The Craigslist Killer is a Boston University medical student

in Education | 25 responses

As an alum of Boston University Medical School, and having trained at Boston Medical Center, this is truly sad and disturbing news.

The so-called “Craigslist Killer,” who was the target of a national manhunt, is apparently a 22-year old medical student at Boston University:

Boston police tonight arrested Philip Markoff, a 22-year-old Boston University medical student, in the murder of 26-year-old Julissa Brisman at the Copley Marriott last week and an attack on a second woman at a Back Bay hotel.
Markhoff, who allegedly contacted the women through Craigslist ads, had been the target of a national manhunt since police last week released hotel security footage of a fair-haired young men believed to be responsible for Brisman’s murder.

And this alleged killer was studying to be a doctor?

This isn’t the first time a BU medical student was charged with murder. When I was a resident, I remember another prominent case that caused quite a stir, when a medical student, who was also a former sniper of the Israeli military, was arrested for murder while on patient rounds.

It’s difficult to imagine how a fellow medical student that you work and study with can be capable of such heinous acts. Obviously Mr. Markoff was intelligent and driven enough to get accepted to BU.

I wonder what went wrong.

Comments

John
The conceit that doctors are somehow above the heinous is just that. We aren’t. Modern history provides enough examples of just what people with medical training are capable of doing when they lose their moral bearings, or when they lack any capacity for recognizing a moral compass at all. Yes, we are vetted, and the selection we undergo weeds out a lot of unfit candidates, but the process isn’t perfect and the profession isn’t absolutely perfect in weeding out the clever sociopaths who know how to hide their behavior from those who do the weeding.
I appreciate your concern for your alma mater. It would make me wonder too, about the admission process and the observation and in the end, whether there is anything that you could do about a student who was sociopathic, functioning, but not yet criminal.
I have no answers, except that calling out bad behavior is probably better than shutting up in the interest of discretion and collegiality. I think a serious school would pull out an unfit candidate and say as much and offer to repay all monies paid in tuition or pay off all medical school loans in exchange for an agreement that the student never become a physician. Any takers?
Eric Turkewitz
I hate to state the obvious, but he hasn’t been convicted of anything yet.
Anonymous
Taking wagers, Eric?
R Silverman MD, FACS, FASCRS
He was a pre med student…not a med student….does this make you feel better?
emily
No profession is safe from really disturbed people. You can find examples of sick behavior from everyone from priests to teachers to lawyers, etc. Smart and capable doesn’t unfortunately equal kind and safe.
Anonymous
As a former BU medical student myself it is sad seeing this happen again at the school. However, it was not entirely unpredictable. I witnessed numerous acts of hostile behavior directed at medical students during my time at BU by residents and attendings, and felt that the atmosphere was bad enough that eventually another medical student would “flip out” and hurt someone. I feel truly sorry that I was unable to effect any real change at the school by talking with faculty, but certainly feel that BU is not a good environment for students. I am not sure what to any extent the atmosphere at BU contributed to this sad event, but I predicted it would happen and I am very somber that it did. The Appropriate Treatment of Medical Students committee doesn’t seem to really care about the effect that abusive teaching practices have on students.
I hope that things will change for the better at the school! I really wish I had been more persistent in my concerns that med students at the school were/are subjected to a lot of abuse, could have maybe prevented this, I guess I will never know.
The creepy thing is that when I heard that someone had been killed at the Copley Marriott (which is a ten minute walk from the school I have made many times) I remarked offhandedly that it might have been a BU med student. I am sorry to see how right I was.
Frank Drackman
Just like Jack the Ripper, probably had a great MCAT score and stellar Recommendation letters…
Anonymous
CNN is reporting that it was a PRE MED student at BU. This is very different than a med student as we all know. If it is a pre med student then this ruins the concept of this entire thread.
Kate
Dr. Silverman,
The NYTimes article on him claims that he is a second-year medical student, and has a picture from his white coat ceremony, as well as some details from his wedding website (he’s apparently engaged).
As a second year medical student in NYC, I can tell you that my class is already talking about this. None of us think that he could have been screened out by the admission process. How could he? By all reports he was an upstanding young man, charismatic enough to have friends and get engaged. I don’t see enough of my classmates in the first two years to judge anything more than their conversational abilities, let alone their homicidal capabilities. And if he truly is psychopathic, I’m sure he would be able to game the system perfectly.
We will never know if some telltale clue would have emerged in his clerkships, where he would be under the watchful eye of the whole hospital for most of the day.
But as tragic as this story is, I’m glad that he was found as a student, where his killings were done on his own time, rather than as a trained physician, where they might have gone on secretly for years.
And if any BU med students are reading these comments, students at other schools know that it’s not you, it’s him…and I’m sorry that you had to wake up to this horrible news about a classmate today.
cory
i know the guy philip and he does not seem the type of person to do that stuff
GG Freeman
For those of you who had psychology (and for those who just watch a lot of Discovery Channel, perhaps)…
You should realize that the definition of a psychopath is someone who is intelligent and easily able to ingratiate themselves with others… they simply lack the machinery to feel remorse for their actions.
You need look no deeper into “why” this happened than knowing that about 1% of the Adult population is psychopathic to some degree, and while the vast majority of them never kill, it does happen.
Scientists are even now able to identify psychopathic traits in children as young as 2 with 4 being very reliable, and again, while not all of these “traited children” grow up to be psychopaths, apparently ALL psychopaths show the traits as early as 4 years old.
Time for a better screening tool for med school than the MCAT?
My sympathy to the victims and their families, indeed.
dumbfounder
There was a murder on campus committed by a student when I went to Johns Hopkins undergrad in the late 90′s. I can’t remember if it was a pre-med student or not, but many are at Hopkins. Maybe it has something to do with the intense pressures put on students in the med/pre-med programs. Hopkins was a pressure cooker.
SarahW
abusive teaching practices at BU? What exactly do you mean by that?
David
From what I’ve been able to surmise the guy has/had a gambling problem and is heavily in debt (in addition to being in debt as a med student). (Assuming he did do it) The guy wasn’t targeting prostitutes in a law and order SVU sort of way, but rather robbing them as he knew they deal in cash and would be unlikely to report the crimes to the police.
With the murder it seems likely that his victim resisted and did not hand over the cash. Rather than risk being caught, he killed her. In addition, even after murdering someone, it is alleged that he kept up his crime spree and contacted more victims.
Dr. Dave
Just to play Devil’s advocate:
Need I mention how someone with sociopathic tendencies is actually an IDEAL candidate to be a doctor?
You’d want someone who can display sympathy (even if faked), impose pain on others (even if for the long-term good of the patient), and has a rather healthy ego (do YOU want a doctor who is racked with self-doubt?). If it were only for the lack of TRUE compassion (or a modicum of it), then your typical sociopath would be the IDEAL candidate.
Heck, I’m surprised MORE doctors are not hiding skeletons in their closets. I’ve known surgeons who hunt: if THAT’S not a contradiction in terms for one supposedly devoting their life to the sacredness of life, then I dunno what is!
I suppose we don’t see more MD killers because they’re doing well in this life, and there’s little motivation to risk it all for the sake of a dark passion/thrill.
momingle
He can’t handle the pressure. He cracked.
Anonymous
If only he’d been a doctor already, then his estate would have had the benefit of tort reform to preserve it from the results of his actions!
Anonymous
I went to BU Med as well (one year ahead of Kevin, actually). I did not find it abusive or hostile. It certainly was a more friendly place than the other universities where I did residency and worked on the faculty.
Of course, as an MS2 I doubt anyone in the pre-clinical faculty knew who I was. There isn’t much interaction with faculty in the second year of med school.
Anonymous
Even scarier, there is pretty much no way to screen these students out without spending a great deal of time, money, and invading their privacy. The Jeremy Noyes case comes to mind.
http://www.thesmokinggun.com/archive/years/2008/0819081family1.html
PatricParamedic
As an author whose non-fiction book, “America’s Dumbest Doctors,” will be released in July, I am always amazed at how society deifies MDs. We’ve somehow spawned countless thousands of true freaks with stethoscopes. The fact is, some of our finest primates wear lab coats, and we owe them a huge debt of gratitude. But it is also true that some of the greatest miscreants in society graduated from the very same med schools. There is no professional in the land who evades more punishment than a criminal M.D. Pity.
Anonymous
As a medical student I can tell you that the presence of the “clever sociopath” in medical school is likely much more common than people would actually like to believe. For example, although the admission process in medical school is technically stringent, and makes a very rough quantitative estimation of ones intellectual inclination towards the study of medicine, qualitative estimation of one’s future competency and aptitude towards the practice of medicine is a function of less tangible qualities. These include emotional stability, emotional maturity, professional experience, dedication to the art of medicine, and most importantly, one’s dedication towards humanity. Perhaps these sound corny and cliché, and perhaps nobody really cares when you got a 4.0 GPA in undergrad and a 40 MCAT. But the introvert genius looking to feed his/ her professional narcissism by earning an MD degree, simply does not belong in medical school.
Michael Rack, MD
“I’ve known surgeons who hunt: if THAT’S not a contradiction in terms for one supposedly devoting their life to the sacredness of life, then I dunno what is!”
Most doctors devote themselves to the sacredness of human life. I see no contradiction in a surgeon or other doctor hunting animals.
Anonymous
HE WAS PRE-MED!!!!! Stop referring to him as a med student. We all know that when we all enter College about 90% of our friends say they are “pre-med” cause it sounds cool. Pre-med is not a degree it is not a specialty, it is simply a group of classes that one needs to take in order to be considered for medical school. So please stop shaming the rest of us by referring to him as a “med student.”
ABCD
Just to confirm all rumors – he was a med student. He was in my class.
http://www.Medicalmaniacs.com PatricParamedic
I, too, resent sloppy reporting, and there is indeed a vast difference between pre-med and someone already accepted into a program.
But for the record, those who take comfort in Markoff’s “non-med-student” status might want to crank down their exasperation just a bit. There is an enormous amount of crime going on among the physician population. Here in California, while the Michael Jackson doctor-circus was going on, 21 other MDs were quietly convicted for crimes ranging from anal rape, major drug-running, kidnapping, to Medicare fraud, wife & girlfriend murders.
That’s one summer, one state.
Let’s think about the volume of bad behavior out there, and just what we might do about it.

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The Craigslist Killer is a Boston University medical student

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