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Authors: Michael Benson
Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle (5 page)
BOILING OVER:
APRIL 8, 2005
APRIL 8, 2005
Stephen Stanko’s own urge to kill, and kill again, boiled over on Friday, April 8, 2005, sometime after midnight. He’d completed his self-taught course in serial killers and he’d given himself a grade of A. Now, with his real job kaput, his obsession with murder blended with a growing rage. His rickety dam of self-control cracked, then gave way, releasing a torrent of turpitude.
He stressed badly. He needed money. Being fired turned out to be a greater blow to his ego than he would have expected. Rejection of any kind pumped up Stanko’s pressure cooker.
According to his story, Stanko and Laura Ling had an argument. She slapped him and a lit cigarette in his mouth flew between his glasses and his face, burning him.
That was it.
Mr. Hyde, come on down!
Let the bondage begin. Stanko bound Ling’s wrists together behind her back. He was too jacked and did a sloppy job.
Mr. Hyde, come on down!
Let the bondage begin. Stanko bound Ling’s wrists together behind her back. He was too jacked and did a sloppy job.
BTK would have laughed.
Stephen Stanko then turned his attention to Ling’s teenage daughter, who was in her room asleep in bed. When he entered her bedroom, he flicked on the lights. Penny woke up.
Penny’s mind tried to register what she was seeing. At first, it simply didn’t compute. Stephen was in her room, with a knife in his hand. He’d gotten home about nine o’clock that night and everything was normal. She’d gone to sleep at about eleven-fifteen, and all was still peaceful. Now it was an hour and a quarter later, and Stephen was next to her bed with a knife in his hand. At first, he just stared at her, and she hoped it was a dream. It didn’t register. Maybe he had secretly called a fire drill or something.
After a couple of seconds, Stanko said, “Scream, and I will kill you both.”
He was referring to her mom. Mom was in trouble. She had to get to her. Stanko produced more neckties and was about to bind her wrists at the small of her back when she wriggled free.
Penny ran down the hall and looked in her mother’s room. Mom was on the bed, moaning and kicking.
That was the last thing the daughter remembered for a while, as Stanko hit her over the head with a blunt object and knocked her out. When she woke up, she saw him beating her mother. The punches became frenzied. Stanko dished out a vicious beating that continued until his hand was bleeding and he couldn’t punch anymore.
Stanko refocused his attention on Penny. He ripped off Penny’s clothes and got on top of her. She tried to struggle, but there would be no more escaping.
The blow to the head sapped her will and he was too strong. She felt the blade of the knife upon her neck. As she was raped, she heard her mother beside them moaning.
When the act was complete, he positioned the daughter so she could watch as he returned his attention to Laura Ling. Stanko still kept his weight on Penny so she couldn’t move. He flipped Laura onto her stomach and, with Penny watching in horror, choked Laura until she was dead. She fought hard. She heard her mother making choking noises. Then the noises stopped, and that was it.
Penny forced herself to look away. She closed her eyes really tight and tried to make it go away. She didn’t want this to be the last image she had of her mom.
She tried to replace the nightmare with pleasant memories of her mom. How beautiful she was—how smart and funny. She was a warm and inviting person, the kind of person everyone wanted to be friends with. She was—oh God, now she was
gone
.
gone
.
At some point, he pushed Laura off the bed and she lay still on the floor between the bed and the wall. Stanko got up and looked down at his lifeless girlfriend. He then looked down at Penny; his eyes still filled with raging ire, he said something truly bizarre.
“Look what you did to her!” he screamed at the girl. “And I loved her!”
The killer flipped the teenager over, forcing her into a prostrate position. He lifted Penny’s head, and, producing a knife, twice slit her throat.
Stephen Stanko took a shower, and when he re-dressed, he felt in vain for a pulse in Laura Ling and her daughter. He later claimed he felt suicidal at that moment, but his actions suggest he was a man with plans for a future.
Believing Laura and Penny dead, he tarried: calmly removing a gold bracelet from Ling’s lifeless wrist, then packing a bag. He emptied out her purse and pocketed her car keys. He went into her wallet and took all of the cash and her ATM card. Only then did he leave the house.
As was true of many famous murderers, Stanko had turned violent, not under a full moon, but under the slenderest silvery sliver—on the eve of the new moon. Those were the darkest nights of the month, and killers on the run liked their nights dark.
His first stop was Ling’s bank, where he used her card to empty her account of seven hundred dollars. A surveillance camera captured him, his face composed, as he made the transaction at the drive-through machine.
Penny was not dead, however. Why Stanko couldn’t find her pulse is one of the mysteries—and miracles—of this story. She regained consciousness and even made it to a phone. Bound, with blood still flowing from her neck wounds, Penny called 911.
She later explained that she had no idea how she had the strength to get to the phone or how she dialed the three numbers and hit send. Next thing she knew, there was an operator talking into her ear and she was explaining that she had just been raped and she feared her mother was dead.
“When he left, he took my mom’s car keys,” Penny said.
“What kind of car does your mother drive?”
“It’s a red Mustang.” She further ID’d the car for police, so the manhunt could start immediately. The conversation between Penny and dispatch lasted for sixteen minutes, until first responders arrived at the scene on Murrells Inlet Road, at about 3:00
A.M
.
A.M
.
They found a scene of unspeakable horror, the teenager beaten and bleeding from her neck. Blood spattered on the wall. Laura Ling, still in her red plaid pajamas, on the bedroom floor, her body facedown and wedged between the bed and the dresser.
Her hands were bound behind her back with a gray-and-black necktie, so tightly that the medical examiner later discovered ligature marks where the silk dug into the flesh.
As Penny had feared, Laura Ling was dead. The men asked Penny about the man who killed her. She told them everything she knew. It was Stephen Stanko, the author, the ex-con, her mom’s live-in boyfriend.
He was an out-of-work writer working on a book. He was an ex-con who wrote a book about prison. He always seemed like a nice guy, and he just snapped. Penny had no idea why.
The wounds to Penny’s neck were serious but not life-threatening. He had slit her throat, just as she said, twice, one above the other. The deepest cut came at the insert point of the bottom slash, where his knife caused a puncture wound that resembled a horizontal tracheotomy incision.
In Penny’s room, on the bed on its side, next to a stuffed toy zebra, was a white lacey purse on its side. Beside it was a pile of its contents. The purse was Laura’s. The killer had spilled it out, looking for the keys to the Mustang.
When the ambulance arrived, Penny was taken away. Her mother was left behind. Laura’s body needed to be photographed and examined thoroughly by detectives before it could be removed to the morgue for autopsy.
At the hospital, after her neck was stitched up, Penny was visited by a female cop, with a rape kit. Penny said she was pretty sure she remembered exactly what Stanko did and didn’t do to her, but oral and anal swabs were taken, nonetheless, in addition to the vaginal swabs.
Penny closed her eyes and endured the procedure, hoping beyond hope that she was allowing the cop to gather DNA evidence that would put her attacker away.
Georgetown County sheriff A. Lane Cribb had been in law enforcement since 1973, thirty-two years. He attended Horry-Georgetown Technical College, Limestone College, and the University of Alabama, where he received a bachelor’s degree in business administration. His first job as an officer of public safety was with the South Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control bureau.
Cribb worked as a criminal investigator with the Florence County Sheriff’s Office (FCSO) and then returned to Georgetown County in the same capacity. He was first elected Georgetown County sheriff in 1992, and had been reelected three times.
He loved to learn more about being a cop, and had graduated from courses at the Carolina Command College, National Center for Rural Law Enforcement (NCRLE), and the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy.
He was also a joiner of clubs and fraternal societies. He was an Elk and a Mason. Plus, he was a member of the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) and was a past president of the South Carolina Sheriffs’ Association (SCSA).
Within minutes of Penny’s 911 call, an all-points bulletin (APB)was on the air, and Sheriff Cribb was heading a manhunt that would make newspaper headlines across the United States. Stanko was described in the police “be on the lookout” (BOLO) as six-foot-three and 192 pounds, with medium-length dark hair and glasses with silver aviator frames. He might be headed toward North Carolina, the bulletin stated. Sheriff Cribb secured a warrant for Stanko’s arrest, accusing him of murder, criminal sexual misconduct, and car theft.
CRIME SCENE
From the Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO), the lieutenant in charge of criminal investigations, William Pierce, arrived at the Ling home. He worked in plainclothes, always a neatly tailored suit. With his burly physique, shaved head, and trimmed goatee, he had the aura of a stern, single-minded pursuer of justice.
Pierce started with the sheriff’s office in August 1990 as a reserve deputy, and became a deputy sheriff assigned to the Uniform Patrol Division two years later. In 1997, he was assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division to cover Waccamaw Neck and Pawleys Island. In 2002, he went to school in Atlanta to become a polygraph operator. After an internship with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, (SLED), Pierce conducted lie detector examinations all across South Carolina.
Since 2003, when he was promoted to lieutenant, he had investigated crimes in addition to his polygraph duties. But none of his experience could prepare him for the Ling murder scene. It was worse than anything he could have imagined. He knew immediately that they were after a monster. The carnage was something that a civilized human being would be incapable of doing.
Not knowing for sure that the living witness would survive, Lieutenant Pierce examined the scene as if forensic evidence against the killer would be essential.
The emergency people had somewhat contaminated the scene in their understandable urgency to treat the seriously wounded Penny, but other than that, the home was as the killer left it.
Laura’s body was still on the floor between the bed and the wall, her hands were still bound together behind her back with a pair of silk neckties. Near the body was a small lamp, with a glass globe that had been broken during the violence. On the lamp shade were what appeared to be bloodstains. Pierce also found droplets of blood in the hallway, and in the bathroom.
The entire lamp was bagged as evidence. Swabs were made of each discovered blood droplet. All of the evidence was sent to Senior Agent Bruce S. Gantt Jr., at the SLED crime lab, who would determine to whom the blood belonged and how it probably got there. All in all, swabs were made from blood found in Laura Ling’s bedroom, and the hallway wall, as well as in the bathroom, especially on the medicine cabinet.
Driving Laura Ling’s red Ford Mustang, her savings in his wallet, Stephen Stanko drove northeast on Route 17, switching to a northwesterly heading in Forestbrook on a major thoroughfare alternately called Black Skimmer Trail, the Edward E. Burroughs Highway, and Route 501. He got off at Singleton Ridge Road, in Conway, South Carolina.
He pulled into the driveway of Henry Lee Turner, his old buddy from the library, on Kimberly Drive in Conway. Turner lived in a white “single-wide” mobile home on a cul-de-sac in the Coastal Village Mobile Home Park. The mobile home had bluish green shutters and wooden stairs at the side and back doors.
Stanko had been there several times before, once with Laura when Henry was having computer woes. It was about six-thirty in the morning. Turner was asleep, but he got up to answer the door.
Stanko said, “My dad just died.”
“I’m sorry to hear that, Steve,” Turner said.
“I just—I just need someone to talk to.”
“Well, come right on in.”
Turner attempted to console him. Stanko agreed to get them breakfast and borrowed Turner’s keys so he could drive Turner’s truck to McDonald’s and purchase food.
Not everyone on the Coastal Village street was asleep. John Marvin Cooper, who lived next door on Kimberly Drive, was up and having his coffee when he heard a car pull into Henry Turner’s driveway. He looked out the window and saw a red Mustang, and a guy with glasses getting out. He didn’t think much of it. He’d seen the man with the glasses visiting Henry before.
It was sometime between seven forty-five and eight o’clock when the man, who he could now see was wearing a baseball cap and a shirt with some sort of purple logo on the front, exited Turner’s house, got into Turner’s 1996 black Mazda pickup, and left. Cooper thought that was odd. Cooper left for work at eight-fifteen; as he did, he waved at Turner. He wasn’t curious enough to ask why the bespectacled visitor was driving Turner’s truck. Didn’t seem like any of his business.
It would turn out to be important that while Stephen Stanko was out getting breakfast, Turner called his son Roger on the phone. Turner told his son that Stanko was upset about his father’s death and was going to be staying with him for a while.
Minutes after Cooper left for work, Stanko returned in Turner’s truck, carrying a bag of McDonald’s.
After eating, and while Turner was in the bathroom shaving in front of the medicine cabinet’s mirror, Stanko pulled out a gun and, using a pillow as a silencer, shot Turner dead, once each in the chest and back.
The pillow had kept the shots quiet, so Stanko went about his next task deliberately, thoroughly. He searched Turner’s home for things that might have value to him on his trek toward freedom, or his trek toward oblivion. Whatever it turned out to be, there’d be a trail of death.
Stanko stole another gun and some more money. Now armed, and even more financially flush, he left Laura Ling’s car in the cul-de-sac outside Turner’s house and drove away in Turner’s 1996 Mazda B2300 two-wheel-drive extended-cab pickup truck. To make the truck easy to identify, it had a Shriners tag on the front and two Shriners decals on the back.
At nine-thirty Friday morning, Stephen Stanko called the Socastee library and talked to John Gaumer, Laura Ling’s boss. He identified himself. He was, after all, in that library all the time and was known there.
“Laura’s probably not going to make it into work today. She’s not feeling very well this morning,” Stanko said.
“What are her symptoms?” Gaumer asked.
“Copious vomit,” Stanko said. “We’re thinking it’s something she ate.”
Gaumer said he was sorry to hear that and hoped she felt better. Stanko thanked him and hung up.
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