In the last week of August 1990 the University of Florida had no suspect, no explanation and, by the Tuesday of its first full week of fear, an emergency telephone bank. An alumni group and a Gainesville radio station had set it up so that students, many of whom owned no phone, could tell their parents they were alive. By then four of the five people who would die in Gainesville that week were already dead, and the police chief, Wayland Clifton Jr., was standing in front of a crowd of students who shouted at him, asking whether they could feel safe and whether they should go home.
Universities invite strangers in. They keep long hours, house thousands of young adults in rented rooms within a short walk of one another, and rely on the belief that a town of students is, on the whole, a safe place. The cases here do not share a method or a decade. Some of the men involved were drifters, some were graduates, one had been a professor. What links them is the point at which the campus, its newspaper, its police department or its dean had to answer for what had happened to students, staff or neighbors, and what each institution changed afterward. In two of the cases the system had first put the wrong man in prison.
Between August 24 and 27, 1990, five young people who studied at the University of Florida or at Santa Fe Community College were killed in Gainesville. Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, were freshmen at the university. Christa Hoyt, 18, was a Santa Fe student who worked as a records clerk for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office. Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada were both 23 and had been friends since high school in Miami; she was a pre-law student who had just been elected president of the pre-law fraternity Phi Alpha Delta, and he had just graduated from Santa Fe and was about to enter the university’s architecture program. The Florida Supreme Court later set the killings on August 24, 25 and 27.
The news arrived piece by piece. UPI reported on August 28 that university administrators had weighed suspending classes or closing the campus and decided against it, because none of the killings had taken place on university property. The president, John Lombardi, said women who felt unsafe off campus would be given space in university buildings, and he spoke of a "maniac on the loose." Churches offered beds. The university’s escort service stepped up its patrols to walk students back from night classes, and Guardian Angels came from Tampa, West Palm Beach and New York. Police and sheriff’s departments formed a 60-member task force on the Monday; on the Tuesday, 46 more officers arrived from the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the state patrol, with two FBI teams that specialized in serial murder and laboratory experts who had worked on the Ted Bundy case. Several students left their apartment complexes that Tuesday carrying pillows and suitcases.
Residents bought deadbolts and weapons. John Redmond, then an Alachua County sheriff’s deputy, recalled in 2014 that people who answered their doors often had a shotgun in their hands. Sadie Darnell, the Gainesville police spokeswoman, said in 2025 that the department "had to deal with it without any preparation."
Police arrested an 18-year-old University of Florida student, E.H., on an unrelated charge in the days that followed. He was questioned and searched as a suspect, and the arrest drew national coverage, ABC News reported. He was never charged with any of the Gainesville killings, and Danny Rolling later said he had nothing to do with them.
The man responsible had already left the Gainesville area. Danny Harold Rolling, a 36-year-old drifter from Shreveport, Louisiana, was arrested in Ocala in September 1990 on a robbery charge, before anyone linked him to the student killings; he was identified as the Gainesville suspect while in the Marion County jail. A federal jury in March 1992 convicted him of a bank robbery in Gainesville on August 27, 1990, at a trial moved from the city because of publicity and from which the killings were kept out. On November 15, 1991, an Alachua County grand jury indicted him on five counts of first-degree murder and other counts. On February 15, 1994 he pleaded guilty to all of them. A penalty-phase jury recommended death on each murder count by a vote of 12 to 0 on March 24, and Circuit Judge Stan R. Morris imposed five death sentences on April 20, 1994.
Florida executed Rolling at Florida State Prison near Starke on October 25, 2006; he was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. In a written note given to his former pastor shortly before, he confessed to the November 4, 1989 killings of Tom Grissom, 55, his daughter Julie, 24, and his grandson Sean, 8, in Shreveport. He was never tried for them.
The fear outlasted the arrest. The Independent Florida Alligator reported in 2025 that the effects of the 1990 killings were still strong in Gainesville, especially for college-aged women.
Gainesville’s police and its university remembered Tallahassee. In the early hours of January 15, 1978, two members of the Chi Omega sorority at Florida State University, Margaret Bowman, 21, and Lisa Levy, 20, were killed. Two other members of the sorority were badly hurt but survived, and about an hour later a dance student a short distance away was also badly injured. A member of the sorority who had come in at about three in the morning described to police a young white man with a protruding nose, in a dark cap and jacket.
Theodore Robert Bundy had been in Tallahassee for little more than a week. He had escaped from custody in Colorado on December 30, 1977, and by January 7 had rented a room near the university. He was arrested in Pensacola on February 15, 1978, and for almost two days gave a false name. The trial was moved to Miami because an impartial jury could not be seated in Leon County; it opened on June 25, 1979, with television cameras in the courtroom, among the first trials in the country to be televised nationally. Bundy acted as one of his own lawyers. On July 24, 1979 a jury convicted him of two counts of first-degree murder, three counts of attempted murder and two counts of burglary, and Judge Edward Cowart sentenced him to death. A second jury in Orlando convicted him in February 1980 of the kidnapping and first-degree murder of a 12-year-old girl from Lake City, a case with no connection to a campus.
The Florida Supreme Court affirmed the university convictions on June 21, 1984. Bundy was executed on January 24, 1989, after confessing in his last days to about thirty killings in seven states. On the evening of January 23 he agreed with an FBI agent that thirty was "a fairly close figure."
His confessions reached back to the campuses of the Pacific Northwest. In the spring of 1974, within two months, the region lost three women with ties to three colleges: Donna Manson, 19, of Evergreen State College in Olympia; Susan Rancourt, 18, of Central Washington State College in Ellensburg; and Roberta Parks of Oregon State University in Corvallis. A fourth, Georgann Hawkins, 18, was a University of Washington student. Investigators attributed these cases to the same man, and Bundy admitted to eleven killings in Washington in January 1989, though he could name only eight of the victims. He was never tried for any of them in that state. The number of killings that belong to him has never been settled; investigators in Utah, Colorado and the Northwest were still matching cases to him decades after his death.
William Scott Smith, a Salem, Oregon, man, was in jail on a sentence for telephone harassment when investigators questioned him in April 1984 about the death of Katherine Redmond, 18, a Willamette University freshman and a member of the Alpha Chi Omega sorority, known to friends as Katie. She was killed in April 1984, and the district attorney, Michael Brown, announced on April 11 that investigators were virtually certain the death was hers, and he treated it as a killing. He would not link it to the death of a Salem convenience store clerk, Rebecca Ann Darling, 21, or to the Green River investigations.
The university moved quickly to manage what students knew. Its vice presidents met with staff to handle information and rumor; the counseling office held a discussion for students; the Alpha Chi Omega house closed its doors to press and public; and members told the student newspaper, The Collegian, that they felt numb and empty. A vice president, Sam Hall, said there was no suggestion that anything had happened on campus. About 100 students had joined search parties that weekend. A memorial service was held in the university center on Saturday, April 14.
A Marion County grand jury indicted Smith for the aggravated murder of Redmond in late April, and he was also charged in Darling’s death. The Collegian reported on April 27 that each charge carried life imprisonment without parole for 20 years, and that members of her sorority sat in the courtroom as he was handed the indictments. Her sisters began circulating petitions to put the death penalty on the November ballot, working with a citizens' group that still needed 30,000 signatures by June 1, and her friends set up a memorial scholarship fund in her name.
Smith was convicted of both murders in July 1984 and given two life sentences. Years later the Marion County Sheriff’s Office cold case squad reopened the 1982 case of Sherry Eyerly, 18, a pizza delivery driver who had vanished on July 4 of that year. Smith had been looked at early and set aside because of an alibi. Investigators who went back to him in prison uncovered information that undermined it, and on December 18, 2007 he pleaded guilty to her murder and received a third, concurrent life sentence from Presiding Judge Paul Lipscomb. He was serving his sentences as of that date.
Daniel Lee Corwin had been a student at Texas A&M University. Police said in 1988 that he had not attended since withdrawing with failing grades in May 1987, and The Battalion, the university’s newspaper, reported after his execution that he had later posed as a student, riding with students between Huntsville and College Station. He was on parole, after about nine years of a 40-year sentence imposed in Bell County for a 1975 assault on a woman who survived, committed while he was still a juvenile.
On October 20, 1988 an A&M student survived an assault on the College Station campus. The Battalion reported on October 24 that University Police and the College Station department were working the case together; the director of the University Police Department, Bob Wiatt, said officers were "actively following leads." Investigators learned that the man they wanted was not a student. Wiatt obtained his fingerprints from authorities in Huntsville, they matched prints from the student’s vehicle, and a witness picked him out of a photograph lineup. Officers from the University Police, the College Station and Huntsville police departments and the Walker County Sheriff’s Office arrested him in Huntsville late in October 1988, when he was 30. He was booked in Brazos County on attempted capital murder and other charges, and the lineup was delayed until the survivor was well enough to attend.
He pleaded guilty to attempted capital murder in early 1989 and received 99 years. While serving that sentence he confessed to three killings in 1987 in Central Texas: Alice Martin, 72, Debra Ewing, 26 or 27, and Mary Risinger, 36. In March 1990 a Montgomery County jury sitting in Conroe convicted him of capital murder and sentenced him to death. The Associated Press called it one of the first tests of a recently added provision of the Texas capital murder law that covers the murder of more than one person in separate criminal transactions under the same scheme or course of conduct. The Texas Court of Criminal Appeals affirmed in 1993, and Texas executed him at Huntsville on December 7, 1998, at the age of 40.
After the execution Wiatt told The Battalion that the campus case was what had identified Corwin, and that the work of the university and city officers had contributed to the sentence he later received for the three Central Texas killings.
Linda Yalem, 22, was a sophomore at the University at Buffalo and a runner training for the New York City Marathon. Three weeks before her death she had joined the student newspaper, The Spectrum, planning to write profiles of marathon and cross-country runners. Her only published story, about cross-country running, appeared on October 3, 1990, after she died. Her death came to light in Amherst on the morning of September 30. The Spectrum’s editorial board called it a painful wake-up call about how near sexual violence stood to the campus. The killing was long described as an on-campus murder, though it did not take place on university grounds.
For 16 years nobody was charged. A man who would later be convicted was interviewed in November 1990, after a co-worker reported having seen him, The Spectrum reported in 2020. He was fingerprinted but not asked for a DNA sample, and he was not pursued. The University at Buffalo meanwhile began an annual 5K race in her memory, the Linda Yalem Safety Run, whose entry fees paid for personal safety and rape prevention programs on campus, and planted a grove of trees in her name.
The man was Altemio Sanchez, a Cheektowaga factory worker, married for 26 years and the father of two. A joint task force arrested him on January 15, 2007, after a woman’s death in 2006 prompted investigators to compare its DNA with the profile left by a long unsolved series of sexual assaults on women in and around Buffalo. The woman was Joan Diver, 45, a nurse and mother of four from Clarence, whose husband was on the chemistry faculty at the university; her death came to light in Newstead on October 1, 2006. Investigators recovered DNA from her vehicle that matched the series. A third killing, that of Majane Mazur, 32, of Buffalo, in 1992, was also tied to him. The university’s vice president for student affairs, Dennis Black, said after the arrest that a records check showed Sanchez had run in the 1996 safety race.
On May 16, 2007 Sanchez pleaded guilty to three counts of second-degree murder, for Yalem, Mazur and Diver. On August 14, 2007, Justice Christopher Burns sentenced him to 75 years to life. The sexual assaults linked to him could not be prosecuted because New York’s five-year limitation period had long run. His lawyer told the press that August that he admitted between 12 and 15 such assaults since 1979, a figure reported on August 10; another report on August 14 gave 13 to 20 since the early 1980s.
Sanchez’s arrest also ended a wrongful conviction. Anthony Capozzi, a Buffalo man with schizophrenia, had been convicted of two sexual assaults in Delaware Park in 1984 and spent about 22 years in custody. He had been identified after a city official in the park took down a plate number in 1983. DNA testing matched those assaults to Sanchez. Capozzi’s convictions were vacated on April 2, 2007, and he was released. His mother, Mary, who had fought for him, died in October 2009, and in June 2010 New York paid him $4.25 million to settle his claim. Biological evidence from his case, long believed lost, had sat for decades in a drawer at the county medical center. Sanchez died in state custody on September 22, 2023; the State Commission of Correction ruled the manner of death a suicide.
Donald Gene Miller grew up in East Lansing, was a youth minister at his church, studied at Michigan State University and played trombone in its marching band. CBS Detroit said in 2016 that he held a degree in criminal justice, and that nothing about him drew attention until 1978. A psychiatrist who later campaigned to keep him in prison, Frank Ochberg, called him "a very harmless-looking guy."
Martha Sue Young, 19, was a French student at Michigan State and a member of Miller’s church; they had been engaged and she ended it a few days before New Year’s Eve 1976. Police suspected Miller from the start, according to CBS, but had no evidence to hold him. Marita Choquette, 27, an editorial assistant at WKAR-TV, the public station based at Michigan State, died in June 1978, and the station’s manager, Bob Page, recalled in 2021 that everyone at WKAR was shocked. Wendy Bush, 21, was a Michigan State junior.
Miller was arrested in August 1978 on the day two children, a girl of 14 and her brother of 13, survived an assault in Delta Township. In May 1979 he was convicted in Eaton County of attempted murder and other charges in that case and sentenced to 30 to 50 years. An Ingham County grand jury indicted him in February 1979 on second-degree murder in the deaths of Young and Kristine Stuart, 30, a schoolteacher from Port Huron living in the Lansing area. On July 13, 1979 he pleaded guilty to two counts of manslaughter instead, and was sentenced by Judge Robert Holmes Bell to 10 to 15 years, concurrent. Under the agreement he admitted causing the deaths of all four women, and was never charged in those of Choquette and Bush. In 1998 he was convicted of possessing a weapon in prison and received 20 to 40 more years. Parole was denied in 2016, in June 2021 and in May 2022; as of May 2022, his next eligibility date was August 29, 2027.
The other Lansing college case began on a Sunday in January 2005, with a death and a wrongful conviction and ended, three years later, with another man’s life sentence.
Carolyn Kronenberg had taught study skills at Lansing Community College for 25 years. She was a mother of two sons and a grandmother of two, and had won a faculty award in 1999. The college’s student newspaper, The Lookout, recalled that students and colleagues thought of her as kind and supportive. She was killed in Lansing on January 23, 2005. After her death the college added 80 security cameras, increased police patrols on weekends and grouped classes closer together. In 2006 the library dedicated a collection of books in her name, each with a tribute plate inside.
Two days later police arrested Claude McCollum, a 26-year-old student who was without housing and often slept on campus. Records from his student identification card placed him in a nearby campus building that morning. According to the National Registry of Exonerations he had significant learning disabilities. He was arraigned on January 26, 2005. He agreed to talk to police after being told he might help them, and detectives asked how he might, hypothetically, have done it; he spoke of the possibility that he had done something while sleepwalking. Prosecutors presented those answers to the jury as a confession. At his trial, which began on January 27, 2006 before Ingham County Circuit Judge James Giddings, he took the stand against his lawyer’s advice and said police had described the crime to him in earlier unrecorded interviews. "They did trick me," he said. A forensic scientist testified that DNA in the case did not match him and came from an unidentified man. He was convicted and sentenced to life.
A damaged campus surveillance tape put him in a different building at the time. A state police detective had analyzed the tape before the 2006 trial and written a report concluding that McCollum could not have done it. Prosecutors said they had given it to the defense; his trial lawyer said he never saw it. In September 2007 the prosecutor joined McCollum’s lawyer in asking the Michigan Court of Appeals to vacate the conviction, and the court ordered a new trial. McCollum was released on a $100,000 personal recognizance bond on October 16, 2007, and about 20 relatives welcomed him. His lawyer, Hugh Clarke Jr., said the videotapes proved McCollum had not been at the building where the professor died. The charges were dismissed later that month.
The man the police then pursued was Matthew Macon, 27, a parolee and registered sex offender released from prison at the end of June 2007. Police linked him to five killings of Lansing women from late July onward, and arrested him in Lansing Township in late August 2007 on a parole warrant, days after a woman he assaulted on August 28 survived. A jury convicted him in May 2008 of two counts of first-degree murder, for Sandra Eichorn, 64, and Karen Delgado-Yates, 41, with torture and assault with intent to murder in the case of a third woman, who survived, and related counts. On June 18, 2008 Chief Judge William Collette sentenced him to life without parole. In interviews after his arrest he told detectives about further deaths, including Kronenberg’s. In March 2010 the Ingham County prosecutor announced that he believed Macon was responsible for five unsolved killings, among them the professor’s, and would not charge him with any, because no additional sentence was possible.
The professor’s death changed Lansing Community College. Students criticized the college and its police in 2007 for their handling of the case. Ten years on, Ray Hall, who had led the Lansing police and later led the University of Michigan-Flint’s police department, said the Lansing experience shaped his view of public cameras; Lansing’s later chief, Michael Yankowski, also praised them.
Theodore John Kaczynski knew campuses from the inside. He entered Harvard at 16, earned a Ph.D. in mathematics at the University of Michigan in 1967 with a dissertation that won the year’s Sumner Myers prize, and was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, as an acting assistant professor from July 1, 1967. The department chairman, John Addison, later described him as "almost pathologically shy." He resigned in 1969, "quite out of the blue," Addison wrote, and in 1971 settled in a cabin near Lincoln, Montana. Berkeley’s own newspaper noted in 1996 a coincidence: Hugh Scrutton, who would later be killed by one of his bombs in Sacramento, had been a visiting mathematics student at Berkeley in the summer of 1967.
The FBI named the case UNABOM, for the university and airline targets of the first bombings. A package left at a campus in Chicago in May 1978 and returned to an engineering professor at Northwestern University injured a campus security officer when it was opened, the FBI says. In May 1979 a Northwestern graduate student, picking up an object he meant to use for pens, saw a bright flash and was treated for superficial burns. A device was safely detonated at the University of Utah in October 1981. In May 1982 a secretary at Vanderbilt University was injured by a package addressed to the head of its computer science department, and in July 1982 a Berkeley engineering professor was injured. In May 1985 a Berkeley graduate student, an Air Force officer, was injured in a second Berkeley bombing, and the Associated Press reported that it ended his career as a fighter pilot. In November 1985 a research assistant to a psychology professor at the University of Michigan was injured. In June 1993 a geneticist at the University of California, San Francisco, and, two days later, a computer scientist at Yale University were both seriously hurt. The Yale Daily News recorded how the Yale scientist went for help on his own. The geneticist taught at UCSF for more than 40 years and died in 2011; his son said in 2023 that he wanted to be remembered for his science.
Of the 16 bombings the case covered, three killed men who had nothing to do with a university: Scrutton in Sacramento in 1985, an advertising executive, Thomas Mosser, in North Caldwell, New Jersey, in 1994, and a timber industry lobbyist, Gilbert Murray, in Sacramento in 1995. The task force that the FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms and the Postal Inspection Service formed in 1979 grew to more than 150 investigators and analysts.
The break came from the man’s family. He had demanded that a major newspaper print his long essay against industrial society, and The Washington Post did so on September 19, 1995. His brother, David, and David’s wife read it, compared it with letters he had written, and went to the FBI through a lawyer. Agents arrested Kaczynski at his cabin on April 3, 1996. On January 22, 1998 he pleaded guilty in Sacramento to charges covering the three deaths and two of the injuries, and he admitted the rest. On May 4, 1998 he was sentenced to four consecutive life terms plus 30 years and ordered to pay $15,026,000 in restitution. He died in federal custody on June 10, 2023, at 81; the North Carolina medical examiner ruled the manner of death a suicide.
After the arrest, Addison and the department’s vice chairman, Calvin Moore, said that Kaczynski had never shown them any hostility to industrial society. The university had known him as a shy mathematician who left early.
The campus responses in these cases came in a few forms. A university can open space, as Florida did when a president offered rooms in university buildings to women who no longer felt safe, and churches offered beds. It can add machinery, as Lansing Community College did with 80 cameras and weekend patrols, or gather its students, as Willamette did with a counseling session and a memorial. It can keep a name alive and call it prevention, as Buffalo did with a race whose entry fees pay for personal safety programs. What none of them could do was say where the danger was: in most of these cases the link to the campus was the victims, not the man.
Two men paid for that gap who had killed no one. Claude McCollum lost nearly three years of his freedom to a conviction, and Anthony Capozzi lost about 22 years, in cases where the evidence that later cleared them, a surveillance tape in one and biological evidence kept in a drawer in the other, already existed. Both are exonerated. The men later shown to be responsible were a parolee in one case and a factory worker, married and the father of two, in the other.
• 1967: Kaczynski begins at the University of California, Berkeley; he resigns in 1969.
• 1977 to August 1978: Martha Sue Young, a Michigan State student, and three other Lansing-area women are killed.
• January 15, 1978: Two members of the Chi Omega sorority at Florida State University are killed in Tallahassee; Bundy is arrested in Pensacola on February 15.
• May 25, 1978: A bombing in the case later called UNABOM injures a security officer at Northwestern University.
• August 1978: Donald Miller is arrested in Michigan; he pleads guilty to two counts of manslaughter on July 13, 1979.
• July 24, 1979: Bundy is convicted in Miami of the Chi Omega murders.
• April 1984: Willamette University freshman Katherine Redmond is killed in Salem; William Scott Smith is indicted in April and convicted in July.
• October 20, 1988: A Texas A&M University student survives an assault; Daniel Lee Corwin is arrested in late October.
• January 24, 1989: Bundy is executed in Florida.
• March 1990: Corwin is sentenced to death in Conroe, Texas.
• August 24 to 27, 1990: Five students are killed in Gainesville, Florida.
• September 1990: Linda Yalem, a University at Buffalo student, dies; her death comes to light on September 30.
• February 15, 1994: Rolling pleads guilty in Gainesville; he is sentenced to death April 20, 1994.
• September 19, 1995: The Washington Post prints the bomber’s essay; Kaczynski is arrested April 3, 1996.
• December 7, 1998: Corwin is executed in Huntsville.
• January 23, 2005: Carolyn Kronenberg, a Lansing Community College professor, is killed; Claude McCollum is arrested two days later.
• October 25, 2006: Rolling is executed in Florida.
• January 15, 2007: Altemio Sanchez is arrested in Buffalo; Anthony Capozzi’s convictions are vacated April 2, 2007.
• October 16, 2007: Claude McCollum is released on bond; charges are dismissed later that month.
• December 18, 2007: Smith pleads guilty to a third murder, in Salem.
• May and June 2008: Macon is convicted; sentenced to life without parole on June 18, 2008.
• March 2010: The Ingham County prosecutor announces he believes Macon is responsible for five unsolved killings, and will not charge him.
• June 10, 2023: Kaczynski dies in federal custody; Sanchez dies in state custody September 22, 2023.