Rod Ferrell

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Rodrick J. Ferrell


Born	March 28, 1980(1980-03-28) Murray, Kentucky, U.S.
Penalty	Life imprisonment
Status	Incarcerated

Rodrick 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 Aspergers Syndrome, essentially a form of high-functioning autism.

1 The killings
2 The Vampire Hotel
3 References In Popular Culture
4 References
5 External links

[edit] 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. 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 of Rod's who 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, after negotiations, Ferrell, Wendorf and the rest of the teens agreed to be arrested at a local Howard Johnson's hotel. 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, 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 Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida as inmate DC# 124473.

[edit] The Vampire Hotel

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, and phrases remain, 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.

[edit] 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.^{[citation needed]} 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.