Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  “Unless you have lived it, you can’t fully understand how it happens,” she explained. If you confronted Stephen about his “truths,” he would become adamant. His reality was complicated enough, and others were not to poke at it.

  On April 12, 2006, the first anniversary of Stanko’s arrest in the Augusta Exchange parking lot, Stanko was still sitting in his Georgetown County Detention Center jail cell, awaiting trial, which was scheduled to begin that summer.

  To commemorate the anniversary, one newspaper ran a feature article regarding the case. A reporter asked Gregory Hembree if he planned to seek the death penalty. Hembree said he was, but when asked why, he zipped his lips.

  “It’s too serious a case for me to be playing fast and loose,” Hembree said.

  Richmond County sheriff Ronnie Strength said that while it was true that his men had made the arrest in the Augusta Exchange parking lot, it was really Dana Putnam who was the hero.

  “Without her, we may not have taken him into custody here,” the sheriff said.

  HUMMER

  Not everyone was grinding their teeth at Stephen Stanko, eager to see him die. He didn’t have many friends, but they did exist. And one was Kate Bradley (pseudonym), who went by the nickname of Hummer. She met Stanko when he was doing his kidnapping time.

  Hummer’s son was in Stanko’s cell block on trumpedup “sex with a minor” charges. “My son went to prison for a crime he truly did not commit,” she said. Every lawyer she spoke to looked at the evidence and wondered aloud, “What is this kid doing in jail?”

  Stanko knew the system and helped Brian (pseudonym), her son, with the necessary paperwork that came when a prisoner attempted any legal maneuver. She and her son met Stanko while filling out legal forms. Stanko befriended the woman, and added Hummer to his phone visitation list.

  Because of her son’s experience, and the experiences of other ex-cons like Stanko, Hummer Bradley had become an advocate, and wanted everyone to know how screwed up the South Carolina justice system was.

  She began one interview with: “I’ll tell you, like I told the detective, Stephen Stanko never did anything wrong to me.” She still thought about Steve in such a positive way. “He never did anything bad to me or around me. What I’m aware of is the difficult time Steve had after he got out of prison, the things he went through. It was just horrendous.”

  South Carolina gave no help whatsoever to prisoners released back into the free world, no programs to help them adjust, nothing to prepare them to become part of the legitimate workforce—making their return to crime an inevitability.

  There was a time when released inmates received a new suit of clothes. But no more. Today, prisoners walked out of prison wearing the same outfit they were arrested in years before.

  If they didn’t have any family or a place to go, they might have to steal for their first meal, Hummer said. Even if they were lucky enough to get a job, and jobs were like miracles to ex-cons, they often didn’t have a vehicle to get to and from the job.

  Talking about Stanko, she said: “Due to the fact that he was just out of jail, no one would hire him. He tried every store within miles. Best Buy. Home Depot. Walmart. You name it.”

  The human resources departments at those stores weren’t evil or mean. There were a lot of bosses in a position to hire inmates who didn’t do it, not for philosophical reasons, but because their insurance companies balked.

  “There you go again with the insurance companies. They seem to rule the world,” Hummer opined. “When somebody finally did hire Steve, they didn’t give him a chance. I don’t know anybody who can get a new job in a new field and produce out of the gate. It takes months.”

  People talked about Stanko being a con man. That burned Hummer up. No one talked about the job applications, the steady stream of applications that Stanko wrote. He was always honest about his past, and everyone took a pass.

  The prison was at fault. It was just a cage. It ruined men. Unless you were trying to pass your high-school equivalency test, there was no teaching. And they were released with no money. “Zero!” Hummer exclaimed. “Bus money, that’s it. In the name of heaven!” She urged everyone to picture themselves in that situation—released into a new world, broke. It was not fair. These men almost immediately became desperate and did desperate things.

  As Hummer put it, “They resort to whatever.”

  She didn’t think they wanted to go back to prison; it wasn’t a matter of being institutionalized and ill-prepared to deal with freedom of choice. They liked their freedom, the same as everyone else. They resorted to crime because they were penniless.

  “What are they supposed to do, look for change on the street?” she asked.

  Hummer was lucky enough to help some ex-inmates. She had a small business and hired ex-cons to work for her. She wished she could give more of them an opportunity, but her business wasn’t that big.

  She said she might be in the market for a ghost writer to help her produce the book she envisioned, ripping the lid off the screwed-up South Carolina justice system.

  She said the system worked on a simple premise: “If you don’t have money, you’re going to jail. Innocent or guilty, you are in jail. If you have money, you could get out. Am I bitter about it? You bet.”

  Her son was accused of stopping off on his way home from taking a test at college and having sex with a minor. It was ridiculous. There was not a shred of evidence against him—but it didn’t matter.

  She had an investigator tell her that to get from his school to the scene of the crime to fit the prosecution’s timeline, he would have needed a helicopter. But the price tag was $250,000. Come up with the money and Brian walks; don’t and he’s going away. Truth meant nothing. And when they get out, they might do okay for a brief period; then a lot of them started doing drugs and drinking. She really wished she could have done what she had to do, come up with the quarter million, and kept her son free. If she had known what her son was going to have to go through, she would have raised the money. It wasn’t like she didn’t spend money on the case. She emptied the kitty, again and again, for lawyers, none of whom did her son any good, and one who retired from his practice because he was fed up with the corruption.

  “You’re dealing with the South here,” Hummer explained. “It’s like a Third World War.”

  Getting back to Steve, if he couldn’t get a job after eight and a half years behind bars, who could?

  “He was an extremely educated person. He’s a genius, I can tell you that much,” Hummer said. She remembered him having some official title that allowed him, at first, to have visitation rights with other prisoners and their families, to help them fill out forms.

  In light of the most recent allegations, Hummer said she was still shocked. She never considered Stanko capable of doing anything violent. It was a double shock because she’d gotten to know Laura Ling and her beautiful daughter through Steve, and they were very nice people.

  “He had such a mellow disposition,” she explained. “Very laid-back. When he got out of prison, I had him laughing a lot. He definitely did not have the makeup of a murderer.”

  There was only one explanation: “He just snapped.” He was like a pressure cooker. Laura wanted him to get a job. She was tired of supporting him. “But she was asking him to do the impossible,” Hummer explained.

  She said too many people—and by that, she meant writers—were portraying Stephen Stanko in a bad way, which only went to show they didn’t really know him.

  It was part of the Stanko legend at this point, for example, that his flimflam behavior included pretending he was a lawyer. Not so, Hummer said. He was as smart as a lawyer; and he knew how to do some of the things that lawyers do, because he was so smart. He assisted people in the law, but she never heard him claim he was a lawyer. She did hear him say that he had a lawyer who could help push the paperwork through, and though she couldn’t recall his name, she believed the lawyer to be real. “I heard him on the telephon
e a few times with that attorney,” Hummer recalled.

  Like just about everyone who knew Stanko, Hummer didn’t know much about Stanko’s family. She knew his father would have nothing to do with him. His mother was still receptive to him, and he was in touch with one sister, Peggy, in California, but that was it.

  Hummer remembered one time she drove Steve back home to Goose Creek and she met Stanko’s mom. Stanko was there to pick up some stuff they’d kept in storage for him while he was away. Stanko’s mom gave him some pastries.

  Seemed like a long time ago now. Would she be attending the trial?

  “No, I couldn’t handle it,” Hummer Bradley said, with a shake of her head.

  THE PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATE

  During the run-up to Stephen Stanko’s trial for the murder of Laura Ling, there was much discussion about Stanko’s punishment, if found guilty. One such debate during the late summer of 2006 appeared in the Myrtle Beach Sun News as part of an ongoing series on criminal justice, responsibility, and the death penalty.

  It was a conversation between journalists Tom W. Clark, of the Center for Naturalism in Somerville, Massachusetts, and journalist Isaac Bailey, from South Carolina. The exchange was highly philosophical. Did evil exist? Did all humans have the capacity for self-control? Was there a third factor beyond heredity and environment? Something organic, perhaps. And what effect would the answers to those questions have on the judicial system?

  If a scientific explanation existed, and Clark obviously believed it did, all retributive punishment should be abolished. Obviously, that included the death penalty.

  Tom Clark said taxpayers’ money was better spent on reducing crime, healing communities and victims’ relatives, and lastly rehabilitating imprisoned criminals.

  Stanko lacked the capacity for self-control, Clark said. He didn’t deserve the death penalty because he was a product of his “environmental and genetic makeup.” Stanko could not be held accountable for the genetic factors he was born with, nor had he any control over his upbringing. It wasn’t his fault.

  Despite the fact that he felt Stanko bore no responsibility for his seemingly evil behavior, Clark did not think the prisoner was completely insane, either—not in the legal sense. Stanko knew what he did was wrong. Obviously, if a police officer had been in the room, he wouldn’t have committed those horrible crimes against the Lings, and he wouldn’t have shot Henry Lee Turner.

  His self-control existed, but it was compromised severely by both nature and nurture factors. His lack of self-control could be exacerbated. When combined with his other antisocial characteristics, bad things happened.

  Isaac Bailey responded that maybe it was harder for Stanko to control himself than it was for other people, but he could still do it. He can choose to resist, Bailey wrote, adding that he believed genetics and environment influenced behavior. He did not believe that genetics caused bad behavior.

  Clark said Bailey’s theory brought up an interesting circle of questions. If certain genetics and environment did not cause bad behavior, then what did? What made Stanko choose to act as he had acted? If there is evil, what caused it? Was it caused by genetics, environment, or something else?

  Summing up the South Carolina POV, Bailey said that because he believed Stanko could have prevented himself from raping and murdering, he chose not to. Because of that, he was a “self-made monster” and deserved the death penalty.

  Yes, Clark countered, but we can’t know that Stanko could have resisted his urge to rape and kill. And if—if—he had no choice, then it was immoral to execute him.

  Bailey asked what recommendations Clark had for the justice system given his opinion about killers like Stanko, probable sociopaths with neither conscience nor impulse control.

  Clark laid out a series of bullet points. One, keep Stanko the hell away from society. Two, in order to deter any possible future killers and rapists, Stanko should maintain his isolation from the general public for at least twenty years. Three, his time away should include classes to teach him social and job skills. Four, he should receive treatment for all physical and mental problems. Five, Stanko should be taught relentlessly of how much he hurt his victims’ families, and should be made to apologize and somehow make restitution. Six, after he had completed victim restitution and community restoration, and had fulfilled the terms of his sentence, he still should not be released back into society until it had been determined that he no longer presented a threat.

  Clark said the goal was to reduce crime. Public safety was the first concern. Public safety, in reality, he said, often became secondary to punitive concerns.

  The public liked harsh sentences. Many even liked the death penalty. And why? Because it felt good to get back at the bastards who did those horrible things.

  What sort of society do we want to be? Clark asked.

  In response to the Sun News article, Nils Rauhut, chairman of the Department of Religion and Philosophy at Coastal Carolina University, said that there could never be a clear-cut winner in the debate between Bailey and Clark. They were discussing things that were mysteries. How could we ever know how much differently we could act from the way we actually act? There is no test for that, and any attempt would spawn bad data warped by self-consciousness. We could never know how free we actually are, nor could we ever, with any accuracy, determine what degree of our activity was determined by past occurrences. Because of this, Rauhut concluded, we could never eliminate a system based on punishment.

  DEFENSE LAWYERS

  Because he had no money, Stephen Stanko was originally to be represented by public defender Reuben Goude, a former marine who earned his law degree at the University of South Carolina in 1979, and was admitted to the state’s bar that same year.

  Public defender in Georgetown County was a part-time position. In addition to his work for the South Carolina Commission on Indigent Defense, Goude also had a private practice, so he was a busy fellow.

  “At that time, I was appointed to all of the public defenders’ murder cases,” Goude later recalled. But not exclusively murder cases. A wide variety of criminals came his way as a public defender; while in his private practice, his specialties were real estate closings and title searches, personal injury, car wrecks, divorce, bankruptcy, adoption, and workers’ comp.

  But Goude remained Stanko’s lawyer for less than a year. The beginning of the end for their legal relationship came when the solicitor decided to go for the death penalty.

  In South Carolina, defendants in jeopardy of the death penalty were entitled to two lawyers to represent him, one of which, by law, had to be appointed from outside the public defenders’ pool.

  “Death penalty cases are extremely time-consuming for the lawyers,” Goude said. “If I had hung onto the case, I would have had very little time to do the two hundred other cases I had been assigned.” Plus, he would have gotten paid the same money for a lot more work.

  Goude noted that the whole process was made more efficient when death penalty specialists handled death penalty cases: “They are familiar with the procedures and the forms, and they have the routine down pat.”

  Two other lawyers volunteered to take on the case, and Goude volunteered to get off. Stanko was consulted and agreed to release Goude. And a judge made the switch official.

  So, during the autumn of 2005, Goude was released from the case and replaced by two private lawyers: the bespectacled and mustachioed William “Bill” Isaac Diggs, whose long gray hair was usually tied into a ponytail down his back, and Gerald Kelly, both of whom had death penalty experience.

  Bill Diggs was born June 8, 1950. He’d earned his B.A. in poli-sci at the University of North Carolina at Charlotte in 1977, and his J.D. at the University of South Carolina School of Law at Columbia. He’d been a lawyer since 1980.

  From 1984 through 1989, he was the chief attorney of the South Carolina Office of Appellate Defense. During that stretch, he defended a thousand clients at postconviction and appellate hearings. Over
the years, he’d served on several committees, helping draft South Carolina’s current rules of appellate procedure. He had been approved by the U.S. District Court to be the appointed defense counsel in South Carolina’s capital murder cases.

  Diggs knew the answer to why Stephen Stanko had done what he did was locked up inside his client’s head. He decided to use whatever means he could find to “look inside” Stanko’s brain in search of an explanation for what had happened. He searched the country and came up with a team of experts that could show a jury, with evidence they could see, why Stanko did the things he did, and why it would be wrong to punish him for those actions.

  On May 18, 2006, at Diggs’s request, Stanko was transported to the University of South Carolina Medical Center where, at about noon and under heavy guard, state-of-the-art 3-D color photos were taken of the inside of his brain.

  In addition, Diggs had shrinks poke at Stanko’s psyche. Not everything that came out pleased his defense as a mitigating factor. Some of Stanko’s statements merely underlined his despicable nature. At one point, Stanko told a psychiatrist that he hadn’t raped Penny. The sex had been consensual. In fact, it was Penny’s threat to tell her mother about their affair that started the trouble that night.

  For most of the twentieth century, South Carolina law was simple. A prisoner could be executed for murder, rape, and kidnapping—but only in cases where there was no legitimate argument for mercy.

  The determination of punishment was in the hands of the judge and the jury. No one else had any say-so. That was the way it was until 1972, when the U.S. Supreme Court declared those rules, in effect, unconstitutional.

  In 1976, South Carolina law was changed to make the death penalty mandatory in some cases. This law didn’t fly, as judges repeatedly ruled that there had to be a process of mitigation and aggravation before a prisoner was condemned to die.