His last victim was Terry Gambrel, a 25-year-old marine. Kraft was pulled over for suspected drink driving by the California Highway Patrol when they spotted someone in the front seat. Kraft claimed that he was a hitchhiker. According to court records, one of the officers ‘observed that Gambrel’s trousers were unbuttoned and pulled down between his waist and his knees so that his penis and testicles were supported by the crotch of the pants. The crotch area was wet. There were indentations on Gambrel’s wrists similar to those a wide rubber band would make.’
According to the autopsy, Gambrel’s death resulted from asphyxia due to ligature strangulation. Again, according to court transcripts, ‘The ligature consisted of a strap that had been tightened around Gambrel’s neck. There were also ligature marks on both of Gambrel’s wrists. Petechial haemorrhages in the neck organs indicated the killer had repeatedly tightened and loosened the ligature.”
Gambrel was 25 years old and engaged to be married. It is believed that he was hitchhiking his way to a party when he was picked up by Kraft.
It took five years before Kraft was sent to court. The trial lasted 13 months and cost the American taxpayer $10 million, making it one of the longest and most expensive trials in the history of the American judiciary system. Throughout the trial, Kraft maintained his innocence and even served as co-counsellor. After both sides had argued their case, the jury decided on the death penalty – a decision that was upheld by the judge – and Kraft was sentenced to die in the gas chamber in San Quentin on 29 November 1989. Referring to Kraft’s crimes, Judge A McCartin summed up: ‘I can’t imagine doing these things in scientific experiments on a dead person, much less to someone alive.’
But, incredible as it may seem, the bodies keep on showing up. As recently as 2006, the remains of a 17-year-old marine, James Cox, thought to have gone AWOL on 30 September 1974, were found buried by the side of the road and identified thanks to DNA testing. Authorities think that he could well be another Kraft victim.
Meanwhile, Kraft, who shows not the slightest remorse for his crimes, fights against his sentence and for his life. According to his appeal, there were 20 serious errors in his trial and he maintains the search warrants obtained for a search of his car, office and home after he was pulled over for drink driving were illegal. He also contends that he should have been allowed a separate trial for each murder. But his call for a mistrial hinges mainly around the death list. He argues that the list ‘lacked value’ because any connection between the entries on the list and particular victims was ‘speculative’. Kraft also holds the view that any relevancy of the list is outweighed by its prejudicial impact and should have been omitted as inadmissible hearsay.
His latest appeal was unanimously rejected by the Californian Supreme Court in 2000 on all counts. For most families wanting closure, it was good news, but it is unlikely that Kraft will go to the gas chamber any time soon. He has already been on Death Row for 19 years and is likely to remain there for a good while yet. Kraft plans to appeal yet again to the federal courts, a process that will in all likelihood tie up the process for years and years to come.
CHAPTER FIVE
DANNY ROLLING: THE GAINESVILLE RIPPER
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 infamo
us 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 World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 5
