The High Priest of New Castle: Frank Costal and the Kadunce Ritual Murders

0:00 In Newcastle, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1978, Kathy Cadens and her four-year-old daughter, Dawn, were found murdered in their home. Her infant son was left in the same house completely untouched. Police spent three years on this before a convicted killer sitting in a county jail finally started talking, and what he had to say reshaped everything investigators thought they understood about what happened that morning. [Music] Newcastle, Pennsylvania had a particular feeling in 1978.

0:54 People had lived on the same blocks for three or four generations. Everyone attended the same handful of churches. The social fabric was woven tight around steelwork, neighborhood loyalty, and the reassuring predictability of knowing your neighbor's names, their parents' names, and exactly what their cars sounded like pulling into the driveway at night. The city ran on the familiar, and the familiar felt like safety. That Newcastle didn't fully understand was that the most dangerous person in its recent history had been living among them for years without anyone recognizing what they were actually looking at. To understand how it all happened, you have to go back not eight years, not twenty, but fifty-five years to a woman named Beatrice Costle and a lizard.

1:42 In 1923, Beatrice Costle walked into the offices of the Newcastle news, carrying an eight-inch brown lizard with yellow markings that she thought someone should know about. She had already lost a leg in an automobile accident, and her household had a known reputation for unexplained fires. The lizard visit was, by the standards of her life, a fairly calm afternoon. That is the public record of Beatrice Costle, nine years before things became something else entirely. In 1932, Beatrice shot her husband in the back with a twenty-five caliber pistol and then turned the gun on herself. At the time, Frank Costle Jr. was four years old.

2:24 The father who remained was reportedly violence and abusive. Growing up in a house where the defining event of your earliest years was a murder suicide. Frank carried all of that forward into everything he eventually became. By seventeen, he dropped out of high school and had been picked up on suspicion of stealing a bicycle. By eighteen, he had joined the United States Army and trained as a military policeman. You heard me right? A military policeman. I guess he was trying. You can see it in the record, a young man reaching for something with structure, for a life that looked different from the one he had been handed. A life away from Beatrice and her weird lizard, sporadic unexplained fires at the house, and then Beatrice shooting her husband before taking her own life.

3:10 Frank was trying to get away from all of that. But the army couldn't hold him. He went AWOL and disappeared into the traveling carnival circuit. Which in the late 1940s was one of the few places in America that a person with Frank's history could kind of dissolve completely into a different version of himself. Frank built a new identity on that circuit. He performed under the name Frankie Francine, building himself as a hermaphrodite in a freak show, with a signature act that involved appearing to give birth to a live baby on stage. He learned to sew showgirl costumes. He studied fortune telling, which at its core requires one specific ability.

3:50 Reading what a person desperately needs to hear, and then delivering it back to them with enough theater that they feel understood rather than strategically managed. Frank became unusually good at this, and he became a careful student of how fear and fascination operate on people who have come to see something that they can't explain. He filed all those lessons somewhere they would surface again later. He eventually settled in Pittsburgh and spent years working as an industrial painter and laborer. That chapter closed in 1970 when a workplace accident left him permanently disabled, collecting $240 a month. He was 42 years old, finished with physical labor, and he returned to Newcastle with something entirely different in mind.

4:35 The man who came back was not interested in existing quietly. He grew long black hair and a shaggy beard, and began wearing a bright, red suit to the local shopping mall, where he gathered the young people who felt pushed to the edges of the city's conservative mainstream. Local merchants noted his striking resemblance to Rasputin, the infamous Russian mystic who wielded extraordinary influence through charisma, theatrics, and everyone sustained uncertainty about what he was capable of. Frank loved this comparison. People police initially wrote him off as Newcastle's first hippie. His neighbors eventually arrived at something more precise, calling him "the High Priest of Satan" and "The Witch of Highland Avenue."

5:21 His apartment on Highland Avenue was built to project authority and invoke an unease in equal measure. Black curtains covered every wall, plastic bats, and miniature skeletons hung from the ceiling. He constructed an altar decorated with inverted crucifixes and plastic skulls. He claimed the ability to perform astral projection, sending his consciousness out of his body to observe and influence people at remote locations around the city. He maintained voodoo dolls of personal enemies, a list that included a librarian who refused to lend him a book, and restaurant owners who banned him over hygiene. A wide-ranging list of grievances meticulously kept.

6:05 Expert testimony at his later trial established that Frank's rituals aligned with practices outlined an Anton Le Vais Satanic Bible. Prosecutors argue that he used "sustain psychological pressure and drug use to build an environment where his authority felt absolute." A witness named Steve Hamburg testified about the control Frank maintained over his followers, sobbing in atmosphere where compliance felt less like a choice, and more like the only option that felt safe. Young men came to Highland Avenue and stayed. One of them was a married man named Lou Cadence. Lou Cadence was married to a woman named Kathy, a had two children, a four-year-old daughter named Don and an infant son.

6:50 Later testimony alleged that Lou and Frank were romantically involved, and that Kathy had been noticing things inside her marriage that she could not fully account for. In the weeks before July 11, 1978, Kathy found drugs in the house, drugs that Frank had given to Lou to sell, and she flushed them. According to testimony that would not surface for three more years, Frank Costel treated that act as a transgression requiring a ritualized response. On the morning of July 11, someone entered the Cadence home on Wilmington Avenue, Don, who was four years old, was stabbed 17 times. Kathy, 25 years old, was stabbed 18 times and shot once in the head.

7:32 Their infant son was found alive and completely unharmed. The deliberate choice to leave one child untouched while the violence visited the others was so precise that it moved investigators away from any random home invasion theory almost immediately. Lou told police he'd been at work. For three years, that's where the case stayed. In 1981, Michael Atkinson, a convicted serial killer sitting in a Lawrence County jail, began providing investigators with details about the Cadence murders that only someone present at the scene could plausibly know. He said he had driven Frank Costel, Lou Cadence, and a man named John DuDohic to Wilmington Avenue that morning.

8:13 He waited outside, heard a gunshot, and watched Lou exit the home carrying a rifle. The detail that reframed everything was something Atkinson said Frank had once told him directly. 17 was the ritual number of stab wounds in his practice of Satanism. When investigators confirmed that Don had been stabbed exactly 17 times, the premeditated ritual theory became very difficult to argue away. An expert witness testified about the occult framework Frank had constructed over years. The prosecution argued these were planned, ritualized acts executed with religious intent rather than anything born of impulse. The resulting trial became a regional media event, with the Pittsburgh press providing extensive coverage of what it called "mystery and the devil" in Newcastle.

9:02 Frank Costel took the stand in his own defense and attempted to reduce everything about his Highland Avenue life to theater, props, and performance without real consequence. And then came the detail that quietly reshapes everything about this story. Frank admitted that he had developed his oratorical style, the specific cadence he used to hold his followers in place and convince them of his supernatural authority by watching televangelist Oral Roberts on television and carefully studying his delivery. He described astral projection as a personal belief he had never actually been able to perform. The props were props. The man who had built a following on claims of mystical power had developed his entire method by watching a Christian preacher and applying that technique toward a completely different mythology.

9:54 The occult was window dressing. Frank Costel's actual instrument was a precise understanding of human psychology, specifically the vulnerability of people who felt discarded by their communities, and he wielded that understanding without any internal limit at all. The jury convicted him on two counts of first degree murder and sentenced him to two consecutive life terms. Luke Caden's was tried separately and acquitted, with a reliance on a convicted serial killer as primary witness creating enough reasonable doubt. Luke left Newcastle after the verdict and disappeared from public record entirely. John Dudowick committed suicide before investigators could reach him.

10:35 Frank Costel spent the rest of his life in the Pennsylvania prison system. By the late 1990s he had been moved to a geriatric unit, semi-comatose, skeletal beneath a thin blanket. He died in December 1999 at 71 years old, and whatever he knew about the morning of July 11, 1978, he took it with him. Thanks for listening to 10 Minute Murder, bingeable true crime stories. Hello, I'm Joe, the host, and here's an email from one of you. Subjects recording time, hey Joe, roughly how long does it take you to record a 10 minute episode? I'm guessing it's not actually 10 minutes from start to finish.

11:18 Just curious how many takes usually go into one. Trevor in Lincoln, Nebraska. Trevor, man, it varies so wildly. This one that you just listened to took me maybe 40 minutes, 30, 40 minutes or so. And that does not include all the research and reading up on what the case is all about time. There's no way to calculate that. This is just, I've got it. It's just a record and go. Now some of the reasons that I have to stop and go back is because I screw up a lot. I mess up words, I say things wrong. If you're an OG listener, you know that I have a hard time with names. So I do actually try to go and find out how to pronounce people's names because I think that matters, but I do occasionally get it wrong.

12:03 And that takes time. And then you've got days like today where I've got allergies attacking me from the waste up. You have to pause, take a couple drinks of water, sneeze, whatever, whatever I'll take to do. So that obviously takes time too. Hey, if you're a brand new listener to this podcast, welcome. Put your feet up, get comfortable because there are literally hundreds of episodes where you to catch up on. You can go to 10minuteMurder.com, figure out what's going on with the show there. Also send me an email if you go to the website. And if you're new and you're like, yeah, the 10 minute thing is cool, but I kind of want something longer. If you've got a longer podcast, that'd be great. Good news, I do. It's pretty new.

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