Summer Series 2025: Pike County Massacre: Part 13

In part 13 of summer series 2025 we will finally finish the testimony of George Wagner IV

Sources for episode: 

https://www.youtube.com/live/Z9CediJKQHQ?si=H5vigl_3I7Ia9reQ

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Summer Series twenty twenty five, The Roden Family Murders,
also known as the Pike County Massacer. We're going to
be discussing the murders of Dana Roden, Christopher Roden Senior,
Kenneth Roden, Gary Roden, Frankie Rodin, Hannah Hazel Gilly, Hannah Rodin,
and Christopher Roden Junior. Let's go ahead and dive right

(00:22):
into Summer Series twenty twenty five. All right, guys, we
are officially on part thirteen of the Roden Family Murders,
the Pike County Massacre. We are still in the process
of going through the testimony of George Wagner, the fourth
and we are going to continue on with that. I
hope to get all of his testimony done in this episode,

(00:43):
and then we're getting into closings and verdict and all
of the aftermaths. So I'm hoping to have this series
wrapped up in another one to two episodes, Lord Willing,
because my eyes are starting to cross. So George now
is going in to the morning after the murders. He
and Jake had been off tearing down a storage building

(01:05):
that Angela's dad had bought, so they were doing that,
and Angela had called them and told them to come home,
and they saw on the news about the Rodent family
losing their lives.

Speaker 2 (01:16):
He said.

Speaker 1 (01:17):
The day before the murders was a normal day. George
said he fed the animals. Billy had come over and
had brought Bulvine some donuts, and Bulvine had wanted Billy
to stay there, so Billy ended up staying and George
said he never left the house that night, but he
didn't realize that Jake and Billy had left.

Speaker 2 (01:36):
He said he went to.

Speaker 1 (01:37):
Sleep around ten o'clock and he wasn't too sure, but
he didn't think that Bulvine slept with him that night.
He doesn't remember waking up at all during the night.
He said he got up the next morning and Jake
was in the living room and George.

Speaker 2 (01:53):
Went to get his coffee like he does.

Speaker 1 (01:55):
Every morning, and Jaca told him that they didn't have
time for him to get caught and that they needed
to go ahead and get going so they could get back.
And I'm going to tell you, if Jake Wagner had
told me I couldn't get my coffee, I would have
lost my ever loving mind on him. Do not come
between a person who needs caffeine to function and their coffee.

(02:16):
So they go ahead and leave and they're headed to
the storage building to tear their storage building down, and
as they're going there, George realizes that they forgot the chainsaw.
So they did basically what they could without the chainsaw,
and then they left and had every intention on coming
back to finish the job once they got the chainsaw.

(02:37):
When they ended up getting back home, the news said
that there were some people who had been killed up
on Union Hill Road, and Billy was freaking out because
he could not get in touch with Chris Road and
Senior Angela was in the mudroom and Jake was outside
on his phone. George attempted to get Billy to tell
him what was going on, but Billy was just losing

(02:59):
his Jake came in and said that he had heard
from Andrew Carson that Hannah May, Frankie, and all of
the other Rodent family members had been murdered. They asked
him what his reaction was and he said he really
can't put it into words, but he did say it
was more heartbreaking trauma than he had ever had to

(03:19):
go through in his life. And he ended up going
up on his four wheeler and went up the hill
behind his farm in the woods to kind of calm
down and have a little bit of a safe space.

Speaker 2 (03:32):
And he said he went by himself.

Speaker 1 (03:34):
He stayed there for a couple of hours, and he
was essentially just trying to calm himself down from the
pure horror of this news.

Speaker 2 (03:42):
That was given to him.

Speaker 1 (03:45):
He then said that Tabitha called him, and he said,
at this point in time, Jake was just sitting in
the living room and Billy was trying to talk to Jake,
and Jake just wasn't responding. Angela was in the kitchen
with the kids, and he said at one point Jake
tried to go to Union Hill, but they wouldn't let
him through, of course, because it was an active crime scene.

(04:07):
Billy would spend the next few days at Peterson Road,
which was unusual for him because he usually stayed at
the Flying w because him and Angela would fight constantly.
He said none of them ever talked about the murders,
and he never heard them talk about it. He said
that he personally had no clue that they were involved

(04:27):
in it. He admits that he and Jake and Billy
went to Gary's viewing because Gary's was the first one
that was held. George said he drove them to the
viewing in his truck, and he said everybody unanimously decided
that they did want to go, but they didn't want
to go to the funeral, but they wanted to go
to the viewing. They went to the viewing and they

(04:49):
never talked about the murders there or on their way back.
George said that Billy acted like Billy, and Jake acted
like Jake.

Speaker 2 (04:57):
He said that Jake isn't.

Speaker 1 (04:59):
Really one to show an emotion, and this time of
his life was no different. So he then testifies that
they went to the viewing for the road and family,
and then after that they did end up going to
the funeral for the main four of the Road and family.
After the service, they went to the cemetery, and George
said he rode with Tabitha to the cemetery and then

(05:20):
Billy and.

Speaker 2 (05:20):
Jake wrote together.

Speaker 1 (05:21):
George said, after the cemetery service was complete and over,
George drove Billy and Jake back home in his truck,
and he said that during all of this he had
no idea that Billy and Jake were the ones who
committed these crimes against the road and family. But he
said once the investigation kind of started, nobody ever came

(05:42):
to talk with him about the murders. He knew that
they had talked to Billy a couple of times, but
Billy never had shared with him what they had discussed.

Speaker 2 (05:51):
He said that they had also.

Speaker 1 (05:52):
Spoken with Jake, but again he didn't know what they
were speaking with him about. And George had been there
all of this time that the BCI agents had come
to speak with Billy and Jake, but they never once
came over and questioned him. Now, there was one point
in time where George had texted Billy something about we've
got company, don't come over, meaning BCI was there and

(06:15):
they were questioning different people in the Wagner family. And
if you remember, Billy had very much conditioned his kids
not to trust or like cops. So at this point
in time, Billy had been filling their heads with basically
telling them that BCI was incompetent, they were looking at

(06:37):
the wrong people. So that is why George said he
texted Billy, don't come over. He then kind of leans
into how Billy was just a huge conspiracy theorist and
that the whole bci of it all. They were just
after the Wagner family, just for the heck of it.
He also talked about how Billy was a prepper, thinking

(06:58):
that the end of the world was coming, and it
was just one of those constant things that he was
prepping for, digging holes with a back hoe and burying
a truck with provisions in it. He was just one
of those people that constantly thought the world was going
to end, which is very Lori Valo of him. He
was also very paranoid and thought that people were listening

(07:20):
to him through the TV. He kept tape over the
camera on his cell phone, and he just thought that
people were always listening to him in some way, shape
or form through his phone. Now, I know our cell
phones listened to us, because you'll be talking about something
super random and then you'll get an ad for it
or it'll pop up on Facebook.

Speaker 2 (07:41):
I know that that's a thing.

Speaker 1 (07:42):
But Billy definitely was taking it to the extreme with
his beliefs in a lot of ways. So this was
not just your ordinary normal fear that you're being listened to,
like your iPhone's listening to you. In his mind, people
were listening, and people were watching, and then he said
that Angelo was also very paranoid as well. She would

(08:06):
always think that people were going to kidnap him or
Jake when they were younger. George talked about how after
the murders there was a lot of rumors that were
going around about them possibly being involved, and they ultimately
wanted to go to Alaska to get away from all
of those rumors because there was constant rumors on Facebook,

(08:27):
and Jake and Angelo were always kind of on there
looking at all of the rumors and it was just
too much, and George thought that maybe the speculation was
on them because of the way that Jake had treated
the Manley family in the past. And just for a
little memory, jog the Manly family is Dana Rodin's family.

Speaker 2 (08:51):
Her sister is Bobby.

Speaker 1 (08:52):
Joe Manley, who made the first initial nine one one
call and is the one who found Chris initially. Chris
Senior then asked a little bit more about Alaska and
why they decided to move there, and he said a
lot of it was to get away from all of
the rumors that were surrounding them, but they also had
talked about it for years and had fallen in love
with Alaska when they had visited when George was a teenager.

(09:16):
So they went ahead and decided to sell the farm,
and he said they basically were able to pay themselves
out of debt and ended up going on a two
week vacation to Alaska to see if that's where they
really wanted to be, and they of course loved it.
They drove there and it took about four days to

(09:37):
get to Alaska, and they stayed in a bunch of
different hotels on the way up there. He said, they
went fishing, they talked to different people about jobs, and
they just loved Alaska. And then they decided to of
course come back, and that's when they got stopped in
Montana and they were interrogated at the crossing and essentially

(09:59):
they were separated, brought into separate rooms. And he said
he knew that the search warrants were going on back
in Ohio, and Jake and Angela had actually made contact
with BCI and had told them that they would both come.

Speaker 2 (10:13):
To their office when they got back to Ohio.

Speaker 1 (10:16):
And George said he had also found out about the
searches and he was upset because in his mind, they
were destroying all of Bulvine's stuff, and of course he
said they were very much finger pointing. There was a
lot of chatter on Facebook and people were pointing out
the Wagoners and blaming the Wagoners for everything, and he
basically just thought BCI was trying to frame Angela and Jake,

(10:39):
and he was upset with BCI. He was interrogated and
they went on and on for hours and hours and hours,
and he said, initially BCI didn't accuse him of anything,
and they were just talking about his hunting and fishing
that he did to try to get him to relax
and loosen up, and they were just kind of of

(11:00):
making small talk. And then with Angela they eventually got
her talking a little bit and then they hit her
with that Walmart receipt. And then with George it kind
of escalated the same way. They were talking to him
about different shell casings. They talked about Walmart receipts, They
talked about shoes, and then everything was brought up about

(11:21):
Angela buying a pair of shoes that they thought might
have been used the murders. And they also talked about
the shell casings that were found at the crime scene
that matched one of Billy Wagner's guns, and George said
that he didn't believe them at this point when they
were telling him this, and he said that they were
basically accusing Jake and Angela of being responsible, and he

(11:44):
had no idea why they would go as far as
to accuse his family of this. George said his understanding
at the end of the interview was that they basically
had to decide if George was either going to be
a suspect or a witness, and that they had kind
of alluded to wanting him him to spy on Jake,
and then at the end of the interview, George said
he did agree to spy on Jake, and then they

(12:06):
ended up bringing Bulvine to him, and then they all
ended up going to the car, and Angela and Billy
Wagner were outside waiting.

Speaker 2 (12:13):
Jake was still inside being questioned.

Speaker 1 (12:15):
So they basically got them all in Montana, split them up,
questioned them all separately, and they were definitely trying to
see if they were willing to turn on one another,
and that's kind of where the pieces start to crumble,
the puzzle starts to fall apart.

Speaker 2 (12:30):
George said that.

Speaker 1 (12:31):
After this, Bulvine was acting just not himself. He was
very disoriented, he was tired, and he just wasn't acting
the same way. So after Jake ended up coming out,
they ended up taking Bulvine to the er, and according
to what George said, Sophia said that the BCI had
given Bulvine medicine, so of course they wanted to take

(12:53):
him to the hospital to make sure that he was okay.
George goes on to say that Bulvine had some really
bad anxiety attacks at times, and he wanted to make
sure the BCI didn't give Bulvine anything to try and
calm him down. And if you want to know why
Bulvine has anxiety attacks, look no further than the hostile,
crazy ass environment that he has been raised in.

Speaker 2 (13:16):
Holy Molly, no wonder, the poor kid has anxiety attacks.

Speaker 1 (13:20):
There ended up being nothing in bulvine systems, so he
was free and clear, and then they end up leaving
the hotel that they were staying at. They dropped Billy
off in Ohio at the Flying w George said at
this point he asked Jake if he had anything to
do with the murders and or knew who did, and
Jake denied both, and George said he didn't have any

(13:41):
reason not to believe Jake. He said, though he never
personally asked Billy or Angela if they were involved. So
they essentially are now back in Ohio and they're kind
of wrapping up some last minute things before they moved
to Alaska, and then they end up moving.

Speaker 2 (13:57):
To Alaska officially.

Speaker 1 (13:58):
So George said that the living arrangement for the first
couple of days when they were there was that Billy
and Angela had a hotel and that George slept in
his truck, and he said, his truck is the only
thing that he's ever had that's been specifically his, and
he loves his truck. It's like his castle. He keeps
everything there, and it was like his home away from home. Essentially.

(14:21):
Once they get to Alaska and they get settled in,
they go and find a place to work, which was
the garage that they ended up working at. George then
goes on to talk about his different job responsibilities, Jake's
job responsibilities, how they kind of both did different things there,
and he kind of goes into all of that not
really super super important, so I'm not going to go

(14:43):
into that too much, but that is what he talks
about next in his testimony. George ends up working at
this garage for about three months and then he's laid
off at the beginning of October, which in Alaska is
the beginning of winter.

Speaker 2 (14:57):
And then three weeks later, Jake got laid off.

Speaker 1 (15:00):
So there isn't a ton of work in Alaska because
everyone is getting laid off kind of at the same time.
So he said, at this point he spent a lot
of time with Bulvine and Angela and yeah, the perfect
storm of crazy for sure, and then with everything else,
George said, he started to get homesick. He couldn't find
another job. He really missed Chris Newcom and he just

(15:24):
kind of wanted to be back home. So he started
looking for jobs kind of near the state of Ohio,
but not in the state, kind of in Kansas City,
so that way he could kind of go back and
forth and be closer to home. Angela and Jake were
kind of holdout though, because they did not want to
leave Alaska, and he said it took a month and
a half eventually to convince Angela to go, and once

(15:47):
Angela decided to go, Jake of course went right with her.
Even though Jake had said that he would never.

Speaker 2 (15:52):
Go back to Ohio. Here we are pretty much full circle.

Speaker 1 (15:56):
He then starts talking about Beth Ann and how Jake
met Beth in in Alaska. They were kind of talking
on Facebook. They had met a church. George said that
he saw Beth at the church the first time he went.
Jake was always at the church, and Angela went most
of the time, and Billy maybe went once. George said

(16:17):
maybe the time he was there, he went about five times.
And then one day Jake brought Beth to dinner and
basically just said, I'm going to bring Beth to dinner.

Speaker 2 (16:27):
There was like a.

Speaker 1 (16:28):
Big argument that happened, and I guess there was an
argument because they had cooked Mexican food, and George said,
when he makes Mexican food, he likes to have a
beer with his Mexican food, which there's something wrong with that.
And Jake didn't want George or Billy to have a
beer with their dinner because he didn't want Beth to
think that he came from a bad home that wasn't Christian.

(16:51):
So let me just cover up the fact that I
murdered eight people, because that's real Christian. These people are wacky.
I just cannot get over it, Like what is wrong
with them?

Speaker 2 (17:06):
What the heck?

Speaker 1 (17:06):
Like, you've already killed eight people and you're worried about
your dad and brother having a beer? Like you got
bigger fish to fry. Bro Anyways, so George was upset
about this. He wanted to be who he was, He
wanted to drink a beer, and they ended up arguing
for and half an hour about it, and they ended
up having a beer. Whatever, It's fine, bigger fish to fry,

(17:27):
Like I said, Angela of course sided with Jake because
that is just kind of the trend here. And Beth
ended up staying for a couple of hours and she
just spent some time. George said his first impression was
that she was just normal. She really didn't talk very much,
but all in all, nothing too crazy happened besides the

(17:50):
hour argument about the beer. And then Jake kept seeing
Beth Ann but then she ended up breaking up with
Jake because Beth saw that he was being accused of
murdering eight people, and she ended up breaking up with him.
And George said that the crimes were publicized in Alaska

(18:11):
on a local news station and they were basically said
to be the people of interest in the Wagner family murders,
so Beth and didn't want to have anything to do
with that.

Speaker 2 (18:22):
Props to her.

Speaker 1 (18:23):
He said, when he first went to Alaska, he went
to buy a glock and they were able to sell
it to him, and then he ended up going back
and they refused to sell him anything, probably because he
was on some type of watch list because they thought
that he could be involved in the murder of eight people,
so they didn't.

Speaker 2 (18:41):
Want to sell him anything.

Speaker 1 (18:43):
So then they talk about Beth coming back into the picture,
and they essentially get back together, and I'm sure Jake
and Angela probably persuaded her that these crazy rumors are
not true and you can trust us, and they end
up getting back together.

Speaker 2 (18:59):
They dating, and then they get engaged.

Speaker 1 (19:02):
And at this point in time, George decided that he
was officially going to move back to do this trucking job,
but Jake did not want to leave without Beth Anne,
and Beth did not want to leave Alaska unless she
was married. So at this point in time, George says
he really didn't trust Beth. He didn't approve of her

(19:24):
and Jake being together. He didn't really elaborate on that,
but that's what he said, and then, of course, Jake
and Beth Anne got married, and George did go to
the wedding, and he said that the only thing he
did to help with the wedding is he went in
the middle of the night to get them champagne flutes
for their wedding, and that is pretty much the bulk
of what he did. So they ended up getting married,

(19:47):
of course, and then the day after the wedding is
when they all loaded everything up and they were leaving
Alaska officially, and there was issues at the time with
Beth's passport and there was kind of like back and
forth with that, but essentially they were able to get
out of Alaska, and Jake and George drove separately, and

(20:07):
then they were at one point going to stop in Missouri,
and then they were eventually going to drop Billy off
at the Flying w back in Ohio, and there was
a lot of back and forth because Jake did not
want to go to Ohio. He said the closest that
he was going to get to Ohio was Missouri. And
there was a whole mess about Jake and Angela not

(20:29):
wanting to come back, but Sofia and Bulvine really did
want to come back, and of course, they spent hours
arguing over all of this, and Angela ended up throwing
a fit and was telling George that he had nobody
to watch Bullvyte, and he said that he would figure
it out, he would get somebody to watch Bullvyte if
he needed. And then of course she ends up agreeing

(20:52):
to come back, and then so does Jake. They all agree,
and he said it was about a three to four
hour discussion to get them to agree to move back
to Ohio. So they very much did not want to
go back, but for one reason or another, George was
able to convince them to go back. And I think
the reason that they didn't want to go back was
because they knew that their time was running out and

(21:14):
that the BCI was onto them. They kind of go
off on some other tangents, things that we really don't
have to go into here, and then they talk about
them being watched by law enforcement, and George said that
he knew as soon as BCI was looking at them
that because of how he was raised, you know, once

(21:34):
law enforcement points the finger at you, they're going to
be listening. So he assumed that the phone was bugged,
the truck was bugged. He pretty much knew everything, even
though he was screaming on those phone calls quite often.
So it's interesting thinking that they did know that they
were being listened to, but they still kind of said

(21:54):
it anyway, you know. And then they talk a little
bit about the murder Truck and how the murder Truck
kind of came to be, and there was a particular
incident where Billy wanted George to lend him money so
he could buy this truck. This was before it was
known as the murder truck, and Angela didn't want George
to give him the money, but he ended up giving

(22:16):
him the money, and then the truck ended up showing up.
And it's very convoluted and confusing, but essentially Chris Senior
had been with Billy and drove him to the house
and then they ended up leaving in their respected trucks.
I don't even know. I'm very confused. This whole thing
is confusing. But George said he didn't ever drive this truck.

(22:39):
He said he saw it again in the fall of
twenty sixteen, and he said his uncle had driven it
to the Flying w and George was there fishing with
bulvine and he said that his Uncle Bobby showed up
in the truck, and then he saw it once again
at Uncle Bobby's house once they moved back to Alaska,
and then he talked about the cousin that ended up

(22:59):
with the true and all of that. They talk about
George's arrest November of twenty eighteen, and they asked him
do you know when the guilty plea came in? And
George said he knew it was early last year. Now,
this is obviously a while ago now, since his trial
was last year. So George said he actually learned about

(23:20):
the guilty plea from Jake from one of the sergeants
at the jail, and he said that he didn't really
know what was going on, and he said that he
believed that Jake had maybe gone crazy in jail, because
Jake isn't a very social person. He doesn't get along
with people, and maybe he just decided to start talking

(23:40):
because he broke And George said he didn't even think
that Jake did it, even though Jake did plead guilty
to it, and at some point he did listen to
Jake's proffer that he gave, and he didn't understand how
Jake could do this when he swore up and down
that he wasn't involved, and then a few months later
he learned that his mom also pled guilty, and he

(24:04):
said he felt very heartbroken and betrayed. He said he
still has a hard time comprehending everything with the murders
and dealing with it, and hard to understand that Jake
would actually have done this. And then they bring up
Jake's testimony basically implicating George in all of this, and
he said it's not true. He never helped them before, during,

(24:25):
or after the murders. Then they talked about Angela's testimony
and how he felt about Angela's testimony and her role
and everything, and he said it was very emotionally hard,
and he said even worse because Angela wouldn't even look
at him, And then he went on to say that
he never told Angela about Bloody footprints or knew that
she was involved in any way, shape or form with anything.

(24:47):
They then get into the Boondock Saints of it all,
and I'm not going over Boondock Saints anymore.

Speaker 2 (24:53):
I've had enough.

Speaker 1 (24:54):
They then get to the sexual abuse allegations, and George
said that he never thought that so was being abused
in any way, shape or form by the Rodents, and
he didn't even think about anything until Sophia accused Beth
of it. And he said he wasn't aware that Jake
and Hannah May had any issues regarding custody. And he

(25:15):
said that his understanding of their agreement was that they
would trade off a week at a time, and he
said that sometime on Hannah may Rodins weeks, she would
drop off Sophia with Jake and occasionally said she would
need another day or two. He said none of the
Rodents would have ever done anything to a child, and
he was pretty serious when he said it, So I

(25:37):
do think that in his mind, the Rodents did not
do anything to Sophia. Whatever this whole plan was that
was concocted, in his mind, it never happened. And he
said at this point he's still trying to figure out
why his family did what they did, and he's been
trying to figure it out ever since Jake and Angela confessed.

Speaker 2 (25:59):
Then there's just story he.

Speaker 1 (26:00):
Tells about how Tabitha was living at the house and
he started to have trust issues because Billy was walking
around Nagan in front of her and I cannot and
mentally emotionally handle an image like that right now in
my head, but it was in the testimony, and I'm
sharing it.

Speaker 2 (26:19):
If I have to hear it, so do you.

Speaker 1 (26:21):
And a lot of the rest of the day's testimony
is just about guns and suppressors and so on and
so forth.

Speaker 2 (26:27):
There's a lot.

Speaker 1 (26:28):
There's a lot to it, but I'm only including things
that I think are super super pertinent to like where
we're going to get eventually to the verdict, which is
coming soon. I promised the verdict is coming soon. But
we are now officially on day forty two, and we
are going to get into the rest of George Wagner's testimony,
and then we're going to get into closings, and then

(26:48):
we're getting into verdict, and then we're going to be done,
and it will be a joyous day because I don't
have to think about these people anymore until Billy Wagner's.

Speaker 2 (26:56):
Trial starts, that is.

Speaker 1 (26:57):
So let's go ahead and get into day forty two,
the continued testimony of George Wagner.

Speaker 2 (27:04):
The fourth buckle up.

Speaker 1 (27:06):
So they asked George about if he used Facebook, and
he said he was kind of off and on Facebook,
but he mostly used it for Facebook Marketplace and different
Diesel groups that he was in. He said he would
occasionally talk to people through Facebook Messenger, and one of
those people was Frankie Rodin. They asked him if he
ever blocked Frankie on Facebook or Facebook Messenger, and he

(27:28):
said that he didn't think that he had blocked Frankie.
But there was this graph that basically showed who had
blocked two and it had George blocking Frankie Rodin. But
George said, to his knowledge, he didn't think he blocked Frankie.
So then they get into George and Angela possibly having
his passwords, and he doesn't know if Angela had his passwords.

(27:52):
But then they show him this book of Angela's passwords
and they have him flip through it and he said
he doesn't really know like what was in the book,
but he knows that it was kept in the kitchen,
So I mean, obviously Angela had his passwords, Angela had
everybody's passwords, Angela Wagner probably has my passwords. At this point,

(28:12):
they then talk about the GoFundMe that was put up
by Jake, and George said he wasn't aware of that
until after the arrest was made and it was part
of the discovery, so they kind of briefly touch on that.

Speaker 2 (28:25):
Then they kind of go back.

Speaker 1 (28:27):
To beth Anne and George basically saying he didn't trust her.
He said, number one, she ended up breaking up with
Jake and then ended up going back with him, even
though she knew what people were saying about the family,
and he just thought it was weird for her to
choose to be with somebody that was accused of those
kind of things. And then he had also said that

(28:49):
she had told them about her childhood and talked about
how she was in some type of cult in Texas,
and George said that she told them that the church
sold kids into sex slavery, and Bulvine had said that
Beth had told them that George shot bad people with
his gun, and basically he wanted Beth out because he

(29:14):
didn't feel that Bulvine was safe around her. There were
times that George would say that Sophia kind of was
looking like or acted like Hannah May, and Jake would
get upset and he didn't want to hear that even
though that's literally the child's mother, Like you're the one
that picked her, You're the one that had a baby
with her.

Speaker 2 (29:31):
She looks like her mom.

Speaker 1 (29:32):
They asked him how he felt about Tabitha now being
present in their son's life, and he said, as long
as she straightened everything up, he doesn't have a problem
with her raising Bulvine. And when you think about it,
this whole case is just so sad and tragic all
the way around, because Jake, if we're going to believe
what Jake Wagner says, which I do not, but he

(29:55):
wanted to protect his daughter, and so he did everything
in his power to try and protect his daughter, who
now has neither one of her parents, who doesn't have
grandparents because you took them from the world. You took Dana,
you took her senior. Your dad's in jail, your mom's
in jail. None of it makes any sense. And then
you have Bulvine, who was brought up in this tumultuous home,

(30:20):
and now your dad's in jail, and Tabby is trying
to pick up the pieces she already is struggling. I
root for Tabitha so much. I hope she is well.
I hope she's doing great. I hope she is thriving
in life and she's been able to move on with
her son. But these kids are the victims in all
of this, and it's really sad and tragic. George said

(30:42):
that he noticed that Billy had begun drinking more after
the murders than he did before. So then they get
into the custody agreements of it all, and he said
that they were signed in April of twenty sixteen. And
George said, basically, he came in the house one day
and Angela said she was filling one out for Jake
and asked him to also fill one out. God forbid,
if something were to happen to George or Tabby, what

(31:05):
would happen with Bulvine. So he said at that point
he decided he needed to fill it out. And Angela
is always up to her old tricks, so she assumed
that George wouldn't read this document and she was right.
So once Tabby and George got divorced, there was another
custody agreement drafted up, basically saying that if anything were

(31:26):
to happen to George, that Angela would get Bulvine. He
said he didn't read it, he signed it and then
he left, assuming that that was going to be it,
and he didn't realize what he just signed they kind
of talked about the different parenting styles between Jake and George,
and George said that Jake basically wanted to keep Sophia
chained up in the house until she graduated college, basically

(31:49):
saying they had way different ideas about how to raise
their kids. What's interesting to me because when I first
heard of that this story, I thought, oh my god,
the Wagner family ties really run deep in order to
convince your whole family.

Speaker 2 (32:04):
To help take out the whole.

Speaker 1 (32:06):
Family of your ex fiance, baby mama type situation. But
as you really listen to the testimony, you realize this
family is a hot mess, disaster. None of them like
each other, none of them get along, and yet they
all seemingly got roped into this heinous situation taking out
eight members of the road and family.

Speaker 2 (32:28):
It just doesn't compute in my mind.

Speaker 1 (32:30):
I had no idea until I started researching it and
getting into it that this family truly doesn't like each other.

Speaker 2 (32:37):
They really don't.

Speaker 1 (32:38):
They kind of go in and talk a little bit
about the wire taps and how Angela thinks she's being
framed talking on the wire taps, and George didn't realize
that with everything that was going on that they were
essentially twisting the story and putting it on him.

Speaker 2 (32:52):
Now this is his story.

Speaker 1 (32:53):
Do I necessarily believe that, No, but that is what
he is testifying. Talks about Angela saying basically that she
will take the death penalty over being in prison for
the rest of her life. And then Jake's whole take on,
if you arrest me and give me life, that means
I have sixty years to get out.

Speaker 2 (33:13):
And George said at.

Speaker 1 (33:15):
This point in time, when they were having those conversations
on the wiretaps, that he didn't know that they had
committed the murders. They asked about the verbal threats that
he had made against Agent Scheider, and he said it
was really just something that he said because he was angry,
He didn't mean it, he hadn't been sleeping, and that
he really was not going to kill him. He again

(33:36):
said he never had any idea that his family was
planning to kill the Rodents. He said again Hannah May
was like a sister to him, and Frankie was his
best friend. So that was the defense kind of question
to him going through everything extremely out of order and
all over the place. But that is exactly how it was.
It was extremely all over the place and out of order.

(33:59):
So then the prosecution gets up for cross exam. They
start off asking him about Frankie being his best friend
and asking him if he considered Chris Newcom's best friend,
and he said no, Chris was more like a brother
and that he technically should have been his blood brother.
And I very much took that as he was closer
with Chris than he was with Jake. He said he

(34:21):
last spoke to Frankie in late December of twenty fifteen,
and they asked him about him and Frankie's friendship and
they essentially were four years apart. George was four years
older than Frankie. They then asked him about blocking Frankie
on Facebook and Facebook Messenger, and he said that he
doesn't remember blocking him. He didn't block him, and I'm

(34:41):
sure it was probably Angela Wagner that did, but it's
just my opinion. They then talk about Jake being the
favorite and especially him being the favorite to his mom Angela,
and George said that Angela thought that she was better
than everyone and very much wanted to control everything.

Speaker 2 (34:59):
He also said that she wasn't.

Speaker 1 (35:01):
As bad when they were younger, but it got worse
and worse as they got older.

Speaker 2 (35:05):
And she had.

Speaker 1 (35:06):
Always tried to control him, but he just kind of
always did his own thing, where Jake, on the other hand,
was the kind that could easily be controlled. They then
talk about the different custody agreement stuff, and he said,
you know, he signed the custody agreement without looking at it.
He said, he trusts his mom seventy to eighty percent
of the time, and when he signed it, he didn't

(35:29):
realize that the document had been backdated, which again is.

Speaker 2 (35:32):
Illegally can't do that.

Speaker 1 (35:34):
So they talk back and forth about a lot of that,
and then they get into the night of the murders. Now,
George said on the stand that he went to bed
around ten PM, but the prosecutor points out that when
he was at the border, they had told the border
patrol agents that the family was watching a movie that
night and that he went to bed around twelve thirty.

(35:54):
And George said he doesn't remember the exact time he
went to bed that night because it was six years ago. Now,
according to what Jake said, Chris Senior and Gary were
killed between ten and eleven pm.

Speaker 2 (36:06):
So they do very much talk about.

Speaker 1 (36:08):
The timeline of what Jake said not being accurate, but
they do know from the autopsy and everything that Chris
Senior and Gary were killed around eleven PM. The prosecutor
then asked about his account that he gave at the
border maybe being a bit more accurate than this one
that he just gave now, because things were fresher in

(36:28):
his mind back then than they were at the moment
during trial, and she was just saying that this was
all kind of a coordinate at alibi that they all
gave when they were questioned at the border to cover
for what they had done as a family. George had
previously said that Bulvine had gone to bed at twelve
thirty that night, so they questioned, if you went to
bed at ten Bulvine went to sleep a whole two

(36:50):
and a half hours after you, and George said no.
Sometimes he would wind himself up and get hyper, and
then he would typically crash out at twelve thirty. My
time was much much earlier than that. They asked him
if he had told the BCI agents at the border
that he typically looked at Facebook before he went to sleep,
and he said that sometimes he did, but he doesn't

(37:11):
remember if he told him that and he doesn't remember
if he did it that night. And then they asked
him that if his dad and brother had left the house,
would he have been able to hear them, and he
said yes, because of the location of his room to
the proximity of the stairs, he would have heard them
leaving the house. So basically, they're very much trying to

(37:32):
poke holes in him being asleep at ten pm, because
if that was the case, he went into his room
for ten o'clock to go to sleep. He was on
Facebook for a little while and eventually rolled over to
go to sleep. He likely would not have been asleep
by the time Billy and Jake left the house to
commit the murders. If Chris Senior and Gary were murdered

(37:53):
around eleven pm, they're just trying to poke holes in
his I went to bed at ten o'clock theor. They
then talk and question George about the different guns that
Jake had owned, and they talk about how George was
much more of a gun guy and a hunter. He
was an avid hunter. He hunted a lot more than Jake,

(38:14):
and he was kind of the professional hunter of the crew.
Everybody knew that George was very into hunting, very into guns,
and everybody knew that George knew his stuff when it
came to hunting and installing trail cameras and such. He
then talks about how he and Jake were very different
people despite being brothers. They had a lot of different
interests and they just approached things in different ways.

Speaker 2 (38:36):
So then they talk about.

Speaker 1 (38:38):
How George was really upset that Sophia was calling beth
and mommy, and Sophia would basically tell Bulvine that she
got a new mommy and that Bulvine did, and George
said this kind of became a whole thing, and it
upset Bulvine because his mom was not around either. They
then talked about the accusations that beth Ann was molesting Sophia,

(39:00):
and George said that the easiest thing to do at
that point was just to try and get rid of
beth Ann, to try to get her to move out
and not have to deal with all of those different
accusations or even the thought of that happening. And George
also said that he kind of believed that beth Anne
was going to try and kidnap Ulvine and sell him.

Speaker 2 (39:19):
To the colt that she was in.

Speaker 1 (39:21):
She had expressed to him that she was in this
colt when she was a teenager and she would sometimes
leave the door unlocked at night, and he thought that
this was her way of getting Bulvine into the colt,
which is just very odd behavior, very odd even a
thought process that he would think that way. But I
guess when you're raised by Angela, who was telling him

(39:41):
and Jake that they were constantly going to be kidnapped,
that it kind of makes sense. So there was even
talk about beth Ann being a possible BCEI plant, and
that he said his lawyer was the one who initially
told him that, which again is so wild to.

Speaker 2 (39:56):
Even go there in your brain.

Speaker 1 (39:58):
They asked George if situation with beth Anne was one
of the only times that Angela and George sided with
one another versus Angela siding with Jake, and George agreed
with that and said that they didn't think that beth
Ann was the right type of person and they didn't
want her there living at the house. And there's a
lot more chatter that they talk about Facebook password sharing,

(40:19):
spying on different people on Facebook, and it just goes
round and around and around. We rehash a lot of
the same things. Things we've already talked about. We're not
going to get into it because there are already things
that George has testified to and I don't feel like
going over it again and again and again. But basically
they end the testimony with George saying he had no

(40:42):
idea about anything. He denied knowing anything about what the
family was planning or that they were involved, and everything
was a big surprise to him until Jake gave his
profit where he basically gave his accounts about everything that
had happened, and he still has a hard time grasping
the fact that his brother and his family had anything
to do with murdering the Rodent family and Hannah Hazel Gilly.

(41:04):
He's asked what he thinks should happen to anybody that
committed these crimes, and he says that he thinks they
should receive death, which, holy moly. The prosecutor then ends
things by basically saying that the biggest difference between Jake
and George is that when Jake does something wrong, he
tells about it, and George agrees and says that's kind
of how it always was when they were kids, and

(41:25):
that is the end of his testimony, ending it like
that is wild because Yeah, Jake likes to talk. Jake
never stops talking, is what we've kind of learned from
all of this. So that was George's testimony summarized as
best as I could.

Speaker 2 (41:43):
Because there was so much of it.

Speaker 1 (41:44):
There was like two full eight hour days of George's
testimony and a lot of it was rehashed, so I
cut those parts out. So we are there, we're close.
On the next episode, we're going to briefly discuss closings.
We're then going to get into the verdict and we're
going to talk about the victim impact statements and kind
of where everything stands today with Jake, George, Angelotte, and

(42:06):
Billy because Billy is set to go to trial hopefully
soon for his heinous crimes as well, and who knows
if we're going to be finding out more during his
trial or if it's going to be a lot of
the same song and dance that we heard in George's
trial to be determined for sure, But I will see
you guys next week. I am hoping to wrap this
series up next week. That is my plan, that is

(42:27):
my hope, and we will be done with Summer series
twenty twenty five. Which went on way way longer than
I anticipated, because this trial went on forever and a day.

Speaker 2 (42:38):
But thank you guys.

Speaker 1 (42:39):
I will see you next week, hopefully for the last
part of our summer series twenty twenty five.

Speaker 2 (42:44):
Bye.