LITMIR.BIZ

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      But, incredible as it may seem, the bodies keep on showing up. As recently as 2006, the remains of a 17-year-old marine, James Cox, thought to have gone AWOL on 30 September 1974, were found buried by the side of the road and identified thanks to DNA testing. Authorities think that he could well be another Kraft victim.

      Meanwhile, Kraft, who shows not the slightest remorse for his crimes, fights against his sentence and for his life. According to his appeal, there were 20 serious errors in his trial and he maintains the search warrants obtained for a search of his car, office and home after he was pulled over for drink driving were illegal. He also contends that he should have been allowed a separate trial for each murder. But his call for a mistrial hinges mainly around the death list. He argues that the list ‘lacked value’ because any connection between the entries on the list and particular victims was ‘speculative’. Kraft also holds the view that any relevancy of the list is outweighed by its prejudicial impact and should have been omitted as inadmissible hearsay.

      His latest appeal was unanimously rejected by the Californian Supreme Court in 2000 on all counts. For most families wanting closure, it was good news, but it is unlikely that Kraft will go to the gas chamber any time soon. He has already been on Death Row for 19 years and is likely to remain there for a good while yet. Kraft plans to appeal yet again to the federal courts, a process that will in all likelihood tie up the process for years and years to come.

       CHAPTER FIVE

       DANNY ROLLING: THE GAINESVILLE RIPPER

      In his quest for fame at any price and possessed by an evil spirit he called Gemini, Danny Rolling slaughtered his way into infamy during a three-day murder binge on a university campus. Sixteen years later, he died singing at his own execution.

      At 6 p.m. on 25 October 2006, Danny Rolling became the 63rd prisoner to be executed in Florida since the state reintroduced the death penalty in 1979. Rolling had turned to God during his last years on Death Row, but there were no pleas for forgiveness from the relatives of his victims who had come to watch him die.

      During his final moments, Rolling, who’d once broken into song during his murder trial, stunned onlookers by crooning a hymn he’d composed himself. As the sodium penthonal, the first of the three fatal injections, began to take hold, he kept singing the line, ‘None greater than Thee, oh Lord.’ Thirteen minutes later, he was dead.

      Sadist, murderer, rapist and necrophiliac, Rolling will go down in history as one of America’s most savage and unrepentant killers of all time – which is exactly what he wanted. He had craved fame and wallowed in his celebrity status while awaiting execution on Death Row; indeed, by sentencing him to death the judicial system had played right into his hands.

      ‘It’s true that Rolling was guilty of terrible crimes,’ David Elliot, Communications Director for the National Coalition to Abolish the Death Penalty, told me. ‘It’s equally true that, as the years wore on after the killings, the memory of his victims faded in the public’s mind. So, when it came to the execution, Florida residents knew Rolling’s name, but not the names of his victims. That’s one thing wrong with the death penalty – the names of the victims are forgotten while the criminals become rock stars.’

      In the end, it was a quick and painless death for Rolling, who had eaten every crumb of his last meal: lobster tail and strawberry cheesecake. He would undoubtedly be happy to know a film is now being made about his life.

      Josh Townsend’s The Gainesville Ripper recounts three days when terror struck the town of Gainesville, Florida, and the 33-year-old director vividly recalls what it was like when Rolling embarked on his murder spree. ‘I have lived through it all,’ Townsend says. ‘I’m from Gainesville – it’s my hometown. I was born here. I was in tenth grade when he killed those five students, the weekend before school started. I remember it all like yesterday. There was a mass exodus of students and you weren’t even able to make a simple phone call because so many parents were desperately calling to check up on their kids.

      ‘While the killings were happening, local stores ran out of pepper spray and all the gun shops ran out. Everyone had a weapon of some sort. But the weirdest thing is that every rumour we heard – like the one about the murderer severing Christa Hoyt’s head and leaving it on a shelf – turned out to be true. It’s such a small college town that news travelled quickly.’

      On 24 August 1990, first-year students Sonya Larson (aged 18) and Christina Powell (aged 17) moved into their new apartment in the university town of Gainesville, Florida. Their apartment was on the second floor of a four-floor building in the Williamsburg Village, a cosy cul-de-sac with a view of the nearby woods. Larson was a science and pre-engineering major and Powell was studying architecture. They were just two of the thousands of students fast filling up the town.

      The two girls were unaware of the fact that, while they were busy shopping in Wal-Mart, they had caught the attention of deranged drifter Danny Rolling (then aged 36), who was shoplifting at the store. Rolling had arrived a few days before and had set up camp in the nearby woods. Six foot two and powerfully built with brown hair and hazel eyes, Rolling was already a hardened criminal who had spent much of the last ten years of his life in jail, with previous convictions in three separate states for armed robbery. Rolling had sworn to himself that he would kill eight people – later, he stated this was part of a pact he had made with Lucifer: eight souls for every year he’d done in prison. So far he had killed three.

      Rolling hadn’t been to college and had very little in common with all the students preparing for the upcoming semester. His father, a policeman, had beaten him literally before he could even walk and the constant physical abuse had continued all the way through Rolling’s teenage years. By the time he arrived in Gainesville, Rolling was an alcoholic with a long criminal record and a failed marriage behind him.

      He blamed his list of failures on what he claimed was his violent treatment as a child and his anger at this had spilled over into violence only a few weeks before, when Rolling had shot his father twice, nearly killing him. He was now on the run from his hometown Shreveport, Louisiana, and had finally ended up in Gainesville.

      Mental illness ran in his family and, by the time he arrived in Gainesville on a Greyhound bus, Rolling had become convinced that he was in the grip of demonic possession. On the way, he had robbed two supermarkets, burgled a handful of houses, stolen a car and raped a woman at knifepoint in her own home.

      Rolling followed Sonya and Christina as they left the shop to their home, returned to his tent in the woods and then waited until the sun dipped beyond the darkening trees. He killed time by playing his guitar and singing county and western songs. He also spoke to himself incessantly and recorded his obscure ramblings into a tape cassette recorder. During part of the tape, Rolling left a message for his brother, Kevin, about how it was important when bow hunting deer to ‘aim for the lungs straight through the rib cage’. He also left a message for his father: ‘Well, Dad, I hope you’re doing better. You know, it’s probable you don’t even wanna hear from me. Well, you know, Pop, I don’t think you was really concerned about the way I felt anyway. Nope, I really don’t. You never would take time to listen to me, never cared about what I thought or felt. I never had a daddy that I could go to and confide in with my problems. You just pushed me away at a young age, Pops. I guess you and I both missed out on a lot. I wanted to make you proud of me. I let you down. I’m sorry for that. Maybe, in the hereafter, perhaps you’ll understand this. I’m going to sign off now. There’s something I got to do.’

      Rolling stole a bike from outside a trailer park and headed back to the girls’ apartment. He then watched them from the edge of the woods until they went to bed at around midnight. At 3.30 a.m., he climbed the outside stairs.

      Rolling later wrote an account of that night in a book called The Making of a Serial Killer, which he co-authored with the help of true-crime writer Sondra London, whom he later proposed to in jail

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