Who Is The Craigslist Suspect?
Police in Boston have charged a clean-cut, 22-year-old medical student who is engaged to be married with murder and armed robbery, just months before he was due to walk down the aisle.
Philip Markoff will be arraigned later today on charges of murder, kidnapping and armed robbery, in connection with the death of one young woman and the robbery of another at two Boston luxury hotels. Both women had advertised massage services on Craigslist, the classified ad Web site.
Markoff's fiancee said police have the wrong man and there is no way he could have done it.
In an e-mail to ABC's "Good Morning America, Megan McAllister said Markoff "could not hurt a fly."
She called him "a beautiful person inside and out," according to the message read on the air Tuesday.
McAllister said she and Markoff expect to be married in August "and share a wonderful, meaningful life together."
Markoff has no criminal record, but police are confident they've got their man - and they believe he may have other victims as well. One may be a woman who was tied up and robbed at a Holiday Inn in Warwick, R.I., last week, before the woman's husband arrived and her assailant fled.
Adjectives used by friends and acquaintances to describe Markoff have ranged from "likable" and "fun to be around" and "totally normal," to "creepy" or "weird."
A native of Upstate New York, Markoff graduated from SUNY Albany in 2007 and was attending Boston University's medical school when he was arrested in connection with the murder of 26-year-old Julissa Brisman, who was found dead April last Monday at the Boston Marriott Copley Place.
Joe Coe, a former classmate of Markoff's at SUNY Albany, told Early Show anchor Harry Smith that he remembered Markoff as "an average man, very unremarkable."
Coe said he knew Markoff fairly well. "He was really good friends with one of the men that I lived with, and he was over my apartment frequently."
When asked his general impression, Coe said, "There was nothing that really stood out to me as something special. He would say off-color comments about women, and opposed people, which would become an argument with me and some other people that lived in the apartment."
"Would you describe him as misogynistic?" Smith asked.
When he heard the news of Markoff's arrest as the Craigslist killer, Coe said he initially felt shock. "I wouldn't believe that someone that was in my apartment, that I've had dinner with, that I've spoken with, could be a perpetrator, allegedly, of these kinds of horrific acts against women."
Smith asked if any acquaintances had negative portraits of Markoff: "Did anybody you know, any girls that dated him, or people in your particular social group, ever say 'this guy's creepy'? Or 'this guy gave me a bad vibe?'"
"I heard that a lot," Coe said. "And I've been hearing that a lot since [the news] broke. And it's that misogyny and male entitlement [that] really comes out, and people are starting to talk about that."
"People ask me, 'Is there going to be anything about this guy that people are going to recognize? Is there going to be a history?' Absolutely, because you don't just turn this age, … a second-year medical student, and you suddenly decide you're going to go rob people and shoot women," Brown said. "So there had to be a psychopathy running for a long time, and had to be behaviors that would, once you look back, you'll say, 'Wait a minute, he does have some peculiar things about him from, as you said, creepy things about him,' that have basically been ignored or minimized."
Smith wondered about a medical student - intelligent, who is familiar with technology, leaving a trail of clues. [Computer experts were apparently able to help police track Markoff's movements via his Blackberry use.]
"You have got to wonder about his intelligence, don't you?" Brown said.
She suggested that it reveals a particular psychological trait: "I think the real problem is he just feels omnipotent. He just feels like he's not going to be caught. He thinks he's so smart he doesn't pay attention. He thinks he can get away with everything. And probably he's been able to get away with an awful lot in his life, either through his family or through his school. Something has given him so much entitlement that he simply thinks he walks on water. And he's now found out, of course, that he does not."
Brown also reflected on Markoff's wedding, scheduled for August, which was being publicly celebrated on a Web page.
"He's obviously able to get through life doing the things that normal people do," she said. "But he's got this side of him that people do not really realize was there. And one of the questions was, why did he commit these crimes? [And] were they just robberies?"