I Would Find a Girl Walking (6 page)

This may very well have been Crow’s first common ground with Stano, who shared the detective’s fastidiousness for neatness. It would also become the killer’s downfall.

Before being taken to the jail, I took Paul to where I put a body behind the airport. Little did I know, that was the beginning of the end of me. All during this, Paul was like a person I could talk to, and confide in. I didn’t look at him like a policeman. I saw him as a real person, who cared what happened to me.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, November 3, 1985

 

 

 

 

A
s Sergeant Paul Crow waited for Detective Jim Gadberry to bring Gerald Stano in, he thought back to the murder that had taken up much of his time since the body had been found, on February 17, 1980. Mary Carol Maher, twenty, had been missing since January 27, 1980. Her mother had dropped her off at the Holiday Inn Boardwalk on North Atlantic Avenue, Daytona Beach’s entertainment area. The lounge at the top of the hotel was a popular gathering place for young people. Mary Carol was to get a ride with a girlfriend when she was ready to leave. If she couldn’t, she would call her mom to pick her up.

She was at the bar for a while, talking with friends. She was pretty, blond, with a tanned, toned body, the figure of someone whose favorite hangouts are the gym and the swimming pool. Mary Carol had been a championship swimmer at Mainland High School and was attending Daytona Beach Community College at the time she disappeared.

Mary Carol would be capable of fighting off her attacker, agile as she was. Did she get in a car with someone she knew? Crow wondered.

Several motel employees thought they had seen her get into the elevator with a man who appeared to be Hispanic. Crow had the witnesses assist detectives in preparing a composite sketch of the man. The
Daytona Beach News-Journal
had run the sketch, but so far none of the calls that came in directly to the sergeant had yielded much information about just what had happened to Mary Carol after she left the bar.

Crow’s silent musings were interrupted by a tap on the door of his office.

“We’re ready when you are,” Gadberry said and motioned to Stano to go in.

The three walked to a small interrogation room at the rear of the Detective Bureau office. Gadberry pointed to a chair for Stano to sit down, and then walked in behind Crow, closing the door.

“Gerald, I want you to meet Sergeant Crow,” Gadberry said. Stano extended his hand and shook Crow’s, then moved to a seat behind the small desk. Gadberry and Crow followed suit, sitting in the other two chairs and facing Stano behind the desk.

“Today’s my birthday,” Stano blurted out suddenly, prompting Gadberry to look up quickly from the police reports he had been thumbing through.

“What do you mean?” asked Gadberry, knowing Stano’s date of birth on his driver’s license was September 12, 1951. “Today’s the day they got me,” Stano explained.

“I’m not sure what you’re saying,” Gadberry countered.

“Today’s the day my adoption was final so I kind of think of it as my birthday,” Stano said.

“Oh, so you’re adopted?” Crow asked.

Stano responded with a nod of his head, seeming pleased at the notion.

“What a coincidence,” said the sergeant, “my son is adopted, too.”

With that, Stano seemed to warm up to the burly police sergeant, whose massive shoulders and biceps were solid proof of his years of working out with weights and horseback riding. As Stano listened to Crow, he sat forward in his chair, elbows resting lightly on the desk, staring intently at the detective.

“Hey, did you know your mustache is crooked?” Stano asked Crow, pointing to the bristly row of white hair on the detective’s upper lip. Self-consciously, Crow touched his face. “You should get that evened up,” Stano observed.

“Gerald, Sergeant Crow and I want to talk to you about a girl who disappeared from here and see if you might know anything about her,” Gadberry offered, growing a tad impatient but also being careful to leave out the fact that the girl was dead.

“Okay, fine.” Stano tried to appear cooperative, almost chummy with the men.

Paul Crow knew it was time for him to establish a rhythm with the killer. “Did you know either of these girls?” asked Crow, producing pictures of Mary Carol and her sister, whose close resemblance to one another could have easily caused them to be mistaken for twins.

Crow’s interviewing skills had been refined when he was among a small group of law enforcement officers invited by the FBI to attend their profiling seminar at Quantico. There, he had learned the art from the best, such as John Douglas, the coauthor of
Mind Hunter: Inside the FBI’s Elite Serial Crime Unit
, and Robert K. Ressler, who had first coined the term
serial killer
and had founded ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program). Ressler also wrote the book
Whoever Fights Monsters: My Twenty Years Tracking Serial Killers for the FBI
. Ressler titled his book
Whoever Fights Monsters
after a quote from German philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche: “Whoever fights monsters should see to it that in the process he does not become a monster. And if you gaze long enough into an abyss, the abyss will gaze back into you.”

“Sure, I know that one right there,” Stano said, gesturing toward the picture of Mary Carol with an outstretched finger. “I picked her up once.”

“You picked her up?” Crow said quizzically. “You mean you gave her a ride?”

“Yeah, that’s right; she wanted a ride,” Stano replied.

Puzzling a moment, he pinpointed the date, January 27. “She was over on Atlantic Avenue, walking, real
real
late,” he emphasized, as if trying to cast a shadow over Mary Carol’s habits. Crow was steaming with rage inside but made sure his facial expression relayed no emotion.

“And where did you take her?” the officer asked offhandedly, not making eye contact with Stano.

“Well, I drove across the bridge, the Seabreeze Bridge, and then out Mason Avenue,” Stano replied without hesitation.

“Did you stop anywhere?” asked Gadberry.

“Yeah, I wanted to stop at Fannie Farkle’s, but she didn’t want to,” said the cook, referring to a popular nightspot.

“Well, where did you go?” Crow was pressing on slowly.

“We went to Pantry Pride on Mason and we got a six-pack of beer. Yeah, that’s right,
she
wanted a beer.” Stano paused long enough to cross his leg over his knee.

“And where did you go from there?” Crow continued.

“I let her out; she wanted to get out,” Stano said.

“That’s not really true, is it.” Crow was now purposely rhetorical. “She didn’t
really
get out, did she? You two had some kind of argument, didn’t you? Did she make you mad?”

“Yeah, I guess so,” Stano answered, leaning back up on the desk with his elbows.

“What happened? Did you want to, say, have sex with her and she didn’t?” Crow asked quietly, also an attempt at ingratiating himself with Stano, making it seem they shared a common bond.

“Yeah, she started bitchin’, bitchin’ real bad,” said Stano.

“So, what did you do? Did you hit her?” Crow asked casually.

“Yeah, I popped her,” Stano answered offhandedly.

“Hard?” asked Crow.

“Yeah, real hard, like this.” Stano balled up his fist and swung it for emphasis.

“Were you still riding along in the car?” It was now Gadberry’s turn.

“Yeah, we must have been out Mason a ways by then.” Stano looked straight at Gadberry.

“Then what?” said Crow. “Did you hit her again?”

“God damn, she made me mad,” said Stano, his face starting to flush a bit. “Who did she think she was, better than me?”

“Then what did you do?” Crow continued.

“I reached under the seat of my car and got out my knife; then I let her have it,” said Stano.

“What do you mean, ‘let her have it’?” Crow was now prepared to escalate the interrogation.

“I hit her, hard. We were driving along and I hit her in the chest; then she fell over on the seat so I hit her again, this time in the back.”

“Was she saying anything?” asked Crow.

“Yeah,” said Stano. “She was mumbling something, gurgling a little.”

“Did she try to get out of the car?” Crow asked.

“Yeah, but I wouldn’t let her,” Stano replied.

“No? How did you stop her?” Crow sensed he was getting close. “Now, Jerry you got a little carried away didn’t you? You know, Jerry, she was a strong gal, she could be a real bitch when she wanted to be,” the officer said, appearing to sympathize with the suspect.

Stano showed his anger. “You’re damn right! I got my knife and stabbed her in the thigh, and then I hit that bitch in the chest.”

Crow was still building his rhythm. He wanted to know about the slash in the thigh.

“That’s pretty good! How did you do that?” He appeared to praise the work of the killer.

“I hooked her with the knife and pulled her back toward me,” Stano answered, almost like a commentator at a wrestling match.

This was just what Crow had been waiting for, the reference to the leg injury.

It had been a closely guarded fact in the case that Mary Carol’s femur bone had been broken by the force of a blow. That information had been carefully kept from the press and was known only to investigators working on the case.

Crow realized he was breathing a little more deeply, swept up in the moment by Stano’s story. Small beads of perspiration were dotting his face. For the first time, he allowed himself a little cautious optimism.

Gadberry and Crow had not wanted to intimidate Stano by taping the entire interview, going to great lengths to make it seem like a casual conversation. Now the detectives knew they must follow the letter of the law, to avoid any slipups later, should Stano suddenly develop self-induced memory loss.

Gadberry left the room to get a tape recorder. Crow and Stano sat in stony silence.

Then I would go out riding around, and I would find a girl walking, and hopefully she would get into my car, but she would end up making some kind of remark about my weight, music or looks. That would turn me into a different person altogether. I really don’t like to talk about that person, cause it gets me very upset.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, November 3, 1985

 

 

 

 

C
heryl Ramona Neal, 19, had come to Daytona Beach to celebrate her high school graduation, but the weekend of fun quickly turned sour.

The pretty brown-haired, brown-eyed high school senior with the open smile from Forest Park, Georgia, had gone to visit her boyfriend and childhood sweetheart, William Meadows. It was Saturday afternoon, May 29, 1976, at approximately 2:00 p.m., and Meadows was staying at the Holiday Inn Boardwalk. The door to Meadows’s room was unlocked, and when Ramona walked in, she didn’t like what she saw: four other young females, in full party mode. After arguing with a flustered Meadows, Ramona left in a huff and got in the hotel elevator, clad only in a blue bikini with white polka dots and wrapped in a beach blanket. She had $77 in cash on her. William Meadows had not engaged in any unusual activity with any of the four young women, who were just hanging out in his hotel room.

There were approximately fifteen students from Forest Park who’d come to Daytona Beach on May 28, members of the 1976 graduating senior class from Forest Park High School. The idea was to have a good time, marking that milestone of stepping into adulthood.

Nobody saw Ramona Neal again after midnight on Saturday, May 29.

Ramona’s girlfriends grew worried when she failed to return to her hotel. They called police to make a report. An officer was dispatched to the Mayan Inn, where Ramona was staying with the two young women in room 601, at 10:30 p.m. The authorities also contacted William Meadows, who confirmed everyone’s worst suspicions, that he had not seen Ramona since about 2:00 p.m., Saturday, May 29.

On Monday, May 31, a distraught Jack Neal, Ramona’s father, arrived in Daytona Beach. He told police he would be staying at the Embassy Motel on North Atlantic Avenue. The next day, Neal returned to the police station inquiring if there was any further information as to the whereabouts of his daughter, one of his nine children. He also told police that he had relayed all the pertinent information to the state of Georgia and that he would be staying in Daytona Beach for one more day before returning to Forest Park. He left the family’s home telephone number.

On Friday, June 4, a sergeant with the Forest Park Police Department contacted three of Ramona Neal’s friends. All the girls, including Ramona, were graduates of Forest Park High School in Georgia. According to the girls, Ramona had quarreled with her boyfriend, William Meadows, when she found him with other girls in his room. She had gotten quite upset and left, they stated.

The girls added that they had seen the couple arguing heatedly in the lobby of the hotel that evening, and one of them even implied that Meadows might know more about her disappearance than he was letting on.

Ramona was one of nine children, and she had a twin brother, Ray Neal, who was stationed with the U.S. Marines in San Diego, California. Investigators ran a background check concerning Ramona’s habits and associates. From all of this information, they gathered that she was a normal teenager. She did well in school and she liked to sew, and she was a lifelong friend and then childhood sweetheart of William Meadows. Mr. and Mrs. Neal said that, to their knowledge, their daughter had never dated any other boy and that Meadows had never dated any other girl. That sheltered life and having one and only one sweetheart must have added to her anger over the other women she found in Meadows’s room. Ramona’s personal information was verified later by interviewing numerous fellow students and acquaintances of both her and William Meadows.