January 2, 2020 • 39 mins
On October 2nd, 2002, the first shots are fired. And no one sees anything.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of I Heart
Radio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in
this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or
individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those
of I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. It was quite a warm morning. I
(00:26):
drove my son to school with some other children. Dropped
them off around eight o'clock and my two year old
was still in the car, so he was in a
car see. We were listening to children's music in the
car on the radio. I went to the gas station
(00:46):
and I stopped to pump gas. My name's dot Caroline Namro.
I'm a pediatrician. I live in Silver Spring in Maryland.
It was a lovely day. It was very warm, so
I opened the windows. So as I rolled the windows
down a bit, I turned and I looked at the
right and there was a taxi and there was a
(01:07):
gentleman who was filling his car with gas. But I
thought it was unusual because he was filling the tank
from underneath the license plate, which I had never seen before.
I looked at him for a few seconds and he
looked up at me and we made eye contact. I
had just in a smile. I reached to get my
(01:27):
purse to take out my credit card and I heard
a bang, and immediately in my head I thought that
was a gunshot. But at the same time I thought, no,
why would there be a gunshot. It must be some
sort of electrical problem, maybe with the car. And he
was doing his thing weird and he shouldn't have been
(01:47):
filling it from under the license plate, how strange. I
looked up and he was walking towards my car. It
was just a few paces and he looked in the
passengers side and he said, cool, an ambulance and he
collapsed and I was shaking, so immediately grabbed my phone,
(02:10):
got out of the car, un called nine one one,
and I was totally in shock. By an ambulance. Don't
I don't know. I don't think America has ever gone
(02:38):
back to the way that it was before eleven and
the anthrax attacks and the DC sniper. My name is
Garrett Graff, and I'm a journalist and historian. It's really
amazing looking back to the nineties today, really just how
much simpler the issues on the table were. Government's utilities
(02:59):
and companies all over the world are checking their computer
systems to prevent a Why two came out down Much
of the country was really consumed by the impeachment of
President Clinton. In actually, President Clinton was criticized for trying
to distract from his impeachment troubles by attacking the training
(03:21):
camps of al Quaeda. These were threats that the US
was not focused that much on. As a country, the government,
the National security apparatus was beginning to pay more attention
to it. We must remember it is the obligation of
America to help make the world more peaceful. As far
as I'm concerned, it's an obligation of a commander in
chief as well to understand, in order to keep the peace,
(03:43):
we must rebuild the military power of the United States
of America. The two thousand election at the time seemed
incredibly vicious and partisan, and ultimately it was a vote
of the Supreme Court that declared effectively George W. Bush
the winner of Florida and thus the winner of the presidency.
(04:07):
In many ways, Americans were beginning to lose trust in
institutions as they were hit by various scandals, and then,
of course we didn't know either what came next. Apparently
a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center
here in New York City. It happened just a few
moments ago. Apparently we have very little information available. There
(04:31):
weren't very many people who defaulted that morning to thinking
it was terrorism at first. And I think one of
the most remarkable things that you see on the morning
of nine eleven is just how innocent America truly was.
President Bush continued with his morning reading to school children.
Congress prepared to open for business that day after the
(04:53):
first attacks, and even in New York City, you know,
you saw people just continue their commute, thinking that they
were going on to a relatively normal day at work.
I heard of thorn, walked up and there was a big,
small of fire. You could hear the fire engines and
the emergency crews behind me. I've never seen any fire
like that in the air, and even that the building
(05:15):
were flying down and pen smokes. I can't even describe it.
As the morning of nine eleven unfolded. It quickly became
clear that this was a terrorist attack on not just
New York City but the wider country. This airplane that
ran into the Pentagon. It happened within the hour. The
plane sliced through the building. It came in and hit
(05:37):
actually at about the first and second floors. We really
didn't know how wide the attack actually would go, you know.
Skyscrapers were evacuated in Boston, in Chicago and Los Angeles
and other cities across the country as people feared that
there could be more planes still in the sky. The
fear was really that there would be a second wave
(06:00):
of attacks. That sense of fear was certainly driven by
the accelerating media culture as well. There are thousands of
these terrorists in more than sixty countries. They are recruited
from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps
in places like Afghanistan where they are trained in the
tactics of terra. Unrelenting coverage contributed to this pervasive fear
(06:28):
about whether we were safe living our daily lives. There
was the expectation really that d C would be attacked
again by Al Qaeda, by a car bomb, by more planes.
There was a real fear about whether this was the
day that the next shoe dropped. In the wake of
(06:55):
nine eleven, all of us living in the DC area
were terrified and we were all just waiting for the
next horrific act of terror. I'm Tony Harris. In the
fall of two thousand two, I was working as a
news anchor for Fox forty five in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.
On the morning of October three, reports began flooding our
(07:17):
newsroom about random shootings in Montgomery County, Maryland. We do
have five fatal shootings for no apparent reason, no robbery
motive or anything like that. People who are just sort
of out and about doing their normal tasks. You know,
you think you're out here safe, and here's this woman
coming out of this apparently the post office and was
just shot. The people of Maryland looked through their televisions
(07:42):
to journalists like me for answers, but we didn't have them.
It is quite a mystery. The police say they have
never had a crime quite like this in Montgomery County before.
They are huddling together. They are trying now to figure
out what's going on. And that terrible day was only
the beginning. What emerged over the following weeks was one
(08:04):
of the most disturbing crime sprees in the history of
our country. But now, eighteen years later, the Supreme Court
will rule on the sniper's case, and the convicted killer
could one day walk free. On this season of Monster,
We're going to investigate the full DC sniper story because
(08:25):
I want to find the answers to questions that have
haunted me all these years. What was the killer's motive?
And should they ever be given a second chance to
fully understand? We have to go back to October two
two two, an average Wednesday and suburban Maryland. October two
(08:53):
two two was an unusually warm day for d C.
I was working in the evening shift. You handle the
routine calls. There are several of us working, everybody working
in a cubicle, nothing special really going on. It was
in the early evening. The phone rang, and we don't
have a secretary at night, So whoever picks up the phone,
(09:15):
whatever is on the other end of you get it.
This is Patrick McNerney, a former HAMAS and I detective
with Montgomery County Police in Maryland, was told by our
communications center there had been a shooting murder, or as
we call it, an in the Wheaton Glenmont district in
the Shopper sued Warehouse parking lot. So we're running lights
(09:37):
and siren over to the scene and took about fifteen
minutes to get there. We're presented with a very large
crowd in front of the shopper Sued warehouse. McNerney took
charge of the crime scene. He locked the area down,
began interviewing witnesses and tried to figure out what just happened.
(09:59):
I just could have in a robbery or somebody walked
up to this guy and shot him. And then we
started to deal with why did it sound like a
cannon going off? That was a report from the first
officer who was actually sitting right across the street when
the shooting took place. The sound I heard wasn't really
(10:23):
to me immediately recognized he has a gunshot. It was
just this enormously loud percussion. I'm Alan Felson Um. At
the time, I was working for the Mogomery County Police Department.
I was a bicycle patrol officers signed to the Wheaton District.
The police station is directly across the street from the
Shopper's Food warehouse where we're standing today, so that's where
(10:44):
I was then. Felson was the first officer on the scene.
He heard the shot and responded immediately, but it was
already too late. The killer got away. How could a
shooter pull this off in broad daylight, right next to
a police station. I asked Felson to meet me here
and explain what he saw that day. So you're sitting
(11:08):
there in your cruiser at that point, described what happens
and what you hear. There's a business right next door
here called Country Board that's been here forever. They use
forklifts and palettes. They sell mulch and garden supplies, and
I mean I almost thought that one of their eighteen
wheelers had been knocked over something. It was this enormously
loud percussion, so I did not immediately go, wow, that
(11:30):
sounds like a rifle. It was just this really loud
thunderclap kind of sound. So obviously it drew everyone's attention
in the police station. People heard it inside because it's
that's only, you know, a hundred hundred fifty yards away.
They came to the door and looked out. It was
that lamp. Yes, because I was directly across from the
(11:52):
shoppers foot warehouse, I think I already saw that the
people in front of the store. We're looking straight at
the parking lot from the store. I pulled out, flipped
on the emergency lights on the car. It was probably
less than a minute that it took me, you know,
to drive there. But as soon as I pull in,
I can see if there's a man laying face down
(12:12):
in the parking lot. So I pulled in and I
just yelled at the people are staying there? Did anyone
see anything? And I just got kind of no reaction.
Everyone was still just staring, I think. I then yelled
at them, if you heard the shots, stay here, or
if you saw anything, stay here, and then drove my
car up the aisle closer to where the victim was.
(12:33):
So there's a light pole here, and the victim was
on the pavement. He had blood on his chest and
around his mouth. He had no pulse and wasn't breathing.
I didn't expose the wound right away. He was in
his chest, I saw the blood by his mouth, and
I just went straight into CPR. And by then other
people are showing up because we are only about, you know,
a hundred yards from the police station, and everything kind
(12:55):
of happens in a blur at that point. If I
knew that night what we new thirty six hours later,
I would have probably positioned my car better because I
basically went right in the line of fire. They could
have shot me and still gotten away. Again, at this point,
we didn't know it was riful. That realization only came
(13:17):
when I went in with one of the homicide detectives
to the Shoppers food warehouse and we reviewed their security footage.
There's no audio on this surveillance, so we're just watching
the quiet play of it. This is Patrick McNerney again,
(13:38):
the Montgomery County homicide detective in charge of the crime scene.
McNerney watched the victims last moments caught by the security
camera and reviewing of the tape was he pulled into
the parking lot in his truck, parked in a parking
space probably twenty spaces away from the store, gets out, walks,
he takes five or six steps, and then he goes
(13:59):
down down, and we see, you know, there's nobody standing
near him. All right, So now we have to train
our thinking. It's not a walk up and shoot. We're
looking at a long range shot. Let's see if we
can find a projectile, which is truly the needle in
the haystack. At this point, with all the residual trash,
loose pebbles, stuff like that in the parking lot. Now
(14:21):
we're even more concerned about cars riding through stuff getting
caught into the treads because we don't want to miss anything.
Fire rescue had already come in and determine that this
person was deceased. On the scene. A lot of people
didn't see anything, but two or three people who were
right there, right kind of close to where this person
(14:42):
was shot. They were just walking and they heard the
cannon and they saw this guy drop. They just went
to hiding their cars. They had no idea what was
going on. They quickly detected who was a shooting, saw
this guy get down, and now they're scared for their life.
My job is to stop time as much as possible.
Let's go back, you know, step by step on what happened.
(15:06):
Where did this guy come from? Did somebody follow him
in here? Was he having any issues with anybody? Did
anybody here any arguing, car horns beeping? Any reason why
this event would have taken place. We found out that
James Martin worked in downtown Silver Spring. Use enough guy
people at work like them. He was very quiet. One
(15:28):
son he didn't live too far from where the store was.
I believe it was his first time going to that
store and he was just going to pick up some
stuff for dinner on his way home. Jim was a
really hard worker. He worked all through high school at
a general store, and everyone loved him. He always believed
(15:50):
in fairness. He always believed in things being done kindly
and justly. That's the kind of person he was. He
was wonderful brother. He was just a terrific uncle to
my kids. Old of Martin Cooksley is James Martin's sister.
She calls him Jim. The two of them grew up
(16:12):
together in Missouri. They stayed close even after Jim moved
to the DC area for work. It was late on
October two when she got word of Jim's death. I
was almost asleep that night. I had gone to bed
and I was alone, and I had just begun to
drift off when the phone rang. It was my sister
(16:35):
in law and she said that, um, Jim is dead.
I said, did you have a heart attack, you know,
because our dad had passed away the heart attack, And
she said, no, he's been shot. And nobody says they
saw anything, and nobody knows anything. After she told me
that and we hung up, I thought maybe I was
(16:57):
still sleeping. I thought I was dreaming, and I spent
that entire night thinking that I must be dreaming. Even
for the next few days, I kind of felt like
it was a nightmare, and I kept wishing I would
wake up. It just seemed too unbelievable. In a way,
(17:20):
it kind of kept bit as a buffer, because I
didn't just go completely bonkers the way I probably would
have if I hadn't thought it was a dream. I
kept thinking, I'm going to wake up. But I also
had this weird, strange feeling that something had gone horribly
wrong in the universe because I I had just always
(17:40):
thoughted Jim and I would be old people together. It
just seemed so unbelievable and so wrong, and it just
felt like something had hit the world and knocked it
out of line or something. The death of Jane Martin
(18:00):
seemed utterly random, and investigators weren't sure what to make
of it until they learned there had been another similar
shooting less than an hour earlier at a Michael's craft
store just miles up the road. About forty five minutes
(18:27):
prior to James Martin being shot. If you go north
on Georgia Avenue, probably two or three miles, you get
into an area it's called Aspen Hill, about half a
block off Connecticut Avenue. There's a Michael's Craft store. Police. Hi,
(18:47):
this is deby case Demander at the Michael's and Aston Hill.
We just had somebody fire sort of projectile through the
window of the store. Detective Patrick McNerney also took charge
of a scene. It was the people in the store
who actually made the call because they can tell with
a bullet that came through the window. You're sitting there
(19:09):
and you're just proceeding normally, an all of a sudden, bam,
Oh there was a hole to our plate glass window.
There was a loud popping sound. Whatever came through the
window also went through a light here, and uh fortunately
no one was struck. The shot rode high and when
it entered the glass in front of the Michael's, it
hit one of those lane markers, you know, versus lane
(19:31):
one to three. Hit one of those and kind of
disintegrated and later was found in a pocket on a
shelf behind that. It was one shot so far, yes, okay,
(19:51):
so this is the Michael's Arts and Craft Store, and
this is the location of the first rifle shot. They
take off, they drive away, they head up the road
two miles at the most, and that's when this story
takes the horrible and gruesome turn. I've got to tell you,
this is the most average strip mall in America, and
(20:14):
I visited a thousand of them growing up in Maryland.
That's what this place looks like. Non descript suburbia, that's
what this is. So this is the kind of community
where that would have been big news. The fact that
someone fired a rifle shot through the window of a Michael's.
That would have been huge news in one of the
(20:36):
news rooms in either Baltimore or Washington would have been
asking questions, is there a connection? Come on, they're less
than two miles apart. You've got a fatality. There's got
to be a connection. You could really almost assume that
they're connected, and ultimately they were. McNerney went back to
(20:57):
take another look at the Shoppers food warehouse. Voting from earlier,
we all kind of agreed, you know, this looks like
a sniper a long shot. Nobody saw him, you heard it,
But initially there's no reason why somebody want to shoot
this guy or want to shoot the other people we
talked to in the parking lot who were kind of
right there in that scope range. You know, why didn't
(21:20):
he shoot them? And why him and not to her?
And who knows? Our forensic team was there. I think
our division captain had even come by. He usually came
out and something was really kind of odd. My name
is Bernard James Forsyth. At the time of this event,
I was the director of the Major Crimes Division of
(21:43):
the Montgomery County Police Department, and my rank was captain. Now,
this is six o'clock in the afternoon, one of the
busiest intersections of Montgomery County. It's somewhat unusual that you
would have a shooting and nobody has seen anything. I
called Chief Moose, which is part of our protocol, to
let them know that we had had a shooting down there.
(22:06):
Charles Moose was the chief of Police for Montgomery County.
The two shootings so far fell under his jurisdiction. He
asked me, he said, well, what do you think it is?
I said, Chief, At this point, we just don't really know.
We just didn't know, you know, what had occurred. Probably
the worst case scenario was a random shooting with no motive.
(22:28):
It's very hard to connect randomness, that's what it amounts to.
And with that, the bizarre events of Wednesday, October two
came to an end. But this was just the beginning.
The following day, on October three, I think it's fair
(22:51):
to say all hell broke loose mc mc County Police
and Amillias. Okay, with somebody's been shot down on our
back lot? Are they somebody's down on the ground. Okay,
did you see the person getting you know, I was
at the top of the hill and somebody yelled up
a colony, amblance Okay? Where they just shot? You know? Yeah,
(23:14):
we just heard the shot. I just briefed the chief
as to what we were doing with regard to the
shooting at the Shoppers food warehouse the night before, when
these incidents started percolating into the office. Yeah, I'm getting
down there right now. Okay, he's down on the ground.
(23:34):
We got a crowd of people down here. Okay, can
you ask if anybody saw gun shot? One of them
had to do with a lawn mower, and they were
telling me that somebody was injured, but they weren't sure
they thought maybe a blade had flown off lawnmower blew
up on this guy. He's bleeding real bad, okay, And
(23:56):
is he breathing, yeah, a barely. He's spitting up blood
and everything. It was a very tense time and a
very life changing experience to feel that you walked away
from something that possibly you shouldn't have. My name is
Gary Lee Huss, fifty seven years old. I live in Damascus, Maryland.
(24:19):
Huss was working at the Fitzgerald Automole in Rockville, Maryland.
The first victim of October three was shot just outside
this dealership. It's approximately, I want to say, right around
seven thirty a normal day, driving to work, and I
saw my friends Sonny Buchanan. He maintained the landscaping for
(24:42):
our dealership group at that location. And I saw Sonny
Buchanan with the lawnmower right on the curb. So I
stopped my car and we spoke for a few minutes,
just in general conversation. And I've proceeded back to my car,
(25:03):
shut the door and started to pull away. Is when
I heard a loud bang, and I just thought it
was a backfire from a car. I never even imagined
that it could be anything else. Went ahead and parked
my car and went in and started my day. As
(25:24):
I sat at my desk, my staff members arrived into
my office about a man bleeding on the back lot
and finally went out to view because it was quite
a crowd gathering from all of our employees at the dealership.
At that point, I was corralling my people back, not
(25:47):
ever noticing it was my friend. I didn't even relate
the two together, as I just saw him fifteen minutes
prior standing upright speaking with me. We eventually figured it
was Sonny laying there on the ground and he was
(26:07):
bleeding pretty profusely. He actually walked about fifty yards before
he collapsed, quite a big distance uphill for the damage
that was done to him that day, I assumed that
the lawnmower disengaged and paled him in some way. I
went down to inspect the lawnmower to find the bag
(26:27):
completely intact, the mower deck completely intact, and then flipping
the mower over, the blades were all intact, so that
ruled out that there was any cause from the lawnmower.
The paramedics confirmed that it was a gunshot wound. We
watched the paramedics try and revive Sonny and pretty much
(26:48):
bled out on location. That day, we had somebody in
the police department that was an associate and friend of
ours telling us a little bit of information that there's
a gunman out there, and it seemed like every hour
there was another shooting. I assumed that it was a
single gunman, but there was no method to the madness
(27:12):
of what he was doing and who he was targeting.
At that point. Was I the target and he missed?
And now I'm going to be the one that he's
looking at. It changed my life that day. The two
places you feel the safest or at home and at work,
and one of those areas had been taken from me.
(27:32):
James Sonny Buchanan, the first victim on October three, died
of his wound. Montgomery County police were as baffled by
this shooting as they had been the evening before, but
they wouldn't have much time to think about it. Half
an hour later, another victim would be shot. Yeah at
(28:10):
age twelve am. Only thirty two minutes after Sunny Buchanan
was shot, police learned of another shooting. I don't bother me,
I don't know that was Caroline Namro from the very
(28:33):
beginning of the episode. After pulling into a gas station,
she heard a loud gunshot. Prim Kumar Wallacker then collapsed
in front of her. She immediately called As I was
speaking to the nine one one people, I saw this
police car and I waved over to him and I
(28:54):
went over to the taxi drive at Mr Wallaker. He
was taking a few breaths. He was not verbal at
that point. The last thing he said was when he
looked at the window and he said, call an ambulance,
and then he collapsed. I felt such panic as a
physician because I felt helpless. I had no equipment, no
monitor to put the person on, no oxygen, no suction.
(29:16):
I'm used to having everything to hand. What focused me
was as I spoke to myself in my head, you
know you can do this. You know CPR, you're a doctor.
I dropped to the floor and tried to check for
a pulse, and then the policeman appeared and I said,
I'll I'll do the mouth to mouth part. You did
the chest compressions. I started CPR and the policeman did
(29:38):
assist me. I remember my hands were shaking as I
was doing this. There was a lot of blood, and
I realized that he was stopping breathing. I couldn't feel
a good pulse. I think I felt for a second
or two, very very thready, thin, uneven pulse, and then
it went away. Unfortunately, he vomited. By that point two
(30:01):
our ambulance disappeared and they parted on Connecticut Avenue, and
I remember saying to the policeman, why are they not coming?
I need to suction the airway. You can't do mouth
to mouth if the airways block. So I didn't understand
why were they not getting out. Then the ambulance people
(30:24):
did come out of the trucks, and they did come
towards us. It was all a matter of minutes. Of course,
at the time it felt extremely prolonged for everybody to arrive,
but I don't think it was. Then the ambulance people
tried to intubate at the scene and put Mr Wilker
on a gurney, and then I just remember a lot
of police presence, and everything happened very first after that,
(30:47):
and my husband had arrived and he'd been allowed to
take my son, my two year old away, so I
was very disturbed. The whole day. It's horrific that somebody
could murder somebody, you know, it's it's just awful, what
a waste. And I was there, you know, you started
a question, well why was it him and not me?
Normally a part of the car and I immediately get
(31:10):
out of the car. But that day I paused for
a few seconds because he was filling his gas tank
from where the license plate was, and that had slowed
me down. And that's why I didn't get out of
the car. So that few seconds of delay made a
difference to my life. I was the slightly blurrier object
behind my windshield. The clearer shot was to the guy
(31:32):
that was out of the car. But if I hadn't
been nosy and looked over at him, why was he
doing filling the car? That's really weird. Why is his
gas tank there? I would have got out, you know,
maybe it would have been a better shot to me.
So there. But you know, for the grace of God,
go I. That's a very shocking thought to be faced
with your own mortality. Montgomery County police were starting to
(32:04):
realize they had something big on their hands at this
gas station where prim Kamar Wallaker was shot. Law enforcement
held the first of many press conferences. We are presently
making all of the notifications to the immediate family members.
Our investigators are making that personal contact to all of
(32:24):
those individuals. This is Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose.
Since these shootings took place in his jurisdiction, Chief Moose
was in charge of the investigation. We have a number
of different resources that have been deployed. Clearly, we have
a number of police officers on the street in uniform,
(32:44):
in plain clothes. They are numerous traffic stops, numerous arrests
occurring throughout the county. We're also putting together the last
technical pieces of the hotline. We anticipate in the next
couple of hours coming back to you with that number.
Would ask you, as the media to please be very
diligent in helping us get that number out, and I
(33:06):
would anticipate at that same time that we will connect
that high line to a reward. The FBI, a t
f U, S Marshals, and the Secret Service are all
involved in this investigation, bringing resources to the table, bringing investigators,
bring experience to this situation that is very bizarre to
(33:26):
all of us. The fear of these attacks, the fear
spawned by these attacks really rippled across the Capital region
and up and down the East Coast, whether you were
an ordinary office worker, a school child, or a law
enforcement official. This is journalist and historian Garrett graft. In
(33:50):
some ways, the fear was truly crippling at the time
because what you had was, you know, we had been
told for a year, since nine eleven, that more attacks
were coming. We didn't know when, we didn't know what
form they were going to take, and we didn't know
how long the attacks would go on. Federal law enforcement
(34:11):
and the intelligence agencies had been already operating at a
crushing tempo in the wake of nine eleven, and then
along comes the DC sniper and all of the country's
worst fears are realized. The idea that these were ongoing
attacks with very little information, carried out for no discernible purpose.
(34:34):
This was, in some ways the worst case scenario for
what we had all feared was coming after nine eleven,
As the sniper attacks continued and spread. This was something
that just altered the fabric of life in the Capital.
It was scary to be outside, It was scary to
(34:57):
be on your daily commute. It was scary to go
to the grocery store or fill up your car with gas.
And then as the DC sniper case unfolded, that terror
only grew. Even at my station in Baltimore. The paranoia
and confusion was everywhere. No one knew when or where
the snipers which dried next. It was a terrible feeling,
(35:20):
one that's stuck with us for weeks, and it's a
feeling I'll never forget. Just when you thought it might
be over, news would come in about another shooting after
law enforcement held their first press conference that day on
October three, the attacks continued. Just twenty five minutes after
prim Kumar Wallaker was killed at a mobile gas station,
(35:42):
another unsuspecting victim was shot only two miles away. We
do see that there is a bullet hole just above
the bench on the large window there. The woman, as
we understand, was shot in the face, apparently as she
was just sitting there. There is a ruthless person on
the loose. What I nerves this community the most is
(36:05):
the randomness of the murders. Ordinary people doing ordinary things.
All that the victims appeared to have had in common.
Each was shot to death by a single bullet. Be
careful these guys are using weapons that are gonna go
right straight through our bulletproof vest. The massive man odd continues,
but police admit they don't know who are, what they're
dealing with, or what their motive might be. From My
(36:29):
Heart Radio and tender Foot TV, this is Monster DC
Sniper this season on Monster d C Sniper. Police have
had little to go on, only one witness's description of
(36:50):
two people in a white truck speeding away from one murder. Say,
and he described the vehicle, and he said the guy
was leaning out like on the driver's side mirror. You know,
that was the first lead where someone had actually seen somebody.
More about that calling card. It was left at the
scene of the most recent shooting. It was a card
from a fortune telling deck that's known as the death card,
(37:13):
with a note written on it, Dear policeman, I am God.
But they find out soon that the information they got
was bad. FBI in Washington, d C did a more
thorough search and that's when we got a hit on
a fingerprint. We just heard it on the local a
M radio station. The snipers are in the rest arean Myers, Zoe.
(37:33):
Send everybody you got if you understood the case, It
was basically just two outcomes, death, our life. That was it.
His sentencing is not constitutionally acceptable. He has to be
sentenced in a way that gives a jury the option
to go lower than that. He was a psychopathic, cold
blooded killer that can never walk the street again. I
(37:56):
do believe he was brainwashed, for lack of better term,
I get the feeling he agrees he has to pay
a price, but I don't know if he thinks he's
already paid it or not. I don't know the answer
to that, but I'd like to ask him. Monster DC
(38:17):
Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris
and produced by iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick
and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of I
Heart Radio, alongside producers Trevor Young, Ben Kiebrick, and Josh
Than Payne. Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on
behalf of Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Steadman and Christina Dana.
(38:42):
Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you
haven't already, be sure to check out the first two seasons,
Atlanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have
questions or comments, email us at monster at i heeart
media dot com, or you can call us at eight
three three two eight five six six six seven. Thanks
(39:05):
for listening, H
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of I Heart
Radio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in
this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or
individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those
of I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. It was quite a warm morning. I
(00:26):
drove my son to school with some other children. Dropped
them off around eight o'clock and my two year old
was still in the car, so he was in a
car see. We were listening to children's music in the
car on the radio. I went to the gas station
(00:46):
and I stopped to pump gas. My name's dot Caroline Namro.
I'm a pediatrician. I live in Silver Spring in Maryland.
It was a lovely day. It was very warm, so
I opened the windows. So as I rolled the windows
down a bit, I turned and I looked at the
right and there was a taxi and there was a
(01:07):
gentleman who was filling his car with gas. But I
thought it was unusual because he was filling the tank
from underneath the license plate, which I had never seen before.
I looked at him for a few seconds and he
looked up at me and we made eye contact. I
had just in a smile. I reached to get my
(01:27):
purse to take out my credit card and I heard
a bang, and immediately in my head I thought that
was a gunshot. But at the same time I thought, no,
why would there be a gunshot. It must be some
sort of electrical problem, maybe with the car. And he
was doing his thing weird and he shouldn't have been
(01:47):
filling it from under the license plate, how strange. I
looked up and he was walking towards my car. It
was just a few paces and he looked in the
passengers side and he said, cool, an ambulance and he
collapsed and I was shaking, so immediately grabbed my phone,
(02:10):
got out of the car, un called nine one one,
and I was totally in shock. By an ambulance. Don't
I don't know. I don't think America has ever gone
(02:38):
back to the way that it was before eleven and
the anthrax attacks and the DC sniper. My name is
Garrett Graff, and I'm a journalist and historian. It's really
amazing looking back to the nineties today, really just how
much simpler the issues on the table were. Government's utilities
(02:59):
and companies all over the world are checking their computer
systems to prevent a Why two came out down Much
of the country was really consumed by the impeachment of
President Clinton. In actually, President Clinton was criticized for trying
to distract from his impeachment troubles by attacking the training
(03:21):
camps of al Quaeda. These were threats that the US
was not focused that much on. As a country, the government,
the National security apparatus was beginning to pay more attention
to it. We must remember it is the obligation of
America to help make the world more peaceful. As far
as I'm concerned, it's an obligation of a commander in
chief as well to understand, in order to keep the peace,
(03:43):
we must rebuild the military power of the United States
of America. The two thousand election at the time seemed
incredibly vicious and partisan, and ultimately it was a vote
of the Supreme Court that declared effectively George W. Bush
the winner of Florida and thus the winner of the presidency.
(04:07):
In many ways, Americans were beginning to lose trust in
institutions as they were hit by various scandals, and then,
of course we didn't know either what came next. Apparently
a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center
here in New York City. It happened just a few
moments ago. Apparently we have very little information available. There
(04:31):
weren't very many people who defaulted that morning to thinking
it was terrorism at first. And I think one of
the most remarkable things that you see on the morning
of nine eleven is just how innocent America truly was.
President Bush continued with his morning reading to school children.
Congress prepared to open for business that day after the
(04:53):
first attacks, and even in New York City, you know,
you saw people just continue their commute, thinking that they
were going on to a relatively normal day at work.
I heard of thorn, walked up and there was a big,
small of fire. You could hear the fire engines and
the emergency crews behind me. I've never seen any fire
like that in the air, and even that the building
(05:15):
were flying down and pen smokes. I can't even describe it.
As the morning of nine eleven unfolded. It quickly became
clear that this was a terrorist attack on not just
New York City but the wider country. This airplane that
ran into the Pentagon. It happened within the hour. The
plane sliced through the building. It came in and hit
(05:37):
actually at about the first and second floors. We really
didn't know how wide the attack actually would go, you know.
Skyscrapers were evacuated in Boston, in Chicago and Los Angeles
and other cities across the country as people feared that
there could be more planes still in the sky. The
fear was really that there would be a second wave
(06:00):
of attacks. That sense of fear was certainly driven by
the accelerating media culture as well. There are thousands of
these terrorists in more than sixty countries. They are recruited
from their own nations and neighborhoods and brought to camps
in places like Afghanistan where they are trained in the
tactics of terra. Unrelenting coverage contributed to this pervasive fear
(06:28):
about whether we were safe living our daily lives. There
was the expectation really that d C would be attacked
again by Al Qaeda, by a car bomb, by more planes.
There was a real fear about whether this was the
day that the next shoe dropped. In the wake of
(06:55):
nine eleven, all of us living in the DC area
were terrified and we were all just waiting for the
next horrific act of terror. I'm Tony Harris. In the
fall of two thousand two, I was working as a
news anchor for Fox forty five in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland.
On the morning of October three, reports began flooding our
(07:17):
newsroom about random shootings in Montgomery County, Maryland. We do
have five fatal shootings for no apparent reason, no robbery
motive or anything like that. People who are just sort
of out and about doing their normal tasks. You know,
you think you're out here safe, and here's this woman
coming out of this apparently the post office and was
just shot. The people of Maryland looked through their televisions
(07:42):
to journalists like me for answers, but we didn't have them.
It is quite a mystery. The police say they have
never had a crime quite like this in Montgomery County before.
They are huddling together. They are trying now to figure
out what's going on. And that terrible day was only
the beginning. What emerged over the following weeks was one
(08:04):
of the most disturbing crime sprees in the history of
our country. But now, eighteen years later, the Supreme Court
will rule on the sniper's case, and the convicted killer
could one day walk free. On this season of Monster,
We're going to investigate the full DC sniper story because
(08:25):
I want to find the answers to questions that have
haunted me all these years. What was the killer's motive?
And should they ever be given a second chance to
fully understand? We have to go back to October two
two two, an average Wednesday and suburban Maryland. October two
(08:53):
two two was an unusually warm day for d C.
I was working in the evening shift. You handle the
routine calls. There are several of us working, everybody working
in a cubicle, nothing special really going on. It was
in the early evening. The phone rang, and we don't
have a secretary at night, So whoever picks up the phone,
(09:15):
whatever is on the other end of you get it.
This is Patrick McNerney, a former HAMAS and I detective
with Montgomery County Police in Maryland, was told by our
communications center there had been a shooting murder, or as
we call it, an in the Wheaton Glenmont district in
the Shopper sued Warehouse parking lot. So we're running lights
(09:37):
and siren over to the scene and took about fifteen
minutes to get there. We're presented with a very large
crowd in front of the shopper Sued warehouse. McNerney took
charge of the crime scene. He locked the area down,
began interviewing witnesses and tried to figure out what just happened.
(09:59):
I just could have in a robbery or somebody walked
up to this guy and shot him. And then we
started to deal with why did it sound like a
cannon going off? That was a report from the first
officer who was actually sitting right across the street when
the shooting took place. The sound I heard wasn't really
(10:23):
to me immediately recognized he has a gunshot. It was
just this enormously loud percussion. I'm Alan Felson Um. At
the time, I was working for the Mogomery County Police Department.
I was a bicycle patrol officers signed to the Wheaton District.
The police station is directly across the street from the
Shopper's Food warehouse where we're standing today, so that's where
(10:44):
I was then. Felson was the first officer on the scene.
He heard the shot and responded immediately, but it was
already too late. The killer got away. How could a
shooter pull this off in broad daylight, right next to
a police station. I asked Felson to meet me here
and explain what he saw that day. So you're sitting
(11:08):
there in your cruiser at that point, described what happens
and what you hear. There's a business right next door
here called Country Board that's been here forever. They use
forklifts and palettes. They sell mulch and garden supplies, and
I mean I almost thought that one of their eighteen
wheelers had been knocked over something. It was this enormously
loud percussion, so I did not immediately go, wow, that
(11:30):
sounds like a rifle. It was just this really loud
thunderclap kind of sound. So obviously it drew everyone's attention
in the police station. People heard it inside because it's
that's only, you know, a hundred hundred fifty yards away.
They came to the door and looked out. It was
that lamp. Yes, because I was directly across from the
(11:52):
shoppers foot warehouse, I think I already saw that the
people in front of the store. We're looking straight at
the parking lot from the store. I pulled out, flipped
on the emergency lights on the car. It was probably
less than a minute that it took me, you know,
to drive there. But as soon as I pull in,
I can see if there's a man laying face down
(12:12):
in the parking lot. So I pulled in and I
just yelled at the people are staying there? Did anyone
see anything? And I just got kind of no reaction.
Everyone was still just staring, I think. I then yelled
at them, if you heard the shots, stay here, or
if you saw anything, stay here, and then drove my
car up the aisle closer to where the victim was.
(12:33):
So there's a light pole here, and the victim was
on the pavement. He had blood on his chest and
around his mouth. He had no pulse and wasn't breathing.
I didn't expose the wound right away. He was in
his chest, I saw the blood by his mouth, and
I just went straight into CPR. And by then other
people are showing up because we are only about, you know,
a hundred yards from the police station, and everything kind
(12:55):
of happens in a blur at that point. If I
knew that night what we new thirty six hours later,
I would have probably positioned my car better because I
basically went right in the line of fire. They could
have shot me and still gotten away. Again, at this point,
we didn't know it was riful. That realization only came
(13:17):
when I went in with one of the homicide detectives
to the Shoppers food warehouse and we reviewed their security footage.
There's no audio on this surveillance, so we're just watching
the quiet play of it. This is Patrick McNerney again,
(13:38):
the Montgomery County homicide detective in charge of the crime scene.
McNerney watched the victims last moments caught by the security
camera and reviewing of the tape was he pulled into
the parking lot in his truck, parked in a parking
space probably twenty spaces away from the store, gets out, walks,
he takes five or six steps, and then he goes
(13:59):
down down, and we see, you know, there's nobody standing
near him. All right, So now we have to train
our thinking. It's not a walk up and shoot. We're
looking at a long range shot. Let's see if we
can find a projectile, which is truly the needle in
the haystack. At this point, with all the residual trash,
loose pebbles, stuff like that in the parking lot. Now
(14:21):
we're even more concerned about cars riding through stuff getting
caught into the treads because we don't want to miss anything.
Fire rescue had already come in and determine that this
person was deceased. On the scene. A lot of people
didn't see anything, but two or three people who were
right there, right kind of close to where this person
(14:42):
was shot. They were just walking and they heard the
cannon and they saw this guy drop. They just went
to hiding their cars. They had no idea what was
going on. They quickly detected who was a shooting, saw
this guy get down, and now they're scared for their life.
My job is to stop time as much as possible.
Let's go back, you know, step by step on what happened.
(15:06):
Where did this guy come from? Did somebody follow him
in here? Was he having any issues with anybody? Did
anybody here any arguing, car horns beeping? Any reason why
this event would have taken place. We found out that
James Martin worked in downtown Silver Spring. Use enough guy
people at work like them. He was very quiet. One
(15:28):
son he didn't live too far from where the store was.
I believe it was his first time going to that
store and he was just going to pick up some
stuff for dinner on his way home. Jim was a
really hard worker. He worked all through high school at
a general store, and everyone loved him. He always believed
(15:50):
in fairness. He always believed in things being done kindly
and justly. That's the kind of person he was. He
was wonderful brother. He was just a terrific uncle to
my kids. Old of Martin Cooksley is James Martin's sister.
She calls him Jim. The two of them grew up
(16:12):
together in Missouri. They stayed close even after Jim moved
to the DC area for work. It was late on
October two when she got word of Jim's death. I
was almost asleep that night. I had gone to bed
and I was alone, and I had just begun to
drift off when the phone rang. It was my sister
(16:35):
in law and she said that, um, Jim is dead.
I said, did you have a heart attack, you know,
because our dad had passed away the heart attack, And
she said, no, he's been shot. And nobody says they
saw anything, and nobody knows anything. After she told me
that and we hung up, I thought maybe I was
(16:57):
still sleeping. I thought I was dreaming, and I spent
that entire night thinking that I must be dreaming. Even
for the next few days, I kind of felt like
it was a nightmare, and I kept wishing I would
wake up. It just seemed too unbelievable. In a way,
(17:20):
it kind of kept bit as a buffer, because I
didn't just go completely bonkers the way I probably would
have if I hadn't thought it was a dream. I
kept thinking, I'm going to wake up. But I also
had this weird, strange feeling that something had gone horribly
wrong in the universe because I I had just always
(17:40):
thoughted Jim and I would be old people together. It
just seemed so unbelievable and so wrong, and it just
felt like something had hit the world and knocked it
out of line or something. The death of Jane Martin
(18:00):
seemed utterly random, and investigators weren't sure what to make
of it until they learned there had been another similar
shooting less than an hour earlier at a Michael's craft
store just miles up the road. About forty five minutes
(18:27):
prior to James Martin being shot. If you go north
on Georgia Avenue, probably two or three miles, you get
into an area it's called Aspen Hill, about half a
block off Connecticut Avenue. There's a Michael's Craft store. Police. Hi,
(18:47):
this is deby case Demander at the Michael's and Aston Hill.
We just had somebody fire sort of projectile through the
window of the store. Detective Patrick McNerney also took charge
of a scene. It was the people in the store
who actually made the call because they can tell with
a bullet that came through the window. You're sitting there
(19:09):
and you're just proceeding normally, an all of a sudden, bam,
Oh there was a hole to our plate glass window.
There was a loud popping sound. Whatever came through the
window also went through a light here, and uh fortunately
no one was struck. The shot rode high and when
it entered the glass in front of the Michael's, it
hit one of those lane markers, you know, versus lane
(19:31):
one to three. Hit one of those and kind of
disintegrated and later was found in a pocket on a
shelf behind that. It was one shot so far, yes, okay,
(19:51):
so this is the Michael's Arts and Craft Store, and
this is the location of the first rifle shot. They
take off, they drive away, they head up the road
two miles at the most, and that's when this story
takes the horrible and gruesome turn. I've got to tell you,
this is the most average strip mall in America, and
(20:14):
I visited a thousand of them growing up in Maryland.
That's what this place looks like. Non descript suburbia, that's
what this is. So this is the kind of community
where that would have been big news. The fact that
someone fired a rifle shot through the window of a Michael's.
That would have been huge news in one of the
(20:36):
news rooms in either Baltimore or Washington would have been
asking questions, is there a connection? Come on, they're less
than two miles apart. You've got a fatality. There's got
to be a connection. You could really almost assume that
they're connected, and ultimately they were. McNerney went back to
(20:57):
take another look at the Shoppers food warehouse. Voting from earlier,
we all kind of agreed, you know, this looks like
a sniper a long shot. Nobody saw him, you heard it,
But initially there's no reason why somebody want to shoot
this guy or want to shoot the other people we
talked to in the parking lot who were kind of
right there in that scope range. You know, why didn't
(21:20):
he shoot them? And why him and not to her?
And who knows? Our forensic team was there. I think
our division captain had even come by. He usually came
out and something was really kind of odd. My name
is Bernard James Forsyth. At the time of this event,
I was the director of the Major Crimes Division of
(21:43):
the Montgomery County Police Department, and my rank was captain. Now,
this is six o'clock in the afternoon, one of the
busiest intersections of Montgomery County. It's somewhat unusual that you
would have a shooting and nobody has seen anything. I
called Chief Moose, which is part of our protocol, to
let them know that we had had a shooting down there.
(22:06):
Charles Moose was the chief of Police for Montgomery County.
The two shootings so far fell under his jurisdiction. He
asked me, he said, well, what do you think it is?
I said, Chief, At this point, we just don't really know.
We just didn't know, you know, what had occurred. Probably
the worst case scenario was a random shooting with no motive.
(22:28):
It's very hard to connect randomness, that's what it amounts to.
And with that, the bizarre events of Wednesday, October two
came to an end. But this was just the beginning.
The following day, on October three, I think it's fair
(22:51):
to say all hell broke loose mc mc County Police
and Amillias. Okay, with somebody's been shot down on our
back lot? Are they somebody's down on the ground. Okay,
did you see the person getting you know, I was
at the top of the hill and somebody yelled up
a colony, amblance Okay? Where they just shot? You know? Yeah,
(23:14):
we just heard the shot. I just briefed the chief
as to what we were doing with regard to the
shooting at the Shoppers food warehouse the night before, when
these incidents started percolating into the office. Yeah, I'm getting
down there right now. Okay, he's down on the ground.
(23:34):
We got a crowd of people down here. Okay, can
you ask if anybody saw gun shot? One of them
had to do with a lawn mower, and they were
telling me that somebody was injured, but they weren't sure
they thought maybe a blade had flown off lawnmower blew
up on this guy. He's bleeding real bad, okay, And
(23:56):
is he breathing, yeah, a barely. He's spitting up blood
and everything. It was a very tense time and a
very life changing experience to feel that you walked away
from something that possibly you shouldn't have. My name is
Gary Lee Huss, fifty seven years old. I live in Damascus, Maryland.
(24:19):
Huss was working at the Fitzgerald Automole in Rockville, Maryland.
The first victim of October three was shot just outside
this dealership. It's approximately, I want to say, right around
seven thirty a normal day, driving to work, and I
saw my friends Sonny Buchanan. He maintained the landscaping for
(24:42):
our dealership group at that location. And I saw Sonny
Buchanan with the lawnmower right on the curb. So I
stopped my car and we spoke for a few minutes,
just in general conversation. And I've proceeded back to my car,
(25:03):
shut the door and started to pull away. Is when
I heard a loud bang, and I just thought it
was a backfire from a car. I never even imagined
that it could be anything else. Went ahead and parked
my car and went in and started my day. As
(25:24):
I sat at my desk, my staff members arrived into
my office about a man bleeding on the back lot
and finally went out to view because it was quite
a crowd gathering from all of our employees at the dealership.
At that point, I was corralling my people back, not
(25:47):
ever noticing it was my friend. I didn't even relate
the two together, as I just saw him fifteen minutes
prior standing upright speaking with me. We eventually figured it
was Sonny laying there on the ground and he was
(26:07):
bleeding pretty profusely. He actually walked about fifty yards before
he collapsed, quite a big distance uphill for the damage
that was done to him that day, I assumed that
the lawnmower disengaged and paled him in some way. I
went down to inspect the lawnmower to find the bag
(26:27):
completely intact, the mower deck completely intact, and then flipping
the mower over, the blades were all intact, so that
ruled out that there was any cause from the lawnmower.
The paramedics confirmed that it was a gunshot wound. We
watched the paramedics try and revive Sonny and pretty much
(26:48):
bled out on location. That day, we had somebody in
the police department that was an associate and friend of
ours telling us a little bit of information that there's
a gunman out there, and it seemed like every hour
there was another shooting. I assumed that it was a
single gunman, but there was no method to the madness
(27:12):
of what he was doing and who he was targeting.
At that point. Was I the target and he missed?
And now I'm going to be the one that he's
looking at. It changed my life that day. The two
places you feel the safest or at home and at work,
and one of those areas had been taken from me.
(27:32):
James Sonny Buchanan, the first victim on October three, died
of his wound. Montgomery County police were as baffled by
this shooting as they had been the evening before, but
they wouldn't have much time to think about it. Half
an hour later, another victim would be shot. Yeah at
(28:10):
age twelve am. Only thirty two minutes after Sunny Buchanan
was shot, police learned of another shooting. I don't bother me,
I don't know that was Caroline Namro from the very
(28:33):
beginning of the episode. After pulling into a gas station,
she heard a loud gunshot. Prim Kumar Wallacker then collapsed
in front of her. She immediately called As I was
speaking to the nine one one people, I saw this
police car and I waved over to him and I
(28:54):
went over to the taxi drive at Mr Wallaker. He
was taking a few breaths. He was not verbal at
that point. The last thing he said was when he
looked at the window and he said, call an ambulance,
and then he collapsed. I felt such panic as a
physician because I felt helpless. I had no equipment, no
monitor to put the person on, no oxygen, no suction.
(29:16):
I'm used to having everything to hand. What focused me
was as I spoke to myself in my head, you
know you can do this. You know CPR, you're a doctor.
I dropped to the floor and tried to check for
a pulse, and then the policeman appeared and I said,
I'll I'll do the mouth to mouth part. You did
the chest compressions. I started CPR and the policeman did
(29:38):
assist me. I remember my hands were shaking as I
was doing this. There was a lot of blood, and
I realized that he was stopping breathing. I couldn't feel
a good pulse. I think I felt for a second
or two, very very thready, thin, uneven pulse, and then
it went away. Unfortunately, he vomited. By that point two
(30:01):
our ambulance disappeared and they parted on Connecticut Avenue, and
I remember saying to the policeman, why are they not coming?
I need to suction the airway. You can't do mouth
to mouth if the airways block. So I didn't understand
why were they not getting out. Then the ambulance people
(30:24):
did come out of the trucks, and they did come
towards us. It was all a matter of minutes. Of course,
at the time it felt extremely prolonged for everybody to arrive,
but I don't think it was. Then the ambulance people
tried to intubate at the scene and put Mr Wilker
on a gurney, and then I just remember a lot
of police presence, and everything happened very first after that,
(30:47):
and my husband had arrived and he'd been allowed to
take my son, my two year old away, so I
was very disturbed. The whole day. It's horrific that somebody
could murder somebody, you know, it's it's just awful, what
a waste. And I was there, you know, you started
a question, well why was it him and not me?
Normally a part of the car and I immediately get
(31:10):
out of the car. But that day I paused for
a few seconds because he was filling his gas tank
from where the license plate was, and that had slowed
me down. And that's why I didn't get out of
the car. So that few seconds of delay made a
difference to my life. I was the slightly blurrier object
behind my windshield. The clearer shot was to the guy
(31:32):
that was out of the car. But if I hadn't
been nosy and looked over at him, why was he
doing filling the car? That's really weird. Why is his
gas tank there? I would have got out, you know,
maybe it would have been a better shot to me.
So there. But you know, for the grace of God,
go I. That's a very shocking thought to be faced
with your own mortality. Montgomery County police were starting to
(32:04):
realize they had something big on their hands at this
gas station where prim Kamar Wallaker was shot. Law enforcement
held the first of many press conferences. We are presently
making all of the notifications to the immediate family members.
Our investigators are making that personal contact to all of
(32:24):
those individuals. This is Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose.
Since these shootings took place in his jurisdiction, Chief Moose
was in charge of the investigation. We have a number
of different resources that have been deployed. Clearly, we have
a number of police officers on the street in uniform,
(32:44):
in plain clothes. They are numerous traffic stops, numerous arrests
occurring throughout the county. We're also putting together the last
technical pieces of the hotline. We anticipate in the next
couple of hours coming back to you with that number.
Would ask you, as the media to please be very
diligent in helping us get that number out, and I
(33:06):
would anticipate at that same time that we will connect
that high line to a reward. The FBI, a t
f U, S Marshals, and the Secret Service are all
involved in this investigation, bringing resources to the table, bringing investigators,
bring experience to this situation that is very bizarre to
(33:26):
all of us. The fear of these attacks, the fear
spawned by these attacks really rippled across the Capital region
and up and down the East Coast, whether you were
an ordinary office worker, a school child, or a law
enforcement official. This is journalist and historian Garrett graft. In
(33:50):
some ways, the fear was truly crippling at the time
because what you had was, you know, we had been
told for a year, since nine eleven, that more attacks
were coming. We didn't know when, we didn't know what
form they were going to take, and we didn't know
how long the attacks would go on. Federal law enforcement
(34:11):
and the intelligence agencies had been already operating at a
crushing tempo in the wake of nine eleven, and then
along comes the DC sniper and all of the country's
worst fears are realized. The idea that these were ongoing
attacks with very little information, carried out for no discernible purpose.
(34:34):
This was, in some ways the worst case scenario for
what we had all feared was coming after nine eleven,
As the sniper attacks continued and spread. This was something
that just altered the fabric of life in the Capital.
It was scary to be outside, It was scary to
(34:57):
be on your daily commute. It was scary to go
to the grocery store or fill up your car with gas.
And then as the DC sniper case unfolded, that terror
only grew. Even at my station in Baltimore. The paranoia
and confusion was everywhere. No one knew when or where
the snipers which dried next. It was a terrible feeling,
(35:20):
one that's stuck with us for weeks, and it's a
feeling I'll never forget. Just when you thought it might
be over, news would come in about another shooting after
law enforcement held their first press conference that day on
October three, the attacks continued. Just twenty five minutes after
prim Kumar Wallaker was killed at a mobile gas station,
(35:42):
another unsuspecting victim was shot only two miles away. We
do see that there is a bullet hole just above
the bench on the large window there. The woman, as
we understand, was shot in the face, apparently as she
was just sitting there. There is a ruthless person on
the loose. What I nerves this community the most is
(36:05):
the randomness of the murders. Ordinary people doing ordinary things.
All that the victims appeared to have had in common.
Each was shot to death by a single bullet. Be
careful these guys are using weapons that are gonna go
right straight through our bulletproof vest. The massive man odd continues,
but police admit they don't know who are, what they're
dealing with, or what their motive might be. From My
(36:29):
Heart Radio and tender Foot TV, this is Monster DC
Sniper this season on Monster d C Sniper. Police have
had little to go on, only one witness's description of
(36:50):
two people in a white truck speeding away from one murder. Say,
and he described the vehicle, and he said the guy
was leaning out like on the driver's side mirror. You know,
that was the first lead where someone had actually seen somebody.
More about that calling card. It was left at the
scene of the most recent shooting. It was a card
from a fortune telling deck that's known as the death card,
(37:13):
with a note written on it, Dear policeman, I am God.
But they find out soon that the information they got
was bad. FBI in Washington, d C did a more
thorough search and that's when we got a hit on
a fingerprint. We just heard it on the local a
M radio station. The snipers are in the rest arean Myers, Zoe.
(37:33):
Send everybody you got if you understood the case, It
was basically just two outcomes, death, our life. That was it.
His sentencing is not constitutionally acceptable. He has to be
sentenced in a way that gives a jury the option
to go lower than that. He was a psychopathic, cold
blooded killer that can never walk the street again. I
(37:56):
do believe he was brainwashed, for lack of better term,
I get the feeling he agrees he has to pay
a price, but I don't know if he thinks he's
already paid it or not. I don't know the answer
to that, but I'd like to ask him. Monster DC
(38:17):
Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris
and produced by iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick
and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of I
Heart Radio, alongside producers Trevor Young, Ben Kiebrick, and Josh
Than Payne. Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on
behalf of Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Steadman and Christina Dana.
(38:42):
Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you
haven't already, be sure to check out the first two seasons,
Atlanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have
questions or comments, email us at monster at i heeart
media dot com, or you can call us at eight
three three two eight five six six six seven. Thanks
(39:05):
for listening, H
Popular Podcasts
Good Game with Sarah Spain
Good Game is your one-stop shop for the biggest stories in women’s sports. Every day, host Sarah Spain gives you the stories, stakes, stars and stats to keep up with your favorite women’s teams, leagues and athletes. Through thoughtful insight, witty banter, and an all around good time, Sarah and friends break down the latest news, talk about the games you can’t miss, and debate the issues of the day. Don’t miss interviews with the people of the moment, whether they be athletes, coaches, reporters, or celebrity fans.
Dateline NBC
Current and classic episodes, featuring compelling true-crime mysteries, powerful documentaries and in-depth investigations.
Crime Junkie
If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people.