Seven Days of Rage by Paul LaRosa & Maria Cramer

Author:Paul LaRosa & Maria Cramer
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: POCKET BOOKS
Published: 2009-07-15T00:00:00+00:00

19

Was It the Gambling?

Once the initial legal proceedings were over, and the initial shock of the arrest had worn off, the question everyone wanted to know was: Why? You could scarcely ask the gods for more than they had given Markoff.

“I would describe him as being the perfect all-American kid, you know what I mean?” said Joe Moura, a Boston-based private investigator. “Lovely girlfriend. Ready to get married. Going to med school. I mean, he’s got a terrific future ahead of him. And I’m sure that typically every parent would look at him, and say, ‘You know, if I’m gonna have a son, I’d want one just like him.’ ”

If you were to take a measure of the man before the arrest, you would have to have said, based on every societal indicator, that Phil Markoff had life licked.

Why, if the charges were true, would someone blow all of that on this series of boneheaded robberies? How could someone so smart be so dumb? “I’ve had a lot of clients that are by all accounts terrific guys, and for some reason fall on hard times. Something snaps in their head. And they do something terribly stupid,” Moura said. “What led to that? Usually, you go into drug problems. They get into drugs.”

Before the arrest, police investigators had thought the same thing. Looking at the crime spree, they believed the person responsible was so desperate that there was a real possibility he was driven by a need for drugs. But there were zero signs that Markoff was a drug addict, and when he told the court that he was broke, authorities began to speculate that his true addiction might be gambling. It wasn’t so far-fetched. Markoff and Megan were on their way to Foxwoods casino when he was stopped and arrested, and friends from high school and college mentioned that he frequently played poker, although never for very much money.

And then there was Jamie, the young mother from Cape Cod who had been sitting at the blackjack table in Foxwoods casino the same night that the Craigslist Killer tried to rob Amber, the lap dancer in Warwick. Jamie said she was watching her toddler after the Markoff arrest and happened to see him on television. “I thought, ‘Where do I know that guy from?’ ” she said. “And then I realized it was him. I said, ‘Oh my God, that was the weird guy sitting next to us at Foxwoods.’ I was creeped out. He was a very, very, very strange man.”

Soon enough, police sources were telling reporters that they were looking into the possibility that Markoff had gambling debts, which may have fueled his alleged crime spree. ABC News, in particular, ran stories on its website that claimed Markoff made at least three trips to the casino in April, including one on April 16, two days after Julissa’s murder and the same day he allegedly tried to hold up the lap dancer in Warwick. That matches Jamie’s story. But what does not make sense about the report is that it claims Markoff won $5,300 on April 16.

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