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Welcome to the Serial Killer Podcast.
The podcast dedicated to serial killers. Who they were, what they did and how. I am your Norwegian host, Thomas Weyborg Thu. And tonight we venture into my favorite region in the United States of America. The South.
More specifically, we travel to the Sunshine State, the longtime home state of Ernest Hemingway, the great state of Florida. Florida has many distinct areas, from the tropical Keys and the murky waters of the Everglades to the sweetwater wetlands of Gainesville.
And it is at Gainesville we will stop our travels to look closer at a notorious killer, very famous in Florida, but perhaps less known internationally. He murdered eight human beings, ranging in age from a young boy at only eight years old to a fifty-five-year-old man.
His methods were gruesome, and his murderous reign of terror left an entire community trembling in utter fear. This episode is part one out of our two-part expose into the killer, most commonly known as the Gainesville Ripper. But his real name is, of course, none other than Daniel Harold Rowling.
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The bonus content now includes a brand new expose into the Norwegian black metal artist, murderer, and Satanist, Varg Vikernes. A detailed look into the history of the death penalty around the world, a video review of the excellent film Extremely Wicked, Shockingly Evil and Vile,
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On the 20th of August, 1990, the beautiful university town of Gainesville, Florida, was ranked as being the 13th best place to live in the United States by Money Magazine. By the end of the following week,
American papers had renamed the town Grizzly Gainesville, after the bodies of five young students had been discovered, brutally murdered and mutilated as they slept in their apartments. The murders were very reminiscent of another string of gruesome murders of young students sleeping in their dorms just over a decade earlier.
Back then, it was Ted Bundy who had roamed the night, looking to feed his inner ravenous hunger for rape, torture and murder. But Ted had been executed just over a year before. There was a new monster making Florida his domain.
and his one weak end of savagery transformed the excitement and anticipation of the beginning of a new semester into utter terror as hundreds of students fled not knowing if and when the unknown killer would strike again one week later
The media reported that the police had their number one suspect in custody, which launched an ordeal of nightmarish proportions for Edward Humphrey and his family. His was the classic example of being in the wrong place at the wrong time, emotionally disturbed with a long history of strange behavior and violent emotional outbursts.
He had seemed to police and the many witnesses to his antics to be a prime suspect. With no evidence to hold him, the authorities somehow succeeded in stretching the limits of the law and had him locked away while they built their case around him. However, very much to Edward's relief, before the police could produce a murder case fitting him out of whole cloth,
the real killer was caught. Daniel Rowling's story tends to confirm the idea that the environment in which they spend their formative years encourages the development of serial killers. It would be impossible to know the account of Rowling's childhood and not feel compassion for the child who was abused, beaten, and bullied
by an overbearing and disturbed father. It would be impossible not to feel anger towards his mother, who time and time again refused to take any action to protect her own son. Claudia Rowling had married James Rowling in 1953 when she was 19 in Georgia.
She had become pregnant with Daniel only two weeks later, which not only angered James, but disgusted him too. During the course of her pregnancy, James had struck her a number of times. It is quite plausible that he punched her in the stomach several times, causing harm to baby Danny in the womb.
When she was still pregnant, Claudia made her first out of several attempts at leaving James. She moved to her parents' home in Shreveport, but he followed her there, and somehow he managed to promise Claudia better days and behavior, and thus they continued the marriage. After Daniel was born on the 26th of May, 1954,
James's attitude towards fatherhood did not improve. Actually, it deteriorated from day one. Even when Daniel was just a toddler, James would yell at him for imagined misbehavior or for simply annoying James. The first incident of physical abuse occurred when Daniel was at crawling age. Instead of crawling, Danny would pull himself along on his bottom with one leg.
His father was, for some reason, infuriated by this behavior, and one day he grabbed Daniel by his foot and shoved him along the hallway, bouncing him as he went. When Daniel was four and his brother Kevin was three, Claudia again left James and moved to Columbus, Georgia.
She and James had been arguing because James kept turning the television off as Claudia was watching it. The unavoidable argument that followed had ended when James punched her straight in the face, cutting her lip. They remained separated for six months until Claudia succumbed to James' pleadings and promises, and they got back together once again.
They lived in Columbus for four years, until Claudia again left James because of his violent behavior. However, Claudia seemed unable to live on her own, and James was soon back in the family's life again. And they moved again to Shreveport. Claudia has described the relationship between James and his two young sons and her feeble attempts to protect them.
She would try to ensure that boys had already had their dinner before James came home, as he would constantly abuse them for imagined transgressions. According to James, they didn't sit properly, or didn't hold their cutlery properly. He even insisted that they breathe a certain way. This behavior caused the children to always feel as if they were walking on eggshells,
And if the eggshells broke, James would beat the living daylights out of his own children. Fair was the main dish at the rolling dinner table. Apart from rampant and obscene verbal abuse, James would physically punish his children. Sometimes he would whip them bloody with a belt. Other times he would make a fist and grind his knuckle into the tops of their heads until it made the children's hair sticky with blood.
or he would simply punch them until they lay on the floor in utter agony. Whatever the punishment, he would insist that they not cry out under threat of further punishment. As the oldest child, the abuse was directed mostly at Daniel, and was a constant part of his life, with the verbal abuse occurring several times a day, and the whippings at least once or twice a week.
As the boys grew, they became more aware of their father's violence towards Claudia, but their own fear of their father prevented them from helping. They would beg Claudia to leave James and never return, but she didn't. The boys were never allowed birthday parties, and Christmas was always a season of extra anxiety and fear.
as a result of James' abusive behavior towards the whole family. One Christmas, when Daniel was in third grade, the violence was particularly bad. So Claudia packed up her boys and the Christmas tree into the car and left. But of course, she did not manage to stay away for long. Soon after, Claudia had a nervous breakdown and was hospitalized for some time.
During that year, Daniel became very ill and was away from school a great deal. His teacher told Claudia that it would be best for the child if he repeated the year. She also recommended that Danny receive counseling for his nervousness and personality problems. He never received that counseling. Instead, his father berated and beat him savagely for his flaws.
By age eleven, Danny Rowling picked up music to cope with his abusive father. He played guitar and sang hymn-like songs. About this time, his mother was again committed to a hospital, after she had slit her wrists in an unsuccessful suicide attempt, slash cry for help. The family had no support network, and the state offered no solutions back then,
So Danny ended up doing drugs and binging alcohol, which only worsened his already fragile mental state. At age fourteen, Danny's neighbors caught him masturbating outside the window of their young daughter's room. They didn't press charges, but of course, his father beat him savagely for doing that.
Young Danny tried to reel in his burgeoning aberrant lifestyle, and he attended church and struggled to hold down steady work. Failing to do any kind of regular work, he chose to enlist. First he tried enlisting in the Navy, but they wouldn't take him, so he joined the Air Force. However, the military provided him no comfort.
He eventually quit the Air Force after too much drug use, which included taking acid more than 100 times. Following his discharge from the military, Danny managed to marry and begin what appeared to be a normal life. Then, the cycle of abuse continued. At age 23, after being with his wife for four years,
She separated from him after he threatened to kill her. This was in 1977. At six feet two inches, Danny Rowling was a massive, powerful man. Danny turned his despair into anger and savagely raped a woman who closely resembled his ex-wife.
Later that year, he killed a woman in a car accident which troubled him, but also probably lit something sinister deep within his psyche. Rowling was by all accounts a psychopath, or at least a sociopath. He had no regard for lawful behavior and wasn't troubled by any kind of conscience. From the late 1970s to the 1990s,
Rowling committed a series of petty crimes and thefts. He turned to a series of armed robberies to get cash, and subsequently was in and out of the criminal justice systems in Louisiana, Mississippi, Georgia, and Alabama. He broke out of prison several times and was fired and quit jobs just as frequently.
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But it's good to have some things that are non-negotiable. For some, that could be a night out with the boys, chugging beers and having a laugh. For others, it might be an eating night. For me, one non-negotiable activity is researching psychopathic serial killers and making this podcast. Even when we know what makes us happy, it's often near impossible to make time for it.
But when you feel like you have no time for yourself, non-negotiables like therapy are more important than ever. If you're thinking of starting therapy, give BetterHelp a try. It's entirely online, designed to be convenient, flexible, and suited to your schedule. Everyone needs someone to talk to, even psychopaths, even your humble host.
Never skip therapy day with BetterHelp. Visit betterhelp.com slash serialkiller today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P dot com slash serialkiller. And so it was that on the 4th of November, 1989...
Danny Rowling escalated from rape and road rage to outright slaughter. Rowling had watched Julie Grissom as she worked at Dillard's department store in Shreveport's South Park Mall, and he had stalked her on her way home. He had watched the Grissom family's picture-perfect life, and he was jealous.
His anger and sadistic greed flowered within, and he promised himself he would make sure their happiness would end. For a long time, Danny had harbored deviant sexual fantasies involving torture, rape, and murder. Now, he would finally bring those fantasies to life.
Julie Grissom, 24 years old, was brutally raped vaginally and murdered. Her father, Tom Grissom, and his eight-year-old grandson, Sean, were also killed. They were all killed using the same knife, all having suffered extreme pain and fear as they lay tied up, watching their loved ones stabbed and stabbed again and again and again.
before the killer turned his eyes on them, their screams fading out as their life bled out. Rolling positioned Julie's naked body with her legs spread wide, and her hair carefully fanned onto her bed. She was discovered with tape marks on her wrists and bite marks on her breasts.
The bite marks were eerily similar to those left by Ted Bundy on one of his victims, also in Florida, about ten years earlier. However, Ted didn't pose his victims. He simply left them as they lay, or dumped them. For Danny, the arrangement of his victims' corpses would become his signature, and it would only be a few months before he killed and killed again.
Danny Rowling's mind had already snapped, and after killing an entire family, he wanted to kill the source of his own pain, his father. In May of 1990, he shot his 50-year-old father twice and nearly killed him. Though he miraculously survived, James Rowling had been shot in the stomach and head, losing an eye and an ear in the process. Danny was now a wanted man.
So he fled. He changed his identity with papers he stole after breaking into someone's house. He flew Shreveport and took a bus to Sarasota, Florida, to start a new life as Michael Kennedy Jr. in late July of 1990. But running away to Florida didn't cure Danny. It made him worse.
It was 4 p.m. on Sunday, the 26th of August, 1990, when the Gainesville Police Department first became involved in a series of murders. Thirty-five-year-old officer Ray Barber had been about to sign off at the end of his shift when the communications officer called him on his car radio.
There was a complaint about loud music. Not unusual for this time of the year. The new semester was about to begin, and the kids were celebrating, and had been all weekend. The second message gave him no more concern than the first. It was a signal 64, a call to assist a citizen. Both were routine. He would stop by on his way home.
When he drove into the courtyard at the Williamsburg Village Apartments, the maintenance man was there to meet him. As Barber got out of his car, the man told him that he had a couple of anxious parents wanting him to open their daughter's apartment, as they couldn't get her to answer the door, and willing to take responsibility himself, the maintenance man had called the police.
Barber was initially unconcerned, as he received dozens of calls about missing kids, who usually turned up unharmed, with no idea of the anxiety they had caused. It was only when the parents, Frank and Patricia Powell, told him that their daughter, Christina, seventeen years old, had known they were driving over from Jacksonville that morning, and had not been seen by anyone since early Friday morning,
Although her car was still parked nearby, that barber began to feel uneasy. This feeling increased when the Powells told him that Christina's roommate, Sonia Larson, also 17 years old, had not called her mother the day before as arranged. Within minutes, backup had arrived. As many as 20 law enforcement personnel, including Chief of Police Waylon Clifton,
Following closely on their heels was the media. Lieutenant Sadie Darnell was given the task of being media spokesperson. All she could tell them was that two young women had been murdered after someone apparently forced their way through the door sometime between 11.30 p.m. the 23rd of August and 4 p.m. the 26th of August.
Long before the first headlines could be printed, word of the murders had spread through the William Berg village apartments. Although the police had not publicly released their names, the crowds that had gathered were soon whispering that the girls were freshmen, one from Palm Beach and the other from Jacksonville. No one knew them. All wondered how this could have happened without anybody hearing anything.
one neighbor would recall that he had heard someone showering and playing loud music early on friday morning the song being played had been george michael's faith then there had been a loud banging sound he assumed that girls had been hanging pictures on the wall
Spectators watched as a young woman walked from her car towards the building where the two victims had been found. She had been out of town over the weekend and had heard nothing of the day's events. When she approached the door to her building, the uniformed officer on duty asked her name. When she told him it was Elsa Strepp, he called a plainclothes officer over.
Referring to her notebook, the two men talked in whispered tones. Elsa was escorted from the scene and taken to the Alcua County Crisis Center. Once inside, she was told that her roommates, Christina Powell and Sonia Larson, had been murdered. She almost collapsed from the shock. It was some time before it struck her just how closely she had come.
to meeting the same fate as her two friends. As police continued to work into the night, questioning other residents, checking for fingerprints and other clues, further details of the crimes began to circulate. One of the girls had been mutilated somehow, something to do with her breasts.
The fear and panic began to spread as the story traveled beyond the apartment block to the rest of the community. Before police had even finished packing up and sealing the area, they were called to another site where they were awaited by deputies Keith O'Hara and Gail Barber from the Alakua County Sheriff's Office.
Gail Barber had spent the earlier part of the evening with her husband, Ray Barber, after he had made a gruesome discovery of Christina and Sonia's bodies. She would have liked to stay with him longer, but she was on a roaster for the midnight shift. She hadn't been on long before dispatch had called to ask them to drop by Christa Lee Hoyt's apartment, just in case.
"'Eighteen-year-old Christa worked the midnight shift as a records clerk at the Alacua County Sheriff's Office. She hadn't arrived for work and wasn't answering her phone. It was twelve-thirty a.m. Gail knew Christa well and was sure that there would be some logical explanation for why she hadn't called in.'
The chances of two people from the same family being present at two separate murder discoveries in such a short space of time would be just too coincidental. When O'Hara and Barber knocked on Krista's front door, and there was no answer, they were almost relieved. She's probably left for work already, they told themselves. Then they saw her car.
An older model Nissan Sentra parked nearby. They knocked again and then tried the door. It was locked. Hearing the noise, manager Albert Hoover came out to investigate. The three of them went out to the back of the apartment. Hoover knew something was wrong the moment he saw that the gate had been damaged and the chain link fence was down.
As O'Hara and Barber went further into the backyard, they told Hoover to wait around the front for them. Once they established that there was no one in the yard, they tried the glass sliding door. It was locked from the inside. They noticed that the bamboo shades over the door did not reach the floor. They bent down on their hands and knees to peer under the curtain.
through the beam of the flashlight they could see what appeared to be a naked body seated on the edge of the bed it was bent over at the waist with a small pool of blood at the feet which were still clad in shoes and socks they came to the shocking realization that the body exhibited a very particular characteristic it was missing its head
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And so ends part one in the saga of the Gainesville Ripper. Next week I bring to you Danny Rowling's further crimes and ultimate fate. So, as they say in the land of radio, stay tuned. This podcast would not be possible if it had not been for my dear patrons who pledge their hard-earned money every month.
There are especially a few of those patrons I would like to thank in person. These patrons are my 18 most loyal patrons. They have contributed for at least the last 32 episodes. And their names are...
PJ, Russell, Sam, Sarah, and Troy. You really helped produce this show and you have my deepest gratitude. Thank you.
If you wish to join this exclusive club of TSK producers, go to theserialkillerpodcast.com slash donate and pledge $15 or more to have your name read live on this show. Thank you, good night, and good luck.