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Authors: Michael Benson

BOOK: Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle
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LIZ
Jane Elizabeth “Liz” McLendon thought she could spot a bad boy when she saw one. She’d written papers on juvenile delinquents, what they called in school “hoods,” and considered herself a bit of an expert. Ambitious by nature, she hoped to turn it into a career one day.
She was a beautiful girl, elected homecoming queen. However, if you asked her what she wanted to be when she grew up, she gave a surprising answer.
“A criminologist,” she would say. Specifically, she wanted to be an FBI profiler, who used details of murder scenes to predict what the killer was like.
As almost always happened to youthful dreams, real life got in the way. Liz married young, had a son, and was divorced when the boy was five. To her credit, even with the surprises, the wheels didn’t completely come off her game plan. She completed college and earned a marketing degree.
Several years later, in 1992, the single mom was working as a sales rep for a telecommunications company. Working for the same company, although in a different building a few miles away, was Stephen Stanko.
Liz’s first impression of Stanko was one of suspicion. She even went so far as to tell her assistant manager that she thought the guy was “shifty.”
The female assistant manager exclaimed with a twinkle: “Oh, but he’s so cute!”
Liz furrowed her brow. “I don’t know—there’s just something about him.”
After that, Liz couldn’t get rid of him. He’d taken one look at her and his heart started pounding. Steve found every excuse to visit Liz’s building.
“He was very persistent, and showing up in my office a lot,” Liz recalled. He wore her down.
Stanko told Liz he’d grown up in Goose Creek, which was true, and had just gotten back from Savannah, Georgia, where he was attending art school, which turned out not to be true. He told her that he’d met an evil woman in Savannah and she’d taken every dime he had. He’d been stupid and had fallen for the woman’s con artist scheme.
He was very polite, with such a nice personality—the world’s most charming guy. And Liz wasn’t embarrassed to admit that—forgetting all about Stephen’s shiftiness—she was charmed.
He preferred calling her Elizabeth, rather than Liz, or sometimes “Rizarif,” a version of her name in baby talk.
Stephen liked his beer, now and again, but he wasn’t really a drinker. She never saw him show the effects of alcohol. “Not even a little bit,” Liz recalled. No drug problems, either. That was a very good sign, Liz thought early on. That was one whole category of relationship dysfunction that she didn’t have to worry about. He was just a “nice ol’ Southern boy.”
At first, dating Stephen was tremendous fun. Their nascent romance danced with a nearly gravity-defying bliss. They sang and looked into each other’s eyes.
Although he couldn’t play a musical instrument, he loved music. “He was a good dancer,” Liz recalled. “Shagging (the dance) was one of his preferences, and he was good at that.”
He enjoyed beach music and oldies. When they were together, they listened to a lot of Frank Sinatra and Neil Diamond. “Strangers in the night, dooby-dooby-do.” Early on, he made her a cassette tape of music for her to play in the car, all stuff she liked: Van Morrison, Huey Lewis, Randy Travis, and the Righteous Brothers. That tape was her constant companion for a time, and those songs remind her even today of the good times with Stephen.
He wrote her love letters. He told her that he’d never felt as strong and close to anyone as he did to her. Love more than yesterday but less than tomorrow.
Liz’s fondest memories were of going to college football games at the Citadel, where Stephen was a big fan. The Citadel’s football team rocked in 1992, eleven wins, two losses, on their way toward capturing the Southern Conference championship. Stephen took Liz to the game at the old Johnson Hagood Stadium against Marshall in October, which set the all-time attendance record for the Citadel, more than 23,000 souls surrounding Sansom Field. The stadium and playing field had different names, which is what happened when you tried to dedicate the new without dissing the old.
Stephen told Liz that he wanted to be a writer—write about sales and achieving success. She said she thought he’d be good at that. She could see how he would be a very good motivator. He knew how to make people want to do well.
He said that his hero in the motivational area was Zig Ziglar, and he hoped to one day metamorphose, as Ziglar had, from champion seller to master motivator.
Stanko wanted to author best sellers, like Ziglar had penned, and be in constant demand for speaking engagements. The man could sell a pitch. He made it all seem so feasible.
Once, Stephen took Liz to an exclusive neighborhood and showed her a beautiful mansion. He told her that used to be his home, but he sold it to go to Savannah.
When that went over well, he took her to a boat marina, took her on a boat, and told her it was his—but he’d had to sell it, just like his beautiful home.
In one unusually candid moment, he told her he’d had a few disappointments, that he’d really wanted to go to the Air Force Academy, but it wasn’t meant to be.
“I couldn’t pass the eye exam!” he told Liz. It was a sensitivity to pressure or something in one eye. Nothing serious—just enough to keep him from flying fighter jets.
Stephen saw competition everywhere. Anything and everything was a competition he had to win. Liz remembered one time they had to go to a family function, her family, and Stephen felt anxiety that someone at that get-together might look better than they did. He insisted that he and Liz dress to the nines so that they would be the best dressed.
True, she sensed a chilliness on Stanko’s surface—he countered her ardent embraces with boasts and swagger—but she chalked it up to his rigid upbringing, and—at first, anyway—didn’t look deeper.
Liz noticed that Stephen’s father was the key to his ego. If he needed to dress better, make more money, accomplish more things, or whatever it was, it was because he had been taught to be that way by his father. He had to be the best, or else he would disappoint his dad, which remained a horrible thought to him. His old man, who had gotten into his head and had never left. Every aspect of his life took on a grandeur that was almost entirely imaginary—his wishful imagination, the happier world in which his dad was proud.
The disconnect between Stephen’s father and himself came over matters of discipline. Dad wanted Stephen to be the best at things because he worked the hardest and applied himself with the most tenacity. But that wasn’t at all how Stephen went about life. Stephen was constantly searching for the shortcut, for the cheat, for the convincing illusion. He wanted everything to be easy—
expected
it to be easy.
Liz’s son, a preteen by the time Stephen entered their lives, did not have many pleasant memories of the man his mother dated for almost four years. She came to believe that he was jealous of her relationship with her son. He was not only hard on the kid, but he sought to build a wall between mother and child.
Stephen was her son’s baseball coach in Little League for a brief time, and it was most unpleasant. Stephen would come up with harsh punishments for kids who made an error, until it got to the point where it was no fun at all. Liz could really see Stephen’s father coming out in his personality as he tried to teach the kids baseball. Like his father would have, Liz believed, Steve expected each kid to be perfect in every way, and became angry when they were less than that. It was very difficult for Liz’s kid to deal with Stephen, to deal with a ruler, a dictator in his life. The kid’s dad wasn’t like that at all; his father was easygoing, not hypercritical like Stephen.
He didn’t spend money on himself, but when Liz offered to take him out and buy him clothes, he always agreed, and directed her toward the finer labels. When he was home and being casual, he still wore Tommy Hilfiger jeans and Tommy cologne.
Stephen was seldom tenacious about anything, with the exception of cleaning. He was very clean and very neat—and he wanted his surroundings to be that way as well. Very anal, as a shrink might say.
He loved scrubbing and polishing and vacuuming and the rest of housework that most people found to be a drudge. When he had a sales job, he did best when selling cleaning chemicals to companies and hospitals—and part of the reason for his success was the enthusiasm and joy he showed while demonstrating the product.
When his surroundings were not neat and clean, he was quick to anger. He needed order. Chaos upset him. Liz figured this was probably typical of children of master chiefs. In households like that, she believed, you didn’t experience or learn anything but
orderly.
Over time, Liz saw Stephen’s charm in a different light. In the vernacular of their song playlist, they went from “marvelous night for a moondance” to “you’ve lost that lovin’ feeling.”
His charm was fulsome—even excessive. She saw in him a stubborn unwillingness to rankle. He
needed
to be smooth with people, the better to sway them.
His inability to tell the precise truth, his unwillingness to be banal or pedestrian, was so pervasive as to be a detriment (certainly a complication) to his existence. Life was so much harder for him than it needed to be. Seeing things as they were was not an option. He needed the kaleidoscope of his imagination to cope. He was constantly molding reality and trying to conjure spells. Hyperbole was his paintbrush. He even exaggerated minor happenings. If an ant crawled across his shoe, Stanko would claim it was a ladybug.
It wasn’t just Liz. Everyone had a sense that Stanko enjoyed spinning a yarn or two. Everyone, including Liz, also felt his brags had some basis in fact. She didn’t catch on to the fact that he was a pathological liar until after she fell for him, and by then, it was too late to quit him.
He was a rubber ball that always came bouncing back to her. Only years later would she realize that he had manipulated her most of all.
Stephen sensed Liz needed security and gave her that. He dominated the relationship, not because he was so large and in charge, but rather because his dependence on her was so absolute.
“He depended on me for praise, financial assistance, ego boosting, and helping him out of his many tight spots—and there were an exhausting number of tight spots,” she said.
Liz felt like he was the sun, some huge gravitational mass, and she had gotten too close and fallen into orbit around him, then abruptly was “sucked right in.” Get too close and you became a permanent part of his life.
She had known from early on, maybe six months after she met him, that there were a lot of things going on, plenty of trouble. But she was hooked. He kept her on her toes. She never knew what to expect the next time he walked through the door. To listen to him, he had the world’s most eventful life.
For a guy who really couldn’t hold down a job, he was always busy. He got up every morning, dressed in a suit and tie, ready for the day, and went out there to do whatever it was he did. And he would return ten hours later still looking kempt!
There was never enough solid evidence to tell for sure what Stephen was doing with his time, but he sometimes made jokes about his constantly plotting nature. What did he do all day? He kept all thousand irons in the fire, that’s what.
There were so many imaginary jobs, and imaginary firings, that she had no idea which of them, if any, were real. She believed that he sometimes told little lies poorly so she’d be less likely to suspect his big lies.
There were always schemes. Stephen was like that showbiz act where the frantic man kept many plates spinning atop broomsticks. With Stanko, however, plates fell—quite often, in fact—and that was when his shoveling of the bull shifted into overdrive.
When Liz learned that Stanko was a habitual liar, she tried to determine reality, using outside factors. He concocted stories, left and right. He couldn’t seem to help it.
Looking back on it now, Liz understood that Stephen Stanko was the classic psychopath, the man with no conscience, no capacity for empathy. Back then, she didn’t know any of that. She just knew that Stanko lived in his own world, and she wasn’t sure if the rest of humanity was there with him.
He was a chameleon, all right, but not everyone fell under his spell. Not everyone was sucked in. Those that weren’t—women mostly, Liz found—withdrew when Stephen was around.

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