Who Killed the Rhoden Family? The Wagner Family's Pike County Massacre Explained
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 2 April 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In April 2016, eight members of the Rhoden and Gilley families were found shot execution-style across four separate locations in Pike County, Ohio, in what became one of the most extensive homicide investigations in American history. After two years of surveillance, wiretaps, ballistics analysis, and a homemade silencer recovered from the bottom of a well, the Wagner family of four was arrested in November 2018 and charged with aggravated murder, conspiracy, and related offenses.
What started as a custody dispute over a baby girl became the blueprint for a massacre that took months to plan. The Wagners were not a troubled family in the way most people use that phrase. They were a closed criminal system, run by a patriarch who taught his sons to track police officers on road trips for dollar bills, and a matriarch who regularly accessed her sons' girlfriends' social media accounts to monitor their loyalty. When 19-year-old Hanna May Rhoden wrote in a Facebook message that the Wagners would "have to kill me first" before she'd sign custody papers, Angela Wagner was already reading her messages. This is the story of the eight people they went after anyway, and the family that spent months convincing themselves it was the right thing to do.
#PikeCountyMurders #RhodenFamilyMurders #WagnerFamily #OhioTrueCrime #TrueCrime #TrueCrimePodcast #MassMurder
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | On the morning of April 22nd, 2016, law enforcement in Pike County, Ohio, told residents |
| 0:07.7 | to stay inside and lock their doors. |
| 0:10.8 | In a community where most people never locked their doors at all, that was not a routine |
| 0:15.2 | announcement. |
| 0:16.5 | Eight people had been killed across four locations in a single night, the people responsible or neighbors. Pike County, Ohio, sits in the southern part of the state, tucked into a stretch of the |
| 0:50.3 | Appalachian country where families the foundation everything else is built on. |
| 0:54.9 | People know their neighbors, their neighbors' parents, which truck you drive, where you like the |
| 0:59.3 | fish on the weekends. Generations of families live close enough to each other that the lines |
| 1:03.9 | between households blur naturally over time. The Rodens were one of those families. |
| 1:10.0 | Christopher Rodin Sr. was 40 years old, a laborer who owned |
| 1:13.7 | several properties in Sunfish Township and spent summers working at Big Bear Lake Family Resort. |
| 1:19.6 | His brother Kenneth, 44, ran utility and lumber jobs across the county. Their cousin, Gary, 38, had roots |
| 1:26.6 | in Kentucky tobacco farming before putting |
| 1:29.1 | down roots in Ohio. These were men defined by physical work and deep local connection. Their |
| 1:35.2 | lives anchored to demolition derbies, hunting seasons, and the slow rhythms of agricultural |
| 1:40.9 | community. The younger generation of rodents was just beginning to find their footing. |
| 1:45.9 | Frankie Rodin, 20, was a welder who lived for hunting and fishing and the local demolition derby, |
| 1:51.8 | where his Ford Crown Victoria was a beloved regular entry. He was engaged to Hannah Gilley, |
| 1:57.9 | also 20, who had plans to open a daycare. Hannah Mae Rodin, 19, was a certified nursing assistant and a mother of two, building a life |
| 2:06.2 | with real intention. |
| 2:07.6 | Her mother was Dana, 37, working at Hillside Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation, known |
| 2:13.1 | throughout her unit for regularly bringing food for her colleagues for no other reason |
... |
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