Official: Fugitive wanted to attend Masters
(CNN) -- A suspect in two killings in South Carolina who was captured Tuesday in Augusta, Georgia, told U.S. marshals he had come to the city for the famed Masters golf tournament.
"He told one of the investigators that he was in Augusta to see the Masters but he couldn't get in," said Inspector James Ergas of the U.S. Marshals Service, who was involved in Tuesday's capture of Stephen Stanko.
The Masters ended Sunday.
Stanko, 37, is suspected of two killings and the sexual assault of a teenage girl in South Carolina over the weekend.
Ergas said Wednesday that Stanko appeared to be surprised when he was arrested in a shopping center parking lot Tuesday afternoon.
"I don't think that he realized that he was captured until after he was handcuffed," Ergas said.
On the drive to the courthouse, he was "very quiet, very sullen," Ergas added.
Stanko is being held on a federal charge of wrongful flight to avoid prosecution, according to Chris Dudley, chief of domestic investigations for the U.S. Marshals Service.
Stanko was wanted in connection with the killing of Linda Ling, 43, in the coastal town of Murrells Inlet, South Carolina; the rape of Ling's 15-year-old daughter; and the slaying of 74-year-old Henry Lee Turner in the nearby town of Conway.
Stanko is expected to be charged with kidnapping, murder, assault and battery and sexual assault, Georgetown County Sheriff Lane Cribb said. The county, on South Carolina's northeastern coast, includes Murrells Inlet.
Authorities in neighboring Horry County issued a nationwide alert Monday for Stanko, who co-authored a book while serving time for kidnapping and aggravated assault and battery.
Police began searching for Stanko before dawn Friday after the 15-year-old called authorities to report the sexual assault accusation and the killing of Ling, whom Cribb said lived with the suspect.
Cribb said Stanko was last seen in the area around 4 a.m. Saturday at a restaurant and bar with Turner's truck. He said Stanko was "playing big shot, tipping big" and having a grand time at the bar, "acting unlike someone that had just killed two people hours earlier."
Officials followed tips that led to Augusta, according to the Southeast Regional Fugitive Task Force, a division of the U.S. Marshals Service.
The Marshals Service took over the investigation when police began to suspect Stanko had fled South Carolina. The agency issued a $10,000 reward for information leading to his capture.
Before Tuesday's arrest, a former police officer who wrote a book with Stanko said his co-author was becoming frustrated as he tried to adjust to life outside prison.
"You could tell the depression was setting in, because he kept describing himself as, you know, kind of getting slapped down constantly," said author and criminologist Gordon Crews, who co-wrote "Living in Prison" with Stanko and Wayne Gillespie.
