Ralph Geiger thought he finally caught a break on Craigslist.
At one time, demand for his handyman work was plentiful and he hired help. Now he couldn’t get hired himself. Instead a homeless shelter was home.
But the farm job he found on the Internet in August seemed like a godsend to the 56-year-old Akron man.
“He said he was going to work on this farm and he was excited about it,” his friend Summer Rowley recalled Wednesday. “He was looking forward to it.”
Rowley, who visited or talked to Geiger every day for most of the last decade, said the Aug. 8 phone call was the last time the two spoke. This month, she brought her friend home in a cardboard box, his ashes piled inside.
Geiger appears to be the first of three men who answered a similar Craigslist help-wanted ad to be shot and killed.
Richard Beasley, 52, and 16-year-old Brogan Rafferty are suspects in the slayings and the assault of a fourth man. Each is being held without bond. A hearing that could determine whether Rafferty, a Stow resident, will be tried as an adult is scheduled for today. Beasley of Akron has denied any involvement.
“The monsters,” Rowley said. “Ralph didn’t deserve this. He was too kind. We always told him he trusted people way too much.”
Rowley, 26, said she and Geiger were like a father-and-daughter team. They met when things were better for Geiger and his business. In fact, he had hired her to clean his house when they met.
Eventually, they were inseparable in a purely platonic relationship. He taught her all he knew when it came to home repairs and she often worked with him on various projects.
Although he often told new friends that he was divorced and had daughters of his own, Geiger was a lifelong bachelor.
Eventually, however, his close relationship with Rowley led him to introduce her as his daughter. She didn’t mind.
“He really was a father to me,” she said.
It’s one reason Geiger’s family, all of whom live outside Ohio, allowed Rowley to collect his remains this month and handle his funeral arrangements. She intends to keep her friend’s ashes.
His remains were recovered Nov. 25 from a shallow grave in Noble County.
“I don’t want to bury the ashes. I want to keep them because they put him in the ground already,” she said.
Rowley has scheduled a life celebration Friday at the Harbor Inn in Portage Lakes, an area where Geiger was well-known as a do-it-all handyman. The memorial runs from 4 to 8:30 p.m.
Once-booming business
An East High School graduate, Geiger moved to California in the mid-’70s and helped his father run an antique store. In the late ’90s, he returned to the Akron area and began his own handyman business. He was affable and generous and approached his business as if he was doing it for himself.
“He knew I was down on my luck and he helped me out,” said friend Steve Yancy, who met Geiger when they lived in the Portage Lakes area. “If a job needed an extra person, I was there. His business was booming at one point.”
His ads for his business regularly ran in a local weekly newspaper and his services were always in demand. His friends say Geiger was often too kind, and lowered his prices for those struggling to pay. Others failed to pay, even after Geiger had purchased the supplies.
It all changed after the stock market crash in 2008. People stopped buying marble countertops or rewiring century-old houses. Some who needed repairs really couldn’t afford them. Demand for Geiger’s services dried up.
“He pretty much sank,” said friend Jim Lorentz.
Things fell so far that Geiger eventually found himself at the Haven of Rest shelter in Akron. He lived there for much of 2011, turning down offers to live with friends, until visiting a library last summer.
‘Perfect’ job
He told friends that he used the library computer to search for work. On Craigslist he found what he thought was a perfect job.
“He said, ‘I finally got me a job. I can get back on my feet again,’ ” Lorentz said. “He was excited and I was excited for him. It sounded so perfect for him.”
The position offered him a steady $300 a week salary and the use of a two-bedroom trailer and vehicles. Geiger would essentially oversee a farm and put his handyman skills to work. On the downside, he told friends that the job required him to move to Tuscarawas County, where he would have no cell-phone coverage.
“I said, ‘Are you going to get a hold of me?’ and he said, ‘Of course,’ ” Rowley recalled.
The calls never came. And as the weeks passed, Rowley found herself contacting friends, asking whether they had heard from Geiger. No one had. The silence was concerning.
Purely by chance, she talked to a relative of Timothy Kern, a Massillon man who had been missing since early November, shortly after taking a farm job he found on Craigslist. The relative passed on a number to the FBI.
On the same November day, authorities recovered the bodies of Kern, 47, and Geiger. Both had been shot in the head. Kern’s remains were found in Akron. Geiger’s remains were found 100 miles away in Noble County, in the same area where the remains of David Pauley, 51, of Virginia, were found in November.
Authorities believe Geiger died in early August.
A fourth man, Scott Davis, 48, managed to escape after being shot while visiting the same Noble County location. Davis is credited with exposing the killings. Pauley and Davis had responded to the same Craigslist ad that lured Kern and Geiger.
Authorities say the four all had the same things in common: struggling middle-aged white men searching for work with loose family ties. Robbery, identity theft and murder have been speculated as the motives behind the killings.
“Ralph was a great man with a big heart and he gave me so much,” Rowley said. “He didn’t deserve this.”
Phil Trexler can be reached at 330-996-3717 or ptrexler@thebeaconjournal.com.