Campus Correspondence : With a Killer’s Confession, Gainesville Students Breathe Easier

The last days of August, 1990, mean something to everyone who was in Gainesville at the time. The home to the University of Florida, a relatively quiet town, was taken siege by the worst enemy possible--fear.

Five college students were found brutally slain in their apartments. A killer was on the loose. Rumors abounded.

Many students who had just finished unpacking for the fall semester repacked their suitcases and headed home. Some would never return to the university, instead pursuing their education elsewhere.

Others, unable to get out of town, immediately bought weapons and extra locks for their living quarters. At night, we would sleep over in groups of as many as a dozen. And no matter what, we never went out alone.

Gainesville, which used to be known only as home of the UF Gators, was renamed the “college murder capital.”

Eventually, Danny Harold Rolling would be named a suspect, indicted and convicted of a robbery spree throughout Florida. But no one knew for sure whether this soft-spoken drifter from Louisiana was responsible for the savage deaths of the five students. Investigators and attorneys were bound by a gag order until the trial was under way. News reports sometimes conflicted.

Then, on Feb. 15, just as jurors were about to be selected, Public Defender Rick Parker asked the presiding judge if he could make an announcement. And from out of nowhere, Rolling admitted to the murders.

Weeks of anticipation, months of planning and years of waiting had preceded that day. It was all over in minutes.

Rolling, a career criminal known for singing his self-written ballads before judges, gave a simple explanation.

“I have been running from one thing and then another all my life. . . . But there are some things that you just can’t run from, and this being one of those.”

For Gainesville and UF, Rolling’s confession means they finally can escape the uncertainty that has haunted them for more than three years.

Students at UF and the local Santa Fe Community College have learned a great deal since the murders. Fear may not go away, but personal safety, trust and common sense, which were not such pressing issues before, now seem vital.

Not everyone has changed, though. Many students, especially those who have enrolled since the murders, forget to call roommates when they are running late. Some still jog alone. Doors don’t always get locked.

Perhaps with details about the murders finally coming out, these students will better understand what their older colleagues had to deal with. It’s not the kind of education the college promises in its glossy brochures; but for those of us who lived through the nightmare, it was an unforgettable lesson.

The community, which has been forced to carry the memory of the murders too long, can finally put the incident behind it. The thought of state and national media again descending on the town to cover Rolling’s trial, expected to last three months, was enough to make civic leaders cringe. At one point, someone suggested that a public-relations campaign be started to combat the trial’s negative publicity. Now that the case has been compressed into a monthlong process of deciding whether Rolling will face the electric chair, the bigger media outlets have retreated. And, with them, so has the stigma.

With the pressure of a trial gone, the victims’ families and friends can continue the healing process that few of us will ever fully understand. They are the ones who waited 3 1/2 years to find out if Rolling was the person who destroyed their lives by taking away a loved one.

The only people who gain nothing from Rolling’s admission are the victims themselves. Christa Leigh Hoyt, Sonja Larson, Tracy Paules, Christina Powell, Manuel Taboada. They are the names inscribed on several memorials, including honorary trees on UF’s campus and a place on the 34th Street Wall, a quarter-mile stretch of graffiti-covered cement.

They will be with Gainesville forever.

As will the fear.