Daniel Harold Rolling (May 26, 1954 – October 25, 2006), known as The Gainesville Ripper, was an American serial killer who murdered five students in Gainesville, Florida, over four days in late August 1990. Rolling later confessed to raping several of his victims, committing a triple homicide in Shreveport, Louisiana, and attempting to murder his father in May 1990. In total, Rolling confessed to killing eight people. Rolling was sentenced to death for the five Gainesville murders in 1994. He was executed by lethal injection in 2006.
Shortly before he was executed in Florida for the series of killings in Gainesville, Rolling claimed responsibility for the Shreveport murders, handing his spiritual adviser Rev. Mike Hudspeth and Florida police a handwritten confession and apology. In a written statement made shortly before his execution, Rolling confessed to the murders of the Grissom family in Shreveport.
Claudia and James Rolling, Danny Rolling, Kevin Rolling.
Before Danny Rolling was the Gainesville Ripper, he was a long-time victim of abuse. Born in May 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana, his father James, a Shreveport Police Officer, made sure he knew he was unwanted. He, as well as his mother Claudia, and brother Kevin, were beaten for the most absurd reasons, such as breathing in a way that James did not approve of. Discipline was severe. When he was just one-year-old, he was beaten for the very first time. He wasn’t “crawling properly.” As he grew older, his father would pin him to the ground, handcuff him, then have his police friends take him away because he was “embarrassed” by him. He would beat Danny’s dog, so hard and so often that it died.
Danny failed the third grade after missing so much school due to illness. His teachers described him as “suffering from an inferiority complex, with aggressive tendencies and poor impulse control.” Around the time Danny turned 11, he had turned to music. He played the guitar and sang hymn-like songs. Meanwhile, his mother was committed to a mental health hospital after she had slit her own wrists. Claudia had made several attempts to leave her husband, but always went back.
Looking for another escape, Danny started drinking and doing drugs.
He tried to maintain control of his life, despite the ongoing abuse from his father. He attended church, and worked, though he was never quite able to hold down a steady job. He found himself stealing, arrested for several robberies in Georgia, and was even caught peeping into a neighbor girls’ bedroom window. That was met with another beating from his father.
Danny tried to enlist in the Navy, but when they wouldn’t take him, he turned to the Air Force. His military career didn’t last long though, with his drug use spiraling out of control. It is reported that he took acid on more than 100 occasions.
Out of the military, Danny Rolling was once again met with the challenge of maintaining a job. He met a woman and the two were married, and it seemed like things were turning around. But, just like his father, he was abusive, and after just four years, when he was 23-years-old, his wife left him. Danny had threatened to kill her.
The separation was devastating, and rather than working on the issues that had caused his wife to leave, Danny turned to anger and rage. He found a woman who closely resembled his ex, and raped her. Later that year, he was involved in an auto accident, in which a woman was killed.
By the 1990’s, Danny had already been in and out of jail for numerous petty crimes and thefts including armed robberies in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. Somehow he managed to break out of prison multiple times and continued on with his life.
In May 1990, he finally turned his anger on the man who had caused him so much pain over the years. Danny got into an argument with his father during which he made the attempt to kill him. Despite shooting him twice, his attempt was unsuccessful, though his father did lose both an ear, and an eye.
He broke into someone’s home where he stole the identification papers for Michael Kennedy. Using those papers, he assumed the identity of Michael Kennedy and took a bus to Sarasota Florida.
Then, on Friday, August 24, 1990, early in the morning, Danny broke into an apartment occupied by 17-year-old Sonja Larson and Christina Powell. He found Powell asleep on the downstairs couch, but made no move to disturb her. Upstairs he found Larson asleep, in the bedroom.
Danny quickly taped Larson’s mouth shut before stabbing her to death. He descended the stairs where he found Powell, and taped her mouth shut just as he had her roommate’s. He bound her wrists together behind her back while threatening her with a knife. He cut her clothes off and raped her, forcing her face-down onto the floor. When he was done, he stabbed her five times in the back.
Sonja Larson
He went back upstairs where he found Sonja’s dead body. He raped her before cutting off her nipple’s, keeping one as a trophy. Inside, investigators found 18-year-old Christa Leigh Hoyt decapitated and disemboweled inside her bedroom.
Hoyt's severed head had been placed on a shelf, positioned to face her body which had been propped up on her bed in a sexual pose.
An aspiring police officer, Hoyt was found dead by some of her colleagues at the Alachua County Sheriff's Office, where she worked as a part-time records clerk, after failing to show for her shift.
Christa Leigh Hoyt
The gruesome discovery wouldn't be made for another two days when Powell’s parents stopped by their daughter’s place after growing concerned that they couldn't get ahold of her.
When nobody answered the door, the parents contacted building management, who advised that they should wait for the police to arrive.
Inside, Larson was found nude and lying on her back on her bed. Her legs were draped over the side of the bed, with her hands above her head and her hair fanned out.
Powell's body was found in a similar position downstairs.
Maines said Hoyt's body had been deliberately arranged in such a way to provide a "shock value for whoever was to enter that room."
As detectives moved through the apartment they discovered Powell's body in a similar position on the living room floor downstairs. She had also been raped and posed.
Manuel Taboada and Tracy Paules
Defensive wounds found on Taboada's body showed that he had attempted to fend off the man who would later become known as the Gainesville Ripper, but was ultimately overpowered before being stabbed to death. During the struggle, Paules had run to her bedroom and locked the door. However, Rolling was able to breakthrough. Like Larson, Powell, and Hoyt before her, Paules was tragically bound, raped, stabbed to death, and later seductively posed.
In addition to all the women being posed, their bodies had been wiped down with a cleaning agent after they had been killed. Paules, a pre-law senior, became the Gainesville Ripper's fifth and final victim, before the monster vanished in the night.
Maines described the aftermath of the Gainesville murders as a "media circus", with satellite trucks pouring into the town in droves, and press conferences held daily in an attempt to assuage the public's growing concern and paranoia that the killer was still lurking in their midst.
As the fall semester began, the search for the suspect continued.
Mace sales in the local area skyrocketed and some students even admitted to sleeping with steak knives under their pillows at night.
Ed Humphrey
An 18-year-old UF freshman named Ed Humphrey was initially identified as a person of interest in the case. Humphrey, who suffered from mental illness, had a number of scars across his face and was known to hang around campus at night dressed in military fatigues and wielding a knife. He was arrested just days after the murders following an unrelated physical altercation with his grandmother. A search of his home yielded magazines about knives, guns, and girls. But their investigation into Humphrey hit a snag when his DNA failed to match evidence gathered at any of the three crime scenes.
While DNA testing was still in its infancy, Maines said investigators were able to determine from semen samples that the killer had type B blood, while Humphrey's blood was type A.
COLD CASES PROVIDES BREAKTHROUGH
Back to square one, Maines said a break in the case wouldn't come until months later when investigators were alerted to an unsolved triple murder in Shreveport, Louisiana, which bore a striking resemblance to the killings in Gainesville.
In that case, 24-year-old Julie Grissom, her eight-year-old nephew, Sean, and her 55-year-old father, Tom, were all murdered inside of their home on November 24, 1989.
Maines went to Shreveport to investigate the murders, where he discovered that Julie Grisson's body had been posed in a similar position to the women killed in Gainesville.
She also had tape residue on her body and red wine vinegar had been used to clean her remains of evidence.
Maines said investigators in Shreveport tested the body fluids from the perpetrator and found traces of saliva in a bite mark on her left breast that confirmed her killer also had type B blood.
Shortly afterward, a woman by the name of Cindy Juracich called Crime Stoppers and urged investigators to look into a man called Danny Rolling in connection to both cases.
Each of the killings shared similar methods of murder and sexual components.
DNA evidence left behind at the crime scenes would later help identify the suspect.
A killer wouldn't been identified for months.
The Ripper used a screwdriver and knife to gain access to his victim's homes.
Three months before the Shreveport murders, Rolling had got into an argument with his father and shot him before skipping town. Rolling's father survived but lost the use of an eye and an ear.
Investigators in Florida soon learned that Rolling had multiple previous convictions for armed robbery.
Interestingly, on the same day of Christa Hoyt's murder, police also responded to a robbery at a bank a half-mile away from her home.
During the robbery, the bank teller had placed a red dye pack into a bag of money.
Later that night, an officer patrolling the area spotted a suspicious man lurking near a woods. He gave chase to the suspicious character, tracking him to a campsite.
While the man had vanished, the officer found a screwdriver at the campsite, along with a bag of money stained with red dye and a cassette player with a tape inside.
Cindy Juracich, a resident of Shreveport, said that while traveling through the Florida Panhandle in August 1990, she had heard a report about the murders. The report instantly made her think about Danny, whom she had met at her Louisiana hometown church. She reported that he had said deeply disturbing things to her and her then-husband, Steven Dobbin. “He’d come over every night for a while, and then one night, Steven came in and he goes, ‘He’s got to go,’” Juracich said. She continued that when inquiring about why, her husband reported that Danny had confided in him. “[and Steven said], ‘He likes to stick knives into people.’”
Police found audio tapes with Danny Rolling's recordings at this one-man campsite.
Investigators wouldn't listen to the tape for months, but the recordings it contained would later prove crucial to unmasking who the Gainesville Ripper was.
At this time, Danny Rolling was already in custody in Marion County for a robbery he'd committed at a supermarket 10 days after the bodies of Paules and Taboada were found.
Maines visited Rolling in jail and asked him to voluntarily provide a blood sample for their investigation.
Incredibly, Rolling, who Maines described as "relaxed, cordial and calm", obliged, providing him with three samples that were later found to be a match to all three crime scenes in Gainesville.
They went back to their evidence locker where the bag of money, cassette player and tape were being stored and listened to the tape. They found audio containing audio diaries and ten original songs.
“Jingling spurs rolling into town Old black stallion you bring a grim reaper Dressed in snake hide worn black leather Mystery Rider what’s your name You’re a killer, a drifter gone insane Mystery Rider what’s your game You’re a rebel no one can tame.”
Danny Rolling was charged with 5 counts of first-degree murder on November 15, 1991. Before he could answer to those charges, however, he was convicted for federal bank robbery and sent to Florida State Prison. There, he met Bobby Lewis, an inmate on death row for killing a drug dealer in the 1970’s. Lewis claimed Danny confessed the details of the murders to him. Details lewis wrote in a five-page letter.
Investigators, wanting to confirm the details of Danny’s confession, requested a meeting. Danny only agreed if Lewis could be there, to act as his mouthpiece. It was during this meeting that more details came out about the murders. Details such as how he had gone back to Hoyt’s apartment because he thought he might have left his wallet behind.
As the questioning went on, Danny claimed that he had dealt with different personalities all of his life. He went on to tell investigators about two of his darker personalities, the first of which was named Ynnad, or “Danny,” spelled backward. He described Ynnad as a Jesse James type, a bad person, but not evil.
Then there was”Gemini,” his birth sign, whom he described as evil and blamed for his deadliest acts.
Danny confessed to the Gainesville murders, but they weren’t able to get a confession for the Shreveport murders.
AN author who was once engaged to the Gainesville Ripper has reflected on her relationship with the man who killed five students over four days during the summer of 1990 in an exclusive interview with The Sun.
Sondra London, now 74, was in her early 40s when she received a letter from Danny Rolling, an inmate at Florida State Prison, in June 1992 asking her to tell his story to the world.
At the time, Rolling was awaiting trial for the murders of five students across four days in Gainesville, Florida in late August 1990 - a brutal spree of killings that terrorized the raucous college town and would later go on to inspire the horror movie series Scream.
The career criminal, who blamed his violent outbursts on traumas he suffered during his childhood, reached out to London after reading a screenplay she'd sent to his cellmate, fellow killer and crook Robert "Bobby" Lewis.
Sondra London
Sondra London is a true-crime author and freelance journalist who is most known for being the fiancée of convicted serial killer Danny Rolling. What most people tend to forget, though, is that she was also the girlfriend of former Deputy Sheriff Gerard John Schaefer, a convicted murderer, and suspected serial killer.
With Gerard, she released a collection of short stories called ‘Killer Fiction,’ and with Danny, Sondra wrote ‘The Making of a Serial Killer: The Real Story of the Gainesville Murders.’
Sondra and Danny had started communicating via letters in June 1992, while he was held in a Florida prison, Sondra’s home state, awaiting trial for the five Gainesville college student murders.
They met after much correspondence, and instantly, sparks flew. Sondra once said that she was not expecting to see such a “fine-looking man” through the glass partition. So, as Danny walked towards her, she became hyper-aware of the fact that “I am a woman, and this is a man.” Therefore, for her, it came as no surprise when they got engaged in 1993. They seemed to genuinely be in love, with Sondra supporting him through everything.
On April 20, 1994, Danny Rolling was sentenced to death. He was executed by lethal injection on October 25, 2006, witnessed by many of his victims’ relatives.
Shortly before he was executed in Florida for the series of killings in Gainesville, Rolling claimed responsibility for the Shreveport murders, handing his spiritual adviser Reverend Mike Hudspeth and Florida police a handwritten confession and apology. Rolling had a last meal of lobster tail. He sang a gospel hymn, but made no statement immediately before his execution, which was witnessed by many of his victims' relatives.
Rolling was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 25, 2006, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch appeal.
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