January 2, 2020 • 39 mins
On October 2nd, 2002, the first shots are fired. And no one sees anything.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of iHeartRadio 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 iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
It was quite a warm morning.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
I drove my son to school with some other children.
I dropped them off around eight o'clock and my two
year old was still in the car, so he was in.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
A car seat. We were listening to children's music in
the car on the radio.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I went to the gas station and I stopped to
pump gas. My name's dot Caroline Namo. I'm a pediatrician.
I live in Silver Spring and 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 to the right, and.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
There was a taxi and there was a gentleman who
was filling his car with gas.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
But I thought it was unusual because he was filling
the tank from underneath the license plate.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Which I had never seen before.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
I looked at him for a few seconds and he
looked up at me and we made eye contacts.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I smile.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I reached to get my purse to take out my
credit card, and I heard a bang, and immediately in
my head I thought there 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 something weird
(01:46):
and he shouldn't have been filling it from under the
license plate, how strange.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I looked up and he was walking towards my car.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It was just a few paces and he looked in
the passenger side and he said, call an ambulance, and
he collapsed and I was shaking, so I immediately grabbed
my phone, got out of the car and call nine
one one, and I was totally in shock.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
By an ambula.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (02:36):
I don't think America has ever gone back to the
way that it was before nine to eleven in 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 nineteen nineties today, really just how much
simpler the issues on the table were.
Speaker 7 (02:57):
Governments, utilities, and companies all over the world are checking
their computer systems to prevent a Why two came.
Speaker 6 (03:04):
Outdown Much of the country was really consumed by the
impeachment of President Clinton in nineteen ninety eight. Actually, President
Clinton was criticized for trying to distract from his impeachment
troubles by attacking the training camps of al Qaeda. These
were threats that the US was not focused that much on.
(03:27):
As a country, the government, the National security apparatus was
beginning to pay more attention to it.
Speaker 8 (03:32):
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, we must
rebuild the military power of the United States of America.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
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. In
many ways, Americans were beginning to lose trust in institutions
(04:12):
as they were hit by various scandals and then of course,
we didn't know either what came next.
Speaker 9 (04:20):
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.
Speaker 6 (04:31):
There 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 to 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
(04:53):
after the first attacks, and even in New York City,
you know, you saw people just continue their commune, thinking
that they were going on to a relatively normal day
at work.
Speaker 10 (05:05):
I heard of throwing worked up and there was a
big qualifire. You could hear the fire engines and the.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Emergency crews behind me.
Speaker 11 (05:10):
I've never seen.
Speaker 7 (05:11):
Any fire light in the air, and pieces of the
building were flying down in tense smoke.
Speaker 10 (05:17):
It's horrible. I can't even describe it.
Speaker 6 (05:20):
As the morning of nine to eleven unfolded, it quickly
became clear that this was a terrorist attack on not
just New York City, but the wider country.
Speaker 12 (05:29):
This airplane that ran into the Pentagon.
Speaker 13 (05:32):
It happened within the hour.
Speaker 12 (05:33):
The plane sliced through the building, it.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
Came in and hit actually at about the first and
second floors.
Speaker 6 (05:39):
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 of attacks. That sense of fear was certainly driven
(06:05):
by the accelerating media culture as well.
Speaker 14 (06:08):
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 terror.
Speaker 6 (06:22):
Unrelenting coverage contributed to this pervasive fear about whether we
were safe living our daily lives. There was the expectation
really that DC would be attacked again by Al Qaeda,
by a car bomb, by more planes. There was a
(06:44):
real fear about whether this was the day that the
next shoe dropped.
Speaker 13 (06:55):
In the wake of nine to 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 and two,
I was working as a news anchor for Fox forty
five in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. On the morning
of October third, reports began flooding our newsroom about random
(07:19):
shootings in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Speaker 15 (07:22):
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 task.
Speaker 11 (07:31):
You know, you think you're out here safe, and here's
this woman coming out of this apparently the post office.
Speaker 16 (07:37):
And was just shot.
Speaker 13 (07:40):
The people of Maryland look through their televisions to journalists
like me for answers, but we didn't have them.
Speaker 15 (07:47):
It is quite a mystery.
Speaker 13 (07:48):
The police say they have never.
Speaker 15 (07:49):
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.
Speaker 13 (07:59):
And that terrible day was only the beginning. What emerged
over the following weeks was one 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.
(08:20):
On this season of Monster, We're going to investigate the
full DC sniper story because 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 second, two thousand and two, an
(08:41):
average Wednesday and suburban Maryland.
Speaker 17 (08:52):
October second, two thousand and two was an unusually warm
day for DC. I was working in the evening shift.
You handle the routine calls. There several of us working.
Everybody worked in a cubicle, nothing special really going on.
It was in the early evening. The phone rang, and
(09:12):
we don't have a secretary at night. So whoever picks
up the phone, whatever's on the other end of it,
you get it.
Speaker 13 (09:18):
This is Patrick McNerney, a former homicite detective with Montgomery
County Police in Maryland.
Speaker 17 (09:24):
Was told by our communications center there had been a
shooting murder, or as we call it, an one hundred
in the Wheaton Glenmont District in the Shopper Sued Warehouse
parking lot. So we're running lights and sirn over to
the scene and took about fifteen minutes to get there.
Were presented with a very large crowd in front of
(09:47):
the Shopper Sued Warehouse.
Speaker 13 (09:49):
McNerney took charge of the crime scene. He locked the
area down, began interviewing witnesses and tried to figure out
what just happened.
Speaker 17 (09:59):
This could have and a robbery or somebody walked up
to this guy and shot him. And then we still
had 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.
Speaker 10 (10:21):
The sound I heard wasn't really to immediately recognized bile
as a gunshot. It was just this enormously loud percussion.
I'm Alan Felson. At the time, I was working for
the Montgomery County Police Department. I was a bicycle patrol
officer assigned to the Wheaton District. The police station is
directly across the street from the Shopper's Food warehouse we
(10:42):
were standing today, so that's where I was then.
Speaker 13 (10:46):
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 Felsen to meet me here and explain what
he saw that day. So you're sitting there in your
(11:09):
cruiser at that point, describe what happens and what you hear.
Speaker 10 (11:14):
There's a business right next door here called Country Board
that's been here forever. They use forklifts and pallettes. 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 sounds like a rifle.
It was just this really loud thunderclap kind of sound,
(11:36):
so obviously drew everyone's attention in the police station. People
heard it inside, because that's only, you know, one hundred
hundred and fifty yards away. They came to the door and looked.
Speaker 13 (11:46):
Out it was that lamp.
Speaker 10 (11:48):
Yes, because I was directly across from the shoppishoot warehouse,
I think I already saw that. The people in front
of the store, were 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.
(12:08):
But as soon as I pulled in, I can see
that there's a man laying face down in the parking lot.
So I pulled in and I just yelled that 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 to them, if you heard
the shots, stay here, or if you saw anything, stay here,
(12:28):
and then drove my car up the aisle closer to where.
Speaker 18 (12:31):
The victim was.
Speaker 10 (12:34):
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 woond right away as 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
a you know, one hundred yards from the police station,
(12:54):
and everything kind of happens in a blur at that point,
if I knew that night what we knew 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 rifle. That
(13:16):
realization only came when I went in with one of
the homicide detectives to the Shoppers food warehouse and we
reviewed their security footage.
Speaker 17 (13:31):
There's no audio on this surveillance, so we're just watching
the quiet play of it.
Speaker 13 (13:36):
This is Patrick McNerney again, the Montgomery County homicide detective
in charge of the crime scene. McNerney watched the victim's
last moments caught by the security camera.
Speaker 17 (13:47):
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
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
(14:08):
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 we're even
more concerned about cars riding through stuff getting caught into
the treads because we don't want to miss anything. Fire
(14:30):
rescue had already come in and determined 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 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.
(14:52):
They quickly detected who was a shooting, saw this guy
get down, and now they're scared for their life. My
job is to to stop time as much as possible.
Let's go back step by step on what happened. Where
did this guy come from? Did somebody follow him in here?
Was he having any issues with anybody? Did anybody hear
(15:12):
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. Nice enough guy. People at
work liked him. He's very quiet one son. He didn't
live too far from where the store was. I believe
it was his first time going to that store and
(15:35):
he was just going to pick up some stuff for
dinner on his way home.
Speaker 16 (15:40):
Jim was a really hard worker. He worked all through
high school at a general store, and everyone loved him.
He always believed 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
(16:02):
terrific uncle to my kids.
Speaker 13 (16:05):
Ola Martin Cooksley is James Martin's sister. She calls him Jim.
The two of them grew up together in Missouri. They
stayed close even after Jim moved to the DC area
for work. It was late on October second when she
got word of Jim's death.
Speaker 16 (16:23):
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 in law and she said that Jim is dead.
I said, did you have a heart attack, you know,
because our dad had passed away with a heart attack,
(16:45):
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 still sleeping. I thought I was dreaming, and I
spent that entire night thinking that I must be dreaming.
(17:08):
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,
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
(17:30):
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 had just always thought
it 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
(17:53):
out of line or something.
Speaker 13 (17:59):
The death of Jane and Martin 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.
Speaker 17 (18:26):
About forty five minutes 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.
Speaker 7 (18:44):
Sunny Police offer sixteenth you do la course, Hi, this
is DEBI case the demander at the Michaels at Aston Hill,
which you had somebody fire some sort of projectile through
the window.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
Of the store.
Speaker 13 (18:57):
Detective Patrick McNerney also took charge of it.
Speaker 17 (19:01):
Was the people in the store who actually made the
call because they could tell it was a bullet that
came through the window. You're sitting there and you're just
proceeding normally. Then all of a sudden, bam.
Speaker 18 (19:13):
Oh, there was a hole to our plateglass window. There
was a loud popping sound. Whatever came through the window
also went through a light here, and fortunately no one
was struck.
Speaker 17 (19:24):
The shot rowed high and when it entered the glass
in front of the Michaels, it hit one of those
lane markers, you know, versus lane one, two three, hit
one of those and kind of disintegrated and later was
found in a pocket on a shelf behind that.
Speaker 18 (19:40):
It was only one shot so far.
Speaker 13 (19:42):
You So this is the Michaels 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
(20:05):
story takes the horrible and gruesome turn. I've got to
tell you, this is the most average strip mall in America,
and 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
(20:26):
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, and one of the
newsrooms in either Baltimore or Washington would have been asking questions,
is their connection? Come on, they're less than two miles apart.
You've got a fatality. There's got to be a connection.
Speaker 17 (20:51):
You could really almost assume that they're connected, and ultimately
they were.
Speaker 13 (20:56):
McNerney went back to take another look at the Shopper's
food warehousehooting from earlier.
Speaker 17 (21:02):
We all kind of agreed, you know, this looks like
a snipers 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
he shoot them? And why him and not to her?
(21:23):
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.
Speaker 19 (21:36):
My name is Bernard James Forsayth. At the time of
this event, I was the director of the Major Crimes
Division of 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
(21:58):
seen anything. I called Chief Moose, which is part of
our protocol, to let him know that we had had
a shooting down there.
Speaker 13 (22:06):
Charles Moose was the chief of Police for Montgomery County.
The two shootings so far fell under his jurisdiction.
Speaker 19 (22:13):
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. It's very hard to connect randomness,
that's what it amounts to.
Speaker 13 (22:36):
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 third.
Speaker 19 (22:51):
I think it's fair to say all hell broke loose.
Speaker 18 (22:56):
Montgomery County.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Oh, I guess we amias okay with the travel somebody's
been shot down on our back.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Lot, are they somebody is down on the ground.
Speaker 16 (23:06):
Okay?
Speaker 7 (23:07):
Did you see the person getting.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
Out up the top of the hill and somebody yelled
up the calling ambulance.
Speaker 14 (23:11):
Came where they just sat.
Speaker 18 (23:13):
You know, yeah, we just heard the shot.
Speaker 19 (23:16):
I just briefed the chief as to what we were
doing with regard to the shooting at the Shopper's food
warehouse the night before, when these incidents started percolating into
the office.
Speaker 16 (23:27):
Yeah, I'm being down right now.
Speaker 8 (23:29):
Okay, he's down on the ground.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
We got a crowd of people down here.
Speaker 9 (23:36):
Okay, can you ask of anybody's side.
Speaker 19 (23:38):
That gun shot one of them? Had to do with
a lawnmower, and they were telling me that somebody was injured,
but they weren't sure. They thought maybe a blade had
flown off.
Speaker 16 (23:48):
Well, wasn't.
Speaker 8 (23:51):
A lawnmower blew up on?
Speaker 15 (23:52):
This guy's bleeding real bad?
Speaker 7 (23:55):
Okay?
Speaker 18 (23:56):
And is he breathing? Uh?
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Yeah, barely, He's sitting up lad and everything.
Speaker 20 (24:02):
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.
Speaker 13 (24:19):
Huss was working at the Fitzgerald Automol in Rockville, Maryland.
The first victim of October third was shot just outside
this dealership.
Speaker 20 (24:28):
It's approximately, I want to say, right around seven point
thirty a normal day, driving to work, and I saw
my friend Sonny Buchanan. He maintained the landscaping for our
dealership group.
Speaker 17 (24:43):
At that location.
Speaker 20 (24:45):
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, shut the door, and started
to pull away. Is when I heard a loud bang,
(25:12):
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 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
(25:37):
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 ever noticing it was my friend.
I didn't even relate the two together, as I just
saw him fifteen minutes prior standing upright and speaking with me.
(26:02):
We eventually figured it was Sonny laying there on the
ground and he was 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 in and piled him
(26:23):
in some way. I went down to inspect the lawnmower
to find the bag 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.
(26:43):
We watched the paramedics try and revive Sonny and pretty
much 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
(27:07):
a single gunman, but there was no method to the
madness 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 are at home and at work,
(27:28):
and one of those areas had been taken from me.
Speaker 13 (27:32):
James Sunny Buchanan, the first victim on October third, 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 at a
(28:10):
twelve am, only thirty two minutes after Sunny Buchanan was shot.
Police learned of another shooting mail me that was Caroline
(28:32):
Namro from the very beginning of the episode. After pulling
into a gas station, she heard a loud gunshot prim
Kumar Wallacher then collapsed in front of her. She immediately
called nine one one.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
As I was speaking to the nine one one people,
I saw this police car.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
And I waved over to him, and I went over
to the taxi driver at mister Wallaka. 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
(29:11):
I felt helpless. I had no equipment, no monitor to
put the person on, no oxygen, no suction. 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.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
You know CPR, you're a doctor. I dropped to the floor.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
And tried to check for a pulse, and then the
policeman appeared and I said, I'll do the mathter mouth part.
You do the chest compressions. I started CPR and the
policeman did assist me. I remember my hands were shaking
as I was doing this.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
There was a lot of blood, and.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
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
ambulances appeared and they parted on Connecticut Avenue, and I
remember saying to the police, then, why are they not coming.
(30:08):
I need to suction the airway. You can't do math
and mouth if the airway's block. So I didn't understand
why were they not getting out. Then the ambulance people
did come out of the trucks, and they did come
towards us. It was all a matter of minutes. Of course,
(30:30):
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 mister Wilker
on a gurney, and then I just remember a lot
of police presence and everything happened very first after that,
and my husband had arrived and he'd been allowed to
(30:50):
take my son, my two year old away, So I was.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Very disturbed the whole day.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
It's horrific that somebody could murder somebody.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Just awful, what a waste. And I was there.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
You know, you start to question, well, why was it
him not me? Normally I part the car and I
immediately get 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.
Speaker 13 (31:21):
Of the car.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
So that few seconds of delay made a difference to
my life. I was the slightly blurrier object behind my windshield.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
The clearer shot was to the guy that was out
of the car.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
But if I hadn't been nosy and looked over at him,
Wow was he doing filling the car?
Speaker 2 (31:38):
That's really weird. Why is his gas tank there?
Speaker 3 (31:40):
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.
Speaker 13 (32:01):
Montgomery County police were starting to 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.
Speaker 5 (32:15):
We are presently making all of the notifications to the
immediate family members. Our investigators are making that personal contact
to all of those individuals.
Speaker 13 (32:26):
This is Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose. Since these
shootings took place in his jurisdiction, Chief Moose was in
charge of the investigation.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
We have a number of different resources that have been deployed. Clearly,
we have a number of police officers on the street
in uniform, in playing 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
(32:57):
the next couple 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
would anticipate at that same time that we would connect
that hotline.
Speaker 17 (33:10):
To a reward.
Speaker 5 (33:12):
The FBI, atf US Marshals, and the Secret Service all
involved in this investigation bringing resources to the table, bringing investigators,
bringing experience to this situation that is very bizarre to
all of us.
Speaker 6 (33:32):
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.
Speaker 13 (33:47):
This is journalist and historian Garrick Graff.
Speaker 6 (33:50):
In 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 and the intelligence agencies had been already operating at
(34:14):
a crushing tempo in the wake of nine to eleven,
and then along comes the DC Stiper 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. This was, in some ways the worst
(34:35):
case scenario for what we had all feared was coming
after nine to eleven, as the Stiper attacks continued and spread,
This was something that just altered the fabric of life
in the Capitol. It was scary to be outside. It
(34:55):
was scary to 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.
Speaker 13 (35:10):
Even at my station in Baltimore. The paranoia and confusion
was everywhere. No one knew when or where the snipers
would strike next. It was a terrible feeling, one that
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
(35:31):
held their first press conference that day, on October third,
the attacks continued. Just twenty five minutes after prim Kumar
Wallaker was killed at a mobile gas station, another unsuspecting
victim was shot only two miles away.
Speaker 11 (35:47):
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.
Speaker 14 (36:00):
There is a ruthless person on the loose.
Speaker 11 (36:03):
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Speaker 10 (36:09):
All that the victims appeared to have had in common
Each was shot to death by a single bullet.
Speaker 12 (36:14):
Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going
to go right straight through our bulletproof ess.
Speaker 4 (36:19):
The massive man on continues, but police admit they don't
know who are, what they're dealing with, or what their
motive might be.
Speaker 9 (36:26):
The White.
Speaker 13 (36:29):
From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster DC Sniper
this season on Monster DC Sniper.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Police have had little to go on. Only one witness's
description of two people in a white truck speeding away
from one murders e.
Speaker 10 (36:54):
And he described the vehicle and he said guy was
leaning out like on the driver's side mirror.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
That was the first lead where someone had actually seen somebody.
Speaker 13 (37:04):
More about that calling card.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
It was left at the scene of the most recent shooting.
Speaker 12 (37:08):
It was a card from a fortune telling deck that's
known as the death card, with a note written on it,
dear policeman, I am God.
Speaker 6 (37:17):
But they find out soon that the information they got
was bad.
Speaker 8 (37:21):
FBI in Washington, DC did a more thorough search.
Speaker 16 (37:24):
And that's when we got a hit on a fingerprint.
Speaker 12 (37:27):
We just heard it on the local AM radio station.
The snipers are in the rest area in Myersville, send
everybody you got.
Speaker 13 (37:35):
If you understood the case, it was basically just two outcomes,
death are life. That was it.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
His sentencing is not constitutionally acceptable.
Speaker 10 (37:44):
He has to be sentenced in a way that gives
a jury the option.
Speaker 13 (37:49):
To go lower than that.
Speaker 12 (37:51):
He was a psychopathic, cold blooded killer that can never
walk the street again.
Speaker 21 (37:56):
I 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.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by
Tony Harris and produced by iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt
Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of iHeartRadio,
alongside producers Trevor Young, Ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain. Payne
Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of
(38:37):
Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Stedman and Christina Dana. 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 iHeartMedia dot com,
(38:58):
or you can call us at one one eight three
three two eight five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of iHeartRadio 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 iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:23):
It was quite a warm morning.
Speaker 3 (00:25):
I drove my son to school with some other children.
I dropped them off around eight o'clock and my two
year old was still in the car, so he was in.
Speaker 2 (00:36):
A car seat. We were listening to children's music in
the car on the radio.
Speaker 3 (00:43):
I went to the gas station and I stopped to
pump gas. My name's dot Caroline Namo. I'm a pediatrician.
I live in Silver Spring and 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 to the right, and.
Speaker 2 (01:04):
There was a taxi and there was a gentleman who
was filling his car with gas.
Speaker 3 (01:09):
But I thought it was unusual because he was filling
the tank from underneath the license plate.
Speaker 2 (01:15):
Which I had never seen before.
Speaker 3 (01:18):
I looked at him for a few seconds and he
looked up at me and we made eye contacts.
Speaker 2 (01:23):
I smile.
Speaker 3 (01:25):
I reached to get my purse to take out my
credit card, and I heard a bang, and immediately in
my head I thought there 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 something weird
(01:46):
and he shouldn't have been filling it from under the
license plate, how strange.
Speaker 2 (01:51):
I looked up and he was walking towards my car.
Speaker 3 (01:55):
It was just a few paces and he looked in
the passenger side and he said, call an ambulance, and
he collapsed and I was shaking, so I immediately grabbed
my phone, got out of the car and call nine
one one, and I was totally in shock.
Speaker 4 (02:17):
By an ambula.
Speaker 5 (02:22):
I don't know.
Speaker 6 (02:36):
I don't think America has ever gone back to the
way that it was before nine to eleven in 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 nineteen nineties today, really just how much
simpler the issues on the table were.
Speaker 7 (02:57):
Governments, utilities, and companies all over the world are checking
their computer systems to prevent a Why two came.
Speaker 6 (03:04):
Outdown Much of the country was really consumed by the
impeachment of President Clinton in nineteen ninety eight. Actually, President
Clinton was criticized for trying to distract from his impeachment
troubles by attacking the training camps of al Qaeda. These
were threats that the US was not focused that much on.
(03:27):
As a country, the government, the National security apparatus was
beginning to pay more attention to it.
Speaker 8 (03:32):
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, we must
rebuild the military power of the United States of America.
Speaker 6 (03:49):
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. In
many ways, Americans were beginning to lose trust in institutions
(04:12):
as they were hit by various scandals and then of course,
we didn't know either what came next.
Speaker 9 (04:20):
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.
Speaker 6 (04:31):
There 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 to 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
(04:53):
after the first attacks, and even in New York City,
you know, you saw people just continue their commune, thinking
that they were going on to a relatively normal day
at work.
Speaker 10 (05:05):
I heard of throwing worked up and there was a
big qualifire. You could hear the fire engines and the.
Speaker 2 (05:09):
Emergency crews behind me.
Speaker 11 (05:10):
I've never seen.
Speaker 7 (05:11):
Any fire light in the air, and pieces of the
building were flying down in tense smoke.
Speaker 10 (05:17):
It's horrible. I can't even describe it.
Speaker 6 (05:20):
As the morning of nine to eleven unfolded, it quickly
became clear that this was a terrorist attack on not
just New York City, but the wider country.
Speaker 12 (05:29):
This airplane that ran into the Pentagon.
Speaker 13 (05:32):
It happened within the hour.
Speaker 12 (05:33):
The plane sliced through the building, it.
Speaker 4 (05:35):
Came in and hit actually at about the first and
second floors.
Speaker 6 (05:39):
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 of attacks. That sense of fear was certainly driven
(06:05):
by the accelerating media culture as well.
Speaker 14 (06:08):
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 terror.
Speaker 6 (06:22):
Unrelenting coverage contributed to this pervasive fear about whether we
were safe living our daily lives. There was the expectation
really that DC would be attacked again by Al Qaeda,
by a car bomb, by more planes. There was a
(06:44):
real fear about whether this was the day that the
next shoe dropped.
Speaker 13 (06:55):
In the wake of nine to 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 and two,
I was working as a news anchor for Fox forty
five in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. On the morning
of October third, reports began flooding our newsroom about random
(07:19):
shootings in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Speaker 15 (07:22):
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 task.
Speaker 11 (07:31):
You know, you think you're out here safe, and here's
this woman coming out of this apparently the post office.
Speaker 16 (07:37):
And was just shot.
Speaker 13 (07:40):
The people of Maryland look through their televisions to journalists
like me for answers, but we didn't have them.
Speaker 15 (07:47):
It is quite a mystery.
Speaker 13 (07:48):
The police say they have never.
Speaker 15 (07:49):
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.
Speaker 13 (07:59):
And that terrible day was only the beginning. What emerged
over the following weeks was one 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.
(08:20):
On this season of Monster, We're going to investigate the
full DC sniper story because 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 second, two thousand and two, an
(08:41):
average Wednesday and suburban Maryland.
Speaker 17 (08:52):
October second, two thousand and two was an unusually warm
day for DC. I was working in the evening shift.
You handle the routine calls. There several of us working.
Everybody worked in a cubicle, nothing special really going on.
It was in the early evening. The phone rang, and
(09:12):
we don't have a secretary at night. So whoever picks
up the phone, whatever's on the other end of it,
you get it.
Speaker 13 (09:18):
This is Patrick McNerney, a former homicite detective with Montgomery
County Police in Maryland.
Speaker 17 (09:24):
Was told by our communications center there had been a
shooting murder, or as we call it, an one hundred
in the Wheaton Glenmont District in the Shopper Sued Warehouse
parking lot. So we're running lights and sirn over to
the scene and took about fifteen minutes to get there.
Were presented with a very large crowd in front of
(09:47):
the Shopper Sued Warehouse.
Speaker 13 (09:49):
McNerney took charge of the crime scene. He locked the
area down, began interviewing witnesses and tried to figure out
what just happened.
Speaker 17 (09:59):
This could have and a robbery or somebody walked up
to this guy and shot him. And then we still
had 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.
Speaker 10 (10:21):
The sound I heard wasn't really to immediately recognized bile
as a gunshot. It was just this enormously loud percussion.
I'm Alan Felson. At the time, I was working for
the Montgomery County Police Department. I was a bicycle patrol
officer assigned to the Wheaton District. The police station is
directly across the street from the Shopper's Food warehouse we
(10:42):
were standing today, so that's where I was then.
Speaker 13 (10:46):
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 Felsen to meet me here and explain what
he saw that day. So you're sitting there in your
(11:09):
cruiser at that point, describe what happens and what you hear.
Speaker 10 (11:14):
There's a business right next door here called Country Board
that's been here forever. They use forklifts and pallettes. 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 sounds like a rifle.
It was just this really loud thunderclap kind of sound,
(11:36):
so obviously drew everyone's attention in the police station. People
heard it inside, because that's only, you know, one hundred
hundred and fifty yards away. They came to the door and looked.
Speaker 13 (11:46):
Out it was that lamp.
Speaker 10 (11:48):
Yes, because I was directly across from the shoppishoot warehouse,
I think I already saw that. The people in front
of the store, were 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.
(12:08):
But as soon as I pulled in, I can see
that there's a man laying face down in the parking lot.
So I pulled in and I just yelled that 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 to them, if you heard
the shots, stay here, or if you saw anything, stay here,
(12:28):
and then drove my car up the aisle closer to where.
Speaker 18 (12:31):
The victim was.
Speaker 10 (12:34):
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 woond right away as 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
a you know, one hundred yards from the police station,
(12:54):
and everything kind of happens in a blur at that point,
if I knew that night what we knew 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 rifle. That
(13:16):
realization only came when I went in with one of
the homicide detectives to the Shoppers food warehouse and we
reviewed their security footage.
Speaker 17 (13:31):
There's no audio on this surveillance, so we're just watching
the quiet play of it.
Speaker 13 (13:36):
This is Patrick McNerney again, the Montgomery County homicide detective
in charge of the crime scene. McNerney watched the victim's
last moments caught by the security camera.
Speaker 17 (13:47):
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
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
(14:08):
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 we're even
more concerned about cars riding through stuff getting caught into
the treads because we don't want to miss anything. Fire
(14:30):
rescue had already come in and determined 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 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.
(14:52):
They quickly detected who was a shooting, saw this guy
get down, and now they're scared for their life. My
job is to to stop time as much as possible.
Let's go back step by step on what happened. Where
did this guy come from? Did somebody follow him in here?
Was he having any issues with anybody? Did anybody hear
(15:12):
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. Nice enough guy. People at
work liked him. He's very quiet one son. He didn't
live too far from where the store was. I believe
it was his first time going to that store and
(15:35):
he was just going to pick up some stuff for
dinner on his way home.
Speaker 16 (15:40):
Jim was a really hard worker. He worked all through
high school at a general store, and everyone loved him.
He always believed 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
(16:02):
terrific uncle to my kids.
Speaker 13 (16:05):
Ola Martin Cooksley is James Martin's sister. She calls him Jim.
The two of them grew up together in Missouri. They
stayed close even after Jim moved to the DC area
for work. It was late on October second when she
got word of Jim's death.
Speaker 16 (16:23):
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 in law and she said that Jim is dead.
I said, did you have a heart attack, you know,
because our dad had passed away with a heart attack,
(16:45):
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 still sleeping. I thought I was dreaming, and I
spent that entire night thinking that I must be dreaming.
(17:08):
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,
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
(17:30):
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 had just always thought
it 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
(17:53):
out of line or something.
Speaker 13 (17:59):
The death of Jane and Martin 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.
Speaker 17 (18:26):
About forty five minutes 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.
Speaker 7 (18:44):
Sunny Police offer sixteenth you do la course, Hi, this
is DEBI case the demander at the Michaels at Aston Hill,
which you had somebody fire some sort of projectile through
the window.
Speaker 4 (18:55):
Of the store.
Speaker 13 (18:57):
Detective Patrick McNerney also took charge of it.
Speaker 17 (19:01):
Was the people in the store who actually made the
call because they could tell it was a bullet that
came through the window. You're sitting there and you're just
proceeding normally. Then all of a sudden, bam.
Speaker 18 (19:13):
Oh, there was a hole to our plateglass window. There
was a loud popping sound. Whatever came through the window
also went through a light here, and fortunately no one
was struck.
Speaker 17 (19:24):
The shot rowed high and when it entered the glass
in front of the Michaels, it hit one of those
lane markers, you know, versus lane one, two three, hit
one of those and kind of disintegrated and later was
found in a pocket on a shelf behind that.
Speaker 18 (19:40):
It was only one shot so far.
Speaker 13 (19:42):
You So this is the Michaels 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
(20:05):
story takes the horrible and gruesome turn. I've got to
tell you, this is the most average strip mall in America,
and 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
(20:26):
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, and one of the
newsrooms in either Baltimore or Washington would have been asking questions,
is their connection? Come on, they're less than two miles apart.
You've got a fatality. There's got to be a connection.
Speaker 17 (20:51):
You could really almost assume that they're connected, and ultimately
they were.
Speaker 13 (20:56):
McNerney went back to take another look at the Shopper's
food warehousehooting from earlier.
Speaker 17 (21:02):
We all kind of agreed, you know, this looks like
a snipers 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
he shoot them? And why him and not to her?
(21:23):
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.
Speaker 19 (21:36):
My name is Bernard James Forsayth. At the time of
this event, I was the director of the Major Crimes
Division of 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
(21:58):
seen anything. I called Chief Moose, which is part of
our protocol, to let him know that we had had
a shooting down there.
Speaker 13 (22:06):
Charles Moose was the chief of Police for Montgomery County.
The two shootings so far fell under his jurisdiction.
Speaker 19 (22:13):
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. It's very hard to connect randomness,
that's what it amounts to.
Speaker 13 (22:36):
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 third.
Speaker 19 (22:51):
I think it's fair to say all hell broke loose.
Speaker 18 (22:56):
Montgomery County.
Speaker 4 (22:57):
Oh, I guess we amias okay with the travel somebody's
been shot down on our back.
Speaker 2 (23:02):
Lot, are they somebody is down on the ground.
Speaker 16 (23:06):
Okay?
Speaker 7 (23:07):
Did you see the person getting.
Speaker 4 (23:08):
Out up the top of the hill and somebody yelled
up the calling ambulance.
Speaker 14 (23:11):
Came where they just sat.
Speaker 18 (23:13):
You know, yeah, we just heard the shot.
Speaker 19 (23:16):
I just briefed the chief as to what we were
doing with regard to the shooting at the Shopper's food
warehouse the night before, when these incidents started percolating into
the office.
Speaker 16 (23:27):
Yeah, I'm being down right now.
Speaker 8 (23:29):
Okay, he's down on the ground.
Speaker 4 (23:34):
We got a crowd of people down here.
Speaker 9 (23:36):
Okay, can you ask of anybody's side.
Speaker 19 (23:38):
That gun shot one of them? Had to do with
a lawnmower, and they were telling me that somebody was injured,
but they weren't sure. They thought maybe a blade had
flown off.
Speaker 16 (23:48):
Well, wasn't.
Speaker 8 (23:51):
A lawnmower blew up on?
Speaker 15 (23:52):
This guy's bleeding real bad?
Speaker 7 (23:55):
Okay?
Speaker 18 (23:56):
And is he breathing? Uh?
Speaker 4 (23:58):
Yeah, barely, He's sitting up lad and everything.
Speaker 20 (24:02):
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.
Speaker 13 (24:19):
Huss was working at the Fitzgerald Automol in Rockville, Maryland.
The first victim of October third was shot just outside
this dealership.
Speaker 20 (24:28):
It's approximately, I want to say, right around seven point
thirty a normal day, driving to work, and I saw
my friend Sonny Buchanan. He maintained the landscaping for our
dealership group.
Speaker 17 (24:43):
At that location.
Speaker 20 (24:45):
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, shut the door, and started
to pull away. Is when I heard a loud bang,
(25:12):
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 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
(25:37):
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 ever noticing it was my friend.
I didn't even relate the two together, as I just
saw him fifteen minutes prior standing upright and speaking with me.
(26:02):
We eventually figured it was Sonny laying there on the
ground and he was 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 in and piled him
(26:23):
in some way. I went down to inspect the lawnmower
to find the bag 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.
(26:43):
We watched the paramedics try and revive Sonny and pretty
much 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
(27:07):
a single gunman, but there was no method to the
madness 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 are at home and at work,
(27:28):
and one of those areas had been taken from me.
Speaker 13 (27:32):
James Sunny Buchanan, the first victim on October third, 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 at a
(28:10):
twelve am, only thirty two minutes after Sunny Buchanan was shot.
Police learned of another shooting mail me that was Caroline
(28:32):
Namro from the very beginning of the episode. After pulling
into a gas station, she heard a loud gunshot prim
Kumar Wallacher then collapsed in front of her. She immediately
called nine one one.
Speaker 2 (28:47):
As I was speaking to the nine one one people,
I saw this police car.
Speaker 3 (28:51):
And I waved over to him, and I went over
to the taxi driver at mister Wallaka. 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
(29:11):
I felt helpless. I had no equipment, no monitor to
put the person on, no oxygen, no suction. 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.
Speaker 2 (29:22):
You know CPR, you're a doctor. I dropped to the floor.
Speaker 3 (29:26):
And tried to check for a pulse, and then the
policeman appeared and I said, I'll do the mathter mouth part.
You do the chest compressions. I started CPR and the
policeman did assist me. I remember my hands were shaking
as I was doing this.
Speaker 2 (29:44):
There was a lot of blood, and.
Speaker 3 (29:46):
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
ambulances appeared and they parted on Connecticut Avenue, and I
remember saying to the police, then, why are they not coming.
(30:08):
I need to suction the airway. You can't do math
and mouth if the airway's block. So I didn't understand
why were they not getting out. Then the ambulance people
did come out of the trucks, and they did come
towards us. It was all a matter of minutes. Of course,
(30:30):
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 mister Wilker
on a gurney, and then I just remember a lot
of police presence and everything happened very first after that,
and my husband had arrived and he'd been allowed to
(30:50):
take my son, my two year old away, So I was.
Speaker 2 (30:54):
Very disturbed the whole day.
Speaker 3 (30:56):
It's horrific that somebody could murder somebody.
Speaker 2 (31:00):
Just awful, what a waste. And I was there.
Speaker 3 (31:04):
You know, you start to question, well, why was it
him not me? Normally I part the car and I
immediately get 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.
Speaker 13 (31:21):
Of the car.
Speaker 3 (31:22):
So that few seconds of delay made a difference to
my life. I was the slightly blurrier object behind my windshield.
Speaker 2 (31:31):
The clearer shot was to the guy that was out
of the car.
Speaker 3 (31:33):
But if I hadn't been nosy and looked over at him,
Wow was he doing filling the car?
Speaker 2 (31:38):
That's really weird. Why is his gas tank there?
Speaker 3 (31:40):
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.
Speaker 13 (32:01):
Montgomery County police were starting to 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.
Speaker 5 (32:15):
We are presently making all of the notifications to the
immediate family members. Our investigators are making that personal contact
to all of those individuals.
Speaker 13 (32:26):
This is Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose. Since these
shootings took place in his jurisdiction, Chief Moose was in
charge of the investigation.
Speaker 5 (32:35):
We have a number of different resources that have been deployed. Clearly,
we have a number of police officers on the street
in uniform, in playing 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
(32:57):
the next couple 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
would anticipate at that same time that we would connect
that hotline.
Speaker 17 (33:10):
To a reward.
Speaker 5 (33:12):
The FBI, atf US Marshals, and the Secret Service all
involved in this investigation bringing resources to the table, bringing investigators,
bringing experience to this situation that is very bizarre to
all of us.
Speaker 6 (33:32):
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.
Speaker 13 (33:47):
This is journalist and historian Garrick Graff.
Speaker 6 (33:50):
In 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 and the intelligence agencies had been already operating at
(34:14):
a crushing tempo in the wake of nine to eleven,
and then along comes the DC Stiper 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. This was, in some ways the worst
(34:35):
case scenario for what we had all feared was coming
after nine to eleven, as the Stiper attacks continued and spread,
This was something that just altered the fabric of life
in the Capitol. It was scary to be outside. It
(34:55):
was scary to 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.
Speaker 13 (35:10):
Even at my station in Baltimore. The paranoia and confusion
was everywhere. No one knew when or where the snipers
would strike next. It was a terrible feeling, one that
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
(35:31):
held their first press conference that day, on October third,
the attacks continued. Just twenty five minutes after prim Kumar
Wallaker was killed at a mobile gas station, another unsuspecting
victim was shot only two miles away.
Speaker 11 (35:47):
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.
Speaker 14 (36:00):
There is a ruthless person on the loose.
Speaker 11 (36:03):
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Speaker 10 (36:09):
All that the victims appeared to have had in common
Each was shot to death by a single bullet.
Speaker 12 (36:14):
Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going
to go right straight through our bulletproof ess.
Speaker 4 (36:19):
The massive man on continues, but police admit they don't
know who are, what they're dealing with, or what their
motive might be.
Speaker 9 (36:26):
The White.
Speaker 13 (36:29):
From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster DC Sniper
this season on Monster DC Sniper.
Speaker 4 (36:46):
Police have had little to go on. Only one witness's
description of two people in a white truck speeding away
from one murders e.
Speaker 10 (36:54):
And he described the vehicle and he said guy was
leaning out like on the driver's side mirror.
Speaker 1 (37:00):
That was the first lead where someone had actually seen somebody.
Speaker 13 (37:04):
More about that calling card.
Speaker 4 (37:06):
It was left at the scene of the most recent shooting.
Speaker 12 (37:08):
It was a card from a fortune telling deck that's
known as the death card, with a note written on it,
dear policeman, I am God.
Speaker 6 (37:17):
But they find out soon that the information they got
was bad.
Speaker 8 (37:21):
FBI in Washington, DC did a more thorough search.
Speaker 16 (37:24):
And that's when we got a hit on a fingerprint.
Speaker 12 (37:27):
We just heard it on the local AM radio station.
The snipers are in the rest area in Myersville, send
everybody you got.
Speaker 13 (37:35):
If you understood the case, it was basically just two outcomes,
death are life. That was it.
Speaker 1 (37:41):
His sentencing is not constitutionally acceptable.
Speaker 10 (37:44):
He has to be sentenced in a way that gives
a jury the option.
Speaker 13 (37:49):
To go lower than that.
Speaker 12 (37:51):
He was a psychopathic, cold blooded killer that can never
walk the street again.
Speaker 21 (37:56):
I 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.
Speaker 1 (38:16):
Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by
Tony Harris and produced by iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt
Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of iHeartRadio,
alongside producers Trevor Young, Ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain. Payne
Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of
(38:37):
Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Stedman and Christina Dana. 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 iHeartMedia dot com,
(38:58):
or you can call us at one one eight three
three two eight five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.
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