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 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.
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She (Bobby Manley) had a friend and his wife with her when she pulled into the (Rhoden's) driveway. She left her cellphone charging in the car and went up to the trailer. She turned the handle of the door and thought it was odd it was locked, she said. She also thought it was odd that Rhoden's two pit bulls were outside on the front porch, one sitting in a recliner. The animals normally stayed inside the trailer, she said.
She found the key and opened the door.
She saw a “bunch of blood in the front room,’’ and what looked like drag marks in blood from there to a back bedroom.
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That's where she saw Gary Rhoden, 38, lying on his stomach. Dead. Just up from his body, she saw a bloodied Chris Rhoden, also on his stomach. He was dead, as well.
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She said she did not see any guns or shell casings in the trailer, but did notice a window in a bedroom was wide open.
She said she ran out of the trailer, crying. Manley thinks she was screaming: “Get me my phone, get my phone.” She called 911 at 7:49 a.m. and had to look at the mailbox to find the address, which the police operator wanted.
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She then went to the next trailer to alert her nephew Frankie Rhoden that she had found his father dead.
But his front door was locked, too.
She pounded on the door, calling for Frankie or for Brentley to open the door for “Aunt Jo.’
The toddler unlocked the door and let her in.
“I said: ‘Where is your daddy? Where is your daddy?'’’ she said. “He pointed to the bedroom.”
That’s when she discovered her nephew and his fiancee dead in bed. She said Frankie Rhoden, who was lying on his back, had a black left eye, but she couldn’t tell where they had been shot: "There was just all that blood in the middle of the bed."
She said she did not see any guns or shell casings in that trailer, either, but did see a window in that bedroom was wide open, she said.
Tears welled in Manley’s eyes as she described how she found Gilley. Manley demonstrated by lying down on her parents’ couch. She curled up on her right side as if she were in the fetal position and said she is convinced Gilley had been nursing her infant son.
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Manley said she thinks one of the people in her car may have followed her into one of the trailers, but she's not sure which one or what they saw. She said she can't remember many details after the discoveries, including how her older brother, James Manley, came to find their sister Dana Rhoden dead in her trailer, which is north of the other two trailers on Union Hill Road.
"He could hear the baby crying and he backed up out of there,'' said his wife, April Manley, in a separate interview describing what her husband told her. "He didn't want to find his niece like that.
