The Vampire Clan Murders: Land Between the Lake National Recreation Area

In 1996, a troubled 16-year-old boy named Rod Ferrell believed he was a 500-year old-vampire. He formed a small group of local teens in Murray, Kentucky obsessed with vampire roleplaying, blood drinking, and occult beliefs. The roleplaying took a serious turn when Rod broke into the home of Richard Wendorf and Naomi Ruth Queen - the parents of clan member Heather Wendorf - and beat them to death. What followed became a media sensation, and has been remembered as the Vampire Clan Murders. See us in LIVE on tour in Boston or New York ! For a full list of our sources, visit npadpodcast.com/episodes For the latest NPAD updates, group travel details, merch and more, follow us on npadpodcast.com and our socials: Instagram: @‌nationalparkafterdarkTikTok: @‌nationalparkafterdark Support the show by becoming an Outsider and receive ad free listening, bonus content and more on Patreon or Apple Podcasts. Want to see our faces? Catch full episodes on our YouTube Page! Thank you to this week’s partners! Blueland: Try Blueland for yourself and get 15% off your first order at Blueland dot com slash NPADIQ Bar: Text PARK to 64000 to get twenty percent off all IQBAR products, plus FREE shipping. Message and data rates may apply. Warby Parker: Right now, buy one pair of glasses and get 20% off any additional pairs at http://WarbyParker.com/NPADCash App: Download Cash App Today: https://capl.onelink.me/vFut/zf2267at #CashAppPod Cash App is a financial services platform, not a bank. Banking services provided by Cash App’s bank partner(s). Prepaid debit cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC. Cash App Visa® Debit Flex Cards issued by Sutton Bank, Member FDIC, and The Bancorp Bank, N. A., pursuant to a license from Visa U. S. A. Inc. See terms and conditions for the Sutton prepaid card, Sutton debit flex card, and Bancorp debit flex card. Cash App Green features, Savings, Direct deposit, Round ups, Overdraft coverage and Discountsprovided by Cash App, a Block, Inc. brand. Visit cash.app/legal/podcast for full disclosures. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Danielle LaRock?

  On a brisk night in January 1996, as night fell over Kentucky, two teenagers strolled into their local cemetery. A 15-year-old named Rod Ferrell, donning long, black hair and black clothing, followed closely behind his friend Stephen, who had been there before. Stephen was leading Rod to a headstone near an old oak tree, better known to some as the place where vampires were born. When they arrived, Rod rolled up his sleeves and Stephen pulled out a razor blade. It happened quickly, three cuts into Rod's left arm just below the shoulder. As he began to bleed, Rod offered the arm as a gift and Stephen drank from the wound. Then they traded roles.

• 0:45Danielle LaRock?

  Rod made three cuts in Stephen's arm and drank his blood. Then they sat beside the gravestone in a meditative silence under the night sky. And just like that, Rod Ferrell became the newest vampire in Murray, Kentucky. For most of the people in Murray's vampire scene, it was an aesthetic and a chance to bond with other outcasts. Playing vampire was a way to stand out in a small conservative town. You could make friends, make a name for yourself, and make a few people clutch their pearls along the way. It was a great way for drama students to practice acting, but it wasn't a game to everyone. In fact, Rod quickly became convinced that he wasn't just Rod, but shared a body with a 500-year-old entity.

• 1:30Danielle LaRock?

  By the end of the year, several lives would be shattered and two people would lay dead in what has been remembered as the Vampire Clan Murders. Welcome to National Park After Dark.

• 2:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  Hey, everybody. I'm Cassie.

• 2:03Danielle LaRock?

  And I'm Danielle.

• 2:04Cassandra Yahnian?

  Happy spooky season. We're talking about vampires.

• 2:07Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 2:08Cassandra Yahnian?

  Kind of? Question mark?

• 2:10Danielle LaRock?

  Ish. I know I said when I was covering my werewolf episode a couple of weeks ago, we were covering werewolves, but also not really. And this has similar vibes, so apologies in advance, especially to you. You're gonna hate this.

• 2:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  Great.

• 2:28Danielle LaRock?

  I just wanted to tell you off the top, don't hold me accountable. I apologize. And this is going to serve right at the top also as a massive trigger warning. This episode has all of the things. Everything from talk of self-harm, child abuse, sexual abuse, animal abuse, murder, a lot of violence. So there's that.

• 2:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  I hate it already.

• 2:55Danielle LaRock?

  Okay.

• 2:56Cassandra Yahnian?

  Put my stuffed animal here. I'll see you next episode.

• 2:59Danielle LaRock?

  Okay. It's a long one to be talking to your replacement, which, thank God, you don't have because I do need you to talk back to me for a little bit, at least through some of this, because it's super sad and messed up. And I had so many regrets. But I hope everyone else likes it and you should stick around for it. Well, let's get into this. So to get started, we have to go back to the 1990s. And earlier this month, we, like I just said, had an episode about werewolves and how the stories that we told about werewolves have kind of changed and morphed over time. And the 90s was kind of that point in time for vampires when they underwent this type of renaissance.

• 3:44Danielle LaRock?

  Because classically vampires were these blood-sucking creatures of the night. They slept in coffins, lived alone inside of castles, on dark, desolate hills. Very Nosferatu vibes. But in the 90s, pop culture began to portray vampires as thoughtful, longing souls who craved connection and...

• 4:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  Misunderstood.

• 4:06Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, misunderstood, for sure. And they were like trying to hold on to what they had of their humanity rather than these like bat-like monsters vampires were.

• 4:17Cassandra Yahnian?

  I did watch Buffy the Vampire Slayer a lot during those times, I remember. And they definitely were giving them feelings and...

• 4:25Danielle LaRock?

  They were making them hot.

• 4:26Cassandra Yahnian?

  They were making them hot.

• 4:28Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. And do you, I feel like maybe you haven't seen this, but Interview with a Vampire. Did you see that movie? So that was Tom Cruise and young Brad Pitt. Well, young Tom Cruise also.

• 4:43Cassandra Yahnian?

  But Brad Pitt's more important.

• 4:45Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, Brad Pitt is more important.

• 4:50Danielle LaRock?

  Definitely put it on your list for this season then, if you haven't seen it. It's kind of a classic vamp movie, but anyway. And then, like you said, Buffy the Vampire Slayer, X-Files, Twilight, of course. Fast forwarding a bit past the 90s and into the early aughts, but you get the idea. Like vampires went through this change. And it brought a ton of new vampire fans, like an entire new generation of people who are interested in vampires. And in the 1990s, many of those fans were goths. And you knew those kids in high school. I knew them in high school. Maybe you were one of them in high school or still are.

• 5:32Danielle LaRock?

  The goth community was pretty badass in my town. There's a lot of cool goths that I was envious of back then. Just like, they just like didn't care and gave, they didn't give a shit like way before I didn't give a shit and I wished I could not give a shit like they did. You know what I mean? They're just kind of doing their own thing.

• 5:51Cassandra Yahnian?

  I used to go in Hot Topic and dream of dressing that way, but I could never.

• 5:57Danielle LaRock?

  You could never.

• 5:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  But I would try. I would try.

• 6:00Danielle LaRock?

  You just put your hand on the window of Hot Topic at the present lane mall.

• 6:06Danielle LaRock?

  Tear rolls down your face. Well, anyway. A lot of goths drew inspiration from pop culture vampires of the time. Many liked a pale face of makeup, dark lipstick, and long, dark hair, which takes us back to our story that I kind of laid the foundation of in the introduction. And back to 15-year-old Rod Ferrell. Rod was born Rodrick Justin Rod Ferrell on March 28, 1980, in Murray, Kentucky. His mother, Sandra, was 17 when she had him and his father joined the military shortly after Rod was born and from there was kind of in and out, mostly out of his life. Rod grew up splitting his time between Murray, Kentucky and Eustis, Florida, where his grandparents lived.

• 6:51Danielle LaRock?

  His upbringing was rough. His mother at times struggled to make ends meet and turned to sex work to provide for her son. And we're gonna get into this a little bit further into the episode, but I wanted you to know just kind of off the top that Rod later alleged that his grandfather, Harold, and Harold's friends sexually abused him when he was five years old. So all of this, just so you have an idea of, he had a really troubled and traumatic childhood that led to an unstable and violent teenage adolescence timeframe.

• 7:31Danielle LaRock?

  When Rod became a teenager, he turned towards fantasy as a form of entertainment and escapism. By the time he was 15, he was goth-adjacent. He had long, black hair, ice-blue eyes, wore Marilyn Manson shirts, combat boots, and a trench coat, and stood out in his small conservative town of Murray. Classmates would whisper behind his back, call him a Satanist and a freak. Sometimes they'd try to provoke him into fighting the other goth kid in school, a kid named Stephen Murphy. And these two didn't even know each other. They were just kind of pinned against each other by others in the school. And they really didn't have that much in common at face value. They just both had the same style.

• 8:13Danielle LaRock?

  They liked black and, you know, so everyone was like, yeah, you guys are rivals, whatever. So eventually Stephen went up to Rod and introduced himself. He was like, hey, so everyone like says we should hate each other and what's up? And they ended up becoming friends pretty immediately. And it was then that Stephen introduced Rod to the world of vampires. At nearby Murray State University in Kentucky, a handful of students had started a club called the Victorian Age Masquerade Performing Society, or Vamps as the acronym. And each week, a group of drama majors would get together to play a game called Vampire the Masquerade,

• 8:58Danielle LaRock?

  which is a role-playing game, kind of like Dungeons and Dragons, if you're familiar. I think we're all at least a little bit familiar with that just from Stranger Things, without even having to know too much about that actual game. But imagine it's the kind of game where you get together, you roll dice, but instead of playing as elves and orcs, everyone plays as vampires. Vamps was equal part improv and theater. In sessions that could last hours at a time, a storyteller would guide the group through political and moral quests. And players were rewarded for getting into character using red dye and makeup for dramatic effect. Eventually, word of these Vampire the Masquerade sessions would spread to the nearby town,

• 9:42Danielle LaRock?

  which is how Stephen Murphy and later Rod Ferrell got involved and got their vampire names. Stephen chose the name Jaden, after a character from Star Trek, and Rod named himself Visago, which he picked from a book of demonology. Rod claimed that Visago was 500 years old, had been a French aristocrat in the 1400s, and had spent the years since in a deep slumber. So that's his vampire persona that he's using for this game. Together, they and their characters would participate in Vampire the Masquerade games that would often start in a friend's basement and then spread out into the nearby town. They would go on scavenger hunts across Murray State's campus, go to the local cemetery, and into the woods.

• 10:27Danielle LaRock?

  And listen closely right now, because if you don't and you blink, you're gonna miss this, but here is the public lands connection. Okay?

• 10:38Danielle LaRock?

  Listen up.

• 10:40Cassandra Yahnian?

  Listen up, because this is not a national park.

• 10:43Danielle LaRock?

  Listen up, because it's gonna be quick. Allegedly, rumor has it that they would also go to perform rituals in an abandoned building in land between the Lakes National Recreation Area, a roughly 171,000 acre national recreation area tucked between two dams and reservoirs that straddle Kentucky and Tennessee. This truly should be a freebie, but I have one planned for December, so I'm not counting this one. Okay. You can find TikToks, reels, and blog posts about this building that's abandoned in the National Recreation Area that more recently, due to this particular story and its haunted reputation, has been dubbed the Vampire Hotel.

• 11:25Danielle LaRock?

  The crumbling remains of this building are spray painted with graffiti all over the place, and it's definitely like an abandoned hangout spot for locals. But it actually began as a private retirement home built by this guy, Captain Grover Marler. He was a riverboat captain before the area was developed. And then in the 1960s, the Tennessee Valley Authority acquired the land through eminent domain to create Land Between the Lakes National Recreation Area and kicked him out. And over time, the building kind of just crumbled and became this structure that sat vacant.

• 12:08Danielle LaRock?

  That was a perfect place for locals to go out to, do some

• 12:11Cassandra Yahnian?

  Like teenagers to drink.

• 12:13Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, totally. Totally. So it attracted locals of all kinds. And it was actually originally referred to as Hotel California, probably after the Eagle Song, before this story. And then it was dubbed the Vampire Hotel because this group of kids allegedly went there often.

• 12:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  Not a hotel.

• 12:33Danielle LaRock?

  Not a hotel.

• 12:35Cassandra Yahnian?

  But

• 12:35Danielle LaRock?

  California or otherwise.

• 12:39Danielle LaRock?

  But back to the Vamps. Compared to high school where they were treated like outsiders, Vamps was a bunch of alternative kids. They had piercings and tattoos and regularly donned costumes and makeup for their games. But Vamps also had a strict no harm rule. No weapons, no alcohol, no drugs, and no bloodletting. Very specific code of conduct.

• 13:01Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, I've never had that code. And I mean, it was never a possibility

• 13:05Danielle LaRock?

  If you're playing vampires.

• 13:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  In my friends' groups, but we never had to clarify that bloodletting was not something we would be doing.

• 13:14Danielle LaRock?

  But were you pretending to be vampires?

• 13:16Cassandra Yahnian?

  But just so you know, we're not doing any bloodletting tonight.

• 13:20Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, you point to the rule list. Like, it says no bloodletting.

• 13:25Cassandra Yahnian?

  We weren't, uh, we weren't being vampires, though, so.

• 13:29Danielle LaRock?

  In later interviews, Stephen admitted that he'd been practicing self-harm before he joined Vamps. And in time, he began to blend his practice of cutting himself with the lore of Vampire the Masquerade. So he essentially created his own homebrewed version of being a vampire that went beyond the standard rules of gameplay and involved cutting one another and sharing each other's blood. While he kept this side hidden from the Murray State Vamps folks, he began to recruit locals into a sort of coven of his own. So kind of like his own subgroup of this larger Vamps community. This group of lifestylers grew to include his younger brother, his fiance, a few other high school kids, and eventually Rod.

• 14:14Danielle LaRock?

  Stephen started going by Jaden in his everyday life, his vampire name. And for the sake of simplicity, we're just gonna refer to him as Jaden throughout the rest of the episode because he also continues to go by that to this day.

• 14:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  Okay.

• 14:29Danielle LaRock?

  He also started calling himself the Prince of the City. And in addition to that, Rod kept building on his own backstory of Visago and began integrating that persona into his own. And their gang would hang out in graveyards and parks, and their vampire personas became a way to express themselves and to escape the monotony of their everyday life. When they practiced ritual cutting and blood sharing at home, they wrote their own rules. Nobody could take blood without consent, and only small amounts were ever permitted. And according to interviews during this time, they also had lots of sex and did lots of drugs.

• 15:11Danielle LaRock?

  According to Rod's mother, he started smoking weed at 13 years old and then eventually moved on to acid, cocaine, and heroin. And just as a quick reminder, at this point in time, everyone is 15, 16 years old. Max.

• 15:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, they're kids, yeah.

• 15:29Danielle LaRock?

  So when you're hearing these things

• 15:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  So he's 16 years old when he's doing heroin and acid and everything?

• 15:34Danielle LaRock?

  Yes.

• 15:34Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's really young.

• 15:36Danielle LaRock?

  So this is a group of role-playing, goth, counterculture kids, labels that were not yet especially common or especially welcome in rural towns like Murray. Yet despite that, they stood proudly together. In a 2011 TV program, MSNBC interviewed one woman who was part of this lifestylers group, and she tried to describe what it all had meant to her at the time. She said, "We built a world around ourselves that made us important and powerful and special." Something that I think we can all kind of relate to at one point or another throughout our lives with wanting to feel important and special, especially at that age when you're going through so much and so many changes and all that.

• 16:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  Finding your friend group and where you fit in. And I think, yeah, like

• 16:22Danielle LaRock?

  And how to best express yourself, you know, and feel like yourself. And yeah, so

• 16:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  Be around people who accept you.

• 16:30Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, a crucial time also of development, you know, with growing up. But this is where things just start to go off the rails pretty seriously here. So Rod, in particular, started taking things super seriously, even beyond Vamps and Jaden's group, like that coven he started to create. Rod was still splitting his time between Kentucky and Florida, but while Rod had been going to Eustace his whole life, you know, he spent all his years growing up going back and forth between those two spots. 1996 was the first time that Visago made this trip, and he started spreading the news.

• 17:13Danielle LaRock?

  He had a friend there from second grade named Janine Leclerc, and Janine introduced him to another goth curious teenager named Heather Wendorf. Rod introduced himself as a 500-year-old demon lord who had been awakened from a deep slumber and took the form of an American teenager. He claimed that he and Heather had been soulmates in their past life and that he was assembling a secret coven of chosen ones ready to escape ugly American society. And you can, he just met this girl. Okay. So

• 17:46Cassandra Yahnian?

  Was she into this?

• 17:48Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 17:48Cassandra Yahnian?

  Was she like, hello, what?

• 17:50Danielle LaRock?

  Well, both, I guess. So you can kind of imagine, because Janine is the one that knew him as a kid, like a second grader. So you can imagine her being like, what the hell? Like

• 18:02Cassandra Yahnian?

  What are you talking about? 500-year-old?

• 18:04Danielle LaRock?

  500 years old, I was in second grade with you. You know? But she and other Eustace kids did remember Rod as being somewhat of an outsider, maybe a little bit dorky, before this goth transformation that had him feeling confident enough to share this story to a total stranger, to Heather. And Heather did think, like, what is this? Like, she was a little off-put by it at first, but she was also curious and wanted to kind of know more, even though she was like, okay, you seem like a little bit of an egomaniac, but I'll hear you out type of vibes.

• 18:48Danielle LaRock?

  Heather herself didn't feel like she fit in entirely with her family. Her parents fawned over her older sister, who was an all-American cheerleader type. Heather was an introvert who read Anne Rice vampire novels, and to her, life felt like it was a bit mundane, kind of like nothing exciting, maybe a little bit depressed. And then in walks Rod, this goth kid from out of town who claimed he was a vampire, he owned demonology books, and deliberately talked like, and you're not gonna get this reference, but he talked like Brad Pitt's character from the Interview with a Vampire movie, like very like, talked like this. He's a 16-year-old kid from Kentucky who think, you know, but he just

• 19:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  He's trying to really take on the role of this vampire.

• 19:36Danielle LaRock?

  Yep. So egomaniac or not, he was committed to the bit. And he had this air of charisma that Heather and Janine both did feel drawn to. So maybe they were just bored or gullible. The truth is, they didn't need to believe everything Rod said to be part of his fantasy world. In later interviews, Heather said, "It was like a fairy tale, so much more interesting than getting up and going to school, going home, and then going to bed." So that year, Heather and Janine both became vampires. They shared blood and took the names of Zoe and Celeste. Rod introduced them to the world building of Vampire the Masquerade, where characters

• 20:19Danielle LaRock?

  spoke about Gothic vampiric wars and the destruction of souls. They hung out in graveyards and read a copy of The Necronomicon, which is a famous fictional textbook of magic created by the horror writer H.P. Lovecraft. Rod had led candlelet rituals to the music of Marilyn Manson or Nine Inch Nails, and he led Heather and Janine through demonic rituals. He started talking about death and killing so much that it almost became invisible in everyday conversation. It was almost expected to come up, no matter what they were originally talking about.

• 20:55Danielle LaRock?

  Talk of death was constant in the Murray vampire crew. It was part of staying in the character, part of the lore of the Vampire the Masquerade. So Rod's friends and the adults in his life tended to overlook all of the things that scream red flags in hindsight. In his story, Visago became a nine-foot-tall demon that could turn into smoke. He claimed to be an immortal assassin, something that Rod bragged about before describing detailed methods of killing, such as decapitation. In a confrontation with a teacher at school, he once claimed that he was mad enough to slit their throat.

• 21:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  Oof. That's, and he didn't get expelled for that?

• 21:35Danielle LaRock?

  He did get expelled from school, eventually. I don't think it was for that.

• 21:40Danielle LaRock?

  Surprising.

• 21:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, I thought that that would be like, you can't threaten a teacher to kill a teacher.

• 21:47Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. And after he had returned to Kentucky with his family, he would spend hours on the phone with Heather, where she too would lean into the violent language. After she got grounded by her parents, she would complain about her life, about her sister, and all of the things that she wished she could do. She once joked to Rod, "If you're planning on kidnapping me, you're going to have to kill my parents, because if they're alive, they'll never let me go." And instead of laughing, Rod replied, "Don't worry about your parents. I'll take care of them when the time comes."

• 22:20Cassandra Yahnian?

  Oh, that's creepy.

• 22:22Danielle LaRock?

  But again, in the words of one of Rod's friends, he said things like that all of the time. He said he could fly. He was 500 years old. He could be invisible if he wanted to. It was all baloney. Like, that is a quote from his friend. So he's like, "Yeah, he would say a bunch of shit." And no one believed him, because clearly, he's not

• 22:42Cassandra Yahnian?

  A vampire.

• 22:42Danielle LaRock?

  A 500-year-old vampire.

• 22:44Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 22:45Danielle LaRock?

  It was starting to become like this, he truly believed these things. Which was becoming super dangerous.

• 22:55Danielle LaRock?

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• 25:20Danielle LaRock?

  So essentially, people knew he was a liar and believed that this edgy act was for show. When Heather or Janine would call him out on it, he would laugh along and play it off. While the Eustace girls both enjoyed the vampire personas, on some level, they thought they were humoring Rod. Instead, he seemed to be losing his grip on reality. Rod had a messed-up home life, like we alluded to before. And this is kind of where we're going to get into the details of that. Neglect, abuse, and instability were all present. When Rod was a few months old, he was beaten by his own father, who soon abandoned the family. When he was around six or seven, his mother, Sandra, recalls Rod coming home from a fishing trip with his grandfather, Harold.

• 26:05Danielle LaRock?

  He was shaking, vomiting, and scared. And Rod said that Harold and his friends had raped him, which Sandra believed, because she and her sister had been molested by their father as well. Sandra, meanwhile, was often absent from Rod's life. She had lots of boyfriends and liked to get high. She took ecstasy, speed, and, in her own words, whatever she could get her hands on. When she was around, she was far from the stable presence you would hope for in a parent. She acted more like a teenager herself, eager to befriend her son. She was happy to let him stay out all night, abuse drugs, and avoid school. And more like a friend than a mother, she tried to adopt his interests.

• 26:49Danielle LaRock?

  After Rod became a vampire, Sandra started to dress like him. She acted so flirtatious around him that their landlord thought that they were boyfriend and girlfriend at one point, which is sick.

• 27:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  That is sick. I hate, like, it's so heartbreaking, and it sounds like he's gonna do some things that are really messed up, but I just when children are mistreated and abused like that, it's just so heartbreaking and to have a mother who's allowing it and grandparents and just like being failed by your entire family, I just think is so sad.

• 27:25Danielle LaRock?

  Well, you feel bad for the child behind the crimes, you know?

• 27:29Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 27:30Danielle LaRock?

  So, and there's a lot to, you know, like you said, pretty much everyone failed him at some point in some way. And even the judge later on, not to spoil anything, but he does say, you know, like, "I think that you were failed by your family and you were failed by society." So, but back to Rod's mother. She even asked Rod to turn her into a vampire, like he had done with Heather and Janine. And when he rejected her and mocked her for being a poser, she went after one of his friends. Within a year, she had been charged with soliciting rape after sending detailed pornographic letters to Stephen Murphy's 14-year-old younger brother,

• 28:15Danielle LaRock?

  all in an attempt to get him to turn her into a vampire. In the trial that would emerge from Rod's actions, a forensic psychologist said, "This is one of the most dysfunctional families I have ever encountered." Altogether, Rod began to blur the lines between him and his increasingly violent vampire persona. He started to break the rules of the vamps club: no drugs, no blood, no violence. Rod's drug use ramped up dramatically, and he started bringing LSD to role-playing games. He pressed the group to add cutting into their role-play and targeted other high school members of vamps wanting to cross them over with a razor to become his kind of vampire,

• 28:58Danielle LaRock?

  and started lashing out during games at people that he disagreed with. During one session, Jaden admitted that he'd actually become a vampire just two years earlier, rather than being this 2,000-year-old vampire he had told people about before. And then, rather than just accept that and move on, because, you know, it's a game, at the end of the day, Rod grew enraged. He accused Jaden of being a fraud and of only pretending to be a full vampire. By the way he was acting, Rod seemed to genuinely believe that he was the saga. After their argument, Rod and Jaden's relationship cooled for a bit before blowing up again. And whatever happened depends on who you ask.

• 29:40Danielle LaRock?

  Rod claimed that Jaden attacked him unprovoked after accusing him of harassing his girlfriend. Jaden said Rod had been making violent and explicit threats towards him and his girlfriend, saying things like, "It would be funny to come in and find her guts strung up in his apartment." Like, just saying offhanded, really violent things that

• 30:00Cassandra Yahnian?

  Scary things.

• 30:01Danielle LaRock?

  It's very scary things, especially taking into account how he's acting, you know?

• 30:08Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, if someone said that to me, it would be so funny to walk in and see your guts hanging out. I wouldn't think that was funny.

• 30:16Danielle LaRock?

  In any sort of context, yeah.

• 30:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  No, no context.

• 30:21Danielle LaRock?

  Jaden also said that Rod came at him with a baseball bat and tried to stab him. What both accounts agree on is that Jaden slammed Rod into the wall, holding him by his neck until he nearly passed out. And after he dropped Rod to the ground, Jaden warned Rod to never fuck with him again and left. After getting his ass kicked, Rod's mother pushed him to file an assault report with the police, a decision that would ultimately result in Jaden getting sentenced to six months in jail. For all his tough talk, you can imagine how Rod going to the cops was received by the other goths and vampires in Murray. The Murray State Vamps Club started making fun of him behind his back for believing he was an actual vampire, and eventually stopped inviting

• 31:04Danielle LaRock?

  him around because he sucked all the fun out of the game. And then there was Jaden. Despite their fights, he was still Rod's closest friend and the only other person who seemed to take vampirism as seriously as he did. But even for him, it had gone way, way too far. After one last unhinged performance where Rod fell to his knees and begged Jaden to draw his sword and cut his head off, Jaden yelled at Rod to get a grip, shouting, "Nobody here is actually a fucking vampire, Rod." Like, get a grip, please.

• 31:37Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's like, come on, we know you're not 500 years old. Like, this is getting out of hand here. You're taking it way too seriously and are getting so angry at all of us for something that's not even real.

• 31:48Danielle LaRock?

  So you have Rod's heavy drug use, unstable behavior, and police report, and you have his mother getting charged with trying to seduce Jaden's 14-year-old brother. It's kind of hard to imagine why people were still hanging around Rod at this point, but it seems like people held out some hope that he would eventually snap out of whatever he was, whatever spell he was under, or whatever he was going through, like, seek help, get therapy, have some sort of revelation.

• 32:14Cassandra Yahnian?

  I think there's a lot of empathy between children who are in bad homes, too.

• 32:20Danielle LaRock?

  And similar situations.

• 32:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  And similar situations. It's like, you know what, he's going through a lot of shit at home. This is, we're his friends, like, we're gonna be here through it, or try to be here through it. Of course, there are boundaries and lines that can be crossed and reverse that, but I think overall, children especially, recognize other children who are in bad homes.

• 32:43Danielle LaRock?

  I agree with that, but that boundary is coming up real hard right now. They did hope that even after he got kicked out of Vamps, that he could turn his act around and stay as a part of Jaden's vampire crew. But late that summer, any hope they had for Rod vanished. During, and, okay, I know I've said a lot of messed up things already, but again, this is a trigger warning for animal abuse. During a walk through the woods, a stray cat walked up to the group. Rod bent down, picked it up, and started petting it. Then he said, "Look kitty, a tree." He wound back his arm, threw the cat into a tree, and broke its spine, and the cat

• 33:26Danielle LaRock?

  died. And that was the last straw. Nobody was-

• 33:30Cassandra Yahnian?

  I'd be throwing hands. I know I've said it on past episodes, but it would be throwing hands at this point.

• 33:38Danielle LaRock?

  Mm-hmm. And for everyone in the group, that was it. You know, final straw, line in the sand. Nobody was willing to tolerate animal cruelty. Jaden and his gang were done with Rod, and he was banished from the group for good. And Rod did not take that very well. He made threats against Jaden and vowed to form a rival vampire gang or family, coven, of his own. And in a few short months, he succeeded, recruiting five new people from Murray. One was Howard Scott Anderson, a quiet 16-year-old boy who'd been friends with Rod since elementary school. He had a tough home life and took the vampire name of Nosferatu. Another was a

• 34:19Danielle LaRock?

  girl named Charity Casey, a 16-year-old girl that Rod had been dating, and maybe even was engaged to for nearly a year. It was kind of hard to confirm that, but they were seriously dating, at the very least, for a while. And she didn't believe in vampires, but played along since Rod did and took the name Shay. And it was through Charity that Rod recruited the only adult in the group, a 19-year-old named Dana Cooper. Dana was a lonely person, stuck in a dead-end job with no friends. When asked why she joined up with Rod, she replied, "It would give me somebody to be with, somebody to hang out with. As it was, I was alone by myself in my apartment. The only people that ever came over were my parents."

• 35:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  That's sad.

• 35:07Danielle LaRock?

  To this new group of misfits, Rod promised eternal life and escape from their traumatic home lives. He suddenly became an expert in martial arts, trained the boys in the group in hand-to-hand combat and the use of homemade weapons. He would use mind games to create an "us against the world" mentality, telling his vampires that "The only friend you've got in this world is me." It's like a toxic boyfriend on ecstasy.

• 35:33Cassandra Yahnian?

  And isolating, like, yeah. It's like, no one will care about you the way that I will. No one cares about you the way I do.

• 35:42Danielle LaRock?

  And without the guardrails put in place by Vamps, pushed back from Jaden or disciplined from his mother, Rod escalated his plans. On November 10, Rod's mother called the police department to report him after discovering bottles, rags, and gasoline in his bedroom. By all accounts, it looked like he had been planning on making Molotov cocktails to firebomb the local cemetery where Jaden and his group were meeting. So this is a true, like, rival vamp gang situation in Kentucky right now.

• 36:13Cassandra Yahnian?

  That's like escalating.

• 36:15Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, to dangerous levels. And then, here we are again, circling back to animal cruelty, trigger warning, it's the last one. There was an incident at the local Humane Society. A shelter employee showed up to work and noticed that 30 to 40 dogs were running around, loose. And at first, they thought someone had tried to come in and just, like, free all the animals. But when the sheriffs arrived, they discovered two mutilated puppies outside of the shelter doors, one stomped to death and another who had its legs ripped off.

• 36:48Cassandra Yahnian?

  Oh my god.

• 36:50Danielle LaRock?

  So fucked.

• 36:51Cassandra Yahnian?

  That's so fucked up. I hate this. You're right, at the beginning, when you said I would hate this episode.

• 36:57Danielle LaRock?

  And it gets worse, and like, I was midway through researching this, and I was like, should I just-

• 37:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  Throw this up-

• 37:06Danielle LaRock?

  Scrap this? Truly, I was like, I don't know if I'm enjoying this. And I'm not, but it's a messed up story, and two people who didn't deserve to be killed were, and I want to tell, like, their, like, you know, talk about their story a bit.

• 37:25Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, I revoke my empathy and put him in jail.

• 37:30Danielle LaRock?

  Okay, well, let's get to that part then, shall we?

• 37:35Danielle LaRock?

  Well, because of his reputation, Rod was immediately a suspect in the eyes of the police in regards to this Humane Society incident, although he denied any involvement. He allegedly told an officer, "If I wanted to kill animals, I wouldn't need to go to any shelter because the woods around here are full of them." And, long story short, his connection to this incident was never proven, although everyone kind of knew it was him.

• 37:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 38:00Danielle LaRock?

  While Sandra was far from a perfect mom, she did notice her son's descent into delusions as the years wore on, and she filed a "beyond parental control" report at the local courthouse. Essentially, she argued his drug use and behavior were out of control and that he needed help. The court agreed and arranged mandatory mental health counseling. After skipping out on enough counseling sessions, he was on thin ice. Sandra's tip that he was making Molotov cocktails was the breaking point, and he was ordered to appear before juvenile court. It seems like none of this was known to Rod's new vampire family, but they did notice he started talking an awful lot about escaping Murray and going

• 38:41Danielle LaRock?

  down to Florida to the town of Eustis. This whole time, Rod had been keeping in touch with his first two recruits, Janine and Heather. Before he left for Murray earlier that year, he had promised the Eustis girls that he would come back and take them somewhere, a promise that lived on through long-distance calls and keeping in touch. Rod usually called when the girls were together, and he wove all kinds of Gothic lore that sounded straight out of a vampire-the-masquerade game. He told them that they would become an immortal vampire family, that Janine would be his queen, and that Heather would be his prophet. He promised to take them to New Orleans and to Europe, and he talked for hours and hours at a time

• 39:23Danielle LaRock?

  about all of this. And eventually, his mother discovered that Rod had racked up hundreds and hundreds of dollars' worth of long-distance call fees to have these discussions, and she was pissed.

• 39:36Cassandra Yahnian?

  Oh yeah, back in the day, when you couldn't make phone calls very far or send text messages.

• 39:44Danielle LaRock?

  I remember, there was my first cellphone, a Virgin Mobile phone. Each text message was like 20 cents.

• 39:53Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, they charged a fee per text. Imagine if they did that now, we'd all be like trillions of dollars in debt.

• 39:59Danielle LaRock?

  Me and you would never have earned any profit in the business. We would just spend it all on our text thread.

• 40:06Cassandra Yahnian?

  Probably in jail for avoiding, we'd file bankruptcy.

• 40:10Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. Well, Rod and Heather's calls were part fantasy and part logistics. If she were to run away with Rod, how would she escape her parents? On one call, Rod offered to, quote, "Make it look like a kidnapping by tying them up." Heather shut that down pretty much right away, replying, like, "Hey, yeah, you stupid idiot, you don't pack a bag to get kidnapped. Like, people will know right away."

• 40:37Danielle LaRock?

  In reality, Heather didn't seem too convinced about leaving town at all. In one letter, she wrote that she'd probably need a couple of years here in Eustace, and that her parents hadn't caused me enough trouble that I feel I have to run away from them. But back in Murray, Rod told a simpler story. He told his recruits that they had to rescue Heather because her parents were abusing her, which was something that Heather allegedly told him over the phone. As someone with his own story of family abuse, this was an idea that Rod could easily rally around, whether it was true or not. Scott Anderson, the one that went by Nosferatu, didn't buy it at the time. Whenever he had talked to Heather, she had no real complaints about her parents, at least to him.

• 41:23Danielle LaRock?

  But he didn't push back against Rod's story. Wherever they went, Rod believed that his time was up in Murray. He was due in juvenile court on November 25th, and he wanted no part of that. So he went around telling his vampire family that they needed to be ready to go. While Scott Anderson didn't really buy that Heather was in danger, Rod had promised him that Heather would be his, quote, "dark mate." Scott allegedly took that seriously and asked his family how they would feel if he came back from Florida with a wife and baby. So he's like, "Yeah, don't worry, we have to go rescue her because she's getting abused, but don't worry, I'm promising her to you."

• 42:02Cassandra Yahnian?

  It's like, ew, what?

• 42:04Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, I know.

• 42:07Danielle LaRock?

  And they're 16 years old. 16, 17 years old at this time. I just, I know I've said that several times, but I just really want to drive that home because-

• 42:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  That these are children.

• 42:19Danielle LaRock?

  They're children. And I'm not trying to make excuses for what's about to happen because, or anything, the whole animal abuse and all that, because that's super fucked, but I don't know, it's just something to keep in mind.

• 42:33Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, there's some screws loose in this person's mind. And I know, like you said, he's been through a lot as a child and a lot of stuff that shouldn't have happened to him, but these are some dark, some dark thoughts and actions.

• 42:50Danielle LaRock?

  Totally.

• 42:52Danielle LaRock?

  Rod's girlfriend, Charity Casey, was a different story. In fact, there were several versions of that story. In one version, shared by both Rod and Charity after the fact, she didn't want to leave Murray or her family and friends, but Rod didn't leave her much choice. He threatened her, saying she'd either agree or he would hogtie her and take her anyway. Investigators were skeptical of this explanation. She repeatedly professed her love for Rod and believed that she was pregnant with his child at the time. And in the weeks to come, she didn't behave like someone that had been kidnapped. But either way, the last member to join the trip was Dana Cooper, the lonely 19-year-old. She said she was excited for a new start in life.

• 43:36Danielle LaRock?

  The other members of Rod's crew declined the invitation. He even tried to convince Jaden, promising his old friend and mentor that there was an army waiting in Eustace. Jaden said no and told Rod that he was headed to Murray State University to enter their drama program. But with just four people, they were able to fit into one car, and Rod told Scott to take his family's battered 10-year-old Buick. Dana brought $100 and the rest packed everything they owned that they cared about. As they left, they said goodbye to their Goth friends, but otherwise kept their plans hidden from their parents and the authorities. Scott was supposed to pick up his brothers at a local skate rink that night, so to throw people off of their trail, Rod devised a cover story.

• 44:21Danielle LaRock?

  Charity went into the rink to tell Scott's brother that he'd been kidnapped by Jaden. And with one last lie, they started an 800-mile drive south in the dark. By Sunday, November 24th, they had arrived in Eustace. That night, Heather Wendorf called her boyfriend Jeremy. "Rod's back," she had told him. "I'm planning on going with him, if you want to come with us." The two had been dating for just six weeks, but Jeremy was baffled. Why would she go? Like, it seemed a bit confusing and like a stupid idea, but Heather just simply replied, "I have to go. I don't have another choice." Hours earlier, Heather had met up with Rod at a cemetery near the local high school.

• 45:04Danielle LaRock?

  He had arrived in town in a beat-up Buick with a promise to finally initiate her as a vampire. Heather had adopted the vampire named Zoe, but she'd never been crossed over, that ritual of the three cuts that I talked about in the beginning of the episode, that Jaden had invented, you know, and done to Rod in the cemetery. Once it was complete, believing he had a newfound authority over Heather, Rod talked about leaving town, and he wanted to take her and Janine to New Orleans. So now he's saying, "I own you."

• 45:38Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, I did this ritual, now you're mine.

• 45:40Danielle LaRock?

  Mm-hmm.

• 45:44Danielle LaRock?

  Cassie and I talked about this the other day, but we are ready to shake up our style. For so long, I've stuck with the same thing. My sunglasses, for example. I would always choose aviator-style sunglasses because that was just my go-to. I started shopping around for something new, but quickly realized, how in the world was I ever going to figure out if the new style would look good on my face, especially from a tiny reference photo online? Warby Parker had the solution with their virtual try-on feature. It allowed me to virtually try on so many different shapes and styles and colors, and I realized, try as I might, I'm just not meant for a rectangle shape. Rectangle shape was never going to happen. But cat eye frames are my new best friend, and I love them. Nothing comes close to Warby Parker's quality, price, and customer service.

• 46:28Danielle LaRock?

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• 47:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  I am such a fan of makeup that looks natural and doesn't feel like I'm wearing a ton of product, which is why I've been loving the Just Enough Tinted Moisturizer from Jones Road Beauty. I love having something I can quickly throw on in the morning that evens out my complexion without feeling like I'm wearing a full face of makeup. Especially when I'm traveling or spending time outdoors, I want something lightweight that lets my natural skin show through while giving me a little bit of coverage. Jones Road Beauty was created by legendary makeup artist Bobby Brown, and her philosophy is all about enhancing your natural beauty rather than covering it up. If you're like me and love that natural, no-makeup makeup look, you have to check it out. Modern-day makeup that's clean, strategic, and multifunctional for effortless routines.

• 47:52Cassandra Yahnian?

  For a limited time, our listeners are getting a free, full-size mascara on their first purchase when they use code NPAD at checkout. Just head to jonesbeauty.com and use code NPAD at checkout. After you purchase, they will ask you where you heard about them. Please support our show and tell them our show sent you.

• 48:13Danielle LaRock?

  Heather wasn't so sure about this plan. She had always liked the idea of leaving her boring life behind, but that boring life seemed to have improved recently. She had a steady boyfriend, and the only class she was actually doing poorly in at that time was French. Then Rod asked her a question, point-blank. "Do you want your parents dead or alive?" And she firmly replied, "Alive," warning Rod not to mess with her parents. But as much as she knew Rod to be a lot of talk, part of her grew really concerned about what could happen if they stayed in Eustace for long and didn't follow him to New Orleans, like he was basically telling them they had to do.

• 48:56Danielle LaRock?

  And it certainly seemed like Rod wasn't going to take no for an answer. During the car ride down to Florida, Rod started chanting at one point that he wanted to kill someone. Then, as if to answer his own question, he suggested Heather's parents. Charity, his girlfriend, told him to shut up and stop talking about it, but he replied, "Oh, and you're going to stop me? You can't." Scott, who was driving at the time, later said he took it as Rod simply passing the time, because that was just how he talked at this point. Then, at a friend's house in Eustace, Rod jumped onto the kitchen counter, slid around the marble, and said that if Heather's parents had a setup like that, he could spring down and crack their necks.

• 49:40Danielle LaRock?

  So it's like, he's talking a lot about this.

• 49:43Cassandra Yahnian?

  He's obsessed with this idea.

• 49:44Danielle LaRock?

  Yes. Later that afternoon, a sheriff's deputy stopped to check Scott's ID while they were all stopped to fix a flat tire. And this is where Rod started to panic because if he wasn't asked for his ID at this time, but if something happened and he was asked for identification, Florida police may find out about his missed court date back in Kentucky. So he devised a new plan. They needed to leave immediately and they needed to leave that night. He told Heather she had to decide immediately. Some part of her thought that this adventure could be fun, but another part was afraid of what Rod might do if she stayed.

• 50:27Danielle LaRock?

  Her boyfriend Jeremy tried to convince her to stay, but ultimately she agreed to leave. Heather snuck back into her house to quickly pack her things, grabbing clothes, a sketchbook, $50, and a teddy bear. She wrote a short goodbye note for her family, leaving it in the bathroom so they didn't think she had been kidnapped. Then she climbed out of her window with her belongings and walked into the night. Rod had told Heather that while she packed, he and Scott would be walking over to Janine's house, their other fan buyer friend in Eustis. Heather could then get a ride from Charity and Dana to say goodbye to her boyfriend Jeremy, and then from there, they would all reconvene before driving to New Orleans. And that second part went according to plan.

• 51:10Danielle LaRock?

  After sneaking out, Heather was driven to meet with Jeremy, and through tears, she said goodbye to him and explained that Rod might kill her parents if she stayed. But Rod and Scott never went to Janine's house. She declined Rod's offer to leave. Instead, they walked towards Heather's house. Part of the plan was to steal their car since the Buick was beginning to fall apart. But unlike some versions of this story where he winds up going back to the house because Heather forgot something, courtroom testimony says Rod walked into the house with a plan to kill the Wendorfs. He had told Dana, Charity, and Scott ahead of time. He'd been saying as much for days, but nobody called the police.

• 51:53Danielle LaRock?

  Nobody warned the Wendor family. They all either thought he was lying, thought they could talk him out of it, or said that they were simply afraid of him. But it was too late now, and Scott agreed to join him. They went in through the garage, passing a machete, a chainsaw, and an axe. But Rod elected to pick up a crowbar. Rod said he'd take Heather's dad, Richard, and Scott would take the mother, Ruth. It was nighttime as they snuck into the house, pulled the phone cord from the wall, and crept around. Richard had fallen asleep on the couch like he often did, and Ruth was nowhere to be found. Rod crept close to the couch and raised the crowbar.

• 52:35Danielle LaRock?

  The medical examiner found no sign of a struggle and counted 22 wounds to Richard's head. Rod hit him hard enough in the face to send bone fragments across the entire living room. Scott stood frozen in place as Rod swung, describing later that Rod sounded like a dog or a bear growling. Rod then flipped Richard's body over to steal his wallet before Ruth came in through the kitchen with a cup of coffee. It turns out she had been in the shower, didn't hear anything happening, and then walked into her living room. When she saw Rod splattered with blood, holding a crowbar, she demanded to know who he was and what he wanted. He told her that he wanted the keys to the car, but when he approached her, Ruth threw

• 53:20Danielle LaRock?

  her coffee at him and clawed at his face, essentially fighting back. But police found her face down in the kitchen, bloody and with a severed brain stem. Rod barked at Scott to search half the house, taking anything that they could find. And at the cost of two lives, they left that home with $5, a Discover card, Ruth's pearls, Richard's hunting knife, and the keys to a Ford Explorer. And for all of Rod's talk about vampirism and being a 500-year-old demon lord, Visago did not kill Ruth or Richard. He did not drink their blood or perform a ritual. A deranged teenager bludgeoned a sleeping man to death with a crowbar, killed a woman

• 54:02Danielle LaRock?

  in her kitchen, and then ran away. Heather was waiting with Charity and Dana when Rod pulled up, driving the Wendorfs'car. He refused to get out because of the blood on his face, not wanting Heather to see until they could shower off, which he and Scott did at the truck stop down the road. But Heather wasn't an idiot. After they started driving, she insisted Charity or Dana answer her. Did Rod just kill my parents? Finally, worn down, Charity said yes. Heather tried to throw herself out of the car. Dana told Charity to lock the door, and Heather started breaking down, but they kept driving. At 10:35 PM, Heather's sister Jennifer came home late and caught only a glimpse of her

• 54:47Danielle LaRock?

  dad's feet sporting white socks on the sofa. Believing he had fallen asleep watching TV like usual, she tiptoed past him so she wouldn't get in trouble for staying out past curfew. But then she noticed the ripped phone cord. It was only once she walked towards the kitchen to grab something to eat that she spotted the blood and then her mother. After she called 911 and detectives rushed to the scene, they asked who might have done this, and she gave them her sister's name, and that of her sister's friend, Rod Ferrell. In the weeks to come, Jennifer would stay at her uncle's house, her dad's twin brother, Bill, and in court, she would later testify that she saw him cry every single night.

• 55:29Danielle LaRock?

  As Rod and the gang were on the run, the Buick broke down, they ditched it, and swapped its plates with the Wendorfs' plate. Rod promised they were headed to New Orleans to meet a voodoo priest named the Chicken Man. But even after making it to Louisiana, they were dead broke. Rod was growing more dangerous after the murders, not less. He and the gang broke into houses along the way and were stealing weapons. News coverage of the double murder had exploded around the nation, an immediate blitz of headlines like "Five Sought in Bludgeoning" and "Teen Vampire Cult Murders." And Heather was the lead suspect, with stories framing her as a satanic mastermind and reporters

• 56:10Danielle LaRock?

  printing whatever high school gossip they could pry out of her classmates in Eustis. National news talked of a manhunt for armed and dangerous teenagers. Oprah and Barbara Walters were calling the victims' families before the teens were even caught. Heather said she stayed with the group essentially because it was too late, and Rod told her she didn't have a choice. But they weren't-

• 56:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  I'm sure she was terrified at this point.

• 56:34Danielle LaRock?

  Absolutely petrified.

• 56:36Cassandra Yahnian?

  I mean, she tried to launch herself out of a car and they wouldn't let her, and now they're, they have more weapons, it's escal- I mean, I shouldn't say escalating because it's escalated, but now they're breaking into other people's homes, other people's lives are potentially in danger. She knows he killed her parents, so her life is in danger.

• 56:56Danielle LaRock?

  Mm-hmm.

• 56:57Cassandra Yahnian?

  You know?

• 56:58Danielle LaRock?

  It's just so terrifying, like just nowhere to turn. And you just went through, I mean, the amount of shock she must have been experiencing and just, she's in survival mode right now.

• 57:13Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 57:14Danielle LaRock?

  You know? But they weren't on the run for very long. On Thanksgiving of that year, November 28th, Charity made a call to her grandmother to ask for money, and the grandma had the wherewithal to check the number on Charity's caller ID. After she hung up, she dialed the police, who were able to trace the call to Baton Rouge. And with that lead, the police eventually caught up to the Vampire Clan and they turned themselves in without a fight. In Eustis, about 100 students gathered in the high school auditorium to pray for the Wendorfs. More than 200 mourners came to their funeral, where the pastor asked everyone to think of Heather, saying, "God loves her and nothing will change that." In Murray, Kentucky, the sheriff's office reportedly got dozens of calls reporting vampire

• 57:59Danielle LaRock?

  sightings. The trial of the Vampire Clan murders was a media sensation, attracting swarms of reporters and TV networks. NBC falsely reported that teenagers had drunk the victim's blood, and Rod's public defender put out a statement that the case had nothing to do with vampires, though that statement didn't do much good. Rod was brought to court on two counts of first-degree murder, armed burglary, and armed robbery. While it was Rod that swung the crowbar, not Scott, Charity, or Dana, under Florida law, they could each be found guilty of aiding and abetting Rod's actions and therefore be guilty of the same crimes. The trial brought in mental health experts, family, and friends to interrogate Rod's

• 58:44Danielle LaRock?

  psychology and dysfunctional upbringing. His mother, Sandra, fiercely denied the allegations and tried to paint a sympathetic view of a difficult childhood. But her credibility was shot after she was forced to defend her own charges of trying to seduce a 14-year-old boy.

• 59:02Danielle LaRock?

  That old chestnut, you know?

• 59:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 59:06Danielle LaRock?

  They also brought Jaden to the stand as an expert vampire witness. He testified about how he met Rod and what vampirism meant to him. And while he still claimed a vampire identity, he said, quote, "I don't mean that I have lived eternally for thousands of years. I am 19 years old and I can die." He also said he didn't have fangs and opened his mouth to show the jurors. As part of his defense, Rod claimed on the witness stand that Heather had urged him to kill her parents repeatedly over the course of months. His defense attorney argued that it was unjust for Rod to face the death penalty while Heather went free. She was the only member of this, you know, quote unquote vampire clan that was not on

• 59:51Danielle LaRock?

  trial, and not everyone was happy about that. More than just media speculation, a local sheriff and trial judge pressed the idea that Heather was guilty, but two separate grand juries would exonerate her and find no cause to charge her with her parents' deaths. The allegations against her were rumors whipped up by the media while the evidence showed Heather had directly told Rod to stay away from her parents. And in the end, the jury voted 12 to 0 for the death penalty for Rod Ferrell.

• 1:00:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  And how old was he when he was sentenced to death?

• 1:00:28Danielle LaRock?

  He was 17 when he was sentenced.

• 1:00:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  I mean, I know what he has done is absolutely horrific, but a child sentenced to death is, or a minor sentenced to death is, is something I wasn't expecting.

• 1:00:45Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. Um, and at the sentencing, and also, sorry, before I move on, 12 to 0 too.

• 1:00:55Cassandra Yahnian?

  Like, everyone voted for the death sentence?

• 1:00:57Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. At sentencing, the judge spoke directly to Rod. He said, "I think you are a disturbed young man. I think your family failed you, and I think society failed you, but that cannot serve as an excuse for cold-blooded, premeditated murder." And then he, he passed down the ruling sentencing him to death. And there are a number of documentaries on this case that are available for free on YouTube. And I'll tell you right now, if you're more interested in this case and, you know, want to see and watch those, there's one in particular that's going to be listed in the show notes.

• 1:01:38Danielle LaRock?

  It's very 90s, you know, home like video style type thing. And they show everything when it comes to the crime scenes. It's crazy. There's no blurred out images. There's footage of very violent scenes, so just be aware of that.

• 1:01:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  Not something I will be watching.

• 1:02:00Danielle LaRock?

  Yes, but in one of those documentaries, Rod is interviewed shortly after he's sentenced to death. And he smirks about, you know, they ask him something about like, how are you feeling right now, you know, after all this? And he kind of just like side smirks and he's like, in that like voice, he talked like this, he was like, you know, I always wondered about my death and what it would feel like. And I've always been curious about the electric chair and I'm actually looking forward to it. Like that type of thing. And he would like stick his tongue out at the, you know, when he was being shuffled

• 1:02:45Danielle LaRock?

  in and out of the courtroom and he would like kiss the glass and just be really antagonistic and just a shithead. He was just as being a fucking shit.

• 1:02:54Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, I mean, he sounds like a shithead teenager.

• 1:02:58Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Cassandra Yahnian?

  Obviously more than that, but.

• 1:03:02Danielle LaRock?

  At its very core.

• 1:03:03Cassandra Yahnian?

  Very childish.

• 1:03:04Danielle LaRock?

  Yes, very childish. The rest of the vampire clan pled guilty one after the other. Scott accepted two consecutive life sentences. Dana received 17 and a half years and admitted guilt by association. Charity received 10 and a half years. She said that she still loved Rod, but insisted that she was not evil. Heather opposed prison for both of the girls, believing they didn't know what was going to happen either. But after the courtroom circus, Heather walked free, left to pick up the pieces of a life left in shambles. She got out of Eustis as soon as she could and attended art school in North Carolina. She got married, started a family and built a career as an artist.

• 1:03:47Danielle LaRock?

  Although online, in a list of her favorite movies, you'll see the movie Dracula and she still uses the nickname Zoe, now spelled with a Z rather than a Z. Scott Anderson, who's still serving life in prison, and this guy, it's like, I know we didn't talk about him much, but he fucking pisses me off with this. He blamed Heather for everything in a 2019 episode of the Dark Cults docu-series. So after 22 years in jail, he believed that Heather, it was Heather that manipulated Rod's dark impulses to get him to do what she wanted, which was to kill, for him to kill her parents.

• 1:04:30Danielle LaRock?

  He's like, yeah, well, she did some dark woman stuff to him and, you know, got him to kill her parents for her and she got away with it and I'm pissed.

• 1:04:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  And I'm sure that's all coming from Rod. Cause that was his, like what he was saying.

• 1:04:47Danielle LaRock?

  Fucking two decade, over two decades ago and you've grown and matured and everything came out, you have all the information. And now your brain has developed, hopefully. And that's what you still think. I don't know. It's just like, get a grip. But yeah, let's, let's blame it on Heather.

• 1:05:07Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, not you guys.

• 1:05:09Danielle LaRock?

  And not Rod, who has a rap sheet of troubles and red flags and violent and concerning behavior. Meanwhile, Heather's like, you know, like I'm doing kind of bad in French, but I kind of like my life right now. But yeah.

• 1:05:26Cassandra Yahnian?

  And she specifically, it sounds like she specifically told him, I do not want you to kill my parents. And not only did she tell him that, but she went with them because she thought it was the only way to get him to not harm her parents.

• 1:05:39Danielle LaRock?

  Right, right.

• 1:05:41Cassandra Yahnian?

  So it's, yeah, just blame it on her still is wild.

• 1:05:48Danielle LaRock?

  Fuck off. That's what I have to say. Um, the vampire clans of Murray, Kentucky disbanded or went underground. In a 2011 NBC special, Jaden said he was a straight up Christian who hadn't practiced vampirism for many years, trading his black cloak for a green hoodie. Yet he still introduced himself on camera as Jaden Murphy, not Stephen Murphy. Rod is still in prison to this day, although he is no longer on death row. Florida Supreme Court reduced his sentence to life in prison because he was a minor at the time of the murders. The laws changed and it changed actually when he was 20. So just a few years after he was sentenced to death, everything changed.

• 1:06:34Danielle LaRock?

  And while he head on to his vampiric identity for several years, Rod denounced vampirism by 2011, at least publicly. In fact, he told a story of being reformed. In a 2019 resentencing hearing, he tearfully read a written statement aloud to the victims' families, apologizing for what he had done. He said his actions were hiding behind vain arrogance, sadistic sarcasm, and his own fragile fantasy world. He continued that counseling classes in prison had helped him see the truth. He said, "Regardless of the outcome of this resentencing, please know just how deeply sorry I am for all of the hurt that I have caused. I'm sorry for all of the pain and your loss.

• 1:07:19Danielle LaRock?

  I'm sorry for everything." And neither of the families or the judge bought it. With his long history of lying, the judge ruled that Rod was irreparably corrupt. And because he landed in prison as a teenager, there's a real chance that he could become the longest-serving convict in US history as time goes on, you know, if he dies old, like elderly. And his killings, the brutal murders of Richard Wendorf and Naomi Ruth Queen, AKA Ruth, spawned a low-budget film, several true crime books, and a TV docudrama. But what they all fail to highlight is the people who were killed. Richard was described by his younger brother as a hard worker, thrifty, a good provider,

• 1:08:04Danielle LaRock?

  and a devoted and loving son, grandson, father, and husband, while his partner Ruth was described by her eldest daughter as a good mother and a school volunteer who gave away the crafts that she made. If you open the latest rulebook for Vampire the Masquerade, the role-playing game that brought vampirism to Murray, Kentucky, it's a little overwhelming. There are over 400 pages of dense world-building rules and storytelling, the kind of stuff the Vamps Club geeked out about, and the kind of stuff that Rod got lost in. But before all of the rules, at the very front of the book, there's a warning. "This is a game about monsters, but it is only a game.

• 1:08:47Danielle LaRock?

  Don't use it as an excuse to become a monster yourself." And that is the story of the Vampire Clan murders.

• 1:08:56Cassandra Yahnian?

  Do you know if they added that after all of this happened?

• 1:09:00Danielle LaRock?

  I don't know, but it's a pretty dope inclusion. Like, that's a mic drop moment, and I wouldn't be surprised.

• 1:09:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  It feels like it would be something that was added after.

• 1:09:14Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. Um, but yeah, pretty effed.

• 1:09:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah, I would say so. Pretty, pretty fucked up.

• 1:09:24Danielle LaRock?

  I know we do a lot of true crime. I don't know what it is. I don't know if it's just like my current headspace or tolerance for this type of content right now or what, but, and I know I did it to myself, like, no one was telling me to do this, but I don't know, just something about that story is so unsettling and disturbing. And we've covered horrific murder cases before. I don't know, maybe if you feel the same way, but it's just something about it felt really especially awful.

• 1:09:57Cassandra Yahnian?

  I hate all of them. I hate all of them. But yeah, that one was really, I think it's really awful when you hear of cases where such young people are involved, minors, doing things that are so horrific. And I think it's just more jarring than other ones. You know, when we hear of stories that full-grown men are participating in stuff like this, we're like, that's fucked up. But we've heard that story before, and I think when it's a child, it's just so shocking in a different way. And it's really upsetting, and...

• 1:10:34Danielle LaRock?

  And it's so layered because of his background and what he experienced. And like, there's just so much discussion to be had about his, you know, how did that influence him, to what degree, like, how mu... And of course, his sentencing was like, you're disturbed, and it, you know, we, essentially, we feel, we feel for you for what happened to you, but it doesn't really matter. Like, that's essentially what the sentencing and the judge was saying, and...

• 1:11:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  You know, and I think in a larger scope that we do not have to go down or anything, but I do think that what he went through is probably directly related to why any of this happened, and why he had violent tendencies, and why he was escaping into another world to be someone else. I think that it's all connected to his, to him growing up. And I also think that it's all connected to most people who commit horrible things like this, and not, I mean, you can't control what happens to you as a child, and as an adult, you have a responsibility to heal from it in a way that makes you safe for society, um, but...

• 1:11:48Danielle LaRock?

  And yourself, yeah.

• 1:11:49Cassandra Yahnian?

  And yourself. But I do think this is where children are failed so much, and people aren't being held responsible and aren't being, I mean, those parents, that mom should not have had him, you know? But then there's also a fucked-up system for people in foster care and getting them into the right place and what that looks like. And I, I don't think that there are enough services dedicated to children or crimes against children that are being taken seriously enough. And things like this are not going to happen as much if we address it at the source, which is childhood trauma, which is a whole nother conversation that could go on for so long.

• 1:12:34Cassandra Yahnian?

  But I truly, truly believe that people are created like this. I don't, like, turn into this because of trauma. I don't think anyone is born evil.

• 1:12:46Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah, that's going to a nature-nurture debate.

• 1:12:49Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Danielle LaRock?

  And...

• 1:12:50Cassandra Yahnian?

  Which is also a debate, and...

• 1:12:53Danielle LaRock?

  That's also not for today.

• 1:12:55Cassandra Yahnian?

  Two people can be raised in the same home and experience the same traumas and come out completely different. So that's a whole other conversation, too. But I do think that, uh, trauma and abuse creates trauma and abuse later.

• 1:13:12Danielle LaRock?

  And it's so apparent in this story. I mean, there's a direct line from the grandparents to the mother to Rod, and then Rod to others. You know, it's like, you can see it in real time, almost, like, in this way, you know, when it's all laid out like this, you can follow that thread.

• 1:13:32Cassandra Yahnian?

  And if someone had stopped it, and if any of those children had been taken care of, if his mom had been taken care of and not molested as a child, would she had turned out the way that she had? Using drugs and not being a good mother and trying to molest a teenager, you know, like, could it have stopped long before even Rod? This happened to Rod, you know, it's just, um, a whole hole to go down. But I think collectively as a whole, we need to take care of children a lot better than we do.

• 1:14:05Danielle LaRock?

  I agree. I agree. Well...

• 1:14:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  Well, I hated that.

• 1:14:11Danielle LaRock?

  Well, I know, and I knew it, and I felt it, and I also hated it. This is actually one episode, I'm like, God, my job is hard.

• 1:14:21Cassandra Yahnian?

  This is horrible.

• 1:14:22Danielle LaRock?

  This is really bad.

• 1:14:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  Catch us doing adventure National Park episodes.

• 1:14:27Danielle LaRock?

  Catch me talking about 18th century history for the next five weeks. Just kidding, I won't.

• 1:14:33Cassandra Yahnian?

  We have done a lot of true crime recently, and I have been missing, uh, more of the adventure stories and like, really, really outdoor, um, related, fun, more, I say fun, but like, survival stories and just stuff like that, so...

• 1:14:50Danielle LaRock?

  Going back to our roots.

• 1:14:52Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:52Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. My next story, I have my next few planned out, actually through the end of the year because we're pre-planners, but my next story is very outdoor-based, although it does have a true crime element, so sorry, but it is more outdoorsy. And my freebie, which is coming up, uh, in the next upcoming weeks, too, I'm so excited about, not to our outdoor roots, but...

• 1:15:18Cassandra Yahnian?

  We just have to get through October because October is dark and spooky, but...

• 1:15:23Danielle LaRock?

  It's scary.

• 1:15:24Cassandra Yahnian?

  November, December.

• 1:15:26Danielle LaRock?

  We'll get through it.

• 1:15:27Cassandra Yahnian?

  We're gonna get through it. November, December, we have some fun ones, and, um, Danielle specifically has a fun birthday episode planned, so...

• 1:15:35Danielle LaRock?

  Yeah. Meanwhile, everyone's like, we like that.

• 1:15:39Cassandra Yahnian?

  We're like, we actually really like true crime, and we're not shaming, we know people, and that's why we do it. We, too, have watched many a crime documentary, but, um, some just hit, hit in a bad way, and this was one of them.

• 1:15:55Danielle LaRock?

  I just need to, like, cleanse myself of Rodville, like, even like, his pictures now of at a sentencing hearing, like, as an adult, you know, in present days.

• 1:16:03Cassandra Yahnian?

  I wanna watch Family Guy after this.

• 1:16:04Danielle LaRock?

  Oh, my God, I just like, yeah, I need to just dunk myself in...

• 1:16:09Cassandra Yahnian?

  Especially because we're about to go to bed. It's like, I can't have this my last thought before bed.

• 1:16:14Danielle LaRock?

  I know, I'm sorry. We actually, we tried to record this like, three times, and stuff kept happening. So by the time we actually pressed record, it was like 9:30 at night, so...

• 1:16:25Cassandra Yahnian?

  And now it's 10:40, so it's time for bed.

• 1:16:29Danielle LaRock?

  Well, go watch Family Guy.

• 1:16:31Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:32Danielle LaRock?

  Um, I'll just, you know what I'll do? I'll go over and take a look at Choss because I bought him a pumpkin costume today, and he looks so fucking cute.

• 1:16:44Cassandra Yahnian?

  He's spreading the cheer in the house today.

• 1:16:48Danielle LaRock?

  He's like, it comes complete with a little hood that has like, a fake stem and little leaf, like, pumpkin leaf on it, and just, so damn cute. And Gator's a ghost. He's a little ghost.

• 1:16:58Cassandra Yahnian?

  As he should be.

• 1:17:00Danielle LaRock?

  So I'll go, um, snug them for a little bit, that'll make everything better.

• 1:17:05Cassandra Yahnian?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:06Danielle LaRock?

  Well, everyone else, uh, we hope you cleanse yourselves as well, um, and we hope you come back next week, please, and thank you. And we'll see you next time. Uh, in the meantime, enjoy the view.

• 1:17:20Cassandra Yahnian?

  Go watch your back.

• 1:17:21Danielle LaRock?

  Bye.

• 1:17:22Cassandra Yahnian?

  Bye.

• 1:17:26Danielle LaRock?

  Thanks for joining us for another episode. We hope you learned something new and have another location to put on your list. If you want more NPAD content, make sure to follow along with our adventures on all socials at National Park After Dark. For more stories just like this one with the added bonus of exclusive content, you can join us on Patreon or Apple subscriptions. If you prefer to watch our episodes, head over to our YouTube channel. And if you're enjoying the show, please take a moment to rate, review, and subscribe on your favorite listening platform.

• 1:18:04Danielle LaRock?

  And the only other person who seemed to take vampirism, that's how you say that, right? Vampirism?

• 1:18:10Cassandra Yahnian?

  You're asking the wrong girl. I believe you.

• 1:18:16Danielle LaRock?

  You're right. Okay, I think it is vampirism.

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