At the large table next to ours, there was one girl, a pretty young woman with a tan and long, straight dark hair. She was the only one nursing a large glass of water, which she sipped slowly, through a straw.
Perhaps, I thought, it wouldn’t be one of the young women drinking heavily but this girl who would wander away from the pack in disgust, and get picked up, snatched.
My friend and I finished our dinner and walked out into the nippy Central Florida March night. On the corner, we spotted an even chillier sight: a beautiful young woman, dressed somewhat provocatively, standing alone on a street corner. Not a streetwalker, though, but clearly a “good girl,” another spring breaker.
“Are you all right, sweetie?” my friend asked her, to which she replied a bit defiantly, “Yeah!” I couldn’t help it. This time I did speak up. “You shouldn’t be standing here alone at night,” I told her. Now she smiled condescendingly, as if I were a bothersome aunt to be barely tolerated, as she said, “Oh no, my ride is right over there,” and she pointed to a dark street, perpendicular to the one we were on.
Although facing the electric chair, Gerald Stano had lost none of his illusions that women were attracted to him. He asked if I had a boyfriend, later telling the lead investigator on the case that our first meeting had “gone well,” as if we had been on our first date.
As I probed for information that would illuminate his motivation to murder, I found myself eventually asking point-blank: Why did you do it? His answer:
As for the question, “What made me kill and kill again,” I can’t really answer that, except like this. I would be drinking, and lonely, and thinking about all the couples having fun together, and here I am single having no fun at all. Then I would go out riding around, and I would find a girl walking, and hopefully she would get into my car, but she would end up making some kind of remark about my weight, music or looks. That would turn me into a different person, altogether. I really don’t like to talk about that person cause it gets me very upset. But for you, Kat, I will. Cause you want to know everything. Other people have tried, but to no avail.
1
Crime stories—whether true or a sordid tale created in the imagination of an author—are a subject that fascinates millions. Early cop shows on television, like the black-and-white image of Sergeant Joe Friday in
Dragnet
, have morphed into graphic, high-definition bloodbaths like
CSI
. From years of being a crime reporter, I knew the public’s saturation level for such stories was high. As I detailed a high-profile murder case years ago in which one slaying was actually videotaped, a friend, unable to wait for the next day’s developments, called to ask, “What’s your story going to be tomorrow?”
Psychiatrists may have described Gerald Stano as slow or below average because of his traumatic start in life, but that didn’t stop him from killing and killing again. He used different methods—firearms, strangulation, drowning—and left his victims’ bodies in remote places. In those days, law enforcement agencies didn’t communicate as they do now, and there was nobody looking at the big picture—attractive young women who disappeared off the street, never to be seen alive again.
If Gerald Stano was walking and driving the streets today and carrying out his deadly mission, a key weapon would be on the side of law enforcement agencies: DNA, microscopic genetic material that makes identification nearly foolproof. Tiny drops of blood left at the scene where a feisty young woman struck back, semen from an act of hurried sex, or even flesh under fingernails could have put Stano behind bars years earlier. That might have stopped his rides of death. He may have been caught much sooner. But the question that seems to plague friends and families of those young women murdered in the 1970s still most fervently remains: how did he talk them into getting into his car?
Gerald Stano was in rare form—killing form, that is—for seven years. In Florida alone, he killed a woman on an average of every three months. For that period, from 1973 to 1977, a total of eighteen women died at the hands, literally, of this moody man who prowled the streets in search of someone who would give him a little respect or sex if he was lucky.
From the jam-packed leather briefcase of Paul Crow, the chief investigator on the Stano cases for the police department in Daytona Beach, Florida, came a grim compilation of names. It had no header stating what it really was—a death list. But it was a summation of the lives that the former computer programmer and short-order cook had snuffed out on his nocturnal forays.
Overwhelmingly, Stano’s victims were white. Only two were black. They ranged in age from twelve—Susan Basile, his former roller-skating partner—to thirty-four-year-old Bonnie Hughes, a Dundee, Florida, housewife, who appeared to be his oldest victim. She had been beaten in the face with a blunt instrument and was found slain in an orange grove February 11, 1976, in Polk County, Florida.
This coldest of lists presented its vital statistics in a phrase reminiscent of the old
Dragnet
show on television—“just the facts.”
Most of Stano’s victims had presented a lonely image: prostitutes walking darkened streets, glancing nervously over their shoulders; women with car trouble only too happy to see someone pull over and offer to help, especially a man driving the same model car they were; or young girls hitchhiking, ignoring the oft-repeated parental warnings about getting into cars with strangers.
Some were street-smart. They were cagey about figuring out if the would-be “john” was a cop. Accepting a ride from a lone male driver wasn’t too scary, they figured. They were young, agile. They could be out of the car in a heartbeat. Or so they thought.
They didn’t reckon with a radio blasting disco music that jarred their senses. And they didn’t hesitate to voice their feelings. “How can you stand to listen to that stuff? Donna Summer and that disco crap are so over the hill.”
They didn’t anticipate stops for beer or requests for sex. By the time they began to process what was happening, it was too late.
Out of nowhere, a fist would come slamming into their faces, wildly hitting them again and again as the driver proceeded calmly. Sometimes it was a knife, the sharp blade plunging into their torsos over and over as they fought helplessly to escape. For others, the demonic turn of their captor sent a shock wave that almost immediately brought a gut response.
“If I can open the door, I can run,” more than one probably thought. But even those who were alive when they left the car didn’t make it more than a few feet before the dark-haired driver produced a small handgun and shot them.
ONE
A Date for an Interview
Now, about Kathy Kelly. As you know she is the only one I have consented to talk too [
sic
]. Reason is, she is a friend of yours and Donald Jacobson. Is she married Paul? Let me know okay?
—Gerald Stano to Paul Crow, September 4, 1985
A
s the appointment at the prison for my first interview with Gerald Stano neared, I couldn’t believe I was worried about what to wear. I was no newcomer when it came to conducting prison interviews, having worked at the
News-Journal
as a police reporter for about twenty-five years by that time. But I didn’t want to give any wrong ideas to the man whose favorite song was “Just a Gigolo, I Ain’t Got Nobody,” sung by David Lee Roth.
In addition to the assistance of Don Jacobson, Stano’s attorney, I also had the support of Paul Crow, the police sergeant to whom Stano looked for advice, guidance, and reassurance. Paul and Jerry, as Stano called himself and Paul addressed him, had developed a good rapport thanks to Paul’s interviewing skills developed at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
Paul and I had a long-standing friendship, having gone to high school together. As he worked his way up the ranks, we stayed in touch and had a good working relationship. On my beat as a police reporter in the 1970s and ’80s, I depended on forming relationships with people who were going to tell me things. “You may want to check on this,” someone might say, trusting that his or her name wouldn’t appear in a story. News today at most law enforcement agencies is funneled through public information officers, whose job it is to keep reporters from having one-on-one contact with officers.
Early on, Paul had confided to me that a major investigation was under way, and Gerald Stano was confessing to murder, again and again. I had held off writing anything until signed confessions were in hand that Stano had admitted the slayings of at least six women.
A colleague, Rosemary Smith, and I quietly gathered all the information about six of the murders. We looked through court records, including a search warrant for Stano’s car issued a day after his April 1, 1980, arrest for the attack on Donna Marie Hensley. All the basic information about the 1977 AMC Gremlin was detailed in the warrant, including the serial number and color of interior, right down to the trailer hitch on the rear.
Rosemary and I collaborated on the story that broke the news to local residents that the deaths of at least ten young women in the area over a seven-year span had been the work of one man. The front-page story ran September 3, 1981, with a headline in large type that read: “Killer Says ‘Revenge’ Was Motive.” The final chilling detail of the affidavit filed in the charging documents was the description of the license tag on the front of Stano’s car: “No riders except blondes, brunettes and redheads.”
Walking into a state prison in August 1985, especially to see a death row inmate, was intimidating to say the least, and oppressive, to put it best. One door after another clanged shut, until I suddenly felt like a prisoner myself. The interior of the interview room was bare and sterile. Inside sat Gerald Stano, a slightly pudgy man handcuffed behind a small table, dressed in an orange prison jumpsuit. He didn’t seem embarrassed by his restraints; quite the contrary, he appeared amiable, and even cheerful.
He immediately started asking me about people he knew at the
News-Journal
, from when he had worked in the mailroom. There, employees called inserters took the newspapers as they rolled off the press and inserted advertising sections into the finished product. For $3.50 an hour, it was mindless work, shuffling one part of the newspaper into another.
It was very conversational at first, which put me at ease. I certainly hadn’t wanted to walk in and immediately start asking him about the people he had killed. So the chat about the paper was an icebreaker. He seemed confident, even flattered by the attention. It was a break in his daily routine, which he complained, time and again, was so monotonous.
He was clean shaven. Later, he told me that he shaved every day, not that prisoners had to, as some inmates even sported long beards and mustaches. But he seemed to take as much pride in his personal appearance behind bars as he did on the outside.
The initial discussions I had with Paul Crow were about the crimes to which Stano had confessed. I had only seen Stano from a distance once when I walked by Paul’s office and saw him sitting inside.
I realized it would take a while to draw things out of Stano, just as it happened with him and Paul. Paul had already warned me that Stano relished playing cat and mouse to prolong the giving of information as long as possible. It was the thrill of the game for Stano, making him think he was in charge.
He didn’t feel comfortable with some things that I asked him about in letters. The death of Susan Basile, one of the few—if not only—victims he had known personally, gave him bad dreams, he said. Like other serial killers, Ted Bundy for instance, Stano seemed to have preferred perfect strangers as his prey.
I went to the prison three or four times. It was always on a Thursday, since I typically had off Thursdays and Sundays, so I had to go on Thursday to comply with prison regulations on interviews. On some weeks that I didn’t go, he would write that he was disappointed—although he always knew days in advance when I would be there for an interview because it involved clearance by prison officials.
We made the agreement that I would send him a series of questions that he would answer, but pretty soon the letters from him took on a different, more personal tone, commenting on the weather or a visit from his parents. I had his complete confidence and support, especially because I had the backing of Paul Crow, who had vouched for me as being trustworthy. Stano’s letters were more like letters to a friend than to a reporter. He urged me to be careful, and even sent me a get-well card after I had surgery.
He knitted a scarf and hat for me for Christmas 1985, sending it through his attorney. It was bright orange and white, the style more fitting for wintry northern climates than the sunny south. I knew all along he had been gifting other inmates with many of his “creations,” such as baby blankets. It was, after all, a change to the tedium of prison life. He had his radio and a small black-and-white television, his primary source of entertainment. Once he wrote me that he had watched the Junior Miss Pageant, which had been broadcast from Daytona Beach.
What intrigued me most about him was that he could have killed so many women over a seven-year period and then resumed his daily life with total normalcy. And also, the irony that I had written about so many of the crimes and had met with some of the families.
Of course, I had initially covered them as separate crimes, and not as the work of the man now sitting before me. It amazed me that he was able to pull it off for so long. The first time I went to see him, I admit I was extremely nervous—my skin felt clammy and I nervously fiddled with my pen and notebook. And when he started talking about working at the newspaper office, I think I was glad to be off the subject of why I was there.
From that first meeting in prison, I did my best to draw Stano out. In a series of forty letters over a ten-month period, he confessed his hatred for his adoptive father, devotion to his adoptive mother, and insecurities about women as well as his appearance. Stano was detail oriented to the point of fastidiousness. Today, he would probably be recognized in the psychiatric community with obsessive-compulsive disorder, that inner drive for everything to be just right.