Defense experts diagnosed Stanko with brain damage attributed to multiple head injuries across his life, including birth trauma, a teenage head blow sustained while shielding a classmate, and repeated sports injuries.[1]
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At 6:34 in the evening on June 13, 2025, Stephen Christopher Stanko was pronounced dead in a South Carolina prison. He was 57 years old — executed by lethal injection for two murders he committed in 2005, in two South Carolina counties. The legal proceedings that translated those crimes into this sentence had taken nearly two decades to reach their conclusion.
Stanko had spent that interval on death row, sentenced separately for each killing. The first victim was Henry Lee Turner, a 74-year-old retired Air Force master sergeant and father of three, killed in Conway. The second was Laura Ling, 43, Stanko's girlfriend, who died in Murrells Inlet in Georgetown County. He was sentenced to death twice — once for each murder, in separate proceedings.
In the same attack that killed Ling, Stanko raped and attempted to murder her 15-year-old daughter, Christina. Christina survived. Her survival placed her at the center of the prosecutions that followed, and it also meant she would spend the next twenty years living with what had happened to her mother and to herself while the courts worked through the case to its conclusion.
At trial, prosecutors described Stanko as a cold, calculated psychopath — someone who had planned and carried out his crimes deliberately. His defense attorneys argued the opposite: that Stanko had been legally insane when the murders were committed, his judgment so fundamentally impaired that criminal responsibility should not apply. Both juries rejected that argument. Death sentences were handed down in both cases.
As the June 13 execution date approached, supporters circulated a petition to South Carolina Governor Henry McMaster urging him to issue a stay and seek clemency. The petition's central argument was medical. Experts, it said, had determined that Stanko suffered from brain damage — the accumulated result of multiple head injuries across his lifetime. Among them was a blow he received as a teenager while physically shielding a classmate from an assault. A difficult birth and repeated sports-related traumas were listed as contributing factors. The petition asked whether a man whose capacity for judgment may have been compromised by physical injury should face execution. The execution proceeded as scheduled.
In his final statement, Stanko apologized to the families of his victims and asked not to be judged solely by what he called "the worst day of his life." He asked those receiving the statement to consider the full arc of his existence rather than only its most devastating chapter. It was a request that almost every condemned person makes in some form — and one that required the recipients to hold his appeal alongside everything they already knew about what he had done.
Henry Lee Turner was 74 years old, a retired Air Force master sergeant who had raised three children, when Stanko killed him. Laura Ling was 43. Her daughter Christina was fifteen years old on the night Stanko attacked her, and she had carried that experience for nearly twenty years as the legal process ran its course.
On the evening of June 13, 2025, Stanko was pronounced dead at 6:34 p.m. The case that had begun in 2005 with two murders and the near-killing of a teenager formally closed nearly two decades later — the crime and its legal consequence brought together one last time in a South Carolina prison.
