Florida Serial Slaying Case Leaves Painful Scars on Community, Families of Victims : Crime: The savage killings shocked a quiet college town and the nation. A grand jury will soon hear the evidence against the prime suspect.

MIAMI —  For more than a year now, Ricky Paules has followed the news with agonizing patience, reading and watching every report on the investigation into the brutal slayings of her daughter and four other college students in Gainesville, Fla.

Scores of times, she has looked at newspaper photos of Danny Harold Rolling, the man police call the prime suspect in the deaths. She has seen him on television, hands and feet chained, shuffling in and out of courtrooms, looking drugged and confused.

“They tell me it’s him; they say they have evidence,” Paules said. “And there is a lot of anger in me that I’m beginning to direct at him. But, until I see this man in court, until he’s been charged, until I can look him in the eyes . . . well, it will never be over.”

Prosecutors say they have convincing evidence that Rolling, a 37-year-old drifter and career criminal, is the serial killer who, during three days in August, 1990, slaughtered five college students living near the University of Florida campus. The evidence will be presented to a grand jury that convenes on Nov. 4.

The killings terrorized a community preparing for the start of a new school year and left a bustling college town with a bloody stain that is unlikely ever to be erased.

“Some people say the killings were an end-of-innocence type thing for Gainesville,” said Joseph Kays, a spokesman for the state’s largest university, where enrollment this year is 34,500. “I don’t know if Gainesville was any more innocent than anywhere else. But no one is going to forget what happened here anytime soon.”

For Paules and the other parents whose children were slain, the last year has been an open-ended nightmare as the largest, most expensive manhunt in Florida history was unable to bring the case to a close. Now, police say they have their man. Semen, fibers and a screwdriver used to pry open the victims’ sliding glass doors will link Rolling to the crime scenes, police say, and finally lead to a charge being brought in the deaths.

Rolling is a tall, slender Louisiana man who has spent most of the last decade in jail for a variety of crimes, chiefly robberies. He has been in police custody since Sept. 7, 1990, just 10 days after the last of the five bodies, some horribly mutilated, were found. He was arrested in Ocala, Fla., 30 miles from Gainesville, minutes after pulling a gun to rob a supermarket of $2,300 and then crashing his getaway car.

On Sept. 18 of this year, Rolling pleaded guilty to the robbery charge and was sentenced to life in prison under the state’s habitual offender statute. He is never to be paroled. Last Monday, he was convicted in Tampa, Fla., on three counts of burglary. He has been charged with a bank robbery in Gainesville. He is also under indictment in Louisiana for shooting his father, a former police officer, in the face.

Mary Lou Cuellar, a Tampa public defender who represented Rolling on the burglary charges, tried to have her client declared mentally incompetent to stand trial. A psychiatrist has testified that Rolling is a heavy drinker and drug user who is haunted by visions of the devil and who has been known to scratch himself until he bleeds.

“He doesn’t remember, gives no input, says: ‘Whatever you feel is best,’ ” Cuellar said. “He is very little help at all.”

Of the state’s insistence on trying Rolling for other crimes even after he has been sentenced to life in prison, Cuellar says: “Their purpose is to gain publicity, to appear to be tough on crime. They’re grandstanding, milking it.”

Investigators acknowledge that Rolling is unlikely to ever get out of prison, even if he is not indicted for the Gainesville slayings. But they express confidence that sophisticated lab tests on physical evidence will conclusively tie Rolling to those slayings and bring the $3-million manhunt to an end.

“We have certain DNA evidence gathered at the crime scene that indicates he was on the scene and carried out the crimes,” said John Joyce, a spokesman for the multiagency task force set up a year ago to solve the case. “We feel confident.”

The Gainesville killings were particularly savage, and, as the gory details of the crimes leaked out, the shock waves spread out from the shady university town and horrified the nation.

The bodies of roommates Christina Powell, 17, and Sonja Larson, 18, were found first, on Aug. 26, 1990, the day before the first classes of the fall semester. They had been bound and gagged, tortured and then stabbed to death. The breasts of at least one of the two had been mutilated.

The next day, the body of Christa Hoyt was found in the apartment where she lived alone. She had been decapitated, her head set on a shelf to shock those who would find her.

Two more victims were discovered the next day, Aug. 28. Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada, both 23 and close friends from Miami, were bludgeoned and stabbed to death in the off-campus apartment they shared.

Last month, investigators in Shreveport, La., released court documents that appear to link Rolling to a gruesome triple slaying there that had startling similarities to the Gainesville crimes. College student Julie Grissom, 24, was found stabbed to death on Nov. 4, 1989. Her body was also carefully positioned by the killer. Also slain were Grissom’s father, Tom, 55, and her 8-year-old nephew, Sean, who apparently walked in on the slaying.

As in at least two of the Gainesville killings, Grissom had apparently been bound with duct tape, raped and killed, her body then washed with a household cleaner.

All of the female victims were small brunettes.

Although Rolling is described as the chief suspect in the Gainesville deaths, investigators have refused to rule out the possible involvement of a second man, Edward L. Humphrey, 20. He is a former University of Florida freshman from Indialantic, Fla., whom police named as a suspect within days of the deaths last year.

Humphrey, a manic-depressive, once rented an apartment in the same complex as two of the victims and, like Rolling, reportedly liked to spend time in the woods.

After being convicted of beating up his grandmother, Humphrey was released on Sept. 18 from a state mental hospital and is now free on probation.

In a press conference, Humphrey’s attorney, Don Lykkebak, proclaimed his client’s innocence in connection with the slayings, adding: “Ed Humphrey does not even know Danny Rolling.”

But task force investigators have suggested that the two may have met in the woods in the days prior to the first of the slayings and worked together.

Compared to Rolling, the evidence against Humphrey is slim and inconclusive, police admit, amounting to no more than five pubic hairs found at two of the three crime scenes. But that evidence will also be presented to the grand jury. “We feel strongly about both of them,” Joyce said. “We are keeping track of Humphrey, and we wish he were still in custody.”

Whoever is guilty, Ricky Paules said: “Oh, I want to see him suffer. He’s a bastard, an evil man, who made those girls . . . suffer, feel pain, feel fear.

“It’s been a very severe year. I cry every morning and every night, and there are moments when I still don’t believe this has happened. I open my bedroom door sometimes, and I expect Tracy to be there. It’s not real, it’s just not real.”

After the Alachua County grand jury meets on Nov. 4--on Ricky Paules’ 55th birthday--she expects an indictment and, eventually, a trial. She plans to attend, “to represent Tracy,” she said. “I think that’s when it will hit me again, like a sickening wave, that Tracy’s gone. And then maybe we can go forward with our lives.”