Can Art Humanize a Killer?
The Unsettling Contradiction Between Creativity and Violence
Introduction
“Florida flush sunrise awaken those under ye spell. Perhaps today will fore-tell of wondrous things… wind that sings, and babbling brook that brings… seasons in simpler things.”
“Florid Flush ” like the spiny palmettos and throngs of azaleas, Pickerelweed and American Beautyberry - a picture of southern abundance paired with “wonderous things” and “wind that sings”… who knew our poet was also the Gainesville Ripper?
In 1990, Danny Rolling fled Shreveport, Louisiana for a land where “the girls are beautiful”. Within just a few days, even hours of settling into the college town of Gainesville, Rolling stalked two girls home and murdered them in their sleep. They had just moved in to their off-campus apartments for the start of their fall semester that August. He would go on to murder three more young women before his capture in Ocala on September 7th, for a botched robbery at a supermarket.
Danny Rolling pleaded guilty for the first-degree murder of five college students and was executed by lethal injection in October, 2006.
But Rolling’s crimes are only part of the story that continues to fascinate the public decades later. Alongside court records and crime scene photographs exists another archive entirely: poems about nature, handwritten reflections, drawings, and songs filled with longing, melancholy, and self-expression.
The contrast is deeply unsettling.
Society often associates creativity with sensitivity and humanity — qualities seemingly incompatible with brutality. But the artistic remnants left behind by Rolling complicate that assumption, forcing an uncomfortable question: can art humanize a killer?
The Humanity in Creativity
Creative expression is inherently human. Roughly 50,000 years ago in Sulawesi, Indonesia, humans were making their mark by painting and etching into limestone caves the images of warty pigs and tracings of the human hand. These Sulawesi cave paintings are some of the oldest known figurative artworks in the world. These paintings are more than aesthetic artifacts; they are evidence that the impulse toward expression has accompanied humanity for tens of thousands of years.
In June of 1889, Vincent Van Gogh created his Starry Night from behind bars at the Saint-Paul-de-Mausole asylum in France after a series of mental breakdowns, including the one that ushered the removal of his ear. Today, that artwork hangs in the Museum of Modern Art in New York City, and is the third-most visited painting in the world. Nearly three million people visit the Starry Night a year - what makes this particular artwork so attractive that flocks of our species travel miles to catch a real life glimpse?
10 million straw-colored fruit bats travel thousands of miles across Africa following the “green-wave” - a seasonal surge of plant growth including fruits - for food and the critical energy needed for female bats to reproduce. Across the Atlantic in the fall, tens-of-thousands of Greater sandhill cranes migrate from Canada and the midwest to spend the winter in Florida’s wetlands. Florida has fossil records of these birds dating back 2.5 millions years ago, and this persistent migratory pattern has more than doubled the state’s resident population.
But these creatures travel for survival - not for a moment in the presence of a curated inanimate object hanging on a wall. That is uniquely human.
Creative expression connects people because it is representational of our own selves as well as our species as a whole. Human expression makes an impression on humankind. This is the humanity in creativity.
The Sensitivity in Creativity
Alligators perform “water dances” and low-frequency bellows to snare a female and warn other males to stay away. Male white-spotted pufferfish create large, geometric, rosette-like circles in the sand and decorate them with seashells to attract mates. Mockingbirds compose and invent their own melodies that pass down and are modified over time. These behaviors are primarily driven by survival and mating, but the debate on whether this is the same as human creative expression will be left for one’s own interpretation.
Creative acts for the sole purpose of self expression connect us as a species beyond the need to survive. Music, art, poetry, writing - it goes beyond simple explanation and introduces the ability to have multiple interpretations and resonate differently with multiple groups of people from all over the world.
Individuals who process the world with greater emotional depth and sensory awareness tend to exhibit higher levels of creative ideation and artistic achievement, as reported in the National Library of Medicine. The study included using Sensory Processing Sensitivity (SPS) - describes individual differences in sensitivity to environments - and Aesthetic Sensitivity (AES) to assess different facets of creativity and empathy in different individuals. Higher scores were associated with more creative ideas, meaning, those with more of this emotional depth and sensory awareness were also those more creative.
But what does this mean when our creator is also a monster? How does this emotional expression contradict with the idea that creativity relates to emotional and sensory awareness? The ability to feel, process, and create - can creative expression humanize someone who has done evil, despicable things?
The Peculiarity of Creative Offenders
Danny Rolling took part in poetry and songwriting as well as drawing and painting. He left behind evidence of both creativity and destruction, emotional awareness and violence. The emotional depth associated with creative individuals contradicts with the malicious behavior of someone like Rolling. Creative-expression, as theorized previously, is inherently human. The question unfolds, can art humanize a killer?
Or at least attempt to? To preface, whether creative or not, these individuals still committed horrendous acts that deface the identity of the human race. No amount of paintings or poetry can fix these acts of evil.
The peculiarity surrounding creative offenders lies in the loss of a comforting binary. The human race has been so evolutionarily successful in part to its powerful brain and our ability to process our surroundings so well. Survival meant determining friend vs. foe, a poisonous vs. non-poisonous snake, safe vs. unsafe - we naturally divide our environment into clean categories: good vs. evil, sensitive or violent, human or monster. Creativity disrupts that division because artistic expression is often treated as evidence of empathy, introspection, and emotional complexity.
Someone capable of extreme violence but also writes about nature’s beauty forces the realization that humanity and brutality can coexist within the same individual. Art does not excuse violence, but it does deny the idea of complete distance. It does not redeem the offender, but it does reveal that cruelty is not always committed by figures devoid of emotion or self-awareness. The capacity for creative expression does not erase evil, nor does evil erase humanity.
Offenders who create art also present an irreconcilable contradiction: evidence of sensitivity existing alongside destruction. We want monstrosity to appear alien and easily identifiable, yet creative offenders remind us that violence can emerge from individuals who still participate in deeply human acts of expression.
Art humanizes because creativity itself is human. But humanization is not the same as absolution.
Can Art Humanize a Killer?
To humanize, in this sense, is to acknowledge their humanity - their emotions, contradictions, desires, and inner world. Recognizing humanity within violent individuals is peculiar and rather unsettling, for it confronts the truth that evil does not exist outside of humanity, but within.
Creative expression, such as in Danny Rolling’s songs and poems, are peculiar for this same reason. They are not notable because they belong to a killer; they're recognized because they mirror the same emotional expressions created by the rest of mankind. Connected by the comprehension that this person exhibits the qualities associated with being human, the contradiction between artistic sensitivity and horrific violence does not resolve itself neatly. Instead, it exposes the unsettling true complexity of human nature itself.
Whether art humanizes a killer will remain controversial. But it does introduce something almost even more unpalatable; the possibility that humanity and monstrosity were never opposites to begin with.