Hanna and Jake
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Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI.

In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Pikedon Massacre, a production of iHeartRadio and KT Studios. The bodies of seven adults and one 16-year-old boy were found in four different locations along a country road in Pike County. A small-town nightmare comes to life in rural Ohio.

Eight members of the Roden family gunned down in cold blood in their sleep. Just a nightmare scenario. All of them shot in the head, execution style. It's absolutely shocking. The brutal murder sparked a two and a half year investigation comprising state, local, and federal authorities. Then Attorney General Mike DeWine comments on what ends in a stunning series of arrests. At the center of this case were members of the Wagner family who

whom we believe the evidence will show, conspired together to kill these eight people. It's a crime that shocks a once-quiet community and leaves a haunting legacy that may lie at its very heart. There are survivors, and they are very young. We're talking three children, one as young as four days old, a six-month-old baby, and a three-year-old. And when the reporters were asking, were all of them asleep at the time, they said, no. This is the Pyton Massacre.

Episode 3, Hannah and Jake. Over the course of the first two episodes, we've covered the details of the Roden murders and learned about the family accused of carrying them out, the Wagners.

I'm Courtney Armstrong, a producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Lidecker and Jeff Shane. We worked on a documentary about the rodent murders back in 2019. Here's Stephanie. If we're going to talk about the rodent deaths, then we also need to talk about their lives. So often when it comes to crime victims, it all becomes about their murders and so little about who they were prior.

By all accounts, the Rodin family was a very happy, close-knit family. In fact, they lived just miles from one another. They were close enough that they all lived on the same road, which speaks to just how tight-knit they were. And, you know, this family went back generations in Pike County. Everyone we talked to pretty much said the same thing about them. They were all very hardworking, very kind, and very generous. And we probably heard this the most about the matriarch of the family, Hannah's mother, Dana Rodin.

Here's one of Dana's oldest friends, Becky Ryder. She was a very nice person, just a great mother and a great wife to her husband. She was just an all-around good person. As we listened to Becky describe Dana Roden, we began to see a vivid portrait take shape. A trusted friend, a caring nurse at a nearby assisted living facility, and a surrogate mother to some of the local kids. Brittany was one of them. A lifelong friend of Dana's son, Chris Jr., she reminisced about Dana with Stephanie.

She had shorter brown hair. She always had the, like, curly. And sometimes she would put, like, purple streaks in her hair. Blonde streaks. Like, I don't know. She liked that kind of weird stuff. And I'm sitting here, like, I always looked at her like, what are you doing to your hair? See, now I do that to my hair.

She would be very proud of you. Yes, she would. She'd laugh at me. And Dana always sort of looked after everybody else's kids. She would kind of be the mama bear. Yeah. One time we were all riding and I wasn't, I was on the four wheeler with Chris while we were all riding. And I actually got in a wreck because the four wheeler, like, I don't know what happened to it. Like it just completely messed up and we flipped down a hill and,

Dana met her husband, Chris Roden Sr., when she was in high school, and they fell in love immediately. A few years later, they got married.

Here again is Becky Ryder speaking to producer Jeff Shane. She remembered meeting Dana as a young wife who had found the man of her dreams. When I met Dana, her and Chris Sr. was already married. So they got married in high school then? Yeah, she got married really young. Was that uncommon? Yes, it's uncommon, but for her, she knew that's the man that she loved and she knew she wanted to be with him forever. Stephane Likens knew Chris Sr. as a devoted family man and a skilled craftsman. She spoke to our producer, Jeff, about him. I tell you, if...

You could see some of the stuff, some of the things that he built, like the decks. He was an amazing carpenter. He built this one that had all kinds of intricate, you know, he designed them, you know, just his imagination. You know, he could, if, you know, if they said money's no object, you would be amazed at, you know, the things that he could do.

Together, Dana and Chris Sr. raised three kids, Frankie, Hannah, and Chris Jr. But after more than 20 years of marriage, their relationship began to fall apart. Dana and Chris Sr. got divorced, but they continued to live on the same property, working together to take care of the children. They still had each other's back no matter what. Everything was always for the kids.

19-year-old Hannah Roden was Chris Sr. and Dana's only daughter. She was great. She was funny. She was really funny. She was really, really nice. She knew everyone. Everyone knew her. And she just, like, talked to everyone. Like, she wasn't stuck up or anything like that. And she lived life to the fullest. But after her murder in 2016, it became clear that Hannah's life and the events leading up to her death were much more complicated than anyone in Pikedon could have known.

All of this starts six years earlier. In the summer of 2010, Hannah had recently turned 13 and she starts dating a local boy named Jake Wagner. At the time, Jake was just shy of 18. The relationship moves quickly. Three years later, Hannah and Jake begin planning to start a family. And in November 2013, Hannah gives birth to their baby girl, Sophia.

She was a great mom. Like sometimes she would bring her baby to school. Like the, she would always come into mine and Chris's class because we had American government together and she'd always bring the baby in there and let our teacher, Mr. Carino see the baby.

We talked to a relative of the Wagner family. She asked us not to use her name, but shared her thoughts on what Jake was like as a father to Sophia. Jake was always very, I mean, hands-on. Like, he would always be playing. Like, they'd be outside. They'd be, you know, non-stop. And he always kind of made sure that she, you know, had what she needed. And he was always very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very, very,

Just very active with her and very protective of her. It seemed like, you know, the second that, like, if anything bad were to happen, I guess, he was on it. Like, he was there for her. He was ready to do whatever needed to be done in order to make sure that she was okay. ♪

While raising a family is difficult for the young couple, they make things work. Hannah stays in school while Jake works as a truck driver with his brother, George Wagner. The couple and Sophia split time between the Rodin and the Wagner households. For everyone involved, it's a dream scenario.

Angela Wagner, Jake's mother, is already a grandparent, but she's excited to be spending time with the newest addition to her family. Her grandchildren, they absolutely adored her. They loved her. They always wanted to go with her. And she would go out of her way to make sure that they were taken care of or, you know, on the holidays that they got, you know, anything they could, anything she could give them and everything like that.

Dana Roden's friend, Stefan, told our producer, Jeff, that Dana was just as elated. Was she excited to be a grandmother again? Oh my gosh, yes. Those babies were her life.

In 2015, things seemed to be going well for Hannah and Jake. They have a wedding date set and even had rings tattooed on their fingers. Throughout that time, Hannah became very close with the Wagner family, so much so that after the murders, Angela Wagner tells the press that Hannah was like a daughter to her and her entire family. So if that's the case...

What could possibly have gone wrong? Well, we have a little bit of insight into that thanks to a signed affidavit that Jake Wagner submitted. And this is just from his perspective. But what he claims is that he and Hannah split in April 2015, which is a year before the murders. He claims that Hannah actually was the one to break up with him because...

She thought he was working too much. And his perspective was that he wanted a stay-at-home wife and a full-time mother to Sophia, which Hannah was just not ready to do. Which, again, that is his account. We don't have the benefit of having Hannah's account or any of Hannah's family's account either. We spoke with an anonymous Wagner family source, and they say that Jake just really wasn't ready to throw in the towel on the relationship, period.

He was trying very hard to make sure that they got back together. He still wanted to be with her. He was trying to, I guess, get back with her, just everything that he could.

Yeah, again, going back to kind of figuring out like the timeline and what...

might have happened, we're able to kind of piece some of it together through social media. We found a post from July of 2015 where she made a rather cryptic entry on Facebook posting lyrics to a song about domestic abuse. And the lyrics read, he slowly isolates her from all of her friends. She works really hard, but he takes all of it. She ended the post with her own words saying, end domestic violence, live a happier life.

It is important to note that we don't know for an absolute fact that these posts were about Jake. The timeline certainly matches up, but if they were all about Jake, it raises a number of questions. Was Jake Wagner a controlling and abusive partner? Though we can't be sure about what went on behind the scenes of Jake and Hannah's relationship, we do know one thing. Hannah was 18 years old when she posted that message, and she would be dead within a year.

We're going to take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down from unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Walzak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. Oh my God.

In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the Valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is him and the sniper me out of some tree.

But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fisher. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house, the hunt, family annihilation today and a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I spent almost a decade researching right wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat.

It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Let's go back to that summer of 2015, just after Hannah and Jake broke up. That May, she starts dating a guy named Charlie Gilley. Charlie is her brother Frankie's best friend and the brother of Frankie's fiancee, Hannah Gilley.

Here's journalist Jeff Winkler. There was this period after Hannah Mae had broken things off with Jake Wagner that when she got with Charlie, it was sort of what you would hope for. You know, everyone seemed to like Charlie Gilley, who, you know, by all accounts was very caring, very loving, very much liked by the family.

Charlie is proud of his relationship with Hannah. He often posts photos of he and Hannah kissing and proclaims his love for her online. However, as fast as things heat up, they fizzle out just as quickly. And by the end of July 2015, the couple breaks up. Now, according to that same affidavit that Jake Wagner signed, he and Hannah continued a physical relationship that entire summer.

Brittany told Jeff Shane what she heard about Jake Wagner and Hannah's fraught relationship from Hannah's brother, Chris Jr. Chris would always come to school and talk to me about it. What would he say? Just that his sister is in a shitty situation. He just treats her awfully and she really can't do anything about it because she has a kid with him. He would just say that it's a whole bunch of BS and that Jake would just treat her like crap. Like, what did you think about that at the time?

At some point this same summer, Hannah falls for another boy from Pikedon, Corey Holdren. According to our Wagner family source, when Jake finds out, he's crushed. He got extremely upset when he found out that she was seeing somebody else.

And he was hurt. He didn't understand. And every time that I got a chance to talk to him, he would cry. He was like, you know, I don't understand why she's being this way, why she won't give me the chance to explain myself. Like, we could work on it, and it would be good to see her. We would be good together. I mean, it was just always... Yeah, he was very, very upset about that. So... And after, I think after...

After being upset and after that kind of wore off, I think it did turn to anger. In August 2015, Hannah Summer ends with a big shock. She's pregnant. Unlike her first child, this one is unplanned. Adding to the anxiety, she doesn't know who the father is. The potential fathers are Charlie Gilley, Corey Holdren, and Jake Wagner. For Jake, the pregnancy offers a glimmer of hope.

I could just tell by talking to him that when he did find out that Hannah was pregnant again, that it almost was like a sense of relief to him. Kind of, I think he thought that that was going to bring them back together.

He asked Hannah and was willing to be there, you know, for the birth. He was asking, you know, if she needed any help with anything with the baby, like the child support. He was willing to pay that. He had gotten things for the baby at one point. Him and Angela had went and bought a crib and just things like that for the child, yeah. And this was before he had any idea if it was even his or not.

But behind the scenes, there are rumors that the once amicable co-parenting situation between Hannah and Jake is beginning to fall apart. According to Mike Allen, attorney and legal analyst for Fox 19 in Cincinnati, things soon reach a boiling point. Two or three weeks prior to the murder, there's evidence that Jake Wagner and his father tried to get Hannah Roden to sign some documents related to custody of her daughter Sophia to Jake Wagner.

But Jake's plan seems to backfire. Here again, our Wagner family member. There was a custody battle. It's basically what it was about to do. There was a custody battle between, you know, them and the daughter. Hannah wasn't allowing Jake to see her or any of the family to see her. And so it kind of just, it got out of hand at that point.

It just set him off to the point where Jake, um, cause he had made the comment a couple of times. I mean, and I had told a couple of people about this. I mean, he had made the comment, you know, that he was going to, to kill her.

And he told her that, you know, he's like, I'm going to, I'm going to have to kill you. Like, you're not going, you're not going to let me see the baby. Then, you know, you're not going to have her. And I'm like, Jake, you can't say those things. Please just chill out.

Right, people say stuff like that all the time. On April 17th, 2016, in the midst of the couple's custody dispute, Hannah gives birth to a baby girl named Kylie.

On the birth certificate, she doesn't list anyone as the father. Less than a week later, on April 22nd, Hannah and seven members of her family are found murdered in their homes. Thankfully, the life of baby Kylie and her two cousins are spared.

The brutal murders committed in front of these young children rattled everyone who heard about the story, even seasoned prosecutors like then-Attorney General Mike DeWine. I guess the worst thing I've ever seen. When you see a mother, a young mother just gave birth four days before, and she's murdered right beside her child. Thank God they did not harm the baby. But it doesn't get much worse than that.

Jeff Winkler spoke to us about trying to make sense of the killers' intentions. There was a conscious choice to leave every single young child alive who basically couldn't identify them successfully. I mean, that is probably the most shocking part of the whole ordeal is that there was a conscious choice by these killers to spare the children, which sort of displays the cold-heartedness of decisions they were making.

Going back to the timeline for a second, following the murder, it was one week that passed and Jake Wagner files for custody for both Sophia and the newborn Kylie. He seems convinced that he's Kylie's father, but acknowledges that even if he isn't, he still deserves partial custody so the sisters could spend time together. Yeah, the whole Wagner family was pretty vocal at that time about their need to have custody of these kids. Angela Wagner told the press that

Sophia and Kylie quote-unquote needed each other, and that when they got older enough to understand what happened to their mother, that they will really need each other. Right, and custody is something that's complicated, and it varies state by state. So, Stephanie, I know you dug into this quite a bit. Yeah, it's very specific. We spoke to a family law advisor.

in Ohio. And, you know, yes, if you're an unmarried woman, all parental rights go to you. The father does not have any parental rights unless he goes to court and files accordingly.

To that point, these papers for custody were filed exactly one week after the murders. That's pretty quick to pull all of your custody documents together in such a short amount of time. I know things vary from state to state, but it's pretty unusual to have that so tidy so quickly. And some reports have indicated that that may mean that they had been

going through the process and that Jake and the Wagner family were compiling documents and such prior to the murders. So it is possible that because he didn't have any rights, could that actually be reason enough to go through with this crime? Yeah, I spoke to Mike Allen. He's a former prosecutor and now he's a criminal defense attorney in Ohio. And he told me about how Jake's quick custody filings look from a legal perspective. That

That's extremely strong evidence for the prosecution. I mean, six days, less than a week after the killings to go ahead and file. It can take months, you know, maybe a year, a little bit more, a little bit less. It's not something that goes quickly at all. And I think that that is going to be some evidence that's problematic for the defense doing it that quickly after the murders.

Jake seems determined to be a father to Sophia and to Hannah's newborn baby. Throughout Hannah's pregnancy and even after the birth, Jake Wagner publicly says there's a good chance he's baby Kylie's father. He's so confident that shortly after Kylie is born, he checks her for a hammer index toe, a Wagner family trait.

So he really wanted to be a part of Hannah's life and Sophia's life and Kylie's, baby Kylie's life. Absolutely. Absolutely. He was still willing, I guess, to get help with the child, help with, you know, whatever Hannah would need.

In June 2016, nearly two months after the Rodin murders, Jake Wagner, Charlie Gilly, and Corey Holdren all take paternity tests. It's determined that Charlie Gilly is Kylie's father.

With baby Kylie going to her father, Charlie Gilley, three-year-old Sophia goes to her father, Jake Wagner, the accused, which is interesting when you look at the timeline of events. In fact, on the day of the murders, Jake allegedly picked up Sophia from the road and home. As a result, Sophia's life was thankfully spared. She wasn't even there. Was that just a huge coincidence? Was that fate? Or does that actually point to a larger plot?

Well, for example, if the Wagners indeed are the killers, then on the very day Hannah and the rest of the Rodens, that they were celebrating the expected birth of Kylie with the baby shower, the Wagners were out shopping at Walmart for items that the prosecutor plans to introduce as evidence at their trial. Right. That's an important trip to Walmart. That becomes a big piece of this case. We've seen those photographs, too, from the baby shower, and everybody looks so happy.

You know, it's really staggering. Let's just say that Jake's dream was to be a family again with Hannah. He was in love with her. He wanted to keep his family together. Why kill her and guarantee that you're traumatizing your child? It doesn't really totally make sense. Journalist Jody Barr analyzed the potential motive. The older these kids get, the more they're going to look like their moms and dads who were murdered. And you want that connection.

And these families are fighting over that through the court system. And now on the back end of this, you learn that, wait a minute,

if everything is true that these investigators have alleged in these charging documents, man, this goes much deeper, you know, as far as the custody is involved here, if that is truly what happened. But this is a case, I mean, we're four years removed from this now. I think about this every day in some respect. I mean, if it's, you know, you wonder about those kids, you know, how they're doing now. Has it gotten any easier to accept this? Are those kids...

Do they remember any part of this? It's a whole, I mean, it's generations of a family wiped out. Yeah. Then you think about, you know, on the back end of this, I mean, those kids had to go somewhere. What do you do with those children? What are they telling them? You know, it's just like, when you, when you think about the human end of this outside of the investigation, man, this family, these are going to be hard conversations that they have with these children.

Could you imagine explaining this to a kid when they ask where their mom and dad are? Tell me about my mom and dad. I mean, they're going to get on the Internet one day. They're going to Google it. I mean, you Google Roden, the worst news possible that any human could ever have is going to come up. And, you know, how do you prepare them for that? This is, you know, whatever happened that morning on Union Hill Road, you know, it impacted a lot more than just those eight people who were killed. I mean, you've got their family members and you've got.

People in that area are going to remember this forever. This is never going away. Let's stop here for another quick break. We'll be back in a moment. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down. From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Walzak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. Come on, Paul.

In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the Valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is him and the sniper me out of some trees.

But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fisher. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house, a hunt, family annihilation today, and a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat.

It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. The legacy still lingers on with Dana's friend, Stefan. Quite a shame, you know, that Hannah Mae, you know, just had that baby and they, you know, it's, oh, it makes me sick. It's really unimaginable.

Yes, it is. You know, no one deserves, no one deserves to die the way that they did. And it breaks my heart. It breaks my heart that Dana will never see her kids, you know, grow up, go to school, get married, have their own children. I'm sorry. It's okay. It's okay to be emotional about it. I mean, it is emotional. It's horrible. Yes, it is. Yes.

On the one hand, you've heard, I'm sure you've heard, I've heard that whoever did this had some sort of moral code that they wouldn't hurt the children and they wouldn't harm the kids. But then on the other hand, it's like, but they left all these kids without a family. And so that's almost worse in a way. Yes. And I feel so sorry for the children that will never get to know their parents. They'll grow up without their parents.

We know that the Wagners are in prison awaiting trial for these murders, but also that they've pled not guilty to all charges. It's also important to remember that they are innocent until proven guilty. So, if somebody else other than the Wagners committed this crime, who was it and why? During the ensuing investigation, information started to emerge that perhaps there were several other theories that needed to be considered closely.

Here's reporter James Pilcher, who followed the story closely for years. On the surface, the rodents appeared to be, you know, salt of the earth, all American, very close-knit family. And there were other things that led you to believe that all was not as it seemed. There had been reports of scuffles with other people in public. There had been reports of run-ins with law enforcement.

And it wasn't long before authorities made a shocking discovery that turned the case on its head. Here's then Attorney General Mike DeWine at a news conference a few days after the murders took place. Let me go ahead, and I think it's okay for us to confirm that we did find marijuana in three locations. Is it Grow Operations? No.

Later it was discovered that the rodents had a pretty sizable crop of marijuana plants on their property. You know, there were indications that they were involved in some drug deals and drug trade with marijuana. That obviously fueled even more speculation that these were outside operators, possibly was this a drug deal gone bad or was somebody trying to take over their turf? All kinds of rumors started to flow after that disclosure.

More on that next week.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI.

In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.