Pike County: Death in the foothills

Update: Four members of the Wagner family were arrested Tuesday, Nov. 13 in connection with the killings.

Correction: An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported when Hanna Rhoden's daughter went to stay with her father, Jake Wagner. Rhoden dropped her daughter off on Friday, April 15, 2016. 

He cocked his head and leaned in from the edge of the funeral home’s couch, when they asked what he needed.  

Those who came to call couldn’t imagine losing a member of their family, let alone eight — all at the same time, in a murderous massacre in the stillness of the night. 

“Whatchya’ mean?” asked Leonard Manley, looking out over the crowded parlor the day before he would bury a daughter, a son-in-law and three grandchildren and three shirt-tail relatives. 

He opened his arms wide as if to offer an embrace: “My friends are here. My family is all here. 

“What else could a man need?’’ 

Sorrow visits the foothills of Appalachia as sure as its seasons and its next generations. But this is different. 

These unwelcome visitors likely knew the family they slaughtered, some as they slept, in their homes, on family land. 

Death and family brought the Rhodens to Ohio generations ago. 

Now it holds them here. 

The canary yellow paint is faded and peeling on the house set a bit back from Union Hill Road. But its roof is sturdy, made of metal. Its foundation, rows of cinderblock.

Sheets of particle board cover what used to be windows. Only one is grayed; the rest remain the burnished tan of newness. Not enough seasons have passed to weather them.

The boards are nailed in place to keep the strangers out — in case gawkers don’t heed the No Trespass signs affixed to the front of the home and to the trunks of greening trees surrounding it. A lone remnant of crime scene tape flaps in the warmth of an early summer breeze. 

If not for those less-than-subtle warnings, the little yellow house could pass for any other in the gentle rolling hills of rural Pike County, Ohio. Junked cars and broken-down appliances litter the yard. A deserted swingset rusts nearby. A picnic table sits, abandoned.

For Tony Rhoden, this is what’s left of his family homestead, a testament to a lifetime of hardship and heartbreak. It symbolizes all the homes and the properties where his dad Clarence Rhoden planted apple, peach and pear trees and sowed crops each spring to feed his family when the asphalt company layoff came before Thanksgiving, as it did every year. Where he and his brothers hunted squirrel, rabbit and deer. Where they, too, taught their sons to kill not for sport, but for survival.

After Clarence died, there was no reason for Tony to return to the yellow house. His younger brother, Kenneth, moved in. And his baby brother, Chris, was raising his family just down the road in his own trailer on the same property.

They tended to it. They kept it safe.

Until April 22. 

*****

No one seems to know yet who crept onto the Rhoden properties to kill Tony’s younger brothers, a sister-in-law, a cousin, two nephews, a niece, and a soon-to-be-niece who never saw the wedding that would have officially made her a Rhoden. The killers took much of the evidence, but they left behind the family’s next generation — a toddler and two babies — physically unharmed.

Tony doesn’t have a theory about who would kill his relatives. Nor does he know why. He can’t fathom that hate.

Investigators discovered hundreds of marijuana plants at the crime scenes, and evidence of three commercial grow operations at two of the sites. They have never elaborated, nor confirmed if marijuana was a motive for the massacre. They haven’t said much about the mass killing, which remains unsolved.

It was 26 days before authorities released the land back to the family.

The crime scenes — three trailers and a camper — were towed away.

Kept safe, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine said, for that hopeful someday when a judge or jurors might need to see them to help convict the killers.

Tony and his sole surviving brother, Brady, spent that spring weekend mowing, weed-whacking and trimming trees on the five-acre property his dad and mom bought 25 years before. They repeated the process just down the road on the six acres Chris Rhoden had bought his ex-wife, Dana, just a month before their family was killed.

He’s not sure what might happen to the land and, in this moment, it does not matter.

“I have the satisfaction of saying: ‘Chris, I took care of that for you,” said Tony, his eyes hidden behind sunglasses. “He would’ve done it for me.”

It was a 14-hour job that sweltering Sunday. 

During those first few weeks, Tony, Brady or Brady’s boys would return often to mow, to feed and water the 350-to 400-pound hog, the dozens of chickens and the 15 dogs the killers spared.

As spring turned to summer, the mowing trips dropped to weekly. The animals were sold. Relatives took the dogs.

Brady still drives by daily. Tony, not quite so often. But enough.

“Sometimes I catch myself driving up to Union Hill to sit at dad’s place,” Tony said, looking out into the distance. “I drive out there and think … just sit at the picnic table and think.”

It is not a place of comfort.

“It’s hard to go back,” he said.

“Nothing eases the pain.

“I don’t reckon anything will.”

There was never a doubt back in the early 1960s that Geneva Stone Rhoden would raise eight of her nine siblings left orphaned after her mother died — nearly a year to the day after a logging accident killed her father. 

Geneva had been married just two years to Clarence and was living in Kentucky when the call came. 

The young couple loaded up their two young children and headed for her parents’ home across the river in Ohio. 

She was barely 19. He was just 23.  

Geneva Rhoden fought for and won custody of her school-aged younger siblings, Tony said. 

“She cared so much, she wanted to keep them together as a family,” he said. 

Through the years, Geneva and Clarence, who worked in sawmills as a young man, moved from house to house, and from southern Ohio county to southern Ohio county. 

Then they bought that little yellow house and settled in Pike County. 

All the while, they were having babies of their own. One about every 18 to 24 months. 

“As one was coming around, another was going out,” Tony recalled of his aunts and sisters, uncles and brothers. 

Between their nine children and Geneva Rhoden’s siblings, the couple would raise 17 children through a 35-year marriage filled with deep love, marred by deeper loss. 

The Stone and Rhoden families grew up together. They shared bedrooms with bunk beds and kitchens with never enough chairs for family meals. 

“I was 17 before we ever had running water in the house. Se-VEN-teen,” said Tony, now 48. “We had wells and an outhouse.  

“You’d draw your water to bathe in. You’d draw your water for laundry. You’d draw your water for everything,” he said. “Mom would do laundry: She’d do everyone’s laundry for the week and then do dad’s on the weekends, his work clothes. 

All of the children pitched in. 

“It was part of life, you know?” 

*****

While Geneva the matriarch cooked and laundered for the family, Clarence worked his Columbus job at an asphalt paving company during the weekdays and gardened on the weekends. Gardening was both necessity and passion, something he learned as a boy from his father and one some of the children picked up, as well.

He relied on his hands, because he couldn’t read or write.

Family lore has it that Clarence attended school for just one day. The story goes that he came home from school and told his dad he didn’t care much for it, said Kenneth Rhoden’s ex-wife Stacie Rigsby, who has done extensive genealogy research on the family.

Court records paint a bleaker picture.

Clarence grew up poor, one of eight children and the son of a railroad worker, who sometimes meted out harsh discipline.

He “never had the opportunity to receive an education because his father forbade him from going to school, and forced him to stay home and work on a cattle farm,” according to Pike County court records related to a felony conviction against Clarence that came years later.

As an adult, Clarence was particular about his fruit and vegetable gardens. He knew the bounty would have to feed a least a dozen mouths during the winter months after the annual layoffs arrived at Strawser’s Paving in Columbus.

His job wouldn’t start back up until April.

“Believe me, we ate many beans and potatoes,” Tony said. “Sometimes that’s all we could afford.

“But we never, ever, ever went hungry. Never.”

Christmas meant presents; gifts that had been dutifully paid for on layaway accounts for months. Birthdays always brought family parties.

“Mom made sure each one of us had a cake,” Tony said. “It might not have had all the candles, but we had cake.”

As sure as the fruit trees set their blossoms, the Rhoden kids helped their dad plant and tend to his half-acre garden every spring.

“Summer times, he would come home on the weekends and what we was supposed to have gotten done out there, he would go out and mend it the way he wanted it done,’’ Tony said, flashing a rare grin.

For family barbeques, they would slaughter the chickens the children helped raise.

The kids would play basketball with a hoop fashioned from a 20-inch bicycle rim attached to an old pole one of the kids found somewhere.

And of course, those hot months also meant swimming and fishing in a nearby creek — an idyllic setting amid a beautiful countryside.

*****

One Saturday in the spring of 1984, Steven Rhoden, the little brother with whom Tony shared secrets and a room, went missing.

The sheriff assembled a search party. But as darkness set in, no one could find the green-eyed 14-year-old with sandy-blonde hair.

Tony can’t recall who told him that Steven’s 73-pound body was found in the creek the following day. He was told his little brother had slipped while setting a minnow trap. Steven hit his head and drowned.

The coroner’s report lists the day he was found as his day of death: May 13, 1984.

Mother’s Day. 

The next day was Geneva Rhoden’s 41st birthday. 

The family buried Steven in the Rhoden family cemetery, in Greenup County, Kentucky. Relatives still decorate his grave.

“It seems so long ago now,” Tony said, his words catching in his throat. “It was a tough time for a long time.

“Still is to this day.”

“You ask that question: Why?’’ he went on. “It’s just an accident you can never understand.”

“Just like this,’’ Tony said, referencing the April killings.

“It’s something that never should have happened.”

Tony and most of his siblings had moved out and started their own families by January 1991, when his parents bought that little yellow house on Union Hill Road.

The decade that followed brought more pain to the Rhodens, first in the form of hastily recanted allegations of sexual assault against Clarence in 1991.

To this day, some familiar with those charges remain skeptical, first made by a teenage girl who quickly said she made them up. But four years later, she leveled the same charges in court. She was an adult by then. She is not identified because The Enquirer does not name victims of sexual assault. 

In the interim, Geneva had separated from her husband and left the house. But she didn’t go far; she stayed on the land living in a camper.

Clarence would be indicted, tried and convicted in a one-day trial 21 years ago on five counts of sexual battery.

Eight days later, his divorce from Geneva was finalized.

Clarence filed appeals to overturn the conviction. He lost and was sentenced to serve 10 years in prison.

Through the years, neighbors, several of the Rhoden children and even the assault victim asked the court to consider releasing him early from Orient prison, court records show. Prison was worsening his hypertension and heart issues, their letters noted. His children wrote they feared he might die behind bars.

The mostly handwritten notes, all photocopied and tucked neatly in the court file, depict a hard-working man who rarely missed a day of work, a father who provided for his family and a neighbor who often shared a cup of coffee and a hand of rummy 500.

“Should he die while still incarcerated I believe that we would be unable to resolve our differences and have some sort of relationship,” the victim wrote the judge in 2002.

“This matter,” her letter continued, “has divided a very close family. And I desire (that) family to be reunited again.”

It may have divided family members, but it did not break them.

In the end, Clarence spent four years in prison while his little yellow house stood empty. He would return there and live until a heart attack killed him six years later in the summer of 2008.

His family buried him next to his son, Steven, in the Rhoden family cemetery.

In history and heartache, the Rhodens are not unlike countless generations of families who call this southern swath of Ohio home. They settled in scenic plots of fertile ground where flatlands give rise to the forested foothills of Appalachia, about 90 minutes east of the river city of Cincinnati and 60 miles south of the capital city of Columbus.

For the Rhodens and their neighbors, Appalachia is more than simple geography defined by receding glaciers millions of years ago. Appalachia is a culture rooted in hard work and hard living, in family privacy and family grudges, in distrust of strangers and abundant generosity.

It’s a place that makes time for long conversations, where time seems to pass more slowly. A place where Sunday dinner still means the meal served around 2 p.m. And where asking questions equates to prying into the business of others.

“We were a family that kept to ourselves,” Tony said. “That’s just how we are.”

That sense of privacy, of self-sufficiency, comes honestly to many here, after decades of being left behind by employers in one of the state’s poorest and undereducated counties. Nearly a quarter of its residents live below the poverty line compared to 15.9 percent statewide.

This is a place where the promise of jobs that an atomic plant brought back in the 1950s withered away, like so much other skilled labor work through the decades. And skilled labor is a lifeline when one-fifth of Pike County residents don’t hold a high school diploma or GED and just 11 percent hold bachelor’s or advanced degrees.

“It’s like they just forgot us down here,” Tony said.

That has left folks to rely heavily on those they trust to stitch together a patchwork of jobs largely learned and passed down through generations: They tend crops, cut trees, work at mills, fix cars and other machinery. Many often trade for goods and services when money runs low.

Some struggle mightily with drugs and alcohol abuse. Others rely on public assistance, while still others turn to illegal activities to try and make ends meet.

For even more, living at home in Pike County — where a quarter of its housing units are heated by wood and 6 percent have no indoor plumbing — means commuting an hour or longer to nearby cities for decent-paying jobs.

Tony tried making the trek to Columbus — like his dad did for more than three decades before and like his brother Kenneth had recently started doing.

“I didn’t care for it,” he said. “The drive. And the people, well they were different.

“And,” he added after a momentary pause. “This is home.”

*****

It was Tony’s brother, Chris, who stayed on the family property. He lived in a trailer within spitting distance of his dad’s house, with wife Dana on Union Hill Road. They raised their children — Clarence “Frankie,” Hanna, and Chris, Jr. — there. Chris. Sr., and Dana eventually went their separate ways. In recent years, however, their kids were beginning to raise their children there, too.

It was Chris, as well, who took on the job of overseeing his dad’s estate, which ended up being worth about $50,000 — almost all of that tied to the land on Union Hill Road and another 47 acres less than four miles away on Left Fork Road.

Chris Rhoden paid the funeral bill and he paid off his dad’s debts. He and his siblings each shared one-eighth interest in the land, but later, his sisters relinquished their share to the brothers, according to Pike County probate and property records. 

It was not a lot in cash. Its fortune was in memories.

Most of the family remained close, connected by blood and history and a deep-seated loyalty that seemed unshakable. Sisters and brothers, cousins and aunts and uncles, nieces and nephews routinely dropped by each other’s homes often and unannounced.

It was common for the men and boys to work on demolition derby cars, while the women cooked large meals inside for everyone. They lent each other money, shared in their devotion to children and child-rearing and rarely could stay angry with each other for long.

Even in divorce, there was little acrimony.

“Once a Rhoden, always a Rhoden,” said Kenneth’s former wife, Stacie Rigsby. “I don’t know why that is, really. We all was just so tight.”

The pair had worked at reconciling, but it never worked, she said.

But for Chris and Dana, getting back together seemed to be their logical next step. They had always loved each other, after all, family members said.

Chris bought her the trailer about a mile down from his home. And once their youngest son graduated from high school, they planned to remarry, said her dad, Leonard Manley.

Dana was proud of the new home, which sat between Chris’ trailer and her parents’ trailer on Union Hill Road. She posted photographs of the home she had made for her and her children on social media accounts.

Laughter and love filled the home during a baby shower she hosted April 9 for her only daughter and her soon-to-be born granddaughter, Kylie

Less than a month later, it would be one of four crime scenes. And baby Kylie, just 5 days old, would be in foster care -- far way from any family.

*****

The Rhoden men were known as hard workers who rarely if ever complained. The family women as caregivers to their children and also to those who had less.

Tony, Chris and Kenneth, and other Rhoden relatives, worked together for years as laborers for long-time family friend Robin Waddell. A decade ago, the men cleared 100 acres of woods, ran electricity and put in the roads to create what is now the idyllic Big Bear Lake Family Resort and Campground on the edge of Scioto County in Lucasville. The overnight campground is a home-away-from-home retreat for hundreds of regulars who park their campers there seasonally. Some make it home, year-round.

“Nobody worked harder than them boys,” Waddell said, showing off the elaborate decks and playgrounds Chris Rhoden built over the years.

“You can’t look anywhere here and not see Chris,” he added.

Dana had recently started using her social media accounts to help sell salvaged cars for the Scioto River Trading Company, near the campground, said her dad Leonard Manley.

Chris and Kenneth would frequently buy cars at auction, fix them and turn around and sell them or useable parts to turn a small profit.

The car business was what Dana and Chris did on the side for a little extra cash, Manley said. It wasn't a lot. But, here, everything helped.

She worked full-time as a nursing assistant at the Hillside Skilled Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Peebles, 10 miles west of her home. She loved the work, often taking food and small gifts to patients and staff.

But pay in that field is barely above minimum wage.

*****

Kenneth Rhoden also worked alongside his brothers and tinkered with cars and building demolition derby cars.

Getting by for him sometimes meant growing marijuana on that family land on Left Fork Road where he lived in a camper, said his daughter and namesake Kendra Rhoden.

Like his dad, Kenneth was gifted at gardening and turned to growing and cultivating marijuana to supplement his income and to help her mom, also a nurse’s aide, in lean times.

The 19-year-old never knew him to be involved in large-scale distribution, she said. 

Kendra is now the executor to his estate. She said there really isn’t much to it: His camper, a truck and his beloved motorcycle. There are no secret bank accounts, no piles of cash, she said.

Kenneth lived down the road from oldest brother Brady, who still lives on the 47-acre tract.

It’s just a few miles and a short drive to Union Hill Road, where Chris and Dana and their kids lived.

He lived alone with Brownie, a pit bull-terrier mix, and had recently gone to work for U.S. Utilities in Columbus.

“My dad was the kind of person who always gave life lessons,’’ Kendra said. “He would say that even in the darkest hour would come light.

“He would always say to live every day like it was your last.”

Kendra Rhoden said nothing seemed amiss with her dad or other family members in the days leading up to April 22.

Just like many nights, Kendra was going to spend the night with her cousin Hanna and Hanna’s 5-day-old baby girl Kylie the night of April 21. But Kendra needed the cash a last-minute, overnight babysitting job would bring. So she said she’d see Hanna — who was like an inseparable sister to her – the next day.

Hanna, 19, had packed up her older daughter, Sophia Wagner, and dropped her off at her father's home on Friday April 15. She presumably snuggled in with her newborn she’d been faithfully nursing that week. Her brother, Chris Jr., 16, was also likely home when their mom arrived home after pulling a double shift at the nursing home because he had school the next day.

Down the road, Chris Sr. and Tony talked by phone about getting a part to fix Dana’s faucet. The conversation was brief. Neither a man of many words. They signed off, saying they would see each other the next day at work at Big Bear. 

Their cousin, Gary, had been living and working alongside Chris Sr. for several months. Chris Sr. had worked to get Gary off of drugs and alcohol and had helped him repeatedly to stay clean and sober, said Gary’s stepmother, Ruth Rhoden.

“Chris got him off of all that stuff,” she said, adding that Gary often worked with Chris Sr. at Big Bear Lake.

That meant that paydays would come and Chris would hold back most of Gary’s pay to ensure he wouldn’t spend it on drugs. Instead of giving him the money, he would go shopping or run errands with his cousin.

“He was really, really good to Gary,” she said.

The two had worked together at the lake, putting on some finishing touches on a wooden playground near the entrance of the camping area.

Chris and Dana’ oldest son, Clarence “Frankie” Rhoden, 20, was living in a trailer with his fiancée, Hannah Gilley, 20, and their 6-month-old son, Ruger.

Hannah never learned how to drive, so she was often stuck on Union Hill Road until or unless someone came to pick her up. On April 21, her sister Meranda had packed a bag to spend the night after she finished her job at a local pizza parlor, said their grandfather Kenny Shoemaker.

But for whatever reason, Meranda drove past Union Hill Road that night.

She headed home and slept in her own bed.

*****

In the early morning hours of April 22, the killers entered the trailers on Union Hill Road and Left Fork Road. They fired a total of 32 bullets into the eight victims.

They killed Hanna, even as her newborn girl snuggled alongside her, in her mother’s new trailer. Dana was shot five times; her little brother was shot multiple times, too. 

They shot both Frankie and Hannah Gilley, as their toddler slept between them and as Frankie’s now 4-year-old son, Brentley, was in another room.

Chris Sr. was shot nine times. It appeared, family members said officials have told them, he may have struggled with his attackers. His cousin, Gary, was found shot multiple times in a back bedroom. The men were found lying on the floor near each other.

Kenneth was the only victim shot once. He was shot in the eye. He, too, was found in his bed. His home was the only left unlocked.

None of the dogs at any of the properties were hurt. Surveillance equipment and cameras were taken from the properties, family members said. It’s unclear if anything else was taken from inside the homes.

Attorney General DeWine has said since the first press conference that the investigation would not be easy. It has turned into the most complex and largest in Ohio’s history.

Earlier this month, he said authorities have gathered the evidence necessary to prosecute the killers. He said he and investigators have learned a lot about Pike County in the last six months of the probe. And, he has said repeatedly, he is sure folks here know more than they are saying. 

All that aside, DeWine, continues to promise the killers will be caught.

The Rhodens and their extended family aren’t so sure. 

And even if they catch the killers, Tony can't help to wonder:

Will it really matter? 

Tony steeled himself as he stood outside that little yellow house back in the summer. He hadn’t stepped foot inside since his dad Clarence died eight years before.

He went in search of a piece of his family’s heritage, for something to hold onto.

He inhaled deeply and walked up to the house, its paint peeling more than he remembered. He looked at the particle board.

Patient and strong and alone, he methodically worked the nails out of the board and lifted it just enough to slip inside.

He walked across the threshold.

Not much had changed. There were Kenneth’s things, left after he moved out and into his own place on Left Folk Road. A few of his dad’s were there, too.

But he couldn’t find that one thing he came seeking: The white leather-bound family Bible, with photos of happier times stuffed between its pages; and maybe family birthdates and other notes scribbled just inside its cover.

It didn’t take him long to check the rooms before he knew it wasn’t there. It’s most likely in one of those trailers the authorities towed away.

At least he hopes it is.

He fastened the board back in place, brushed the dust and cobwebs off his shirt and headed back down Union Hill Road leaving as he had come.

Empty handed.