Gerald Stano was no stranger to the disco room at the Holiday Inn Boardwalk. A devoted fan of disco queen Donna Summer, he occasionally went there with a group of friends, said at least one young woman in a later deposition.
Gerry Friedman now thinks Stano had been stalking her daughter. She believed Mary Carol might have had a passing acquaintance with Stano through a friend who worked at a Howard Johnson’s Hotel with him.
“They were outside one night talking after work and Stano came by and asked if they wanted a ride,” said Gerry. The girls declined.
Gerry firmly believed her daughter wasn’t hitchhiking that night. Anytime that was suggested in a newspaper story, she complained to Police Sergeant Paul Crow. Thirty years later, she’s more convinced than ever that Gerald Stano had singled out Mary Carol and was tracking her.
According to Gerry, she learned through police reports that the night he approached her daughter at the Top of the Boardwalk Lounge, Stano asked Mary Carol if she needed a ride home to Ormond Beach, Florida. Mary Carol’s hesitation about accepting a ride from someone she didn’t know well, if at all, may have been tempered by his indication that he knew where she lived.
After exhausting all possible leads as to her daughter’s whereabouts, Gerry finally reported Mary Carol’s disappearance to the police on January 30, 1980, but she recalled the nonchalant attitude of the officer working behind the complaint desk.
“She’s probably off having a good time,” the officer told her.
“I went everywhere,” Gerry Friedman said. By then, she admitted, she was “panicky. I went to work less; I did less.”
By that time, Mary Carol’s older brother John, and their younger sister, Celeste, were both attending Clemson University in South Carolina on swimming scholarships. Indeed, all of Gerry’s four children, including the youngest, Mark, were regular water bugs. Their love of swimming no doubt came from Gerry, who was a member of a synchronized swimming group at Chicago State University. At a young age, when they were bored at home, a family friend who coached swimming suggested they take up the sport. Later, they got swimming lessons as birthday presents.
“We swam all day, ate, then went to bed,” recalls John Maher, oldest of the Maher children. He and Celeste had worked hard to recruit Mary Carol for the Clemson swim team because of her strong showing as a swimmer at Mainland High School. She, her mother, and their younger brother joined the other siblings and spent a festive weekend when Mary Carol went to check out the campus. A group family photo in Mary Carol’s baby book documents the South Carolina trip. Although she was offered a scholarship, she decided to stay at Daytona Beach Community College for her last semester before transferring to the South Carolina school in the fall.
“She wanted to stay and enjoy the beach,” said John.
On February 3, 1980, the facts were noted in a news release issued by Sergeant Roy G. Willis:
“Missing person: Mary Carol Maher, W/F, 20 years old. Subject is 5-6, 125 Lbs. and has long sandy blonde hair which she wears in a pony tail on the right side of her face. Subject has blue green eyes.
“Last seen wearing tan slacks with a possible pink blouse with floral designs. Last seen at the Top of the Boardwalk Lounge, located at the Holiday Inn 400 N. Atlantic Ave., at 10:45 p.m. on the 27th. Day of Jan. 80.”
A small story appeared in the newspaper about her disappearance. Leads, if any, were few and futile. Mary Carol Maher had simply disappeared without a trace.
The mystery of her whereabouts ended two weeks later, on February 17, when two young men out “dirt-dogging” in a remote area off Bellevue Avenue thought they had discovered a dead animal because of an unpleasant smell.
Investigating closer, the sight of a watch on an arm convinced the two it wasn’t a dead dog. They discovered it was actually a woman’s body covered with a foam material and some tree limbs, “so we jumped in my car and headed for the police station,” said one of the men in a statement to police.
Sergeant Paul Crow responded to the scene. The victim appeared to be a white woman, wearing a black-striped long-sleeved silk shirt with blue jeans. He soon discovered holes in the front and back of the shirt, as well as her right thigh. “The body had what appeared to be multiple stab wounds,” he wrote in a report dated February 17, 1980. Returning to the police department, Crow searched missing reports for a possible match to the human remains. Aside from the differences in clothing, the description of the victim matched the missing person report, 80-01-8046, prepared on Mary Carol Maher. Crow later confirmed that Mary Carol had been wearing her mother’s blouse, rather than the one described in the missing person alert.
Mary Carol was a strong swimmer; she was athletic, fit. Yet she was no match for the man intent on harming her. Her body showed no indication of defensive wounds during the attack in which Stano struck her again and again with a sharp object.
Crow contacted Gerry, then went to her home, where she identified some of the jewelry found at the scene. “As soon as I saw the watch, I knew it was hers,” she recalled later. The family’s vigil of waiting was over. Mary Carol was dead. “That was the beginning of the end,” her mother believed.
Three weeks after Mary Carol hugged her mother goodbye, Gerry learned she would never see her alive again.
The hours and days of prayer for Mary Carol’s safe return ended with the news that the body found off Bellevue Avenue was hers. Individually, her family suffered in their own private hells.
“There was some guilt on my part for not pushing her into coming [to Clemson] in January,” John Maher said. “It took me a few years to see that it wasn’t my fault,” he said, admitting to a “lot of rage.”
For Gerry Friedman, her daughter’s death was proof of her mantra: “It’s up to God. He knows when you’re going to be born and when you’re going to die.” She suffered greatly after her daughter’s death, both mentally and physically. She had what she termed a nervous breakdown as she struggled to cope with the loss of her daughter and the horrific details of her death; and Gerry also suffered cancer and chronic back problems. But the pain in her heart was an unremitting one.
In 1983, she sued Gerald Stano for more than $100 million in Circuit Court in Volusia County, Florida, seeking to be compensated for the mental pain and suffering she experienced from her daughter’s death and the loss of her services and companionship.
Six months later, a jury awarded her more than $200 million in what was then believed to be the largest money judgment ever handed down in a wrongful death suit. “I don’t expect to collect any of the money,” Gerry Friedman told reporters after the jury returned the verdict. “I did it for my daughter and all the other victims’ families. Mary Carol can rest in peace now.”
For this mother, years of attending bereavement support groups may have eased her pain a bit, but the murder of her daughter left her with permanent scars more painful than any surgery or cancer treatments.
On July 21, 2008, she wrote:
I have been wounded in my heart and soul for over 28 years. The scars will remain with me, my children, family and friends forever.
As a single mother of four outstanding academic and athletic children, I have always been proud of them as well as their achievements. Mary Carol was on a full scholarship when her untimely death occurred.
The least victim of Gerald Stano had to have been a better person than this demonic individual.
Some may have forgiven the despicable deed—yet God must deal with his soul.
Perhaps we may now have some closure and peace of mind that this nightmare of 28 years is coming to an end.
Once a heart is pierced, all that remains are the scars.
The injustice of it all are the years of anguished waiting.
A copy of that statement is tucked inside Mary Carol’s baby book, now filled with newspaper clippings of her untimely death. It has become a tribute to a daughter whose life ended way too soon, and a testament to the suffering of a close family for whom Mary Carol’s death would always be raw.
SEVENTEEN
Profile of a Serial Killer
“HERE COMES THAT OLD RED AGAIN”
I thought I would never get caught, and everything would be alright. But it didn’t work out that way at all.
—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, November 3, 1985
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obody should have been surprised by Gerald Stano’s murderous path. Devoid of any kind of bonding experience with his mother, he spent a lifetime feeling rejected by his adoptive father and scorned by the women who didn’t like his taste in clothes or music.
Court-appointed psychiatrists spent hours analyzing Stano. When all was said and done, it seemed murdering women was something for which he was predestined. Finding his prey “would turn me into a different person altogether,” he would claim. For Stano, his driver’s license was also a license to kill. It gave him mobility, just what he needed to stay under the radar of law enforcement officers, who weren’t operating with any of today’s investigative tools, such as DNA testing.
Stano’s first appointment with the electric chair was made in June 1983 when Circuit Judge S. James Foxman gave him two death sentences for the murders of Susan Bickrest, the bar waitress found dead near Spruce Creek in 1975, and Mary Kathleen “Katie” Muldoon, the Daytona Beach Community College student and part-time bar employee found shot to death in 1977. Before sentencing Stano, Judge Foxman said, “I see no motive in these killings.”
Furthermore, he said, “Normally we see passion, greed, the need to eliminate a witness; I don’t see that here. These murders are completely senseless.”
Almost three decades later, when discussing Gerald Stano, whose claims of killing more than forty women would place him among the most prolific serial killers in the country, Foxman recalled, “He seemed to be the most ordinary person.”
Conceding he didn’t think the former short-order cook was highly intelligent, Foxman had no doubt that Stano committed the crimes he confessed to. “I think there was more than enough evidence to conclude he did those murders. He did recall a lot of details at great length.”
Within six months, Stano received a life sentence for the murder of Cathy Lee Scharf, the young woman he had picked up at the Anchor Bar on Merritt Island. His first murder trial in her death ended in a mistrial; the second ended with a guilty verdict in December 1983 and a recommendation by the jury that he be sentenced to die.
He walked into the courtroom there already facing a life sentence for the murder of Nancy Heard, twenty-four, found strangled in Ormond Beach in 1975. In 1981, he received a life sentence in her death in Volusia County. In Brevard County, Circuit Judge Gil Goshorn rejected a last-minute request for a new trial before sentencing Stano to die by electrocution, the method of court-ordered death as mandated by Florida law.
The next month, a Seminole County jury convicted Stano in the 1974 stabbing death of an unidentified woman dubbed “Madame X.” Stano claimed to have picked up the short, stocky woman with bad teeth in 1974 as she was hitchhiking in Altamonte Springs, a suburb of Orlando, Florida. Her body was found three to four weeks later. A set of engagement and wedding rings was found nearby and an autopsy indicated she may have had two children.
She was never identified and earned the nickname of “Madame X” from a radiologist. Her family never knew her fate. Just minutes after the jury convicted Stano, Circuit Judge Robert B. McGregor sentenced Stano to life in prison.
By that time, Stano had also already pleaded guilty to the murders of Mary Carol Maher, twenty, the pretty blond former high school swim star who died from multiple stab wounds; Toni Van Haddocks, twenty-eight, the black prostitute with the broken arm whom he had viciously attacked; Nancy Heard, twenty-four, the motel maid whom he had strangled to death; Linda Hamilton, sixteen, whom he had killed in nearby New Smyrna Beach; and Ramona Neal, nineteen, whom he had picked up while she was in town celebrating her high school graduation.
Gerald Stano had first been arrested on April 1, 1980, for his assault on Donna Marie Hensley, the prostitute whose escape made her a “live victim,” a critical witness for investigators. Through Hensley, investigators connected Stano to the murder of Mary Carol Maher. After he was charged with Maher’s death, Stano was examined by psychologist Ann McMillan and psychiatrists Robert Davis and Fernando Stern.
Dr. McMillan’s report concluded June 23, 1980, included her interviews with Gerald Stano’s adoptive parents for three and one-half hours and subsequently Stano himself for six and one-half hours.
Dr. McMillan detailed Stano’s early development and the neglect he suffered from birth and his behavior in childhood and later years, from lying and stealing to petty theft and vandalism. The Stanos described their son as a “lifelong pathological liar.”
As a young adult, he worked at the Burroughs Corporation, where he was fired for being “totally incorrigible.” While drinking heavily, his behavior was described as ranging “from a happy, silly drunk” to “a violent, deranged madman.”
Dr. McMillan concluded her report by summarizing her initial impressions, that Gerald Stano had never been a “normal” personality, nor had he ever had a pattern of normal male-female relations.
Now, as to what made him “kill and kill again,”
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as Stano once was asked, it wasn’t just the fact that he would be alone in his room and lonely, and would “see all the couples having fun,” and then he would go out in his car and “find a girl walking.” The stressor, or trigger, would occur once the “young lady” (as he called his victims, as if to depersonalize them) said something that set him off. It could be anything from a disparaging remark about his weight to a slight dismissal of his taste in music.