Deadly Cults

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.