I Would Find a Girl Walking (16 page)

“It come up after I had gotten my clothes on at that time, and I was reaching underneath my seat and she asked for her thirty dollars at that time.”

“Why were you reaching under your seat?”

“I was reaching under the seat to bring out a concealed knife I had underneath the seat.”

“Was your wallet underneath the seat also?” Crow asked, knowing full well that Stano would have never reached for the wallet to make good on his offer.

“Yes, my wallet was there which was, uh, empty at the time.”

“You had no intentions to really pay her, did you,” the sergeant said more as a statement than a question.

Stano agreed and said no, not really. He had a payment in mind all right, but it wasn’t cash.

“Gerald, when you reached down underneath the seat, was your intention to get your wallet to pay her, or was the intention getting the knife?” Crow confirmed.

“Getting the knife,” Stano stated matter-of-factly.

“Once you got the knife in your hand, Gerald, what did you do?”

“I reached over and stabbed her once with my left hand, which it was in, and retracted the knife from her body with my right hand and repeatedly stabbed her and then got out of my car and took her out and stabbed her a couple more times outside the car and put her down on the ground and covered her with some branches and twigs.” Again, he showed no emotion; only the detached account of the hunt.

“Gerald, when you got her outside of the car and you say you stabbed her a few more times, did you take her away from the car, or did you just cover her right there in the road?”

“No, I took her away from the car and covered her with branches off the side of the road.”

Stano told the sergeant that after he dumped the body he got back in his car and on the road and drove down Wildrose Avenue. He said he thought of stopping at the home of his brother, who lived on the same street, so he could spend the night there because he had been drinking heavily before the attack on Van Haddocks. But he decided against it because there were no lights on in the house, so he headed back to the hotel where he was staying, the Riviera Hotel on U.S. 1 in Ormond Beach.

“After getting to the hotel, I had a T-shirt on that was covered with a little bit of the young lady’s blood,” he said as casually as if he was referring to mustard from a hot dog. “I wiped off the blood on the seat, and left the knife and the shirt in the car at that time. I remember locking the car when I got out.”

Crow wanted to go back and pinpoint the moment right before Stano stabbed Toni Van Haddocks, wondering what made him explode at that particular time.

“Well, she was starting to get a little edgy, and I don’t like being forced, or pushed, really, by verbal statements. And she had said something to the effect of ‘Well, let’s get on with it or let’s not get on with it,’ and I just saw red. And that was it.”

“Do you like black girls?” Crow asked, already surmising what the answer would be.

“No.”

“Did the fact that she was black tend to heighten your anger a little bit?”

“A little bit.”
²⁷

Crow inquired if there was any specific reason why the suspect had taken the young woman to that particular location.

“Yeah, yeah there was. My brother and I don’t seem to see eye to eye and I was trying to get back at him. By what means I couldn’t tell you, but I figured I could get back at him by doing it over there.”

Crow wondered aloud how Stano had anticipated the evening going when he first picked up Toni in Ridgewood. “Did you think about, well, I’ll just go have sex with this girl? Or, will I just go out and take her and kill her?”

“Well, my thoughts at that time when I picked her up were having sex with her and bringing her back, but it didn’t work out that way.”

A lot of things had a way of “not working out” with Gerald Stano.

Nothing seemed to ever work out right for Toni Van Haddocks. She was street-smart, but on February 15, 1980, the night following Valentine’s Day, she was a wounded bird, with her left arm in a cast. Against the enraged Gerald Stano, she didn’t stand a chance.

“It ended up with me killing the young lady,” Stano stated at the end of the interview.

I got the worst of everything growing up. What I mean is, my brother could do no wrong. If he did, I would pay the penalty. But, I loved him like a brother, even though we were both adopted. Sure, we had our differences, but that’s normal though.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, August 27, 1985

For some reason, [my brother] doesn’t want to see me any- more. Why, I don’t know. It could have been from an article a reporter wrote from Sanford. She said I hate my brother. That is not true, Kathy. I love my brother very much. Sure we had our differences growing up, but that is only normal. Especially for two boys.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, December 16, 1985

 

 

 

 

W
ith each murder, Gerald Stano severed a most important bond. Linked by blood and love, the young women whose fate rested in his hands left grieving families to ponder their loss. In two cases, the young women had twin brothers: Ramona and Ray Neal and Barbara and Burt Bauer. Their connection and relationship began in the womb. The girls’ brothers were their protectors, their confidants, their heroes. Their brothers felt the burden of their sisters’ murder all the more significantly because of the unique relationship they shared.

The first time Ray Neal ever saw his twin sister Ramona’s killer, Gerald Stano was just minutes from death. Ray and his brothers, Keith and Ronnie, had front-row seats at the Florida State Prison, at Starke, Florida, for the execution.

“We got there early so we sat on the front row,” Ray Neal, a sheriff’s deputy in Texas, recalled. Ramona Neal, one of Stano’s victims, was not only Ray’s sister, but his twin. Ramona had been born first, on October 3, 1957, and had tipped the scales at a few ounces more than the six pounds her brother weighed. The Neal twins were babies number seven and eight for their parents, Juanita and Jack, and they grew up in a large, loving Christian family. The nine Neal children crowded into a three-bedroom home. Their dad worked, while their mom stayed home to look after her brood.

Their brother Keith was older by fifteen months and recalled that it was his never-ending delight to chase the younger toddlers around trying to steal their baby bottles.

“Me and Ray and Ramona did a lot together,” recalled Keith. “We were real close.”

She and her twin brother did everything together, attending many of the same classes together. They first walked to school, then rode the school bus together. “She was very bubbly and had a wonderful personality,” said Ray Neal.

Often, they would fall asleep talking about their hopes and dreams for the future. “We would talk about what we wanted to do together as adults once we were both grown.” The sister who shared his love for jarred pickles endured kidding from her brother when she sucked her thumb until she was nearly thirteen.

“She would always try to hide it,” said Ray.

Ray had been stationed at Camp Pendleton, California, when he learned that his twin sister had gone missing while on a senior trip to Daytona Beach, Florida. Although they were precisely the same age, Ray hadn’t walked across the stage with Ramona for their graduation from Forest Park High School because he had gone to summer school so that he could finish school early and enlist in the Marine Corps.

“I knew she was going [on the trip],” Ray Neal recalled. It was the highlight of the year for the graduating class in that Georgia town. When he got a telephone call at Camp Pendleton, he knew instinctively that “something was wrong.”

The Neals faithfully attended services at a Southern Baptist church where they lived, and Ramona’s funeral was held in the church her father helped found. Her trip to Daytona Beach for graduation had caused her to miss Sunday school for the first time in ten years. Back home in Forest Park, she proudly owned pins signifying ten years’ continuous Sunday service attendances.

Ramona’s death affected the entire Neal family. “We have never been the same since,” said Ray. His older brother, Keith, became more like a surrogate twin once Ramona was gone. “We talk on the phone every day,” said Ray. Although his dark-haired sister died more than three decades ago—her body was found June 15, 1976—the years have not dulled the pain.

Keith was right there with Ray and their brother Ronnie when Stano was put to death. The three Neal brothers were approved by the state to witness Stano’s death. “We all promised our mother before she died that we would not rest until Stano was tried and executed,” said Ray Neal. Most of the rest of the family was also on hand, waiting in a nearby room.

“I was in the witness room,” said Ray Neal. “It was dead silence.”

Gerald Stano, the man who somehow talked Ramona Neal into getting into his car, entered the room, never looking out toward the seated witnesses. “He focused completely on his attorney,” said Neal.

But even years later, haunting questions remained. How did Stano persuade Ramona to get into his car? Why did she let her guard down?

“Guys like that are very slick,” said Ray Neal. “They know what to do. Trust me, I don’t know what happened; all I can say is she would not have just jumped in a car with him.”

 

 

The final moments of his older sister’s life were a mystery to Ed Bickrest as well. His sister, Susan, had just pulled into the parking lot of her apartment complex in Daytona Beach after leaving her waitress job when she met her killer, according to statements Gerald Stano later gave to detectives about how he had followed her from the restaurant.

“I can’t see her getting in the car with someone,” said Bickrest, from his home in Cumberland, Rhode Island. “She was a little stubborn,” he said. “She wasn’t going to have someone push her around; she wouldn’t take that kind of crap.”

Susan and Ed were the only children of Ed and Emma Bickrest. Two years separated the siblings, who grew up near Cleveland, Ohio, in a close-knit suburb, the kind of place where folks didn’t lock their doors and neighbors often dropped in on each other.

It was just five days before Christmas in 1975 that the Bickrests learned their twenty-four-year-old daughter’s dream of moving to Florida to start a new life had ended tragically.

The initial call to the Bickrest home indicated Susan had drowned. It wasn’t until the next day, after hours of tearful worrying, that the couple learned she had actually been murdered. Alive when Stano threw her unconscious body into Spruce Creek, the battered cocktail waitress hadn’t been able to summon enough strength to get out of the water.

Emma Bickrest was consumed by her daughter’s death, calling investigators periodically to check on the progress of the hunt for the killer. It would be more than four years before Gerald Stano was arrested and ultimately confessed to the crime.

“My parents always said: ‘If it was an accident, [we could understand], but for someone to murder your child for no other reason for being in the wrong place at the wrong time’ . . .” said Bickrest, his voice trailing off as he repeated his parents’ rhetorical statement.

When Emma Bickrest learned Gerald Stano was to be executed, she was determined to come to Florida and face the man who had taken her daughter’s life, but a week before the date of the execution, she was hospitalized and wasn’t able to go.

“It was a message from God that he didn’t want her to go,” said Ed Bickrest. Susan’s younger brother had no interest in seeing such a horrific sight as someone being electrocuted. “I never considered it; it was just taken care of.”

 

 

The Neal and Bickrest families endured one of the saddest rituals of death, the funeral, but Susan Basile’s family was robbed of that kind of psychological closure to her death. Twelve-year-old Susan, who may have been the only one of Gerald Stano’s victims whom he actually knew beforehand, had skated with him at the neighborhood roller rink. She was the picture of innocence, her brother, Mike, said. Why didn’t anyone notice an older man paying such attention to a child?

Looking back, he said he doesn’t think his parents were any more protective of his younger sister than they were of him and his sister, Sharon. But those were times when people weren’t as aware of child predators as they are now.

“It was an era when girls weren’t sexually aware like they are now,” said Mike Basile. “They weren’t on the Internet or Twitter or looking at role models like Britney Spears,” he continued.

When police suggested that Susan might have run away, the family knew better. Though it would be nearly seven long years before they would learn her fate, Marjorie Basile knew the minute her daughter failed to arrive home at her usual time after school that her child was in danger.

The Basiles, now in their eighties, dealt with their grief in their own private way. Pictures of Susan were put away, but nothing could stop the daily reminders in their hearts and minds that their youngest never had a chance.

Echoing his mother’s doubts as to whether Stano was actually the killer, Mike Basile was philosophical.

“Even in the event that he was not my sister’s murderer, he deserved the death penalty.”

Killers like Stano could never be rehabilitated, he believed.

“It’s ingrained and it’s never coming out,” said Basile. “They’ll tell you anything you want to hear just to get out and have the chance to do it again.”

Young women should go out in 2–4 girl groups. Never go out alone, cause that is asking for trouble. I don’t care where it is, that is trouble for one girl.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, January 28, 1986