As Shawcross continued his confession, it became clear what the strange marks were that had been found across Dorothy Blackburn’s chest. He said he liked to sit his victims in the front passenger seat of his car before disposing of them, so he used to use a bungee cord to tie them in place. The detectives showed him photographs of the two missing women, Maria Welch and Darlene Trippi. He admitted that he had killed them both and marked on a map where he had left the bodies. Later that evening, he led police to the exact places where he had dumped their bodies. One had been left sitting up in some bushes near the river and the other was dumped in water near some houses. The pool had iced over, making the victim look like some ethereal underwater fairy out of Arthurian mythology. Both women had been strangled.
As police drove Shawcross back from these places, they took him by the area where they had found Felicia Stephens and noticed that he seemed to recognise it, though he initially denied it, saying, ‘I don’t do black women.’ Yet they used what they’d observed of his behaviour as leverage to get him to confess to her murder too. According to Shawcross, Stephens had run up to his car to solicit his business and her head had become caught in his automatic car window, nearly killing her, so he’d pulled her into the car to finish strangling her. He was adamant that there had been nothing intimate; he did not like black prostitutes. (He later told someone he had killed a black prostitute to throw the police off his trail.)
In November 1990, Shawcross was indicted on 10 first-degree murder charges and pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity. After five weeks of dramatic testimony and courtroom demonstrations, the jury was not sufficiently impressed with the defence interpretation of Shawcross’s behaviour. They took half a day to find him both sane and guilty of murder in the second degree (not premeditated) on 10 counts. Shawcross was sentenced to 25 years to life on each of the 10 counts, meaning that he would have to serve 250 years in prison before being eligible for a parole hearing.
A second trial for Elizabeth Gibson’s murder in Wayne County had been scheduled, but there seemed little reason to proceed. Shawcross’s attorney advised him to plead guilty on that charge, which he did, and he was given a further life sentence.
Shawcross died of a heart attack in November 2008.
LEMUEL WARREN SMITH
Lemuel Warren Smith was born in New York in 1941. By the time he was 17, Lemuel stood a massive 6ft 4in tall and played basketball for Amsterdam High. He was considered a local hero for the team and there was talk of a promising future in sports. But, in 1958, the family decided to move to Maryland. Shortly before the move, Smith was arrested for beating to death a woman, Dorothy Waterstreet, with a lead pipe in an Amsterdam dry-cleaner’s. It was the first of the many serious crimes committed by Lemuel Smith. However, due to legal technicalities, he never stood trial for this offence.
During the following summer, while under continuing pressure from Amsterdam police, Smith was relocated to Baltimore, Maryland, where he abducted a 25-year-old female and almost beat her to death. A witness interrupted Smith and he ran away from the victim, who survived the savage attack. Smith was quickly arrested and, on 12 April 1959, was sentenced to 20 years in prison for assault.
After nearly 10 years in custody, Smith was paroled in May 1968, and he quickly reasserted his violent nature. On 20 May 1969, he kidnapped and sexually assaulted a woman, but she managed to escape. Later that same day, he kidnapped and raped a 46-year-old friend of his mother’s. When the woman convinced Smith to let her go, he was arrested again and eventually sentenced to 4–15 years in a New York prison. Freed on 5 October 1976, it was less than one month before he killed again.
In November, Robert Hedderman, 48, and Hedderman’s secretary, Margaret Byron, 59, were found brutally murdered in the back of Hedderman’s shop in Albany, New York. Both had been stabbed and their throats had been cut. Human faeces were found at the crime scene, which would later prove valuable. Lemuel Smith worked nearby and hair and blood evidence made him a prime suspect.
On 23 December 1976, while police were investigating the double murder, Joan Richburg, 24, was raped, murdered and mutilated in her car in a car park at the Colonie Shopping Centre, New York. The pattern of brutality and more hair evidence made Smith the prime suspect in that murder as well, but police did not have enough evidence at that time to arrest and question him.
On 10 January 1977, a large black man tried to lure a 22-yearold woman out of a gift shop in Albany. When she resisted, he took her 60-year-old grandmother hostage and threatened to kill her. When members of the public came to her assistance, he threw the woman down, knocking her unconscious, and deliberately stepped on her hand, breaking it. Several years later, the grandmother saw a picture of Smith in the newspaper and identified him as her attacker.
In July 1977, Marilee Wilson, 30, was abducted from downtown Schenectady. She was taken to a wooded area, where she was raped and her body brutalised before being left to die. Her attacker rammed sticks into her mouth and other parts of her body, causing massive internal injuries. She was burnt with a cigarette and bitten on her nose, face and nipples. The bites on Wilson’s body left definitive impressions, which would later be of evidential value. Smith was known to frequent the area and witnesses recalled Wilson being accosted by a large black man. Schenectady police made Smith the prime suspect in her murder.
On 19 August 1977, Marianne Maggio, 18, who worked in the same area as Marilee Wilson, was kidnapped and raped. Following the rape, her attacker forced her to drive towards Albany, where police stopped the car and arrested Lemuel Smith without incident.
Now that Smith was in custody, the police had to try to gather as much evidence as was possible to link him to the murders they suspected him of. An officer looking at photographs of Marilee Wilson noticed that a mark on her nose might be a bite mark. She was exhumed and the bite mark was positively matched to an imprint of Lemuel Smith’s bite pattern. The police also tried an ingenious experiment, which would turn out to be a major turning point in the investigation of the murders.
In October 1977, Smith was taken to a sports stadium in Albany. He and four other men were randomly placed behind five screens at one end of the stadium. At the other end of the stadium, a police dog was given the scent of the faeces and stained clothing from the Hedderman store murders 11 months earlier. The dog crossed the entire stadium directly to Lemuel Smith. Out of sight of the dog, the five men were randomly rearranged and the experiment was repeated with the same result. It was successful a third time as well.
On 5 March 1978, with the pressure from the dog experiment and the bite mark match, Smith confessed to five murders, including the murder of Dorothy Waterstreet nearly 20 years earlier.
Along with his confessions, Smith revealed disturbing secrets about lifelong mental problems including a claim that he suffered from multiple personality disorder. He said that the spirit of his deceased brother, John Junior, who had died as an infant before Lemuel was born, was controlling him. One counsellor described that other personalities besides John Junior might exist inside Smith. They also determined that he had suffered multiple head injuries as a child and teenager and that he had suffered further mental abuse as a result of overzealous religious convictions, especially from his father.
Smith’s lawyers and doctors feared he might not be fit to stand trial by reason of insanity. However, it was decided to go ahead with the rape and kidnapping trials. Two doctors testified to his delusions but stopped short of saying that he was criminally insane. Smith was found guilty of rape in Saratoga County, New York, on 9 March 1978 and was sentenced to 10–20 years in prison.
On 21 July 1978, a four-day trial in Schenectady ended with Smith being found guilty of kidnapping and he was sentenced to another 25 years to life. Soon after this, Lemuel Smith unsuccessfully attempted suicide. In Albany, Smith was indicted for the Hedderman double murder. He was found guilty on 2 February 1979 and sentenced to another 50 years to life. Despite the weight of evidence against him for t
he murders of Marilee Wilson and Joan Richburg, it was decided not to proceed with a trial as there was no death penalty, and with the sentences already given to him there was no likelihood of him ever being released. However, despite being incarcerated he would have one last opportunity to kill again; this time, the murder would cause outrage around the country.
In 1981, Lemuel Smith was serving his sentence in the maximum-security Green Haven Correctional Facility. On 15 May 1981, Green Haven corrections officer Donna Payant mysteriously disappeared while on duty. Hundreds of corrections officers combed the entire prison grounds throughout the night and into the following morning. Rubbish bins were periodically emptied into a truck, which two senior correction officers escorted to a rubbish tip 20 miles away. When the rubbish was spread out at the tip, officers found Payant’s mutilated body. Her hands were tied around her back. Her uniform was ripped and there was a dark-coloured cord wrapped tightly around her neck. She had severe cutting injuries on her nose, lips and eyelids. Her nipples appeared to have been either cut or bitten off and there were some strange bruises on her cheek and neck. It was the first time in the United States that a female corrections officer had ever been killed inside a prison. New York governor, Hugh Carey, officially vowed ‘a swift response’.
The same medical examiner who had discovered the bite marks on Marilee Wilson was called to examine bite marks found on Payant’s body. He quickly identified the bite marks, and Lemuel Smith was charged with Payant’s murder on 6 June 1981. The charge carried a mandatory death sentence.
The trial of Lemuel Smith opened in Duchess County Court in Poughkeepsie on 20 January 1983. The prosecution case relied solely on the identification of the bite marks, which had been identified as those of Smith from a previous murder that he had confessed to. Despite his defence team trying to rule out the evidence from the previous trial as being inadmissible, it was allowed. On 21 April, the jury found him guilty of the murder of Donna Payant. Despite being sentenced to death in the electric chair, Smith successfully lodged an appeal based on a breach of the American constitution. The Appeal Court ruled in his favour and his sentence was commuted to life. As punishment for the Payant murder, and due to the threat he posed even while in prison, Lemuel Smith spent the next 20 years of his life in near-isolation, the longest such span by a prisoner at that time. He will spend the rest of his natural life behind bars.
GERALD STANO
The young Gerald Stano (b. 1951) acquired several minor criminal convictions, and in 1967 the Stano family moved to Norristown, Pennsylvania. His parents hoped that the change in environment might help curb his odd behaviour. However, nothing changed and if anything he became worse. He began missing school on a regular basis and continued to steal money from his family and classmates. On one occasion, he stole a large sum of money from his father’s wallet and paid members of the school track team to run behind him so he would finish a race first. Despite all of his failings, Stano finally received his high-school diploma at the age of 21. But it did not take long for him to revert to his old ways. Just weeks after being hired, he was sacked for stealing money from employees’ purses. From then on he moved from job to job, unable to hold a job down for any length of time. In the early 1970s, Stano moved to Florida where he again moved from one job to another. In 1975, he tried to get his life back on track. He stopped his previous abuse of alcohol and drugs and began dating a local hairstylist. Stano fell in love with the pretty 22-year-old woman and, on 21 June 1975, they married. Within months of his wedding, he started drinking heavily again and began to physically abuse his wife. Six months later, the marriage was over; his wife filed for divorce and he moved back in with his parents.
On Sunday, 17 February 1980, Detective Sergeant Paul Crow was called to a desolate area behind the Daytona Beach Airport, where two college students had stumbled on the decomposed remains of a young woman. As Detective Crow examined the crime scene, he noted the condition and location of the body. It was covered with branches and obviously posed. The victim was lying on her back, with her arms positioned at her side and her head turned upward. The body was completely clothed and there was no visual indication of sexual molestation. Crow surmised that she had been dead for at least two weeks and, because of the advanced state of decomposition, it was not immediately clear what had caused her death. When he turned the young woman over, Crow discovered several puncture wounds to the back, suggesting that her killer had become enraged and had stabbed her repeatedly. The young woman was later identified as 20-year-old Mary Carol Maher, a local college student. An autopsy revealed that she had suffered multiple stab wounds to the back, chest and legs.
On the morning of 25 March 1980, a local prostitute walked into the Daytona Beach police station and asked to speak with an officer. Detective Jim Gadberry escorted the young woman into his office and took her statement. She said that she had been walking along Atlantic Avenue when a man in a red Gremlin with tinted windows pulled up beside her. The two quickly agreed on a price and she directed him to her motel room. Once there, the man refused to pay up front and the two began to argue. The man produced a knife and sliced her right thigh open. Afterwards, he berated her for prostituting herself and fled the scene. The wound was deep and the young woman needed 27 stitches. She was extremely angry about the attack and made it clear that she wanted the man arrested for assault. She was adamant that she would recognise him if she saw him again and described him as being of average height and slightly overweight. He wore glasses and had a moustache. She was also certain that she had just seen the man’s car parked at a local apartment building.
After taking the woman’s statement, Gadberry drove to the apartment complex the woman had mentioned in her statement. He was unable to spot the man’s car, but less than a mile away he spotted a red 1977 Gremlin that appeared to match her description. He wrote down the car’s registration number. On his arrival back at police headquarters, Gadberry did a computer check on the Gremlin’s registration number and discovered that the vehicle was registered to Gerald Eugene Stano, a 28-year-old man from Ormond Beach. As the detective looked over the suspect’s records, he noticed that the man had a long list of arrests, but had never been convicted of anything. He had also been a prime suspect in several other assaults on local prostitutes. Gadberry took a picture of Stano to the victim, and she positively identified the suspect as the man who had assaulted her. She signed an affidavit charging him with aggravated assault and battery.
On 1 April 1980, Gadberry and Detective Crow brought Stano in for questioning. Before the interrogation began, Crow gave Gadberry certain questions to ask Stano to which he already knew the answers. He wanted to see how Stano reacted when telling the truth and when lying. Crow soon discovered that whenever Stano was telling the truth he would lean forward in his chair and when he was lying he would lean back.
After an hour of relentless questioning, Stano finally confessed to the assault on the prostitute. Then Crow took over. Sitting directly across from Stano, he said: ‘Gerald, I’m Detective Sergeant Paul Crow. I’ve got a problem that I think you might be able to help me with. I’ve got a missing girl […] I just wondered if you had seen her.’ Crow then produced a photo of Mary Carol Maher and placed it on the table. Stano studied the photo for a few minutes. ‘Yeah, I’ve seen her before,’ he said. He then went on to describe seeing her at a local hotel the previous month. When Crow asked him if he had approached the girl, Stano leaned back and said he gave her a ride to Atlantic Avenue and had not seen her since then.
Crow knew Stano was lying and decided to change the subject. ‘Gerald, what are you upset about?’ he asked. Stano leaned forward and looked directly into Crow’s eyes. ‘Today’s “the day you got me day”,’ he said. ‘Today’s the day my parents adopted me.’ According to police reports, Stano began to talk about his childhood and his relationship with his parents. After a while, Crow brought the subject back to Mary Carol Maher. Stano changed his earlier statement about dropping her off on At
lantic Avenue and said that he drove her around a while and eventually stopped at a local supermarket to purchase beer. After more questioning, Stano finally confessed to her murder. He told the officer: ‘I stabbed her several times in the chest. She opened the door and tried to get out, but I cut her on the leg and pulled her back in. I shut the door, she fell forward and hit her head against the dashboard and started gurgling. I stabbed her a couple more times in the back, because she was messing up my car. She just went limp. So I took her.’
They then drove to the location where Stano said he had disposed of the body. When they arrived at the location, Stano showed Crow and Gadberry where he left the body and described how he had posed it. When they drove back to the police station, Stano signed a written confession to Mary Carol’s murder.
Later that evening, Stano was asked about another missing female, Toni Van Haddocks, a 26-year-old prostitute, who had been reported missing on 15 February. Crow took a photo of the girl into the interrogation room and placed it in front of Stano. As soon as he looked at the photo, Stano leant back and said he had never met her. Crow knew he was lying, but he did not yet have enough information about the case to question him and decided to wait. In the meantime, Stano was charged with the first-degree murder of Mary Carol Maher and remanded in custody.
On 15 April 1980, a resident of Holly Hill, near Daytona Beach, discovered a human skull in his garden. Police scoured the area and eventually found more bones and some torn clothing. Apparently wild animals had discovered the corpse and scattered the remains. A post-mortem later identified the victim as Toni Van Haddocks. Her death was attributed to multiple stab wounds to the head.
The Evil Within - A Top Murder Squad Detective Reveals The Chilling True Stories of The World's Most Notorious Killers Page 31
