Post by CCADP on Aug 26, 2005 7:35:55 GMT -5
15 Years Ago, Terror Stalked Gainesville
By BOB ARNDORFER
New York Times Regional Newspapers
First of three parts
GAINESVILLE -- Some of the infamous and sacred symbols of the terrorism that began in Gainesville 15 years ago today are changing.
Construction gates block entrances to the olive-drab ghost town on Archer Road named Gatorwood Apartments. The sprawling complex has been closed in preparation for razing or remodeling.
It was in Gatorwood apartment No. 1203 that confessed serial killer Danny Rolling committed his final two murders of five college students in late August 1990 -- those of Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both 23 and from Miami.
A few blocks west, Southwest 24th Avenue, little more than a lane that connects Southwest 34th Street to 43rd Street, has become the center of a community debate over widening the road to enable expansion of the nearby Butler Plaza shopping center.
Inside a khaki-colored duplex apartment on Southwest 24th Avenue -- a block west of 34th Street and a short hike from the killer's wooded campsite -- Rolling murdered Christa Hoyt of Archer, an 18-year-old Santa Fe Community College student. Up a hill a half mile to the north, at the summit of the 34th Street graffiti wall, the 15-yearold painted memorial to the five murdered students today is as often painted over as not. The 25foot-long, framed panel presumably is defiled unintentionally by people too young to know anything about the savage crimes on the eve of the 1990 fall semester at the University of Florida and SFCC.
Gatorwood, Southwest 24th Avenue and The Wall. Each in its way is a monument to Gainesville's darkest hour, a time when palpable fear stalked the city for months and threw it into the harsh spotlight of national notoriety.
Amid change, however, those monuments illustrate how time, and life, go on.
That's now being demonstrated all over town as students arrive in Gainesville to start or continue their college careers. They're settling in, gearing up for studies and embarking on new beginnings.
Just as did five other students in August 1990:
SONJA LARSON, 18, a UF freshman from Deerfield Beach, and her Williamsburg Village Apartments roommate, CHRISTINA POWELL, 17, a UF freshman from Jacksonville. Their bodies -- the first to be discovered -- were found Aug. 26, 1990, the Sunday before classes began.
CHRISTA HOYT, a records clerk for the Alachua County Sheriff's Office who planned to go into forensic investigation, whose body was discovered the next day.
TRACY PAULES, entering her senior year at UF and planning to go to law school, and MANUEL "MANNY" TABOADA, a SFCC transfer who planned to major in architecture. Their bodies were found Aug. 28.
SURVIVAL BY APPEAL
Fifteen years after the murders and more than 11 years after he was sentenced to death for them, life goes on, too, for Rolling.
Now 51, he remains on death row in Union Correctional Institution west of Starke, less than 40 miles from the scenes of his heinous rampage, which included the decapitation, mutilation and rape of some of his victims. Outside the razor-wire fencing, Rolling's appeals of his 1994 death sentence continue to drag on.
He recently lost the latest motion in his drive to get his sentence overturned. After confessing to the crimes in early 1993, Rolling changed his not guilty plea to guilty in a Gainesville courtroom on Feb. 15, 1994. He was sentenced to death two months later.
In July in Tallahassee, the U.S. District Court of Appeals in the Northern District of Florida -which received the case three years ago this month -- denied Rolling's petition to have his sentence set aside.
Rolling's lawyers had contended that he should be given a new sentencing hearing because it was impossible for him to have gotten an impartial jury in the Gainesville area. He also questioned the constitutionality of Florida's death penalty.
Court records indicate that Rolling plans to file a new appeal soon with a federal court in Atlanta, the last stop before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rolling also is a suspect in the 1989 stabbing deaths of an 8year-old boy, his mother and grandfather in Shreveport, La., Rolling's hometown. Louisiana officials didn't pursue an arrest warrant in that case because of Rolling's case in Florida, said a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office in Shreveport.
Given the legal questions involved, it's conceivable that Rolling's appeals could be sent back to state courts, and more years could pass before his case is resolved.
`YOU'RE GOING DOWN IN FIVE!'
Some members of the victims' families see cruel irony in the slow pace of justice.
"It's really sad that Christa's dad is no longer here," said Dianna Hoyt of Archer, Christa Hoyt's stepmother. "One of the reasons he got ill was because of Christa's death, and it was one of the reasons he passed away -- he died of a broken heart."
Her husband, Gary Hoyt, turned 53 Aug. 28, 1990 -- the day after his daughter's body was found. He died in 2000 at age 63.
"And to think that he passed on, and for (Rolling) the appeal process is going on and on . . . it's so sad," said Hoyt, 61, a pediatric registered nurse at Shands at UF.
Rolling also has outlived Jim Larson, Sonja Larson's father. He died of colon cancer in 1996, a death his widow thinks was advanced by his daughter's murder.
"I think it was pushed ahead by his sorrow," said Ada Larson, 67, a retired teacher who lives part of the year in Ohio and the other part in Deerfield Beach, south of Boca Raton.
"How much longer for these appeals?" she said. "It took two to three years for his (last) appeal, and just last month they denied it. They sent me like 40 pages from that hearing. I read the whole thing and it's just a lot of rehash of the same things. It's just ridiculous."
The day Rolling was sentenced to death in 1994, Mario Taboada of Miami stood in the courtroom, held out his left hand with fingers and thumb extended and shouted at the man who killed his younger brother, "Five years -- you're going down in five!"
Eleven years and four months have passed since Taboada made his dramatic gesture in court.
He told The Sun recently that the endless delays in carrying out Rolling's death sentence are beyond frustrating. They're spurring him to greater involvement in helping bring about Rolling's execution.
"I'm thinking about becoming more active in expediting this," said Taboada, 44, an account executive at WXDJ-FM, a tropical/Latin-music radio station in Miami. "I want to do whatever I can to make it happen.
"I've said this before and I'll say it again: I'd like to refer to Danny Rolling in the same tense as my brother -- in the past tense," he said.
NO DETERRENT
Even some people outside the victims' families are frustrated and angered by the legal delays.
"What 15 years teaches us is that Florida has an absurd, inefficient and costly legal system," said Sadie Darnell, a retired Gainesville Police Department captain who was the ever-present voice of GPD during the studentmurders investigation, and a friend to -- and advocate for -the victims' families ever since. "If I were a judge or jury and pronounced this very weighty decision, I'd expect that sentence to be carried out at least within one's lifetime.
"Two of the victims' fathers are dead," said Darnell, who earlier this month returned to GPD in a civilian capacity as a community relations coordinator. "The fact that his sentence has not been carried out is a chronic, painful reality for the families."
Spencer Mann was Darnell's counterpart when he served as public information officer for the Alachua County Sheriff's Office at the time of the murders.
"It's been very frustrating that the appellate process has dragged on so long, especially for the victims' families," said Mann, who in 1998 joined the 8th Judicial Circuit State Attorney's Office in Gainesville as an investigator and spokesman. "It's very close to working itself out, but it shouldn't take this many years to get there."
Former GPD Chief Wayland Clifton said there likely are "several years yet to go" in Rolling's appeals process.
"From my perspective, that's far, far too long," said Clifton, who served as chief during the student murders and the investigation. "It literally has no deterrent value if the perpetrator is caught and given the death penalty but is still alive 16 or 17 years later."
`PERHAPS THE MOST DANGEROUS
PLACE IN AMERICA'
Early in 1990, John Lombardi was named the school's new president. Steve Spurrier began his tenure as head football coach. That August, Gainesville learned that Money Magazine had selected the city as the 13th best place to live in the United States.
Among the criteria for the magazine honor was the city's "safe streets."
Mann recalled how the city and campus were on an emotional high as the fall semester approached.
"When the murders occurred, it knocked the community's feet out from under it," he said.
Within a week of what headlines called "the Southwest Slayings," as the national news media descended on the city with their fleets of satellite trucks, then-CBS News anchor Dan Rather called Gainesville "perhaps the most dangerous place in America."
The Tampa chapter of the Guardian Angels, a volunteer group of crime fighters that got its start in New York City, sent a delegation to Gainesville to patrol apartment complexes. Nine days after the final two bodies were found, talk-show host Phil Donahue drew a large audience at the Downtown Community Plaza as he did a live broadcast on the student murders.
CLIMATE OF FEAR
Even as the thickening mist of 15 years tries to obscure the details, some who experienced that period in Gainesville readily recall how terrifying life was in the months before Nov. 15, 1991, when Rolling was indicted and formally charged with the murders.
"There was a fear in this community that was overwhelming," said Jeanne Singer, chief assistant state attorney for the 8th Judicial Circuit, who in 1993 was assigned to build the prosecution's case in the Paules-Taboada murders. "I had young children then and I didn't let them play in the front yard."
With each new discovery of bodies, the community's fear escalated. Singer recalled how sales of guns and Mace skyrocketed during that period.
The city was crawling with police. Dozens of investigators were assembled into a task force, including members of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Florida Highway Patrol.
Clifton once said he wanted the killer, while still at large, to feel like Gainesville was a police state.
Locksmiths were kept busy fortifying doors, and many people installed home security systems. Almost every house with a porch light had it turned on every night.
Within days of the student murders, a double murder occurred in Melrose. It turned out they were unrelated to the Gainesville killings, but the Melrose murders only intensified the profound dread that a serial killer was on the loose.
UF ramped up its Student Nighttime Auxiliary Patrol, which provided escorts to students as they walked across campus. Demand for the service was so great that the university hired and trained dozens of new escorts.
Santa Fe Community College instituted a similar campus escort service in response to the murders.
On the campuses and off, people sought safety in numbers, doubling and tripling up with roommates or relatives. Frightened people swamped GPD and the Sheriff's Office with calls about a strange sound or suspicious activity.
"Rumors were flying like crazy," said Linda Gray, who as director of UF's News and Public Affairs department served as spokeswoman for the university.
"At the time, it was deemed probably the worst crisis to hit a college campus in modern times," said Gray, who today is assistant vice president and director of News and Information at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. "There had been murders and shootings on campuses before, but in most of those cases the perpetrators were immediately known. This was a situation where five bodies were found over a three-day period . . . and Danny Rolling was not charged for almost a year."
It was in the days before widespread cell phone use, and parents and students weren't able to be in instantaneous contact as they are today. UF set up a bank of phones in alumni offices, Gray said, and received thousands of calls each day from parents wanting to know if their children were safe.
As vice president for student affairs at the time of the murders, Art Sandeen helped coordinate UF's response to the crisis.
"There was no precedent for this scale of tragedy, at least in my experience," said Sandeen, professor in UF's College of Education's Department of Educational Leadership, Policy and Foundations. "Parents and students didn't know what to do."
Lombardi's leadership and constant visibility "really enabled the institution to continue," Sandeen said.
"And Mike Browne, who was student body president -- we couldn't have been more fortunate during those terrible days to have a leader like Mike. I'll never forget a press conference in the Reitz Union in which Mike said, `This is my university and they're not going to take it away from me.' And he urged his fellow students to return."
UF didn't cancel classes, but instead said attendance was optional. The school also dispensed with the deadlines for tuition and other fees.
"Lombardi said we're not going to ask students to pay their fees, drop and add courses and make other life decisions when we don't know what a crazy man is going to do," Gray said.
She said that after initially going home for a few days, most UF students returned for the fall semester. About 500 didn't return in the fall, she said, but most of them came back for the spring semester in 1991.
Clifton, who today is chief probation officer for the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice in the 8th Judicial Circuit, said the experience of 1990 led to changes that remain in place 15 years later.
"Security is a lot better now," he said. "We're all more conscious about the transition from one semester to another. It's a time when the community is very vulnerable because we've got 60,000 new people coming to town."
Bob Arndorfer writes for The Gainesville Sun.
By BOB ARNDORFER
New York Times Regional Newspapers
First of three parts
GAINESVILLE -- Some of the infamous and sacred symbols of the terrorism that began in Gainesville 15 years ago today are changing.
Construction gates block entrances to the olive-drab ghost town on Archer Road named Gatorwood Apartments. The sprawling complex has been closed in preparation for razing or remodeling.
It was in Gatorwood apartment No. 1203 that confessed serial killer Danny Rolling committed his final two murders of five college students in late August 1990 -- those of Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both 23 and from Miami.
A few blocks west, Southwest 24th Avenue, little more than a lane that connects Southwest 34th Street to 43rd Street, has become the center of a community debate over widening the road to enable expansion of the nearby Butler Plaza shopping center.
Inside a khaki-colored duplex apartment on Southwest 24th Avenue -- a block west of 34th Street and a short hike from the killer's wooded campsite -- Rolling murdered Christa Hoyt of Archer, an 18-year-old Santa Fe Community College student. Up a hill a half mile to the north, at the summit of the 34th Street graffiti wall, the 15-yearold painted memorial to the five murdered students today is as often painted over as not. The 25foot-long, framed panel presumably is defiled unintentionally by people too young to know anything about the savage crimes on the eve of the 1990 fall semester at the University of Florida and SFCC.
Gatorwood, Southwest 24th Avenue and The Wall. Each in its way is a monument to Gainesville's darkest hour, a time when palpable fear stalked the city for months and threw it into the harsh spotlight of national notoriety.
Amid change, however, those monuments illustrate how time, and life, go on.
That's now being demonstrated all over town as students arrive in Gainesville to start or continue their college careers. They're settling in, gearing up for studies and embarking on new beginnings.
Just as did five other students in August 1990:
SONJA LARSON, 18, a UF freshman from Deerfield Beach, and her Williamsburg Village Apartments roommate, CHRISTINA POWELL, 17, a UF freshman from Jacksonville. Their bodies -- the first to be discovered -- were found Aug. 26, 1990, the Sunday before classes began.
CHRISTA HOYT, a records clerk for the Alachua County Sheriff's Office who planned to go into forensic investigation, whose body was discovered the next day.
TRACY PAULES, entering her senior year at UF and planning to go to law school, and MANUEL "MANNY" TABOADA, a SFCC transfer who planned to major in architecture. Their bodies were found Aug. 28.
SURVIVAL BY APPEAL
Fifteen years after the murders and more than 11 years after he was sentenced to death for them, life goes on, too, for Rolling.
Now 51, he remains on death row in Union Correctional Institution west of Starke, less than 40 miles from the scenes of his heinous rampage, which included the decapitation, mutilation and rape of some of his victims. Outside the razor-wire fencing, Rolling's appeals of his 1994 death sentence continue to drag on.
He recently lost the latest motion in his drive to get his sentence overturned. After confessing to the crimes in early 1993, Rolling changed his not guilty plea to guilty in a Gainesville courtroom on Feb. 15, 1994. He was sentenced to death two months later.
In July in Tallahassee, the U.S. District Court of Appeals in the Northern District of Florida -which received the case three years ago this month -- denied Rolling's petition to have his sentence set aside.
Rolling's lawyers had contended that he should be given a new sentencing hearing because it was impossible for him to have gotten an impartial jury in the Gainesville area. He also questioned the constitutionality of Florida's death penalty.
Court records indicate that Rolling plans to file a new appeal soon with a federal court in Atlanta, the last stop before the U.S. Supreme Court.
Rolling also is a suspect in the 1989 stabbing deaths of an 8year-old boy, his mother and grandfather in Shreveport, La., Rolling's hometown. Louisiana officials didn't pursue an arrest warrant in that case because of Rolling's case in Florida, said a spokeswoman for the district attorney's office in Shreveport.
Given the legal questions involved, it's conceivable that Rolling's appeals could be sent back to state courts, and more years could pass before his case is resolved.
`YOU'RE GOING DOWN IN FIVE!'
Some members of the victims' families see cruel irony in the slow pace of justice.
"It's really sad that Christa's dad is no longer here," said Dianna Hoyt of Archer, Christa Hoyt's stepmother. "One of the reasons he got ill was because of Christa's death, and it was one of the reasons he passed away -- he died of a broken heart."
Her husband, Gary Hoyt, turned 53 Aug. 28, 1990 -- the day after his daughter's body was found. He died in 2000 at age 63.
"And to think that he passed on, and for (Rolling) the appeal process is going on and on . . . it's so sad," said Hoyt, 61, a pediatric registered nurse at Shands at UF.
Rolling also has outlived Jim Larson, Sonja Larson's father. He died of colon cancer in 1996, a death his widow thinks was advanced by his daughter's murder.
"I think it was pushed ahead by his sorrow," said Ada Larson, 67, a retired teacher who lives part of the year in Ohio and the other part in Deerfield Beach, south of Boca Raton.
"How much longer for these appeals?" she said. "It took two to three years for his (last) appeal, and just last month they denied it. They sent me like 40 pages from that hearing. I read the whole thing and it's just a lot of rehash of the same things. It's just ridiculous."
The day Rolling was sentenced to death in 1994, Mario Taboada of Miami stood in the courtroom, held out his left hand with fingers and thumb extended and shouted at the man who killed his younger brother, "Five years -- you're going down in five!"
Eleven years and four months have passed since Taboada made his dramatic gesture in court.
He told The Sun recently that the endless delays in carrying out Rolling's death sentence are beyond frustrating. They're spurring him to greater involvement in helping bring about Rolling's execution.
"I'm thinking about becoming more active in expediting this," said Taboada, 44, an account executive at WXDJ-FM, a tropical/Latin-music radio station in Miami. "I want to do whatever I can to make it happen.
"I've said this before and I'll say it again: I'd like to refer to Danny Rolling in the same tense as my brother -- in the past tense," he said.
NO DETERRENT
Even some people outside the victims' families are frustrated and angered by the legal delays.
"What 15 years teaches us is that Florida has an absurd, inefficient and costly legal system," said Sadie Darnell, a retired Gainesville Police Department captain who was the ever-present voice of GPD during the studentmurders investigation, and a friend to -- and advocate for -the victims' families ever since. "If I were a judge or jury and pronounced this very weighty decision, I'd expect that sentence to be carried out at least within one's lifetime.
"Two of the victims' fathers are dead," said Darnell, who earlier this month returned to GPD in a civilian capacity as a community relations coordinator. "The fact that his sentence has not been carried out is a chronic, painful reality for the families."
Spencer Mann was Darnell's counterpart when he served as public information officer for the Alachua County Sheriff's Office at the time of the murders.
"It's been very frustrating that the appellate process has dragged on so long, especially for the victims' families," said Mann, who in 1998 joined the 8th Judicial Circuit State Attorney's Office in Gainesville as an investigator and spokesman. "It's very close to working itself out, but it shouldn't take this many years to get there."
Former GPD Chief Wayland Clifton said there likely are "several years yet to go" in Rolling's appeals process.
"From my perspective, that's far, far too long," said Clifton, who served as chief during the student murders and the investigation. "It literally has no deterrent value if the perpetrator is caught and given the death penalty but is still alive 16 or 17 years later."
`PERHAPS THE MOST DANGEROUS
PLACE IN AMERICA'
Early in 1990, John Lombardi was named the school's new president. Steve Spurrier began his tenure as head football coach. That August, Gainesville learned that Money Magazine had selected the city as the 13th best place to live in the United States.
Among the criteria for the magazine honor was the city's "safe streets."
Mann recalled how the city and campus were on an emotional high as the fall semester approached.
"When the murders occurred, it knocked the community's feet out from under it," he said.
Within a week of what headlines called "the Southwest Slayings," as the national news media descended on the city with their fleets of satellite trucks, then-CBS News anchor Dan Rather called Gainesville "perhaps the most dangerous place in America."
The Tampa chapter of the Guardian Angels, a volunteer group of crime fighters that got its start in New York City, sent a delegation to Gainesville to patrol apartment complexes. Nine days after the final two bodies were found, talk-show host Phil Donahue drew a large audience at the Downtown Community Plaza as he did a live broadcast on the student murders.
CLIMATE OF FEAR
Even as the thickening mist of 15 years tries to obscure the details, some who experienced that period in Gainesville readily recall how terrifying life was in the months before Nov. 15, 1991, when Rolling was indicted and formally charged with the murders.
"There was a fear in this community that was overwhelming," said Jeanne Singer, chief assistant state attorney for the 8th Judicial Circuit, who in 1993 was assigned to build the prosecution's case in the Paules-Taboada murders. "I had young children then and I didn't let them play in the front yard."
With each new discovery of bodies, the community's fear escalated. Singer recalled how sales of guns and Mace skyrocketed during that period.
The city was crawling with police. Dozens of investigators were assembled into a task force, including members of the Florida Department of Law Enforcement and the Florida Highway Patrol.
Clifton once said he wanted the killer, while still at large, to feel like Gainesville was a police state.
Locksmiths were kept busy fortifying doors, and many people installed home security systems. Almost every house with a porch light had it turned on every night.
Within days of the student murders, a double murder occurred in Melrose. It turned out they were unrelated to the Gainesville killings, but the Melrose murders only intensified the profound dread that a serial killer was on the loose.
UF ramped up its Student Nighttime Auxiliary Patrol, which provided escorts to students as they walked across campus. Demand for the service was so great that the university hired and trained dozens of new escorts.
Santa Fe Community College instituted a similar campus escort service in response to the murders.
On the campuses and off, people sought safety in numbers, doubling and tripling up with roommates or relatives. Frightened people swamped GPD and the Sheriff's Office with calls about a strange sound or suspicious activity.
"Rumors were flying like crazy," said Linda Gray, who as director of UF's News and Public Affairs department served as spokeswoman for the university.
"At the time, it was deemed probably the worst crisis to hit a college campus in modern times," said Gray, who today is assistant vice president and director of News and Information at the University of Central Florida in Orlando. "There had been murders and shootings on campuses before, but in most of those cases the perpetrators were immediately known. This was a situation where five bodies were found over a three-day period . . . and Danny Rolling was not charged for almost a year."
It was in the days before widespread cell phone use, and parents and students weren't able to be in instantaneous contact as they are today. UF set up a bank of phones in alumni offices, Gray said, and received thousands of calls each day from parents wanting to know if their children were safe.
As vice president for student affairs at the time of the murders, Art Sandeen helped coordinate UF's response to the crisis.
"There was no precedent for this scale of tragedy, at least in my experience," said Sandeen, professor in UF's College of Education's Department of Educational Leadership, Policy and Foundations. "Parents and students didn't know what to do."
Lombardi's leadership and constant visibility "really enabled the institution to continue," Sandeen said.
"And Mike Browne, who was student body president -- we couldn't have been more fortunate during those terrible days to have a leader like Mike. I'll never forget a press conference in the Reitz Union in which Mike said, `This is my university and they're not going to take it away from me.' And he urged his fellow students to return."
UF didn't cancel classes, but instead said attendance was optional. The school also dispensed with the deadlines for tuition and other fees.
"Lombardi said we're not going to ask students to pay their fees, drop and add courses and make other life decisions when we don't know what a crazy man is going to do," Gray said.
She said that after initially going home for a few days, most UF students returned for the fall semester. About 500 didn't return in the fall, she said, but most of them came back for the spring semester in 1991.
Clifton, who today is chief probation officer for the Florida Department of Juvenile Justice in the 8th Judicial Circuit, said the experience of 1990 led to changes that remain in place 15 years later.
"Security is a lot better now," he said. "We're all more conscious about the transition from one semester to another. It's a time when the community is very vulnerable because we've got 60,000 new people coming to town."
Bob Arndorfer writes for The Gainesville Sun.