By Raven Rogers
I've corresponded to a few Serial Killers but Danny was, by far, my favorite. I've written to: Danny Rolling, Keith Jesperson, Gary L. Ridgway, Edmund Kemper, Richard Ramirez, Charles Albright, and a few more. I initially wrote to them for research on a book I am working on but found myself caught up trying to understand them as human beings. I asked myself how I could even see them as human beings, over and over again...but I do. I learned so much about them, like their likes and dislikes, their wants and needs, the darkness inside them that cannot be seen. Fear is what you cannot see, the unknown that is there just beyond your reach but cannot be touched upon. They are fear.
Danny Rolling came across so normal it was almost hypnotic the way his writings came across. He was a very intelligent man actually. I started to care for him, not love or lust, as a person. He claimed to care for me as well, warning me of the dangers that lurk in the world. In one of his writings he called me "morbid"...how strange that was coming from a man who killed and mutilated people.
Danny loved drawing and on several occasions, the prison guards took his pens and pencils away from him as a punishment. My last communication with him was in July, 2006 because the "punishments" were happening more often and he couldn't write as much. He sent to me a painting in 2005 of a wide eyed girl, alone in the darkness, holding an umbrella...there is a very menacing tree behind her with branches outstretched as if whispering to her. She looks scared. Fear, Danny fed on it...for him, it was power to feel your fear. I don't think Danny really ever knew when he was to close his eyes forever as his victims have done before him. He would tell me he thought it was going to be soon because they were taking his things away from him...but he never really knew. It's sad for all involved what he felt he had to do. I miss his writings; However, I believe things happen for a reason and they happen for the best most of the time. Farewell Danny and may your victims rest in peace now.
Editor's note: this is a contributor's account of corresponding with Danny Rolling, published as she wrote it. Rolling was convicted of five murders committed in Gainesville, Florida, over three days in August 1990, pleaded guilty in 1994, and was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 25, 2006. The correspondence described here ended in July 2006, three months before that. His victims were Sonja Larson, 18, Christina Powell, 17, Christa Hoyt, 18, Tracy Paules, 23, and Manuel Taboada, 23. He also confessed to the 1989 killings of William Grissom, his daughter Julie and his grandson Sean in Shreveport, Louisiana, for which he was never tried. On the letters themselves this archive can say nothing. It has not seen them, and the assessment of him as intelligent and normal is the author's own impression of a man who was, on any reading, presenting a version of himself to somebody who had written to him. The archive publishes it as testimony about the correspondence, not as evidence about him. The accompanying photograph is in the source folder and has not been reproduced here.