Over four days in August 1990, five students were murdered near the University of Florida campus in Gainesville. Their names were Sonja Larson, Christina Powell, Christa Hoyt, Tracy Paules and Manuel Taboada. The killings emptied the town, sent students home mid-semester, and produced a manhunt that arrested the wrong man before DNA and a cassette tape recovered from a wooded campsite identified a drifter named Danny Rolling. The press called him the Gainesville Ripper. He pleaded guilty in 1994, later admitted to a triple murder in Shreveport, Louisiana, and was executed in 2006. Along the way, a young screenwriter named Kevin Williamson saw a news report about the case, and it inspired him to write Scream. In this episode of Conspiracy Theories, Cults, & Crimes, Vanessa Richardson traces the five students Gainesville lost, the investigation that took a wrong turn before it found him, and the uneasy afterlife of a case that became one of the most successful horror franchises ever made. Please note, this episode contains descriptions of extreme violence and sexual violence and may not be suitable for all audiences.
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