Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (6 page)

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Authors: Michael Benson

BOOK: Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle
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FIRST RESPONDERS
At nine o’clock Friday night, Henry Lee Turner’s neighbor John Marvin Cooper finished his shift and came home. He and his family did their normal thing. He did notice that the red Mustang was still in Turner’s driveway, and the truck was gone.
“I just assumed he (Turner) was out,” Cooper later said.
The Coopers went to bed at about eleven-thirty, but didn’t have a restful night.
At 11:05
P.M
., Myrtle Beach police officer Robert Kelly Todd Jr. was home on Temperance Drive and had just started watching the news when there was an urgent pounding on his door. Todd answered it, and standing there was a nervous and upset Roger Turner.
Turner said that he’d been watching the news, too, and they flashed a “Fugitive Alert” for Stephen Stanko. On TV, they said the guy had already killed two people. (Either the newscast incorrectly reported that Penny Ling had died or Roger misheard.) Roger said that was the same guy who was staying with his dad.
To further amp up Turner’s anxiety, his dad was supposed to have come to a cookout earlier that evening and he never showed up. He’d tried to call his father’s landline and his cell, but no answer, and both answering machines were full.
Turner said he didn’t know what to do and asked Todd for help. Todd said he would call the Horry County police to see what he could find out, and after that, they’d drive over to Henry Turner’s home to see what was up.
Turner told Todd where his dad lived, and Todd suggested they meet up at the McDonald’s near there and then go to the house together. Roger Turner said okay and left, heading for McDonald’s.
Todd placed the call. At first, he tried to talk to guys from the Horry County police with whom he’d worked. Frustratingly, none of his friends were on duty, so he asked to be put in touch with the road supervisor, who turned out to be Sergeant Jimmy Edwards.
Todd explained that he was a Myrtle Beach cop and asked the dispatcher to have Edwards give him a call. Edwards called back, and Todd told him about Roger Turner’s worries. Todd said he would do a drive-by to see if it looked like anyone was home. Todd drove to the McDonald’s, picked up the waiting Roger Turner, and cruised slowly past Henry Lee Turner’s home.
“Look in the driveway. There’s the Mustang Stanko stole,” Turner said.
Todd turned his car around and parked so that they could see if someone was leaving the house. He called Sergeant Edwards and said he believed he’d found the stolen Mustang.
“Can you read the plates?” Edwards asked.
“Yes,” Todd replied, and read off the numbers.
Edwards quickly verified that this was indeed Laura Ling’s automobile. The verification was made at 12:25
A.M.
, Saturday, April 9. “I’ll be right there,” Edwards said, and soon joined Todd and Turner outside.
They approached the house and looked behind it. A look of horror crossed Roger Turner’s face. “My father’s pickup truck is gone,” he said.
Edwards told Todd to get the man’s son out of the area, so Todd drove Turner back to the McDonald’s. There they were joined by a lieutenant. The three sat in the restaurant until word came.
The first responder to the interior crime scene was Officer Thomas McMillan, of the Horry County Police Department’s (HCPD’s) Special Emergency Response Team (SERT).
All McMillan knew as he stood outside the mobile home was that Turner’s son had called in, saying his dad was missing, that he’d missed a family meal, and something was wrong. That, plus the stolen car out front, was enough to give him a solid notion of what he would find inside.
Through Roger Turner, the anxious son, keys were located. McMillan entered the mobile home from the left side door. He called out and got an eerie silence in return. The officer could feel the heaviness to the silence—the utter stillness that so often surrounded death.
He began his search at the Kimberly Drive end. Standing with his back to the street, he was in a narrow hallway, with a closet to his right and a bed on his left.
McMillan moved to the left, along a wall. In the plasterboard wall, there was what appeared to be a bullet hole. There was no telling how old it was, but still it was a further harbinger of the dreadful. He stepped lightly past the foot of the bed to get to the doorway that led to the rest of the home.
In front of him now was the living room, which comprised about half of the total square footage. To his left was a bathroom. It was clearly a bachelor pad, more disheveled than filthy, with stacks of things covering just about every surface space.
There was a pool table, and even that was being used as surface space for piled-up papers and magazines. There was a couch, along the right-hand wall, and a chair with a pair of side tables.
At the far end of the living room, he looked to his left into a tiny kitchen. There was an empty bottle of beer here. A full six-pack there, a couple of cigarettes in an ashtray. There’d been a little party going on.
McMillan looked to his right, and there was a doorway leading to the bathroom/bedroom suite that made up the far end of the mobile home.
The door was closed. The SERT officer knocked hard and called out one last time, using his command voice. No response. McMillan stepped back and kicked the surprisingly flimsy bedroom door open and right off its hinges.
With a bang, the door fell flat—damn near striking the body lying on the floor.
McMillan stepped through the doorway at the far end of the living room when he saw the body, which he presumed to be that of Henry Lee Turner. It lay just beyond the fallen door. The body’s head, facedown, was pointed toward the Kimberly Drive end of the home, and the feet were in the doorway to the victim’s private bathroom.
The victim was wearing a purple polo shirt, blue jeans, and black athletic shoes. Looking past the body, McMillan saw Turner’s bed, and, beside it, his personal computer on a small table. Behind the investigator was Turner’s dresser, with a large mirror mounted on top of it.
McMillan looked in every space in the home. That meant he had to step over the body and into a small bathroom, where blood droplets were visible to the naked eye. There was no one hiding.
The SERT officer advised that the home was clear, and there was one apparently deceased victim inside. It was 3:33
A.M.
Only then did he concentrate his attention on the body, which was facedown, bullet hole in the back. McMillan was now joined by EMT officer Walter Gable.
McMillan also discovered a pillow, with gun residue on one side and blood on the other. Placing the pillow between the body and the muzzle, the killer had used it to serve as a makeshift silencer. It must have worked, because none of the neighbors—some of whom were only a matter of feet away—had heard the shots.
The victim’s pants pockets had been pulled inside out. There was an electric razor, still plugged in, lying on the floor near the body. Photo ID found at the scene proved the body to be that of Henry Lee Turner, as suspected, born on April 16, 1930. He’d been a little more than a week shy of turning seventy-five.
The cards were of plastic and laminated paper. They included Turner’s driver’s license, which said he was five-six, 185. Also there were Turner’s five Visa cards, his AAA club card, Social Security card, uniformed services ID, a concealed-weapons permit, a card establishing him as a VIP customer at Food Lion, and his VA and Medicare cards. Lastly, a business card for a local lawyer who specialized in motorcycle accidents.
Judging from the extra bullet hole found in the wall, it appeared the killer had fired a test shot, perhaps to see if his pillow/silencer was effective. Turner was in his private bathroom. The killer fired the test shot from as far from Turner as he could get without going outside. If the pillow idea didn’t work, the killer could say,
Oops, I was playing with your gun and it went off. Sorry about the hole in your wall. I’ll pay to have that fixed.
But the pillow did work and the test shot was adequately silenced. Turner was shaving when his killer entered the back suite of rooms, with gun drawn, and fired.
Crime scene specialists arrived on the scene and began processing it for evidence. The hole in the wall was probed and, after some digging, yielded a .38 Special bullet.
In the back bedroom where the body was found an officer wearing gloves went through Turner’s dresser. In one drawer was found two spent .38 cartridge cases.
The killer had picked up his ejected shells and had “hidden” them in a dresser drawer. Why bother? Didn’t the killer know how thoroughly the scene of a homicide was searched? Didn’t he care?
At 4:34
A.M
., Sergeant Jeff Gause arrived and observed the interior of the mobile home in detail. Gause took many photos of each space within the structure, and he later used these to draw a schematic of the space, like a simple pencil layout of the house, showing not just the location of each room, but each piece of furniture as well.
By that time, the crime lab people were busy. There were eleven blood swabs taken from various locations near Turner’s body—in the bathroom on the cabinet door, tub, air vent, and floor, and three locations on Turner’s bedroom floor. These would be taken to the lab and subjected to DNA testing.
Five minutes after Gause, HCPD detective Anne Pitts arrived. She “caught” this one and became the Turner murder’s lead investigator.
Dr. Dan Bellamy, the deputy coroner, arrived and pronounced Turner dead. The body was lifted and it was discovered that he had a bullet hole in his chest as well.
There were no exit wounds.
He was shot once in the chest, one in the back. The order of the shots would remain a point of contention, even among the experts.
Dr. Bellamy took the body’s temperature and estimated the time of death as approximately nine o’clock on the morning of April 8. That done, the body was taken out and delivered to the morgue to await autopsy.
Within hours of Penny Ling’s 911 call, long before they knew of Turner’s murder, police officers from neighboring Horry County Street Crimes Unit #2 were at headquarters for a special briefing. They were informed of the Ling crimes in Georgetown County. There was a connection with a Horry County library, so their job was to interview the county’s library employees to see if anyone had seen or heard from Stephen Stanko. Two officers were sent to Conway, and another pair to handle Murrells Inlet, Garden City, Surfside Beach, and Myrtle Beach. Their efforts were cut short that night, however, when a Myrtle Beach cop called and said he was with Turner’s son, and he thought that the red Mustang they were looking for was parked out in front of Turner’s house. So Street Crimes Unit #2 regrouped at a McDonald’s on Singleton Ridge Road and Route 544, just south of Turner’s home.
After the SERT team discovered Turner’s body, Unit #2 was assigned to evacuate neighbors of the crime scene, until it could be secured.
The Coopers, Turner’s next-door neighbors, had been asleep for less than two hours when they woke up to a phone call from Horry County dispatch, informing them that an officer was at their back door. The officer explained the importance of the red Mustang and ordered the Coopers to evacuate.
“Why?” Cooper asked.
“To be out of harm’s way,” the officer replied.
Cooper told the officer that he had some knowledge of Stanko’s movements and was instructed to come to police HQ the next morning and give a complete statement.
Unit #2 also woke up Jeff Humes, another Kimberly Drive neighbor. Even as he was scrambling to evacuate, Humes managed to tell the officer that the last time he saw Henry Turner was the previous Tuesday afternoon, when Turner offered to sell Humes his truck. Asked about the red Mustang, Humes said he’d seen it in Turner’s driveway “off and on for the past year or so.”
In one Kimberly Drive home, cops found Tamara Florence and Thomas Grant (pseudonyms), who were particularly annoyed at being roused in the middle of the night for evacuation. (At four-thirty that morning, the pair were taken to HQ to give a written statement, but were not in a cooperative mood. Although they did give their interviewer their landline and cell phone numbers, they refused to say anything about anything until they got a full night’s sleep. Their written statement was only two words long:
Sleeping today
.)
Next door to Florence and Grant, police talked to Jamila Woodberry, who said she was at work and missed everything.
Police had better luck at the home of Rosa Yaccobashi, who said she’d seen the red Mustang repeatedly in front of Turner’s home “for the last few weeks.” She’d seen that guy they were looking for on several occasions, just sitting in the yard talking to Turner. Police asked Yaccobashi when was the last time she saw Turner.
“Few days ago,” she said. “He was out on his Harley.”
“Anybody else come visit him?”
“Yes, there was another gentleman that stayed with Henry. Big, tall guy, maybe sixty. They rode motorcycles together.”
Not long after police arrived at the Ling scene, Sheriff Cribb ordered a WANTED poster be created for Stanko, one that included his 1996 mug shot and a photo of Laura Ling’s Mustang. The poster gave a description of Stanko, a description of the car, and said he was wanted for murder and criminal sexual conduct.

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