According to Wikipedia, Naoma Ruth and Richard Wendorf were found by their daughter Jeni Wendorf on November 25, 1996, beaten to death in their Eustis home.
While 49-year-old Richard Wendorf was asleep on his couch and Ruth was in the shower, Rod Ferrell and accomplice Scott Anderson entered the home through the unlocked garage, picking up the murder weapon. Before Richard had even awakened, Ferrell beat him multiple times with a crowbar, fracturing both his skull and ribs, almost instantly knocking him out, and killing him shortly thereafter. When Ruth had found Ferrell and Anderson in the home moments later, Ferrell 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 Ruth 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. Richard was 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 murder's connection to White Wolf's Vampire: The Masquerade role-playing game was made by Calloway County prosecutor David Harrington.
Harrington said the youths were involved in an ongoing role-playing game, but that Ferrell had begun to take the vampire game more seriously, scaring others into quitting. He referenced an incident in which Wendorf and his "vampire clan" mutilated puppies. "The animal shelter thing was the first visible sign he had gone beyond game-playing," Harrington said.
J. Gordon Olmstead-Dean, president of the Interactive Literature (IL) Foundation, disagreed. The IL seeks to educate the public on the existence of Interactive Literature, including role-playing games.
"Obviously, in the Wendorf case, the youths were at least familiar with the Vampire role-playing material. The question that emerges is whether or not the material is responsible for their behavior. Clearly, the idea is preposterous. When five people commit a heinous criminal act and attribute it to fictional work which is read by hundreds of thousands of others, we have to decide whether it is the work or the individual that is to blame. The youths in the Wendorf case exhibited extreme sociopathic behavior. Vampire constitutes neither a reason or an excuse. Whatever sad reasons may lie behind this crime, the youths identification with Vampire is incidental to the act, not contributory. If we are to condemn every work of literature or art in Western civilization which has ever been perused by, or cited by, a criminal, we would have to condemn a great deal of our culture."
Which brings us to Vampire Clan. As a vampire movie, Vampie Clan is grainy, disjointed, and the leads occasionally flat. But as a retelling of true events it transforms into a fascinating study of cult politics. Rod Ferrell (Drew Fuller) believes he is a 500 year-old vampire named Vesago. Raised by his mother, who espoused the same vampiric beliefs, he is alternately magnetic and tortured. Ferrell is a believable vampire in the modern sense, embracing the extreme goth culture and drinking his clan's blood. There's not a fang in sight.
Following Ferrell's whims are his coterie of babes, glammed up in the film to make them easier on the eyes. Charity Lynn Keesee (Alex Breckenridge) and Dana Lynn Cooper (Marina Black) are the core of the cult, with Howard Scott Anderson (Timothy Lee DePriest) the muscle. When one of the girls turns out to be pregnant, the film implies that Ferrell is looking to replace her with fresh blood (pun intended) in the form of Heather Wendorff (Kelly Kruger). Heather is an easy target -- she supposedly hates her family and is planning on running away with the clan.
Unfortunately, we're not entirely sure as to why Ferrell wants to kill Heather's parents. There's some hints that it might be as much a robbery as it is a thrill kill. When the Clan relays the news to Heather, none of the cult seems interested in implicating her in what was supposedly a spiritual triumph. Indeed, Heather's life before she joined the Clan is inscrutable because we learn so little. Vampire Clan makes it clear that Heather is innocent; reality is not so clear cut.
At times the film is disjointed, flashing back and forth between timelines. Part of the reason Vampire Clan isn't always engaging is because it attempts to reconstruct true events, which are often less exciting than typical Hollywood drama. But perhaps the most noteworthy aspect of the film is there's nary a reference to role-playing games. For a movie attempting to recreate the facts of a horrible crime, that's exactly how it should be.
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