How the Gainesville Ripper was finally arrested after his gruesome murder

Read the first part of E! and the two-part series of Oxygen here

In four days in August 1990, five students were murdered in Gainesville, Florida.

Christina powell and roommate Sonya larson were incoming freshmen who never made it to their first week of classes at the University of Florida. Christa hoyt attended Santa Fe Community College and worked nights as a records clerk for the Alachua County Sheriff’s Office, hoping to someday become a law enforcement officer herself. Manuel Taboada was in the process of moving from SFCC to UF, wanting to study architecture. And Tracy Paules, his friend since high school, was a senior pre-law at UF.

The crime scenes were gruesome, the victims all stabbed to death in their own apartments, the women mutilated and three of them sexually assaulted.

Despite assurances from authorities and university officials that they were taking every precaution to ensure their safety, many students left for the comfort, company, and locked doors of the house, again living with their parents, an attractive prospect. . Hundreds of people did not return to campus until the spring semester, when the terror eased slightly.

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Because with the killer quickly dubbed “the Gainesville Ripper” still around, no one could be sure they wouldn’t be next.

As the students slept with knives by their beds and stocked up on Mace, each suspicious character was a possible killer for the multi-agency task force on the case.

And when at 18 Edouard Humphrey was arrested and charged with assaulting his grandmother just 48 hours after the murders, investigators believed he could be their man. They found magazines about knives, guns and girls during a search of his home, and he was known to carry a knife on campus.

What he also had, however, was type A blood. And semen collected at the crime scenes showed the killer to be type B.

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