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The World's Most Bizarre Murders. James Marrison
Читать онлайн.Название The World's Most Bizarre Murders
Год выпуска 0
isbn 9781843586982
Автор произведения James Marrison
Жанр Биографии и Мемуары
Издательство Ingram
‘The Grim Reaper,’ runs the text, ‘came calling on the little college town, not on the wings of some terrible strange bird but on the conventional wheels of man’s invention. The silver and black Greyhound swung into the station like a rolling coffin. A fugitive from justice stepped lightly off, carrying a navy-blue sports bag filled with tomorrow’s pain.’
Standing on the doorstep of the girls’ apartment, Rolling tried to prise the wooden door frame open with a screwdriver, but it wouldn’t budge. So he called upon Gemini for assistance. Gemini, according to Rolling’s account, promptly obliged. When he tried the door handle, he now found that the door was unlocked.
Wearing a black ski mask, black clothes and gloves, Rolling was equipped with an automatic pistol and a military-style K Bar knife. He saw Christina Powell who was sleeping on the downstairs sofa but he moved past her out of the living room and through the hall and up the stairs. There he pushed open the door leading to Sonya Larson’s room. She was asleep; her room was full of unpacked boxes.
In less than a minute, he had covered Sonya’s mouth with duct tape and stabbed her to death. As she died, Rolling promised her that he would come back for her later. These were in all likelihood the last words she ever heard. (The neighbours would later recall how they’d heard George Michael’s ‘Faith’ playing loudly at around that time, accompanied by bangs, and had assumed the girls were hanging pictures on the walls.)
Rolling then went downstairs where Powell was still fast asleep; he raped and killed her then returned upstairs to Larson. He tore off her clothes, spread her legs wide open on the bed and put her arms over her head. But she was ‘too bloody to rape’, in his words, so he went back downstairs and had sex with Powell’s corpse instead, chewing on her breasts like ‘a mad dog gnaws a bone’. That finished, he went and helped himself to some of the contents of the fridge.
Rolling claimed that the next thing he knew it was eleven o’clock the following morning and he was riding his bike. Suddenly, he felt the urge to check his bag. In it he found a clear plastic sandwich bag containing one of Christina Powell’s nipples. He couldn’t remember taking it and he threw it in the gutter.
In the next 48 hours, Rolling would kill three more people, all of them students. Their bodies would be found within hours of each other, creating utter panic in the small university town. Nine hours after police officers discovered the corpses of Powell and Larson, they were called to another apartment just nine miles away where they discovered the mutilated body of 19-year-old Christa Hoyt. This time, the attack was even more frenzied. In a rage, he cut off her head and placed it on the bookshelf at eye level in her bedroom. After slicing off her nipples, which he laid on the bed beside her, he carefully propped up her body on the bed and bent her over at the waist. He then ‘gutted’ her by cutting her open from her chest to her pubic bone. He later said that Hoyt reminded him of his estranged wife and mother to his child, Omatha Ann Halko.
The first victims had been found on Sunday. By Tuesday afternoon, police had discovered Christa’s body. Later that day police, also discovered two more bodies, those of roommates Tracey Paules and Manuel Taboada. Rolling had overpowered Manuel while he slept, then raped and murdered Tracey Paules before posing her nude body in a doorway.
Within 48 hours, Rolling had killed five students. There was panic in the small university town. Many students fled the campus for good and nobody in Gainesville slept alone. ‘I’m scared to death,’ one female student told a local news crew at the time. ‘I think someone’s going to jump through my window.’
After his Gainesville killing spree, Rolling fled to Tampa in a stolen car. Now in the grip of another demon – this time a freewheeling, gun-toting outlaw Rolling named Jesse Lang – he embarked on a series of robberies. However, he was soon arrested while trying to hold up a supermarket, less than two weeks after the first murder. To begin with, Rolling was just another bank robber awaiting trial, not a suspect in one of the widest murder hunts in US history. But police were already beginning to feel he might be tied to a triple murder committed ten months earlier in Shreveport, Louisiana, Rolling’s hometown.
On 4 November 1989, at around 6 p.m., someone had broken into the Grissom family home and stabbed Tom Grissom, his daughter Julie and her eight-year-old son Sean to death. The killer had used duct tape, which he later removed, and raped Julie before killing her. He’d then arranged her carefully on the bed with her legs parted in a sexually provocative manner, before fanning her hair lovingly on the pillow. Rolling had been seen by many witnesses in the town on the day of the murder, and the similarities between the manner in which Julie Grissom had been posed and the way the corpses had been arranged in the recent Gainesville slayings were too much to ignore.
When Rolling went to the prison dentist, investigators were able to get a sample of his DNA, which matched that in traces of semen found in three of the Gainesville slayings. But, despite the compelling evidence against him, Rolling initially denied all the charges – it turned out that, despite the frenzied nature of his attacks, he’d actually been fairly careful. He had removed all the pieces of duct tape from his victims, save one, and carefully scrubbed two of his Gainesville victims with detergent. However, in addition to the DNA evidence, police had found Rolling’s tent in the woods, and with it his homemade cassettes, the screwdriver he’d used to try to break into Larson and Powell’s apartment, and a pair of jeans stained with Manuel Taboada’s blood.
Despite his predicament, Rolling could not resist boasting of his exploits to his fellow prisoners. Apart from his desire to kill eight people to represent his time spent in jail, he also craved fame. He was, he told his cellmates, in reality a country and western singer but that career had failed so the only way he could think to achieve celebrity status was to rape and murder his way to notoriety. His stunned cellmates were quick to rat him out to authorities. One even appeared at his trial and testified against him. ‘He was trying to terrorise the city of Gainesville. He was trying to make himself infamous or famous. He wanted to be a superstar amongst criminals,’ fellow Death Row inmate Bobby Lewis testified during Rolling’s trial.
Exhibit 172 A in the evidence presented against Rolling was a poem that he had written, called ‘Gemini’:
The moan… the groan…
The silver moon shown…
The whisper… the cry…
Dead leaves fly…
Through the haze it sweeps your fears…
Then… it appears…
Your nightmare come to life…
A maniac… with a knife… The man… the groan…
The silver moon shown…
The whisper… the cry…
Dead leaves fly…
Tonight… in the arms of Gemini…
A captured butterfly will die…
Burned red with fever…
Then turned gold forever…
Forever my dear…
No more pain… no more fear…
Close your eyes my dear…
And sleep…
The moan… the groan…
The silver moon shown…
The whisper…
The whisper… the cry…
Into the night comes Gemini…
And tonight… You die…
The crime scenes were so shocking that many photos had to be censored at the trial in case they prejudiced the court. ‘I’ve got to get out of here,’ Rolling was heard to whisper at one point, but overall he