When Tonya Beasley’s father asked her to help him learn how to use the internet, she never dreamed it would lead to a sickening bloodbath.

Tonya, who is now 31 years old, shared that back in 2011, at the age of 17 as she was about to start her senior year of high school, her father Richard, who was not proficient with technology, requested her assistance in creating a Craigslist account to sell some furniture.

But he had a far more sinister motive.

Richard was using the classifieds website to post job advertisements for workers who could help out on his 688-acre farm in Akron, Ohio.

He was using these falsified ads to lure in potential victims he would go on to brutally murder.

Richard, then 53, was eventually convicted of killing three men in November 2011, earning him the haunting nickname: ‘The Craigslist Killer’.

In an interview with the Daily Mail, Tonya expressed that even 14 years later, she carries a sense of remorse for facilitating the account setup for her father and is deeply disturbed by the fact that he misused his role as a father to target victims.

‘He was having conversations with these people online telling them he has a daughter. He tried to gain their trust and used me as a pawn,’ she said.

Tonya Beasley was 17-years-old when she learned her father was the ‘Craigslist Killer’ 

A young Tonya is pictured with her father Richard Beasley on one of her prison visits with her grandmother (who is not pictured)  

Tonya recalled her complete shock when she learned at 17 that her father was the Craigslist Killer.

‘It did not feel real,’ she recalled. ‘I was feeling so many emotions. I shut down.’ 

Two years before Richard went on his killing spree, there was another Craigslist Killer named Phillip Markoff.

The individual in question, a young medical student residing in Boston, committed the heinous act of killing his former fiancée and then embarked on a week-long crime spree, preying on individuals he found on Craigslist before eventually taking his own life.

After Richard’s arrest, Tonya had to help the FBI identify her father and provide witness testimony – though she did not testify at his trial. 

Tonya, now a mother to her three-year-old son, said, ‘He wasn’t the person I thought he was. He is a psychopath and a cold-blooded killer.’ 

While she hadn’t previously thought of him as a murderer, she knew her father had his demons.

He grew up with an abusive father and later enlisted in the service. He had a high IQ but was also very manipulative, she explained.

He left the military with ‘dishonorable discharge,’ she told the Daily Mail. ‘We think it was for mental health because he was diagnosed at some point with schizophrenia.’

She remembers visiting him in jail with her grandmother when she was younger – before his murder spree. 

The first time he was arrested, it was for breaking and entering, and illegally pedaling weapons – Tonya told the Daily Mail he was also picked up at a later date for selling drugs. He was convicted of aggravated robbery, kidnapping and attempted murder and spent several years behind bars before he was convicted of the triple-murder.

‘It was all about easy money for him,’ Tonya said. ‘He was lazy. He didn’t want to work.’

But when he was released from jail, she was excited to have her dad back, and said he became a ‘street preacher’ in their small Ohio town.

She described him as a very charismatic person who people were drawn to. He drove around on his motorcycle with his full, bushy beard and easy smile, she recalled. The two of them even volunteered together at their local church.

However, after a bad car accident with a severe back injury that requires him to use a wheelchair and a cane, he become addicted to drugs – including oxycodone.

Tonya said her father never hurt her, but remembered being put in some dangerous situations – such as him picking up hitchhikers when she was in the car or leaving her alone when he was doing drug deals. She said her father even got a boy she was dating to sell drugs for him. 

Tonya being held by her father as he mother sits nearby. The photo was taken December 24, 1993. Tonya’s mother divorced her father after his arrest. Tonya said she no longer has a close relationship with her mother 

Tonya pictured as a young girl with her dad 

Tonya pictured with her parents on the day of her prom

But as time went on, his crimes turned darker.  

In 2011, Richard posted an ad on Craigslist for a caretaker for his property, offering a $300 stipend to look after the farm and live in a mobile trailer on the land.

But the ad was bogus. There was no job, no farm, no mobile trailer, no income.

More than a dozen people applied, and Richard managed to trick three different people into taking the fake job: Ralph Geiger, 56, of Akron, David Pauley, 51, of Norfolk, Virginia, and Tim Kern, 47, of Massillon, Ohio.

He then killed them all, execution-style, and buried some of their remains in a hand-dug grave in the woods. According to the Noble County Coroner, Geiger was killed in August and the authorities believe the other two men were killed in October and November, The Star Advertiser reported.

It later emerged his motive was to steal their possessions and sell them for drug money.

A fourth victim, Scott Davis, survived an attack but was seriously injured. He was shot in the arm as he ran from Richard and his alleged accomplice, 16-year-old Brogan Rafferty.

The South Carolina man told CNN he hid in the woods for hours before he was able to get to a house and call for help.

Police opened an investigation on Nov. 6, 2011. 

In 2013, Richard was handed three death sentences but there is no scheduled execution date, according to the Ohio Supreme Court. He continues to claim he is innocent.

Tonya recalled meeting with Davis years after he escaped death, describing the experience as ‘healing but traumatic’.

‘There’s a difference between someone being a headline and someone being a real person standing in front of you actually telling you in the first person what my dad did that made it all the more real because I didn’t know the little nitty gritty details.  

‘He was describing the look in my dad’s eyes when he shot him and how his voice sounded and I just pictured that in my head because I know how he talks. I know how he looks… like, he’s my dad.

‘I did apologize for what my dad did and we hugged. I know that is not enough to deal [with] what happened to him. He is going to have to deal with this the rest of his life.’ 

She described her father as a narcissist who is able to turn his emotions on and off when it is self serving.

‘I knew he was capable of doing things that were wrong and I knew the drugs could make him do horrible things,’ she said.

Her father moved around living in Texas before settling in Ohio. He spent years in prison for a series of different crimes before the triple-murder

Beasley pictured with his teen accomplice Brogan Rafferty, who met Beasley when he was a child and looked up to him as a father-figure but later called him a ‘wolf in sheep’s clothing’ 

The ad that Richard Beasley posted to Craigslist to lure his victims 

CraigsList Killer Richard Beasley is still on death row. Currently, there is no scheduled execution date set. The triple-murderer continues to maintain his innocence 

Richard’s alleged accomplice, Brogan, was tried as an adult but not given the death penalty because he was just 16 at the time of the murders. He was convicted of aggravated murder and attempted murder.

Brogan is now serving a life sentence in an Ohio prison without the chance of parole. 

Tonya said she occasionally still gets a letter from her father and believes he will die in prison of old age before he is executed.

Despite her feelings toward Richard, she plans to visit him at the Chillicothe Correctional Institution with her son over the summer. 

It will be the first time in more than a decade that she will come face-to-face with her dad.

‘The only reason I am going to see him is so I can tell my son I did make the effort and I wasn’t keeping him away from him out of spite,’ she said. 

‘I am not holding this hate and never letting him meet his grandson because of my own feelings towards him.’