I Would Find a Girl Walking (9 page)

No one ever wins was his conclusion. The parents don’t win, the relatives don’t win, and obviously, the victims never did.

Paul Crow did enjoy a Pyrrhic victory of sorts with Gerald Stano’s admission of guilt. And although he would wait patiently for his answers, engaging in small talk with his subject until he was willing to be forthcoming with the information at hand, at times the investigator would also reach the end of his rope, as in the case of two unidentified victims. He and Stano had already established a rapport, and at some point during the course of that particular interview, the detective said, point-blank:

“I’m getting tired of talking to you, Jerry. Just where are we with this thing?”

Stano replied, flatly: “About 90 percent.”

And then, after Crow prodded him with, “Where else should I look?” Stano answered, succinctly, “Gainesville. It was in Gainesville. There was two of them, two girls. One had a pair of boots on, so I could run her down. The other one had a gypsy outfit on and she didn’t have a chance.” And then the two men just silently stared at each other.

From Stano’s savage attack on Donna Marie Hensley, the prostitute who escaped from his grasp and led Detective Jim Gadberry to the short-order cook, Sergeant Crow was able to determine that the killer had become, as he put it in the profiling lingo, “disorganized” once he “went inside.” By his own admission, he forced some of his victims out of his car so they wouldn’t leave any traces of evidence; others met death right in the front seat, by a severe pummeling or stabbing. Completing the murder inside the car or apartment or whatever the case might be was what tripped up Ted Bundy, finally, when he went from “organized” to “disorganized” serial killer. Bundy had gone “inside,” to the Sigma Chi Sorority house in Tallahassee. Stano had taken Donna Marie Hensley back to the seedy motel room she called home in Daytona Beach.

What Crow did know was that, like Bundy, Stano was also, in his own way, a “charmer.” Even though he was not good-looking like the suave, smooth-talking law student from Seattle, Stano dressed well, wore cologne, and his approach was friendly; he talked a good talk. The detective also recognized that these killers killed quickly, within fifteen minutes of having a victim in their cars.

Crow believed that Stano, like Gary Ridgway—who would eventually admit that he thought of killing women as his “career”—was not a part-time serial killer but had probably been at his “job” for quite a long time. It was the only job that he would ever truly hold.

Just like with the women he couldn’t keep unless he snatched them and killed them, Stano had never been able to stay at one job for very long. That may have been one of many reasons for his sense of restlessness, and the rage that festered and grew inside him.

Looking at Stano’s patterns of behavior earlier on, Paul Crow instantly detected what he had in common with other serial killers: a penchant for being cruel to animals, setting fires, and pulling malicious pranks, such as throwing rocks from an overpass to cars driving below. He also was teased by his fellow classmates. Another part of the pattern was the lying, the cheating, and the stealing.

A major factor was his sense of abandonment, first by his biological mother, then by his adoptive parents when they were no longer able to cope with his shenanigans at home and shipped him off to his grandparents.

And the adoptive father was violent toward him, Stano would complain. He admitted that he was deathly afraid of the elder Stano.

Crow wanted to be sure he had given Stano every chance to be truthful during the hours of interrogation. It seemed highly unlikely Stano wasn’t the killer, given the amount of detailed information he had provided, but the detective sergeant wanted to give him one last chance.

Bluntly, he said, “Jerry, after this is sealed we’ll never be able to speak again, so I’ll work as hard as I can with you to get out of this thing. If you didn’t do any of these things, tell me that.”

He said, “No, we’ll leave it alone.”

Gerald Stano had killed about fifteen young women on the west coast of Florida alone, but those police departments did not cooperate with the news ban proposed by the Daytona Beach Police Department and released all pertinent information to the
St. Petersburg Times
prematurely. The true total number of victims, some unidentified, some never found, may never be known.

There was also the issue of multiple crimes and case overload. At the same time that Crow was working the first murder Stano was linked to after his arrest—Mary Carol Maher—he was also investigating a serial rapist case, at the Derbyshire Apartments complex. Coincidentally, Stano had once lived there and later encountered one of his victims, Susan Bickrest, in the parking lot.

The only rape victim who could identify her assailant was a topless dancer who was also bisexual. Crow didn’t care who or what the women were or what they did. The bottom line, he felt, was that “the S.O.B.,” meaning the rapist, “had done seven others in the area.” Those issues alone, however, the ones casting a shadow over the character of a victim, could become an uphill challenge for any prosecutor. Unfair, but sadly true.

In this case, the victim who escaped the serial rapist had been approached by the suspect at the bottom of the stairs of the apartment complex. He was posing as a security guard and began by telling her to be careful. This was a ruse very similar to one that Ted Bundy used, sometimes pretending to be a police officer, like he did with one young woman at a mall, whom he approached telling her someone had broken into her car.

The would-be rapist attempted to assault the victim, but she was a physically strong woman who turned the tables on her attacker, beating him until he fled. Crow identified two different approaches and styles in the attacks: the anger rapist, who came on strong and got angry and violent, or the con approach of the “security guard,” who pretended to “protect” the victim.

Paul took the case of the serial rapist to the press, releasing a composite sketch of the man terrorizing women. Ironically, he turned out to be the night-shift security guard at my newspaper. This would be at least the second person who worked there—Stano was the first—who showed a proclivity for violence against women. How often had he urged my fellow workers to “be careful” as they walked to their cars on a dark night?

Gerald Stano had used both styles in each of his attacks. First he would befriend or “rescue,” as it were, a prospective victim, and then he would strike, relentlessly, with the stealth and fury of a shark.

This was similar to the strategy that Stano had used on Mary Carol Maher, the champion swimmer who was in top physical shape, and also during his attack on Donna Marie Hensley, the prostitute. Full force, and then, the overkill. Except that Hensley was able to get away.

Paul Crow believed that Stano suppressed a dangerously high level of anger and frustration toward women. As with most serial killers, his attacks were not about sex, but about power and control. Although he also had a highly developed sex drive, most of the time he could not perform, since he was a long-term alcoholic and used drugs for a period of time. His ex-wife rarely wanted to engage in sex with him, Stano would tell the psychiatrists who evaluated him. Did he use the knife, as he did with Hensley and Maher, as a phallic symbol of penetration?

During the interview that he conducted with Jerry Stano after his arrest for the attack on Hensley, Paul Crow let Detective Jim Gadberry do most of the talking because he wanted to watch how Stano phrased his answers, and also his body language. He noticed that when Stano was telling the truth, he would lean his body forward and place his elbows on the table. When he was not telling the truth or leaving something out on purpose, he would push away, fold his arms, and lean back in his chair, appearing to seem confused.

For the case of Mary Carol Maher, Crow had a two-hour sit-down with his detainee before he was able to extract a full confession. Finally, the killer’s take on how he had inflicted the stab wound to the girl’s leg unfolded as follows: she tried to get out of the car, and he hooked her in the thigh and pulled her back inside the car. She then fell forward, and he stabbed her a couple of times in the back. Then, he said, “The bitch started bleeding all over my car floor, so I took her out behind the airport and dumped her; then I went home and cleaned my car out.”

For Mary Carol, hers was clearly the typical case of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. She was at a beachside hotel at the dance floor upstairs. She was a regular at the popular spot for young people. She had won several gold medals for swimming in her high school. She was a perfectly normal teenager, exemplary even: Daytona Beach’s golden girl. And then she was murdered for no reason at all.

Like some of the other notorious serial killers, Stano took trophies. He would take the young women’s purses, ankle bracelets, or driver’s licenses. Crow was certain that he kept them all in a particular place. Stano even told him, on one occasion, “Some day, we will go there.”

In the cases of all of the girls who had fallen prey to Gerald Stano, the investigator from Daytona Beach had kept in mind a sound piece of advice once offered to him by a friend, well-known criminal defense attorney F. Lee Bailey: “When you ask a question, know the answer.”

Paul Crow already knew all the answers with Gerald Stano.

The only time Crow saw Stano shed a tear was when he took detectives to the location where he had left Mary Carol Maher. “It still smelled, but he walked us to the place and stopped, and then he turned, like he did so many times with other victims, and pointed to the exact spot. I really feel that was the moment he knew it was over.”

Sometimes, a person is said to “blink” when caught in the act, and when they know there is no turning back.

To Paul Crow, that was the only time that Gerald Stano “blinked.”

Well, I had just been fired from the Burroughs’ Corporation in Paoli, Penn., and I wanted to be alone for a while. So, I got into my 1973 Plymouth Duster: (green over green with avenger 60’s and slotted disk mags, 3 speed on the column, and a beautiful stereo system. It was also jacked up in the back with air shocks). I made it as far as Holly Hill Plaza, where I wanted to buy a few tapes for my car. While in the parking lot, I saw a Duster’s hood up, and thought I would help. It turned out to be a young lady with a Duster like mine, but only an automatic. Hers was blue on the bottom with a white vinyl top. She had a dead battery, so I took my jumper cables and gave her a jump start.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, October 21, 1985

In 1973, Barbara and Burt Bauer were the seventeen-year-old twins who called this once grand residence their home.

Barbara Anne Bauer was a cheerleader, popular in school, and on the honor roll. She was vivacious and outgoing. She and her twin brother were inseparable, except for one sunny September afternoon when Barbara drove to Daytona Beach to pick out fabric to make her cheerleading outfit.

The pretty teenager with long sun-bleached brown hair had driven her Plymouth Duster out of the garage of the family’s sprawling two-story house on the afternoon of September 6, 1973. She was dressed casually for her shopping trip in cutoff blue jeans, sandals, and a T-shirt bearing the logo “OHIO STATE.”

Hours passed and Barbara did not return home, never to be seen again by her family and setting off a months-long search.

Her mother, Audrey, became frantic and phoned all of Barbara’s friends, who confirmed that Barbara had told them that she was planning to drive to Holly Hill Plaza in Daytona Beach, at Nova Road and Mason Avenue, to a fabric shop there.

Her mother then called the New Smyrna Beach Police Department and was told to consider the possibility that her daughter had run away. Like so many other parents, Audrey Bauer assured the responding officer unequivocally that her daughter wouldn’t leave of her own free will without telling her parents.