Welcome to the piked In Massacre, a production of iHeartRadio and Katie's Studios. This is episode ten Wild Country. In this episode, we're going to be answering a bunch of questions we've received over social media. We are also going to be going deeper into some subjects we've only touched on and talking about some stories we haven't been able to tell. I'm Courtney Armstrong. I work at Katie's Studios
with Stephanie Leidecker and Jeff Sheen. Just as a legal reminder, Angela, Billy Jake, and George Wagner were charged with aggravated murder. Angela Wagner's mother Rita Joe Neucomb and Billy Wagner's mother, Frederica were both charged with obstruction of justice and perjury. Nucom was also charged with forgery. All six of them pled not guilty, and our justice system presumes innocence until guilt is proven.
Ali from Ormond Beach, Florida asked us about the drugs and how they relate to the case and if there's anything else in the piked In area that pertains to drugs that we should know.
So. One of the big theories behind the murders. We explored was drugs and the fact that the Rodents did have a pretty large marijuana grow operation on their property. But it's not just specific to the Rodent or even specific to Piked. In the immediate area is kind of a hotbed that's been affected by drugs in myriad ways.
For starters, there's not a ton of jobs, and that has really taken a toll on the town. And just generally speaking, Ohio.
And the southern part of the state has been devastated by drug abuse, mostly prescription painkillers and heroin. In Pike County, the drug overdose mortality rate from twenty fourteen to twenty eighteen was more than seventy one deaths per one hundred thousand population. The rate for the rest of the country was twenty seven deaths per one hundred thousand. That's nearly three times the mortality rate of the rest of the country. A lot of these drugs come in from Portsmouth.
Portsmouth, Ohio, is the neighboring town to Pike and so about a fifteen minute drive I spoke to investigative reporter James Pilcher, who did an incredibly deep dive into Portsmouth into the larger picture of what's happening in southeastern Ohio.
Sportsmith, which is in the next county over on the river south of Pike County in Piketon, is known as ground zero for the pill mill epidemic. That's where pill mills and the opioid epidemic is known to have had a major hotspot way early on in the late nineteen nineties early two thousands, when the oxycon first hit the market.
And tell me what a pill mill is.
A pill mill is where a doctor who for whatever reason isn't there to see clients, somebody just shows up and you just hands some prescription for money, and then they get the prescription there and then right next door is a pharmacy and then they just put it in and then those people get the pills because it's legal in that state. They might drive them home to Florida and then sell them for ten times the price or trade them or whatever. But it was unregulated in Ohio
at the time, and Kentucky was bad too. Kentucky had the same issues. So right there enforcements right there on the Ohio River bordering Kentucky, so you had both sides of the river. So there were cars lined up from Florida and West Virginia and Georgia up and down all over town for a decade, and it just ravaged the city, which had already been decimated by you know, the pullout of industrialization, and so all of that kind of flooded in.
You have all of these, you know, an economically depressed area, all of a sudden, addiction becomes a major major issue. People are driving from all over the country because it's easy to get the pills there.
And then of course there's also the people who get into kind of the illicit activities to make money, right.
Absolutely, absolutely, a cottage industry of crime and drug associated kind of sprung up, and you know, started to do my own reporting on it. So one of our editors worked as the managing editor of the Portsmouth Daily Times, which is the daily newspaper there in the early twenty ten, and so he was very familiar with the rumors that
had been circulating around about Michael Moran. Moran had already been a city council but he wasn't on city council anymore, but he was still well known within the legal circles and chamber of commerce, and he did some work pro bono work about legal defense, but he always seemed to
have a pretty girl in his army. In December of twenty eighteen, a now former reporter with that newspaper put out on Facebook segments of a federal affidavits from the Drug Enforcement Administration, which basically laid there and put out for public viewing. That's the federal law enforcement was investigating the very same rumors that have been following Moran around for years, that he was running girls and running drugs, and that this was who he was.
It's important to note that Michael Moran has not been arrested or charged with any crimes. Also that Moran has categorically denied all of this.
My editor at the time, and I was working as an investigative reporter at the Cincinnati Enquirer, said would James be interested in taking a look at this? And I'll be honest, I thought, I didn't think it was real at first. I thought there was no way that this is as bad as they say it is and whatever. So I took a drive out there. The partnered me with a woman photographer whom we went out there a
couple of times, and I'll never forget it. We were doing some b roll shoot shots in front of a pseudo abandoned shoe factory with graffiti about hookers and things like that, and a guy comes running up and says, what are you doing? And I told him and I said, by the way, ever heard of Michael Moran. He says, oh, yeah, that guy runs women. So this was not a secret in Portsmouth. Everybody knew the rumors and had known somebody
that knew somebody that had worked for him. It was going on that he was running women all over the country. He was promising women drugs for sex. He had relationships with judges and with members of law enforcement, all of it. So you know, all of this is in a federal document we're talking about.
It's like human trafficking, right, yes.
So so you know, some people this is an interesting distinction. Some people will say, oh, well, these women knew what they were doing, they were just trying to make money. Well, if you talk to the experts, it went one step
beyond that. It went into trafficking because Moran was holding over them a the fact that they were drug addicts, and he would withhold their money or withhold their wherewithal to get drugs, which under federal statute and Ohio statute is a form of trafficking B. He was intensively promising more lenient sentences because he had friends in the legal system.
I'd like to point out here that we reached out to Michael Moran as well as the prosecutors involved. Neither side got back to us with comment.
So I talked to some folks, but getting those first initial people to talk, that was their big fear, is they these women just weren't afraid to go to jail. They were afraid for their lives. And the reason they were afraid for their lives is the name of one woman, and that's Megan Lancaster. Meghan was a known prostitute in the late two thousands in Sciotra County. If you talk to her sister in law and you talk to other people who knew her, she worked for Mike Moran. Meghan
got hooked on drugs early on in high school. Shortly out after high school. If you talk to her sister in law, who has led the charge, he started partying later in high school and out of high school, and that led her, according to our sources, into the circle
of Morane. So Moran would hire her out for bachelor parties, and you know Katie Lancaster, her sister in law, even tells the story about her running into Megan wearing Christmas lingerie in a Walmart picking something up on her way to a Christmas party where she was the entertainment for a bunch of Moran's friends. And she mysteriously disappeared, so
we can't even say she was murdered. Her car was found of blood on it, the door was left wide open, half parked in a local fast food joint there in downtown Portsmouth, and they have not found hide nor hair of her. And I can tell you there are a lot of places in Sciota County where you can hide a body. It's full of hollers and dips and forests, and it's wild country. It really is wild country. The glaciers came through and cut a bunch of stuff, and
it's it's beautiful, but it's also wild country. And a flew of women went missing or got killed that were addicted prostitutes, sex workers up in Ross County, in Chilcoffee, which is two counties to the north. Since twenty ten, more than a dozen women have either been killed or gone missing in Ross County which is the county north of Pike County, which is probably an hour forty five minutes north of pikedn in Chilicothee. So Megan, A lot of people theorized that Meghan might have been wrapped up
in something that got those women killed. But there's a lot of thought and there's a lot of theory or rumor that now that that was separate from what happened to her, and what happened to her points back to possibly Michael Marine that he.
Would want to silence her for some reason.
Yeah, these are powerful men taking advantage of addicted, unempowered women.
And so how would you say, like Michael Moran in tying this back to the road in case Michael Moran and the situation in Portsmouth, I think just speaks to this community, which I think includes Piked In as people. You know, these men in power are kind of doing what they want. And you know, when you look at Sheriff Rider, who handled the investigation for the road and murder, he was also doing what he wanted. You know, now he's indicted on all these charges of you know, theft from the county.
Yeah, and so you know, you can the parallel if you're wanting to make a parallel to the road in cases absolutely either a you had ineffectual or corrupt or both law enforcements, right you had a community or a culture of lawlessness that has descended on upon many play in rural America. I will also say there's a major issue in small town America with the quality and quantity of law enforcement that happens there and the lack of accountability. Because nobody's watching, you might.
Be wondering how the crimes in Portsmith fit into the Road and Family case. While we probably know that Michael Moran and what's happening in Portsmouth is not directly related to the Road and murders, it does speak to the distrust and lack of accountability in law enforcement. It's this idea that all these men in power, from judges to attorneys are involved in these crimes and their cover ups. It raises a pretty unnerving question who do you trust
if you can't trust elected officials and law enforcement. Furthermore, this influx of drugs and lack of accountability from law enforcement and the haphazard way piked and authorities tried to recover some seemingly very important evidence is basically exactly what reporter James Pilcher outlined so well in his work.
Yeah, it seems really systemic in the area and specifically too piked in and that impacts everything from the top down. Let's stop here for a quick commercial break. We'll be back in a moment. Mike Land from Hoboken, New Jersey, asked if there were any other personal stories we'd heard from people along the way that hadn't made it into the podcast, and here are a few that stand out to us.
The relationship between Frederica Wagner and Angela Wagner, her daughter in law, has been the basis of a lot of conversation that it was a troubled relationship and that Angela and her husband were vicious fighters. And we even have heard from a very close source that Angela would actually have to put a little sedative in Billy Wagner's shakes every day because that would lower his temper and that's how she would survive the day. It just paints a picture,
whether this is true or not. Here Angela enters the Wagner family. She's feuding with her now mother in law, the matriarch of the family, Frederica, her husband I don't know how tall he actually is, but he's a tall presence of a man, and you know, allegedly hot tempered. So Angela is trying to survive this new dynamic homeschooling her boys and sedating her husband and feuding with her mother in law. It just paints a very complicated picture.
It does. And because I can be pedantic of allegedly drugging her, but other stuff we did here because I spoke to the same person who was a family member, it was someone who was a family.
They were there.
This is apparently first hand account correct.
And part of that which I thought also painted such an interesting picture was, like you said, the Wagners were known really widely to have get into it with the fights. And what this source said to us was that she was at the family home, at the Wagner family home, and she commented that Angela had very many decorative baskets all over and she said those are very beautiful. And Angela allegedly said, well, every time we get into a fight and Billy needs to apologize, he buys me another
basket because I like him. And so just picturing this house filled with decorative baskets, each one emblematic of an argument, just an interesting picture. Here's a rich question and it comes from Aaron from Malvern, New York, and she asks how to Sheriff Reader play into the investigations and how mighty play into the upcoming court trials. He complicates this,
I mean, he's been accused of many things. In court documents filed just last month, they alleged Reader of misappropriating about fifteen thousand dollars and SEES funds and borrowing six thousand dollars from employees, which can be seen as coercion. The records also accuse him of circumventing rules at auctions to improperly get impounded vehicles for his family, so to
his benefit. Additionally, the court alleges that Reader on June twenty seventeen, seized seven thousand dollars that prosecutors call quote
possible proceeds of drug trafficking. So these are charges that have gone for several years, and there's even new allegations that charge him and engaging in a pattern of corrupt activity, which is a first degree felony, and prosecutors have long used the charge as a way to attack organized crime figures and major drug dealers by seeking long prison sentences. So the fact that they're using this against a sheriff is interesting strategy.
You know. The issue is now that his character is being called into question, and according to sources we've talked to, the criminal justice experts agree that if Reader is found of any wrongdoing, it could pose obstacles for the prosecution in the trials against the Wagners.
You know, Reader was the frontman of making everybody feel at ease that the investigation was being handled, but frankly was kind of doing a messy job from the jump.
Yeah.
I mean, in theory, you could look at every single case Sheriff Reader took the lead on and wonder what he was doing behind the scenes in order to make
an arrest, which would include the rodent investigation. On the other side of that, though, you know, what experts are saying is that the prosecution might argue to the judge on the case that Reader's criminal history isn't relevant to the Wagner trials and thus shouldn't be heard by a jury, and they'll do that by downplaying his role in the investigation. And if that becomes the case, then it won't necessarily
be a death blow to the state case. Another expert was quoted as saying in the press, officers are human beings like everybody else, and so sometimes juries can weigh in on that and decide what kind of credence they want to give to his behavior.
Shriff Frieder also potentially jeopardized the investigation by having the Rodents cars and mobile homes moved off site, which Attorney Mike Allen an investigative reporter Jodi Barr talked about in episode five. So Shriffrieder's involvement is far reaching and it has the potential to effect in multiple ways, not only during the investigation but moving forward with the trials.
Yeah, there was something else early on in the investigation that happened that really did cause a stir and that's the road in autopsy reports, And for some reason these were held up in being released to the media outlets, which is something that happens occasionally in criminal cases, but it garnered a lot of attention specifically with the road in case.
Probably the reason why is oftentimes autopsies are not released to the public because there might be a hell or something very significant in those autopsy reports. For example, this is just top of head not related to the Wagner
or Roding case at all. If somebody had a certain tattoo marking or had been cut in a certain way that only the perpetrator slash killer would know, then authorities don't want that information to be wildly known because it's something that would be helpful to know if there was a confession, for example, So if somebody confessed, they would know that information. So that is not entirely uncommon, although in this case it seems that was not the reason why.
Yeah, it's speculated that it's not the reason why. And this is this one actually all the way up to the Ohio Supreme Court. Two outlets, the Columbus Dispatch and the Cincinnati Inquirer, sued the state for the right to the autopsies. The suit was filed against the Pike County Coroner, David Kessler, and that came after the Dispatch was denied three separate times officially asking for the final autops reports.
And what the Dispatch's claim was was that the final autopsy reports are of great public interest and quote significant value to the Dispatch and our news gathering activities.
The authorities really were apprehensive to release the autopsy information, arguing that the release could hinder the investigation. I wonder, just to harp on this a little longer, like what was the city, like what was Pike County really trying to protect?
You know?
Four times, three times seems like a lot of times to continue to fight the release of this, and now that we know what they say, like what in there was so damning to the investigation? You know, it's just like seems like a lot.
Well. I actually spoke with attorney Jack Grenier, and he was one of the lawyers who filed the suit on behalf of the dispatch, and he had some really compelling thoughts.
You have to kind of wonder, in light of the trouble that the sheriff ultimately got into, what was motivating the desire to keep things kind of quiet, Because is a pretty good example of, in my view, law enforcement overreacting. And I say that kind of cautiously because you know, it's say it was multiple murders in a gruesome situation. But I think the.
Idea of you know, you just have to withhold as much information as you possibly can.
From the public, and even maybe more information than you're allowed to withhold, is to me an overreaction and I think we saw that in this case. You know that somehow, you.
Know, if any piece of information got out.
There would somehow derail the whole investigation.
I just I just don't buy into that.
The Inquirer really argued that it was in the public's best interest to know what the autopsy said and to review. I meant, what we learned from the autopsies is pretty important in terms of what happened to the rod Ends. We learned how many times they were shot, where they were shot, which really did speak to how personal the crimes were. Some of these family members were shot multiple times in the face with a shotgun, and so if this was a drug cartel hit, you know, it wasn't
once and quick. It was personal and it was an overkill, which is what we learned from the autopsies.
Once these autopsies would be released, here we go again, more questions with few answers, and sure enough, that's exactly what happened. Thankfully we have this information and we could actually really look at these autopsy reports in great detail, and I can speak for myself saying it was really dark and twisted when you really do see just how much to your point, Chef of an overkill.
This really was.
Yeah, it made me think like what releasing this autopsy would do to the town of piked In and speaking to a fair amount of the residents and just the feeling of uncertainty. I don't know how it would if it was a good thing or a bad thing, because the people in piked In were thinking it was a drug cartel who did this prior to the autopsy release,
and that created a sense of fear. But then I think after the autopsies were released, people started circling in on the Wagners and really thinking they did it, which created a whole other set of problems in terms of this kind of small town justice that the Wagner's faced, whether they deserve it or not, creates a whole new problem for the sheriff's office.
Let's stop here for another quick break. We'll be back in a moment. So we were talking about the informant, which we've covered in the past, but I know there's been some other questions out there.
Yeah, so Woody from Comack, New York asked us on social media about the likelihood that the informant is in fact one of the Wagner four.
I'm obsessed with understanding more about the informant personally, So you definitely think it must be a family member.
Who must is a strong statement. I think the likelihood, I think it seems likely only because if this family allegedly did commit this careful, careful, planned out murders that they spent months planning, why would they then be so careless and have someone else involved enough with the information that they could turn state's evidence. So to me, it says that if they kept it all within the family, then necessarily it would have to be someone in the family.
It's unknowable at this point, but that's what makes sense to me.
Is it possible that it's Rita Angela Wagner's mother because she would have maybe been witnessed of some of these conversations. I mean, it's possible that it's any of them, assuming it's one of the four. Let's just play this out for a second. If Courtney, if you're correct, and it's one of the four of the Wagners that are the accused. To me, if one of them was going to fold, George, the eldest son, seems the most likely, And for that I say simply because he had the least amount of
skin in the game. If he wasn't fighting for his niece solely, you know, he wasn't you know, maybe supercharged by love the way Jake was. He wasn't supercharged about protecting his children the way Angela maybe was about her son Jake and her granddaughter. We know the dads potentially had some sort of a confrontation leading up that could be you know, charged by emotion. But that said, he turns now he's the one asking for solitary confinement in
a bible. The fact that they were trying to get George Wagner off on bail very recently, that would speak to this as well. That A, he's the informant b just through the basic ways that you would be released from prison on bail. They made that attempt. It was unsuccessful on the behalf of the defense, but that is
interesting strategy. By the way, how shocking would this be if George Wagner, the eldest son, had to actually appear in court and testify against his mother and his father and his younger brother Jake.
That would be shocking. So while it is all speculation, it is all possible, and several reputable sources have said it's not the most unlikely thing. Just as a legal reminder, Angela, Billy Jake, and George Wagner were charged with aggravated murder. Angela Wagner's mother Rita Joe Nukomb and Billy Wagner's mother Frederica were both charged with obstruction of justice and perjury.
Nucomb was also charged with forgery. All six of them pled not guilty, and our justice system presumes innocence until guilt is proven. Jody Barr, who we heard from throughout the course of this podcast, has summed up pretty well how the three of us feel about this case.
Soby this is a case that I think about it.
I'm pretty sure every day.
And you know again, that's why I'm very eager to hear from Yeah, I just want to see this trial. I want to know more about what happened here and if they really do have the right people. Sounds like they do. I mean, these indictments are.
Very linked in very detailed, but that's only.
One side of this. I want to hear from the Wagoners and see if they have an explanation because at the end of the day, when the last trial is held and the last jury, if it gets to that point, you know, I would hope that the Rodent family can walk out of that courtroom and know for sure that the people who did this are the people who go to prison for it. I can't think of a better way to hand down justice.
We've talked about this a lot, and people ask us, you know why we work in crime investigations in general, and I think their truth is victims have a voice even after death, and for us, we really do want to share our deepest sympathy with the Rodent family.
I think the point of this podcast is to really angle towards shining light on the injustices that the Rodent family faced and help bring a sense of closure and answers to the surviving Rodin family.
Well.
I think also when the Wagners finally do have their day in court, our hope is that the Rodents finally see justice.
Piked In Massacre is executive produced by Stephanie Leidecker and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound designed 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.