Danny Rolling: Serial Killer Who FLIPPED and Inspired the Scream Series

Everyone who knew Danny Rolling unanimously agreed that he had a rough childhood and upbringing.

In December 1996, “Scream,” a brand-new kind of self-aware slasher, appeared on the scene and forever transformed how modern horror films were made. But did you know that a real-life serial killer served as the model for the classic horror film?

Danny Rolling was a real-life serial rapist and murderer who inspired “Scream” screenwriter Kevin Williamson to create his iconic Ghostface antagonist. The 2022 Tubi documentary “Lights, Camera, Murder: Scream” weaves Hollywood history with genuine crime intrigue.

Danny Rolling in a file photo

Daniel Harold Rolling, sometimes known as the Gainesville Ripper, lived from May 26, 1954, until October 25, 2006. In Gainesville, Florida, he killed five students over the course of four days in August 1990.

Later, Rolling admitted to raping a number of his victims, as well as to executing a triple homicide in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he lived, and to trying to kill his father in May 1990. Rolling admitted to killing eight individuals in total. He received a death sentence for the five killings that occurred in Gainesville in 1994.

In 2006, he was put to death via lethal injection.

Who Was Danny Rolling and Why Did he Become a Killer?

Danny Rolling was born in Louisiana’s Shreveport. Danny’s father, James Rolling, a Shreveport police officer, claimed that Danny was unwanted from the moment of his birth. James also verbally and physically mistreated Danny, his mother Claudia, and his brother Kevin for trivial reasons, such as breathing in a way that annoyed him.

In one instance, Danny’s mother said her husband attempted to make her cut herself with a razor blade and went to the hospital as a result. She repeatedly tried to leave her husband, but she always came back.

Newspaper reports on the string of mindless murders by Danny Rolling

One instance of the senior Rolling’s notion of discipline involved handcuffing and pinning Danny to the ground before having police remove his son because he felt humiliated by him. In another tale, Danny had a dog that James frequently thrashed until the dog died in Danny’s arms.

Rolling was detained multiple times in Georgia as a teenager and young adult for robberies, and he was also discovered watching a woman get dressed. He struggled as an adult to fit in with society and maintain stable employment. Rolling once served customers at Pancho’s restaurant in Shreveport.

What Did Danny Rolling Do?

During a burglary and robbery rampage in Gainesville, Florida, in August 1990, Rolling killed five students—one from Santa Fe College and four from the University of Florida. He severed one of his victims’ heads from its body.

Then he posed them, occasionally using a mirror.

Sonja Larson and Christina Powell, both 17-year-old college freshmen, shared an apartment when Rolling broke in early on Friday, August 24.

He briefly stood over Powell when he discovered her dozing off on the downstairs couch but chose not to wake her up in favor of investigating the upstairs bedroom, where Larson was also fast asleep. Rolling stabbed Larson to death with a Ka-Bar knife after first taping her lips shut to muffle her screams.

She lost her life trying to repel him.

Rolling returned downstairs after that, taped Powell’s lips shut, tied her wrists behind her back, and threatened to kill her while he cut her clothes off. After forcing her to lie face-down on the ground, he raped her before stabbing her five times in the back.

Rolling put the body in a sexually suggestive position. Before leaving the flat, he took a shower.

The following day, on Saturday, August 25, Rolling entered Christa Hoyt’s apartment by using a screwdriver to pry open a sliding glass door. When he discovered she wasn’t home, he waited in the living room for her to return.

When Hoyt arrived at the apartment at 11 a.m., Rolling ambushed her from behind and put her in a chokehold. He restrained her and then led her into the bedroom, where he raped her and cut the clothes off her body.

He bound her wrists behind her back and gagged her mouth with duct tape. He forced her to lie face-down on the bed, as in the Powell murder, and then stabbed her in the back, rupturing her aorta.

Afterward, he turned her over and cut her abdomen open from pubic bone to breastbone. Rolling returned to his campground but could not locate his wallet. He returned to the murder scene, where he decapitated Hoyt, set her body up in a sitting position at the foot of her bed, and set her head on a shelf so that it was facing the corpse.

Later, he said that his goal was to heighten the surprise of whoever found her.

Crime scene pictures. The girl was beheaded by Danny Rolling

The murders were now the subject of extensive media coverage. Numerous students have started to take further precautions, such as altering their daily schedules and sleeping in groups. Some students withdrew from the institution or transferred because the spree occurred so early in the fall semester.

Manny Taboada, who was also 23 years old, shared a residence with Tracy Paules. On Monday, August 27, Rolling used the tools he had previously used to pry open their sliding glass door and enter their flat. After a scuffle, Rolling killed Taboada after discovering him dozing off in one of the bedrooms.

When Paules entered Taboada’s bedroom after hearing the disturbance, he encountered Rolling. Although she tried to seal herself in her bedroom, Rolling managed to open it.

Before rolling her over and stabbing her three times in the back, Rolling taped her lips and wrists, took off her clothes, and sexually assaulted her. Taboada’s body was left in the same position as he was killed, whereas Paules’ body was posed by Rolling.

All the victims, except Taboada, were petite, white brunettes with brown eyes, just like Rolling’s mother. Despite having few leads at first, investigators could name two individuals.

University of Florida student Edward Lewis Humphrey, who had a history of mental illness and had several scars from a vehicle accident on his face, was one possibility. Humphrey was detained for five months following a physical dispute with his grandmother before a grand jury declined to indict him for the murder because of inadequate evidence.

Media sources constantly aired Humphrey’s picture. After Rolling’s arrest, the authorities publicly exonerated him of all accusations. Later, the other suspect was also cleared.

How was Danny Rolling Caught?

On November 4, 1989, Shreveport police reported an unsolved triple homicide to Florida authorities. Detectives discovered connections between the Gainesville murders and those of Tom Grissom, 55, Julie, 24, and Sean, 8, his daughter and son-in-law.

The family was preparing for dinner when they were ambushed in their house. Julie Grissom’s body had been dismembered, cleaned, and posed later.

Due to similarities between the killings that took place in Gainesville and Shreveport, Don Maines, an investigator on the case for the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, visited Shreveport in November 1990.

The bodies of the Grissom murder victims are removed

Soon after Maines visited Shreveport, Cindy Juracich, a resident of that city, called Crime Stoppers to report that Danny Rolling might have been involved in the killings in both places. Juracich had heard about a spate of murders three months earlier, in August 1990, while she was driving across the Florida Panhandle.

She considered Rolling, whom she had met at the church in her native Louisiana, and any connections he might have had to the other three Shreveport murders after reading the report. She and her ex-husband Steven Dobbin had heard profoundly terrible things from Rolling.

For a while, he would visit every night, then one night, Steven entered and said, “He’s got to go,” according to Juracich. She added that Dobbin had told her that Rolling had disclosed an issue to him. “What kind of problem?” I asked. “[And Steven added], ‘He likes to stab knives into people.’”

Juracich claimed that when she first learned about these remarks, she disregarded them because she didn’t want to accept that Rolling might be accountable for the deaths in Shreveport. “One day, I’m going to leave this town, and I’m going to go where the women are gorgeous, and I can just sit in the sun and watch beautiful women all day,” Rolling had promised her.

Juracich was troubled by the Gainesville murders, and in November, she eventually called the police because she suspected Rolling was somehow involved in both cities’ killings. She said, “It wouldn’t let me sleep. ‘I think there’s one guy y’all need to investigate — Danny Rolling,’ I told Crime Stoppers one day as I picked up the phone to speak with them.”

When authorities were alerted to the information, they swiftly located Rolling, who had been detained on September 7, 1990, for robbing a grocery in Ocala, Florida. Ten days had passed since the discovery of Paules and Taboada’s bodies before the robbery.

Danny Rolling in court

Forty miles south of Gainesville, at the Marion County Jail, was where Rolling was detained. Investigators discovered that Rolling shared blood type B with the perpetrator in the murders in Shreveport and Gainesville.

Investigators in Florida thought Rolling might be accountable for the bank robbery that occurred that day. Christa Hoyt’s body was discovered, and they learned that he had numerous convictions for armed robbery.

They retrieved the revolver, screwdriver, money bag, and cassette player from the evidence locker and listened to the tape there. Tools that matched the markings left at the Gainesville crime locations were also discovered.

Investigators found audio diaries he had produced there alluding to the crimes; they were made in a small camp he had been living in that was in a wooded area close to apartment buildings frequented by students.

Later, it came to light that on August 5, 1990, Rolling broke into Janet Frake’s Florida home in Sarasota. He sexually raped her while taping her up and binding and gagging her, but he did not murder her.

Danny Rolling is Convicted and Put to Death

Rolling was accused of five charges of murder in November 1991. He was put on trial a little more than four years after the killings. He claimed his goal was to achieve “superstardom” like Ted Bundy.

Danny Rolling was a troubled individual who had a tragic and unfortunate upbringing

Before his trial began in 1994, Rolling unanticipatedly entered a guilty plea to all charges. Rod Smith, the state’s attorney, then discussed the prosecution’s penalty phase. Rolling’s father was audibly shouting off-camera during an interview with his mother that Court TV filmed with her during his trial.

On April 20, 1994, Rolling received a death penalty verdict. Rolling was identified as having paraphilia, borderline personality disorder, and antisocial personality disorder.

Execution

Rolling confessed to the Shreveport killings and handed a handwritten confession and remorse to Florida authorities and his spiritual advisor Reverend Mike Hudspeth just before he was executed in Florida for the string of killings in Gainesville.

Rolling consumed a lobster tail for his final supper. Before being put to death in front of several of his victims’ families, he sang a gospel song but said nothing.

On October 25, 2006, Rolling was put to death by lethal injection at Florida State Prison after the U.S. Supreme Court dismissed a last-ditch appeal. At 6:13 p.m. EDT, he was declared dead.

How Did Danny Rolling Inspire Scream Series?

Williamson discovered Rolling’s horrifying tale through a documentary and believed it would make a great starting point for a slasher story. The opening prologue of the “Scream” series, in which Drew Barrymore’s Casey Becker speaks with Ghostface on the phone while he watches her from a distance, is possibly the most memorable scene in the entire series.

The character of Sidney Prescott (played by Neve Cambell), one of the strong “final girls” in the horror movie genre, was created by Williamson to reverse the script of the defenseless female victim.

A newspaper clipping from the time about the murders

Over the course of its 84-minute running length, “Lights, Camera, Murder: Scream” examines Rollings’ psychology and how writer William Williamson and director Wes Craven modified and adapted his story for “Scream.”

A tidbit contributing to the meta-aspect of “Scream” was the defense’s assertion during Rollings’ trial that the defendant couldn’t tell the difference between reality and movies and had been inspired to kill after seeing “The Exorcist III.”

RIP Victims.

Next, read about the Infamous Roswell Incident, and if you want something really disturbing, read the story of Ed Gein — The Man Who Inspired Leatherface!