Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  And, obviously, any resemblance to autonomy flew out the barred windows. All decisions—from here on out—were to be made by others. All he had to do was listen to the commands of the Man, and do as he was told. Anything else resulted in discipline.

  When thoroughly received and evaluated, Stanko was assigned a number, and from then on, he answered only to that six-figure sequence. He waited in a holding area with the other rookies until he was assigned a six-by-nine cell with two roomies.

  From then on, things became familiar, a routine: on weekdays a daily hour of recreation. No exercise on weekends. A shower every three-to-five days.

  The only surprise interruptions came when he had to take one of many tests designed to pigeonhole the prisoner by intelligence and aptitude. These, along with the prisoner’s criminal record, informed officials where to best place him in the system.

  For all of the sophisticated thinking he demonstrated during his psychological exams, Stanko would later suspect that he was destined to be grouped with the hard cores. He was guilty of kidnapping, a violent offense considered pretty hard-core. Violent offenders were caged exclusively in maximum-security prisons, which were hell by design!

  Stephen Stanko spent four years in maximum security, and then, because he’d been employed and kept disciplinary free, he was transferred out. Under the new arrangement, Stanko’s jobs were more to his liking. According to Bob Ward, who was at the time the acting director of operations for the South Carolina Department of Corrections (SCDC), Stanko’s prison jobs included being a library helper, a teacher assistant, and a chief clerk in the prison education building.

  During his time in the prison library, Stanko not only read but wrote as well. He kept sort of a diary about his experiences. He researched the incarceration system, how it functioned and why it operated the way it did.

  He learned the “why” behind some of the things that had happened to him. He wrote in a tiny and precise printing, both sides of the paper margin to margin, no negative space, no air on the page at all.

  Stanko not only economized on paper with his writing style, he was prolific. Of course, he had plenty of time, but he managed to fill more than 2,000 pages, 1,000 pieces of college-ruled loose-leaf paper, with his observations.

  By 1999, Stanko was ready to tell somebody about what he believed to be his literary accomplishment. He chronicled every minutia of life at MacDougall and then Turbeville Correctional Institution. He entitled the manuscript After the Gavel Drops, which was what it was about, what happens to the man after he’s taken from the courtroom in handcuffs.

  As finally edited down for presentation, After the Gavel Drops consisted of fifty short chapters. Stanko, of course, would let any prospective publisher know that there was a lot more where that came from. Prison was his muse, and the pearls of wisdom flowed like “Ol’ Man River.”

  Every word impacted poorly on the South Carolina corrections system.

  In Stanko’s life, his manuscript was unique. It was, in no shape or form, a confidence game. There wasn’t anything flimflam about it. He created it and he was going to sell it. Who’d’ve thunk? Maybe this was the new Stanko.

  The appeal, Stanko realized, was that he wasn’t writing a book about an average prisoner, he was chronicling the experiences of an inmate in a Southern prison who was white and highly educated. Readers were far more likely to buy a book written by him than by some dropout street thug.

  He wrote a solid proposal and sent it out. He was prepared to collect rejection slips, but, as it turned out, he didn’t need patience. Greenwood Press in Westport, Connecticut, nibbled.

  On June 18, 1999, acquisitions editor Emily Michie Birch, with Greenwood’s School and Public Library Reference department, sent Stanko a letter thanking him for his proposal. Birch wrote that Greenwood was publishing a series of books for high school and public libraries about living in alternative environments—and his book might fit into that category nicely. Birch envisioned a book “suitable for high school students” (and she used that phrase), but still real. She also wanted a section for friends and family members with loved ones in prison, explaining how to relate to them. She envisioned the prisoner paired up with a university-affiliated scholar so that it would have the equal academic weight of the other books in the series. Birch told him a college-connected psychologist or a sociologist would be best—although if he had a working relationship with a psychologist, that would be fine, too, regardless if he or she were a college professor.

  She didn’t say anything about supplying him with an egghead coauthor, so he had to find his own. By August, Stanko had gotten nowhere. If Stanko couldn’t find someone, she might suggest a name. She thought it might be a welcome addition to the manuscript to get some feedback from politicians and corrections officers.

  Thus, during the autumn of 1999, Stanko sent the table of contents for his manuscript to the criminal justice department at the University of South Carolina, the largest CJ program in the state.

  Stanko’s package ended up on the desk of Dr. Reid H. Montgomery Jr., a professor there. Montgomery opened the package—a book proposal from a prisoner, you didn’t see that every day—and began to read.

  Although the grapevine was secret, Liz McLendon had a contact who knew something about Stephen Stanko’s behavior in prison. Liz learned that Stephen was telling people that he was a lawyer and that he was inside on bum charges, some bogus white-collar crap, exacerbated by his nagging wife’s accusations.

  Wife? Liz thought, her hands balling into fists. Her role in the drama, the murder victim who refused to die, had been reduced in Stephen’s telling to that of a nagging wife who was way too quick to get bent out of shape.

  Even years later, she would anger at the memory. She managed to get past a lot of the things he’d done to her, but tell the world they were married, that irked her.

  In addition to that anxiety, Liz had to deal with her fears that, despite Stephen’s incarceration, he would find a way to harm her. As if to reinforce her terror, Stanko gave out Liz’s phone number to other inmates and the family of other inmates. She remembered this as a scary time.

  Reading the book proposal, Dr. Reid Montgomery found that the first paragraph on page one was a two-word glossary of “unfamiliar terms.” The first word was “heart,” which in prison meant the ability to stand up to others, not to squeal, and to take punishment stoically. The second word was “suitcase,” which referred to the inside of an inmate’s rectum, in which drugs were smuggled.

  The TOC gave a one-paragraph summary of each of the fifty chapters, beginning with “Reception and Evaluation” and ending with “The Convict Enigma,” in which Stanko talked about the fact that many ex-cons suffer from post-traumatic stress, making it difficult to reclaim a “life once held.”

  The document concluded with a two-paragraph “About the Author,” in which Stephen Stanko described himself as a former honor student, former chemical representative and salesman who had spent forty-three months (1,309 days) inside, “journaling every event.” He had 2,600 pages written.

  Dr. Montgomery was intrigued by what he read—but too busy to coauthor the book himself. He recommended Stanko try Dr. Michael C. “Mickey” Braswell, professor emeritus in the Department of Justice and Criminology at East Tennessee State University (ETSU), who’d been Montgomery’s collaborator on a book called Prison Violence in America, published in 1994. Dr. Braswell was also a book editor and knew how to doctor a manuscript from pedestrian to exceptional.

  On November 1, 1999, Stanko wrote Dr. Braswell a letter from Turbeville prison to the professor’s post office box at ETSU. Stanko apologized for the handwriting, explaining that his typewriter had been “lost” during a recent institutional transfer. He referenced Dr. Montgomery and explained that the book was “tentatively accepted” by Greenwood Press. He gave Braswell the name of the acquisitions editor at Greenwood with whom he’d been dealing. She said they would want a book between 90,000 and 110,000 words in length,
and he was busy whittling it down to that size. This is my invitation to you to co-author the completed manuscript, Stanko wrote.

  He enclosed a copy of his manuscript’s table of contents with the letter, plus a blank “Request for Visitation” form. If Braswell was unable to accept, Stanko asked that he forward the message to any university affiliated scholars who may find interest.

  Braswell turned out to be too busy, too (although he did end up writing the foreword to the book’s final version). The timing was bad. He was already working on a couple of books.

  He did, however, talk to Stanko on the phone several times and found him “obviously bright, energetic—and somewhat grandiose and manipulative.”

  During one phone conversation, Stanko expressed loneliness, feelings of being adrift without an anchor, of being disenfranchised. His family, he said, had disowned him. Braswell listened to Stanko from a psychology POV and did some on-the-spot analysis.

  “I noticed that there was anger in his voice when he talked about his father, or anything to do with his father. There was a resentment,” Braswell said. “My advice to him was that he was going to have to work through that. Anger wasn’t going to get him anywhere.”

  Even during those few phone conversations, Braswell had pegged Stanko as a man suffering from an antisocial disorder. And Braswell knew what he was talking about. He had observed more than his share of antisocial personalities in his day, having for several years been a prison psychologist for Georgia Corrections. He worked at the Georgia Diagnostic and Classification Center (GDCC). All adult males entering the corrections system passed through the GDCC and had their mental health poked, prodded, and evaluated. The GDCC had a permanent prisoner population of a couple hundred as well, head cases who checked in for their psychological exam and never checked out. Braswell knew antisocial.

  “Antisocials often don’t have the capacity for intimacy but they are really good at pretending to be whatever you want them to be. Antisocials—psychopaths, sociopaths—are consummate actors. They are both charming and cruel,” Braswell said.

  Charming to get what they want. Cruel for fun. As long as they felt they might get their way, they would do any dance you wanted them to do. They were big into flattery. They would tell you that you weren’t like the others, you understood them better.

  “They are chameleon-like. It probably has something to do with how they were raised.” Braswell felt that in many cases, antisocials have had something happen to them in childhood, an inconsistency, perhaps, that caused their psyche to be stunted in this way.

  “People like to say it’s brain chemistry and anomalies, and it can be,” Braswell said. “But I have a feeling that at least as often as not that chemistry is a reaction to environmental factors.”

  Antisocials excelled when their lives were thoroughly structured, such as would occur in an institution. Braswell’s experiences as a prison psychologist were that antisocials needed an inflexible list of things they could and couldn’t do.

  During his phone conversations with Stanko, the psychologist tried a couple of linguistic tricks to gauge his reactions. Interpersonally, Braswell found Stanko to be shrewd.

  “Unfortunately, antisocials tend to be above average in intelligence,” Dr. Braswell said. If you tried to disagree with Stanko, he would change his opinion, always reenforcing, never conflicting. He was never simply enjoying interaction with another person; he was always manipulating.

  “And traditionally antisocials are not dangerous,” Braswell concluded, “unless you put them in a corner. If you put them in a position where they aren’t in control, can’t talk their way out, in which they have no room to maneuver, then there might be unexpected violence.”

  The psychologist had never looked at Stanko’s medical records and he had never given him a thorough examination, things that would be necessary to make an official diagnosis. So Braswell didn’t know if being antisocial was all that Stanko was, but it almost certainly was a part of what he was.

  Braswell recalled that Stanko wasn’t happy with the sluggish pace and seemed very anxious to get the literary show on the road. Stanko, Braswell thought, had a grandiose perception of his connection with the editor at Greenwood. Braswell doubted that she was focusing on Stanko and his problems quite as much as he thought she was. Everything he said was tinged with a strain of grandiosity, but it was most noticeable when Stanko talked about himself as a literary “playa.” He easily leapt ahead of himself, already thinking about a tour of speaking engagements after the book was published.

  As Dr. Braswell remembered it, Stanko underplayed the violence of his kidnapping charge. Braswell assumed, however, that the violence was there. Stanko wouldn’t have been given such a lengthy sentence if there hadn’t been more violence than Stanko was fessing up to.

  Dr. Michael Braswell called Dr. Gordon Crews, an associate professor in Washburn University’s CJ department—and Dr. Crews said sure, he’d love to do a prison book with a literate prisoner.

  “Apparently, I was the only one who had time,” Crews recalled more than a decade later. He added with a chuckle: “Everybody else was too lazy.”

  Braswell told Crews that the idea had already crossed Reid Montgomery’s desk, and Montgomery had given it an enthusiastic thumbs-up. Crews knew Montgomery well. He’d been Crews’s teacher and mentor in college.

  “I had a couple of books out at that time,” he said. One was called The Evolution of School Disturbance in America: Colonial Times to Modern Day. “I was looking for something to write,” Crews added. Crews sent Stanko one of his books, so Stanko would have an example of his work.

  Not only wasn’t Crews too busy, the Stanko project nicely filled a niche in his schedule.

  Gordon Crews and Stephen Stanko talked about the crimes that had landed him in prison. Stanko freely admitted to flimflamming, and begrudgingly admitted that he had to get a little rough with his woman at one point because he was trying to pack and leave—and she was all in his face.

  The professor made an effort to verify Stanko’s criminal history. Crews used to work at the South Carolina Department of Corrections; so when he and Stanko first got hooked up, Crews contacted “all the buddies” inside the system looking for off-the-record info on Stanko. The list of convictions matched the list Stanko had given. The kidnapping charge was alarming, but Stanko had explained that. No one got hurt.

  “I learned he was a model prisoner, who never caused any problems,” Crews recalled. Stanko had no disciplinary record, which was why he was later released a year and a half early.

  When Crews didn’t immediately find evidence that Stanko was lying to him, he stopped his informal investigation. Like so many others who encountered the killer chameleon who was Stephen Stanko, Crews took him at face value.

  “It’s human nature,” Crews said. “Good-looking guy, big ol’ guy. Very smart.” People don’t think the worst of others. No one meets a charming person and asks themselves, Gee, I wonder if this guy is a sociopath.

  Looking back, Crews could see how adept Stanko was at social manipulation, how his every word geared toward supporting his mark’s preconceived notions. No mention of Clorox or asphyxiation, that was for sure. He said Elizabeth was trying to block him. He feared he would be arrested if he didn’t split quick. He “overreacted.” For a brief time, he tied her to a chair, but he untied her before he left! He only detained her until he could get his clothes packed and get out.

  Crews had been naïve. Maybe Crews trusted him because Stanko was from the South. Maybe it was because Stanko was good at what he did. Crews, highly impressed with Stanko’s ability to deceive, referred to it as an “art.”

  Stanko did his homework. “He talked to Braswell a little bit about me. He talked to Montgomery about me.” By the time Stanko talked to Crews, he knew just where to place the compliments.

  Crews said, “The way he approached me, ‘Hey, Gordon, I’m like you, a young writer. The only difference between us is I’m on the other side
of the tracks. If it wasn’t for a couple of bad breaks, I’d be right with you. I would have gone on to college and become a writer. But, instead, because of the unfairness of the prison system I’m being victimized in prison.’”

  This was playing right into Crews’s sympathies. The scholar was, and had been for years, an advocate for inmates. Crews had seen in person how horribly inmates were treated.

  “Even just over the phone, he could peg me,” Crews recalled. He knew that his story would wrench sympathy from Crews. His story of being a white-collar criminal seemed designed for Crews—how he was forced to share a cell with hard-core, violent criminals; to use the toilet in front of three violent criminals, who stood there looking at him. That would be intimidating for anyone. Well, it just went to show how messed up the corrections system was. “Imagine the world from my POV,” Stanko said. “I’m an educated, upwardly mobile guy who is now serving a long prison sentence in Lowcountry, South Carolina, because my stupid girlfriend got in my way. Look what I’m going through.”

  Crews found Stanko fascinating. The image of Stanko on the toilet as the three black men, hard-core criminals, as Stanko described them, gave Crews the chills. It was the sort of thing people didn’t normally think about.

  Not all of Stanko’s complaints impressed Crews. Crews had worked with the corrections system and knew that a lot of things that Stanko took personal offense to were standard operating procedure.

  Everything out of Stanko’s mouth was about Stanko. There was no subject that wasn’t first painted with a thick coat of the sociopath’s narcissism.

  Gordon Crews remembered the first version of the manuscript that Stephen Stanko sent him: “His chapters were kind of like Stephen King chapters—three pages or so.” Still, he was struck by the coherence of Stanko’s argument against the current penal system. It was Stanko’s contention that prison created more violent criminals than it reformed. He noted that nonviolent criminals were given long stretches behind bars, where they had no choice but to learn how to be violent, thus making them more likely to hurt someone once they got out.