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Authors: Michael Benson

BOOK: Michael Benson's True Crime Bundle
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Prison officials had had it up to here with Stanko. He was aggravating to the nth degree. Then came the final straw: they found out he was writing a book.
Stanko made the mistake of mentioning his literary efforts during one of his prison interviews. Stanko said he was writing a book about
them
and what a shitty prison system they ran, about all the evils they’d done to inmates.
Oh, you think so?
was their response. The prison fought back.
“They cut him off at the ankles every chance they could,” Crews recalled. “They shut him down at that point.”
First they took away Stanko’s computer privileges. He had to smuggle his writing out, passing his mother pages when she came to visit. She would later send the stuff to Dr. Crews. Then they took away his paper and pencil.
By that time, Dr. Crews had all the manuscript he needed to fashion a winner. He never was granted visitation rights.
At one time, Stanko had been granted phone visitation rights from a list of thirteen people. These were mother Joan, all three surviving siblings—brother Jeff, sisters Peggy and Cynthia—friends Bob McMurray, Bill Kupter, and Pattie Perkins, literary collaborators Braswell and Crews, and his editor at Greenwood Press, Emily Birch. Also on the list were three lawyers, Harry L. Devoe, Wesley Locklear, and John Shupper.
Devoe was a Clarendon County lawyer who represented Stanko during a postconviction relief hearing. It was through Devoe’s efforts that Stanko’s name was not placed on the state’s sex offender registry, an addition that was normally routine for those convicted of kidnapping.
By the time Stanko was released from prison, the phone rights of everyone but the three lawyers had been revoked. Even Stanko’s mother was no longer allowed to call him.
Crews negotiated a contract for himself and Stanko with the Greenwood publishers. He began to edit Stanko’s manuscript and write his own portion of the book.
Along with the theme that corrections were being handled all wrong, Crews noted that there was a “never again” motif to Stanko’s writing. He vowed that he would never go back to prison. That could mean one of two things: he intended to go straight, or he would take his own life before returning to prison.
From 2000 to 2002, Stephen Stanko and Gordon Crews worked on the book together, communicating only by phone. They finished their masterwork and submitted it to Greenwood.
It was quickly rejected. It
bounced
back.
“Not appropriate for high-school students,” the publisher said.
Crews almost blew a gasket. Today, he has smoothed out, but acknowledged that Stanko had the misfortune of attracting an editor at Greenwood who was determined to make a square peg fit a round hole, no matter what damage she had to do to the peg. She had written in her very first letter to Stanko that she wanted the book to be part of a series she was putting together for high-school students. That caveat to the contract, however, was soon forgotten.
“I didn’t pay any attention to that for five years, you know?” Crews said.
Now the manuscript was being rejected because it was too adult. Crews thought that was the point. This was a Scared Straight scenario. Telling the truth to high-school students about life inside prison could only be a good thing, right? The word “appropriate” wasn’t appropriate.
Crews burned a bridge or two, and was removed by the publisher from the project. Greenwood replaced Crews with Dr. Wayne Gillespie, an assistant professor of criminology at East Tennessee State University.
Gillespie cut out about 90 percent of what Crews had written, cut back Stanko’s section to about one hundred pages—and he wrote the rest of the book himself.
It was finally published, a slender hardcover, in 2004, with the title
Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an Insider’s View.
The book had three authors listed on the cover: Stanko, Gillespie, and Crews. They had to give Crews credit because they were still using a couple of chapters he’d written. The book came out two months before Stanko’s release.
Crews talked to Stanko about the book. Crews said that he didn’t like it. Stanko said he didn’t like it, either—but he couldn’t help but be excited about being
published.
In his book, Stanko wrote he had two concerns regarding his return to society: one, that he would carry an ex-con stigma wherever he went, and two, that he would bring some of the hell of prison with him when he returned to the outside.
Dr. Gillespie would later say that Stanko’s coauthors were unaware of the details of the crimes that had Stanko living in prison. They had asked him what he had done, and had taken his word when he told them.
“He was very selective in the information he revealed to me,” Gillespie recalled. “He presented it as a domestic situation—nothing hard-core. He kind of said they were having problems because of problems at work. He was general in his description, and that is why I was led to believe his main crimes were fraud and breach of trust.”
“I never knew—none of his collaborators knew—the details of his past. How could we be so stupid?” Crews wondered.
To write the book’s foreword, the publisher brought back Dr. Michael Braswell, who’d originally turned down an offer to coauthor.
Braswell taught courses emphasizing peacemaking, social justice, and restorative justice. He believed in giving criminals and their victims opportunities to interact: criminals could accept responsibility for the damage they’d done, and victims could regain emotional wholeness. Braswell’s courses included: Ethics and Social Justice, Themes of Justice (a film course), Human Relations and Criminal Justice, and Peacemaking Practicum. He was a former prison psychologist, a licensed marriage and family therapist, and a college teacher for fifteen years. It was Braswell’s goal to improve the relationship between personal and institutional transformation in ways that would tend to create a more compassionate community and criminal justice process. He was strongly opposed to the death penalty—a problem solver based on fear, greed, cynicism, and an overreliance on the notion of punishment. The college professor taught humility, compassion, and service—what he called a “commitment to the possibility of forgiveness and restoration.”
Pragmatists thought Braswell viewed the world through rose-colored lenses, and his daydreams, though interesting to contemplate, lacked relevance in the real world.
Braswell’s foreword to Stanko’s book contained spooky harbingers, right from the first paragraph, invoking as it did the name of Jack Henry Abbott, another inmate/author who proved there is no relationship between writing ability and criminal rehabilitation. At least, sometimes—even sociopaths can write.
Abbott was a career criminal who, after learning that Norman Mailer was writing a book about the life and death of murderer Gary Gilmore, became pen pals with the author. Mailer slobbered over Abbott’s letters—they were “intense, direct, unadorned, detached, and unforgettable”—that he had them forged into a book called
In the Belly of the Beast.
Mailer didn’t stop there. Calling Abbott “intellectual, radical, and a potential leader,” the author campaigned for the prisoner’s parole. Asked if it wasn’t risky to put a guy like him back on the streets, Mailer would say that “culture is worth a little risk.” Abbott’s freedom lasted only six weeks, ending when he stabbed a restaurant employee to death for denying him access to an employees-only men’s room. In retrospect, Abbott’s book should have been called
In the Belly of Anyone Who Annoys Me.
“I think Abbott ended up scaring Mailer before it was over,” Braswell opined. He said that Abbott’s behavior after release, as well as Stanko’s, illustrated one of his corrections-reform power points. The brainwashing prisoners received in the system served them counterproductively when they tried to reenter society. Simple as that.
While Stephen Stanko was still in prison, Liz heard he had a book in the works that was to be published. She felt her blood pressure skyrocket. And that was before she read it. Reading the damn book, months later, infuriated her.
In the book, Stanko referred to Liz as his “spouse.” It made the steam come out of her ears. True, he didn’t use her name, but to try to make people think his attack on her was just a marital squabble was unconscionable.
Stanko was released to community supervision in July 2004, a two-year program, squinting into the sun and relying on the kindness of Hummer, the mother of his fellow inmate whom he’d befriended. Only days later, Liz was notified by a victim’s advocate group, whose job it was to keep potential future victims aware and up to date, that Stephen was a free man. After that, though, Liz was in the dark. She later said she had no knowledge of where Stephen was staying or what he was doing following his release from prison.
“And I didn’t want to know,” she said. Although she did suppose he might be staying with his parents; in which case, they were on opposite sides of Goose Creek and not likely to run into one another.
During those early days of new freedom, Stephen Stanko made no attempt to contact Liz McLendon. He
did
receive periodic phone calls from his original coauthor, Gordon Crews, who was urging him to rewrite his original prison manuscript—the one that was inappropriate for high-school kids—and send him the stuff.
Stanko said he was planning on writing again, and he would send Crews the pages when he was done, but he didn’t want to write about prison anymore. By that time, Crews had relocated to Rhode Island. He and Stanko never did meet in person.
“I was up the Coast, and I never found time. I never pushed myself to go see him,” Crews admitted.
They talked on the phone. During one phone call, Stanko told Crews that he was working on something. He was doing a lot of research in a library he frequented. He said he was being helped by a pretty librarian and a friendly old man he’d met.
Crews encouraged Stanko to keep it up, to continue going to the local library. Knowing what he knew now, remembering that encouragement made him feel, as he put it, “sick to my bones.”
But Stanko’s creativity was never the main thrust of the conversation. Mostly, he whined about how hard it was for ex-cons to assimilate into free society.
Stanko had a list of complaints. Couldn’t keep a job, couldn’t
whatever.
Folks discovered he was a convicted felon and he got the stink eye everywhere.
The tone of the conversation was perfectly in keeping with their relationship over the years. Stanko complained and Crews listened. Stanko still knew how to push Crews’s buttons. Crews had dedicated years of work into researching the problems inmates had reentering society, so the ex-con had his coauthor hanging on every word.
Crews responded to Stanko’s complaints with a “good-ol’-criminal-justice-faculty-type” condolence: “It sucks,” Crews told him. “Do the best you can.”
Crews recalled Stanko’s “perfection.” No one would have figured him out. “You can tell by his writing how articulate and smart he is.”
During this same period, as Stanko struggled with reentry, he also called his foreword-writer, Dr. Michael Braswell. Stanko, Braswell recalled, was in some sort of financial straits, his demeanor different from when he was in prison. Now living a life without institutional structure, Stanko’s grandiosity got the best of him. He couldn’t tell the truth, when it felt better to brag. Braswell picked up on the hustling-and-hectoring nature of Stanko’s phone pitch. He no longer sounded like a new kind of journalist. More like a fast-talking salesman. “He sounded like the kind of guy who could sell anything,” Braswell remembered.

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