The 1990s
In 1946, the British novelist George Orwell wrote an essay in which he lamented the decline of the British murder since prewar days. The “classic” cases, he said, such as Jack the Ripper, Dr. Crippen, the Brides in the Bath, have a gruesome or dramatic quality that touches the imagination of novelists and film producers. With these Orwell contrasts the “Cleft Chin Murder” of 1944, in which an American GI named Karl Hulten teamed up with a striptease dancer, Betty Jones, and set out on what was intended to be a rampage of crime that would bring 1920s Chicago to London. They shot and robbed a hired car driver and dumped his body in a ditch, then drove around all weekend in his car until they were caught. Both were sentenced to death, although she was reprieved. Orwell complains that, as the most talked-about murder of recent years, it is oddly commonplace and unmemorable.
He would probably have had something similar to say about the rise of the serial killer—Manson, Corona, Mullin, Kemper, Frazier, Corll, Gacy—for all these certainly lack the quality of the classic American murder case from Professor Webster to Lizzie Borden. And this is simply because killers who are demented by drugs or suffering from clinical psychosis are bound to be less interesting than killers who are basically normal but are driven to kill by some negative or twisted emotion we can understand.
This complaint will certainly be echoed by any future criminologist who attempts to tell the story of serial murder in retrospect. The interest of the tale lies mainly in the advances that have been made in forensic and psychological detection—in short, in the manhunt. Corll, Gacy, Henry Lee Lucas, clearly belong to the story, but only because their cases have been landmarks in the history of mass murder. As to the dozens of killers known by acronyms such as the Night Stalker, the Green River Killer, the Skid Row Slasher, the Trashbag Killer, the Sunset Slayer, the Trailside Killer, the Freeway Killer—they will probably be relegated to a few paragraphs describing the number of their crimes and how they were caught. There is something oddly anonymous about such murderers.
In the case of the Night Stalker, this sense of anonymity persisted even after he had been caught. Yet the crimes themselves were hideous enough. He would break into a house, creep into the bedroom and shoot the husband in the head, before raping and beating the wife. On one occasion when a woman refused to tell him where to find the valuables, he put out her eyes with a knife and took them away with him. He also occasionally raped or sodomized children.
The intruder had already been described by the roommate of a woman he killed in her condominium in Los Angeles on March 17, 1985; Maria Hernandez said he was a long-faced young man with black curly hair, bulging eyes, and rotten teeth.
In that spring and summer there were more than twenty attacks, most of them involving both rape and murder. By the end of March the press had picked up the pattern and splashed stories connecting the series of crimes. After several abortive nicknames, such as the “Walk-In Killer” or the “Valley Invader,” the Herald Examiner came up with the “Night Stalker,” a name sensational enough to stick.
By August things were obviously getting difficult for the Night Stalker. The next murder that fit the pattern occurred in San Francisco, the shooting of sixty-six-year-old Peter Pan and his wife on August 17, showing perhaps that public awareness in Los Angeles had made it too taxing a location. This shift also gave police a chance to search San Francisco hotels for records of a man of the Night Stalker’s description. Sure enough, while checking the downmarket Tenderloin district police learned that a thin Hispanic man with bad teeth had been staying at a cheap local hotel periodically over the past year. On the last occasion he had checked out the night of the San Francisco attack. The manager commented that his room “smelled like a skunk” each time he vacated it and it took three days for the smell to clear.
The Night Stalker’s next shift of location was to bring about his identification. A young couple in Mission Viejo were attacked in their home. The Night Stalker shot twenty-nine-year-old Bill Carns through the head while he slept, and then raped his partner on the bed next to the body. He then tied her up while he ransacked the house for money and jewelry. Before leaving he raped her a second time and force her to fellate him with a gun pressed against her head. After making her repeat that she loved Satan, he left.
A thirteen-year-old boy, James Romero, was repairing his motorcycle when he noticed an orange Toyota driving slowly past, and the driver peering around as if looking for a place to rob. And when he saw the car a second time half an hour later, he made a note of its license plate number. When he heard about the rape, he alerted the police. LAPD files showed that the car had been stolen in the Los Angeles Chinatown district while the owner was eating in a restaurant. The Night Stalker abandoned it soon after the attack, and it was located two days later in a car park in the Los Angeles Rampart district. It was taken away for forensic testing, and a single fingerprint was successfully raised from behind the rearview mirror.
The identification was described by the forensic division as “a near miracle.” The computer system had only just been installed, and this was one of its first trials. Furthermore, the system only contained the fingerprints of criminals born after January 1, 1960. Richard Ramirez was born in February 1960.
The police circulated the photograph to newspapers, and it was shown on the late evening news. At the time, Ramirez was in Phoenix, buying cocaine with the money he had stolen in Mission Viejo. On the morning that the papers splashed his name and photograph on the front pages, he was on a bus on the way back to Los Angeles, unaware that he had been identified.
In the bus station he went into the men’s room to finish off the cocaine, and then into a liquor store to buy Pepsi and sugared donuts. Waiting for his change, he saw his own face looking up at him from a newspaper, and as someone said, “It’s him,” he ran from the shop. Stimulated by the cocaine, he raced two miles, and into the Hispanic district. In a parking lot he tried to drag a woman from her car, but was chased by passers-by. Seeing a red Mustang in a yard he jumped into it, but the owner, who was underneath it, emerged and grabbed him by the collar. Ramirez reversed into the garage wall and the car stalled. Once again he began running. He tried to pull another woman from her car, but failed and fled, now pursued by a crowd. Racing ahead, he stopped to stick out his tongue at his pursuers. Minutes later, he was caught, and dragged down by a crowd. At that moment, a young policeman arrived, and Ramirez shouted, “Save me before they kill me.”
In his hometown of El Paso, on the Texas-Mexico border, acquaintances said Ramirez had become a Satanist in negative reaction to Bible-study classes, and that he had spent his teens as a loner, smoking marihuana and listening to heavy metal music.
In spite of his own desire to plead guilty, his lawyers entered a plea of not guilty. The defense strategy was to play for delays, and the case came to trial only after three and a half years, in October 1988. Ramirez was finally sentenced to death in November 1999, telling the court, “You maggots make me sick.”
At a second trial in San Francisco, he was besieged by enthusiastic female groupies who lined up to visit him in jail. He married one of his admirers in October 1996.
The kind of good fortune that identified Richard Ramirez from a single fingerprint failed to favor the police in the case of Gary Ridgway, the Green River Killer, which illustrates the difficulty of capturing an elusive criminal in a crowded urban area. In a deal to save himself from the death penalty, he offered to give the details of fifty-nine murders. In fact, he admitted that the actual number was closer to ninety.
The first corpse was discovered in the slow-flowing Green River, near Seattle, Washington, on July 15, 1982, and was identified as a sixteen-year old prostitute, Wendy Coffield.
Gary Ridgway prepares to leave the courtroom where he was sentenced in King County, Washington. Ridgway received a life sentence for each of forty-eight counts of murder in what became known as the “Green River Killer” serial murder case that began in 1982 and was the largest unsolved serial murder case in American history. (Associated Press/Joshua Trujillo, Seattle Post-Intelligencer)
The second, twenty-three-year-old Debra Lynn Bonner, known as “Dub,” was a stripper with a list of convictions as a prostitute. Her body was found on August 12, 1982, also in the Green River. Between then and March 21, 1984, forty victims were found in the Seattle-Tacoma area, many from the strip around Sea-Tac airport, known as a haunt of prostitutes.
Within three days of the finding of Dub Bonner, Dave Reichert, the detective in charge of the case, heard that two more bodies had been found in the Green River. Both women were black, both were naked, and they had been weighted down to the river bottom with large rocks. They were only a few hundred yards upstream from the spot where Dub had been found, and had almost certainly been there at the time.
As Reichert walked along the bank toward that site, he discovered another body. Like the other two, she was black, and was later identified as sixteen-year-old Opal Mills. The fact that rigor mortis had not yet disappeared meant that she had been left there in the past two days—which in turn meant that if the police had kept watch on the river, the killer would have been caught before this young woman had died.
It was the first of a series of mischances that would make this one of the most frustrating criminal cases in Seattle’s history. The next—and perhaps the worst mischance—occurred two days later, when a local TV station announced that the riverbank was now under round-the-clock surveillance, thus destroying all chance of catching the killer on a return visit.
No less than twenty-six women vanished in 1983, and the remains of eight of them were found near Sea-Tac Airport or close by. In March, special investigator Bob Keppel, known for his brilliant work on the Ted Bundy case, was asked to write up a report on the investigation. It was devastating, with hundreds of examples of incompetence and failure to follow up on leads. For example, when the driving license of one victim, Marie Malvar, was found at the airport, and the police notified, they did not even bother to collect it—although it might well have contained the killer’s fingerprint.
In 1984, four victims were found together on Auburn West Hill, six more in wooded areas along State Route 410, and two near Tigard, Oregon, the latter giving rise to the speculation that the killer had moved. In January, a Green River Task Force of thirty-six investigators was formed, with a $2 million budget. (By 1988 the bill would have reached $13 million.)
Among the hundreds of suspects interviewed by the police was Gary Leon Ridgway, thirty-five, a short, mild-looking man with fishlike lips, who worked for the Kenworth Truck Plant and was known to pick up hookers—he even admitted to being obsessed by them. He also confessed to choking a prostitute in 1982, but claimed this was because she bit him.
By 1986, with the investigation stalled. Ridgway’s file was reopened, and his ex-wife interviewed about his preference for sex in the open, often near the Green River. Ridgway was placed under surveillance. And still women disappeared—although no longer with quite the same frequency. And so throughout the 1990s, the case marked time, while Reichert, the chief investigator, admitted that his obsession with the killer had caused serious problems in his marriage.
Since genetic fingerprinting had first been used in 1988 to convict the South Side Rapist, Timothy Spencer, it had led to the solution of many murders. The main problem was likely to occur if there was not enough DNA material for testing, or if it was old. In 2001, a major breakthrough came when the Washington State crime lab acquired the equipment to extract usable DNA from old samples and multiply the quantity by the method known as STR, or short tandem repeats. Now a major review of samples of semen evidence began. And by September 2001, it had paid off. Semen samples, taken from Opal Mills, Marcia Chapman, and Carol Christensen, three of the earliest victims, proved to be from Gary Ridgway. Paint fragments and fiber evidence taken from the grave of Debra Estes in 1988 were also linked to Ridgway. When Ridgway was finally arrested on November 30, 2001, he was charged with four counts of murder.
At first pleading innocent, he later agreed to change his plea to guilty to avoid the death penalty.
Ridgway’s account of how he became a serial killer occupies the most fascinating chapter of Reichert’s book Chasing the Devil. As with so many killers, the problems started with a domineering mother. Born in 1949, he was a chronic bed wetter, and she would drag him out of bed and parade him in front of his brothers, and then make him stand naked in a tub of cold water. His father seems to have been a timid nonentity. But as an employee of a mortuary he strongly influenced his son’s fantasies by describing at length interrupting someone having sex with a corpse. Ridgway began to fantasize about this. When he saw his mother sunbathing he had imagined having sex with her, but now he dreamed of killing her and violating the body. All this seems to imply some inbuilt or genetic tendency to sexual violence.
Like so many serial killers he was sadistic to animals, and once killed a cat by locking it in a refrigerator. He also claimed that, as a teenager, he drowned a little boy by wrapping his legs around him and pulling him under the water. And later he would stab and injure another boy, because, he said, he “wanted to know what it was like to kill someone,” although he was never caught.
Sent to the Philippines as a sailor, he began to use prostitutes, and they quickly became a lifelong obsession.
He had discovered he enjoyed choking when he was quarrelling with his second wife, Marcia, and wrapped his arm round her neck from behind (a method also used by the Boston Strangler). In addition he enjoyed tying her up for sex. In 1975 they had a son, Matthew, whom he adored. A religious phase lasted until 1980, when they divorced. But during their marriage, he still hired prostitutes.
He embarked on killing them after his divorce. Because he seemed a “milquetoast,” they felt no alarm about him, and allowed him to get behind them. He often took them back to his house, had sex, and then killed them. Later, he found he preferred to kill them first and have sex with the bodies. He also confessed to revisiting bodies several times for more sex.
On one occasion, he even took his son with him in his pickup truck when he went into the woods with a prostitute; when the boy asked what had happened to her, Ridgway told him that she lived nearby and had decided to walk home.
He even admitted to a scheme—never carried out—to overpower a prostitute and then impale her with an upright pole in her vagina—a favorite practice of the original Dracula, Vlad the Impaler.
And so this apparently harmless little man was able to carry on killing for many years. Reichert emphasizes that Ridgway was full of self-pity, regarding himself as the helpless victim of these sinister urges. On November 5, 2003, Ridgway pleaded guilty to forty-eight murders, and received forty-eight life sentences.
Joel Rifkin bore a certain physical resemblance to Gary Ridgway and, like him, had a curious urge to kill the prostitutes who exercised such a fascination over him.
In late June 1993, soon after dawn, two New York State troopers patrolling Long Island’s Southern State Parkway noticed that a station wagon ahead of them lacked a license plate. When they signaled it to stop, it swerved off the freeway into the streets of Wantaugh. The troopers pursued—reaching speeds of ninety miles an hour—with sirens wailing. Five additional police cars joined the chase before the station wagon veered out of control and hit a telephone pole. The driver proved to be bespectacled thirty-four-year-old Joel Rifkin. He claimed to have no explanation for his wild flight, but when the troopers noticed a foul order emanating from the car, they checked the back of the wagon. There, wrapped in tarpaulin, was the naked, decomposing corpse of a woman. She was a twenty-two-year-old prostitute named Tiffany Bresciani, who had vanished three days earlier. Rifkin confessed to strangling her as they had intercourse, and taking her back to the house in East Meadow, Long Island, where he lived with his mother and sister.
It was hot weather and the corpse began to decompose quickly, so he decided to dump it among some bushes on rough ground near the local airport. And he went on to admit that he had made a habit of picking up prostitutes and strangling them—seventeen in all. (The police decided the number was actually eighteen, and that Rifkin had simply lost count.)
Rifkin was an unemployed landscape gardener, and he had been picking up prostitutes on average three times a week since he was eighteen. In his bedroom, police found victims’ ID cards, driving licenses, credit cards, and piles of women’s underwear: panties, bras, and stockings. In the garage, which smelt of decaying flesh, they found the panties of his last victim, Tiffany Bresciani.
As information about Rifkin began to emerge, it became clear that—once more—he was basically an inadequate. An illegitimate child, he had been adopted a few weeks after his birth in January 1959 by a Jewish couple, Ben and Jeanne Rifkin, who also adopted a girl.
The children seemed to have been well treated, but Joel was backward at school; he mumbled, walked with hunched shoulders, and was dyslexic. (As with Bundy, there was probably a lack of “bonding” with his mother immediately after birth.) His schoolfellows called him “turtle” and made fun of him. When he left home he tried various jobs, on one occasion working in a record store, but he was usually late, and would turn up with rumpled clothes and dirty fingernails.
Rifkin’s dream was to become a famous writer, and it could be argued that he had the right kind of preparation—a certain amount of childhood and adolescent frustration often seems to be good for writers. Rifkin spent hours writing poetry in his bedroom. But a few half-hearted attempts at further education fell through because he had no ability to concentrate. He began to work as a landscape gardener, but with such inefficiency that he usually lost his customers within days.
He was already in his late twenties when his stepfather was diagnosed as suffering from prostate cancer, and committed suicide because he could not bear the pain. Jeanne Rifkin was shattered and went into a depression.
Not long after, Rifkin met an attractive blonde in a coffee shop; he was scribbling, and they began a casual conversation; he was impressed when she told him she was writing a film script.
He told her—untruthfully—that he was also writing a film script, and that he was a university student. When she took a small apartment, she even invited him to move in, to help her with her script. Rifkin had hoped that this was the beginning of a love affair; but she refused even to let him kiss her. A few weeks later, she tired of his laziness and untidiness and threw him out. After Rifkin’s arrest it was reported that she had worked as a streetwalker, and was suffering from AIDS, although it is not clear whether he was aware of either of those facts.
What is certain is that he began to kill prostitutes in 1989, picking them up on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. Many prostitutes turned him down because he looked and smelled peculiar. But one with whom he had sex on two occasions said he seemed perfectly ordinary and normal, and made no odd sexual demands. Another prostitute, however, refused when he asked for oral sex.
Rifkin continued to commit murder after murder for almost five years, killing seventeen or eighteen prostitutes, many of them drug addicts. He may well have had sex with the corpses since he often took them home and kept them for days before he disposed of them. One body that he tossed on waste ground near JFK Airport was still there, more than a year later, under a mattress. Other bodies were placed in metal drums and thrown in the East River.
Rifkin’s motivation has never been adequately explained. What is clear is that he was, like so many serial killers, an inept underachiever, a person who found life too much for him. As one of his schoolmates told a reporter, he was a lifelong loser. We can only assume that he killed because violence satisfied some long-held fantasy, and because it gave him a bizarre sense of achievement, a feeling that, in spite of a habit of failure, he was a “somebody,” a multiple killer, a man to be reckoned with.
Yet soon after his arrest, one of the policemen involved in the chase commented that he had probably wanted to be caught, since driving with a corpse in a car without license plates seems to be asking for trouble.
On May 9, 1994, Joel Rifkin was sentenced to 203 years in prison.
Probably the most widely publicized American case of the 1990s was that of Jeffrey Dahmer, a homosexual killer who murdered and cannibalized seventeen young men.
Dahmer, born in 1960, was arrested on July 22, 1991. Late that evening, a slim black man ran out of the Oxford Apartments in a rundown area of Milwaukee, shouting for help, and waved a police car to a stop. He was wearing a handcuff on one wrist, and explained that a white youth was trying to kill him.
The police went up to Apartment 213, and the door was answered by a tall, good-looking young man who apologized for causing a disturbance. His manner was so believable that the police were about to go away when one of them noticed a strong smell of decay emanating from the flat. As they tried to force their way in, the young man—Dahmer—became hysterical. When a policeman opened the door of the refrigerator, he found himself looking at a decapitated human head. They found another severed head in the freezer, three skulls in a filing cabinet, and four more elsewhere around the flat. A kettle contained severed hands and male genitals, and packets of meat that proved to be of human flesh. The man who had raised the alarm, Tracy Edwards, thirty-two, described meeting Dahmer in a shopping mall. Dahmer invited him to a party, but there was no one else in the apartment when they arrived. Edwards accepted several drinks, after which he became sleepy. Then Dahmer snapped a handcuff on his wrist and held a butcher’s knife against his throat, forcing him to sit still as he watched a videotape of The Exorcist. When Dahmer said he intended to kill Edwards and eat his heart, Edwards managed to kick him and run for the door.
At the police station, Dahmer seemed glad that it was all over, and admitted that he was a cannibal and had been obsessed by dissection ever since he was a teenager, and had enjoyed stripping birds and small animals of their flesh to preserve their skeletons. And later, the same morbid obsession with dead things had led him to kill human beings.
He was eighteen, he explained, when he committed his first murder—when his parents were away, he had picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker, Stephen Hicks, who sexually attracted him, and they sat in Dahmer’s home drinking beer and smoking pot. When Hicks said he had to go, Dahmer became oddly hysterical—he obviously found it worrying to be left alone—and struck Hicks on the head with a dumbbell. Then he undressed him and masturbated on the corpse. After dark he buried the body in the crawl space under the house, but later transferred it to a remote spot. He was almost caught when police stopped him for driving over the central line, but fortunately—for him—they failed to notice the parcels in the rear.
Unlike the majority of serial killers, who for the most part are from working-class backgrounds, Dahmer came from a comfortable middle-class home. But his parents quarreled constantly. He obviously suffered from a deep sense of insecurity and inferiority, partly because they seemed to prefer his younger brother, Dave.
After his first murder, Dahmer joined the army, but was discharged for drunkenness. He had always been a heavy drinker, obviously finding it an escape from reality. He moved in with his grandmother in West Allis, near Milwaukee, and took a job in a chocolate factory. He had recognized his homosexuality in his early teens, and his strange inner compulsions meant that he preferred to be alone, rather than trying to join the gay community. But in Milwaukee, where he was known as a monosyllabic loner, he was banned from a gay bar for slipping knockout drugs into drinks.
In 1986, when he was in his mid-twenties, he was arrested for exposing himself to two boys, and placed on probation. In September of the following year, he committed his second murder, going to a hotel room with a man named Stephen Tuomi, and apparently having normal sex with him before they fell asleep. In the middle of the night, Dahmer strangled Tuomi—he claimed that he had no memory of the murder, but simply woke up and found himself in bed with the body.
The murder certainly seems to have been unpremeditated. Dahmer had to go out and purchase a large suitcase, in which he succeeded in taking the body back to the basement of his grandmother’s house. There he dismembered it, and then left it out in garbage bags for collection. This was typical of the fifteen murders that followed between January 1988 and July 1991. He would pick up a young male, usually black, and invite him home—either to his grandmother’s or, after she had asked him to leave, to his own apartment on North Twenty-fourth Street. There the victim was rendered unconscious with a strong dose of a knockout drug in his alcohol, and undressed and strangled. Dahmer then dismembered the body, and disposed of it in garbage bags—although he also stored some of it in his refrigerator for cooking and eating.
Dahmer had already come close to being caught in September 1988, when he had picked up a thirteen-year-old Laotian boy named Keison Sinthasomphone and raped him in his apartment, after giving him drugged coffee. But the boy had succeeded in staggering out into the street and back to his home. The police were notified, and Dahmer was charged with second-degree sexual assault and sentenced to a year in a correction program, which allowed him to continue working in the chocolate factory.
Yet three years later, on May 26, 1991, Dahmer was able to pick up the younger brother of his earlier victim, Conerak Sinthasomphone, in the same shopping mall where he later picked up Tracy Edwards. Conerak was also given drugged coffee, and then stripped and raped. But when Dahmer went out to buy beer, the naked boy succeeded in escaping from the apartment, and stood talking to two black teenage girls, begging for help. Dahmer tried to grab the boy, but the girls clung on to him, and one of them succeeded in ringing the police. Two squad cars arrived shortly, but when Dahmer explained plausibly that the young man was his lover and that this was merely a lover’s quarrel, the police escorted Conerak back to Dahmer’s apartment and left him there to be murdered and dismembered. When this was finally revealed after Dahmer’s arrest, it caused a scandal that shook the Milwaukee Police Department.
In March 1990, Dahmer was released from the correctional center in which he was serving his sentence for the earlier rape. By that time he had already killed five times. On March 13, 1990, he moved into the Oxford Apartments, and during the next eighteen months killed twelve more victims, the last two in just over two weeks, between July 5 and July 22, 1991, the day of his arrest.
Dahmer had almost been caught after his second murder, that of Eddie Smith, on June 14, 1990. He had invited a fifteen-year-old Hispanic youth back to his apartment, but, for some reason, decided to try to knock him unconscious with a rubber mallet instead of the usual drugged drink. The youth fought back, and managed to reach the door. Dahmer let him go after making him promise not to tell the police. The young man broke his promise, but when he begged the police not to let his foster parents know that he was gay, they decided to do nothing about it. So once more, Dahmer managed to escape to kill again.
In the summer of 1991, the revelations about the apartment full of corpses filled the front pages week after week, and made worldwide headlines. In January 1992, Dahmer appeared in court charged with fifteen murders. He made no attempt at defense, and was sentenced to fifteen terms of life imprisonment. Asked how he felt about being in prison, he remarked: “I couldn’t find any meaning for my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here.”
Robert Ressler happened to be in Milwaukee lecturing at a university at the time of Dahmer’s arrest, and was asked if he would testify for the defense, who had decided on an insanity plea. His own feeling was that although Dahmer was not entirely innocent, the odd mixture of “organization” and “disorganization” in his crimes made it arguable that he was not entirely sane. This is why he went twice to interview Dahmer in prison. The result shed some interesting light on Dahmer and his motivation. One of the most interesting comments entered the conversation almost by accident. He asks Dahmer if he ever committed violence in his early years, to which the reply was no, but there was violence against him, and he went on to tell how, on his way home from school he was approached by three seniors, and had a feeling that they were hostile. “Sure enough, one of them just took out a billy club and whacked me on the back of the head.” Ressler does not pursue this. But when, a few moments later, he asks when Dahmer became interested in dissecting animals, Dahmer says that it was at the age of sixteen, after he had been hit on the head. It started in a biology class, when they were dissecting a baby pig.
Since so many serial killers have received skull injuries, it is inevitable to wonder if the beginning of his obsession with death and corpses was the blow on the head. By coincidence it was also the end. Dahmer was murdered in a Wisconsin jail on November 28, 1994; he was struck on the head with an iron bar by a fellow convict called Christopher Scarver, who explained that he believed he was the Son of God.
In the 1990s, I became involved in correspondence with the “Gainesville Ripper,” Danny Rolling, who, when he was in jail, had become engaged to Gerard Schaefer’s one-time fiancée Sondra London, now a well-known crime writer. He had written to her from Florida State Prison, where he was serving time for an attempted robbery of a supermarket store in Ocala, Florida.
It was not until January of the following year that the police had administered a blood test. Rolling’s DNA revealed that he was the man who had been involved in the sex murder of four young women on the campus of the University of Florida at Gainesville in the previous August. The crimes had caused such fear that half the students had gone home.
Sondra and Rolling entered into correspondence, and by Christmas 1992 had decided that they were in love. Finally, she was allowed to visit him, and the meeting confirmed their feelings. There was, she told me, an instant and powerful physical attraction. Soon after this they announced their engagement.
This announcement, in February 1993, was featured in some newspapers next to a story claiming that he had confessed to the Gainesville murders to a fellow inmate, Robert Fieldmore Lewis.
Rolling looked an unlikely serial killer, thirty-eight years old, tall, good-looking, and articulate, a talented artist and guitar player, who looked more like a schoolteacher in his horn-rimmed glasses. But in due course he confessed to the Gainesville murders, and eventually, to three more.
Through Sondra, I came to write an introduction to Rolling’s autobiography, The Making of a Serial Killer, which is how I came to exchange a few letters with him. He told me that had no doubt that he had been possessed by some demonic force when he committed the murders. It sounds like the typical excuse made by a killer; yet after studying the case, I came close to believing him.
Rolling was born in 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana, the son of a police sergeant who had been a war hero. Unfortunately, James Rolling was also another of Van Vogt’s Right Men. Such men, as already noted, are usually family tyrants. Rolling senior seems to have had no love for his son, and lost no opportunity of telling him he was stupid and worthless.
Rolling also went into the military, but just before he was scheduled to go to Vietnam, was caught with drugs and discharged. He was dismayed, for he had been enjoying military life. His father was furious and disgusted with him. But Danny then had a religious conversion, and married a fellow member of the Pentecostal Church. Unfortunately, he was unable to get rid of a habit he had acquired in childhood of peering through windows at women undressing. When he was caught, the marriage began to disintegrate.
On the day he was served his divorce papers, he committed his first sex attack, breaking into a house and raping a young woman who was alone. He felt so remorseful that the next morning he made his way back to her house to apologize—then saw two grim, powerfully built men come out, and changed his mind. But soon after that he committed his first armed robbery. And it was not long before he was serving his first jail term.
The brutality and violence of prison life in the South shocked him. Blacks and whites hated one another and often killed one another. He was nearly gang-raped in the shower by a group of blacks.
Free once more, he now experienced a compulsion to commit rape. He admits in his book that what he enjoyed was the surrender of the terrified girl, the sense of power; it was balm to his bruised ego. Another period in jail only confirmed his self-image as a desperate criminal.
Back in his hometown in 1989, he began peeping through the window of a pretty model named Julie Grissom. One day, after missing work for three days in a row, he was fired from his job in a restaurant. He reacted just as he had reacted years earlier to his divorce papers. On November 1989, he crept into the backyard of the Grissom household, where he had formerly played Peeping Tom. Undeterred by the fact that there were three people in the house—Julie Grissom’s father and her eight-year-old nephew—he burst in and tied up all three at gunpoint with duct tape. Then he stabbed to death the boy and the elder man, dragged Julie into the bathroom and raped her against the sink, forcing her to say, “Fuck my pussy, daddy.” After making her climb in the bath so he could wash out her vagina with a hosepipe, he stabbed her to death. He left after taking $200.
By now he was convinced that he had two “demons,” one a robber and rapist called “Ennad,” and the other a killer called “Gemini.”
A violent quarrel with his father ended with James Rolling trying to shoot him, and with Danny shooting his father and leaving him for dead. In fact, James Rolling survived, minus one eye. Rolling committed more armed robberies and rapes, and then traveled to Gainesville, where he bought a tent and pitched it in the woods.
There were more voyeuristic activities—on some occasions he stripped naked while he peeped. On August 24, 1990, he broke into an apartment shared by two seventeen-year-olds, Christina Powell and Sonja Larson, who were both asleep. He stabbed Sonja to death in her bed. Then he went downstairs and woke up Christina on the sofa, and at gunpoint taped her hands. After raping her he stabbed her to death, making her lie on her face while he did it. He left both bodies positioned for maximum shock value.
Two evenings later he broke into the apartment of eighteen-year-old Christa Hoyt (on whom he had been spying), and waited for her to return home. When she did, he overpowered her, and raped and stabbed her to death, also disemboweling her and cutting off her head. When police arrived on the scene, they were horrified to find her headless body seated on the edge of her bed, her severed nipples beside her.
Two days later, Rollings broke into an apartment shared by two students, Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both twenty-three. The latter was stabbed as he lay asleep. Tracy Paules heard sounds of struggle and came to see what was happening. Rolling chased her to her bedroom, tied her up and raped her, afterwards stabbing her to death as she lay facedown.
The murders caused widespread panic; thousands of students left campus for Labor Day weekend; only seven hundred returned. By then Rolling had already moved south, living by burglary and armed robbery.
On August 27, 1990, a bare-chested, ski-masked bandit robbed the First Union Bank a half mile down the road from Hoyt’s apartment. Two witnesses later recognized Rolling from the muscle-definition of his chest.
On September 7, driving a Ford Mustang taken after his last burglary, Rolling stopped in Ocala, Florida, and walked into the crowded Winn-Dixie supermarket at midday. He strolled up to the location manager, Randy Wilson, pointed a .38 at his head and demanded the money from the cash drawer. Then he called to the girls to empty their registers.
Rolling asked: “Where’s the safe?”
“In my office.”
“Let’s go.” They went up two steps into the office.
Meanwhile, the store’s bookkeeper, who was returning from an errand, was notified at the entrance that the store was being robbed. She ran into the dry cleaner next door. “Can I use your phone? We’re being robbed.”
As Rolling left the store with a bag of money, the manager followed him, and watched him turn into the back lot behind the store. A crowd of shoppers pointed. “He went that way.” By now a police car had arrived and Wilson directed them.
When Rolling reached his stolen car, the police were right behind him. The high-speed chase that followed ended when Rolling wrecked the car. He fled into a nearby building, through to the back, and into the parking lot. The police were there waiting for him. He ignored their order to freeze, and ran on. Finally, a tackle brought him down, and moments later he was in a squad car. Behind, in his stolen car, was the $4,700 he had taken. Within an hour he was behind bars.
It was in Florida State Prison that he met Robert Lewis, who had written a screenplay. When Danny asked him who was the Sondra London mentioned on the title page, Lewis explained that she was his editor. Danny, who felt that he too could become a writer, to while away the long years behind bars, asked for her address, and wrote to her.
In his hometown of Shreveport, authorities had noted the similarity between the murder of the Julie Grissom family and the Gainesville murders. Now the FBI’s VICAP came into operation, detailing the similarities.
In January 1991, Rolling was asked for a blood sample. The result revealed that the Gainesville Ripper and the killer of the Grissom family were the same person. Tried for the Gainesville murders in 1994, he was given five death sentences.
And why am I prepared to take seriously his claim of being “possessed” by a demonic entity?
In The Making of a Serial Killer, Rolling tells how he tried to enter the apartment of Christina Powell and Sonja Larson and found the door locked. He claims that he then prayed to “Gemini,” his demon, and that when he tried the door again, it was unlocked. And in a letter to me he described how, in his cell, a kind of gray gargoyle had leapt onto his chest, held him down with its claws, and thrust its tongue down his throat. All this may, of course, be invention. Or it may be that Rolling really believes what he says. I am inclined to think that he does.
After thirty years studying the paranormal, I have slowly come to accept that “possession” can actually occur, and that it is not a fantasy dreamed up by the feeble-minded and the sex-starved.
But whether Rolling was possessed by some unpleasant paranormal entity is perhaps beside the point. As in the case of Ted Bundy, Rolling’s life typifies the development of a sex killer: the childhood voyeurism culminating in his first rape (which was committed in a state of rage at the prospect of divorce); the murder of the Grissoms, again committed in a state of anger and defiance; and then the orgy of rape and murder at Gainesville. It seems clear that, as in the case of Ted Bundy, rape and murder proved addictive. In a sense, Rolling was possessed—by his craving to violate and kill.
