When karma strikes twice

At 6:13 PM EDT on October 26, 2006, Danny Harold Rolling took his final breath. Florida’s most notorious serial killer since Ted Bundy was executed by lethal injection for raping and carving up five college students in a ghastly spree that horrified and terrorized the University of Florida’s campus in Gainesville back in August of 1990, just as the fall semester got underway. Each one was murdered with a hunting knife. Some were mutilated, sexually molested and put in gruesome poses. One of his victim’s severed head was placed on a shelf, her body posed in a seated position.

Just before his execution, he confessed to the November 1989 murders of a 55-year-old man in Shreveport, Louisiana, his 24-year-old daughter and her 8-year-old son.

One of his victims at UF was Sonja Larson, a freshman who was killed along with her roommate in the apartment they shared. Her goal was to become a teacher. On that fateful night, she and her roommate, Christina Powell, went to a local Walmart to buy a few things. Danny Rolling was a drifter who just happened to be in the store at the same time. He followed the women back to their apartment and attacked them in their sleep.

Her brother, Jim Larson, who lives in Orlando, said, “He confessed to killing five people. He cut their heads off, then played with them. He did the worst things you can possibly do to somebody…”

During the trial, he was so  shocked by the details that at one point, he curled into a ball on the floor and sobbed. He might have never moved from that spot had it not been for his wife, Carla. She cradled him as he cried and sat with him during the remainder of the trial. She convinced him that evil had not infested the entire world, despite it touching so close to home. She was his guide and mentor; his beacon of hope and strength.

Fast forward seven years. Carla Larson got up on the morning of June 10, 1997, to go to work as a building engineer for Centex Rooney Construction Company. The project, a resort called Coronado Springs, was on Walt Disney World property. It was an ordinary day until she left for lunch and never came back. She went to a nearby Publix supermarket to buy grapes and strawberries when a small time convict named John Huggins kidnapped her in the parking lot, drove to a remote field, and strangled her, partially burying her in a shallow grave and covering her with leaves.

What did Jim Larson do to deserve this? They had a one-year-old daughter together. It was her idea, but he didn’t want to bring a child up in a world where murderers like Danny Rolling stalked innocent victims. After extensive counseling, Jim found inner peace and their daughter was born. They had bought a small house in the suburbs of Orlando, in College Park. They installed new locks and a home security system. They bought a Rottweiler. Carla drove a big Ford Explorer. Jim made sure he did everything he could do to keep his family safe.

John Huggins was a Sanford landscaper who had been in and out of trouble with the law most of his life. He was on vacation with his estranged wife, Angel, and their children, staying at a hotel directly across the street from that Publix. In broad daylight, he punched Carla in the stomach, forced her into her Explorer, and drove away, never to be seen alive again. Two days later, her nude body was found, partially clad in a beach towel. She was badly decomposed after only two days in the hot summer sun, but one of the medical examiner’s photographs suggested the possibility of a pre-mortem sexual injury. In other words, rape, without all of the details of the autopsy report. At the time, Dr. Sashi Gore was the Chief Medical Examiner for Orange and Osceola Counties. A different Dr. G back then.

I distinctly remember this murder. It’s funny how the mind plays tricks. After his arrest, John Huggins looked like an ordinary guy to me, unlike a murderer, but then again, what is a murderer supposed to look like? Someone pleasing to the eye, like Casey Anthony or Ted Bundy? When Jim Larson was interviewed on TV, he acted so unemotional and flat, he became a prime suspect in the minds of viewers. He’s hiding something! I even hesitated to believe him because of his indifference. He talked to the media, never shedding a tear, and never showing anger or sorrow. When he spoke, it was insipid, with a prosaic stare. Law enforcement officials were so perplexed by his strange behavior, they asked him to take a lie detector test, just to see if he was somehow involved. Of course, his only involvement was the incredible love he felt for his wife. It lasts to this very day. The murders of his sister seven years earlier, and now his wife, had completely drained him.

On the afternoon of the murder, Carla’s white Explorer was seen speeding away from what turned out to be her temporary grave, along the Orange-Osceola county border. Huggins was trying to patch up his broken marriage. He and his family had been staying in motel and hotel rooms mostly around the Melbourne area where his wife’s mother lived, before coming to Orlando. Angel, his second wife, later told police that her husband was gone at lunchtime that day and returned sometime later, all sweaty and nervous. She soon left with the children to stay with her mother, Fay, leaving Huggins behind.

Later that day, he arrived at Fay’s house driving a white SUV that matched the general description of Carla’s. It was a rental, he said. Although he and his wife were in the process of a divorce, they continued to stay together in the coastal area until her sister, Tammy, arrived to visit. During that time she and Huggins began a relationship. What happened next was something I remember because it was so obvious what this was all about.

Kevin Smith, who lived nearby, was a friend of Huggins. He had agreed to let him keep the SUV at his house for a few days. On the evening of October 26, police received a phone call that an SUV was engulfed in flames in a vacant lot near Kevin’s house. Instinctively, most of us knew what it was, and a subsequent investigation proved it was Carla’s and it was set on fire intentionally.

On the following day, seventeen days after Carla’s murder, Tammy returned to her home in Maryland with John in tow. Shortly after they left, Angel watched America’s Most Wanted, which featured Carla’s murder. She had wondered where John got the SUV and never believed his story. She called the show and reported that she suspected her husband of the murder. As a result of that call, investigators conducted two extensive searches of Fay’s house, but were unable to find anything incriminating. Angel and her mother searched, too, and one day while getting a can of bug spray out of the back yard shed, Fay noticed a screwdriver on top of an electrical box. On a whim, she unscrewed the lid, and found jewelry inside - jewelry that was later found to belong to Carla, including her pear-shaped diamond engagement ring.

John Huggins was arrested in Maryland and extradited back to Florida. After his indictment in front of an Orange County grand jury, he requested a change of venue, which was granted and transferred to Jacksonville in Duval County. On February 3, 1999, Huggins was convicted of first-degree murder, carjacking, robbery and kidnapping. During the sentencing phase, Jim Larson told the jury that, ”One night Carla and I were sitting on a bench outside her dorm room. We were just talking. Carla got up to do something. She walked a few steps and turned around and looked at me. It was just a moment. But when our eyes met, it was as if our souls touched one another. I smiled back at her. I felt so good my eyes filled with tears. I loved her so much. We set our wedding date for Dec. 1, 1990, after her graduation from college.”

After considering the aggravators and mitigators, the jury recommended the death penalty by an 8-4 vote. The court agreed, and John Steven Huggins was sentenced to death. Ironically, Danny Rolling and John Huggins were on death row together. Two murders unrelated except for one common thread - a man, two women and two families who did nothing in life to deserve this. Neither did Jim and Carla’s daughter, a mere one-year-old at the time, much too young to sin, and much too young to know anything about bad karma.

This is the end of PART ONE. Where am I going with this? Wait and see. The answer will come this week, when I weave it all together with what we are witnessing today in a case that has so much national exposure, it dwarfs the magnitude of Carla’s murder in scale, but certainly not in importance.

TO READ PART 2, CLICK HERE

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