Episode 629: The Kentucky Teenage Vampire Clan Murders Part I - The Masquerade

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Thumbtack presents project paralysis.

I was cornered.

Sweat gathered above my furrowed brow and my mind was racing.

I wondered who would be left standing when the droplets fell.

Me or the clawed sink.

Drain cleaner and pipe snake clenched in my weary fist, I stepped toward the sink and then...

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There's no place to escape to.

This is the last time.

On the left.

That's when the cannibalism started.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's the whole, that's the thing.

Well, that's the whole, they want it to be.

I don't know why people.

They want it to be real, but they don't understand that if it was real they'd all be dead they'd all be fucking murdered like they'd all be dead in their beds and they would have their fucking throat slit demons are gonna beat god it's just how it is well at least on earth what do we know about every single movie bad guys always win in the first act yeah they always win but guess what happens in real life they just win they continue to just win demons beat angels so if you want demons to be real like if you want vampirs to be real just so you can fight them, I don't think you're ready to, Mr.

Vince McClintock, who runs the skating ring in the center of town that has two refrigerators in the back of it so you could sell illegal beer to people because it's a dry county.

That's a great, he said that the skating rink is very sober.

Oh, yes.

No, no, the skating rink.

He made a point to mention how sober the skating rink was.

Yes, because he knows how attractive the skating rink is to child vampires yes because they all want to go spinning spinning fun to do they love to watch their food rollers skating's not a hammered activity no you don't think so god no it's the most it's the you're gonna fall yeah you're gonna bust your ass so what do you use heroin

also i think angels kill demons i don't think angels do kill demons that's why hell exists no because satan lost to saint michael the war they lost no he walked away no he didn't

if god wanted to beat the devil he would just destroy the devil.

He didn't.

The devil made a bargain with God and got released.

He was essentially allowed to be.

He was sentenced to an eternity of damnation.

That's your interpretation of it.

The devil has a job.

He does.

He's a warden.

It's a job.

It's a shitty job.

He was on the same side as God.

The whole thing is a fucking work.

Until he starts playing too much music.

He's fucking the guitar.

None of it's real anyway.

Welcome to the last podcast on the left.

Ladies and gentlemen, my name is Marcus Parks.

I'm here with Satan's best friend, Henry Zabrowski.

He doesn't know me.

He doesn't care.

And that's what I like about him.

He doesn't care.

He doesn't answer prayers.

You know why?

He's not a fucking Labrador retriever looking to do tricks for me like that smelly desert wizard that's up there lying all of us while he's giving people hair lips and making new forms of AIDS every day.

Hold on.

All right.

I will not take this anti-Labrador rhetoric any longer.

That's all God is.

Big steak and shit-covered Labrador retriever.

Then I like him now.

Are you happy?

Shoot him in the head.

And of course, we have St.

Michael's right-hand man, Ed Larson.

I will tear down the who plays the ute.

What?

That's probably what the devil played in heaven, right?

That was.

Oh, the loot?

The loot.

The loot.

You said ute.

Yeah, you said ute, which is cool for uterus.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

He plays that too.

That's what I do.

When I'm working at the abortion clinic, I like to pop some utes.

Haven't you seen Rosemary's baby?

He played the fuck out of that ute.

He did.

With the tip of his rock hard dog-like penis.

Today, we begin one hell of a tale.

Rocking a ute.

It's a two-partner.

Got it.

Rock that.

Don't come and knock it if my youte isn't knocking.

Today, we begin the tale of the Kentucky Vampire Clan murders.

I can't believe there's another clan in Kentucky.

And besides that word, they don't spell many of the other words correctly.

The story of the so-called Kentucky teenage vampire cult is extremely complicated in terms of both narrative and motivation.

But the complication of the story is partly what makes it both utterly fascinating and entirely absurd from beginning to end.

Because we are, after all, going to be talking almost exclusively about mid-90s goth teenagers throughout this entire series.

Yes, so be prepared.

You remember the crew from South Park?

Imagine if they killed the goth crew from South Park.

Imagine if they killed a couple people.

This is literally who we're dealing with.

We're dealing with the gothics of the town.

We're dealing

truly

in a world of pasty legs.

These are the alabaster-nied

pieces of shit

that walk the streets of Kentucky.

I guess at night.

I mean, Kentucky, my God.

I mean, these people watching some of these documentaries, I knew these people in Lubbock.

I knew these people in fucking Abilene.

I knew him in Florida.

Oh, very much so.

I bought lots of weed.

Yeah.

I hung out with them.

The Gothics accepted my fat Polish body.

No questions asked.

That's right.

Way back in 1996, a goth teenager named Rod Farrell from Murray, Kentucky brutally murdered the parents of a 14-year-old girl in Eustis, Florida.

The girl was a member of Rod's teenage vampire clan, and Rod killed her parents without her knowledge when the so-called clan all ran away together to where else but New Orleans.

Let me guess, New Orleans didn't take for them.

No, they had to move on to Baton Rouge.

Ah, yes.

Now, Rod Farrell was himself just 16 years old at the time of the murders, but he'd convinced half a dozen kids in both Kentucky and Florida that he was not just a chain-smoking, emaciated, overly pretentious twat with long black hair from a typically dysfunctional southern family.

Instead, Rod Farrell had convinced his fellow goths that he was a 500-year-old real-life vampire with special powers named Visago.

Yes!

Visago!

Yes, Visago needs to finish his social studies work.

Yes, Dunny.

Visago better hurry up.

They're running out of the very special sauce at Burger King,

my favorite.

Visago has been informed that the McRivy's bang.

Yes.

Post-haste, get my caddage.

I can't stress enough.

This whole story is what we talked about, you know, we were doing our production call.

It's if the West Memphis 3 did it.

That's what this whole thing is.

If you believe those children are capable of doing something, like, but this is true.

These guys are full-on guilty.

Well, Rod is guilty.

One of these guys are full-on guilty.

The rest of them are only guilty of taking this shit way too seriously.

We're going to get into it.

But yes, I do believe that, yeah, Rod and one other, the kid who was like in the house with them that could have stopped it.

Those guys definitely hold a lot of responsibility.

The rest of them, though, just fucking wrong place, wrong time, wrong people.

You know what I call them?

Vinos.

Vinos?

Vampires in name only.

Ron is the only one that actually was

sort of a vampire.

And this is where we're going to begin my overarching theme in this series, which is technically being a vampire is attainable.

It's being a werewolf.

It's not attainable.

Also, my big problem problem with it was we watched the documentary.

It's mostly shot during the day.

Yeah, exactly.

And none of them ever, they never address any kind of daylight, night time.

Like they just always say, like, well, the legends aren't always true.

Well, that, yeah, you don't know what happened in the manipulations of the DNA that their forefathers from space did on the ancestral line of the vampir, the from Cain himself, the Cainites.

And the Kanites were so kind of deluded over time that now most Cainites can suffer the rays of the sun.

Yes.

I'd say the most offensive part of the entire doc was watching them try and cook.

We'll talk about, we're going to talk about this doc.

We're going to talk about it.

Now, to give you an idea of how Rod Farrell saw himself and how he saw his actions, and to remind you again, like Rod Farrell is the guy who brutally murdered two people, convinced a lot of technology.

teenagers that he was a real-life vampire.

Just to give you an idea of how massive of a douchebag this guy really is, let's take a listen to Rod himself discussing the act of murder while he was sitting on death row for his crimes.

I mean, it's really really simple.

It's either you do or you don't.

It's not some big, complex struggle like they would show in a movie or something.

It is rather simple.

It's do I want to and don't I want to?

Do I care of the consequence or not?

He's a bitch.

What a bitch.

What a bitch.

This guy, I.

It's that whole thing of like, do I not want to?

It's that he's performing.

Yeah, oh, absolutely.

Very much so.

Also, because he's a scared young man in jail that then then now is trying to keep up Kfabe because he got all these guys gunning for you now.

You can't show emotions in all this.

But this documentary, we watched, like, as you go through, with last podcast on the left, like one of the main things we talk about all the time is how it's portrayed and how crimes are portrayed on one half of the media.

And then how, if you look at it from a more humanistic angle, it all falls apart.

Yeah.

Right.

Where you hear about the kentucky teenage vampires when you read about rod farrell outside of this scenario you see this portrayal of a these drug-addled maniac satanic like they they have no control over their impulses and they're and they're they're evil and they're and they're and they're they're sullying the good name of of a wonderful little town that's good you know like a christian town all this kind of shit but then you watch this documentary called real stories Stories about this crew.

And of all of the pieces of true crime material we've watched, that is highly embarrassing to the subject.

Between the, uh, when Robert Picton got picked up by the undercover officer, just by the guy keep saying the word fuck all the time.

Uh, you know, we've got Paul Bernado rapping, recording of him rapping.

This is pretty close to the most embarrassing footage that you could show.

Like,

and it just shows that they're everyone here is

not the brightest bulb in the pack yeah and not everybody here is just let's just say it they're not vampires yeah you call it embarrassing but they seem to be proud of it they are that's how embarrassing that's how you know it's embarrassing is that they're very proud of it

And as far as them like not being the brightest bulbs in the bunch, like, you know, we're going to talk about it a little bit more and we're going to explore this.

Like, I do believe that these, they are technically intelligent people.

It's not that they're idiots, it's more that they're just delusional.

And there's reasons behind that.

Now, these murders created a moral panic when they occurred in 1996 because it was said that Rod Farrell had created his Visago vampire persona after becoming obsessed with a tabletop role-playing game called Vampire the Masquerade.

Yeah, prepare to get wet, ladies.

We're about to head into RPG zone.

And it ain't just me warbling about BG3.

This shit's getting real.

All right, wake me when it's over.

Well, the Vampire the Masquerade panic was built on top of the original satanic panic fear that kids were falling into Satanism and witchcraft after using dungeons and dragons as a sort of gateway to satanic ritual.

But while Rod Ferrell and his friends certainly spent an incredible amount of time in the world of Vampire the Masquerade.

I think that after hearing Rod's story, you'll agree that Rod was the type of person who was going to inevitably commit a murder no matter what his interests were.

And he was likely going to involve other people when he did so.

One can't blame Vampire the Masquerade for the Kentucky Vampire Clan murders any more than you can blame Isaac Asimov's Foundation series for Om Shinrikyo or Star Trek for Heaven's Gate.

You can't even fucking blame Julius Caesar for the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.

Really, these works of fiction just provided frameworks.

But I think that using these texts terrifies most people, partly because we're far more used to our cult leaders using the Bible as their framework, and nobody says shit about that.

Well, they also, parents in the Bible Belt, I think, have there's two issues.

One is they think that either children are entirely incapable of doing anything, right?

That they are innocent babes that must be protected at all costs, or kids are unlike they are so manipulatable by the powers of Satan that they are all like just waiting to be filled with demonic energy.

And they kind of think that the stuff like this is what's happening to them.

And it's like, but it's no, it's the president.

Like it's the government that's doing it.

It's fucked up because this is what they use to fuel all their bullshit too.

Yes.

Yeah.

I hate when people give goths a bad name because they're honestly a lot of fun.

They're great.

You know, and then these guys, they fucking blow.

Like, if the goths I knew would kick the shit out of these kids, they would have stabbed them really fast.

You know,

the goths had knives on them.

Yeah.

So did Texas goths.

Like those are some of the Texas goths that I knew were some of the toughest motherfuckers I ever came across.

Yeah, they're just punching barbed wire all the time.

Yeah, it's going like, fuck you, God.

Fuck you, God.

I dare you to kill me, God.

You know what I mean?

Now, Rod Farrell had a dangerous combination of intrinsic brutality and the sort of charisma that is irresistible to lost souls.

And he had it by the age of 16.

As such, Rod Farrell knew how to control and influence his fellow goths in the same way that Marshall Applewhite from Heaven's Gate knew how to play to the deepest needs of lonely sci-fi nerds.

It does.

That being said, Vampire the Masquerade did indeed provide the framework to create the fantasy world that Rod Farrell and his friends lived within.

And there is a reason why Vampire the Masquerade worked so well.

Just so you know, this is to remind you: if you play Vampire the Masquerade, you will go insane.

See, while Vampire the Masquerade certainly shares a lot of gameplay elements with other tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons,

the Masquerade is far more about lore and storytelling than gameplay.

So bringing that lore outside of the game to build your own lore, that's a pretty easy step to take.

Being a vampire is a lifestyle, dog.

All right, I can't walk around like a dwarf all day, even though technically I have the stature for it, but I can't see in the dark and I don't have rock sense.

Vampire the Masquerade also heavily depends on personal interactions and human emotions, which makes it a far easier world to fall into on a deep personal level than other tabletop RPGs like Dungeons and Dragons.

In other words, while you can't really walk around all day pretending you're a paladin after you leave a DD game and retain an ounce of respect from the outside world, hey, you've never been needed in the forest.

You've never been needed to speak to the animals and needed to cast and tangle.

You don't know what I have to cast and tangle.

Well, why you can't do that?

Blade Ward.

A player can absolutely retain their vampiric masquerade persona indefinitely without having to so much as change an article of clothing after they leave the gaming table.

But more importantly, if your vampire persona is believable enough, then you might find that there are other goths who will come to accept it and join in on the game.

And this is especially true when you're talking about high school kids.

Oh, yeah.

Plus, due to the inherent hoardiness of both vampires and the game itself, the people who accept you might also think that your dedication to the bit is actually quite sexy.

And you get the added bonus of getting laid on top of everything else.

Sometimes being cringe pays off.

Nobody fucks more than goth kids.

They really, I mean it, over the middle of the morning.

Over band kids, over theater kids, over the MS-13 kids.

The football players kind of fuck a lot.

No, really.

They got to focus on the game.

The baseball players.

They fuck a lot.

Oh, yeah.

Sure.

Goths, we're talking about our subsection.

You're not allowed.

You're not in here yet.

You just dealt drugs to us.

Yeah, I partied, man.

I was hanging with the goths more than anybody.

It's kind of nice.

Yeah.

But no, goths are, you know, it's a special community.

And they also are, they are inherently kind of cringe.

You have to be sincere.

You do.

And a part of Vampire the Masquerade is sincerely playing the vampire part to the hilt.

Yeah.

But in the end, while plenty of people certainly take their Vampire the Masquerade games a little too seriously, 99.999% of them do so without ever hurting another living soul.

For many, the game is a harmless escape from a life that doesn't have the sort of romance or magic that they'd prefer.

But that escape is exactly how Rod Farrell brought other teenagers under his influence.

But I would hesitate to really even call these kids Rod's followers, and I definitely wouldn't call them cult members.

Yeah, no, no, no, definitely not.

Really, this story is more a tale about how a friend group got totally out of control while committing to the bit.

And going by the documentaries I watched about all this, some of those people who were a part of Farrell's vampire clan at one point or another, they're still committing to the vampire bit well into their 40s.

That documentary which shows the current vampire crew of Murray, Kentucky, and they're all like, I just, oh my god.

And they're all like, yeah, it's kind of crazy how so place became vampire central.

It's just like,

is it?

Are you sure?

Vampires everywhere, vampires from across the world now come to Murray, Kentucky, in order to be at the epicenter of the culture.

It's like, I, you don't have

a wendy's

like you don't have like you don't have the infrastructure no they don't have they don't have a wendy's but they do have a hardy's well and that hardy's does does become as we'll talk about in episode two that hardy's does become the epicenter of the local vampire universe which is surprising and i think the only reason why they hang out with the hardys they don't have a denny's because everyone knows is denny's is where the goth kids hang out Denny's is where you're supposed to have it.

Chain smoke and drink coffee until they make you leave.

Yep.

Honestly, I'm looking at the restaurants now.

It's not a lot of chain stuff.

Unlimited Buffalo Wild Wings, which is about to open in a couple weeks.

So go check it out.

The grand opening.

Wow.

The whole thing.

The mayor's coming to the grand opening of the B-Wubs there, and he's going to shoot himself in the head that night.

That's amazing.

That's amazing.

He's going to shoot the town dog.

That's pretty, you know.

I'm honestly, this Murray place doesn't look half bad as far as we're looking at restaurants here.

I mean, I'm not against any of this.

Oh, I hate a Kudoba, though.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Thumbs down.

Arad's fellow vampire clan members were mid-90s goth kids from Poduck towns in Kentucky and Florida who wanted nothing more than to live any life other than the one they were forced to live.

And there's certainly no sin in that.

Oh, yeah, man.

Look at my life.

I dress I'm a 40-year-old.

I dress I'm going on 12.

Yeah.

But unfortunately for these goth kids, the person who facilitated that life and made it feel real, real, he ended up being a psychopath named Rod, who led them directly into becoming accessories to a brutal double murder.

But before there is a Wendy's,

it's a 1-1-1-1 Chestnut Street.

Sorry to interrupt.

I just wanted to make sure.

I don't want to give out bad information.

Thank you.

We can't deal with another backstrap blackstone fucking situation.

But before we get into the story of Rod Farrell and his Kentucky teenage vampire clan, let's acknowledge our source for this series.

Today, we've got The Embrace, a true vampire story by Aphrodite Jones, which, if we're being honest, is a hot fucking mess.

In fact, we had to figure out the overall narrative for this story on our own so much that I'm going to go ahead and put a big old, for entertainment purposes only, stamp on this entire series.

As it turns out, it's pretty difficult to get a straight story out of a bunch of highly dramatic small-town goths.

And someone who calls himself Aphrodite Jones.

Yeah.

My name's Aphrodite Jones.

You might know me by my birth name, Bill Smiths.

Yeah, now I write about them piles circularly, and I also deliver steamy, steamy romances about men built like trees

and a man who lives in a little tiny hole.

And it's called, Hey, Come Fuck Me in This Hole.

Aphrodite Jones.

Right all.

Aphrodite Jones sounds like a fucking character Amber Nelson would create.

Aphrodite Jones.

Yeah.

My puss is a dick.

I'm just an old whore, y'all.

Well, the stickiness of this story is doubly illustrated by the fact that I watched two documentaries in which they interview most of the main players in this case.

But in both documentaries, these people tell different stories, they use different timelines, and they give different motivations that contradict not only what they had already told the author of this book, because the author did interview a lot of these people, sometimes they contradict what they themselves said in the previous documentary.

I just wonder if they're talking to that one girl that's in the center of the new vampire cult that looks like E.T.

She's got that like, she's got like a goth wig on, and she's got that fetal alcohol syndrome, like looks sort of like a pug.

And she's just sitting there just being like, I know that it's becoming harder and harder to be a vampire in Kentucky, which is why we shape-shift into bats.

And you're like, you can't take her fucking testimony seriously.

These docs are the PCP version of the 7-Up series.

I mean, really, the only thing that stays the same is that they're consistently douchebags of the highest order.

Because while we certainly love our goths, it's really hard to deal with a man three years older than me waxing philosophically with 100% seriousness about vampirism, like it makes him some sort of fucking tough guy.

But that's all to say that while the details and stories that Aphrodite Jones uncovered and the stories these people tell, while they're incredibly absurd and highly fascinating, some of the connective tissue here might be a little off.

So we're going to have a lot of seems like statements being made over the next couple of episodes.

Now tell me, you big-headed little girl.

Tell me, my name's Aphrodite Jones.

I thought, Investigative Journals.

Let me ask you.

on the day of the crime, on the night of the crime question,

what exactly was the order of events

there?

Yes, do go on.

Very interesting.

Let me write that down.

Let me get my quill.

Worst afternoon in the fucking world.

Worst book in the world.

Is she alive?

Yeah, yeah.

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So without further ado, let's get into the story of Rod Farrell and the Kentucky Vampire Clan murders.

So Rod Farrell was one of those guys that you'd say was fucked from the very start.

Yeah.

His mother, Sandra Gibson, and that's Sandra with an O, she quit school at the age of 16 because she, quote, quote, felt persecuted and misunderstood, which is code for, this is hard and I don't want to do it anymore.

I'm persecuted.

Learn that word.

That's not it.

I'm turkey looted and I'm persecuted.

Every day I cannot risk.

Turkey looted?

Turkey looted.

It means that I sat on a bee earlier today and I had one large bee sting inside of one of my butt cheeks.

Could you use it in a sentence, please?

I got turkey looted on my way to my child molestation trial.

I got it in there.

Well, described as eternally immature, Sandra would use baby talk to get her way.

And when she was examined by mental health professionals after her son's arrest for murder, it was found that Sandra had the mental and emotional development of a 12-year-old girl.

Thank you.

Never grew up.

That's That's what I say.

Age state of mind.

I can't read.

Sandra was also hypersexual.

Yep.

To the point where there were rumors that she and her son Rod would sometimes have sex because she was constantly flirting with him by making inappropriate comments and touching him in places that she shouldn't.

Hey, I've never flirted with my son.

I just told him I was wet once.

And then I did tell him his shoulders are getting wider.

Every small town has at least one of these, and they're always fucked up.

The one from my small town, for example, he's dead now.

Died from, I believe, a fentanyl overdose a few years ago.

I'm a little fuzzy on the details, but yeah, it never ends well.

It really was the small town you came from because I figure most towns have like 10 of these.

Yeah, yeah.

That's why I said every small town has at least one.

My town, less than 400 people, so let's say one in 500.

Not bad.

Yeah.

Not bad at all.

But when you put all of Sandra's behavior together, and also, by the way, Sandra, she would also regularly hit on Rod's friends, his teenage friends,

and she would try to have sex with him.

You guys learning calculus?

Yeah, me too, calculus pussy.

You know what I'm saying?

Come over here, turkey late me.

But when you put all Sandra's behavior together, it points squarely towards childhood sexual abuse.

And it's alleged that Sandra was badly abused by her father, Harold Gibson.

Thanks for fucking sucking all the air out of my bit.

It's alleged.

I don't know for sure.

Well, I'm going to put it on.

His name's Harold.

Yeah, and it's, and the best.

You know, if your name's Harold, I'm sorry, but I don't trust you.

Yeah, you got to have that at least the D.

Harold is fine.

It's my father's middle name.

And if then, if his daughter gets married to the Pharrell, and then Harrell gets then, and then he that leaves, right?

Because he leaves, time pharaoh leaves and then Sandra marries her father he then becomes Harrel Pharrell does it work god damn it

together but they all it's too many names yeah that sound similar yeah well allegedly Harrel sexually abused both Rod's mother Sandra and Sandra's sister so badly that the sister ran away from home at the age of 14.

That sexual abuse is alleged to have fucked up Sandra so badly that she in turn fucked up her son Rod as well.

Now not too long after Sandra quit school, she became pregnant with Rod at the age of 17, and she got married to the father in what was presumably a shotgun wedding.

According to Sandra, Rod was born near death with the umbilical cord wrapped around his neck, which Sandra would later say was the reason why there was, quote, something's wrong with Rod's brain.

Yeah, but

Sandra was also said to be a pathologist.

That's what the doctor said.

Yeah, he said he was turkey-looted, murky-looted.

He had all sorts of problems, but it's the brain that got really fucked up.

We told her to stop doing the somersault.

I didn't know.

I did the belly flop three times just because everybody kept plowing.

He kept plowing me.

And Sandra, she was also said to be a pathological liar.

So it's hard to tell.

She once had sex with Santa Claus.

Oh, my name is Aphrodite Jones.

I'd like to actually write that down in my book.

But to make matters worse in little Rod's life, his father divorced Sandra when Rod was just a few months old.

So the only authority figures in Rod's life were his allegedly sexually abusive grandfather, Harold, and his utterly useless grandmother.

But while Harold claimed to have tried to instill authority into Rod's life, Sandra would constantly undermine Harold by telling Rod that he didn't have to listen to his granddaddy if he didn't want to.

He ain't your daddy.

You don't gotta do it.

He see you.

Yeah, he might be the granddaddy, but that don't mean just because he thinks it don't mean he's your direct daddy.

In fact, throughout Rod's life, Sandra would act more like Rod's friend and peer instead of his mother.

And this would naturally get both of them into a lot of trouble for entirely different reasons later on.

Let's just say they both committed felonies.

So if you're a 500-year-old vampire,

how do you explain away the fact that your mother's there?

Yeah.

It's because the way of the vampire, as far as I saw, saw this movie about it.

it was starring a wonderful actor.

His name is Jim Carrey.

He's a vampire.

He's a voice beaten.

It's crazy what happened to vampires, man.

I ain't got no explanation.

If I were to guess, I would say that I think what he said was that his soul was swimming around in the ether in the dream world for 500 years, and then it took the vessel of this boy.

Technically, Vampire of the Masquerade.

If all of this is, this doesn't first come from there, but if it is vaguely based on Vampire of the Masquerade, the two kind of things that are super important in it are the, as your player character, is who turned you and who you turn.

Yeah.

So he actually probably, if he is talking about Visago, he has already...

talked and hinted about who turned him,

which turned him at some point during the time period.

And I guess his mom would probably also, which we'll find out, would maybe she would get turned along the way.

Okay.

And vampire, the masquerade essentially means pretending to be a vampire.

Pretending to be a human within a human-led world, but remaining a vampire.

The masquerade is fitting in.

Gotcha.

Thank you, by the way.

Sure.

Yeah, of course.

But the thing about Rod's grandparents is that they were also kind of shitty, even outside of the alleged sexual abuse.

Wow.

They lived in just as much of a fantasy world as the fucking vampire kids.

But the Gibsons' fantasy world was fueled by a strict Pentecostal fundamentalism that saw Satan as a real guy who meddled in earthly affairs.

Furthermore, Ron's grandfather Harold openly hated his daughter Sandra and blamed her behavioral problems on drugs, boys, and witchcraft.

Whoa, that's just fun.

That's cool.

Sandra, meanwhile, would simultaneously return her father's hatred and depend on him for financial support.

Although Sandra earned some money as as a stripper and allegedly as a sex worker on occasion, she would quit any straight job she got within a few weeks for the same reason she quit high school.

It was hard and she didn't want to do it.

Honestly, the one time I even kind of even dabbled into sex work was out dancing.

I was dancing, right?

And this guy came from breakfast or something from his continental.

I guess got some kind of continental breakfast from his hotel.

And he dropped a banana peel up on the stage, right?

And I'm swinging around, you know, I got pour some sugar on me, my favorite song going on.

And I slipped on it and I slipped on a banana peel.

And wouldn't you know it, I fell pussy first right on that man's erect penis.

And it went inside of me.

And just the struggle, me trying to get up out of it, I caused him to ejaculate inside of me.

And honestly, just as a kind of nice little gesture, he gave me 50 bucks.

I got to go home early.

Because Sandra couldn't keep a job, she would return to her father again and again for money.

And she also depended on him and his wife for child care.

But when she dropped them off at her parents' place when she didn't feel like taking care of little Rod, she'd also make sure to tell her father that someone in her quote-unquote drug group would kill Harold for her if she really wanted it.

Or so Harold claimed.

And I'll be back by 10:30.

All right, the emergency, here are the emergency numbers.

Here's my meth dealer, and here is a

man who's gonna kill you

if you

even think about double-crossing me.

All right, don't double-cross me.

I'll bring back Wendy's.

Now, this claim about the so-called drug group, it might have been true.

She might have said something like, I got friends that'll kill you if you don't do what I say.

I know she said it, but she definitely said it.

Is it real?

No.

But it also might be another example of how everyone in Rod Ferrell's family created and lived in a fantasy world of their own making that justified their actions and beliefs.

Rod, of course, did the same thing, just with vampires.

Yeah, but the vampires adds the edge, doesn't it?

It does.

You know, but this it i find it interesting because they they again they're all in a fantasy world they're all like a totally they just on one side or another it's either christian fantasy or you know satanic fantasy now do you think that also the casual like i'm gonna kill you i'm gonna get somebody to kill you it seems to run in this whole crew where like you know how many times i read stories about like and see body cam footage of like it's an old man and an old woman who for years every time they fought the old man or the woman would pull out the old shotgun and wave it around until finally, the one day that it accidentally goes off and they shoot him in the fucking head.

Yeah.

It's a trashy small-town thing.

People would threaten to kill each other all the time when I was growing up.

Like it was just, it was just so, it was just thrown around so much.

I'm going to kill you, motherfucker.

I'm going to fucking kill you.

Why are they, why are they so, I know that things are hard.

Yeah.

Yeah, things are real tough.

I think it's just, you just eventually, you know, if you got a good head about you, you just stop hanging out around those people.

You keep doing it.

Well, yeah.

They keep saying those things.

You keep doing it.

You just stop showing up.

Yeah, you got to move to Dallas.

Or New York City.

Oh, yeah.

No one's ever told me they'll kill me in New York City.

I lived in Lubbock.

Texas for five years going to college.

I lived in New York for almost 20 years and people threatened to kill me in Lubbock with far more regularity than I ever got in New York City.

Oh, God, I did.

The Times, the amount of times, people threatened to kill me in Lubbock.

Jesus Christ.

Two men try to kill us in Oklahoma City.

Yeah.

Oh, man.

I got rocks thrown at me in Tallahassee because I turned down the wrong street.

Yeah.

I thought they were just thought that was your food and they thought you were the guy from Never Ending Story.

Well, the rocks were cracked.

Oh, so they were just, they were like, that's famous.

It's actually nice.

Yeah.

Now I think about it.

Now, Rod and the rest of the Gibson family were from the town of Murray, Kentucky, population 18,000, located just about a two hours' drive northwest of Nashville.

It is home to the Boy Scout Museum.

Oh, where all my petrified boys are.

And the town does not allow the sale of alcohol of any sort at any establishment.

In short, Murray is an absolutely terrible place to be a weirdo.

It's a, they say it's part of the buckle of the Bible Belt.

Oh, yeah.

I can't believe that a town in the Bible Belt is named after a Jewish man.

Murray?

Yeah.

Steinowitz.

Steinowitz, Kentucky.

Murray was also somewhat of a college town.

It's home to a small public university called Murray State that has about 10,000 students.

This will become extraordinarily important later on in this story.

But overall, Murray, Kentucky is a Bible Belt town through and through.

And as you'll hear in this clip from one of the documentaries about the vampire clan murders, the townsfolk were not happy about what occurred there in the mid-90s.

Better wake up because the big cities come to the little town.

And whether it's gangs or whether it's vampires, they better open their eyes and see because they can be mom and daddy's perfect little angel

and hell's brewing underneath.

Yep, that's what vampires do.

They're always moving to Murray, Kentucky.

Definitely leaving Paris, San Francisco, New York City to come straight to no bricks

to Murray, Kentucky.

Absolutely.

I can't wait to get there.

There's a Wendy's.

Now, after listening to that clip, it's good to keep in mind that almost everything we're going to talk about over the next couple of episodes happens in a Kentucky accent.

Unless said Kentucky goth teenager decides he wants to start talking like he's from Eastern Europe instead.

For example, here's one of the Murray, Kentucky Vampire Clan members talking about his vampire family in one of the documentaries.

And again, this kid is born and raised in Murray, Kentucky.

There are those of us who are of

a different nature, I guess you could say, of Ompiers,

who have a family altogether of our own.

We have sires, childers,

so on and so forth.

Jaden here is my sire.

He's my brother as well,

by blood, by birth.

This here is Anjolique.

This is her family name, Anjulique.

She is like a sister to me.

Raven over here that is fiddling with his makeup

is a distant cousin,

basically, of the family.

He has been through the bond with, I believe, every member of the family.

So he might as well be

kindred with us.

We are, I guess you could say, more sexual than...

Is it safe safe to say humans?

Oh, God, it just...

The cringe is so hard.

It's so hard to wash.

So you're like, Ska, Ska, come upstairs.

Your daddy's ready to give you your bath.

Sky,

come on.

Hey, I get it, man.

Water's still hot from your granddaddy's bath.

We're all going to wash the dog together.

I get it.

You know, I spent years getting rid of my Texas accent.

I hated talking to, I hated my Texas accent.

You You become a wampire.

No, I mean, I did end up for a little while with a really strange accent where people are like, Are you from Ireland or something?

Because it was like you have to try really hard to get rid of these accents.

They're very, very difficult to get rid of.

But I did not start talking like one payoff.

Is it uh safe to say possible?

Is human?

Is it safe to say is you know I do not do guys.

This my clan, it is time for us to go to the Wattoburger.

Vampire.

We go to Wattaburger together as a vampire clown.

Yes, it is 2 a.m.

in the morning.

That means it is time for us to go to the Walmart Super Center.

Super center.

Or now is the time when we do our shopping.

Oh, no, I forgot to return my bowling shoes.

Oh, baby, it gave the charge for 20 boy bars.

20 boy bars for each shoe I will not wear.

But if the things that we're about to talk about, if they don't happen in a Kentucky accent or an affected Eastern European accent,

it happens in a backwoods, Florida accent.

Because Rod Farrell, the leader of this vampire cult, he spent his childhood bouncing between Murray, Kentucky, and the Florida lake town of Eustis, where the murders actually took place.

Eustis, by the way, is home to the longest consecutive running event honoring George Washington, George Fest, which is held every February, which has been held every February for the last 124 years.

Why are you looking at me with such disdain?

Great.

George Fest.

Wow.

Better get there.

I hope I can secure a hotel for next year.

Now that you've busted that wide open.

I looked up Fun Things to Do in Eustis, and it said go to DeLand.

Whoa, fuck you, dude.

Yeah, it makes no sense if, you know, you're a normal person.

I've heard at George Fest, you can actually walk a black person around like you own them.

Is that true for only $10?

Yeah, well, Kyle's playing as George Washington.

Wow, I've used this.

Wow.

Now, the reason why Rod shared time between Kentucky and Florida is because his grandfather, Harold, made his living as a traveling salesman, although we have no idea what he actually sold.

Inspiration.

And staplers.

Inspiration and staplers.

Just how is when you don't talk about about the pitches out one lead to the other.

But because Rod's mother, Sandra, was so incredibly irresponsible, Harold Gibson forced her and Rod to come with him when he left Kentucky for Florida or Florida for Kentucky.

Because Harold believed that having Rod and Sandra close to him would, quote-unquote, straighten him out.

But really, all it did was fuck up Rod even more.

Because he was constantly switching from one school to another, Rod never found a way to fit in.

As we all know, kids who move around a lot tend to gravitate towards gothness, which Rod found in his early teens during the early 90s.

It sometimes like leads you to become the most unpopular person in school, but every once in a while, a new kid will come to the school and then all of a sudden be the most popular person of the class.

And I don't know if it's just because it depends on if they're hot or not.

Yeah, that's the only thing that matters.

Yeah.

Or they're good at basketball or some shit.

Yeah, that would help.

Yeah.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Which adds to the attractiveness.

Do you know anybody that moved around a lot?

I wonder.

Like, do we know anybody that was the cool person?

It also must be kind of fun to change your persona all the time.

Amber moved around a lot.

But she, you know, it sounded traumatizing for her.

Yeah.

She's not a goth, but does wear black all the time.

She does.

Now, the later statements that Sandra made about her son's goth leanings are very much at odds with her father's statements, although Harold was obviously seeing things through a fundamentalist Pentecostal lens.

See, while Sandra claimed that she tried discouraging her son's goth leanings, at least at first, Harold said that Sandra taught Rod how to make love potions, how to use tarot cards, and how to use candles to perform spells.

So happy you said potions.

Now I tell them how to develop the potion.

Was in my crack.

See, this here love potion is called Boone's Farm.

Now, what this does, it puts your, it puts your potential

in a dreamlike state where they're going...

Harold also claimed that Sandra had a relationship with a so-called shaman priest named Davis.

But I think that all of Harold's claims of witchcraft come down to the fact that Sandra would sometimes play Dungeons and Dragons with little Rod.

But no matter where Rod's golf leanings came from, he got weirder and more withdrawn as he entered his teenage years as a full outcast.

And because his mother was constantly telling him, don't listen to your granddaddy, and she was never actually punishing him, he came to fully understand that there were no consequences for his actions within his own household.

Now, at first, Rod wasn't the worst kid around.

He got into trouble at school for skipping.

He would smoke.

He'd get into trouble for that.

He got into trouble for mocking the names of his teachers.

Mrs.

Stone Cypher, which is a cool name.

That's a cool name.

But then there was also Mr.

Pig.

Now, Mr.

Pig could have avoided that.

Mr.

Pig could have been Mr.

P

in a fucking second.

Mr.

Big.

If he really was.

I feel like guys like that that have a name like that in high school.

Mr.

Pig, and it's pig with two G's.

Yes, I feel like those types of guys, they're looking for a fucking fight.

Like a boy named Sue.

Oh, for sure.

I mean, that's the name that pissed off Poomba.

Exactly.

You know, and so you can't, if it pisses off Poomba.

The pig.

Yeah, and he's like the coolest, nicest pig around.

You can't be fucking around with this.

He's not real.

Yeah.

I think Pumba is technically realer than God.

Let's continue.

Osach, the assistant principal at Rod's School in Kentucky tried having weekly meetings with the young boy to straighten him out.

This is when Rod was, I think, like 13, 14, 15.

Come here, it's like he just toousled his hair a little bit.

Now you think about that, Buster.

The assistant principal discovered that Rod was cutting himself, but Rod said that he'd been doing it for satanic ritual purposes.

Now, this is the early 90s, so the satanic panic was in the news constantly.

So it's far more likely that Rod was using the satanic panic to freak out an authority figure rather than his grandfather's explanation, which was that Rod's idiot mother had initiated him into a satanic cult.

You know, it's it's interesting because what will come up again and again in this little series is the idea of they all need each other.

Yeah.

You know, like him saying, By they all, you mean the Christians and the vampires,

the vampires.

So him saying, like, this is a dumb city.

So he gets to go to his dumb high school and he gets to say,

I'm a satanic cult member.

And because they're taking it seriously, they then, it doubles you down to, and it increases your reputation and then it increases the reputation of the people that are going to strike down these satanic clans and shit like that.

It's great for everybody.

It's great for the social economy of the entire city.

Yeah.

And it not just, it doesn't just help your own, like, it, what, and really, like, with this assistant principal, like, he's not just going to work every day and trying to keep teenagers from blowing each other in the bathroom.

He's going to work every day to do battle with Satan himself.

It makes everything so much more important.

It raises the stakes of his day.

He gets a skip in a step.

Yeah, and having these kids there are the only way a school in Kentucky can be diverse.

We need at least one vampire.

That's what they said, I believe.

I believe he counts as black.

He counts as black.

That's what they say.

He's wearing black.

Now, Harold's claims against Sandra for being a cult member are further disproved by Sandra's own actions.

See, Sandra believed that Rod was having a hard time in school because he was a goth, so she tried to fix the situation by throwing out everything black or dark colored in Rod's room and replacing all of it with bright floral patterns.

Works every time.

Like in the Adams family, when you're putting the happy hunt.

This seemingly was when Rod had one of his first truly violent outbursts.

Instead of just sulking about the room, Rod became enraged and tried to stab his mother with a knife.

Soon after, Rod was expelled from school for reasons entirely different.

But since Sandra never graduated herself, I don't even know why they just said, like, he was expelled from school for a semester.

I just think it was all

good.

I think he was like, get out of here.

Yeah, we hate you.

Yeah.

But since Sandra never graduated herself, she allowed her son Rod to remain a high school dropout starting at the age of 15.

Just remember, Rod, now that you're out of high school, you're a man.

Yeah.

Now, as it often goes, especially in small towns, weirdos find other weirdos.

And in either late 1995 or early 1996, Rod made friends with another Goth teenager in Murray, Kentucky named Stephen Murphy.

Now, Rod said in one of the documentaries that he was already a vampire when he met Stephen.

Stephen will tell you a different story about I was already a vampire.

I remember he kind of like was a vampire and I kind of brought the whole vampire thing to Murray.

So well, yeah, that's what Rod says.

He's totally bullshit.

Yeah, he's bullshitting you,

But they said that the two of them became friends despite the meddlings of the other local kids who tried to get them to fight each other because they both claimed that they were vampires.

So no, we're not going to fight each other.

We're going to be friends.

Yeah, we vampires hug.

Vampires are known to be friendly.

Absolutely.

Definitely hang out in groups.

From what it seems like, I think it's a little more likely that Rod was already into gothy shit when the two of them met, but Stephen Murphy was the one who introduced Rod into vampirism as a lifestyle.

Whoa!

One was a hobbyist.

I'm taking sides here, bro.

I'm taking sides.

But I view that Rod Rod is a more of a, he was a goth hobbyist, and then he met Stephen Murphy that was like really in the lifestyle.

And then as soon as Rod saw that he met somebody else that was about 15% more goth than him, he realized, I actually have to be the same amount of goth as him.

Yes.

And also remember, they're both 15, 16 year old boys.

Yeah.

And Stephen told Rod that he was, quote, the prince of the city.

Wow.

The city of Being Murray, Kentucky.

And he was therefore the strongest vampire in town.

He'd also taken Jaden as his vampire name, because everyone takes vampire names when they get turned.

Yes.

And I was going to take Willow, but I heard it was taken.

So now I'm Jaden Smith Vampire.

That's my last name, vampire.

did you get that effort ID

wampire you saying vampire

it is wampire

actually uh the kid that has the Eastern European accent uh that's uh Stephen Murphy's little brother oh yes yes yes yes now within I think a month or two maybe sooner Stephen made Rod a vampire by siring him to use the vampire parlance siring means you make someone else a vampire.

Make him a vampire!

In January of 1996, the two of them went to the local cemetery to what they called the chosen tree, where all the local vampires have been made by their sires.

Rod made three cuts on his left arm and let Stephen drink of his blood.

Then Stephen made three cuts on his left arm, and Rod drank of his blood.

Then the two sat in quiet meditation for hours, satisfied in their new vampiric bond.

And this really happened.

Yeah.

These people did this sort of shit all the time.

Oh, yeah.

And they continued to do so for years and years, even after Rod killed two people.

Stephen Murphy actually still does it to this day and takes it all extraordinarily seriously.

Just sell booze.

It's also important to remember that Rod was sired in January of 1996.

He committed the murder of Heather Windorf's parents in November of the same year.

So keep in mind that everything we're about to discuss happens over the course of about 10 months.

Yes, the way of the bombuar is very fast.

You almost take the express line when you have become a bomb.

Now, I know we're going to get into it, but I'm pretty sure when he killed these people, he didn't drink their blood.

Well,

okay.

Jesus fucking.

You just jumped away.

I know.

I'm sorry.

I'm sorry.

You just jumped away.

Yeah.

We'll get to it.

I'm sorry.

I got bad again.

No, I.

You got to stop poking holes in this story.

I really do.

I really

do.

Stop looking for logic here.

Remember, it's 16-year-old kids talking shit.

They all have a fourth-grade reading level.

Nobody is.

There is no Stephen Hawking in this scenario.

I will actually argue against that.

Like, they do read.

They read Aleister.

The Masquerade is quite reading heavy.

Yeah.

And these kids, they read Aleister Crowley.

You know, they read the so-called Necronomicon.

Like, they're actually very well-read kids.

They're just, uh, they just are very, uh, some of them are very gullible and very prone to fantasy.

I noticed an L.

Ron Hubbard book on their shelves.

Oh, very much so.

Got you.

Now, Rod's new vampiric image was quite at odds with his true life as a typical teenager from a dysfunctional family who smoked Marlborough's and ate McDonald's.

But that, of course, was the whole point.

Oh, he's not a vampire?

No, he's Rod.

Soon enough, Stephen was initiating Rod into the world of vampirism by sharing his experiences of, quote, dealing with ghosts and witches throughout his past lives.

Never take their first offer.

Always barter with a ghost.

Never take stick of price for a casket or a candelabra.

Now, what am I bartering these ghosts for?

Things, money, stuff, business.

Out of the deal.

But Rod immediately picked up on the game that Steven was playing here.

Rod immediately tried to one-up Steven and take control.

He began building his own personal lore by claiming that he'd been sent to Earth as a vampire to challenge God himself.

I'm not on Earth.

I am here to tell God you better work.

God put some sissy in that wall.

It's time for vampires to come to town.

Rod then said that a great vampiric prophecy would be revealed in the year 2000.

But before that would come to pass, Rod needed Stephen's help to recruit a vampiric family in Kentucky.

Even though Steven had already been doing the vampire thing before Rod even showed up.

I mean, it's bullshit, bro.

You want your own vampiric family, but like...

Like I do that.

Like I'm the...

Yeah, you do that, but the vampire, but you know, the vampire prophecy says actually I'm the one that has to be doing that.

That's what I saw in my dreams and my vampiric prophecy dreams being a 500-year-old vampire.

My vampiric prophecy dreams also told me I need to form a vampire cult here in Murray, Kentucky.

Why?

So, what's who's lying to who?

It's real weird that your vampiric dreams are saying that, but I think what happened is that you, my vampiric powers, are so powerful that they seep into your mind, and now you are having my vampiric dreams about me and my vampiric family, which you now have to help me with.

Wow,

wow!

I know how they think.

Now, as I said, Stephen and Rod took the vampire lifestyle very seriously.

They would talk shit about the so-called rival vampire gangs in the area.

But when they said vampire gangs, what they really meant were the other goth kids in the surrounding towns who didn't take things as seriously as they took them.

Yeah, one of them was even talking about Evangelion or whatever that is.

It's their only chance at friends.

War must be made.

Two clans of vampires can't exist.

Not in the center of vampirism.

Murray, Kentucky.

Stephen and Rod called the other goth kids who worked at Walmart and McDonald's, the ones who wore cat eye lenses and prosthetic fangs, a bunch of fucking dorks, a bunch of fucking posers.

Posers each one.

Those kids weren't real vampires because real vampires didn't even have fangs.

No, dude, they can't afford them.

No, dude, Rod and Steve, they didn't have fangs and they were real vampires.

So therefore, real vampires don't have fangs.

And anyone who tried using fangs, fucking poser, fuck you.

Dude, who cares?

All right?

My teeth are specifically short.

Yes.

It's actually super difficult for me to bite shit.

All right?

And that's what makes me a real vampire because these privileged ass motherfuckers with their long ass teeth

Ain't born like I am.

Amen.

Now as far as what made someone a real vampire, the delineating line was the regular consumption of human blood.

It is, however, important to note that Stephen was not a violent kid, or at least he wasn't any more violent than the average small-town Kentuckian.

See, while Stephen did and still does drink blood, he had very strict rules around not hurting or killing other people for it, because in his vampire world, human life is sacred.

Let's hear from Stephen himself, expanding on how his vampiric family consumes blood in one one of the documentaries.

You cut enough to where you have at least, you know, a small stream of blood coming out, just for enough to ingest like a few ounces or so.

Then they will take from you.

After that is completed, they will cut themselves and you will take from them, which is the crossover, the embracement.

My blood tastes real metallic.

It tastes like sticking a spoon in your mouth.

Of course, then one of the people that I embraced actually said my blood tasted like dirt one time.

I was like, wow.

You know, it's just, it's all on, you know,

how your life is, you know, stress level, whether or not your adrenaline's rushing through your body.

That'll make your blood taste differently.

Just, you know, normal everyday stuff, you know, will cause your blood to have a different, you know, taste and different texture and color.

He has the same cadence as a man who owns a brewery.

I mean, technically, he is a brewery.

And also, I don't think it's going to surprise anyone to find out that Stephen Murphy Murphy wears an assortment of tool t-shirts throughout his appearances on the documentary.

Man, he's got to fucking show that Maynard gang is strong.

This is scary.

We interviewed a vampire.

We have interviewed other people.

And they do this, right?

So part of what they do is when they consume blood, it's droplets at a time.

They are not.

He says ounces.

He doesn't know what things are.

He doesn't know measurements.

As a cook, I'm pretty sure he doesn't know.

If it was ounces of blood, that's a lot of blood.

He is, they're sucking on razor cut marks on each other's arms.

Yeah, they just cut, they cut the top of their arm and the other ones suck it out.

And that's basically it.

And this is honestly close to standard goth behavior.

I have seen a lot of cuttings.

Well, I'm not sure.

Cutting yourself.

Cuttings and page.

Cuttings are a whole different thing altogether.

But in terms of goth behavior,

I always remember the first goth girl I fell in love with in middle school.

She carved Kurt into her arm, right?

Like that stuff.

Or Kurt Cobain, I'd imagine.

Yes.

And it was stuff like that where it was a little bit more because they were edgy.

Oh, yeah.

No, I knew a kid.

What was his name?

Bert.

Wow.

What an evil man he was.

The legendary,

the long arm of Bert.

No, I think Bert was his friend.

I think it was Danny who carved.

No, he didn't carve.

He burned the word evil into his forearm with a lighter.

I had to change it to stable when I started applying for work.

And it it got infected.

Oh, yeah.

Remember when our roommate, who was also managing all of our money for Murderfist at the time, got deceit and malice tattooed on his arms?

We're all like, cool.

You're in charge of the money.

You can't have deceit and malice tattooed to your arms.

Yeah, and then he left in the middle of the night with everything that we had in the last of my bologna.

Which was, I believe, enough for a cart and a cigarette.

Very much so.

That is on the two of you.

Yes.

We learned.

We know.

We learned.

No deceit, no malice.

No, while Stephen Murphy is definitely cringy, he's also, or at least he seems totally harmless.

From what I can tell, he and the others in Murray, Kentucky used vampirism as a way to make themselves feel powerful in a place that absolutely fucking hates them.

Going from what he told other people in the mid-90s, it seems like Stephen knew, at least back then, that he wasn't really a vampire vampire.

But, you know, it did give him something to lean on.

But after Rod Farrell Farrell murdered two people, I think vampirism was what enabled Stephen to survive in Murray, Kentucky.

So I think he had no choice but to go all in, and all the rest of the goth kids followed.

You know, it's a lifestyle choice that you make, and it also is what takes you out of

this bullshit you're in.

Yeah.

I totally understand.

I get it.

I just want to be a vampire.

I get it.

Yeah, I totally get what they're going for.

I get where they're coming from.

Especially in Kentucky.

Oh, yeah.

But Stephen's mother, she does not agree with Stephen's lifestyle choice, nor does she agree with the choice of Stephen's little brother, who is the kid you heard earlier speaking in the Eastern European accent.

Vambire.

Here's what their mother had to say about vampirism in the documentary.

Vampires.

I call it bullshit.

Vampires are mythical beings, okay?

A figment of somebody's imagination.

written up in a book that's been made into a cult by kids who think

trips on acid, like the 70s, ain't good enough for them.

They have to do

bizarre things.

Okay, she kind of

fell apart there at the end, but I love the idea that she's like, can't they just do acid?

Acid was fine for us.

Like, you just did acid.

You listened to some prong.

You call Sean Rush.

Like, that's all we needed.

We were innocent.

We were babes.

Now, what's unclear is how much Rod Farrell believed in vampirism when Steven sired him in January of 1996.

See, later, in the lead-up to his double murder trial, Rod Farrell was diagnosed as having schizotypal personality disorder complete with hallucinations.

They say this shit all the time.

It's just because he said all of this stuff about being a vampire because he didn't want to appear like he was fucking giving up on the whole Kfabe of it.

And they're all just like, they always do this.

I felt the same way about

the Slenderman killer girl.

Oh, sure.

Where I felt like she's just aping the symptoms that her mother was exhibiting, and she's learning to sort of like fake it.

But he, I would say that Rod Ferrell's grip on reality is loose, to say the very least.

But what point is it just being dumb?

Just too stupid.

Rod Farrell also had a pretty heavy substance abuse problem.

This is the murderer himself a few years after his conviction conviction, talking about his drug use during that year.

I was very big on the drug scene.

Marijuana, acid,

occasional PCP,

crank once in a while,

and whenever I could get my hands on it, heroin.

Yeah, it didn't help the thinking process.

I don't think it made him a great problem solver.

Yeah, so while I think Rod's friend Stephen Murphy knew deep down that this was all just pretend, no matter how hard he's dug in on his vampirism in the years since, Rod Farrell himself seemed to have a far looser grip on reality during the year he supposedly became a vampire.

Don't give weed a bad name like that.

Weed don't do it.

Weed don't do it.

I think it might be the crank.

Yeah, I've smoked weed every day since I was 16.

I've never sucked blood.

Not once.

Hey, try it, man.

Have you ever sucked blood on weed?

I mean, if I did, it would have to be because that's how I wake up.

Yeah.

And

I think it was probably the meth combined with the acid that tends to give you some weird ideas.

And being stupid.

It all big old mixed.

And being an absolute fucking psychopath because Rod Farrell is without a doubt a psychopath.

North Way.

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Now before long, Stephen and Rod were performing so-called rituals at the local cemetery where Rod had been sired.

And while one might think they were doing weird rituals of their own making, it's probable they were performing so-called ceremonies inspired by the tabletop RPG Vampire the Masquerade.

Yes, yes, burn the books!

Burn those evil books!

Now as far as how these kids got into Vampire the Masquerade, it all comes down to small-town dynamics.

See, in small cities like this, especially in the south, young weirdo college kids and older weirdo high school kids, they tend to interact and mingle because there's honestly just not that many of you.

And goth kids, despite their goofiness, do tend to be a little more mature than their peers.

Like when I was in high school, I hung out with college kids.

You know, it's just the way it goes.

I think they're just better at talking.

Yeah.

So, Stephen Murphy was friends with some local college kids who attended Murray State.

Specifically, these kids were in the drama department.

No way.

What?

Yeah.

The drama department.

Oh, no.

The drama department.

Yes.

I'm studying drama.

Where?

Murray State University.

I'm at Murray State currently.

My major is Bucket.

And my minor is Chevo.

Again, I cannot talk shit because I got a creative writing degree from Texas Technical University.

Hey, Texas Tech allowed you to be creative.

But the key here is the name.

of the troop.

Well, specifically, these kids were in the drama department and they'd formed a club called the Victorian Age Masquerade Performing Society, which it took all of us a very long time to figure out that for short, that is Vamps.

Yeah, Victorian Age Masquerade Performing Society.

Wow.

That's cool then.

Yeah.

No, it's fun.

It's fun for college kids.

Yeah.

I mean, basically, VAMPS was an improv group.

They were all part of the drama department.

And they found that a great tool for developing their improv skills was extended play sessions of Vampire the Masquerade.

Yeah, I mean, I get it.

Murder Fist was black market puppet players.

Like, we all had these stupid ass names that we thought was cool as fuck.

We were theater kids.

We didn't know the difference.

And do you think that, all right, social hierarchy here.

Where does the vampire improv group fit in at Murray State?

Yeah.

Where, like, between who?

Between like the diabetics?

Like, you think it's...

I mean, that's everybody.

You think it's the kids?

Yeah, yeah, yeah, sure.

So it's diabetics, kids in wheelchairs, vamps.

What's below

vamps at Murray State besides the pedophile club?

I believe.

Probably the Roadkill Boys.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And something called the Somali A Club.

No one liked him.

Yes.

Murray State.

The Murray State Somali A Club.

It's like just two guys with a bottle of Merlot.

And it's like, we've got to get out of this town.

Have you thought about becoming a vampire?

I heard that the chess club in Murray State just plays checkers.

Yeah, hell yeah.

Gotcha.

Gotcha, you fuckers.

In a nutshell, Vampire the Masquerade takes place in a sort of goth punk world where vampires, werewolves, and other supernatural creatures are real.

Boo.

The core.

Boo.

The core game elements are story and character interaction.

Because while many other games are about having the skill to kill monsters, Vampire the Masquerade allows you to roleplay as a monster.

Each game involves several vampires from either the same or different clans who all have their own personality traits as well as their own abilities and disadvantages.

Awesome.

Called Disciples and Banes.

Yeah.

But this is where all the drama and action are created.

Basically, players get to have overly dramatic fights with with their friends that are both verbal and sometimes physical.

And the game gives everyone a safe space to be an over-the-top weirdo, which honestly sounds incredibly fun and incredibly freeing.

Unlike DD, which I do love, Vampire the Masquerade is way more about political machinations and character development.

So it's everybody playing off of each other.

DD, oftentimes, the game itself is really just about trying to sell me on me.

Because I admit, I'm eyebrows deep in this.

DD makes you essentially like, you're right.

It's sometimes it devolves in just killing things.

Yeah.

A heist or doing stuff.

Or Vampire the Masquerade, again, it can make a whole lifestyle.

Yep.

And it can go anywhere.

Like with D and D, there is a goal.

We are going into this.

We're going XYZ.

Yeah, we're going into a cave.

We have a campaign where we're going to go into a cave.

We're going to kill a monster and a bunch of weird shit's going to happen on the way.

But Vampire the Masquerade, it just sort of goes indefinitely.

And the story can go wherever you want it to go.

It's kind of cool.

It's pretty cool.

Oh, no.

I've been been reading all the manuals.

Oh, it gets fucked up.

No one ever pretends to be Frankenstein.

Dude.

Lion ain't no Frankenstein.

We're all Frankenstein's game.

Yeah, no fire.

That would be, honestly, I love the idea everybody's a different kind of Frankenstein.

Tell me something that would definitely turn into a fuck party.

Yeah.

Well, that's the other thing about Vampire the Masquerade that makes it really popular with goth kids is that it's very fluid.

It allows you to explore your sexuality.

It allows, like, if you're feeling kind of weird about, like, you know, like, you know, boys kind of give me a boner sometimes.

Vampire the Masquerade allows you to kind of explore that feeling without feeling so crazy about it.

Yeah, in Dungeons and Dragons, the only fluid is Mountain Dew.

Sometimes there is butt sweat

because

it gets warm in my

dining room.

It does get warm in there.

Now, where Dungeons and Dragons has a dungeon master that runs the game, the game master in Vampire the Masquerade is called the storyteller.

It's different.

It tells you so much about the game itself.

The storyteller is responsible for controlling what else but the story and the world in which the players exist.

I'm the vampire's boss.

But instead of being just an arbiter of gameplay mechanics and rules, the storyteller is more like an improv coach.

They exist to help the players have a good time living within their characters while keeping the story contained within the established lore, which is both extensive and extremely important to the game.

More is number one.

Now, as an improv coach, do they inappropriately touch the ladies?

You can't officially call yourself an improv teacher unless you've played the game.

All right, let's do the game.

Let's call everybody sit on Papa's knee.

It depends.

Are the girls paying for the improv coaching?

Yeah, because if they are, they're absolutely.

That's what they're paying for.

The improv coaching is the free part.

Well, players and storytellers obsess over the details of their own mythologies as they roleplay in Vampire the Masquerade.

But that mythology has to exist within the lore.

In fact, huge amounts of the Masquerade rulebooks are dedicated solely to the lore rather than the gameplay.

Oh, yeah.

But once the players get playing.

So much reading.

Yes.

But once the players get playing, shit can get real serious real fast.

You betcha.

While many players simply talk and describe the action, like say a DD game, the really hardcore Vampire the Masquerade players actually act out everything that happens in real time.

Acting!

Theater!

The most dangerous game of all.

Because one must be careful who you pretend to be because one becomes what you pretend to be.

What they act out, however, usually excludes real violence and presumably full penetrative sex.

Although I'm sure there have been many masquerade games over the years that have given the latter a go with varying success.

Yeah, I've never heard anybody getting dome from a half-orc.

It doesn't work like that.

D never leads to sex.

Most of the time, doesn't definitely lead to sex.

No.

Blown by an orc, it'll just get chewed off.

Yes,

flesh is back on the menu.

Meat's back on the menu.

Yeah.

We all know vampires suck.

Yep.

Yes.

Hey, bite.

Ben suck.

Wampire.

Ben suck.

Wampire.

Kensucky.

Whoa.

Wow.

Yeah.

Vampires really put the suck in Kensucky.

You could also kind of do that with like tech sucks.

Yes.

Oh, wow.

Fun.

You can't really do it with Florida, though.

Florida ass.

Horrida.

Write it down.

These are shirts.

Now, when Rod Farrell arrived at his first Vampire the Masquerade game, hosted by the Victorian Age Masquerade Performing Society in the storyteller's basement, welcome, Miss Pretzels!

He found the college improv actors to be, in a word, ridiculous.

They wore sunglasses day and night.

They always wore their costumes and their makeup, no matter what.

And worst of all, they didn't even drink each other's blood.

In other words, Rod Ferrell didn't understand that these were just fucking college kids being weird and having fun playing a game from sundown to sun up.

Then they understand that the blood's the worst part.

Yeah.

All the rest of the stuff is what's fun about being a vampire.

Yeah.

Yeah, the blood is always the worst part about being a vampire.

It's always like the pain in the ass.

Like that's the, that is the moral of almost every vampire story is that getting blood's a problem.

It's always going to be.

Yeah.

And you need human blood.

And if you're a vampire and you drink other vampire blood, then really nothing's happening.

Yeah, you throw it up.

Something depending on the lore.

Well, that's what they, that's what this world of vampires, what they would say is that, yes, vampire blood tastes like copper or it tastes very, but human blood is sweet blood.

Delicious.

They love human blood.

The diabetics.

Yeah.

Yes.

Yeah.

They talk about fat guys.

A lot of them.

God just sucking in a big fat guy's belly.

It's delicious.

It's like ice cream.

At times, as many as as 17 people would participate in a vampire the masquerade game in Murray, Kentucky.

That's awesome.

Yeah, and they were all led by a storyteller named James Yoe.

Yoe never allowed drugs or alcohol to be used during game sessions, and he also banned weapons or harmful physical contact, which Rod Farrell also thought was super fucking lame.

It's a vampire masquerade RPG game.

We don't need to kill each other.

Nor do we need to drink alcohol.

Listen, that is only distracting and it's tiring.

I have people present at all the time.

And it's pronounced Yoe!

I can't Yancey him like the other girls are.

I know, I can't help him.

I know.

But even though the vampire scene at Murray State wasn't as hardcore as Rod wanted, he still began joining in on game sessions, and he still greatly enjoyed himself.

Yeah, I bet he did like it.

The game would usually start in James Yoe's basement, where Yoe would hand out props like prosthetic fangs, claw finger ornaments, or red dye to paint blood or scars.

And once properly adorned, the players would go outside and explore town using intricate maps that Yoe would draw, improving the whole way.

But going from what a cop said during one of these documentaries, the highly fundamentalist Christians in Murray, Kentucky, they actually believed that these kids were in a satanic vampire cult.

They marveled.

This cop, he was flabbergasted that some of these members of the cult, they slowly faded away over the years.

I guess they just went underground.

The vampires went underground in order to commiserate with their masters in Europe.

Yeah, and he said, but they're still this one group, the one led by that Stephen Murphy boy.

They're still here.

We can still see them.

And I don't understand why all the rest of them, why they went underground, why we can still just see each other.

They must be preparing for a great event.

Well, what these fundamentalists didn't understand was that the so-called vampire cult members didn't go underground.

They were college kids playing a role-playing game who fucking graduated and moved away.

But Stephen and his friends were townies, and so they just didn't leave.

So tell me, now, so they got a degree in being the vampire.

Wait a second, Joe.

Please, Dr.

Vampire.

Okay, so you're being a vampire, not my question, Mr.

Vampire.

Dr.

Vampire, please.

I do not go to four years of vampire school to be called mr vampire i didn't mean to insult you dr vampire but now i just want you know you're not gonna come back to suck me and the rest of the police force no i have moved on to another small town in kentucky

i have moved up north to the upper peninsula i gotta say honestly it's just uh well it's nice to catch up you know you don't ever see anybody live town anymore because i got the job at ibm

Oh,

actually,

that very well.

Now, you're selling these vampire degrees, it's leading a job.

So I talk to my son about that.

I unfortunately did not get a job at IBM.

I am stuck in the eternal cycle of drama student, drama teacher.

Let me just tell my son, I got one word for you, right?

You want to make money?

Vampirism.

Make money.

But during the masquerade games back in 1996, the players would usually end up at the local cemetery.

That's where the game really got going.

And it's awesome.

Yeah, because then they found that once they got to an isolated spot away from the prying eyes of locals, they could become less inhibited.

The game really got flowing once they got to the cemetery.

All right, once we're outside, we're allowed to yell again.

My mom just counted.

My mom's got to go to work in the morning, so we get out yelling in my vampire-covered dojo at home.

Now, Rod Farrell wanted his character in Vampire the Masquerade to be, as author Aphrodite Jones put it, a hedonist, a porn animal, a sensualist.

Rod wanted to be a rebel whose only aim was to destroy the widely accepted ideals of American society.

I just came.

Stephen Murphy also got more into his character once they started playing the game.

But Aphrodite Jones neglected to mention which clan Rod and Stephen chose, which is incredibly important in Vampire the Masquerade.

Yeah, it's almost like she didn't care, or like it didn't matter, but it does.

It does.

Choosing a clan in Vampire of the Masquerade is like choosing your class in D ⁇ D.

You know, in D ⁇ D, you got Paladin, Druid, Mage, Thief, many others.

Jigolo.

Warlock.

Well, there are 13 main clans in Vampire the Masquerade.

Apparently, there are also other smaller sub-clans.

It depends on what extension you're playing or what excited, what you want to include in your game.

Yes, but each of those 13 clans has their own unique traits and their own unique lore.

Now, going by the most recent Vampire the Masquerade rulebook, our head researcher Joel surmised that Stephen Murphy was probably a member of Clan Bruha.

This is all speculation here at the last podcast on the left team.

Okay.

Clan Bruha, they're the counterculture punk rock types.

They initiate political uprisings.

Rod Farrell, however, was likely a member of Clantoriador.

According to the rulebook, vampires in Clantoriador are cursed by their own sensuality, which makes them divas obsessed by aesthetic perfection.

To a Torreador, beauty is power, and love can make them do just about anything.

They can even make the dead feel something raw, something real.

Or so the rule book states.

Oh, you come out upstairs, daddy's ready for a second bath.

Come on, daddy,

you scout the daddy.

Mom, I'm being raw and real down here.

you scout.

Your granddaddy's got to go to jail

in the morning.

So he's doing the first babe.

Oh, is he?

Oh, so his sentence is coming up.

Yeah.

Very quickly now, the state is very eager to have him.

Okay.

Everyone has to go.

I have to say goodbye to my grandfather.

We have to pause the game.

He's going to jail for molesting his niece.

Oh, yeah, I forgot he did that.

Nice is this town in France.

That's very good.

Thank you.

Thank you.

That's my fucking bit.

And so, after joining Clan Torreador, Rod chose his Wampir name.

The name that he hoped would send chills down the spines of his enemies, a name that he believed oozed sensuality and power.

From that day forth, Rod Farrell became

Visago.

Man, now he's a real vampire.

I do stand behind changing your name from Rod.

Roderick is a hastily named child.

I'm so happy that it wasn't Rodney.

No, no, it's Roderick.

It's Roderick.

Yeah, Roderick Farrell.

Yeah.

But that's how one version of the story goes when it comes to choosing Visago as his vampire name.

According to Rod, he chose Visago long before he met Steven.

Like, Steven didn't turn into a vampire or nothing.

Like, when he met Steven, like, he was already Visago.

And like, Steven's talking bullshit.

I've been a vampire.

Yeah.

Here in one of the documentaries is Steven explaining the process of him choosing Visago.

At time,

I was a practitioner of witchcraft.

I'd also practiced demonology.

I'd taken Visago as my patron demon at that time.

He being one of the nine crown princes of hell and having legions under him.

In demonology, taking a patron demon,

you basically

literally the same way Catholics would take a patron saint.

What a fucking moron.

Damian Eccles is so lucky he's around.

Damian Eccles, like just comparing the two is just like makes Damian Eccles look like Bono.

You know, like, wow.

This fucking guy, because he's, it's always the, as they get, as we get older,

those of us who, you know, get rid of our accent as the younger, as younger boys, like, the accent comes back a little bit and it is funny.

Like, yeah, you know, I study in, I study in demonology.

I was, you know, just Visago.

He's nine, he's one of the nine crime princes of hell.

I don't know.

Honestly, get that kind of recommendation is kind of difficult.

It's actually pretty difficult.

It's pretty hard to get him on vote.

You know, I don't know if you've ever read The Lesser Key of Solomon, but he is within that pantheon of demons, along with Asmodiel.

And if you want to hear one of them keys, it sounds like this.

That's one of the lesser keys.

One of the major keys.

As far as where Stephen Murphy got his vampire name, remember Stephen Murphy's vampire name is Jaden.

I read mine in a comic book.

It was Star Trek The Next Generation.

Yeah.

Yeah,

it was the episode where Data loses his memory on a pre-industrial planet, and the woman that helps Data is named Jaden.

And Stephen Murphy, I suppose, just liked how it sounded because he's still a fucking nerd, just like the rest of us.

Yeah, you know, it's a TNG thing, so.

Yeah, that's what I did.

I was a vampire still, but I love Star Trek.

Yeah.

Many vampires do love Star Trek.

I bet.

Now, before long, Rod and Stevens were role-playing all the the time, and Rod especially could not seem to turn it off once he got started.

But Steven was a stickler for the rules, and the first cracks in their relationship showed when Rod refused to follow said rules.

I must remind you all again that this does end in a double murder.

Okay.

I think that part of the reason why Rod and Stevens started bickering is because they also had a strong sexual attraction to each other, because both boys seems like at least a little bit fluid.

If you're full-on vampire, you're a tiny bit fluid.

Definitely.

During During one game session, for example, Stephen kissed Rod and sucked on his lips until they bled.

And it's pretty likely that the two of them were fooling around outside the game, as is their right, nay, their responsibility, as Goth teen boys.

So there's a lot of big feelings surrounding all of this shit.

Oh, very much so.

Now, despite the fact that Rod wasn't playing by the rules, both the game storyteller and Stephen Murphy began to believe that Rod was taking the game entirely too seriously.

This conversation that Stephen and the storyteller had, this is why I think Stephen didn't always believe that he was a vampire.

No.

See, every person who played vampire was weird, but James Yoe and Stephen Murphy were worried because Rod truly was beginning to believe he was a vampire and they were making fun of him behind his back for it.

Yeah.

Rod even began telling students on the Murray State campus that he really was a 500-year-old immortal being named Visago.

I don't think you understand the perilous social position Vamps is in, okay?

Because, like, honestly, we're in between the Ross Perot fan club and the People with No Feet collective, all right?

And we need to kind of think about this as a, we don't need to ruin this, yeah, okay, for us.

Yeah, we can't have a high school student going around campus telling them that he's a 500-year-old vampire named Visago, yeah, because Jenny's not gonna come to the next meeting if I've got a high schooler who thinks he's a real fucking vampire.

You're ruining everything.

Well, things got even more tense between Stephen and Rod when they got into a fight over a girl.

And it was rumored that Rod was again breaking the rules by dropping acid during game sessions.

You don't know.

Let him drop the acid.

I mean, feeling at that point, just like he's doing it.

We're sitting there for five hours.

It's more like 12.

Gotta do acid.

But the biggest rift came when Stephen dropped the veil of the fantasy just a little.

See, Stephen, when he started playing Vampire the Masquerade, he changed his character.

And he told Rod that he'd only been sired two years before they met, which went totally against what Stephen had told Rod when they first got together.

And Rod became furious that Stephen had been made, quote, without the approval of the elders.

And Rod was genuinely pissed that Stephen had pretended to be a full vampire.

But the final straw came when Stephen admitted to Rod that he was actually,

shudder to think, a Christian.

What?

Which made Rod realize that Stephen was no vampire at all.

Fuck that?

What the fuck?

You went to church

in Murray, Kentucky.

Yeah.

They have one church for every 300 people.

Murray, Kentucky does?

Yeah.

Yeah.

According to the documentary in the 90s.

Yeah.

Well, the town that I grew up in, yeah, it was less than 400 people.

I think we had five churches.

If you didn't go to church, it's so much harder to not have gone to church.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's extremely difficult to have missed church.

Because you look like a psychopath.

Yes.

You're forced to do church.

Yes.

But just as the showdown between Stephen and Rod was about to reach a breaking point, Rod's grandfather Harold was called back down to Florida on business.

So, as was the custom by that point, Rod and Sandra went with him.

So, in the spring of 1996, Rod arrived in the lake town of Eustis, Florida, armed with his Visago the Vampire persona, where he met and captivated the teenage girl whose parents he would one day murder.

Soon after his arrival, Rod met a 14-year-old named Heather Windorf, but instead of just saying, Hi, I'm Rod,

he told her that he was a vampire named Visago who had just woken up after being in a slumber for five centuries.

Wow, that's amazing.

That's crazy.

You don't even have a bedhead or nothing.

That's amazing.

You just woke up?

Yep.

You don't even have no coffee or nothing?

I do not need coffee for I'm an immortal being.

Wow, that's amazing.

My name's Heather.

My name's Heather.

And my doctor said that they had to separate my legs when I was a child.

I was born with mermaid syndrome.

My mom used to drink whiteout while she was pregnant with me.

Eustace.

No.

This claim was made despite the fact that Heather was introduced to Rod by her best friend, Janice Leclerc.

Janice Leclerc had known Rod since they were both in the second grade.

So the whole I've been asleep for five centuries thing was kind of hard to explain away.

He told me he was a vampire.

I've known him since the second grade.

I don't think he's a vampire.

Wow, that's 500 years ago?

Yeah.

I didn't know you were 500 years old, too.

That's funny.

That's interesting.

But Rod found some way to explain that away.

I'm a vampire.

Yeah.

He said that although he was cursed with immortality, he was eager to finally rejoin society.

The first step that this immortal being was taking was to hang out at a Florida lake town, dressed like a late 20th century gothic teenager.

Is there anything more vampiric?

There's anything more absolutely intoxicating than a vampire posing as an 18-year-old in Eustis.

Uh, please, 16-year-old.

Yum!

Ultimate vampire move!

I've been all over.

Casablanca.

I've been to Tehran.

I've been to Tokyo.

I've been to Mongolia.

But here's where I found my love.

I have crossed oceans of time to get to Eustace.

I'm so surprised that Rod knows where Tehran is.

I saw it on CNN while I was trying to jerk off.

I was sort of flipping back and forth between the scrambled porn.

Now, please remind me once more.

Have I missed George Fest yet?

Or must I wait until next February comes?

Unfortunately, yeah, he's coming back next February.

You're going to have to get in.

You're going to get in now.

You want to get in right now if you want to do the wooden teeth contest.

You know how hard it is to be a vampire with wooden teeth?

It's called analog.

Oh my God, if you're a vampire with wooden teeth, if you bite somebody in the chest, are you putting a stake through their heart?

Interesting.

Write it down, save it for our game.

Now, Rod regaled Heather with tales of his life amongst the 15th-century nobility.

That's the life that he had lived before he had taken his slumber.

We ate a lot of cheese.

There's a lot of mirrors everywhere.

Big hats.

Lots of wigs.

Even though he'd spent five centuries astrally projecting to phantom cities across the world, he'd chosen to re-emerge in physical form form as a 16-year-old American boy because it was the perfect opportunity to be what he called the ultimate rebel.

Heather, meanwhile, she was hesitant to believe Rod in the beginning, but it really didn't take her that long to fully commit.

That meant that she was either incredibly gullible or incredibly bored.

But I'm more inclined to give her the benefit of the doubt and believe that she was incredibly bored for personal reasons.

I got stuck in a water slide when I was nine and five men collided with my forehead.

Speaking as someone who was 14 living in a town of less than 400 in the mid-90s, it really was mind-numbingly boring and frustrating because you got just enough of a taste of the outside world from books, movies, and TV to know that cooler and more interesting shit was happening everywhere else but where you were at that very moment.

But because it was pre-internet, you only got glimpses of the outside world.

So you didn't have a full picture of what the world was really like or how things actually worked.

But if you had a strong enough imagination, you could fill in the gaps yourself.

And if you're like, I don't know, 14 years old, if the wrong person comes around, they can really do a number on you.

So yeah, I can't really blame Heather for hoping that maybe vampires were real and maybe she was special enough to be chosen by one.

And I certainly can't blame her for what happened to her parents a few months later.

I will say, honestly, you know, if a vampire was going to be real, he'd be from out of town.

You know, it's not like I believe like Bobby Weathers from down the street.

I don't believe Bobby Weathers was a fucking vampire.

He was from out of town.

How was I supposed to know?

I don't know.

But turned out Mr.

Henderson, he was a mummy.

Now that is true.

That is true.

That is true.

He

He was a mummy.

Now, Heather was unfortunately fully primed to believe Rod's bullshit before he even arrived.

Heather wasn't a full goth when she met Rod, but she was interested in ancient civilizations.

She'd learned about reincarnation, and she'd read every Anne Rice novel that had ever been written up to that point.

So when Rod began telling her, this 14-year-old girl, that the two of them had been matched together for hundreds of years in past lives, and that he regularly astrally traveled to ancient civilizations as a magical ancient vampire, it fit into Heather's understanding of what she wanted the world to be.

See, Rod told Heather that he was an all-powerful ancient being with powers similar to a god, and as a god, he'd been called to help save the United States from greed, corruption, and the ugly Americans who threatened to destroy this planet.

Rod was therefore assembling a team of young Americans just like Heather to join this important mission.

And if she did what Rod said, Visargo, he would one day sire her, just like he'd sired so many other teenagers all over the country.

Now, before,

before we begin our conquest of this very United States of America,

what I need you to do is help me with my spelling test.

What is

this word?

Apostrophe.

Do you know how to apply for a GED?

Have you heard of a FAFSA?

School loan.

Now, Heather said that she thought Rod was an egomaniac when she first met him, but she was also immediately attracted to him.

He was sensitive.

He had an appealing voice.

Thank you.

She liked his message about America being totally fucking bullshit.

Because this was also a really appealing idea to a sensitive small-town teen in the mid-90s.

That's what Heather faces.

It makes me laugh.

It's made me laugh a lot.

Physically, though, Heather thought that Rod was kinda gross.

Yeah, I don't like you at all.

You smell bad.

You look bad.

He was skinny and pale, with long, ratty black hair tied into a ponytail, and he was not a handsome boy.

No.

But he emitted what Heather called a mystical eroticism and he knew how to talk just like Brad Pitt in interview with the vampire.

No one's ever talked to me before.

That's the thing.

Honestly, if you lay a line like this on a small town girl, like this idea that you're rolling into town and he's talking all the, because this is straight from Vampires the Masquerade.

Yeah.

This is all straight from the handbook.

He's not making stuff up.

He's like just stealing what he read from the book after the fact.

He's applying it.

Like the idea of like, we were joined together thousands of years.

Like, he's not making that shit up off the dome.

He read it.

No, he read it first and then he's reading it to her.

And she's just like, wow.

Yeah.

She doesn't know anything.

Also, I'm pretty sure a vampire can't be a god.

Yeah.

Yeah.

He's also in Eustis, Florida.

Well,

there is all of that.

I mean, they are reading all the same shit, you know, like, and he is taking certain things from, you know, like Necronomicon and H.B.

Lovecraft and Crowley and all sorts of shit, and he's putting it all together to make his own little story.

Like, that's the thing.

I'm not even getting close to all of the shit that he told her.

Oh, yeah.

I mean, my God.

It's just no point in telling it because it's fake.

It's fake and it's dumb.

I just wish they could have gotten involved with Halloween horror nights.

Yeah, they would have done anything destructive.

Yeah.

Now, Heather was a loner who couldn't really really connect with anyone save her friend Janice, and she felt that her parents only cared about her older sister Jennifer, who was, of course, your all-American cheerleader type.

So, after hanging out with Rod in the local cemetery and listening to him pontificate about monsters, devils, vampirism, astral projection, and witchcraft, Heather started dressing more goth.

She donned a black trench coat and combat boots, pretty much made a new goth uniform.

She then dyed her hair black.

But Rod, perhaps thinking back to how things had gotten out of hand with Stephen, he made sure to keep her below his status.

Allegedly, he told her, quote, you know, dressing like a wompire

doesn't make you one.

Yeah, had to obviously neg her at every point.

Yeah, just bite her.

Yeah.

Yeah, you care about her, bite her, bro.

Yeah, well, but that's the thing.

You got to string them along.

Yeah, you got to string them along.

Once you bite her, then she's struggling on forever.

Yeah, bad, but then she won't do what you say.

Exactly.

Then she can go off on her own and make her own wampirs.

Yeah.

Seems like his sire is a crier.

Whoa, cute.

But even though Rod was obviously just nagging her, Heather became smitten with all of his talk of shared past lives, and she truly came to believe that Rod had the power of mind control.

The books in the documentaries go back and forth about whether or not they had a sexual relationship.

They might have, they might not have.

It's hard to tell.

Yeah, I mean, again, it's just all she was 14, so.

Eventually, the girl who introduced Heather to Rod, Janine Leclerc, began to believe that Rod was a vampire as well, because Rod really did have an incredible line of bullshit for a 16-year-old boy.

In one ruse, Rod would tell Heather that he knew French because he had, as I said, been alive in 15th century France.

So why would he not know French?

And as such, he would ask Heather to astrally project back to that time and place.

Then, he'd quiz her on pronunciation of Parisian street names and facts about French history.

Now, this little shit didn't actually know how to speak French, and his knowledge of French history was probably cursory at best.

But he definitely had enough knowledge to make Heather feel stupid when she couldn't recite fake French as well as he could.

All right, don't you know?

Now read it.

It's from the tennis courts of the French Revolution.

Now read me the tenets that they wrote.

There he is.

Oh, shit.

Wrong!

Wrong again!

I can't remember.

Idiot!

Wrong again!

It said.

Perfect.

You're learning.

My God.

You were there.

Rod was also incredibly adept at the sort of self-depreciating duck and dive that any good cult leader needs.

When Heather and Janine would suddenly see how absurd this whole thing was, they'd start making fun of him.

But when they did that, he would join in and make fun of himself as well, which only made him more endearing.

You see, cult leaders do this shit all the time.

Fucking, what's his name from Nexium?

Oh, Keith Ricky.

He was a master at this thing.

Like, this is all pretty crazy, right?

This all sounds pretty weird, but guess what?

It works.

Anytime someone says that shit, run.

If LRH saw him do that, he'd smack the fucking spit out of his mouth.

But in between the laughs, Rod would get serious and eventually he began involving both heather and janine in bloodletting and blood drinking rituals rod would slice his arm with a razor blade and entice them to drink from him to quote sanctify their souls all while they listened to that brand new 1996 goth kid hit record antichrist superstar oh man in florida you just got that shit when you showed up to fucking freshman year i legitimately don't think our audience that's younger than us can even understand, like, as a goth, or as a wanting to be that, when that whole vibe rolled in, Marilyn Manson's Antichrist superstar, his second, his second record.

We already knew after Sweet Dreams, and you know, and what was the first record called?

Smells like children.

Yeah, smells like children.

There was something about that album that kind of gave us all like permission to be goth.

Yeah, in a way.

It opened it all up for us.

And we all listened to it.

We used to listen to it in the locker room.

Oh, of course.

The football kids loved, like, they'd get like beautiful people makes you want to fucking destroy something.

Yeah.

technically, he was you know, he's a bad man, but he's a very bad man.

Oh, absolutely.

But yeah, he definitely made music that makes you really want, like, it really helps in football.

It does.

Rod's mother, Sandra, however, did catch the teens ritually drinking each other's blood on one occasion.

Yeah, I'll drinking your blood.

She accused them of performing devil worship.

She destroyed their so-called altar, and she screamed at Janine to leave the house or she'd call the police.

Rod explained away an embarrassing interruption from his mother by telling telling the girls that Sandra was just jealous because Rod refused to sire her because his mom was like super fucking lame.

Crazy lame.

It's like the only time she's done something good.

Yeah.

I remember you asked me, you were just under my childhood home and you just asked me about like, what, you know, is it just like it was when you were in high school?

And I was like, well, I don't know if all my stuff survived the several times my mom destroyed every single poster in the room, ripped it all from the walls and everything.

And so it's kind of funny that it's always like that.

Yeah.

And so it was like that singing scene in Boogie Knights.

It was like, please stop it.

Stop it.

Literally that.

And then he gave me the line.

He's like, that's why it's important to invest in picture frames.

That's right.

Because you can't just tear down a poster.

Really good.

It's really good.

Narod was taken back to Murray, Kentucky, sometime in, I think, late summer 1996.

The timelines here are very, very loose, but he promised that even from Murray, Kentucky, he would still astrally project from time to time to visit both Heather and Janine back in Florida.

The two girls, meanwhile, stayed in vampire mode so hard that they would drink each other's blood even when Rod wasn't there.

And they would lie to their parents by saying that their frequent wounds, oh, this, it's just a cat scratch.

There's no cat.

Yeah, where's the fucking cat?

Yeah.

But when Rod didn't astrally project into their dreams, as promised, he told them, over the phone, of course, the ultimate astral projection.

Yes.

Speakerphone!

Yes!

I got a calling card!

He told them that the only reason why he hadn't astrally projected was because his other children needed to be attended to.

Children in other parts of the world, they need me more.

Or he would tell them that he could not astrally project because he was helping his vampire brethren do battle against the rival vampire clans of Kentucky.

Oh, yeah, I should have known that.

I read about that in the vampire newspaper.

Yeah, it's all over.

I wish that vampire and vampire wars would stop.

I wish we don't get together by each other or coke.

Now, when I astral project to you, please accept the charges.

Have you heard of this new thing?

I've been seeing all these these commercials for your thing, 1-800-Collect.

Have you heard about it?

Even vampires needed.

Even vampire.

When you're in a pinch, when you're in a pinch.

You can use 1-800-Collect.

You never did that as a little boy.

I had extended friends, like friends that became long-distance friends, where we did have like weird fantasy games.

Like we did do, like, we pretended to sort of be members of, like, I remember we had the Monster Club.

We used to pretend like it was real.

And it was like a thing that we did as kids.

And I guess normally you'd think you'd just grow out of it.

I'm talking about like this, like middle school.

Oh, yeah.

No, you absolutely grow out of it.

Yeah.

I was never good at playing pretend.

Yeah.

Oh, it always bothered me for some reason.

Serious little Russian philosopher of a fucking boy.

I don't play your pretend games.

I do real games like football.

Things that have fucking sets and standards.

Hey, you ever played Punch the Face?

That's a real game.

I only play games with consequences.

Serious physical consequences.

You ever played a game called joining the military after 9-11?

Heather, of course, still believed in Rod, and he would promise in phone conversations that he was going to one day take Heather through other dimensions or take her around the world.

Shoot that save enough money.

Yeah, to the aforementioned Tehran or Casablanca, other vampire capitals.

Cleveland.

In response, Heather would tell him that if he was planning on taking her,

you're going to have to kill my parents because if I'm alive, they're never going to let me go.

Now, I do not believe that Heather was being serious when she told Rod that he was going to have to kill her parents if he wanted her to go with him traveling across the world.

No, they don't say what they, they're kids.

They're children.

Well, these kids, I mean, they even talk about it in the documentary.

They talked about killing people all the time.

They would just blow off scene.

They'd say, oh, yeah, we got to kill that person.

Let's do it next Tuesday.

I don't feel like doing it right now.

Let's do it next month.

They're playing vampire.

They're not real vampires.

Essentially, if you want to play vampires, you have to pretend to kill people.

Yes, yes, you have to pretend to kill people.

Or at the very least,

you want to kill people.

You have to talk about wanting to kill people.

But when Heather mentioned that Rod would need to kill her parents in order to take her away, Rod allegedly said,

Don't worry about your parents.

I'll take care of them when the time comes.

And indeed, Rod Ferrell would take care of Richard and Ruth Windorf just a few months later when he beat them to death in their own home with a crowbar.

And it's with everything that led up to that point that we'll return next week with part two of our series on the Kentucky Vampire Clan murders.

Wambire.

Kentucky Wambire.

Wambire.

Is that safe to say?

Wambire, not cumon.

Not human.

Not human.

I have a vampire question, just like vampire lore question.

It's got nothing to do with the story at all.

I'm just curious.

Can vampire.

Can vampires go to space?

Yeah, of course.

No, actually, there's a book I read, which was awesome.

It's all about how, it's a sci-fi book about retro engineering a vampiric-like gene in order for to help these astronauts go through deep space.

See, but the thing is,

my question, why it doesn't hold water for me.

Yeah, vampires aren't.

Yeah, they don't seem real to you.

It looks like if space looks like it's dark, but the sun's always out.

If the sun's always out, then how can a vampire go to space?

Well, I mean, one of the

capsule inside of it.

You can't see it.

There's no windows.

Yeah, and if you're also looking at vampires from a sort of more scientific perspective, then one could say that vampires or vampires are more sensitive to sunlight because the radiation that the sun gives off is much more harmful to vampires than to actual humans.

But when you're in space, the sun's rays, the sun's radiation, is just as harmful to a regular human as a vampire because the sun's rays, you're not protected by the ozone layer.

So actually, out in space, humans and vampires equal ground.

Yes, because it's the same amount of protection because the humans inside have to be protected by the sun race.

So that's why they surround with all the tin foil inside of all that weird aluminum foil shit in there, right?

That's what keeps the sun out, and that's what keeps vampires safe.

So, yeah, vampires can't go into space just as much as humans can.

I really appreciate you guys.

I appreciate your curiosity.

My mom never told me she was wet.

Yeah.

Unless she just got out of the pool.

Go to patreon.com/slash last podcast on the left and give us money to talk about these dumb things.

Then go to at LP on the left for all of our your social needs.

Go for your social needs.

We're doing this one more week, right?

Yeah, one more week.

Yeah, then we got more stories for you.

We got more.

We got a lot of stuff coming up.

Don't we, Edward?

There's all kinds of shit coming up.

Lastpodcastontheleft.com.

Buy tickets for our live shows.

We have many of them.

That's right, man.

We're going to be in North Carolina this whole weekend.

If you're listening to this today, we are in Charlotte tonight.

And then tomorrow we're going to be in Durham.

And then the tour does not stop there saturday september 20th st paul minnesota october 11th milwaukee wisconsin october 25th oakland california november 29th cleveland ohio and december 12th and 13th we're going to be in portland oregon yeah baby babe very excited to see you that's right also i got another show i want you all to come out to if you're in la on august 21st please come to Dead Men Tell Some Tales, a dark dive into Disney history.

And we're going to have a lot of fun talking about all the people who's ever died at the Disney parks.

That's going to be at the Elysian Theater.

You can get tickets at eddytoons.com.

Very good.

Yeah.

Very good.

Well, I have this website open about, this is a body language analysis expert who is talking to

the astronauts when they came back from the Apollo 11 moon landing, and he's saying they seem very nervous.

Ah, yeah.

Well, they're coming back to Earth.

Oh, yeah, it's a whole thing.

Also, they're like pilots and scientists.

They don't really like talking to the media.

They're not used to it.

I don't think you understand that this body language expert is fucking talking about it, Marcus, and it's where you're ignorant.

I'm so fucking tired.

You're ignorant.

I'm so fucking tired.

I'm going to go sleep like the one.

I'm going to sleep like a bomb fire for the whole weekend.

You creatures of the night with beautiful music.

They made

hey, listeners.

Marcus Edd and Henry here.

It's a little bit of an announcement.

You loving all the episodes of last podcast on the Left lately?

Well, listen, now you can get even more from us.

Squeeze it out of us.

If you want to hear new episodes ad-free and unlock access to Last Podcast on the Left seven days early, subscribe to SiriusXM Podcast Plus on Apple Podcasts or visit seriousxm.com/slash podcast plus to start your free trial today.

Do it.