Typical Monkey Behavior: Craigslist HeBoon Murderer went on a Monkey Shining Rage for Seven Days

Thank you for learning to spell 'shining'.

http://www.cbsnews.com/stories/2010/08/20/48hours/main6791591.shtml?tag=strip
(CBS) This story was originally broadcast on Sept. 19, 2009. It was updated
on Aug. 20, 2010.

In the spring 2009, Boston was a city at peace.

But then, on April 10, everything changed. The "Craigslist Killer" began his
seven-day crime
spree.

His first victim was a woman from Las Vegas who was fleeing that city’s
crackdown on vice.

"I just picked a city and went to it. I've been doing it for the past two
years," Leffler said of
choosing Boston. Her line of work? "I was escorting."

In this case, a traveling escort. Trisha Leffler, 29, checked herself into
the Westin Copley
Place Hotel. No surprise, she went right to where the money is - the Back
Bay area of the city,
known for its fancy hotels, exclusive boutiques and hip restaurants.

When asked how much money she can make in this field, Tricia told "48 Hours
Mystery"
correspondent Peter Van Sant that being an escort is quite lucrative - she
can make thousands of
dollar a week.

Tricia said she immediately went online to Craigslist, the Web bulletin
board, and placed an ad
in the erotic services section. She said after submitting her ad with the
headline "Sweet
Blonde," she started getting phone calls right away.

"What Craigslist does is basically provide services and these prostitutes
have been providing
services for years. And if it’s not the Yellow Pages, it's gonna be
Craigslist. They find a means
to advertise their services," according to Joe Moura, a Boston-based private
investigator and "48
Hours" consultant.

Moura said that by acting as her own boss, Tricia was increasing her risk.

"If there’s a street prostitute, she’s gonna have a pimp down the street or
across the street on
the corner who’s protecting her. Somebody using Craigslist getting a fancy
hotel in Boston, she’s
on her own."

But that April night, when Tricia saw the man who answered her ad, she said
she felt perfectly
safe. "He looked nice, he looked young. Good looking, obviously."

Once the door was closed, this good-looking young man pulled out a very
dangerous-looking gun.

"I backed up a little bit. He just said, 'If you do everything you're asked,
no harm's gonna come
to you.' He said, 'Lay down, put your hands behind your back.' When he
started to walk towards
me, he put the gun back in his pocket."

The man put on some black leather gloves and took out some plastic zip ties.


In an exclusive interview with "48 Hours Mystery," Tricia explained, "He
knelt down with one knee
in between my legs. I’m thinking like what does he want? I’m shaking. I’m
scared. It dawned on me
later that he could have very well killed me."

Tricia's attacker wanted money. "I had about $800 in cash, he grabbed that,
put that in his
pocket," she said.

As he took her credit and debit cards, Tricia said he made no attempt to
disguise his face. But
he was intent on getting his phone number off her cell phone.

"Was he wearing his gloves when he did that?" Van Sant asked Tricia.
"No," she replied.
"Well, how dumb is that?"
"Dumb."

Dumb, and, as it turned out, he was more than a little weird.

He picked up a pair of Tricia's underwear from the floor and put them in his
pocket. "If he
would've looked at my face, it would've been, like, "What the hell are you
doing?"

At that point, she explained, the gunman began walking around the hotel room
looking for
something.

"And he said, 'Come here.' And I went in to the bathroom and he basically
tied me to the
doorknob. I got really scared. He took a knife out of his pocket and cut the
phone lines. He came
back over to me and taped my mouth. He put three pieces of tape over my
mouth."

Tricia noticed that he had yet to put the gloves back on, meaning that his
fingerprints were all
over that tape.

After he left the room, she quickly broke free from the zip ties, but
worried that he may still
be nearby.

"I'm worried he's listening through the door. I look out the peephole.
There's nothing - there's
nobody out there. I open the door very slowly, stuck my head out, looked
both ways. Nobody was in
the hallway. I crept down the hall to see if he was maybe standing by the
elevator. [There's]
nobody by the elevator.

"I’m still shaking. I’m still nervous," she continued. "So I went back to
the room, grabbed my
room key, shut the door and went and knocked on the next-door neighbor's
door.'Can I call
security? I've just been robbed at gunpoint.'"

From the start, Boston police took Tricia Leffler seriously.

"They didn’t say, 'You’re not supposed to be doing this' - anything like
that. They were very
respectful towards me. They wanted to catch the guy," she told Van Sant.
"The next day, when I
went down to the police station to look through some photos, they had a
surveillance photo of the
man that I described."

Stills taken from a hotel security camera were the first shots of the man
who became known as the
Craigslist Killer.

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