American Serial Killers

by Peter Vronsky

  He left the apartment drained and exhausted and slept most of the day in his tent.

  “You’re Him, Aren’t You?”

  On the night of August 26 and 27, Rolling rode out on his bike again, trolling through the archipelago of student apartment complexes. He watched twenty-three-year-old Tracy Paules for hours through a window as she spoke on the phone, waiting for her to go to sleep. At around 2:30 a.m., her male roommate, Manuel Taboada, who worked nights as a barman, came home and went to bed. Only then did Tracy feel safe to go to bed herself. Shortly after 3:00 a.m., Rolling silently forced the door with his screwdriver and slipped into the apartment. He stabbed and struggled with Manuel, killing him.

  The noise coming from Taboada’s room awakened Tracy. She cautiously made her way to Taboada’s room, hopelessly brandishing a curling iron to defend herself, and caught a glimpse of a hooded black figure standing with a large knife over Taboada, who lay in an expanding pool of blood bubbling out of his wounds. Tracy dashed back into her room, screaming, and locked her bedroom door. Rolling effortlessly kicked open her door and overpowered Tracy.

  “You’re him, aren’t you?” Rolling recalled her blurting out.

  After warning her not to scream, Rolling chose not to tape her mouth. Tracy did what survivors of some serial killers did: she engaged the killer in conversation, attempting to de-objectify herself in his perception. When she asked him what happened to her roommate, Manuel, Rolling replied that he was an ex–Green Beret skilled in the martial arts and that he had knocked him out.

  “My brother was a soldier too,” she said, doing her best to establish a sympathetic rapport. “He was killed in Vietnam.”

  It might have worked had Rolling actually been in Vietnam.

  “Really? Vietnam was a bitch! I’m tempted to let you go. But then again? I guess not,” Rolling said as he proceeded to rape her.

  When he was done, he turned her over on her stomach, forced her face into a pillow and stabbed her three times in the back, the seven-inch blade of the Ka-Bar fatally cleaving her lung and drowning her in her own blood.

  Rolling then dragged Tracy’s body into the hallway, stopping at the bathroom door. Taking a wet washcloth, he wiped the blood from her face and combed her hair into place. Not as a sign of remorse, as some thought, but to make her presentable to him. Then he raped her again, postmortem, on the hallway floor, before he douched her with dishwashing soap. Afterward, he dragged her body by the ankles out toward the entryway of the apartment, where he posed her at the door to greet the first person who came through it.

  “You Look Like You Could Use a Friend”

  Later that day, about a kilometer away from the murder scene, Rolling robbed a bank and was seen by a witness slipping back into the woods where he had his tent. The police descended on the woods and found the tent—along with Rolling’s handgun, money, mask, gloves and screwdriver—but Rolling escaped. The evidence was bagged and locked away in storage. No connection was made to the murders.

  Rolling fled Gainesville and went to Tampa, where he committed a series of burglaries and robberies to sustain himself. There over the Labor Day weekend he came upon a young woman, Diana, sitting on a park bench sketching portraits in pastels. He said, “You look like you could use a friend.” He gave her a hundred dollars to sketch his portrait. He was kind. He was gentle. He was boyishly vulnerable and sweet. Afterward, he took her to a nearby arcade where he won a teddy bear for her. She invited him home to her apartment, where they spent the evening pleasantly talking. He took a shower and laundered his clothes in her washer. They ordered in Chinese food and watched Good Morning, Vietnam on her VCR. He slept the night on her couch while she slept in her bedroom. When he left the next morning, she gave him directions on how to find his way back to her apartment, but he never returned.

  Diana would be one of the dozens of women who had nothing but fond memories of their encounter with sweet, angelic Danny. Luckily for her, the angel Gemini had been dormant when gentle Danny crossed her path. Or maybe Diana herself was the better angel of them all.

  “You Are Not Going to Be Satisfied with My Answer Here”

  On September 7, Rolling was finally arrested in Ocala while attempting to rob a supermarket. Both the Shreveport and Gainesville investigators almost immediately invited FBI profilers from the BSU to assist in the investigations. The profiles the FBI furnished were a reasonable fit for a number of suspects, including Danny Rolling, as well as the freshman suspect Gainesville PD had arrested.

  Police in Shreveport got wind of the similarities between their still unsolved Grissom murders and the Gainesville murders, in particular the use of liquid soap or vinegar to douche evidence from the victims’ genitals and the removal of the duct tape bindings by the perpetrator. The crimes had been cataloged with ViCAP, which had been launched specifically to link multijurisdictional crimes, but typically, nobody bothered to query ViCAP for possible links to other cases. (See the next chapter for more on the failures of ViCAP.)

  On November 5, Shreveport PD called the Gainesville PD task force, alerting them to the similarities between the Grissom and Gainesville murders.

  Detectives in Ocala in the meantime also called the task force to report that they had a suspect by the name of Rolling, whom they arrested driving a car stolen in Gainesville at the time of the murders. And guess what; Rolling was from Shreveport, the site of the Grissom murders.

  Everybody was suddenly “liking” Rolling, as cops say. The hunt for the hunter was on.

  Now, for the first time in my accounts of the epidemic era, DNA takes the stage. The DNA age had arrived and would take a big bite out of the serial killer surge. The first serial killer to be convicted using DNA evidence was Timothy Wilson Spencer, “the Southside Strangler,” who murdered five women in Virginia between 1984 and 1988. DNA quickly became a huge game changer in serial murder investigations and prosecutions and remains even more so today.

  On January 11, police ran a preliminary enzyme test comparing Rolling’s blood samples with the blood and body fluids collected at the scene of the crimes. The test was not as accurate as a DNA test, but it narrowed down Rolling to a small 0.3 percent of the population that had the same type of blood.

  Despite all his concerted attempts to eliminate biological evidence from the crime scenes, Rolling’s douching and cleaning were not entirely successful, and now the law was closing in on him.

  On January 21, police surreptitiously acquired a sample of his blood when Rolling had a tooth extracted by the prison dentist. His DNA came back as an unequivocal positive match to all three crime scenes in Gainesville. To ensure that the surreptitious search would not be thrown out in court, police obtained a search warrant in February to take DNA swabs and hair samples, and other biological and material evidence, from Rolling’s person and his cell.

  The DNA results from that search reaffirmed a positive match to that found at all three murder crime scenes.

  As police were working up the evidence against him for the Gainesville murders, Rolling stood separate trials in September and October 1991 for the series of armed robberies and burglaries he had committed in Tampa and Ocala. As a habitual offender, he was sentenced to four terms of life imprisonment. He wasn’t going anywhere now.

  On November 15, 1991, Rolling was indicted by an Alachua County grand jury on five counts of first-degree murder, sexual assault and burglary in the Gainesville slayings.

  Throughout 1992, the Alachua County prosecutors worked on building their case. Rolling had blabbed and bragged about his murders to numerous fellow inmates whose testimony was now collected by investigators.

  On June 7, 1992, at his arraignment, Rolling pleaded not guilty to the charges.

  Meanwhile, Rolling had begun corresponding with true-crime author Sondra London, to whom he eventually became engaged. Throughout 1993, London orchestrated a blitz of media coverage for Rolling and herself
, writing about his pending trial in the National Enquirer, in a five-part series for the Globe and participating with him in interviews on A Current Affair.

  The two of them cowrote Rolling’s autobiography, The Making of a Serial Killer, an insightful psychological memoir revealing the depths of a serial killer’s mind, memory and imagination.

  As this was happening, Rolling was confessing to investigators through a cellmate informant, who would participate in the confessionals speaking for Rolling, who claimed he could not bear to hear himself vocalize the horrific confessions and would only affirm or negate the cellmate’s responses to questions. Rolling claimed that his fundamentalist Pentecostal beliefs drove him to confess because his conscience troubled him too much.

  His murder trial was in its first day on February 15, 1994, when to everyone’s surprise Rolling suddenly changed his plea to guilty on all five counts of murder. After a mandatory sentencing trial before a jury, he was formally sentenced to death on April 20.

  Louisiana declined the cost of extraditing and putting him on trial for the Grissom murders despite positive DNA matches to those murders. On the eve of his execution in 2006, Rolling confessed in writing to the three Grissom family murders in Shreveport.

  * * *

  —

  Other than Gemini, Rolling never gave any lucid explanations as to why he committed any of his brutal crimes. How could there be any?

  In the end, Rolling wrote:

  We bury our dead and walk away. And the circle of insanity is complete . . .

  You are not going to be satisfied with my answer here. I really don’t have a message. It’s a tragedy—a terrible, terrible, TRAGEDY. I regret it. I wish it never happened.15

  He was right about one thing—we are not going to be satisfied with his answers.

  Danny Rolling was executed by lethal injection on October 25, 2006.

  “The Kings of Follow-Up”: FBI Profilers and The Silence of the Lambs

  Shortly after the Gainesville murders, The Silence of the Lambs was released in February 1991 and would become the fifth-highest-grossing film that year. If any film defined the cultural “state of the union” in American serial murder during the 1990s and beyond, then it was the Jonathan Demme movie based on Thomas Harris’s book. It elevated both serial killers and FBI profilers to a “high-concept” status in popular culture and entertainment not unlike dinosaurs, baseball or aliens. It was not the first movie about serial killers, nor the first to feature profilers: there had been movies like the 1986 Manhunter, also based on a Thomas Harris novel, Red Dragon, but for various reasons the movies did not catch on.

  The Silence of the Lambs was produced with FBI cooperation and starred Jodie Foster as FBI trainee agent Clarice Starling; Scott Glenn as a veteran profiler like Robert Ressler or John Douglas; and Anthony Hopkins as Hannibal “the Cannibal” Lecter, whom Clarice is sent to interview in the hope of gaining insight into an unidentified serial killer nicknamed “Buffalo Bill,” loosely based on a composite of Ed Gein and Gary Heidnik. The FBI hosted Foster and Glenn at Quantico, where they met behaviorists, and the production was even allowed to film scenes at Quantico. This FBI collaboration with Hollywood was not something new. Since J. Edgar Hoover, the FBI has collaborated with movie and TV studios on productions that laud the agency and promote its worth to the American public.

  As The Silence of the Lambs went into production, the FBI’s profilers were under a siege of bad publicity. On April 19, 1989, a gun turret mysteriously exploded, killing forty-seven crewmen on board the battleship USS Iowa. Navy investigators decided that Clayton Hartwig, one of the sailors who perished in the turret, deliberately caused the explosion. It was alleged that he was motivated by a frustrated homosexual fixation on a fellow crewman. The problem was proving it. The Naval Investigative Service (NIS) asked the FBI to conduct an “equivocal death analysis”—a type of psychological autopsy intended to determine a cause of death: Was the death accidental, suicide or murder? The FBI profilers concluded that Hartwig committed suicide “in a place and manner designed to give him the recognition and respect that he felt was denied him.”16

  While it was not the fault of the FBI that their assessment was treated by the Navy as hard evidence, the fact of the matter was that there was no conclusive evidence that Hartwig had deliberately caused the explosion. A congressional Armed Services subcommittee hearing was held, and unlike the “serial killer epidemic” hearings the decade before, this one resulted in a very hostile and dismissive assessment of the FBI’s profiling system. In its report, the Armed Services congressional subcommittee concluded:

  Just as the FBI psychological analysis was key to the Navy investigation, so it was to the subcommittee inquiry. As a result, the subcommittee, using the professional services of the American Psychological Association, sought the opinions of 11 independent clinical licensed psychologists and one psychiatrist. Additionally, the subcommittee consulted independently with a psychiatrist and a psychologist who had some previous knowledge of this case. Ten of the 14 experts consulted considered the FBI analysis invalid. And even those who believed the analysis to be somewhat credible were critical of procedures, methodology, and the lack of a statement of the limitations of a retrospective analysis of this nature.

  The FBI psychological analysis procedures are of doubtful professionalism. The false air of certainty generated by the FBI analysis was probably the single major factor inducing the Navy to single out Clayton Hartwig as the likely guilty party. . . . The procedures the FBI used in preparing the Equivocal Death Analysis were inadequate and unprofessional.17

  Profilers working for other agencies rushed to disassociate themselves from the bungling of the BSU. They pointed out that murder is rarely in the jurisdiction of the FBI and few of their agents had any actual homicide investigation experience. The late Robert Keppel, who worked on the Atlanta Child Murders, Ted Bundy and the Green River murders and is considered one of the leading profilers outside the FBI, dismissively recalled his experience with the FBI in the Atlanta case:

  We couldn’t wait to hear what gems of wisdom would come from the BSU’s agents, most of whom were only self-proclaimed experts in murder investigations and had never investigated one lead in an actual murder case. The FBI were the kings of follow-up but couldn’t solve a crime in progress. Most local homicide detectives knew this.18

  In defense of the FBI profilers, they never claimed that they could solve a case alone, nor definitively identify a perpetrator. The way the US Navy used the FBI’s profile is not the way the FBI intended it to be used. A BSU profile is intended to narrow the focus from a list of suspects developed by local homicide investigators, help lure an unsub out into the open and assist in the psychological approach to the suspect during the interview once identified. It is supposed to work the way it did the first time the BSU tested their system in the field, during the 1974 investigation of serial killer David Meirhofer in Montana as described earlier in these pages.

  When the FBI’s public affairs people read the script of The Silence of the Lambs with the ridiculous scenes of the FBI dashing about the country in military transport aircraft to arrest suspected serial killers and Clarice Starling coming to the rescue and engaging in a gun battle with Buffalo Bill, they knew it was just the Hollywood whitewash that the FBI needed at that moment. They opened their doors at Quantico to the film production.

  Good Serial Killers Rising

  What nobody calculated was the resulting promotion of serial killers to the kind of cult status that Anthony Hopkins’s Hannibal Lecter would achieve. FBI agent Clarice became the naive straight man [woman] to Lecter’s leading man genius and charm. By the time Lecter rips the face off one of his guards and wears it as a mask to escape captivity, the audience is cheering him on instead of Clarice. In fact, Lecter escapes to make sequels, while Clarice goes after Buffalo Bill and is retired from the screen with no sequel.
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  In the public’s perception, the Chianti-sipping Lecter became a “good” serial killer, while the sexually confused, poverty-ridden, rural shack–dwelling, nipple-pierced pseudo-transsexual Buffalo Bill, who kept his victims in a stinking pit and skinned them, was the “bad” serial killer. Buffalo Bill was himself “less-alive.” Many movie viewers could imagine themselves enjoying the company of Dr. Lecter at a dinner party (as long as they weren’t on the menu), but none would want to even be seen in public with Buffalo Bill.

  Steven Egger argues that such post–Silence of the Lambs demarcation in popular culture between “good” and “bad” serial killers paved the way further, since the first adulation for Ted Bundy, for raising serial killers in status above “ordinary” killers:

  For many, the serial killer is a symbol of courage, individuality, and unique cleverness. Many will quickly transform the killer into a figure who allows them to fantasize rebellion or the lashing out at society’s ills. For some, the serial killer may become a symbol of swift and effective justice, cleansing society of its crime-ridden vermin. The serial killer’s skills in eluding police for long periods of time transcends the very reason that he is being hunted. The killer’s elusiveness overshadows his trail of grief and horror.19