A Criminal Injustice - A True Crime, a False Confession, and the Fight to Free Marty Tankleff

The Deadly Crime Spree of the Craigslist Killer

A producer from 48 Hours Mystery teams

with a Boston Globe reporter to reveal the

secret life of the young man known

as the "Craigslist Killer"

Compressed into a seven-day time span, the story of the Craigslist Killer just kept unfolding: three vulnerable women, each cornered in a hotel room, one of them murdered when she resisted. Who would be next? The images of the suspect are jarring: an all- American handsome young man who could be the guy next door, clean-cut and casually dressed. Using hightech investigative tools and old-fashioned shoe leather, detectives from the Boston Police Department track down their man and arrest the unlikeliest of suspects: twenty-three-year-old Philip Markoff, a brilliant, wellregarded medical student at Boston University who is engaged to be married on the beach at sunset to a beautiful and trusting fiancée. If guilty, what is his motivation? Why did he allegedly use Craigslist, the online bulletin board, to pick out his victims? The arrest of Markoff, a man with no criminal record, seems incomprehensible, but the evidence against him seems overwhelming. Police match his gun and fingerprints to the crimes, and use a trail of digital bread crumbs to lead to Markoff's doorstep.

When Manhattan model and masseuse Julissa Brisman agreed to meet a client at the Boston Marriott Copley Place Hotel, she thought it would be just one more day on her road to recovering from an alcohol addiction. Instead, she was discovered lying facedown in a pool of blood on a hallway carpet, her head battered, a bullet through her heart. The hotel's surveillance cameras captured the image of a tall, blond, clean-cut man, texting on his BlackBerry. As police moved in, pieces of an astonishing puzzle emerged: investigators revealed that the Boston University medical student was linked to several incidents across the Northeast, all involving women with whom he connected on Craigslist -- including the armed robbery of a prostitute at another Boston hotel, and the assault of an exotic dancer in Rhode Island. The Craigslist Killer was arrested by Boston police barely a week after Julissa Brisman's murder. As the public tried to understand why someone with everything to live for would be so reckless, the double life of Philip Markoff began to materialize, and he appeared to be an out-of-control thrill seeker hiding a secret sexual life.

With the in-depth analysis that distinguishes TV's 48 Hours Mystery, this penetrating profile of Markoff and his crimes goes well beyond newspaper headlines to reveal how a young man described as "a beautiful person inside and out" hid his dark obsessions from the world -- and how the Internet can make any one of us the next victim of the most unlikely killer.

Torn from the headlines, here is the case that shocked a nation: the Seattle city bus ride that turned to mayhem and murder at the hands of a gunman. Ann Rule unmasks the forces that drove quiet, clean-cut Silas Cool to shoot the driver, causing the bus to plunge off the Aurora Bridge into an apartment building. The catastrophe left three dead -- including Cool -- and dozens injured. While the scene unfolds as in a terrifying movie, Rule finds very real answers to the haunting question "how could this happen?" -- and expertly constructs the unseen chain of events that resulted in an explosive and shattering tragedy.

Jeanne Dominico's fiancé found her body on her kitchen floor. More than forty stab wounds and blows to her head with a blunt instrument had cut her life short. What monster had struck in the heart of a peaceful New England town?

Jeanne was a hard-working single mother. Nicole, her fourteen-year-old daughter was on the honor-roll and head over heels in love--with an eighteen-year-old man she'd known only through the Internet. Once the lovers met in person, Jeanne's motherly instincts sensed trouble. If only she'd known that the life in danger was her own.

With a history of psychological trouble and family misfortune, Billy Sullivan's obsessive and controlling power over Nicole contributed to the brutal slaying of her mother. But it was Nicole's stunning confession and guilty plea that led to Billy's sensational trial, where a sordid tale of love, loss, betrayal and murder finally took a cold-blooded killer offline--and on line for justice.

"Phelps is a first-rate investigator." --Dr. Michael M. Baden

It was nine days before Christmas 1998, and thirty-two-year-old Ronda Reynolds was getting ready to travel from Seattle to Spokane to visit her mother and brother and grandmother before the holidays. Ronda’s second marriage was dissolving after less than a year, her career as a pioneering female Washington State Trooper had ended, but she was optimistic about starting over again. "I’m actually looking forward to getting on with my life," she told her mother earlier the night before. "I just need a few days with you guys." Barb Thompson, Ronda’s mother, who had met her daughter’s second husband only once before, was just happy that Ronda was coming home.

At 6:20 that morning, Ron Reynolds called 911 and told the dispatcher his wife was dead. She had committed suicide, he said, although he hadn’t heard the gunshot and he didn’t know if she had a pulse. EMTs arrived, detectives arrived, the coroner’s deputy arrived, and a postmortem was conducted. Lewis County Coroner Terry Wilson, who neither visited the death scene nor attended the autopsy, declared the manner of Ronda’s death as "undetermined." Over the next eleven years, Coroner Wilson would change that manner of death from "undetermined" to "suicide," back to "undetermined"—and then back to "suicide" again.

But Barb Thompson never for one moment believed her daughter committed suicide. Neither did Detective Jerry Berry or ballistics expert Marty Hayes or attorney Royce Ferguson or dozens of Ronda’s friends. For eleven grueling years, through the ups and downs of the legal system and its endless delays, these people and others helped Barb Thompson fight to strike that painful word from her daughter’s death certificate.