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The company also dispatched Clint Powell to take the stand. The customer-service manager was familiar with the technical workings of Craigslist.
Powell told the courtroom how Anderson first used Craigslist as a way to find ice-fishing gear, truck parts, and collectable plates with misspelled words like "Star Terk." This pattern changed in October, as Anderson started trolling for women. Powell read various postings made by Anderson. One said, "looks and size don't mean a lot to me. I'm not little man, but I'm not huge either." Another read, "Looking for fresh faces for a new video and Web site...new talent only. Also need 18 plus virgin willing to be in a video."
The entire time, Anderson sat motionless, staring straight ahead. "I don't think he made eye contact with a single person the entire trial," Margoles says. "He was the quietest defendant I've ever had."
On day five of the trial, Anderson's former cellmate, Gregory Wikan, took the stand. He told the jury how Anderson had boasted about being known as the "Craigslist Killer." Again, Anderson stared straight ahead, refusing to make eye contact.
The final day of testimony saw Detective Laura Kvasnicka take the stand as the last witness. She detailed the life Anderson led online, including multiple attempts to lure women to his home. He looked for no-strings-attached hook-ups, posting one such advertisement just hours before killing Katherine.
It took five hours for the jury to return its verdict. The Olson family held one another as the 12-member jury announced the news: Michael Anderson was guilty of first- and second-degree murder, as well as second-degree manslaughter.
The following morning, Judge Mary Theisen addressed the family with watering eyes. She told them that Katherine's life had touched the entire courtroom.
The sympathy turned to rage as her gaze fell on Michael Anderson. "You're a callous, cruel, and unjust human being," Theisen said, sentencing Anderson to a mandatory term of life in prison without parole.
On an unseasonably snowy March 20 in New York City, George Weber — a passionate, affable 47-year-old radio newsman for WABC who had worked at KGO in San Francisco in the early '90s — posted a Craigslist ad looking for rough sex.
His solicitation was answered promptly by 16-year-old John Katehis, a self-described sadomasochist Satanist who lived with his separated parents in the East Elmhurst neighborhood of Queens. "I can smother somebody for $60," he wrote to Weber. In the context of what was to be a sadomasochistic romp, Katehis' aggressive reply failed to raise red flags.
The two met in Brooklyn and made their way to Weber's first-floor brownstone apartment in Carroll Gardens. There, Katehis allegedly stabbed Weber some 50 times in the neck and torso. The teen stripped off his bloodied clothes, put on a clean pair of jeans and T-shirt purloined from Weber's wardrobe, and hopped the G train back to Queens. When police arrested Katehis at a friend's house in upstate New York, he was still wearing Weber's clothes.
About three weeks later, on April 14, Philip Markoff — a tall, blond, 23-year-old med student at Boston University — read an Erotic Services ad on Craigslist posted by 26-year-old Bronx-based call girl Julissa Brisman. Markoff sent her an e-mail and the two arranged a soirée at the Marriott Copley Hotel in Boston's upscale Back Bay district. Seconds after entering the room, Markoff allegedly pounced on Brisman, who, according to a medical examiner, fought back tenaciously. He stands accused of shooting Brisman three times — twice in the torso, once in the hip — killing her.
Markoff was with his fiancée, on their way to Foxwoods Casino in Connecticut, when he was pulled over and arrested just south of Boston on I-95. The summa cum laude graduate of the State University of New York-Albany was later implicated in a similar Boston robbery, as well as one in Warwick, Rhode Island. A common thread ran through all three crimes: young women solicited through Craigslist's Erotic Services category.
Even more than the Weber slaying, the Markoff murder captured the public imagination. How could somebody like Markoff — clean-cut, well educated, ambitious, and in the midst of planning a beachside wedding this summer — do such a thing? Lacking any other hook, the national press dubbed Markoff "the Craigslist Killer," a phrase that still makes Newmark and Buckmaster cringe.
"We're taken aback any time we hear that term used," Buckmaster says. "Although, if you stop and think about it, it's a testament to how exceedingly rare violent crime is on Craigslist, when you consider that it's the most common way that Americans are meeting each other these days by a significant margin. The reason they don't call him 'the Handgun Killer' or 'the Boston Killer' or 'the Hotel Killer' is because thousands of homicides have involved those factors."
The Weber and Brisman murders couldn't have come at a worse time for Craigslist. Just as the crimes were splashing into primetime news segments, a sheriff in Chicago was mounting a campaign against the company.
Cook County Sheriff Tom Dart first made headlines in October when he announced he was suspending all foreclosure evictions in his jurisdiction. The energetic state representative-turned-sheriff was fed up with throwing law-abiding people out on the streets.
By March, Dart was onto a new cause: Craigslist. He filed a federal lawsuit against the site, accusing it of "facilitating prostitution." He claims that, during the last two years, his department has arrested more than 200 Craigslist users on charges ranging from prostitution to juvenile pimping and human trafficking. "In the hundreds of arrests that we've made, never have we had one where we went under the guise that it's a massage and it turned out that it was just a massage," he says. "We know what's going on."
