Analysis
by Barbara Kirwin, Ph.D.

Fla. V. Ferrell

The egregiously incriminating details of the double murder to which Rod Ferrell confessed defy easy explanation. If Neeley and Broderick, at least on the surface, looked like upstanding members of their communities, Ferrell with his Goth clothing and coal- black nearly waist-length hair was clearly an outsider to all but the members of his vampire cult. He was charged with the brutal bludgeoning of his ex-girlfriend’s parents. The bodies of Ruth and Richard Wendorf were found horribly mutilated with cigarette burns and gashes shaped like "V’s" carved into their flesh. Although only 17, Ferrell already had a significant arrest record in Kentucky for animal torture and sacrifice. He once pulled the legs off a dog.

After his arrest, Ferrell confessed to the murders in a bragging, erotically-tinged oration, regaling detectives with the grisly details. He claimed that he got a high from the killings and felt no remorse. This ensured that regardless of his age, Ferrell would face the death penalty. Ferrell’s confession can be seen as an extension of his crime — the Hostile/Exhibitionistic Confession.

Ferrell was a stranger to society’s norms from the start. As a child, he lived in the chaotic world of a deranged mother who herself was charged with having sex with a 14-year-old boy as part of a vampire cult initiation. Although Ferrell’s mother was later acquitted because of mental illness, she persisted in her beliefs that her son’s cult had supernatural powers. Ferrell’s natural father had disappeared years before. Rod and his mother drifted from state to state. The vampire cult and the Goth world were his only family, the only place he fit in, the only setting in which he was empowered and belonged.

Ferrell’s confession contains the adolescent bravado and grandiose exaggeration of theatrical role-playing. Throughout his trial he blew kisses to reporters, wagged his tongue and grimaced menacingly at the cameras. Ferrell was desperate for attention, to be noticed, to be somebody. A damaged, emotionally disturbed young man, he had long ago given up hope of achieving anything in the normal world. He started to fantasize about himself as an anti-Christ, a Satanic creature. "There was a rush to actually feel that I was taking a life," Ferrell said. "When you take a life you become a god for a split second, and I felt that way."

Coming from an undeniably dysfunctional background, Ferrell had created a negative persona for himself. He displaced all the fear and longing he experienced as an abused child with hatred and arrogance. Ferrell’s confession is a masterpiece of performance art, the last and final installment in his personal vampire theatre of the gruesome and absurd. The effect it had, of course, was to alienate a jury even further, to place Ferrell even further beyond hope of sympathy or redemption. In essence, Ferrell had the final control; he was committing legal suicide and self-annihilation.

The one statement of the confession that impresses me as emotionally telling is when Ferrell matter-of-factly states that he would never kill, "little kids — that’s my rule. I don’t kill anything that little." In Ferrell’s twisted code of conduct, he still draws the line somewhere.

Ferrell appears to be severely mentally ill. His crime does not have as clear a connection to personal motivations of anger or revenge. At some level, I believe, Ferrell feels an overriding death wish despite his inability to express guilt or remorse.

Ferrell seems to have found on death row some kind of peace and security. He lives in an imposed "family" of which he is a member: in a life of predictable rules and order -- something he never had outside except in the sadistic rituals of the Vampire cult. The second video clip shows an older, drug-free Ferrell with scrubbed face and short hair, wearing his fluorescent orange jumpsuit. He is subdued, reflective, as he answers, "I was definitely evil at that time…and I enjoyed my evil." When he is asked how he feels about the murders, there appears some faint glimmer of emotion in his eyes, a pulsation in his neck, a cracking in his voice. He, among all the murderers profiled here, seems to be the most honest with himself and us, the most resigned to his fate and perhaps because of his age, the most tragic.