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Amish Man Killed a Woman, Then Stayed With Her Grieving Family · Murder Files Unsealed

0:00
Speaker 1: When you think about the concept of a sanctuary, you
0:03
usually picture something that's heavily fortified.
0:05
Speaker 2: Right, right, Yeah, like a fortress exactly.
0:08
Speaker 1: I mean, we instinctively build physical architecture to manage our
0:13
anxiety about the outside world.
0:15
Speaker 2: Oh. Absolutely.
0:16
Speaker 1: We use high walls, heavy dead bolts, maybe a really
0:21
complicated security system.
0:23
Speaker 2: Yeah, with like a dozen different cameras feeding directly to
0:25
your phone.
0:26
Speaker 1: Right. The entire philosophy of modern safety is built on
0:29
keeping the danger securely on the outside.
0:31
Speaker 2: It is, I mean, it's a fundamental human coping mechanism. Right.
0:34
We create a hard boundary, yeah, a demarcation line, exactly.
0:38
We draw this line where the inside is a protected,
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predictable in group, and the outside is chaotic, it's threatening,
0:47
full of variables we just can't control.
0:49
Speaker 1: Right, And we rely on that physical boundary to just exhale,
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to feel safe.
0:54
Speaker 2: We really do.
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Speaker 1: But then you encounter a community where the sanctuary isn't
0:57
built of stone.
0:58
Speaker 2: Or steel or ring doorbell can.
1:00
Speaker 1: Right, no cameras at all. You step into a world
1:02
constructed entirely out of mutual trust.
1:05
Speaker 2: Which is so rare today.
1:07
Speaker 1: It really is a place where the doors literally aren't
1:09
locked because the danger is supposed to be miles away,
1:12
like existing in a separate century.
1:14
Speaker 2: Entirely, Yeah, a completely different era, and suddenly.
1:17
Speaker 1: That invisible architecture of trust is violently shattered. Welcome today's
1:23
deep dive.
1:23
Speaker 2: We have a really heavy one today.
1:25
Speaker 1: We do. We are looking at a tragedy that is frankly,
1:29
genuinely difficult to comprehend. It's a recently concluded criminal case
1:33
from July twenty twenty six that completely destabilized a quiet
1:38
Ohio community.
1:40
Speaker 2: It really shook them to their core.
1:41
Speaker 1: Our mission today is to figure out what happens when
1:44
an insular culture, one built entirely on a deliberate theological
1:47
separation from the outside world, is violently betrayed from the inside. Yeah.
1:51
Speaker 2: To fully grasp the magnitude of the s rupture, we
1:54
really have to look closely at the timeline here.
1:55
Speaker 1: Okay, let's unpack this.
1:57
Speaker 2: So the sentencing for this case just took place on
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July twenty four to twenty six, but that gavel coming
2:02
down was really just the procedural conclusion to a nightmare
2:05
that began over a year earlier in March of twenty
2:08
twenty five.
2:08
Speaker 1: Wow, so over a year of just you know, dealing
2:11
with the.
2:11
Speaker 2: Fallout, exactly, and it forces this really uncomfortable examination of
2:16
human predation, especially when it's operating under the guise of
2:20
profound communal support.
2:21
Speaker 1: Right, So let's lay out the geographic and cultural groundwork
2:25
here for you, the listener, because the physical landscape is
2:29
intrinsically linked to how this crime happened.
2:32
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, it's a huge factor.
2:34
Speaker 1: And you know how it was concealed and the pains
2:36
taking away was eventually solved. We are looking at Meeks County, Ohio.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, Megs County.
2:42
Speaker 1: If you picture the topography, it sits right along the
2:46
Ohio River in the southeastern part of the.
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Speaker 2: State, deep in the Appalachian foothills, right.
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Speaker 1: Exactly, deep in the foothills. It's defined by winding roads,
2:54
rolling farmland, and these really narrow valleys that naturally isolate
2:58
the small population center.
3:00
Speaker 2: And that topography creates physical boundaries that really appeal to
3:03
communities seeking isolation.
3:05
Speaker 1: Right, It's like natural fortress walls.
3:07
Speaker 2: Yeah, exactly. And within this county there is a specific
3:11
Amish settlement, and it's crucial to understand that this isn't
3:15
one of the massive, sprawling communities you might find in places.
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Speaker 1: Like Holmes County or Jaga County right.
3:20
Speaker 2: Where it's almost commercialized, you know, where tourists are frequently
3:23
interacting with the residents.
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Speaker 1: Yeah, those are almost like tourist destinations. Yeah, but this
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Miggs County presence is much smaller.
3:30
Speaker 2: Much smaller, and highly conservative.
3:32
Speaker 1: Highly conservative. They communicate primarily in Pennsylvania.
3:36
Speaker 2: Dutch, which is a distinct High German dialect for those.
3:39
Speaker 1: Who don't know, right, and their entire societal structure rests
3:43
on three non negotiable pillars, shared labor, mutual aid, and
3:49
a strict theology emphasizing humility and deliberate separation from the
3:54
modern world.
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Speaker 2: Yeah. They aren't just accidentally living off the grid, No,
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not at all. They have made a conscious choice to excise
4:01
modern conveniences because they view the modern world as fundamentally corrupting, and.
4:06
Speaker 1: Because they have severed those ties to the outside world.
4:09
Their survival strategy is entirely internal, entirely.
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Speaker 2: I mean, mutual aid isn't just a charitable concept for.
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Speaker 1: Them like it is for us, you know, donating to
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a GoFundMe or something.
4:18
Speaker 2: Yeah, right, for them, it is the literal engine of
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their existence. If a family's barn burns down. There is
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no insurance company.
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Speaker 1: To call right, no state farm agent.
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Speaker 2: No. The community simply gathers and builds a new one.
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If someone is sick, the community harvests their fields.
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Speaker 1: It's an incredible safety net.
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Speaker 2: It really is. The safety net is tightly woven, but
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it only functions if every single person in the network
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implicitly trusts everyone else.
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Speaker 1: Which brings us to the two individuals at the center
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of this tragedy. Let's look at Rosanna Kinsinger.
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Speaker 2: Okay, let's talk about Rosanna.
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Speaker 1: She was twenty eight years old and she had actually
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relocated to Miggs County from Missouri specific to take on
5:00
the role of a.
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Speaker 2: School teacher, which is a huge deal in that culture, right.
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Speaker 1: I mean, think about what a teacher represents in an isolated,
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one room schoolhouse environment. She isn't just delivering a curriculum.
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Speaker 2: Now, she's a primary authority figure U.
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Speaker 1: Sir, a get parent really yeah, and a cultural guardian
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shaping the minds of the next generation.
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Speaker 2: That role elevates her to a deeply respected position. I
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mean an Amish community is teaching is a highly significant calling.
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It's very often filled by young, unmarried women who demonstrate
5:29
exceptional character, and neighbors and fellow community members consistently described
5:35
her as this established, trusted pillar of this tight knit group.
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Speaker 1: She lived alone in a trailer on Dye Road in
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the Rutland area, which you know, in this high trust environment,
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was not viewed as a vulnerability at all, not at all.
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It was completely normal And we have to establish this
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fact with absolute clarity before we go any further.
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Speaker 2: Yes, this is very important.
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Speaker 1: She was not involved romantically or sexually with the perpetrator. Yeah.
6:02
Every single piece of forensic and testimonial evidence presented in
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court confirmed this.
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Speaker 2: There was zero relationship.
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Speaker 1: Zero. She was living her life of filling her role.
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But the perpetrator, on the other hand, occupied a very
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different space in the social hierarchy.
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Speaker 2: A completely different space. Samuel Hawkstetler was eighteen years old
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at the time of the crime, just eighteen, yeah, just teenager.
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And unlike Rosanna, who was an established authority figure, Samuel
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was a recent transplant, right.
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Speaker 1: He hadn't been there long.
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Speaker 2: No, he had moved to the Megs County settlement from
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Kentucky in the fall of twenty twenty four, just months
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prior to the events of March twenty twenty five.
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Speaker 1: Wow, So he was brand new to this specific group.
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Speaker 2: Basically, Yeah, he was living with a local Amish man
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named Mose Troyer.
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Speaker 1: So you have this fascinating social dynamic colliding here. Rosanna
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holds community trust and respect. Samuel is an eighteen year
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old arrival who is still on the periphery exactly.
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Speaker 2: He's very much on the out side looking in. Socially speaking, and.
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Speaker 1: In this culture, a young single man integrates by keeping
7:05
his head down, working hard alongside the others on community projects.
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Speaker 2: All right, proving is worth through grueling, physical labor and humility.
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Speaker 1: But that shared labor is exactly where the narrative shifts.
7:17
On March twelve, twenty twenty five, the community gathered for
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the construction of a greenhouse.
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Speaker 2: Which is the quintessential example of the mutual aid we
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just discussed.
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Speaker 1: Right, dozens of people working in tandem, a real hive
7:28
of communal activity. Both Rosanna and Samuel were present at
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this bill.
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Speaker 2: They were, but Samuel wasn't keeping his head down.
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Speaker 1: No, he wasn't. Witnesses at the greenhouse later detailed a
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very different behavior pattern to investigators.
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Speaker 2: Yeah, he was acting way out of line for that environment.
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Speaker 1: Instead of focusing on the labor Samuel spent a significant
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portion of the workday posturing, like showing off directly toward Rosanna.
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Speaker 2: He was actively attempting to flirt with her in the
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middle of this communal workspace.
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Speaker 1: And her reaction was unambiguous. She showed zero interest and
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completely rejected his.
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Speaker 2: Advances, completely shut him down.
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Speaker 1: Right, And you know, think about this for a second.
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If you live in this settlement, your primary safety net
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is the people immediately around.
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Speaker 2: You, because you have deliberately separated from the violence and
8:15
unpredictability of the modern world.
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Speaker 1: Exactly, the people standing next to you at a greenhouse
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build are your entire universe of trust.
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Speaker 2: They are everything.
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Speaker 1: So when a teenage boy from the community flirts with
8:27
you and you brush him off, that registers as a
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totally mundane, perhaps slightly annoying interaction.
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Speaker 2: Right, you don't view him as a threat because he
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is inside the sanctuary, he is.
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Speaker 1: One of you. But what happens when the threat already
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has a key to the house.
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Speaker 2: That is the terrifying crux of this case. The predator
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was an insider. He utilized the community's inherent assumption of
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safety as his camouflage.
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Speaker 1: It's just chilling. The workday ends, right, the sun goes down,
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people return to their farms, and the community goes to sleep,
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believing everything is completely normal.
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Speaker 2: But it wasn't. After the greenhouse construction finished, Samuel Hawkstetler
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walked to Rosanna's trailer on die Road.
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Speaker 1: Oh man, Yeah.
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Speaker 2: What occurred inside that trailer was later painstakingly reconstructed through
9:12
physical evidence, the condition of Rosanna's body, and statements made
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by Samuel.
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Speaker 1: The violence was staggering.
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Speaker 2: It was. It was a brutal, non consensual sexual assault.
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Speaker 1: The physical mechanics of the assault are deeply disturbing. During
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the attack, Samuel covered Rosanna's face with the blanket or
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pressed her face directly into the bedding.
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Speaker 2: The force he exerted was just so extreme.
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Speaker 1: So relentlessly aggressive, that her lower dentures were violently dislodged.
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Speaker 2: Which just shows you the level of violence here. He
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also applied intense, sustained downward pressure to her torso right,
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and the ultimate cause of death was positional asphyxiation.
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Speaker 1: Let's break down what that actually means physiologically for the listener.
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Positional asphyxiation isn't just running out of air.
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Speaker 2: No, It's not like holding your breath.
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Speaker 1: Right, It's a mechanical failure of the body's ability to
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breathe based on how it's positioned. Exactly when someone applies
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massive pressure to your torso while simultaneously burying your face
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and bedding, your diaphragm is physically prevented from contracting and expanding.
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Speaker 2: Your lungs literally cannot draw in oxygen.
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Speaker 1: It is an agonizing, suffocating death. And she died while
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the assault was actively ongoing.
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Speaker 2: Just horrific. And after extinguishing her life, Samuel simply left
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the trailer.
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Speaker 1: But the scene he left behind presents this incredibly jarring
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juxtaposition of horrific human violence and pastoral indifference.
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Speaker 2: Really surreal.
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Speaker 1: He left the back door of the trailer wide open,
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and because this is a rural farming environment, by the
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time Rosanna was discovered the next morning, a goat had
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wandered through that open door. A goat, a goat, it
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was just roaming inside the trailer. She was found nude,
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face down, bent over her bed while a farm animal
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wandered aimlessly around the crime scene.
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Speaker 2: It is a surreal and just awful image to try
11:04
and process.
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Speaker 1: It really is, and her discovery only happened because the
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community's internal clock was disrupted.
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Speaker 2: Right because people expected her.
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Speaker 1: At work, they expected her at morning activities. When she
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failed to appear, the social fabric titened. Friends grew concerned.
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They walked to the trailer, found the open door, and
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discovered her body.
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Speaker 2: At that point, community elders are summoned, and eventually a
11:26
call goes out to nine one one.
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Speaker 1: Right and the Miggs County Sheriff's Office deputies respond and
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they immediately recognize this is a suspicious death. Obviously, but
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this is where the cultural practices of the Amish intersect
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with the aftermath of a murder in a way that
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is profoundly chilling.
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Speaker 2: This part is just it's hard to believe.
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Speaker 1: It is. When a sudden death occurs in this community,
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they don't sit back and wait for a police press
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release or a coroner's official notification.
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Speaker 2: No, the news of a tragedy travels first through their
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own internal and log network. It is a deeply personal,
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immunal obligation to notify family. So the elders immediately organized
12:05
a group to walk the two miles to the Kinsinger
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family farm.
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Speaker 1: To deliver the devastating news to Rosanna's parents. Yes, And
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this is the detail that is almost impossible to process.
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Samuel Hawkstetler joined that group. Unbelievable, the man who had
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just suffocated their daughter the night before walked those two
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miles with the elders.
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Speaker 2: And it gets worse.
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Speaker 1: It does. According to prosecutor James K. Stanley's account, Samuel
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didn't just walk silently in the back of the group. Yeah,
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he volunteered to be the specific person to look Rosanna's
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father in the eye and tell him that his daughter
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was dead.
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Speaker 2: It is a breathtaking level of manipulation. I mean, typically
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the physiological fighter flight response kicks in after a violent crime, right.
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Speaker 1: Right, The perpetrator wants to put immense distance between themselves
12:49
and the crime scene.
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Speaker 2: Or they want to hide. But Samuel moved in the
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exact opposite direction.
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Speaker 1: He walked directly into the blast radius of the family's grief.
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Speaker 2: You really have to wonder about the psych coology here.
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I mean, was he staying close to control the narrative, right.
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Speaker 1: To monitor what the elders knew and what the police
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were finding.
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Speaker 2: Or was he exploiting a cultural loophole, knowing that turning
13:11
away a person offering help during a tragedy is simply
13:14
unthinkable in Amish society.
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Speaker 1: It has to be a dark convergence of both. I mean,
13:19
he was certainly monitoring the situation, but he was heavily
13:23
reliant on their cultural blindness to internal threats.
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Speaker 2: Because he didn't just deliver the news and go home.
13:30
Speaker 1: No, he volunteered to stay at the Kinsinger farm. He
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stayed for three consecutive.
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Speaker 2: Nights, Friday, Saturday, and Sunday night.
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Speaker 1: He was a welcome guest in the home of the
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woman he had just murdered.
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Speaker 2: He slept under their roof, He sat at their table
13:43
and shared their meals.
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Speaker 1: He helped the family with their daily farm chores.
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Speaker 2: And most disturbingly, he actively assisted the family in preparing
13:50
their barn for Rosanna's funeral gathering.
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Speaker 1: Which, you know, traditional Amish morning practices are deeply intimate.
13:56
The body is typically prepared and viewed right there on
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the family farm, right The entire community converges on that
14:02
space for services, shared meals, mutual support. It is a
14:06
massive undertaking that requires everyone to.
14:08
Speaker 2: Pitch in, and Samuel was standing right there in the
14:11
center of it all, sweeping out the barn, setting up
14:13
the space where the family would weep over the body
14:16
he had destroyed.
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Speaker 1: Oh my god.
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Speaker 2: Rosanna's parents and her siblings had absolutely no idea. They
14:23
were expressing gratitude to this young eighteen.
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Speaker 1: Year old man, completely unaware that he was the predator.
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Speaker 2: Prosecutor Stanley stood in court later and stated that beyond
14:32
the physical murder itself, this calculated hospitality was quote perhaps
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the most cruel thing that he did.
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Speaker 1: The prosecutor's framing is entirely accurate. I mean, the psychological
14:42
weight of this specific betrayal is just staggering.
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Speaker 2: He weaponized their culture's most sacred.
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Speaker 1: Practice, hospitality in the face of immense grief.
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Speaker 2: The family's vulnerability was absolute.
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Speaker 1: They were completely blind to it because Amish culture extends
14:57
this grace automatically. If someone shows up to the help
15:00
you carry your burden, you embrace them.
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Speaker 2: The betrayal was invisible.
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Speaker 1: Because the very concept of an insider committing this kind
15:07
of atrocity, let alone volunteering to prepare the funeral barn
15:11
was fundamentally unfathomable to their worldview.
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Speaker 2: It was a total exploitation of human empathy. He used
15:18
their safety net as a sniper's blind But you.
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Speaker 1: Know, while Samuel was hiding in plain sight, eating meals
15:23
with grieving parents. A modern criminal investigation was quietly, methodically
15:29
spinning up all around him.
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Speaker 2: The Meigs County Sheriff's deputies knew a violent.
15:32
Speaker 1: Crime had occurred, and they were getting to work.
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Speaker 2: And this investigation provides a fascinating study. In contrasts, you
15:39
have modern law enforcement operating in the year twenty twenty five, right,
15:43
But they are investigating a crime within a community that
15:45
deliberately rejects the vast majority of the technology that modern
15:49
policing relies upon.
15:51
Speaker 1: Think about a standard homicide investigation today. If you're a detective,
15:56
you are relying entirely on a web of invisible digital
15:59
trip Oh. Absolutely, you look for ring doorbell cameras on
16:03
neighboring houses. You execute geofens warrants to pull extensive cell
16:07
phone location.
16:08
Speaker 2: Data, tracking every device that pinged near the crime scene.
16:12
Speaker 1: Right, you analyze social media footprint, credit card swipes, Wi
16:15
Fi handshakes, GPS telemetry from modern vehicle.
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Speaker 2: You're pulling a digital net over the area exactly.
16:22
Speaker 1: But in Meegs County, the detectives were flying blind in
16:24
that regard.
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Speaker 2: They were forced backward in time.
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Speaker 1: Essentially a modern detective suddenly has to rely on the
16:30
erratic behavior of a wandering goat, the physical forensics of
16:34
the trailer, and the subtle shifts in eye contact among
16:37
tight knit neighbors.
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Speaker 2: It became an entirely analog detective story.
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Speaker 1: And it was through those analog methods, specifically careful community interviews,
16:46
that Samuel's masks start to.
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Speaker 2: Crack, because in the weeks following the funeral, people who
16:51
worked alongside him started noticing glaring red flags.
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Speaker 1: Right his baseline behavior shifted dramatically. He became highly unfocused,
17:00
in erratic during shared labor projects, and.
17:03
Speaker 2: Suddenly he started floating the idea of moving back to Kentucky.
17:06
Speaker 1: The sudden desire to flee delayed by just a few
17:09
weeks as the pressure mounted.
17:10
Speaker 2: But the most damning behavioral clue wasn't his work ethic.
17:14
It was his morbid curiosity.
17:16
Speaker 1: Oh, this part is wild.
17:17
Speaker 2: He started asking other people in the community hypothetical questions
17:21
about the legal.
17:22
Speaker 1: System, like what kind of questions?
17:24
Speaker 2: He was essentially asking his neighbors what would happen to
17:27
a person if they had killed someone?
17:29
Speaker 1: I mean, you don't need a cell phone paying when
17:31
a suspect is literally asking his coworkers about the consequences
17:35
of hypothetical murder.
17:36
Speaker 2: Right, it's a massive red flag.
17:38
Speaker 1: Those bizarre inquiries, combined with the ongoing physical analysis of
17:42
the crime scene, focused the detective's attention squarely on Samuel.
17:46
Speaker 2: They secured sirch warrants, processed the evidence, and on May five,
17:50
twenty twenty five, nearly two months after the murder, Samuel
17:53
Hawksteller was arrested.
17:54
Speaker 1: And booked into the Gallia County jail.
17:56
Speaker 2: And this is where the collision between an insular, isolated
18:00
culture and the United States legal system creates a massive
18:04
constitutional complication.
18:05
Speaker 1: Okay, yes, let's get into this.
18:07
Speaker 2: Following his arrest, investigators sent Samuel down for a recorded interview,
18:12
and during that interrogation, he essentially confesses.
18:15
Speaker 1: He admitted to having sexual intercourse with Rosanna. He admitted
18:18
to placing a blanket over her head, right, and he
18:21
told the investigators that when he rolled her over afterward,
18:24
he realized she was dead. So, as a layperson looking
18:29
at this, you think case closed.
18:31
Speaker 2: You have the killer on tape admitting to the acts.
18:34
Speaker 1: But a judge eventually threw that entire confession.
18:37
Speaker 2: Out completely suppressed it.
18:38
Speaker 1: Meaning the prosecution was legally barred from mentioning yet a trial. Okay,
18:42
let's unpack this because the legal mechanics here are fascinating.
18:45
How does a recorded confession to a murder get thrown out?
18:48
Speaker 2: It really comes down to a deep linguistic and cultural chasm.
18:52
The judge ruled that Samuel did not fully understand his
18:55
miranda rights.
18:56
Speaker 1: Which we have to remember his primary language is Pennsylvania Dutch.
19:00
Speaker 2: Yes, and his educational background is limited to an Amish
19:03
one room schoolhouse.
19:05
Speaker 1: Right. The miranda warning is something we all know from television.
19:08
You have the right to remain silent. Anything you say
19:12
can and will be used against you in a court
19:14
of law.
19:14
Speaker 2: We all know it by heart.
19:16
Speaker 1: But that warning is entirely predicated on a baseline understanding
19:20
of American civil law, constitutional rights, and modern English terminology.
19:25
Speaker 2: Exactly, if you don't truly comprehend what an adversarial court
19:29
of law is, or what waiving a right means in
19:32
a constitutional sense, reciting those words to you is legally meaningless.
19:37
Speaker 1: And in Amish culture, the concept of galassonheit, yieldedness and
19:40
submission to authority is drilled into them from birth.
19:43
Speaker 2: Yes, Galasson height is central to their worldview.
19:46
Speaker 1: The idea that you have a constitutional right to defy
19:49
a police officer's questioning is a completely alien concept.
19:53
Speaker 2: It just doesn't compute for them.
19:54
Speaker 1: But the suppression went even deeper than the constitutional warning, didn't.
19:57
Speaker 2: It It did. The judge noted that sam m didn't
20:00
understand the basic English legal and sexual terminology the investigators
20:04
were using.
20:04
Speaker 1: The linguistic barrier was so absolute that he didn't even
20:08
comprehend the English word for.
20:10
Speaker 2: Sex right when discussing the physical act, he used the
20:13
agricultural term reading.
20:16
Speaker 1: More importantly, he did not grasp the legal concept of rape.
20:20
He didn't understand the precise definitions of the felony crimes
20:23
he was being questioned about.
20:24
Speaker 2: So you have an eighteen year old from an isolated
20:27
agrarian community sitting in a concrete interrogation room, agreeing to
20:32
things using vocabulary that means something entirely different in a
20:35
court of law than it does in his own head.
20:38
Speaker 1: The justice system, to its credit, recognized that this was
20:41
not a constitutionally sound foundation for a confession.
20:45
Speaker 2: No, it wasn't. The Fifth Amendment requires that any waiver
20:48
of rights must be knowing, intelligent, and voluntary.
20:51
Speaker 1: The judge determined that Samuel lack the linguistic and cultural
20:54
comprehension to make a knowing waiver.
20:57
Speaker 2: Therefore, the confession is toxic evidence. It can not be used.
21:00
Speaker 1: Just imagine being the prosecutor in that room.
21:02
Speaker 2: Oh, a total nightmare.
21:04
Speaker 1: You have the killer, he told you he did it.
21:07
You know he stayed in the victim's house for three days,
21:10
and suddenly a judge tells you that the confession cannot
21:14
be presented to a jury.
21:15
Speaker 2: Panic has to set in.
21:17
Speaker 1: How do you secure justice for the Kinsinger family without
21:20
the confession?
21:21
Speaker 2: Well, you pivot entirely to the physical evidence. The prosecution
21:25
decided to proceed to trial relying on forensic science.
21:29
Speaker 1: And they had one piece of evidence that was absolutely unassailable. Yes,
21:33
something that transcends language barriers and cultural misunderstandings. DNA exactly.
21:39
Investigators had recovered DNA evidence from vaginal and anal swabs
21:43
taken from Rosanna's body during the autopsy, and they.
21:46
Speaker 2: Ran that genetic profile against a swab taken from Samuel Hawksteller.
21:50
Speaker 1: And this statistical probability at match is mind boggling.
21:53
Speaker 2: The mathematical certainty here is staggering. It matched him at
21:57
a frequency rarer than one in one te trillion unrelated individuals.
22:02
Speaker 1: Let's contextualize what a one in a trillion match actually
22:04
means biologically.
22:05
Speaker 2: Yeah, let's break that down.
22:07
Speaker 1: Forensic DNA analysis looks at specific regions of the human
22:10
genome called short tandem repeats or STRs.
22:15
Speaker 2: These are highly variable sections of.
22:16
Speaker 1: DNA right By analyzing multiple STR locations and calculating the
22:21
statistical frequency of those specific genetic variations occurring in the
22:25
general population, scientists use the product rule to multiply those
22:29
probabilities together, and.
22:31
Speaker 2: When you hit a number like one in one trillion in.
22:33
Speaker 1: A world with a total population of roughly eight billion people,
22:37
that number.
22:38
Speaker 2: Is effectively an absolute biological certainty.
22:41
Speaker 1: No one else on planet Earth could have left that DNA.
22:44
Speaker 2: It is the ultimate forensic trump card.
22:46
Speaker 1: The analog detective story reliant on wandering goats and neighborhood
22:50
gossip is suddenly saved by the absolute pinnacle of modern
22:54
biological science. It didn't need the digital cell phone pay
22:57
and they didn't even need the confession because the biology
22:59
was under.
23:00
Speaker 2: Armed with that DNA. Samuel was formally indicted on a
23:03
slew of severe charges aggravated murder murder, rape, kidnapping, and strangulation.
23:08
Speaker 1: The case began moving slowly through the pre trial system.
23:11
There were hearings dealing with the language issues. Interpreters were
23:14
brought in and eventually Samuel indicated to the court that
23:17
he was comfortable preceding in English.
23:19
Speaker 2: But as we moved toward the scheduled trial date in
23:22
the summer of twenty twenty six, the sheer crushing weight
23:26
of that DNA evidence starts to force a resolution.
23:30
Speaker 1: The defense realizes they cannot beat the biology. On July
23:33
twenty four to twenty twenty six, just days before the
23:36
jury trial was scheduled to begin, the case came to
23:39
a sudden, dramatic halt.
23:41
Speaker 2: Samuel Hawkstetler, who is now nineteen years old, changed his plea.
23:45
He pleaded guilty, but it wasn't a blind plea to
23:47
all charges.
23:48
Speaker 1: No, it was a carefully structured plea agreement.
23:50
Speaker 2: He pleaded guilty to a single count of aggravated murder,
23:55
and it is important to understand the mechanics of that
23:57
specific charge. Under Ohio law, the charge legally established that
24:02
he purposely caused the death of Rosanna Kinsinger while committing
24:06
or attempting to commit rape or kidnapping in.
24:08
Speaker 1: Exchange for pleading guilty to that central most severe felony,
24:12
the remaining subordinate counts the separate murder, rape, kidnapping, and
24:17
strangulation charges were dismissed.
24:19
Speaker 2: The state had originally signaled they were seeking a sentence
24:22
of life without the possibility of parole if the case
24:25
went to a full trial, but through.
24:27
Speaker 1: This plea deal, they secured a guaranteed sentence of life
24:30
in prison, with parole eligibility only after twenty five years.
24:35
Speaker 2: He was also mandated to register as a Tier third
24:38
sex offender and as a violent offender for the rest
24:40
of his life.
24:41
Speaker 1: Now you might wonder why a prosecutor would accept a
24:44
deal that offers parole eligibility in twenty five years for
24:47
a crime this horrific.
24:48
Speaker 2: That's a fair question, but it almost.
24:50
Speaker 1: Certainly comes down to sparing the Kinsinger family. A trial
24:53
would have been a grueling, deeply traumatic public spectacle.
24:57
Speaker 2: Oh, it would have been horrific for them.
24:59
Speaker 1: The family would been forced to sit in a courtroom
25:01
day after day listening to forensic pathologists detail the agonizing
25:06
reality of positional asphyxiation.
25:09
Speaker 2: They would have to endure cross examinations, about the brutal sexual.
25:12
Speaker 1: Assault and listen to testimony regarding those horrific three days
25:17
where the killer hid in their home.
25:19
Speaker 2: A plea agreement guarantees a conviction, It guarantees a life sentence,
25:23
removing him from society until at least the year twenty fifty,
25:27
and it completely insulates the family from being re traumatized
25:30
on the witness stand.
25:32
Speaker 1: It provides certainty in a system that is inherently unpredictable.
25:36
Speaker 2: And regarding his age, Ohio law is very rigid here.
25:39
The fact that he was eighteen at the time of
25:41
the offense doesn't offer him a discount on the severity
25:44
of aggravated murder.
25:45
Speaker 1: Once adult jurisdiction applies, he is treated as a full
25:48
adult facing the maximum adult consequences.
25:51
Speaker 2: But during the sentencing hearing, his defense attorneys certainly tried
25:54
to frame the narrative in a way that asked for
25:56
leniency or at least a mitigation of his intent.
26:00
Speaker 1: Defense attorney stated that Samuel felt a great amount of remorse.
26:03
The attorney claim that causing Rosanna's death was never his intention.
26:07
Speaker 2: And then they deployed a phrase that is deeply.
26:09
Speaker 1: Troubling, extremely troubling.
26:11
Speaker 2: The defense attributed the fatal outcome in part to a
26:14
lack of experience.
26:16
Speaker 1: Let's stop and completely dismantle that argument, because blaming a
26:20
lack of experience for brutal murder is a horrific semantic game.
26:25
Speaker 2: It really is.
26:27
Speaker 1: It implies that sexual assault is just a risky activity,
26:30
like driving a car where a novice might accidentally cause
26:33
a crash.
26:34
Speaker 2: Right, like an oops moment.
26:35
Speaker 1: Exactly Yeah, Can lack of experience ever be a valid
26:39
contextualizer for a violent, non consensual assault where a woman's
26:44
face is pressed into a bed with enough force to
26:46
knock out her dentures.
26:47
Speaker 2: Not at all.
26:48
Speaker 1: That doesn't sound like a lack of experience. That sounds
26:50
like extreme, relentless aggressive violence.
26:52
Speaker 2: The defense is attempting a very specific legal maneuver here,
26:56
minimizing intent. They're trying to separate the intent to commit
27:00
the sexual assault from the intent to kill.
27:03
Speaker 1: They're suggesting that an older, more experienced criminal might have
27:06
known precisely when to stop applying downward pressure to avoid asphyxiation.
27:11
Speaker 2: It is a sterile legalistic strategy designed to explain away
27:15
the brutality of the act, but it falls entirely flat
27:18
when confronted with the physical reality of the crime scene.
27:21
Speaker 1: The force required to dislaunch dentures and prevent a human
27:24
diaphragm from expanding is not accidental.
27:27
Speaker 2: No, it minimizes the absolute terror Rosanna must have experienced
27:32
in her final moments.
27:33
Speaker 1: Samuel himself did address the court during the sentencing. He
27:36
offered a statement saying, I'm sorry for everything I did.
27:40
I wish I could go back to those days and
27:42
make a different life. I don't know how to fully
27:44
express how sorry I am for all this. I know
27:47
your life will never be the same again.
27:48
Speaker 2: Without her, And then he claimed that he had prayed
27:51
for Rosanna and for her family.
27:53
Speaker 1: The mention of prayer is particularly hollow given the context
27:56
of his actions.
27:56
Speaker 2: He prayed for the family, the very same family he
27:59
sat and ate dinner with while their daughter lay dead
28:02
in a trailer just miles away.
28:03
Speaker 1: It's disgusting. Judge Linda Warner imposed the agreed upon sentence
28:07
of life with parole eligibility after twenty five years. Afterward,
28:12
Meads County Sheriff Scott Fitch issued a very grounded, sober statement.
28:16
Speaker 2: What did he say?
28:17
Speaker 1: He expressed hope that the plea would provide the family
28:20
a measure of justice and a step toward healing, but
28:23
he wisely acknowledged the grim reality of the situation, stating
28:27
that absolute no court outcome could ever erase the loss.
28:30
Speaker 2: The civil legal system has executed its function. It processed
28:34
the forensic evidence, secured a conviction, and physically separated the
28:38
killer from society.
28:40
Speaker 1: The gavel has come down, but.
28:42
Speaker 2: A courtroom gavel doesn't magically repair a shattered cultural foundation.
28:46
Speaker 1: And that is where the real lasting damage of this
28:48
case resides. The State of Ohio has closed its file,
28:52
but the spiritual and cultural crisis for the Manx County
28:55
Amish community is just beginning.
28:57
Speaker 2: When people think about the Amish and violent crime, they
28:59
almost inevitably point to one specific, highly publicized.
29:03
Speaker 1: Tragedy, the two thousand and six Nickelminds school house shooting
29:06
in Pennsylvania.
29:07
Speaker 2: Right Nickel Miins is the cultural touchstone for most people
29:10
regarding the Amish and trauma.
29:11
Speaker 1: In the two thousand and six case, a non Amish man,
29:14
a complete outsider, walked into an Omish schoolhouse and murdered
29:18
five young Amish girls.
29:19
Speaker 2: The global narrative that emerged from that nightmare was the
29:22
community's immediate, almost radical public forgiveness of the killer.
29:27
Speaker 1: They even attended the killer's funeral and raised money for
29:30
his widow.
29:31
Speaker 2: It was an incredible display of theological grace. It was
29:34
deeply rooted in their strict commitment to non resistance.
29:38
Speaker 1: For the Amish, forgiveness isn't just an emotion you might
29:41
eventually feel if you go to enough therapy.
29:44
Speaker 2: No, it is a mandatory religious obligation required for their
29:47
own spiritual salvation.
29:49
Speaker 1: But the dynamic in Meeg's County is the complete inverse
29:53
of nickel miins It is.
29:54
Speaker 2: A dark, distorted mirror image. In nickel miinds, the evil
29:58
was entirely external, came.
30:00
Speaker 1: From the outside world, a world they already view as fallen, corrupt,
30:04
and dangerous.
30:05
Speaker 2: In a strange way, the Nickelmind's tragedy confirmed their worldview.
30:09
Speaker 1: But in Meegs County, the perpetrator was Amish, the victim
30:12
was Amish. It was insider on insider violence.
30:15
Speaker 2: Crucially, the killer didn't give them the physical or emotional
30:18
space to forgive him from a distance.
30:20
Speaker 1: No, he exploited their grief rituals before the concept of
30:24
forgiveness could even be formulated. He was literally sleeping in
30:27
their house while they wept.
30:29
Speaker 2: To understand how devastating this internal betrayal is, we have
30:32
to look closely at two foundational concepts that govern Amish society,
30:37
Ordnung and Galassenheit.
30:39
Speaker 1: The Ordnung is essentially the invisible architecture of the community.
30:43
It refers to the comprehensive set of rules, both written
30:46
and unwritten, that order their daily life.
30:48
Speaker 2: It dictates everything from the style of clothing they wear,
30:51
to the specific technology they reject, to the precise way
30:54
they interact with their neighbors.
30:56
Speaker 1: It is the structural glue that keeps the community cohesive
30:59
and separate from the modern world.
31:01
Speaker 2: And Galassenheit is the internal psychological companion to the Ordnung.
31:05
It translates roughly to yieldedness or submission.
31:09
Speaker 1: Is the core Amish value of yielding to God's will,
31:12
yielding to the community's collective needs over your individual desires,
31:16
and maintaining a quiet, humble, non combative spirit.
31:20
Speaker 2: So Samuel Hawkstetler didn't just break in Ohio state law.
31:23
He annihilated both the Ordnung and galasson height.
31:26
Speaker 1: By asserting his own violent individual will over Rosanna. He
31:30
completely rejected.
31:32
Speaker 2: Yieldedness and by hiding inside the family's grief. He broke
31:36
every unwritten rule of community trust and order.
31:39
Speaker 1: This crime forces the Meegs County settlement to confront a
31:44
terrifying reality that they have spent centuries trying to design
31:48
out of their lives.
31:49
Speaker 2: That evil is not always external.
31:51
Speaker 1: The very trust that makes their entire way of life
31:54
possible was the weapon used to destroy one of their own.
31:57
Speaker 2: This raises profound questions about the application of forgiveness in
32:01
this specific context. Amish teaching makes a very clear distinction.
32:05
Speaker 1: Here, what kind of distinction.
32:07
Speaker 2: They generally accept that the state's civil justice system is
32:10
necessary for dealing with serious violent crimes. They believe the
32:14
state wields the sword of secular justice. They aren't protesting
32:17
the prison sentence, and they aren't trying to pull Samuel
32:20
out of a jail cell.
32:21
Speaker 1: His plea and sentence place him squarely under the authority
32:25
of the state of Ohio for decades, and they accept
32:28
that secular outcome.
32:29
Speaker 2: But the spiritual requirement to forgive that mandate remains. However,
32:34
whether the Kinsinger family or the broader Meigs County community
32:38
will ultimately extend personal spiritual forgiveness to Samuel is a
32:42
deeply private matter.
32:44
Speaker 1: It will not be the public, globally televised spectacle of nickelminds.
32:48
Speaker 2: The violation was far too intimate and the betrayal too calculated.
32:52
Speaker 1: So what happens tomorrow morning in Meeks County? What happens
32:55
to the shared labor projects? Are they ever going to
32:57
gather to build another greenhouse? Without flashing back to March twelfth,
33:01
twenty twenty five.
33:03
Speaker 2: Life will resume its deliberate, analog pace. The barns will
33:07
still need raising, the harvests will still need gathering.
33:11
Speaker 1: Before the frost right life goes on.
33:13
Speaker 2: The mutual aid in times of illness, death, and economic
33:16
hardship has to continue because it is the only physical
33:19
way they survive off the grid.
33:21
Speaker 1: But the ghost of this betrayal will be a permanent
33:23
resident in that community. Oh, absolutely, they will continue these practices,
33:27
but the memory of a murderer hiding inside their mourning
33:30
eating at a grieving family's table will linger in their
33:34
history forever.
33:35
Speaker 2: The extremely small size of the settlement means everyone knew
33:38
Rosanna intimately.
33:40
Speaker 1: And everyone knew Samuel.
33:41
Speaker 2: The knowledge that one of their own could commit such
33:43
a brutal act, and then so thoroughly exploit their own
33:47
deeply held norms of hospitality, adds a layer of psychological
33:51
violation that ordinary stranger on stranger crimes simply do not carry.
33:57
Speaker 1: It's incredibly common for true crime media to treat involving
34:00
the Amish with a sense of exoticism.
34:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, they really do.
34:03
Speaker 1: They lean heavily into the buggies and the bonnets, setting
34:07
up this stark, almost cinematic moral contrast between the pure
34:10
simple country folk the dark, gritty reality of crime.
34:14
Speaker 2: Like a movie script exactly.
34:17
Speaker 1: But we have to push back on that trope entirely.
34:19
We don't need any embellishment here.
34:20
Speaker 2: No embellishment is required. The raw facts are devastating enough
34:23
on their own.
34:24
Speaker 1: The true horror of this story isn't about Amish exceptionalism failing.
34:29
It isn't a morality play about how even the purer
34:31
can fall. It's about a universal human nightmare.
34:35
Speaker 2: It is about the absolute, calculated exploitation of human empathy.
34:39
Speaker 1: A young man sixually assaulted and suffocated a woman, and
34:42
then walked directly into her family's grief and made themselves
34:45
useful while they planned her burial.
34:47
Speaker 2: The family did not know, the community did not know,
34:51
only the slow, quiet persistence of an analog investigation, eventually
34:56
backed by the undeniable mathematical truth of friends DNA science
35:01
brought the reality of the predator to light.
35:04
Speaker 1: Let's take a step back and look at the massive
35:06
journey we've just been on.
35:07
Speaker 2: It's a lot to process.
35:08
Speaker 1: We started at a quiet, communal greenhouse build in rural Ohio,
35:13
a completely normal day of shared labor.
35:15
Speaker 2: We walked through a tragic, brutal crime fueled by violent
35:19
rejection and ending in positional asphyxiation.
35:21
Speaker 1: We unpacked a baffling, sociopathic betrayal of cultural hospitality where
35:26
a killer slept under the same roof as his victim's
35:28
morning parents.
35:29
Speaker 2: We followed an analog investigation that had to rely on
35:31
community whispers and a wandering farm animal.
35:34
Speaker 1: Until it is ultimately saved by a one in a
35:36
trillion biological match that rendered a suppressed confession irrelevant.
35:40
Speaker 2: And we ended in a courtroom in July twenty twenty
35:43
six where a nineteen year old was handed a life sentence.
35:47
Speaker 1: Samuel Hosteller is locked away. He will spend at least
35:50
the next quarter century and potentially the rest of his
35:53
natural life, in the state prison. Far removed from the
35:56
rolling farmland and quiet valleys of Meags County.
36:00
Speaker 2: Kinsinger's family, they will carry the memory of those three
36:03
nights he slept in their home for the rest of
36:05
their lives.
36:05
Speaker 1: The legal system closed the case file, but the cultural
36:09
wounds remains wide open, and it may never fully heal.
36:12
I don't see how it ever could, which brings me
36:14
back to where we started, and a final thought, I
36:16
want you, a listener, to really mull over. We talked
36:19
at the very beginning about a sanctuary built not of
36:22
walls or cameras, but entirely.
36:24
Speaker 2: Of trust, an open door policy reliant on the fundamental
36:27
belief that everyone inside the house is safe.
36:30
Speaker 1: If a culture relies entirely on extreme mutual trust to
36:34
survive outside the modern world, does a betrayal of this
36:38
magnitude permanently alter their cultural DNA.
36:41
Speaker 2: It's a profound sociological question. When the threat already possesses
36:45
a key to the sanctuary, how do you ever sleep
36:47
with the door unlocked again?
36:49
Speaker 1: Can a community ever truly return to a state of deliberate,
36:53
peaceful separation when they are forced to realize that the
36:56
most profound, terrifying dangers aren't lurking out there in the
37:00
chaos of the outside world, but might be sitting right
37:04
next to them at their own dinner table.
37:06
Speaker 2: It's a haunting thought.
37:08
Speaker 1: It is something to think about the next time you
37:09
lock your own front door and turn on your alarm.
37:13
Thank you for joining us for this deep dive into
37:15
the Miggs County case. Keep questioning what you read, keep
37:18
looking for the underlying why behind the facts, and we
37:21
will catch you next time.
37:22
Speaker 2: Stay curious, everyone, Goodbye,