Rod Ferrell

Roderick J. Ferrell
Mug shot of Roderick Ferrell.
Status	Incarcerated in New River West Correctional Institution
Occupation	Unemployed
Conviction(s)	Murder, Burglary, Armed robbery
Criminal penalty	Life sentence

Roderick Justin Ferrell (born March 28, 1980) was the leader of a loose-knit gang of teenagers from Murray, Kentucky, infamously known as the "Vampire Clan." In 1998, Ferrell pled guilty to the double slaying of a couple from Eustis, Florida, becoming the youngest person in the United States on Death Row. Ferrell told people that he was a 500-year-old vampire named Vesago. He was also diagnosed with Asperger syndrome, essentially a form of high-functioning autism.

The killings

On November 25, 1996 (the week of Thanksgiving), Naoma Queen and Richard Wendorf were found beaten to death in their Eustis home. While 42-year-old Richard Wendorf was asleep on his couch, Ferrell had entered the home and beaten him multiple times with a crowbar, fracturing both his skull and ribs. When Queen had found Ferrell in the home moments later, he bludgeoned her to death, bashing her head with the crowbar. He claimed in his confession, however, that in his original plan, he was going to allow Naoma Queen to live, but she first attacked him by lunging at him and throwing a very hot cup of coffee on him, which angered him and made him change his mind and kill her also. The victims were found bearing burn marks in the shape of a V. It was said that the V was Rod's symbol, which he accompanied with a dot for each person he considered to be in his vampire cult.

The victims were the father and step-mother of Heather Wendorf, a long-time friend and ex-girlfriend of Rod's whom he was helping run away from a home that she described as "hell."

Ferrell and the rest of his clan fled the scene. After four days of driving through four states, the group was found in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. It is believed that Ferrell liked a video arcade in New Orleans, and they were headed there. One of the girls placed a call to her mother in South Dakota. The group needed money, and Charity Keesee thought her mother could help them. But Keesee's mother informed the police about her whereabouts and helped police trick Ferrell, Wendorf and the rest of the teens into going to a local Howard Johnson's hotel, where they were arrested by waiting law enforcement. The four were held at a Baton Rouge jail for a week before being extradited back to Florida, where they were initially booked at Lake County jail. They were later moved to a juvenile facility in Ocala.

On February 12, 1998, then-seventeen-year-old Ferrell pled guilty to the murders, claiming that the others travelling with him were innocent except Scott Anderson, who was simply an accessory. Anderson was convicted of premeditated first-degree murder and sentenced to life in prison, while Charity Keesee and Dana Cooper were convicted of murder in the third degree.

For two years, Ferrell held the record as the youngest inmate on death row until September 1999, when the Florida Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life without parole. Ferrell is serving his sentence at the New River West Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida, as inmate DC# 124473.

The Vampire Hotel

File:VampireHotel.gif

The Vampire Hotel, as it looked prior to its demolition

The tendency of teenagers to be drawn to this group and to the charismatic Rod Ferrell is thought to have been helped by the presence of a ruined structure nicknamed "Vampire Hotel" that sat in the hills of the Land Between The Lakes National Recreation Area, located in southwestern Kentucky and northwestern Tennessee.

Following the murders, the Vampire Hotel was mostly destroyed, and the roads leading to it were closed off in an effort to stop its use as a secluded meeting place. Most of what remains is a large foundation, resembling a bunker, that extends out of the steep hillside. Scattered bottles and charred piles of wood serve as indications that visits are still made to the structure, located on the heavily wooded hillside overlooking Kentucky Lake to the west. Graffiti remains as a reminder of the structure's role in history. Skulls; pentagrams; cryptic numbers; phrases including "Follow me to death," "Deposit dead bodies here," "Those who came to this place fear not even evil;" and references to the antichrist can still be found on the approximately 10-foot-high portions of the foundation walls that remain exposed.

References In Popular Culture

Four American television networks announced plans to produce movies in 1997 inspired by the Ferrell-Wendorf clan's case. There is a Court TV show about Rod Ferrel. By April, Fox had planned to release Running With the Devil: The True Story of the Kentucky Vampire Thrill Kill Cult, in which Wendorf would have been played by Christine Taylor. It was never produced. NBC produced Mother, May I Sleep With Danger?, where Tori Spelling played "Laurel" opposite Ivan Sergei. CBS had announced interest in producing a TV movie with either Heather Matarazzo, Drew Barrymore or Carla Gugino playing Wendorf or another character based on her, but it did not occur.

In 2002, director John Webb made the movie Vampire Clan, in which the murders and the events leading up to them were shown. The cast included:

• Drew Fuller as Ferrell
• Marina Black as Dana Cooper
• Alex Breckenridge as Charity Keesee
• Timothy Lee DePriest as Scott Anderson
• Stacy Houge as Jeni Wendorf
• Kelly Kruger as Heather Wendorf
• Spencer Redford as Jeanine Leclair

The song "Blood on the Bluegrass" by the Legendary Shack Shakers is about the killings and mentions both Ferrell and Wendorf by name.

References

• "Vampire cult town shrinks under national spotlight", Lubbock Avalanche-Journal / Associated Press. December 2, 1996.
• Hallifax, Jackie. "Death sentence for cult leader reduced", Sun Sentinel. November 10, 2000. (archived by rickross.com)
• Florida v. Rod Ferrell - "The Vampire Cult Slaying Case", Court TV. June 22, 2001.
• Jones, Aphrodite. The Embrace: A True Vampire Story. June 1, 2000. ISBN 0-671-03467-7.
• Seigenthaler, John. MSNBC Investigates, MSNBC. October 26, 2002.
• "The Vampire Clan" profile provided by sacrosanctum.org

External links

• Vampire Clan at IMDb
• [1]Rod Ferrell's confession