Gerald Stano

What the record shows

Gerald Eugene Stano was a Florida serial killer who was convicted of nine first-degree murders of young women committed between 1973 and 1980, mostly in and around Daytona Beach in Volusia County. He confessed to killing about 41 women in Florida, New Jersey and Pennsylvania, but no killing outside Florida was ever charged, and police were skeptical of several of his confessions. Stano pleaded guilty to eight of the murders and was convicted by a jury of a ninth, the killing of 17-year-old Cathy Lee Scharf in Brevard County. He received six life sentences and three death sentences, and was executed in Florida's electric chair at Florida State Prison on March 23, 1998, aged 46.

Stano was born in Schenectady, New York, in 1951, according to the Wikipedia article. The Tampa Bay Times reported at his execution that social workers said his birth mother abused and neglected him, that he went to a foster home at six months and was adopted at 13 months although a psychiatrist had called him unadoptable, and that he had serious behavior problems as a child and was often in trouble with the law as an adult. He later lived in Ormond Beach and worked as a short-order cook.

The case opened on April 1, 1980, when Daytona Beach detective James Gadberry arrested Stano for the aggravated battery of Donna Hensley, a woman who had been stabbed. According to findings of fact by a federal district court, later reproduced by the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eleventh Circuit, Gadberry noticed that her wounds resembled those of Mary Carol Maher, a 20-year-old whose killing his department was investigating, and Stano confessed to the Maher murder that day. Sergeant Paul Crow of the Daytona Beach police then took charge of questioning. Under a plea agreement with Seventh Judicial Circuit prosecutors that ruled out the death penalty for killings with bodies found in that circuit, Stano pleaded guilty on September 2, 1981, to the Volusia County murders of Maher, Toni Vann Haddocks and Nancy Heard and was sentenced to life in prison.

In 1982 Stano confessed to many more killings. On August 15 and October 8, 1982, he confessed to Crow the murders of Susan Bickrest, found in Spruce Creek in December 1975, and Mary Kathleen Muldoon, killed in November 1977. A Volusia County grand jury indicted him on January 18, 1983. United Press International reported that he had by then pleaded guilty to eight murders in Volusia, Alachua and Bradford counties and was serving six life terms. He pleaded guilty to the Bickrest and Muldoon murders on March 11, 1983, and on June 13, 1983, Circuit Judge S. James Foxman sentenced him to death in both cases, citing his prior convictions and lack of remorse.

The Scharf case was the only one tried before a jury. Scharf, of Port Orange, disappeared in December 1973 and her skeletal remains were found the next month in the Merritt Island National Wildlife Refuge, UPI reported. The first trial ended with a hung jury. On retrial in Titusville, the state introduced a taped 1982 confession to a Brevard County detective and testimony from jailhouse informant Clarence Zacke. Stano was convicted in December 1983 and a jury recommended death by 10 to 2; he was sentenced to death. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the conviction and sentence in 1985.

Questions about the reliability of Stano's confessions run through the record. In December 1986 he recanted his confessions to the Bickrest and Muldoon murders, describing himself as a compulsive confessor, UPI reported. His lawyers argued that Crow had coerced the confessions while pursuing a book about the case; a book with a foreword by Crow appeared in 1993. After a lengthy evidentiary hearing, a federal judge found no collusion and found that Crow had not fed Stano information, and the Eleventh Circuit affirmed in 1995. In 1998 Stano presented an affidavit from a freelance writer saying Zacke had recanted his testimony, affidavits from officers attacking Crow's credibility, and tapes in which Crow allegedly said he had heard Stano confess to a crime Crow did not believe he committed. The Florida Supreme Court rejected these claims on March 20, 1998, noting that Stano had also confessed to two officers. The Tampa Bay Times reported that police never found physical evidence linking him to the bodies he described and that the true total was unknown.

Three governors signed death warrants for Stano, and his execution was stayed several times, including in July 1986, when he had been scheduled to die alongside Ted Bundy. He was electrocuted on the morning of March 23, 1998, and pronounced dead at 7:15 a.m. In a final statement released by one of his lawyers, Stano maintained that he was innocent.