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Authors: Michael Benson

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TALKING HEADS
Stephen Stanko’s narcissism no doubt made him feel glorified by his fame, his
stardom
. He thought like a public relations agent. Hmm, he pondered, how to envelop himself in an aura of benevolence.
With a snap of his fingers, he thought about using his celebrity for the cause of
good
. He would dedicate his public profile to lowering the crime rate through prison reform! Excellent plan, a perfect continuation of the social visionary he’d been all along.
It was all the fault of the system—the prison system, the system of assimilating ex-cons into society—and he was going to
prove
it. He would have a trial and he would use it as a sounding board, as a soapbox, for the very same message he’d delivered in his book.
He would exploit his celebrity to the maximum, pedal to the metal, and that was no delusion! In the days after Laura Ling and Henry Lee Turner died, he
really was
the most famous criminal in America.
Stephen Stanko was national news. On the evening of his arrest, a segment on Stanko was featured on
Anderson Cooper 360
°
,
a news program on CNN.
Cooper’s choice as an expert witness was Jane Elizabeth “Liz” McLendon Buckner, Stanko’s ex-girlfriend and 1996 victim. At the top of the show, Anderson Cooper teased the segment on the killer’s capture, concisely summing up Stanko as a “smooth talker, a published author—with a
dark
secret.”
Liz was getting to be a media veteran. Her media tour, which would turn her into a staple on cable news, began when a local TV news reporter located her. She was put on the air live and told to address Stephen Stanko, who very well might be out there watching the coverage of himself on TV. She looked into the camera and asked Stephen to give himself up before anyone else got hurt. She asked him to think about his niece whom he adored, and think of how he would feel if someone hurt her. She had been good on TV, and now the national cable networks wanted her as well. For a while, she said yes to everyone.
In retrospect, the direct plea to Stephen Stanko on local news, Channel 2, would seem ridiculous to Liz. She appealed to the conscience of a man who lacked one.
“It was a waste of time,” Liz said. “He wasn’t paying attention to anything at that point.”
Now Stanko was behind bars, and Liz could talk about events in the past tense. There was a terror to Stanko’s spree, as long as it was ongoing, that was gone now that he was caught. Liz could start to heal again from the old wounds torn open anew by recent events.
On this night, she would share the Anderson Cooper show with a feature on breast implants (what you need to know before going under the knife); a plan to legalize alley cat hunting in Wisconsin, where there was overpopulation; dolphins stranded on the Florida Coast; and a surefire way to self-determine the level of your racial bias. It was going to be a full show.
Cooper started with the “breaking news,” and that was Stanko. He explained that Stanko looked “anything but like a fugitive” when apprehended “a few moments ago in Georgia.” He looked like a successful businessman.
Cooper introduced an unspooling pre-recorded segment. An unnamed “friend” of Stanko’s was quoted as saying Stanko had pledged that he’d never go back to prison. After eight years in, he’d only been out nine months.
There was a description of the Ling and Turner murders, and an emphasis on his savage rape of a fifteen-year-old girl. He’d been caught because he twice stole the motor vehicle of his victims, making him traceable.
South Carolina lieutenant Andy Christenson was shown making a public statement, obviously recorded before Stanko’s arrest. He warned that desperate people did desperate things, that people should be “vigilant and cautious.” People should not take matters “into their own hands.” Christenson said the public was being fooled by this guy. “He is very convincing,” the cop said. Folks should be looking for a fellow with the gift of gab, a smooth guy.
Cooper said the killer not only dressed well, but he was a published author as well, a book called
Living in Prison
. He was released early because he could convince others his life of crime was finished.
When Liz came on, Cooper explained that she had been, during the early 1990s, Stanko’s girlfriend for four years. She discussed the “very, very wicked way he had of twisting things around.” She said he lied—he lied well—that he was articulate and intelligent. She bought the package, enough to dedicate four years to him. Most of that time “she didn’t suspect him at all.”
Cooper commented that Stanko had a classic sociopathic personality. He was “surrounded by mirrors,” a chameleon, whoever he needed to be depending on the situation. His manipulation of others was constant.
“He could make you believe something that you knew for a fact was not the truth,” Liz explained. When, after forever, she began to catch on, Steve did an inadequate job of backpedaling, which she could see through. “He tried to convince me that it was not what I suspected,” she said, but by that time, she knew better.
Cooper asked Liz if she had been scared when she learned Stanko was out of prison and on the run.
“Very,” she said. Truth was, she was frightened from the moment he was released. She had no reason to think he would try to find her, but one never knew.
When she learned of his violent rampage, she became terrified. “He does have a personal vendetta against people who he think wronged him, and I’m sure I was on that list, somewhere along the way,” Liz explained.
Cooper finished his Stanko segment with an interview of Stanko’s coauthor Dr. Gordon Crews, who said he’d found Stanko to be an easy guy to work with. Dr. Crews described reading the first draft of Stanko’s book, and being impressed with the prisoner’s philosophy and articulation. He said he found Stanko’s writing fascinating and “signed on immediately” to be a part of the project.
Of course, taking into consideration subsequent events, Crews felt he should revise all of his previous opinions. For the past few days, Crews had been learning new things about Stanko—bizarre, incredible things. Crews had Stanko characterized in his mind as a model prisoner who was toiling to let the outside world know what it was like on the inside. The book, as Crews saw it, was a cry for reform, and Stanko was the lead crusader.
It never—seriously,
never
—occurred to Crews that Stanko would return to his violent ways once out. It was mind-blowing. How wrong could a guy be?
He’d seen Stanko as depressed, yes. Violent, no.
“You could tell that depression was setting in,” Crews said, “because he kept describing himself as, you know, kind of getting slapped down constantly. Nobody wanted a convicted felon working at Best Buy with them. The last time I spoke with him, he was very depressed, on the verge of giving up.”
Crews said he had a great deal of sympathy for Liz Buckner, because he knew how convincing Stanko could be, and couldn’t blame her at all for falling under his spell. He was glad, in retrospect, that nothing confrontational had occurred during the writing of the book. Knowing what he knew now about the crimes that sent Stanko to prison the first time, he could see the pattern repeating itself. He would put on a façade designed to accomplish whatever it was that he wanted to accomplish—whether it had to do with acquiring money or sex, a job or a relationship. If he was confronted with his lies, confronted strongly, he resorted to violence.
(Crews and Liz later appeared on the same segment of the Greta Van Susteren show on Fox News. Although she regretted it later, Liz was given an opportunity to address Crews and she really blasted him. She wanted to know how a person who had committed the crimes that Stephen had committed against her could be allowed to use that experience to make a profit. In retrospect, she was railing against the system, but Crews took the brunt of it. And she did later feel bad about her misdirected anger.)
After finishing with Anderson Cooper, Gordon Crews stuck around and appeared later in the evening on the same network, this time being interviewed by “former prosecutor turned media wolverine” Nancy Grace, who implied he was a vulture for trying to make a buck off Stephen Stanko’s previous crimes, a criticism Crews couldn’t help but liken to the pot calling the kettle black.
He told Grace that his becoming Stanko’s coauthor was the publisher’s idea, since Stanko was an inmate and Crews a scholar. He said he put in three and a half years on the project that became
Living in Prison
, both writing his own section while helping to hone Stanko’s already-impressive prose.
Crews said that Stanko was brimming over with confidence and enjoyed painting himself as a new breed of writer. Like Truman Capote or Hunter Thompson, he was going to create a genre of writing.
It sounded maybe like Crews was describing someone perfect, but no, Stanko’s faults were always in evidence as well. The professor thought the inmate had a lot of talent, but he sometimes came on too strong. He had none of the humility one might expect to see in an individual who’d spent years behind bars.
Grace asked if, during the entire time the professor and the inmate worked together, had Stanko ever discussed the details regarding his kidnapping charge. Crews replied that Stanko had not. Looking back on it, Crews said, Stanko’s range of topics when they communicated was extremely narrow.
If Stanko referred to his crime at all, he called it “white-collar,” combined with a “domestic dispute,” just one of those spouse things that got out of hand. He’d been stressed because of work and they had a fight. Certainly nothing worthy of a ten-year sentence.
Grace wasn’t impressed with Crews’s naïveté.
PEOPLE ARE MEAN
In all spectacular murder cases, there were many players, and the media and public underwent a natural process of separating the good guys from the bad guys. In this case, a misperception had placed Dana Putnam in some people’s eyes on the list of bad guys. The reason? She had aided and abetted and heaven-knows-what-elsed the killer.
The negative blowback took Dana’s supporters by surprise. Those who loved her—and there were many—were stunned by this interpretation of the facts. She had the misfortune of being in the thick of a sensational news story. Public figures had long understood that it was a mistake to read about yourself on the Internet, or listen to call-in radio shows when you are the topic, but Putnam was unprepared for the reckless criticism of strangers.
In hindsight, she should have known there would be a negative reaction—some people had their minds in the gutter. When that reaction came, the loudest barks wouldn’t necessarily come from the smartest dogs.
Putnam was criticized for taking a liking to the guy she met at her birthday party, for being nice to him and giving him a place to stay at the tail end of a long night of drinking. She hadn’t seen through the con man’s con, and for this, she was to be held accountable? People were just
mean
.
Her friends—as well as clear-thinking strangers—saw Dana correctly as one of the heroes of the story. After all, she was the person who supplied the information that led to Stephen Stanko’s arrest.
Plus, her kindness ended his flight and kept him in one place. Her actions, keeping Stanko calm and focused on a “strangers in the night” romance, might even have prevented additional violence.
Back when Dana was still answering questions, she was asked how she felt. She said it made her feel good,
great,
that the world was now a safer place.
“I feel like God had chosen me to bring him down,” she explained.
Good feeling or no, Dana despised notoriety. She did not like her name on the front pages of newspapers in this, or any other, context. She stopped answering reporters’ questions, which she felt would only fuel the publicity fire.
By April 13, public criticism had gotten so bad that Janice Putnam agreed to speak to the press and address the unexpected controversy.
Spitting fire, the mother said, “My daughter may not want to talk about what happened, but I do.” Janice said it hurt her soul to see and hear her daughter’s character sullied and rubbed in the dirt. “They are just slamming her, instead of praising her for getting this guy off the street,” she said. People thought that Dana knew the guy was a psycho sicko and was nice to him, anyway, and that wasn’t even close to what had happened. The guy was a con artist. Didn’t they get that? Her daughter was conned—conned by a master. “It is just so upsetting with everybody making it seem like she is a scumbag and hangs out at lounges. And she is not that way at all.” It was the people who called those radio talk shows who were the worst, spouting slanders against her daughter without knowing any of the facts, without knowing their butts from holes in the ground.
At least, the police had been nice. In Augusta, law enforcement authorities had gone on the record to say they believed Dana to be a hero and recommended that she receive the $10,000 reward that the Feds had put up.
Janice knew that, no matter how public opinion went—and she could only hope that people would start being nice—Dana’s ordeal was far from over. She couldn’t just close her eyes and make it all go away. Someday there was going to be a trial, and it was going to start all over again. Dana would no doubt have to testify, and there would be cross-examination during which she would be asked heaven-knows-what. She
didn’t
invite him home to have some sort of illicit affair. She was trying to prevent a tragedy by getting an intoxicated man off the roads. How was she supposed to know he was a creep?
She assured everyone who might hear or see her words that she and her daughter were in complete agreement that they wanted “this man” put away.
“He was a real con artist,” Janice said, adding that it would be a few weeks before her daughter learned if she qualified for the $10,000 reward.
Dana’s father, Charles Putnam, also leapt to her defense, publicly stating that his daughter was merely “doing what a good citizen would do.”
Greg Rickabaugh, of the
Augusta Chronicle,
called the federal police to find out the status of that reward money. He was told by Deputy Kenneth Shugars that Dana Putnam had been asked to fill out paperwork. Until that was done, the Washington office couldn’t determine if she qualified.

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