Posteal Laskey

Posteal Laskey | The Cincinnati Strangler

Born: 06-18-1937

The Cincinnati Strangler

American Serial Killer

Crime Spree: 1965 – 1966

Death: 06-29-2007

Between October 1965 and December 1966, female Cincinnati residents were terrorized by a series of strangulations and sexual assaults.

Seven women died and one was injured in the space of fourteen months, convincing homicide detectives that all eight crimes had been committed by a single man. Cincinnati obviously had a serial killer in their midst.

The killer blew his first attempt, on October 12, 1965, when he beat and raped a 65-year-old woman, failing in his effort to strangle her with a length of plastic clothesline. Two months later, on December 2, his weapon was the same, employed to strangle Emogene Harrington in the basement of her own apartment building. Police linked the two crimes in theory, but the panic was yet to come.

On April 4, 1966, 58-year-old Lois Dant was raped and strangled in her first-floor Cincinnati apartment. Two months later, on June 10, 56-year-old Jeannette Messer was found in a city park, raped and strangled with a necktie.

On October 12, Mrs. Carl Hochhausler, 51, was found by her daughter in the family garage, beaten, raped and strangled to death by an unknown assailant. Eight days later, in a crime that police called “an exact copy” of the previous murders, 81-year-old Rose Winstsel was savagely beaten in her home, strangled with the electric cord of a heating pad. Authorities were less certain in the death of octogenarian Lula Kerrick, found in the elevator of her apartment building on December 9. The strangulation looked familiar, but she had not suffered sexual assault.

A few days later, suspect Posteal Laskey was arrested and charged with the “similar” slaying of a seventh victim, Barbara Bowman.

Convicted and sentenced to life for that crime, Posteal Laskey was never charged in the other murders but police remain confident of his guilt, an assumption seemingly supported by the abrupt cessation of murders after his arrest.

Posteal Laskey died in prison, of natural causes, on May 29, 2007. No one claimed his body and he was buried in one of the State of Ohio’s prison cemeteries.