Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle

by Michael Benson

  With his expertise established, Dr. Wu told the jury about the sad shriveled state of the gray matter immediately behind the defendant’s forehead.

  Dr. Ruben Gur was a psychiatry professor and neurologist from the Univsrsity of Pennsylvania—a tall, bespectacled man, with a wild crop of curly gray hair. For his court appearance, he wore a brown jacket, with a blue shirt and tie.

  As he testified, Dr. Gur stood and showed the jury a plastic model of the human brain. The model opened at its center and divided into two halves so Dr. Gur could show a cross-sectional view.

  “Dr. Gur, during your examination, did you find that images of Steve’s brain revealed a normal brain?” William Diggs asked.

  “No, sir. Those images showed an abnormal brain,” Dr. Gur replied. Abnormal in a way that could induce “malfunction in a very serious way.”

  Was it a common problem? No, Stephen Stanko’s brain was rare.

  Thank goodness, spectators thought, they were discussing the abnormal brain of a rare monster.

  Dr. Gur characterized Steve’s problem as a physical injury causing a personality disorder, the effect of which was that Steve had little regard for others. He treated other people like instruments. He was charming but had “no feeling beyond the external demeanor.” People with the condition Stanko suffered from could be “super cool” yet glow hot in a flash.

  “All of a sudden, they can attack,” Dr. Gur testified.

  Dr. James Thrasher, the South Carolina psychiatrist who examined Stephen Stanko not long after the murders, repeated his testimony that complications surrounding Steve’s birth and a severe concussion as a teenager could have damaged his brain.

  Thrasher explained that during his first interview with the defendant soon after the murders, Stanko had given him conflicting reasons why he’d driven to Henry Lee Turner’s house after murdering Laura Ling. At first, he told Thrasher the same lie he’d told Turner, that his father had died and he needed consoling. (But that lie, Stanko must have realized, was destined to collapse when authorities discovered his dad was alive.) Later, Stanko told Thrasher he’d gone to see Turner because he was feeling suicidal and was thinking of turning himself in because he “might have” killed Laura.

  At Turner’s house, Stanko claimed, there had been an “altercation.” Turner grabbed a gun and pointed it at Stanko. There was a struggle. During the desperate grapple, the gun went flying. Stanko dove and got to it first. He grabbed it and fired, all in one motion.

  Taking it point by point, Gregory Hembree used masterful cross-examination technique to illustrate the ways Stephen Stanko’s scenario differed from the evidence. Stanko’s story, for example, did not account for the other two shots fired, or the hole in the pillow-turned-silencer.

  “Did Stanko mention the second shot into the victim’s torso with the .357 Magnum?”

  “No.”

  “Did he mention the pillow?”

  “No, he did not.”

  “Did he mention there was still an electric shaver near the victim’s hand when he was found on the bathroom floor?”

  “No, he didn’t mention that detail during our interview,” Dr. Thrasher replied.

  SUNDAY

  Even on the Lord’s Day, the machinery of justice kept grinding, and the parade of defense witnesses continued. Brent E. Turvey testified that he currently was a senior partner at Forensic Solutions LLC, based in Alaska. He worked there in his capacity as a forensic scientist and criminal profiler. Turvey was a teacher, who in addition to studying and testifying about actual crime scenes, taught and researched crime scene analysis and criminal profiling. He’d earned his master’s degree in forensic science at the University of New Haven in West Haven, Connecticut. Before that, he’d earned two Bachelor of Science degrees (history and psychology) from Portland State University in Oregon. He was an experienced expert witness and had testified for prosecution and defense alike all over the world in cases involving assault, fetish burglary, sexual assault, serial rape, domestic homicide, staged crime scenes, and sexual and serial homicide. He had testified in civil cases, as well, involving lawsuits stemming from crimes and autoerotic deaths.

  Fetish burglary? Those were cases in which a serial burglar stole items that gave him a sexual thrill, sometimes alone and sometimes in conjunction with valuables. Those items might include items such as undergarments or high-heeled shoes.

  Autoerotic deaths? These occurred when people accidentally killed themselves while using desperate and dangerous masturbatory techniques, such as hanging.

  He’d coauthored several books: the Rape Investigation Handbook, Crime Reconstruction, and Forensic Victimology. By himself, he’d written Criminal Profiling: An Introduction to Behavioral Evidence Analysis, the third edition of which was published by Academic Press in 2008.

  He narrated a slide show—projected onto a big screen at the front of the courtroom—of photos of the body, with its bullet holes and nearby razor.

  Turvey showed the jury photographs of the gun that was used to kill Henry Lee Turner, a bloody suitcase, and Stephen Stanko’s business cards in the truck he stole from Turner’s home.

  Turvey was asked his interpretation of the evidence. After looking at the big picture, how did he think the kill went down? Contradicting Dr. Collins’s testimony that Turner was shot first in the chest, Turvey said he believed the defendant kicked down the bedroom door and shot Turner through the pillow in the back. The first shot was from behind and struck the victim in the back. Turner turned and began to walk toward the defendant, but he ran out of strength and dropped to his knees. The second shot was fired while facing the victim. The evidence showed that Turner had been struck on the right side of the head, and apparently at one point, the victim grabbed the shooter, because gun residue was found on the victim’s hands.

  “Mr. Turvey, would you say this was a skillful crime?” William Diggs asked.

  “No.”

  “Did this crime exhibit foresight?”

  “It did not.”

  “Precaution?”

  “Hardly,” the witness said, pointing out that the defendant left figurative bread crumbs for the police to follow. Hunting down Stanko was a simple matter of reading license plate numbers. He still had items that connected him to the crime scene. Every decision he made ensured he would be identified by witnesses, identified by law enforcement, and captured.

  Brent Turvey was replaced on the stand by Dr. Bernard Albiniak, a bald and bespectacled physiological psychology professor from Carolina Coastal University, who testified to evidence that would eventually seem to the jury like a broken record. PET scan, frontal lobes, poor impulse control, complicated pregnancy, difficult birth, concussion as a teen . . .

  Dr. Albiniak testified: “He is a psychopath.”

  MONDAY

  On Monday morning, November 16, 2009, the fourth day of testimony, the defense rested its case. The prosecution put on a few rebuttal witnesses designed to poke holes in Stephen Stanko’s insanity claim.

  One was forensic psychologist Dr. Pamela Crawford, who had previously testified at Stanko’s Horry and Georgetown County competency hearings. Dr. Crawford began her testimony with the jury out of the room. She described her conversation with Stanko and his account of the violence both in Murrells Inlet and in Conway. The defense believed all evidence regarding the Laura Ling case was irrelevant. Judge John listened carefully and decided to allow her to testify in front of the jury, but not about the Ling murder. This was a trial for the murder of Henry Lee Turner, and the judge wanted to keep it that way.

  With the jury back, Dr. Crawford testified that she was a member of the American Academy of Psychiatry and the Law and the American Psychiatric Association, that she spent a total of seventeen hours examining the defendant.

  “When were those interviews?” the prosecutor asked.

  “[It was] 2006, and earlier this year.”

  She began to tell the jury Stanko’s story of why he had shot Turner. Judge John interru
pted Dr. Crawford’s testimony, and again sent the jury out of the room. The judge asked Stanko point-blank why he shot Turner. Stephen Stanko said it was self-defense, that he was in fear for his life when he did it.

  The judge called the jury back in and allowed Dr. Crawford to continue her testimony.

  “At any time, did you discuss with the defendant what happened in Mr. Turner’s home?” Hembree asked.

  “Yes.”

  “Did he describe for you what happened?”

  “Yes, he said the victim pulled a gun on him.”

  “Why did the victim do that?”

  “According to the defendant, Turner learned that Laura Ling was dead, and the news angered him.”

  “What did the defendant say happened next?”

  “He said they wrestled for the gun, and it went off twice, once striking him in the chest. He said the second bullet went off into the room somewhere.”

  The scenario was self-serving, of course, and, interestingly, it failed to account for the fact that the victim had been shot in the back, as well as for the fact that the body and the bullet hole in the wall were discovered in opposite ends of the home.

  According to the defendant himself, Dr. Crawford testified, the death of Henry Lee Turner had nothing to do with a brain injury: “It’s clear from what he told me that not only did he remember the events, but he was asserting that he was defending himself, which sort of rules out an insanity defense in the sense that he said that ‘I remembered it. I did this because I was trying to protect myself,’ and that’s just pretty crucial.”

  “He knows right from wrong?”

  “Absolutely,” the witness replied. “He simply lacks a conscience. He lacks empathy.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t think anybody can tell you why he doesn’t have a conscience.”

  “Is he out of control?”

  “No, he does not have a condition that would make him unable to control his conduct. In my opinion, the defendant has no condition that prevents him from conforming his conduct, and should be held criminally responsible under the laws of South Carolina.”

  Gregory Hembree paused to let that statement sink in. Then he shifted gears and asked if Dr. Crawford spoke to anyone other than the defendant during her investigation.

  Dr. Crawford said she had. She had talked to members of his family, friends of his, and other people who knew him. They all described a charming but shallow personality, a man without empathy. They described a man perpetually in need of flattery, whose ego required frequent boosts of social support. His self-importance was inflated, and his need for admiration extreme. These were all aspects of a psychopathic personality, but not of insanity.

  “And after those long examinations of the defendant, what was your conclusion regarding Stanko’s psychological state?” Hembree asked.

  She found him to be a highly narcissistic individual, totally stuck on himself, and every bit as sane as anyone in that courtroom—before, after, and including when he pulled the trigger twice and shot Henry Lee Turner dead.

  If Dr. Crawford’s testimony hadn’t been damaging enough, the rebuttal continued with the testimony of Dr. William Brannon Jr. Dr. Brannon said he had closely examined Stanko’s childhood medical records and found no evidence that there was anything wrong with Stanko’s brain at birth, that he did have jaundice as an infant, but that frankly was not an abnormality, and wouldn’t cause a brain injury.

  In response to the prosecution’s damaging rebuttal witnesses, the defense put on a couple of rebuttal witnesses of their own—but there were no new faces, no new messages. Just familiar faces harping on the same note.

  The first was Dr. Ruben Gur. An encore performance from Dr. Thomas Sachy followed, who was losing track of the number of times he’d sat in a witness chair on Stephen Stanko’s behalf.

  Dr. Sachy reiterated: damage to the frontal lobe, violent and psychopathic manner, PET scans, birth trauma.

  Cross-examining Dr. Sachy, Gregory Hembree asked, “Did Stanko know right from wrong during the time of the killing?”

  Dr. Sachy sputtered at first: “He didn’t . . . He was morally . . . How does the law say it? He didn’t appreciate the moral difference between right and wrong. Morals are not something we think about. They are something we appreciate. They are biologically determined by how well your brain works.”

  Dr. Sachy’s answers, because he was so highly educated, sometimes included a technical vocabulary and complex syntax. His words could make a juror shrug, but not in this case. Stanko knew the difference between right and wrong—he just didn’t care.

  At one point on Monday morning, with the jury out of the room, Judge Steven John asked the defendant if he would be testifying on his own behalf. Stephen Stanko quietly conferred with counsel for a moment and then told the judge he would not.

  It was a few minutes before one o’clock when lawyers on both sides told Judge John that they had no more witnesses. The judge declared the lunch break.

  Final arguments began at 2:30 P.M.

  Delivering the prosecution’s closing argument was Deputy Solicitor Fran Humphries, who reminded the jury that Henry Lee Turner had been shot twice. Once in the chest and once in the back.

  Not only was the murder cowardly, it was premeditated as well. The defendant called ahead to let Turner know he was coming, and he arrived at Turner’s home ready to kill.

  “He’s mean—and he likes himself that way,” Humphries said. “He believes he’s smarter than everyone else, and he just . . . doesn’t . . . care.”

  The defendant was a man of excuses. It was always somebody else’s fault.

  He and his brain—to believe his defense—were seldom in the same room, seldom in the same building. While he was over here, minding his own business, his brain was over there, plotting evil.

  Humphries said he knew the jury was plenty smart—certainly smart enough to see that Stephen Stanko’s brain remained inside his head at all times, that he was a murderer.

  The argument lasted a smidgen more than twenty minutes.

  William Diggs took about twice that long, hammering away at the only point he had tried to make all along.

  The guy had an injury. Maybe it happened at birth, maybe that blow to the head he took, maybe during some accident that they didn’t even know about. But a lot of the electrical activity that would normally be occurring in the front of a normal brain was absent in Stephen Stanko’s brain. He had a deformity—and that meant he was insane when he shot the poor victim.

  “Sane people do not behave in the way Stephen Stanko did. Sane people do not do what Stephen Stanko did. He’s got a personality disorder and it’s caused by a defect. He’s got areas in his brain that don’t function,” Diggs said.

  Diggs showed the jury one more time the colorful slides of a normal brain next to Stanko’s brain. He reminded them what a PET scan was, and what it revealed. He reminded the jury that he had kept the promise he’d made in his opening statement. He’d shown them what insanity looked like.

  Law in South Carolina said insane meant not knowing the difference between right and wrong, and the ability to make that distinction lay right there in the frontal lobes, right where Steve had his defect. Plus, look at Steve’s circumstances. He’d been in a tough place, just out of prison and trying to get by, and he attacked the man who befriended him, who was willing to help him? Made no sense at all. He had to be insane. Now Steve was in dire straits, with no one to watch his back. He didn’t have friends. His family wouldn’t support him. The reason the jury hadn’t seen any Stanko supporters in the room was that there weren’t any. Stanko was flying solo, and he needed their help.

  “Every single member of his immediate family has given up on him,” Diggs said. “Does anyone really believe Stephen Stanko is in this courtroom because of bad choices? That’s incomprehensible.”

  Diggs was done. One reporter glanced at her watch. Three-thirty in the afternoon. There was a short break, and Judge Steve
n John gave the jurors their instructions:

  They were to consider evidence, and evidence only. All evidence was to be weighed equally, whether it was from the first day of the trial or the last. If there were problems, they were to contact him immediately via a bailiff. A unanimous vote would be necessary to convict the defendant. He thanked them profusely. He understood how difficult it was to be a sequestered jury. It was like having a twenty-four-hour-a-day job.

  They were to be commended for executing their public duty with such diligence. Then he ordered them to go to their room and begin their deliberations. The jury began its deliberations a little after four o’clock.

  It took them only forty minutes. They were back. Reach a verdict? Yes, Your Honor. Of murder, guilty. Of armed robbery, guilty. Stephen Stanko again showed no emotion.

  Bill Diggs moved that an immediate mistrial be declared. The jury had only been out for less than an hour. They could not have possibly gone about their deliberations in any kind of attention to detail. They had sworn to undertake a deliberate process, and there was no way they could do that in less than an hour! He said that he thought the first jury at Stanko’s first trial in Georgetown County had been quick, and they had taken two hours. That was an eternity compared to the actions of this jury. This jury swore that they were to have no preconceived notions. It was a joke. He suspected that some of these jurors had made up their mind even before they were qualified. He cited at least one juror who had admitted during voir dire of having prior knowledge of Stephen Stanko and his alleged crimes.

  Outside the courtroom, to reporters, Gregory Hembree explained that one of the reasons the jury was quick was that the questions most juries deliberate slowly over—whether or not the defendant committed the crime—were not a factor here. Stephen Stanko admitted that he shot Henry Turner. The only question was whether or not he was sane when he did it, and even the defense couldn’t always get its witnesses to say he wasn’t.