5 | The Fugitive

I was born and raised in Ohio and I have never been to Caldwell.

Same. Did not even know this place existed before this case.

Let me take you back to the day. Emily and I drove to Noble County, Ohio. To Caldwell, so I could see for myself where Richard Beasley chose to bury some of his victims,

Caldwell's tiny in the county of Noble County, and I think there’s only like 14,000 people in Noble County.

Caldwell is nestled in the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains, a quiet, peaceful place. The land rolls on forever here, wild and unbroken. The woods are thick, a hunter's paradise. A single falling leaf feels monumental. A snapped twig echoes like a gunshot.

I mean, I am convinced that zombies are in the woods, and if you made noise, nobody's there to hear you. You just truly feel that you are in the middle of nowhere,

And if you know where to look in this beautiful place, you'll find something else: the faint impressions of three graves, each one, the length of a grown man,

There was such precision in the way that he was doing things. You wouldn't just stumble upon this. This was a part of Ohio that you only see in the movies.

This is the God Hook episode five of 10: The Fugitive.

If you're going to stand up and stand up, you're going to stand against the wickedness and stand against wickedness. You're going to stand for what's right then stand for what's right. You're going to walk with God, then walk with God. Amen? I'm just saying it's all or nothing, man.

Chaplain Rich, admired Pastor Baker's words, but he would not heed them. He would not walk with God – he would run from him. Yet in the days leading up to the bond hearing that would set Beasley free, God was undeniably on his mind. From behind bars at the Summit County Jail, he repeatedly requested clergy visits from local pastors, the same kind of clergy visits he himself provided to young women inmates.

Yeah. Mary came down to visit…clergy visit.

These men of God, soothed him.

We had a good time, real long time in prayer together. Makes me feel real good and tell you the truth. Brought my blood pressure down.

What Beasley asked of God, we'll never know. Maybe it was about buying time, hoping that some divine intervention could miraculously set him free, but those quiet moments of prayer did nothing to quell the storm inside him. Texas still loomed. That was what sent his blood pressure soaring – a trip back to a Texas prison cell for violating his parole on a decades-old burglary conviction.

There's a hold on me from Texas. I'll never make bail, but I wish I could. I'd be out right now. I mean, they got a $25,000, 10% bond. I could be out. That's not a problem. It's just with a hold from Texas, it's not going to get done. That's all there is to it.

But it did get done. On July 15th, 2011, after spending five months behind bars, a 79-year-old visiting judge set Beasley free until trial. And just like that, Beasley was gone. For Lieutenant Detective Terry Pasko and his team who'd spent 18 months building a prostitution case against Beasley, it was a crushing blow.

What I still can't figure out is: if he had – and I believe he did – a parole holder out of Texas, then why was he released?

They were so close to filing charges, it almost felt like Pasko was being played somehow.

And who would authorize that release?

It was a Summit County Judge, James Murphy, who decided to grant Beasley his freedom before trial.

It's my understanding Texas is a compact state. We have a reciprocal agreement with Texas. We hold yours, you hold ours, and nobody leaves until you call and say, release him, or we come and pick him up at your door. And I still can't figure out why, because to me, he shouldn't have been released.

It's crucial to grasp the importance of this judge's decision and how deeply Beasley feared to return to a Texas prison cell because investigators believe it was the catalyst for all of what was to come.

I don't know. I go back and forth.

Emily, who prosecuted the Beasley murder case, says it's more complicated than that.

I can say that his motive was he didn't want to go back to prison, and I think that certainly was a way that we could describe it. This is the thing that set him off. He just didn't want to go back and he would do whatever he had to do to not go back. But then there's part of me, it's like, but for someone who had gotten away with so much before, whether or not that was the break that he realized, wow, things have caught up with me and I'm not going to get out of this. Or is he just thinking, I'm going to continue getting away with things and still no one's going to catch me, so it doesn't matter if I do this here.

I'm not sure where Beasley went in the days after he was released from the Summit County Jail. No one could find him. Police searched the city. No luck. His probation officer, his chaplain friends, even his own mother had no idea where he was. He didn't turn up at a shuttered halfway house, not in his mother's basement, not at The Chapel, not anywhere near the Akron Bible Church. Beasley had disappeared.

It made no sense. The logical thing would be get out of Ohio if you had family somewhere else. Not go back to Texas either. But I mean, he didn't have a whole lot. So if he's going to start over, he was selling his car off. He was selling everything he had off.

But there was one person who knew exactly where Beasley was hiding. A 16-year-old kid, a high school junior Brogan Rafferty, the boy Beasley, had taken under his wing. The boy who had witnessed things no kid should ever see.

I think that we have to start looking at why it is that someone like Richard Beasley would choose an accomplice or choose people to be around him. I think in some way, he wanted to be able to control them.

And a 16-year-old kid, a smart one, a capable one is still a 16-year-old kid and can be manipulated, and it's the beginning of a cult in a way. You've always got to get that first acolyte.

For Brogan, Beasley wasn't just a mentor, he was the father figure Brogan never had. Under Beasley's influence, the boy learned scripture. Comforting for sure, but Chaplin Rich's idea of redemption often dealt in darkness. Here's a police recording – Brogan's mother, her voice full of emotion, speaking openly about her son's bond with Beasley.

Can I say something too?

Yes.

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

Her concern for her son is clear even as she grapples with guilt over her inability to care for her son

For a while because of my doings, I don’t have the best history in the world and I've definitely not been the best mom, but now I am. I was worried about what my actions did to him, and now he's really just becoming a real man. I've been so impressed. I'll say something, sometimes I'm like, whoa, that's not my son.

And she's shocked that her son could have participated in anything criminal.

Boys will be boys, but lately he's really changed, and this is like a total shock.

Amy knew Brogan's mother from the streets. She says Brogan's parents were longtime friends of Beasley's who knew about his criminal past, his manipulations, but they believed his prison conversion was real, that he really had found God. They thought Beasley could give Brogan the stability they could not.

Did she ever talk about the relationship that Rich and Brogan had?

Yeah. She made it sound like Brogan was being cared for by him, and he’s just like a support system.

Amy witnessed Brogan grow up around the Yale street house. Beasley made sure the boy was always nearby, a quiet presence in a house full of attics and exploitation. He drove Brogan through Akron, pointing to street corners where he told Brogan, his mother allegedly worked.

He kept going on and on and on about it, about his mom being at the corner and prostituting. He said, that's it right there, and that's where she stands. And he's like, I know how bad it hurts you buddy, and that's why I'm here with you and I'm here for you and stuff. And I was like, wow.

And always there was talk of God.

Yeah, he'd say stuff like, ask God and he'll get you through this, or whatever, and stuff like that, but it would be so, it just was so hard to, even for Brogan, you have to be, because it's like one minute you're seeing this side, and then the next time you're seeing it, you're hearing this. So it's like for a child, it'd be…

It's a lot.

It's a lot.

Brogan saw both sides of Beasley: the preacher and the predator. For a child that must have been deeply confusing. Yet Brogan never fought back. He either wouldn't or couldn't disobey Chaplain Rich. Amy said the boy appeared broken and simply obeyed orders without question.

Rich pretty much ran him almost like a slave, like.

One minute, Beasley told Brogan to pray. The next, he sent the boy to find sex workers who owed Beasley money. Here's criminologist, Volkan Topalli.

I think he was just trying to break him down emotionally. Part of domineering another person is to break their ego down, so to speak, and sort of identifying your mother is this kind of person, I'm the one that's showing that to you, but still, I care enough for you to keep you around. That kind of thing.

Beasley's tactics were textbook mind control.

You're disrupting another human being's ability to engage in a logical thought process essentially. So keeping someone off balance essentially so that you can continue to domineer and dominate with them and be confident that they're going to be there for you and that they're going to do your bidding when you need them to.

Amy said Brogan wasn't just a victim. He was a project who became a sort of mini-me trained to follow in Beasley's footsteps.

Do you think he was teaching him, Rich was kind of starting to mold him a little bit in his own view?

Yeah.

So kind of like Rich part two?

Yes.

Beasley the predator was turning Brogan into a younger version of himself. By day, Brogan attended a good high school, an unremarkable student who blended into the crowd. But beneath the surface there was something darker. Brogan didn't just witness crime. Police say he romanticized it, immersing himself in books about the Irish mob, captivated by its brutality.

He was a giant man-boy, almost. He was tall, he was thick. His affect was always flat.

Emily says there was an emptiness about him. There was no fear, no rage, no remorse, nothing.

You would think that there'd be some kind of emotion or even just a bit of quivering in the voice when talking about these things. There was none of that. So if you had the ability to see him and listen to him, the idea that it was just this poor teenage boy was quickly, quickly just dispersed. There was such a coldness and emptiness. It was kind of like the crime scene, like you have to see where the crime happened to truly understand how far out you were, you have to hear his voice to understand the coldness and the emptiness that existed within this man-child.

Quiet, cold, removed from the rest of the world. A boy molded to follow orders. Maybe. That's for you to decide. But I do think it's important that you hear Brogan's voice. I'm getting a little ahead on the timeline here, but I want you to judge. Just about four months after Beasley walked out of the Summit County Jail, a detective sat down with Brogan Rafferty and pressed him for the truth.

Of course, you've known Richard Beasley quite some time. Is that right?

Yeah, coming up on seven years. I met him shortly after he got out when I was about ten.

Okay.

We had a little bit of an understanding that just as since he was a friend of my father's and we just had known each other for a while, that we had, I would do anything for you, you would do anything for me kind of thing, because that's just, we thought that we were that good of friends.

At some point, that friendship crossed a line and became something different.

When did he start getting you involved in crimes or these particular crimes? Is this something that recently has happened or is this something that's went on for quite some time?

Recently, this past year. He had gotten into altercation with some woman that he had staying with him and gotten into some legal trouble because of that. And of course he did about six months, I think it was for that. And then after he got out, I was thinking that everything would be back to normal and all that, but for one reason or another, they wanted him to go back in there and he decided that he was going to go out on the run.

A few weeks after Beasley went off the grid, he reached out to Brogan and told him in no uncertain terms he was not going back to jail.

So they wanted him to go back to jail. And Richard Beasley didn't want to go back to jail?

No.

Okay.

I think he was under the frame of mind that just the whole ex-convict thing, there was no way that he was going to be getting out again. So he took off, and I can't remember about when that was. It was of course when he decided to, but…

If I remember it correctly, he missed his court date sometime early August. Does that sound right?

That sounds about, yeah. Okay. And I think it might've been the second, I'm not sure. But anyway, somehow or other he was still in contact with me. I can't remember the details of that.

Okay. So he's on the run. He is on the lam. He's trying to keep a low profile from the cost, but he's still keeping in touch with you.

Yeah, and I can't remember whereabouts he was staying, but I'm sure that I knew at some point. He presented the suggestion that he needed my help to survive since he didn't have any means of income.

Beasley needed Brogan's help, not to outrun the law, but to hide from the cops in plain sight, to shed his old life and become someone new. And in the process, Brogan Rafferty would become someone unrecognizable even to his own parents.

When was the first time that he got you involved in some crime?

That was, well, I am trying not to lie to you, so I'm thinking.

Just answer you the best you can. I don't expect you're going to know the date, but just do the best you can on a timeline of about when it was.

The only thing that I can think of would be the first incident that I related to my attorney would be the Geiger incident.

The Geiger incident. An unusual phrase for a kid who wasn't just aware of Ralph Geiger's death. He knew. He knew exactly what happened, how Geiger was killed in cold blood. The first of Richard Beasley's murder victims.

Disassociation is a good way to put it. It's the hallmark of someone who's been broken down by somebody else

And a quality necessary in an accomplice to murder,

Which is necessary if you need someone to help you do these horrific kinds of things. They can't be panicking. They can't be losing their emotional control over things. You need someone who's really under your control and dominated.

We are about to plunge into total darkness. With Brogan Rafferty, a full partner, Beasley orchestrated a deadly scheme that would keep him from going back to jail. This wasn't an impulsive act. It was calculated. You don't just stumble into a scheme like this. You sit down, you think, you plan.

I'm sure he had a huge amount of confidence that it was going to work.

I'm a Gen X kid, so I have a lot of stupid movies in my memory bank, but I would be like, oh my gosh, this guy is like Dr. Evil. But the fact that there was so much work and effort that went into this plan, it was a job.

That's a great way to put it. Actually. I do think he thinks he was an evil genius. The problem is there's so many variables to control with something like this.

Beasley thought he was Sherlock Holmes, that he could outsmart everyone, and for a while he did. What you are about to hear next is painful.

Tell us about the Geiger incident.

About, let's see, this is November. Be sometime in August, I think.

Okay. August of this year?

Yeah. I was to go help Beasley murder this man, hide the body for him or with him, not for him.

Sometime in late July or early August of 2011, Richard Beasley sat down and came up with a meticulous plan to kill a man to save himself. He would execute his plan in Ohio, even though he knew police were looking for him there.

I think Ohio was his fiefdom. I do. And I think Texas was just trouble for him and unfamiliarity and a more dangerous place. And Ohio was his comfort zone.

Beasley, who had ministered to the desperate and secretly prayed on them, would do it again. This time. His targets wouldn't be desperate women, but desperate men.

I think he was hanging around the Salvation Army areas in Akron.

Beasley wasn't just hanging around, he was hunting. His eyes swept the streets, searching for the perfect prey, the right height, the right weight, the right age, a man with the right eye color, the right skin tone, and most importantly, a man no one would come looking for someone. Richard Beasley could erase, someone he could become.

And somehow he stumbled upon this character named Ralph Geiger, who must look, who did look similar to him somewhat.

Ralph Geiger once ran a successful construction business, but by February of 2011 that life was gone. He was homeless, living in a shelter in downtown Akron. He didn't have much in the way of material possessions, no car, no cash, no home. But he hoped to regain all that he had lost. And then, out of the blue, a chance encounter, Geiger told a friend that a man had randomly approached him about work on a farm down in southeastern Ohio. In early August, Geiger left to rebuild his life.

You, Mr. Geiger, and Mr. Beasley getting this red car. Richard Beasley's driving?

No, Mr. Geiger's driving.

Oh, okay. Did Richard instruct you to bring anything with you, or what did he tell you when you guys were going to be gone, before you went?

He said that he was going to need to get another identity for this gentleman, that he had to have me help him do it.

Okay, and what were you going to do?

I wasn't told we're going to take him down here and murder him. He just said that he needed a new identity, that this guy looks similar to him, and he said that he needed to somehow murder him and then make his appearance overall similar to that gentleman's, but point being, I got in the car with him and Mr. Geiger, and then we drove down to Caldwell, Ohio.

Okay.

Brogan, Beasley, and Geiger. 100 miles south toward Caldwell, Ohio, towards something terrible. Oh my God. You know, it just struck me. We're going to Caldwell. We're going to God's country.

You look around and you're like, there is some higher thing that has created this country because this part of Ohio is beautiful.

We're about to leave the highway behind for back country roads. Soon I'll experience those woods for myself, the woods that hid so many secrets, and I'll come face to face with the man who unearthed them: the lead detective in Beasley's murder case, the man you heard questioning Brogan Rafferty. Noble County Sheriff Jason Mackey.

Jason's a great guy. Once you meet him, you'll see why. It's just important that you sit and talk with him. He really was the backbone of this case, in my opinion, and he just kind of encompasses everything that is Noble County

And what he found in those woods stayed with him, just as this case stayed with Emily. Oh, finally, we're here. Caldwell, Ohio: population 1,869. So should just park in the lot here?

Yep. Just walk right in. I'll come with you and introduce you to Jason.

Sheriff, I just want to get some sound levels on here. Just say the Pledge of Allegiance, please.

I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible.

Great.

You forgot under God.

I know. I'll see if anybody picked up on it. Let me know.

Sheriff Jason Mackey has a quiet confidence about him, a wry sense of humor. Our team set up in his office.

All righty. Sheriff Jason Mackey, take one.

Oh, I love that.

Okay, so we're ready.

Good to go. And there are no mistakes here. If you need to stop down and say something differently, it's all good.

You need to curse at me or anything, just go right ahead.

Okay, perfect.

Profanity is a-okay.

Okay. Sheriff Mackey isn't the biggest guy in the room, but he's tenacious, not the kind of man you want to mess with. What is clear: he loves this place. So you've lived here all your life?

Pretty much, yes. Rural southeast Ohio is beautiful. It's a great place to live, great place to raise a family. Overwhelmingly, very quiet, low crime. We don't have a lot of homicides.

Mackey knows this place. He knows the man who runs the gas station, the one who lives in the corner house, the family three generations deep. It's not just names and faces. He knows their stories.

So the community is very tight knit?

Yes.

Proud of their community?

Oh, absolutely proud.

So if I were a psychologist – and I'm not – I would say that you are not happy with people who underestimate Noble County.

I'm not happy with criminals that think they can come here and commit crimes and not face consequences.

In the fall of 2011, Mackey had no idea that his quiet town, Caldwell, Ohio, was about to become the backdrop of something monstrous. A calculated plan to seduce, to deceive, to kill. And if you think Brogan Rafferty, the devoted acolyte, would remain an obedient disciple who blindly followed the commands of his master, Sheriff Mackey would strongly disagree.

I think Broken Rafferty was just getting started.

Do you ever think that there may be more bodies that you don't know about?

Oh, absolutely.

Really?

Sure.

Next time, The Craigslist Ad.

So I spun around, a gun was pointed directly at the back of my head, and I kept running and running, I said, man, what the F are you doing, man? What's wrong with you?

Sheriff Hannum’s office.

We just had a gentleman come up to our front door, got some blood on him. He claims that he's been shot.

I tend to try to follow the evidence and try to find the truth.