BY COLIN WILSON
In late August 1990, both Time and Newsweek carried the story of the slaughter of four women and a man on the Gainesville campus, in Florida. In fact, it is infrequent for either magazine to carry stories about American murders in their European edition, and the fact that they did was a sign of how far the five murders had shocked America.
I had just finished writing—in collaboration with Donald Seaman—a book called The Serial Killers, and the last major American case I had dealt with had been the murders of the serial killer Leonard Lake, in California, which had come to light after Lake’s suicide in 1985. In fact, as far as I can remember, this was the last occasion when Time and Newsweek had given wide coverage to an American case. For this reason, I paid particular attention to the reports from Gainesville—a campus where I had once lectured. Then, as the weeks and moths went by with no further reports, I assumed that the killer had escaped. In fact, no one knew that he had been arrested ten days after the murders.
It was some time before I learned what had actually happened. This came about in 1993, through reading Sondra London’s book Knockin’ on Joe, a remarkable and intimate study of serial killers, including Carl Panzram, Gerard Schaefer and Ottis Toole (the partner-in-crime of Henry Lee Lucas). I had never heard of Danny Rolling, but from this I learned that at that time, he stood accused of the Gainesville murders.
It seemed that Danny Rolling had written to Sondra London from prison in June, 1992, addressing her as “Madame Sondra, Media Queen.” He was serving life for armed robbery, and had just been charged with the Gainesville murders. By Christmas of that year, Sondra London and Danny Rolling had decided they were in love. Finally she was allowed to visit him one time at Florida State Prison. The meeting apparently confirmed their feelings for one another.
There was an instant and powerful physical attraction. Soon after this, they announced that they were engaged.
This announcement, in February of 1993, was featured in newspapers next to a story claiming that Danny Rolling had confessed to the Gainesville murders to a fellow inmate, Robert Fieldmore Lewis. The local media assumed—understandably—that Sondra was only pretending to be in love with Danny to get his story.
Sondra’s tide “Media Queen” had been acquired in 1989, when she launched a publishing company of that name, to bring out a private edition of a book called Killer Fiction by Gerard Schaefer, who was serving life for killing two teenage girls in Florida. (An augmented trade edition of Killer Fiction will be published in Fall, 1996, by Feral House.) Oddly enough, Schaefer had been Sondra’s first lover. They had met when Schaefer was 18 and Sondra a year younger. But Sondra was shaken by his admission of the sinister and violent impulses he experienced towards women, and walked out on him. In fact, Schaefer’s sexual fantasies were all concerned with humiliating women and with hanging them. Killer Fiction includes sketches of women in their underwear standing on gallows.
On July 22, 1972, about seven years after their breakup, Gerard Schaefer was arrested for abducting two teenage girls, tying them to trees, and terrorizing them. By some fluke, both escaped. Upon being arrested, Schaefer was fired from his job as a sheriffs deputy, and then, regrettably, bailed. Before he was incarcerated for six months in the following December, he had murdered at least two more teenage girls, Georgia Jessup and Susan Place. (In fact, it later became clear that he had used this brief freedom to murder at least five.) On September 27, 1972, Schaefer had turned up at Susan’s home, and later had taken the two girls off in his car, telling Susan’s mother they were “going to the beach to play guitar.” They never returned home.
But Susan’s mother had been suspicious of this smiling man who, at 26, was so much older than her teenage daughter, and noted down the number of the license plate on his car. She managed to get one of the digits wrong, and an innocent man was interviewed by the police. But driving through Martin County, Florida, she-noticed that all of the license plates there began with 42—the local prefix she had recalled as being the first numbers on the license plate. The car proved to belong to Gerard Schaefer, who was in jail for abducting the two girls. A glance at his photograph told her that this was the man who had gone to the beach with her daughter. Some time after that, the dismembered remains of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were found in nearby woods. A search of Schaefer’s room at his mother’s house in Ft. Lauderdale revealed many items (including teeth) belonging to a number of girls who had vanished.
Schaefer received two life terms for these two murders, but police suspect that the true number of victims was around 34. (Schaefer himself later told Sondra London the number was upwards of 80.)
Though Sondra was shocked at the thought that she had lost her virginity to a serial killer, her curiosity led her to write to him in prison. He replied, and in 1990 she went to see him. He showed her the “stories” he was writing—sadistic fantasies about raping and murdering women—and gave her permission to publish some of them. And so Killer Fiction appeared, in a desktop edition priced at $18.00. I bought my copy from a crime bookseller in New Jersey. It was only later, through Paul Woods, the British publisher of Knockin’ on Joe, that I made Sondra’s acquaintance.
Gerard Schaefer, in fact, must be one of the most disgusting serial killers of all time, although he consistency denied being a serial killer, and even tried suing me once for referring to him as one. (The judge threw it out.) His “killer fiction,” and his even more explicit secret letters to Sondra, make it clear that all his fantasies involved cruelty. He liked terrifying his victims, and he particularly enjoyed having two girls at his mercy, so he could make each one beg him to kill the other one first. He finally died in prison in December of 1995, hacked to death by another prisoner.
All this, then, makes it clear why Sondra London was uniquely qualified to present the memoirs of another confessed serial killer.
Danny Rolling is clearly a different kind of person from Gerard Schaefer. His crimes are horrific, but the lack the sheer sadistic evil of Schaefer’s. It is not my intention to make any excuses for Danny Rolling, for as a student of criminology, that is hardly my business. Yet one thing seems clear: that while Schaefer reveled in his sadistic fantasies, accepting them totally and unquestioningly, Danny Rolling has always been more of a Jekyll and Hyde, a man who struck many who knew him well as sensitive, decent and arguably talented, and who was possessed periodically by an immense violence. Schaefer’s work has literally dozens of passages like this:
I kicked her in the stomach and she doubled up. “Teach you to bite my dick, bitch!” Bloody vomit spewed up from her gut and splashed from her mouth…
Danny Rolling, I think, would find this as revolting as most people do.
Sondra’s account of Rolling in Knockin’ on Joe makes it clear that from the beginning, he was fated to be a dropout from the society that the rest of us take for granted. Many criminals claim that their fathers are to blame, but in the case of Danny Rolling, this is undoubtedly true. His father, as this book will make clear, was a brutal domestic tyrant. The first time Danny dared to argue with him, his father threw him on the floor, handcuffed him, and sent for a squad car to take his son to jail; Danny spent two weeks in there. It is hard to understand such men, whose aim seems to be to crush the ego of their children and wives, rather than, like most fathers, doing their best to nurture a sense of security and self-confidence. Danny offers some insight in the sections of this book following “My Father the Hero,” so one can try and work out the answers for oneself.
In a letter to me, Danny described how his father had once made a scene at the checkout of the supermarket, raving and shouting until the manager came and told him that if he didn’t calm down, he would have to leave. Unimpressed, James Rolling asked the manager if he knew who he was talking to—that he was a police sergeant. All this fuss, Danny recounts, was due to the fact that Danny’s mother had picked out the wrong brand of chewing tobacco for her husband. It is easy to see why his children found life with James Rolling intolerable.
It must be admitted that Rolling Senior had one good reason for feeling furious with his son. When Danny was a child, a friend introduced him to voyeurism. They would watch a young cheerleader undressing and bathing. Finally, they got caught at it, and it became general knowledge that Danny Rolling was a peeping Tom. For a father who had been a war hero, and who was now a member of the police force, it must have been a keen humiliation. The habit stayed with Danny his whole life.
What is clear is that the sense of insecurity in his home life led Danny to rebellion. If he had been of more malleable material, he would have been crushed, and become merely a social inadequate. In fact, he was born a fairly dominant person (one of the dominant five percent), and he was also talented, as his writing, his songs and artwork reveal. Such people tend to rebel against bullying.
My own situation bore some relation to Rolling’s, for my father was an irritable, short-tempered man, and if anyone had asked me as a child if I loved him, I would have answered with astonishment, “Of course not!” The astonishment would have been due to the fact that I somehow took it for granted that no one loved their fathers. Mothers were for loving, fathers were for fearing—or at least being nervous about. Yet now it seems to me totally obvious that children—particularly boys—need a father to love; to begin with, they need him as a role model. (All this has been expressed with exemplary force and clarity in Robert Bly’s Iron John.)
Now in my case, it may have been just as well that I felt totally detached from my father. I must emphasize that I didn’t hate him, as Danny hated James Harold Rolling. I just didn’t care much about him. Dad was not a reader, and he had no interest in ideas, so it would have been a catastrophe for me to take him as a role model. But when, at the age of ten, I became fascinated by chemistry, and then by astronomy and physics, I suddenly had a purpose in life. Things were still difficult. When I left school at 16,1 went to work in a factory for 48 hours a week, and hated it as much as Dickens had hated the blacking factory, or Wells the drapery emporium. But by then I knew I wanted to be a writer, not a scientist, and it took eight years before I succeeded in getting my first book—The Outsider—published. It had been a hard struggle, and I frequently plunged into total discouragement—particularly when a typescript was rejected. But I recognize that if, on top of my other problems, I had had to deal with a father like James Rolling, I would almost certainly never have made the breakthrough. And I might now well be dead, from one of the illnesses that arise from sheer resentment and frustration.
Danny had another problem I didn’t have. He was living in a drug culture. I was never tempted to take drugs, probably because they were not available after the Second World War when I was a teenager. Danny was downright unlucky. He enjoyed the Air Force, but just before he was due to be shipped to Vietnam, he was arrested for drugs, sent to the stockade, and discharged. His father was furious and disappointed, and things went from bad to worse. After a religious conversion, he married a fellow member of the Pentecostal Church. But he claims that she was sexually frigid, and when police caught Danny peering in through a window at a woman undressing, the marriage went into decline. She finally left him, and then divorced him. He took it very hard.
From then on, it was all downhill. In the misery and resentment of being served his divorce papers, he committed his first rape. Filled with remorse, he decided to go and apologize the next day, placing his future in his victim’s hands. But he saw a threatening male coming out of her front door, and ran away. Soon after that he committed his first armed robbery.
Soon he was in prison—and this, it seemed to me, was the real turning point. The violence shocked him. He came close to being gang-raped in the shower by a crowd of black prisoners. Interracial violence was endemic. One white was killed by three blacks simply because he was white; then two months later the murdered prisoner’s brother stabbed to death two of the killers.
Free once more, Danny’s problem now was a compulsion to commit rape. As he points out, the difference between the rapist and the “normal male” is very small indeed. He references a study where a hundred college men, asked if they would rape a pretty girl if they were sure they could get away with it, replied yes. Yet in his description of a rape, in the section “You Don’t Have to Do This,” it is obvious that, in spite of being a peeping Tom, he was still a long way from being a Ted Bundy. According to his own account, he treated the girl like a human being, and only broke his promise to the extent of having an orgasm inside of her instead of withdrawing. Clearly, he was still a human being.
Yet his problem, obviously, was that he was fast losing all respect for himself. After another period in prison, even more degrading than the others, he seems to have committed his first multicide—a treble murder of a girl named Julie Grissom, her 8-year-old nephew, and her father. It was the day after he had been fired from a job, and again the cause seems to have been a fury of resentment.
He does not confess to this murder in the present book. But he does not deny it, either. Robert Fieldmore Lewis claims that Danny Rolling confessed to it in prison.
By now, Danny had become convinced that he had at least two alter-egos, one called Ennad, who was a rapist and a robber but not a killer, and one called Gemini, a demonic entity who thirsted for blood. Yet clearly, he was not entirely in Gemini’s power, for during the course of an intended rape-murder, he realized that there was a baby lying in a crib, watching him with innocent curiosity. He allowed his intended victim to escape.
A few months before the Gainesville murders, a violent quarrel with his father ended with James Rolling trying to shoot him, and Danny shooting his father and leaving him for dead. In fact, James Rolling recovered, minus the use of one eye and one ear.
Danny Rolling was now on the run. Another rape attempt ended in sudden remorse. In another, the girl suddenly showed herself willing, and after it was over, drank a beer with him.
After that, he went to Gainesville, and committed the five murders that caused hundreds of students to flee the campus in terror. They are described in this book in such detail that there would be no point in even summarizing them.
After that, he left Gainesville and went back to armed robbery. Within ten days he was caught after robbing a grocery store in a town 40 miles south of Gainesville.
It was not until January of 1991 that the murder investigation reached the point of drawing his blood. When DNA testing identified him as the man who had raped three of the four women in Gainesville before killing them, he was promptly identified as the prime suspect, but it was not until November 11, 1991 that he was formally charged with the five murders and three rapes.
What finally made him decide to confess to the murders is another story. But at any rate, he did plead guilty to the crimes at his trial in February of 1994. He had already been given four life sentences plus 170 years for the armed robberies, but this time he received seven more life sentences, 100 more years, and five death penalties.
And that, it would seem, is all there is to say about it. His criminal career seems easy enough to understand. It began with the voyeurism in childhood, watching the cheerleader get undressed. Ted Bundy’s career of murder started in exactly the same way. The poor relationship with his father led to social maladjustment, as well as inability to control his rage and resentment. The rest followed naturally—his first rape, his first armed robbery, his first prison sentence…
Yet Danny Rolling believes there was another cause: that he was periodically “possessed”—either by a darker side of his own personality, or by an evil spirit. In this book he tells how, lying in bed with his wife Omatha, the room filled with an evil presence. In a letter to me, he tells of another frightening encounter, when he was in solitary confinement:
I was resting on my iron bunk when this thing that appeared like a gargoyle pounced on my chest, pinning me to the mattress. It had both claws pressing against my shoulders…
It released its grip on one of my shoulders and clawed open my mouth, snaking a foot-long slimy tongue down my throat. I couldn’t breathe…I was suffocating, and I began to struggle. I managed to push the thing far enough away from my face to get that horrible tongue out of my windpipe. It sneered and spat, “How does it feel to kiss a snail?” I screamed and it just disappeared.
This sounds, of course, like a bad nightmare, and that may well be all that it was. Yet it seems to me possible that Danny Rolling is dealing with something more than that.
In 1980, I began to write a book about poltergeists. I had been interested in the paranormal for ten years or more, since being commissioned to write a book called The Occult. My approach was rationalistic. I believed in poltergeists, but was convinced that they were due to spontaneous psychokinesis, or “mind over matter,” mostly on the part of emotionally disturbed teenagers. But as I studied case after case for my new book, I gradually became convinced that they were nothing of the sort—that they were, indeed, disembodied entities—that is, “spirits.” There seemed to be little doubt that many of them were highly unpleasant—not just disembodied juvenile delinquents, like poltergeists, but entities capable of inspiring criminal violence.
There was no abrupt change of viewpoint; I did not suddenly become a “spiritualist.” But I came to accept that spirits could wander in and out of a human being as easily as a tramp can wander in and out of an empty house whose doors have all been left open. However, according to the authorities on this subject—men such as Allan Kardec and Carl Wickland—such spirits cannot obtain much influence over a person unless the individual happens to be on their “wave length.” So in a sense, any such possession takes place by some form of mutual consent.
I have been struck by how many criminals come to believe that they have been possessed by some unpleasant entity. Ted Bundy said he felt like a vampire, and referred to his violent alter-ego as “the hunchback.” The Yorkshire Ripper thought he was possessed by the Devil. Little by little, I have become willing to entertain the hypothesis that some criminals are possessed by demonic entities—that once they have been accustomed to being swayed by negative emotions, they have opened themselves to the possibility of being influenced by some of the nastier denizens of the “spirit world.” It is only a hypothesis, a suspicion that creeps into my mind again and again, reading about serial killers like Ted Bundy and Pee Wee Gaskins. I have been particularly struck that men who start out as rapists, simply enjoying “stealing” sex without the other person’s consent, often drift into the most appalling sadism. In the most recent serial murder case in England, the builder Fred West, who began simply as a man who thought about nothing but sex (due, I suspect, to an accident that caused brain damage) ended by torturing girls before he killed them, and only having sex with them once they were dead.
So I am perfectly willing to entertain the hypothesis that Danny Rolling was possessed by the entity he calls Gemini. He claims that Gemini unlocked the door of Christina Powell and Sonja Larson’s apartment, so that he could enter. And detectives who saw the bookcase he moved in Christa Hoyt’s apartment were convinced that two men must have been involved, since it was too heavy for one man to carry.
But is possession by spirits really a reality, or merely a manner of speaking, a kind of shorthand for a psychological condition we do not yet understand, like multiple personality?
When I was speaking to an audience in Marion, near Boston, Massachusetts, in 1995, the psychiatrist Stanislav Grof was one of my fellow lecturers. After a panel discussion about criminal psychosis, I asked him whether he had ever seen any evidence of possession. In reply, he told the following story, which can also be found in his book The Adventure of Self-Discovery.
In the Maryland Psychiatric Research Center, he encountered a girl called Flora, who had a criminal record. She had been imprisoned for driving the getaway car in a robbery in which a watchman was murdered. After leaving prison, she had become a multiple drug addict and alcoholic, and had been imprisoned again for accidentally wounding a girlfriend when cleaning a gun under the influence of heroin. Now she was suffering from a multitude of psychiatric problems, including suicidal violence.
Grof was treating patients with the psychedelic drug LSD, and decided—after much hesitation—to try this. During the first two sessions there was only minimal progress. But at the third session, she began to complain of facial cramps. Suddenly, her face froze into a “mask of evil,” and a deep male voice came from her mouth, declaring that it was “the devil.” He ordered Grof to stay away from Flora, declaring that she belonged to him, and that he would punish anyone who tried to take her away. He then began to threaten Grof, describing in detail what would happen to Grof and his colleagues if he persisted. What worried Grof was that “the devil” seemed to know all kinds of personal details about himself and his colleagues that Flora could not possibly have known.
Although he began to experience panic, Grof forced himself to take Flora’s hand—which had twisted like a claw—and held it for the next two hours, while calming himself and envisaging a capsule of light embracing them both. After what seemed the longest two hours he had ever spent, her hand relaxed. When she “awoke,” she had no memory of what had taken place. From that point on, Flora began to improve, until she was discharged, joined a religious group, and took a normal job.
Grof retains an open mind. But he is still puzzled about how “the devil” came to know so much about his personal life and that of his friends. It is easy to believe that the entity Grof encountered was a genuine “evil spirit.” And I find it just as easy to believe that the same hypothesis may explain some of the mystery of Danny Rolling.