The Houses on Union Hill Road
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Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, the host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I'm John Walczak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI.

In 2001, police say I killed my family and rigged my house to explode before escaping into the wilderness. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. Join me. I'm going down in the cave. As I track down clues. I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Hunting. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world. Robert Fisher. Do you recognize my voice? Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters. But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America.

Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Hello, and welcome to Haunting, Purgatory's premiere podcast. I'm your host, Teresa. We'll be bringing you different ghost stories each week, straight from the person who experienced it firsthand. Some will be unsettling, some unnerving, some even downright terrifying. But all of them will be totally true.

Listen to Haunting on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Welcome to the Piked Massacre, a production of iHeartRadio and KT Studios. The only way I can really describe it is this is orchestrated. If you orchestrate something, that goes to planning. ♪

Everybody understands their position in the orchestra. They understand what notes to hit. They have a specific purpose and a job. They know the area and they know the prey.

They know the nature of these individuals. Hell, they know where their homes are. They know where security cameras are. They know what they have to defeat to get past these, whether it be locks, timing relative to bedtime. They know all this. That's why this is so shocking when you begin to think about it is the level of orchestration involved to pull this thing off. This is The Pikes and Massacre, Return to Pike County, Season 2.

Episode 4, The Houses on Union Hill Road. I'm Courtney Armstrong, a television producer at KT Studios with Stephanie Lidecker and Jeff Shane. Over 200 investigators and police officers have contributed so far to this ongoing investigation. As of today, they say they received 883 tips, conducted 465 interviews, did 38 search warrants, and 60 cyber extractions. Without question, this has been by far the longest, most complex investigation

That's coroner, distinguished professor, and criminal forensics expert Joseph Morgan. It's something that borders on the apocalyptic.

From the outset, the sheer magnitude of the case posed huge investigative hurdles for the Pike County Sheriff's Office. Pike County, it's a rural county. They're poor. They don't have a lot of money. It's not judgmental. It's just the reality of it. When you begin to think about those detectives that were from this little area up there, from Pike County Sheriff's Department, it's something they'd never borne witness to.

It leads to limitations in your ability to process things. So it is a Herculean undertaking for these investigators.

And less than a month into the investigation, authorities made what seemed to many like an unusual decision. While we talked with Joseph Morgan, we looked over aerial photos of the crime scenes before the mobile homes were removed.

They're all we have to go on as no crime scene photos have been released. There's a mock-up showing the placement of the properties on our Instagram. The first few images were of the property where Chris Sr. and Frankie Roden's trailers were located.

Jeff got Morgan's thoughts on Pike County's relocation strategy. Looking at these aerial photos while we're talking about it, what really struck me, they lived in trailers, but these look more like homes that are in the ground that aren't going anywhere. To me, that like the crime scene is the most important part and moving them, like that seems like this was, that would not be so easy. After the termination of this case and when it's finally, these cases are all adjudicated,

I'm going to want to study this from a crime scene perspective because I want to learn how they did this. I want to teach this because if they did it effectively, it's something that somebody could write an academic paper on. I mean, it's that big a deal. If you look at this image, you would have to detach that mobile home completely and it's probably a foundational structure. So it's at least

has a cinder block foundation that is built around the thing so that they can build the stick, build the structure around it and then attach it to the mobile home. Just the sheer logistics of detaching this thing from the ground. I've certainly never worked a case that involved multiple mobile homes that where people had been in dwelling for years

that are plumbed and have electricity run to them and have foundations and that they're just lifted up off the ground and taken from there. This is a monumental task in order to facilitate this. You got to make sure that nothing is going to be disrupted in transit because everything is relative. It's relative. There's distance relationships.

There's time relationships because things degrade, they change. We've got bullet holes. Well, this is not like going into a static home. It's moving back and forth as it's kind of going down the road. So it's shifting. Well, what if it shifts just a few millimeters relative to

if you're trying to pull trajectories on these bullets. So to that end, it really gives you pause to think, why was it that you wanted to move it from this location? By any measure, investigating the Roden murders was a massive undertaking. Eight bodies spread out across four bloody crime scenes. And soon after the victims were found, Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation and FBI agents were called in to help lead the charge.

But, according to Joseph Morgan, before the Rodin's mobile homes were moved, it was imperative that authorities analyze the scenes in their original states. Viewing that body in the context and the environment in which it is found, that's where the tale is told at that point. And you have to allow the body to tell you that story. Maybe the person was face down. They were face down in bed. They're in a prone position.

Someone walked up behind them, maybe when they were unaware, maybe they were sleeping, and at close range, they put a single round into the back of their head. Well, I don't want to move or manipulate the body until it's time to remove it from the scene after it's been measured and examined for things like post-mortem changes and documented photographically. I don't want to change the body at all. I want to see what the body is telling me at current.

The body is the biggest piece of evidence that you have because that is obviously in this case the target of what the individuals were striving for. That's where the most force is brought to bear. That's where the most violence takes place. That's where you have the most transference that's going to take place from one object to the body or from one body to another body. The violence perpetrated by the alleged assailants, the Wagners, in the Roden case was unusually brutal.

32 gunshot wounds between eight victims, all but one shot in the head. And the evidence collected on the scene and in the lab will all contribute to chronicling what transpired on the night of April 21st, 2016.

In light of Jake Wagner's plea deal, this story will be integral for the prosecution's case against the other three Wagners accused in the murders. Exactly five years after the Roden murders in Pike County, one of the four defendants, Jake Wagner, is pleading guilty to all counts. In exchange, he avoids the death penalty and will serve multiple life sentences with no chance at parole. His father, mother, and brother are similarly charged, and they've pleaded not guilty. To help them avoid a possible death sentence, prosecutors say that Jake will testify against them.

I spoke with Joseph Morgan about how Jake Wagner's plea will impact upcoming trials. We need to understand the larger narrative here. He's now on the outside. Jake is on the outside. He's no longer, for all intents and purposes, part of the family. He is going to be a state's witness at this point in time. So you're going to have defense counsel. They want to prevent the state from validating anything that this young man has to say.

So Jake's already pled guilty. He's already implicated his family. Why is how these murders happened important now?

They want to try to either put all of the blame on him and say that our defendants had nothing to do with this whatsoever. It's all on him. He suddenly got a guilty conscience, had, you know, what we say, a come-to-Jesus moment, and decided to roll over on everything. And it's all him, all by himself. It doesn't matter what we think. What's going to matter is what the jury thinks moving forward.

At the end of the day, everybody else will be able to draw their own conclusions. But how in the world is this going to be presented to the jury? You're going to need a playbill to keep up with all of the various permutations here. Because if you've got four different parties here, including Jake in this and what he's saying to the prosecution, you've got four different parties here that are giving you different scenarios

It's going to be tasked to someone to try to make sense of all this, and that someone, that group of people, are going to be the jury. It will be explained before the court and the people in that jury box and before the judge. They will say, "Well, we know that at this hour, on the 21st, this occurred." And then moving forward, this is when the bodies were found. Well, what occurred between these moments in time

Studying the aerial photos of the crime scenes, Stephanie put into perspective just how overwhelming a task it is putting the story of the road murders together. Just seeing these photos now firsthand and walking through them with you only offers up more questions for us. This was not a small operation. This was huge. The volume of this case is one of the most striking things for me, I think. You know, out of every case that I cover, I don't recall a case like this that's blood-soaked.

And it is spread far and wide. There's so many pieces that have to be put into place with this. You're leapfrogging from this bloodbath to another bloodbath. The forensics alone were highly complicated, just from a geographic distribution standpoint. It's like a beautiful mirror, okay, that someone had hanging on their wall. And somebody with specific intent went in and destroyed this mirror.

and crashed it down into thousands and thousands of pieces. And then it is your job to make sense of these broken pieces and try to put it back together, not necessarily to make it usable again, but to try to understand what happened, what affected its destruction, to what degree is it destroyed, what instrumentality may have destroyed it, and what the timing was like on this. How long has this thing been destroyed?

We spoke with Joseph Morgan about the importance of timeline in a multiple homicide case. Timeline is essential here because, you know, we just have these bits and pieces coming out about the order of death. They're going to be really focused on the body and the changes in the body and the traumas the body has sustained and all those sorts of things. I think that that's something that's critical.

As we studied the aerial images of the crime scenes, along with the autopsy reports, Morgan tried to piece together the chronology for us. Because his body was in a more advanced state of decomposition, it's been speculated that victim Chris Roden Sr. was the killer's first victim. So, we started by looking at the layout of his trailer.

Joseph pointed out what could have been the killer's way in. Here he is talking to Stephanie. They have a poured parking pad right there, and there's like a sidewalk that extends up to, that's a ramp. Yeah, walking up into this little walkway into the porch area and therefore into the front door. There's this entire runway, which was likely where the assailants entered, correct? So that brings me to this point.

How many locks would have had to have been defeated on that door in order to gain entrance? And how can you gain entrance to that door without making noise? But if you're going into that porch, it also speaks to the fact that they did have multiple trained attack dogs surveilling this area. Why didn't those attack dogs attack? Because there's quite a bit of a runway for you to get up to that porch. And is it possible that they knocked on the door?

Yeah.

It seems implausible that they would draw them to the door. You know, it makes me, it really makes me think, why would they be in the bedroom and how did the perpetrators get into the bedroom without these guys knowing it? That tells me that maybe there was a hidden key.

It does make sense about perhaps a hidden key. Certainly we don't know this is fact, this is speculation, but we do know that they were running serious surveillance on the family. They have cameras at each of the locations in the homes, really doing some top-level surveillance on the family. And Jake, the youngest son...

was there quite a bit because he was sharing custody with the youngest daughter and for a long period of time they would tick-tock between homes. You get to know the location in the area very, very well. Joseph speculated about why Chris Sr. may have been targeted first. He apparently was identified as a primary target or at least as a primary threat.

In our language, and you hear this in the news media quite a bit and on television shows and whatnot, but there really is truly something that is referred to as overkill. You know, in Chris Senior's case, he was shot nine times. What do you make of the brutality of that? It kind of begs that question. Well, either you view that person as a threat, maybe

Maybe you see that they're going to charge you. Maybe you have an awareness of what their potential for violence is and that you want to prevent that. There's evidence that he attempted or reacted at least to the point where he raised his arm. He's taken one round in his right forearm.

But this is the part that is very, very curious. It says that a round passed through a door. I don't know which door. He was in a bedroom. Maybe it was the door to his bedroom or maybe he was hiding behind a door. But then it goes on to say that that round in turn passed into his body.

So, you know, we're learning just in the sequencing with the senior among the Rodan clan that there was a lot of firepower that was essentially directed toward him. You know, he resided in the trailer with Gary, so we can surmise that if Chris Senior was first,

then Gary would have had to have been second because they occupy the same, essentially the same space. You know, I guess they have separate bedrooms. But Gary didn't receive the same amount of attention that Chris Sr. He was only shot three times, but these three gunshot wounds he sustained, two were to the head, and it's kind of nonspecific in the descriptor.

But we know that one was in the face. And this is kind of a theme that you see running through the nature of all of these killings. And I find that kind of interesting because anytime someone has shot an individual in the face from a profile standpoint, that gives you the attitude that the individual is looking at them at the shooter when they're fired upon. We're going to take a quick break here. We'll be back in a moment.

Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind. Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down.

From unbelievable romantic betrayals... The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family... When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal...

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Walzak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. Come on.

In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the Valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is him and the sniper me out of some tree.

But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fisher. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house, the hunt, family annihilation today and a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I spent almost a decade researching right wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat.

It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Victims Chris Sr. and Gary Roden's crime scene potentially held a cache of clues for investigators. We know that this scene in particular was very bloody, okay, because we know that Chris Sr. was shot multiple times. So when we examine a scene, that is a treasure trove of evidence collection there.

If someone has tried to clean themselves, clean their hands, washed down a weapon, maybe tried to repair an injury of their own, you've got evidence sitting in the drain.

And this is something they would have had to have accounted for. So all of the drain traps, everything within there would have had to have been secured. What if something got flushed down the toilet? Well, you know, because now that's going to go into a septic tank since this is so isolated. They're not going to be on city sewer system. Logistically, it's a freaking nightmare. I mean, for a crime scene person, it is an absolute nightmare. You have to make sure that all of your bases are secure.

Outside Chris Roden Sr.'s home was potentially even more evidence. Here comes the big part. That porch right there, which is a point of egress. You need to keep that in mind. That is a point through which somebody entered this damn dwelling. Just let that sink in for a second.

That's got to be detached and moved. Now it looks like they have a concrete slab parking area that's actually very nice. It's got a trailer, a red truck, a gray truck, and a small car that's parked right by the sidewalk. And that sidewalk is poured concrete as well. That's all going to contain potential evidence.

We know that that is an important piece of, it's almost like a footprint, right? That has so much potential DNA or blood or something that seeps into it. Yeah, potentially blood evidence, more than likely, if they traipse out of that house. This would have required a Herculean effort upon the authorities there.

As we mentioned, crime scene photos were never released. There were also very few on-the-ground photos of the surrounding area because the entire road was closed to the public. However, the aerial shots provide valuable insight into the crime scenes.

Most likely, the killers then moved to the trailer just a few hundred yards away where Frankie Roden and his fiancee, Hannah Gilley, were living with Frankie's toddler and the couple's six-month-old baby boy. I always pictured it much further apart from one another. It looks as though, and again, this is an aerial shot, you could on foot run from Chris Sr.'s home to Frankie, where he and Hannah were sleeping. Making it up to Frankie and Hannah,

The proximity of the homes most likely forced the killers to utilize some critical tools. Silencers.

We know from courtroom testimony that a homemade silencer was found at a property owned by the Wagners. Having silencers when these crime scenes are so close together seems like they would have to. And it does sound as though from what we've researched that Frankie Rodin and his fiancee, Hannah Gilley, and their three-year-old son, Frankie's three-year-old son, they were sleeping at the time. Absolutely. Absolutely.

And the other thing is this is not something that you would do in the dark. You want to make sure because you're going there to specifically execute these people, to kill them. You want to make sure that you're going to shoot them. So unless you've got flashlights in your hand, which they very well might have, you're going to flip the switch. As soon as you walk through the door, the light switches right there.

The element of surprise allowed the killers to get within intimate range of their victims. With a gunshot wound, you don't think about that as being intimate. But if you start scoring headshots, particularly multiple headshots, you know that there is kind of a close approximation of the perpetrator to the victim in that particular case. So it tells a different tale. And, you know, with gunshot wounds to the head, particularly multiple ones, you want to think about, well, where are they shot in the head?

If it is an execution style to the back of the head, that's one thing. I'm not saying that the person is being humane that's doing it, but they want it over with and done as quickly as possible. When you start talking about shooting people in the face, this is something different, particularly if it's multiple times. First off, the individual has the potential to visualize you as you're doing it, and you're visualizing them. That brings it up to another level.

Execution style means from the back of the head, so you don't have to make eye contact with your victim, which makes sense. Yeah, that's a classic interpretation of it. Like when I'm talking to somebody, a fellow death investigator, a fellow forensic science person, if I say, yeah, it was an execution style shooting, automatically for me, and I would assume for most of my colleagues, we're going to think, okay, they're probably shot in the occiput, which if you put your hand on

you know, your fingers on the backside of your head and you feel that big knot in the back of your skull, that's your occiput. That's where your cerebellum dwells, where your primal brain dwells. And there's mercy. There's mercy there.

in the ox put back there. You know why there's mercy? Because if you fire into that area, it's almost an instantaneous death. But if you start shooting people all over their body and you do it multiple times, and particularly if you approach them and shoot them in the face, there's no guarantee they're dead instantly. No guarantee whatsoever.

According to Morgan, the killers then likely traveled a mile and a half up the road where victims Dana, Chris Jr., and Hannah Roden lived. I can't imagine that Dana poses the same threat level, say for instance, as Chris Sr. Chris was a pretty robust kind of guy, big guy, worked outdoors with cars and whatnot. He's familiar with weapons. I would imagine he could pose a threat, but

this mother living in her trailer with her kids, what threat did she pose? Is she the focus of a tremendous amount of anger? Well, when you combine the fact that they have committed overkill here with the shooting of her in her skull so many times, and then...

They moved to shoot her in a manner in which could potentially disfigure her. This seems to me almost a messaging that's sent out. The people that are perpetrating this have purpose to them. We have the other Hannah. Now, what kind of person could stand over a young woman and fire around into her face while staring at her and her baby? You're visualizing this. This is not something that's done in abstract. You're not...

a long, long distance away. You're up close and personal. And these rooms are, they're, you know, it's not the Taj Mahal here. I mean, it's, they're not real, real tiny, but they're pretty small. You're going to be on top of her when you're doing this.

Jeff wondered how the brutal precision executed by the killers could play into the prosecution's case. Does that come into play that they shoot a mother holding her baby twice in the head? Does that make it worse than shooting her once? This is a prosecutor's dream if you're talking about a narrative, all right? It takes...

such savagery on the part of an individual to do this. You look at Chris Jr., who is indwelling this place, and he's shot. It's kind of nonspecific. We do know that he was actually shot multiple times in the head, and he's

16-year-old kid, what threat does he pose? Why would you take the life of a 16-year-old boy there? I don't

I don't understand that. I think at the end of the day, when we analyze all of these shootings, there's a thread, obviously, I've talked about the overkill that goes into all of this, but there's a proximal issue here too. That is that you're getting into the space of these victims. ♪

Then, it's likely the killers targeted their last victim, Kenneth Roden, who was sleeping in a trailer a few miles away on Left Fork Road. However, Kenneth's crime scene was strikingly different from the other Roden victims. This is the end, the big finale, and they shoot this guy in the eye. Now, you know, this idea that he is shot in the eye, again, this goes to another level of violence here. Literally, did he see this coming at that moment in time?

Then to kind of put the icing on the cake, you drop dollar bills around. Again, that goes to motive. You're trying to put the police on the scent that this is something other than what it appears. I've worked cartel-related homicides before. Yeah, there's messaging that goes along with this sort of thing. But again, is that what they were going for? This is a different type of staging. You're not trying to mitigate crime.

the idea that it's something other than homicide is still a homicide. You're trying, this goes to the motivation behind the homicide to put them off scent. And that's a very, very interesting narrative when you begin to kind of think about it, I believe. - In your professional experience, have you ever heard of a family that operates as a foursome to different locations in this manner? That's pretty uncommon, I would assume. - Never.

I did work in two major metropolitan areas as a coroner and medical examiner investigator. I've never encountered it.

The sheer barbarity of the Roden murders will be a critical part of the story. But one element in particular will be crucial to convey to the jury. Jeff asked Joseph Morgan about it. I'm just curious, like, how the prosecutors were going to want to talk about the question of whether or not the victims were aware their life was going to end and how that might impact the jury. It's going to be critical for the prosecutor to be able to take the information that the investigators have developed...

in the field and working these scenes in particular. The time, these little markers and time along the way, how well were they able to document the actions that took place within the environment? If they can get that information out into open court, then they'll begin to talk about, I can envision in a closing statement in particular, a prosecutor would stand up there and say they took their time.

We have them documented as being in this location or this particular time and you as a jury have to consider this. What were they saying? What were they doing while they were in there? Did these people know that they were about to die? And of course, the prosecutor, it's their job to put, as horrible as it is, to put the jury members in the place of the victims.

to help them understand because everybody's been in fear of their life, the end of their life at some point in time. So you have to make that almost, you can't do it, but you want to make it as almost tactile as you possibly can so the people in the jury, they feel it stirring within their soul where they understand, okay, these people were at a critical mass and they knew that it was about to happen. What would I do in that moment in time where I realized that my life was actually coming to an end?

Let's stop here for another quick break. We'll be back in a moment. Hi, it's Andrea Gunning, host of Betrayal. I'm excited to announce that the Betrayal podcast is expanding. We are going to be releasing episodes weekly, every Thursday. Each week, you'll hear brand new stories, firsthand accounts of shocking deception, broken trust, and the trail of destruction left behind.

Stories about regaining a sense of safety, a handle on reality after your entire world is flipped upside down from unbelievable romantic betrayals. The love that was so real for me was always just a game for him. To betrayals in your own family. When I think about my dad, oh, well, he is a sociopath. Financial betrayal.

This is not even the part where he steals millions of dollars. And life or death deceptions. She's practicing how she's going to cry when the police calls her after they kill me. Listen to Betrayal Weekly on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. I'm John Walzak, host of the new podcast Missing in Arizona. And I'm Robert Fisher, one of the most wanted men in the world. We cloned his voice using AI. Come on, Paul.

In 2001, police say I killed my family. First mom, then the kids. And rigged my house to explode. In a quiet suburb. This is the Beverly Hills of the Valley. Before escaping into the wilderness. There was sleet and hail and snow coming down. They found my wife's SUV. Right on the reservation boundary. And my dog flew. All I could think of is him and the sniper me out of some tree.

But not me. Police believe he is alive and hiding somewhere. For two years. They won't tell you anything. I've traveled the nation. I'm going down in the cave. Tracking down clues. They were thinking that I picked him up and took him somewhere. If you keep asking me this, I'm going to call the police and have you removed. Searching for Robert Fisher. One of the most dangerous fugitives in the world.

Do you recognize my voice? Join an exploding house, a hunt, family annihilation today, and a disappearing act. Listen to Missing in Arizona every Wednesday on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows. Hi, I'm Molly Conger, host of Weird Little Guys, a new podcast from Cool Zone Media on iHeartRadio. I've spent almost a decade researching right-wing extremism, digging into the lives of people you wouldn't be wrong to call monsters.

But if Scooby-Doo taught us one thing, it's that there's a guy under that monster mask. I've collected the stories of hundreds of aspiring little Hitlers of the suburbs, from the Nazi cop who tried to join ISIS, to the National Guardsman plotting to assassinate the Supreme Court, to the Satanist soldier who tried to get his own unit blown up in Turkey. The monsters in our political closets aren't some unfathomable evil. They're just some weird guy. And you can laugh. Honestly, I think you have to. Seeing these guys for what they are doesn't mean they're not a threat.

It's a survival strategy. So join me every Thursday for a look under the mask at the weird little guys trying to destroy America. Listen to Weird Little Guys on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

Hi, I'm David Eagleman from the podcast Inner Cosmos, which recently hit the number one science podcast in America. I'm a neuroscientist at Stanford, and I've spent my career exploring the three-pound universe in our heads. We're looking at a whole new series of episodes this season to understand why and how our lives look the way they do. Why does your memory drift so much? Why is it so hard to keep a secret? When should you not trust your intuition?

Why do brains so easily fall for magic tricks? And why do they love conspiracy theories? I'm hitting these questions and hundreds more because the more we know about what's running under the hood, the better we can steer our lives. Join me weekly to explore the relationship between your brain and your life by digging into unexpected questions. Listen to Inner Cosmos with David Eagleman on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.

I think that even a trained assassin would find it foolhardy to go about trying to kill eight people on the same evening. Covering this much territory, there are too many things that can go wrong unless you have somebody watching your back. You're going to have to have a person that potentially is a lookout or a transporter. You're going to have to have somebody that can muscle or control the intended victims, and then you have to have a shooter.

And then ideally, you would in fact need somebody that's doing overall coordination. Because logistically, it's a daunting task, I think, to say the very least, you know, in this particular case.

There are too many variables involved. But even after you plan, perpetrators are not crime scene investigators. They don't think like crime scene investigators. They're so very rare. Most of the cases that we work as investigators, there is a huge opportunity for these people to screw up along the way, to leave something behind that is a direct indicator of their involvement or at least presence when these deaths occur.

And in this case, what was left behind included three young children. According to Morgan, these spared lives go directly to the heart of the presiding motive of the case. The singular driver behind this, it has to... Those children hold value. The attachment to the children is the driver behind this. When you get overkill, in my experience at least...

It goes to a lot of anger. It goes to a lot of passion. And you'll see it in domestics. You go to all this trouble, but yet you leave these three babies alive. And you have to, you know, you begin to kind of question this. And as an investigator, it takes you down a specific direction. Who would attach value to these children? Who would want to see them continue to live and still exist among the land of the living up there in Pike County?

When accused killers Billy, Angela, and George Wagner head to trial, prosecutors will paint them as the main characters in a gruesome, multi-layered horror story. Good prosecutors are great storytellers. That's their heartbeat. If they are effective, they take all these little pieces of evidence, all the stuff we've been talking about,

And they tighten that thing down and they walk in the courtroom and they start talking about mamas and they start talking about babies and they start talking about these familial ties. And it will be powerful in court. It will be very powerful. And I can almost see it now. I'm envisioning right now when he starts talking about this and you can see that jury, there'll be a slow turn of their heads toward that defendant's table.

No matter who's on trial at that particular time, because they will talk about mama and they will talk about those babies. And they're going to stare that individual down and they're going to think, who in the hell is in the courtroom with us right now? While we wait to see if Billy, Angela and George Wagner will head to trial, there's one man intimately involved in the Roden murder case who has already seen his day in court. Pike County Sheriff Charles Reeder.

After the Rhodes murders, he became front and center of all of the coverage. He was giving information alongside the Ohio Attorney General at that time. People were looking to him for information, and they wanted Reeder along with the state of Ohio to solve these murders. From all of the coverage that went into Pike County in the months after these murders, I mean, Charlie Reeder was a central figure in that.

But Sheriff Reeder had a quick fall from grace. In June 2019, he was indicted on eight felonies and eight misdemeanors. His charges included theft in office and tampering with evidence. That was huge news, not only because of his involvement in the rodent murders, but I mean, you're talking about the sitting sheriff, the high sheriff of Pike County,

On March 24th, 2021, Sheriff Rader appeared in court to face the charges leveled against him. A guilty verdict would have major consequences.

If you're a defense attorney working on this case and the sheriff of the county gets indicted, I would think, you know, if you're a Wagner attorney, you would look to have a field day with that. That might be part of your defense. More on that next time.

The

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