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

Beach.
    What Crow did know was that, like Bundy, Stano was also, in his own way, a “charmer.” Even though he was not good-looking like the suave, smooth-talking law student from Seattle, Stano dressed well, wore cologne, and his approach was friendly; he talked a good talk. The detective also recognized that these killers killed quickly, within fifteen minutes of having a victim in their cars.
    Crow believed that Stano, like Gary Ridgway—who would eventually admit that he thought of killing women as his “career”—was not a part-time serial killer but had probably been at his “job” for quite a long time. It was the only job that he would ever truly hold.
    Just like with the women he couldn’t keep unless he snatched them and killed them, Stano had never been able to stay at one job for very long. That may have been one of many reasons for his sense of restlessness, and the rage that festered and grew inside him.
    Looking at Stano’s patterns of behavior earlier on, Paul Crow instantly detected what he had in common with other serial killers: a penchant for being cruel to animals, setting fires, and pulling malicious pranks, such as throwing rocks from an overpass to cars driving below. He also was teased by his fellow classmates. Another part of the pattern was the lying, the cheating, and the stealing.
    A major factor was his sense of abandonment, first by his biological mother, then by his adoptive parents when they were no longer able to cope with his shenanigans at home and shipped him off to his grandparents.
    And the adoptive father was violent toward him, Stano would complain. He admitted that he was deathly afraid of the elder Stano.
    Crow wanted to be sure he had given Stano every chance to be truthful during the hours of interrogation. It seemed highly unlikely Stano wasn’t the killer, given the amount of detailed information he had provided, but the detective sergeant wanted to give him one last chance.
    Bluntly, he said, “Jerry, after this is sealed we’ll never be able to speak again, so I’ll work as hard as I can with you to get out of this thing. If you didn’t do any of these things, tell me that.”
    He said, “No, we’ll leave it alone.”
    Gerald Stano had killed about fifteen young women on the west coast of Florida alone, but those police departments did not cooperate with the news ban proposed by the Daytona Beach Police Department and released all pertinent information to the St. Petersburg Times prematurely. The true total number of victims, some unidentified, some never found, may never be known.
    There was also the issue of multiple crimes and case overload. At the same time that Crow was working the first murder Stano was linked to after his arrest—Mary Carol Maher—he was also investigating a serial rapist case, at the Derbyshire Apartments complex. Coincidentally, Stano had once lived there and later encountered one of his victims, Susan Bickrest, in the parking lot.
    The only rape victim who could identify her assailant was a topless dancer who was also bisexual. Crow didn’t care who or what the women were or what they did. The bottom line, he felt, was that “the S.O.B.,” meaning the rapist, “had done seven others in the area.” Those issues alone, however, the ones casting a shadow over the character of a victim, could become an uphill challenge for any prosecutor. Unfair, but sadly true.
    In this case, the victim who escaped the serial rapist had been approached by the suspect at the bottom of the stairs of the apartment complex. He was posing as a security guard and began by telling her to be careful. This was a ruse very similar to one that Ted Bundy used, sometimes pretending to be a police officer, like he did with one young woman at a mall, whom he approached telling her someone had broken into her car.
    The would-be rapist attempted to assault the victim, but she was a physically strong woman who turned the tables on her attacker, beating him until he