Yeah, one book published, Stanko boasted, but he’d written several. In addition to his scholarly work, he also had two novels and an autobiography in the can. He was shopping the autobiography around, figured that would be the next to be published.
He was a smart guy, maybe an intellectual, too smart to be a criminal. And now that he was free at last, he couldn’t have seemed more rehabilitated.
She ordered a copy of his book for her library’s shelves and told Stanko to consider her library his library. He had access to all of the books, not just in the branch, but in the entire system. If he wanted a book and couldn’t find it on the shelf, they could go together to the county library system’s online catalog. The library had subscription-based databases for research in newspapers, magazines, and journals published from the mid-1980s on. There was a free New York Times archive on the Web, but it only included before 1922 and after 1987. Otherwise, you had to pay a fee. After years of dealing with clumsy microfiche, the Horry County libraries now had the much-easier-to-use microfilm for its periodical archives. And, of course, he would have access to the Internet. He had come to the right place, she said. Socastee was a library where he could do all of his research and see a friendly face at the same time.
Through Ling, Stanko made another friend, seventy-four-year-old Henry Lee Turner. Turner had taken one of Ling’s computer classes, held at the library. Later, when he had computer problems, he called Ling and she came over to his house to help him, bringing Stanko with her.
Ling was well loved by her colleagues. She went the extra mile to help people. Turner was an aging veteran, who lived in a mobile home and loved to fish. For a con man, they were the perfect marks.
Laura Ling urged Stephen Stanko to be ambitious. In September, he sent a proposal for a grant to the National Institute of Justice to work with underprivileged children. His idea was sort of a Scared Straight program, during which he would make those tough street kids aware that illegal behavior had extremely unpleasant consequences.
He never heard back. An ex-con who wanted to work with kids! How many red flags did that raise?
Ling learned about, but was untroubled by, the terms of Stanko’s probation. He’d been released a year and a half early with the caveat that he leave his residence only for work or for church. Any other outing had to be approved in advance by his probation officer.
Laura eagerly introduced Stanko to her family, confident of the impression he would make. And she was right. They thought him fine. Victoria Loy, Laura’s sister, remembered him as “pleasant and solicitous.” She recalled an attentive man who focused on Laura and made her feel special. And he couldn’t have seemed more normal. If there was anything off-putting about the new boyfriend, Victoria didn’t pick up on it. She didn’t know what he was like before prison, but he seemed like a real nice guy after it. And Victoria remembered how happy Laura was, and how warm and good it felt to see her that way. She had a new handsome boyfriend, with smarts and charm, a published author who looked good either in a suit or a golf shirt! Whew. Laura was happier than she had been in a long time—and that made her friends and relatives happy.
Laura’s home was close to the corner of Murrells Inlet Road and Mary Lou Avenue, about three hundred yards, the length of a short par 4, from the water’s edge. She brought Stanko home to meet her daughter during October 2004, on what happened to be pretty Penny’s fifteenth birthday.
Penny remembered well the occasion of Stanko’s first visit. She could tell he wanted the evening to go well. He was on his very best behavior—not that he wasn’t always. But on this occasion, he was almost nervous, because his hopes were so high.
And, more important, as far as the teenager was concerned, her mother was so happy. She was beaming with joy, radiating happiness, when Stanko was at her side.
That made Penny happy—and she approved of Stanko, too. He knew stuff, could make her laugh, and seemed like the “all-around great boyfriend.”
Penny remembered saying some things that became really, really ironic, when she looked back on it. After Stanko’s visit on her birthday, she had lightheartedly needled her mother.
“Gee, Mom, thanks for bringing home an ex-con,” Penny had said. But she was just kidding. She thought Stephen seemed like “a great guy, without a great past.”
The teenager heard Stephen talk about his future in such hopeful terms. He wanted a new start on life, a new beginning. Her mom, who normally enjoyed helping people, looked at that as “an opportunity.” She wanted to help him begin anew.
After knowing her for two months, Stanko told Laura that he was being evicted from his apartment. Was it okay if he moved in with her? Laura said she’d have to get the approval of Penny.
Stanko said, “Of course,” and the matter was presented to the teenager. Penny, finding joy in her mother’s happiness, responded, “Sure, why not?”
Penny and Stanko even spent some quality alone time. He helped her build a birdhouse. Taught her how to drive a car with a stick shift. Everything was moving along nicely, Stanko thought.
The Lings lived in an oil-painting-worthy village of Murrells Inlet, another picture postcard from South Carolina’s Lowcountry. Best known for its fishing, the village was a sensual delight. Scenic, for sure, but it also felt, smelled, and sounded good. In the mornings, there was the glorious cacophony of the feeding gulls in the inlet. You could watch them, diving into the water, poking their sharp little beaks into the pluff mud, the dark soft mud in the marshes—in search of tasty morsels. Murrells Inlet tasted good also. Its restaurants, thirty of them, were seafood places mostly, of course, but some ethnic entries as well to offer variety, and they were considered the best around. There was also a seafood market for do-it-yourself chefs. Visitors who wanted to go to sea and catch their meal could easily charter a boat from an appropriately briny captain—or rent a canoe or kayak and piddlepaddle at a leisurely pace in the inlet. Plus, there were potentially romantic strolls through Brookgreen Gardens, the world’s largest outdoor sculpture garden, aromatherapy provided by the bountiful magnolias and azaleas. And, as was true of the entire Myrtle Beach area, there was plenty of golf. It was a great place to live—a great place to fall in love.
For Stephen Stanko, Murrells Inlet was indescribably beautiful. The contrast to the scenery he’d grown used to in prison was practically dazzling. Locals didn’t necessarily see it as perfect, however. Compared to the beaches on the Atlantic Ocean, Murrells Inlet was swampy.
The Lings lived in a small L-shaped house. With light green siding and black shutters around white window frames, it looked like it could have been a mobile home bent at its center. It was situated so that its concave angle faced the road. There was a wooden porch and a set of steps at the front door, just left of center.
Stanko felt like he’d stepped in it—stepped into paradise. It wasn’t just the locale, either. Like Humbert Humbert, the hero/villain of Nabokov’s Lolita, he’d lip-smackingly insinuated himself into his own peculiar dream. Only two months after meeting Laura Ling, Stephen Stanko was cohabitating with her and her daughter.
OWL-O-REST
For some of the time after Stephen Stanko got out of prison, he had a job, but most of his energy was dedicated toward confidence games. In his heart of hearts, in his innermost psyche, he was a flimflam man. No getting around it.
On December 8, 2004, Stanko—as usual, well kempt and wearing a suit—walked into the Owl-O-Rest Factory Outlet furniture store in a small strip mall between a post office and a suntan place on 17 Business North, in Surfside Beach, South Carolina.
It was a family business, owned by a woman, her ex-husband, and her mom. The woman was Kathleen “Kelly” Crolley, who years later recalled, “The store was started by my stepfather in June of ’83. I originally agreed to help him part-time, while completing college here at the beach. A year later, he passed away.”
The establishment was modestly sized—7,500 square feet.
She was twenty-one at the time.
Her mother had four children under eight—and one on the way. The store was no gold mine—not now, and definitely not then— but Kelly played with the cards she was dealt and ran the store to the best of her ability. She made some changes. Now the store stocked a lot of coastal designs and also offered a lot of special orders for people. They worked with about 150 different vendors.
Crolley was one of four people working on the day Stanko came in. He was wearing business attire. Although he was polite enough, he wasn’t relaxed and seemed in a hurry.
“If I was to order a gift for my wife, would it be delivered in time for Christmas?” he asked.
Crolley said it would. All he had to do was say the word and she would place the order immediately. The present would arrive in plenty of time.
“If it doesn’t arrive on time, could you give me a photocopy out of a catalog? You know, so I’ll have something to wrap and put under the tree.”
Crolley remembered saying no problem. The man said he was in the market for a rolltop desk and another one, which would fit into an odd space.
“I think he said four feet. He decided on the one for sure and would think about the other,” she recalled.
Stanko explained that he was building a house on Pawleys Island. As Crolley and Stanko looked at all kinds of desks, discussing the pros and cons of each, he answered his cell phone five times.
“He would walk around the corner, sometimes to accept the call and thank the other party for their contribution, and offer to meet them for lunch,” Crolley recalled. He told them he hoped that he could find people to match their generosity.
She normally would not inquire about a customer’s private conversation, but she couldn’t help herself. She told him that she wasn’t trying to be nosy, but she was curious. “You know, as to what was going on,” Crolley said.
Stanko told Crolley he was a corporate attorney practicing in Texas, but he had taken off work for the past year to a year and a half to begin a charity: the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation.
He was pleased to say it was doing very well. There was to be a big write-up the next day in the Sun News, with all the businesses that were sponsoring the charity. He was giving a plaque to all the businesses that helped. He said he’d raised about $500,000 so far.
His reason for starting the charity couldn’t have been more personal. He had a thirteen-year-old niece stricken with cancer. At that very moment, he said, she was hospitalized at the Medical University of South Carolina.
“My baby girl was born prematurely there. She weighed one pound, twelve ounces, and everyone did a great job,” Crolley said. During that tough time, she’d stayed at the Ronald McDonald House. She couldn’t say enough good about the place, and she was pleased to say that today she had a healthy and happy little girl.
After that brief exchange, the seed planted, Stanko returned to shopping for a desk. There were more phone calls. Crolley left the customer with a couple of catalogs and went to talk to her ex-husband and mom.
“You think it would be okay for me to give one hundred dollars to a very good cause?” she asked them.
She told Stanko that they weren’t able to contribute much, but that the store would like to participate. “He never asked me for a dime!” Crolley remembered, still flabbergasted by Stanko’s acting ability.
He placed the order for one desk, still undecided about the second. As they were doing the paperwork, she noticed the delivery address seemed a little off.
“A lot of my customers are second-home owners or have just moved here and will frequently not know the directions or exact address of their home, so I let it go—but it was a flag,” Crolley explained.
In retrospect—twenty-twenty hindsight—there were other clues that not all was as it seemed. The desk was to be a surprise, Stanko said, a Christmas gift for his wife, so he had to talk with his secretary about how to work out his deposit without the wife knowing about it.
Stanko said he would come back the next day to complete the deal. He wanted to sleep on it before he ordered the second desk.
Before he left, Crolley said, “Wait here, I want to give some money for the cause, and the store does, too.”
Stanko was pleased.
“What was the name of the charity again?” she asked.
“You could just make the checks out to me, Stephen Stanko.”
The red flags seemed so obvious to Crolley years later.
“I could do that, but we’ll need a receipt from you for the store—you know, for tax purposes.”
She gave him an Owl-O-Rest check for one hundred dollars, and one for twenty-five dollars from her. On the receipt, Stanko put the name of the research foundation and signed, from Steve Stanko.
After Stanko left the store with the checks, Crolley ran the sequence of events over and over in her mind and came to the conclusion there was something iffy about that guy.
To be safe, she called the Better Business Bureau and asked if they had any record of Stanko’s charity in South Carolina. They said they didn’t.
After hanging up, she remembered that he’d said he practiced corporate law in Texas. Maybe the charity was registered down there, she thought.
Her next call was to the Sun News. The guy she talked to said he had no knowledge of Stanko’s charity, and knew nothing of the big article scheduled for the next day. Afterward, Crolley suspected that she might not have talked to the right person.
When Stanko did not return the next day, as promised, Crolley still didn’t write him off. She thought perhaps he had gotten busy with “all the commotion,” the Sun News thing, and all of those plaques.
The following day, she called him. During the conversation, he said the Sun News event had gone well, and she had to admit that she’d been busy and hadn’t gotten around to buying a copy of the newspaper.
She said she’d already ordered the rolltop, but he had to place the order that day in order to receive the second desk in time. He asked if he could give her his brother’s credit card number.
Crolley said she couldn’t do that without speaking directly with his brother. Stanko said okay, he would visit the store the next day with the cash.
“I never spoke with him again,” she recalled.
Crolley kept an eye on the checks and found that the store check was cashed at a nearby bank. On the same day the check was cashed, a little video store beside the bank was robbed.
“My mom even went to the video store to inquire as to what the robber looked like, which was kind of awkward for her, but we were afraid there might have been a connection,” Crolley said.
She never did get to the proper authorities to find out the information she was after.
“My personal check was held longer and I was actually concerned—not so much for personal safety, but more for identity theft.”
She had a special watch put on her account and asked around if anyone else had heard of Stephen Stanko.
“I really feared he was bad news, but did not know what to do about it. I wasn’t even sure a crime had been committed, since he never asked for the money,” Crolley explained.
Kelly Crolley’s experience with Stephen Stanko was typical of those first months when he needed cash and was busy thinking up new confidence games.
He felt no twinge of guilt. A man had to do what he had to do. Getting a job was Mission: Impossible, so what else was he supposed to do?
He’d have to cast his spells on people.
He always scammed women, and he made thousands of dollars just with his ability to lie effectively. On some, he pulled the “collecting money for sick kids” bit.
For others, he said, “I’m a lawyer,” and offered various legal services for a fee. When he scored, he’d hit a bar or a bookstore or a mall, and begin trolling for a new victim.
Professionally Stephen Stanko might have been struggling, but his personal life couldn’t be beat. Those early days with Laura Ling—romancing, then cohabitating—were about the best times that ther
e ever were, according to him.
He later said, with no apparent sense of irony, that he and Laura shared a love that was straight out of a Harlequin romance novel. It was an unconditional love. They loved each other without question. They never passed judgment.
Removing the rose-colored glasses, we find something less than nirvana in Murrells Inlet. In reality, Stanko sold Laura and Penny Ling a package of lies, and they bought it all.
He said he had an engineering degree from a military college, that he’d worked as a paralegal. He also told them that he’d practiced law without a license—but that turned out to be the truth.
He kept busy doing things, always painting his activities with broad strokes of legitimacy and benevolence. He was charitable and political, always on the side of good.
Stanko suspected the authorities were keeping an eye on him, and he geared some schemes directly toward them. He wanted to send a clear message that he was trying to succeed, trying to be a positive force on society.
To accomplish this, he’d started a program to help juvenile delinquents return to the straight and narrow. Plus, his literary ambitions were rekindled. He couldn’t divulge the details, he said, but he was working on a major literary work.
As time passed, from 2004 to 2005, Stanko wasn’t feeling the upward mobility he had when he first got out of prison. His genius was rendered all but moot.
To those who bothered to observe carefully, Stanko’s activities were a mask covering up his bleak reality. He was just another ex-con who couldn’t get a job.
RESEARCH
During this time, Stephen Stanko did have at least one friend, who called him once a month or so to see how he was doing. It was Dr. Gordon Crews, one of the coauthors of Stanko’s published book, Living in Prison.
Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Page 2