Ohio teen convicted in deadly Craigslist scheme

ANDREW WELSH-HUGGINS

AP Legal Affairs Writer

AKRON — An Ohio teenager was found guilty of aggra­vated mur­der Tues­day for his role in a deadly plot to lure men des­per­ate for work with phony Craigslist job offers.

Pros­e­cu­tors in the week­s­long trial painted 17-year-old Bro­gan Raf­ferty as a quick stu­dent of vio­lence and will­ing par­tic­i­pant in three killings, while the defense argued he was act­ing under the duress of his alleged accom­plice, a self-styled chap­lain depicted as a mentor.

Author­i­ties say Raf­ferty, of Stow, helped Richard Beasley, of Akron, lure four vic­tims at sep­a­rate times with bogus Craigslist job offers to a nonex­is­tent cat­tle farm in rural Noble County in south­east Ohio; they say the motive was rob­bery. Author­i­ties say Beasley shot and killed three of the men; the fourth vic­tim was shot in the arm and survived.

Raf­ferty stood with his hands clasped behind his back and showed no emo­tion as the ver­dicts were read. His mother leaned over and cried softly.

Led from the court­room, Raf­ferty shook his head and said, “Noth­ing to say.” He didn’t respond to reporters’ ques­tions about the verdict.

Pros­e­cu­tors and the defense, who are under a gag order, didn’t com­ment afterward.

Raf­ferty had tes­ti­fied that he didn’t want to be a part of such vio­lence and said he went along with the plan only because he feared for his life.

“I thought he’d kill me,” Raf­ferty said.

Raf­ferty was tried as an adult but faces a max­i­mum poten­tial sen­tence of life in prison because he is a juve­nile. His sen­tenc­ing is set for Nov. 5.

Beasley, 53, has pleaded not guilty and could face the death penalty if con­victed at his sep­a­rate trial.

Jurors reached the ver­dict on their fourth day of delib­er­a­tions, con­vict­ing Raf­ferty of three counts of aggra­vated mur­der and one count of attempted murder.

The man who sur­vived, 49-year-old Scott Davis of South Car­olina, had tes­ti­fied as the prosecution’s star wit­ness, iden­ti­fy­ing Raf­ferty as Beasley’s accom­plice and telling a har­row­ing story.

Davis told a crowded, hushed court­room that he had moved to the Can­ton area after sell­ing his South Car­olina busi­ness to be closer to his fam­ily, and responded to a Craigslist ad to work as a farmhand.

He said he met Raf­ferty and a man who called him­self “Jack” for break­fast before dri­ving to an iso­lated Noble County farm.

Pros­e­cu­tors say that “Jack” was actu­ally Beasley, and that he urged Davis into a wooded area to look for farm equipment.

Davis said he heard a gun cock and turned around to find him­self face to face with a hand­gun. He said he pushed the weapon aside, was shot in the arm and fled as “Jack” fired at him.

Davis said he kept falling as he ran away but even­tu­ally made it to a creek bed, tried to stop the bleed­ing and waited for dark. In ris­ing pain and wor­ried that the blood loss would kill him, Davis said he climbed to a hill­top, found a house and asked to call 911.

“I was get­ting weak at that point,” Davis testified.

Dur­ing Rafferty’s trial, defense attor­ney John Alexan­der painted Beasley as the mas­ter­mind and said that the first killing came with­out warn­ing for Raf­ferty, who “had no idea any of this was going on.”

After the first killing, Alexan­der said that Beasley warned Raf­ferty to keep quiet and coop­er­ate by remind­ing him that he knew where his mother and sis­ter lived.

Pros­e­cu­tor Emily Pelphrey told jurors that Raf­ferty chose to par­tic­i­pate in the killings, say­ing he was a “stu­dent of vio­lent crime.”

“He made the choices he wanted to make,” she said.

Pros­e­cu­tors also showed jurors pho­tographs of a suit­case filled with weapons found in Rafferty’s bed­room, includ­ing a sawed-off shot­gun, a .22-caliber pis­tol, two knives and ammu­ni­tion. None of the weapons was con­clu­sively linked to any of the three killings.

Jurors also were shown pho­tos of the graves of the three men killed in the plot and said they were just try­ing to improve their lives and find work.

The three men were Ralph Geiger, 56, of Akron; David Pauley, 51, of Nor­folk, Va.; and Tim­o­thy Kern, 47, of Mas­sil­lon. Author­i­ties say they were tar­geted because they were older, sin­gle, out-of-work men with back­grounds that made it unlikely their dis­ap­pear­ances would be noticed right away.

All the vic­tims were robbed of things includ­ing per­sonal items, a truck and a weapon, pros­e­cu­tors say.

Davis’ escape on Nov. 6, 2011, is what led author­i­ties to find Pauley’s body in the same area where Davis was shot. Geiger’s body also was found in Noble County, while Kern’s body was found in a shal­low grave near an Akron-area shop­ping mall.

Beasley was a Texas parolee who returned to Ohio in 2004 after serv­ing time on a bur­glary con­vic­tion. He was await­ing trial on pros­ti­tu­tion and drug charges when author­i­ties took him into custody.

Police have said a halfway house he ran in Akron was a front for prostitution.

Posted by AP News on Oct 30 2012. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS Feed. Comments can be made below.