World's Most Evil Killers - Season 3, Episode 14 - Danny Rolling - Full Episode | Forensic Files

-Gainesville, Florida, 1990. On the 23rd of August, students Christina Powell and Sonja Larson
were preparing to start their freshman year at the University of Florida. -They are the very vision of hope and happiness
and joy for the future. -But in less than 24 hours, they would both be dead, brutally murdered
by a 36-year-old vagrant named Danny Rolling. -This is a person who volcanically erupted behaviorally.
The hatred, the paranoia, the psychosis just unleashed itself upon the world. -Rolling's passion for killing grew.
His victims were bound, stabbed, and mutilated. Some had been savagely raped. -His capacity for violence, and his appetite for violence
was more than anyone I had ever encountered. -A reign of terror had been unleashed.
A serial killer the press dubbed The Gainesville Ripper was on the loose. Danny Rolling was taking the lives of innocent victims
all over town, making him one of the world's most evil killers. ♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪ Gainesville, a university city in inland Florida.
It was here that 36-year-old drifter Danny Rolling killed five students in just four days.
The city was shaken to its core by the murders, and, when Rolling was arrested for armed robbery
on the 7th of September, 1990, the police had no idea they had a serial killer in custody.
Retired FBI Special Agent Ken Porter worked on the investigation into the Gainesville college killings.
-He brought a dark cloud of fear and terror amongst the whole community of Gainesville, Florida
for at least two or three months, where people were just afraid to go out, afraid to open their doors, afraid of the dark.
-In that brief spree of killings in August, 1990, Rolling effectively terrorized an entire community.
He reduced the community to a sense that no one, and no woman, in particular, was safe,
that there was a madman on the loose, which, indeed, there was. -Rolling's victims would have had the most horrendous time
during their ordeals, because here's somebody that they don't know who's coming into their home,
which is their place of sanctuary, and attacking them in the most brutal way. It really is terror of an unimaginable degree.
-Former State Attorney Rod Smith had never encountered a case featuring such depravity.
-I have no way to measure comparative evil, but certainly, he was a guy whose crimes were,
for this community, and in this part of the world, were among the most tragic and horrific.
-This killer's story begins in 1954. Danny Harold Rolling was born in Shreveport, Louisiana,
on May the 26th. His 20-year-old mother fell pregnant almost immediately after the couple married,
much to his father's disgust. -Danny Rolling was a son of a policeman, but he wasn't a very compassionate policeman.
In fact, he was a violent and abusive father. -For the rest of Danny's life, his father would refer to him
as an accident that should never have happened. He had a violent temper, and almost anything young Danny did
was able to ignite it. -If he didn't breathe properly, he was beaten by his father.
The slightest thing would set him off, and I think if look at that now, we'd called that coercive control now.
We'd call that the kind of behavior that is designed to chip away at somebody's self esteem,
that really does destroy someone's identity. -Time after time throughout his childhood,
Rolling was told by his supremely arrogant father that he was useless. He was a useless piece of work
and never would amount to anything. -15 months later, Rolling's mother would fall pregnant again,
and gave birth to her second son. She would continually try to protect the two boys
from their father's destructive influence. -His mother flees several times, taking him and his younger brother.
They get away from his abusive, domineering father, but she soon goes back to the home.
So, you got this constant toing and froing, this constant state of upheaval, and this creates an environment that isn't safe,
that isn't secure. -To add to Rolling's insecurity, his mother, his only form of stability,
was struggling with mental-health issues. Despite him needing her, she wasn't always around.
Still a young child, Rolling's existence became a solitary one. He would hide in the woods or wander the neighborhood
to escape the constant abuse from his father. -He would go out at night when his parents didn't know about it,
and he would look through the windows of the neighbor's homes, and he'd see them around the kitchen table,
around the dinner table, happy families all together, and he's got that building resentment.
"Why have these people got this when I haven't? What's wrong with me?" And that's something that continues to bubble away
in the background. -Rolling yearned for a normal family, the kind of home life that everyone else appeared to have.
The suffering at the hands of his father, coupled with his mother's mental instability,
sent him on a downward spiral. -Now, the impact this had on quite a suggestible child
was severe. Now, I'm not suggesting for a second that Rolling's father made Rolling into a serial killer,
but there was no doubt at all there was a very great deal of animosity between father and son.
-As a teenager, Rolling continued to escape his home life. He spent even more time wandering the neighborhood,
and around the age of 13, his innocent childhood pastime of watching families became sexually motivated.
-Rolling had a habit of stalking people, and he would watch them. That voyeurism that develops during his early years,
when he'd look through the windows of the happy families in his neighborhood, and have that simmering resentment,
turned into something else. It turned into something quite sinister. -Rolling took a particular interest
in watching young women. He was caught several times and began to get a reputation as a peeping tom.
His life had now started on a destructive path of crime. -It was that classic serial-killer pattern --
petty crime, small offenses, gradually escalating into greater and greater offenses.
-By now, he'd started drinking heavily. In 1971, age 16, a drunk Rolling had a fight with his father,
and he was locked up for two weeks in a juvenile detention center. In an effort to escape his abusive home,
Rolling then dropped out of high school and joined the Air Force. -And I think what he's essentially doing here
is looking for some structure. He's looking for a sense of belonging. This is somebody who's always felt rejected,
who's always felt excluded, and for many people who join the military, it's a family to them.
It's rules, it's structure, it's routine, it's a way of life. -Rolling initially thrived in the military,
but his drinking evolved to substance abuse and led to an early discharge. After barely a year's service, he returned to the home
in Shreveport he desperately tried to escape. Nevertheless, Rolling appeared to turn his life around.
He started attending the United Pentecostal Church where he met a young woman in the congregation.
It was love at first sight, and in 1974, when Danny was just 20, the couple married.
A year later, they welcomed a baby daughter. -When he was first married, you know,
he was a very religious guy in a kind of hyper-religious area out of Shreveport,
went to a very Pentecostal church, had a very black-and-white view of the world,
of the ongoing battle between good and evil. -Things looked like they might be on the up for him,
but he's still drinking, he's unemployed, he's not the kind of man that he thinks he should be.
-In 1977, after just three years of marriage, Rolling's wife filed for divorce. The 23-year-old was devastated by her rejection.
-And this is something that I don't think he just moved beyond. The very fact that his wife is the person that chooses
to end their relationship, she's taking the control away from him. So, we're just adding to these resentments all of the time.
-At around the time his wife left him, Rolling was working in a local bakery. He had an accident with a bread-slicing machine
and lost part of his finger. It seemed everything was going wrong for Danny Rolling.
He stole his father's gun and embarked on a series of armed robberies across Mississippi,
Alabama, and Georgia, but he was soon arrested. By 1989, after spending a total of eight years behind bars,
Rolling found himself, once again, back in the family home in Shreveport. -Aware that he doesn't amount to anything
and only too conscious of his father's horror at his uselessness, he's 35 years old,
he's virtually amounted to nothing until now, Rolling decides to prove that he does do something,
and he chooses to kill. -Danny Rolling had grown up thinking he was worthless. He'd failed at high school, in his military career,
and in marriage. In 1989, at the age of 35, he found work at a restaurant in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana,
but even this resulted in failure. On November the 4th, he was fired for missing his shift.
Rolling claimed his boss had changed the roster without telling him and was aggrieved at his wrongful dismissal.
-Rolling is somebody who I would refer to as a grievance collector. So, throughout his life,
he's harboring all of these resentments. There are various events where the heat is turned up,
and I think the significant one for me is when he loses his job at a local restaurant.
Now, usually, he would take this fairly quietly, and he'd internalize his trauma,
and that resentment would bubble away, but on this occasion, he externalizes. He threatens his manager, he shouts at him.
You see this rage begin to come out, and this is the day of his first killing. -Enraged by his mistreatment at work, that night,
Rolling took his sinister hobby of stalking to a whole new level -- a deadly one.
He'd grown infatuated with a 24-year-old department-store worker named Julie Grissom.
-He had decided that he wanted her, essentially. So, he followed her home, and he spied on her,
he saw her with her family, which included her father, Tom, and Tom's grandson Sean,
and he's got this vision of this perfect family in front of him again. So, he's thinking, "Why have these people got this
when I haven't got this? I feel really aggrieved, I feel really resentful about this."
-The back door of the house was unlocked. Armed with a knife, Rolling let himself in
and begins a violent attack on the whole family, brutally stabbing all of them. -And on that evening, he kills Julie.
He rapes her, he assaults her, he also kills Tom, he kills Sean, as well. So, he wipes out three generations of an entire family.
But it was the attack on 8-year-old Sean that was particularly horrific. -Sean was stabbed with such force that the knife went
all the way through him and stuck in the ground. That is a sort of extreme level of violence
that even us forensic pathologists has really seen. It really tells you something about what the person
is thinking when he commits that murder. -After raping and killing Sean's Aunt Julie,
Rolling carefully cleaned her, put her dirty clothes in the washing machine, and posed her body provocatively.
-I think that Rolling saw this as vindication that he amounted to something. That this was his handiwork.
This was something he was good at. -Rolling fled. Two days later, a neighbor discovered the gruesome murder scene.
The small town of Shreveport was in shock. Rolling had a secret that nobody else knew.
For the first time, he'd succeeded at something. He had been in control, and he liked it.
Six months later, Rolling had yet another altercation with his father. -The Shreveport murders gave Rolling the courage to confront
the man who'd humiliated him, emasculated him over years. He gets into a full-scale, drag-out fight
with his police-officer father. It is so severe that Rolling shoots his father, and, indeed, his father loses one eye and an ear in the fight.
-Empowered by confronting his nemesis and seemingly getting away with the Grissom family murders,
it was time for a newly confident Rolling to move on. In May, 1990, the 36-year-old left his home in Shreveport
for the last time and headed for the university city of Gainesville, Florida to feed his newfound appetite for killing.
-Many people ask, "Well, why did Rolling target a college town? What was so special about it, that drew him to that place?"
And I think that was because it symbolized the very thing that he resented -- young people, successful people, people who had opportunities,
and he is just a pot of simmering resentment, and it's no surprise to me that he takes it out on people
who he wants to be like, people who he feels envious of. -En route to Gainesville, Rolling's trip included a stop
in Florida's state capital, Tallahassee. -He got off at the bus station in Tallahassee
and clearly had already made plans as to what he was going to do. He bought a Ka-Bar knife there, at an Army/Navy store
right there by the bus station. -Armed with his Ka-Bar combat knife, once he arrived in Gainesville,
Rolling set up a makeshift camp in the woods. -He was a vagrant, a bum, if you like,
but he had a purpose, and his purpose was a very particular kind of victim. -Danny primarily targeted young women,
and they were always young brunettes, like his former wife had been. I was always struck by the fact that, for the most part,
his victims were of a type. -On the 23rd of August, 1990, new roommates Christina Powell and Sonja Larson
were preparing for the beginning of the fall semester at the University of Florida.
-They're 17 and 18 years old, they're freshmen. This is the start of an exciting period in their lives.
-Someone else was enjoying their excitement, too. That evening, they caught the attention of Danny Rolling.
-And he's watching them through the window. He can see them giggling along together,
having a nice time, washing the dishes. You can just imagine the kind of conversations they're having
about the things they're excited about at university. -Rolling has been watching them.
In fact, he's probably spent the best part of the night outside in the woods just behind the apartment block.
In the early hours, he breaks in. He used very specific equipment -- a screwdriver to get in through a sliding door
that most of these girls had, and a Ka-Bar knife, which he also used. Those two elements were his signature.
-Rolling found Christina asleep on the couch downstairs and Sonja in bed upstairs.
-So, he's decided that Christina is the one that he wants. So, he gets Sonja out of the way first.
-He leaves Christina Powell asleep on the couch and creeps upstairs and attacks Sonja Larson while she's asleep.
He puts duct tape over her mouth to prevent her screaming, and also, of course, to prevent her waking up Christina,
who's asleep downstairs. -Rolling stabbed Sonja repeatedly until she was dead. He then made his way back downstairs to Christina,
who was still asleep on the couch. -He wakes her, puts duct tape over her mouth to prevent her screaming, tapes her hands behind her back,
and proceeds to cut off her clothes and underclothes and rape her with a knife to her throat.
He then turns her onto her face and stabs her five times in the back. It's an act of the grotesque wickedness.
-As with his first female victim, Julie, in Shreveport, Rolling washed and posed his victims.
-I suspect the posing of the body has to do with his last vision of the body. He can't take a photograph -- too dangerous.
So, what he does is his sexual conquest -- and, remember, this woman was a sexual conquest
a matter of moments ago -- he cleans her up, because there's nothing arousing or exciting
about her as a bloodied body. Cleans her up, poses her, and I suspect at that moment,
the flash camera of his brain takes one last look before leaving. -Barely a day later, on August the 25th,
Rolling broke into the home of his next victim. 18-year-old Christa Hoyt was a community-college student
and a part-time overnight clerk at the local Sheriff's office. -Once again, he broke in through a sliding door
using a screwdriver. Once again, he was carrying his Ka-Bar knife. Once again, he was targeting an innocent student
who had her whole life in front of her. This time, however, Christa Hoyt wasn't at home when he broke in.
-Rolling patiently waited for his victim to return. When Christa arrived at around 11:00 AM,
he was ready. -He starts with a choke hold, he renders her unconscious, he then binds her wrists, he gags her...
-Cuts her clothes off after she's taped, has sex with her, kills her by stabbing her in the back --
actually punctures her aorta, which is virtually instant death. -But what he's done after she dies shows
a development in his technique. So, he not only poses her in a provocative position.
He actually beheads her and places her head in such a way that she is looking at her own mutilated,
posed body. -Sometimes, if people are psychotic, they have some delusion about the head.
It's almost as if they're afraid that killing them didn't kill them. Removing the head and being able to look at the head
detached from the body is a complete reassurance that the person is really dead.
-Through the violent murder of Christa Hoyt, it seemed Rolling was also settling old scores from his past.
-Many people who have observed that Christa bore quite a resemblance to Rolling's ex-wife,
the woman who had rejected him, and it's no surprise to me that this was possibly the most violent of his murders,
the one where the most rage was expressed. -The residents of Gainesville were blissfully unaware
that a killer was on the loose. The town's students were full of hope and excitement
at the start of the new college year. Danny Rolling had killed and mutilated three female students
in less than 48 hours. The parents of Rolling's first victims in Gainesville, Christina and Sonja, were becoming concerned
at not being able to contact their daughters. At 4:00 PM on Sunday, the 26th of August,
two days after they were killed, police entered their apartment and discovered the horrifying truth behind their silence.
Just hours later, Rolling's third victim, Christa, had failed to turn up for work.
-Christa Hoyt worked at the local county Sheriff's office, and she was a very reliable employee.
She was never late for work, it was completely out of character for her not to turn up on time.
So, when she didn't show up for her shift, which began at midnight, two officers went to her home to see what was going on,
and they came across the most horrendous scene. -The Gainesville community was learning
that some of their students had been butchered. Over night, it had gone from a serene college town
to a place where its residents cowered behind closed doors in fear for their lives.
But Danny Rolling's killing spree wasn't over. On the same day officers discovered his latest victim,
Rolling had broken into another apartment. His next chosen victim was 23-year-old Tracy Paules.
-He knows that she lives in an apartment not far from where his den, his hide, in the woods is.
-By then, people were alerted that something was going on. We know that because we actually have a tape recording of Tracy,
and it's a phone recording in which she basically is telling someone else, as I was recall,
Tracy was uncomfortable, and she said, "If Manuel doesn't show up pretty soon, I'm leaving."
And Manuel was working that evening, and Manny came home. Well, when he came home, you know,
I guess the feeling was that all was safer and more normal. -Manny, or Manuel, Taboada, was Tracy's burly 6'2"
college roommate. Unaware that Tracy had company, Rolling followed his usual plan of attack --
breaking in through the sliding door with a screwdriver, armed with his Ka-Bar knife and a gun.
But this time, he was in for a surprise. -Danny did not realize that Manuel had come home.
So, he thought he was going into an apartment that had one or two women in it. Manuel was not the target, but when he checked the room,
he found Manuel, and actually, when he stabbed Manuel, Manuel came alive and fought him for a sustained period of time.
-Hearing Manuel's screams, Tracy awoke and went to investigate. She was greeted with a most horrific scene.
Terrified, she raced down the corridor and locked herself in her room. -And now, all that stands between Tracy and Danny Rolling
is a flimsy bedroom door. He literally bursts through it, breaks it down. -Tracy was now at the mercy of a killer.
-Rolling taped her mouth, taped her hands behind her back, as he'd done to his other victims,
cut off her T-shirt, and raped her. Once again, he turned her onto her face and stabbed
her three times in the back, killing her. Once again, he cleaned and posed the body.
This was a killing spree -- a spree aimed at, to some extent, in cleansing him of the feeling that he was worthless.
-The repetition in his crimes was all part of Rolling's design. He wanted to leave behind a signature
so that the world would know he had finally succeeded in something. By now, police have discovered three of his victims.
The entire city was in turmoil. Ken Porter was an FBI agent at the time and was part of a task force
assigned to investigate the multiple killings. -I was driving to work on Monday Morning, August 27th,
and I heard a news report on the radio of three murders that had been discovered over the weekend,
and was just shocked as I was driving in, because things like that had not happened in Gainesville.
-The task force had immediately identified similarities between the crimes. -He appeared to be looking for young, college-aged females
with brunette hair of a small, petite build. That was the profile of the three victims
that had been discovered up to that point. -On the very day that Gainesville learned
they had a serial killer on the loose, Rolling committed an armed robbery at the local branch of the First Union Bank.
It heightened the fear felt amongst the community. The next morning, on Tuesday, the 28th of August,
the bodies of Manuel and Tracy were discovered. Tracy fit the profile of the previous female victims.
She was a young female college student, kind of petite in build, brunette hair. She was also killed in the same manner as the other three --
with a knife, stab wounds, mutilated body, and, immediately, everybody knew that it was the same killer.
-The people of Gainesville were now terrified. With the body count rising day by day, anyone could be next.
The authorities were determined to catch this monster before he struck again. During their investigations into the murders
and the armed bank robbery, police came across two men acting suspiciously. -So, these two officers followed them into the woods,
they came upon a campsite that had been carved out of this densely wooded area near the university campus.
-Unbeknownst to the officers, one of these men was Danny Rolling. -The police saw Rolling and a drug dealer friend
of his at the campsite. Now, when Rolling clocked that the police were watching him, he fled.
He just upped and he left. -Rolling's drug dealer was apprehended, but the killer himself had slipped into the night.
-They look around the campsite, and they notice there's a camping tent set up there,
and they noticed a few things inside this tent. They saw this money that was covered in this pink,
reddish dye, and they knew right away, "Oh, this might be the proceeds or evidence
from the bank robbery." They also found a gun that matched the description of the handgun that was used in the bank robbery.
-But there were also some other items which were quite perplexing. So, there was a ski mask, there were a pair of trousers,
there was some pubic hair, and they didn't make the connection at the time between the murders and the items at this campsite,
but they did back them up, and they were to prove incredibly valuable when the pieces were put together.
-With an entire town under the glare of the national media spotlight, the FBI were under pressure to find the killer.
On August the 30th, amid the panic and chaos on campus, police identified a 19-year-old freshman
with mental health issues as a suspect. Edward Humphrey lived in the same apartment complex
as the last two victims and had been outwardly aggressive to other students. -Two days after the final murder,
he was involved in a physical battle with his grandmother, which involved him hitting her, and the police arrested him.
-Mr. Humphrey's behavior was such that he was highly conspicuous. I mean, he was loud, he was drunk,
he was off his medication, he had had brain injuries, he was out of control a lot, even in restaurants.
-Humphrey's grandmother didn't want to press charges, but the state decided that,
in order to keep their prime suspect in custody, they would. They posted bail at an unachievable $1 million
and took DNA samples from the suspect, hoping to conclusively link him with the college murders.
-He was under investigation quite heavily because a lot of the evidence pointed to him
as a possible suspect. Word of that leaked out to the press, so he became a focus of the media
as well as a focus of the investigation. -I think everybody was so desperate to solve
what had happened here for a lot of reasons, one of which is just a sense of security that,
"They got the guy." -Now it seemed that police had their serial killer and the prime suspect for the bank robbery,
Rolling's drug dealer friend, both in custody. Despite the incriminating evidence at the campsite,
the FBI weren't convinced this was their man. -For some reason, I just felt that this was not our bank robber.
He seemed to me to be totally clueless about how to rob a bank. -But, you never give up on somebody
until you do the investigation. So, over the next couple of days, my partner and I started conducting investigations
to determine if this individual was, in fact, the bank robber or not. -Meanwhile, the FBI's real killer and bank robber,
Danny Rolling, was still on the run. -He stole a car, he drove to Tampa, he committed three robberies, including holding up
a convenience store on September the 2nd, and five days later, he tries to commit another robbery,
this time in a store in Ocala, where he holds the manager to ransom and demands he opens the safe,
but, unfortunately, other people realized what's happening, the police are called,
and Rolling is unable to escape this time. -Rolling was finally taken into custody
and awaiting trial for the Ocala supermarket robbery. But in Gainesville, the investigation
into the student slayings had hit a dead end. DNA evidence had proven that prime suspect Edward Humphrey was not their killer.
-He found himself at the center of this investigation when police named him as a potential suspect,
but this was a rabbit hole that was going to lead nowhere, and it really was a distraction.
-Without another suspect for the murders, the investigation came to a standstill.
The Gainesville community had believed the perpetrator of these horrific killings was safely locked up.
It had given them a false sense of security. But now they knew the truth. There was a serial killer still at large.
A dark cloud of fear and panic hung over the Gainesville community once again. -Serial killer Danny Rolling had been arrested
for a grocery store robbery in nearby Ocala, but the investigations into the Gainesville murders
and bank robbery he committed in the city were still ongoing. No link had been made between the crimes or to Rolling.
The serial number of the gun used in the bank robbery was traced to its registered owner
three hours south in the coastal city of Sarasota. So, FBI agents went to interview him.
-So, the guy told a story of selling it to some vagrant, some guy who was just passing through town
who wanted to buy the gun. Sold it to him for cash. And the agent asked him, "Well, was there anything that stood out about this guy?
Anything that you can remember that would help us identify who he was?" -Officers were told the gun had been sold to a vagrant
who had a very distinctive attribute. -We were in a task force meeting one morning,
and I started recalling what this FBI agent had reported, that the individual -- the gun used in the bank robbery
had been sold to an individual who had a missing finger, and one of the Florida Department
of Law Enforcement agents stood up and says, "Holy shit!" And the whole room falls silent.
-And he proceeds to explain that, during the crime scene investigation of the first murders
of Christina Powell and Sonja Larson, that they found a piece of paper towel on the counter in the kitchen.
On one side was the imprint of a man's penis, as if he were wiping himself off after conducting a sex act.
On the other side of the paper was a hand print with a finger missing. And it was at that point that everybody realized
the bank robber is the murderer. The problem is we still didn't know who that was.
-Once that connection had been made, the crime lab began reexamining other exhibits from the woodland campsite
in connection with the student murders. -Among the elements of significance were a ski mask
whose fibers matched the duct tape found at the third murder, Christa Hoyt's pubic hairs were found
on Rolling's sleeping bag at the campsite, blood on a pair of his trousers was found to be Manny Taboada's,
a screwdriver was found which matched the marks on the sliding doors by which he'd got into the apartments,
but the most significant, perhaps, of all, was there was a series of audio tapes.
-In these disturbing recordings, Rolling alluded to the horror that he was about to unleash.
As more details of the Gainesville killings emerged, police in Shreveport, Louisiana, realized
that there were significant similarities between these cases and the unsolved murders of the Grissom family in 1989.
They suspected all eight homicides may be connected, but the identity of this serial killer remained a mystery.
-After a period of time when it became evident that the murderer had either left Florida
or had been arrested, because no further murders had been committed that matched that M.O.,
a decision was made to test the DNA of all inmates in Florida who had been arrested between --
I think it was like a three- or a four-month window -- anybody who had been arrested during that time frame
was gonna have their DNA checked against the DNA on the homicides. -Danny Rolling was in jail pending the trial
for the armed robbery of the grocery store in nearby Ocala, so he was on the list to have his DNA checked
against the killer's. He also had a partially missing finger on his left hand. -They obtained his profile, and lo and behold, they matched,
and they've got their man. -On the 24th of January, 1991, as a result of DNA testing,
Rolling became the prime suspect in the Gainesville student murders. Brian Jarvis was a sergeant covering major crimes
in Marion County, where Rolling was brought in for questioning in connection with the murders.
-When Danny walked into the interview room, he was shackled. He had a lot of anxiety, his left leg would tap,
it would shuffle, he would be scratching his leg, or picking lint off of it. In fact, there was one or two points
there where the detective offered to show him the photos of the crime scene, said, "I want to make sure
you know what we're talking about here," and Danny couldn't look at them. He turned his head away, and he reacted,
he said, "I don't want to see that." -On September 18, 1991, Danny Rolling was convicted
for three counts of attempted armed robbery and two counts of aggravated assault
on a law enforcement officer. He was jailed for life. Finally, two months later,
Rolling was indicted on five counts of first-degree murder for the atrocities in Gainesville.
-Rolling is indicted for the murders, and he initially pleads not guilty, but he does begin to confess,
and he doesn't do this in a standard traditional way, where he sits down with officers or prosecutors
and tells them what happened. -He actually speaks through a fellow inmate of his.
-Once the details of his crimes were revealed through his fellow prisoner, Rolling himself broke his silence
and spoke to the investigators. He blamed the atrocities on a personality disorder.
-And then another one, the evil one that causes him to kill, Gemini, was the personality really responsible.
-Now, in my view, it was not gonna be about whether he'd found guilty, but whether or not he was gonna be executed.
-With a potential death sentence now hanging over him, Rolling's trial was set for February 15, 1994,
in Gainesville, Florida. On the opening day in court, the prosecution was prepared for an insanity plea from Rolling,
but he was to surprise everyone. -Sure enough, he got up, and he stepped forward,
and he addressed the court, and he confessed to the crimes, and, of course, the outburst was --
the victims were stunned, shocked, there was even some people like, "What does that mean?
Did he just confess?" I mean, it was that shocking to everyone. -Rolling changed his plea to guilty
on all five counts of murder, three counts of sexual battery, and three counts of armed burglary.
On March the 24th, the 12 jurors unanimously recommended the death penalty. -I had no question in my mind that Judge Morris
was gonna give him the death penalty. I don't think Danny had any doubt, I don't think the defense team had any doubt.
-On the 20th of April, 1994, 39-year-old Danny Rolling was sentenced to death by Judge Stan Morris,
and immediately sent to Florida State Prison. His legal team began a process of appeals
which would last over 12 years. During one of these hearings, Rod Smith got the opportunity to cross-examine Rolling.
-It was the one time, it was just -- in my mind, it was almost me and him, just for a brief moment.
Danny had said something in an answer to me, as I recall it, "Mr. Smith, I'm not the monster you made me out to be,"
or, "I'm not a monster," something like that. And for the first time in the entire thing,
the entire process, I think I lost my cool entirely, and I remember saying -- and I remember the judge just about --
oh, he was really upset with me for it. I remember saying something to the effect that,
"When you killed that boy, were you a monster then?" -Rolling fought his death sentence to the very end.
The day before his execution, his last appeal was turned down. That night, on the eve of his death,
Rolling surprised everybody again. Despite never admitting to the 1989 Grissom family murders
in his hometown of Shreveport, he had another confession to make. "Hereby, I make a formal written statement
concerning the murders of Julie, Tom, and Sean Grissom. I, and I alone, am guilty.
It was my hand that took those precious lights out of this old, dark world." On October 25, 2006, in Florida State Prison,
justice for his victims was finally carried out. At 6:00 PM, Danny Harold Rolling was executed
by lethal injection. He was 52 years old. -When a grisly crime like this is committed,
and people's lives are impacted forever, the worst part of it is, of course, the victimization.
The families who should've been able to see their kids graduate from college, who instead have to bury them
at the beginning of their college careers. That's the worst part. -The things that mystify us most about people like Rolling
is how ordinary they are. We want them to be monstrous in their behavior, we want there to be something obvious about them,
and it's hard to accept that somebody this meaningless in terms of anything they accomplished in their lives
could come in and kind of dominate and terrorize a community. -When I looked into his eyes, it was vacant.
There was just darkness, and I'd never seen that before with anybody, and I've never seen it with anybody since,
and Danny Rolling is, in my opinion, the most evil person I've ever met. -Danny Rolling brutally slaughtered eight people
for no reason other than to prove to himself that he could succeed at something.
He stalked women, mutilated, and raped them. He killed anybody who got in his way,
including an 8-year-old boy, and that makes Danny Rolling one of the world's most evil killers.
♪♪ ♪♪ ♪♪

Danny Rolling, known as the Gainesville Ripper, murdered five university students in Florida in 1990. Rolling also confessed to murdering a family in his hometown of Shreveport, Louisiana.

An in-depth look at the lives and crimes of some of the world's most evil killers, including Jeffrey Dahmer, Ted Bundy, Richard Ramirez, Cary Stayner, Leonard Lake, Dorothea Puente and more.

Brief Summary

Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper, murdered five students in 1990, terrorizing the community and revealing his dark psychological background.

Key points

First Victims. Christina Powell and Sonja Larson were preparing for college when tragedy struck.
The Gainesville Ripper. Danny Rolling, a vagrant, brutally murdered five students in Gainesville, Florida in 1990.
A Dark Childhood. Danny Rolling's abusive upbringing shaped his violent tendencies.
The Grissom Family Murders. Rolling's first killings were marked by extreme violence and a chilling sense of control.
The Gainesville Community in Shock. The murders left the community terrified and on edge.
Tragic Arrival. Tracy anxiously awaits Manuel's return, unaware of the horror about to unfold.

Episode highlights

Episode quotes

He was a useless piece of work and never would amount to anything.

Danny Rolling's father's harsh words.

4:35WatchAug 3, 2021

Tension

85/ 100High tension

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