He later confessed to raping several of his victims, committing a triple homicide in his home city of Shreveport, Louisiana, and attempting to murder his father in May 1990.

[3] As a teenager and young adult, Rolling was arrested several times for robberies in Georgia and Alabama and was caught spying on a woman getting dressed.

In the early morning hours, Rolling broke into the apartment shared by two university freshmen, 18-year-old Sonja Larson and 17-year-old Christina Powell.

Rolling murdered Larson, first taping her mouth shut to stifle her screams, and then stabbing her to death with a Ka-Bar knife.

[4] Rolling broke into the apartment of Christa Hoyt, an 18-year-old chemistry honors student at Santa Fe College,[6] prying open a sliding glass door with a screwdriver.

After she had been subdued, he used duct tape to gag her mouth and bind her wrists together behind her back and led her into the bedroom, where he cut the clothes from her body and raped her.

Thinking he may have lost it at the murder scene, he returned there, at which time he decapitated Hoyt, posed her body in a sitting position at the edge of her bed and placed her head on a shelf facing the corpse.

[4] With the exception of Taboada, all of the victims were petite white brunettes with brown eyes, like Rolling's mother.

One suspect was Edward Lewis Humphrey, a 20-year-old University of Florida student who had a history of mental illness and had previously been convicted of felony assault against his grandmother; he was held in custody for five months until a grand jury refused to indict him on the murder charges, citing insufficient evidence.

Detectives noted that there were similarities between the Gainesville murders and those of 55-year-old Tom Grissom, his 24-year-old daughter Julie, and his 8-year-old grandson Sean.

Don Maines, an investigator on the case with the Florida Department of Law Enforcement, traveled to Shreveport in November 1990 because of similarities between the murders committed in Gainesville and murders committed in Shreveport;[9] these included posing of the victims, tape residue on the victims' bodies, and vinegar used to cleanse the bodies.

[9] Three months earlier, in August 1990, Juracich heard a news report about a string of murders as she traveled through the Florida Panhandle.

The report made her think about Rolling, whom she had met at her Louisiana hometown church, and his possible link to the murder of the Grissoms in Shreveport.

"One day, I picked up the phone, I called Crime Stoppers, and I said, 'I think there's one guy y'all need to investigate — Danny Rolling.

'"[9] Investigators responded to the tip and quickly found Rolling, who had been arrested on September 7, 1990, for an Ocala, Florida, supermarket robbery.

They returned to the evidence locker, where the gun, screwdriver, bag of money, and cassette player had been stored, and listened to the tape.

The small camp where he had been living was in a wooded area near apartment complexes frequented by students; investigators discovered audio diaries he had made there alluding to the crimes.

During his trial, Court TV conducted an interview with Rolling's mother from her home, during which his father could be heard shouting off-camera.

[17][18] Rolling was executed by lethal injection at Florida State Prison on October 25, 2006, after the U.S. Supreme Court rejected a last-ditch appeal.

His crime spree inspired screenwriter Kevin Williamson to pen the script of the 1996 slasher film Scream, which became a successful horror franchise.

It also included a segment of Rolling using one of his hearings as an opportunity to publicly display his affection, serenading London in the courtroom.

On January 14, 2022, Discovery+ premiered the paranormal documentary Scream: The True Story, starring Steve Shippy and Cindy Kaza.