I Would Find a Girl Walking (17 page)

 

 

 

 

S
ome of Gerald Stano’s victims came to Daytona Beach to chase a dream, though happiness could be elusive at the “World’s Most Famous Beach,” like catching that perfect wave. To some, it was the last frontier, where they came to escape from the cold, or a restrictive family structure, or to simply start a new life. Others, like graduating senior Ramona Neal, came down to celebrate a new beginning. For Ohio native Susan Bickrest, it was a combination of getting away and the postcard-perfect vision of sunny Florida, while Katie Muldoon hoped to finance her goal of becoming a wood sculptor by working as a server at a restaurant while studying at Daytona Beach Community College.

For another of Stano’s victims, Nancy Heard, moving to the “Sunshine State” in late 1974 was part of the process of figuring out the path she would take, whether to stay married or strike out on her own. She came to the Daytona Beach area from South Carolina. She had been married to Tom Heard for about a year, since November 1, 1973. Before she moved to Florida, Nancy worked at a credit union office in Myrtle Beach and spent her spare time with Tom and three other couples.

Tom was one of Elizabeth Heard Dow’s three sons and the first to get married. After their marriage, Tom found himself immersed in work as a radar technician, covering holidays and weekends for others on leave. Tom had dropped out of Clemson University to enlist in the U.S. Air Force, but according to his mother, he was having second thoughts about a military career. “It was pretty stressful,” recalled Mrs. Dow, now a resident of Greenville, South Carolina. When Tom decided he wanted to return to Clemson, the family asked then senator Strom Thurmond and other elected representatives to intervene on his behalf for an early release from the U.S. Air Force. After some inquiries, Nancy learned that she probably could get a job at the university, too, if she brushed up on her computer skills.

The couple decided on a trial separation. Nancy would go to Florida, where her mother lived, while Tom pursued his college dream of studying entomology.

The perky-looking twenty-four-year-old with the long, wavy blond hair took a job as a maid at the Mandarin Motel in Ormond Beach while she set up a plan of studies. She wrote to her mother-in-law that she had purchased a bicycle for transportation to work. She had loved the shores of Myrtle Beach and looked forward to being in a beach atmosphere again.

Leaving her bike at home so that she could ride to work with her sister proved a fatal plan. As Nancy took a break from work January 2, 1975, she walked down the motel’s steps to the beach and encountered Gerald Stano. She fit his perfect profile of a victim—alone, and with an outgoing, friendly nature that allowed him to begin to spin his web of deceit, offering a ride in a friendly manner.

Nancy Heard officially became a crime statistic when Charles Austin Hill IV reported finding the body of a white female to the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office on January 3, 1975. Hill and a friend had been hunting by the dirt extension of Old Dixie Highway north of Bulow Creek Road near Tomoka State Park when they found the body of a young woman lying beneath a power line.

Volusia County Sheriff’s Office deputies who examined the woman’s body found it lying on its back with her clothes in disarray. Her knees were spread and her feet were together. The body was cold. The deputies described the young woman as having light brown to blondish hair and wearing glasses, a blue denim jacket with red lining, a light blue long-sleeved sweater, a bra, blue denim pants, light blue panties, dark blue canvas shoes with red soles, and gray socks. To the southeast of her body was a blue denim bag with red straps, approximately eighteen inches away from her head.

The deputies notified the medical examiner, Dr. Arthur Schwartz, who went to the scene with Investigator Mike Cook of the state attorney’s office.

After Dr. Schwartz viewed the body, he and Cook obtained, among other items, a book of matches imprinted with the name of the Mandarin Motel on South Atlantic Avenue in Ormond Beach, Florida. Following a preliminary investigation by Dr. Schwartz, the body was removed to Halifax District Hospital via Beacon Ambulance for an autopsy. Reporting Deputy Sergeant Arthur Dees and Investigator Cook proceeded to the Mandarin Motel with Polaroid pictures of the victim, whom the manager of the motel and two fellow maids identified as Nancy Heard.

In a written statement dated March 6, 1981, Gerald Stano wrote:

“I remember taking a girl up there with me (Bulow Creek) with a blue purse trimmed in brown and light colored clothes. During our travel we got into an argument and I hit her in the head with the back of my hand. . . . She said she wanted to go back to the beach and I said shut up bitch and I hit her again.”

Stano’s account of the slaying continued:

“We then stopped along some little path and I began to move towards her and she was nervous. Then I put my hands up to her and I strangled her.”

Armed with Stano’s written statement, Sergeant Paul Crow interviewed the suspect at the Daytona Beach Police Department on March 12, 1981.

Once more, Sergeant Crow advised Stano of his rights and ascertained that his current address was the Volusia County Jail. Crow then said the name “Nancy Heard” into his tape recorder, spelling it out, “H-E-A-R-D,” and opened his line of questioning.

“And you’re willing to talk to me at this time about a case in 1975, a white female who has been identified as Nancy Heard in reference to a homicide investigation?”

“Yes, sir.” Stano knew the drill by then.

“Mr. Stano, in January of 1975, do you recall ever picking up a white female in the Ormond Beach area?”

“Yes, I do.”

Then, as usual, Crow asked Stano about the approximate location where he had picked up his victim, as well as a physical description of the girl, if only to determine with final certainty that she was indeed Nancy Heard. Stano was as precise as he was detached in his answers.

“In regards to the first part of the question, I picked her up around the Mandarin Motel on the beachside. She was walking down the beach, down the beach stairs from the Mandarin Motel. It was towards afternoon. She was wearing a blue pair of pants, or excuse me, strike that, jeans, uh, a light shirt, uh, uh a blue Wrangler jacket with red trim and a blue pocketbook with red trim, or reddish brown trim.”

The sergeant wanted to know if Stano and the young woman had any type of conversation that would have personalized the victim to her attacker. At this point, the investigator had no idea that the attack had been all too personal.

“Uh, the conversation was just, just a little. She said she worked at the Mandarin Motel as a maid and, um, asked me what I did and I told her I worked for Publix Supermarket.” Stano did not, of course, but it was his way of ingratiating himself to a potential prey.

Crow wanted to broach the subject of favorite hunting grounds.

“Are you very familiar with the motels along Daytona Beach and Ormond Beach, the names of the motels?”

“Yes, sir. I could name at least half the motels down the beachside.”

“And you’re positive of the name of the motel you’ve mentioned that you picked her up behind, or whatever?”

“Yes, sir, the Mandarin Motel. Yes.”

Crow wanted to know what time of day it was, and Stano replied that it was early afternoon. Nancy Heard had apparently decided to take a walk on the beach behind the motel where she worked, an impulse for some fresh air, perhaps, or a break from the monotony of making beds and cleaning toilets. It was a decision that would seal her fate.

Then the sergeant asked where the two went after Stano picked her up.

Stano mapped out a route taking several twists and turns until the pair reached an area near Old Dixie Highway called Cobb’s Corner.

That’s when Crow interjected:

“Are you very familiar with the area up there?”

“Uh, so-so. But I could find my way around there pretty, pretty good.”

“We’re talking about the Tomoka State Park area, are we not?”

“Yes. Yes. Somewhere around there.”

“What, or where, did you take this young lady to?”

“Uh, there is a, uh, power line, uh road, there is a dirt road that runs, um . . .”

Crow was growing impatient. He already knew about the power line and about the hunters on the stretch of dirt near the highway.

“Gerald, where about on Old Dixie Highway are you talking about? Is it a specific area that you know or was it a dirt road or a hunter’s trail? What are we talking about here that you got off the road?”

Stano sensed some irritation on the part of Crow but continued his vagaries as if to purposely raise the sergeant’s level of exacerbation. It was his game, and he was very good at it.

“Uh, up around Old Dixie Highway there’s a little, um, you could call it a hunter’s trail going down there. It’s big enough for a tractor-trailer, you know, and 4 by 4’s, what have you, you know. And I took my car down that way, which was my green Satellite at that time, 1973. I took, I went down that road to some power lines which was about a quarter of a mile to half a mile, if not a little more, and I disposed of the body.”

After providing Crow with so much extraneous detail, now Stano had jumped ahead and left out the most important part of his account.

“You disposed of the body,” Crow stated slowly. “What do you mean you disposed of the body?”

The sergeant tried to stay within the exasperatingly meandering rhythm of the interrogation. “Did you kill her in the car? Give me some details. What was she wearing when she was in the car? Give me some details.”

“I choked the young lady to death, and finding out that she was dead, I dragged her out of the car leaving her in some thickets on the side of the road, and then turning around and then just leaving,” Stano said. Again, though, Stano had skipped a critical part of his confession.

Crow just looked at him, and after a beat, asked point-blank : “Gerald, why did you kill her?”

Stano, though never at a loss for words, sat silently. No answer, only the slightest hint of contrition.

“Gerald, let me ask you again, why did you have to kill her, son?”

“Well, I was engaged at the time to a young lady, and this young girl, Nancy . . .”

Crow looked up. “Is that the name she used?”

“Yes. Yes. Nancy. And, uh, she started to sound like my future wife, bitching, bitching, bitching, and I wasn’t about to take it from anybody. . . . I just, I just went ahead and, uh, put my arms around her and just strangled her. I put my arms around her neck and strangled her.”

Crow was somewhat taken aback by Stano’s association of this victim with his then fiancée, and now he wanted to recap.

“Gerald, what you’ve told me is simply that you picked her up on the beach at the Mandarin Motel, took her up to the Tomoka State Park area . . . [and then] something from her attitude or conversation irritated you to the point that you felt there was a need to kill her, choke her. Was it your intention to kill her when you started choking her or did you . . . What was on your mind then?”

“Not exactly. I didn’t intend to choke her. I was just meaning to, uh, keep her mouth shut because she was trying to run her mouth so goddamn much she sounded like my future wife that I was gonna marry.”

The sergeant had nothing left to say except to ask Stano if he recalled anything else, about Nancy or the conversation with her. He did not. All he remembered was that after he killed her and left her body by the side of the road, he had driven down Old Dixie Highway to U.S. 1 and then back home.

 

 

More than thirty years later, memories of learning of her daughter-in-law’s murder were still as fresh to Elizabeth Heard Dow as they were then.

An uncle of Nancy’s called the Heard home to let them know what happened. “I’ve got some sad news,” she recalls being informed.

The family was shocked. “I loved my Nancy, and I can’t believe what we went through,” said Mrs. Dow in her genteel southern accent.

She waited for her son Tom, Nancy’s husband, to get home. He walked in “happy as can be,” she recalled. He had just learned he had gotten permission to be discharged from the U.S. Air Force and allowed to return to college. Later, he would say that day “turned from the happiest day of his life to the saddest day of his life.”

The Heard family gathered later in Georgetown, South Carolina, for Nancy’s funeral, some of them no doubt remembering that happy day less than two years earlier, in 1973, when they’d attended Tom and Nancy’s wedding at St. James Episcopal Church in Greenville.

Years would go by before they would learn through a newspaper article read by a friend that Nancy had been the victim of a man who had killed and killed again. Was she too trusting of the friendly stranger that day?

Mrs. Dow remembered warning Nancy of the dangers of going anywhere by herself.