The jury unanimously recommended the death sentence. Judge Morris agreed. However, like many killers in the United States, Rolling had a long wait between his sentencing and his actual execution. Twelve years, in fact, to relish his role as a Death Row celeb. During that time, he wrote and published his memoirs, got engaged and fielded off other offers of marriage from the hordes of serial-killer groupies vying for his attention. As well as becoming a published author, he also became a commercially successful artist. That said, Rolling made no money from the sales of his book The Making of a Serial Killer. This was because the State of Florida won a court case against Rolling and his co-author London, which ruled that neither should be able to earn any royalties from the book under the Florida version of the ‘Son of Sam Law’, a law that was passed in 1977 in New York. The ‘Son of Sam Law’ rules that killers may not financially benefit by selling their stories to the press and thereby profit from the notoriety of their crimes.
The ‘Son of Sam Law’ came about after the conviction of David Richard Berkowitz in 1977. Berkowitz was found guilty of six murders and seven woundings after a one-year-long killing spree in which he shot his victims with a 44-calibre handgun.
In notes he sent to the press and one note he left at one of the crime scenes, he referred to himself as the ‘Son of Sam’. The reference was to his neighbour’s dog. His neighbour was called Mr Sam Carr and Berkowitz claimed Mr Sam Carr’s dog was possessed by the devil and was ordering him to kill. Hence the name ‘Son of Sam’.
The ‘Son of Sam Law’ was put into place to stop Berkowitz from signing a book deal amid press speculation at the time that he was about to sell his life story to a publisher for a huge fee.
The law has yet to be applied to serial-killer collector websites and Rolling certainly cashed in on his notoriety in order to sell his paintings. In fact, his artwork is still today avidly collected the world over by serial-killer art collectors. One of the collector websites I contacted told me that a Rolling sketch sold recently for over $1,000.
Finally, after Rolling’s last-ditch appeal – which argued that execution by lethal injection constituted cruel and unusual punishment – was deemed without merit by a Florida Supreme Court, Danny Rolling’s execution date was set. He had been on Death Row since 20 April 1994, but in October 2006 Rolling finally went to his well-deserved death. Singing all the way.
CHAPTER SIX
THE WASP WOMAN MURDER
Twenty years ago, Hollywood actress Susan Cabot was found bludgeoned to death in her Los Angeles home. But had the murderer really been a Latin American ninja, as her son claimed? Or had the baby-faced mummy’s boy done it himself, driven insane by an infected batch of hormones from a dead man?
Among the many murderers and psychotics portrayed in the movies there is one type of deranged lunatic particularly close to Hollywood’s heart and that is the faded actress-turned-recluse. The Hollywood classics Billy Wilder’s film noir Sunset Boulevard (1950) and Robert Aldrich’s gothic horror What Ever Happened to Baby Jane? (1962) were set in decaying Hollywood mansions and both tell the story of actresses driven mad by their sudden loss of fame. Both movies end in murder.
So, when in 1986 a real Hollywood recluse was found bludgeoned to death in her dilapidated home, it made headlines all over America. Throw in a Latin American ninja and a dwarf on a strange experimental drug and the ‘Wasp Woman murder’, as it was known, became a Hollywood legend almost overnight.
The murder victim was Susan Cabot, who had been a household name in the 1950s. Cabot had appeared in 20 films, acting alongside Hollywood legends such as Humphrey Bogart, Charles Bronson and Lee Marvin. Her films were usually low-budget westerns, in which Cabot was invariably typecast as the smouldering female temptress. Apart from the steady work in the movies, she also had regular offers of work from Broadway, television and radio and was under contract with Universal International Pictures.
But Cabot abruptly terminated her contract with Universal and after a brief stint on Broadway started working with maverick director Roger Corman. For Corman, Cabot appeared in Carnival Rock (1957), Sorority Girl (1957), the wonderfully titled but ultimately disappointing The Saga of the Viking Women and Their Voyage to the Waters of the Great Sea Serpent (1957), sci-fi flick War of the Satellites (1958), Machine-Gun Kelly (1958) and last of all the horror movie The Wasp Woman (1959).
Cabot was 40 when she starred in The Wasp Woman and excelled in what was to be her final role – and the one for which she is best remembered – as Janice Starlin, a character who unwisely tests out a rejuvenating beauty product derived from wasp enzymes. Extracted from royal jelly, these enzymes make her young again but ultimately, in a typically bizarre Corman premise, turn Cabot’s character into a lustful, murderous queen wasp.
At the peak of her abilities, Cabot quit acting altogether and soon afterwards disappeared into obscurity. Apart from the very occasional interview, nothing was heard about her for another 20 years. It was known that she had had a son named Timothy, who was afflicted with dwarfism, and it was rumoured, but never confirmed, that the son’s father was the then King Hussein of Jordan, with whom Cabot had been romantically linked. Cabot and her son lived in a large property in an exclusive neighbourhood in Encino in Los Angeles but were very rarely seen by neighbours. To all intents and purposes, Cabot had vanished.
On the night of 10 December 1986, emergency services received a call from Susan Cabot’s home on 4601 Charmion Lane. The caller breathlessly identified himself as Timothy Cabot and he reported the entry of a burglar at the house that he shared with his mother. A fire department paramedic unit responded to the call and arrived just four minutes later, by which time Timothy was waiting for them, now quite calmly, outside the front door. He told the two paramedics that he had been attacked, that his mother was in the bedroom and that he believed she was also injured.
Their house was a prime piece of real estate perched on top of a hill with a view of the lights of Los Angeles below, though it seemed a bit dilapidated from the outside and shabbier than the other impeccably maintained properties on the street. Nothing, however, could have prepared paramedics for the chaos that met them when they pushed open the door.
Inside, rubbish bags lay strewn in every room, newspapers and magazines were stacked in toppling piles along the corridors and trash and rotting food was everywhere. The house also appeared to have been ransacked: furniture was overturned, drawers were open and their contents strewn about the house. The sudden eeriness was made worse by the sound of Timothy’s four pet Attika dogs. Usually a docile breed, these four were in an absolute frenzy, and Timothy, in order to protect the paramedics, had locked them up in his room.
The paramedics found Susan Cabot lying dead on her bed dressed only in a purple V-neck nightgown. There was blood everywhere: a large arc of it was sprayed on the bedroom mirror near her bed, there were large splatter stains on the ceiling above her prone body and further bloodstains on the floor and the bed. For some reason, the killer had covered Cabot’s face and head with a piece of bed linen before bludgeoning her remorselessly to death. Under the blood-soaked material, Cabot’s face was all but unrecognisable. There were human hairs and brain matter smeared on the linen, and shards and splinters of bone protruding from the back of her shattered skull.
By now police had arrived on the scene and were busy checking all of the other rooms to check for signs of forced entry and to make sure that the intruder was no longer on the premises. But the dogs were deemed too vicious and dangerous to remove without the help of animal control and so there was one room they could not enter. Investigators were, however, able to glimpse weight-training equipment and barbells on the floor. On the walls were pictures of Timothy’s idol, Bruce Lee.
There was something rather unnerving about Susan Cabot’s son. With soft brown eyes and straight chestnut hair, to begin with Timothy looked just like a teenage boy. But on closer inspection his face seemed older, as if a wizened adult were somehow peering from ou
t of a young boy’s face. He didn’t act and talk like a teenager either.
In fact, Timothy was 22 years old. Born with a form of dwarfism caused by a defective pituitary gland, he should have stood at only just four foot. But due to an experimental growth hormone, which he had been taking for 15 years, he had grown by almost a foot and a half. What he said next stunned investigators. He told police that he had woken up at around nine-thirty, when he had heard his mother being attacked in her room. He had gone into the kitchen, where he confronted a burglar. The burglar, he told police, was a tall Latino man with curly hair, and he had been dressed like a Japanese ninja warrior. Timothy was a practising martial-arts enthusiast, but despite this he proved no match for the masked intruder, who had knocked him out cold.
Over the next few hours, the police began to have their suspicions about his story. According to the initial incident report obtained by this author, Timothy’s statements became ‘increasingly inconsistent’. The doubts increased when the paramedics examined his injuries. According to the investigator’s report, Timothy only had superficial wounds to the arm, torso and head. Paramedics reported to police, ‘The trauma to his head did not appear serious enough to cause unconsciousness.’
Timothy was immediately taken in for questioning at LAPD West Valley station, where he held his own during a three-hour grilling. When asked about his relationship with his mother, he described it as ‘very close’. His mother and he talked about everything, he told investigators, including ‘intimate sexual matters’.
When the questioning was over, Timothy was formally charged with his mother’s murder. He demanded that he be taken home to collect some medication that he said he needed, and there, without any prompting at all, Timothy led detectives to the murder weapon.
By this time, it was the early hours of the morning. It had taken animal-control officers six hours to finally remove the dogs and Timothy now led police to a hamper in the room where they had been. Inside the hamper was a box of soap powder and in the box was a bloody barbell and a scalpel. His fingerprints were on one end of the barbell and his mother’s blood was on the other. Timothy said that he had hidden the barbell because he was sure that no one would have believed his story.
And, of course, nobody did. Apart from the forensic evidence stacked against him, his story just didn’t make any sense. Yet it wasn’t going to be a straightforward matter for the prosecution team, even when later he confessed to lawyers that he had made up the whole ninja story and killed his own mother. When he stood trial in May 1989, his legal defence initially put in a plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. In arguably one of the strangest defence strategies of all time, Timothy’s lawyers argued that he could not be held responsible for his actions because their client was ‘a human experiment gone wrong’.
The experiment in question had first begun in 1958, and Timothy had been one of many test subjects. As a possible cure for dwarfism, the National Institute of Health had started to offer a supply of cadaver-derived pituitary free of charge to children diagnosed with growth hormone deficiency (GHD); the batch of hormones had been extracted from the pituitary glands of around 80,000 dead human bodies. The experiment lasted eight years and around 700 children with GHD received the treatment. Timothy, who had been diagnosed with pituitary dwarfism as a child, was one of them and had been taking the injections since he was six years old.
But, for some, the wonder cure was to have tragic results. Due to a contaminated batch of growth hormones, the supply had been infected with a fatal neurological illness. Over the years, an unusually high percentage of the test subjects had developed Creutzfeldt Jakob disease (more commonly known today as ‘mad cow disease’). The incubation period for CJD is long, in some cases 20 years, and as there was no way to diagnose for CJD there was no way of knowing if Timothy had CJD or would one day contract it. All the same, his lawyers used it as a cornerstone of his defence. His mother, they argued, had warped his poor fragile mind by bombing it for decades with potent chemicals, harvested from the genetic material of hundreds of thousands of dead bodies.
This all fitted in perfectly with Timothy’s insanity plea, because the psychological symptoms of CJD include extreme changes in personality, dementia, the loss of the ability to think clearly and memory loss. Then, it was sensationally revealed that Cabot, wrongly believing that it would help her look younger, had been helping herself to her son’s drugs for years too. So had the frequent injections affected Susan Cabot’s mental stability as well? Had she become deranged and attacked Timothy and if so had he simply been acting in self-defence? It was just another bizarre twist to the death of Susan Cabot and inevitably recalled one of her most famous roles as The Wasp Woman, a character who had taken an experimental anti-ageing drug only to become a crazed and violent killer.
Timothy’s lawyers were busy painting a disturbing profile of Susan Cabot as a woman unable to cope with her loss of fame, a faded Hollywood has-been who had shut herself up and away from the lights of Hollywood and slowly driven both herself and her son insane. It was straight out of the movies – one movie in particular.
It wasn’t long before the reclusive, unhappy existence that Timothy and his mother had shared for 11 years on Charmion Lane was being compared in the press to the one of Billy Wilder’s most famous movies. In Sunset Boulevard, Gloria Swanson plays Norma Desmond, a once-famous Hollywood silent-movie star who dreams of the day when she can make her long-awaited comeback. By the end of the film, however, it is clear that Desmond is a dangerous, delusional psychopath.
Actually, very little is known about what really happened behind the walls of 4601 Charmion Lane, or indeed the kind of life Timothy had to endure under his mother’s roof. One of the very few people to actually be invited into Susan Cabot’s home and interview her before she died was famous film historian Tom Weaver. He had long been a fan of Susan Cabot’s work and visited her in her home on several occasions up to her death in 1986. Tom Weaver specialises in the history of B-movies and low-budget horror movies and is the author of such books as Attack of the Monster Movie Makers and Science Fiction and Fantasy Film Flashbacks.
‘It was on my first-ever trip to California, around 1984, that I first met Susan, who had been at or near the top of my find-and-interview list almost since Day One,’ he wrote in a recent article on Susan Cabot. ‘I not only thought she was a knockout looks-wise in movies like The Wasp Woman, Machine Gun Kelly and others, but acting-wise too, and it frustrated me that no one knew where she’d ended up. Roger Corman told me, wrongly, that she was living happily in Washington, DC; that bum steer was the closest thing I had to a lead. So I was bowled over when, on that first California trip, Lori “Revenge of the Creature” Nelson mentioned casually that she’d seen Susan just the other day, at some sort of reunion of Universal Pictures veterans.
‘To make a long story short, my brother Jon and I were soon very friendly with Susan, the fun of knowing her only slightly spoiled by her aggressively oddball son Tim. The kid was pleasant but… strange. He struck me as looking like about 12 years old (facially and height-wise) but he was obviously much older, because he had his own car. Too often he did “little things” that would drive his mom nuts, like wearing sunglasses when we’d go out at night and clamming up and ignoring her requests to take them off, refusing to watch some of her movies with us even though she was practically begging him to. Things that seemed to me to be designed to get her worked up.
‘A swift kick in the ass would have solved a lot of her problems with Tim, I always thought, but being a star-struck twenty-something kid from upstate New York, getting to visit on various trips with one of my favourite B-movie stars, it certainly wasn’t my place to say so.
‘Susan’s house was also strange. A mini-mansion, walled and gated, including a kennel full of vicious-sounding dogs – a lot fancier than you’d think a single mom, whose long ago credits were mostly B-movies, could afford. There were rumours that, back in the day, she and King Hussein was an ite
m; when I’d bring that up, she was the one who did the clamming up. Eventually I began to think that was where the money was apparently still coming from.
‘Inside, it got weirder. The place was a wreck and apparently always had been. There was junk piled everywhere, to the point that finding a place where three or four people could sit down was a major project involving lots of moving-of-stacks-of-junk. The dust was piled almost as high as the junk; I still remember picking up a chessman from a dust-covered chessboard practically in the middle of the room, uncovering a round, perfectly clean spot in the deep dust that indicated that the board had been set up many years before, there in the middle of the room, and then never once touched.
‘I couldn’t help but think of, say, Thriller episodes [an American series of short horror stories that aired in the 1960s] where unsuspecting folks ventured into creepy old mansions unoccupied for decades. I was once with Susan when she needed something out of the trunk of her car; she unlocked and lifted the trunk hatch but, looking at the car, it was as if nothing had been opened. Clothes were crammed so tightly into the trunk that they held the shape of the underside of the trunk hatch!’
Another person who had been allowed to set foot inside the house was Timothy’s tutor, who was called as a witness at his trial. She stated that his mother frequently screamed at her son, apparently for no reason. The image of an overbearing, hysterical mother whose mental deterioration was rapidly spinning out of control was further borne out in testimony by Cabot’s long-term psychologist, Carl Faber. His patient, he told the court, had spent time in 14 separate foster homes, where she had been sexually abused. As an adult, she had been plagued by bouts of irrational terror and despair and had talked about suicide on the very day she had been murdered. Although she was reasonably well off, Cabot still lived in constant fear that she would lose her home for lack of money and she had learned not long ago that her son could have contracted CJD. Her son, she had told her psychologist many times, was the only reason she kept on living.
The World's Most Bizarre Murders Page 6