Andrea Shoemaker Carver angrily addresses Jake Wagner during his sentencing hearing on Jan. 3, 2025 (Law&Crime).
Drama was high, surprising, and consistent in an Ohio courtroom on Friday, where a convicted killer was sentenced for his role in an eight-person massacre of another family over a child custody dispute.
In April 2021, Edward “Jake” Wagner, 32, pleaded guilty to murdering members of the Rhoden and Gilley families — five years to the day of the gruesome finds at three houses and one camper in Pike County.
Two other members of the Wagner clan were also admittedly culpable — to various degrees — in the violence. Angela Wagner, 54, and her mother, Rita Newcomb, 72, were sentenced earlier in the same courtroom on Friday. They remained at the defense table throughout the proceedings.
During Jake Wagner’s sentencing hearing, the first victim impact statement came from Andrea Shoemaker Carver, the mother of Hannah Hazel Gilley, 20, who was murdered alongside fiancee Clarence “Frankie” Rhoden, 20, with multiple gunshots to their heads.
The two young betrothed had a 6-month-old child together who was left physically unharmed. Two other children in the family also managed to escape with their lives.
“You killed your granddaughter’s mother,” a visibly emotional Carver said, addressing the defendants. “You’re evil. You’re evil. You are the spawn of Satan. And the Satan is Billy Wagner.”
George “Billy” Wagner III, 53, is the last of the remaining defendants in the case. His trial, long delayed, was previously slated to begin later this month but has since been pushed back to an indeterminate date due to ongoing appeals.
Yet another member of the family, George Wagner IV, 33, was convicted following a jury trial in 2022. He was ultimately sentenced to eight consecutive, or one after another, terms of life in prison plus 121 years.
Jake Wagner, however, received a far more lenient sentence.
“I give you the opportunity of parole after 20 years on your prison sentence,” the judge said. “So you do six on the gun spec; you do six on the gun spec; you do life on all the other counts; everything concurrent — with the opportunity of parole at 20 years. So, 32 years out, you get your chance. Because you cooperated. Because you did something to acknowledge the responsibility for the crime. That’s not a deal, that’s as close as I can come to solving the problem that was handed to me by these ancient plea agreements.”
In other words, Jake Wagner will serve time for two gun crimes consecutively and then will serve the rest of his sentences at the same time — with the possibility of parole after 32 years behind bars. Or, in simpler terms, he was sentenced to 32 years to life with the possibility of parole.
That sentence was a shock to the state, defense, gallery, and other court-watchers alike. In the tumult-heavy Pike County Common Pleas Courtroom, visiting Judge Jonathan Hein ripped up a plea agreement that called for eight consecutive life sentences with no possibility of parole.
The judge said he could not sentence Jake Wagner to the same sentence his brother received — because George Wagner contested his role in the murders and was convicted by a jury. The court also took issue with the 30-year sentence meted out to Angela Wagner.
“How do I resolve the good deal that your mom got?” Hein asked out loud. “Thirty years is a really long time; that’s a really good deal for the level of the conduct. Especially since she could have stopped the whole thing dead in its tracks before it ever happened. And I don’t let her off the hook because she didn’t go to the scene. I put her equally responsible because the eyes of the law put her equally responsible.”
In the end, the judge said, the killer’s mother received something not entirely unlike preferential treatment due to “gender bias.”
And Hein set out to fix that perceived fault in justice.
The judge’s shredding of the plea agreement led to audible tears in the by-then crowded courtroom; that final decision was the final piece of theater in a hearing rife with spectacle.
Sentencing was immediately preceded by Jake Wagner’s own sermon-like allocution in which he repeatedly referenced his Christianity.
“I asked God, I said: ‘Put me and my family back on the straight and narrow path by any means necessary. Any.’ And I can tell you today: I am not sorry I got caught,” the killer intoned. “I’m sorry for what I’ve done. But I am glad I got caught. I one hundred percent believe that it was Jesus who made me get caught to answer my prayer, so he could become exactly who he’s supposed to be to each of us: the lord and savior.”
Wagner, for his part, admitted to shooting five of the eight victims.
Divine intervention notwithstanding, the defendant cooperated with law enforcement in the case by providing investigators with the location of several pieces of evidence — including the murder weapons. Later, he also testified against his brother.
But amid that faith-themed mea culpa, the courtroom underwent another bit of the aforementioned drama.
While Jake Wagner droned on about the responsibility of all Christians to admit their life of sin and not to rank those sins better or worse than one another, the victims’ families stomped out of the courtroom.
The camera panned to watch the echoing but orderly exit as several grieving, angry loved ones left the room in a single-file line.
Angenette Levy contributed to this report.
