Nobody Would Miss Them: The Craigslist Murders of Richard Beasley
10 Minute Murder | Bingeable True Crime Stories
Joe
4.9 • 638 Ratings
🗓️ 2 June 2026
⏱️ 12 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
In 2011, Richard Beasley of Akron, Ohio was convicted in the homicide investigation surrounding the murders of Ralph Geiger, 56, David Pauley, 51, and Timothy Kern, 47 — three men lured to a remote Noble County location through a fraudulent Craigslist job posting, then shot and buried in shallow graves. A fourth victim, Scott Davis, 49, survived a gunshot wound and escaped through the Ohio woods after dark, triggering a digital forensics investigation that ultimately put Beasley on death row.
Here's what makes this one different: Richard Beasley was not a ghost. He was the large, white-bearded man everyone in Akron called Preacher Rich. He spent years sitting across from vulnerable people in jail visiting rooms and courtroom hallways, making himself indispensable to them, so he could eventually burn it all down when the moment was right. These three men were chosen. Beasley sat across from them in restaurant booths and ran actual interviews, screening for whoever had the fewest people who would notice if they vanished. This is a story about economic desperation, a career con man's patience, and a survivor named Scott Davis who refused to die alone in the dark.
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | There was a job on Craigslist, 688 acres of Ohio farmland, a furnished two-bedroom trailer, |
| 0:09.0 | $300 a week, and a few cows to feed. Dozens of men answered that ad in the fall of 2011. |
| 0:17.0 | Most had been out of work for a while. Some were even living out of their cars. |
| 0:21.6 | Three of them never made it back home. |
| 0:24.5 | And the man behind that ad was not some faceless stranger. |
| 0:28.5 | He was the large, friendly, white-bearded guy that everyone in Akron knew as Preacher Rich. |
| 0:35.0 | Today we're talking about Richard Beasley and how deliberate every single part of it was. Richard Beasley grew up in Akron, after his family relocated from Washington, D.C. when he was just a few weeks old. |
| 1:09.5 | And like so many serial killers that we talk about |
| 1:12.0 | here, Richard's childhood was really rough, an alcoholic, physically abusive stepfather, |
| 1:19.3 | years bounced between relatives, sexual abuse by neighborhood kids that he kept private for decades. |
| 1:26.4 | He graduated from high school in |
| 1:28.0 | 1976. He learned a trade. He married. Had a daughter named Tanya. And then he spent the |
| 1:34.0 | following decades building a criminal record. He did time in Texas on a burglary conviction. |
| 1:40.0 | He did six federal years on an illegal weapons charge and got out in 2004. |
| 1:45.0 | In 2005, a dump truck hit his car. |
| 1:49.0 | He had serious spinal injuries. |
| 1:51.0 | He developed an opiate dependency and a $125,000 settlement followed. |
| 1:57.0 | He used a cane to get around, sometimes a wheelchair. He told people that he'd put |
| 2:02.5 | that settlement money, that $125,000 into a halfway house on Yale Street in Akron. He had, in fact, |
| 2:10.8 | done exactly that. He also filled it with women that he was coercing into sex work through a |
| 2:16.9 | combination of crack cocaine, |
| 2:18.8 | meth, and the patient practice psychological manipulation of someone who had been studying |
... |
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