To Protect & Serve

with nobody good pointing but myself. If I could go back and change it, I would a million times. This is not who I am. Never ever did I imagine myself on the defense side of this court route that I've spent twenty five years of my life in this county in law enforcement. I am a good person, make bad decisions and choices I have, and I'm out pray that the work will find mercy on me. This is the Piked and Massacre returned to Pike County season two,

episode five, To Protect and Serve. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a television producer at Katie Studios with Stephanie Lydecker and Jeff Shane. On the morning of April twenty second, twenty sixteen, the Pike County Sheriff's Office responded to calls of multiple homicides in what would soon be considered Ohio's most notorious mass murder. The bodies of seven adults and one sixteen year old boy were found in four different locations along a country road in Pike County. We know all of these victims

all members of the Roden family. The shooting ste left the town of Piked and numb a lot of unanswered questions as to how this unfolded and who is responsible for that. As news of the tragedy emerged, the nation turned to the area's top law enforcement official for answers. Pike County Sheriff Charlie Reader to give a brief update on what we are doing at this time. I have deputies from my county and other counties that are keeping the scenes secured. Here's reporter James Pilcher. He's the one

updating the media. He's the one who is available. He's the one when you wanted to ask how things are going, he was the one that you call. So he began the face of the investigation early on. This investigation is very large, one, probably the largest in Pike County that we've ever had and been a part of. It's very tragic. I want everybody to be patient, but understand that we are working around the clock, twenty four hours a day, but this is going to be a very lengthy process.

Reporter angeinet Levy covered many of Reader's briefings during the course of the road and murder investigation. You know, he was out in front of this standing next to the Attorney General at the time, doing press conferences with him, and he often became very emotional and people there were a lot of people in Pike County who really really liked him. You came in like thieves in the night and took eight lives, some being children. We are getting closer.

The family and the victims will have justice one day. Charlie Reader, by all accounts, as somebody who grew up in Pike County. He did not come from a well to do family or anything like that. A lot of people out in Pike County or poor. He worked for many years for the Pike County Prosecutor, Rob junk He was his investigator, and at some point Charlie Reader was appointed the sheriff by the Democratic Party in Pike County. Criminal defense attorney Mike Allen remembered Readers twenty and sixteen

landslide election. He got seventy five percent. Approbably got twenty five percent. It's pretty unheard of in any kind of election. So at one point he was pretty popular sheriff. There were a lot of people in the community who felt that he did some good things at the Sheriff's office when he first took over. They felt like he was

clean up crime in the streets. Southern Ohio has a very major brug problem with hopioids in methemphetamine, and fenton al in all of it, and a couple members of the community claimed that Reader really was there for the family after one of their members that died from a drug overdose and helped plan a memorial three in his honor. So he was very approachable. He was out and about in the community much more. Charlie Reader branded himself as the people's sheriff during the height of the road and

murder investigation. Sheriff Reader's passionate pleas for justice earned him the trust of his community. As a sheriff of Pike County, or a three hundred and fifty six days into this investigation, I've got a message for the killers. We will find you, we will arrest you, and you will be prosecuted. As this case moved forward, the spotlight grew brighter and brighter in that area because of this case, and I think he enjoyed the spotlight to a degree, and I think

he had greater political aspirations as well. Here's producer Chris Graves speaking with investigative reporter Jodi Barr. He covered the road and murder case for Foxnews nineteen and Cincinnati. What kind of power does a sheriff wield in a community like Pike County. He was the closest to the people of Pike County, and you see that with a lot of elected officials in more rural areas that you know, the sheriff is literally the top dog in the county.

He is the face of law enforcement. He controls what happens with law enforcement, where patrols happened. So as far as an elected official, as far as a person holding power, your sheriff in these areas, he is the man. Can something like that go to someone's head? You've worked in law enforcement, yourself for quite a while. Oh yeah, you see it a lot police chiefs or sheriffs or somebody

who's recently promoted to a supervisory position. I mean, thank goodness, it doesn't happen to a lot of them, but some of them does. Now. Whether that happened here or not, I don't know, but yeah, that very much could happen. As the Road and investigation moved into its second year, some disquieting rumors about Sheriff Frieder began to surface. As we began to spend more time out there, we started hearing the rumblings that there was some corruption out there.

We had heard rumors about him intimidating people and possibly taking money from people who were in the drug dealing business. I know, I for one, was told by some of my law enforcement sources in the Cincinnati area, Hey, you need to be careful around him. He's dirty. And these were just people that were my sources who said, you know, look, I just want you to be aware, be careful. Was it because they were afraid they didn't trust him? They

did not trust Charlie Reader. There was a rumor that he was sexually harassing some female employees when he worked at the Ross County Juvenile Detention Center. Records from his personnel file said that he wasn't the right fit and there were too many questions. He had a lawsuit in small claims court in nineteen ninety five and Galli Police four not paying a debt and there was a warrant issued for him, but he ended up paying it. So, I mean, there were some things out there. There appears

to be two sides of Charlie Reader. One that you know, the public sees, and they saw it in these naturally televised broadcast press conferences where a reader is very emotional talking about these Rodent murders very early on. And then there's something you see in Charlie Reader where when reader is challenged, you see another side of Reader. So he's got a very public face and a very private face.

Then oh yeah. Investigators recently too vehicles that had been parked at the homes where eight members of the Rodent family were found shot to death in Pike County, Ohio last month. The four mobile homes themselves where the bodies were found, will be removed from the scene to be stored at a location in nearby Waverley. Going to get out to investigative reporter Jodi Barr live in Pike County. While I was in Pike County, I started seeing things

that I had to question. What we found at that evidence ware a house where the trailers, the vehicles, the equipment that all belonged to the rodents where the Sheriff's office in BCI took that. So we found problems with the security of that evidence and the security of that warehouse. I'm not an attorney. I've never prosecuted the case, I've never collected evidence. But what I do know is that

evidence that is collected has to be secured. I've seen prosecutions lost in court rooms in the states I've covered because someone failed to secure one piece of evidence. And of course Charlie Reader was so central to what we were looking at. He is the man in charge that we had to go find him. We scheduled the interview and we sat down and we had this conversation with Charlie Reader, and I want to say it last it's maybe forty five minutes to an hour, and again, back

to watching the two sides of Charlie Reader. You had the emotional Charlie Reader early on in the interview where he's talking about, you know, the rodents and you know what this is done to Pike County. And then I broke out an iPad, and on that iPad I had visuals the images that I had taken from that warehouse with the gate standing wide open, another gate secured with a piece of thin wire. You know, days and nights

of no law enforcement at that warehouse. And I think Reader knew during the middle of that interview that this was not going to look good when we reported it, that what we found there looked terrible and it reflected on the job he did. So I saw Charlie Reader change, but he changed into very defensive and red face. But Reader find admitted that they did not have a deputy

posted at that warehouse. Watching that avidage twenty four to seven, what Sheriff Reader did next struck seasoned reporter Jodi barrs troubling.

Here is JODI's first hand account of the interaction. So the interview ends and my photographer and I are tearing down the equipment and Charlie Reader walks us out the front door of the old Sheriff's office in Waverley, and we're standing on the ports of that Sheriff's office, and Reader wants to make a deal, and he says, if we'll just hold off on airing the report of the evidence warehouse and wait until they could return property to the family, that Reader would let us in and give

us full access to him and Charlie Reader's story of the first one hundred hours after the road and murders. And I just told him, no, we don't make deals. Several months after that report aired, I got messages from people in Pike County, one after the other telling me that there was a raid underway at this road and evidence warehouse in Waverley. Well, I dropped everything I was doing at Cincinnati and drove the two hours east to

this warehouse. And when I got there there they were Sheriff Charlie Reader, deputies with the Pike County Sheriff's Office carrying things in and out of this warehouse. And you know, I'm standing there wondering what is going on here. This shouldn't be happening unless if something's happened, we don't know about evolving the murders. This was a great public concern, but that night Reader would not return my phone calls.

It was very contentious trying to get information out of Pike County, out of the sheriffs office at that point, but after that we were never able to access him again. Despite Scharff Reader's apparent mishandling of aspects of the road and murder investigation, authorities were able to put the Wagner family behind bars in twenty eighteen. However, just weeks later, area journalists got word at a different investigation, unrelated to the road murders was underway, one that placed Sheriff Charlie

Reader on the other side of the law. The State Auditor's office released a document to all of us that stated an anonymous tip had come into the Auditor's office in which someone stated that everyone was scared to death a Reader, that he was basically a monster, and investigators needed to look into a safe that was in his office that contained money season in drug deals and it also said something about him possibly gambling and is this

really wore on? The investigation continued, and then words started spreading around Pike County. It really took what was going on with Charlie Reader to a whole new level. In June of twenty nineteen, a grand jury brought forth sixteen charges against Sheriff Charlie Reader. As a result, he was suspended from office, bringing his three year ten yere a sheriff to a close. The indictment laid out detailed of

the investigation and his crimes. Reader originally faced several counts of theft in office, which is a felony in ohiole as well as tampering with evidence, which is also a felony in Ohio. So what happens is that Charlie Reader has a pretty sizeable amount of money that he's taken

from alleged drug dealers in Pike County. Every sheriff, every law enforcement agency in the entire country, much less than including Ohio, is allowed to seize money from suspects if they think that that money or those goods are being used in the commission of a crime. Money that was seized in drug cases is supposed to be secured in a safe or in a bank account or something, and you can use them for education purposes for the sheriff's department,

you can contribute it to appropriate charities. But in these cases, at least on two occasions, the allegation was that he took cash and can hearded it to his own use, so the state auditor does their annual review of the book.

On the first past, the state auditors find some money missing out of the seizure account, and then they go back to reader and apparently he tries to put it back, but these that leads to the state auditors office then diving into getting warrants and diving into his personal finance records. They find multiple extenses and multiple trips to casinos both in the area and out of state, and tens of

thousands of dollars spent to casinos impossible debts. The records are pretty clear that showed some pretty big losses at the racetrack, and also they found that he withdrew more than twenty eight hundred dollars from machines at the Atlantic Casino,

so it was pretty clear it was from gambling. Some of the other allegations were that a lot of times in drug cases, cars are forfeited, and in a couple of the charges, the allegations are that at the auction he rigged it and engineered it that either he or friends of his would get those vehicles and then turn around and sell them, So they were very serious charges. On September twenty fourth, twenty twenty, Sheriff Charles Reader pled

guilty to five charges filed against him. They included two counts of theft in office, two counts of tampering with evidence, and one count of conflict of interest. A few months later, he appeared in court for sentencing. It was a day that Anteinette Levy would not soon forget. What was the mood like through all of this? I couldn't believe it. When I got out there that morning, the street was

blocked off. There were members of the US Marshals Service there, The US Marshalls Service bomb squad was there, there were Sheriff's deputies there. I mean, this was quite the operation. They were sniper's own bread. I actually have a photograph of a sniper on a roof. And there had been some rumblings online apparently, people encouraging people to show up

at the courthouse to protest this sentence. There was some fear that people who were really hardcore supporters of his might show up and try to do something dangerous in order to keep him from being sentenced to prison. It was crazy. It had never even been like that for a Wagner Court hearing. We're going to take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment. Inside the courtroom. The mood was much different here today for sentencing in the case stat of Ohio versus Charles Reader. Okay, his

numbers twenty nine TEENCR. Sixty eight. Reader got his sentencing in front of a visiting judge, Patricia Cosgrove, who had actually sentenced three previous Ohio sheriffs on corruption charges. There were five charges, and all of those could have gotten him more than twelve years in prison. You see Charlie Reader.

He's sitting in court, sitting beside his defense attorney at a table to the left, and at the table to the right, the prosecutor who went to the grand jury got the indictments against Reader, who got the guilty plea from Reader months before. And you see these two tables in opposition to one another, and the judges in the center, and there's an empty podium in the center, and then you see people walk up to that podium and then they start telling these stories of the good deeds Charlie

Reader did in certain instances around that county. He went through one of the most horrendous crimes ever committed in our counties. To my memory, what he went through. I can't take him him the nights that he went sleepless, what his family went through, what it does to his health. But I believe in his heart Charlie Reader is a good man. As Charlie made mistakes, yes, ma'am, he probably has, But in the Bible it says you who are without saying,

cast the first stone. I couldn't throw many rocks at him because I've made mistakes. To the one fact, I know, Charlie was a man you could count on when you needed him, and I would vote for him today just as sure as I am standing here as God is my witness. After these people have said what they said, you see a Reader walk up to the podium and the courting now here from mister Reader. You know he's instantly emotional. He's in tears, and he's asking the judge

for mercy to be lenient with him. In sinacy. This is where he is laying it all out and asking the state of Ohio for mercy. I said I had light on the office of sheriff. I can only ask that my staff, their families, the community, and my family who is here today, we'll forgive me for the undue stress I call stim I have, and I now pray

that the quirk will find mercy on me. I have no words for the shame that I have and that I feel in the regret that I have betrayed just playing the trust if I had with my staff in the community. Please do not send me to prison. I have rung, but I'm not run. I still have a lot of good left in me. During the proceedings, details of readers crimes were illuminated. The state would note that the defendant was an elected county sheriff who committed these

crimes in his position as a county sheriff. He used his position to obtain control over the evidence bags and then use that control to remove the funds and use them for his own benefit. The majority of the funds involved were removed from the four evidence bags cut open by defendant. Fourteen thousand and seven hundred and seventy five dollars was removed prior to the defendant and his attorney turning those bags over to investigators for the Oddit States Office.

The different currency knew in many cases uncirculated bills were put into the currency bags so that restitution would have

been taken care of at that point. Additionally, there's a total of four thousand, eight hundred and fifty dollars outstanding, three thousand, five hundred from the purchase of the Nithan divers which was the profit made by the sheriff on that transaction, three hundred and fifty dollars owed the people who purchased the Chevy Silverado, and one thousand dollars which the state says never made it into the evidence bag.

So Judge Patricia Cosgrove, she has a reputation for being very tough on sheriffs in Ohio who have been engaged in corruption, and she has no nonsense, and she questioned reader from the bench. During the judge's questioning, Sheriff Rider did his best to explain his moral motivation behind his actions.

Why did you cut open these evidence envelopes and take the money out and then in some cases you put it back although you were caught because the envelopes had been unsealed and sealed again improperly and the denominations did not match what was taken at the crime scene. Up from those individuals, I guess why did you take the money? I took the money, and mind you, this does not excuse it, but from drug dealers that took it from

parents of very poor people. In this count that money, regardless of what the state and what the media has claimed in the past years of a gambling problem, and that money being used for gambling, was used. When there was a tree planted in the name of the Shelton Boy. It's at the entrance of Western High School to the left. As soon as you pull in. Nobody could pay for that tree. Nobody offered to pay for that tree. A

drug dealer did. When schools had cheerleading or peewee that had car washes and such, I would have our cruisers taken down there. My men and women did not make good money, so some of them would give them two dollars, five dollars. I took money from that and I provided it to those people. In the PSI the prec ends investigation, the PSI officer notes, there's no documentation that you used it for those things, right, I did not document those things.

He didn't produce any receipts to back these claims up. And there's a very strict process by which those siments are tracked, and you have to produce an accounting of all of that money. So he claimed that he was essentially a robin hood. The judge certainly didn't believe it, But then the judge started asking him questions about gambling. There were a couple of times that Judge Cosgrove all the condimental line, and she sounded very, very skeptical. Let's

stop here for another quick break. We'll be back in a moment. Did you lose three thousand dollars gambling at the Sciota downs Rocino between June two thousand and seventeen in September two thousand and seventeen. Yes, not by myself. They have cards, and of course, begainning your honor, I'll pl guilty to this, but they have cards that you

put in a machine. I can have a card in my name, and I can have a card in my name that my wife possesses, so I can be at one machine and she can be at the other, and the money that she spends and the money that I spend they count on the same card and calculating the money as one well, obviously, and that doesn't answer the

question where did the money and then checking account come from? Okay, also want to ask you in late June two thousand and seventeen, you took a trip to Reno, Nevada for the Sheriff's conference, and then you withdrew twenty eight hundred dollarsand a ATM. The state believes that some of this is due to gambling. I mean, you're talking like over or almost six thousand dollars and a couple months that you lost are extended on gambling. And at that point

we were making almost eleven thousand dollars a month. And that again was from my checking account where it should show my direct deposits, my wife direct deposits, and that it came from our devot cards where I retrieved that money. I don't doubt it came from a debit cards. The question is where did the money come that when to

your check can account? And that's I guess that's that's that's where that's where the media reported that I had numrible problems because it came from our joint bank account. My wife made very good money at the time, and I took that money and I gambled. Okay, all right, Um, that's all the questions of court. Has she really let him have it? She took no grief from him whatsoever?

It cannot be underestimated the damage that you have paused to the citizens of Pike County, to law enforcement who every day get up face the same sort of stresses that you do. They go all home at night, they get up in the morning, they don't know if they're going to come home. The sacrifices that these men and women at make um, I think you made a mockery of them. I couldn't have imposed a much greater sentencement

than I have. As I said, I've taken a consideration some of the mitigating factors, but punishment is appropriate to sentence you to. I considered the minimum. However, to sends you to anything less than three years in prison would demean the seriousness of the offense and not adequately protects

society for future criminal conduct by yourself and honors. The judge handed him three years, and Reader walked out of that courtroom and into a jail cell to pay for throwing away his career, embarrassing himself, and embarrassing his family. Do you think he became a victim of his own power, he said, of sheriff in that county, like that is top dog, right. Maybe he started feeling he was above

the law. You know, in fifteen years of doing this job, looking at people like Charlie Reader in multiple states with multiple different schemes of crimes being committed, there's a trend with just sheriffs in general where a lot of them get in trouble. Is it because they feel so powerful and untouchable? I don't know, But man, when you look at it in the final analysis, what we have here is a guy in Pike County who had the county by a string, who had the trust of people who

live in that county. So is it power? I don't know. All that I know at this point is you had an elected official who makes them pretty bad decisions and he's paying for it. Now, have you gotten a sense what the implications might be for the Wagner cases that Readers now going to jail. Their early face of the investigation is now in prison for corruption. Whether or not that had anything to do with the actual investigation, no

one knows. But if I'm a defense attorney, all I gotta do is throw up that smokescreen at some point and see what happens. And if I'm a prosecutor, I'm thinking, okay, I need to have a contingency plan. To how to answer this. If you're the fence, I'm assuming you will bring it up and court you'll point to that if the judge allows it and say, you know, how can you trust this investigation. This man was out there on the scene that morning. I think it makes people in

the county question what's really going on there? Well, we wait to see how Sheriff Frieder's conviction will impact the Wagner trials. One journalist continues to grapple with the legacy of the Rodent family murders, a story that forever changed her life more than five years ago. More on that next time. For more information on the case and relevant photos, follow us on Instagram at Katie Underscore Studios. The Pikedon 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 iked In 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,