Free I Would Find a Girl Walking by Diana Montané, Kathy Kelly Page A

right, afterwards, what did you do with her? Did you just leave her on the side of the road, or did you shove her off to the side?”
    “She was laying down on her side, ways off the road, and I uh . . . proceeded to go due north again.”
    “You remember how much you had to drink by this time?”
    “Whoa!” He whistled. “A good amount, a good amount because, I don’t know. Too much!” He laughed. “Too, too much, because I know I was sick on the way home; I had to stop a couple of times, because I was sick on the way home.”
    At some point, he must also have thrown her purse in a trash can, where it was later recovered.
    “Okay, then you went, found your way to U.S. 1 back to the Derbyshire Apartments. Do you remember having sex with this girl?”
    “Some, some of them. Some of the girls I did, and some of them I didn’t.” He shrugged.
    Although Stano had confessed to forty murders and was serving three life sentences at the Florida State Prison after pleading guilty to three of the murders in Volusia County, it was this homicide, that of seventeen-year-old Cathy Lee Scharf, in Brevard County, that would bring him to trial for first-degree murder and eventually send him to the death chamber. After two trials, he was convicted of first-degree murder on December 2, 1983, and sentenced to death. In the case of the forty murder confessions, there was a conspicuous lack of physical evidence, making it impossible for jurisdictions in Florida to prosecute.
    Sergeant Manis was ready to conclude his interview with Gerald Eugene Stano.
    “Can you think of anything else that may have happened in this particular case that I haven’t asked you, that you can remember that kind of stands out about this particular girl, anything at all?”
    Again, Stano’s remorseless detachment came through.
    “Not really, except she was a heck of a dancer.”

SEVEN
    Inside the Mind of the Lead Investigator
    Meeting one of Satan’s children is a feeling I can’t put into words.
    —Sergeant Paul Crow
     
     
Paul, your [ sic ] right about you and I having the inside track of the real me. But, I am covering it with Kathy too. People would fall over if they knew what type of real relationship we have.
    —Gerald Stano to Paul Crow, September 4, 1985
     
     
     
     
    I n 1984 there were several serial killers that hit the FBI’s adar screen at the same time: John Wayne Gacy, Wayne Williams, Ted Bundy, Gerald Stano, and Gary Ridgway, later to be identified as the Green River Killer.
    After Stano was arrested and subsequently indicted for murder, Paul Crow, the Florida detective sergeant, received an urgent call from the Green River Killer Task Force in Washington State, asking him how he had managed to “get” Stano.
    They had one suspect in mind, who turned out to be Gary Ridgway, except by the time they caught up with the “real” Green River Killer, the department had spent more than $1 million and shrunk to one man: Sheriff Dave Reichert, who later became a congressman. The capture of the Green River Killer took twenty years.
    Law enforcement officers were ill-prepared then to track down serial killers who were constantly on the move and used different methods to kill their prey. Establishment of DNA testing—a critical tool to link cases—was years down the road. There was Wayne Williams, the child murderer in Atlanta; Ted Bundy in the Pacific Northwest, the West, and Florida; and Gerald Stano. John Wayne Gacy, who killed and tortured young men and posed as a pillar of his community near Chicago, also surfaced at the time. So it was Williams, Bundy, Gacy, the Green River Killer, and Stano converging. “It was like five aircraft crashing overhead at once.”
    A few years earlier, in 1979, then sergeant Crow had been selected by the FBI to attend its profiling school in Quantico, Virginia, headed by John Douglas. Agent Robert K. Ressler was also a lead instructor. The Central Florida investigator compared the experience to being