Warning: Graphic content, readers’ discretion advised. This story contains a recollection of crime and can be triggering to some readers discretion advised.

Florida 1919

on the  23rd of August  students christina powell and sonia larson preparing to start their freshman year at the university of  florida.

but in less  than 24 hours,they  would both be dead.brutally murdered bya 36 yeald old vagrant named danny rolling.this is a person who volcanically erupted behaviorally the hatred , the paranoia,the psychosis  just unleashed itself upon the workd.

Rolling’s passion for killing grew,his  victims were bound ,stabbed and mutilated , some hade been savagely raped. his capacity for violence and his  appetite for violence was more than anyone had ever encountered.

A ewign of terror had been unleashed , a serial killer the press dubbed the  Gainesville Ripper was on  the loose ,danny  rolling was taking the lives of innocent victims all over the town , making him one of the world’s most evil killers.

Gainesville  a university city in  Inland florida , it was here that 36 year old drifter danny rolling  five students in just four days.

the city was shaken to its core by t he murders and  when rolling was arrested for armed robbery on 7 th of september ,1990 the police had no idea they had a serial killer in custody.

Retired FBI special agent kenneth R porter  worked on the investigation into the  Gainsville  College  killings.

” he brought a dark cloud of fear and terror amongst  the whole community of Giansville ,florida   for at least two or three months, where people were just  afraid to go out , afraid to open their doors, afraid of the dark”

– Ken Porter

In that brief spree of killings  in August 1990 ,Rolling effectively terrorized an entire community  he reduced the community to a sense that no one and no women in particular was safe, that there was a madman on the loose, which indeed there was .

rolling’s  victims whould have had the most horrendous time during their ordeals ,because ,here’s somebody that they don’t know , hwo’s coming into their home,which is their place of sanctuary and attacking them in the most brutal way , it really  is terror of  an  unimaginable degree.

former state  attorney Rod Smith had never encountered  a case featuring such depravity

” I have neno way to measure comparative evil but certainly he was a guy whose crimes were for this community and and this part of the world were among the  most tragic and horrific”

-Rod smith

 

Danny  rolling

This killer’s story begins in 1954, Danny Howel Rolling was born in shreveport Louisiana on may 26th, his 20 year old mother ,fell pregnant almost immediately after the couple married  much to his father’s disgust.

 danny rolling was a son of a policeman, but he wasn’t  a very compassionate policeman , in fact he was a violent  and abusisive father , for the  rest of danny’s life his father would refer to him as an accident  that should never  have happened ,he had a violent temper and almost anything young danny did was able to ignite it .

if  he didn’t breath properly,he was beaten by his father,that the slightest thing would set him off and  if we look at that now we’d call that coercive control , we call that kind of behavior that  is designed to chip away at somebody’s self- esteem ,that really  does destroy someone’s identity.

Time after time througout his childhood ,rolling was told by his supremely arrogant father that he was useless ,he was a useless piece of work and  never would  amount  to anything.

fifteen months later rolling’s  mother  would fall pregnant again and gave birth to her second son , she would continually try to  protect the two boys from their father’s destructive influence.

His mother flees several times, taking him and his younger  brother, they get away from his abusive domineering father,but she soon goes back to the home , so you’ve got this constant shewing and throwing this  constant state  of upheaval and this creates an environment that isn’t safe ,that isn’t secure. 

To add  to rolling’s insecurity his mother is only form of stability was struggling  with mental health issues,despite him  needing  her she wasn’t always around, still a young child rollings existence became a solitary one  he would hide in the woods or wander the neighborhood to escape the constant abuse from his father.

He would go  out at nightwhen his parents  didn’t know about it and he would look  through the windows of the neighbor’s home’s and he’d see them around the kitchen table, around the dinner table, a happy  families all together and he’s got that building resentment, ” why have these people got this when i haven’t  what’s wrong with me?”  and   that’s something that continues to bubble away in the back background.

rolling yearned for a normal family the kind  ofhome life that everyone else appeared to have , the suffering  at the hands of his father coupled with his mother’s mental instability sent him on a downward spiral.

 the impact  this had on quite a  suggestible child  was severe no, i’m not suggesting  for a second that rolling’s father made rolling  to a  serial killer , but there was no doubt at all there was very great deal of animosity between father and son.

as a teenager rolling continued to escape his  home life, he spent even more time  wandering the neighborhood and around the age of 13 his innocent childhood pastime of watching families became sexually motivated

Rolling had a habit of stalking people and he would  watch them and that voyeurism that  had developed during his early years when he looked  through the windows of the happy families in his neighborhood and had that simmering  resentment turned into something else.it turned into something  quite sinister.

Rolling took a particular interest in watching young women ,he was caught several times and began  to get a reputation as  a peeping Tom. his life had now started on a  destructive path of crime.it was  that classic serial  killer pattern.petty crime, small  offenses, gradually escalating into greater and greater offenses.

by now he´d started drinking heavily , in 1971, age 16, a drunk  rolling had a fight with his father and he was locked up for two weeks  in a juvenile detention center.

in effort to escape his abusive home,rolling then droppedout of high school and joined the Air Force and what he’s essentially doing here  is looking for some structure he’s looking fota sense of belonging,this is somebody who’s always felt  rejected who’s always felt excluded

and for many people who joined the military it’s a family to them. It’s rules its structure it’s routine, it’s a way of life , rolling thrived in the military

but  his drinking evolved to substance abuse and led to eary  discharge .after barely a year’s service  he retunred  to the home in Shreveport desperately tried to escape nevertheless rolling   appeared to turn his life around

he started  attending the United pentecostal church where he met a young women in the congregation ,it was love at first sight

and in 1974 when danny was just 20 the couple married a year later they welcome a baby daughter.when he was first married  , he was very religious guy in a kind of hyper – religious area out of  shreveport, went to a pentecostal church had a very black and white view of the world of the ongoing battle between good and evil.

Things look like they might  be on the up for him but he´s still drinking,he’s unemployed he’s not  the kind of man that he think he should be.

1977

after  just three years of marriage Rollings  wife filed for  divorce. the 23 year old was devestated by her rejection and this  is something  that  he does move beyoind ,the very fact that his wife is the person that chooses to end their relationship  she’s taken  the control away from him  so we’re  just adding to these resentments all of the time

at around his wife left him rolling was working  in a local bakery, he had an accident with a bread  slicing machine and lost part of his finger ,it seamed  everything was going wtrong for danny rolling.

he stole  his father’s gun and embarked on a series of armed robberies across Mississipi Alabama and  Georgia but he was soon arrested.

1989

after spending a total of eight years  behind bars , Rolling find himself once again back in the family home in Shreveport. Avare  that he doesn’t amount to anything  and only too conscious of his father’s horrors at his uselessness  he’s 25 years old  virtuallly  amounted to nothing until now.

Rowling decides to prove that he does do something and chooses to kill . danny rolling  grown up  thinking he was worthless he’d failed  at high schoo,l in his military career and  in marriage  .

in 1989 at age 34  he found work  at a resturant in his hometowmn of Shrevereport ,Louisina. but  even this resulted in failure on. on November the 4th   he was fired for missing  his shift.

Rolling claimed his boss had changed ther roster without  telling him and was  aggrieved  at his wrongful dismissal.

Rolling is somebody who  refer to as a grievance collector so throughout his life he’s harboring all of these resentments ,there are various events where the heat is turned up and the significant one is when he loses his job at local resturant.

now usually he would take this fairly quietly and hie´d  internalize his trauma and that resentment would bublle away ,but on this occasion he externalizes, he treatens  his manager, he shouts at him you see this rage begin to come out and this is the day of his first  killing.

Enraged by his  mistreatment at work, that night rolling took his sinister hobby of stalking to a whole new  level, a deadly one .

he´d grown  infatuated with  a 24  yrar old department store worker named Julie Grissom.He had decided that he wanted her  essentially , so he followed her home and spied on her , he saw her with her family ,which included her father  Tom and Tom’s grandson Sean and he’s got this vision of this perfect family in front  of him again ,so he’s thinking ,” why have these people people got this when i haven’t got it”

 The backdoor of the hosue was unclocked , armed with a knife  , rolling let himself in and  begins a violent  attack on the whole family brutally  stabbing all of them.and  on that evening he  kills julie , he rapes her , he assaults her  ,he also kills Tom , he kills sean as well, do he  wipes out three generations of an  entire family .

but it was the attack on eight  year old sean that that was  particularly horrific. sean  was stabbed with such  force that  knife  went all the way through him and stuck  in the ground that is the sort of extreme level of violence that even  his forensic pathologist has rarely seen, it really tells you something about  what the person is thinking when he commits that murder .

After raping and killing sean’s aunt julie ,rolling carefully cleaned  her and put her dirty clothesin the washing machine  and posed her body  provocatively .rowling saw this as vindication that he amounted to something, that this was his handiwork, this  was something he was good at

rolling fled two days later , a neighbor discovered the gruesome murder scene, the small town of shreveport was in shock , Rolling had a secret that nobody else knew , for the first time he´d succeeded  at something , he had been in control and he liked it.

six months later rolling had yet another altercation with his father. shreveport murders gave rolling the courage to confront the man who’d humiliated him , emasculated him over years, he gets into a  full scale drag out fight with this police officer father.it is so severe  that rolling shoots his father and indeed his father loses one yee and a ear in the fight.

Empowered by confronting hos nemesis and seemingly getting away with  Grissom family murders it was time for a newly confient  rolling to move on . 

 in may 1990

the 36 year old left his home in shreveport for the last time and  headed for the university city of Gainsville , florida to feed his newfound appetite, the killing.

Many people asked  why did rolling’s target a college town.what was so special about it taht drew him  to that place and that’s was because it symbolized the very thing that he resented, ypung people, successful, people, people who had opportunities and he is just a potter simmering resentments and it”s no suprise that he takes it out  on people who he wants to  be like , people  who he feels envious of.

Our route to Gainsville rolling’s trip included a stop in florida state capitol Tallahassee .he got off  of  the bus station in tallahassee and clearly had already made plans as to what  he was going to do he bought a K-bar Knife there , at an army navy store right there by te bus station 

armed woth  his k-bar – combat knife,once he arrived in Gainsville rolling set up a makeshift camp in the woods. he was a vagrant a bum if you like.but he had a perpase and his purpose was a very particular kind of victim.

danny primarily targeted young women, always young brunettes like his former wife had been  by the fact that for  the most part his victims were of a type.

On the 23rd of august 1990 , roommates christina powel and sonia  larson were preparing for  the beginning of the fall semester  at the iuniversity of florida. they’re 17 and 18 years old their freshman ,this is the st art of an exciting period in their lives.

someone else was enjoying their excitement too that evening they caught the attention of danny rolling and he’s watching them through the window,he can see them ,giggling along together, having a  nice time washing the dishes , you can  just imagine the kind of conversations, they’re having about the things they’re excited about at the university.

Rolling has been watching them, in fact he’s probably spent the best part of the night outside in the voods just behind the apartment block in the early hours he breaks in .he used very specific equipment , a screwdriver to get in through a sliding door that most of these girls had

and a k-bar knife which he also  used.those two elements were his signature. rolling found christina asleep  on the  couch downstairs and sonia in bed upstairs.

so ,he’s  decided that christina is the one that he wants , so he get’s sonja  out of the way first . he leaves christina powell asleep on the couch and creeps upstairs and  attacks sonia larson while she was asleep , he puts duct tape over her mouth to prevent her  screaming and also of course to prevent her waking up christina who’s asleep  downstairs.

Rolling stabs sonja repeatedly until she was dead  he then  made his way back downstairs to  christina who was still asleep on the couch. he puts duct tape over  her mouth to prevent her screaming, tapes her hands behind her back and proceeds to cut off her  clothes and under clothes and rape her with a knife  to he throat. 

he then turns   it onto her face  and stabs her five  times in the back.it’s an act  of the most grotesque wickedness.

as with his first femal victim julie in shreveport ,rolling washed and posed his victims .by posing the body has to do  with his last vision of the body , he can’t  take a photograph, too dangerous. so what he does is his  sexual  conquest , and remember  this women was a sexual conquest a matter of moments ago , he cleans her up because there’s nothing arousing or exciting about her as a bloody body  ,cleans her up,poses  her and at that moment the flash camera of his brain takes one last look before leaving.

Barley a day later  on august the 25th , rolling broke  into home of his next victim 18 year old christa hoyt was a community college student and a part -time  overnight clock at the local sheriff’s office once  again he broke in through a sliding door  ,using a scredriver, once again he was carrying his cable  knife,once again he was targeting an innocent  student, who had her whole life in front of her .

This time however christa hoyt wasn’t at home when he broke in, rolling patiently waited for his   victim to return when christa  arrived at around 11 AM he was ready. he starts with a choke hold he renders her unconscious he then binds her wrists ,he  gags her, cuts her clothes offf after she’s taped,has sex with her ,kills her by stabbing her in the back,actually punctures her aorta which is virtually instant death.

but  what he´s done after she dies  shows a development in his technique so he not only  poses her in a provocative position ,he actually beheaded her and places her head in  such a way that she is looking at her own mutilated posed body .

sometimes if people are psychotic they have some delusion about the  head,it’s almost as if they’re afraid that killing them didn’t kill them,removing the head and being able to look at the head detached from the body is  a complete reassurance that  the person is really dead.

through the violent murder of christa hoyt it seemed rolling was also settling old scores from his past .many people who have observed that  christa  bore quite a  resemblance to rowling’s  ex-wife the woman who had rejected him and it’s no suprise that this was possibly the most  violence of his murders,  the one where the most rage was expressed

the  residents of Gainesville were  blissfully unaware that a killer was on the loose , the town’s students were full of hope and excitement at the  start of the new college year.

danny  rolling had killed and mutilated three femal students in less  than 28 hours

the parents of rolling’s first victims in Gainsville christina and sonia were becoming concerned at not being able to contact their daughters.

at 4 pm  on sunday the 26th of august two days after they were  killed, police entered  their apartment and discovered the horrifying truth behind their silence ,just hours later rolling’s third victim christa  had failed to turn up for work.

christa hoyt worked at the local county sheriff’s office and she was  very reliable employee, she was never  late for work  ,it was completely out of  character for her  not to turn up on time.

so when she didn’t show up for her shift ,which began at midnight ,two officers went to her home to see what was going on and they came across the most horrendous scene.

The Gainsville Community was learning that some of their students  had been butchered overnight it had gone from a serene college town to a place where its residents cowered behind closed doors  in fear for their lives.

but danny rolling’s killing spree wasn’t over,on the same day officers discovered his latest victim-rolling had broken into another apartment,

his next chosen victim was 23 year old Tracy Paules.

he knows that she lives in an  apartment  , not  far from where his den is hide in the woods. by then people were alerted that something was going on ,because  the detectives have a tape  redording of Tracy and it’s a phone  recording in which she basically telling someone else , that she is uncomfortable and she said  if manuel doesn’t show up  pretty soon , i’m leavind

Manuel ” manny”

and  manual was working that evening and manny came home  ,when  he came home the feeling was   that all was safer and more normal . manny or manual Taboada was  Tracy’s  college roommate.unanware that Tracy had company,Rolling followed his usual plan of  attack  breaking in through the sliding door with a screwdriver armed with his k- bar knife and a gun  but this time he was in for a suprise, danny didn’t realize that manuel had come home .

so he thought  he was going into an apartment that had  one or two women in it . manuel was not the target. but when he checked ther room he found  manuel and actually when  he stabbed manuel  , manuel came alive and fought him for  a sustained period of time. hearing manuel screams tracy awoke and went to investigate,she was greeted with the most horrific scene , terrified she raced  down the  corridor and locked her  herself in  her room.

and now , all that stands between Tracy and danny rolling is a flimsy bedroom door,

he literally bursts through it ,breaks it down , Tracy was now at the mercy of a killer.Rolling tapedher mouth ,taped  her hands  behind her back, as he´d done to his other victims, cut off her t-shirt and raped her ,once again  he turned  her onto her face and stabbed her three times in the  back ,killing her .once again ,he cleaned and posed the  body,this was a killing spree, a spree aimed at to some extent and cleansing him  of the feeling that he was worthless.

The repetition in his crimes was all of rolling’s design, he wanted to leave  behind a signature so the world would know he had finally succeeded in something . by now police had discovered three of his victims the entire city was in tumoil

kenneth porter  was an FBI agent at the time and was part of  a task force  assigned to to investigate the multiple killings.

The task force had immediately identified similarities between the crimes..  rolling appeared  to be looking for young college -aged females with brunette hair of  a small petite build , that was the profile of the  three victims that had been discovered .

on the very day  that Gainesville learned they had a serial killer  on the loose, rolling committed  armed robbery at the local branch of the first Union Bank. it heightened  the fear felt amongst the community.

the next morning on Tuesday the 28th of august , the bodies of  manuel and tracy were  discovered.tracy fit the profile of the previous female victims she was a young female college student,kind of petite and build  brunette hair, she was  also killed in the same manner as  the other three.

with a knife , stab wounds mutilated body and immediately everybody knew that it was the same  killer , the people of Gainesville were now terrified with a body count  rising day  by day anyone could be  next ,the  authorities were determined to catch this monster  before he struck again.

The campsite where Danny Rolling fled after robbing a bank on the day that Christa Hoyt was murdered. Authorities found a duffel bag with red-dyed money in it, a screwdriver and a cassette tape and player.Courtesy of the Alachua County Sherriff’s Office

During their investigations into the murders and the armed bank robbery, police came across two men acting suspiciously. so this two officers followed them  into  the woods , they came upon a campsite that had been carved out of , of this densely wooded area near the university campus.Unbeknownst to the officer’s one of thesee men was danny rolling.

Police saw rolling and a drug dealer, friend of his at the campsite  ,when rolling clocked  that tje police were  watching him he fled , he just left,rolling’s drug dealer was apprehended but  the killer himself  had slipped into the night ,they look around the campsite and they notice there’s a camping tent set up there and they noticed a few things inside this tent.

they saw this money that was covered  inthis pink reddish die  and they  knew right away ” oh this might be the proceeds or evidence from the bank robbery  .they also found  a gun that matched  the description of th handgun that was used in the bank robbery.

but there were also some other items which were quite perplexing so there were a ski mask, a pair  of trousers ,there were some pubic hair and they didn’t make the connection at the time between the murders and the items at this campsite ,but they did  back them up and they were to prove  incredibly valuable when the pieces were put together.with  an entire town under the glare of the national  media spotlight the FBI  were under pressure to find the killer

Edward humphrey

on the 30th amid the panic and chaos on campus, police identified a 19 year freshman with mental health issues as a suspect , edward humphrey lived in  the same apartment complex as the last two victims and had been outwardly aggressive to other students.

Two days after the final  murder ,he was involved in a physical battle with his grandmother which involved  in him hittingher and the police  arrested him. humphrey’s behavior was such that he was highly conspicuous  , he was loud , he was drunk ,he was off his medication ,he had brain injuries ,he was out of  control a lot, even in resturants humphrey’s hgrandmother didn´t want to press  charges

but the state  decided that in order  to keep their prime suspect in custody , they posted bail as an unachievable one million dollars and took DNA  samples from the suspect , hoping to conclusively link him with the college murders, he was under investigation quite heavily because a lot of evidence pointed  to him  as a possible  suspect.

word of that leaked out to the press so he became  a focus of the media as well as  a focus of the investigation. everybody was so desperate to solve what had happened here for a lot of reasons one of which is just a sense of security is that   Quote they got the guy.

Now  it seemed the police had the  serial killer and the prime suspect  for bank robbery, Rollings drug dealer friend both in custody ,despite the incriminating evidence that the campsites  the FBI  weren’t convinced  this was  their man  ,for some  reason detectives just felt that this was  not their bank robber  ,he seemed to detectives to be totally clueless how to rob a bank.

so over the next couple of days detectives  started conducting investigations to determine if this individual was infact the bank robber or not.

Meanwhile the FBI’s real killer and bank robber danny  rolling was still on the run, he stole a car ,he drove to Tampa, he committed three robberies including holding up a convenience store

on september the 2nd  and five days later

he tries to commit another robbery ,this time in a store , where he holds the manager to ransom and demands he opens the safe ,but unfortunately other peiple realize what’s happening ,the police  are called  and rolling is unable to escape  this time.

Rolling was finally taken into custody of  the waiting trial for the Ocala supermarket robbery .

but  in Gainsville  the investigation into  the student slayings had hit a dead end  DNA  had proven that prime suspect humphrey was not their killer.he found himself at the center of this investigation when police named him as a  potential suspect,but this was  a rabbit hole that weas going to lead nowhere and it really was a distraction

whithout another  suspect for the murders the investigation came to a standstill, the Gainsville Community had believed the perpetrator of these horrific killlings was safely locked up. It had given them a false sense of security ,but now they knew  the truth.

there was a serial  killer still at large.A  dark cloud of fear and panic hung over the Gainesville community once again. Serial killer  Danny Rolling had been arrested  for a grocery store robbery in nearby Ocala, but the investigations into Gainsville murders and bank robbery  he´d committed in the city was  still ongoing.

No link had been made between the crimes or to rolling, the serial number of the gun used in the bank robbery was traced to his registred owner  three hours south in the coastal City of Sarasota  so FBI  agents went to interview him.

so the guy told the story  of selling it to some vagrant,some guy  who was just passing through town,who wanted to buy  the gun,sold it  to him for  cash , and the agent asked him ” well,  was there anything that stood out about this guy , anything that you can remember that would help us identify who he was.”

Officers were told the gun had been sold to a vagrant who had a very distinctive attribute.detectives were in a task force meeting one morning  and one  of  the detective’s started recalling what this FBI agent had reported that the individual,the gun used in the bank had been sold to an individual who had a missing finger and one of the  florida departement of law enforcement agents stood up and says” holy shit”. and the hwole room falls silent.

and he proceeds to explain that during the crime  scene investigation of the first murders of christina powel and sonia larson.that they found , a piece of paper towel on the counter  in the kitchen on one side was was the imprint of a man’s penis as he were wiping himself off  after conducting  a sex act.

on the other side of the paper was a handprint with a finger missing.and it was at that point that everybody realized ,the bank robber is the murderer.problem is,detectives still didn’t know who that was.

once that connection had been made the crime lab began re- examining other exhibits from the woodland campsite in connection with the students murders.

among the elements of significance were a ski mask, whose fibers matched the duct tape found  at the third murder.tracy-paules

christa hoyts pubic hairs were found on rolling sleeping bag at the campsite.

Blood on a pair of his trousers was found to beManuel ” manny”.

 A screwdriver was found which matched the marks on the sliding doors by which he got into the apartments,

but the most significant perhaps of all was there was a series of audio tapes.in these disturbing recordings  rolling alluded  to the  horror that he was about to unleash.

 ” i know i have to learn the rewst of my life ,but i’m getting pretty good at it.i’m a big boy  i take care of myself, we’re all down here for just a breath anyway, well… i’m gonna sign off  for a little  bit .. i got something i gotta do”

-Danny rolling

As more   details of the Gainsville killings emerged.police in shreveport Louisiana realized that were  significant similarities between  these cases and the unsolved murders of the grissom  family

in 1989 , they suspected all eight homicides may be connected but the identity of this serial killer remained  a mystery, after a period of time  when  it became  evident that the murderer had either  left Florida or had been arrested  because no further murders had been committed that matched that Mo ,a decision was made to test  the DNA of all

inmates in Florida , who had been arrested between  like  a three or four month window ,anybody  hwo had been  arrested durring that time frame was going to have their DNA checked  against  the  DNA on  homicides.

Danny rolling was in jail pending the trial for  the armed robbery of the grocery store, so he was on the list to have  his DNA checked against the killers ,he also had a partially missing finger on his left hand.

they obtained his profile and they match,  and the’yve got their man.

on the 24th of january 1991  as a result of DNA testing ,Rolling became the prime suspect in the Gainsville student  murders.

Brian Jarvis

Brian Jarvis was a sergeant covering major crimes  in marion County  where  rolling was brought  in for questioning in connection with the murders

On september the 18th  1991 danny rolling was convictect for three  counts of  attempted armed robbery and two counts of aggravated assault on the law enforcement officer, he was jailed for life.

finally two months later rolling was  indicted  on  five counts of  first -degree murder for  attocitites in Gainsville

Rolling is indicted for the murders and he initially pleads not guilty but  he does begin to confess and he doesn’t do this in a standard traditional way where  he sits down with officers or prosecutors and tells them what happened, he actually speaks through a fellow inmates of his .

 once  the details of his crimes were revelaed through his fellow prisoner , rolling himself broke his silence and spoke to the investigtors,he blamed the  atrocities on a personality  disorder

” i have dealt with ,um different personalities  all my life one personality is a  gentleman named Ynnad who is a jesse james type. he ,well y’know , he´s…well  he´s not a goood person ,but he’s not really an evil person.”

-danny rolling

and then aonther one, the evil one that cause him to kill  ,Gemini was a personality  really  responsible.

” because i’m tell you guys, danny’s not that person ,i never wanted to come this  way,believe me, god is my judge , i never wanted to come this way.but i’m here and now i gotta live with this”

-danny rollings

 Rod Smith:”  Now in my view was not going to be about whether he’d found guilty but whether or nothe was going to be executed.

-former state attorney .eighth judical circuit court

With a potential death sentence now hanging over him rollings’s trial  was set for february the 15th 1994 in  Gainsville ,florida.  on the opening in court  the prosecutors was prepared for an insanity plea from Rolling but he was  to suprise everyone

sure enough he got up and he stepped forward and he adressed the court and he confessed to the crimes  and of course  the Outburst was the victims were stunned   there was even  some people  lile what does mean , did he just confess? it was shocking to everyone,rolling changed his plea to guilty on all five counts of murder  , three counts of sexual battery  and  three counts of armed burglary on march  the 24th the 12  jurors unanimously recommended the death penalty

Rod smith:”  i had no question in my mind that judge morris was going to give him death penalty i don’t think danny   had any doubt, i  doin’t think the defense team had any doubt

-former state attorney .eighth judical circuit court

on  20th of april 1994, 39  year old  rolling was sentenced  to death by judge stan morris and immediately sent  to Florida state  prison , his legal team began a process of appeals which would last over 12 years .

during onen of these hearings  Rod Smith got  the  opportunity to cross-examine rolling.

the very end the day before his executon his last apeoal was turned down , that  night of the eve  of  his death rolling suprised everybody again despite never admitting to the  1989  Grissom family murders in his home town of  shreveport he had another confesssion to make.

danny rolling :”hereby i make a formal written statement concerning the murders of julie ,tom  and sean Grissom.i and i alone am guilty  , it  was my hand that  took those precious lights out of this  old dark world”

On october the 25th 2006 in florida state prison justice for his victims was finally carried out .

at 6 pm,  danny  harold  rolling was executed by leathel injection. he was 52 years old .

More Details

Police noticed there were markings near the door that indicated a break-in. (Nine)

Tracy Paules had been dragged from her bedroom. (Nine)

Police found audio tapes with Danny Rolling’s recordings at this one-man campsite. (Nine)

DNA evidence left behind at the crime scenes would later help identify the supectCredit: Alachua County Sheriff’s Office

Each of the killings shared similar methods of murder and sexual componentsCredit: Alachua County Sheriff’s Office

A killer wouldn’t been identified for monthsCredit: Alachua County Sheriff’s Office

The Ripper used a screwdriver and knife to gain access to his victim’s homesCredit: Alachua County Sheriff’s Office

Rolling’s campsite behind the University of Florida is seen aboveCredit: Alachua County Sheriff’s Office

One victim is stretchered out of a home following the first double murder

Rolling’s crimes were the inspiration behind the Scream horror movie seriesCredit: AP

Officials with the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office display evidence from the Danny Rolling case for media to look at before the items are destroyed Wednesday, June 18, 2008.

DOUG FINGER/THE GAINESVILLE SUN

One of many knives collected in evidence. Investigators said that knives were turned in by residents, but none were linked to the killings. To this day the knife used in the murders has never been found.

DOUG FINGER/THE GAINESVILLE SUN