Can't Stop Reading About the Craigslist Killer

Photo Credit: Dailycomedy.com

It began with a book-signing party at a restaurant in Milton, MA promoted on Facebook by a friend who’s a veteran crime reporter at the Boston Globe. The etiquette of going to one of these things is that you buy the book. But now that I’ve actually started reading Seven Days of Rage – The Deadly Crime Spree of the Craigslist Killer, by Paul La Rosa and Maria Cramer, the young Globe crime reporter who covered the Craigslist killing of a woman advertising her exotic services on Craigslist, I can’t put it down.

Be assured that I will be at my office at 9 a.m. this morning and ready for the public relations work I love doing. Still if I had a double life where I could play hooky today, I’d stay home and read the remainder of this 209 page very quick read. Though I’d never stoop to watch the soaps, I was fascinated by the accounts of the Craigslist killing when it occurred here in Boston last April, and titillated when it turned out that Philip Markoff, the guy charged in the murder, was a student at B.U. Medical School.

I especially like the book’s account of the defendant’s “cyber stupidity,” explaining how his identity was very quickly determined in an age of Blackberries, text messaging, cell phones, and email. And that’s the part missing from all those True Detective magazine stories that were a staple of Grandpa’s leisure reading.

A physician who saw patients seven days a week at his office on New York’s Lower East Side, Grandpa loved reading about crime. Though he sent Grandma out to get The New York Times for stock quotes, he relished the Daily News and other tabloids providing regular coverage of mayhem and murder.

Mom thought it was disgraceful that her father-in-law, “an educated man,” would read what she considered trash. But I guess Grandpa felt he had nothing to prove. I confide that because of the many newspapers I read each day for my work, I don’t read as many books as I should. My night table has a stack of books on issues less exciting than crime, and I’ve read 80 per cent of each – with no desire to play hooky to finish any one of them.

Our Bill of Rights says that everybody has a right to a fair trial, and I have no idea what the defense team of Philip Markoff has in mind. Given the evidence disclosed in the press and the recently released book about the case, will his lawyers go for a trial, playing for the fumble? The notoriety of the case makes it seem unlikely the Suffolk County D.A. would allow for a plea bargain. In a world of legal texts, the defendant could be exonerated.

Though it’s almost time to get ready for work this morning, I’m looking forward to additional details about Philip Markoff’s engagement to that good-looking blonde from the Jersey Shore who stood by her man for about a week. Assuming I get home early enough to pick the book up again this evening, please don’t disappoint me.