Killer charm, p.1
Killer Charm, page 1
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Killer Charm
And Other True Cases
From the Files of Linda Fairstein
Linda Fairstein
Contents
Killer Charm: The Double Lives of Psychopaths
How Serial Rapists Target Their Victims
The Rape Scandal That Puts You at Risk
The Five Most Dangerous Places for Women
The Most Surprising Crime Zone: Your Own Home
Why Some Women Lie About Rape
About the Author
Killer Charm:
The Double Lives of Psychopaths
From the Files of Linda Fairstein
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
AT 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 within the week, the public was in for a shock. Security-video footage showed a good-looking guy strolling away from two of the crime scenes while casually checking his cell phone. Investigators tracked him through e-mail forensics and other evidence and, on April 20, arrested the man identified as the alleged Craigslist Killer as he drove on the interstate with his fiancée. He was later charged with murder and multiple other crimes.
In all other ways, though, the alleged killer defied most people’s assumptions of what evil looks like. Philip Markoff, 23, was a medical student at Boston University. Tall, handsome, from a solid family, and with no criminal record, he was living with his fiancée, 25-year-old Megan McAllister, a fellow med student he had met in college while both were volunteering at a local hospital. They were reportedly planning a beach wedding in August.
Friends of Markoff spoke out immediately, backing McAllister’s statements to the press that “he wouldn’t hurt a fly” and describing him as personable and highly intelligent. News articles mentioned his good looks, as though his physical appearance was an indicator of good behavior. The mainstream media repeatedly used expressions like clean-cut and all-American in describing him.
But as Boston police continued to amass critical evidence, the picture darkened. Investigators found a stash of women’s underwear—which they characterized as souvenirs from victims—in the springs of the bed Markoff shared with McAllister. Detectives also found zip ties (the kind used to bind the two robbery victims) and a semiautomatic gun in a hollowed-out copy of every med student’s bible, Gray’s Anatomy.
You can’t help but wonder: Is it possible that Megan McAllister had no clue that there was something not quite right about the man she planned to marry? All my investigative experience causes me to doubt that. But that is just one of many mysteries that surround the psychopathic personality and the people he deceives.
A Psychopath’s Mask
Many of the details that have emerged about Markoff’s personality fit the criteria for a psychopath: someone (usually male) who almost entirely lacks empathy but can appear normal, even charming and brilliant. Psychopaths apply their intelligence to mimicking conventional behavior; they are both great actors and heartless predators. There are about 1 million in the United States, or about 1 percent of the adult male population (but as much as 25 percent of the prison population). In other words, they can be anywhere. And since their danger flies under the radar, it’s important to understand how they operate.
In my 26 years supervising the sex-crimes unit in the Manhattan District Attorney’s Office, my colleagues and I prosecuted many people who fit the psychopath criteria: dentists and doctors, teachers and lawyers, accountants and professors, college students and the wealthy heirs of prominent parents.
I got my first exposure to the type when, as the newly designated chief of the bureau, I was assigned to the trial of Marvin Teicher, a distinguished-looking and highly respected dentist. A brilliant police investigation, in which a female detective went undercover as a patient, revealed his true character: Teicher was captured on film molesting the sedated woman.
I was as astonished as the rest of the public to discover that a prominent health-care professional—a man whose hobby was starring in musical comedies in an amateur theatrical group—was also a repeat sexual predator. Teicher was my introduction to the elaborate double lives led by psychopaths and to the disguising power of their outward appearance of respectability: their college degrees, their breeding, and often their good looks.
Many psychologists call this power the mask of sanity, a phrase most famously applied to the charming, handsome serial killer Ted Bundy, who was executed in Florida in 1989. Bundy was a law student during part of his 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 bec
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 be hearing from many of them. We usually do … after the unmasking.
-Additional research by Amanda Tust
How Serial Rapists Target Their Victims
From the Files of Linda Fairstein
Linda Fairstein
Introduction
STRANGER RAPISTS—predators who attack strangers either by isolating them in encounters on roadways, parking garages, recreational pathways, or invading their homes—are among the most prolific of criminals. Once these men establish a “comfort zone,” they tend to repeat their acts with alarming frequency. In these zones, they are confident in their ability to overcome their victims, commit a sexual assault, and escape without intervention.
By October 2010, when I wrote this article for Cosmopolitan magazine, I had prosecuted scores of serial sex offenders: violent criminals who carefully targeted women, usually with a well-researched plan of the geographical setting or neighborhood in which they operated. When I tried the case of Russell West in 1985, his brazen daytime attacks shocked everyone in New York City. Manhattan’s “Midtown Rapist” struck in landmark locations such as the Pan Am office tower over Grand Central Station and the CBS studio offices. However, it surprised few experienced detectives that West was a parolee and had once worked as a messenger, making deliveries to all these sites. He had been imprisoned ten years earlier for rapes in many of these exact locations. West scouted them carefully, knew every empty office and abandoned floor, and made these busy buildings his comfort zone.
This article also described a serial attacker known in 2010 only as the “East Coast Rapist,” a then-unidentified man responsible for raping at least seventeen young women between 1997 and 2010. DNA evidence linked a pattern of attacks that followed the I-95 from Fairfax County, Virginia, up through Connecticut and Rhode Island. In early 2011, a joint FBI–Department of Justice task force stepped up the manhunt for the rapist. An anonymous tip led to Aaron Thomas; when he was arrested in his New Haven, Connecticut, home, he asked the police, “why didn’t you pick me up sooner?” His DNA indeed proved a match to the open cases down the highway. Thomas, now awaiting trial in Virginia, was raised in Prince George’s County, Maryland, which helps explain his ease in navigating the areas where he stalked his prey. Two of the teenagers he abducted and raped on Halloween 2009 testified against Thomas at his hearings. Commonwealth Attorney Paul Ebert said that both young women “got some solace from telling their stories—they were poised and sophisticated.” With courageous survivors to confront this serial monster, and the reliability of DNA technology to cement his guilt, I expect Thomas to be handed several life sentences when convicted for these heinous crimes.
How Serial Rapists Target Their Victims
IT WAS ABOUT 7 P.M. on a frigid night, three days after Christmas 2001, when a 29-year-old woman in Fairfax County, Virginia, realized she was late for work. Knowing she had to hurry or she’d miss her bus, she threw on a coat and rushed into the darkness to the bus stop.
There, she waited, noticing a man standing off to the side, a cigarette dangling from his lips. She’d later tell police that she thought the man was trying to be polite by not smoking too close to her.
But he was anything but polite. Around 7:15, he approached her and asked when the next bus was coming. Before she could answer, he said, “I have a weapon. Follow me,” and led the terrified woman down the street and behind a large utility box in the front of an apartment complex. He forced her to lie on the ground, lifted her clothes over her face, pulled off her shoes and one leg of her jeans, and raped her, the blade of a knife pressed to her neck.
When results from DNA testing came in about three months later, Fairfax County police linked the crime to five previous rapes dating back to 1997 around the Washington, D.C., area. But connecting these cases didn’t help capture the predator. Over the next eight years, police suspect (and some DNA evidence confirms) that he repeated his vicious crime, leaving the D.C. region and traveling up the East Coast, raping three more women and attempting to attack a fourth in Connecticut. He might have succeeded in raping another in Rhode Island, but as he entered a home there, he was scared off by an 11-year-old girl’s screams.
His most recent known attack occurred in suburban Northern Virginia on Halloween evening 2009. He raped two teenage girls in a wooded ravine behind a dimly lit shopping center on their way home from trick-or-treating. The location of his assaults led the media to dub him the East Coast Rapist. To this day, he still has not been caught or even identified. Police suspect he’s responsible for at least 16 rape cases (11 linked by DNA).
Some rapists target women they’ve met (even briefly) and commit a single crime with little premeditation, but serial rapists are another breed. Typically intelligent, normal-seeming men, who often have a wife or girlfriend and a demeanor that lets them blend into their communities, they’re known for their methodical preparation, their practiced ability to home in on vulnerable strangers, and the compulsive, recurrent nature of their attacks.
When it comes to dangerous criminals like these, your best weapon is awareness: the more you know about how they work and who they look for, the better your chances of staying out of their sights.
Hidden Danger Zones
One of my most high-profile cases as a New York City prosecutor was the investigation of a man who had committed a series of brazen rapes of young women inside some of midtown Manhattan’s fanciest office towers in 1985. The first victim was a 20-year-old college student working part-time for a clothing manufacturer just off Fifth Avenue, on the 18th floor of a high-rise building.
