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You are now listening to True Murder, the most shocking Killers in True crime History and the authors that have written about him, Gasey, Bundy, Dahmer, The Nightstalker, Bck. Every week another fascinating author talking about the most shocking and infamous killers in true crime history. True Murder with your host journalist and author Dan Zufanski.
Good Evening. Criminologist Anthony Mioli said, Sondra London broke round in publishing the Confessions of serial killer Danny Rowling, but only part of that story could be told in nineteen ninety six. Now, in this unique new volume, the controversy surrounding the making of a serial killer is revealed in a series of interviews and appearances including NBC Dateline, Court TV Talk Radio and Courtroom Drama. The only shows off Rolling's art with a stunning painting Rolling called his masterpiece
and his handwritten explanation of its symbolism. Podcasters Dan Supaski True Murder and Ariel Kooxie Malice share thought provoking conversations that elicit new revelations about London's work with Rolling, and in a sensational Secret interview with Rolling is finally revealed. The book that we're featuring this evening is Danny Rolling Serial Killer Interviews with my special guest, journalists and author
Sondra London. Welcome back to the program, and thank you so much for this interview, Sondra London.
Oh, dame, it's always a pleasure to be a guest on your show. You're such a good host and you ask some great questions.
Huh. Thank you so much. Your a great guest and one of the most thought provoking programs that we ever have are when you appear. So let's get right to this. You appeared recently on True Murder. We talked about the making of a serial killer and why this book at this time and why this approach.
Okay, well, you know I set out to do an intensive, in depth study of Danny Rowling, and I didn't have any structures upon me, no deadline, or nobody to please, so it was a completely untrammeled research project that went on about six years directly with Danny Rowling, and my goal there was to learn because I had been presented with the mystery of the mind of a serial killer years before in the person of Gerard John Schaeffer. And when I got through working with Shaeffer and published the
book Killer Fiction, I still was not done. I still was mystified by this phenomenon. So when Danny Rowling contacted me and offered me the privilege of access to him, I considered it a great privilege, and I was very happy to be able to allow to do this course of study under whatever I had no idea of. No one could imagine the conditions that developed from me doing this story, but I was very committed to doing this,
so at any rate, we did the book. Well. It turns out that doing the book is historian itself, and a book can only be one book link long, and so far as I'm concerned, one subject. So out of all that work, the Making of a serial Killer, it runs about two hundred pages, and it's only the material that really relates to that title, and I only covered that much. But in the course of working the Danny
Rowlings of an enormous amount of material was generated. And I would like to think I was done with that case by doing the Making of a Serial Killer, But it turns out there's some really, really more interesting things that follow on, And so I purposed to do a book I call Beyond the Making of a Serial Killer. And I got about one hundred and fifty pages into that project when now you did my interview with Anthony
me only Oh my goodness. This turned out to be a four hour marathon interview and we just we just stayed on it and very wide ranging topics from other cases that he and I had both worked. And we're talking so much about the use of the artwork as being able to convey the essence of the personality. And so those are the things that we talked about. And well, it turned out to be about one hundred and twenty pages long, and I said, wow, you know it's going
to take over the whole book. And so I said, you know what, let me just break that out into another book and put some more interviews in it, and just do a book only of interviews. So in my mind, I thought I had all these interviews transcribed and I would just kind of, you know, I'll slap this together and no time at all, it would be like it did itself. You know, it didn't turn out that way. Transcribing is very hard. I used to be a professional
transcriptionist for medical but not now. I don't want to do any more transcribing because and then you use the robot and you get all the us and ums, and you know, it's more work to go through there and pick them out than it would be if you just sat and typed it. So anyway, that was my concept.
That was why I decided to do this book, and I decided to get this out and then go back to work on Beyond the Making of a Serial Killer, which is really back more to the subject of Danny Rowling's crimes, because in that book, I will reveal the confessions to the triple murder in Louisiana, and I'm also
including some of Danny Rowling's fiction. He had specialized on a long project called the Legends of the Black Marsh, kind of like fairy tales from the Middle Ages with witches and gypsies and princes and princesses and you know, fiery steeds, you know, But he did within that body of work he started doing contemporary fiction. He still called it Legends of the Black Marsh, but it wasn't it was contemporary. So I put a couple of those in there,
because he deals. The protagonist in the story is, of course Danny Rowling right, So it's another way to see it. So that's what's going to be in beyond the making of a serial killer when I get it done. Meanwhile, I put out this book of interviews, and to me, it's not like what you'd call a regular true crime book. It's more like a magazine in a way, because you can pick up any part and just read that part. You don't have to read it in order, and in fact,
there is no order. It's not in chronological order by any means. If anything, it's the opposite. Because I put the interview with Meoli up front. I just feel that it's very conversational and there's lots of interesting artwork. At the end of when Meoli and I have our little chat, there's a story that the any rolling Road for Meoli
and it's included here, and it's called Rooftop. So he wrote that story after he left my companionship and my elaboration, and I made some observations about how Danny had changed since we last worked together, and it comes out in that story. I included his handwriting because it's become starting to annoy me. People are saying that he didn't write
anything that I wrote. It okay, And I find myself having to defend myself in the form of putting the handwriting, and I clean up the image from artifacts so you don't see the wrinkles and that you just see a black and white image of his what he inscribed against the white page. And there's a lot of information in that. You know, there's a whole body of study about handwriting graphology and people who say that your handwriting reveals things about yourself. And so I considered that as much a
part of it as a drawing of a face. Right here, he's using his whole self to inscribe these words. They're not edited. There's no sound for London in the mix. Uh So there, that's it. So that's just please don't pursue that area of inquiry because it's fruitless. That would defeat my whole purpose in being there. If I wanted to make things up, I would write fiction.
Mm hmm. Right now, the thing is you you, it's we need to explain or you need to explain that not only had me only spoken to many other killers before he had a chance to this six hour face to face with Rolling, but did you had also spoke to several serial Killers before you got a chance to speak to Rolling. So the thing is that when you gave you write that you gave him basically a creative writing a crash creative writing course, so that he was
able to be able to communicate. And also as just from the very beginning he used artwork and symbols and you can explain, but the way he expressed himself, so it wasn't like you were directing him to do this, which just happens to be very entertaining way of presentation. Like you say, very much like a magazine though with artwork, poems, writing, it's very very decorative. Tell us why was essential that he communicate this way?
Well, I did work with a famous author by the name of Joel Norris who wrote this book Serial Killers to growing right, and people probably don't realize he had a degree in art therapy. Well, I worked with him,
and we worked and interviewed artist Tool and he was illiterate. Okay, So at that point when I began to work with Tool, I had gone from Schaeffer who had a degree in creative writing and criminal justice double bachelor's degrees, to artist Tool, who was functionally Elizabeth And I said, well, how am I gonna get me anything from him? And it was then that I introduced the very idea that I later called killer art. And I'm just like, well, you can't write,
send me pictures. And so then we got to meet him and questioned him about his pictures in person and do a drawing there and you know, watch him do it, work with him on that. So I learned how you can use that form of expression, and then if you want to, you can go further and delve with the person and say, you know, well, I see why that your figure is missing one part of the body's what's missing. And they can't even figure out that they haven't drawn
any feet on it. And that has to do with not being grounded literally, because our psychology and our body are intimately they're they're part of the same entity. Okay, So it's like you can't separate your foot from your leg. You can't separate your psychological or spiritual self from your body. So when the body does, if you want to know about the mind, then you can delve in that direction. When with Danny Rowling, we were participating consensually in revealing
the inner workings of his mind. And he has often said I don't understand myself. When asked if he was dangerous over me, he was killed again and he said, you know, I really can't say. You know, he says, my mind has betrayed me and I really don't know. So and then look at the appearance he made in court. It's so famous. They played this on TV all the time, where he sings to me and I'm standing there looking really sappy and he's singing away. But listen to the
words he's the words are what were my words? All my tears run together? What were my words? Because at that point it was understood that, you know, he was half unconscious and youth in the arts, the music gestures anything nonverbal is closer to the unconscious. You're trying to probe and to the unconscious and find out what's hiding in there and who is Jemini? You know, and you know in order to get to that level, you can't.
The person is not a machine that you walk up and put a quarter in and you get your answers on ice.
That's right.
What you get depends on you have to give. You have to participate to get anything of any lasting significance.
You talk about the the use of the third person narrative to be able to explain things and not be able to admit the things but in this other personality. And Ted Bundy is a famous case, but you also talk about you know, you also talked about him, Danny Rowling, being able to do that as well. You say that this is necessary.
Why, well, there's too much pain involved, isn't there. I mean, for such a dramatic breakdown of the one's nature to occur, you have to have an enormous amount of trauma and pain behind it.
And so.
Going into that it's not easy and it's not fun, and it can really you know, throw your schedule off for your regularly scheduled activities because you can break yourself down going back into that place where you were broke down. I remember when I co authored this book with Diane Fitzpatrick, and she had been under several forms of torture, especially as a child, and we worked all that out, took thirteen years, and at the end it was a comment that she made to me, you know, now I don't
have to go down into the hole anymore. I've been there. I know what it is. It's the whole.
Yeah.
So you and coming to terms with these painful traumas is what I would call the subject. There is a painful experience.
You talk about that. Anthony Meoli, like yourself, considered him quite unique. Uh In when he asked him questions again and this third person narrative that he would respond. He asked him about the three murders in Louisiana and he said that his eyes changed, and you commented that that was very similar to your experience. Tell us about what you discussed about this change when they were discussing these murders and this exchange between me and rolling.
Well, I'm sorry, I can't address your question directly. I can talk about a little bit about that, though. You could say, you know what, he's one of those people with those hazel eyes anyway, you know, and it's quite common for people to say those people's eyes change, isn't it. You don't hear that much about brown eyed people's eyes changing. But he has those kind of in the middle, you know,
kind of a pale eyes, so for his eyes to change. Now, remember Anthony Muoli was there in person with Danny, and I have never been allowed to be there in person with Danny. All of our work was in writing and it's really as we experienced it. At the time, we wanted visitation. The state knew we wanted visitation, so they withheld it to manipulate him to confess. Okay, So being in the middle in the first person, it was, well, we just want to have the station so we can
talk about the things about his life story and his crimes. Well, the state thought they were hurting us by denying that, but guess what all that did was ensure that everything we did was in writing. So there's no question did it happen or not. There's no question is this sound for London saying this or is it Danny Rowling saying it?
Because every single thing that happened is in writing. So I think it's kind of ironic that in the attempt to defeat our purpose and to make me stop doing my project, they really were part of helping to create it as the a very useful document historically, because it is a document. It isn't just me saying this.
This information that Meoli gathered, and he's a respected criminologist. You interviewed him extensively and shared a lot of the things. You've shared a lot of the same ideas. It was certainly about the value of the art work, and not so much interpretive, but just in whatever he thought he was communicating. It was very interesting that he had an extensive painting collection given to him by Danny Rolling. So both you have extensive art collections, Yes, from Danny Rolling, don't you.
I think it's very interesting. And in fact, Meoli wants to do a book of Killer art and he wants me, you know, the co author, and I'm not sure what I can contribute to the one.
With all the artwork.
He has probably the biggest artwork Killer artwork collection extant today, and I encouraged him to do it. I wish he would put out a full color book of his art collection.
So this is impressive, the collection that you put together. Here some of the examples of Danny Rolling's art. But also we've got to say that also some of your own sketches of Danny Rolling are quite interesting and I was impressed with them.
So you you know, people ask why are all these prisoners so talented? And my answer is, well, if we locked you up in a cage and took your TVU and everything else away, and your visits and all your other activities, and gave you a piece of paper and a pencil, all that we'd find out you had talent too, you know. I think it's just something that we don't do much these days, take a penant, paper, you know. But I think it's it's not that exceptional, and I
think it looks more exceptional when you look at prisoner. Prisoners, but jet remembered they're they're in a cage. They're deprived of normal lives, is the main thing about a prisoner, you know.
Mm hmm.
Uh.
Let's talk about an interview you had with Don Snyder or pardon me, an interview Don Snyder had with Danny Rowling. And then you've got a copy of this after they killed this story. Well it was from People magazine, I believe at that time. Tell us a little bit about this, uh, this tape and really, what did you what did you learn from listening to it?
Don Snyder was uh had been pre eminent in that whole media empire for years before they even founded People magazines, and he was like a kind of a senior journalist emeritus working on special projects at will and so within that context, and he had contacted me, he came to visit me, and he had some kind of politicerprise winning
photographer with him took all these pictures. And but Don Sider was very, very thoughtful and in depth thinker, and he spent enough time with me to find out that I think there I'm just not going to say he said this, but I think he found out that what they wanted was not the real story. And he said he had come to respect me. I sent me Christmas cards and checked up on me from time to time.
And so when he went in and got that tape, and so when they killed the story, I took it as a gesture of his own personal goodwill that he gave me that tape. He said, it's yours. Do whatever you want with it, because evidently there was some kind of kind of a you know, get a kind of program going on there, reaching through People magazine, and evidently Don Cider didn't want to play to that audience, right, So that's how we got the tape. Now, what did
I learn from that tape? I was able to really hear Danny change personalities in an audio in real time, and that was kind of shocking. First time I heard it, I was like, who's that? A different voice comes in, you know, and I was like, what, wait a minute. When he says, oh my god, that's him, and he tells this part where he's talking about how Gemini came and whispered in his ear and all, and he uses the voice of Gemini and it's kind of a whisper, and he whispers the words that jem and I said
to him. And then right after that, then he says, in Danny's voice, he says, and I let that thing into me. I let that Gemini spirit into me. And you can tell you can hear him changing his point of view.
Yeah, well incredible.
Yeah, So that was really that was really important in my uh, in terms of understanding him, because I, like I said that dissociation is normal. We all do it. And if I'm if you're there playing with your two year old child and you talk and baby talk and your boss calls you, you pick up the phone your you don't talk baby talk to your boss, you instantly
react in a different mode without thinking. Because that's normal, you see, it's normal to have different presentations for different circumstances. What the difference there between normal and Danny Rowling is that his condition was so much more extreme that that he had lost control of it, and if you were just normal, you could control and modulate your presentation accordingly.
You know, whether you're with the you know, leading the brownie troop, or whether you're the CEO you know of a company deploying one hundred and fifty people, you could easily do both things. It's not any kind of weird pathology involved. The way we get into the weird pathology is when the break is so strong, it's so extreme, that the different ways of being don't they're not merged, they don't flow one to the other. It's rigid, they're separated. You get one or the other.
Your philosophy is throughout this entire book as well. We're we talking about censorship. Of course, that's raised in this book as well through some of the interviews and some of the things that you were subjected to. And it's very very interesting that you were able to provide this in this book to show that again, the philosophy of the entire truth, I think, especially in ninety six was
something novel and I still think it is. Maybe you can explain what you mean by that and why you're not an apologist for all the graphic detail and all of the things that Danny Rowling was willing to say about the truth about.
The murders, Well, you just lay out about a whole book's worth of dissertation for me to respond to. I don't know. I'll probably won't cover all that, So let me know what I leave out there. The issue about censorship and telling the whole ugly truth. I will directly connect that to Gerard John Schaeffer, because that was his philosophy, and I fought him on this, and I refused to publish things that he sent me. If you want to
call it censorship, you could call it that. And he continually argued his position that it was important for me to recognize that we're dealing with pathology, and if you don't present the pathology, it is a cheat. So I got that from John Shaeffer, and like I say, that was not my own idea. I had to be convinced
of it. And so once he condensed me, then I begin to see it that way, because I begin to see that entertainment uses mortality as a dramatic device, and we use the idea that someone might die or be killed to build interest in a story, and sects it up to because we're talking literally about life and death.
There's nothing more interesting than life and death. So entertainment requires that you produce a feeling of wanting to buy the sponsor's product at the end of the experience, so they don't really serve their interest to take you on a trip that you know, a horror is a true horror show will leave you unsettled, you wondering. You know, if your next door neighbor might like autist tool said, just pick up an ac accent, start hitting you with it.
And that's what he said. He said, anybody can go off anytime, you don't know, but to think that way, to leave your audience that way, is not a satisfying esthetic experience. Now you know, Shakespeare was a success. He was the rock star of his time, and he never
let a play end without leaving the stage littered with corpses. Yeah, okay, So to present that experience to the audience in a way and then to wrap it up in a way that leaves them intact and maybe with something to think about, but not really disturbed, you know, to the point where they don't want to come to the next play. So I think that those the demands of entertainment have shaped what we want to hear about. And I, for example, I'll use Anne rule. UH was probably the definition of
successful uh true crime. And UH I knew Anne, and we had several talks about this and the things that I was pursuing. You said, Oh, I stay away from that. You know, the uh JFK assassination. Oh I stay away from that. Uh the hand of death cult. Oh no, no, I I don't have anything to do with it. And then she has said publicly things like who cares if one whino bashes another whino over the head? It's not interesting?
And that goes all the way back to our theories uh uh in esthetics that we developed uh from the the Greeks and the Romans, that we're concerned with people of significance in what happens with them. We don't care about the bums out there in the alley hitting each other over the head. There's no stakes, there's nothing that we care about involved there. Okay, So I've given a lot of thought of this and how entertainment shape what
our audiences want. And then instead of becoming another in rule and providing exactly what they want, I'm doing the opposite. Why Because I'm more interested in doing things that other people have left undone. Okay, if you want the same old thing, then you can get it easily, and so you don't need me. So since I'm here, why don't I go ahead and do the things that you don't dare to do. I say the things that you don't dare to say, because at least it's not the same
old thing. Working with for Shaeffer, who really a terrible experience and having to be treated to the kind of assaults that he would perpetrate with his writing that he sent to me to publish it was. It was very painful. But then to come to Danny Rowling again, he has a different reason for wanting to participate. When I meet this person, he has already committed his crime. That's a given. You can't get stuck on that level. You can't just keep saying over and over but he got her head off,
How could you talk to him? Okay, that was already done before the very beginning, so it has to be given. So what do you do then? And what he wanted to do was try to give back at least some understanding of what could be learned from the story of his life, from what he had done, what had shaped him, the things that had happened to him, and then he did not shirk in any way personal responsibility for what
he had done. So it's the whole picture right there, that he wanted to do something good for the world, and I wanted to do something good for the world because I wanted to look into this dark corner of secrets. Everyone's too afraid to go in there with the monster, and so you don't find out anything. And he could have lived and died none of this, and we'd never known any of this. And as far as I didn't teach him. And I go back to what Diane Fitzpatrick
said about being in the MK Ultra program. She said, now, this isn't after we wrote the book in personal correspondence, she said, it's not like they taught us anything. She said, it's like they enabled us to bring it out in ourselves, right, Okay, So to create a condition to allow the person to come forth in their own way, it's not the same as teaching them how to write. And the case of Danny Rolling, the biggest characteristic he had when I started
with him was zero self esteem. He hated himself so much, and he did not consider himself in any way worth anything. And so when he began sending me these letters, and he would burn first into graphics in the middle of the word, it'd just be writing along in words. Then all of a sudden, it's a picture, you know, and I'm like, what is this? Okay? I said. Finally, I said, Danny,
you are an artist. And I said, if you want to draw pictures, please just start a new page, draw picture, sign it, and date it, because you are an artist. And anyone who had any contact at Danny Rolling from then on knows very well that how much he took that to heart. Every single page he ever wrote, he dated and initialed okay. And then he began once once someone was there to validate him, to see to see something, to see himself as reflect that in the eyes of
someone who saw something there. Okay. He would look into my eyes and I would see he would see that I respected him and that he was valuable and interesting. And so from that he gained enough ego nourishment to come forth with his art, which I did not teach him art, and that's for sure, Yeah, but I just uh worked with him until he was a person who had enough self respect that he would allow that artistic talent to come out into and to mature and grow.
And Danny, before he died, he had become I think other people will say that he had become one of the most preeminent killer artists that of modern times. He's done an incredible body of work. And the thing that I find most compelling about what came out of that was that it is not just decorative. It's not oh, he's a good artist. It's that he used the graphic cards to probe his own mind. And that's what we're
here for. He's not there to make pretty pictures like Elmer Wayne Henley make the prettiest little landscapes you will ever saw. You know, uh Malveaux, And I think Malvaux is a fabulous artist, but he never created anything that delved into his mind. And so that's why I think Danny Rowling's artwork turned out to be significant.
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and his artwork. But there was a whole group of people that were in sense that you would dare do anything like that and share have any feelings for this Danny Rowling, And we'll get to that a little bit later, but will let you include a particularly interesting interview with Dateline with Jane Paully and Jane Paully has somebody named
Jennifer Frake on the program. And then you join a little bit later as you as it is demonstrated in this interview or illustrated, what exactly happens, what is the premise of it? Tell us a little bit more about your invite onto this with Jane Paully on Dateline and Jennifer Frake's appearance. Tell us more about what happens.
Haha. I'm happy to talk about NBC. Boy. They started when I was down at the trial, at the murder trial, and they sent a producer down from New York specifically to camp out on me and get me to agree to an interview. And I told them no. Okay, I haven't gone into this part yet in print, but I'll
just go into it with you now. I was under contract to Maury Terry, who's been in the news again recently, and Maury Terry had me under contract and told me that he was going to arrange exclusive coverage and for me to tell everyone no. And so that's what happened. I told everyone no. And the other part of it what Mary Terry was going to do for me and manifest for me. That didn't work out quite that way. But let's go back to NBC. So NBC's down there and there the part the motel I stayed in for
the trial. I had to talk to them about my, uh my privacy and instructed them not for no one there to I was there or where ourves and they breached that. They weaked that out to the press, so every time I had to step out of my door, they would be camping out there. So NBC sent the one down and it was kind of funny. I told her, sure, I said, so we can talk. You can take me out to dinner at the outback. That would be great. And then she's like, ooh, I'm vegan and everything. I said,
that's cool. You don't have to eat it, you know, and oh, I'm a marathon running around. That's wonderful. Okay, we're going to the outback right and and you know that's it. That's my commitment to you. I'll let you take me to the outback. So then she comes to pick me up. Oh, why don't we go to Streak and Shake instead. I'm like goodbye, And so that when on and then that did not succeed, and they sent a third producer down from New York to Bird dog Me. Okay,
this one got sent to Maury Terry. So they were negotiating back and forth. Maury Terry was saying this, Oh, we don't pay for news. She said, well, you pay for entertainment. You want to do an entertainment story and then you pay for it, you know. And they were like, ooh, no, it's not entertainment, it's news. So that didn't go anywhere. Okay. So those were the three producers that came down to
Gainesville to bother me in person. After that they switched to calling me at work and insisting ending and then they're like, well, we're going to do this story anyway, whether you participate or not, okay, And so I did agree to do this story. Now, this was a transcript of the first appearance I did on NBC Dayline, and I just couldn't believe they had the nerve to call me again and want me to go on again. And in fact, I did go on again, but I had
some secret weapons. My good friend and alumnus had been very high up in the DA's office in New York State and organized crime, and he trained prosecutors for the state. He came down from Albany to my hotel in New York City and put me through coaching session, uh par excellence, and then he would throw me questions and then he and I went answer and he said no, no, no, you can't be angry. You can't be angry. Now I'll
do it again. And so I had that training session with him because he was my friend, and so I did the second appearance, you know, and it was just as UH damaging. I had over two hundred and fifty death threats uh and UH when I tried to report it to UH law enforcement, UH, they said that they didn't accept that that kind of report. Okay, And I stopped counting after the two hundred and fiftieth threat that I was keeping track of. But all this was UH
deliberately done. And I, as I told them, when they were trying to argue me into appearing all that, I would say, look at I'm not that big of a story. What's the big deal? You know? Why are you so determined to get me? You know? And now I realize that they were getting their marching orders from intelligence, frankly, because I've learned more since then, you know, from other people and other sources that now I realize that's what
that was. Okay. So so here we have what happened in this story there that's in the book Janet Freke. All right. The Making of a Serial Killer includes one chapter where Danny wrote about committing a rape in Sarasota. Danny Rowling did not know the woman's name and did
not name her or identify her in any way. Okay, And so the and they come forth with this bogus story that she was in her local Barnes and Noble browsing the books, which people who knew her and Sarasota said was absolutely preposterous, knowing her reputation and her you know, other other activities. But she was browsing the books and Burned and Noble when she found this book and she opened it up and she saw what he was. He was writing about her, and she fell to her knees
there in the aisle. Okay, she literally fell to her knees. Oh, she was so devastated at this write up. And then the other handle on this story was the hero cop. Now the hero cop, oh legedly, according to the story presented, heard about his rape, not not for reading the book or anything, you know, couldn't say that. So he just knew about it, I guess. And so he ran her DNA against Danny Rowling and got a hit. Now, why is this nonsense? Because the statute of limitations on rape
had run. Okay. That means that there was no active case open, okay, And that means that any law enforcement agency in the state of Florida that expects to get the services of the State lab has to fill out a form with the case number on it, okay, to even file it. Okay. The next thing is, during that same time frame, I had a murder suspect and we got his DNA and it took the state lab eighteen months to get around to it, even though it had a case number. Okay. So that's that's the state of
the art of the State clime labs. They are underfunded, their way behind. You don't just run down there and check the DNA. He said, quote unquote, he checked it rolling on a hunch, on a hunch? What hunch? And what about your boss? How did he approve of you spending your time that way on a case of rape that had been committed over seven years earlier. None of that's holds up. That just doesn't hold up. Didn't happen.
But Sondra, that's what Jane Pauley was, you know, I mean the way the interview went and the way it was produced. Obviously, then they interview you and then they put voiceovers and yeah, and it's very very dramatic and obviously one sided to say the least, and that they just empathize with with with Frank Janet Frake. But the thing is is that you talked about that this is
all entertainment. But at the same time you have to admit that you made a conscious decision to not be a writer like Anne Rule and saw the future and were more was more interested in the way which were sent a book differently than Ann Rule. Not everybody wrote like Ann Rule even at the time, but to be successful.
So the thing is, I got to say that you also use controversy, and not to say you deserve the ridicule and the humiliation and the attacks and the trying to end your career economically, but I'm saying that it seems that Jane Pauley is is poking you with the idea that you don't have enough empathy and how dare you have feelings? Or a serial killer? And that's the way they're the way they're painting this, And so why
do you present this in the book? And again people see this as you are somewhat attacking or criticizing Janet Frake. Why is it not that, why.
Is it not that? I don't know what that means? What do you mean? Why is what not? What?
Well? The thing is with with Janet, like I say that you talk about her, her family, taking a movie deal. You talk about this in the book, and.
That's the murder victims family.
That's not okay.
Now, Janet Frakes did file suit against Danny Rowling for a million dollars, right, that was not the state lean.
Right. And this lawsuit you write though, too, is that she because of the statute and there was no way that she would have collected any of the money. So you say this is disingenuous some of these stants that she takes, because it's just not she's not going to get any money from this and she's not going to any recourse.
Well, here's the ultimate irony. I nor Danny Rowling revealed to the world her name and her face. Jane Pauley did that, right, Okay, So if that's such a heinous offense that the story of what happened to her should be known. If that's so offensive, then what's Jane Paully doing?
Yeah, that's right. Well, like I said, I think it's.
No one would have ever known that the person in the story with her. There was no way, and it didn't matter. Jane Pauley went and dug it up and put her on TV and striking all these moral poses and I'll tell you a little dialogue that was off the record on that deal. And when we got through taping and everything, and we were standing around and everything, I said, Jane, I said, you know, you can strike poses at might expense all you want. I said, but
you can't keep from saying my name. And she laughed. She said, you're right, you know, because that's the ultimate irony. And this is what I brought out in the controversy with the state governor of Wyoming who wanted me banned from AOL and went on Larry King to say, I want to thank the governor for catapulting me into the spotlight. I was working in obscurity until he chose to bring me to the attention of millions of people all over
the world. CNN was on two hundred something countries, you know. And I say, all of a sudden, my my website is flooded with you know, people wanting to and I all these offers to do interviews, and I said, I just want to thank the governor, you know, for bringing me to the attention of all these new and this new audience. And that was the same thing I would say to Jane polly Well. I said, it in a different way. And she also said she also said, O weur attorneys, uh have believed that you are in the
right on the state lawsuit. And I said, oh, so will they fire and will they file an amicus brief? Oh no, she said, that's gonna happen.
Yeah, this this son of Sam legislation too. You talk about this thing already being struck down, and then yet at the same time this has already been deemed unconstitutional, and then you are still being you know, tried in the in the media over this as well. So I was.
Being tried in court, took all of my money, and they were further than that.
What was the premise? And what was the premise though? Because the idea that the the perpetrator is not the profit from the notoriety of his crimes. What's that got to do with you? How can we get around that?
Here's what they did. They attached me to the to the sellon under a legal principle that they invented, and they called it unique and special. Okay, just let's just say or the sound of that for a minute. If you know anything about law, unique and special means unprecedented, either in law or in custom. No one has ever, and he said that himself when he was given the Attorney General was given a lifetime Achievement award for what
he did to me. Okay. And when the Associated Press covered that, he admitted, but he didn't say it as if he should be ashamed of it. He said it as if it was evident of what a brilliant attorney he was. He said, I haven't heard of anyone this law has been used against who was not a fellon. Okay, So that was his He was so creative. I don't know of any other case when one of these type of cases was brought against a non convicted person, okay.
And he told the Associated Press he always wanted to be successful, but he never suspected that his success would be measured by how well he prevented someone else's. So they had no real legal precedent and no way to attach me to this action. In addition, there was no money Okay, no money was ever paid to Danny Rowling, and that's easily proven because his accounts or public record. Okay, there was never any money. The lawsuit was brought under
prior restraint, which again is improper illegal. I was sued before these stories were written. They were not written. Yeah, okay, when I was sued. So there's you know, I could go on and on about how bogus this action was, but I will bow to the wisdom of Steve Dunlevy, or the anchor on a current affair that I brought this to because I was already doing stories for him, and he said, nobody gives a bleep about the First Amendment.
It's not a story. And you know, I don't want to hear that either, but I'm afraid that that's the way it is. The eyes glaze over. It says, if our constitutional protections against abuse, as if that's just nothing, that's just a bore. That's a big boar, okay. And if there was an injustice done to you as a journalist, who cares? Have you got another story? You know, it's
not a story. So the fact that I don't really want to leave the stage without putting it on the record, the things that I had to go through because I did the story, and this book here, Danny Rowling Serial Killer Interviews, does put those things on the record, or some of them, and it gives you an idea that this was a historically significant event, bringing this book into being being the making of a serial killer, the effect that all these spinall were generated in terms of the impact.
So yeah, Like we mentioned that he said that this was groundbreaking in the publishing The Confessions of a serial Killer Danny Rowling, especially in nineteen ninety six. Let's Jesus as an opportunity to stop for a second for these messages.
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Now, we talked about this groundbreaking journalism that you were doing and other people weren't understanding, and getting back to these interviews that are involved in here. Know, we had an interview October twentieth, twenty twenty about the making of a serial killer, but you also had an interesting interview with Ariel Kooxie from the Malice podcast and a lot of things I found very very interesting some of the things that were revealed, and you just disgust and came
out of that interview. So tell us a little bit about that interview and what was had from it.
I don't really have a response to that. If you want to ask me about, you know, something we talked about there, and I could expand on I mean, doing an interview, I'm just there and it starts and it goes and then it ends.
Yeah, well you talk about that when she asked about Danny Rowling and you talk about this hatred was not just so specific to the victims, but society more at large. So you talked about maybe the impetus for all of this was the abuse that he suffered at the hands of his father and that disappointing rejection and lack of love. How did that you discuss that? So tell us what you discussed about that that abuse.
Well, I can say this that I think that if it was just his father, he would have been a simple patricide. And if a count attempt between him and his father had come to court, he would have been exonerated under self defense because his father shot at him six times before he fired back. And so, but the drama with the father playing the central role, if he was simply a patricide, then they would not be a story.
But what happened there was that society played a role, and society refused to protect the child, okay, and society indemnified the father because he was a good officer, and those things could go on. And I would say that if there was a turning point where this child could have been saying, that was it when society allowed the abuse and indemnified it. And from that point on, eventually it coalesced in his mind that his enemy was not
his father, It was society. So under the terms that he presents as the drama that went on within his mind, it was a deal expressed in terms of one life for every year that you were tortured in prison. So that is an abstraction. That's not a love rivalry or trying to sell body parts or any of the things that we have for these multiple homicides. It was an abstraction and really had nothing to do with who these victims were. It wasn't you know, when you get out
of prison, you're gonna hunt like with Schaeffer. Oh, he threatened the defense attorney, he threatened the prosecutor, he threatened the judge. You know, he threatened the sheriff. He was going to get out. He was going to have his organized crime people go after them. Well, that's not what this was. This was against what someone with the heavily Christian background might refer to as powers and principalities.
Yes, what we talked about when we alluded to us there was that his aunt, I believe, went to the police and reported the abuse of the father, and the police said no, but he's a good cop, and so we're not going to interfere into anything domestics like that and you say this is good enough. Impetus for sure. He also talked about this is that it was.
A turning point that in his mind that made him a serial killer. It wasn't because he, you know, wanted to stalk this victim and find them and target them and learn about them and tease them or like b Dkay send things to the paper about them. He was working out a revenge type concept against society. So who did he choose, Well, he said he didn't choose. He say he'd say Gemini that chose. But okay, why did
Gemini choose that victimology? And my answer would be because these were young people who belonged and were cherished by society. Their parents put them in school and took care of them. They were well kempt, they were valued. And I see, if there was only one image of Danny Rowling, it would be a guy with his nose pressed up against the window of life, watching life go by and knowing he could never be part of it.
And you talk about this revenge on society as well. Anthony Mioli does a very interesting statistic and you remark that is very interesting about this one to two percent of serial killers in his experience, are people that would pose a body like Danny rolling dish.
Oh, yes, okay, Well, there's an extra emphasis on anything you do at a homicide beyond just ending the life of the victim. If you have ended the life of the victim, the hitman's point of view, or the businessman's point of view is get the heck out of dodge and live to kill again another day for whatever reason. If you do any if you stay there at the scene of a crime, for any reason, it has to be given great weight because what were you doing?
That's right, that was.
More important than getting out of getting away getting away with murder. Why were you still there? Well, there was more to do. And the way he would express it he would go into a spiritual terminology and to say that he had to exemplify evil, pure evil, and that he had to destroy the works of God, the human figures, the works of God, the beauty of the works of God, that he had to destroy that because why. And that took a while, because he kept saying, well, I don't
know why. And he gets saying I don't have a message. And I said, well, oh, everyone says you do, and so and he said, any days, any message, it's geminized MESSAGESLF. Well, you asked Gemini, you know him, I don't, And so eventually it just came through from that type of dialogue saying that evil walks this world like a natural man and that he was there to show that evil is real. So that's as far as we're going to get with that, my friend, Well, there's no other source. There's no other
source on that. That's as far as it goes.
You talk about that while his case was ongoing and while his life was in jeopardy. Yeah, he cared. He cared very much about this book, and he cared very much about your agreement. We haven't mentioned that is that you were very experienced with other people. And what was unique was your agreement with Danny Rowling. What was unique about what he did concerning your agreement?
Mm, well, what was unique is did Danny you would think that someone would be thinking about their case and he he never expressed any interest in it, and things will appear in the news, and I would think that I want to know his reaction. He didn't even know he would get the the the uh legal work in the mail, not even open it, and uh he when it came time for him to plead, decided what to plead.
He wrote to me and he said, there there were several things I need to consider and when I plead, And the first number one how is this going to affect our story? And then there were two other things. The last one was the victim's families. And then he went into his discussion of his bullet points, and he talk totally about how is this going to affect our story? He never got to the part about the victim's family
item that he listed. And I called his lawyers when I got this letter, and I said, you better go down there and get a hold of him. I said, he is more concerned about this story than he is about his own life. And his lawyers said to me, that's how it's always been with Danny.
Yeah, you do an interview with Ron and Ron and what I found interesting is, again I mentioned it again, is that you provide you include information and material in this book that many people would not include. They would take out anything where like a negative review. People would if they had their way, they would take all of
those and never ever get to see them. But you've included this and one of the biggest change exchanges on this radio show is that callers call in and talk about your culpability and that you should fry along with oh yeah, and that they can't understand your viewpoint on the death penalty. So you do talk about that viewpoint, tell us how you feel and what people might say in contrast to what you're saying about the death penalty.
About the death penalty, I say that if you have a feeling in your heart and you cultivate it that you want someone to be killed, then you are exactly the same as a murderer, because murder under even under the law, doesn't exist unless you have men's rea or the guilty mind. So you could literally kill someone, but if you didn't have that evil intention in your heart, it wouldn't be murdered. Okay. That's what makes it murder,
is that tension in your heart. So if this is the intention that you're expressing, it's ironic because you're blaming someone else for being homicidal while you are expressing the desire for a living person to be killed. And I wish that that irony were made more prominent if it were possible.
And you say too, that this is evidenced by people literally jumping up and down with glee and rejoicing. This is not a somber, you know, closure thing. This is exactly what you describe.
Well, And that's why I wrote the song, and they played the song on the radio. And I wrote the song after going through the murder trial there with Rolling and it was so traumatic. I remember that I lost my voice and only got my voice back while I was driving back home from Gainesville and making up the song. I got my voice back by singing this song. I was writing about death row and the verse about the the those who are dancing, I'll just tell you it says,
undead memories of the lives you've taken. They won't let you rest. Every night you'll awake and they're dancing on your grave, demanding nothing less than your whole life. Cause you've been dancing with the reaper. Now every day you see him in your own eyes. So this goes on, and then at the end I speak, and this is what I would like to say. If I only had a few words. My last words would be Execution makes us killers too. I know, well I'm a killer, and
so are you. Vengeance demands the killer die. When will we stop? And wonder why God help us.
Ale Yes, it's a very, very fascinating collection you've put together. Danny Rowling serial Killer Interviews. I want to thank you very much for this again fascinating interview for those that might want to take a look at other work or find this out. Can you tell us about the Amazon page, website, etc.
Well, my books are on Amazon, but I'd like people to know that I have a website called songs a London dot com and if you go there and there are excerpts from all the books and then links appear there to the Amazon page where you can buy it, but you can get pre use and reviews. As Dan mentioned, the bitter with the Sweet, you know, that's that's what controversy means.
Yeah. Absolutely, it's an impressive, impressive collection and I think it'll be a collector's item. As to tell you the truth, I really do. Thank you so much for coming on and talking about this latest Danny Rolling serial Killer and we look forward to speaking to you again when finally you talk about Beyond the making of a serial Killer. Thank you so much, Sondra London. You have a great evening and hope you're talking again.
So much. Dan I'm always happy to appear on your show.
Thank you so much, it's always a pleasure. You have a great inning.
Good night,
