Читать книгу Watch Mommy Die - Michael Benson - Страница 15

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 on the medicine cabinet.

Driving Laura Ling’s red Ford Mustang, her savings in his wallet, Stephen Stanko drove northeast on Route 17, switching to a northwesterly heading in Forestbrook on a major thoroughfare alternately called Black Skimmer Trail, the Edward E. Burroughs Highway, and Route 501. He got off at Singleton Ridge Road, in Conway, South Carolina.

He pulled into the driveway of Henry Lee Turner, his old buddy from the library, on Kimberly Drive in Conway. Turner lived in a white “single-wide” mobile home on a cul-de-sac in the Coastal Village Mobile Home Park. The mobile home had bluish green shutters and wooden stairs at the side and back doors.

Stanko had been there several times before, once with Laura when Henry was having computer woes. It was about six-thirty in the morning. Turner was asleep, but he got up to answer the door.

Stanko said, “My dad just died.”

“I’m sorry to hear that, Steve,” Turner said.

“I just—I just need someone to talk to.”

“Well, come right on in.”

Turner attempted to console him. Stanko agreed to get them breakfast and borrowed Turner’s keys so he could drive Turner’s truck to McDonald’s and purchase food.

Not everyone on the Coastal Village street was asleep. John Marvin Cooper, who lived next door on Kimberly Drive, was up and having his coffee when he heard a car pull into Henry Turner’s driveway. He looked out the window and saw a red Mustang, and a guy with glasses getting out. He didn’t think much of it. He’d seen the man with the glasses visiting Henry before.

It was sometime between seven forty-five and eight o’clock when the man, who he could now see was wearing a baseball cap and a shirt with some sort of purple logo on the front, exited Turner’s house, got into Turner’s 1996 black Mazda pickup, and left. Cooper thought that was odd. Cooper left for work at eight-fifteen; as he did, he waved at Turner. He wasn’t curious enough to ask why the bespectacled visitor was driving Turner’s truck. Didn’t seem like any of his business.

It would turn out to be important that while Stephen Stanko was out getting breakfast, Turner called his son Roger on the phone. Turner told his son that Stanko was upset about his father’s death and was going to be staying with him for a while.

Minutes after Cooper left for work, Stanko returned in Turner’s truck, carrying a bag of McDonald’s.

After eating, and while Turner was in the bathroom shaving in front of the medicine cabinet’s mirror, Stanko pulled out a gun and, using a pillow as a silencer, shot Turner dead, once each in the chest and back.

The pillow had kept the shots quiet, so Stanko went about his next task deliberately, thoroughly. He searched Turner’s home for things that might have value to him on his trek toward freedom, or his trek toward oblivion. Whatever it turned out to be, there’d be a trail of death.

Stanko stole another gun and some more money. Now armed, and even more financially flush, he left Laura Ling’s car in the cul-de-sac outside Turner’s house and drove away in Turner’s 1996 Mazda B2300 two-wheel-drive extended-cab pickup truck. To make the truck easy to identify, it had a Shriners tag on the front and two Shriners decals on the back.

At nine-thirty Friday morning, Stephen Stanko called the Socastee library and talked to John Gaumer, Laura Ling’s boss. He identified himself. He was, after all, in that library all the time and was known there.

“Laura’s probably not going to make it into work today. She’s not feeling very well this morning,” Stanko said.

“What are her symptoms?” Gaumer asked.

“Copious vomit,” Stanko said. “We’re thinking it’s something she ate.”

Gaumer said he was sorry to hear that and hoped she felt better. Stanko thanked him and hung up.