Serial Killer Investigations (40 page)

Two days later, Rollings broke into an apartment shared by two students, Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both 23. The latter was stabbed as he lay asleep. Tracy Paules heard sounds of struggle and came to see what was happening. Rolling chased her to her bedroom, tied her up and raped her, afterwards stabbing her to death as she lay face down.

The murders caused widespread panic; thousands of students left campus for Labor Day weekend; only 700 returned. By then Rolling had already moved south, living by burglary and armed robbery.

On 27 August 1990, a bare-chested, ski-masked bandit robbed the First Union Bank a half mile down the road from Christa Hoyt’s apartment. Two witnesses later recognised Rolling from the muscle-definition of his chest.

On 7 September driving a Ford Mustang taken after his last burglary, Rolling stopped in Ocala, Florida, and walked into the crowded Winn-Dixie supermarket at midday. He strolled up to the location manager, Randy Wilson, pointed a .38 at his head and demanded the money from the cash drawer. Then he called to the girls to empty their registers.

Rolling asked: ‘Where’s the safe?’ ‘In my office.’ ‘Let’s go.’ They went up two steps into the office.

Meanwhile, the store’s bookkeeper, who was returning from an errand, was notified at the entrance that the store was being robbed. She took the opportunity to run into the dry cleaner next door. ‘Can I use your phone? We’re being robbed.’

As Rolling left the store with a bag of money, the manager followed him, and watched him turn into the back lot behind the store. A crowd of shoppers pointed. ‘He went that way.’ By now a police car had arrived and Wilson directed them.

When Rolling reached his stolen car the police were right behind him. The high-speed chase that followed ended when Rolling wrecked the car. He fled into a nearby building, through to the back, and into the parking lot. The police were there waiting for him. He ignored their order to freeze, and ran on. Finally, he was brought down by a tackle. Moments later he was in a squad car. Behind, in his stolen car, was the $4,700 he had taken. Within an hour he was behind bars.

It was in Florida State Prison that he met an inmate named Bobbie Lewis, who had written a screenplay. When Danny asked him who was the Sondra London mentioned on the title page, Lewis explained that she was his editor. Danny, who felt that he too could become a writer, to while away the long years behind bars, asked for her address, and wrote to her.

In his hometown of Shreveport, authorities had noted the similarity between the murder of the Julie Grissom family and the Gainesville murders.

Now the FBI’s VICAP came into operation, detailing the similarities.

In January 1991, Rolling was asked for a blood sample. The result revealed that the Gainesville Ripper and the killer of the Grissom family were the same person.

Tried for the Gainesville murders in 1994, he was given five death sentences.

And why am I prepared to take seriously his claim of being ‘possessed’ by a demonic entity?

In
The Making of a Serial Killer,
Rolling tells how he tried to enter the apartment of Christina Powell and Sonja Larson and found the door locked. He claims that he then prayed to ‘Gemini’, his demon, and that when he tried the door again, it was unlocked. And in a letter to me he described how, in his cell, a kind of grey gargoyle had leapt onto his chest, held him down with its claws, and thrust its tongue down his throat. All this may, of course, be invention. Or it may be that Rolling really believes what he says. I am inclined to think that he does.

After 30 years studying the paranormal, I have slowly come to accept that ‘possession’ can actually occur, and that it is not a fantasy dreamed up by the feeble-minded and the sex-starved.

But whether Rolling was possessed by some unpleasant paranormal entity is perhaps beside the point. As in the case of Ted Bundy, Rolling’s life typifies the development of a sex killer: the childhood voyeurism culminating in his first rape (which was committed in a state of rage at the prospect of divorce), the murder of the Grissoms, again committed in a state of anger and defiance, then the orgy of rape and murder at Gainesville. It seems clear that, as in the case of Ted Bundy, rape and murder proved addictive. In a sense, Rolling
was
possessed—by his craving to violate and kill.

Chapter Fifteen

The Jack the Ripper murders, which took place in the East End of London in the autumn of 1888, are generally acknowledged to be the first sex murders in our modern sense of the term. But a century before that date, London was also the scene of the first crimes that we would regard as sexually abnormal—the series of knife attacks on women by a man who became known as the ‘London Monster’.

In the words of the chronicler J. W. von Archenholtz, he committed ‘nameless crimes, the possibility of whose existence no legislator has ever dreamt of’. These nameless crimes amounted to creeping up behind fashionably dressed women and slashing at their clothing with a sharp knife, which occasionally caused painful wounds; it was also alleged that he would hold out a nosegay to young ladies, and as they bent to sniff it, would jab them in the face with a ‘sharp pointed instrument’ hidden among the flowers. He was also known to jab bosoms.

During the months he was attacking women, the London Monster created a reign of terror: rewards were offered and walls covered in posters describing his activities.

It seems that he became obsessed with the pretty daughter of a tavern keeper, Anne Porter, and followed her in Saint James’s Park, making obscene suggestions. On the night of 18 January 1790, when she was returning from a ball with her two sisters, he came up behind her, and she felt a blow on her right buttock. Indoors, she discovered that she had a nine-inch-wide knife wound that was four inches deep in the centre. Six months later, out walking with a gentleman named Coleman, she recognised the Monster in the park. Coleman followed the man to a nearby house, accused him of being the attacker, and made a kind of ‘citizen’s arrest’. The man denied being the Monster, but Anne Porter fainted when she saw him.

He proved to be a slightly built man young man named Renwick Williams, 23, a maker of artificial flowers. It seemed that Williams was from Wales, had received some education, and come to London under the auspices of a gentleman who was a patron of the theatre. Williams was hoping to become an actor or dancer, but proved to lack the talent and application. Instead he dressed ‘above his station’ and tried to become a ladies’ man, drinking rather too much. So the picture we form of him is of an introspective ‘wannabe’, dreaming of fame, and sexually stimulated by fashionable young ladies, whose bare arms and half-covered bosoms must have struck a country-bred youth as wickedly exciting. Slashing these provocative garments—and penetrating the body underneath—probably induced a sexual climax.

At his trial, Williams insisted that it was a case of mistaken identity; and offered an alibi. The jury chose to disbelieve him, and he was sentenced to six years in prison for ‘damaging clothes’. The prosecuting counsel talked of ‘a scene that is so new in the annals of humanity, a scene so inexplicable, so unnatural, that one might have regarded it, out of respect for human nature, as impossible.’ All of which demonstrates that the eighteenth century was very far from any comprehension of sex crime.

That is understandable since, for all practical purposes, the nineteenth century saw the beginning of the ‘age of sex crime’. Before that, most crime was motivated by profit. But already, by 1790, Renwick Williams was becoming so excited by the provocatively clad ladies of London that he became the first ‘sadistic piqueur’.

In 1807 and 1808, a peasant named Andrew Bichel, of Regensdorf in Bavaria, murdered two young women, apparently for their clothes, then dismembered their bodies and buried them in his woodshed. He tried unsuccessfully to lure other women to his cottage. It is not clear whether, like the London Monster, he had a fetish for female dress, but when dogs sniffed out the women’s remains, Bichel was tried for murder and beheaded.

In 1867, as noted earlier, the clerk Frederick Baker, murdered eight-year-old Fanny Adams in Alton, Hampshire, and wrote in his diary: ‘Killed a young girl yesterday—it was fine and hot.’

In 1871, a French youth, Eusebius Pieydagnelle, begged the jury to sentence him to death for four murders of girls, and explained to them that he had become fascinated by the smell of blood from the butcher’s shop opposite his home in Vinuville, and persuaded his middle-class father to allow him to become an apprentice there. In the slaughterhouse, he drank blood and secretly wounded the animals. When his father removed him and apprenticed him to a lawyer, he went into deep depression, and began killing people, including a 15-year-old girl and his former employer.

In April 1880, 20-year-old Louis Menesclou admitted to murdering four-year-old Louise Dreux and sleeping with the body before he attempted to burn it; he was executed.

But it was the five Jack the Ripper murders, which happened between 31 August and 9 November 1888, that achieved worldwide notoriety, and made the police aware that they were confronted by a new kind of problem: a killer who struck at random.

The first victim, a prostitute named Mary Ann Nicholls, was found in the early hours of the morning with her throat cut; in the mortuary, it was discovered that she had also been disembowelled. The next victim, another prostitute, Annie Chapman, was found spread-eagled in the backyard of a slum dwelling, also disembowelled; the contents of her pockets had been laid around her in a curiously ritualistic manner—a characteristic that has been found to be typical of many serial killers. The two murders engendered nationwide shock and outrage—nothing of the sort had been known before—and this was increased when, on the morning of 30 September 1888, the killer murdered two pickups in one night. A letter signed ‘Jack the Ripper’, boasting of the ‘double event’, was sent to the Central News Agency within hours of the murders. When the biggest police operation in London’s history failed to catch the killer, there was unprecedented public hysteria. As if in response to the sensation he was causing, the Ripper’s next murder was the most gruesome so far. A 24-year-old prostitute named Mary Jeanette Kelly was killed and disembowelled in her room; the mutilations that followed must have taken several hours. Then the murders ceased—the most widely held theories being that the killer had committed suicide or was confined in a mental home.

From the point of view of the general public, the most alarming thing about the murders was that the killer seemed to be able to strike with impunity, and that the police seemed to be completely helpless.

Robert Ressler wrote in
I Have Lived in the Monster:
‘Sexual satisfaction for Jack the Ripper, and others of his ilk, derives from seeing the victim’s blood spilt’ and pointed out that cutting out uteruses and opening the vagina with his knife leaves no doubt that the crimes were sexual (by which, presumably, he means that they were accompanied by orgasm).

In 1988, a century after the Ripper murders, a television company in the US decided to do a two-hour live special on the case, and asked John Douglas and Roy Hazelwood to participate. Their provocative conclusions are described in
Dark Dreams
by Hazelwood and Michaud.

To begin with, Douglas and Hazelwood were interested to learn of the vast amount of evidence that would be available to them, from coroner’s reports, witnesses’ statements, and police files; there were even photographs. In addition, they were presented with a list of five favourite suspects, which included Queen Victoria’s physician Sir William Gull; the heir to the throne Prince Albert Victor; Roslyn Donston, a Satanist and occultist who lived in Whitechapel; Montague Druitt, a melancholic schoolmaster who drowned himself soon after the last murder; and a psychotic Polish immigrant named Aaron Kosminski. The latter two were listed as leading suspects in a private memorandum by Sir Melville Macnaghten, who had been assistant chief constable at Scotland Yard soon after the murders. Most of these suspects were dismissed on various grounds—for example, Sir William Gull had suffered a stroke that paralyzed his right side a year before the murders and would have been in no condition to prowl the streets, while Prince Albert Victor had solid alibis.

But the most interesting part of the program was the analysis presented by the profilers:

[John] explained that Jack was like a predatory animal who would be out nightly looking for weak and susceptible victims for his grotesque sexual fantasies. Douglas told the TV audience that with such a killer, you do not expect to see a definite time pattern because he kills as opportunity presents itself. He added that such killers return to the scenes of their successful crimes.

He surmised that Jack was a white male in his mid-to-late-twenties and of average intelligence. John and I agreed that Jack the Ripper wasn’t nearly as clever as he was lucky. I then said that we thought Jack was single, never married, and probably did not socialise with women at all. He would have had a great deal of difficulty interacting appropriately with anyone, but particularly women.

I said Jack lived very close to the crime scenes because we know that such offenders generally start killing within very close proximity to their homes. If Jack was employed, it would have been at menial work requiring little or no contact with others.

I went on to say that, as a child, Jack probably set fires and abused animals and that as an adult his erratic behaviour would have brought him to the attention of the police at some point.

John added that Jack seemed to have come from a broken home and was raised by a dominant female who physically abused him, possibly even sexually abused him. Jack would have internalised this abuse rather than act it out toward those closest to him.

John described Jack as socially withdrawn, a loner, having poor personal hygiene, and a dishevelled appearance. Such characteristics are hallmarks of this type of offender. He said that people who know this type of person often report he is nocturnal, preferring the hours of darkness to daytime. When he is out at night, he typically covers great distances on foot.