Murder by Craigslist - Hanna Rosin - The Atlantic

8/30/2014
Murder by Craigslist - Hanna Rosin - The Atlantic
SUBSCRIBE
RENEW
GIVEAGIFT
DIGITALEDITION
Print | Close
MurderbyCraigslist
A SERIAL KILLER FINDS A NEWLY VULNERABLE CLASS OF VICTIMS: WHITE, WORKING-CLASS MEN.
ByHannaRosin
Wanted: Caretaker For Farm. Simply watch over a 688 acre patch of hilly farmland and feed a
few cows, you get 300 a week and a nice 2 bedroom trailer, someone older and single preferred
but will consider all, relocation a must, you must have a clean record and be trustworthythis is
a permanent position, the farm is used mainly as a hunting preserve, is overrun with game, has
a stocked 3 acre pond, but some beef cattle will be kept, nearest neighbor is a mile away, the
place is secluded and beautiful, it will be a real get away for the right person, job of a lifetimeif
you are ready to relocate please contact asap, position will not stay open.
Scott Davis had answered the job ad on Craigslist on October 9, 2011, and now, four weeks later to the
day, he was watching the future it had promised glide past the car window: acre after acre of Ohio
farmland dotted with cattle and horses, each patch framed by rolling hills and anchored by a house and
a barnsometimes old and worn, but never decrepit. Nothing a little carpentry couldnt fix.
Davis rode in the backseat of the white Buick LeSabre; in the front sat his new employer, a man he
knew only as Jack, and a boy Jack had introduced as his nephew, Brogan. The kid, who was driving the
car, was only in high school but was already a giantat least as tall as his uncle, who was plenty tall.
Jack was a stocky, middle-aged man; Davis noticed that hed missed a couple of spots shaving and had
a tattoo on his left arm. He was chatty, telling Davis about his ex-wife, his favorite breakfast foods, and
his church.
Davis, 48, had left his girlfriend behind in South Carolina, given away the accounts for his landscaping
business, and put most of his equipment in storage. Hed packed his other belongingsclothes, tools,
stereo equipment, his Harley-Davidsoninto a trailer, hitched it to his truck, and driven to
southeastern Ohio. Hed told everyone that he was moving in part to help take care of his mom, who
lived outside Akron and whose house was falling apart. Moving back home at his age might seem like
moving backward in life. But the caretaker job hed stumbled across online made it seem more like hed
be getting paid to live free and easy for a whilea no-rent trailer plus $300 a week, in exchange for just
watching over a farm with a few head of cattle outside the town of Cambridge. Jack had reminded him
in an email to bring his Harley because there were plenty of beautiful rural roads to putt-putt in.
Jack and Brogan had met Davis for breakfast at the Shoneys in Marietta, where Jack had quizzed his
new hire about what hed brought with him in the trailer. Davis boasted that it was full from top to
bottom. After breakfast, Davis followed Jack and Brogan to the Food Center Emporium in the small
town of Caldwell, where he left his truck and trailer in the parking lot, to be picked up later. Jack told
Davis that the small road leading to the farm had split, and theyd have to repair it before bringing the
truck up. Theyd been driving for about 15 minutes, the paved road giving way to gravel, and then the
gravel to dirt, while Davis watched the signal-strength bars on his cellphone disappear.
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/print/2013/09/advertisement-for-murder/309435/
1/16
8/30/2014
Relatedstories:
"I'm Supposed to Be Dead Anyway"

Hanna Rosin interviews Brogan Rafferty, the killer's teenage accomplice
What You Draw When You're in Prison for Murder
The young convict's tortured drawings
On a densely wooded, hilly stretch, Jack told his nephew to pull over. Drop us off where we got that
deer at last time, he said, explaining to Davis that hed left some equipment down the hill by the creek
and theyd need to retrieve it to repair the road. Davis got out to help, stuffing his cigarettes and a can
of Pepsi into the pockets of his jean jacket. He followed Jack down the hill, but when they reached a
patch of wet grass by the creek, Jack seemed to have lost his way and suggested they head back up to
the road. Davis turned around and started walking, with Jack following behind him now.
Davis heard a click, and the word fuck. Spinning around, he saw Jack pointing a gun at his head.
Wherewegotthatdeeratlasttime. In a flash, it was clear to Davis: he was the next deer.
Davis instinctively threw up his arms to shield his face. The pistol didnt jam the second time. As Davis
heard the crack of the gunshot, he felt his right elbow shatter. He turned and started to run, stumbling
and falling over the uneven ground. The shots kept coming as Davis ran deeper into the woods, but
none of them hit home. He ran and ran until he heard no more shots or footsteps behind him. He came
to the road and crossed it, worried that if he stayed in the open hed be spotted by his would-be killer.
He was losing a lot of blood by now, but he hid in the woods for several hours, until the sun was low,
before he made his way back to the road and started walking.
Jeff Schockling was sitting in his mothers living room, watching Jeopardy, when he heard the
doorbell. That alone was strange, as hed later explain on the witness stand, because out there in the
boondocks, visitors generally just walked in the front door. Besides, he hadnt heard a car drive up.
Schockling sent his 9-year-old nephew to see who it was, he testified, and the kid came back yelling,
Theres a guy at the door! Hes been shot and hes bleeding right through! Schockling assumed his
nephew was playing a prank, but when he went to the door, there was the stranger, holding his right
arm across his body, his sleeve and pant leg soaked with blood. The guy was pale and fidgety and
wouldnt sit down at the picnic table outside. But he asked Schockling to call 911.
Sheriff Stephen Hannum of Noble County arrived after about 15 minutes. He would later describe
Davis as remarkably coherent for a man who had been shot and was bleeding heavily. But what Davis
was saying made no sense. He claimed that hed come to the area for a job watching over a 688-acre
cattle ranch, and that the man whod offered him the job had shot him. But Hannum didnt know of
any 688-acre cattle ranches in Noble Countynothing even close. Most of the large tracts of land had
been bought up by mining companies. Davis kept going on about a Harley-Davidson, and how the guy
who shot him was probably going to steal it. The sheriff sized Davis upmiddle-aged white guy, puffy
2/16
8/30/2014
eyes, long hair, jean jacket, babbling about a Harleyand figured he was involved in some kind of dope
deal gone bad. Hannum made a few calls to his local informants, but none of them had heard anything.
Then he located the truck and trailer in the Food Center Emporium parking lot, and they were just as
Davis had described them. It was beginning to look, Hannum later recalled, like Mr. Davis truly was
a victim rather than whatever I thought he was at the beginning.
Davis wasnt the only person to answer the Craigslist ad. More than 100 people applied for the
caretaker joba fact that Jack was careful to cite in his e-mails back to the applicants. He wanted to
make sure that they knew the position was highly sought-after. Jack had a specific type of candidate in
mind: a middle-aged man who had never been married or was recently divorced, and who had no
strong family connections. Someone who had a life he could easily walk away from. If picked I will
need you to start quickly, he would write in his e-mails.
Jack painstakingly designed the ad to conjure a very particular male fantasy: the cowboy or rancher,
out in the open country, herding cattle, mending fences, hunting gameliving a dream that could
transform a post-recession drifter into a timeless American icon. From the many discarded drafts of
the ad that investigators later found, it was clear that Jack was searching for just the right pitch to
catch a certain kind of mans eye. He tinkered with detailsthe number of acres on the property, the
idea of a yearly bonus and paid utilitiesbefore settling on his final language: hilly, secluded, job
of a lifetime. If a woman applied for the job, Jack wouldnt bother responding. If a man applied, he
would ask for the critical information right off the bat: Howoldareyou?Doyouhaveacriminal
record?Areyoumarried?
Jack seemed drawn to applicants who were less formal in their e-mail replies, those who betrayed
excitement, and with it, vulnerability. I was raised on a farm as a boy and have raised some of my own
cattle and horses as well, wrote one. Im still in good shape and not afraid of hard work! I really hope
you can give me a chance. If for some reason I wouldnt work out for you no hard feelings at all. I would
stick with you until you found help. Thank you very much, George.
If a candidate lived near Akron, Jack might interview him in person at a local Waffle House or at a mall
food court. Hed start by handing the man a preemployment questionnaire, which stated that he was an
equal-opportunity employer. Jack and the applicant would make small talk about ex-wives or tattoos,
and Jack, who fancied himself a bit of a street preacher, would describe the ministry hed founded.
Hed ask about qualificationsany carpentry experience? ever work with livestock?and provide more
details about the farm. Jack explained that his uncle owned the place, and he had six brothers and
sisters with a lot of kids and grandkids running around, especially on holiday weekends and during
hunting season. The picture Jack painted was of a boisterous extended family living an idyllic rural life
pretty much the opposite of the lonely bachelor lives of the men he was interviewing.
If the interview went well, Jack might tell the applicant that he was a finalist for the job. But if the
applicant gave any sign that he did not meet one of Jacks criteria, the meeting would end abruptly. For
one candidate, everything seemed on track until he mentioned that he was about to get married. Jack
immediately stood up and thanked him for his time. George, the man whod written the e-mail about
being raised on a farm, told Jack that hed once been a security guard and was an expert in martial arts.
He figured this would be a plus, given that hed have to guard all that property when no one else was
around. But the mood of the interview immediately changed for the worse. Jack took the application
out of Georges hands before he even finished filling it out and said hed call him in a couple of days. If
George didnt hear anything, he should assume that someone else got it.
3/16
8/30/2014
Scott Davis (left) and David Pauley (right), two of the men who had the misfortune of answering the
Craigslist ad placed by the mysterious "Jack"
David Pauley was the first applicant who met Jacks exacting criteria. He was 51 years old, divorced,
and living with his older brother, Richard, in his spare bedroom in Norfolk, Virginia. For nearly two
decades, Pauley had worked at Randolph-Bundy, a wholesale distributor of building materials,
managing the warehouse and driving a truck. He married his high-school sweetheart, Susan, and
adopted her son, Wade, from an earlier marriage. For most of his life, Pauley was a man of routine, his
relatives said. He ate his cereal, took a shower, and went to work at precisely the same times every day.
He was the stable influence in my life, says Wade. I grew up thinking everyone had a nine-to-five.
But Pauley grew increasingly frustrated with his position at Randolph-Bundy, and finally around 2003
he quit. He bounced around other jobs but could never find anything steady. He and Wade often had
disagreements, and in 2009 he and Susan got a divorce. Now he found himself sitting on his brothers
easy chair, using Richards laptop to look for jobs. Mostly hed find temp stuff, jobs that would last only
a few weeks. Sometimes he had to borrow money just to buy toothpaste. He got along fine with Richard
and his wife, Judy, but their second bedroomwith its seafoam-green walls, frilly lamp shades, and
ornate dresserwas hardly a place where he could put up his poster of Heidi Klum in a bikini or start
enjoying his post-divorce freedom.
Pauley was cruising online job opportunities when he came across the Craigslist ad in October 2011.
Usually Pauley looked for jobs only around Norfolk. But his best friend since high school, Chris Maul,
had moved to Ohio a couple years earlier and was doing well. He and Maul talked dozens of times a day
on the Nextel walkie-talkies theyd bought specifically for that purpose. If Maul, who was also divorced,
could pick up and start a new life, why couldnt Pauley?
And the Craigslist job sounded perfect. Three hundred dollars a week and a rent-free place to live
would solve all Pauleys problems at once. On top of that, his brother, an ex-Navy man, was always
pestering Pauley to cut his long hair before job interviews. With a gig like this, who would care whether
he had long hairthe cattle? Pauley sat down and wrote an e-mail to Jack.
Well about me, Im fifty one years young, single male, I love the out doors, I currently live in
4/16
8/30/2014
virginia have visited ohio and i really love the state. Being out there by myself would not bother
me as i like to be alone. I own my own pick up truck so hauling would not be a problem. I can fix
most anything have my own carpentry tools.
If chosen i will work hard to take care of your place and treat it like my own.
I also have a friend in Rocky River, Ohio. Thank you, David.
A few days later, Pauley got an e-mail back from Jack saying that he had narrowed his list down to
three candidates, and you are one of the 3. Jack asked his usual questionswas Pauley married? had
he ever been arrested for a felony?and told him that if he was chosen, hed have to start immediately.
Richard remembers his younger brother being energized in a way he hadnt seen in months. Pauley
called Jack several times to see whether there was anything else he could do to help him decide. Jack
promised that hed call by 2 p.m. on a Friday, and Pauley waited by the phone. When 2 oclock came
and went, he told his brother, Well, I guess the other person got chosen above me.
But early that evening, the phone rang. When Pauley got on the line, Richard recalls, his whole face lit
up.
I got it! I got the job! he yelled as soon as he hung up. He immediately called his friend Maul on the
walkie-talkie and started talking a mile a minute. He swore that this was the best thing that had ever
happened to him and said he couldnt wait to pack up and go. To Mauls surprise, he found himself in
tears. For the past few years hed been worried about Pauley, whom hed always called his brother
with a different last name. Maul remembers, It was like, maybe this is the turning point, and things
are finally going the right way. They made a promise to each other that on Pauleys first weekend in
Ohio after settling in, Maul would bring down his hot rod and theyd drive around on the empty
country roads.
Next Pauley called his twin sister, Deb, who lives in Maine. She told him that she hated the thought of
him sitting alone on some farm for Christmas and made him promise that hed come visit her for the
holidays. He told her that his new boss was a preacher and said he felt like the Lord was finally
pointing him toward the place where he might find peace.
That week, Pauley went to the mens Bible-study group hed been attending since hed moved into
Richards house. For weeks hed been prayingnever to win the lottery or get a girlfriend, always for
steady work. Everyone there agreed that God had finally heard his prayers.
The church gave Pauley $300 from its helping hands fund so that he could rent a U-Haul trailer. He
packed up all his stuffhis model trains, his books and DVDs, his Jeff Gordon T-shirts and posters, his
Christmas lights, and the small box containing the ashes of his old cat, Maxwell Edisonand hit the
road.
Pauley arrived at the Red Roof Inn in Parkersburg, West Virginia, on the night of Saturday, October 22,
2011. It was not far from Marietta, Ohio, where he was supposed to meet his new employer at a Bob
Evans for breakfast the next morning. He called his sister, who told him that she loved him and said to
call back the next day.
Then, just before going to bed, he called up Maul, who told him, Good luck. As soon as youre done
talking to them tomorrow, let me know. Give me an exact location so I can come down Saturday and
we can hang out.
5/16
8/30/2014
The next day came and went with no call from Pauley. Maul tried him on the walkie-talkie, but there
was no response. He then called Richard and got the number for Pauleys new employer, Jack, whom
he reached on his cellphone. Yes, everything was all right, Jack told Maul. Hed just left Pauley with a
list of chores. Yes, he would pass on the message when he saw him the next day. But a few more days
went by without a call, so Maul dialed Jack again. This time Jack said that when he showed up at the
farm that day, Pauley had packed all his things in a truck and said he was leaving. Apparently hed met
some guy in town who was headed to Pennsylvania to work on a drilling rig, and hed decided to follow
him there.
There was no way, Maul thought to himself, that Pauley would take off for Pennsylvania without telling
him. The two men had been best friends since high school, when theyd bonded over their mutual
distaste for sports and love of cars. Over the years theyd moved to different cities, gotten married,
gotten divorced, but theyd stayed constantly in touch, Maul said.
They kept their walkietalkies on their bedside tables and called each other before they even got up to
brush their teeth in the morning. They talked, by Mauls estimate, about 50 times a day. Most people
couldnt figure out how we had so much to talk about, Maul said. But thered always end up being
something. But after Pauley reached Ohio? Nothing.
Early in November, about two weeks after hed last spoken to Pauley, Maul called his friends twin
sister. Deb hadnt heard from him either, and was also worrieda habit shed honed over a lifetime.
When she and her brother were 14, their mother got emphysema. Since their father had left the family
and their older siblings were already out of the house, Deb quit school and, as she put it, basically
became Davids mother. Years later, she moved to Maine with her second husband and Pauley stayed
in Norfolk, but the twin bond remained strong.
By the time she received the concerned phone call from Maul, Deb had already spent several days
sitting with her laptop at the kitchen table, in her pajamas, looking for clues to explain why she hadnt
heard a word from her brother. With a red pen and a sheet of legal paper, shed made a list of places to
callthe motel in Parkersburg, the U-Haul rental placebut shed learned nothing from any of them. It
wasnt until Friday night, November 11, nearly three weeks after Pauley had left for Ohio, that she
remembered something else: Cambridge, the town where he had said the farm was located. She typed
the name into Google and found the local paper, TheDailyJeffersonian. She scrolled through the
pages until she landed on this headline, dated November 8: Man Says He Was Lured Here for Work,
Then Shot. There was no mention of the mans name, but there was one detail that sounded familiar:
he said hed been hired to work on a 688-acre ranch. The article cited the Noble County sheriff,
Stephen Hannum. Deb called his office right away.
After picking up Scott Davis five days earlier, Hannum and his team had been following up on his
strange story, but not all that urgently. They had Daviss explanation about the Craigslist ad, and theyd
located security-camera footage from his breakfast meeting with his employers. But Debs phone call
lit a fire under Hannums investigation. She told Jason Mackie, a detective in the sheriffs office, that
Pauley had talked with his friend Maul 50 times a day and then suddenly stopped. Although no one
said it explicitly at the time, a sudden drop-off like that meant a missing person, and that in turn meant
there might be a body.
The next day, a Saturday, the sheriffs office called an FBI cyber-crimes specialist to help them get
information about who had written the Craigslist ad. They also sent a crew with cadaver dogs back to
the woods where Davis had been shot. One FBI agent would later recall the torrential downpour that
day and the sound of coyotes howling. A few hours before dark, the investigators found a patch of
6/16
8/30/2014
disturbed soil overlaid with tree branches. They began digging with their hands, until they found blood
seeping up from the wet earth and a socked foot appeared. The body they discovered was facedown,
and one of the items they removed from it was a corded black-leather bracelet with a silver clasp.
Mackie telephoned Deb and described the bracelet. Yes, it was her brothers, she told them. The
investigators also found a second grave, this one empty. They later learned it had been meant for Davis.
Now the investigators knew they were looking for a murderer. By early the next week, they had
identified the man in the breakfast-meeting footage as a local named Richard Beasley. Additionally, the
cyber-crimes specialist had received enough information from Craigslist to trace the IP address of the
ads originating computer to a small house in Akron. When the investigators arrived at the house, its
occupant, Joe Bais, said hed never written any ads on Craigslist and he didnt know anyone named
Richard Beasley or Jack. But when they showed him a picture, he recognized the man whod called
himself Jack. It was someone he knew as Ralph Geiger, who until recently had rented a room from Bais
for $100 a week. Real nice guy, Bais would later recall on the witness stand. He didnt cuss, didnt
smoke, didnt drink First Sunday he was there, went to church. As it happened, Geiger had just left
him a note with his new cellphone number. The landlord called Geiger and kept him on the line as
investigators traced the call. On November 16, an FBI SWAT team arrested the man outside another
Akron house, where he had been renting a room after leaving Baiss place. The suspects name was, in
fact, Richard Beasley. Although investigators didnt know it yet, Ralph Geiger was the name of his first
victim.
Tracking down the teenager who had been with Beasley/Jack when he drove Scott Davis out into the
woods proved easier. Just as Jack had said, his name was Brogan, Brogan Rafferty to be exact, and he
was a junior at Stow-Munroe Falls High School. A detective and an FBI agent drove to the school and
interviewed Rafferty in the principals office, while another set of investigators searched his house.
Rafferty later told his mother that before he left school that day, he had found a girl he liked and kissed
her, even though her boyfriend was nearby. He had been worried that hed never see her, or anyone
else from his high school, again. He was right to worry: that evening, police arrived with a warrant, and
he was taken into custody.
Richard beasley, aka Jack, was born in 1959 and raised in Akron primarily by his mother, who worked
as a secretary at a local high school, and his stepfather. He was briefly married and had a daughter,
Tonya, who was about Raffertys age. Over the years, he worked as a machinist, but his job record was
interrupted by spells in jail. He served from 1985 to 1990 in a Texas prison on burglary charges and,
starting in 1996, another seven years in a federal prison for a firearms offense. When he went on trial
for the 2011 Craigslist murders, the photo favored by newspapers made him look deranged, with wild
eyebrows and hair and a crumpled mouth. But during the trial, with his white hair combed and his
beard trimmed, he looked almost like Santa Claus, especially when he smiled.
In the mid-2000s, a dump truck hit Beasleys car and he suffered head, chest, and spinal injuries. He
had recently returned to Akron from federal prison, where, he told everyone, hed found God, and hed
begun spending a lot of time at a local megachurch called the Chapel. After the accident, he started
taking opiates for back and neck pain and stopped working steadily.
But Brogan Raffertys father, Michael, who knew Beasley from the local motorcycle circuit, told me that
even before the car wreck, Beasley had been lazy. He was known as someone who always had a little
bit of an angle going, like a scam artist, Michael Rafferty said. People in their motorcycle clubs knew
Beasley had a criminal record, but to Michael Rafferty he seemed harmless, like he was all talk.
Michael Rafferty said hed never once seen Beasley lose his temper in the 20 years he knew him.
7/16
8/30/2014
Beasley didnt drink or smoke much, and he spent a lot of his free time at the Chapel, where he went to
Bible study and worked in a soup kitchen. So when, at age 8, Brogan Rafferty said he wanted to start
going to church on Sundays, his dad said it was okay for him to go with Beasley. It was only church,
after all. And Michael Rafferty, a single parent who was working long shifts at the time, hated waking
up early on Sundays anyway.
For the next eight years, Beasley was a regular presence in the Rafferty house on Sundays, coming by
early to get his young charge, whod be waiting in a slightly rumpled suit. Sometimes when he took
Rafferty to church, Beasley would bring along his daughter, Tonya, or Raffertys half-sister Rayna, who
was three years younger than Rafferty and shared the same mother but, like Rafferty, lived full-time
with her own father. (Raffertys mother, Yvette, was a crack addict who didnt have custody of her four
children and was rarely around when they were young.) Beasley was a mentor to Rayna and her
brother, Rayna recalls. After Bible study, hed sneak them leftover donuts or take them to McDonalds
and talk to them about the importance of school or the danger of drugs. The Bible is the key to peace
of mind, and a road map to salvation, he wrote in the Bible he gave Brogan.
Around 2009, Beasley founded what he told friends was a halfway house to help reform addicts,
runaways, and prostitutes. Beasley would cruise the streets of Akron at night, picking up strays and
bringing them back to the house. If they were in trouble with the law, he would vouch for them in
court, saying they had turned their lives over to Christ. A few times, Rafferty asked Beasley whether
they could go out and look for his mother, Yvette, who Rafferty always worried was in trouble.
But there was another side to Beasleyand to his halfway house. Amy Saller, who later described
herself on the witness stand at Raffertys trial as a former crack addict and prostitute, lived at the house
on and off for more than two years from 2009 to 2011. Beasley had picked her up one night, and she
came to stay with him because he told her his mission was to save all the girls that are on the streets,
she testified. I pictured him as a savior, somebody that was trying to help me. There were four or five
other prostitutes in the house, Saller recalled, and Beasley got them all cellphones. Soon, instead of
being their savior, he became their pimp. He began advertising their services online and driving them
to meet johns. Saller said that Beasley would do anything in his power to keep the girls at the house,
including buying them drugs. Saller said she never saw Beasley get violent, although she added that she
was nonetheless afraid of him.
In February 2011, Beasley was arrested in Ohio on a variety of drug-related charges. While he was in
jail, investigators were building a prostitution case against him. He was released on bond in mid-July.
But after he failed to check in with authorities in Texas, where he was still on parole for his earlier
crimes, the state issued a warrant for his arrest, and he was deemed on the run from the law.
Beasley wanted to disappear. The key, he realized, would be to assume a new identity, and it wasnt
long before he came up with an idea. Whereas once he had preyed on prostitutes, now he would target
a member of a new class of vulnerable citizens drifting at the margins of society: unemployed, middleaged white men.
Thiswillbethefourthtimewevetalkedtoyou.Andeachtimewegetalittlebitmore.Buttonightit
allneedstocomeout,100percent.Allright?
One week after arresting Brogan Rafferty, investigators made a deal with their 16-year-old suspect. If
he agreed to testify against Beasley, he would be charged only with complicity to murder and
attempted murder, respectively, in the cases of David Pauley and Scott Davis. He would not be charged
with two other homicides that had by now been uncovered. Later, Rafferty would back out of the deal,
but the plea-deal interview was recorded and the judge allowed it to be played at Raffertys trial.
8/16
8/30/2014
The story Rafferty told began in the first week of August, when Beasley told Rafferty that he was on the
run from the law. He was determined not to go back to jail, and he suggested to Rafferty that he
needed [his] help to survive.
The first thing Beasley wanted was a new identity, and he began hanging around a local homeless
shelter searching for someone who looked like him. He had by now come up with the perfect lure for a
male victim in post-recession America: he would present himself as a beneficent but exacting
employer, one with the power to alter a mans fortunes by granting him the job of a lifetime as the
caretaker of a sprawling farm.
It wasnt long before Beasley met a man named Ralph Geiger, who for many years had run a thriving
maintenance business, but for whom jobs had gradually dried up. Geiger, 56, was staying at a shelter
and looking for work, and Beasley told him about the caretaker job hed invented. Geiger had lived on a
farm when he was younger, and he leapt at the opportunity. Rafferty remembers Beasley quizzing
Geiger about his size and appearance: Howmuchdoyouweigh?Youlookalotlikeme,exceptyour
hairisalittlebitdarker.
Whether Rafferty knew that Beasley intended to kill Geiger would later become a key point in the
teenagers trial, and he told different versions of his story at different times. In his plea-deal confession,
Rafferty told the investigators that Beasley said that he needed a new identity. And that this guy
looked similar to him. And he said that he needed to somehow murder him. Later, though, Rafferty
would tell the jury that hed had no idea what was coming. The first time he realized that Beasley was
anything other than a very nice man, he claimed, was on August 9, when they drove Geiger to the
same wooded spot where they would later take David Pauley and Scott Davis. After they got out of the
car, Beasley raised a pistol and shot Geiger in the back of the head. It was as if somehow I immediately
slipped into a dream or something, Rafferty told the jury. Like I had ice in my veins. From then on,
Rafferty said, he lived in a state of fear and panic, terrified that Beasley would kill his mother or halfsister Rayna if he told anyone what had happened, or that maybe on their next run Beasley would kill
him.
He was just scared and he didnt see a way out, Raffertys father, Michael, told me. Heroes arent
born at 16.
Rafferty didnt tell anyone about Geigers murder, but he did describe it in a poem dated August 16,
2011, that was later found on his hard drive. It was titled Midnight Shift:
We took him out to the woods on a
humid summers night.
I walked in front of them.
They were going back to the car.
I didnt turn around.
The loud crack echoed and I didnt
hear the thud.
The two of us went back to the car
for the shovels.
He was still there when we returned.
He threw the clothes in a garbage
bag along with the personal items.
I dug the hole.
It reached my waist when I was in
9/16
8/30/2014
it, maybe four feet wide.

We put him in with difficulty,
they call them stiffs for a reason.
We showered him with lime like a
Satanic baptism
it was like we were excommunicating
him from the world
I thought there would be extra dirt,
he wasnt a small man.
There wasint. I dont know how.
We drove out of there discarding
evidence as we went
felt terrible until I threw up
in the gas station bathroom where
I was supposed to throw away the bullets and shell.
I emptied myself of my guilt, with
my dinner, but not for long.
When I got home, took a shower hotter than hell itsself.
prayed like hell that night.
Rafferty grew moody that fall, according to his parents and friends, but they figured it was just
hormones or girl trouble. He later told his mom that after homecoming, while the other kids were
having fun, all he could think about was crashing the Buick his dad had bought him, so that he could
join Gram Rita, his beloved grandmother whod died a few years earlier. But he didnt wreck the car.
He just stayed in his room and waited for Beasley to call.
Beasley, meanwhile, was constructing a life as Ralph Geiger. He dyed his hair brown and found a room
to rent. He went to a doctor to get prescription painkillers for the injuries hed sustained in his car
accident. In September, he landed a job as a quality inspector at a company that made liftgates for
trucks. But it didnt last long. Beasleys back still hurt, and he became worried that parole officers
would somehow catch on to him. Still, he couldnt survive without a steady income. Perhaps thats
when the idea came to him. The Geiger killing had gone so smoothly that he could turn it into a career
of sorts, preying on other men whod fallen out of the economy.
Instead of trolling the shelters, as hed done to find Geiger, Beasley came up with the strategy of
placing an ad on Craigslist. After all, he didnt want his victims to be completely down and out. He
needed men on the margins, yes, but not so marginal that they didnt have some possessions worth
killing for: a truck or a TV or a computer or even a motorcycle.
On Sunday, October 23, as David Pauley was driving his U-Haul full of stuff to the breakfast meeting
with his new employer, Rafferty woke up early. He fed his cats, tidied his room, and told his father he
was heading out for a job digging drainage ditches. I love you, Dad, he said as he left to pick up
Beasley. Before driving to the Bob Evans in Marietta, Beasley and Rafferty went to Kmart and bought a
couple of shovels. Then they drove to a spot not far from where Geiger was buried, and Rafferty dug the
grave intended for Pauley. Before they left, Beasley put a $20 bill under a nearby rock: if it was gone
when they came back, hed know someone had been there.
After breakfast with Pauley, Beasley had his new hire follow him to the Emporium in Caldwell, to park
his truck and trailer. He told Pauley the same story about the road to the farm being split that he would
later tell Davis. On the subsequent drive in the Buick, Pauley asked about the job and Beasley told him
10/16
8/30/2014
not to worry: You get an honest days pay for an honest days work. When they pulled over near the
creek, Beasley asked Rafferty and Pauley to follow him up a hill, but Rafferty said he had to go to the
bathroom. And then, as I finished and turned around, Rafferty told investigators, I heard a crack.
Pauley was lying facedown. Somehow his cowboy hat had ended up hanging on a nearby branch.
Back in Akron, Beasley began to improvise. Hed heard from a friend about the reality-TV show
StorageWars, in which people bid on abandoned storage units hoping that there might be valuable
items hidden inside. Beasley told people he was involved in that kind of thing, and began to unload
Pauleys stuff: he returned the U-Haul, sold Pauleys truck for $1,000, and sold the other belongings
the Christmas lights, the model trains, some tackle boxes, the Jeff Gordon memorabiliato neighbors
or at flea markets.
The Pauley money quickly dwindled, but Beasley wasnt all that concerned. He already had a stillbetter victim lined up in Scott Davis. Before Davis had even hit the road for Ohio, Beasley told his
landlord that hed won a bid on a fantastic storage unit that contained a flat-screen TV, a computer,
some lawn-care equipment, and, best of all, a Harley. He told Rafferty that he thought he could net
$30,000 on this kill, enough for him to make it through the winter.
But at Beasleys moment of anticipated triumph, his gun jammed. Rafferty was waiting in the car when
he saw Beasley hustling back toward him. He got away, Beasley said, breathing hard as he climbed
back into the Buick. If they saw Davis along the road, Rafferty told the investigators, I was to hit him
with my car. But they didnt find him, so they headed back out onto the highway. Beasley started
madly tossing things out of the carthe shovels, a leather jacket, the air freshener, even his own
laptop. If Davis made it to the police, he didnt want the Buick to be easy to identify. Rafferty went
along, but he refused to toss out the rosary beads hanging from the rearview mirror. They were a gift
from his Gram Rita.
Eventually, they made their way back to Akron, where, as Rafferty saw it, any logic or purpose to
Beasleys actions went out the window too. Following a botched murder like Daviss, youd think
Beasley would lie low. But hed been counting on that haul, and now that it had fallen through, he
recklessly pursued another. Though police were already talking with Davis and beginning to track
down leads, they didnt move quickly enough to save Beasleys fourth and final victim. On Sunday,
November 13, exactly a week after the attempt on Daviss life, Beasley and Rafferty picked up a man
named Timothy Kern in the parking lot outside a pizzeria in Canton, where hed spent the night
sleeping in his car. Kern was from the Akron area, 47 years old and divorced. Hed recently lost his job
as a street cleaner.
Beasley had a mental inventory of the items he thought Kern was bringing with him, and almost as
soon as they got into Raffertys Buick, Beasley began questioning him. Did he have that laptop hed
mentioned? Kern said no, hed left it behind with his sons Zachary and Nicholas. The flatscreen TV?
Same story: Zach and Nick had it. Instead, Kern had brought an old TV. Apart from that, he just had a
couple of garbage bags full of clothes and cassette tapes, which fit easily in the back of Raffertys car.
That, and the late-80s sedan that hed abandoned in the pizzeria parking lot because it barely ran.
I get half a pit in my stomach, Rafferty later told the investigators, because as the story goes on and
on, Im realizing that Im about to help Beasley do this for no reason at all. Not that I even wanted to do
it at all. But it takes, like, all the minimal sanity and reason out of doing this It would be like if a lion
killed a zebra just to kill it Just cause it wanted, like, its hoof or something. The man literally I think
had $5 in his pocket. One other thing struck Rafferty at the timeenough so that he mentioned it to
the investigators more than once: Timothy Kern had given everything he had of value to his sons, who
11/16
8/30/2014
were just a little older than Rafferty himself. It was clear that Kerns family had broken up, but just as
clear was that he loved his kids, Rafferty told the investigators.
In his e-mails to Jack, Kern had described himself as single and available for immediate relocation,
but hadnt said much about his sons. In truth, Kern was ambivalent about the caretaker job hed been
offeredhe described it on his Facebook page as a good offer but with drawbacks, because he
would be more than two hours away from his sons and wouldnt have cellphone service. Kern and his
ex-wife Tina had divorced in 1997, and Zach and Nick were already 19 and 17. But Kern made a point of
seeing them nearly every day, even if that meant waiting around the corner from their house until after
Tina left for work.
Kerns marriage wasnt the only thing in his life that had fallen apart. In the 1990s, hed worked as a
sound engineer at a local club, but when he lost that job in 2000, he had trouble finding a new one. He
lived with his parents for a few years, but then his father kicked him out, and after that no one was sure
where he slept. Maybe in his car.
But despite all that, or maybe because of it, he was never unsteady in his commitment to Zach and
Nick. He focused on his children in the intense way certain divorced dads do when theyre cut off from
the daily routines of their families. (He had another son from an earlier marriage, whom he didnt see
much, and that might have played a part, too.) He only cared about these two. I mean, that was his
purpose, that was his thing, his ex-wife told me. It sometimes drove her crazy that hed spend his last
penny on cellphone bills to make sure he could stay in touch with the boysinstead of, say, keeping up
with his child-support payments. All day, texting, every day, Tina said.
Inset: Victim Timothy Kern with his sons Nick and Zach around 2001 (Courtesy of the Kern family).
Large photo: Zach and Nick today (Gregg Ruffing).
Zach and Nick present themselves to the world as pretty toughtheyre both covered in tattoos, and
Zach plays in a heavy-metal bandbut they had remarkably tender relationships with their father.
They knew, for instance, to always answer his texts quickly, so that he didnt get his feelings hurt and
follow up with Oh,Iseeyourebusy or 2cool4dad. The day Kern left for Ohio, Nick, who was a senior
in high school, lent him $20. That night, Nick texted him before going to a party:Iloveyou.Imiss
you.Improudofyou.Goodluck. When Kern got up the next morning, he wrote Nick: Textmewhen
12/16
8/30/2014
youwakeup.Loveyou.Leavingsoon.
Rafferty knew that they werent taking Kern to the same spot where theyd shot Geiger, Pauley, and
Davisnot even Beasley was that crazy. Instead, their destination was a narrow wooded area behind a
mall on the western edge of Akron, where Beasley had had Rafferty dig a grave the night before. Hed
done a sloppy job: it was barely two feet deep and uneven, but Beasley no longer seemed to care. It was
a Sunday, and the mall was empty. Locals refer to the place as a dead mall because every store had
gone out of business during the recession, except for a mattress-and-furniture liquidator, where
desperate families went to sell their belongings. The other storefronts were suspended in a last
moment of forced cheer, with neon signs in the windows still reading Everything must go and Wall to
wall savings.
They parked, and Beasley told Kern that they had been there squirrel hunting earlier and hed lost his
watch. Kern followed Beasley into the woods behind, which were littered with plastic cups and beer
cans from a party. Rafferty kept his distance, he told the investigators, and then heard a pop. He saw
Kern on his knees, holding the side of his head. He kept taking enormous gulp[s] of air. Three shots
later, he was still gulping. Finally, on the fifth shot, he stopped.
That night, Nick tried to call his dad and got no answer, but he figured he was just getting settled. Then
a couple of days went by and Nick started to get worried. I called him like 2,000 times. Because he
would contact us like every hour of every day. And now nothing? Nick began sleeping with his phone
in his hand and waking up to listen to the messages, even though no new ones had registered. The next
Sunday, a week later, he was at a friends house watching a football game when his mom called and
told him to come home immediatelyshe had something she needed to tell him.
Tell me now! he screamed into the phone. Tell me right fucking now! As he explained to me, I
knew. Because that would be the only explanation for him not calling us.
I was initially drawn to the story of the Beasley murders because I thought it would illuminate the
isolation and vulnerability of so many working-class men, who have been pushed by the faltering
economy from one way of lifea nine-to-five job, a wife, childreninto another, far more precarious
one: unemployed or underemployed, single or divorced, crashing on relatives spare beds or in the
backseats of cars. At what other moment in history would it have been plausible for a serial killer to
identify middle-aged white men as his most vulnerable targets?
But what I discovered in the course of my reporting was something quite different. As traditional
family structures are falling apart for working-class men, many of them are forging new kinds of
relationships: two old high-school friends who chat so many times a day that they need to buy
themselves walkie-talkies; a father who texts his almost-grown sons as he goes to bed at night and as
he wakes up in the morning.
Christians often talk about a God-shaped hole, a need inside us that can be filled only by faith. But
perhaps we share a family-shaped hole. When the old structures recede for men, they find ways to
replace them with alternative attachments, bonds with one or two people that offer the warmth and
intimacy typically provided by a wife or significant other. If anything, these improvised families can
prove more intense because they are formed under duress and, lacking a conventional domestic
routine or a recognized status, they must be constantly tended and reinforced.
While researching a recent book she co-wrote about working-class fathers, DoingtheBestICan, the
sociologist Kathryn Edin noticed something surprising. The men she spoke with were exceptionally
emotional when it came to their childrenchildren whom many of the men did not live with and were
13/16
8/30/2014
not steadily providing for. They had taken the ethos that fathers should be involved with their children
and kind of gone overboard with it, Edin explained to me, so they were even more expressive than
middle-class men. Often this emotiveness spilled over into other areas or landed on children who were
not their own, or even on other adultsa sibling or cousin, a childhood best friendas if the men were
inventing a new language of intimacy. In some cases, when a man was courting a woman, Edin found
that he would court her child so intensely that it seemed the child was the main audience for his
affections, not the mother.
Edin concluded that for men who are failing the traditional tests of marriage and parenting, this kind
of intense emotional connection is the last form of identity available. Its a way to maintain a sense of
family if you cant be a reliable breadwinner, or even keep up with child support.
David Pauley had his friend Chris Maul and his twin sister, Deb. Timothy Kern had his sons Zach and
Nick. Scott Davis was fortunate enough to live to tell his own story, but even if he hadnt, his mother
was eagerly waiting for him to arrive in Ohio to help fix her house. Of all Beasleys victims, the one it
took me the longest to learn much about was the first, Ralph Geiger. He had some family in California
and Atlanta, but unlike the relatives of the other victims, they did not attend the trials of Beasley and
Rafferty. After Geiger was cremated, his ashes were delivered to a young woman named Summer
Rowley. Though she was not a relative of Geiger, she did attend the trials, and I visited her at home one
day. She mentioned that she was afraid of what people might think about Geigers relationship with
her, that he was just hitting on the pretty young girl. But he would never do that.
Rowley met Geiger in 2004, when she was 19 and he was 49. A friend had set her up with a job cleaning
his house, and after a few visits he asked her whether she wanted to try painting some drywall. Rowley
didnt know how to do that, but Geiger taught her, and after a while they began working together
regularly. He taught her how to fix a drain, caulk a hole, and perform various other plumbing tasks. He
taught her how to cook a roast and make soup. He was like a father, Rowley told me. He helped
change her from a wild teenager into a young woman who was ready, at 25, to have a baby with her
fianc. When her daughter was born, she presented Geiger as the little girls pa-pa. On the mantle
beneath Rowleys TV is a picture of Geiger nestling the infant, barely a week old, against his big chest.
Richard Beasley had believed that no one would come looking for the divorced, unsettled, middle-aged
men he was targeting. But he should have known better. Like his victims, Beasley was himself divorced,
and lived apart from his child, and was only sporadically employed. And like them, he too had created
an intense surrogate family relationship, with Brogan Rafferty.
When prosecutors interviewed Beasleys daughter, Tonya, she said that when she saw her dad and
Rafferty together on Sunday mornings, they seemed like father and sonmuch closer to one another
than she and her dad had ever been. On the stand, Rafferty described Beasley as the one person that I
could go to about anything, a father that I never had.
Rafferty, of course, did have a father, one with whom he lived and who provided for himright down to
the white Buick LeSabre. But long before the murders, Rafferty would complain to his half-sister Rayna
about how tough his dad, Michael, was on him. Michael hardly had an easy situation himself. When
Brogan was not yet a week old, Michael came home from work one day to discover that his wife, Yvette,
and his infant son were gone. It was bitterly cold that weekBrogan was born on Christmas Eveand
Michael searched for 48 hours before Yvette came back home. He assumed she was doing drugs again,
and as much as Michael loved her, he decided to kick her out and raise Brogan alone, with the help of
his own mother, Rita.
At the trial, the local press seized on the story of how, at age 5, when he was in kindergarten, Brogan
14/16
8/30/2014
would eat breakfast alone, get himself dressed, and make his own way to the bus stop. He raised
himself, in my opinion, one grade-school counselor who knew him told the jury. But things werent
quite so simple: Michael explained to me that he worked an early shift at a machine shop and had to
leave the house by 6:30 a.m. Before he left, he laid out clothes for his son, poured his favorite cereal in
a bowl, and left him a little pitcher of milk. Then he gently woke him up and left for work.
That said, Michael allows that I put a lot of responsibility on Brogan, because it was just the two of
us. Michael is regimented and strict and has a fierce temper. He had been raised to believe that boys
dont cry, and he raised Brogan the same way. Rayna believes that Brogan drifted toward Beasley
because he was a little scared of his father, and Beasley was like an escape.
Raffertys lawyers wondered whether Beasley and the boy had a sexual relationship. Raffertys dad
wondered too. How else to explain a bond so intense it led Rafferty to pick up a shovel and dig four
graves? But Rafferty rolled his eyes when his dad asked and said, It wasnt like that at all. The real
explanation seems less complicated. Michael represented an old vision of fatherhood: strict, manly,
and reliable, working the early shift to put food on the table but coming home worn and agitated.
Beasley, by contrast, had no such parental obligations and was free to represent a newer and in some
ways more appealing vision: expressive, loving, always around to listen and give advice. It was easy for
Beasley to be a hero to Raffertyand, to a lesser degree, to Rayna and the other kids at their church.
He did what their distracted, overworked, and somewhat traumatized parents couldnt do, Rayna says,
which was really connect to us.
In November 2012, a jury convicted Brogan Rafferty of two dozen criminal counts, including murder,
robbery, and kidnapping. Judge Lynne Callahan told Rafferty that he had been dealt a lousy hand in
life but that he had embraced the evil, and sentenced him to life without parole. In April 2013,
Richard Beasley was also convicted of murder and was sentenced to death. Throughout his trial, he
maintained that he was innocent. (Both Beasley and Rafferty are appealing their convictions.)
In letters to his father now, Rafferty sometimes sounds like a kid and sometimes like a damaged man:
Im sorry I left my room a mess when I left. Im sorry for disgracing you and the family name, he
wrote from jail. He reads books from the library straight out of a high-school curriculumTheGrapes
ofWrath and CatcherintheRye and TreasureIsland. He identifies with AllQuietontheWestern
Front, he wrote, because prison life is like war: Each man fights his own battle, and each with an
invisible enemy. He has admitted to his dad that he used to resent him for being so strict, but now hes
grateful, because thanks to all the rules and the chores and the premature independence, he knows
how to take care of himself.
Mostly, though, his letters are full of longing for family, for his dad and his half-sisters, his dog,
Whiskey, and his cats, Cow and Monkey, his mom and his grandma and grandpa and his aunts and
uncles. The Raffertys are an old Irish clan, with a coat of arms hanging in the living room. Rafferty
draws that coat of arms sometimes in prison, along with the two tattoos he wants to get, one that says
Dad and another that says Rita.
I deserve to be here, but I dont deserve to sit in a hole while my loved ones and pets die around
me. Thats Hell.
I love you Dad, and I always will.
This article available online at:
http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2013/09/advertisement-for-murder/309435/
15/16
8/30/2014
Copyright 2014 by The Atlantic Monthly Group. All Rights Reserved.
16/16

Murder by Craigslist - Hanna Rosin - The Atlantic

Загружено:

Сведения о документе

Авторское право

Доступные форматы

Поделиться этим документом

Поделиться или встроить документ

Параметры публикации

Этот документ был вам полезен?

Это неприемлемый материал?

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

Murder by Craigslist - Hanna Rosin - The Atlantic

Загружено:

Авторское право:

Доступные форматы

8/30/2014