The Serial Killer Who Inspired Scream Terrorized My College Town 35 Years Ago and Left Me Too Terrified to Sleep (Exclusive)

I’ll never forget the late-August night in 1990 when my roommate Stephanie called me on the phone sobbing. It was on a Tuesday shortly before the start of the fall semester at the University of Florida in Gainesville, and I was sitting in my office at The Independent Florida Alligator, UF’s student-run newspaper, working on the latest issue of the “Applause” entertainment section, which I edited. At first, Stephanie could barely get any words out, but I had a sneaking, stomach-churning feeling. I knew why she was calling.

Over the course of the previous week, a serial killer had been terrorizing our college town. He murdered five students — four female, one male — breaking into their apartments at night, raping the women and stabbing all five to death. He posed their bodies after killing them, and in a horrific, gruesome twist, he decapitated one of his victims and placed her head on a mantle near her corpse. News of the murders traveled quickly and somewhat inaccurately: At one point, my friends and I thought he’d decapitated all of his victims and put their heads on display in their living rooms.

He didn’t, but the truth didn’t offer any consolation.

It felt like we were living in a real-life horror movie — and in fact, the murder spree of the “Gainesville Ripper,” as he would later come to be known, eventually launched books, documentaries and movies, and inspired Kevin Williamson to write the 1996 film Scream. Making matters more terrifying than any nightmare on Elm Street was the fact that the killer’s five victims were young local students like Stephanie and me, and they lived in the part of Gainesville where we lived. 

The four female victims — roommates Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, Christa Hoyt, 18, and Tracy Paules, 23 — were all White brunettes. The fifth victim was Manny Taboada, 23. He was Paules’ roommate, and he happened to be in the wrong place — at home sleeping in his own bed — at the wrong time.

Stephanie and I lived in a two-bedroom apartment in a secluded one-story duplex adjacent to a heavily wooded area. Although the five murders happened over the course of just four days, Gainesville would be on high alert for weeks. Every time I came home, whether it was daytime or at night, I was terrified the killer might be lurking in the dark behind our apartment, waiting to strike. Or maybe he was living right next door. We didn’t really know our neighbors, and in such fraught times, extreme fear and trust can become mutually exclusive.

Stephanie’s tearful phone call came the day police revealed the identities of the last two victims, Paules and Taboada. It was the first time we’d spoken all day, and I knew she wouldn’t have called me at work unless it was something more personal than the latest death report. She managed to stop crying long enough to get some words out. 

“Jeremy, I knew one of the girls,” she said before bursting into tears again. “We had classes together. We were friends.”

After days of uncertainty and fear, it sounded like Stephanie had reached her breaking point, and I wasn’t far behind. She said her mother, who lived in Gainesville but outside the killer’s apparent zone of interest, was insisting that we spend the night at her place and stay there until the police caught the monster responsible for the murders. I spent one or two nights in a guest bedroom, but I didn’t sleep at all. I could only think about my peers who had lost their lives in such a grisly way.

I didn’t feel particularly safe at Stephanie’s mother’s house. There was probably slightly more safety in numbers, but that didn’t mean the killer couldn’t still strike. During the long Labor Day weekend that followed, I would get a brief reprieve from being constantly on-guard and terrified. My friend Alex’s alternative-rock band, Henrietta’s Lovers, was playing a party at Tulane University, and he invited me to join them on a road trip to New Orleans. We had a great time, but we felt like a dark cloud was hanging over our heads the entire time we were away. After a few days, I knew we’d have to return home, and I’d have to face increasingly darker fears.

Late Sunday night when the guys dropped me off at my apartment, the band’s bassist asked if I wanted to crash at his fraternity house for safety in numbers. I didn’t want to be like the doomed kid in horror movies who runs upstairs instead of outside, but I declined. I couldn’t let fear control my life. Stephanie was still staying with her mom, so I would be spending the night alone in our apartment in the middle of the danger zone.

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By this point, the police had released a sketch of the suspected serial killer. It was one of those police sketches that could basically be anyone. But that anonymous face still etched itself in my brain. That night, every time I closed my eyes, I saw it. When I opened my eyes and looked out the window, it was staring at me in the dark on the other side. I had another sleepless night. If I started to doze off, I was jolted awake by that anonymous, frightening face. 

Eventually, Stephanie returned home, and things slowly went back to normal in Gainesville. The police would arrest and release two suspects before finally arresting Danny Rolling, a Shreveport, La., native who would later confess to a triple homicide in his hometown and shooting his own father in the weeks before his Gainesville rampage. 

By the time he went to trial in 1994 and was convicted and sentenced to death for the five Gainesville student murders, I had already graduated and moved to New York City. He was executed by lethal injection in October of 2006, just one month after I left N.Y.C. and moved to Buenos Aires. 

The specter of the summer of fear followed me long after the case was closed. It would remain the single most terrifying episode of my life until February 2007, just a few months after Rolling’s execution, when I was the victim of a home invasion in Buenos Aires. I escaped with just a few bruises from a scuffle on the bathroom floor and a blood-stained hoodie, but vivid memories of fighting for my life against three burglars on the cold, hard tile, one of them wielding a screwdriver threateningly, haunt me to this day — and not just because of the sudden, intense panic I felt that morning.

The Buenos Aires break-in also brought back unwelcome memories of that August in Gainesville. The primary focus of my flashbacks wasn’t the anxiety that had plagued my college town during those few weeks in the late summer of 1990, or Stephanie’s sobbing, or even that creepy police sketch, which, now that I think about it, looked a lot like the one the Buenos Aires police department produced after I went to the station and described the primary assailant to them. Maybe it had embedded itself into my brain more indelibly than I’d thought.

The memory that haunted me most, though, was the strip of head-shot photos of the Gainesville serial killer’s five student victims that ran in the local papers for weeks. Unlike Stephanie, I didn’t know any of them personally. But after fighting for my life in my own home in Buenos Aires, I had an epiphany: Nearly 17 years later, for the first time, I truly understood what must have been going through their minds while they were fighting, bravely but unsuccessfully, for theirs. 

It’s an understanding I wouldn’t wish on anyone — knowing what it’s like to fear your life is about to be snatched away from you by the devil when you have so much of it left to live.