I Would Find a Girl Walking (13 page)

“Since that time, when was the next time you saw him?”

“I haven’t seen him since.”

The attorney began to close the deposition by reminding Stano of his rights and asking him if he had been aware of them during the full length of the interview, to which the defendant replied that yes, he was and he had been.

Then Elwell concluded by asking him, “Is what you have said in this course of this one hour fifteen minutes a complete and accurate recall from your memory of the events that occurred on September 6, 1973, when you and a friend, Sammy Henderson, took the life of a young girl whom you had abducted from the Holly Hill shopping center?”

“Yes.”

Stano’s buddy, Sammy Henderson, was later arrested in connection with the Bauer murder. Gerald Stano finally exonerated Sammy Henderson of any complicity in the kidnapping and murder of Barbara Bauer, and the charges were dropped.

“I had stated first that Sammy Henderson was with me during this ordeal. Well, he wasn’t at all. It was all fabricated about him,” Stano later admitted. “You see, we went to Junior High School together here in 1965. We were friends at one time but his parents would treat me very nasty. They bought him everything he cried for, no matter the cost. That really rubbed me the wrong way from the start.”
²⁴

Paul Crow believed that Gerald Stano
did
have an accomplice in the Barbara Bauer case, but not Henderson. Crow was friends with Dr. Albert Bauer, a veterinarian in New Smyrna Beach, and the two often talked of the case, which had taken a grave toll on both Bauer and his wife.

But whoever the true accomplice might have been, Gerald Stano took that piece of information with him to his grave.

And now she’s in me, always with me, tiny dancer in my hand.

—Elton John

On about June 1975 in the afternoon . . . I approached a young girl walking down the side of the road. She was wearing jean type pants and a blouse, and was carrying school- books with a purse of some sort. She got into my car with no force of any sort from me. She recognized me from Starlite Skate Centers. . . . I was a very good skater along with her. I believe we used to skate together during “couples” and “all-skate.”

—Gerald Stano to Daytona Beach Police Department, October 1, 1982

 

 

 

 

A
bout a month after his deposition for the murder of Barbara Anne Bauer, on the last week of September of 1982, Gerald Eugene Stano confessed to Detective Sergeant Paul Crow that he had also killed twelve-year-old Susan Basile.

It was more than just a break in a dramatic case. For Paul Crow, it was affirmation of his long-held suspicion. For Marjorie and Sal Basile, Susan’s parents, it was the words they had dreaded to hear. After seven years of waiting and hoping to learn what had become of their youngest child in 1975, they still weren’t convinced this was the final chapter.

“I think there’s a little part of my mother that believes she is still alive,” said Mike Basile, Susan’s older and only brother. She was his youngest sister. Susan was twelve years old when she disappeared, the same age her brother Mike had been when she was born, a surprise—but a welcome one—for the Basile family.

After her birth, the Basile infant was “everybody’s baby,” he recalled. “It was a blessing and it meant a lot to my parents even though it wasn’t planned.” News that his mom, a pediatric nurse, was expecting a baby had come as a “total shock,” he recalled.

“She retired to take care of Susan; she didn’t have that option when [my other sister] Sharon and I were growing up.”

Stano had showed absolutely no remorse for any of the victims, but taking the life of this beautiful child—the light of her parents’ eyes—was abhorrent even to him.

After all, he knew her. He had probably clasped her small hand as the two glided around the rink at the Starlite Skate Center on Nova Road in Daytona Beach.

At first, Stano only admitted to having picked Susan up when she got off the school bus in Port Orange that Tuesday, June 10, 1975, but he insisted he just “took her for a ride” and let her out. And that he never saw her again.

The sergeant had been certain for months, however, that Stano had killed Basile, whose highly publicized disappearance had remained a mystery until then.

Stano finally confessed that he had killed her. According to Crow, Stano said he enticed Susan Basile into his car by offering to take her to the skating rink. She objected when he turned the wrong way on Nova Road and demanded to be let out, but Stano said he drove into the woods and strangled her. He said he left the body there in the woods, partly covered by small tree branches, his signature method of covering his tracks, literally.

 

 

Susan’s disappearance had been a puzzle from the start, to her family as well as to investigators.

“We’re using standard police procedure in this case, but believe me, if someone comes to us with something they’ve seen on a Ouija board, we’ll check it out,” Port Orange Police Chief Ed McQuaid had said, leaning back in his chair and glancing over at a growing file of reports on the disappearance of Susan Basile.

Twelve-year-old Susan had vanished less than a quartermile from her home about 3:30 p.m. on June 10, 1975. She had gotten off a school bus and was last seen walking down the winding, tree-shaded lane.

“Sometimes she went with her friend, Joy Bothwell, to a convenience store for a soft drink, but this particular day her friend hadn’t ridden the bus so she started home alone,” recalled Lieutenant Randy Milholen, a young police officer who headed the search for the missing child.

When some two hours later Susan still wasn’t home, her parents went to the Port Orange Police Department to report her missing. They had spent two hours searching on their own and checking with all of Susan’s friends before deciding to seek help from law enforcement authorities.

Police broadcast an alert with the girl’s description to the city’s patrol officers on duty as well as surrounding law enforcement agencies.

Mike Basile had returned to his hometown after graduating from college. After nasal surgery, he recuperated at his parents’ Nixon Lane home. He went to his apartment that afternoon, then returned to find his mother frantic that Susan hadn’t come home after the school bus had dropped her off.

“I asked, ‘What’s wrong?’ and she said, ‘Susan’s not home yet.’ That wasn’t like her, and it just went downhill from there. And the police came, and their theory was that she ran away. I knew that couldn’t possibly have happened.”

Meanwhile, neighbors of the Basile family had organized a search and were hunting through the wooded area near their home.

A close friend of the family, Joy Bothwell’s mother, learned that another neighborhood resident, a young boy, had seen Susan as she walked toward her house. The witness was taken to the police station and questioned.

At first, he told police he had seen Susan as she walked toward a 1975 dark blue Chevy van parked on the side of the road. He gave a description of the vehicle and occupants.

Investigators then assumed that the dark-haired girl was abducted by the occupants of the van, although they conceded that there was no other evidence that the girl had been forced into the vehicle.

An exhaustive search of the area by volunteers failed to turn up any clues as to the girl’s disappearance. The description of the van was publicized nationwide, and a $5,000 reward was posted for information leading to her whereabouts.

Despite numerous “sightings” throughout the state, nothing definite turned up.

If the van was owned locally, why hadn’t some neighbor called the police department to report seeing it, the lieutenant wondered.

After checking out several possible leads, police conceded that they were “grasping at straws.”

To help determine what happened that fateful day when Susan walked away from the bus, Lieutenant Milholen and Detective Dick Vineyard assembled as many members of the original cast as possible nearly a month later. Although most of Susan’s schoolmates were away on summer vacation by then, about six showed up at the Port Orange Police Department on Wednesday morning for the “instant replay” of the day when the youngster disappeared.

They were taken in separate cars to Mainland Junior High, the start of the bus ride. Detectives synchronized their watches and kept track on the charts of all the time spent from the time the bus left the school until it stopped at Herbert and Jackson, Susan’s stop.

As the bus slowed to a stop Wednesday morning, Vineyard was waiting as Joy Bothwell stepped from the bus. Joy, Susan’s longtime friend, played Susan’s role. From inside the bus, the driver and the remaining youngsters peered out.

The blond-haired child walked down Jackson as Vineyard kept track on a stopwatch of just how long it took her to reach a small bend in the road where a blue van was parked.

A similar blue 1975 Chevy van was the only clue investigators had as to what happened to Susan Basile. The neighborhood boy who knew Susan was the last person to see her that day as she was walking toward the blue van.

The fifteen-year-old boy was there on Wednesday, too, doing the same things he had done that day. He had arrived on an earlier bus and had stopped to get his bicycle from the house on the corner, where he always left it. That day, as he had done in the past, he helped the woman who lived in the house with some odd jobs.

As she had twenty-nine days earlier, the woman pointed out to the boy several piles of grass clippings she wanted picked up and had her back turned as “Susan,” played by Joy, walked down the road.

The young witness, whose name was withheld by police for protective reasons, pedaled off on his bike to a nearby convenience store, then rode south toward the van.

Vineyard, who was at the wheel of the van, borrowed from a local auto firm, drove away as the youngster approached, just as the young witness said it happened nearly a month ago.

A short time later, Susan’s father, Sal Basile, drove down Jackson toward Herbert as he had done the day his daughter vanished.

The drama, played out against a background of police radios blaring as detectives posted at different spots talked back and forth and an occasional bellow from a cow grazing along the side of the road, lasted less than thirty minutes.

It took Joy two minutes and ten seconds to walk down the road and reach the spot where the van was parked. At least twelve minutes passed from the time the young witness first saw her walk down the road to the time he saw her near the van. It was about eighteen minutes from the time she stepped from the bus until her father came along.

For Joy, Susan’s young friend, it was a walk she had made many times, but not that particular day. She usually walked home with Susan, but that day she had stayed after school for a softball game.

“I want to do anything I can to help,” Joy said.

For a haggard-looking Sal Basile, it was another try to piece together the mystifying puzzle of what had happened to his youngest child.

What clinched Susan Basile’s case for Paul Crow was that Stano constantly talked about the skating rink. “He put himself there long before we got to discuss Susan Basile,” Crow said. Always seeking some degree of authority, Stano was a skating guard, and he was at the rink to help the skaters who fell.

Susan Basile loved to skate. Small and lithe as she was, she could turn and pirouette with ease, like a little dancer. And she loved the sense of freedom that it gave her. Years later, her brother, Mike, described how full of life Susan always was, and how in turn she filled everyone else’s lives with sheer joy.

Gerald Stano frequented a skating rink in Ormond Beach and another one on South Nova Road, in Daytona Beach.

During several interviews and a series of letters, Stano remained most reticent to talk about the Basile case. Despite his having killed and killed again, details of the hours and minutes leading to the death of his tiniest victim had been locked away a long time, perhaps for good.

Crow gave Stano a yellow pad, and told him to write about it. “Then I’ll come back and talk to you,” the sergeant said as he closed the door behind him.

Finally, Stano recalled the chilling scenario.

He was just on his way to the skating rink on South Nova when Susan Basile got off her school bus at her usual stop, just a few miles away from her home.

Stano and Basile knew each other. They had skated together. He wrote that when he offered the child a ride home, she got in his car without hesitation. He was her friend, she thought.

He drove his car along Nova Road, and instead of turning north towards Susan’s house, he turned south. Just before he reached the railroad crossing, which was along a densely wooded area, he choked the child to death.

This was what Gerald Stano wrote about Susan’s final day, which Crow then asked him to copy on an affidavit and which the sergeant himself notarized. The statement was taken at the Daytona Beach Police Department on October 1, 1982, at 9:00 a.m.: