Danny Rolling - The Making of a Serial Killer: The Real Story of the Gainesville Murders in the Killers Own Words. True Crime Series, Book 2

THE MAKING OF A SERIAL KILLER

THE REAL STORY OF THE GAINESVILLE STUDENT MURDERS IN THE KILLERS OWN WORDS

DANNY ROLLING & SONDRA LONDON

INTRODUCTION BY COLIN WILSON

Publication or duplication of the contents of this book in whole or in part is prohibited.

Portions of The Making of a Serial Killer were previously copyrighted in four volumes of The Rolling Papers, (c) 1992, 1993, 1994 by Sondra London

Excerpts have appeared in Knockin on Joe, Nemesis Books (London, England, 1993), The Globe, and The National Examiner.

This First Special Limited Edition of The Making of a Serial Killer is published by FERAL HOUSE BOOKS Spring 1996

1996 by Sondra London. All rights reserved.

CHAPTER 1
The Bloody Task of Murder

CHAPTER 2
Something Died

CHAPTER 3
Drugs, Sex & Close Encounters

CHAPTER 4
The Life of an Outlaw

CHAPTER 5
A Real Killer

CHAPTER 6
They Called Him Psycho

CHAPTER 7
Getting Babes

CHAPTER 8
Possessed by the Reaper

CHAPTER 9
No Place Left to Run

CHAPTER 10
The Last Dance

APPENDICES

BY COLIN WILSON

In late August 1990, both Time and Newsweek carried the story of the slaughter of four women and a man on the Gainesville campus, in Florida. In fact, it is infrequent for either magazine to carry stories about American murders in their European edition, and the fact that they did was a sign of how far the five murders had shocked America.

I had just finished writingin collaboration with Donald Seamana book called The Serial Killers , and the last major American case I had dealt with had been the murders of the serial killer Leonard Lake, in California, which had come to light after Lakes suicide in 1985. In fact, as far as I can remember, this was the last occasion when Time and Newsweek had given wide coverage to an American case. For this reason, I paid particular attention to the reports from Gainesvillea campus where I had once lectured. Then, as the weeks and moths went by with no further reports, I assumed that the killer had escaped. In fact, no one knew that he had been arrested ten days after the murders.

It was some time before I learned what had actually happened. This came about in 1993, through reading Sondra Londons book Knockin on Joe, a remarkable and intimate study of serial killers, including Carl Panzram, Gerard Schaefer and Ottis Toole (the partner-in-crime of Henry Lee Lucas). I had never heard of Danny Rolling, but from this I learned that at that time, he stood accused of the Gainesville murders.

It seemed that Danny Rolling had written to Sondra London from prison in June, 1992, addressing her as Madame Sondra, Media Queen. He was serving life for armed robbery, and had just been charged with the Gainesville murders. By Christmas of that year, Sondra London and Danny Rolling had decided they were in love. Finally she was allowed to visit him one time at Florida State Prison. The meeting apparently confirmed their feelings for one another.

There was an instant and powerful physical attraction. Soon after this, they announced that they were engaged.

This announcement, in February of 1993, was featured in newspapers next to a story claiming that Danny Rolling had confessed to the Gainesville murders to a fellow inmate, Robert Fieldmore Lewis. The local media assumedunderstandablythat Sondra was only pretending to be in love with Danny to get his story.

Sondras tide Media Queen had been acquired in 1989, when she launched a publishing company of that name, to bring out a private edition of a book called Killer Fiction by Gerard Schaefer, who was serving life for killing two teenage girls in Florida. (An augmented trade edition of Killer Fiction will be published in Fall, 1996, by Feral House.) Oddly enough, Schaefer had been Sondras first lover. They had met when Schaefer was 18 and Sondra a year younger. But Sondra was shaken by his admission of the sinister and violent impulses he experienced towards women, and walked out on him. In fact, Schaefers sexual fantasies were all concerned with humiliating women and with hanging them. Killer Fiction includes sketches of women in their underwear standing on gallows.

On July 22, 1972, about seven years after their breakup, Gerard Schaefer was arrested for abducting two teenage girls, tying them to trees, and terrorizing them. By some fluke, both escaped. Upon being arrested, Schaefer was fired from his job as a sheriffs deputy, and then, regrettably, bailed. Before he was incarcerated for six months in the following December, he had murdered at least two more teenage girls, Georgia Jessup and Susan Place. (In fact, it later became clear that he had used this brief freedom to murder at least five.) On September 27, 1972, Schaefer had turned up at Susans home, and later had taken the two girls off in his car, telling Susans mother they were going to the beach to play guitar. They never returned home.

But Susans mother had been suspicious of this smiling man who, at 26, was so much older than her teenage daughter, and noted down the number of the license plate on his car. She managed to get one of the digits wrong, and an innocent man was interviewed by the police. But driving through Martin County, Florida, she-noticed that all of the license plates there began with 42the local prefix she had recalled as being the first numbers on the license plate. The car proved to belong to Gerard Schaefer, who was in jail for abducting the two girls. A glance at his photograph told her that this was the man who had gone to the beach with her daughter. Some time after that, the dismembered remains of Susan Place and Georgia Jessup were found in nearby woods. A search of Schaefers room at his mothers house in Ft. Lauderdale revealed many items (including teeth) belonging to a number of girls who had vanished.

Schaefer received two life terms for these two murders, but police suspect that the true number of victims was around 34. (Schaefer himself later told Sondra London the number was upwards of 80.)

Though Sondra was shocked at the thought that she had lost her virginity to a serial killer, her curiosity led her to write to him in prison. He replied, and in 1990 she went to see him. He showed her the stories he was writingsadistic fantasies about raping and murdering womenand gave her permission to publish some of them. And so Killer Fiction appeared, in a desktop edition priced at $18.00. I bought my copy from a crime bookseller in New Jersey. It was only later, through Paul Woods, the British publisher of Knockin on Joe , that I made Sondras acquaintance.