Paper Ghosts is a true crime podcast that investigates the search for the person responsible for the abductions of four missing girls in neighboring New England towns for more than 50 years. Each case as remain unsolved. Jesus, Mary and Josephine, I hope that's brave for many of you know what I think it is? Listen to paper ghosts on the radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hey, I'm Mr. Toy, host of Get Down Cape Town, a new podcast from My Heart Radio. As a founder and chef of several New York City restaurants, I believe that food is the ultimate gateway into a culture. As a proud ambassador of Korean food. I'm excited to share my culture with you. Tune into the unfiltered conversations with trailblazers like Roy Choi of the Great Food Truck Movement, Korean Skincare with Charlotte Cho and pioneering rap battle art dumfounded.

Listen to get down in Cape Town on the Heart radio app, Apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast. Welcome to the Pickton Massacre, a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Studios' episode seven, 4000 miles away. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a television producer at Katie's Studios with Stephanie Lydecker and Jeff Shane after the rodent family was brutally gunned down in their homes. Authorities embarked on what would become the largest homicide investigation in Ohio's history. Over the course of the cases, first year, law enforcement officers began compiling a staggering amount of clues that they hoped would lead to the killers.

Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine giving an update in the Pike County murders, received eight hundred and eighty three tips. We have conducted four hundred and sixty five interviews. DeWine says there have also been 38 search warrants issued, but so far no arrest.

I think that, you know, we've made significant progress. But by early 2017, the evidence that authorities had collected was pointing them towards one group of people, in particular the Wagner family, that spring with the case heating up, the Wagners decided to leave the pectin area with Jake Wagner and Hannah Rodin's daughter Sophia, until they sold their farm, packed up their belongings and drove 4000 miles north to Kenai, Alaska. A city of about 8000 people southwest of Anchorage.

It was a move that Wagner relative to Ray, not only encouraged but conceived of, they had been wanting to move to Alaska for a while because the pastor of the church moved there, given his very important headstone and their family. I'm the one that told them, go to Alaska. Number one, the state of Ohio can not afford to extradite you from Alaska back home. I just thought it was the greatest that they took off.

I said that's the best thing in the world for the kids and it's the best thing in the world for you guys.

The family quickly got settled in Kenai. They lived together in a double wide trailer on a large piece of property. Billy and Angela even registered to vote. Jeff talked to one of the Waggoner's family relatives who kept in touch with them while they were in Alaska. She asked us not to use her name, but told us about their life once they arrived.

What was their life like in Alaska? Well, Jake has got a job, was a construction type business. Angela didn't work. I think she might have done some things from like home over the Internet or something like that. And Bill, I'm not sure what he said exactly, but they did have a very nice home in Alaska that they were in the process of trying to buy, from what I understand anyways. And Jake, he had Zofia at the time and they just kind of were getting by.

The Wagner sudden departure left the whole town of Paten bewildered and suspicious. Dana Rodin's friend Stefan remembers the day she heard the news. She shared her thoughts with Jeff. Well, when they left for Alaska, I was like, oh, wow. They are going to there they are, Ramit, you know, they are running. And then I thought they all get away with it. If they did this, if they did this, they will get away with it or people talking about the Wagners, like was the feeling that they might have been guilty or what were people thinking or speculating in town?

Yeah, they pretty much thought that, you know, that was the that was the deal. They were running from it. But the Wagners relocation didn't hinder the investigation, according to reporter James Pilcher. It only helped to move the case forward.

They moved to Alaska, which raised even more suspicion in the very following month. Law enforcement actually finally searches the properties where the Wagners lived. That was really the first public indication that the Wagners were possible suspects, if not people of interest. So that started to tighten the noose in terms of the Wagners. On June six, 2017, as the investigation pressed on, Attorney General Mike DeWine appealed to the public for information connecting the Wagners to the crime.

Investigators want any information about the family, including information about vehicles, guns and ammunition. Anyone with information is asked comments.

Investigative journalist Jody Barr recalled the attorney general's announcement. Other than being on the ground in Pike County and hearing actors names come up from time to time and you had no verifiable leads, or you would exhaust all leads. That was the first time that anything was said in public from anybody but this investigation that they may have people that they were looking at and who potentially had something to do with this. And at that time, no one knew the extent of the involvement that the investigators believe the waggers may have had.

It was just they were asking for help and that seemed really strange. But it also on the other hand, it connected some of the pieces that we had heard in the beginning, you know, that maybe gave more weight to the custody issues that we were trying to dig into before. But it was still just it was still confusing that they would come out and say that and no arrests made, no indictments made. But yet they were asking for help to identify.

Is that unusual that they would just kind of like blatantly say a name and be like, does anyone know anything about this person who's not an official suspect or someone we've arrested, even if it's just confusing? And I would look at now Governor Mike DeWine, you know, why they played it, the way they played it? You know, did they know what they needed to know then? Were they trying to have the Wagners make a misstep when they announced this to the world?

Mike Dewan's press release prompted the Wagners family attorney, John Clarke, to accuse law enforcement of harassing his clients. Here's Jeff, followed by Stephanie.

In a statement to the Cincinnati Enquirer, the lawyer said that the authorities were clueless, incompetent, or they themselves were involved in a cover up. In short, his clients were innocent.

That's because, according to Clarke, the Wagners were cooperating with officials and had provided authorities with everything they had asked for, including laptops, phones and DNA willingly. And they also agreed to repeated interviews with the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation. Clark even said that the Wagners told BCI agents that they were, in fact, moving. I spoke with former Ohio prosecutor Mike Allen about the legal implications of the Waggoner's cooperation. What about the Wagners and their compliance with authorities?

I know their lawyer has said they've cooperated 110 percent. Can you talk through the details of that? Sure.

I mean, from what I understand, they did turn over some things, laptops, phones that they submitted to DNA giving exemplars which they could be compelled to do anyway. Some of them, at least, were interviewed by Ohio BCI agents. And I guess they told those agents that they were traveling and about to move to Alaska. And they claim they had been thinking about that for a long time. So, yeah, I mean, from what I can see, there was some cooperation.

But whether it was 110 percent, I don't know. And frankly, I doubt because that rarely happens, does that do anything when it comes to juries?

You know, does that hold sway?

It can. You know, in closing argument, the defense lawyer could stand up and say to the jury, my client, you know, he cooperated 110 percent, you know, meaning that he has nothing to hide.

The Cincinnati Enquirer even tracked the family down in Alaska in July of 2017. In a published article, Jake Wagner said that he had moved to give Sophie a better life. This is Jody Barr again. The Cincinnati Enquirer obviously went there and they found them. I mean, it is they didn't try to slip off in the middle of the night. It didn't seem I mean, if a reporter could find them, then obviously law enforcement knew very much where they were at that point in time.

I mean, as far as the level of cooperation, we haven't heard anything yet that said the Wagners weren't cooperating with law enforcement. Did they do it? We want to know now. Obviously, everybody wants to know right now and, you know, let the process play out. But I mean, if they're cooperating, as this attorney says, they're giving over computers and laptop, you know, DNA, whatever it takes. You know, people who aren't experts in criminology, we look at that and go, oh, man, that sounds like an innocent person.

An innocent person will be doing that.

Despite their involvement in a very large and very active murder investigation, the Wagners are trying to start a new life in Alaska and didn't seem to have any intention of returning. Here's our anonymous Wagner family source.

When I was asked how things are going, you know, when are you guys going to come back and visit or. So far, she was kind of just really backwards about it. She never would really tell me what they were doing. And she never really said when she would be back home to visit, just that she misses us, you know, and that she would love to be able to come home that right here. And that she made the comment or said that if she did get to come back, that she couldn't tell me over the phone that she would just basically have to show up and that once she made it here, then she would contact me, let me know, but that she didn't want people to find out about it.

In Alaska, the family went about life as normal. They tried to fit into the local community and became regular parishioners at the local church. Their pastor even described them to the Dayton Daily News as, quote, good country people. We reached out to the pastor who declined to speak with us. It was at this same church that Jake Wagner was introduced to another churchgoer, Elizabeth Armer.

The couple dated for several months. And then in March 2013, they got married. This is Jody Barr.

I've seen, you know, people I know lost a spouse. You know, they're married again, six months. If he's innocent, he got remarried. He want carry on with his life and, you know, maybe that's it. But if he really is guilty of having a hand in killing eight people and one of those being the mother of his own child, and then he enters into vows with another woman, then love with that, too. I don't know.

I don't know what kind of person you're dealing with here.

Here's Stephanie talking about what she learned by looking at Elizabeth Armor's Facebook posts she took to Facebook to let the world know just how dangerous being involved with the Wagners could be. Elizabeth said in one of her posts that God told her to come forward about her relationship with Jake Wagner. According to her posts, Elizabeth met Jake through the church and then was encouraged to get to know him by her pastor. But she maintained that she had no idea that the Wagners were involved in such a large murder investigation.

And when that news of the Rodin massacre came up, the pastor had vouched for the Wagners, telling her that the charges were just slander against the family. However, in another post, she said she wanted to just be a mother to Sophia, but that she ended up marrying her worst nightmare. All of those posts have since been taken down. We've tried to find her and contact her directly, and she's literally nowhere to be found.

Then in the spring of 2018, two years after the rodents were killed, the Waggner shocked everyone again, this time by returning to the Python area.

Our Waggner family relative explained why they decided to come home from what I, like I said, have understood just a little bit. I talked to Angela and our family in general talking they had in that room because Bill family father got sick and they couldn't afford or they were losing what their home and everything that they had there in Alaska. So I basically just was a handful of that type of stuff. So they decided that they were going to come back down here and they were just going to get everything basically situated here.

Once that happened and once they got back on their feet, basically, then they were planning to go back. They wanted to go back. Angel wanted to go back there. She made that clear to her father multiple times that that was going to be a place they were really looking forward to live in. And he just wanted to be there. But they had a bunch of stuff to take care of in order for that to happen.

The move seemed to baffle everyone in PYKEN. Here's local resident Angie. If you think about it, the Wagners were scot free. They went to Alaska. They could have took off and nobody could have ever seen them again, ever. But they came back here. They came back. Now, my the way that I am, I would never do that. But if I had pulled something off like that and got away with it, that room in which, Elastica, you unpack my shit and I'm here in the woods and nobody's ever going to see me again, I'm sure the hell I'm not going to come back.

The only way I would come back is if I thought my ass covered.

Upon returning to fight in the waggoner's tried to fly under the radar and return to life as normal. But our Waggner family relative told Jeff that their homecoming was anything but welcome when they came back, where people kind of like, has that story died down or were people like, oh, the Wagners are back?

It was probably quiet for about, I don't know, two or three weeks at that. And then everybody found out that they were back in town and they just absolutely tortured. And legally, everybody had started basically attacking them, the community accusing them of murdering those people. Like if they were in town and people identified their vehicle, they would throw all of that. Angela had actually went into a store one day and some woman had actually pulled up behind Angela as she was coming back out of the store and threw a glass bottle at her and it busted her in the back.

She was constantly get it was left and right, like anybody that knew them or that knew our family, like where we lived. There was a handful of people that had drove by my house and they were throwing stuff because I live kind of right on the highway and my house is very easy to spot. I have no privacy. So when they I was getting trashed, people were trailer trash out in my yard, in my driveway. They were trying to hit us while we were me and my son had to try, you know, they were just doing my workplace.

My vehicle was parked outside in my vehicle got keyed. They had, of course, the eggs on it all that time stuff wrote murderer on it when I had absolutely nothing to do with any of that.

As things began to unravel for the Wagners, law enforcement was tightening up the case against the family. It seemed like it was only a matter of time before they were arrested.

Investigators now believe there were multiple attackers. That's according to information from the Ohio attorney general's office. The Ohio attorney general says the investigation is progressing to adds his office knows a lot more about what goes on in those Pike County hills. Now, we know a lot more of us have. We crack the case if we come up with enough evidence to arrest someone and get them convicted? No, we have not. But have we made progress? Oh, yeah, we've made more progress.

On Halloween of 2013, authorities conducted yet another search on a Wagner family property, this time a farm formerly owned by Jake and George Wagner. During that raid, investigators uncovered a homemade silencer at the bottom of a well.

It would seem to be the final piece of the puzzle for investigators, as we discussed in great detail in Episode two on November 13th, Angela and Billy Wagner and their two sons, Jake and George Wagner, were arrested for the murders of eight members of the rodent family, nearly everyone.

We have major developments tonight in a bizarre and tragic murder case, took two and a half years, but arrests have finally been made in the Pike County massacre. Billy Wagner is a third. He's 47, also 48 year old Angela Wagner. Twenty seven year old George Wagner, the fourth and twenty six year old Edward Jake Wagner are now facing charges. The attorney general announced two more arrests of people accused of being involved. Angela's mother, Rita Nuchal, and Billy's mother, Fredricka Wagner, were also arrested today in conjunction with the cover up of these crimes.

We're going to take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment. Paper Ghosts is a true crime podcast that investigates the search for the person responsible for the abductions of four missing girls in neighboring New England towns for more than 50 years. Each case has remain unsolved. Every day is like being lost in limbo. I pray every day that we find Lisa so we can go on. It wasn't until this past year that things took an unexpected turn.

Breakthrough answers to decades old questions and witnesses finally ready to talk.

I don't think that's the I there. I can describe what he's wearing. I can smell them a mile away. Jesus, Mary and Josephine. I hope that's brave for many of you know what I think it is? Listen to paper ghosts on the radio app, Apple podcast, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hey, I'm Charlie Sanders and I'm bald and I am Brian Husky.

I am also bald. We're the host of the new podcast Bald Talk from the Big Money Players Network and I Heart Radio. Before this, I was a writer and producer for Key and Peele and created the show Weird City than I appear on Bob's Burgers and Veep.

But the show is not just about being bald. So for you Heroes' out there, there's a lot to glean from our show. It's about insecurity, vanity, all that.

But you rub your eyes on every season. You knew that. Oh, you were the mean congressman dude, right?

No, no, no. That's Dan back at all. He's actually a guest. We. Oh, OK. You were the press dude. Mike McLintock. No, no, no, no. That's Matt while she was also a guest. Oh, wait, wait, wait. I remember you you were a TV producer, the presenter that that's Paul Scheer. He was on Veep, too. But we have him on the podcast as well. Yeah.

The show is not about having people who are bald from Veep to hell of a coincidence. You got to say that, right? So we'd be very limiting.

What is Macaulay Culkin like? I don't know. I'm not on succession. That's the other one, I think.

But that's his brother, right? They're so talented. Those to listen to ball talk on the radio, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to a podcast coming September 16th.

Angela, Billy, Jake and George Wagner were charged with aggravated murder. Angela Wagner's mother, religion Newcome and Billy Wagner's mother, Frederica, were both charged with obstruction of justice and perjury. Newcome was also charged with forgery. All six of them pled not guilty. And our justice system presumes innocence until guilt is proven. At first blush, it seems farfetched to believe that these two grandmothers had a part in conspiring to pull off Ohio's largest mass murder. Jeff spoke with Mike Allen about the charges against Frederico Wagner.

Frederica has been charged with obstruction of justice and perjury. So how do you explain that to someone who, you know, like me, who's never been to law school or doesn't know what it means?

Well, perjury is pretty simple under Ohio law. It just basically says that you cannot knowingly make a false statement in an official proceeding while you are under oath. It's real simple. And the obstructing justice is pretty simple as well. Ohio law provides that you can't with purpose to hinder the discovery, apprehension or prosecution of a person do anything that would assist someone in doing that. And that's one that that's charged pretty frequently. You don't see perjury charged a lot because it's so difficult to prove, but was convicted of both.

She would be facing four years Max. Plainly stated, prosecutors think Frederico was lying to them and trying to hinder the investigation to cover up for her family. We'll get into the specifics of her charges later. For now, here's Stephanie, followed by Jeff. We wondered if there was anything in Frederica Wagner's past that could have indicated that she would be involved in something as gruesome as mass murder.

As we know, the Wagners were a well known and well-to-do family in the pectin area. And Frederica Wagner was at the helm of this. A self-described entrepreneur, she owned properties Oliver Pike County that spanned over seventeen hundred acres and were valued at more than four million dollars. She also founded two nonprofits, Lucasville Mission, a church that helps underprivileged children, and the Crystal Springs Home, a facility that provides services to developmentally disabled adults. As we've learned throughout the series, Frederica had her detractors as well as her supporters in the community growing up.

Kristina Howard spent a lot of time with Frederica. In fact, her mom worked at the Crystal Springs home.

She was pretty well known by everybody. And if she wasn't doing a charity or something outside of church, then she was doing well in church. She held over two hundred acres of land and a lot of people that lived on her property that she rented out to, she would say, hey, you know, if you come to church, then I won't charge you a dime a group. And all she ever asked of them was for them to go to church.

She was always nice to me growing up. She's never yelled at me. She's never really told me no. There would be times that I would go to work with Mom and I would just hang out at Fridays all day long while my mom was working. You know, I would just hang out, feed the horses in bars. But she was literally like a grandma to me.

DeRay paints a similar portrait of Fredrica, she told us about the pastoral surroundings of her grandmother's fine farms and her family's legacy in the area.

If you go to their house, you go eighty eight miles out of Cincinnati east on thirty three.

And I'm telling you, you are in the hills, the Appalachian Hills of Ohio with this far. Then all of a sudden you'll see something to the right. It looks like a real nice entryway, kind of farms on it.

And you look we see your trailer sitting right next to the entrance, a nice entrance with wrought iron gates. It's got blind on it. Then you look away up. You see all these little houses, some of the more categories. And then she's got the big house and then she's got the old walking horse barn and she's got the shop. Then you come to her, her colonial style home. And it's a it's a very homey feeling. When you walk into the home, you feel like going home.

And I see all my grandmother's Catholic little statues around and pictures of the kids on the horses, pictures of all their famous horses.

She developed a breed of horse called the Virgin Grand. She named after my uncle, which she takes no credit for.

The horses is what the driving passion was for Fredricka and Bob to be together, stay together, work together, because that's the problem, I think, with with people who get married today. So it's natural to want to have relationships. It's natural to want to have kids when you're young, all those hormones in your head.

But to keep you together, you better have something solid in common that you have to work with together to keep your family, leaving them a legacy.

And that's what Fredricka Wagner did for her kids. Her mom developed a breed of horse over years. They have a two thousand acre farm. They had three kids and they left them a legacy. You know, we're not talking about people who are trained murderers.

We're talking about real people here who have had real, honest to goodness, God fearing lives.

Frederico Wagner's attorney described her as a God fearing woman who taught Sunday school for nearly half a century and lived about as close to the cross as anyone can. We all struggled with this contradiction in Frederico Wagner. How could this sweet grandmother who was charitable and kind be involved in any capacity with the murder of eight people? So we decided to look a little deeper into Pickton's most giving resident, and what we found was not all virtuous. Jody Barfield said after the world became familiar with the Wagner family, you know, of course, reporters start digging into their backgrounds and it's just some of the things that come out.

You learn about the business dealings and you know what Fredricka is accused of doing in the past. This is good background information to have when you're trying to understand who these people are. But I have to say, when I was on the ground in Pike County, Ohio, when I was hearing their names, when I went by flying farm, I mean, it is a peaceful, quaint farm tucked into the rolling hills of eastern Ohio. When you drive by there, nothing on the surface points to anything that's been alleged now that any of the people involved in any of this could have been involved in the killing of eight people.

That's the beauty of investigations, I guess, is that you just don't know the whole story until you know the whole story.

Let's stop here for another quick break. We'll be back in a moment. Hi, this is Melanne Verveer and this is Kim Mazzarelli and we're co-hosts of Senecas Conversations on Power and Purpose, brought to you by the Seneca Women Podcast Network and I Heart Radio.

We're launching a brand new season of this podcast, which brings you fascinating conversations with leaders like two time gold medalist, author and activist Abby Wambach and actor, producer and entrepreneur Justin Baldoni, among many others. Listen to Senecas conversations on power and purpose on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

My name is Langston Kerman and I love black people. I love them short. I love them tall, I love them thick. I forgive them when their booties are small. The only thing I love more than black people are the conspiracy theories that black people come up with.

So I, along with the beautiful oppressors that I heart, radio and big money players have a brand new podcast called My Mama Told Me where each week me and a special guests will explore all of the deep and twisted conspiracies that the white man doesn't want us to know about. We'll talk silly conspiracies. We'll talk crazy conspiracies. We'll talk those conspiracies. You learn from your uncle who used to wear jean shorts when he went swimming at the public pool, anything from baby urine as an acme treatment to lotion being a tool for government mind control and sterilization.

Ladies and gentlemen, I don't want to be your president, but if you want to hear where the president is hiding that AIDS vaccine, then listen to my mama told me available on the I Heart radio app, Apple podcast or anywhere else that pods are cast. Let's start with S.W. farms, the farm breeds horses as well as dogs and pigs typically found in New Zealand in the 1990s, Fredricka, got into legal trouble with a group of customers surrounding the sale of these pigs.

Here's Mike Allen again.

She was sued by a group of customers because the allegation was that her place, I think it was the flying W it didn't meet the standards promised for the sale of exotic animals, which is interesting. I guess the group said that she defrauded them in the sales that gave them some animals that didn't match the advertised description.

Dana Rodin's friend Becky told Jeff that flying farms had been whispered about and piped in for years.

At one point in time, you know, Fredricka was a person to be feared in the county because there was always rumors. I don't know what all the rumors was. There was like, oh, you don't want to go back there. Bad things happen to people that go back here. So, you know, I stay away from my area way back where as far as I know, I've always heard bad things about them. So, yeah, I said, well, I would never go.

Piped in local, Barbara told Jeff about one rumor in particular, they made their money in horses and miniature horses and their some shady dealings that I've heard about going on there, like them stuffing the horses with drugs and sending them back and forth to Mexico and, you know, just awful things like that.

Now, we obviously can't prove that, but it's worth mentioning, because it's this type of thing that people in Pich didn't like to whisper about, one thing we should talk about is this, quote unquote, life changing rent to own operation.

Fredricka Wagner designed to help lower income residents over the decades, Frederico Wagner entered into at least 132 land installment contracts. Now, these contracts basically allowed the Wagners to retain deeds on land as buyers attempted to pay off the principal and the interest. The idea was that if the buyers made all of their payments, they'd eventually become landowners, but it rarely played out that way. In fact, as it turns out, only 12 of those contracts were actually satisfied, 12 out of 132.

And in looking into all of the deals, nearly 80 percent of them were ultimately terminated without a corresponding deed transfer. And that basically indicates despite somebody making payments at the end of the day, the land stayed in Frederica Wagner's possession. There are countless examples of sour deals just like that where people really did feel that Frederico Wagner took advantage of them. And again, does that mean that she was involved with a mass murder? Of course not. But it does point to character, which I do think is valuable.

Yeah, there was one tenant quoted in this story saying that Frederica had raised her rent by twenty five percent following the murders in 2016, and another described his rental property as a one room home with an exposed toilet standing just a few feet from the foot of his bed. Again, this doesn't prove their guilt, but it does speak to the type of woman Frederica was, or at least how the public perceived her at the time. I spoke to attorney Mike Allen about Fredrica land deal contracts when I was in and I spoke to some people and these are just personal accounts, but saying, you know, my family rented land and ended it for years and years and years and then had it pulled out, which I mean, the court seems to back that up.

But, yeah, land contracts are tough. And, you know, for the person who was, you know, not the the owner of the property, but the person trying to buy it, there are a lot of pitfalls with it. And someone smart, which apparently, Fredricka, was they can take advantage of people in a land contract situation.

Fredricka also runs a nonprofit called Crystal Springs, a group home that provides housing and rehabilitation services to developmentally disabled adults. And according to some, when her son Billy married Angela Newcome, who we now know is Angela Wagner, Frederica wasn't happy about it. Kristina Howard told us the relationship between Frederico Wagner and her daughter in law always seemed contentious.

She never really had much to do with Angela unless I come to Billy. And growing up, I heard Freddie call Angela like an evil woman at Tomatina, like a nasty woman. One time, Angela tried to keep Freddy from seeing her grandkids, George and Jake, because they were talking about moving away and all this. And I never heard Freddy say that she hated anybody. But she said, you know, like, oh, I really dislike this woman.

She's just a nasty woman.

Perhaps Frederico Wagner has reason to be suspicious of Angela. Kristina Howard gave Stephanie her thoughts on Angela Wagner.

Angela, she does have a little bit of a shady facade to her, like you feel like there's more to her than meets the eye. And so, like on the outside, she's all happy thoughts with anybody and everything else. But you just get a vibe from her, you know that there's more to it. It turns out that the seemingly devoted, hardworking mother had a bit of a checkered past. In 2001, Angela Wagner, along with Billy Wagner, were charged with improperly handling a firearm.

And in 2012, they are both charged with receiving stolen property, which is a fifth degree felony.

Jody Barr put the Wagner family's criminal history into context for us. You're looking at improperly handling a firearm charges when you look at those two charges and even the details that were reported to support those charges and back to where it was in the rest of the waggers background. When you look at this as a whole, across the course of their lives, the charges of improperly handling a firearm, I mean, those charges came 15 years before these murders. It was an alleged road rage.

You know, there was a gun pulled out, but the charges are dismissed. No one got hurt. I mean, that is something that I see multiple times a week alleged in police reports. The charge of receiving stolen property came four years before these murders. When you look at the criminal record, nothing in this says to me that you've got murderers in the hills of Pike County, Ohio. I mean, this could be your neighbor next door with these charges.

Here again is Frederik, his niece, Doré, reading a news article about her aunt's involvement in the road and murders. So let me summarize it for you. On November the 13th, 2013, the Ohio governor elect, Mike DeWine, held an internationally broadcast news conference and announced the arrest of Fredrica Wagner and several of her family members. Governor Devine accused, Fredricka, family members of the rodent's homicides and he specifically accused Fredrica of masterminding the coverup.

When I heard that, I wanted to call him up and tell him that there was no way and that someday you will have to apologize to my and I do not know who came up with that theory and tried to put it out there, but that is someone with an evil mind. I think that that it's that that it's the devil trying trying to test us, because there's no way possible that Fredrica could ever do something like that. However, she is not that kind of person, she carries the light of Jesus with her everywhere she goes.

And I am I am I am convicted on that. There's no way she would have ever done something like that ever. The idea that the entire Wagner family allegedly conspired to kill the rodents in cold blood still baffles Jody Barr to this day.

I think that is the common theme of this entire story about Pike County and about this road massacre is it's just too far fetched. Now, when you try to connect the dots to the mysteries of, you know, how the Wagners conducted their business, how they live their lives. I don't know that I have seen any reporting, any fact brought out about the Wagners that would say, yep, there you go, mass murderers. I think that is the draw that continues to keep people interested in this story, is that you would have never seen any of this comix.

I don't know what a family capable of a mass murder would look like or how they would conduct your business, but this was out of nowhere. It's still just hard to believe. On June 26, 2019, Frederico Wagner headed into a Pike County courtroom for a pretrial hearing with Frederica sitting in the defendant's chair. There was a stunning courtroom revelation.

Charges against the grandmother connected to the rodent family massacre have been dismissed. It was dismissed because I was innocent. They had no evidence against me. Well, grandmother Frederica Wagner might be out of the woods, the rest of her family await their day in court, where a stunning number of truths promised to be exposed.

Its search for the truth, I believe that is it applies to this case. The mystery will be solved. The truth will eventually be discovered.

Hannah was struggling to keep custody of Sophia. Pavi straight up told her are safer than you with papers did not sign them because they were you. Well, you've got to wonder who is this informant? Because if it's a member of the Wagner family, I think that's a twist no one saw coming.

More on that next week, reach out to us on our social media outlets with questions where on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter at Pectin Massacre.

We look forward to answering your questions and upcoming bonus episodes pectin massacre's executive produced by Stephanie Lydecker and me, Courtney Armstrong, editing and sound design by executive producer Jared Asten Additional producing by Jeff Shane and Andrew Becker. The Python massacre is a production of I Heart Radio and Katie Studios from our podcast From My Heart Radio. Visit the I Heart Radio App, Apple podcast or wherever you listen to your favorite shows. My name is Langston Carman, and I'm a black man who loves conspiracy theories.

That's why I, along with the beautiful oppressor's that I heart radio and big money players, have a brand new podcast called My Mama Told Me where each week me and a special guest will explore all the twisted conspiracies that the white man is keeping secret. So listen to my mama told me available on the radio app, Apple podcast or anywhere else, that podcast. With a pandemic and a revolution happening at the same time, we get to choose what kind of society we want to rebuild and who we want to be together.

I'm Baratunde Thurston, author, activist and comedian, and I've got a new podcast, How to Citizen with Baratunde in our democratic experiment is at a tipping point, but which way we tip is up to us. I Heart Radio is number one for podcast, but don't take our word for it. Find How to Citizen with Baratunde Day on the radio app or wherever you get your podcast.