I Would Find a Girl Walking (4 page)

Gerald was home alone one day when he was sixteen. His parents were gone, but one of their cars was sitting in the driveway. Feeling adventurous, he took it and began driving around, as usual his foot heavy on the accelerator. Gerald was never hurt during these escapades, but his erratic driving habits were now a new danger for the Stanos to face.

At nineteen, Gerald went to the computer school at Maxwell Institute in Pennsylvania. At last, his parents thought, perhaps he’ll settle down, try to make something of his life. Using the experience from the computer school, he got a job at the Chestnut Hill Hospital. But before long, he was in trouble there, too. He got fired for stealing money from the pocketbooks of female employees. At his next job, in the computer department of the University of Pennsylvania, he lied about his experience and training to get a job. It wasn’t long before the truth was discovered. Confronted, he lied again. Again, he faced unemployment.

Gerald’s life began to fall apart. He had been fired from two jobs and was languishing in a crummy hotel while he was trying to make his first attempt at independence. His frustration grew when he was thrown out of the hotel for stealing money from other guests’ rooms. Desperate, he returned home to live, knowing he was giving up a lot of the freedom he had come to enjoy while he was out on his own.

He went to work for Burroughs Corporation, only to be quickly fired as “incorrigible.” By then, Gerald had begun to drink heavily and dabble in drugs. At that time, at least according to Stano, he began to date a mentally disabled girl named Yvonne,
⁵
who, ignorant of the consequences of sex, soon ended up pregnant and had an abortion paid for by the Stano family.
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“My relationships with women I can say was not exactly the best,” Stano admitted. “It was good up north, cause you have a different type of girl. Down south, they think you got money to burn on them. Besides, I was very picky at my girlfriends. Like Yvonne up in Pennsylvania. If the young lady is a respectful type (no running around) I will take to her, and treat her with respect. But, if she is a tramp, she won’t get any respect from me.”
⁷

Eugene Stano was desperate with worry over his adopted son. He talked with his wife, and together they decided they would try yet another course of action, sending Gerald away again, this time back to Florida, where Norma was caring for her ailing mother. Maybe it would be a fresh start for Gerald, a chance to begin anew, and repair his fractured relationship with his family.

Back in Florida, Gerald met Teresa Esposito,
⁸
twenty-three, a hairdresser, and the couple decided to get married. But as the wedding day neared in June 1975, a major hurdle appeared on the horizon. Jerry was arrested on charges of forging a check from his employer. The three-monthminimum jail sentence would mean that the couple’s months of planning, reserving a church and reception hall, were for naught.

On May 21, one month exactly before the day of the planned nuptials, Teresa put pen to paper to plead her fiancé’s case. She told Circuit Judge J. Robert Durden that she was “looking forward to the most happy day in a girl’s life—my wedding on June 21.”

Because Jerry “had involved himself in a most unfortunate situation,” the plans for the wedding were in jeopardy. The venues had been reserved, invitations had been sent, and Teresa had been honored at several bridal showers, she said in appealing to Durden “not only in your capacity as a judge but also to you as a parent—to beg of you to make it possible for Gerald and me to marry as planned.”

His parents, Norma and Eugene Stano, got into the act as well. They recounted the couple’s plans for the wedding as well as the future and implored the judge to be reasonable.

“We realize that justice must be served—and that it will. However, would it not be served as well, if not better, if you could find the compassion in your heart to mitigate the sentence and to contribute to Gerald’s rehabilitation by making it possible for Gerald and Teresa to be able to follow through with their wedding plans on June 21st?” the parents wrote.

The judge capitulated, and the Stano-Esposito wedding went on. Gerald’s new father-in-law, Mario Esposito,
⁹
gave him a job at a service station as a way to keep an eye on him while he was on probation. A small announcement on the “society pages” of the
Daytona Beach News-Journal
duly recorded the marriage.

Nevertheless, within a short time, the Stano marriage was in serious trouble.

One day at the service station owned by his father-in-law, Stano said that his “ex-brother-in-law swung at me, and I came at him with my belt. . . . I took out my anger on my ex-wife’s [Teresa’s] dog and her. Once, in front of her aunt and uncle; and that started the divorce proceedings.”
¹⁰

After thirteen months, Teresa Stano had endured enough. She filed for and was granted what Florida law calls a dissolution of marriage. She received all of the items she requested, which included most of the wedding gifts. Five years later, in 1981, Stano told psychiatrist Dr. F. Carrera that his former wife had left him because of his abusive punishment.

“I’d push her around . . . hit her face . . . for sticking with her parents,” the psychiatrist quoted him as saying in a report to the court. Gerald Stano admitted his spousal abuse began about six months after the couple exchanged vows. Stano criticized his mother-in-law’s “smart mouth” and his wife’s laziness, saying she left laundry in the washer while she watched soap operas. Stano, a self-confessed neat freak, railed at her sloppy housekeeping and insistence on always having her family members around.

Their sex life “was always bad,” he told Dr. Carrera. “She never wanted to have sex except during our one-week honeymoon.”

These fights over sex would lead him to storm out of the house, occasionally going “downtown looking for a woman.”

He had begun to drink nonstop when he was twenty-one, and after his divorce—when he was twenty-five—he was drinking one case of beer a week and two cases on weekends. He had also been smoking marijuana and taking downers.

The tumultuous relationship with Teresa started Stano on a different path, “basically what started the change of Jerry, to the Jerry that people call a ‘serial killer.’ ”
¹¹

The drinking and drug abuse, plus his incipient resentment toward women, perhaps contributed to the escalation of Stano’s violent behavior.

Gerald Eugene Stano was starting to pick up a dangerous rhythm to his nights.

When I moved to Florida in 1974, I saw girls getting in and out of cars. After a while, they were getting in my car too. After a while, the girls said they were going to have their “old man” get me. That triggered my memory of the threat. So I would go out and get some beer and booze, and get drunk and then pick up one of the girls and kill her, knowing I wouldn’t have to worry about her getting the “old man” on me.

—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, August 15, 1985

 

 

 

 

O
n March 25, 1980, Donna Marie Hensley was strolling along Daytona Beach’s Ocean Avenue, which ran parallel to the Atlantic Ocean and served as the “backyard” of the tourist playground known as the Boardwalk. At night, the area turned into a darker scene, with cars driving slowly, the men inside looking for some kind of companionship to pass the lonely hours. In the shadowy arcades, drug deals were offered and financed.

The founding fathers of Daytona Beach seemed to have gotten things backward. Here, Main Street was on the peninsula, while Beach Street, the hub of downtown, was on the mainland, facing the Halifax River, part of the Intracoastal Waterway that separated the mainland and the beachside. Along the scenic ribbon of water, locals watched the smaller pleasure boats out for the day as well as sleek yachts, owned by the very rich, passing through on their way south for the winter.

For decades, Main Street capitalized on its carnival atmosphere, drawing summer visitors as well as annual invasions of black-jacketed motorcyclists. Along the Boardwalk, facing the Atlantic Ocean, crowds enjoyed the whirling rides, cotton candy, and games of chance. On a warm summer night, tourists could ride the Ferris wheel, looking out at endless miles of ocean.

By the 1980s, many of the longtime residents had moved away from their once fashionable homes. The area had become a tourist mecca, not an entirely flattering description. Tiny shops crammed side by side hawked seashells and T-shirts, mementos for the throngs of tourists to take home.

But crime was a growing problem. Teenagers ran away from homes in colder northern areas and fled to the beachside city, lured by the promise of fun by visiting nearby Walt Disney World and a magical life on the beach. Others ran from brutal family situations, failing school grades, or other circumstances that drove them as far away from home as their thumbs would take them. In town, with little or no money, the hunger pangs soon became a daily constant. They sought solace in others seeking the same paradise—life on the beach—and soon learned crime was the only way to survive. Purse snatchings and car break-ins financed their wanderings but not for long.

Spring break was a raunchy ritual with its wet T-shirt contests and even nastier sex games. Undercover cops blanket the beaches, but there isn’t enough man- and woman-power to divert the hormonal herd, running amok, and drunk at that, until all hours of the night and early morning.

Donna Marie Hensley was already high on quaaludes, known in the 1980s by the street name of “Disco Biscuits,” but she was alert enough to know that when you climbed into cars and later into bed with strangers, the stakes were high. Sometimes things got a little kinky, the result of a guy feeling powerful after peeling off a twenty-dollar bill for what he thought would make him feel like a real man.

A steady diet of pills had helped insulate Donna from much of her life. Most of the time she was high, and the buzz from the uppers and downers she used helped dull the pain. She had tried suicide when her dead-end life seemed too much to bear, but she wasn’t even successful at that.

Her life was one long and monotonous routine, sleeping most of the day and prowling the streets at night looking for tricks. Most of the time, guys didn’t notice the glazed look in her eyes. In fact, they barely noticed her at all. They just wanted sex, and they didn’t care where they got it. As long as they paid up and she didn’t get hurt, Donna didn’t care. She was a prostitute, used to making a living off her body. By now, her memory of falling into a life of selling her body had grown fuzzy, like the shadows of passing strangers.

Time and drugs had ravaged her face and body, as well as her mind, making her look drawn and haggard. She was twenty-four and once had been a real babe. Faded signs hinted at her former beauty.

She pulled her lightweight jacket tighter around her shoulders, trying to ward off the chill of the late-night air. It was one of those cool Central Florida March nights, in the low fifties.

She spotted the small red car as it pulled up. At that hour of the morning, there were few vehicles on the street, save for bread and milk delivery trucks making their early runs to restaurants and a few cabs carting late-night drinkers home from bars.

She had seen the car before; it was a Gremlin, and the license tag on the front read, “No riders except blondes, brunettes and redheads.”

The driver rolled down the window of the car, slowing to a stop right next to Donna.

“Are you working tonight?” the pudgy, bespectacled driver called over.

Donna had been around long enough to know she had to be careful about cops. They often dressed casually, wearing designer blue jeans; rode around in cars with out-of-town tags; and pretended they were tourists out for a good time. As soon as they agreed with a girl on just how much a good time would cost them, they flashed a badge, and the charade was all over.

She glanced at the man’s brightly patterned polyester shirt and white belt and assumed no cop would be caught dead in disco clothing. She took her time looking him over. From his appearance, she remembered that her friend Cheryl had seen him around the night before, just cruising the Main Street area on the beachside.

“No, I’m not working, just out for a walk,” she answered, biding her time until she could sense what he was after.

“In that case, how about a ride instead?” he offered, with a cockeyed smile.

Donna climbed in, quickly glancing around the inside of the car. Everything seemed worn but clean, none of the litter of beer cans or overflowing ashtrays she was used to.

They exchanged small talk for a few minutes, mostly about the weather, inane chatter. Then he asked abruptly, “How much to get laid?”

She paused momentarily, and then spewed out: “Twenty dollars.”