Media reposts said that two important items were found in the apartment of med student suspect Philip Markoff: underwear, and a gun that was stuffed into a hollowed-out “Gray’s Anatomy” textbook.
Apparently the underwear belongs to the victims Julissa Brisman of New York City (murdered in a Boston hotel room), and a 29-year-old woman from Las Vegas, who
fortunately survived an armed robbery. Both women advertised massage services on Craigslist.
The first woman Markoff is accused of robbing said she thinks she’s alive because she didn’t resist. “I just complied with everything he wanted me to do and I didn’t resist him in any way, and I think that’s why,” she said in an interview with Boston television station WCVB. Prosecutors have not released her name.
“There are various items of all kinds of ilk that we feel are connected to (the) incidents . . . that are subject right now to forensic examination,” a newspaper quoted Lt. Detective Robert M. Merner as saying when referring to the “souvenirs” allegedly discovered in Markoff’s Quincy, Mass., apartment.
It has become public also an aggression of Markoff against a university friend. Morgan Houston who was in the same pre-med program as Markoff at SUNY Albany, told to the New York Daily News that she once had a scary encounter with Philip Markoff after a fraternity party. They were walking back to their dorms on campus and then “He pushed me up against the wall and tried kissing me,” Morgan Houston said. She protested, but was frightened because her study partner was trying to overpower her.
“No, Phil, get off me, stop kissing me, I’m not interested in you, what are you trying to do?” Houston says she told him, as she tried to break free in the dark. “I couldn’t physically get him off of me. Thankfully, he wasn’t on top of me, but I couldn’t push him away.”
Luckily, another male friend who was walking by yanked Markoff away from Houston, the News reported.
“I don’t know what would have happened,” she told the paper from her family’s home in South Carolina. She said she brushed the incident off as the result of too much drinking, and the pair never talked about it again.
The Theory about the gambling is getting strong. Investigators are looking into gambling as the possible motive for the attacks. An official said that Markoff was a “frequent visitor” to Foxwoods casino in Connecticut. The casino is cooperating with authorities investigating Markoff’s gambling habits.
The first woman Markoff is accused of robbing said she thinks she’s alive because she didn’t resist.
“I just complied with everything he wanted me to do and I didn’t resist him in any way, and I think that’s why,” she said in an interview with Boston television station WCVB.
Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal on Wednesday called on Craigslist to stop what he calls “pimping and prostitution in plain sight.” He asked the site to immediately eliminate photographs in the “erotic services” section, hire staff to screen images and ads that violate the site’s terms of service and fine those who violate those terms.
But Craigslist’s CEO, Jim Buckmaster, said criminals who use the site are virtually guaranteed to get caught because they leave electronic trails that are easily traced.
“So don’t use Craigslist for crime unless you want to go to jail,” he said Wednesday in an interview from San Francisco, where the company is based.
Buckmaster said there have been billions of interactions on Craigslist and added “compared to human society as a whole the risks of Craigslist are low, but they’re not zero.”
