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Authors: Michael Benson

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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.
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.
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