by Colin Wilson
Yet three years later, on 26 May 1991, Dahmer was able to pick up the younger brother of his earlier victim, Conerak Sinthasomphone, in the same shopping mall where he later picked up Tracy Edwards. Conerak was also given drugged coffee, and then stripped and raped. But when Dahmer went out to buy beer, the naked boy succeeded in escaping from the apartment, and stood talking to two black teenage girls, begging for help. Dahmer tried to grab the boy, but the girls clung on to him, and one of them succeeded in ringing the police. Two squad cars arrived shortly, but when Dahmer explained plausibly that the young man was his lover and that this was merely a lover’s quarrel, the police escorted Conerak back to Dahmer’s apartment and left him there to be murdered and dismembered. When this was finally revealed after Dahmer’s arrest, it caused a scandal that shook the Milwaukee Police Department.
In March 1990, Dahmer was released from the correctional centre in which he was serving his sentence for the earlier rape. By that time he had already killed five times. On 13 March 1990, he moved into the Oxford Apartments, and during the next 18 months killed 12 more victims, the last two in just over two weeks, between 5 July and 22 July 1991, the day of his arrest.
Dahmer had almost been caught after his second murder, that of Eddie Smith, on 14 June 1990. He had invited a 15-year-old Hispanic youth back to his apartment, but, for some reason, decided to try to knock him unconscious with a rubber mallet instead of the usual drugged drink. The youth fought back, and managed to reach the door. Dahmer let him go after making him promise not to tell the police. The young man broke his promise, but when he begged the police not to let his foster parents know that he was gay, they decided to do nothing about it. So once more, Dahmer managed to escape to kill again.
In the summer of 1991, the revelations about the apartment full of corpses filled the front pages for week after week, and made worldwide headlines. In January 1992, Dahmer appeared in court charged with 15 murders. He made no attempt at defence, and was sentenced to 15 terms of life imprisonment. Asked how he felt about being in prison, he remarked: ‘I couldn’t find any meaning for my life when I was out there. I’m sure as hell not going to find it in here.’
Robert Ressler happened to be in Milwaukee lecturing at a university at the time of Dahmer’s arrest, and was asked if he would testify for the defence, who had decided on an insanity plea. His own feeling was that although Dahmer was not entirely innocent, the odd mixture of ‘organisation’ and ‘disorganisation’ in his crimes made it arguable that he was not entirely sane. This is why he went twice to interview Dahmer in prison. The result shed some interesting light on Dahmer and his motivation. One of the most interesting comments entered the conversation almost by accident. He asks Dahmer if he ever committed violence in his early years, to which the reply was ‘no’, but there was violence against him, and he went on to tell how, on his way home from school he was approached by three seniors, and had a feeling that they were hostile. ‘Sure enough, one of them just took out a billy club and whacked me on the back of the head.’ Ressler does not pursue this. But when, a few moments later, he asks when Dahmer became interested in dissecting animals, Dahmer says that it was at the age of 16, after he had been hit on the head. It started in a biology class, when they were dissecting a baby pig.
Since so many serial killers have received skull injuries, it is inevitable to wonder if the beginning of his obsession with death and corpses was the blow on the head. By coincidence it was also the end. Dahmer was murdered in a Wisconsin jail on 28 November 1994; he was struck on the head with an iron bar by a fellow convict called Christopher Scarver, who explained that he believed he was the Son of God.
In the 1990s, I became involved in correspondence with the ‘Gainesville Ripper’, Danny Rolling, who, when he was in jail, had become engaged to Gerard Schaefer’s one-time fiancee Sondra London, now a well-known crime writer. He had written to her from Florida State Prison, where he was serving time for an attempted robbery of a supermarket store in Ocala, Florida.
It was not until January of the following year that the police had administered a blood test. Rolling’s DNA revealed that he was the man who had been involved in the sex murder of four young women on the campus of the University of Florida at Gainesville in the previous August. The crimes had caused such fear that half the students had gone home.
Sondra and Rolling entered into correspondence, and by Christmas 1992 had decided they were in love. Finally, she was allowed to visit him, and the meeting confirmed their feelings. There was, she told me, an instant and powerful physical attraction. Soon after this they announced their engagement.
This announcement, in February 1993, was featured in some newspapers next to a story claiming that he had confessed to the Gainesville murders to a fellow inmate, Robert Fieldmore Lewis.
Rolling looked an unlikely serial killer, 38 years old, tall, good-looking, and articulate, a talented artist and guitar player, who looked more like a schoolteacher in his horn-rimmed glasses. But in due course he confessed to the Gainesville murders, and eventually, to three more.
Through Sondra, I came to write an introduction to Rolling’s autobiography The Making of a Serial Killer, which is how I came to exchange a few letters with him. He told me that he had no doubt that he had been possessed by some demonic force when he committed the murders. It sounds like the typical excuse made by a killer; yet after studying the case, I came close to believing him.
Rolling was born in 1954 in Shreveport, Louisiana, the son of a police sergeant who had been a war hero. Unfortunately, the father was also another of Van Vogt’s Right Men. Such men, as already noted, are usually family tyrants. Rolling senior seems to have had no love for his son, and lost no opportunity of telling him he was stupid and worthless.
Rolling also went into the military, but just before he was scheduled to go to Vietnam, was caught with drugs and discharged. He was dismayed, for he had been enjoying military life. His father was furious and disgusted with him. But Danny then had a religious conversion, and married a fellow member of the Pentecostal Church. Unfortunately, he was unable to get rid of a habit he had acquired in childhood of peering through windows at women undressing. When he was caught, the marriage began to disintegrate.
On the day he was served his divorce papers, he committed his first sex attack, breaking into a house and raping a young woman who was alone. He felt so remorseful that the next morning he made his way back to her house to apologise—then saw two grim, powerfully built men come out, and changed his mind. But soon after that he committed his first armed robbery. And it was not long before he was serving his first jail term.
The brutality and violence of prison life in the South shocked him. Blacks and whites hated one another and often killed one another. He was nearly gang-raped in the shower by a group of blacks.
Free once more, he now experienced a compulsion to commit rape. He admits in his book that what he enjoyed was the surrender of the terrified girl, the sense of power; it was balm to his bruised ego. Another period in jail only confirmed his self-image as a desperate criminal.
Back in his hometown in 1989, he began peeping through the window of a pretty model named Julie Grissom. One day, after missing work for three days in a row, he was fired from his job in a restaurant. He reacted just as he had reacted years earlier to his divorce papers. On November 1989, he crept into the backyard of the Grissom household, where he had formerly played peeping Tom. Undeterred by the fact that there were three people in the house—Julie Grissom’s father and her eight-year-old nephew—he burst in and tied up all three at gunpoint with duct tape. Then he stabbed to death the boy and the elder man, dragged Julie into the bathroom and raped her against the sink, forcing her to say, ‘Fuck my pussy, daddy.’ After making her climb in the bath so he could wash out her vagina with a hosepipe, he stabbed her to death. He left after taking $200.
By now he was convinced that he had two ‘demons’, one a robber and rapist called ‘Ennad’, and the other a killer
called ‘Gemini’.
A violent quarrel with his father ended with James Rolling trying to shoot him, and with Danny shooting his father and leaving him for dead. In fact, Rolling survived, minus one eye. Rolling committed more armed robberies and rapes, and then travelled to Gainesville, where he bought a tent and pitched it in the woods.
There were more voyeuristic activities—on some occasions he stripped naked with peeping. On 24 August 1990, he broke into an apartment shared by two 17-year-olds, Christina Powell and Sonja Larson, who were both asleep. He stabbed Sonja to death in her bed. Then he went downstairs and woke up Christina on the sofa, and at gunpoint taped her hands. After raping her he stabbed her to death, making her lie on her face while he did it. He left both bodies positioned for maximum shock value.
Two evenings later he broke into the apartment of 18-year-old Christa Hoyt (on whom he had been spying), and waited for her to return home. When she did, he overpowered her, and raped and stabbed her to death, also disembowelling her and cutting off her head. When police arrived on the scene, they were horrified to find her headless body seated on the edge of her bed, her severed nipples beside her.
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
Sex Crime—The Beginnings
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.