Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (35 page)

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Authors: Michael Benson

BOOK: Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle
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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 Ling 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 Tracy 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)

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