One Dorm From Murder

Gainesville ripper warning for shocking content, rape and gore. I want to share some of the horrid things this guy did so you get a true feel for how vile a killer he was. One of my all time favorite horror movies is Scream. The infusion of humor in between the scares was something I was so impressed with. Well, did you know Scream was inspired by a true story? Well, in Florida, something even crazier than the normal degree of crazy was taking place in the early 90’s. A screenwriter named Kevin Williamson was house sitting for a friend and was watching a developing news story about some really gruesome murders taking place right in the town he was staying in. The story was so shocking and surprising for the area, that he became scared he could be a target for in this killer’s seemingly random murder campaign. He looked over and notice a nice breeze coming in from the open windows near him. He starts getting really freaked about, gets a butcher knife, and works at shutting down any entry into the house. He calls his friend and says he thinks someone is in the house, while checking every nook and cranny just to be sure there wasn’t. Once he made all the rounds through the house and made sure that in fact, there WAS NOT anyone in the house, he sat down and began writing the screenplay for Scream. Here’s the story of the real killings and how certain parts of the story line up with some bits of Scream as well. This all takes place in Gainesville, Florida just a month after Gainesville had just been awarded with the title as the best town in America to live in. In the early morning hours of August 24, 1990, someone broke into an apartment shared by University of Florida students, Sonja Larson and Christina Powell. Both girls were very young, just 17 years old each. Christina was asleep on the couch downstairs. Standing over her for a moment, watching her sleep, the intruder decided to leave her there… for now. He went upstairs and found Sonja in her bed, also asleep. He attacked Sonja, quickly taping her mouth to stifle her screams. He then stabbed her to death with a Ka-Bar knife, which is a combat knife originally used by marines in hand-to-hand combat. Think Rambo – it’s that style of knife, it is similar to the Buck 120 knife used in Scream, but the Buck 120 is used more for hunting. He didn’t just stab her with the Ka-Bar though. He violated and mutilated her body, then posed her nude for the shock factor. Ghostface in Scream also liked to pose his victims, like Drew Barrymore posed for her parents to find in a shocking way. But he wasn’t finished. He went downstairs to where Christina was still sound asleep. He taped her mouth shut immediately, bound her wrists behind her back and cut her clothes off. He raped her the put her face down on the floor where he stabbed her five times in the back. He then put her in a provocative pose and feeling like he wasn’t done, he returned to Sonja’s dead body where he violated her again. He removed both girls nipples to keep as trophies and took a shower. During this time, a young reporter worked this area. He was a motivated journalist, wanting to get the biggest scoops first, much like a character in Scream. This reporter would drive around, listening to the police scanner to try to be the first on scene at any juicy story. On Sunday, August 26th, he’s doing just that. He hears a police transmission asking for back up. Then another, then another and more. He knew it had to be something big so he hightailed it to the location of the apartment shared by Sonja and Christina. He was the first reporter to arrive and he was making his way up to the apartment, when a deputy he knew well and who often gave him scoops told him he absolutely couldn’t go in. While talking to the deputy, he sees other cops running out of the apartment puking. Now, he knew these cops, and he knew they had seen a lot and could handle just about anything, but seeing their reaction, he realized this must be beyond horrific. While still collecting evidence at the apartment, the police get a call that another body had been discovered. In and apartment less than 2 miles away from the young ladies’ apartment, the body of 18 year old Christa Hoyt was found. Christa, had worked as a clerk on night shift at the sheriff’s office. She uncharacteristically had failed to show up to work. When co-workers tried calling repeatedly, there was no answer. Officers were sent to her apartment for a well-check. This crime scene may have been even more brutal than the first. Officers who entered weren’t prepared for the decapitated, posed body of Christa and they were quick to run for a puke in the bushes. The killer had entered the apartment by jimmying a sliding glass door with a flathead screwdriver. Christa wasn’t actually home when he entered, so he decided to stay and wait; murder was his goal, not burglary. At around 11 am, Christa had entered her apartment and was attacked from behind, caught in a chokehold by the intruder. He grabbed his roll of duct tape and covered her mouth and bound her wrists behind her back. Then he led her to her bedroom. He cut her clothes off of her body, made her lay face-down on the bed, then stabbed her several times, one of which severed her aorta. This is sick – he flips her over and completely slices her open from her abdomen to her breastbone. When police arrived, they found Christa sitting up, without a head. The head was displayed on a bookshelf facing the body. Hearing about the murders through the local journalist, the town was sent into a panic, much like the town in Scream. Instead of a high school, though, the real killings were set around the University where they tried to prepare their students as best they could. They gave them the usual advice; don’t walk alone; be on alert; check your surroundings. The university did give students the option of returning home with no repercussions. The dorms were quiet and mostly vacated. Nearly everyone was armed with pepper spray and guns became a commodity, making them hard to find anywhere within 100 miles of town. Gainesville became like a ghost town, everyone taking cover, hoping they wouldn’t be the next victim of the killer. Like the movie, just hours after the murders, the news was all over the papers and the tv. Rumors were swirling, from tales of cannibalism to cults and more. It became a media frenzy with even news trucks being dispatched for Japan. The killer was dubbed, the Gainesville Ripper. The press, just like in the movie, pestered students and even victim’s families, trying to be the station with the best coverage. Police and forensics teams frantically worked the sites. They knew that the killer had cleaned up much of the scenes of his killings prior to posing the bodies, which they thought was unique to him. Since no weapon was found at the scenes and no one had seen anything, officers were left with little to work with. Forensic scientists did get a clue from the 2nd crime scene, though. Maybe not a clue, per se, but an indication of the degree of depravity this killer was capable of. So, many of us true-crime bingers know about lividity. When the heart stops pumping, gravity forces blood to the lowest part of the body. Well, if a deceased person lies on their back long enough without being moved, the blood will become fixed where, even if they’re moved later, the blood remains in the area it had completely pooled to, which is called maximum lividity. Maximum lividity takes at least 6 hours to occur. We know Christa’s body was found sitting upright – with her head on the bookshelf. Well, her blood had fixed lividity on her back, not down her legs or butt. This means she had laid there for at least half a day before being placed in the upright position. This guy wasn’t afraid of being caught or in a hurry to leave. Unlike the movie, local police didn’t take on the task of finding the killer by themselves. A task force was formed to try to suss out a suspect. Local, state and national law enforcement descended on the area. More than 150 officers patrolled the streets, swats, k9’s and a helicopter were in constant surveillance of the wooded areas around the city. Hoping to dissuade another killing, patrol cars saturated the area, but it didn’t work. Just 3 days after finding Christa’s body, 2 more bodies were found. Tracey Paulous, who lived with her friend and roommate, Manuel Taboda, both 23, were found dead in their apartment on August 27. The pair had been friends since high school and shared a ground floor apartment less than 2 miles from the first murder scene. Similar to Christa’s apartment, the killer had entered by prying open the sliding glass door. The creeper found Manuel asleep in his bedroom. He attacked Manuel, stabbing him; Manuel fought back, but succumbed to the stabbing, eventually being stabbed 37 times. Hearing the commotion, Tracey went down to Manuel’s room and saw the attacker. She fled to her bedroom and barricaded the door, but it wasn’t enough to keep the killer out. He broke through the door, taped her mouth and wrists, cut off her clothing and raped her. Like the others, he turned her face-down and stabbed her 3 times in the back. He went on to pose Tracey’s body but didn’t bother posing Manuel’s. Investigators needed to prove the killer was the same for all of the cases. Thousands of items had been collected for evidence. Forced entry marks on each of the victim’s doors revealed the same tool had been used in each. Sticky residue from the duct tape used on the victims matched and the removal of the victim’s clothing had been cut off in the same pattern and motion. And, the killer had cleaned up each scene with detergent. One investigator was once again leafing through the array of photos taken at each crime scene. Finally, one photo caught his attention. He noticed in the photo, a wadded up paper towel next to a kitchen sink. He was able to dig up that wad of paper towels that had been collected along with the masses of other items and he submitted it for testing. They got a hit that it contained pure semen, meaning it was uncontaminated. They began the test for DNA, but it would take weeks for results to come back. Meanwhile, the public is so paranoid, that people are calling in every possible lead they can to police like, it’s probably my weird neighbor. Police have to check out every one of the over 6,900 leads that roll in. This ended up gumming up the investigation and making the work even more tedious and frustrating. Quickly, the focus turned to a 19 year old university student. He was reported as behaving erratically and talking incessantly about the murders; plus, he had a violent history. Police brought him in and as soon as they did, the killings seemed to stop, so they were further confident they had their guy. Edward Humphrey had a history of mental illness and his face was disfigured from an accident where he had jumped from a moving car during a mental break. The scars helped to fit him into the category of the type of monster everyone imagined could do this sort of thing. Police were able to arrest Edward because he had just recently attacked his grandma. Initial tests on semen found at crime scenes showed that whoever left it had been a type B secreter, which narrowed the pot for them substantially since it’s a more rare type. Only about 12% of the population had that type. Edward, however, didn’t have type b blood. He was held in custody for 5 months until a grand jury felt there was insufficient evidence to indict him. If you remember in Scream, the police thought they had the real killer initially as well, but they didn’t. On the day that Christa’s body had been found, the girl found sitting…a bank in Gainesville was robbed at gunpoint. The day after the robbery, a cop spotted the robber walking down a street in Gainesville and chased him into the woods surrounding town. The robber lost him, but the cop did happen upon a campsite. There, he found a bag with dye-stained money, so they know it’s his spot. The campsite had some key items that could lead to the robber’s identity. Police collected a gun, a screwdriver, a mask, duct tape and a cassette tape recorder. The collected evidence was thrown into storage until police had time to look further into it. For now, they decided to just focus on the killings since they were already spread so thin. More than a year after the killing spree, in a response to a nationwide request from the task force asking for reports of similar crimes, police got a call from Louisiana. A year before the murders in Gainesville, 24 year old Julie Grisom was raped and murdered in her apartment. Her 8 year old nephew and her dad were also killed, each with multiple stab wounds. The scene had been cleaned up with detergent, the bodies had been displayed and the means of entry was similar to the other killings. With the case at a standstill, police decide to go back and take a look at other crimes that had been committed in Gainesville in the time surrounding the murders. Investigators came across the evidence from the robber’s campsite. The screwdriver found at the campsite matched exactly the marks that were left by prying open the sliding glass doors at 2 of the ripper’s crime scenes as did the duct tape. A strand of hair found in the campsite had belonged to Christa Hoyt. A pair of pants that were recovered had traces of Manuel’s blood. The robber was also the Gainesville Ripper. As for the cassette tape recorder that was found, police were shocked when they listened to the tape that was found inside it. The killer had recorded his voice and recorded his full name. It was 36-year-old Daniel Harold Rolling. He had recorded his thoughts, songs and messages for his family, saying things like, “this is not what I had wanted.” When police went to search for Daniel Rolling, they didn’t have to search far. He was already in jail. The week after the Gainesville murders, he’d been arrested for another robbery. Even with the evidence police had, Danny, as he was known, wouldn’t admit to the murders. Police had other ways of proving it was him, though. They gathered DNA from him and he matched those collected. He was responsible for 5 murders that they knew of at this point. After arresting Danny for the murders and the robbery, investigators set their sites on details of the cases. One of the leads they had gotten in earlier had actually been the right one. A Shreveport, Louisiana resident, Cindy Juracich had called in a tip to crime stoppers and had reported that Danny Rolling may be responsible for murders in both Shreveport and Gainesville. Cindy had been driving through Florida on a trip and had heard about the Gainesville murders on the radio. It flipped a switch in her mind and made her immediately think about Danny, whom she had previously met at her church in Louisiana. Danny had said some pretty creepy-ass things to Cindy and her husband. He had told them that he likes to stick knives in people. Her tip did help them look into him a suspect. When looking into his past, they found that Danny was born in Shreveport to a police officer father who continuously told him he was unwanted. His father was brutally abusive, even beating the family dog so badly that it died in Danny’s arms. As a teen, Danny was arrested several times for robberies in Georgia and once was caught peeping on a woman through a window getting dressed. As an adult, he had trouble holding down a job and finding a path in society. He had tried the military, but got kicked out for drug possession. He got his shit together for a while and even married and had a daughter, but drove that wife away after repeating the abuse his own father had done to him. After the divorce, his behavior got worse. His voyeurism increased and he raped a woman who looked like his ex. He also committed several armed robberies. He was in and out of jail through the 80’s, and when he was out of jail, it was worse for women wherever he traveled. He got into an argument with his father at one point, pulled out a gun and shot him in the stomach and head. His dad survived, but lost the use of an eye and an ear. All of Danny’s female murder victims were petite, Caucasian brunettes with brown eyes like his mother had been. So. The prosecution had all the evidence they needed and a month before his trial was to begin, Danny said he wanted to talk. But, in a bid to possibly pin everything on his cellmate, he wanted the cellmate to speak for him. The police would ask questions, Danny would whisper an answer to his cellmate who would give the answer. Fortunately, the cellmate answered for him a few times and then asked out loud for all, “is that right, Danny” and Danny answered yes. That helped to prove he was the one providing the confessions that he did. He said he was inspired by horror movies, and specifically, the Exorcist. He even gave himself a couple of personas. One was Ynnad which is Danny backwards – he got the idea from the exorcist, part 3. His other persona was Gemini which was the name of the killer in the same movie. As for answers for the murders and why he had come back to Christa’s house after she had been dead some time, he said he had realized after he had killed her that his wallet was missing so he had gone back to retrieve it and have some fun with the dead body. Danny was able to evade capture right away by the lack of evidence he was leaving at the scenes. Instead of leaving duct tape on his victims, he knew enough to throw them in dumpsters so prints wouldn’t be found. He used cleaning solvents to wash down the bodies to get rid of traces of semen, but in a oopsie moment, he left behind that one towel with his semen on it. Psychiatrists examined Danny and diagnosed him with a severe personality disorder, but that he was fit for trial and knew the severity of his crimes. While behind bars, awaiting trial, a writer, Sondra London collaborated with Danny to write a book on him called, The Making of a Serial Killer: The True Story of the Gainesville Murders in the Killer's Own Words. While working together, the two became romantically involved, eventually getting engaged. Their relationship was the focus of Errol Morris’ First Person tv show. It spotlighted their romance, Danny’s artwork he had started making while in jail and the supposed feelings of remorse he had over his crimes. It also showed a segment of Danny using one of the court hearings to publicly display his love for Sondra by serenading her in the courtroom. Danny was set to go to trial nearly four years after his murder spree. Shortly before it began, Danny pleaded guilty to all charges. So it went directly into the penalty phase of the trial. On April 20, 1994, Daniel Rolling was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection on October 25, 2006. Ladbible, Wikipedia, wattpad.com, allthatsinteresting.com, criminalminds.fandom.com, biography.com