The man Cincinnati called the Strangler was convicted of a stabbing.
Six women were strangled in the city between December 1965 and December 1966. Posteal Laskey was never charged with any of them. He was tried for the killing of a seventh, a woman stabbed in the throat beside an abandoned taxi, and the six stranglings remain open cases on the books of the Cincinnati Police to this day.
Emogene Harrington was fifty-six. On December 2, 1965 she was found on the basement floor of her apartment building on East McMillan Street in East Walnut Hills, raped, with a length of plastic clothesline tied around her neck.
Lois Dant was fifty-eight. On Monday, April 4, 1966, the week before Easter, she was on the telephone to a friend in her ground-floor apartment in Price Hill and hung up because somebody knocked at the door. She was raped, beaten and strangled.
Matilda Jeannette Messer was fifty-six and was walking her dog in Burnet Woods on June 10 when she was beaten, raped and strangled with a necktie. She was found beside the stone staircase in the park. Her dog, a toy fox terrier called Judy, had been tied to a tree near the body.
Alice Hochhausler went out on the night of October 11 for one reason. Her daughter Beth was finishing a nursing shift at Good Samaritan Hospital, and with a killer loose in the city her mother did not want her walking home alone. She was struck on the head hard enough to knock out her dentures as she crossed from her driveway to her house in the Gaslight District of Clifton, dragged into the garage by her ankles, and strangled with the sash of her own bathrobe. She was fifty or fifty-one, the mother of nine, and the wife of a surgeon at the hospital her daughter was working in. She was found the next morning.
Rose Winstel was eighty-one. Nine days later, on October 20, she was found beaten and strangled with the cord of an electric massager in her house on Vine Street Hill.
Lula Kerrick was eighty-one and had walked home from early Mass at St. Peter in Chains Cathedral, three blocks away. On the rainy morning of Friday, December 9, 1966, a resident of The Brittany apartments at West Ninth and Race summoned the elevator and it arrived carrying her body, a nylon stocking around her neck. She had been beaten and strangled but not raped. Some Cincinnati accounts give her name as Leila.
Plastic clothesline, a necktie, a bathrobe sash, an appliance cord, a stocking. All of the women had been beaten about the head, some disfigured by it, one left with multiple bones broken in her torso. All but one showed evidence of sexual assault, by one count; another puts it at five of the seven.
The seventh case was different and the police knew it at the time.
Barbara Rose Bowman was thirty-one. On the night of August 13 into the morning of the 14th, 1966, she left a bar in Corryville and called for a Yellow Cab to take her home to Price Hill. A cab came, and patrons described the driver as a young Black man. Less than two blocks from her apartment, at Grand Avenue and Ring Place, she was attacked and stabbed in the throat, seven times by one account. She was still alive when police reached her, lying in the pouring rain beside the taxi. She died shortly afterward.
Her age and the knife put her so far outside the pattern that investigators took her off the list of the Strangler's victims. Accounts still disagree about what else was done to her: some say she was strangled and raped as well as stabbed, one has her struck by the cab first, and the writer who worked from the original police files and court transcripts describes it simply as a stabbing death. Every source agrees on the knife.
Her killing is the only one of the seven for which anybody was ever convicted.
The taxi was the thread that led to Laskey. Cab number 186 had been reported stolen from the Yellow Cab Company hours before Bowman was picked up, and somebody had been answering the dispatcher on its radio. In 1966 every Yellow Cab in Cincinnati used an identical ignition key. Posteal Laskey Jr. had driven for the company between July and December 1962, had driven that cab, and when he was dismissed he kept the key along with several other items he was supposed to return.
None of that was known while the city was hunting a strangler. What the investigation of 1966 produced instead was a dragnet conducted on the basis of race.
Hairs recovered at the scenes pointed to a Black assailant, and from there police swept up Black men across Cincinnati: sex offenders first, then men who had worked as janitors or merely applied to, then men picked up because a caller had seen a Black man on a trash truck or standing on a corner. Officers went to twelve-hour shifts. Civilians were recruited. More than a thousand leads were run. What it produced in the Black neighborhoods was a year of being stopped, and a widespread conviction that the police were not solving a murder so much as conducting a census.
The white city was frightened in its own way. Gun sales rose, locks sold out, bars and nightclubs began closing early, and for two years Halloween was moved to Sunday afternoon.
What actually broke the case was an assault that failed. Late on the night of December 8, 1966, Sandra Chapas finished her shift at Kenner Toys on Sycamore Street and had to walk across downtown because her husband never came for her. Nearing her apartment on West Court Street she realized she was being followed, heard footsteps on the stairs behind her, got inside and slammed the door. The man left. A neighbor coming home from work wrote down his license number. She was twenty-two. Another account has her followed to her car and grabbed on the stairwell until a neighbor intervened, and has several witnesses taking down the plate.
Hours later Lula Kerrick was found in the elevator at The Brittany. While detectives were still there, others traced the plate to the Wuest mattress factory on Gest Street and arrested a twenty-nine-year-old laborer. Laskey was living with his mother, had recently taken an apartment elsewhere with a friend, and played guitar in a band that had gone nowhere. He had been born on June 18, 1937.
He was held without bond, not for murder, but on a probation violation. He had been prosecuted in 1965 for attacking a woman named Judith Buckner and given three years' probation that October, and a judge now found him guilty of assault over the Chapas pursuit. That bought the police the time to build a case.
They built it on Bowman. Patrons of the Lark Café were shown photographs and identified Laskey as the driver who had picked her up, and an FBI artist's composite drawn from their descriptions was set beside his 1965 mugshot. Eight witnesses identified him, some tentatively. Two more women came forward after the arrest: Delle Ernst, sixty-nine, who said he had robbed her on October 4, and Virginia Hinners, who said he had robbed her on September 21.
He was indicted in mid-December on a single count of first-degree murder.
The trial opened in late March 1967 before Judge Simon Leis Sr., who was seventy. The jury was all white, a motion for a change of venue was refused, and Laskey was represented by two attorneys who had recently been fired from the Hamilton County prosecutor's office.
Two things about it have been argued over in Cincinnati ever since. There was almost no physical evidence; the case was eyewitness identification, the cab, the stolen key and the dispatcher's radio call, and the witnesses from the Corryville bar did not agree with one another. Laskey said he had been at home when Bowman was killed and two people supported him.
And Judge Leis allowed the prosecution to call the victim of an uncharged assault to testify against him. By the account of the writer who worked from the original files, that was the nail in the coffin.
On April 13, 1967 Laskey was convicted of first-degree murder and sentenced to die in the electric chair.
Then the city burned.
On June 11 his cousin Peter Frakes picketed with a sandwich board reading Cincinnati Guilty, Laskey Innocent, and was arrested. The next evening a protest meeting at the Abraham Lincoln statue at Reading Road and Rockdale Avenue broke up and Avondale went up: bottles and firebombs, fires in the street, overturned cars. The Ohio National Guard was called in. One person died, sixty-three were injured, 404 people were arrested, and roughly two million dollars of property was destroyed.
It was one of a hundred and fifty-nine racial disorders in American cities that summer, and it was the first of them.
Martin Luther King came to Cincinnati to appeal for calm.
When President Johnson's Commission on Civil Disorders reported the following year it named Cincinnati and named the mechanism: the poverty of the city's segregated neighborhoods, the practice of stopping Black people on foot or in cars without obvious basis, and the disproportionate use of loitering laws against minorities. The ordinance Frakes had fallen foul of made it a crime for three or more people to assemble on a sidewalk and behave in a manner annoying to passers-by. The Supreme Court struck it down in 1971, in a case brought by a student named Dennis Coates.
Laskey's execution was set for July 8, 1968. His lawyers argued he could not have had a fair trial, because the prosecutor's office and the press had presented him to the city as the Cincinnati Strangler, something the state had never charged and never attempted to prove in court. The appeal was rejected, the court holding that the verdict had not been the product of racial or social prejudice.
What saved his life had nothing to do with his case. On June 29, 1972, in the wake of Furman v. Georgia, the United States Supreme Court disposed of a batch of pending capital petitions including his, and the death sentences fell. Fourteen men from Hamilton County came off death row at once. Laskey's sentence became life.
He served the rest of it. He was moved between institutions, kept a clean disciplinary record, and was refused parole at every hearing. In March 2002 news that he might be released produced enough public reaction in Cincinnati to make the papers. In February 2007 he was refused again and told he could not apply until 2017.
He died on May 29, 2007 at the Pickaway Correctional Institution in Scioto Township, aged sixty-nine, after more than forty years inside. No family came forward to claim him, and he was buried in a prison cemetery on the grounds. He denied killing Barbara Bowman to the end.
What can be said with confidence is narrow. A jury convicted him on circumstantial evidence and disputed identifications, and no court has ever disturbed that verdict. The six stranglings were never charged against him or anyone else, and the only argument publicly offered for attributing them to him is that they stopped when he was arrested. A retired officer who worked the case said years later he had no doubt Laskey had done all seven, which is a police opinion, not a finding.
The rest is a question Cincinnati has never finished with. A city hunted a strangler by sweeping up Black men on the strength of their skin, convicted one of them of a different killing in a trial the Black community did not accept, and then arrested his cousin for holding a sign, and that arrest started the first riot of the long hot summer of 1967. The federal commission that examined it afterward pointed at the street stops and the loitering law rather than at the verdict.