Rod Ferrell

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Rodrick Justin Ferrell (born March 28, 1980 to teenage parents) 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 United States on Death Row. Ferrell told people that he was a 500-year-old vampire named "Vesago."

On November 25, 1996, Naoma Queen and Richard Wendorf, were found beaten to death in their Eustis home. While 49-year-old Richard Wendorf was asleep on his couch, Ferrell had entered the home and beat 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. The two were parents of Heather Wendorf, member of the Vampire Clan.

On February 12, 1998, then seventeen-year-old Ferell pled guilty to the murders, alleging that he was assisted by his girlfriend at the time, Charity Lynn Keesee, and two other members of his gang, Howard Anderson and Dana Cooper. Anderson was also convicted of premeditated first degree murder, sentenced to life in prison, while Keesee and Cooper were convicted of murder in the third degree.

For two years Ferrell held the record as the youngest inmate on death row until November 2000 when the Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life without parole. Ferrell is serving his sentence at the Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida as inmate DC# 124473.

Ferrell's connections with "vampirism" was generally thought to be derived by White Wolf's roleplaying game system "Vampire the Masquerade". Murray, Kentucky was home to a live-action roleplaying group numbering about a dozen members, based on the White Wolf system. The group was usually choreographed by James Yohe, a local from the city, though not a student of Murray State University.

[edit] The Vampire Hotel

The Vampire Hotel, as it looked prior to its demolition

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

Yohe didn't use the building in his live-action roleplaying sessions, preferring to stick to the campus of Murray State or the large fields around the city, though many of Ferrell's associates have alluded to the fact that he enjoyed going to the LBL park.

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 a secluded meeting place. All that remains is the foundation.