Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (15 page)

Rod was questioned in Baton Rouge, Louisiana on 28th November 1996. He said, in answer to their question, that he’d been seeing a psychiatrist at the behest of either his school or his mother. He couldn’t
remember
which. He admitted that he no longer cared about anything, adding ‘It’s because I don’t have any
concern
for life anymore.’

He went on to answer questions about the proposed trip then said that he and Scott had gone to Heather’s garage for ‘weapons, food and cash.’ Moments later he added ‘I went to her dad and smacked the fuck out of
him until he finally quit breathing so yes, I’m admitting to murder.’ He also said that he’d rained numerous blows on Ruth Wendorf’s head ‘until I saw her brains falling on the floor.’

His statement showed that Scott hadn’t taken part in the bloodshed, because ‘he totally froze,’ adding later that ‘the most he did was move the bodies a little bit.’

Rod added that they hadn’t gotten caught until he let his girlfriend phone home as she was the only thing he cared about. By then they were lost and hungry and walking through a bad neighbourhood which scared Charity.

Rod was very amicable with the Baton Rouge police saying that they didn’t beat him like the Murray and Florida cops had. He said that such violence had made him wary of everyone. Asked if he’d seen a murder before he replied ‘I’ve fucking seen murders all my life, ever since I was five…’ He implicated a male relative in one such murder and added that the cult the relative was part of had raped five-year-old Rod as part of an initiation rite.

Moments later he asked if he’d get the death
penalty
. When told that he probably would, he said ‘I was kind of hoping… please go ahead, ha!’

He added that he didn’t currently know where his mother was, but that she was staying with a new boyfriend who had just gotten out of prison for forgery. Earlier in his statement he’d talked about one of her
ex-boyfriends
who, he alleged, did drugs.

Towards the end of his statement he said that he
hoped the police who were coming to collect him were as nice as the ones currently interrogating him. He said that if they weren’t he would clam up, adding ‘I didn’t speak for two years at one time so I can do it again.’

Scott said that he’d planned to kill Ruth Wendorf whilst Rod killed Rick Wendorf. But when he’d seen Rod strike Rick for the first time he knew that he couldn’t go through with it. He said that they’d told Charity and Dana minutes before the deaths that they were going to kill the couple and steal their car. Scott said that Heather hadn’t had prior knowledge of the murders. He was unable to explain to the police why he’d agreed to kill the couple or why he’d let Rod go ahead with such vicious acts. The girls had remained in the Buick whilst the murders were taking place in the house so there was little they could add.

It was a foregone conclusion that Rod would be found guilty of killing Rick and Ruth Wendorf, a couple who had done him no harm and whom he’d met for the first time moments before he bludgeoned them to death. His skin had been found under Ruth’s fingernails as she’d scratched his arms whilst they wrestled. His footprints were also found at the scene. He had
told Dana and Charity that he and Scott planned to kill the couple and the police had his full confession on tape.

It’s not a court’s place to explain why an act occurred, only that it did. But obviously the defence wanted to show any mitigating circumstances. They spoke of Rod’s miserable childhood, being moved around from one place to another. They spoke of Sondra’s prison sentence for soliciting sex from a fourteen-year-old child. An expert who’d interviewed Sondra said that she had the maturity of a twelve-year-old and was sometimes delusional.

Rod had also told them that he’d been sexually abused by his grandfather – and by other men – at age five or six as part of a Black Mass. As he was also claiming to be a vampire who had lived for hundreds of years, no one paid much attention to these
allegations
. But Sondra said that Rod’s grandfather had taken him out for the day fishing when he was five and that he’d come back looking hugely traumatised and vomiting. He’d later drawn pictures of demons and pictures that suggested oral and anal abuse.

Sondra’s sister Lyzetta spoke up in court saying that her father – Rod’s grandfather – had kissed her and fondled her, and that he’d rubbed her childish body against his. As a result of this she had left home at age fourteen.

Rod’s grandfather has never been charged with any sexual offence so must be assumed innocent. But he told reporters that a Christian wouldn’t do such things, and in this he was wrong for professionals who
have studied sexual addiction have found that men and women who act in sexually inappropriate ways have often spent years adopting the moral high ground. As a result, they are well known for their strong moral values both by their families and in the wider community When the man – or woman – is then arrested for, say, flashing or making obscene phone calls, everyone refuses to believe it at first because it contrasts so strongly with the values he or she has always professed.

Such men and women are often desperate for
outside
approval so they try harder than normal to appear extra good. But deep down they believe that they are bad people who are not lovable and whose needs will not be met. They see sex as their most important need and will risk their careers, marriages and children’s happiness to have these needs met.

Patrick Carnes, author of
Out
Of
The
Shadows:
Understanding
Sexual
Addiction
has noted that such
sexual
obsessives are often drawn to helping professions such as the ministry, social work and nursing. These are all professions in which people can either nurture or dominate. Both roles are attractive to the sexual addict who believes that he or she cannot be loved for themselves, only for what they can give to others – or can force from them.

Rod Ferrell admitted to psychiatrists that being sexualised at the age of six had left him a nymphomaniac and that he’d had numerous lovers. The vampire embrace – though he didn’t say so – is also a very sexual act. During it the teens embrace closely and one
grazes his teeth against the neck of the other. When performed by two same sex members of the clan it had a homo-erotic element.

Rod’s statement in court seemed to differ from what he’d originally told police. In his statement at Baton Rouge he’d said that Scott just froze when he, Rod, started to bludgeon Rick. But in court he said that Scott smiled whilst watching this first murder and that Scott had seemed high afterwards.

He hadn’t said much about Heather initially, but now said that she didn’t like her mum and suggested that Heather had masterminded the two murders – but this contrasted with what he’d told Scott and the other girls earlier Rod now seemed to be trying to spread the blame in order to get a reduced sentence for himself.

Sondra had planned to say in court that she’d
overheard
Heather and Rod planning the deaths together. But she failed a lie detector test on the subject so her testimony couldn’t go ahead.

Rod now changed his plea to guilty. Later that month (February 1998) he was sentenced to die in Florida’s electric chair. He remained implacable, only looking
momentarily close to tears when his mother began to sob.

Charity was given ten years for robbery with a firearm or deadly weapon. She was also guilty of driving Heather away from the Wendorfs’ home that night. Dana was given seventeen years for similar offences as she was an adult offender rather than a juvenile. Scott, who had watched the killings and stolen the Explorer, was given two life sentences for first degree murder.

A programme aired in Britain about the vampire murders said that the judiciary was looking closely at Heather as they believed she might have played a part in planning her parent’s deaths. But subsequent to the programme being aired, a Grand Jury said that they’d found no evidence against her and she was cleared.

Scott will remain incarcerated for life without the
possibility
of parole. Charity’s original release date was set at 2007 but she will probably be released in 2004. Within weeks of her arrest, she lost the baby she was carrying. It’s believed that Dana’s sentence will also be reduced. Heather, who was cleared of all charges, moved away from the area and returned to school.

Rod was put on Florida’s Death Row. Interviewed in Lake County Jail in Tavares after being sentenced, he said that he didn’t realise the impact of his actions. This seems unlikely: he was long-term disturbed but
he wasn’t delusional when committing the homicides. After all, he’d made sure that the couple didn’t have company, had cut the phone lines, gotten rid of his bloodstained shirt and changed the registration of the Explorer to that of the Buick in order to confuse the law.

As is often the case with high profile youthful killers, teenager ‘fans’ soon set up websites dedicated to the vampire clan and tried to find Rod’s prison address so that they could write to him. One boy on a vampire message board said he’d been told by another web-user that he could have the address for seventy-five dollars. The boy seemed fascinated with Rod Ferrell because he sounded articulate, looked
impressively
Gothic with his flowing black hair and had
committed
the murders when he was so young.

But appearances can be deceptive. Most of Rod’s statements, when carefully analysed, made little sense. And with his dyed black hair shorn off in jail, he looked weak and hopeless. One of the policemen
associated
with the case summed it up best, saying that he talked a good talk but was really just a scared little kid.

In April 1998 Rod’s lawyers tried to have his death sentence commuted to life imprisonment, arguing that the jury hadn’t given enough weight to the psychological reports about his multiply-abused childhood. The judge disagreed so he is still likely to die in the electric chair.

Mary was born on 26th May 1957 to Betty, a
seventeen-year
-old single mother. She was a beautiful baby with a sweet smile and large violet-blue eyes. But Betty shrieked ‘Take the thing away from me’ when a nurse tried to put the baby girl into her arms. Betty had been hidden away in a convent for the duration of her
pregnancy
as she came from a Catholic family and in those days illegitimacy was frowned upon.

No one knew who Mary’s father was and Betty – who was deeply religious – just said that he was the Devil. Whatever Mary’s true paternity, Betty reluctantly took her home to the house she shared with her widowed mother and younger sister in Gateshead, England. Thankfully her relatives loved Mary from the start.

Betty returned to her factory job leaving her mother to care for the child. Seven months later she met a
handsome
young man named Billy Bell. They married within weeks of meeting (by which time she was pregnant again) and Billy moved in with Betty and her mum. Billy was very proud of his new bride who had won many local beauty competitions and who loved to dance.

Betty continued to look upon her firstborn with
unconcealed
loathing. She gave the one-year-old some of her
own mother’s tranquillisers and Mary almost died. Luckily Betty’s relatives found the baby and rushed her to hospital where she had her stomach pumped out. Everyone knew that a one-year-old could not have reached the secure hiding place where Betty’s mother kept her tranquillisers but no one wanted to believe that Betty was to blame…

That autumn Betty gave birth to a son, Mary’s first half-brother. At this stage the rest of the family moved back to their original home town of Glasgow in Scotland, leaving Betty and Billy in Newcastle, England, with their little brood.

Billy soon found that he alone had to take care of the two children. Betty would do the cleaning but she
didn’t
cook and wouldn’t get up to feed the babies during the night. When her little boy was six months old she left him and Mary with her husband for a few weeks and no one knew where she’d gone. On other
occasions
she took Mary with her to stay with an
assortment
of friends and relatives. Robbed of the routine that young children so desperately need, Mary often looked pale and tense.

She had received so little attention from her mother that she’d had to deny her own need for hugs and now wouldn’t let her relatives hug her. (Gwendolyn Graham, profiled in this author’s book
Women
Who
Kill,
had a similarly neglectful mother and also could not respond to physical affection when it was finally offered.)

Mary’s mother now gave her away to a female acquaintance and the woman cut Mary’s hair because it was full of lice. The frightened toddler had no idea what was happening. Unfortunately the woman soon returned the child and Betty explained this rejection by telling Mary that she was a bad child. The following year, it’s apparent that Betty gave both Mary and her little brother pills that could have resulted in their deaths. Luckily a relative saw the children eating the tablets – though she didn’t see Betty handing them over – and she made both children sick.

A few months later Betty took Mary to visit her grandmother in Glasgow. Betty was holding Mary near the window when she suddenly ‘fell’ out. Her uncle managed to grab the three-year-old by an ankle, seriously straining the ligaments in his back. The
following
week Betty left Mary with a stranger that she’d met at an adoption agency but her relatives reclaimed her within hours. The woman, who clearly meant well, had already bought the confused little girl some new clothes.

One of Billy’s relatives suggested that she and her husband adopt Mary as they were so worried about her being ill-treated and given away to strangers, but for some reason Betty refused to consider this. Instead, she took the sad-faced little girl back to Newcastle.

Shortly afterwards Mary had yet another ‘accident’ in which she swallowed some of her mother’s iron tablets and spent three days in hospital, iron tablets
being poisonous to a small child. By now she was almost four and was able to tell the doctors that her mother had given her ‘the sweets.’ A neighbourhood child who had been playing with Mary when the pills were handed over verified this.

Mary’s relatives made it clear that no child could have this many near-death accidents in four years – but Betty’s response was to sever contact with them. Sadly, they didn’t go to the authorities and Mary’s life now took an even more dangerous path.

For some time Betty had been seeing other men and she now began to turn this into her profession. She became a prostitute and often went to Glasgow to
pursue
this work but at other times, when Billy was away, she had clients come to the house. Billy – who loved Mary and her brother and was always good to them – was away more and more often, sometimes serving time in jail for petty theft.

Betty’s own life careered increasingly downhill. She was often admitted to hospital suffering from her nerves. She complained of stomach problems and sometimes imagined that she had cancer. Her digestion had been poor since childhood, again doubtless as a result of stress. A desperately unhappy woman, she attempted suicide several times, sometimes by
overdosing
and once by preparing to jump off a bridge. Four-year-old Mary watched and listened to her
moth
er
’s constant stream of complaints and blamed herself as children do. Her mother contributed to this, telling her that she was no good.