1 | The False Prophet

Hello, you have a prepaid call from Richard Beasley, an inmate at Summit County Jail. You may begin speaking now.

Richard.

Hi mom.

Before I say anything else, I just want you to know you're not to reply any way to what I'm going to tell you or to say anything on the phone to anyone, or anyone around you. That's what Rhonda said.

Okay.

Did you hear everything I said?

Yes.

Okay.

Investigators call jailhouse recordings “the poor man's wire.” They're like catnip – a way to get inside a criminal's mind without the fuss of a warrant or a van full of surveillance gear.

Well the news is plastered saying that they found a body in Caldwell County.

I don't know what to tell you. I’m still quite shocked.

I know honey, so were we. So were we.

That conversation you just heard is between a devoted mother and her oldest son, Richard Beasley, who had soon become known as the Craigslist Killer, convicted of executing – and this is crazy – executing the very man his mother is telling him about.

Were you able to see anything on today's paper?

No.

I guess they found two more victims. One up here behind Rolling Acres and another one buried in Holmes County.

Beasley is a giant of a man, six foot one, 250 pounds. The people who knew him said he looked like Santa Claus. If Santa was a biker who carried a beat up Bible. He looked and sounded like someone you could trust. Knowing what I know now, it makes my skin crawl because Richard Beasley's story is one of the darkest I've ever covered.

Did you start your Bible study yet?

No. We're going to do that this weekend on Sunday. I’ve just been too rattled. I mean, this is all just so overwhelming. I’ll tell you this, there is some disinformation going around on top of what we said, but that's a different story.

Yeah, yeah.

It's important that you hear Beasley's voice so you can understand the story I'm about to tell you, and you'll be hearing that voice a lot. We've acquired more than 22 hours of these jail calls and are sharing them publicly for the first time because before Beasley became the infamous Craigslist Killer, he was a very different kind of person: a conman. A religious conman, actually. Maybe you know the type. They use the God hook to fish for victims, they reel you in and then promise redemption to get what they want. It's a tactic as old as time.

So you have this person who's using religion to say that he's good and he's drawing people in and gaining their trust.

If you can make sense of this case like many others, then you're probably as bad off as the people that were committing it.

Richard Beasley is a very dark, manipulative, evil individual.

Those folks that were working the streets, he basically controlled every aspect of their lives

I spun around, the gun was pointed directly at the back of my head.

I personally know the very instant my brother died,

Beasley, I wanted on death row. He deserved to be on death row. There's no way around it: some folks just need killing.

Oh, God, this is a dark story, one that's – I'm going to say it – hard to believe, and if you ask me if it could all happen again, I would have to say “yes.” And I'm about to tell you why.

I'm Carol Costello. This is The God Hook episode one, The False Prophet,

A shallow grave in the country, an add on Craigslist, an outrageous murder plot, all unraveling tonight in northeast Ohio.

In the fall of 2011, detectives in rural Ohio discovered multiple bodies with gunshot wounds buried in shallow graves. Another body was discovered in Akron and eventually linked to the others. All men, all targeted because their killer thought no one would miss them, but he was wrong. They were loved. Ralph Geiger, David Pauly, Timothy Kern, and Scott Davis, the fourth man who barely escaped death.

Richard Beasley was dubbed “The Craigslist Killer” because all of these men responded to an ad placed on Craigslist. The popular classified site Craigslist was Beasley's bait, but the hook that he used to reel in his victims was his persona. He sometimes called himself Pastor Jack and he offered something many of us want: redemption. We hear that phrase “stone cold killer” a lot. That's because they exist.

What was that guy's name?

We did the last one that disappeared.

Yeah.

Timothy Kerns.

I'll pray for his family.

I’ll pray for Kern's family. Even after Beasley was suspected in multiple murders, he played like he was an honest to God chaplain. It was this phony piousness that rankled prosecutors as they took Beasley's case to trial in 2012.

During opening statements here at the Summit County Courthouse, a special prosecutor with the Ohio Attorney General's office referred to 53-year-old Richard Beasley as a wolf in sheep's clothing.

Emily Pelphrey was the special prosecutor who delivered that powerful opening statement.

I wasn't quoting it because I wanted the jurors to think that I was calling God to preside over this. It was a poke to the defendant like, we know you, we see you, and we're going to put this up there.

And while Emily wasn't thinking about Bible verses as she stood before the jury, arguably what she told those 12 people reflected what the Bible says about false prophets: every tree that does not bear good fruit is cut down and thrown into the fire.

Hey Emily.

Hi girl.

Where are you?

I'm just about 50 miles outside of Columbus.

Emily is a friend of mine. If you listened to my first podcast series, Blind Rage, you'll likely remember her voice. She was my legal guide.

It's a long drive and there's nothing out here. It's really the middle of nowhere.

Last year we got to talking about the Craigslist Killer, the months-long trial and how it still haunts her, thirteen years after the final verdict. We decided to drive to Caldwell, Ohio, in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains where Beasley and his accomplice shot and buried some of his victims.

So why do you want to revisit this case again?

I'm sitting across the table from someone who's such a false prophet and I had a real problem with that during the trial.

I think you still have a problem with that right now.

Do I need therapy? We're talking through this.

I think we're both going to need therapy after this.

We'll tell you about that emotionally fraught trip to Caldwell later, but right now we have to begin this story 100 miles north in Akron, Ohio because, as Emily insists, there is so much more to tell, not only about the murders, but about what happened before the killings. Emily was right. Of course she was right.

I was only part of the murder trial and I just didn't know about all of the women that were involved in this case.

Ah, the women. This is the untold part of the story, the part no one has paid much attention to until now. And it's disturbing because before Richard Beasley preyed on vulnerable men, he preyed on vulnerable women. And had he paid for those alleged crimes, the men he buried in Caldwell might be alive today.

Richard Beasley grew up in a Christian household. His mother Carol devoted her life to the steadfast love of the Lord. People who knew Carol Beasley say she was proud of her devotion that it shaped every life she touched her oldest child, her son Rich, gave credit to his mom for his own faith. He told a reporter he accepted Jesus as his savior when he was 12 years old. But if you want to understand how he got so good at charming people, bending them to his will, you have to go back to the beginning.

Akron, Ohio, mile after mile of Goodyear Plants,

Richard Beasley was born in 1959 in Akron, Ohio, not far from where I was born. Back then, Akron was the rubber capital of the world.

We had four of the world's seven largest tire companies headquartered right here. Thousands and thousands of employees worked for the rubber companies and earned great union wages.

Doug Oplinger is the former managing editor of the Akron Beacon Journal.

It was the perfect middle class community where with a high school degree you could live a very good life.

Beasley's upbringing should have exemplified that good middle class life. But like so many people who end up in the American prison system, Beasley came from a long line of trauma and dysfunction. His mother Carol got pregnant with him when she was 16. His biological father left the picture early on and by the time Beasley was five, Carol was already remarried. Court documents say Beasley was abused physically when he was a child and learned to lie to avoid being hurt. Carol testified in court that Richard was sexually abused by neighborhood boys.

If there was a place though where Beasley could have found stability, where he could have escaped the reality of his life, I imagine it could have been his mother's church.

Most young people, especially people who grow up in poor neighborhoods are heavily exposed to religion as children and for a lot of folks that live in those neighborhoods, there's the school system and then there's the church.

Volkan Topalli is a criminologist

At a very young age, these kids all go to church, and so it's part of their upbringing. What's interesting is that they continue to reference it well into their teens, their twenties, their thirties, their forties as ways to explain and justify their criminal behavior.

The Chapel attracts thousands of parishioners, including some of Akron's most influential citizens who prayed beside people in need of Jesus's love like Carol Beasley. The draw in the early eighties and into the two thousands was its pastor, Newt Larson.

He was just one of the most loving and caring people in the community,

And the chapel attracted thousands of congregants?

Yes. Oh, sure, yes.

Why do you think that was? What were those people looking for?

Larson was really powerful at telling stories that people could identify with. He was a journalist, a storyteller. That was his power.

Do you know that when you love a stranger or you love somebody in need, it's like you're doing what Jesus did if he were here on Earth because you're his body. The greatest thing in the world is love, and the greatest thing a church can do is love people and care about them, so keep it up.

I'm just thinking of Richard Beasley attending services there and listening to this great storyteller, and I mean, is it possible that he took cues from this pastor to use for whatever nefarious purposes that he wanted to?

Boy, that's a great question.

I understand men like Beasley because I grew up with them. Men who came of age in an unstable world and struggled to find their footing in life. After high school, Beasley joined the Navy, but that didn't last long. Before he knew what he was back in the town where he grew up looking for a job as a machinist only. Now, Akron wasn't the bustling industrial hub it had once been. By the early 1980s, Akron had gone bust.

And he left. He went to Texas and I don't know what happened there, but Texas and the oil industry was a great place for a machinist,

But a good paying Texas oil job wasn't in the cards for Beasley. With each new failure, he only fell deeper into that rabbit hole of desperate circumstances and poor choices. Eventually, he wound up in a Texas prison for a series of burglaries. Not exactly crimes of the century, but they cost him five years behind bars and they would come back to haunt him. After Beasley was paroled, he moved back to Ohio and tried to make a fresh start. He met a woman at a biker rally. They got married and had a daughter together, but it wasn't long before things began to spiral again. By 1996, Beasley found himself divorced and back in prison, this time for illegally dealing weapons. His sentence: seven long years. It was during this time that Beasley claimed he found solace in the same good book he did as a child. Only this time he read the Bible behind bars. He would later tell everyone he saw the light that he was reborn. In short, he found God again. Dr. Volkan Topalli.

I will say that this idea that people find God in prison is up for a lot of debate in both religious and scientific circles

And everywhere in between. Emily told me prosecutors hear that inmates find God in prison so often it's become a trope.

One of the jokes that we used to say was people say that they found God when they got to prison. God must be really busy because he just likes to hang out in prison. Nevermind all of the awful things that are happening in the world, and that's not to discount if people have found their way through religion, I commend them and I'm happy for them. But I think that when it's used as a shield to put out this image that you're a good person and that you draw people in, that's just what makes me very, very angry.

Dr. Topalli thinks it's a bit more complicated than that, though.

I think that that's something that people sometimes forget, they sort of say, well, if someone said they found God in prison, but then when they got out they committed crimes, then I guess they were lying about finding God in prison, and I don't actually think that's true. When you're in prison and you're experiencing all of these punishments, it does make you rethink your choices and religion can sometimes feel like a good way to absolve yourself of guilt, but also to sort of reconcile what you did on the outside with who you are on the inside. And everyone knows that if you say you found God, that that's something that's usually attractive to people on parole boards. That's something that's attractive to the powers that be, politicians, et cetera. It's something that's just culturally acceptable, I think overall culturally acceptable, especially in the United States. And so some of it is performative and I think some of it's also highly genuine. The question is: does it last?

Beasley's turn to religion in prison seemed genuine. He studied the Bible assiduously, and soon his knowledge of scripture was second to none. When he was released in the early 2000s, he seemed to be turning his life around. He went home to his mother and her church, The Chapel. It wasn't long before he started attending Bible studies, handing out free coffee at church-sponsored shelters and delivering food to the homeless. Something many ex-cons do across the country with the blessing of community-based faith groups.

Ladies and gentlemen, the President of the United States.

President George W. Bush.

Our government has a responsibility to help prisoners to return as contributing members of their community.

Bush signed the Second Chance Act in 2007, which authorized federal grant money to nonprofit faith-based associations.

Some of the most important work to help ex-convicts is done outside of Washington, DC and faith-based communities in community-based groups. I like to call the folks who are engaged in this compassionate work “members of the armies of compassion.”

Some of the most powerful people within America's criminal justice system listen to that speech. Lawyers, judges, and probation officers believe that faith communities, street ministers, can help rehabilitate the least among us. They believe ex-cons through their newfound faith can help others just like them. Richard Beasley seemed to be an important member of that army of compassion. He went to church, he could quote the Bible with a laid back every man's sort of charm. He even took a troubled nine-year-old boy named Brogan Rafferty under his wing. He gave the child a Bible with an inscription that read: The Bible is a roadmap to salvation.

You're about to hear from Brogan's father. This conversation is from a police interview. Michael Rafferty knew Beasley from their old motorcycle club days.

And Rich picked him up in the mornings, take him to The Chapel and stuff like that for services.

That's right. Beasley would take Brogan to The Chapel every Sunday and then to Bible studies afterwards. He told GQ magazine, Brogan loved church, and that punishment for the kid would be no Chapel on Sunday.

See, I used to have him over here for dinner about every Sunday after he got up, felt sorry for him. He didn't know nobody or nothing like that.

Rafferty valued Beasley's friendship at first. Besides, he needed help. His ex-wife struggled with addiction and would often disappear on drug binges, leaving Michael with the kids. Young Brogan told The Atlantic his father was impatient and angry, but did the best he could. Beasley he said, was his father without the anger. He was, “the best thing that ever happened to me.” Here's Brogan's mother.

Even though I've always known that Rich is on both sides of the good and the bad guy or whatever, I've always checked him on his references with Brogan and to Brogan, Rich could do no wrong.

And for a time Michael Rafferty thought so too. Beasley would teach Brogan to be a good Christian boy, until the mask began to slip

As far as Rich as a man and stuff, I thought he turned a corner with his life and stuff, but he always wanted to have that little bit of a flare of danger. You know what I'm saying? And then the one time he comes over here, we're both Irish drinking whiskey and stuff like that. He comes over here and he comes up with something about robbing a bank, and I can tell he was serious. Dude, that's effing nuts. You know what I'm saying? Rich is the kind of guy as I discovered after a period of time is he'd rather make a crooked quarter than an honest dollar.

That paradox is exactly what Dr. Topalli studies. If someone claims to live in accordance with the Bible, to love thy neighbor as thyself to follow The 10 Commandments: thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, to believe there are consequences for sin. You might think that would stop criminal urges. It should. It can. But it doesn't.

There could be real belief, there could be real dedication. It's just that they're also motivated by these criminal kinds of urges, and so they've got to reconcile those two, that can happen. You can sort of believe in religion, believe in God, believe in heaven, and all these kinds of things, and still commit all these heinous acts by sort of manipulating the religious doctrine to sort of justify your behavior.

Dr. Topalli and his team interviewed violent criminals, all of whom were still on the streets committing crime, all of whom said they believed in God, the 10 Commandments, and heaven and hell.

They'll say things like, well, I'm about to steal this car and it's wrong and I shouldn't, but that person probably has insurance and I'm going to get a car, and the insurance company will buy them a brand new car and the insurance company's worth billions. And you sort of convince yourself that what you're about to do is actually a good thing. Hey, I'm going to help this person get a new car. Right? The aspects of religion that they're really, really interested in the most that they feel most strongly about is this idea of forgiveness. That one is a really big one for them. Things like, oh, well, I know God's going to forgive me.

Maybe it was nuts to turn your kid over to Richard Beasley, but perhaps Rafferty with his Catholic Irish roots believed that people can change, that no one is beyond repair. Didn't Jesus say let him without sin cast the first stone?

When I was a little girl, I used to confess my sins to a Catholic priest. He would give me penance. I would pray and ask for God's forgiveness. And in my child's mind, God would forgive me and I would be free of sin. I would be redeemed. It felt so good. Don't we all want to believe that we can be forgiven for the things we've done wrong, that our past sins don't have to haunt us, that if we can repent, can find some newer better way of looking at the world that we are more than the worst things we've ever done?

F. Scott Fitzgerald had that great line, there are no second acts in American lives.

Dr. Amir Hussain is a theologian.

I hate that line because America's all about second acts and third acts, and we love that redemption story. We love the bad person who transforms, the Scrooge story. I mean, that's an English story, but that resonates with America. The miser who realizes, oh, it really is about helping people and not about hoarding money, but we understand that there are people who are cons at this who will say exactly what you want to hear, tell you exactly the kind of story, and that unfortunately is how predators work.

But make no mistake, Beasley was a predator because under the mask of a man born again was the face of a cold calculating sociopath. It wasn't long before he attached himself to another ministry, a street ministry.

Amen. Praise the Lord. Come on somebody. Hallelujah. Amen. Glory to God.

Its pastor was exactly the kind of man Beasley wanted to be.

Lemme tell you, the bottom line is I wasn't addicted to crack cocaine and all these drugs out here on the street only. That was band-aids over my cancer, which was myself. I was addicted to myself. Can anybody admit that? Hey, I'm addicted to myself. I'm prideful and self-absorbed. Amen?

A man who ministered to people who needed it most: the homeless, addicts, and sex workers, and especially to those behind bars with little hope and nowhere to go.

Praise God. He kept them folks away from me. Amen. I got broken over my sin. I was broken over my sin, broken over it, man, the Holy Spirit will break you, man. The Holy Spirit is revelation. It reveals God is light.

Before long, Beasley began to emulate this pastor. He started to call himself Chaplain Rich, a man who loved Jesus, until the devil that always sat on Beasley's shoulder got the best of him.

And you might think you know the story of that monster, but let me tell you, you don't know the half of it. Next time: The Ravenous Wolf.

So when did you first really engage with Rich Beasley? When was that time?

I was in jail. I was incarcerated in Summit County.

Do you remember what he said?

He said that if I would agree to come to his program, that he could definitely help me, that Jesus hadn't forgotten me and he felt the Lord had sent him to me.

He specifically targeted folks that were the most desperate of the desperate. What Richard Beasley did is he took those folks that were working the streets. He basically controlled every aspect of their lives.