The monotony of prison—interrupted by occasional court appearances or visits to the prison doctor—was also broken by visitors who toured the prison hallways with guides, seeing firsthand the most dangerous prisoners of all, the murderers.
Ron Word, an Associated Press reporter based in Jacksonville, toured the prison and said that his “most vivid memory of Stano was during a tour of death row.” The serial killer, Word recalled, was “sitting in his underwear, doing a paint-by-number of
The Last Supper
.”
Although the anticipation of death permeated the cellblocks, prisoners depended on the jailhouse pipeline for word when their population has been reduced by one.
“It looks like Gov. Graham got one of us the other day at 12 noon. After it was over, they have the nerve to bring visitors by for a tour. They don’t care about our feelings when they have an execution. All they care about is themselfs [
sic
]. But, we have to stick with each other, and hope for the best.”
32
At one point, Stano thought it might be useful to apologize to the families of the victims, though actual remorse seemed a foreign emotion to him. The “bitchin’” girls got what they deserved. He never would have shot, stabbed, or strangled them if they hadn’t asked for it by being disrespectful.
Although this seemed to him like a good idea at the time, he thought maybe someone else should write the apology:
“Kathy, what would you say to an article printed in the newspaper? It would be a type of apology to all the relatives of the victims. . . . What do you think? If you want to do it, let me know, and I will formulate the letter for you. But, I would want it word for word as I write it. I trust you more than anyone to write it. It’s the least I can do. Cause, the public has me labeled as “having no remorse or feelings.” . . . But let me know what you think, okay? I would like to verify a few things, and put a point across to someone and their family.”
33
Even from his prison cell, Stano was still conniving and thinking of ways to manipulate people and the situation in his favor. Did he have any idea how transparent it seemed to have a prisoner facing death suddenly begin to feel sorry for all those murders and the lives they had ruined? Did he know people would see it for what it was, a ploy for sympathy, a reprieve from that last walk to “Old Sparky”?
In some letters, he seemed resigned to his future and his fate:
“As you know, I go for the pre-clemency hearing Friday, Sept. 6. I am a little nervous about it too. But, we all (us men on D.R.) have to go through it once. Then, our case goes to Gov. Bob Graham for his consideration. After that, he signs a warrant for us, and we go to death watch for 30 days. I haven’t been there yet, but I might be there before this year is up. It all depends on how fast he rules on the case. But I have a feeling he will rush mine through.”
34
Again and again, the Florida Supreme Court denied appeals from Stano’s legal team. During 1997 alone, three execution dates for him were stayed. Five days before Stano was scheduled to be executed, a Brevard County jurist, Judge Tonya Rainwater of the Eighteenth Circuit in Viera, Florida, denied his last appeal on March 19, 1998.
She dismissed claims in a forty-seven-page brief that a prisoner to whom Stano had supposedly confessed had now recanted his story. The last-minute appeal also claimed to have statements from four Daytona Beach police officers accusing Sergeant Paul Crow of lying to protect his cases.
The round of allegations was ill-timed and ill-founded, she wrote. The prisoner’s claims of recanting his story amounted to hearsay; inadmissible evidence, she wrote in dismissing the appeal. As for accusations against Crow, state and federal courts had dismissed similar claims in the past.
The night before his planned execution, Stano requested a deluxe meal, not unlike one of the repasts he had enjoyed during his carousing days in Daytona Beach. With great care, he invoked a happier time in his life. His bountiful dinner selections at fine dining spots were definitely not on the prison menu, but an exception was made for his final meal. Before being strapped in, Stano consumed a Delmonico steak, bacon bits, baked potato with sour cream, some French bread with butter, and a tossed salad topped with blue cheese dressing. For dessert, he requested a half gallon of mint chocolate chip ice cream and washed down the big meal with two liters of Dr. Pepper.
After Stano’s death, his attorney released a final statement, dated March 23, 1998:
LAST STATEMENTS OF GERALD EUGENE STANO
I want to thank my family, my many friends, and my legal team for all their love and support. Know that I love you all and cherish your love. Thank-you for sticking with me even when you were attacked, made fun of, and criticized.
People on death row need good people to help them. Whatever people feel about the death penalty, surely everyone agrees that innocent people should not be executed. When people on death row do not have good lawyers who are allowed to do their jobs without fear, innocent people get executed.
I am innocent. There are good police officers and there are bad one. Many police officers have come forward and said that I was put on death row by a police officer who lies under oath. That is true. I was frightened, I was threatened, and I was held month after month without any real legal representation. I was not strong enough. I confessed to crimes that I did not commit. It is hard for a person who has never been held in jail, completely isolated, and without any help, to understand that a person will confess to something awful that they did not do.
My heart goes out to the families who believe that I am responsible for the death of their loved one. My team presented my innocence, but today courts seem to want vengeance more than justice. The result in my case was that no one listened. Now I am dead and you do not have the truth. This is tragic. Sgt. Paul Crow created the story, but all other police officers know I am innocent. Crow should be held accountable.
In the end, Paul Crow became the target of Stano’s venom, some eighteen years after the two had first met and formed an unlikely alliance. Crow had been father confessor to Stano, tripped up in his killing spree by the one who got away.
“All of the people I met have told me: ‘you’re crazy to have trusted a cop.’ That’s them. Not me. I wasn’t like that. They never hurt me, so why should I not trust them. . . . All during this, Paul was like a person I could talk to, and confide in. I didn’t look at him like a policeman. I saw him as a real person, who cared what happened to me.”
35
His letters referred time and again to the special relationship he had with Crow, one of trust and understanding. Yet, when his final days neared, Stano turned on Crow.
“I don’t think it was him,” said Crow, referring to Stano’s final statement. “I think it was his attorney.”
Stano’s attorney for the appeals process, Chris Quarles, a public defender, continued to be bound by restrictions of the bar even years after Stano’s case was closed via his execution. It was his job to give his client the best legal representation he could, to fight the charges.
“He clearly wanted to please Crow,” said Quarles when discussing whether Stano had been coerced. “I think there’s no doubt he pleaded falsely to some.”
But did he think Stano was telling the truth when he admitted the multiple killings?
“I would have no better take on that than anyone else,” said Quarles.
Quarles had been a public defender in the appellate division since 1980, and there was no doubt that Stano was one of his more interesting cases, he said.
“He must have had a certain charm,” said Quarles of Stano’s prolific approaches to women. The longtime public defender encountered people who knew Stano before his arrest, and they commented on the killer’s affability and easygoing nature.
Abused as a child, Gerald Stano went to his death saying he had been used by a police officer and a court system for crimes he didn’t commit. Despite detailed confessions to law enforcement agents in several jurisdictions, multiple stories of how his rage could be ignited by something as simple as criticism of his music, Stano said it was a lie.
When he was in custody all those months and years, Stano believed he had the upper hand. As long as he had information investigators wanted, they would have to play the game his way. A few hints here and there, then he would sit back in the chair and prolong the agony, making detectives work for every scrap of information they got.
Until then, the stocky man in the polyester shirt and pants who’d lured women into his car over and over again had gotten away with murder. Years later, he would sit for hours telling and retelling the killing tales.
“After eight hours of talking to him, you were drained,” said former Volusia County Sheriff’s Office investigator Dave Hudson.
Although Crow had heard chilling details of the murders of the pretty young women and was convinced Stano had killed them, he said he had given the confessed serial killer one last chance to clear his conscience.
“Jerry, I don’t think I’m gong to be able to talk to you any more,” he said he had told Stano when he visited him at the Florida State Prison. They were put into a small room that served as a guard’s booth, all glassed in. The appeals process was counting down, and Stano’s date with the electric chair loomed; although ultimately it would actually end up delayed again and again—for another twelve years.
“If there is anything you want to recant right now, here is the time to do it,” said Crow. “I’ll do anything to help you.”
“I’m okay with it,” Crow quoted the condemned killer as saying, referring to his lengthy string of confessions. “Suddenly he appeared cocky,” Crow said. “He said no, that he would see me in court.”
And, although Stano’s final statement referred to love three times in the first paragraph, that was another foreign emotion to him. He adored his adoptive mother and claimed that he cared about his brother, Arthur, but showing affection was not something that Gerald Stano did.
On the morning of Monday, March 23, 1998, uniformed officers brought Gerald Stano to the death chamber and seated him in the seventy-five-year-old electric chair.
36
The macho Jerry was gone. His head was shaved and coated with gel. The top buttons of his shirt were open and an electrode was attached to his right calf.
In the audience, his attorney mouthed words of encouragement, while siblings of some of Stano’s victims waited to watch his final breaths. Within fifteen minutes of being strapped in with a leather headpiece and an apronlike mask, the first jolt—eight seconds of 2,300 volts and 9½ amps—coursed through his body.
“Die, you monster,” Ray Neal said aloud, punching the air with his fist for emphasis. Afterward, Cheryl Ramona Neal’s brothers, who had witnessed the execution, rejoined the rest of their family, who had not, filling them in on the details of Stano’s final minutes. The family member of another victim had brought cigars. The stogies were usually a celebratory measure for a birth, but these families were cheering a death, the end of life for a man whose circle of victims spread far beyond the women he beat to death, or shot or strangled.
If the moral victory of the $200 million judgment—never collected—brought Mary Carol Maher’s mother Gerry Friedman comfort, Stano’s execution did not.
“I don’t believe in the death penalty, abortion or euthanasia,” she said emphatically.
But her son, John, and his sister, Celeste, were at the Florida State Prison in Starke on March 23, 1998, to watch Stano put to death.
The Maher siblings sat in the audience with family members of other victims as the jolts of electricity coursed through Stano’s body. John Maher’s eyes met Stano’s briefly as he looked for any sign of remorse.
“In the end, he was a coward as I expected,” Maher said then. “I’ve got a sense of relief. I can’t hate like that ever again. It’s not worth the toll it’s taken on me.”
Stano’s body was released to a local funeral home, then cremated. A funeral home spokesman declined to disclose the disposition of the ashes.
Stano went to his grave without uttering a word from death row about his victims.
Were there more? Was he still holding a few cards close to the vest?
In the eighteen years between his arrest and execution, Gerald Stano enjoyed the feeling that he was in charge. He picked out Paul Crow for his mentor, almost a surrogate father figure. He called all the shots on when he would be interviewed and just how the information these investigators so desperately wanted would leak out. For hours on end, he tantalized them with small hints of what he had done before actually admitting the heinous crimes for which he became so famous.
He alternated between owning up to cases long before police had any inkling he was involved or reluctantly giving up facts, such as about the murder of Susan Basile, his youngest victim.
In the end, he turned on Detective Paul Crow, the only person he had said he could trust. He walked the tightrope to the electric chair by himself. But eventually, Stano’s time ran out. If he had one of those proverbial cards up his sleeve, he didn’t show it.
APPENDIX A
Stano’s Letters to Kathy Kelly
G
erald Stano’s first letter to me arrived in my work mail August 20, 1985. The clerk who sorted the letters brought it to me with a puzzled look, saying, “That killer is writing to you.” She had no idea I had asked him to write, to tell me his story.
After that, to avoid conversations at work, I gave Stano my home address, knowing full well—I hoped—that he would never show up at my door. I had made one visit to the prison, at that point, and we’d agreed that I would write him a series of questions about his life and the cases, and he would answer.