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Authors: Michael Benson

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OWL-O-REST
For some of the time after Stephen Stanko got out of prison, he had a job, but most of his energy was dedicated toward confidence games. In his heart of hearts, in his innermost psyche, he was a flimflam man. No getting around it.
On December 8, 2004, Stanko—as usual, well kempt and wearing a suit—walked into the Owl-O-Rest Factory Outlet furniture store in a small strip mall between a post office and a suntan place on 17 Business North, in Surfside Beach, South Carolina.
It was a family business, owned by a woman, her ex-husband, and her mom. The woman was Kathleen “Kelly” Crolley, who years later recalled, “The store was started by my stepfather in June of ’83. I originally agreed to help him part-time, while completing college here at the beach. A year later, he passed away.”
The establishment was modestly sized—7,500 square feet.
She was twenty-one at the time. Her mother had four children under eight—and one on the way. The store was no gold mine—not now, and definitely not then— but Kelly played with the cards she was dealt and ran the store to the best of her ability. She made some changes. Now the store stocked a lot of coastal designs and also offered a lot of special orders for people. They worked with about 150 different vendors.
Crolley was one of four people working on the day Stanko came in. He was wearing business attire. Although he was polite enough, he wasn’t relaxed and seemed in a hurry.
“If I was to order a gift for my wife, would it be delivered in time for Christmas?” he asked.
Crolley said it would. All he had to do was say the word and she would place the order immediately. The present would arrive in plenty of time.
“If it doesn’t arrive on time, could you give me a photocopy out of a catalog? You know, so I’ll have something to wrap and put under the tree.”
Crolley remembered saying no problem. The man said he was in the market for a rolltop desk and another one, which would fit into an odd space.
“I think he said four feet. He decided on the one for sure and would think about the other,” she recalled.
Stanko explained that he was building a house on Pawleys Island. As Crolley and Stanko looked at all kinds of desks, discussing the pros and cons of each, he answered his cell phone five times.
“He would walk around the corner, sometimes to accept the call and thank the other party for their contribution, and offer to meet them for lunch,” Crolley recalled. He told them he hoped that he could find people to match their generosity.
She normally would not inquire about a customer’s private conversation, but she couldn’t help herself. She told him that she wasn’t trying to be nosy, but she was curious. “You know, as to what was going on,” Crolley said.
Stanko told Crolley he was a corporate attorney practicing in Texas, but he had taken off work for the past year to a year and a half to begin a charity: the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation.
He was pleased to say it was doing very well. There was to be a big write-up the next day in the
Sun News,
with all the businesses that were sponsoring the charity. He was giving a plaque to all the businesses that helped. He said he’d raised about $500,000 so far.
His reason for starting the charity couldn’t have been more personal. He had a thirteen-year-old niece stricken with cancer. At that very moment, he said, she was hospitalized at the Medical University of South Carolina.
“My baby girl was born prematurely there. She weighed one pound, twelve ounces, and everyone did a great job,” Crolley said. During that tough time, she’d stayed at the Ronald McDonald House. She couldn’t say enough good about the place, and she was pleased to say that today she had a healthy and happy little girl.
After that brief exchange, the seed planted, Stanko returned to shopping for a desk. There were more phone calls. Crolley left the customer with a couple of catalogs and went to talk to her ex-husband and mom.
“You think it would be okay for me to give one hundred dollars to a very good cause?” she asked them.
She told Stanko that they weren’t able to contribute much, but that the store would like to participate. “He never asked me for a dime!” Crolley remembered, still flabbergasted by Stanko’s acting ability.
He placed the order for one desk, still undecided about the second. As they were doing the paperwork, she noticed the delivery address seemed a little off.
“A lot of my customers are second-home owners or have just moved here and will frequently not know the directions or exact address of their home, so I let it go—but it was a flag,” Crolley explained.
In retrospect—twenty-twenty hindsight—there were other clues that not all was as it seemed. The desk was to be a surprise, Stanko said, a Christmas gift for his wife, so he had to talk with his secretary about how to work out his deposit without the wife knowing about it.
Stanko said he would come back the next day to complete the deal. He wanted to sleep on it before he ordered the second desk.
Before he left, Crolley said, “Wait here, I want to give some money for the cause, and the store does, too.”
Stanko was pleased.
“What was the name of the charity again?” she asked.
“You could just make the checks out to me, Stephen Stanko.”
The red flags seemed so obvious to Crolley years later.
“I could do that, but we’ll need a receipt from you for the store—you know, for tax purposes.”
She gave him an Owl-O-Rest check for one hundred dollars, and one for twenty-five dollars from her. On the receipt, Stanko put the name of the research foundation and signed,
from Steve Stanko.
After Stanko left the store with the checks, Crolley ran the sequence of events over and over in her mind and came to the conclusion there was something iffy about that guy.
To be safe, she called the Better Business Bureau and asked if they had any record of Stanko’s charity in South Carolina. They said they didn’t.
After hanging up, she remembered that he’d said he practiced corporate law in Texas. Maybe the charity was registered down there, she thought.
Her next call was to the
Sun News
. The guy she talked to said he had no knowledge of Stanko’s charity, and knew nothing of the big article scheduled for the next day. Afterward, Crolley suspected that she might not have talked to the right person.
When Stanko did not return the next day, as promised, Crolley still didn’t write him off. She thought perhaps he had gotten busy with “all the commotion,” the
Sun News
thing, and all of those plaques.
The following day, she called him. During the conversation, he said the
Sun News
event had gone well, and she had to admit that she’d been busy and hadn’t gotten around to buying a copy of the newspaper.
She said she’d already ordered the rolltop, but he had to place the order that day in order to receive the second desk in time. He asked if he could give her his brother’s credit card number.
Crolley said she couldn’t do that without speaking directly with his brother. Stanko said okay, he would visit the store the next day with the cash.
“I never spoke with him again,” she recalled.
Crolley kept an eye on the checks and found that the store check was cashed at a nearby bank. On the same day the check was cashed, a little video store beside the bank was robbed.
“My mom even went to the video store to inquire as to what the robber looked like, which was kind of awkward for her, but we were afraid there might have been a connection,” Crolley said.
She never did get to the proper authorities to find out the information she was after.
“My personal check was held longer and I was actually concerned—not so much for personal safety, but more for identity theft.”
She had a special watch put on her account and asked around if anyone else had heard of Stephen Stanko.
“I really feared he was bad news, but did not know what to do about it. I wasn’t even sure a crime had been committed, since he never asked for the money,” Crolley explained.
Kelly Crolley’s experience with Stephen Stanko was typical of those first months when he needed cash and was busy thinking up new confidence games.
He felt no twinge of guilt. A man had to do what he had to do. Getting a job was Mission: Impossible, so what else was he supposed to do?
He’d have to cast his spells on people.
He always scammed women, and he made thousands of dollars just with his ability to lie effectively. On some, he pulled the “collecting money for sick kids” bit.
For others, he said, “I’m a lawyer,” and offered various legal services for a fee. When he scored, he’d hit a bar or a bookstore or a mall, and begin trolling for a new victim.
Professionally Stephen Stanko might have been struggling, but his personal life couldn’t be beat. Those early days with Laura Ling—romancing, then cohabitating—were about the best times that there ever were, according to him.
He later said, with no apparent sense of irony, that he and Laura shared a love that was straight out of a Harlequin romance novel. It was an
unconditional
love. They loved each other without question. They never passed judgment.
Removing the rose-colored glasses, we find something less than nirvana in Murrells Inlet. In reality, Stanko sold Laura and Penny Ling a package of lies, and they bought it all.
He said he had an engineering degree from a military college, that he’d worked as a paralegal. He also told them that he’d practiced law without a license—but that turned out to be the truth.
He kept busy doing things, always painting his activities with broad strokes of legitimacy and benevolence. He was charitable and political, always on the side of good.
Stanko suspected the authorities were keeping an eye on him, and he geared some schemes directly toward them. He wanted to send a clear message that he was trying to succeed, trying to be a positive force on society.
To accomplish this, he’d started a program to help juvenile delinquents return to the straight and narrow. Plus, his literary ambitions were rekindled. He couldn’t divulge the details, he said, but he was working on a major literary work.
As time passed, from 2004 to 2005, Stanko wasn’t feeling the upward mobility he had when he first got out of prison. His genius was rendered all but moot.
To those who bothered to observe carefully, Stanko’s activities were a mask covering up his bleak reality. He was just another ex-con who couldn’t get a job.
RESEARCH
During this time, Stephen Stanko did have at least one friend, who called him once a month or so to see how he was doing. It was Dr. Gordon Crews, one of the coauthors of Stanko’s published book,
Living in Prison
.
The book’s complete title and byline was
Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an Insider’s View
by Stephen Stanko, Wayne Gillespie, and Gordon A. Crews.
Stanko and Crews had had frequent phone conversations when Stanko was in prison. Then, like now, Stanko mostly griped. Stanko told Crews it was tough on the outside being an ex-con. Nobody wanted to hire the guy who was just out. Crews reminded him that he was a guy with a lot of skills, and to think positively.
Stanko hit Crews up for money. He tried to sell his future royalties from the book to Crews, who said he should be writing again. Just because he was a free man didn’t mean he had to stop writing. He wasn’t a prisoner/writer. He was a writer!
Stanko wanted to write another book, to use his extraordinary experience and scientific knowledge, not to mention intuition, to teach the world a precious lesson about some other topic that wasn’t “living in prison.”
Stanko gave some thought to the topic of his new yet-to-be-written book. He kicked around a few ideas and decided: serial killers. He’d always been interested in the subject. It would be cool to become an expert.
That decided, Stanko’s trips to the Socastee library became purposeful. Multipurposed even. He read all day, and kept copious notes. And when he was taking a break, he was chatting—quietly, of course—with his girlfriend.
He thought about being comprehensive, to learn about every serial killer in history, their MOs, their body count, their signature. The book could be like an encyclopedia. It could work. There was that much public interest. There had even been serial killer trading cards a few years back.
Maybe he wouldn’t make it comprehensive. For one thing, it had been done; for another, he figured the book would be better with a more narrow scope.
He would focus—look in minute detail—on the serial killers he found most fascinating. Six to ten killers for the whole book—the serial killers who appealed to Stanko more than the others.
Like many modern-day enthusiasts, Stanko observed serial killers with something that greater resembled admiration than disdain. There was a definite hierarchy, guys who stood out. Guys with superior bloodthirstiness and perversion. Members of the—drumroll—“Serial Killer Hall of Fame.”
He had a notebook that he was filling with notes from the books he read in the library. He also spent a lot of time in periodicals. He printed news and magazine articles about hard-core crime from the library’s microfilm archives and kept a scrapbook.
Which killers to include? Some were a lock.
Like “Zodiac,” for example. ID unknown. Bastard got
away
with it. Terrorized millions for years. He was the original masked gunman prowling lovers’ lanes in Northern California, shooting and stabbing young lovers during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
This was before the big Zodiac movie. All he knew, he learned from books. Stephen Stanko liked Zodiac a lot. He was psychologically terrifying, and he backed it up with death.
Plus, his terror campaign was visual. He had a Zodiac costume that he wore when he went out to perforate young white women—like every day was Halloween.
To some extent movies such as
Halloween
and
Friday the 13th
were based on Zodiac, who added the “masked homicidal maniac stalking teenagers” theme to the big picture of serial murders!
One of Zodiac’s intended victims—the male half of a necking couple that the killer ambushed beside a lake—survived Zodiac’s stabbing, although his girlfriend was murdered. He
saw
Zodiac, and lived to talk about it.
Zodiac’s shirt, the survivor saw, had a circle with crosshairs over it, a symbol he had also used in his letters and other written communications. The killer wore a sack, square at the top, over his head, with eyeholes cut in it. As he was being stabbed, the survivor saw that Zodiac was wearing glasses inside his spooky hood.
In his letters, Zodiac made the cops and the press look stupid, jerking them around with an unbreakable code that he promised would, if deciphered, identify him.
Although some of Zodiac’s codes were solved, the one with his name in it was not. He was taunting the cops, yanking them around. His letters described a bloodlust only appeased by murder, and a raging misogyny, all cloaked in a crude attempt at far-out 1969 hippie vernacular. Zodiac thought shooting chicks was the “ultimate trip.”
Criminal profilers, professional and amateur alike, analyzed the many clues Zodiac supplied, and tried to figure out what kind of guy he was. Many theorized that the Zodiac had been a military man—perhaps a sailor.
Like Dad,
Stanko thought.
Stanko had Zodiac pegged as not much of a stud. If he was any kind of lover boy, he’d have worked it so that he got a piece before he snuffed them. Stanko assumed a lot of these “gun does my talking” types suffered from erectile dysfunction.
At the scene of a cabdriver’s murder in San Francisco, a bloody fingerprint, presumed to belong to Zodiac, was found. Over the years, there had been a handful of suspects in the Zodiac murders. Some didn’t pan out, and some stuck around.
The best suspect was the late Arthur Leigh Allen, whose spending records revealed him to be frequently in Zodiac’s vicinity. He also had proximity with several of the victims, and may have been an acquaintance with one of the victims. His handwriting looked like Zodiac’s; he had a history of doing really sick things; and his demeanor, when he was questioned, was oddly defiant, very much the type of personality to use the mail to laugh at authority figures, while simultaneously terrifying all of Northern California. Some said the case against Allen was a construct of a true-crime writer, and, in reality, was much weaker than presented. Allen was said in a couple of books to have received a speeding ticket in the vicinity of one murder. This was declared untrue by a third source. Plus, his thumbprint didn’t match the bloody one found at one of the murder scenes.
One thing that everyone could agree on, Stanko discovered, was that Zodiac—along with Charles Manson and the murder at Altamont—was part of that “death of the counterculture” gestalt, symbols of the end of an era, the 1960s—such a hopeful decade turned horrible by violence—giving way to the disastrous 1970s.
The killer not only wrote taunting letters to police and press, sometimes using code, but he established his bona fides in a shiveringly creepy fashion, enclosing in the envelopes bloodstained cloth torn from a victim’s shirt.
Maybe, some theorized, Zodiac was more than one guy. Did a conspiracy theory fit? Maybe the one writing the letters was never the one shooting the gun. Paranoids noted that the case resembled a military mindcontrol experiment that had gotten out of hand.
There were a lot of theories—some almost solid, others wacko—and the Zodiac letters continued for years. One guy thought that he turned into the “Unabomber.” Zodiac claimed for years in his writing that he was still killing people; after the initial burst of murders, no more bodies could positively be linked to him.
In some ways, Stanko thought, the Zodiac killer was the most legendary of the serial killers.
Stephen Stanko also exhaustively researched “Son of Sam,” aka David Berkowitz. Son of Sam was a derivation of the Zodiac theme a few years later. He also shot teenagers and young adults in the nighttime.
Unlike Zodiac who prowled the plentiful desolation of Northern California, Son of Sam patrolled the side streets of New York City. He found victims on front stoops, walking down the sidewalk, and (like Zodiac) necking in parked cars.
Son of Sam always used the same gun: a fearsome .44 bulldog. He shot couples or females alone. Never males alone. Because of the girth of his bullets, he cruelly maimed the victims he didn’t kill.
Like Zodiac, Son of Sam wrote taunting letters to the police and press. But the East Coast version was an upgrade in a way. His prose was written by a deviant poet, exhibiting a well-honed terroristic craft. Stanko was a writer and noticed the difference right away.
The similarities in the messages of mayhem were compelling as well. The chilling taunts of the Zodiac and the Rimbaud-like prose-poetry of Son of Sam bubbled up from the same misogynistic vat.
Berkowitz was caught and arrested, and the police said he was the Son of Sam. But, just as some people believed Zodiac was a team effort, there was a compelling theory that Berkowitz did not act alone. Perhaps Son of Sam, which referred to itself as a group in the letters, was a Devil-worshipping cult, holding meetings in a cave in a park north of the city, a club of death, in which the same .44 was passed around so that every satanic member had an opportunity to kill with it. The killing only stopped when one of them was caught, and he took the rap for everybody.
A writer searched Westchester County in search of this cult and found evidence that it existed—in a park, in a cave decorated with satanic symbolism.
The theories grew wackier. One suggested that the Sam kills were filmed from a van always in the vicinity, those snuff films going for top dollar to the pervs who paid for that junk.
How good could those films be? Stanko wondered—if they did exist. They were shooting at night from a distance. To get any kicks out of the kills, you’d need a camera getting close-ups inside the cars where the carnage was.
At first, Berkowitz confessed to all thirteen shootings. He had a loony tunes tale to tell: Sam was a cranky neighbor who worshipped the Devil, drank blood, and sent messages to Berkowitz via the incessant barking of his dog, Harvey. Berkowitz said he acted alone, and cops, eager to wrap up the nightmare, were eager to believe him.
Later, Berkowitz said he’d only done a couple of the shootings, that others had pulled the .44’s trigger as well. Then he had his throat slashed in prison and claimed to have “found God.”
Stephen Stanko discovered Ted Bundy–land, a vast continent of research on the crown prince of serial killers. There were people who thought Bundy was the most fascinating serial killer of all time. He combined the looks and charm of a swinging bachelor with an unquenchable thirst to kill as many pretty young girls as he could.
Now here was a guy that Stanko could identify with. A chick magnet/snuff artist. Bundy helped launch the career of the legendary true-crime writer Ann Rule, who worked beside him and never sensed the evil.
Bundy was a 1970s serial killer, and the fun part here was the way Bundy continued to lie about and cover up his murders, even as the evidence mounted against him, and his charm and powers of persuasion were such that he always had allies right up until the end.
Although most experts believed Bundy killed at least thirty-five people, when Bundy finally confessed, he admitted to only thirty. He was a rapist, a necrophiliac, and a postmortem surgeon.
After seducing his always lovely victims into a private moment, he took them by surprise—either coming up from behind or sometimes accosting them as they slept—and rapidly bludgeoned them into unconsciousness.
On some occasions, the bludgeoning itself turned out to be fatal; but in some other cases, after they were knocked out, he would become intimate and manually strangle them.
Bundy did not give up his freedom easily. After one of his arrests, he escaped by jumping out a second-story courthouse window. Hurting his ankle in the fall, he limped around free for a short while.
He was a nomadic killer. He killed in the American Northwest, on the salt flats, and in the Rocky Mountains. He killed in Florida, and it was there that he was caught the last time and eventually was pushed into the electric chair. Predictably, he had gone to his execution kicking and screaming.
Stanko thought Bundy’s modus operandi was worthy of extra thought. Hit ’em over the head, knock them out or make them groggy, and
then
get intimate. There would be a lot less potentially harmful rasslin’ that way.
One of the newest serial killers who was Hall of Fame worthy was “BTK,” another writer of taunting letters. BTK was an acronym for bind, torture, and kill. He did his thing in Wichita, Kansas.
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