"Terror in the Air": Gainesville in August 1990 (ABC News 20/20, Part 4)

Part 4 of ABC's 2021 20/20 episode on the Gainesville murders: a town in panic, students buying guns, national media, leaked crime-scene details, and the police focus on Ed Humphrey, who was later cleared. Rolling is not heard.

Subject

Danny Rolling

Recorded

about 2021

Runtime

6:52

Content warning: Concerns the murders of five college students. Contains a graphic description of the mutilation of a victim, as leaked to the press (05:33 to 05:44 of the video). Also shows a man who was later cleared being treated as the main suspect.

The Report

This is a 6-minute-52-second segment of "The Devil in Gainesville," a 2021 episode of ABC News's 20/20, posted by ABC News as Part 4 of the episode on April 13, 2021. It combines 20/20 narration with new interviews of former investigators, journalists and residents and with news footage from August 1990. Danny Rolling is not heard and is not named in this part. Most of the people interviewed are not named on the soundtrack.

Historical Context

In late August 1990, five students were murdered in Gainesville, Florida, over four days: Sonja Larson, Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, Tracy Paules and Manuel "Manny" Taboada. Danny Rolling was arrested on September 7, 1990, for an unrelated supermarket robbery in Ocala, was charged with the five murders in November 1991, pleaded guilty on February 15, 1994, and was sentenced to death. He was executed on October 25, 2006.

Circumstances

Before Rolling was identified, the investigation came under heavy pressure. The town filled with police reinforcements and national media, details of the crime scenes leaked to the press, and investigators focused on Edward Humphrey, a University of Florida student. Humphrey was held in custody for five months and was publicly cleared after Rolling's arrest.

What the Report Covers

Former residents and journalists describe "terror in the air," parents calling the TV station and students leaving town; a 1990 clip shows a student buying a .38 who, asked if he knows how to handle it, says, "No, but I'm going to find out." The narration explains that the killer was entering through rear sliding glass doors from the woods, and that locks sold out at hardware stores. The police force tripled, with state troopers, the National Guard and the FBI, and the media "stormed the town." A former investigator says reporters followed detectives to interviews; the former police chief describes a reporter offering him a credit card from a Cayman Islands bank in return for inside information. A 1990 report relays leaked details, and a woman from Christa Hoyt's family (her stepmother, according to the research for Part 2; not verified) describes the family learning from a newspaper what had been done to Christa. A 1990 police statement says media reports had "damaged our homicide investigation." The segment ends with a former investigator saying Ed Humphrey became "a person of interest," and a resident recalling that she or he believed at the time that police had "the right guy."

What Makes the Recording Significant

It documents the scale of the August 1990 panic in Gainesville and the pressure placed on the investigation by the press, including the effect of leaks on the victims' families, through archival footage and participants' later accounts.

Archival Importance

A segment from ABC News's own upload of the 2021 episode, built partly from 1990 news footage.

Important Caveats

Danny Rolling is not heard. **Edward Humphrey was innocent of the murders**: the segment ends while he is still presented as the police's main suspect; page copy must state that he was cleared. The interviewees are identified only by context (see the transcript); the former chief is identified in the research memo as Wayland Clifton by inference, and the 1990 police statement is attributed by ABC's description to chief investigator Spencer Mann; neither name is spoken. The bribe story is the former chief's account and is not otherwise verified. The leaked details read out at 05:08 and 05:33 are graphic and should not be repeated in page copy.

Archival Anchor: The killer or killers of five college students may still be in the Gainesville area tonight.

Interviewee: There wasn't fear in the air, there was terror in the air.

Archival Reporter: And remember, all five murder victims were found over just three horrific days.

Interviewee: It's almost like you had a wild animal, and you knew it was in your community, and it had struck at random places. We almost sensed the presence of evil.

Former Local Tv Journalist: Our switchboards were swamped with calls from parents and other family members. "I haven't heard from my daughter, I haven't heard from my son. I haven't heard from them, it's been two hours." Parents were calling the TV station saying, "Should we take our children out of school?"

Interviewee: You could drive down the street and see people loading their baggage into the trunks of their car. They were going home.

Parent: I'm going to take [unclear: "her" (captions) / "them" (Whisper)] back home because it's too much of a risk.

Student: A lot of people are leaving. Our whole dorm this weekend is going to be gone.

Archival Reporter: Many haven't left town, but an arrest soon would pacify this anxious, nervous community. Students are arming themselves with knives, rolling pins, stun guns, even shotguns.

Archival Reporter: What kind of gun are you buying?

Student: It's a .38 special.

Archival Reporter: You know how to handle it?

Student: No, but I'm going to find out.

Interviewee: Students that did stay here, they were staying six or eight people in an apartment.

Student: We're all buddying up and getting together so that we can, you know, like, safety in numbers, but it's really scary.

John Donvan: The students of the University of Florida wanted to know: what [unclear: "do" (Whisper) / "did" (captions)] the police know? What's going on? The problem was, the police didn't really know exactly what was going on.

Police Official: All I can say is that you need to protect yourself against any intruder, anyone that you don't know, in your apartments, in your complexes, and make sure your complexes are secure.

Police Official: We're trying to marshal all the resources we possibly can, number one, to prevent any further homicides, and secondly, to identify our suspect or suspects.

Archival Reporter: A lot of these students are very scared.

Police Official: Yes, and I cannot blame them. Obviously, you begin to wonder how secure you are in your own home.

20/20 Narrator: The investigators saw that whoever was doing this was coming in through the back door. What was beyond the back door in every case? The woods. And coming up out of the woods to these back doors, they saw he was going to sliding glass doors and using a screwdriver to pry them open.

Interviewee: It was almost like a hurricane was coming, when people run in and they buy out all the bread and milk. All the locks at all the hardware stores were sold out.

Archival Reporter: With reinforcements arriving daily here from throughout the state, Gainesville's police force has now tripled in size.

Former Investigator: The crimes themselves were happening in about a two-mile radius all along that corridor, and so we knew we had to put down a security blanket.

20/20 Narrator: The local law enforcement went on 12-hour shifts, no days off. So now we have state troopers, we have the National Guard called in, we have FBI here, and the news media then stormed the town.

Former Journalist: Huge. The story is huge. I've never seen so many satellite trucks in my life.

Interviewee: It felt like an invasion of media from out of town. I was at the airport, and literally saw reporters getting off the plane, running through the terminal.

20/20 Narrator: Reporters everywhere, press conferences.

Reporter: [unclear: "You have hot suspects?" (Whisper; not in captions)]

Police Official: No, we do not have a hot suspect.

Reporter: Do you have any suspects?

Former Investigator: This was a very competitive business. Some reporters would sit outside of the police station, and when we would go out and run these leads down, they would follow us. We would interview that witness, and the reporters were going in behind us and asking them, "What questions were they here asking you about?"

20/20 Narrator: And the chief told me the story of one reporter who basically tried to bribe him.

Former Gainesville Police Chief: There was a credit card on some kind of bank in the Cayman Islands, and it had my name on it, and he said, uh, "If you can provide me with some of the insights into this crime, then that, that's yours." Well, I said, "Take that credit card," and I kind of indicated where he could probably keep that for safekeeping.

Former Investigator: Of great concern to the investigation itself were the leaks that were getting out to the media, because there are certain elements about these cases that you have to keep close to the chest, in order to ascertain who may be a viable suspect and who may not.

Archival Reporter: A source within the investigation is telling us the type of weapon used is a sharp medical instrument. Body parts are missing [unclear: "at one of the scenes" (captions) / "in part of the scenes" (Whisper)].

Police Official: Here again, at this point, we're not prepared to talk about specific crime scene evidence.

Christa Hoyt'S Stepmother: We didn't know very much about the crime scene or what had happened to her, and a friend of mine called me up and said, "You don't want to read the newspaper." But there in the newspaper, it was told to us about what had happened to Christa: that she was beheaded, that she was gutted, that she was posed on the side of a bed. We had no clue. My God, this was our little girl. And that's all Gary could say, was, "This was my little girl. Look what happened to her."

20/20 Narrator: In fact, it was after that that the families went to the police department and said, "You guys, you've got to clean this up."

Police Spokesman: A lot of media reports that have been issued have damaged our homicide investigation. We've had to change our strategy from time to time based on information that has come out.

20/20 Narrator: The police were under enormous pressure to solve this problem by making an arrest.

Former Investigator: A person that became a person of interest to us was Ed Humphrey. We were getting a lot of tips focusing on him.

Archival Reporter: Police call Edward Humphrey the best suspect they have.

Interviewee: I remember when Ed Humphrey was arrested. When I saw him on the news footage, I remember thinking, "There's the son of a bitch, you know?" He's been in jail. The murders have stopped. So maybe they got the right guy. [06:47: speech ends; the segment runs to 06:52.] ---