The Serial Killer Files (31 page)

Hysteria gripped the community. Hundreds of students fled the state. Many who remained traveled in groups and avoided being alone.

Though twenty-three-year-old Tracey Paules shared in the general unease, she was not overly concerned. Her roommate, also twenty-three, was an old high school pal; Manuel Taboada, a strapping six-foot-three-inch senior who weighed over two hundred pounds. With Manny around, no harm would befall her, she believed.

She was wrong.

In the early-morning hours of August 27, the Ripper crept into their apartment while they slept. Manny awoke to find himself under attack by the knife-wielding maniac. Though the young man put up a ferocious struggle, he was no match for the Ripper’s blade. Hearing the commotion, Tracey hurried to Manny’s bedroom door, where she was set upon by the killer. He subdued her with duct tape, raped, then killed her.

With the city in a panic, police intensified their search for the sex-killer. Suspicion fell heavily on a local man named Edward Humphrey—a chronic troublemaker with a history of violently erratic behavior. But as the authorities focused their attentions on Humphrey, the real killer was miles away.

His name was Daniel Harold Rolling. Born in Shreveport, Louisiana, in 1954, he seems never to have had a chance at a normal life. His policeman father was a brutal martinet who terrorized the family, subjecting his children—and especially young Danny—to unrelenting physical and verbal abuse. By his early adolescence, the boy was heavily into alcohol and drugs and had made several failed suicide attempts. He had also become a Peeping Tom, a compulsion that would later evolve into housebreaking, rape, and, ultimately, sex-murder.

At seventeen, he joined the Air Force, but was discharged two years later after being caught with marijuana. By 1979, he had turned to armed robbery—an offense that earned him several stints in the penitentiary. Paroled in 1989, Rolling returned to Shreveport and tried living with his parents. This ill-advised move culminated in an explosion of gun violence between father and son. After putting two bullets into the old man, Danny fled to Kansas City, then made his way down to Florida. August 1990

found him in Gainesville, camping in the woods not far from the homes of the women who would become his first victims.

After the slaughter in Gainesville, Rolling headed for Ocala, where, on September 8, he was captured after robbing a supermarket at gunpoint. At first, the police didn’t realize that they had bagged the Ripper. Rolling seemed like nothing more than a petty thief, short on talent and luck. Further investigation into his background, however, uncovered some disturbing facts. Officials learned that Rolling was wanted in Shreveport for the attempted murder of his father. Moreover, there had been a horrific triple homicide in Shreveport during the time that Rolling resided there with his parents—a crime that bore marked similarities to the Gainesville horrors.

An examination of evidence gathered from the campsite where Rolling had stayed after arriving in Gainesville produced overwhelming physical evidence linking him to the murders, including a pubic hair that—thanks to DNA analysis—was matched with one of the victims. Before long, Rolling had confessed to the crimes, though he tried to pin the blame on an evil alter ego named “Gemini”—a ploy that fell apart when investigators discovered that he had gotten the idea from watching the movie Exorcist III.

At his 1994 trial, his lawyer tried to persuade the jury that Rolling deserved sympathy because of his brutalized upbringing. Whatever sympathy they might have felt for the mistreatment he had suffered as a child, however, failed to mitigate their outrage over the atrocities he had committed as an adult. For five counts of murder, Danny Rolling was sentenced to die in the electric chair.

Recommended Reading

Colin Wilson and Damon Wilson, The Killers Among Us, Book II (1995) Time-Life Books, Serial Killers (1992)

GALLERY OF EVIL: TEN AMERICAN MONSTERS

1825–1879

Every era is haunted by its own particular monsters—dark, unsettling figures who incarnate the dominant fears of the time. In the late 1800s, when American women first organized to demand social and political equality, triggering powerful anxieties in men, that figure was the female serial poisoner.

This nightmarish being became a stock feature of late-nineteenth-century popular culture, which spawned a whole genre of fictional crime stories about the unspeakable doings of assorted “domestic fiends”—homicidal maniacs in the guise of loving housewives, mothers, and caretakers. Far more unnerving, of course, were the real-life cases of women who gleefully wiped out large numbers of their nearest and dearest. Among the most infamous of these was the woman who has gone down in the annals of crime under the name of Lydia Sherman.

Her original name was Lydia Danbury. Born in New Brunswick, New Jersey, in 1825, she was just seventeen when she married her first husband, Edward Struck, a forty-year-old widower with six children. Within a year of their wedding, Lydia had given birth to a healthy girl. Six more babies followed in rapid succession.

Lydia Sherman encourages her elderly husband to drink a glass of doctored wine With a wife and thirteen children to support, Struck—by then living with his family in Manhattan—took a job as a police officer. In 1863, however, he was fired in disgrace after failing to respond quickly enough when a knife-wielding drunkard attacked a hotel bartender.

By then, Struck’s children from his first marriage had grown up and left home, and one of Lydia’s babies had died of an intestinal ailment. That left six children in the household. With not a penny coming in to feed them, Struck plunged into a state of extreme despondency. Eventually, he refused to leave his bed. Deciding that he had become more trouble than he was worth, Lydia killed him with arsenic-laced porridge. The attending physician diagnosed the cause of death as “consumption.”

Lydia was a forty-two-year-old widow with no income. Just a month after disposing of her husband, she began to feel disheartened by the difficulty of supporting six children on her own. In the first week of July, she poisoned the three youngest with arsenic.

Freed of these burdens, Lydia’s situation improved, particularly since her fourteen-year-old son George had gotten a job as a painter’s assistant. Unfortunately, George soon developed a condition known as

“painter’s colic” and was forced to quit work. His mother gave him a week to recuperate. When he showed no signs of improvement, she killed him with arsenic-spiked tea.

Only two of Lydia’s children still remained above ground: her eighteen-year-old daughter, also named Lydia, and little Ann Eliza, aged twelve. Ann Eliza was a frail child, frequently sick with fever and chills. Lydia began to feel oppressed by the burden of caring for her. In March 1864, she killed the little girl by mixing a few grains of arsenic into a spoonful of patent medicine. The cause of death was given as “typhoid fever.”

For the next six or seven weeks, the two Lydias—mother and daughter—lived together in a small apartment on upper Broadway. In early May, after paying an overnight visit to her half sister in lower Manhattan, young Lydia returned home with a fever and took to bed. Her mother did not feel like caring for her. On May 16, 1866, after dutifully taking the foul-tasting medicine her mother had fed her, the eighteen-year-old girl died in convulsive agony and was laid to rest beside the bodies of her father and five siblings.

Shortly afterward, Lydia moved to Stratford, Connecticut, where she met and married an old man named Dennis Hurlburt, a local farmer of considerable means. Slightly more than one year later, Hurlburt fell violently ill and died after eating a bowl of his wife’s special clam chowder. His death was attributed to

“cholera.”

The forty-six-year-old widow came into a considerable inheritance. If her motives had been entirely mercenary, she could then have tossed away her arsenic and never killed again. But—though Lydia was happy to profit from her crimes—money was not, in the end, what drove her. Like others of her breed, she was a confirmed predator, addicted to cruelty and death.

Within months of Hurlburt’s death, Lydia married Horatio N. Sherman, a hard-drinking widower with four children. In mid-November 1870—just two months after the wedding—Lydia murdered Sherman’s youngest child, a four-month-old baby named Frankie. The following month, she poisoned his fourteen-year-old daughter, Ada.

The sudden death of his two children devastated Sherman. He began to hit the bottle harder than ever.

After returning from one weeklong bender, he took to bed for several days before returning to work on Monday, May 8, 1871. When he came home from the factory that evening, Lydia was waiting with a nice cup of poisoned hot chocolate. Two days later, he was dead.

The sudden, shocking death of the seemingly healthy Sherman aroused the suspicions of his physician, Dr. Beardsley. Securing permission to conduct a postmortem, Beardsley removed the stomach and liver and shipped them to a toxicology professor at Yale for analysis. Three weeks later, he received the results. Sherman’s liver was saturated with arsenic. A warrant was promptly issued for the arrest of Lydia Sherman.

On June 7, 1871, she was picked up in New York City and transported back to New Haven, where she was charged with the murder of Horatio Sherman. Her trial was a nationwide sensation. In the end, Lydia was found guilty of second-degree murder and sentenced to life imprisonment in the state prison at Wethersfield, where she died of cancer in 1879.

1859–?

She was that rarest of all psychopaths: a woman who engaged in wholesale slaughter, partly out of greed but mostly for the sheer joy of it. Even more unusual was the extreme savagery of her crimes. There had been other female “murder fiends” in the late nineteenth century—Lydia Sherman, Sarah Jane Robinson, Jane Toppan. But they had all shared the traditional MO of female serial killers: poisoning their victims, then pretending that the deaths were due to natural causes.

Belle Gunness was frighteningly different. True, she was not averse to eliminating an expendable spouse or superfluous child with a dose of strychnine when it suited her purposes. But the corpses that were dug up on her Indiana “murder farm” hadn’t been poisoned. They had been butchered.

A forty-two-year-old Norwegian emigrant, Belle had purchased the farm in 1902 with the $8,500

insurance money she came into when her first husband, Mads Sorenson, died suddenly in convulsive agony. Her first two babies—also heavily insured—had perished the same way. Though the symptoms were characteristic of strychnine poisoning, the doctors who examined the corpses saw nothing suspicious.

Moving to the small town of La Porte, she set herself up on what she liked to call “the prettiest and happiest country home in northern Indiana.” Shortly thereafter, she married a young widower, Peter Gunness. Just nine months after the nuptials, he was killed when a cast-iron sausage grinder fell from the stove top and struck him directly between the eyes while he was reaching for a shoe. At least that was Belle’s explanation. So bizarre was this story that neighbors talked openly of murder. The insurance company, however, declared her husband’s death an accident, and Belle collected another hefty payment.

That was when her homicidal career began in earnest. Over the course of the next six years, a succession of men found their way to Belle Gunness’s happy country home. Some were hired hands brought in to help with the farm work. Others were well-to-do bachelors lured to the farm by the classified matrimonial ads that Belle regularly took out in Norwegian newspapers throughout the Midwest. All of them vanished without a trace.

Then, in the early-morning hours of April 27, 1908, the Gunness farmhouse burned to the ground. When the blaze was finally extinguished, firemen were aghast to discover the remains of four people—three children and an adult woman—stacked like cordwood in the cellar of the incinerated house. Though badly charred, the murdered children were recognizable as the youngest of Belle’s six offspring. The fourth corpse was assumed to be that of Belle herself. Positive identification was impossible, however.

The woman had been decapitated, and her head was nowhere to be found.

Belle Gunness

(Corbis)

Suspicion immediately fell on a disgruntled farmhand named Ray Lamphere, who was charged with murder. In the meantime, searchers sifted through the ashes in a search for the missing head. They never found it. What they did unearth sent shock waves throughout the nation—and earned Belle Gunness everlasting infamy as one of the most terrifying sociopaths in the annals of American crime.

A dozen butchered corpses lay buried around the property: in a rubbish pit, a privy vault, a chicken yard.

Each of the bodies had been carved up like a Thanksgiving turkey—head hacked off, arms removed from the shoulder sockets, legs sawed off at midthigh. The various pieces of each body—limbs, head, trunk—had been stuffed into separate grain sacks, sprinkled with lime, then buried.

The discovery of these atrocities turned the Gunness farmstead into an instant, macabre tourist attraction. On the following Sunday, ten thousand curiosity seekers descended on the property, some from as far away as Chicago. Whole families strolled about the place like vacationing sightseers, while hawkers did a booming business in hot dogs, lemonade, and souvenir postcards of the “murder farm.”

Inset was a photograph of Belle: “America’s Female Bluebeard,” as the newspapers quickly dubbed her.

Under arrest, Lamphere—who had served not only as Belle’s hired hand but her lover as well—told a gruesome tale. Each of the victims had been murdered for money. But greed wasn’t Belle’s only motive.

Judging from Lamphere’s testimony (and from the grisly evidence unearthed in the Gunness farmyard), it was clear that she was a sexual psychopath. Despite her 250-pound bulk and mannish features, she wielded a seductive charm. Her victims had been lured into a secret bedchamber, where they were chloroformed, then slaughtered with an ax by the monstrous Belle.