First, they played with dice. Then, they formed clubs, started dressing up like vampires and staged productions. Eventually, police said, some players began drinking blood.
Five teenagers, who police believe became attracted to vampires because of a role-playing game, are accused in the beating deaths in Florida of one the suspects' parents. The arrests cast a spotlight on an underground vampire culture, much of it evolved from the best-selling game Vampire: The Masquerade.The game, which has sold more than 500,000 copies since its 1991 creation, has its own jargon, hierarchy and dress.
The more serious players belong to clans - the Tremere or the Assamite Antitribu. Women submit to sires. They casually mention omens like the Coming of Gehenna. But it's all harmless fun, some players say.
"First of all, what kind of pathetic idiots torture puppies and bash their parents to death? This doesn't follow any tenant of vam-piric belief," Marjean Stewart of Denton, Texas, wrote in an Internet discussion area on vampires.
Police in Murray, Ky., the hometown of four of the suspects, said they believe the slayings may have evolved from the youths' involvement in the game.
"What are we? We are vampires, and that is enough," the game advertises. "No one holds command over me. . . . What is a claim of power for ones who defy death? Call your damnable hunt. We shall see whom I drag screaming to hell with me."
Authorities haven't contacted the game's publisher, White Wolf Inc. of Atlanta.
"I doubt seriously there's going to be any tie between these individuals, who were very disturbed, and our role-playing game," company spokesman Greg Fountain said.
Masquerade was patterned after the popular Dungeons & Dragons game of the 1980s and now is second in popularity only to D&D, White Wolf said.
Masquerade is no longer played around a table. Players act out roles in full vampire garb, usually at night on city streets, said J. Gordon Melton, who spent four years studying vampire culture and runs the Institute for the Study of American Religion in Santa Barbara, Calif.
"Instead of a group of people sitting around and rolling dice, the dice have been eliminated, costumes have been added and staging has been added," Melton said. "It's quite an event."
Four of the teenagers await extradition from Louisiana, where all five suspects were arrested Thanksgiving night. The lone adult suspect, 19-year-old Dana Cooper, was returned Tuesday to Florida to face murder charges.
She seemed solemn, tired and pale as she was denied bond Wednesday in Tavares, Fla. She appeared before a judge by video camera from jail, and no court date was set.
One of the suspects, Roderick Ferrell, 16, had lived in Eustis, Fla., where he met 15-year-old Heather Wendorf. He and three other teens from Kentucky went to Eustis where they allegedly bludgeoned Wendorf's parents.
The group fled in the Wendorfs' vehicle and were caught in Baton Rouge, La., after the parents of one of the teens called police, authorities said.
Authorities believe Ferrell also was involved in a break-in this fall at an animal shelter in which two puppies were mutilated.
His mother, Sondra Gibson, faces charges of solicitation to commit rape. She wrote a sexually explicit letter to a 14-year-old boy, urging him "to become a Vampire, a part of the family immortal" and asking him to become "my sire," police said.