Danny Harold Rolling

Name:	Danny Harold Rolling
Alias:	The Gainesville Ripper
Official bodycount:	5
Claimed bodycount:	8+
Location:	Florida, USA

On August 20 1990, the beautiful university town of Gainesville, Florida was ranked as being the thirteenth best place to live in the United States by Money magazine. By the end of the following week, American papers had renamed the town “Grisly Gainesville” after the bodies of five young students had been discovered, brutally murdered and mutilated as they slept in their apartments. One weekend of savagery, by one man transformed the excitement and anticipation of the beginning of a new semester into terror as hundreds of students fled, not knowing if and when he would strike again.

One week later the media reported that the police had their number one suspect in custody, beginning an ordeal of nightmarish proportions for Edward Humphrey and his family. His was the classic example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Emotionally disturbed with a long history of strange behaviour and violent emotional outbursts, he had seemed to police and the many witnesses to his antics, to be a prime suspect. With no evidence to hold him, the authorities somehow succeeded in stretching the limits of the law and have him locked away while they built their case around him. Before they could, the real killer was found.

Daniel Harold Rolling had moved on after the murders in Gainesville and was eventually arrested for armed robbery in Ocala, Florida. It would be some time before he would be linked to the murders, and it would be longer still before Edward Humphrey’s name would be cleared.

The Daniel Rollings story tends to confirm the idea that the environment in which they spend their formative years creates serial killers. It would be impossible to know the account of Rolling’s childhood and not feel compassion for the child who was abused, beaten and bullied by an over-bearing and disturbed father. It would be impossible not to feel anger toward his mother who time and time again refused to take any action to protect her own son. But Daniel Rolling was not a child when he brutally murdered five young people at the threshold of their lives.

Relatives at a memorial wall for the victims in Gainesville

Were the psychological scars from his childhood so deep that he was unable to control his malevolent impulses? Was the man who had come to be known as “The Gainesville Ripper” merely a victim of the brutality of his past? Should he be treated with leniency or should he feel the full weight of the law? These were the questions that a jury of twelve and one judge had to answer in 1994 when Danny Rolling was to be sentenced for five murders.

It was 4.00pm on Sunday 26 August 1990 when the Gainesville Police Department first became involved in the series of murders. Thirty-five year-old Officer Ray Barber had been about to sign off at the end of his shift when the communications officer called him on his car radio. There was a complaint about loud music. Not unusual for this time of the year. The new semester was about to begin and the kids were celebrating, had been all weekend. The second message gave him no more concern than the first. It was a signal 64 – a call to assist a citizen. Both were routine, he would stop by on his way home.

Christina Powell

When he drove into the courtyard at the Williamsburg Village Apartments the maintenance man was there to meet him. As Barber got out of his car, the man told him that he had a couple of anxious parents wanting him to open their daughter’s apartment as they couldn’t get her to answer the door. Unwilling to take responsibility himself he had called the police. Barber was initially unconcerned as he received dozens of calls about “missing” kids, who usually turned up, unharmed, with no idea of the anxiety they had caused.

It was only when the parents, Frank and Patricia Powell, told him that their daughter Christina, 17, had known they were driving over from Jacksonville that morning and had not been seen by anyone since early Friday morning, although her car was still parked nearby, that Barber began to feel uneasy. This increased when the Powell’s told him that Christina’s roommate, Sonja Larson, also 17, had not called her mother the day before as arranged.

Sonja Larson

Reluctantly, the Powells agreed to wait outside the building as Barber and the maintenance man went up to the girl’s second-floor apartment. His bangs on the door produced no result, so Barber attempted to open the front door using a master key, but for some reason it wouldn’t work. Breaking one of the glass panes, while not allowing him to open the door, which was dead-bolted, released a strong and unpleasant odour from within the apartment. As soon as the door crashed open under the force of the two men, Barber saw the bloodied naked body of a young woman, lying grotesquely, on a bed with her arms above her head.

He found the second body, another young woman, on the stairway down to the lower level of the apartment. Both women had been stabbed repeatedly, mutilated and deliberately positioned for maximum shock effect.

Back downstairs, the Powells anxiously waited for word from Barber. As soon as they saw his face and averted eyes they knew there would be no good news. Their first instinct was to go to their daughter, but Barber knew it was better for everyone if they didn’t. He called in the double homicide to Dispatch and asked them to send over someone from the Alachua Crisis Centre to help the parents.

Within minutes back up had arrived, as many as twenty law enforcement personnel, including Chief of Police Wayland Clifton. Followed closely on their heels were the media. Lieutenant Sadie Darnell was given the task of talking to the media. All she could tell them was that two young women had been murdered after someone apparently forced their way through the door, some time between 11.30pm August 23 and 4.00pm August 26.

Long before the first headlines could be printed, word of the murders had spread through the Williamsburg Village Apartments. Although the police had not publicly released their names, the crowds that had gathered were soon whispering that the girls were freshmen, one from Palm Beach and the other from Jacksonville. No one knew them. All wondered how this could have happened without anybody hearing anything. One neighbour would recall that he had heard someone showering and playing loud music early on Friday morning, it was George Michael’s 'Faith.'  Then there had been a loud banging sound; he assumed that the girl’s had been hanging pictures on the wall.

Spectators watched as a young woman walked from her car toward the building where the two victims had been found. She had been out of town over the weekend and had heard nothing of the day’s events. When she approached the door to her building the uniformed officer on duty asked her name. When she told him it was Elsa Streppe he called a plain-clothes officer over. Referring to a notebook, the two men talked in whispered tones. Elsa was escorted from the scene and taken to the Alachua County Crisis Center. Once inside she was told that her roommates, Christina Powell and Sonja Larson had been murdered. She almost collapsed from the shock. It was some time before it struck her just how closely she had come to meeting the same fate as her two friends.

As police continued to work into the night, questioning other residents, checking for fingerprints and other clues, further details of the crimes began to circulate, one of the girls had been mutilated somehow, something to do with her breasts. The fear and panic began to spread as the story travelled beyond the Apartment block to the rest of the community.

Before police had even finished packing up and completely sealing the area they were called to another site where they were awaited by deputies Keith O’Hara and Gail Barber, from the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office.

Gail Barber had spent the earlier part of the evening with her husband Ray Barber after he had made the gruesome discovery of Christina and Sonja’s bodies. She would have liked to stay with him longer but she was rostered on for the midnight shift. She hadn’t been on long before dispatch had called to ask them to drop by Christa Leigh Hoyt’s apartment, just in case. Eighteen-year-old Christa worked the midnight shift as a records clerk at the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office. She hadn’t arrived for work and wasn’t answering her phone. It was 12.30am.

Christa Hoyt

Gail knew Christa well and was sure that there would be some logical explanation for why she hadn’t called in. The chances of two people from the same family being present at two separate murder discoveries in such a short space of time would be just too coincidental.

When O’Hara and Barber knocked on Christa’s front door and there was no answer they were almost relieved. She’s probably left for work already. Then they saw her car, an older model Nissan Sentra, parked nearby. They knocked again, and then tried the door.  It was locked. Hearing the noise, the manager, Elbert Hoover came out to investigate. The three of them went out to the back of the apartment. Hoover knew something was wrong the moment he saw that the gate had been damaged and the chain-link fence was down. As O’Hara and Barber went further into the backyard, they told Hoover to wait around the front for them. Once they established that there was no one in the yard, they tried the glass sliding door. It was locked from the inside.