Serial killer Danny Rolling executed in Florida

The victims’ families ran an advertisement Thursday in The Gainesville Sun thanking the community for its support: “We hope you will remember August 1990 and the years that followed without any sense of community shame for what has happened here. You turned a blemish into a rose.”

Calm, cooperative to the end
Rolling was calm and cooperative ahead of the execution, Corrections Department spokesman Robby Cunningham said. He spent several hours with his brother Kevin and his brother’s pastor, officials said.

The gathering on a barren cow pasture across from the prison was reminiscent of the crowds that gathered for Bundy’s execution on Jan. 24, 1989, in the state’s old electric chair. Bundy was suspected in the deaths and disappearances of 36 women across the country.

Bundy died in the same death chamber. 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 crimes.

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.

Police stymied for months
The bodies of Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, were found stabbed to death in a townhouse 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.

AP file Danny Harold Rolling, seen in 1994 during his trial in Tampa, Fla., spent 12 years on death row.

For months, a 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 for robbing a grocery store.

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

Rolling blamed the murders on abuse he suffered as a child and his treatment in prison, and claimed he had good and bad multiple personalities.

But 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.”

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

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