John Brennan Crutchley

On October 30, 2010, the cable channel Investigation Discovery broadcast a 20-minute summary of the Brevard County incident which led to Crutchley's incarceration. This episode of American Occult includes interviews with "vampirism sociologist" Katherine Ramsland, as well as law enforcement officers from Brevard County, Florida, Robert Leatherow and Jake Miller, and also identifies the victim as one Laura Murphy.

On March 30, 2002, Crutchley died in prison. Corrections officials reported on April 2, 2002, that he had been found dead in his cell at the Hardee Correctional Institute with a plastic bag over his head. The cause of death reported was asphyxiation. Subsequent reporting around August 1, 2003, from the Florida Department of Corrections declared that Crutchley died of autoerotic asphyxiation.

Less than a day later, he was arrested again for violating his parole after testing positive for marijuana. Even though he denied smoking marijuana (saying that inmates blew marijuana smoke in his face), prosecutors in the subsequent trial showed Crutchley confessing to a corrections inspector that he smoked the substance because he was nervous about his impending release and he was aware of the relaxing effects of cannabis. This violation of his parole resulted in a sentence of life imprisonment to be imposed on Crutchley on January 31, 1997, under the "three strikes law". This was his third conviction; the first two were for the kidnapping and the rape of the Brevard teen.

After serving 11 years of his sentence, Crutchley was released on August 8, 1996, from Union Correctional Institution in Raiford, Florida for the Brevard County Jail for good behavior. Officials in Bridgeport, West Virginia, where his mother lived, did not want him, nor did the people in Malabar and Melbourne. Therefore, he was transferred to the Orlando Probation and Restitution Center, a half-way house where he would undergo counseling and pay restitution even while serving his 50 years of parole.

Writing in 1992 about the 1986 conviction, Ressler predicted that Crutchley's "25 to life" sentence would result in release as soon as 1998. In fact, Crutchley was released two years earlier than that.

In June 1986, Crutchley pleaded guilty on kidnapping and rape charges in exchange for prosecutors dropping the "grievous bodily harm" charge for extracting the victim's blood and for drug possession. During the sentencing phase, the blood issue came up nonetheless and Crutchley claimed to have been introduced to blood drinking by a nurse in roughly 1970 as part of a sexual ritual. He said it should not be considered in his sentencing because in this case, he had not drunk the blood; he claimed that it had coagulated before he could drink it, "and he couldn't get it down". His wife did not take the stand, but told reporters that her husband wasn't guilty, but was just "a kinky sort of guy."

In late November 1985, in Malabar, Brevard County, Florida, a nude teenaged girl, handcuffed at both feet and ankles, was found crawling along the side of the road. She had been passed by several trucks before someone stopped to help her. She begged the driver to not take her back "to that house,"; when he asked where, she told him to remember a certain house. He noted the location, took her home, and called for police and an ambulance.

In 1977, a 25-year-old Fairfax, Virginia secretary, Debbora Fitzjohn, disappeared. Crutchley was placed under close scrutiny because he was Fitzjohn's boyfriend and she was last seen alive at the trailer park where Crutchley lived. As a result, he was questioned several times for his possible involvement in her disappearance. However, nothing came of it due to lack of evidence, even after her skeletal remains were found by a hunter in October the following year.

In addition to suspecting Crutchley of murders in Florida and Pennsylvania, Ressler also suspected Crutchley for murder in the 1977 disappearance of Debbora Fitzjohn, the secretary whom he met in Fairfax, Virginia. She had been in his mobile home and police identified Crutchley as the last person to see her alive.

Born to a well-to-do family in Clarksburg, West Virginia, John Crutchley was a friendless child, preferring to spend most of his time tinkering with electronic gadgets in the basement of his home. This penchant for electronics paid off early when he earned a good amount of money repairing and rebuilding complex radio and stereo systems even before he graduated from high school. Eventually, he graduated with a bachelor's degree in physics from Defiance College in Ohio in 1970, and earned a master's degree in engineering administration at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He married his first wife in 1969.

His departure from Kokomo came after an investigation was made by plant security into missing materials. He later moved to Fairfax County, Virginia, in the mid-1970s and remarried. He worked for several high-tech firms in the Washington, D.C. area, including TRW, ICA and Logicon Process Systems. At about this time, several teenaged girls disappeared in and around that area. He later moved to Florida and began working in 1983 at Harris Corporation in Palm Bay, Florida.

John Brennan Crutchley (October 1, 1946 – March 30, 2002) was an American convicted kidnapper, rapist, and suspected serial killer who was suspected of murdering up to 30 women, but was never tried for nor convicted of murder. He was called the "Vampire Rapist" because he drained the blood of his victim almost to the point of death while he repeatedly raped her.