The Craigslist Killer: Seven Days of Rage

Boston Globe reporter Maria Cramer covers the crime and police beat. She is also a "48 Hours" consultant. In the spring of 2009, she found herself at the center of a white-hot story.

"I got a call from my editor on April 15 telling me that there was a report of a woman shot at the Copley Marriott in Boston," she told "48 Hours" correspondent Peter Van Sant.

The dead woman was 25-year-old Julissa Brisman, an aspiring model from New York City.

Cramer said she knew immediately that it was going to be a big story. That's because the police had connected Julissa's murder to the robbery of Trisha Leffler just days before.

Both women had advertised in the erotic services section of Craigslist and had been restrained with plastic ties. And, once again, surveillance stills from the Marriott showed a tall, blond, preppy-looking man leaving the scene of the crime.

"Give me a sense when you first saw the first released photographs of this suspect, what did you see in that picture?" Van Sant asked Cramer.

"You saw a very relaxed looking guy. He was looking at his Blackberry, texting, looking like he had just left the hotel bar and was heading home," she replied.

Van Sant said, "In some ways, that makes it all the more insidious, all the more disquieting for people living here."

"What frightened a lot of people," Cramer continued, "are these pictures of a person that doesn't seem to have a care in the world."

The attacks could not have come at a worst time for Boston.

"What we had goin' on here was the Boston Marathon," private investigator Joe Moura explained. "Because it connected to Craigslist, everybody's imagination went wild."

Cramer said, "It basically created a frenzy - not only from the media, but from the police, because you had the possibility of a serial criminal here.

The media labeled him the "Craigslist Killer" and now all eyes were focused on the 20th floor hotel room of Julissa Brisman.

"48 Hours Mystery" producer Paul LaRosa, along with Cramer, has written a new book about the case called "Seven Days of Rage." It is published by Simon and Schuster, a division of CBS.

Excerpt: "Seven Days of Rage"
About the Book

"Police believe that the attacker immediately pulled a gun on her. He got at least one plastic tie on her wrist. At that point, she fought back," LaRosa explained. "Her killer shot her right at the front of her room. When he opened the door to flee, she fell outside the room."

"The cops said he didn't have to kill her," LaRosa continued. "Once you hit somebody in the head with a gun butt they go down."

A guest from New York City was staying in a room just down the hall from Julissa. The witness, who we'll call "Jill", told LaRosa what she saw and heard:

"Jill was in her room reading a mystery novel and all of the sudden, she starts hearing a commotion down the hall. Eventually, she poked her head out the door. And what she saw down the hall was a woman who was half in and half out of the doorway; she wasn't moving. Jill decided at that point, she was going to call security. The guard bent over, started moving the hair away from the woman on the floor and he saw a lot of blood," LaRosa said.

"Once he saw the blood, the guard said, 'Get in your room.' [Jill] stayed in the hallway and watched to see what was happening. The security guard started talking into his walkie-talkie. He said, 'This is an emergency. We need paramedics.'"

Less then an hour later, Julissa Brisman, only a week away from her 26th birthday, was pronounced dead at Boston Medical Center.

Later that night, cops called her mother, Carmen, in New York City. Carmen called Mark Pines, a photographer who was helping Julissa in her career, and also a family friend.

"She just told me that Julissa had died. You can't go back from a statement like that; it's definitive," Pines recalled. "We just started crying. More than words, we needed to share feelings at that point. The details - I didn't care about the details at that point. My heart was so broken that all I could do was cry."

For her family and Julissa's many friends - her murder was a tragic end to a life just beginning to turn around.

"What we know about Julissa before this was that she was a party girl. She was living the high life in New York," said Cramer. "She was a young, beautiful girl in New York City and she took full advantage of her youth and her beauty to, you know, live it up."

But at the time of her death, Julissa had stopped drinking and radically changed her looks.

Pines said the change was evident. "She would smile with her whole face. She'd smile with her mouth and her eyebrows at the same time, and she had eyes that were, like, just - they had this incredible, cock-eyed optimism. She had this amazingly positive, optimistic thing in her eyes, you know?"

Pines featured Julissa in a video about cell phones and wrote a song about her.

Julissa was trying to get her modeling and acting career going, but in the meantime, there were bills to be paid. So she began to offer what's known in the trade as sensual or erotic massages.

"Her services are advertised as massages, and from what I'm told by those close to her, they did not include full services," said Cramer, who further explained the service did not involve sexual intercourse.

When asked by Van Sant if Julissa was a prostitute, Cramer replied, "No. Not from what I'm told. She was disgusted by it. That said, she was definitely operating in a world that could become dangerous."

With two victims plucked off Craigslist - one dead and one terrorized - critics blasted the site as a virtual bordello filled with all-too-real prostitutes.

"People say, rightly so, that sex and crime were always around, even before the Internet. You could go in the back of a newspaper and see a lot of ads for women who would have sex with you. And that's true," said LaRosa," but the Internet makes it so much easier."

Writer Maureen Orth investigated the Craigslist Killer story for Vanity Fair magazine.

"They're creating huge cyber cities that are absolutely unpoliced. You can walk into your room any time of the day and just click on or not," she said. "Craigslist has a huge number of categories - M for T, men for trannies; T for M, trannies for men; rice queens, white guys who only like Asians; burritos, white guys who only like Latinos. I mean, these are all up there, all the time."

All the time - and the Craigslist Killer knew that all too well. Just two days after Julissa's murder, he dipped into Craigslist yet again to find his next victim.

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[anniee27]

I agree with others here that the scariest thing about this case is the fact that this guy seems so normal, you would walk by him on the street. My heart goes out to his fiancee, who was fooled just like everyone else was.

[bensonjunior]

These are all great, but when are you having new episodes?

[innocentwoman]

It is really creepy to think this guy was in med school and engaged but also killing girls on the side. Just because they advertised sexual services it does not mean they deserved any of this - shame to those of you who think so.

[Overruled1]

In my opinion, I would think that the service online would be safer than the threat these girls would meet on the streets...it seemed the police prefer the pimp involved...but as it is a felony to "pimp", they are losing the focus of the crime.
I also believe that Craigslist was more slandered by the controlled media as these crimes could have as easily been called anything else....for example, "The Boston strangler", after all they had a marathon to protect....

[software_king]

It doesn't make sense to me that a guy who is obviously intelligent would send e-mails from his actual IP address and not realize or care that he was on video. I guess it's fortunate he wasn't knowledgeable about computers and the ubiquity of video survellance...

The reporter was pretty harsh to say "somebody like Julissa Brisman is easily forgotten" but maybe she thought she was being brutally honest.

And the closing credit/test was yellow journalism at it's best: "....craiglist renamed its erotic services section, calling it adult services. that section is growing faster than ever."

This section is actually NOT growing due to the mandatory user traceable credit card fees now being charged there. But CBS has to make up a little bit of stuff to make the story sound more intrigueing and current I guess...



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