Danny Rolling

What the record shows

Danny Harold Rolling, known as the Gainesville Ripper, murdered five college students in Gainesville, Florida, over four days in August 1990 and later confessed to killing three members of a family in Shreveport, Louisiana, in November 1989. He pleaded guilty in February 1994 to five counts of first-degree murder, was sentenced to death that April, and was executed by the State of Florida on October 25, 2006. Courts convicted him of five murders. He confessed to eight. Louisiana authorities attributed the three Shreveport deaths to him but never charged him.

The earliest killings attributed to Rolling took place in his hometown. ABC News reported that William Grissom, his daughter Julie and his grandson Sean were killed in Shreveport on November 4, 1989; the Wikipedia article gives their ages as 55, 24 and 8. Investigators later noted that the posing of the bodies and tape residue at that scene resembled what was found in Gainesville a year later.

According to the Florida Commission on Capital Cases record, Rolling broke into three student apartments in Gainesville while armed with a pistol and a knife. On August 24, 1990, he killed Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, in the apartment they shared. On August 25 he killed Christa Hoyt, 18, a Santa Fe College student, after watching her apartment the previous day. On August 27 he entered an apartment shared by Manuel Taboada and Tracy Paules, both 23, killed Taboada in his bedroom and then killed Paules. The victims were stabbed; the court record describes sexual battery in each incident and the posing of bodies.

The investigation first focused on Edward Humphrey, an 18-year-old student arrested days after the murders on an unrelated charge, but ABC News reported that his type A blood did not match the type B semen found at all three scenes, and he was cleared. Rolling had been booked into the Marion County Jail on September 7, 1990, for a supermarket robbery; police did not know the killer was already in custody. In November 1990, Cindy Juracich, who knew Rolling from a Shreveport church, called Crime Stoppers to name him, and investigator Don Maines found the Grissom scene strikingly similar. Rolling's blood was type B, a screwdriver from his abandoned campsite matched pry marks at the Gainesville doors, and the AP reported that DNA taken after the robbery arrest linked him to the murders. A grand jury indicted him on five counts of first-degree murder on November 15, 1991.

According to the Florida Supreme Court's 2006 opinion, Rolling initially pleaded not guilty but on February 15, 1994, the day his trial was to begin, pleaded guilty to five counts of first-degree murder, three counts of sexual battery and three counts of armed burglary with battery. On March 24, 1994, the penalty-phase jury recommended death for each murder by a 12-0 vote, and on April 20, 1994, Circuit Judge Stanley R. Morris sentenced him to death on the murder counts and to life terms on the remaining charges.

The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the convictions and death sentences on March 20, 1997, and the U.S. Supreme Court denied review that November. State postconviction relief was denied and the denial affirmed in June 2002; the Eleventh Circuit affirmed denial of federal habeas relief in February 2006. Governor Jeb Bush signed a death warrant on September 22, 2006, and the Florida Supreme Court rejected a final lethal-injection challenge on October 18, 2006.

Rolling was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison and pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. on October 25, 2006. The AP reported that he made no final statement and instead sang a hymn. Shortly before the execution he handed his spiritual adviser a handwritten confession stating that he alone had killed Julie, Tom and Sean Grissom in Shreveport and that Julie Grissom's former fiance was innocent; the AP published the note two days later.

Rolling was born in Shreveport on May 26, 1954. According to the Wikipedia article, his father was a Shreveport police officer who abused his wife and sons. The AP reported that he served about eight years in prison in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi for robberies before the Gainesville killings.