In the spring of 2005, the reference shelves of a public library near Myrtle Beach held a book about life behind bars, and one of its three authors was a regular in the reading room. Stephen Stanko was thirty-seven, articulate and well dressed, and he made no secret of the fact that he had spent most of the previous decade in a South Carolina prison. He told the staff he was researching his next book. Within days of being fired from a sales job, he had killed the librarian who shared his home and the elderly friend who took him in at four in the morning, and he was buying drinks for strangers in Columbia, posing as a New York businessman. When police finally searched the library for evidence, they took his book off the shelf.
Stanko grew up in a military household. His older brother, testifying at a post-conviction hearing in Georgetown County in January 2019, described a relatively normal childhood in a family that moved often with their father’s career. The two boys played baseball together. Stephen, he said, was an extrovert, an excellent student, popular and athletic, and he had been struck in the head a few times on the ball field. A mitigation investigator who worked on the Georgetown defense found that the father was a strict military parent born in Cuba, and that Stanko had graduated eleventh in a class of more than two hundred.
Teachers, neighbors and friends who testified for the defense in the capital cases described a polite, well-liked and successful boy until an accident in high school. A former teacher told one of the juries that he had been a role model in middle school. Defense experts later traced what they called frontal-lobe damage to two events: a reduced supply of air to the brain at birth and a blow to the head from a beer bottle when he was a teenager. The state’s experts rejected the damage outright. A court reviewing the record later noted that his IQ had been measured at 143.
The turn came, in his brother’s telling, after high school, when Stanko failed to win a place at the Air Force Academy. From that point, the brother said, Stephen began getting into trouble and making promises to people that he did not keep.
Then came a long record of theft and fraud, including convictions for posing as a lawyer, and, Library Journal reported in 2005, an earlier prison term for stealing cars. In Charleston in the 1990s he was convicted of kidnapping a former girlfriend and assaulting her, and he was also convicted there of obtaining goods by false pretenses and breach of trust. The woman later testified that he had lied to her repeatedly and had once tried to drug her and tie her up. He pleaded guilty in that case and received a ten-year sentence.
By the accounts of the men who ran the prisons that held him, he was an exemplary inmate. A former warden of Turbeville Correctional Institution told the 2019 hearing that Stanko had been trusted, had taken part in programs that helped other prisoners, and was "the type of individual that most wardens would love to have." Correctional officers gave the capital juries the same picture.
From 2000 to 2004, while he served the kidnapping sentence, Stanko worked with the criminologist Gordon A. Crews on a book about American prisons. Wayne Gillespie joined them as a co-author, and the result, Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System With an Insider’s View, was published by Greenwood in 2004. The professors were associated with East Tennessee State University. The book set an academic history of the correctional system beside Stanko’s own account of life inside. Writing about release, he described his fear that he would carry something of the institution back into the free world with him.
Crews said during the manhunt that the last time he spoke to Stanko, his co-author was deeply depressed and close to giving up, and that Stanko had told him he would not go back to prison because of what he had been through there. "Nobody wants a convicted kidnapper working at Best Buy with them," Crews told a South Carolina television station during the manhunt. The collaboration did not end with the murders. In 2011 Crews and Angela D. Crews, both then at Marshall University, presented a conference paper titled "Collaborating with a Killer" to the Southern Criminal Justice Association, describing the practical and ethical problems of continuing to write with a man serving two death sentences.
Stanko left prison in July 2004 after about eight and a half years. He settled on the Grand Strand and worked his way into the life of the Socastee branch of the Horry County library system. John Gaumer, the director of the county library, recalled a "well-dressed, slick, smooth-talking individual" who seemed entirely comfortable telling people he was an ex-convict. He held a job for about a month as a salesman at a stucco supply company in Myrtle Beach. The general manager described him as eager but unreliable, a man who brought in few sales, and let him go roughly a week before the killings. Prosecutors would later say that by the spring of 2005 he was under investigation for scams around Myrtle Beach, including posing as a lawyer and an investigator, and that people who had paid him were demanding their money back and threatening to go to the police. Horry County police also said they believed he had targeted older people in the past in an effort to cheat them.
Laura Ling was forty-three, a reference librarian at the Socastee library and the mother of three. She had earned a master’s degree in library science, and a friend remembered her as a skilled seamstress. Ling led a book discussion group, and it was there, her co-workers said, that she met Stanko, whom she found intelligent and well spoken. She helped him with his research. He moved into her home in Murrells Inlet, in Georgetown County, where she lived with her teenage daughter.
Henry Lee Turner was seventy-four and lived in Conway, in Horry County. Born in Hyman, South Carolina, he had served twenty years in the Army Air Corps and the Air Force, traveling widely before he retired as a master sergeant in Puerto Rico. Afterward he worked as a private investigator, ran a motel and sold real estate. He was a Shriner who dressed as a clown for parades and a member of the Royal Order of Jesters, a sociable man with many friends who liked to offer a drink to anyone who came through his door. His son remembered him as a jolly man who set high expectations for his three children.
Turner had signed up for computer classes at the Socastee library to learn to use a new machine, and his teacher was Laura Ling. She introduced him to Stanko. The two men discovered a shared habit of reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, and for about two months they were close. Stanko told Turner he was an attorney and dropped the names of judges and lawyers he claimed to work with. Turner’s son, who knew people in the local legal community, began to test the stories, and at their third meeting, he said, Stanko grew flustered and left after being caught in a lie. The son came to believe that Stanko saw his father as a father figure he did not want to disappoint.
Laura Ling was strangled in her Murrells Inlet home in April 2005. South Carolina news organizations, reporting on the case at the time of his execution, dated her killing to April 7; the state’s brief to the US Supreme Court in 2025 gave April 8. Her daughter, who was fifteen, was also attacked; she survived and called 911. Stanko had taken jewelry and a credit card, withdrawn money from Ling’s account at a cash machine and left in her red Ford Mustang.
Within hours Stanko was in Conway with Henry Turner, a friend who took him in that night, and later that morning he shot Turner to death. He took Turner’s keys, his checkbook and his gray Mazda pickup, and left the Mustang in the driveway. Over the following days he drained Turner’s bank account.
Turner missed a family cookout that evening, and when his son learned that Stanko was wanted in Georgetown County he raised the alarm. Turner’s death was discovered the following day, a Saturday.
On the evening of April 8, Stanko turned up in Columbia’s Vista district carrying cash. He told people he was a New Yorker in town to close a big deal, flirted with women and bought rounds for strangers. On April 9 he drove to Augusta, Georgia, where the Masters golf tournament had filled the city with visitors. In a bar he met a woman and introduced himself as a businessman in town for the tournament; reporting at the time of his execution added that he told people in Augusta he owned several Hooters restaurants. She let him stay at her apartment. On Sunday, April 10, they went to church together. On Monday she introduced him to her co-workers.
By then police in two South Carolina counties had issued a nationwide alert for an ex-convict, armed and considered dangerous, wanted in two killings and an attack on a teenager. Lieutenant Andy Christenson, the Horry County police spokesman, told reporters that anyone capable of what Stanko had done had to be treated as armed and dangerous. Federal investigators offered a reward of $10,000. In the early hours of Tuesday, April 12, Stanko left the woman’s apartment. Later that day she saw his photograph in a newspaper story about Turner’s death, called the police and helped arrange his arrest.
Officers acting on a tip that the truck had been seen found him in a shopping center parking lot in Augusta on April 12. He had just finished lunch at a bakery cafe. He was wearing a suit and tie, he was unarmed, and he was taken into custody without a struggle. "He did not look dangerous at all," the manager of the restaurant said. In the truck investigators found Turner’s checkbook and a gun, and tests later matched it to the bullets taken from Turner’s body. Stanko waived extradition and was returned to South Carolina. At the Socastee library, Ling’s co-workers were given counseling, and police had guarded the staff during opening hours until the arrest.
The Georgetown County case came to trial first. Stanko did not seriously dispute what he had done. His lead lawyer, William Diggs, argued that an organic brain disorder had left him unable to tell right from wrong, and the defense called experts on brain imaging to support a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. One of them, the psychiatrist Joseph Wu, testified that PET scans showed abnormalities in the part of the brain that governs impulse and aggression. The defense also put the word "psychopath" before the jury, a strategy his later lawyers attacked.
Ling’s family told the jury about the woman they had lost: a librarian who had raised three children and earned her master’s degree. Her daughter also testified against Stanko at one of his trials. In 2006 the jury convicted him of Laura Ling’s murder and of a series of other charges arising from the attack on her daughter, among them kidnapping, assault and battery with intent to kill and armed robbery, and recommended death. He arrived on South Carolina’s death row in August 2006. Greg Hembree, the prosecutor, told one of the juries that "Stephen Stanko is just plain evil." Hembree later became a state senator and was the chief sponsor of the 2021 law that added the firing squad to South Carolina’s methods of execution.
On appeal, Stanko’s lawyers argued that the trial judge had wrongly barred questions to prospective jurors about the insanity defense. The South Carolina Supreme Court found the jury selection fair and affirmed the conviction and sentence in 2008.
An Horry County grand jury had indicted him on August 25, 2005, for the murder and armed robbery of Henry Turner. The trial began in November 2009 before Circuit Judge Steven H. John, with Diggs again leading the defense, even though Stanko had by then accused him, in a separate post-conviction claim, of failing him in Georgetown County. Stanko insisted on keeping him, and the judge accepted his waiver of the conflict after several hearings.
The defense called seven medical experts and two mitigation experts. A psychiatrist found mild signs of brain dysfunction and diagnosed antisocial personality disorder or psychopathy. A specialist in physiological psychology attributed frontal-lobe damage to the birth injury and the teenage head injury. A neuroimaging expert reported damage in the right hemisphere. The state answered with a forensic psychologist who had interviewed Stanko for about seventeen hours and diagnosed a severe personality disorder, a neurologist and neuropsychiatrist who said the claimed white-matter damage and atrophy were not there, and a diagnostic imager who called the scans perfectly normal. The jury could have found him not guilty by reason of insanity or guilty but mentally ill. On November 16, 2009, it found him guilty of murder and armed robbery.
At sentencing, Turner’s daughter told the jury what the family had lost: his laughter and his humor. Turner’s partner said that Stanko had ruined their lives. The state laid out his earlier Charleston convictions, his frauds after release and the crimes in Murrells Inlet. Three days after the verdict, the jury found a statutory aggravating circumstance and recommended death, after deliberating for about an hour. Judge John imposed the death sentence.
On February 27, 2013, the South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the Turner conviction and sentence in an opinion by Chief Justice Toal. The court agreed that the trial judge had erred in telling the jury that malice could be inferred from the use of a deadly weapon, an instruction it had disapproved in an earlier case, but held the error harmless because other evidence showed malice. It rejected his claims that a juror who knew of his first death sentence should have been excused, that the trial should have been moved and that the state’s exclusion of people over sixty-five from jury duty was unconstitutional. It also held that his claimed brain condition did not place him in a class of offenders exempt from execution, noting his IQ and his long career as a con man. The US Supreme Court declined to hear the case in October 2013.
State post-conviction proceedings followed in both counties. In Horry County, Circuit Judge Benjamin Culbertson heard testimony in March 2015 and denied every claim in May 2016, describing defense counsel’s approach to the family evidence as an intentional strategy to win sympathy. The South Carolina Supreme Court refused to review that ruling in 2019. In Georgetown County, a judge found that the lawyers who had represented Stanko at his first post-conviction hearing in 2015 were not qualified, and a second hearing began in January 2019. Stanko’s brother testified that he had never been asked to take the stand. Wu returned to say he had not been given the records he requested in 2006 and had misgivings about the word "psychopath." A former member of the trial team, Gerald Kelly, told the court he had no doubt that Stanko committed the crimes and that, in his view, Stanko was mentally ill but not insane. Diggs called his former client a gentle, genuinely nice man.
In federal court, US District Judge Richard Gergel denied Stanko’s habeas petition in the Turner case in 2022. On July 29, 2024, a panel of the Fourth Circuit, in an opinion by Judge Pamela Harris, affirmed. It held that the state supreme court had reasonably found a valid waiver of the conflict with Diggs, and that his claims about the mitigation case were procedurally barred. In May 2025 the US Supreme Court turned away his last petition. Senior Assistant Deputy Attorney General Melody Brown wrote to the state’s justices that he had exhausted his ordinary remedies. His appeals in the Georgetown case were still pending.
"We hold it for the worst of the worst, and truly, Stephen Stanko fits that description," said Jimmy Richardson, the Fifteenth Circuit solicitor.
The South Carolina Supreme Court issued the death warrant on May 16, 2025, setting the execution for 6 p.m. on Friday, June 13, at Broad River Correctional Institution in Columbia. By law Stanko had until May 30 to choose among the electric chair, the firing squad and lethal injection. He had leaned toward the firing squad, but the autopsy of Mikal Mahdi, executed by the state’s marksmen in April, was reported to show that the bullets had nearly missed his heart. Stanko chose lethal injection, and said in doing so that his concerns about the other methods had not been resolved. The state supreme court denied his request for more information about the protocols. Judge Gergel, hearing a last federal challenge on the Wednesday before the execution, declined to stop it.
Turner’s youngest son said in May that his faith had allowed him to forgive Stanko and that he had healed after the murder, but that he would be in the witness room. "I want him to know I’m there to watch him die," he said.
Stanko ate his last meal on the Wednesday: fried fish and shrimp, crab cakes, a baked potato, carrots, fried okra, cherry pie, banana pudding and sweet tea. On Friday evening, two members of Turner’s family, a relative of Laura Ling, a member of Stanko’s own family, the prosecuting solicitor and one of his lawyers watched from the witness rooms. His lawyer Lindsey Vann read a final statement that ran about three and a half minutes. In it he apologized to the families of his victims and asked not to be judged by the worst day of his life. Governor Henry McMaster declined clemency by telephone minutes before the execution began.
The first dose of pentobarbital was given at about 6:07 p.m. Stanko appeared to say a few words and turned toward the victims' families, and his lips quivered. He seemed to stop breathing within about a minute. A second dose was called for at 6:20. He was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. He was fifty-seven, the sixth prisoner executed in South Carolina since the state resumed executions in September 2024. About twenty-five protesters stood outside the prison.
Twenty years earlier, in a book meant to explain prisons to the people outside them, he had worried in print about what the institution would make of him once he left. Less than a year after it let him go, two people who had welcomed him into their lives were dead.
• 2000 to 2004: While serving a ten-year sentence for kidnapping and assault, Stanko works with Gordon A. Crews on a book about prisons.
• 2004: Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System With an Insider’s View is published by Greenwood.
• July 2004: Stanko is released after about eight and a half years.
• April 7 or 8, 2005: Laura Ling is killed in Murrells Inlet; her 15-year-old daughter survives an attack and calls 911.
• April 8, 2005: Henry Lee Turner is shot to death in Conway. That evening Stanko is in Columbia.
• April 9, 2005: Stanko reaches Augusta, Georgia, during the Masters.
• April 11, 2005: A nationwide manhunt is under way.
• April 12, 2005: A $10,000 reward is offered; Stanko is arrested in a shopping center parking lot in Augusta.
• August 25, 2005: Horry County grand jury indicts him for Turner’s murder and armed robbery.
• 2006: Georgetown County jury convicts him of Ling’s murder, with other charges, and recommends death; he reaches death row in August.
• 2008: South Carolina Supreme Court affirms the Georgetown conviction and sentence.
• November 16, 2009: Horry County jury convicts him of Turner’s murder and armed robbery; it recommends death three days later.
• February 27, 2013: South Carolina Supreme Court affirms the Horry County conviction and sentence.
• October 2013: US Supreme Court declines review.
• May 2016: Horry County post-conviction relief denied.
• January 2019: Second post-conviction hearing in the Georgetown case.
• 2022: Federal district court denies habeas relief in the Turner case.
• July 29, 2024: Fourth Circuit affirms.
• May 2025: US Supreme Court denies his final petition; on May 16 the state supreme court sets an execution date.
• May 30, 2025: Deadline for choosing a method; he chooses lethal injection.
• June 13, 2025: Executed at Broad River Correctional Institution, Columbia; pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m.