For a number of years now prostitutes (called "providers" on the Internet) have turned to the electronic superhighway to tout their services to "johns" who refer to themselves as "hobbyists." According to many in law enforcement, these women have flocked in vast numbers to Craig's List (founded in San Francisco in 1995), to advertise and solicit their clients. Both men and women promote themselves on such sites in various ways, many times as legitimate to erotic masseuses and dancers, some who indicate they will provide "special services," have place ads by the thousands on a daily basis on the "Erotic Section" of such computerized national Internet sites. These otherwise "special web site sections" draw what one Chicago TV station reported was 1 billion viewings each month from across the world. Not too long ago over 9,000 new listings were added to the Craig's List "Erotic Services" section in the NYC area in just one day!

Many are quick to chastise law enforcement for investigating violations, on the Federal level, of the Mann Act (also known as the white slave traffic act), a federal law that like many similar state laws prohibits prostitution and human trafficking, suggesting that prostitution is a so-called "victimless crime" in which both parties get what they want (sex and money). Others see this now high tech form of the sexual dating game to be degrading to women and one that claims millions of men, women and children across the world as victims. And as for being a "victimless crime"; just ask the wife of former New York Governor Elliott Spitzer if she believes that she and her daughters were victims in her husband's activities with a call girl, or ask the parents the hundreds and thousands of women and girls who are forced to prostitute themselves, especially girls who are preteens, if they believe such children and many overwhelmed women are victims or not. Now friends and family members of a 26-year-old woman police say placed an ad on Craig's List as a Boston area masseuse who was gunned down by her 10 PM client on the 20th floor of Boston's Marriott Hotel in upscale Copley Square earlier this week, question the link between her Internet listing and her death.

Cities across America have witnessed local women and girls from other states traveling in response to ads in the erotic sections of Internet web sites in order to sell erotic massage services and/or themselves. Girls as young as 11 have been picked up by police and the FBI in sting operations across the country related to FBI's "Project Innocence Lost," undercover operations designed to decriminalize the acts committed by the girls and women in order to go after the pimps working and using these women and children as sexual chattel in the hotels, motels and back alleys across this country.

While the idea of sex for money has been with us since the beginning of recorded history, the idea that there are no victims in such unions, especially the young girls that find themselves forced, tricked, or sold into sex slavery, just doesn't compute with those trying to save the true victims of such crimes. And while some may engage in prostitution for the believed easy money (one suspected woman was recently arrested with $16,000 cash in her purse), others simply have no other choice. Many young prostitutes say they do it to feel a sense of love, or importance, or just to be told that they are pretty; something that evidently went unsaid in their own homes before they became street walkers now turned Internet saleswomen, selling themselves to the highest bidder, perhaps multiple times per night.

Police have offered the theory that Boston murder victim, killed by her assailant in a high end hotel room, had agreed to meet a man at the room she had rented. He had had responded to her Craig's List ad as a masseuse, noting a massage table was found at the murder scene. A friend of the victim's noted that her ad also carried the notation, "no full services." An e-mail believed linked to her killer states, in part, "Hi, I'm visiting from out of town. I'd love to get together (with you)." The woman evidently fought with her assailant as he attempted to place plastic restraints on her wrists, and in response to her struggles, her soon to be killer shot her multiple times and then casually strolled from the room and from the hotel, but his image was captured on hotel security cameras as he left the building, nonschlantly typing away on his phone as he walked. It is that picture, along with a picture of someone meeting the same basic description that police have matched to the man who robbed a 29-year-old Las Vegas woman who was assaulted in Boston's Copley Hotel shortly after midnight last Friday. In that case the victim, also believed to have advertised herself on Craig's List as a masseuse, described by the NY Daily News as a prostitute, was bound by her client with plastic cord, gagged, and her debit card, $250 in American Express gift cards, and $800 in cash was stolen from her. She reported she had been robbed by a tall, blond muscular man who threatened her with a gun and a knife, and left her tied up in the hotel room.

Now Boston police, bracing for the upcoming Boston Marathon and NBA and NHL playoff games, have two similar crimes believed to have been committed by the same man in the same city. Someone who, by his actions, may well have committed similar offenses against victims who many times are not willing or not able to report the crime to police, some for obvious reasons. Police fear that the believed assailant may have struck again on Thursday night, this time in Warwick, RI, an hour from Boston where he met another out of town woman who had posted an ad on Craig's List offering "private dances" in her rented Holiday Inn Express room. Once again the assailant pulled a gun on the victim, tied her up (like the other victims) with plastic rope and demanded money, this just as the woman's husband or manager appeared in the room. The assailant left without obtaining any money, meaning he's out and on the prowl for a new victim. Hotel, airline, credit card, parking garage, cel phone calls, e-mails, bank records, surveillance cameras, and other computerized records are just some of the possible electronic trails that may lead law enforcement to the man police now believe committed all three of these crimes, and police are involved a race against time to identify him before he strikes once again.

With his casual attitude exhibited after robbing one woman, attempting to rob another and killing a third victim within the same week, the chances are that the assailant, if indeed the same person, has likely committed similar crimes in the past, and if not stopped, will do so again in the very near future. This is a bad combination of believed desperation for money and the willingness to kill. The likelihood that the assailant is a drug fueled serial offender has caused law enforcement to release his photographs to the media, this both in an attempt to identify him, and to warn other women he might attempt to contact or solicit via the Internet in general, and Craig's List in particular, of the threat that he would likely pose to them should they, like his last known victims, agree to meet him in a local hotel room for "a quick massage or a fast dance."