The Vampire Killers: A Horrifying True Story of Bloodshed and Murder

INTRODUCTION

Vampires have become hauntingly fashionable.

They’re the superheroes of the 1990s; sensual lovers surrounded with a romantic aura of danger, and mysterious beings with superhuman powers. For the most part, based on contemporary depictions in literature and film, they long ago lost the ugly, rotting corpse–like appearance and grave stink of Max Schreck’s portrayal of a vampire in the 1922 silent film, Nosferatu. Today’s fictional vampires are more likely to have the urbane romanticism and darkly erotic glamour of a George Hamilton or a Tom Cruise.

For the most part they are creatures who are irresistible to women or attractive to men; the kind of lover many people wouldn’t mind sharing a passionate interlude with—or a little blood.

One of the nicest things about them is that despite the aura of erotic danger, they’re perfectly safe because everyone knows they don’t really exist. They’re no more real than gnomes, or trolls or the scary giant who lived at the top of Jack’s magical beanstalk and ate little boys. Or are they?

To many Americans today, and to other people around the world, vampires are as real as a timber rattler or a black widow spider. A few years ago, Dr. Stephen Kaplan of the Vampire Research Center in Elmhurst, New York, launched the first vampire census of North America. Then, and in succeeding years, he interviewed scores of men and women who were convinced that they were real vampires who were dependent on blood for survival. The first census turned up twenty-one people, most of them married with children and regular jobs. But some of them slept in coffins and drank human or animal blood. He talked to one beautiful blonde who appeared to be in her twenties, but was actually in her sixties and traded sex for blood, which she collected by making tiny incisions in the flesh of her donors with a scalpel. Blood, the researcher concluded, greatly slowed the aging processes.

Kaplan and others learned that a thriving vampire underground exists in America. They have their own support networks, publications, Internet contacts and E-mail addresses which they use to keep in touch, swap information and set up meetings between blood drinkers and voluntary blood donors. Hundreds of women contacted Kaplan to sign on as volunteer donors in return for meetings or dates with vampires.

Vampires can be very sensual, very sexual. And they can be very dangerous, indeed, even when they’re not the real thing. Many of the people Kaplan talked to and corresponded with during his activities as founder and director of the VRC he later described as kooks, crazies, oddballs and blood cultists, who sought blood as a psychological manifestation. But they were not true vampires who drank blood as part of a physiological need.

The kooks, cultists and other pseudo-vampires are the most dangerous, and they can be every bit as sinister, depraved and ruthlessly savage as their fictional counterparts while prowling city streets, trolling highways and lurking in the darkened byways of college campuses to seek out prey for ghastly blood feasts. They’re a ghastly mix of Satanists, whacked-out druggies, twisted loners and counterfeit vampires turned on by fantasies of power, kinky sex, or both.

Ironically, the Sunshine State seems to attract more than its fair share of vampires—both real and imagined. One of Dr. Kaplan’s yearly enumerations disclosed that Florida and Illinois were tied for sixth place for the most vampires counted, with fourteen each. For awhile, Miami was said to have a clandestine vampire bar where blood was mixed in with the vodka and tomato juice for Bloody Marys with a real bite to them. More ominously, a Winter Park lawyer from a prominent family of attorneys was arrested a few years ago after two beautiful young women filed separate complaints that he lured them to his room at a local Holiday Inn, drugged them, then filled syringes with his own blood and squirted it on them. The vampire lawyer was a heavy cocaine user, and eventually entered into a plea agreement on drug charges. He was sentenced to a four-and-a-half-year prison term.

The area near the central Florida city that is internationally famous as the home of the Orlando Magic and Disney World has more trouble with vampires than with giant mice. John Crutchley was a math genius with a master’s degree in engineering who developed a computer language for the Navy and once held security clearance at the Pentagon before he earned a nickname among law enforcement agencies and the press as Florida’s vampire rapist. He was sentenced to prison for abducting a nineteen-year-old hitch-hiker from California and holding her prisoner at his home in Malabar, near the Kennedy Space Center, while raping her and guzzling nearly half her blood. She escaped through a window while he was at work, and staggered down a road, handcuffed and naked until she was rescued. He told her, I’m drinking your blood; I’m a vampire, she reported to police.

When Crutchley was released on parole in 1996 after serving nearly eleven years of a twenty-five-year sentence for sexual battery and kidnapping, he was accepted at an Orlando halfway house. Residents of the Malabar and Melbourne area, and of his former hometown in Clarksburg, West Virginia, rejected efforts to settle him in either of those communities. But he didn’t stay very long in Orlando. Shortly after protests by outraged neighbors and the Orange County sheriff, he was ordered to spend the rest of his life in prison for parole violation. He had tested positive for marijuana during a urinalysis, and told police he had inhaled it at a going-away party the night before he was released from the Union Correctional Institute in Raiford.

A few weeks after Crutchley was paroled to the halfway house, a band of teenagers who were fascinated with blood and the so-called undead made international headlines when they became the object of a multi-state dragnet as suspects in the ghastly murder of a quiet, hard-working middle-aged couple in central Florida, only a few minutes’ drive northwest of Orlando. The fugitives were four teenagers from western Kentucky said to have banded together as the nucleus of a vampire clan—and the fifteen-year-old daughter of the murder victims.

This is their story, recounted as faithfully as I can tell it. There are no made-up names, and all conversation and quotes are taken from interviews, court records or published news accounts. The only license the author has taken is presentation of some of the courtroom activity slightly out of chronological order. That was done in order to smooth out the narrative and make the story more readable.

PROLOGUE

Murray, Kentucky

Wednesday, October 16, 1996

Darla Speed knew something was seriously wrong the moment she stopped her car to open the chain-link gate at the Murray–Calloway County Animal Shelter and was greeted by about thirty dogs running loose.

It was a typical, crisp mid-October morning, but it wasn’t the low sixty-degree temperatures that chilled the shelter director. Overnight, someone had cut a hole in the chain-link fence on the east side of the compound, and tried unsuccessfully to break into the building by removing a window panel. The intruder failed to get inside the building, but had propped open the kennel doors, releasing forty dogs into the enclosure surrounding the compound and allowing them to escape through the hole in the fence. Only two dogs were still locked up inside their individual kennels, and ten of those freed were either carried away or had wandered into nearby woods or residential Murray neighborhoods. The shelter was at the end of a gravel road known as Sycamore Street Extended, and was quiet and isolated.

The dogs were milling around the shelter, many of them frightened, their tails tucked between their legs. Several of the dogs were bruised and showed signs of having been beaten. A couple of mixed-breed black Labrador retriever puppies from a litter dropped off at the shelter a few days earlier had suffered a much more gruesome fate.

Deputies from the Calloway County Sheriff’s Department in Murray, dispatched to investigate the vandalism at the shelter just outside the southern city limits, discovered the broken bodies of the fifteen-pound puppies in a field a short distance east of the enclosure. One of the puppies had been stomped to death and its crushed body was lying at the center of a circle of tall grass that was flattened as if some strange ritualistic dance had been performed there. The legs were ripped off of the other dog and, along with other body parts, were apparently carried away by the killers.

Mutilation and killing of the puppies was a gruesome, frightening act, and one of the most disturbing aspects of the perplexing atrocity was the possibility that the abuse and loss of life might have been even worse. After seeing what they did to these puppies, I’m grateful they weren’t able to get inside where the cats are kept, the shaken shelter director told a local newspaper reporter.

While the county dog catcher began looking for the missing animals, news spread through the southwestern Kentucky community about the horror at the shelter. Local residents were appalled and frightened. It seemed that anyone who was vicious enough to focus such a savage attack on a pair of defenseless puppies might not be satisfied with mutilating animals the next time they were driven to satisfy their bloodlust. The next time the victims might be human, possibly children.

Sheriff Stan Scott, a lawman with twelve years’ experience on the department, was one of those who was concerned by the perplexing crime and the possibility that it might be the precursor of more serious violations. Calloway County was a fine place to live but, like other American communities, it wasn’t untouched by crime. Most of the problems that Scott and his small force of seven full-time deputies and four part-timers were called on to deal with involved traffic violations, domestic quarrels, assaults, burglaries or minor thefts. On a few occasions, sheriff’s officers and their colleagues with the Murray Police Department were even called on to investigate armed robberies and homicides.

The shelter break-in and mutilation of the puppies was altogether different from the types of crimes Murray law enforcement agencies were used to dealing with, however, and it raised troubling implications that there were some kind of ritualistic killers or blood cult at work in Calloway County. We’re dealing with some sick individuals and I want them caught, the sheriff declared. He theorized that as many as four people were involved, and the puppy killings might be related to some kind of cult activity.

Then Scott and his deputies began talking to people, trying to figure out what was going on. Most of the people they talked with were local teenagers.

1. JENNIFER

A few minutes before 8 p.m., Jennifer Lynn Wendorf began preparing to wind up her shift as a cashier at the Publix Supermarket in Mount Dora, balancing out her cash register and turning over the cash drawer to the night supervisor.

It was a typically comfortable, cool mid-autumn central Florida evening when the pretty teenager walked to the parking lot, slid gratefully into the driver’s seat inside her shiny 1996 candy-apple-red Saturn convertible and backed out of the space. The car the high school senior drove was an early graduation gift from her parents, Richard and Naoma Ruth Wendorf. They were planning to present a similar gift to their younger daughter, Heather Ann, when she celebrated her sixteenth birthday early the following year.

The Wendorfs were proud of both their girls. Their vivacious oldest daughter was a good student who played a prominent role in extracurricular activities at her high school and had already been accepted for enrollment at Florida State University in Tallahassee. Their fifteen-year-old was a high school sophomore, and although she seemed to be experiencing the throes of some teenage rebellion, she was already showing promise as an artist and had proven to possess diverse musical skills. She played piano, oboe and the xylophone—all exceptionally well.

It had been a long day but before returning to her home in rural northeastern Lake County, Jennifer had one more stop to make. She drove to the apartment of her boyfriend, Tony Stoothoff, on Northland Road in Mount Dora a few blocks from the supermarket. The seemingly casual decision to visit her boyfriend would later acquire alarming significance.

Some time later, after promising to telephone and let Stoothoff know she had arrived safely at home, Jennifer finally scooted back into the driver’s seat of her convertible and began the twenty-minute drive. There was still plenty of time for a chat with her parents before turning in and getting some sleep so she could arise early and prepare for school Tuesday morning. Jennifer was one of the most popular girls at Eustis High School, where she was a senior, a pep rally leader and co-captain of the varsity cheerleading team that supported the Panthers when they played football or basketball against teams from Mount Dora, Leesburg, Tavares and other area schools.

The cheerleaders were close friends on and off the sidelines where they leaped and tumbled during games, and they often teamed up to shop, hang out, and attend frequent slumber parties. More than half the time Jennifer was the party organizer and they were held at her house.

Although she worked in Mount Dora, a quaintly bucolic community of about seven thousand people, one of a scattering of small towns clustered so close together that they share common borders, or are separated by no more than a five- or ten-minute drive, she and her sister attended school in Eustis. With a population of about ten thousand, Eustis was only slightly larger than Mount Dora and was a couple of miles’ drive north along State Road 437, then seven or eight miles west on State Road 44, from the Wendorf home on Greentree Lane. Conveniently for the sisters, Eustis High was just a couple of blocks off Orange Avenue (SR 44) on the east edge of town.

One of the main reasons the senior Wendorfs scrimped and saved until they were able to buy the five-acre plot of land, then build their home in the development of new brick and wood houses eight years earlier, was because of their concern for the welfare of their daughters. Space, privacy and the opportunity to insulate the girls from the rapidly expanding metropolitan sprawl that surrounded their previous home in Orlando, about thirty miles to the southeast, were important factors in the decision to relocate the family in the quiet little residential development, where they could avoid all the urban problems and social ills that went along with living in or near a major population center.

Richard and Naoma Wendorf also liked plenty of walking-around room and the house was constructed with 3,129 square feet of floor space, including a screened-in porch area and an outdoor pool. The single-story L-shaped brick house was designed with separate bedrooms in the northwest wing for each of the girls. Jennifer’s bedroom was on the northwest corner and Heather’s was next to it, to the east. Heather’s name was prominently displayed on the door of her room. The rooms of the two sisters were joined by a hallway that led to the rear bathroom and the family room on the west side of the house. The master bedroom was at the opposite end of the house, separated from the girls’ rooms by the family room, breakfast nook, kitchen, dining room and living room. The arrangements afforded maximum privacy for the teenagers, and for their parents.

Richard and Naoma Wendorf enjoyed indulging their daughters, and each of the sisters had her own telephone, and a television set with a videocassette recorder. The main reason Naoma worked as a volunteer at the school was because she wanted to be closer to her daughters.

Jennifer’s thoughts may have flickered briefly toward concern for her younger sister when she pulled her convertible to a stop, climbed outside and walked into the garage, then moved into the house through the laundry room entrance. Heather was creating serious problems within the family, and during a chat with her mother earlier in the day, Jennifer had suggested calling a family conference that night to discuss how the trouble should be handled.

The mother and daughter had talked earlier that afternoon after Mrs. Wendorf drove from the school to Stoothoff’s home in the Eudora Apartments. Mrs. Wendorf worked from 7:30 a.m. to 1 p.m. as a volunteer in the high school office during school days, and she had wanted to talk to Jennifer about her reasons for skipping Monday classes to spend the day with Tony. The discussion soon turned to Heather. Jennifer suggested during the mother–daughter chat that her little sister might merely be going through a phase. I don’t think it’s a phase, Mrs. Wendorf replied. She’s been up in my face lately.

But Jennifer also had other things on her mind when she walked into the house. She had promised to telephone Tony to let him know she was safely home and say goodnight. As she walked past the family room she noticed her father’s feet on the couch. The television was on, and she figured he had fallen asleep. Later, retracing her steps for homicide detectives, she said that after phoning her boyfriend she went into the kitchen to get a snack when she noticed a trail of blood on the floor.

And then, that’s when I saw my mom. I saw my mom. She was lying there and then I … I ran to the living room to see what my dad was doing, she said.

He wasn’t asleep.

Belinda North was working the late shift at the Florida Regional Medical Emergency Service in Mount Dora when she logged a call at almost exactly 10:30. Ms. North was an experienced professional, who was trained to handle emergencies and to keep her cool under pressure—even when fielding a call from someone like the agitated young woman who was on the other end of the line.