The Terrifying True Story of the Serial Killer Who Inspired ‘Scream’
· Vice
While house-sitting one night in 1994, aspiring screenwriter Kevin Williamson came across a TV documentary about Florida serial killer Danny Rolling (a.k.a. the Gainesville Ripper). The story scared Williamson enough on its own, but when he noticed a window in the house inexplicably open, he really freaked out. Williamson then called up a friend as he canvassed the area armed with a butcher knife. Their discussion soon shifted to fictional murderers like Freddy Krueger and Jason Voorhees, and the idea for Scream was born.
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Although the movie wasn’t entirely based on Rolling and his crimes, he shared some similarities with his onscreen counterparts. For starters, Rolling confessed to killing a total of eight people, which is the exact number of lives that were lost by the time Scream reached its conclusion (even if one of those deaths wasn’t shown). Rolling claimed his first victims after getting fired from his job at a restaurant in 1989.
That night, he broke into a home in Shreveport, Louisiana, where he murdered 24-year-old Julie Grissom, along with her eight-year-old nephew, Sean, and her 55-year-old dad, Tom.
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Much like the killers in Scream, Rolling mostly targeted students; except in his case, he focused his energy on two Gainesville, Florida, universities. Between August 24 and August 27, 1990, Rolling stabbed five more people to death: four women and one man. The women had all been raped and their bodies were posed in different positions. Julie Grissom had suffered a similar fate, which helped connect her death to the Gainesville murder spree.
Authorities linked Rolling to the killings using DNA evidence and charged him with murder in 1991. A little over two years later, Rolling pleaded guilty just before his trial was set to begin. By the following month, he was sentenced to death.
Rolling was executed by lethal injection on October 25, 2006, ten years after Scream premiered in theaters.
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