Stephen Christopher Stanko was born on January 13, 1968, at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base. In 1996 he was imprisoned for assault and kidnapping, and he served eight and a half years of a ten-year sentence. 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. People who met him afterward described a highly intelligent, polished former prisoner who did not mind talking about his time inside or the book.
He was released in 2004 and rented a room in Myrtle Beach for almost a year. His parole officer made sure the landlady knew his background, which he had disclosed himself; he was sometimes late with the rent, complained that his record kept him from finding work, and held one or two short jobs. Then he moved out abruptly, to a friend's home, in return for keeping an eye on her elderly mother.
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 he moved in with her 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 911 call that brought police to the house. He drove to Conway, shot Turner dead and took his pickup truck; most accounts put that killing the next day, and at least one on the same day. A national manhunt followed, with a ten thousand dollar reward. He spent it in Augusta, Georgia, during the Masters golf tournament, telling people he owned several Hooters restaurants, and on April 12 the U.S. Marshals Service arrested him without a struggle at a bakery cafe there, unarmed and in a suit and tie. In his house police found articles on Jeffrey Dahmer, Gary Ridgway and other serial killers; a spokesman said he was either interested in serial killers or becoming one.
On August 18, 2006, a Georgetown County jury convicted him of Ling's murder and sentenced him to death, the first death sentence in that county in nearly eleven years, with a further 110 years for the criminal sexual conduct, kidnapping and armed robbery in the attack on her daughter. In November 2009 a Horry County jury convicted him of Turner's murder and sentenced him to death a second time. His lawyers argued insanity at both trials, and it failed both times. The South Carolina Supreme Court upheld the first conviction and, in February 2013, the second. At a post-conviction hearing in 2015 his trial lawyer, Bill Diggs, testified that Stanko had a brain defect; on May 24, 2016, the court upheld the conviction again.
The United States Supreme Court turned down his last petition on May 5, 2025, and South Carolina set his execution for June 13. Offered the electric chair, lethal injection or the firing squad, he said he had been leaning toward the firing squad until the details of another recent execution were published, asked for more information about the state's protocols and was refused, and on May 30 chose lethal injection. Roger Turner, whose father he killed, said he would attend, that it should have happened years before, and remembered his father as a jolly, kind-hearted man and a loving father. For his last meal Stanko had fried fish, fried shrimp, crab cakes, a baked potato, carrots, fried okra, cherry pie, banana pudding and sweet tea. His lawyer read a long final statement in which he asked his surviving victim and the families for forgiveness. He was pronounced dead at Broad River Correctional Institution at 6:34 that evening. He was fifty-seven.
Both killings fell inside about a day, which makes this a spree rather than a series. The spokesman's suggestion that he was becoming a serial killer was never borne out by anything found.