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Authors: Michael Benson

BOOK: Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle
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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 each 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.
From that point on, Stanko and Liz fought frequently. She was in his face about the secrets. In dribs and drabs, she learned more details of Stanko’s business, although it was, as usual, difficult to distinguish reality from daydreams.
He told her that Ray Crenshaw was investing in the initial car purchases, and they were getting their cars cheap, wholesale, from the supplier, who was Doug McElveen. She asked Stanko where McElveen was getting the cars.
“He buys them at auctions and sells them to Ray and me,” Stanko explained.
Liz asked: “How much money have you and Ray invested?”
Stanko didn’t give her a number, but he said it didn’t matter. He’d already made all of his investment back and he was $12,000 in the black.
Liz thought at the time that was impossible. The damned lot hadn’t opened yet!
“There,” Stanko had said to her. “Now you know everything.”
She could only shake her head.
“I
soooo
didn’t know everything,” Liz told the cop.
“Did you ever see any verification of any of this?” Detective Lewis asked.
“No, never.”
“Any of it?”
“None of it.”
“What happened next?”
She told Lewis that her domestic woes intensified dramatically on February 9, 1996, twelve days before he attacked her. Stanko called her on the phone and told her he was having a “bad day.” He sounded terribly upset, so she had the florist send him a balloon at work to cheer him up. It didn’t work. He was cheerless.
Oh-oh,
she remembered thinking. From that point on, he appeared to her to be on the verge of being out of control, teetering on the brink. She knew because she’d seen that “same temperament within him before.” Now there was no talking to him. Complete silence was recommended, because there was no way to predict what would trigger an argument. Sometimes she thought it didn’t matter what the topic was. His temperament was such that he could argue, and little else. Mention the weather and he’d pick a fight.
“How long have you known Stephen Stanko?” Detective Lewis asked Liz.
“Uhhhh . . .” The calendar in her head wouldn’t work. She was still very shaken. Who could guess that one day she’d be having a regular life, and the next answering questions because her boyfriend tried to kill her? Finally she answered, “Several years.”
“Ever in trouble before?”
“He’s been in
a lot
of trouble,” she said, her tongue clicking out the sound, and her eyes growing wide for a moment to emphasize her point.
As far as she could tell, Stanko was the kind of guy who made his living by making promises he couldn’t keep. He was always raising money for something; then, when it came for him to supply whatever product was involved, the deal would fall through.
He’d scramble to avoid the wrath of investors, and then the process would start over again. Round and round, he went. There had been several companies that he couldn’t have been more optimistic about, until the last moment when it turned out they didn’t exist. Liz had a sneaking suspicion that this was true of the used-car lot he was starting up with Ray Crenshaw’s money.
Then there were times when he got a job someplace, as an employee, and still he couldn’t keep his nose clean. More than once, he’d gotten the pink slip because supervisors “falsely accused” him of something. Once, it was “falsifying orders,” apparently to collect commissions he hadn’t earned. Another time, it was “forging customer documents.” There was a third time, too, but she couldn’t recall the specifics. Maybe it would come to her later.
Stanko suffered legal difficulties at least once because of his misdeeds on the job. Stanko had dealings with a man she only knew of as Mr. Orr (pseudonym). Mr. Orr and his son, both of Goose Creek, got in trouble with Stanko over something. Because of that difficulty with the law, Stanko had to report periodically to Romeo Radoran, an officer of Berkeley County Probation.
“Did you and Stanko live at this same address back then?” Detective Lewis asked.
“No, previous,” she said, and she gave Stanko’s address in Ashton Drive in Goose Creek. “That was before I bought this house,” she said, referring to the one on Durham Drive. She said she’d lived with her parents on Johns Island at that time and didn’t purchase her house until July 2005.
“Now, this car lot deal, was that the first major business plan he’d kept secret from you?”
“Oh no,” Liz said, shaking her head. “During the late spring of 1995—May, June—I discovered that he’d been pawning his personal items. He’d lost his job with Southern Chemical. He didn’t want me to know.”
The blowup that time had occurred on June 23, 1995. She confronted him on several issues involving work, pawn slips, and a smattering of unexplained phone calls. The confrontation led to an explosive argument.
“At that time, he threatened my life and put his hands around my neck,” Liz said. He didn’t choke her, but she was terrified because she assumed he was about to.
Luckily, she got away from him. She ran to get her car and escaped to a friend’s house.
“Which friend?”
“Mary Lou Culpepper.”
“Where does she live?”
“North Charleston.”
Detective Lewis established that the victim had filed a report with the sheriff’s department after that attack—but she, in the long run, had decided not to press charges.
After that, she and Stanko only talked occasionally on the telephone. He was living at the time with Randy and Charles Bishop, in the Devon Forest neighborhood, along the northern edge of Goose Creek.
On July 1, or thereabouts—she wasn’t sure of the exact date—he left the Bishops home and moved to Atlanta, where he met Cynthia Wilson, employed by Turner Broadcasting.
Liz didn’t see Stanko during this time. She wasn’t sure of the details, but she knew that Wilson was “taken” by Stanko for more than $4,000.
“There was a long-term statute filed, and, to my knowledge, a judgment was filed against him for that amount,” she explained.
Continuing with her chronology, Liz said it was September 26, 2005, when Steve Stanko returned to Charleston. He showed up at her door and she let him in. The following day, he was taken by his mother and sister to the Berkeley County Probation Office, where he was arrested, and eventually he served thirty-five days in the Berkeley County Detention Center.
Liz went out and retained an attorney for Stanko’s defense, a guy named Rick Buchanan. In addition to providing him with representation, she further bailed Stanko out of trouble by paying off some of his debts, many of which appeared to have been incurred between May and July of 1995.
Thinking ahead, Liz requested that a psychiatrist be called in to evaluate her boyfriend, and provide ongoing treatment following his release.
When he did return—he was released on October 30—not much had changed. He was supposed to make restitution for the money he’d scammed, serve his probation in a clean manner, and do community service hours. But it was the same ol’ Stephen. Another deal was in the works, and Liz was to be the beneficiary. The deal was with Ray and Natalie Crenshaw, for a brand-new Yukon. And, as usual, Stanko always had a story as to why the deal was never finalized.
A psychiatrist did have sessions with Stanko, and Liz was allowed to sit in, almost like marriage counseling. She was concerned enough about the Yukon that never arrived to mention it in front of the shrink. This irritated Stephen to no end. She continued to cross-examine him about the used-car lot, and the obvious fact that he wasn’t taking as close care of his legal responsibilities as he should. He wasn’t visiting his probation officer, he wasn’t making restitution, and he wasn’t serving the community. She probably did sound like a broken record, reminding him that he was in dire straits here, and he wasn’t adapting.
Straight and narrow? Stanko couldn’t even
find
the straight and narrow. In response to her nags, she told Detective Lewis, he became verbally abusive.
The next blowup came on January 26, 1996, when Stephen Stanko was supposed to deposit a check in Liz’s account, to pay her back for the legal assistance she’d acquired when he was arrested. No surprise, the money never showed up.
Then, on Valentine’s Day, 1996, a week before the attack, he told her that he had deposited the check in her account, just as he said he would. It was the bank. They must have put it into the wrong account or something. Later that day, he told her he’d been to the bank; the error had been discovered; he’d been issued a bank check, and had deposited it in her account. That turned out to be another lie.
Liz was starting to get the idea. Stanko saw other people as marks, and she was the biggest mark of all, defending him and spending money on him
long after
she should have learned her lesson.
Here was a guy who genuinely couldn’t help himself. When everything told him that keeping his word and doing the right thing was the best way to insure a happy future, he nonetheless told only lies and did the wrong thing every single time.
After Valentine’s Day she questioned him about all of it. She took his word for nothing and asked for verification. That made Stanko jittery and more than a little hostile.
“On Sunday morning,” she said, referring to February 18, “I opened the trunk of my car, a ’95 Honda Accord, to find Stanko had stashed some items from work in there.” He’d been asked to clean out his desk. She confronted him immediately, asking him if there was anything he wanted to tell her, any news about his job that he wanted to share. He said the items were just some stuff that he couldn’t keep at the office—which he referred to as “the tower,” to make his new position seem more important.
By Sunday evening, Stanko was extremely agitated, telling Liz that he’d just gotten paged by Doug McElveen. The cars McElveen had purchased at auction were ready, and Stanko and Ray Crenshaw were going to pick them up for their used-car lot.
Trouble was, he hadn’t been out of Liz’s sight, and she knew there had been no page. His lies grew sloppier when he was agitated. At nine-thirty or ten o’clock that evening, Stanko left; he and Ray were going to go to McElveen’s car lot. He was gone for about two hours, during which time Liz was “terribly concerned and upset.” When he returned, she asked him if they’d been able to pick up the cars from McElveen, and Stanko said they had.

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