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Speaker 8: You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking
Speaker 8: killers in true crime history and the authors that have
Speaker 8: written about them. Geesy Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker DTK. Every
Speaker 8: week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and
Speaker 8: infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host,
Speaker 8: journalist and author Dan Zupanski.
Speaker 5: Good evening, the true story of the nineteen ninety Gainesville
Speaker 5: student murders in the Killer's Own Words second edition, Murder
Speaker 5: Confessions and Drawings done on death Row in Florida duringing
Speaker 5: the early nineteenses. The man convicted of the vicious murders
Speaker 5: of five college students in Gainesville, Florida, discusses his motivations
Speaker 5: and actions in committing the crimes, reflects on what made
Speaker 5: him into a killer and his struggle to come to
Speaker 5: terms with what he did. Including new prologue, new illustrations,
Speaker 5: and a new preview of the companion volume Beyond the
Speaker 5: Making of a Serial Killer. The book that we're featuring
Speaker 5: this evening is the Making of a Serial Killer second
Speaker 5: edition with my special guest, journalist and author Sondra London.
Speaker 5: Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much
Speaker 5: for this interview. Sondra London.
Speaker 7: Oh damn, it's always a pleasure. You're such a good interviewer.
Speaker 5: Oh, thank you so much. It's always an absolute pleasure.
Speaker 5: You have some of the most unique is not even
Speaker 5: an apt word, but you have definitely I must read
Speaker 5: true crime book, especially here Making of a serial Killer incredible.
Speaker 5: What we talked about is that this is this book. Well,
Speaker 5: you can explain this book originally came out in what year?
Speaker 5: And then tell us now the reason for this new
Speaker 5: second edition Making of a Serial Killer? When was it
Speaker 5: first published? And tell us a little bit about that.
Speaker 7: In nineteen ninety six, Faraoh House published it. And so
Speaker 7: that is the edition that most people are familiar with,
Speaker 7: their selling for a couple of hundred dollars, you know,
Speaker 7: on Amazon, because it's been out of print for many years.
Speaker 7: I had published the original as a independent publisher of
Speaker 7: my own, and I had so many attempts to steal
Speaker 7: my work in progress that I would copyright, oh every
Speaker 7: fifty or one hundred pages, and I called it the
Speaker 7: Rolling Papers, And that is the first copyright it was
Speaker 7: placed on it while it was still a work in progress.
Speaker 5: Now, tell us what is different about this Making of
Speaker 5: a Serial Killer the second edition? And some you mentioned
Speaker 5: that all along the way you copyrighted things because you
Speaker 5: knew that people were trying to steal this information, but
Speaker 5: they were happening it.
Speaker 7: They weren't crying, they were doing it.
Speaker 5: They were stealing it. Yes, And you've just had a
Speaker 5: dramatic example of that recently in the last year or
Speaker 5: two as well, and an author claiming, yeah.
Speaker 7: Yeah, well it's in Europe. So a lot of Americans
Speaker 7: haven't learned about yet the preposterous case of a fraud
Speaker 7: in which all of the art org that Danny Rowling
Speaker 7: did for our volume The Making of a Serial Killer,
Speaker 7: and all of the artwork he did for me, and
Speaker 7: that he signed many many documents giving me the ownership
Speaker 7: of them, and this guy boldly went and published them
Speaker 7: in Europe and twenty and twelve and put out a
Speaker 7: big collection of Danny Rowling's artwork that he got photographed
Speaker 7: for me when he interviewed me, and charging fifty six
Speaker 7: dollars well euros whatever a book since twenty twelve. So
Speaker 7: you would think it was impossible because has my face
Speaker 7: and all the art org and has my name on it,
Speaker 7: dear Sondra, But he still put his name on it
Speaker 7: as the owner and author of the clan. He claimed
Speaker 7: Danny gave it to him right before he died in
Speaker 7: two thousand and six, as if Danny Rowling had all
Speaker 7: about artwork in his cell since nineteen ninety two and
Speaker 7: then when he came to visit him he handed it
Speaker 7: to him. That's how naive he is. He didn't even
Speaker 7: realize you cannot visit someone who is on death watch.
Speaker 7: You have to go through extreme vetting and there's no press.
Speaker 7: It has to be family or or one person only.
Speaker 7: But he just told the most outrageous lies.
Speaker 5: Well, luckily, The Making of a Serial Killer this second
Speaker 5: edition gets people to not only hear it from the
Speaker 5: original the originator being you, and then this added bonuses
Speaker 5: the prologue, the new illustrations, and the new preview of
Speaker 5: the companion volume On the Making of a Serial Killer
Speaker 5: a new cover. Let's get to this most incredible book.
Speaker 5: You say that you share? You share a Pulitzer Prize
Speaker 5: winning historian Douglas Sulfel Freeman his philosophy that the biographer
Speaker 5: should provide no information beyond what his subject possessed at
Speaker 5: a particular moment, so as to take the reader into
Speaker 5: the past as it was when the life was lived,
Speaker 5: rather than to distort the historical record to conform to
Speaker 5: newly formed standard standards and customs, and such is your
Speaker 5: purpose with this book, can you explain?
Speaker 7: Yes, that is an immense challenge because it it's twenty
Speaker 7: five years ago and things have changed and expectations have changed.
Speaker 7: And even at the time it was published, it was
Speaker 7: way out on the edge of freedom of speech in
Speaker 7: terms of publishing things that you might under play by
Speaker 7: calling him politically incorrect. So it was already like that
Speaker 7: when it was published. So to bring it forward into
Speaker 7: today now that occasions some discussions with the owner of
Speaker 7: Farrell House, who had the copyright. And you know Farrell
Speaker 7: House was one man operation which was Adam Portfree and
Speaker 7: when he died, his sister inherited the business. Well, Jessica
Speaker 7: wants Sarah House to be a kinder, gentler publisher, and
Speaker 7: when I wanted to do a second edition, the senter
Speaker 7: the letter and if she chooses not to do it,
Speaker 7: then I get the copyright back. See. And so she
Speaker 7: started actually reading the book because she was not involved
Speaker 7: in the business when Adam bought it. And then she
Speaker 7: came to the part where Danny was raving about his
Speaker 7: enthusiasm for rape and she says, aha, aha, you can't
Speaker 7: publish that, you know, And I just I have developed
Speaker 7: a philosophy about censorship, and very much so when it
Speaker 7: comes to let's say, presentations involving violence, and I feel
Speaker 7: that cleaning it up or sexing it up, or making
Speaker 7: it palatable for many, many people, it creates a very
Speaker 7: dangerous motif and it creates a current of belief that
Speaker 7: enhances the glamour of my and other violence because it's
Speaker 7: a cheap, dramatic device, a very satisfying way to resolve
Speaker 7: any conflict. We're constantly said with these scenarios, and people
Speaker 7: are given what they want, they show what they like
Speaker 7: by what they buy, they make it more of it.
Speaker 7: And so I feel that a lot of that influence
Speaker 7: would get someone to cross the line over into something
Speaker 7: that would ruin their life forever and they could never
Speaker 7: be who they were or who they could have become
Speaker 7: because they are guided by these images and stories and
Speaker 7: so forth that don't tell the whole story. And so
Speaker 7: from working with a guy like Danny Rowling, there was
Speaker 7: always the sense of what's suffering that these explosions of
Speaker 7: violence brought on, and how he lost who he was
Speaker 7: and He was very eloquent about that, and I've felt that, look,
Speaker 7: all of this needs to be included, and we the
Speaker 7: reader need to grow in terms of being able to
Speaker 7: incorporate it all into one picture. Then don't just skim
Speaker 7: for the sexy parts and get off. Instead, follow the
Speaker 7: whole storyline where the sexy parts are something that brings
Speaker 7: on a great deal of suffering, that it's inescapable and
Speaker 7: ruins your whole wife.
Speaker 5: Right now, you write, the first week of July nineteen
Speaker 5: ninety two, you received the introductory letter from the high
Speaker 5: profile prisoner Danny Rowling, who had been charged with five
Speaker 5: murders that were committed in nineteen ninety in Gainesville, Florida.
Speaker 5: And Danny Rowland was housed in Florida State Prison next
Speaker 5: to Bobby Lewis. Tell us who Bobby Lewis is and
Speaker 5: your relationship with him, and what Bobby Lewis had shown
Speaker 5: Danny Rowling.
Speaker 7: Bobby Lewis was a murderer from Jacksonville, and when he
Speaker 7: saw all the attention Shaeffer was getting from Killer Fiction,
Speaker 7: he said he wanted me to do his stories because
Speaker 7: they were better than Shaeffer's. And I said, you know,
Speaker 7: you don't get any money, and you had to be
Speaker 7: honest and so forth you had to show a pack
Speaker 7: and everything. He's like, yeah, yes.
Speaker 9: His signs on.
Speaker 7: So from that point I wrote and published with my
Speaker 7: media Queen Impromoter history of being on death Row with
Speaker 7: Ted Bundy and his story of escaping from death Row
Speaker 7: which is why he was on death row with dead
Speaker 7: Bundy because uh, they were both escape risks. So anyway,
Speaker 7: Bobby was had presented himself to me as a good
Speaker 7: guy that was very popular and uh influential in the
Speaker 7: person and could uh get anything money, guns and girls,
Speaker 7: you name it, and UH had a completely hm con
Speaker 7: man type of a uh description of who he was. Well,
Speaker 7: it turns out what he really was was a snitch
Speaker 7: and that where he got all his power was from
Speaker 7: working from the man, and uh was involved in multiple
Speaker 7: situations uh of you know, where the administration would give
Speaker 7: him privileges and then they would get something on a
Speaker 7: inmate and return. So that was who he really was.
Speaker 7: So they placed Danny Rowling next to him on purpose.
Speaker 5: Okay, now before we go okay, but before we go
Speaker 5: a little bit further for everyone that doesn't know this
Speaker 5: entire story and of course you have to include this.
Speaker 5: You mentioned killer fiction, and what we haven't talked about
Speaker 5: is how you come to this. Honestly, you didn't just
Speaker 5: come to true crime and decide to write serial killers
Speaker 5: in prison. So we'll have to go backwards just a
Speaker 5: bit briefly to talk about your relationship when you were
Speaker 5: seventeen years old, I believe, and Gerard Schaeffer, the relationship
Speaker 5: and what you saw in the relationship and why you
Speaker 5: broke it off, and then what you learned a few
Speaker 5: years later about Gerard Schaeffer and his criminal career.
Speaker 7: Well, I don't want to give him too much a mind.
Speaker 7: Today I will try to touch on what I think
Speaker 7: of as irrelevant portions. The Shaeffer was a in prison
Speaker 7: sixteen years on a double homicide, and he had been
Speaker 7: convicted in nineteen seventy three of two murders that he
Speaker 7: was connected to thirty four dead or missing women in addition,
Speaker 7: and so what when that happened, They didn't have the
Speaker 7: name serial killer, and it was developed by Robert Wrestler,
Speaker 7: And as I point out here in this prologue, Robert
Speaker 7: Wrestler based his definition of serial killer in large part
Speaker 7: upon the Schaeffer case. So how did what did that
Speaker 7: had to do with me? Because when I was a
Speaker 7: junior in high school, I met John Shaffer and he
Speaker 7: was one year older than me, and he was my
Speaker 7: study boyfriend for a year. As I turned from a
Speaker 7: junior to a senior, I dated him exclusively. So we
Speaker 7: were both you know, sixteen seventeen eighteen kind of thing.
Speaker 7: And then we broke up. And then nine years later
Speaker 7: was the headlines that this ex that this policeman share
Speaker 7: a deputy share was perpetrating behind the badge. And at
Speaker 7: the same time, this was the Paul Beach post I
Speaker 7: think had had, you know, just pages and pages of
Speaker 7: this story. But the thing that excited everyone so much
Speaker 7: was the writings that they found that he had done,
Speaker 7: and they were about murder and so and now John Schaeffer,
Speaker 7: you know, in the nine years since I knew him
Speaker 7: as a kid, he had gotten two degrees, one in
Speaker 7: criminal justice and one in creative writing. And he worked
Speaker 7: with novelist Harry Crews, who wrote a recommendation for him
Speaker 7: for his writing. So that was that, that was the
Speaker 7: big deal in his murder conviction. So then I went
Speaker 7: along with my life. And then it was years later
Speaker 7: nineteen eighty nine, that technical writing business wasn't going so
Speaker 7: good and along with everything due to economics, and I said, well,
Speaker 7: I want to do something different, in something I can
Speaker 7: put my name on. And so then they executed Ted Bundy.
Speaker 7: That led me to the stranger beside me by Anne Rule,
Speaker 7: and my comment was, shoot, I can write better than her.
Speaker 7: And I knew a serial killer a lot more than
Speaker 7: she did, so I said I could do this, and
Speaker 7: so then I wrote your Shape for in Prison. That
Speaker 7: was February seventh, nineteen eighty nine. It said, do you
Speaker 7: want to write a book. So then that is how
Speaker 7: that got started, because I wanted to figure out what
Speaker 7: in that heck kind of what is going on here
Speaker 7: that I could know someone that well and yet you
Speaker 7: can't tell they have a whole nother life. And I
Speaker 7: wanted to figure out what kind of a mind is this,
Speaker 7: And so it turned into I asked him a question, John,
Speaker 7: do you still write those stories?
Speaker 9: Oh?
Speaker 7: God of his opening pendle his box at that point,
Speaker 7: because after that he began to assault me virtually by
Speaker 7: sending these grossly offensive sex violence stories. And little did
Speaker 7: he know that this is my way of getting in
Speaker 7: him to admit what he had done. He committed himself
Speaker 7: as a killer. So I did. I got coached by
Speaker 7: boy Hazel what Behavior Science Unit, the FI, and he
Speaker 7: was very helpful. Shaeffer was very difficult, and so Shaeffer
Speaker 7: wrote about one part of his stories, so he called
Speaker 7: Stark Stories. Stark is where the electric chair is, and
Speaker 7: Stark Stories was all about atrosities going on in the prison.
Speaker 7: And that's what got me in trouble because it was
Speaker 7: true and it was atrocious, and in fact, I have
Speaker 7: plenty of evidence that Shaeffer himself was murdered by prison
Speaker 7: guards in prison. Well, so that is why I was
Speaker 7: persona non grata in Florida State Prison when Danny Rowling
Speaker 7: came along.
Speaker 9: So back to.
Speaker 7: You know what brought us to this. The difference there
Speaker 7: was Shaeffer's story was old and not really news by
Speaker 7: the time we started working together. But Danny Rolling story
Speaker 7: was a huge news story and I was already working
Speaker 7: for a current affair putting news story. He's all national TV.
Speaker 7: So that's what was different about the Rolling case was
Speaker 7: this whirlwind of intense attention and.
Speaker 9: That was uh.
Speaker 7: How the way that came through was through the good
Speaker 7: offices of Bobby Lewis, and Bobby Lewis was drawn to
Speaker 7: me because he saw what I did with Schaeffer stuff,
Speaker 7: and then he saw what I did with his stuff.
Speaker 7: So he turned me over to Danny. And Danny was
Speaker 7: presented to me by Bobby as quote unquote highly suggestible,
Speaker 7: and I was told he will do anything you tell him.
Speaker 7: And so throughout the rest of all this there was
Speaker 7: Bobby trying to manipulate Danny to Bobby's own benefit, and
Speaker 7: it was kind of, you know, throwing a spoken wheel,
Speaker 7: so to speak. But Bobby continued to play a role there.
Speaker 7: The problem with Bobby was he lied too much, and
Speaker 7: he expected to be the star of the rolling trial.
Speaker 7: But they couldn't use him because they knew what a
Speaker 7: liar he was, so they could only put him on
Speaker 7: for about three minutes to just establish some facts and
Speaker 7: then give him off quick, right, because helied so much.
Speaker 9: So that's Bobby, Sondra.
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Speaker 5: Plus, he talked about the introduction. Bobby Lewis now has
Speaker 5: trying to manipulate the situation. But he shows your writing
Speaker 5: to Danny Rowling and Danny Rowling says, who wrote this?
Speaker 5: He said, well, or who is Sondra London? And he says, well,
Speaker 5: it's my editor. But I think Danny Rowling. As you write,
Speaker 5: Danny Rowling realizes at some point or very very very
Speaker 5: soon after reading this that you are the person to
Speaker 5: write this. Now, with all your experience and with your
Speaker 5: coaching with Roy Hazelwood from the FBI Behavioral Science Unit, prepared,
Speaker 5: no one could be prepared an extraordinary preparedness for this interaction.
Speaker 5: But what was the goal? What was the goal? And
Speaker 5: we know it's in Danny Rowling's own words, and that
Speaker 5: would be shocking to people. But what was your goal?
Speaker 5: And you did write that also, Hazelwood gave you some
Speaker 5: really important advice about what not to do when speaking
Speaker 5: with well.
Speaker 7: As I say about was my goal, and my goals
Speaker 7: were multiple. I still had a mystery to be solved
Speaker 7: of the mind of a serial killer. Now, I graduated
Speaker 7: from a college that put us through independent studies. We
Speaker 7: didn't have classes, and we didn't have raids, and we
Speaker 7: learned how to structure our own studies. So I knew
Speaker 7: I had to go from the particular to the general.
Speaker 7: I knew I had to read all of the published literature,
Speaker 7: and then I started going back the other way, from
Speaker 7: the general to the particular. And by the time I
Speaker 7: had copies of killer fiction, I sent it to some
Speaker 7: name brand serial killers to get their review so I
Speaker 7: could publish it as a blurb. And from that I
Speaker 7: became acquainted with a litany of modern serial killers of
Speaker 7: different types. That helped me broaden my general knowledge.
Speaker 9: So I know what to compare it to.
Speaker 7: Then. But I have a philosophy that I have developed dance.
Speaker 7: Everyone who interviews anyone is always pressing for a generalization,
Speaker 7: and I'm always continually asked you, well, what is it about?
Speaker 7: And so you try to be nice and give them
Speaker 7: what they want because that's what they want, and they
Speaker 7: want to bite, they want to sound, they want you
Speaker 7: to boil it down. But I think that too, does
Speaker 7: a disservice to the phenomenon, particularly of serial murder, because
Speaker 7: of very subtle pathology. And if you start generalizing you,
Speaker 7: it will blind you to what is right in your face.
Speaker 7: And if you please just open your eyes and look
Speaker 7: at the next five human bodies that pass your vision,
Speaker 7: you will know that each one is completely different in
Speaker 7: different ways, and if you worked up their biochemistry, you'd
Speaker 7: note that each one is different. And there's a kind
Speaker 7: of a meme that is often repeated, the serial killers
Speaker 7: are all alike. And I am against that movement and
Speaker 7: whatever pressures were brought to bear to make people say
Speaker 7: things like that, I don't know who got someone to
Speaker 7: say that, because it's not true, and thinking of it
Speaker 7: that way will get you in trouble because you will
Speaker 7: miss the unique human being that you're dealing with here,
Speaker 7: because you're gonna say, oh, well, he's just like John
Speaker 7: Jenifer Will. He's not so then what so it's better
Speaker 7: if you take everything that you've learned from other cases
Speaker 7: and from our studies that have been done, from dialogue
Speaker 7: with experts and authors, and put it on the back burner.
Speaker 7: Don't ignore it, but don't let it get in the
Speaker 7: way of the data that you are privileged to be
Speaker 7: the exclusive holder of. So, because that's what important thing
Speaker 7: of what I My mission was was to get as
Speaker 7: much data as I could and to publish it. Go
Speaker 7: where the data leads, elicit the data, organize the data,
Speaker 7: fact check it, of course is we're dealing with reality here,
Speaker 7: and then to publish what I found. And my goal
Speaker 7: was not to create a bestselling novel or something that
Speaker 7: would give you a warm fuzzy that everything's all white,
Speaker 7: that the bad guys are really obvious, and then the
Speaker 7: good guys will catch them, quickly, identify them and punish
Speaker 7: them and and everything's fine. You can go to sleep now.
Speaker 7: And you know, I wish I could get a hold
Speaker 7: of a storyline that because the ones that I have
Speaker 7: been presented with their nothing like that, And so I
Speaker 7: think I would do it dishonor by trying to squeeze
Speaker 7: it into a proqustian bed because everyone asked me for
Speaker 7: a sound bite. So I think the most productive way
Speaker 7: to examine my work is to do well on the
Speaker 7: one case under the microscope and draw out the unique
Speaker 7: features of that case, rather than try to look for
Speaker 7: lowest common denominator to everyone we know of that's been
Speaker 7: identified as a serial killer.
Speaker 5: This book includes everything about Danny Rowling's life and his
Speaker 5: disturbing upbringing with his father James and his mother Claudia.
Speaker 5: It also includes the graphic details. It may seem even exaggerated,
Speaker 5: but is the gleeful recitation of his rapes and murders, Yeah,
Speaker 5: mixed in with other things like his his incredible artistry,
Speaker 5: I mean, his illustrations, poems.
Speaker 7: It is versifying.
Speaker 9: Yes, well that was what Danny's like.
Speaker 7: You get a letter from Danny, and you know most
Speaker 7: people just write one line after another. Well, he bursts
Speaker 7: into pictures, you know, right in the middle of a line,
Speaker 7: and that's that's true to life. To present his unique character,
Speaker 7: to include that, it helps you get a feel for
Speaker 7: what Danny's really like.
Speaker 5: Very much like your other investigations for book projects, though
Speaker 5: you the big one of the goals is to also
Speaker 5: get the absolute truth about the murders, but also you
Speaker 5: try to delve into by asking Danny Rowling the motivation
Speaker 5: behind all of this.
Speaker 7: Absolutely, that's what it's about, the guilty mind men's rea. Well,
Speaker 7: with Danny Rowling it went beyond that, beyond the motivation.
Speaker 7: For with him, it was a strong death wish that
Speaker 7: was on the record since childhood, and he made multiple attempts,
Speaker 7: suicidal gestures, and he hated himself. When Danny presented himself
Speaker 7: to me, he had what I call zero self esteem. Zero.
Speaker 7: And you know how I mentioned a minute ago when
Speaker 7: he's writing along, all of a sudden he burst into
Speaker 7: pictures and I had to tell him, Danny, these pictures
Speaker 7: are really good. I said, from now on, everything that
Speaker 7: you do, would you write it or whether you draw it,
Speaker 7: I need you to sign it and date it. And
Speaker 7: anyone whoever corresponded with Danny Rowing knows that he initialed
Speaker 7: every page, numbered, every page dated, every page dated, every artwork, signed,
Speaker 7: every artwork. Well, that was a improvement in his psychology
Speaker 7: that allowed him to see himself as an artist and
Speaker 7: as worthy of attention, whereas before he was completely covered
Speaker 7: up with shame and guilt and unworthiness so a big
Speaker 7: part of my contribution to making this book come out
Speaker 7: was working with Danny as a human being and recognizing
Speaker 7: him for his talents. Right and Phil gave him a
Speaker 7: college level course and creative writing. When he started, he
Speaker 7: was just nearly illiterate, but he caught on fast, and
Speaker 7: I gave him a lot of instruction, and he would
Speaker 7: send me a piece I'd edit and send it back
Speaker 7: and explain the principles of the edits I did on it,
Speaker 7: and he picked it right up. He was parched for
Speaker 7: learning and appreciate ciation for who he was. He was
Speaker 7: a talented, imaginative, sensitive child. He was abused before he
Speaker 7: was born, and he was abused again as an infant,
Speaker 7: and uh on up and these witness these incidents were witnessed,
Speaker 7: so you can please multiply in your own mind all
Speaker 7: the things that went on that were not witnessed. So
Speaker 7: that is how he came to me. Just uh, you
Speaker 7: know what, I'm gonna tell you something personal. I had
Speaker 7: a dream about that time when I was just starting
Speaker 7: to work with Danny, and uh I was somehow or
Speaker 7: another fetched up with a uh troop of gypsies and
Speaker 7: so UH had a nice feast and dancing and music
Speaker 7: and everything that I spent the night in the next stay,
Speaker 7: the gypsies or everyone was being roused and had to move.
Speaker 7: So my role in that was to be the bathe
Speaker 7: the children. So okay, So they sent all the children
Speaker 7: my way to a bathroom, a bathtub where I scrubbed
Speaker 7: them and bathed them. And there was a boy that
Speaker 7: this is what I connected with, Danny Bowling. He was
Speaker 7: probably about nine years old and felt that he covered
Speaker 7: with grime. And as I scrubbed his back, a picture
Speaker 7: of astonishing beauty emerged from his back. It would be
Speaker 7: like it was a tattoo, except it was and it
Speaker 7: was more like a vision or a tapestry that could
Speaker 7: only be seen after the grime was washed away, and
Speaker 7: then the beauty of what was under need could be seen.
Speaker 7: And when I had that dream, it was so vivid,
Speaker 7: and I just wondered and thought, what about what it was?
Speaker 7: And I kept saying, that was Danny. That was what
Speaker 7: I was doing with Danny Well, was washing away that
Speaker 7: grime that was keeping his ability to communicate obscured under repassion.
Speaker 7: And by neglect.
Speaker 5: This psychological better term investigation here, you also make it
Speaker 5: so that he's attracted to you. You say he's in
Speaker 5: courtship mode from the very beginning, that that he meets
Speaker 5: you and wants to meet you and wants you to visit.
Speaker 5: But he also he also wants to please you. And
Speaker 5: some of the terms of that to satisfy you in
Speaker 5: this endeavor is that he needs to include every bit
Speaker 5: of his background, of course, which is important, but also
Speaker 5: the shameful parts, the parts.
Speaker 9: That he's the painful, the hearts.
Speaker 7: He can't be preening around like a peacart because I
Speaker 7: will not impress me. I need to see his pain.
Speaker 7: I need to see the the turning points in his life.
Speaker 7: I need to see how he got hurt. That's very
Speaker 7: very hard, uh you know you know about honest tool right,
Speaker 7: very brutal upbringing. And I was privileged to debrief him
Speaker 7: with Joel Norris and drawing figures, drawing the human figure
Speaker 7: and h and he always drew enormous ears on his
Speaker 7: little stick figures. And asked him why the ears were
Speaker 7: so big. We thought maybe yelling was important. No, he muttered,
Speaker 7: He muttered under his breath, they were handles, okay, it
Speaker 7: was how he was being sexually abused. Well, that's all
Speaker 7: he could say, and he had to turn his face
Speaker 7: down and nearly wish it was very low. But through
Speaker 7: working with that, it was very gradually able to bring
Speaker 7: him to talk about what had been done to him. Oh,
Speaker 7: he was blithely happy to chat all day about what
Speaker 7: he had done and bloody murder and you know who
Speaker 7: he had heard and the crimes he had committed. But
Speaker 7: when it came to how he had been wounded, he
Speaker 7: could not speak, and he had to be worked with
Speaker 7: at that point to be able to bring that out.
Speaker 7: So anything that would go to the really painful part,
Speaker 7: that's the part that you're not gonna get. Now, here's
Speaker 7: the thing. People think, Well, you want to know why
Speaker 7: did he kills So you're going to walk up to him,
Speaker 7: stick a mic in his safe and say, hey, rolling,
Speaker 7: why'd you kill him? And then carefully sit down and
Speaker 7: explain to you in a way you can understand why
Speaker 7: all this happened. That it's not possible. You will get
Speaker 7: a reaction, but it will not be the answer to
Speaker 7: the question you asked. In order to really answer a deep,
Speaker 7: painful question like this, it requires a great deal of
Speaker 7: personal investment in terms of your time, your energy. You
Speaker 7: have to get you have to get involved. And if
Speaker 7: you are, say, for example, a doing a psychological assessment,
Speaker 7: you know, you just do a draw by say he
Speaker 7: clicks off these uh, the these symptoms and the DSM,
Speaker 7: so therefore his diagnosis X. But you know, I read all,
Speaker 7: I went to the trial, heard all their testimony, and
Speaker 7: I think the most valuable thing to talk about here
Speaker 7: is borderline personality disorder, because he really had a lot
Speaker 7: of borderline traits regardless of his dissociative disorder. I think
Speaker 7: he'd set call it comorbidity of different conditions than the
Speaker 7: same person. But what I'd like to talk about is
Speaker 7: the borderline personality disorder because he did not respect people's
Speaker 7: boundaries and he violated them. And as soon as a
Speaker 7: person was around him, he would try to befriend them.
Speaker 7: The investigators who were trying to, you know, work for
Speaker 7: the police to try to find him guilty walker, and
Speaker 7: he try to be their friend. He had no discernment
Speaker 7: when it came to boundaries of people, and that was
Speaker 7: why his early pathology involved violating boundaries. And it started
Speaker 7: with the voyeurs and where he called himself the eyes
Speaker 7: and he would just look but he was still violating boundaries.
Speaker 7: And then that same impulse escalated, as it will to
Speaker 7: doing breaking and entering. Well, there you go, breaking and
Speaker 7: entering is violating boundary right there. Sure, And so it
Speaker 7: goes on to rape, and then it goes on to murdering.
Speaker 7: All those are forms of violating boundaries. When you uh
Speaker 7: looked at the cases of the girls he tried to
Speaker 7: row me ince the Sarasota before the murders, they all
Speaker 7: commented in social behavior was prematurely intimate, and he would
Speaker 7: try to exert it kind of prietary control over a
Speaker 7: girl he just met, and again violating boundaries. So when
Speaker 7: you start back with your question about him being in
Speaker 7: courtship mode with me, he was violating boundaries. Okay, So
Speaker 7: whenever it's Danny Wiling, he's gonna do that. He's gonna
Speaker 7: try to be friends and make connections. And then there's
Speaker 7: another aspect of that, which is called splitting. And it
Speaker 7: doesn't mean that Danny splits into Enad and Danny and Gemini. No,
Speaker 7: it means his perception of you will split and you
Speaker 7: are an angel, a princess, a goddess, or you're a
Speaker 7: demon from hell. That's splitting, Okay, So you would see
Speaker 7: that in Dan, that tendency toward that emotional extremes. Bobby Lewis,
Speaker 7: he's the greatest, he's my partner, I trust him and everything.
Speaker 7: He's the best convict. And then after when he realized
Speaker 7: how Bobby had betrayed him, then of course you know
Speaker 7: Bobby was the enemy. Let's put it that way.
Speaker 5: Absolutely, you talk, you write about his past, his background,
Speaker 5: and I know from reading numerous books. You've read hundreds
Speaker 5: of books and I have as well. Sure that everybody
Speaker 5: attributes their background. When it's especially a death penalty case,
Speaker 5: people come out of the woodwork to say he bunked
Speaker 5: his head and he was acting weird from this time on.
Speaker 5: And despite any kind of interaction with doctors, there was
Speaker 5: always some reason and trip to their background. But in
Speaker 5: this case, this is a particularly disturbing childhood with this
Speaker 5: father that's a police officer. Tell us a little bit
Speaker 5: about this background.
Speaker 7: Let me do that in a minute. Let me talk
Speaker 7: about how that gets into the case. It is defense
Speaker 7: attorneys doing their due diligence. They have to put on
Speaker 7: some kind of defense. Now with Danny Rowling. In many states,
Speaker 7: most states, you have aggravators and mitigators, and these are
Speaker 7: aspects of a case that will make the penalty more
Speaker 7: or less. Okay, so that's what comes in on the
Speaker 7: death penalty hearing, are aggravators and mitigators. Well, Danny Rolling
Speaker 7: went into this with nineteen aggravators, and they were statue
Speaker 7: territory aggravators like having a weapon and whilcom a fella
Speaker 7: knee and things like that. Okay, he had nineteen aggravators,
Speaker 7: they were statutory or not in debate. And on the
Speaker 7: other side he had one paltry mitigator, which was his
Speaker 7: mental state. He did not plead mentally ill, not guilty
Speaker 7: Barbies and the mentally illness. He plead diminished capacity in
Speaker 7: mitigation of the sentencing. Okay, So it's not like they
Speaker 7: were saying he's insane. But the the the long suffering
Speaker 7: public defenders are. Their job is to go find people
Speaker 7: to stand up and present something on behalf of the defendants.
Speaker 9: So that's why it's there.
Speaker 5: Certainly I understand that. But what I'm saying is that
Speaker 5: this background, this upbringing, is particularly disturbing, even compared to
Speaker 5: the other people that wound up on death row and
Speaker 5: in as a serial killer. This is stands out this childhood.
Speaker 7: Okay, I'll talk about that. He was the first son
Speaker 7: of a Shreveport, Louisiana deputy sheriff who wore his Sam
Speaker 7: Brown belt around the house, basically right, And he was
Speaker 7: the stereotype Southern sheriff in every way. And he was
Speaker 7: a war hero. He had been in Korea and had
Speaker 7: experienced what could only have been severe trauma during war,
Speaker 7: which we need not to go into here. But some
Speaker 7: of the only moments he ever spent with his sons
Speaker 7: were him telling the stories of the war atrocities that
Speaker 7: he lived through the most horrifying, and he would tell
Speaker 7: them over and over to the boys, and that was
Speaker 7: how they got to be around him. Then, on the
Speaker 7: other hand, when he got mad at his wife, he'd
Speaker 7: threaten her. Remember, he'd say, my granddaddy sliced my grandma's
Speaker 7: neck to death at dinner, so you got to do
Speaker 7: what I say. And he would use that as a threat.
Speaker 9: It was true.
Speaker 7: He witnessed he had witnessed Danny's father had witnessed his
Speaker 7: grandfather cutting the neck and killing his grandmother at the
Speaker 7: dinner table.
Speaker 5: Yeah, incredible, Sorry, Sondra, We're just going to use this
Speaker 5: for a break, for a second, for these messages.
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Speaker 5: I apologize to that Sondra you were talking about. You
Speaker 5: were talking about the father's treatment or living with James,
Speaker 5: the war hero who had been traumatized and saw his
Speaker 5: own father kill his mother. Yeah, let's talk.
Speaker 7: Talk about what actually you know he did in a minute.
Speaker 7: But I want you to ask me a leading question
Speaker 7: about how I recently received some inside information that possibly
Speaker 7: that was not his reel father. Could I tell you
Speaker 7: more about that?
Speaker 5: Well, let's hear about Let's hear about this because this
Speaker 5: obviously not in the book. Let's talk about this popular way.
Speaker 7: Yeah, whenever you want to get to that. You could
Speaker 7: just set me up with that question.
Speaker 5: Well, let's talk about it right now. Let's talk about it.
Speaker 7: Oh, people have contacted me and they say that Danny's
Speaker 7: mother had been having sex with one or two other
Speaker 7: Shredport Share deputies, and they actually have DNA samples and
Speaker 7: they would like me to find some DNA samples from Danny.
Speaker 7: Danny has sent out any correspondence, put a he put
Speaker 7: a bloody fingerprint on when he said anything like that,
Speaker 7: lot up here, then we could test them.
Speaker 5: Hmm.
Speaker 7: Interesting, So it would explain what he constantly said, you're
Speaker 7: not mine and and I don't want you around because
Speaker 7: especially if it were known down at the cop shop
Speaker 7: that he knew that they gossiped about it, right, if
Speaker 7: that was the case, it would create that dynamic.
Speaker 5: Would it would explain, but it would it would explain
Speaker 5: what you write in the book and what he writes
Speaker 5: in the book as well. You have the collaborator, You
Speaker 5: have the corroboration from people to get everything he did say.
Speaker 5: You write that you got that corroboration, that verification that
Speaker 5: that actually happened, and then you get Danny Rowling's take
Speaker 5: on it in his own unique way, encouraged by you
Speaker 5: to be a writer and to be insightful and to
Speaker 5: express himself. H So, now now tell us what.
Speaker 9: Are we alive?
Speaker 5: Yes we are Danny Rowling is is Danny Rowling is
Speaker 5: talking about throughout this book about wanting love from his father,
Speaker 5: sending him letters later and corresponding and telling him I
Speaker 5: love you, I love you. And we haven't even got
Speaker 5: to the confrontation between the two that ends up with
Speaker 5: one of them wounded. Let's talk about just what happens
Speaker 5: in his life that prompts him to go into the military,
Speaker 5: and then from there what happens afterwards in his life.
Speaker 7: Well, I think that he was always cool to the boys,
Speaker 7: even when they were small, and before puberty he was tortured,
Speaker 7: put them in uh handcuffs and uh leave, he'd go,
Speaker 7: you know, lead the property and leading the boys in handcuffs,
Speaker 7: he would beat them. Uh. The next the neighbor across
Speaker 7: the street, so I'm beating Danny so severely that she
Speaker 7: called down to mister d'Artois, who was at the uh
Speaker 7: the police chief, and said, uh, James uh Rowling is
Speaker 7: gonna beat that boy to death. And they said, well,
Speaker 7: d uh officer Rowling is a very good officer, and
Speaker 7: we we don't wanna interfere in domestic situations to do
Speaker 7: something that would reflect on him. So in my in
Speaker 7: my interpretation of why Danny became a serial killer instead
Speaker 7: of merely a patricide, is that society he let this
Speaker 7: go on, that there was no help for him, and
Speaker 7: that uh because the father was in the local law
Speaker 7: enforcement establishment. Whenever they saw Danny they said, oh, you're
Speaker 7: you know, ah, you're a growing son, right, you know.
Speaker 7: And uh So in that context, I think he grew
Speaker 7: to conceptualize the enemy as society, especially those who belong
Speaker 7: in society and are are loved and welcomed and sustained
Speaker 7: and uh strengthened and nurtured because he always felt that
Speaker 7: he was on the outside looking in on those qualities
Speaker 7: in life.
Speaker 5: When he finally made it to prison, I know we're
Speaker 5: jumping the hat here, but when he finally made it
Speaker 5: into prison, what was his experience like? And did he
Speaker 5: later doesn't he later vow for revenge for every year
Speaker 5: he spent in prison and the truth he received.
Speaker 7: He was, as he says, in and out of every
Speaker 7: dusty joint in the South and that's true. He was
Speaker 7: in multiple states, and he was in county jails, and
Speaker 7: he was in uh, you know, state pens, and he
Speaker 7: was in the mental institution in uh in Alabama, and
Speaker 7: he writes some you know, his experiences about each of these.
Speaker 7: Another thing that we'll run into here during especially during
Speaker 7: these prison encounters, is that some of the people involved
Speaker 7: in the controversy happened to be black, and so he
Speaker 7: would use the kind of language that he uses to
Speaker 7: describe his opponent uh in the unpleasant uh contratempts. And
Speaker 7: I again cling to my editorial philosophy that we're here
Speaker 7: to learn how these people think. We mustn't step in
Speaker 7: and cut off their tongues when they say what they say. Uh.
Speaker 7: It's a promise I've made anyone I worked with that
Speaker 7: if you talk to me and you don't betray me,
Speaker 7: and you don't uh uh disrespect me, you don't talk
Speaker 7: to anyone else, I guarantee you your true story as
Speaker 7: you want it presented, will come out. And so you know,
Speaker 7: that's what I have to offer, because I believe in it,
Speaker 7: because I believe it shouldn't be altered in order to
Speaker 7: fit the demands of best selling book that provides a
Speaker 7: predictable arc of entertainment, just like the last book that
Speaker 7: came out. And I think these pressures are insidious. And
Speaker 7: I've talked to not the serial killers or anything, but
Speaker 7: these young offenders that all of a sudden they've killed someone,
Speaker 7: are all of a sudden they reached their hands up
Speaker 7: a little girlss panties and they don't know, they don't know,
Speaker 7: they don't know the difference between fantasy and reality, and
Speaker 7: all of a sudden they've crossed a line that is
Speaker 7: so real and they can never, never, never go back,
Speaker 7: and all the ideas they had for their life have
Speaker 7: to be just gone. And all their friends are gone,
Speaker 7: all their little gang members that the brother brother you know,
Speaker 7: all them gone, you know. And I think if you
Speaker 7: wanna tell the whole story, you gotta put that in there. So, uh,
Speaker 7: anyone who's been in I think these days or well
Speaker 7: that was those days, the nineties. Anyone who's been in
Speaker 7: prison over those years knows that it's a very racist
Speaker 7: environment and to keep the peace, corrections will isolate and
Speaker 7: segregate those of different persuasions to prevent them from fighting.
Speaker 7: So that's what it's like in prison. So if you
Speaker 7: write about a prison fight, you know, and as someone
Speaker 7: calls you white boy, and you call him something else,
Speaker 7: that goes in the book because that's what happens. So
Speaker 7: I'm getting a little bit into my philosophical background of
Speaker 7: how I chose to edit this massive material. But I
Speaker 7: wanted to be in the public interest. I wanted to
Speaker 7: stretch the reader's perception because so often everyone says, oh,
Speaker 7: I've got really good instincts, so I can tele for
Speaker 7: guys off color, and I just go the other way.
Speaker 9: So that's brilliant.
Speaker 7: Good for you, that's great from the ninety nine point
Speaker 7: nine percent of nutcases floating around committing a murder too,
Speaker 7: if you want, this is not what you have. When
Speaker 7: you have a person who is a serial killer, somehow
Speaker 7: or another, they have got away of presenting a complete
Speaker 7: picture of who they are, and you think that's all
Speaker 7: there is to it. Sure, and you come there and
Speaker 7: you accept that that's that's it, that's the kind of
Speaker 7: person they are. Only if you're dealing with these people
Speaker 7: for years do you begin to see striking illustrations of
Speaker 7: completely opposing ideas, manner of speaking, manner handling things, and
Speaker 7: and you see that, okay, listen. They were developed in
Speaker 7: order to help you cope. Okay, So if you were
Speaker 7: in a situation you could not cope with, you could
Speaker 7: have learn to snap over into a different part of
Speaker 7: your mind where you could cope with it. It only
Speaker 7: becomes a disability when that ability you learned is out
Speaker 7: of control and it starts snapping over here and snapping
Speaker 7: over there without you driving it, and you find yourself
Speaker 7: at a loss. You're trying to explain to someone that
Speaker 7: you know, you don't even you don't know how that happened,
Speaker 7: and that wasn't you, and you're sorry it happened, and
Speaker 7: you got to go now right. He does this several
Speaker 7: times in the book with rape victims. He takes them
Speaker 7: and does all the preliminaries, and he's ready to kill them,
Speaker 7: and then something human happens that all of a sudden
Speaker 7: triggers the better instincts. He looks around, he comes to
Speaker 7: himself and he says, I don't even know what I'm
Speaker 7: doing here, lady. You know, I'm so sorry I hurt you,
Speaker 7: and you know, go ahead, you're free to go. You know.
Speaker 7: He did that several times, So that is something that
Speaker 7: is a disability.
Speaker 9: He told it.
Speaker 5: He talks about the personalities that are a struggle. He
Speaker 5: describes it as a struggle in his own mind. And
Speaker 5: as time goes on, more of the more domineering personality.
Speaker 5: Maybe you can explain this, these two personalities especially, and
Speaker 5: then Danny Rowling, I guess, well, let me.
Speaker 7: Stop saying where there's a lot of skepticism about the
Speaker 7: diagnosis of dissociative identity disorders. There is that skepticism because
Speaker 7: there are people who are whose careers are dependent upon
Speaker 7: discrediting this, because it is the mechanism that is used
Speaker 7: in mind control mk ultra labs in order to create
Speaker 7: an alternative personality that can be quote unquote, as I
Speaker 7: said before, easily led to do things that are even
Speaker 7: against their own interest. That's the definition of the mk
Speaker 7: ult goals. And they use this sociative identity to disorder
Speaker 7: to further those goals. And so a lot of these
Speaker 7: characters that get picked up and are called serial killers,
Speaker 7: you might call them a roadkill on the MK highway,
Speaker 7: because they've been processed. So that's why you have people
Speaker 7: so vociferous about saying there's no such thing. Okay, so
Speaker 7: we'll set them aside because a person like Danny Rowling
Speaker 7: is not using this as a defense in court. He's
Speaker 7: not trying to get away with murder. He's not pushing
Speaker 7: himself on you and saying, look at this, look at this.
Speaker 7: He's reacting to probing where he is asked questions over
Speaker 7: and over and over what is it like for you?
Speaker 7: And so he answers them. He doesn't answer them to
Speaker 7: give an excuse for being a murderer. He answers them
Speaker 7: because he's under this process where psychiatrists want after another
Speaker 7: come in and ask these questions, and so he answers
Speaker 7: him as bestI give, this is what it's like for me.
Speaker 7: And so that's what he did with me to write
Speaker 7: this book that I want to know what it's like
Speaker 7: for you.
Speaker 9: And yet I.
Speaker 7: Also experienced his switching in our interpersonality relations also besides
Speaker 7: him talking or writing about it analytically, and you also
Speaker 7: notice it in your every day life and it's quite
Speaker 7: striking and it's a good thing. This is rare because
Speaker 7: people really don't have to completely reshape their mind in
Speaker 7: order to wrap it around this. But people say they
Speaker 7: want to understand the mind of the seriality. They say
Speaker 7: that I don't know, I don't know if they do,
Speaker 7: because you have to do some work on your mind,
Speaker 7: because your mind has these things in it. They say,
Speaker 7: if this is true, then that is not true. So
Speaker 7: if he is a sexual, fadest, violent offender, then he
Speaker 7: cannot be a prayerful church attender who drives the school
Speaker 7: bus and goes and tends to the sick and shut in,
Speaker 7: plays them songs out in the street, and just does
Speaker 7: random acts of kindness here and there. Girls who dated
Speaker 7: him and told the writer that he was always a
Speaker 7: gentleman and indeed he was very honorable with me throughout
Speaker 7: some very stressful things. Okay, So the mind has to
Speaker 7: develop the ability to see that that's not fake. He
Speaker 7: wasn't pretending to honor our agreement not to talk to
Speaker 7: anyone else. He really did it.
Speaker 9: Okay.
Speaker 7: So it's not a mask to cover his secretly depraved
Speaker 7: desire to hurt me, because it's not there. He had
Speaker 7: a secret desire to honor his commitment and to respect
Speaker 7: all the suffering that I've had to go through to
Speaker 7: being associated with this case. And he said anything he
Speaker 7: could do to help, that would be it. And all
Speaker 7: you had to do the help was just keep his
Speaker 7: mouth shut from talking to these other authors, and he
Speaker 7: did it. So you may not be impressed by that
Speaker 7: because it has to do with, you know, the business
Speaker 7: of getting a story rather than sexs and and and
Speaker 7: violence or something more pressing. But that, indeed was k
Speaker 7: uh what was going on U? And I wanna mention
Speaker 7: that I was uh working with the current affair with
Speaker 7: Steve Dunlee, who is legendary and who I brought this
Speaker 7: story to at the beginning as a part of a
Speaker 7: a bachelor's stories. I was cultivating and he was He's
Speaker 7: always so to the point, you know, and he said, uh,
Speaker 7: you know, forget all those other stories. Concentrate like crazy
Speaker 7: on the Rolling case. Right. So I knew I had
Speaker 7: the top news story on TV. Uh ready, you know
Speaker 7: to follow my story because I was being encouraged from
Speaker 7: the top and it it was really a reality that
Speaker 7: every day he got all these uh attempts to get
Speaker 7: his attention away from me.
Speaker 8: Yeah.
Speaker 7: So that was a lot of what was going on there.
Speaker 7: And then the legal challenge was just in insane and
Speaker 7: that went on, and then the other thing that was
Speaker 7: involved there is that Danny wanted to confess and be executed.
Speaker 7: I mean, do you understand that, yes, does that come
Speaker 7: through there in that book or not. He wanted to
Speaker 7: be confessed and be executed because of his crimes. So
Speaker 7: in order for me to be his friend and his partner,
Speaker 7: I had to represent that whether I agreed or not,
Speaker 7: it's not my life and it's not for me to
Speaker 7: influence him and tell him all, no, don't lose that,
Speaker 7: stay around or anything. If that's the way he feels.
Speaker 7: It's just still for me to document that. That's how
Speaker 7: he came to me like that, and I didn't change it.
Speaker 7: He wanted to die, and he wanted me to cooperate
Speaker 7: with the state so that he would go along peacefully
Speaker 7: to his death. And he defied his defense attorneys while
Speaker 7: he was in there talking to the state with Bobby
Speaker 7: Lewis as interer. Marketer there and his defense attorney was
Speaker 7: standing outside the prison refused entryu by the Department of Corrections,
Speaker 7: refused to come in to represent his death row a
Speaker 7: client who was in talks with the state about his guilt,
Speaker 7: and his and his lawyers stood outside and they wouldn't
Speaker 7: let them in. These are the kind of circumstances that
Speaker 7: surrounded this case. Highly irregular, so and then, like you
Speaker 7: could see, everything was irregular. We be can be called
Speaker 7: them rolling rules because he started to become such a
Speaker 7: great artist that they outlawed paint having paint. Jesus, they
Speaker 7: changed the rules so pristers couldn't have paint anymore.
Speaker 9: Because I was in.
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Speaker 5: Sorry I cut you off, Sondra. You talked about that
Speaker 5: they were even denying him art supplies, so that and yes,
Speaker 5: mm hmmm, I see okay.
Speaker 7: Now wool new Ruol no art supplies for anyone.
Speaker 5: The thing is is that there is a shred of
Speaker 5: understandability in terms of I guess law enforcement and the
Speaker 5: judiciary being Danny Rowland isn't infamous just because of the
Speaker 5: things that we've already talked about, but especially because of
Speaker 5: the the incredible a trial that were the crime scenes
Speaker 5: and at least part of this crime and some of
Speaker 5: those crime scenes and then his description of that outraged.
Speaker 5: But Danny Rowling is unique in his fact as far
Speaker 5: as the crime scene and the particulars of posing, and
Speaker 5: so we have this shock value which is not so usual,
Speaker 5: which is quite unique. So he describes the process making
Speaker 5: of a serial killer. And in this are these incredible
Speaker 5: crimes like August twenty third, nineteen ninety in Gainesville, Christina Powell,
Speaker 5: seventeen year old and Sonia eighteen. They're lived together.
Speaker 7: I'll tell you the worst thing about that one. He
Speaker 7: started Sonya upstairs and he pounced on her. She was
Speaker 7: sound asleep, and pounced on her. He had his knife,
Speaker 7: He had his duct tape in one hand and his
Speaker 7: knife in the other, and he threw his body on
Speaker 7: top of her, slapped it on his mouth, and stabbed
Speaker 7: her right in her heart. And as she was dying,
Speaker 7: he said to her in her ear, I'll be back
Speaker 7: for you after you're dead. And to me, that is
Speaker 7: beyond the pail. I mean, you got your thrill, you did,
Speaker 7: you killed everything? Do you have to do? You have
Speaker 7: to just go that far just to profane her spirit?
Speaker 7: You know? Yes, that was what was happening, and he
Speaker 7: misited it. And then the rest of that story is
Speaker 7: actually went downstairs. They came back up to Sonia Larson
Speaker 7: because he said he was going to come back, remember, Yeah,
Speaker 7: and when he came back and behold, his comment is
Speaker 7: she was too bloodied to rape. Wow.
Speaker 5: Through this whole description, this graphic description, this third person
Speaker 5: description that Danny Rowling has of the only an account
Speaker 5: that only he witnessed. Yep, these murders. Who is this?
Speaker 5: People have criticized and said that this one of the characters,
Speaker 5: one of the personalities is Gemini, and he got that
Speaker 5: from an Exorcist movie. So we're going to ask you
Speaker 5: about these personalities. What does he attribute this lost control
Speaker 5: of Danny ruling? What personality? Tell us about these personalities
Speaker 5: including Gemini?
Speaker 7: Okay, and now I have to go back to things
Speaker 7: that happened that his mother told about it, and she
Speaker 7: had witnessed these kind of changes in him, and she
Speaker 7: put that in her deposition, her taped deposition, that she
Speaker 7: had seen this herself, and that, of course his body changes,
Speaker 7: his voice changes, his posture changes. And I think his
Speaker 7: mother also made a very piercing observation, being an unsophisticated
Speaker 7: lay person, yet she was his mother, and she said,
Speaker 7: Danny just seems like a little fifteen year old boy.
Speaker 7: It seems like he never got past fifteen. And when
Speaker 7: I think of Danny, I think he never got past
Speaker 7: thirteen because he was not sexually mature, and he was
Speaker 7: a child, and he had a child's psychology. But because
Speaker 7: all of a sudden he was going to jail, getting
Speaker 7: locked up for in judy for you know, voyeurism, all
Speaker 7: of a sudden, he had to be a convict. And
Speaker 7: so this creative ability of the mind is said, I
Speaker 7: can't do that, I don't know how to do that,
Speaker 7: I'm inadequate for that. Therefore it has to be done.
Speaker 7: And so this spontaneous quality that the human mind has
Speaker 7: probably latent in most people and is able to come
Speaker 7: up with a new personality that can do these things,
Speaker 7: that can walk the walk of the convict, and that
Speaker 7: can take on the burgeoning sexuality and own it, because
Speaker 7: little Danny cannot, He cannot own those things at all.
Speaker 7: So the sexuality, first of all, would be what would
Speaker 7: be the split in his personality, and it would be
Speaker 7: a part of a process that some psychiatrists called life
Speaker 7: saving or a way to stay sane in the intolerable situation.
Speaker 7: Is in order to protect the core personality, another personality
Speaker 7: has to be created that can absorb the kind of
Speaker 7: punishment that triggers it. So that would be the incarcerations
Speaker 7: and all that goes along with it, and the criminal
Speaker 7: acts and all that goes along with them, and that
Speaker 7: would be accumulated up into his unad size and he
Speaker 7: would go along like that pretty well. And the only
Speaker 7: thing about this Gemini thing is that it had a
Speaker 7: specific time and place, and that was in Parchment Prison.
Speaker 7: And Parchment Prison was in such deplorable condition, and I
Speaker 7: believe it's back in the news today about what's going
Speaker 7: on in Parchment. But Danny's story was so poignant, down
Speaker 7: at the end of a sloping hall where all the
Speaker 7: sewage accumulated three inches in his cell, and being treated
Speaker 7: very callously like everyone is at Parchment, that he couldn't
Speaker 7: give any belief for the horrible housing situations he was
Speaker 7: kept in. And according to his narrative, it came a
Speaker 7: time where gem and I appeared outside himself, and at
Speaker 7: that time or upon that occasion, Danny agreed to accept
Speaker 7: this with into his own self. Okay, in other words,
Speaker 7: he phrases him in It all sounds kind of poetic.
Speaker 7: But I can't change the way Danny expresses himself.
Speaker 9: Okay.
Speaker 7: All I can tell you is how he expresses it,
Speaker 7: so you can interpret it some other way if you want.
Speaker 7: But he says that Gemini guaranteed him revenge for all
Speaker 7: he'd suffer in the terms of one life for every
Speaker 7: year that you've been in prison, which made eight, and
Speaker 7: that Danny agreed to it. But now I'd like to
Speaker 7: introduce the concept of ego dystonic. And ego dystonic is
Speaker 7: where you know you're doing wall and you're not happy
Speaker 7: about it. Okay. Symtnic is where you just joyfully loved
Speaker 7: to do wrong right. Ego dystnic is where you try
Speaker 7: to maintain your self respect and still know that you're
Speaker 7: committing these behaviors that don't go with your idea of
Speaker 7: who you are, so Danny could own ena that was
Speaker 7: part of who he was. It was how Danny found
Speaker 7: a way to grow up without having to put lot
Speaker 7: himself or become when he was not, so Danny could
Speaker 7: still remain a kid. And then he could have a
Speaker 7: part of himself that could carry himself in prison and
Speaker 7: that knew how to perpetrate and pull armed robbery and
Speaker 7: all that kind of stuff. It's almost like a big brother,
Speaker 7: it kind of sounds like. So. Uh. Then the problem
Speaker 7: was that with all that learning that he's minded about
Speaker 7: splitting and everything, well, that could be exploited, okay, and
Speaker 7: some some cases were found to be considered good candidates
Speaker 7: uh to be worked on because they all that he
Speaker 7: had been uh they already had developed these capabilities.
Speaker 9: Uh.
Speaker 7: So that uh, there are there are things that might
Speaker 7: have been done to Danny Rowling that he's not aware of.
Speaker 7: And yet that caused him to be sensitive because when
Speaker 7: I asked, he stopped writing to me. And I was
Speaker 7: also at that time under contract to Mary Terry, and
Speaker 7: Mary Terry told me that his occult underground contacts told
Speaker 7: him that someone would be sent to Middle Florida to
Speaker 7: quote unquote commit mayhem and now you're Danny Rowling denied
Speaker 7: that anybody sent him, and he denied to be a
Speaker 7: part of any cult or anything like that. But when
Speaker 7: he goes to explain why he went here and why
Speaker 7: he did that, he reports hearing voices and the technology
Speaker 7: from a voice the skull was developed early in the seventies.
Speaker 7: So these are dots that cannot be connected, and so
Speaker 7: it's let's just keep an open mind about certain things,
Speaker 7: wait and see if any kind of confirmations come up.
Speaker 5: You talk about you write about the he calls it
Speaker 5: apartment apartment M for murder. Yeah, he talks about the
Speaker 5: murders that have put him in a unique league of
Speaker 5: serial killers. Certainly he talks about he writes about the
Speaker 5: murders where he does the mutilations and poses the bodies
Speaker 5: for maximum shock value. But he also now is incorporating
Speaker 5: creatively the idea that there's the voices actually saying actual
Speaker 5: words to him. It's very interesting, I would say, tell.
Speaker 7: But where is the line between that and being a songwriter.
Speaker 7: To be a songwriter, you had to be open to
Speaker 7: hearing voices.
Speaker 9: Okay, but don't we know that he started doing songs
Speaker 9: at fifteen MM.
Speaker 7: He doesn't talk about hearing voices until after the so
Speaker 7: called inviting Gemini in that occurred at Parchment Prison. Here's
Speaker 7: another thing about Parchman. The warden was Donald Cabana. Donald
Speaker 7: Cabana wrote Just a just a fearing book, from being
Speaker 7: a executioner to being anti death penalty crusader. And when
Speaker 7: they asked Donald, the defense asked donalds Cabana to come
Speaker 7: to Games to go on testify about the conditions at Parchment.
Speaker 7: Donald Cabana was told if he were to testify on
Speaker 7: Danny Wallingsby, he would have no further career in law enforcement.
Speaker 7: Really yeah, pretty cold there. So what they put on
Speaker 7: a stand which made no sense was Ed Dix, the
Speaker 7: Florida Department of Law Enforcement agents, whose story was he
Speaker 7: went to Parchment and he didn't see nothing.
Speaker 5: Okay, sure right.
Speaker 7: That was the testimony that the state put on regarding
Speaker 7: the story Danny Rowland told. But the similar stories are
Speaker 7: still coming out of Puachmin today.
Speaker 5: You write about this incredible situation where a doctor talks
Speaker 5: about at the trial that the incisions made on these
Speaker 5: at this last where the people are posed like the thinker,
Speaker 5: a grotesque replica car from human flesh and bone. Its sculptor,
Speaker 5: the devil's advocate Gemini. That's what Danny Roland writes. But
Speaker 5: the doctor says was very meticulous with the incision in
Speaker 5: the abdomen. And this doctor Copeland commented, he said this
Speaker 5: person was either an expert or very lucky. But then
Speaker 5: he said he backed it up. He said it was
Speaker 5: not luck. This was knowledge acquired. So Danny Roland rolling
Speaker 5: didn't have that. You've explored it. He didn't have that
Speaker 5: kind of background, and yet he did.
Speaker 7: He worked at LSU. He did some work at LSU,
Speaker 7: learned to handle a scalpel at LSU. I didn't put
Speaker 7: that in there.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 7: I think I didn't put the part in there about
Speaker 7: how he sliced his fingers off either, And I didn't
Speaker 7: make the final cut. But yeah, he did have experience.
Speaker 7: It was one of his responses to my challenges.
Speaker 5: I see, I just thought it would give it would
Speaker 5: give some.
Speaker 9: The hunting.
Speaker 7: The hunting he does describe in detail, the field butchering
Speaker 7: of deer.
Speaker 5: I see. Well, let me ask this then, is this
Speaker 5: Danny Ruling's idea of rationalization? You talk about the different
Speaker 5: personalities He none and Gemini. And like I say, Gemini,
Speaker 5: people are familiar with Exorcist three. But is this some
Speaker 5: way how much do you believe in this? How much
Speaker 5: do you believe in these personalities being responsible for all
Speaker 5: of his criminal behavior?
Speaker 7: Well, you know that's like ask me about demons or something.
Speaker 7: That's not my training or my belief system.
Speaker 9: It's abnormal psychology.
Speaker 7: And that's the best he could do to describe his experience. So,
Speaker 7: and I've seen him, I've had to deal with different
Speaker 7: parts of Danny. Remember that part where he said he
Speaker 7: wrote them a letter saying I love you, I love you,
Speaker 7: I love you. He did that to me and he
Speaker 7: wrote I love you. They got to Dan, he said,
Speaker 7: but do you love me? Do you really love me?
Speaker 7: But do you really love me?
Speaker 5: And well, that's what he asked his father. He always
Speaker 5: wanted that statement from his father, but incredibly he could
Speaker 5: not do it at the best of times. I think once.
Speaker 7: And he said so, and he wanted him dead. And
Speaker 7: let me talk about that shooting. It was James Harold
Speaker 7: who opened fire on his firstborn son. Okay, James Harold
Speaker 7: discharged his service revolver on his firstborn son, shot at
Speaker 7: him three times. Is his marksmanship went wild all three times,
Speaker 7: and then Danny came back and approached him, and he
Speaker 7: shot at Danny three more times. He emptied his service
Speaker 7: revolver at Danny without laying a bullet on him. It
Speaker 7: was then and only then that Danny fired back. Danny
Speaker 7: fired three shots. The first went wild, the second was
Speaker 7: mid mid midcenter and his abdomen, and the third was
Speaker 7: right between his eyes, and Danny quotes the the medical
Speaker 7: professionals that it was a wonder because the bullet between
Speaker 7: his eyes entered the skin, entered the skull and then
Speaker 7: split and went all the way around the brain and
Speaker 7: exited out the rear. Now that just sounds crazy, but
Speaker 7: that's what happened. And then the one in the abdomen
Speaker 7: didn't hit a single organ and went straight through and through. Yeah,
Speaker 7: incredibly the facts about that. Psychologically it was a patricide.
Speaker 7: Legally it was self defense.
Speaker 5: Yeah, okay, you right. You write those to the pathology
Speaker 5: of the husband, James. His wife has got terminal liver
Speaker 5: cancer and she's watching the trial coverage of her son,
Speaker 5: who could receive the death penalty likely and he comes
Speaker 5: home and sees this, flips out, beats her throws her
Speaker 5: out of the house, gets a divorce.
Speaker 7: Yeah. Yeah, Jason felt this really really disturbed man. And
Speaker 7: I want to make one more relevant comment about that.
Speaker 7: Please consider that he was a veteran with many, many
Speaker 7: recognitions of the parallel situations he had been in and
Speaker 7: the things that he had done and the things that
Speaker 7: he had witnessed in the war, and when he came
Speaker 7: home he was post traumatic. They didn't have that then.
Speaker 7: And there was a time mentioned in the book when
Speaker 7: he was asleep and he was dreaming and you know,
Speaker 7: flashing back, and he tried to strangle his wife. Well,
Speaker 7: listen to this. That identical scenario took place with George
Speaker 7: John Schaeffer, and his father had been shot down behind
Speaker 7: enemy lines of the Knots and had perilous adventures and
Speaker 7: traumatic experiences during the war and brought those experiences home
Speaker 7: into the dynamics of his relationship with his son. And
Speaker 7: I would like to just posit for a moment that
Speaker 7: perhaps those people that were killed by those sons were
Speaker 7: really victims of war, because, as the scripture teaches us,
Speaker 7: when we suffer a trauma, it's going to go on
Speaker 7: until the how many generations, seventh generations, the trauma will
Speaker 7: If we know anything about epigenetics, we know that what
Speaker 7: happened to our parents will be re enacted in our genetics,
Speaker 7: our very genetic code. And so I would like to
Speaker 7: point out that's one thing that I learned from my
Speaker 7: studies of the making of serial killers? Is it in
Speaker 7: the two cases or I studied the most they could
Speaker 7: both be traced back to wartime atrocities and the post
Speaker 7: traumatic stress of that cause.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I want to thank you, Sondra London. Our time
Speaker 5: is up, unfortunately, but you didn't get it round to
Speaker 5: talking about the the companion volume. Beyond the Making of
Speaker 5: the serial Killer.
Speaker 7: They talk about hardly any need healing. Did we.
Speaker 5: All the time? There's so much to talk about. This
Speaker 5: is such an incredible case and your involvement is just unprecedented.
Speaker 5: So it is able.
Speaker 7: To answer some of the lingering questions that people have
Speaker 7: about this case in this book.
Speaker 5: Well, I'm sure they still have many, many more questions,
Speaker 5: but I think some of those questions can be answered
Speaker 5: by taking a look at the Making of a serial
Speaker 5: Killer the second edition. It's fabulous. Thank you so much.
Speaker 7: I'd like to put out a cry if anyone has
Speaker 7: any samples of Danny Bowlings DNA be great if they
Speaker 7: get in touch with me.
Speaker 5: Right on for those people too. You have a website
Speaker 5: for this second edition. Can you just tell us about that?
Speaker 7: Well, my website is called Sondra London dot com. And
Speaker 7: then when you get there there's you know about and
Speaker 7: all that, but the real action is on run sable pails.
Speaker 7: And when you go in there then you'll find that
Speaker 7: be making them.
Speaker 9: A serial killer.
Speaker 7: And now there'll be an excerpt there and so forth.
Speaker 7: And of course the book is available on Amazon in
Speaker 7: a paperback.
Speaker 5: And Kendle fantastic. Thank you so much, Sandra London. It
Speaker 5: has been an absolute pleasure the making of a Serial
Speaker 5: Killer second edition. Thank you so much. You have a
Speaker 5: great evening.
Speaker 7: It was my pleasure.
Speaker 9: Good night, good night,