Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  On July 22, forensic technician Patti B. Ruff in the SLED Evidence Processing Department, who had tested items of evidence from the Ling scene for blood and semen, filed her report, which had been reviewed and approved by her supervisor, Lieutenant Emily B. Reinhart. Among the items that tested positive for biological evidence were a candle, a black bra, pajama bottoms, a sleeveless top, a pink suit coat, with a matching shirt, a beige suit coat, a comforter, and a quilt. Items that tested negative included a silk necktie, a pair of white panties, leather belt, bath towel, and one pink and one white bra. She also tested the Goose Creek High School ring and verified that the material in the grooves was dried blood.

  Although Stephen Stanko’s two murder trials would eventually take place years apart, the grand jury hearings for the Laura Ling and Henry Lee Turner murders took place on back-to-back days in August 2005. The indictments for the Ling crimes were submitted in Georgetown County by the Fifteenth Circuit Solicitor’s Office on August 24. Indictments for the Turner murder were submitted to a Horry County grand jury on August 25.

  Late that summer, in September, Joe Harper, a subrogation specialist at the Armed Forces Insurance Exchange (AFIE), wrote a letter to Horry County sheriff Phillip E. Thompson explaining that AFIE insured the victim, and was cutting a check, to go to Henry Lee Turner’s estate, for $4,296.91. The money was to cover the costs of cleaning up and fixing the mobile home after the murder. The check was made out to the executor, daughter Debbie Gallogly. More than three grand of that money went to pay the bill of Crime Scene Services (CSS), of Monroe, North Carolina, cleaners of crime scenes. For that fee, CSS removed blood, body fluids, and fingerprint dust from the walls and floor of Turner’s back bathroom and bedroom. They disinfected the entire home, always a good idea when there has been a death. The bedroom door was repaired. The CSS workers wore protective gear—masks, gloves, and boots—as they removed, transported, and disposed of “five boxes of biohazard.” The bedroom and bathroom carpet and pad were replaced and the walls of those rooms were freshly sheetrocked and painted. Using estate money, Gallogly also repaired the bullet hole at the other end of the mobile home caused by Stephen Stanko’s test shot.

  For those in charge of making sense of Stephen Stanko’s actions, the dust had officially settled and it was time to figure out what had just happened.

  Who was Stanko?

  What made him tick?

  Why did he switch from a charming good-natured flimflam man into a homicidal maniac?

  Had there been a harbinger? What caused the switch?

  Was it organic or inorganic, nature or nurture?

  PART II

  GOOSE CREEK

  Stephen Christopher Stanko was born January 13, 1968, on the island of Cuba, son of William Stanko, a master chief in the U.S. Navy stationed at Guantánamo Bay.

  When William was transferred, his family moved with him, and Stephen grew up in a Roman Catholic household in Goose Creek, South Carolina, with two brothers and two sisters. The community was home to the Naval Weapons Station and Strategic Weapons Facility, where his dad worked.

  At first, the Stankos lived in the Menriv section of Goose Creek, where the navy’s housing development was located. Later, they upgraded to a ranch-style redbrick home, with a finely manicured lawn, on pretty Kenilworth Road.

  Goose Creek, part of the urbanized northern suburbs of Charleston, was a small city with a population just under 30,000; yet its footprint crossed a county line. Part of the city was in Berkeley County, part in Charleston County. It had only officially been a city since 1961, but the area had been unofficially called Goose Creek, because of the area stream with that name, since at least the mid-1700s. Just to the east, on the other side of North Rhett Avenue, was the weapons station, and beyond that, the Francis Marion National Forest.

  William ran a tight ship. Everyone obeyed, including their mom, Joan. The atmosphere in the home was sometimes hard for outsiders to deal with. There was a perceived weightiness to the Stanko aura. Hard for some to breathe, hard to relax in the Stanko house.

  Stephen had one older brother, William Jr., a younger brother, Jeff, and sisters Peggy and Cynthia. The Stanko siblings coexisted under difficult circumstances in a very cold environment. One of Stephen’s relatives once referred to that abject home as “like suicide.” It was volatile. The siblings, it’s been said, felt trapped, no escape.

  According to one friend, Stephen felt that his dad preferred his older brother, Billy. William Jr. had been eight years old when Stephen was born. Stephen was the second brother, and he believed he got short shrift. Yet, Billy was considered a little bit wild by Stanko standards. Rode a motorcycle. Who knows what else?

  When Stephen was fifteen years old, Billy died in a house fire, maybe arson, in St. George, a small town near Interstate 95 in Dorchester County. Billy Stanko was twenty-three when he died, and the Stanko home grew even heavier, now heavy with sadness.

  Before then, Stephen had been a “golden boy,” the kid who had everything going for him. With the exception of the typical adolescent faux pas, when he tried to grow a mustache before he was ready, his appearance was always impeccable.

  He was Stephen “all-American” Stanko, and he appeared luminous back then, born with his own inner light. Teachers’ eyes twinkled when they discussed him.

  He was brilliant.

  That boy was going to be something someday. He was even athletic, played football and baseball. Go Gators. The boy could do anything he wanted to do with his life, his coaches bragged.

  Despite his active lifestyle, his youth was basically injury free. One time he’d been knocked cold when hit in the forehead by a beer bottle, but that was about it.

  And what Stephen wanted was what his father wanted: admission into the Air Force Academy, where he hoped to become an aeronautic engineer, designing and building state-of-the-art military aircraft.

  Befitting a boy who seldom lost, Stanko carried a quiet confidence with his perfect posture. But all of that changed after his brother’s death. If Stephen thought he would step into the position of number one son in his father’s eyes after Billy was gone, he was deeply disappointed. Dad turned his back on him, wouldn’t have anything to do with him, like he blamed him.

  Stephen’s inner light flickered and dimmed.

  In 1985, when he was a high-school junior, Stanko took the SAT college admission exam. He scored a 500 in verbal and 620 in math, not spectacular, putting him in about the eighty-fifth percentile. He asked for the results to be sent to four colleges: the Air Force Academy, Clemson, University of South Carolina, and Furman.

  Stephen was a senior at Goose Creek High when his already fading self-luminescence extinguished forever. A slender envelope from the Air Force Academy arrived. Inside, a brief note: he had not been accepted.

  Stephen had been certain that the Air Force Academy was his destiny—so much so that he had turned down scholarships at other schools in anticipation of his acceptance. Then the balloon popped.

  About-face. He would later wonder, with bewilderment, how he had gone from the mountaintop to free fall so suddenly. How—if he was supposed to be a genius—could he do such stupid things?

  According to Stanko, this was the time in his life when he became “lost,” his moral compass spinning. His life plummeted at a frightening pace. Instead of going to a prestigious institute of learning, he took a few classes at the local community college.

  When that didn’t work out, Stanko turned to a life of crime.

  By the early 1990s, Stephen Stanko was on probation for multiple charges of grand theft auto.

  LIZ

  Jane Elizabeth “Liz” McLendon thought she could spot a bad boy when she saw one. She’d written papers on juvenile delinquents, what they called in school “hoods,” and considered herself a bit of an expert. Ambitious by nature, she hoped to turn it into a career one day.

  She was a beautiful girl, elected homecoming queen. However, if you asked her what she wanted to be when
she grew up, she gave a surprising answer.

  “A criminologist,” she would say. Specifically, she wanted to be an FBI profiler, who used details of murder scenes to predict what the killer was like.

  As almost always happened to youthful dreams, real life got in the way. Liz married young, had a son, and was divorced when the boy was five. To her credit, even with the surprises, the wheels didn’t completely come off her game plan. She completed college and earned a marketing degree.

  Several years later, in 1992, the single mom was working as a sales rep for a telecommunications company. Working for the same company, although in a different building a few miles away, was Stephen Stanko.

  Liz’s first impression of Stanko was one of suspicion. She even went so far as to tell her assistant manager that she thought the guy was “shifty.”

  The female assistant manager exclaimed with a twinkle: “Oh, but he’s so cute!”

  Liz furrowed her brow. “I don’t know—there’s just something about him.”

  After that, Liz couldn’t get rid of him. He’d taken one look at her and his heart started pounding. Steve found every excuse to visit Liz’s building.

  “He was very persistent, and showing up in my office a lot,” Liz recalled. He wore her down.

  Stanko told Liz he’d grown up in Goose Creek, which was true, and had just gotten back from Savannah, Georgia, where he was attending art school, which turned out not to be true. He told her that he’d met an evil woman in Savannah and she’d taken every dime he had. He’d been stupid and had fallen for the woman’s con artist scheme.

  He was very polite, with such a nice personality—the world’s most charming guy. And Liz wasn’t embarrassed to admit that—forgetting all about Stephen’s shiftiness—she was charmed.

  He preferred calling her Elizabeth, rather than Liz, or sometimes “Rizarif,” a version of her name in baby talk.

  Stephen liked his beer, now and again, but he wasn’t really a drinker. She never saw him show the effects of alcohol. “Not even a little bit,” Liz recalled. No drug problems, either. That was a very good sign, Liz thought early on. That was one whole category of relationship dysfunction that she didn’t have to worry about. He was just a “nice ol’ Southern boy.”

  At first, dating Stephen was tremendous fun. Their nascent romance danced with a nearly gravity-defying bliss. They sang and looked into each other’s eyes.

  Although he couldn’t play a musical instrument, he loved music. “He was a good dancer,” Liz recalled. “Shagging (the dance) was one of his preferences, and he was good at that.”

  He enjoyed beach music and oldies. When they were together, they listened to a lot of Frank Sinatra and Neil Diamond. “Strangers in the night, dooby-dooby-do.” Early on, he made her a cassette tape of music for her to play in the car, all stuff she liked: Van Morrison, Huey Lewis, Randy Travis, and the Righteous Brothers. That tape was her constant companion for a time, and those songs remind her even today of the good times with Stephen.

  He wrote her love letters. He told her that he’d never felt as strong and close to anyone as he did to her. Love more than yesterday but less than tomorrow.

  Liz’s fondest memories were of going to college football games at the Citadel, where Stephen was a big fan. The Citadel’s football team rocked in 1992, eleven wins, two losses, on their way toward capturing the Southern Conference championship. Stephen took Liz to the game at the old Johnson Hagood Stadium against Marshall in October, which set the all-time attendance record for the Citadel, more than 23,000 souls surrounding Sansom Field. The stadium and playing field had different names, which is what happened when you tried to dedicate the new without dissing the old.

  Stephen told Liz that he wanted to be a writer—write about sales and achieving success. She said she thought he’d be good at that. She could see how he would be a very good motivator. He knew how to make people want to do well.

  He said that his hero in the motivational area was Zig Ziglar, and he hoped to one day metamorphose, as Ziglar had, from champion seller to master motivator.

  Stanko wanted to author best sellers, like Ziglar had penned, and be in constant demand for speaking engagements. The man could sell a pitch. He made it all seem so feasible.

  Once, Stephen took Liz to an exclusive neighborhood and showed her a beautiful mansion. He told her that used to be his home, but he sold it to go to Savannah.

  When that went over well, he took her to a boat marina, took her on a boat, and told her it was his—but he’d had to sell it, just like his beautiful home.

  In one unusually candid moment, he told her he’d had a few disappointments, that he’d really wanted to go to the Air Force Academy, but it wasn’t meant to be.

  “I couldn’t pass the eye exam!” he told Liz. It was a sensitivity to pressure or something in one eye. Nothing serious—just enough to keep him from flying fighter jets.

  Stephen saw competition everywhere. Anything and everything was a competition he had to win. Liz remembered one time they had to go to a family function, her family, and Stephen felt anxiety that someone at that get-together might look better than they did. He insisted that he and Liz dress to the nines so that they would be the best dressed.

  True, she sensed a chilliness on Stanko’s surface—he countered her ardent embraces with boasts and swagger—but she chalked it up to his rigid upbringing, and—at first, anyway—didn’t look deeper.

  Liz noticed that Stephen’s father was the key to his ego. If he needed to dress better, make more money, accomplish more things, or whatever it was, it was because he had been taught to be that way by his father. He had to be the best, or else he would disappoint his dad, which remained a horrible thought to him. His old man, who had gotten into his head and had never left. Every aspect of his life took on a grandeur that was almost entirely imaginary—his wishful imagination, the happier world in which his dad was proud.

  The disconnect between Stephen’s father and himself came over matters of discipline. Dad wanted Stephen to be the best at things because he worked the hardest and applied himself with the most tenacity. But that wasn’t at all how Stephen went about life. Stephen was constantly searching for the shortcut, for the cheat, for the convincing illusion. He wanted everything to be easy—expected it to be easy.

  Liz’s son, a preteen by the time Stephen entered their lives, did not have many pleasant memories of the man his mother dated for almost four years. She came to believe that he was jealous of her relationship with her son. He was not only hard on the kid, but he sought to build a wall between mother and child.

  Stephen was her son’s baseball coach in Little League for a brief time, and it was most unpleasant. Stephen would come up with harsh punishments for kids who made an error, until it got to the point where it was no fun at all. Liz could really see Stephen’s father coming out in his personality as he tried to teach the kids baseball. Like his father would have, Liz believed, Steve expected each kid to be perfect in every way, and became angry when they were less than that. It was very difficult for Liz’s kid to deal with Stephen, to deal with a ruler, a dictator in his life. The kid’s dad wasn’t like that at all; his father was easygoing, not hypercritical like Stephen.

  He didn’t spend money on himself, but when Liz offered to take him out and buy him clothes, he always agreed, and directed her toward the finer labels. When he was home and being casual, he still wore Tommy Hilfiger jeans and Tommy cologne.

  Stephen was seldom tenacious about anything, with the exception of cleaning. He was very clean and very neat—and he wanted his surroundings to be that way as well. Very anal, as a shrink might say.

  He loved scrubbing and polishing and vacuuming and the rest of housework that most people found to be a drudge. When he had a sales job, he did best when selling cleaning chemicals to companies and hospitals—and part of the reason for his success was the enthusiasm and joy he showed while demonstrating the product.

  When his surroundings were not nea
t and clean, he was quick to anger. He needed order. Chaos upset him. Liz figured this was probably typical of children of master chiefs. In households like that, she believed, you didn’t experience or learn anything but orderly.

  Over time, Liz saw Stephen’s charm in a different light. In the vernacular of their song playlist, they went from “marvelous night for a moondance” to “you’ve lost that lovin’ feeling.”

  His charm was fulsome—even excessive. She saw in him a stubborn unwillingness to rankle. He needed to be smooth with people, the better to sway them.

  His inability to tell the precise truth, his unwillingness to be banal or pedestrian, was so pervasive as to be a detriment (certainly a complication) to his existence. Life was so much harder for him than it needed to be. Seeing things as they were was not an option. He needed the kaleidoscope of his imagination to cope. He was constantly molding reality and trying to conjure spells. Hyperbole was his paintbrush. He even exaggerated minor happenings. If an ant crawled across his shoe, Stanko would claim it was a ladybug.

  It wasn’t just Liz. Everyone had a sense that Stanko enjoyed spinning a yarn or two. Everyone, including Liz, also felt his brags had some basis in fact. She didn’t catch on to the fact that he was a pathological liar until after she fell for him, and by then, it was too late to quit him.

  He was a rubber ball that always came bouncing back to her. Only years later would she realize that he had manipulated her most of all.

  Stephen sensed Liz needed security and gave her that. He dominated the relationship, not because he was so large and in charge, but rather because his dependence on her was so absolute.

  “He depended on me for praise, financial assistance, ego boosting, and helping him out of his many tight spots—and there were an exhausting number of tight spots,” she said.