In March 1980 a Daytona Beach sex worker named Donna Hensley was stabbed about thirty times in a motel room and survived. She had seen the man before, and she picked him out of a police photograph. He was arrested on April 1 and charged with aggravated battery, and after an hour of questioning he admitted the assault.
Then a detective sergeant named Paul Crow sat down across from him. Crow had been working the killing of Mary Carol Maher, a twenty-year-old former high school swimming champion found stabbed in a dump near the Daytona Beach airport two months earlier. Her body had been laid out with care: her clothes tucked in, her arms folded across her chest, pine branches placed over her. Crow had built a profile out of that arrangement.
He put Maher’s photograph on the table and said he had a missing girl and wondered whether Stano had seen her. Stano looked at it and said he had, at a hotel the month before. The hotel was four doors from the building where Hensley had been stabbed.
He was born Paul Zeininger at Schenectady, New York on September 12, 1951, the fifth child of his mother and the third she gave up. He was assessed as unadoptable, spent his first months in institutional care, and was adopted at six months by a family named Stano. He was bullied as a boy, was arrested at fourteen for a false fire alarm and for throwing rocks at cars from a highway bridge, and did not finish high school until he was twenty-one. He went to a computer school, was fired from a hospital job for stealing from co-workers, and after moving with his parents to Ormond Beach was fired from one job after another, mostly for theft or lateness. He raped a mentally disabled girl, who became pregnant, and his parents paid for her abortion. He worked as a cook and a car detailer around Daytona Beach and had a reputation as a compulsive liar.
On September 2, 1981 he pleaded guilty to the murders of Mary Carol Maher, Toni Van Haddocks and Nancy Heard and received three consecutive life sentences with mandatory minimums of twenty-five years. His confessions in other cases were read into the record as part of the arrangement.
In prison he kept talking, and the accounts multiplied. On June 8, 1983 he pleaded guilty to the murders of Susan Bickrest, twenty-four, an aspiring cosmetologist newly arrived from Ohio, taken from her workplace on December 20, 1975, and found floating in Spruce Creek, and Mary Kathleen Muldoon, twenty-three, found in a ditch at Ormond Beach in November 1977. He waived a hearing and Judge Foxman sentenced him to death for both. Bickrest's murder came back into the news in 2020, when the French true-crime writer Stéphane Bourgoin admitted that the murdered wife he had spoken of for decades had never existed and that he had built her story from Bickrest's.
The ninth was the only one a jury decided. Cathy Lee Scharf was seventeen, from Port Orange, and was last seen hitchhiking in December 1973; her remains were found by hunters on January 19, 1974, in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge near Titusville, in Brevard County. He confessed to her killing three separate times: to Crow and to Detective David Hudson of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office in March 1981, and then to Detective John Manis of the Brevard County Sheriff’s Office over two days in August 1982. Manis taped the second day. All three officers gave evidence, the tape was played, and in September 1983 the jury convicted him of first-degree murder and recommended death.
The trial court found four aggravating circumstances and no mitigating circumstance at all: a prior violent felony conviction, a killing committed during a kidnapping, a killing that was heinous, atrocious or cruel, and a killing that was cold, calculated and premeditated. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed, and affirmed the two Volusia County death sentences separately in 1984. The Supreme Court of the United States declined to hear the case in 1985.
That is nine convictions: eight by plea, one by verdict, three death sentences and six life terms, although some summaries give one death sentence and eight life terms. It is also the whole of what any court ever established about him.
He had confessed to forty-one. He said his first killing was in New Jersey in 1969 and that he had killed six women in Pennsylvania; claims checked there nearly twenty years later turned up too little physical evidence to charge. Florida investigators came to believe the real figure might be as high as eighty-eight.
The confessions have been argued over ever since, and his appellate lawyers built their case on them. Crow conducted most of the questioning alone and without a recorder. Stano was suggestible and wanted to be liked, and accounts he gave changed materially between tellings, with places and methods shifting toward what his interviewers already believed.
What the case leaves is not a question about whether he killed anyone. It is that thirty-two deaths were cleared on his word and nothing else, and a cleared case is a case nobody works. If any one of those thirty-two belonged to someone else, the confession closed it.
The comparison most often drawn is with Henry Lee Lucas in Texas. Both men produced enormous totals under sustained questioning by an officer who believed them, and in both cases the totals were accepted by agencies with unsolved files to account for.
One of the uncharged cases has since been given a name. Highway workers found a woman's skeletal remains in the wooded median of Interstate 95, north of the Volusia-Brevard line, on November 5, 1980. Stano said he had met her in a bar on Main Street in Daytona Beach in 1978 or 1979 and choked her, although the examiners found stab wounds to her upper body, and he remembered the slogan on her shirt, "Do it in the dirt." Under the plea agreement no charge was filed. In March 2024 genetic genealogy identified her as Pamela Kay Wittman.
He was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison on March 23, 1998, aged forty-six. His last statement blamed Crow: "I am innocent. I am frightened. I was threatened, and I was held month after month without any real legal representation. I confessed to crimes I did not commit."