I Would Find a Girl Walking

Table of Contents

 

 

 

Penguin Group (Canada), 90 Eglinton Avenue East, Suite 700, Toronto, Ontario M4P 2Y3, Canada (a division of Pearson Penguin Canada Inc.)

Penguin Book Ltd., 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

Penguin Group Ireland, 25 St. Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2, Ireland (a division of Penguin Books Ltd.)

Penguin Group (Australia), 250 Camberwell Road, Camberwell, Victoria 3124, Australia (a division of Pearson Australia Group Pty. Ltd.)

Penguin Books India Pvt. Ltd., 11 Community Centre, Panchsheel Park, New Delhi—110 017, India

Penguin Group (NZ), 67 Apollo Drive, Rosedale, Auckland 0632, New Zealand (a division of Pearson New Zealand Ltd.)

Penguin Books (South Africa) (Pty.) Ltd., 24 Sturdee Avenue, Rosebank, Johannesburg 2196, South Africa

 

Penguin Books Ltd., Registered Offices: 80 Strand, London WC2R 0RL, England

 

The publisher does not have any control over and does not assume any responsibility for author or third-party websites or their content.

 

I WOULD FIND A GIRL WALKING

 

A Berkley Book / published by arrangement with the authors

 

PRINTING HISTORY

Berkley mass-market edition / April 2011

Copyright © 2011 by Kathy Kelly and Diana Montané.

 

All rights reserved.

No part of this book may be reproduced, scanned, or distributed in any printed or electronic form without permission. Please do not participate in or encourage piracy of copyrighted materials in violation of the authors’ rights. Purchase only authorized editions.

For information, address: The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

eISBN : 978-1-101-47766-3

 

BERKLEY
^®
Berkley Books are published by The Berkley Publishing Group,
a division of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.,
375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.
BERKLEY
^®
is a registered trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.
The “B” design is a trademark of Penguin Group (USA) Inc.

 

 

 

 

Most Berkley Books are available at special quantity discounts for bulk purchases for sales, promotions, premiums, fund-raising, or educational use. Special books, or book excerpts, can also be created to fit specific needs.

 

For details, write: Special Markets, The Berkley Publishing Group, 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014.

 

 

For a newspaper reporter, good sources are the backbone of the job. Throughout my reporting career, I relied on a network of contacts I could depend on to tip me off to a good story or steer me away if I was on the wrong track.

Thankfully, thirty years after I first reported the heinous crimes of Gerald Stano, those sources are still here helping me out.

This book could not have been completed without the help of Paul Crow, who opened his mind and his briefcase to allow me every opportunity to make this as factual as possible.

Mel Stack, my attorney, was instrumental in making this book as complete as it could be. I am also indebted to Circuit Judge James Foxman, Circuit Judge C. McFerrin Smith, Chris Quarles, Dave Hudson, Don Slack, Francis Monaco, Ed Seltzer, Jim Tiller, Karen Duffy, and Ron Word.

I sought and got very good advice from a number of sources, including Lee Butcher, John Firestone, Amy Hill Hearth, Kathy Trocheck, Michael Connelly, and Margie Schlageter.

To family members who relived a very painful chapter of their lives—Ray Neal, Michael Basile, Ed Bickrest, Elizabeth Heard Dow, Gerry Friedman and her son, John Maher—you have my greatest admiration.

To my writing partner, Diana Montané, thank you for suggesting I chronicle the life of this aberrant soul. Your help was invaluable.

Thanks to our agent, Linda Langton, who had faith in us and our project from the very beginning. Our editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, literally took us under her wing and saw the promise in our first efforts.

Friends and family supported me from day one. My nephew, Michael, was a sounding board and constant throughout the process. To all my friends who cheered me on, a warm thank-you from the heart.

—Kathy Kelly

 

A heartfelt “Thank you for everything” again and again to our agent, Linda Langton, who never wavered in her belief in this project and followed it through with grace and determination. And to our keen and gifted editor, Shannon Jamieson Vazquez, who managed to preserve the essence of the book while ensuring a final, precise, and polished copy.

 

And a very special thanks and recognition to Paul Crow, whose profiling skills put a stop to the monster that was Gerald Stano. Also, to “whoever fights monsters.”

—Diana Montané

Kathy, as I said before, it’s not easy to remember everything to a tee. I know you have copies of the confessions I wrote for Paul, and it makes me wonder why you want me to relive these homicides again? But for you, I will. Nobody else as far as I am concerned. You have my full cooperation, as you know.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, October 21, 1985

 

 

 

 

T
he young woman was only too happy to catch a ride when she climbed into Gerald Stano’s car. Glancing quickly at her surroundings, she found the vehicle almost obsessively neat, and the driver looked like someone right off the set of
Saturday Night Fever
—slick polyester pants and a patterned shirt, with a few buttons opened at the neck to expose his hairy chest.

When the radio began blasting out the beat of disco queen Donna Summer, she smiled. “Who listens to that stuff?” she asked. Suddenly, the face of the driver darkened, and his arm quickly left the steering wheel. Reaching beneath his seat, he grabbed a knife and began swinging it wildly, plunging the blade deeply into her chest again and again.

How dare she insult his taste in music? She would pay for that remark with her life.

From the beginning, Gerald Eugene Stano’s own life seemed to be the stuff of dreary novels. When he was born, he lived in what a psychologist later called “subhuman conditions.” Stano implicated himself in an estimated forty murders by the time he was twenty-eight years old. The man who lived in relative obscurity had become famous at last as one of the most prolific mass murderers in history.

The criminal mind has long been the subject of public fascination. What makes people like David Berkowitz, John Wayne Gacy, and Ted Bundy tick? More than a century later, people still are trying to find out what caused Jack the Ripper to attack British prostitutes, again and again.

Stano considered these young women as no more than prey. He would “find a girl walking,” stalk her, take her, and ultimately destroy her, with complete disregard as to whether she was somebody’s daughter or sister. She was just a girl walking, and that, in his mind, made her fair game. She could have been anyone.

 

 

Serial killers are the people next door, or, in my case, a fellow employee at the newspaper where I worked for many years. I don’t recall ever seeing Gerald Stano at the newspaper, but it was our mutual place of employment that proved to be a touchstone at our first meeting behind the walls of the Florida State Prison.

Little did I know that the isolated murder cases I covered as the police reporter for the
Daytona Beach News-Journal
from the late 1960s until the late 1970s would ultimately be traced back to that man who grabbed newspapers fresh off the press, added advertising inserts, and bundled them together so they could be thrown on my driveway.

The young women who were strangled or stabbed and dumped like yesterday’s garbage had all made a fatal mistake—falling for the low-key approach of the man who may have gained their trust with something as simple as a casual compliment.

I told their stories. I talked to their anguished families. Their photographs haunted me, pretty young women in the wrong place at the wrong time.

After Stano’s arrest and death sentences for three of the slayings, I found myself drawn to this case and wanting to learn more about this man who fancied himself a lady-killer. Which he was—literally.

His attorney, Don Jacobson, was someone with whom I had worked before as a reporter. Telephoning him about my plans was easy; he quickly connected me with Stano in prison, acting as our liaison.

From that first meeting in prison, a relationship developed in which I did my best to draw Stano out. In a series of forty letters written over a ten-month period—from August 15, 1985, to June 10, 1986—Stano confessed his insecurities about women and his appearance and, yes, details of some of the slayings.

 

 

The spring break ritual in Daytona Beach hit home for me in 2009 at dinner one evening with a friend at a restaurant near the Boardwalk.

As we sat in the restaurant, the spring breakers descended upon us, like the bikers had the week before, more than the usual number, since they had been warned against going to Mexico on spring break because of the recent outbreaks of violence along its borders.

The kids, boys and girls, all good-looking and clean-cut college kids, were ordering large decanters of wine, followed by tequila shots with beer chasers, and then more wine decanters, followed by more tequila, more beer, and mixed drinks. They were growing louder and more rambunctious by the minute.

I looked at the faces of the girls, and I could visualize the faces of Gerald Stano’s prey, his victims, reflected in their faces.

I wanted to say something, to warn them, to tell them that the streets were nowhere near as safe as they seemed, and that they were not as invincible as girls their age think they are. We used to think so at that age, too, my friends and I. But I didn’t say anything. I knew they wouldn’t listen.