On the morning of April 22, 2016, dispatchers in Pike County, Ohio, began receiving calls that would mark one of the darkest days in the state’s history. By the time officers had finished checking four separate rural properties scattered across Scioto Township, eight people were dead — all members of the same extended family, the Rhodens, shot execution-style in their beds. It was the largest mass murder Ohio had seen in decades, and it would take more than six years to fully untangle the web of motive, loyalty, and violence that made it possible.

Eight Lives Lost

The victims ranged in age from sixteen to forty-four. Christopher Rhoden Sr., 40, was found at his home along Union Hill Road; his brother Kenneth Rhoden, 44, was discovered in a camper on a nearby property. Their cousin Gary Rhoden, 38, was also killed. At a third location, Christopher’s former wife Dana Lynn Rhoden, 37, was found dead, along with three of their children: Clarence “Frankie” Rhoden, 20; Hanna May Rhoden, 19; and Christopher Rhoden Jr., 16. Hanna’s fiancé, Hannah “Hazel” Gilley, 20, was shot at a fourth location. A nursing infant was found alive in the arms of her deceased mother. The methodical nature of the killings — carried out silently across multiple sites in a single night — pointed unmistakably to premeditation and to perpetrators who knew the land and the people on it.

The Custody Motive

Investigators combed through thousands of tips over two years before their focus settled on the Wagner family, neighbors with an intimate and troubled history with the Rhodens. At the center of it all was a child: the infant daughter of Jake Wagner and Hanna May Rhoden. The Wagners, prosecutors argued, feared that Hanna was planning to seek full custody and that DNA testing might reveal inconvenient truths about the baby’s parentage. Rather than face a custody proceeding, the Wagner family — patriarch George “Billy” Wagner III, his wife Angela, and their two adult sons, George Wagner IV and Jake Wagner — allegedly chose to eliminate the problem entirely, planning the massacre over months with military-like precision.

Arrests and the First Convictions

In November 2018, Ohio Attorney General Mike DeWine announced charges against all four Wagners. The case began to unravel through plea agreements. Jake Wagner pleaded guilty in April 2021 to eight counts of aggravated murder and fifteen additional charges, agreeing to testify against his family in exchange for avoiding the death penalty. His mother, Angela Wagner, followed with her own plea in September 2021, admitting to conspiracy to commit aggravated murder and related offenses. The first contested trial belonged to George Wagner IV, whose three-month proceedings in 2022 ended in conviction on twenty-two counts, including eight counts of aggravated murder. He was sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole.

Sentences and Ongoing Legal Battles

In January 2025, Jake Wagner and Angela Wagner were sentenced at hearings that brought some measure of finality — though not without controversy. Jake received a sentence of life in prison with the possibility of parole after thirty-two years, a result the state immediately challenged, arguing the sentence was too lenient given the scope of his admitted crimes. The Ohio Supreme Court accepted the state’s appeal. Angela was sentenced to thirty years. A peripheral figure, Rita Newcomb — who had helped tamper with evidence — received five years of adult supervision. As of mid-2026, George Wagner IV’s appeal of his own conviction remains pending before Ohio’s Fourth District Court of Appeals, with his attorneys citing alleged juror conflicts. And Billy Wagner, who has pleaded not guilty to all twenty-two charges against him, still awaits trial; the question of whether he will face the death penalty has been litigated all the way to the state’s appellate courts, which in January 2026 reinstated the possibility over the trial judge’s objections.

Why This Case Still Matters

The Pike County Massacre is frequently cited by legal scholars as a study in the complexity of prosecuting family-based conspiracies. The need to flip co-conspirators, the layered timeline of plea agreements, and the decade-long distance between crime and final resolution illustrate how justice can move with frustrating slowness even in cases of enormous public weight. For the surviving Rhoden family members — including the infant girl who slept through the night her family was killed — the courtroom delays are not abstractions but lived experiences of deferred closure. Ten years after the murders, three of the four Wagners have been convicted or pleaded guilty. The fourth trial has yet to begin.

A nursing infant survived that April night, found unharmed in her deceased mother’s arms — and somewhere in southeastern Ohio, she is growing up in the long shadow of a question that may not be fully answered for years: when the last trial finally concludes, will the full truth of what happened on those four properties ever be told, or will the final chapter of the Rhoden family massacre belong, like so many American tragedies, to the lawyers?