Sociology of Crime

This article is about the attempted robbery of a woman offering lap dances in a hotel in Rhode Island. The man tied the woman up but thankfully her husband came into the room before anything could happen. The assailant fled and the husband chased him but was unsuccessful. This attack is believed to be committed by the Craigslist Killer who is the suspect in a murder case and a robbery.
I actually found this article in a different way. My mom had told me about the Craigsist killer so I googled it to learn more and found this article. My mom told me because this past summer I had replied to a bunch of job opportunities I found on Craigslist and my mom was saying that she didn’t want me to do that anymore. This killer has made her extremely worried. This reminds me of the panic that crime can cause which we discussed in class. I’m sure my mom is not alone in her worries and I bet many other people will be deterred from using Craigslist in the future. Craiglist is a very popular site and I would be interested to see how this case affects how many people will visit their site in the future which would be a good testament to whether it caused a panic or not. Also I think there was another murder recently unrelated to these where a woman responded to a babysitting ad on Craigslist and was then murdered and I wonder if this guy got the idea from him. The idea of killing someone who responds to an ad as opposed to someone who posts an ad is much scarier to me because that is what I did and for it to be so random ads another level of fear. I think it is interesting though how much scarier things are the more directly they are related to ones life. Like as soon as I found out this man was responding to masseuse ads, etc. I was immediately less scared because I thought “Oh I would never post a thing like that.” But the babysitting case was in the realm of things I have and would do so it feels way more real to me.
Another thing that interests me is that the killer only murdered one of the victims, robbed from the other, and attempted to rob from the third. Since this article is about the attempted robbery I don’t know a whole lot about the other cases but I would like to know the details of the murder case because it seems like it was not quite the pattern. I wonder if the woman was maybe fighting him and he killed her because it seems weird to me to have the mid set to kill just one victim and not the others. Because this case is receiving so much publicity and because the police have some pictures of the man I feel fairly confident that he will be caught.