Starke, Fla. ? Danny Harold Rolling, Florida’s most notorious serial killer since Ted Bundy, was executed by injection Wednesday for butchering five college students in a ghastly string of slayings that terrorized Gainesville in 1990.

Rolling, 52, was pronounced dead at 5:13 p.m. CDT, more than 16 years after his killing rampage at the start of the University of Florida’s fall semester.

When asked for a last statement, Rolling sang for two minutes what sounded like a hymn with the refrain “none greater than thee, O Lord, none greater than thee,” witnesses and prison officials said.

He appeared to continue singing after prison officials turned off the microphone, finally stopping just before he died.

The bodies of his victims were found over three days in late August, just as the University of Florida’s fall semester was beginning. All had been killed with a hunting knife. Some had been mutilated, sexually assaulted and put in shocking poses. One girl’s severed head had been placed on a shelf, her body posed as if seated.

The killing spree touched off a huge manhunt and plunged the laid-back college town into panic. Students fled and residents armed themselves.

Belongings that Rolling left at a campsite in the woods and DNA taken after a later arrest for robbery linked him to the slayings. When he came up for trial in 1994, he shocked the courtroom by pleading guilty.

“There are some things you just can’t run from, this being one of those,” Rolling told the judge.

He later told The Associated Press: “I do deserve to die, but do I want to die? No. I want to live. Life is difficult to give up.”

Dianna Hoyt, whose stepdaughter was slain, said the execution marked “the final chapter of this book.”

“This man brought this outcome to himself, and the law of the land carried through to show us justice,” Hoyt said.

Outside the prison, death penalty opponents stood in a circle singing “Amazing Grace” after Rolling was pronounced dead.

Other onlookers supported the execution. “They’re doing a good thing,” said Randy Hicks, 35, a truck driver and former prison guard who occasionally watched over Rolling. “This guy deserves it. It’s very overdue.”

The gathering of people on a barren cow pasture across from the prison was reminiscent of the crowds that assembled for Bundy’s execution on Jan. 24, 1989, in the state’s old electric chair. Bundy was suspected in the deaths and disappearances of 36 women across the country.

Bundy died in the electric chair in 1989 in the same death chamber. The case was still fresh in the minds of many when Rolling’s killings began the following year in roughly the same area as some of Bundy’s crimes.

Rolling, a police officer’s son from Shreveport, La., arrived in Gainesville on a Greyhound bus, pitched a tent in the woods near campus and set out to become, as he would say later, a “superstar” among criminals.

The bodies of Sonja Larson, 18, and Christina Powell, 17, were found stabbed to death in a townhouse just off the University of Florida campus. Christa Hoyt, 18, was found decapitated the next morning in her isolated duplex. Tracy Paules and Manny Taboada, both 23, were discovered dead a day later in the apartment they shared.

Texas execution

Also Wednesday, a man was executed in Huntsville, Texas, for initiating a murder-for-hire plot that authorities said led to the fatal stabbings of his parents and an uncle.

The lethal injection of Gregory Summers, 48, came more than seven years after the execution of Andrew Cantu, convicted of taking the $10,000 offer and fatally stabbing Gene and Helen Summers, both 64, and Billy Mack Summers, 60. Their home in Abilene was set on fire after they were attacked and their bodies were found in the rubble.

Attorneys for Summers tried Wednesday to block the punishment by challenging the constitutionality of the lethal injection method, accusing prosecutors of hiding evidence and raising questions about testimony from a trial witness who implicated Summers.

The U.S. Supreme Court three weeks ago refused to review his case. Three appeals went to the high court late Wednesday, and all were rejected.

Authorities said the 1990 slayings were the result of Summers’ parents’ frustration with bailing their son out of his financial problems and Greg Summers’ attempt to get $24,000 in life insurance.

“His father had come to the end of his rope with Greg and was starting to cut him off financially,” said Kent Sutton, who prosecuted Summers. “Greg was going to inherit everything and that was one of the reasons he wanted the house burned.”

Prosecutors also showed how Summers previously collected insurance payoffs from fires at his grandmother’s house and a vehicle.