In the conference room, perched on folding chairs and tossing back doughnuts and soda, the investigators looked for hidden patterns in maps of the crime scenes and listened to forensic scientists talk about the killer’s “geographic profile.” (They now believe he lives somewhere in Montgomery County, Md., where most of the shootings took place.) Police sharpshooters were briefed on how the sniper chooses his angles and targets. As the meeting wore on, a delivery truck arrived with 70 pizzas.
Most intriguing of all was the evidence that didn’t seem to fit: a tarot “death” card found in the matted grass outside Benjamin Tasker Middle School. There, the sniper had critically wounded his eighth target, a 13-year-old student, as he got out of his aunt’s car on his way to school. On the back of the card was an ominous inscription: “Dear Policeman, I am God.” In the grass next to the card, the sniper had left, perhaps deliberately, the spent shell casing.
That shooting may yet prove to be a critical turning point in the investigation. Until then, the sniper had taken aim only at adults. And he had never before deliberately left behind evidence, as other serial killers often do. Was the sniper really a tarot devotee, or was the card a kind of mocking wink at the police, who always search for a killer’s “calling card”? That mystery lies at the heart of the newly created task force police are dryly referring to as “SNIPMUR.”
Police Chief Charles Moose, the stern, at times emotional Montgomery County cop at the center of the investigation, had hoped to deliver good news at the meeting. Just a few hours before, the sniper had claimed his 10th victim, a man pumping gas at a filling station in northern Virginia. This time, the police thought they had the killer surrounded. Days earlier, anticipating another shooting, Moose and other area police chiefs had devised a plan to quickly shut down the busy I-95 interstate, the shooter’s suspected escape route–trapping him on the highway.
The first part of the plan worked perfectly. Minutes after the fatal shot was fired, a battalion of squad cars closed on-ramps and exits in the area–jamming traffic for 50 miles. For the next three hours, in heavy rain, investigators pulled over and searched dozens of white vans, which witnesses had seen near the crime scene. By the time the cops sat down for their brainstorming session, it was becoming depressingly clear that the killer had somehow slipped through the dragnet.
“How can we stop this guy?” one participant wondered aloud. Another lawman suggested using the media to secretly send a message to the sniper that would “de-escalate” the situation. What would we say, someone else responded–“ask him to please stop killing people?”
Late last week there was no sign the killer planned to comply. And nothing seemed to ease the dread that shadowed anyone who stepped outside. Sidewalk cafes were empty. Gas-station owners –parked trucks between the pumps and street, attempting to lure back customers, who warily crouched behind their cars while their tanks filled. Schools went into “code blue” lockdown, keeping students inside, curtains drawn. Playing fields were off-limits. All around the region, the sniper had succeeded in making the irrational seem rational. Of course the chance of being chosen by the shooter was small. But someone was going to be next, and the seemingly random way he picked his anonymous targets–black, white, male, female, adult, child, it didn’t matter–made it impossible to avoid the hair-raising feeling that someone, hidden in the distance, might be staring at you through a rifle scope.
As the murders continued and new clues failed to emerge, it seemed everyone was turning up with his own airtight theory about the sniper. Computer geeks swore the killer was modeling himself after One Shot, One Kill, a popular videogame. No, said highbrow-cop-show fans, he was re-enacting a script from “Homicide,” the defunct television drama. Amateur serial-killer historians speculated that the sniper might be paying homage to Son of Sam on the 25th anniversary of his New York killing spree. Some law-enforcement sources believed the shooter may be acting with another person–or even that he is not a traditional serial killer at all, but a Qaeda operative inaugurating a new brand of post-9-11 terror. Others thought he might be a former military or police sniper gone mad. NEWSWEEK has learned that the FBI had asked the Defense Department to search their records from the sniper school at Fort Bragg, N.C., for rejected applicants or former students with psychological problems. As the shootings continued, members of a little-known but fast-growing subculture emerged to share their expertise: hobbyist shooters who hit distant targets for fun questioned the killer’s skills. Why did he target only people standing still, and shoot from relatively short distances? One sure sign he wasn’t a trained sniper, they said: he sometimes shot his victims in the chest or the neck. Snipers go for the head.
The list of theories goes on–and each one has its own peculiar logic. But if the armchair speculation has a kind of macabre appeal, it also seems only to reinforce how little we actually know about the attacker, or where he may turn up next.
The sniper set to work with astonishing speed. On the morning of Oct. 3, Douglas Gansler, the youthful Maryland state’s attorney in Rockville, was preparing his daily caseload when the Police Department’s Major Crimes Unit called: after two similar murders within 12 hours, a pattern was developing. The night before, the gunman had killed a 55-year-old man walking across the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse. The next morning he killed a 39-year-old landscaper, again with a single shot. Montgomery County has nearly a million residents, but the affluent community averages fewer than two murders a month–compared with the nearby District of Columbia, where 250 people were slain last year. “When you get two within hours, that sends up a signal,” says Gansler, who immediately dispatched two of his most seasoned prosecutors to the crime scenes.
But the sniper had only just begun his day’s work. In the hours that followed, he shot and killed a 54-year-old cabdriver, a 34-year-old woman sitting on a bench, a 25-year-old mother vacuuming her mini-van–and, later that night, a 72-year-old man standing on a corner in Washington, D.C. “An hour or two would go by and we were hopeful that it had ceased,” Gansler recalls. “Usually, we were wrong.”
Police frantically moved from one shooting to the next, looking for patterns that would make sense of the crimes. The cops borrowed the FBI’s sophisticated Rapid Start software, which sifts through the thousands of calls people have made to the special tip line, looking for connections. So far, the police say they’ve gleaned thousands of useful leads. “We’re also getting a lot of pissed-off ex-wives calling in about their hunter ex-husbands,” says a detective working the investigation.
One clue stood out: witnesses reported seeing a man–some said two men–in a white box truck in the vicinity of the shootings. Police began pulling over the common delivery trucks by the dozen. (On Saturday, the police released a digital composite of a white truck, which they say witnesses from several crime scenes had described.)
Without much else to go on, forensic scientists from the FBI and ATF got to work examining what little physical evidence there was. The killer hadn’t left behind shell casings in the first several days of the murders, suggesting he either shot from inside a vehicle or paused to pick up the discarded shells. Another explanation: he was using a bolt-action hunting rifle, which holds the cartridge inside the gun until it is popped out. To weapons experts, it was a potentially significant clue. Was the sniper a weekend shooter using a common hunting rifle, or a trained marksman behind a precise but harder-to-tame weapon like the Colt AR-15? One way to tell: examine the bullet fragments taken from the victims. Investigators had quickly determined that the shooter was using .223 rounds, which can be fired from a number of easily obtainable weapons. By itself, this was not a terribly useful piece of information, since .223s, which are made by several companies, are widely available all over the country. But once fired, a bullet can often tell a story. Every gun leaves a signature “fingerprint” on a bullet as it hurls out of the barrel, telltale markings that can identify the make and model of the gun–and therefore reveal clues about the person who fired it.
Another key question: just how good a shot was he? The police and press continually referred to him as a “sniper,” which implied he was a trained marksman, perhaps even a former police or military shooter. “What you have here is somebody who knows how to take a shot and then leave without anybody seeing him,” says one law-enforcement official. But professional snipers, along with the growing number of “sport snipers,” were more than a little peeved at the suggestion that the killer had anything in common with them. Sport-sniper chat rooms were filled with angry discussions about the killer’s lack of skill. A trained sniper wouldn’t risk shooting from 100 yards away, but would move back much farther. The pros’ evaluation: he’s an amateur, maybe a hunter, with average shooting ability and possibly a little know-how. “This looks like somebody who has had some exposure to sniper skills,” says Derrick Bartlett, who runs Snipercraft, a Florida sniper school. “But I can guarantee you that every legitimate sniper in the United States would love to have the opportunity to put a bullet between this guy’s eyes.”
Trained or not, he was obviously skilled enough to kill two more people and wound two others in the days that followed–this time moving farther south, into Virginia–and completely evade the police who were lying in wait. (Authorities at the latest site found a piece of yellow legal paper, which they bagged as evidence. NEWSWEEK has learned that it contains scribbled driving directions from northern Maryland down toward the Washington Beltway.)
Personality profilers believe that the sniper was carefully watching–and thoroughly enjoying–the round-the-clock press attention to his exploits. He also seemed to toy with the police, mocking their inability to catch him. When Chief Moose went on television to reassure parents that their children were safe in school, the sniper next appeared at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Md., and shot a 13-year-old boy. It was there that the killer left behind the tarot card and the spent shell casing (some FBI profilers believe that the card may have been planted at the crime scene by someone else). Moose was devastated when a law-enforcement official anonymously leaked word of the evidence to a local TV reporter, and lashed out at the press. “I have not received any message that the citizens of Montgomery County want Channel 9 or The Washington Post or any other media outlet to solve this case,” Moose scolded. “If they do, then let me know. We will go and do other police work and we will turn this case over to the media and you can solve it.”
At first, the outburst seemed a little over the top. Evidence from police investigations is routinely leaked to the press. But days later the reason for Moose’s anguish became clear. Along with the “I am God” inscription, the card reportedly warned police not to tell the press about it. Sources close to the case tell NEWSWEEK that before the tarot card became public, Moose had tried to establish trust with the killer, speaking to him in code during his ubiquitous briefings. “I hope to God that someday we’ll know why all of this occurred,” he said, apparently hoping the shooter would get the picture. “He has been doing that from the beginning and has been trying to communicate with [the killer],” says a source close to the investigation. “I don’t know how successful it has been, but that is the idea–to try to get one message out, to try to build more of a rapport.”
As Moose tries to get inside the mind of the killer, the families of his victims are left to sort out the work of his hands. The first to die, government worker James Martin, 55, was leader of his son’s Boy Scout troop. Kenneth Bridges, the most recent victim, was the father of six, and spent his nights and weekends helping low-income workers start their own businesses. Friends of James (Sonny) Buchanan, 39, recalled how he used to cajole Baltimore Oriole tickets from his corporate clients so he could take kids from the Boys and Girls Club to the games. “He used to spend a fortune on those kids buying them snacks and hats and whatever they wanted,” says a friend. A few days after his death, his family opened a nonprofit youth foundation, Sonny’s Kids, in his memory. These are the first obituaries. With so little to go on, and with such a cunning adversary, investigators can only hope that they will be the last.
