← Criminally Obsessed
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A
Hi, everyone. It's Anne Emerson. And this is criminally obsessed. It's being called the House of Horrors, the worst child abuse case in Ohio's history. I still shudder when I think about how the Vinton County Sheriff, Ryan Kane described what he saw. Nothing could prepare us. Even in 22 years of law enforcement, nothing could have prepared us or me to see the scene. I've never seen human beings live in that condition before. Our guest today, Daily Mail journalist Mary o', Connor, wanted to know more than what was just coming out of the courthouse. What did this family's life look like before the police arrived?
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People really want to be able to try and understand this and maybe make sense of it, but maybe there is no making sense of it.
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A
She's been on the ground in Ohio. She's seen and heard things that no one else has. She's actually been to the house that we've only seen images of and then track this family's history to another home. And what she found there was horrifying.
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B
A neighbor had actually gone to tour the property, and they had described, you know, horrible conditions. Some of the doors had padlocks on them. The floorboards were just so kind of soaked in and urine that they had to kind of relay the foundations of the property. It was so, so, you know, so it's so saturated with urine, with urine.
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A
Sixteen kids living in filth hidden away in a rural home in Hampden, Ohio, until investigators say they were eventually discovered. Now parent Gary Seiders Jr. Has filed for a mental evaluation. His father, Gary Seiders Sr. Has done the same. Both men are asking the court to decide whether or not they are mentally competent. They face 16 charges of child endangerment, along with the mom, Elizabeth Siders, and grandmother, Christina Siders. If this was happening years before the police ever found these children, what else did they miss? Mary takes us deeper into the reclusive world of the Siders family. Be sure to, like, subscribe and turn on your notifications. I don't want you to miss any of the updates to this story or any of the stories that were followed following. Now let's get into it. Mary o', Connor, thank you so much for joining me. You're with the Daily Mail. How long have you been with the Daily Mail?
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B
So I joined last May. I came over to the States previously. I was based with the Daily Mail in London for three years, and for that, other places like the BBC, Sunday Times. Yeah. So I've been around a little bit.
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A
You kind of got out into the community And I really want to. I really want to explore some of the places that you went on during this. During this time on the ground.
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B
Hamden's a very small village, about 700, 800 people in Ohio in one of the smallest counties, Vinton county, in the area. And it's. It was telling straight away, the. Everyone was talking about it. Everyone, you know, going to the gas stations, going to different places, different businesses near to the house. Everyone has an opinion about this. Everyone has heard about it. They can't believe it. And, you know, people would talk about sightings they'd had of the family, but never knowing exactly what was going on behind closed doors. I mean, when I spoke to the pastor, he's a pastor in charge, in charge of a ministry in. In Hamden, and he was running a food bank. He said that, you know, Christina would be the one that came to the food bank, and she would be presented very sweet, cordial, polite. And she seemed, you know, the image of a kind of caring grandparent coming to get food for her family every week for two years. And he was just kind of flabbergasted that, you know, this seemingly sweet lady who had come with a couple of her grandchildren and sometimes her husband, he had no idea what was going on. The pastor said, you know, they. Absolutely no idea. He said they didn't smell. There wasn't any kind of issue around them. The only kind of hint that we got was that the granddaughters, he said, would whisper to their grandmother, but they wouldn't really communicate with anybody else. So it was an interesting. Even he couldn't square the sort of presentation of politeness. Well, presented with the idea that this was all going on behind closed doors. I mean, he even said at one point we were giving her extra food because she said she had 16 grandchildren. And then we said, hang on. How could you possibly have 16 children in that house?
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A
And, well, exactly. Like, did he know where she was coming from? Like where she lived? Did they have to give an address, that sort of thing? Or how much information did the pastor have to work with?
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B
So I think he pretty much knew where they lived and. And said he'd been. He'd been there, but never saw, you know, anything amiss. People never got close enough to kind of really see and dig deep into what was going on or allegedly going on. He was saying initially they were giving her, you know, extra meat, and they kind of knocked that down to, you know, the amount, the same amount as everybody else. But, you know, he listed off what he was giving her, you Know, fresh fruit, pasta, meat producer, you know, a lot. And it was interesting because when we then visited the house, there were boxes that had things like egg boxes outside the house in the trash that you could see from the road outside the house. And there were, there was evidence that there were food boxes and things like that there. So it's obviously interesting when you know, we heard the initial reports very early on in this case about the children appearing malnourished and you know, the suggest that from the Dollar General employees that they, the family were going to the store and buying, you know, big bottles of oil and, and things like that. I, I think I saw on one of your. Heard on one of your other episodes about you were discussing what that might be used for and the idea that it could, you know, extra calories, essentially calorie loading through, through that. So it is that it is a very kind of baffling contradiction.
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A
So here's another part of this story that, that you were uncovering really is when you went back in time a little bit to try and figure out where these people came from because they'd only been according to the, to the information you were receiving there since June of 2025. So let's, let's go back to how did you find out or, or what did you find out about Elizabeth and Gary Seiders Jr. About how they met, where they come from.
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B
So what we know and what I sort of found at this point was that they were living in a kind of trailer mobile home park and there were two, they lived one trailer over from each other. And then according to what the records that I saw, they got married. Elizabeth was heavily pregnant at the time, about seven months pregnant when they got married in Mason County, West Virginia with the sign off from a judge with her parents permission. And then she shortly after that moved into the trailer that he was living in. So they lived there for a while, then they moved around a little bit. And then the next, the next key time that I was looking at was when they moved to a three bedroom house in nearby Cheshire. And when I went to talk to neighbors there, it was kind of extraordinary because one of them, a lady called Melissa, she told me that her brother and his wife had actually lived next door to the house that the Siders family had had stayed in. And she was convinced that her, their children had talked to, so her, her brother's children had talked to the Siders children through the fence that there was really no kind of nothing hugely concerning at that time. It was just they talked to them through the fence. They thought that they were the siders children, but they didn't really know anything about them. And so obviously that is interesting in the scheme of when the authorities said that a lot of the children couldn't talk and they were nonverbal. Well, this neighbor was saying, you know, she believed that her niece's nephews had spoken to some of the children. The other thing that we found was when we went there, there was a local man at the property and he said that the state the property had been left in when it was vacated was just, you know, astounding to him. You know, there were piles and piles of children's clothing left in an attic room. The floorboards, I don't know if this is a bit too graphic, but the floorboards were just so kind of soaked in and urine that they had to kind of relay the foundations of the property. It was so, you know, so did so saturated with urine. With urine. It was requiring, you know, pretty extensive renovations apparently. And the neighbor that I'd spoken to, Melissa, she told me that after the family moved down, and she did point out that there were. There were seemingly other families living there as well. She said after the family moved out, a neighbor had actually gone to tour the property to see about moving into it. And they had described, you know, horrible conditions and had told her that some of the doors had padlocks on them. So it seems that the full kind of extent of the property and was left kind of became known after it was vacant. And people in the community, even a couple of doors down, didn't know what was happening inside that home.
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A
Padlocks. That is so scary to think about why they would have had padlocks on doors inside a home. This is what's so hard about this story for me is that these two, two opposing, like descriptions that we keep getting and I, I truly believe this is how they fell through the cracks on so many levels was because they had this outside sort of look of like Christina going and picking up food at the food bank. And then you have children that might or might not have been the ciders kids talking through the fence to other children. And then we get these horrific reports from first responders. It's like these children are non verbal. They're being treated like livestock. They look like they've, you know, they, they were obviously, they were horrified at what they found. This dichotomy of like, what's going on blows my mind.
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B
Yeah, exactly. And you know, it's this, it's this idea of, you know, how Can. I mean, neighbors were near to their hand in house. The, the, the house in question. Neighbors were absolutely kind of fabgasted too. You know, one that we spoke to said, I, I'd seen, I'd seen children, but, you know, they, they were with their grandmother, you know, they waved. I didn't know there was anything wrong. But then another neighbor said, well, actually, I never even saw the children. I didn't even know there were children in that house. So it really goes to the, to this idea about, you know, they were in the community but they weren't, if that makes sense. You know, they had neighbors, they had people around them, they weren't totally inside the house, they weren't, you know, completely isolated, like totally isolated, never leaving the house. They did leave the house, people saw them, but it's. What did people actually know, who actually knew them well enough to know what was really going on and did they allow people to get close enough to know what was going on?
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A
We've had child welfare experts on talking about this case and what I keep on hearing about is this control from the sider's men, the concern that there was some kind of control going on. What's your take on Cider Senior?
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B
First of all, his lawyers applied for there to be and it's been ordered that there will be a competency evaluation to assess, you know, if he's able to kind of assist in his own defence and if he was legally insane at the time the offences were committed. There were, or allegedly committed were, you know, various suggestions that he'd been unwell, he'd had things going on with his health. So. So it's difficult to know exactly in the absence of kind of more court documents, more evidence about what was kind of going on and who, if anyone, was leading it with. Gary Jr, we know that he's facing a separate case of public indecency charges which stem from four incidents in May. He's alleged to have exposed himself to, to members of, to people who weren't members of his family. So, so that case is pending as well.
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A
I mean, with a gag order, what are you expecting now, like, with a gag order in place, this, this is going to make this story hard to investigate.
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B
It certainly presents some challenges because it's a very broad, seemingly very broad gag order. So in terms of getting access to things, making public records requests, we're already finding that, you know, it's proving difficult to get those records because of the gag order. And I think there are still so many unanswered questions that People just want to know about how these children were found in these conditions and how they'd sort of lived this. This way, allegedly for so long undetected.
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A
I wanted to ask you also about the truancy reports coming out of Addaville Elementary School, because, you know, as this kind of. As this is a lot of kids, right? This is 16 kids. So I am not. I don't, you know, as they're. They're just trying to get their record straight, right. Trying to find birth certificates, Social Security numbers, anything that puts these kids in one place or gives them a name.
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B
Yeah, and I mean, I think the authorities have, have. Have done that. You know, it's been established that the children were all born in hospitals. Various addresses are associated with the births. To answer your question about the truancy reports, so, so they came from 2021. The school board went to a. Went to a court and said that essentially Gary Sidis Jr. And Elizabeth hadn't been sending their children to school. So this was six children then, sort of aged between seven and 13. They were supposed to attend Adderville Elementary. But according to the complaint we've seen from October 2021, the school was forced to take legal action because the children weren't showing up for school. And complaints also named the six children individually, sort of saying that they were alleging they were an unruly child by way of being a habitual truant from school. But then, you know, months later, a judge overseeing the case had to kind of put the whole thing on pause because the family couldn't be served with the complaints because they couldn't be found. And so obviously, there was this opportunity. There was this. There was. They did come up on the radar, and there was this opportunity that school officials had to kind of. To intervene. But, you know, if they can't be served with complaints because they disappeared and gone elsewhere, it's. It was clearly a challenge.
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A
What is your big question right now as you head back into this? Trying to figure out what happened?
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B
I think just who else knew about. Did anyone else know about this? Did they have any visitors to the house? Were there other opportunities missed, opportunities for those children to have been brought out of those conditions sooner? Was there a ringleader in this? You know, and the question that, you know, I think Elizabeth's lawyer raised and was considering about, is Elizabeth a victim as well in this? Her lawyer, Tommy Stolley, said that, you know, she didn't consider herself to be one. But they were still looking into it. Prosecutors were still looking into it. There were questions, obviously, about, you know, she got married at such a young age and while pregnant and had all these children. But her lawyer said in media interviews that he. She had said that they'd always wanted a big family and that children were a gift from God.
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A
The number of questions with a gag order now on us is really frustrating, but. But still, despite that, people are following this story. Why do you think people can't let this go right now?
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B
I think just the initial descriptions of how horrifying the conditions allegedly were in that house and the idea of the ginormous size of the family, I think people can't quite understand how that many children could have lived in such, you know, allegedly deplorable conditions for so long. And perhaps people, you know, like to think in a small community like that, you know, people, maybe someone would have seen something. How. How could people not have seen something? It's that idea of, you know, they live among us, perhaps that things could be happening under your nose, but it's very well hidden. Allegedly, a lot of people can't quite believe that parents, grandparents, could, you know, keep their children, the children they care and in these conditions for so long. And, you know, the way the children were found, the. The authorities were saying that they, you know, seven of them had to be taken to hospital, two airlifted, one was in a critical condition. You know, a lot of. A lot of people just can't understand how it could get to that point. People really want to be able to try and understand this and maybe make sense for it, but maybe there is no making sense of it.
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A
Drop a comment below and tell me what you think. You know, as a reporter that has been in the field for 30 years, I know that there is so much that's missed if you don't get there in person. So I'm so grateful to Mary o' Connor and to the Daily Mail for filling us in on some of these details, as horrifying as they are. Be sure to, like, subscribe and turn on your notifications so you don't miss any of the updates to these stories. Sam.