Posteal Laskey Jr. was convicted of one murder: the August 1966 stabbing of Barbara Bowman, a 31-year-old woman who had taken a taxi home from a bar in Cincinnati, Ohio. An all-white jury found him guilty in April 1967 and he was sentenced to die in the electric chair. The sentence was later commuted to life, and he died in an Ohio prison in 2007, at 69, after about 40 years in custody.
He is remembered in Cincinnati by another name. Between December 1965 and December 1966 six women in the city, most of them past 50, were strangled, and the newspapers spoke of a "Cincinnati Strangler." Laskey was arrested on the morning the sixth woman was found. The stranglings stopped after his arrest, and many police officers believed he was responsible for all of them. He was never charged with any of the six, no court ever examined the claim, and the six cases are still listed as unsolved by the Cincinnati Police. His family regarded him as a scapegoat.
Dennis Whitehead, a Cincinnati-born writer who later wrote a book on the case from the original police files, court transcripts and prison records, describes the city of 1965 as feeling far removed from the strains of the decade: the escalating war in Vietnam, the draft protests, the civil rights movement and a growing distrust of police. That changed with the first killing.
On December 2, 1965, Emogene Harrington, 56, a mother of nine, was found strangled in East Walnut Hills. Police at first connected her death to a series of recent assaults on older women in that neighborhood.
On April 4, 1966, Lois Dant, 58, was found strangled in Price Hill, on the other side of the city. Her death broke the East Walnut Hills pattern that investigators had been following.
On June 10, 1966, Jeannette Messer was found strangled in Burnet Woods, where she had gone to walk her dog. WCPO gives her age as 56; Whitehead gives it as 55.
In August 1966 Barbara Bowman, 31, left a bar in Corryville by Yellow Cab to go home to Price Hill. She never reached home. She was stabbed to death in Price Hill.
Her case did not fit the pattern. She was much younger than the other women, and she had been stabbed, not strangled. But it held the most concrete evidence of any of the killings, because the man who drove her had been driving a cab.
According to WCPO, the Yellow Cab that collected her had been stolen, and it had picked up at least six fares before her. Whoever was driving it had called in to the dispatcher using a cab number, 188, that turned out to be a number Laskey had used when he drove for the company. Whitehead records that Laskey had driven for Yellow Cab in 1962. Police found nearly two dozen people who thought they had seen the driver, and an FBI artist drew a composite sketch from the descriptions given by patrons of the bar where Bowman had been. After Laskey's arrest, witnesses who said they had seen the driver identified him.
On October 12, 1966, Alice Hochhausler was found strangled in Clifton. She was a mother of nine and, according to Whitehead, a nurse at Good Samaritan Hospital. She had gone out to pick up her daughter from the hospital so that the young woman would not have to walk home alone. WCPO gives her age as 50; Whitehead gives it as 51.
Later that October Rose Winstel, 81, was found strangled in Clifton. Whitehead dates her death to October 20, 1966; the WCPO list gives October 19.
After Alice Hochhausler's death, Whitehead writes, residents demanded an arrest. Politicians pressed the police leadership, and the leadership pressed the officers on the street.
Fear spread across the city. Residents paid locksmiths to fit extra locks, and sporting goods stores reported brisk sales of guns. Frank Sefton, a patrolman who was the first officer to reach Barbara Bowman, later told the National Law Enforcement Officers Memorial Fund that locksmiths and hardware stores "couldn't keep locks in stock." A police hotline took about 800 tips a day, officers checked more than 15,000 cars, and trick-or-treating at Halloween was moved to daylight hours. A separate triple killing in suburban Bridgetown in September 1966, which police did not connect to the stranglings, added to the alarm.
The killer, if there was one killer, left little evidence. Police believed early on that one man was committing all of the stranglings. According to Whitehead, hairs recovered at the scenes pointed investigators toward a Black man, and from there a dragnet began. It started with known sex offenders and widened to Black men in general, including men who had worked as janitors and men who had merely applied for such jobs. Officers were put on 12-hour shifts, and civilians were recruited to help.
The Memorial Fund's account says a special squad of 22 officers ran down more than 1,000 leads and worked more than 100 hours of overtime. One lead was a brown and cream-colored car reported near several of the scenes.
On the morning of Friday, December 9, 1966, Lula Kerrick, 81, was found strangled downtown. WCPO gives her first name as Leila.
The arrest came within hours. The accounts differ on how police got the license plate that led them to Laskey. Whitehead writes that hours earlier, around midnight, a woman walking home from work realized she was being followed as she reached home and got safely inside, and that a neighbor arriving home wrote down the number of the car the man drove away in. WCPO says instead that a caller reported seeing a strange man near the place where Lula Kerrick lived and gave police a plate number. Either way, the number belonged to Posteal Laskey Jr., then 29.
Police found him at the mattress factory where he worked and arrested him about four hours after Lula Kerrick's body was found. He was held without bond, not for murder but on a violation of probation: in 1965 he had been convicted of assault and placed on probation. Whitehead writes that a judge then found him guilty of assault.
The detention gave police time to build a case, and they built it on Barbara Bowman, the one killing with witnesses, a cab and a dispatcher's record. He was indicted on a single count of first-degree murder.
The first-degree murder trial opened in Hamilton County in late March 1967. Judge Simon Leis Sr., then 70, presided. Laskey was defended by two lawyers who had recently been fired as assistant Hamilton County prosecutors.
The prosecution had little physical evidence. Its case rested on the witnesses who said they had seen the driver, on the cab and on the dispatcher's record. Whitehead describes the eyewitnesses from the Corryville bar as inconsistent. Laskey said he had been at home when Barbara Bowman was killed. WCPO reports that two people supported his alibi; the Memorial Fund's account says five witnesses placed him at home.
Judge Leis allowed the prosecution to call a woman who said Laskey had assaulted her, in an attack for which he was not on trial. Whitehead, who read the transcripts, regards that testimony as decisive.
On April 13, 1967, the jury found Laskey guilty of first-degree murder, and he was sentenced to death in the electric chair. The jury was all white; Laskey was Black, and all of the women in the case were white. The Ohio prison record gives May 8, 1967 as the date his sentence took effect and he was admitted to the state system, and it names the committing judge as Leis.
The arrest and the trial came at a time of rising tension between Cincinnati's police and its Black neighborhoods. The Memorial Fund's account says Laskey's arrest set off racial tensions in the city, that the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. traveled to Cincinnati to plead for calm, and that hundreds of National Guard troops were sent in when protests turned violent. Whitehead links both the race-based dragnet of 1966 and what many saw as the injustice of the Laskey trial to the unrest in Cincinnati's Black community that summer.
Laskey's death sentence was never carried out. WCPO reports that his sentence was commuted to life in prison after the U.S. Supreme Court barred executions as they were then carried out. The Memorial Fund's account instead ties the commutation to the end of capital punishment in Ohio, and Whitehead dates it to 1970. Accounts differ on the date and the mechanism; all agree that the sentence became life imprisonment. The Ohio prison record lists his offense as first-degree murder "with mercy," one count, from Hamilton County, with a sentence of life.
Laskey spent the rest of his life in Ohio prisons. Whitehead writes that he kept a clean disciplinary record and could point to accomplishments in prison, and that his health was failing in his later years, but that the parole board refused him every time he became eligible. Early in 2007 he applied again; the Ohio Parole Board denied him and set his next eligibility for 2017.
Posteal Laskey died of natural causes at the Pickaway Correctional Institution on May 29, 2007, at the age of 69, according to the Ohio Department of Rehabilitation and Correction as reported by FOX19. He had spent about 40 years behind bars. He was buried on the grounds of the prison.
The six stranglings were never charged against Laskey or anyone else, and Whitehead reports that they remain cold cases on the books of the Cincinnati Police.
The case for attributing them to him has always rested on circumstance. The killings stopped after his arrest, and the Memorial Fund's account says that this was why police believed they had the right man. Artie Crum, an officer who worked the case, told WCPO: "There was no doubt in my mind he was guilty." His belief, like that of his colleagues, is an opinion, not a finding of any court.
Against that, the one case that went to trial was different in kind from the others: a younger victim, a knife, and a stolen taxi. The evidence that convicted Laskey of Barbara Bowman's death came from witnesses and from the cab, not from the strangling scenes. His family believed he had been made a scapegoat.
The stranglings. Laskey was never charged with any of the six strangling deaths, and no court has ever weighed evidence linking him to them. The attribution comes from police officers and from press accounts.
The license plate. Whitehead traces the plate number to a neighbor of a woman who was followed home hours before Lula Kerrick was found; WCPO says a caller saw a man near where Lula Kerrick lived. The two accounts cannot both describe the same report.
The alibi. WCPO says two people supported his alibi; the Memorial Fund says five witnesses placed him at home.
The commutation. WCPO ties it to the U.S. Supreme Court; the Memorial Fund to the end of the death penalty in Ohio; Whitehead dates it to 1970.
Victims' ages and names. Sources differ on Jeannette Messer's age (55 or 56), Alice Hochhausler's (50 or 51), Rose Winstel's date of death (October 19 or 20) and Lula Kerrick's first name (Lula or Leila).
What happened to Barbara Bowman. Accounts of the attack differ in detail. All agree that she was stabbed and that the conviction was for her murder.
June 18, 1937: Posteal Laskey born (Ohio prison record).
1962: Laskey drives for the Yellow Cab company in Cincinnati.
1965: Convicted of assault and placed on probation.
December 2, 1965: Emogene Harrington, 56, found strangled in East Walnut Hills.
April 4, 1966: Lois Dant, 58, found strangled in Price Hill.
June 10, 1966: Jeannette Messer found strangled in Burnet Woods.
August 1966: Barbara Bowman, 31, stabbed to death in Price Hill after leaving a Corryville bar by cab.
October 12, 1966: Alice Hochhausler found strangled in Clifton.
October 1966: Rose Winstel, 81, found strangled in Clifton.
December 9, 1966: Lula Kerrick, 81, found strangled downtown; Laskey arrested a few hours later.
Late March 1967: Trial opens before Judge Simon Leis Sr.
April 13, 1967: Found guilty of first-degree murder; sentenced to death.
May 8, 1967: Sentence takes effect; admitted to the Ohio prison system.
1967: Unrest in Cincinnati's Black neighborhoods, which Whitehead links in part to the Laskey trial.
Date disputed (Whitehead: 1970): Death sentence commuted to life.
Early 2007: Parole denied; next eligibility set for 2017.
May 29, 2007: Dies at the Pickaway Correctional Institution, aged 69.
December 2025: Dennis Whitehead's two-part history of the case appears in the Northern Kentucky Tribune.