Transcript of The Vampire Clan Murders

And so it becomes vengeful. Destructive. Wicked. The question is: did it have to be this way? When it comes to evil, what role does nature and nurture play? To this day, there's no scientific consensus, and it can be an uncomfortable question to ask, especially when we're talking about terrible crimes like the ones in today's story—committed by a teenage boy who loved monsters.

I'm Harvey Guillen, and this is "Killer Stories." Everybody knows Dungeons and Dragons, the fantasy role-playing game, but have you heard of Vampire: The Masquerade?

It's a cult classic, tabletop role-playing game that came out in the early '90s. It's very similar to D&D—the dice, the storytelling, the campaign—but it's set in a place called the World of Darkness, which is exactly like ours, except for the fact that there's vampires and other monsters that exist. When he's 5 years old, Roderick Ferrell's mom, Sandra, introduces him to Dungeons and Dragons, and it acts as a gateway to Vampire: The Masquerade in 1991 when Roderick's 11.

Most people call him Rod, and like a lot of kids who play role-playing games, he uses them as an escape from his real life, because his real life hasn't been easy, to say the least. Rod survived a life-threatening illness when he was only 2 years old. His father left before he could remember, and his mom struggles with drug use, and the two of them have moved around a lot, back and forth between Florida, where Rod's grandparents have a house, and Kentucky, where he was born.

1995 is a Florida year. It's also the year Sandra remarries, and Rod gets a stepfather. And this guy's a real loser, not because he's a self-proclaimed Satanist—which he is—because he's physically and emotionally abusive to Rod and Sandra. He's also a drug dealer, willing to supply his 14-year-old stepson with any substance he wants. Drugs and alcohol become two new ways for Rod to escape reality, on top of his games.

And before long, Vampire: The Masquerade starts bleeding into Rod's real life. He starts studying the kinds of occult practices they talk about in the game, taking them seriously, wearing a lot of black. He becomes quieter, more brooding, and it probably doesn't help that other kids start feeding into his vampire obsession. For example, like one day he cuts his finger in biology class, and his instinct is to suck on the cut, which is honestly pretty normal, but as soon as he does, people start calling him a vampire.

And you can't really call it bullying because I don't think he minds. I mean, at the end of the day, he's just a nerd who desperately wants to be a vampire, a character I played on TV for years. Thank you very much. But there are many differences between Rod and Guillermo, not the least of which being Rod is a real person in the real world, where vampires don't exist. He also hangs out with people who aren't vampires. He's had girlfriends before, and in Florida he finds two friends who think his rants about demons and vampires and astral projection are interesting and definitely not delusional.

Friends like Janine Leclair and Heather Wendor—they both bought into Rod's interests, and Janine is there the day that Rod takes his vampire fantasies to new extremes. Now, I'm not a parent, not that I know of, so I've never had to worry about opening a teenager's door, not knowing what to expect. But no parent could possibly prepare themselves for what Sandra Ferrell walks into in December 1995. Warning: it involves self-harm, so some of you may want to skip ahead.

It's totally okay. I'll make sure that you're all caught up. Okay, so Sandra opens the door to Janine and another boy sitting in front of a makeshift altar, with her son's blood smeared across their faces and splattered across the floor. There are razor blades and cuts across Rod's arms. He made the cuts himself, then dared his friends to drink his blood. He says it was all part of the game. They were performing a "crossing over" ritual to make his friends full-fledged vampires.

If you're just rejoining us, what you need to know is Rod and his friends took elements of the game too seriously, and that led to Rod harming himself in order to carry out a ritual. Obviously, that's cause for concern. The makers of Vampire: The Masquerade never intended their game to lead to real violence. All the elements are supposed to be pretend. It's safe to say that Rod's mom doesn't react well to her son's blood ritual. She accuses him of being evil, which is a harsh judgment coming from a woman married to a self-proclaimed Satanist.

Anyways, they move back to Kentucky a few weeks later, to a town called Murray, which is one of many southern towns that claims to be the buckle of the Bible Belt. So, not a place that looks kindly on vampire-loving teenagers who dabble in the occult. Rod's grandparents move with them too, and not long afterward, Rod's mom and stepfather leave for a new life in Michigan, a life without Rod. On his way out the door, Rod's stepfather apparently tells him, and I quote, "Your mother is never coming back, so you might as well get used to it."

They call themselves the Vampire Clan, and they're led by a 17-year-old named Jaden Murphy, who says he goes by the "Prince of the City." And the group meets at a house they nicknamed the Crypt. Some are theater majors at the local college, others are still in high school, but they all feel like misfits, ostracized by their conservative Christian town. Jaden and Rod hit it off right away. They develop a special bond. Even though there's just a 2-year difference between them, Jaden kind of becomes the father figure Rod never had, one who shares all the same interests.

Once Jaden's in the picture, Rod goes full '90s goth. The trench coat, the black hair, the Marilyn Manson tee, even the white makeup and drinking blood becomes pretty routine for him and his friends. They see it as a kind of spiritual communion, and Rod's often the one providing the blood. Meanwhile, when it comes to school, Rod starts cutting class more often than he attends, maybe because he isn't getting much sleep. He and his vampire clan spend their nights hanging out in cemeteries, which is a little bit on the nose and strange and worrying as it is.

But at some point, Rod breaks ties with reality. He goes from blurring the lines between what's a game and what's not to permanently erasing that line. For extended periods, he fully steps into the mythology he's been creating for so long and starts introducing himself not as Rod, but as Vsago, the 500-year-old immortal French vampire.

The mechanic is simple: if you make evil choices, your score decreases and your thirst for blood grows. For a while, Rod's evil choices only happen when he's playing the game. His real-life actions, however questionable, don't really impact anyone outside the Vampire Clan, and they're all willing participants in the sex that happens in graveyards, in the blood rituals at sunrise. It's all insular, contained. But that changes in October 1996. Another warning: this next part is so incredibly upsetting, I almost didn't want to talk about it, but it happened.

It's part of this story, so I'm going to. So, on the morning of the 14th, a local animal shelter employee shows up to work and finds about 30 dogs running loose in the driveway. Someone had broken into the shelter by cutting their way through a fence, one that was keeping all the dogs contained. The employee's first thought is, "Ugh, this must be some kind of prank." But the truth turns out to be so much more. Inside the shelter, she finds strange occult symbols on the wall drawn in blood, and more blood on the floor pooling around the remains of two dead puppies.

She also finds more animals who were beaten with broken paws and cracked ribs. You've probably heard of the Satanic Panic before. It started in the '80s and continued on well into the '90s. People thought things like heavy metal music and Dungeons and Dragons were tools being used to recruit kids to Satanic cults, and these Satanic cults were really powerful and widespread, committing horrific ritual abuse all over the place. We now know that wasn't true.

It was a moral panic based on unfounded fears. However, if your town had a group of kids who dressed in dark clothes and performed strange rituals in cemeteries, and then you found weird symbols written in blood of murdered animals on the walls of a local business, well, what would you believe? Well, you'd probably think there was a connection, right? And you'd be right. Rod spearheaded the whole thing, and witnesses saw a bunch of goth kids lurking in the area before the break-in occurred.

So suspicion quickly falls on the Vampire Clan, and it actually causes them to fracture. See, Jaden doesn't approve of Rod's actions. In fact, he sees them as a threat to the vampire community's very existence. He knows that acts of real violence only confirm their town's worst fears, which is not what he wants. And what happened at the animal shelter was strike two for Rod. A few weeks prior, Jaden watched him murder a kitten.

So after the break-in, he confronts Rod about his behavior, and it doesn't go well. An argument breaks out. Rod threatens to kill Jaden. Jaden pins Rod against the wall. No one gets hurt, but Jaden bans Rod from the group for life. He says he's no longer welcome at the Crypt, and in the split, four members of the group go with Rod. They see him as their maker, meaning they drank his blood and he drank theirs, so they're fiercely loyal.

Rod keeps attending counseling sessions, but pretty soon he gets expelled from the school for behavioral problems, and he never re-enrolls. So he becomes a 16-year-old high school dropout, and before long, his drug use spirals out of control. And I'm not talking about typical teenage experimentation, you know, marijuana every now and then with some friends. He's using LSD, PCP, methamphetamines, and heroin, which maybe explains his increasingly erratic behavior around the friends he still has, like his rants about achieving immortality or his plans to unlock the seven gates of hell, or how he wants to, and I quote, "kill a whole lot of people."

You know, statements that should raise red flags, but they don't. They're so normalized in the group that no one thinks much of it. It's all just Rod being Rod. Rod's girlfriend, Charity, is definitely concerned about his drug use. She's tried to talk to him about it, but she's arguably more concerned about his continued contact with his ex-girlfriend from Florida, Heather Wendorf. For weeks, Rod and Heather have been talking on the phone almost every night.

Rod calls collect because he assumes Heather's family has the money. Oh, if you lived through the '90s, then you know what calling collect is. If you didn't, it just means that the charge goes to the person receiving the call, and it was very expensive. Anyways, different times. Needless to say, Heather's parents aren't happy when they receive a $2,000 phone bill, and Heather isn't happy when they force her to cut off contact with Rod.

Heather had already been complaining about her controlling parents so much so, she used to joke about how Rod would have to kill her parents in order to take her away so she could join the coven, live as a vampire, move to New Orleans. So you can imagine the new restriction makes that mindset worse, much worse, because before long, that joke about killing Heather's parents kind of becomes the plan.

On November 24, 1996, Rod Ferrell and his coven of self-proclaimed vampires buy some gas station snacks for a road trip. And that is a bizarre sentence to say out loud for many reasons, one of them being, "What's a road trip snack for a vampire? Combos? Beef jerky? Candy?" I would love to know what's running through these teenagers' heads because theoretically, they know they're about to pile into an Old Buick and drive for hours across multiple state lines to possibly murder the parents of one of their ex-girlfriends, the same person who claims to be a 500-year-old vampire named Vsago and in on the plan is Vsago's current girlfriend.

Now, if that vampire love triangle isn't strange enough, before they reach the house of the ex-girlfriend where the killing will occur, they make a pit stop to visit another one of Vsago's ex-girlfriends. Imagine it's two days before Thanksgiving, and your old middle school boyfriend pulls into your driveway, and out pops a bunch of greasy-looking goth kids, and this boy, who you thought you would never see again, asks if he and his friends can use your shower.

What would you say? Well, this girl, her name is Shannon, doesn't know what to say. She's really unnerved by the whole thing, but she's also too polite to turn them away, so she ultimately just says yes and invites them in. She lets them use her shower, listens to their plan of escaping to New Orleans. She even lets Rod use her phone to call Heather. When Shannon asks whether Rod actually thinks Heather's parents will let her run away, Rod says, "Don't worry about it.

I'm probably going to have to kill them." Shannon can't tell if he's joking or not, but pretty soon they're gone, and Shannon is just hoping she'll never see them again. Unfortunately for her, that's not the case. Later that night, Rod shows up on Shannon's doorstep again. She doesn't know it, but since Rod's last visit, he picked up Heather from school, drove her to a cemetery, performed a blood ritual to turn her into a vampire, and then took a bunch of LSD.

Heather's now back at her house packing her things before they leave for New Orleans. Rod says he needs to use Shannon's phone again to call Heather. He needs directions to her house. He reiterates his intentions to kill Heather's parents, but now says he plans to steal their car as well because the Buick has been giving them trouble. And yet, even still, Shannon assumes he's kidding. That night, Heather sneaks out of her house and meets up with Rod and his coven.

Remember Janine Leclair, Rod's other friend from Florida? She was part of the blood ritual his mom walked in on. Well, all the girls in the coven go to meet up at Janine's house, and they leave Rod and his friend, Howard Scott, to carry out the rest of the plan. The details of what happens next are absolutely horrific. The two boys circle the house to see where the parents are inside. Heather's father is watching television. Her mom is making coffee.

They then break into the house through the garage where Rod finds a steel crowbar. That becomes the murder weapon. Heather's dad doesn't see the attack coming, but her mom does. She does her best to fight back, throwing scalding coffee into Rod's face and scratching at him with her nails, but neither one survives the attack. Rod makes sure of that. I won't get into all the specifics. They're too graphic, but I will mention one detail. Before he leaves, Rod takes a lit cigarette and burns a letter into each of their bodies.

She calls the police, and within a matter of hours, a manhunt is underway. The papers are quick to label the case the Vampire Cult Killings, knowing that will attract attention, and arrests are made within days, but the investigation isn't over. From that point on, it becomes a game of unraveling who knew what and when. The first story Rod tells police is a wild one. He blames the murders on a rival group of vampires who wanted to frame him, but no one buys that.

And even though he claims to have large gaps in his memory, the story that ultimately wins out in court, no one besides Rod necessarily planned for the murders to happen. No one believed his violent threats. They planned to take Heather away. They planned to steal, but nothing more than that. In the end, a jury convicts everyone in the group except Heather. Even though the judge in the case urges the jury to indict Heather as well, that doesn't happen.

The jury decides she had no prior knowledge of the plan, so her case never goes to trial. Howard Scott Anderson receives two consecutive life sentences without parole. His sentence is later reduced to 40 years, which means he'll be 51 years old when he's released. Rod's girlfriend, Charity Keasey, receives 10 years in prison and a third girl, Dana Cooper, receives 17 years. Meanwhile, Rod pleads guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and is sentenced to die.

He becomes the youngest person ever placed on death row in the United States. That changes after a Florida Supreme Court later rules that a defendant has to be 17 years or older to receive the death penalty. Rod was 16 when he killed Heather's parents, so his sentence gets commuted to life in prison. He's asked for a reduction in sins, but his requests have been denied. When I read Frankenstein, I have empathy for the monster.

I think a lot of people do. And when I was reading about this case, I found myself empathizing with Rod, the kid, before he became a killer, the outcast who didn't have role models. And it should go without saying that my empathy has nothing to do with the fact that he shares some qualities with the character I played on TV. I mean, all of Rod's parents and role models abandon him in different ways. One of his primary caretakers, his grandfather, allegedly sexually assaulted him at a young age.

A claim that has been supported by family members. And that life-threatening disease he survived at two years old, it's called encephalitis. It's an inflammation of the brain, typically caused by an infection or autoimmune response. And research has found evidence that links it to schizophrenic disorders, which could make sense. Descriptions of Rod's erratic behavior, delusions of grandeur, and blackouts sound a lot like someone slipping in and out of a disassociative state, which is the kind of thing that can be exacerbated by drug use.

In a conversation about nurture versus nature, there's a lot that could help explain what drove Rod to his ending. All the people who failed him along the way. But if there's one thing I've learned in my true crime journey, it's this: you can't lose sight of the fact that all those things that could help explain his behavior don't excuse it. And the greatest failure in this story is that two innocent people are now dead.

The Wendorfs. When Rod Ferrell stepped out of the game, he didn't achieve immortality. He achieved destruction. His story is a dark mirror to the tragedy of Frankenstein, a reminder that the creatures we create, whether out of loneliness, fantasy, or trauma, rarely obey the rules of their maker. And when they escape the confines of a game or a novel, the cost is always paid in the real world.

Thanks for tuning in to Killer Stories, a Spotify podcast. New episodes release on Mondays. If you like today's story and want to learn more, we drop some of our favorite sources in the episode description. Until next time, I'm Harvey Guillen. Stay safe, out there.