BTK was different, because although FBI profilers would have called it impossible, he ran off a string of murders that terrified Kansas, stopped, and then came back a generation later to create a second nightmare for that city.
The BTK case had some things going for it, in a fetishistic way. Lots of bondage. Dude was into rope—exquisite restraint. Military men knew their knots!
His first kills occurred in a spree: He wiped out most of a family, stringently binding them before asphyxiating them slowly. Found dead were the dad, the mom, and little brother on the main floor, and little sister hanging from the rafters of the basement, her toes only inches above the floor, pants pulled down and smeared with semen. The older siblings came home from school that day and found themselves alone in the world.
That pervy stuff was one thing, but Stephen Stanko really latched onto him because BTK had literary aspirations. The killer wrote letters and sent creepy drawings. He illustrated one of his crime scenes in a graphic and horribly accurate way—like Zodiac and Son of Sam might’ve if they’d had artistic skills. His most troubling drawing was accurate right down to the placement of the furniture in the victim’s bedroom, to the position of the victim’s eyeglasses on top of her dresser.
For almost thirty years, no one had a clue who BTK could be. Might be your next-door neighbor. His career was like a movie sequel. He BTK’d a bunch of victims, hibernated for years, and then came back.
Another reason Stanko liked this case was because it made the straights of Wichita—the cops and the press and the political leaders—seem really stupid. Law enforcement became so desperate, it did silly things.
Those knuckleheads had heard of subliminal advertising, like when movie theaters had inserted single frames of Coke and popcorn during a movie, and supposedly sales went up. It was supposed to work on the subconscious without the conscious mind even knowing it. Like Keystone Kops, the police rigged a TV show about BTK—they knew BTK would be watching.
During the program, which would review in detail all of BTK’s kills and communications, they would subliminally insert a symbol the killer used in his letters, sort of a BTK logo that hadn’t been made public. That was accompanied by a photo of a telephone and a drawing of an Indian chief. Out of that, the killer was supposed to subconsciously understand the message: “BTK, call the chief,” as in the chief of police. BTK did not call.
But he did eventually get caught, a generation later. Dennis Rader did himself in by purposefully leaving clue after clue, until, unaware of the sophistication of cyber sleuthing, his computer gave him up.
Some days when Stephen Stanko came into the library, he studied not a serial killer but a famous murder, such as the murder of Beth Short in 1947 Hollywood, better known as the “Black Dahlia” murder.
This was a good one because there were photos. Beth Short was a rather lazy black-haired starlet who came from New England to Hollywood to be a star. Instead, she ended up floating around Southern California, accepting donations from various escorts.
The last stranger she found herself with tortured her for days, carving her flesh and slicing a Sardonicus-like smile into her cheeks. That brutally inflicted rictus came last, and she drowned in her own blood.
Her remains were drained of blood by her killer. She was surgically sliced in two at the waist and placed in a vacant lot in the Leimert Park section of Los Angeles.
Stanko stared at the photos of the pale and mutilated form lying obscenely like a broken manikin only a few inches from the sidewalk. The photos were in black and white, and you could feel the evil juju coming off them. They hearkened back to the days of film noir, dark movies he’d seen as a kid—all fedoras, bullet bras, and shadow.
What must it have been like to be there and see that bisected nude body? It was almost too intense to think about.
The shelves of the library were rich with Black Dahlia books, everybody and their mother thought they knew who had killed the Black Dahlia. At least two unrelated people claimed it was their father. But no one knew who it was. He—or they—got away with it. Like Zodiac, wreaking havoc in the world, and walking.
As Stephen Stanko researched killer after killer, one of his favorites—one he would return to, again and again, re-reading passages that he was already familiar with—was the prolific Gary Ridgway, aka “The Green River Killer.” He killed so many.
There were different ways to rank the serial killers, but number of victims was the most scientific, and Ridgway was right up there. When he finally confessed, in 2001, he recalled murdering at least forty-eight women.
The murders took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Ridgway killed both white and black women—when the assumption of the time was that heterosexual serial killers usually stuck to the opposite sex, but the same race. Not Ridgway. He was an equal-opportunity killer, choking his victims sometimes with his arm and sometimes using a ligature.
He committed his crimes near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, and earned his nickname by using the Green River as his initial dump site. The disposal ground, Stanko figured, was probably a matter of convenience rather than aesthetics—“down by the river” being a place where a fellow could have some privacy. Although he did spread his kills out over two decades, the great majority of them occurred in quick succession from 1982 to 1984.
Unlike a lot of serial killers, Ridgway wasn’t very bright, with a two-digit IQ. Stanko certainly couldn’t identify with that. Stanko was a flippin’ genius.
Ridgway committed his first violent act at sixteen and stabbed a six-year-old boy. Stanko read about Ridgway’s troubled mind. “I’d always wondered what it felt like to kill someone,” Ridgway said of his youth, and Stanko could feel him, man.
Ridgway had served in Vietnam, aboard a navy patrol boat. Like Arthur Shawcross (“The Genesee River Killer”) in Rochester, New York, he graduated from harming children to murdering women down on their luck, prostitutes and runaways.
He would use the same dump site repeatedly before moving; so when remains were found, bunches of remains were found. His dump sites were so secluded, however, that those remains were usually skeletal by the time they were discovered. The victims were left naked and sometimes posed in positions designed to degrade them further.
Because of Ridgway’s venue, the Great Northwest, some of the detectives working his case had also been involved in the search for Ted Bundy. In fact, after Bundy was captured, detectives interviewed him in hopes he might be able to shed some light on the Green River case. Bundy gave it the old college try, but his expertise was unhelpful.
During the long investigation, Ridgway was arrested twice, both times on prostitution-related charges. Following his first arrest, he was considered a suspect in the Green River killings, but he was crossed off the list after passing a polygraph examination with flying colors. Murderers with severe personality disorders, police had learned, sometimes could fool a lie detector because they lacked shame and guilt, and didn’t feel the normal stress when lying.
In 1987, police took hair and saliva samples from Ridgway; so, when DNA technology developed, these samples were used to match Ridgway with semen found on Green River victims. He was arrested in 2001 and, at first, charged with twenty killings. By the time he was convicted in court, twenty-eight more victims had been added to his kill list.
Stephen Stanko was a straight guy, but his all-time favorite serial killer was gay: Jeffrey Dahmer. Maybe the gay aspect enhanced the grisliness of Dahmer’s tale for Stanko, but maybe not. Maybe it was just the fact that Dahmer was so completely sick in so many ways, he was number one, the ultimate nightmare.
And he did it in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—the most
normal
of cities.
On the night of May 27, 1991, in Milwaukee, a naked fourteen-year-old Asian boy burst out through the front door of a house and began to scream in the street. In quick pursuit was a blond young man named Dahmer.
The cops showed up, and the frightened teenager said the man was trying to kill him. The blond man told the police that he was sorry for the fuss, but this was just a “lovers’ quarrel.”
The cops sided with the older man, and the boy was dragged back inside the house. Cops reported the incident as
Intoxicated Asian, naked male. Was returned to his sober boyfriend.
When cops did see the fourteen-year-old again, he had been dissected, his severed skull on display in Dahmer’s home.
Dahmer was caught. His home was searched by the crime lab. The discovered evidence thrust Dahmer to the top of the all-time greatest serial killer list.
They found evidence of cannibalism. He stored parts of his victims in vats. There wasn’t just a homosexual angle, but a racial angle as well, with the great majority of the white killer’s victims being poor and members of a minority.
He was saving parts. Who knew what all Dahmer was doing with those body parts? Eating some, sure—but the guy was probably playful, too.
The arrest came down on July 22, 1991. Dahmer was tried and convicted, and sentenced to almost one thousand years in prison. He didn’t serve nearly that many, however, as he was killed by a fellow inmate in November 1994.
When Stephen Stanko wasn’t researching other criminals, he enjoyed getting access to the library computer and looking up himself. He was listed as an author, and people anywhere could order his book online.
Very cool. While Googling himself, he learned that he was not the only famous Steve Stanko. There was a muscle-bound guy who had been Mr. Universe in 1947. He was, in fact, a legend of bodybuilding’s “golden era.”
Somewhere along the line, as Stephen Stanko learned about Zodiac and Son of Sam, BTK and Bundy, Ridgway, Dahlia and Dahmer—all for the book he was going to write, of course—his interest shifted.
According to the Georgetown County Sheriff, A. Lane Cribb, who later read Stanko’s serial killer notes, there came a time when Stanko no longer focused on what serial killers were like. He began to wonder what it would be like to
be
a serial killer. He’d already had some experience. Like BTK, he knew how good it felt to tie up a woman. But he’d yet to cross that line between here and the beyond. Cribb came to believe Stanko had feverishly pondered becoming a sex killer, a destroyer of innocence, a sadistic betrayer of everything vulnerable, a breaker of the ultimate taboo—he had pondered becoming a child-raping, knife-across-the-throat snuff artist.
STAND-UP
Ah, but that was the
serious
side of the man. That was only one facet of Stanko’s personality. He could write anything. Even
humor
. He spent a lot of time while in prison thinking about what a funny guy he was. He knew it was a tough row to hoe, but he thought he might take a crack at being a stand-up comic. He would be the ex-con comic. Tim Allen had pulled it off, and Stanko figured himself funnier than that guy. He would be the first to expose the outside world to some
real
prison humor! There was nothing like a long stretch behind bars to bring out the yuks.
Now, out and about, he kept a separate notebook—separate from the serial killer stuff—that consisted of his “comedy routine.” When he thought of a joke, he’d put it in there. The routine got out of order after a while, and the pages were filled with arrows and inserts scribbled up and down the margins.
He could hear himself doing it, hear roaring laughter from a packed house. . . .
[Reacting to applause]
Thank you, thank you. Okay, my name is Steve Stanko
[pause]
and before you begin making fun of my name, let me say that I was recently released from an eight-and-a-half-year stint in prison, and this is kind of therapy for me.
Thinking twice now about poking fun at “Stanko” now, aren’t you?
It’s always funny, when I make that announcement, to watch the reactions in the audience. The men that think they are tough sit up and poke their chest out. The less aggressive seem to get shorter. I wasn’t sure at first what that was from. And then, one club-owner told me that they had to pop one guy off his seat
[make an oral popping noise]
like a plunger.
And, of course, gay men smile, and their faces light up. Sorry guys
[turn around, shake butt and wag finger]
this is an exit hole only! See me after the show, though, and I will give you some names and inmate numbers that you can write.
The women, on the other hand, are another story. That all depends on the man they are with. The proper woman will cower closer to their date . . . spouse . . . escort. No, just kidding. But they still look me up and down with that questioning face.
[Wiggle eyebrows, give audience a wicked smile.]
Rougher, country, “red neck” women usually start calling me forward or winking. After going out with a few of them, I realized that all they wanted was information about their families and exes. “Did you know my daddy? . . . brother? God-damn husband? Is he okay? Queer? . . . Dead?”
No, really, none of you have anything to be afraid of. I didn’t kill, rape, attack, mutilate or do any of the really “cool” crimes. I was one of those
[dripping with sarcasm]
really bad guys: Breach of trust with fraudulent intent . . . 673 counts, of course.
If any of my victims are in the audience, this gig doesn’t pay squat, so leave me alone after the show. Ten years for that—go figure, ha ha.
Prison is strange. It is and it’s not what the media makes it out to be. It can be tough. I mean, the first day I was given a total body shave, a delousing, a wire-brush scrub, stuck with two needles and told I would probably get a rectal exam.
Yeah, at the end of the day I just looked at my cell-mate and said, “Do you think they will let me out of the cell tomorrow?” He just kinda smiled and said, “I hope not!”
The first thing I had to do once in prison was learn the language of the convicts. Everyone knows what a rat or a snitch is, and of course shanks and shivs are homemade—excuse me, cellmade—weapons.
But there is also the “deck”, a pack of cigarettes, “buck” which is inmate-made wine. Oh yeah, good stuff, not Dom Perignon but Dumb Parthenon, when it hits you will buck like an idiot in a Roman arena.
One of my favorite prison slang words is “sack,” a quantity of marijuana so small that it is folded and folded into a piece of one-inch square paper until it is about the size of a pinkie nail. Costs five bucks.
And then there’s the “sit-up.” No, that is not how you trick inmates into indecent carnal acts....
And on and on it went. Stanko thought he was a riot. When he wasn’t studying serial killers, he was watching stand-up comedy on TV, checking out the tricks they used, the timing of it. He was
so
going to be a star.
Then the unexpected happened. He got a real job. During the first months of 2005, Stanko worked as a salesman at Stucco Supply in Myrtle Beach.
But the job didn’t last. He was fired on April Fools’ Day by the general manager, Jeff Kendall. Stanko was hired to be a salesman, but he didn’t make enough sales—so he was served the pink slip.
On the surface, one might think Stanko a natural at sales. Instead, he daydreamed, perhaps plotting the future, not maximizing the present.
Perhaps Stanko’s preoccupation with manipulating people proved to be a detriment. That was counterintuitive, but maybe Stanko actually found himself unable, or just unwilling, to work for a living; so hungry was he to scam and to con, to exploit the fact that others had consciences.
According to one “dear friend” of Laura Ling’s, it was that first week in April, after Stephen Stanko lost his job, that Stanko “totally took over” the Socastee library. She said he turned the place into his own personal office, where he pretended to be a lawyer and conned old ladies out of their money. She spoke to Laura about it, told her there was something dead about Stanko’s eyes that gave her the chills. Laura said, “Mind your own business”—and she did.
For Laura, Stanko was now a liability both at work and at home. He was spending her money faster than she could make it. She was a librarian, not an heiress, and on the verge of receiving an eviction notice. Something had to give. It was time she read Stanko the riot act.