Children Who Kill: Profiles of Pre-Teen and Teenage Killers (14 page)

Meanwhile, Rod was being given very conflicting
messages
about life. His grandparents said that smoking and drinking were forbidden and that women
shouldn’t
wear make-up or trousers (because Deuteronomy 22 says that a woman wearing male garments or vice versa is an abomination,) whereas Rod’s mother was making up for her desperately repressed childhood by partying like mad.

Children need consistency in their lives. If a child runs around singing a song and his mother smiles then he assumes that singing is good, that it brings adult approval. If, the next time he sings he’s shouted at, he doesn’t know which way to turn. Rod’s grandparents would give him one set of instructions – but when Sondra had an argument with them then she’d tell Rod not to do what they said.

When Rod was five years old he allegedly came back from a day trip looking very distressed. Sondra questioned him about what had happened and formed the impression that he had been sexually abused in a ceremony run by a religious cult that involved one of her relatives. Rod would continue to mention this alleged incident every so often – and it would be raised again eleven years later at his trial.

Rod’s grandfather was a travelling salesman so the
family moved around a lot. The little boy often had to get used to new neighbours, new schools and new acquaintances. Sometimes his mother was away
staying
with a boyfriend but at other times she and Rod played Dungeons & Dragons together. Rod also played this role-playing game with his father, Rick. The boy had a talent for it as he was highly
imaginative
and creative. But Rod’s grandfather declared it was ‘the Devil’s game.’

These inconsistencies continued over the years. Rod’s grandparents kept telling him to pray and to read the Bible whilst his mother taught him how to cast spells and read the Tarot cards. His school noticed that he’d become increasingly troubled, increasingly strange.

By the time he entered his teens, Rod was hurting
himself
physically as a way of coping with all the hurt he had inside. A friend saw him batter himself against a fence. He also had shallow cuts on his arms which he made with a knife or a razor. He was clearly deeply depressed and often talked about suicide.

When he was fifteen, Sondra married again. She moved away to Michigan with her new husband, meaning for Rod to join them later when he left school. But someone gave Rod the impression that his mother didn’t want him back. When Sondra heard this she was horrified and travelled to Murray to fetch him. So Rod changed house and school again.

By now he was sleeping all day and truanting from school so he was expelled for bad attendance and poor attitude. Now he had even less structure to his life.

Rod started to experiment with drugs. He also smoked cigarettes and lived off junk food. He often looked anaemic and ill.

Physically, Rod matured quickly, growing to almost six foot tall. He remained reed-thin but grew his hair down to his shoulders and dyed it jet black. With his probing dark eyes, porcelain complexion and narrow nose he appealed to girls who were looking for someone different, someone who seemed superficially strong. Deep down, of course, Rod had little self-esteem or hope for the future. All he could do was invent a
persona
that would draw other lost young people to him, that would give him a transitory power.

The group of people who Rod now spent his time with would later be described as a terrifying vampiric cult – but they were hardly that. They were a loose knit group of around thirty, of which only five would go on the run.

Rod’s main man was Scott Anderson whom he’d known since second grade. Scott had been taken away
from his unhappy home and had settled down with foster parents but was now back with his biological parents again. He was thin, wore thick glasses, lacked confidence and was desperate to lose his virginity. He saw Rod, who’d had several lovers, as a heroic figure and tended to follow him around.

Charity Kessee, Rod’s sixteen-year-old girlfriend – who he called Che or Shea – was the second member of the group. She loved Rod’s dark romantic side but feared his violence. (He’d break furniture when he got really angry.) They’d been together for almost a year. She lived with her father in Murray but kept in touch with her mother who lived in South Dakota. She often felt lonely when her father was at work.

Charity told Rod again and again that she loved him but he clearly doubted that he was lovable and kept setting her little tests. She noticed that he’d
provoke
fights in order to get a reaction, something that was hard for the teenager to understand. But it’s
common
for dysfunctional people to provoke fights as a means of avoiding true intimacy. Such damaged
people
desperately want to be loved but at the same time they can’t allow others to get close. The drama of
passionate
arguments offers a kind of love – or the closest thing to love that most of them have ever known.

The third teenager who Rod hung around with was fifteen-year-old Heather Wendorf, a platonic friend. Heather’s older sister had started dating so Heather was somewhat lonely. An artistic girl, she felt different to the more conventional students at school.

Heather’s father was a self-made man who’d been
able to give his two daughters and his common-law wife Ruth a good standard of living. They lived in a beautiful house that had many amenities.

Limited information has been released about Heather’s home life so it’s hard to know exactly where her unhappiness stemmed from – but she’d started to cut her arms to release her emotional pain, something that both her older sister and her mother knew about. She also suffered from insomnia and migraines and thought about death frequently.

People who knew her at school said that she was intelligent but troubled. She had always been a quiet girl but became even quieter after she got to know Rod. She started to dye her hair purple and sometimes wore a dog collar around her neck – but Heather
wasn’t
living a wild child life. Her parents liked her to stay home with them at night and watch TV. Luckily she was close to her seventeen-year-old sister, but her
sister
was currently the source of family rows as she was staying out late with her new beau.

Heather wrote to Scott that she had ‘vengeance, hate, destruction’ in her as well as the side of herself that she showed at school, a largely passive side. Heather told Rod all about her unhappiness and Rod strongly empathised.

The fourth member of the cult was nineteen-year-old Dana Cooper, a friend of Charity’s who Rod had met a fortnight before. Dana had her own flat and Rod and his mates started to hang out there. Dana was overweight and lacking in confidence so was grateful for these instant new friends.

The teenagers dressed like vampires and often met up at the cemetery. They hung out in a small
crumbling
outhouse in the woods that they called the Vampyre Hotel. They’d take turns at lightly cutting their arms and licking their own or their friends warm blood.

The press would later refer to this as drinking blood, as if the supposed vampires were opening their veins widely, but the wounds the teens inflicted were just thin razor cuts. One of Heather’s boyfriends was so disgusted by this blood-licking act that he finished with her, though he was aware that she was being influenced by Rod.

Rod said that he’d been reincarnated many times and had lived for hundreds of years, inhabiting the best districts of Paris. It wasn’t clear why he’d chosen to relocate to rural Kentucky for his current life.

Rod’s homelife continued to have its difficulties. His mother – by now an attractive thirty-five-year-old – often flirted with his friends. They liked his house as they could just hang out and be themselves with Sondra. But Rod was clearly embarrassed by his
mother’s
behaviour and was always looking for different places to stay. On another occasion a friend saw Rod and his mother arguing and Sondra trashed her son’s room and dragged him out of it by his hair.

The tension exacerbated when Sondra developed a
crush on one of Rod’s fourteen-year-old friends. She wrote the child a letter saying that she dreamed about being ‘French kissed and fucked’ by him. She wrote a second letter that was equally graphic and suggested the boy move in. Sondra knew that the boy’s brother was active in another vampire cult and hoped that this fourteen-year-old would initiate her so that she could become a vampire who supposedly had eternal life.

Rod was incensed by all of this – after all, early adulthood is partly about forging your own identify and separating from your parents. How could he revel in his vampiric differences if his mother was a vampire too? Rod told friends that he wanted to kill his mother and his grandfather, who he described as a sick
bastard
. But his rage was becoming increasingly
free-floating
, for he also offered to kill the parents of two of his friends.

At this stage the mother of the fourteen-year-old boy who Sondra desired saw the sexually explicit letters. She went to the police and on 12th November 1996 Sondra was charged with ‘soliciting rape and sodomy’ from a minor. She would subsequently spend six months in jail.

Rod also had his run-ins with the police as they
suspected
that – acting with another teenager – he’d
mutilated
two puppies from the local animal shelter. And one of his friends said that Rod had fatally swung a kitten against a tree.

By now the sixteen-year-old was experimenting with so many drugs that his girlfriend Charity felt frightened. Rod looked stoned and threatened to kill
numerous people – yet he thought he was being singled out by the locals simply because his long hair and black clothes made him look different.

All five of the teens felt alienated from their peers and were looking for a new start. They talked more and more about running away. On 25th November 1996 they each packed some clothes and set off on their great adventure in Scott’s old Buick. Rod was pleased when Charity told him that she was expecting their child. (She’d been deliberately trying to get pregnant in the hope that he’d settle down with her and not look at any other women.) But he knew that Charity’s dad wouldn’t be so pleased.

They could hear that the engine was soon going to pack up so they looked around for another vehicle. Rod knew that Heather’s parents were wealthy and that they had a sports utility jeep. He’d previously heard Heather say that she’d only be allowed to leave home when her parents were dead – and she’d been overheard telling someone else that she wished they’d both disappear. It suited Rod’s purpose to remember these words now as he had so much hate in his heart.

The boys let Heather Wendorf think that they were going to collect another friend who was supposed to run away with them. In truth, they went looking for the Wendorfs’ house. Rod had lived some distance away from Heather throughout much of their
friendship
so had never been to her home before but another friend had told him how to identify the place. At first he approached a neighbouring dwelling but looked inside and saw little children playing so knew that couldn’t be Heather’s home.

The teens soon located the Wendorfs’ garage and Rod grabbed a crowbar to use as a weapon. The door was unlocked so he and Scott entered the house, had a drink in the kitchen and looked around. The youths saw Heather’s father sleeping on the settee, something the hardworking man often did at the end of another long day.

Rod had allegedly heard Heather complain about her parents many times. She’d cried on the phone and he’d assumed that she was being abused, just as he’d been. He’d decided, without telling her, that her
parents
were going to die.

Rod started to batter the man – a man he’d never met – over the head with the crowbar. The first few blows rendered him unconscious but Rod continued to batter him, causing blood and brain tissue to fly
everywhere
. He delivered more than a dozen blows to the man’s skull until he eventually stopped breathing, his face unrecognisable, the bar briefly forced deep into his chest. Faced with the reality of watching a brutal death, Scott froze. He believed, in principle, in blood sacrifices – but seeing all this real blood and brains was completely different.

Moments after killing Rick Wendorf, Rod lifted the dead man’s shirt and burnt a V for vampire into his stomach with a lit cigarette then took his credit card.
Scott went into one of the other rooms to see if there was any cash available and Rod, holding the
bloodstained
crowbar, walked out into the hall.

At that moment Ruth Wendorf stepped into the hallway carrying a coffee. Startled at suddenly finding this long-haired stranger in her house, she asked him what he wanted. He lashed out at her, and she threw the hot liquid over him. They fought and she scratched him – the police would later find his DNA under her nails. Enraged, the teenager battered the crowbar into her head again and again.

Then Rod and Scott left, knowing that Heather’s older sister would shortly walk into the scene of
horror
. They’d already cut the phone lines so that she couldn’t immediately summon help.

Scott took the wheel of the Wendorfs’ Explorer (an act of theft that, in the eyes of the law, would make him almost as guilty as Rod) and soon caught up with the other car that Charity was now driving. They eventually all transferred to the Explorer and ditched the Buick.

Heather was shocked when she saw that they’d stolen her parents’ vehicle and said that they’d be livid – but, after dropping several hints, Rod admitted that they were dead. Heather appeared shocked, then angry for a time, and later said she’d thought about running away from the group but decided to stay in case Rod killed her too.

Independent life is hard – and the five teenagers had little money and only a vague notion of where they were heading. They got lost several times and burgled a house to find cash to buy food. Rod had thought he might live on his wits in the wilderness – but the girls were cold and scared and Charity was two months pregnant with his child. Like most teenagers, he had only a sketchy idea of how he’d survive in the real world, telling the others that they might be able to stay with his former friends in New Orleans.

Meanwhile – as they’d suspected – Heather’s sister had come home and discovered the bodies so an APB was out for the Explorer. Charity decided to phone her mum and ask for help. Her mother told them to go to a motel and she’d arrange to pay for it. The police raced to the motel and the teens surrendered immediately.