Hanna and Jake

Welcome to the piked In Massacre, a production of iHeartRadio and Katie Studios, the bodies.

Of seven adults and one sixteen year old boy were found in.

Four different locations along a country road in Pine County.

A small town nightmare comes to life in rural Ohio. Eight members of the road and family gunned down in cold blood in their sleep.

Just a nightmare scenario.

All of them shot in the head execution style is absolutely shocking.

The brutal murder spark 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, whom we believe the avalanche 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 is is 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 piked In Massacre, Episode three, Hannah and Jake. Over the course of the first two episodes, we've covered the details of the Rodin murders and learned about the family accused of carrying them out, the Wagoners. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a producer at KATI Studios. With Stephanie Leidecker and Jeff Shane, we worked on a documentary about the Roden murders back in twenty nineteen. Here's Stephanie.

If we're going to talk about the road in 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. I all accounts, the Roden 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 you pretty much said the same thing about them. They were all very hard working, very kind, and very generous. And we probably heard this the most about the matrix of the family Hannah's mother, Dana Rodin.

Here's one of Dana's oldest friends, Becky Ryder.

She is a very nice person, just a great mother and a great your wife to her husband.

Yeah, she's just so wrong, a good person.

As we listened to Becky described Dana Roadin, 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 Junior. She reminisced about Dana with Stephanie.

She had shorter brown hair. She always had the like curly and sometimes she was put like purple streaks in her hair, blonde streaks like I don't know. She liked that kind of weird stuff slumps in 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 on the four wheeler with Chris. Well, we were all riding in 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 the hill and Chris went and got his mom, and his mom like came up in the woods. It was like freaking out, and then she took care of me, gave me some eyes, she gave me some water, you know, being that whole.

Mom like are you okay?

Are you okay?

Do I need to call the ambulance? So that was always a good thing.

Dana met her husband, Chris Rhoden Senior, when she was in high school, and they fell in love immediately a few years later they got married. Here again, as Becky Ryder speaking to producer Jeff Shane, she remembered meeting Dana as a young wife who had found the man of for dreams.

Well, I met danae her and Chris 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 likns knew Chris Senior 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 a at you know, the things that he could do.

Together. Dana and Chris Senior raised three kids, Frankie, Hannah, and Chris Junior, but after more than twenty years of marriage, the relationship began to fall apart. Dana and Christina 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.

Nineteen year old Hannah Rodin was Chris Senior 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, but she wasn't stuck up or anything like that, and she lived life to the fullest.

But after her murder in twenty sixteen, it became clear that Hannah's life and the events leading up to her death were much more complicated than anyone I piked in could have known. All of this starts six years earlier, in the summer of twenty ten. Hannah had recently turned thirteen, and she starts dating a local boy named Jake Wagner. At the time, Jake was just shy of eighteen. The

She was a great mom like sometimes she would bring her her baby to school like the She would always come into minding Chris's class because we had American Government together, and she would always bring the baby in there and let our teacher, mister Krino, 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 hand on, like he would always be playing like, hey be outside baby, you know, non stop hand and he always kind of make sure that she, you know, had what she needed. Just very active with her and very protective of her. It seems 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.

Well. 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 in Sophia split time between the Rodent 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 great children. They absolutely adored her. They left her. They always wanted to, you know, go with her, and she would go out of her way to make sure that they were taking care of or, you know, on the holidays that they thought you know anything that cod you think she could give them and everything like that.

Dana Rohden's friend Stefanne 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 lives.

In twenty fifteen, 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?

We have a little bit of insight into that thanks to a signed affid David that Jake Wagner submitted, And this is just from his perspective, but what he claims is that he and Hannah split in April twenty fifteen, 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 to 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 get back with her, just everything that he could.

It's really hard to know what goes on in a relationship behind closed doors. Is it possible that Hannah felt as though she was being controlled by Jake or that she was in over her head and couldn't get out of the relationship. Is it possible that Jake Wagner's broken heart was really the reason that his entire family allegedly killed her entire family.

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 twenty fifteen 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

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 eighteen years old when she posted message, and she would be dead within a year. We're going to take a quick break here.

This period after Hannah May had broken things off with Jake Wagner that when she got with Charlie, it was sort of by what you would hope for, you know, everyone seemed to like Charlie Gilly, 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 twenty fifteen, the couple breaks up. Now, according to that same Fit David that Jake Wagner signed, he

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 was just saying that it's a whole bunch of bs and that Jake would just treat her like crap.

Ele Like, what did you think about that?

At the time, that she needed to get out of that relationship and not be associated with that family.

At some point this same summer, Hannah falls for another boy from piped in, Corey Holdron. 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 why she's been this way, why she you know, won't give me from the chance to explain myself, Like we could work on it, and it would because Lucia, we would be good to Yeah, I mean, it was just always Yeah. He was very

In August twenty fifteen, 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 Gilly, Corey Haldron, 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 was going to bring him back together. He as Hannah and was willing to bear, you know, for the birth. He was acting, 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 on him and Angela had went and bought

But behind the scenes, there are rumors that the once amicable cope parenting situation between Hannah and Jake is beginning to fall apart. According to Mike Gallon, attorney and legal analyst for Fox nineteen and Cincinnati, things soon reached a boiling point.

Two or three weeks prior to the murder, there's evidence that Jake Wagner and his father tried to get Hannah rode and to sign some documents that 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 would have been able to do. There was a custody battle between you know, the 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, because he had made the comments a couple of times, I mean, and I had to a couple

Right, People say stuff like that all the time, right.

It's right, like, especially when I'm upset as he was. I mean, he was just completely out of his mind. It really really upset him.

On April seventeenth, twenty sixteen, 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 twenty second, Hannah and seven members of her family are found murdered in their homes. Thankfully, the life of baby

I guess the worst thing I've ever seen. And when you see a mother, young mother just gave worth four days before and she's murdered right beside her child. Thank God they did not harm the baby. But you know, it doesn't get much worse than that.

Jeff Winkler spoke to us about trying to make sense of the killer's 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 ordeals, 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 as 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 attorney 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

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'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 trade.

He still wanted to be involved and still wanted to be there, so it was a very emotional time for him.

So he really wanted to be a part of Hannah's life and Sophia's life and Kylie's baby, Kylie's life.

Absolutely, he was still willing, I guess, to help with the child, help with you know, whatever Hannah would need.

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

With baby Kylie going to her father, Charlie Gilly, 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 Rodents that they were celebrating the expected birth of Kylie with the baby shower, the Wagoners were out shopping at Walmart for items that the prosecutor plans to introduce his 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.

Journalists Jodi Barr analyze the potential motive.

The older these kids get, the more they're going to look like their moms and dads who are 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 learned that Wait a minute, if everything is true that these investigators have a ledge 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,

It's a whole I mean it's generations of a family wiped out.

Yeah, then you think about, you know, in 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 or tell me about my

I mean, you google Rodent.

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 a you know, whatever happened that morning on Union Hill Road, you know it impacted a lot more than just those eight people who are 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. The legacy still lingers on with Dana's friend Stephane quite ashamed.

You know that paina may you know, just 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 they and I'll never see her kids, you know, grow up to 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.

On the one hand, you've heard I'm sure you've heard. I've heard that like whoever did this, you know, had like some sort of moral code that they wouldn't hurt the children and they wouldn't you know, harm the kids. But then on the other hand, it's like, but they left all these kids without a family, and so like that's almost worse in a way.

Yes, And I feel so sorry for the children. You know that they will never get to know their parents, you know, will never grow they'll grow up without their parents.

We know that the Wagoners 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 Wagoners 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.

On the surface, the Rodents appeared to be the salt of the earth, all American, very close knit family, and there were other things that led you to believe that all was now 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 the 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 three locations.

There's a grow operations.

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

More on that next week. Picked In Massacre there 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 Kati Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.