world know he had the capacity to kill, the cojones to take a life.

  He hurt women to let all women know that when he was in a relationship, he was the one in charge. The master. King of the Castle. He saw himself as a rich and slick intellectual. When he looked in the mirror, he saw a handsome superior man, merciless and impeccable.

  At about three-thirty on the afternoon of April 13, state court judge Richard A. Slaby signed a search warrant allowing law enforcement to have at Henry Lee Turner’s truck in search of evidence. There was, the judge ruled, reasonable cause to believe evidence in a double homicide might be hidden somewhere in the Mazda. The warrant allowed police and crime scene personnel to search for biological and trace evidence, including—but not limited to—blood, hair and fibers, any sharp objects that could be used as a weapon, any firearms, parts of firearms, ammunition, or firearm-related items.

  Police could also look for any “documents, receipts, or personal effects” that would link Stanko to the death of Henry Turner or Laura Ling. The warrant made special note of a missing piece of jewelry, the shape of which matched a bruise that had been found on Laura Ling’s body.

  The warrant required that an itemized list of the evidence found and seized be made and presented back to the judge for review within ten days.

  Goldfinch Funeral Home prepared Laura Ling’s remains for eternal rest. The work was done at their Beach Chapel, one of three funeral homes along the coast run by George H. Goldfinch Jr., this one on Pawleys Island, on the other side of Brookgreen Gardens State Park from Murrells Inlet.

  Visitation was kept short, held on April 13, from six to eight in the evening. Goldfinch put an obituary up on its website, which was almost identical to the one that ran in the local paper. It noted that Ling’s birth and death dates were July 10, 1961 to April 8, 2005. It gave her education and work history, details of the planned services in her honor, and listed her survivors as her sons and daughter, her mother and her sisters, Catherine Hatfield, of McKinney, Texas, and Victoria Loy, of Tulsa, Oklahoma. A nephew, McLean Hatfield, of McKinney, Texas, and Laura’s ex-husband Chris Ling, of Kill Devil Hills, North Carolina, were also mentioned. It concluded: Memorials may be made to Socastee Public Library.

  On April 14, Ling’s remains were transported by hearse from the Beach Chapel to the Precious Blood of Christ Church, a somewhat progressive Roman Catholic church on Waverly Road, also on Pawleys Island. A mass of Christian burial was held; after which Ling’s remains were transported to Northwest Dallas to the Hillcrest Mausoleum & Memorial Park. Another ceremony was held at an A-framed pavilion/pier that protruded into a man-made lake. Ling’s remains were then entombed.

  A page on th
e Goldfinch website was set up for people to share their remembrances and feelings regarding Laura Ling. Many of the entries were from people Ling knew in Texas who fondly recalled the laughter she brought. One entry came from one of Ling’s former students from the days when she taught Sunday school in Texas.

  But not all of the writing was from the Lone Star State. Janis Walker Gilmore, of Pawleys Island, was Laura Ling’s tennis buddy, who recalled that she volleyed as she did everything, “flat out.” Janis and Laura were not just casual tennis players who volleyed for exercise. They played United States Tennis Association (USTA) team tennis together for a couple of years.

  Janis remembered Penny hanging around the courts waiting for her mother to finish, sometimes killing time by reading the latest Harry Potter book.

  Laura was incredibly bright and funny. She once said to me, “You have it all—the big house, the husband, the nice kids, the money—I’d like to hate you, but you’re just too damned nice!” That was Laura, Janis recalled.

  Linda O’Quinn, a schoolmate of Laura Ling’s during her master’s program at the University of South Carolina, recalled that Ling was as beautiful on the inside as on the outside.

  Simultaneous to the South Carolina services for Laura Ling, on April 14, was a hearing in the Georgetown County Courthouse, with Stephen Stanko in attendance. Part of Georgetown’s Historic District, that courthouse was one of the oldest in the country, built in 1824 to replace the wooden one that burned in 1819. Designed with security in mind, the walls were six feet deep. Along the front were six impressive pillars and a balustrade.

  Stanko waived his right to a bond hearing, and was held without bail. The judge signed an arrest warrant for a charge of armed robbery. The affidavit explained that there was reasonable cause to believe Stanko stole Turner’s vehicle, cell phone, and two of Turner’s guns after the murder. After all, Stanko had been walking toward Turner’s truck when he was arrested in Augusta.