On the evening of November 22, 1985, a motorist in Malabar, Florida, stopped for a naked young woman crawling along the roadside, handcuffed at the wrists and ankles; several trucks had already passed her. She begged him not to take her back to that house and told him which one it was. At the hospital doctors found that nineteen-year-old Laura Murphy had lost 40 to 45 percent of her blood and had ligature marks on her neck. She had been hitchhiking to Melbourne the day before, she said, when a man picked her up and stopped at his house to fetch a notebook. When she would not go in, he choked her unconscious with a ligature, dragged her inside, stripped her and strapped her to the kitchen counter under lights and a video camera. He raped her, put needles into her arm and wrist, drew her blood and began to drink it, telling her he was a vampire, then handcuffed her in the bathtub and came back to do it again. The next morning, after a third time, he left for work, warning her that his brother would kill her if she tried to escape. She pushed herself out of the bathroom window. A hematologist said later that she would have bled to death within twelve hours.
The house belonged to John Brennan Crutchley, an engineer at the Harris Corporation in Palm Bay, whose wife and child were away visiting relatives in Maryland for Thanksgiving. He was arrested during the search, at 2:30 in the morning. The tape in the camera had been partly erased. Photographs from that first search showed a stack of credit cards several inches thick, and officers noted women's necklaces and locks of hair hidden in a closet; none of it was there when they came back. The second search found seventy-two index cards on which he had rated the sexual performance of women and some men; some of those partners said he had crossed from consensual restraint into assault. At his office police found photographs of a bound and gagged woman whom Crutchley was choking with his hands, homemade sex tapes, and dozens of photographs of women in public places. He also had a large amount of classified material on naval weapons and communications, and the FBI, the CIA and naval intelligence considered, but never opened, an espionage case.
He was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia, on October 1, 1946, the youngest of three children in an affluent family. By his own account his mother, grieving for a daughter who had died the year before he was born, dressed him as a girl for his first six years, and his parents beat him until he lost consciousness. He was a friendless boy who spent his time in the basement with electronics. He graduated from Upper St. Clair High School in Pennsylvania, earned a physics degree from Defiance College in Ohio in 1970 and a master's in engineering administration from George Washington University, and worked for General Motors, Delco Electronics in Kokomo, Indiana, which he left after a plant security inquiry into missing materials, and defense firms around Washington, among them TRW, before joining Harris in 1983.
In June 1986 he pleaded guilty to kidnapping and rape, and prosecutors dropped a charge of grievous bodily harm for taking Murphy's blood and a drug charge. At sentencing he said a nurse had introduced him to drinking blood as part of a sexual ritual in 1970, and asked that it not count against him because in this case, he said, the blood had clotted before he could get it down. His wife told reporters he was just a kinky sort of guy and called the attack a gentle rape. On the testimony at the hearing, the judge went beyond the state guidelines and sentenced him to twenty-five years to life, with fifty years of parole to follow. The press called him the Vampire Rapist.
The FBI profiler Robert Ressler, brought in by local authorities, was convinced that Crutchley was an organized serial killer, and pushed for the wider second search. Investigators came to suspect him of killing women in Virginia, Maryland, Ohio, Washington, D.C., and Brevard County, and he was suspected in as many as thirty deaths. No evidence ever linked him to any of them, and he was never charged with murder. Deborah Rita Fitzjohn, twenty-five, a secretary from Fairfax, Virginia, and his girlfriend, vanished on January 28, 1978, after visiting his trailer; he said he had fallen asleep in front of the television and she was gone when he woke. A hunter found her skeleton in October 1979, and in 1985 police found the business card of the chief investigator on her case among his things. At his desk they found the photo identification of Patti Lou Volansky, twenty-nine, who set out to hitchhike from Mims, Florida, on March 15, 1985, and was never seen again; he said he had put her out of his car and found her ID on the seat the next day.
The desk held the identification cards of five other women. One belonged to Nancy Kay Brown, twenty-five, of Rantoul, Illinois, who disappeared on vacation in Cocoa Beach on June 6, 1983, and was found in Canaveral Groves in March 1984, killed by a blow to the head. Others belonged to Cheryl Ann Windsor, sixteen, whose body was found in a creek on Merritt Island in May 1984, and to Diana Lee Casey, twenty, whose skeleton was also found on Merritt Island that year. Bones found in brush in Malabar in January 1985 included remains of Kimberly Ann Walker, twenty-one, of Vero Beach, last seen getting into a small, light-colored car, and of Jeanette Marcotte of Saskatchewan; Crutchley drove a beige 1982 Nissan Stanza. In 1995 naval investigators examined his access to the Norfolk Naval Air Station during two murders there; another man pleaded guilty to one of them, and the other remains unsolved.
Ressler predicted in 1992 that the sentence would free him by 1998. He was released for good behavior on August 8, 1996, after eleven years, from Union Correctional Institution. Neither Bridgeport, West Virginia, where his mother lived, nor Malabar nor Melbourne would take him, and he was sent to a halfway house in Orlando. Less than a day later he tested positive for marijuana. He said inmates had blown smoke in his face, but prosecutors showed him admitting to a corrections inspector that he had smoked it because he was nervous about his release, and on January 31, 1997, the violation, his third strike, brought a life sentence. On March 30, 2002, he was found dead in his cell at Hardee Correctional Institution with a plastic bag over his head. The death was reported as asphyxiation, and in 2003 the Florida Department of Corrections said it was autoerotic asphyxiation.