Extraction from the book: Programmed To Kill: The Politics of Serial Murder by author David McGowan
''The Miami Herald newspaper in Florida reports on a seminar held in the Hilton Hotel in Gainesville for teachers and police officers--including priests and social workers--focusing ''on satanic cults and religious practices similar to voodoo'' (''Cult movements pose, threat experts warn,'' June 4, 1989)''
Daniel Rolling was raised by his mother, Claudia Beatrice Rolling, and his physically abusive father, James Harold Rolling. James had served in the Korean War, from which he returned as a highly decorated hero. He has been described as an extremely controlling man with a violent temper. He reportedly tied his sons up frequently, and on one occasion locked then thirteen-year-old Danny up in a jail cell for two weeks.
He also derived a perverse pleasure from trapping neighborhood cats, shooting them, and then watching them die.
The Rolling family had a long history of mental illness, violence and suicide. Danny’s great-grandfather had slit his wife’s throat from ear to ear, killing her in full view of Danny’s father. The family also had a history of working in law enforcement. Danny’s grandfather had worked for the County Sheriff’s Office, and his father joined the local force in Shreveport, Louisiana and quickly made lieutenant. In June 1971, Danny became an airman in the U.S. Air Force. Like Albert DeSalvo, he was just seventeen at the time of his enlistment; his father signed for him. Two years later he found himself in a military prison, gaining a discharge after an Air Force psychiatrist determined that he had an antisocial personality disorder. By late 1973, he was back home in Shreveport where he regularly attended church, sang in the choir, and played his beloved guitar. Like so many other accused serial killers, Rolling viewed himself as an artist—in this case, a singer/songwriter/guitarist, not unlike Charlie Manson.
On September 6, 1974, Danny married. He was at the time working for the local Water Department. By 1977, Rolling’s wife had filed for divorce. She later married a cop. Danny, meanwhile, embarked on a career in crime. In 1979, he was charged with two counts of armed robbery. Following his conviction on the charges, he was sentenced to a six-year prison term. Not long into his incarceration, Rolling managed to escape, but he was recaptured just hours later. For his efforts, he had an extra year tacked onto his sentence. In February 1980, he pled guilty to a charge of armed robbery in the state of Alabama, earning him a ten- year sentence in that state.
On June 7, 1982, Danny was released by the state of Louisiana after serving less than half his sentence. He immediately began serving time in Alabama for his conviction there. The very next month he escaped again, but he was recaptured after two days. Nevertheless, he was released after just two years, having served a total of just five years of his combined seventeen-year sentence. Upon his release, he headed west to California, for reasons unknown, and then drifted his way back east. In Mississippi he was charged with grand larceny and armed robbery and given a fifteen-year sentence, which he began serving on July 25, 1985. Rolling was regularly put into solitary confinement in a cold, damp, sewage-infested cell. Eventually he graduated up to being put on a chain gang. On July 29, 1988, after serving just three years of his sentence, he was again released. Upon his return home, he immediately began attracting neighborhood kids, just as Arthur Shawcross had done upon his return from prison.
On May 17, 1990, James Harold Rolling opened fire with his service revolver on his son Danny. More than once he had told his wife that he wished the boy were dead. But it was not Danny that almost died that day; Rolling returned his father’s fire, hitting the senior Rolling and knocking him down. Danny then shot him again, in the face, from close range. He then kicked his father’s prone and nearly dead body. James though miraculously survived. Danny, meanwhile, fled to Sarasota, Florida, allegedly assuming the identity of a Vietnam veteran named Michael J. Kennedy who had died in 1975.
Danny/Michael left Sarasota suddenly on August 18 and headed for Gainesville, where he set up camp in a wooded area. Rolling’s arrival in Gainesville coincided with Money Magazine’s ranking of the city as the thirteenth safest place to live in the United States. It was about to be rocked by five brutal and seemingly senseless murders in the space of less than forty-eight hours.
Gainesville police officer Ray Berber discovered the first two bodies on August 26, 1990. He was the first officer on the scene and he spent time alone in the apartment of the two dead college students, who had been stabbed repeatedly, mutilated, and left posed as a macabre greeting for their discoverers. One of the girls was in her bed, the other on the floor of the apartment’s living room. One had been raped. Both bodies had been washed with detergent to cleanse them of forensic evidence. It appeared as though the killer, or killers, had thoroughly searched the apartment. One body was left spread-eagle on the floor facing the front door, a gaping hole in her chest where her breasts had been removed. Some of the parts carved from the two girls had been taken by the killer(s). Evidence suggested that duct tape had been used as a restraint, but the tape had subsequently been removed. Most of the blood spilled by the victims had been wiped away. In a remarkably short time, the crime scene was crawling with law enforcement personnel. Twenty or more officials were on the scene within minutes, including the Gainesville police chief and a state’s attorney.
Just nine hours later, a similar scene played out elsewhere in Gainesville. In a rather unlikely scenario, the first officer at that crime scene was officer Gail Berber, the wife of Ray Berber. The victim was Christa Hoyt, whom Gail had trained as a Sheriff’s Explorer.
Christa had subsequently gone to work full-time in the record’s department of the Sheriff ’s Office. Her head had been cleanly severed and placed on a bookshelf facing the front door. Her headless corpse had been carefully posed. Her nipples had been removed and placed alongside of the body. Her breasts were then removed and wrapped-up to go, but the killer had apparently forgotten to take them. Christa had been sliced open from her breastbone to her public bone with surgical precision, without any damage done to any of her internal organs. A&E noted, “the cuts were precise—ritualistic.” As with the first crime scene, there was evidence of rape and restraint with adhesive tape, and the body had been washed with soap and water. The home appeared to have been methodically searched.
The crime scene clearly suggested that multiple perpetrators were responsible for the brutal murder. A bookcase had been moved down the hall, past the bathroom and into the bedroom. Investigators doubted that one man alone could have moved the heavy and unwieldy unit. Another heavy bookcase had likewise been moved—to allow Christa’s head to be positioned for maximum effect. The body had been moved several hours after death, indicating that the killer(s) either remained at the scene for a considerable amount of time or returned to the scene for reasons unknown. It was later claimed that Danny Rolling returned to retrieve his wallet, although that claim begs the question of why a serial killer, and veteran criminal, would be carrying such an incriminating piece of evidence that could be inadvertently left behind.
Hoyt, who put up a fight against her killer(s), had spent a summer at the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Entomology Lab. She aspired to be a chemist working in criminal forensics, and towards that end had joined the Sheriff ’s Explorers in her senior year of high school. She was reportedly having an office romance with a deputy sheriff. She also had a fondness for the color black, with her car, most of her wardrobe, and the black roses on her birthday cake chosen accordingly. She had also, curiously, made mention of a “devil cult” living in the immediate vicinity.
A task force, which included no fewer than ten members of the FBI’s Behavioral Sciences Unit, was immediately assembled. The principal agent working the case for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement was J.O. Jackson, who had served in the same capacity on the case of the recently executed Ted Bundy. In addition to the FBI’s team of profilers, which included the ubiquitous John Douglas, and the FDLE agents, the task force included local police, state troopers, and U.S. Navy reservists. The show of force by the police was unprecedented and a highly militarized atmosphere soon enveloped the college town, with various law enforcement agencies conducting coordinated paramilitary maneuvers. It looked very much like a dress rehearsal for a declaration of martial law. The day after Christa Hoyt’s body was found, two more victims were discovered. One of them was a 6’3” tall, 200+ pound, powerfully built college athlete who had struggled valiantly with his attacker(s), suffering thirty-one stab wounds to his chest, face, arms, hands, and legs, many of them defensive wounds. Though it was ultimately claimed that Danny Rolling, acting alone, killed Manny Toboada, the truth is that he did not appear to be physically up to the task.
Toboada’s roommate, Tracey Paules, was killed along with Manny, raising further doubts that a single killer was responsible. Paules had been raped anally and left on display. There was semen present and five pubic hairs were found. There were marked differences between the Toboada/Paules crime scene and the two previous ones. Blood was splattered everywhere about the home the two students shared. No attempt had been made to clean up the bodies or the crime scene. Though the two victims had died exceedingly violent deaths, there were no gratuitous mutilations to the bodies.
A maintenance man discovered the victims when he opened the door to what he thought was a burglarized apartment and peered in. He reported seeing a dark- colored bag on the floor near Tracey’s head. He immediately turned around, locked the door and left to await the arrival of police. When he returned with the officers, he found that the door was unlocked and the bag was missing.
Following the discovery of the last two bodies, the rash of killings ended just as suddenly and just as mysteriously as it had begun. On the same day that Manny and Tracey were found dead, a known drug dealer named Tony Danzy and a man alleged to be Danny Rolling were seen lurking in the woods. Though Rolling avoided capture, various items from the pair’s campsite were seized as evidence, including a cassette recorder and cash that was said to be linked to a bank robbery from the previous day. From this we can surmise that in the midst of his two-day killing frenzy Rolling took a short break to rob a bank with a sidekick, who, of course, had nothing to do with the murders.
Two days after the last victims were discovered, a man named Edward Lewis Humphrey had a violent altercation with his grandmother. Humphrey was one of three prime suspects in the case, and he remained a prime suspect throughout the next year, although he was never formally charged. Humphrey had made violent threats in the past, and he was known for displays of erratic behavior. He was aware of unreleased details of the crimes, including the nature of the wounds received by the victims. He also lived very close to the Toboada/Paules crime scene and his brother George knew victim Tracey Paules.
Humphrey was the offspring of an alcoholic mother and an abusive father. He had in the past been diagnosed as manic-depressive and committed to a psychiatric facility. Ed’s sister believed that it was while he was institutionalized that he began getting crazy thoughts in his head—such as that Satan was after him. Indeed, Ed thought that Satan was everywhere. He also developed a sudden interest in knives and militaristic behavior. Friends reported that he frequently put on Army fatigues and ventured off into the woods saying that he was going out on “recon.” Neighbors had seen him returning from the woods late at night carrying a hunting knife. Ed also claimed to be the middleman for a high-volume drug dealer—this despite the fact that he lived directly below a Gainesville police officer.
Following his arrest for the attack on his grandmother, Ed was taken to Regional Medical Center and questioned for more than twenty-four hours without an attorney present. Although he was a first-time offender charged only with aggravated assault, his bail was set at $1 million. Following his conviction, he was sentenced to serve twenty-two months at Chattahoochie State Hospital, which seemed to please his mother: “you should know this: many of Ed’s friends are bad boys and Ed is in a good place now...and if he commits suicide, well, that’s life.” Humphrey was suspected of being afflicted with Multiple Personality Disorder. He admitted to knowing about the killings, but he blamed them on alter identities that he said he had no control over. One of his fellow inmates, Stephen Michael Bates, claimed that he had participated in the murders with Humphrey and a third man. He also said that Humphrey was involved in “satanic stuff.”
The Gainesville campus was rife with talk of a satanic cult at work. Of the lead suspects other than Humphrey, one reportedly had satanic writings in his home (another, described as a “charmer with the ladies,” was suspected of a multiple stabbing murder in Ohio). Some of the items on the list of evidence sought by the task force—which included a black hood; photographs, audiotapes, or videotapes of the murders being performed; human flesh; severed nipples; and human blood—hinted at satanic involvement in the crimes.
On September 25, 1990, investigators announced that semen samples recovered from two of the crime scenes matched. A full year later, in September 1991, Rolling was convicted on robbery charges and sentenced to life in prison as an habitual offender. No one had yet been arrested or charged for the five murders. Danny had never been considered a suspect. Over the course of the next two months, Rolling was convicted on two separate counts of burglary. For the three convictions, he was sentenced to a total of three life terms plus an additional 170 years. And the state of Florida was not done with Danny Rolling.
While he was in custody, samples of Rolling’s blood and hair were surreptitiously gathered—the blood from a tooth extraction and the hair from a haircut. Prosecutors later returned with a warrant and gathered the very same samples from Danny, making no mention of the samples gathered previously. On November 1, a grand jury was convened to hear the purported case against Danny Rolling for the five grisly murders. Two weeks later, Rolling was indicted on murder charges. Following that, he reportedly made several suicide attempts, which led to his being transferred to Chattahoochie State Hospital. Meanwhile, the officer who had served as the police spokesman on the murder cases moved on to the FBI Academy at Quantico.
At around that same time, Danny began a relationship with a rather notorious character named Sondra London, a serial killer groupie and true-crime writer. London—who claims as friends such notables as prolific author Ann Rule and the Behavioral Sciences Unit’s resident ritual abuse denier, Kenneth Lanning— urged Danny to publicly take credit for the Gainesville murders.
Rolling’s cellmate, convicted murderer Bobby Lewis, also played a key role in that effort. Danny soon reportedly ‘confessed’ to the murders, but it was actually Lewis who did all the talking. Rolling’s role was to sit nearby in a nearly catatonic state and occasionally nod in agreement or mumble an affirmative response. The first such ‘confession’ was audiotaped and the second was videotaped. It is clear from both that Rolling was almost completely incapacitated. The killings were blamed on an alter-ego named “Gemini,” who acted alone. Danny claimed to have no control over the actions of his alter identities (which was probably true). The confessions were largely unverifiable, but in an attempt to verify some aspect of them, police investigators searched for the murder weapon based on information supplied by Rolling. They came up empty handed.
Rolling’s trial on the homicide charges was repeatedly postponed. First scheduled for September 1992, it did not begin until February 15, 1994. The jury was barely seated when its services were rendered unnecessary; Danny shocked the court and all involved in the case by entering guilty pleas to all the charges he was facing. The trial, therefore, immediately shifted to the penalty phase, with the jury reduced to an advisory role. Rolling claimed that he had entered the pleas in order to keep the details of the murders from being aired in open court. His intent was allegedly to allow Ms. London to publish his exclusive story, just as she had gotten Schaefer’s ‘serial killer fiction’ published by Feral House—the publishing house owned by Adam Parfrey that has exclusive rights to the copious writings of Church of Satan founder Anton LaVey.
Whether that was Rolling’s true intent remains an open question. If it was, then the plan failed miserably. Prosecutors proceeded to air their case, such as it was, regardless of the guilty pleas. And since guilt was no longer an issue, the case that was presented went almost completely unchallenged, with nary an objection to be heard from the defense team, despite that fact that the primary evidence was, at best, problematic. The state claimed, for instance, that a Stanley screwdriver found at the campsite was the tool used to gain access to the murder scenes. Pry marks found at the scenes purportedly matched the blade of that particular screwdriver, although it is difficult to conceive how the literally thousands of identical screwdrivers manufactured by Stanley could have been excluded. Another problem was that the screwdriver, even if it could be linked to the crimes, could not be linked to Rolling. There was no evidence that he had ever purchased or owned it. The state simply claimed that Danny had stolen the screwdriver, but there was no evidence to support that claim.
Prosecutors also claimed that Rolling had stolen duct tape and two pairs of athletic gloves that were allegedly found at the campsite, but there was also no evidence to support that contention. No physical evidence, such as fingerprints, tied any of the items to Danny. No murder weapon could be linked to the defendant, but that did not stop prosecutors from claiming, without documentation, that Danny had purchased a knife in Tallahassee using an assumed name. A pair of black pants that were allegedly recovered from the campsite, and that were allegedly stained with Manny Toboada’s blood, were presented as evidence. Prosecutors did not bother though to explain how the bloodstains could be on the pants when it was known that Toboada’s killer had thoroughly cleansed himself by taking a dip in the building’s pool immediately after the murders.
Other evidence included: the bizarre, videotaped ‘third party’ confession; a clothing fiber purportedly found at one of the crime scenes; a note found at one scene that allegedly matched Rolling’s handwriting; and a pubic hair from Christa Hoyt that was allegedly found at the campsite. It was never explained why all the alleged campsite evidence was not produced until a year after the investigation had begun. The state claimed that a “genetic blueprint” in blood and semen samples positively identified Rolling as the killer. Such a claim, however, would be somewhat more credible if investigators building the case against Danny had not clandestinely gathered biological samples from him—samples that could easily have been planted as evidence.
Another item purportedly found at the campsite was a cassette tape-recorder. Inside was a tape that Rolling had made for his family. That tape reportedly was not listened too until months after it was seized and booked into evidence. Danny had ended the tape with the following statement: “Well, I’m gonna sign off for a little bit. I got something I gotta do. I love ya. Bye.” That rather innocuous comment was touted by the state, rather creatively, as irrefutable proof of the defendant’s guilt. Though it hardly needs to be stated, most people at any given time have “something they gotta do.” Very rarely does that involve committing mass murder. In a scenario that precisely mirrored the circumstances of Ted Bundy’s kidnapping trial, Danny Rolling’s defense attorneys, the presiding judge, and the prosecutors had all been classmates together at the University of Florida law school. It is, indeed, a small world that serial killers inhabit. Appearing before the court as a defense witness, Rolling’s mother offered testimony concerning possible demonic possession and detailed the family’s history of mental illness and institutionalization. Danny, who was frequently described as a “Jekyll and Hyde,” claimed via his ‘confessional’ videotape that he suffered from multiple personalities. All the experts called to the stand, however, disputed that contention. After just five hours of deliberations, the jury returned with a recommendation that Rolling be given five death sentences. The judge opted to let a few weeks pass before formally imposing sentence on Danny—doing so, appropriately enough, on April 20, 1994.
In the interim, Rolling’s father was cited for battery of his terminally ill wife.
“Civilization, it’s not of the lord, it’s of the devil, brother...Old Lucifer, he was at me for a long time—knocking on the door to my mind.”
—Danny Rolling, who, curiously, was missing a portion of his left ring finger
