Sophia Michaels
“Scream” is widely considered one of the best slasher films ever made, and Neve Campbell’s status as the ’90s scream queen was solidified by the franchise. The movie has spawned five sequels so far, with “Scream 6” set to hit theaters on March 10, 2023. While the masked murderers in the Scream films are fictional, the story has a real-life basis in the murders committed by serial killer Danny Rolling in Gainesville, FL.
Rolling was born in Shreveport, LA, and had a difficult upbringing that resulted in several physical altercations with his father, a police officer. He was arrested multiple times for robberies in Georgia and for spying on a cheerleader. In May of 1990, he attempted to kill his father with two gunshots to the head; his father survived, but lost an eye and an ear.
In August of that same year, Rolling made his way to Gainesville just as the University of Florida was beginning its fall semester. He began a spree of burglaries in low-cost apartment buildings off campus, which led to the savage, fatal stabbings of five students (one from Santa Fe College and the rest from the University of Florida). He taped each of their mouths shut before stabbing them to death, raping one of them and leaving their bodies in sexually provocative positions. The murders attracted intense media coverage from all over the country and had students at the University of Florida sleeping with steak knives under their pillows.
Excluding Taboada, who was a large man, all of the victims were slim, Caucasian brunettes with brown eyes. The town’s law enforcement initially named 18-year-old student Edward Lee Humphrey as their suspect after he was arrested for beating up his grandmother and had previously lived in Paules and Toboada’s apartment complex. Although Humphrey didn’t fit the crimes exactly, the murders came to a halt as soon as he was taken into custody.
At the same time, Rolling had been arrested on a burglary charge in Ocala. A hotline call from a woman named Cindy Juracich, who had known Rolling from her hometown church and recalled that he had told her husband he liked to “stick knives in people,” led police to look at him more closely. During that investigation, the police realized that the tools Rolling used to pull off the burglary left the exact same marks as the ones at the murder scenes in Gainesville. They also discovered that he’d been staying at a campsite in a wooded area close to the apartment complexes where the victims lived. By November 1991, he’d been charged with the murders, and in 1994, before his trial could even begin, Rolling shocked everyone by pleading guilty to all charges.
The screenplay for “Scream” was later dreamed up by Kevin Williamson, a North Carolina transplant living in LA and trying to make it big as an actor. While housesitting for someone in Westwood, he watched a newscast about a string of killings that rocked Gainesville to its core and began imagining what would happen if a killer wielded the same knife that Rolling used to gut his victims. The events have since been dramatized in several documentaries, including Tubi’s “Lights, Camera, Murder: Scream” and Discovery+ feature “Scream: The True Story.”
Danny Rolling was executed by lethal injection in October 2006 at Florida State Prison. We’ll never be able to look at Drew Barrymore’s gruesomely iconic exit the same way again.
