
                         Roanoke Times
                 Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.

DATE: WEDNESDAY, April 12, 1995                   TAG: 9504120070
SECTION: VIRGINIA                    PAGE: C-3   EDITION: STATE 
SOURCE: Associated Press
DATELINE: NORFOLK                                LENGTH: Medium

`VAMPIRE RAPIST' PROBE SPREADS HERE

Investigators in Virginia intend to see if there is evidence that a Florida man convicted of drinking a woman's blood during a sexual attack was involved in the slayings of two women in Norfolk.

John Brennan Crutchley is serving a 25-year sentence for kidnapping and raping a 19-year-old hitchhiker in Brevard County, Fla., in 1985. He was called the ``vampire rapist'' because he used a hypodermic syringe to draw blood from the woman's veins and drank it.

The newspaper Florida Today, quoting unidentified Brevard County law-enforcement authorities, reported Tuesday that Crutchley could be involved in 32 slayings in Florida, Virginia, Maryland, Ohio and Washington, D.C. They include three slayings that took place while Crutchley worked as an engineer for high-technology companies in Virginia, the newspaper said.

While Crutchley worked on a Navy project for defense contractor TRW in the early 1980s, two women were killed at the Norfolk Naval Air Station, the newspaper said.

Special Agent Ron Benefield of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service said investigators are looking into Crutchley.

``We have two unresolved Norfolk-area homicides, and we will pursue any appropriate lead ... to successfully resolve these cases,'' Benefield said.

Navy messenger Pamela Ann Kimbrue, 23, disappeared March 25, 1982, and her body was found a day later in the back seat of her car. She had been bound, raped and strangled.

Ten months later, Navy clerk Carol Ann Molnar, 21, disappeared from a Norfolk nightclub. Her body was found wedged under the rocks of a sea wall at the air station on May 2, 1983.

Crutchley was an early suspect in the 1977 disappearance of Deborah Fitzjohn, 25, in Fairfax County, said Robert Horan, the commonwealth's attorney there. Her skeletal remains were found in woods near Centreville in 1978, and investigators were unable to determine the cause of death.

Horan said he believed Crutchley and Fitzjohn had been dating, and she told a relative she was going to see him shortly before she disappeared.

by CNB