WAVERLY, Ohio — The former sister-in-law of George Wagner IV detailed Friday her nearly four-month marriage to his brother saying it was built on lies and threats of violence before it ended in her harrowing escape.
Elizabeth Armer, 29, told jurors she plotted her escape from her husband, Jake Wagner, after his mother, Angela Wagner, inaccurately accused her of harming Jake's daughter.
Jake Wagner told her he would "string me up in the barn. beat me to death with a baseball bat, bulldoze the barn down and and kill my family,'' said Armer during her five-hour testimony during the final day of the trial's seventh week. "And if he didn't do it, his mom would do it. If his mom didn't do it, his dad would do it or George would do it.
"He just kept saying any of them would be willing to do this because it would be the right thing to do,'' she said calmly and measured.
Wagner IV, 31, is charged with eight counts of aggravated murder, burglary and conspiracy in the 2016 shooting deaths of members of the Rhoden family in four separate homes on April 21 and 22. His brother, Jake, pleaded guilty in the case in 2021 and is expected to testify Monday. Under the terms of Jake Wagner's plea agreement, prosecutors will remove the death penalty for each member of his family if he testifies. The two, their mother and their father, George "Billy" Wagner, have been jailed since November 2018 on the charges.
Armer's testimony is the second time an ex-wife of the sons described the family as controlling, paranoid, insular and violent. Wagner IV's ex-wife Tabitha Claytor earlier testified that she escaped from the Wagner family home after an argument during which Wagner IV hit her with a belt and Angela Wagner chased her with a gun.
Armer's escape was as methodical as Claytor's was chaotic.
Armer said she packed a bag the night Jake threatened her with death. She called her father and friend seeking help. She developed a ruse to leave and convinced Angela Wagner to drive her to a Walmart store on July 6, 2018. She testified that she was so terrified, she changed clothes in the store, snuck out of a back entrance where her father — who had flown to Ohio — was waiting in a rental car.
"I was afraid they were following me,'' she said, adding that she took the SIM card out of her phone "because I was concerned I was being tracked."
Her father, she said, drove down several country roads and once convinced they were not being followed, drove to a restaurant where a friend picked her up and drove her to Virginia.
Prosecutors have kept Armer's whereabouts a secret, including from Wagner IV's lawyers, including John Parker.
Parker asked why she refused to talk with Wagner IV's defense team:
"Because the Wagner's terrify me,'' she told Parker. "Do you like to discuss things with people who terrify you?
Parker, in a short cross examination, could not seem to shake Armer who answered his questions about her background growing up in what she described as an Amish-Mennonite community calmly and directly. He asked her about damage she suffered to her brain and asked if it affected her memory.
She said she suffered "sudden, unprecedented cellular death to her right prefrontal cortex" in January 2020 that only affected her ability to remember names, "but that's coming back."
In a Tik Tok video posted Sunday, Armer said her doctors said the damage occurred from stress and for a year she had difficulty speaking but she has recovered.
At times during her testimony, Armer mentioned her brain function and asked for time to think: "A moment? I'm very nervous. Sorry, my brain blinked."
But she recalled meeting Wagner, marrying him and moving to Missouri and then Ohio with clarity Friday.
She said on her wedding night, Jake Wagner asked her for her personal information including bank account numbers, her social security card, her passwords to accounts and synched his phone with hers so he could see her calls and text messages.
She said the Wagners moved the day after her wedding in March 2018 to Missouri where they were going to buy a farm. She said she and Jake and his daughter would live in one house and his mother, brother and his son would live on the same property but in a different home. But there was no home and she testified the Wagners could not find a place to live and left the motel room they were crammed into for a week and traveled back to Ohio.
Prosecutor Canepa: "Can you describe to us the family dynamics when you were living there?"
Armer: "Interactions were strained as far as I remember. They were usually highly stressed and emotional angry. Again, the shouting continued. Decisions were typically made as a group; they would discuss what they were going to do come to a decision and then that's what everybody would do. They would make group decisions."
She was excluded from those decisions, but could overhear them and once overhead a conversation about creating an electric weapon to harm then-Attorney General Mike DeWine and Ryan Scheiderer, who was the lead Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation agent on the case.
She also overheard the family discussing plans on what they would do if one or more of them were arrested, including a plan for a jail break.
The family, she said, went through her belongings and Angela Wagner accused her of poisoning food and alleged she inappropriately touched Jake's daughter, which she testified she did not do.
She said Angela Wagner asked her intimate details about her marriage and that Wagner IV and his father visited "whores."
Armer is now divorced from Jake Wagner and said in responding to well-wishes on a Tik Tok video that she testified in the hope it brings justice.
"Thank you for your compassion. Yes, it was/is terrifying. Sometimes you have to feel the fear and do it anyways,'' she wrote.
The trial enters its eighth week Monday.
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