WAVERLY — Sometime in the next few days, Tony Rhoden will climb into his pickup truck and drive out to Scioto Burial Park to freshen up the flowers in the vases on his family’s headstone and spread some mulch around its concrete base.
He stops here often, where one of his brothers and a sister-in-law, two nephews and a niece all are buried side by side. But this next trip? This time it will be different. Because he’ll have some news to share while there.
He'll share that Edward “Jake” Wagner — one of four Wagners charged with shooting to death eight members of the Rhoden family in April 2016 — has confessed.
In a stunning and last-minute development that shocked a packed courtroom, Wagner pleaded guilty Thursday to 23 charges, including eight counts of aggravated murder. He has been cooperating with investigators and has agreed to testify against his parents and older brother, who also are charged in the killings.
Tony Rhoden: 'I don’t feel like in five years it’s gotten any easier'
For Tony, sitting in the front row at Pike County Common Pleas Court Thursday and listening as prosecutors recounted exactly what Wagner had told them he and his family had done, the moments didn’t even seem real. But they were, with Wagner’s change of plea coming on the fifth anniversary of the homicides.
“Has there been healing? Not really,” Tony said Monday, sitting down with The Dispatch after he asked to have a few days to take in all that has happened. “I don’t feel like in five years it’s gotten any easier. So many lives that were destroyed that day — not just those who were murdered but the lives of all the victims who were left behind. Yep. A lot of lives destroyed.”
Charged along with Jake Wagner are his parents, 49-year-old George "Billy" Wagner III and 50-year-old Angela Wagner, and his older brother George Wagner IV, 29. All were arrested in a coordinated take-down in various locations in November 2018. The family had moved to Alaska after the killings but had returned to this part of the country by then, and all were from the nearby Scioto County village of South Webster when arrested.
Special Prosecutor Angela Canepa said in court Thursday that Jake Wagner has told prosectors and investigators that his family were active participants in the planning of the killings and in carrying them out. Jake Wagner, through his confession and admission, even led investigators to where they could recover the three guns he said his family used while killing the eight people in four homes in three separate locations in rural Pike County in the middle of the night on April 22, 2016.
Killed were Tony’s brother, Christopher Rhoden Sr., 40 and Chris Sr.’s ex-wife Dana Manley Rhoden; their sons, Christopher Rhoden Jr., 16, and Clarence “Frankie” Rhoden, 20; their daughter, Hanna Rhoden, 19; Frankie’s fiancée, Hannah Gilley, 20; another of Tony and Chris Sr.’s brothers, 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden; and Gary Rhoden, 38, a cousin.
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From the time the bodies were discovered on April 22, it became an investigation led by the Ohio Attorney General’s Office’s Bureau of Criminal Investigation, the likes of which had never really been seen.
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The scope of the five-year investigation and the toll it has taken on everyone involved was evident by the BCI supervisors, crime-scene analysts, lab technicians and special agents who ringed the crowded courtroom to hear Jake Wagner plead guilty. A great many deputies from the Pike County sheriff's office, as well as new Sheriff Tracy D. Evans himself, were there, too.
And the importance of this case was underscored when Gov. Mike DeWine — who was Ohio attorney general when BCI took the case — and his wife, Fran, walked into the courtroom after the hearing and met with the Rhoden, Manley and Gilley families.
“I made a commitment to the families that we would solve this case. This plea was really a big deal, a huge step toward justice,” DeWine told The Dispatch in an interview Monday. “I felt that I should be down there with the families.”
He said he didn’t think it was appropriate to be in the courtroom during the plea, so the DeWines watched it on a livestream and then joined the families afterward. He said the most emotional moment of the day came when family matriarch Geneva Rhoden — now 78, requiring oxygen and barely able to walk — made her way over to him and threw her arms around him in a hug.
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“I was not only intellectually involved in this case but emotionally involved in this case,” DeWine said. “I don’t believe in closure. But they needed to see justice. Miss Geneva Rhoden needed to see justice."
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To say the day in court was gut-wrenching is an understatement, Tony Rhoden said.
It was, the 53-year-old said, the most difficult day he’s had in court since the Wagners were arrested on Nov. 13, 2018. With an unflinching strength, Tony stared at the 28-year-old who stood before him and admitted to killing so many people he loved, including Hanna Mae Rhoden, the mother of Jake Wagner’s daughter, who is now 7.
“People use the word monster a lot,” Tony said. “And I looked at him and saw a monster.”
But, he said, he felt it when Jake Wagner choked up a couple of times during the hearing. And it made him wonder after all this time: What changed?
“He has held out for five long years. So many lies. So much pain. What clicked in his brain to say ‘I need to make this right?’” Tony wonders. "Maybe there's a human being under all that after all."
Tony and his family still have a wrongful death lawsuit pending against the Wagner family, including against mother/grandmother Fredericka Wagner, who had her own charges of perjury and obstructing justice related to this case dismissed.
Attorneys Adam Nemann and Brian K. Duncan represent the Rhoden family in that civil case. Nemann said Monday that it is proper for the criminal cases to finish before the judge turns attention to the wrongful-death lawsuit, but that he is confident the civil case will bring another kind of justice.
"Eight people who were murdered, your family basically decimated ... You would want to do everything you could in your power to make the people responsible to pay in any way they can," Nemann said.
And there are, of course, the three other criminal cases pending. George Wagner IV is due back before Judge Randy Deering for a previously scheduled motion hearing Wednesday. His attorney, Richard Nash Jr., did not respond to a request from The Dispatch for comment, but gave a statement to People magazine: "My client maintains his innocence.”
As part of the plea agreement, prosecutors agreed to remove the death penalty as an option for not only Jake Wagner but for his parents and brother, too, should they be convicted. The Rhoden family was OK with that decision.
“Twenty-four hours a day in a prison cell, that’s punishment,” Tony said of Jake Wagner. “And every second of that time alone I hope what he did crosses his mind. And I hope he lives to be 200.”
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