Midnight Shift: The advertisement sounded too good to be true. And it was. Those who responded found themselves lured into the grasp of a serial killer.
A Doctorate in Death: Professor Amy Bishop was known around campus for her notoriously short fuse. Still, no one would have suspected that she’d pull a gun during a faculty meeting.
Secrets and Lies: A duplicitous redhead, a hapless, love-struck rancher and a handsome cowboy come together in this sordid tale of sex, deceit and murder.
The Girl in the Yellow Pajamas: How do you catch a killer when you can’t even put a name to the victim? A classic murder mystery from Australia.
Life After Death: The horrific tale of a woman who was prepared to go to any lengths to have a baby – including bloody murder.
Game, Set, and Murder: He was a Wimbledon finalist and the greatest Irish tennis player of his generation. So how did he end up embroiled in a bloody mutilation murder?
Eat Me: The advertisement called for a man who was prepared to be killed and then eaten. Amazingly, there were four applicants.
A Man Walks into a Bank…: The barely believable tale of a bank heist gone horribly wrong and the robber who, literally, lost his head.
Click the "Read More" link below to read the first chapter of
Murder Most Vile Volume 17
Midnight Shift
Perhaps Scott Davis should have followed his instincts, which told him
that if something sounded too good to be true, it probably was. But the ad he’d
found on Craigslist had been impossible to resist. He’d been wanting to move
back to Ohio for some time, to be closer to his elderly mother. This job would
give him that opportunity – if his application was successful, of course. The
advertiser had suggested in his write-up that there was likely to be a great
deal of interest. Scott could see how that would be the case. The ad was
enticing:
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 trustworthy – this 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 lifetime. If you are ready to relocate please contact
asap. Position will not stay open.
Scott Davis had answered the ad on October 9, 2011. Now, four weeks
later, he was sitting down to breakfast with his new employer at the Shoney’s Restaurant
in Marietta, Ohio. The stocky, middle-aged man had introduced himself as Jack,
and the teenager who’d accompanied him as his nephew, Brogan. He got right down
to business, although he seemed less interested in going over Scott’s duties on
the farm than in the contents of the U-Haul trailer Scott had brought with him
from South Carolina. Scott assured him that it was “full from top to bottom”
and yes, that it did contain the Harley-Davidson that Jack had encouraged him
to bring with him because there were “plenty of beautiful rural roads to
putt-putt in.”
With breakfast done, Jack told Scott to follow him and Brogan and then
drove to the Food Center Emporium in the nearby town of Caldwell. There, Jack instructed
him to leave his truck and trailer in the parking lot and to drive with him and
Brogan in their white Buick LeSabre. A small section of the road leading to the
farm was badly rutted, he explained, and they’d have to make sure it was
passable before returning for the trailer.
That sounded to Scott like a reasonable explanation and so he slid into
the back seat of the Buick. Brogan, at the wheel, pulled the car out of the lot
and headed west. Fifteen minutes later and the paved road had devolved to
gravel and then to dirt, although they’d yet to encounter a stretch that was as
impassable as Jack had suggested. Still, Scott wasn’t too concerned. He was
looking out of the window at the landscape, which was as peaceful and as
beautiful as Jack had described it. The stretch they were driving now was hilly
and densely green and it was here that Jack told his nephew to pull over. “Drop
us off where we got us that deer the last time,” he said, and Brogan duly
obliged, slowing the vehicle, edging it to the side of the road and then
bringing it to a stop. Jack explained that he’d left some equipment down by the
creek and needed to retrieve it. He asked Scott for his help. Scott then got
out of the vehicle and followed Jack down the slope to a clearing in the trees.
There, Jack appeared momentarily confused and then said that perhaps this
wasn’t the place after all. He suggested that they head back to the car.
Scott turned around and started walking, with Jack now following
behind. But they’d taken only a few steps when he heard a loud click and then
Jack cursing “Fuck!” Turning, Scott saw that Jack was holding a pistol and that
it was pointed at his head.
Instinctively, Scott threw up his arm to shield his face and that was
when the pistol fired and pain flared in his elbow. He’d been hit! He’d been
shot and if he didn’t get moving, he’d be shot again. Jack evidentially meant
to kill him. Scott turned and started to run, stumbled and fell, rose again and
sprinted into the trees. Behind him he heard footfalls and the snap of the
pistol. Barely aware of the pain in his shattered elbow, he kept going ever
deeper into the woods. Eventually, when he felt that he’d made enough distance,
when he could no longer hear the sound of Jack blundering through the brush
after him, he stopped.
Scott’s path had taken him in a broad arc that had brought him back to
the road. But he wasn’t about to step out into the open, not with his killer
likely to still be looking for him. Instead, he lay down in the brush,
clutching his injured appendage and gritting his teeth against the pain that
was now beginning to kick in. He felt weak from loss of blood but knew that he
had to stay awake. If he passed out here in the woods, he would probably die.
Eventually, once the sun had completed its arc across the sky and plunged the
world into darkness, he rose and staggered out onto the dirt road. Not knowing
where he was or where he was headed, he started walking.
Jeff Schockling was sitting in his mother’s living room, watching TV,
when the doorbell chimed. That in itself was unusual. The location was remote
and visitors tended to be friends and acquaintances who didn’t bother ringing
the bell. Not wanting to interrupt his viewing, Jeff shouted out to his nephew
to get it, which the boy did. Moments later, the 9-year-old came running back
into the house, yelling, “There’s a guy at the door! He’s been shot and he’s
bleeding!”
At first, Schockling thought that his nephew was playing a prank on
him. But the youngster was so insistent that he went to check for himself. Sure
enough there was a stranger on the porch, a middle-aged man with graying
shoulder-length hair who was quite obviously injured. He was holding his right
arm across his body and Schockling could see right away that he had lost a lot
of blood. His jeans and denim jacket were literally soaked in it. “Call 911,”
the man rasped in a voice that was barely more than a whisper. “I’ve been shot.”
It took Sheriff Stephen Hannum just 15 minutes to reach the remote
scene. There he found the injured man sitting at a picnic table, clutching his
wounded arm. It was apparent that he had suffered significant blood loss but he
was still remarkably coherent for a man with such a serious injury. He said
that his name was Scott Davis and that he’d come from South Carolina to take up
a job as a farm manager. But the rest of his story raised Sheriff Hannum’s
suspicions. According to Davis, the farm he’d been meant to oversee was a
688-acre spread and Hannum knew that there were no farms that big in the area.
Not even close. Davis also claimed that the man who had hired him had then
pulled a gun and shot him without provocation.
“Why do you think he’d do a thing like that?” Hannum asked.
“I don’t know,” Davis said wincing. “Maybe he wanted to steal my
Harley.”
The mention of the Harley got Hannum to size up Davis again. He knew
that there were some bikers out of Akron who occasionally sold dope in the area.
Is that what this was? A dope deal gone wrong? He decided that it probably was.
But as Hannum began checking up on the story that Davis had told him,
he soon realized that much of it was true. The truck and trailer were still
standing in the Food Center Emporium parking lot, and contained exactly the
objects that Davis had described, including his Harley-Davidson motorcycle. It
was then that he knew he was dealing with an attempted murder. Soon he’d come
to realize that it was much bigger than that.
Scott Davis wasn’t the only man to answer the Craigslist ad. David
Pauley was 51 years old and divorced. He had fallen on hard times when he
spotted the advertisement that offered the promise of redemption. At the time,
he was living in the spare bedroom at his brother’s home in Norfolk, Virginia
but prior to that he’d been in regular employment for most of his life. Two
decades of that time had been spent with Randolph-Bundy, a wholesale distributor
of building materials. There he’d worked his way up to warehouse manager but in
2003 he’d had a disagreement with his employer and had quit. His timing could
not have been worse. Recession loomed and with companies across the nation
laying off staff he found it difficult to find work. For eight years he’d
subsisted on short term, low-paying jobs. When he came across the Craigslist ad
in October 2011, it must have seemed like a godsend.
David was doubly keen on the Craigslist job because his best friend, Chris
Maul, had moved to Rocky River, Ohio a couple years earlier and was doing well.
He and Chris had been buddies since high school and they spoke several times each
day, using the Nextel walkie-talkies they’d bought for that purpose. Chris
thought that the job would be a good opportunity for his friend to get a new
start and David was even more enthusiastic about it. He could barely contain
his excitement when he got the call from Jack saying that his application had
been successful. His first call was to his friend. The second was to his twin sister,
Deb, who lived in Maine.
On the evening of Saturday October 22, 2011, David Pauley checked in at
the Red Roof Inn in Parkersburg, West Virginia. Parkersburg is just across the
state border from Marietta, Ohio and David was due to meet his new employer for
breakfast at a Bob Evans there the next morning. Just before retiring for the
night, he made a call to his old buddy Chris Maul and said that he’d check in
with him the next day. That call never came.
Chris was naturally concerned when he didn’t hear from David. And his
apprehension grew during the day as he tried several times to reach David on
his walkie-talkie and got no response. Eventually, he phoned David’s brother,
Richard, in Virginia and got the number of David’s new employer, Jack, who he
managed to reach on his cellphone. Everything was fine, Jack assured him. He’d
just given David a long list of chores and he was probably busy with that and
with settling in. He promised to pass on a message and was sure that David
would call soon.
But when days passed and there was still no word, Chris dialed Jack
again. This time Jack had a different story to tell. He said that David had
packed up all his things and had left, saying that he’d met a guy who was
headed to Pennsylvania to work on a drilling rig, and that he’d decided to go
there too. Chris found this story hard to accept. It just didn’t sound like
David. Even if he had decided to leave his employer in the lurch (which Chris
thought was unlikely) he would not have left without letting Chris know. The
two of them had planned to meet up over the weekend.
Chris continued to fret over his friend’s whereabouts over the next
week. Eventually, in early November, he called David’s sister in Maine. She too
had heard nothing and was beginning to worry. In fact, she’d spent the last few
days at her laptop making up a list of numbers that she could contact in order
to try to track her brother down. She’d already called the motel in Parkersburg
and the U-Haul rental place but had learned nothing. Then, on Friday night,
November 11, she tried a different tack and started scanning newspapers. That
was how she came across The Daily Jeffersonian and the article dated November
8: “Man Says He Was Lured Here for Work, Then Shot.” The article mentioned Noble
County sheriff, Stephen Hannum as a contact. Deb dialed his office immediately.
Since the attempted murder of Scott Davis five days earlier, Hannum
and his officers had been trying to locate the man who had posted the
Craigslist ad and lured Davis to Marietta. They’d located security-camera
footage from the breakfast meeting at Shoney’s and although the film was
grainy, they knew that they were looking for a middle-aged man and a teenaged
boy. Tracking them, though, was proving difficult. Then came Deb’s phone call
and the investigation was given a whole new emphasis. Was it possible that the
Davis shooting was not an isolated incident? Could they possibly be hunting a
serial killer?
The next day, Saturday, November 12, the sheriff called in an FBI cyber-crimes
specialist to help track the person who had posted the Craigslist ad. At the
same time, he sent officers with cadaver dogs into the woods to search the area
where Scott Davis had been shot. There was a torrential downpour that day but
it didn’t stop the dogs finding a shallow grave containing the remains of David
Pauley. Just a few feet away, another grave had been evacuated, this one
apparently intended for Scott Davis.
The investigation rapidly began gathering pace now. First the
cyber-crimes expert tracked an IP address to a boarding house in Akron. The
owner of that house, Joe Bais, insisted that he’d never posted an ad on
Craigslist in his life. He did, however, mention that he’d recently rented a
room to a man named Ralph Geiger who might have done so. He had no idea where
the police might find Geiger. In the meantime, the security footage from Shoney’s
had also borne fruit. The man seen talking to Scott Davis was identified as
Richard Beasley, an ex-con currently wanted in Texas on a parole violation.
So were Ralph Geiger and Richard Beasley the same man? There was one
way to find out. Geiger had left his cellphone number with his former landlord.
On November 16, the police got Bais to call Geiger and to keep him on the line
long enough to run a trace. Geiger was taken into custody by an FBI SWAT team
while he was still on the phone. His young accomplice, Brogan Rafferty, was
arrested soon after and revealed his friend’s true identity. As the
investigators had expected, “Geiger” was really Richard Beasley.
Beasley, the police learned, had a long arrest record and had served
time for burglary and for firearms offences. After being released from a prison
term for the latter charge in 2009, he’d apparently decided to turn over a new
leaf and had founded a halfway house for runaways, drug addicts and
prostitutes. He would cruise the streets of Akron at night, picking up strays
and bringing them back to the house where he’d provide them with a bed for the
night. He’d also get them into drug programs and try to convince them to accept
Christ as their savior.
But Beasley’s house was a front. While he was pretending to help the
young girls under his care, he was also serving as their pimp, driving them
around town to hook up with various clients. And he was providing them with
drugs, which is what saw him arrested in February 2011. Then the police heard
about the prostitution ring he was running and began building a case. Richard
Beasley was probably going away for a long time and he knew it. That was why he
skipped out on his bail mid-July 2011, changed his appearance and started using
the alias Ralph Geiger.
The police also learned about Beasley’s relationship with Brogan
Rafferty. It appeared that Beasley had known the boy for eight years. Brogan’s
father, Michael, had met Beasley via the local motorcycle circuit and knew that
he was a “bible puncher” who attended a local church called the Chapel and was
also a street preacher. So when 8-year-old Brogan expressed an interest in
attending church services, Michael saw no problem in allowing Beasley to take
him. It was only church after all. What was the worst that could happen? The
answer to that question, apparently, was murder.
One week after arresting Brogan Rafferty, investigators struck a deal
with the 16-year-old whereby he would be allowed to plead to reduced charges in
exchange for his testimony against Beasley. Rafferty initially agreed to the plea
bargain and although he would later renege on the deal, all of the interviews
he gave were recorded and the recordings would later be played in court.
According to Rafferty, it all began in the first week of August 2011,
when Beasley admitted to him that he was on the run from the law and said that
he needed his help. The first thing Beasley wanted was a new identity, and so he
began hanging around a local homeless shelter looking for someone who resembled
him. The man he eventually decided on was Ralph Geiger. Geiger had once run a
thriving building maintenance business, but the recession had bitten hard and
destroyed his livelihood. He was desperate to get back on his feet so when
Beasley offered him the “job of a lifetime” as the caretaker of a cattle ranch,
he couldn’t resist. He ended up shot to death and buried in the woods.
Thereafter, Beasley started calling himself Ralph Geiger.
Now, however, Beasley had another problem. He needed money and, since
the ruse he had used on Geiger had worked so well, he decided to expand the
scam. That was when he began running his Craigslist ads, luring desperate men
to Ohio to be shot and robbed and buried in the woods. It had worked with David
Pauley and would have worked with Scott Davis too, if Beasley’s gun had not
jammed at the critical moment.
Rafferty had even more to tell. There was a fourth victim. After the
failed attempt on Scott Davis’ life you would have thought that Richard Beasley
would have laid low for a while, perhaps even gotten out of town. But Beasley
was desperate. He’d told Rafferty that he stood to make around $30,000 out of
the Davis murder, enough to “see him through the winter.” Now he had
nothing.
And so Richard Beasley got right back to working his Craigslist scam
and in no time at all he’d attracted a new mark, a man named Timothy Kern. Like
the others, Kern was desperate, having recently lost his job. On Sunday,
November 13, Beasley and Rafferty picked up Kern at a parking lot in Canton,
where he’d spent the night sleeping in his car. However, Beasley’s potential
score this time was hardly worth the effort. Kern had a rusty old sedan with an
ancient TV set on the back seat beside a few garbage bags filled with his
clothes. Disgusted, Beasley decided to kill him anyway. Kern was driven to a
wooded area behind an abandoned mall in western Akron. There he was shot to
death and buried in a shallow grave. Four days later, the police net would
finally close on Craigslist killer, Richard Beasley.
Richard Beasley went on trial in April 2013, and was convicted on three
counts of first-degree murder and sentenced to death. By then, his accomplice
Brogan Rafferty had already had his own day in court and (having reneged on his
plea bargain) been sentenced to life in prison without parole. Lest you feel
any sympathy for Brogan, lest you believe he played a passive role in all this,
here is a poem that the police found on his computer hard drive. Dated August
16, 2011, it commemorates the murder of Ralph Geiger. It is titled “Midnight
Shift.”
We took him out to the woods
on a
humid summer’s night.
I walked in front of them.
They were going back to the
car.
I didn’t turn around.
The loud crack echoed and I
didn’t
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
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 wasn’t a small man.
There wasn’t. I don’t 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 itself.
Prayed
like hell that night.
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