I Would Find a Girl Walking Read Free Page B

that I had written about so many of the crimes and had met with some of the families.
    Of course, I had initially covered them as separate crimes, and not as the work of the man now sitting before me. It amazed me that he was able to pull it off for so long. The first time I went to see him, I admit I was extremely nervous—my skin felt clammy and I nervously fiddled with my pen and notebook. And when he started talking about working at the newspaper office, I think I was glad to be off the subject of why I was there.
    From that first meeting in prison, I did my best to draw Stano out. In a series of forty letters over a ten-month period, he confessed his hatred for his adoptive father, devotion to his adoptive mother, and insecurities about women as well as his appearance. Stano was detail oriented to the point of fastidiousness. Today, he would probably be recognized in the psychiatric community with obsessive-compulsive disorder, that inner drive for everything to be just right.
    Eventually Paul Crow would tell me, with some degree of caution and hesitation, and even a tinge of embarrassment, that he didn’t know if Stano truly trusted me or if it was all part of his facade. He pointed out that where Stano had a very small social circle, I had a large network that stretched throughout several states, and even internationally. Stano craved that sort of popularity for himself. “Tell Kathy I like her very much. And I think she’s beautiful too. She is the ‘old fashion type.’ That is what I like in a girl Paul. I would be very honored to have her as my girlfriend if I was out,” Stano wrote to Paul on January 28, 1986.
    “You’re a pretty lady, Kathy,” said my high school friend, “and I hate to say this but you probably became like a kind of Farrah Fawcett poster on his wall.” Fawcett was the “it girl” back then. I cringed at the thought.
    I don’t know if he honestly took a liking to me or if it was all pretense, but I’m sure he welcomed any diversion from the prison routine, especially having a female visitor. I don’t even want to imagine what he told other inmates about me when he got back to his cell, but I’m certain it enhanced his self-image as a macho guy. He was only too happy to comply with anything that improved his own perception of virility. Even though facing the electric chair, he had lost none of his illusions that women were somehow attracted to him, despite also claiming that “I kind of look over the girls, because of my weight problem I have. If they snicker at me, forget it. But, if they take me for what I am, that’s a different story. Besides, I am not what the girls call a hunk. I am just an overweight nobody.” 2
    I don’t know that I was able to penetrate his wall. He was not at all willing to talk about some of the crimes; some of the others he was only too ready to revisit in exact detail. Some, he said, were hard to remember, while others he claimed to have blocked out. Early in our discussions, he claimed innocence of one of the murders, saying he was in jail at the time. Prodding him for more details in some of the cases disturbed him, causing him sleepless nights on his hard prison bunk, he said.
    But he also told me about the women he had killed.
    He talked to me about what was believed to be his first murderous rage, in Gainesville, in 1973. He picked up two young girls who were hitchhiking. Something in the ensuing conversation convinced him they were lesbians. Comments about his manhood, his clothes, or his weight provoked him to a boiling rage, and he lashed out and killed the girls as they drove along in his car.
    This was frequently his pattern. Sometimes it was his fist. More often, it was a knife. As he drove, he would slash his victims again and again. Sometimes he shot them, usually in the temple, with a .22 caliber weapon he claimed to have borrowed from a friend.
    I found it particularly unsettling because he considered these young women as no more