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To me, it may be have something to do with that one little girl. But to me, there's a bigger reason. You can't tell me that they walked in and killed eight people over one child. It's just so bizarre that there's so many twists and turns. It's mind boggling and it's like a puzzle trying to put the pieces together. It's just got so many tentacles and goes in so many different directions. Nobody has said anything other than he was shy and in love with Hannah Roden.
Literally in love, like something is off. This is The Pikes and Massacre, Return to Pike County. Season 3, Episode 10, House on a Hill. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a television producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Leidecker and Jeff Shane. In researching this story, we sometimes find ourselves mired in details that lead to dead ends.
In this episode, before George Wagner IV's trial, we're stepping back to take an eagle-eye view on the dark power dynamics at play in Southern Ohio. We have uncovered some shocking new theories about what might have led to the grisly murders of the eight members of the Rodin family.
Here's Stephanie and Jeff. After following this story for years, you really start to see that there are sort of two Pikedons. In one Pikedon, there are people simply trying to live, work, and put food on the table for their family. And on the other hand, there's a lot of people in power who are misusing it. And quite a few of these individuals have used their power for personal gain, period. Often with brutal consequences for those who get caught in the crossfire.
No one exemplifies this more than Michael Moran, who we know is a local Portsmouth lawyer who was accused of doing all sorts of heinous things. As we've discussed in previous episodes, Michael Moran preyed upon vulnerable female clients, often prostitutes and drug users. He lured them in with inexpensive legal representation, then trapped them into sexual slavery and worse.
His victims were people like Megan Lancaster, who went missing in 2013. Angie Montgomery knew her and her sister-in-law Katie, who spent years trying to find Megan. Here's Angie. The way Katie described Megan to me, she looked at me and she was like, I know she would find a way to get a hold of somebody. I know she would. That's what always, you know, was in the back of her mind. I know she would find a way to say something to somebody.
During her tireless crusade to find out what happened to Megan, Katie Lancaster also fell victim to the pressures of life in Pike County. I'm going to be honest with you. She was using I didn't know it. Her and her husband went through hell right before she died. And she also told me that the court told her to stop with her Megan campaign.
She was found in an area in Portsmouth that's known for drug dealing. And she was found in a house having apparently overdosed. Right. That's the same area that Moran's office was in. Right. Right up the road. Here's Jeff speaking with Sophie, an acquaintance of the Wagner family. We spoke with her in an earlier episode, but as a reminder, she's the one who alerted us to ties between Michael Moran and Angela Wagner's father, Pug Carter.
That was news to me. How did you find that out? We talked about Michael Moran on the podcast.
But kind of as an outlier, it just spoke to crimes that were happening in the community. But this really connects Michael Moran to the Wagner family. Another local sleuth who goes by JJ confirms the story.
Everybody there in that little town of South Webster knew what he was doing. I mean, he was their supplier. Is it just mainly pot that we're talking about? Hard drugs, too. Like heroin and cocaine? Oxycodone. He even did time in prison for his drug dealings. He was a wannabe gangster, if you will. So that's what she grew up in. That's what she was familiar with.
Billy Wagner's aunts lived across the street from the Carters. That's how they had to have met. For a defense lawyer like Michael Moran, Pug Carter was probably a legitimate source of steady income. But he also recognized another possible stream of cash from his less well-off female clients. Michael Moran exploited the power dynamic ruthlessly, often abusing the women he lured in and calling them "the product."
He turned around and sold their services right back to the most powerful in Pike County. It's rumored that some of this took place in a house on a hill just south of Piketon. Here's Stephanie speaking with Angie Montgomery.
This is just, you know, frankly, rumor and speculation that there's a place that was this house slash bar and officials, people that worked for the local police would go there for drinks. And sometimes there would be girls there and maybe men.
Not such great behavior would happen behind closed doors. Yes, and if you give me two seconds, I'll give you the name of the place. It's on top of Big Bear Lake. It's just like a resort. I was told that there was some sort of a security pin pad that you could go into that club anytime. I shouldn't call it a club, like a bar. Anytime if you had a key. Yes.
It's like you just take this place and just drop it in the middle and it lands on top of this mountain because you have to have four rollers to get up to it. Actually, I dated a police officer years ago. I remember me and him were driving down 104 and we drove past Big Bear Lake. I remember him telling me that's where all the cops go to get chicks and do illegal stuff.
Wow.
We took the address and just put it into Google Maps, and the chateau seems to be located just south of Piked Inn, kind of on the way to Portsmouth. It's way up on the top of this mountain, looking over Lake Fraser, which is actually sometimes referred to as Big Bear Lake, but the technical name is Lake Fraser, hence the name Fraser Chateau.
We heard a lot about in the early days that, you know, the rodents would go to Big Bear Lake in the summertime to go off-roading and tubing. And it was just a place to go as a family for fun. But when you look at this photo, you see at the very, very top, there's almost this fancy place kind of looking over the whole thing.
And Steph, which I find interesting is if you look at this map, which we'll post on our Instagram @kt_studios, there's almost this like back road that goes up to it that almost looks like a place where you could drive a four-wheeler, which does remind me of how Angie described this place. It makes you wonder what was going up and down this road, like who was transporting what to the chateau from town.
We found out that it was for sale in 2001, and it was owned by a man named Richard Frazier Jr. He then passed it on to Richard Frazier III in the early 90s. We were also able to track down some videos of the Chateau in its heyday. What you see are people enjoying the better things of life. They're having drinks, they're watching the Kentucky Derby.
The audio is a little hard to decipher, but what you just heard was one man saying, "Bring it on home to daddy," followed by another saying, "We were only going to win about a million dollars."
Men are wearing tuxedos and they're gambling and drinking champagne. You know, it looks like one of those very fancy upscale country clubs you would see in the movies. Everybody is living their best possible life. Makes you wonder what was happening up at the chateau. What's being alleged is that this chateau sort of serves as the center of yet another backstory in the massacre that could be connected
And again, we're kind of learning about this real time also, but it's interesting when things that were considered rumor in previous seasons and we couldn't talk about it, really now are all shaping up to be a matter of fact.
And the more people we speak to, the connective tissue becomes clearer and clearer. We were also able to uncover that Moran represented the owners of the Chateau in a court case where they had an issue with a bank loan. So there's now no doubt that Michael Moran was tied to Frasier Chateau in some capacity. It just ties together all of these players that we've been talking about. Michael Moran, Frasier Chateau, the cops, the Wagners, the Rodens, they're all in this same world in ways that we never imagined.
We've also found road and connections to the Chateau. We've been told that Chris Sr. might have been doing construction there, and it's confirmed that Frankie and Chris Jr. worked there because they listed it as their place of employment on Facebook. So there was an obvious connection there for work, and we have heard that Chris Sr. was also a craftsman and used to do construction on a lot of patios in and around the area.
And it's been speculated that perhaps he overheard something or saw some sort of nefarious behavior at the Chateau and that people were afraid he was going to snitch. And maybe that's a factor into the massacre.
But again, we do know it's definitely playing a role and quickly these dots are getting connected. Worth noting, though, that none of our research would suggest that any of the rodents were connected to anything nefarious at Big Bear Lake. We called and confirmed with Big Bear Lake workers that the chateau is now closed. We've learned that Big Bear Lake bought over 300 acres of land 15 years ago, which included the chateau. The current owners have nothing to do with the chateau.
According to the person we spoke with who has worked at Big Bear Lake for 15 years, thieves who rode around on ATVs would come in and have completely destroyed what was left of the property. This same worker knew the rodents and confirmed the work they did there. The whole thing is now boarded up and Big Bear Lake's current owner actually plans on bulldozing the whole building in a few weeks.
The Roden men all working at Big Bear Lake just speaks to what we've heard about them before, which is that they're all really hard workers and good with their hands. Before the murders, Chris Roden Sr. worked as a carpenter, and Dana Roden was working full-time, sometimes even double-time, as a nurse. The whole ring of people, the powers that be, that are not doing what they should be doing, and that's why families in Pike County feel like we're forgotten.
In the early 2000s, most of the big companies in charge of plants and mills in the area left Pike County, and drug abuse was up at the time of the murders. The unemployment rate was also up at 8.6% compared to 5.1% nationwide. You know, you've got people that are hardworking people that grow marijuana. It's so bizarre to people outside, you know, the rural communities that don't know the goings-on.
As reported at the time of the murders, the Rodents had 200 marijuana plants with a street value of about half a million dollars. I thought the cartel did it. I really did. And I've talked to people in the area who said they swear the cartel did it. Cartel activity in the area is documented. In 2010, a large marijuana seizure just 15 miles west of Pikedon was suspected of being linked to the Sinaloa cartel.
Two years later, another pop bus yielded solid evidence of a campsite set up by the Mexican Nationals. According to a Wagner family insider, it's been going on for years. And there are rumors that the Wagners were wrapped up in it as well. Again, these are simply rumors about the Wagners being involved in the cartel that we have heard throughout the years. However, it seems likely that any potential connections between them were also investigated. Maybe they got mixed up with the cartel.
She's referring to the cartel location being close to Frederica and George Wagner Sr.'s horse farm.
George Wagner Sr., which was Billy's father, was a drug dealer too, and he would put bags of dope in these female horses' vaginas and ship them. That's how he transported his drugs. It was right in their back door, you know? What about the people that live right there by them? And the horses, it threw me into that thing, thinking of the horses, with Freddy and them with horses, the Mexicans shipping the horses, you know? Maybe there was something in there.
I need to point out that we were unable to locate any records to support these allegations. Pikedon's location suits cartel operations in the Midwest perfectly. There's a lot of cartel in that area, and they grow in the hills. You know, it's fertile ground and it's easy to hide. It's also a known trafficking route in southern Ohio. U.S. Route 23 runs from the state line in Portsmouth north through Pikedon, Columbus, and eventually into Michigan.
But before 1926, Portsmouth was the southern terminus of the road. Three years later, it was expanded, eventually running all the way to the Atlantic Ocean and Jacksonville, Florida. Now, the two-lane divided expressway is outdated. Interstate 75 gets most of the legitimate north-south traffic in the area, which makes 23 the preferred route of those trying to keep a low profile.
It just seems to me that it was so personal, the murders were, to me. Especially the way Chris Sr. was killed, just how many times he was shot.
Because if you're just doing this to get custody of a child, you're just going to go in, shoot the person one time, a couple times, and then leave, not do what they did to him when I read the autopsy dummy. He was shot in his extremities, his torso, his head. That's overkill. And to me, that's anger.
The autopsies, if you really look at them, if you really read between the lines and where the paragraphs leading up to the redactions, if you really look at it and go, oh, okay, that's what's redacted. There was marks in the groin area, you know, wounds in the groin area. Chris Sr. and Frankie Roden, it appears that their genitalia had been removed.
They were tortured. They were mutilated. There was marks where not a typical knife would have been used. There was a lot of talk about, do you know what a gaff is? A gaff is a weapon that's used by the cartel.
Okay. What's it look like? It has like a claw with sharp blades like Edward Scissorhand. You think the redacted sections of the autopsy point to that type of weapon maybe being used? Yes. We're going to take a break. We'll be back in a moment.
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The brutality of the Mexican cartel is widely known. It's possible all the power brokers in the orbit of the Piketon Massacre were dealing with something larger and even more terrifying than what they had created themselves.
Even Sheriff Reeder, who was at the time in charge of enforcing the law in his dark corner of Ohio, was possibly in over his head. Here's Jeff talking about the possibilities of what happened the night of April 21st, 2016. It all comes full circle back to Reeder. When we initially got involved with the case, the theory out there was that it was the cartel. And that theory was put out there by Reeder very early on in the investigation and is what people thought happened for quite some time.
I remember talking with Kendra Roden, Kenny's daughter, and this was maybe a week or so after the murders happened. And it was when Charlie went on TV to do a presser and said that he didn't know the Roden. And I remember Kendra looking at me and saying, I don't know why he's saying he doesn't know us. He knows who we are. I know she just went through hell and I didn't want to say, well, how does he know you or whatever, you know?
But I always kept that in the back of my mind, like it upset her that he said he didn't know them. Imagine them sitting around a table, eating supper, plotting to kill eight people. It's just hard to grasp. Was there a larger and much more dangerous element pulling the strings from a distance with threats against the Wagner family and others in Piketon?
I'm just theorizing, but it's been said to me, it's possible that Jake is lying because there's death threats in some way against them behind bars, which would kind of point to a larger issue, whether that's the marijuana operation or some fishy dealings, or maybe Billy was in other trouble and this was going to be his way out.
I think they're involved, but I believe the cartel was involved with them. It was too horrendous and happened too fast for everything to go down in a timeframe that it supposedly went down in for having just two people to do it. You know what I mean? The cartel zoomed in on him and they let it be known that if you don't take a plea, we will kill your family. We'll kill the rest of your family.
You know, they're wielding this proverbial sword over their heads because they are involved. I mean, out of nowhere, he took a plea. I do not think Jake could stand over Hannah and shoot her, especially with a baby next to her. Something is off. Something is not right. It's important to note that George IV Wagner and his father, Billy Wagner, have both pleaded not guilty and are presumed innocent.
No one, except for the people who will appear in court next month, knows the real truth. It seems like there are basically three ways this could play out. It's either, as their plea deals would suggest, Jake Wagner...
So what we know for a fact is that George Wagner's trial is set to start August 29th.
We're going to learn a lot more when George's trial actually begins and we learn more about the prosecution's case. But for right now, all we can do is sort of guess what might happen. And what's being reported so far is that Angela Wagner was not present at the time of the murders. Jake Wagner has confessed to committing five. And we can sort of surmise that because George Wagner is saying he didn't kill anyone, that Billy Wagner must have killed the other three.
This theory plays well into what the plea deals have said so far, but there are still so many other theories to unpack. Is it possible that there's another layer to this altogether and the Wagners were in fact tied into something nefarious, whether that's the cartel or not?
And there was this potential of a custody battle to heat up. And on top of that, there does seem to be corruption behind the scenes. We know that. So at this point, there's been so many pieces of the puzzle held close by the prosecution and the defense for obvious reasons. They want to keep their case sacred. But that's about to change.
Once George's trial starts, it shapes everything because you'd have to imagine that Billy Wagner's trial is just behind it and their stories all better match. Or is there an entirely new story that's evolving real time? We're likely going to pause just for a stretch so we can have jury selection happen and really be with you when things start to heat up. I think there's a curveball coming.
Whether or not Angela Wagner was present at any or all of the Rhodes family houses on the night of the murders has been a huge point of contention. Added confusion is that we've read conflicting reports based on what was reported on and what we've seen in court. What we've understood and have reported on this podcast that Angela was at home babysitting the night of the murders.
However, in looking back one more time through court transcripts, we found conflicting reports that said Angela had moved two of the bodies. To shed some light on this, we spoke to FOX 19 legal analyst Mike Allen. She pled to conspiracy to commit aggravated murder, which indicates to me that she was not there and didn't participate in it. Also several counts of aggravated burglary. Now that's trespassing in an occupied structure.
or a structure that could be occupied. But the real thing here is tampering with evidence. I checked with Mike Schell. He's a reporter here at Fox 19. He's been following this thing closer than anyone. I said, "Is there any indication that Angela did participate in the homicides?"
And he said no. His understanding was that she was at home with a baby or babies. So I think the gist of what she pled to is that she was not there when it happened, but conspired before the fact. I don't know why they're so closed mouthed about this, but that would be my speculation.
You mentioned dumping tight-lipped. Is that standard or not standard? What do you make of the prosecution not releasing a lot of information? You know, they want to keep a lid on it because it's just got so many tentacles and goes in so many different directions. And I think they're probably inundated with media requests. But I will say this, it's highly unusual. As a matter of fact, I don't ever remember a trial that I've been involved with or anything
that I've even heard of here in Hamilton County where that's happened. I mean, every document that's filed in the clerk of court's office is put online unless the judge orders it sealed. And judges here don't routinely do that unless there's a legitimate law enforcement reason to do it. So that's got me baffled. I tell you, it sure would make everybody's job easier. Let's stop here for another break.
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I'm Martine Powers. And I'm Elahe Azadi. Martine and I are the hosts of Post Reports. The show comes out every weekday from The Washington Post. You can follow and listen to Post Reports wherever you get your podcasts. It'll be a match, I promise.
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Just when we think we know everything about this case and things are wrapping up, we find something else out and more information comes out. And it's clear that with the Rodin and the Wagner case, it's really expect the unexpected. Ultimately, though, eight members of the Rodin, Manley and Gilley family were killed in their homes.
And I think I speak for the entire team here at K2 Studios, but getting to the bottom of what happened is really in the name of finding justice for the family. We hope to honor not only the victims, but also the lives and the people that they left behind. In speaking with their family members, loved ones, and friends, it's really hard to move on without knowing exactly what happened that night. And with the trials finally coming up,
The hope is that we can at least give some sort of end to this horrible chapter of their lives. While we wait for jury selection and the trial of George IV to begin, we will continue to follow leads. We are humbled beyond measure with what the community of Pike County and family members have shared with us. For now, we leave you with a message we recently received from one of the surviving Roden family members. "Just know that my family, they were good people.
♪♪
After that, we'll pause before the Wagner trials heat up. If you're enjoying The Pyton Massacre, listen to our other hit series, Crazy in Love. New episodes air every Tuesday wherever you get your podcasts. For more information and case photos, follow us on Instagram at kt underscore studios.
The Pikedon Massacre is produced by Stephanie Lidecker, Jeff Shane, Chris Graves, Scott DeGraw, and me, Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound design by Jeff Twa. Music by Jared Aston. Audio mixing by Ken Novak. The Pikedon Massacre is a production of KT Studios and iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
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