Leonard Manley said Pike County police had spent the five weeks since the grisly murders bothering him and his family. We were standing at the edge of Leonard’s driveway, so close to where his daughter, Dana, had been brutally murdered. “You can come here and say 100,000 words but it ain’t gonna bring Dana back and it ain’t going to make me feel any better,” he said.



But Allis joked with the grieving Leonard until he giggled. On the way over we’d picked up balloons and sparklers at the Dollar Store. There were some little kids at Leonard and Judy’s place and we chatted with them, offering our gifts.



“If it was Mexican, they’d have chopped you up in little bitty pieces, killed them dogs, and killed them babies, too,” said Leonard.



“Yep,” said Allis.



“If they go after you, they kill everything in [their] path, and most time, they burn it up to pieces,” said Leonard. “Whoever done this must have had a little bit of mercy for them three babies … I don’t think anyone in their right mind would shoot someone in the face [when] their baby is nursing them.”



“Yep,” said Allis.



He told us we’d be surprised by how much had been covered up in Pike County. Only one incident report had been filed on the case. It described the scene at Chris Rhoden Sr.’s trailer, and the bodies found there, but said nothing of the three other crime scenes. (When asked, a representative from the attorney general’s office said that the other crime scenes were so similar that filing additional reports seemed unnecessary.) The whole thing was “screwy,” Leonard said, emphasizing to me that cartel had nothing to do with this, but the organized nature of the crime pointed to someone smart. “If you get digging here in Pike County, you’d be surprised how much has been covered up,” he continued.



“Cops is really stupid,” he added, “When it comes down to common sense, they ain’t got none.”



I asked him what happened to his hand—he was missing a finger—and he gestured to some crumpled dirt trackers rusting out back. He’d been working on “one like that” when his finger got pinched. He turned to show us the scar that stretched down his spine from when the tree limb fell on him.



About an hour later, Bobby’s truck tires crunched the gravel. She spotted the Memorial Day balloons intended for the children and smiled lopsidedly.



She picked up the balloons and crossed the grass to join us.



Bobby started talking about a polygraph the police wanted her to take. The polygraph was voluntary, but she said of course she’d agreed to one. Allis told her she should have a lawyer present.



“Don’t need no lawyer,” Leonard said. “Just let them do their thing and once she gets through with that lie detector test, then she can do something about it. Hey Bobby, tell her what they been asking you.”



“How much someone paid me to kill my family,” she said. We told her that sounded hard, that we would have wanted to cry.



“I did cry,” she said. “I jumped up and I was wanting to deck them, but I caught myself just in time.”



Then she began to tell us the story of the crime scene. “I walked in,” Bobby said, “I found my brother-in-law dead. He’s covered up. I pulled the cover up and said, ‘Rhoden, Rhoden’—”



I watched Leonard wander off, looking uncomfortable as he pretended to consider some grime on the side of his trailer.



“—I saw his cousin laying there and went up to my nephew’s house. That three-year-old let me in there. I asked him where his dad was, he pointed to the bedroom.”



She was hyperventilating, looking delirious, as if talking about the bodies had transported her back into the bloody trailers, and now she was trapped.



“Six-month-old baby covered head-to-toe in blood, going like this to his daddy”—she pet the air—“… her left boob was out when I went there and found them … I got Dad here and no one’s going to touch me, and I’ve got Mom.”



The next day, I visited Sherriff Reader in his office, and asked him about the polygraph. “Wow,” Reader said, blinking hard. He admitted that he hadn’t known about it; he’d called in big city guys from the Bureau of Criminal Investigation and they were leading the investigation. Their expertise outstripped his. “You got all these people that are very well educated and they’re sitting there, telling the Sheriff of the county, ‘Hey, it’s our first time too … we’ve never handled anything like this!’”