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Authors: Michael Benson

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STANKO THE
GRIFTER
To establish the defendant’s confidence-game lifestyle, Gregory Hembree called Harriet Cunningham to the stand. She explained that she lived in Socastee, not far from the library where Laura Ling had worked. She frequented that library and knew both the defendant and his murder victim.
“How would you describe his demeanor?” Hembree asked.
“Highly professional,” Cunningham replied. “I even invited him over for supper one night.”
Stanko had been her lawyer, she explained, and had taken $1,300 from her in exchange for $200,000 in Veterans Administration benefits he claimed she was owed. She only later learned that she had been hoodwinked.
He had been so smart and polite. It never occurred to her that the nice young man was lying.
“Did Mr. Stanko give you any money at all?” the solicitor inquired.
“No. It was supposed to come by FedEx,” the elderly witness replied. “I received no money from the VA.”
After Cunningham, an auto mechanic named Robert Ollsen (pseudonym) took the stand and described how he had been conned by the defendant, giving him a $1,000 retainer for legal services, which never materialized.
Sitting in the courtroom that day, as well as every day of the trial, was Stephen Stanko’s coauthor Dr. Gordon Crews and his wife. They were in the process of moving and had the summer off; so luckily, they had the freedom to attend the trial in its entirety.
“It was fascinating to sit through that. It was unbelievable,” Dr. Crews said. This, despite the fact that Crews was not a witness, and the book wasn’t mentioned once. The most memorable thing about the trial, by far, Crews thought, was listening to the testimony of the surviving victims, Penny Ling, in particular. “To hear that young victim describe what happened to her was something I’ll never forget,” Crews said.
Stanko didn’t know Crews was coming. The coauthors made eye contact briefly, but Stanko quickly looked down. Crews could tell Stanko recognized him. The defendant had seen his former colleague’s “About the Author” photo on the dust jacket of the Crews book he’d received while in prison. In addition, Stanko had had computer privileges when Crews first started working with him, and had probably seen a photo of Crews on the Internet somewhere.
But there was only that one brief flash of recognition, and that occurred at the start of the first day. For the most part, Stanko kept his head down and his eyes lowered the rest of the way.
Crews wondered what triggered the homicidal spree. In a lot of ways, Stanko’s collaborator suspected, it was similar to the buildup to his attack on Liz nine years earlier. Stanko knew the adage of weaving tangled webs through deceit. Well, Stanko’s deceptions were chronic, complex, even layered. When the tangled web fell on him, it was always way too complex in its structure for even Stanko’s considerable intellect to untangle. He’d tried a straight job, but it didn’t work. He assumed it wouldn’t
ever
work. His con jobs were falling apart. He was selling stuff that didn’t exist. He owed everyone money. And his own inability to deal fairly with his fellow human beings had again painted him into a desperate corner, where, in Stanko’s mind, the only solution was violence. “I’d like to know what broke bad that night,” Crews later said. Deepening the mystery, there was a sexual component to the attack in the Ling case that, according to both parties, didn’t exist with the McLendon crimes.
Crews was slightly nauseated by the way Stanko had fooled him years before into believing he was basically a white-collar criminal, but who was a monster, instead.
Now that the truth was out, Crews wanted the details. The author didn’t just sit and watch. When court was adjourned, he was social and did some informal research.
“I got to meet his victims and victims’ family,” Crews recalled, “and realized how bad something like this hits them. It is stuff I teach every day in my class, but a reminder for me as well.” Sometimes he sought them out and sometimes they approached him.
One afternoon during the trial, Liz Buckner approached Crews in the parking lot outside the courtroom. He remembered that she chewed him out once on live TV for profiting off a tragedy, and his first thought was that he was going to receive a second dressing-down. Instead, Liz impressed upon him the sickening details of Stanko’s attack on her, and details of the buildup to the attack that were obviously similar to Stanko’s buildup to murder.
“It was a direct parallel,” Crews recalled. “He had trouble with anger every time he was confronted. This is classic sociopathic stuff. He builds this box, and I think he really believes half of the lies he tells. Like any con man, he is convincing because he has himself convinced. If he says he’s an attorney, he believes it.”
His murders were cons gone bad. He killed his marks. It wasn’t that he killed the people he loved most, it was that he killed the people he
used
most. Crews thought how lucky Liz was to be alive. She survived because of the killer’s blunder, not because of his mercy.
Crews never caught Stanko in a lie, and Stanko never made a promise to Crews that he didn’t keep. Of course, Crews was conned by Stanko in that he didn’t reveal or give any indication of his own capacity for violence. But, on the other hand, Crews’s interaction was different from others in that the book was real. It wasn’t like the used-car lot he claimed to own, the charities he claimed to collect for, or the legal services he claimed to provide. Stanko really did write a book, and it really had literary and scholarly merit. In that sense, who could expect Gordon Crews to see through to the real Stephen Stanko?
According to Dr. Michael Braswell, there was probably a solid reason why Stanko went from flimflam to legit when incarcerated, and back again when freed. One of the surefire ways to treat a person with an antisocial personality disorder was to give their lives a lot of structure, structure such as is offered by institutionalization. If provided with enough structure, antisocials were unable to manipulate the situation, which, in turn, allowed them to partake in nonmanipulative activities. Now looking back, Crews wished he had spent more time asking Stanko about topics other than his difficulties in prison, or assimilating into society following his release. Crews wished he’d spent time finding out what made Stanko tick. He’d worked with the man for years and knew nothing about his childhood. The only family member Stanko ever referred to was his mother. He mentioned no siblings. Crews had the definite impression that Stanko was an only child. He did allude to his dad once—who, he said, was dead—but it was a subject that for reasons unexplained angered him.
“His mother was his only supporter,” Crews remembered. “She was top dog, behind him four hundred percent. I’ve got letters from her yelling at me because I wasn’t moving fast enough.” Stanko was impatient when it came to the collaboration. Crews’s part of the writing, or editing—or whatever it was—was never happening fast enough for him, and he enlisted his mother’s help to quicken the pace. When Crews and Stanko had problems with the editor at Greenwood Press, because they hadn’t produced a manuscript that was suitable for high-school students, Stanko’s tone became desperate. “Please, you’ve got to publish this. This is my life,” Stanko would say.
“He didn’t understand the system,” Crews recalled, “didn’t know that publishers will end up doing whatever they want to do, which was pretty much what happened.”
As a rule, the hallways were cleared and secured before the defendant was led into or out of the courtroom. There was one time, however, Crews observed, when there was a mix-up.
“The timing was screwed up or something, and everyone ended up out in the hallway together,” Crews said. Stanko and Penny Ling’s father for an awkward moment found themselves standing only a few feet apart.
The situation didn’t last long. As soon as the guards saw their error, they got Stanko out of there, and didn’t bring him back until the hallway was cleared.
With the exception of that one error, the courthouse had its act together. They had a system designed to keep parties from opposite sides of criminal trials from encountering one another. They were kept in separate rooms—defense here, prosecution there.
Which door a witness used to enter the courtroom depended on which side he or she was on. The victim’s family, for example, was always escorted in through a side door, which assured that they would never be in close proximity to the defendant, his supporters, or his counsel.
During the trial, as all spectators do, Crews spent a lot of time observing the jury. It seemed to him that the panel felt no sympathy for the defendant—or defense counsel, for that matter.
They looked at the solicitor when he was speaking as they would a friend or trusted neighbor who was explaining something to them. But they looked at the defense counsel with suspicion. This man William Diggs wasn’t from their part of the world. He used too many words.
The prosecution knew how to make the jury cry. The defense counsel could only, at best, confuse them. At worst, the jurors clenched their teeth and balled their fists. Sometimes they had no idea what the defense was talking about
and
they didn’t like it.
If it wasn’t a done deal, it was the next thing closest to it.
“I remember turning to my wife and saying, ‘Look at that jury,’” Gordon Crews recalled. They hated Stephen Stanko’s guts.
Not relying solely on eyewitness testimony, the prosecution presented damning scientific evidence as well.
Testifying for the people was SLED agent Robin Taylor, the division’s lieutenant supervisor of DNA casework.
“You are a forensic scientist?” asked Gregory Hembree.
“Yes,” Taylor replied.
Taylor said that her lab had received a wide array of biological evidence from the Ling crime scene, via the Georgetown County investigators. Among that evidence were blood swabs taken from the Ling crime scene, from the blade and handle of the pocketknife taken from the defendant at the time of his arrest, and the gear shift and steering wheel of the red Mustang. The swabs from the car had proven to be, unfortunately for the prosecution, insufficient for reliable interpretation.
“I also processed Penny Ling’s Sexual Assault Evidence Collection Kit, head and pubic hair—pulled to include the follicle—from both victims, pubic combined, and vaginal, oral, and rectal swabs, plus fingernail scrapings and miscellaneous body fluid.” Taylor tested the droplets of blood found in the hallway and bathroom of the Ling home after Penny’s rape and Laura’s murder.
There was a concentration of blood on the medicine cabinet, perhaps indicating that the killer, bleeding from the hand, was rummaging around in search of first-aid materials.
“Did you identify the blood found on the knife blade pulled from the defendant at the time of his arrest?”
“Yes, I did. That blood’s DNA profile was a match for the control blood sample from the victim Laura Ling.”
“There is no doubt?”
“The chances of an unrelated individual having a DNA profile identical to Laura Ling’s is one to twenty quadrillion,” Taylor replied.
“Was semen among the evidence found at the crime scene?” Hembree asked.
“Yes.”
“On which swabs was the semen found?”
“It was found on the vaginal and outer-anal swabs.”
“Was DNA profiling able to identify that semen?”
“Yes, the semen belonged to Stephen Stanko,” Taylor stated.
During cross-examination, William Diggs asked about the fingernail scrapings that had been taken from both Penny and Laura Ling.
“Were you able to positively identify Stephen Stanko’s DNA in those scrapings?” Diggs asked.
“No,” Taylor said.
On redirect, Hembree asked if the scrapings had yielded only the DNA of the victims.
“No, there was a second contributor to the DNA,” Robin Taylor said.
“Could Stephen Stanko be ruled out as that contributor?”
“No, he could not.”
Dr. Pamela Crawford, a forensic psychologist, testified that she had given the defendant a lengthy interview following his arrest. She’d examined his medical history and interviewed friends and family members regarding his behavior over time, and she had come to the conclusion that he had a “personality disorder with narcissistic and antisocial features.” He had a “grandiose sense of self-importance,” lacked empathy, and took advantage of others. “For his achievements and talents, he requires excessive admiration.”
“Did you find in this defendant any mental disease?”
“No. He has a personality disorder,” Dr. Crawford answered.
“Did you find any mental defect?”
“No.”
A chilling look into Stephen Stanko’s cunning came with the testimony of John Gaumer, Laura’s boss at the library. He said he’d received a phone call at 9:30
A.M
., only a few hours after the murder.
The call was from Stanko, who said he was calling on Laura Ling’s behalf. She probably wouldn’t be making it to work that day, Stanko calmly said, as she was still recovering from a bout of food poisoning.

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