“Look what you did to her!” he screamed at the girl. “And I loved her!”
The killer flipped the teenager over, forcing her into a prostrate position. He lifted Penny’s head, and, producing a knife, twice slit her throat.
Stephen Stanko took a shower, and when he re-dressed, he felt in vain for a pulse in Laura Ling and her daughter. He later claimed he felt suicidal at that moment, but his actions suggest he was a man with plans for a future.
Believing Laura and Penny dead, he tarried: calmly removing a gold bracelet from Ling’s lifeless wrist, then packing a bag. He emptied out her purse and pocketed her car keys. He went into her wallet and took all of the cash and her ATM card. Only then did he leave the house.
As was true of many famous murderers, Stanko had turned violent, not under a full moon, but under the slenderest silvery sliver—on the eve of the new moon. Those were the darkest nights of the month, and killers on the run liked their nights dark.
His first stop was Ling’s bank, where he used her card to empty her account of seven hundred dollars. A surveillance camera captured him, his face composed, as he made the transaction at the drive-through machine.
Penny was not dead, however. Why Stanko couldn’t find her pulse is one of the mysteries—and miracles—of this story. She regained consciousness and even made it to a phone. Bound, with blood still flowing from her neck wounds, Penny called 911.
She later explained that she had no idea how she had the strength to get to the phone or how she dialed the three numbers and hit send. Next thing she knew, there was an operator talking into her ear and she was explaining that she had just been raped and she feared her mother was dead.
“When he left, he took my mom’s car keys,” Penny said.
“What kind of car does your mother drive?”
“It’s a red Mustang.” She further ID’d the car for police, so the manhunt could start immediately. The conversation between Penny and dispatch lasted for sixteen minutes, until first responders arrived at the scene on Murrells Inlet Road, at about 3:00 A.M.
They found a scene of unspeakable horror, the teenager beaten and bleeding from her neck. Blood spattered on the wall. Laura Ling, still in her red plaid pajamas, on the bedroom floor, her body facedown and wedged between the bed and the dresser.
Her hands were bound behind her back with a gray-and-black necktie, so tightly that the medical examiner later discovered ligature marks where the silk dug into the flesh.
As Penny had feared, Laura Ling was dead. The men asked Penny about the man who killed her. She told them everything she knew. It was Stephen Stanko, the author, the ex-con, her mom’s live-in boyfriend.
He was an out-of-work writer working on a book. He was an ex-con who wrote a book about prison. He always seemed like a nice guy, and he just snapped. Penny had no idea why.
The wounds to Penny’s neck were serious but not life-threatening. He had slit her throat, just as she said, twice, one above the other. The deepest cut came at the insert point of the bottom slash, where his knife caused a puncture wound that resembled a horizontal tracheotomy incision.
In Penny’s room, on the bed on its side, next to a stuffed toy zebra, was a white lacey purse on its side. Beside it was a pile of its contents. The purse was Laura’s. The killer had spilled it out, looking for the keys to the Mustang.
When the ambulance arrived, Penny was taken away. Her mother was left behind. Laura’s body needed to be photographed and examined thoroughly by detectives before it could be removed to the morgue for autopsy.
At the hospital, after her neck was stitched up, Penny was visited by a female cop, with a rape kit. Penny said she was pretty sure she remembered exactly what Stanko did and didn’t do to her, but oral and anal swabs were taken, nonetheless, in addition to the vaginal swabs.
Penny closed her eyes and endured the procedure, hoping beyond hope that she was allowing the cop to gather DNA evidence that would put her attacker away.
Georgetown County sheriff A. Lane Cribb had been in law enforcement since 1973, thirty-two years. He attended Horry-Georgetown Technical College, Limestone College, and the University of Alabama, where he received a bachelor’s degree in business administration. His first job as an officer of public safety was with the South Carolina Alcoholic Beverage Control bureau.
Cribb worked as a criminal investigator with the Florence County Sheriff’s Office (FCSO) and then returned to Georgetown County in the same capacity. He was first elected Georgetown County sheriff in 1992, and had been reelected three times.
He loved to learn more about being a cop, and had graduated from courses at the Carolina Command College, National Center for Rural Law Enforcement (NCRLE), and the South Carolina Criminal Justice Academy.
He was also a joiner of clubs and fraternal societies. He was an Elk and a Mason. Plus, he was a member of the National Sheriffs’ Association (NSA) and was a past president of the South Carolina Sheriffs’ Association (SCSA).
Within minutes of Penny’s 911 call, an all-points bulletin (APB)was on the air, and Sheriff Cribb was heading a manhunt that would make newspaper headlines across the United States. Stanko was described in the police “be on the lookout” (BOLO) as six-foot-three and 192 pounds, with medium-length dark hair and glasses with silver aviator frames. He might be headed toward North Carolina, the bulletin stated. Sheriff Cribb secured a warrant for Stanko’s arrest, accusing him of murder, criminal sexual misconduct, and car theft.
CRIME SCENE
From the Georgetown County Sheriff’s Office (GCSO), the lieutenant in charge of criminal investigations, William Pierce, arrived at the Ling home. He worked in plainclothes, always a neatly tailored suit. With his burly physique, shaved head, and trimmed goatee, he had the aura of a stern, single-minded pursuer of justice.
Pierce started with the sheriff’s office in August 1990 as a reserve deputy, and became a deputy sheriff assigned to the Uniform Patrol Division two years later. In 1997, he was assigned to the Criminal Investigation Division to cover Waccamaw Neck and Pawleys Island. In 2002, he went to school in Atlanta to become a polygraph operator. After an internship with the South Carolina Law Enforcement Division, (SLED), Pierce conducted lie detector examinations all across South Carolina.
Since 2003, when he was promoted to lieutenant, he had investigated crimes in addition to his polygraph duties. But none of his experience could prepare him for the Ling murder scene. It was worse than anything he could have imagined. He knew immediately that they were after a monster. The carnage was something that a civilized human being would be incapable of doing.
Not knowing for sure that the living witness would survive, Lieutenant Pierce examined the scene as if forensic evidence against the killer would be essential.
The emergency people had somewhat contaminated the scene in their understandable urgency to treat the seriously wounded Penny, but other than that, the home was as the killer left it.
Laura’s body was still on the floor between the bed and the wall, her hands were still bound together behind her back with a pair of silk neckties. Near the body was a small lamp, with a glass globe that had been broken during the violence. On the lamp shade were what appeared to be bloodstains. Pierce also found droplets of blood in the hallway, and in the bathroom.
The entire lamp was bagged as evidence. Swabs were made of each discovered blood droplet. All of the evidence was sent to Senior Agent Bruce S. Gantt Jr., at the SLED crime lab, who would determine to whom the blood belonged and how it probably got there. All in all, swabs were made from blood found in Laura Ling’s bedroom, and the hallway wall, as well as in the bathroom, especially