I Would Find a Girl Walking Read Free

from a lone male driver wasn’t too scary, they figured. They were young, agile. They could be out of the car in a heartbeat. Or so they thought.
    They didn’t reckon with a radio blasting disco music that jarred their senses. And they didn’t hesitate to voice their feelings. “How can you stand to listen to that stuff? Donna Summer and that disco crap are so over the hill.”
    They didn’t anticipate stops for beer or requests for sex. By the time they began to process what was happening, it was too late.
    Out of nowhere, a fist would come slamming into their faces, wildly hitting them again and again as the driver proceeded calmly. Sometimes it was a knife, the sharp blade plunging into their torsos over and over as they fought helplessly to escape. For others, the demonic turn of their captor sent a shock wave that almost immediately brought a gut response.
    “If I can open the door, I can run,” more than one probably thought. But even those who were alive when they left the car didn’t make it more than a few feet before the dark-haired driver produced a small handgun and shot them.

ONE
    A Date for an Interview
    Now, about Kathy Kelly. As you know she is the only one I have consented to talk too [ sic ]. Reason is, she is a friend of yours and Donald Jacobson. Is she married Paul? Let me know okay?
    —Gerald Stano to Paul Crow, September 4, 1985
     
     
     
     
    A s the appointment at the prison for my first interview with Gerald Stano neared, I couldn’t believe I was worried about what to wear. I was no newcomer when it came to conducting prison interviews, having worked at the News-Journal as a police reporter for about twenty-five years by that time. But I didn’t want to give any wrong ideas to the man whose favorite song was “Just a Gigolo, I Ain’t Got Nobody,” sung by David Lee Roth.
    In addition to the assistance of Don Jacobson, Stano’s attorney, I also had the support of Paul Crow, the police sergeant to whom Stano looked for advice, guidance, and reassurance. Paul and Jerry, as Stano called himself and Paul addressed him, had developed a good rapport thanks to Paul’s interviewing skills developed at the FBI Academy in Quantico, Virginia.
    Paul and I had a long-standing friendship, having gone to high school together. As he worked his way up the ranks, we stayed in touch and had a good working relationship. On my beat as a police reporter in the 1970s and ’80s, I depended on forming relationships with people who were going to tell me things. “You may want to check on this,” someone might say, trusting that his or her name wouldn’t appear in a story. News today at most law enforcement agencies is funneled through public information officers, whose job it is to keep reporters from having one-on-one contact with officers.
    Early on, Paul had confided to me that a major investigation was under way, and Gerald Stano was confessing to murder, again and again. I had held off writing anything until signed confessions were in hand that Stano had admitted the slayings of at least six women.
    A colleague, Rosemary Smith, and I quietly gathered all the information about six of the murders. We looked through court records, including a search warrant for Stano’s car issued a day after his April 1, 1980, arrest for the attack on Donna Marie Hensley. All the basic information about the 1977 AMC Gremlin was detailed in the warrant, including the serial number and color of interior, right down to the trailer hitch on the rear.
    Rosemary and I collaborated on the story that broke the news to local residents that the deaths of at least ten young women in the area over a seven-year span had been the work of one man. The front-page story ran September 3, 1981, with a headline in large type that read: “Killer Says ‘Revenge’ Was Motive.” The final chilling detail of the affidavit filed in the charging documents was the description of the license tag on the front of Stano’s car: “No riders