After a police raid found 16 children confined to one filthy room, new revelations have emerged about the urine-soaked state that Ohio’s so-called ‘House Of Horrors’ was found in.
The children were found living in appalling conditions (Image: WHSV3)
Every day brings new and more shocking revelations from the Ohio “House of Horrors” case, where 16 children, aged between 20 months and 18 years, were found living in shocking squalor. The children’s parents, Gary Siders Jr and Elizabeth Siders, along with the children’s grandfather Gary Siders Sr. and his wife Christina Siders, have been charged with with 16 counts each of endangering children.
The children, who were all found in the same 12 foot by 12 foot room and “covered in insects and feces” according to an Ohio Attorney General’s Office report. But, it has now emerged, the shocking urine-soaked conditions in which the family were living may date back for many years.
Parents Gary Jr and Elizabeth Siders married in Mason County, West Virginia, in March 2008. Elizabeth Siders was 15 at the time, but state law permitted marriages at any age with parental consent. .
British journalist Mary O’Connor has looked into the family’s background, and learned some “extraordinary” details. The couple had met while they were living in the same West Virginia trailer park, and Elizabeth was already heavily pregnant when they married. Mary, who is the Daily Mail’s senior US reporter, told the podcast that not long after they married, the couple moved to a three-bedroomed home in the small town of Cheshire, Ohio.
Neighbors in the town told Mary that the Siders had been living in absolutely appalling conditions there, but the full shocking extent of the family’s lifestyle did not become apparent until after they had moved on.
The floor of the Cheshire home were ‘saturated’ with urine, locals said (Image: WSYX)
One Cheshire local, Melissa Edmonds, told Mary that her brother and his wife had lived next door to the Sider family. While recent police reports suggest that the Sider children were now largely “non-verbal,” while they were living in Cheshire they had reportedly spoken to their neighbors’ children through their garden fence.
“The other thing that we found when we went there, ” Mary said, “was a local man at the property, and he said that the state the property had been left in when it was vacated was ‘astounding’ to him.
“There were piles and piles of children’s clothing left in an attic room, and the floorboards were just so soaked in urine that they had to relay the the foundations of the property.”
Bruce Gullick was hired to renovate the home in Gallia County and described the conditions inside the house (Image: WSYX)
The house was “saturated” with urine to such an extent that major renovations were required before it could be let to a new tenant,” local man Bruce Gullick said.
Mary added: “After the family moved out, a neighbor had actually gone to tour the property to see about moving into it and they had described, you know, horrible conditions, and had told her that some of the doors had padlocks on them.”
Bruce Gullick had been hired to renovate the Cheshire home and told WSYX what he saw inside: “A lot of kids’ clothes in the attic stuffed away like someone was living up there,” he said. “The whole entire house was just urine, human and pet feces, so it was pretty tough.”
But, as was the case in Hamden, members of the small – apparently tight-knit – community were seemingly unaware of what was going on in their midst until it was too late.
Melissa Edmonds said her niece and nephew had befriended some of the Sider children (Image: WSYX)
With Elizabeth Siders bearing a child almost every year over the course of 18 years, as well as giving birth to a pair of conjoined twins in November 2022, who tragically died shortly after they were born, the family needed more living space and moved to the house on Ohmer Street, Hamden, Ohio four years ago
But no-one seemed to realise the grim conditions in which all of the children were living.
The trigger for the shocking discovery was an unrelated public indecency investigation by the Vinton County Sheriff’s Office, after Gary Jr was accused of exposing himself.
The shocking conditions only came to light after Gary Jr was arrested on an unrelated charge (Image: Southeast Ohio Jail)
It was on June 30 that Vinton County deputies and Ohio Bureau of Criminal Investigation (BCI) agents arrived to serve the arrest warrant. Upon entering the severely dilapidated home, they were shocked to discover the 16 children.
Sheriff Ryan Cain, who led the initial raid, said: “Nothing could prepare us, even in 22 years of law enforcement. Nothing could have prepared us to see the scene. I’ve never seen human beings live in that condition before.”