Just before 8am on one spring morning, an emergency operator picked up the phone to hear a distraught woman screaming: “There’s blood all over the house!”
Eight people, all members of the same family, had been shot dead in four separate locations around Pike County, Ohio. A small child and two babies were found unharmed, although one of the infants was found soaked in blood because his mother had been breastfeeding him at the moment she was shot.
Ohio governor Mike DeWine, the state’s attorney general at the time of the killings, said that the assailants had acted in “cold, cold, cold blood,” adding: “This was calculated, planned out… it just chills you to think about it.”
Now, on what is the ninth anniversary of the horrific murders on April 22, 2016, we look back at what happened.
While some early clues pointed to the involvement of a drugs cartel, police struggled to identify a motive for the killings. It would be two years until the first arrests were made in the case, and the trial of the final defendant was only concluded in January this year.
True crime podcaster Annie Elise explains: “Eight members of the Rhoden family were found murdered in their sleep; parents, siblings, a cousin, and a young couple shot multiple times – their bodies left in a brutal and bloody scene.
“Yet three children who were found inside two of these homes, the killers left completely unharmed. Rumours quickly began to circulate throughout the small town, with some speculating that this wasn’t a random act, others had people asking was this a cartel hit? A drug-fuelled act of revenge? Or was the truth much closer to home?”
On April 22, 2021, the fifth anniversary of the murders, local man Jake Wagner stood up in a Poke County courtroom and told a judge: “I am guilty, your honour.”
One of the victims, Hanna Rhoden, was the mother of Jake Wagner’s child. He had begun a sexual relationship with Hanna when she was 13. When she was 15, and Wagner had just turned 20, she became pregnant with his child. It was because the relationship had broken up, prosecutors believed, that the shocking slaughter took place.
The Wagners, who shunned outsiders and homeschooled their children, “held a vote” on whether to wipe out the entire Rhoden family in the hopes of getting custody of the child. They planned the slayings for four months, buying ammunition, silencers, and even “brass catchers” to prevent leaving bullet casings behind.
Wagner admitted to shooting five of the eight victims himself and made a deal with prosecutors. In exchange for them waiving the death penalty, he pleaded guilty to 23 charges in connection with the homicides of the Rhodens, and gave evidence against several members of his own family.
The victims, aside from 19-year-old Hanna Rhoden, were her parents; 40-year-old Christopher Rhoden Sr. and his ex-wife, 37-year-old Dana Rhoden; their two other children, 20-year-old Clarence “Frankie” Rhoden and 16-year-old Christopher Rhoden Jr., as well as 20-year-old Hannah Gilley, who was Clarence Rhoden’s fiancee, Christopher Rhoden Sr.’s brother, 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden, and a cousin, 38-year-old Gary Rhoden.
After the murders, the weapons that the killers had used were sunk into blocks of concrete that were then fashioned into boat anchors and given as a Father’s Day present to another member of the extended Wagner family.
Evidence provided by Jake Wagner led to the recovery of the “anchors,” which had been sunk into a lake, and the guns found inside them were definitively tied to the crimes.
Edward “Jake” Wagner was sentenced to life in prison with the chance of parole in 32 years. His brother George Wagner IV, was found guilty and sentenced to eight consecutive life terms without the possibility of parole.
Passing sentence, Judge Jonathan Hein said: “Each generation has its own people who can prove the depths of depravity of human nature, and that’s what this case did. It showed the boundless depravity of people who have no respect for others, only their own self-interest in mind.”
The killers’ mother Angela was sentenced to 30 years for her part in planning the horrific crime. Angela’s mother Rita Holcomb was found guilty of helping to cover up the crime and was handed a suspended sentence and five years of probation.
As the sentence was passed, one relative of the victims screamed at Angela Wagner: “You killed your granddaughter’s mother! You’re evil. You’re evil. You’re the spawns of Satan and Satan is Billy Wagner. You’re the evilest mother to help that man take the lives of three other mothers.”
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