Welcome to the Pikedon Massacre, a production of iHeartRadio and KATI Studios. In April twenty sixteen, when eight members of the Rodent family were murdered in their homes, the media descended on the sleepy town of Piketon, Ohio.
Community clearly shaken after this morning's multiple homicides.
People in this small community being told to be on alert tonight as news of the unthinkable and gruesome killing spread, The small rural community is left feeling and rumors begins swirling.
Discoveries the murder scenes are now advancing the theory the killings could be related to a drug cartel.
Authorities aren't commenting on whether they had any potential suspects.
Gooybody, thanks.
All the bad stuff happens in the big cities, but the devil works at it everywhere.
But in the aftermath of the arrests of six members of the Wagner family, attention turns to the very people responsible for the investigation.
There was this belief among almost everybody I talk to about incompetence when it came to law enforce in that county.
There's nobody watching the watchers in these small communities, and in many cases that can lead to major corruption and.
The dark secrets of a once quiet town are slowly brought to light.
There's been a lot of murders here that have not been solved. But if I say what I think, I could probably end up in the river.
This is the piked In Massacre, Episode five, air and Opportunity. In the days after the killings, the Rodent murders became an international headline and it was a sensational story, a series of murders, multiple potential motives, all taking place in a small town in Ohio. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a TV producer at Katie Studios, where I work with Stephanie Leidecker
and Jeff Shane. We've been following the case for a long time and through the course of our investigation learned that the town of piked In, Ohio has its own story to tell. Journalist Jeff Winkler wrote about the story for the website The Outline. He told me about his impressions of the initial reporting coming out of piked In.
It was a big media story for about two weeks, and you know, everybody from all over came to cover it, all over the world, and a lot of people had been similarly executed in the middle of Appalachia and no one knew what was going on. I mean, I grew up in the Ozarks in Arkansas, and these are people I feel familiar with. You know, when I go up to New York, California, that's like a Disneyland and it's
a strange, people daring place. These areas and folks like this are not wildering to me in the same way that they weren't the people who came down and covered the story Originally. You get a lot of talk of a book at these people smoking and you know, wearing camo, and you know a lot of gwking. You know, it was just these sort of quotes from sad sort of back its people is how they're perceived, and that's that's just.
Not where I come from.
But I think this thing that stood out for me was just how human everyone was.
Piked In Resident Angie Montgomery shared her view of the media coverage with producer Jeff Sheane.
How do you think like piked In and the like Pike County in general, I guess has been portrayed in the media.
I don't think they've been very kind to us. I've seen a lot of reports where they call this uneducated kill billy just dumb. They think we're dumb, they think we're a bunch of inbread. I've actually seen that in some reports, and it's sad.
Well, it's easy for some to view the town of piped In through this kind of provincial, almost stereotypical lens. It's not what we found when we visited the area.
It's pretty far removed from the big cities of Olo. It's about an hour and a half south from Columbus, an hour and a half east of Cincinnati, and just under thirty minutes from the Ohio River, which basically separates southern Ohio from northeastern Kentucky. There's a Walmart, there's a restaurant.
There used to be this great dive bar that has since closed, I believe, and look for the twenty two hundred residents piked In his home Native Barbara and Jeff actually spoke of it about that when we were there.
Piked In's considered a village and it is a small just a small little town that has a grocery store and a pizza shop, and gas stations and there's a tire shop. People sit and talk to the gas station, wherever, wherever they go. They people know each other and they just sit and talk. You know, at the tire shop you're waiting for a or an oil change or whatever. You just sit there and chat with your neighbor or whoever happens to come in. You probably know who it is.
You know somebody everywhere, or you know somebody that knows somebody everywhere anywhere you go.
I imagine that is probably like sometimes kind of enjoyable, and then other times it's probably pretty maddening.
Yeah, sometimes people know when when I spend the day in my pool or when I skip a day. If if there's a day goes by, I don't get in my pool. Next time I see someone else, they'll say, how come you weren't in your pool the other day. So it's crazy.
The majority of people we spoke with depicted piked in this way. Small town USA, everyone knows everyone, nobody ever locked their doors growing up. But when we started to pull back the curtain, it was clear that piked In harbored some dark secrets, secrets that didn't start with the rodents.
It seems like there's like two sides of piked In, which is one is like the blue collar hard workers who you know, want to raise their families the right way, and yet somehow something horrible still did happen to this town.
I think it's like every town, you're gonna find that wherever you go, there's going to be the ugly part, and piked In has it.
Jeff spoke to Stephanne, a former Pikedon resident who had recently left town. She shared barber sentiments about the community.
I want to ask you, so you now you're in Florida and you're away from Pikedon and all this, but it still seems like it's very much a part of your DNA, right.
I haven't been home since July a year before last, since twenty eighteen, and I just I don't know if I'll ever really like go back and live there. Ever.
You know, if you look back through the history of piked In, you know there's quite a bit of things that just happened that, you know, there's no explanation for get swept under the rug. I don't know.
I think there's just more evil there than just what happened to those eight.
Stephan's remarks left us unsettled, but when we followed up with investigative reporter Jodi Barr. He seemed to corroborate her thoughts with some troubling stories he had heard during his time covering the road in case.
This was national news the day after a few days after it happened.
But you know, as it typically.
Happens with the news cycles, you know, the national folks move on to.
The next big story.
We were left with that, and we would get emails and constant questions or phone calls about new information.
Is there anything to know? And there was nothing to know.
So my boss came to me and said, hey, can you go over and start digging into this and see if there's anything at all that we could find out. I was in Pike County a lot, and I kept getting stories about other homicides in Pike County, and I thought, Man, if there were that many homicides in a county, this small man, there could be something here that we don't yet know, and it's worth taking a look.
Through his research, Jodi discovered that there have been at least three recent cases in By County involving multiple homicides. Cases like the January twenty sixteen murders of Candace Newsom and her teenage daughter, Christina. They were both shot execution style in their home. Police finally did arrest the Newsom's
neighbor for their murders in twenty nineteen. Neighbor Christian R. Davis, was indicted by a grand jury, but did not plead, nor has he been convicted, but there was plenty of chatter on social media, none of which can be confirmed, mentioning the possibility of an accomplice to the murders still at large. Candace Newsom's sister, Darla has even spoken publicly she thinks that her sister and niece's murder may be related to the Rodents, stating that they ran in the same circles.
What struck me about Candace and Christina and was just the fact the similarities between, Like just the idea that in the middle of the night these people were gunned down in the in their homes while they slept. Just it is striking, you know, before even reading any other details, just hearing that when you're researching the road in case, you're like, well, that's weird. You know, that's fifteen minutes away. It's the same exact style of murder.
Yes, And it was just so odd that you had that type of crime in happening in a place like that.
Then in April twenty sixteen, just weeks before the Rodents were killed, Douglas Eatman and Carolyn and Tomlinson were shot execution style in their home. According to Jodi Barr, one detail of the crime struck a familiar chord.
A double homicide, four children left alive. This is very similar to the Rodent case.
I mean again, it's a striking coincidence that in the same area this is happening. In the same month, you know, the same month and year that the Rodents were murdered, this has also happened.
That's what led us down.
The path of even looking at these cases, because we had heard that there were other people who were shot no the night, execution style in their home.
When you're looking at.
The Rodent case and then you see these other cases in a county that small, you start asking yourself what the hell is going on, because it doesn't make sense that this is happening there unless there is some sort of common denominator. And it's still hard to believe today that there were these types of murders that took place in a county so small, with so few people living in it. I mean, you don't hear about that in big cities, and you sit back and you wonder to yourself, what is going on?
I mean, why is this happening.
Fortunately, police arrested Douglas Eatman's uncle Charles and his cousin James Allen, on suspicion of Douglas and Carolyn's murder. Each face is twenty to fifty years or life in prison, with enhanced sentencing for capital offenses also a possibility. The pair were indicted but have not pled or been convicted. The case is ongoing. According to investigators, it was a drug related killing. The motive for Candas and Christina Newsom's murders, however,
remains unclear. But beyond the methods of these killings, there's another thing that Jody told us about that ties them all together.
Then in some cases people get away with it for extended periods of time. Kendice Newsom and her teenage daughter Christina. It took four years before investigators charged a neighbor and family friend with murder in that And that's four years and the alleged perpetrator in that case is what a next door neighbor, and it took four years a piece. That together is just you wonder if Pike County if people were getting good at committing crimes and potentially getting away with it.
One case that remains unsolved is the two thousand and six murder of thirty four year old Curtis Francis and thirty year old Jennifer Brigett.
Kurt Francis and Jennifer berg At. You know, they were both shot and killed in their beds, in their homes in the middle of the night. And you know, when I'm looking through these incident reports of these murders and I go, WHOA.
This sounds very similar to the road case.
You know, two people shot in their bed in their homes in the middle of the night, and I thought, this is one we need to pursue.
But no one would talk.
We couldn't find out any information. All the search warrants were sealed at the courthouse and there's absolutely no arrest. Ten years later, there's nothing here. We are today still nothing. We're in a dead end and it may never be solved. And unfortunately there are other cases like that there that just didn't get the attention.
We're going to take a quick break here we'll be back in a moment.
Let's take one quick step back for a minute and really look at the Curtis Francis and Jennifer Burguett case. That's the couple who was also shot in their home while they slept in two thousand and six. They only lived about fifteen minutes down the road from the road in property. Fifteen minutes and to this day, that case remains unsolved.
For Angie Montgomery, Curtis Francis's cousin, it remains a devastating memory without closure. She spoke to Jeff about it.
I was shocked that I had never even heard of Curtis and Jennifer's case, because it's a pretty it's egregious that this happened and it's unsolved, and it just seems crazy that another in such a small community that something like this could happen again. And so what I would would love to do, and maybe it would kind of be to like walk through kurt and Jenny's case and kind of like explain who they were and any of the facts that you know about the case.
Well, Curtis was a very hard working, good guy, loved his family, loved hunting and animals, and fishing and all that stuff, and he would help anybody. And he was very protective. That's one word I like to use to describe him. Very protective of the people. We loved. Jenny was a good girl. It's always taking care of others. I think they just got messed up with the wrong people.
The wrong people and he's referring to are local drug dealers.
The most of the crime that happens around here, like carthev's and breaking and enterings and things like that, is from drugs. There's a huge problem with opioids and methodmphetamine here, huge and that probably does play a part in every almost every murder that's happened, probably in the past ten years. I think the people that killed my cousin lived I think four or five minutes up the road from Curtain Jenny. They were big druggillers, and Curtis owed in some money, supposedly for marijuana.
So you feel like you know who did it.
Oh, yes, I don't want to be that person, but I'm pretty blunt and upfront in the law enforcement here. They have mishandled Curtain Jenny's case from the rip.
When Angie says law enforcement, she's talking about the Pike County Sheriff's Office, the same agency heavily involved in conducting the Rodent murder investigation. In twenty sixteen, a plumber discovered a well that had seemed to have been mysteriously hidden with rocks and dirt. It was on a property that, according to eyewitness statements, was the last place Curtis Francis was seen on the night of his murder. The Pike
County Sheriff's Office was called in to investigate. Officers lowered a plumber's drain camera into the well and discovered what appeared to be burned clothes and a gun.
It was a thirty out six was at the bottom of the well and Curtis's pistol that was taken in nine of the murders, and that's what they were shot with, a thirty out six.
Both of them.
Curtain Jimmy with a potential murder weapon line just thirty feet down a well. The Pike County Sheriff's Office decided to use a curious tactic to recover the gun. They called in a fire truck to pump water into the well to try and push the firearm back up out of the well. Shaft so investigators could get their hands on it. It did not go as planned.
They blew the water down the well, which in turn made the ground break because of the force of you know, a fire hose could blow the skin off of it. So they did that. This is what they told us that happened. When they did that, it busted the ground loose. The guns went down into the ground, and that they don't have the money or the equipment to get them out, so they hired a guy to seal the well shut. He's a welder. He welded the well shut and that
was it. I think after this fiasco with the guns in the well, when the guns were found, and how they handled that situation and handled the possible murder weapons, I think they're ashamed, and they should be. They took probably the only hope we have of any type of physical evidence and blew it to snotherings basically, and nothing's been done with it since.
With Curtis and Jennifer's case going cold, Angie decided to pursue the killers herself.
I've spent years and years. I've got file after file after file of things I've done. I've actually went and got names I've went and talked to people. Well, I'm just going to be honest with you. I've done with the police. I've tried to do the police haven't done, which is talk to people, get information, you know, get date, get time, get people talking.
You know.
All you've seen Kurt that day, Okay, who was with him? What was his demeanor? Things like that. There's eyewitness statements, and I've tried my best to get somebody or anybody just to listen. It's pretty cut and dry, you know.
It's I've had a few people out of state that are like retired homicide investigators and stuff look at the case and tell me that they can't, for the life of them, figure out why there hasn't been an arrest made for the town that we you know, the size of our town, there's been a lot of murders here that have not been solved. It's ridiculous. But if I say what I think, I could probably end up in the river.
According to Jody barr Angie's thoughts about the Pike County Sheriff's Office are shared by many in the community.
The impression I got from the people in Pike County when I was working there covering the road and murders.
There was this belief among.
Almost everybody I talked to about incompetence when it came to law enforcement in that county and the lack of that sheriff's office ability to do a large scale murder investigation and carry that through to a prosecution.
And the man at the head of the Pike County Sheriff's office is none other than Sheriff Charles Reader. You've heard about Sheriff Reader before. He's the officer who stated he would stop at nothing to solve the Rodents case.
I've got a message for the killers.
We will find you, the family and the victims will have justice one day.
To a lot of people watching these news conferences, Reader's passionate campaign for justice was admirable, But to journalists like Jeff Winkler, Reader's determination, his mishandling of the road and investigation from the very start.
It was the largest mass murder in Ohio's history, and the law enforcement at the beginning, the local law enforcement was almost comically inept to handle such a large and bloody incident. They were just they weren't equipped to handle it. From the very beginning of the investigation, and they bungled a lot of stuff right from the get go. It was one problem after another.
Nearly a month after the bodies were found, Sheriff Reeder had key pieces of evidence, including the roadents, mobile homes, and automobiles, moved to a warehouse in the nearby town of Waverley. Jodie Barr was on the scene and told Jeff what he saw.
So I'm out of the warehouse where they moved these vehicles, the equipment from all the roadent properties where they moved the four mobile homes where these murders happened.
There's a large fence around this huge.
Outdoor lot and it is full of cars and ATVs, farm equipment, back hos, huge tractor trailers. So, as a reporter with you know, at least a small knowledge of the chain of custody of evidence. I know that with all this evidence just you know, fifty yards away from me, that you've got to have it secured somehow.
There's got to be a peace officer.
Someone there with a gun and a bat swore who swear an oath to uphold the laws in the constitutions of the state of Ohio.
They're guarding that that was not the case. Yeah.
So this it's the largest in criminal investigation in the state's history, right, and the main evidence is not getting watched.
There was no one in that parking lot watching that evidence. So when you drive up to a warehouse and you look and there's nothing between you and hundreds of pieces of evidence except air and opportunity, if that doesn't raise a red flag, I don't think you're doing your job.
I knew at that point time.
That there was something to explore here because potentially this evidence, if it's unguarded, they can't establish a chain of custody.
This entire investigation could be jeopardized. So that's why we took them.
We took Mike Allen, the former Hamilton County District Attorney.
We took him to Pike County. I called him and I said, hey.
I want to take you to Pike County. Here's what I found. I don't want to show you what I've found yet. I just want to take you to this warehouse and you give me your impressions of what we see there through the eyes of a prosecutor.
Here's Mike Allen.
Jody was on this thing like white on Rice, and I went up there living and that's when I noticed it too, and you know, you've got it. Seems to me it was close to thirty forty, maybe even fifty vehicles that had a fence around them. Well that's fine, but it would have taken an old man like me about ten seconds to climb over that fence and take something out of one of those vas vehicles, plant something, put something in one of the vehicles.
It just was not done right.
I mean, anybody involved in law enforcement, from the first week that you're at the police academy, you learned that you must preserve the evidence, and you must preserve that chain of custody of the evidence. And I don't know what, if anything, they pulled out of any of those cars, but if I were defending this case and they tried to introduce any of that evidence, I would be all over it and I would move to have the evidence excluded because it just was not properly secured.
So Jody began preparing a report about the evidence fiasco for newstation Fox nineteen and Cincinnati. Soon after, Jody and his crew were approached by Sheriff Charles Reader, who presented them with a curious offer. The Sheriff's office declined to comment, but here is Jody's side of the story.
He tried to make a deal with us to not hear that warehouse.
Yeah, and the deal was that he.
Was going to give us this unfettered access where we could do this first hundred hours with Charlie Reider after he learned the murders. If we wouldn't do this, that always That still sits for me today. It pissed me off then because I'm like, you know, what, what do you think we are?
We don't make deals. My photographer, how're you know? We got back in the car after that, We're going, what the hell just happened here? Never have we ever experienced that.
Let's stop here for another quick break. We'll be back in a moment. In June twenty nineteen, Reader was indicted on eight felonies and eight misdemeanors. These felony charges are not directly related to the road and investigation. He was accused of conflict of interest, theft in office, and tampering with evidence, among other nefarious activities. According to reports, we are also allegedly stole cash sees from drug arrest to
fund a gambling problem. Here's investigative journalist James Pilcher.
Yeah, he had a gambling addiction and he decided, oh, I'll just use my own forces money to feed it. Yeah, uh huh. Man, in places like this, and I'm not going to say it's necessarily a lack of journalistic outlets keeping cabs or whatever, but there's no accountability. There's nobody watching the watchers in these small communities, and in many cases that can lead to major corruption.
It's definitely worth noting that Sheriff Reader has pled not guilty to all of these charges. However, to Jody Barr, it's just another surreal event to what seems like a never ending bizarre story.
Reader was, you know, shouldered to shoulder with Mike DeWine, the now governor who was then the attorney general when these murders happened, that they together were updating the nation about what happened here in those days after the murders, and where you going?
Is this real?
Then you read what the indictment's alleged, and you read what the grand jury handed up, and then you know, you just have to assume if a grand jury is handing up an indictment, that there's been an investigation conducted. There have been facts gathered, a prosecutor has reviewed that,
I mean evidence, tampering and tampering with records. You're talking about a guy who led the sheriff's office and who for a time, a moment in time when this first happened, these murders first happened, who was also leading that investigation until the state came in and took it over. You just sit back and go, man, let's see where this ends. I mean, Pike County has been a crazy ride so ever since the end of April twenty sixteen, and it's
still right now. You've got people awaiting trial facing the death penalty on eight murders. The sheriff and dited removed from office. It has been an absolutely crazy half a decade.
There still the people of pikes And are torn about Sheriff Reader.
He put this town before him, He cared about Pike County.
Here's roadin family friend Brittany talking to Stephanie Leidecker.
If it wasn't for him, he for Charlie Reader, they wouldn't have came close to even finding out about the Wagners. Honestly, that's my opinion. How Come because he worked his ass off to find like that's all he did was investigate all of that. He didn't like, he didn't like he had done his job, Like he went and you know, like he was doing really well in Pike County, like keeping this, like getting the drugs off the streets and whatnot.
But he's still made effort, a lot of effort into the road In case.
Charlie had dedicated himself to getting justice for the road and family, and then he was booted, not that that long ago.
Apparently he was taking the money from the Rodent case for gambling, But honestly, I don't believe it because I don't know. I just don't believe that they just were finding reasons to get him out of office.
Andrew Montgomery holds a much different view of Sheriff Reader.
You know, now he's blaming his gambling habits on because what he's seen is the Rodent crime scenes have on iting so much he couldn't sleep, so he would go gamble. Well, unknown Charlie for thirty years, and he's been gambling way before this happened. And that's just that just to me shows you his character. You know, I'm going to use the death of eight people to try to smooth over that. I'm still in money off my county and gambling, and
that is discuss things to me. I just think there's a lot of dirty deeds that going around here, and I think that they will do anything they can to keep them covered up. Do we have a lot of crime here, yeah, because of drugs. Do we have a lot of drug activity here? Yes, way more than there was fifteen years ago. Is it safe here? I'm more scared of law enforcement than I am of the people
that killed my cousin. You're afraid to say anything when in all reality, yeah, some things are out there that you think because you go down a ton of rabbit holes. When you talk to two and three hundred people like I have over the course of two years, you find out a lot of crap and it does take you down those rabbit holes.
Is it true?
You don't know, but by god, it looks like something isn't right. Hike County is It's beautiful as far as landscapes, it's a beautiful place. You know. We're full of farmers and just down to earth people. But there's a lot of dirty people here too, and most of them are in power.
So with sheriff readers ethics being brought into question. Does this impact the charges brought against the Wagoners? Here's Jeff wein Glare again.
I would assume, you know, the charges against Reader, the felonies and the misdemeanors about being you know, through and through corrupt, and when it came to both law enforcement and financial dealings.
Yeah, I would assume this is going to affect a lot of things.
In fact, the prosecutor for the piped in area also just resigned. This just sort of makes you start thinking about everything that happened in the beginning. Now you're seeing these charges and these resignations, and you know, it doesn't speak well about finding any answers to this thing.
Every answer we get about what happened to the road and seems to leave more questions. So how through all of these other crimes did official zero went on?
The Wagner's Police received over eleven hundred tips, They conducted over five hundred interviews, tested about seven hundred pieces of evidence, served close to two hundred search warrants, subpoenas and other things. So this was something that was huge.
So when you read these indictments, you know they were talking about the Wagner's movements, even months before these murders happened, four months to plan this out. I mean, if that's every day for four months, that's the full time job. You know, they're hacking computers and there were surveillance cameras on those properties. If we already believe that the prosecution as a leg you know, this paints a very dark pick.
Everybody had started basically attacking them the community, accusing them of murdering those people.
One day, she was, I can't believe that they just won't leave us alone. They just will not leave us alone. We're starting to get really worried that we're going to be arrested.
More to come next week. Piked In Massacre is executive produced by Stephanie Leidecker and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound design by executive producer Jared Aston. Additional producing by Jeff Shane and Andrew Becker. The piked In Massacre is a production of iHeartRadio and Kat Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.