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Pike County murder trial: Investigators describe recovering, testing murder weapons

Wagner Trial 1026 blv 11
Brooke LaValley/Brooke LaValley/Columbus Dispatch
A State Exhibit shows the items that were found in a bucket filled with concrete and immersed in the pond on the Flying W property. The trial of George Washington Wagner IV resumes Wednesday, October 26, 2022 at the Pike County Common Pleas Court in Waverly, Ohio. Eight members of the Rhoden family were found shot to death at four different locations on April 21-22, 2016.
Wagner Trial 1026 blv 11
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WAVERLY, Ohio — The eighth week of trial for a man accused of killing eight people in Pike County in 2016 continued Monday with a focus on more shoeprint evidence and the recovery of the murder weapons.

George Wagner IV — along with his mother Angela, father George "Billy" Wagner and brother Edward "Jake" Wagner — is accused of shooting and killing the Rhoden family members "execution-style." The family's bodies were found on April 22, 2016. He faces eight charges of aggravated murder, along with other charges associated with tampering with evidence, conspiracy and forgery.

Found dead that day were 40-year-old Christopher Rhoden Sr., 37-year-old Dana Rhoden, 20-year-old Hannah "Hazel" Gilley, 16-year-old Christopher Rhoden Jr., 20-year-old Clarence "Frankie" Rhoden, 37-year-old Gary Rhoden, 19-year-old Hanna May Rhoden, and 44-year-old Kenneth Rhoden.

The trial is the first time a person has faced a jury for the deaths of the Rhoden family six years ago.

On Monday the prosecution circled back to evidence collected against George and his family members in the course of the years-long investigation.

Bill Bodziak was called to the stand to explain his examination of bloody footprints found at the first crime scene, where Gary and Chris Sr. were found shot to death. Bodziak has performed shoe imprint analysis for several high-profile cases over the years and has testified multiple times about his findings, including in the OJ Simpson trial and the trial of Timothy McVey.

Bodziak explained for the jury the different parts of a shoe's outer sole that can create imprints, both three-dimensionally and two-dimensionally. In the case of the footprints in the Rhoden murders, the impressions were 2D and made in blood; investigators who discovered them took gel impressions and sprayed the prints with a chemical that enhances texture and detail in an impression in blood before cutting up the floor where the prints were found.

All of those items collected were sent to Bodziak so he could determine the sizes of the shoes used in the murders; investigators had already, through the help of Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigations agent Suzanne Elliott, determined the brand of the shoe to be a Walmart brand athletic shoe.

The day after the print evidence was hand-delivered to him in Florida by a BCI agent, Bodziak said he went to a local Walmart store and bought three pairs of size 10.5 and size 11 in the shoes to examine them. He focused specifically on finely textured portions with hand-pounded stippling; Bodziak explained to the jury that molds were made in shoe factories for each size, with a worker hand-stamping the texture pattern into the mold, creating unique impressions with unique mistakes, inconsistencies or quirks that would be mirrored in every shoe made from that mold.

Because of this process, all size 10.5 shoes in that brand would feature the same hand-stamped pattern that would differ from shoes of other sizes within the same brand.

Bodziak compared the hand-crafted pattern on the bottom of the two different sizes to the bloody footprints and found that two of the four prints were made with a size 11 shoe, one was made with a size 10.5 shoe and one print couldn't be determined because it was too distorted. He determined this by creating his own prints with the new shoes he bought and overlaying them onto the prints found in Chris Sr.'s trailer, matching the small textures on the underside of the shoes.

An impression found within Dana's home, on a patch of linoleum floor, couldn't be definitively identified, but Bodziak showed the jury where the small, triangular-shaped texture patters was present among other shoe prints.

Bodziak said he also purchased a size 10 in the Walmart shoe, comparing and subsequently ruling out that size because the proportions of the tread didn't match the shoe prints from the crime scene.

During cross examination, Richard Nash, George's defense attorney, asked Bodziak to explain an open-source shoe mold to the jury; Bodziak said some shoe companies, particularly smaller ones that cannot afford to hand-craft their own patterns, can buy molds that are available to other companies. Those molds typically have blank spaces on them for the shoe company to modify with their own brand name.

Nash asked whether there could be multiple shoe brands using the same open-source sole pattern and Bodziak conceded that was possible.

"The source of the Walmart athletic shoe outsole came from a mold that could have been used, at other times, by other manufacturers," he said.

BCI agent Ryan Scheiderer replaced Bodziak on the stand after he stepped down, to corroborate details the jury heard in the week before from George's brother, Jake. Scheiderer explained how agents tracked down a pick-up truck used in the murders, as well as the concrete buckets filled with murder weapons the Wagners placed in a pond at the Flying W Farm.

When they arrived at the pond, the goose house Jake described was where he'd said it would be, though it didn't look the same anymore.

"It was in poor shape, it was not floating, it was not white anymore as he'd indicated, it had weathered and was under the water," said Scheiderer.

Nevertheless, investigators heaved the concrete buckets used to weigh it down from the pond. The buckets were photographed and X-rayed before they were taken to BCI headquarters in London, Ohio. At the BCI office, Scheiderer said the evidence lab worked to dismantle the buckets and chisel out the items inside.

Matt White, a BCI firearms specialist, then examined the guns and firearm-related items recovered from the concrete, Scheiderer said.

After a lunch break, the prosecution called Lt. Ed Schillig, a Franklin County Sheriff's Deputy, to the witness stand. Schillig is a member of the department's dive team and was on the scene on April 18, 2021 when investigators searched the pond at the Flying W Farm to recover the buckets.

Schillig described the procedures and safety precautions divers take when searching for evidence or recovering items; Andrew Wilson, special prosecutor, showed him several photographs from the day of the search, asking him to walk the jury through the process of pulling the buckets from the pond. Once all of them were recovered, they were turned over to BCI, Schillig said.

Prosecution then re-called White to the stand to explain and describe the items found inside the buckets, including the sliced up pieces of guns Jake told investigators were the murder weapons.

White said it was up to him to break the solid concrete cylinders and carefully chisel out every piece of evidence within. To do that, he said he used hammers and mauls with chisels to score the cylinders in a cross shape, breaking the concrete into quartered chunks. From there, he said he carefully — almost as an archaeologist would — used a hammer and chisel to delicately chip the concrete away from the items in order to extract them without damaging them.

He said many of the items inside had varying degrees of damage, including cuts and burning — Jake testified last week that he'd cut up the guns and used an acetylene torch to burn spots he felt would be key to investigators. White testified a torch was consistent with the kind of focused burn damage he found.

Ultimately, White recovered pieces that assembled to create a complete Glock .40 caliber pistol and a 1011 Walther Colt long rifle pistol; ammo for both guns and ammo for an SKS rifle were also found inside the bucket.

White said he cleaned up the items he managed to chisel out with water, gun cleaning solution, a nylon brush and "a substantial amount of time and effort."

Two items pulled out were the cut up pieces of the barrel of a gun that had been welded to pipe fittings and thread adaptors. White said these items would likely have been used to attach something — like a silencer — to the end of the guns. One barrel was consistent with a 9mm Beretta pistol. Jake testified that he'd tried to fashion a silencer for a Beretta pistol out of a flashlight, but when the gun was fired it failed and the firearm was destroyed in the process; also inside the bucket was 9mm ammunition.

Once all the items were extracted and identified, White said he went to work trying to find a way to forensically identify whether the guns were consistent with ballistic evidence already recovered from the murder scenes in 2016 and the Wagner's home on Peterson Road in 2017.

In order to do that, White said he removed the firing pin from the cut up 1911 Colt pistol. Reattaching that firing pin into an undamaged, identical weapon would allow him to test fire it, he said, and determine whether the firing pin impression matched casings found at the scenes and at Peterson Road. White said he was able to do it, and the firing pin impression he'd previously testified was so unique he'd never seen it before this case was consistent with the gun that fired both shots at two crime scenes and Peterson Road.

Casings from the test fires, the Wagners' driveway and yard, and the bedrooms of Frankie, Hannah Hazel, Dana, Chris Jr. and Hanna Rhoden, all matched and appeared to have been fired from the same gun, White said.

The Glock pistol was trickier to test fire, White said. Concrete had gotten into some parts of that gun, because it was placed in the concrete without its magazine attached, and it was "significantly difficult to remove," he said. The Glock's barrel was cut into several parts, though White said concrete hadn't been able to penetrate the inside of the barrel, keeping it relatively clean.

He took the rear part of the slide — which had been cut in half — and attached it to an unfired Glock of the same generation, but couldn't test fire it himself. If he did, the slide would come off, causing unsafe conditions, he said. Instead, he said he used a tool made for these situations; a box, with padded vice grips inside, can hold a damaged gun while it's remotely fired, keeping the agent out of harm's way in case the firearm "catastrophically fails on firing," White said.

Thanks to that tool, he was able to test successfully fire the .40 caliber Glock pistol multiple times; White testified earlier in the trial that he'd determined it was likely a Glock pistol fired the .40 caliber, hollow-point rounds found in the bodies of Chris Sr., Gary and Kenneth.

Before he could confirm for the jury whether that test fire produced casings that matched evidence found at the murder scenes, court adjourned for the day; White will return to the witness stand Tuesday morning.

You can read recaps of each day of the trial in our coverage below:

Watch opening statements below:

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