Brushes with Madness

[Lzen]

Originally Posted by mikey23545

When I was in high school my best friend had a twin sister, and the three of us used to hang out together all the time. During our junior year his sister went on a shopping trip by herself to a neighboring town. She was never seen again.

Her body was found months later in a dump in another city. It turns out she was one of the 41 victims of Gerald Stano, one of the most prolific mass murderers ever.

Years later, I was sitting in a small pub in Port Orange, Florida when a not very attractive women sat down next to me and first tried to get me to buy her a drink, then asked to borrow twenty dollars. The answer to each request was no. She eventually got up and left, but after that I would every now and then see her hanging around the bar.

I would eventually see her face again on the "picture tube". Her name was Aileen Wuornos, the female mass murderer who offed seven men here in the state of Florida. They made a movie called "Monster" about her starring Charlize Theron.

Why couldn't it have been Charlize who sit down and asked for me to buy her a drink that night...

Never heard of that guy. Wiki says there is controversy surrounding his conviction. Says there is a lot of question on whether he actually committed these murders.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gerald_Stano

Controversy has long accompanied Gerald Stano's criminal history, with some^[who?] believing that Stano was actually a 'serial confessor', including his arresting officer, Detective James Gadberry, who challenged the decision to accept Stano's first confessions as valid and, in 1986, signed a legal affidavit stating unequivocably that Sergeant Paul Crow was responsible for "spoon feeding" Stano the intimate details of unsolved homicides. According to Gadberry's affidavit, Stano merely parroted the information back to Crow while other veteran homicide officers later made statements to the effect that, they too, had witnessed Paul Crow 'helping' Stano to confess to crimes he had not committed.
Crow's colleagues^[who?] recalled how he actively gathered information on unsolved or "cold case" murders from foreign jurisdictions. During sworn testimony in Orlando Federal Appeals Court in 1993, Crow himself recalled using copies of stories from the local newspaper to locate details about murders to which Stano later confessed, including the murder for which Stano was later executed.
In 1995, Crow was removed from office by a grand jury appointed by Florida Governor Lawton Chiles, citing corruption.
Further controversy surrounded the fact that Stano, in spite of his 41 murder confessions, was brought to trial for just one homicide: that of 17-year-old Cathy Lee Scharf, who was murdered in December 1973. A conspicuous lack of physical evidence corroborating Stano's confessions made it virtually impossible for jurisdictions in Florida to prosecute, and Stano's previous convictions were exclusively the result of his own guilty pleas.^{[citation needed]}
Following a hung jury, prosecutors introduced the testimony of a jailhouse informant, Clarence Zacke, who was later discredited when another man against whom he had testified, Wilton Dedge, was released after serving 22 years for rape; lawyers for the Innocence Project established that his DNA did not match that found on the victim.^{[citation needed]}
During a secretly recorded conversation with freelance reporter Arthur Nash in 1997, Zacke admitted that he had lied regarding Stano and other defendants, including Wilton Dedge. He said his testimony had been fabricated with the assistance of two county prosecutors, who offered him incentives in exchange for testimony.^{[citation needed]}
In late 2007, an FBI lab report surfaced which concluded that Stano could not have been the source of unidentified Caucasian pubic hairs that were recovered from Scharf's body. The report was never presented as evidence by the public defender representing Stano. The source of the pubic hairs was not identified, and they were destroyed shortly after Stano's execution in the Florida electric chair in 1998.

I'm not saying either way. Just curious, what is your take on this?