Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  Liz felt like he was the sun, some huge gravitational mass, and she had gotten too close and fallen into orbit around him, then abruptly was “sucked right in.” Get too close and you became a permanent part of his life.

  She had known from early on, maybe six months after she met him, that there were a lot of things going on, plenty of trouble. But she was hooked. He kept her on her toes. She never knew what to expect the next time he walked through the door. To listen to him, he had the world’s most eventful life.

  For a guy who really couldn’t hold down a job, he was always busy. He got up every morning, dressed in a suit and tie, ready for the day, and went out there to do whatever it was he did. And he would return ten hours later still looking kempt!

  There was never enough solid evidence to tell for sure what Stephen was doing with his time, but he sometimes made jokes about his constantly plotting nature. What did he do all day? He kept all thousand irons in the fire, that’s what.

  There were so many imaginary jobs, and imaginary firings, that she had no idea which of them, if any, were real. She believed that he sometimes told little lies poorly so she’d be less likely to suspect his big lies.

  There were always schemes. Stephen was like that showbiz act where the frantic man kept many plates spinning atop broomsticks. With Stanko, however, plates fell—quite often, in fact—and that was when his shoveling of the bull shifted into overdrive.

  When Liz learned that Stanko was a habitual liar, she tried to determine reality, using outside factors. He concocted stories, left and right. He couldn’t seem to help it.

  Looking back on it now, Liz understood that Stephen Stanko was the classic psychopath, the man with no conscience, no capacity for empathy. Back then, she didn’t know any of that. She just knew that Stanko lived in his own world, and she wasn’t sure if the rest of humanity was there with him.

  He was a chameleon, all right, but not everyone fell under his spell. Not everyone was sucked in. Those that weren’t—women mostly, Liz found—withdrew when Stephen was around.

  Liz sometimes thought women were more astute when it came to these things. There were several women she remembered who didn’t want their boyfriends or husbands to be associated with Stanko.

  “After three and a half years with Stephen, there were times when I questioned my own sanity,” Liz said, likening that time to a “runaway roller-coaster ride.”

  Liz explained: “He was very good at what he did. He practiced it until he perfected it, and he used it on everyone. He made a career out of it.”

  There was a time period when Liz knew something was wrong with Stephen, even before he did—how he tried to hide his criminal activity from her—and she sensed the deception, even if she didn’t know at first what was being hidden.

  She tried to talk to him about it, but he denied anything and everything, and these discussions usually deteriorated into arguments. Some couples, Stanko would later note, could argue their way through their problems, but that was not the case with them.

  He had a bad temper and “lost it” when he got mad.

  Stephen and Liz went to a counselor for a time. But the counselor was too weak. Stephen was able to turn things around so that Liz felt she was the one being counseled. He tried to make her seem jealous. She’d admit to being suspicious of him, with good reason, but jealous? No way. That was another of his lies.

  Any woman would have been suspicious. Stephen took telephone calls all day and all night. Sometimes he would go into the bathroom, close the door, and speak on the phone in a low voice. That was suspicious—with a capital S. She didn’t confront him, though. He’d trained her that it was always wise to keep the relationship on an even keel. If there was a fight, she would lose.

  “I felt like I walked on eggshells in my own home,” she recalled. “I felt like, if I made the wrong move, I was going to be in trouble.” She cried every business trip, because he found a way to make her miserable.

  At one point, Stephen called Liz’s boss and complained that her job was interfering with their relationship. She had worked hard to get where she was at that job, getting ahead in what was still a man’s world, and she couldn’t have been more mortified—humiliated!—by Stephen’s phone call.

  In 1995, Stephen was arrested for white-collar crimes, creating false paperwork at his job in order to collect commissions he wasn’t owed. He told Liz he was innocent.

  She got him a lawyer, but he ended up serving more than a month in jail. That was how Liz discovered Stanko was more than just a businessman with shaky ethics. He was a downright thief.

  Stephen also made a big deal out of Liz’s earnings and stated that he should bring home the money. Despite that, he stole blank checks from her purse.

  “When he needed money, he couldn’t resist pawning paintings and jewelry from around my home,” she complained. One day, she confronted him about his criminal activities.

  As usual, he abruptly became nasty; this time, his attack leapt beyond verbal, and became physical. He assaulted her in her home at one point, putting his hands on her throat.

  Stanko got control of himself before doing Liz any harm—with the exception of scaring her. For the short term, she ran to her friend Mary Lou Culpepper.

  Stephen and Liz broke up after that. For the long term, Stanko stayed with a couple of friends of his for a time, not far from Goose Creek. From there, to get even farther from Liz, he headed for the big city—Atlanta, Georgia.

  “Once he was in Atlanta,” Liz recalled, “he began his same old tricks, just with different people.” He was pulling paperwork swindles at different jobs, and manipulating a new girlfriend. “What are the odds? He began to see a young woman I knew,” Liz remembered. “Her name was Cynthia, and she had a young daughter. That’s who he preyed on. He was always on the lookout for single mothers.”

  Stephen saw single mothers as age-appropriate damsels in distress, usually struggling in life a bit, in need of a man. It was a situation that he found easy to overwhelm. It was easy for him to interject himself into those incomplete families and make himself the hero.

  “It would always seem at first that he was the answer to all of their problems, but in the long run, he just brought fresh problems into their lives,” Liz said.

  Stephen told Cynthia Wilson that Liz was calling him constantly; when, in actuality, the reverse was true. Liz was the one being pestered by unwanted phone calls.

  He wanted to come back. She said no. He called again. Again, no. He was relentless and again she wore down. Despite all of Liz’s resistance, there came a day when he was back.

  He needed a place to stay and she supplied that—but their romantic relationship was finished. They were no longer boyfriend and girlfriend after Atlanta.

  While Stephen was in Georgia, Liz moved into a new home in Goose Creek, where her next-door neighbors were Delray “Ray” and Natalie Crenshaw.

  When Stephen returned to Goose Creek, he got a job at a used-car lot, but that, as usual, wasn’t enough. He wanted to start his own car dealership.

  Although Liz certainly did not mind socializing with the Crenshaws, she begged Stephen not to bother them with his “business deals.” Stephen said that was silly talk. Soon Stephen and Ray were more than friends, they were partners. Ray Crenshaw was in the orbit of the huge gravitational sphere that was Stephen Stanko, and had been sucked in.

  Liz’s conscience is still troubled over this part of the story. She knew Stephen was a con man, she knew that the Crenshaws were just the sort of people he would rip off, and yet she sat by and smiled and allowed it to happen.

  The biggest question of all was: why did she let him back?

  “I’ll question that forever,” Liz said.

  So, by 1996, Liz no longer thought of Stephen at all the way she had when their relationship was still dewy and new, wreathed in romance. They weren’t even buddies. He’d become a bully and a burden. She had long since figured out that his charm was always self-serving. She’d he
ard plenty of examples of him being misogynistic, verbally abusive to women. And she’d felt his hands around her neck. It was a simple case of cause and effect. Whenever she confronted him about anything, he “went mad.” It was like he had a switch, and when you triggered it, there was no stopping him.

  “The difference was like night and day,” Liz recalled.

  Why? Why? Why had she let him back? Naïveté, that’s what it was. She thought he had changed. She still believed the things he said. No, amend that. It wasn’t just naïveté. It was insecurity as well. Stephen had her convinced that she was powerless to change the way things were. Stephen was a social guy, and a popular guy, and he knew plenty of cops—both Berkeley County and Goose Creek. She remembered the first time he grabbed her throat. She called the cops, and when they arrived, Stephen went into his bs rap and blamed everything on Liz. The cop told Liz that he thought it would be for the best if she left and slept someplace else that night.

  Leave? It was her house, but he was the one who got to stay; he was the one who had been attacking her. Liz realized Stephen had the cops in his hip pocket.

  The reason for the police officer’s suggestion was practical. Liz said she had a place to go, and Stephen said he did not. After that, Stephen told Liz that she should never call the police again or he would have them lock her up.

  “I believed it was true,” Liz said. He really did know those policemen and they were going to protect their own. He’d grown up in Goose Creek, went to school with those guys. She was a transplant from another part of the state—Johns Island.

  And that’s the way it was: Stephen was in charge and she had no say.

  According to Stephen Stanko, it was he who eventually decided it was best all around if he left Liz McLendon. For one thing, he didn’t want to harm her physically, and for another, he was afraid that she would be charged as a conspirator if he was ever caught in the possession of stolen items. So, in the “he said” version of the story, he started to pack a bag—to protect her.

  The “she said” version differs, of course—and is, no doubt, far closer to reality. She said it was Sunday evening, February 18, 1996, when she confronted him with the fact that he’d been fired and hadn’t told her. Of course, he scrambled, offered excuses. When she refused to buy it, the argument became nasty.

  The following evening, Monday, February 19, she arrived home from work to find Stephen and Ray Crenshaw sitting in the backseat of an unmarked police car in Crenshaw’s driveway, answering questions about stolen cars.

  Liz’s final argument with Stephen erupted early on the morning of February 20. He was too close, leaning. She pushed him; he pushed her back. They wrestled around.

  “Get out!” she screamed.

  “I will,” he replied. He started packing. Liz went to bed and fell asleep. When she woke up in the morning, there was a strong scent of bleach in the air.

  Typical, she thought silently. Stephen was cleaning again—well, good, maybe that would give his anger an outlet, if he set about the task of disinfecting something.

  She opened her eyes and realized that disinfecting was not what Stephen had on his mind. He was standing over her, with the look of a predator on his face. In his hand was a wet cloth.

  He leapt upon her.

  When the attack was over and Stanko was gone, it took a while, but Liz finally managed to call 911, and emergency help arrived. First on the scene on Durham Drive were Detective D. Kokinda and Deputy T. K. Stern, and close behind was Detective Darrell Lewis, who was already familiar with Stanko because of the stolen-car investigation.

  The call went out to all law enforcement in the area to be on the lookout for Stephen Christopher Stanko, who was six-three, 190 pounds, brown hair, brown eyes, probably wearing wire-rimmed glasses.

  While Kokinda and Stern processed the scene for evidence, Lewis tried to obtain a written statement from Liz. But this was impossible, as the victim was still too upset.

  Liz had given a brief and somewhat rambling account of events to Stern, who relayed them to Lewis, so he’d be up to speed. The victim had seen Stanko talking outside with his business partner and a cop, so she knew something was wrong—but when she questioned him about it, he became extremely hostile.

  She said the next morning, this morning, he tried to asphyxiate her with chemicals. He said he was doing it to keep her from calling the police. Lewis thought this warranted an “intent to kill” charge. The victim certainly thought as it occurred that he was trying to kill her. When he couldn’t asphyxiate her, he tied her up and kept an eye on her as he prepared to leave, showering and then packing his stuff into luggage.

  With no more information immediately forthcoming from the primary victim, Lewis talked to Liz’s next-door neighbors, the Crenshaws. Ray Crenshaw, a guy with longish chestnut hair combed back over his ears and a neatly trimmed gray beard, said that before the violence, Stanko had confessed to him that he was stealing the cars that they were supposed to sell at a used-car lot that they intended to operate together. Through Ray Crenshaw’s help, Lewis was able to recover the stolen vehicles. Lewis made arrangements for both Liz and Ray to give thorough statements on February 22. Ray would come down to the sheriff’s station to give his. Lewis would return to Liz’s home for hers.

  Lewis reviewed the files and found a report from a Virgil Cordray, an employee at McElveen Pontiac, of two vehicles that had disappeared from the lot. The report was filed on February 2, almost three weeks earlier. Lewis could see that Stanko’s grip on civilized behavior had loosened abruptly during February 1996. He learned another piece of the puzzle after talking to people, at McElveen Pontiac, who told him that Stephen Stanko had been fired on February 17, just a few days before the attack on Liz. The cause for dismissal? He’d “unlawfully loaned” a woman named Teddy Monette a raspberry-colored Blazer from the McElveen lot. When they confronted Stanko about it, the car was returned, but he was fired, anyway.

  Stephen Stanko fled Liz McLendon’s house in a stolen GMC Jimmy, drove two hundred miles northwest, from the southern shore to South Carolina’s northwest corner, headed toward the Blue Ridge Mountains, through Columbia to Greenville, where he took a hotel room.

  Stanko claimed that he spent his brief time in the motel doing some soul searching. He pondered for the first time “the reality” of his crimes.

  Regarding the violence to McLendon, he didn’t know where that demon came from. Stanko, by his own recollection, spent a sleepless night in the motel, suicidal thoughts swirling in his mind. He lost the urge to flee, and he tried to summon up the strength to turn himself in.

  As it turned out, surrender was unnecessary. He called McLendon to see if she was okay, and police already were prepared to trace the call. He called three times, each time from a different phone—but all three numbers were traced to the Days Inn on Congaree Road in Greenville, South Carolina.

  According to Stanko, he was packing his bags to “go home,” when the motel’s parking lot filled with cop cars.

  Stanko was booked for kidnapping, assault and battery of a high and aggravated nature, grand larceny, and breach of trust.

  FEBRUARY 22, 1996

  At 8:45 A.M. on February 22, 1996, Liz sat down in her home before Detective Darrell Lewis and answered questions for the purpose of formulating a formal written complaint. Since she had been telling him her complaint, his questions were pointed, and they quickly got down to brass tacks.

  At Detective Lewis’s prompting, McLendon verified that she lived in a home on Durham Drive, and her complaint concerned the man she lived with, her former boyfriend Stephen Christopher Stanko. Her complaint was that he’d kidnapped, assaulted, and battered her with the intent to kill.

  “You said you confronted him about lying about his activities?”

  “Yes, I’ve been suspicious of the activities of Stephen Stanko for a while now.”

  “How long?”

  “Several weeks.”

  The suspicious thing was that he left for work e
ach day very early and returned very late. She knew he had days off, but he always said he was going to work, anyway. She knew there had to be activities to which she wasn’t privy.

  “Did you ever ask him about those activities?”

  “Yes, I would regularly question him about why he was at work so much, and he told me he had ‘deals to finalize.’”

  She said he worked at a car dealership, and according to him, he told her that he was meeting businesspeople who’d come in from out of town or was waiting for some guy who was supposed to deliver cars.

  Her suspicions escalated in mid-January 1996, a month earlier, when she received a phone call from a man named Chuck Thornwald (pseudonym), who asked for Stephen Stanko. She said he wasn’t home, and Thornwald asked if Stanko was at “his dealership” or was it McElveen.

  Liz was flustered. No, she was downright alarmed by the question. What? “His dealership”? As far as she knew, Stanko owned diddly-squat. She suddenly realized there was a need for her to answer the question.

  “Uh, McElveen,” she said.

  When Stanko got home, Liz grilled him about what Thornwald had said, and Stanko begrudgingly admitted that he did indeed own a car dealership. It wasn’t open yet, though. She wanted to know who was putting up the money, and Stanko said it was Ray Crenshaw. Liz knew something was out of whack—all of this car dealership stuff was way too secret not to be trouble. She asked him why he hadn’t told her any of this, and he said he “wanted it to be a surprise.” The alarm bell in her head would not stop ringing.

  He went into bs mode again. She could sense it. She’d get him talking about himself, and he wouldn’t stop. He said he fully intended to tell her about the used-car lot when it was ready to open. He said that he wasn’t stopping there. He had a second business in preparation as well, and this one was just for her, a real moneymaker, so she wouldn’t have to work.