Between August 24 and 27, 1990, five students were killed in three apartments near the University of Florida in Gainesville. Sonja Larson, eighteen, and Christina Powell, seventeen, were found first. Christa Hoyt, also eighteen, was found the following morning in her duplex, decapitated. Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both twenty-three, were found the day after that in the apartment they shared. The bodies had been arranged, and the scenes had been arranged around them.
A task force of local, state and federal officers ran the investigation for months. They followed hundreds of leads and took blood samples from dozens of men. For most of that period the man responsible was in custody in the same state, held on an armed robbery at Ocala with no connection drawn to Gainesville at all.
What drew it was a telephone call from another jurisdiction. Detectives in Shreveport, Louisiana, were working an unsolved triple killing from November 1989: Tom Grissom, his daughter Julie and eight-year-old Sean Grissom, stabbed in their home. Julie Grissom's body had been posed. Shreveport suggested Gainesville look at a local drifter with a record, the son of a Shreveport police officer, who had left town after the killings. In May 1990, three months before Gainesville, he had shot at his own father, a serving Shreveport officer who had abused the household for years, and the father survived. That is how the two cases met, and it is the part of the record worth keeping: the connection was not made by forensic science or by the task force, but by one set of detectives noticing that a signature described in the newspapers matched their own file.
The physical case followed quickly. Rolling had camped in woods near the campus, and the site held a screwdriver of the type used to force the apartment doors, money from a bank robbery, a pistol, and a cassette recorder containing his own singing. Semen recovered from the scenes matched him.
He pleaded not guilty and used a fellow inmate to pass on an account of the killings. Then, in February 1994, with jury selection still under way, he changed the plea to guilty on all five counts of murder. He told the court there were some things a man could not run from. The plea removed the question of guilt from the jury entirely and sent the case straight to the penalty phase, which is not an unusual course when the evidence is overwhelming; whether it was strategy or his own decision the record does not settle. He was sentenced to death five times over, with ten life sentences and 185 further years on the other counts.
His stated motive was notoriety, and he named its model. Ted Bundy had been executed in Florida in January 1989, nineteen months before the Gainesville killings, and Rolling said he intended to surpass him. He also claimed multiple personalities; Harry Krop, the clinical psychologist who examined him in January 1991, found no evidence of any and recorded instead a pattern of anger, impulsiveness and narcissism. In custody he co-wrote and illustrated a book about his own crimes.
He was executed by lethal injection on October 25, 2006, aged fifty-two. Days earlier he had written a confession to the Shreveport killings and handed it over: he alone was guilty, and it was his hand that took those lives. He was never tried for them. That is the arithmetic this entry carries: five deaths covered by a conviction, three covered only by an admission made when there was nothing left to lose by making it.
The case had two afterlives that have nothing to do with either court. Florida universities rebuilt their approach to student safety around it. And in March 1994, a screenwriter named Kevin Williamson watched a news program about the Gainesville killings and wrote the script that became Scream, which is how most people now encounter the case without knowing that is what they are encountering.