John Brennan Crutchley was never convicted of any murder. He was convicted of kidnapping and sexual battery against one woman who survived, and was suspected by investigators of between twenty-four and thirty killings that were never charged. The entry is flagged on both counts.
He was born in Clarksburg, West Virginia on October 1, 1946, the youngest of three children of a comfortable family, and worked as a systems engineer for a defence contractor. On November 21, 1985 he picked up a nineteen-year-old hitchhiker, Laura Murphy, near Malabar, Florida, choked her unconscious at his house and held her for more than twenty hours, draining nearly half her blood with a syringe and drinking some of it while assaulting her. She pushed herself out of a bathroom window and was found crawling naked and handcuffed at the roadside. Doctors believed another extraction would have killed her. The press called him the Vampire Rapist.
A search of his house and his office at work turned up handcuffs, ropes, a handgun, home-made tapes, and the identification card of a woman, Patti Volansky, twenty-nine, who had disappeared while hitchhiking in Brevard County in March 1985. The FBI profiler Robert Ressler, who worked the case, said he thought police had a serial killer in custody rather than only a rapist, and gave evidence at the sentencing hearing which led the judge to exceed the state guidelines.
He pleaded guilty in 1986 to kidnapping and sexual battery and was sentenced to twenty-five years to life. Florida investigators told reporters they believed he might have been involved in around twenty-four deaths, three of them in Brevard County; the Brevard County Sheriff's Office closed its investigation in August 1996 without bringing any further charge. He was released to a halfway house in Orlando on August 8, 1996 after eleven years, and was arrested the next day for a positive drugs test. On January 31, 1997 that violation, counted as a third strike, brought a life sentence.
He was found dead in his cell at Hardee Correctional Institution on March 30, 2002 with a plastic bag over his head. It was first treated as suicide; on the accounts of other inmates it was recorded as an accident during autoerotic asphyxiation. He was fifty-five. No murder was ever charged against him, and the suspected figure remains exactly that.