The Duggars And The Siders Did The Same WHAT?!

[00:00:00]This is Hidden Killers with Tony Bruski.

[00:00:02][music] Here now, Tony Brussi.

[00:00:07]Shiny or Shady.

[00:00:12]In talking about the Ciders, uh, recently, this is a family with the 16 kids that were in the 12 by 12 room.

[00:00:20]And naturally what what kind of came to mind was was the Duggars, the you know 19 kids in counting and and just the sheer amount of kids. But but do the comparisons end there solely on having a ridiculous amount of children?

[00:00:39]And at first I'm like, yeah, that's, you know, probably about it. You know, I mean, come on. I mean, look at look at the condition that the the Cider family children were found in versus how um how the Duggars grew up. I mean, you know, very different environments without a doubt. But at its core, are they really all that different?

[00:01:07]They really all that different?

[00:01:11]I want to talk about it today.

[00:01:13]I want to get your thoughts in the comments section on Substack uh and YouTube. Follow me through this here. Um obviously it's all opinion, but I'm uh kind of been wrestling with this and the more I've been thinking about it, the more I'm like, "Oh god. Oh god." And you go, "Oh, oh."

[00:01:36]The attorney general of Ohio looked at one family and called it pure evil. That would be the uh the ciders, the uh the shady if you will in our graphic. A cable network look at another family every week for 10 years and sold it as the wholesome heart of American television, two labels at absolute opposite ends, you know, supposedly of the moral universe. Peel the labels off, set the two families side by side, and you're kind of looking at the same machine twice. One of them lived in a room the size of a parking space, and nobody knew until it was almost too late. The other one lived in front of cameras, and nobody knew until it was almost too late either. Both of these families are in front of a judge.

[00:02:34]So, here's what actually happened. Now, in Ohio, four people share one last name and one indictment.

[00:02:44]Gary Cider, Senior, 73. Christina Cider, 67. Gary Cers, Jr., 36. Elizabeth Ciders, 33. Each of them charged with 16 counts of endangering children after deputies found 16 kids in a house in Hampton on June 13th of 2026. All four pled, of course, not guilty. Ohio Attorney General Andy Wilson credited or called it pure evil.

[00:03:11]The Venton County Sheriff said livestock had been kept in better conditions. in Arkansas.

[00:03:18]Well, very different family, a name most of America already knows.

[00:03:25]Joseph and Kendra Duggar were each charged with four counts of endangering the welfare of a minor and four counts of false imprisonment. [gasps] The state removed all four of their children, both placed and or both pled not guilty.

[00:03:39]Joseph separately faces two felonies in Florida involving a child under 12 and has pled not guilty there as well.

[00:03:47]Two families, two states, 20 children pulled into state custody between them. There's exactly one thing that separates these families from each other and it has nothing to do with the children and it does not show up until the very end. Couple of other things worth watching for along the way.

[00:04:09]Everybody already knows what kind of family the Ciders are and nobody can find the document that says so. And and one of these two grandfathers put a single word in writing about a child endangerment charge.

[00:04:26]We're going to get to that.

[00:04:29]The first thing these two families have in common is that outside of the household, nobody ever actually laid eyes on the children. In Ohio, that was done by disappearing. Investigators believe the siders lived in multiple Ohio counties going back to 2008. And in Wisconsin at one point, and that the family largely avoided creating medical and government records the entire time.

[00:04:50]Venting County Schools has no enrollment record for these kids. No homeschooling record either. Some of the children could not speak. The oldest, 18 years old, could not spell her own name. In Arkansas, it was done in plain sight.

[00:05:04]19 children ran through the Advanced Training Institute, the homeschool program built by the institute in basic life principles. No outside teachers ever walked in. No school nurse, no guidance counselor, nobody inside that house who was legally required to pick up a phone if something looked wrong because, well, isolation.

[00:05:24]Isolation prevented that.

[00:05:26]Same result, opposite methods. One family hid the children by vanishing off the map. The other hid them by putting them on a stage and called it religion.

[00:05:35]Either way, the only adults who ever saw those kids up close were the adults running the house.

[00:05:43]And here's the shiny version might actually be worse, not better. The Duggar method was legal.

[00:05:50]Ohio stripped most of its homeschool verification requirements in 2023.

[00:05:55]Arkansas asked a family for one notice of intent a year with no testing and no teaching credential. The shiny family did not break the rule. The rule was written to let them do exactly this out in the open on basic cable with a studio audience. The siders had to run and hide to keep their children off the books. The Duggars got to do it on camera and call it a lifestyle.

[00:06:20]And there's a fact that each of those households ran on one man in Ohio.

[00:06:32]73-year-old Gary Cider senior sat at the center of a household of 16 children and multiple adults.

[00:06:41]In Arkansas, everything there routed through Jim Bob Duggar.

[00:06:49]the court rules, the no dating rules, the chaperons, the dress codes, every major decision in 19 kids' lives funneled through their one father who actually ran for public office once as a family values candidate. As hilarious as that is, two kingdoms, one king each. The difference is that one king had a podium and a television contract and America handed him a microphone.

[00:07:18]The other lived in squalor. Then there is the instinct that that nothing is is is ever allowed to leave the family. The Duggars left a paper trail on this one.

[00:07:27]In 2002 and 2003, Josh Duggar then 14 and 15 had improper contact with five underage girls, four of them his own sisters. Jim Bob did not call a hotline.

[00:07:38]He sent Josh away and told police it was a Christian counseling program. Michelle later told police that Joshy was not in counseling at all and that he was working under a family friend remodeling a building. Then Jim Bob took his son to a police officer he knew personally, an Arkansas State Trooper for what he described as investigators as a stern talk. The trooper was a mandated reporter. He didn't report anything. His name was Joseph Hutchkins and in 2012 he was sentenced to 56 years in prison on charges of his own involving illegal material. Yeah. You know, the man the Duggars chose to handle it quietly is now serving more time, [laughter] more than four times the sentence that that Joshu received. And the stern talk was not a failed attempt to do the right thing. It was a mechanism. Jim Bob's 2003 contact with a friendly cop started the clock in Arkansas's three-year statute of limitations. And by the time Springdale police opened a real life uh investigation file into December of06, that clock was already out. It expired 5 months early. No charge could ever be filed because of the failure of a Yeah.

[00:08:54]The siders did not leave a paper trail. They left a hole where the paper should be. There's no single documented incident to point out because with the siders, the concealment is is the whole architecture. We're just beginning to learn of the monstrous behavior that's alleged in this case, a family that kept everything, including 16 human beings, off of every record for years at a stretch. So, the difference is real. The Duggars left documents. The Siders left an absence. But the instinct underneath is identical. And it's the same instinct in both houses.

[00:09:30]Whatever happens in this family stays in this family. Nobody outside gets to know and nobody outside gets to help. For the record, Jim Bob and Michelle Duggar have never been charged with a crime and I'm not accusing them of committing any sort of crimes. All four siders have pled not guilty. And then there's the ugliest thing that they have in common, which is that both of these houses were opened by pure accident. The Cider's house came open because a deputy walked up to the porch to serve a warrant that had nothing to do with any child. Court records show it was for four counts of public indecency against Gary Ciders Jr. Investigators have said they did not expect to find any children in that house at all and they found 16.

[00:10:15]The Duggar house came open in 2006 because someone sent a tip to the producers of Oprah and the production company alerted authorities. Not a teacher, not a pediatrician, not a case worker. A daytime talk shows, legal department is the reason that that file exists.

[00:10:33]And there the shine evaporates completely.

[00:10:39]It did not matter that the one family was invisible and the other was famous.

[00:10:45]It did not matter that one was broke and the other had a network deal. No system went looking for these children. In both houses, the only thing that found them was luck.

[00:10:56]And in one of them, luck arrived months too late to charge anyone.

[00:11:01]And then there are other women.

[00:11:03]Elizabeth Ciders was 15 years old when she married Gary Siders Jr. in West Virginia in 2008. He was 18. She was 7 months pregnant. Her parents signed the consent form. 16 children later, she is a defendant facing 16 felony counts. and her own attorney has said publicly that he is looking into whether she was harmed in this case as much as anyone.

[00:11:26]The Duggar world runs on a courtship submission model that starts girls young and points them at one destination.

[00:11:36]Kendra Duggar married into it and is now a defendant with four her four children taken from her. Anna Duggar married Josh and is still there.

[00:11:48]Same machine, different paint.

[00:11:51]It takes girls and it turns them into defendants.

[00:11:55]Then it acts surprise when the state shows up.

[00:12:01]It's the same family twice.

[00:12:04]And there's one place, exactly one, where the two of them split apart. And it has nothing to do with what happened to a single child. In Ohio, every defendant had bond set at $300,000. Gary Cider, Senior's own attorney, filed a motion stating that his client is unemployed and cannot afford any bond at all. Not a reduced one, any. And a judge realized or released him anyway on recognizance bond, cuz they couldn't afford to keep him. The county prosecutor stood up and explained that keeping a 73-year-old in a county jail meant the county was on the hook for his medical care and that the cost could bankrupt the county. So he signed a piece of paper and he walked out wearing a GPS monitor that the court order specifies is paid for by the state's expense. He is being evaluated to determine whether he's even stable or understands the proceedings. Venton County is the smallest county in Ohio with the smallest budget of all 88. And removing those 16 children more than doubled the number of kids in its custody overnight. The state had to approve a million dollars in emergency funding and the prosecutor had to borrow lawyers from other counties just to carry the case. In Arkansas, Joseph Duggar's bond was $600,000.

[00:13:18]He posted it, hired private counsel. He was released and flown home with his father sitting in the courtroom. While he waited in a Washington County jail, his father wrote him a letter that the sheriff's office later released as a public record. In it, Jim Bob compares his son to King David.

[00:13:39]The delusion runs wild, doesn't it? Who, in his own worlds, his own words royally messed up. Use the word royally. Oh, dude, he royally messed up. And then repented, tells him to make lemonade out of lemons.

[00:13:55]Literally.

[00:13:57]And on the child endangerment charges against Kendra, on the four children the state pulled out of that home, the word Jim Bob Duggar puts in writing is ridiculous. He writes that it is ridiculous they charged and arrested her. That the family is praying to get her charges dropped.

[00:14:13]That word sits about as far from the ciders as a word can sit. A reporter asked a relative of the Ohio family for his reaction. Ronnie Fletcher, married to one of Gary Senior's daughters, gave one word, horrified.

[00:14:28]That's the only difference between these two families. Not the crime, not the children, the money and everything the money buys. One family is the other family with a checkbook, a network, and a public relations department. One grandfather gets a competency evaluation and an ankle monitor the taxpayers pay for. The other gets to write the word ridiculous about a child endangerment charge. He put it in a letter to a jail on a system he knew was being read. with the confidence of a man who's never once been made to feel small by anything.

[00:14:59]The shine did not change what these families did. It changed what happened to them afterward.

[00:15:06]That's the thing that explains what everybody already knew, thought they knew. Everybody knows the siders.

[00:15:15]Everyone knows there's a church. There's a doctrine, a preacher, a belief system driving so much of this.

[00:15:35]So why does everyone know this? Why does everyone look at this and act surprised?

[00:15:50]Because we had seen the silhouette before. A high control religious household, too many children, no outside eyes, everything handled internally.

[00:15:58]America watched that exact shape for a decade and called it a family show. The duggers are the reason the ciders look instantly familiar. The shine is what made the silhouette recognizable. And the shine is also what made it forgivable.

[00:16:12]When the shape had a laugh track in a network, it was wholesome. When the same shape turned up, broke in an Appalachian County. It was pure evil.

[00:16:24]And watch what the shine brought even after the mask came off.

[00:16:29]The attorney general called the siders pure evil. TLC canceled The Duggars in July of 2015 when the police report surfaced and then premiered a spin-off 5 months later. That spin-off ran more seasons and across all of it, the network was paying the family a reported 25 to $40,000 an episode. Same silhouette discovered in two different tax brackets. One called evil, one got a renewal in a paycheck. So, who is worse?

[00:16:56]That's a question everyone is asking.

[00:17:00]And it's the wrong question because it is the same question asked twice. One of these families is the other one with money. The shine is the only difference.

[00:17:09]And the shine is not a virtue. It's camouflage. It's the exact thing that let one family do things out of the open. The applause what the other one had to do in the dark.

[00:17:22]And the places where they actually differ are worth saying out loud, too.

[00:17:25]Josh Duggar is convicted. The siders are accused. And everyone gets a trial. The room in Ohio sounds physically worse than anything ever documented inside the Duggar house. All of that is true, but the crimes are not the comparison. The architecture is concealment, control, no outside eyes, everything handled in the house, found by accident, children taken point for point, is the same blueprint built once with money and once without.

[00:17:56]There's an 18-year-old girl in Ohio who spent her whole life in a house she was almost never allowed to leave. She's legally an adult and she cannot spell her own name. There are 15 more behind her, some of whom cannot speak. And there are four children in Arkansas, the oldest of them, seven, who for a time no longer slept in their own house.

[00:18:18]20 kids, two tax brackets, one blueprint. Nobody is ever going to sit them down and ask which family was worse because they not understand the question. The shine never reached them anyway. to a child who was not allowed to leave. The locked room and the television set were exactly the same size. The shine was always for us.

[00:18:41]It was never for them.

[00:18:44]Your thoughts in the comments section.

[00:18:48]It is kind of stunning, isn't it? When you really really break it down, you really examine it. And yes, there's obviously some stark differences here.

[00:18:59]But did you realize how much there was in common?

[00:19:03]Yeah.

[00:19:05]Your thoughts in the comments section on Substack and YouTube. We'll continue it there. Until next time, I'm Tony Bruski.

[00:19:11]We'll talk again real soon. Want more on this case and others? Then [music] press subscribe now and don't miss a moment of true crime coverage from Tony [music] Brussi and the Hidden Killers podcast.