I, too, have been waiting for this for a long time.
And before I start, I will ask everyone also to remember Danny Rolling's victims in Louisiana (although he was never brought back to his hometown, Shreveport, LA, for prosecution):
Julie Grissom
Tom Grissom
Sean Grissom
Okay, here goes (and please forgive my rambling
) . Back in 1988-89 I lived with my husband and two small children on the same block in Shreveport, Louisiana as Danny Rolling. I moved from that neighborhood in approximately July 1989, several months before he murdered the Grissom family.
One day I began to notice that
every day this guy would be out in his yard (a police car was parked there, so who would think anything sinister?) waving at me on my way home from work and from picking up my babies from childcare. Well, being the naive country girl I was at that time, naturally I returned his waves (that is what Southern country people do). I never gave it a second thought, didn't even bother mentioning to my husband. The only time I ever heard anything else mentioned about him was when my husband and our neighbor (who both had muscle cars) would talk about the guy on the corner with the nice-looking Chevelle. They even tried to approach him once for "car talk," but my husband said he just gave them the brushoff and they said well, screw him, whatever.
Well, time rocks along and we move to another neighborhood, and then we hear about the heinous murders of the Grissom family. I distinctly remember that my husband was working the graveyard shift then and I had him install a double deadbolt on our back door, which had windows in it. Then, we heard news reports about some guy named Danny Rolling shooting his father, a policeman, and fleeing. I had no idea who this was and didn't pay much attention to it at all, just another story on the news. Then after the Gainesville murders and Danny Rolling's subsequent arrest, my husband said "Don't you remember that guy, he's the one who lived on the corner and had that old Chevelle?" I said, "You mean the one who used to wave at me every day on my way home from work? I thought he was just a friendly neighborhood guy." Needless to say, that was not the case. At that time, it creeped me out pretty bad.
Well, more time passes and we move back to our hometown in the country to get our children away from the city schools. Anywho, my husband had subsequently gone into cable/satellite TV work and we had one of those monstrous 10-feet satellite dishes and my husband knew how to tune it to all kinds of programming besides just your regular cable channels. One day while transponder-surfing, he came upon this FBI training video that was being broadcast to local LE departments regarding the Gainesville and Shreveport murders. My husband kept trying to get me to watch, but I couldn't bring myself to watch because I kept thinking about how Danny Rolling had waited for me every day, just to wave at me, just too creepy for me. The video showed the Shreveport crime scenes and (I think) even LE interviews with Rolling. On the video, it was disclosed that Rolling would break into neighborhood houses, rummage around, fix himself a sandwich, take a bite out of the sandwich and place it back in the refrigerator, and maybe steal some panties or something equally perverted.
Okay, so then my husband reminded me of the time we were out of town for a few days, came home and found our kitchen window had been broken and there was a half-eaten sandwich in the refrigerator. My husband had thought at the time that one of his buddies who had a house key had done it for a joke or maybe even been hungry, but no one ever owned up to it, and we just kind of blew it off and thought the window maybe had been broken before and we just hadn't noticed it. (Remember the naive country kids part here).
I just kind of was completely shocked and to this day I have never read any of the books written about and by Danny Rolling, for fear of what I might find. I am also hesitant to share this story because it sounds so implausible, but every word is 100% true. I was also always hesitant to put it out on the web cause what if Rolling somehow escaped death row and hunted me down?
So for everyone who believes that evil in the heart, no matter what the cause, should be coddled and excused, I think you are tragically wrong. My family could have easily been four more victims of Daniel Harold Rolling.
I, for one, will feel relief and and some sense of closure when this pseudohuman is exterminated.
