Stephen Stanko had already published a book about what prison does to a person by the time he killed anyone.
He was born on January 13, 1968 at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. He served most of a ten-year sentence for kidnapping and was released in 2004. While inside he co-wrote a study of the correctional system with two criminology professors, published as Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System With an Insider's View. His contribution was about the difficulty of coming out. He wrote that what he feared most was that he might carry some of the institution back into society with him.
Out, he presented well. He was articulate, well dressed, comfortable talking about his conviction and about the book he had written. He spent time at the Socastee library near Myrtle Beach, where he said he was researching another one. He met two people there. Laura Ling, forty-three, was the librarian. She moved in with him, at her house in Murrells Inlet, where she lived with her fifteen-year-old daughter. Henry Lee Turner, seventy-four, of Conway, was a regular at the library who talked to him often and became something close to a father figure.
He killed both of them inside twenty-four hours. On April 8, 2005 he beat and strangled Ling at the Murrells Inlet house. He then raped her daughter and cut her throat. She survived, got to a phone, and made the call that brought police to the house. The next day he drove to Conway and shot Turner dead, then took his pickup truck.
What he did afterwards is the part that people who met him have never got over. He drove to Augusta, Georgia, and spent the days of the manhunt telling people he was there for the Masters and that he owned several Hooters restaurants. In Columbia he had told women in a restaurant that he was a New York millionaire. The US Marshals put up a ten thousand dollar reward. He was arrested at a bakery cafe in the Augusta area, having just finished lunch, unarmed, wearing a suit and tie. The manager of the restaurant said he had not looked dangerous at all.
He was tried twice. A Georgetown County jury convicted him of Ling's murder in 2006 and he was sentenced to death, with a further 110 years for the kidnapping, sexual assault and armed robbery of her daughter. A Horry County jury convicted him of Turner's murder in November 2009 and sentenced him to death again. He ran an insanity defence at both trials, and argued brain damage through nearly twenty years of appeals. Both convictions held.
The United States Supreme Court refused his last petition in May 2025. He was executed by lethal injection at Broad River Correctional Institution on June 13, 2025, aged fifty-seven. Under South Carolina law he could have chosen the electric chair or the firing squad instead.
Police who searched the house after the killings found articles he had collected on Jeffrey Dahmer, Gary Ridgway and other serial killers. A police spokesman said at the time that he was either interested in serial killers or becoming one. He was neither, on the record: two murders in a single day is a spree, not a series, and the archive files him that way. But the sentence is worth keeping for what it says about how quickly a man who wrote thoughtfully about institutions was reclassified as a specimen of one.