Journal of Dracula Stufies 2 (2000)
[Dr. Katherine Ramsland has published
fifteen books, including a biography of Anne Rice, The Vampire Companion,
and Piercing the Darkness (a journalistic expose of the vampire
subculture).]
While most of the vampire subculture these
days is a benign form of role-playing, there have been cases of people who were
inspired by the predatory image to kill. To their minds, the vampire mythos
provides a framework that inspires and even licenses certain types of violent
behaviors. Although this bloodthirsty
impulse reaches back centuries and crosses cultures, I want to examine the
mythology’s influence on three cases in recent American culture: Roderick
Ferrell, James Riva, and Richard Trenton Chase. I will take one case at a time
and then discuss how they attach to the vampire frame.
A Brief History of the Vampire and Crime
Since primitive
time, humans have been known to drink blood, often in religious rituals.
However, some sanguinary acts had nothing to do with ceremony. In 300 B. C. a
Buddhist monk drank the blood of swine to cure an illness said to be incurable
-- and it worked. Warriors of many cultures drank the blood of their enemies to
affirm their conquest and enhance their power.
Some even did it as a communion of friendship with their victim. In
contrast, the compulsion to drink blood is generally part of a sexual perversion
called hematomania. For example, Peter Kurten, “the Vampire of Dusseldorf,”
felt the buildup of erotic tension before he attacked a victim and achieved
release only after violence. It seems that blood is a complex symbol that
inspires both healing and destruction.
A quick list of some who
drank blood in a pathological manner includes Gilles de Rais, Sergeant François
Bertrand, Fritz Haarmann, and the aforementioned Peter Kurten. There are many
lesser known “vampires” as well, both male and female.[1]
Some merely kidnap or drug someone to get a taste of blood, others murder.
John
George Haigh is frequently found on the lists of modern vampires. However,
while inspiring the media to go into a frenzy over his confession about
drinking blood, he probably had no such fetish. When he was arrested in England
in 1949 for the possible murder of a missing woman, he immediately asked about
the chances of getting out of the local mental institution. Then he launched
into a confession that involved killing six people in order to drink their
blood. (Later he added three more to his tally, none of whom could be traced to
real people.) Haigh insisted his acts had been motivated not by personal gain,
but by a gruesome dream cycle that involved gory images. “It was not their
money but their blood that I was after,” he stated. Nevertheless, each time he
killed someone and then dissolved that person’s body in sulfuric acid, he was
in debt and he took over their properties to enrich himself. He claimed he had
a series of dreams about bloody crucifixes that always triggered his
compulsion, but it seems more likely that he was malingering insanity. Twelve
physicians examined him and only one thought he had an aberrant mental
condition. He claimed to drink his own urine, too, although the only person to
see him do it was a doctor for whom Haigh demonstrated this dubious talent. It
turns out that Haigh had studied various forms of psychoses in detail, so his
claim to be a vampire in need of human blood is highly suspect.[2]
The
cases below demonstrate that those who identify with the vampire as a framework
for their crimes generally came to the image with pathology intact, rather than
being inspired by the image to become killers. This is an important detail,
because the media likes to play up the vampire’s inspiration in mental illness
and violence. At best, it creates a frame and perhaps fuels an impulse that is
already in place.
Case One: Roderick Ferrell[3]
On Thanksgiving Day in 1996, Roderick
Ferrell, 16, from Murray, Kentucky, led a pack of teens to Eustis, Florida,
where he killed the elderly parents of a former girlfriend. Ferrell had lived
in Eustis for a year and had then returned to Kentucky. He’d gotten involved with a fantasy
role-playing game called Vampire: The Masquerade. However, he wanted
something more edgy, so he formed The Vampire Clan. According to one member,
Ferrell became obsessed with “opening the Gates of Hell,” which meant to him
that he had to kill a large number of people in order to consume their
souls. He certainly felt angry and that
anger often took the form of violence.
At
one point, Ferrell was arrested for breaking into a local animal shelter to
mutilate two puppies. He pulled the legs
off one. However, this was considered a misdemeanor, so he was let off. Yet his
motives seem to have been less about mischief than about his occult practices.
Someone in his clan saw him kill a cat in a rather brutal manner, too.
But
he didn’t stop with that. Richard
Wendorf and his wife were found beaten to death in their Eustis home. Cigarette
burns in the shape of a V, with two dots on either side, were present on the
body of Richard Wendorf, and Ferrell had told friends that his sign was a V,
with dots on each side to signify clan members. Early news reports suggested
that their 15-year-old daughter, Heather, had plotted with this gang to murder
her parents. Wendorf and the others were
subsequently arrested in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Roderick Ferrell, Howard Scott
Anderson, 17, Charity Lynn Keesee, 16, and Dana Cooper, 19, were caught in the
Wendorf’s stolen Ford Explorer when one of the girls inadvertently revealed
their whereabouts to her mother.
In
a Grand Jury hearing, Heather was cleared of all charges, although the other
four were held for separate murder trials. Heather claimed that she and Keesee
were riding in Anderson’s car when the murders took place. She had no idea what
Ferrell was planning, and was not even sure that he had actually done it until
she saw him playing with her mother’s pearl necklace.
However,
the same day her parents were murdered, she had received Ferrell’s blood in a
cemetery ritual in order to “cross over” and “become a vampire.” She had also
told friends that she had been a demon in a past life and that she talked with
spirits during blood-drinking rituals.
When dating Ferrell, she viewed him as a kindred spirit and awaited the
day when he would return to Florida so they could live together. She named her
cat Vassago, a name that Ferrell had adopted after a Prince of Hell. She had
told a friend she sometimes wished her parents were dead, especially after they
stopped Ferrell’s collect calls to her, and had once asked her older sister,
Jennifer, if she ever thought about killing them. She mentioned that Rod could
kill people, if Jennifer ever needed that done.
Apparently
Ferrell had decided to kill Wendorf’s parents before arriving. He and the
others had visited another girl in Eustis to reveal the plan. That made it
first degree murder, two counts. Prosecutors said they would seek the death
penalty for Anderson and Ferrell initially. Ferrell told reporters from the Orlando
Sentinel that a rival vampire clan had done the killings. Then he claimed
to have been treated by psychiatrists for multiple personality disorder and
that he’d been part of a Satanic cult run by
his grandfather. While his many stories were probably lies, it
soon became clear that he had some serious attachment problems and had grown up
in an unstable household.
First,
his mother’s arrest following his own indicated that he’d been raised by
someone with a mental illness. Sondra Gibson, 35, was indicted in November 1997
for allegedly writing sexually explicit letters to a fourteen-year-old boy to
entice him into a sexual initiation ritual. In the letters she stressed how she
longed to be near him and to become a vampire. She asked him to “cross me over
and I will be your bride for eternity and you my sire.” Gibson pleaded guilty
to a felony charge of unlawful transaction with a minor.
On top of that, Ferrell’s father – himself
the child of a man who had been treated for psychiatric problems – had
abandoned him as a child. There were no siblings – just an unbalanced mother
with whom to share a house, The vampire image may have appeared to him to be a
source of power and freedom, as well as a way to find some excitement in a
small Kentucky town.
As preparations began
for Ferrell’s trial, details emerged of what exactly had happened that day.
Anderson was in the house, but it was Ferrell who swung a crowbar at a sleeping
Richard Wendorf. He then stabbed Ruth Wendorf in the head when she walked into
the room. The girls returned and they piled into the car to run away to New
Orleans. When they were caught, there were fresh scars on the arms of these
clan members, as if they’d been drinking blood that day.
The
Eustis murders appear to have been senseless, unrelated to any kind of threat,
abuse, surprise attack, rage, or confrontation. They had a plan and they
carried it out. On videotape, Ferrell describes without emotion how he
bludgeoned the sleeping man and then struck the woman. The other boy had merely
stood by.
Since
there is no “diminished capacity” law in Florida and the plea of not guilty by
reason of insanity has become less popular with juries, the defense offered in
pretrial motions the arguments for mitigating the penalty phase:
The killings were committed while Ferrell
was mentally disturbed;
Ferrell was too disturbed to realize the
seriousness of the crimes;
Ferrell was under the influence of drugs;
Ferrell suffers from schizotypal
personality disorder;
Ferrell was raised by a divorced mother who
failed to discipline him properly, and was neglected by his father;
Ferrell was sexually abused as a youth;
Ferrell was allowed to participate in
violent and self-destructive role-playing fantasy games, which impaired his
judgment about what was real or normal;
Ferrell is developmentally disabled;
Ferrell suffers from his beliefs in
vampirism
Of
his vampirism, Ferrell had said that he had no soul and was possessed. He had
devised vampire rituals that gave him an adrenaline rush. He liked to threaten others and make them
believe that his vampire nature made him all-powerful. He believed there was a
group of vampires that really existed and he was one of the rare ones. He saw
himself at war with other vampire clans and believed that he had the power to
do anything he pleased. When he was arrested for murder, he told the arresting
officers that he was a powerful immortal and they would be unable to hold him.[4]
Case Two: Richard Trenton Chase
Richard Trenton Chase had a thing for
blood, in part because he was afraid of disintegrating. Although deemed sane at his trial, he was clearly
psychotic.
In
the late seventies, Chase was known as “The Vampire of Sacramento.” He began by
killing a woman, cutting out her entrails, stuffing her mouth with dog feces,
and drinking her blood from a yogurt cup. He also smeared his face with it. Next,
he killed a family, including an infant, and was quickly identified through a
police search. In his apartment, police discovered evidence that he seemed to
be planning to kill again over forty more times that same year. He killed near
his own home, and his criterion for entering a house was merely to find a door
that was not locked. Into those homes that were locked he was not invited. The
very definition of a vampire!
During
one of Chase’s incarcerations in psychiatric facilities for mental instability,
he purchased rabbits and drank their blood. At times, he tried to inject rabbit
blood into his own veins. He also bit
the heads off birds and was known to the hospital staff as “Dracula.” Once he was
free and without supervision, he also purchased or stole dogs and cats to
torture them and drink their blood. He
did these things because he believed that he was being poisoned by soap dishes.
That is, if the bottom of a piece of soap in his dish was wet, it meant his
blood was turning to powder and he would need to replenish it. Otherwise, all
of his energies would be depleted and he would disintegrate. Chase was
sentenced to die, but was found dead in his cell in 1980 after swallowing an
overdose of antidepressants.
Born
May 23, 1950, he liked to set fires as a child and to torment animals. He had a
sister, four years younger, and his father was a strict disciplinarian who
bickered constantly with his wife. By the time Richard was ten, he was killing
cats. As a teenager, he drank and smoked dope, getting into trouble several
times but showing no shame over it. He dated several girls, one of whom
reported that “Rick” was unable to perform sexually because he could not keep
an erection. This problem bothered him
and when he was eighteen, he went to see a psychiatrist. He learned that a root
cause of impotence was repressed anger. The psychiatrist also thought he might
be suffering from a major mental illness, but did not suggest he be committed.
After
he moved out of his parents’ home, he went through a series of roommates, many
of whom reported his bizarre behavior and heavy drug use. Once he nailed shut
his bedroom closet door because “people” were invading his space from in there.
He was preoccupied with any sign that something was wrong with him, and he once
entered an emergency room looking for the person who had stolen his pulmonary
artery. He also complained that the bones were coming out through the back of
his head, his stomach was backwards, and his heart often stopped beating.
Another psychiatrist diagnosed him as a paranoid schizophrenic, but thought he
might actually be suffering from a drug-induced toxic psychosis. He was put
under observation for 72 hours, and it was recommended that he stay. Eventually
he was released.
His
life grew increasingly slovenly, and he submersed into hypochondria and drug
abuse. He lived with his mother for awhile, now divorced, but believed he was
being poisoned. His father got him an apartment. Chase soon began to kill and
disembowel rabbits that he either caught or bought, and to eat their entrails
raw. Sometimes he would put the intestines with the animal’s blood into a
blender, liquefy them, and drink this concoction in an effort to keep his heart
from shrinking. He once injected rabbit blood into his veins and got very ill.
He believed this rabbit had ingested battery acid that had seeped into his
stomach, but in fact he had a bad case of blood poisoning.
Finally
he was committed as a schizophrenic suffering from somatic delusions. The
doctors tried anti-psychotic medications, which failed to work, indicating that
Chase’s psychosis may have been precipitated by his drug abuse. In 1976, he
escaped and showed up at his mother’s house. He was returned to the hospital,
ending up at a facility for mental patients, where he earned the nickname,
“Dracula.” One day he was found with blood around his mouth. Two dead birds,
their necks broken, lay outside his window.
Eventually
he was released and deemed no longer a danger. His parents were granted a
conservatorship, renewed annually, and his mother paid his rent and shopped for
his groceries. Chase moved into another
apartment and began to catch and torture cats, dogs, and rabbits. He killed
them to drink their blood. Sometimes he stole neighborhood pets. He bought guns
and started to practice with them. Although he was on psychiatric medication,
he remained unsupervised. His mother weaned him from the medications herself.
In 1977, the conservatorship expired and his parents failed to renew it,
leaving Chase on his own.
One
day he paid his mother a visit. She heard a loud noise and opened the door to
see her son holding a dead cat. He threw the animal to the ground and tore it
open, smearing the blood all over his face and neck. His mother failed to act
and never reported the incident.
On
August 3 that same year, police officers found Chase’s Ford Ranchero stuck in
sand near Pyramid Lake in Nevada. Two rifles lay on the seat, along with a pile
of men’s clothing. Blood smears on the inside and a blood-filled white plastic
bucket containing a liver made them suspicious.
When they spotted Chase through binoculars, he was nude and covered in
blood. He saw them and ran, but they caught up with him and took him back to
his pick-up. He claimed that the blood was his. It had “seeped out” of him. The
liver, it turned out, was from a cow.
Soon
he grew bolder. Apparently he found the door at the Wallin home unlocked. He
encountered Teresa (Terry) Wallin, 22, and three months pregnant. He opened the
door and ran into Terry as she was taking out the garbage. He raised his pistol and shot her twice. She
fell; Chase then knelt over her prostrate body, firing another bullet into her
temple. His next move was to drag her into the bedroom, leaving a trail of
blood behind. He then retrieved a knife from the kitchen and an empty yogurt
container from the trash bag that Terry had been carrying. When he was done, he
left.
Terry’s
husband, David, found her lying just inside the door, on her back, her clothing
in disarray that suggested assault. Her left nipple was carved off, her torso
cut open below the sternum, and her spleen and intestines pulled out. Chase had stabbed her repeatedly in the lung,
liver, diaphragm, and left breast and had cut out her kidneys and severed her
pancreas in two. He placed the kidneys together back inside her. There was
blood in the bathroom and it was later learned that he had smeared Terry’s
blood all over his face and hands, licking it off his fingers. There were odd
rings of blood around the body, as if someone had placed a bucket there.
On
January 27, Evelyn Miroth, 38, received the same treatment. Chase also shot a
male friend who was visiting her, and her six-year-old son, Jason. Her infant
nephew was missing from his crib. It later turned out that Chase had drunk
Evelyn’s blood and had mutilated the baby’s body in the bathroom, opening the
head and spilling pieces of the brain into the tub. A knock on the door must
have interrupted him and he had fled with the body. As police looked for him,
he took the baby to his home and severed the head. He removed several organs
and consumed them.
The
police closed in and grabbed him as he was leaving his apartment with a box
full of bloody newspapers and rags. He was arrested. In prison, he told another
inmate that he needed the blood of his victims because of blood poisoning, and
he’d grown tired of hunting for animals. He also admitted to one of the dozen
psychiatrists who examined him that he was disturbed about killing his victims
and was afraid they would come for him. He had never felt compelled to kill. He
simply thought the blood would help him. It was clear that he had intended to
murder his victims and knew it was wrong, so he was convicted of six counts of
first degree murder.
FBI
profiler Robert Ressler interviewed Chase and felt strongly that he ought to be
transferred to a psychiatric hospital. He learned that other inmates tried to
get Chase to kill himself. The day after Christmas, 1980, that is just what he
did. Despite his lifelong concerns, his
heart was found to be normal.[5]
Case Three: James Riva
James Riva claimed to hear the voice of a
vampire before he shot his grandmother four times with bullets that he had
painted gold. He then tried to drink her blood from the wound in order to get
eternal life. Finally, he set her corpse on fire. To some degree, he claimed,
it was self defense, because he was convinced she was drinking his blood while
he was asleep, as were other vampires. He believed that everyone was a vampire
and that he needed to do something to become like everyone else. The secret, he
was told, was to kill someone and drink the blood. Afterward, the vampires
would throw a party for him.
At
the age of five, Riva had become enraged by something his father had done and
had rigged a mechanism intended to hit his father in the head with a hammer. He
drew pictures of bare bottoms with holes oozing blood and other pictures of
violence. His depictions of death were so graphic that a teacher notified his
parents.
Fascinated
with vampires since the age of thirteen, he drew pictures of violent acts and
began to eat things with a blood-like consistency. He killed animals, including
a horse, to drink their blood. He also punched a friend in the nose and tried
to spear another in order to get blood from them, and claimed that he had
attacked strangers to get it, but didn’t want to kill anyone. He kept an axe by
his bedroom door and once told a psychiatrist he was going to kill his
father.
He
appeared to his mother to be in the grip of a serious mental illness. She would
not allow him to live in their home. He told a psychiatrist that he was hearing
male voices warning him to watch out for vampires. The voices also said that if
he wanted to be like everyone else, he had to drink blood. He decided that his
grandmother was using an ice pick at night to get blood from him -- although
she was an invalid in a wheelchair. He also believed that she was poisoning his
food. On the day that he killed her, he felt he was going to die.
A
jury returned a verdict of second degree murder, with a life term. From prison,
Riva sent several threatening letters to his mother. He showed every indication
of extreme paranoia. He stopped drinking blood in prison, he said, because he
couldn’t get enough and he thought his body, used to human tissue consumption,
was metabolizing his. He claimed he had taken blood from people for ten years.
He had never wanted to kill anyone; he had just wanted their blood. Apparently,
he was never a fan of vampire films or books.
Clinical Vampirism
Is vampirism that targets others a
psychiatric affliction? That is, is the vampire activity a manifestation of a
larger mental illness or is this a category unto itself?
Richard
von Krafft-Ebing, a German neurologist and psychiatrist, wrote several case
histories in 1886 that involved lust murders and blood drinking.[6] He noted
that some individuals can only get excited at the sight of fresh blood, such as
the 19-year-old vine-dresser who murders a girl, drinks her blood, tears out
her heart, and buries her remains. There was also the man who cut his arm for
his wife to suck on before sex because it aroused her so strongly.
Dr.
Richard Noll, who believes that clinical vampirism is rare, renames it
Renfield’s Syndrome. He describes the
typical progression into this mental condition as: 1) a pivotal event, usually
in childhood, triggers the feeling that blood is exciting and might involve
autovampirism; 2) in puberty, this association becomes part of sexual arousal
and may involve taking blood from others. Persons with this syndrome are
primarily male and the blood tends to take on a mystical quality, as if it can
enhance their lives or empower them.[7]
Riva
and Chase seem to fit this syndrome, although both clearly have comorbid
disorders. It is not known whether they participated in autovampirism, but
their blood thirst did progress through stages of increased violence. Ferrell
seems to have developed his vampirism as a fetish and a means to control those
around him. Since Ferrell neither attempted the practice in prison nor claimed
to suffer from blood deprivation, it can be fairly assumed that his vampirism
was an outgrowth of an imagination caught up in vampire role-playing games, and
not clinical vampirism. Engaging in the forbidden excited him to the point of
murder, but the vampirism element seemed incidental.
Some
people seek out intense experience just to stimulate themselves and psychopaths
appear to be born with a need for greater stimulation than the average person.
Psychotic or otherwise, some people need something to inspire them past an emotional
deadness. That antisocial activities escalate indicates, according to
psychiatrist Robert Simon, that they fulfill a need for stimulation.[8] In fact, some killers report that they feel
normal only after killing. Thus, they
become addicted to their compulsive patterns.
It was clearly the case with Chase that he was planning to increase his
brutal behavior quite dramatically and there is every indication that Riva
would have killed again. Ferrell, too,
seems to have acquired a feeling of grandiosity from his murders that may have
inspired him to continue. As their dark sides take over, Simon points out,
their personal lives spiral downward and self-care diminishes. They have to
feed a need. This is the pattern of a drug addict. Simon also states that
intermittent stimulation of the brain has the effect of altering brain
excitability; it can even produce seizures. The brain becomes increasingly more
sensitive to the stimulation and more prone to post-stimulation depression. It
could be, he suggests, that some killers have this type of mood disorder. Where
it takes them will be channeled through their fantasies. Some will only
fantasize about their victims, while others will clothe themselves in a fantasy
role that makes their killing both satisfying and permissible.
Enter
the vampire – the charismatic, dangerous, sexual predator who possesses secret
powers.
Psychologist
Michael Apter’s theory of arousal may help to explain.[9]
Once something is labeled dangerous, he says, it exerts a magical attraction.
It produces arousal, which is mostly pleasant. It makes us feel more alive.
However, it can also make us feel anxious, so we develop what he calls
“protective frames.” This is a way to mentally create a buffer around our
experience that helps us feel safe; it allows us to feel excited without being
overwhelmed by anxiety. For example, a protective frame is a story arch that
has an aesthetic sense of closure. The monster rises up and scares us. We have
the weapons to fend him off and bring him down. Thus, we can enjoy the
excitement he engenders in us. Within the frame, we welcome risk; we’re eager
to go to the edge to experience the sense of exhilaration. We can actually
enjoy danger.
Apter
describes three types of frames: the confidence frame, the safety frame, and
the detachment frame. 1) The confidence frame is one in which you feel
confident of your abilities or weapons or defenses. You can bring on the
monster. 2) The safety zone is the place where you feel
no danger. 3) The detachment frame is a fantasy that
involves no significant interaction with the environment. Each provides a
degree of removal from the threats of the real world. With the safety and confidence frames, the
individual is in the real world. In detachment, one is merely observing. Either
someone else is perceived to be in danger or the danger is perceived to be past
or imaginary.
For
some people the frame they use can become pathological. They might add sources
of arousal to increase the excitement that actually endanger others and then
use the frame to protect themselves from the consequences. Rod Ferrell, for
example, viewed himself as a powerful vampire that the law officers could not
arrest or prosecute. Even if he did end
up in prison, he couldn’t die because he was immortal. For him, the vampire was
a protective frame that gave him license to do what he did and made him feel
that he was too powerful to be saddled with consequences.
People
who involve others in their frame in order to get aroused may put them at risk.
The frame is a fantasy that allows this to occur without seeming harmful to the
perpetrator. He still feels safe, despite potential repercussions in the real
world. Generally the frame forms from a fantasy that has an erotic buzz, like
the vampire for the killers described above. Then it involves preparation,
which digs the person more deeply into the role. The next step includes a victim – perhaps
initially in fantasy, but eventually in reality. Each of the killers thought
about their vampiric acts before they did them; each knew he was going to
eventually kill. Each killed as a “creature” more powerful than those victims.
Generally the victim’s distress continues the
stimulation and enhances the image of power – these people are just
disposable objects. Then the danger of discovery for those who are not
completely psychotic provides an extra sheen of arousal. Both Chase and Ferrell
avidly followed news reports of what they had done. That they viewed themselves
in vampiric frames made them feel not only justified in what they had done –
Riva as well – but invulnerable. Life is recreated through the frame so that
their otherwise chaotic impulses are given organization and coherence. As a
vampire, it makes sense to kill as they did, to take a life to enhance their
powers. They create safety in this frame for themselves and use detachment to
make it work.
Ferrell,
while mentally disturbed, was not psychotic. He found within the vampire frame
an exciting game that increasingly became more real to him because he finally
had a sense of power and could not relinquish it. Being a vampire dampened the
anxiety and heightened the excitement of the aroused state. It made perfect
sense, given his frame and how strongly he seemed to believe in it, that he
would feel as he did and do what he did.
These
three cases illustrate how a mental illness that evolves into aggression and
violence may find a form for these acts within a predatory mythology like the
vampire. It is not the case that the vampire image has made them violent, but
rather that it has provided a way to organize their self-impressions and to
justify their acts. They are “safe” from the consequences. While everyone uses
frames in some manner, in this case, the frame becomes pathological because it
licenses killers to pull others into their frame and do them harm.
The
vampire is a dangerous creature. Using this mythos for a protective frame
heightens excitement but may also inspire aggression, depending on the state of
mind of the person involved.
[1]For details, see Basil Copper, The
Vampire (New York: Citadel, 1973); Norine Dresser, American Vampires
(New York: Norton, 1989); and J. Gordon Melton, The Vampire Book: The
Encyclopedia of the Undead (Detroit: Visible Ink Press, 1994).
[2]For further details on Haigh, see David
Briffett, The Acid Bath Murders (West Sussex, England: Field Place
Press, 1988); Lord Dunboyne, ed. The Trial of John George Haigh (London:
William Hodge, 1953); and Molly Lefebure, Murder with a Difference: The
Cases of Haigh and Christie (London: Heinemann, 1958).
[3]Details of the Ferrell case are taken from
articles in the Orlando Sentinel, Lake County Edition, Florida.
[4]See also Clifford Linedecker, The Vampire
Killers (New York: St. Martin’s, 1998); and Aphrodite Jones, The Embrace
(New York: Pocket Books, 1999).
[5]See Ray Biondi & Walt Hecox, The
Dracula Killer (New York: Pocket Books, 1992); and Robert Ressler & Tom
Shachtman, Whoever Fights Monsters (New York: St. Martin’s, 1992).
[7]For details of Noll’s studies, see Bizarre
Diseases of the Mind (New York: Berkley, 1990) and Vampires, Werewolves
and Demons (New York: Brunner/Mazel, 1992).
[8]See Robert Simon, Bad Men Do What Good
Men Dream (Washington DC: American Psychiatric Press, 1996).
[9]Details can be found in Apter’s The
Dangerous Edge: The Psychology of Excitement (New York: The Free Press,
1992).
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