Many think that assigning blame settles matters. – Mason Cooley
I reckon the American yellow press is just reluctant to give up a good villain after spending so much effort creating it. It’s been months now since Craigslist decided to stop being the whipping boy of every politician with an anti-whore agenda and every fourth-rate reporter hoping to lead a lynch mob, but apparently the New York Post (a tabloid rag in the grand old Hearst tradition) didn’t get the memo. This article is slightly paraphrased to correct the Post’s clumsy grade-school level composition and remove inflammatory and unnecessary terms, but you can look at the original for the full effect.
All four of the corpses found near a Long Island beach in December were young prostitutes who advertised their services on Craigslist and were likely slain by a serial killer, authorities said Monday (January 24th). After identifying one of the bodies as Megan Waterman, 22, of Maine, officials revealed that the three other skeletons found wrapped in burlap bags at Gilgo Beach were all Craigslist escorts who were killed shortly after meeting their murderer. Using DNA evidence, the other victims were identified as Maureen Brainard-Barnes, 25, of Norwich, Connecticut; Amber Lynn Costello, 27, of North Babylon, New York; and Melissa Barthelemy, 24, of Buffalo, New York.
The killer’s last known victim, Costello, disappeared from North Babylon only five months ago on September 2nd; Waterman was last seen at a Hauppauge, New York Holiday Inn on June 6th of last year, and Brainard-Barnes vanished from Manhattan in July 2007. Barthelemy was last seen in The Bronx on July 12th, 2009 and was reported missing six days later after her mother and sister received calls from her cell phone. “Do you know what your sister does for a living?” the male caller asked, according to Barthelemy’s mother. “Your sister’s a whore, don’t be like your sister.”
Though my version sticks to the facts, that’s never good enough for the Post, which felt compelled to subtitle the article “Craigslist creep killed 4 hookers” and open it with the phrase “Craigslist was a hit list”; the rest of the article was peppered with boyfriends described as rappers, pimps and drug dealers. Indeed, the serial killer himself is eclipsed by references to Craigslist, as though the Post were trying to blame the website for the murders; I daresay that’s a bit of a stretch even for a tabloid. The AP version is, as you might expect, a bit more subdued, and contains additional details, including a number of brilliant and sensitive comments from the district attorney:
Investigators did not identify a suspect, or say how the women were killed, but were looking into what clients they might have met shortly before they disappeared. One of the women was reported missing nearly 3½ years ago; another was seen as recently as last September. “Their deaths are a direct result of their business as prostitutes,” Suffolk County District Attorney Thomas Spota told reporters. “I sincerely hope that people who are engaged in a similar business as these four young women would come forward. They certainly must have some information.”
Police were looking for another missing Craigslist escort when they happened upon the bodies near the beach. They have since said that the person they were originally looking for, a woman from New Jersey, was not among the dead. Authorities said Monday that case is still under investigation. Police Commissioner Richard Dormer initially suggested that a serial killer might be involved when the bodies were found in December, but detectives later became tight-lipped about the matter. But on Monday, Spota said that “the actual cause of deaths appear to be substantially similar” and that “it appears the same person or persons are responsible.” Spota and Dormer refused to say how the women died. The case has some similarities to a 2006 New Jersey case, in which four prostitutes’ bodies were found in a drainage ditch just outside Atlantic City and about a mile from the beach; those killings remain unsolved.
District Attorney Spota says that the deaths of the women was a “direct result of their business as prostitutes”; obviously he must have the same words of wisdom for the families of cops killed in the line of duty. Perhaps one day the gang of a criminal Mr. Spota convicts will kill him as well, and if that happens I’m sure he’ll accept his fate knowing that it was a “direct result of his business as district attorney.” Brandy Devereaux had some choice words for jackasses like Mr. Spota, including a number of links to new stories about other people he would no doubt say deserved to die because of their choices to be highway workers, psychiatric counselors and Wal-Mart employees. But please note that Mr. Spota’s second quoted sentence surpasses the first in sheer cluelessness; after telling sex workers it’s our fault if we’re killed, he suggests we come forward to be arrested (no doubt so he can increase his conviction rate). I guess he thinks whores are as stupid as he is evil and pompous.
Interestingly, Police Commissioner Dormer had more sense and sensitivity: “What activities these victims may have engaged in prior to their murders does not matter,” Dormer said Monday. “They were young women whose lives were cut tragically short.” At least Commissioner Dormer recognizes that murderers are responsible for murders; if the New York Post was in charge of the investigation it would no doubt be sending cops over to interrogate Craigslist personnel, and if District Attorney Spota were running the show he would no doubt be subjecting hookers to the third degree. Obviously those motivated by advertising revenues or votes would rather persecute those they can get their filthy hands on in lieu of the yet-unknown (and therefore inaccessible) party who actually committed the crimes.
Wait a sec. Stories about four bodies found in Egg Harbor in 2006 don’t mention craigslist so why include references to it in a story about the “craigslist killer”?
Silly boy! It’s because Craigslist hadn’t been “discovered” to be a hotbed of “human trafficking” yet in 2006. 😉
I also came across this:
A study of the murder rate among prostitutes from 1981 to 1990 found that an average of 124 hookers were murdered each year in the United States, according to a 2004 article in the American Journal of Epidemiology.
So, why aren’t women’s rights and rescue groups raising a shit storm over this fact? Why aren’t they demanding the legalization of prostitution rather than helping to push it underground and abetting the perpetrators of these murders?
When can we expect an Amber Lyon special on CNN where she complains about how women who voluntarily sell sex are being murdered at a rate many times greater than other women?
Because the neofeminist attitude is, “you can’t make an omelet without breaking a few eggs”. Dead prostitutes are a price neofeminists and the mainstream feminist organizations they dominate are willing to pay in order to achieve their holy goal of denying men sex. 😦
The groups declare that we MUST eliminate prostitution (good freakin’ luck) so that women won’t be exposed to these dangers.
Hey, I have a better idea; why don’t we make a law that all women must be guarded from all harm by men at all times, and prohibit women from holding ANY job in which harm might come to them (i.e. any job outside home). Furthermore, to protect us from being “sex objects” I propose we should all have to wear clothes which cover every part of our bodies a man might conceivably be sexually attracted to, something like this:
Oops…
I think that you’re on to something, Maggie. We all know that in countries where the women are protected in this way, men never harm them, women’s rights are always respected, and of course there is no prostitution at all (or, apparently, any homosexuality).
“why don’t we make a law that all women must be guarded from all harm by men at all times, and prohibit women from holding ANY job in which harm might come to them”
Nope nope nope, then they couldn’t be a wife either. I don’t really need to come up with the statistics on domestic violence and how many women are killed by their husbands (or vice versa really) do I? In fact, lets compare how many prostitutes were killed to how many wives were killed in a given year by their spouses or motivated by their spouses (hired hits, “accidents”, etc). If it’s more then I think we should criminalize marriage… just saying…
Oh wait! Let’s ban women from the Armed Forces again! One giant step backwards….
Oops! I forgot that one! I guess the only infallible way to protect all women is to abort all female babies. That’d solve the problem, all right. 😦
In about a hundred years, there wouldn’t be any problems plaguing humanity at all.
Here’s a brief, utterly incomplete list of people who died as a direct result of their business:
St. Peter
Abraham Lincoln
Joan of Arc
John F. Kennedy
William Wallace
Gus Grissom
There are of course many, many more. Here in the US we just had a national holiday named after one of them.
HEY I though Grissom retired! Oh wait, not the CSI Grissom eh?
Biography of Gus Grissom.
If you’ve never seen The Right Stuff, I highly recommend it.
One of my greatest fears for my girls is that one of them may be hurt while making a living only to have the government make her out to be worse than the perpetrator for providing a service to the community. For that reason, I provide security for them as much as possible.
Yes I found the most upsetting thing in this article to be where Sporta or whatever is name is said “their deaths were a direct result of their involvement in prostution”. NO! Their deaths are the direct result of a nut case. Are we to say that the women Ted Bundy killed was the direct result of them being house wives, women that he faked out and they offered to help him, women who shopped at a certain super market????
The Media makes me ill.
As an MVS, reading this makes me want to scream for days. An MVS is a murder victim survivor, i.e., the surviving family members/friends of murder victims. It’s disgusting for this prosecutor to talk this way. Unfortunately, I’ve already experienced this “blaming the victim” evil along with too many other MVS. Some of my favorites: people get murdered because they’re homeless; people get murdered because they choose to in order to fix their karma; they get murdered because they chose to be in a certain place at a certain time, etc. That 1’s like saying a woman deserved to get raped because she was wearing a miniskirt. What’s disgusting is this information is no surprise to me and too many othe MVS. What do we expect when a huge number of people haven’t even been taught to give condolences? Condolences are a basic courtesy that MVS deserve when talking about their tragedies along with ANYONE who has had a loved 1/friend die. Many in society don’t want to deal with MVS at all except as a form of ghoulish entertainment. The problem with this is that repression is pretty much evil and if problems aren’t exposed they won’t ever get better. Seeing murders as just ghoulish entertainment does nothing to better anything which is what these people want. It’s too messy, too sad, etc., etc. If we don’t deal with the sad and messy in life we’re in sick denial. There’s many who revel in their denial. BUT, there’s also many who don’t and also won’t ever shut up about exposing evils like the garbage this prosecutor is spewing. Thanks for listening.
People in our sick society are censured for making dumb jokes or expressing unpopular opinions, but when some ass like Spota makes this kind of evil comment it goes by unnoticed. 😦
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