Ohio massacre: 'I was not leaving those babies in there'

 

 
A visitation for members of the Rhoden family took place in West Portsmouth, Ohio, the day before six of the eight victims will be laid to rest. The Enquirer/Carrie Cochran
PIKE COUNTY/SCIOTO COUNTY LINE, Ohio — It's the image of her 6-month-old nephew covered in blood “from head-to-toe" stroking his slain father’s upper chest that Bobby Jo Manley can’t get out of her mind.....



Ruger Rhoden was wearing a diaper and on his hands and knees when she found him between the bodies of his father, Clarence “Frankie” Rhoden, and his mother, Hannah Gilley, the morning of April 22. The three were in the same blood-soaked bed. The baby was not crying.
But Manley, 36, started weeping as she recalled leaning over Frankie Rhoden’s body to pick Ruger up and carry him out of the trailer on Union Hill Road. She said she wrapped Ruger in a blanket, put her hoodie sweatshirt on his 3-year-old brother, Brentley, and ran out of the trailer with the two children.
“I was not leaving those babies in there. All I wanted was to get those babies out of there," she said in exclusive interviews with the Cincinnati Enquirer Tuesday and Wednesday. “Thank God, they didn’t take those babies, too.”
Manley would discover four bodies in two adjacent Rhoden family residences that morning. It is her frantic 911 call the public has heard played repeatedly on news websites and TV news shows the past two weeks.
The interviews are the first time Manley has publicly discussed the discoveries. The details she described are the most specific disclosures yet about the killings of eight people that rocked this rural community about 90 miles east of Cincinnati.
Authorities have declined to release much information about the nation's largest mass-killing in 2016 in which there have been no arrests.The Attorney General's Office on Wednesday would not confirm any of the details Manley offered.
Attorney General Mike DeWine has repeatedly called the Rhoden family killings a “calculated, cold-blooded, pre-planned execution."
Manley calls it a nightmare.