Home Β» Gear. Young dude looking for a good time. Everybody in the New York sex trade had heard the stories about Craigslist. Like the one about the two bodybuilder types who liked to set up meetings with masseuses, and then flash fake police badges before robbing the women. She knew well the changes the site had brought to the businessβhow it created an electronic version of a 42nd Street back alley, with scams and cheap whores galore.
But none of this prepared her for what she found one night in April when she spotted one of her girls surfing the web.
Clicking on a link, Davis navigated to breaking news out of Boston: A masseuse had been shot three times on the 20th floor of a Marriott hotel. There was a blurry security-camera image of the man the press had already dubbed the Craigslist Killer, and below that a picture of the victim, a sultry-looking woman with long light brown hair.
Craigslist is full of creeps. It was a simple idea that changed everything: a no-frills hippie flea market updated for the Internet age, a place to go to buy a toaster, rent an apartment, or score some meth and hook up with random strangers for the afternoon.
It helped to nearly destroy the newspaper industry in America, and it transformed the sex trade. Soon Craigslist was everywhere, a self-governing global community of online buyers and sellers, a for-profit business that operated more like a public service.
