Elizabeth Siders Faces 23 Counts as Gary’s Case Stalls

Tony Brueski (0:00)

This is The Big Breakdown, a long look back at some of the biggest stories we're covering for you at the Hidden Killers Podcast and True Crime Today. This is Hidden Killers with Tony Brueski.

Tony Brueski (0:20)

Were these fine idiots?

Yeah, the Siders. There's some action over there.

This is a family where a five-year-old who couldn't form words, a seven-year-old who'd never seen a doctor, a nine-year-old who couldn't count to 12 and knew half of the alphabet. Sixteen children in a single room in rural Ohio. On a September 9th, Gary Siders Sr. was wheeled into a Vinton County courtroom. He is 73, a forensic examiner, had already evaluated him and the state didn't object to what that evaluation found. He's not competent to stand trial, not restoreable, meaning his decline is permanent. His attorney told reporters the prosecution is very likely coming to a very quick end. On him, 16 counts of child endangerment, one count for every child found in that house. And now there's a real chance he walks away from all of it, not because the jury cleared him, but because the court says he can't understand what he's accused of. How nice. He aged out. He aged out and his brain finally failed. While his brain was kind of functioning, he was able to help create this little insane world of these other fuckers, right here.

Good for you. You've aged out. Let's put him down now. Let's do the humane thing and tie him to a railroad track that's very active with a lot of cars to make sure it really, it's just gone animal feed. Well, this ruling is not new territory for this family. This is not the first time a system looked at what was happening around this man and found a reason to walk away. It's just the most recent, really.

June 30th investigators found the Vinton County Sheriff's Office and the Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation showed up at a house on Omer Street in Hamden, a small community of about 80 miles south of Columbus. They were there to collect a DNA sample from Gary Siders Jr, the grandfather's son, in connection with a separate child-s abuse investigation. They were looking for children, but they found 16 of them, ages 20 months to 18 years, crammed into a 12 by 12 foot room inside the, inside the, inside that house, the floor is so rotted with filth, that responders nearly fell through it. Cockroaches, feces, trash everywhere. No school enrollment, no medical care. Some of these children couldn't speak at all. Attorney General Andy Wilson said at a press conference that some of them looked almost like feral animals. He said if investigators had waited another 24 hours, they'd likely be dealing with the death of one or more of those children.

Seven were hospitalized, two airlifted, one in critical condition. The 18-year-old was included in the charges because developmentally, she was still a child.

So, they didn't charge her.

Here's my thought. And I get the prosecutor saying things that are kind of grandiose. You hear that quite often.

If you waited 24 hours, there would be more, or they'd be dead.

If that's the case, considering many of these have gone for many, many, many years, and this just happens to be by accident that you stumbled upon these children, if that is true, that just a few more days, there would have been more, there would have been dead kids.

What's been happening for the last 18 years? Because if that is true, I'm going to guess there's a mass grave in that backyard. If that's true, because it's not just happenstance that you're there and then, well, a few more days and there'd be dead kids. They've been living like this for quite a while. Again, you weren't called in because people were concerned about the children. They didn't know there were children there. So I find it either an overstatement. I mean, I believe it was horrifically bad. Or possibly more likely that there's already several dead kids in this story that we don't know exist, that probably most of the world never knew existed, that are probably beneath the soil of the properties into which these ghouls have once resided. They've moved around quite a bit. That's my conjecture, that's my opinion based on the evidence that we're seeing. I have no idea, I have no way of proving it, but I'm gonna take a wild guess that if that statement is true and they were that close to the edge of death, well, I'm gonna guess there's been more than a few that have already crossed over to that barrier. Seven were hospitalized, two airlifted, one in critical condition, the 18-year-old, like I said, because she was still basically a child, even though she's 18, was looked at as a child because of being developmentally.