January 2, 2020 • 40 mins
On October 3rd, five people are shot in one day. And a witness sees a vehicle.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster d C 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 iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. A deadly rampage. Victims slain randomly, all
(00:24):
within a one mile radius, all within fifteen hours. The
first shooting at six o four last night, a fifty
five year old Caucasian mail killed in the parking lot
of a grocery store. Then early this morning, at seven one,
a Hispanic man mowing his lawn shot dead. Half an
hour later, a forty year old cab driver gunned down
(00:45):
while pumping gas. Then another thirty minutes later, a Hispanic
woman shot fatally in the head. It was a wrong eight.
Denique debarked my car and I was late for work,
so I was running. My name is Suzy Cooper. I
(01:06):
was very lucky because at eight o'clock in the morning,
I was the only car in that area, so they
could easily have gotten me. I got inside the beauty
shop and I went to have cup of coffee and
all of a sudden I heard shot. I was very shaky.
(01:27):
I opened the back door, thinking it was coming from there. No.
But then night I went back up front of the
shop and I saw this woman sitting on a bench.
She was dead. It was so hard to believe what
I was saying. You would think you're at a movie scene.
(01:49):
You know, it was a mess. The bench was in
front of a restaurant, so the bullet went through the
window of the restaurant. That's the woman didn't see it's coming.
There is a ruthless person on the loose. What I
nerves this community the most is the randomness of the murders.
(02:11):
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 going to go right straight through our
bullet proof vest. The massive man odd continues, but police
admit they don't know who are, what they're dealing with,
or what they're motive might be. From My Heart Radio
(02:34):
and Tenderfoot TV, this is Monster DC sniper thirty four
year old Sarah Ramos was sitting on a bench in
front of a Peruvian restaurant when the snipers shot and
killed her. This was now the second day of attacks.
Earlier that morning, Sunny Buchanan and prim Kumar Wallacker had
(02:57):
both been shot and killed, making Almos the third victim
of the day. All of these shootings were horrifying and tragic,
but for some reason, this shooting in particular always stuck
with me. And when I visited the side of the murder,
it unsettled me. Oh boy, this feels a little this
(03:24):
feels a little loft putting. We're sitting in the parking
lot and this is where Sarah Ramos was killed. Sarah
was thirty four years old. She had just gotten off
of bus, and she was sitting on a bench, you know,
next to a post office, and and she was reading
(03:46):
a book and she was shot. She was just I mean,
the randomness of it. And that's what really gets you
about all of these killings. You know, you're essentially a
sitting duck. You have no way to defend yourself. No
one did, no And in a woman sitting on a
bench reading a book, how freaking cowardly is that. It's
(04:09):
just the idea that she's just plucked off man And
just like that's no regard for human life at all.
That's just that's literally target practice, and I just drive away.
That just sort of brings home for me the depravity
of all of it. The victim was laying on the
bench with a sheet over her. That was horrible, really.
(04:33):
That's the first one that I went to. My name's
John Decullis, as a crime analyst form government Kety police.
They called me um to interview a witness who only
spoke Spanish, Juan Carlos I think his name is. When
police first arrived at the crime scene, they found one
Carlos Fieta nearby. They don't know if he's a suspect,
(04:55):
if he's a witness. He's probably around twenty two, I think,
typical lamentscape looking guy, wearing you know, the landscape or uniform.
So I took him aside and started asking him questions.
He was pretty clear that he didn't see where the
shots came from. There's a there's an access route that
runs parallel to the parking lot. He was walking down
(05:19):
that road and had actually passed the front of the
store and where she was sitting on the bench, and
more or less as soon as he got past the
like the corner where he could see her. He heard
the shot. Within a few seconds, he saw a white
box truck leave passed right by her and then drove
west up to Georgia Avenue. It would have had to
(05:41):
have been a drive by shooting almost It was like
five seconds or something after he heard the shots, the
van left the scene. He was the only one that
that was really close, and he was the only one
that saw any kind of vehicle. And he described the
box truck very well, you know, to the point where
it had like damaged to the rear bumper. Vieta described
(06:02):
a white box truck, a delivery truck with a cabin
separate cargo. Area police immediately started pulling over white box
trucks and similar vehicles, but finding that one truck in
the middle of DC's rush hour traffic was almost impossible.
And well, you know how many white box trucks there
are out there. You're going to see at least two
or three white vans or box trucks sitting in just
(06:24):
about every parking lot in the country. My name is
David C. Reich and Ball, retired Lieutenant Maryland State Police
raik and Ball played a major role in the DC
sniper investigation, and he later wrote a book that detailed
what was going on behind the scenes. But nine thirty
or so, I guess it was. I get a phone
call from the Rockville Barrack, Dave. I don't know what's
(06:47):
going on here in Montgomery County, but there's been a
rash of shootings. Montgomery police are running around like crazy.
Looks like this might have started the night before. But
we've got three bodies down and a shooter out there,
and Montgomery County is is asking for help. This could
be the next terrorist attack. Can you get the state
(07:09):
police rolling? If there's one thing that the Maryland State
Police can do, and it's actually by design, we can
get two hundred to three hundred troopers at any place
in the state within a couple of hours. Our goal
was to just simply flood the entire area with road
(07:29):
troopers to supplement Montgomery County. The troopers were coming in
from all over the state, and I had brief him
on what we knew, which at that time was very
very little. We were looking for a couple of guys
in a white box truck shooting people. That's about what
we knew. We didn't know if we had a single shooter.
We didn't know if we had maybe multiple teams. Our
(07:52):
troopers were stopping every white van, every white box truck,
and their instructions were and be careful because these guys
are using weapons that are going to go right straight
through our bulletproof vest. And a sniper case is about
the worst kind of case you can have. Most homicides,
the shooter has some connection with the victim, boyfriend, girlfriend,
(08:16):
ticked off, neighbor, relative, There's some sort of a connection
that can be made. This case, we have nothing. A
white van, white box truck, and a high speed bullet
that's all we had. And spreading panic. We had plenty
of that. There have been a number of white vans
(08:38):
all across this county that had been stopped by police officers,
a number of people calling in, in fact, so many
people that, as Andrew mentioned, they're inundating the system. Don't
call nine one one unless you feel that you have
solid information about a white box truck. Police continued hunting
for the white box truck, but the terror of October
three wasn't over. Just an hour and twenty minutes after
(09:01):
the Ramo shooting, and just eight miles south on Connecticut Avenue,
the sniper struck again. The fourth shooting on October three,
took place at nine am. Maria Welsh stopped by Safe
(09:25):
Way after dropping off her kids at school. So I
had come out of the grocery store. Literally I remember
just so vividly that the parking lot was completely empty,
because just very quiet. Was probably about ten o'clock in
the morning, and I just was loading the back of
my car up and got in the car. And as
I started the car and went to back out of
(09:46):
my parking spot, I heard this loud like pop, this
loud like kind of sound. Then at that moment, there
was a gentleman walking behind my car. I remember like
slamming on the brakes and saying, oh my goodness, did
I just hit something, And he says to me, no,
it came from in front of your car. So, as
I was pulling up towards the main road, which is
(10:07):
Connecticut Avenue, I hear someone calling for help, and I
kind of look over and I see this woman next
to the vacuum cleaner laying on the ground. That woman,
Laurie and Louis Rivera, had been cleaning her minivan using
the gas station's vacuum. Now she was lying on the pavement,
tangled in the vacuum cleaner's hose. Maria Welsh, a nurse,
(10:29):
jumped out of her car and raced over to help.
And as I was running towards her, then I realized
that I probably should have my cell phone in case
I needed an ambulance. I turned to grab my cell
phone and when I turned background towards her, it looked
like she was having a seizure. I at the time
knew nothing about any neighbor shooting, and I thought that
something had happened with the vacuum, like an electrical current
(10:50):
of some sort. So as I was approaching her, I
couldn't really do anything because the vacuum cleaner was still running.
We always kind of learned that with you know, electrical equipment,
you don't want to touch the victim. So I called
nine one. Yeah, I'm announced to the corner of care.
A woman was something grow off, I'm glad out of
(11:13):
noise in her mouth. What's coming out of her mouth? Station? Yeah.
The person that answered the phone said, Okay, well, do
you know what happened? I said, no, I don't know
what happened. I just heard this loud noise, like a
loud bang, And she said, what kind of noise do
you think it is? And I said, I don't know,
like a bomb of some sort, yea to on the bomb.
(11:34):
Maybe it's like that kind of nice, like like a
gun shot, baby kind of. I said, I've never heard
a gunshot. And she said, okay, just sit tight, we'll
send an ambulance to you. And then the vacuum stopped.
I do remember standing there being like, oh my gosh,
Oh my gosh, what am I going to do for her?
What can I do for her? And at this point
a small crowd had sort of gathered around me, feeling
(11:55):
like we have to do something, you know, it's a
matter with her. Do something, And of course I make
this big announcement like Okay, I'm a nurse, I'm gonna
I'm gonna do CPR. When I went to go pull
the vacuum cleaner hose out from around her, she started
bleeding from her mouth, which then prevented me from doing
any kind of mouth to mouth, so I just started
doing chest compressions. No ambulance arrives. There is a fire
(12:18):
station that's less than a quarter of a mile from
the gas station that I can see, and I'm thinking,
why are they not sending me anything? I'm like, I
need help. There's like a crowd now and we're all
screaming where's the ambulance for his ambulance. I later did
find out that they had told first responders not to
respond yet until the area was secure, And as a nurse,
(12:41):
I can understand that. And you're trying to minimize the
amount of casualties you have. You don't send everybody in,
but when you're in it, I felt like I was
being hung out to dry there for a second. Within
a few minutes, this man shows up in this little
pickup truck with like a tackle box of equipment and
he says, I'm an e MT and I can help you,
And I said great. I don't know what's happened. So
(13:03):
at that point I start to notice that there's like
swat team on top of the buildings across the street
from us. There's agents everywhere. They have wrapped the entire
area with like yellow tape, and they're now gathering people
and telling them to go inside the gas station. And
this agent comes up to me and tells me I
need to get inside the gas station. Quickly. I was like,
(13:24):
I don't understand I'm doing CPR. I'm a nurse. And
he says the e m T s here, he can
do it. You go inside, and I'm like, we really
should be doing two persons CPR. And he's like, I'll
do it and tells me to get inside the gas station.
And I said, I don't know why everyone's making such
a big deal. This woman was vacuum your car, Like
what is going on? So now we're all standing in
the gas station and I called my husband at the
(13:45):
time and I said, gosh, I'm so sorry. I decided
to stop it the safe way before coming home, and
something happened with some woman vacuum in your car, and
I ended up doing CPR. So now the police are
telling me I have to stay inside the gas station.
And then within like five minutes, he calls me back
and he's like, Okay, you need to get out of there.
That woman was shot and I was like, no, she wasn't.
I think I would know if she'd been shot. I
(14:06):
did CPR on this one. There's no blood, there's no gunshot.
I don't know what you're talking about. Mind you, the
bullet went through her back. And then she fell backwards
and landed on her back. There was no exit wound,
so when we're doing CPR and chess compressions, there was nothing.
You couldn't see anything. At this point, I think it
was an FBI agent comes in to take our statements,
(14:28):
and I remember asking, I said, you know, can you
just tell me what happened with the woman? Was she shot?
And he said she was. I got a phone call
and that was one of the detectives. He asked me,
are you Nelson Drivera. I said yes, and he said
(14:50):
Glory is your wife. Yes, she just got shot. And
you know, from that point and now my life changed completely.
My name is Nelson Rivera and I was married to
Laurie and Louis Rivera. I am from the country of Honduras,
(15:13):
Central America. When I came to the United States, I
started going to the church Jesus Christ little recent and
that's when I admit the Lord. She was a member
of the church. She was a sweet, very sweet girl,
and I fall in love with her. And the funny
(15:33):
part was I didn't speak no English at all, so
it was hard for me to ask her out for
a date. But I figured it out. I asked my
older brother, can you call her? And told her I
(15:53):
wanted to take her out for dinner. So he called
her and she said, yeah, I take her to this
Planic restaurant. And I don't know what to say because
I didn't know how to say it. It was just
weird and funny at the same time. You know, I
was just looking at her and she was just looking
(16:15):
at me. So after dinner, it was about eight o'clock
a night, and front of us was the Temple that
Jesus very Larry Sane and I knew that word Mary,
and I asked her, do you want to marry me?
And she told me, are you crazy? And I guess
(16:41):
I was crazy right that time. I was lucky she
took me back. We keep dating for a while and
then we got married in November twenties nine. And Josselina
she was born in January nine. Glory. She was. She
(17:03):
was a good mom. Jocelyn. I always wanted to go
to the pool, and she always wanted Mommy to take her.
She was so little, but she still remember that Mommy
was taking her to the pool. And that's the only
memory Jocelyn remember from her mom that morning before before
(17:26):
I left to work. It was something completely different than
any other day. She was sleeping and I just standing
on with ever by the side of the bed for
about five minute and then I left. So when I
was driving around eight o'clock in the morning, I was
(17:47):
listening the news in the radio and I heard about
people being shot in Maryland. And I think it was
about close to nine o'clock. I got a phone call
m and I was one of the detectives and uh,
he asked me, are you Nelson Rivera. I said yes,
(18:12):
and he said are you driving? Said yes, it is
somebody with you and I said yes, and he told me,
can you pull over? I got something to tell you,
but I want you to pull over. So I pull
over and he said, Glorie is your wife? He said, yes,
(18:42):
she just got shot. I just get off of that
truck and I run across the street because I don't
know what to do. And you know, I was lucky
a car don't hit me or something. It's even hard,
you know, after or so many years. She was so young,
(19:04):
she was just twenty four years old. You know. We
drove back to Canclington, Maryland, to that showed that station
where she got shot. You know, her blood was there,
and you know, there was a lot of people and
I was just wondering, you know, if my daughter was
in the car. And fifteen minutes before that happened, she
(19:26):
dropped Jocelyne off on the daker. So I kicked her
up and she was three years in eight months. But
I said, you know, Joselyne, I got to talk to you.
That was the most hard part for me to do.
What I'm gonna say. You know, they're just millions of
(19:46):
things that come to my head. I said, Jocelyne, um,
mommy is She's not gonna be with us anymore. She's
with Heavenly Father. Now she's going to watch us from there.
She's going to watch you the whole time. That was
not an easy thing to say. It really really impacts
(20:11):
Yourseline's life any holidays, any Mother's Day. It's just it's
been hard. When she was young, you know, she was
saying that Daddy, I just I just want to die,
you know, to go with my mom because she's in heaven,
so I want to be in heaven with her. You know,
(20:32):
that was that was devastating for me. Every time when
she was saying something like that, I said, you know,
it's not our time yet. I said, everybody is going
to have their own time, and she'll be waiting for us.
That's kind of thing I was dealing with. And you know,
(20:56):
I'm still and now she's she's twenty, but there are
some moments you've seen. Still miss her mom. You know,
it's not the same. While victims families grieved the senseless
(21:19):
loss of their loved ones, the police and the media
were stepping into high gear. Here's former police Lieutenant David
reichenba again. As word was getting out through the media
and everywhere, the panic was starting to set in. Many
of the merchants, out of fear, have locked their doors
and they are letting customers in and out as necessary.
There's a great deal of fear going on. If you remember,
(21:41):
this is back in the early days of cable news,
so this was new for law enforcement to have to
deal with a media that was seven causes some problems
down the road because it was a learning curve, not
only I think for the media, but also for us.
There's a lot of concern since these shootings are so
random and so public that parents have wanted to go
to the schools and pull their kids out. A little
(22:04):
while ago, we heard from the local police Captain Charles Moose.
Here's what he had to say. We have no information
that this has anything to do with the schools. None
of the victims have been of anything close to school age.
None of the locations are close to the schools. I
think the school kids are safe. They will be released
under normal schedule. We won't create a situation of panic
(22:26):
of traffic that at this point the police department is
not capable of. Howling Now, certainly I can't arrest a
parent that insists on going to the school to get
their kids, but please don't do it. It doesn't help
the situation at this point. So please the media if
you can help me get that message out. Derek be
Lyles was a public information officer for Montgomery County, Maryland.
(22:49):
It was his job to manage relations between the media
and the police. Dealing with the media on a case
that's attracted the attention of the country was a little
bit overwhelming. The atally showed up in our parking lot
and just set up tense and in fact, we call
it it can't moose. Those of us who are public
information officers refer to how big an event is based
(23:10):
upon how many chemical toilets are delivered, and and I
believe this was a five seater, so it was big.
I'd go out and talk to the media to find
out what they wanted to know, and then come back
to Chief Moose and the others who were making the
decisions about what was going to be said. We tried
to tell the public everything we could about how to
(23:31):
keep safe. Of course, there's things that we can't tell
you because we're in the process of investigating it at
this time that if we were to release the information
early it might ruin everything. We didn't have a whole
lot of information to tell the public, so we've tried
to provide the best information we could to people, and
one of those things was about the white panel van.
(23:51):
Police have had little to go on. Only one witnesses
description of a white truck speeding away from what murder,
saying school children were kept indoors through the day at
police were on hand when schools let out. Police admit
they don't know who are, what they're dealing with, or
what their motives might be. The first big day is
like why Montgomery County, who has a grudge? What are
(24:14):
they trying to prove that's Patrick McNerney, the homicide detective
who had been assigned to the first murder outside the
Shoppers food warehouse. Now, after four more shootings in Montgomery County,
the case and potential motives looked very different. Who are
people work for the police department might be a little unhinged,
either current or retired. Let's find out where these people
(24:37):
are and actually put your hand on them and know
where they were during this time frame. And that was
our first thing. We did it kind of like you
a Wizard of Oz. Start at the very beginning of
the yellow brick road, and you know, I work your
way out. But that theory would be quickly thrown out.
That night, at investigators got their first indication that the
(24:59):
snipers weren't just focused on Montgomery County. The snipers had
now moved into the nation's capital. It was now pm
the night of October three. After laying low for almost
(25:22):
twelve hours, the snipers had just shot their fifth victim
of the day, and they crossed over the border into Washington,
d C. Yeah, we get to get a shot out here.
I'm on the corner of Georgia and drinking. Tell me
a street. They just got the inter section. Yeah about California,
(25:45):
k A L M. I a bird north. I decided
talk Oda KF. He's greeting like a bucker. He's greeting bab.
The victim, Pascal Charlot, was a seventy two year old
Haitian immigrant and a retired carpenter. He was standing on
a street corner when he was shot. I need to
(26:06):
try and drink over during the Come on, okay, what's
wrong here? It just got shott. He's freaking, he's like breathing.
He's still breathing. But he got Pascal Charlotte died less
(26:30):
than an hour later. There were a few witnesses nearby
when the shot rang out. One reported seeing US sedan
driving with its headlights off. Another saw a bright flash
of light, but that was about it. No one had
spotted the white box truck let alone it's license plate.
The next morning, Friday, October four, Maryland's chief medical Examiner
(26:54):
autopsy the victims and extracted bullet fragments from their bodies.
He sent them to walk there. Dandridge Jr. A forensic
firearm examiner at the A T F Lab in Maryland.
It's not unusual. For state and local to ask a
t F to assist them with firearms related crimes. A
t F, in fact, is the firearms police. Essentially. My
(27:18):
name is Walter Dandridge, Jr. I work for the Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives. Firearms have rifling cut into the barrel
and they're in a hellical twist within the barrel, and
so when the bullet is fired at rifling imparts a
spin on the bullet. You see a quarterback throw a
(27:40):
football and slow motion and has this tight spiral and
is flying straight and true. You want this tight spiral
spin in order to maintain the stability of the projectile.
A gun's rifling does more than add a spin to
the bullet. It carves grooves into the sides of the
bullet as well, creating marks that a forensic firearm examiner
(28:02):
like Dandridge can analyze. Dandridge compared the bullets from different
shootings against one another to see if they had been
fired from the same gun. So I stick one projectile
on the left stage of the comparison microscope, and I'll
stick the second projectile on the right stage of the microscope,
and I'm looking through the eyepiece, and I can manipulate
(28:24):
the bullets on each of those stages, rotating them and
looking at the microscopic marks, I can raise the magnification
to twenty x and see those marks clearly. If all
of that is corresponding, then we will call that an identification,
(28:45):
which would indicate that they were fired from the same firearm.
Dandridge confirmed what everyone feared. All of the recovered bullets
have been fired from the same high powered rifle. There
was a sniper on the loose who killed one person
on Wednesday, October two, and then five more on Thursday,
October three. And now it was Friday, October four, and
(29:10):
everyone was on edge about what would happen next. Here's
retired homicide Detective McNerney again. It was Friday. I had
just gotten in into the office and my supervisor, Nick
the Carlo, came to me and says, listen, you need
to get your papers together. You're going to Fredericksburg, Virginia
for a shooting outside of a Michael's down there. Yes,
(29:34):
I am in front of Michael's and somebody's out here
who needs some help. Okay, let's go on. I'm not
sure there was allowed crack and she said she needs
help and she's lying down injured or yeah, I definitely injured.
She heard herself. I'm not sure it was allowed. You know,
(29:57):
it looks like she's been shot or quickly she's and shot. Yeah,
I thought, okay, hope they come back and get my
sun out of the car. Yeah, okay, we're getting somebody
on the way. I pulled up and there was allowed,
you know, gunshot? Did you see anything or anyone? You
(30:20):
just heard a loud pop. I heard the call for
help and I saw the car, didn't I didn't see
the car. You didn't see the car. I saw. I
noticed that a car was screwing with but I did
not see it. Okay, did anyone out you know the
same thing. We were aware of that. The car sped away,
but we did not got chilice process what it was. Okay,
(30:40):
someone said there was a man in it. What about
the lady this enter? Did she see it? At the
people around here right now? Did you actually see the car? No,
she didn't see it. Okay, are you see in the
parking lot? Yeah? Yeah. Year old Caroline Seawell was the
(31:04):
seventh victim in just three days. She just finished a
simple errand at Michael's and she was loading bags into
her minivan when a bullet pierced her back. It tore
through her liver and punctured her lund. But when detective
McNerney heard that this shooting, like the first, took place
at a Michael's craft store, he perked up. Now, at
(31:25):
least have some connection, you know, what are the connection
between these two places? And so this thing happens in
Spotsylvania County in Virginia. My supervisor, Nick said, listening at
two helicopters waiting for you over at the police academy
and they'll take you down there. That was my big
adventure to fly on the helicopter with the FBI. As
Detective McNerney flew south to Fredericksburg, Virginia, Caroline Seawell was
(31:50):
metavact north to a hospital in Fairfax. A matter of fact,
our helicopters crossed one another's path on the way down there.
Seawell was rushed into emergency surgery and miraculously she survived. Meanwhile,
mcnerney's helicopter arrived in Fredericksburg. We landed right in the
parking lot where the Michaels was down there, and when
(32:12):
I went in and I was talking to the manager's place,
you know, what is your connection with Montgomery County? Oddly enough,
the same guy who set up the store Montgomery County
set up the store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Okay, well, now
we have a connection, and you know, why would somebody
want to shoot you or somebody at the store And
we're coming up with blanks on that. McNerney was convinced
(32:35):
that the crimes were connected, but he'd need a bullet
to prove it. The round was recovered, or what was
left of it. The seawell was putting stuff in the
back of her van. Her arm was up pulling down
the tailgate when she was shot. The round went through
her and stayed inside the rear of the van. I
(32:56):
met with the sheriff, explaining, this is what we have
in Montgomery can honey, what you're telling me here fits
the things that we're looking for. And then there was
discussion about what are you going to do with the round,
and there's like, well, well we'll submit it to Virginia
State Police and you know, we'll get something back in
a couple of months. Like, let me make this offer
to you signed the evidence over to me, and I'll
(33:18):
take it directly down to the A t F Lab
and they'll examine it, hopefully within twenty four hours. They
ultimately said that's the better route, and fortunately for me,
the FBI stayed there with their helicopter. It was interesting, though,
this was a sniper helicopter Old Huey, So on the
way down here I could sit on the outboard seat
looking out the window, the doors wide open. But on
(33:41):
the way back the guys had their night vision goggles
on and they were sitting on the outboard seat like, Wow,
I don't know it would be a target. But I
got back there. I took the round to a t F.
He had his lights and sirens on and the brakes
were smoking when he reached the lamp. That's forensic firearm
exam under Walter Dandridge. Again. There was a lot of
(34:02):
urgency during this time, but the urgency wasn't at the
sacrifice of quality. We didn't do anything different with the
sniper investigation other than once we received the evidence, we
worked it right through. If that meant working all night,
we did that as opposed to quitting after eight hours.
The next morning decision was yes, it's included in our case.
(34:26):
Let's get the sheriff up here and do the press announcement.
The weekend brought a break from the shootings, and some
wondered if the spree had ended as quickly as it began,
but police were working over time. They interviewed employees from Michael's,
questioned white box truck owners, and checked up on people
(34:48):
who had recently bought or sold rifles in the area,
but they didn't come up with many promising leads. On Saturday, October,
police said they had to tame demand Robert Baker, the
third who had been reported missing around the time of
the shootings. He had left his home in Montgomery County, Maryland,
and taken with him a rifle that fired the same
(35:09):
kind of bullets used in the attacks, and reportedly he
was affiliated with militia and white supremacist groups, but after
initial hopes he was connected to the attacks, police ruled
him out. Speaking to the Washington Post, Montgomery County Police
Chief Charles Moose said, quote, I would just like to
(35:29):
express the fact that Mr. Baker's vehicle is a dark
blue GMC pickup truck. It never has been white, never
has been associated with the white box truck we've been
talking about. The Next day, Sunday, October six, marked the
first funeral for one of the victims, prim Kumar Wallaker,
(35:52):
the taxi driver who had been shot at the gas station.
Caroline Namro attended. She was the doctor who witnessed the
shooting and gave of Wallack or CPR. It was very
It was very emotional, obviously very devastating to his family.
They asked me what his final words were and I
I told them, you know, unfortunately he didn't have time
(36:14):
to say any messages to his family. And I did
relate what had happened, and then they asked me to speak,
which I was quite shocked that they wanted me to speak.
It was a very big funeral was in a church.
During the time that people were speaking, I had a
(36:34):
few minutes to sit down and collect my thoughts, and
I did get up and speak. I remember saying that
it was such a terrible waste of a life. This
is devastating, and I remember thinking that I should try
and say something religious because it wasn't a church, so
I the only thing I could think of was blessing
(36:57):
to the family, that God would turn his face to them,
Shine His light on them and give them peace, which
is the priestly blessing. And I said to the police
liaison lady, I said, I don't want my face to
be on television. They still hadn't found the snipers. I
didn't want anybody to find me or come to the
house or anything. In the evening, if I was putting
(37:20):
the kids to bed and it was very quiet in
the house, I just felt a little nervous. Everyone shared
that anxiety, even police officers working the case. Here's retired
Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenba. Again, I was a
parent of a teenage girl at that point. Hey, your
(37:42):
kids are everything. There's concerned, there's panic, and of course
there's that. I want to call it the unrealistic thought
process because I went through it too. I was concerned
about my kid. Is my kid going to be a
target in all this. Now, the police side of me says,
that's just unrealistic and the odds are astronomical. But dad
(38:04):
part of me says, hey, my kid could be the
next target. I guarantee you every parent, certainly in Montgomery
County and now the District of Columbia, we're beginning to
think the same thing. How could you not? And then
Monday October seven, a m Benjamin Tasker middle School, our
(38:29):
worst fear next time on Monster DC Sniper. This was
a copy of French George's County for novel on one
call Hello, Hello, thanking the cost of middle school. You
gotta tell that hright, I'm the principle to school. Drive
(38:50):
off with him here. I don't know where I had
no idea. That's the death Head terror card. The message
here is white obvious, Call me God. They decide who lives,
they decide who dies. There was a very quick realization
that this could be the next stage of a terror campaign.
(39:14):
And there it is all over network news, which meant
we had an internal leak. Monster DC Sniper is a
fifteen episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris and produced by
iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams
(39:38):
are executive producers on behalf of I Heart Radio, alongside
producers Trevor Young, ben Kiebrick, and Josh Thain. Payne Lindsay
and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV,
alongside producers Meredith Steadman and Christina Dana. Original music is
by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you haven't already be
(40:00):
you're to check out the first two seasons at Lanta
Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have questions
or comments, email us at Monster at iHeartMedia dot com,
or you can call us at one eight three three
to five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Monster d C 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 iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. A deadly rampage. Victims slain randomly, all
(00:24):
within a one mile radius, all within fifteen hours. The
first shooting at six o four last night, a fifty
five year old Caucasian mail killed in the parking lot
of a grocery store. Then early this morning, at seven one,
a Hispanic man mowing his lawn shot dead. Half an
hour later, a forty year old cab driver gunned down
(00:45):
while pumping gas. Then another thirty minutes later, a Hispanic
woman shot fatally in the head. It was a wrong eight.
Denique debarked my car and I was late for work,
so I was running. My name is Suzy Cooper. I
(01:06):
was very lucky because at eight o'clock in the morning,
I was the only car in that area, so they
could easily have gotten me. I got inside the beauty
shop and I went to have cup of coffee and
all of a sudden I heard shot. I was very shaky.
(01:27):
I opened the back door, thinking it was coming from there. No.
But then night I went back up front of the
shop and I saw this woman sitting on a bench.
She was dead. It was so hard to believe what
I was saying. You would think you're at a movie scene.
(01:49):
You know, it was a mess. The bench was in
front of a restaurant, so the bullet went through the
window of the restaurant. That's the woman didn't see it's coming.
There is a ruthless person on the loose. What I
nerves this community the most is the randomness of the murders.
(02:11):
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 going to go right straight through our
bullet proof vest. The massive man odd continues, but police
admit they don't know who are, what they're dealing with,
or what they're motive might be. From My Heart Radio
(02:34):
and Tenderfoot TV, this is Monster DC sniper thirty four
year old Sarah Ramos was sitting on a bench in
front of a Peruvian restaurant when the snipers shot and
killed her. This was now the second day of attacks.
Earlier that morning, Sunny Buchanan and prim Kumar Wallacker had
(02:57):
both been shot and killed, making Almos the third victim
of the day. All of these shootings were horrifying and tragic,
but for some reason, this shooting in particular always stuck
with me. And when I visited the side of the murder,
it unsettled me. Oh boy, this feels a little this
(03:24):
feels a little loft putting. We're sitting in the parking
lot and this is where Sarah Ramos was killed. Sarah
was thirty four years old. She had just gotten off
of bus, and she was sitting on a bench, you know,
next to a post office, and and she was reading
(03:46):
a book and she was shot. She was just I mean,
the randomness of it. And that's what really gets you
about all of these killings. You know, you're essentially a
sitting duck. You have no way to defend yourself. No
one did, no And in a woman sitting on a
bench reading a book, how freaking cowardly is that. It's
(04:09):
just the idea that she's just plucked off man And
just like that's no regard for human life at all.
That's just that's literally target practice, and I just drive away.
That just sort of brings home for me the depravity
of all of it. The victim was laying on the
bench with a sheet over her. That was horrible, really.
(04:33):
That's the first one that I went to. My name's
John Decullis, as a crime analyst form government Kety police.
They called me um to interview a witness who only
spoke Spanish, Juan Carlos I think his name is. When
police first arrived at the crime scene, they found one
Carlos Fieta nearby. They don't know if he's a suspect,
(04:55):
if he's a witness. He's probably around twenty two, I think,
typical lamentscape looking guy, wearing you know, the landscape or uniform.
So I took him aside and started asking him questions.
He was pretty clear that he didn't see where the
shots came from. There's a there's an access route that
runs parallel to the parking lot. He was walking down
(05:19):
that road and had actually passed the front of the
store and where she was sitting on the bench, and
more or less as soon as he got past the
like the corner where he could see her. He heard
the shot. Within a few seconds, he saw a white
box truck leave passed right by her and then drove
west up to Georgia Avenue. It would have had to
(05:41):
have been a drive by shooting almost It was like
five seconds or something after he heard the shots, the
van left the scene. He was the only one that
that was really close, and he was the only one
that saw any kind of vehicle. And he described the
box truck very well, you know, to the point where
it had like damaged to the rear bumper. Vieta described
(06:02):
a white box truck, a delivery truck with a cabin
separate cargo. Area police immediately started pulling over white box
trucks and similar vehicles, but finding that one truck in
the middle of DC's rush hour traffic was almost impossible.
And well, you know how many white box trucks there
are out there. You're going to see at least two
or three white vans or box trucks sitting in just
(06:24):
about every parking lot in the country. My name is
David C. Reich and Ball, retired Lieutenant Maryland State Police
raik and Ball played a major role in the DC
sniper investigation, and he later wrote a book that detailed
what was going on behind the scenes. But nine thirty
or so, I guess it was. I get a phone
call from the Rockville Barrack, Dave. I don't know what's
(06:47):
going on here in Montgomery County, but there's been a
rash of shootings. Montgomery police are running around like crazy.
Looks like this might have started the night before. But
we've got three bodies down and a shooter out there,
and Montgomery County is is asking for help. This could
be the next terrorist attack. Can you get the state
(07:09):
police rolling? If there's one thing that the Maryland State
Police can do, and it's actually by design, we can
get two hundred to three hundred troopers at any place
in the state within a couple of hours. Our goal
was to just simply flood the entire area with road
(07:29):
troopers to supplement Montgomery County. The troopers were coming in
from all over the state, and I had brief him
on what we knew, which at that time was very
very little. We were looking for a couple of guys
in a white box truck shooting people. That's about what
we knew. We didn't know if we had a single shooter.
We didn't know if we had maybe multiple teams. Our
(07:52):
troopers were stopping every white van, every white box truck,
and their instructions were and be careful because these guys
are using weapons that are going to go right straight
through our bulletproof vest. And a sniper case is about
the worst kind of case you can have. Most homicides,
the shooter has some connection with the victim, boyfriend, girlfriend,
(08:16):
ticked off, neighbor, relative, There's some sort of a connection
that can be made. This case, we have nothing. A
white van, white box truck, and a high speed bullet
that's all we had. And spreading panic. We had plenty
of that. There have been a number of white vans
(08:38):
all across this county that had been stopped by police officers,
a number of people calling in, in fact, so many
people that, as Andrew mentioned, they're inundating the system. Don't
call nine one one unless you feel that you have
solid information about a white box truck. Police continued hunting
for the white box truck, but the terror of October
three wasn't over. Just an hour and twenty minutes after
(09:01):
the Ramo shooting, and just eight miles south on Connecticut Avenue,
the sniper struck again. The fourth shooting on October three,
took place at nine am. Maria Welsh stopped by Safe
(09:25):
Way after dropping off her kids at school. So I
had come out of the grocery store. Literally I remember
just so vividly that the parking lot was completely empty,
because just very quiet. Was probably about ten o'clock in
the morning, and I just was loading the back of
my car up and got in the car. And as
I started the car and went to back out of
(09:46):
my parking spot, I heard this loud like pop, this
loud like kind of sound. Then at that moment, there
was a gentleman walking behind my car. I remember like
slamming on the brakes and saying, oh my goodness, did
I just hit something, And he says to me, no,
it came from in front of your car. So, as
I was pulling up towards the main road, which is
(10:07):
Connecticut Avenue, I hear someone calling for help, and I
kind of look over and I see this woman next
to the vacuum cleaner laying on the ground. That woman,
Laurie and Louis Rivera, had been cleaning her minivan using
the gas station's vacuum. Now she was lying on the pavement,
tangled in the vacuum cleaner's hose. Maria Welsh, a nurse,
(10:29):
jumped out of her car and raced over to help.
And as I was running towards her, then I realized
that I probably should have my cell phone in case
I needed an ambulance. I turned to grab my cell
phone and when I turned background towards her, it looked
like she was having a seizure. I at the time
knew nothing about any neighbor shooting, and I thought that
something had happened with the vacuum, like an electrical current
(10:50):
of some sort. So as I was approaching her, I
couldn't really do anything because the vacuum cleaner was still running.
We always kind of learned that with you know, electrical equipment,
you don't want to touch the victim. So I called
nine one. Yeah, I'm announced to the corner of care.
A woman was something grow off, I'm glad out of
(11:13):
noise in her mouth. What's coming out of her mouth? Station? Yeah.
The person that answered the phone said, Okay, well, do
you know what happened? I said, no, I don't know
what happened. I just heard this loud noise, like a
loud bang, And she said, what kind of noise do
you think it is? And I said, I don't know,
like a bomb of some sort, yea to on the bomb.
(11:34):
Maybe it's like that kind of nice, like like a
gun shot, baby kind of. I said, I've never heard
a gunshot. And she said, okay, just sit tight, we'll
send an ambulance to you. And then the vacuum stopped.
I do remember standing there being like, oh my gosh,
Oh my gosh, what am I going to do for her?
What can I do for her? And at this point
a small crowd had sort of gathered around me, feeling
(11:55):
like we have to do something, you know, it's a
matter with her. Do something, And of course I make
this big announcement like Okay, I'm a nurse, I'm gonna
I'm gonna do CPR. When I went to go pull
the vacuum cleaner hose out from around her, she started
bleeding from her mouth, which then prevented me from doing
any kind of mouth to mouth, so I just started
doing chest compressions. No ambulance arrives. There is a fire
(12:18):
station that's less than a quarter of a mile from
the gas station that I can see, and I'm thinking,
why are they not sending me anything? I'm like, I
need help. There's like a crowd now and we're all
screaming where's the ambulance for his ambulance. I later did
find out that they had told first responders not to
respond yet until the area was secure, And as a nurse,
(12:41):
I can understand that. And you're trying to minimize the
amount of casualties you have. You don't send everybody in,
but when you're in it, I felt like I was
being hung out to dry there for a second. Within
a few minutes, this man shows up in this little
pickup truck with like a tackle box of equipment and
he says, I'm an e MT and I can help you,
And I said great. I don't know what's happened. So
(13:03):
at that point I start to notice that there's like
swat team on top of the buildings across the street
from us. There's agents everywhere. They have wrapped the entire
area with like yellow tape, and they're now gathering people
and telling them to go inside the gas station. And
this agent comes up to me and tells me I
need to get inside the gas station. Quickly. I was like,
(13:24):
I don't understand I'm doing CPR. I'm a nurse. And
he says the e m T s here, he can
do it. You go inside, and I'm like, we really
should be doing two persons CPR. And he's like, I'll
do it and tells me to get inside the gas station.
And I said, I don't know why everyone's making such
a big deal. This woman was vacuum your car, Like
what is going on? So now we're all standing in
the gas station and I called my husband at the
(13:45):
time and I said, gosh, I'm so sorry. I decided
to stop it the safe way before coming home, and
something happened with some woman vacuum in your car, and
I ended up doing CPR. So now the police are
telling me I have to stay inside the gas station.
And then within like five minutes, he calls me back
and he's like, Okay, you need to get out of there.
That woman was shot and I was like, no, she wasn't.
I think I would know if she'd been shot. I
(14:06):
did CPR on this one. There's no blood, there's no gunshot.
I don't know what you're talking about. Mind you, the
bullet went through her back. And then she fell backwards
and landed on her back. There was no exit wound,
so when we're doing CPR and chess compressions, there was nothing.
You couldn't see anything. At this point, I think it
was an FBI agent comes in to take our statements,
(14:28):
and I remember asking, I said, you know, can you
just tell me what happened with the woman? Was she shot?
And he said she was. I got a phone call
and that was one of the detectives. He asked me,
are you Nelson Drivera. I said yes, and he said
(14:50):
Glory is your wife. Yes, she just got shot. And
you know, from that point and now my life changed completely.
My name is Nelson Rivera and I was married to
Laurie and Louis Rivera. I am from the country of Honduras,
(15:13):
Central America. When I came to the United States, I
started going to the church Jesus Christ little recent and
that's when I admit the Lord. She was a member
of the church. She was a sweet, very sweet girl,
and I fall in love with her. And the funny
(15:33):
part was I didn't speak no English at all, so
it was hard for me to ask her out for
a date. But I figured it out. I asked my
older brother, can you call her? And told her I
(15:53):
wanted to take her out for dinner. So he called
her and she said, yeah, I take her to this
Planic restaurant. And I don't know what to say because
I didn't know how to say it. It was just
weird and funny at the same time. You know, I
was just looking at her and she was just looking
(16:15):
at me. So after dinner, it was about eight o'clock
a night, and front of us was the Temple that
Jesus very Larry Sane and I knew that word Mary,
and I asked her, do you want to marry me?
And she told me, are you crazy? And I guess
(16:41):
I was crazy right that time. I was lucky she
took me back. We keep dating for a while and
then we got married in November twenties nine. And Josselina
she was born in January nine. Glory. She was. She
(17:03):
was a good mom. Jocelyn. I always wanted to go
to the pool, and she always wanted Mommy to take her.
She was so little, but she still remember that Mommy
was taking her to the pool. And that's the only
memory Jocelyn remember from her mom that morning before before
(17:26):
I left to work. It was something completely different than
any other day. She was sleeping and I just standing
on with ever by the side of the bed for
about five minute and then I left. So when I
was driving around eight o'clock in the morning, I was
(17:47):
listening the news in the radio and I heard about
people being shot in Maryland. And I think it was
about close to nine o'clock. I got a phone call
m and I was one of the detectives and uh,
he asked me, are you Nelson Rivera. I said yes,
(18:12):
and he said are you driving? Said yes, it is
somebody with you and I said yes, and he told me,
can you pull over? I got something to tell you,
but I want you to pull over. So I pull
over and he said, Glorie is your wife? He said, yes,
(18:42):
she just got shot. I just get off of that
truck and I run across the street because I don't
know what to do. And you know, I was lucky
a car don't hit me or something. It's even hard,
you know, after or so many years. She was so young,
(19:04):
she was just twenty four years old. You know. We
drove back to Canclington, Maryland, to that showed that station
where she got shot. You know, her blood was there,
and you know, there was a lot of people and
I was just wondering, you know, if my daughter was
in the car. And fifteen minutes before that happened, she
(19:26):
dropped Jocelyne off on the daker. So I kicked her
up and she was three years in eight months. But
I said, you know, Joselyne, I got to talk to you.
That was the most hard part for me to do.
What I'm gonna say. You know, they're just millions of
(19:46):
things that come to my head. I said, Jocelyne, um,
mommy is She's not gonna be with us anymore. She's
with Heavenly Father. Now she's going to watch us from there.
She's going to watch you the whole time. That was
not an easy thing to say. It really really impacts
(20:11):
Yourseline's life any holidays, any Mother's Day. It's just it's
been hard. When she was young, you know, she was
saying that Daddy, I just I just want to die,
you know, to go with my mom because she's in heaven,
so I want to be in heaven with her. You know,
(20:32):
that was that was devastating for me. Every time when
she was saying something like that, I said, you know,
it's not our time yet. I said, everybody is going
to have their own time, and she'll be waiting for us.
That's kind of thing I was dealing with. And you know,
(20:56):
I'm still and now she's she's twenty, but there are
some moments you've seen. Still miss her mom. You know,
it's not the same. While victims families grieved the senseless
(21:19):
loss of their loved ones, the police and the media
were stepping into high gear. Here's former police Lieutenant David
reichenba again. As word was getting out through the media
and everywhere, the panic was starting to set in. Many
of the merchants, out of fear, have locked their doors
and they are letting customers in and out as necessary.
There's a great deal of fear going on. If you remember,
(21:41):
this is back in the early days of cable news,
so this was new for law enforcement to have to
deal with a media that was seven causes some problems
down the road because it was a learning curve, not
only I think for the media, but also for us.
There's a lot of concern since these shootings are so
random and so public that parents have wanted to go
to the schools and pull their kids out. A little
(22:04):
while ago, we heard from the local police Captain Charles Moose.
Here's what he had to say. We have no information
that this has anything to do with the schools. None
of the victims have been of anything close to school age.
None of the locations are close to the schools. I
think the school kids are safe. They will be released
under normal schedule. We won't create a situation of panic
(22:26):
of traffic that at this point the police department is
not capable of. Howling Now, certainly I can't arrest a
parent that insists on going to the school to get
their kids, but please don't do it. It doesn't help
the situation at this point. So please the media if
you can help me get that message out. Derek be
Lyles was a public information officer for Montgomery County, Maryland.
(22:49):
It was his job to manage relations between the media
and the police. Dealing with the media on a case
that's attracted the attention of the country was a little
bit overwhelming. The atally showed up in our parking lot
and just set up tense and in fact, we call
it it can't moose. Those of us who are public
information officers refer to how big an event is based
(23:10):
upon how many chemical toilets are delivered, and and I
believe this was a five seater, so it was big.
I'd go out and talk to the media to find
out what they wanted to know, and then come back
to Chief Moose and the others who were making the
decisions about what was going to be said. We tried
to tell the public everything we could about how to
(23:31):
keep safe. Of course, there's things that we can't tell
you because we're in the process of investigating it at
this time that if we were to release the information
early it might ruin everything. We didn't have a whole
lot of information to tell the public, so we've tried
to provide the best information we could to people, and
one of those things was about the white panel van.
(23:51):
Police have had little to go on. Only one witnesses
description of a white truck speeding away from what murder,
saying school children were kept indoors through the day at
police were on hand when schools let out. Police admit
they don't know who are, what they're dealing with, or
what their motives might be. The first big day is
like why Montgomery County, who has a grudge? What are
(24:14):
they trying to prove that's Patrick McNerney, the homicide detective
who had been assigned to the first murder outside the
Shoppers food warehouse. Now, after four more shootings in Montgomery County,
the case and potential motives looked very different. Who are
people work for the police department might be a little unhinged,
either current or retired. Let's find out where these people
(24:37):
are and actually put your hand on them and know
where they were during this time frame. And that was
our first thing. We did it kind of like you
a Wizard of Oz. Start at the very beginning of
the yellow brick road, and you know, I work your
way out. But that theory would be quickly thrown out.
That night, at investigators got their first indication that the
(24:59):
snipers weren't just focused on Montgomery County. The snipers had
now moved into the nation's capital. It was now pm
the night of October three. After laying low for almost
(25:22):
twelve hours, the snipers had just shot their fifth victim
of the day, and they crossed over the border into Washington,
d C. Yeah, we get to get a shot out here.
I'm on the corner of Georgia and drinking. Tell me
a street. They just got the inter section. Yeah about California,
(25:45):
k A L M. I a bird north. I decided
talk Oda KF. He's greeting like a bucker. He's greeting bab.
The victim, Pascal Charlot, was a seventy two year old
Haitian immigrant and a retired carpenter. He was standing on
a street corner when he was shot. I need to
(26:06):
try and drink over during the Come on, okay, what's
wrong here? It just got shott. He's freaking, he's like breathing.
He's still breathing. But he got Pascal Charlotte died less
(26:30):
than an hour later. There were a few witnesses nearby
when the shot rang out. One reported seeing US sedan
driving with its headlights off. Another saw a bright flash
of light, but that was about it. No one had
spotted the white box truck let alone it's license plate.
The next morning, Friday, October four, Maryland's chief medical Examiner
(26:54):
autopsy the victims and extracted bullet fragments from their bodies.
He sent them to walk there. Dandridge Jr. A forensic
firearm examiner at the A T F Lab in Maryland.
It's not unusual. For state and local to ask a
t F to assist them with firearms related crimes. A
t F, in fact, is the firearms police. Essentially. My
(27:18):
name is Walter Dandridge, Jr. I work for the Bureau Alcohol, Tobacco,
Firearms and Explosives. Firearms have rifling cut into the barrel
and they're in a hellical twist within the barrel, and
so when the bullet is fired at rifling imparts a
spin on the bullet. You see a quarterback throw a
(27:40):
football and slow motion and has this tight spiral and
is flying straight and true. You want this tight spiral
spin in order to maintain the stability of the projectile.
A gun's rifling does more than add a spin to
the bullet. It carves grooves into the sides of the
bullet as well, creating marks that a forensic firearm examiner
(28:02):
like Dandridge can analyze. Dandridge compared the bullets from different
shootings against one another to see if they had been
fired from the same gun. So I stick one projectile
on the left stage of the comparison microscope, and I'll
stick the second projectile on the right stage of the microscope,
and I'm looking through the eyepiece, and I can manipulate
(28:24):
the bullets on each of those stages, rotating them and
looking at the microscopic marks, I can raise the magnification
to twenty x and see those marks clearly. If all
of that is corresponding, then we will call that an identification,
(28:45):
which would indicate that they were fired from the same firearm.
Dandridge confirmed what everyone feared. All of the recovered bullets
have been fired from the same high powered rifle. There
was a sniper on the loose who killed one person
on Wednesday, October two, and then five more on Thursday,
October three. And now it was Friday, October four, and
(29:10):
everyone was on edge about what would happen next. Here's
retired homicide Detective McNerney again. It was Friday. I had
just gotten in into the office and my supervisor, Nick
the Carlo, came to me and says, listen, you need
to get your papers together. You're going to Fredericksburg, Virginia
for a shooting outside of a Michael's down there. Yes,
(29:34):
I am in front of Michael's and somebody's out here
who needs some help. Okay, let's go on. I'm not
sure there was allowed crack and she said she needs
help and she's lying down injured or yeah, I definitely injured.
She heard herself. I'm not sure it was allowed. You know,
(29:57):
it looks like she's been shot or quickly she's and shot. Yeah,
I thought, okay, hope they come back and get my
sun out of the car. Yeah, okay, we're getting somebody
on the way. I pulled up and there was allowed,
you know, gunshot? Did you see anything or anyone? You
(30:20):
just heard a loud pop. I heard the call for
help and I saw the car, didn't I didn't see
the car. You didn't see the car. I saw. I
noticed that a car was screwing with but I did
not see it. Okay, did anyone out you know the
same thing. We were aware of that. The car sped away,
but we did not got chilice process what it was. Okay,
(30:40):
someone said there was a man in it. What about
the lady this enter? Did she see it? At the
people around here right now? Did you actually see the car? No,
she didn't see it. Okay, are you see in the
parking lot? Yeah? Yeah. Year old Caroline Seawell was the
(31:04):
seventh victim in just three days. She just finished a
simple errand at Michael's and she was loading bags into
her minivan when a bullet pierced her back. It tore
through her liver and punctured her lund. But when detective
McNerney heard that this shooting, like the first, took place
at a Michael's craft store, he perked up. Now, at
(31:25):
least have some connection, you know, what are the connection
between these two places? And so this thing happens in
Spotsylvania County in Virginia. My supervisor, Nick said, listening at
two helicopters waiting for you over at the police academy
and they'll take you down there. That was my big
adventure to fly on the helicopter with the FBI. As
Detective McNerney flew south to Fredericksburg, Virginia, Caroline Seawell was
(31:50):
metavact north to a hospital in Fairfax. A matter of fact,
our helicopters crossed one another's path on the way down there.
Seawell was rushed into emergency surgery and miraculously she survived. Meanwhile,
mcnerney's helicopter arrived in Fredericksburg. We landed right in the
parking lot where the Michaels was down there, and when
(32:12):
I went in and I was talking to the manager's place,
you know, what is your connection with Montgomery County? Oddly enough,
the same guy who set up the store Montgomery County
set up the store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Okay, well, now
we have a connection, and you know, why would somebody
want to shoot you or somebody at the store And
we're coming up with blanks on that. McNerney was convinced
(32:35):
that the crimes were connected, but he'd need a bullet
to prove it. The round was recovered, or what was
left of it. The seawell was putting stuff in the
back of her van. Her arm was up pulling down
the tailgate when she was shot. The round went through
her and stayed inside the rear of the van. I
(32:56):
met with the sheriff, explaining, this is what we have
in Montgomery can honey, what you're telling me here fits
the things that we're looking for. And then there was
discussion about what are you going to do with the round,
and there's like, well, well we'll submit it to Virginia
State Police and you know, we'll get something back in
a couple of months. Like, let me make this offer
to you signed the evidence over to me, and I'll
(33:18):
take it directly down to the A t F Lab
and they'll examine it, hopefully within twenty four hours. They
ultimately said that's the better route, and fortunately for me,
the FBI stayed there with their helicopter. It was interesting, though,
this was a sniper helicopter Old Huey, So on the
way down here I could sit on the outboard seat
looking out the window, the doors wide open. But on
(33:41):
the way back the guys had their night vision goggles
on and they were sitting on the outboard seat like, Wow,
I don't know it would be a target. But I
got back there. I took the round to a t F.
He had his lights and sirens on and the brakes
were smoking when he reached the lamp. That's forensic firearm
exam under Walter Dandridge. Again. There was a lot of
(34:02):
urgency during this time, but the urgency wasn't at the
sacrifice of quality. We didn't do anything different with the
sniper investigation other than once we received the evidence, we
worked it right through. If that meant working all night,
we did that as opposed to quitting after eight hours.
The next morning decision was yes, it's included in our case.
(34:26):
Let's get the sheriff up here and do the press announcement.
The weekend brought a break from the shootings, and some
wondered if the spree had ended as quickly as it began,
but police were working over time. They interviewed employees from Michael's,
questioned white box truck owners, and checked up on people
(34:48):
who had recently bought or sold rifles in the area,
but they didn't come up with many promising leads. On Saturday, October,
police said they had to tame demand Robert Baker, the
third who had been reported missing around the time of
the shootings. He had left his home in Montgomery County, Maryland,
and taken with him a rifle that fired the same
(35:09):
kind of bullets used in the attacks, and reportedly he
was affiliated with militia and white supremacist groups, but after
initial hopes he was connected to the attacks, police ruled
him out. Speaking to the Washington Post, Montgomery County Police
Chief Charles Moose said, quote, I would just like to
(35:29):
express the fact that Mr. Baker's vehicle is a dark
blue GMC pickup truck. It never has been white, never
has been associated with the white box truck we've been
talking about. The Next day, Sunday, October six, marked the
first funeral for one of the victims, prim Kumar Wallaker,
(35:52):
the taxi driver who had been shot at the gas station.
Caroline Namro attended. She was the doctor who witnessed the
shooting and gave of Wallack or CPR. It was very
It was very emotional, obviously very devastating to his family.
They asked me what his final words were and I
I told them, you know, unfortunately he didn't have time
(36:14):
to say any messages to his family. And I did
relate what had happened, and then they asked me to speak,
which I was quite shocked that they wanted me to speak.
It was a very big funeral was in a church.
During the time that people were speaking, I had a
(36:34):
few minutes to sit down and collect my thoughts, and
I did get up and speak. I remember saying that
it was such a terrible waste of a life. This
is devastating, and I remember thinking that I should try
and say something religious because it wasn't a church, so
I the only thing I could think of was blessing
(36:57):
to the family, that God would turn his face to them,
Shine His light on them and give them peace, which
is the priestly blessing. And I said to the police
liaison lady, I said, I don't want my face to
be on television. They still hadn't found the snipers. I
didn't want anybody to find me or come to the
house or anything. In the evening, if I was putting
(37:20):
the kids to bed and it was very quiet in
the house, I just felt a little nervous. Everyone shared
that anxiety, even police officers working the case. Here's retired
Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenba. Again, I was a
parent of a teenage girl at that point. Hey, your
(37:42):
kids are everything. There's concerned, there's panic, and of course
there's that. I want to call it the unrealistic thought
process because I went through it too. I was concerned
about my kid. Is my kid going to be a
target in all this. Now, the police side of me says,
that's just unrealistic and the odds are astronomical. But dad
(38:04):
part of me says, hey, my kid could be the
next target. I guarantee you every parent, certainly in Montgomery
County and now the District of Columbia, we're beginning to
think the same thing. How could you not? And then
Monday October seven, a m Benjamin Tasker middle School, our
(38:29):
worst fear next time on Monster DC Sniper. This was
a copy of French George's County for novel on one
call Hello, Hello, thanking the cost of middle school. You
gotta tell that hright, I'm the principle to school. Drive
(38:50):
off with him here. I don't know where I had
no idea. That's the death Head terror card. The message
here is white obvious, Call me God. They decide who lives,
they decide who dies. There was a very quick realization
that this could be the next stage of a terror campaign.
(39:14):
And there it is all over network news, which meant
we had an internal leak. Monster DC Sniper is a
fifteen episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris and produced by
iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams
(39:38):
are executive producers on behalf of I Heart Radio, alongside
producers Trevor Young, ben Kiebrick, and Josh Thain. Payne Lindsay
and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV,
alongside producers Meredith Steadman and Christina Dana. Original music is
by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you haven't already be
(40:00):
you're to check out the first two seasons at Lanta
Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have questions
or comments, email us at Monster at iHeartMedia dot com,
or you can call us at one eight three three
to five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.
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