Morgan Metzer was bashed with the butt of a pistol, choked to within an inch of her life, sexually assaulted, and left tied up with a pillowcase over her head.
The man who broke into her home in Canton, Georgia, just after midnight on New Year’s Day 2021 wore a mask and distorted his voice.
Even looking and sounding like Batman, Morgan had an inkling, somehow, that it could be her ex-husband Rodney Metzer.
Badly injured, she lay face down and half naked on the deck and hoped someone would come for help, and someone did, about 1.40am – Rodney.
He expressed horror and concern, untied her, called 911 and stayed holding her until the police arrived.
Within hours, it all began to unravel. Rodney being there so quickly didn’t make sense, and police didn’t buy his story.
He claimed someone mysteriously knocked on his window and yelled Morgan’s name, prompting to go and check on her.
Rodney lived only 15 minutes away and so got there quickly, but Morgan wondered how he knew to look, as she told him she was going to her parents’ house.
‘I know what I know, I told my truth,’ he told police who interviewed him at the scene, but they were incredulous.
‘There’s no way in hell that somebody knocks on your window and said her name and you immediately come over here because you’re going to check on her,’ one told him.
‘And she happens to be bound with a pillowcase over her head by a man who’s disguising his voice.’
Metzer didn’t say at the time, but there was another big red flag that pointed to her husband being the culprit.
‘On his way out he kept saying ‘you messed up. You’re going to be fine but we can’t say that about your ex-husband. You’re really going to miss him’.’
‘That’s when I went, ‘wow, it’s him.’ Why would somebody randomly say you’re going to miss your husband?’ she told The Sun.
Police, suspicious of Rodney, searched his phone and found he was copying Morgan’s messages and secretly taking photos of her in the shower while he was sleeping on her couch weeks earlier.
They arrested him for lying to police and he spent New Year’s Day in jail while they search his home and found more incriminating evidence.
‘The investigation revealed a different story,’ Cherokee County District Attorney Shannon Wallace said when Rodney pleaded guilty in August 2021.
‘The day before, Metzer attempted one last time to reconcile with his ex-wife, but she refused. Then, around 12.30am on January 1, Metzer broke into her home and entered her bedroom, wearing a mask and carrying a gun.
‘When he spoke to her, he disguised his voice. He hit her with the butt of his gun and tried to strangle her two times.
‘He zip tied her hands, assaulted her, placed a pillowcase over her head, and dragged her to the deck.
‘He left her there, face down, instructing her not to move until she heard a car honk. He told her she would be shot if she moved.
‘After leaving his ex-wife tied up outside on the deck, Metzer went to his apartment, changed his clothes, and came back to her home, where he found her still lying face down, tied up outside.’
Wallace explained that detectives found a gun in his car and zip-ties in his apartment, both of which matched those used in the attack.
CCTV also gave him away. He was caught leaving Lowe’s Home Improvement carrying a pack of zip ties, and coming home to his apartment and leaving a few minutes later wearing different clothing.
Detectives also found that he searched on the internet for ‘how long before you starve to death’, ‘how to change the sound of your voice’, and ‘how long it takes to choke someone unconscious’.
Only one thing was stolen – Morgan’s phone, so he could erase the CCTV footage of his arrival, attack, and departure.
Morgan was too scared to sleep for weeks after the attack and often kept her twin children home from school as she needed them with her.
‘A downstairs lamp was on so there was light coming from behind him. I screamed so loud, it’s a scream that I don’t think I can ever do again. It was so painful. Soon enough, he was on top of me,’ she recalled.
‘He was wearing a mask which made him look like Batman, it even had the ears which angled up a bit.
‘At that point, I knew I was going to die.’
Morgan said she woke up to every woman’s worst fear, and the distorted Batman-like voice still haunted her when she slept.
‘I could feel his finger on the trigger of the gun. And I was like, ‘This is it. I’m gone’,’ she told Fox 5.
‘[Then] he decided to strangle me. Two times. Once to the point I barely had any breath left. I thought it was going to be my last breath.’
Police said Rodney’s attack could have been even worse, as they found a suicide note they believed meant he planned to kill Morgan and himself, but backed out.
Morgan and Rodney met as teenagers when she was 14 and he was a high school senior, and got married in 2010.
Their first child died of a congenital heart defect in 2011, but their baby twins, now aged nine, arrived within the next year.
They appeared to friends as a stable and loving couple, but underneath, Rodney was a ‘master manipulator, prosecutors said, who gaslighted her for years.
Some of it was minor, like berating her for not picking up the kids from school, falsely saying she agreed to, but sometime were more serious.
‘He had me convinced I pushed him down the stairs. I did not. He made me feel like I was the aggressive one and the toxic one in the family,’ she said.
They finally got divorced in December 2020, but stayed friends to make parenting their children easier.
They drove to Florida before Christmas that year to leave their children with family and put on a ‘united front’, but Rodney wanted it to be real.
So he hatched his most shocking piece of gaslighting yet – a fake cancer diagnosis.
He called Morgan to break the news he had pancreatic cancer, even showing her forged hospital invoice as proof.
Morgan felt sorry for him and left him sleep on her couch in the days before New Year’s Eve, but kicked him out so she could start 2021 afresh.
His web of lies was quickly unraveled as soon as the police, whom he hadn’t spent years manipulating, started looking at him.
‘He was choking me, staring at me,’ Morgan told police after they arrived, all captured on her security system.
‘Did you see his face?’ the sheriff’s deputy asked as Rodney looked at her.
‘No, he had something over it,’ Morgan replied.
Rodney insisted he rushed over after the cryptic knocking on his window because ‘even though we’re not married I’m supposed to try to protect her’.
None of it worked. Morgan’s security footage showed police handcuff Rodney and lead him away in handcuffs.
‘This man is a master manipulator. In the days leading up to this attack he faked a cancer diagnosis in an attempt to gain sympathy from his ex-wife,’ Wallace said.
‘When that didn’t work, he created a convoluted plan that the investigators in this case and our office truly believe involved a plot to kill her and then himself.
‘When he couldn’t go through with that plan, he instead devised a new plan to rescue her.
‘Fortunately, Sheriff’s Office investigators saw through this scheme and quickly arrested the defendant.
‘I cannot imagine how terrifying this must have been for her. This is a classic example of how the most dangerous time for a domestic violence victim is when she decides to leave an abusive relationship.’
Even after police found overwhelming evidence, Morgan had been so badly gaslit that she had moments of doubt.
‘There were quite a few times where I convinced myself even after that that maybe it wasn’t him. Maybe it was someone else. I can’t believe we’re doing this to him,’ she said.
‘There’s no way he would have done this to me. He wouldn’t hurt me.’
Rodney was charged with a long list of crimes including sexual battery, kidnapping, and aggravated family violence battery.
At first, Rodney tried to convince police of his innocence, and manipulate them the same way he did to his wife.
‘It’s sickening to me that this happened to her and it’s sickening to me that y’all think I would do this,’ he told them during interrogation.
‘I’m a very kind, gentle… like I don’t have an angry bone in my body.’
Morgan said as terrible as the attack was, it at least finally revealed his true colors to friends who didn’t see through his manipulation.
‘No one had ever believed he was a bad person, it was a relief. He would always blame stuff on me too, to make me think like I was in the wrong. That was the gaslighting,’ he said.
Rodney pleaded guilty and was jailed for 70 years, with 25 to be served in prison and the rest on probation, as part of a plea deal.
The case has now been dramatized into the Lifetime film Gaslit by my Husband, with One Tree Hill stars Jana Kramer and Austin Nichols playing Morgan and Rodney.