Seven Days of Rage: The Deadly Crime Spree of the Craigslist Killer

When Manhattan model and masseuse Julissa Brisman went to meet a client at a luxury Boston hotel, she thought she’d be leaving the hotel with enough money to buy her little sister’s school books. But Philip Markoff, the handsome, clean-cut, twenty-two-year-old med student who hired Brisman on Craigslist, had different plans. On April 14, 2009, guests notified management of a woman screaming on the twentieth floor, and Brisman was found in a pool of blood, with several bullet wounds to her torso and…plastic restraints around her wrist.

Hotel surveillance video captured Markoff’s image, and an additional tip helped police connect him to attacks on several other women, including a prostitute who was tied up at a Boston hotel, and the assault of an exotic dancer in Rhode Island, both of which bear a striking similarity to the Brisman murder.

A skillful blend of hard journalism and fascinating yet chilling true-crime narrative, this headline-making story will appeal to fans of Ann Rule.

Paul Larosa is an Emmy Award-winning producer for the CBS newsmagazine 48 Hours. He won a Primetime Emmy for the acclaimed CBS documentary 9/11, and has also won a Peabody Award, a Christopher Award, and an Edward R. Murrow Award. For sixteen years he was reporter for the New York Daily News, where he was the co-winner with Anna Quindlen of the Meyer Berger Award given by Columbia University's School of Journalism. He lives in Brooklyn with his wife and their two children.

Maria Cramer is a reporter for the Boston Globe who covers crime and has been covering this story since the April 14th killing of Julissa Brisman. She covers Boston police for the Globe and has been the lead reporter on numerous crime stories, including the case of Clark Rockefeller, who gained international attention in 2008 when he kidnapped his daughter from a Boston Park and was later connected to the 1984 disappearance of a California couple. She lives in Jamaica Plain, Mass.