It is November, and 5am feels like winter. As he has on many mornings these past four months of 2011, Brogan Rafferty, age 16, wakes up early to help his friend and mentor, Rich Beasley, on an errand of Beasley's design. Rafferty doesn't need to pick up Beasley until six, but unlike your typical teenager, Rafferty likes to get up early and drink coffee in the morning so he has some time to himself before he leaves the house.
Today they are going to pick up Timothy Kern, age 47, who will be waiting for them in a strip-mall parking lot with all his earthly possessions. Like the three men who preceded him on this grim adventure, Kern answered an ad on Craigslist that said: "We need someone to watch our farm down in southern Ohio. Live for free in a double-wide trailer, nothing in the way of duties except to take in the peacefulness of the countryside and remark on the changing of the seasons and make sure no one steals any farm equipment or perpetrates any mischief. The pay is $300 (£175) a week."
Rafferty pulls up in front of Beasley's with plenty of time and throws his Buick into park. Beasley comes lumbering across the front lawn, expelling steamy breath into the dark Akron morning and deposits himself into the front seat. Rafferty says nothing, as is his habit. Rafferty is a junior of middling academic record at Stow-Munroe Falls High School, remarkable to his peers and teachers mostly for being such a giant. Nearly 200cm tall, more than 100kg and not finished growing yet. He's a laconic character, polite but suspicious of authority, prematurely world-weary with an easily inflamed sense of injustice and an almost pathological ability to keep his own counsel.
The agenda today can't be a big mystery to Rafferty. After all, he was the one who dug the hole yesterday out at a plot of neglected suburban scrubland near the old Rolling Acres Mall -- about yay wide and yay deep and big enough for an adult male body.
Beasley, not being partial to manual labour, had watched. As they pull out on to the road, Rafferty wills himself not to think about what he and Beasley will be doing this morning. Richard Beasley: age 52, former convict, motorcycle enthusiast, professed man of God, known on the Akron street as Chaplain Beasley. He'd started taking Rafferty to church when Rafferty was nine years old and already almost comically large and serious and quiet. Since then Beasley has become probably Rafferty's best friend, his uncle-dad, his guide to the Gospels of the Bible and the affairs of the teenage heart, to the mysteries of Akron and the even deeper mysteries of Rafferty's own parents. Rafferty calls him his counsellor.
The enterprise that will bring them to Tim Kern began in August, in the dead of summer. Beasley had discovered that there was a warrant out for his arrest, the product of a 20-month investigation into the goings-on at a halfway house he operated. If he were arrested, he could spend the rest of his life in prison. So Beasley began to target men like Kern. At first because he needed a new identity, and later to provide income to support a life on the run.
Beasley's Craigslist ad was designed for a certain kind of person: male, white, unattached, ageing, someone on the downward slope of life for whom things maybe haven't gone exactly as planned. It is sort of a retirement plan for the obsolete white man. In the industrial northeast of Ohio at the far side of the Great Recession, there is no shortage of these people. Beasley has been interviewing subjects he carefully selects from the hundreds of men who reply to the ads. He's been showing up at the food court of the Chapel Hill mall with an official-looking application form, affecting the air of an affable blue-collar-type landowner who wants to find someone friendly to camp out on his spread while he's up in Akron conducting the business of his normal life. Beasley ascertains certain things from these gentlemen: do you have a wife or kids or people you need to keep in close touch with? This farm doesn't have mobile-phone coverage; can you live in peaceful isolation? What type of vehicle do you have, and would you be bringing that down with you when you came, and oh, there's a laptop computer? Bring it all with you, and my nephew and I will drive you on down to Caldwell.
Beasley tells Rafferty to get off the highway at an exit in the town of Canton. He says that Tim Kern is waiting in his car not too far from there. Rafferty is quiet, as always. But he is also observant. Beasley smells this morning of bar soap and, beneath that, something fetid. Rafferty notices he's wearing the same clothes as yesterday, and he wonders whether these are now the only clothes he has. Beasley has always been a rumpled character, a corpulent man in denim and leather and boots, with long white hair he wears in a balding grandmother's braid. But one of his principles is to maintain a bright hygienic line between him and the street people he ministers to. His message: I live among you by choice; I can leave if I want. But by November 2011, near the end of Richard Beasley's run, things are falling apart on both the bodily maintenance and criminal mastermind fronts. Beasley has been dyeing his hair as part of his new identity, but now the filmy silver roots have grown out. He's abandoned his house and is now living on the east side of Akron in a rented room that doesn't even have a door you can close.
In less than a month, Rafferty will deliver a series of confessions to the FBI about the elaborately planned crimes he and Beasley committed together. If you listen to the confessions carefully, they begin to sound different when Rafferty starts describing this morning's events with Kern. Throughout most of his statements, he maintains a tone of impassivity, sounding like someone who'd merely watched a series of killings on an unmarked videotape he received in the mail. But when he talks about Kern, it's like things won't stay psychologically tamped down. It's as if whatever mental box he'd built to house these events comes unsealed and everything spills out.
There is a surveillance camera in the car park where Kern is waiting in his 1995 Buick LeSabre. Footage from that camera will indicate it is 06:05 on that morning of Sunday November 13, 2011, when Beasley and Rafferty arrive to get him.
Rich Beasley is sitting in navy prison trousers in the visitors' hall at Chillicothe Correctional Institution, situated in farmlands south of Columbus. On his face is a commiserating smile that says: can you believe it, the world is so fucked up, but did we really expect anything different? He is large, with a fulsome white goatee and an untrimmed moustache that covers the absence of front teeth and works as a kind of flap behind which bites of microwave cheeseburger disappear as a dog disappears into a flap in a back door. He has lively, almond-shaped blue eyes that do not shy from contact and don't seem to have anything to hide. They might be said to have a mischievous twinkle. He looks like the Grinch, or at least a little like he was drawn by a cartoonist.
It's easy to see that Beasley was a preacher. The man has the gift of gab. But he's not what you'd call silver-tongued. His talent in the sermonising arena was never soaring oratory, more of a folksy sociability. He can talk knowledgeably about using a store-bought still to make moonshine and the origin and bylaws of the Hells Angels, as well as how right Jesus was when he said to give unto Caesar what was Caesar's. Beasley says he always lived by the laws of God but that, when he went on the run from the law, he wasn't living by the laws of man and that's wrong, so shame on him.
God has been the one constant in his life, he says, thanks to his mother. "I accepted Jesus as my saviour when I was 12 years old. I was baptised then, and that's all the baptising I needed, according to my religion."
Beasley's original and most defining role in Rafferty's life was as the guy who took him to church. First as a good-works type of deal and then because they were homeys. Beasley did his ministering in the ghetto, but he and Rafferty went to services at the Chapel, a giant evangelical church that looks not unlike an ageing community college and serves thousands of mostly middle-class parishioners who don't fancy putting on airs when it comes to worship but value community and charity and Christ. Beasley's mother, Carol, has been a member in good standing at the Chapel for 40 years. "I took him to church because he needed it," Beasley says. "It was the right thing to do. His father would go to his [bikers] club-house on Friday and wouldn't be home. And his mother, well...
But Rafferty loved church. His punishment was not being allowed to go to church."
Rafferty and Beasley were also regulars at the Bible study held in the orchestra room afterwards. Everyone thought they were a funny pair, the little-boy giant and the ageing former biker. They tried to get Rafferty in with the kids his age, but he preferred to be with the older folks. "He was nine, but he looked 14," Nancy Wilson, one of the regular members of the Bible study, says at bakery in Akron one morning last winter. "Rafferty was like a puppy. He was following Richard [Beasley] around."
And Beasley, on the other hand: "Well, he maintained what you call the rough look. You know, the down-and-outer look," Wilson says. "He was dishevelled, but he felt that gave him an 'in' with the people he was ministering to."
Wilson, and the whole Bible-study group, got to know Beasley from the letters he sent his mother when he was doing time in prison in the early 2000s. Carol would read the letters aloud and then they'd pray for him. They'd heard, Wilson says, how he'd got in trouble the first time, down in Texas, when he wasn't more than 25 years old. A series of robberies, then a gun charge that he told everyone wasn't his fault, then a couple of other scrapes that he explained were really just misunderstandings. It seemed to Wilson that he spent a lot of his letters complaining about the bedding and the food and didn't say too many remorseful things, but the group was compassionate, because give the guy a break, he was in jail, after all. Plus, they'd all do anything for Carol. She lived a real Christian life. There wasn't a thing she wouldn't do or give to help people.
And after he got out, Beasley seemed to have found his way back to God. He'd become a chaplain. Well, he hadn't technically been ordained, but he said he was training up. The group knew all about that halfway house he'd started down on Yale Street, where he lived. There were some weird people who used to stay there, certainly. That one guy ended up being a sex offender. But these were Beasley's people -- the downtrodden, the addicted, the halfwits, the streetwalkers, petty thieves and wrecks of Akron. He lived among them. Because that's who needed help.
Akron belongs to the official demographic denomination of Midsize American City -- your Springfield, Missouri, your Greensboro, North Carolina -- the type of place most people have heard of but almost no one has been to on purpose. In a city of this size, with a downtown of no more than a handful of city blocks, without even a proper ghetto, the street is small enough that it is mostly on a first-name basis with itself. And it's true that the street was on a first-name basis with Chaplain Beasley. To hear Beasley tell it (and a lot of his claims check out), he had ministered to them at the Hope Café, where the streetwalkers would gather for some free coffee and four-colour Jesus brochures; he had fed them from the food bank; he had delivered bread to the drunks at the bars so that even if they'd boozed away their wages, they could come home with something for their families to eat. He conducted weekly Bible studies at his halfway house for the unwanted and forgotten and lived with them and tolerated their vices and their personality defects, their vomit and blood and urine, and endured what no other man could endure, and still had charity in his heart. That is the story he tells. And it's what Nancy Wilson and her husband, Dave, mostly believed. "We overlooked things," Dave says now. "Signals. They were there."
There really is a plot of land in Caldwell, just like Beasley promised in the Craigslist ad. It technically belongs to a coal-mining company. It's beautiful in that corner of Ohio's Appalachia, the hillocks bunched up and frosted in woods. It feels like being back in what even people who have known no such simpler time refer to as a simpler time.
If on this November morning you were to head out of Caldwell, up on to Rado Ridge, past a couple of desolate houses, and turn on to Don Warner Road, you would find "the farm". That road will drop you down into what people here call a "holler", and if you stop midway down the hill and take the half-grown-over four-wheeler track, you would find a hole containing the body of one Ralph Geiger, naked and partly decomposed. Ralph Geiger being the name on Beasley's driving licence and pill prescriptions these days. The body has been here since summer, when the leaves were green; now it sits beneath a metre of damp earth coursed by hunters out savouring the final days of bow-hunting season. If you left the four-wheeler track and traveled farther downhill to the wooded floor of the holler, you would find, under 50cm of dirt, the body of David Pauley, who'd answered the ad in October, when the leaves had begun to change. He'd driven up from Virginia with a pickup and a U-Haul filled with model trains, Nascar memorabilia and a shotgun. Maybe 15 metres away from David Pauley's body is a hole that Rafferty had dug not much more than a week ago. It is empty except for several centimetres of rainwater -- it had been meant for the body of Scott Davis, who'd answered the ad and decided to move all the way up from South Carolina. But with Davis something had apparently gone wrong with the gun. Beasley had only been able to shoot Davis in the arm, and then Davis had taken off into the woods. Bleeding and cold, he hid in the underbrush for seven hours, until, after dark, he'd just by chance found the road again and walked until he found a house with a light on. There'd been no gain from the failed commission of that crime, and that's why Beasley and Rafferty are at it again so soon, in this car park at dawn, saying good morning to Tim Kern.
Rafferty says he hangs back while Beasley does the interfacing with Kern. Beasley gets jocular and street-preachery, and Kern yields. It is in keeping with Kern's character. He is closing in on 50 years old and recently unemployed -- he'd been working nights cleaning speedway car parks until he was recently downsized. He has a history of being a burner and a loafer and a dude who loves classic rock. He is the divorced father of three boys. Tina, his ex-wife, a cocktail waitress at the Winking Lizard Tavern, still loves Kern, but she couldn't take being married to him any more. It was like having another kid. In the most recent photographs, his face reveals an almost boyish guilelessness that doesn't age super well. Rafferty thinks he seems sweet. Today he wears a black baseball hat that he can't seem to put on straight.
The first strange thing Rafferty notices about the Tim Kern situation is the car. A Buick that can't operate at speeds over 50kph. This is the big payday Beasley has been hoping for? A car you can't even drive on the highway? There is no question about Kern taking it down to the "farm" -- they'll take Rafferty's car.
And then there's the stuff. Kern is living in his car, at this point. All he has are garbage bags filled with clothes and keepsakes, a few pictures of his family and a soiled ream of personal documents of the type you see the itinerant clutching outside government offices everywhere.
Before they get into the car, Beasley starts telling Kern which of his things he'll need down on the farm and what he should come back to pick up later. Take this, leave that. A toolbox, a believable amount of clothes, so Kern will think he's really going somewhere. Rafferty, as the muscle, grapples the TV into his boot.
It's not even a flat-screen. Why does Beasley want this TV? What kind of vetting process could Beasley have done on this guy?
Whatever slim margin of logic they've been operating on, robbing and killing men who were themselves almost destitute, is now out of the window. Beasley asks Kern how much cash he has on him to get by with down on the farm, and Kern gets all sheepish and says: five bucks.
While it's still dark, the three of them drive out of that car park lot and into the still- somnolent morning for what is supposed to be a 90-minute drive to Caldwell. Beasley and Rafferty up front, Kern in the back.
Beasley keeps the patter up. He was always good like that.
Rafferty often remarked inwardly about how weird some of the stuff Beasley talked to these men about was. Beasley would take them out for breakfast on the way to the farm, the big magnanimous boss guy.
When they were eating breakfast with David Pauley just before they killed him, Beasley told this long story about a friend of his who looked like Kenny Rogers, and when they'd go out to eat, Beasley would let it slip to the waiter that it really was Kenny Rogers and they'd all eat for free. Today, Kern seems affable in the face of Beasley's small-talk fusillade, kind of dazy and trying to act professional around his new employer.
What the Craigslist job offered Kern was an unforeseen opportunity: an actual grown-up life. Instant adulthood, including a place to live where his sons -- they were grown, but he called them his "babies" -- could visit, a setup that lately seemed beyond him to puzzle out. Still, Kern did not exactly go gladly into this adventure. He'd been anxious yesterday, wringing his hands, telling his boys he didn't want to leave them, staying up all night packing at Tina's house -- he still used it as kind of a base for showering and the keeping of important items. He was trying to seem laid-back about it, but he felt pretty adrift, heading out that morning to go live by himself on a farm in southern Ohio.
Before they get too far, Beasley leans back and says, "Hey man, we were hunting squirrels out by the old Rolling Acres Mall the other day. And you know what? I lost my watch. It's got a lot of sentimental value. Do you mind if we go over to the woods and look for it real quick before we head down to the farm?" And Kern says, "No, I don't mind."
Granted, maybe Beasley and Kern live in a world where it's not totally implausible to have been hunting squirrels in the Akron suburbs. But it was still a weird thing to say. This overly companionable ageing biker type and his darkly silent "nephew" pick you up to drive you down to your new job on a farm, but first, at six in the morning, they want to root around the woods for a watch they lost while shooting urban rodents? But what would you say if you were Kern? One thing about humans is that they will put up with all but the most absurd and alarming events once they've signed on to a situation. There is in fact a moment when the teenage girl could jump out at the stop light once she starts to get the smell of bad magic on the guy who offered her a lift home, when the homeowner could close the door on the man at the front steps whose face isn't composed right at all. But if you don't bail right away, chances are you will be along for the entire ride, however windy and gruesome it turns out to be. We've all done it: taken the cab even though the driver seems weird, boarded the plane even though that guy in the trench coat is sweating and talking to himself, stayed in a situation even though some tingly instinct is telling you to flee. And what you've learned from those experiences is that it always works out. Trust is how Craigslist works. The shocking thing isn't that the occasional bad actor on Craigslist shows up and takes advantage of that trust. The shocking thing about Craigslist is that it almost never happens.
Tim Kern will not make it down to Caldwell today. He is not going to a desolate parcel of land carefully selected because it seemed like it might need a caretaker and because you can't hear a gunshot from the nearest house. He will never get further than the scrub woods around an abandoned shopping mall. This criminal enterprise is rapidly devolving, the standards lowering from a kind of wannabe Hollywood film about professional hit men into a haphazard, tragically absurd killing spree. We know now that it will be over in a week. But to Rafferty it seems like it could go on and on. When he talks about it now, he says he was living in a state of total acquiescence. A surrender to what he calls darkness.
The entire period suffused with a thick matter that fundamentally transformed all things, from the food he ate to the people he talked to, into some kind of intolerable simulacra that tasted of metal and death.
Rafferty is now 18 and he's locked up at the Warren Correctional Institution.Two years ago, he had never even been in the back of a police car. Now, in the early days of a life sentence without parole, he has already come to inhabit the persona of the old professorial prisoner who approaches life inside with a quiet, philosophical asceticism. "No one knows how old I am in here because I'm old-school," he says. "I carry myself as if I were older. I look like I'm mid-twenties. Plus, they all think I'm this crazy killer. This serial killer. So they steer clear of me."
Rafferty gives the impression that he would rather be alone and is only being interviewed because his father told him to. (Both Rafferty and Beasley are appealing against their verdicts.) He gazes kind of inwardly in the midst of the heartbreaking human calamity that is the visitors' room -- shackled men with face ink and cornrows holding their newborn babies, old mums wheeling oxygen tanks to buy their only sons a microwavable calzone. But it's not the desperate quietude of someone who wants to connect and can't figure out how. It's an almost imperturbable sense of independence.
Rafferty is, and always was, a priori different, is how he sees it.
He's not the kids in his high-school class, he's not like the man shackled with the neck ink, he has never been like anyone ever except maybe his mum and dad, though both of them were always at distances so untraversable that he couldn't know for sure if he was like them or not. He has never really needed other people. (This is convenient, because he has never had anyone he could safely need.)
Mike Rafferty, Brogan Rafferty's dad, is in his early 50s, small in stature, around 170cm, built almost in a square, a Rubik's Cube of flesh. He has a long dark ponytail, a prominent forehead, a small expressionless mouth and shiny dark eyes framed out by the longest, most beautiful, dark eyelashes that give a poignancy to the latent violence he exudes. It's like My Little Pony was a 53-year-old biker from the rust belt of Akron. He is a machinist by trade, works nights precision-cutting metal for aircraft landing gear, and, yes, is the president and a member in good and legendary standing of the North Coast motorcycle club, a close affiliate of the Hells Angels. According to the police, North Coast is suspected of dealing in meth, but Mike has no criminal record, save for a public-urination charge. In fact, he comes across as a straight arrow who does not suffer fools gladly or without punching them in the face. "Maybe I wasn't the kind of father I should have been," he says. "I wasn't good at showing emotion, and I was a bit of a disciplinarian."
The kind of father he was: the kind who buys a small house in a good school district, teaches his kid to box in the garage starting when he's five; who didn't drink on weeknights but spent Fridays at "church" (the weekly meeting of North Coast) and most of the weekend at bars; who, Rafferty says, once broke the boy's nose over a missing report card; who Beasley and Rafferty and Yvette, Rafferty's mother, all agree was a good provider but terrified Brogan. From Mike, Rafferty learned what Mike saw as that most important tool: self-reliance. Up until that November, Mike saw himself as a dad who was doing a pretty good job raising a boy more or less on his own. It was a stable place to live, but not a home that allowed for certain parts of being a kid: like admitting that you're weak, and you don't have the answers, and that circumstances can arise that you simply cannot be expected to take care of by yourself.
Rafferty's mother, on the other hand, is an addict. Over time, he'd reduced his relationship with her to the smallest unit of parenting she could handle: Rafferty told Yvette she could go on a crack binge -- because no matter what she promised, she was going to go on a crack binge anyway. She just couldn't do it on the weekends Rafferty was with her. But he couldn't rely on even that.
Yvette was a biker chick from the first time she ever got on a motorcycle. "I was hot as shit, I ain't gonna lie," she says over a steak at TGI Fridays. "Hair down to my ass. I was hot."
By all accounts this description of Yvette Rafferty is accurate.
She arrived in northern Ohio from out of the American South as a woman from a dream issue of Easyriders magazine, skinny and willowy, with hair spun from ice cream and sunshine and a taste for denim and leather. She liked to party, and she was crazy, too. She met Mike when she was working at a bikini bar. That was not long before she became addicted to cocaine. She says she was sober while she was pregnant. But Rafferty wasn't three days old when she disappeared into a crack house with him still swaddled in a hospital blanket. Mike took Rafferty away after that, and they separated. She still seems like kind of a love mama, even though a good chunk of her humanity appears to have disappeared into addiction. She is a hug person, a kiss person, a person who loves to cry, the type of hippie biker chick who'd want to sleep with all her babies in a big family bed but also bungee them to a chopper for a ride to get formula. But in reality, she is now a 49-year-old woman who has to remove her new dentures before she eats a TGI Fridays steak with Jack Daniel's sauce. Who, after two beers, starts shivering and loses the gift of coherent speech for long stretches and tries to eat a wet napkin off her plate. Sits there chewing it like lettuce. Rafferty has known before memory that his mother is an addict. When he was ten, he found evidence on the internet that she'd prostituted herself. During the steak dinner she admits knowing what she'd become. Her face crumpled and she said: "I know all this is my fault. I know it is. If I hadn't have been an addict, none of this would have happened." "To me, he was just death," says Rafferty. "When I thought of him, it was death."
Beasley was death incarnate? "Yes." Beasley must have known, somehow, that Rafferty could handle living through that darkness without imploding. It was Beasley's gift to see potential where others do not, where most people would not want to look for potential. Beasley was almost blinded by the opportunities he saw -- like growing weed or making moonshine or faking a raffle or trading on the inherent advantages of running a "halfway house" in the hood -- in a way that seemed to make normal opportunity almost invisible to him. What Mike, Rafferty's dad, used to say about Beasley was that he'd rather make a crooked nickel than an honest dollar. It was the kind of thing you could say right to Beasley's face and he'd laugh about it. Mike says Richard Beasley once asked him if he'd like to rob a bank. Which Mike most certainly didn't want to do. But those were the kinds of things kicking around in Beasley's head.
Perhaps Beasley saw in Rafferty a kind of potential that Rafferty was probably unaware of. Beasley knew Mike from the world of Akron bikers, and Yvette from a life that brought him into the drug houses and jails of Akron, and he knew Rafferty. This hulking castoff, who strangers thought was possibly mute but confidants knew as a preternaturally sardonic kid who acted like a full-grown man but was probably hiding a stunted little baby somewhere inside, like a worm larva in the middle of an apple. It's not that Beasley became friends with Rafferty when he was nine as part of a long con. Beasley probably started taking Rafferty to church because it felt like a good Christian thing to do. Beasley seemed to enjoy hanging out with Rafferty, tooling around Akron, visiting graveyards and dropping general world knowledge. And in the bargain Rafferty, according to the amateur psychology of pretty much everyone who came into contact with them, got a dad who wasn't a hard-ass, who took him around and treated him like an equal, but who also understood (without judgment) the world where his mum came from. Yvette describes Rafferty's feelings this way: "He was ashamed of me, but he loved me." Beasley was kind of like Rafferty himself -- they both straddled the straight and the street worlds.
And when the time came, Beasley knew what Rafferty's skill set might be, knew how to activate it, and he apparently didn't hesitate.
In the summer of 2011, before they lured that first man, Ralph Geiger, down to southern Ohio, Beasley had a conversation with Rafferty. There was going to be a warrant out for Beasley's arrest.
And if they got him, he said, they were going to put him away for a crime he didn't commit. So he was going on the run. This news lit in Rafferty an incandescent bloom of indignation. Damn cops. They messed with his mother. "Well, he had told me this story about how they were going to put him in jail over some old stuff that he didn't do," Rafferty says. "I was angry. I was angry. It didn't seem right."
But then, when the murders began, it couldn't have been just about that anger any more. Whatever compelled Rafferty to help Beasley, it had to have become something else. Rafferty says now that he did what Beasley said because Beasley threatened him. He told Rafferty: I know where your mother lives. I know where your sister lives. He would check on Rafferty every day, call him, have him meet up. Rafferty says that every time he dug a hole, he expected that he might end up in it. This explanation seems too simple, but Rafferty's is the only narrative we have about these events.
Threatened or not, Rafferty trudged on. Like a golem. Made of clay by his master, animate but not awake to his humanity. To be there and not really be there, the way he is here at the Warren Correctional Institution, that was what Rafferty could do better than just about anyone. Rafferty's greatest skill as accomplice in a crime of massively gruesome proportions is to be able to locate himself fathoms beneath the emotional sea even when he's right beside you.
Does Beasley see himself as a man attuned to the potential lurking in places other men would never look? The subject is broached when we meet on death row. A warrant had been out for his arrest, which was for, essentially, running a prostitution ring --
20 women, one male -- out of his "halfway" house. A ring staffed by the women he ministered to. The women for whom he'd stood up in court to promise judges that, as counsellor and halfway-house proprietor, he'd look after them. The women he'd visit in jail, talk on prison phones with, and describe his physical longing for in conversations the authorities were recording. By most accounts, his favourite had been a 17-year-old girl named Savannah, who died of an overdose. Rafferty knew her as Beasley's girlfriend.
Beasley tried to get one of these women, Amy Saller, off drugs, in a way. She says he devised his own detox system: three rocks one day, and then two for each of the next couple of days, and then down to one. But it never worked. So he'd just buy her the rocks and let her smoke them at his place. She thought his biggest fear was that she would leave. She said Beasley put her up as an escort on Backpage and took a commission on the money she made. When asked about all of the above, Beasley's says: "Amy Saller. I'm sorry, I don't know who that is."
Beasley mentions a car accident he had about eight years ago. "I haven't been able to have sex since it happened. I had a steel coffee cup in my lap." He smiles mischievously here and slits his eyes like a cat. "You can't use what you don't have."
And then, thinking about it, he gets a little more grandiose. "I think it was a blessing from God that I wasn't able to have sex. If I could, it might have complicated the relationship I had with all those women. I might have been tempted. As it was, I was able to remain pure."
On the way to the Rolling Acres Mall, Kern mentions that he likes Rafferty's Buick. Beasley has a plan for Kern's car: he and Rafferty will come back with some blowtorches and scrap it for cash. Beasley will take the cash and give Kern a Ford F-150. A more appropriate vehicle for the terrain down on the farm. Kern will pay off the difference in installments that will come out of his wages.
It's almost as if Beasley enjoys spinning out these scenarios, a natural outgrowth of the fecundity of his scheming brain -- he's got the gift, so why not share it?
Rolling Acres is like Chernobyl, with its cheerful awnings inviting you to condemned cinemas and the now-removed names of big-box stores silhouetted on to the brickwork of its entrances.
The mall was built in the 70s and expanded in the 80s, and now, in the aftermath of the recession, is home to only a single JC Penney store that will itself soon be shuttered. They pull around an outbuilding and park near the woods.
When they brought men to "the farm", Beasley had a trick he'd pull. He'd walk in front of the subjects right away and let them follow him down one of the tracks into the forest. Having a stranger walking behind you into the woods tends to raise defences.
And then at some point -- like in Scott Davis's case, when they were looking for some construction equipment they couldn't find -- there'd be an excuse to turn around. And just like that, the subject would be out in front. That's when Beasley would shoot him in the head without the victim ever knowing what happened, Rafferty says. It was the beauty of Beasley's method that he never had to lay a hand on anyone, never had to overpower a body -- he simply had to pick the right people and then be the guy in charge.
And now they are in the woods, looking for this "watch". Beasley pulls back a branch and lets it slap back at Rafferty and Kern.
Then Kern holds it back for Rafferty so he can walk by. This act of kindness disturbs Rafferty, though he doesn't say anything.
Beasley and Kern walk together, looking. Rafferty acts like he's searching the thick November leaf layer a few yards away. Rafferty says he hears a pop. When he turns, he sees that Kern is down on his knees and Beasley has the .22 in his hand. Kern's holding the side of his head. And then Beasley says, "Are you all right?" Like he's concerned Kern's hurt himself. But when Kern doesn't respond, Beasley shoots him again, and again, and again, and Kern slumps over on to his side. There's something wrong with the gun, Beasley is saying. And it hits Rafferty then that Kern is still breathing.
All of these events, Rafferty says, blend together -- maybe because he has a reluctance to go back over them or because he dissociates even right there in the moment. But this whole debacle is beyond the pale, horrific in an absurd, intolerable way to Rafferty. This man has nothing worth stealing, there is no reason to kill him. And now he won't die. Beasley gets up close and shoots him one last time, in the face. Now Kern is lying on the ground, eyes open wide and staring at the leafless branches above. Every few seconds he takes a big, audible gulp of air, like a dying fish. He's still alive, Rafferty says, he's still alive. Beasley says no. No way.
His brain is dead, there are four bullets in his head and I put one between his eyes.
It stops eventually, the desperate, drowning sounds. Then Beasley says to grab a leg and takes the other one himself. And together they drag Kern to the hole. It's only 60cm deep, and Kern doesn't fit in there. Beasley removes Kern's jacket and cuts the shirt off with a pair of scissors. The black hat he kicks to the side is covered in blood.
Why? Rafferty says he asks Beasley. Why did we do this, he didn't have anything. Beasley has his own logic about it: well, he was a dead man as soon as he got in the car. As if it had been out of their hands.
The first time, with Ralph Geiger, they removed all the clothes, covered him with lime, replaced the ground cover so you could have walked right the grave and not suspected anything. For David Pauley, they had changes of boots, gloves; Beasley had even put a $20 note next to the hole so they'd know if anyone saw the hole in the interim. But by the time they got to Kern... Well, Kern is still in his trousers and shoes and socks. Rafferty hasn't even finished filling the hole when Beasley tells him to stop. It's getting light now. Beasley kicks some leaves over the hole.
This would be the last murder. Scott Davis had got away. And he talked to the police. Right now, as Rafferty and Beasley are at the mall, the FBI is tracing the Craigslist ad back to Beasley's IP address, and later to a camera at a Shoney's in Marietta, Ohio, that snapped a picture of Rafferty and Beasley as they walked in to meet Scott Davis the morning he was shot. Three days from now, agents will show up at Stow high school and pull Rafferty from class. He will still have the TV in his boot. He and Beasley won't even have scrapped Kern's car yet -- there will have been zero financial or other gain from the murder of Tim Kern. The same day Rafferty is arrested, a SWAT team will pick up Beasley outside the house where he rented the room.
It's getting lighter out as they drive back from Rolling Acres.
Beasley has Rafferty stop at McDonald's for breakfast. Beasley likes McDonald's because of the free internet. Rafferty says they don't speak. Beasley taps on his computer, and Rafferty watches the street outside as the day gets brighter. He drops Beasley at his place and heads for his mum's. When he's pulling up the hill toward home, he gets a call from Yvette. She's crying. A man she knows had been an asshole last night, and now she is walking home. Rafferty says that he'll pick her up on the way home. This is one of those periodic moments of clarity for her, when she can see plainly what the dynamic is with her son, Rafferty being the stable one, the guy who comes to the rescue. I'm sorry I wasn't there last night, she says, I didn't know you were coming over this weekend, I swear.
Rafferty stops her. It doesn't matter, Mum.
Carol Beasley, Richard Beasley's mum, says that she doesn't want to fool herself. Richard probably did the things they say he did.
Though she can't help slipping into the framework her son has provided her for these events . "But why did Scott Davis make the ambulance take him to Akron General hospital, which is right by the motorcycle club?" she asks. "He literally had to pass several other hospitals on his way there. And why did Davis refuse to talk to the police for days?"
Even if she pretty much knows the truth, she won't really be able to process it until Beasley admits it. No one will know what happened until he comes clean. It seems impossible to understand this whole saga without knowing the truth from Beasley.
There are things we don't know about Rafferty. He claims he participated in these crimes because Beasley threatened him. It's also possible that Rafferty participated because he thought he needed to be a man. But even if Rafferty is lying about the threats, even if he believes that he did this of his own free will, it was still coercion. These crimes benefited only one person:
Richard Beasley. There was some discussion at the trial about how Rafferty received treasure from these men: David Pauley's shotgun, for example. But it seems like, say, an uncle who has molested his nephew and then buys him anything he wants at the toy shop, in doing so binding all kinds of emotions (shame, guilt, pleasure, terror, pain) into a terrible cocktail that can never be unmixed.
Hopefully Beasley will tell the truth, because it's the only possible way to take even a fractional step toward making amends. "Oh," Carol says, "I don't think so. He doesn't want anyone to know the real him. He's too ashamed. He will never, ever do that."
And she was right. The moment he sat down for our interview, with a twinkle in his eye, Beasley began telling magnificent stories. Ralph Geiger had been down in Caldwell, "pounding nails" for work, when he came across a meth lab he shouldn't have seen, and the meth dealers had to walk him out into the woods and kill him. Rafferty murdered Tim Kern himself, with an accomplice, as a way to earn his colours in the North Coast motorcycle club. Beasley seemed to understand that some of this was hard to believe, and so he didn't gild the lily.
He did not confess to a thing. It would seem that this failure to come clean would probably have some ramifications with God, if he happened to believe in God.
How is it a fellow gets to heaven? "I believe you will go to heaven if you accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your saviour."
You don't have to confess to anyone? "You have to confess to God and ask forgiveness. Do you know the story of King David? He killed a man and had an adulterous affair.
And he was the apple of God's eye."
That's it? Confess to God and then you're in heaven?
He nodded. That's it.
He asked one more thing. Please ask people to write to me, he said. I may be able to counsel them in their lives. And if I could communicate with men outside these walls, he said, it would make me feel free, too.
Devin Friedman is director of editorial projects at USGQ
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
