you sound utterly horrible.

but in a feeble attempt to answer your disgusting toned question, its newsworthy as a sign of the times maybe you would have been happier if it acknowledged that this has happened before via traditonal advertising mediums. Its also newsworthy because its a grisly murder and incorporates that (to most folk) unknown quantity THE INTERNET!!!!

"So what?" Are you serious?! First of all, someone was brutally murdered! I can think of a thousand more compassionate ways to reply than "so what?"! Secondly, this is newsworthy because of the far-reaching implications. This may be an isolated incident, but it casts a shadow over internet sites like craigslist. Yes, this murderer couild have used a newspaper ad, but such ads often create some sort of paper trail. As with pedophiles, the internet allows murderers and rapist to better conceal their intentions.

Regardless, if all you have to say is "so what?" in response to an act of cold-blooded murder, then maybe YOU need to spend less time on the internet, and more time interacting with real human beings!

Isn't that a wee bit far to go for a nanny job? Or is nannying paying a hell of a lot better than I realized?

I smell something rotten in the state of Denmark.

I have to make a post here that is somewhat related, yet seemingly completely unrelated.

I live in Dallas, TX. There is a university just North of here that goes by the name of University of North Texas. I don't expect any of you folks across the pond to know it, but it's one of the more prestigious music universities in the United States.

Well, a few months ago (and by a few months ago I mean... September) a nice young lady was murdered. She picked up some piece of trash to give him a ride somewhere and he ended up murdering her.

Then burned her corpse.

The police arrested someone in connection with the murder. Apparently, the murderer went to a friend to help dispose of the body. Their clever solution was to burn the corpse - and her car - in an industrial complex half an hour South of Denton.

Now, why is this seemingly related? I assume that the police probably used the murdering idiot's Craigslist posting to catch him via his e-mail address and ip address. That is an assumption of mine. There's not enough info to gather.

Now, why is this related?

Before the murderer here in Dallas fled to Mexico (he's a LEGAL immigrant) he spent DAYS logging into his myspace page. The news outlets knew about his page. Everyone knew about it. Bulletins were sent all over myspace about it. For days he logged in. Days. Days. Days.

I cannot stress that enough. Days.

Literally the same day of the murder his myspace had leaked via news organizations. Everyone knew. He even logged in to take off a ton of lewd material that could easily be used against him (featuring dozens of pornographic images posted by one of his 'friends' and the likes).

Did the police bother attempting to use myspace to track his whereabouts? Nope.

He was caught on October 9th in Mexico. Now he's waiting extradition. Good luck with that one.

A web savvy prosecutor with a subpoena could have easily caught this bastard long before he even fled the country. Did they bother? Nope.

I'm glad the police in the craigslist case were smart enough to catch this guy quicker than police in our case did. If it was trusty old style detective work then good on them. If using his craigslist post to track him was how they did it then even better.

I wish the police were a bit smarter at this 'net' thing.

"It is the first murder on the site and if it makes other young people think twice about replying to ads and turning up alone to meet strangers,"

Wow gee if they don't already know that from all the other publicity there is about X met Z on Y and got killed there has been then they deserve a Darwin award and one more out of the thousands of publicised murder cases is unlikely to make them have a single thought

Aparently while my back was turned the world was filled by heartless bastards.

Dude, piss off ok. It's pretty shocking stuff. Also, I don't know where you come from but over here in good ol' Blighty a murder is a big deal.

I think the point here is about the fickleness of the media and their unwillingness to report stuff that doesn't have some kind of ghoulish twist or that hasn't happened in their own back yard. Hundreds if not thousands of people are killed every day all around the world, completely unreported, and in far more horrific circumstances - and yet the media will blow up the significance of one poxy case. People are killed all the time, that's human nature, but there needs to be more balance in how it's reported. There should perhaps be laws and journalistic guidelines that make it illegal for people like Madeleine Mc flipping Cann to be on the front page for more than a few days, at which point they should be rightfully replaced with coverage of the huge numbers of other dead people who nobody seems to give a flying f**k about.

<< Puts on flak jacket >>

If you must know, I'm from "good ol blighty"

Where the hacks will blow up any murder story that possibly has any internet related angle beyond all proportion whilst ignoring all the other murders that take place.

Where the governments entire answer to crime is to either stick a camera on it and it will go away or to just fine / tax you for it.

It is not about being heartless or needing to "piss off" to use your highly educated turn of phrase, it is about the fact that murders happening because of the fact that despite hundreds upon hundreds of incidences of people meeting up with someone they don't know and getting murdered, some people are just too thick to learn that it is not a good idea.

So why don't you "piss off" and take a second to think before posting.

What do you mean 'so what'? You guys have obviously never tried to get a reliable baby sitter on a Friday evening. This is a goddam calamity!!!

While "Yeah, right" does come across as a heartless bastard, his point, which was better made by fixit_f, is correct. Why aren't all you lot pounding on about the thousand of people killed every week by dictators thoughout the world, or those millions that die every year because most of the rest of the world turn their back on them, or even worse buy the cheap TVs, DVDs, Designer labels made by kids in sweatshops, who, if they are luck reach the age of 16, and in some of the more severe cases, if they are very lucky they don't reach the age of 16.

This woman should know that going to meet a stranger in a strange place on her own was a f**king stupid thing to do, wherther they "met" on the internet, local newspaper, local shop window, or whatever.

You just completely proved my previous point, by breaking out the numbers and pointing out just how "common" this is, so lets all collectively ignore it.

A life is a life, and when snuffed before it's time be needless violence, we all lose something, a possible poet, a great actor, the writer of the next big bestseller, or the next great scientific mind. It could be just your Average Joe/Jane, or it could be someone who boils everything down to numbers and logical arguments about something as ill-suited to logical explaination as human life and existance is (relating to society at large). But any one of those have value, and add to the collective body known as humanity.

Yes, there are numerous people killed every day, and every year. And if you go outside of the US, there are even more. Yes, the US has a relatively high homicide rate for the industrialized world, but it's still a lot lower than a majority of countries. Yes, space constraints in your local paper or news program require pruning and delivery of what it considered "news." However, even if there is only a quick paragraph in the local secion of the Star Tribune (local paper for Mpls), it still gets reported. There are about 40-60 murders each year in the Twin Cities area, hardly enough to overwhelm the newspaper. Yes, this one grabbed more attention, but that was because it was out of the norm, and the circumstances were different, in that there seemed to be a lure, it involved people who didn't know each other at all (contrary to popular belief, just like kidnapping, it's usually people you know or are connected to who commit a crime against you), and it was in a town that has had a total of 2 other murders in the last 31 years, one of them being a murder-suicide between husband and wife.

As I explained above, I have more of a vested interest in this specific case, but if this had been in Bath, England, or Moscow, or Perth, I still would have been appalled by it. It's just an appalling thing, and I find reading the news to be a depressing proposition because of the sheer number of deaths, murders, suicides, accidents, etc. that are reported each and every day.

[You just completely proved my previous point...]

And you missed mine - my complaint is that the media overplay their remit to entertain us and overlook their education remit.

As I said, there are thousands of murders in the USA each and every year that gather not even a footnote in a paper, never mind front page news. The only difference between those and this type of tragedy is that this one has the power to "entertain" us.

I don't mean that in a sick way (maybe I do, I dunno) - I mean that when we pay to be entertained by a film, a book, a newspaper we pay to *feel* something. Funny, angry, happy, sad, shocke etc. You get it. This type of story tends to make us feel angry but serves little to no use educating us (telling us something we didn't already know - i.e. pychos lure ppl to their deaths every now and again)

I don't mean to play down this womans tragic demise, but I don't hear you playing up the other 12,000 murders and asking "why don't we hear about them too?" If you just want to be titillated by some poor womans death then fair enough. If you want a media that actually does it's full job then surely you want them to report the full facts of the world we live in, not just the "cool" bits they hear about?

No?

There was no reason to report this particular murder over any other than the fact she used an internet classified rather than a "normal" one.

Okay, the charges were put up, and it's 2nd degree, which means it was not pre-meditated. In otherwords, it may have been a fake ad, but there wasn't planning by the suspect to commit murder. There also was no evidence of sexual assault.

Besides that, it is not a bold claim to say that there are 40-60 murders a year around here. 2006 had 60 homicides in Mpls, and this year, there have been 33, which is down 10 from last year through August, and 2 more added in Sept that are not part of that. So... 35, with only 25% of the year left. I'm not saying it's the safest city in the world. Now, I will say that I did not include surrounding areas as well as I could have, but the Mpls crime report is easy to get a hold of, instead of trying to find all the various cities and towns that makes up the area. However, the actual town that she was killed in is Savage, a suburb, which has had as of now, 3 homicides in 31 years.

I didn't miss your point Ross, but it's not that I'm entertained by this, or titulated... it actually touches on me personally, since friends of mine are greiving, because they knew her, and it adds to the numerous other senseless deaths that have haunted St. Olaf College campus in the last 7 years, both to students and young alums, some of which I knew.

So, yes, I do take it personally a bit when this is thrown at me as "just another murder." But I stand by my point earlier that the media can only report so much, unless you want newspapers that are 300 pages long each day, and 24/7 news channels that are devoted to certain geographical locations. Yes, it is horrible that some crimes are raised up as stories, while others barely have a byline next to them, but that doesn't change the fact that yet again, a person was killed senselessly (especially after reading the charges filled today), and the fact that 12,000 are killed each year in US doesn't diminish the personal or the societal grief of each individual one. We don't, can't, hear about them all, but you can still be appalled by that. When you start to assign numbers and statistics to each one, you dehumanize it, and you might as well be talking about livestock.

Finally, Criagslist's PR has said that this is the first situation they know of where someone was murdered answering an ad, and there is only one other case, someone abducted in LA, that might be linked to a Craigslist ad. So, this is a very rare occurance. Also, I have never once advocated, suggested, or otherwise implicated Craigslist, or any other online classified ad or social networking site, nor has anyone else here. But I feel like that the people who have expressed outrage or disgust with this are being cast as censors and/or open to some kind of action by the government or other entities to limit such things. I think no such thing.

It's funny how so many people lacking in confidence decide to post messages.

They act as if they're making some kind of relevant point about society by pointing out the obvious fact that this is not out of the ordinary. However, it remains inhumane and as such deserves attention. Those who naysay know this to be true - they just want to seem clever by being pretentious little scabs with no original thoughts.

"Bah, this happens all the time, she's not special, who cares, ahaha I'm witty aren't I?" No, you're not. You're more shallow than the killer and are perhaps a bigger problem than even they are. Idleness feeds wickedness. So instead of hopping on to a story with clear morality and trying to express some ridiculous complaint about society, try learning about someone else's life and stop fueling your pathetic whims.

no one is asking you to be sympathetic or to compare an indiviudal murder incident against thousands....

wow news flash news papers print stories to sell copies, not to tell you the news, did you seriously only just figure that out?

and for those of you who have said you just don't care, guess what woman come in other formats then jpeg.

...Humanity if all someone reading this sorry tale can respond with "So what....". Are we really descending into that place?

I stake my claim as a compassionate human being. I, for one, feel that it is only right to be outraged at every reported murder, all the while knowing that it is but one instance of very many across our planet. That outrage helps keep our sense of Humanity in place.

So what about one single death? How about "So what?" about one million? After all, it didn't happen to me or a loved one, "So what?". Its only relative numbers, even a million, "So what?" about 22 million. Who cares?

Who indeed?

Blimey but there's a lot of bilge on here.

To those who really think that this murder is newsworthy, but the dozens of other ones from the same location aren't: get a grip. The woman lived in the USA. In Minneapolis alone there have been 38 murders so far this year. What makes THIS particular murder newsworthy compared to the hundreds of others happening every day in the USA and elsewhere? Other, of course, than the sensationalist voyeurism of finding even a vague IT reference in a murder?

But please, spare me the false outrage by raging hypocrites at my supposed "lack of tact".

Shouldn't you be reading the Daily Mail and crying over Diana?

Or did you come here for tech news like the rest of us?

Surely sometimes it is necessary to view events like this without resorting to the emotional responses? I agree that The story merits an appearance on El Reg, because there is an It angle -- but I worry that the mainstream media report stories like this, when the only reason they stand out is "THE EVIL INTERNET!!!".

I think a response of "so what" is justifiable on this occasion -- if I were being really objective I could even suggest that we don't yet know if the woman deserved it, perhaps she was killed because she abused or murdered a member of her assailant's family?

It is not necessary to post "OMG WHAT A TRADGEDY!" to every story of a death you know? You can still be compassionate, and still care for and help your fellow human beings without doing so.

Everyone here actually takes a 'So what' attitude towards deaths of people they know nothing about. It's called surviving in this world.

Don't get me wrong, this is a horrible thing to happen and I do feel for the people involved, but in an hour or two I'll have probably forgotten about it. If I didn't start turning an uncaring statistical eye to murder stories I'd have gone joined the statistics long ago. It's too sad and sick to care about all (any?) of them.

And, well done for 'she deserves it'. - Some people still actually have faith in the human race. Some people still have trust.

It's naive.

It's not deserving of death.

Some people are blissfully unaware of the 'evils' in the world around them, and it's not always their fault. For instance, she may not read the news and learn about these things happening to others. Or she may just skip the sad stories.

"A life is a life, and when snuffed before it's time be needless violence, we all lose something, a possible poet, a great actor, the writer of the next big bestseller, or the next great scientific mind. "

Or she might have been planning to drown the kids in the bath tub.

Since everyone's throwing ridiculously emotive hypotheticals around. Now where's the self-righteous indignation icon?

Edward Rose:

This woman intended to take care of children. She had a professional obligation to be aware of the dangers of meeting strangers alone. Did she deserve death? No; she'd (as far as we know) done nothing heinous enough to deserve death (some people would argue that there isn't anything heinous enough to deserve death). Should anyone be surprised she's dead? Not really; like test pilots and soldiers and motor racing drivers who put themselves in harm's way (as she did) death is a possibility.

Others:

The reason the story is in El Reg is because it has an IT angle: the Internet was used as the contact between killer and victim. That's the "what" in "So what?".

It's a shame she's dead but if we wrung our hands and hearts about every murder, we'd get blisters.

And since when did anonymity rob an argument of its intrinsic merit? It's the *abuse* of anonymity that does that.

http://www.co.scott.mn.us/wps/PA_1_0_FL/GetJISInfoServlet?list=JISD&id=200700005104

He looks none to bright too me.

But where do we draw the line between ignorance and naivety?

> People get murdered answering ads from local newspapers too, but it doesn't get trumpeted in so many newspapers

Yeah, right, and you just happen to know about all these murders that aren't reported by asking Donzo and his amazing psychic stick insect.