MAYO: Panic of Danny Rolling murders fades as execution looms today

[Dr. Jack]

MAYO: Panic of Danny Rolling murders fades as execution looms today
Published October 25, 2006

GAINESVILLE -- Condemned killer Danny Rolling will soon be gone, his execution scheduled for 6 p.m. today. In the college community where he killed five students 16 years ago, he already is all but forgotten.

"I know what happened, but I couldn't even tell you his name," Karley Counts, 20, a University of Florida junior from Clearwater, said Tuesday afternoon outside the shuttered apartment complex where Rolling's last two victims were found. "It definitely feels safe around here now."

Counts, who lives in a gated apartment community, was 4 at the time of the killings.

The mood in Gainesville that summer was full-blown panic when victims -- most of them mutilated, several of them sexually assaulted -- were found at three off-campus apartments on three successive days in late August 1990. Some students armed themselves, many others fled the town.

Counts said she rides her bike every day past the closed Gatorwood Apartments, where Tracy Paules and Manny Taboada, both 23 and from Miami-Dade County, were killed. Local police and firefighters now use the complex for training.

Rolling's other victims: Sonja Larson, 18, of Deerfield Beach; Christina Powell, 17, of Jacksonville; and Christa Hoyt, 18, of Archer.

Rolling, 52, is scheduled to die by lethal injection at Florida State Prison near Starke, about 45 miles north of the UF campus. His appeals lawyer, Baya Harrison, described Rolling on Tuesday as "remarkably calm." Harrison said Rolling told him: "I don't want to die, but it looks like I'm going to die."

Rolling's lawyers filed papers with the U.S. Supreme Court seeking a stay of execution, and the Florida attorney general asked the court to reject Rolling's application. Harrison said he does not believe he will be able to halt the execution.

"I definitely want to see him executed," Counts said. "He did a lot of bad things to people who definitely didn't deserve it."

Rolling's victims are memorialized on a busy street that runs along the UF campus, their names permanently on a wall that bikers and joggers whisk past. Five palm trees line the median of 34th Street, a clean white ribbon and a plaque with each victim's name on each.

In an apartment parking lot across the street, medical student Esteban Gallego, 23, of Miami, looked toward the names on the wall.

"We know the story, but it's not something on our minds all the time," Gallego said Tuesday. "It's a different atmosphere now ... We sleep with our windows open at night."

This article was supplemented with information from The Associated Press.

[Keith]

personally, I hope the guy dies a slow agonizing death (a sentiment which I imagine is shared by the parents of those college-age kids that he killed).

[Dr. Jack]

Danny Rolling executed for murders of 5 college students

The Associated Press

October 25, 2006, 6:21 PM EDT

Danny Harold Rolling, the state's most notorious serial killer since Ted Bundy, was executed Wednesday by lethal injection for the grisly hunting-knife slayings of five college students in 1990 that threw the University of Florida into a panic.

Rolling, 52, was pronounced dead at 6:13 p.m. Wednesday in the execution chamber at Florida State Prison. Several victims' relatives witnessed the execution, and dozens of death penalty supporters, curious onlookers and journalists gathered on the barren cow pasture across from the prison.

The U.S. Supreme Court turned down his final appeal, a challenge to the constitutionality of the chemicals used in Florida's execution procedure that has failed before the court in other cases. Justices Stephen Breyer and John Paul Stevens voted to grant the stay of execution, the court said in a three-sentence order.

The horror of Rolling's killings unfolded when police officers found the bodies of the victims over a three-day period, one decapitated and posed, others mutilated and several sexually assaulted.

The spree touched off a massive manhunt, causing students to cower in fear and purchase weapons. Rolling was jailed for a supermarket robbery when investigators used DNA to link him to the killings months later.

Rolling pleaded guilty to the slayings in 1994, shocking the courtroom on the first day of his trial. ``There are some things you just can't run from, this being one of those,'' Rolling told Circuit Judge Stan R. Morris, who accepted the pleas, found him guilty and later sentenced him to death.

He later told The Associated Press: ``I do deserve to die, but do I want to die? No. I want to live. Life is difficult to give up.'' Outside the prison Wednesday, death penalty opponents stood in a circle singing ``Amazing Grace'' after Rolling was pronounced dead, but others were there in support of the execution.

``They're doing a good thing,'' said Randy Hicks, a 35-year-old Lake Butler truck driver and former prison guard who occasionally watched over Rolling. ``This guy deserves it. It's very overdue.''

Death penalty protesters, who were cordoned off in a separate area by police tape, said the execution only served to provide Rolling additional attention.

``The state of Florida is giving this psychopathic killer just what he wanted,'' said Mark Elliott of Clearwater, spokesman for Floridians for Alternatives to the Death Penalty.

The execution reopened old wounds for some of the victims' families, including Dianna Hoyt, the stepmother of victim Christa Hoyt, who attended Santa Fe Community College, near the university.

``It is very hard for us to see someone else die,'' she said. ``But, he deserves it.''

The victims' families ran an advertisement Thursday in The Gainesville Sun, thanking the community for its support: ``We hope you will remember August 1990 and the years that followed without any sense of community shame for what has happened here. You turned a blemish into a rose.''

Rolling was calm and cooperative ahead of the execution, Corrections Department spokesman Robby Cunningham said. He spent several hours with his brother Kevin, and his brother's pastor Jim Wallingworth, officials said.

His last meal was lobster tail, butterfly shrimp, baked potato, strawberry cheesecake and sweet tea shortly before noon. ``He enjoyed his last meal. He ate every bite,'' Cunningham said.

The gathering outside the prison was reminiscent of the crowds that gathered for Bundy's execution on Jan. 24, 1989 in the state's old electric chair. Bundy was suspected in the deaths and disappearances of 36 women across the country. That case was still fresh in the minds of many when Rolling's killings began the next year in roughly the same area as some of Bundy's.

The bodies of UF students Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, were found stabbed to death on a Sunday afternoon in 1990, in a town house just off the campus. Hoyt, 18, whose decapitated head was left on a bookshelf, was found the next morning in her isolated duplex; and Paules and Manny Taboada, both 23-year-old UF students, were discovered dead a day later at Gatorwood Apartments.

For months, a large task force of local, state and federal agents followed hundreds of leads and took blood samples from dozens of men. They did not know that Rolling was already behind bars in Marion County after robbing a grocery store.

Then authorities in Rolling's hometown of Shreveport, La., investigating a triple slaying that they believe he committed, suggested that police should check out the drifter and ex-con. The DNA left at the crime scenes in Gainesville matched genetic material police recovered from Rolling during some dental work.

Throughout the years, Rolling insisted he was not as atrocious as many thought.

In a letter to the AP in 2002, Rolling wrote, ``I assure you I am not a salivating ogre. Granted ... time's past; the dark era of long ago _ Dr. Jeckle & Mr. Hyde did strike up & down the corridors of insanety.''

Rolling, who often drew dark and sexual pictures, claimed he had good and bad multiple personalities. He blamed the murders on abuse he suffered as a child from his police officer father and his treatment in prison. He said he killed one person for every year he was behind bars. He served a total of eight years in Alabama, Georgia and Mississippi before the killings.

In his trips through north central Florida courts, Rolling twice sang gospel songs when he was sentenced. A tape of his own songs was found by investigators at a campsite in Gainesville where he stayed while committing the killings.

Rolling was the 63rd inmate to be put to death since Florida resumed executions in 1979 and the third this year. He was the 259th since 1924, when the state took over the duty from individual counties.

Copyright © 2006, South Florida Sun-Sentinel

[guzzi]

additional attention...i got ur additional attention right heer dumb ass...