June 23, 2021 • 24 mins
About 30 minutes away from Piketon is Portsmouth, Ohio, a once bustling community that fell on hard times and became the epicenter of the Opioid crisis. In episode seven, we talk to local journalist, Nikki Blankenship, who did a deep investigation into the issues her hometown faced, including serious allegations of sex trafficking. What she found was that Pike County isn’t the only tight knit community with secrets.
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Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to The Piked and Massacre, a production of iHeartRadio
and Katie Studios. There were always these rumors about Michael
Moran and the women that he was around and the
circles he ran in. This guy trafficking women all over
the country from this little town that's known as the
epicenter of the opioid epidemic. It was public knowledge, that
was the crazy thing. Everybody knew the rumors and had
(00:24):
known somebody that knew somebody that had worked for him.
She loved papers and it said Michael Moran's name, his
cell phone number. I had all this information that really
impacted our area, and so this could have brought a
lot of closure to these families who were being told
nothing by our local officials, in our local enforcement. This
(00:48):
is the Piked and Massacre. Returned to Pike County Season two,
Episode seven, twenty five miles South. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a
television producer at Katie Studios with Stephanie Lydecker and of Shane.
In episode five of this season, we explored the allegations
of corruption and the subsequent arrest of Pike County shaff
of Charlie Reader. But his story is just one of
(01:09):
many that has illuminated alleged abuses of power perpetrated by
those involved in southern Ohio's criminal justice system. So in
this episode, we want to focus on another case that
has long affected a community just twenty five miles south
of Piketon, in a town called Portsmouth, Ohio. In twenty fifteen,
a reporter named Nicki Blankenship began investigating rumors of human
(01:32):
trafficking in the town. Like many small Ohio towns, Portsmouth
has a long, rich history of industrial might, preceding an
era of rapid urban decay. Here's James Pilcher, a reporter
for Local twelve News and Cincinnati, speaking with our producer
Chris Graves. Portsmouth is the county seat of Theodore County,
which fits right below Pike County, so it's about thirty
(01:54):
to forty five minutes south of Piketon. Portsmouth has this
rust belt burned out in industrial field. There are half
empty two empty factories in the middle of the city.
At one point US Shoe had their biggest plant there,
and then obviously you know the global economy and we
all know what happened to manufacturing in the Midwest. It
(02:15):
still has a small profitable steel mill downtown, but it's
barely hanging on. So it's kind of like a city
that was forgotten. Yes, when the manufacturing industry began to disappear,
Portsmouth was besieged by the drug trade. Nicky Blanketship grew
up in the area and saw the devastation firsthand. Your
area has been really hit by the opiate crisis, right, Yeah,
(02:39):
we call ourselves ground zero for the opiate ever the
met I've lived in Ohio since nineteen eighty four, Insider County,
so yeah, I've lived here in my whole life. I
remember in high school people around me, they would start
out with small pain pills and an oxycott and hit
and it was no longer recreational drug use that people
(03:00):
to one at parties. You were seeing people become addicted
very very very quickly. In two thousand and eight, Nikki
started writing about the issue for a local newspaper. I
started out covering the drug epidemic. I was the first
in the area to do stories on oxycotton and looking
at overdose rates in the area and started asking those
(03:20):
questions from the corner's office about how many of these
depths that we're seeing are connected to opiate use, and
then started looking into pill mills and we ended up
shutting down over twenty three pill mills inside a county.
Nikki's reporting helped shut a light on the area's drug problem,
but other illicit industries sprung up around it. Nikki was
(03:41):
there to cover it all. In twenty thirteen, I did
a series that ran for months on prostitution, and I
was walking the streets with some of these girls. I
also talked to like parents of women that were working
on the streets and talked to officers about the problem
and local instances about how it affected them. It was
(04:02):
interesting because when I was doing these stories, I started
seeing a lot of names come up from these girls.
The one mentioned most often was Michael Moran. Michael Moran,
he's in his mid seventies, long time defense attorney, you know,
d wise, drug offenses, those kinds of things. He had
(04:23):
his own firm in Portsmouth, and at one point in
the late two thousands he got himself appointed as a
city councilman of Portsmouth. He's a very public person, so
if there was a Red Cross banquet or something that
I was covering, he would be there. So he's been
around my whole career pretty much now. Rumors have been
(04:43):
circulating about Mike Moran for years. These stories about him
being involved in prostitution go all the way back to
the seventies. A lot of those stories are just about
him hiring girls dance and at local parties and poker games.
It was the secret that everyone choked about, but no
one really talked about, and it was pretty common knowledge.
(05:06):
I think I mentioned like a Red Cross banquet I
had to cover once. He was there with a girl
known to be arrested for prostitution, known to be arrested
for drug abuse, and she was there. You could tell
that she was under the influence by her behavior. She
was being very loud and on a cell phone in
the middle of this banquet and speaking very appropriately for
(05:27):
the setting, and Mike's just laughing with her. And a
city councilman at the time actually leaned over towards me
jokingly elbowed me on the side and said, there's Mike
and one of his girls. It's just always been known
as Nicky began exploring Moran's ties to the local sex trade.
The story grew much darker. I was interviewing some people
(05:49):
who were in an impatient treatment facility, and I found
out that one of the women over the program was
involved with a human trafficking program, and so I started
talking with her about human trafficking and she said that
when women are arrested at a certain age, Moran has
been going to see them in jail and gotten them
(06:12):
judge charges and exchange for doing sexual favors for him
and working in prostitution. Nikki further explained the allegations leveled
against Moran by area women at the corrupt of what
he does is he offers his legal services to get
these women out of jail and then puts them under
(06:32):
his employee. Yes, he gets women out of jail and
that basically gets them into his clutches. Other stories are
that people are hired as dog walkers or as cleaners
and and said are actually working in prostitution, and affidavit
(06:53):
filed by the DA would later support these accounts. James
Pilcher explained that this method of manipulation marks the ditinction
between prostitution and human trafficking. Some people will say, oh, well,
these women knew what they were doing. They were just
trying to make money. These women were prostitutes. Well, if
you talk to the experts. It went one step beyond that,
(07:13):
it went into trafficking because some of those allegations Moran
was holding over them, the fact that they were drug addicts,
even he would withhold their money or withhold their wherewithal
to get drugs. So the statute says, if you withhold
or threatened to withhold money that women need for drugs
or withhold the drugs, it's trafficking because it's coercion. Anytime
(07:33):
you can prove coercion, it's trafficking, both in the Ohio
law and federal level. We're going to take a quick
break here. We'll be back in a moment. Some believe
(07:58):
Michael Moran's reach goes farther than even human trafficking. In
twenty thirteen, a Portsmouth woman named Megan Lancaster disappeared. Michael
Moran has denied any involvement or responsibility in her disappearance. Additionally,
authorities have not brought any charges against him in the case.
At this time, it's unclear whether they have questioned him
(08:18):
in the matter. Megan, it's probably the case that is
closest to my heart, and that's mostly her sister in law,
Katie Lancaster has just screamed and screamed and screamed on
her behalf. My name is Katie Lancaster, and I am
the sister in law and best friend of Megan Lancaster
who has been missing from Soda County since April third,
(08:40):
twenty and thirteen. Who was Megan Lancaster and how did
you meet? We met at a it was called Soda
County Joint Vocational School. We were both taking cosmetology. And
she is a wonderful, loving, gives a shirt off her
back person that I know for a fact that if
(09:02):
this tragedy had to happen to anybody, she would have
given everything she had to save the next person. Megan
and Katie formed an unbreakable bond and soon they became
family members. I was spending about every night with Megan,
pretty much on school night. Megan would say, my brother
wants to take you on a date. So I said, okay, okay,
(09:25):
like I'll let him take me for dinner and so
on and so forth. And I did that well. I
never left. I was seventeen and we just hit it
off and fell in love. Katie and Megan's brother Jimmy,
were married in two thousand and five. A few months later,
(09:47):
Katie became pregnant. Soon after, Megan did as well. I
went into labor August thirty first, had my baby September first,
like in the middle of the night, and she had
her baby November fourth, So we were legitimately only, you know,
a couple months apart. In two thousand and six, Megan
(10:09):
gave birth to a son named Reese. Being a young
single mother was tough, but Megan seemed to have a
bright future ahead of her. Any sports she played, she
played to the fullest. She was there for her team,
always cheering everybody. On the softball she was the pitcher.
She had a full ride scholarship to Shawnee State. I mean,
I mean, Megan couldn't have been any smarter than what
(10:31):
she was. Despite her intelligence and athleticism, Megan fell victim
to the drug epidemic that gripped the Portsmouth area. She
was open back that you know that she used drugs,
that she used a needle. It was rough, and I
would tell her, I would say, Megan, I would try
to play both sides, like her friend and her sister
(10:53):
in law, because I would say, Megan, you need to
get help and you need to change for you first
and foremost, but at the same time, you need to
do it for Reeese because he needs you. And her
answer was, Katie, why change it? Now? Everybody's gonna look
(11:13):
at me the same way. I'm never gonna live down
the things I've done. I'm never gonna be able to
change that opinion that people have of me. She just
couldn't see past the past, you know, path the things
that she felt people would never forgive. And then that
(11:35):
point took over Megan and it led to more years later,
a strange encounter with Megan would leave Katie forever suspicious
of one local man, Michael Moran. I was in walmoret
with Jeremy, and all of a sudden, I see Megan
got bouncing down the aisle and I'm like, what the
(11:56):
hell was she wearing? It was literally Anta lingerie. To
be honest, she said, I'm here to get something for
this party I'm doing for Marian It's a bachelor party.
And I'm just like, okay, but again, why are you
in here in that outfit? Is you like? Because this
(12:16):
is what I'm wearing to the party, And I'm like,
get get whatever you're getting in and get the heck
out of here before you get arrested for indecent exposure?
Can you describe April third, twenty thirteen. April third, twenty thirteen,
Megan went missing. That day, she was with her mom.
She went to her mom's early in the morning, said mom,
(12:38):
I need to pay my insurance because she had been
pulled over and called over card been impounded for literally
like sixty dollars in back child support or something. So
her mom followed her to Portsmouth. Megan got in her
mom's card down in Portsmouth, they rode down to the
bonding company. They paid her insurance, then got back in
(13:02):
her own care her Mustang, and they went their own ways.
Later that day, Megan called her mother, Marcy, to make
arrangements to see her son. She said, Mom, I'll be
there to stay the night with Reese. But that night
Megan never showed up, you know. And then the next
(13:23):
day Marcy tried to get a hold of her cut
and went by her apartment. Her car wasn't there, so
Mar's thought she's out running the streets or whatever, you know,
out running the road, and didn't think much more about it.
Two days later, on April fifth, Megan's car was found
in the parking lot of a local fast food restaurant.
She was nowhere to be found. What stuck out about
(13:50):
the car was the fact that it was up on
the curb, and Megan would never have parked it like that,
as she especially. She might have pulled in if she
was in a hurry and got out and got something,
got right back in the car and left, but she
would have never pulled in there to leave it there
like that. Inside the car, police found Megan's wallet and
(14:12):
a small notebook that contained some suspicious entries. She left
clues as to who she'd been working for, what's she'd
been up to. Right, Yes, she left papers in it.
They actually said dance for and Michael Marian's name, his
cell phone number, and how much he paid for her
to dance. We know we have this problem with missing women,
(14:39):
and we know we have this problem with women who
have been found dead in their cases that never their
murders have never been solved. And despite that car set
her mom said t October of twenty thirteen. And there's
a documents where they took it, where they took the
car into evidence that are dated showing that and it
was really Katie and Megan's family that did all of
(14:59):
the investigating, and higher private investigators they couldn't get in
cooperation from local police. So it's Megan's case really, it's
the only one that has really been made public so
people can see exactly what these women have gone through
and how these things have happened. If Moran was running
a decades long sex trafficking operation, we're talking about some
(15:23):
serious abuse of power. What are your thoughts on that.
The abuse of power makes me completely fucking sick. Excuse
my language, but I don't know how else to put
it. It It makes me sick because you know, he's in
this position to help people, to help rebuild their lives
if they been in trouble once or twice, you know,
a drug charge, whatever, they send them to treatment, they
(15:44):
do this, they do that, but he takes it a
step further and takes them, like, buys them what they want,
courses them into these things, shows them a life that
they've never had before, and then boom back on drugs,
back to doing what they were doing back in trouble.
(16:05):
And to me, that is sickening and there's no excuse sport.
Do you think Mike Moran is involved in Megan's disappearance.
I do believe Michael Moran is involved in Megan's disappearance,
and I do believe that we will eventually tie Mike
Moran to Megan's disappearance. Let's stop here for another quick break.
(16:32):
We'll be back in a moment. What's it like to
go through losing a family member or a friend but
not actually knowing what happened to them? It's hell. I
(16:53):
was talking to my mother in law about this today.
You know, people lose people all the time, and they
have a grave to go to somewhere they can go
visit that they know that that person is there, or
they have ashes that they have or whatever, what have you.
But we have a flipping sign with missing on it
(17:14):
that we decorate, and it is heartbreaking, and it is
hard not to know whether she's hungry, she's cold, she's
being hurt, she's being abused, or worse, she's dead. Not
to know that. It is so hard. I see her
mama suffer daily, or importantly, I see her baby boys
(17:38):
suffer very badly. And I'm not saying that, you know,
he cries every day or no, I'm not saying that,
but he has a lot of questions but we can't answer.
But I can guarantee you I won't stop to I
can answer him. I don't care if he's twenty five, thirty,
thirty five, forty, If I'm along around that long, I'll
(18:01):
fight until I can answer those questions for him. In
an interview, Moran claimed that he only knew Megan as
a police informant who was tied to a drug case
he tried years back. When asked about what may have
happened to her, Moran believed that she may have been murdered,
though he had no information to support his statement. It
(18:21):
should be noted that there have been no other specific
allegations tying Moran to the disappearance of any other women.
Nikki Blankenship continued her investigation into human trafficking in Portsmouth,
but her attempt to report on the areas missing women
was met with some pushback. You kind of started this
with this story. This seemed to have been local knowledge
(18:42):
that no one was reporting on. Right when I was
first saying let me talk about the missing women, I
was told now it didn't matter if there was proof
it was can't we talk about the missing women? Can
I talk to their families, and I was told, now,
Nikki didn't let that stop her. So I I have
seen these things personally. In Cider County, we say that
(19:03):
everyone's been affected because if it's not your friend, it
is or your family member's at least somebody you went
to school with. Everybody knows somebody who's been affected by
the drug epidemic, and everybody knows somebody who has turned
a prostitution. So this is a pretty personal story for you. Yeah.
I spent probably my whole career, I feel like working
(19:25):
on this, and nobody was listening to their stories before
or seeing them as even human. That really made me
connect with a lot of these people in their stories
living here my whole life. These are my friends and
my family members as well. Not specifically, but I have
lost so many friends to overdose. I have so many
(19:46):
friends that have battle addiction, and a lot of people
I went to school with are gone. Now I have
several friends from high schools that ended up working in prostitution.
They're people, They're human, and yet seen as a prostitute
or an addict exactly, and that makes people not really
care what happens to them. That makes people assume that
(20:09):
they chose some lifestyle that is dangerous. It makes people
just assume that they somehow are asking for that or
whatever happens to them as a part of a lifestyle
they chose, and so they just turned a blind eye.
And I think that's another thing that has made it
so easy for it to happen, and it happened right
in public, is that people see them as prostitutes and addicts.
(20:32):
Nickie didn't give up searching for prooflinking Michael Moran to
Portsmith's sex trafficking industry. I was at home a lot
late at night, just going through court documents and talking
to families because a lot of these families told me
I was the only person they trusted. So then for me,
it was like, how do I get something more than
(20:53):
a story from a family member or even a girl.
I need some kind of career, finding some kind of document.
In twenty seventeen, she got it. A man named Mark
Eubanks reached out to her and passed along a copy
of a sworn Affidavid filed by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Mark Cubanks, he had been reading my stories on human
(21:15):
trafficking and on the heroin epidemic and he just smelled
me a copy of this Silda Affidavid. It was actually
a part of his case and had told me his story,
which was that he had been arrested on drug charges
and when he was arrested, he was immediately taken and
given live a detective test about missing women and dead
(21:36):
women and Mike Moran and human trafficking. The Affidavid laid
out Southern Ohio Drug Task Force and FBI operations that
had been UNDERWAGH since twenty fifteen investigating Michael Moran and
his ties to area sex trafficking. He's accused of trafficking
women all over the country from New York and New
Jersey to Florida, racketeering and compelling and promoting prostitution. In
(21:59):
other thing that is in the affidavit that he was
working with drug traffickers and there was a wire tap
where they were able to hear some of the conversations
between Moran and drug traffickers and he was getting drugs
from these drug traffickers in order to provide to the
females that he had working for him. The AffA David
(22:20):
specifically talks about whom working with local judges and law
enforcement and adult probation to make these things happen. Nikki
finally had the proof she needed that validated the stories
told by Portsmouth's most vulnerable women, but when she brought
the document to her editor, she was shocked and they
(22:41):
told me, no, we're not going to publish. Michael Moran
would later be arrested and charged with eighteen felony accounts,
including promoting prostitution and trafficking in persons. He was released
on a three hundred thou dollar bond, which was later
revoked after he violated the terms of his agreement. He
(23:05):
has pleaded not guilty to all charges and staunchly maintains
his innocence. He is now under house arrest while he
awaits trial. We'll bring you the second part of the
Michael Moran story in episode nine, but next week we'll
be hearing from some of our regular contributors, who will
discuss updates from accused brother George Wagner, the four's most
(23:26):
recent pre trial hearing. For more information on the case
and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at Katie Underscore Studios.
The Piked and Massacre Returned to Pike County is executive
produced by Stephanie Lydecker and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and
sound designed by executive producer Jared Aston. Additional producing by
(23:47):
Jeff Shane, Andrew Becker, and Chris Graves. The Piked and
Massacre Returned to Pike County is a production of iHeartRadio
and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Welcome to The Piked and Massacre, a production of iHeartRadio
and Katie Studios. There were always these rumors about Michael
Moran and the women that he was around and the
circles he ran in. This guy trafficking women all over
the country from this little town that's known as the
epicenter of the opioid epidemic. It was public knowledge, that
was the crazy thing. Everybody knew the rumors and had
(00:24):
known somebody that knew somebody that had worked for him.
She loved papers and it said Michael Moran's name, his
cell phone number. I had all this information that really
impacted our area, and so this could have brought a
lot of closure to these families who were being told
nothing by our local officials, in our local enforcement. This
(00:48):
is the Piked and Massacre. Returned to Pike County Season two,
Episode seven, twenty five miles South. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a
television producer at Katie Studios with Stephanie Lydecker and of Shane.
In episode five of this season, we explored the allegations
of corruption and the subsequent arrest of Pike County shaff
of Charlie Reader. But his story is just one of
(01:09):
many that has illuminated alleged abuses of power perpetrated by
those involved in southern Ohio's criminal justice system. So in
this episode, we want to focus on another case that
has long affected a community just twenty five miles south
of Piketon, in a town called Portsmouth, Ohio. In twenty fifteen,
a reporter named Nicki Blankenship began investigating rumors of human
(01:32):
trafficking in the town. Like many small Ohio towns, Portsmouth
has a long, rich history of industrial might, preceding an
era of rapid urban decay. Here's James Pilcher, a reporter
for Local twelve News and Cincinnati, speaking with our producer
Chris Graves. Portsmouth is the county seat of Theodore County,
which fits right below Pike County, so it's about thirty
(01:54):
to forty five minutes south of Piketon. Portsmouth has this
rust belt burned out in industrial field. There are half
empty two empty factories in the middle of the city.
At one point US Shoe had their biggest plant there,
and then obviously you know the global economy and we
all know what happened to manufacturing in the Midwest. It
(02:15):
still has a small profitable steel mill downtown, but it's
barely hanging on. So it's kind of like a city
that was forgotten. Yes, when the manufacturing industry began to disappear,
Portsmouth was besieged by the drug trade. Nicky Blanketship grew
up in the area and saw the devastation firsthand. Your
area has been really hit by the opiate crisis, right, Yeah,
(02:39):
we call ourselves ground zero for the opiate ever the
met I've lived in Ohio since nineteen eighty four, Insider County,
so yeah, I've lived here in my whole life. I
remember in high school people around me, they would start
out with small pain pills and an oxycott and hit
and it was no longer recreational drug use that people
(03:00):
to one at parties. You were seeing people become addicted
very very very quickly. In two thousand and eight, Nikki
started writing about the issue for a local newspaper. I
started out covering the drug epidemic. I was the first
in the area to do stories on oxycotton and looking
at overdose rates in the area and started asking those
(03:20):
questions from the corner's office about how many of these
depths that we're seeing are connected to opiate use, and
then started looking into pill mills and we ended up
shutting down over twenty three pill mills inside a county.
Nikki's reporting helped shut a light on the area's drug problem,
but other illicit industries sprung up around it. Nikki was
(03:41):
there to cover it all. In twenty thirteen, I did
a series that ran for months on prostitution, and I
was walking the streets with some of these girls. I
also talked to like parents of women that were working
on the streets and talked to officers about the problem
and local instances about how it affected them. It was
(04:02):
interesting because when I was doing these stories, I started
seeing a lot of names come up from these girls.
The one mentioned most often was Michael Moran. Michael Moran,
he's in his mid seventies, long time defense attorney, you know,
d wise, drug offenses, those kinds of things. He had
(04:23):
his own firm in Portsmouth, and at one point in
the late two thousands he got himself appointed as a
city councilman of Portsmouth. He's a very public person, so
if there was a Red Cross banquet or something that
I was covering, he would be there. So he's been
around my whole career pretty much now. Rumors have been
(04:43):
circulating about Mike Moran for years. These stories about him
being involved in prostitution go all the way back to
the seventies. A lot of those stories are just about
him hiring girls dance and at local parties and poker games.
It was the secret that everyone choked about, but no
one really talked about, and it was pretty common knowledge.
(05:06):
I think I mentioned like a Red Cross banquet I
had to cover once. He was there with a girl
known to be arrested for prostitution, known to be arrested
for drug abuse, and she was there. You could tell
that she was under the influence by her behavior. She
was being very loud and on a cell phone in
the middle of this banquet and speaking very appropriately for
(05:27):
the setting, and Mike's just laughing with her. And a
city councilman at the time actually leaned over towards me
jokingly elbowed me on the side and said, there's Mike
and one of his girls. It's just always been known
as Nicky began exploring Moran's ties to the local sex trade.
The story grew much darker. I was interviewing some people
(05:49):
who were in an impatient treatment facility, and I found
out that one of the women over the program was
involved with a human trafficking program, and so I started
talking with her about human trafficking and she said that
when women are arrested at a certain age, Moran has
been going to see them in jail and gotten them
(06:12):
judge charges and exchange for doing sexual favors for him
and working in prostitution. Nikki further explained the allegations leveled
against Moran by area women at the corrupt of what
he does is he offers his legal services to get
these women out of jail and then puts them under
(06:32):
his employee. Yes, he gets women out of jail and
that basically gets them into his clutches. Other stories are
that people are hired as dog walkers or as cleaners
and and said are actually working in prostitution, and affidavit
(06:53):
filed by the DA would later support these accounts. James
Pilcher explained that this method of manipulation marks the ditinction
between prostitution and human trafficking. Some people will say, oh, well,
these women knew what they were doing. They were just
trying to make money. These women were prostitutes. Well, if
you talk to the experts. It went one step beyond that,
(07:13):
it went into trafficking because some of those allegations Moran
was holding over them, the fact that they were drug addicts,
even he would withhold their money or withhold their wherewithal
to get drugs. So the statute says, if you withhold
or threatened to withhold money that women need for drugs
or withhold the drugs, it's trafficking because it's coercion. Anytime
(07:33):
you can prove coercion, it's trafficking, both in the Ohio
law and federal level. We're going to take a quick
break here. We'll be back in a moment. Some believe
(07:58):
Michael Moran's reach goes farther than even human trafficking. In
twenty thirteen, a Portsmouth woman named Megan Lancaster disappeared. Michael
Moran has denied any involvement or responsibility in her disappearance. Additionally,
authorities have not brought any charges against him in the case.
At this time, it's unclear whether they have questioned him
(08:18):
in the matter. Megan, it's probably the case that is
closest to my heart, and that's mostly her sister in law,
Katie Lancaster has just screamed and screamed and screamed on
her behalf. My name is Katie Lancaster, and I am
the sister in law and best friend of Megan Lancaster
who has been missing from Soda County since April third,
(08:40):
twenty and thirteen. Who was Megan Lancaster and how did
you meet? We met at a it was called Soda
County Joint Vocational School. We were both taking cosmetology. And
she is a wonderful, loving, gives a shirt off her
back person that I know for a fact that if
(09:02):
this tragedy had to happen to anybody, she would have
given everything she had to save the next person. Megan
and Katie formed an unbreakable bond and soon they became
family members. I was spending about every night with Megan,
pretty much on school night. Megan would say, my brother
wants to take you on a date. So I said, okay, okay,
(09:25):
like I'll let him take me for dinner and so
on and so forth. And I did that well. I
never left. I was seventeen and we just hit it
off and fell in love. Katie and Megan's brother Jimmy,
were married in two thousand and five. A few months later,
(09:47):
Katie became pregnant. Soon after, Megan did as well. I
went into labor August thirty first, had my baby September first,
like in the middle of the night, and she had
her baby November fourth, So we were legitimately only, you know,
a couple months apart. In two thousand and six, Megan
(10:09):
gave birth to a son named Reese. Being a young
single mother was tough, but Megan seemed to have a
bright future ahead of her. Any sports she played, she
played to the fullest. She was there for her team,
always cheering everybody. On the softball she was the pitcher.
She had a full ride scholarship to Shawnee State. I mean,
I mean, Megan couldn't have been any smarter than what
(10:31):
she was. Despite her intelligence and athleticism, Megan fell victim
to the drug epidemic that gripped the Portsmouth area. She
was open back that you know that she used drugs,
that she used a needle. It was rough, and I
would tell her, I would say, Megan, I would try
to play both sides, like her friend and her sister
(10:53):
in law, because I would say, Megan, you need to
get help and you need to change for you first
and foremost, but at the same time, you need to
do it for Reeese because he needs you. And her
answer was, Katie, why change it? Now? Everybody's gonna look
(11:13):
at me the same way. I'm never gonna live down
the things I've done. I'm never gonna be able to
change that opinion that people have of me. She just
couldn't see past the past, you know, path the things
that she felt people would never forgive. And then that
(11:35):
point took over Megan and it led to more years later,
a strange encounter with Megan would leave Katie forever suspicious
of one local man, Michael Moran. I was in walmoret
with Jeremy, and all of a sudden, I see Megan
got bouncing down the aisle and I'm like, what the
(11:56):
hell was she wearing? It was literally Anta lingerie. To
be honest, she said, I'm here to get something for
this party I'm doing for Marian It's a bachelor party.
And I'm just like, okay, but again, why are you
in here in that outfit? Is you like? Because this
(12:16):
is what I'm wearing to the party, And I'm like,
get get whatever you're getting in and get the heck
out of here before you get arrested for indecent exposure?
Can you describe April third, twenty thirteen. April third, twenty thirteen,
Megan went missing. That day, she was with her mom.
She went to her mom's early in the morning, said mom,
(12:38):
I need to pay my insurance because she had been
pulled over and called over card been impounded for literally
like sixty dollars in back child support or something. So
her mom followed her to Portsmouth. Megan got in her
mom's card down in Portsmouth, they rode down to the
bonding company. They paid her insurance, then got back in
(13:02):
her own care her Mustang, and they went their own ways.
Later that day, Megan called her mother, Marcy, to make
arrangements to see her son. She said, Mom, I'll be
there to stay the night with Reese. But that night
Megan never showed up, you know. And then the next
(13:23):
day Marcy tried to get a hold of her cut
and went by her apartment. Her car wasn't there, so
Mar's thought she's out running the streets or whatever, you know,
out running the road, and didn't think much more about it.
Two days later, on April fifth, Megan's car was found
in the parking lot of a local fast food restaurant.
She was nowhere to be found. What stuck out about
(13:50):
the car was the fact that it was up on
the curb, and Megan would never have parked it like that,
as she especially. She might have pulled in if she
was in a hurry and got out and got something,
got right back in the car and left, but she
would have never pulled in there to leave it there
like that. Inside the car, police found Megan's wallet and
(14:12):
a small notebook that contained some suspicious entries. She left
clues as to who she'd been working for, what's she'd
been up to. Right, Yes, she left papers in it.
They actually said dance for and Michael Marian's name, his
cell phone number, and how much he paid for her
to dance. We know we have this problem with missing women,
(14:39):
and we know we have this problem with women who
have been found dead in their cases that never their
murders have never been solved. And despite that car set
her mom said t October of twenty thirteen. And there's
a documents where they took it, where they took the
car into evidence that are dated showing that and it
was really Katie and Megan's family that did all of
(14:59):
the investigating, and higher private investigators they couldn't get in
cooperation from local police. So it's Megan's case really, it's
the only one that has really been made public so
people can see exactly what these women have gone through
and how these things have happened. If Moran was running
a decades long sex trafficking operation, we're talking about some
(15:23):
serious abuse of power. What are your thoughts on that.
The abuse of power makes me completely fucking sick. Excuse
my language, but I don't know how else to put
it. It It makes me sick because you know, he's in
this position to help people, to help rebuild their lives
if they been in trouble once or twice, you know,
a drug charge, whatever, they send them to treatment, they
(15:44):
do this, they do that, but he takes it a
step further and takes them, like, buys them what they want,
courses them into these things, shows them a life that
they've never had before, and then boom back on drugs,
back to doing what they were doing back in trouble.
(16:05):
And to me, that is sickening and there's no excuse sport.
Do you think Mike Moran is involved in Megan's disappearance.
I do believe Michael Moran is involved in Megan's disappearance,
and I do believe that we will eventually tie Mike
Moran to Megan's disappearance. Let's stop here for another quick break.
(16:32):
We'll be back in a moment. What's it like to
go through losing a family member or a friend but
not actually knowing what happened to them? It's hell. I
(16:53):
was talking to my mother in law about this today.
You know, people lose people all the time, and they
have a grave to go to somewhere they can go
visit that they know that that person is there, or
they have ashes that they have or whatever, what have you.
But we have a flipping sign with missing on it
(17:14):
that we decorate, and it is heartbreaking, and it is
hard not to know whether she's hungry, she's cold, she's
being hurt, she's being abused, or worse, she's dead. Not
to know that. It is so hard. I see her
mama suffer daily, or importantly, I see her baby boys
(17:38):
suffer very badly. And I'm not saying that, you know,
he cries every day or no, I'm not saying that,
but he has a lot of questions but we can't answer.
But I can guarantee you I won't stop to I
can answer him. I don't care if he's twenty five, thirty,
thirty five, forty, If I'm along around that long, I'll
(18:01):
fight until I can answer those questions for him. In
an interview, Moran claimed that he only knew Megan as
a police informant who was tied to a drug case
he tried years back. When asked about what may have
happened to her, Moran believed that she may have been murdered,
though he had no information to support his statement. It
(18:21):
should be noted that there have been no other specific
allegations tying Moran to the disappearance of any other women.
Nikki Blankenship continued her investigation into human trafficking in Portsmouth,
but her attempt to report on the areas missing women
was met with some pushback. You kind of started this
with this story. This seemed to have been local knowledge
(18:42):
that no one was reporting on. Right when I was
first saying let me talk about the missing women, I
was told now it didn't matter if there was proof
it was can't we talk about the missing women? Can
I talk to their families, and I was told, now,
Nikki didn't let that stop her. So I I have
seen these things personally. In Cider County, we say that
(19:03):
everyone's been affected because if it's not your friend, it
is or your family member's at least somebody you went
to school with. Everybody knows somebody who's been affected by
the drug epidemic, and everybody knows somebody who has turned
a prostitution. So this is a pretty personal story for you. Yeah.
I spent probably my whole career, I feel like working
(19:25):
on this, and nobody was listening to their stories before
or seeing them as even human. That really made me
connect with a lot of these people in their stories
living here my whole life. These are my friends and
my family members as well. Not specifically, but I have
lost so many friends to overdose. I have so many
(19:46):
friends that have battle addiction, and a lot of people
I went to school with are gone. Now I have
several friends from high schools that ended up working in prostitution.
They're people, They're human, and yet seen as a prostitute
or an addict exactly, and that makes people not really
care what happens to them. That makes people assume that
(20:09):
they chose some lifestyle that is dangerous. It makes people
just assume that they somehow are asking for that or
whatever happens to them as a part of a lifestyle
they chose, and so they just turned a blind eye.
And I think that's another thing that has made it
so easy for it to happen, and it happened right
in public, is that people see them as prostitutes and addicts.
(20:32):
Nickie didn't give up searching for prooflinking Michael Moran to
Portsmith's sex trafficking industry. I was at home a lot
late at night, just going through court documents and talking
to families because a lot of these families told me
I was the only person they trusted. So then for me,
it was like, how do I get something more than
(20:53):
a story from a family member or even a girl.
I need some kind of career, finding some kind of document.
In twenty seventeen, she got it. A man named Mark
Eubanks reached out to her and passed along a copy
of a sworn Affidavid filed by the Drug Enforcement Agency.
Mark Cubanks, he had been reading my stories on human
(21:15):
trafficking and on the heroin epidemic and he just smelled
me a copy of this Silda Affidavid. It was actually
a part of his case and had told me his story,
which was that he had been arrested on drug charges
and when he was arrested, he was immediately taken and
given live a detective test about missing women and dead
(21:36):
women and Mike Moran and human trafficking. The Affidavid laid
out Southern Ohio Drug Task Force and FBI operations that
had been UNDERWAGH since twenty fifteen investigating Michael Moran and
his ties to area sex trafficking. He's accused of trafficking
women all over the country from New York and New
Jersey to Florida, racketeering and compelling and promoting prostitution. In
(21:59):
other thing that is in the affidavit that he was
working with drug traffickers and there was a wire tap
where they were able to hear some of the conversations
between Moran and drug traffickers and he was getting drugs
from these drug traffickers in order to provide to the
females that he had working for him. The AffA David
(22:20):
specifically talks about whom working with local judges and law
enforcement and adult probation to make these things happen. Nikki
finally had the proof she needed that validated the stories
told by Portsmouth's most vulnerable women, but when she brought
the document to her editor, she was shocked and they
(22:41):
told me, no, we're not going to publish. Michael Moran
would later be arrested and charged with eighteen felony accounts,
including promoting prostitution and trafficking in persons. He was released
on a three hundred thou dollar bond, which was later
revoked after he violated the terms of his agreement. He
(23:05):
has pleaded not guilty to all charges and staunchly maintains
his innocence. He is now under house arrest while he
awaits trial. We'll bring you the second part of the
Michael Moran story in episode nine, but next week we'll
be hearing from some of our regular contributors, who will
discuss updates from accused brother George Wagner, the four's most
(23:26):
recent pre trial hearing. For more information on the case
and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at Katie Underscore Studios.
The Piked and Massacre Returned to Pike County is executive
produced by Stephanie Lydecker and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and
sound designed by executive producer Jared Aston. Additional producing by
(23:47):
Jeff Shane, Andrew Becker, and Chris Graves. The Piked and
Massacre Returned to Pike County is a production of iHeartRadio
and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the
iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your
favorite shows.
Hosts And Creators
Stephanie Lydecker
Courtney Armstrong
Jeff Shane
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