By the time Rod was just 16 years old, he started a small gang known as “The Vampire Clan.” This was about much more than being rebellious teens who enjoyed goth fashion and 1990s heavy metal music. He truly seemed convinced that he was a vampire.
Rod even gave himself a new vampiric identity in the form of “Vesago,” a persona he named after a character he created for a tabletop role-playing game called, Vampire: The Masquerade.
Rod believed that as Vesago, he was a 500-year-old vampire. “I tried to embrace the lifestyle of being a vampire and being so young, my mind latched onto it so deeply, so tenaciously, that I got lost inside it,” he explained.
Rod found the name for his vampire alter-ego in a 17th-century occultic book The Lesser Key of Solomon. Vesago is believed to have special powers including fortune-telling and the ability to uncover lost objects.
It’s unclear how many people Rod led in his “clan,” but authorities say at one point it could have had as many as 30 members, all of whom were expected to drink Rod’s blood as part of a grisly initiation ritual.
