May 5, 2026 • 41 mins
Revisiting the Piketon Massacre, Ten years later. Joseph Scott Morgan and Dave Mack discuss the case that can best be described as: 8 Murders. 4 Crime Scenes. 1 Night. Ten years since the murders took place, eight years since the arrest of the Wagner family. The case isn't over yet.
Transcribe Highlights
00:00.09 Introduction: Timelines
05:13.71 Jake Wagner, 18 dating Hanna Rhoden. 13
10:19.50 Billy Wagner 6'6" 275 lbs
15:16.31 Forgive but don't forget
20:39.38 Toddler "mommy and daddy playing zombie"
25:05.27 Custody of Baby Sophia
30:17.03 Dark, no light, suspects had to be familiar
35:29.91 Execution of Rhoden Family
41:08.15 Vengeance and Hatred
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:01):
Body dams with Joseph's gotten more professionally, I found it
interesting about marking your life or timelines in your life. Professionally.
I know we do it in our private lives, that
sort of thing, you know, with you know, births and
(00:24):
marriages and deaths and you know, things like that, But professionally,
some things get I don't know, kind of jumbled up.
Many times. You know, there are a lot of beginnings
and ends. Sometimes you forget about the middle, at least
I do. But something caught my eye. I guess it
(00:46):
was probably about a month ago, and it was one
of those moments where he thought, wow, that that happened
ten years ago. And I had the privilege of commentating
on this event, and I'm looking back reflectively now about
(01:11):
what I bore witness to or you know, kind of
had an insight into, and it was a privilege. And still,
you know, I've come away still being marked by these events,
and since that, I'll never forget the people and the
(01:35):
landscapes that I bore witness to, because those landscapes are
not too different than locations that I grew up in
and spent time even as an adult. What I'm referring
to is down in southeastern Ohio and a little place,
(01:58):
a flee speck of a plug where arguably the most
brutal homicide that the country has ever witnessed, brutal homicides,
may I say, has ever witnessed, and certainly the largest
homicide investigation in the history of the state of Ohio.
Of course, what I'm referring to is what has become
(02:20):
known as the Pike County Massacre or the Pikedon Massacre.
It's ten years later, let's have a discussion. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan, and this is body bags, Dave. When you
(02:40):
and I first started working together on body bags, this case,
these cases were in the air. We didn't necessarily know
about all of the outcomes at that particular, Tom, but
(03:02):
there were discussions. We've done episodes on it, and I
got to tell you, it's hard to believe looking back
now that it's been ten years since the actual massacre
took place, and I felt it was fitting for you
and I to at least have a discussion about this.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
What say you, my friend, I'm glad that you wanted
to revisit it, because it is still not done ten
years later, Okay, and I pulled up the original episode.
How we look at things when we title them, you
try to encapsulate everything for your notes so that you
can go back to it and go, okay, piked a
massacre one night, four crime scenes, eight murders. That tells
(03:48):
you what the mathematics of everything. And I will never
forget you have been so involved in this. You've been
to this area, You've walked the the same area that
these people were walking and running in that night. And
to me, there are so many different angles this on
(04:11):
this episode, on this topic, rather that it really comes
down to something as simple as control, ego and being
willing to do everything you can for custody of a child. Yeah,
(04:32):
and I'm thinking of baby Sophia who was robbed of
everything in her life, of what she could have had
and what she has left with. And I mean the
child was just a toddler when all this happened. And
think she's now, you know, in her early teens, This
little girl that was the the impetus. And it's not
(04:54):
her fault. I mean it was the adults in her
life that were fighting over her. You had a teenage
mother who had been by the way, a very similar
situation in terms of the ages that we are dealing with.
In the most recent case of Celeste Reevas and D
four VD Burke, the guy in this case was eighteen
(05:21):
at the time he started dating having relations with a
then thirteen year old girl named Hannah. The Rodents and
the Wagners were friends the families. And when you think
about these two families who have interconnected personal relationships, and
(05:42):
now you've got an eighteen year old man and a
thirteen year old girl that are in a relationship that
everybody knows about, Joe, there wasn't an adult among them
that stood up and said, get your hands off that girl.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
He's thirteen.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And I blame everybody involved for that same thing, like
I got issues with the whole thing with celestevas two
and when she was involved with Burke and the whole
nine there. But that's what this comes down to. And
by the way, what we have learned in the year
since is pretty scary, Joe, because history pretty much repeated
itself with the same guy while they were pretty much
(06:25):
on the lamb from this murder. So setting up the teams,
you have the Rodents and the Wagoners. The Rodents were
the family that was destroyed that night. The Wagners are
the ones that put the ball in play. So Joe,
I need you to suffer somehow, somehow. Tell me who
(06:46):
was in charge. You captained the team who put this
game plan together for the Wagners to attack the Rodents
in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Well, I'll put it. Let me put it to you
this way, Dave, it wasn't the shooters. The shooters were
complicit in this, obviously, because you have to have them
on board. And here here's a I'm sorry, they were
the pawns. Yeah, well no, you know, it's really hard
(07:21):
to say if if you can refer to three grown
ass men as pawns, because that gives them an excuse.
Oh okay, And I try to stay away from that
because you know, we we I believe, as human beings
(07:42):
all have we all have free will, and we make
decisions about those things that we are going to be
involved in that we're not going to be involved in. Now,
the leader of the pack, can they be highly manipulative? Yeah, yeah,
you can. I mean you you look at something like
maybe it's a bad example. You look at Jonestown though,
(08:03):
a lot of kids down there, But dude, the vast
majority of the people that were down there were adults, okay,
and they made free will decision to get involved in that.
But this is something that runs, i think a bit
deeper than that because the old adage of blood being
thicker than water, and you kind of stoked those familial flames,
(08:27):
you know, with with just that bit of stimulus there,
and it really gives you. It sets the it sets
everything in motion. So for me, the leader of this,
the person that's actually making the decisions, it's going to
come down to Angela Wagner, you know it has to.
(08:47):
She is the matriarch of the family. It's her, you know,
her her two adult sons. You know, we've got George
Wagner's twenty seven, he's the oldest of the kids. We've
got Edward Jake goes By Jake who's twenty six, and
(09:09):
he's the what they call him the Pataphamilias. He's the
father of this precious little child that's been brought into
this world that you know, is is kind of the
the the center of all this. He's the youngest son,
he's very close with his mother. So could he be
easily manipulated in control? Yeah, we see that throughout. But
(09:33):
you know, at you know, twenty four twenty six, you
have a will of your own better and you're gonna
you're gonna be ind to it. And then we've got
this this other person that who's the patriarch of of
this little you know. Uh, I don't know how to
say it other than this, uh, this syndicate here, right,
(10:01):
and that's that's gonna be Billy. Now, Billy, you know
you were talking about the Reeva's case. I want to
take take just a moment here to acknowledge something in
the physical space about Billy. We've seen rex Huerman on
television the last few years, and certainly as of late,
(10:22):
you know, when he you know, admitted to being Gilgo,
the Gilg Killer, and people have made note of of
rex Huerman's hulking size. All right, I got to tell you,
for those of you that have not seen, that have
(10:43):
not seen Billy Wagner, make it a point to look
up ark ival ark ivl video of him coming in
and out of court. He is massive, and I mean
I'm talking about to the point of being intimidating physically,
(11:09):
just like have you ever been around somebody, Dave. I've
been around guys that are really big, and I don't
feel intimidated by when they walk in the room, you know.
But you know, I've been around a lot of like
football players, you know that that you know they have
to duck when they walk in the door. But they
the ducking comes along with a big smile and a
(11:32):
warm handshake, you know where they engulf your hand when
they shake your hand. But not this. There is something.
There is this cloud that this guy drags behind him.
And to give you a little inside baseball information here
and I've mentioned this, I think on previous episodes something
I was struck by. The Wagoners actually lived in a
(11:52):
kind of a it almost looks no Norman Rockwellian when
you see there this farmhouse that they have story kind
of knock off Victorian looking thing on a plot of
land out there in this beautiful countryside which I'd recommend
anybody visiting this area as Appalachia. It's gorgeous. People are
all very friendly. The kitchen where they had this kitchen
(12:18):
table they would sit around and they were they would
go on and talk about these plans to commit this
this mask or it's in that kitchen that you can
learn a lot about this family and talking about Billy.
Billy had a hair trigger, hair trigger relative to his
(12:38):
anger control issues, like to break things, yell, scream, carry on.
And at the time of the mask he was not
living in that house, but what was contained therein that
house spoke volumes. And I'll never forget this, and I
can't remember who it was that. I think it was
one of the producers. I was actually on the the
(13:00):
Piked and Masker Oxygen series, the docu series, which was
an incredible experience. Dave she had the mama had taken
her walls were adorned and the shells were adorned with
wicker baskets. And so every time, as we say down
(13:23):
here in the South, every time Billy would throw a fit,
he'd feel bad about it. He gotten by by his
wife a basket and it might contain something in it,
you know, like some kind of little what Nott gift.
But she would retain those baskets and she'd hang them
on the wall and she'd put them on her shelf.
(13:44):
And I was thinking about mark you know, I started
off having this discussion about marking time, right, you know
that where a decade removed, and so just literally if
you walk into that little bit of kitchen in that
house and you look around on the walls and shells.
She might say, well, wow, she's got a real interest
in baskets. But when you flip it and you think, oh,
(14:06):
my lord, every time he blew his top, lost as cool.
Whatever the case might be, this is representative of that.
So just imagine if you've ever been if you've ever
had issues with a family member and they have rage
control problems and maybe you were scarred by it when
(14:29):
you were a kid or you were in bad relationships.
Just imagine if you walked into your house and for
every event that occurred in your life when you you know,
where some kind of intimate relationship of familial whatever, and
it was marked by some item. And really it goes
to the idea of a total you know, it's like
(14:50):
something that's there that marks that moment in time.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Every negative thing you've ever done in the relationship is
hanging out in front of your face, Meaning there is
no forgiveness, because forgiveness is forgetting it. And by the way,
whenever somebody says I'm going to forgive but I ain't
never gonna forget, well, I'm going to tell you what
that's not the forgiveness God offers us, and you've got
to forget it.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Hanging baskets on the wall is a reminder.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
And by the way, just to give you guys an idea,
how big Billy Wagner is. The man is at the
time of this ten years ago, six foot six, two
hundred and seventy five pounds. This is a big guy
and his wife is hanging baskets to remind him of
all the times he lost his and got mad at
and had to apologize right every minute. Now you talk
(15:37):
about controlling the family, there is your control, because she
shoved it right in his face and said I'm in charge,
not you, big man.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
And yeah, I had like this this moment just now
when you said that. I was thinking, now, if we believe,
which I do, I believe that she was in control
of the whole thing. She's directing, directing this collection of
of you know, her sons and her husband. Can you
(16:08):
just envision her looking at them say well, y'all, come
on into the kitchen. We need to have a talk.
It's not like saying let's go sit on the front porch.
I'll pour her some lemonade or some iced tea or something. Now,
let's come into the kitchen and you're going to see
here before you you know, it's like walking into a
record executive's office that's got gold records for years and
(16:30):
years and they're hanging The reason you hang your gold
records on the wall is to demonstrate to everybody that
walks in, you know, your past and what you've done.
You know, you let that kind of settle into your
groundwater a little bit. And I would submit that that's
kind of the underpinning of this relationship far, you know,
and this existed long, long, long before the massacre took place.
(16:54):
You owe me, you owe me something. You're absolutely right,
brother Dave, that it's there and it's in your face.
And my question is, I think that night ten years ago,
when they were sitting there and they were waiting in
that house, rocking back and forth, maybe they cast their
(17:17):
eyes upon those baskets. They were reminders and maybe a warning.
Whatever happens, we certainly don't want to displease Mama. Back
(17:44):
on the morning of you know, April twenty second, twenty
twenty six, Bobby Joe Manley, who is you know, actually
the former sister in law of Chris Rodin senr Comes
(18:04):
to his home, right, she's there to tend to the dogs,
and she goes to open the door, and when she does,
she makes this incredible discovery at the house because it
(18:26):
looks like Hellis has kind of visited this place. She
finds her former brother in law. He's deceased, his cousin
Gary Roden, who along with Chris Senior, they do landscaping
work together at a campground that's some distance away. He's
(18:51):
dead in the house. So when she calls this sing
in Dave, you can imagine, you know, this is something
that he's never beheld before, and that in and of itself,
I think is kind of a you know, it's kind
of a window into the horror. You know. She runs
next door to Chris Senior's son's house who lived immediately
(19:17):
they lived and I've got a little slice reality for
you here in just a second. But runs next door
to where Frankie Rodin has a house trailer okay, and
just like his daddy, big big piece of property, and
runs to that door to go check on Frankie. He
(19:42):
lives there with his fiancee, who is Hannah. Knocks on
the door and a child. Dave comes to the door
and it's their oldest child who had this child's little
I mean little little little has been sleeping on the
sofa or had been laid on south and she's like,
(20:04):
where's where's your mommy and daddy at And that child
looks at Bobby Joe and says, mommy and daddy are
playing zombie and she retrieves this child walks in and
they've got a baby that's laying between them amongst their
(20:30):
gore where they've both been shot and killed as they
lay there in bed. But the baby was not killed,
and that baby has been wallowing around, you know, for
a protracted period of time in blood and tissue. This
baby is retrieved, brought from the house, and you know
(20:51):
it's from there the scene begins. I think that when
the cops arrive on Gin and it's called Union Hill
Road is the name of the road. It's one of
those moments in time that marks you as an investigator
because you know that you're beholding something and you can't
make sense out of it. I don't think your brain
(21:13):
is quite capable of processing this stuff. Even as as
long as you've been working, as jaded as you might be,
you can't. You cannot do it in an instant. It's
almost like you've got to catch your breath so that
your brain can kick into like investigative mode years after
(21:33):
the fact. There were two things that really stuck with
me when I was working on this documentary. The first
was how big this piece of property is. And these
two trailer houses are essentially they kind of line up
with one another. They're on two separate sets of property,
(21:55):
but this property of Butts it joins. Okay, both of
these plots do. And there's all kinds of buildings out there.
There's a barn. Two things that stuck with me though
Frankie's trailer it had been sitting there on this knoll,
(22:15):
you know, which is where Bobby Joe would have walked
up and found you know that that child at the
door that saying was talking about the uh playing zombie
h Dave. When I got there, that trailer was not there,
and I'll get into that in just a moment. But
what was there was this skeletal remains of this wooden
(22:39):
staircase and on the top of that platform and that
that wooden staircase. After all these years, there still sat
a little trike from a child, and you could see
other toys that were off in the distance, and all
this stuff is overgrown. But it's like when you're looking,
(23:00):
when you're standing there, you know, because it's on the
top of a hill, you can get to a point
where you're staying on the property and you're you're staring
eye to eye with that landing, that that wooden landing,
and it's almost like the trick is like looking you
in the eye, just kind of like a silent witness.
(23:20):
What's weird is you know, you think about, well, did
some worker just throw it up there? Or had it
been there? You know, the night that all of us happened,
just kind of bearing silent witness as an inanimate object
that the killers may have just brushed past it, you know,
to commit the horror that was committed inside of inside
(23:41):
of this dwelling.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Can I ask you a question? All right, there are
four crime scenes. Each crime scene is a trailer house
trailer and kind of yeah, okay, but then that's where
the front porch and most house trailers, you know, they
do sit up off the land and a small deck
with stairs that leads into it. You know, you've got
a little down in most of them. And in this case,
(24:07):
each of these crime scenes pretty much or these houses
were they were all towed away during the investigation. All right,
But getting back to this, at the first location, the
one crime scene, and you can number them however you want,
but crime scene one, we've got Chris Rodin senior, forty
years old and Gary Rodin, his cousin, who's thirty eight.
(24:29):
These two men are found in the at the same
crime scene where Chris has been shot in the head
torriso in arm nine times. Yeah, we've got Gary. He's
got a gunshot one too, the head. I have to
wonder was it overkill on Chris and Gary was just
(24:50):
shot in the head and left. I can't figure that
out because it just seems like that seems extremely weird
to me that you've got nine shots in one guy
and one right to the head of the other there.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Yeah, and then you.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Better to go to the next because each one of
these crime scenes represented something to the Wagner family.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
These are all Rodent relatives.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
These are all people related to Hannah, who has was
the mom of the two year old baby at the time,
the toddler. You know that the whole battle was about
baby Sophia. And so you've got the Wagner family that
they're going to destroy the Rodent family to gain custody
of that baby. That's the entire game plan here or no,
(25:35):
that's the time. That's the object, is to end up
with custody of this child. At first, they were just
gonna we just got to kill the mom. We'll just
kill Sophia's mom, Hannah, you know, and we'll take her
out and then the baby will be ours. And they
thought about it, went nope, we have to take out
everyone who could come against us as a potential you know,
(25:58):
home for the baby. So we have to wipe out
all next to Ken. And that was the battle. There was, Okay,
we're not just going to take out Hannah. We're taking
out every Roadent family member that would have a claim
to be the parent of this child, to raise this
child should they be gone. So the Rodent family has
to be destroyed. And there are these four locations that
were predetermined as to these people that they were friendly,
(26:23):
they had known one another. You mentioned this a minute ago, Joe,
about that area. Everybody knew everybody. It's country living. But
you know, we got interpersonal relationships for years here yep.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Generational Yeah yeah, generational relationships.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, you're perfectly okay with your eighteen year old son
going out with their thirteen year old daughter. And you're
perfectly okay with your thirteen year old daughter going out
with their eighteen year old son.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah. Yeah, And nobody's knocking that down at all, you know,
in the midst of all this. And yeah, it's it's
a bit I think, well it is. It's unpalatable for
most people, you know, to think about that. But when
you look at the dynamics of this environment and of
where they lived and the relationships between these two dare
(27:10):
I say clans of people, it they they're intertwined and
they're kind of twisted around in this in this kind
of grotesque dance. I think that they've done for a
long long time because there is there are drug deals
that have been made. Uh, there's people selling pot. Uh,
(27:32):
there's people that are involved in theft, all these sorts
of things. And to a bigger picture, Dave, Uh, you know,
when you've got four separate crime scenes and they they
make they make that decision that we're not stopping with
just one victim here. That opens the door to this
(27:54):
investigation from a different you're entering You're entering the scene
from a different door, and that's a metaphor where your
view as a cop, you're thinking, Okay, who would kill
all of these people? What's the interconnectivity here? Well, the
first stop along this line was that this had something
(28:15):
to do with drugs that you know. I can't tell
you for how long they toyed with this idea that
you know, it was some type of drug cartel that
had come here and wiped out you know, all.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
The oh my gosh, I got hey, Joe, because I've
covered this from the standpoint of what we already knew
after the fact. I didn't even think about that, because
we already knew the inner person relationship between Jake and
Hannah and the baby and the families and what actually transpired.
It never occurred to me to start where you're talking
about now, where you've got an entire family wiped out, which,
(28:56):
by the way, that is how drug deals happen. And
when they go south, man, it ain't just you that
goes down. It's your wife, it's your chill, it's everybody
gets wiped out. The only ones that might not be
killed are the little babies, the toddlers, well.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
I think I submit to you. And this is one
of the things that kind of put them off sin
initially was that they felt as though they being the authorities.
I think probably one of the FEDS got around this.
They were thinking everyone would have been wiped out, that
would not have been just simply the adult members. And
(29:32):
there's I think there's two ways you can come down,
you know, on either side with it. Uh maybe you know,
certain certain organized crime groups would not want to touch
little children, but yet you are touching them because you're
entering into their world where they lay sleeping. It's not
like you you waited until these people were driving down
the road and you've got somebody that you know, showers
(29:54):
showers their car with with semi automatic gunfire and kills
everybody out. No, you're waiting till they're at home in
their sleep. And it also, you know, one of the
things that we're thinking about the investigators in this case
is you, I think one of the most striking things.
(30:15):
And you can appreciate this, you know, I was talking
about the environment.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
There.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
You're out there at night, dude, you're kind of wandering around.
There is no artificial light, out there period. You know,
every now and then you might come across a house
it has light pole, but if you're if you're away
from that, you're kind of bumping around the dark and
you don't know, you don't know what's what. So do
(30:41):
you have a gang of ruthless drug dealers that are
part and parcel of this. That means that they would
have had to have shown up, be familiar with the area,
know where people are domiciled, and would have targeted them.
But when you get to like the you know some
(31:04):
of these players in this, So we'll talk about a minute,
what in the world did they have to do with it?
Because you're really running the risk here if you're if
you're working in the world, I think of an assassin
for a drug cartel or whatever it is. You want
to get in and get out. The thing that was
so striking about the piked In massacre is that you
(31:26):
had and this this is one of the themes that
runs through this. You had one night, four scenes an
eight dead. Who's to blame? Well, Dave, you know, we
(31:54):
were we were talking about Frankie's trailer, we talked about
Chris Seniors trailer, their domicile back up the road, which
I would say for those that are not familiar with
the geography, when I say back up the road I'm
talking about, you're heading more toward and none of this
(32:14):
is densely populated. But if you want to go back
into town, you have to go past Dana Roden's house.
And again I'm not implying that this is the sequencing
in which any of this happened. We're able to determine
sequencing at another time. But when when Dana Roden's house,
(32:36):
who by the way, is the ex the ex spouse
of Chris Rodin Sr. When her house is entered into,
she's found deceased, deceased in her bed. She's a nurse.
(32:56):
She had been working long hours and had been at
you know, a care center. And again, these jobs are
not real close, dude. You have to if you want
to be employed. These people have to drive like long distances,
you know, if they're going to work somewhere away from
the farm. These folks decided to get these jobs and
(33:18):
they were, you know, it's a long round trip. She
had Dana had worked as a nursing assistant and had
come come in, uh dog tired. She lived in the
house with her daughter, Hannah, who is the crux of
all of this. The child Sophia, who normally lives with them,
(33:45):
was not there the night of these homicides. She was
with the Wagoners, which is very convenient. You know that
that child Sophia is the center of this. But who
was there in addition to Hannah and her mama was
(34:05):
also Chris Junior, who's only sixteen years old. He lived
in the house. And oh, by the bye, Hannah had
just given birth to a precious little infant, and that
baby was in bed with her. And this child is
like little bitty, I mean, this child is so so
very is a newborn, all right, four days old, four
(34:30):
days old. So when entry is made into Dana's home,
you talk about if you think the other ones were hellish,
as if it couldn't get any worse. All three, all
three of these individuals are dead. Hannah's dead in her bed,
(34:51):
she's been shot in the face. Dana's deceased, she never
got up out of bed. And Chris, the sixteen year old,
it almost it almost seems as though that he had
an awareness of what was going to happen. We'd heard
different reports at different times about his body, and he's
been executed as well. And Sid notice I say executed
(35:14):
inside the house. So they're going in and they're completely
wiping out, wiping out the DNA of this family, just
right before your eyes. I mean you can see. But
yet they leave, they leave this four day old baby alive.
(35:35):
And you know, years later we find found out and
I think, you know, with every one of these cases,
there's one little bit that's that just shocks you to
no end. We find out later that the perpetrator of
of Hannah's murder actually took that little baby and nuzzled
(36:01):
that little baby against the mother's breast in death because
the perpetrator did not want the child to quote unquote
starve to death.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
Didn't know how long it'd before their bodies were found, and.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Right so left behind, left this baby behind the suckle
on its mother, you know, in death, and again just
you can't. It's hard, brother, It's really really hard to
take the measure of all of this.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Bottom line is the investigators did a good job, eventually
came back with a story that could hold water. But Joe,
we got the destruction of an entire family, and I'm
not talking about justin nuclear family talking about the extended
family when you start looking at this generationally speaking, and
(36:52):
it was one family destroying another to gain custody of
a child. And it was that single purpose that if
you've ever if you've ever had friends who have gone
through a divorce and you've watched them fighting over the
nitty gritty of every little thing, it really can be ugly.
(37:14):
And when it comes to custody of children, sometimes you
have a parent who really has never been that involved
in the children's lives. You know, they go to work,
come home, attend a game here. You know that they're
not engaged, they're not involved parents. But boy, when it
comes time for divorce, you're not taking my child away
from That's my child, right And that's what I see here.
I see that in the mother, who I believe masterminded
(37:37):
the whole thing. But I also see it more particularly
in the biological father of baby Sophia, Jake Wagner. Jake
Wagner to all who knew him. First of all, when
you've got an eighteen nineteen year old man involved with
a child, a thirteen or fourteen year old girl, the reason, yeah,
don't let that happen is because the reason that young
(37:58):
adult man is doing that is because he can control
the little girl he emotionally, physically, everything about He can
control that. And that's exactly what Jake did with Hannah
until she out groom when she was fifteen, sixteen years old.
She was done with him. She was the baby. She
got pregnant at fifteen. When he's twenty years old, he's
(38:19):
having a child with a fifteen year old girl. And
that's not enough to put him in jail. Okay, that's Joe.
I read comments from people who went to school with
both of them, with Jake and Hannah, now those are
two different groups of people because there was five years
separating them, and Jake's friends said, yeah, he was a
real control freak. You know, he was crazy about it.
(38:41):
Well after the Wagners went on the run, And we
need to get to this as another whole episode. You're
gonna have to do on this, Joe, because Jake Wagner's
history repeated itself. It really did. But back to this one.
You pointed out that when they first started investigating, there
was a thought that this could have been drug related,
(39:03):
Like you send up the secarios from Columbia to take
out this group of felons. And yet I have to
imagine that police locally knew what minimal amounts of pot
the family was dealing with the rodents I'm talking about,
didn't they have an idea of what really was going on?
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah? They did, and certainly, you know, when they begin
to connect the dots, you know, this is not a
group of people that and yet they made money. They
did make money off of the sale of weed, all right,
but we're not talking about individuals that have got a
(39:44):
grow operation that is, you know, a twenty four hour
processing plant here. You know, where you've got people that
are you know, harvesting and packaging and distributing, and that's
not what this is. Yeah, they would have been on
the radar, probably peripherally at least, and certainly and after
(40:07):
the fact, when they go out and they talk to
any kind of associate or person that had purchased purchase drugs,
maybe that had started with them, they began to get
a sense, I think at least that this was not
this was not about drug deals, This was not about
(40:27):
ill gotten game. It came down to what the coin
of the realm here was, and the coin of the
realm was vengeance and hatred. Join us for part two
of revisiting the piked and massacre ten years later. I'm
(40:54):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Body dams with Joseph's gotten more professionally, I found it
interesting about marking your life or timelines in your life. Professionally.
I know we do it in our private lives, that
sort of thing, you know, with you know, births and
(00:24):
marriages and deaths and you know, things like that, But professionally,
some things get I don't know, kind of jumbled up.
Many times. You know, there are a lot of beginnings
and ends. Sometimes you forget about the middle, at least
I do. But something caught my eye. I guess it
(00:46):
was probably about a month ago, and it was one
of those moments where he thought, wow, that that happened
ten years ago. And I had the privilege of commentating
on this event, and I'm looking back reflectively now about
(01:11):
what I bore witness to or you know, kind of
had an insight into, and it was a privilege. And still,
you know, I've come away still being marked by these events,
and since that, I'll never forget the people and the
(01:35):
landscapes that I bore witness to, because those landscapes are
not too different than locations that I grew up in
and spent time even as an adult. What I'm referring
to is down in southeastern Ohio and a little place,
(01:58):
a flee speck of a plug where arguably the most
brutal homicide that the country has ever witnessed, brutal homicides,
may I say, has ever witnessed, and certainly the largest
homicide investigation in the history of the state of Ohio.
Of course, what I'm referring to is what has become
(02:20):
known as the Pike County Massacre or the Pikedon Massacre.
It's ten years later, let's have a discussion. I'm Joseph
Scott Morgan, and this is body bags, Dave. When you
(02:40):
and I first started working together on body bags, this case,
these cases were in the air. We didn't necessarily know
about all of the outcomes at that particular, Tom, but
(03:02):
there were discussions. We've done episodes on it, and I
got to tell you, it's hard to believe looking back
now that it's been ten years since the actual massacre
took place, and I felt it was fitting for you
and I to at least have a discussion about this.
Speaker 2 (03:22):
What say you, my friend, I'm glad that you wanted
to revisit it, because it is still not done ten
years later, Okay, and I pulled up the original episode.
How we look at things when we title them, you
try to encapsulate everything for your notes so that you
can go back to it and go, okay, piked a
massacre one night, four crime scenes, eight murders. That tells
(03:48):
you what the mathematics of everything. And I will never
forget you have been so involved in this. You've been
to this area, You've walked the the same area that
these people were walking and running in that night. And
to me, there are so many different angles this on
(04:11):
this episode, on this topic, rather that it really comes
down to something as simple as control, ego and being
willing to do everything you can for custody of a child. Yeah,
(04:32):
and I'm thinking of baby Sophia who was robbed of
everything in her life, of what she could have had
and what she has left with. And I mean the
child was just a toddler when all this happened. And
think she's now, you know, in her early teens, This
little girl that was the the impetus. And it's not
(04:54):
her fault. I mean it was the adults in her
life that were fighting over her. You had a teenage
mother who had been by the way, a very similar
situation in terms of the ages that we are dealing with.
In the most recent case of Celeste Reevas and D
four VD Burke, the guy in this case was eighteen
(05:21):
at the time he started dating having relations with a
then thirteen year old girl named Hannah. The Rodents and
the Wagners were friends the families. And when you think
about these two families who have interconnected personal relationships, and
(05:42):
now you've got an eighteen year old man and a
thirteen year old girl that are in a relationship that
everybody knows about, Joe, there wasn't an adult among them
that stood up and said, get your hands off that girl.
Speaker 3 (05:59):
He's thirteen.
Speaker 1 (06:00):
Yep.
Speaker 2 (06:01):
And I blame everybody involved for that same thing, like
I got issues with the whole thing with celestevas two
and when she was involved with Burke and the whole
nine there. But that's what this comes down to. And
by the way, what we have learned in the year
since is pretty scary, Joe, because history pretty much repeated
itself with the same guy while they were pretty much
(06:25):
on the lamb from this murder. So setting up the teams,
you have the Rodents and the Wagoners. The Rodents were
the family that was destroyed that night. The Wagners are
the ones that put the ball in play. So Joe,
I need you to suffer somehow, somehow. Tell me who
(06:46):
was in charge. You captained the team who put this
game plan together for the Wagners to attack the Rodents
in the middle of the night.
Speaker 1 (06:58):
Well, I'll put it. Let me put it to you
this way, Dave, it wasn't the shooters. The shooters were
complicit in this, obviously, because you have to have them
on board. And here here's a I'm sorry, they were
the pawns. Yeah, well no, you know, it's really hard
(07:21):
to say if if you can refer to three grown
ass men as pawns, because that gives them an excuse.
Oh okay, And I try to stay away from that
because you know, we we I believe, as human beings
(07:42):
all have we all have free will, and we make
decisions about those things that we are going to be
involved in that we're not going to be involved in. Now,
the leader of the pack, can they be highly manipulative? Yeah, yeah,
you can. I mean you you look at something like
maybe it's a bad example. You look at Jonestown though,
(08:03):
a lot of kids down there, But dude, the vast
majority of the people that were down there were adults, okay,
and they made free will decision to get involved in that.
But this is something that runs, i think a bit
deeper than that because the old adage of blood being
thicker than water, and you kind of stoked those familial flames,
(08:27):
you know, with with just that bit of stimulus there,
and it really gives you. It sets the it sets
everything in motion. So for me, the leader of this,
the person that's actually making the decisions, it's going to
come down to Angela Wagner, you know it has to.
(08:47):
She is the matriarch of the family. It's her, you know,
her her two adult sons. You know, we've got George
Wagner's twenty seven, he's the oldest of the kids. We've
got Edward Jake goes By Jake who's twenty six, and
(09:09):
he's the what they call him the Pataphamilias. He's the
father of this precious little child that's been brought into
this world that you know, is is kind of the
the the center of all this. He's the youngest son,
he's very close with his mother. So could he be
easily manipulated in control? Yeah, we see that throughout. But
(09:33):
you know, at you know, twenty four twenty six, you
have a will of your own better and you're gonna
you're gonna be ind to it. And then we've got
this this other person that who's the patriarch of of
this little you know. Uh, I don't know how to
say it other than this, uh, this syndicate here, right,
(10:01):
and that's that's gonna be Billy. Now, Billy, you know
you were talking about the Reeva's case. I want to
take take just a moment here to acknowledge something in
the physical space about Billy. We've seen rex Huerman on
television the last few years, and certainly as of late,
(10:22):
you know, when he you know, admitted to being Gilgo,
the Gilg Killer, and people have made note of of
rex Huerman's hulking size. All right, I got to tell you,
for those of you that have not seen, that have
(10:43):
not seen Billy Wagner, make it a point to look
up ark ival ark ivl video of him coming in
and out of court. He is massive, and I mean
I'm talking about to the point of being intimidating physically,
(11:09):
just like have you ever been around somebody, Dave. I've
been around guys that are really big, and I don't
feel intimidated by when they walk in the room, you know.
But you know, I've been around a lot of like
football players, you know that that you know they have
to duck when they walk in the door. But they
the ducking comes along with a big smile and a
(11:32):
warm handshake, you know where they engulf your hand when
they shake your hand. But not this. There is something.
There is this cloud that this guy drags behind him.
And to give you a little inside baseball information here
and I've mentioned this, I think on previous episodes something
I was struck by. The Wagoners actually lived in a
(11:52):
kind of a it almost looks no Norman Rockwellian when
you see there this farmhouse that they have story kind
of knock off Victorian looking thing on a plot of
land out there in this beautiful countryside which I'd recommend
anybody visiting this area as Appalachia. It's gorgeous. People are
all very friendly. The kitchen where they had this kitchen
(12:18):
table they would sit around and they were they would
go on and talk about these plans to commit this
this mask or it's in that kitchen that you can
learn a lot about this family and talking about Billy.
Billy had a hair trigger, hair trigger relative to his
(12:38):
anger control issues, like to break things, yell, scream, carry on.
And at the time of the mask he was not
living in that house, but what was contained therein that
house spoke volumes. And I'll never forget this, and I
can't remember who it was that. I think it was
one of the producers. I was actually on the the
(13:00):
Piked and Masker Oxygen series, the docu series, which was
an incredible experience. Dave she had the mama had taken
her walls were adorned and the shells were adorned with
wicker baskets. And so every time, as we say down
(13:23):
here in the South, every time Billy would throw a fit,
he'd feel bad about it. He gotten by by his
wife a basket and it might contain something in it,
you know, like some kind of little what Nott gift.
But she would retain those baskets and she'd hang them
on the wall and she'd put them on her shelf.
(13:44):
And I was thinking about mark you know, I started
off having this discussion about marking time, right, you know
that where a decade removed, and so just literally if
you walk into that little bit of kitchen in that
house and you look around on the walls and shells.
She might say, well, wow, she's got a real interest
in baskets. But when you flip it and you think, oh,
(14:06):
my lord, every time he blew his top, lost as cool.
Whatever the case might be, this is representative of that.
So just imagine if you've ever been if you've ever
had issues with a family member and they have rage
control problems and maybe you were scarred by it when
(14:29):
you were a kid or you were in bad relationships.
Just imagine if you walked into your house and for
every event that occurred in your life when you you know,
where some kind of intimate relationship of familial whatever, and
it was marked by some item. And really it goes
to the idea of a total you know, it's like
(14:50):
something that's there that marks that moment in time.
Speaker 2 (14:53):
Every negative thing you've ever done in the relationship is
hanging out in front of your face, Meaning there is
no forgiveness, because forgiveness is forgetting it. And by the way,
whenever somebody says I'm going to forgive but I ain't
never gonna forget, well, I'm going to tell you what
that's not the forgiveness God offers us, and you've got
to forget it.
Speaker 3 (15:11):
Hanging baskets on the wall is a reminder.
Speaker 2 (15:14):
And by the way, just to give you guys an idea,
how big Billy Wagner is. The man is at the
time of this ten years ago, six foot six, two
hundred and seventy five pounds. This is a big guy
and his wife is hanging baskets to remind him of
all the times he lost his and got mad at
and had to apologize right every minute. Now you talk
(15:37):
about controlling the family, there is your control, because she
shoved it right in his face and said I'm in charge,
not you, big man.
Speaker 1 (15:47):
And yeah, I had like this this moment just now
when you said that. I was thinking, now, if we believe,
which I do, I believe that she was in control
of the whole thing. She's directing, directing this collection of
of you know, her sons and her husband. Can you
(16:08):
just envision her looking at them say well, y'all, come
on into the kitchen. We need to have a talk.
It's not like saying let's go sit on the front porch.
I'll pour her some lemonade or some iced tea or something. Now,
let's come into the kitchen and you're going to see
here before you you know, it's like walking into a
record executive's office that's got gold records for years and
(16:30):
years and they're hanging The reason you hang your gold
records on the wall is to demonstrate to everybody that
walks in, you know, your past and what you've done.
You know, you let that kind of settle into your
groundwater a little bit. And I would submit that that's
kind of the underpinning of this relationship far, you know,
and this existed long, long, long before the massacre took place.
(16:54):
You owe me, you owe me something. You're absolutely right,
brother Dave, that it's there and it's in your face.
And my question is, I think that night ten years ago,
when they were sitting there and they were waiting in
that house, rocking back and forth, maybe they cast their
(17:17):
eyes upon those baskets. They were reminders and maybe a warning.
Whatever happens, we certainly don't want to displease Mama. Back
(17:44):
on the morning of you know, April twenty second, twenty
twenty six, Bobby Joe Manley, who is you know, actually
the former sister in law of Chris Rodin senr Comes
(18:04):
to his home, right, she's there to tend to the dogs,
and she goes to open the door, and when she does,
she makes this incredible discovery at the house because it
(18:26):
looks like Hellis has kind of visited this place. She
finds her former brother in law. He's deceased, his cousin
Gary Roden, who along with Chris Senior, they do landscaping
work together at a campground that's some distance away. He's
(18:51):
dead in the house. So when she calls this sing
in Dave, you can imagine, you know, this is something
that he's never beheld before, and that in and of itself,
I think is kind of a you know, it's kind
of a window into the horror. You know. She runs
next door to Chris Senior's son's house who lived immediately
(19:17):
they lived and I've got a little slice reality for
you here in just a second. But runs next door
to where Frankie Rodin has a house trailer okay, and
just like his daddy, big big piece of property, and
runs to that door to go check on Frankie. He
(19:42):
lives there with his fiancee, who is Hannah. Knocks on
the door and a child. Dave comes to the door
and it's their oldest child who had this child's little
I mean little little little has been sleeping on the
sofa or had been laid on south and she's like,
(20:04):
where's where's your mommy and daddy at And that child
looks at Bobby Joe and says, mommy and daddy are
playing zombie and she retrieves this child walks in and
they've got a baby that's laying between them amongst their
(20:30):
gore where they've both been shot and killed as they
lay there in bed. But the baby was not killed,
and that baby has been wallowing around, you know, for
a protracted period of time in blood and tissue. This
baby is retrieved, brought from the house, and you know
(20:51):
it's from there the scene begins. I think that when
the cops arrive on Gin and it's called Union Hill
Road is the name of the road. It's one of
those moments in time that marks you as an investigator
because you know that you're beholding something and you can't
make sense out of it. I don't think your brain
(21:13):
is quite capable of processing this stuff. Even as as
long as you've been working, as jaded as you might be,
you can't. You cannot do it in an instant. It's
almost like you've got to catch your breath so that
your brain can kick into like investigative mode years after
(21:33):
the fact. There were two things that really stuck with
me when I was working on this documentary. The first
was how big this piece of property is. And these
two trailer houses are essentially they kind of line up
with one another. They're on two separate sets of property,
(21:55):
but this property of Butts it joins. Okay, both of
these plots do. And there's all kinds of buildings out there.
There's a barn. Two things that stuck with me though
Frankie's trailer it had been sitting there on this knoll,
(22:15):
you know, which is where Bobby Joe would have walked
up and found you know that that child at the
door that saying was talking about the uh playing zombie
h Dave. When I got there, that trailer was not there,
and I'll get into that in just a moment. But
what was there was this skeletal remains of this wooden
(22:39):
staircase and on the top of that platform and that
that wooden staircase. After all these years, there still sat
a little trike from a child, and you could see
other toys that were off in the distance, and all
this stuff is overgrown. But it's like when you're looking,
(23:00):
when you're standing there, you know, because it's on the
top of a hill, you can get to a point
where you're staying on the property and you're you're staring
eye to eye with that landing, that that wooden landing,
and it's almost like the trick is like looking you
in the eye, just kind of like a silent witness.
(23:20):
What's weird is you know, you think about, well, did
some worker just throw it up there? Or had it
been there? You know, the night that all of us happened,
just kind of bearing silent witness as an inanimate object
that the killers may have just brushed past it, you know,
to commit the horror that was committed inside of inside
(23:41):
of this dwelling.
Speaker 2 (23:44):
Can I ask you a question? All right, there are
four crime scenes. Each crime scene is a trailer house
trailer and kind of yeah, okay, but then that's where
the front porch and most house trailers, you know, they
do sit up off the land and a small deck
with stairs that leads into it. You know, you've got
a little down in most of them. And in this case,
(24:07):
each of these crime scenes pretty much or these houses
were they were all towed away during the investigation. All right,
But getting back to this, at the first location, the
one crime scene, and you can number them however you want,
but crime scene one, we've got Chris Rodin senior, forty
years old and Gary Rodin, his cousin, who's thirty eight.
(24:29):
These two men are found in the at the same
crime scene where Chris has been shot in the head
torriso in arm nine times. Yeah, we've got Gary. He's
got a gunshot one too, the head. I have to
wonder was it overkill on Chris and Gary was just
(24:50):
shot in the head and left. I can't figure that
out because it just seems like that seems extremely weird
to me that you've got nine shots in one guy
and one right to the head of the other there.
Speaker 3 (25:00):
Yeah, and then you.
Speaker 2 (25:03):
Better to go to the next because each one of
these crime scenes represented something to the Wagner family.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
These are all Rodent relatives.
Speaker 2 (25:12):
These are all people related to Hannah, who has was
the mom of the two year old baby at the time,
the toddler. You know that the whole battle was about
baby Sophia. And so you've got the Wagner family that
they're going to destroy the Rodent family to gain custody
of that baby. That's the entire game plan here or no,
(25:35):
that's the time. That's the object, is to end up
with custody of this child. At first, they were just
gonna we just got to kill the mom. We'll just
kill Sophia's mom, Hannah, you know, and we'll take her
out and then the baby will be ours. And they
thought about it, went nope, we have to take out
everyone who could come against us as a potential you know,
(25:58):
home for the baby. So we have to wipe out
all next to Ken. And that was the battle. There was, Okay,
we're not just going to take out Hannah. We're taking
out every Roadent family member that would have a claim
to be the parent of this child, to raise this
child should they be gone. So the Rodent family has
to be destroyed. And there are these four locations that
were predetermined as to these people that they were friendly,
(26:23):
they had known one another. You mentioned this a minute ago, Joe,
about that area. Everybody knew everybody. It's country living. But
you know, we got interpersonal relationships for years here yep.
Speaker 1 (26:33):
Generational Yeah yeah, generational relationships.
Speaker 2 (26:36):
Yeah, you're perfectly okay with your eighteen year old son
going out with their thirteen year old daughter. And you're
perfectly okay with your thirteen year old daughter going out
with their eighteen year old son.
Speaker 1 (26:47):
Yeah. Yeah, And nobody's knocking that down at all, you know,
in the midst of all this. And yeah, it's it's
a bit I think, well it is. It's unpalatable for
most people, you know, to think about that. But when
you look at the dynamics of this environment and of
where they lived and the relationships between these two dare
(27:10):
I say clans of people, it they they're intertwined and
they're kind of twisted around in this in this kind
of grotesque dance. I think that they've done for a
long long time because there is there are drug deals
that have been made. Uh, there's people selling pot. Uh,
(27:32):
there's people that are involved in theft, all these sorts
of things. And to a bigger picture, Dave, Uh, you know,
when you've got four separate crime scenes and they they
make they make that decision that we're not stopping with
just one victim here. That opens the door to this
(27:54):
investigation from a different you're entering You're entering the scene
from a different door, and that's a metaphor where your
view as a cop, you're thinking, Okay, who would kill
all of these people? What's the interconnectivity here? Well, the
first stop along this line was that this had something
(28:15):
to do with drugs that you know. I can't tell
you for how long they toyed with this idea that
you know, it was some type of drug cartel that
had come here and wiped out you know, all.
Speaker 2 (28:33):
The oh my gosh, I got hey, Joe, because I've
covered this from the standpoint of what we already knew
after the fact. I didn't even think about that, because
we already knew the inner person relationship between Jake and
Hannah and the baby and the families and what actually transpired.
It never occurred to me to start where you're talking
about now, where you've got an entire family wiped out, which,
(28:56):
by the way, that is how drug deals happen. And
when they go south, man, it ain't just you that
goes down. It's your wife, it's your chill, it's everybody
gets wiped out. The only ones that might not be
killed are the little babies, the toddlers, well.
Speaker 1 (29:10):
I think I submit to you. And this is one
of the things that kind of put them off sin
initially was that they felt as though they being the authorities.
I think probably one of the FEDS got around this.
They were thinking everyone would have been wiped out, that
would not have been just simply the adult members. And
(29:32):
there's I think there's two ways you can come down,
you know, on either side with it. Uh maybe you know,
certain certain organized crime groups would not want to touch
little children, but yet you are touching them because you're
entering into their world where they lay sleeping. It's not
like you you waited until these people were driving down
the road and you've got somebody that you know, showers
(29:54):
showers their car with with semi automatic gunfire and kills
everybody out. No, you're waiting till they're at home in
their sleep. And it also, you know, one of the
things that we're thinking about the investigators in this case
is you, I think one of the most striking things.
(30:15):
And you can appreciate this, you know, I was talking
about the environment.
Speaker 3 (30:17):
There.
Speaker 1 (30:19):
You're out there at night, dude, you're kind of wandering around.
There is no artificial light, out there period. You know,
every now and then you might come across a house
it has light pole, but if you're if you're away
from that, you're kind of bumping around the dark and
you don't know, you don't know what's what. So do
(30:41):
you have a gang of ruthless drug dealers that are
part and parcel of this. That means that they would
have had to have shown up, be familiar with the area,
know where people are domiciled, and would have targeted them.
But when you get to like the you know some
(31:04):
of these players in this, So we'll talk about a minute,
what in the world did they have to do with it?
Because you're really running the risk here if you're if
you're working in the world, I think of an assassin
for a drug cartel or whatever it is. You want
to get in and get out. The thing that was
so striking about the piked In massacre is that you
(31:26):
had and this this is one of the themes that
runs through this. You had one night, four scenes an
eight dead. Who's to blame? Well, Dave, you know, we
(31:54):
were we were talking about Frankie's trailer, we talked about
Chris Seniors trailer, their domicile back up the road, which
I would say for those that are not familiar with
the geography, when I say back up the road I'm
talking about, you're heading more toward and none of this
(32:14):
is densely populated. But if you want to go back
into town, you have to go past Dana Roden's house.
And again I'm not implying that this is the sequencing
in which any of this happened. We're able to determine
sequencing at another time. But when when Dana Roden's house,
(32:36):
who by the way, is the ex the ex spouse
of Chris Rodin Sr. When her house is entered into,
she's found deceased, deceased in her bed. She's a nurse.
(32:56):
She had been working long hours and had been at
you know, a care center. And again, these jobs are
not real close, dude. You have to if you want
to be employed. These people have to drive like long distances,
you know, if they're going to work somewhere away from
the farm. These folks decided to get these jobs and
(33:18):
they were, you know, it's a long round trip. She
had Dana had worked as a nursing assistant and had
come come in, uh dog tired. She lived in the
house with her daughter, Hannah, who is the crux of
all of this. The child Sophia, who normally lives with them,
(33:45):
was not there the night of these homicides. She was
with the Wagoners, which is very convenient. You know that
that child Sophia is the center of this. But who
was there in addition to Hannah and her mama was
(34:05):
also Chris Junior, who's only sixteen years old. He lived
in the house. And oh, by the bye, Hannah had
just given birth to a precious little infant, and that
baby was in bed with her. And this child is
like little bitty, I mean, this child is so so
very is a newborn, all right, four days old, four
(34:30):
days old. So when entry is made into Dana's home,
you talk about if you think the other ones were hellish,
as if it couldn't get any worse. All three, all
three of these individuals are dead. Hannah's dead in her bed,
(34:51):
she's been shot in the face. Dana's deceased, she never
got up out of bed. And Chris, the sixteen year old,
it almost it almost seems as though that he had
an awareness of what was going to happen. We'd heard
different reports at different times about his body, and he's
been executed as well. And Sid notice I say executed
(35:14):
inside the house. So they're going in and they're completely
wiping out, wiping out the DNA of this family, just
right before your eyes. I mean you can see. But
yet they leave, they leave this four day old baby alive.
(35:35):
And you know, years later we find found out and
I think, you know, with every one of these cases,
there's one little bit that's that just shocks you to
no end. We find out later that the perpetrator of
of Hannah's murder actually took that little baby and nuzzled
(36:01):
that little baby against the mother's breast in death because
the perpetrator did not want the child to quote unquote
starve to death.
Speaker 3 (36:12):
Didn't know how long it'd before their bodies were found, and.
Speaker 1 (36:15):
Right so left behind, left this baby behind the suckle
on its mother, you know, in death, and again just
you can't. It's hard, brother, It's really really hard to
take the measure of all of this.
Speaker 2 (36:31):
Bottom line is the investigators did a good job, eventually
came back with a story that could hold water. But Joe,
we got the destruction of an entire family, and I'm
not talking about justin nuclear family talking about the extended
family when you start looking at this generationally speaking, and
(36:52):
it was one family destroying another to gain custody of
a child. And it was that single purpose that if
you've ever if you've ever had friends who have gone
through a divorce and you've watched them fighting over the
nitty gritty of every little thing, it really can be ugly.
(37:14):
And when it comes to custody of children, sometimes you
have a parent who really has never been that involved
in the children's lives. You know, they go to work,
come home, attend a game here. You know that they're
not engaged, they're not involved parents. But boy, when it
comes time for divorce, you're not taking my child away
from That's my child, right And that's what I see here.
I see that in the mother, who I believe masterminded
(37:37):
the whole thing. But I also see it more particularly
in the biological father of baby Sophia, Jake Wagner. Jake
Wagner to all who knew him. First of all, when
you've got an eighteen nineteen year old man involved with
a child, a thirteen or fourteen year old girl, the reason, yeah,
don't let that happen is because the reason that young
(37:58):
adult man is doing that is because he can control
the little girl he emotionally, physically, everything about He can
control that. And that's exactly what Jake did with Hannah
until she out groom when she was fifteen, sixteen years old.
She was done with him. She was the baby. She
got pregnant at fifteen. When he's twenty years old, he's
(38:19):
having a child with a fifteen year old girl. And
that's not enough to put him in jail. Okay, that's Joe.
I read comments from people who went to school with
both of them, with Jake and Hannah, now those are
two different groups of people because there was five years
separating them, and Jake's friends said, yeah, he was a
real control freak. You know, he was crazy about it.
(38:41):
Well after the Wagners went on the run, And we
need to get to this as another whole episode. You're
gonna have to do on this, Joe, because Jake Wagner's
history repeated itself. It really did. But back to this one.
You pointed out that when they first started investigating, there
was a thought that this could have been drug related,
(39:03):
Like you send up the secarios from Columbia to take
out this group of felons. And yet I have to
imagine that police locally knew what minimal amounts of pot
the family was dealing with the rodents I'm talking about,
didn't they have an idea of what really was going on?
Speaker 1 (39:22):
Yeah? They did, and certainly, you know, when they begin
to connect the dots, you know, this is not a
group of people that and yet they made money. They
did make money off of the sale of weed, all right,
but we're not talking about individuals that have got a
(39:44):
grow operation that is, you know, a twenty four hour
processing plant here. You know, where you've got people that
are you know, harvesting and packaging and distributing, and that's
not what this is. Yeah, they would have been on
the radar, probably peripherally at least, and certainly and after
(40:07):
the fact, when they go out and they talk to
any kind of associate or person that had purchased purchase drugs,
maybe that had started with them, they began to get
a sense, I think at least that this was not
this was not about drug deals, This was not about
(40:27):
ill gotten game. It came down to what the coin
of the realm here was, and the coin of the
realm was vengeance and hatred. Join us for part two
of revisiting the piked and massacre ten years later. I'm
(40:54):
Joseph Scott Morgan and this is Bodybacks.
Host
Joseph Scott Morgan
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