WATCH MOMMY DIE-Michael Benson

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have written about them. First, he bound and beat his girlfriend, a three year old librarian. Then he went after her teenage daughter, warning her scream and I will kill you both, before knocking her unconscious. When the teenager awoke, he proceeded to rape her, and in a final horrifying act of depravity, he forced the girl to watch as he slit her

mother's throat. But the killing didn't stop there. Stephen Stenkoe was described as a perfect gentleman who seemed so pleasant and so normal, But behind Stenko's mild mannered appearance, round spectacles and quiet intelligence was a cold blooded ex convict who kept a grizzly scrap book on serial killers and convinced everyone he was a nice guy until he killed

and killed again. A well orchestrated manhunt caught up with Stenko, who tried to get away with his crimes by pleading insanity, but the jury saw through his ruse and the ruthless killer was sentenced to death. The book this evening they were featured is A Psycho Killer's Vicious Attack Watch Mummy Die by veteran journalist and best selling author Michael Benson. Welcome back to the program, and thank you to agreeing to this interview. Michael Benz. Thanks, thank you, Michael, great

book once again. Congratulations on doing it again scaring the hell out of the public.

within Stephen Stanko. You know, he's one of those rare psychopaths who has the looks in charisma to start new relationships and be socially active even as he's running for his life. And in that sense, I think he reminds

a lot of people of Ted Bundy. Watch Mommy Die is not just about Stenko's most haineous act, although we certainly deal with that at length, but it is also a character analysis of a lady's man, a con man, a sex criminal, and a murderer who could have had it all in the straight world, but who instead lives today on South Carolina's death Row.

one who came out creepy. When he was little. His dad was transferred to the Naval Weapons station in Goose Creek, South Carolina, which is a town suburb really of about seventeen thousand, just north of Charleston, South Carolina, and that's where Stenko grew up. Now, you know, every book I write, the research is never one hundred percent fulfilling. And one of my frustrations when writing Watch Mommy Die was that we still don't know much about the Stanco family chemistry.

But what we do know isn't good. The Stankos didn't talk about it. The only evidence we have is from outsiders, people who for whatever reason found themselves inside the Stanko home watching the family interact. So it's not the best evidence, but it's what we have to go on. According to one witness, no one was happy in the Stanko house. One witness said it was grim. The dad ran such a tight ship, as you might expect from a military dad, but it went beyond just militaristic. It was so regimented

as to suck the joy from life. Now, one witness said that the dad seemed to times to be a cruel man, and that was that was the word that the witness he was cruel. One thing is for sure. The rules were stringent and enforced with punishment. Now, I can't really blame that on Stanko's problems because up until the time he was a teenager, he thrived on it. He uh, you know, he loved the disciplined atmosphere. He entered high school the guy who had everything going for him.

He was tall and good looking, and he was good at sports, baseball, football, Plus he was smart. His teachers got dreamy thinking about him, and you know, I've seen this happen, and they knew the boy was going to go far and they were going to be able to say they knew him when. And Sanko himself was just you know, his mister confidence. He just assumed that he

was one of the best in the briest. He was going to attend the Air Force Academy and become a fighter pilot, and after that, the sky was the limit. He was going to join NASA, become an astronaut, he was going to go into politics, become president of the United States. As a teenager, the moon literally seemed to be within Stenko's reach, and he had the drive to do it. His father had seemed to that. You know, Dad drove Stephen with ridicule. Stanko's father was never satisfied

with anything Stephen did. He was never good enough, and pleasing his father became all important to Stanko. It was like an obsession. He was already as impeccably neat as he could get. It had been years since he'd received a demerit over his appearance. He would look kempt when he got up in the morning, he'd look kempt when he got home at night. And when it came to school working studies, he worked really, really hard, but he

could never satisfy his father. Stanko believed that the only way to shut his dad up was to become rich and famous. Well, then the whole chemistry changed. Tragedy struck Stanko's brother, Billy, who was older and had already moved out of the parents' house and into a place of his own, died in a house fire. Maybe it was our sin, nothing they could prove anyway, Steven's bright future

instantly dimmed. Since there was a pecking order in the Stanko family, and Stanko believed that as Billy was older and now gone, he Stephen would move up one notch in his father's estimation, sort of like a battlefield promotion. And that, I think everyone will agree is an extremely odd and selfish interpretation of events, and very revealing when it comes to how Stenko's mind worked. Even then, anyway, Stanko's dad did not give him more respect after Billy died.

In fact, he acted meaner towards Stephen than he ever had before. Stenko complained that it was as if his dad thought he was responsible for Billie's death. And to be fair to the dad, everyone has the right to be cranky when they lose the sun in a fire or otherwise, and it's entirely possible that he was meaner to everyone in general. But Stephen didn't see it that way, couldn't see it that way. It was absolutely selfish in every possible way, and he noticed only that his father's

attitude changed towards him. So Stenko lost the eye of the tiger when it came to his brilliant future. The death took the wind right out of Stephen's sales, and he began to look for easier ways to get by in life. Now, instead of schoolwork, he dedicated his intellect to working on schemes, convoluted plots to get ahead, convoluted plots to get rich. He took the SAT exam didn't do that great and was rejected by the Air Force Academy.

So when high school was over, instead of becoming a fighter pilot but an astronaut in president of the United States, Stanko took a couple of courses at the community college and began to steal cars. So it's quite a plummet.

of course homecoming queen, Plus she was also ambitious. After her divorce, she'd returned to school, earned a degree that was out there banging heads at a man's world, trying to make something out of herself. Liz thought at first that Steve and was shifty and something about his eyes. She didn't quite trust him, but he wouldn't leave her alone, and he eventually wore her down and worked his way into her heart, and Stephen and Liz had a lovely romance,

during which he gave her a detailed autobiography. He was only about forty percent true. See that house, I used own that house, he'd say, See that boat that used to be mine too. I had to sell them because some woman down in Georgia ripped me off. That's what kind of stuff he would say. And Liz fell into his spouth, totally unprepared for I guess we all are, which we are tendencies to trust people, especially if they're

good looking. Right, And by the time she figured out how he was a con man emotionally speaking, she was in so deep that extracting herself was complicated, you know, she later said, I mean, speaking to her today, she's filled with wisdom about him. She would say that she would boast about everything. Every nook and cranny of his psyche was exaggerated. She once told me that if an ant crawled across his foot, he would claim it was a ladybugger. Yeah, it's nothing. He had the magnifying glass

on every little thing. So Sanko had the had the soul of a con man. You know, he was a smart guy.

sold cars to people and kept the money. Now he was going around to friends and neighbors looking for investment partners, people who would go in with him on a used car business. He would tell him they could make a bundle if they invested now, but it had to be now because there was a limited window of opportunity. They shake on partners and make excuses as to why the

investment lacked. Profits have here more complicated lies, creating tangled webs, and Stanko's companies were always on the verge of making a mint right up until the instant they became valueless. Sure so, I mean he was used to an incredible liar. He would tell one series of lies to one person, including another other set of lives to the next person, and he'd remember what he told to who so that he wouldn't contradict himself. There are a lot of people

who can't lie for five minutes without betraying themselves. You know, Stanko could go for weeks, but and it was a big butt. He didn't know when to stop. He couldn't stop. He was a very good liar, but not a perfect one. He would eventually lie himself into a corner, and sadly, violence would erupt a second that jig was up. He felt trapped and he would lash out. When you look at the mechanics of a con Stanko was very good

at some aspects of the technique, but comically poor. At others, he could convince anyone of anything, but any con artists will tell you that the most important rule is after the con is complete and the cash is in your pocket, get the hell away from the victim, get away from the mark help. Stenko repeatedly screwed up his life because once the con was done and the money was in his pocket, he was horrified to discover that he was working with or living with the people he just conned.

So and when he did lash out violently the first time Liz was his target, it was his own frustration over the mess he made of his life. It led to the attack that would put him behind bars for almost a decade. Yeah, Living Stephen's relationship had become tumultuous by that time, even caught committing fraud and Liz paid

for his lawyer. They broke up temporarily and stopped being romantic permanently when stink out during one fight, put his hands on her throat, and then after a period of separations, she let him come back, and for that she would never be able to forget herself. It was just throw up to February next.

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could smell chemicals. She knew how anal he was, and she felt, all good, Maybe he's going to clean something well, that wasn't his plan. Stanko took chemicals from various cleaning liquids, soaked a cloth with them, and came into Liz's room. He jumped on her and held the cloth over her mouth and nose. She fought as hard as she could, and there was no doubt in her mind that he was trying to kill her, no matter how already tried. However, he couldn't get her to pass out. You could see

the wise. She could see the wildness of his eyes. During the attack, she managed to bite him on the left hand. She heard him say it always works in the movies, why isn't it working now? And he was talking about the chemicals over the mouth trick, And that was how she knew that he'd been planning this attack. He'd been thinking about it ahead of time. So she told him that if he just let her go, she wouldn't call the police. He said he didn't believe her.

Unable to kill her by asphyxiation, Stanko tied her up good and tight and made her sit on the toilet as he showered. He told her the bad guy in his back he is in control. Because he took a shower he was humming and singing, acting as if everything was perfectly normal, and that might have been the thing that scared Liz the most. I mean she still shivers when she talks about it. He could just flick a

switch and his old personality was back. So yeah, apparently the bad I left at that point because a kinder, gentler Stenko came out of the shower. He packed a bag, released Liz's bondage, and left, thinking probably that this was all going to blow over. She was going to forgive him, but she called a neighbor and then she called the police and Stenko was quickly apprehended, arrested, tried, and sentenced to a decade in prison for assault with intent to

kill and kidnapping. The incident with Liz becomes particularly chilling when we see how similar it is to the tragic events of two thousand and five. Clearly, Stenko saw the attack on Liz as an incomplete murder, something he was going to have to make up for when he was next to Freeman.

an insider his view. The book was Stanko's idea. Almost as soon as he went into prison, he began taking notes and writing a manuscript about his prison experiences, starting with how he was processed into the system and how he learned, sometimes the hard way, how to get by in different situations. And just as a professional writer might, he wrote an outline for the entire work, perfected a few sample chapters, and wrote a query letter that he

sent to publishers. And the query was so good that Stenko received an immediate positive response from a small New England press, and he found an editor who was interested, and she thought it might well. They were doing a series of books on different different social situations for high school kids, and she thought that a prisoner writing about being in prison would would be perfect for that series.

So she said that the manuscript would carry more way to be teamed up with a college professor or there's some other kind of scholarly type. But he was on his own. She wasn't going to recommend anybody, so said he started sending query letters to college professors, and sure enough they were interested as well. There were some bumps in the road. The first manuscript was supposed to be geared for, you know, high school students, but was written

in a very adult manner. They forgot about the it was part of the series, and they wrote the book they wanted to write, which never works in publishing. Rule number one. Family wants to be a professional writer, you know, write what they want you to write, now what you want to write, because they're not going to change their mind. That's right. It's just a tipt And I think that most people who have been a professional writer for any

amount of time and run into that very problem. Sure, I know the specifications to hit them as perfectly as you possibly can. So anyway, that writer quits and then he's brought back, and there's a shake up in the lineup, and some people are on board for a while, and then they come back and they just write the forward. Eventually the book finally comes out, and by the time it does, the co authors are Wayne Gillespie and Gordon A. Cruz. Cruise was an assistant dean at Roger Williams University when

the book was written. He's now a tenured professor at Marshall University, and Gillespie was a criminal justice professor at East Tennessee State University. So they fit the bill find and by the time the book comes out, even though that Stanko was the driving force behind it, he's only written the last three chapters of the book comes out as a hardcover library bound. I have a copy. I understand that when Watchbommy Died came out, cells of Stanko's living in prison also went up, So I guess I

earned him some royalties. Actually I know and like Gordon Cruz, so he gets the royalties. That's fine. I don't think Stanko's getting any royalties in prison. But anyway, Yeah, he wrote the last three chapters of the book that came out,

the prisoner's narrative, the prison environment, and surviving in prison. Still, when he gets out of prison after eight and a half years in he's a published author and he thinks that, you know, unlike ninety nine percent of the other prisoners, he's moved up socially during his time inside, and that now the the re entry into the free world is going to be completely seamless. Well, of course it did you know? It didn't work out that way.

details of the crime. He doesn't tell people, but he tells everybody he's just out of prison because he can't brag about the book without saying that he was a prisoner. Sure, yeah, I mean it's funny that you know, there are different levels of resistance when a fellow like myself goes into an area and tries to talk to people. And I was getting a very negative reaction for a while from some people every time I mentioned Stephen Stanko and I

want to write a book about Stephen Stanko. And it didn't occur to me for a long time, and things got a lot better once it did occurred to me that they thought I was writing a book with him. This was his next book, and he was writing about the murders and I was his co author. And I said, no, no, I'm writing about him, not with him. If I'm writing with somebody's with the police and the victims, I'm not on his side in any way. And then they said, oh, okay, we'll talk to you now.

of one of his people in his cell block in prison. Yeah, but then he's then he's out on his own. He's sort he's sort of homeless. So he's wandering from library to library, and he finds the library that has a pretty librarian. It says, this is perfect. And that was how he met Laurel. And she was she was beautiful librarian, and she was a single mom living with her equally

beautiful fifteen year old daughter. And mother and teen daughter lived in Mural's Inlet, South Carolina, just north of Myrtle Beach, which was the longtime home of action mystery writer Mickey Splain. And after a few months of working with Laura on the material that he's putting together for his second book. They have a begin a romance, and it comes to a point where she brings him home to meet the daughter to see if it's okay if he moves in with them. So Henny is so pleased that her mother

is happy because she's a divorced woman's loneliness. And he's so pleased that she said, I don't care if the guy's in next cotton. It seems like a nice guy to me. He can move in. So Stanko moves in with the two of them, and in light of what happened, and we can only imagine how Stanko's mind must have been squirming during that process. You know, he must have been like humbered, humbered in the now because novel Lolita moving in with Lolita and her mother. I mean, it's a two fer, he's thinking.

in Prison by Steven Stanko. So yeah, she has no there's absolutely no hesitance on her part to help him with his research, even though the nature of his researches is maybe not the best thing for our next kind, let's put it that way. I know, well, while spending the days at the small branch library with Laura Ling and she's working as his research guy, he researches a study of serial killers. Sure you know I mean. And then this catches my attention too, because it looks like

something I might write. You know. He wants to write a book about sort of a serial killer hall of fame. And he says fame, not shame. This is true of many psychos. He doesn't distinguish between fame and notoriety. So and he would have categories the Deadliest Killer the Green River killer because he had the most killed, the most perverse, Jeffrey Dahmer, the wildest crime scene of virtual tie, I mean,

the Black Tally Avenger and the Gainsville Ripper. Now, in a lot of ways, Stanko's takes for very much like those of your average true crime reader. And you know, Dan, I'm sure the large percentage of your listeners right now would not have found Stanko's research esoteric. At Hall, he dug ted Bundy and Zodiac and Son of Sam and Jack the Ripper. You know, he researched Arthur Shawcross, the Genesee River Killer, and d T. K the buying torture

kill guy from Wichita, Kansas. And in some cases he wrote his theories about serial killers in a notebook, but he also made photocopies of the newspaper and magazine articles on the subject. To me, he pasted them into a scrapbook, very very neatly, you know, as his father would have approved of. So you know, later after Sanco was captured, was Sheriff A Lane Crib of Georgetown County in sown, South Carolina, who gave personal attention to Stanko's writings and clippings.

After his arrest and all the papers were confiscated. Sheriff Lane noticed that the tone of Stanko's work changed over time. It started out being encyclopedia of serial killers, but it turned into a guidebook for someone learning how to become a serial killer.

going to be his first victim. Now even.

in the in the area. He couldn't help it. He needed to manipulate people. I've heard say that psychopaths can actually be functional better in prison because they are all opportunities to manipulate people have been taken away. That's why the only time Stenko isn't a com man is when he's in prison. He has to actually create a product, and that's the book. Now, outside of prison he can just lie and say there's a product and sell that.

So anyway, in December of two thousand and four, he's been out for about six months, and like that, he walks into a furniture outlet store in Surfside Beach, South Carolina, and he scammed the owners out of a couple hundred dollars because he says he's working for a charity for children's cancer, and he claims his niece was sick with cancer and that's why he'd become personally involved with the cause.

And the scam was so heinous to pretend that you're gathering money for children's cancer, but to keep the money yourself that the woman who gave him the money later testified during the penalty phase at both of Stanko's trials, giving evidence that life in prison was too good for him. So yeah, I mean, lack of shame was his forte.

because it's just horrible. But as was true, you know, when Stanko was living with Liz, his cons became increasingly complex and a never growing number of people were angry with him, and it got to a point where as Liz had done, Laura Ling is paying his bills. He's on the verge of losing her apartment because she can't afford him, and they're having a fight. You know. Senko says it's because she caught him with the daughter, and that that that's that's the lady buck crawling across the foot.

That's not that's not in reality. It's the fact that he's found himself painted into a corner by his own lives and he's fighting with the woman he lived with, only this time it's Laura Ling and not lives McClendon and pretty Pennies down the hall sleeping peacefully and instantly in her bedroom, and just after midnight, Stanko's ties up Laura Ling and beats her, and he goes down the hall tells Penny that if she screams, he's gonna kill them both, and she runs to see her mother and

sees her mother tied up in the bedroom, and then he hits her over the head and when she wakes up, she's being raped, you know. He places her in the master bedroom so that he can watch his He savagely beats Laurea Ling with his fist, beats her face in until his knuckles her bloody, and then he makes her

watch as he strangles her to death. And one of the one of the one of the miracles that one of the miracles of the story is that Penny survived the attack at all, because when Stanko was done, Laurel Ling was already dead, and he flipped the teen daughter onto her stomach, lifted her head by the hair, and twice slit her throat, one wound above the other. And if the knife had gone into her neck a few

millimeters deeper, the girl would have been dead. And looking at it from Stanko's point of view, not killing Penny with the number one flaw in the execution of his game plan that day, he thought Laura and Penny were both dead and this was the reason why his flight lacked urgency. He thought he had left no witnesses.

almost immediately. But Stanko's now in a red Mustang that he's stolen from his murder victim, and he drives north to Conway, South Carolina, to visit his other friend, seventy four year old Henry Turner.

let me borrow your truck. I'll go to McDonald's and get us breakfast. Now, what Stanko doesn't know is that while he's going to get the egg mcmuffins right, Turner gets on the phone and calls his son and says, my friend, Stephen Stenko's dad just died. He's gonna be staying with me for a couple of days. It turns out to be a key factor. Sure, So after breakfast, Stanko rummages around the Turners like in the bathroom, shaving,

still getting ready in the morning. Stanko goes to where Turner keeps his gun three fifty seven revolver, grabs a pillow as a makeshift silencer, and shoots Turner twice, once in the chest, once in the back. Experts disagree as to which was first, right leaves him down his okay, sorry, no, no, go ahead sorry. Lee's Henry Turner dead, face down in the bedroom of his house. Now Stanko leaves the red Mustang in front of Turner's house and steals Turner's black

pickup trucks right and takes it, takes off again. And so Turner's son knows that Steven Stanko's staying with his dad. And because Henny Ling managed to call nine one one very quickly, there's already a bulletin on the TV. There's a man hunt for Stenko faces on TV. Be on the lookout, you know. Turner's SONSYS does not vote well for dad safety and calls the police immediately, and that's how they discover Henry Turner's body.

He says, I'm a big time wheeler dealer. I own twelve Hooters franchises throughout the Southeast. People say, so, how'd you hurt your hand, Steve, since he's got no skin on him and his knuckles, and he changes the story a couple of times. One time he says, oh, I was running a marathon and I fell. Another time he deep he burned his hand trying to fix his car. Another time somebody said something nasty to his day. He

had to punch the guy. Anyway, He runs up one hundred and eighty dollars cab, buying beers for everybody, and he pays the bartender with three one hundred dollars bills and says, keep the change. I I didn't mention. During the his flight, he stops and empties out Henry Turner and Laureling's bank accounts. So he's lovely with cash. Sure, so he's uh. He seems like he couldn't seem less, like he's hiding or running away. He's acting.

woman he'd met here. Drop me a line sometime, baby. And he hits the road again, and he's still in Turner's pickup truck, but he's not sure what to do. Turns on the truck radio and the announcers talking about Tiger Woods leading the Masters tournament in nearby Augusta, Georgia, which is due west. Now. The Masters, for those who dear listeners who don't know, the springtime golf tournament held

annually in augusta most prestigious golf tournament there is. It's played on a kind of fairy tale type course walled off inside of a not so great section of town, and TV announcers aren't allowed to call the spectator the crowd. That's too vulgar. That's called the gallery. There's kind of lotti do and it's been raining, so everybody who went to see the golf is in a bar someplace waiting for the rain to stop. So the town is just filled with white guys in golf shirts and cargo pants.

And he's absolutely going to blend and it's wild. It's wild in Augusta that he needs Dana Putnam, Dana Putnam, who was a beautiful woman celebrating her thirtieth birthday, and they hit it off and they drink and flirt, and he says he's got to leave, and she says, no, no, no, you're in no condition to drive. You got to think he's not in any condition to drive. At this point, she invites him home to sleep on her couch, and

that's what he did. In the morning, he picks up his vehicle and return his pickup, but he still doesn't leave. He goes with Putnam the church, he meets her parents. He visits her on Monday and gives her a single yellow rose, tells her he's sick of Bimbo's and he's looking for a woman he could stay with long term. So he's got he's got everybody kind including himself, because you know, he really should be trying to get away.

I mean, he's in Augusta having a meal in a restaurant, and he has no idea that there are twenty four hour news channels that are putting his face up on the screen every five minutes. So it's Jana Putnam's mom who eventually sees Stanko's picture in the paper, and she called her daughter with the bad news. She's you know, if he's there, get the heck away from him, and if he's not called the police. Well, he wasn't there.

He was at in a restaurant having breakfast. So Putnam called the cops, and the next time Stanko called her to tell her how much he loved her. The police were listening in and by the time he walked out of the restaurant and into the parking lot, the multiple law enforcement agencies were on the scene and he was arrested without resisting, which brings us up to the trial.

up with an insanity defense. In mind, something wrong with him, His brain just doesn't work right, and he's really sorry all this stuff happened, but it's not his fault because sometimes he loses control of himself. So yeah, the defense was an insanity claim, and the jury and end up seeing a series of doctors who showed them PET scans PET standing for positron emission tomography and three D pictures that show in colorful light the parts of a person's brain,

not only their structure, but how they are functioning. If the part of your brain is not functioning, that doesn't light up as brightly. And Stanko's frontal lobes, where his impulse control was supposed to live, had shriveled up and ceased to work. According to the pet scans, his frontal lobes, in terms of just size, were among the smallest two or three percent of the population. And those frontal lobes were, as his lawyers explained, what made him human or what

made other people human. He didn't have them, so there was insanity. You could see nothing theoretical about it. There. It is insanity. The defense theory was that Stanko's frontal lobe was injured when he was in an accident as a teenager. He got hit in the forehead with a beer bottle, so it's the best thing to come up. But they also throw in some testimony about a tatoot john de he'd had as a newborn baby, hoping that might infer that that was when his frontal lobes died.

But I think they didn't seem to really have an accident that fits the pet scams. So the prosecution had a quick response, you know, junk science. You know, maybe the science was good, but the application was way out of sync with reality. You know. Defence shrinks interviewed Stanko, but the things he said were not always helpful. That was when he said, for example, that the little Penny had come on to him and they were having an affair, and that's when Penny's mom found out about it, and

that's how the trouble started. Sure, so I think the most the most dramatic part of the trial was when Penny testified.

bought a teddy Bear and gave it to Penny. And very interesting imagery when you talk about Penny testifying trial to help put this guy away and she's still clutching that teddy bear.

ended with could you please over your scarf? And she does and the jury gets to see the scars from herself with thrown and unbelievably, Penny's father, Christopher Ling, who was a big man with a large jaw, was there for the entire trial and for her testimony. And while she is testifying, his eyes are burning holes in the back of Stanko's neck. You know, how he could listen to what he was listening to without attacking Stanko took

the strength of ten men. You know, Penny's testimony would have been dramatic enough without her father in the room listening to it. You know, she was very brave, and afterwards her father couldn't stop talking about what a great daughter he had. You know, she had one hundred times with the spine of the Jellyfisher was on trial and she was his hero. During the second trial, he testified on Penny's behalf so that she wouldn't have to go

through the ordeal again. And the only time during the second trial that Christopher Ling left the courtroom was during the playing of his daughter's ninety one one call. He'd heard it quite a few times at that point and just didn't want to hear it again.

need the second trial? How can you can execute him twice? Sure, but the argument against that was, you know, doesn't Henry Turner's family deserve closure just as much as Laura ling family, And nobody had a good rebuttal to that, and it ended up costing the taxpayers two hundred and ten thousand dollars.

But Stanko was convicted twice and as two death sentences, So what was his You know, if either of his sentences is ever lowered for whatever reason to life in prison, reduction of the other sentence would have to be considered as well. So, in an odd way, having two death sentences is to Stenko's advantage, but not much of an advantage. Chances they are good he's.

courtroom and apologized to everybody. But even then he began to ramble and started to talk about movies he'd seen, and he got he got off the track and really didn't help his case at all. If you know about William Dale Hudson, what about Yes, Yes, he was originally going to be writing a book about Stanker. I didn't know him, didn't know he had planned on writing a book about Staker, but while he was working on that book, he died under mysterious circumstances during the summer of two

thousand and nine. He was he's the man in his fifties, as I am, and he left home on a business trip, called his wife while on the road to say he had a migraine who was pulling over and was later found by fisherman floating face down in the PD River. So I guess it was my good fortune. His misfortune was my good fortune because by the time I submitted my proposal for this book, uh, they no longer had an author to do it.

I think true crime is in a lot.

The poor victim was spotted while thrashing in the back seat of the killer's car, and multiple calls came into that reporting a possible abduction. That the calls were not processed efficiently, the relationship between the calls was temporarily lost, and the police lost an opportunity to catch the guy before he killed his victim. So that's she was. She was also a policeman's daughter. Wow. So one of the

most amazing things is that he was captured alive. Yeah. Yeah, they brought him in and cuffs that in a bag and that's to their credit.