John Jefferson
Inset: Jessica Hager (Facebook). Background: The house where she was killed (Google Maps).
Torment abounds in a Kentucky murder-suicide that took the life of a recently-married woman from Wisconsin earlier this month.
Jessica Hager, 40, a mother of four, was shot and killed at her new home during the early morning hours on Oct. 5, according to a terse press release issued by the Shelby County Sheriff’s Office.
The killer is said to have been a friend of the family’s — a man who dated the victim’s sister-in-law in an on-again, off-again relationship.
David Hager, the slain woman’s husband of three months, said the killer was a former member of the U.S. Marine Corps who suffered from mental health issues and publicly discussed his problems online.
Law enforcement say they were called to the residence on Bagdad Road in Bagdad, Kentucky — an unincorporated community some 40 miles due east of Louisville — in response to an “unknown emergency” at around 3:30 a.m. Inside, sheriff’s deputies found two adults dead.
The Shelby County Coroner’s Office later identified the slain woman to Louisville-based Fox affiliate WDRB. Her presumed killer was also identified as Franklin County resident Michael Rahmlow, 42.
The coroner said the assailant had an argument with someone at the house earlier on the day in question. Later, the killer returned in the dead of night, broke into the house, and shot Jessica Hager before ending his own life. The woman’s husband was able to escape the violence, the coroner said. Neighbors told the TV station that David Hager ran across the street and knocked on their door for help.
“Jessica shook me and said ‘David, I think somebody’s breaking into the house,”” he told WDRB. “Sure enough, I heard glass breaking and the door being kicked in. I thought it was police for a minute. But I didn’t know, my mind was everywhere. It happened so quick.”
A plan to elude the intruder was quickly hatched and executed.
“I got up, and I told Jessica before I left the bedroom, I said ‘You go to the basement and go out the door, no matter what happens,’ and I’m going to see what’s going on,” David Hager told the TV station. “Yes, I heard the shots fired.”
Outside the house, the realization was swift and painful.
“I was like ‘What the hell is going on here, what’s going on,’ when I seen that car I was like, ‘Why?,’” David Hager went on in comments to WDRB. “He was a friend (on an) every day basis. We were up here, or he was at our house every day. He texted me on the phone. He called me on the phone, ‘What are you doing?’ We were friends.”
David Hager said that Rahmlow blamed Jessica Hager for his relationship’s ups and downs.
“He was dating my little sister, and then every time they would break up, he would think automatically my Jessica’s telling my little sister to leave him over some bull crap,” David Hager told WDRB.
According to the grieving husband, Rahmlow frequently posted on Facebook about the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs denying him treatment for PTSD and other maladies.
A man who identified himself as David Hager’s “brother” echoed this assessment of the killer in a Facebook post — while also remembering Jessica Hager as a “happy” woman and “one of the best human [beings] you’ll ever meet” who, in the end, “got an unfair chance in life.”
Across the country, back in Wisconsin, the slain woman’s high school friends are also torn up. They remember her as Jessica Diedrick, according to Green Bay-based ABC affiliate WBAY. And they are unsatisfied with the answers investigators have turned up so far.
“We sat around the fire, and we speculated, and we’re like, ‘Well, what if this? What if this?’ Your brain just goes and it goes and you want an explanation, and you’re just …” one friend told the TV station. “So many things are unexplained. I feel like there’s been one side of the story told, and unfortunately, we’ll never know Jess’ side. So that’s, I think, what concerns us the most is why this happened in the first place, and why there aren’t more answers.”
Another friend suspected there was more yet to be learned.
“There’s a lot more to it, I think, than what’s been said — and that what’s been looked at,” the second friend told WBAY. “I mean, she was taken, very selfishly, taken from her kids, and that’s the biggest thing. I think we all just want to know why, how could this happen? Why something has to be done more than what has been done already.”
One friend in Wisconsin up a GoFundMe to help with funeral expenses and to help raise Jessica Hager’s children.
The investigation is said to be ongoing.
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