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Today's story is about the real life string of murders in Florida that inspired the now famous horror movie Scream.
This story is quite graphic and distressing, so listener discretion is advised.
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Okay, let's get into today's story.
It begins here.
From the director of It comes It.
Welcome to Derry, the chilling new HBO original series exploring one of horror's biggest terrors, Pennywise the Clown.
Set in 1960s Derry, Maine, the new HBO original series is streaming Sundays at 9 p.m. on HBO Max.
Also, you can listen to the official It Welcome to Dairy podcast wherever you get your podcasts.
On Sunday, August 26th 1990, a 56-year-old woman named Patricia Powell and her husband Frank pulled into a parking lot outside of this beautiful three-story white apartment building in Gainesville, Florida.
Gainesville is this beautiful little town in northern Florida that is home to the massive University of Florida, which is known for their big time football team and their big time college party scene.
Patricia and Frank's daughter, 17-year-old Christine, was going to be a freshman that year at the University of Florida, and apparently she had been so excited after getting her acceptance letter that her dad, Frank, had gone out and got a gold necklace for her that had the school's mascot, an alligator, dangling from it.
And apparently Christine wore this all the time.
Two days earlier, Christine and her new roommate, 18-year-old Sonya Larson.
The two had actually met over the summer when they took some summer classes together.
They had actually already come to Gainesville and they had moved in to this white apartment complex that Patricia and Frank were now parked outside of.
And after unpacking some of their things in their apartment, Christine and Sonia had left and gone into town and grabbed a bite to eat at a local restaurant.
And then afterwards Christine had used a payphone to call back home and tell her parents how well it was going and how much she already enjoyed her roommate and how excited she was for the year.
And she told Patricia and Frank that she would call them the following day.
But the following day came and went and Patricia and Frank did not hear from their daughter.
And they had no way to actually call her because she had not set up her landline in her apartment.
But Patricia and Frank, they told each other that, of course, everything was fine.
You know, she just got to college.
She's excited.
She's probably out having a good time.
And she just forgot to call.
And anyways, Patricia and Frank had already planned a visit to see their daughter in Gainesville the next day, which was Sunday.
And so fast forward back to that Sunday, and Patricia and Frank are now parked outside of their daughter's apartment apartment complex.
They still haven't heard from her, but they're still telling themselves everything's fine.
She's probably just busy.
And so they get out of their car and they walk over to the building and they go through one of the front access doors that brings them into the building.
They find themselves inside of this carpeted stairwell where, at every level on the way up, There were doors leading off to each of the apartments.
They made their way up to the second level, where they knew their daughter's apartment was, and they walk up to her door and before they even knock or turn the doorknob or anything, they notice on the door.
There are all these notes, these handwritten notes that have been taped all over it.
And they read a couple of them and they were notes from some of Christine and Sonia's friends on campus that apparently had tried to stop by over the last weekend but had not been able to make contact with Christine or Sonia.
And so these notes said things like hey Christine, you know we came over to try to get you to come out with us, but you didn't come to the door.
So we left without you.
Sorry.
You know, give us a call when you get in.
And so obviously the parents are totally worried given the circumstances.
They don't know where their daughter is.
They've been telling themselves everything is fine.
And now these notes make it seem like everything is not fine.
But the parents?
They keep their cool and they just start knocking on the door and calling out for their daughter.
But there's no answer.
And so Patricia and Frank, they start to panic at this point and they leave the carpeted stairwell.
They go outside and they find a maintenance worker that works for this building.
And they explain their situation with their daughter and how they can't get in touch with her.
And can he please let them in to make sure she's okay?
The maintenance worker said he couldn't without speaking to his manager.
And so he goes to his manager and the manager she says that's fine, but we need to get the police involved.
They need to escort us into the apartment.
And so the maintenance worker calls the police and requests this escort.
And a few minutes later, a single Gainesville police officer arrives at the apartment complex.
And he tells Patricia and Frank that just as a precaution, I need you guys to stay outside.
So they stay right outside those front access doors.
They're outside of the apartment building.
And then this officer, along with the maintenance worker and the manager of the building, those three.
They go inside the stairwell, they go up to the second floor and at that point the maintenance worker gets out his keys, he finds the right one and he opens Christine and Sonja's door.
The door swings open and immediately the police officer yells out for the two girls, but there's no answer.
And so the officer is first into the apartment, which basically immediately opens up to their living room.
And in the middle of the living room is a couch that's angled towards the right side of the room where a TV had been set up, and so the officer again, as he walks in, he's calling out, trying to get the girl's attention, but there's no answer.
Behind him is the maintenance worker and the building manager, and they begin making their way towards the right side of the living room, over towards that tv, to see if maybe someone was laying on the couch.
And as they round that corner and can finally actually see the front of the couch, the maintenance worker, after seeing what he saw, screams out and runs out of the apartment.
He runs down the stairs, out the access doors and begins vomiting on the grass and sobbing, right next to Frank and Patricia.
Naturally, Frank and Patricia, after seeing this, are immediately concerned that something's wrong with their daughter.
They try to stop them from getting in, but there was nothing stopping them.
They managed to push past those two.
They get into the living room and they're calling out for their daughter.
And eventually they make their way over to the side of the couch and they see their daughter, Christine.
She is lying on the ground in front of the couch.
She's on her back.
She has no clothes on and she's been stabbed to death.
And whoever has killed her has positioned her in this very suggestive sexual lewd position, as if they were trying to demean her as much as possible and shock whoever found her.
And so, after these totally devastated and wrecked parents are escorted out of the apartment, this one police officer, he continues searching the apartment, And so he searches the rest of the first floor.
There's no sign of Sonja.
He goes upstairs and he finds Sonja.
She's laying on her bed.
She also has no clothes on.
She's been stabbed to death.
And she's positioned on the side of the bed in a sort of suggestive lewd position, much like Christine downstairs.
It would later be determined that Christine had been sexually assaulted, but Sonia had not been.
The officer at this point leaves the apartment.
He goes outside.
He walks past the grieving parents who are being consoled by the building manager and the maintenance worker.
And the officer goes over to his car and he uses his radio to call in for backup.
A forensics team comes out to the apartment and they begin processing the scene and right away they discover on the outside of the door frame of the door leading into the apartment there were markings on the edge that looked like someone had used a screwdriver or some similar instrument to pop open the door.
They also found there was a towel and some soap that was lying on the ground near Christine's body and near the couch.
That had apparently been used to both clean Christine's body and also clean some other parts of the apartment.
And so they believe this was done to try to intentionally destroy evidence suggesting the killer or killers were somewhat sophisticated.
They also discovered there was some residue on Christine's wrists that indicated at some point her hands had been bound by duct tape.
But when she was found, her hands were not bound and there was no duct tape from her wrists.
And so whoever had done this had at some point removed the duct tape and taken it away.
And so investigators believed that the killer, or killers, had used the duct tape to immobilize Christine for the attack.
And then, after she was deceased, they had removed that tape in order to be able to get her arms up over her head, which seemed to increase the shock value of this lewd position they had put her in.
Based on what they saw inside of this apartment, the police were convinced they were up against a group of killers or a killer that had targeted these two girls.
That this was not some random attack, that this was calculated, this was on purpose.
And if they didn't get caught, they were going to strike again.
And so, even though the police really didn't have any leads to operate on, they just had this crime scene and they were looking for maybe someone with duct tape and a knife and a screwdriver.
I mean, that was really about it at this point.
And so, even though they have virtually nothing, because there were thousands and thousands of young people flooding Gainesville for the start of the new school year at the University of Florida, Literally the following day Monday, classes were starting.
Because of all these young people in town, the police felt it was very important that they got the media to put out a bulletin to all these people in town that there was potentially a killer or killers on the loose.
And so that night, Sunday evening, this news bulletin goes out, and it basically just told residents of Gainesville to stay indoors and stay in groups.
And if you needed to go outside, travel in groups and just overall, stay vigilant until we figure out who did this.
12 hours before Christine Powell and Sonya Larson were discovered, an 18-year-old Gainesville woman named Krista Hoyt did not show up for work.
Krista was a student at Santa Fe Community College, which was right down the road from the University of Florida.
That year she was planning to transfer to the University of Florida, and then after graduation, she wanted to pursue a career in forensics with the FBI.
And so, given her interest in law enforcement, while she was a student she had gotten a part-time job working in the records department of the sheriff's office.
And apparently at this sheriff's office she was famous for always coming to work, no matter what, including the time that she got her wisdom teeth removed.
And then an hour after coming home, she showed up for work.
And so on.
This Saturday night, when Krista was supposed to be showing up for work and she didn't, and she didn't call ahead and no one could get in touch with her on her landline, everybody at the sheriff's office was really concerned.
And so they waited around for about an hour, hoping that she might just show up with some story about why she was late.
But she never showed up.
She didn't call.
They still couldn't get in touch with her.
And so in the very early hours of Sunday morning, the sheriff's office called the Gainesville police and asked them to do a welfare check on Krista.
And so two police officers from the Gainesville Police Department.
They show up at the apartment belonging to Krista Hoyt.
Krista lived alone and she lived about two miles away from Christine Powell and Sonya Larson.
And so these two officers, they get there and they walk up to the front door and they knock, but there's no answer.
And they try the doorknob.
It's locked.
And so one of the officers walks around to the back of this apartment and he sees there's a glass sliding door.
And so he knocks on the glass sliding door.
There's no answer.
He tries the door.
It's locked.
And then he notices the drape that's inside the apartment that's covering up this sliding glass door.
It reaches almost to the ground, but not all the way.
There's a couple of inches on the bottom where, if you were laying on the ground, you could actually look through this little space and see into the apartment.
And so that's what he does.
He lies down and he puts his flashlight up and he looks through this couple inch gap on this window.
And as soon as the light illuminates what's inside of this apartment, he finds Krista.
Krista is sitting on the edge of a bed.
That's not that far away from the sliding glass door, and she's facing the door.
She's kind of hunched over at the edge of the bed.
She's got no clothes on and she's got stab marks all over her back and she's missing her head.
And her head was next to the bed, to the left up on the shelf, and it was positioned in such a way that it almost appeared like the head was looking down at the detached body.
When this crime scene was processed, the forensics team immediately noticed there were marks on the back sliding glass door where someone had used probably a screwdriver or something similar to pop the door open.
And then they also found residue of duct tape on Krista's wrists, but the duct tape was gone.
She was found with her hands not bound.
It would later be determined that Krista had been sexually assaulted before she had been murdered.
The obvious similarities between Krista's crime scene and Christine and Sonia's crime scene were initially only recognized by Gainesville police because much of the information about the two crime scenes was not public.
But that night, Sunday evening, when the police went to the media and asked them to put out that bulletin to all Gainesville residents to say that there could be a killer or killers on the loose, It didn't take long for residents of Gainesville and news anchors to begin speculating that you have these two murders that have happened really close together physically.
They're less than two miles apart and they've probably occurred within the last 24, 48 hours.
So they've happened in rapid succession.
They're both unsolved.
And so, even without intimate details of the crime scene, it wasn't hard to say I think these two are probably connected.
And so that night, Sunday evening, Gainesville really went into a state of panic.
And within hours of this news, you had stores all over Gainesville that had sold out their deadbolts and locks, their mace, their stun guns, their baseball bats, their actual guns, their knives.
I mean, people were really trying to arm themselves to protect themselves against this unknown threat that was murdering students in Gainesville.
And the police.
Even though they did not come out and substantiate the claims that perhaps these two homicides are connected, they did believe they were.
And so that night, Sunday night, as all this chaos is kind of unfolding in town, the police put hundreds of officers all over the place, on foot, on every street corner.
They had police cars and trucks parked all over the place.
I mean, the entire town was on an extreme heightened alert.
The police believed another attack was imminent, and so all they could do was try to come out in force to try to discourage the killer or killers from striking again.
But, as it would turn out, it didn't work.
By the following morning, so Monday morning, what was happening in Gainesville had gone from just being a Florida story to a national story, and everybody all over the country was talking about it.
And one woman named Lisa Byers who was in her 20s.
She did not live in Gainesville, but she had a very close friend who did.
She was 23-year-old Tracy Paulus.
Tracy had taken some years off from college, but that year had decided to go back and give it another go.
And so she was enrolled at the University of Florida.
And so Lisa called Tracy and said, hey, you know, I'm watching the news.
This is crazy what's happening in your town.
How are you holding up?
And Tracy would tell her that you know I'm just as concerned as everybody else.
It's terrifying to think there are killer or killers on the loose, but I think I'm okay because I have my roommate.
Tracy's roommate was 23-year-old Manny Taboda, who was this big, strong former football player who was very close with Tracy.
The two had never dated, but they had been very good friends for a number of years.
And he too had taken some time off of school and had agreed to go back.
Because Tracy had convinced him.
You know, come back, get your degree with me and we'll live together.
And so when the news broke about these killings happening in their town, Manny had told Tracy that he would protect her, that nothing would happen to her.
And so when Lisa heard this from Tracy that she thought that she was okay because she has Manny and you know he'll look after her and they were not planning to really leave the apartment much besides classes, you know Lisa was reassured but she was still worried.
And so she told Tracy, please give me a call this evening after you come back from classes just to let me know that everything is okay.
And so Tracy said she would, and then they hung up.
And then that evening, Tracy did not call Lisa back.
So Lisa tried calling Tracy, but no one picked up.
And so that night, Lisa went to bed.
She was very worried, but she went to sleep.
And then early the next morning, which was Tuesday morning, she tried calling Tracy again, but there was no answer.
And so Lisa reached out to a mutual friend of theirs that lived in the same apartment complex in Gainesville.
His name was Tommy.
And so she asked Tommy, can you please go over to Tracy's apartment and make sure she and Manny are okay?
And so Tommy said, no problem.
I'll give you a call from Tracy's landline once I talk to her.
And so about five minutes later, Tracy got a call.
She picked it up and it was Tommy calling from Tracy's landline and he was just screaming.
When the police arrived at Tracy's apartment, they found Tracy in her bedroom And, like the other victims, she had no clothes on.
She was positioned on the side of the bed in a very suggestive, lewd position.
She had been stabbed to death and it would turn out she had been sexually assaulted.
And then down the hall from Tracy, they found Manny.
He was in his bed, and he too had been stabbed to death, except he had his clothes on and he was not positioned in a suggestive position.
He had kind of died wherever he was and that was the position they found him in.
The forensics team.
When they processed the scene they found markings on the outside of the back sliding door where it looked like someone had used a screwdriver to pop open the door.
And then on Tracy's wrists, they found that residue from duct tape.
But there was no duct tape.
It had been removed.
At this point to the police, it was undeniable that they were up against a serial killer or killers.
And when the news broke that there was now a fourth and fifth victim and they were both college students, and one of them was now this big strapping man that apparently was taken down just as easily as these other four petite women.
This threw Gainesville into an absolute state of pandemonium.
Suddenly, it felt like no one could protect them.
The people in Gainesville, they were fair game.
It didn't matter that police were out in force in the streets and you had people walking around with guns and bases, baseball bats and mace, and you had people locking their doors and sleeping in groups.
It was like no measures were actually stopping these killings from happening.
Whoever was doing it was killing with impunity.
And so that day Tuesday, you had hundreds and hundreds of students from the University of Florida just leaving the school, who just didn't come back.
And as for the police, they called in the FBI and the National Guard.
And so by that night, Tuesday night, there were literally hundreds of officers and state police officers all over the place.
There were helicopters overhead, both police helicopters and news helicopters with spotlights.
They had National Guard military style trucks all over the place.
And so Gainesville was really at the highest alert you could possibly be on.
But even still, the people of Gainesville.
They were not going to feel safe until the police made an arrest.
And the next day, just 24 hours after Tracy and Manny had been found, the police did just that.
After receiving dozens and dozens of tips about one particular individual, they were able to arrest 19-year-old Ed Humphreys, who was a freshman at the University of Florida.
They arrested him for domestic abuse because he had actually struck his grandmother in the face.
And so they pick him up for domestic abuse.
But they set his bail at a whopping 1 million, which is way higher than you would normally expect for a domestic abuse charge.
But this was a unique circumstance where he was being arrested for one thing, but really he was being looked at as the suspect of these five homicides.
And so the police really needed him to stay behind bars.
And this massive bail, that did that.
He had no way to pay it.
And so, while Ed was behind bars, the police began investigating him, and they found there was a lot of reasons to believe he was the serial killer.
He had shown he was willing to be violent because, after all, he punched his grandmother in the face.
And people that knew him said he was totally mentally unstable and that he hated women and that he would walk around with a knife on his belt basically all the time.
And at night, he was known to walk around the forests of Gainesville.
There were these very thick forests that kind of butted up against the University of Florida.
And he would walk through the forest at night, which put him very close to the different apartment buildings where all the victims were found.
And on top of all that, Ed Humphreys just looked like what you would imagine a serial killer would look like.
He had all these deep scars all over his face and his eyes looked totally hollow like he was permanently on drugs, and he was seen smiling at the cameras when he was led in and out of the courtroom.
And to make him even more suspicious, as soon as he was arrested, the attack stopped.
There were no more slayings in Gainesville.
And so naturally, the country believed Ed was the guy.
Basically, everyone thought Ed was the guy.
But it came back that his blood type was type A and the killer or killer's blood type the blood that had been found at the various crime scenes was type B.
Now this did not clear Ed of guilt, because people believed there was a chance that, you know, he could have been involved in some way.
Perhaps he had an accomplice or multiple accomplices.
But when this news broke, pretty much everybody was back on edge, because clearly there's at least one or more killers that are still on the loose.
Shortly after this blood type discrepancy presented itself, the FBI approached the Gainesville police and said hey, why don't you use our VCAP program?
VCAP stands for Violent Crime Apprehension Program.
And what it was, was this computer program where it allowed investigators to input details of their crime they were investigating.
And when they submitted it, it would be compared against this huge database of other crimes in the country.
And if there were any similarities with any other crime, those similar crimes would get popped on screen.
And so when the Gainesville police input the information from these five student slayings in Gainesville, The computer program spit out a single match.
It was from an unsolved triple homicide in 1989 in Shreveport Louisiana, which is a town located about 800 miles to the northwest of Gainesville.
Shreveport back in the late 1980s was considered so safe by its residents that many of them didn't lock their front doors and they would leave their car keys just sitting on their front dash.
But in 1989, that would all change.
On Friday, November 3rd of that year, eight-year-old Sean Grissom was dropped off at his grandfather's house in Shreveport.
He was there to celebrate his eighth birthday.
And so his grandfather was this 56-year-old man named Tom who was divorced and he was getting ready to retire soon and he was also trying to spend more time with his grandson, excited about having sean over.
Also staying at this house with sean and his grandfather was sean's aunt, 24 year old julie grissom, who was a college student.
She was attending louisiana state university in shreveport When Sean was dropped off by his mother at his grandfather's house.
The grandfather Tom yelled out to the boy's mother and said you know, I'll have him back by Monday.
I'll drop him off, you know, see you later.
And so Sean's mother, she leaves.
And that day and the following day, she doesn't hear from Sean's grandfather or from Julie.
And so come Sunday night, she tries calling them to see what's going on.
She knows they're having a great time and doesn't really want to interrupt them, but she also hasn't heard from them.
But they don't pick up.
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She convinces herself that everything is just fine, that I'm sure there's an explanation.
They're probably just having a great time.
They don't want to call me.
And so she ends up going to bed.
And so the next morning, Monday morning, when Sean is supposed to be dropped off early enough that she can take him to school, When he doesn't show up, the mother calls the grandfather back and tries to get in touch and figure out what's going on, but she can't get in touch with him.
And so she's telling herself that okay well, you know, his grandfather must have just dropped him off at school.
And so the mother calls Sean's school and the school says no, we have not seen Sean today and we haven't heard from him.
So we don't know what's going on.
And so now Sean's mother is terrified.
She calls the police and the police actually get in touch with the neighbor of Tom Grissom.
And they ask this neighbor hey, can you go next door and just make sure Tom and Sean and Julie are OK?
And so this neighbor says, no problem.
They leave their house and immediately they notice, as they're looking at Tom's house, that the two cars in the driveway had not left since Friday.
It was just something the neighbor noticed.
And then they also noticed that there were two newspapers at the end of the driveway.
It was the Monday and Sunday paper.
And they knew Tom always read the newspaper.
And so the idea that he would just leave them sitting at the end of the driveway.
That didn't really add up.
And so the neighbor walks around to the front door and they notice there are lights on inside and they knock on the front door but there's no answer.
They try the front door, but it's locked.
And so they end up going around to the very back of the house, and they're able to get into the house through the garage.
And then through the garage, they open another door that leads into the main part of the house.
And this neighbor they immediately see on the ground towards the back door near the kitchen is Tom.
He's laying on the ground and he's obviously deceased.
This neighbor, they run out.
They call the police.
The police come back over.
They go inside the house, and sure enough, they find Tom Grissom has been stabbed to death.
He's laying on the ground near the back door.
They find Sean Grissom, the eight-year-old.
He's slouched over on the couch in front of the TV. and he's been stabbed to death as well.
And then upstairs they found 24-year-old Julie the aunt, and she was positioned on the edge of the bed in this very suggestive way.
She had no clothes on and she had been stabbed to death, and it would later be determined she had also been sexually assaulted before she was killed.
And they also discovered there's vinegar on her body, as if whoever's done this has attempted to clean her with vinegar.
There was no sign of a robbery in the house or ransacking in the house.
There was no sign of forced entry.
Overall, the investigators said this was a very neat crime scene, as if whoever did this had done this with great intentionality.
And so, after kind of going through the crime scene, the police really didn't have any leads to go off of.
And so this crime went unsolved.
And so as these Gainesville police are looking at this report in this VCAP computer system and they're reading about this unsolved triple homicide, all they can think about is how unbelievably similar the crime scene was to all the crime scenes of the student slayings, specifically that Julie had been arranged in this kind of suggestive pose like the other female victims in Gainesville.
And on top of that it was determined that the blood type of the killer in Shreveport was type B, same as the killer or killers in Gainesville.
So there was a match in the blood type.
Somehow after this discovery, through this VCAT program, the media found out about this Shreveport unsolved triple homicide and how apparently it was incredibly similar to all these slayings that have taken place in Gainesville.
And so before long, that was all every news network all over the United States was talking about.
And at first the police in Gainesville and anybody involved in this investigation was very upset about this because one, they probably had a leak that someone was giving information to the.
But two, the press was kind of jeopardizing their investigation because by having these details leaked the killer or killers could potentially benefit from kind of knowing what the police were thinking about and what they were up to.
But as it would turn out, this particular leak would prove to be quite fruitful.
Shortly after this news about the Shreveport killing and the student slayings was all over the news, this woman named Cindy, who lived in Shreveport.
She called the police after watching all the news, like everybody else, and told the police they really ought to look at this guy, Danny Rawlings.
Danny Rawling was this 37-year-old drifter who was in Shreveport at the time of the Grissom family murders in 1989 and apparently after those murders he had told Cindy's husband that he quote had a problem and his problem was he liked stabbing people.
And Danny literally always walked around with a huge knife on his waist.
He seemed totally mentally unstable.
And so this claim that he liked stabbing people, Cindy and her husband took literally and basically told him to stay away from them.
And so in one of their last conversations with Danny, Danny actually told Cindy that he planned to leave Shreveport and go someplace where there's lots of beautiful young women that he can just stare at all day long.
And so when police asked Cindy, you know, do you think he's capable of killing all eight of these people?
She said, oh yeah.
And so the police turned their attention to Danny and began researching his background.
And they discovered he was raised in a very abusive household.
Specifically, his father really couldn't stand him.
They had a really bad relationship.
And then, when Danny got old enough, he joined the Air Force, but he was kicked out after two years for being mentally unstable.
And once he was discharged he began the string of armed robberies in the 1980s and he eventually got caught and spent the bulk of the 1980s in prison.
And then in 1989, when he got out of prison, he came back to Shreveport and moved in with his parents.
Now, this was not a happy homecoming.
His parents did not want him living with them, but Danny kind of forced the issue.
He had nowhere else to go.
And so he wound up living there.
And as it happened, they lived less than a half mile away from the Grissom family home.
Six months after the Grissom family was murdered and three months before the Gainesville student slayings had begun, Danny gets in this huge fight with his father, where his father actually draws a pistol and forces Danny to leave the house and tells him to never come back.
And so Danny, he runs out of the house and he gets his gun from his vehicle, comes back inside his house and shoots his father point blank in the head and then in the stomach, before fleeing the scene.
His father would amazingly survive this attack despite some pretty significant damage to his head.
And he would tell the police and before long there was a warrant for Danny's arrest for attempted murder.
But when they went to go arrest him, he was gone.
They had no idea where he went.
And so, as the Gainesville police are looking at Danny's criminal record, they're starting to say to themselves that this guy looks really interesting.
He does seem like he could be the serial killer we're looking for.
And so, as they continue to dig deeper and deeper, one of the Gainesville police officers suddenly thinks of something.
There was this unsolved armed robbery of this bank in Gainesville that happened the same week, where all five of the students had been killed.
A lone masked gunman walked into this bank in broad daylight and demanded money from the teller, and the teller, who thought on their feet, gave him the cash, but it was the type that was booby-trapped with die packets, meaning if this robber tried to tamper with the money at all, it would detonate, sending die all over them and kind of making it obvious that this money had been stolen.
But the robber doesn't see this.
He takes the bag of cash.
He leaves the bank and manages to flee and go into the forest before the police show up.
And so the police.
Ultimately, they go and search the forest and they find this campsite deep in the woods.
And at this campsite, which is abandoned, they don't find the person who robbed the bank.
But at this campsite, they find the bag that has the money inside of it.
And the die packet has been activated.
So clearly the robber had tried to fiddle with it.
And then when it detonated, they had taken off and left the money.
And then also at this campsite, near this duffel bag full of ruined money, was a screwdriver, a gun and an audio recorder.
Now at the time, the police that were seeing this.
They were part of this huge effort in Gainesville to stop any more attacks on students and catch the killer or killers.
That was all they were thinking about.
And so when they didn't immediately catch this robber, they kind of said, you know what?
This is a lower priority item than what we're dealing with with this loose serial killer or killers.
And so let's just round up the evidence, put it in storage and somebody else can deal with this after we handle this killer situation.
And so no one listened to the audio recording.
They just put it in evidence.
They grabbed everything else, put it in evidence, and they threw it in the storage room.
And so now this Gainesville police officer that's just remembered this unsolved armed robbery, He says to the group that's investigating Danny.
He says you know hey, since Danny has a penchant for armed robbery, clearly he has a rap sheet full of armed robberies.
That would have meant he was in Gainesville.
And so maybe he committed this armed robbery.
And so we should go look at the evidence and listen to that tape.
And so the officers, they practically run to the storage locker.
They get the evidence from this unsolved armed robbery.
They come back and they hit play on this audio recorder.
And what they hear is unbelievable.
They hear on this recording a man singing a song.
It's clearly a song he wrote.
And he's singing about being a, quote, mystery killer.
And then it kind of segues into him talking about how to effectively kill a deer with a knife, to be really effective with a knife.
And he's getting into really graphic detail of how to do that.
And then, somewhat unbelievably, on this audio recording, the man identifies himself.
He says his name is Danny Rawling.
And so this audio recording was huge.
It meant Danny Rawling.
The guy they're looking at as potentially being the serial killer was definitely in Gainesville in the woods near the University of Florida the same timeframe that all of the victims were killed.
Also, the screwdriver that had been found at this campsite matched the markings that had been made along the outside of some of the door frames of the victims' homes.
Also went into Danny's military records and it showed he had a blood type of B, So his blood type matched the blood type that had been found in all of the victim's homes.
And so just like that, Danny became the number one suspect.
And when they went to figure out where he was, amazingly, they found he was already in custody.
He was being held in a jail cell 40 miles south of Gainesville for another armed robbery.
And so immediately, Danny was charged in the murders of the five Gainesville students.
They couldn't charge him for the three Shreveport murders because they just didn't have enough evidence.
And then after that, Danny was transferred to Florida's maximum security prison to await trial.
Initially, Danny said he was innocent.
He had nothing to do with the murders.
But then, almost four years later, when his trial was finally starting, on the first day of his trial, he surprised everyone in the court when he stood up and said I'm going to change my plea.
I'm guilty on all five counts.
I did kill all five students.
He would tell the court.
The reason he did this is he wanted to be a superstar, like the notorious serial killer Ted Bundy, who he looked up to.
Danny would also, at another date, confess to killing the three Grissom family members in Shreveport.
Because of Danny's detailed confessions, we now know all the terrifying details of what actually happened when he killed all eight of his victims.
Back on Friday, November 3rd 1989, Danny was fired from his job as a waiter at a local restaurant in Shreveport.
And so he was frustrated, he was angry and he was kind of walking around his neighborhood when he decided the way he would kind of channel his frustration was he would go kill some people.
And so he was armed with his K-bar knife, which he always carried with him.
And he found himself standing in front of this little house.
And he saw some people moving around inside.
And he looked around.
There wasn't anyone watching him.
And so he just walked up to the front door.
He tried the handle and it was unlocked.
And so before he opened the door, he made sure his knife was in hand.
He opened the door, walked right in and he saw Sean, the eight-year-old, sitting on the couch watching TV.
And, without any hesitation, he walked up behind him and stabbed him through the back, killing him almost instantly.
And then Danny walked into the kitchen, where he found Tom the grandfather, who was making steak out on the back grill.
And so he was going back and forth between the kitchen and the grill, kind of getting ready for dinner.
And at some point, when Tom came back into the house and was holding steaks in his hand, Danny leapt out and stabbed him.
And even though Tom put up a fight, he was very quickly subdued as well.
And then after that, Danny made his way upstairs where Julie was.
That was Sean's aunt and she was getting ready for a wedding she was going to attend that night for one of her friends.
And so she had just gotten out of her shower and she was getting ready to put on this red dress she had picked out.
And Danny walked into her room and she most likely saw him, at which point Danny would have told her what he had just done to her loved ones downstairs.
And he threatened her with the knife and said if you don't listen to me, I'm going to do the same thing to you.
And because she was terrified, she listened to him, and so he immobilized her, and then he sexually assaulted her, and then he stabbed her to death.
Afterwards he cuts the tape off of her wrists and puts the tape in his pocket, and then he lays her out on her back on her bed.
And then he goes downstairs and gets some vinegar and uses the vinegar to attempt to clean her body, to destroy any evidence he might have left behind.
And then after cleaning her, he kind of puts her in that lewd suggestive pose with her hands up over her head and her legs spread.
And then he leaves.
Six months later, in August of 1990, after Danny has shot his father and is on the run from the law, he finds himself in Gainesville Florida, and he sets up this little camp just behind the University of Florida, in this thick forest.
And then on Friday, August 23rd, as he's sitting out at his campsite, he gets this sudden urge to go kill again.
And so he waits for it to get dark out, and then he gets out his audio recorder and he records himself alluding to this murder he's about to go perpetrate.
Then, armed with a pistol, a screwdriver and his K-Bar knife, he left his campsite and walked in the darkness in the forest about a mile away, until he was looking from inside the forest out towards this three-story white apartment building.
And it's believed that within the last 24 hours he had been in that area and he had seen two young girls go in and out of this apartment building.
And that was all he needed to determine who his victims were going to be.
And so those victims were Christine Powell and Sonya Larson.
And so, when he was standing in front of their apartment building, he eventually strode out of the forest.
He walked up to that access door that led him into that stairwell.
He made his way up to the door of Christine and Sonia and he used his screwdriver to pop the door open.
He went inside and shut the door behind him and walked into the living room and he found Christine was sleeping on the couch.
And so he left her be, he didn't touch her.
He went upstairs and he found Sonia sleeping on her bed.
And so, as he's standing there realizing that he has these two girls, he needs to make a decision about which one he's going to kill first and which one he's going to sexually assault.
And so, as he's standing there looking over Sonia's bed, he decides he's going to kill Sonia and then he's going to sexually assault Christine.
And so very casually, he walks into Sonia's room.
She's fast asleep.
She's on her back and he pulls out a piece of duct tape and he gets the duct tape in one hand and he pulls his knife out in the other and he presses the duct tape over her mouth, which wakes her up, and then he drives the knife into her chest.
And so Sonia would put up a pretty incredible fight, but ultimately she would succumb to her injuries.
And then, after she was dead, Danny just left her where she was and he went downstairs and he found Christine was still asleep on the couch.
She had not woken up from the commotion upstairs.
And so he walked right in front of her and, standing over her with his knife, He kind of nudged her awake.
And when she woke up, he had a piece of tape.
He put it over her mouth and he told her to be quiet and held up the knife and told her that I just killed your roommate.
And if you don't listen to what I'm going to say, I'm going to kill you, too.
And so naturally, she complied to what he wanted, and so she let her wrists be tied, and then, at that point, he cut her clothes off, he sexually assaulted her, and then he stabbed her to death.
And so after she was dead on the ground, he went and got that towel and that soap and he began cleaning Christine's body to try to remove any evidence he might have left behind.
And then he cut the duct tape off of her wrist and removed the duct tape from her mouth and put those in his pocket.
And then he positioned her in that kind of lewd, suggestive position that she was found in.
And then Danny went back upstairs and cut the clothes off of Sonia and then positioned her on the side of the bed in a suggestive position as well.
And then Danny leaves the apartment.
So he goes back into the woods.
He walks in the wood line back to his campsite.
But when he got there, he was just too jacked up.
He was too excited from what he had just done that he just couldn't control himself.
All he wanted to do was go out and kill again.
And so he managed to sit at his campsite for a total of eight hours before he couldn't help it any longer.
He had to go back out and find another victim.
And so his next victim he decided would be this woman he just happened to see a couple of days ago.
He was walking down the road near this row of apartments, near the school, and he looked into one of them and he just saw there was this girl in this apartment and he just thought for a second.
You know, I bet she lives alone there.
But that was the entire interaction.
He didn't know this person.
He was just kind of guessing that she might be alone in there.
And so here he is in the forest after killing these two teens.
And he's like, okay, I'm going to go back to that apartment because I think that woman is alone.
And that woman would be Krista Hoyt.
And so in the early morning hours of Saturday, August 24th, Danny leaves his campsite with his screwdriver, his gun and his K-bar knife and he walks about a half mile away from his campsite until he's still in the woods.
But he's looking out at the back of Krista's apartment and then at some point he walks out of the forest.
He walks right up over her fence and gets up to her back sliding door.
He uses a screwdriver to pop the sliding door open.
He slides it open, he steps inside and he finds out that krista is actually not in her apartment.
There's no one in her apartment.
But instead of leaving and finding another victim, he decides he'll just wait for Krista.
And so he shuts the sliding back door and he goes into her bedroom closet and shuts the closet and then just waits and he stays in her closet for several hours, until around 11 am that morning.
Krista comes home and when she was in the house he waited a little bit longer to make sure she didn't know he was there, and then at some point he kind of slipped out of the closet, snuck up behind her and put her in a chokehold.
Now, at first Krista tried to fight back, but eventually she realized she could not overpower whoever this was.
And at that point, she said, OK, OK, you know, what do you want?
And Danny would tell her, you got to listen to me or I'm going to kill you.
And he showed her the knife.
And so Krista said, OK, and she put her wrists out.
He taped her wrists with duct tape.
He put tape over her mouth, and then he brought her into her bedroom, where he cut her clothes off and sexually assaulted her.
And then afterwards, he stabbed her to death.
Once she was dead he cut the duct tape off of her wrists and pulled the duct tape off her mouth and put that duct tape in his pocket.
And then he positioned her body on the bed in a suggestive position before he left.
When he got back to his campsite he realized he had accidentally left his wallet in Krista's apartment.
And so, calm as can be, he walked back through the forest, right back into Krista's apartment.
He found his wallet and he was about to leave when he thought to himself well, wait a minute, I should mutilate her body.
And so he pulled Krista's body off of the bed, and using his knife, he decapitated her.
He put her head up on the shelf next to the bed and then he repositioned her body on the edge of the bed, making it seem like she was kind of hunched over looking out the back door.
And then, before he left, he reached up and twisted her decapitated head and made it seem like it was looking down at the rest of her body.
48 hours later, on the evening of Monday, August 27th, Danny was back at his campsite out in the woods and he suddenly got the urge to go kill again.
And so he stood up, he grabbed his knife, his screwdriver and his gun and he walked away from camp, made it about a mile through the woods until he was standing still in the forest looking out at this big apartment complex that was very commonly occupied by college students.
And so at some point he leaves the forest and walks up to the first apartment he sees.
He has no idea who's going to be in there.
And he goes up to their sliding back glass door.
He gets a screwdriver out and he pops it open.
He slides the door open.
He steps inside.
And the first thing he sees is Manny Tabota, this big, strong former football player who's laying in his bed and Danny just walks over and starts stabbing him, and Manny wakes up and puts up one heck of a fight, but ultimately Danny is able to overpower him and kills him.
While Danny was stabbing Manny, the other resident inside of this apartment, 23-year-old Tracy Paulus.
She was in the shower.
And so she gets out of the shower and she hears all this commotion down the hall.
And so she steps into the hall and she looks into Manny's room and she sees Danny on top of him stabbing him.
And so Danny looks back.
He sees Tracy.
Tracy screams.
She runs down the hall into her bedroom.
She slams the door behind her.
She locks it.
And then she leans up against the door to try to keep it shut.
Meanwhile, Danny just continues to stab Manny until Manny is dead.
And then Danny stands up and he just walks down the hall, calm as can be.
He gets to the bedroom door where he knows Tracy is.
She's trapped.
She can't go anywhere.
And he begins to smash the door down. ramming it with his shoulder.
He's kicking it over and over again.
And Tracy's screaming for him to stop.
But eventually he manages to just kick the door down.
And as soon as he's inside the room, Tracy kind of stands back and she says to Danny are you the one?
And Danny looks at her and says, yes, I am the one.
And then he threatened her with a knife and said I'll kill you, just like the guy down the hall, unless you listen to me.
And so Tracy listened.
She got her wrists bound and her face bound.
And then Danny cut the clothes off of her and then sexually assaulted her.
And then he stabbed her to death.
And then, after she was dead, he cut the duct tape off of her wrists and removed the duct tape from her mouth, and then positioned her body in a suggestive sexual position on the edge of the bed.
And then he left.
Later that day, Danny would rob that bank in Gainesville.
And then, one month later, Danny would be arrested for a botched armed robbery 40 miles south of Gainesville.
And then, while he was in prison, he would find out he was being charged with the five murders in Gainesville.
16 years later, at 6 pm on October 25th 2006, Danny Rawling was led into the execution chamber in Florida State Prison.
He offered no apology to the family members of his victims that were on the other side of the glass.
Instead, Danny just sang a religious hymn to himself in order to comfort himself.
And then 13 minutes later, Danny was pronounced dead.
He was executed via lethal injection.
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