Latest / The conspiracy / The Serial Killer Who Inspired Scream - part 1

Transcript

The Serial Killer Who Inspired Scream - part 1 · The conspiracy

0:00
Speaker 1: Every fall, thousands of students showed up. They moved into apartments,
0:04
Speaker 1: unpacked their things, and prepped for the upcoming semester. It
0:08
Speaker 1: was a college town where the biggest worry was when
0:11
Speaker 1: your next assignment was due, or whether your roommate would
0:14
Speaker 1: get along with you. But in nineteen ninety someone was
0:17
Speaker 1: already in the trees nearby watching. He had come from
0:21
Speaker 1: elsewhere carrying something no one could have imagined, and by
0:25
Speaker 1: the time the first week of classes was over, five
0:28
Speaker 1: students were dead, and the man responsible was closer than
0:32
Speaker 1: anyone thought. This is the story of the Gainesville Ripper. Crime, conspiracy, cults,
0:39
Speaker 1: serial killers, and murder all things that I left to consume.
0:41
Speaker 1: And I know you do, do you sick tisted, beautiful,
0:44
Speaker 1: intellectually minded freak? And today we are talking about a
0:48
Speaker 1: very infamous killer that I think a lot of people
0:50
Speaker 1: don't know about, and he is the killer that inspired
0:54
Speaker 1: the franchise screen. So, without further adue, let's unbuckle our seatbelts,
0:58
Speaker 1: going Maki to the highway, slamm on the right, and
1:00
Speaker 1: bustle the windshield into this infamous case. Together. Let's take
1:18
Speaker 1: a quick pause to talk about something I love and
1:21
Speaker 1: the pun pause is intended because I'm talking about my
1:25
Speaker 1: kitty cats. Now, my cats are my children and they
1:28
Speaker 1: deserve the best. So when they started dealing with constant
1:32
Speaker 1: hairballs and getting a little chalky, I actually looked at
1:36
Speaker 1: what was in their food and it was mostly fillers
1:39
Speaker 1: and mystery ingredients I couldn't even pronounce. And that's when
1:42
Speaker 1: we switched to Smalls. Smalls is fresh human grade cat
1:46
Speaker 1: food made with preservative free, one hundred percent human grade ingredients,
1:50
Speaker 1: the kind of stuff you'd actually find in your own fridge,
1:53
Speaker 1: and it's delivered rate to your door. And since switching,
1:56
Speaker 1: I mean, the hair balls have basically stopped, and honestly
1:59
Speaker 1: they're is a lot less stinky, which is nice. And
2:02
Speaker 1: here's why it works. Cats are little carnivores, and Smalls
2:06
Speaker 1: is gently cooked with no fillers and no artificial junk,
2:10
Speaker 1: so more of the NW treents actually get digested, if
2:13
Speaker 1: that makes sense, which means more energy and in a
2:15
Speaker 1: silkier coat, and fewer hairballs and less stinky poops and
2:19
Speaker 1: a healthier cat all around. My cats go absolutely feral
2:23
Speaker 1: for these recipes, but don't take my word for it.
2:25
Speaker 1: Forbes bring Smalls the best overall, cat food and BuzzFeed
2:28
Speaker 1: said that their cats went completely ballistic for this stuff.
2:32
Speaker 1: Can confirm and after switching, eighty eight percent of cat
2:35
Speaker 1: owners reported overall health improvements. And if you're at all
2:38
Speaker 1: spooked by commitment, which I totally get, you don't have
2:41
Speaker 1: to be because you can try Smalls risk free. If
2:44
Speaker 1: your cat won't need it, then they will refund your order,
2:47
Speaker 1: So stop serving your little carnivore a bowl of processed shortcuts.
2:51
Speaker 1: And for a limited time, because you are a crime, conspiracy,
2:54
Speaker 1: cult and murder listener, you can get sixty percent off
2:57
Speaker 1: your first order plus free shipping and free treats for
3:00
Speaker 1: life when you head to smalls dot com slash CCCM.
3:03
Speaker 1: That's sixty percent off your first order with free treats
3:07
Speaker 1: for life and free shipping when you go to smalls
3:09
Speaker 1: dot com slash CCCM. Thank you so much to Small's
3:12
Speaker 1: for sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's
3:14
Speaker 1: get back to it. Danny Harold Rolling was born on
3:17
Speaker 1: May twenty sixth, nineteen fifty four, in Shreveport, Louisiana, and
3:21
Speaker 1: his parents, James and Claudia, had married roughly a year earlier,
3:25
Speaker 1: when Claudia was in her late teen slash early twenties,
3:28
Speaker 1: and it only took James about two weeks of marriage
3:31
Speaker 1: to show Claudia who he really was, and the violence
3:34
Speaker 1: started almost before their life together had a chance to begin. Now,
3:37
Speaker 1: James Rolling was a police officer on the Shreveport Force,
3:41
Speaker 1: and he carried a badge professionally and brought the authority
3:44
Speaker 1: that came with it into his home every single night.
3:48
Speaker 1: To the outside world, he was, you know, law enforcement,
3:51
Speaker 1: but behind closed doors he was the very thing people
3:54
Speaker 1: call law enforcement about. And when Claudia found out she
3:58
Speaker 1: was pregnant, James didn't celebrate. James resented the pregnancy and
4:03
Speaker 1: told Claudia the child was her own doing. Don't think
4:06
Speaker 1: that's how that works, James. I think it takes dud
4:09
Speaker 1: to dango. James, you idiot, And he said that he
4:12
Speaker 1: never asked for it and didn't want it. There's these
4:16
Speaker 1: crazy things called condoms. James look him up. And when
4:19
Speaker 1: Danny finally arrived, that resentment didn't fade away with time,
4:23
Speaker 1: and Claudia and James would go on to have another child.
4:27
Speaker 1: He did not learn his lesson, and his name would
4:29
Speaker 1: be Kevin. So Danny had a younger brother named Kevin,
4:32
Speaker 1: and Kevin's arrival didn't make things any better with James.
4:36
Speaker 1: It just gave him two targets instead of one, or
4:39
Speaker 1: actually three targets instead of one, since he was a
4:41
Speaker 1: jackass to his own wife now. Claudia left James again
4:44
Speaker 1: and again across the span of the marriage, and she
4:47
Speaker 1: would disappear for weeks, sometimes even months, in an attempt
4:51
Speaker 1: to build real resistance between herself and her violent husband.
4:55
Speaker 1: But no matter how long she stayed gone, she always
4:58
Speaker 1: came back, and every time she returned, the cycle picked
5:02
Speaker 1: up exactly where it had left off. So James just
5:04
Speaker 1: ran the household through control and violence, and neither had
5:08
Speaker 1: a limit, unfortunately, and he would beat Claudia regularly and
5:12
Speaker 1: put hands on both boys from the time they were toddlers,
5:16
Speaker 1: and the triggers for his violence were very unpredictable and absurd,
5:20
Speaker 1: and something even as minor as the way one of
5:23
Speaker 1: the boys was breathing could set him off. And on
5:26
Speaker 1: the days when his fists stayed down, his mouth took
5:29
Speaker 1: over because he was verbally abusive as well, so James
5:32
Speaker 1: would just lay into Danny with words instead, calling him
5:35
Speaker 1: unwanted and telling him he should never have existed, so
5:39
Speaker 1: there was no version of daily life where the boys
5:42
Speaker 1: felt safe in their own home, which is incredibly sad.
5:45
Speaker 1: And being a cop just gave James tools that most
5:48
Speaker 1: abusive fathers didn't have, and he made sure to use
5:51
Speaker 1: every single one of them. And one time he threw
5:54
Speaker 1: Danny to the ground and snapped a pair of handcuffs
5:56
Speaker 1: on him, and then he called in his fellow officers,
6:00
Speaker 1: who came and took the boy away, and all Danny
6:03
Speaker 1: had done was embarrass his father, and James had his
6:06
Speaker 1: own son hauled off like a suspect for it. Guy's
6:10
Speaker 1: ego is as fragile as an eggshell, so normal childhood
6:14
Speaker 1: milestones didn't exist under this roof. Birthdays went uncelebrated, and
6:19
Speaker 1: so did every holiday, and the small rituals that most
6:23
Speaker 1: families build a childhood around were just stripped away entirely.
6:27
Speaker 1: And when Danny brought home a puppy at one point,
6:29
Speaker 1: James directed his violence at the animal. This guy's just
6:33
Speaker 1: the megapiece of shit, and he would keep at it
6:36
Speaker 1: day after day until one day the dog actually passed
6:39
Speaker 1: away in Danny's arms, and Claudia's suffering went well beyond
6:44
Speaker 1: the routine beatings as well, and she ended up in
6:46
Speaker 1: the hospital at least once that we know of, telling
6:49
Speaker 1: the staff that James had put a razor blade in
6:51
Speaker 1: her hand and made her turn it on herself. And
6:55
Speaker 1: through it all she could see what was happening to
6:58
Speaker 1: her older son, and she tried to Danny in front
7:00
Speaker 1: of a psychologist, someone who could evaluate and maybe even
7:04
Speaker 1: help him, but James shut down every single attempt that
7:07
Speaker 1: she made, and according to him, there was no problem.
7:10
Speaker 1: Danny was just going through something and sooner or later
7:14
Speaker 1: he would snap out of it on his own. Now,
7:16
Speaker 1: the professionals who did manage to observe Danny at school
7:19
Speaker 1: saw something different, and school counselors flagged him before he
7:24
Speaker 1: finished the third grade, noting aggression and an inability to
7:27
Speaker 1: control his impulses, similar to his father, because sometimes history
7:32
Speaker 1: repeats itself in these cases, and his behavior problems bled
7:36
Speaker 1: into his academics and he fell behind in the classroom.
7:39
Speaker 1: Still without parental cooperation at home, those assessments pretty much
7:44
Speaker 1: went nowhere, and Danny's teenage years brought an escalation of
7:47
Speaker 1: his behavior on every front, and he would start drinking
7:51
Speaker 1: and using drugs early into his teens and police even
7:54
Speaker 1: arrested him at least twice for alcohol alone, and he
7:57
Speaker 1: would run away from home repeatedly, likely a vain attempt
8:01
Speaker 1: to get away from his abusive father on any terms
8:04
Speaker 1: he could find. But he also began creeping out to
8:07
Speaker 1: windows at night, peeping in to watch girls as they untressed,
8:13
Speaker 1: and he was caught doing it more than once, but
8:15
Speaker 1: the behavior didn't stop, and it started to become a compulsion.
8:19
Speaker 1: So Danny's kind of becoming creep at this point, and
8:23
Speaker 1: crime just kind of caught his attention while he was young,
8:27
Speaker 1: and he moved from shoplifting and petty theft to breaking
8:31
Speaker 1: into homes, and police picked him up multiple times, leading
8:34
Speaker 1: to his stints in one juvenile facility after another, but
8:38
Speaker 1: still none of it slowed him down, and each criminal
8:41
Speaker 1: release only brought on worse behavior, and Danny eventually dropped
8:45
Speaker 1: out of high school entirely and unable to shake his
8:48
Speaker 1: behavioral issues. He never gained footing that might have offered
8:51
Speaker 1: him another path, and he left with no diploma, a
8:55
Speaker 1: juvenile record, and a childhood that handed him almost nothing
8:58
Speaker 1: positive to carry forward. Everything that happened while growing up
9:02
Speaker 1: inside that house followed him out the door and it
9:05
Speaker 1: showed itself plainly in his volatility with authority and his
9:09
Speaker 1: inability to connect with anyone around him. So, after dropping
9:13
Speaker 1: out of high school, Danny joined the US Air Force,
9:16
Speaker 1: but the military didn't hold him long, and within a
9:19
Speaker 1: year he picked up a drug possession charge and got
9:21
Speaker 1: written up for disobeying orders, and in nineteen seventy two,
9:25
Speaker 1: the Air Force discharged him and he was back in
9:27
Speaker 1: Shreveport with nothing to show for it. And upon his
9:30
Speaker 1: return he landed at his grandfather's place, and for a
9:33
Speaker 1: short while things seemed to kind of level out, and
9:36
Speaker 1: he started attending church regularly, and it seemed that something
9:40
Speaker 1: resembling stability started to take shape around him for the
9:44
Speaker 1: very first time in his life. But substances kept pulling
9:47
Speaker 1: him away, and the drinking that had started in his
9:50
Speaker 1: teens never really stopped, and the drug use that ended
9:53
Speaker 1: his military career carried right along with it. And just
9:57
Speaker 1: like everything else, work never really stuck either. Danny couldn't
10:00
Speaker 1: hold a job any longer than he could hold an address,
10:04
Speaker 1: always moving before anything had a chance to even take root.
10:07
Speaker 1: But in his time at church, Danny met a young
10:11
Speaker 1: woman named oh Math Holco and the two were married
10:14
Speaker 1: on September sixth, nineteen seventy four, at the United Pentecostal
10:18
Speaker 1: Church in Shreveport. Now she was nineteen and the couple
10:22
Speaker 1: had a daughter together pretty soon after, and Danny resorted
10:25
Speaker 1: to alcohol in marijuana to try and handle the pressures
10:28
Speaker 1: of marriage and fatherhood, and the voyeurism that had started
10:32
Speaker 1: in his teenage years managed to return even while the
10:35
Speaker 1: marriage was still intact, and that abuse that he had
10:38
Speaker 1: grown up with became the abuse he handed down, unfortunately,
10:43
Speaker 1: and he drove oh Math away with the same sort
10:46
Speaker 1: of violence that had been constant in his own childhood.
10:49
Speaker 1: So she would leave and the divorce would be finalized.
10:52
Speaker 1: So at this point, troubled by disturbing thoughts and a
10:54
Speaker 1: habit of peeking into windows, as we know, Danny went
10:58
Speaker 1: downhill after this divorce, and this is when he would
11:01
Speaker 1: commit what is believed to be his first essay. And
11:05
Speaker 1: the resemblance of the woman to o'mather was unmistakable, and
11:09
Speaker 1: whatever restraint that had once kept him at the edges
11:12
Speaker 1: of other people's lives, watching from the dark, was now gone.
11:16
Speaker 1: And from that point forward he followed a grim pattern,
11:20
Speaker 1: and he crossed the country by himself, robbing people and
11:24
Speaker 1: sexual assaulting women along the way. And the robbery started
11:27
Speaker 1: not long after his marriage dissolved, and two Win Dixie
11:31
Speaker 1: supermarkets were among his targets, along with a string of
11:34
Speaker 1: other stores. And these weren't, by any means sophisticated jobs,
11:38
Speaker 1: and they weren't hard to trace back to him. And
11:41
Speaker 1: by the end of the decade, his robbery spree had
11:43
Speaker 1: stretched across state lines, and he hit targets throughout the South,
11:47
Speaker 1: moving fast and recklessly enough that law enforcement eventually caught up,
11:51
Speaker 1: and in nineteen seventy nine he was locked up in Jackson,
11:54
Speaker 1: Georgia for armed robbery, and he walked out of prison
11:57
Speaker 1: in nineteen eighty four and was just back to Robin
12:00
Speaker 1: within months. In the nineteen eighties, repeated the cycle on
12:03
Speaker 1: a wider scale, and Alabama locked him up for armed
12:07
Speaker 1: robbery as well, and so did Mississippi, and the charge
12:11
Speaker 1: never changed, and neither did rolling. Why I don't understand,
12:14
Speaker 1: like there are multiple charges, Just lock him up for life.
12:17
Speaker 1: He's just going to keep Robin shit the what is happening?
12:20
Speaker 1: But he would serve his time, walk out and pick
12:23
Speaker 1: up exactly where he left off, and by his mid thirties.
12:27
Speaker 1: Rolling had spent the majority of his adult life either
12:29
Speaker 1: locked up or running from the consequences of what he
12:32
Speaker 1: had done. Well free, and he had no home, no
12:35
Speaker 1: family willing to claim him, and a criminal record that
12:38
Speaker 1: stretched across several states. So in November of nineteen eighty nine,
12:43
Speaker 1: Julie Grissom was twenty four years old and living in Shreveport, Louisiana,
12:47
Speaker 1: as well as her father, William Grissom, who also went
12:50
Speaker 1: by the name Tom. Now Tom's eight year old grandson
12:54
Speaker 1: Sean rounded out a tight family circle, and a year earlier,
12:58
Speaker 1: Julie had fallen in love with a man named Hal Carter,
13:01
Speaker 1: and the two talked about getting married, though they couldn't
13:04
Speaker 1: agree on the timeline, and Carter wanted to date for
13:07
Speaker 1: three years first, while Julie pushed for one, and they
13:11
Speaker 1: settled onto but before the wedding could happen, the relationship
13:14
Speaker 1: ended over timing. But the way Carter remembered, Julie had
13:18
Speaker 1: nothing to do with how things fell apart. Same quote.
13:21
Speaker 1: She'd opened that door, and she had this smile like
13:25
Speaker 1: she had just been waiting for me, and she could
13:27
Speaker 1: hardly bear to wait any longer. She just made people
13:30
Speaker 1: feel good about themselves. And during this time, Rolling was
13:34
Speaker 1: back in Shreveport and working at a restaurant, and he'd
13:37
Speaker 1: been fired from the job for repeated absences, losing the
13:40
Speaker 1: last thread of structure holding his daily life together basically,
13:44
Speaker 1: and it is believed that he saw Julie at her
13:46
Speaker 1: department store job in a local mall and marked her
13:49
Speaker 1: as a target. So on November fourth, nineteen eighty nine,
13:53
Speaker 1: just hours after Rolling had been fired from the restaurant, Tom, Julie,
13:58
Speaker 1: and Sean Grissom were stepped to death inside Tom's home
14:02
Speaker 1: while preparing for dinner. So Shreveport officers responded to Tom's
14:06
Speaker 1: residence and discovered the three victims dead inside, and the
14:10
Speaker 1: scene was violent and organized in ways that unsettled investigators,
14:15
Speaker 1: and all three of them died from knife wounds, and
14:18
Speaker 1: Julie was assaulted during the attack, and later Danny would
14:23
Speaker 1: wash her body and stage it in a deliberate position
14:26
Speaker 1: before leaving. Now, at this point there was no immediate
14:28
Speaker 1: suspects and no witnesses and no clear motive tying anyone
14:33
Speaker 1: to the family, so the investigation went nowhere and Roling's
14:37
Speaker 1: name didn't surface at all during the initial investigation, and
14:40
Speaker 1: instead suspicion landed on the wrong person entirely, and investigators
14:45
Speaker 1: zeroed in on how Carter, the ex boyfriend, and the
14:49
Speaker 1: weight of that suspicion followed him for years, because I mean,
14:53
Speaker 1: usually in these scenarios they look at people that are
14:55
Speaker 1: actually close to the family, especially when they're this violent
14:59
Speaker 1: and seeming random. But six months after the Grisome murders
15:02
Speaker 1: in May of nineteen ninety, Rolling turned on the man
15:05
Speaker 1: who had shaped him, and he showed up and shot
15:08
Speaker 1: his father multiple times. So James would naturally collapse, bleeding badly,
15:14
Speaker 1: but he would not die, and he survived the shooting,
15:18
Speaker 1: though the damage was permanent and James lost the use
15:21
Speaker 1: of one eye and one ear, injuries he would carry
15:25
Speaker 1: for the rest of his life. So after he shot
15:27
Speaker 1: his father, Danny left and cut a path from Louisiana
15:31
Speaker 1: into Florida, burglarizing businesses and houses and stealing whatever vehicles
15:36
Speaker 1: he needed to keep moving forward, and he would go
15:38
Speaker 1: on to assault another woman by August in Sarasota, Florida,
15:43
Speaker 1: and then he kept moving north. So Rolling had made
15:46
Speaker 1: his way through Florida and reached Gainesville right as the
15:49
Speaker 1: fall semester at University of Florida was getting underway, and
15:52
Speaker 1: more than three fourths of the university's thirty four thousand
15:55
Speaker 1: students lived off campus, scattered across apartment complexes throughout city,
16:00
Speaker 1: and classes were set to begin around when Rolling arrived,
16:04
Speaker 1: and he set up camp in the woods near the university,
16:07
Speaker 1: living out of the trees with whatever he'd carried or
16:10
Speaker 1: stolen along the way. And to anyone who might have
16:13
Speaker 1: noticed him, he was just, you know, another drifter, and
16:16
Speaker 1: the students moving into the apartments that week didn't seem
16:19
Speaker 1: to really notice him at all. And Christina or Christy
16:22
Speaker 1: Powell was seventeen years old from Jacksonville, and she was
16:26
Speaker 1: someone who found the bright side of things without being
16:29
Speaker 1: told to look for it, and she wanted to design
16:32
Speaker 1: homes for people who couldn't afford them. And Christie's best
16:35
Speaker 1: friend was headed to New York for college, and she
16:37
Speaker 1: refused to make it about the goodbye, and her friend
16:39
Speaker 1: dreaded the separation, but Christie kept steering the conversation toward
16:43
Speaker 1: all the trips they would take back and forth, and
16:45
Speaker 1: she really cared for her friend and made plans to
16:49
Speaker 1: stay close. And Christie's roommate was eighteen year old Sonya
16:52
Speaker 1: Larson of Deerfield Beach who had dreams of becoming a teacher,
16:57
Speaker 1: and she loved children and carried that warmth into every
17:00
Speaker 1: relationship that she had, and she was physically affectionate, always
17:03
Speaker 1: reaching for a hug or holding a friend's hand. And
17:06
Speaker 1: Sonia carried a boldness that showed up in unexpected places,
17:10
Speaker 1: even teaching one of her friends how to drive. So
17:13
Speaker 1: both Christy and Sonia lived in the apartment together on
17:16
Speaker 1: the southwest side of Gainesville, and they were just settling
17:19
Speaker 1: into their first days of the semester when Rolling chose
17:22
Speaker 1: their home, and on August twenty fourth, nineteen ninety Rolling
17:26
Speaker 1: would enter their apartment and kill both of them, and
17:30
Speaker 1: their bodies weren't discovered until Sunday, August twenty six, roughly
17:34
Speaker 1: forty eight to seventy two, hours after they had passed away.
17:38
Speaker 1: And Christie's mother and father called multiple times as the
17:41
Speaker 1: first day of classes approached, and their daughter just never
17:44
Speaker 1: picked up, and when they couldn't get through, they called
17:47
Speaker 1: the police and asked them to check on her, and
17:50
Speaker 1: officers opened the door and found her body in the
17:52
Speaker 1: living room, and Sonya would be upstairs in a bedroom
17:55
Speaker 1: on the second floor, and one of them was unclothed
17:58
Speaker 1: while the other was partly cloth and Lieutenant Sadie Darnell,
18:01
Speaker 1: a Gainsville police spokesperson, confirmed those details and the bodies
18:06
Speaker 1: had also been posed and both victims showed signs of mutilation,
18:11
Speaker 1: and Danny was still not a suspect at this point.
18:15
Speaker 1: And then there was Krista Lee Hoyt, and she was
18:18
Speaker 1: eighteen years old and from Gainesville, and her nickname was Glowworm,
18:22
Speaker 1: which stuck with her because of her warm spirit, because
18:25
Speaker 1: she just seemed to draw people towards her, and those
18:28
Speaker 1: in her orbit appeared to remain close. And Christa's hobbies
18:31
Speaker 1: included cooking, camping, swimming, and racquetball. And a scholarship covered
18:36
Speaker 1: her tuition at Santa Fe Community College, and she held
18:39
Speaker 1: a job as a records clerk at the Alachua County
18:42
Speaker 1: Sheriff's office because she actually wanted to work crime scenes
18:45
Speaker 1: for a living, and she took her future very seriously
18:48
Speaker 1: and was meticulous with her grades, and after exams she
18:52
Speaker 1: convinced herself she had bombed, sometimes crying over it, only
18:56
Speaker 1: to find out later that she had done almost better.
18:59
Speaker 1: Than everyone else. But on Sunday, August twenty six, the
19:02
Speaker 1: same day Christi and Sonia were found, Christa didn't show
19:06
Speaker 1: up for her shift at the Sheriff's office and deputies
19:09
Speaker 1: went to check on her because that was not like
19:11
Speaker 1: her at all, not to show up, and unfortunately, they
19:14
Speaker 1: would find her body inside her apartment in southwest Gainsville,
19:18
Speaker 1: roughly two miles from the complex where the first two
19:21
Speaker 1: victims had been discovered, and the discovery came about eight
19:25
Speaker 1: hours after the first and Lieutenant Spencer Man told the
19:28
Speaker 1: press that Christa's body showed signs of trauma, but he
19:31
Speaker 1: would not go into detail, and the full extent of
19:34
Speaker 1: what was done to her included a STA wound in
19:38
Speaker 1: the back assault dition an additional mutilation, and the connection
19:44
Speaker 1: between the scenes was becoming impossible to ignore, and according
19:48
Speaker 1: to Gainesville's son, what tied the two crime scenes together
19:52
Speaker 1: was the way the victim's bodies had been mutilated. Now
19:55
Speaker 1: by the end of August, the city understood what it
19:58
Speaker 1: was dealing with, and Gainesville Police Chief Wayland Clifton addressed
20:01
Speaker 1: the press directly saying, quote, the two crimes could have
20:04
Speaker 1: been done by the same individual. The method of operation
20:07
Speaker 1: in these cases are similar, and State University System Chancellor
20:12
Speaker 1: Charles Reid when further saying, quote, it looks like it's
20:15
Speaker 1: part of a serial killer. It's a community problem. It's
20:18
Speaker 1: not just a university problem, unquote. And Governor Bob Martinez
20:23
Speaker 1: cautioned young people against staying alone. And the FBI was
20:26
Speaker 1: already working alongside local investigators, and Martinez had sent the
20:30
Speaker 1: state police mobile crime lab to the city and at
20:33
Speaker 1: the crime scenes, investigators recovered biological evidence left behind by
20:37
Speaker 1: the killer, including Seaman and Saliva, and students on campus
20:42
Speaker 1: couldn't help making a connection to a name Florida knew
20:45
Speaker 1: all too well, and that was Ted Bundy, because Ted
20:48
Speaker 1: Bundy had been executed just a few months earlier at
20:51
Speaker 1: this point, on January twenty fourth, nineteen eighty nine, Jana Walters,
20:56
Speaker 1: an eighteen year old freshman from Longwood, Florida, spoke for
20:59
Speaker 1: a lot of the saying, quote, that's what we're all saying.
21:02
Speaker 1: It's another Ted Bundy on the loose, some sicko. It's
21:05
Speaker 1: frightening really unquote. And parents across the state flooded the
21:09
Speaker 1: university in local police with phone calls, and university President
21:14
Speaker 1: John Lombardi and his administration fielded calls all day trying
21:18
Speaker 1: to convince parents their children were safe, which no, they're not.
21:24
Speaker 1: What are you saying? There's a literal serial killer on
21:27
Speaker 1: the loose. But because most incoming students still didn't have
21:31
Speaker 1: working phone lines, the university opened a free phone bank
21:34
Speaker 1: and urged everyone to remain on campus where they could
21:37
Speaker 1: be reached. So three young women were dead in the
21:40
Speaker 1: same neighborhood within forty eight hours, and hundreds of students
21:44
Speaker 1: packed up and left Gainesville entirely. Don't blame them. And
21:48
Speaker 1: the ones who remained bunched together in large groups at night,
21:51
Speaker 1: and more than a few kept baseball bats with an
21:53
Speaker 1: arm's reach while they tried to sleep. And Menuel to
21:56
Speaker 1: Boada had spent most of his life pushing through things
21:59
Speaker 1: that would have stopped many people. He lost his father
22:02
Speaker 1: as a teenager, but he kept going and his grades dipped,
22:06
Speaker 1: but then he brought him back up and he graduated
22:08
Speaker 1: with honors from high school, where he played football and
22:11
Speaker 1: wanted to be an architect. And Tracy Paulus was twenty
22:15
Speaker 1: three and had enrolled again at the University of Florida,
22:17
Speaker 1: picking up the degree she had left unfinished and she
22:21
Speaker 1: wanted to become a lawyer, and she'd been salutatorian and
22:23
Speaker 1: homecoming queen at her high school, graduating in nineteen eighty four,
22:27
Speaker 1: and friends and family described her as smart, beautiful, and
22:31
Speaker 1: very well spoken. And Tracy's older sister, Laurie Lay, was
22:34
Speaker 1: two years ahead of her and the two of them
22:37
Speaker 1: had a special bond, and before Tracy left for Gainesville,
22:40
Speaker 1: Laurie called her, quote, Trace, I had this feeling You're
22:44
Speaker 1: going to go to Gainesville and I'm not going to
22:46
Speaker 1: see you again unquote, and Tracy responded, quote, what why
22:51
Speaker 1: do you say stuff like that to me? You're freaking
22:53
Speaker 1: me out. Stop. I'm going to be fine unquote. So
22:56
Speaker 1: Manuel and Tracy had gone to the same high school
22:59
Speaker 1: in Miami, now splitting an apartment at the Gatorwood complex
23:02
Speaker 1: in Gainesville, and on August twenty eighth, nineteen ninety two,
23:06
Speaker 1: days after the first three bodies were found, their bodies
23:10
Speaker 1: were discovered inside that apartment. So investigators established a command
23:14
Speaker 1: post in the gap between Gaiorwood and the location where
23:17
Speaker 1: Christa's body had been discovered, roughly two miles apart, and officially,
23:22
Speaker 1: police would not confirm a link to the three earlier victims,
23:26
Speaker 1: though they acknowledged they were treating the two new deaths
23:29
Speaker 1: as a probable double homicide. And Manuel was the only
23:32
Speaker 1: male victim across the five killings, and because of that,
23:36
Speaker 1: it's possible that Rolling hadn't come for him, but he
23:39
Speaker 1: was in the apartment when Rolling forced his way inside,
23:42
Speaker 1: and Rolling would attack Manuel when he was in bed,
23:46
Speaker 1: but Manuel would put up a fight, but unfortunately he
23:49
Speaker 1: would succumb to multiple wounds. And then during that attack,
23:53
Speaker 1: Tracy would hear the commotion go see what was going on,
23:56
Speaker 1: and she would see Manuel either dying or dead on
24:00
Speaker 1: the floor, so she would run back to her room
24:02
Speaker 1: and barricade the door, but unfortunately Rolling would get in
24:06
Speaker 1: and that is where he would do the same to
24:08
Speaker 1: her and also assault her. And after investigators discovered their bodies,
24:13
Speaker 1: they would contact the family, specifically Laurie, and Laurie was
24:18
Speaker 1: with her husband when she found out and they booked
24:20
Speaker 1: a flight home to Miami immediately, and at the family
24:24
Speaker 1: home afterward, Tracy's family and friends gathered and Laurie noticed
24:28
Speaker 1: that every young man who walked through the door had
24:30
Speaker 1: been in love with Tracy at some point, saying quote
24:34
Speaker 1: either when we were seven, eight, twelve, fifteen, twenty, whatever
24:37
Speaker 1: it was, and I got a nice interior chuckle about that,
24:40
Speaker 1: because that's who she was unquote. So five students were
24:45
Speaker 1: dead in four days. A city of college kids had
24:48
Speaker 1: become the most frightened place in Florida. So the investigation
24:52
Speaker 1: stretch beyond Gainesville Police and the Elichow County Sheriff's office,
24:57
Speaker 1: drawing agents from law enforcement agency's statewide, and one of
25:00
Speaker 1: them was Dawn Mainz, a retired Florida Department of Law
25:04
Speaker 1: Enforcement or FDL investigator who had graduated from the University
25:09
Speaker 1: of Florida in nineteen seventy three. And the case drew
25:12
Speaker 1: national media coverage and generated a staggering paper trail, and
25:16
Speaker 1: by the time the investigation wound down, the task force
25:19
Speaker 1: had produced nearly seven thousand reports totally roughly one hundred
25:23
Speaker 1: thousand pages, and investigators noted a pattern across all three
25:27
Speaker 1: crime scenes. The killer had entered through back doors, and
25:31
Speaker 1: every home sat near a wooded area that provided natural cover.
25:35
Speaker 1: And Mainz would describe the final specifics saying, quote, this
25:38
Speaker 1: killer had a style about him. He would draw the
25:41
Speaker 1: victims to the edge of the bed and then leave
25:44
Speaker 1: them in a spread equal position as their final resting place. Unquote,
25:48
Speaker 1: just an absolute monster, like as if literally murdering someone
25:54
Speaker 1: as horrible enough, you have to desecrate their body by
25:59
Speaker 1: putting them in the position I just you know, deepest
26:01
Speaker 1: hole in the ground, bury him, you know. But in
26:05
Speaker 1: the immediate aftermath, investigators didn't have a profile that pointed
26:08
Speaker 1: anywhere really useful, but what they had instead were tips,
26:12
Speaker 1: and the tips pointed to someone named Edward Humphrey. Now,
26:16
Speaker 1: Humphrey was a University of Florida student in his late teens,
26:20
Speaker 1: so a car accident had left visible scars on his face,
26:24
Speaker 1: and he carried knives on him, and he had stopped
26:26
Speaker 1: taking medication prescribed for a mental health disorder, and several
26:30
Speaker 1: tipsters flagged him by name shortly after the murders, and
26:34
Speaker 1: within days of the killings, Humphrey was behind bars on
26:37
Speaker 1: a million dollar bond, just off of tips because they
26:41
Speaker 1: don't have any proof that he's actually been to these
26:43
Speaker 1: places or done anything, and a search of his home
26:45
Speaker 1: turned up magazines about knives, guns and girls, but the
26:49
Speaker 1: physical evidence seemed to engine his direction without ever arriving,
26:53
Speaker 1: and Mains explained the problem, saying, quote, we have a
26:56
Speaker 1: lot of physical evidence that, according to our technology at
26:59
Speaker 1: the time, placed Ed at some of the scenes, some fiber,
27:03
Speaker 1: some hares. They couldn't say definitively it was Ed's hair,
27:07
Speaker 1: but they couldn't say it wasn't so circumstantial. But seaman
27:11
Speaker 1: recovered at all three Gainesville crime scenes revealed the killer
27:14
Speaker 1: had type B blood and Humphrey's blood was Type A.
27:19
Speaker 1: News outlets were already telling the public that the prime
27:22
Speaker 1: suspect was locked up, but that was not the case,
27:26
Speaker 1: and Humphrey had also been arrested for assaulting his grandmother,
27:29
Speaker 1: which only deepened public suspicion, despite him having a completely
27:33
Speaker 1: different blood type, and the ordeal consumed his life and
27:36
Speaker 1: his families, and his brother, George told the New York Times, quote,
27:40
Speaker 1: my brother wasn't well off mentally to begin with, and
27:43
Speaker 1: this has rattled him to his foundations unquote. And Humphrey
27:47
Speaker 1: was eventually released from jail ten months after the grandmother assault,
27:51
Speaker 1: and his emotional instability and record of violent outbursts had
27:55
Speaker 1: made him look like a suspect, but the truth was
27:57
Speaker 1: simpler wrong placed at the long time, and State Attorney
28:02
Speaker 1: Rod Smith acknowledged what happened, saying, quote, it was the
28:05
Speaker 1: desperation of the time and the need to get that guy.
28:08
Speaker 1: We made a mistake unquote. So on September seventh, nineteen
28:12
Speaker 1: ninety ten, days after the last bodies were discovered, Rolling
28:16
Speaker 1: walked into a Wing Dixie supermarket in Ocala, Florida, with
28:19
Speaker 1: a pistol, and a witness told the Acellistar banner. He shouted, quote,
28:24
Speaker 1: this is a robbery, get your money out, unquote, and
28:27
Speaker 1: officers arrived fast and caught Rolling after a short pursuit
28:31
Speaker 1: and arresting. Officer Ken Rain remembered Rolling's reactions, saying, quote, unquote, boy,
28:36
Speaker 1: you guys are good now. Ocana sits in Marion County,
28:39
Speaker 1: about forty miles south of Gainesville, a different jurisdiction that
28:43
Speaker 1: had no reason to make a connection between a supermarket
28:46
Speaker 1: hold up and the serial murder case in Alachua County.
28:50
Speaker 1: So Rolling was booked into Marion County jail on armed
28:53
Speaker 1: robbery charges, and he would later be convicted on a
28:56
Speaker 1: separate federal bank robbery charge and transferred to Florida a prison.
29:00
Speaker 1: So the man that investigators across the stage were hunting
29:04
Speaker 1: was already now behind bars, and nobody knew it. So
29:09
Speaker 1: in August nineteen ninety, a woman named Cindy Jarusich, going
29:12
Speaker 1: by Cindy Dobbin at the time, caught a news broadcast
29:16
Speaker 1: about the Gainesville killings while driving through the Florida Panhandle,
29:19
Speaker 1: and one name hit her the moment she heard the report,
29:23
Speaker 1: Danny Rolling. Now Danny was someone she knew from her
29:26
Speaker 1: church back in Louisiana, and Rolling had once told Cindy
29:30
Speaker 1: and her family something she hadn't forgotten, quote one day,
29:34
Speaker 1: I'm going to leave this town and I'm going to
29:36
Speaker 1: go where the girls are beautiful and I can just
29:38
Speaker 1: lay in the sun and watch beautiful women all day unquote.
29:42
Speaker 1: And her then husband, Stephen Dobbin, had told her something worse.
29:46
Speaker 1: Rolling had confided in Dobbin that he had a problem,
29:50
Speaker 1: and when Cindy asked what kind of problem, Dobbin answered,
29:53
Speaker 1: quote unquote, he likes to stick knives into people. And
29:57
Speaker 1: at first she tried to dismiss the can, but the
30:01
Speaker 1: Shreveport triple homicide from November nineteen eighty nine and what
30:04
Speaker 1: was happening in Gainesville looked too much alike, and Cindy
30:08
Speaker 1: could not shake the feeling so in November of nineteen ninety,
30:11
Speaker 1: she picked up the phone and called crime stopper saying, quote,
30:15
Speaker 1: I think there's one guy y'all need to investigate, Danny
30:18
Speaker 1: Rowling unquote, and the call cracked the case wide open.
30:23
Speaker 1: I want to take a quick pause on the video
30:24
Speaker 1: to tell you something that has quite literally changed my
30:27
Speaker 1: life and my husband's life, and that is Shopify. And
30:30
Speaker 1: if you have been sitting on a business idea, maybe
30:33
Speaker 1: you think about it late at night when you're going
30:35
Speaker 1: to bed, thinking that you can't do it, you can
30:38
Speaker 1: with Shopify because Shopify makes it easy to actually make
30:42
Speaker 1: it happen, and everything you need to start selling is
30:45
Speaker 1: included and ready from day one. And that's how we
30:48
Speaker 1: built our own store. Sour Boys runs on Shopify, and
30:52
Speaker 1: we'd be lost without it because I'm not a web
30:54
Speaker 1: developer and I am not an expert on payments. I
30:57
Speaker 1: investigate crimes for a living basically, and make sketch comedy.
31:02
Speaker 1: It's not my wheelhouse. But the storefront was live and
31:04
Speaker 1: taking orders faster than we could even make candy. But
31:07
Speaker 1: don't worry, there's enough candy, and it was all through Shopify,
31:10
Speaker 1: and Shopify checkout helps your customers actually finish their purchase
31:14
Speaker 1: and when they come back, their details are already saved,
31:17
Speaker 1: so it's just one tap and it's done, so you
31:19
Speaker 1: don't have to worry about customers just leaving an abandoned cart.
31:23
Speaker 1: And that's a real confidence boost when you have a business.
31:25
Speaker 1: And because Shopify handles the setup and check out, you
31:28
Speaker 1: get your time back to focus on actually growing your business.
31:32
Speaker 1: And Shopify powers millions of businesses worldwide, household names like
31:36
Speaker 1: Mattel and Jim Shark and Sour Boys, and it's all
31:40
Speaker 1: using the same infrastructure day one. With Shopify, nothing stands
31:43
Speaker 1: between your idea and a real business. So go make
31:46
Speaker 1: it one and start your free trial at shopify dot
31:49
Speaker 1: com slash CCCM. Start your free trial at shopify dot
31:53
Speaker 1: com slash CCCM. Thank you so much to Shopify for
31:56
Speaker 1: sponsoring the video and supporting the channel, and let's get
31:58
Speaker 1: back to it. So FDL investigator Don Maines traveled to
32:01
Speaker 1: Shreveport and examined the evidence from the Grisom murders, and
32:05
Speaker 1: the way Julie Grissom's body had been arranged matched what
32:08
Speaker 1: investigators had seen at several of the Gainesville crime scenes
32:12
Speaker 1: and tape residue marked her skin and someone had wiped
32:14
Speaker 1: her body down with vinegar, a detail that was similar
32:17
Speaker 1: to soap that had been found on the Florida victims.
32:20
Speaker 1: And when the Shreveport perpetrator's body fluids came back as
32:24
Speaker 1: type B blood, it lined up with all three Gainesville
32:27
Speaker 1: crime scenes, and Mainz called it a revelation, and investigators
32:32
Speaker 1: confirmed that Rolling himself also carried type B blood, linking
32:36
Speaker 1: two crime sprees across two states to a single suspect.
32:40
Speaker 1: And meanwhile, a separate thread of evidence had been sitting
32:42
Speaker 1: in storage since August and the same day investigators discovered
32:46
Speaker 1: Christa's body, a bank was robbed about a half a
32:49
Speaker 1: mile from her apartment, and one of the tellers managed
32:52
Speaker 1: to get a red die pack into the money before
32:54
Speaker 1: it left the counter. Later that evening, an officer spotted
32:57
Speaker 1: a figure disappearing into a nearby tree line and follow
33:00
Speaker 1: the trail to a campsite, and whoever had been there
33:03
Speaker 1: was now gone, but the campsite was not empty and
33:06
Speaker 1: left behind where a screwdriver, the die marked money bag,
33:10
Speaker 1: and a gun and a cassette player with a tape
33:13
Speaker 1: still inside it. And at the time no one connected
33:16
Speaker 1: the robbery to the murders, and the presence of a
33:19
Speaker 1: firearm at the campsite seemed to rule out a connection
33:22
Speaker 1: since no gun had been used in the student murders,
33:25
Speaker 1: and the tape sat in an evidence locker for months unplayed,
33:30
Speaker 1: which is crazy to me, and Rolling's record of armed
33:33
Speaker 1: robbery convictions changed the picture, and investigators went back and
33:37
Speaker 1: looked at the bank job from the day Christa's body
33:39
Speaker 1: was found with fresh eyes, and they pulled the cassette
33:42
Speaker 1: player from storage and finally pressed play. Now on the tape,
33:47
Speaker 1: a man talked and sang, and in one of those
33:50
Speaker 1: songs you could hear quote mystery rider, what's your name?
33:55
Speaker 1: You're a killer, a drifter gone insane unquote. Between songs,
33:59
Speaker 1: he spoke to family members, circling back to how his
34:02
Speaker 1: life had gone off course, and according to state Attorney Smith,
34:06
Speaker 1: Rolling also went into detail about the best method for
34:10
Speaker 1: killing a deer, and somewhere on the tape, the voice
34:13
Speaker 1: identified itself by name Danny Harold Rolling, and Detective Lagrain
34:18
Speaker 1: Hewitt remembered the moment, saying, quote that was exciting. It
34:22
Speaker 1: didn't matter what the lyrics were or what he was saying.
34:24
Speaker 1: At that point, unquote, and Maines saw it differently, saying, quote,
34:28
Speaker 1: if we had played the tape before, we would have
34:30
Speaker 1: had this guy three months ago. But for some reason, somehow,
34:33
Speaker 1: that tape escaped us, and I'll freely admit it. And
34:38
Speaker 1: DNA evidence gave investigators what they needed, and in May
34:41
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety one, Rolling was publicly identified as the prime
34:45
Speaker 1: suspect in the Gainesville murders, and the formal charge came
34:49
Speaker 1: six months later, five counts of first degree murder. An
34:53
Speaker 1: inside Florida State Prison, a Rolling found an unlikely ally
34:57
Speaker 1: in Bobby Lewis, a death row inmate. Now Lewis told
35:00
Speaker 1: authorities that Rolling had walked him through the killings in
35:03
Speaker 1: detail and said he wanted to come clean, and Lewis
35:07
Speaker 1: had his own reasons for cooperating with them because he
35:09
Speaker 1: was serving a life sentence for killing a drug dealer
35:11
Speaker 1: in Jacksonville in the nineteen seventies and was looking for
35:14
Speaker 1: a reduction and what Lewis put down on paper filled
35:18
Speaker 1: five pages of specifics about the murders, and FDLI investigator
35:22
Speaker 1: Hewitt said the letter contained details only the killer could
35:26
Speaker 1: have known, and investigators arranged to sit down, but Rolling
35:29
Speaker 1: had a condition he would only do it if Lewis
35:32
Speaker 1: sat in the room and did the talking for him.
35:35
Speaker 1: So Rolling leaned on Lewis in a way that went
35:38
Speaker 1: beyond the interviews. He became very codependent with him, and
35:42
Speaker 1: he said he needed Bobby's support and asked not to
35:46
Speaker 1: be separated from him. So the arrangement proceeded, and investigators
35:49
Speaker 1: posed the questions and Lewis gave the answers, and Rolling
35:53
Speaker 1: confirmed or denied each one. It was like a translator
35:57
Speaker 1: who didn't need to be Translator's a really weird situation.
36:00
Speaker 1: Lewis became something between a confidant and a confessor, the
36:04
Speaker 1: one person Rolling trusted enough to speak through. And the
36:07
Speaker 1: affirmations Rolling gave were captured on recording, and as Hewitt
36:11
Speaker 1: put it, quote, it was important because he was participating
36:14
Speaker 1: in the confession unquote. And the session ended up producing
36:18
Speaker 1: details that hadn't surfaced before, and one of them was
36:20
Speaker 1: after killing Christa Hoyt, Rolling went back he was worried
36:25
Speaker 1: his wallet might still be inside her apartment. The decapitation
36:29
Speaker 1: happened on that return trip and was not part of
36:32
Speaker 1: the original attack, and that's when they learned what happened
36:35
Speaker 1: inside Tracy and Manuel's apartment, that Tracy heard the struggle
36:38
Speaker 1: in Manuel's room and came to see what was happening,
36:41
Speaker 1: but the sight of Rolling sent her running back toward
36:43
Speaker 1: her room, and she got the door shut and tried
36:46
Speaker 1: to lock it, but Rolling forced his way through. And
36:48
Speaker 1: ABC News reporter John don Van reported that Tracy confronted
36:52
Speaker 1: Rolling directly, and she asked him, quote, You're the one,
36:56
Speaker 1: aren't you, unquote, and Rolling replied quote unquote, yeah, I'm
37:00
Speaker 1: the one, and Lewis, after hearing everything Rolling described, said, quote,
37:05
Speaker 1: I've never been told nothing in reality. I've never read
37:08
Speaker 1: nothing in a Stephen King novel that comes close to
37:12
Speaker 1: what the reality is of what this man did unquote.
37:16
Speaker 1: And despite confessing to the five Gainesville murders, Rolling refused
37:20
Speaker 1: to admit to the Shreveport killings. During the interviews, and
37:23
Speaker 1: as the questions continued, Rolling introduced a different explanation for
37:27
Speaker 1: what he'd done, and he claimed he had quote unquote,
37:31
Speaker 1: dealt with different personalities all my life and described two
37:35
Speaker 1: alter egos, and he called the first one you nad
37:39
Speaker 1: his own name reversed genius and described it as a
37:43
Speaker 1: bad presence, but not an evil one. I beg to differ,
37:46
Speaker 1: and the other he called Gemini, which Rolling cast as
37:50
Speaker 1: the truly dangerous one and the personality he held responsible
37:54
Speaker 1: for the murders. Isn't that convenient for Rolling? Isn't it
38:00
Speaker 1: fell bullshit? To be honest? And Rolling had lifted that
38:03
Speaker 1: name from The Exorcist IIE, a movie he walked shortly
38:05
Speaker 1: before the murders, and in the film, an evil spirit
38:08
Speaker 1: named Gemini is responsible for a string of killings. In
38:12
Speaker 1: State Attorney Rod Smith had no patience for the explanation luckily, saying, quote,
38:17
Speaker 1: Danny committed these crimes for one reason only, he loved it.
38:22
Speaker 1: And Rolling also told investigators something else. He had aspired
38:25
Speaker 1: to be a superstar in the mold of Ted Bundy,
38:29
Speaker 1: and in an interview with the Gainesville Son, Smith said
38:32
Speaker 1: Rolling fell short of that goal, crediting a deliberate effort
38:36
Speaker 1: by authorities to center the victims and their families instead
38:40
Speaker 1: of their killer. And clinical psychologist Harry Kropp first evaluated
38:44
Speaker 1: Rolling in January nineteen ninety one after the Okalla armed
38:48
Speaker 1: robbery arrest, and Crop's evaluation uncovered what he called end
38:52
Speaker 1: quote incredible amount of underlying anger unquote, along with a
38:56
Speaker 1: borderline personality disorder, and the symptoms included violent mood swings,
39:01
Speaker 1: impulsive and self destructive behavior, narcissism, and anti social feelings. Quote,
39:07
Speaker 1: but he rejected Rolling's claim of quote unquote multiple personalities,
39:11
Speaker 1: saying quote, I didn't buy it. This was Danny looking
39:14
Speaker 1: for something that would make what happened more dramatic and
39:17
Speaker 1: minimize his own culpability by saying the devil made me
39:21
Speaker 1: do it unquote. So by November nineteen ninety one, Rolling
39:25
Speaker 1: had been formally charged with five counts of first degree
39:27
Speaker 1: murder for the Gainesville killings, and he pleaded not guilty
39:31
Speaker 1: to all of them. And the prosecution was led by
39:33
Speaker 1: state Attorney Rod Smith, and Rolling's lead defense attorney was
39:37
Speaker 1: Rick Parker, and Smith's case rested on the evidence. The
39:40
Speaker 1: investigation had already assembled the DNA, the recorded confessions, and
39:44
Speaker 1: the forensic trail from campsite to crime scenes, and the
39:48
Speaker 1: defense couldn't argue the facts away, so Parker built his
39:51
Speaker 1: strategy around the penalty and the Supreme courts nineteen eighty
39:55
Speaker 1: two decision in Ettings versus Oklahoma required capital juries to
39:59
Speaker 1: cons or a dependent's history of abuse and deprivation when
40:03
Speaker 1: deciding between life and death, regardless of whether that history
40:07
Speaker 1: excused the crime, and Parker planned to put Rolling's childhood
40:11
Speaker 1: on trial instead. In my opinion, the child innocent, you know,
40:16
Speaker 1: the child pretty innocent in this case. The adult fully
40:21
Speaker 1: culpable put him in a hole. I think personally, I
40:24
Speaker 1: don't know now. Parker's mitigation case would lay bare the
40:27
Speaker 1: Rolling household from the beginning, beatings that started so young,
40:31
Speaker 1: a father who weaponized his badge against his own family,
40:34
Speaker 1: a mental illness that went unaddressed because James Rolling blocked
40:38
Speaker 1: every attempt to get his son evaluated fair, and the
40:41
Speaker 1: defense would present Rolling's psychological profile as evidence of damage,
40:45
Speaker 1: not as an excuse. Definitely damage damage, for sure. I
40:50
Speaker 1: think there's a little bit of nature and nurture in
40:52
Speaker 1: there for sure. However, while awaiting trial, Rolling's admission went
40:57
Speaker 1: beyond Gainesville, and he had also confessed to killing three
41:00
Speaker 1: members of the Grisom family in Shreveport, Louisiana in November
41:05
Speaker 1: of nineteen eighty nine, which put his confirmed total at
41:08
Speaker 1: now eight victims, and no separate charges were filed in
41:11
Speaker 1: Louisiana for those killings, and he would face justice only
41:15
Speaker 1: in Florida. So Rolling's trial opened in February of nineteen
41:18
Speaker 1: ninety four, more than three years after the murders, and
41:22
Speaker 1: on February fifteenth, the day set for trial to begin,
41:25
Speaker 1: Rolling stood up and changed his plate, and he actually
41:29
Speaker 1: entered guilty pleas on every murder count and on the
41:32
Speaker 1: additional charges connected to them. And he was thirty nine
41:35
Speaker 1: years old at the time, and his confession had already
41:38
Speaker 1: been specific, and Rolling had shown investigators where he buried
41:42
Speaker 1: the murder weapon near his campsite, along with jewelry he
41:45
Speaker 1: had actually taken from the victims and the tools he
41:48
Speaker 1: used to pry open their doors. Because Rolling pleaded guilty
41:52
Speaker 1: before any jury were seated, the question of whether he
41:55
Speaker 1: committed the murders was settled on the spot, so testimony
41:58
Speaker 1: about the crimes, the crimes, photographs, and physical evidence never
42:02
Speaker 1: reached the jury. So Rolling's plea eliminated the need for
42:06
Speaker 1: a guilt phase and pushed the trial straight into penalty proceedings,
42:10
Speaker 1: and prosecutors sought the death penalty on all five counts.
42:13
Speaker 1: Five young people had been murdered mutilated in their homes
42:19
Speaker 1: across four days, and the crime scenes showed pre planning,
42:23
Speaker 1: control and cruelty that went far beyond what was necessary
42:28
Speaker 1: to kill, and Rolling had shown no remorse in any
42:31
Speaker 1: of his recorded statements. And as we know, the defense
42:34
Speaker 1: countered with Rolling's life and the abuse that followed. And
42:37
Speaker 1: the argument wasn't that Rolling was innocent, just that the
42:40
Speaker 1: jury should understand what built him before deciding whether the
42:44
Speaker 1: state should kill him. But Rolling would address the court
42:48
Speaker 1: himself saying quote, I've been running from first one thing
42:52
Speaker 1: and then another all my life, whether from problems at home,
42:55
Speaker 1: or with the law, or from myself unquote. And Rolling
42:59
Speaker 1: cast an himself as a victim of violence, not as
43:02
Speaker 1: someone who had chosen it. And still that distinction carried
43:06
Speaker 1: no weight with the court when it came to a
43:08
Speaker 1: sign responsibility, and on April twentieth, nineteen ninety four, Rolling
43:12
Speaker 1: was formally sentenced to death on all five counts of
43:15
Speaker 1: first degree murder. The jury took about six hours over
43:18
Speaker 1: two days to reach its recommendation, juriors deciding twelve to
43:21
Speaker 1: nothing that Danny Rowling should die in the electric chair.
43:24
Speaker 1: And Anne garn Christa Hoyt's mother, attended every session of
43:28
Speaker 1: the trial, and she said she did it to honor
43:31
Speaker 1: the victim's courage. And after the jury's recommendation. She told
43:34
Speaker 1: reporters quote unquote, we got what we prayed for. It's
43:37
Speaker 1: partial relief. And Anne Paula's Tracy Pollis's cousin, described the
43:42
Speaker 1: moment the recommendation came down, saying, quote, when I heard
43:45
Speaker 1: the verdict, I just started crying that a big smile
43:48
Speaker 1: came on my face unquote. And victim advocates Laura Nutson
43:52
Speaker 1: said the families understood that no recommendation could return what
43:55
Speaker 1: they had lost, but what it did give them was
43:58
Speaker 1: a certainty that Rolling wouldn't take another life. So Rolling
44:01
Speaker 1: arrived on Florida's death row already carrying a reputation that
44:05
Speaker 1: preceded him because he had confessed and pleaded guilty and
44:08
Speaker 1: had been sentenced to die. And this caught the eye
44:11
Speaker 1: of Sondra London, a freelance journalist best known for writing
44:14
Speaker 1: a book about G. J. Shaeffer, her ex boyfriend and
44:18
Speaker 1: a suspected serial killer. So London began correspondence with Rolling,
44:21
Speaker 1: and the relationship quickly turned into something else entirely, and
44:24
Speaker 1: she described meeting him in prison saying, quote, standing before
44:28
Speaker 1: my hungry eyes was one gorgeous hunk of a man. Unquote.
44:32
Speaker 1: Clearly she has a type. That's all I'm going to say.
44:35
Speaker 1: Rolling described the relationship his own way, saying quote deep
44:39
Speaker 1: as the Amazon River and just as wild unquote disgusting.
44:43
Speaker 1: I hate this grouse. So it started as those letters
44:47
Speaker 1: became an engagement and a jointly written book, The Making
44:51
Speaker 1: of a Serial Killer, The Real Story of the Gainesville Murders,
44:55
Speaker 1: and prosecutors moved to block the profits, and a state
44:58
Speaker 1: used the Son of Sam law, designed to stop convicted
45:01
Speaker 1: criminals from cashing in on their own stories, to go
45:04
Speaker 1: after them, which thank god that exists. Also, I need
45:06
Speaker 1: to do a video on the Son of Sam, because
45:07
Speaker 1: that one is freaking crazy. And a judge sided with
45:11
Speaker 1: the prosecutors in nineteen ninety eight, ordering twenty thousand dollars
45:14
Speaker 1: in profits tied to London's Gainsville Ripper publication turned over
45:18
Speaker 1: to the state, and Rolling spent years writing from his
45:21
Speaker 1: cell and not just to London, though in one letter
45:24
Speaker 1: went to the Associated Press in two thousand, running seventeen
45:27
Speaker 1: pages in which Rolling argued that a quote mangy dog
45:31
Speaker 1: gets more consideration unquote than the prisoners looks like they're
45:35
Speaker 1: doing their job right over at Florida State. Am I right?
45:38
Speaker 1: And then two years later he wrote again saying, quote,
45:41
Speaker 1: I assure you I am not a salivating ogre granted
45:44
Speaker 1: times past. The dark era of long ago Doctor Jekyl
45:48
Speaker 1: and mister Hyde did strike up and down the corridors
45:52
Speaker 1: of insanity. Unquote, I don't care, shut up, shut up.
45:57
Speaker 1: Take the pen out of this guy's hand. And he
45:58
Speaker 1: eventually told these associated press quote I do deserve to die,
46:03
Speaker 1: but do I want to die? No? I want to live.
46:06
Speaker 1: Life is difficult to give up on. Quote you should
46:09
Speaker 1: have thought of that before you took the life of
46:12
Speaker 1: eight innocent, beautiful human beings. You piece of shit. And
46:17
Speaker 1: his legal team filed appeals challenging the death sentence, and
46:20
Speaker 1: his central argument was that Lewis had effectively been working
46:23
Speaker 1: for the prosecution, using their friendship to extract statements that
46:27
Speaker 1: should never have been admitted as evidence, and the courts
46:30
Speaker 1: rejected every challenge, luckily so. On October twenty fifth, two
46:34
Speaker 1: thousand and six, more than sixteen years after the killings
46:37
Speaker 1: that had empty Gainesville of its sense of safety, Rolling
46:41
Speaker 1: faced his death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison,
46:45
Speaker 1: and at the time he was fifty two years old,
46:48
Speaker 1: and in his final hours he was calm and cooperative,
46:51
Speaker 1: and his brother Kevin visited with a pastor and the
46:54
Speaker 1: three of them sat together for several hours, and Kevin
46:57
Speaker 1: was the same younger brother who had grown up under
46:59
Speaker 1: their father fists alongside Danny and before the injection, Rolling
47:03
Speaker 1: saying a hymn, and he was pronounced dead at six
47:06
Speaker 1: thirteen pm Eastern time. Sixty two inmates had been executed
47:10
Speaker 1: since Florida resumed the death penalty in nineteen seventy nine,
47:14
Speaker 1: and Rolling was the third put to death that year,
47:16
Speaker 1: and Christa's stepmother, Diana Hoyt, watched the execution occur and
47:21
Speaker 1: she spoke on the execution saying, quote, this is a
47:24
Speaker 1: tough thing, but is a necessary thing to go through.
47:28
Speaker 1: It is very hard for us to see someone else die,
47:31
Speaker 1: but he deserves it. And Sean Grissom's brother was also
47:35
Speaker 1: heard from that day Becausehawn had just been eight years
47:38
Speaker 1: old when he was killed by Rolling alongside his grandfather
47:42
Speaker 1: and aunt in Shreveport, and he said, quote, my brother
47:45
Speaker 1: would have been twenty five and now Danny Rolling paid
47:49
Speaker 1: for what he did. And Rolling himself had actually released
47:52
Speaker 1: a written statement before the execution, and it was a
47:55
Speaker 1: confession more direct than anything he had ever offered investigators
47:58
Speaker 1: at the time of his arrest, saying quote, I and
48:02
Speaker 1: I alone am guilty. It was my hand that took
48:05
Speaker 1: those precious lights out of this old dark world unquote.
48:10
Speaker 1: It was only dark because of you, Ganny Rolling And
48:13
Speaker 1: outside the prison, a crowd had gathered in a field,
48:15
Speaker 1: split between those who opposed the execution and those who
48:19
Speaker 1: supported it, and the scene was similar to the crowds
48:21
Speaker 1: that had gathered for Ted Bundy's execution in the same
48:25
Speaker 1: death chamber in nineteen eighty nine. And the families of
48:28
Speaker 1: the Rollings five Gainesville victims ran a joint advertisement in
48:33
Speaker 1: the Gainesville Sun, and it was addressed to the community
48:35
Speaker 1: that had held them up through years of investigation, trials, appeals,
48:39
Speaker 1: and grief, saying, quote, we hope you will remember August
48:43
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety and the years that followed without any sense
48:46
Speaker 1: of community shame for what has happened here. You turned
48:50
Speaker 1: a blemish into a rose unquote. And in the months
48:53
Speaker 1: after the murders, a memorial took shape on Southwest thirty
48:56
Speaker 1: fourth Street in Gainesville, and in two thousand the city
48:59
Speaker 1: added five palm trees along the street, one representing each
49:03
Speaker 1: victim with individual name plaques, and on the nearby thirty
49:07
Speaker 1: fourth Street wall, someone painted a mural which was a
49:10
Speaker 1: black background covered in red hearts and the five names
49:13
Speaker 1: written in white and the word remember. And Sadie Darnell,
49:17
Speaker 1: who later became sheriff and has since retired, held the
49:20
Speaker 1: role of public information officer for Gainesville Police during the killings,
49:23
Speaker 1: and she was the person who had to face the
49:25
Speaker 1: victim's families and deliver updates in those first terrible days,
49:29
Speaker 1: and she reflected on what the experience had demanded of
49:32
Speaker 1: a department that had never faced anything like it, saying, quote,
49:35
Speaker 1: for that to happen in a medium sized community or
49:38
Speaker 1: medium sized police department was totally unexpected. We had to
49:42
Speaker 1: deal with it without any preparation and any sense of
49:45
Speaker 1: having been through it before, unquote. But the killings didn't
49:49
Speaker 1: fracture Gainesville, and instead they pulled the community together, and
49:54
Speaker 1: neighbors started escorting each other to their cars after dark,
49:57
Speaker 1: and porch lights stayed on through the night across the city.
50:00
Speaker 1: And one thing Darnell pointed to was the choice by
50:03
Speaker 1: then University of Florida President John Lembardy to keep holding
50:07
Speaker 1: classes and playing football games in the weeks that followed,
50:10
Speaker 1: same quote. It was a brilliant thing to do because
50:12
Speaker 1: it started the healing process of her community. It was
50:15
Speaker 1: a start a return to normalcy, a different normalcy, unquote.
50:19
Speaker 1: And there was also changes that had an impact on
50:21
Speaker 1: safety policies and how security worked at Florida colleges with
50:25
Speaker 1: improvements to campus lighting, access controls to dorms, and expanded
50:29
Speaker 1: security patrols. And they also had a much needed conversation
50:33
Speaker 1: about how student housing existed outside of campus security before
50:37
Speaker 1: nineteen ninety and institutions in Florida were influenced to look
50:40
Speaker 1: differently at the liability and duty they have to care
50:44
Speaker 1: for students who lived off campus. And at nineteen ninety four,
50:47
Speaker 1: ABC News ran an episode of its documentary series Turning Point,
50:51
Speaker 1: focused on the Gainesville Ripper case, and most people who
50:54
Speaker 1: watched it turned it off and went about their evening,
50:57
Speaker 1: but Kevin Williamson did not. Now. Williamson, a screenwriter, happened
51:01
Speaker 1: to be watching it by himself while looking after someone
51:03
Speaker 1: else's house, and part way through the broadcast, he looked
51:07
Speaker 1: up and saw a window standing open, and he was
51:10
Speaker 1: certain he hadn't left it that way, and he got
51:12
Speaker 1: a friend on the phone and pulled a knife from
51:14
Speaker 1: the kitchen and searched every room in a house for intruders,
51:18
Speaker 1: And once the house was clear, the conversation with his
51:21
Speaker 1: friend shifted to horror movies and they got into the
51:24
Speaker 1: genre's unwritten rules, what separated the great horror films from
51:27
Speaker 1: the forgettable ones, And one idea that lodged into Williamson's
51:32
Speaker 1: head was that someone could be standing right outside your
51:35
Speaker 1: window watching you, and you would never know it. And
51:39
Speaker 1: by the time the call ended, the seed of a
51:41
Speaker 1: screenplay had planted itself, and Williamson wrote a script he
51:45
Speaker 1: originally called Woodsboro Murders, but it eventually became the movie
51:50
Speaker 1: We All Know to be Scream, directed by Wes Craven,
51:54
Speaker 1: which hit theaters in December of nineteen ninety six. And
51:57
Speaker 1: the connection between Rolling and the film's killer, Ghostface, is loose,
52:03
Speaker 1: and Scream never retells Rolling's crimes directly, but Ghostface watched
52:07
Speaker 1: his victims before he struck, posed their bodies and turned
52:11
Speaker 1: each murder into a spectacle, and the fictional town of
52:14
Speaker 1: Woodsboro also erupted into the same kind of media firestorm
52:18
Speaker 1: that had consumed Gainesville in nineteen ninety and screen became
52:21
Speaker 1: one of the most successful horror films ever made and
52:24
Speaker 1: launched a franchise that is still producing sequels three decades later.
52:28
Speaker 1: But regardless of the film's success and the story of
52:31
Speaker 1: the man who inspired it, we must properly remember the
52:35
Speaker 1: victims because that is the most important part of all
52:39
Speaker 1: of this. And the Grisom family in Louisiana were deeply
52:42
Speaker 1: loved and any loss of a child is devastating, and
52:46
Speaker 1: I want to remember Tom and Julie and Sean, and
52:49
Speaker 1: the Gainesville victims had bright aspirations and futures ahead of them,
52:54
Speaker 1: had so much more life to live. Christina Powell wants
52:57
Speaker 1: to design affordable homes, Sonia Larson wanted to teach children,
53:01
Speaker 1: and Krista Hoyt wanted to investigate crime scenes, and Manuel
53:04
Speaker 1: Tabawata wanted to become an architect, and Tracy Paulis wanted
53:08
Speaker 1: to practice law. They were seventeen, eighteen, eighteen, twenty three,
53:12
Speaker 1: and twenty three, respectively, and five palm trees stand on
53:16
Speaker 1: thirty fourth Street in Gainesville, one for each of them,
53:18
Speaker 1: in a city that chose to remember them. For who
53:22
Speaker 1: they were, and that is how I will remember them
53:24
Speaker 1: as well what I hope you do too, And that
53:27
Speaker 1: is where I want to leave this video. As always,
53:29
Speaker 1: my heart goes out to the families and to the victims.
53:32
Speaker 1: And if you guys would like me to deep dive
53:34
Speaker 1: into any other cases, please let me know in the
53:36
Speaker 1: comments below. I always read them. And until then, please
53:39
Speaker 1: be safe out there and I will see your beautiful
53:41
Speaker 1: face all right. Bye.