Inside The Sniper Manhunt
Pay attention, profilers have long warned, to a serial killer's first strike. The first of the bullets that strafed the suburbs of Washington last week sliced through the air over a drab strip-mall parking lot in Aspen Hill, Md., and cracked a nickel-size hole in the front window of aMichaels craft store. It then arced through a leafy display of silk autumnal bouquets, zipped behind the head of a female cashier and pierced a hole through thelamp over the register of lane No. 5. Emerging on the other side, it whizzed over a Christmas-ornament display and finally ricocheted off a shelf of Inspiration for theHeart mini prayer books. Unlike every shot to come, the bullet hurt no one.
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The bullet fragments, lying there on the store floor, not far from a selection of bride-and-groom wedding-cake figurines, communicated the theme of this diabolical case: no matter how upscale the neighborhood, no matter how comfortable the surroundings, you too could be a target. Here, among the endless supermarkets, party stores and gas stations, a malicious hunter — or hunters — has taken position in the natural habitat of contemporary Americans. And incredibly, each time, despite busy, well-lighted streets, no one noticed the shooter. As it turns out, the suburbs, with a camouflage of hedgerows, neon signs and anonymous traffic, make a better shooting gallery than a dark alley.
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But if the randomness of the crime is rare, the counterattack has been groundbreaking. Because the crime scenes ring the nation's capital — and because this area was so recently scarred by terrorist attacks — little has been spared in the search for the killer. Says Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan: "Everyone rushed forward to help us that first day. I don't think that would have happened before 9/11." An estimated 1,000 people are working on the case, including Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) units, U.S. Marshals and state police. One kindergarten-through-second-grade school in Montgomery County was watched over alternately last week by police, Secret Service agents and the FBI. The feds have donated premier ballistics forensics investigators. The FBI, using software originally designed for movies such as Star Wars, is creating animated 3-D computer-graphic displays to reconstruct the crime scene and help calculate the sniper's position, in hopes of jogging potential witnesses' memories. And federal law-enforcement sources tell TIME that the bureau has asked the Pentagon to search its records for recently discharged GIs who went through sniper school. The schools teach snipers to work in tandem — one as the spotter, the other as the shooter.
For the police, the p.r. challenge alone has been dizzying. Investigators had to carefully weigh their obligation to keep the public informed and calmed while knowing that they were also talking to the killer. At each ofthe 50 or so press briefings since the firstshooting, officials have agonized over what effect public statements may have on the shooter. Hopefully, Montgomery County police chief Charles Moose told Time, "Nobody ever has to live with the fact that maybe something they did kept this person or these people out there any longer than they have been." In 16 hours, Moose encountered almost three times as many homicide reports as his department usually sees in a month.
Meanwhile, regular folks have awkwardly adapted to the presence of a sniper intheir community. After a 13-year-old boy was shot in the stomach walking into school on Oct. 7, events were summarily canceled: field trips, all outdoor school sporting events, four homecoming celebrations, even sat exams. Park rangers have been spotted monitoring soccer fields — the de facto town squares for Montgomery County's affluent families. From the backseat of a Fairfax, Va., woman's car, a 5-year-old who has been newly forbidden from riding his bike asks, "Mommy, will it hurt if I get shot?" At the scene of the first, victimless shooting, employees now walk zigzag across the parking lot. They still take smoking breaks, but now they stand pressed up against cement columns, trying to act nonchalant.
The day the shootings began, Oct. 2, it took several hours for the bewildered Michaels employees to realize they might be part of something bigger. That's when they heard that a middle-aged man had been gunned down walking through a Shoppers Food Warehouse parking lot, a little more than 2 miles away. Not only did the killer brazenly fire in the waning daylight hours of rush-hour congestion, he shot James Martin right across the street from a police station.
Just 5 miles away, James (Sonny) Buchanan was mowing a patch of grass near the clogged Rockville Pike artery the next morning when a bullet ripped open his chest. Five miles northeast and half an hour later, Premkumar Walekar crumpled to the ground, murdered while putting $5 worth of gas into his cab. His daughter, watching the live bulletin on TV, recognized the American flags in the back window of his cab and rushed with her mother to the scene, where they identified him. Two miles away, unaware of the rippling circle of violence, Sarah Ramos was killed while sitting on a park bench, waiting for a ride. A witness reported seeing a white van with two occupants screech out of the area. Police began frantically stopping white vans, but a little more than an hour later, Lori Lewis Rivera was struck down while vacuuming her minivan outside a Shell station. At 9:20 p.m., about a 5-mi. drive from the last shooting, Pascal Charlot, 72, was cut down with a shot below the neck as he crossed the street.
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