Dr. Kim Collins, pathologist at the Medical University of South Carolina in Charleston, testified that she was a professor of pathology at that school, and that hospital’s director of the autopsy section. She said she’d earned her medical degree at the Medical College of Georgia School of Medicine in Augusta, and completed her residencies in forensic pathology at the North Carolina Baptist Hospital and the Bowman Gray School of Medicine at Wake Forest. Another noteworthy item on her résumé was that she was coauthor of a book called Forensic Medicine, an illustrated text that has been called the “atlas of forensic medicine.” She said that her clinical expertise was in general forensic pathology, sexual assault, child abuse, and elder care. She testified regarding the autopsy of Laura Ling.
Dr. Collins brought a large board upon which two diagrams of Laura Ling’s body had been drawn, front and back. On those drawn figures, the pathologist had marked every injury the victim received during the attack.
Every bruise, each cut and gash and gouge. Even wounds inside the victim’s mouth were marked and labeled. With a pointer in her right hand and her written report in her left, she itemized those wounds for the jury.
There were contusions on the back of the left thigh, on both buttocks, ligature marks on the wrists, bruises on the arms, abdomen, and uppermost thigh, severe face trauma, etc.
“See how the necktie is tightly wrapped around both wrists before the wrists were tied together,” she said.
Lucky for Liz Buckner, she was one of the first to testify. “It will be good to get it over with,” she remembered thinking. For the occasion, she wore a light blue collared blouse under a black-and-white–patterned jacket.
She testified that she met Stephen Stanko in 1992. They met at work, a telecommunications job. They became boyfriend and girlfriend, and for a long time things were good, and they cohabitated in Berkeley County, South Carolina. Then there were difficulties. Cause? Stanko was a con man, not the man he was claiming to be.
“I was becoming increasingly upset with Stephen,” she testified, “because I felt I wasn’t getting the whole truth. Some things were beginning to take place that I did not like.”
Borrowing money. Starting phony businesses with a neighbor. Pocketing all the money. She discovered he’d been fired from his job and they had a row, started out as an argument but escalated into pushing and shoving. She told him to leave and he said he would. She saw him pull out a suitcase and start to throw stuff in it. She went to bed and cried herself to sleep.
“What, if anything, happened when you woke up?”
“When I woke up, he was standing at the foot of my bed—and he had a horrible look on his face. I asked him what he was doing and he said he was getting ready to leave. I asked him, ‘What is that that I smell? What are you doing? Are you cleaning the house?’ And, at that moment, he jumped over me with the cloth that was drenched in Clorox-409 mixture. He proceeded to try to suffocate me. He flipped me on my stomach and he put the pillow over my head.”
During much of Liz’s testimony, Stanko kept his eyes down, on the table in front of him. But during this part, he flashed her a quick glare, as if silently accusing her of lying. After a few seconds, he gave it up and lowered his eyes again.
“What were you thinking as he did this?” Hembree asked.
“I thought he was going to kill me. I thought I was going to die.”
Liz told the jury how Stanko held the cloth tightly over her face. But, as was frequently true of first-time asphyxiators, he underestimated the required time and energy to kill someone in that manner.
“What happened next?”
“He actually did say, ‘This isn’t working. It worked in the movie.’”
“Did that statement have a meaning to you?”
“I took it to mean that he’d seen a movie in which someone was killed that way, but it didn’t work in real life, so he was going to have to think of another way to kill me.”
“What, if anything, did he do next?”
Liz’s voice, urgent but unemotional up till this point, began to crack. She pulled out a tissue and prepared for the impending tears.
“The instant he stopped trying to kill me, he reverted back to his normal personality. He began to talk to me like nothing had happened. He took a couple of neckties and tied me up.”
“Neckties?”
“Yes.”
The jurors had just seen a photo of the neckties that bound Laura Ling’s wrists, so they were familiar with what that looked like.
“What did you do?”
“I was screaming for him to get away from me, and I was praying that he would leave. I told him, if he just left, I would never say anything to anybody about this.”
Dabbing at her eyes with the tissue, she described how he carried her, now bound and gagged, into the bathroom and sat her on the toilet while he took a steamy shower.
“I could hear him humming in the shower, humming and murmuring, like he was happy and he didn’t have a care in the world, like it was just another normal day.”
When he got out of the shower, Liz testified, he left her tied up in the living room. He kissed her on the head and left. Later, she heard he had been arrested.
Liz Buckner was cross-examined by the defense’s second chair, Gerald Kelly, who wasn’t afraid to butt heads with the witness, despite her victim status—a very risky thing to do in front of a jury, because it was so easy to appear villainous.
She answered Kelly’s questions—aimed toward making her seem to have exaggerated the violence of the attack, and an unwillingness to accept blame for the fact that there was a row in the first place. Hadn’t she thrown a set of keys at Stephen Stanko, escalating hostilities?
She sensed that her interrogator knew she felt guilty and was trying to use that to make her look bad in front of the jury. She felt that she was being victimized all over again. He asked her if she had a dog at the time she dated the defendant. She said she did, and he asked if the dog was still alive. At that time, the dog was still alive, but Liz couldn’t help but wonder why he asked. He seemed to be picking around, searching for sore spots. What did he hope to prove? Did he want to anger her so that the jury would get to see the hellcat who needed gagging and bondage for her own good?
Liz personalized her experience, painting upon the defense attorney motives he no doubt didn’t have, projecting her emotional state onto him. She came to believe that he was sadistic, that the defense lawyer was enjoying the process. Liz could tell. Enjoying it just a little bit too much, she thought.
TESTIMONY OF PENNY LING
Penny Ling, with teddy bear, took the stand. She wore a black sweater over a white blouse and a black-and-white–patterned skirt. Those who knew the young woman’s story noticed immediately that as she took the oath and had a seat, she was wearing a scarf that hid her neck from view. As her testimony began, it was instantly obvious that this was a strong woman of great courage.
On the ledge in front of her sat the Bible used for swearing in witnesses, a plastic cup filled with water, and a box of facial tissues.
Her testimony, no matter how difficult, was nice and loud and clear. She broke down a little bit during one portion, describing the death of her mother, but she was strong when she described her own pain and suffering. When she teared up, the jury and the spectators teared up with her.
It was a small courtroom, almost intimate, and not crowded. In a room like that, everyone was close to one another, and it was difficult for the spectators to be completely quiet. Even during the most dramatic testimony, there was usually a background noise of fidgeting, shuffling, and coughing. But not as Penny testified. The courtroom was silent—except for the sound of her voice.
She understood that many rape victims preferred to stay anonymous, to hide their faces, but she knew she had not done anything to be ashamed of and had allowed the press to print her name. The Associated Press had her photo. So what? It was the man who did these things to her who should be ashamed, not Penny.
She was determined to take the horrible thing that had happened to her and make it into something positive. There were people out there watching the news on TV and reading the newspapers who had had similar things happen to them, and she wanted all of those people to know that it could be all right. With the right mind-set, you could piece your life back together again. She used her mother’s memory as a source of inspiration. Her mother had taught her to work hard and she could do anything she wanted to do—and those were the words she was going to live by.
She had not seen the attack coming. Looking back, she’d noticed that Stephen Stanko was a little bit more aggressive around the house than before, but she never thought he might be a rapist or a murderer. The attack, she felt at the time, was out of the blue. She didn’t know what had triggered it.
Only two people knew what the final straw had been. One was gone—the other a pathological liar.
She remembered waking up and feeling like she was in the Twilight Zone, encased in a miasmic cloud. Stanko was in her room, telling her not to scream. If she screamed, she and her mother were both dead. Now, looking back, she understood that it didn’t make any difference if she screamed or not. He intended on killing them both, anyway. At the time, she believed him. People were always believing him.
She recalled that the reality of the situation came with a blast of adrenaline. She threw off the covers and burst into action. She needed to get to her mom, and get to her quick. She needed to gather up her mother so they could both get out of there.
She ran into her mother’s room and saw her mother on the floor. She was still alive. Penny could hear her moaning, and she thought her mother was trying to say something. But Laura Ling was too incoherent to form the words.
At that point, she testified, she must have been hit over the head or something, because she suddenly lost consciousness. When she woke up, she was on her back, on her mother’s bed, and Stanko was raping her.
She told the jury that despite the blow to her head, she continued to struggle. She didn’t want to make it easy for him. She kicked and fought as hard as she could, but she couldn’t come close to matching her attacker’s strength.
The rape was completed. Stanko flipped Penny over onto her stomach and placed one of his knees on her back. He held the teenager down as he returned his attention to Laura.
“And this entire time, my mom was still alive,” she testified. “I mean, I could tell because she was moving.”
She pressed her chin against the head of the teddy bear as she described the horror of watching the monster kill her mother. “He began choking her, and I immediately thought, ‘Oh God, he is going to kill her,’ ” she said. She had fought, fought harder than ever when the defendant was murdering her mother. She said she told herself, “If you’re going to die, die saving your mom.”
Her mother’s moaning turned into urgent choking noises—noises that became weaker and quieter, until they stopped. Penny forced herself to look away, because she knew that Stanko was too strong to be stopped and he was killing her mother. She didn’t want the murder to be her last image of her mom.
“The next thing I know, he was behind me. He held my head up and he slit my throat—twice,” Penny testified.
She described how “lucky” she was. If the killer had sunk the knife into her neck just a little bit deeper, she would have been dead. But he didn’t.
A number of things had to go right for her, or she wouldn’t have made it. She described the manner in which she, despite her wounds, had managed to make an emergency telephone call and maintain a dialogue with the dispatcher for the sixteen minutes it took for first responders to arrive.
With that, the tape of her 911 call was played for the jury.
“I want my mommy,” Penny was again heard to say.
She described the days after her injuries, when, as she lay in a hospital bed, she watched the progress of the manhunt for Stanko with great interest.
“I realized that the reason he was wasting all this time is because he thinks I’m dead,” Penny said. “He was enjoying himself and taking his sweet time, because he thinks he doesn’t have anything to worry about.”
As Stephen Stanko listened to Penny testify, he put on a little show of his own for the jury, for he could feel their eyes upon him as the young girl described what he’d done. Stanko pulled out a handkerchief and began to dab at his eyes, but those close enough could see that there were no actual tears to wipe. The gesture with the handkerchief was as phony as everything else about the defendant.
When she finished telling the story, the solicitor asked her to remove the scarf from around her neck. She untied a knot with nimble fingers, then allowed the scarf to fall away.
There was a gasp followed by a hush. The scars from the slitting of her throat were still clearly visible.
Penny’s family, including her dad, sat right behind the prosecution, his sunglasses atop his head. Chris Ling was a big man, with a rock-hard jaw and a cleft chin. Those who saw it would never forget the expression on his face as he listened to his daughter testify about what Stephen Stanko had done to her. He was listening to her, but his eyes were on him. The old cliché “If looks could kill” was never more apropos.
“You couldn’t have had a scene like that in a movie,” one spectator commented. “I’ve never seen so much hate and anger in a man’s face. I was wondering, ‘How in hell is he staying in that seat?’”
Chris Ling was only twenty feet or so from the man who had raped his daughter and murdered his ex-wife. Every time Penny’s dad shifted in his seat, the deputies in the courtroom shifted their weight toward him. If there was one thing to keep the deputies on the four walls of the courtroom relaxed, it was the knowledge that every spectator had passed through security screening. Penny’s dad was unarmed.
When her testimony was through, the judge asked the defense table if there was cross-examination. William Diggs realized he had nothing to gain here. If he was too sympathetic to the witness, he reinforced her testimony in the minds of the jury. If he was even the slightest bit aggressive with her, he would come off as cruel.
“No questions,” he said.
Gregory Hembree would later recall Penny Ling as one of the most courageous individuals he had ever encountered in a court of law. To testify to the things she did, while the man who murdered her mother and raped her was in the room, only a few feet away, took nerves of steel, and Penny had them.
When it was over, Chris Ling still felt the hate and the anger, but it was obvious by his countenance that he felt something else swelling in his breast: pride. He couldn’t stop telling anyone who would listen how proud he was of Penny. She was the strongest and most courageous young lady in the whole world.
Everyone agreed.
STANKO THE GRIFTER
To establish the defendant’s confidence-game lifestyle, Gregory Hembree called Harriet Cunningham to the stand. She explained that she lived in Socastee, not far from the library where Laura Ling had worked. She frequented that library and knew both the defendant and his murder victim.
“How would you describe his demeanor?” Hembree asked.
“Highly professional,” Cunningham replied. “I even invited him over for supper one night.”
Stanko had been her lawyer, she explained, and had taken $1,300 from her in exchange for $200,000 in Veterans Administration benefits he claimed she was owed. She only later learned that she had been hoodwinked.
He had been so smart and polite. It never occurred to her that the nice young man was lying.
“Did Mr. Stanko give you any money at all?” the solicitor inquired.
“No. It was supposed to come by FedEx,” the elderly witness replied. “I received no money from the VA.”
After Cunningham, an auto mechanic named Robert Ollsen (pseudonym) took the stand and described how he had been conned by the defendant, giving him a $1,000 retainer for legal services, which never materialized.
Sitting in t
he courtroom that day, as well as every day of the trial, was Stephen Stanko’s coauthor Dr. Gordon Crews and his wife. They were in the process of moving and had the summer off; so luckily, they had the freedom to attend the trial in its entirety.
“It was fascinating to sit through that. It was unbelievable,” Dr. Crews said. This, despite the fact that Crews was not a witness, and the book wasn’t mentioned once. The most memorable thing about the trial, by far, Crews thought, was listening to the testimony of the surviving victims, Penny Ling, in particular. “To hear that young victim describe what happened to her was something I’ll never forget,” Crews said.
Stanko didn’t know Crews was coming. The coauthors made eye contact briefly, but Stanko quickly looked down. Crews could tell Stanko recognized him. The defendant had seen his former colleague’s “About the Author” photo on the dust jacket of the Crews book he’d received while in prison. In addition, Stanko had had computer privileges when Crews first started working with him, and had probably seen a photo of Crews on the Internet somewhere.
But there was only that one brief flash of recognition, and that occurred at the start of the first day. For the most part, Stanko kept his head down and his eyes lowered the rest of the way.
Crews wondered what triggered the homicidal spree. In a lot of ways, Stanko’s collaborator suspected, it was similar to the buildup to his attack on Liz nine years earlier. Stanko knew the adage of weaving tangled webs through deceit. Well, Stanko’s deceptions were chronic, complex, even layered. When the tangled web fell on him, it was always way too complex in its structure for even Stanko’s considerable intellect to untangle. He’d tried a straight job, but it didn’t work. He assumed it wouldn’t ever work. His con jobs were falling apart. He was selling stuff that didn’t exist. He owed everyone money. And his own inability to deal fairly with his fellow human beings had again painted him into a desperate corner, where, in Stanko’s mind, the only solution was violence. “I’d like to know what broke bad that night,” Crews later said. Deepening the mystery, there was a sexual component to the attack in the Ling case that, according to both parties, didn’t exist with the McLendon crimes.
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