Watch Mommy Die. Michael Benson
He was just another ex-con who couldn’t get a job.
RESEARCH
During this time, Stephen Stanko did have at least one friend, who called him once a month or so to see how he was doing. It was Dr. Gordon Crews, one of the coauthors of Stanko’s published book, Living in Prison.
The book’s complete title and byline was Living in Prison: A History of the Correctional System with an Insider’s View by Stephen Stanko, Wayne Gillespie, and Gordon A. Crews.
Stanko and Crews had had frequent phone conversations when Stanko was in prison. Then, like now, Stanko mostly griped. Stanko told Crews it was tough on the outside being an ex-con. Nobody wanted to hire the guy who was just out. Crews reminded him that he was a guy with a lot of skills, and to think positively.
Stanko hit Crews up for money. He tried to sell his future royalties from the book to Crews, who said he should be writing again. Just because he was a free man didn’t mean he had to stop writing. He wasn’t a prisoner/writer. He was a writer!
Stanko wanted to write another book, to use his extraordinary experience and scientific knowledge, not to mention intuition, to teach the world a precious lesson about some other topic that wasn’t “living in prison.”
Stanko gave some thought to the topic of his new yet-to-be-written book. He kicked around a few ideas and decided: serial killers. He’d always been interested in the subject. It would be cool to become an expert.
That decided, Stanko’s trips to the Socastee library became purposeful. Multipurposed even. He read all day, and kept copious notes. And when he was taking a break, he was chatting—quietly, of course—with his girlfriend.
He thought about being comprehensive, to learn about every serial killer in history, their MOs, their body count, their signature. The book could be like an encyclopedia. It could work. There was that much public interest. There had even been serial killer trading cards a few years back.
Maybe he wouldn’t make it comprehensive. For one thing, it had been done; for another, he figured the book would be better with a more narrow scope.
He would focus—look in minute detail—on the serial killers he found most fascinating. Six to ten killers for the whole book—the serial killers who appealed to Stanko more than the others.
Like many modern-day enthusiasts, Stanko observed serial killers with something that greater resembled admiration than disdain. There was a definite hierarchy, guys who stood out. Guys with superior bloodthirstiness and perversion. Members of the—drumroll—“Serial Killer Hall of Fame.”
He had a notebook that he was filling with notes from the books he read in the library. He also spent a lot of time in periodicals. He printed news and magazine articles about hard-core crime from the library’s microfilm archives and kept a scrapbook.
Which killers to include? Some were a lock.
Like “Zodiac,” for example. ID unknown. Bastard got away with it. Terrorized millions for years. He was the original masked gunman prowling lovers’ lanes in Northern California, shooting and stabbing young lovers during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
This was before the big Zodiac movie. All he knew, he learned from books. Stephen Stanko liked Zodiac a lot. He was psychologically terrifying, and he backed it up with death.
Plus, his terror campaign was visual. He had a Zodiac costume that he wore when he went out to perforate young white women—like every day was Halloween.
To some extent movies such as Halloween and Friday the 13th were based on Zodiac, who added the “masked homicidal maniac stalking teenagers” theme to the big picture of serial murders!
One of Zodiac’s intended victims—the male half of a necking couple that the killer ambushed beside a lake—survived Zodiac’s stabbing, although his girlfriend was murdered. He saw Zodiac, and lived to talk about it.
Zodiac’s shirt, the survivor saw, had a circle with crosshairs over it, a symbol he had also used in his letters and other written communications. The killer wore a sack, square at the top, over his head, with eyeholes cut in it. As he was being stabbed, the survivor saw that Zodiac was wearing glasses inside his spooky hood.
In his letters, Zodiac made the cops and the press look stupid, jerking them around with an unbreakable code that he promised would, if deciphered, identify him.
Although some of Zodiac’s codes were solved, the one with his name in it was not. He was taunting the cops, yanking them around. His letters described a bloodlust only appeased by murder, and a raging misogyny, all cloaked in a crude attempt at far-out 1969 hippie vernacular. Zodiac thought shooting chicks was the “ultimate trip.”
Criminal profilers, professional and amateur alike, analyzed the many clues Zodiac supplied, and tried to figure out what kind of guy he was. Many theorized that the Zodiac had been a military man—perhaps a sailor.
Like Dad, Stanko thought.
Stanko had Zodiac pegged as not much of a stud. If he was any kind of lover boy, he’d have worked it so that he got a piece before he snuffed them. Stanko assumed a lot of these “gun does my talking” types suffered from erectile dysfunction.
At the scene of a cabdriver’s murder in San Francisco, a bloody fingerprint, presumed to belong to Zodiac, was found. Over the years, there had been a handful of suspects in the Zodiac murders. Some didn’t pan out, and some stuck around.
The best suspect was the late Arthur Leigh Allen, whose spending records revealed him to be frequently in Zodiac’s vicinity. He also had proximity with several of the victims, and may have been an acquaintance with one of the victims. His handwriting looked like Zodiac’s; he had a history of doing really sick things; and his demeanor, when he was questioned, was oddly defiant, very much the type of personality to use the mail to laugh at authority figures, while simultaneously terrifying all of Northern California. Some said the case against Allen was a construct of a true-crime writer, and, in reality, was much weaker than presented. Allen was said in a couple of books to have received a speeding ticket in the vicinity of one murder. This was declared untrue by a third source. Plus, his thumbprint didn’t match the bloody one found at one of the murder scenes.
One thing that everyone could agree on, Stanko discovered, was that Zodiac—along with Charles Manson and the murder at Altamont—was part of that “death of the counterculture” gestalt, symbols of the end of an era, the 1960s—such a hopeful decade turned horrible by violence—giving way to the disastrous 1970s.
The killer not only wrote taunting letters to police and press, sometimes using code, but he established his bona fides in a shiveringly creepy fashion, enclosing in the envelopes bloodstained cloth torn from a victim’s shirt.
Maybe, some theorized, Zodiac was more than one guy. Did a conspiracy theory fit? Maybe the one writing the letters was never the one shooting the gun. Paranoids noted that the case resembled a military mindcontrol experiment that had gotten out of hand.
There were a lot of theories—some almost solid, others wacko—and the Zodiac letters continued for years. One guy thought that he turned into the “Unabomber.” Zodiac claimed for years in his writing that he was still killing people; after the initial burst of murders, no more bodies could positively be linked to him.
In some ways, Stanko thought, the Zodiac killer was the most legendary of the serial killers.
Stephen Stanko also exhaustively researched “Son of Sam,” aka David Berkowitz. Son of Sam was a derivation of the Zodiac theme a few years later. He also shot teenagers and young adults in the nighttime.
Unlike Zodiac who prowled the plentiful desolation of Northern California, Son of Sam patrolled the side streets of New York City. He found victims on front stoops, walking down the sidewalk, and (like Zodiac) necking in parked cars.
Son