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Authors: Michael Benson

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The next morning, Monday morning, Stanko didn’t get up and go to work. Liz figured he’d lost his job, but Stanko said no, he was working a late shift, noon to nine at night. That afternoon, after he left, Liz called his job, and the receptionist said she hadn’t seen him. Liz asked if Stanko was still employed there, and the receptionist said she didn’t know. Liz called Natalie Crenshaw, who said she didn’t know either if Stanko still had a job, but she did hear that there had been some kind of argument at work on Saturday. Liz sensed the old pattern coming to a head.
“I was aware of the signs,” she explained. “He became defensive and argumentative in a violent and verbally offensive manner.”
Late that Monday evening, Stanko went to Crenshaw’s house. Liz drove around to keep tabs on Stanko’s whereabouts. She saw him outside Crenshaw’s house, sitting in what appeared to her to be an unmarked cop car. He was in there for a long time, maybe as long as ninety minutes.
Part of the reason she was so tenacious about keeping tabs on Stephen Stanko, of course, was that she cared for him. But there was another factor as well. She feared that she was somehow—albeit innocently—involved. Stanko had borrowed Liz’s car and said he was having the passenger-side front-door panel repaired. In the meantime, he had her driving a GMC Jimmy, which he said came from McElveen. It had taken her a long time to get her car back, too long, and this just caused her to dwell harder on all of the unanswered questions she had.
She returned home and removed the pillows from Stanko’s side of the master bed. She placed the pillows, along with a blanket, on the couch, so he’d know when he got home that he wasn’t welcome in her bed. She then went to sleep with the lights out.
“When I woke up, he was in the bedroom, with a small flashlight. I asked him what he was doing, and he said, ‘Where are my pillows?’ I told him he was sleeping on the sofa. He said he was sleeping in the bed, and that I was a bitch.”
He yelled the same things, over and over again, screaming that he hadn’t done anything wrong and that he deserved better. He called her a “stupid idiot” and an “old hag.”
At the end of a verbal tirade, Stanko rolled up a robe in his hand and threw it at her, striking her in the head “fairly hard.” She told him she wasn’t going to put up with this anymore.
He picked up a box of facial tissues and threw it at her. She grabbed the box and returned fire. She told him to leave. He went to the garage and returned with his luggage.
He started packing in a somewhat haphazard fashion, the verbal abuse flying the whole time. In between insults, he screamed what were either more lies, or perhaps delusions.
“I’m doing well,” he screamed. “I’m sleeping at night. I’m making money! I’m not lying! You are the problem! You are my problem!”
He grabbed her and threw her down so that she landed hard on the floor.
“If you touch me again, I’ll call the police,” she said.
He slapped her across the head.
“Go ahead and call the police,” he said. “I’ve already talked to the police today. I’ve talked plenty.”
She tried to dial 911, at least twice, but each time Stanko hung up the phone so she couldn’t get through. One time he was too slow, and the call went through.
Using the system’s caller ID, the emergency operator called Liz back. Stanko screamed that he was leaving and again began to throw items in his luggage.
Liz answered the phone and said her boyfriend was leaving, but if he came back, she would call again, and if that happened, they should send someone quickly.
Stanko didn’t leave, however, but he did sleep on the sofa. The next morning, Tuesday, February 20, at about seven-thirty, the phone rang and Stanko answered it. He entered the bedroom and told Liz that her brother was on the phone. She spoke to her brother briefly, no more than five minutes.
When she hung up, Stanko reentered the bedroom and said, “I’m leaving today, and I won’t be coming back.”
“I think that is for the best,” Liz replied.
His movements, she noticed, were becoming manic again. While letting out a steady stream of rambling words, he was walking quickly in and out of the bedroom and going through the house, ostensibly making sure that he had left nothing of his behind.
He came back into the bedroom and plopped down in a blue chair by the window. He told Liz once again that he’d done nothing wrong. She was the one who’d been wrong by being so suspicious about everything and asking too many questions.
What did he expect? He’d recently been in jail! Liz thought. And he was only free because he promised to do certain things—and didn’t even have it together to do them. He’d done no community service, and the times when she did manage to drag him to see the shrink, he steadfastly refused to take responsibility for any of his actions, always turning the sessions around so that the focus was on her and how distrustful she was.
She could see, and feel, his growing ire. He left the room and she could hear him rummaging through a laundry closet. “I thought he was just pulling out the dirty clothes that he wanted to take with him,” Liz told Detective Lewis.
She heard the sounds of things being moved around in the closet, but she didn’t give it much thought. She stayed in bed, hopeful that Stanko would leave before they had an opportunity to fight again.
He came back into the bedroom and she could see the wildness in his eyes. Now he stood at the foot of her bed, glaring at her. She could smell the strong odor of chemicals. Smelled like Clorox and ammonia.
Her first thought was to ask him what he was cleaning; but before she had the chance, he said, “We can’t have you calling the police, can we? I have to shut you up.” He jumped onto the bed next to her and pressed a chemical-soaked cloth over her face.
She fought as hard as she could. When he pulled the cloth from her face, she managed to tell him that she wouldn’t call the police if he just let her go. “He said he didn’t believe me, that I would call the police.”
She told him that whatever he had done, that adding murder or doing this was only going to make it worse for him. No reaction. She knew then that she was in deep trouble. He wasn’t going to let her call the police.
Liz grabbed quickly for the phone, but he was quicker, and he was on top of her before she could grab the receiver. His strong arms were too much. He held her wrists together with one hand and, with his other arm, flipped her onto her stomach on the bed.
Liz thought,
Oh, my Lord, he is going to kill me.
Even as Stephen sat on her, she managed to wriggle her left hand free and again reached for the phone, the landline. She only needed to press four buttons—speaker 911—but she couldn’t do it. He grabbed the phone cord and jerked it away.
“You’re not calling anyone. I’m going to have to tie you up,” Stanko said. He tried to get the cord, to pull out of the phone, but couldn’t do it. So he reverted his attention to her, again holding her wrists together with one hand, while using the other to press the soaked rag over her face.
While still applying pressure on her face, Stanko said, “This always works in the movies. Why isn’t it working now?”
Even then, in her panic, she picked up on the premeditated nature of the violence, the way he had watched a movie once and made a mental note to try that if he ever tried to kill somebody.
Stanko eventually took the cloth away from Liz’s face. She gasped for fresh air, her face slick and shiny with tears. Liz got the impression he was trying to think of another way to kill her. The second he lightened up on the pressure, Liz managed to bite his left hand.
“Whereabouts on his hand?” Detective Lewis asked.
“Somewhere in the thumb area,” the victim replied.
He held her wrists together behind her back and bound them together with a necktie. At first, she just lay there on the bed, too scared to move.
He told her to sit up on the edge of the bed. She was exhausted from the struggle and was running out of strength. He found rope and used it to bind Liz’s wrists and ankles together. The scariest part of this for her was his manner. After he stopped trying to asphyxiate her with the smelly cloth, he reverted right back to his normal personality. As he bound her, he was talking to her in a calm voice, as if nothing had happened. She still thought she was going to die, but, in reality, the next attempt on her life never came.
“Please just leave,” she begged. “Or let me get in my car and go.” She realized that he’d put her dog outside, and had closed the bedroom blinds.
Stanko told her not to scream, not to make another sound. He would hurt her if she even tried to speak. He put her on the floor.
“I don’t want to gag you, so please don’t make a sound,” Stanko instructed.
“Please don’t gag me,” she begged. “I’ll be quiet.”
Stanko went into the kitchen and she could hear him making several phone calls, but she couldn’t tell what he was saying. While he was out of the room, she tried to wriggle her feet free so that she’d be able to make a run for it—but there was no way. The bondage was too tight.
“I just need to take a shower and get dressed—and then I’ll leave,” Stanko promised. “If you listen to me, I won’t hurt you.”
He made her sit on the floor while he shaved, and then he forced her to sit on the toilet while he showered.
“I wanted him to leave as quickly as possible, so I didn’t make a sound,” Liz explained. “When he got out of the shower, he told me that he had done some bad things. He said he couldn’t help it. He always wanted to make himself out to be something he wasn’t.”
He told her he was sorry, how he never intended to hurt her. She risked speaking at that point and urged that he phone someone for help—whether it be his shrink, his probation officer, or his lawyer.
Stanko said he thought not. He was either going to kill himself or run. He hadn’t decided.
“I said, just go, and let me go, so this will not be something else to cause you trouble,” Liz explained. She noticed that Stanko appeared to be calming down somewhat.
He sat on the edge of the bed and said, “Don’t move and I’ll untie you.” He did release her bondage and then said, “The bad guy is back. He is in control—and I don’t know what to do.” He told her he loved her, and repeated that he never intended to hurt her.
“He stopped the clock on the wall, sat on the floor next to me, and said he was leaving,” Liz said. He kissed her on the head, said good-bye, and left.
Alone at last, Liz’s mind was filled with multiple voices, all of them screaming. One dominant voice wondered what Stanko had done to make him go crazy like that. What had the “bad guy” done now that he was “in control”?
Another voice screamed that she was a mess and needed help, so she called her brother and instructed him to get someone over to her house. Ray Crenshaw called and instructed her to call 911, which she did.
Soon thereafter, the police, Natalie Crenshaw, and members of Liz’s family arrived—all, more or less, at the same time.
“Stephen tried to contact me several times that day,” she told Detective Lewis. He told whoever answered her phone that he intended to turn himself in.
Darrell Lewis thanked Liz for her time and courage, and the interview ended.
On February 23, 1996, at 7:00
P.M
., Frank Boedeker, of the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office (BCSO), drove to the Greenville Detention Center in Greenville, South Carolina, and served a warrant for Stephen Stanko’s arrest on kidnapping charges. Boedeker then transported Stanko to the Berkeley County Detention Center, where he was booked at 11:30
P.M
. and incarcerated. Filling out one booking form, under identifying marks, Boedeker wrote,
Scar on chin.
While being booked, Stanko gave his address in Goose Creek, said he had been born in Guantánamo, Cuba, and gave as his next of kin “Elizabeth Stanko.” This was not the last time he’d claim he and Liz were married, a false assertion that never failed to get under her skin.
STANKO’S GOOD INTENTIONS
By the midnight after his arrest, Stephen Stanko was wearing an orange jumpsuit, sprawled on the world’s thinnest “mattress” in the county detention center. Seriously? Half an inch? It wasn’t just uncomfortable, it was insulting.
Stanko was kept in isolation with no access to a phone. All civilized comforts were denied him. They wouldn’t even let him have toilet paper, he later complained.
After stewing in his own juices for a few days, a deputy sheriff came and got him and took him to an interrogation room at the Berkeley County Sheriff’s Office in Moncks Corner.
Darrell Lewis seemed like a nice guy.
“I need to know what happened, and I will do everything that I can to help,” Detective Lewis said.
Stanko bought it. It was 6:40
P.M.
, February 24, two and a half days after Stanko attacked Liz. He was given a cup of coffee and he said he was ready to tell his story.
Lewis advised Stanko of his Miranda rights, one by one, and Stanko acknowledged that he understood his rights. He wasn’t evil, he explained, but he did have a temper and he did “lose it.”
Stanko told the investigator that he was twenty-eight years old, and had completed three years of college. His story started the previous Halloween, when he was released from the Berkeley County Detention Center after serving a little over a month.
Detective Lewis could tell right away what the theme of Stanko’s statement was going to be. The theme:
Police had it all wrong. Once you looked at all the facts, you could see that Stephen Stanko was the real victim.
So he got out of jail, and returned home to Elizabeth, his girlfriend, and wanted to impress on everyone his sincere feelings when he came back to the house on Durham Drive. His intentions were good. Pure. Immaculate, man.
“I had intended to start my life over again and make the wrongs I had committed once again right,” Stanko told Lewis. That feeling of serenity, as it turned out, only lasted for nine days.
That serenity was violated during a job interview at 84 Lumber in Goose Creek. Just the night before the interview, Elizabeth had upset him deeply by telling him that he didn’t care for her, and he was unappreciative of the many things she had done for him.
How could she be so thoughtless, to upset him, just before a job interview?
Their argument about whether he cared or was appreciative, he claimed, raged well into the night, and left him haggard when he should have been rested. Instead of a spring in his step, he was dragging. She hid the car keys so he had to walk to the interview. And then, unbelievable, she still wasn’t done—she locked him out of the house!
As a result, the interview at the lumber company didn’t go well, and he didn’t get the job. Naturally. That went without saying. He didn’t get back inside the house until much later in the day, when he was “finally allowed calm conversation” so he could convince Elizabeth of how unreasonable she was being.
Stanko told Lewis that for the first eight weeks after his Halloween release from jail, he did not break the law. Everything was straight business, until December 1995, when he first took money from Ray Crenshaw.
During that time, however, his domestic life was woeful. He and Elizabeth had multiple fights. Her beef was always the same: he wasn’t
loyal
to her.
“These fights became more and more aggressive,” Stanko complained.
Like any longtime girlfriend, he supposed, Elizabeth McLendon knew his weak spots. Figuratively speaking, she knew just where to kick him where it hurt. She knew just how to extract maximum fury from him.
“She would taunt me with my actions of the past, the way my family left me, and how I had lied before. But I wasn’t. I wasn’t lying to her,” Stanko said. And there was no infidelity. She thought there was, but there wasn’t.
He was true to her. He loved her. All he wanted was love and respect in return. “That was all I ever wanted from anybody,” he said, getting downright sappy. He knew he was going away, and he had a right to be sappy, damn it.
Detective Lewis let him go, gave him a lot of slack rope, pleased that the suspect was so chatty. But Lewis eventually steered Stanko away from his tortured emotions and toward giving a chronology of facts.
Life, Stanko said, got better on November 14, 1995, when he got a job at McElveen Pontiac Buick GMC, at the intersection of Interstate 26 and Highway 17A in Summerville, South Carolina. Stephen Stanko was hired as a salesman, selling cars.
“I had a good couple of weeks to end November and brought home a good paycheck,” Stanko boasted. He was bragging; yet there was a sad subtext. His “good” stretches were
so brief
—mere interruptions in his bad stretches.
Stanko cherished that strong feeling of pride that came with bringing home the bacon. He had always felt bad about not helping out as much as he felt he should at Elizabeth McLendon’s house. The new job allowed him to help out with her bills and groceries.
Well, truth be told, he still couldn’t help out as much as he’d hoped. He wasn’t trying to get into the black, just out of the red. There was a $2,000 legal bill from the attorney Rick Buchanan, who handled his case.
He was trying to get out of debt; he was working hard. And when he went home, his girlfriend was giving him nothing but aggravation, nothing but a nightly battle, tonight’s segment of a never-ending argument from hell!
There was a stretch there where his emotional roller coaster was rocketing out of control. He was actually doing well at work, and had entered a trial period that might lead to a promotion to assistant finance manager.
He felt higher than high about how the professional portion of his life was going. Even Elizabeth was impressed with his progress at the car dealership. She told him so. She said she was “proud and happy” for him.
He
responded
to that kindness—if only she had given him more positive feedback. He worked long, grueling hours so that he might be able to pay off his legal debt and help around the house as well. But, like all good things, this was short-lived.
Elizabeth’s kindness was ephemeral. He’d heard of “cruel to be kind,” but Elizabeth was the opposite—“kind to be cruel.” And eventually, because of the fights at home and the belittling he endured, he “felt like nothing.” He had a metaphor for Detective Lewis: “My self-esteem became a pit.”
It was during this time, Stanko said, that he met and befriended a thirty-four-year-old man named Delray Crenshaw. They had a couple of brief conversations, had a catch with a baseball and mitts on the front lawn a couple of times—sunshine, pop the glove, really zipping them—and
boom,
Stanko and Crenshaw were good buddies.
They had a lot in common, Stanko claimed. Crenshaw was successful and Stanko wanted to be successful—make that,
deserved
to be successful. Crenshaw owned businesses so, Stanko said, “I had hoped that we could somehow combine these two lives and make more.” More money, he meant.
The big problem, the way Stanko looked at it, was that he and Elizabeth had nothing to offer Crenshaw, nothing to attract Crenshaw into a business partnership. But that “problem” worked itself out the day Crenshaw said, without prompting, “Hey, let’s do something together!” It was kismet.
Crenshaw didn’t have anything specific in mind, and neither did Stanko at first. But once he started pondering, a scheme practically sat down in his lap.
Stanko called Crenshaw and explained that he worked for a guy named Ricky Davis. Davis was the used-car manager at McElveen, and Stanko had an opportunity to, on his own, purchase a number of “late-model cars for a low price.” Stanko said he needed $8,900 to buy the cars. He already had most of it. He needed only $2,200 more—but the thing was, he needed it in the next couple of hours.
That $2,200 figure, Detective Lewis noticed, would pay off Stanko’s legal debt, plus give him some carrying-around money for a few days.
“Within hours, Ray had the cash in my hand,” Stanko said. “Instantly I was important, and a
part of something.
”
Stanko instructed Crenshaw to keep their business deal a secret from Elizabeth. Stanko wanted the new business to be a surprise. “It was a dream I truly had for us,” Stanko told the investigator, his face a mask of sincerity. “Anyway, the twenty-two hundred went to paying the bills, and things like that.”
For the first ten days, he had no trouble “holding off” Crenshaw. He made up stories about “problems here and problems there.” There was “trouble transporting the cars.”
He told Crenshaw that he had a GMC Yukon and a Sierra pickup truck that he was going to trade for the cars from Ricky Davis. Crenshaw didn’t suspect, Stanko could tell. His mark had taken the bait, 110 percent.
“He thought I was the next best thing to sliced bread,” Stanko bragged to the investigator. Unfortunately for Stanko, the key ending to any con is to get the hell away from the mark—to make off with the gold, so to speak.
But that was hard when you were tied down in a domestic situation, and the mark was your best friend. Crenshaw was pretty good-natured, and slow to suspect impropriety, but he did become impatient when day after day went by, and there were no late-model used cars arriving.
Stanko continued to lie to his friend, to invent new lies, but he could tell his credibility was eroding, and his lies became crazier. Despite this, Stanko felt safe taking a second bite from the apple. He told Crenshaw that he could get some pickup trucks at an unbelievable price, and, like before, the deal had to be made in the next couple of hours or the opportunity would be blown. Crenshaw, the saint that he was, forked over another $1,800 in cash.
Stanko emphasized to Lewis that the two cash payments from Crenshaw were his only payoff during the scheme. Ray and Natalie Crenshaw opened up a “used-car lot” bank account, with Stanko’s name on it, but he never took any money from that account.
Plus, as further evidence that he was basically an honest guy, Stanko pointed out for the investigator that he had multiple opportunities to snatch cash at his job, but “never took a dime.”
Now Stanko was on another “I’m innocent” jag. He actually said, “I did not do any of this for money.” He wanted love, admiration, and respect. He understood now that he had gone about it the wrong way. He understood he had a psychological problem. He wasn’t just an everyday, run-of-the-mill thief!
Lewis urged Stanko to get on with his tale.
Stanko told him that the time eventually came when he was going to have to “come up with some results” for Crenshaw. He had yet another idea. He went to the used-car lot where he worked. He knew there was a desk drawer where there were many duplicate sets of keys for cars on the lot. Stanko took keys that matched up with makes of cars that he’d promised Crenshaw. One by one, during business hours, Stanko drove the cars off the McElveen lot and to another location—in essence, delivering the cars, one by one, to Crenshaw. Stanko convinced Crenshaw that he had to keep the cars a secret from the people he worked with because he didn’t want anyone on the job to know he was competing with them on the side.
Stanko took another car—and then another. He enlisted Crenshaw’s help. After hours, when the lot was unattended, Stanko would take a car, drive it to Crenshaw, and then Crenshaw would give him a ride back to McElveen’s so Stanko could take another car.
Stanko stopped there and said that even though Elizabeth and the Crenshaws—Ray and Natalie—sometimes helped him with his schemes, none of them ever had the slightest inkling that there was any wrongdoing involved. They were all unadulteratedly innocent.
“Do you remember the makes of the cars you stole?” Detective Lewis asked.
“Sure. There were two pickup trucks, three Century, a Grand Prix, a Buick Regal, and that’s not counting the Jimmy I gave to Elizabeth. I told her it was my demo,” Stanko replied.
“What happened next?”
“After that, I contacted customers I met at work, who couldn’t find the deal they were looking for, and steered them to the Crenshaw cars.” He sold cars that way. He faked contracts. He knew just how to make the transactions look legitimate.
“Who’d you sell the cars to?” Lewis asked.

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