Watch Mommy Die. Michael Benson
readability. The denotations and connotations of the words remain unaltered. In some cases, witnesses are credited with verbal quotes that in reality only occurred in written form. Some characters may be composites; and in one case, two characters have been made of one real-life person. The object is to avoid embarrassing anyone who, after all, did not ask to be included in the narrative.
PROLOGUE
“Nine-one-one, what is your emergency?”
Weak and dazed, a small female voice whimpered incoherently on the other end of the line. “Uh . . . uh . . . I . . .”
“May I help you?” the male dispatcher asked.
“I, uh . . .” For a moment, the voice sounded far away.
“Pardon me?”
A deep breath: “I’m at my house and I’ve been raped.” She spit out the last word through clenched teeth.
“What’s your address?”
“My mom is dead.”
“Pardon?”
“My mom is dead!”
“Okay. What—what, what’s your address?” the dispatcher stammered.
She recited her address. The operator asked her to check her mother: “See if she has a pulse.”
“I can’t. My hands are tied.”
“Okay, just hang on.” The tape picked up the sound of the dispatcher typing on a keyboard.
“Please hurry.”
“Ma’am, ma’am, just stay on the phone with me. I’ve got people on the way, okay? . . . So who did this?”
“My mom’s boyfriend.”
“Your boyfriend?”
“My mom’s boyfriend!”
“Your mom’s boyfriend. What’s his name?”
The victim now elongated her words and enunciated carefully: “Ste-phen Stan-ko.” She started to cry. “I’m scared,” she said. He had made her watch while he killed her mother.
“Calm down for a second, okay. I’m going to put you on with another dispatcher, okay?”
“Okay.”
“Okay, hold on.”
After a pause, a mature and calm female voice came on the line. “Hey,” she said.
“Hi,” the victim replied. “I’m bleeding from my ear.”
“You’re bleeding from your ear?”
“Oh God! Oh God!”
“Did he try to hurt you?”
“He raped me!”
“He raped you?”
“My hands are still tied!”
“You’re still tied up?”
“Yeah!”
“Okay. We got men out there. They should be there shortly.”
“Please hurry. Help me, help me, help me.”
“Is he around, do you know?”
“No, he left. Oh God, this isn’t supposed to happen to me. There’s blood everywhere. I think he cut . . . he cut my neck.”
“Did you ever think he might do something like this?”
“No, no. I want my mommy,” she said.
“How old are you?”
“Fifteen. I tried to put up a fight. I tried! I tried!”
“Did he hit you or something?”
“Oh God, yes! Mommy—oh God—Mommy!”
The dispatcher kept the girl on the line until help arrived. The girl was letting out high-pitched cries of anguish, repeating again and again that her mother was dead.
“What’s taking them so long?”
“They will be right there, honey.”
“I want my mommy. Please help my mommy.”
One of the first responders to the scene of horror was Charles “Chuck” Petrella, a young paramedic with the rescue squad. Petrella talked to Penny and stayed with her as she was ambulanced to the hospital, leaving her dead mother behind.
Petrella, a father himelf, was moved by Penny, and the next day came to visit her in the hospital. On his way, he stopped at the hospital gift shop and bought her a teddy bear, little knowing that one day she would clutch that teddy bear tightly even as she sat in a court of law delivering testimony that could send her attacker, the murderer of her mother, to death row.
PART I
MR. HYDE
South Carolina, July 2004. The South Carolina Lowcountry shore. Stephen Christopher Stanko was bespectacled, impeccably neat, thirty-six years old, mildmannered, white—and only just out of prison. Fresh to the outside—having just served eight years of a ten-year sentence for kidnapping, fraud, and breach of trust—he squinted in the strong summer sunshine.
Sure, his morning-fresh freedom gave him a fish-out-of-water feeling—but not as bad as most ex-cons, he figured. He’d shed his prison skin and emerged from his squalid surroundings into the crisp air of freedom with that ol’ Stanko sangfroid intact.
He had to pat himself on the back. He had chameleon skills, and could be just what anyone wanted him to be. Plus, he’d actually accomplished something in prison. That put him in—what?—the 99.9 percentile of ex-cons!
He entered prison a normal civilian and was released a published author.
With a pleasure that bordered on the autoerotic, he enjoyed stroking his own ego. Have to go away for a few years? Boom, start a career. He’d turned lemon into lemonade. Most guys got out and had nothing better to look forward to than manual labor. He had bigger plans. Much bigger. He’d used prison as a tool for upward mobility. It was proof of what a genius he was. Not only had he created a product that would generate income, he’d done some serious planning as well. He knew how to get over in modern society.
Still, even on geniuses such as himself, prison took its toll. It cut away at a man like a thousand small torturous cuts. His confidence was rendered porous by prison. Deep down, gnawing like a rat on the inside of a bedroom wall, was his insecurity. He worried that he’d lost his touch, that years behind bars had institutionalized him.
Ah, but it was all coming back to him—life without bars. Easy as pulling a nickel out of a child’s ear. All he had to do was conjure the cheery illusion of truthfulness and sincerity and he’d be sure to succeed. You had to know just how much of the truth to mix in, and he had the knack.
Great webs of deceit he could weave—and almost every dewy silver strand was based on a verifiable fact. Some people couldn’t lie for five minutes without betraying themselves. Stanko could go for weeks.
While serving the last days of his sentence, he’d arranged for his first few days of freedom. To help him, he’d recruited the goodwill of a woman he called “Hummer,” the mom of a guy in Stanko’s cell block. When he first got out, he called Hummer and she “loaned” him money for a motel so he’d have a roof over his head.
Hummer came in handy—for a little while, anyway. He knew that she was not a bottomless well, however. Pretty soon he was going to have to rely on his charm for food and shelter.
Existing as an ex-con can be a tricky business. Stanko coped by speaking about it, but only in positive terms. It was a neurolinguistic