Ed VulliamySunday October 13, 2002Through driving rain out of a leaden sky, the nightmare returned. On Friday morning, at a windswept Exxon gas station near the pretty colonial town of Fredericksburg in Virginia, the killer who has brought terror to the most powerful city in the world struck again.
By the evening, the crime scene had become a sickening sight, drained of any movieland novelty that the primetime news might hanker for. Instead there were red and blue swirling lights, a car abandoned on the forecourt, fumbling uniformed police and strutting FBI agents in raincoats or jumpsuits, paramedics, ghouls and voracious television crews brandishing their halogen lights in the gloom. The glare also illuminated the rain-lashed faces of frightened residents and the gas station staff, dumb with grim realisation. 'Oh Jesus,' said one, Jane Wells. 'He's here.'
The official reports - first 'an emergency situation', then a 'shooting incident' - tarry behind what everyone knew immediately - that the creature they call the 'psycho-sniper' had hit again. Police yesterday said that ballistic evidence 'conclusively linked' the latest killing to nine previous sniper attacks, which have left eight people dead and two seriously wounded. The latest victim was Kenneth Bridges, 53, a businessman and father of six. This time there's a new, rare clue: a white mini-van seen leaving the area, giving credence to an emerging theory among investigators: that the 10 attacks in as many days may be the work of the killer and an accomplice, or driver.
Each time he (they presume it's a he) kills, he deepens and widens his trail of random carnage. The communities reduced to living under a perceived death sentence (however hard the police urge people to 'get that last bit of yard work done') are spreading across the map - Fredericksburg is as far south as the killer has struck. But what is most horrifying is that the sniper's victims were hit by bullets that came from nowhere; anyone could be next. The killer has no category of victim: not former colleagues at work, not schoolmates, not women; there is no indication of anger or revenge.
First came James Martin on 2 October, aged 55 and white, killed in a supermarket. Then James Buchanan, white and 39, killed mowing his lawn.
Premkumar Walekar, Asian, 54, was killed at the first of four gas-station murder scenes; then Hispanic Sarah Ramos, 34, was shot outside a post office. Lori-Ann Lewis Rivera, 25, white, at another gas station; Pascal Charlot was black, 72, and the next two victims were wounded - a 43-year-old woman and a 13-year-old schoolboy. Then two more deaths, both white and both at gas stations. But it was the wounding of the schoolboy which reduced the now ubiquitous figure of Montgomery County police chief Charles Moose to shake with tears and rage: 'Today it went down to children. Now we're stepping over the line.' After Friday's killing, he just looked like a man possessed.
But Moose is no closer to knowing why the killer has targeted the suburbs of Washington. 'All you have,' says Michael McGrath, president of the Academy of Behavioural Profiling, 'is a pattern of someone going around shooting indiscriminately. This kind of behaviour is extremely rare.' Park Dietz, a psychiatrist who runs a forensic consulting firm, said: 'It's not about the victims, it's about the shooter.'
But almost nothing is known about the 'shooter', except that he has a high-velocity weapon that can pierce armour from a mile away, and that he learnt to shoot it well, either at one of the gun clubs in the area or in the armed forces.
He leaves no fingerprints, footprints, powder burns or DNA. Just one crass message - 'Mister Policeman. I am God' - on a tarot card bearing what he thinks is his signature: Death. The rest is conjecture.
The murderer defies all the categories into which the American industry of homicide-trapping likes to file its quarry. He is not a specialist 'serial killer' who cools off between murders such as Ted Bundy, with his preference for young brunettes. Nor is he a 'mass murderer', like James Huberty, who gunned down 21 people in a California hamburger restaurant in 1984. He is not even a roaming 'spree killer', such as Andrew Cunanan, who took five lives in as many months, including that of Gianni Versace. That is why the authorities have awarded this murderer a special category status all to himself: 'psycho-sniper'. But to classify him is not to answer the question baffling the battalions of detectives, Swat teams, profilers, forensic scientists, psychiatrists and data-crunchers - who or what is he?
James Alan Fox of Northeastern University, the country's leading professor of criminal justice, observes: 'He stops and shoots and doesn't hear the screams. Others enjoy squeezing the last breath from their victim. It makes it easier for him to psychologically murder.'
Mass killers, he says, fire until they 'run out of bullets', whereas this man, with demonic restraint, uses only one round at a time.
Robert Ressler, a former FBI profiler, runs a firm called Forensic Behavioural Services International from Spotsylvania County, scene of attack number eight. 'He's different,' ponders Kessler, 'It's just a gunshot.
'A true spree killer would have killed in Maryland and kept going south - they're on a desperate fugitive run that has to come to an end.'
Ressler thinks the sniper has an accomplice; his police sources tell him they are searching for the gunman and a driver. The media have descended on the case with a hunger for thrills and ghoulish mystery - television and newspapers want to feature in the same fantasy movie as that in which the killer cast himself.
Between the media and the police there is friction, which came to a head over the leaking of one of the only clues the authorities have: the tarot card.
Police chief Moose has failed to contain his rage. Detectives believe the card was the opening gambit in a grisly game of communication with their hunters that few killers can resist playing, and which can lead to their downfall.
Joseph Borelli received letters from the serial killer David Berkowitz, the so-called 'Son of Sam', because he claimed to have killed five women and a man in New York on instructions from a 2,000-year-old dog of that name.
'A lot of people say serial killers want to get caught,' says Borelli. 'He may think he's so smart he could talk to them, and that could be the first break in the case.' The tarot card may have been that break, say the police privately - the message had an instruction that the communication not be leaked to the media.
The card is also the hunter's first indication of the killer's banality; it leads the police to think he is desperate for respect and credit for his crimes. 'The people who do that are usually losers seeking attention,' says Ressler. 'It's a logo to give themselves recognition - "I'm the guy. I'm doing it all".'
Professor Fox sees the card as giving 'tremendous insight into his behaviour, into his state of mind'. He said: 'This man feels extremely important. Through the killing spree, he feels immortal, in control and in command. He's likely an ordinary individual who doesn't get the respect he deserves. Now, he gets it with a gun.'
Brent Turvey, author of Criminal Profiling, says: 'He thinks he's God, but he's not; he's a pathetic loser and a coward, so he leaves a card saying "I am God".' Turvey posits that the killer may have seen the movie Navy Seals, in which one character is a sniper who uses the codename 'God'. 'This is a wannabe,' says Turvey. 'He wants to be a sniper. He wants to be a cool, stealthy, feared person. But he's not. Police have to look for someone who wanted to be a sniper.'
Tarot enthusiasts as well as the authorities point out that what was intended to be a gesture of occult mystery also testifies to the killer's ignorance: the 'Death' card, number 13 in the pack, does not signify mortality but transition from one essence to another. The Tower card is what the killer, had he known his tarot, was looking for.
The round-robin of inter-agency blame for the tarot card leak is symptomatic of the disorganisation in the search for the killer. 'It's one of the best operations I've seen,' proclaimed Kevin McCann of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF). But his breezy confidence belies a cacophony in the cramped warren of rooms at Rockville, beneath Montgomery County police headquarters, where the investigation is based.
The place is a swarm of telephones, television sets, maps of the murder sites taped to walls and leads scrawled on white marker
While the purpose is an estimably common one, the idle talk is of back-biting, turf battles, politics, leaks and confusion - hallmarks of multi-agency manhunts of this size and kind. The players are themselves a tower of Babel: the FBI, called in after the crimes became officially 'serial'; the ATF; the Secret Service; the US marshals; Maryland and Virginia state police forces; those of five counties and a host of smaller suburban city departments.
'It's a total bureaucracy with guys who have never worked a homicide wanting to know every little detail,' said one Prince George's County detective. 'We have all those hurdles to jump and a lot of bullshit to wade through.'
Even the tarot card betrays a story of bickering: it was found by Prince George's police after a shooting in Bowie, Maryland, on Monday, but its existence was hidden from colleagues in Montgomery for a day. The leak came on Wednesday, possibly from the jilted department. 'Quite frankly,' says a detective, 'one part of the team thinks the other part of the team did it.'
Meanwhile, fear seeps into the daily routine. Booths at the pizza place on Connecticut Avenue are empty. At the Food Warehouse in Wheaton, couples unload groceries with a brisk caution, under the eye of armed security guards.
The Montgomery County youth soccer league has cancelled its weekend practice, explaining: 'Safety is paramount.' And as Mary Harman says as she walks home in Bethesda rather than stop for her usual browse, 'he is still out there some place, and it's only a matter of who, when and where next'.
