Roderick Justin Ferrell
Rod was born on 28th March 1980 to seventeen-year-old Sondra and twenty-year-old Rick Ferrell in Kentucky. Within months the marriage had crumbled and they got divorced. Sondra found it difficult to fit into normal society as her Pentecostal fundamentalist parents hadn’t allowed her to go on dates, visit the cinema or attend dances when she was growing up. She admitted that her childhood had been an emotionally and mentally abusive hell so she wanted little Rod to see her as a friend rather than a cold controlling mum.
But despite his mother’s good intentions, Rod’s first few years were very uncertain ones. Sondra had felt alienated from the other children at school and had left as soon as possible. Still just a teenager herself, she was ill-equipped to support her infant son. Sometimes she’d find work in a burger joint for a few weeks, leaving Rod with her parents. On other occasions she worked as a dancer or lived off benefits.
The teenage mother began to smoke cannabis and drink alcohol in order to relax. She started dating. She continued to have difficulties with her parents and her father told her that she wasn’t fit to be a mum.
Rick, Rod’s dad, initially visited his son but Sondra kept interrupting their games and made the visits unpleasant. As a result, he saw less and less of the little boy. On the upside, Rod and his mum went to the cinema together and shared pizzas and had some fun times. But her boyfriends and various jobs limited the amount of time she spent with her son.
Meanwhile, Rod was being given very conflicting messages about life. His grandparents said that smoking and drinking were forbidden and that women shouldn’t wear make-up or trousers (because Deuteronomy 22 says that a woman wearing male garments or vice versa is an abomination,) whereas Rod’s mother was making up for her desperately repressed childhood by partying like mad.
Children need consistency in their lives. If a child runs around singing a song and his mother smiles then he assumes that singing is good, that it brings adult approval. If, the next time he sings he’s shouted at, he doesn’t know which way to turn. Rod’s grandparents would give him one set of instructions – but when Sondra had an argument with them then she’d tell Rod not to do what they said.
When Rod was five years old he allegedly came back from a day trip looking very distressed. Sondra questioned him about what had happened and formed the impression that he had been sexually abused in a ceremony run by a religious cult that involved one of her relatives. Rod would continue to mention this alleged incident every so often – and it would be raised again eleven years later at his trial.
Rod’s grandfather was a travelling salesman so the family moved around a lot. The little boy often had to get used to new neighbours, new schools and new acquaintances. Sometimes his mother was away staying with a boyfriend but at other times she and Rod played Dungeons & Dragons together. Rod also played this role-playing game with his father, Rick. The boy had a talent for it as he was highly imaginative and creative. But Rod’s grandfather declared it was ‘the Devil’s game.’
These inconsistencies continued over the years. Rod’s grandparents kept telling him to pray and to read the Bible whilst his mother taught him how to cast spells and read the Tarot cards. His school noticed that he’d become increasingly troubled, increasingly strange.
By the time he entered his teens, Rod was hurting himself physically as a way of coping with all the hurt he had inside. A friend saw him batter himself against a fence. He also had shallow cuts on his arms which he made with a knife or a razor. He was clearly deeply depressed and often talked about suicide.
When he was fifteen, Sondra married again. She moved away to Michigan with her new husband, meaning for Rod to join them later when he left school. But someone gave Rod the impression that his mother didn’t want him back. When Sondra heard this she was horrified and travelled to Murray to fetch him. So Rod changed house and school again.
By now he was sleeping all day and truanting from school so he was expelled for bad attendance and poor attitude. Now he had even less structure to his life.
Rod started to experiment with drugs. He also smoked cigarettes and lived off junk food. He often looked anaemic and ill.
Physically, Rod matured quickly, growing to almost six foot tall. He remained reed-thin but grew his hair down to his shoulders and dyed it jet black. With his probing dark eyes, porcelain complexion and narrow nose he appealed to girls who were looking for someone different, someone who seemed superficially strong. Deep down, of course, Rod had little self-esteem or hope for the future. All he could do was invent a persona that would draw other lost young people to him, that would give him a transitory power.
The group of people who Rod now spent his time with would later be described as a terrifying vampiric cult – but they were hardly that. They were a loose knit group of around thirty, of which only five would go on the run.
Rod’s main man was Scott Anderson whom he’d known since second grade. Scott had been taken away from his unhappy home and had settled down with foster parents but was now back with his biological parents again. He was thin, wore thick glasses, lacked confidence and was desperate to lose his virginity. He saw Rod, who’d had several lovers, as a heroic figure and tended to follow him around.
Charity Kessee, Rod’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend – who he called Che or Shea – was the second member of the group. She loved Rod’s dark romantic side but feared his violence. (He’d break furniture when he got really angry.) They’d been together for almost a year. She lived with her father in Murray but kept in touch with her mother who lived in South Dakota. She often felt lonely when her father was at work.
Charity told Rod again and again that she loved him but he clearly doubted that he was lovable and kept setting her little tests. She noticed that he’d provoke fights in order to get a reaction, something that was hard for the teenager to understand. But it’s common for dysfunctional people to provoke fights as a means of avoiding true intimacy. Such damaged people desperately want to be loved but at the same time they can’t allow others to get close. The drama of passionate arguments offers a kind of love – or the closest thing to love that most of them have ever known.
The third teenager who Rod hung around with was fifteen-year-old Heather Wendorf, a platonic friend. Heather’s older sister had started dating so Heather was somewhat lonely. An artistic girl, she felt different to the more conventional students at school.
Heather’s father was a self-made man who’d been able to give his two daughters and his common-law wife Ruth a good standard of living. They lived in a beautiful house that had many amenities.
Limited information has been released about Heather’s home life so it’s hard to know exactly where her unhappiness stemmed from – but she’d started to cut her arms to release her emotional pain, something that both her older sister and her mother knew about. She also suffered from insomnia and migraines and thought about death frequently.
People who knew her at school said that she was intelligent but troubled. She had always been a quiet girl but became even quieter after she got to know Rod. She started to dye her hair purple and sometimes wore a dog collar around her neck – but Heather wasn’t living a wild child life. Her parents liked her to stay home with them at night and watch TV. Luckily she was close to her seventeen-year-old sister, but her sister was currently the source of family rows as she was staying out late with her new beau.
Heather wrote to Scott that she had ‘vengeance, hate, destruction’ in her as well as the side of herself that she showed at school, a largely passive side. Heather told Rod all about her unhappiness and Rod strongly empathised.
The fourth member of the cult was nineteen-year-old Dana Cooper, a friend of Charity’s who Rod had met a fortnight before. Dana had her own flat and Rod and his mates started to hang out there. Dana was overweight and lacking in confidence so was grateful for these instant new friends.
The teenagers dressed like vampires and often met up at the cemetery. They hung out in a small crumbling outhouse in the woods that they called the Vampyre Hotel. They’d take turns at lightly cutting their arms and licking their own or their friends warm blood.
The press would later refer to this as drinking blood, as if the supposed vampires were opening their veins widely, but the wounds the teens inflicted were just thin razor cuts. One of Heather’s boyfriends was so disgusted by this blood-licking act that he finished with her, though he was aware that she was being influenced by Rod.
Rod said that he’d been reincarnated many times and had lived for hundreds of years, inhabiting the best districts of Paris. It wasn’t clear why he’d chosen to relocate to rural Kentucky for his current life.
Rod’s homelife continued to have its difficulties. His mother – by now an attractive thirty-five-year-old – often flirted with his friends. They liked his house as they could just hang out and be themselves with Sondra. But Rod was clearly embarrassed by his mother’s behaviour and was always looking for different places to stay. On another occasion a friend saw Rod and his mother arguing and Sondra trashed her son’s room and dragged him out of it by his hair.
The tension exacerbated when Sondra developed a crush on one of Rod’s fourteen-year-old friends. She wrote the child a letter saying that she dreamed about being ‘French kissed and fucked’ by him. She wrote a second letter that was equally graphic and suggested the boy move in. Sondra knew that the boy’s brother was active in another vampire cult and hoped that this fourteen-year-old would initiate her so that she could become a vampire who supposedly had eternal life.
Rod was incensed by all of this – after all, early adulthood is partly about forging your own identify and separating from your parents. How could he revel in his vampiric differences if his mother was a vampire too? Rod told friends that he wanted to kill his mother and his grandfather, who he described as a sick bastard. But his rage was becoming increasingly free-floating, for he also offered to kill the parents of two of his friends.
At this stage the mother of the fourteen-year-old boy who Sondra desired saw the sexually explicit letters. She went to the police and on 12th November 1996 Sondra was charged with ‘soliciting rape and sodomy’ from a minor. She would subsequently spend six months in jail.
Rod also had his run-ins with the police as they suspected that – acting with another teenager – he’d mutilated two puppies from the local animal shelter. And one of his friends said that Rod had fatally swung a kitten against a tree.
By now the sixteen-year-old was experimenting with so many drugs that his girlfriend Charity felt frightened. Rod looked stoned and threatened to kill numerous people – yet he thought he was being singled out by the locals simply because his long hair and black clothes made him look different.
All five of the teens felt alienated from their peers and were looking for a new start. They talked more and more about running away. On 25th November 1996 they each packed some clothes and set off on their great adventure in Scott’s old Buick. Rod was pleased when Charity told him that she was expecting their child. (She’d been deliberately trying to get pregnant in the hope that he’d settle down with her and not look at any other women.) But he knew that Charity’s dad wouldn’t be so pleased.
They could hear that the engine was soon going to pack up so they looked around for another vehicle. Rod knew that Heather’s parents were wealthy and that they had a sports utility jeep. He’d previously heard Heather say that she’d only be allowed to leave home when her parents were dead – and she’d been overheard telling someone else that she wished they’d both disappear. It suited Rod’s purpose to remember these words now as he had so much hate in his heart.
The boys let Heather Wendorf think that they were going to collect another friend who was supposed to run away with them. In truth, they went looking for the Wendorfs’ house. Rod had lived some distance away from Heather throughout much of their friendship so had never been to her home before but another friend had told him how to identify the place. At first he approached a neighbouring dwelling but looked inside and saw little children playing so knew that couldn’t be Heather’s home.
The teens soon located the Wendorfs’ garage and Rod grabbed a crowbar to use as a weapon. The door was unlocked so he and Scott entered the house, had a drink in the kitchen and looked around. The youths saw Heather’s father sleeping on the settee, something the hardworking man often did at the end of another long day.
Rod had allegedly heard Heather complain about her parents many times. She’d cried on the phone and he’d assumed that she was being abused, just as he’d been. He’d decided, without telling her, that her parents were going to die.
Rod started to batter the man – a man he’d never met – over the head with the crowbar. The first few blows rendered him unconscious but Rod continued to batter him, causing blood and brain tissue to fly everywhere. He delivered more than a dozen blows to the man’s skull until he eventually stopped breathing, his face unrecognisable, the bar briefly forced deep into his chest. Faced with the reality of watching a brutal death, Scott froze. He believed, in principle, in blood sacrifices – but seeing all this real blood and brains was completely different.
Moments after killing Rick Wendorf, Rod lifted the dead man’s shirt and burnt a V for vampire into his stomach with a lit cigarette then took his credit card. Scott went into one of the other rooms to see if there was any cash available and Rod, holding the bloodstained crowbar, walked out into the hall.
At that moment Ruth Wendorf stepped into the hallway carrying a coffee. Startled at suddenly finding this long-haired stranger in her house, she asked him what he wanted. He lashed out at her, and she threw the hot liquid over him. They fought and she scratched him – the police would later find his DNA under her nails. Enraged, the teenager battered the crowbar into her head again and again.
Then Rod and Scott left, knowing that Heather’s older sister would shortly walk into the scene of horror. They’d already cut the phone lines so that she couldn’t immediately summon help.
Scott took the wheel of the Wendorfs’ Explorer (an act of theft that, in the eyes of the law, would make him almost as guilty as Rod) and soon caught up with the other car that Charity was now driving. They eventually all transferred to the Explorer and ditched the Buick.
Heather was shocked when she saw that they’d stolen her parents’ vehicle and said that they’d be livid – but, after dropping several hints, Rod admitted that they were dead. Heather appeared shocked, then angry for a time, and later said she’d thought about running away from the group but decided to stay in case Rod killed her too.
Independent life is hard – and the five teenagers had little money and only a vague notion of where they were heading. They got lost several times and burgled a house to find cash to buy food. Rod had thought he might live on his wits in the wilderness – but the girls were cold and scared and Charity was two months pregnant with his child. Like most teenagers, he had only a sketchy idea of how he’d survive in the real world, telling the others that they might be able to stay with his former friends in New Orleans.
Meanwhile – as they’d suspected – Heather’s sister had come home and discovered the bodies so an APB was out for the Explorer. Charity decided to phone her mum and ask for help. Her mother told them to go to a motel and she’d arrange to pay for it. The police raced to the motel and the teens surrendered immediately.
Rod was questioned in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on 28th November 1996. He said, in answer to their question, that he’d been seeing a psychiatrist at the behest of either his school or his mother. He couldn’t remember which. He admitted that he no longer cared about anything, adding ‘It’s because I don’t have any concern for life anymore.’
He went on to answer questions about the proposed trip then said that he and Scott had gone to Heather’s garage for ‘weapons, food and cash.’ Moments later he added ‘I went to her dad and smacked the fuck out of him until he finally quit breathing so yes, I’m admitting to murder.’ He also said that he’d rained numerous blows on Ruth Wendorf’s head ‘until I saw her brains falling on the floor.’
His statement showed that Scott hadn’t taken part in the bloodshed, because ‘he totally froze,’ adding later that ‘the most he did was move the bodies a little bit.’
Rod added that they hadn’t gotten caught until he let his girlfriend phone home as she was the only thing he cared about. By then they were lost and hungry and walking through a bad neighbourhood which scared Charity.
Rod was very amicable with the Baton Rouge police saying that they didn’t beat him like the Murray and Florida cops had. He said that such violence had made him wary of everyone. Asked if he’d seen a murder before he replied ‘I’ve fucking seen murders all my life, ever since I was five…’ He implicated a male relative in one such murder and added that the cult the relative was part of had raped five-year-old Rod as part of an initiation rite.
Moments later he asked if he’d get the death penalty. When told that he probably would, he said ‘I was kind of hoping… please go ahead, ha!’
He added that he didn’t currently know where his mother was, but that she was staying with a new boyfriend who had just gotten out of prison for forgery. Earlier in his statement he’d talked about one of her ex-boyfriends who, he alleged, did drugs.
Towards the end of his statement he said that he hoped the police who were coming to collect him were as nice as the ones currently interrogating him. He said that if they weren’t he would clam up, adding ‘I didn’t speak for two years at one time so I can do it again.’
Scott said that he’d planned to kill Ruth Wendorf whilst Rod killed Rick Wendorf. But when he’d seen Rod strike Rick for the first time he knew that he couldn’t go through with it. He said that they’d told Charity and Dana minutes before the deaths that they were going to kill the couple and steal their car. Scott said that Heather hadn’t had prior knowledge of the murders. He was unable to explain to the police why he’d agreed to kill the couple or why he’d let Rod go ahead with such vicious acts. The girls had remained in the Buick whilst the murders were taking place in the house so there was little they could add.
It was a foregone conclusion that Rod would be found guilty of killing Rick and Ruth Wendorf, a couple who had done him no harm and whom he’d met for the first time moments before he bludgeoned them to death. His skin had been found under Ruth’s fingernails as she’d scratched his arms whilst they wrestled. His footprints were also found at the scene. He had told Dana and Charity that he and Scott planned to kill the couple and the police had his full confession on tape.
It’s not a court’s place to explain why an act occurred, only that it did. But obviously the defence wanted to show any mitigating circumstances. They spoke of Rod’s miserable childhood, being moved around from one place to another. They spoke of Sondra’s prison sentence for soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old child. An expert who’d interviewed Sondra said that she had the maturity of a twelve-year-old and was sometimes delusional.
Rod had also told them that he’d been sexually abused by his grandfather – and by other men – at age five or six as part of a Black Mass. As he was also claiming to be a vampire who had lived for hundreds of years, no one paid much attention to these allegations. But Sondra said that Rod’s grandfather had taken him out for the day fishing when he was five and that he’d come back looking hugely traumatised and vomiting. He’d later drawn pictures of demons and pictures that suggested oral and anal abuse.
Sondra’s sister Lyzetta spoke up in court saying that her father – Rod’s grandfather – had kissed her and fondled her, and that he’d rubbed her childish body against his. As a result of this she had left home at age fourteen.
Rod’s grandfather has never been charged with any sexual offence so must be assumed innocent. But he told reporters that a Christian wouldn’t do such things, and in this he was wrong for professionals who have studied sexual addiction have found that men and women who act in sexually inappropriate ways have often spent years adopting the moral high ground. As a result, they are well known for their strong moral values both by their families and in the wider community When the man – or woman – is then arrested for, say, flashing or making obscene phone calls, everyone refuses to believe it at first because it contrasts so strongly with the values he or she has always professed.
Such men and women are often desperate for outside approval so they try harder than normal to appear extra good. But deep down they believe that they are bad people who are not lovable and whose needs will not be met. They see sex as their most important need and will risk their careers, marriages and children’s happiness to have these needs met.
Patrick Carnes, author of Out Of The Shadows: Understanding Sexual Addiction has noted that such sexual obsessives are often drawn to helping professions such as the ministry, social work and nursing. These are all professions in which people can either nurture or dominate. Both roles are attractive to the sexual addict who believes that he or she cannot be loved for themselves, only for what they can give to others – or can force from them.
Rod Ferrell admitted to psychiatrists that being sexualised at the age of six had left him a nymphomaniac and that he’d had numerous lovers. The vampire embrace – though he didn’t say so – is also a very sexual act. During it the teens embrace closely and one grazes his teeth against the neck of the other. When performed by two same sex members of the clan it had a homo-erotic element.
Rod’s statement in court seemed to differ from what he’d originally told police. In his statement at Baton Rouge he’d said that Scott just froze when he, Rod, started to bludgeon Rick. But in court he said that Scott smiled whilst watching this first murder and that Scott had seemed high afterwards.
He hadn’t said much about Heather initially, but now said that she didn’t like her mum and suggested that Heather had masterminded the two murders – but this contrasted with what he’d told Scott and the other girls earlier Rod now seemed to be trying to spread the blame in order to get a reduced sentence for himself.
Sondra had planned to say in court that she’d overheard Heather and Rod planning the deaths together. But she failed a lie detector test on the subject so her testimony couldn’t go ahead.
Rod now changed his plea to guilty. Later that month (February 1998) he was sentenced to die in Florida’s electric chair. He remained implacable, only looking momentarily close to tears when his mother began to sob.
Charity was given ten years for robbery with a firearm or deadly weapon. She was also guilty of driving Heather away from the Wendorfs’ home that night. Dana was given seventeen years for similar offences as she was an adult offender rather than a juvenile. Scott, who had watched the killings and stolen the Explorer, was given two life sentences for first degree murder.
A programme aired in Britain about the vampire murders said that the judiciary was looking closely at Heather as they believed she might have played a part in planning her parent’s deaths. But subsequent to the programme being aired, a Grand Jury said that they’d found no evidence against her and she was cleared.
Scott will remain incarcerated for life without the possibility of parole. Charity’s original release date was set at 2007 but she will probably be released in 2004. Within weeks of her arrest, she lost the baby she was carrying. It’s believed that Dana’s sentence will also be reduced. Heather, who was cleared of all charges, moved away from the area and returned to school.
Rod was put on Florida’s Death Row. Interviewed in Lake County Jail in Tavares after being sentenced, he said that he didn’t realise the impact of his actions. This seems unlikely: he was long-term disturbed but he wasn’t delusional when committing the homicides. After all, he’d made sure that the couple didn’t have company, had cut the phone lines, gotten rid of his bloodstained shirt and changed the registration of the Explorer to that of the Buick in order to confuse the law.
As is often the case with high profile youthful killers, teenager ‘fans’ soon set up websites dedicated to the vampire clan and tried to find Rod’s prison address so that they could write to him. One boy on a vampire message board said he’d been told by another web-user that he could have the address for seventy-five dollars. The boy seemed fascinated with Rod Ferrell because he sounded articulate, looked impressively Gothic with his flowing black hair and had committed the murders when he was so young.
But appearances can be deceptive. Most of Rod’s statements, when carefully analysed, made little sense. And with his dyed black hair shorn off in jail, he looked weak and hopeless. One of the policemen associated with the case summed it up best, saying that he talked a good talk but was really just a scared little kid.
In April 1998 Rod’s lawyers tried to have his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, arguing that the jury hadn’t given enough weight to the psychological reports about his multiply-abused childhood. The judge disagreed so he is still likely to die in the electric chair.