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"It is November, and 5 a.m. feels like winter. As he has on many mornings these past four months of 2011, Brogan Rafferty, age 16, wakes up early to help his friend and mentor, Rich Beasley, on an errand of Rich\u2019s design. Brogan doesn\u2019t need to pick up Rich until 6, but unlike your typical teenager, Brogan likes to get up early and drink coffee in the morning so he has some time to himself before he leaves the house. Today they are going to pick up a man named Timothy Kern, age 47, who will be waiting for them in a strip-mall parking lot with all his earthly possessions. Like the three men who preceded him on this grim adventure, Tim answered an ad on Craigslist that said: We need someone to watch our farm down in southern Ohio. Live for free in a double-wide trailer, nothing in the way of duties except to take in the peacefulness of the countryside and remark on the changing of the seasons and make sure no one steals any farm equipment or perpetrates any mischief. The pay is $300 a week.\n\nBrogan pulls up in front of Rich\u2019s with plenty of time and throws his Buick into park. Rich comes lumbering across the front lawn, expelling steamy breath into the dark Akron morning, and deposits himself into the front seat. Brogan says nothing, as is his habit. Brogan is a junior of middling academic record at Stow-Munroe Falls High School, remarkable to his peers and teachers mostly for being such a giant of a human being. Six feet five inches, close to 230 pounds, and not finished growing yet. He\u2019s a laconic character, polite but suspicious of authority, prematurely world-weary with an easily inflamed sense of injustice and an almost pathological ability to keep his own counsel. The agenda today can\u2019t be a big mystery to Brogan. After all, he was the one who dug the hole yesterday out at a plot of neglected suburban scrubland near the old Rolling Acres Mall\u2014about yay wide and yay deep and big enough for an adult male body. Rich, not being partial to manual labor, had watched. As they pull out onto the road, Brogan wills himself not to think about what he and Rich will be doing this morning.\n\nRichard Beasley: age 52, former convict, motorcycle enthusiast, professed man of God, known on the Akron street as Chaplain Rich. He\u2019d started taking Brogan to church when Brogan was just 9 years old and already almost comically large and serious and quiet. Since then Rich has become probably Brogan\u2019s best friend, his uncle-dad, his guide to the Gospels of the Bible and the affairs of the teenage heart, to the mysteries of Akron and the even deeper mysteries of Brogan\u2019s own parents. Brogan calls him his counselor.\n\nThe enterprise that will bring them to Tim Kern began in August, in the dead of summer. Rich had discovered that there was a warrant out for his arrest, the product of a twenty-month investigation into the goings-on at a halfway house he operated. If he were arrested, he could very well spend the rest of his life in prison. And so Rich began to target men like Tim. At first because he needed a new identity, and later to provide a kind of income to support a life on the run.\n\nIt\u2019s like Rich\u2019s Craigslist ad was designed for a certain kind of person: male, white, unattached, aging, no longer fostering unreasonable ambitions or fueled by fantasies about what he might turn out to be someday, someone on the downward slope of life for whom things maybe haven\u2019t gone exactly as planned. It is sort of a retirement plan for the obsolete white man. In the industrial northeast of Ohio at the far side of the Great Recession, there is no shortage of these people. Rich has actually been interviewing subjects he carefully selects from the hundreds of men who reply to the ads. He\u2019s been showing up at the food court of the Chapel Hill mall with an official-looking application form, affecting the air of an affable blue-collar-type landowner who just wants to find someone friendly to camp out on his spread while he\u2019s up in Akron conducting the business of his normal life. Rich ascertains certain things from these gentlemen: Do you have a wife or kids or people you need to keep in close touch with? This farm, it doesn\u2019t have cell coverage; are you a fellow who can live in peaceful isolation? And what type of vehicle do you have, and would you be bringing that down with you when you came, and oh, there\u2019s a laptop computer? Bring it all with you, and my nephew and I will drive you on down to Caldwell.\n\nRich tells Brogan to get off the highway at an exit in the town of Canton. He says that Tim Kern is waiting in his car not too far from there. Brogan is quiet, as always. People tend to make assumptions about you when you are huge and so quiet you could be mistaken for mute. But Brogan is also observant. Rich smells this morning of bar soap and, beneath that, something fetid. Brogan notices he\u2019s wearing the same clothes as yesterday, and he wonders whether these are now the only clothes Rich has. Rich has always been a rumpled character, a corpulent man in denim and leather and boots, with long white hair he wears in a balding grandmother\u2019s braid. But one of Rich\u2019s life principles is to maintain a bright hygienic line between him and the street people he ministers to. His message: I live among you by choice; I can leave if I want. But by November of 2011, near the end of Richard Beasley\u2019s run, things are falling apart on both the bodily maintenance and criminal mastermind fronts. Rich has been dyeing his hair as part of his new identity, but now the filmy silver roots have grown out. He\u2019s abandoned his house and is now living on the east side of Akron in a rented room that doesn\u2019t even have a door you can close.\n\nFacebookPinterestA Tale of Two Dads: Mike Rafferty (left), with his son, Brogan, was a better but ultimately less formative father figure than Richard Beasley (right). Photo: Courtesy of the subjects\u2019 families \n\nBrogan will later say that he senses about Rich this morning a new kind of desperation. A more profound and disturbing desperation, if it\u2019s possible to vibe more profoundly disturbing than this whole thing has been from the start. In less than a month, Brogan will deliver a series of lengthy confessions to the FBI about the elaborately planned but almost logic-defying crimes he and Rich committed together. If you listen to the confessions carefully, they begin to sound different when Brogan starts describing this morning\u2019s events with Tim Kern. Throughout most of the hours of his statements, Brogan maintains a tone of almost stolid impassivity, sounding like someone who\u2019d merely watched a series of killings on a strange unmarked videotape he received in the mail\u2014what happened was awful, certainly, but concerned events that had nothing to do with him. But when he talks about Tim, it\u2019s like things won\u2019t stay psychologically tamped down. It\u2019s as if whatever mental box he\u2019d built to house these events so they would be out of sight, on this day that box comes unsealed and everything hidden there spills out.\n\nThere is a surveillance camera in the parking lot where Tim Kern is waiting in his 1995 Buick LeSabre. Footage from that camera will indicate it is five minutes after 6 A.M. on that morning of Sunday November 13, 2011, when Rich and Brogan arrive to get him.\n\n\n\nIt is hard not to like Rich Beasley right away. When I first see him, sitting in navy prison pants in the visitors\u2019 hall at Chillicothe Correctional Institution, which is situated in farmlands south of Columbus that are on this winter day frozen into a lifeless meringue, he stands and greets me with a commiserating smile that says: Can you believe it, the world is so fucked up, but did we really expect anything different? His hand is an old overboiled ham hock that envelops mine in a shake. He is large, with a fulsome white goatee and an untrimmed mustache that covers the absence of front teeth and works as a kind of flap behind which bites of microwave cheeseburger disappear as a dog disappears into a flap in a back door. He has lively, kind of almondy-shaped blue eyes that do not shy from contact and don\u2019t seem to have a thing in the world to hide. They might be said to have a mischievous twinkle. The hairs of the eyebrows are unruly and backward-reaching. He looks like the Grinch, or at least a little like he was drawn by a cartoonist.\n\n&amp;quot;I have to admit I don\u2019t get GQ magazine,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I get Easyriders magazine and something called Armchair General, about military history. I also read The Week cover to cover every week.&amp;quot;\n\nIt\u2019s here, in the old death-row visitors\u2019 wing at Chillicothe, a vast empty hall surrounded by two stories of Shawshank Redemption-vintage cells, that we speak for a total of about eight hours over two days. It\u2019s easy to see that Rich was a preacher. The man has the gift of gab. But he\u2019s not what you\u2019d call silver-tongued. His talent in the sermonizing arena was never soaring oratory, more of a folksy sociability. He can talk knowledgeably about using a store-bought still to make moonshine and the origin and bylaws of the Hells Angels, as well as how right Jesus was when he said to give unto Caesar what was Caesar\u2019s. Rich says he always lived by the laws of God but that, when he went on the run from the law, he wasn\u2019t living by the laws of man and that\u2019s wrong, so shame on him.\n\n&amp;quot;You seem like a guy people feel comfortable with,&amp;quot; I tell him.\n\nHe releases another commiserating grin, this one called guilty as charged. &amp;quot;People say that,&amp;quot; he replies.\n\nGod has been the one constant in his life, he tells me, thanks to his mom.\n\n&amp;quot;I accepted Jesus as my savior when I was 12 years old,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I was baptized then, and that\u2019s all the baptizing I needed, according to my religion.&amp;quot;\n\nRich\u2019s original and most defining role in Brogan\u2019s life was always: the guy who took him to church. First as a good-works type of deal and then because they were homeys. Rich did his ministering in the ghetto, but he and Brogan went to services at the Chapel, a giant evangelical church that looks not unlike an aging community college and serves thousands of mostly middle-class parishioners who don\u2019t fancy putting on airs when it comes to worship but value community and charity and Christ. Rich\u2019s mother, Carol, has been a member in good standing at the Chapel for forty years.\n\n&amp;quot;I took him to church because he needed it,&amp;quot; Rich says. &amp;quot;It was the right thing to do. His father would go to his [bikers] clubhouse on Friday and wouldn\u2019t be home. And his mother, well\u2026 But Brogan loved church. That was his punishment\u2014he wouldn\u2019t be allowed to go to church.&amp;quot;\n\nFacebookPinterestHelp Needed: Timothy Kern was nearly broke when Rich and Brogan picked him up in this Canton parking lot. Photo: Scott Heckel/The Repoitory/AP Photo\n\nThe two of them were also regulars at the Bible study held in the orchestra room afterward, where some socializing and fellowship were had. Everyone thought they were a funny pair, Brogan and Rich. The little-boy giant and the aging former biker. They tried to get Brogan in with the kids his age, but he just preferred to be with the older folks.\n\n&amp;quot;He was 9, but he looked 14,&amp;quot; Nancy Wilson, one of the regular members of the Bible study, told me at a Panera Bread in Akron one morning last winter. &amp;quot;Brogan was like a puppy. He was following Richard around.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd Rich, on the other hand: &amp;quot;Well, he maintained what you call the rough look. You know, the down-and-outer look,&amp;quot; Nancy says. &amp;quot;He was very disheveled, but he felt that gave him an \u2019in\u2019 with the people he was ministering to.&amp;quot;\n\nNancy, and the whole Bible-study group, got to know Rich from the letters he sent his mom when he was doing some time in prison in the early 2000s. Carol would read the letters aloud, and then they\u2019d pray for him. They\u2019d heard, Nancy says, how he\u2019d gotten in trouble the first time, down in Texas, when he wasn\u2019t more than 25 years old. A series of robberies. Then a gun charge that he told everyone wasn\u2019t his fault, and a couple of other scrapes that he explained were really just misunderstandings. It did seem to Nancy that he spent a lot of his letters complaining about the bedding and the food and didn\u2019t say too many remorseful things, but the group was compassionate, because give the guy a break, he was in jail, after all. Plus, they\u2019d all do anything for Carol. She lived a real Christian life. There wasn\u2019t a thing she wouldn\u2019t do or give to help people.\n\nAnd after he got out, Rich really seemed to have found his way back to God. He\u2019d become a chaplain. Well, he hadn\u2019t technically been ordained, but he said he was training up. The group knew all about that halfway house he\u2019d started down on Yale Street, where he lived. There were some weird people who used to stay there, certainly. That one guy ended up being a sex offender. But these were Rich\u2019s people\u2014the downtrodden, the addicted, the half-wits, the streetwalkers, petty thieves, and wrecks of Akron. He lived among them. Because that\u2019s who needed help.\n\nFacebookPinterestTimothy Kern. Photo: The FBI/AP Photo\n\nAkron belongs to the official demographic denomination of Midsize American City\u2014your Springfield, MOs, your Greensboro, NCs\u2014the type of place most people have heard of but almost no one has been to on purpose. In a city of this size, with a downtown of no more than a handful of city blocks, without even a proper ghetto, the street is small enough that it is mostly on a first-name basis with itself. And it\u2019s true that the street was on a first-name basis with Chaplain Rich. To hear Rich tell it (and a lot of his claims check out), he had ministered to them at the Hope Caf\u00E9, where the streetwalkers would gather for some free coffee and four-color Jesus brochures; he had fed them from the food bank; he had delivered bread to the drunks at the bars so that even if they\u2019d boozed away their paycheck, they could come home with something for their families to eat. He conducted weekly Bible studies at his halfway house for the unwanted and forgotten and lived with them and tolerated their vices and their personality defects, their vomit and blood and urine, and endured what no other man could endure, and still had charity in his heart. That is the story he tells. And it\u2019s what Nancy Wilson and her husband, Dave, mostly believed.\n\n&amp;quot;We overlooked things,&amp;quot; Dave says now. &amp;quot;Uh. Signals. We overlooked signals. They were there.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nThere really is a plot of land down in Caldwell, just like Rich promised in the Craigslist ad. It technically belongs to a coal-mining company. It\u2019s beautiful in that corner of Ohio\u2019s Appalachia, the hillocks bunched up like geological bedcovers and frosted in woods. It feels like being back in what even people who have known no such simpler time refer to as a simpler time.\n\nIf on this November morning you were to head out of Caldwell, up onto Rado ridge, past a couple of desolate houses, and turn onto Don Warner Road, you would find &amp;quot;the farm.&amp;quot; That road will drop you down into what people here call a &amp;quot;holler,&amp;quot; and if you stop midway down the hill and take the half-grown-over four-wheeler track, you would find a hole containing the body of one Ralph Geiger, naked and partly decomposed. Ralph Geiger being the name on Rich\u2019s driver\u2019s license and pill prescriptions these days. The body has been here since summer, when the leaves were green; now it sits beneath four feet of damp earth coursed by hunters out savoring the final days of bow-hunting season. If you left the four-wheeler track and traveled farther downhill to the wooded floor of the holler, you would find under two feet of dirt the body of David Pauley, who\u2019d answered the ad in October, when the leaves had begun to change. He\u2019d driven up from Virginia with a pickup and a U-Haul filled with model trains, NASCAR memorabilia, a shotgun. Maybe fifty feet away from David Pauley\u2019s body is a hole that Brogan had dug not much more than a week ago. It is empty except for several inches of rainwater\u2014it had been meant for the body of Scott Davis, who\u2019d answered the ad and decided to move all the way up from South Carolina. But with Scott something had apparently gone wrong with the gun. Rich had only been able to shoot Scott in the arm, and then Scott had taken off into the woods. Bleeding and cold, Scott hid in the underbrush for seven hours, until, after dark, he\u2019d just by chance found the road again and walked until he found a house with a light on. There\u2019d been no gain from the failed commission of that crime, and that\u2019s why Rich and Brogan are at it again so soon, in this parking lot at dawn, saying good morning to Tim Kern.\n\nBrogan says he hangs back while Rich does the interfacing with Tim. Rich gets jocular and street-preachery, and Tim yields. It is in keeping with Tim\u2019s character. He is closing in on 50 years old and recently unemployed\u2014he\u2019d been working nights cleaning Speedway parking lots with these big Zamboni-like machines until he was recently downsized. He has a history of being a burner and a loafer and a dude who loves classic rock. He is the divorced father of three boys. Tina, his ex-wife, a cocktail waitress at the Winking Lizard Tavern, still loves Tim, but she couldn\u2019t take being married to him anymore. It was like having another kid. In the most recent photographs, his face reveals an almost boyish guilelessness that doesn\u2019t age super well. Brogan thinks he seems sweet. Today he wears this black baseball hat that he can\u2019t seem to put on straight.\n\nFacebookPinterestHoles in the Woods: Rich wasn\u2019t partial to physical labor, so Brogan did the digging. Photo: Courtesy of the Ohio Attorney General\u2019s Office, BCI \n\nThe first fucked-up thing Brogan notices about the Tim Kern situation is the car. A Buick that can\u2019t operate at speeds over thirty miles per hour. This is the big payday Rich has been hoping for? A car you can\u2019t even drive on the highway? There is no question about Tim taking it down to the &amp;quot;farm&amp;quot;\u2014they\u2019ll take Brogan\u2019s car. And then there\u2019s the stuff. Tim is living in his car, at this point. All he has are garbage bags filled with clothes and keepsakes, a few pictures of his family, and a soiled ream of personal documents of the type you see the itinerant clutching outside government offices everywhere.\n\nBefore they get into the car, Rich starts telling Tim which of his things he\u2019ll need down on the farm and what he should come back to pick up later. Take this, leave that. A toolbox, a believable amount of clothes, so Tim will think he\u2019s really going somewhere. Brogan, as the muscle, grapples the TV into his trunk. It\u2019s not even a flat-screen. Why does Rich want this TV? What kind of vetting process could Rich have done on this guy? Whatever slim margin of logic they\u2019ve been operating on, robbing and killing men who were themselves almost destitute, now it\u2019s out the window. Rich asks Tim how much cash he has on him to get by with down on the farm, and Tim gets all sheepish and says: Five bucks.\n\nWhile it\u2019s still dark, the three of them drive out of that parking lot and into the still-somnolent morning for what is supposed to be an hour-and-a-half drive to Caldwell. Rich and Brogan up front, with Tim in the back, like a kid.\n\nRich keeps the patter up. He was always good like that. Brogan often remarked inwardly about how weird some of the stuff Rich talked to these men about was. Rich would always take them out for breakfast on the way to the farm, the big magnanimous boss guy. When they were eating breakfast with David Pauley just before they killed him, Rich told this long story about a friend of his who looked like Kenny Rogers, and when they\u2019d go out to eat, Rich would let it slip to the waiter that it really was Kenny Rogers and they\u2019d all eat for free. Today, Tim Kern seems affable in the face of Rich\u2019s small-talk fusillade, kind of dazy and trying to act professional around his new employer.\n\nFacebookPinterest&amp;quot;Chaplain Rich&amp;quot; allegedly ran a prostitution ring out of the so-called halfway house (above), he operated in Akron. Photo: Courtesy of writer\n\nWhat the Craigslist job offered Tim was an unforeseen opportunity: an actual grown-up life. Instant adulthood, including a place to live where his sons\u2014they were grown, but he called them his &amp;quot;babies&amp;quot;\u2014could come visit, a setup that lately seemed beyond him to puzzle out. Still, Tim did not exactly go gladly into this adventure. He\u2019d been anxious yesterday, wringing his hands, telling his boys he didn\u2019t want to leave them, staying up all night packing at Tina\u2019s house\u2014he still used it as kind of a home base for showering and the keeping of important items. He was trying to seem laid-back about it, but he felt pretty adrift, heading out that morning to go live by himself on a farm in southern Ohio.\n\nBefore they get too far, Rich leans back and says, Hey man, turns out we were hunting for squirrels out by the old Rolling Acres Mall the other day. And you know what? I lost my watch. It\u2019s got a lot of sentimental value. Do you mind if we go over to the woods and look for it real quick before we head down to the farm? And Tim says, No, I don\u2019t mind.\n\nGranted, maybe Rich and Tim live in a world where it\u2019s not totally implausible to have been hunting squirrels in the Akron suburbs. But it was still a weird thing to say. This overly companionable aging biker type and his darkly silent &amp;quot;nephew&amp;quot; pick you up to drive you down to your new job on a farm, but first, at six in the morning, they want to root around the woods for a watch\u2014a watch!\u2014they lost shooting at urban rodents the other day? But what would you say if you were Tim? One thing about humans is that they will put up with all but the most absurd and alarming events once they\u2019ve signed on to a situation. There is in fact a moment when the teenage girl could jump out at the stoplight once she starts to get the smell of bad magic on the guy who said he\u2019d give her a lift home, when the homeowner could close the door on the man at the front steps whose face isn\u2019t composed right at all. But if you don\u2019t bail right away, chances are you will be along for the entire ride, however windy and gruesome and never-ending it turns out to be. We\u2019ve all done it: taken the cab even though the driver seems weird, gotten on the plane even though that guy in the trench coat is sweating and talking to himself, stayed in a situation even though some tingly instinct is telling you to flee. And what you\u2019ve learned from those experiences is that it always, always works out. Trust is how Craigslist works in the first place. The shocking thing isn\u2019t that the occasional bad actor on Craigslist shows up and takes advantage of that trust. The shocking thing about Craigslist is that it almost never happens.\n\nTim Kern will not make it down to Caldwell today. He is not going to a desolate parcel of former strip-mining land carefully selected because it seemed like it might actually need a caretaker and because you can\u2019t hear a gunshot from the nearest house. Tim Kern will never get farther than the scrub woods around an abandoned suburban shopping mall. This criminal enterprise is rapidly devolving, the standards lowering from a kind of wannabe Hollywood film about professional hit men into a haphazard, tragically absurd killing spree. We know now that it will be over in a week. But to Brogan it seems like it could go on and on and on and on. When he talks about it now, he says he was living in a state of total acquiescence. A surrender to what he calls darkness. The entire period suffused with a thick matter that fundamentally transformed all things, from the food he ate to the people he talked to, into some kind of intolerable simulacra that tasted of metal and death.\n\n\n\nWhen I meet Brogan last fall at the Warren Correctional Institution, he\u2019s 18 years old and still looks older than he is. He wears his hair slicked back with product, comb marks visible, and a small trimmed mustache. He is fastidious, immaculate, his navy prison pajamas neat and creased. He does push-ups on his knuckles every morning, part of a fully regimented and scheduled day he once described in a letter: &amp;quot;After returning from breakfast, I do my hygiene\u2014brush my teeth, etc. After that I try to straighten up the cell: make my bed, make coffee, fix the stuff on the floor\u2026&amp;quot; Two years ago, he had never even been in the back of a police car. Now, in the early days of a life sentence with no possibility of parole, he has already come to inhabit the persona of the old professorial prisoner who approaches life inside with a quiet, philosophical asceticism.\n\n&amp;quot;No one knows how old I am in here because I\u2019m old-school,&amp;quot; he tells me. &amp;quot;I carry myself as if I were older. I look like I\u2019m midtwenties. Plus, they all think I\u2019m this crazy killer. This serial killer. So they steer clear of me.&amp;quot;\n\nBrogan thanks me for coming, even though he gives the impression that he would rather be alone and is doing this because his father told him to. (Both Brogan and Rich are appealing their verdicts.) He refuses my offers of food and drink but eventually agrees to allow me to buy him a black coffee. He expresses disdain for the prisoners here who aren\u2019t like that: &amp;quot;People in jail, they come around asking for coffee or food or whatnot,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;No sense of shame, even if they don\u2019t know you at all. I would never do that. I would rather go without.&amp;quot;\n\nWe sit across a short table from each other over the course of two days. I knew he was going to be a quiet kid, but the way he\u2019s quiet is different. When I ask if he once loved Richard Beasley, the pause is so long, Brogan gazing kind of inwardly in the midst of the heartbreaking human calamity that is the visitors\u2019 room\u2014shackled men with face ink and cornrows holding their newborn babies, old moms wheeling oxygen tanks to buy their only sons a microwavable calzone\u2014that I\u2019m not sure if I\u2019m waiting for an answer or this is his way of saying &amp;quot;Pass.&amp;quot; But it\u2019s not the desperate quietude of someone who wants to connect and can\u2019t figure out how. It\u2019s an almost imperturbable sense of independence. Brogan is, and always was, a priori different, is how he sees it. He\u2019s not like me, he\u2019s not like the kids in his high school class, he\u2019s not like the man shackled with the neck ink, he has never been like anyone ever except maybe his dad and his mom, though both of them were always at distances so permanently untraversable that he couldn\u2019t know for sure if he was like them or not. He has never really needed other people. (This is convenient, because he has never had anyone he could safely need.)\n\nFacebookPinterest&amp;quot;Chaplain Rich&amp;quot; is shown here with Brogan in a restaurant surveillance video, getting a bite before an attempted murder. Photo: Karen Schiely/Akron Beacon Journal/AP Photo\n\nThe first time I met Mike Rafferty, Brogan\u2019s dad, he was in his garage listening to Deep Purple, &amp;quot;Smoke on the Water,&amp;quot; lifting weights on a quiet afternoon in his three-bedroom suburban ranch. Early fifties, small in stature, I\u2019d guess five feet eight inches, built almost in a square, a Rubik\u2019s Cube of flesh, with a long dark ponytail, a prominent forehead, a small expressionless mouth, and shiny dark eyes framed out by the longest, most beautiful, dark eyelashes that give a poignancy to the latent violence he exudes. It\u2019s like My Little Pony was a 53-year-old biker from the rust belt of Akron. He is a machinist by trade, works nights precision-cutting metal for aircraft landing gear, and, yes, is the president and a member in good and legendary standing of the North Coast motorcycle club, a close affiliate of the Hells Angels. According to police, North Coast is suspected of dealing in meth, but Mike has no criminal record, save for a public-urination charge, and strikes me, while he sits on his sofa in jean shorts and a tank top, as a straight arrow who does not suffer fools gladly or without punching them in the face.\n\n&amp;quot;Maybe I wasn\u2019t the kind of father I should have been,&amp;quot; he says. &amp;quot;I wasn\u2019t real good at showing emotion, and I was a bit of a disciplinarian.&amp;quot;\n\nThe kind of father he was: the kind who buys a small house in a good school district, teaches his kid to box in the garage starting when he\u2019s 5; who didn\u2019t drink on weeknights but spent Fridays at &amp;quot;church&amp;quot; (the weekly meeting of North Coast) and most of the weekend at bars; who, Brogan says, once broke the boy\u2019s nose over a missing report card; who Rich and Brogan and Yvette, Brogan\u2019s mother, all agree was a good provider but terrified Brogan. From Mike, Brogan learned what Mike saw as that most important tool: self-reliance. To be able to take care of yourself in a fight, to get yourself to school, to keep a straight house and get good grades, to understand never to make excuses or dwell on how hard it all is. Up until that November, Mike saw himself as a biker-machinist dad who was doing a pretty good job raising a boy more or less on his own. It was a stable place to live, but not a home that allowed for certain parts of being a kid: like admitting that you\u2019re weak, and you don\u2019t have the answers, and that circumstances can arise that you simply cannot be expected to take care of by yourself.\n\nBrogan\u2019s mother, on the other hand, is an addict. Over time, he\u2019d reduced his relationship with her to the smallest unit of parenting she could handle: Brogan told Yvette she could go on a crack binge\u2014because no matter what she promised, she was going to go on a crack binge anyway\u2014she just couldn\u2019t do it on the weekends Brogan was with her. But he couldn\u2019t rely on even that.\n\nI met Yvette for dinner this past winter. Yvette was a biker chick from the first time she ever got on the back of a motorcycle. &amp;quot;I was hot as shit, I ain\u2019t gonna lie,&amp;quot; she told me over steak at TGI Fridays. &amp;quot;Hair down to my ass. I was hot.&amp;quot;\n\nBy all accounts this description of Yvette Rafferty is accurate. She arrived in northern Ohio from out of the American South as a woman from a dream issue of Easyriders magazine, skinny and willowy, with hair spun from ice cream and sunshine and a taste for denim and leather. She liked to party, and she was crazy, too. She once rode a big old dirt bike that belonged to a Mexican all the way back from Daytona Beach while the bike\u2019s owner leaned back and slept against the luggage rack. And she ain\u2019t never even rode a dirt bike before! She met Mike when she was working at a bikini bar. That was not long before she became addicted to cocaine. She says she was sober while she was pregnant. But Brogan wasn\u2019t 3 days old when she disappeared into a crack house with him still swaddled in a hospital blanket. Mike took Brogan away after that, and they separated. She still seems like kind of a love mama, even though a good chunk of her humanity appears to have disappeared into addiction. She is a hug person, a kiss person, a person who loves to cry, the type of hippie biker chick who\u2019d want to sleep with all her babies in a big family bed but also bungee them to a chopper for a ride to get formula. But in reality she is now a 49-year-old woman who has to remove her new dentures before she eats a TGI Fridays steak with Jack Daniel\u2019s sauce. Who, after two beers, starts shivering and loses the gift of coherent speech for long stretches and tries to eat a wet nap off her plate. Sits there chewing it like lettuce until I reach into her toothless mouth before she can swallow it. Brogan has known before memory that his mother is an addict. When he was 10, he found evidence on the Internet that she\u2019d prostituted herself. The really terrible moments of my dinner with her came when she admitted knowing what she\u2019d become. Her face crumpled and she said: &amp;quot;I know all this is my fault. I know it is. If I hadn\u2019t have been an addict, none of this would have happened.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\n&amp;quot;To me, he was just death,&amp;quot; Brogan tells me. &amp;quot;When I thought of him, it was death.&amp;quot;\n\nRich was death incarnate?\n\n&amp;quot;Yes.&amp;quot;\n\nRich must have known, somehow, that Brogan could handle living through that darkness without imploding. It was Rich\u2019s gift to see potential where others do not, where most people would not want to look for potential. Rich was almost blinded by the opportunities he saw\u2014like growing weed or making moonshine or faking a raffle or trading on the inherent advantages of running a &amp;quot;halfway house&amp;quot; in the hood\u2014in a way that seemed to make normal opportunity almost invisible to him. What Mike, Brogan\u2019s dad, used to say about Rich was that he\u2019d rather make a crooked nickel than an honest dollar. It was the kind of thing you could say right to Rich\u2019s face and he\u2019d laugh about it. Mike says Rich once asked him if he\u2019d like to rob a bank. Which Mike most certainly didn\u2019t want to do. But those were the kinds of things kicking around in Rich\u2019s head.\n\nIt\u2019s my theory that Rich saw in Brogan a kind of potential that Brogan was probably unaware of. Rich knew Mike from the world of Akron bikers, and Yvette from a life that brought him into the drug houses and jails of Akron, and he knew Brogan. This hulking castoff of a kid, who strangers thought was possibly mute but confidants knew as a preternaturally sardonic kid who acted like a full-grown man but was probably hiding a stunted little baby somewhere inside, like a worm larva in the middle of an apple. I\u2019m not saying that Rich became friends with Brogan when he was 9 as part of a long con. Rich probably started taking Brogan to church because it felt like a good Christian thing to do. Rich seemed to genuinely enjoy hanging out with Brogan, tooling around Akron, visiting historic graveyards and dropping general world knowledge. And in the bargain Brogan, according to the amateur psychology of pretty much everyone who came into contact with them, got a dad who wasn\u2019t a hard-ass, who took him around and treated him like an equal, but who also understood (without judgment) the world where his mom came from, a secret he didn\u2019t much share with his friends from school. Yvette describes Brogan\u2019s feelings this way: &amp;quot;Brogan was ashamed of me, but he loved me.&amp;quot; Rich was kind of like Brogan himself\u2014they both straddled the straight world and the world of the street. And when the time came, Rich knew what Brogan\u2019s skill set might be, knew how to activate it, and he apparently didn\u2019t hesitate.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nIn the summer of 2011, before they lured that first man, Ralph Geiger, down to southern Ohio, Rich had a conversation with Brogan. There was going to be a warrant out for Rich\u2019s arrest. And if they got him, he said, they were going to put him away for a crime he didn\u2019t commit. So he was going to go on the run. This news lit in Brogan an incandescent bloom of indignation that in the mind of a 16-year-old can glow so much more purely than in people like you or me. The damn cops, he knew about them, they messed with his mother.\n\n&amp;quot;Well, he had told me this story about how they were going to put him in jail over some old stuff that he didn\u2019t do,&amp;quot; Brogan says. &amp;quot;I was angry. I was angry. It didn\u2019t seem right.&amp;quot;\n\nBut then, when the murders began, it couldn\u2019t have been just about that anger anymore. Whatever compelled Brogan to help Rich, it had to have become something else. Brogan says now that he did what Rich said because Rich threatened him. He told Brogan: I know where your mother lives. I know where your sister lives. He would check on Brogan every day, call him, have him meet up. Brogan says that every time he dug a hole, he expected that he might end up in it. This explanation seems too simple to me, but Brogan\u2019s is the only narrative we have about these events.\n\nThreatened or not, Brogan trudged on. Like a golem. Made of clay by his master, animate but not awake to his humanity. To be there and not really be there, the way he is when we are at the Warren Correctional Institution, that was what Brogan could do better than just about anyone. I would say that Brogan\u2019s greatest skill as accomplice in a crime of massively gruesome proportions is to be able to locate himself fathoms beneath the emotional sea even when he\u2019s right beside you.\n\nDoes Rich see himself as a man attuned to the potential lurking in places other men would never look? I try to broach the topic when I meet him on death row. I ask about the warrant that had been out for his arrest, which was for, essentially, running a prostitution ring\u2014twenty women, one male\u2014out of his &amp;quot;halfway&amp;quot; house. A prostitution ring staffed by the women he ministered to. The women for whom he\u2019d stood up in court to promise judges that, as counselor and halfway-house proprietor, he\u2019d look after them. The women he\u2019d visit in jail, talk on jailhouse phones with, and describe his physical longing for in conversations the authorities were recording. By most accounts, his favorite had been a 17-year-old girl named Savannah, who died of an overdose. Brogan knew her as Rich\u2019s girlfriend.\n\nI tell Rich that I interviewed one of these women, Amy Saller. She told me, I say, that you did try to get her off drugs, in a way. She said you had devised your own detox system: three rocks one day, and then two for each of the next couple of days, and then down to one. But it never worked. So you\u2019d just buy her the rocks and let her smoke them at your place. She thought your biggest fear was that she would leave, and you wanted her near you. Sure, you wanted to trick with her sometimes, but she seemed to feel she had you in her back pocket. She knew she could steal from you and you might yell and scream, but you weren\u2019t going to get violent. She said you put her up as an escort on Backpage and took a commission on the money she made. It was strange that Amy, whom you pimped out, who has in the intervening months gotten sober and is working at Red Lobster now and has earned the right to visit her kid, talks as if she isn\u2019t totally sure who was using whom. When I ask you about all of the above, your answer is only: &amp;quot;Amy Saller. I\u2019m sorry, I don\u2019t know who that is.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd about the notion of those physical longings and the like: &amp;quot;I haven\u2019t been able to have sex since I had my car accident,&amp;quot; Rich tells me. He\u2019s referring to an accident he had about eight years ago. &amp;quot;I had a steel coffee cup in my lap when it happened.&amp;quot; He smiles mischievously here and slits his eyes like a cat. &amp;quot;You can\u2019t use what you don\u2019t have.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd then, thinking about it, he gets a little more grandiose. &amp;quot;I think it was a blessing from God that I wasn\u2019t able to have sex. If I could, it might have complicated the relationship I had with all those women. I might have been tempted. But as it was, I was able to remain pure.&amp;quot;\n\n\n\nOn the way to the Rolling Acres Mall, Tim mentions that he likes Brogan\u2019s Buick. Rich has a plan for Tim\u2019s car: He and Brogan will come back with some blowtorches and scrap the car themselves for cash. Rich will take the cash and give Tim a Ford F-150. A more appropriate vehicle for the terrain down on the farm. Tim will pay off the difference in installments that will come out of his wages. It\u2019s almost as if Rich enjoys spinning out these scenarios, a natural outgrowth of the fecundity of his scheming brain\u2014he\u2019s got the gift, so why not just share it with the world?\n\nRolling Acres is Chernobyl-y, with its cheerful awnings inviting you to condemned movie theaters and the now removed names of big-box stores silhouetted onto the brickwork of its entrances. The mall was built in the \u201970s and expanded in the \u201980s, and now, in the aftermath of the Great Recession, is home to only a single JCPenney outlet store that will itself soon be shuttered. They pull around an outbuilding and park near the woods.\n\nWhen they brought men to &amp;quot;the farm,&amp;quot; Rich had a trick he\u2019d pull. He\u2019d walk in front of the subjects right away and let them follow him down one of the tracks into the forest. Having a stranger walking behind you into the woods tends to raise defenses. And then at some point\u2014like in Scott Davis\u2019s case, when they were looking for some construction equipment they couldn\u2019t find\u2014there\u2019d be an excuse to turn around. And just like that, the subject would be out in front. That\u2019s when Rich would shoot him in the head without the victim ever knowing what happened, Brogan says. It was the beauty of Rich\u2019s method that he never had to lay a hand on anyone, never had to overpower a body\u2014he simply had to pick the right people and then be the guy in charge.\n\nAnd now they are in the woods, looking for this &amp;quot;watch.&amp;quot; Rich pulls back a branch and lets it slap back at Brogan and Tim. Then Tim holds it back for Brogan so he can walk by. This act of kindness disturbs Brogan, though he doesn\u2019t say anything.\n\nRich and Tim walk together, looking. Brogan acts like he\u2019s searching the thick November leaf layer a few yards away. Brogan says he hears a pop. When he turns, he sees that Tim is down on his knees and Rich has the .22 in his hand. Tim\u2019s holding the side of his head. And then Rich says, &amp;quot;Are you all right?&amp;quot; Like he\u2019s concerned Tim\u2019s hurt himself. But when Tim doesn\u2019t respond, Rich shoots him again, and again, and again, and Tim slumps over onto his side. There\u2019s something wrong with the gun, Rich is saying. And it hits Brogan then that Tim is still breathing. All of these events, Brogan says, they blend together\u2014maybe because he has a powerful reluctance to go back over them or because he dissociates even right there in the moment. But this whole debacle is beyond the pale, horrific in an absurd, intolerable way to Brogan. This man has nothing worth stealing, there is no reason to kill him. And now he won\u2019t die. Rich gets up close and shoots him a last time, in the face. Now Tim is lying on the ground, eyes open wide and staring at the leafless branches above. Every few seconds he takes a big, audible gulp of air, like a dying fish. He\u2019s still alive, Brogan says, he\u2019s still alive. Rich says no. No way. His brain is dead, there are four bullets in his head and I put one between his eyes.\n\nIt stops eventually, the desperate, drowning sounds. Then Rich says to grab a leg and takes the other one himself. And together they drag Tim to the hole. It\u2019s only two feet deep, and Tim doesn\u2019t completely fit in there. But Rich doesn\u2019t seem to care. He removes Tim\u2019s jacket and cuts the shirt off with a pair of scissors. That black hat he kicks to the side\u2014it\u2019s covered in blood.\n\nWhy? Brogan says he asks Rich. Why did we do this, he didn\u2019t have anything. Rich has his own logic about it: Well, he was a dead man as soon as he got in the car. As if it had been out of their hands.\n\nFacebookPinterestRichard Beasley. Photo: Karen Schiely/Akron Beacon Journal/AP Photo\n\nThe first time, with Ralph Geiger, they removed all the clothes, covered him with lime, replaced the ground cover so you could have walked right over the grave and you wouldn\u2019t have suspected anything. For David Pauley, they had changes of boots, gloves; Rich had even put a $20 bill next to the hole so they\u2019d know if anyone saw the hole in the interim. But by the time they got to Tim\u2026 Well, Tim is still in his pants and shoes and socks. Brogan isn\u2019t even finished backfilling the hole when Rich tells him to stop. It\u2019s getting light out now. Rich is ready to get out of here. He starts kicking some leaves over the hole.\n\nThis would be the last murder. Scott Davis had gotten away. And he talked to the police. Right now, as Brogan and Rich are at the mall, the FBI is tracing the Craigslist ad back to Rich\u2019s IP address, and later to a camera at a Shoney\u2019s in Marietta, Ohio, that snapped a picture of Brogan and Rich as they walked in to meet Scott Davis the morning he was shot. Three days from now, agents will show up at Stow high school and pull Brogan from class. He will still have the TV in his trunk. He and Rich won\u2019t even have scrapped Tim\u2019s car yet\u2014there will have been functionally zero financial or other gain from the murder of Tim Kern. The same day Brogan is arrested, a SWAT team will pick up Rich outside the house where he rented the room. There will be a helicopter and everything.\n\nIt\u2019s getting lighter out as they drive back from Rolling Acres. Rich has Brogan stop at McDonald\u2019s for breakfast. Rich likes McDonald\u2019s because of the free Internet. Brogan says they don\u2019t speak. Rich taps on his computer, and Brogan watches the street outside as the day gets brighter. He drops Rich at his place and heads for his mom\u2019s. When he\u2019s pulling up the hill toward home, he gets a call from Yvette on his cell. She\u2019s crying. A man she knows\u2014the guy she calls her &amp;quot;millionaire maniac,&amp;quot; a &amp;quot;famous&amp;quot; dog breeder, known for his prize German shepherds, who likes to party\u2014had been an asshole last night, and now she is walking home. Brogan doesn\u2019t say much, just that he\u2019ll pick her up on the way home. She\u2019s still crying when she gets into the passenger seat. This is one of those periodic moments of clarity for her, when she can see plainly what the dynamic is with her son, Brogan being the stable one, the guy who comes to the rescue. I\u2019m sorry I wasn\u2019t there last night, she says, I didn\u2019t know you were coming over this weekend, I swear. Brogan stops her. It doesn\u2019t matter, Mom. It really doesn\u2019t matter.\n\n\n\nA few months before I go to Chillicothe to meet Rich, I have breakfast with Carol Beasley, Rich\u2019s mom, at a bakery near her house. She is a kind woman in a cute Christmas sweater who is befuddled by her own cell phone and is more worried about the weather for my flight back to New York than I am. Carol tells me that she doesn\u2019t want to fool herself. Richard probably did the things they say he did. Though she can\u2019t help slipping into the framework Rich has provided her for these events\u2014the inconsistencies, the suggestion of plots underlying the apparent facts. &amp;quot;But why did Scott Davis make the ambulance take him to Akron General hospital, which is right by the motorcycle club?&amp;quot; she asks me. &amp;quot;He literally had to pass several other hospitals on his way there. And why did Scott refuse to talk to the police for days?&amp;quot;\n\nWe have a philosophical conversation about how, even if she pretty much knows the truth, she won\u2019t really be able to process it until Rich admits it. I tell her that I\u2019ve exchanged some letters with him in advance of our meeting. I told him I was hoping that he would be able to fully open up, to come clean. No one will really know what happened until he does. My guess is that it won\u2019t change the facts. But it seems impossible to understand this whole saga without knowing the truth from Rich\u2014why he decided to do this, what he thought as he slept in the same hotel room with Ralph Geiger the night before he murdered him.\n\nFacebookPinterestSurviving Prison: &amp;quot;I carry myself as if I were older,&amp;quot; says Brogan, pictured here in court with his mom, Yvette. Photo: Phil Masturzo/Akron Beacon Journal/AP Photo\n\nIt\u2019s also true that there are things we don\u2019t know about Brogan. He claims he participated in these crimes because Rich overtly threatened him. I think it\u2019s also possible that Brogan participated because he thought he needed to be a man. But even if Brogan is lying about the threats, even if he believes that he did this of his own free will, I think it was still, functionally, coercion. These murder-robberies benefited only one person: Richard Beasley. There was some discussion at the trial about how Brogan received treasure from these men: David Pauley\u2019s shotgun, etc. But that fact strikes me more like, for instance, an uncle who has molested his nephew and then buys him anything he wants at the toy store, and in so doing binds all kinds of incompatible emotions (shame, guilt, pleasure, terror, pain) into a terrible cocktail that can never be unmid. Regardless, I tell Carol that morning that I hope Rich can tell the whole truth, because it\u2019s the only possible way to take even a fractional step toward making amends.\n\n&amp;quot;Oh,&amp;quot; Carol Beasley says, the shiny tinsel threads in her sweater throwing plasticky sparks beneath the recessed lighting, &amp;quot;I don\u2019t think so. He doesn\u2019t want anyone to know the real him. He never has. He\u2019s too ashamed. He will never, ever do that.&amp;quot;\n\nAnd she was right. The moment he sat down across the table from me, with that twinkle in his eye, Rich began telling magnificent stories. Ralph Geiger had been down in Caldwell, &amp;quot;pounding nails&amp;quot; for work, when he came across a meth lab he shouldn\u2019t have seen, and the meth dealers had to walk him out into the woods and kill him. Brogan murdered Tim Kern himself, with an accomplice, as a way to earn his colors in the North Coast motorcycle club. Rich seemed to understand that some of this was hard to believe, and so he didn\u2019t gild the lily. When we came to a fact that didn\u2019t make sense, he made like the two of us were trying to piece this whole mystery together, but he could only help me so much. &amp;quot;I don\u2019t know,&amp;quot; he\u2019d say, staring off at a section of floor fifteen feet away, as if examining some mysterious half-human creature who\u2019d been following him at this distance for quite some time. &amp;quot;That\u2019s what I\u2019m trying to figure out. I don\u2019t know.&amp;quot;\n\nBut he did not confess to a thing. Near the end of our conversations, I ask him a little bit about religion. Because it would seem that this failure to come clean would probably have some ramifications with God, if Rich happened to believe in God.\n\nHow is it a fellow gets to heaven?\n\n&amp;quot;I believe you will go to heaven if you accept Jesus Christ into your heart as your savior.&amp;quot;\n\nYou don\u2019t have to confess to anyone?\n\n&amp;quot;You have to confess to God and ask forgiveness. Do you know the story of King David? You\u2019re of Jewish descent, right? He killed a man and had an adulterous affair. And he was the apple of God\u2019s eye.&amp;quot;\n\nThat\u2019s it? Confess to God and then you\u2019re in heaven?\n\nHe nodded. That\u2019s it.\n\nHe asked one more thing, though, at the end of our visit. Please ask people to write me, he said. I may be able to counsel them in their lives. And if I could communicate with men outside these walls, he said, it would make me feel free, too.\n\n\n\nDevin Friedman (@devinfriedman)  is GQ\u2019s director of editorial projects."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
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