The High Priest of New Castle: Frank Costal and the Kadunce Ritual Murders
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 19 March 2026
⏱️ 13 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
On July 11, 1978, Kathy Kadunce, age 25, and her four-year-old daughter Dawn were found stabbed to death inside their New Castle, Pennsylvania home in what investigators would eventually classify as a ritualistic homicide connected to a Satanic cult operating in Lawrence County. The cold case investigation sat dormant for three years before a convicted serial killer named Michael Atkinson provided testimony pointing to Frank Costal Jr., a self-styled occult high priest who maintained a following of alienated young men, as the architect of the killings.
Frank Costal spent his entire adult life building himself into something impossible to ignore. He started as a carnival freak show performer, eventually returned to New Castle, filled an apartment with black curtains and plastic skulls, and built enough psychological authority over his followers that grown adults were afraid to cross him. When Kathy Kadunce discovered drugs in her house and flushed them, the consequences were unthinkable. This is the story of a traumatized child who grew into something genuinely terrifying, and the family who paid the price for it.
#SatanicPanic #PennsylvaniaMurder #KadunceMurders #FrankCostal #ColdCase #OccultMurder
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | In Newcastle, Pennsylvania, in the summer of 1978, Kathy Cadence and her four-year-old daughter, Dawn, were found murdered in their home. |
| 0:10.0 | Her infant son was left in the same house, completely untouched. |
| 0:14.0 | Police spent three years on this before a convicted killer sitting in a county jail finally started talking, |
| 0:20.0 | and what he had to say |
| 0:21.6 | reshaped everything investigators thought they understood about what happened that morning. Newcastle, Pennsylvania had a particular feeling in 1978. |
| 0:57.2 | People had lived on the same blocks for three or four generations. |
| 1:00.0 | Everyone attended the same handful of churches. |
| 1:05.5 | The social fabric was woven tight around steelwork, neighborhood loyalty, and the reassuring predictability of knowing your neighbor's names, their parents' names, |
| 1:12.2 | and exactly what their cars sounded like pulling into the driveway at night. |
| 1:15.1 | The city ran on the familiar, and the familiar felt like safety. |
| 1:20.6 | What Newcastle didn't fully understand was that the most dangerous person in its recent |
| 1:25.1 | history had been living among them for years without anyone |
| 1:28.4 | recognizing what they were actually looking at. To understand how it all happened, you have to go back |
| 1:33.5 | not eight years, not 20, but 55 years to a woman named Beatrice Costel and a lizard. |
| 1:42.4 | In 1923, Beatrice Costel walked into the offices of the Newcastle News, |
| 1:47.5 | carrying an eight-inch brown lizard with yellow markings that she thought someone should know about. |
| 1:53.3 | She had already lost a leg in an automobile accident, and her household had a known reputation |
| 1:58.4 | for unexplained fires. The lizard visit was, by the standards of |
| 2:03.5 | her life, a fairly calm afternoon. That is the public record of Beatrice Costel nine years before |
| 2:09.8 | things became something else entirely. In 1932, Beatrice shot her husband in the back with a 25-caliber |
| 2:17.3 | pistol and then turned |
| 2:18.8 | the gun on herself. At the time, Frank Costell Jr. was four years old. The father who remained |
... |
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