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mean he had to stop writing. He wasn’t a prisoner/writer. He was a writer!
    Stanko wanted to write another book, to use his extraordinary experience and scientific knowledge, not to mention intuition, to teach the world a precious lesson about some other topic that wasn’t “living in prison.”
    Stanko gave some thought to the topic of his new yet-to-be-written book. He kicked around a few ideas and decided: serial killers. He’d always been interested in the subject. It would be cool to become an expert.
    That decided, Stanko’s trips to the Socastee library became purposeful. Multipurposed even. He read all day, and kept copious notes. And when he was taking a break, he was chatting—quietly, of course—with his girlfriend.
    He thought about being comprehensive, to learn about every serial killer in history, their MOs, their body count, their signature. The book could be like an encyclopedia. It could work. There was that much public interest. There had even been serial killer trading cards a few years back.
    Maybe he wouldn’t make it comprehensive. For one thing, it had been done; for another, he figured the book would be better with a more narrow scope.
    He would focus—look in minute detail—on the serial killers he found most fascinating. Six to ten killers for the whole book—the serial killers who appealed to Stanko more than the others.
    Like many modern-day enthusiasts, Stanko observed serial killers with something that greater resembled admiration than disdain. There was a definite hierarchy, guys who stood out. Guys with superior bloodthirstiness and perversion. Members of the—drumroll—“Serial Killer Hall of Fame.”
    He had a notebook that he was filling with notes from the books he read in the library. He also spent a lot of time in periodicals. He printed news and magazine articles about hard-core crime from the library’s microfilm archives and kept a scrapbook.

    Which killers to include? Some were a lock.
    Like “Zodiac,” for example. ID unknown. Bastard got away with it. Terrorized millions for years. He was the original masked gunman prowling lovers’ lanes in Northern California, shooting and stabbing young lovers during the late 1960s and early 1970s.
    This was before the big Zodiac movie. All he knew, he learned from books. Stephen Stanko liked Zodiac a lot. He was psychologically terrifying, and he backed it up with death.
    Plus, his terror campaign was visual. He had a Zodiac costume that he wore when he went out to perforate young white women—like every day was Halloween.
    To some extent movies such as Halloween and Friday the 13th were based on Zodiac, who added the “masked homicidal maniac stalking teenagers” theme to the big picture of serial murders!
    One of Zodiac’s intended victims—the male half of a necking couple that the killer ambushed beside a lake—survived Zodiac’s stabbing, although his girlfriend was murdered. He saw Zodiac, and lived to talk about it.
    Zodiac’s shirt, the survivor saw, had a circle with crosshairs over it, a symbol he had also used in his letters and other written communications. The killer wore a sack, square at the top, over his head, with eyeholes cut in it. As he was being stabbed, the survivor saw that Zodiac was wearing glasses inside his spooky hood.
    In his letters, Zodiac made the cops and the press look stupid, jerking them around with an unbreakable code that he promised would, if deciphered, identify him.
    Although some of Zodiac’s codes were solved, the one with his name in it was not. He was taunting the cops, yanking them around. His letters described a bloodlust only appeased by murder, and a raging misogyny, all cloaked in a crude attempt at far-out 1969 hippie vernacular. Zodiac thought shooting chicks was the “ultimate trip.”
    Criminal profilers, professional and amateur alike, analyzed the many clues Zodiac supplied, and tried to figure out what kind of guy he was. Many theorized that the Zodiac had been