Stephen Stanko 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 own contribution was about the difficulty of release, and he wrote that what he feared most was carrying some of the institution back out into society with him.
He spent time at the Socastee library near Myrtle Beach, saying he was researching another book, and met both of the people he killed there. Laura Ling, forty-three, was the librarian, and 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 became something close to a father figure.
On April 8, 2005 he beat and strangled Ling at the Murrells Inlet house, then raped her daughter and cut her throat. The girl survived, reached a telephone, and made the call that brought police to the house. The next day he drove to Conway, shot Turner dead, and took his pickup truck. He spent the manhunt in Augusta, Georgia telling people he was there for the Masters and owned several Hooters restaurants, and was arrested at a bakery cafe there, unarmed, in a suit and tie.
The archive files him as a spree rather than a series: two murders inside a single day. Police who searched the house found articles he had collected on Jeffrey Dahmer and Gary Ridgway, and a spokesman said at the time that he was either interested in serial killers or becoming one, which is a reclassification the record does not support.