I Would Find a Girl Walking (19 page)

She packed lightly for her last trip. Her father told investigators he believed that she had only taken her silver Timex watch with a wide leather band, a sleeping bag, and two bathing suits.

It was shortly before 9:00 a.m., July 22, 1975, when G. C. Bradshaw, a member of the police department in DeKalb County, Georgia, found Linda’s body. She wore pierced earrings, nothing else.

The last time her father would see her was on a slab at a morgue when he arrived in Volusia County, Florida, to identify her on July 30, 1975. Her nude body—heavily tanned from the sun and bearing the outline of a two-piece bathing suit—had been found a little over a week earlier at New Smyrna Beach, three-quarters of a mile south of Turtle Mound.

Sheriff’s investigator Bud Eaton and medical examiner Dr. Arthur Schwartz came to the scene. Investigators began to work the crime scene, measuring ninety-two feet from Linda’s body to a row of vegetation along the shore. Along a cutoff just south of where the victim was found, investigators found what they believed were signs of a struggle. They made plaster casts of tire marks and footprints discovered at the scene but found nothing else of value.

The first story about the discovery of the body appeared in the
Daytona Beach Evening News
the same day the body was found, a four-paragraph account that offered few details.

Over the next few days, reporters covered the slow process of identifying the victim. In an unusual move, investigators enlisted
News-Journal
artists Rafael Torres and Steve McLachlin to create sketches based on photos of the dead girl.

Worried parents from several parts of the nation called to inquire about the girl with the bikini tan. Investigators had determined she was about fifteen years old. Her body lay unclaimed in a Holly Hill funeral home as, again and again, parents from other areas learned that this was not their child.

Eventually, in a rare move, investigators released to the press the actual photos of the dead girl as efforts to identify her intensified. On July 29, 1975, the
Daytona Beach Morning Journal
ran two photos—one from the front, the other a side angle, by
News-Journal
photographer Bob Pesce. Promising leads from anxious families were evaluated and discounted until Linda’s father made the positive identification.

But the grim image of a young dead girl on the pages of the local paper—not a pleasant sight for residents getting their daily news at the breakfast table—finally gave investigators the break they needed.

Linda Hamilton, a high school freshman, had met up with seventeen-year-old Scott Henne in the first week of July. “They became traveling companions and eventually traveled to Daytona Beach together,” according to an official sheriff’s office report by Deputy R. J. Baker.

Once they arrived in town, they met up with some of Henne’s friends and later shared a dwelling on North Oleander Avenue. Henne and Linda were allowed to share the front part of the house. She soon met three young men spending some time at a vacation home in Flagler Beach. The registered renter of the property, Edward O’Leary, told investigators that Linda had stayed at the condo several times. “He further stated that he had knowledge of her status as a runaway and also, that she was 16 years old,” said deputies. For those reasons, he didn’t approve of her staying there but didn’t object strongly to his own brother staying there while he was vacationing there with his friends.

Wherever Linda stayed those weeks she was in town, she came and went at her leisure. She talked of making contacts so that she could get mushrooms for use as a hallucinogenic drug.

Somewhere on her aimless ramblings around the beachside, Linda Hamilton’s path crossed with Gerald Stano’s. In a March 12, 1981, interview with Sergeant Paul Crow, Stano recalled the details.

Stano related that he “took off,” cleaned the car, and went back for another beer. Six years after the slaying, he recalled the small talk they engaged in, how she had told him that she was staying in Flagler Beach for a few days with friends.

After he drove away, Linda Hamilton died in her watery grave. A postmortem examination would show she had ingested seawater and sand into her stomach. The autopsy further revealed evidence of strangle marks around her neck. She had been asphyxiated and drowned, just as Susan Bickrest had been.

 

 

Whether prowling the streets of Daytona Beach in the late hours amid a backdrop of flashing nightclub signs or cruising around during the day, Stano showed no hesitation in approaching his “marks.” Some encounters ended badly for him, such as the time he grabbed a young woman’s purse when she refused to return the money he had paid her for sex. She called police, but investigators discounted her story because she seemed to be mentally unstable. Again, Stano escaped close scrutiny by police.

I kind of look over the girls, because of my weight problem I have. If they snicker at me, forget it. But, if they take me for what I am, that’s a different story. Besides, I am not what the girls call a hunk. I am just an overweight nobody.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, August 21, 1985

 

 

 

 

M
ary Carol Maher’s baby book was a labor of love for her mom, Gerry. Following the birth of her first daughter—just about twelve months after her first son—on January 17, 1960, Gerry began documenting all the important moments of Mary Carol’s life.

The scrapbook, now over fifty years old, recorded the milestones in the life of the young woman her mom called “MCM,” her initials. Carefully written down were the names of guests at a baby shower in her honor. A birth announcement from Gerry and her husband, Jack, proudly proclaimed to family and friends the arrival of their daughter, born at 7:55 a.m. on a Sunday, weighing eight pounds, ten ounces. She was twenty-one and one-half inches long.

“Mary Carol had a slight bruise over her right eye but she’s a beautiful girl,” her mother noted. Gerry’s second child proved to be athletic and artistic, a girl who made her own greeting cards for her mom, all of which were saved. An accomplished pool player, she loved the thrill of the game and frequently vanquished her male opponents. Pictures from family gatherings and newspaper clippings about Mary Carol’s swimming prowess and her graduation from Mainland High School in Daytona Beach, Florida, were affixed to the pages. The happy occasions such as Christmas were there in Gerry’s book of memories, too—indeed, among the last photos of Mary Carol were pictures of an idyllic family Christmas gathering in 1979.

In a perfect world, Mary Carol would have shown this compilation of her life’s achievements to her own child one day.

But the book that had started so joyously with a little girl’s birth instead became a tribute to her life, all twenty years of it. The happy project took a dark turn when Mary Carol was reported missing, then found dead. The scrapbook reflects the life of a happy child well loved by her family, the documentation of the dramatic events until the end of her twenty years, her disappearance, then murder. In the first story that appeared in the paper, Mary Carol was merely reported missing. Her body was discovered about three weeks later; it would be about six weeks before investigators were able to determine that she was the last young woman not to survive a ride in serial killer Gerald Stano’s car. With a sharp object, he had killed her by striking her again and again, breaking her sternum.

 

 

Gerry’s children, her two sons and two daughters, were the foundation on which her life was built. She also called upon her deep faith, which she had relied upon to steer her through troubled times, including her divorce and becoming a single mother in the 1970s.

It was that abiding belief in a higher power that brought her through the darkest time of her life: Mary Carol’s murder. Some thirty years later, she could recall with certainty the last night she saw her daughter, and the ragged fear that overtook her when Mary Carol wasn’t at their appointed meeting place the next day.

“I came home from work very tired,” said Gerry, recalling the night of January 27, 1980. She spoke quietly, eloquently, as she sat in the house in Ponce Inlet, Florida, she shares with Leonard Friedman, her second husband of more than twenty-five years.

In 1980, Gerry was a Realtor, an occupation for which she had a real calling, which was a bonus since it helped support the family of five.

That evening, Mary Carol asked to use her mom’s car to go out with friends.

“I had an appointment in Gainesville the next day to have dental work done and I needed to be on the road early,” Gerry said, explaining why she couldn’t fulfill her daughter’s request.

Instead, she agreed to drive Mary Carol to the Holiday Inn, where a lounge on the highest floor—the Top of the Boardwalk—was a popular gathering place for young people. There, Mary Carol said she planned to meet two longtime friends.

Once they arrived at the hotel in Daytona Beach, Mary Carol tried to convince her mom to come upstairs for a while to say hello to her friends. Gerry declined, reminding Mary Carol she had to be up early the next day. Mary Carol had decided to accompany her mom to Gainesville, so they agreed on a time to leave in the morning.

Their last few moments together were marked by the closeness the mother and daughter shared.

“She put her arms around me and gave me this pat on the back,” Gerry recalled. Gerry drove away about 10:30 p.m. She never saw her daughter alive again.

The next morning, she awoke to discover Mary Carol had never come home. Her room was just as she had left it. Gerry wasn’t overly concerned, since her daughter would occasionally spend the night with a friend if she was out late, so Gerry drove to the subdivision where Mary Carol’s friend lived.

But when Gerry arrived, there was no Mary Carol. She drove back home, thinking her daughter might be waiting there.

“Meanwhile, I’ve wasted thirty minutes,” she recalled, concerned about being late for her dental appointment. She left for Gainesville, a two and one-half hour drive away. When she got back that night, she discovered that Mary Carol was still not home.

Mild concern was starting to set in. Mary Carol and her mother enjoyed a close relationship, but she was, after all, twenty years old. She worked at a restaurant in Holly Hill and enjoyed going out with friends several times a week.

Gerry began trying to track her daughter down, but all the promising leads to her whereabouts proved fruitless. Calls to acquaintances turned up information that only increased Gerry’s concern: Mary Carol’s friends had never made it to the Top of the Boardwalk.

“One had to work late and one was sick,” she said. A bartender later told police that Mary Carol had sat alone and seemed “melancholy,” her mother said. When she disappeared from the bar, an employee thought she had gone to the restroom.

“Keep her safe and in a warm place,” prayed Gerry as the hours turned into days, then weeks.