John Brennan Crutchley

Infobox Criminal


subject_name = John Brennan Crutchley
image_size = 200 px
image_caption = Mug shot of John Brennan Crutchley.
date_of_birth = birth date|1946|10|1
place_of_birth = Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, U.S.
date_of_death = death date and age|2002|03|30|1946|10|01
place_of_death = Florida, U.S.
alias =
conviction = Kidnapping, Sexual battery, Rape
penalty = Life sentence
status = Deceased
occupation = System engineer
spouse =
parents =
children =

John Brennan Crutchley (October 1 1946 - March 30 2002) was a convicted kidnapper and rapist who was suspected of murdering more than 30 women, but was never tried nor convicted of those crimes. He was called the "Vampire Rapist" because he drained the blood of his victim almost to the point of death while he repeatedly sexually assaulted her.

Early life and career

Born to a well-to-do family in Pittsburgh, John Crutchley was a friendless child, preferring to spend most of his time tinkering with electronic gadgets at 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 at Defiance College in Ohio in 1970, and earning a master's degree in engineering administration at George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He married his first wife in 1969. [Monaco, Richard and Bill Burt, "The Dracula Syndrome", Avon Books, 1993. ISBN 0-380-77062-8, p. 119]

Crutchley's first marriage showed strains by the time he graduated from college, and it all but ended by the time he moved to Kokomo, Indiana to work at Delco Electronics Corporation. Crutchley had been working at General Motors' Central Foundry Division in Defiance, Ohio where he was responsible for the installation of a new plant security system. He applied for a transfer to Delco Electronics, Kokomo, where the systems were designed and built, and worked there for several years as an electrical systems engineer [Development of GM Security Monitoring Systems [http://wiki.gmnext.com/wiki/index.php/Development_of_GM_Security_Monitoring_Systems] ] . 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, and 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 began disappearing in and around that area.

Disappearances

In 1977, a 25-year old Fairfax secretary, Deborah 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 out of it due to lack of evidence, even after her skeletal remains were found by a hunter in October the following year. Other disappearances in the area have not been definitely linked to Crutchley. A rash of disappearances also occurred in Pennsylvania when he resided there (in some cases bodies of women were found in remote areas in the state); some investigators even linked Crutchley with the disappearance of two teenaged girls, the Lyon Sisters in Wheaton, Maryland and a possible rape-murder of teenager [http://www.kathybeatty.com Kathy Lynn Beatty] in nearby Aspen Hill, both in Montgomery County, where his second wife's family lived.

The "Vampire Rapist"

According to FBI profiler Robert Ressler, [Ressler, Robert and Tom Schactman,"Whoever Fights Monsters". St Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0-312-95044-6] Crutchley fit the profile of a serial killer. This section considers that work the primary resource outside of court records on the case. [ [http://www.earthops.net/crutchley.html EarthOps.Org reporting downloaded as of July 16, 2008 extensively copied here by permission of, and by, author.] ]

On Thanksgiving, 1985, in Malabar, Brevard County, Florida, a motorist stopped to help a 19-year-old woman at the roadside. She was nude, handcuffed at both feet and ankles, filthy and exhausted. She'd been crawling along the side of the road, and had been passed by several trucks before someone had stopped. She begged the man to not take her back there, and when he asked where, she told him to remember a certain house. He then got her out of there, and called for police and an ambulance.

The hospital determined that whatever her other injuries, she was missing between 40 and 45 percent of her blood. She'd been hitchhiking the day before and the man who gave her a ride was willing to take her where she needed to go, but said he had to stop off at home first. He invited her in, and she refused, and he got into the back seat of the car and choked her unconscious.

"The hitchhiker awoke to find that she was tied to a kitchen countertop, arms and legs immobilized. A video camera had been set up, along with lights. The man raped her and videotaped the action. Then he inserted needles into her arm and wrist and carefully extracted blood and began to drink it, telling her that he was a vampire. After that, he handcuffed her and put her in the bathtub, returning later for another round of sexual assault and blood extraction. The next morning, after a third round, the man handcuffed the hitchhiker and left her in the bathroom, saying that he would be back later for further assaults, and that if she tried to escape in the interim, his brother would come and kill her. It was after the attacker had left the house that she was able to push out of the bathroom window and crawl to the road. Had she not escaped then, doctors believed, she might well have died from a further round of blood extraction." ["Whoever Fights Monsters:" Ressler, Robert and Tom Schactman, St Martin's Press, 1992. ISBN 0-312-95044-6 "What Plus Why Equals Who" - page 169]

An arrest warrant was served for John Brennan Crutchley, and some evidence collected. The video tape in the camera was partially erased, which according to the victim would otherwise have contained footage of her rape and the extraction of her blood. Photographs of the house taken at the time of this first search showed, among other things, a stack of credit cards several inches thick. A second, later, search did not turn up these credit cards, the whereabouts of which remain unknown.

Ressler was convinced that Crutchley had almost certainly killed before, and was what is termed a "serial killer of the organized type". Ressler instigated the second search, which was of much wider scope and detail than the first. Ressler noted that there had been four female bodies found in Brevard County in the previous year. No evidence could be found to link these deaths to Crutchley, however.

As Crutchley was intensively investigated, it was discovered that he was not only into extremely experimental sex, but also he had meticulously recorded his exploits, some of which involved his wife. Some of the partners indicated that Crutchley had crossed the line into assaults which had been initially "consensual acts" but which began to turn ugly when "stop phrases" were ignored. At his trial, Crutchley claimed to have been introduced to blood drinking by a nurse in roughly 1970, as part of a sexual ritual.

Crutchley pleaded guilty to rape and kidnapping, rather than also be charged with possession of drugs and grevious bodily harm. His wife - evidently trying to categorize this affair as nothing more than a little S&M that got out of hand - stated that this had been a "gentle rape, devoid of any overt brutality". After the trial, she told reporters that her husband was just "a kinky sort of guy".

Crutchley's initial defense at the time of his arrest was that the hitchhiker was "a Manson girl" who had solicited kinky sex from him. Her sexual history was not available at the time of this article -- though interestingly she initially did not wish to press charges even after having passed a lie detector test and tests which indicated the presence of semen. She pressed charges only after a rape counselor convinced her of her duty to other women.

Crutchley was found to be in possession of several women's IDs, as well as several different women's necklaces kept concealed in a closet. Fact|date=September 2008

Crutchley, at his pre-sentencing hearing, maintained that the actions for which he'd been convicted were consensual, and outside of the jurisdiction of the court.

Crutchley was convicted of kidnapping and rape after pleading guilty in June 1986. He was sentenced to 25 years in prison with 50 years of subsequent probation.

Brief freedom

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 on good behavior. Officials in Fairfax County, Virginia, where his mother lived, did not want him, neither did the people in Malabar and Melbourne. Hence 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 in probation.

Arrested again

Less than a day later, he was arrested again for violating his probation after being tested 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 telling a corrections inspector that he smoked the substance because he was nervous of his impending release and he thought that the drug would make him relaxed. [ [http://groups.google.com/group/alt.true-crime/browse_thread/thread/f105ce03c6e49d3d/985c678121367673?lnk=st&q=John+Crutchley%2C+the+so-called+vampire+rapist%2C+&rnum=1#985c678121367673 "Vampire Rapist" sentenced to life for smoking pot] , Associated Press report, February 1, 1997, retrieved 2006 12-24]

This violation of his probation 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 kidnapping and rape.

Death

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. [Reuters, April 2, 2002] The cause of death reported was asphyxiation.

Subsequent reporting around August 1, 2003 from the Florida Department of Corrections [ [http://www.local6.com/news/1588423/detail.html Local6.com News (August 1, 2002)] ] declared that the "Florida Vampire Rapist" died of autoerotic asphyxiation.

NASA connection

At the time of his arrest, Crutchley was found to be in possession of a great deal of information — of top-secret levelFact|date=September 2008 — regarding naval communications, information processing, and weapons equipment. Crutchley's employer, Harris Corporation, was highly involved with not only the NASA research and launch facilities at Cape Canaveral, but also with with other Naval contractors and subcontractors.

Notes and references