The posse decided to terminate the track until the north bank of the canal could be cleared. On July 24, 1982, agents returned to the site with the large dog.
Harrass II was scented on the clothing of Stano again, and he immediately waded across the canal to the north side. The dog checked the cleared area, and on three different occasions it returned to a spot on the canal bank where Cathy Scharf’s body had been found on January 19, 1974.
Mr. Preston, the dog’s handler, pointed the spot out, and confirmed that Stano’s scent was most predominant in that area. He was then told that he’d indicated the exact spot where the body had been found.
There were several other law enforcement officers present as Sergeant Johnny Manis began his tape-recorded interview with Gerald Stano.
“Okay, the particular case we want to talk about today was one that occurred in 1978. It had to do with a girl who was picked up on Cocoa Beach. If you uh . . . would kind of start where you came from, what you did, and so forth . . .”
Stano seemed oblivious to the presence of the others in the room and started what he appeared to treat as a “day in the life,” another day that would end yet another life.
“Well, in ’78 I was living in the Derbyshire Apartments in Daytona Beach, and I was driving a 1973 Plymouth Satellite.” He cleared his throat. Stano always took great pride in the cars he drove, which he described in great detail. “I was proceeding to pull out of the apartments. I heard the nicest place would be the Anchor Bar on Merritt Island.” He mentioned that he had dressed up for the outing because he didn’t “want to look like the average run of the mill bum.” So he had put on a light blue leisure suit with a blue multicolored silk shirt.
“I am no slouch when it comes to clothes,” he later bragged.
14
“I used to fold the sleeves back over the sleeves of the jacket,” he told investigators in 1982. Those were the days of the popular television show
Miami Vice
, and Stano entertained many fantasies about his fashionable appearance.
“I always used to wear a gold chain around my neck, a gold ring on my right hand, and also a gold Timex digital watch with a gold ID bracelet,” he said. “And after I had done all that, I proceeded to go south and went out to U.S. 1. The reason I go down U.S. 1 is because uh . . . being an alcoholic, which I’m using a word, a true word for myself, I used to uh . . . go down that way because there were more stops, more . . .”
“Beer stops?” Manis deduced.
“Yeah, beer stops on the way down; 95 is kinda dry. And I went down U.S. 1 to State Road 520, which is I believe uh . . . Cocoa Beach, Merritt Island and Titusville exit. Then uh . . . I went towards the beach, went towards Merritt Island.” He cleared his throat again. “Excuse me, and I went down 520 all the way down to the Anchor Bar.”
He said he arrived at the Anchor Bar after dark, because he got there just before the musical show started, at around 9:00 p.m. or so.
“Okay, do you remember what you were drinking at the bar?” Manis asked over Stano’s whistling, perhaps a tune he had heard at the bar on the night in question.
“Uh . . . probably uh . . . probably Jack Daniel’s and Coke, or a beer, one of the two because that’s all I drink.”
“Okay, you are sitting at the bar. Tell me what happened from there.”
“Okay, the show started and this young lady got up to dance, and I watched her dance. She looked pretty, you know pretty cute in my eyes. She kinda struck a fancy to me, and after she got done dancing, she mingled with the crowd. After she’d go back, she’d change.” Stano did not explain what he meant by “change,” and Manis didn’t ask.
The sergeant now inquired whether the young woman appeared to be inebriated.
“Oh yeah! She was tipping the glasses or whatever, I guess.” Stano let out a laugh.
When prompted by the officer as to the kind of clothing the girl was wearing, her abductor described her attire with a critical tone in his voice.
“She had a uh . . . nice pair of pants on, nice blouse; she wasn’t dressed shabbily. She was not your, uh, highly sophisticated way the girls wear.” He added that she was wearing some jewelry that looked like “Indian jewelry.”
“Do you remember what age she may have been?”
“Roughly between 19 and 23.”
“Did she ever indicate that she might be a hooker, that would go out for money or anything like that?”
He coughed. “Excuse me. Something, part of her wanted to, it looked to me. Part of her looked, you know, like she might be like that. The other part didn’t, you know, her personality, the way she handled herself.” That was the usual fantasy dichotomy he projected with his potential victims.
“She never approached you for any favors for money or anything?”
“No, nothing like that. For a little drink, though.”
“She wanted a drink?”
“Oh man!” He whistled for emphasis, then laughed, unaware as to where the interview was headed and just reveling in the moment. “I remember I was pretty well gone by then, and I just told the bartender that was there to go ahead and give the young lady a drink.”
“Okay, all right, after you struck up a conversation with her, did you dance with her?”
“I believe we did, I believe we did. Because I like, I like music, I like to get out there and dance a little bit when I’m loaded and I know I gotta drive. That helps, you know, sober me up a little bit.”
“Then what did you do?”
“I said, ‘Hey let’s go for a little ride,’ and she said yeah, and we left the bar together. We get in the car, we went west to U.S. 1. Well, before I got to U.S. 1, my car had a uh . . . tendency to pull into ABCs by itself, with a little help from me.” He chuckled again, a self-deprecating laugh; and the account of the trip to the liquor store was told with utter detachment, as if his actions had nothing to do with him. “And I pull in there and got a . . . another six-pack.”
“After you bought the six-pack, did you continue west of 520?”
“We come to the intersection of U.S. 1 and . . . By that time she was talking pretty good and I was too, and I just made a right-hand turn and went on my merry way on U.S. 1 going north, but it was a little way up, and the heated argument started.”
“What was that about?”
“Oh slightest drop of a pin I guess, at that time.” The interview was finally leading up to the juncture where, as Manis by now realized, there would be that trigger, the one that made Gerald Stano snap and turn into what he called “Jerry the serial-killer.” “Because we’re both dipping into the six-pack, and uh, I pulled over the side of the road; I just lost my senses and I killed the young lady.”
Stano said he had a gun in the car but that it wasn’t his, that he had borrowed it from a friend. He said it was a .22, a six-shot revolver.
“I pulled off, you know, like I had a little car trouble. We just pulled off and I had the gun out of the glove box. It was loaded, all six chambers were loaded, and I uh . . . I pulled the gun out and I said, ‘This is the end of the line.’ ” His face became distorted. Cathy Lee Scharf must have been paralyzed with fear.
“Is she out of the car, the girl?”
“Uh . . . she’s getting ready to get out of the car. I said, ‘Let’s go.’ By then I reached over and unlocked the door, and both of us got out on her side.”
“After you both got outside, did you walk to the back, or the front, or . . .”
“Well, the passenger side was left open, and I took her down at gunpoint a little way, so that the car traffic couldn’t see us. And from there I uh . . . proceeded to pull the trigger, I believe several times.” And again, a different method of murder from most of the other victims, who met their fate by being drowned, strangled, or stabbed.
“Did she ever say anything that you remember? After you shot her the first time, for instance?”
“Not really. I don’t know. No she didn’t say anything.”
Manis breathed in and out slowly as he mused about what Stano would recall.
Oh, she must have said something. She had to have said something. What had she said to him?
“All right, afterwards, what did you do with her? Did you just leave her on the side of the road, or did you shove her off to the side?”
“She was laying down on her side, ways off the road, and I uh . . . proceeded to go due north again.”
“You remember how much you had to drink by this time?”
“Whoa!” He whistled. “A good amount, a good amount because, I don’t know. Too much!” He laughed. “Too, too much, because I know I was sick on the way home; I had to stop a couple of times, because I was sick on the way home.”
At some point, he must also have thrown her purse in a trash can, where it was later recovered.
“Okay, then you went, found your way to U.S. 1 back to the Derbyshire Apartments. Do you remember having sex with this girl?”
“Some, some of them. Some of the girls I did, and some of them I didn’t.” He shrugged.
Although Stano had confessed to forty murders and was serving three life sentences at the Florida State Prison after pleading guilty to three of the murders in Volusia County, it was this homicide, that of seventeen-year-old Cathy Lee Scharf, in Brevard County, that would bring him to trial for first-degree murder and eventually send him to the death chamber. After two trials, he was convicted of first-degree murder on December 2, 1983, and sentenced to death. In the case of the forty murder confessions, there was a conspicuous lack of physical evidence, making it impossible for jurisdictions in Florida to prosecute.
Sergeant Manis was ready to conclude his interview with Gerald Eugene Stano.
“Can you think of anything else that may have happened in this particular case that I haven’t asked you, that you can remember that kind of stands out about this particular girl, anything at all?”
Again, Stano’s remorseless detachment came through.
“Not really, except she was a heck of a dancer.”
SEVEN
Inside the Mind of the Lead Investigator
Meeting one of Satan’s children is a feeling I can’t put into words.
—Sergeant Paul Crow
Paul, your [
sic
] right about you and I having the inside track of the real me. But, I am covering it with Kathy too. People would fall over if they knew what type of real relationship we have.
—Gerald Stano to Paul Crow, September 4, 1985
I
n 1984 there were several serial killers that hit the FBI’s adar screen at the same time: John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams, Ted Bundy, Gerald Stano, and Gary Ridgway, later to be identified as the Green River Killer.
After Stano was arrested and subsequently indicted for murder, Paul Crow, the Florida detective sergeant, received an urgent call from the Green River Killer Task Force in Washington State, asking him how he had managed to “get” Stano.
They had one suspect in mind, who turned out to be Gary Ridgway, except by the time they caught up with the “real” Green River Killer, the department had spent more than $1 million and shrunk to one man: Sheriff Dave Reichert, who later became a congressman. The capture of the Green River Killer took twenty years.
Law enforcement officers were ill-prepared then to track down serial killers who were constantly on the move and used different methods to kill their prey. Establishment of DNA testing—a critical tool to link cases—was years down the road. There was Wayne Williams, the child murderer in Atlanta; Ted Bundy in the Pacific Northwest, the West, and Florida; and Gerald Stano. John Wayne Gacy, who killed and tortured young men and posed as a pillar of his community near Chicago, also surfaced at the time. So it was Williams, Bundy, Gacy, the Green River Killer, and Stano converging. “It was like five aircraft crashing overhead at once.”
A few years earlier, in 1979, then sergeant Crow had been selected by the FBI to attend its profiling school in Quantico, Virginia, headed by John Douglas. Agent Robert K. Ressler was also a lead instructor. The Central Florida investigator compared the experience to being invited to study at Harvard.
He had the opportunity to gain different and new skills, such as handling the interview process, which he had previously gathered by sheer instinct. “I have always tried to befriend the person,” he said, referring to his relationship with the suspects. “I try to find some common ground with them, and try not to show any emotion about what they did. That way, they relax and feel comfortable.” This made it much easier to extract a confession.
At the bureau’s profiling school, the sergeant studied with John Douglas, the pioneer investigator who would eventually cowrite
Mind Hunter
. Crow remembered that Douglas “liked to play mind games” and that he was a “very dapper dresser.”
Another instructor, Robert K. Ressler, who coined the term
serial killer
and later founded and headed ViCAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program), was different. “He looked like he had just gotten off the midnight shift, which was odd because his mind was sharp and he did not miss a beat.” The older investigator reminded the sergeant of TV’s Columbo, played by Peter Falk, who was always dressed in an old trench coat and going back to ask more and more questions until he completely wore out his suspect. “He always appeared to be confused,” Crow said about Ressler, “but he had his radar on all the time.” Whereas Douglas had more of a pit bull style, the Florida investigator recalled, Ressler was more laid-back, and the two worked best as a team. In retrospect, Paul Crow looked upon the “nightmare,” as he put it, that was Gerald Stano, and how casually he talked to him about crimes that brought such pain to so many.
The seasoned detective knew that he had to tread into that territory very carefully.
“Meeting one of Satan’s children is a feeling I can’t put into words,” Crow would later say, referring to Stano. “One side of me gets mad as hell remembering how casual he was about the murders, like they were no big deal at all.”