Murder: True Crime Stories - MYSTERY: The Rod Ferrell “Vampire Clan” Murders featuring Connor Tomlinson from What the Fact

Episode Date: October 2, 2026

In 1996, 16-year-old Rod Ferrell led a group of teenagers in Kentucky who called themselves a vampire clan, immersing themselves in role-playing games, rituals, and a shared fantasy world that blurred the line between imagination and reality. Ferrell claimed to be a 500-year-old vampire, and his growing influence over the other members pulled them deeper into isolation and violence. That November, the fantasy turned deadly when Ferrell and his followers traveled to Florida and brutally murdered the parents of one of the group's members. The case stunned the country and became one of the most infamous examples of youth subculture spiraling out of control. Afterward, Connor joins Carter, his new co-host on the Rewind Original "What the Fact" as they talk about Vlad the Impaler, one of the real-world inspirations for Dracula himself.Be sure to follow What the Fact wherever you listen to podcasts, with new episodes dropping every Wednesday! For more: https://t-sml.mtrbio.com/public/smartlink/whatthefact-856Head over to our YouTube channel to WATCH our video episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@crimehousestudios If you’re new here, don’t forget to follow Murder: True Crime Stories to never miss a case! Want all 2 parts of every case all at once? Join Crime House+ and get both parts of each case dropped at once ad-free. Join at crimehouseplus.com or if you’re listening on Apple Podcasts, tap “Try Free” at the top of this show’s page. Murder: True Crime Stories is a Crime House Original Podcast, powered by PAVE Studios.🎧 Need More to Binge? Listen to other Crime House Originals Clues, Crimes Of Reddit, Serial Killers & Murderous Minds, Crime House 24/7, and more wherever you get your podcasts!Follow me on SocialInstagram: @CrimehouseTikTok: @CrimehouseFacebook: @crimehousestudiosX: @crimehousemediaYouTube: @crimehousestudios

Hey everyone, Carter here. I am hosting a new show called What the Fact with my co-host, Connor Tomlinson, who you might know and love from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum. Every week we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Connor brings the tangents and an infectious energy that will make you realize history is the most fascinating thing on Earth. Follow What the Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube. at What the Fact Pod. This is Crime House. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder, True Crime Stories, a crime house original where I tell the story of a murder

and all the people it affected. Today, I'm on the set of my new Pave Studio show, What the Fact, and I have the privilege of being joined by Connor Tomlinson, star of Love on the Spectrum, and my co-host, where every episode we take the audience through some of history's most unbelievable events. Hi, everyone. Thank you for having me, Carter.

Can I just say how much I love doing what the fact with Carter? And when I learned about what case he was covering today, I just had to come on this show. For everyone listening at home, it's the case of Rod Farrell and the vampire clan murders about a young man who committed murder and may have believed he was an actual vampire. Today, I'll take you through the story of this case. then be sure to stick around afterward as Connor and I bring you an exclusive peek into our dynamic on what the fact with a minisode we're doing just for murder true crime stories about the man who inspired Count Dracula himself. Sounds great. Carter, the floor is yours. It's a Monday night in late November 1996 in a quiet subdivision outside Eustace, Florida.

The 17-year-old named Jennifer Windorf pulls in a Monday night. the driveway after a long shift at work. The porch light is off. The house is dark. That's not strange. Her dad has a habit of falling asleep in front of the TV so she doesn't bother with the lights. She steps inside, but something on the floor stops her cold. By the time Jennifer understands what she's looking at, it's already too late. Her father is on the couch right where she expected him. Her mother is on the kitchen floor. Neither of them is moving, and her little sister, Heather, is gone. Over the next few days, the whole country would learn who did it, a group of teenagers who called themselves the vampire clan, led by a 16-year-old boy who said he was

500 years old. The vampires are the part everyone remembers, but they were never the reason to two people died. This is the story of Rod Farrell and the vampire clan murders. People's lives are like a story. There's the beginning, a middle, and an end. But you don't always know which part you're on. Sometimes the final chapter arrives far too soon, and we don't always get to know the real ending from Carter Roy. And this is murder, true crime stories, a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. New episodes come out every two. Tuesday, Thursday, and Friday, with Friday's episodes covering the cases that deserve a deeper look. Thank you for being part of the crimehouse community.

Please rate review and follow the show. And for early, add free access to every episode, subscribe to Crimehouse Plus. You'll get part one and part two at the same time, plus exclusive bonus content. To join, go to Crimehouseplus.com or tap try free on the Murder True Crime Story Show page on Apple Podcast. Welcome back to another episode of Murder Mystery Fridays, where I'm covering cases with questions that I can't get out of my head. And the ones where the evidence points in multiple directions and every theory feels like a possibility. Remember, these episodes are also on YouTube with full video. Just search for Crimehouse Studios and be sure to like and subscribe.

A quick heads up before we start. This episode includes descriptions of murder, domestic, and child abuse, sexual. assault, animal cruelty, and self-harm. Please listen with care. Today's case became famous almost overnight for one very specific reason. The teenagers at the center of it said they were vampires. Soon, the story made international headlines. It became a movie, a book, and eventually a punchline.

But strip away all the pulpy details, and you're left with two ordinary people who lost their lives because of one teenager's twisted game. The strange thing about this case is that it was solved almost immediately. The killer confessed within a week. What I can't let go of are the two questions that have never been answered. Was he the only one who wanted them dead? And how much of this was ever about vampires? All that and more coming up.

In the fall of 1996, the Wendorf's were living in Eustis, a small city about 40 miles northwest of Orlando. Richard Windorf was 49 years old. Everybody called him Rick. He worked hard. He came home tired, and most nights he fell asleep on the couch with the television going. His partner was Naoma Ruth Queen. She went by Ruth.

She was 54, originally from West Virginia. And according to those who knew them, she and Rick were an easygoing couple who had their life together. Between them, there were two girls. in the house, their daughters, 17-year-old Jennifer, and 15-year-old Heather. Heather was the moody one. One newspaper later described her as a girl who rebelled against her parents over cleaning her room and other small stuff.

It's the kind of thing that blows over in most families. But in this one, a stranger walked into the middle of it before it could. His name was Rod Farrell. And yes, it's pronounced like the word Farrell, which is a word, a coincidence people have never let go of rod met he was living in eustace himself he was 15 like her he was intense and a little theatrical um to heather that was the appeal they were drawn to each other right away and for a little while they dated then rod moved away his home life was complicated and it pulled him back to kentucky but he and heather didn't let go of each other they stayed on the phone constantly

running up big long-distance bills on collect calls until Heather's parents finally had enough and cut them off. According to her sister, that made Heather furious because for her, Rod was more than an ex-boyfriend. He was her only connection to a world that felt secret and important, a place that was bigger than the small suburban life she felt stuck in. Roderick Farrell was born on March 28th, 1980 in Murray, Kentucky, a small college town about 100 miles northwest of Nashville. His mother, Sandra Gibson, was only 17 when she had him. His father wasn't much older, and he joined the military soon after Rod was born.

After that, he mostly disappeared from his son's life. So it was Rod and Sandra. And Sandra's parents, whenever Sandra couldn't manage on her own, that happened a lot. Her parents had moved from Kentucky down to central Florida, so Rod's whole childhood was spent shuttling between the two states. For Rod, there was never a version of home that stayed still long enough to feel safe, never an adult who was reliably boringly there. Rod grew up learning that people and places were temporary and that he was mostly on his own.

And the instability was only part of it. it. Money was tight. By her own admission, Sondra was a sex worker at one point to keep them afloat. And then there's the darkest piece. Rod later said that when he was five years old, his maternal grandfather sexually abused him. He repeated that claim under oath at his trial. His grandfather was never charged and he denied it. But Rod's own aunt took the stand and testified that the same grandfather had abused her too. Now, I want to be careful here because these are just allegations, but whatever happened to Rod, the people who examined him years later pointed to a childhood full of trauma as part of what led him towards a dark path. By the time he was a teenager,

the thing Rod reached for to escape was fantasy. Specifically, a role-playing game his own mother had introduced him to called Vampire the Masquerade. If you've never seen it, it's a tabletop game, a cousin of Dungeons and Dragons, except the whole world is built out of vampire mythology. Players invent vampire characters, join imaginary clans, and move through a hidden society of blood, secrecy, and power. For a lonely kid who already felt like an outsider, it was more than a game. It was a place to be somebody. And Rod didn't just play it. He moved in.

Back in Murray, he started drifting toward the local goth and occult scene, which was bigger than you'd expect for a small Kentucky town. Groups of teenagers met up in parks and cemeteries after dark cut themselves and drank one another's blood. They even had a gathering place and abandoned building in the woods. Somebody graffeted it with the words, Vampire Hotel. At the center of that world was an older teenager named Stephen Murphy who went by Jaden.

Jaden was 18 and he ran what amounted to a house of vampires in Murray. He decided who was in and who was out and he led the rituals. When Rod turned up, Jaden took him under his wing. Not long after Rod went through the ceremony, the group called Crossing Over. Late one night, he and Jaden. Caden cut themselves, let the blood drip into cups and drink. In the logic of that world, it bound Rod to Jaden and made him part of the family. And it meant Rod got to choose a new name.

He chose Vesago. According to Rod, Vesago wasn't some character he played on the weekends. Vesago was a 500-year-old vampire who was a member of the Malkavian clan. A lot of the kids treated the vampire world as somewhere to visit and then went back to being ordinary. But Rod lived inside it around the clock. He talked like Visago. He carried himself like Visago. He wore the whole identity like armor.

According to his own mother, Rod didn't think he was pretending. She said he believed Visago had taken up residence inside him, that he wasn't in some real sense entirely human anymore. So by 16, Rod Farrell had a broken childhood behind him, a new name, and a conviction that he was something ancient and untouchable. What he didn't have yet were other people who believed it. But he was about to fix that. I'm Claire Buckley, and if your idea of relaxing is listening to seriously,

unsettling stories before bed, then you are going to love my podcast Pretty Scary. From terrifying true crime, haunting ghost tales, creepy alien encounters and anything weird, it's the stories that leave you staring at the ceiling afterwards, questioning absolutely everything. Lock your doors, get comfy and prepare to dive into the darkness. Just search for Pretty Scary with Claire Buckley. By 1996, 16-year-old Rod Farrell had remade himself as Vassau. The 500-year-old vampire, and he wanted a clan of his own. It came together fast, but it stayed small.

At its core, there were three other teenagers. There was his 16-year-old girlfriend, Charity Kese. There was his best friend, 16-year-old Howard Scott Anderson, who went by Scott. And there was Dana Cooper, the oldest of the group at 19 years old. Rod gave them names. He gave them roles. He decided who got to cross over and who didn't. But what held these kids together had nothing to do with vampire theology.

It was simpler than that. Every one of them felt like they didn't belong anywhere. And Rod made them feel like they belonged with him. In return, they were loyal. So at 16 years old, with no money, no resources, and no real belief, system, Rod Farrell had made himself the leader of something. And the more people bought into Vassago, the more untethered Rod became. His drug use got heavier. He'd later tell a court-appointed evaluator that he'd taken LSD 40 or more times, and there was cocaine in the mix too. He was

also cutting himself more. From the outside, you can see the shape of a kid coming apart. the drugs and the blood rituals, and the deepening belief that he was something other than human. From the inside, Rod seems to have felt the opposite. He felt like he was becoming more powerful, and in October of 1996, he did something that would follow him through every courtroom to come. On the night of October 14th, Rod and another teenager broke into the Murray-Calloway County Animal Shelter. By morning, two puppies were dead, and dozens of dogs had been let loose. The local sheriff, Stan Scott, didn't know who'd done it yet, but he knew what he was looking at. He told the Murray Ledger in Times, quote, we're dealing with some sick individuals, and I want them caught.

Within a couple of weeks, Rod was one of the names in front of the sheriff, charged with animal cruelty and a handful of related counts. and the research shows that kids who hurt animals are more likely to hurt people too. Rod was checking that box at 16 in public. And once it got out that the kids behind it called themselves vampires, the mood and Murray curdled, suddenly Rod's little clan went from a strange rumor to something the whole town was afraid of. Around the same time, Rod's friendship with Jaden fell apart, During one confrontation, Jaden threw Rod against a wall hard enough to knock him unconscious and send him to the hospital.

Since Jaden was 18, he was charged with assault. At that point, Rod didn't really seem to care about losing Jaden because by then he already had a circle of his own. And then, Heather called from Florida. Rod and Heather had never stopped talking, and during one of those calls, Heather told him something awful. She said her home life was unbearable and that her father was sexually abusing her. That was all Rod needed to hear.

He decided he was going to drive down to Florida, get Heather out, and take the whole clan somewhere new. The plan was Norlands, a fresh start. All of them together, a real vampire family. Well, there was one problem. the court date about the animal shelter. Rod just skipped it. Instead, a few days before Thanksgiving, he loaded Scott, Charity, and Dana into a car and pointed it south. It was a long drive, most of a day and a night. As far as anyone is ever able to piece together afterward,

none of them understood what Rod was driving toward. They reached Eustis on November 25th. Heather slipped out to meet them. The first stop was a cemetery where Rod and Heather cut themselves, drank each other's blood, and Heather crossed over into the clan. It was the same ritual Rod had gone through with Jaden months earlier. Then it was on to the practical part of the plan. They needed a better car for the long drive to New Orleans, and Rod's idea was to go to the Wendorf house,

deal with Heather's parents and take their Ford Explorer. When it came time to go to the house, the girls weren't there. Terity and Dana drove Heather over to her boyfriend's apartment so she could say goodbye before leaving town. That left Rod and Scott to go to the Wendorf house alone. What happened inside is brief, but it's violent, so if you'd rather skip ahead, give it about a minute. Rod and Scott went in through the unlocked garage and on the way they picked up a crowbar.

Richard Windorf was asleep on the couch, the television still on. According to the court record, Rod struck him in the head again and again with the crowbar. Richard died of blunt force injuries with skull fractures and he had no defensive wounds at all because he never knew it was coming. Rod told investigators later in his own words that he just kept beating him, quote, and beating him, taking pleasure in it. Ruth Queen was in the shower when it happened. She heard the noise and came out barefoot into her own kitchen, not knowing what she'd find. What Ruth did next tells you exactly who she was. She didn't freeze.

She grabbed a cup of scalding coffee off the counter and threw it in Rod's face. She scratched him, she clawed at him. She fought for as long as she could, and her injuries showed she was conscious in fighting the whole time. Rod beat her with the crowbar until the blows severed her brainstem, and she died. Before he left, Rod did one more thing. According to reporting on the case, investigators found a ritual burn mark on Richard's body,

in the shape of a V with a dot for each member of his clan. V for Vsago. Rod had been signing that name onto the world for months. Now he'd signed it here. Then he grabbed Richard's credit card and the keys to the Explorer, and he and Scott drove off to meet the others. The five of them piled into the stolen Ford Explorer and started for New Orleans.

Along the way, they used Richard's credit card to buy gas and a knife. The plan was already coming apart, though, because back in Eustace, Jennifer Windorf had come home to find her father and her mother dead. She called 911. When police arrived, two things jumped out fast. The family's Ford Explorer was gone from the driveway, and so was Heather, who should have been home. detectives put out an alert for the vehicle and for the missing girl, and they started working the people around the family. And when they talked to other teenagers in Eustace,

one name kept coming back. Rod Farrell, the kid from Kentucky, the one Heather knew. On November 27th, two days after the murders, a warrant went out for his arrest. By then, the case was moving. faster than the teenagers and the explorer. The stolen truck's description was out across state lines. Detectives understood they were looking for a group of Kentucky kids who called themselves vampires,

and they had a trail to follow because the clan kept using Richard Wendorf's credit card as they ran. And inside that stolen explorer, the clock was running out. The plan was already unraveling. The group was low on money and running on nerves. Then on Thanksgiving Day, Charity found a pay phone and called her grandmother in South Dakota to ask for help. Her grandmother called the police. With detectives coaching her over the phone, Charity steered the group to a hotel in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. An officer spotted the explorer pulling up, called for backup, and secured everyone inside.

Nobody resisted. For Charity Kesey, that call was the moment the spell broke. She was 16 years old, a thousand miles from home, sitting in a motel room with a boy who had just murdered two people. She wanted out, and her grandmother gave it to her. Three days after Richard and Ruth were beaten to death in Eustace, all five teenagers were in custody. But catching Rod Farrell was well.

One thing. Understanding him was another. Eight years, hundreds of episodes, and we've barely scratched the surface of true crime. I'm Mark. And I'm Bethan, and this is Seeing Red. Every Wednesday, we bring you another extraordinary case. And our huge back catalogue has everything from notorious murders and baffling disappearances, to scams, scandals, survival stories, and crimes you won't believe actually happened. If you're new to Seeing Red, you've got a lot to catch up on.

Search Seeing Red, a true crime podcast wherever you listen. By Thanksgiving night in 1996, five teenagers were in custody in Baton Rouge, hundreds of miles from the house and Eustace, where Richard Wendorf and Ruth Queen were killed. And then Rod Farrell did something most suspects don't do. He talked and took most of the blame onto himself, describing the killings to investigators.

Looking back, it makes sense. Rod was running the show. Meanwhile, Heather was distraughts and cooperative, covered in cuts she'd made on herself, but clearly shaken by what had happened to her family. The others were more shut down. By some accounts, when officers asked them questions, they kept glancing over at Rod,

waiting to be told what to say. And once Rod started talking, he didn't hold back. He walked investigators through the night, step by step, in a flat, matter-of-fact voice. And he described the murders as something he had done and chosen to do. The charges came down quickly on December 17th, 1996. A grand jury indicted Rod on two counts of first-degree murder, along with armed burglary and armed robbery. He was 16 at the time of the killings, but prosecutors made the call to charge him as an adult. That decision carried enormous weight. Because Rod was being charged as an adult,

the death penalty was on the table. The state was signaling that it saw the crime as monstrous enough to set his age aside. The next 14 months could come down to whether a jury saw it the same way. His trial began in February 1998. Jury selection started on the second and then on February 5th. Before the case really got going, Rod changed his plea to guilty. As his own attorney put it, quote, he accepts responsibility and he wants to live. That second part is the key, because this was a death penalty case.

Pleading guilty didn't end anything. Rod still had to stand in front of a jury. this time to decide whether he lived or died. His defense tried to give that jury a reason to spare him. They brought in mental health experts who pointed to his childhood abuse, his heavy drug use, and a diagnosis of schizotypal personality disorder. It's a condition that's tied to distorted thinking

and a deep sense of being fundamentally different from other people. Three doctors agreed that while Rod understood right from wrong, his ability to control his own behavior was seriously impaired. But the state's expert pushed back hard, testifying that Rod wasn't mentally ill at all, just a young man with some personality problems. Other experts made an even simpler point. They argued the diagnosis is unreliable,

even inappropriate in someone that young. So the jury ended up holding two very different versions, of the same boy. In one, Rod was a profoundly damaged kid. Failed by nearly every adult who should have protected him, so scrambled by abuse and drugs and fantasy that he wasn't fully in control of his actions. And the other, he was a cold, deliberate young man who had chosen to walk into a stranger's home and beat two people to death for a set of car keys. The unsettling part is that both of those could be true at once. What the jury had to decide was which version should determine whether Rod Farrell lived or died.

While all of that played out, the people Rod had hurt sat in the courtroom. Richard's younger brother, Robert Windorf, testified about losing him. At one point, Rod turned and directed some of his remarks straight at Robert. so that Richard's own brother had to sit there and listen to him talk about what he'd done. Jennifer called it, quote, the Rod Show. In the end, the jury didn't buy the performance. They recommended he be put to death for both murders. The vote was unanimous at 12 to nothing.

On February 27, 1998, Circuit Judge Jerry Lockett, formerly sentenced 17-year-old Rod Farad. to death, which made him the youngest person on death row in America at the time. And what the judge said from the bench has followed this case ever since. He told Rod he thought he was a deeply disturbed young man and then said, quote, I think your family failed you. I think society failed you. But Lockett didn't stop there.

He had sat through days of testimony about how Rod was raised and he turned some of it back on Rod's mother. From the bench, she said she should have been on trial too for her part in what Rod had become. That death sentence held for about two years. Then in November of 2000, the Florida Supreme Court stepped in. Relying on an earlier ruling that it was cruel or unusual to execute someone who was only 16 at the time of the crime, the court threw out Rod's death sentences. They replaced them with life in prison with. the possibility of parole.

And the others had their own days in court. Scott Anderson, the best friend, pleaded guilty to two counts of first-degree murder and was sentenced to life. He told detectives he froze during the attacks. Years later in December of 2018, a judge resentenced him to 40 years, which could make him eligible for release

as early as 20131. Dana Cooper was sentenced to 17 and a half years and was released in 2011. Charity Kesey got 10 and a half years and was out by 2006. And then there was Rod's mother. Sandra Gibson was never charged in the murder, but she had a case of her own back in Kentucky. Around this same time, she was accused of writing to a 14-year-old boy soliciting sex

and tying it to the vampire world. as an invitation to cross over. She pleaded guilty to unlawful transaction with a minor. So that's where the legal story lands. Rod's in prison for life. His followers were convicted and his mother has a record of her own. But this is Murder Mystery Fridays. And the reason this case has stuck with me for years is that a couple of questions never got a clean answer.

First one is about Heather. Two grand juries looked at Heather Windorf. Both of them declined to charge her, and the reasoning was straightforward. When her parents were killed, Heather was in a car on the other side of town, saying goodbye to her boyfriend. She's always said she had no idea Rod was going to hurt anyone. But there's one more thing about Heather, and it complicates the picture of a girl who is simply along for the ride. Remember why? Rod said he drove all the way to Florida. He said he wanted to rescue her from her father who was allegedly sexually abusing her. When investigators finally looked into that claim, they found nothing to support it. And at Rod's trial, a psychologist testified that Rod had been furious when Heather first told him and then, quote, mortified to learn she had made the whole thing up. the abuse that set this entire plan in motion had never happened.

I'm not going to tell you what was in Heather's head at 15 because I don't know. And the people whose actual job it was to decide couldn't agree on it either. But that lie is part of why some people were never satisfied with the grand juries clearing her. Judge Lockett himself pushed prosecutors to take Heather back in front of a second grand jury. telling them, quote, there is genuine evil in this world. There were others who went further, insisting Heather had wanted her parents dead all along. The loudest was Rod's own mother who claimed she'd overheard Heather ask Rod to kill them. The trouble with that is what happened next.

Sondra Gibson took a polygraph, failed it, and took the claim back. Years later, in an interview, Heather described Rod the way a lot of people who know knew him did, she said, quote, he was charming. He could tell a lie like it was the truth. She also said she never took the vampire stuff all that seriously. She went to art school, got married and eventually reconnected with her family, though the relationship stayed strained. The second question is about the vampires. How much did any of it matter? When you lay it all out, the vampires look a lot more like a a costume than a cause. The trauma, the instability, the isolation, the drugs, all of it was in place

long before Visago showed up. The game and the rituals didn't create Rod Farrell. They gave him a language for what he already felt. Powerful, different, owed something by a world that had failed him. and they gave him a way to draw in lonely kids who wanted more than anything to belong to something. But the case didn't end in 2000. In 2019, Rod got a chance to argue for a lighter sentence under newer court rulings about people who committed their crimes as juveniles. For the first time, he sounded somewhat remorseful. He told the court that nothing he could say or do would bring the window over. back and then added, quote, I hope you know just how truly sorry I am.

The judge wasn't moved. In April of 2020, he denied the request, calling the crimes among the most appalling he had ever seen and saying Rod Farrell was irreparably corrupt. Rod is still serving life in a Florida prison. But the person I keep circling back to is Jennifer. Jennifer Wendorf was 17 years old when she walked into that house. She found her parents. She made the 911 call.

And then for the rest of her life, she has had to keep showing up to a trial and then to hearing after hearing decades apart to stand in a courtroom and argue that the person who did this should stay where he is. At that hearing in 2019, she told the judge that if Rod ever. got out she'd be quote back to that lonely little girl nearly 23 years ago i want to leave you where the headlines never do almost everyone remembers the vampires the word latched on to this case in 1996 and it never came off it made the story feel like a movie it turned a 16-year-old killer into a kind of dark celebrity but richard and ruth weren't characters in his story Rick was a 49-year-old man who worked hard and fell asleep in front of his TV. Ruth was a 54-year-old woman who, in the last minutes of her life, threw a cup of coffee and fought a boy holding a crowbar because she was not going down without a fight.

And this is the part I can't get past. Long before any of this reached a courtroom, there were adults all around Rod Farrell who saw pieces of what he was becoming. The abuse he had survived, the years with no stable home, the dead animals, the blood and the cemeteries, any one of them could have stepped in. None of them did. And in the end, it was Richard and Ruth who paid for it. Okay, now it's time for Carter calls it. What we know, Rod Farrell and his self-styled vampire clan beat Richard Wendorf and Ruth Queen to death. in their home in Eustace, Florida, in November 1996.

Now, two separate grand juries cleared the couple's daughter, Heather Windorf, of having any role in planning it. Not everyone who watched this case has agreed with that call, and that's where I have some thoughts. I think Heather didn't know. I don't think Heather wanted her parents to die. But I also want to take this moment to talk about what it's like to be a teenager because it is a very hard time. and I know myself and a lot of other people probably have experiences of being confused about feelings we have, whether it's wanting to run away, whether it might be self-harm, not knowing what to do. And I want to point out the difference between words and actions. Because Heather did lie about her father, and that did set all of this in motion.

But that is different than being responsible for the murder. I also think it's possible that a teenager might offhandedly say something like, I wish my parents were dead. I think probably that's not a crazy thing that teenagers might mutter to one another. And I want to highlight how big a difference it is from saying that to doing it. That being a teenager is a confusing time and that this story is so much about teenagers who got caught up in something confusing and the one who took it too far. I do think it's interesting that Charity and Dana got time for the murders, though they weren't at the house when it happened, just like Heather wasn't there. So I'm not entirely sure why they are punished for being part of a murder they weren't at if Heather is not part of it when she wasn't there. But presumably they were part of the plan for longer.

Now, Judge Leavitt is the one who said that there should be a second grand jury to look into Heather and said there is genuine evil in the world, presumably pointing it at her. And again, I think that we need more compassion for teenagers and what they go through. Again, not to excuse the behavior of somebody like Rod, but to understand why people might lie, might be confused about the actions they take. And when we look at the other teenagers in this group, why they got caught doing something I don't think they wanted to do. Why it is that Scott froze when it happened because he didn't want to do it but didn't know how to stop being a part of it because he was under the influence of somebody else. Again, that's not an excuse for behavior, but it's trying to understand it.

What I keep coming back to is that you have teenagers that clearly needed some help. Rod clearly came from a bad, tough background and never got any guidance about how to handle himself better. Then he found other teenagers who are lonely in their own ways, however good or bad, their parenting might have been around them. And somewhere in that, the most horrible idea was hatched. If somewhere, anywhere, along the way had been able to intervene, maybe things would have been different. I won't go any further than that.

I really don't know what was in Heather's mind when it went down. But I personally have a lot of room for understanding a teenager that might lie, might say some extraordinary things. And I think it's important to draw the distinction between that and the action of murder. So that's my call. Heather's whereabouts hold up. The one claim that says she wanted her parents dead came from a woman who bailed a polygraph and took it back. And the murders were never part of the plan Heather said in motion, even if there was a lie involved. Now, if you think that those two grand juries got it wrong, I want to hear from you. I want to hear what you think of the case, because I think it's important we talk about it because that's what might make a difference the next time. We'll be back next week. But first, I am thrilled to welcome Connor Tomlinson back as we dive into the story behind the man behind the vampire myth. Every week on What the Fact. Connor brings us some of the most incredible fun facts from history. I go through the story and he brings the entertainment, the facts, the insights, and everything else.

Okay, Connor, you ready? Do you know which real prince left 20,000 people impaled on stakes outside his own capital city? And then, 400 years later, got turned into a vampire by a novelist who knew almost nothing about him. That prince is Vlad the Impaler. Vlad the Impaler, the man who was not a vampire. Vlad III, Prince of Wallachia, roughly southern Romania today, born between 1428 and 1431, most likely in Sigiswara, Transylvania. In Romania, he's actually a national hero.

The prince who stood up to the Ottoman Empire and came down hard on crime. The monster version is an export. Okay, let's start with the name. Vlad's father was inducted into the Order of the Dragon in 1431, a knightly order sworn to defend Christian Europe against the Ottomans.

So they called him, Vlad Dracul, the dragon, which made his son, our guy, Vlad, Dracula, son of the dragon. He signed it that way himself. In Romania, Drach means dragon, and it also came to mean devil. So Dracula also means son of the devil. Yeah, and he signed his name that way. And his name reads as son of the dragon or son of the devil, depending on who's saying it. Okay, moving on to the impaler portion.

Vlad takes the throne in 1456 and governs by terror on purpose. Impalement, a stake through the body stood upright. A death that could take days becomes his signature. Ottoman soldiers, merchants who ignore his trade rules, his own nobles, thieves, anyone who crossed him was fairer game. And in 1462, outside his own capital, he left a field of stakes that a Greek historian writing at the time counted at about 20,000 bodies. Yeah, what do you think of that kind of punishment?

It's probably the most brutal way to be punished. Getting a metal spike jabbed through and then slowly bleeding and dying in agony. That wasn't the worst part. Worst part of it was Vlad would collect the blood and drink it. You can see where it'd get the name the devil from doing that. In fact, I think, I don't know if this is true or just in the book, but I think he had a saying, The blood is the life, and the life it shall be mine. Now the thing that actually made him immortal, which isn't the stakes, it's the printing press.

Invented by Johann Gutenberg. Yes, Gutenberg invents it up and running in Europe by the 1450s. Vlad takes the throne in 1456, and so people start writing about him because there's now a printing press, especially the Transylvanian Saxon merchants he taxed, jailed, and impaled. They have money, contacts in German cities, and access to a press. So from the 1480s on, German print shops turn out pamphlets about the crimes of Dracula, Vida. Dracula, the prince, which means almost every number we have about him comes from someone with a reason to inflate it. I can't believe there was a 15th century media campaign.

I mean, I bet the castle, where Vlad lived was probably just as menacing as he was. Yeah. His people called him prince. His enemies called him impaler, but the world would come to know him as Dracula. Which brings me 400 years forward to an Irish theater manager working in London named Graham Stoker. Graham Stoker. author of the book Dracula.

That's exactly it. In fact, he's months deep into a vampire novel. He has a plot, a castle, and a villain called Count Wampi. Wampier. Wampier, yes. And that summer, Stoker's on holiday in the town of Whitby, and he pulls a book out of the subscription library, an account of the Principalities of Wallachia and Moldavia,

written in 1820 by a British consul named William, Wilkinson and Stoker's note survived so we know exactly what he took out of it. One footnote, which he copied out in capital letters, D-R-A-C-U-L-A, Dracula, in Waleakian language means devil. The capitals are his and in the notes, Wampre gets crossed out. Wampere. Thank you. Wampere gets crossed out. Yeah, because Wampier sounds a little too on the nose.

They call Count Orlock Nosferatu because, no. Nosfaratu literally translates to vampire. Funny enough, the book didn't mention the impalements at all. It just said that a Wallachian prince named Dracula, crossed the Danube, fought the Turks, and then lost his throne to his own brother. Stoker just liked it because the name meant devil. But it's true, Dracula really did fight against the Turks.

They were trying to take his land, spread Islam all across Europe, and destroy all of course. Christendom. It was actually during that time, Constantinople had been taken over by Islam, and the city itself became Istanbul. That's right. Well, with the impalments, the drinking of blood might have been a bit devilish himself. Sometimes he would do much, much worse. Well, Connor, thank you for diving into that with me. For everyone watching and listening, you can get a lot more of this on What the Fact. Make sure to subscribe on YouTube and

follow us wherever you get your podcasts. And now, a special preview of the real thing. 1816 is not only Doom. That freezing, ruined summer, produced some of the most iconic creative work in history. And you have lived your entire life inside the things it made. Okay, picture a rented mansion on Lake Geneva in Switzerland. Perpetual rain, lightning over the lake, counting till the thunder, candles at noon,

a group of young writers trapped inside decides to make a game of it. How about a little competition? The poet Lord Byron challenges everyone to write a ghost story. One of his guests is 18 years old. Mary Godwin, soon to be Mary Shelley. Author of one of the most famous horror novels ever written. I'm glad you bring that up because a few nights in between two or three in the morning, she has a waking nightmare, a pale student,

kneeling over something he has built watching it stir. She wrote later that she believed what terrified her, would terrify others the next morning. She started writing. Oh, that sounds a lot like a familiar book. I wonder which one it would be. Let's see, a doctor who creates a monster who rises, maybe with lightning helping animate it.

Could it be Frankenstein? Written at 18, very impressive. What many consider the first true. science fiction novel. And contrary to popular belief, Carter, Frankenstein isn't the monster itself. Frankenstein's the name of the guy who creates the creature, although, well, I believe the creature, as it's more known as, or the wretch, Victor Frankenstein was trying to discover the secret of life, proved to his colleagues that death could be undone, reversed. But when his creature was created, he was terrified by a...

monstrous appearance. Yes. All that poor creature wanted to do was exist. He did nothing wrong and everyone wanted him dead. Totally, right? You think of all the monsters that are like, evil, bad, and yet Franken, well, the wretch, right, wanted to be good, wanted to fit in, wanted to be loved. He wanted to belong, to not be alone.

Yeah, which we can all relate to, obviously. Well, and in this case, the instigating force was this storm. this volcanic winter, they're all inside. And in fact, not only was Frankenstein invented, but in that same house that summer, Byron's physician sketches out the vampire. Dracula's the first suave, aristocratic vampire in English fiction, the direct ancestor of Dracula.

So every brooding vampire you've ever encountered, include you, Tom, Cruz, and Brad Pitt and interviews for vampire. And Antonio Banderas, don't forget him. How could I? And these are three of the sexiest vampires in the history of the world. And it all goes back to that rainy week.

in Switzerland in 1816. Interesting thing, both Frankenstein and, well, Dracula as the vampire went on to inspire, would both become adopted by Universal Studios, along with the Wolfman, the mummy, the invisible man, and the creature from the Black Lagoon. So I guess in some ways, the volcanic winter was the birth of Universal Studios. Traces all the way back to there, everything we have now. What's your ranking of vampire movies? Okay, let's see.

Dracula untold with Lou Gevins. I'd put that at around a five. Bram Stoker's Dracula. Ten. Who could go wrong with Gary Oldman? Oh, you cannot. If my sister's watching, sorry, Anna, but on the subject of Twilight, don't get me wrong. I thought it was good, but overall, I give it a four and a half.

Okay, not quite a five, yeah. And, of course, it's cross-genre, because it's got vampires and... Weirwolves. Yeah. I'm more of a werewolf guy anyway. Oh, yeah. Well, that's a whole other time. We're talking about great werewolf movies. Here's looking at you, Jack. So that summer, Byron also wrote a poem called Darkness, imagining the sun going out and the human race dying and cold and black. He had no idea that he was describing something that had literally already happened. Really?

Mm-hmm. Okay, last thing. In Germany, the cold killed the oat crop. So horses starved. And people were slaughtering animals. They could not feed. And they were. German inventor named Carl von Andreas asks, what if there was another way to get around? A two-wheeled machine you straddle and push with your feet, the great-grandfather of the bicycle invented because a volcano killed the horses. Oh, yeah. Poor horses.

That part's sad. So, in memory of the horses of 1816, Frankenstein, the modern vampire, the bicycle, all out of one of the worst summers in history. And remember, it's silver lining. of the worst things that ever happened, some of the best things were left behind. Year two starts with a catapult and a corpse. Oh, yes. I'll be right back.

Thanks so much for listening. I'm Carter Roy, and this is Murder True Crime Stories. Come back next time for the story of another murder and all the people it affected. Murder True Crime Stories is a Crime House original, powered by Pave Studios. Here at Crime House, we want to thank each and every one of you for your support. if you like what you heard today. Reach out on social media at Crimehouse on TikTok and Instagram. Don't forget to rate, review, and follow Murder True Crime Stories wherever you get your podcasts.

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Murder True Crime Stories is hosted by me, Carter Roy, and is a crime house original powered by Pave Studios. This episode was brought to life by the Murder True Crime Stories team, Max Cutler, Ron Shapiro, Alex Benadon, Natalie Pertofsky, Lori Marinelli, Sarah Camp, Alyssa Fox, Mara Del Mara Rosa, Claire Swartlander, and Russell Nash. Thank you for listening. Thanks for listening, everyone. Before you go, I am hosting a new show with Connor Tomlinson from Netflix's Love on the Spectrum.

It's called What the Fact. Every week, we take three unbelievable true facts from history and tell you the full story behind them. Follow What The Fact wherever you listen or subscribe on YouTube at What The Fact Pod.