Crime Stories with Nancy Grace - Medical Examiner's Nightmare: MASS MURDER AT FARMHOUSE

Episode Date: April 23, 2021

Eight members of the Rhoden family were killed, in four separate homes in rural Pike County, Ohio. It's taken five years, but now one of four suspects charged with the murders pleaded guilty Thursday. How did investigators prove who did it? Death scene investigator Joe Scott Morgan, Professor of Forensics at Jacksonville State University, explains. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

This is an iHeart Podcast. Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. This is Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. I'm executive producer Jackie Howard. It's been five years since eight people, seven adults and a teenage boy were murdered in four homes in Pike County, Ohio. Edward Jake Wagner has pleaded guilty to eight counts of aggravated murder in the death of the Roden family. Wagner's child. The first alarm was raised when Chris Roden's sister-in-law called 911 at 7.49 a.m. Listen. There's blood all over the house. Okay. My brother-in-law's in the bedroom and I beat the hell out of him. Okay. There's blood all over the apartment.

Ma'am, can you tell me what county that's in? It's my county. It's my county? Yes, and they drive him in the bathroom. Okay, okay. I need you to get out of the house. Did you drive over there? Yes, I did.

Okay, what's your name? My name is... Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police.

Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I'm going to call the police. Okay, I to get out of the house. Did you drive over there? Yes, I did. Okay, what's your name? My... What's your brother-in-law's name?

Huh? What's your brother-in-law's name? Ryan. Yeah. Ma'am? Yeah. What's his name? Chris Roden.

Chris and Gary Roden. Chris and Gary Rogan? First I'm gonna say it looks like they're dead. You think they're both dead? I think they're both dead. It looks like someone has beat the out of them. Okay. Is there anybody else in the house? Not that I know of.

Okay. The door was locked when we got here, but I heard that she was out. And I went in and there was nobody on the floor. Okay. I need you to get out of the house and get out of the house. Okay. I'm gonna go get some help. Okay.

I'm gonna go get some help. Okay. I'm gonna go get some help. Okay. I'm gonna go get some help. Okay. I'm gonna go get some help. Okay. I'm gonna locked when we got here, but I heard a big t-bucket. I went in and there was a lady on the floor. Okay. I need you to get out of the house and wait. I'm down the house.

Okay. I'm standing outside right now. Okay. Shortly after that, Kenneth Roden's cousin also called 911. 911, can I help you? Yeah, I need a deputy to come out to close this. Okay. All this stuff that's on the news, I just found my cousin with a gunshot wound.

Okay. Sir, is he still alive? No, no. Okay. Well, there is. I don't know what his address is. He don't have a box. He don't have a box.

Okay. I'll be standing out by the very way, going. I don't know what his address is. He don't have a box. He don't have a box. Okay. I'll be standing out by the very way. What's your name, sir? What's his name? Kenneth Roden. Kenneth Roden?

Yeah. Okay, sir. Are you out of the house? I'm out of the house right now. I just went in, hollering at him, and checked in. I'm out of the house? I'm out of the house right now. I just went in, hollered at him, and checked his phone right now. And I looked up and he had a gunshot wound.

Again, eight murders in four homes. That's a nightmare for forensic investigators. Joe Scott Morgan, professor of forensics at Jacksonville State University and author of Blood Beneath My Feet joins me now. Joe Scott, how would you handle a crime scene like this over four homes? I got to tell you, Jackie, I've been on several scenes like this or similar to this over my career where you've got multiple bodies that are scattered over a large area. To say that it is a logistical nightmare is an understatement because I think that most people, particularly Nancy's fans, can probably understand that we're very meticulous when it just comes to one body.

But just multiply that and think about everything that goes into literally processing each body. Because as cruel as it sounds, each body or a body is your largest piece of evidence that you have at a scene. And without that body and without the information that it gives up, you're lost. You're lost from Jump Street. So the moment that you cross that threshold onto that scene, you can never get that first step again. It only happens once. So you have to be prepared mentally and physically and logistically and every other way before you ever set foot inside there. Because you are the individual that is going to be annotating everything that's going on within there.

Now, most of the time, there's a team of us that go in. You're going to have crime scene investigators who are collecting fiber evidence and all that sort of thing and ballistic evidence, then you're going to have probably a crime scene photographer whose their sole purpose is to actually be there and document everything photographically. Because, you know, like the old saying, you know, a single photo, you know, it can speak a thousand words. So, and that's a moment in time that you're having to capture that maybe six months later or eight months later, or in this case, five years later, it's going to tell you about that frozen moment in time.

And you have to be very careful in capturing. And, of course, you've got the detective that's there. That's the lead investigator. He's taking notes and making observations. And then there's somebody like myself from the medical examiner's office, who's the medical legal death investigator. And we look at these scenes like this, and we try to determine what exactly happened to this individual, first off to bring about their death, but sometimes, sometimes we can get an indication as to what was going on prior to death. Then in the midst

of the death, which is something a lot of people don't hear about, it's called perimortem, which is in the middle of. And then of course, we document what has happened to the body afterwards. And so you have to be very careful, Jackie, because the case literally can be won or lost or solved or unsolved by virtue of what you do in that one instant in time. And it's, you know, lawyers, people like Nancy, they love to use the term, you can never unring the bell. You can't get that sound back once the clapper hits inside of that bell. And that certainly rings true, pardon the pun, in forensics. You can't get that first act because if you go in and you step on something or you don't pay attention to everything in your environment you're ruined from the absolute beginning well speaking of that just got time must be an enemy for you does at a at a scene like this over four homes it takes a lot of time to

collect this much evidence does it degradegrade? I mean, is there the possibility of it degrading in the amount of time that it takes? And how many people would it take literally to process this many crime scenes? Well, okay, I'll give you an example. Many years ago, when I was working in Atlanta, we had a tragedy that occurred there that's been since referred to as the Buckhead shooting. And we had, I don't know, upwards, I think it was something like 16 bodies. And these bodies were spread out all over kind of a large area. They were in a building, but they were on multiple locations.

And I've had other mass homicides that have taken place. And the best way to do that is, say, if you take body A, okay, you take body A and you assign team A to that body. And they are solely responsible for that body. They don't get involved with anything else. Their sole assignment is to handle all of the photography, all of the trace evidence, all of the measurements, anything else that comes into play. And of course, the examination of the body. And, you know, to your point, that creates a kind of a steadiness, if you will, because you've set the framework. You know, you're talking about how, you know, it doesn't matter what we do, the old hands on the clock never stop moving forward, do they? And so you can't freeze time. You can't say, oh, I want to do over timeout. It's not like a ball game. Time is ticking off

that clock. So everything that you have in that environment does in fact begin to degrade, whether it's blood evidence, what if a strong wind comes along and blows away fiber, or if you've got something, say, for instance, that's outside the home, there's a rainstorm that comes up, and you haven't accounted for it. Well, rain is one of the worst enemies, you know, for an investigator. But, you know, there's even something that's more critical than that sometimes, and that's the effect that time has on a body. Because, you know, we hear about all these terms, and you hear this one overarching theme in death investigations called the postmortem interval. We talk about it all the time. And that's, that's

a very significant thing. Because, you know, one of the biggest questions people ask me as a medical legal death investigator is, you know, well, hey, Morgan, when did this person die? Well, that's a central piece of the puzzle, isn't it? And when you have a multitude of bodies, you know, at a scene, the sequencing of all of that, when did they die? In what order did they die? How long have they been here in this particular state? Were they originally killed here? Were they migrated somewhere? So all of that stuff comes into play. And the one denominator, the common denominator relative to that is time. And then you place all your other factors in place. So you have to be very attuned to this as you move down this line. And one of the most important elements here is that you may have actually heard of before. It's an odd term. It's called algor mortis. And what that means is it's actually the postmortem cooling of the body.

You know, at what temperature is the body? When you get there as an investigator and by measuring that temperature, you can actually, there's a formula we can plug that into to get an idea as to at what rate is the body decreasing in temperature. You know, our body temperature in life is 98.6, you know, as an average, everybody's not at that, but you use that as an average and you kind of measure that as you move through time. And if we say we show up at a scene and we've got a body that's at, I don't know, 95 degrees. Okay.

Well, dependent upon the environment that they're in, we can kind of get a guesstimate that that person's been down roughly anywhere from three to maybe four and a half hours. Now, you can't really tie it down, contrary to what you see on TV. You can't tie it down any closer than that, but that time element is very important, and here's why. Because once you're at the scene and you're with the body, if a body has taken on room temperature at that point, it's pointless to take the body temperature other than initially, because that means that you're outside of a 12-hour block. Because at the 12th hour after death, all of the energy that we've generated in life is gone. It's all dissipated. So it's real important that once you get there, you get an initial body temperature.

And that'll give us an idea. And you say, well, Morgan, that's kind of, I don't understand that. Well, let me give you a great example. Let's say the police actually apprehend somebody or they're questioning somebody and they have what's called an alibi for where they were. They say they have an alibi. They say, well, I last saw them, you know, two hours ago. But, you know, based upon the science, the temperature, this person's been dead for at least six hours.

So you can kind of, with science, you begin to chip away at that alibi and you say, no, you didn't see them two hours ago because I know that they've been dead for at least six or seven hours at this point. So that's why it's so important. And then you get an idea about the sequencing. You know, you get a mass casualty event, which this in this little area is you look at that and you think, well, in what order did these people die? Is there any variables in the postmortem changes that have taken place? The stiffness of the body, otherwise known as rigor mortis or algor mortis with the body temperature or postmortem lividity, liver mortis, the settling of the blood. So all of these things are essential when we're trying to tell this tale of what

happened in a mass casualty event. And this is, like I said, a mass casualty event because, you know, you look at some place like, let's just take a big metropolitan area where maybe New York or Chicago. Now, though it is a tragedy, if you have eight people dead in one of those locations, they're going to view that as a mass casualty. But it's not going to be as impactful there to the resources as it is in someplace like, say, rural Ohio or another rural location in America. It puts a great strain on the resources and how you can respond and how you have to process it. Because as you can imagine, in a tiny little Appalachian village town, they're not going to have the same crime scene investigators or the same type of technology, for instance, that, say, somebody in a large metropolitan area has, you're going to have to wait.

You're going to have to wait and call the state police, and state police are going to have to show up. And what's happening that entire time? Well, time is bleeding off that clock. It's just kind of whittling away and going forward and forward. And the further you move out down that timeline, the more evidence that's lost, more information is lost. And so it's critical to get there as quickly as you possibly can.

Crime Stories with Nancy Grace. Joe, the Pike County Sheriff at the time, Charles Reeder, said that these individuals, their lives were taken in the most horrific way he'd ever seen, execution style. You came in like thieves in the night and took eight lives, some being children. In the most horrific way I've ever seen in my 20 plus years. We are getting closer. We will find you. The family and the victims will have justice one day. We are coming.

The autopsies revealed powder burns on the skin of some of the victims. What can you tell us about how these victims died? I can tell you if what the investigators and sheriff are saying, there's a level of brutality involved in this case that I think that would probably classify this as making it very, very personal. Because if you're just going out to simply execute somebody, and I think the example people use many times is like a mob hit, for instance, that a lot of people are familiar with because of modern media or news or maybe movies, you just see somebody simply shooting somebody in the back of the head and then walking away. There's almost an economy in the way somebody would do that.

But when you begin to see what I classify as uber-violence at a scene, then that breaks it down and kind of ties it back to a personal nature. Because isn't one stab wound, isn't one beating, isn't one bullet, isn't that sufficient to the task? Why do you have to go down this road and get yourself involved in something like overkill? Which gives you, I think, from a profiling standpoint, it gives you a real, at least it begins to form a picture of the type of person that the police might be looking for in a case like that. Somebody that, you know, had a proverbial axe to grind.

Let's take a listen to what WLWT News 5 reporter Brian Hamrick had to say about the autopsies when they were released. The coroner's preliminary report shows Christopher Roden Sr. was shot nine times, including five times in the face, three in the torso, and once in the arm. He appears to be the only one of eight with defensive wounds, indicating he may have been awake when the attack happened and was most likely the first one killed. Inside the same trailer, Gary Roden was shot three times in the head and face, including one shot that left a muzzle stamp on his temple, indicating a point-blank shot. Next door, a couple shot while in their bed with their weak old baby between them, another child on the floor. Frankie Roden was shot three times in the head and face.

His girlfriend, Hannah Gilly, was shot five times in the head and face. One of the shots was through her eye. Both baby and the young child left unharmed. Just down the road, three more killed. Dana Roden, Chris seniors ex wife. She was shot five times across the forehead and in the temple, then up through the chin. Chris Roden Jr., he was 16, shot four times, including two through

the top of his head. And his sister, Hannah, was shot twice in the head. And in a trailer a few miles away, Kenneth Roden, he was shot once through the right eye. Given what you said about the personal nature of this joke, the coroner said all but one of the victims were shot more than once. Two people were shot five times. One person was shot nine times. Shot at close range. The evidence showed that a couple of the individuals were awake when they were attacked. How would we know that? There is a certain awareness that people have when they are being

attacked as opposed to just slumbering. And I'm glad you mentioned that, Jackie. Again, back to a case that I worked many, many years ago. I had an entire family of eight that were killed in a very, very small home. I mean, it was tiny. This house couldn't have been more than 1,300 square feet, and there were eight people living in that. Can you imagine? And one of the decedents that actually has always stuck in my mind with that case was a young girl that was 13 years old at the time. And she was laying on a single size bed. You know, just imagine a tiny bed that you would put your young child in. And she was laying on that bed and she had the covers. And I'll never forget it. She had a My Little Pony blanket that was pulled up so that it was right at the level of her shoulders.

And, Jack, you know, she had a perfectly circular defect or bullet hole right between her shoulder blades. And, you know, her little head was still turned to the left. She was laying face down, turned to the left with her arms resting beneath her head and sleeping. She had no awareness that that was coming to her. So for us, when I see a body like that, in the case of the 13-year-old girl, I know that she did not have an awareness. Now, in the hallway, though, in the hallway,

it was a bloodbath. You had three siblings that were all laying on top of one another in the middle of the hallway. There was so much blood, actually, and I don't want to be too graphic, but I actually slipped down at that scene in the blood. And those individuals, because they were up and fighting for their life, they knew what was going on.

But for that little girl, she had no awareness. So as an investigator, that might say to me, for instance, that she was one of the first people that were killed. For everybody else, the ones that weren't in bed, they never saw it coming. So you have to be very, very careful when you observe individuals at scenes in the position in which they are initially found. And you have to be very careful as to how you document that, because again, that goes back to this idea of sequencing the deaths in what order, because there are no more living witnesses in, you know, certainly like a case like we're discussing in the cases I've worked many times, there were no living witnesses.

All you had to go on was what the bodies were telling us. We had to actually, in that case, and people have heard this said for years and years, we had to let the dead speak to us in that moment, Tom, and tell us their tales through the science that they were living behind and their clues. With me today is Joe Scott Morgan. He is a forensics professor at Jacksonville State University and author of Blood Beneath My Feet. For more on this case and others, go to crimeonline.com. For Crime Stories with Nancy Grace, I'm Jackie Howard. This is an iHeart Podcast.