Original subtitles

Jennifer Wendorf was 17 years old,

pretty, popular, cheerleader.

She had the world by the tail.

And then she comes home,

and there is blood everywhere.

Pieces of skull were in the next room over.

It was a bloodbath.

Her sister was missing.

We have no idea if Heather's gone willingly,

if she's been abducted, or if she's dead somewhere

and we just haven't found her body.

Her sister, Heather,

had a darker side.

She was hanging around

with very disturbed people.

When you go to church,

you take communion. When we got together,

we drank blood.

There was a supernatural mystique.

This would send chills

through my entire body.

Who could have done this?

Here we go.

Here we go, Mustangs...

Lake County is, um, about...

40 miles from Orlando.

Lake County is situated

right in the center of the state.

We're center east and west,

and we're center north and south.

Eustis is-is one of those

smaller communities that had a very

hometown feel to it.

But a lot of my colleagues from Orlando

would,

would call me and say, "What in the world

is going on in Lake County?"

Because weird things just always seem to happen

in Lake County.

Very odd things.

Jennifer Wendorf was 17 years old,

pretty, popular, cheerleader.

She had a new car that her folks had given to her.

Everything was going perfectly for her.

She had the world by the tail.

And then she comes home.

Because it was after 10:00 when she got home,

she knew that she had broken the rules.

So, she's gonna sneak in.

It's dark in there.

She sees her dad on the couch.

And she thinks, "Okay, I made it.

I've, you know, snuck past him."

Then she gets into the kitchen

and there is blood everywhere.

All of a sudden,

everything is completely upside down, torn apart.

Okay.

A call had come out on 911

in reference to

a death at a home in the Eustis area.

My zone partner, who was Deputy Jeff Taylor at the time,

he was the first one to respond.

Within a very short time frame,

he was shouting across the radio,

"A signal five,"

which translates to a homicide.

The male victim,

Richard Wendorf, he was lying on the couch.

He most likely was sleeping...

at the time of the first strike

because he does--

There's not a lot of blood pooled in other locations.

Most likely, he didn't even see it coming.

In the kitchen,

we have the mother.

It looks like she was trying to defend or cover herself

by protecting her face,

and then as she fell to the floor,

the final blows would have happened on the ground.

By the time that I made it out to the call,

Jennifer was able to tell us

that her parents' car was missing and we also knew

that her sister was missing.

People will say

that the Wendorfs were a nice family.

The dad had a good job, as a warehouse manager

for a bottling company.

And Ruth was able to stay at home.

They weren't rich, but they were a close family

and they... they seemed to be fairly normal.

Miss Ruth Wendorf.

She was a very nice lady who came

and worked on our campus

as a volunteer.

Jennifer, the oldest daughter, was a cheerleader.

Very nice young lady,

never heard a cross word said about her as well.

Jennifer...

is bright and pretty.

She had a scholarship to go to FSU.

She had her bright future all ahead of her.

Heather was the artist.

The free spirit.

And Heather had a darker side.

She wore outlandish outfits.

Dyed her hair different colors.

Did a lot of bizarre artwork.

Heather was a new student at Eustis High School.

And I remember Heather walked by.

She had a hangman's noose

hanging from her backpack.

And in the hangman's noose was a Barbie doll.

Which I thought was kind of strange.

Jennifer relayed that her mother

had told her

that Heather was getting out of control.

That there were serious problems at home

and that she had had enough of Heather's behavior.

Her sister was hanging around

with some very bad people.

Heather had a friend named Rod Ferrell

that used to go to Eustis High School.

They'd been best friends since they were

sophomores in high school.

And they would spend the whole night

hanging around the cemeteries and going into

mausoleums and stuff like that.

Rod was another student.

You know, I never did figure him out.

In August, here in Florida, it's very, very warm.

It'd feel like it was 100 degrees out there,

even in the shade.

Rod would sit in the sun.

And normally have on, like,

a black trench coat or something

and just watch people walk by.

Watches other students walk by and I said,

"You know, this, this is really different behavior."

I actually had personally met Rod

when he lived in Eustis and, and, um,

went to Eustis High School.

I had actually talked to him in and around town

and on the street and...

Rod had been standing out on the front porch

and he had brought out a couple samurai swords.

He was swinging these swords around

and talking about his martial arts training

and how he knew how to use these swords

and how sharp they were.

And then he made the comment,

"You don't see any cats around here, do you?"

Jennifer was convinced right from

the very minute that she called 911

that her sister's friends were involved in this

because of

things that had been going on.

So it was worrisome about Heather.

We didn't know if she was missing by her own free choice

or whether or not she had been forcibly taken.

The medical examiner who did the autopsies

saw that there were some "V" marks

on the bodies.

There were pieces of skull...

that were in the dining room, the next room over.

Veteran detectives, who have seen a lot,

are appalled at this bloodbath.

That's what it was, a bloodbath.

In the descriptions by Deputy Taylor

from when he walked in and saw the living room

and saw the ceiling, he kind of described it

as reminiscent of, like, a Jackson Pollock painting,

only in this case, it's all the same color.

It's all blood.

When the detectives are talking with Jennifer

and they're asking,

"Who could have done this?

Who was responsible for this?"

Jennifer is thinking about her sister, Heather, who's missing,

and she's saying that she was hanging around

with very disturbed people.

Her sister had friends

who altogether believed that they were immortal

and had, you know, different nonhuman aspects.

And they said, "What do you mean?"

And, she says,

"Vampires."

When the detectives realized that Rod Ferrell

is from Murray, Kentucky,

they start making phone calls to Murray, Kentucky.

And that's when it all started coming together for them.

Rod would take it as far as he needed to take it.

He believed that in drinking the blood

and taking a life, he gained life.

I thought, "This dude actually has the capability

of killing somebody."

The Wendorfs were a nice family,

a middle-class family.

All of a sudden, the parents are dead.

It shook everybody up.

That night, we have no idea

if Heather's gone willingly, if she's been abducted

or if she's dead somewhere

and we just haven't found her body.

We have no idea.

When the detectives are talking

with Jennifer, she mentions to the detectives

that Heather had a friend

named Rod Ferrell that used to go to Eustis High School

before he moved away to Kentucky

and that he was a dangerous character.

So right away, Jennifer's thinking, you know, that

Heather's either run away with them or been kidnapped by them

or had something to do with her parents' death.

Well, the detectives, when they realized that Rod Ferrell

is from Murray, Kentucky,

they start making phone calls to Murray, Kentucky.

Rod grew up in Kentucky.

And Rod's father left the family as a young child.

His father was absent, his mother was more like

a buddy than a parent.

And they were living together with his grandparents.

Rod and his mother, Sondra, both wore dark clothing,

and they were walking around one evening holding hands.

And the neighbors thought they were, like,

a boyfriend, girlfriend thing.

When they moved out, there was a pentagram

etched in the floor-- burned onto the floor.

And then he fell in with this group of kids

and Scott Anderson.

Me and Rod met and...

it was, "Here's somebody else that I can connect with,

someone that knows me and knows what I'm going through."

Scott Anderson lived in a shack, basically,

with garbage bags nailed over the broken windows.

The dad was an alcoholic and a drug addict.

I was working at McDonald's,

and there had been a lot of times that I would bring,

you know, leftover stuff from McDonald's home

just so that I'd make sure my little brothers

would have something to eat.

I guess you could say, you know,

Rod had this social machismo about him.

I mean, people would just kind of gravitate toward him.

I was just happy to be kind of like his right-hand man.

I knew Jaden, but I didn't know him

as well as I knew Rod.

I met Rod Ferrell at the...

close to the end of my junior year at Callaway High.

Rod had the same views, we had the same principles on life.

Sometimes it's killed or be killed.

Life will eat your ass up and spit you out quick.

And we learned that at a very early age

as children raised in homes that were, you know,

not so financially sound, you know, but we learned

how to make do in that and saw how our parents struggled.

So we had a lot of those commonalities.

I was introduced to this path of vampirism

when I was, 16 years of age.

To me, it reflected my soul.

Because the nighttime called to me

and conveyed the power in human blood.

This literally would send chills through my entire body

because I finally found my spiritual haven.

I knew Rod around a year and a half

when I finally made the decision

to bring him into the house.

I had Rod meet me at a tombstone

that we called the birthplace, and we began the ritual.

We just used regular razor blades.

As you can see here, cut the upper arm.

After we cut ourselves, he would feed from me first

until pretty much his heart's content

or until the bleeding stopped,

and I would do the same as well.

Giving blood as a gift

is one of the most precious gifts you can give to someone.

It is a total commitment and there is no turning back

once this is done.

Something that I'd noticed

with a lot of folks who were coming

to an awareness that the vampire

was something they associated with,

many came from a similar background:

from isolated areas, from rural areas,

where they didn't have a whole lot of outlets

for their difference.

I didn't really have a whole lot of friends.

Rod started to kind of

tell me about the vampire persona.

You know, Rod had me totally convinced that this was real,

and...

to try to dream outside of what sh-- hole

of a life that I had,

and to hope to maybe find something better.

It was just an exchanging of blood.

Slice on my arm, he drinks some of my blood,

I drink some of his blood and...

"Yes, I'm in with the inner circle."

That's when I really started to really begin to meet

the people that he started to gather around him.

For Rod, the idea of creating his own vampire family

became his motivation through everything that he did.

And he's one of these kind of bigger-than-life characters,

you know?

He's got a swagger to him and

he's kind of funny and he's smart.

Rod, me, Jaden,

Charity and Dana, we all came from

dysfunctional families that were barely making it.

I guess in our minds,

it was us against the world.

It seems silly to adults to think about

a 16-year-old having a charisma

that he could get kids to do whatever he wanted to,

but he used it

to be the boss of these...

these kids that were more dysfunctional than he was.

Rod's mother has a series of boyfriends and marriages.

And his mother brought him down to Eustis, Florida

because she was involved with a man there.

Rod and Heather, they'd been best friends

since they were sophomores in high school.

So they were very close.

They would go out and they would spend the whole night

hanging around cemeteries and going into mausoleums

and stuff like that.

And then, because his mother's relationship, as usual,

broke down, she moved back to Murray, Kentucky.

Rod hated Murray, Kentucky.

He hated it there,

rebelled there,

um, got kicked out of school there.

After Rod came back from Florida,

he had this...

...charisma about him.

People would just kind of gravitate toward him.

You know, when I started getting into it

and learning from Rod and learning from Jaden, you know,

they both had two totally different aspects

of the blood drinking.

Jaden's belief was you only take what you need to survive.

Rod would take it as far as he needed to take it.

He believed that in drinking the blood and taking a life,

he gained life.

I thought, "This dude actually has

the capability of killing somebody."

Jennifer was able to tell us

that her parents' car was missing.

So we're looking

for the blue Explorer.

We put out the tag information.

Lo and behold, we get a hit.

In the initial onset

of the investigation, we were handling it

as if not only had we had a homicide

but we may also have had

a child abduction at the same time.

It was a pretty chaotic scene.

But then Jennifer was able to tell us

that her parents' car was missing.

They started looking for the Wendorfs' stolen

1993 Ford Explorer, a distinctive blue color.

So, that night

we put out the BOLO, we put out the tag information.

Lo and behold, we get a hit...

in Seminole County.

Seminole County found a vehicle

with that tag number on it

abandoned in their jurisdiction.

But the tag wasn't on the right car.

The tag was on a vehicle that's VIN number

was registered to Scott Anderson out of Kentucky.

But it now is bearing the tag

that belongs to Richard Wendorf.

So this gives us some good information.

One, we now know that they've swapped tags.

We have a new tag number, a Kentucky tag.

We're able to modify

our BOLO for the blue Explorer

to show that it now is maybe bearing

a Kentucky tag that should be registered to Scott Anderson.

So that gives us a little bit of help.

where are they going?

Back in Eustis, Florida, during the time

before the murders,

Heather was acting out somewhat.

Heather was running up

fantastically high

long distance phone call bills...

talking to Rod on the phone.

And her parents were very upset about it.

Rod, he ran up a $850 phone bill

talking to Heather Wendorf.

I mean, that's a lot of time on the phone, you know?

Heather was fascinated with him

because of his demeanor and his storytelling

and his fantasy, and so they have a very...

very special bond with one another.

One of the things that really typifies a vampire

is this sort of mesmeric personality.

We see Rod not merely cultivating it,

but using it to hold people enthralled, to get them

to agree to things

that maybe they never would have considered.

I...

have, been present when Rod talked to Heather

on a few occasions about her parents.

Now, I did hear her mention

many times how abusive they were.

Letters were found

that Heather wrote to Rod and talked about

the hell of-of her family life, and things of that nature.

Well, you know, no one really knows

what was going on inside their family.

Was it really that bad?

It's hard for me to say,

but Rod thought it was.

Rod looked at her as this

damsel he was going to rescue,

who he thinks her parents are abusive.

So to him this was a modern-day romance, you know,

he's the knight in shining demon-scaled armor,

driving to Florida to rescue this girl

and bring her into the fold, into his house.

Rod had this...

this family idea.

He was gonna create

his vampire family

and Heather was gonna be part of it.

I think

he wanted to have a group that looked up to him.

That's exactly what Rod was looking for.

He wanted people to surround him

and to worship him.

He found power in that.

There had to have been some kind of change,

a crossover from thinking

about killing someone to literally removing lives

from this realm.

Everything that I'd been studying before,

it was darkness,

it was nighttime, and it wasn't evil.

Just like anything, anything can be turned

into something that's evil and bad.

It's all on your intent, and that was not my intent.

That was not what I was also shown.

That is not what I showed Rod.

The moment when I was pretty sure

that Rod had,

left what I was teaching him,

that was the last time that I had seen Rod

before they left for Eustis, Florida.

We had met up at a friend's house.

We decided to go for a walk

and talk, as we normally did.

I hadn't talked to him in a few days.

Well, this cat walked up to us, out of nowhere,

and... he picked the cat up.

He flips the cat over, holding onto its neck,

and then hurls it into the tree.

The cat was convulsing on the ground, of course,

it didn't die immediately.

And Rod's reaction was giddy laughter.

And he just kind of grinned.

I was like, "This sh-- is not ---- ing funny, man."

And I was like, "Dude, what is your problem?"

He goes, "It's you, you and your holier-than-thou

---- ing attitude that you've got."

Here's Rod developing his own take

on what it means to be a vampire,

building off of those ideas of

feeding off of life force, taking it

to what he probably thinks is a pioneering extreme.

"Let's not just take life force from a friend.

"Let's not just take it in sips and drabs.

Let's just take a whole life."

The thing that the detectives wondered about was...

was Heather kidnapped,

or was she a murder victim herself somewhere?

Or what? Does she have something to do with this?

Um, did she actually do it... herself?

They don't know for sure.

Seminole County found

a vehicle abandoned in their jurisdiction.

So, once we found Scott's car in Seminole County,

which is to the east of us,

we knew the tags had been swapped.

But here's the question-- where are they going?

There's a possibility they're moving towards the Daytona area.

However, we'd also received information from Jennifer

that she believed they were possibly going to Louisiana.

The detectives reached out to the authorities in Louisiana,

passed along the information

and what we were looking for and what we were working.

Rod had outlined that we were gonna pick up Heather

and we were gonna go

to New Orleans,

because, supposedly, that was the city of vampires,

and where we could find a group of like-minded people that would

accept us, and we could go on

about building our vampire house.

When he said, "Hey, let's go to Florida,"

it was like, "Okay, I got the keys,

I got the car, I got a pocket full of money. Let's go."

Got into Eustis on Sunday night.

Then, the next day,

we went and picked Heather up, and we went to a cemetery.

Rod and Heather walked off, and they were gone

for about a good hour, hour and a half.

What he took away from the vampire

was the vampire as predator,

the predator of humans.

And maybe that's better.

Maybe that's more.

And it seems like he became intoxicated with that idea.

Well, vampire in literature

and movies and so on is a predator.

They prey on the innocent victims, they trick people.

They manipulate people.

I have my speculations

why Rod and Heather were so long

in the graveyard.

Because Heather was being abused by her father,

and Mom knew about it,

and wasn't doing anything about it, and

Heather found someone that she could manipulate

into, you know, doing something about it.

And, you know...

You know, it goes back to the earlier,

you know, Rod talking about wanting to kill someone,

and I guess, you know, there was his fantasy ---- ing

served up on a silver platter.

We met Heather up the road,

maybe a quarter mile from her house.

And that's when Rod said, "Hey, look,

"we're going in here.

"We're gonna get Heather's parents' Explorer

so we'll have something to drive."

It was something that I assume

that him and Heather came up with

while they were in the cemetery.

The girls got in the car, and they left.

As I'm walking to Heather's house with Rod,

I was kind of in my own little space.

I was scared, but I was also... excited,

because I was doing something definitely outside my norm.

As we're going through the garage,

the only vehicle that was there was the Explorer, so...

I didn't know if anybody was home or not.

He stops, and he starts to dig around.

That's when he picks up this crowbar.

Me and Rod, we go in

through the utility room door off the garage,

which was unlocked.

We just

walked into the house like we owned the place.

Send my $1,000 to this address, Mr. Keeper,

and thank you ever so much.

I'm sorry, Mr. Keeper,

but if you only knew how badly I need to make...

It was kind of okay, hey, you know, adrenaline kicks in.

You know, we're going in,

you know, to deprive some people of their stuff.

You know, the vampire mindset

of "Hey, I'm going to take this.

There's not sh-- you can do about it."

As we go through the house,

I'm walking through,

looking for money

or things that can be used for money.

Boss.Hiya.

Heather's dad's laying there on the couch, asleep.

And I'm like, "Okay.

What now? What are we gonna do?"

Rod--

he pretty much swings for the fences.

He begins to beat her dad to death with a crowbar.

I actually yelled at him, "What the hell are you doing?"

And when he turned, he yelled at me, and ---- ing said,

"What are you doing? Why are you standing there?

Find the money, find the car keys, find all this."

You know, and I just kind of like, "Sh-- !

"If I don't do what this mother---- er says, he's gonna

do to me what he just did to him."

Then I see Heather's mom.

I don't know who she saw first, but I do remember her saying,

"Who are you and what do you want?"

When he turned and looked at me,

I didn't recognize him.

Probably the most frightening look I've ever seen

on anyone's face.

It was like

seeing the devil himself.

She hit him with a hot cup of coffee.

Scratched him in the face.

And then when she went down,

he... he did more to her than he did

to Heather's dad.

It was...

I was shell-shocked.

I went into flight mode.

You know, my first thing was just saying,

"Okay, we got to get as far away

as possible."

We took the Explorer and we met up with the girls.

And we eventually ended up

on a dirt road.

I swapped the license plates,

and we headed to New Orleans.

And that's when Rod

told, Heather

and, Dana and Charity what happened.

You know, it was,

like, shell-shock with Charity and Dana.

Heather, she went, screaming and wigging out.

It was a weird mind----

for pretty much everybody

that was riding in the backseat,

with this bloody crowbar in the car,

having to

either put their feet on it

or sit in an awkward position so their feet are not touching it.

On the way over to Heather's, he was--

he was quiet and, you know, held to himself.

And then after the incident in the house,

he was happy and giddy,

and, you know, life was just

roses and flowers and all that sh-- .

I remember the reaction when Rod told Heather.

She was, like, massively distraught.

But, you know,

as I've had time to think about it over the years,

my speculation is she was just putting on a show

to throw the rest of us that were like,

"What the hell just happened?" off.

It was Heather's

older sister, Jenny, who found their parents

around 11:00, when she came home from work.

They were beaten and bloodied.

Police believe Heather and three of her friends

took the couple's truck

and tried to cover their tracks.

There were several possibilities

of where they could be going.

Nobody knew for sure.

It wasn't till we got a break,

when Charity reached out to her grandmother

in Kentucky through a phone call,

and we were able to get the information

from the grandmother as to the phone number

that she called from.

Well, through some good detective work

and some backtracing,

they were able to come up with a pay phone

outside of Baton Rouge.

It's been a few days, and...

now, I guess,

Rod is starting to get spooked,

and he's beginning to think,

"Okay, now there's gonna be cops looking for us now."

So...

we start to dump stuff.

By the time they got to Baton Rouge,

they go down to the waterfront

to get rid of the murder weapon.

They're all exhausted.

They haven't slept. They haven't eaten.

They're running on empty.

Charity's crying.

We needed money

to try to, you know, keep going.

Charity figured that her mom

would probably be the best... best bet.

So, she wants to call her mother,

and, um, Rod lets her do it.

When the kids started running out of money

and Charity

needed to reach out to her mom

to try to get some more funds,

she reached the grandmother.

And the grandmother relayed the information

to the detectives.

So they convince the grandmother to go ahead

and call her back and let her know she was gonna send money.

Well, what they weregonna pick up

was not gonna be money.

It was gonna be the detectives.

Charity's grandmother gets a call.

Charity says,

"Help me. I need money."

But her grandmother

tricks her into going to the Howard Johnson to check in.

Detectives were there

waiting for them to show up.

Soon as we got parked,

I turned the Explorer off.

I'd never seen that many cop cars in my life.

Flashing lights, spotlights and...

Vampire cult leader Rod Ferrell

and four other teenagers, including Heather Wendorf,

were arrested in the murders of Richard and Naomi Wendorf.

The state attorney

was seeking the death penalty for Rod.

In the hopes of just getting a life sentence,

Rod pleaded guilty.

They sought the death penalty.

He got the death penalty from the judge.

But the supreme court later overturned it

to a life sentence.

Anderson said,

you know, "I didn't do any of the killing."

But he was in the house.

And, in Florida, they have a thing called

felony murder.

Anderson

pleaded guilty to avoid the death penalty

and gets a life sentence.

Charity got ten and a half years,

and Dana got 17 and a half years in prison.

One of the biggest aspects of this case

has always been, especially here

in Lake County, what responsibility

does Heather have in the death of her parents?

That's been the burning issue.

The victims' 15-year-old daughter,

in letters written

to one of Ferrell's acquaintances in Kentucky,

she writes...

Heather Wendorf

was, in fact, a suspect

equal to that of Rod

and Scott and Charity and Dana.

Heather Wendorf denied she took part

in her parents' murders, but admitted

she ran to Baton Rouge with the other teenagers.

But then, as more and more information came about,

the state attorneys made the decision

that they were not going to prosecute Heather Wendorf

in this case, in the homicide against her parents.

And the sheriff at that time, Sheriff George Knupp,

was very upset about that,

'cause he thought she should've been charged, too.

Heather's attorney says his client did not learn

of her parents' murders until after she ran away

with the four teenagers already indicted in the killings.

Many have asked why didn't she turn herself in

or call for help?

Her attorney says she feared for her own safety.

Nothing happened to Heather, and I think that,

by my opinion, you know, my speculation,

she was the mastermind of it all. And, you know,

I'm here because of something I think that she had a hand in.

And she got away scot-free.

This group, led by Rod Ferrell,

took this fairy-tale world of vampirism,

moved it into the dark cult world

of murder, and destroyed

a whole bunch of lives in the process.

Thought my mom got rid of all this stuff.

I didn't know she kept this stuff.

I've spent 22 years in-in prison because

I let this numbskull,

you know, influence me to that level.

I mean, if I hadn't...

made that decision to...

drive away...

Should they deserve a second chance?

I believe the girls are already out.

They're already living a life.

Does Scott have the ability to do that?

Possibly.

I know from what we learned about them at that time

that you had a lot of kids

wanting to be part of something bigger

and being led

by a very disturbed young man.

Heather lived with her attorney's family

until she became of age.

And, after that, I have no idea where Heather went to

or what she's doing today.

I hope that she has found

whatever was missing for her

and that she's able to have become a healthy

and productive member of society,

because I'm sure that this will never leave her.

She'll never get her parents back.

She'll never get her sister back.

I understand that they stayed estranged.

So...

hopefully,

she's made peace with herself

and has moved forward.

As far as Scott and Rod go,

they're still locked up.

Captioned by Media Access Group at WGBH access.wgbh.org

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