Fla. College Killer Awaits Execution

Oct. 25, 2006
Man who terrorized U. of Fla. in Gainesville to be put to death

Sixteen years after he terrorized the college town of Gainesville in a murderous spree, Danny Harold Rolling, the state's most notorious serial killer since Ted Bundy, faced execution Wednesday.

The bodies of his five college student victims, some mutilated, posed and sexually assaulted, were found over a three-day period in late August 1990, just as the University of Florida's fall semester was beginning.

The killing spree touched off a massive manhunt, plunging the laid-back college town into panic. Students fled and residents armed themselves.

After a dozen years on death row, Rolling, 52, was scheduled to die at 6 p.m. Wednesday. His final appeal was in the U.S. Supreme Court, where he was challenging the constitutionality of the chemicals used in Florida's execution procedure.

The attention surrounding Rolling's execution has reopened old wounds in Gainesville and for families of the victims.

Dianna Hoyt, whose stepdaughter Christa Hoyt was killed by Rolling and decapitated, planned to watch the execution at Florida State Prison in Starke.

"This is a tough thing, but is a necessary thing to go through," she said. "This is the final thing we can do for Christa and for my late husband and her dad, Gary."

"It is very hard for us to see someone else die," she said. "But, he deserves it."

Tracy Paules' mother and sister also planned to watch her killer receive the lethal injection.

"If you see us crying, it is not for Rolling, but for Tracy," said her mother, Ricky Paules.

Rolling, a police officer's son from Shreveport, La., arrived in Gainesville on a Greyhound bus, pitched a tent in the woods near campus and set out to become, as he would say later, a "superstar" among criminals.

He also robbed a bank and stole a car before leaving Gainesville the day after the last of the bodies were discovered. Belongings he left at the campsite in the woods and DNA taken after a later arrest for robbery would eventually link him to the slayings.

When he was finally scheduled to go on trial in 1994, Rolling shocked the courtroom by pleading guilty to the five slayings.

"There are some things you just can't run from, this being one of those," Rolling told Circuit Judge Stan R. Morris, who accepted the pleas and found him guilty and later sentenced him to death.

Crowds were expected outside the prison Wednesday, with possibly the largest turnout since Bundy's execution.

Bundy, suspected in the deaths and disappearances of 36 women, was electrocuted Jan. 24, 1989, in the same death chamber where Rolling will die by lethal injection. The case was still fresh in the minds of many when Rolling's killings began the following year in roughly the same area as some of Bundy's.

The bodies Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, were found stabbed to death on a Sunday afternoon in 1990, in a town house just off the University of Florida campus.

Christa Hoyt, 18, was found decapitated the next morning in her isolated duplex.

Tracy Paules and Manny Taboada, both 23, were discovered dead a day later in the apartment they shared.

For months, a large task force of local, state and federal agents followed hundreds of leads and took blood samples from dozens of men. They did not know that Rolling was already behind bars in Marion County for robbing a grocery store.

Then authorities in Rolling's hometown of Shreveport, investigating a triple slaying that they believe he committed, suggested that police should check out the drifter and ex-con.

Throughout the years, Rolling has insisted he was not as atrocious as many thought.

In a letter to The Associated Press in 2002, Rolling wrote: "I assure you I am not a salivating ogre. Granted ... time's past; the dark era of long ago - Dr. Jeckle & Mr. Hyde did strike up & down the corridors of insanety."

Rolling claimed he had good and bad multiple personalities.

He blamed the murders on abuse he suffered as a child from his police officer father and his treatment in prison. He said he killed one person for every year he was behind bars. He served a total of eight years in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi before the killings.

Rolling will be the 63rd inmate to be put to death since Florida resumed executions in 1979 and the third this year.

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