Laskey was born in 1937 in Cincinnati and worked as a taxi driver.
Between 1965 and 1966 seven women, most of them elderly, were raped and strangled in the city. The press called the unknown attacker the Cincinnati Strangler and the case produced something close to a panic; women were escorted home and the city offered a reward.
He was arrested in December 1966 and tried for the murder of Barbara Bowman, a twenty-one-year-old law student, and convicted in 1967. He was sentenced to death.
The sentence was commuted to life imprisonment in 1972 when the United States Supreme Court struck down the capital statutes then in force. He was denied parole repeatedly and died in prison on May 29, 2007.
One conviction. The other six killings were attributed to him and never charged, and he denied all of them, including the one he was convicted of. His conviction rested on eyewitness identification and on his taxi, and it has been questioned in Cincinnati since, though no court has revisited it.
His cousin was the subject of a well-known United States Supreme Court free speech case arising from a protest about the conviction, which is how the name appears in American constitutional law.