June 22, 2025 • 49 mins
In part 4 we are still in the trial of George Wagner IV and we finally hear from Jake Wagner as he takes the stand, his testimony lasted 4 days so we have a lot to cover. Let’s dive in.
Sources for episode:
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/07/day-19-ski-masks-brass-catcher-and-bug-detector-found-in-wagner-raids-introduced-as-evidence/
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/11/day-20-several-guns-introduced-in-wagner-trial-but-none-are-the-murder-weapons/
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/12/day-21-text-messages-wiretaps-show-wagners-were-odd-family/
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/13/day-22-angela-wagners-interrogation-is-played-for-the-jury-as-her-brother-testifies-against-her/
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/14/day-23-angela-wagners-mother-co-defendant-testifies-against-family-to-spare-her-own-freedom/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pretty-lies-and-alibis/id1519114534?i=1000582982701
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/19/day-26-the-silencer-used-in-the-rhoden-murders-is-introduced-during-wagner-trial/
https://www.scribd.com/document/686257537/Jake-Wagner-Court-Docs-Hearing-Excerpts
Sources for episode:
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/07/day-19-ski-masks-brass-catcher-and-bug-detector-found-in-wagner-raids-introduced-as-evidence/
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/11/day-20-several-guns-introduced-in-wagner-trial-but-none-are-the-murder-weapons/
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/12/day-21-text-messages-wiretaps-show-wagners-were-odd-family/
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/13/day-22-angela-wagners-interrogation-is-played-for-the-jury-as-her-brother-testifies-against-her/
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/14/day-23-angela-wagners-mother-co-defendant-testifies-against-family-to-spare-her-own-freedom/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/pretty-lies-and-alibis/id1519114534?i=1000582982701
https://sciotovalleyguardian.com/2022/10/19/day-26-the-silencer-used-in-the-rhoden-murders-is-introduced-during-wagner-trial/
https://www.scribd.com/document/686257537/Jake-Wagner-Court-Docs-Hearing-Excerpts
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to the twenty twenty five summer series. Here at
Primetime Crime, we are going to be discussing the Pike
County Massacre. We're going to be talking about the murders
of Dane of Roden, Christopher Roden Senior, Kenneth Roden, Gary Roden,
Frankie Rodin, Hannah Hazel Gilly, Hannah Roden, and Christopher Roden Junior.
(00:22):
Those are our victims, all eight of them. We're going
to talk about the case. We're going to talk about
the victims. We're going to honor the victims, and we're
going to discuss where everything stands today as this case
is finally adjudicated. Join me every Sunday night starting in
June for an episode of the Pike County Massacre for
(00:43):
twenty twenty five summer series. Let's go. Okay, guys, welcome
to Part four of the Pike County Massacre, the Roden
Family Murders. We are still knee deep in trial coverage
of the trial of George Wagner the fourth and we
still have so much to cover, and I really do
feel that this series is going to last all summer long,
(01:06):
so we are going to go ahead and get into
the next day of trial coverage, and if you're keeping up,
we are on day eighteen. So first witness up today
is a man named Brian White. He is a former
BCI agent and he worked as the crime scene agent
and was called to the Wagner property on May tenth
of twenty seventeen for a small scale search that they
(01:30):
did of the property. Now, they were able to initially
keep this search pretty low key and the media was
not alerted to this. He ended up taking pictures of
the outside area of the house and some of the
barn buildings, and what they later found would lead to
the second bigger search warrant being executed on the Wagner
(01:50):
family property. So they talked about the spent shieldcasings that
were found. They found a ton of spent shial casings.
They found twenty two rimfire m twenty two rim fire cartridges,
nine mm fire cartridges, and they also found a live
twenty two round in the kitchen cabinet of the Wagner
(02:11):
family home. So, after all of this that they had
gathered and all of the different spent shellcasings, they were
able to compare those to the ones that were left
at the crime scenes and that is when they kind
of realized that everything was a match and they had
their suspects, and that is what led to the second
(02:33):
bigger search that would occur at the house just a
few days later. Now, I also do want to say
that in the midst of the second search going on,
is after the Wagner family had decided that they were
going to leave Ohio and move to Alaska. I think
that they realized that they were onto them and they
wanted to basically get the heck out of Dodge. And honestly,
(02:55):
the Wagner family home is cute. It's like this cute
little red home. It is a lot of property, but
it obviously has a lot of bad juju and there's
majorly bad vibes that happened all around that property. I'm
going to be posting some of the pictures on my
Instagram and Facebook pages that way you guys can see
what it looks like, kind of what the property looks like,
(03:17):
because I'm such a visual person that I want to
see kind of what I'm talking about when I'm telling
these stories. When I think of Tabitha hiding out on
the property, hiding from crazy Angela Wagner, I want to
be able to visualize how did she hide? How is
she able to get away without being attacked by crazy
Angela Wagner. And you can see the property is very
(03:41):
brush heavy and there's a lot of property there, so
it makes sense that she'd be able to hide and
remain undetected, thankfully, and not shot at by Angela Wagner
because Angela is crazy. The Wagner property is seventy acres.
So these searches that they did were a big undertaking.
(04:01):
The bigger search, like I said, happened just two days later,
and this was a massive search, and again there was
more shellcasings found all over the property. They also found
a burned DVR that had been placed in the fire pit.
And a lot of this ongoing testimony was about ballistics
and such, and it was very extensive. There was a lot.
(04:23):
I'm just giving you guys the meat and potatoes of
things because I cannot navigate hours of ballistics because I
am not that person. I am just not. He did
testify that they were able to do some comparisons between
the twenty two's that were found at the Wagner property
and said that they did compare them to the shell
casings from Franky and Dana's house and they were the same.
(04:44):
So next up was special agent. His name is Todd Fortner,
and they talked about the search warrant on May twelfth
at the Wagner home. He said he was there and
he went to the area where they stored the different
trucks and trailers on the property. And they had a
lot stuff on this property. It was massive. They unloaded
all of the trailers and it literally looks like an
(05:07):
episode of Hoarders. There was so much stuff that they
had to comb through. They found newspapers with headlines about
the road and family murders. In the floorboard of a
truck that belonged to Jake Wagner. They found three different
black ski masks in a crate. They found paperwork and
documents from law offices with forged custody agreements. They found
(05:28):
the Walmart receipt for the shoes. They found phones, camera kits,
trail cams, so many things. There was so much crap
on this property. They also searched a large open air
trailer and they found more cell phones, trail cams, a
notepad with writings, a GPS system, a brass catcher which
I guess is supposed to catch shellcasings when a gun
(05:49):
is fired. They also found SD cards, shoes, laundry baskets,
bank cards, iPad boxes, and a bug detector and so
on and so forth. There was also a notebook with
George's name on it and it had writings in them. Now,
there were some drawings and some of the notebooks had
drawings of tactle gear. Now, the defense very much argued
(06:11):
that the sche mass couldn't have been involved in the
crime because Jake said that they burned any of the
items of clothing that were used in the homicides. Basically,
the defense is doing everything they can to try to
argue that just because these items were found some of
them might have had George Wagner's name on them, they
didn't necessarily point to George being involved and actually being
(06:32):
one of the people that was at the different crime
scenes and committed these murders. Because at the end of
the day, it's their job to defend their client as
much as we might not agree with them, and they
need to try to cast doubt that George Wagner was
involved in this. So that is exactly what they are
doing now during these days of trial. George Wagner the
(06:54):
Fourth turned thirty one, but no mention of his birthday
was made, and you really have to think about what
a sad way to celebrate your thirty first birthday being
on trial for eight person murder. What even is your
life at this point in time. In the next day
of trial, there were many guns that were introduced by
(07:15):
the state and these were all guns that were found
during the executed search warrant in twenty seventeen and eighteen
on properties owned by the Wagner family, And there were
a ton a ton of guns that they brought in,
but none of these guns were the murder weapons, and
the defense very much did not want these guns to
be brought in and not part of what the jury
(07:38):
heard and had to take back with them because basically saying,
these guns don't have anything to do with the homicide,
and all of these guns painted George Wagner the fourth
and his family to be homicidal maniacs, which they were.
But the judge ended up denying the motion by the
defense to exclude the guns, and the whole day day
(07:58):
twenty was spent talking about the guns that the Wagner
family owned. Now it was revealed that Jake Wagner had
a list of all of the different guns that the
family owned on his phone. However, there were some guns
on the list that they were not able to find,
and these were the guns that were used in the homicides.
There were twenty one guns listed on his list and
(08:19):
they only found seventeen. So, honestly, if nothing else, though,
I feel like all the gun talk and bringing in
all of these guns really does show you that the
Wagner family was prepared to take on a mass murder,
and they obviously were familiar with guns. They were comfortable
with guns. They did target practice constantly on their property.
(08:39):
And it makes sense when you think about it, because
a lot of the people that were killed were only
shot once. Hence, while a lot of people in the
beginning phases of this case thought that this was a
cartel type hit because a lot of the people that
were killed, a lot of the victims were killed pretty
much instantly, So it makes sense that they're bringing these
(09:01):
guns in to show that, hey, they are very familiar,
very comfortable, very experienced handling firearms and handling these guns.
The next day of trial was basically spent and going
through phone records and text messages and different interactions between Jake,
Angela Billy, and George Wagner in the months that led
(09:21):
up to their arrests in twenty eighteen. Now, there were
a lot of text messages that were presented, a lot
of which were full of misspellings, hard to read, I
don't even know, just random gibberish stuff. So a lot
of the messages had to do with Billy and Angela,
and a lot of them discussed their relationship and their
(09:43):
relationship wasn't great following the murders, and in some of
the messages, Billy had talked about how his mental health
was not good and that he wished he could die,
and he said he wanted Angela to shoot him in
the head. And then there was also talk that they
just wanted to run away with the two of them
and leave their children, but they would take their grandchildren
with them. There was also text messages between the two
(10:07):
that revealed that Angela said that George and Tabitha's son
would often sleep with her in bed and that he
would call her mommy. And I don't know what is
going on with Angela Wagner, but she has some really
deep seated issues. I don't get what her hang up is,
but she had a really odd relationship with George Wagner,
(10:28):
and I don't even know what kind of relationship she
had with Jake. And then it looks like she's just
repeating the cycle with her grandson. And it's just so
bizarre to me. I don't know any normal woman who
would act like this. So again, the reason that the
prosecutors brought all this evidence in is because they said
(10:49):
that Angela wore the pants. She was the boss of
the family, and she had aspirations of taking the grandkids
and raising them as her own. Again, she tried to
repete the crazy cycle of the Wagner family. Next up,
the jury got to hear Angela's interrogation, which was played
for them, and this interrogation was two hours long. It
(11:11):
took place in Montana in twenty seventeen. Now, this interrogation
took place after the family had already moved to Alaska
and BCI agents had learned that they were on their
way back to Ohio and they were able to intercept
them in Montana. So during this interview, Angela denied having
any knowledge of who killed the road In family, and
(11:32):
she said that she had first learned about the murders
while she was at home in her kitchen and Jake
came inside and he was hysterically crying and said, you
need to turn on the news now. Obviously this is
all a lie because they knew about it ahead of time,
because they're the ones that did it. Angela Wagner's brother
then took the stand to testify against the Wagner family
(11:54):
and his name is Chris Newcom, and he talked about
buying guns for the Wagner's gift them to the Wagners
and also said he had bought them a forty caliber
gun and this is the gun that the state believes
is one of the weapons that was used in the murders.
Chris Newcomb was also asked if he knew what George
and Jake's favorite movie was, and Chris said it was
(12:16):
a movie called Boondock Saints and basically, if you don't know,
because I did not know. This movie portrays two brothers
who go on a murdering spree using guns that have
silencers attached to them. And they believe that this movie
is very much what inspired Jake to use the silencers
in the killings because they did find the silencers on
(12:38):
the Wagner property, and prosecutors later said that Jake Wagner
idolized Norman Ritis, who is an actor. I believe I
talked about that earlier, and Jake had dyed his hair
to mimic Norman's appearance and basically did all of this
before going and acting out this movie script in the
homicides against the Ronan family. And Chris said that when
(13:01):
he learned about the homicides and that the Wagners were involved,
that he felt like he wanted to go out and
kill Jake himself for his role in things. Next step
on the stand is Rita Newcom, who is Angela Wagner's mom. Now,
remember she decided to testify against the family against George
Wagner the fourth in order to spare her own freedom.
(13:23):
So Rita Newcom is a notary and she told prosecutors,
the grand jury agents from BCI that she had witnessed
Hannah Rodin signed custody documents saying that she gives sole
custody to Jake Wagner. But all of this was a lie.
At this trial for George Wagner, she testified that she
did not see Hannah sign the paperwork, and that Angela
(13:45):
essentially stole the notary stamp, ended up using it, and
then asked her mom to lie. So not only were
these documents forged with the stamp that Rita uses for
her notary stuff, but it also had forged Hannah Rodin's signature,
and the paperwork was also illegally postmarked to reflect the
signing occurring a whole two years before the murders, when
(14:07):
the paperwork was actually drafted up and created three weeks
before the killings. In exchange for her testimony, she received
no prison time and would only receive probation. And honestly,
Rita is probably the least heinous person in all of this.
Not that I agree with what she did, because she
obviously knew what her daughter and family were involved in,
(14:29):
and she lied for them, and Angela pretty much forged
her name and everything else, but then she asked her
to lie about it. But still, you can't do that,
and I'm glad that she did do the right thing,
and she came forward and she testified against the family
and basically told the truth. The state then brought back
an expert witness with the BCI crime Lab. Her name
(14:52):
is Julia I've talked about her in the past, and
they ended up going over more Facebook data and accounts,
and the jury learned during the test simony that the
Wagner and Roden family had all blocked one another on
Facebook except Jake Wagner, who was friends with everybody, because
I guess in Jake's head, it's keep your friends close
and your enemies closer. Next day up, Julia is still
(15:15):
up on the stand for the state and she's going
through all the different wiretaps and phone calls that went
back and forth between the Wagner family, and I'm going
to go through all of this, but I do want
to give credit to Gigi from Pretty Licen Alibis for
breaking all of this stuff down transcribing it all because
she did a day by day trial coverage of this trial,
(15:36):
and there's so much information here. All of this stuff
that I'm about to talk about comes directly from her
podcast episode she did on this day breaking down all
of these different wire taps. Because I was not able
to find anything else online really about it. I have
been just kind of referencing different articles throughout to go
through this trial coverage, but this was one day of
(15:58):
trial coverage that was. So Gigi is bringing you all
the information and we are going to go through that now.
So the first conversation happens May fifth of twenty seventeen
at twelve fifty seven pm, and it's a conversation that
occurs in the car between all four of the Wagners, Billy, George, Jake,
(16:21):
and Angela, and they're talking to Bovine, who is George
the fourth and Tabitha's son, and he's a child at
this point, he's three years old, and he is basically
being told by his dad that during this road trip
on the way back to Alaska, they were stopped at
(16:41):
the border, and that the people at the border are
bad people. They're the ones that want to kill us.
They want to kill Uncle Jake, they want to kill
your papa, they want to kill me. They're bad people,
and basically trying to get this kid to believe that
anybody that isn't a Wagner family member is somebody that
can't be trusted. And he's only three years old. And
(17:03):
they also all go on to have like this wild
paranoia that Tabitha is at the border waiting for them,
waiting to flip the script on them, that was never true.
But they just have this insane paranoia that everybody is
out to get them because they literally killed eight people,
So I guess I would be paranoid too, but I
(17:25):
don't understand why they are acting like this. Then there
is a call on June thirteenth of twenty seventeen from
Billy to George, and George asks for Angela to google
something because he found something on his truck that he
wants her to google, and he tells her to google
(17:47):
the letter HX plus and he said that he found
something on the top of his truck and it says
h plus Remote Start, and he said that it looks
like an oblong thing with black wires coming out of it.
(18:08):
Billy responded and thought that maybe it was something with
a GPS, and then George said that he thought it's
something maybe for a stereo or something GPS related, and
then George said that he's going to wait on Jake
at the Utoparts store and that they were trying to
find a radiator, and they just kind of go back
(18:31):
and forth about that. Then there is text messages back
and forth between Jake and the new owner of the
home that the Wagner family used to live in that
is on Peterson Road, and the text was on June
fifteenth of twenty seventeen, at nine point thirty seven in
the morning, and the new owner said, Hey, I called
(18:52):
the sheriff about the Thompson guy, and the investigators are
here at the farm today digging the crap out of
the lot behind the barn, which someone would let us
know what the heck's going on. All they say is
that it will be done on Friday night at nine am.
Jake responds and asks what they're doing. The owner says,
I don't know what they're doing, and Jake says, I
(19:15):
don't know what they're looking for, but I know they've
harassed us so much that I won't talk to them
anymore if they don't have a warrant, and I would
go ahead and tell them to take a hike. Jake
says that they need a search warrant and tells the
new owner to ask a lawyer and says you could
basically sue them for doing this. Then at ten oh five,
(19:37):
Jake texts and says, I'm sorry that they're doing this
to you guys, but seriously, if you do not give
them permission and they don't have a warrant, they can't
do that. You can sue them. At ten sixteen, Jake
texts once again and said, did they give you a
warrant the first time they searched or did you give permission?
And somebody named Joe had told Jake that they were
(19:59):
tearing them place up with a trap ho and said,
if they are, sue them for destruction of property because
they won't stop until you do so. Basically, in my opinion,
at this point, Jake Wagner is losing his mind because
he knows that they're going to find some little shred
of evidence that is going to be able to pin
this back on the Wagners and his freedom will be
(20:23):
over for good. So I think he knew at this
point in time that they were really in trouble. The
owner of the home did say that they left the
warrants on the kitchen table, and there's really nothing that
they can do because they do have the warrants, so
they have to allow them to search the property. Next
(20:44):
is a call on June fifteenth of twenty seventeen, and
this is a call between George and Angela, and George
is losing his mind. He is panicking about the search
at the property, and Angela also is a little panicking too,
and they keep going over and over, and George said,
(21:05):
the new owner is texting Jake, and they're down there
again today digging up everything inside of the barn. Now
in all of these calls, Angela is starting to lose
her mind because I think she also realizes that the
gig is finally almost up and they are going to
find evidence on the property because that's where they disposed
of a lot of their stuff. That's why they left it,
(21:27):
that's why they went to Alaska. They wanted to get
away from all of it. So Angela is starting to
lose her mind. George is losing his mind, Jake is
losing his mind. Billy God knows what he's doing, what
he's thinking during all of this. So although they were
actually losing their minds, they were still in the process
(21:47):
of going to Alaska and finding a new property. And
in one of the calls that took place on June fifteenth,
at nine to twelve pm, they are talking about this property.
It's going to be four acres, they're not going to
have any neighbors, and Angela is so excited. She just
cannot wait. They are going to move into this new
(22:08):
house on Saturday. It is brand new, they've remodeled it,
and it has this big basement. There's a full basement
with a big wood stove fireplace downstairs. And again there's
four acres, there's no neighbors, and they talk about how
they're going to be able to put all of the
different cars on the property, and literally all of the
(22:31):
panic and fear that Angela had in the previous calls
about the BCI basically digging up her old property has
gone out the window. And she is just so excited
about this new home and this new beginning for her family.
And they decide for whatever reason, that they're going to
put the house in George's name, but all of their
(22:51):
names are going to be on it, but it's going
to be in George's name. And they're going to run
a credit check in about ten minutes, and George has
the best credit, so there's nothing wrong with his credit.
And there was also calls with Rita newcom and Angela
going back and forth about everything there. It is very involved.
There is a lot to it, but basically Angela Wagner
(23:12):
is losing her a mind, trying everything she can in
the world to cover her tracks and make it seem
like she's not a delusional human. And I don't think
she did a great job with that. In just in
my opinion, they talk about thirteen hundred screenshots of different
Facebook communications. There are three hundred plus screenshots of Hannah's
(23:34):
communications on Facebook Messenger from July twenty fifteen to April
twenty first of twenty sixteen, which is when they were murdered.
They show a screenshot of the message where Hannah says
they'll have to kill me first, and her saying I
won't sign the papers ever, it won't happen now. That
message was sent at eight thirty eight pm and the
(23:57):
screenshot of it was taken at nine to sixteen that
same night. Then there are searches that happened on April
third of twenty sixteen, which was forms for declaration of
guardian in the event of my death. Those ended up
being printed off the same day and the next day.
(24:18):
There is a sample form for guardianship in case of
my death in Ohio that was also searched for, and
they were able to find all of this through all
of Jake's old iPhone backups. So, like I had said,
Angela Wagner had access to Hannah Rodin's Facebook page. She
had her password from when Hannah was living with the
(24:39):
family and she was a creep, so she was obviously
going onto Hannah's account. She saw the message about they'll
have to kill me first, and that's when the plan
really started to take shape, and they started looking up
all of these different forms and all of that was
found as evidence on on the road and family cell phones.
(25:02):
They then go on to talk about some of the
other Google searches that transpired. On May third, they searched
for Pike County murders. Again on the seventh Pike County murders,
and on July twenty ninth of twenty sixteen, they searched
the name Jake Wagner. On August sixth of twenty sixteen,
(25:22):
they searched Victims of Violent Crimes Fund. There is a
photo of one of Jake's guns that was the cult
nineteen eleven twenty two, that was taken on January thirty
first of twenty fifteen, and they believe that this is
the gun that was used in the murders. And there's
also a picture of Jake's hand holding that gun. So
(25:42):
it's really incredible to see all the work that law
enforcement did to basically catch them in the act and
try to trace back all of the evidence that they
had and pin it on the Wagners. Because the Wagners, essentially,
they were in their safe space. They were in their home,
they were in their car, they were having these conversations
(26:04):
between one another, and they thought that they were safe,
but the wire taps proved for that to be not
the case. They were not safe, and the wire taps
really did come back to bite them in the butt
because they were talking about different things that were transpiring,
the searches of the property, the stuff with Rita, and
(26:25):
the forgery of the documents. It all just kind of
came together in a full circle moment to make us
realize that the Wagners were not innocent in any of this,
and they played a huge role in the Road and
family murders. The next day of trial, they very much
focused on the silencer that they thought that the Wagner
(26:47):
family had used during the massacres, and they found this
silencer had been burned and this again was consistent with
Jake Wagner's confession. That burned all of the evidence, which
is so dumb. But the silencer wouldn't melt under the
fire because it is made out of metal and other items.
(27:10):
I guess I'm not a gun person, so I have
no idea, but it wouldn't burn. So Jake said that
they just threw it inside of the barn, and that's
probably why they were flipping out when they were doing
all of these searches, because they knew that that silencer
was still there and had not been disposed of. They
also had a forensics accountant with BCI who basically went
(27:34):
over all of the different financial records of the Wagner
family and there was a ton of different occurrences where
Angela Wagner would use her son's credit and bank cards
and she would go out and buy these different items
to carry out the murders. They said that Angela bought
a cell phone jammer above detector which ended up being
(27:56):
used in the killings, and she bought all of this
stuff using George's credit card and the purchases were made.
The fraud department of the credit card company did call
George and he sure enough authorized and said that he
knew that his mother is buying these items, so that
(28:16):
proves that he was complicit in what was happening. She
was buying these items to commit the murders and he
knew it and was okay with it because he gave
his approval. There were also some credit card statements that
were shown that appeared that George's card was used to
buy a vehicle oil filter at a local autopart store,
(28:37):
and they said that they believed that this was likely
used as a second kind of homemade silencer. And I
don't know anything about silencers. I know what they do,
what they're supposed to do. But the Wagner family is
so dumb for all of this stuff. I don't understand
(28:57):
how they felt that they were going to get away
with all of this and not have all of this
evidence come back to bite them in the butt, because
it's all right there in black and white. Okay, So
we are now getting into the part of the trial
where Jake Wagner himself is going to come up and
take the stand as a witness for the state. So
(29:19):
Jake did this, gave his testimony in exchange for taking
a plea deal. Essentially, we're going to get into all
of that in a little while at the end of
this series, but he testified. It was not recorded audio
or video, but there is transcripts that live out on
the internet. I'm going to do my best to try
(29:41):
to sum it all up. But he testified for four days,
which is a long time. He essentially is the star
witness of this case. But you have to remember the
defendant is his brother. So it's all very wild and
convoluted that this all would transpire in the way it did,
and that he would end up being the state's biggest witness.
(30:04):
So we are just going to go through it. I
was able to find the transcript. We're going to go
through it. I might skip over some parts that I
don't really feel are relevant. But he approaches the stand.
He says his name is Edward Jacob Wagner. He says
he is twenty nine and he is currently incarcerated in Columbus,
and he says the jail is CCR or FCCR one,
(30:31):
and he says it's in Franklin County and he's been
in there for about four years. He was arrested November
thirteenth of twenty eighteen, and they asked, your mother, brother,
and father were all arrested on the same date and
he said yes, and they asked him, prior to being arrested,
can you tell us where you lived? And he gave
(30:51):
the address. He was back living in Ohio at this point,
he said he lived there with his mom, brother, his daughter,
and his nephew, and the home was previously owned by
his grandfather and that was his mother's father, so Angela's father.
They asked about another home that the Wagner family had
(31:11):
previously lived in, and then they get to the home
on Peterson Road and they ask about that. They asked
who all had lived at that location, and he said,
his brother, his brother's ex wife, Tabitha, my nephew, my daughter,
and sometimes my father meaning Billy Wagner. And they said,
when your dad wasn't at the house, where was he?
(31:35):
And Jake answered and said that he was at his
mom's house. His mom is Rodrika Wagner. We've talked about her,
and she lived on the Flying w Farms that she
owned in Pikedon, Ohio. Now, they asked him whose name
that house was in, and it was in George's name,
and Jake goes on to say that it was put
(31:55):
in to George's name for insurance purposes, and he said
the reason for that was because he and George's credit
and insurance history was clean, so it would have been
cheaper for them to get insured with the house versus
their parents. I guess their parents had bad credit. They
asked about the fire that had occurred at the property,
(32:18):
and Jake gov on to talk about that, and then
they go and they ask what the family likes to
do together, and he said, you mean hobbies. We hunted,
we fished, We rode four wheelers, played in the mud,
went to fairs, festivals, immunsement parks. Not often. We tinkered
on engines, and I think that's about it. They asked
(32:38):
if he went to school, and Jake said public school
for a very short period of time. He only went
for about a month, and then he and his brother
were homeschooled. And they asked if he received any other
type of schooling after homeschooling was finished, and he said yes,
and that he and his brother both attended a technical
education college in Lucaville for diesel engineering. They asked if
(33:03):
both brothers went there at the same time, and Jake
said they did, and they went for about a year,
and then they asked, are you close with your brother?
And do you love your brother? Do you believe he
loves you? And Jake said yes to both. And they
asked if it was difficult for Jake to be there today,
and Jake says very And they asked, is it true
that you would love nothing more than for him to
(33:26):
be able to go home? Jake says yes, and he
says he feels the same way about his mother and father.
And then they ask what type of jobs they had,
and Jake said, mechanic, welding, transportation as in truck driving,
and he said he pretty much did all of those
jobs with his brother. And then they went on to
(33:47):
talk more about hunting, and they said, tell us when
you hunted, who would you be hunting with? Would it
just be you and George? You and George and your dad?
Kind of tell me a little bit about that, and
then he said a variety my brother and I mostly
occasionally my dad, uncle Chris, some member of the Rodens,
my friend James Roden and his family from Virginia, some
(34:11):
of my uncle Chris's friends, and that's about all I
can remember. He said. Hannah came a couple of times,
uncle Chris is fiance Randa came and he thinks that
that's all. And I do want to say I misspoke.
I mentioned James Roden. It's James Roden are with a T,
not a D. So I just wanted to clarify that.
(34:33):
And they also clarified that in the questioning. And they
asked how often would you hunt? How many times per
year and he said at least two weeks out of
the year. And they talk about the different types of hunting,
deer hunting. They just go into all of the hunting information,
different types of hunting, different things that they would use
(34:53):
during hunting. They go on and on and on about that.
They then go on to ask Jake about the relationship
with his mom, and he said they had a close relationship,
but he had a closer relationship with his brother and
a close ish relationship with his father. And they say,
can you tell me a little bit about the family
meetings that you guys would have and some of the
(35:15):
things that you would discuss, And he says, I can't
think of a proper word, but an example would be
if we needed to build a fence, where it would go,
how it would be situated, they would all get together
and talk about that and try to figure out where
they were going to do it, how they were going
to execute the plan to build defense or make amendments
(35:36):
to the property, whatever the case may be. Now, he said,
the family meetings would typically be himself, his mom, his father,
and his brother, and they would just kind of go
back and forth and talk about things. Sometimes they would
vote on things. It was just kind of the routine
that they had. They would have these family meetings in
the kitchen and they would discuss everything that needed to
(35:58):
be discussed, and like I said, they would take a
vote on things if they needed to take a vote,
and kind of go from there. Obviously, the state is
very much trying to establish here that the Wagner family
made decisions about everything as a family. They would have
family meetings about the placement of offence, So they're very
much trying to paint the picture that the Wagner family
(36:18):
did everything together and they talked about everything beforehand. So obviously,
George is guilty of this homicide and he's the one
who's on trial right now, and Jake is testifying against
his brother, which again mind blown. Jake then goes on
to recall when he first met Hannah, and Hannah was
(36:40):
only thirteen and he was seventeen, and he said, the
first time he met her, she had this bunny from
four h that she was holding, and Jake eventually would
pet the bunny and then they ended up talking, and
that's kind of how their relationships started. And I just
have to say, at a seventeen year old being interested
(37:02):
in a thirteen year old actually makes my skin crawl.
It is so disgusting to me. I can't even imagine.
He said, when he and Hannah started dating, he had
talked with both Dana and Chris and got their permission
to date Hannah. And he says that Billy had a
good relationship with Chris, so they were good friends. But
(37:24):
anytime that Hannah and Jake would be alone, there would
be another Rodin family member that would accompany them, either
Chris Junior would go or Frankie Roden would go, So
it was never just like Hannah and Jake were necessarily alone,
at least in the beginning stages of all of that.
(37:47):
So Hannah got pregnant, obviously, and she was sixteen at
the time, and the baby, Sophia, ended up being born
in twenty thirteen, and they asked, prior to the baby
being born, did Hannah live with you and your family?
And he said yes for the majority, and then approximately
(38:07):
in February twenty and fifteen, they ended up kind of
separating a little bit, and she ended up leaving and
not living with the Road and family anymore. And they said, Jake,
I would like for you to talk about a time
where Hannah stated that you choked her. Can you tell
us if you recall such an incident and what you
recall about that incident? And he said, I do recall
(38:29):
the incident, but I never choked her. They said, can
you describe what you did? And he said, I believe
the argument was over yard work. I believe, trivial stuff.
And she had I'm not exactly sure of the right
word to be blunt, I guess you could say, and frank,
she was lazy in her responsibilities as she voluntarily chose
(38:49):
to do, and I was upset because she was making
me do not only my responsibilities but also hers. I
honestly didn't have to, but if something doesn't get done,
I figured I needed to do it and get it done.
She in my eyes at the moment, she was acting
much like my brother's ex wife, which at the time
I had not a high value of her attitude or
(39:10):
her actions, and she I don't know specifically why she
was in her attitude that day, she had an attitude.
I know she was on Facebook, and that was my argument. Basically,
she wanted to be on Facebook while everybody else was
doing her responsibility, which was a very small responsibility. Basically
it was to mow the grass once every other week,
(39:32):
and she stomped off outside. I followed her, and she
was I wouldn't say yelling, basically saying that I was
trying to have her do the work, which she didn't
want to. I argued with her that she volunteered to
do this work. I'm not trying to make her do it.
I was just trying to tell her, you need to
do your job of what you said you're going to do,
because if I'm going to make this farm work, I
(39:54):
need you to do your part. Because my argument was that,
I really guess my point was my idea for her
to do her part so I could save enough to
get a dairy calf business going, and she was going
to be responsible for tending to baby calves, which is
a lot of responsibility, time and dedication. I was telling
her if she couldn't do a single job of mowing
(40:15):
the grass, how was she going to be able to
do that to make actual money. And she had basically
started to stomp off on the patio outside of the
house and was going to say something, and she was
just gonna leave, and I was frustrated, so I put
my right hand on her. She was facing me. I
put my right hand on her shoulder, just under her collarbone,
and used my forearm pressed against under her collarbone, not
(40:39):
on her throat, and I pressed her against the board
on the patio and held her there until she would stop,
basically screaming, not saying a word, and she was very mad,
so I held her there until she calmed down. So
he is admitting here that Hannah, I guess, wasn't holding
up her end of the bargain and mowing the grass,
(41:00):
even though she was taking care of his child and
living in the hell hole that was the Wagner family home,
being spied on, being stalked, god knows what else. And
she wanted to scroll on Facebook and just have a
little bit of quiet time. And Jake was on her
for not mowing the grass, and he thought, well, if
(41:21):
you can't mow the grass, how are you going to
take care of all the cattle that I want to
buy for this farm and we're going to make money
off of And then he put his hands on her
and tried to stop her from leaving and being upset,
and he says, yeah, I did put my hands on her,
but I didn't choke her, and then said that this
(41:42):
whole thing lasted probably less than five minutes. And they
ended up breaking up after that, and then Hannah started
seeing somebody named Charlie Gilly who was the brother of
Hannah Hazel Gilly who was married to Frankie Rodin. And
then eventually she broke up with Charlie. And then at
the time time of her death, she was dating a
(42:02):
man named Corey Holdron, and Jake said that he was
aware of that. He met Corey maybe once, maybe twice.
And this is where we start to get into the
child abuse claims, because in Jake's mind, his daughter Sophia
was being sexually molested in some way, shape or form
at the Rodan family home by somebody that the Rodan
(42:24):
family knew. So these were his concerns. He was concerned
that Hannah was gonna let Sophia be molested. And they said,
what did you base those concerns on? And he said,
to my knowledge at the time, what I've heard for
several people that her choice of men was some kind
(42:45):
of drug user. And he said, there was a time
when I had been informed from Hannah's cousin, Patricia Manley,
I think her last name is. It was Patricia. I'm
sure everybody knows who that is. She had told me,
actually texted me and told me that Hannaana and Charlie
Hannah had went to put Sophia to sleep in her room,
and then her and Charlie were both in the room
(43:06):
with the door locked and were in there for hours
and not answering the door whenever she knocked. She did
not elaborate on what that meant, but I assumed she
may have put Sophia to sleep and possibly have been
doing inappropriate things with my child in the room with them,
I guess you could call it. Besides that, my daughter
had told me that Corey Holdron had locked her in
the bedroom and left her there for hours while she
(43:27):
screamed for her mother and no one would come to
rescue her. She told me that she had screamed for
me and I didn't come to rescue her. Whenever I
was home, Sofia would cling to me, and every time
that it was time for her to go back to
Hannah's house, she would scratch and claw. However, she would
hold on to my leg and scream, Daddy, please don't
make me go, with eyes that were filled with tears.
(43:49):
I did not know what was going on, but I
asked Dana Rhodin. She said she was just being a brat.
I asked Hannah about it. She said, nothing out of
the ordinary was going on, going wrong, And in fronted Hannah,
I said, Hannah, well, I guess I should probably say
this first. There's a past history in my family and
Hannah and Tabitha's of either rape or child molestation, and
(44:10):
because of those I had a deep fear for my
own daughter when she was born, and I solemnly swore
to her that while she was in my arms, I
would never let anything happen to her as it happened
to Tabitha, as it happened to Hannah, and as it
happened to my mother and to a couple cousins of mine.
I confronted Hannah about all of those things, and she
was abrupt with me. She said, I was overreacting. She
(44:32):
said that Sophia was just being a brat. It's the
same opinion that Dana had told me. And I told
her abruptly, Hannah, what if your carelessness leads to my
daughter being molested as you were? And she said, I
guess we'll just have to deal with it. And those
were my concerns, and I was very, very fearful that
it was going to happen or already had happened. They
(44:53):
asked if anyone else in the family have those concerned
and he said, to some extent, yes, And they asked
who and his family had those concerns, and he said,
my father, my mother, and my brother. They then asked
him if he had obtained an attorney at some point
to try and get fifty to fifty custody, and he said,
I believe it's called shared parenting with equal rights, but yes,
(45:16):
And they said, can you tell us if Hannah seem
interested in signing any of the paperwork that you and
your attorney had tried to get her to sign, and
he said, for a good period she did seem very interested.
Towards the end of twenty fifteen, it seemed more along
the lines that she was just stalling for some reason.
I don't know why. She told me she was getting
a lawyer to double check the paperwork, but the paperwork
(45:38):
was very, very short, and said that it was basically
Chris Roaden Senior's legal lawyer that he had used from Columbus,
and Jake doesn't believe that there ever was such a lawyer.
They then asked if during this time, if someone from
the family was monitoring Facebook private messages of Tabitha and
her mom, and Jake says yes, and he said that
(46:01):
the one who was monitoring that was his mom, Angela.
And they asked who Tabitha is and Jake says that
it's his brother's ex wife, and they said okay. And
while your mother was monitoring these conversations, did she also
observe a conversation that occurred between Tabitha's mom and Hannah,
And Jake goes on to say yes, and asked if
(46:25):
they recalled. He happened to recall what the general nature
of the conversation was, and that was objected to and
it was sustained. They asked if they knew why Angela
was watching these messages, watching Tabitha's personal messages, and Jake
says she was monitoring Tabitha's personal messages to see if
(46:45):
she was planning to try to see custody again of
her son, my nephew, and to see if she was
still involved in some sort of drug use or potential
harmful behavior for my nephew. They then talked about the
conversation between Hannah and Tabitha's mom, and they asked Jake
when he saw that message between Tabitha's mom and Hannah,
(47:07):
he had to make a decision about his concerns for Sophia,
and he said, to be Frank, I guess to the
point I had decided that I felt I had no
other choice other than to kill Hannah. And they said,
can you tell us how that decision progressed? When did
you first think of it? Were you the first one
who thought of it? Tell us about that, and he said,
I was not the first. My father first mentioned it
(47:29):
to me. He said something along the lines that if
something is not done, Sophia will be I forget the
exact word he used, but in a general aspect, I'm
going to say harm and I at first. I can't
remember exact words I use, but my first response was
that I had blowed up over a matter and told him,
telling him that that was my daughter's mother. I still
loved her and I was not going to let that happen.
(47:51):
And I stopped out of the door, and then they
ended up having another conversation and Angela was there, and
basically he said it again, it's not quote. It may
have been worded differently somehow. He said something along the
lines that the only option would be that they would
have to kill Hannah. He was dismissive of it, of course,
but then after his last conversation and argument with Hannah,
(48:13):
he went to his dad and said, I told him,
we'll have to do it. He said, the time span
between when Billy Wagner had first brought it up to
him and when he said we're going to have to
do it was probably about two months of time. So
we are getting into the meat and potatoes of Jake
Wagner's testimony. We are going to go ahead and call
this good for part four, and we are going to
(48:34):
pick up next week with Part five. We're going to
continue in to all of the testimony. It is long
it is involved. There is a lot of information here.
I'm trying my best not to overwhelm myself, and I
don't want to overwhelm you guys with all of this information,
because it is a heck of a lot. So we
are going to go ahead and call that good for
this episode. I will see you next week for part
(48:55):
five of the Road and Family Murders Pike County Massacre.
I hope you guys have a great week and I
will see you then. Bye.
Welcome to the twenty twenty five summer series. Here at
Primetime Crime, we are going to be discussing the Pike
County Massacre. We're going to be talking about the murders
of Dane of Roden, Christopher Roden Senior, Kenneth Roden, Gary Roden,
Frankie Rodin, Hannah Hazel Gilly, Hannah Roden, and Christopher Roden Junior.
(00:22):
Those are our victims, all eight of them. We're going
to talk about the case. We're going to talk about
the victims. We're going to honor the victims, and we're
going to discuss where everything stands today as this case
is finally adjudicated. Join me every Sunday night starting in
June for an episode of the Pike County Massacre for
(00:43):
twenty twenty five summer series. Let's go. Okay, guys, welcome
to Part four of the Pike County Massacre, the Roden
Family Murders. We are still knee deep in trial coverage
of the trial of George Wagner the fourth and we
still have so much to cover, and I really do
feel that this series is going to last all summer long,
(01:06):
so we are going to go ahead and get into
the next day of trial coverage, and if you're keeping up,
we are on day eighteen. So first witness up today
is a man named Brian White. He is a former
BCI agent and he worked as the crime scene agent
and was called to the Wagner property on May tenth
of twenty seventeen for a small scale search that they
(01:30):
did of the property. Now, they were able to initially
keep this search pretty low key and the media was
not alerted to this. He ended up taking pictures of
the outside area of the house and some of the
barn buildings, and what they later found would lead to
the second bigger search warrant being executed on the Wagner
(01:50):
family property. So they talked about the spent shieldcasings that
were found. They found a ton of spent shial casings.
They found twenty two rimfire m twenty two rim fire cartridges,
nine mm fire cartridges, and they also found a live
twenty two round in the kitchen cabinet of the Wagner
(02:11):
family home. So, after all of this that they had
gathered and all of the different spent shellcasings, they were
able to compare those to the ones that were left
at the crime scenes and that is when they kind
of realized that everything was a match and they had
their suspects, and that is what led to the second
(02:33):
bigger search that would occur at the house just a
few days later. Now, I also do want to say
that in the midst of the second search going on,
is after the Wagner family had decided that they were
going to leave Ohio and move to Alaska. I think
that they realized that they were onto them and they
wanted to basically get the heck out of Dodge. And honestly,
(02:55):
the Wagner family home is cute. It's like this cute
little red home. It is a lot of property, but
it obviously has a lot of bad juju and there's
majorly bad vibes that happened all around that property. I'm
going to be posting some of the pictures on my
Instagram and Facebook pages that way you guys can see
what it looks like, kind of what the property looks like,
(03:17):
because I'm such a visual person that I want to
see kind of what I'm talking about when I'm telling
these stories. When I think of Tabitha hiding out on
the property, hiding from crazy Angela Wagner, I want to
be able to visualize how did she hide? How is
she able to get away without being attacked by crazy
Angela Wagner. And you can see the property is very
(03:41):
brush heavy and there's a lot of property there, so
it makes sense that she'd be able to hide and
remain undetected, thankfully, and not shot at by Angela Wagner
because Angela is crazy. The Wagner property is seventy acres.
So these searches that they did were a big undertaking.
(04:01):
The bigger search, like I said, happened just two days later,
and this was a massive search, and again there was
more shellcasings found all over the property. They also found
a burned DVR that had been placed in the fire pit.
And a lot of this ongoing testimony was about ballistics
and such, and it was very extensive. There was a lot.
(04:23):
I'm just giving you guys the meat and potatoes of
things because I cannot navigate hours of ballistics because I
am not that person. I am just not. He did
testify that they were able to do some comparisons between
the twenty two's that were found at the Wagner property
and said that they did compare them to the shell
casings from Franky and Dana's house and they were the same.
(04:44):
So next up was special agent. His name is Todd Fortner,
and they talked about the search warrant on May twelfth
at the Wagner home. He said he was there and
he went to the area where they stored the different
trucks and trailers on the property. And they had a
lot stuff on this property. It was massive. They unloaded
all of the trailers and it literally looks like an
(05:07):
episode of Hoarders. There was so much stuff that they
had to comb through. They found newspapers with headlines about
the road and family murders. In the floorboard of a
truck that belonged to Jake Wagner. They found three different
black ski masks in a crate. They found paperwork and
documents from law offices with forged custody agreements. They found
(05:28):
the Walmart receipt for the shoes. They found phones, camera kits,
trail cams, so many things. There was so much crap
on this property. They also searched a large open air
trailer and they found more cell phones, trail cams, a
notepad with writings, a GPS system, a brass catcher which
I guess is supposed to catch shellcasings when a gun
(05:49):
is fired. They also found SD cards, shoes, laundry baskets,
bank cards, iPad boxes, and a bug detector and so
on and so forth. There was also a notebook with
George's name on it and it had writings in them. Now,
there were some drawings and some of the notebooks had
drawings of tactle gear. Now, the defense very much argued
(06:11):
that the sche mass couldn't have been involved in the
crime because Jake said that they burned any of the
items of clothing that were used in the homicides. Basically,
the defense is doing everything they can to try to
argue that just because these items were found some of
them might have had George Wagner's name on them, they
didn't necessarily point to George being involved and actually being
(06:32):
one of the people that was at the different crime
scenes and committed these murders. Because at the end of
the day, it's their job to defend their client as
much as we might not agree with them, and they
need to try to cast doubt that George Wagner was
involved in this. So that is exactly what they are
doing now during these days of trial. George Wagner the
(06:54):
Fourth turned thirty one, but no mention of his birthday
was made, and you really have to think about what
a sad way to celebrate your thirty first birthday being
on trial for eight person murder. What even is your
life at this point in time. In the next day
of trial, there were many guns that were introduced by
(07:15):
the state and these were all guns that were found
during the executed search warrant in twenty seventeen and eighteen
on properties owned by the Wagner family, And there were
a ton a ton of guns that they brought in,
but none of these guns were the murder weapons, and
the defense very much did not want these guns to
be brought in and not part of what the jury
(07:38):
heard and had to take back with them because basically saying,
these guns don't have anything to do with the homicide,
and all of these guns painted George Wagner the fourth
and his family to be homicidal maniacs, which they were.
But the judge ended up denying the motion by the
defense to exclude the guns, and the whole day day
(07:58):
twenty was spent talking about the guns that the Wagner
family owned. Now it was revealed that Jake Wagner had
a list of all of the different guns that the
family owned on his phone. However, there were some guns
on the list that they were not able to find,
and these were the guns that were used in the homicides.
There were twenty one guns listed on his list and
(08:19):
they only found seventeen. So, honestly, if nothing else, though,
I feel like all the gun talk and bringing in
all of these guns really does show you that the
Wagner family was prepared to take on a mass murder,
and they obviously were familiar with guns. They were comfortable
with guns. They did target practice constantly on their property.
(08:39):
And it makes sense when you think about it, because
a lot of the people that were killed were only
shot once. Hence, while a lot of people in the
beginning phases of this case thought that this was a
cartel type hit because a lot of the people that
were killed, a lot of the victims were killed pretty
much instantly, So it makes sense that they're bringing these
(09:01):
guns in to show that, hey, they are very familiar,
very comfortable, very experienced handling firearms and handling these guns.
The next day of trial was basically spent and going
through phone records and text messages and different interactions between Jake,
Angela Billy, and George Wagner in the months that led
(09:21):
up to their arrests in twenty eighteen. Now, there were
a lot of text messages that were presented, a lot
of which were full of misspellings, hard to read, I
don't even know, just random gibberish stuff. So a lot
of the messages had to do with Billy and Angela,
and a lot of them discussed their relationship and their
(09:43):
relationship wasn't great following the murders, and in some of
the messages, Billy had talked about how his mental health
was not good and that he wished he could die,
and he said he wanted Angela to shoot him in
the head. And then there was also talk that they
just wanted to run away with the two of them
and leave their children, but they would take their grandchildren
with them. There was also text messages between the two
(10:07):
that revealed that Angela said that George and Tabitha's son
would often sleep with her in bed and that he
would call her mommy. And I don't know what is
going on with Angela Wagner, but she has some really
deep seated issues. I don't get what her hang up is,
but she had a really odd relationship with George Wagner,
(10:28):
and I don't even know what kind of relationship she
had with Jake. And then it looks like she's just
repeating the cycle with her grandson. And it's just so
bizarre to me. I don't know any normal woman who
would act like this. So again, the reason that the
prosecutors brought all this evidence in is because they said
(10:49):
that Angela wore the pants. She was the boss of
the family, and she had aspirations of taking the grandkids
and raising them as her own. Again, she tried to
repete the crazy cycle of the Wagner family. Next up,
the jury got to hear Angela's interrogation, which was played
for them, and this interrogation was two hours long. It
(11:11):
took place in Montana in twenty seventeen. Now, this interrogation
took place after the family had already moved to Alaska
and BCI agents had learned that they were on their
way back to Ohio and they were able to intercept
them in Montana. So during this interview, Angela denied having
any knowledge of who killed the road In family, and
(11:32):
she said that she had first learned about the murders
while she was at home in her kitchen and Jake
came inside and he was hysterically crying and said, you
need to turn on the news now. Obviously this is
all a lie because they knew about it ahead of time,
because they're the ones that did it. Angela Wagner's brother
then took the stand to testify against the Wagner family
(11:54):
and his name is Chris Newcom, and he talked about
buying guns for the Wagner's gift them to the Wagners
and also said he had bought them a forty caliber
gun and this is the gun that the state believes
is one of the weapons that was used in the murders.
Chris Newcomb was also asked if he knew what George
and Jake's favorite movie was, and Chris said it was
(12:16):
a movie called Boondock Saints and basically, if you don't know,
because I did not know. This movie portrays two brothers
who go on a murdering spree using guns that have
silencers attached to them. And they believe that this movie
is very much what inspired Jake to use the silencers
in the killings because they did find the silencers on
(12:38):
the Wagner property, and prosecutors later said that Jake Wagner
idolized Norman Ritis, who is an actor. I believe I
talked about that earlier, and Jake had dyed his hair
to mimic Norman's appearance and basically did all of this
before going and acting out this movie script in the
homicides against the Ronan family. And Chris said that when
(13:01):
he learned about the homicides and that the Wagners were involved,
that he felt like he wanted to go out and
kill Jake himself for his role in things. Next step
on the stand is Rita Newcom, who is Angela Wagner's mom. Now,
remember she decided to testify against the family against George
Wagner the fourth in order to spare her own freedom.
(13:23):
So Rita Newcom is a notary and she told prosecutors,
the grand jury agents from BCI that she had witnessed
Hannah Rodin signed custody documents saying that she gives sole
custody to Jake Wagner. But all of this was a lie.
At this trial for George Wagner, she testified that she
did not see Hannah sign the paperwork, and that Angela
(13:45):
essentially stole the notary stamp, ended up using it, and
then asked her mom to lie. So not only were
these documents forged with the stamp that Rita uses for
her notary stuff, but it also had forged Hannah Rodin's signature,
and the paperwork was also illegally postmarked to reflect the
signing occurring a whole two years before the murders, when
(14:07):
the paperwork was actually drafted up and created three weeks
before the killings. In exchange for her testimony, she received
no prison time and would only receive probation. And honestly,
Rita is probably the least heinous person in all of this.
Not that I agree with what she did, because she
obviously knew what her daughter and family were involved in,
(14:29):
and she lied for them, and Angela pretty much forged
her name and everything else, but then she asked her
to lie about it. But still, you can't do that,
and I'm glad that she did do the right thing,
and she came forward and she testified against the family
and basically told the truth. The state then brought back
an expert witness with the BCI crime Lab. Her name
(14:52):
is Julia I've talked about her in the past, and
they ended up going over more Facebook data and accounts,
and the jury learned during the test simony that the
Wagner and Roden family had all blocked one another on
Facebook except Jake Wagner, who was friends with everybody, because
I guess in Jake's head, it's keep your friends close
and your enemies closer. Next day up, Julia is still
(15:15):
up on the stand for the state and she's going
through all the different wiretaps and phone calls that went
back and forth between the Wagner family, and I'm going
to go through all of this, but I do want
to give credit to Gigi from Pretty Licen Alibis for
breaking all of this stuff down transcribing it all because
she did a day by day trial coverage of this trial,
(15:36):
and there's so much information here. All of this stuff
that I'm about to talk about comes directly from her
podcast episode she did on this day breaking down all
of these different wire taps. Because I was not able
to find anything else online really about it. I have
been just kind of referencing different articles throughout to go
through this trial coverage, but this was one day of
(15:58):
trial coverage that was. So Gigi is bringing you all
the information and we are going to go through that now.
So the first conversation happens May fifth of twenty seventeen
at twelve fifty seven pm, and it's a conversation that
occurs in the car between all four of the Wagners, Billy, George, Jake,
(16:21):
and Angela, and they're talking to Bovine, who is George
the fourth and Tabitha's son, and he's a child at
this point, he's three years old, and he is basically
being told by his dad that during this road trip
on the way back to Alaska, they were stopped at
(16:41):
the border, and that the people at the border are
bad people. They're the ones that want to kill us.
They want to kill Uncle Jake, they want to kill
your papa, they want to kill me. They're bad people,
and basically trying to get this kid to believe that
anybody that isn't a Wagner family member is somebody that
can't be trusted. And he's only three years old. And
(17:03):
they also all go on to have like this wild
paranoia that Tabitha is at the border waiting for them,
waiting to flip the script on them, that was never true.
But they just have this insane paranoia that everybody is
out to get them because they literally killed eight people,
So I guess I would be paranoid too, but I
(17:25):
don't understand why they are acting like this. Then there
is a call on June thirteenth of twenty seventeen from
Billy to George, and George asks for Angela to google
something because he found something on his truck that he
wants her to google, and he tells her to google
(17:47):
the letter HX plus and he said that he found
something on the top of his truck and it says
h plus Remote Start, and he said that it looks
like an oblong thing with black wires coming out of it.
(18:08):
Billy responded and thought that maybe it was something with
a GPS, and then George said that he thought it's
something maybe for a stereo or something GPS related, and
then George said that he's going to wait on Jake
at the Utoparts store and that they were trying to
find a radiator, and they just kind of go back
(18:31):
and forth about that. Then there is text messages back
and forth between Jake and the new owner of the
home that the Wagner family used to live in that
is on Peterson Road, and the text was on June
fifteenth of twenty seventeen, at nine point thirty seven in
the morning, and the new owner said, Hey, I called
(18:52):
the sheriff about the Thompson guy, and the investigators are
here at the farm today digging the crap out of
the lot behind the barn, which someone would let us
know what the heck's going on. All they say is
that it will be done on Friday night at nine am.
Jake responds and asks what they're doing. The owner says,
I don't know what they're doing, and Jake says, I
(19:15):
don't know what they're looking for, but I know they've
harassed us so much that I won't talk to them
anymore if they don't have a warrant, and I would
go ahead and tell them to take a hike. Jake
says that they need a search warrant and tells the
new owner to ask a lawyer and says you could
basically sue them for doing this. Then at ten oh five,
(19:37):
Jake texts and says, I'm sorry that they're doing this
to you guys, but seriously, if you do not give
them permission and they don't have a warrant, they can't
do that. You can sue them. At ten sixteen, Jake
texts once again and said, did they give you a
warrant the first time they searched or did you give permission?
And somebody named Joe had told Jake that they were
(19:59):
tearing them place up with a trap ho and said,
if they are, sue them for destruction of property because
they won't stop until you do so. Basically, in my opinion,
at this point, Jake Wagner is losing his mind because
he knows that they're going to find some little shred
of evidence that is going to be able to pin
this back on the Wagners and his freedom will be
(20:23):
over for good. So I think he knew at this
point in time that they were really in trouble. The
owner of the home did say that they left the
warrants on the kitchen table, and there's really nothing that
they can do because they do have the warrants, so
they have to allow them to search the property. Next
(20:44):
is a call on June fifteenth of twenty seventeen, and
this is a call between George and Angela, and George
is losing his mind. He is panicking about the search
at the property, and Angela also is a little panicking too,
and they keep going over and over, and George said,
(21:05):
the new owner is texting Jake, and they're down there
again today digging up everything inside of the barn. Now
in all of these calls, Angela is starting to lose
her mind because I think she also realizes that the
gig is finally almost up and they are going to
find evidence on the property because that's where they disposed
of a lot of their stuff. That's why they left it,
(21:27):
that's why they went to Alaska. They wanted to get
away from all of it. So Angela is starting to
lose her mind. George is losing his mind, Jake is
losing his mind. Billy God knows what he's doing, what
he's thinking during all of this. So although they were
actually losing their minds, they were still in the process
(21:47):
of going to Alaska and finding a new property. And
in one of the calls that took place on June fifteenth,
at nine to twelve pm, they are talking about this property.
It's going to be four acres, they're not going to
have any neighbors, and Angela is so excited. She just
cannot wait. They are going to move into this new
(22:08):
house on Saturday. It is brand new, they've remodeled it,
and it has this big basement. There's a full basement
with a big wood stove fireplace downstairs. And again there's
four acres, there's no neighbors, and they talk about how
they're going to be able to put all of the
different cars on the property, and literally all of the
(22:31):
panic and fear that Angela had in the previous calls
about the BCI basically digging up her old property has
gone out the window. And she is just so excited
about this new home and this new beginning for her family.
And they decide for whatever reason, that they're going to
put the house in George's name, but all of their
(22:51):
names are going to be on it, but it's going
to be in George's name. And they're going to run
a credit check in about ten minutes, and George has
the best credit, so there's nothing wrong with his credit.
And there was also calls with Rita newcom and Angela
going back and forth about everything there. It is very involved.
There is a lot to it, but basically Angela Wagner
(23:12):
is losing her a mind, trying everything she can in
the world to cover her tracks and make it seem
like she's not a delusional human. And I don't think
she did a great job with that. In just in
my opinion, they talk about thirteen hundred screenshots of different
Facebook communications. There are three hundred plus screenshots of Hannah's
(23:34):
communications on Facebook Messenger from July twenty fifteen to April
twenty first of twenty sixteen, which is when they were murdered.
They show a screenshot of the message where Hannah says
they'll have to kill me first, and her saying I
won't sign the papers ever, it won't happen now. That
message was sent at eight thirty eight pm and the
(23:57):
screenshot of it was taken at nine to sixteen that
same night. Then there are searches that happened on April
third of twenty sixteen, which was forms for declaration of
guardian in the event of my death. Those ended up
being printed off the same day and the next day.
(24:18):
There is a sample form for guardianship in case of
my death in Ohio that was also searched for, and
they were able to find all of this through all
of Jake's old iPhone backups. So, like I had said,
Angela Wagner had access to Hannah Rodin's Facebook page. She
had her password from when Hannah was living with the
(24:39):
family and she was a creep, so she was obviously
going onto Hannah's account. She saw the message about they'll
have to kill me first, and that's when the plan
really started to take shape, and they started looking up
all of these different forms and all of that was
found as evidence on on the road and family cell phones.
(25:02):
They then go on to talk about some of the
other Google searches that transpired. On May third, they searched
for Pike County murders. Again on the seventh Pike County murders,
and on July twenty ninth of twenty sixteen, they searched
the name Jake Wagner. On August sixth of twenty sixteen,
(25:22):
they searched Victims of Violent Crimes Fund. There is a
photo of one of Jake's guns that was the cult
nineteen eleven twenty two, that was taken on January thirty
first of twenty fifteen, and they believe that this is
the gun that was used in the murders. And there's
also a picture of Jake's hand holding that gun. So
(25:42):
it's really incredible to see all the work that law
enforcement did to basically catch them in the act and
try to trace back all of the evidence that they
had and pin it on the Wagners. Because the Wagners, essentially,
they were in their safe space. They were in their home,
they were in their car, they were having these conversations
(26:04):
between one another, and they thought that they were safe,
but the wire taps proved for that to be not
the case. They were not safe, and the wire taps
really did come back to bite them in the butt
because they were talking about different things that were transpiring,
the searches of the property, the stuff with Rita, and
(26:25):
the forgery of the documents. It all just kind of
came together in a full circle moment to make us
realize that the Wagners were not innocent in any of this,
and they played a huge role in the Road and
family murders. The next day of trial, they very much
focused on the silencer that they thought that the Wagner
(26:47):
family had used during the massacres, and they found this
silencer had been burned and this again was consistent with
Jake Wagner's confession. That burned all of the evidence, which
is so dumb. But the silencer wouldn't melt under the
fire because it is made out of metal and other items.
(27:10):
I guess I'm not a gun person, so I have
no idea, but it wouldn't burn. So Jake said that
they just threw it inside of the barn, and that's
probably why they were flipping out when they were doing
all of these searches, because they knew that that silencer
was still there and had not been disposed of. They
also had a forensics accountant with BCI who basically went
(27:34):
over all of the different financial records of the Wagner
family and there was a ton of different occurrences where
Angela Wagner would use her son's credit and bank cards
and she would go out and buy these different items
to carry out the murders. They said that Angela bought
a cell phone jammer above detector which ended up being
(27:56):
used in the killings, and she bought all of this
stuff using George's credit card and the purchases were made.
The fraud department of the credit card company did call
George and he sure enough authorized and said that he
knew that his mother is buying these items, so that
(28:16):
proves that he was complicit in what was happening. She
was buying these items to commit the murders and he
knew it and was okay with it because he gave
his approval. There were also some credit card statements that
were shown that appeared that George's card was used to
buy a vehicle oil filter at a local autopart store,
(28:37):
and they said that they believed that this was likely
used as a second kind of homemade silencer. And I
don't know anything about silencers. I know what they do,
what they're supposed to do. But the Wagner family is
so dumb for all of this stuff. I don't understand
(28:57):
how they felt that they were going to get away
with all of this and not have all of this
evidence come back to bite them in the butt, because
it's all right there in black and white. Okay, So
we are now getting into the part of the trial
where Jake Wagner himself is going to come up and
take the stand as a witness for the state. So
(29:19):
Jake did this, gave his testimony in exchange for taking
a plea deal. Essentially, we're going to get into all
of that in a little while at the end of
this series, but he testified. It was not recorded audio
or video, but there is transcripts that live out on
the internet. I'm going to do my best to try
(29:41):
to sum it all up. But he testified for four days,
which is a long time. He essentially is the star
witness of this case. But you have to remember the
defendant is his brother. So it's all very wild and
convoluted that this all would transpire in the way it did,
and that he would end up being the state's biggest witness.
(30:04):
So we are just going to go through it. I
was able to find the transcript. We're going to go
through it. I might skip over some parts that I
don't really feel are relevant. But he approaches the stand.
He says his name is Edward Jacob Wagner. He says
he is twenty nine and he is currently incarcerated in Columbus,
and he says the jail is CCR or FCCR one,
(30:31):
and he says it's in Franklin County and he's been
in there for about four years. He was arrested November
thirteenth of twenty eighteen, and they asked, your mother, brother,
and father were all arrested on the same date and
he said yes, and they asked him, prior to being arrested,
can you tell us where you lived? And he gave
(30:51):
the address. He was back living in Ohio at this point,
he said he lived there with his mom, brother, his daughter,
and his nephew, and the home was previously owned by
his grandfather and that was his mother's father, so Angela's father.
They asked about another home that the Wagner family had
(31:11):
previously lived in, and then they get to the home
on Peterson Road and they ask about that. They asked
who all had lived at that location, and he said,
his brother, his brother's ex wife, Tabitha, my nephew, my daughter,
and sometimes my father meaning Billy Wagner. And they said,
when your dad wasn't at the house, where was he?
(31:35):
And Jake answered and said that he was at his
mom's house. His mom is Rodrika Wagner. We've talked about her,
and she lived on the Flying w Farms that she
owned in Pikedon, Ohio. Now, they asked him whose name
that house was in, and it was in George's name,
and Jake goes on to say that it was put
(31:55):
in to George's name for insurance purposes, and he said
the reason for that was because he and George's credit
and insurance history was clean, so it would have been
cheaper for them to get insured with the house versus
their parents. I guess their parents had bad credit. They
asked about the fire that had occurred at the property,
(32:18):
and Jake gov on to talk about that, and then
they go and they ask what the family likes to
do together, and he said, you mean hobbies. We hunted,
we fished, We rode four wheelers, played in the mud,
went to fairs, festivals, immunsement parks. Not often. We tinkered
on engines, and I think that's about it. They asked
(32:38):
if he went to school, and Jake said public school
for a very short period of time. He only went
for about a month, and then he and his brother
were homeschooled. And they asked if he received any other
type of schooling after homeschooling was finished, and he said yes,
and that he and his brother both attended a technical
education college in Lucaville for diesel engineering. They asked if
(33:03):
both brothers went there at the same time, and Jake
said they did, and they went for about a year,
and then they asked, are you close with your brother?
And do you love your brother? Do you believe he
loves you? And Jake said yes to both. And they
asked if it was difficult for Jake to be there today,
and Jake says very And they asked, is it true
that you would love nothing more than for him to
(33:26):
be able to go home? Jake says yes, and he
says he feels the same way about his mother and father.
And then they ask what type of jobs they had,
and Jake said, mechanic, welding, transportation as in truck driving,
and he said he pretty much did all of those
jobs with his brother. And then they went on to
(33:47):
talk more about hunting, and they said, tell us when
you hunted, who would you be hunting with? Would it
just be you and George? You and George and your dad?
Kind of tell me a little bit about that, and
then he said a variety my brother and I mostly
occasionally my dad, uncle Chris, some member of the Rodens,
my friend James Roden and his family from Virginia, some
(34:11):
of my uncle Chris's friends, and that's about all I
can remember. He said. Hannah came a couple of times,
uncle Chris is fiance Randa came and he thinks that
that's all. And I do want to say I misspoke.
I mentioned James Roden. It's James Roden are with a T,
not a D. So I just wanted to clarify that.
(34:33):
And they also clarified that in the questioning. And they
asked how often would you hunt? How many times per
year and he said at least two weeks out of
the year. And they talk about the different types of hunting,
deer hunting. They just go into all of the hunting information,
different types of hunting, different things that they would use
(34:53):
during hunting. They go on and on and on about that.
They then go on to ask Jake about the relationship
with his mom, and he said they had a close relationship,
but he had a closer relationship with his brother and
a close ish relationship with his father. And they say,
can you tell me a little bit about the family
meetings that you guys would have and some of the
(35:15):
things that you would discuss, And he says, I can't
think of a proper word, but an example would be
if we needed to build a fence, where it would go,
how it would be situated, they would all get together
and talk about that and try to figure out where
they were going to do it, how they were going
to execute the plan to build defense or make amendments
(35:36):
to the property, whatever the case may be. Now, he said,
the family meetings would typically be himself, his mom, his father,
and his brother, and they would just kind of go
back and forth and talk about things. Sometimes they would
vote on things. It was just kind of the routine
that they had. They would have these family meetings in
the kitchen and they would discuss everything that needed to
(35:58):
be discussed, and like I said, they would take a
vote on things if they needed to take a vote,
and kind of go from there. Obviously, the state is
very much trying to establish here that the Wagner family
made decisions about everything as a family. They would have
family meetings about the placement of offence, So they're very
much trying to paint the picture that the Wagner family
(36:18):
did everything together and they talked about everything beforehand. So obviously,
George is guilty of this homicide and he's the one
who's on trial right now, and Jake is testifying against
his brother, which again mind blown. Jake then goes on
to recall when he first met Hannah, and Hannah was
(36:40):
only thirteen and he was seventeen, and he said, the
first time he met her, she had this bunny from
four h that she was holding, and Jake eventually would
pet the bunny and then they ended up talking, and
that's kind of how their relationships started. And I just
have to say, at a seventeen year old being interested
(37:02):
in a thirteen year old actually makes my skin crawl.
It is so disgusting to me. I can't even imagine.
He said, when he and Hannah started dating, he had
talked with both Dana and Chris and got their permission
to date Hannah. And he says that Billy had a
good relationship with Chris, so they were good friends. But
(37:24):
anytime that Hannah and Jake would be alone, there would
be another Rodin family member that would accompany them, either
Chris Junior would go or Frankie Roden would go, So
it was never just like Hannah and Jake were necessarily alone,
at least in the beginning stages of all of that.
(37:47):
So Hannah got pregnant, obviously, and she was sixteen at
the time, and the baby, Sophia, ended up being born
in twenty thirteen, and they asked, prior to the baby
being born, did Hannah live with you and your family?
And he said yes for the majority, and then approximately
(38:07):
in February twenty and fifteen, they ended up kind of
separating a little bit, and she ended up leaving and
not living with the Road and family anymore. And they said, Jake,
I would like for you to talk about a time
where Hannah stated that you choked her. Can you tell
us if you recall such an incident and what you
recall about that incident? And he said, I do recall
(38:29):
the incident, but I never choked her. They said, can
you describe what you did? And he said, I believe
the argument was over yard work. I believe, trivial stuff.
And she had I'm not exactly sure of the right
word to be blunt, I guess you could say, and frank,
she was lazy in her responsibilities as she voluntarily chose
(38:49):
to do, and I was upset because she was making
me do not only my responsibilities but also hers. I
honestly didn't have to, but if something doesn't get done,
I figured I needed to do it and get it done.
She in my eyes at the moment, she was acting
much like my brother's ex wife, which at the time
I had not a high value of her attitude or
(39:10):
her actions, and she I don't know specifically why she
was in her attitude that day, she had an attitude.
I know she was on Facebook, and that was my argument. Basically,
she wanted to be on Facebook while everybody else was
doing her responsibility, which was a very small responsibility. Basically
it was to mow the grass once every other week,
(39:32):
and she stomped off outside. I followed her, and she
was I wouldn't say yelling, basically saying that I was
trying to have her do the work, which she didn't
want to. I argued with her that she volunteered to
do this work. I'm not trying to make her do it.
I was just trying to tell her, you need to
do your job of what you said you're going to do,
because if I'm going to make this farm work, I
(39:54):
need you to do your part. Because my argument was that,
I really guess my point was my idea for her
to do her part so I could save enough to
get a dairy calf business going, and she was going
to be responsible for tending to baby calves, which is
a lot of responsibility, time and dedication. I was telling
her if she couldn't do a single job of mowing
(40:15):
the grass, how was she going to be able to
do that to make actual money. And she had basically
started to stomp off on the patio outside of the
house and was going to say something, and she was
just gonna leave, and I was frustrated, so I put
my right hand on her. She was facing me. I
put my right hand on her shoulder, just under her collarbone,
and used my forearm pressed against under her collarbone, not
(40:39):
on her throat, and I pressed her against the board
on the patio and held her there until she would stop,
basically screaming, not saying a word, and she was very mad,
so I held her there until she calmed down. So
he is admitting here that Hannah, I guess, wasn't holding
up her end of the bargain and mowing the grass,
(41:00):
even though she was taking care of his child and
living in the hell hole that was the Wagner family home,
being spied on, being stalked, god knows what else. And
she wanted to scroll on Facebook and just have a
little bit of quiet time. And Jake was on her
for not mowing the grass, and he thought, well, if
(41:21):
you can't mow the grass, how are you going to
take care of all the cattle that I want to
buy for this farm and we're going to make money
off of And then he put his hands on her
and tried to stop her from leaving and being upset,
and he says, yeah, I did put my hands on her,
but I didn't choke her, and then said that this
(41:42):
whole thing lasted probably less than five minutes. And they
ended up breaking up after that, and then Hannah started
seeing somebody named Charlie Gilly who was the brother of
Hannah Hazel Gilly who was married to Frankie Rodin. And
then eventually she broke up with Charlie. And then at
the time time of her death, she was dating a
(42:02):
man named Corey Holdron, and Jake said that he was
aware of that. He met Corey maybe once, maybe twice.
And this is where we start to get into the
child abuse claims, because in Jake's mind, his daughter Sophia
was being sexually molested in some way, shape or form
at the Rodan family home by somebody that the Rodan
(42:24):
family knew. So these were his concerns. He was concerned
that Hannah was gonna let Sophia be molested. And they said,
what did you base those concerns on? And he said,
to my knowledge at the time, what I've heard for
several people that her choice of men was some kind
(42:45):
of drug user. And he said, there was a time
when I had been informed from Hannah's cousin, Patricia Manley,
I think her last name is. It was Patricia. I'm
sure everybody knows who that is. She had told me,
actually texted me and told me that Hannaana and Charlie
Hannah had went to put Sophia to sleep in her room,
and then her and Charlie were both in the room
(43:06):
with the door locked and were in there for hours
and not answering the door whenever she knocked. She did
not elaborate on what that meant, but I assumed she
may have put Sophia to sleep and possibly have been
doing inappropriate things with my child in the room with them,
I guess you could call it. Besides that, my daughter
had told me that Corey Holdron had locked her in
the bedroom and left her there for hours while she
(43:27):
screamed for her mother and no one would come to
rescue her. She told me that she had screamed for
me and I didn't come to rescue her. Whenever I
was home, Sofia would cling to me, and every time
that it was time for her to go back to
Hannah's house, she would scratch and claw. However, she would
hold on to my leg and scream, Daddy, please don't
make me go, with eyes that were filled with tears.
(43:49):
I did not know what was going on, but I
asked Dana Rhodin. She said she was just being a brat.
I asked Hannah about it. She said, nothing out of
the ordinary was going on, going wrong, And in fronted Hannah,
I said, Hannah, well, I guess I should probably say
this first. There's a past history in my family and
Hannah and Tabitha's of either rape or child molestation, and
(44:10):
because of those I had a deep fear for my
own daughter when she was born, and I solemnly swore
to her that while she was in my arms, I
would never let anything happen to her as it happened
to Tabitha, as it happened to Hannah, and as it
happened to my mother and to a couple cousins of mine.
I confronted Hannah about all of those things, and she
was abrupt with me. She said, I was overreacting. She
(44:32):
said that Sophia was just being a brat. It's the
same opinion that Dana had told me. And I told
her abruptly, Hannah, what if your carelessness leads to my
daughter being molested as you were? And she said, I
guess we'll just have to deal with it. And those
were my concerns, and I was very, very fearful that
it was going to happen or already had happened. They
(44:53):
asked if anyone else in the family have those concerned
and he said, to some extent, yes, And they asked
who and his family had those concerns, and he said,
my father, my mother, and my brother. They then asked
him if he had obtained an attorney at some point
to try and get fifty to fifty custody, and he said,
I believe it's called shared parenting with equal rights, but yes,
(45:16):
And they said, can you tell us if Hannah seem
interested in signing any of the paperwork that you and
your attorney had tried to get her to sign, and
he said, for a good period she did seem very interested.
Towards the end of twenty fifteen, it seemed more along
the lines that she was just stalling for some reason.
I don't know why. She told me she was getting
a lawyer to double check the paperwork, but the paperwork
(45:38):
was very, very short, and said that it was basically
Chris Roaden Senior's legal lawyer that he had used from Columbus,
and Jake doesn't believe that there ever was such a lawyer.
They then asked if during this time, if someone from
the family was monitoring Facebook private messages of Tabitha and
her mom, and Jake says yes, and he said that
(46:01):
the one who was monitoring that was his mom, Angela.
And they asked who Tabitha is and Jake says that
it's his brother's ex wife, and they said okay. And
while your mother was monitoring these conversations, did she also
observe a conversation that occurred between Tabitha's mom and Hannah,
And Jake goes on to say yes, and asked if
(46:25):
they recalled. He happened to recall what the general nature
of the conversation was, and that was objected to and
it was sustained. They asked if they knew why Angela
was watching these messages, watching Tabitha's personal messages, and Jake
says she was monitoring Tabitha's personal messages to see if
(46:45):
she was planning to try to see custody again of
her son, my nephew, and to see if she was
still involved in some sort of drug use or potential
harmful behavior for my nephew. They then talked about the
conversation between Hannah and Tabitha's mom, and they asked Jake
when he saw that message between Tabitha's mom and Hannah,
(47:07):
he had to make a decision about his concerns for Sophia,
and he said, to be Frank, I guess to the
point I had decided that I felt I had no
other choice other than to kill Hannah. And they said,
can you tell us how that decision progressed? When did
you first think of it? Were you the first one
who thought of it? Tell us about that, and he said,
I was not the first. My father first mentioned it
(47:29):
to me. He said something along the lines that if
something is not done, Sophia will be I forget the
exact word he used, but in a general aspect, I'm
going to say harm and I at first. I can't
remember exact words I use, but my first response was
that I had blowed up over a matter and told him,
telling him that that was my daughter's mother. I still
loved her and I was not going to let that happen.
(47:51):
And I stopped out of the door, and then they
ended up having another conversation and Angela was there, and
basically he said it again, it's not quote. It may
have been worded differently somehow. He said something along the
lines that the only option would be that they would
have to kill Hannah. He was dismissive of it, of course,
but then after his last conversation and argument with Hannah,
(48:13):
he went to his dad and said, I told him,
we'll have to do it. He said, the time span
between when Billy Wagner had first brought it up to
him and when he said we're going to have to
do it was probably about two months of time. So
we are getting into the meat and potatoes of Jake
Wagner's testimony. We are going to go ahead and call
this good for part four, and we are going to
(48:34):
pick up next week with Part five. We're going to
continue in to all of the testimony. It is long
it is involved. There is a lot of information here.
I'm trying my best not to overwhelm myself, and I
don't want to overwhelm you guys with all of this information,
because it is a heck of a lot. So we
are going to go ahead and call that good for
this episode. I will see you next week for part
(48:55):
five of the Road and Family Murders Pike County Massacre.
I hope you guys have a great week and I
will see you then. Bye.
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