In the early morning of August 24, 1990, a man armed with a pistol and a Marine Corps K-Bar knife broke through the rear door of an apartment near the University of Florida in Gainesville. Christina Powell, seventeen, was asleep on the couch downstairs. He went upstairs, stood deciding which of the two women to attack, and stabbed Sonja Larson, eighteen, as she lay in her bed, taping her mouth to muffle her cries while she fought him; she was conscious for less than a minute. Then he went back down, taped Powell's mouth and hands, cut off her clothes, raped her and stabbed her five times in the back. He posed both bodies and left. Larson's first name appears in the court record as Sonya.
About forty-two hours later, on Saturday, August 25, he pried open the sliding glass door of Christa Hoyt's duplex two miles away with a screwdriver and waited in her living room. Hoyt, eighteen, into whose bedroom he had peeked a few days earlier, came home about eleven. He seized her in a chokehold, taped her, raped her, and stabbed her through the back, rupturing her aorta. She was decapitated, and he posed her body as well. At about three in the morning on August 27 he pried the sliding door of an apartment shared by Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both twenty-three, stabbed Taboada in his bed and killed him after a long struggle, broke through the door of the room where Paules had fled, raped her and stabbed her three times in the back. He cleaned and posed her body before he left.
The day after the last killings, at one in the morning of August 28, a deputy saw two men go through a fence gate into a wooded tract owned by the university. One of them, Tony Danzy, turned back when officers called out; the other ran. A police dog led officers to a campsite where they found a raincoat and dye-stained money from a bank robbery the day before, and in the tent a tote bag holding a Taurus pistol, and later a screwdriver, duct tape and a dark ski mask. The man who had fled was Danny Harold Rolling, thirty-six, a drifter from Shreveport, Louisiana. On September 7 he was arrested in Ocala for an armed robbery, with no connection yet drawn to Gainesville.
The connection came through Shreveport. Detectives there were working the stabbing deaths of Tom Grissom, his daughter Julie and his eight-year-old grandson, Sean, in their home in November 1989, and Julie Grissom's body had been posed. Rolling, the son of a Shreveport police officer who had abused the household for years, had shot at his father in May 1990 and left town; the father survived. Semen recovered from the Gainesville scenes was matched to Rolling. On November 15, 1991, an Alachua County grand jury indicted him on five counts of first-degree murder, three of sexual battery and three of armed burglary with a battery, and on June 9, 1992, he pleaded not guilty.
In Florida State Prison he befriended another inmate, Bobby Lewis, who hoped to sell what Rolling told him to Rolling's fiancée and biographer, Sondra London, or to trade it for his freedom. Prosecutors refused any deal, but Rolling made Lewis his confessor anyway, having him copy out Rolling's written accounts of the killings, and on January 31 and February 4, 1993, having waived his right to counsel, Rolling sat with Gainesville task force investigators while Lewis told the story and Rolling confirmed each statement. On February 15, 1994, the day set for trial, he changed his plea to guilty on every count, telling the court there were some things a man could not run from.
The jury chosen to decide the sentence took three weeks to seat, from 1,233 summonses, and on the sixth day of selection his lawyers asked for the first time to move the case out of Gainesville. The court refused. The jury recommended death on each murder by a vote of twelve to none, and the judge imposed five death sentences, with further terms on the other counts, finding four aggravating circumstances for every killing. He also found mitigation: an emotional age of fifteen, extreme mental or emotional disturbance, a childhood of physical and mental abuse, a family history of mental illness, and remorse. The clinical psychologist Harry Krop, who examined him in January 1991, found no evidence of the multiple personalities Rolling claimed. Rolling said he had meant to outdo Ted Bundy, executed in Florida nineteen months before the killings.
On March 20, 1997, the Florida Supreme Court affirmed the death sentences. Justice Harry Lee Anstead dissented on the venue question, writing that a community so deeply scarred by the crimes should not have been asked to decide the fate of the man responsible for them. The United States Supreme Court declined to hear the case that November. Rolling was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 25, 2006, aged fifty-two. Days earlier he had written a confession to the Shreveport killings: he alone was guilty, and it was his hand that took those lives. He was never tried for them.
Florida's universities rebuilt their approach to student safety after the killings, and the screenwriter Kevin Williamson has said a television program about the Gainesville case in 1994 gave him the idea for the film Scream.