Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  Crews applied for visitation rights with the prisoner and was turned down—although he was granted telephone rights. It was during this time that Crews realized that South Carolina Corrections was not going to be helpful when it came to Stanko’s book.

  Just because Stanko was not a disciplinary problem in prison didn’t mean he wasn’t a pain in the ass. The system hated an intelligent and articulate prisoner.

  Stanko saw himself as better than the corrections system. He observed his surroundings with thick condescension. And when dealing with prison employees—the very people who had power over him—he couldn’t help but allow his condescension to show, to push at the boundaries whenever he could.

  I am special was what Stanko was saying, and he felt he deserved to be treated special as well. And why not? The smallest schoolchild could see he didn’t belong there.

  Intelligent prisoners noticed what was being done to them. Many prisoners lived hellish existences on the outside, and came to feel they were treated better inside than outside. Go ahead and beat me, they say, it’s better than what I was going through as a free man.

  The educated ones, on the other hand, say, This ain’t cool. They can’t do this to us.

  Plus, educated and articulate prisoners knew how to make complaints in such a way that they commanded a response. Stephen Stanko, a bit of a jailhouse lawyer, researched his rights and called out the system whenever one of those rights was denied.

  “He filed many injunctions and complaints and lawsuits against them over the years,” Dr. Crews remembered. “Grievance after grievance after grievance was filed with the South Carolina Department of Corrections—so naturally, they labeled him a troublemaker.”

  In 2000, records show, he sued the South Carolina Department of Corrections and won. The suit involved work time lost, and he was awarded by the court the grand sum of $5.69.

  In 2001, he sued the SCDC again, claiming that instead of being in minimum custody, he deserved to be in minimum out restricted (MOR) custody. This time, he lost. The case lingered in the courts for a while, but on March 31, 2003, administrative law judge Ralph King Anderson III ruled that MOR custody was not appropriate because Stephen Stanko was a kidnapper.

  Prison officials had had it up to here with Stanko. He was aggravating to the nth degree. Then came the final straw: they found out he was writing a book.

  Stanko made the mistake of mentioning his literary efforts during one of his prison interviews. Stanko said he was writing a book about them and what a shitty prison system they ran, about all the evils they’d done to inmates.

  Oh, you think so?was their response. The prison fought back.

  “They cut him off at the ankles every chance they could,” Crews recalled. “They shut him down at that point.”

  First they took away Stanko’s computer privileges. He had to smuggle his writing out, passing his mother pages when she came to visit. She would later send the stuff to Dr. Crews. Then they took away his paper and pencil.

  By that time, Dr. Crews had all the manuscript he needed to fashion a winner. He never was granted visitation rights.

  At one time, Stanko had been granted phone visitation rights from a list of thirteen people. These were mother Joan, all three surviving siblings—brother Jeff, sisters Peggy and Cynthia—friends Bob McMurray, Bill Kupter, and Pattie Perkins, literary collaborators Braswell and Crews, and his editor at Greenwood Press, Emily Birch. Also on the list were three lawyers, Harry L. Devoe, Wesley Locklear, and John Shupper.

  Devoe was a Clarendon County lawyer who represented Stanko during a postconviction relief hearing. It was through Devoe’s efforts that Stanko’s name was not placed on the state’s sex offender registry, an addition that was normally routine for those convicted of kidnapping.

  By the time Stanko was released from prison, the phone rights of everyone but the three lawyers had been revoked. Even Stanko’s mother was no longer allowed to call him.

  Crews negotiated a contract for himself and Stanko with the Greenwood publishers. He began to edit Stanko’s manuscript and write his own portion of the book.

  Along with the theme that corrections were being handled all wrong, Crews noted that there was a “never again” motif to Stanko’s writing. He vowed that he would never go back to prison. That could mean one of two things: he intended to go straight, or he would take his own life before returning to prison.

  From 2000 to 2002, Stephen Stanko and Gordon Crews worked on the book together, communicating only by phone. They finished their masterwork and submitted it to Greenwood.

  It was quickly rejected. It bounced back.

  “Not appropriate for high-school students,” the publisher said.

  Crews almost blew a gasket. Today, he has smoothed out, but acknowledged that Stanko had the misfortune of attracting an editor at Greenwood who was determined to make a square peg fit a round hole, no matter what damage she had to do to the peg. She had written in her very first letter to Stanko that she wanted the book to be part of a series she was putting together for high-school students. That caveat to the contract, however, was soon forgotten.

  “I didn’t pay any attention to that for five years, you know?” Crews said.

  Now the manuscript was being rejected because it was too adult. Crews thought that was the point. This was a Scared Straight scenario. Telling the truth to high-school students about life inside prison could only be a good thing, right? The word “appropriate” wasn’t appropriate.

  Crews burned a bridge or two, and was removed by the publisher from the project. Greenwood replaced Crews with Dr. Wayne Gillespie, an assistant professor of criminology at East Tennessee State University.

  Gillespie cut out about 90 percent of what Crews had written, cut back Stanko’s section to about one hundred pages—and he wrote the rest of the book himself.

  It was finally published, a slender hardcover, in 2004, with the title Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an Insider’s View. The book had three authors listed on the cover: Stanko, Gillespie, and Crews. They had to give Crews credit because they were still using a couple of chapters he’d written. The book came out two months before Stanko’s release.

  Crews talked to Stanko about the book. Crews said that he didn’t like it. Stanko said he didn’t like it, either—but he couldn’t help but be excited about being published.

  In his book, Stanko wrote he had two concerns regarding his return to society: one, that he would carry an ex-con stigma wherever he went, and two, that he would bring some of the hell of prison with him when he returned to the outside.

  Dr. Gillespie would later say that Stanko’s coauthors were unaware of the details of the crimes that had Stanko living in prison. They had asked him what he had done, and had taken his word when he told them.

  “He was very selective in the information he revealed to me,” Gillespie recalled. “He presented it as a domestic situation—nothing hard-core. He kind of said they were having problems because of problems at work. He was general in his description, and that is why I was led to believe his main crimes were fraud and breach of trust.”

  “I never knew—none of his collaborators knew—the details of his past. How could we be so stupid?” Crews wondered.

  To write the book’s foreword, the publisher brought back Dr. Michael Braswell, who’d originally turned down an offer to coauthor.

  Braswell taught courses emphasizing peacemaking, social justice, and restorative justice. He believed in giving criminals and their victims opportunities to interact: criminals could accept responsibility for the damage they’d done, and victims could regain emotional wholeness. Braswell’s courses included: Ethics and Social Justice, Themes of Justice (a film course), Human Relations and Criminal Justice, and Peacemaking Practicum. He was a former prison psychologist, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and a college teacher for fifteen years. It was Braswell’s goal to improve the relationship between personal and institutional transformation i
n ways that would tend to create a more compassionate community and criminal justice process. He was strongly opposed to the death penalty—a problem solver based on fear, greed, cynicism, and an overreliance on the notion of punishment. The college professor taught humility, compassion, and service—what he called a “commitment to the possibility of forgiveness and restoration.”

  Pragmatists thought Braswell viewed the world through rose-colored lenses, and his daydreams, though interesting to contemplate, lacked relevance in the real world.

  Braswell’s foreword to Stanko’s book contained spooky harbingers, right from the first paragraph, invoking as it did the name of Jack Henry Abbott, another inmate/author who proved there is no relationship between writing ability and criminal rehabilitation. At least, sometimes—even sociopaths can write.

  Abbott was a career criminal who, after learning that Norman Mailer was writing a book about the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore, became pen pals with the author. Mailer slobbered over Abbott’s letters—they were “intense, direct, unadorned, detached, and unforgettable”—that he had them forged into a book called In the Belly of the Beast. Mailer didn’t stop there. Calling Abbott “intellectual, radical, and a potential leader,” the author campaigned for the prisoner’s parole. Asked if it wasn’t risky to put a guy like him back on the streets, Mailer would say that “culture is worth a little risk.” Abbott’s freedom lasted only six weeks, ending when he stabbed a restaurant employee to death for denying him access to an employees-only men’s room. In retrospect, Abbott’s book should have been called In the Belly of Anyone Who Annoys Me.

  “I think Abbott ended up scaring Mailer before it was over,” Braswell opined. He said that Abbott’s behavior after release, as well as Stanko’s, illustrated one of his corrections-reform power points. The brainwashing prisoners received in the system served them counterproductively when they tried to reenter society. Simple as that.

  While Stephen Stanko was still in prison, Liz heard he had a book in the works that was to be published. She felt her blood pressure skyrocket. And that was before she read it. Reading the damn book, months later, infuriated her.

  In the book, Stanko referred to Liz as his “spouse.” It made the steam come out of her ears. True, he didn’t use her name, but to try to make people think his attack on her was just a marital squabble was unconscionable.

  Stanko was released to community supervision in July 2004, a two-year program, squinting into the sun and relying on the kindness of Hummer, the mother of his fellow inmate whom he’d befriended. Only days later, Liz was notified by a victim’s advocate group, whose job it was to keep potential future victims aware and up to date, that Stephen was a free man. After that, though, Liz was in the dark. She later said she had no knowledge of where Stephen was staying or what he was doing following his release from prison.

  “And I didn’t want to know,” she said. Although she did suppose he might be staying with his parents; in which case, they were on opposite sides of Goose Creek and not likely to run into one another.

  During those early days of new freedom, Stephen Stanko made no attempt to contact Liz McLendon. He did receive periodic phone calls from his original coauthor, Gordon Crews, who was urging him to rewrite his original prison manuscript—the one that was inappropriate for high-school kids—and send him the stuff.

  Stanko said he was planning on writing again, and he would send Crews the pages when he was done, but he didn’t want to write about prison anymore. By that time, Crews had relocated to Rhode Island. He and Stanko never did meet in person.

  “I was up the Coast, and I never found time. I never pushed myself to go see him,” Crews admitted.

  They talked on the phone. During one phone call, Stanko told Crews that he was working on something. He was doing a lot of research in a library he frequented. He said he was being helped by a pretty librarian and a friendly old man he’d met.

  Crews encouraged Stanko to keep it up, to continue going to the local library. Knowing what he knew now, remembering that encouragement made him feel, as he put it, “sick to my bones.”

  But Stanko’s creativity was never the main thrust of the conversation. Mostly, he whined about how hard it was for ex-cons to assimilate into free society.

  Stanko had a list of complaints. Couldn’t keep a job, couldn’t whatever. Folks discovered he was a convicted felon and he got the stink eye everywhere.

  The tone of the conversation was perfectly in keeping with their relationship over the years. Stanko complained and Crews listened. Stanko still knew how to push Crews’s buttons. Crews had dedicated years of work into researching the problems inmates had reentering society, so the ex-con had his coauthor hanging on every word.

  Crews responded to Stanko’s complaints with a “good-ol’-criminal-justice-faculty-type” condolence: “It sucks,” Crews told him. “Do the best you can.”

  Crews recalled Stanko’s “perfection.” No one would have figured him out. “You can tell by his writing how articulate and smart he is.”

  During this same period, as Stanko struggled with reentry, he also called his foreword-writer, Dr. Michael Braswell. Stanko, Braswell recalled, was in some sort of financial straits, his demeanor different from when he was in prison. Now living a life without institutional structure, Stanko’s grandiosity got the best of him. He couldn’t tell the truth, when it felt better to brag. Braswell picked up on the hustling-and-hectoring nature of Stanko’s phone pitch. He no longer sounded like a new kind of journalist. More like a fast-talking salesman. “He sounded like the kind of guy who could sell anything,” Braswell remembered.

  In the days after the Laura Ling and Henry Lee Turner murders, there were calls on the radio and TV for those who had encountered Stephen Stanko to come forward and tell the county solicitor what they knew.

  Among those who called was Kelly Crolley, whose family’s Owl-O-Rest Factory Outlet furniture store had been scammed out of $125 by Stanko posing as a charity fund-raiser.

  Crolley came in for an interview and was questioned by Fifteenth Judicial Circuit deputy solicitor Fran Humphries, who could tell that Crolley was going to make a great witness, communicating for the court just how despicable Stephen Stanko could be even when he wasn’t on a spree of violence.

  On that Masters weekend—while Stephen Stanko was still running free, simultaneously fleeing from the law and enjoying happy hour—the U.S. Marshals were trying to predict what his next move might be. After all, Stanko was on a spree. As the killer haunted taverns and saloons in search of fresh marks, fresh victims, law enforcement was elsewhere providing protection and setting up surveillance around people they considered likely future targets. One of those possible targets was Gordon Crews, who worked at Roger Williams University in Rhode Island at that time. The first Crews heard of Stanko’s new violence was when a local reporter chased him down and asked him for a comment. U.S. Marshals showed up at his house and took Crews and his family into protective custody. The university closed for two days, such was the fear that Stanko was heading toward their campus to kill Crews. Two of Crews’s colleagues, with whom he’d had squabbles, complained to the university that Crews might have hired Stanko to kill them. “I love academics,” Crews later said with a laugh.

  It was funny in a way, looking back: As the Crews family was being locked up in Rhode Island, Stanko was in Georgia knocking back shots of tequila with great ceremony and laughter. Crews recalled the total craziness. America’s Most Wanted came to his house!

  All that publicity was having a positive effect on book sales. There was a rush to buy Living in Prison. There were copies on eBay selling for $250. Crews’s personal copy was seized by a U.S. Marshal. In the weeks that followed, libraries in South Carolina reported that copies of the book were being checked out but not returned.

  Crews said he was available to do TV, as long as he had an opportunity to plug the book. He was on Good Morning America, and appeared with Nancy Grace, Anderson Cooper, and Gret
a Van Susteren on their shows.

  One of the people police most wanted to talk to was Liz McLendon. Police feared that Stephen Stanko might consider his attack on Liz as an incomplete murder, something unfinished in his life. Police tried to extract from Liz info that would help them catch the guy. She said that she’d learned that Stanko was a wanted man, again, when her next-door neighbor, Natalie Crenshaw, who knew Stanko well, had called her and said it was on the news.

  All of that time trying to push Stanko out of her brain and in one instant he was baaa-aack. Liz’s fear and anxiety were back as well. Damn him, she thought. Liz had spent years, nine years or something, trying to forget Stanko, and she’d done a pretty good job of it. Now that it was all relevant again, she found memories were not returning as coherently as police would have liked.

  They asked questions for which she didn’t have good answers. Why had she helped him even after he was arrested? She tried to explain that she was more fiercely loyal than she was suspicious—until the nightmare struck like a two-by-four in the forehead. It was so painful that she tried to forget.

  They would ask her how she could not know, and she had no explanation. Liz came out of the interrogation with increased sympathies for all victims, for everyone who had ever fallen into a sociopath’s web of seduction and deceit.

  She told the cops that she believed him because he believed himself. He had himself convinced that his lies were true, and that was how convincing he was.