Free Killer Charm by Linda Fairstein

Introduction
    During my thirty-year prosecutorial career, many of the cases my colleagues and I took to trial involved sexual predators who disarmed their victims simply by virtue of the “mask of sanity” that psychopaths present to the world.
    My first high-profile trial, in 1977, involved a well-respected dentist who sedated patients so that he could molest them while they were semi-conscious. “Not possible!” the media and general public responded when he was arrested. Dr. Marvin Teicher was distinguished-looking, married, and had a great reputation as a dental practitioner. When I wrote Killer Charm in 2009, the country was shocked by the murder of a twenty-five-year-old masseuse in a hotel room in Boston—a victim of the mysterious “Craigslist Killer.” As other attacks occurred in the area, people were shocked to find that videotapes revealed a handsome young man who casually walked away from the scenes of the crimes. Philip Markoff, the twenty-three-year-old medical student soon charged with the murder and other attacks, was a poster boy for this kind of unexpected psychopathic killer. The superficial charm exhibited by an astounding number of dangerous psychopaths is one of their best weapons to overcome potential victims.
    Almost a year after I wrote this piece, on the anniversary of the date Markoff had planned to marry his fiancée, he wrote her name—Megan—in blood on the wall of his jail cell. The unlikely killer had slashed his arteries with a pen that he carved into the shape of a razor. He then covered his head with a plastic bag and stuffed toilet paper in his throat, killing himself before his cases could go to trial.
    This horrific end to the predator’s life only provoked more questions: Had anyone known that Markoff was a psychopath before his crimes came to light? Was life not worth living to him, now that the world knew his sane demeanor was only a façade? The extent of Markoff’s spree, like those of Teicher and infamous serial killer Ted Bundy, forces us to think about how easy it is to deny that a seemingly “normal” person living among us could be capable of inhuman crimes.

Killer Charm
    A T 10:15 ON THE EVENING of April 14, 2009, Boston detectives responded to emergency calls from the posh Marriott Copley Place hotel. A young woman, later identified as 25-year-old Julissa Brisman, had been found lying in the doorway of her hotel room on the 20th floor. She had been hit over the head and shot three times. One bullet entered her heart and killed her almost instantly.
    Brisman was an aspiring actress and model from New York City, a petite and striking woman who had also worked on and off as an erotic masseuse, advertising her services on Craigslist. It soon emerged that she’d planned to meet an online client that night in Boston. When police uncovered the Craigslist connection, they were instantly reminded of another case: Just four days earlier, in a room at Boston’s nearby Westin Copley Place hotel, a 29-year-old woman who’d listed herself in the erotic-services section on Craigslist had also been attacked by her client. In that case, the assailant pulled out a gun, bound her hands behind her back, and robbed her before vanishing.
    As investigators struggled to pull together leads in the two cases, another hotel attack occurred just over the state line in Rhode Island. Two days after Brisman’s murder, another woman who had advertised erotic services on Craigslist was tied up by her client in a room at the Holiday Inn Express, but the assault was interrupted and the attacker escaped.
    In the press, the Craigslist Killer case began to take on a psycho-on-the-loose, Silence of the Lambs kind of sordidness: The guy appeared smart and brazen, yet it was hard to picture him as anything other than a lowlife—perhaps an ex-con with a history of robbery or murder, someone who’d give you the creeps if you shared a hotel elevator with him.
    But when the cops arrested a suspect