Gerald Eugene Stano was a short-order cook in the Daytona Beach area when he was arrested on April 1, 1980, for attacking a woman in a motel room. Within hours he had confessed to killing Mary Carol Maher, a 20-year-old college student and swimmer whose body had been found that January. Over the following two years, mostly in sessions with a Daytona Beach detective sergeant named Paul Crow, he confessed to many more killings. By October 1982 a Sanford newspaper reported that he had admitted to 33 murders, 31 in Florida and two in New Jersey, and had claimed four to six more in Pennsylvania. The number most often printed later was 41.
Courts in Volusia, Brevard and Seminole counties, and a circuit court sitting in Bradford County, convicted him of first-degree murder, most often on his own guilty pleas, once on a jury's verdict and once on a judge's. By 1987, the Evening Herald reported, he was serving three death sentences and seven life sentences. He was executed in Florida's electric chair on March 23, 1998, for the murder of Cathy Lee Scharf, a 17-year-old from Port Orange who disappeared in December 1973.
His case is also one of the longest-running arguments in Florida over confessions. From 1986 until the week of his execution his lawyers contended that Crow had fed him details and promised him his life, and that many of the confessions were false. State and federal judges heard those claims and rejected them. In a written statement released after his execution, Stano said he had confessed to crimes he did not commit.
Very little about Stano's childhood appears in court records or news reports, and what does appear comes from the defense psychologist who examined him after his arrest. Dr. Ann McMillan reported that he was taken from his birth mother at about six months old because of extreme neglect, and that he was then functioning at what she called an "animalistic level." A team that examined him for adoption at 13 months concluded that he was unadoptable. He was adopted nonetheless and grew up as Gerald Eugene Stano. McMillan tied that early neglect to lifelong problems in coping with ordinary life, and she was prepared to testify that he acted under extreme mental or emotional disturbance.
At his 1983 sentencing in Volusia County, Circuit Judge S. James Foxman accepted three mitigating factors: a difficult early childhood, marital difficulties and his confessions and guilty pleas. He gave them little weight. The federal appeals court recorded that in March 1983, at 31, Stano had a twelfth-grade education and had taken computer training.
He lived in Ormond Beach, north of Daytona Beach, and worked as a short-order cook. The Sanford Evening Herald described him that way in 1982, and Florida Today used the same description when he was executed. His parents visited him in prison in the days before his death.
The arrest came out of a case that had nothing to do with murder at first. A woman reported that Stano had attacked her in a Daytona Beach motel room and that she had escaped. According to findings later made by a federal district court, officers in the Daytona Beach Police Department came to believe that the officer assigned to the case, James Gadberry, would not pursue it properly, and they asked their supervisor, Sgt. Paul Crow, to give it to them. Crow spoke with Gadberry, and Gadberry then had Stano arrested on April 1, 1980, on a charge of aggravated battery. The woman survived.
Gadberry began the questioning. While talking to Stano, he connected the woman's wounds to the unsolved killing of Mary Carol Maher, and he told colleagues that they had the man responsible for the Maher murder, or words to that effect. Crow, who was in charge of the Maher investigation, came into the interview room.
Mary Carol Maher was 20 and lived in Daytona Beach. Florida Today described her in 1998 as a junior college student and a champion swimmer. She disappeared in January 1980. Her body was found that month in a dump, with puncture wounds, partly covered with pine branches, Crow testified at a later trial.
In the interview room on April 1, Crow showed Stano a photograph of two sisters. Stano pointed at once to Mary Carol Maher. He described how he had killed her, including wounds police had not found, and then led officers to the place where her body had been found. The district court later found that Crow did not show him the way. Crow had a second autopsy done on her body, and it found two wounds in her back that Stano had described. That same day Stano telephoned a lawyer, Donald Jacobson, from the jail and confessed to him as well.
Her sister, Celeste Fausel, was one of the official witnesses at his execution in 1998. "I forgave him a long time ago," she told Florida Today. Her brother, John Maher, called Stano "misguided, demented."
Toni Van Haddocks was 26. She had been listed as a missing person from Daytona Beach, and her body was found in Volusia County around April 6, 1980, a few days after Stano's arrest, according to the district court's findings. Florida Today placed the discovery in Holly Hill. Stano at first denied knowing anything about her. On May 9, 1980, after waiving his rights, he confessed to Crow, and in doing so he described a cast on her arm, a detail police had not known. Crow and another officer interviewed him about her again on May 19 and June 3, 1980.
From the beginning, Jacobson's aim was to keep his client out of the electric chair. In May 1980 he went to the prosecutor, Larry Nixon, and the two men reached an arrangement: Stano would receive use immunity for murders he confessed to before entering a guilty plea, as long as the bodies had been found within the Seventh Judicial Circuit, which takes in Volusia, Flagler, Putnam and St. Johns counties. Jacobson told Stano that killings outside that circuit, including the Scharf case in Brevard County, were off limits. He wanted Crow to act as a clearing house for any other cases.
Jacobson hired McMillan to test Stano and gather his history. Crow met McMillan and Jacobson several times in 1980, and at one meeting he identified four suspected victims by general location only, giving what the court later called just enough information for Jacobson to ask Stano about them. McMillan later testified that she had told Crow that Stano would lay down false trails and that Crow should feed on his ego. The district court found that this was not an instruction on how to interrogate him and that Crow did not use it.
On March 12, 1981, Stano was brought to Daytona Beach and gave four more confessions to Crow and a detective named Hudson: Linda Hamilton, Ramona Neal, a woman never identified, and Nancy Heard. The next day he led officers to the places in Tomoka State Park where the bodies of Ramona Neal and Nancy Heard had been left.
Nancy Heard was 24. Florida Today described her as a maid at a beachside motel; her body was found north of Ormond Beach in January 1975. The district court's findings place it about three miles north of the Holiday Inn on the boardwalk.
Linda Ann Hamilton was 16 and came from Millbury. She went missing from the Daytona Beach boardwalk area in July 1975 and was found on the beach near New Smyrna Beach.
Ramona Neal was 19, from Forest Park, according to Florida Today, and had a twin brother, Raymond. She met Stano in Daytona Beach in June 1976 after a quarrel with her boyfriend, the newspaper reported, and her body was found in Tomoka State Park. Raymond Neal became a police officer in Houston. He and his brothers witnessed the execution in 1998. "It was great to see some justice done," he said.
On September 2, 1981, Stano appeared before Judge Foxman in the Circuit Court for Volusia County. Jacobson and the public defender, Howard Pearl, had advised him to plead. He pleaded guilty to three counts of first-degree murder, for the deaths of Mary Carol Maher, Toni Van Haddocks and Nancy Heard. Under the plea agreement Foxman sentenced him to three life terms, and the other three murder counts, for Ramona Neal, Linda Hamilton and the woman never identified, were dismissed. The plea was entered after a hearing on his competency. Foxman, according to a later defense brief, cited his cooperation in solving the crimes and in letting the victims' families stop wondering about girls who had been missing for so long.
The deaths in the three dismissed counts were never tried. They are confessed killings, not convictions.
In prison, Stano kept writing and talking to people from the case, among them Jacobson, Crow and Kathy Kelly, a staff writer at the Daytona Beach News-Journal. Jacobson warned him not to confess to more killings without a grant of immunity; he knew, the district court found, that Stano was responsible for more than the six Volusia victims. Stano went on confessing.
In spring 1981 Crow contacted the Brevard County Sheriff's Department about a possible case there. The district court found that the captain he spoke to remembered nothing about a matching homicide. Crow then asked Kelly to search for a case that fitted the facts Stano had described. She found an October 6, 1977, news article and sent it to him, and Crow wrote to the Brevard state attorney, Douglas Cheshire Jr. In November 1981 he wrote to Detective Johnny Manis of the Brevard County Sheriff's Office.
Manis and Lt. James Bollick interviewed Stano at Florida State Prison on January 20, 1982. He did not admit to any killing in Brevard County. On August 11, 1982, back in the Daytona Beach jail, Stano waived his rights again and talked to Manis about two women, Cathy Lee Scharf and Sandra DuBose. The next day Manis recorded a confession about each, using his own tape recorder and waiver form. Crow was in the room only briefly and asked no questions, the court found. The Brevard prosecutor, Dean Moxley, later testified that these were the most important confessions in his case.
In the same period Stano confessed to Crow to the deaths of Susan Bickrest, on August 15, 1982, and Mary Kathleen Muldoon, on October 8, 1982. By late October 1982 the Evening Herald reported that he had admitted to 33 murders and that police in Altamonte Springs wanted to know whether an unsolved 1974 case there was one of them. The newspaper noted that if he were convicted of everything he had claimed, he would be the worst mass murderer in the country's history.
In March 1973 two young women, Ann Arceneaux, 17, and Janine Ligotino, 19, were stabbed to death in Gainesville, according to the list Florida Today printed in 1998. Sgt. Jessie Blitch of the Gainesville Police Department testified about both cases at Stano's 1983 Brevard sentencing.
Barbara Bauer was 17 and lived in New Smyrna Beach. She was reported missing on September 6, 1973, and her body was found about seven months later in North Florida, about 100 miles from home, Florida Today reported. At his 1983 Brevard sentencing hearing Stano testified that he had first met her because she was having car trouble, and that he did not remember how he had killed her.
On March 8, 1983, Stano appeared with his lawyer, Fredrick Replogle, before Circuit Judge John J. Crews in the Circuit Court for Bradford County in Starke. He pleaded guilty to first-degree murder in all three cases and received three life sentences. The two Alachua County sentences were to run concurrently with each other, and the sentence for Barbara Bauer, the Bradford County case, was to run consecutively to them.
Susan Bickrest was 24 and worked as a waitress, Florida Today reported. Stano's account, as summarized in a defense brief from the record, was that on the night of December 19, 1975, he was drinking at a Daytona Beach bar when he saw her leave in her car. He followed her to her apartment complex, and she got into his car when he suggested a ride. He struck her, and when she tried to get out he pushed her back and locked the doors. He drove onto Interstate 95, stopped and strangled her. Her body was found in Spruce Creek, about 17 miles from her apartment. The medical examiner found that she had died of strangulation and drowning.
Mary Kathleen Muldoon was 23 and a student at Daytona Beach Community College. Stano said he met her in November 1977 at a bar on Seabreeze Boulevard in Daytona Beach. They drove off together, he struck her after an argument, and he drove about 20 miles south to a remote area of New Smyrna Beach, where he shot her. Her body was found on November 12, 1977, face down in a drainage ditch in a wooded area. The medical examiner attributed her death to a gunshot wound followed by drowning.
A Volusia County grand jury indicted Stano for both murders on January 18, 1983. At his arraignment on February 8, Judge Foxman appointed Pearl, who had represented him on the 1981 pleas, and Pearl entered pleas of not guilty. On March 11, 1983, Stano changed his pleas to guilty on both counts and waived a sentencing jury. Pearl told the court that the state had not yet produced all its discovery and that he was not fully prepared as Stano's lawyer to advise him, but that Stano still wanted to plead. The prosecutor said the missing material related to sentencing, not guilt. Foxman found the pleas knowing, intelligent and voluntary.
The sentencing hearing ran from June 8 to 10, 1983. The state introduced certified judgments for the six earlier murder convictions. Four psychiatrists and one psychologist had examined Stano. By agreement, McMillan's report was read in: she would have found extreme disturbance and substantially impaired capacity. Dr. Fernando Stern agreed with her. Dr. Frank Carrera III and Dr. George Barnard did not, and Dr. Robert Davis said he could not decide whether extreme disturbance existed but described Stano as a sociopath. Foxman adopted the testimony of Carrera and Barnard.
On June 13, 1983, Foxman sentenced Stano to death for each murder. He found two statutory aggravating factors in both killings, the factor for especially cruel murders and the factor for cold, calculated and premeditated murders, and found that Stano had six prior murder convictions, and that Susan Bickrest had been kidnapped. He called the killings completely senseless. The prior murders, he wrote, were the dominant factor.
Cathy Lee Scharf was 17 and lived in Port Orange, two blocks from the restaurant where she worked as a busgirl in December 1973, according to the trial record. She planned to become a cosmetologist. Her father, John Scharf, described her in court as "just like any other kid." Her mother, Edith, last saw her at about 7 p.m. on December 14, 1973, as she left home, and a neighbor testified that he saw her walking south alone on U.S. 1 the next morning. Her parents reported her missing within a day or two.
On January 19, 1974, two hunters found a body near the Haulover Canal in Brevard County, about 30 miles from her home, in a remote and heavily overgrown area. It was covered with palm fronds, which an investigator said had been placed there deliberately. The body was so decomposed that the medical examiner could not determine a cause of death, though he ruled out natural causes. Her childhood dentist identified her from her dental records. Months later two boys found her wallet, and her mother identified it and the jewelry found with the body.
A Brevard County grand jury indicted Stano for first-degree murder in March 1983; Crow was among the witnesses before it. The defense said no physical evidence linked him to the killing, and the state's case rested on his statements: to Crow, in March 1981, that he had picked up a young hitchhiker in Port Orange, argued with her, stabbed or shot her and covered her with palm fronds; and to Manis, in August 1982, that he had hit her to keep her quiet, stabbed her when she tried to leave the car and carried her to the canal bank.
The first trial ran from September 26 to 30, 1983, and ended in a mistrial when the jury could not agree. A retrial was held from November 28 to December 2, 1983. John and Edith Scharf had said they would not testify a second time, and the court declared them unavailable and read their earlier testimony to the jury. The state added a witness, Clarence Zacke, a prison inmate who testified that Stano had told him he had killed the girl. The defense brought out that Zacke was serving long sentences and had traded his testimony for a reduction. The judge excluded testimony the defense offered from a psychiatrist and from a St. Petersburg detective, James Kappel, about a false confession Stano had given in a St. Petersburg homicide.
The jury found Stano guilty of first-degree murder and, after a penalty phase on December 5 and 6, 1983, recommended death by a vote of 10 to 2. At that hearing Stano testified that he had confessed because he realized he needed psychiatric help. On cross-examination he admitted other murders, said he had pleaded guilty to the ones he committed, and denied killing Cathy Scharf. The trial court sentenced him to death, finding four aggravating circumstances (prior violent felony convictions, murder during a kidnapping, an especially cruel killing, and a cold, calculated and premeditated killing) and no mitigating circumstances.
In October 1982 Lt. Edward Overman of the Altamonte Springs police sent the details of the city's only unsolved killing of a woman to investigators working with Stano. Her partly clothed body had been found on November 24, 1974, behind the Interstate Mall on State Road 436. She has never been identified, and the case papers called her "Madam X."
On January 13, 1984, Circuit Judge Robert McGregor heard the case in Sanford in a one-day trial without a jury. The defense and the state had agreed on certain facts, and the state had agreed not to seek the death penalty. McGregor heard a taped confession in which Stano said he had picked the woman up on State Road 436 near Interstate 4 in October or November 1974 and stabbed her after she refused his advances. The assistant public defender, Don West, argued that there were large discrepancies between Stano's description of the woman and her clothing and what the autopsy showed, and he wanted to call police officers from St. Petersburg and New Jersey who believed some of Stano's confessions were false. McGregor did not allow it. He found Stano guilty and sentenced him to life, his seventh life sentence, the Evening Herald and United Press International reported. Stano called the verdict fair. Moxley said his office had been criticized for spending time and money trying Stano when he was already facing execution.
The Supreme Court of Florida affirmed the two Volusia death sentences on November 1, 1984, in Stano v. State, 460 So. 2d 890 (Fla. 1984). It held that the killings showed the heightened premeditation the cold, calculated and premeditated factor requires, that the women had been conscious when ordered from the car, and that the trial court could reject the statutory mental mitigators on the evidence of the doctors it believed. Stano argued that death was disproportionate when he had received life for six other murders. The court found there had been no plea bargain on these two sentences. In a footnote it said that if all his confessed killings were considered, "we would be hard pressed to find anyone approaching Stano in number, senselessness, or lack of provocation or motive." The Supreme Court of the United States denied review (471 U.S. 1111 (1985)).
The court affirmed the Brevard conviction and death sentence on July 11, 1985, in Stano v. State, 473 So. 2d 1282 (Fla. 1985). It upheld the exclusion of the false-confession testimony as irrelevant, the use of the parents' earlier testimony, the dentist's identification and the finding that the state had proved the girl's death. It noted that the details of his confession "correlate well with the crime scene." Of the sentencing, it said that "one person with eight prior convictions of first-degree murder presents an unusual situation," and it found that the prosecutor's argument had "approached the outermost limits of propriety" but was not reversible. Certiorari was denied (Stano v. Florida, 474 U.S. 1093 (1986)).
On May 22, 1986, Governor Bob Graham denied clemency and signed a death warrant in the Scharf case, with execution set for July 2, 1986. Stano's new lawyers filed a motion for postconviction relief less than a day before the scheduled execution. It claimed that the confessions underlying the earlier pleas had been coerced, that his lawyer had colluded with a detective and a psychologist to obtain them, and that trial counsel had been ineffective. The trial court denied it without hearing outside witnesses. The Florida Supreme Court granted a temporary stay (Stano v. State, 492 So. 2d 1335 (Fla. 1986)) and then, on October 16, 1986, affirmed the denial and vacated the stay, by a vote of four to three (Stano v. State, 497 So. 2d 1185 (Fla. 1986)). The Supreme Court of the United States denied review (481 U.S. 1059 (1987)).
A warrant on the two Volusia death sentences was signed for the week of November 26 to December 3, 1986, with execution scheduled for December 2. The trial court stayed it to consider his motion, then denied relief. The Florida Supreme Court affirmed on February 25, 1988 (Stano v. State, 520 So. 2d 278 (Fla. 1988)), holding that his guilty pleas were free and voluntary and that "by insisting on pleading guilty and by telling counsel that he had confessed freely and voluntarily, Stano rendered any further investigation pointless." After a second warrant on those sentences, it denied a habeas petition on May 16, 1988 (Stano v. Dugger, 524 So. 2d 1018 (Fla. 1988)).
A second warrant in the Scharf case was signed on June 4, 1987. In August 1987 U.S. District Judge Patricia Fawsett heard argument in Orlando on his request for a stay, in a hearing that ran from about 1 p.m. to past 10 p.m. one day, the Evening Herald reported. His lawyer, Mark Olive, argued that police had obtained confessions to crimes Stano did not commit by promising that a mass murderer could escape the electric chair with an insanity defense. The Eleventh Circuit granted a stay (Stano v. Dugger, 828 F.2d 12 (11th Cir. 1987)).
In the Volusia case, Judge Fawsett denied habeas relief in May 1988, and the Eleventh Circuit granted a stay on May 18, 1988 (Stano v. Dugger, 846 F.2d 1286 (11th Cir. 1988)). A divided panel then ordered the writ granted. In Stano v. Dugger, 889 F.2d 962 (11th Cir. 1989), the majority held that the March 1983 guilty pleas were taken in violation of his right to counsel, because Pearl had told the court he was not prepared to advise him. Judge Fay dissented, opening with the words, "Bad cases can generate bad law."
The full court vacated that decision (897 F.2d 1067 (11th Cir. 1990)) and reheard the case. On January 2, 1991, in an opinion by Judge Fay, the en banc court held that Stano's Sixth Amendment claims had no merit. It found that he had never asked to represent himself and that "the voluntariness of Stano's pleas is beyond question." "Stano gambled and lost," the court wrote; "he cannot challenge his election to plead guilty retrospectively." (Stano v. Dugger, 921 F.2d 1125 (11th Cir. 1991) (en banc), cert. denied, 502 U.S. 835 (1991).)
In the Scharf case, the en banc court sent three issues back for a hearing (Stano v. Dugger, 901 F.2d 898 (11th Cir. 1990) (en banc)). Judge Fawsett heard evidence from January 22 to 31 and March 5 to 9, 1992, and on June 10, 1992, denied relief in detailed findings.
She found no collusion among Crow, Jacobson and McMillan, and no evidence that Crow or Hudson gave Stano case files or details, coached him or edited the recordings. She found that Crow's investigation had included records checks of the boardwalk area, a chart of women who had accused Stano of assault, contacts with other agencies and a laboratory examination of his car. She found that Stano's August 1982 confessions to Manis were not coerced, and that there was no evidence that Zacke was acting for the government when he talked to Stano. She found Gadberry's account, that Crow had fed Stano information, to conflict with the testimony of several other witnesses. Crow's testimony about whether he planned a book was, in her words, "the most credible evidence provided by any of the witnesses in the case on this subject." After the ruling, Stano asked her to reopen the case because of Blind Fury, a 1993 book about him with a foreword by Crow. She refused.
The Eleventh Circuit affirmed on April 20, 1995, in an opinion by Judge Carnes (Stano v. Butterworth, 51 F.3d 942 (11th Cir. 1995)). It held that "there cannot have been suppression of nonexistent evidence," rejected the informant claim and the voluntariness claim, and said the book claim "has the intellectual appeal of a mosquito bite." The Supreme Court of the United States denied review (Stano v. Singletary, 516 U.S. 1122 (1996)).
A third warrant set his execution for April 29, 1997. His case was joined to the litigation over Florida's electric chair that followed a malfunction during the March 1997 execution of Pedro Medina, and after the Florida Supreme Court upheld electrocution (Jones v. State, 701 So. 2d 76 (Fla. 1997)), the warrant was reset for March 23, 1998.
In the final weeks his lawyers filed new claims. They offered an affidavit from a man named Nash Rosenblatt, who said Zacke had told him that his trial testimony was untrue and that prosecutors had told him what to say. They offered affidavits from current and former Daytona Beach police officers who said Crow was not to be trusted under oath, and tapes of 1986 conversations between Crow and a freelance writer about a possible book. They argued that Pearl's representation in five of the earlier convictions had been tainted by a conflict of interest.
On March 20, 1998, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the denial of relief (Stano v. State, 708 So. 2d 271 (Fla. 1998)). It assumed the Rosenblatt affidavit was admissible and held there was no reasonable probability of an acquittal, noting that recanted testimony is "exceedingly unreliable" and that Stano had confessed to Hudson and Manis as well as to Zacke. It held that the claims about Crow's credibility and his alleged promise of a life sentence were procedurally barred and would not probably produce an acquittal, and that the Pearl claim was time-barred and, in any event, that "there still remains sufficient aggravation." Four justices joined the opinion; three concurred in the result only.
Stano was executed in the electric chair at Florida State Prison in Starke on the morning of Monday, March 23, 1998. He was 46. Florida Today reported that he was brought into the chamber at about 7 a.m., that the current was applied at 7:09 a.m., and that two doctors pronounced him dead at 7:15 a.m. CBS News reported that there was no visible smoke or flame. It was Florida's first execution since Medina's, and Stano was the 40th person executed in the state since the death penalty was reinstated, Florida Today said.
He made no oral last statement. He gave his lawyer, Lissa Gardner, a written statement to release afterward. In it he denied killing anyone and wrote, "I confessed to crimes I did not commit." He also wrote, "I was not strong enough." In one of his last interviews, WFTV reported in 2024, he said: "I have not done anything to harm your daughters. I am not the one."
The witnesses included two state senators, his spiritual adviser and relatives of two of the women whose deaths he was convicted of or confessed to: Celeste Fausel, the sister of Mary Carol Maher, and the brothers of Ramona Neal. His adviser, the Rev. Clifford Lyda of Gainesville, said he was calm but obviously very scared. Afterward John Maher and the Neal brothers smoked cigars together outside.
The courts that heard the evidence found Stano's confessions voluntary and reliable enough to convict him, and no court ever set aside one of his convictions. The dispute over them is nonetheless part of the record.
Doubts were raised from early on by police officers in other places. In January 1984 his lawyer said police in St. Petersburg and New Jersey believed some of his confessions were false. In the Brevard trial the defense tried to call a St. Petersburg detective about a false confession Stano had given there. In the Seminole case the defense pointed to differences between his description of the woman and the autopsy findings. At the Brevard sentencing he denied the very killing for which he was later executed.
His lawyers in 1998 pointed to a 1986 tape on which, they said, Crow acknowledged that Stano had lied to police officers about some murders and that some confessions taken by other agencies did not match the facts. They said Gadberry had told Crow in 1986 that he doubted Stano's guilt. The freelance writer who recorded the 1986 conversations, Andy Campanaro, told them he did not believe Stano had killed anyone. The officers' affidavits described Crow as dishonest; one said that many police officers believed Crow had set Stano up. These are allegations in a defense brief. The Florida Supreme Court did not decide whether they were true; it held that most of them could have been raised years earlier and would not probably have changed the verdict.
On the other side, the district court found that Stano led officers to bodies and gave details police did not have, including the cast on Toni Van Haddocks's arm and the wounds in Mary Carol Maher's back, and that Crow had not fed him information. Prosecutors in Brevard said his confession matched the scene, including the palm fronds and a ring. Crow himself remained convinced. Speaking to the Daytona Beach News-Journal in 2019, years after he had become the city's police chief, he said he believed Stano might have killed as many as 88 people.
The 1984 Florida Supreme Court opinion recorded that by the time of his first pleas he had confessed to nine murders but been charged with only six. Newspapers in the 1980s and 1990s put his total at 33, then 41. Florida Today printed a list of 28 names in 1998, with other killings it said he had described in New Jersey, Georgia and Pennsylvania. None of the confessed killings outside Florida was ever charged.
Besides the convictions and the three Volusia counts dismissed in 1981, reports name these women among those whose deaths Stano confessed to or was linked with. None of these deaths was tried, and they are confessed or attributed only.
Sandra DuBose, whose death he confessed to Manis in August 1982, died in August 1978, according to Florida Today. He offered to plead guilty to her death and Cathy Scharf's in exchange for a promise of life imprisonment, Moxley testified; the offer was not accepted, and no conviction for her death is recorded.
Florida Today's 1998 list also named more than a dozen other women and girls, among them a 12-year-old from Port Orange who disappeared in 1975, in Florida counties from Pasco to Polk. The list survives only as scanned pages that contain errors, and the reports do not confirm Stano's involvement in any of these deaths.
On November 5, 1980, a work crew found a woman's skeletal remains in woods beside Interstate 95 near Port Orange. Florida Today reported in 1998 that Stano had described her as a woman he choked in 1978 or 1979, and that no charge was filed under his plea agreement. According to the sheriff's office, as reported in 2024, he said he met her at a bar on Main Street in Daytona Beach. Until 2024 she was known only as Jane Doe.
On October 17, 2024, the Volusia County Sheriff's Office announced that she had been identified as Pamela Kay Wittman, who was 25 and had moved from Indiana to Daytona Beach to start a new life. Genealogy For Justice, the nonprofit that paid for the work, said she came from Martinsville, Indiana, and that the identification was made in March 2024. Genetic genealogists at FHD Forensics made it from DNA taken from a small piece of bone. Investigators estimated that she was killed around February 1980.
Schoolmates in Indiana remembered her as a person with a big heart who liked to make people laugh and loved to sing. A memorial marker at the place she was found says that she had "the voice of an angel." Her younger half-sister, who was in grade school when she disappeared, traveled to Florida to receive her remains for burial in Indiana. "I wish I had the opportunity to get to know her, but learning the truth has been healing," she said. "After all these years, finally this family can answer the question of what happened to their loved one," Sheriff Mike Chitwood said. The sheriff's office said Stano picked women walking alone because he saw them as the most vulnerable.
Crow, who rose to become Daytona Beach police chief, was still living in the city in 2019, when he told the News-Journal that the area's crowds of young people made it "easy stomping grounds for people like that."
Stano's case left a long trail of Florida and federal opinions on guilty pleas, counsel's duties when a client insists on pleading guilty, and claims of newly discovered evidence brought on the eve of an execution. The en banc Eleventh Circuit decision on his Volusia pleas is still cited on the difference between a plea inquiry and an inquiry into whether a defendant wants to represent himself.
For the families, the convictions answered some questions and left others. Of the many deaths Stano described, most were never tried, and only Pamela Wittman's has since been given a name and returned to her family.
March 1973: Ann Arceneaux and Janine Ligotino are killed in Gainesville.
September 6, 1973: Barbara Bauer is reported missing from New Smyrna Beach.
December 14, 1973: Cathy Lee Scharf, 17, leaves her Port Orange home; her body is found near the Haulover Canal in Brevard County on January 19, 1974.
November 24, 1974: the body of the woman later called Madam X is found behind the Interstate Mall in Altamonte Springs.
January 1975: Nancy Heard is found north of Ormond Beach.
July 1975: Linda Hamilton goes missing from the Daytona Beach boardwalk area.
December 1975: Susan Bickrest is found in Spruce Creek.
June 1976: Ramona Neal meets Stano in Daytona Beach; she is later found in Tomoka State Park.
November 12, 1977: Mary Kathleen Muldoon is found in New Smyrna Beach.
January 1980: Mary Carol Maher is found in a dump near Daytona Beach.
April 1, 1980: arrested in Daytona Beach for aggravated battery; confesses to the Maher killing.
About April 6, 1980: Toni Van Haddocks's body is found; he confesses to her death on May 9.
May 1980: plea arrangement between Jacobson and prosecutor Larry Nixon.
November 5, 1980: remains later identified as Pamela Kay Wittman are found beside I-95.
March 12 to 13, 1981: four more confessions; he leads officers to two bodies in Tomoka State Park.
September 2, 1981: pleads guilty in Volusia County to three murders; three life sentences; three counts dismissed.
August 11 to 12, 1982: confesses to Manis about Cathy Scharf and Sandra DuBose.
August 15 and October 8, 1982: confesses to Crow about Susan Bickrest and Mary Kathleen Muldoon.
January 18, 1983: Volusia indictment for Bickrest and Muldoon.
March 3, 1983: Brevard indictment for Scharf.
March 8, 1983: pleads guilty in Bradford County circuit court to the Arceneaux, Ligotino and Bauer murders; three life sentences.
March 11, 1983: pleads guilty to the Bickrest and Muldoon murders.
June 13, 1983: sentenced to death twice by Judge Foxman.
September 26 to 30, 1983: first Scharf trial ends in a mistrial.
November 28 to December 6, 1983: retrial; guilty verdict; jury recommends death 10 to 2; death sentence follows.
January 13, 1984: found guilty in Sanford of the Madam X killing; life sentence.
November 1, 1984: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Volusia death sentences.
July 11, 1985: Florida Supreme Court affirms the Scharf conviction and death sentence.
May 22, 1986: first death warrant; execution set for July 2, 1986, and stayed.
October 16, 1986: Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of postconviction relief, 4 to 3.
June 4, 1987: second warrant in the Scharf case; federal stay follows.
May 18, 1988: Eleventh Circuit stays execution in the Volusia case.
January 2, 1991: en banc Eleventh Circuit upholds the Volusia guilty pleas.
January to March 1992: federal hearing on the confessions; relief denied June 10, 1992.
April 20, 1995: Eleventh Circuit affirms in Stano v. Butterworth.
April 29, 1997: execution date set and then postponed during the electric chair litigation.
March 20, 1998: Florida Supreme Court affirms denial of his last motion.
March 23, 1998: executed at Florida State Prison; pronounced dead at 7:15 a.m.
October 17, 2024: Volusia County Sheriff's Office announces the identification of Pamela Kay Wittman.