Her roommate, Larson, was found in her bedroom upstairs wearing only a T-shirt pulled up past her breasts, revealing multiple stab wounds to her arm, thigh and both of her breasts. Five knife wounds were tightly clustered just around the nipple of her right breast, and a deep slash was inflicted on her left breast. The interior of her right arm had been punctured with eleven wounds. All the wounds had been inflicted while she was alive. Her arms stretched upward past her head, while her legs extended off the end of the bed, spread apart with both feet touching the floor. There was a tight cluster of stab wounds around her right breast.1
From the traces of adhesive, police determined that both victims had been gagged and restrained with duct tape, but the tape was later removed by the killer. The type of knife used was identified by the distinct wounds made by its uniquely designed blood groove: a foot-long fighting knife issued by the US Marine Corps, known as the Ka-Bar and available at any sporting goods store. Its seven-inch clip-point blade was forged in “1095 Cro-Van” (chromium and vanadium) hypereutectoid carbon steel alloy that allowed its edge to be honed razor-sharp with a microscopically subtle “toothy” bite. The name “Ka-Bar” was adopted by the manufacturer in 1923 after they received a torn and crumpled letter from a fur trapper attesting to how he “killed a bear” with the knife with only “k a b ar” legible. It is a formidable killing knife and utility tool first issued to Marines in the Pacific in 1942 and is still in service today.
As horrific as this crime was, it hardly made a ripple in the press outside of Florida. A double-stabbing homicide was not particularly big news by the 1990s. Nonetheless, the killings were a haunting reminder of Ted Bundy’s murders of two college girls in a sorority house in Tallahassee, Florida, twelve years earlier.
Then on August 26, another student, eighteen-year-old Christa Hoyt, was found raped and murdered in her apartment. The killer had pried open a glass door while she was out and waited in the dark apartment for the victim to come home.
Hoyt was found on her bed, headless, sitting hunched forward midway between the foot of the bed and the headboard. Her hands drooped beside her thighs, which were spread wide apart. Her abdomen was cut open from her breastbone to her pubic bone, exposing her intestines, abdomen lining and colon. The cut demonstrated a hunter’s “dressing” skill in that it exposed the intestines but did not cut into them.
A single knife entry wound at her back traversed her body seven and a half inches through her aorta, heart, lung, exiting between her ribs through the tissue of her left breast. Her nipples were removed and tossed into the bedding next to her.
Her severed head was on a bookshelf that the killer had carried into the bedroom and carefully positioned to face the bedroom door. The head was cut off neatly, again demonstrating a hunter’s experience. Except for two small scratches on the cheek, her face appeared serene and her eyes were closed. The head was propped up by a wooden jewelry box and carefully positioned to be looking down at her own decapitated body and toward anybody entering the room.
Detectives immediately noted the presence of lividity on her back, a postmortem phenomenon where blood is drawn down by gravity and pools at the lowest points in a corpse, leaving a distinct purplish bruising. It helps police to determine whether a body has been moved or manipulated postmortem from its original position. Hoyt had to have been moved from her back into the sitting pose hours after her death. The ME would later note that had not rigor mortis set in, it would have been impossible to position her in that pose. Rigor mortis, the temporary stiffening of muscle due to chemical changes after death, begins approximately four hours after death and peaks at about thirteen hours. Was the perpetrator so brazen as to linger in the apartment so long?
Again the murder weapon was identified as a Ka-Bar, and traces of adhesive on the victim’s wrists and mouth indicated that she had been bound with duct tape.
Coming so quickly on the heels of the previous murders, the horrific murder garnered national press attention. And of course, there was now a moniker: the Gainesville Ripper.
University students are cocky and confident, and while the murders frightened them, at the same time they provided grist for collegiate humor—the campus was nicknamed “Murder U.” Daughters phoned home every night and morning, assuring their parents they had locked the doors and windows and survived the night. Young men suddenly found that young women were more willing to spend the night in their company. As it often is in cases like this, while the women trembled in fear, the men felt safe and secure.
All that changed on the morning of August 27, when the Gainesville Ripper forced open a locked aluminum door and slipped into an apartment platonically shared by a strong athletic male and a female, twenty-three-year-old Manny Taboada and Tracy Paules. Tracy had made a conscious choice to take a male roommate to feel safer.
Taboada was attacked as he slept in his bed but managed to struggle before he succumbed to a flurry of knife blows and slashes to his chest, abdomen and arms. His intestines protruded from a particularly deep and powerful knife wound in his abdomen. He was lying on his back on the bed in a pool of blood.
Awakened by the noise of the struggle, Tracy Paules must have attempted to lock her bedroom door. From the blood drops and bloody footprints, police surmised that the killer, covered in blood, kicked open her bedroom door. Paules had been anally and vaginally raped and then rolled over on her stomach and stabbed in the back three times. Liquid soap was found in her genitals. The killer dragged her body from the bedroom into the entry hallway, leaving behind a smeared trail of blood. She was placed with her legs open toward the front door, a folded towel propping up her buttocks, posed to shock whoever first entered the premises. This time, however, there was no gross mutilation: the blood was washed away from her face by the killer and her hair neatly rearranged. (Reminiscent of the victims of the 1940s serial killer William Heirens.) Profilers interpreted it as a sign of remorse.
Gainesville now resembled a disaster area as desperate parents drove cross-country to get their children and take them home. The streets of the student neighborhoods were jammed by columns of cars with hastily piled luggage tied to their roofs trying to make their way out of Gainesville through a gauntlet of network television news satellite trucks. By the Labor Day weekend on August 31, Gainesville was almost deserted of students. More than seven hundred students never returned to the university at all.
In September, the police and newspapers identified a suspect in their custody, a University of Florida freshman with a history of mental illness and behavioral issues who had recently been threatening to stab people. On August 30, he had been arrested when he assaulted his grandmother. He had a Ka-Bar in his possession, and when questioned by police, he admitted to the Gainesville murders. After his arrest, no further murders occurred. Relieved by the news of the arrest, students and parents calmed down. Several weeks later, disturbing news was announced: the suspect had been cleared and released. Despite the fact that the Gainesville Ripper had not been identified after all, the killings had ceased, and things returned to normal.
Judging by the washing of the last victim’s face instead of the signature mutilation, some profilers ventured that the Gainesville Ripper had come to the end of his cycle of murders—like Albert DeSalvo or Edmund Kemper had. Other investigators suspected he had committed suicide or otherwise died. The majority, however, believed that it was most likely the Gainesville Ripper was in custody on another charge. The police carefully inspected their arrest records for any recently detained criminals with a history of sex crimes. They found none that fit.
More than a year would pass before thirty-nine-year-old Danny Rolling was charged with the Gainesville murders. As police suspected, he was already in their custody, but his criminal record wasn’t typical of a serial sex murderer. Rolling, a boyishly attractive, intelligent man sporting designer-frame glasses, was in prison for a series of dramatic armed robberies, involving car chases
and shoot-outs with police, not the sexual offenses that serial killers often accrue. His preferred weapon was a handgun, not a knife. Rolling had been arrested in Ocala, some one hundred kilometers south of Gainesville, on September 7, 1990, ten days after the last of the murders in Gainesville. A few days earlier, in Tampa, he had robbed a store and exchanged gunfire with police before managing to escape in a high-speed chase. In Ocala, Rolling robbed a supermarket, was again chased by police but this time he crashed his stolen car. He fled on foot through an office building and out into a flea market, where he was finally boxed in and captured.
Since then he had been sitting in jail awaiting trial for the armed robberies.
“Don’t Ever Forget That My Grandfather Cut My Grandmother’s Throat While She Was Eating”
Danny Harold Rolling was born on May 26, 1954, in Shreveport, Louisiana, to Claudia and James Harold “Baby Dumpling” Rolling.2 James had recently returned from the Korean War, one of the most decorated servicemen in his home state. He joined the Shreveport Police, where he served twenty-one years. James was fucked-up long before he went to Korea. According to Danny and his mother, Claudia, when his father was five years old in 1936, he was sitting at the kitchen table with his maternal grandparents when his grandfather Robert Elmer “Elmo” Phelps got into an argument with Sarah, his wife of twenty-seven years and the mother of their nine children.3 As James watched, grandpa Elmer stood up from the table, picked up a butcher knife and slit Sarah’s throat at the table as she sat soaking her feet in a big pan of water.4 James would recall how the water turned red with her blood. Whether this was how James remembered it, or how he perhaps told and spun the story, we will never know for sure. According to the newspaper reports, Elmer stabbed Sarah in the heart with an ice pick and strangled her.5 No further details were reported. Elmer’s death sentence was commuted to life, and he was stabbed to death in prison in 1948. His grandson James, however, was never quite right after that.
There was madness in the family, according to Claudia’s testimony: “He has an uncle who laid down on the couch, put a shotgun in his mouth and pulled the trigger and blew his head off. He had another uncle that died in a mental institute. He has a brother that lives in California that is [sic] the only way he functions is on medication.”
Whatever disorder emerged in James after witnessing the murder of his grandmother, it worked for him in the Korean War, where he earned many decorations for killing North Koreans and Chinese, and it even worked in the Shreveport PD after he returned from the war; he successfully rose in police ranks to lieutenant. It didn’t work so well at home with his family. On at least one occasion, James woke in the middle of the night with a war “flashback” and nearly choked Claudia to death. She complained that he slept with a knife under his pillow.
In a sense, this is the quintessential genesis of so many serial killers: a violent heritage that passes from one generation to another, each crippling its young, leaving behind, at best, a crop of abused and maladjusted individuals, or at worst, a series of raped and dead murder victims.
Claudia became pregnant two weeks after their marriage. James did not want the child. It was a difficult pregnancy for Claudia right from the beginning. James was a violent, short-tempered husband who bullied, choked and pushed Claudia down a flight of stairs while she was pregnant.
Danny’s mother wrote to the court during his sentencing, “Danny was abused from the day he was born. My husband was jealous of him. He was told from the time he could understand that he would be dead or in jail before he reached the age of fifteen.”
Claudia’s sister recalled that James did not want to bring the baby home from the hospital and would kick him, the baby sliding halfway across the room. When she threatened to call authorities, James drew his police revolver and warned her off. Claudia recalled that James would hit the baby when it attempted to crawl: “He sat on his little backside and put one leg underneath and pushed with the other leg and James didn’t like that. To him I think it looked crippling or something, and with my husband, everything has to be perfect.”
A year later, a second son, Kevin, was born. James Rolling was violent and frighteningly moody—at one moment he could be friendly; at the next he could break out into vile rages. He had compulsive obsessions—a fear of germs that required that every member of the family wash their hands prior to entering the kitchen, that shoes be taken off and placed in a certain way when entering the house. Any breach in these strict rules was punished by vicious beatings, often with James’s heavy police-issue belt. He kicked their puppy to death when it soiled the floor. He forced them to come to the dinner table blindfolded or made them walk around with paper bags or pots over their heads as punishment. He handcuffed his sons to kitchen chairs. He whipped Kevin so hard that he wet himself.
Perfection was expected of the children. When Danny was ten and Kevin nine, James decided it was time for them to learn how to drive a car. Their feet could not reach the pedals, but that did not stop James from screaming at and hitting his sons when they failed to start the car as he instructed.
James Harold controlled every aspect of his sons’ lives: until they were sixteen, they were not allowed to date or choose the clothing they wore. He strictly supervised their haircuts, and they were prohibited from sitting on the couch in the living room—they might infect it with germs from the outside.
Danny was a witness to extraordinary violent fights between his mother and father, with the father on several occasions threatening to shoot his mother with his revolver or cut her with a knife. Once, James pointed a handgun at his wife and said, “Don’t ever forget that my grandfather cut my grandmother’s throat while she was eating.”
Gemini
Around the age of thirteen or fourteen, Danny Rolling began window-peeping, an obsession that stayed with him all his life. Danny was caught several times by neighbors, which was humiliating to James, and he beat Danny mercilessly. Danny developed a reputation as a window-peeper in the neighborhood and at school, and girls laughed at him. Rolling would write:
Voyeurism for me began as a mere curiosity. The female form was a beautiful mystery and very exciting to look on. At the first stage of adolescence, I made the connection by peering in windows and masturbating while watching lovely ladies do their thing. Eventually, the pretty butterfly that fluttered across my genitals metamorphosed into a dominant beast of lust. As I developed into a man, the secret behavior developed into a personality with an identity all its own, that finally took on the face of murder.6
Rolling later gave these “personalities” their own names—the armed robber personality, the professional criminal, was called “Ennad” (Danne backward), while the raging homicidal personality was named “Gemini.” Danny was the good and gentle boy, while “Ennad” and “Gemini” struggled to dominate Danny’s psyche. But this was not a multiple personality syndrome. According to Rolling, these were external entities that possessed him at various points in his life, which did not make him do things, but caused him to do things.
A psychiatrist who assessed him reported:
It has become compartmentalized or disassociated. It’s out there, it’s somebody else, it’s not Danny, it’s Gemini. So he will say it’s Danny that is the voyeur, it’s Danny that robbed, it’s Danny that raped, but it’s Gemini that killed. Because that’s what he cannot accept. And I don’t mean he’s saying the devil made him do it or he’s not responsible.
But that was exactly what Danny was saying. The devil made him do it. And he meant it.
A clue lurks in Rolling’s strict fundamentalist Christian discipline and later his Pentecostal zeal. The intensity of Rolling’s adolescent rage and trauma, combined with his Christian upbringing, which condemned that very rage he was feeling compulsions to act upon, in the conventional beliefs of fundamental Christianity, was readily recognized as a “possession” by evil forces. God and Satan were coexistent entities, each w
ith legions of angels, prophets and servant-soldiers. In fundamental Christianity, when it comes to God and Satan, you cannot believe in one without believing in the other.
In the context of dogmatic Christianity, there is really nothing “psychiatric” about Rolling’s belief in Gemini—what explanation could he possibly have, other than a relationship with evil forces? Perhaps here at last we have a precise definition of evil—it is the thing that drove Rolling to rape and kill. The psychiatrists can call it “a variety of dissociative disorders”; the priest will call it “Satan”; Danny Rolling called it Gemini. I think it’s still a little too early for us, even in our age of science, to conclusively write off old-time biblical Evil. We are still too puppy blind on our trip down Evolutionary Road.
But when it comes to Gemini, we will see that there was a secular source behind Danny Rolling’s vision. As it frequently is, the source was Hollywood.
“Any Weapon Just Takes Up Space, Until the Human Hand Finds Work for It”
Of course, the fact that Danny Rolling consumed inordinate amounts of liquor and later extensive amounts of LSD certainly did not help. At the age of sixteen, Rolling began to drink. The conflicts with his father increased, and his father “arrested” him and locked him in the station house jail one night. When Rolling was seventeen, he left home and joined the US Air Force, where he was trained as a military policeman (following the same military career path that Albert DeSalvo and Jeffrey Dahmer did with various degrees of success). This was 1971 in the last years of the Vietnam War, yet another story of a father and son, two wars and one serial killer.
On the eve of being deployed to Vietnam, Rolling was arrested for possession of marijuana and ended up with a dishonorable discharge, coming home to the contempt of his father. Upon returning to Shreveport, Danny became involved with the Pentecostal Church, going to services Wednesday, Thursday, Friday, Saturday and Sunday. There he met his wife and married in 1974. A year later, the couple had a baby girl, Kiley Danielle.
American Serial Killers Page 36
