True Crime Campfire - Stranger Than Fiction: Volume 3

Episode Date: September 2, 2022

A beautiful bride, married only 8 days before drowning in the river under mysterious circumstances. A young woman on a sunny walk, accepting a ride from a friendly stranger and ending up in a real-life nightmare. A strange fire. A new groom with a gash on the head. A NASA engineer who blends in perfectly until it’s time to let the monster out. Murder or suicide? Abductor or serial killer? Man, or vampire? Join us for a grab bag of bizarre stories: The mystery of "Eight-Day Bride" Christina Kettlewell, whose 1947 death baffled Canada, and the horrifying true story of John Crutchley, a real life "vampire" who may have been one of America's most prolific serial killers. Sources:https://thetruecrimefiles.com/christina-kettlewell-murder/https://the-mystique.medium.com/murder-or-suicide-mystery-of-the-8-day-bride-5b1121f7451chttps://buzzfeed-unsolved.fandom.com/wiki/The_Mysterious_Death_Of_The_Eight_Day_Bridehttps://digitalarchive.tpl.ca/objects/262810/barries-friend-and-husband-of-the-dead-bride-jack-kettlewehttps://murderpedia.org/male.C/c/crutchley-john.htmhttps://www.sun-sentinel.com/news/fl-xpm-1996-10-13-9610120412-story.htmlFollow us, campers!Patreon (join to get all episodes ad-free, at least a day early, an extra episode a month, and a free sticker!): https://patreon.com/TrueCrimeCampfireFacebook: True Crime CampfireInstagram: https://gramha.net/profile/truecrimecampfire/19093397079Twitter: @TCCampfire https://twitter.com/TCCampfireEmail: [e-mail]! https://true-crime-campfire.myspreadshop.com/Become a supporter of this podcast: https://www.spreaker.com/podcast/true-crime-campfire--4251960/support.

Hello, campers, grab your marshmallows and gather around the true crime campfire. We're your camp counselors. I'm Katie. And I'm Whitney. And we're here to tell you a true story that is way stranger than fiction. We're roasting murderers and marshmallows around the true crime campfire. A beautiful bride, married only eight days before, drowning in the river under mysterious circumstances. A young woman on a sunny walk, accepting a ride from a friendly stranger and ending up in a real-life nightmare. A strange fire. A new groom with a gash on the head. A NASA engineer who blends in perfectly until it's time to let the monster out. Murder or suicide. Abductor or a serial killer.

Man or vampire. This is Stranger Than Fiction, Volume 3. Case 1. Eight-day Bride, the mysterious death of Christina Kettlewell. So, campers, for this one, we're in Ontario, Canada, May 20, 1947. All hell was breaking loose at the quaint little lakeside cottage where a newlywed couple Jack and Christina Kettlewell were spending their honeymoon, joined by their best friend. Ronald. Yeah, it's weird, I know. Just put a pin in that for a minute. We'll get back to it. Anyway, I mentioned all hell breaking loose. Well, Ronald had just come back from a rowboat ride to find the cottage on fire. He ran inside to look for his friend's Jack and Christina and finally found Jack in a sitting room, disoriented, barely conscious, and bleeding from a nasty cut on his

forehead. Ronald shook his friend, Jack, where's Christina? But he was too woozy to answer. Neighbors were already gathering outside, making a bucket chain to try and fight the fire, so, still not knowing where Christina was, Ronald rushed Jack into his car and drove him to the hospital for treatment. The neighbors tried their best, but the fire was just out of control, and within an hour the cute little house was just a pile of smoldering wreckage. As everybody stood around staring, wondering what had caused the fire, one of the neighbors caught sight of something in the water. It was Christina Kettlewell, barefoot and dressed in pajamas,

lying face down in the shallows of the lake. The pretty new bride, married only eight days before, was dead, drowned, as our honeymoon cottage burned. So we have a groom in the hospital with a head injury, his brand new bride drowned and best friend Ronald, physically unscathed but undoubtedly traumatized by the awful scene he just walked in on. How the hell did we get here? I hate you so much. Y'all know this one is unsolved, right? She's doing this to me again.

You'll do it, and you'll love it, hush. We're going to figure it out together. Damn it, Witt. I'm a podcaster, not an investigator. So, what a sad end to a love story, right? Well, maybe it was a love story. We're not really sure what it was, to be honest with you. Christina met Army vet Jack Cettlewell when she was 19,

and her parents were not happy about it. For one thing, he wasn't Catholic. Big no-no for Christina's devout parents, but they also had a problem with something else about Jack, namely that he apparently came as a package deal with a dude named Ronald Barry. Jack and Ronald were roommates and best buds, and they were inseparable. Ronald bugged Christina's parents, even more than Jack did. He couldn't seem to hold on to one job for one thing.

He'd worked as an insurance salesman for a while, then a construction worker, and by the time of Jack and Christina's marriage, he was teaching ballroom dancing and cutting hair. Ronald was such a constant in Jack's life that he tagged along on his and Christina's dates. He was around so much that the parents were worried he might be in love with Christina himself, which bless your hearts. I mean, it's a possibility, but may I suggest another, that the hairdresser slash ballroom dancing instructor roommate might have been infatuated with Jack, not Christina, or hell, maybe both of them.

I mean, who knows? Oh, my God, they were roommates. Yeah, they actually were. There was definitely something going on, though. Their relationship was at the very least a bromance, not standard issue for the 19. And it drove Christina's parents bananas. They thought Ronald was creepy and pushy and weird and they questioned his motives and he gave him the hebes. So they did what so many misguided parents have done before and since.

They tried to forbid her from seeing Jack and Ronald. That went about as well as it always does. Christina just started spending all her time over at the guy's apartment. She stopped coming home at all. And at one point, Christina's sister went over there to try and convince. her to come home, and they got into a big screaming fight, so bad that the neighbors called the cops. Two days later, Jack and Christina ran off together and got married in a courthouse ceremony. They had their wedding night at Jack and Ronald's house, and then off they went on

their honeymoon to the cabin at Severn Falls. And off Ronald went with him. What the hell, Jack? Really? Yeah, it's a little weird, right? Especially for 1947. Just guys being dudes. But Ronald did own the cabin, so maybe he just wanted to come along to make sure they didn't steal the towels. Like, I'm sure that's all it was, right? Oh, yeah. That's all that. 1947 Airbnb host. Right.

But I'm not sure Christina was happy about it because allegedly she was acting pretty weird during the first few days of their stay. She just burst into tears out of nowhere and then she'd walk around like a zombie. Like, she didn't really know where she was. That's very weird. And at one point, she and Ronald apparently had a heart-to-heart where Christina asked if he thought Jack really loved her, so obviously she was having her doubts. And then, three days into the honeymoon trip, Ronald decided to go for a row around the lake and find a place to catch some sun. Jack and Christina stayed back at the cabin, maybe hoping to finally get a few hours without the third wheel. When Ronald got back hours later, though, all hell had broken loose.

The cabin was on fire, Jack was inside, slipping in and out of consciousness with a big head wound, and Christina was nowhere to be found. And like I already told you, while Ronald ran Jack to urgent care and the neighbors tried to fight the fire, somebody found poor Christina, dressed in her pajamas and drowned in like 10 inches of water not far from the house. At the hospital, doctors treated Jack for the nasty gash on his forehead, plus shock, and some pretty serious burns. And this was really strange. When they tested his blood, they found a monster dose of codeine, an opioid used to treat pain or a bad cough. Dude was drugged to the gills. And he claimed he couldn't remember anything that had happened that day past lunchtime. When they autopsied Christina, they found codeine in her blood too.

Just trace amounts, though. And it didn't look like she'd been in the house while it was burning. There were no burns on her body, and they didn't find soot in her lungs. There was no evidence of an attack either. She drowned in her pajamas. They just couldn't figure out exactly why or how. But the local authorities were determined to try and find out. This was a death with a whole swirl of unanswered questions around it.

So in June of 1947, they convened an inquest to try and figure out what the hell happened. And it brought out some really intriguing evidence in a whole constellation of different theories. So let's go through them one by one. Katie, just shut up. You're going to be fine. theory one is that Christina took her own life there are a couple of reasons for this one first the way she was acting at the cabin on the first few days of the honeymoon

crying a lot then kind of going catatonic asking Ronald if he thought Jack really loved her and then on top of that at the inquest Ronald dropped a bombshell when he handed over three letters he said Christina had written before she died these things were explosive and not just because they pointed to suicide as a possible cause of Christina's death In the first letter, dated a little over a month before the marriage and addressed to Ronald, Christina wrote that she just tried to poison herself.

She said, this will be the best way out, as I cannot bear the thought of another girl having him, him meaning Jack, of course. Thanks to the True Crime Files blog for the direct quotes from these letters, by the way. Now, obviously, the poison didn't work, if there ever was any poison in the first place, and a few weeks later, Ronald claimed he'd gotten a second letter from Christina. In this one, she told him she tried to poison both herself and just, Jack. She said, when you love someone, you really love him, and I know there is no one for me but Jack. And if I cannot have him, I don't intend anyone else to. As you might say, I waited in the

hope that Jack would ask me to marry him, but I now realized that I might just be a passing fancy. And creepily enough, at the inquest Jack did talk about a sudden illness that cropped up right around the time this letter was dated. Now, the last letter wasn't written to Ronald. It was addressed to his and Jack's landlady, and Ronald said Christina had written it at the cottage the day before she drowned and given it to him to pass on to this woman. This one might be the most ominous of all three. Here's an excerpt. Ronnie is in the boat outside somewhere. By the time he gets back, everything will be over with. He must be afraid something would happen because he's staying an extra day to make sure we go back to Toronto with him. Huh. Interesting, right? Now, I don't know why

she'd confide in her husband's landlady like this, a lady that she apparently barely knew, but it sounds like she might be plotting something pretty sinister here, just one day before the shit hit the fan. So, okay, maybe Christina's mental health was falling apart. Maybe even after Jack married her, she still couldn't shake her desperate insecurity about whether he really loved her. Maybe she just couldn't take it anymore and tried to take both of them out. Dosed herself and Jack with Codine, bashed him over the head, set the cottage on fire, and then drowned herself. Seems kind of cut and dried when you look at it like that, right? But here's the thing, campers. All this odd behavior, the crying jags and whatnot, Jack actually didn't see any of that. Ronald was the only

one to see it, supposedly, and he claimed later that he didn't tell Jack about it because he was afraid it had ruined his bro's honeymoon. Now, y'all, we're talking about a small cottage with three people in it. How would Jack miss it if his new wife was randomly bursting into tears and then going into fugue states afterwards. Like, pretty frequently, it sounds like. He didn't see any evidence of this over three days on his own honeymoon. I'm having a hard time buying that. And I'm always suspicious when we only have one person's word about something like this anyway.

And like, why in the hell wouldn't he have told his best friend that his girlfriend was allegedly trying to poison him? Just didn't want to ruin the romance, I guess? I guess. And as for those letters, I mean, even the one to the land. landlady, all of these were in Ronald's possession. Nobody else got any letters like this, not her parents, not her sister, not her friends. At the inquest, they had a handwriting analyst testified that the letters were in Christina's handwriting, but I'm just incredibly dubious about

that. It just, that in general and handwriting analysis specifically, and so are a lot of forensic scientists. It's really not the most reliable. So I think it's very possible that somebody else by which I mean obviously our boy Ronnie wrote those letters yeah they certainly seemed to paint a very obvious picture and it almost feels like a little too obvious to me like too perfect and ronald had trouble keeping his story straight it went from i got back from boating found the place on fire ran in and found jack then tried to find christina but couldn't right too i got back ran into this burning cottage just normal everyday hero stuff no big deal and then i found Jack all dazed and barely conscious

with Christina hovering over him and crying. Uh-huh. He said she wouldn't look at him or talk to him, kind of like those catatonic episodes he claimed she'd been having all week. So this is what he claims, so he carried his buddy Jack outside to safety. Then, he said

he ran back inside a few minutes later to get Christina out of the burning house. But by then, she was nowhere to be found until the neighbor found her dead in the water an hour or so later. Now, y'all, That's a major change. That's not forgetting one or two minor details and remembering them later.

Those are two massively different stories. And the thing about story number two is that it looks real bad for Christina, as do those letters Ronald so helpfully provided. And his uber helpful stories about Christina's mental state in the days leading up to her death, stories which, interestingly enough, nobody else can corroborate. Yeah. And it's interesting to note that the Crown Attorney at the inquest thought Ronald was shady as shit.

He said Ronald was, quote, a liar of the most blatant kind whose sinister figure permeates the whole of this tragedy, but whose purpose and design are shrouded in mystery. I couldn't have said it better myself. So was this an attempted murder slash suicide?

Maybe. Or maybe you'll be more likely to subscribe to theory too. Christina was murdered, either by Ronald alone or by Ronald and Jack in Cahoots. As the folks over at True Crime Files point out in their article on the case, there are really only a few classic motives for murder, and two of the biggest are love and money.

Let's start with love. Jealous love. Christina's parents thought Ronald might be secretly in love with her and plotting to steal her away from Jack. But it's much more likely that Ronald was in love with Jack and possibly vice versa. Jack himself told the police that he and Ronald had been involved in a, quote, intimate relationship for years. family, friends, and neighbors of the two guys assumed they were together

and were shocked when Jack got married. Of course, the media used charming language to talk about all this. Everybody kept talking about Jack and Ronald's unnatural relationship. Yeah, nice phrasing folks. I mean, it was the 40s, of course, but it's like a guy holding hands with another guy was the equivalent of like tentacle hentai to these people. Feral saying, terrifying. Just do what historians do and say,

They were close friends and confidants who sometimes shared a bed. No, Harold, they're lesbians. God. But if there was something romantic between Ronald and Jack, that could provide either or both of them with a pretty standard motive for murder. When Christina asked Ronald if Jack really loved her, was that her way of asking about the elephant in the room? Just another way of saying, like, hey, man,

are you in love with my husband or what? Yeah. Ronald could have dosed Jack with enough Kodine to make sure he wouldn't remember anything, then bashed him over the head to make it look like a home invasion, or to frame Christina. Then he could have killed Christina, set the house on fire, and rushed in to save Jack and come out looking like a hero. Right, or they could have plotted together to kill her.

Jack taken one for the team by doping himself up with Kodine and letting Ronald hit him in the head. and now, you know, he's made his family happy by marrying a woman. See, Mom and Dad, I'm not gay, I got married to a lady. But now that his new bride was dead, so tragically especially, he could reasonably take a nice long break from relationships and secretly continue his love affair with Ronald. It's a theory.

But, you know, it might not have been about love, or not just about love anyway. There's also a big, fat financial motive in the mix in the form of two $5,000 life insurance policies that Jack took out on Christina before they got married. Double indemnity, meaning the beneficiary would get double the amount in the case of accidental death, which does include murder. He took one out on himself, too, and guess it was listed as beneficiary for both of their policies? Oh, yeah, our boy Ronald, obviously.

And it just so happens that Ronald was struggling for money at the time all this happened. Can the life insurance industry just, like, quit it with the double indemnity clause? It's like putting a cookie in front of a toddler and telling them not to eat it. Yes, in this metaphor, murderers or toddlers, and I stand by it. Oh, I stand by that. And it wasn't just the life insurance policies either. Ronald also had a $5,000 policy on the cottage, with Jack as the beneficiary. So you could argue there that they each had a financial motive to murder Christina and burn down the evidence.

Five grand in 1947 is equivalent to a little under 70K today. Not too shabby. But you could also argue that Ronald had... a pretty decent motive to kill both Jack and Christina. I mean, he was beneficiary of Jack's life insurance too, and he was the primary beneficiary in his will. All told, if both Jack and Christina had died, Ronald would have been due to get almost 300,000 smackeroonies in 2022 money. Dang. Not only that, but when Christina's body was discovered that day at the lake, her wedding ring was mysteriously missing from her finger. Had she thrown it into the lake as a symbolic gesture

before taking her own life, or did her killer steal it? Apparently, it was a pricey diamond. And Ronald may have felt that Christina owed him. At the inquest, he claimed that about a year before Christina and Jack's marriage, Christina had been sexually assaulted by a group of men who then tried to blackmail her about it, which is just, uh, charming, right? Can you imagine what a fucking nightmare to, like, go through that, and then have the monsters who did it extort money out of you,

because it's 1947 and you're so scared of anybody finding out that it happened? just ugh. So I really hope Ronald made the whole thing up. He claimed that he loaned Christina the money to pay off these scumbags and a lot of money at that. $12,000, the equivalent of about 150 grand in today's money. So maybe once Ronald hit financial troubles, he realized he needed that money back and decided murder was the best way to get it. Or maybe he made the whole damn story up to make himself look like the hero again. Look at me. I loaned my friend's girlfriend this massive amount of money to save her from blackmail. Seems to be a pattern with Ronnie, the hero thing, right? I'm pretty well convinced that Christina was murdered and Ronnie was the killer. What I can't

figure out is whether Jack was involved. By all accounts, the dynamic in their relationship was that Ronald was a dominant one, and Jack just kind of followed him around and did whatever he said. Jack was the type to hate any kind of confrontation, and Ronald seems like a classic manipulator to me, So it's possible that Jack was just an innocent pawn in Ronald's plot. But I also think it's very possible that Ronnie actually talked him into a conspiracy. Yeah, it's bizarre because in order for Jack to have participated, he would have had to agree to be drugged and bludgeoned, both of which could have ended very poorly, if anything could have gone wrong. I mean, I guess he could have agreed to be drugged and then Ronnie went off script and just hit him. Yeah, absolutely.

But, like, the fact that Jack didn't corroborate the story about hearing Christina crying, I'm leaning toward Ronnie being a lone wolf. But I could be wrong. No, I think that's what I'm leaning towards as well. So public opinion at the time seemed to be that they were in on it together. But here's the thing, bizarrely, even though a lot of people thought they were murderers, both Jack and Ronald were treated like celebrities while the story was in the news. They were both, you know, young, handsome dudes, and women would see them and just act like they just bumped into the flipping Beatles. It was just weird as hell. There's a picture from an old Toronto Star article of them, like, both signing autographs for a group of girls who look like just, yeah, they're all excited.

Like, what the hell, folks? There really isn't anything new under the sun, is there? Like, we act shocked by the thirst over Chris Watts, but really it's just human nature to be fucking freaks. Also, stop writing that loser. letters. He's not going to fuck you. You can't fix him. In the end, there wasn't enough evidence to prove that there was anything nefarious about Christina Kettlewell's death. As any homicide detective will tell you, there's what you believe in your gut to be true, and then there's what you can prove. And sometimes, the space between

those two is too big to cross. Christina was laid to rest before she could reach her 25th birthday, and her family was devastated to lose her. A few years later, Jack got married again. And get this shit, he never told his new wife about Christina. Just skipped over that entire chapter in his life history. The woman never knew he'd been married before, had no idea about the fire or the drowning or the inquest or anything. She and Jack had kids together and were married for decades before finally splitting up in the late 60s. But one of their kids, Richard, grew up to marry a family history nerd named Sharon. And in 1992, Sharon was looking into Richard's side of the family and,

you guessed it, unearthed the whole sordid story about Christina. It knocked her and Richard on their asses. They couldn't believe Richard's dad had kept all this a secret for 40-plus years. Oh, yeah. They didn't say anything to Jack about it, though. He was really old by then and sick, and they figured it would just upset him. And whatever Jack might have known about his first wife's death, he took it to the grave a few years later. Wow.

As for our boy Ronnie the Rat, he just kind of dropped off the map for a while. He stuck around until Jack's second marriage. Then, when Jack's little boy, Richard, was a toddler, he came over to the house one day, handed the little boy a peek-a-kid-knees dog as a present and skipped town. Nobody connected with the case ever heard from him again. Yeah, my guess is he took his money and ran. As there usually are with cases this old, there are some annoying gaps in the story. Like, we don't know the official cause of the fire in the cottage, whether it was ever ruled arson or anything like that.

And we don't know if the police ever investigated Ronald's story about Christina being sexually assaulted and blackmailed by a group of five men. Yeah, I bet not. Probably not. But based on what we do know, I feel like most of Ronald's story is a giant bag of bullshit. And I don't trust him as far as I could throw him, which, to be fair, is probably pretty far. I'm pretty strong. Yeah, you could probably sling him pretty far. But regardless, I don't trust the guy.

Like, what do you think, campers? I'm curious to hear your stories on this one. Yeah, me too. Okay, so moving on to case two. Okay, so moving on to case two, we're calling this one Vampire, the story of John Brennan Crutchley. This one is dark, y'all, a lot more than we usually get into on this show. So listen on a day when you can handle the dark.

Yeah. For this story, we're in Malabar and Brevard County, Florida, right around Thanksgiving in 1985. A guy was driving home one afternoon when a surreal sight came into view. A young woman, totally naked and covered in scrapes, hopping down the side of the road and trying desperately to get his attention. She was hopping, he quickly realized, because her wrists and ankles were handcuffed. The man screeched to a stop and ushered the young woman into his car, and as he sped them away towards help, she pointed one cuffed hand toward a white house a little ways down the road. Remember that house, she said, the man who lives there attacked me.

Her name was Laura. She was 19 years old, and when she arrived at the emergency room, she was as close to death as her doctors had ever seen anybody get. They had to cut the handcuffs off her wrists and ankles to treat her. and as they did, they noticed what looked like ligature marks around her neck and needle marks on her arms. She was also paper white, and doctors soon realized why. She'd lost almost half the blood in her body. As she slowly began to recover, police came to the hospital to take her statement, and one hell of a statement it was.

The day before, a bright sunny afternoon, she'd been on her way to buy cigarettes when a nice car pulled up beside her. The driver was a businessman type, she told the detectives, blonde hair, 40-ish, dressed nicely. He offered her a ride. And it was hot, and she was already tired and sweaty, and there was nothing about the guy that set off any red flags. He seemed nice. So she said, sure, thank you, and hopped into the passenger seat of his car. They'd only been driving for about 30 seconds before the man said, oh, hey, sorry about this, but I actually need to stop by my house and grab something I forgot. Do you mind? Then I'll drop you

off where you need to go. Laura said that was okay, and a few minutes later, the man pulled up alongside a white brick house. Want to come in? He asked her. No thanks, Laura said, I'll just wait for you here. So the guy went inside, and after a few minutes, he came back out and opened the backseat passenger door. You know what?

I think the thing I need is actually back here somewhere. He climbed into the back seat, and Laura heard him rummaging around for a few seconds, and then, quickly and smoothly, before she could react, he slipped a rope around her neck and started pulling, with his knee braced up against the back of the passenger seat. As the ligature cut off her air supply, Laura frantically clawed at the rope, but it was no use. She blacked out. And when she came to, she was tied down to like a kitchen island type thing, like a countertop. She was naked, blindfolded, with duct tape, but not so completely that she couldn't see anything.

There was a little slit in the tape, and she could just barely see her abduct her through it. He was standing next to her, totally naked, adjusting a video camera that sat on a tripod a few feet away. he'd set up lights too almost like a movie set I'm sure Laura knew full well that she was in the hands of a monster it's hard to imagine a more terrifying scenario than this but as bad as it was she could never in a million years have predicted the first thing her captor said to her when he realized she was awake I'm a vampire he said I'm gonna drink your blood

before Laura had a chance to process this surreal statement the man sexually assaulted her on the countertop as the video came hammer rolled. And then impossibly, the nightmare got worse. Through the crack in the duct tape, Laura watched the man assemble some kind of a syringe hose beaker system, and before she could say anything, he stuck the needle into her arm. Laura could see her own blood snaking down this clear plastic hose and dripping into the beaker, drip by drip, until he had a startling amount, like at least a short tumbler's worth. And then to her absolute horror, he drank it. He smiled this nasty little smile that didn't reach his eyes. It's so good, he told her.

Laura was frozen. She thought, I've seen his face. He can't let me go. He's going to have to kill me. When he was finished with his ghoulish little bloodletting ritual, Laura's captor forced her off the kitchen counter and into the bathroom. Handcuffing her wrists and ankles again, he shoved her down into the empty bathtub and told her to stay there. I'll be back for more, he said. By this point, Laura had already lost enough blood to feel woozy. She drifted in and out of consciousness his afternoon slid into night. At some point that night, the monster came back, dragging her to his bedroom for more of the same hell he put her through earlier.

The blood drinking seemed to be the part he liked the most. He always smiled that dead-eyed smile as he did it. At some point, Laura realized he drugged her to. She wasn't sure what with. After the assault was over, he dragged her back to the bathroom. and left her there. In the morning, he was back. For the third time, he assaulted her and drained more of her blood. Between the blood loss and whatever drug he was giving her, she was getting weaker by the minute, losing track of her thoughts. The only thought she could hold on to was that she had to

find a way to escape or she was going to die. After he'd finished with her that morning, he deposited her back in the bathtub. I have to go to work, he told her. I'll be back later. Don't even think about trying to get out of here. If you try to escape, my brother will kill you. Laura hadn't seen or heard anybody else in the house, but she couldn't be sure this monster's brother wasn't lurking around somewhere, ready to pounce if he caught her trying to leave. Brother or not, though, Laura knew that she was running out of time. He drained half of her life force away. She felt weak and sick and disoriented. But once the vampire had left for work and the house was quiet, Laura was able to marshal her thoughts enough to notice.

something. There was a little window above the bathtub, and the lock on it looked broken. She was still handcuffed at the wrists and ankles, but she managed to hop over to the window. Yep, broken. This was it. It was this or death. Laura took a deep breath and called up every ounce of strength she had left, and she just barely managed to push that window open and squeeze herself through, landing hard on the ground outside. She crawled as best she could through the grass to the road, and as soon as she was sure there was no pissed off brother coming after her, she got to her feet and started hopping as fast as she could. She had to try three times to flag down a car. The first couple people just drove

right past, which really makes you wonder about our fellow humans. Like, I get that she was probably a scary sight in that moment, but Jesus people, really? You're just going to drive on by? That's horrifying. Hearing this story at the hospital, the Brevard County detectives were just stunned. A vampire rapist? Beakers of blood? Videotaped assaults? It was horrifying.

Fortunately for the investigators, both Laura and the driver who came to a rescue after escape remembered exactly where the House of Horrors was. So the investigation was off to a running start. They quickly determined that the owner of the house was a guy named John Brennan Crutchley, a married father and an engineer

for the Harris Corporation, a NASA contractor. His driver's license photo showed a baby-faced guy with chin-length blonde hair, looking a little bit like a grown-up version of one of the children of the corn, but still, on paper, not the kind of dude you'd expect to be abducting young women and telling him he's a vampire. They drew up a search warrant as quick as they could and hauled ass over to Crutchley's house at about two in the morning. He didn't seem especially surprised to see them,

but he did look kind of sweaty and disheveled, like he hadn't slept in a few days. His wife and kids were away for Thanksgiving, he told them. You know, the only tiny ray of light in this fucking nightmare of a story is the thought of what this little waste of carbon must have gone through the moment he got home and realized his victim had escaped out the bathroom window. Just, ooh. One of the things the investigators were looking for, of course, was the videotape Laura said Crutchley had made of the attacks.

And they did find the video camera, but the tape inside had been, surprise, surprise, partially erased. Infuriating. But they did find syringes, needles, and plastic. tubing like the kind Laura had described, plus a mason jar full of human hair. What the fuck? They also found some other things that made their antennae twitch, a plastic bag full of women's necklaces hidden deep inside a closet. Those are my wife's, crutchly insisted, but the

searchers noticed that there was a whole collection of jewelry right out in the open on the wife's dresser. Why would she keep these hidden away separate from all her other jewelry? They also found IDs and credit cards for multiple women, none of whom was Crutchley's wife. Now, why the police didn't confiscate this stuff the first time? I can't imagine. It might as well have been neatly labeled trophies from my victims. But it's possible their search warrant was just really limited. Like maybe they were only allowed to take stuff that match Laura's account of the attack, whatever. But it just sucks out loud that they didn't take these things because by the time they came back later, for a second search, they were gone. So who these women were, if their whereabouts were a

counted for and why John Crutchley had their IDs or bank cards, we have no idea. God dang it. One of the creepiest things they found at the house was a stack of index cards on which Crutchley had kept meticulous track of women he'd had sex with. He'd made notes about each name, rating their bedroom skills. He and Dick Notebook would have gotten along famously. I know, right? They would have. When the investigators reached out to the women on the list, some of them had disturbing stories to tell, about sex that had gone from consensual to not. John was into kink, which was okay with some of them, but he didn't respect boundaries. More than one woman told detectives that when they'd try to use their safe word, Crutchley would get angry and restrain them. Ugh, a little shit stain.

But most importantly for the investigation into Laura's abduction and assault, when the detective searched Crutchley's backyard, they found, in the pocket of a pair of swim trunks hanging from a clothes line, Laura's driver's license. Now, Crutchley admitted, he'd had sex with Laura, but it was consensual, he said. He just wanted some side action while his wife and kids were out of town, and he picked Laura up. But there was no assault. He referred to Laura as a Manson girl and said she was into kinky stuff. The detectives weren't by and a word of it. They'd seen the condition that poor girl was in when she'd arrived at the hospital, and ain't no way that was consensual. So they arrested him, charged him with kidnapping, sexual assault, drug possession,

and grievous bodily harm. On the surface, John Crutchley seemed to like a normal, even overachieving guy. I mean, for God's sake, the guy had security clearance at the Pentagon. But Storm Clouds had followed him around his whole life. He'd been let go from a lucrative engineering job years earlier under suspicion of theft. And then there were the missing and murdered women. Everywhere he went, teenage girls seemed to disappear, only to turn up dead and dumped out in the woods. And in 1977, his girlfriend, Deborah Fitzjohn, went missing too. He was the last one seen with her. Police were suspicious of Crutchley,

but by the time Deborah's body was found, it was skeletonized and they couldn't figure out a cause of death. There just wasn't enough evidence to charge him. But there was plenty of evidence in Laura's case, and Crutchley was smart enough to know it. He took a plea bargain, pled guilty to kidnapping and sexual assault in exchange for the DA dropping the drug and grievous bodily harm charges. And he admitted he'd had a, quote,

taste for blood ever since a nurse had introduced him to bloodletting about 15 years earlier. It was a kind of ritualistic sexual fetish. Yeah, I have my doubts about this, by the way. I mean, we've seen this before, right? With Rod Farrell and similar nerds. And the thing about the people

who drink blood as like a sexual fetish is it's usually not nearly this intense. I mean, it's more about like the symbolic dominance, submission dynamic or whatever. This guy was literally draining this woman dry. Like he was filling up beaker after beaker until she'd lost half the blood in her body.

So for him, I think this was way more than just one of many sexual kings. This feels more like the signature of a serial killer to me. Uh-huh. I have a feeling it was all about the blood drinking for him, and I feel very sure, as did the investigators, that if Laura hadn't escaped when she did, he'd have blood her dry and buried her somewhere never to be heard from again. Yeah. And this just knocked me right on my ass when I read it.

His wife stuck by her man. even after he pled guilty. Oh, she told the press, John's just kinky. He doesn't mean anything by it, which is just, whew. This bitch actually had

the solid gold nerve, the brass balls to tell the press that this 19-year-old girl's abduction and assault was, quote, a gentle rape devoid of any overt brutality.

Excuse the fuck out of me. was it as she's laying there handcuffed and drained of half her blood and going in and out of consciousness? What ignorant horse shit. Shut your vile mouth. Oh, thank God. Thank God. Someone is there for Laura to invalidate what she went through. God bless her. I mean, Laura clearly, now that Laura knows maybe she'll drop the charges, Jesus, shut the fuck up.

Right, right, I'm sure. Shut the fuck up, bitch. She didn't realize it was gentle. Yeah. Like, I think, you know, we're usually pretty, like, empathetic with spouses of murderers. not this bitch shut up that's not okay

yeah I need to take a breather hang on shut your freaking pie hole lady okay serenity now serenity now serenity now

so anyway he took the plea deal and ended up sentenced to 25 years with 50 years of parole upon release but because he minded

his peas and cues in prison the parole board good job guys decided to let him out in 10 unbe-fucking leaveable. Ten years. He should have been thanking

all the lucky stars in the universe that he was even allowed to see daylight again after what he did. Yes, but shortly after giving a weepy, self-pitying interview to a local news station,

you've got to get a load of this shit as vomitist, where he cried sloppy tears and complained about people using the V word to define him, V meaning vampire, apparently not, you know,

vomit trail, and called himself a, tired guy over 50 years old who had only done that nasty thing 11 years earlier because he was unfulfilled by the shallow life his cushy tech job provided him yeah let it sink in after all that he got released oh yeah john you're you're the real victim here thank you for shedding light on what really happened fucking freak like this man was this man worked for NASA how many people would fucking kill for that and he's like he has the audacity to be like I'm unfulfilled so I had to kidnap a woman and drain

her blood and drug her and terrorize her for hours. How else could you possibly handle being unfulfilled? It just goes to show that he has no concept of like what, like I hate using this word, but I don't know how I'll still put it, what like a typical normal person like that isn't a fucking

murderer deals with life. Yeah, he did seem like he felt like people would understand if he just explained it. He's like, oh, you got understand. Oh, honey. I was just unfulfilled by my job working for literally sending people to the moon. That's crazy. John, shut the fuck up. I really, I'm going to need like, I don't know, several

several meditation sessions after this half of the episode. This guy is incredibly loathsome. Yeah. The conditions of his probation were pretty standard, and one of them was no alcohol or drugs because, you know, those things take away inhibitions, which is not something you want with guy like Crutchley. His inhibitions are already too low, right? This was Crutchley's chance for a new life, a chance to scrub the scarlet letter V off his chest. V for vomitus, V for vile. He's a venomous vanker, but as I'm sure you'll be totally unsurprised to hear, he biffed it. Just, just fumbled it on the one-yard line. Just he popped positive

for weed on the very first drug test. Very first drug test just days after moving into the halfway house where he was supposed to surround the first leg of his parole. Fucking dipshit. So it was back to jail for John. In late March 2002, guards found John

Crutchley dead in his cell with a plastic bag over his head and his pants pulled down. Cause of death? Well, I'd say you're not going to believe this, but you absolutely are going to believe it. Auto-erotic asphyxia, because of course it fucking was. And authorities

are still looking into the possibility that the guy was a serial killer. He's a suspect in as many as 30 unsolved murders and disappearances, but nothing has ever been proven 100%. Robert Ressler, one of the OG FBI profilers, believes he was a prolific serial killer who just never got

caught until his last victim managed to get away alive. And yeah, I mean, I think that's 100 percent likely. And absolutely the stuff of nightmares. I mean, we've said it so many times, but it's true enough to bear repeating. The truth really is stranger than fiction sometimes, and often a lot lot scarier. I'm glad this little edge lord shit bag is no longer polluting our planet. So those were wild ones, right? Campers? You know, we'll have another one for you next week. But for now, lock your doors, light your lights, and stay safe until we get together again around the

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