Inside The Sniper Manhunt

Sunday, Oct. 13, 2002 By AMANDA RIPLEY/WASHINGTON
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The victims were carrying out the banal tasks of everyday life, their last unremarkable moments juxtaposed with the killer's lightning brutality. Officials speculated thatthis could be a terrorist attack but searched in vain for any overt political message. The victims, if they were lined up side by side, would roughly resemble a random sampling of the Washington metropolitan area. They were white, black, Hispanic, Indian, male, female. There was a government analyst, a landscaper, a housekeeper, a nanny.

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The first shooting that broke the killing pattern — flimsy as it was — came the next day in a parking lot in Spotsylvania County, Va. The shooter had deviated by about 70 miles from the epicenter of the other attacks, spurring speculation that he was rebelling against hypotheses that he must live in Montgomery County. The shooting also left the woman injured but alive. And it took place in front of another Michaels store. Desperate for a motive, police contacted Michaels headquarters in Texas for reports of disgruntled employees. But the return to a Michaels craft store may have been sheer coincidence, since there are 40 of them in Maryland and Virginia.

FBI profilers began working on the case, and, at the ATF's suggestion, geographic profiler Kim Rossmo stepped in. "Random crimes aren't random, not in the mathematical sense," says Rossmo, a former Vancouver police official. After studying about 4,000 criminals, Rossmo is convinced that most operate a predictable distance from where they live and work. They constantly juggle the competing urges to attack in a convenient and familiar locale and to go unrecognized. That means they tend to pick hunting grounds midway between the places they know best. When a criminals' stats are plugged into an algorithm Rossmo has developed using his theory, it creates a rainbow-hued map, with the crime scenes in lime and yellow zones, the perpetrator's likely home in bright red or orange and the least productive places to look in indigo. It's a tidy treasure map, but Rossmo concedes his program won't find a killer by itself. "There are only three ways you can solve a crime: physical evidence, eyewitnesses or a confession."

After 48 hours without a shooting, chief Moose appeared on Sunday afternoon, Oct. 6, at a press briefing to reassure the public. He promised to "greatly increase" police presence at area schools the following day, though he couldn't guarantee officers at every building. The next morning, an eighth-grade boy was shot in front of Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Md. At a press conference, Moose struggled for composure. "I guess it's getting to be really, really personal now," he said.

The boy, whose name has not been released, had just been dropped off by his aunt, less than 20 ft. from the school door. Driving away, she heard a loud sound andturned around to see her nephew on theground. His science teacher, Karen Pumphrey, walked out to find the boy grimacing in pain. "I've been shot," he told her. Suffering from injuries to the spleen, stomach, pancreas, lung and diaphragm, he is in critical but stable condition.

Frantic parents streamed back from work to pick up their children from area schools. As protective police helicopters hovered, residents shut themselves inside. Says Sherri Long, whose daughter Staci is a Tasker student: "People who needed to get prescriptions waited. We've got tapes due back at Blockbuster, and we'll just pay the fines."

At the scene of the boy's shooting, police stumbled upon a trove of clues. A matted area in the brush opposite the school suggested that the sniper had lain in wait for his victim. Police also found a tarot "death" card with the message "Mister Policeman, I am God." The card, which may turn out to be a prank by someone familiar with the Vietnam War habit of leaving calling cards on the bodies of Viet Cong, was sent to the feds to be analyzed for fingerprints and DNA. The card, it would later be reported, also contained a request not to tell the media about its existence. "There is often an indignation on the part of serial killers at news reports about them that are inaccurate, so they start giving little hints about who they really are, what they have done," says Jamie Greene, a clinical and forensic psychologist. "They want recognition."