I Would Find a Girl Walking (14 page)

Stano later retracted his statement, though, and by 1985 had decided against accepting responsibility in the Basile case:

In the years following Susan Basile’s disappearance, a police reporter for the
Daytona Beach Morning Journal
, Bob Ford, did several follow-ups on the exhaustive search for the young girl. Bob also talked to the family repeatedly.

“We try to keep our minds on something else,” said Marjorie Basile, Susan’s mother. Susan’s father, Sal, kept looking out from his driveway in the direction of the spot where Susan had supposedly vanished. “It’s bad enough if one of your children dies and you know about it,” he said. “At least you can give them a decent burial. But this way, I just don’t know.” The father added that the family kept on checking drainage ditches. “At night, we check the beaches,” he said. The Basiles combed all of the remote and wooded areas from south of New Smyrna Beach to Flagler County and westward to DeLand.

One piece of circumstantial evidence that had somewhat deflected the investigation was the sighting by a sign painter who told Sal Basile of a van with “Aries” written on the side. The fifteen-year-old boy, who had participated in the recreation of the sequence of events leading up to the crime, also said that he, too, had seen a dark blue Chevrolet with the white letters “Aries” painted on the side driving on Jackson Street, close to where Susan had disappeared.

Sal Basile, a letter carrier, had added $3,500 to the $1,500 reward money collected by colleagues at his postal service branch. “What we need is a break,” he said. “There is so little to go on—just the van.”

For his part, Detective Vineyard, who had been assigned to the Basile case, stated, “We spent more time, manpower, money, and used more elaborate investigative techniques on the Basile case” than any other investigation the department had ever handled.

Hundreds of volunteers searched for miles around the area where the little girl had disappeared. The State Department of Transportation offered the use of an airplane especially equipped with stereoscopic cameras and a three-man crew. The photo plane used infrared stereo film and took between two hundred and three hundred frames of film in the area. Film processing was done by NASA at Cape Kennedy and was analyzed the next day in Tallahassee. It was all to no avail. By then, it had already been a year since Susan Basile vanished after she got off her school bus.

After Susan disappeared, Mike left home. The stress of Susan’s disappearance and the mounting anxiety as the weeks and months went by made him flee his familiar surroundings. He watched his mother’s health deteriorate to the point that “it didn’t appear as if Mom was going to make it through it.”

“It turned out to be such an awful ending,” said Mike Basile. “[Susan] was so beautiful, you know, just beautiful.”

Sal Basile bore his grief stoically and privately.

“My father suffered silently and that’s his personality,” recalled Mike. “I saw him break down, and I’d never seen him cry before, even when he lost his parents.” As for Marjorie Basile, “I know that my mom, even when they told her that [Gerald Stano] had confessed, she didn’t believe Crow,” said Mike years later, by then a ponytailed city worker who indulged his passion for music by playing in a band. “She almost had some animosity for Crow,” he recalled, often wondering if Crow had been taken in by Stano or if he was being untruthful about the confession.

For those years following Susan’s disappearance, the topic of what had happened to her became taboo, her brother recalled. Family pictures of her disappeared from the walls, and she was a subject best not discussed.

Mike Basile handled his loss resolutely. He contemplated attending Stano’s execution at Florida State Prison in 1998 but changed his mind. He watched television coverage of Stano’s death instead, then went to see his parents.

“My dad almost died that day,” he recalled. Sal Basile suffered panic and anxiety attacks after the execution was carried out. “I thought, well this guy is doing it again,” said Mike. “He killed my sister, and now he’s going to kill my dad.” Sal, who had internalized much of his grief over his daughter’s death, was finally able to calm down, averting a call for an ambulance.

Stano’s guilt or innocence and whether he deserved to die in the electric chair was not a question Mike Basile spent much time pondering.

“Even in the event that he was not my sister’s murderer, he deserved the death penalty,” Basile felt, likening the serial killer to a rabid dog. “You have a rabid dog running down the street, you put him down. And that’s what he is to me.”

I asked her if she wanted to go for a ride and she climbed in you know and just talked for a little bit and ahh we got back out there on the road and . . . she started to get a little on the . . . on the crabby side and ahh I just went ahead and hit hit [
sic
] her in the face with my right hand it carries a school ring . . . ahh I hit her and that shut her up for a little while.

—Gerald Stano to Paul Crow, August 15, 1982

T
hey told me she had drowned!” Emma Bickrest recalled the police telling her of her daughter, Susan.

Mrs. Bickrest then proceeded to explain how Susan had come to move to Florida from Ohio during the fall of 1975.

“My mother was living with us and she had to stay with Susan,” she said. “Susan wasn’t comfortable with this arrangement so we bought a larger house. And just as we moved there in 1975, she decided to go to Daytona Beach.”

This was in November 1975. “And I told her, ‘Susan, at least wait until after Christmas.’ ” This was a concerned mother’s apparent last-ditch effort to dissuade her daughter from such a far move away from family and friends. “But she told me, ‘I have to find a job.’ ” Susan was a cosmetologist, but the only job she could find when she moved to Daytona Beach was a waitress job. However, it suited her temporarily. She had been in the Daytona Beach area for only five weeks when the unthinkable happened.

Two fishermen, Pete Rosen and Larry Gump, reported finding a body floating in Spruce Creek, in Port Orange, just south of Daytona Beach, on December 20, 1975, at approximately 4:45 p.m. The men had been fishing underneath the East Bridge on Spruce Creek on I-95, and they observed what appeared to be a human body floating face down in the water. The two called the local police and told the officers that the individual was wearing blue jeans, a maroon jacket, and platform shoes and had long blond hair.

Deputies recovered the woman’s body from the river and transported it to the Halifax Hospital Morgue for autopsy. Medical examiner Dr. Arthur Schwartz noted that the victim had lacerations to the bridge of her nose, the tip of her nose, and around her nostrils. He also noted a laceration to her lower lip and a minor laceration to the chin. She also had a small abrasion beneath her left eye.

From his pathological findings, Dr. Schwartz determined the cause of death as manual strangulation with extensive abrasions and bruises. The medical examiner’s report indicated that the victim had been in the water for six to eight hours prior to recovery. According to forensic science, it takes about four minutes for a person to die from strangulation, to stop the blood flowing to the brain, and Schwartz also determined that she might not have been dead when her body was placed in the water. He later identified the body as Susan Bickrest, age twenty-four.

“And next thing I know is, the sheriff calls me and tells me my daughter drowned. I screamed and yelled and hollered for my husband. I thought I was going crazy!” Emma Bickrest recalled.

At the time investigators notified the Bickrests of their daughter’s death, it appeared she had drowned, given that she was found dead in the water. An autopsy later determined she had been strangled as well.

 

 

On December 31, 1975, Special Investigator Ernest Gibbs, of the Office of the State Attorney in the Courthouse Annex of Daytona Beach, Florida, brought Sandra Linda Gutaucks, Susan Bickrest’s roommate, to his office for an interview. Gutaucks, twenty-one, was also originally from Ohio, like Susan, and she informed Gibbs that the two girls had planned their move down to Daytona Beach together.

When questioned by the investigator, Sandy Gutaucks said that Susan drove a 1970 Chevy Camaro. “She just kept her tape player in there, and you know, Kleenex and all kinds of stuff in there, usually her glasses,” she said.

Gutaucks added that Susan’s glasses were missing one of the arms, so she hardly ever wore them, and that although Susan had contact lenses, she claimed that they bothered her, so she never wore them either. Both young women worked as waitresses at P. J.’s Lounge.

Gibbs asked Gutaucks when she had first noticed that Susan was missing. The roommate stated that when she had returned home on the evening of Saturday, December 19, at around 6:30, she had noticed Susan’s car in the parking lot out in front of the building.

“And then I figured, oh well, Susan is home,” Gutaucks said. “Good, I wanted to talk to her. I ran for the stairs, I went in, [but] there were no lights on, so I figured she was asleep like she normally is when I get home. So I put the stereo on, it was rather loud so, the lights were still off and it was dark. I walked to her bedroom and closed the bedroom door [still] thinking she was asleep, put the lights on in my bedroom and went into the kitchen to make me something to eat. I noticed there were no dirty dishes or anything so I figured she hadn’t eaten yet. So I walked to her bedroom, opened the door and yelled, ‘Susan! Do you want to eat?’ ”

Sandy Gutaucks went back to P. J.’s Lounge to wait for Susan to show up for work, but her roommate never showed. Gutaucks pointed out that Susan had never notified P. J.’s Lounge that she would not be reporting to work that night.

“And that’s where . . . they knew . . . it wasn’t like Susan, not to call, you know, she was really conscious of work and everything, her job,” the roommate said.

Special Investigator Gibbs then prompted her. “She liked her job, then. How did she like life?”

Gutaucks replied, without hesitation, “A lot.”

“She enjoyed it?” asked the investigator.

“Yeah. Everything is, was, just like she always wanted to do, move to Florida, you know, live down here.”

 

 

More than six and a half years later, on August 18, 1982, Investigator Dave Hudson, of the Volusia County Sheriff’s Office, received a call from Sergeant Paul Crow, of the Daytona Beach Police Department, regarding the Bickrest murder.

Crow revealed to Hudson that on August 15, 1982, at 12:25 p.m., he had interviewed Gerald Stano in regards to the December 20, 1975, murder of Susan Lynn Bickrest, and Stano had confessed to the sergeant that he had murdered her.

After reading Stano his rights and asking him the required questions about his name, age, and current residence, which was the Florida State Prison in Raiford, Florida, Paul Crow began his interview with Gerald Stano.

“Mr. Stano, let me take you back to December 19, 1975. . . . Could you tell me in your own words what you did that night and what contact you had and what was the result of it?”

Stano paused for a moment and proceeded with his account of the night in question.

“Alright . . . ahh . . . she ahh . . . she come out of P. J.’s where I was,” Stano said, referring to the lounge where Susan Bickrest worked as a waitress.

“I went down to P. J.’s to check it out; I’d never been down there. I’d heard a coupla good things about it. I decided to go down and check it out. I went down, I had a ’73 Plymouth Satellite at that time, green over green and I had to park it on the street. So . . . I went in you know and I had a coupla drinks. They were two for one. I like that, and then I decided well, you know, it’s closing hour so I’m gonna go ride around for a little bit. Coming out of there was this sandy brown-haired girl that got into a white Camaro with a black top and she ahh . . . she took off one way and I took off the other way. And I got to thinking after a while, you know, ’cause . . . I got myself a six-pack in one of these stores when I got to thinking about her and I figured well, I’m gonna see if I can find her. So I was going back up to . . . I forget which road it is . . . I was going back up . . . what pulls out of one of the side streets but the white Camaro with the black top? So I said, what the heck, I’ll follow her you know, just to try to talk to her before she went into her house and she pulls in this Derbyshire Apartments on Derbyshire Avenue.”

Crow wanted to know the approximate time of the encounter.

“I’d say somewhere around . . . between the hours of three and four.” Stano meant the early morning hours.

Crow wanted Stano to clarify whether he had been out purposely looking for the girl, and if he had followed her to her apartment complex at the Derbyshire Apartments. Stano replied that he had.

“Okay,” Crow went on. “Then tell me again, in your own words, what happened when she entered the complex at Derbyshire Apartments.”

Stano looked up, trying to remember with his usual fastidious exactness.

“Well . . . she went over to ahh . . . she drove in and parked her car in one of the parking spaces by the complex. I just drove up and just stopped behind her car and started talking to her for a little bit and you know . . . she climbed in, you know.” Stano implied that Susan Bickrest had willingly entered his car, but later, during his trial for her murder, he confessed that he had actually forced his victim into his vehicle at gunpoint.