Further reading for Danny Rolling
The Gainesville Ripper by Mary Ryzuk
A Monster of All Time: The True Story of Danny Rolling, the Gainesville Ripper by JT Hunter
Hoo, boy! Danny Rolling. You wouldn’t know it by looking at him. Every photo of Rolling is a mugshot or a courtroom photo and in every one he’s making this sad pouty face. Like in the Last Podcast episode about him, you can just hear him tearfully expressing his sorrow and regret for having done what he did. But in spite of this sad sack look, Danny Rolling committed the sorts of murders that you find in horror movies that have a hard time landing an R rating in America.
Rolling’s childhood is fairly typical of a serial killer: head trauma and a violent, emotionally neglectful father who specialized in cruelty. Rolling’s emotional problems made it hard for him to integrate into whatever it is that we consider normal society and turned the same corner that much of these guys do. It began with spying on women through their windows. Eventually, Rolling took to spying on an entire family, just watching them, nothing prurient. He was obsessed with the Grissom family who unlike his family, loved one another and supported one another. So destroyed them: One child, one grandfather, one daughter, raped, murdered, displayed in a deliberately obscene way.
Following a fight with his father who lost an eye and an ear because of it, he fled to Gainesville, Florida, where the truly horrible shit happened. Rolling raped, murdered, and mutilated five more victims, displaying their corpses much like he the victims of his first murder, but the mutilations this time around went far beyond his first murder, earning him the nickname, The Gainesville Ripper by the press.
Episodes 452 & 453
