Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  Police tapped her cell phone so they could monitor Stanko’s calls. Within hours, Putnam received a call from Stanko asking if he could spend the night on her couch again.

  “Hey, gorgeous,” Stanko said. “Let me ask you something: How the heck do I get you off my mind? I miss you. It’s almost a physical missing you.”

  As she set up a date with him, police electronics experts were busy using the signal from Stanko’s cell phone to determine his location. They discovered he was in a West Augusta restaurant.

  A police drive-by read the plate number and verified that the stolen Mazda was parked outside the restaurant, which was part of a large shopping mall.

  By the time Stanko left the restaurant and walked to the truck, law enforcement was there in force and ready for him.

  At three o’clock on Tuesday afternoon, Stephen Stanko had entered a mall restaurant called the Atlanta Bread Company. He sat at a small wooden table near the front of the shop and ordered a grilled chicken sandwich and a soft drink.

  The mall, in Northwest Augusta, was called Augusta Exchange. It was built on eighty-seven acres of farmland and opened in 1997. Its most notable features were a Target store and a twenty-screen movie complex, which included IMAX.

  The Atlanta Bread Company was a chain restaurant with the slogan “Come for the food, stay for the culture.” The restaurant started out in 1993 as a single café in Sandy Springs, a suburb of Atlanta. Ten years later, there were more than one hundred of them in twenty-three states.

  Waiting tables inside the restaurant was restaurant supervisor, twenty-four-year-old Chris Ainsworth, who remembered Stanko as polite and dressed well.

  “He looked like a nice guy. He seemed calm, like nothing was wrong,” Ainsworth later said.

  Seventeen-year-old assistant store manager Marcie Crown said that she didn’t recognize Stanko, even though his picture had been on television. His hair looked darker in person than it did on TV, she explained. He was dressed normally—gray jacket over a yellow dress shirt, jeans, a light blue vest, and a tie.

  “He did not look dangerous at all,” Crown commented. “It’s very freaky.”

  As Stanko was eating, the call came in that the stolen truck had been found. That news lit up law enforcement. After a few days of chasing ghosts, a license plate number was something real. This was it.

  Within minutes, the mall was surrounded with deputy U.S. Marshals from the Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, along with members of the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office.

  When Stanko came out, at approximately 3:25 P.M., exiting the mall through the Mattress Depot, he was promptly and efficiently arrested.

  An eyewitness to the arrest was twenty-one-year-old Jeremy Nave, who worked at the Atlanta Bread Company and was arriving at the shopping mall in his car as Stanko was exiting on foot.

  “I saw a guy dressed in a suit,” Nave recalled. “He looked like he was coming from the Hallmark store. I stopped and let him cross the street. He walked toward his truck. Next thing, I turn around and see him on the ground, with two guys dressed in bulletproof vests standing over him. When I saw U.S. Marshals, county deputies, and the FBI, I figured it was a drug bust.”

  Inspector James Ergas, of the U.S. Marshals, involved in the arrest, said it didn’t appear Stanko knew the jig was up, until the handcuffs were snapped on.

  Officers patted him down and found a knife. He was handcuffed and whisked away. Stanko was charged with “unlawful flight to avoid prosecution.” During his brief stint in a Georgia jail, Stanko was separated from the rest of the jail population, according to Richmond County sheriff Ronnie Strength.

  Fox News reported at 3:58 P.M., about a half hour following the arrest, that Stanko was in custody.

  Inspector James Ergas and Deputy Kenneth Shugars, also of the U.S. Marshal’s Service, questioned the suspect.

  “Any aliases?”

  “Yeah. ‘Stephen Knight.’ ‘Chris Knight.’” Then a joke: if they were named Stanko, they’d have aliases, too.

  Beyond that, Stephen Stanko denied anything and everything. Whatever it was, he didn’t do it. What was he doing in Mattress Depot? He was applying for a job.

  Stanko told Deputy Shugars that he was in Augusta to see the Masters, but he hadn’t gotten in. He stayed for the fun of it, because there was a 24/7 cocktail party under way.

  Stanko repeated some of the lies he had told over the course of his flight. He told the federal officers about the restaurant franchises he owned. He said he drove a Jaguar, but it was in the shop.

  He was asked about his injured hand, and he said he got that in a bar fight in Columbia, South Carolina. On the drive to the courthouse, Ergas said, Stanko was “very quiet, very sullen.”

  Stanko briefly appeared before a federal magistrate judge in Georgia regarding the charges of criminal flight. An arrest warrant from Georgetown County in South Carolina for the murder of Laura Ling, countersigned by Judge William P. Moeller, was presented.

  In response, there was also an extradition hearing. Judge John Baxter signed a “Waiver of Extradition” form allowing Stanko’s return to South Carolina to face the music without further ceremony.

  Back at the Augusta parking lot, Sergeant Scott Peebles, of the Richmond County Sheriff’s Office, was busy in the shopping mall’s parking lot getting Henry Lee Turner’s pickup truck ready for a thorough inspection from the men and women of the county crime lab.

  He called Edwards Paint & Body Works, which regularly towed for law enforcement. Edwards agreed to come put the Mazda on the back of a long flatbed truck.

  At 3:53 P.M., less than a half hour after Stanko was arrested, Sergeant Peebles notified Investigator James “Jim” Gordon, at the county Vehicle Processing Bay (VPB), that he had arranged for the truck to be moved.

  The truck was transported to the VPB and arrived at quarter after four. Gordon took down all of the truck’s pertinent info: it was a 1996 Mazda special edition B2300, with an extended cab. It was black with purple side stripes. He also wrote down the truck’s South Carolina tag number and VIN.

  Gordon noted that the truck arrived with all windows up and all doors locked. No key was with the vehicle. In the bed was a cooler, blue with a white top.

  He secured the vehicle.

  The crime lab people wouldn’t be able to sink their teeth into that truck until a search warrant was acquired. No hurry. Neither the evidence nor the suspect was going anywhere soon.

  HEMBREE

  In Georgetown and Horry Counties, the machinery was already working toward prosecuting Stephen Stanko for the murders. The two counties shared a single chief prosecuting attorney. He was Solicitor J. Gregory Hembree. In another state, Hembree would have been known as the district attorney.

  “‘Solicitor’ is just an archaic term we use here in South Carolina, because that’s the way we are,” Hembree explained with good cheer.

  On Tuesday evening, Hembree was standing in shorts, watching his ten-year-old son’s baseball practice, when his cell went off. It was Captain Bill Pierce, of the Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office. They had arrested a suspect in Augusta, Georgia, and were already in the process of moving him to Georgetown County.

  Pierce said, “Stanko says he might want to talk to you. Where are you?”

  “I’m on my way is where I am,” Hembree said—and that was it for baseball practice. He grabbed his son, drove home, executed a quick wardrobe change, then drove to the GCSO. When Stanko got there, Hembree was waiting for him.

  As a matter of practice, Gregory Hembree did not interrogate suspects. That put him in a position to be a potential witness. He had, however, from time to time, had suspects who wanted an in-person meeting with the prosecutor. Motives varied. Hembree usually accepted the invitation. He wanted to “be available to facilitate the conversation with law enforcement.” At those meetings, there was no interrogation. The solicitor left the questioning to the sheriff’s office. When Solicitor Hembree met with Stephen Stanko, he would allow
Stanko to do most of the talking.

  Now Hembree and Stanko sat in a small interview room.

  “Mr. Stanko, I understand you want to speak to me. What is it you want to say?” Hembree asked.

  Stanko told the solicitor that he wasn’t sure what he was going to do. There was a chance that he wasn’t even going to combat the charges against him. He said he knew his was a death penalty case. Maybe, he suggested, he would just accept the fact that he should be executed.

  “He didn’t admit to anything,” Hembree recalled. “I felt baited.” There was an attempt, it seemed, to recruit Hembree over to his side, to help out good ol’ Stephen Stanko.

  Stanko seemed to be saying, Come on, Greg, we’re a couple of white guys here in South Carolina, let’s cut a deal. It was offensive.

  The killer thought he was being charming. Hembree saw it as typical “jailhouse manipulation.” Guys in desperate situations tended to be conniving.

  It was Stanko’s intelligence that separated him from the pack, though. Coming into the meeting, Hembree knew that Stanko had a prior, and that he had a history of scamming people. But he hadn’t been briefed on Stanko’s intelligence.

  At the meeting, Stanko was concerned with how he was going to be portrayed in the media. He was image conscious and considered the style and texture of his infamy, which he misconstrued as fame.

  Perhaps there was a small sense of accomplishment in Stanko’s demeanor. Maybe it was like Sheriff Cribb said. Maybe he’d studied to be a killer and had pulled it off. Now he wanted to help shape the media coverage—spin the story to his advantage so he could take his well-deserved place in the “Killers Hall of Fame.”

  Bottom line: Stanko was willing to take responsibility, as long as the solicitor made him look good in the press. Hembree, of course, made no such promise.

  Convicting Stanko, Hembree felt, would be easy, even without a confession. By stealing his victims’ vehicles, he left a track of bread crumbs for police to follow.

  The solicitor patiently allowed Stanko to speak his piece, and then told him that if he had anything he wanted to share, to tell it to the sheriff. Hembree got up and left.

  The meeting lasted less than five minutes.

  Gregory Hembree already saw signs of psychopathy in Stephen Stanko. There had been a time when shrinks thought of that particular personality disorder in terms of what was missing. The psychopath was a person lacking components of his psyche—for instance, empathy, fear, remorse. But lately some shrinks had begun to ponder facets of personality not missing but rather in overabundance.

  Sadism.

  Hunger for control.

  A relentless craving for reward.

  Like a dope fiend needing his next spike, psychopaths need their next reward—sex, money, fame, whatever, a trophy of some sort—often an unreasonable expectation considering the deviance of their behavior.

  So psychopaths took what they could get. As long as Stephen Stanko was incarcerated because of his violent rampage, he might as well soothe himself with thoughts of fame and image.

  Maybe he’d make the celeb news. Maybe paparazzi were scheming to get a photo of him.

  The new theories regarding acute personality disorders weren’t all just psychobabble, either. Vanderbilt University scientists had discovered chemically testable differences between psychopaths and others. One was the variance in levels of dopamine, a naturally produced chemical that contributed to a person’s motivation and pleasure.

  Those scientists concluded that the elevated level of dopamine was not an additional symptom to the personality abnormalities already known, but rather responsible for the personality changes.

  Gregory Hembree suspected from the outset that Stanko would opt for an insanity defense, based on his personality disorder. What choice did he really have?

  There were doctors out there who would testify for a fee that psychopaths were criminally insane because they lacked the impulse control to prevent themselves from committing crimes.

  That was okay with the solicitor, who considered it a desperate defense, one that never worked. The legal standard for insanity was whether the accused understood the difference between right and wrong. Psychopaths sure did understand the difference. They just didn’t care.

  A jury would have to accept new legal standards for insanity to buy that pitch—and that was not likely to happen. Not archaic ol’ South Carolina.

  One could argue that it was foolish to equate impulse control with criminal insanity. Those with strong impulse control didn’t as a rule commit crimes. You’d have to empty the prisons if you accepted “I couldn’t help it” as a legally valid excuse.

  TALKING HEADS

  Stephen Stanko’s narcissism no doubt made him feel glorified by his fame, his stardom. He thought like a public relations agent. Hmm, he pondered, how to envelop himself in an aura of benevolence.

  With a snap of his fingers, he thought about using his celebrity for the cause of good. He would dedicate his public profile to lowering the crime rate through prison reform! Excellent plan, a perfect continuation of the social visionary he’d been all along.

  It was all the fault of the system—the prison system, the system of assimilating ex-cons into society—and he was going to prove it. He would have a trial and he would use it as a sounding board, as a soapbox, for the very same message he’d delivered in his book.

  He would exploit his celebrity to the maximum, pedal to the metal, and that was no delusion! In the days after Laura Ling and Henry Lee Turner died, he really was the most famous criminal in America.

  Stephen Stanko was national news. On the evening of his arrest, a segment on Stanko was featured on Anderson Cooper 360°, a news program on CNN.

  Cooper’s choice as an expert witness was Jane Elizabeth “Liz” McLendon Buckner, Stanko’s ex-girlfriend and 1996 victim. At the top of the show, Anderson Cooper teased the segment on the killer’s capture, concisely summing up Stanko as a “smooth talker, a published author—with a dark secret.”

  Liz was getting to be a media veteran. Her media tour, which would turn her into a staple on cable news, began when a local TV news reporter located her. She was put on the air live and told to address Stephen Stanko, who very well might be out there watching the coverage of himself on TV. She looked into the camera and asked Stephen to give himself up before anyone else got hurt. She asked him to think about his niece whom he adored, and think of how he would feel if someone hurt her. She had been good on TV, and now the national cable networks wanted her as well. For a while, she said yes to everyone.

  In retrospect, the direct plea to Stephen Stanko on local news, Channel 2, would seem ridiculous to Liz. She appealed to the conscience of a man who lacked one.

  “It was a waste of time,” Liz said. “He wasn’t paying attention to anything at that point.”

  Now Stanko was behind bars, and Liz could talk about events in the past tense. There was a terror to Stanko’s spree, as long as it was ongoing, that was gone now that he was caught. Liz could start to heal again from the old wounds torn open anew by recent events.

  On this night, she would share the Anderson Cooper show with a feature on breast implants (what you need to know before going under the knife); a plan to legalize alley cat hunting in Wisconsin, where there was overpopulation; dolphins stranded on the Florida Coast; and a surefire way to self-determine the level of your racial bias. It was going to be a full show.

  Cooper started with the “breaking news,” and that was Stanko. He explained that Stanko looked “anything but like a fugitive” when apprehended “a few moments ago in Georgia.” He looked like a successful businessman.

  Cooper introduced an unspooling pre-recorded segment. An unnamed “friend” of Stanko’s was quoted as saying Stanko had pledged that he’d never go back to prison. After eight years in, he’d only been out nine months.

  There was a description of the Ling and Turner murders, and an emphasis on his savage rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. He�
��d been caught because he twice stole the motor vehicle of his victims, making him traceable.

  South Carolina lieutenant Andy Christenson was shown making a public statement, obviously recorded before Stanko’s arrest. He warned that desperate people did desperate things, that people should be “vigilant and cautious.” People should not take matters “into their own hands.” Christenson said the public was being fooled by this guy. “He is very convincing,” the cop said. Folks should be looking for a fellow with the gift of gab, a smooth guy.

  Cooper said the killer not only dressed well, but he was a published author as well, a book called Living in Prison. He was released early because he could convince others his life of crime was finished.

  When Liz came on, Cooper explained that she had been, during the early 1990s, Stanko’s girlfriend for four years. She discussed the “very, very wicked way he had of twisting things around.” She said he lied—he lied well—that he was articulate and intelligent. She bought the package, enough to dedicate four years to him. Most of that time “she didn’t suspect him at all.”

  Cooper commented that Stanko had a classic sociopathic personality. He was “surrounded by mirrors,” a chameleon, whoever he needed to be depending on the situation. His manipulation of others was constant.

  “He could make you believe something that you knew for a fact was not the truth,” Liz explained. When, after forever, she began to catch on, Steve did an inadequate job of backpedaling, which she could see through. “He tried to convince me that it was not what I suspected,” she said, but by that time, she knew better.

  Cooper asked Liz if she had been scared when she learned Stanko was out of prison and on the run.

  “Very,” she said. Truth was, she was frightened from the moment he was released. She had no reason to think he would try to find her, but one never knew.