Ohio charges a married couple and their two children for the murder of eight members of a family in joint custody dispute
The eight members of the Rhoden family were murdered in the early morning of April 22, 2016 in Ohio. They all seemed riddled with bullets. Most were killed in their beds while they slept. They lived in a mobile home and three trailers a few miles apart on family land in Pike County. The killers performed a deadly choreography. No one could warn anyone as they were all shot in a wild route within minutes. Nearby, it seemed to smell like home growing marijuana, nothing outrageous. There was a lot of blood in all four houses. Stains dotted everything. Even a three year old and two babies. The only survivors. One was six months old and the other, born just four days earlier, was still attached to his mother’s body when police arrived. The mother, Hanna, had been shot twice in the face and was cold.
The Rhodens were a middle-class group with permanent jobs that paid on time. The investigators initially thought of a settlement because one of the victims had had drug problems in the past. The point is, the directions were wrong. None of the dead had known such deadly enemies in life, nor did the disarray of the massacre invite one to think of hitmen. Nor did it correspond to a case of mass domestic violence. The only certainty was that the criminals were still free and armed. Over the next few days, police scrambled to scour the state and locate nearly 50 relatives of the family in case the gunmen also targeted them.
The case became one of the most unprecedented and complex in Ohio’s criminal history. The Rhodens were buried, and it was two years before the prosecutor, sheriff, and reporters stopped coming to the anniversary masses. The Pike massacre was buried as were his victims: Christopher Rhoden, 40; his ex-wife, Dana, 37; their three children, Hannah, 19, Chris, 16, and Frankie, 20. The gunmen’s anger also killed Frankie’s girlfriend, as well as an uncle and cousin in the family, aged 44 and 38, who spent the night in one of the trailers . For a while there was a sign on Christhoper’s stable door: ‘Do you know who killed us on April 22, 2016?’
It has taken six years to find the answer and hold the trial, which will begin before a popular jury at the end of this month. The expectation is maximum. Violence in rural America is once again at the center of the debate. The Attorney General who had to piece the puzzle together, Mike DeWine, has been the state governor since 2019. Only the sheriff who led the investigation is missing from the room: Charles Reader. The bailiff became famous for his televised investigations and interventions, but was sentenced to prison last year on charges of 16 crimes of corruption and the theft of thousands of dollars seized in other cases.
And who will sit on the couch? Well, no more or less than the four members of the Wagner family, an archetypal representation of that place in North America where when it takes to pull your fists – or the gun – to defend the clan, it’s done. . And from the thousands of evidence gathered, it seems they decided to shoot custody of Sophie, a two-and-a-half-year-old girl who was the result of a casual relationship between Hanna Rhoden (when she was 15 years old). old) and Jake Wagner (at 22). In addition to Jake, his parents, Angela and George Wagner III, as well as his 30-year-old brother George Wagner IV, will have to answer for the eight murders.
Days of vertigo await in this community of barely 28,000, which takes its name from General and Expeditionary Zebulon Pike, who died in 1813. The prosecution’s team is unwilling to let the most expensive criminal investigation ever conducted in the area end without guilt. In these six years, the Public Prosecution Service confirms that it has succeeded in reconstructing the sign of hell, determining the role in the conspiracy of each of the people sitting on the couch and who shot that night when 32 bullets passed through the air went.
The portrait of the Wagners shows a simple, traditional family that adheres to a certain code of conduct that is as hard as the string of a whip. They allowed no influences in their lives. So much so that when the two sons’ wives tried to get them to move to another city, they eventually broke up and fled to avoid retaliation from the herd. The suspects are not a social model. Harsh childhood, educational backwardness, fights, petty crimes, the classic. The Rhodens were not lucky enough to cross their path.
According to the tax bill, they formed a collegiate family. And apparently creepy. They held a vote on Christmas 2016 to decide whether to kill Christopher Rhoden and his crew. It came out yes. That was the icy conscience of the group. The clan also went to where their future victims lived when they were gone to fire into the air and make sure the sound of the blasts didn’t go too far. The head of the family felt that it was best to buy the parts to make homemade mufflers, which ultimately proved fatal. The researchers confirmed the impossibility of making that many recordings without anyone hearing, so they looked for the stores where such mechanisms were sold.
Angela, the mother, was not directly involved in the murder. Apparently she stayed at home with little Sophie, awaiting her dramatic orphanage. It was the day of joint custody and the clan’s alibi. But first, the woman bought sneakers for her husband and children to use on their journey to hell and destroyed them. The imprint of a blood-impregnated sole had been stamped onto the floor of a caravan. They also took a van with them for their travels, which they later hid. Christopher Rhoden, a worker at a Lake Lucasville resort, fell first when he confidently opened the door of the “mobile home” to George Wagner. He tried to defend himself, but was shot nine times. His wife, a nurse, had her face destroyed by five shots. The others had no resistance. They slept. A brutal hunt.
Months later, the alleged killers moved to Alaska. They had been interrogated. The police were suspicious. They wanted to distance themselves. But they made the mistake of coming back too early. The hills and meadows called to them. That is carried in. Like the violence. In 2018, they moved to South Webster and were arrested one by one.
In April 2021, the same day as the fifth anniversary of the massacre, Jake confessed in exchange for an agreement with the prosecution to exonerate the four from the death penalty and replace them with life imprisonment. She cried when she talked about Hanna’s murder. They are assessed separately. George Wagner IV will be the first to appear in court once the selection of jurors is completed on August 8. It is not an easy operation. The process may take until the fall. And many residents of this low-income province are unwilling to be away from their jobs for several weeks.
Source: La Verdad
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