Читать книгу The World's Most Bizarre Murders - James Marrison - Страница 14

In his quest for fame at any price and possessed by an evil spirit he called Gemini, Danny Rolling slaughtered his way into infamy during a three-day murder binge on a university campus. Sixteen years later, he died singing at his own execution.

At 6 p.m. on 25 October 2006, Danny Rolling became the 63rd prisoner to be executed in Florida since the state reintroduced the death penalty in 1979. Rolling had turned to God during his last years on Death Row, but there were no pleas for forgiveness from the relatives of his victims who had come to watch him die.

During his final moments, Rolling, who’d once broken into song during his murder trial, stunned onlookers by crooning a hymn he’d composed himself. As the sodium penthonal, the first of the three fatal injections, began to take hold, he kept singing the line, ‘None greater than Thee, oh Lord.’ Thirteen minutes later, he was dead.

Sadist, murderer, rapist and necrophiliac, Rolling will go down in history as one of America’s most savage and unrepentant killers of all time – which is exactly what he wanted. He had craved fame and wallowed in his celebrity status while awaiting execution on Death Row; indeed, by sentencing him to death the judicial system had played right into his hands.

‘It’s true that Rolling was guilty of terrible crimes,’ David Elliot, Communications Director for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, told me. ‘It’s equally true that, as the years wore on after the killings, the memory of his victims faded in the public’s mind. So, when it came to the execution, Florida residents knew Rolling’s name, but not the names of his victims. That’s one thing wrong with the death penalty – the names of the victims are forgotten while the criminals become rock stars.’

In the end, it was a quick and painless death for Rolling, who had eaten every crumb of his last meal: lobster tail and strawberry cheesecake. He would undoubtedly be happy to know a film is now being made about his life.

Josh Townsend’s The Gainesville Ripper recounts three days when terror struck the town of Gainesville, Florida, and the 33-year-old director vividly recalls what it was like when Rolling embarked on his murder spree. ‘I have lived through it all,’ Townsend says. ‘I’m from Gainesville – it’s my hometown. I was born here. I was in tenth grade when he killed those five students, the weekend before school started. I remember it all like yesterday. There was a mass exodus of students and you weren’t even able to make a simple phone call because so many parents were desperately calling to check up on their kids.

‘While the killings were happening, local stores ran out of pepper spray and all the gun shops ran out. Everyone had a weapon of some sort. But the weirdest thing is that every rumour we heard – like the one about the murderer severing Christa Hoyt’s head and leaving it on a shelf – turned out to be true. It’s such a small college town that news travelled quickly.’

On 24 August 1990, first-year students Sonya Larson (aged 18) and Christina Powell (aged 17) moved into their new apartment in the university town of Gainesville, Florida. Their apartment was on the second floor of a four-floor building in the Williamsburg Village, a cosy cul-de-sac with a view of the nearby woods. Larson was a science and pre-engineering major and Powell was studying architecture. They were just two of the thousands of students fast filling up the town.

The two girls were unaware of the fact that, while they were busy shopping in Wal-Mart, they had caught the attention of deranged drifter Danny Rolling (then aged 36), who was shoplifting at the store. Rolling had arrived a few days before and had set up camp in the nearby woods. Six foot two and powerfully built with brown hair and hazel eyes, Rolling was already a hardened criminal who had spent much of the last ten years of his life in jail, with previous convictions in three separate states for armed robbery. Rolling had sworn to himself that he would kill eight people – later, he stated this was part of a pact he had made with Lucifer: eight souls for every year he’d done in prison. So far he had killed three.

Rolling hadn’t been to college and had very little in common with all the students preparing for the upcoming semester. His father, a policeman, had beaten him literally before he could even walk and the constant physical abuse had continued all the way through Rolling’s teenage years. By the time he arrived in Gainesville, Rolling was an alcoholic with a long criminal record and a failed marriage behind him.

He blamed his list of failures on what he claimed was his violent treatment as a child and his anger at this had spilled over into violence only a few weeks before, when Rolling had shot his father twice, nearly killing him. He was now on the run from his hometown Shreveport, Louisiana, and had finally ended up in Gainesville.

Mental illness ran in his family and, by the time he arrived in Gainesville on a Greyhound bus, Rolling had become convinced that he was in the grip of demonic possession. On the way, he had robbed two supermarkets, burgled a handful of houses, stolen a car and raped a woman at knifepoint in her own home.

Rolling followed Sonya and Christina as they left the shop to their home, returned to his tent in the woods and then waited until the sun dipped beyond the darkening trees. He killed time by playing his guitar and singing county and western songs. He also spoke to himself incessantly and recorded his obscure ramblings into a tape cassette recorder. During part of the tape, Rolling left a message for his brother, Kevin, about how it was important when bow hunting deer to ‘aim for the lungs straight through the rib cage’. He also left a message for his father: ‘Well, Dad, I hope you’re doing better. You know, it’s probable you don’t even wanna hear from me. Well, you know, Pop, I don’t think you was really concerned about the way I felt anyway. Nope, I really don’t. You never would take time to listen to me, never cared about what I thought or felt. I never had a daddy that I could go to and confide in with my problems. You just pushed me away at a young age, Pops. I guess you and I both missed out on a lot. I wanted to make you proud of me. I let you down. I’m sorry for that. Maybe, in the hereafter, perhaps you’ll understand this. I’m going to sign off now. There’s something I got to do.’

Rolling stole a bike from outside a trailer park and headed back to the girls’ apartment. He then watched them from the edge of the woods until they went to bed at around midnight. At 3.30 a.m., he climbed the outside stairs.

Rolling later wrote an account of that night in a book called The Making of a Serial Killer, which he co-authored with the help of true-crime writer Sondra London, whom he later proposed to in jail (see Chapter Nineteen: Serial-killer Groupies). According to the book, on the night of the murder Rolling found himself possessed by a malignant spirit, which he called Gemini, an ‘evil puppet master born long ago in a sewage-filled cell in a Mississippi prison’. His account is written in the third person, and begins when he arrives in Gainesville on a Greyhound bus.

‘The Grim Reaper,’ runs the text, ‘came calling on the little college town, not on the wings of some terrible strange bird but on the conventional wheels of man’s invention. The silver and black Greyhound swung into the station like a rolling coffin. A fugitive from justice stepped lightly off, carrying a navy-blue sports bag filled with tomorrow’s pain.’

Standing on the doorstep of the girls’ apartment, Rolling tried to prise the wooden door frame open with a screwdriver, but it wouldn’t budge. So he called upon Gemini for assistance. Gemini, according to Rolling’s account, promptly obliged. When he tried the door handle, he now found that the door was unlocked.

Wearing a black ski mask, black clothes and gloves, Rolling was equipped with an automatic pistol and a military-style K Bar knife. He saw Christina Powell who was sleeping on the downstairs sofa but he moved past her out of the living room and through the hall and up the stairs. There he pushed open the door leading to Sonya Larson’s room. She was asleep; her room was full of unpacked boxes.

In less than a minute, he had covered Sonya’s mouth with duct tape and stabbed her to death. As she died, Rolling promised her that he would come back for her later. These were in all likelihood the last words she ever heard. (The neighbours would later recall how they’d heard George Michael’s ‘Faith’ playing loudly at around that time, accompanied by bangs, and had assumed the girls were hanging pictures on the walls.)

Rolling then went downstairs where Powell was still fast asleep; he raped and killed her then returned upstairs to Larson. He tore off her clothes, spread her legs wide open on the bed and put her arms over her head. But she was ‘too bloody to rape’, in his words, so he went back downstairs and had sex with Powell’s corpse instead, chewing on her breasts like ‘a mad dog gnaws a bone’. That finished, he went and helped himself to some of the contents of the fridge.

Rolling claimed that the next thing he knew it was eleven o’clock the following morning and he was riding his bike. Suddenly, he felt the urge to check his bag. In it he found a clear plastic sandwich bag containing one of Christina Powell’s nipples. He couldn’t remember taking it and he threw it in the gutter.

In the next 48 hours, Rolling would kill three more people, all of them students. Their bodies would be found within hours of each other, creating utter panic in the small university town. Nine hours after police officers discovered the corpses of Powell and Larson, they were called to another apartment just nine miles away where they discovered the mutilated body of 19-year-old Christa Hoyt. This time, the attack was even more frenzied. In a rage, he cut off her head and placed it on the bookshelf at eye level in her bedroom. After slicing off her nipples, which he laid on the bed beside her, he carefully propped up her body on the bed and bent her over at the waist. He then ‘gutted’ her by cutting her open from her chest to her pubic bone. He later said that Hoyt reminded him of his estranged wife and mother to his child, Omatha Ann Halko.

The first victims had been found on Sunday. By Tuesday afternoon, police had discovered Christa’s body. Later that day police, also discovered two more bodies, those of roommates Tracey Paules and Manuel Taboada. Rolling had overpowered Manuel while he slept, then raped and murdered Tracey Paules before posing her nude body in a doorway.

Within 48 hours, Rolling had killed five students. There was panic in the small university town. Many students fled the campus for good and nobody in Gainesville slept alone. ‘I’m scared to death,’ one female student told a local news crew at the time. ‘I think someone’s going to jump through my window.’

After his Gainesville killing spree, Rolling fled to Tampa in a stolen car. Now in the grip of another demon – this time a freewheeling, gun-toting outlaw Rolling named Jesse Lang – he embarked on a series of robberies. However, he was soon arrested while trying to hold up a supermarket, less than two weeks after the first murder. To begin with, Rolling was just another bank robber awaiting trial, not a suspect in one of the widest murder hunts in US history. But police were already beginning to feel he might be tied to a triple murder committed ten months earlier in Shreveport, Louisiana, Rolling’s hometown.

On 4 November 1989, at around 6 p.m., someone had broken into the Grissom family home and stabbed Tom Grissom, his daughter Julie and her eight-year-old son Sean to death. The killer had used duct tape, which he later removed, and raped Julie before killing her. He’d then arranged her carefully on the bed with her legs parted in a sexually provocative manner, before fanning her hair lovingly on the pillow. Rolling had been seen by many witnesses in the town on the day of the murder, and the similarities between the manner in which Julie Grissom had been posed and the way the corpses had been arranged in the recent Gainesville slayings were too much to ignore.

When Rolling went to the prison dentist, investigators were able to get a sample of his DNA, which matched that in traces of semen found in three of the Gainesville slayings. But, despite the compelling evidence against him, Rolling initially denied all the charges – it turned out that, despite the frenzied nature of his attacks, he’d actually been fairly careful. He had removed all the pieces of duct tape from his victims, save one, and carefully scrubbed two of his Gainesville victims with detergent. However, in addition to the DNA evidence, police had found Rolling’s tent in the woods, and with it his homemade cassettes, the screwdriver he’d used to try to break into Larson and Powell’s apartment, and a pair of jeans stained with Manuel Taboada’s blood.

Despite his predicament, Rolling could not resist boasting of his exploits to his fellow prisoners. Apart from his desire to kill eight people to represent his time spent in jail, he also craved fame. He was, he told his cellmates, in reality a country and western singer but that career had failed so the only way he could think to achieve celebrity status was to rape and murder his way to notoriety. His stunned cellmates were quick to rat him out to authorities. One even appeared at his trial and testified against him. ‘He was trying to terrorise the city of Gainesville. He was trying to make himself infamous or famous. He wanted to be a superstar amongst criminals,’ fellow Death Row inmate Bobby Lewis testified during Rolling’s trial.

Exhibit 172 A in the evidence presented against Rolling was a poem that he had written, called ‘Gemini’:

The moan… the groan…

The silver moon shown…

The whisper… the cry…

Dead leaves fly…

Through the haze it sweeps your fears…

Then… it appears…

Your nightmare come to life…

A maniac… with a knife… The man… the groan…

The silver moon shown…

The whisper… the cry…

Dead leaves fly…

Tonight… in the arms of Gemini…

A captured butterfly will die…

Burned red with fever…

Then turned gold forever…

Forever my dear…

No more pain… no more fear…

Close your eyes my dear…

And sleep…

The moan… the groan…

The silver moon shown…

The whisper…

The whisper… the cry…

Into the night comes Gemini…

And tonight… You die…

The crime scenes were so shocking that many photos had to be censored at the trial in case they prejudiced the court. ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ Rolling was heard to whisper at one point, but overall he seemed resigned to his fate.

Faced with the evidence against him, Rolling confessed to investigators in January 1993. On the eve of his trial, he told Circuit Judge Stan R Morris, ‘I’ve been running from first one thing and then another all my life. Whether from problems at home or with the law or from myself. But there are some things you just can’t run from – this being one of them.’ He pleaded guilty.

The jury unanimously recommended the death sentence. Judge Morris agreed. However, like many killers in the United States, Rolling had a long wait between his sentencing and his actual execution. Twelve years, in fact, to relish his role as a Death Row celeb. During that time, he wrote and published his memoirs, got engaged and fielded off other offers of marriage from the hordes of serial-killer groupies vying for his attention. As well as becoming a published author, he also became a commercially successful artist. That said, Rolling made no money from the sales of his book The Making of a Serial Killer. This was because the State of Florida won a court case against Rolling and his co-author London, which ruled that neither should be able to earn any royalties from the book under the Florida version of the ‘Son of Sam Law’, a law that was passed in 1977 in New York. The ‘Son of Sam Law’ rules that killers may not financially benefit by selling their stories to the press and thereby profit from the notoriety of their crimes.

The ‘Son of Sam Law’ came about after the conviction of David Richard Berkowitz in 1977. Berkowitz was found guilty of six murders and seven woundings after a one-year-long killing spree in which he shot his victims with a 44-calibre handgun.

In notes he sent to the press and one note he left at one of the crime scenes, he referred to himself as the ‘Son of Sam’. The reference was to his neighbour’s dog. His neighbour was called Mr Sam Carr and Berkowitz claimed Mr Sam Carr’s dog was possessed by the devil and was ordering him to kill. Hence the name ‘Son of Sam’.

The ‘Son of Sam Law’ was put into place to stop Berkowitz from signing a book deal amid press speculation at the time that he was about to sell his life story to a publisher for a huge fee.

The law has yet to be applied to serial-killer collector websites and Rolling certainly cashed in on his notoriety in order to sell his paintings. In fact, his artwork is still today avidly collected the world over by serial-killer art collectors. One of the collector websites I contacted told me that a Rolling sketch sold recently for over $1,000.

Finally, after Rolling’s last-ditch appeal – which argued that execution by lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment – was deemed without merit by a Florida Supreme Court, Danny Rolling’s execution date was set. He had been on Death Row since 20 April 1994, but in October 2006 Rolling finally went to his well-deserved death. Singing all the way.