Hopper Road

and that's scary. This is the piked In Massacre Returned to Pike County, Season two, Episode ten, Hopper Road. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a television producer at Katie Studios with Stephanie Lydecker and Jeff Shane. Over the course of producing this series, we've spoken to several members of the road and family.

Because of a gag order and impending trials for the Wagner family, they have been unable to go on record, but earlier this year, one member of the family told us that her friend, a piked And resident named Angie Montgomery, wanted to share a story about her own family and a loss they had suffered some years back. Coincidentally, that same week, a listener wrote in asking about that exact case. So for this bonus episode, as we gear up to

the season finale next week, we decided to look into it. Angie, perhaps more than most people, can empathize with what the Rodents are going through. When we spoke to Angie, she had just heard about Jake Wagner's plea deal in the Roden murder case. This news hit Angie especially hard. She told us that she immediately reached out to her Roden family friend. I remember texting her. I'm just telling her

I was sorry. I had to hurt so bad knowing that you sat down to eat Christmas dinner with these people, you went to church with these people. So I can't imagine finding that out. Angie reflected back on the day the bodies of eight members of the Roden family were found. I think we lost our innocence that day. We lost our wholesomeness, our trust, we lost everything. It was like you weren't in a daze, this isn't happening, and you're like, where am I living? What's going on here? It's crazy.

Angie's bewilderment is, no doubt informed by her own tragic loss ten years before the Rodent family was gunned down. Her cousin Curtis Francis and his fiance Jennifer Burgett, were also murdered in Pike County, Andie spoke with producer Chris Graves about it. I know this is probably hard, but can you describe for me what happened to Curtis and Jennifer. On December ninth, two thousand and six, Curtis was at

his friend's house visiting. He had been drinking that day and having a little bit of fun, and Jenny had came down and told him that he needed to get home, and he laughed about ten thirty that night and went home, and his mother talked to him before he went to bed. It was about midnight, I think, and Jenny had talked to a friend I think about eleven thirty, so they were going to bed. And the next day a nine one one call came in that Jenny's mother had found

Curtis and Jenny. They had been shot in their bed. It was horrible. Curtis and Jenny were good people, you know. It was heartbreaking. It was just a shock. It's unsolved, correct, yes, fourteen years unsolved. It's a roller coaster. You go up and down. Every day you go up and down. You know today is going to be the day something's going to happen and nothing. Just before their murders, thirty four year old Curtis Francis and thirty year old Jennifer Burgett

were recently engaged couple living in Piked in Ohio. Your cousin, Curtis, can you tell me a little bit about him and what he was like. Curtis was a good guy. He had a good heart, would help anybody. He was a hard worker, lovedy family. He was very loyal, and he was a very good person. He was a little bit older than me, and we would see each other, you know, when we were younger, but we really hung out were when we got older, like teenagers and in early twenties.

During that time, we were pretty close. He was like more like a big brother to me. What about Jennifer, his fiancee. I'd like to call her a caretaker. She liked to take care of everybody. She loved animals, she liked to fish. She was a good soul. She had a good heart. And what were they like together? They were a cute couple. They were they would always joke around. Curtis liked to joke a lot and laughing and things. And they were just a normal couple, I guess, hard

working couple. Their murders just before Christmas in two thousand and six were a shock to everyone who knew the couple. Curtis and Jennifer were shot while they lie asleep in their home on Hopper Road in Piketon. It was later determined that the bullets that killed them were fired from a lever action rifle. I assume you guys tried to work with the police on this, right, How did that work?

At first? The families being told Jenny and Curtis's family, you know, we don't know who did this, we don't know what's going on. You know, that's law enforcement. You trust them. If they tell you, hey, we're working on this, we're going to get them. You know, you got to be patient, which everybody understands that you can't solve a murder in a day. Sometimes it takes a long time.

But after fourteen years of being told, going from we're working on it to not contacting at all, too well, we've went as far as we can go with this case. There's not really anything else we can do unless someone confesses or you know, something drastic happens that hurts. I think there was one article on it when it happened a few days after it happened in the local paper, and a few other media outlets picked it up and did a couple of articles, but after that there was nothing.

You feel like you're never going to get justice, and then you worry about, hey, you know there's someone on the loose that could do this to other families, and then that turns into kind of aggravation. Why is there anything being done? Why isn't this case important? Why is it my family important? But authorities had no answers. Eventually, the case that became known as the Hopper Road double murder when cold. Then in twenty twelve, there was suddenly

some movement. As part of his Ohio Unsolved Homicide's initiative, then Attorney General Mike Dwine revived the case, urging anyone with information to come forward. He caught wind and he went on Channel ten news station out of Columbus and featured the Hopper Road murders, talked about it. They had a deputy from the Sheriff's department and talk about it asking for tips. You know, anybody if they have any information.

We believe they are. There's a person or people out there who have information who would enable us to solve the case. We had gotten a new sheriff and he wanted to reopen the case and try to get some help with it. How did that make you feel that you feel like someone was actually paying attention to you? Guys? Yeah, we were excited. You know, this is that somebody's going to do something. You know, we've got the Attorney General in this Something's going to happen. They followed a few

leads and a few tips, but nothing came about. In twenty fourteen, the investigation was handed back over to the Pike County Sheriff's office. Didn't just slin code again. Two years later, in twenty sixteen, Jodi Barrd, then an investigative reporter at Fox nineteen in Cincinnati, received an email from a woman named Paula Horne. It's saying, you know something to the effect of my son was wrongfully convicted of murder. And then she says, I've got information in another cold case.

So of course that got my attention. I go and meet with this woman and what ended up happening was Paula Horne's son, Eric was convicted of a separate murder in Pike County a few years before Curtain Jenny were murdered. He was convicted of murdering Paul Schope, shot him, killed him. He was convicted of that, but Paula Horne was on a mission to have her son, Eric Horne, set free

from prison. Paula Horne was convinced her son did not do the murder, so she pulls this huge box out of a closet and it stacked full of papers and files. Paula Horne had collected a massive amount of documentation tied to her son's murder conviction, but it was documents within this archive pertaining to a different case that caught Jodie's eye, the murders of Curtis Francis and Jennifer Burgett on Hopper Road. As it turns out, Eric Horne knew Curtis Francis and

was with him hours before he was murdered. In this box of documents that Paula Horne had were email communications between the prosecution and Eric Horn's own attorney in their plotting how Eric Horne would plead guilty in one case and the state would use him as a witness in the double murder on Hopper Road. Okay, this was essentially Eric Horne saying, I will train information about this double murder for a plea deal in this Paul Shop murder.

So Eric Horne had written out a statement it's called a proffer, where he's getting investigator's information in one case to essentially help him in another. Eric Horn gave this proffer two investigators somewhere around September of two thousand and night. So over the next month or so, Eric from prison writes his mother a letter and he tells her about what happened the night that Kurt Francis and Jennifer Burgett

were murdered. According to his letter, Eric Horne told authorities that he was at a house on Wynd Road and piked in on December ninth, two thousand and six. That night, a group including Curtis Francis, had gathered at the home for a party. Horn claimed that he left the wind Road home at around ten thirty pm and nevisa Curtis Francis again. But Horne said that just weeks later he

ran into a man who was at the party. The man told Horn that he was forced to go to Curtis and Jennifer's house that night by his housemate, who shot the couple over a money dispute. Eric Horne never admits to having direct involvement with the actual murders themselves, but Eric Horne wrote in that letter that there was a lever action rifle that hung on the wall of the Howel's home on Wynn Road, and that after these murders happened, that gun was no longer on the wall.

We're going to take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment. The files collected by Paula Horn contained not only Eric Horne's statements, but accounts from other witnesses about the night of Curtis Francis and Jennifer Burgett's murders. What I was reading on them was unbelievable. There were witness statements out of an investigative file from the Pike County Sheriff's Office contained in this box of reds. So this box of records contained every document that somebody like

me could only dream of having. When you start investigating a murder that's ten years old at that point in time, and what she had in her possession were documents that ultimately provided a whole lot of answers for you know, kurta and Jenny's family. We went over every shred of paper in this case file. I made sure I understood who every person was, who these players are, how they were connected. My next job was then to go talk to the victims' families. So I went to Judy Conley,

who was Kurt Francis's mother. Jodi Barr revealed some of the other statements taken by police and their investigation into Kurt and Jennifer's murder to the family. These accounts, however, seemed to contradict what Eric Horn initially told authorities. Here again is Angie Montgomery. One statement is from a gentleman whose house Curtis was at the night that he got murdered.

He stated that his brother and his friend, Eric Horne, had left after Curtis had left, about ten thirty or eleven, and took a rifle off the wall and went and killed Curtis and Jenny, and that they came back with bloody clothes, and they got in the shower, took a shower, got the blood off of them. Took their clothes out in the yard and put them in a black trash bag and burnt them all at the command of his mother because apparently Curtis owed the mother's fiance three hundred dollars,

is what I was told. And then there's another statement, and they told the same story that they took a rifle off the wall, came back bloody, took a shower, burnt the clothes. Eric Horn denies any and all involvement in Curtis and Jennifer's murders. Jodi barr knew that the information he had could help track down Curtis and Jennifer's killers, but there was one problem. Jody couldn't get any more information from investigators. We can't pull the records in this case.

They're all under still this is still considered although it's cold. It's a pending open investigation, regardless of whether investigators are actively working it or not. These are not records you can get a hold of under the Open Records Act. So what do you have at that point? The only thing you have are the witnesses and family members who may have been in contact or who may have remembered something from back when this began. But I knew there

was something here. I just had to get somebody from the family to work with us, to help us. And then all of a sudden, this guy with his huge winner jacket walks in from the backyard and he's greasy, he's been working on a car. And it's Paul Francis. His brother is Kurt Francis. And Judy introduces us and tell him why why I am there, and his whole

demeanor changed. He looked angry, and I'm thinking, Okay, you know this is this is gonna be one of those where I get, you know, hauled out of the house by my collar and my belt loops. And all Paul tells me is, let's get in your car. I've got

something to show you. So Paul and I get in the car and we drive from his home over to Win Road and he walks me out to the edge of the property and he says, this is a well, and then he starts telling me the story about the story that this well told that he just so happened to find. Paul told Jody that in July of twenty sixteen, he was doing a plumbing job at the same house on Win Road that Curtis was last seen at the night of his murder in two thousand and six. By

this point, the previous owners had moved out. He's doing plumbing work, so he sees a waterline running outside with an electrical wire running out alongside the pipes. So he's trying to pull this water line up, and it gets to a point where he can't pull it up out

of the ground any longer. So then he just starts pulling this electrical wire and it, you know, it snakes across the yard and it goes down a hill under a pile of jump in the yard, as he described it, and he digs down and he finds this well shaft. Paul told me, in the back of his mind, the suspicion was that this could hold some sort of answer to his brothers and his sister in law's murder. He

told me he had a gut feeling about it. So Paul Francis called the Pike County Sheriff's Office in to investigate. By twenty sixteen, the department was headed up by Charlie Reader, who, as we know, would later be jailed on charge was related to corruption and office. At the moment when in twenty sixteen. What were you guys his feelings about Charlie Reader? Were you hopeful? Yeah, you're hopeful. With every new sheriff, he also had his hands full because the Rodent massacre

had just happened. We knew that sources were probably stretched, but we also thought the BCI, the FBI, they're already down here in our county. That gave us a little bit of hope of maybe, hey, they'll the sheriff will say something and they'll pick up on this too. We were very hopeful that he would do something and something would would happen. So the sheriff, Charlie Reader, paid a local plumbing company to run a plumber's camera down the well. They were able to capture images of a handgun and

then this lever action rifle. I mean that is very similar to the gun that Eric Horne described in his two thousand and eight letter that he sent his mom from principal. Let's stop here for another quick break. We'll be back in a moment. Authorities also found burnt clothing, a detail relayed and Ericorn's statement this could have been the break in the case. The only physical evidence that

we know of was down a well. Shaft, and the Sheriff's office was just feet away from being able to get their hands on it, bag it, process it, and potentially prosecute somebody in the Hopper Road double murder. So then they were faced with the task of how do we get these guns out of this well. It's an eight inch pipe, you know, that goes down into a well. So they tried with a magnet, I was told, and

when that failed, they called in a firetruck. The idea was to use the fire hose to fill the well with water, which wouldn't turn lift the guns back up to the surface for authorities to retrieve. But things did not go as expected. They place the fire hose in the pipe and turned the water on. It blew the bottom of the well out and knocked like an eighty foot hole in the well, took the guns with it. Sheers off is ultimately ends up getting a welder out there.

The welder wells of plate over top of this well, and that's where it sat since July of twenty sixteen. And you know, here we are years later. The likelihood that it's ever recovered, it's not looking very good right now. How did that feel for you guys? Horrible. Um, I'm gonna get emotional and felt horrible anger. You know this is that was probably the biggest break we'll ever get in that case. In this case. Ever, despite potential evidence

being lost, Jodi Barr pressed on with his investigation. In twenty seventeen, he went forward with a series of reports on the Hopper Road double murder case. The Pike County sheriff at the time, Charlie Reader, when I was looking into this case, told me that he developed a cold case unit within a sheriff's office and he had some season law enforcement officials, investigators, criminal profilers on this team, and they were looking into the Hopper Road cold case.

So I got an interview with those four men, and I wanted to know more about the well. I wanted to tune them about this evidence in the bottom of this well. I wanted to know I named all the names that were contained in these witness statements. You know. I had all four members of this cold case unit sitting in front of me in an interview inside the Sheriff's office, and all I got from this cold case unit was no comment. Every question was a no comment.

Have you been able to develop any type of motive profile of the suss no comment, so you know we were at the enter the road. Jody's reporting on Curtis and Jennifer's murder also received some pushback from the Pike County community, mainly due to his interactions with Sheriff Charlie Reader. At the time, the people in Pike County that's seen Jody's airing of the Hopper Room murders had a different perspective on mister Barr because of the investigation he did

at the road and warehouse with mister Reader. Mister Reader had got on Facebook and had a huge rant aimed at mister Barr, and I like to say they drink mister Reader's kool aid. People were saying, you know, this guy's just down here to make the Pike County Sheriff's office and Charlie Reader look horrible. And so I had a lot of people messaging me saying, I can't believe that your family would let that guy do a report on this case. And you know, he's just a troublemaker.

He isn't even from around here. And I would always bite back and say, at least he cares. You know, he's the only one that cares Jody, and I meanness with all my heart, and I hope I can get it out without crimes. He really does care about my family. He is in constant contact with me. He has helped me, he has listened to me cry. He's just as aggravated as we are. He's a very caring person and he

and he's a godsend. Jodi Barr's reporting helped raise awareness about Curtis and Jennifer's murders, but police were seemingly unable to make any progress. Still today, no one's been arrested. Curtain. Jenny's family have no more answers today than they had when we rolled out of Pike County for the last time and aired the final broad cast into this case. From your extensive investigation, it seems as though investigators know what might have happened to Curtis and Jennifer and who

may have done it. Why do you think there has been an arrest, That's my question. I don't know why there hasn't been an arrest. I don't know the investigators just didn't have enough. I don't know what else was needed to finish his investigation. You've got people in these statements telling stories that you know, spell out what happened. When you know the people who were identified in these statements as having gone to this murder scene committed these

crimes and came back home. So I don't know why or what or where investigators are at this point in time. This is we're fifteen years down the road and no arrest. So as far as the family's concerned, and I talked to them regularly still today, I mean, they just they feel like this was a miscarriage of not even justice. They didn't get that far. It's just an incomplete investigation.

You just hope one day you'll be able to finish the story because at this point, you know, two people are dead and it appears that whoever did this is you know, gotten away with murder. But that won't be the case if Ai Montgomery has anything to do with it. You're still on this mission to get answers, to get justice, and also to make sure that it doesn't happen to

another family. Right. I got my kid up where they were a little bit older, I had a little bit of time on my hands, so I started going full force with getting the Hopper Road cased out into the public speaking. I went to the prosecutor, spoke with him a few times. I went to the sheriff's we had an interim sheriff when mister Reader got suspended. We're told just hang on, you know, helps coming, and it never does. And I noticed that it's always when I get really

rowdy squeaky. Will gets the most grief. When I start squeaking, I'll get a phone call, hey, you know, just hang on. I'm going to figure something out, and nothing happens, and we're tired of it. That's what I get the most emotional about is just feeling like nobody cares. And I can't imagine what curtain Jenny's mom their mothers feel like. That's another thing that puts the fire under my ass. It's never it's not going to bring them back. You'll

always have a hole in your heart from that. But I would love to see someone get arrested for Curtis and Jennifer's murder and get prosecuted and that we get justice. For more information on the case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at Katie Underscores Studios. Next week, we'll be bringing you the season finale, where a full panel of contributors will answer listener questions, so please write us with anything you want to know. This week is your

last chance to get the questions in. The Piked and Massacre Returned to Pike County is executive produced by Stephanie Lydecker and me Courtney Armstrong. Editing and sound designed by executive producer Jared Aston. Additional producing by Jeff Shane, Andrew Becker, and Chris Graves. The Piked and Massacre Returned to Pike

County is a production of iHeartRadio and Katie Studios. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.