Bad men were clever, she emphasized. By the time the man revealed his monster within, it was too late for the victim to escape. Predatory men were not going to show their bad face until the victim was good and hooked; so it was important for women to recognize the early signs that she was dating a sociopath: the narcissistic behavior, the seemingly compulsive manipulation of others.
When she wrote, she still found her own honesty surprising her. She almost startled herself with the balance when she wrote about Stephen Stanko. He had caused her a lot of pain, but there had been a lot of laughter as well. It seemed almost bizarre to hear herself say it now, but he was . . . fun-loving, for the most part.
As long as she molded herself into just the girlfriend he wanted, and wasn’t a problem or an obstruction to him, then he was very nice. Kind. Gentle.
Over the years, she had followed cases that reminded her of Stephen, cases like that Scott Peterson who killed his beautiful wife, Laci. He was another Stephen Stanko in Liz’s eye. Then there was that couple from Utah, Mark and Lori Hacking. Before he killed her—when she was five weeks pregnant—he did nothing but lie to her. He planned to move her across the country based on the lie that he was going to medical school in North Carolina. He reported her missing and lied convincingly to the media for two weeks, until he was arrested. Stephen would have done that, too.
Stephen was always threatening to take Liz to other parts of the country, really anywhere: New York City . . . Seattle, Washington . . . Rochester, New York. He said it was because of business concerns, but knowing what she knew now, she suspected he just wanted to put some space between himself and the people he’d burned. Plus, he’d be taking her out of her element, to separate her from her support system so that she would be exclusively dependent on him. A dependent woman was the ultimate mark, malleable to the max when subjected to sophisticated psychological manipulation. That’s the way these men were. They separated their women from their sources of information. Victims were forced to trust them and believe the things—the lies!—they said.
In her writing, Liz still questioned why she let Stephen back into her life, in the days before he tried to suffocate her with a chemical-drenched cloth. She fell for his tricks every time. He had to try to kill her before she caught on. She knew that Laura Ling, were she still around, would be kicking herself for the same reason.
Liz had spent too many hours contemplating that attack of fifteen years before. She looked at it alone and as part of the “big picture.” She realized she was practice for Stephen Stanko. Hers was the incomplete murder, the one he used to help improve his technique. He learned that the chemical asphyxiation scenario was a Hollywood construct. Next time, he’d use a knife. He got his taste of violence, went to prison, did some research on how killers did it and the perverted fetishes they fulfilled, and then he went out and did it.
Liz didn’t believe Stephen got his first taste of violence when he attacked her in 1996. She believed he had been thinking about hurting and killing people long before that. He’d already begun his research. Fortunately for her, he was using the cinema as his source, rather than a nonfiction source that might have sparked a more lethal game plan.
Another aspect of the case that still puzzled her was the sexual nature of Stephen’s crimes against Penny Ling. She’d been with the man almost four years and it never occurred to her that he was a future rapist. Maybe it was something he picked up while researching serial killers, or maybe it was something that had been tickling around in his brain (or whatever) for years. The rape shocked Liz because Stephen had a niece whom he adored. He was very close to her, loving toward her, and supportive of her activities, like gymnastics. How could that same person who adored his niece like that rape a teenager?
At the time, Liz saw the events as linear, one thing after another, bad to worse, when it came to her killer ex-boyfriend; but with wisdom, she came to see his behavior as a cycle. The same events happened over and over again. Pick up a single mom; promise security; leech room, board, and money; fail at real life; replace it with a con game; become frustrated; outlive your welcome in the woman’s home; become violent.
It had happened to her, and to Laura Ling, and it probably would have happened to Dana Putnam as well, if she hadn’t seen Stanko’s photo on page 5B. The Ling crime scene had a lot in common with the 1996 scene in her home. He used neckties to bind his victims. He dropped the chemicals and, instead, beat Ling in the face and head until she was semiconscious, then strangled her. It was a horrible way to look at it, but he’d learned, improved his technique.
Liz would never understand why she was still alive. Why had Stephen stopped and let her live? Why hadn’t he finished her off? Did he run out of guts—so that he had to kill Laura Ling to prove to himself he was a real man? It was a sick thought, but he was a sick guy.
Liz didn’t just write about the things she knew. She did research so she could approach, with some knowledge under her belt, the subject of abused women—and the men who abused them. She knew about sociopaths and psychopaths. She remembered reading the definition of narcissism and thinking how it fit Stanko to a tee. He was self-centered to a pathological degree, and self-aggrandizing. He needed to be the big man, bigger than life, the alpha male, and every ounce of his energy was dedicated toward making that so. He had to believe his own lies. He could not be honest with himself, because reality could never satisfy his ego the way his imagination could.
She thought about the “nature versus nurture” question. Not that she was a medical expert, but Liz didn’t believe that Stephen was affected at all by a difficult birth or a concussion as a teenager. She did, however, think that Stephen’s upbringing and his personality disorder were associated. Liz had had a conversation with one of Stephen’s relatives once and had learned some insight into what life was like with a naval master chief in charge. It was stifling, she’d been told, almost despair inducing.
And in 2010, Liz still worked on her book every day. Maybe not three or four pages every day, but a few sentences; maybe a paragraph about a new idea that had struck her; maybe a full page, on an especially prolific day. Until recently, she hadn’t had an awful lot of time. Lately she had been working at home, running her marketing consultant business, spending most of her day at the computer—so she had increased flexibility in her schedule, more time to dedicate to doing the things she wanted to do.
As far as getting her writing published, Liz hadn’t gotten very far. She had taken some tentative steps to secure herself a literary agent, but without success. She’d thought the Stephen Stanko name itself would be a door opener. She’d also spent time contemplating self-publishing, but she had decided she didn’t want to go that route. She lacked the distribution capabilities to make such a venture efficient.
But she would never give up. She wanted to provide abused women with a voice. When in that situation, everyone needed to know that they weren’t alone. All of those women who had crawled into their holes needed to know there was hope. And most of all, they should know that none of it was their fault—nothing was true just because their attacker said it was.
Liz became infuriated when she thought of it. She knew that Stanko, even on death row, was still promoting the notion that Laura Ling was in some way responsible for her own death.
Not all of Liz’s writing was about Stephen Stanko. She also wrote poetry, some of which she had gotten published, and music as well. She was the sort of person who would get up in the middle of the night and sit with a light on in a quiet spot and just start writing.
“I don’t want this to be my only book. I want this to be my first book,” Liz said.
In 2010, Penny Ling was finishing her bachelor’s degree at a prestigious private university in South Carolina. Like her parents, she was very intelligent and earned several scholarships.
Dana Putnam married George Burkhart during Christmas break, 2009, in Key West. They live in Georgia.
Dr. Kim A. Collins, the forensic pathologist on both the Laura Lin
g and Henry Turner cases, was the wife of federal judge David Norton and lived on Wadmalaw Island, with two dachshunds and three retired racing greyhounds. She would have loved to say that the Stanko case was the toughest of her career, but it wasn’t even close. Once, nine firefighters, whom she considered her colleagues, were killed in a fire. “These were the people we were working with. Now your colleagues are your victims. Anytime you know the person, it is hard to fathom,” she said. She insisted that all nine autopsies be conducted in one day, so that they could stay together as a team throughout the postmortem procedure. This allowed the city of Charleston to have an official police and firefighter escort of the bodies to the funeral homes the following day.
Sergeant Jeff Gause, the man who photographed the Turner murder scene, was slightly injured in a car chase in 2009. On a Saturday night, Steven Wayne Branham, wanted for the robbery of a Family Dollar Store in Little River, rammed Gause’s car three times, causing him to spin out of control. Gause was flown by helicopter to New Hanover Regional Medical Center in Wilmington, North Carolina. He was treated overnight at a nearby hospital and released in the morning. The incident was only a prelude to the conclusion of the chase. After smashing into Gause’s car, Branham crashed through a ditch, crossed a front yard, and eventually plowed several hundred feet into a cornfield. There, with cops in close pursuit, he shot and killed himself. Controversy briefly flared when police stated that a Horry County sergeant, not Gause, was seen, gun drawn, standing over the “dead at the scene” perp. The story quieted quickly when forensics determined Branham actually had committed suicide.
Georgetown County investigator William Pierce, one of the first cops at the Laura Ling murder scene, was promoted to the rank of Enforcement Captain by Sheriff Lane Cribb on July 16, 2008. Captain Pierce’s new duties included overseeing the Criminal Investigations Division, the Uniform Patrol Division, the Organized Crime Bureau, Courthouse Security, the Warrants Division, and Community Services.
At the end of December 2009, Horry County deputy solicitor Fran Humphries, who’d been involved in both of Stephen Stanko’s death penalty trials, retired from the Fifteenth Judicial Circuit. After twenty years in prosecution, he said he was ready for “new adventures.” He entered a private practice with the Monckton Law Firm, where he would be working both criminal injury and criminal defense cases. Calling the move “bittersweet,” Humphries said he was proud to have worked all those years at Greg Hembree’s side. “I am thankful that I had the honor of working under the finest prosecutor in this state, and a finer man,” Humphries said.
Kelly Crolley was still working at her family’s furniture store in Surfside Beach. She still wondered what Stephen Stanko had in mind when he entered the Owl-O-Rest in 2004. Did the con game go off as planned? Or, was he out to steal furniture?
Crolley couldn’t help but feel a little guilty. If she had been more tenacious when she first suspected Stanko was a crook, maybe he’d have gone to jail and he wouldn’t have had an opportunity to kill those people.
Nonetheless, life for Crolley was good. Her daughter, who weighed less than two pounds when born, was a beautiful and healthy ten-year-old in 2010.
Clarice Wenz, Stephen Stanko’s chemistry and physics teacher at Goose Creek High School, retired as a teacher and took a part-time job as a consultant for a science book publisher. She taught teachers how to operate the classroom equipment that accompanied the publisher’s text.
Stephen Stanko’s original coauthor, Dr. Gordon Crews, was “not trying to be a vulture,” but still hoped the original manuscript for After the Gavel Drops would be published. They worked for years on it, and he’d like to share that effort with the world.
That manuscript, Crews said, was “much more realistic and gritty” than the one that was appropriate for high-school students. But Crews, who was in the spring of 2010 tenured as a full professor at Marshall University in West Virginia, could do nothing with the material he had until he got Stanko’s permission. When Stanko finished his appeals process, Crews planned to get in touch to see if Stanko wanted to do another book.
Dr. Michael Braswell, who turned down an opportunity to coauthor Stephen Stanko’s book (although he did write the foreword), believed that Stanko’s time was running out. He was close to exhausting his legal options.
“His defense has become a caricature,” Braswell opined.
With Stephen Stanko back in Lieber, there were fifty residents of South Carolina’s death row. Three more condemned men lived at Gilliam Psychiatric, and a fourth was housed on death row in San Quentin, California, where he’d been convicted of another capital murder. Seniority went to Edward L. Elmore, twenty-eight years on death row. At fifty-one years old, Elmore had been there more than half of his life.
Even from a psychopath’s point of view, there were elements of Stanko’s behavior during his spree that were not cool. Raping an underage girl. Very uncool. Pedophiles were the lowest rung on the prison ladder, and were—whenever the opportunity arose—treated like toilet paper. And then there was getting caught. Also uncool. He had simply taken inadequate steps to evade capture. He was still driving the truck he stole from his final victim. Why not switch vehicles? Perhaps he only knew how to steal a car if he had the keys in his hand. Why hadn’t he changed his appearance? A simple brush cut might have done the trick. Perhaps he was too vain to get rid of his hair.
And so Stephen Stanko sat on death row, facing a lengthy legal process to be followed by his execution. Even though he lived in a cage, his psychopathy raged on. He still believed himself to be someone he wasn’t.
No longer the jailhouse lawyer who helped everyone with their paperwork, Stanko was isolated on death row, alone with his hopeless addiction to patting himself on the back. Was he a martyr? For a cause? Maybe the martyr for prison reform?
That would show the archaic corrections system! That would show them all what a great man Stanko was. Was he a future inductee into the “Killer Hall of Fame” because he was so cool in the hours after he killed two people, he was able to make friends, even begin a relationship with a woman, while on the run for his life? That was ultracool, the stuff of which movies were made. Did he wonder who would play him in the movie?
Maybe years on death row would one day burrow—like a rodent—a hole in his delusion, causing him to see himself with a clear, unaffected eye. Inside his head, he would hear his echoing name—Stanko, Stanko, Stanko—the very name that everyone remembered, everyone had a joke about, the name that might have caused a fair share of sadness in his childhood in Goose Creek.
He was lonely. Unable to manipulate others, clock ticking, needle waiting, perhaps one day he would only be able to manipulate himself into a writhing case of the horrors.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jones, Mark R., Palmetto Predators: Monsters Among Us, Charleston, S.C.: The History Press, 2007.
Stanko, Stephen, Wayne Gillespie, and Gordon A. Crews, Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an Insider’s View, Westport, Ct.: Greenwood Press, 2004.
Like heaven on earth, Sunset Beach, South Carolina. (Photo by Tracy Minarik)
Stephen C. Stanko in 1986 as a senior at Goose Creek High School.
Stephen Stanko’s Berkeley County Detention Center photo from 1995. (Photo courtesy South Carolina Department of Corrections)
Stanko as he appeared in 2006. (Photo courtesy South Carolina Department of Corrections)
Stanko on the eve of his second death-penalty trial in 2009. (Photo courtesy South Carolina Department of Corrections)
After Stanko’s 2004 release from prison, he searched for a library that was suitable for his research, preferably one with a pretty librarian.
The Socastee library, where Laura Ling worked, fit the bill nicely.
(Photo by Tracy Minarik)
After knowing Laura Ling for only a matter of weeks Stanko moved in with Laura and her daughter in their home in Murrells Inlet, where water fun was only a few hundred yards away. (Photo by T
racy Minarik)
The house on Murrells Inlet Road where Stanko murdered Laura Ling and raped her teenaged daughter. (Photo by Tracy Minarik)
Dr. Kim A. Collins of the Wake Forest University School of Medicine Department of Pathology was the forensic pathologist called in on the case. (Photo courtesy Horry County Police)
Paramedic Chuck Petrella treated Penny Ling following her attack. He subsequently visited the teenager in the hospital and brought her a teddy bear. Penny would later clutch that bear tightly as she testified in court against the man who’d raped her and killed her mother. Solicitor Greg Hembree called Penny the bravest girl he’d ever known. (Author photo)
Stanko’s second murder victim was Henry Lee Turner, a seventy-four-year-old man who lived alone. Stanko once referred to Turner as a “quasi-father figure.” (Courtesy Horry County Police)
The clue that led to the discovery of Henry Lee Turner’s body was Laura Ling’s stolen red Mustang, which was found in front of Turner’s house. (Courtesy Horry County Police)
Stanko had remembered to throw his writings—including his book proposal regarding serial killers and the written version of his stand-up comedy act—into the back of Laura Ling’s Mustang, but left them behind after stealing Turner’s truck. (Courtesy Horry County Police)
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