Maury Troy Travis : Serial Killer Documentary

• Report rights infringement
• published: 13 Dec 2015
• views: 25032

Maury Troy Travis (October 25, 1965 – June 10, 2002) was an American serial killer who committed suicide in a St. Louis county jail, after being arrested for murder. Travis murdered at least 12 prostitutes, and claimed to have killed 17, all in separate incidents between 2000 and 2002 in his home in Ferguson, Missouri. He was caught when he anonymously mailed a map to the body of one his victims to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, which was later found to have come from Expedia.com and linked to his computer. Serial Killer Caught By His Own Internet Footprint By Peter Shinkle - St. Louis Post-Dispatch June 17. 2002 When the FBI and police tracked down suspected serial killer Maury Troy Travis, they didn't need bloodhounds, lab tests, fingerprints or other standard tools of criminal investigations. Instead, agents simply tapped into the wealth of information that Microsoft Corp. and other Internet companies keep on people who visit their Web sites and use their services. The stunning breakthrough in what had seemed a difficult case underscored why such information is a valuable resource for police -- and sometimes a concern for civil libertarians. Travis' arrest June 7 was set in motion two weeks earlier, when a Post-Dispatch reporter received an anonymous letter praising a story profiling a slain prostitute. Accompanying the letter was a map of part of West Alton, marked with an "X" to show where a body could be found. After finding a skeleton there, authorities focused on the map, which appeared to have a come from an Internet service. Detectives found an apparent match on Expedia.com, according to affidavit by FBI agent Melanie Jimenez. On May 30, Expedia told Jimenez that Microsoft, based in Redmond, Wash., provides the information for its map site. So the FBI, using a subpoena, requested records of any maps of West Alton made between May 18, the date of the newspaper story that spurred the letter, and May 21, the postmark on the envelope. It took four days to get an answer. On June 3, Microsoft reported back that only one computer had done it. The company said that on May 20, the computer had "zoomed in on the map of the West Alton, Missouri, area approximately 10 times in a chronological order to end with an exact match of the map" sent to the Post-Dispatch, Jimenez said in the affidavit. But Microsoft could provide no name. Just an address that is meaningless to most people: It was the Internet Protocol address of 65.227.106.78. To translate the IP number, the FBI turned to WorldCom Inc., which provides local telephone numbers to connect Internet services to their dial-up customers. WorldCom assigns a temporary IP address to each customer for each Internet session. The question wasn't just who used 65.227.106.78, but who used it at the time in question. The next day, on June 4, WorldCom's Internet division, UUnet, identified the user the evening of May 20 as MSN/maurytravis, Jimenez said. The MSN stands for Microsoft Network. The FBI went back to Microsoft Network later the same day to identify the customer. It was Maury Troy Travis of Ferguson. That was the groundwork for surveillance and, on June 7, an arrest and search warrant that authorities said helped solidify the case with DNA and tire tread evidence linking Travis, a 36-year-old waiter, to some of the killings. He was charged with two counts of kidnapping in federal court documents that also linked him to seven murders overall. Police think he may have killed 10 or more. On June 17, without ever admitting guilt, Travis hanged himself in jail.