Siders' 14-Year-Old Bride And The Judge Who Forgot

Siders family Gallia County Ohio child marriage judge — in 2002, a Gallia County judge approved a marriage license for a fourteen-year-old pregnant girl and a forty-eight-year-old man named Richard E. Siders, a cousin of Gary Siders Sr. When asked about it years later, that judge said he vaguely remembered and acknowledged that no investigation was ever conducted.

That marriage was the first of at least three involving girls between fourteen and fifteen connected to the Siders family across two Ohio counties and West Virginia. In each case, the law allowed parents and judges to sign off on marriages that Ohio's own criminal code could have treated as evidence of a felony. The legal contradiction — one statute criminalizing the conduct, another legalizing the marriage — ran unchecked for nearly two decades.

Tony maps the pattern from the first marriage license in 2002 to the sixty-four charges now pending in Vinton County, where prosecutors allege sixteen children were confined to conditions the Attorney General described as prolonged and extreme interfamilial neglect. The connection between the three child brides and the four defendants in the current case is closer than anyone has reported — and it starts with the grandparents.

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