Ohio 'House of Horrors': Kids Will Tell All the Dirty Secrets?

[00:00:00]I think the kids that are younger where the brain has what we call more neuroplasticity, they will tend to do better. But the older kids are really, I think, going to struggle.

[00:00:10]>> Questions mount about the 16 children at the center of the CERS case. Officials say they were hidden from the world for years, and they could hold the key to explaining what was going on behind closed doors. How will investigators get to the truth? I'll dig into it. I'm Anchet Levy and this is Crime Fix.

[00:00:38]The 16 CERS children are in therapeutic foster care receiving treatment for their physical needs and for emotional trauma. Six of the children are younger, three sets of twins, but there are older children who will likely be able to tell investigators and children's services workers the story of what has gone on in their lives over the last decade or longer. The children, as we've been telling you, were removed from this house on OMR Street on June 30th as law enforcement executed a search warrant as they investigated a crime that to this day remains a secret. But what secrets and stories will these children tell?

[00:01:16]That's a question that we just don't have the answer to right now. But those children have likely been interviewed already, and that process requires great care. I'll get into what that process is like shortly. Their parents, Gary Ciders Jr. and Elizabeth Ciders, remain in the Southeast Ohio Regional Jail, charged with child endangering. They've pleaded not guilty. Gary's mom and dad, Gary Senior and Christina, have pleaded not guilty to those same 16 charges. Only Gary Senior has been released from jail because he's receiving treatment for a serious medical condition. While the investigation into what was going on inside the house continues, the main concern is for the children. Children's services workers visited the jail to talk with each of the adult citers family members. But the children will also be interviewed delicately and with great care because really the first interview will be the most important.

[00:02:09]Court records and law enforcement claim that the children haven't been to school, at least in the last six years.

[00:02:15]But have they ever been to school? We don't know. We know they had to be registered since Gary Jr. and Elizabeth were cited for their six older children being habitually truent back in 2021.

[00:02:26]That case never moved forward because investigators couldn't find the parents in Gallia County to serve them with the paperwork. But the older children appear to have had social media accounts. I've linked these by looking at who the children are friends with and who they follow. And these accounts appear to belong to the kids. One video shows cats and it looks like it was taken outside that home on Omar Street with the walkway from the house that leads to the driveway area. Others are reposted videos that show references to relationships. One has a caption that reads, "How I felt after feeling uncomfortable hugging my own dad."

[00:03:03]Another states, "Everyone yelling at me like, "Damn, I'm trying." Another states, "Me seeing a little girl spending time slash having fun with her dad. I used to be a daddy's little girl." And another shows a scene from a movie or a TV show, and it shows a father yelling at his child. The caption, "My dad since I started being a teenager because I changed and I'm not the little girl he used to love anymore." Again, I've looked at these accounts and looked at who each account follows and interacts with, and these appear to be the kids. All of these are incredibly sad. It could be teenage children feeling angst, but keep in mind, the environment we were told they were living in is just awful. You know, running a business is tough enough, but why make it harder doing things manually or relying on dozens of apps that don't talk to each other? That's where our sponsor, ODO, comes in. ODU is an all-in-one business management platform with a full suite of integrated apps that seamlessly connect all your operations from sales and accounting to manufacturing and even shipping. ODU can automatically generate professional sleek looking sales orders, invoices and vendor bills. And it can automatically assign sales teams, send email updates through each sales stage, and even use AI to pull reports that help your decision making. For manufacturing, their apps can sync inventory with real time production and purchase updates so you never run out of stock. And when it comes time for accounting, that's also fully automated. ODU can create invoices, track expenses, and even summarize data with AI to save you hundreds of hours. The best part, you can choose your apps and even build custom workflows so it's all fully tailored to your business's needs. Take your business to the next level by consulting with an ODU expert today for free at odo.com/crimefix.

[00:04:55]Law enforcement said the house was filthy. The children were isolated, apparently with the exception of being able to use social media, and officials say they weren't in school. The attorney general said the siders were hiding the kids. All of the children are in foster care now, as I mentioned, likely with different families in different counties. Venton is a small county.

[00:05:14]There's no way they could have enough foster families to take in 16 children.

[00:05:18]State legislators have sent $1 million to the Department of Children and Youth for that area of the state just for these kids. But that will likely be just a drop in the bucket. This >> is a special fund that is being set up specifically for Venton County. Benton County does belong to a threecount consortium which is Hawking, Venton, and Ross counties. But these resources are specifically for this emergent need. Um we know um that many of them will be needing therapeutic foster care for quite some time to come. Uh that is $150 a day to $250 a day on average um per child. So um those those costs alone would bankrupt the county uh when you see them doubling the number of cases.

[00:06:02]The dollars will be tracked. They are specific to provide resources for these children. Uh there are resources that cover uh their transportation. There are emerent needs uh clothing um you know just their immediate immediate placement. Uh there will be court costs.

[00:06:17]Each of these children will be before the court. They will have to have special courtappointed um uh folks that will provide services. each individual child will have to have case plans and those sorts of things worked out. So these dollars will be tracked specifically for this purpose and we will be able to identify to you exactly how those resources have been invested uh to provide resources for those kids and again we will maximize federal funds wherever possible.

[00:06:41]>> As all of this is going on the court process is moving forward. Gary Junior's lawyer who requested and was granted a sweeping gag order has filed a request for a bill of particulars. That's a legal document that demands specific details from the prosecution about the crimes alleged. That request is usually filed after a defendant has been indicted, but that hasn't happened yet.

[00:07:03]But the prosecutor is preparing the case for the grand jury. The interviews of the children though, particularly the older children, will be very important.

[00:07:12]So, how will investigators and social workers go about interviewing these children so they are not further traumatized? and how do they keep any information from possibly tainting those interviews?

[00:07:26]To dive into this a little more deeply, I want to bring in Dr. Daniel Bober. He is a forensic psychiatrist. He works with teens and also conducts forensic interviews as a forensic psychiatrist.

[00:07:37]So, Dr. Bober, thanks for coming back on. It's been been a little bit.

[00:07:40]>> Great to see you.

[00:07:42]>> Tell me a little bit um about first of all your your thoughts on this case. Um, you know, we have a family of four grandparents and, you know, parents living in a house that law enforcement says was just disgusting. And 16 kids are are in this house. It's like a 13-500 square foot house.

[00:08:05]>> Well, when I think about the condition that these children were found in, uh, what I think about is what's called psychosocial dwarfism or deprivation dwarfism. And this is a rare phenomenon that occurs when children are exposed to extreme emotional trauma, environmental deprivation, and chronic neglect. And essentially what's happening is there's a chronic fightor-flight response which causes growth hormone to be suppressed in the pituitary gland and forces the child into a biological survival mode, stunting their growth and development. Uh, and this is what I'm seeing here when I look at some of these reports. And it's very rare indeed. And it shows a chronic pattern of abuse, neglect, and deprivation over years and what it can do to alter a child's physiology and development.

[00:09:00]>> I we should make clear that you obviously um you haven't evaluated the children. You're just looking at everything that we're reading um and the public is reading. So, um, if you say you encounter these children or you're the person assigned to help these children through counseling because right now they're in what's called therapeutic foster care. Um, how do you go about interviewing these kids?

[00:09:27]Because you're talking about this deprivation. They've been kind of isolated.

[00:09:32]I would assume that these are going to be some kids potentially either who are are yearning for help or maybe have issues trusting adults, >> right? So, I think there's two main aspects to this. There's obviously the therapeutic part, which is we want to provide a nurturing environment where these children can thrive and recover, but obviously there's also a prosecution to think about. And so if we're going to interview them, we want to interview them in a way that is neutral, uh that doesn't retraumatize them, and we want to keep it, you know, very open-ended, giving them, uh, the opportunity to speak freely in a narrative format so that we're not tainting the evidence for a potential prosecution.

[00:10:16]>> So, when you say open-ended, is it just kind of like you introduce yourself, you you let them talk, um, that type of thing? I know I've seen things in the past where it's like you you have toys around the um room and stuff like that.

[00:10:30]Things that kids like to play with, so they're not just sitting there staring at you across a couch or across a table.

[00:10:38]>> Well, in this particular case, that might be even more important because we know that it seems like there's some developmental arrest there. Uh there's some behavioral regression where some of the kids are non-verbal. Again, I didn't examine them, but that's what some of the reports I'm reading are saying. And so, as a result, they may not be able to speak. And so, a lot of times in these interviews, what we'll do is we'll use pictures that represent different actions or speak to them through play therapy, if you will, where they can act out some of these behaviors. But the most important thing we want to do is we want to make sure it's open-ended so that we're not leading them to a uh to a conclusion. Uh, one of the things that we do in situations like this with this particular level of deprivation and neglect is we will bring in speech language pathologists to assess their communication skills because we want to make sure uh that they're able to express themselves and that they know what the difference is between a truth and a lie because kids this age are very open to suggestion. And we don't want to give the defense uh any ammunition to challenge the interview or the veracity of the interview in the way that it's done.

[00:11:51]>> You know, some of these kids are very young. I mean, we we have 16 kids here.

[00:11:55]Uh three sets of twins, the youngest being one and a half and then we have an 18-year-old and we have a 16-year-old.

[00:12:03]We have we have some older teens. And you know, from what we can understand and what we can see online, they they were active on social media, which is kind of mind-boggling to me. Um, but at the same time, um, I could see that maybe you give the kids phones, if you're not going to let them be part of society, give them phones and let them do things that way. Um, we see some of these Tik Tok videos and and on some of them, you know, they say things like, "I'm really starting to hate this house and this family." There's some talk about, you know, remembering back when you were daddy's little girl and he he felt differently about you and things like that. That kind of tells me obviously that that that this was not a happy home. Um, you know, a lot of times teenagers don't get along with their parents, but but this these videos seem like a cry for help in some ways.

[00:13:00]>> Yeah. Which is a little bit unusual in a case like this because usually these cases thrive in a closed family system where the family has no contact with the outside world. So there's no social reference point uh for the kids, for example, the older kids to say, "Hey, this is not the way it's done. This is clearly a sick family system. and this is a dysfunctional home. So, I'm actually surprised that their primary caregivers, and I use the caregiver word loosely, allowed them to do that. Uh because again, it did allow them the opportunity to realize that this was extremely pathological what was going on under that roof.

[00:13:38]Um, you know, there's a lot of talk uh about, you know, at least from the defense side, they've said, you know, we've seen nothing that shows anything but a family living in extreme poverty.

[00:13:52]But now we've had some videos and photos of the scene uh come out. You know, there have been some AI ones out there, but there have been some that appear to be legit. And and we're not talking, you know, just a little cluttered and dirty.

[00:14:06]We're talking like it appears you can actually see feces and stuff on the floor. The the the floor is littered with trash. And I guess I kind of think to myself, Dr. Bober, and you're you're a medical doctor. You you're a psychiatrist.

[00:14:21]I mean, these kids I I actually think to myself, were they brushing their teeth?

[00:14:26]Like, do they even I was thinking that the other night. Do these these kids even have teeth? Like it just boggles my mind that they were living in this filth. So So what does that do to a child? Like what kind of trauma can just living in filth cause?

[00:14:40]>> So to your point, uh I think it's really interesting to think about the the parents and the grandparents that were living in this home that allowed this to occur. I think the sheriff made the comment that the livestock were treated better than the kids. So what is the pathology or what are these psychological factors that lead these caregivers to treat kids this way? Are we talking about you know some kind of a shared delusion or some kind of intergenerational inshment where they believe that this type of treatment is accepted and is okay? Uh but clearly the children were objectified in such a way as they almost existed as extensions of these caregivers that they didn't see them as human beings as their kids but saw them as property as objects to do as they wish. Uh and that obviously is is deeply concerning.

[00:15:32]>> Uh what do you make of just these people had trash service. What do you make of them just allowing trash to collect in this house? I I that's a part of this that I don't understand either. I mean, we're talking feces, bugs, all kinds of stuff that that can be seen in some of these images.

[00:15:53]>> Yeah. I mean, obviously, uh at some level, the parents, the grandparents were willing to accept this. And that leads me to believe that they never learned or maybe they grew up the same way. Uh because this is at a you know at the very least uh you know not a way that kids should be raised and obviously these deplorable conditions are you know we're not talking about just bad parenting. We're talking about inhumane conditions uh that are unhygienic conditions that no kids or any human beings should live. And so the fact that they uh allowed this to happen, you know, speaks to their own uh severe, deranged, warp way of raising these children.

[00:16:37]You know what's wild to me is that we have images of Gary Senior and Christina, his wife, the grandparents, and from just a few years ago, and they look clean. And you know, pe family members of them of theirs have come out and said, "I I was at their house when I was younger, and they didn't live like this. They they were not dirty." What do you make of that? I mean, I I I can't even imagine trying to keep a house clean with 16 kids running around. I mean, as a parent, that would be very difficult. But this this is a this is not just like messy and cluttered from having kids. This what we're seeing is filth.

[00:17:16]>> So, What do you what do you make of the grandparents not living like that but then all of a sudden here we are.

[00:17:23]>> So we have that but we also have reports that they were moving around a lot during that period and there's some suggestion that maybe because they were moving around so much they wanted to fly under the radar and conceal these conditions. So is their consciousness of guilt? Did they know that if they were discovered that they were doing something wrong? Were they trying to punish these kids in some way? Uh there's just a lot of unanswered questions. Uh and not only did these kids need to be interviewed in a very artful way, but these caregivers need to be interviewed. You know, I'm so interested to understand how they thought that this was okay uh to subject their kids to these conditions.

[00:18:06]>> And we know that Children's Services pretty much immediately went into the jail to interview these four adults. So, so they were in there very quickly to talk to them.

[00:18:17]>> Yeah. I mean, I'm interested to see, you know, now that these kids are in therapeutic foster care, you know, what will the future hold for them? I think the kids that are younger, uh, where the brain has what we call more neuroplasticity, they will tend to do better. Uh, but the older kids are really, I think, going to struggle. Uh, there are several periods in the brain where there are critical thresholds or windows of brain development. For example, language acquisition really closes around puberty. So these kids that are, you know, 18 years old, if they're unable to speak or spell their name, you know, there could be obviously some training and some rehabilitation, but the question is, will they ever be able to function normally? Uh, and the best case scenario is years, if not decades of of recovery to try to uh come back from this, which I don't know that they actually can.

[00:19:08]And one of the things um that I'm interested in is how frequently these children will be receiving therapy and how frequently uh they will be interviewed in a forensic setting. Um you know, it's one thing to go through therapy and go to therapy sessions once a week, maybe twice a week, but we're talking um a forensic interview setting.

[00:19:30]Like how many times do you think they will interview them? Because sometimes, you know, things come out bit by bit.

[00:19:38]May, you know, you're not going to just sit the child down unless they're very open to discussing this and and everything comes out. It it may happen in stages, right?

[00:19:49]>> Well, that's true. Uh but the other side of that is you want to try to get as much information as you can during the first interview. Uh because the more you interview a child, the more you risk actually changing uh their memories of what happened. It's sort of like the brain is overwriting it, if you will.

[00:20:05]And so, you want to try to get as much information as quickly as you can during that first interview and try to limit it. Uh, not only limit it in terms of distorting the information, but limiting limiting it in terms of exposing the child to further trauma by having to relive or recall some of these events.

[00:20:24]>> You know, I I think about the younger kids and what you just mentioned about the brain having more neuroplasticity.

[00:20:30]Um, my hope is that some of these younger kids have very limited memories of this and that they can thrive in a new environment, but I I think you're right about the older kids possibly struggling. Um, and I hope they don't. I hope they don't. I hope they're somehow able to move forward from this. But but it just from the Tik Tok videos alone, it it looked like this could be um you know, everyday struggles with parents and teenagers, but at the same time, there may have been a really verbally abusive environment in that house because I can't imagine living like that and everybody's just happy, >> right? But the good news is uh in the beginning of our conversation, I had spoken about psychosocial dwarfism or deprivation dwarfism. Once these kids, especially the younger kids, are put into a warm, loving, nurturing environment where they are are receiving positive feedback, adequate nutrition, food, clothing, shelter, uh healthy living conditions, most of them uh will recover uh significantly rather quickly.

[00:21:35]Uh it may take several months. Uh it may take a year or more, but just them being placed into these new nurturing conditions uh will likely cause a growth spurt uh and at least a trajectory or a direction towards normal development.

[00:21:52]>> Well, I hope you're right about that. Um because the way that they've been living um is is not like anything we we see or are used to. and just the fact that there were 16 of them um it's very it's very concerning um to say the least and I'm hoping the best for these children.

[00:22:12]Dr. Daniel Bober, thank you so much for your time and expertise as always.

[00:22:16]>> Thank you, Anette.

[00:22:19]>> Christina Ciders, Elizabeth Ciders, and Gary Jr. all remain in jail. They're being held on a $300,000 bond each. Gary Jr. is scheduled to appear in court later this week for a pre-trial hearing on four misdemeanor counts of public indecency that he faces. Those charges relate to alleged incidents at the CERS home in late May in which law enforcement say Gary Jr. exposed himself to someone who was not a family member.

[00:22:46]The nature of that charge though remains unclear at this point. So stay tuned.

[00:22:51]We're going to continue to follow this case and dig into all of the information we can uncover. That's it for this episode of Crime Fix. I'm Annette Levy.

[00:22:58]Thanks so much for being with me. I'll see you back here next time.