The Man from Primrose Lane lived a lie and died a millionaire.

By Phil McIntyre

The door was unlocked, even though the dead man inside was a notorious recluse. Patrolman Thomas Sackett stepped inside.

It was June, 21st, 2008. Minutes earlier, sixteen-year-old William Beachum had phoned 911 to report that the old man who lived in the house was not answering the door. As Sackett had learned that morning, Beachum sometimes ran errands and did grocery shopping for the old man. Beachum’s older brother, Albert, had passed the job onto him some time ago.

As his eyes adjusted, Sackett looked around. He called out for the old man but received no answer. He looked inside a coat closet by the front door and found boxes of mittens stacked there—the hermit was often seen shuffling down Merriman in West Akron, wearing knitted mittens, even in the middle of summer.

Then he noticed the blood.

It coated the foyer floor as if a bleeding body had been dragged across it. The blood began in the kitchen, where the old man’s fingers were discovered in a blender, ground to pulp.

Patrolman Tom Sackett discovered the man’s body in the living room.

The Man From Primrose Lane, as he was known in the neighborhood, was still sitting up. He’d been shot in the gut, his fingers chopped off. Dead for at least a couple days.

“Most of the blood had come from the open wounds on the man’s hands,” says Sackett. “He would probably have survived the gun shot.”

Akron’s Homicide team was called in.

“We couldn’t find any prints,” says Sackett. “We only found two partials. One in the tank of the toilet, the other on the back of the bedpost. Someone scrubbed the house clean before we got there, the doorknobs and walls wiped of fingerprints. It’s likely it was the Man From Primrose Lane, himself. ”

But who was the Man From Primrose Lane, and who would have motive to murder a fiercely private man in such a gruesome manner?

The house on Primrose Lane is listed under the name Joseph Howard King, according to records obtained from the Summit County Auditor’s Office. It was purchased in 1979, for $15,000 and the buyer paid cash. At first, detectives assumed that Joe King was the true identity of the Man From Primrose Lane.

Police also used the information provided to the Auditor’s office thirty years ago to find an account and safe-deposit box at a local Charter One bank, under King’s name.

“The Man from Primrose Lane died with at least $3.4 million in stocks and bonds,” says Mike Weger of Confidential Investigations, the private investigative firm hired by Albert Beachum. “And another $700,000 in a personal savings account.”

That’s three million reasons someone would want to kill the man. “It’s definitely a possible motive,” admits Lieutenant Mark Gareau. But first, someone would have to come forward and identify themselves as the man’s next-of-kin, and that seems unlikely considering what the private investigator discovered next.

Weger tracked King’s birth certificate to a hospital in Bellefonte, Pennsylvania. Using the city’s birth records, he located a possible relative, another King born to the same parents listed on Joe King’s certificate, at the same hospital, in 1928, two years after King was delivered there. The woman’s name was Carol. She has since married and changed her last name to Dechant. Weger found her in Pennsylvania. “And that’s when things got really weird,” says Weger.

Dechant informed the investigator that her younger brother had died in a car crash, along with their parents, in 1932. Whoever the Man from Primrose Lane was, he wasn’t Joe King.

The P.I. had uncovered a decades-old crime. The Man from Primrose Lane had stolen a dead boy’s identity and had used it to lay low in Akron for at least thirty years. Perhaps this old crime had something to do with his murder.

Police returned to the scene and swept the house again for new clues. Detectives were shocked to discover, inside the dead man’s home, a box of composition notebooks that detailed the life of a young woman named Katy Keenan from age six to her eighteenth birthday. According to a source close to the investigation, Keenan claims she has never met the Man from Primrose Lane. She refused comment for this story. However, she posted this message on her Facebook wall: “I’d like people to respect my privacy. Something that hasn’t been respected, apparently, for the last ten years.”

Though police do not consider Keenan a suspect, one detective, who asked to remain anonymous, believes she holds the key to this unsolved murder. He points to a passage from the notebooks in which the writer admits to following her into a movie theater because he wanted to protect her from other men who might be interested in her. In another, he admits to being in love with her.

“I don’t believe that the killer’s motive was money,” says Sackett, who was recently promoted to detective. “There is no relative who stood to inherit his fortune. So what is the motive? One possible motive might be someone close to Keenan finding out about those notebooks and confronting the man about it and then things escalated and got out of hand.”

It’s worth noting that Keenan’s father has refused to speak with investigators. He has a prior record for assault in Cuyahoga County. He did not return repeated calls for comment.

But that still doesn’t answer the question on everyone’s mind—just who was the Man from Primrose Lane to begin with?

“Look, that’s not my concern,” says Lt. Gareau. “My job is to find out who killed this man. I don’t care if the guy was running from the law, or from creditors, or a nagging wife. Someone murdered him. And we’re going to find out who did it.”

(Mandy Dissell contributed to this story.)

Email Phil McIntyre: philmcintyre58@hotmail.com