Free Killer Charm by Linda Fairstein Page B

killing spree. By the time he was captured, he was estimated to have murdered at least 30 young women in a four-year cross-country rampage. And just like Philip Markoff and Marvin Teicher, he compelled, and traded on, women’s trust.
    The mask of sanity is the element that makes women like Trisha Leffler, Markoff’s first known robbery victim, tell reporters, “He was a tall, good-looking guy. When I first laid eyes on him, I was comfortable.” Moments later, he was pointing a gun at her. One of Bundy’s methods was to put his arm in a sling and approach a woman to ask for help in lifting a small sailboat onto his car.
    Bundy’s “mask” was so convincing to women that when he was on trial for the horrific murder of a 12-year-old girl in Florida, he asked his then-girlfriend on the stand if she would still marry him, despite all she knew about him. She answered yes . And although Markoff’s fiancée reportedly called off the wedding, her first response to his arrest was to e-mail news outlets protesting that “Philip is a beautiful person inside and out and did not commit this crime.”
    Often, the women involved with men like Markoff, Bundy, and Teicher are not only blinded by the men’s charm but also deeply in denial. Their friends and family, usually equally blinded, support their choice of such a successful man, and tearing down the illusion becomes increasingly difficult. How could they have gotten so involved with someone so bad?
What the Women Know
    But sometimes the spell does get broken and the people in a psychopath’s life realize the signs were always there. In Bundy’s case, an ex-fiancée, Liz Kloepfer, saw the truth and reportedly called police in Utah after he moved there from Seattle, where a number of young women had disappeared and later been found dead. Kloepfer told authorities that Bundy was not at home on the dates some of the women had gone missing, that his sex drive had dwindled when the rape-murders began, that he owned a fake cast, and that he had once tied her up and attempted to choke her. He was eventually arrested during a routine traffic stop, when police found suspicious items, such as handcuffs, in his car.
    Once a psychopath is arrested, stories often leak out about earlier crimes. Take the case of Eric Lewenstein, which I supervised several years ago. In 1997, Lewenstein was 22, wealthy, handsome, and living in New York, the son of a high-profile physician and grandson of a financier. One night, he allegedly attacked a young aspiring actress he met at a trendy nightspot, forcing her into the restroom and beating her when she resisted his advances. Despite her injuries, the victim declined to press charges, fearing that she wouldn’t be believed.
    She didn’t testify until five years later, when Lewenstein was charged with a similar attempted sexual assault, in which the victim described how the perp smashed her head against the tiles in a restaurant restroom. Both women told their stories in court, and Lewenstein pleaded guilty.
    One week after Markoff’s arrest, I got an e-mail from a woman who’d gone to high school with Lewenstein. “Stories will start to come out about Markoff,” she wrote. “We all knew about Eric. His nickname was Frankenstein.”
    That’s why when I trained young lawyers investigating sex offenders and killers, I told them to talk to ex-wives and girlfriends. They often have information they’ve been too embarrassed to reveal or they feared no one would believe. Once the mask is ripped off, people who’ve glimpsed behind it come out of the woodwork.
    Several days after Markoff’s arrest, a friend of his from undergrad days told the press about a night when the pre-med student overpowered her on their way home from a night out, pinning her against a wall as he came on to her until a classmate pulled him away. “There are other people who have seen glimpses” of Markoff’s dark side, the young woman said. I assume police and prosecutors will