By Michael Benson
I have dealt with psycho killers of all shapes, sizes, and genders: but none were more sinister than Stephen Stanko, the Monster of the Low Country. Stanko was different from other psychos. He had charisma.
He was a social being, or could perfectly imitate one, and metamorphosed into a pied-piper party animal while under tremendous stress. He reminded a lot of people of Ted Bundy. He had superior social skills, very rare for a sociopath.
Sociopaths as a rule having only a superficial charm. Stanko, because his brain worked the way it did, could have had no real understanding of compassion, yet he had the acting ability to rival an Oscar-winner.
He could make friends, pick up women, command the spotlight, even when he was completely desperate, on the run from the law, on the run for what he must’ve known was his life.
But that is the end of the story. It began in 1968 when Stanko was born on the island of Cuba. Guantanamo Bay. His dad William Stanko was a master chief in the Navy. Stephen was one of five kids, two brothers, two sisters. His brother Billy was the oldest, and was eight when Stephen was born.
When he was still little, his dad was transferred to the Naval Weapons Station in Goose Creek, South Carolina, population about 17,000. And that is where Stanko grew up.
We still don’t know much about the Stanko family chemistry, but what we do know isn’t good. According to one witness, no one was happy in the Stanko house. It was grim. The dad ran such a “tight ship,” it was beyond militaristic. Dad sucked the joy from life.
For what was fun but an insidious form of slacking?
Stephen’s dad may not have been a cruel man. One thing for sure: The rules were stringent and enforced with punishment. According to witnesses, and reinforced by Stanko’s own never-ending whining, Dad drove Stephen with ridicule. Nothing Stephen did was good enough.
Now… Stanko’s siblings did not turn into psycho killers, so it is over-simplification to blame Dad for Stephen’s adult behavior. I’m just giving you an idea of the ambiance when Stanko was a kid.
At first anyway, Stephen Stanko thrived in that disciplined atmosphere. He entered high-school the guy who had everything going for him. He was tall and good-looking and he was good at sports. Baseball. Football.
Plus he was smart. His teachers got dreamy-eyed thinking about him. They knew the boy was going to go far and they were going to be able to say they knew him when.
Stanko had it all mapped out, the Air Force Academy, fighter pilot, astronaut, President. Stanko had the drive to do it. His father had seen to that. Stanko believed the only way to shut up his dad was to become rich and famous. And, in that manner, Stephen put a tremendous amount of stress on himself.
Stephen tried and tried, but he was never good enough. Pleasing his father became an obsession, all-important. He was already as impeccable and neat as he could get. It had been years since he’d received a demerit over his appearance.
Then tragedy struck. When Stanko was 15 years old, his older brother Billy died in a house fire at the age of 23. Investigators admitted maybe it was arson, “Possibly suspicious” is the quote, but it was nothing they could prove so the notion was dropped.
Stephen believed there was a pecking order in the Stanko family. With Billy gone, Stephen would move up one notch in his father’s estimation, sort of like a battlefield promotion. It was an extremely odd and selfish interpretation of events, and very revealing when it came to how Stanko’s mind worked. With sociopathy, of course, comes absolute selfishness.
Stephen did not step up in the pecking order as he had hoped. Instead, Stanko’s dad became increasingly mean toward Stephen. It was as if his father thought he was responsible for Billy’s death. Whatever happened here, Billy’s death took the wind out of Stephen’s sails.
He began to look for easier ways to just get by in life. He was never again able to muster legitimate ambition, at least not as a free man. From then on, everything was a clever trick that Stephen was pulling on the world.
Now, instead of schoolwork, he worked on schemes: convoluted plots to get ahead, complex plots to get rich, schemes that if charted might’ve resembled Rube Goldberg cartoons. His ideas strained logic.
He took the SAT exam, didn’t do that great, and was rejected by the Air Force Academy. When high school was over, instead of becoming a fighter pilot, astronaut, and President of the United States, Stanko took a couple of courses at the community college, skipped class, and started stealing cars.
By the time he was in his early twenties he was on probation for grand theft auto. His commitment to legitimate ambition degraded into an obsession with confidence games. Stanko developed the soul of a con man. He was a smart guy and he could have made an honest living easily, but he chose not to.
He was a natural liar, smart enough to always mix in a bit of the truth so false statements were almost impossible to confirm or debunk.
He might tell one series of lies to you, and another completely different set to the next guy, but he could remember who he’d told what so that he rarely contradicted himself. A lot of people couldn’t lie for five minutes without betraying themselves. Stanko could go for weeks.
But (and it was a big but) he didn’t know when to stop. He was a very good liar but not a perfect one. He would eventually lie himself into a corner and, feeling trapped, he would lash out.
When you look at the mechanics of his cons, Stanko was very good at some aspects of the technique, yet comically poor at others. He could convince anyone of anything. But any con artist will tell you that the most important rule is, after the con is complete and the cash is in pocket, get the hell away from the victim, quit the mark.
Stanko repeatedly screwed up his life because, once the con was done and the money was in his pocket, he was horrified to discover that he was working with, or living with, the very people he’d just conned.
Which brings us to Liz. Liz was beautiful (is beautiful, I’m pleased to say), from Johns Island, elected homecoming queen. And smart, she wanted to grow up to be a criminologist. But, as often happens, real life got in the way. She married, had a son, and divorced. She didn’t let it get her down, however. She finished college and earned her marketing degree. Now Liz was out there banging heads in a man’s world, working telecommunications, making something great of herself.
In 1992, when Stanko was twenty-four, life for him took a fleeting turn for the better. He got a job as a sales rep for a telecommunications company, and there he met Liz, a single mom with a son in grade school.
Liz had that quality that Stanko found most seductive. She was gorgeous, of course, plus she was ambitious. Although he lacked legitimate ambition himself, he admired it, perhaps required it, in the women he liked. Liz’s first impression of Stephen was that he was shifty, but he wouldn’t leave her alone and he wore her down.
Stephen and Liz had a lovely romance, went on dates, went to football games, and all the while he gave her a detailed auto-biography that was only about forty-percent truth. See that house? I used to own that house. See that boat? That used to be mine, too.
Liz fell into his spell. And by the time she figured out that he was a con-man, she was a smart woman and that moment was going to come, emotionally speaking she was in deep and extracting herself was complicated.
Stanko had stopped physically stealing cars. Now he got a job at a used car lot, sold cars to people, and kept the money. Plus, he was going around to friends and neighbors seeking investment partners. Naturally he strung his partners along. Stanko’s companies were on the verge of making a mint right up to the instant they became valueless.
He painted himself into a corner and when he felt trapped he lashed out, Liz was his target. It was his own frustration over the mess he’d made of his life that led to the violence. Liz and Stephen’s relationship had already been tumultuous, and it had been that way for a while. He was caught committing fraud and Liz paid for his lawyer. They broke up temporarily, and stopped being romantic permanently, when Stanko, during one fight, put his hands on her throat.
After a period of separation, she let him come back, and for that she would never be able to forgive herself. He’d done nothing to deserve a second chance, nothing to re-establish trust. He continued to flash poor judgment and a disturbingly cold side.
It was February 1996 and Liz was sick of the Stanko drama, lying, criminal activity when she was still paying the bills for the last time he got caught, etc. etc. He stood too close to her, she pushed him away. He lost his temper. There was a tussle that broke up and peace appeared to have returned.
She went to sleep but in the morning the fight resumed. Liz was in bed crying when she heard Stanko rummaging around in a closet and she could smell chemicals. She knew how anal Stanko was and thought: “Good, maybe he is going to clean something.”
Stanko took chemicals from various cleaning liquids, soaked a cloth with them and came into Liz’s room. He jumped on her and held the cloth over her mouth and nose. She fought as hard as she could.
There was no doubt in her mind that he was trying to kill her. No matter how hard he tried, however, he couldn’t get her to pass out. She could see a wildness in his eyes. During the attack she managed to bite him on the left hand.
She heard him say, “It always worked in the movies. Why isn’t it working now?” That was how she knew that he’d been planning this attack, that it was pre-meditated.
She told him that if he just let her go, she wouldn’t call the police. He said he didn’t believe her. Unable to kill her by asphyxiation, Stanko tied her up good and tight and made her sit on the toilet as he showered.
He told her, “The bad guy is back. He is in control.”
As he took a shower he was humming and singing, acting as if everything was perfectly normal. That might have been the thing that scared Liz the most. He could flick a switch and his old personality was back.
Apparently the bad guy left at that point because a kinder, gentler Stanko came out of the shower. He packed a bag, released Liz’s bondage and split.
She called a neighbor, and then the police, and Stanko was quickly apprehended, arrested, tried and sentenced to a decade in prison for assault with intent to kill and kidnapping.
The incident with Liz becomes particular chilling when we take into consideration future events. Clearly Stanko saw the attack on Liz as an incomplete murder, something he was going to have to compensate for when he was next a free man.
From 1996 to 2004, Stanko served eight years of a ten-year sentence in MacDougall Correctional Institute in Ridgeville, South Carolina. It was what Stanko did while in prison that made him extraordinary. While in prison he wrote part of a published book called Living In Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an insider’s view.”
As soon as he got to prison, he began writing a manuscript about his prison experiences, starting with how he was processed into the system and how he learned, sometimes the hard way, how to get by. Just as a pro might, he wrote an outline for the entire work, perfected a few sample chapters, and wrote query letters to publishers.
He found an editor at a New England press who was interested, but she thought it might carry more weight if Stanko shared the writing duties with a college professor or other scholastic type. There were some bumps in the road.
Stanko’s first editor made it clear that she wanted to publish the book as part of a series for high school students. It was a specification that Stanko forgot almost immediately. The first manuscript described in realistic terms what it was like to be in prison, not the youth-audience product the editor expected at all. Back to the drawing board.
There was a revolving door of scholarly types who routinely bit off more than they could chew, overbooked themselves, and followed up with letters of regret. A few signed on to the project. Some left for good, some left and came back. The roster changed a few times.
When the book finally came out, and it took years, Stanko’s credited co-authors were college professors Wayne Gillespie and Gordon A. Crews. Although it was Stanko’s idea and he was the driving force behind the book, by the time the book came out, in hardcover, library bound, he was the author only of the last three chapters: “A Prisoner’s Narrative,” “The Prison Environment” and “Surviving in Prison.”
The important thing here is, as is true of many sociopaths, the removal of freedom eased the symptoms. In a cage, Stanko could focus and do legitimate work.
Legitimate ambition returned. “What can I actually do to improve my situation?” Stanko asked himself.
He wasn’t conning the world into believing he had written a book, he was sitting down with pen and paper and doing the labor.
Stephen Stanko did something very rare, He came out of prison a published author. He was sent away for a stretch and came out having improved his lot. When Stanko re-entered the free world he could not have been more full of himself.
Crews, the co-author, had befriended Stanko as they worked together, and they continued to talk on the phone even after Stanko was released from prison. Crews urged Stanko to stick with his literary ambitions, that there was the embryo of something there that could grow into something great.
Stanko’s glasses could not have been more rose-tinted. He felt his status in the world of literature would make his re-entry into the free world completely seamless. It didn’t work out that way.
In July 2004, Stanko got out of prison on his kidnapping charge and traveled to the Myrtle Beach area. He knew in his heart that his true calling was to be a writer. Stanko took the bits and pieces of stuff Crews would say on the phone and used those words as a mantra to prop himself up. With one book out, his best bet was to write another as quickly as possible, he told himself.
All he needed was a home base, and a library in which to do his research, preferably a library with a beautiful librarian. And so it was, fresh out of prison, Stanko befriended Laura Ling, a beautiful librarian, a single mom living with her equally beautiful fifteen-year-old daughter, Christina. Mother and teen daughter lived in beautiful Murell’s Inlet, in an odd little L-shaped house, like a mobile home that had been bent ninety degrees at the middle.
In October 2004, Laura Ling brought Stanko home to get the approval of her teenaged daughter. The girl was so pleased for her mom, she said sure, she had her blessing, who cares if he’s an ex-con.
Stanko was seemingly up front with Laura regarding the stretch he’d just pulled, but he lied when he said he’d been sent away for non-violent “white-collar crimes.”
In light of what was about to happen, knowing what we know now, we can only imagine how Stanko’s mind must have been squirming during this process, as he insinuated himself into Laura and Christina’s lives. The Nabakov novel Lolita comes to mind, the book about the man who married the young mom because he wants to get at her daughter.
Laura Ling was born and raised in Dallas, Texas. She was a raven-haired beauty, and a superstar at North Garland High: Student council, National Honor Society, nominee for Miss North Garland, B.A. from Texas A&M, masters in library science from the University of South Carolina.
She got married, had two kids, divorced, split the kids, her son with his dad and her daughter with her, and now she worked as a librarian in a county branch library, helping people find books and teaching a computer class for the elderly on the side. Enter Stephen Stanko, looking for a beautiful librarian to help him with his research.
She fit Stanko’s needs to a tee: Beautiful, check. Ambitious, check. Knows her way around the library, check. Carrying a heavy load of emotional baggage. Double check.
While spending his days at the small branch library with Laura Ling as his research guide, Stanko began to write what he hoped would be his second published book, a study of serial killers. What made those guys tick? Why did they get caught? How did they get away with it? What ultra-kinky fetish did each practitioner appease with his murders?
Stanko’s book was going to be about sort of a Serial Killer Hall of Fame with categories:
, deadliest killer, The Green River Killer,
, most perverse, Jeffrey Dahmer,
, wildest crime scene, a virtual tie between the Black Dahlia Avenger and the Gainesville Ripper.
He dug Ted Bundy and Zodiac and Son of Sam and Jack the Ripper. He researched Arthur Shawcross, the Genesee River Killer, and BTK, the Bind Torture Kill guy from Wichita, Kansas.
In some cases he wrote his theories about serial killers in a notebook, but he also made photocopies of newspaper and magazine articles on the subject, and pasted them into a scrapbook.
Sheriff Cribb of Georgetown County later read the stuff and concluded it started out being an encyclopedia of serial killers, and turned into a guidebook for someone learning to become a serial killer.
The pressure was building in Stanko. He wondered how it felt to take a life, how it felt to play God in that way.
Stanko struggled with the writing of the second book. Without the built in discipline that came with living in prison, he couldn’t sit still long enough to get the thing written. He slipped back into bad habits…
Steven and Laura had quite a romance during the early days of their relationship. But it wasn’t long before Stanko’s inability to make an honest living started to get in the way.
He was living off con jobs and they were becoming increasingly complex. Painting the floor and painting the floor, backing up closer and closer to the corner.… There were an ever-growing number of people angry with him.
He was pretending to be a lawyer and selling legal services. He was once again selling used cars that weren’t his, and taking contributions for bogus charities. One of those cons was so egregious that his mark testified at the sentencing portion of Stanko’s murder trials. She was a woman who worked in a furniture store and Stanko conned her out of $125 bucks for a charity helping pediatric cancer patients, including his niece who wasn’t doing well. “Just make out the check to Stephen Stanko,” he said, and she did.
As the pressure in the pressure cooker grew, imagine Stanko’s frustration: He was thinking about his stalled literary career. He was thinking about killing, more and more about killing. It was something he’d tried to do, kill a woman, and he had failed. This was a sign of weakness. All of this time, he’d been thinking about killers, thinking about killing. Now his new woman was having difficulties with him. He was trapped in the corner by his own lies, fighting with the woman he lived with, only this time it was Laura not Liz and her pretty daughter was down the hall sleeping peacefully
It was time to lash out…
April 8, 2005: Just after midnight, Stanko beat Laura until she could no longer defend herself, beat her until her face was lumpy and raw, until his right fist was stained with her blood and his own.
With blood dripping from his right hand he walked down the hall and raped Laura Ling’s daughter, and then forced the teenager to watch as he savagely beat and then strangled the life out of her mother.
With Laura Ling already dead, he flipped the teen daughter onto her stomach, lifted her head by the hair and twice slit her throat, one wound above the other. If the knife had gone into her neck a few millimeters deeper the girl would have been dead.
Looking at it from Stanko’s point of view, not killing Laura’s daughter was the number-one flaw in the execution of his game plan that day. He’d left a living witness.
For the second time in his life he had set out to kill someone and had failed, only this time he didn’t know it right away.
The young girl, bleeding from the neck, played dead and Stanko bought it. She listened in terror as Stanko showered and gave himself some first aid on his injured hand. His flight from the murder scene lacked urgency for the simple reason he thought he had left no witnesses behind.
Instead, despite her predicament, her hands bound, the girl managed to dial 911, report the crime, gave the dispatcher Stanko’s name, Steph-en Stan-ko,” she enunciated so they would hear her loud and clear.
And the manhunt started almost immediately.
The Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office’s lieutenant in charge of investigations was William Pierce who would later call the crime scene at the Ling home worse than anything he could have imagined. He knew immediately that they were after a monster. The carnage was something a civilized human being would be incapable of doing.
Some potential evidence at the Ling crime scene was justifiably compromised by first responders anxiously tending to her daughter’s potentially life-threatening throat gashes, but other than that the crime-scene investigators found the home much as Stanko had left it. Laura’s body was on the floor between the bed and the wall, her hands bound together behind her back, with a pair of silk neckties. The bondage was so tight that the silk had dug into the flesh.
Near the body was a small lamp with a glass globe that had been broken during the violence. On the lampshade were what appeared to be bloodstains, so the entire lamp was bagged as evidence. Blood was found throughout the home, and each droplet was swabbed individually. The patience would pay off. Stanko injured his hand when beating Laura and had bled plenty.
Leaving the Ling home, Stanko stole Laura Ling’s red mustang, emptied her bank account at an ATM and drove northward to Conway, South Carolina, to visit his other new friend, 74-year-old Henry Lee Turner. Stanko met Turner because Turner had attended Laura’s computer classes at the library.
One time, when his computer crashed, he called Laura for help, and when she went out to look at it, she took Stanko with her. Stanko and Turner hit it off. Stanko had described Turner as like a quasi-father figure. He made it sound like a good thing, but considering Stanko’s feelings toward his real dad, that didn’t bode well for Henry Lee Turner.
Turner lived alone in a mobile home bachelor pad. Pool table. Nice little place. Stanko drove Laura’s mustang to Turner’s home, told Turner that his father had just died, and asked if he could stay with him for a little while, so he wouldn’t have to be alone. Turner said, sure, of course, come on in, stay as long as you like.
It was early in the morning. Stanko went to McDonald’s and returned with breakfast. Turner and Stanko ate. Then Turner went to the bathroom to shave and while in there Stanko shot and killed him, using Turner’s own .38, and a pillow as a makeshift silencer. He left Laura Ling’s red Mustang in Turner’s driveway and stole Turner’s truck. Once again, Stanko tremendously overestimated how long it would be before the crime scene was discovered. Once again, fate would turn on a factor that Stanko did not know: While he was out buying breakfast, Turner called his son, said Stanko’d had a death in the family and would be staying for a while.
When the bulletin came on TV regarding the Ling murder the manhunt for Stanko, Turner’s son was watching and knew this was bad news. He called the police immediately. Police went to Turner’s home, found Ling’s car, and eventually, taking very small steps with guns drawn, discovered Turner’s body on the bathroom floor.
From Turner’s house, Stanko drove to Columbia, South Carolina and stopped at a bar-restaurant called the Blue Marlin.
This is how he hid. Right out in the open, boisterous, even rowdy. He bought drinks, talked loudly, and became the life of the party. He said he was in real estate, a wheeler-dealer, owned a bunch of Hooters franchises. He’d hurt his hand. It was bandaged, and he gave a variety of excuses for it at the bar. Punched a guy who insulted a woman. Burned it working on the car. Whatever popped into his head. He ran up a $180 tab. He paid the bartender with three hundred dollar bills and said keep the change. He couldn’t have acted less like he was hiding or running away. He acted, in fact, as if he wanted to be remembered.
When the Blue Marlin was ready to close for the night, Stanko said it was too early for the party to end and a group of partiers, including the bartender who felt obligated to spend some of that tip money, moved to a new tavern to continue drinking.
When the night finally ended, Stanko gave his actual email address to a woman he’d just met and hit the road. He headed toward Augusta, Georgia where Tiger Woods was leading the Masters golf tournament at Augusta National. There had been rain delays and there was a lot of drinking going on.
The town was teaming with good ol’ boys in golf shirts and cargo shorts having a cocktail or two at the local taverns. In Augusta, Stanko took his hiding-out-in-the-open act to a whole new level.
It was during the Masters hoopla that Stephen Stanko met Dana Putnam, who didn’t care about the golf. She was a local woman, out celebrating her 30th birthday with a group of girlfriends.
She and Stanko felt the chemistry immediately. She fell in at Stanko’s side, and didn’t leave. At the end of a long night of drinking and flirting with Stanko, Dana decided he was in no condition to drive and invited him home to sleep on her couch. She didn’t know the man she’d just invited home was a killer on the run. She wasn’t an idiot either. Dana locked her bedroom door and Stanko slept on her couch.
In the morning he picked up his vehicle, Henry Turner’s pick-up, and went with Putnam to church. He met her parents. He visited her on Monday and gave her a single yellow rose. He told her he was sick of bimboes and he saw in her a woman who could stay with him longterm.
Stanko was conning everyone including himself at this point and was apparently way out of touch with reality. He lingered in Augusta, when he should have continued running. He was having a meal in a restaurant before resuming his flight. He had no idea that by this time his face and name and the horrible things he had done were being discussed endlessly on multiple twenty-four hour news channels.
As Stanko inexplicably remained in Augusta, Dana Putnam’s mom saw Stanko’s picture in the paper, and called her daughter with the bad news, and to get the heck away from him in case he was still there. Dana Putnam called the cops. For Dana, this was a shock, but not a devastating blow. She had been hesitant from the start with Stephen. He seemed too good to be true, and he was.
The next time Stanko called Dana, from the restaurant, the police were listening in. By the time he walked out of the restaurant and into the parking lot he was arrested without resisting.
Dr. Kim Collins performed both the Ling and Turner autopsies. Of the Turner procedure she recalled that before surgery x-rays were taken of the upper body. Those images would show vivid evidence of the lead slugs inside Turner’s chest. Turner’s underwear in the written report was referred to as “patriotic boxers”. Full dentures were still in his mouth. A bloody white handkerchief was found in one of his pants pockets. Every attempt was made to determine if the killer had left a little bit of himself at the crime scene. Fingernail clippings were taken, with the matter under those nails to be DNA tested. Dr. Collins determined that Turner was shot first in the chest and finally in the back.
Stanko was tried separately for the Ling and Turner murders. At his first trial, the Ling trial, one of the first prosecution witnesses was Dr. Collins, who testified regarding Laura Ling’s autopsy. Dr. Collins established her credentials in the field of forensic pathology, including that she was co-author of the best-selling textbook Forensic Medicine.
She brought with her to the courtroom a large board upon which two diagrams of Laura Ling’s body had been drawn, front and back. On those drawn figures, Dr. Collins had marked every injury the victim received during the attack.
Every bruise, each cut and gash and gouge. Even wounds inside the victim’s mouth were marked and labeled. With a pointer in her right hand and her written report in her left, Dr. Collins methodically itemized those wounds for the jury. There were contusions on the back of the left thigh, on both buttocks, ligature marks on the wrists, bruises on the arms, abdomen and uppermost thigh, severe face trauma. The list went on and on. Dr. Collins testified, “See how the necktie is tightly wrapped around both wrists before the wrists were tied together.”
There was one bruise on Ling’s cheek that was of particular evidentiary value. It had a well-defined and unusual shape, and was made by a ring the killer had been wearing at the time of the attack.
Dr. Collins testimony was riveting, but the most dramatic moment of Stephen Stanko’s first murder trial came near the end when his teenaged victim testified while clutching the teddy bear that her first responder had given her.
She talked about being raped, about her mother’s murder, about having her throat slit, all the while in the courtroom facing her killer. The girls father was in the courtroom, burning holes in the back of Stanko’s head with his hateful gaze.
The defense was an insanity claim. Stanko’s frontal lobes, where his impulse control lived, had shriveled up and ceased to work. The defense’s gambit depended on PET scan technology, that is Positron Emission Tomography, which uses radiation to produce three-dimensional color images of the body’s functional processes. It this case it measured the amount of heat being produced in various parts of Stanko’s brain. Some brains spark hotter than others, which should come as no surprise to observers of life.
The PET system was explained to the jury by Dr. Joseph C. Wu, an Associate Professor in Residence, Psychiatry and Human Behavior, and Acting Director of the Brain Imaging Center at the University of California, Irvine.
Dr. Wu showed images of Stanko’s brain for the jury, all of which demonstrated that Stanko’s brain was not clicking on all cylinders, in particular in the region of the frontal lobes, the location that when healthy tends to control fits of anger or violence.
After Dr. Wu left the stand, Dr. Thomas Sachy, a forensic psychologist, testified that because Stanko was a psychopath, he lacked the brain matter to control his impulses when angry. Sachy pointed to the center of his own forehead.
“The brakes are right here. Damage to that part of the brain takes the emergency brakes off.” Sachy told the jury that Stanko’s frontal lobes were so small that he was in the second or third percentile of the population. He couldn’t appreciate the difference between right and wrong, and that was why his behavior tended toward the psychopathic.
The prosecution was ready for this argument and rebutted efficiently. The prosecution also found confidence in the courtroom axiom: Juries hate the insanity defense, hate it, hate it, hate it.
The prosecution successfully argued that the PET scans might legitimately show what the defense experts were saying they showed, but they simply didn’t matter. The law stated that for a person to be legally insane he had to neither know nor appreciate the difference between right and wrong. Stanko understood the difference between right and wrong just fine, he just didn’t care. And the jury agreed.
Following his first conviction for the murder of Laura Ling, and death sentence, Stanko was sent to live on death row. He was tried separately for the murder of Turner, was again convicted, and sentenced to a second death sentence.
Stephen Christopher Stanko is one of those rare psychopaths who had the looks and charisma to start new relationships with both men and women and be socially active, even as he was running for his life.
In that sense he reminds a lot of people of Ted Bundy. The question is, did Stephen’s brother’s death really spoil a “golden boy” future, or had Stephen been a con artist all along, with the cracks in his schemes only becoming visible following his brother’s death.
Was his tendency toward self-destruction a symptom of self-loathing, a fault in his psyche related to his being sociopathic, or the fatal flaw in otherwise brilliant confidence-game skills? Maybe both.
(Michael Benson was born in Rochester NY and raised in Chili NY. Today, he is one of the world’s most popular true-crime writers. His books, including Nightmare in Rochester, Betrayal In Blood, Killer Twins and The Devil at Genesee Junction, tell vividly of heinous criminals, their tragic victims, and the clever and stalwart lawmen who bring them to justice. On TV, he was recently seen on ABC’s 20/20 and is a regular commentator on the Investigation Discovery (I.D.), Oxygen, and HLN channels. He has appeared on Murder in the Family with Geraldo Rivera, Inside Evil with Chris Cuomo, People Magazine Investigates, Evil Twins, and Evil Kin.
During his four decades as a professional writer, Benson has worked closely with: a former gangster for biographies of Mafia dons Carmine Persico and Albert Anastasia, a retired Army Intelligence agent during the tense days after 9/11 for a book about the CIA, and a retired FBI agent for a book about National Security. He has co-written two books with a former New York Police Department “Cop of the Year”; explored the Grassy Knoll in Dallas with a former KGB agent while researching his highly-acclaimed Who’s Who in the JFK Assassination; collaborated efficiently with an astronaut; and covered the Stephen Hayes triple-murder trial in New Haven, Ct., for the New York Post.
Benson has a B.A. with honors in Communication Arts from Hofstra University. He is the winner of an Academy of American Poets award, and was in 2016 named a Wheatland-Chili High School Graduate of Excellence.)
Editor's note: this article ran in Serial Killer Magazine and is reproduced as written, by an author writing about a man he corresponded with and interviewed. Stephen Stanko has no entry in this archive's roster. He was convicted of the murder of Laura Ling and sentenced to death, then tried separately for the murder of Henry Lee Turner, convicted again and sentenced to death a second time; he was executed in South Carolina in June 2025, after this piece was written. Christina Ling survived being raped and having her throat cut, and testified. One other name here needs a flag: William Pierce is in this archive with convictions across Georgia and South Carolina in 1973, but one of them, the Peg Cuttino case, is contested by the victim's own relatives, and the article's passing reference should not be read as settling it.