Chaplain Rich

Richard Beasley was a self-styled street preacher in Akron, Ohio, known as Chaplain Rich, with a record behind him and new charges pending. In the autumn of 2011 he put ads on Craigslist offering a caretaker job on a 688-acre cattle farm, with a small weekly wage and a free trailer to live in. Men with nowhere else to turn answered.

There was no farm. Beasley had already killed once, shooting a homeless Akron man named Ralph Geiger that August to take over his name. Applicants were driven into the hills of Noble County near Caldwell, with a teenager, Brogan Rafferty, along to dig graves in advance. David Pauley died there in October; Timothy Kern was shot in Akron in November and left behind a derelict mall. A fourth man, Scott Davis, heard Beasley’s gun click without firing, turned, was hit in the arm and ran. He hid in the woods about seven hours before reaching help, and his account sent investigators to an empty grave and then to Beasley.

A jury convicted Beasley on March 12, 2013 of three counts of aggravated murder and more than twenty other charges, and Judge Lynne Callahan imposed three death sentences on April 4, 2013. Rafferty, sixteen when the killings happened, was given life without parole in November 2012. The Ohio Supreme Court affirmed Beasley’s convictions in February 2018.