SERIES FINALE: 10 | The Final Con

Before we begin the final episode of The God Hook, I want to take a minute to thank you for listening. This has been a journey – difficult at times, but one we felt was necessary to take. Emily and I set out to go beyond the headlines to uncover how one man weaponized faith to target society's most vulnerable, and how our collective belief and redemption may have allowed him to get away with it for far too long. And I hate to even say this, how it can all happen again. This is the final chapter. For me, it's also where the story began.

Last year, thanks to Emily, I sat down with her and former special prosecutor, Paul Scarcella, to talk about a case that still weighs on them. It was a first for me. I'd never had an in-depth conversation with special prosecutors about a death penalty case.

The conversation was raw, it was complicated, and it was fascinating. It inspired me to investigate this case. You will hear a lot of that conversation in this episode and the full conversation in a bonus episode. This may be the final chapter of The God Hook, but it's not the end for me and Emily. We're going to continue our partnership. I don't know exactly what that will look like yet. I do know what fascinates us both – the contradictions, the crazy, the ugly, and the beautiful things that exist in our culture and how all of that plays into our criminal justice system. Thank you for your support, for your time, for listening and for subscribing. And now, the series finale.

Emily never dreamed about the Beasley case. Not until months later when the storm came.

I didn't really dream about the case much until there was a big storm.

It was a violent storm, the kind that rattles windows and makes the night darker, scarier.

It was like a big windstorm that hit Columbus.

The power went off. The house went completely dark, silent. That's when Richard Beasley wormed his way back into her head.

I know he's locked up. He's locked up on death row at this point. I know he can't go anywhere, but that's when I thought about him and that's when I had dreams and I could not sleep. It was simply because we just didn't have power.

Emily, a prosecuting attorney for decades, sat across from murderers before, across from people who'd done unspeakable things, but Beasley was different.

There was just an evil about him, and I've sat across the table from other murderers and rapists and awful, awful people, but this was the one person I felt he's just bad.

That night when the wind blew out the lights, Emily felt something she'd never felt on any case: fear.

So I never worried about my own safety or anything like that. I never worried that anybody was going to call me or come hunt me down until that case.

The fear came just that one night, months after the trial, when the lights died and the quiet came,

It was until that one time that the power went out. That was the only time I was nervous.

I'm Carol Costello. This is The God Hook episode 10 of 10: The Final Con.

Beasley's murder trial would be all consuming, not just in time and labor, but heart, mind, and soul.

So it wasn't like unquote the worst stuff that I'd ever seen. I think what made it worse was, and made it memorable, was just how many different avenues this case touched on.

Emily said Beasley's trial reverberated through culture, class, and every emotional fault line.

So you had murders that were awful. You had planned murders, you had recruitment of a co-defendant, murderer. You had socioeconomic issues playing into it. You had stereotypes working into this case. You had family members that showed up that were just these kind of family members that you don't forget. You had colorful witnesses, incredibly colorful witnesses that the stories you just wouldn't believe. You can't make them up. You had a court that was home for us for essentially two months, and I was pregnant during this case.

Yeah, Emily was two months pregnant. She would eventually share her pregnancy with Deb David Pauley's twin. She had to let the judge and her trial team know – mostly, she joked, so they didn't think she was putting on weight.

I was so mad because some of the biggest trials I've done, I was pregnant. And I will never forget. I went to buy a maternity suit and there were two in my size. I'm like two in Columbus, Ohio, the state capitol, and there are two suits for a pregnant woman. I was so irritated.

I bet they weren't that attractive either.

They were awful.

But beneath that self-deprecating humor was something deeper. Emily was carrying a life while prosecuting a man accused of calculated cold-blooded murder. I just wondered, you're in a courtroom with this evil man that clearly affected you and you're pregnant, and I just wondered if you ever thought, will it affect my child? I don't know. I think that would enter my head.

Yeah. I certainly didn't want him to know that I was pregnant. I just didn't feel that that was something that he needed to know.

And that was just because of his pure evil nature, or was it just a combination of things like you were going through at the time?

I think it probably was a little bit of everything, but again, this was unlike any case, and you could feel him from across the table, and it felt like he was constantly scheming to think of another lie or something else that he could do. He always thought that he was a step ahead of everyone, and he truly thought that his lies were believable.

Beasley wasn't just waiting for his death penalty trial to begin. Prosecutors say he was rehearsing one pretrial hearing at a time, prepping for not just a defense, but his latest, latest persona, frail Grandpa Rich. He told his mom to provide a complete list of ailments to his public defender, Rhonda Kotnick.

Degenerative disc disease. I got that. Severe spinal arthritis. You got that? Yes. Lingering effects from the strokes I had. Spinal damage from an industrial accident. You can also tell him I have effusions. Yes. And I have herniated discs. You tell the rest of it too. There's a laundry list. They had to have my achilles tendon reattached and it didn't heal right. I got problems with my right ankle, blood pressure, all kinds of stuff. Right. Okay.

Beasley wanted the court to see a broken man, not a manipulator or a predator, but a frail victim outwitted by a conniving teenager named Brogan Rafferty. If it was an act, it worked at first. At nearly every pretrial hearing and throughout the trial itself, Beasley appeared in a wheelchair, a cane clutched in one hand, his head bowed low as if even holding his head up was too much to bear.

So he was even playing a con in court.

Every word that came out of his mouth was a con.

Former special prosecutor at Emily's co-counsel in the Beasley case, Paul Scarsella. You said he was good on the stand. Right?

Every conman has that ability, right? That's what makes him a conman. They can spin a yarn, they can tell a tale, and he told a heck of a story.

And people believed he needed a wheelchair? And I mean, he kept his head down in court.

He looked old, and you have to remember, the jury only sees what they are permitted to see from the judge, so they don't see the things that have not been admitted into evidence. They don't see the fact that we know that he's walking around in the jail as soon as that wheelchair goes away and that he's manipulating everyone in the jail to get a special mattress or food or whatever it is. So all they see is this man who looks old in a wheelchair.

In January of 2012, when Emily, Paul, and the assistant Summit County prosecutor got the green light to work the Beasley case, the real work began. And it didn't let up. You get the case, and then what happens? You start talking to the different agencies and gathering the evidence?

They had a meeting in Guernsey County where all of the agencies showed up and basically talked about how it was going to go forward from there, and then it just never slowed down from that point. It went on and on.

We were in the process of collecting all the information, both from the FBI, from the Noble County Sheriff's Department, from Bureau of Criminal Investigation, with the Attorney General's office, from the Akron Police Department, from the Marshall Service, from Summit County Sheriff. There were so many different agencies, and just coordinating the emails from Google was just ridiculously largem, the amount of information that came from Google because of the way that they track emails and store emails and everything else. And the FBI and everybody else was fantastic about collecting all that evidence, but there was just so much to go through.

The evidence was overwhelming. According to the Akron Beacon Journal, defense attorneys told the court they were combing through more than 40,000 records. Emails, crime scene photos, witness statements, cell phone data, and more.

I think we had 150 some witnesses on our final witness list.

So how long were your days?

Oh, gosh. I know when we were in trial, we would be at the courthouse probably by seven and wouldn't leave until eight. I mean, it depended on the day, but we were there late nights. I always had snacks.

Emily was the one that kept us fed. So…

Did she bring bananas?

She did. So she always had a food bag.

I just want to back up a little bit to the place where now you’re interviewing family members of the victims, and I just wondered what was that like and how do you prepare yourself to do something like that?

Summit County at the time had a really good victim advocate, so we worked through her many times. I know that I spoke with Deborah Bruce, David Pauley's twin sister, and I had her on the stand, and so I established a relationship with her and I have nothing but the utmost respect for her. I thought she was a wonderful woman. She was always present. She asked questions, and I think more than anything she trusted us, and so we always kept her up to date on what was happening. We were always honest about things too. We played Brogan Rafferty's statement and believe both in the suppression hearing and then in trial, and it's incredibly difficult to hear.

We as a group kind of broke up the victims. I don't remember it being intentional, but we all just kind of broke them up. So John tended to deal with Ralph Geiger, and that was kind of the focus of his as getting all the witnesses together that dealt with Ralph's homicide. And Emily kind of dealt with Deb and the Pauley family. And for whatever reason, the Kerns kind of fell to me. So that's kind of how it all broke out.

As the special prosecutors waited through a mountain of evidence, Beasley's court appointed attorney Rhonda Kotnick was scaling a mountain of her own. With the trial looming, Kotnick and her co-counsel hired a forensic psychologist, someone who might help the jury see a different version of Richard Beasley, not as a cold-blooded killer, but as a man broken by his past.

I'll explain to you what it is that anything he asks, you cooperate. He's a forensic psychologist.

And there was dysfunction in Beasley's past. Court documents reveal a childhood allegedly marked by abuse, and a young boy who learned to lie to survive. In court, Beasley's mom would testify that her son had been sexually abused by neighborhood boys.

One of the things is this forensic psychologist is going to want to talk to granddad and other members of the family about my childhood, what happened when I was raised up, everything okay. And he will testify at the trial and it could be a mitigating factor.

Beasley seemed enthusiastic that a new psychological narrative was taking shape. One that cast him not just as an aging chaplain, but as a man molded by a painful past. Beasley was more than willing to play his part because in a sensational trial like this one would be, everyone played a part. Everything becomes theater, from what's said to how it's said to what you wear in court. And that brings us back to Emily, the assistant DA, who was pregnant with her second child during the trial. Her pregnancy wasn't just about morning sickness or unflattering maternity clothes. Emily's pregnancy became part of the psychological game too. Another layer in a courtroom where perception could be as powerful as fact.

I just remember thinking, how am I going to hide this from the jurors? Because then, especially as a woman, when you're trying cases, it's very different because they judge women very differently than they do men in trial. So you have to take that into account. So I was like, how do I almost hide this but still enjoy it at the same time? So it was a very conflicted feeling going on.

So you didn't want to appear vulnerable to jurors who you wanted to see you as a tough prosecutor.

I was the only woman other than the judge. Especially as a woman, you can come across as a number of things in trial. You can come across as too harsh and pure cold. You can appear too soft, and then you fall into that stereotype of, oh, you're the caring woman that's going to take care of everyone, so you do have to find this balance. So trying to juggle all of that, which I'd had experience with many trials figuring this out, but I had done it pregnant too, but just making sure that I kept that all on the even keel, all the while making sure I had snacks for the table and trying to keep some, and it sounds so silly, but trying to keep some kind of normalcy. You have to have some silly outlet when you're dealing with such awful things and you're seeing pictures of people who, now you have relationships with their families and you're seeing awful pictures of them, or you're hearing awful descriptions of what happened or someone describe in the coldest, most callous voice what they did to them. And you have to just sit there and not cry. And I'm a crier. I cry over commercials, I cry over a lot of things. So you had to keep all with that in check.

And I think one of the things that was actually helpful for us is, part of it's hard is that we both lived in Columbus at the time, so our families were here. Well, the trial's in Akron we're not driving back and forth from Columbus every day. But Emily got to stay with her parents, and I stayed in Youngstown with my parents. So at the end of the day, she would go to her parents. I would drive an hour to my dad's in Youngstown. So having that release valve, if you will, having that sense of home, that someplace, that touchstone, I think helped get us through that as well.

Carol Beasley. We haven't spent much time talking about Beasley's ever present, fiercely loyal mother who stood by her son through every arrest, every prison stay, every court date. But this time something seemed to shift. Carol Beasley feared this would not end well for her son. So she made a decision, a bold, costly, desperate decision. I know that at some point, Richard Beasley came into some money and then he hired a different attorney. Why did he do that?

We spent a lot of time with his mother, Carol Beasley. She's a really nice lady.

Rhonda Kotnick was Beasley's public defender,

And I think she had taken out a loan on her house or home equity or something with her savings because she felt that she had to pay attorneys, that court-appointed weren't good enough. I don't remember her exact words, but it was something like it was something she had to do.

Oh, so she's also religious, right?

Yeah, she is. I mean, she was just a nice lady and she believed a hundred percent her son was not capable of doing these things. A hundred percent true mother there to the end, still visiting and putting money on his books.

So she must have paid a good bit of money for hiring this new attorney.

Two attorneys.

Two attorneys.

We had monthly meetings. I mean, just how's the progress? How's this going? And so we were working hard and Richard always was in the loop as to what was happening, but I think it was just mom felt a better comfort level if she retained an attorney.

I remember him from a long time ago. It was James Burdon, right?

Yeah. He was one of the top people in Akron.

She believed her son deserved the best defense one that could match the weight of the charges against him. So she hired the best, most expensive defense attorneys in town, and maybe that's what Beasley needed, because on February 19th, 2013, nearly two years after Beasley killed Ralph Geiger for his name, Richard Beasley's capital murder trial began, and it would be a spectacle, one that would take center stage literally. I want to focus a little bit on jury selection because Emily said that was quite the thing.

That's one word for it. Took forever.

It did take forever, but that's not what it made it unforgettable. It was a location: the Akron Civic Theater, a grand gilded palace built to the 1920s, known for concert symphonies and standup comedy, red velvet seats, painted sky ceilings, gilded balconies. But in February of 2013, the stage lights rose on something no audience had ever seen there. Before Richard Beasley's death penalty case, the Civic Theater was the only venue big enough to hold it, all 500 potential jurors, rows of attorneys, armed deputies, and the media.

We had the Akron Civic Theater where we filled it up with potential jurors and we sat on the stage because the jury pool had to be so large, not just because it was high profile, but because it was a death case. And some jurors, when they're going through the process, will say they don't want to sit on a death penalty case. So the best way to do it was pretty much to call in like half of Akron, sit them in the Akron Civic Theater while we sat on stage.

I forgot we sat on stage. I completely forgot.

Yeah. Yeah.

The star of the show, grandpa Rich, was there too. He arrived slumped in a wheelchair in a dark suit. His head bowed low. The proceedings were both dramatic and mundane.

And so that was the first phase where it was just, we're going to give you questionnaires and you fill those out, and then we have to go through all of them.

That panel was 500 people that came in and filled out questionnaires, and then we go through all the questionnaires and they break 'em down into groups of like, I think we did six or eight.

It was exhausting. And all the while the attorneys are basically asking the same questions over and over.

The special prosecutors didn't want to risk a juror who secretly opposed the death penalty. Defense attorneys only wanted jurors who were open-minded or anti-death penalty. It took days to whittle down the jury pool to 12 with three alternates. But once the jury was seated, the trial moved back to the Summit County Courthouse, and the main event began

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.

So you get the jury, and I'm going to go to opening arguments because Emily, you decided to use a certain phrase that the judge didn't really like.

I don't know, the judge was fine with it.

The Court of appeals may have had a comment.

No, the defense attorneys objected. The opening statement, when you give your opening statement, we have a mantra that, and a lot of prosecutors do that you under promise and overdeliver. We had this theme, if you will, of what we wanted to present, and we wanted from the beginning that the jurors to understand that what they were seeing was not what it really was, and what this individual presented as was not who he really is within. So one of the phrases that everyone's always heard is it's a wolf in sheep's clothing, and this really shows you what a bad Catholic I am. I googled the phrase to find out where it was from. I was like, oh, shit, it's from the Bible. And then it just kind of fell into place, and I'm like, well, I'm going to use that as my theme, because we'd used the phrase a wolf in sheep's clothing all the time, but I just didn't know where it was from.

So I put that on the screen in big letters in my PowerPoint, whatever font I used. And as I'm going through it pregnant, and I just remember my face was turning red because I just had really hyper blood flow, and plus I'm nervous. It's kind of like an out-of-body experience when you give an opening statement. I got nervous every time just trying not to pass out, holding onto the table. And I knew that if I quoted the Bible in some ways, now that I knew what it was, 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, we know you. We see you, and we're going to put this up there. So as soon as I said it, objection, and we go to the sidebar.

So it was a deliberate poke at Richard Beasley because he called himself Chaplain Rich, and…

Yes.

…used God to attract these vulnerable people. Did he react?

I didn't see him.

He was really good throughout the course of the trial of not reacting. Okay. She doesn't look. I always watch. I always want to see what kind of reaction is going on. He was really very poker faced and did not react very much throughout the course of the trial. He did not like the wolf in sheep’s clothing. You could tell that he kind of fidgeted in his seat. It got to him.

Cus he truly believes he is a…

I don't know what he truly believes, but he did not like being referred to in that fashion.

So there was the objection, and the judge sustained the objection, and we moved on.

The special prosecutors carefully laid out their case against Beasley, witness by witness. One of them, Deborah Bruce, the twin sister of victim David Pauley

My twin brother, who's 51 years old, found a job on Craigslist as a farm caretaker near Cambridge. I've been looking through newspaper articles and everything and saw the one about the man that was bored and had been shot. I was like, this is just two close to what my brother was going there for.

But he found a job on Craigslist too?

Yes, he did.

I wondered what you could share that you think people don't realize.

I think that the hardest thing was having to go into the courtroom and sit there and watch the defendant be brought in. At one point, I made eye contact with Richard Beasley, and he just kind of had a smirk on him. And for me personally, I never really felt anger. I don't know why I've never experienced anger about any of this. But for that split second, if the deputies had not been ready to block me, as I could tell they were, I probably would've punched him in the face to be honest with you. I was just like, who do you think you are to get to look at me like that?

That was just one emotional landmine for prosecutors. In your mind, when you put people up on the stand, who was the most difficult to ask questions of?

I would say the survivor. Scott Davis.

Scott.

Yeah.

Scott Davis was to be the star witness. The man who escaped Richard Beasley, the man who first sounded the alarm who survived a Craigslist ambush in the woods of Noble County.

I spun around. A gun was pointed directly to the back of my head.

Scott's testimony was critical because it would paint a picture of how the crimes went down, and because prosecutors knew what was coming. They suspected Beasley would take the stand to spin his own version of what happened in those woods. Let's jump ahead in time to that moment because the special prosecutors were right. Beasley did take the stand. He rose from his wheelchair and stepped onto the witness Stand.

Do you solemnly swear or affirm is the truth, the whole truth, nothing but the truth?

Suddenly, Beasley was no longer the broken man, too frail to hold his head up. He became a showman, a performer.

You and Brogan Rafferty and Scott Davis Hall end up in the same car?

Yes.

And that would've been Brogan Rafferty’s car?

Sure would've, his Buick.

And where were you in the car?

I was in the front seat on the passenger side.

And Brogan was driving?

Yes.

And where was Mr. Davis?

He was sitting behind me

Right now. You didn't recognize Scott Davis as having seen him or know him before?

No, I did not.

Now, would you describe in your own words then, what happened after you got to the location where you were going to actually physically get out of the car and look at the farm?

Oh, well, we went down to the farm and looked at the farm and he was undecided as to whether or not he was going to take the job or not. He said, let me think about it. He said, by the time we get back to town where my truck's at, I'll have you an answer. So we left and we went back up the drive, and instead of making a right to go directly back to town, Brogan made a left. And I said, I asked him, I said, Brogan, why are we going this way? He said, well, this goes along the back of the farm so he can see where the rest of the farm’s at. And we go down this road and this road is trashed. There's been a partial mudslide or something, and there's gravel and there's ruts, and Brogan's car is dragging real bad. And he said, guys, we're never going to make it to the bottom with all this weight in here. I thought we could get through. I'm going to let you off down here. Go around and turn around and we'll go back the other way. And at that point, he had picked a wide spot in the road and he let Scott and I out and he went down the hill to turn around and come back.

You mean Brogan did?

Brogan did. He was driving the car. Yes.

So he drove the car down to turn the car around?

To turn the car around.

And you and Scott Davis did what?

Scott Davis then pulled out a revolver and pointed it at my head, and I threw my hands up and about urinated in my pants. And I just said, why? And he explained why. He said, brother, you're a weak link.

Tell us what you have learned in your years of connection with these violent motorcycle gangs, what that phrase means.

It means he knew I was a rat, an informant. Weak link is used to describe somebody who either is a snitch or they think is going to snitch, and it's usually used as in you have to take the weak link out of the chain.

Beasley told the jury that Scott Davis was part of a violent motorcycle gang out for revenge because Beasley was a snitch. It was a lie, but Beasley figured it might land. It had worked before. The Noble County Sheriff at the time, Steven Hannum had initially pegged Scott as a drug dealer based on nothing more than how Scott looked. That still stung, and prosecutors feared it might still be in Scott's head when he took the stand. So why did it cause you problems that the sheriff initially didn't believe Scott?

Here you have this guy who's just been through something completely awful, and when something terrible happens, you call law enforcement, right? And you expect them to believe you. And by kind of association prosecutors are law enforcement. So here we come in and we're asking this man who's just been through something so awful to trust us. And by nature too, Scott's a pretty quiet guy. So we had to kind of get over the fact with him that he had been disrespected by law enforcement the first time around, that he had to trust us, that he had to trust us enough to talk about something so awful in his life, and that he had to not just do that, but then also do all of those things in front of the person that did it. So getting over the trust factors and the fear factors and the trauma just was a lot.

In the end, it did prove too much. Scott took the stand and froze.

He was like pulling teeth.

Because he was not a talkative kind of guy?

No, not talkative, scared. Just trying to get anything out of him was next to impossible.

He was the hero of this.

He was. He didn't see it that way,

Really?

No.

Emily was leading the charge that day, asking the questions. Her star witness was unraveling. She had to break through fast, so she gambled

And I made the decision to ask a question. Is there anything else about him that you remember from the breakfast that you had with him?

It was a shot in the dark. She figured that an open-ended question would unlock something, anything.

And out of the blue he said, I remember that he had a really shitty looking Popeye tattoo on his arm. And I just sat there and froze. I'm like, what is he talking about? I have no clue what he's talking about.

Emily had broken the oldest rule in the book, never ask a question you don't already know the answer to. And now everything hung on Popeye the sailor man.

And he described the tattoo. And I look over at Paul and I'm just like, oh, shit, what do I do? And I don't remember if I asked for a moment, but what if there's no tattoo there? What am I supposed to do? Because if the tattoo is there, and you have this man who's visibly upset and scared and intimidated on the stand, describing a really shitty Popeye tattoo is incredibly specific. If it's on his arm, this is the Matlock moment that never happens. This does not happen in real life. And so do we ask the court to instruct him to pull his sleeve up? And we did.

And it was there. It was like that moment in the OJ Simpson trial. If the glove doesn't fit, you must have quit. Except this time the tattoo fit Beasley rolled up his sleeve, and there it was Popeye.

I was thinking like, praise Jesus that I've just taken his name in vain a thousand times, but I just was like, oh my God, it was there. That was really cool.

Even after that big win, the special prosecutors weren't breathing easy. They worried the jury might still fall for Beasley's final con, that a motorcycle gang wanted to kill frail Grandpa Rich for ratting them out to the cops. And that Brogan Rafferty was in on it. And he, Beasley, was just a snitch who happened to know some motorcycle gang members down in Noble County. So prosecutors took another risk on country, not the heartland, the man, the owner of the farm were Beasley buried the bodies. I don't think anybody wanted this witness except Paul. He was the only one. And it was the last minute call.

It was a rebuttal witness. So Beasley was a storyteller, and he told a good story and told a phenomenal story, and he testified about – where the property was found was owned by a guy whose nickname in this motorcycle gang in Akron, his nickname was Country, and his wife was Township and his son was County. Okay? Country, Township, and County. Well, he's putting all of this on County, on the son. Well, he knows he can't put it on Country because Country had fallen down the steps when he was drunk one night and suffered a brain injury and wasn't able to go out and kill people and bury them on the farm that they owned.

So those are real people.

Yes, they're real people. Legitimate. The owner of the farm where we found the bodies, this is the guy who owned the property. So there was an actual farm.

Actually was a farm that was owned by these people. And we debated whether or not to put County on a witness stand as rebuttal. And Emily and John were adamantly opposed. And I'm like, the jury wants to hear from him, and they're like, you're nuts. There's no reason to put him on a witness stand. I'm like, we got to put him on a witness stand. Jury wants to hear from him. He shows up. Got his red ponytail, big beard, wearing his khaki shirt that says United States Marine Corps and was a phenomenal witness and just got up there.

I just sat there and scowled at Paul. I was like, God damn it. Seriously? We've been so organized and put so much time into this. And this guy just flies by the seat of his pants and calls his witness in who is an active…

He had retired from the motorcycle club, wasn't with the club anymore, was involved with them in his younger days, but had come out of the Marine Corps and was just,

He's a great guy,

So what did he say in his testimony?

He got on the witness stand and we went through exactly who he was and yes, that that was his farm and that they knew Beasley and that he had spent some time with Richard and everything else. And I'm like, well, did you ever kill anybody? He was like, no. The only people I ever killed was when I was in the Marine Corps and I was overseas, but most of the time I was on a computer in a tank. So I didn't see anybody like that. The whole nine yards. He goes, I'm like, do you know anything about computers? He goes, I couldn't set up an IP address if my life depended upon it. The whole story was that he was the one who did this, and they were framing Richard for being a snitch about the motorcycle club. And the story, the jury kind of half bought it, or at least they could have theoretically bought it. I knew the jury wanted to hear from somebody, and I think it worked. And when we talked to the jurors after, they're like, oh, thank you for bringing him in. That answered all of our questions right off the bat.

Let's go back in time once again to Brogan Rafferty's trial. The boy Beasley counseled spiritually and molded criminally. His trial wrapped up before Beasley's began. It wasn't in juvenile court, but in Summit County Court. Brogan was tried as an adult. Prosecutors painted Rafferty as a willing accomplice. The defense said he was a scared kid, manipulated by a dangerous man, afraid for his life and his family’s. Rafferty also took the stand in his own defense, insisting he was Beasley's victim, not his partner. Paul Scarsella cross-examined Rafferty. What was it like to cross examine Brogan?

It was fun. He didn't like me.

You could tell from the get-go?

Oh, we went at it right off the bat. My cross was not about actually getting anything from him. My whole goal was to piss him off.

Really? So how did you do that?

Just asked really short, direct questions, and he didn't like any of it. And I called him a liar on several different occasions, and it was probably not the most effective cross examination, but it was the strategy that I was going with time. Probably could have done it much better, kind of wish I had.

But we also had his statement where he confessed to everything.

So he had given a statement, everything he said, and then he gets on the witness stand and tries to show just how scared he was about everything. So my focus was on that he wasn't scared that he was enjoying this. And then at the end, I went through several people in his life that he had talked to and talked about, but that he never brought any of this up with them. I'm like, this was your coach or your teacher or your friend or your neighbor, and all of these people that you've talked about on the stand, on direct about how they were part of your life. But you witness a murder and you never think to go talk to them. You never think that they can protect you, and then you witness a second murder and you don't think that they can protect you, and then you witness a shooting and then you commit a murder, that kind of thing. And that was how it went. Angry Paul came out, I think probably more than he needed to.

According to the Akron Beacon Journal, Rafferty wrote a letter to his father from jail. In it, he said he believed God will keep him from a long incarceration. He clung to the hope that there's a chance I might get out by the time I'm 42. He added, I know there is no way in hell that any kind of God would do that to me. Rafferty also apologized to his father for putting him in this position. He said jailers had placed him in solitary confinement where he spent most of his time exercising and reading books like Treasure Island and Robin Hood. Rafferty's father later gave a copy of that letter to the Cleveland Plain Dealer. Rafferty pleaded not guilty to multiple charges including murder. He was offered a plea deal, but he turned it down. So as you know, the case went to trial, and after 20 hours of deliberations on October 30th, 2012, the jury returned its verdict: guilty on all counts.

Rafferty was convicted of all the murders, but the only one he was found to be the principal offender on was Tim Kern's. Even though we presented different evidence in both of those cases, they're very similar evidence, but there were differences. Both juries came to the same conclusion that Brogan was the one who actually killed Tim Kern. He was the one who actually pulled the trigger

Rafferty's sentence? Life without parole. Rafferty, just 17 years old, would likely never go home again.

In a move that surprised many Richard Beasley stood up from his wheelchair, took the witness chair, and then denied involvement in the Craigslist killings.

Richard Beasley continued to spin an elaborate story on the stand. He blamed everyone but himself for the murders of Ralph Geiger, David Pauley and Tim Kern. He called Scott Davis a liar. He blamed motorcycle gang members for the killings. He even told the court Ralph Geiger allowed him to assume his identity so he could escape parole violations in Texas. The Summit County special prosecutor, John Baumel, cross examined Beasley.

Then John, when he cross-examined Richard Beasley, you have to know that John was very calm. He was the calmest of the three of us. He was very quiet, spoken, nice, nice guy. And when he got up to cross-examine Richard Beasley, there was an angry John. I'm like, oh my. Where has this been the whole time?

It's the first emotion we'd seen the whole time.

Stuck a gun at the back of his head.

You're a liar.

Just as you done to Scott Davis, pulled the trigger and shot him in the back of the head.

I did not do that.

It was a great cross-examination. It was controlled, it was poignant. It was all of the things that he needed to be because he didn't play into Richard's game at that point. John was prepared. He did a great job.

On March 11th, 2013, the prosecution and the defense delivered their closing arguments. It was now up to a jury to decide Beasley's fate. This time his con would not work on anyone except maybe his mom. The jury came back in one day, guilty on all counts. On April 4th, 2013, Richard Beasley, who fancied himself a chaplain, a good man, was sentenced to die for his crimes. Scott Davis, a deeply religious man, felt no pity, none at all.

You are a wolf in sheep's clothing. Vengeance is mine sayeth the Lord. I wouldn't want to be in your shoes on that day.

Deborah Bruce, David Pauley's twin was right there with him. So Richard Beasley sits on death row. Now, I wondered what you thought about the death penalty and Richard Beasley, and if that's where he belongs.

That is absolutely where he belongs. That is absolutely where he belongs. I believe in the death penalty and I hope to be there the day they execute him.

I think there is a possibility that Brogan Rafferty might get parole.

There is, and that is another thing that made me angry, and I guarantee you with his parole hearings come up, I'm going to be right there waiting to have my say. I'm going to do everything in my power to keep him from ever getting out of jail. And after I'm gone, my kids are going to do the same thing, especially my daughter has said repeatedly, I will be there.

Today, Richard Beasley sits on death row. I have no desire to reach out to him. He had his say through jailhouse phone calls, police interrogations, and hours of courtroom testimony. Maybe you think I should confront him. Maybe one day I will, but right now I can't. I just can't.

Emily and Paul were right about this case. It gets under your skin and it takes a long, long time to crawl back out. I'm just curious. So you accomplished this. Are you still glad that you went through this? Because it was a lot.

There were times that I thought we were the dog that chases the speeding car and actually caught it, and we didn't know what to do with it at that point. But looking back, I think Emily and I, I think we handled it as well as anybody else could have. But I think the ability to keep both cases together, to handle the families in the matter we did, is probably one of the things I'm proudest about of my career as an attorney.

But you've told me that this case kind of made you want to leave.

It was one of those, and I do have to give credit also to Jen Baumel, who was the assistant prosecutor from Summit County. But yeah, this kind of case can test you and it tests your belief in humanity. But for all of the bad things that we saw, I just keep falling back on the relationships that were established with the families and with the court. And I've done other murder cases, I've done other capital cases. This one just stands out as something completely different. It had a different level to it.

This was supposed to be the final episode, but there are still some loose ends to tie up and even a few hopeful turns to share. So ,next time: Epilogue, Loose Ends.