Killer’s mother pleads: The mother of the so-called “Craigslist killer” pleaded with a jury on Wednesday, asking them to spare him the death penalty.
The mother of a convicted murderer who killed three men after luring them to his farm via Craigslist job offers pleaded with a jury to spare him the death penalty.
Richard Beasley, 53, was convicted last week of killing three men after he got them to his farm in southern Ohio in 2011 via an advertisement that he needed laborers. The prosecution had described him as a master manipulator.
But his mother, Carol Beasley, said at the sentencing that he suffered a harsh childhood, including physical and sexual abuse. “I love Richard with all my heart,” she said Wednesday, reported The Associated Press.
“I know a lot of the things that I read in the paper that were testified to were not true,” Carol Beasley said in a video posted by the Akron Beacon Journal last week. “Witnesses did not always tell the truth.”
She added: “I really thought he’d be found innocent. He’s always said he didn’t do it.”
However, the jury on Wednesday ultimately recommended that Richard Beasley get the death penalty for the slayings, according to AP.
Judge Lynne Callahan will have to ultimately determine whether or not he get the death penalty. She will make her decision on March 26.
The co-defendant in the triple-murder case, 18-year-old Brogan Rafferty, got life in prison without parole last year.
“Richard Beasley was not going to stop … the killing was not going to stop,” Jonathan Baumoel, assistant Summit County prosecutor, said last week, according to the Canton Rep. “He had a thirst for blood. He had a thirst for death.”
When he testified in his defense, Beasley said that he “had no idea that somebody, anybody, had been killed down on that farm. I had no way to know.”
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