When a storyteller tells a tale, its meaning is often conveyed as much in the tale's telling as in the tale itself.   By changing emphasis or altering details, the storyteller can suggest completely different meanings to his audience while telling what is essentially the same tale.  So it is with Danny Harold Rolling, convicted of the 1990 slayings of five students in Gainesville, Florida.

In 1997 Rolling's biographer, Sondra London, recounted a tale of three spiders, "A Real Killer," as Rolling had told it to her:

"Besides the spirits of the night, the prisoner had other companions in solitary confinement - the spiders spinning their webs in the corners.  He gave them proper names - Ned, Ted, and Fred - and he fed them.  He was quick enough to snatch a fly out of the air, then he would pull its wings off and toss it into the sticky web.  The insect would struggle desperately to free itself, but to no avail.  The spider always got its prey.  He'd feel the vibrations of the wiggling victim in his web of death, and the legs that brought the end would stealthily approach.

"The spider would stretch strand after silky strand from its abdomen and wrap the victim with its spindly legs until it was encased in a neat little package of webbery.   Then, once the prey was completely immobilized, the spider would pounce on it with ravenous lust, and inject the poison with its deadly fangs.

"Though he has no teeth, nor jaws with which to chew his food, the spider is equipped with an ingenious method of consuming the nourishment he needs.  The poison acts as an acid that turns the insides of the victim into a liquid.  Thus, all the web-slinger has to do is wait patiently until the work is done, sort of like waiting on a bartender to mix up your favorite concoction for you to eagerly shove a straw into and suck it dry.  The spider sticks its fang into the expired critter embedded in its web and has a drink.  Slurp!  Ahhh...

"And so life in The Hole went on, with its spiders, its roaches, its rats - and its creeping crud.  The flooding filth that invaded the prisoner's cell became a constant battle.  But the enemy had no human form the prisoner could defeat with blows and kicks.  The only weapons that would work were the broom and the mop.   The trouble was that good ol' Sarge would leave the prisoner locked up for hours with the floating shit before opening his cell so he could clean it out.

"Ned and Ted had begun to reject the daily offerings place [sic] in their webs, and it was getting on the crazed man's nerves.  'Now Ned, you see that big fat roachie-bug I caught for you?  Come on now, eat your roach like a good little boy, hear?  What's the matter with you, Ted?  You're not hungry either?  Damn!   You good-for-nothing spiders!  I go to all his [sic] trouble to catch you guys bugs - and you don't even eat them!'

"One day as the prisoner sat observing his spider pals, he just couldn't take it any longer.  'Ned and Ted?  You guys are so finicky.  Well boys, it looks like Judgement Day has finally arrived!'  And with that he jumped up, grabbed his brown brogan, and smashed Ned and Ted with the heel.  SPLAT!  And that was that.

"Now it was down to just Fred.  He was the biggest of the three, and he never turned up his nose at a fly or a moth.  Attacking any living things in his path, he would pounce on it with a vengeance, bite it, wrap it up in his silky bonds, and save it for a rainy day.

"Fred was Danny Rolling's kind of guy.  A real killer".¹

Four years earlier, on February 13, 1993, Rolling's "confessor", Bobby Lewis, related to me a slightly different version of the story shortly after he had last heard it from Rolling.

"It's amazing to me how the tale of these three spiders, as told to me by Danny Rolling, would turn on the lights in my own head and help me discover as much as I believe anyone will who or what Danny is.  For a time he gave off impressions of himself that lead one to believe he was a son of God, at other times the son of Satan, and more often just a plain evil son of a bitch.  Over time, Danny told this story several times to me, each with a little more in the meaning he was trying to convey to me.

"Years ago he was in a hell-hole of a penitentiary in Parchman Miss in a cell more like a dungeon in the bowels of the place, where sewage would back up two or three times a week and he had to live in human waste til the water level went down.  This place had all that a Southern prison of old had to offer and he looked for anything to give him some substance in life. 

"He found in it, Ned, Ted,  and Fred, three spiders that lived in three different corners of his cell.  He explained how, with time, he acquainted himself with them and they became like his brothers.   They lost their fear of him and would eagerly get on his hand or crawl on his body for a ride around the cell.  He would help them hunt for food.  As a boxer, a karate person, he was fast.  He would catch a fly or roach and pull off their wings or legs so it was still alive and would wiggle.  He'd place his catch in their web and then put the spider in the web.  'Meal time,' he would say.  He pampered them, talked to them.

"Over a period of months, Ned and Ted started to ignore Danny.  They would not eat his offerings.  They no longer would rush to his hand.  They were betraying him.  So he took a needle and tortured them then took his lighter and burnt them and their webs up.  All this he did with Fred's help as Fred always acted the way he wanted.

"The third time he told me the story, he told me I was like his brother, that I was like Fred, and that he loved me.  The look in his eyes was intense and evil and he had a large smile.  Then he said 'I just hope you are never like Ned and Ted.'  I had from the first time picked up on the moral of this story, but on this time it sent a shiver down my back as I truly understood how the relationship that has formed between me and Danny was a game of life and death and I was unsure how prepared I was to deal with this man and have any hope in the end of coming out with my life, or my mind, intact.  I've been in a lot of dangerous situations in my life, some life threatening, but nothing to the continued pressure that each day I would become Ned or Ted and with someone who I hated all he done with all my heart.  It was very hard to play the part of Fred, but I also knew my life depended on it."

The significant difference between these two versions is the manner of the deaths of Ned and Ted.  They are quickly dispatched in the London version, wherein it is told that a simple whack with the heal of a shoe does them in.  But in the Lewis version of the tale, they are first tortured with a needle and then they are burned.

From this difference, two disparate conclusions derive from what is essentially the same tale.

The London version comes to the conclusion that Rolling favors Fred for his aggressive tendencies.  The purpose of this telling is simply to characterize Rolling:

"Fred was Danny Rolling's kind of guy.  A real killer."

The Lewis version concludes that Rolling favors Fred because he is cooperative.  The purpose of this telling is to warn Lewis that he should not fail to cooperate with Rolling:

" 'I just hope you are never like Ned and Ted.' "

¹ The Making of a Serial Killer "The Real Story of the Gainesville Student Murders in the Killer's Own Words" by Danny Harold Rolling and Sondra London, Feral House 1996 pp. 93-94.