For his part, William Meadows provided the police with approximately thirty-two names and telephone numbers of people who could verify his whereabouts and at least an additional ten people who could verify the time element during the day of May 28, the subsequent evening, and May 29, to the morning of May 30. To further prove his truthfulness, Meadows also said he would take a polygraph test in the state of Florida.
By all witnesses’ accounts, Ramona Neal had definitely been seen heading toward the picnic area on Ocean Avenue in Daytona Beach at approximately 3:00 p.m. on May 29, 1976. She was also reported to have been seen by two other people at 6:00 p.m. and again at 8:00 p.m. The last person to be contacted supposedly saw Ramona in the elevator at the Holiday Inn Boardwalk at midnight, on May 29. The Boardwalk was a popular spot for young people, with its seaside restaurants, hot dog stands, and a Ferris wheel.
It was weeks later before there was a break in the case. On June 15, Kenneth Gordon, a student, reported finding what appeared to be a body. Investigator Deputy Sergeant Arthur Dees was called to the scene.
Gordon stated that he was traveling on Old Dixie Highway when his motorcycle ran out of gas, and he began to push it down the road until he got to a gas station.
Approximately four-tenths of a mile north on National Gardens Road and Old Dixie Highway, Gordon noticed something in a ditch on the west side of the road. He believed it to be a dead animal until he inspected it more closely and found that it appeared to be a deceased female. He then pushed his motorcycle to the Texaco station at Interstate 95 and U.S. 1 and notified the sheriff’s office.
Sergeant Dees took pictures of the crime scene. The body appeared to be that of a Caucasian female, lying approximately ten to fifteen feet down an embankment with her head in a southeasterly direction. An attempt had been made to cover the body with natural growth obtained from the immediate area.
Before the body was removed, Sheriff’s Captain Howard McBride contacted Dees with the likely name of the victim. She fit the description of a young woman reported missing to Daytona Beach Police: Ramona Neal.
Meanwhile, authorities in Daytona Beach scrambled to obtain medical records. By 8:00 p.m. on June 16, 1976, the medical records as well as dental charts had arrived from Forest Park. There was no doubt the body was that of Cheryl Ramona Neal.
Ramona had been wearing a two-piece blue and white polka-dot bikini. The halter top was secured in the back and tightly fastened. The bathing suit appeared not to have been disturbed.
13
On June 19, 1976, a thorough ground search was conducted in the area where the victim was found. Members of the Halifax Fire Department assisted in combing the remote area for clues.
Shoveling the area, a slug was recovered. It was encrusted and appeared to be from a .38 or .45 caliber weapon.
One year later, in November of 1977, I covered the story of Mary Kathleen “Katie” Muldoon, a twenty-three-year-old student at Daytona Beach Community College. The young woman’s lifeless body was found in a water-filled ditch along U.S. 1 at New Smyrna Beach. She had been beaten, shot in the right temple with a small caliber weapon, and drowned.
In hindsight, why hadn’t the investigators taken two key pieces of evidence—spent shell casings—and begun to investigate the possibility that the two cases were related?
The problem was the location. City police investigate crimes only within their own jurisdiction, while sheriff’s deputies work only in the unincorporated areas of the county. This meant there was often no immediate sharing of information, a fact that hindered the investigation and ultimately helped Stano kill again and again without being captured.
And someone had gone to a lot of trouble to make sure Katie Muldoon was never seen alive again.
We published Katie’s photo in the paper: a pretty young woman with long brown hair, wearing a sweater and leaning against a brick wall, her arms crossed and a haunting look in her eyes.
Ramona had been looking forward to college. Katie had worked at a restaurant-bar to pay for woodworking classes at the local college. Both Ramona and Katie liked to work with their hands. Ramona liked to sew. Katie’s friends reported that she loved the feel of working with wood and had even named her golden retriever puppy Cedar. Her landlord, Ben Taylor, said that she was studious and dedicated, even “austere.” Why, then, had someone wanted her dead?
These seemed more like random crimes of opportunity. The killer encountered his victims either alone or in some type of distress or some degree of intoxication, and then he struck. Young women tend to think they are invincible and that they know it all. Little do they consider the ominous presence of the friendly stranger, stalking and waiting and ready to pounce at the slightest opportunity.
Katie had been reported missing five days earlier by Taylor, from whom she had been renting a room for about a month. She had come to Florida from Pennsylvania via a series of foster homes. Her parents had died when she was fourteen, and she was placed with various families until she became of age to be out on her own. Taylor, her landlord, said she was a good tenant.
Ramona Neal had reportedly been drinking heavily after her argument with her boyfriend, William Meadows, not at all an unusual practice for the graduating seniors who flocked to Daytona Beach.
On March 12, 1981, Paul Crow interviewed Gerald Stano about the murder of Ramona Neal. First, the sergeant read him his rights, and then turned on the tape recorder.
Stano had told Crow that he had picked up a “young lady,” as he invariably called his victims in his prissy and fastidious way, on the beachside in Daytona Beach.
“Can you tell on what location you found her and what she was wearing on the night in question?” asked the sergeant.
“Err . . . uh . . . the young lady was wearing a blue two piece bikini. She was picked up in front of the Holiday Inn Boardwalk, Daytona Beach, where there’s a little picnic grove with a canopy.” He almost seemed to be speaking in the third person as he related the events of that night.
Crow then wanted to know what the tone of their conversation had been. Stano said that he asked the girl if she wanted to get a little high. “You know, smoke a little weed, and she said, ‘Fine, sure.’ And she hopped in the car and I was also drinking at the time. I also had some beers in the car at the time so we were doing a little bit of both.”
And then they went for a ride. For Ramona, as with the others who felt comfortable with this stranger, it would be her last.
Stano said they cruised the beach smoking pot and drinking a little bit and then they went to Granada Boulevard and on to Beach Street. Then they drove up to Bulow Ruins, a secluded and idyllic state park, all the while smoking and drinking, according to Stano, and they stopped there.
“What happened after you stopped?” Crow asked.
“Well, I believe I asked the young lady if she wanted to have sex. I say believe because we were both pretty well mellowed out or high at the time, and she started to get a sort of an edgy, pissed off side, and that got me upset and pissed off. And my hand just approached her neck and I strangled her.”
With chilling, matter-of-fact delivery, Stano said that his hand “approached her neck,” as if it had a will of its own separate from him. “And I also believe, say believe, that I cut her once or twice with a knife I had with me.” A bullet was found at the scene where Ramona’s body was recovered, although Stano never indicated using a firearm that day.
“I know this has been a long time, Gerald, but you said you cut her.” Crow wanted to establish this. “Do you mean stabbed her?”
“Yes.”
“Okay, what happened then?”
“I then carried her out of the car and left her up there at Bulow Ruins in a swampy area.” Stano always took the victims outside for the kill. He often disabled them inside the car, with sharp blows from his fist, then dragged them to a secluded spot.
“Is there anything specific you did with the body when you laid it down? Think hard, Gerald. It’s been, I know, since 1976, but what did you do with the body once you laid her out by the swampy area? Describe that scene to me, if you can.” Crow wanted to know about the method of concealment of the body.
“We got out there and, as I said before, I got her out of the car, and put thickets, or weeds, whatever you want to call them, over the girl’s body to conceal her from sight from anyone who might happen to pass by.”
Crow asked if it had been nighttime. Stano again nodded and said yes.
“Was your car running or was it off?” To the investigator, every piece of the puzzle held a special significance.
“Car was always running and facing the same direction I come in at.”
Crow wondered why.
“Just in case there happened to have been anybody left behind me to, eh, find out what I was doing so I could easily leave the scene as fast as I could.”
Crow asked if Stano used the same method of concealment with most of his victims.
“Yes, sir!” Stano asserted emphatically, almost with a hint of pride.
Crow then proceeded to show Stano a series of photographs taken at the location where the body was found.
“These photographs that you are looking at are all the bones and the description. Do all those match?”
“Yes, sir, they do,” he stated, staring at the photos.
Crow was thinking that the Bulow Ruins were a very long stretch, and he wanted to know if Stano recalled seeing any landmarks.
“What can you recall that could give me a marker, that I could use to help me focus on where this girl was at?”
“I believe I might be able to help you with that,” he offered, which was his way of using “forced teaming” with the officer by pretending to be on his side. “There was . . . uh . . . two little bridges that . . . uh . . . cross below the ruins. I believe she was . . . uh . . . placed by one of those two little bridges in 1976.” Again, “placed,” as if he had nothing at all to do with it.
SIX
“Last Dance”
Music I like all types, esp: the oldies, dance music (disco) and todays music of the 80’s. I use to like to dance, go for rides, play the organ (which my mother still has), roller skate.
—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, August 15, 1985
When The Pointer Sisters play the following: “Neutron Dance,” “Jump” and “Automatic,” think of me skating around the rink and dancing too.
—Gerald Stano to Kathy Kelly, April 2, 1986
A
News-Journal
story about the death of a local teenager—Cathy Lee Scharf, whose body was discovered, partly covered by palm fronds, in a drainage ditch near Titusville on January 19, 1974—ultimately led investigators to Gerald Stano.
Cathy Scharf was a pretty seventeen-year-old with long, straight blond hair and big blue eyes. She liked to party, as did most teens her age, and this visit to the Anchor Bar would be her last dance on earth.
Years later, after Stano’s arrest, Paul Crow sought me out.
“Can you look and see if there are any other murders around here where the bodies were covered up?”
In the library at the newspaper, darkly dubbed “the morgue” by veteran newspaper reporters, I went through files of clippings. Newspaper librarians laboriously cut and pasted almost every story that appeared in the paper. This, of course, was long before computers meant stories could be found with a few keystrokes.
Flipping back, I found the story we had published on Cathy Scharf, a young woman from Port Orange whose body had been found in the neighboring county, Brevard. Her body, according to the newspaper story, bore several stab wounds to the front and back and had been taken to a remote area, where the killer had placed small branches over it in order to conceal it.
The local police department hadn’t handled the Brevard County case, so Crow wrote a letter to the state attorney’s office, which in turn sent in a county investigator.
Sergeant Johnny Manis, of the sheriff’s office, traveled to Daytona Beach to interview Gerald Stano. Stano had been taken from Florida State Prison and placed in the Daytona Beach Police Department Jail under court order at the request of Crow so that he could be questioned.
Crow told investigators in Brevard that Stano had written him two letters, requesting to talk with him and “clear up some homicides.” Stano was then serving three life sentences for the murders of Nancy Heard, Toni Van Haddocks, and Mary Carol Maher, to which he had pleaded guilty. But Daytona Beach was out of Brevard’s jurisdiction, and the interview was now conducted by Manis.
After he arrived at the Daytona Beach Police Department on August 11, 1982, Sergeant Manis contacted Crow to set up the meeting with Stano. Several people were present when Stano was read his rights, and then waived them.
Just before the interview, investigators had uncovered the physical evidence tying Stano directly to Cathy Scharf’s murder.
On June 9, 1982, Lieutenant J. Bolick, also of the Brevard County Sheriff Department’s Homicide Unit, traveled to Union Correctional Institute in Raiford, Florida, for the sole purpose of getting an article of clothing belonging to Stano.
On July 22, 1982, the clothing taken from Stano was used in an attempt to place his scent at the scene of the homicide of Cathy Lee Scharf. The dog used in this track was Harrass II, owned by John Preston, of Preston Kennels, Galeton, Pennsylvania.
Preston scented Harrass II on items of Stano’s clothing by having the dog sniff it closely. Harrass II pricked up his ears and immediately went to check the precise area where everyone was standing. Then the dog sauntered east on a small trail through the underbrush, where the suspected killer had probably walked. Harrass II kept walking, haltingly panting and sniffing, east on the trail for approximately one-half mile to a spot where the body was found, approximately eight years prior, on the opposite side of the canal. He attempted to cross the canal, but became frustrated by the heavy underbrush on the other side, and could not advance any further.