What must it have been like to be there and see that bisected nude body? It was almost too intense to think about.
The shelves of the library were rich with Black Dahlia books, everybody and their mother thought they knew who had killed the Black Dahlia. At least two unrelated people claimed it was their father. But no one knew who it was. He—or they—got away with it. Like Zodiac, wreaking havoc in the world, and walking.
As Stephen Stanko researched killer after killer, one of his favorites—one he would return to, again and again, re-reading passages that he was already familiar with—was the prolific Gary Ridgway, aka “The Green River Killer.” He killed so many.
There were different ways to rank the serial killers, but number of victims was the most scientific, and Ridgway was right up there. When he finally confessed, in 2001, he recalled murdering at least forty-eight women.
The murders took place in the 1980s and 1990s. Ridgway killed both white and black women—when the assumption of the time was that heterosexual serial killers usually stuck to the opposite sex, but the same race. Not Ridgway. He was an equal-opportunity killer, choking his victims sometimes with his arm and sometimes using a ligature.
He committed his crimes near Seattle and Tacoma, Washington, and earned his nickname by using the Green River as his initial dump site. The disposal ground, Stanko figured, was probably a matter of convenience rather than aesthetics—“down by the river” being a place where a fellow could have some privacy. Although he did spread his kills out over two decades, the great majority of them occurred in quick succession from 1982 to 1984.
Unlike a lot of serial killers, Ridgway wasn’t very bright, with a two-digit IQ. Stanko certainly couldn’t identify with that. Stanko was a flippin’ genius.
Ridgway committed his first violent act at sixteen and stabbed a six-year-old boy. Stanko read about Ridgway’s troubled mind. “I’d always wondered what it felt like to kill someone,” Ridgway said of his youth, and Stanko could feel him, man.
Ridgway had served in Vietnam, aboard a navy patrol boat. Like Arthur Shawcross (“The Genesee River Killer”) in Rochester, New York, he graduated from harming children to murdering women down on their luck, prostitutes and runaways.
He would use the same dump site repeatedly before moving; so when remains were found, bunches of remains were found. His dump sites were so secluded, however, that those remains were usually skeletal by the time they were discovered. The victims were left naked and sometimes posed in positions designed to degrade them further.
Because of Ridgway’s venue, the Great Northwest, some of the detectives working his case had also been involved in the search for Ted Bundy. In fact, after Bundy was captured, detectives interviewed him in hopes he might be able to shed some light on the Green River case. Bundy gave it the old college try, but his expertise was unhelpful.
During the long investigation, Ridgway was arrested twice, both times on prostitution-related charges. Following his first arrest, he was considered a suspect in the Green River killings, but he was crossed off the list after passing a polygraph examination with flying colors. Murderers with severe personality disorders, police had learned, sometimes could fool a lie detector because they lacked shame and guilt, and didn’t feel the normal stress when lying.
In 1987, police took hair and saliva samples from Ridgway; so, when DNA technology developed, these samples were used to match Ridgway with semen found on Green River victims. He was arrested in 2001 and, at first, charged with twenty killings. By the time he was convicted in court, twenty-eight more victims had been added to his kill list.
Stephen Stanko was a straight guy, but his all-time favorite serial killer was gay: Jeffrey Dahmer. Maybe the gay aspect enhanced the grisliness of Dahmer’s tale for Stanko, but maybe not. Maybe it was just the fact that Dahmer was so completely sick in so many ways, he was number one, the ultimate nightmare.
And he did it in Milwaukee, Wisconsin—the most normal of cities.
On the night of May 27, 1991, in Milwaukee, a naked fourteen-year-old Asian boy burst out through the front door of a house and began to scream in the street. In quick pursuit was a blond young man named Dahmer.
The cops showed up, and the frightened teenager said the man was trying to kill him. The blond man told the police that he was sorry for the fuss, but this was just a “lovers’ quarrel.”
The cops sided with the older man, and the boy was dragged back inside the house. Cops reported the incident as Intoxicated Asian, naked male. Was returned to his sober boyfriend. When cops did see the fourteen-year-old again, he had been dissected, his severed skull on display in Dahmer’s home.
Dahmer was caught. His home was searched by the crime lab. The discovered evidence thrust Dahmer to the top of the all-time greatest serial killer list.
They found evidence of cannibalism. He stored parts of his victims in vats. There wasn’t just a homosexual angle, but a racial angle as well, with the great majority of the white killer’s victims being poor and members of a minority.
He was saving parts. Who knew what all Dahmer was doing with those body parts? Eating some, sure—but the guy was probably playful, too.
The arrest came down on July 22, 1991. Dahmer was tried and convicted, and sentenced to almost one thousand years in prison. He didn’t serve nearly that many, however, as he was killed by a fellow inmate in November 1994.
When Stephen Stanko wasn’t researching other criminals, he enjoyed getting access to the library computer and looking up himself. He was listed as an author, and people anywhere could order his book online.
Very cool. While Googling himself, he learned that he was not the only famous Steve Stanko. There was a muscle-bound guy who had been Mr. Universe in 1947. He was, in fact, a legend of bodybuilding’s “golden era.”
Somewhere along the line, as Stephen Stanko learned about Zodiac and Son of Sam, BTK and Bundy, Ridgway, Dahlia and Dahmer—all for the book he was going to write, of course—his interest shifted.
According to the Georgetown County Sheriff, A. Lane Cribb, who later read Stanko’s serial killer notes, there came a time when Stanko no longer focused on what serial killers were like. He began to wonder what it would be like to be a serial killer. He’d already had some experience. Like BTK, he knew how good it felt to tie up a woman. But he’d yet to cross that line between here and the beyond. Cribb came to believe Stanko had feverishly pondered becoming a sex killer, a destroyer of innocence, a sadistic betrayer of everything vulnerable, a breaker of the ultimate taboo—he had pondered becoming a child-raping, knife-across-the-throat snuff artist.
STAND-UP
Ah, but that was the serious side of the man. That was only one facet of Stanko’s personality. He could write anything. Even humor. He spent a lot of time while in prison thinking about what a funny guy he was. He knew it was a tough row to hoe, but he thought he might take a crack at being a stand-up comic. He would be the ex-con comic. Tim Allen had pulled it off, and Stanko figured himself funnier than that guy. He would be the first to expose the outside world to some real prison humor! There was nothing like a long stretch behind bars to bring out the yuks.
Now, out and about, he kept a separate notebook—separate from the serial killer stuff—that consisted of his “comedy routine.” When he thought of a joke, he’d put it in there. The routine got out of order after a while, and the pages were filled with arrows and inserts scribbled up and down the margins.
He could hear himself doing it, hear roaring laughter from a packed house. . . .
[Reacting to applause] Thank you, thank you. Okay, my name is Steve Stanko [pause] and before you begin making fun of my name, let me say that I was recently released from an eight-and-a-half-year stint in prison, and this is kind of therapy for me.
Thinking twice now about poking fun at “Stanko”