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“What is it that enables someone to stoop to such inhumanity?” Former Florida State Senator rod smithProsecutor who secured death sentence for Rowling featured in Discovery+ special Scream: The True Storywhich explored the possible motivating forces behind the killer’s unfathomable acts.
Though it took months to find him, it took one look at the crime scene before the authorities knew they had a monster on their hands.
A spokesperson for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Department said, “I don’t think it takes a rocket scientist to figure out that anybody who commits homicide using mutilation is a very sick person and this is someone who Which we very badly want to hit the streets.” Spencer Mann told Washington Post In August 1990, the discovery of five bodies in three days was already garnering national attention.
The first gruesome scenes unfolded on Sunday, August 26, after Christina P PowellK’s parents, unable to reach her by phone, showed up at the off-campus apartment complex where their 17-year-old daughter lived with a University of Florida freshman. sonya larson, 18. The classes were to start the next day. When no one answered the door, they asked a maintenance worker to let them in, but the building manager said they should wait for the police to arrive.
“When (the officer) went in, I followed him into the apartment and I saw the young woman on the bed … and I just turned and walked out,” Betty Kernutt, manager, missed abc news In 2020. “My maintenance guy, unfortunately, ran down the stairs screaming, ‘Oh my God,’ and came out and threw up. And the sad, sad thing about it is we had parents behind us on the stairs.”
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Powell had been raped and stabbed to death, her mutilated, partially dressed body lying on the living room floor. Larson was lying in an upstairs bedroom, naked and “back on the bed with her feet on the floor and her hair out,” said journalist John Donnelly, who covered the story. Miami Heraldrecalled ABC News.
There was evidence that both girls had been bound with duct tape at some point, but the killer – who had smashed a screwdriver into the front door jamb – had taken it with him. Investigators estimated that they had probably been dead between 48 and 72 hours after they were found.
Eight hours later, on the morning of Monday, August 27, sheriff’s deputies found an 18-year-old girl Christa Leight Hoyt The Santa Fe Community College student and aspiring law enforcement officer was found dead in her apartment about two miles from the first crime scene, where she was a part-time records clerk, after not showing up for her midnight shift at the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office. ,
The scene was strikingly similar, but Hoyt was beheaded as well as stabbed, sexually assaulted, mutilated and lying on a bed with his feet on the floor. The first deputies on the scene were also friends from work.
“These police officers knew Krista,” her stepmother Diana Hoyt told ABC News. “He told (his father) gary She died immediately after the first blow, which was a fact…but it was several hours before that.”
tracy pauls And Manuel R. taboadaThe two high school friends, 23, were found dead in a ground floor unit at the Gatorwood Apartments, another student-friendly complex, on the morning of Tuesday, August 28. The defensive wounds indicated that Taboda, who was enrolled at Santa Fe City College and was planning to study architecture, had tried to fight off the killer before she was stabbed to death. Pauls, a pre-law senior majoring in political science at the University of Florida, stood on the living room floor. She had been raped and had tape marks on her wrists and mouth, as well as soap on her lower body.
Gainesville Police Chief Wayland Clifton told reporters, “We have every reason to believe that the murders are possibly connected to a suspect or two suspects.”
Everyone who was around couldn’t help but think about serial killer Ted Bundy, whose reign of terror across the country only ended when he beat two Florida State University sisters to death and killed a 12-year-old girl over the course of a month in 1978. He was executed in Florida on 24 January 1989, having confessed to 30 murders. In addition to his many female admirers, about 2,000 people gathered outside Raeford Prison to cheer him on the night he was executed.
“That’s what we’re saying — it’s another Ted Bundy on the loose,” 18-year-old UF freshman Jana Walters reported. Washington Post, “Some sick.”
Officials tried to reassure thousands of UF Gators and other residents of the city known for its raucous college scene, but money magazine As the No. 13 best city to live in the country earlier that year, “safe streets” were one of its highlights, making it nothing to panic about. Still, countless bewildered students skip town, inviting Mom and Dad home once again.
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The university dutifully extended the deadline to add and drop classes to September 7, postponed tuition due dates and allowed off-campus residents to move, at least temporarily, into a dorm where security has been beefed up Was. UF’s student nighttime auxiliary patrol recruited dozens of new volunteers, and Santa Fe Community College established its own campus security program.
Instead of paying expensive long distance charges, students can call home from school using several new toll-free hotlines.
And so begins the most terrifying fall semester ever, with detectives searching for a serial killer and students too scared to go anywhere alone. Or be home alone. Or sleep through the night. Every strange noise prompted a call to the police. Some young women started keeping steak knives by their beds. Gun and mace sales increased. people wondered if there was no one, but Two Openly murderers, it probably cannot be the work of just one person to guess all that carnage.
Art Sandin, vice president of student affairs at the time, said, “There was no precedent for this scale of tragedy, at least in my experience.” told gainesville sun in 2005. “Parents and students didn’t know what to do.”
About 17 miles away, Melrose, Fla. In early September a double murder occurred. Unrelated, but this scared the crap out of everyone.
“A week before the murders, things were on the up note around town,” said Spencer Mann, formerly with the Sheriff’s Department and by then an investigator for the 8th Judicial Circuit State Attorney’s Office. Remembered that gainesville sun in 2006. “UF had a brand new president. There was a new football coach (Steve Spurrier, who led the Gators to a national championship in 1996). I saw the up note hit by fear.”
Gainesville attorney Rod Smith told the publication In 2010, “It would be hard to replicate today how out of hand it got for a few days.”
And in the days, weeks and months after Larson, Powell, Hoyt, Pauls and Taboda were killed, everyone was a suspect as law enforcement from all over Florida swarmed the city.
not too well EveryoneBut a subsequent tally put the number of names on investigators’ radar at one time or another at 675.
A multi-agency task force conducted hundreds of interviews, sifted through 18,000 pieces of evidence, ran DNA samples and tracked a flood of tips called in by people who Sure They had crossed paths with the killer.
Some investigators thought they too had named a suspect barely 48 hours after the last two bodies were found, an 18-year-old UF freshman who was seen haggard and walking around campus in the middle of the night with a hunting knife. ,
It wasn’t until January 1991 that Danny Rolling, a 37-year-old drifter and career criminal from Louisiana—already a person of interest in a 1989 triple-murder—came onto their radar. And it would not take yet another few months before it became publicly known that there was a prime suspect.
But at least the authorities didn’t have any trouble finding him, since he was already in jail.
read the second part about this story on oxygen.com
Scream VI Opens in theaters Friday, March 10, 2023.
,Originally published on Oct 9, 2021 at 5 am PT,
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