How Teen “Vampire” and Cult Leader Rod Ferrell Became Youngest on Florida’s Death Row
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The disturbing acts of 16-year-old self-proclaimed vampire Roderick “Rod” Ferrell beckoned local teens to the graveyard and eventually ended with the 1996 murders of two people, as once detailed in Oxygen’s Deadly Cults.Born in Murray, Kentucky — a little over 100 miles northwest of Nashville, Tennessee — Ferrell was raised by his young mother, Sondra Gibson, according to court records previously reviewed by Oxygen.com. Authorities cited a troubling childhood as the reason he could have possibly been drawn to the macabre, including Ferrell’s claims that he was raped by his maternal grandfather, Harrell Gibson, at age 5.
Psychologists said Harrell Gibson allegedly had his friends gang-rape Ferrell as a child, according to Central Florida’s Daily Commercial. During the 1998 trial, Ferrell’s maternal aunt testified that Harrell Gibson sexually abused both her and Sondra Gibson.
Harrell Gibson has never been charged in connection with the claims. Sondra Gibson was an admitted sex worker who would later be a part of Ferrell’s motley crew of blood-drinking goths and later painted by the prosecution as a mentally ill woman who went so far as to attempt to have sex with a 14-year-old teen boy as part of a ritualistic act, according to Daily Commercial. (She denied claims in court that she and Ferrell were “beyond romantic.”)Mother and son reportedly moved between Murray, Kentucky, and Eustis, Florida — about 40 miles northwest of Orlando — after Gibson’s parents moved to the area when Ferrell was around 10, per the Deadly Cults series premiere.
Content retrieved from: https://www.oxygen.com/deadly-cults/crime-news/vampire-rod-ferrell-heather-wendorf-murder-what-to-know.
