Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle Read online

  Watch Mommy Die

  A Killer’s Touch

  A Knife In The Heart

  Benson, Michael

  PINNACLE BOOKS Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  Table of Contents

  Watch Mommy Die

  A Killer’s Touch

  A Knife in the Heart

  WATCH MOMMY DIE

  MICHAEL BENSON

  PINNACLE BOOKS

  Kensington Publishing Corp.

  http://www.kensingtonbooks.com

  All copyrighted material within is Attributor Protected.

  To the strong survivors, Elizabeth McLendon Buckner and the daughter of Laura Ling.

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  Many people contributed in some way, small or large, to this book. To those who requested anonymity, please know how grateful I am for your assistance. To the others, I would like to thank you here:

  McKither Bodison, Warden, Lieber Correctional Institution; Michael C. “Mickey” Braswell, at East Tennessee State University; Kelly Lee Brosky, at the Horry County Office of Public Information; Elizabeth McLendon Buckner; Patti Burns, at the Georgetown County Library; forensic pathologist Dr. Kimberly A. Collins; Dr. Gordon Crews, Associate Professor, Marshall University; Kathleen “Kelly” Crolley and the Owl-O-Rest Factory Outlet furniture store in Surfside Beach, South Carolina; Sergeant Robert A. Cross, Richmond County Sheriff’s Office; librarian extraordinaire Margaret Devereaux; my agent, Jake Elwell, Harold Ober Associates; the manager of International and Business Affairs at truTV, Laura Forti; Ann M. Fotiades, Unit Manager, CBS News Information Resources; Greg Froom, at the South Carolina Lawyers Weekly; Ginger Gaskins-Weiss, at the Office of the Berkeley County Attorney; Sergeant Jeff Gause, Horry County Police Department; South Carolina Department of Corrections Communications director Josh Gelinas; Laura Ling’s tennis buddy, Janis Walker Gilmore; Kensington editor Gary Goldstein; Georgetown County public defender Reuben Goude; the J. Reuben Long Detention Center; the Honorable Deadra L. Jefferson; Margaret Knox, at the Office of General Counsel, SLED; Tracy Minarik, of BlueWaters Pottery, at the Center for Clay Arts, Little River, South Carolina; U.S. Marshal Thedus Mayo; Keith Moore; Maria Montas, CBS News Archives; Captain Bill Pierce, at the Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office; Tonya Root, of the Sun News; Stanko’s high-school science teacher, Clarice Wenz; and Hillary Winburn, at the Conway Library.

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  Although this is a true story, some names will be changed to protect the privacy of the innocent. Pseudonyms will be noted upon their first usage. When possible, the spoken word has been quoted verbatim. However, when that is not possible, conversations have been reconstructed as closely as possible to reality based on the recollections of those that spoke and heard the words. In places, there has been a slight editing of spoken words, but only to improve readability. The denotations and connotations of the words remain unaltered. In some cases, witnesses are credited with verbal quotes that in reality only occurred in written form. Some characters may be composites; and in one case, two characters have been made of one real-life person. The object is to avoid embarrassing anyone who, after all, did not ask to be included in the narrative.

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Dedication

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  AUTHOR’S NOTE

  PROLOGUE

  PART I

  MR. HYDE

  THE LIBRARIAN AND HER DAUGHTER

  OWL-O-REST

  RESEARCH

  STAND-UP

  BOILING OVER: APRIL 8, 2005

  CRIME SCENE

  FIRST RESPONDERS

  THE BLUE MARLIN

  SEARCHING

  THE MASTERS

  SUNDAY

  MONDAY

  STANKO SIGHTINGS

  ARREST

  HEMBREE

  TALKING HEADS

  PEOPLE ARE MEAN

  EXTRANEOUS MATERIAL

  THE MAZDA

  LAB RESULTS

  PART II

  GOOSE CREEK

  LIZ

  FEBRUARY 22, 1996

  STANKO’S GOOD INTENTIONS

  THORNWALD AND CRENSHAW

  “CERTAIN IT WON’T HAPPEN AGAIN”

  HUMMER

  THE PHILOSOPHICAL DEBATE

  DEFENSE LAWYERS

  STANKO SPEAKS

  PART III

  FIRST TRIAL

  TESTIMONY OF PENNY LING

  STANKO THE GRIFTER

  DEFENSE CASE

  BACK PAGES

  TWO HOURS IN JURY ROOM #1

  TO LET DIE

  APPEAL

  SECOND TRIAL

  SATURDAY

  SUNDAY

  MONDAY

  WEDNESDAY

  THURSDAY

  THE PERFORMANCE

  JUSTICE DONE

  “CAN’T KILL HIM TWICE”

  EPILOGUE

  BIBLIOGRAPHY

  PROLOGUE

  “Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”

  Weak and dazed, a small female voice whimpered incoherently on the other end of the line. “Uh . . . uh . . . I . . .”

  “May I help you?” the male dispatcher asked.

  “I, uh . . .” For a moment, the voice sounded far away.

  “Pardon me?”

  A deep breath: “I’m at my house and I’ve been raped.” She spit out the last word through clenched teeth.

  “What’s your address?”

  “My mom is dead.”

  “Pardon?”

  “My mom is dead!”

  “Okay. What—what, what’s your address?” the dispatcher stammered.

  She recited her address. The operator asked her to check her mother: “See if she has a pulse.”

  “I can’t. My hands are tied.”

  “Okay, just hang on.” The tape picked up the sound of the dispatcher typing on a keyboard.

  “Please hurry.”

  “Ma’am, ma’am, just stay on the phone with me. I’ve got people on the way, okay? . . . So who did this?”

  “My mom’s boyfriend.”

  “Your boyfriend?”

  “My mom’s boyfriend!”

  “Your mom’s boyfriend. What’s his name?”

  The victim now elongated her words and enunciated carefully: “Ste-phen Stan-ko.” She started to cry. “I’m scared,” she said. He had made her watch while he killed her mother.

  “Calm down for a second, okay. I’m going to put you on with another dispatcher, okay?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay, hold on.”

  After a pause, a mature and calm female voice came on the line. “Hey,” she said.

  “Hi,” the victim replied. “I’m bleeding from my ear.”

  “You’re bleeding from your ear?”

  “Oh God! Oh God!”

  “Did he try to hurt you?”

  “He raped me!”

  “He raped you?”

  “My hands are still tied!”

  “You’re still tied up?”

  “Yeah!”

  “Okay. We got men out there. They should be there shortly.”

  “Please hurry. Help me, help me, help me.”

  “Is he around, do you know?”

  “No, he left. Oh God, this isn’t supposed to happen to me. There’s blood everywhere. I think he cut . . . he cut my neck.”

  “Did you ever think he might do something like this?”

  “No, no. I want my mommy,” she said.

  “How old are you?”

  “Fifteen. I tried to put up a fight. I tried! I tried!”

  “Did he hit you or something?”

  “Oh God,
yes! Mommy—oh God—Mommy!”

  The dispatcher kept the girl on the line until help arrived. The girl was letting out high-pitched cries of anguish, repeating again and again that her mother was dead.

  “What’s taking them so long?”

  “They will be right there, honey.”

  “I want my mommy. Please help my mommy.”

  One of the first responders to the scene of horror was Charles “Chuck” Petrella, a young paramedic with the rescue squad. Petrella talked to Penny and stayed with her as she was ambulanced to the hospital, leaving her dead mother behind.

  Petrella, a father himelf, was moved by Penny, and the next day came to visit her in the hospital. On his way, he stopped at the hospital gift shop and bought her a teddy bear, little knowing that one day she would clutch that teddy bear tightly even as she sat in a court of law delivering testimony that could send her attacker, the murderer of her mother, to death row.

  PART I

  MR. HYDE

  South Carolina, July 2004. The South Carolina Lowcountry shore. Stephen Christopher Stanko was bespectacled, impeccably neat, thirty-six years old, mildmannered, white—and only just out of prison. Fresh to the outside—having just served eight years of a ten-year sentence for kidnapping, fraud, and breach of trust—he squinted in the strong summer sunshine.

  Sure, his morning-fresh freedom gave him a fish-out-of-water feeling—but not as bad as most ex-cons, he figured. He’d shed his prison skin and emerged from his squalid surroundings into the crisp air of freedom with that ol’ Stanko sangfroid intact.

  He had to pat himself on the back. He had chameleon skills, and could be just what anyone wanted him to be. Plus, he’d actually accomplished something in prison. That put him in—what?—the 99.9 percentile of ex-cons!

  He entered prison a normal civilian and was released a published author.

  With a pleasure that bordered on the autoerotic, he enjoyed stroking his own ego. Have to go away for a few years? Boom, start a career. He’d turned lemon into lemonade. Most guys got out and had nothing better to look forward to than manual labor. He had bigger plans. Much bigger. He’d used prison as a tool for upward mobility. It was proof of what a genius he was. Not only had he created a product that would generate income, he’d done some serious planning as well. He knew how to get over in modern society.

  Still, even on geniuses such as himself, prison took its toll. It cut away at a man like a thousand small torturous cuts. His confidence was rendered porous by prison. Deep down, gnawing like a rat on the inside of a bedroom wall, was his insecurity. He worried that he’d lost his touch, that years behind bars had institutionalized him.

  Ah, but it was all coming back to him—life without bars. Easy as pulling a nickel out of a child’s ear. All he had to do was conjure the cheery illusion of truthfulness and sincerity and he’d be sure to succeed. You had to know just how much of the truth to mix in, and he had the knack.

  Great webs of deceit he could weave—and almost every dewy silver strand was based on a verifiable fact. Some people couldn’t lie for five minutes without betraying themselves. Stanko could go for weeks.

  While serving the last days of his sentence, he’d arranged for his first few days of freedom. To help him, he’d recruited the goodwill of a woman he called “Hummer,” the mom of a guy in Stanko’s cell block. When he first got out, he called Hummer and she “loaned” him money for a motel so he’d have a roof over his head.

  Hummer came in handy—for a little while, anyway. He knew that she was not a bottomless well, however. Pretty soon he was going to have to rely on his charm for food and shelter.

  Existing as an ex-con can be a tricky business. Stanko coped by speaking about it, but only in positive terms. It was a neurolinguistic technique, a sleight of speech, like hiding something in plain sight. He hoped if he spoke openly and matter-of-factly about prison, others would think it matter-of-fact.

  The story of his crimes, as he told it, was always framed as the prelude to revelation and epiphany. Prison gave him a chance to find himself, to discover his true value. And that was considerable. Just ask his publisher.

  When he chose to talk about “going away,” Stanko liked to paint his criminal history as white-collar crapola. No big deal. A freakin’ railroad job. He’d admit, maybe, that he was a bit of a bs artist. But there was nothing un-American about that—it was all part of getting ahead.

  But he never mentioned his kidnapping conviction, the details of which could seep right into a person’s nightmares. Anyone with a dollop of decency would deem them disturbing—and Stanko was hip enough to know he had to keep them secret.

  And that part of his personality, the one that came out when he was angry and with a woman, must never emerge again. That was a rule. If he had a fatal flaw, that was it. Put that guy in the recesses of the mind and keep him there. When he did think about it, Stanko realized he was as a man stricken with lycanthropy, like the Wolfman, Lawrence Talbot, fearing the rise of the full moon would transform him into a bloodthirsty beast, like Dr. Jekyll, keeping Mr. Hyde on the down low. A monster that did very bad things—did them ecstatically—lived inside Stanko. Then it went away, leaving Stanko to endure the soul-crushing consequences.

  Thinking about it made it worse for him. The idea was to sublimate the urge, push it deep, deep inside and hold it there. It was a constant struggle—like holding a balloon underwater.

  An ex-con turned literati darling once described incarceration as living “in the belly of the beast.” And when you were released—Stanko thought, pushing the metaphor—you came out the beast’s ass. No bad men were cured in prison, Stanko knew. They just got worse, until they turned to complete shit.

  Now, the Hummer ticket cashed in and spent—at least for the time being—Stanko headed for the Myrtle Beach area. Where better in the summer?

  WELCOME TO THE GRAND STRAND the sign said.

  During the first weeks of his freedom, he stayed in a number of rooms, all cheap—the landladies (there were never landlords) mostly unpaid. He looked for a job, but it was tough for a quality guy like himself to face the rejection. One look of suspicion or distaste from a prospective employer and his mood was shot the rest of the day. He got so mad.

  He needed something to do with his days; so he began work on his research, maybe get an outline started for his latest literary creation. All he needed was a blank notebook, a cheap ballpoint, and a library with a pretty librarian.

  THE LIBRARIAN AND HER DAUGHTER

  Stephen Stanko took up his research at the Horry County Memorial Library–Socastee Branch. It was a good library, with many books on subjects that interested him. Happily for Stanko, it fit the second criteria as well. The librarian was gorgeous! A raven-haired beauty.

  “I’m Stephen Stanko, the author,” he said to her.

  “Laura Ling, pleased to meet you,” she replied. (Not to be confused with the Laura Ling who was the sister of TV personality Lisa Ling, who was held captive for a time in North Korea.)

  Stanko asked her where she was from.

  Dallas, Texas, born and raised, she said, her inflection emphasizing a musical Southwestern drawl. Stanko kept asking questions and she answered. She was born Laura Elizabeth Hudson. Her mother was Sue McKee Wilson Hudson. Dad, Earl Pierce Hudson, died too young. There was something they had in common, they both completely rocked high school. Laura was the BGOC—“big gal on campus”—at North Garland High. She had range. A member of the Beta Club (“Me too,” Stanko said, telling the truth) and vice president of the student council, she was inducted into the National Honor Society and was a nominee for Miss North Garland. Good-looking, brains, and politically savvy, too—a triple-threat gal, laugh out loud.

  After high school, Laura went to Texas A&M University, where, an honor roll student, she majored in English. She later earned a master’s in library science at the University of South Carolina.

  After school she married Chris Ling and had three children: two sons and t
he youngest, a pretty daughter, Penelope, who was called Penny (pseudonym). When they divorced, the boys lived with their dad, Ling moved into a place in Murrells Inlet, with her daughter, and she took a job as a reference librarian at the Socastee Public Library, near Myrtle Beach.

  The library was modern and designed to please the eye, a one-story brick building, with its own parking lot and a semicircular driveway that allowed cars to drop library-goers right out front. Plus, a roof extended out over the driveway in front of the main entrance, so those entering and leaving weren’t exposed to rain or intense sun.

  Out front by the road was a brick structure that existed only as a mounting surface for the sign. At the top was the county emblem, which reminded passersby that this was THE INDEPENDENCE REPUBLIC. Below that were the street number and the name of the library. In front of the brick sign, a spotlight protruded from the finely manicured lawn, so the words remained legible after dark.

  Inside, Ling proved herself a master librarian. For any serious researcher, Ling was perfect to befriend. It wasn’t that her knowledge of any subject was exhaustive. She might not have known a fact, but she knew where to look it up. Her responsibilities at the library grew, and one of the extracurricular activities she signed up for was teaching senior citizens how to use a computer.

  Upon first meeting, Laura Ling was attracted to the seemingly harmless Stephen Stanko. She found his intelligence and quiet confidence tremendously appealing. And he was good-looking to boot.

  He didn’t hide being an ex-con. White-collar crimes, he always added. He’d learned his lesson and changed his ways. Seen the light. Now he had a cause.

  One of the first questions she asked him was “Author?” Yes, he replied enthusiastically. He’d written a book in prison, and it had been published—a fact that Laura Ling wasted no time verifying. There it was, on her computer screen. His book was a call for prison reform and modernized methods of rehabilitation. Ling was so impressed. As far as she knew, he was the first published author to walk into her library, which, after all, was a branch. Sure, he was an ex-con. That was secondary.