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