January 16, 2020 • 39 mins
On October 9th, the sniper targets Virginia. And the hunt for a white van intensifies.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of iHeart 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 iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Saying somebody got shot as fire Personnaco.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Okay, somebody got shrial, but I did playing there man.
He's laying on the car and there was a white
man just went by with two guys in it. The
man just went gone, now walk forward. We did not
the two thirty two thirty four went out a whitey. Okay,
well there go, there's.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
A going down thirty color chwards your distraction. I'll go
with sixty four, okay. Sean taken information the asters all
the way. I'm the possibatoration.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
A call in the evening on October ninth from a
source saying, you need to get out to Manassas. There's
been another one.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
This is Washington Post reporter Josh White.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
There was nothing more than that. I was given a location.
I knew the area, so I knew that they would
have shut down the intersection right by the gas station.
So I went past the gas station, got off onto
a side road and came up the back way, and
I thought, well, if you wanted to get a really
good view of the crime scene, you would go up
(01:33):
onto this hill. There was a Bob Evans that overlooked
the gas station from across the road. Standing there on
that hill and looking down at that crime scene, it
was lit up at night. Somebody standing there would have
been framed fully in light. It's like a lit up
target with a million access points. They had shut down
the parking lot and they were interviewing everyone who was leaving.
(01:56):
I drove up and I got into an adjacent parking lot,
and I walked right to where I thought.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
Would be the best view.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
That, too, was something that the snipers realized that that
was the best view of that gas station view because
I'm fairly certain I stood directly next to the vehicle
that they had been using to kill tons and tons
of people facing the gas station below.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
There is a ruthless person on the loose.
Speaker 6 (02:22):
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
They killed the five people in one day and then
went on the rampage for the next month.
Speaker 7 (02:35):
It is quite a mystery.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
The police say they have never had a crime quite
like this.
Speaker 8 (02:40):
Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going
to go right straight through our bulletproof vests.
Speaker 9 (02:45):
The white.
Speaker 5 (02:48):
From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is monster DC sniper.
Speaker 10 (03:01):
Nine sniper attacks in eight days have the Washington metropolitan
area on high alert. Since last Wednesday, seven people have
been killed and two wounded. One was a thirteen year
old boy who was critically wounded at a Maryland middle school.
The latest shooting took place just after eight o'clock last night,
about thirty miles west of Washington, d C.
Speaker 5 (03:24):
October ninth, two thousand and two. It has now been
a full week since the spree of sniper killings began
in the DC metro area. Most of the attacks had
taken place in Maryland, except for one shooting at a
Michael's Inspontsylvania, Virginia, but now the snipers were on the move.
Speaker 11 (03:42):
On October ninth, the week following the Montgomery County shootings,
a man who worked in an office building in Manassas
was out pumping gas not too far from where he
worked got named Dean Myers.
Speaker 5 (03:54):
This is Dave Statner, reporter for Channel nine News.
Speaker 11 (03:58):
He's on Sudley Road and Saint Prince William County, Virginia,
and he's just pumping gas and shot and killed.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Bob Myers. The victim's brother, spoke about the shooting at
a press conference.
Speaker 12 (04:11):
I would like to know the reason that would help me,
but I recognize that whatever reason it is, it won't
be a good one.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
This attack sent a ripple through the region. It was
the third shooting to take place at a gas station.
As Channel nine reporter Dave Stander points out, now the
people of Virginia had a lot to worry about.
Speaker 11 (04:35):
This is where you're really starting to notice how cautious
people are filling up with gasoline. People are being extremely
cautious and once again, like the people the first day
we knew about this, the woman vacuuming our car, the
taxi driver who's pumping gas. This happened to Dean Myers.
He's filling up with gasoline. So now the real focus
is what do I do when I'm pumping gas. I
have to get gasoline from my car. There are gas
(04:57):
stations that are starting to put up barricade or harps
to block your people are ducking around the other side
of their vehicle, or putting the nozzle into their vehicle
and walking away from the vehicle, trying to get some
sort of cover. So people are clearly scared filling up
with gasoline, and this shooting of Dean Myers just added
to that fear.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
Who could have imagined that somewhere as mundane as a
gas station could become the impetus for such crippling fear.
I visited the Sonoco station in Manassas, Virginia, where Dean
Myers was killed, and the scene brought back some vivid
memories from that October in two thousand and two. Maybe
one of the indelible images that I have in my
(05:40):
mind from those days. I mean, it really is of
seeing the blue tarp that was serving as a bit
of a barrier protecting people. So people are pumping gas
and they're essentially under around behind this blue tarp. And
the other thing I recall is hearing stories of cops
being asked by folks who needed a fill. Hey, I'll
(06:03):
give you some extra money to fill up my gas
tank because I'm so afraid. I'm afraid to do it myself,
Would you take this extra twenty to fill up my
gas tank? That sort of speaks to how much fear
there was at the time. I think the other thing
that we can't imagine today someone getting away with all
of these episodes, all of these attacks and not clearly
(06:26):
being established on some kind of surveillance cameras, some kind
of CCTV. In two thousand nineteen, come on, you couldn't
even attempt something like what we're talking about now shooting
someone dead in a Sunoco gas station. But we're talking
about two thousand and two. We're also talking post nine
to eleven, so you're talking about putting more of those
(06:49):
systems in place.
Speaker 13 (06:50):
At that point, we still have officers at the scene
searching for evidence, going over it iculously.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
Police believed they were on the sniper's trail. At a
press conference following the Dean Meyer shooting, officials revealed what
type of vehicle they thought the snipers were using.
Speaker 7 (07:11):
The only information we have on a possible vehicle was
a white mini van described as a panel vehicle, meaning
it had only front passenger windows.
Speaker 13 (07:22):
The rest was solid.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
Officials thought the snipers might still be in the area,
so police set up roadblocks on the streets near the
crime scene. Nearby parking lots were shut down. No one
was allowed to leave. Hundreds of people were stopped and questioned,
but no suspects were detained. Officer Stephen Bailey's job was
to scout the Bob Evans parking lot for potential witnesses.
(07:46):
He remembers approaching one specific vehicle. The driver inside said
he was on vacation. This man also said he'd been
directed into the parking lot by another officer. Bailey said
the man was quote very polite and very courteous, and
so with no reason to detain him, Bailey let the
(08:07):
man leave. It would be months later that Officer Bailey
had a terrible realization the man he met that day
was the killer they were looking for.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
I think that, in a lot of ways is a
microcosm of the challenge that was facing everybody.
Speaker 5 (08:24):
This is Washington Post reporter Josh White. He told the
story of standing near the killer's vehicle at the beginning
of the episode, but like Officer Stephen Bailey, he didn't
think anything of it.
Speaker 14 (08:35):
At the time.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
Nobody knew who they were looking for, nobody knew what
vehicle to look for. Nobody knew the mechanism of the shooting.
Was it coming from a car, was it coming from outside. Ultimately,
when they found the vehicle, it was obvious to everyone
why the vehicle was so difficult to detect. It was
an engineered killing machine. It was built in a way
(08:56):
to avoid detection. It was altered in a way that
if you you were to walk right up to it,
you wouldn't think twice. It wouldn't strike you externally as
anything to worry about. I thought, I don't know how
they're ever going to catch this person. It really showed
the vulnerability. It showed that if somebody wants to go
after someone who they have no connection to, randomly in
(09:18):
a metropolitan area, that's millions of people, what's stopping them?
Speaker 15 (09:22):
For me?
Speaker 4 (09:23):
That was one of the scariest moments. That shooting highlighted
how difficult this all was and how frightening it all was.
Speaker 5 (09:31):
This shooting also marked another major shift in the case,
one that greatly raised the stakes for the snipers.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
They I think unbeknownst to them, obviously, they had committed
a crime in a county that had one of the
more aggressive prosecutors from a capital punishment perspective, Paul Ebert, do.
Speaker 16 (09:56):
You a distinction, but not unusual occasions happened.
Speaker 5 (10:01):
This is Paul Ebert, Virginia's longest serving prosecutor. I spoke
with him at his office in Prince William County. He
remembers when Dean Meyers was shot in his district.
Speaker 16 (10:11):
My daughter had strange enough about a half a block
where it has happened. When it happened, you out a bank.
I went to the scene. I got normally do on
a murder case. We don't have that many murders. It
helps me to be able to visualize what's going on.
A lot of press, a lot of people. The body
was gone, chucked around. Of course, it was pretty ivous
(10:32):
that the snipers had done this before, the history leading
up to it, and he I had no idea if
and when would ever get the case try. I talked
with a couple of reporters that I knew, and I
did say that if this is a sniper, it looks
like it is just a death case. Absolute some kind
of a great mitigating factor. It was a capitol case.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
Paul Elbert was issuing a direct threat to the snipers.
We went on television that day to say that quote
this case, if I have anything to do with it,
will be prosecuted in this jurisdiction to the full extent
of the law. Ebert has sentenced more inmates to death
row than any other Virginia prosecutor. So if the sniper
(11:16):
was following the news, they would have known that if caught,
they would eventually face the death penalty. The snipers weren't
(11:39):
done in Virginia, as the area was still reeling from
the death of Dean Harold Myers. Tragedy struck once more.
Channel nine reporter Dave's Statter was there on.
Speaker 11 (11:51):
The morning of October eleventh, two days after Dean Myers
has shot pumping guests in the Monastass area of Virginia.
Further south, in the Vicksburg area, there's another man shot,
fifty three year old Kenneth Bridges. He's shot dead pumping
gasoline at Nexxon station. This is just off Interstate ninety five,
of heavily traveled roadway between Richmond and Washington, this portion
(12:15):
of I ninety five. We worked our way down there
to just off the highway, and it was difficult getting
to that scene. The traffic was just horrendous because the
roadway was shut down just off I ninety five. Police
were probably stopping vehicles coming and going. As we're traveling
down to the scene, we're being passed by convoys of
federal agents heading down there and police from other jurisdictions
(12:37):
trying to get through the same traffic, but they at
least have lights in siren. We finally went onto some
alternate routes and work away up to the scene and
we see police. There's tons of police there. We get
there and here we are watching now, which to us
is almost eerie and bizarre. Yet another person pumping gasoline,
(12:58):
shot dead, doing what we all do every day, and
the tension is continuing to grow.
Speaker 5 (13:05):
Shortly after the crime scene was secured, Virginia Police held
a press conference. They described how they responded and what
they were searching for.
Speaker 17 (13:15):
We are looking for a white van that may had
a ladder rack on top of it. We do not,
in our stress, we do not know if it was
involved in the shooting or not. It was seen in
the area by several people, and we do want to
talk to those people. We had a Virginia State Trooper uniform.
Trooper was across the street from the shooting work in
the traffic accident. He heard the shots. He ran directly
(13:37):
across the street and rendered aid through the victim until
the rescue squad arrived. Once at the hospital, the victim
was pronounced dead.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
The victim, Kenneth Bridges, was a family man. He had
six children and the wife of twenty five years.
Speaker 6 (13:54):
Obviously, everyone was devastated at this horrendous act. In this
horrendous event, losing a loving, hunt husband and a strong, giving,
caring father. Since that time, however, I have seen the
family become stronger and stronger as the hours go by.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
Bridges was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had just been passing
through the DC area when his life was tragically cut short.
Friends say Bridges was a pillar of his community. He
co founded Mata, a nonprofit company which fosters black owned businesses.
Speaker 18 (14:27):
I'm telling you this was a near perfect man who
loved his family, who loved his people. Kenny was a visionary,
a man with great purpose, single minded purpose that he
had built his entire world around. Ken Bridges has infected
thousands and thousands of people all across the country with
(14:47):
this vision.
Speaker 5 (14:48):
Of his The impacts of the d C sniper attacks
were spreading further and further. Families and communities all across
the country had now been affected in various perable ways.
Speaker 11 (15:02):
We're realizing that this thing is not getting smaller, it's
not getting narrower, it's getting larger.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
This is Channel nine reporter Dave's statter again.
Speaker 11 (15:13):
All along this ninety five Carter people are being attacked.
We see it in Montgomery County, Maryland, Prince George's County, Maryland.
We're still trying to figure out what's going on, Why
is this happening. We're talking to police every day, and
it was clear they were having a bit of a
time making sense of why these attacks were occurring at
these locations, and that just really added to the fear
(15:33):
of everybody because nobody could make clear sense of it.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
By this point, ten people had been shot for what
seemed like no reason, and the public had very little
information to go on. All anyone knew was to be
on the lookout for a white van or white box truck.
The public was losing confidence in law enforcement's abilities. Police
were under tremendous pressure to catch these killers. Things seemed
(16:00):
to be working, So what was their plan?
Speaker 12 (16:05):
We had strategies, I mean, I started out and I
had a mission.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
This is Drew Tracy, retired Assistant Chief of Police from
Montgomery County.
Speaker 12 (16:15):
We had to protect our first responders, we had to
protect the citizens, but we also had to have that
investigative role and that ability to stop what was going on,
and that was our mission.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
But how would they find the shooters? Tracy says they
employed a tactic known as a drag net. It starts
with police creating a large perimeter around a crime scene
to ensnare any potential suspects.
Speaker 12 (16:40):
We actually had circles that we put on a map,
so if a shooting went out, we knew that vehicle
could only go in fifteen or twenty minutes so far,
so we tried to slow things down, slow it by
slowing traffic almost type of roadblocks. And what we did
is we had immediate action teams.
Speaker 11 (17:00):
We need to be on.
Speaker 12 (17:01):
Scene in two to three minutes of any critical incident
or possible incident. Then we worked on predetermined roles. I
went over a game plan and showed if the shooting
is within this district, here's everybody's predetermined location they had
to go to.
Speaker 19 (17:18):
And then what we would do.
Speaker 12 (17:19):
Is bring in their support we'd get plane closed units
who look like normal people try to get closer in
to try to pick out a suspect or a vehicle.
So then we could bring in the tactical officers and
utilize the takedown in a safe way, so we wouldn't
put people in danger. The thing that I think was well,
(17:40):
I know for a fact, was really holding us back
is we didn't get good suspect information. They would put
out multiple lookouts because people would just scatter from a
certain area and you had vehicles going in every direction
and no one knew exactly if one was involved or not.
So we had a pretty good game plan, but the
problem was we aren't being provided good intelligence and suspect
(18:04):
information from lookout that hurt us.
Speaker 5 (18:08):
One incident directly after the shooting of Kenneth Bridges highlights
this issue. Police searched nearby motels looking for a suspect.
They had a somewhat fuzzy picture of the suspect from
a security camera and with a description from that, police
detained and questioned a man at one of the motels,
but it was quickly the termed he wasn't the sniper,
(18:28):
and so by the end of the day, no viable
suspects have been arrested. As the shooting spread further from DC,
(18:51):
nearby jurisdictions were biding their time, fearful that at any
moment an attack what happen in their area.
Speaker 19 (18:58):
I was absolutely sure that we were going to get
a shooting. My name is Bruce Gooth. I'm a retired
lieutenant from Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia. Fairfax is
four hundred square miles by one point two million people,
and I was sure we were going to get hit
sooner or later. Sure enough, on October fourteenth, one of
(19:22):
my guys who was working called me on my cellphone
and said, Hey, I think we just had a sniper
shooting down at the Home Depot, which is the False
Church area of Fairfax County, which is right at the
border of Arlington County in Fairfax County. He said that
a woman had been shot in the head underneath the
parking garage.
Speaker 5 (19:41):
The victim was forty seven year old FBI analyst Linda Franklin.
She was loading shopping bags into the trunk of her
car right before she was shot. Linda was with her husband,
Ted Franklin, who then called nine to one to one
in distress. A warning The following audio could be upsetting
to some listeners.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Where are you at and with the home people.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
Un roughed.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
You had shot? Was shot? Two shot of the hood.
Speaker 19 (20:36):
So I got in my car and I drove down
to Falls Church. I was one of the first detectives there.
My first memory was the smell of diesel diesel fuel
from the ambulance. There was an ambulance parked underneath the
parking garage. Inside the ambulance was mister Franklin. They had
put him in there. Obviously he was quite distraught. It
(20:59):
was adistrophic head injury that he witnessed, and he had
been spattered with blood.
Speaker 5 (21:07):
General nine reporter Dave Statter also rushed to the scene.
Speaker 11 (21:12):
After a long day of working on the sniper case
on October fourteenth, my Patrick goes off. It's my colleague
Greg geis telling me there's a shooting right up the
street at the home depot at the top of our street.
I race up to the top of the street in
my car, come into the shopping center and apparently I
came in from the opposite side of police and fire,
(21:32):
and I go into this covered parking area outside the
home depot and I'm pull up and I see a
grocery cart and it's full of stuff. And I look
down from that grocery cart and there's a woman's body
lying on the pavement. Her head is covered with some
kind of yellow sheet, and I realized, well, I'm way
too close, and I immediately pull out to just outside
(21:53):
the covered area and there are police running with police
tape to secure the scene. I pulled out my home
video camera and you see in my first video the
ambulance pull up and go up to look at Miss
Franklin's body, and the next thing I see are police
(22:17):
officers running with their guns drawn across Route fifty, a
six lane highway, to an apartment complex across the street
where there's a white vehicle that looks sort of like
a box truck. They have their guns drawn on what
turned out to be painters who were coming out of
the apartment building, and they put their hands up immediately.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
The painters were just in the wrong place at the
wrong time, so police let them go.
Speaker 11 (22:43):
We were reporting. I went live on the air with
a phone report because I didn't have a live TV
truck with me and no other crews were there. We
broke into coverage with what appeared to be another shooting.
Police obviously had a plan for the next shooting. They
shut down a good portion of the Capitol Beltway that
brings Washingrington, DC. They wanted to make sure that they
could get the vehicle, and the lookout that they knew
(23:04):
they were looking for that evening was a white box truck.
They shut down Route fifty, they shut down four ninety
ninety five, and it created an enormous traffic gym that evening.
Speaker 5 (23:14):
According to Virginia Detective Bruce Gooth, it was quickly clear
to them that this was a sniper shooting, and they
had limited time to catch the vehicle before it was
too late.
Speaker 19 (23:24):
I don't think there was a soul in law enforcement
that didn't think for a second that it wasn't them.
It was clear that it was a somewhat long range shot.
We had our SWAT team put a perimeter up around
where we were to kind of protect us while we
were working a crime scene. We had pre planned that.
Speaker 5 (23:44):
Once again, the night ended with no real suspects, but
perhaps for the first time, law enforcement had a viable
witness who said he'd seen not just a vehicle but
the actual shooter. The witness was a man named Matthew Dowdy.
Speaker 19 (23:59):
And he just described a vehicle and he said the
guy was leaning out like on the driver's side mirror.
He saw the rifle, saw the shot go off. He
was inside the parking lot. This guy we had to
investigate and had two detectives take him back to the
station and get a statement from him. You know, that
was the first lead where someone had actually seen somebody.
(24:23):
That next day after the murder, we had a debrief
with Montgomery County and all the other jurisdictions.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
Virginia officials shared the specific details of Matthew Dowdy's story.
He said he saw an olive skinned man step out
of a cream colored van. The man then shot Franklin
with an AK assault rifle. Dowdy said. The man then
got back into the van and drove away. Dowdy described
the vehicle as a Chevy astro van with a broken
(24:50):
tail light.
Speaker 19 (24:53):
I'll never forget this Chief Moose ten minutes into when
we were trying to get everybody settled in, and he
waved me over. He sat down and he goes, you
are absolutely nuts for having this meeting and putting out
all you're going to put out, you know, as much
as everybody's leaking, all this stuff is going to get
out that there's a witness. And I said, well, you
(25:13):
know that that's just the way it is, because I'm
not holding back information from other homicide detectives. And you know,
we'll take our lumps. If it leaks, it leaks, and
you know, we'll deal with it. But I'll never forget
him shaking his head like you're crazy. But we made
up our mind. You know, we were going to share
whatever we had with surely the homicide detectives that we
(25:36):
were dealing with, and they had helped us in the
past with other cases, so there are people I could trust.
Speaker 5 (25:43):
This incident was especially puzzling to investigators. Had the snipers
specifically targeted an FBI agent. If so, was this shooting
some sort of message sent to law enforcement that not
even they were safe. Up to this point, there had
been nothing to suggest that these attacks were anything but random,
(26:04):
but now investigators were unsure. On top of all this,
the witness, Matthew Dowdie, described the suspect as an olive
skinned man with an ak. This reinforced the notion that
the snipers were potentially terrorists from the Middle East, but
profilers had determined by this point that that was incredibly unlikely.
(26:25):
So what was going on here?
Speaker 11 (26:27):
My thought process was maybe different than some others. What's
going through my mind not what I'm reporting, but what
I'm thinking clearly at that time is that this is
some sort of international terrorism, because what I'm rickly realizing
is that with a few bullets and a vehicle, somebody
is shutting down commerce in the area, panicking hordes of
(26:48):
people in and around the nation's capital. And I'm thinking,
here we are, year ofter nine to eleven, this is
likely some sort of international terrorism. That's just a gut
I had from watching it. You know, if you live
in Israel or a place where there's lots of bombings
and car bombs and bombs on buses and in restaurants,
you'll live a certain way and you're used to it.
(27:09):
We're not used to that in the Washington area, where
there's a lot of random shootings where people are just
shot doing their routine business. So it's just going through
my mind, what an unusual way to shut us down
and to really impact us.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
Channel nine reporter Dave Stanner kept up with the Linda
Franklin story for the next few days, hoping that the
witness identification might lead to a break in the case.
Speaker 11 (27:34):
The next morning, they continued doing the lookouts for the
white van, more stopping of white vans white box trucks,
but they find out soon that the information they got
was bad.
Speaker 20 (27:45):
In suburban Virginia Today where the killer last struck, a
frantic search for clues touched off by a phony witness's
confession last night, but his story that he'd seen the killer,
his van his gun was all a lie, and Task
Force leader Chief Charles Moose was especially worried about that.
Speaker 15 (28:02):
Maybe we didn't hear from some people because they saw
that picture and they said the person I was thinking
about doesn't have one.
Speaker 7 (28:09):
It ohs.
Speaker 11 (28:11):
You can see in the back of my video a
gentleman in the video that I didn't realize who he
was till later. This a guy named Matthew Dowdy. He
was thirty seven years old at the time, and Matthew
Daddy said he witnessed the shooting of Linda Franklin at
the home depot and what he said was a white
box truck sped from the scene. Police investigated further Matthew
(28:32):
Dowdy's claim, and what they determined was that Matthew Doddy,
thanks to security camera video, they could tell was still
inside the store when Linda Franklin was shot. He was
not outside the store in the parking lot area where
this occurred, in the covered parking area, and they quickly
discounted his information. Matthew Dowddy. They also found out how
to long criminal record. He like others, had heard of
(28:52):
the white box truck in the news. It was prominently
out there, and thought he went and interjected himself in
the case he did it, I don't know other than
I'm sure he didn't have a lot of love for
police because he had a long criminal record and actually
had escaped from jail or prison many years earlier in
another charge. Not too long after the shooting of Linda Franklin,
(29:13):
the police chief of Fairfax County, Tom Manger, held a
press conference and said they had the wrong information, made
it very clear that they were charging this person who
gave him the wrong information. Apologized for letting the public
in on this information and it was a bit of
a setback for this case. An interesting note about Matthew
(29:34):
Dowdy About two years later and a mile and a
half away, he murdered and raped a woman at a
motel in the city of False Church, Virginia, and was
arrested and convicted for that murder. So his criminal activity
continued after providing bogus information to police at the Home
Depot shooting.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
Following this incident, journalist and police alank began to doubt
earlier witness accounts. What if the first description of a
white box truck was false and police were on a
wild goose chase. Some experts came forward with ideas.
Speaker 9 (30:08):
At the time of the DC sniper case. I was
following the events just as anyone else was. I tended
to look at them a little bit differently, I think
because I've been doing this research. My name is Gary Wells.
I'm a professor of psychology at Iowa State University, and
(30:33):
my main line of study is the reliability of eyewitnesses.
So I'm looking at it differently, and I'm looking for
what are witnesses going to be able to tell? Really,
people process a lot less information than we think. When
they scan in their environment, They're really only taking in
(30:54):
a very small fraction of information. They get the sense
that they're seeing everything, when in fact there's being very little,
and so therefore a lot doesn't get stored. Moreover, we
now know that memory changes some over time. You take
in new information and you kind of stick it in
with what you remembered, and now you've got a new memory.
(31:18):
So I guess my biggest interest and concern was how
the investigators of the DC sniper shootings were proceeding here.
And I was particularly concerned about this relatively early report
about a white truck or a white man. The reason
(31:39):
I was concerned about that was because I thought it
was premature. I didn't think that law enforcement, under the circumstances,
should have given much credibility to that report. Somehow, the
investigators decided to release that information and in effect sort
of say we're looking for a white van. I think
(32:01):
that was a huge mistake. There's two reasons to really
be concerned about that. One is that you're creating a
situation in which it's very difficult for law enforcement to
win this game. If it was a white van, then
(32:21):
you can pretty much guarantee that this person's going to
switch vehicles because oh, they're onto the white van. We
can't do that. If on the other hand, it wasn't
the white van that gives a lot to cover a
lot of comfort to the shooters, because it's sort of like,
h they have no idea what they're looking at, right,
(32:42):
So you just gave them permission to continue with their
standard mo because everybody's looking for a white van. From
a witness perspective, it's a particularly bad thing to do,
because it turns out I did a little bit of
homework the time to find out that white vans are
(33:03):
pretty close to the most common vehicle on the road
in urban environments. And the reason they are is because
they're so often used as service vehicles. So you know,
those appliance repair men and those roofers and those plumbers
and all these companies are driving all over the place
(33:24):
in white vans. So what happens then is as soon
as you discover there's been a shooting and you look around,
you'll always see a white van. So of course, the
next shooting, white van, next shooting, somebody reports white van.
Of course, somebody's always going to report a white van
in any urban setting. You're taking away their opportunity to
(33:46):
see anything other than a white van at that point,
and everybody knew to be looking for that. I think
that was that was a pretty bad mistake.
Speaker 5 (33:56):
But if not a white van or white box truck,
than what had police seen any other vehicles at the
crime scenes?
Speaker 14 (34:05):
You know, I'll never understand that. How did they rule
out all other vehicles and they being police department's, FBI officials, everyone.
Speaker 5 (34:15):
This is Greg Geiss, a photographer and videographer for Channel
nine News. On October third, the second day of the shootings.
Greg was covering the attacks.
Speaker 14 (34:26):
I was with reporter Gary Reels. We're driving southbound on
Connecticut Avenue. I kept the fire and EMS dispatch channels
locked on several different radios. And what will stick with
me forever are two different police officers in two different
cars key their mic and say, you know, I see
(34:48):
this dark colored crown Fit or Capri, sort of an
old police looking vehicle driving with the lights on, heading north.
And I turned to the right and said to Gary Reels,
I wonder if the sniper's driving a war wagon or
a hoopdie. A war wagon being a term used for
(35:08):
old cars that are sometimes used in gang like violence
by some of what at the time were called cruise
in the Washington area and a hooptie being just an
old junk car that are often used sometimes by folks
who've stolen a car for joy ride or somebody who's
using a stolen vehicle to commit a crime. I left
(35:30):
that evening with a feeling that in some way, a dark,
older model police style Sa'dan may have been involved in
these crimes. The powers that be arrived at the fact
that they're looking for a white box truck. I never
bought into that. Everything I heard indicated a dark, old
(35:54):
model Sedan, and we would engage in conversation different officers
in myself and I would relay that story about the
border vehicles that I heard from Metropolitan Police in Washington,
and the cops were perplexed that they never got that information.
They never heard the nu odds of the cops king
their mic and if you will, flashing a lookout for
(36:18):
what they viewed were suspicious vehicles leaving a scene.
Speaker 5 (36:22):
In a press conference, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose
conceited maybe the white box truck identification was a misfire.
Speaker 15 (36:33):
It's not beyond any reality that the person our people
involved in this would have numerous vehicles that they could
be using.
Speaker 5 (36:41):
If law enforcement had missed the drop on other suspect vehicles.
What else could they have missed? Little did they know
the shooters had actually been trying to contact them for
the past week. The day after the Lend of Franklin shooting,
the police in Rockville, Maryland got a phone call from
the snipers. Good point, what are the people that are
(37:02):
causing the killing of your ear?
Speaker 3 (37:05):
The terrified, it said, call me God, do not release the.
Speaker 5 (37:09):
Press next time on Monster DC sniper.
Speaker 11 (37:16):
The first time that this area so far south has
been brought into what seems to be another case of
a serial sniper attack.
Speaker 15 (37:24):
When I arrived, our victim was laying in the parking
lot and his wife was sitting on the sidewalk and
had her husband's head and her lap.
Speaker 12 (37:33):
To the rear of where the showcasing was found, there
was some type of message that was attached to a tree.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Do not release to the press five red stars.
Speaker 11 (37:43):
You have our turns.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
They are non negotiable.
Speaker 8 (37:46):
No self respecting terrorists is going to do that. Number one,
number two We finally get a demand.
Speaker 20 (37:53):
At that point the Sniper Task Force took this information
and followed it up, and the pieces began to fall
into Place.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Monster d C 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
(38:26):
of 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,
(38:47):
or you can call us at one eight three, three,
two eight five six six sixty seven. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of iHeart 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 iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:26):
Saying somebody got shot as fire Personnaco.
Speaker 3 (00:29):
Okay, somebody got shrial, but I did playing there man.
He's laying on the car and there was a white
man just went by with two guys in it. The
man just went gone, now walk forward. We did not
the two thirty two thirty four went out a whitey. Okay,
well there go, there's.
Speaker 2 (00:47):
A going down thirty color chwards your distraction. I'll go
with sixty four, okay. Sean taken information the asters all
the way. I'm the possibatoration.
Speaker 4 (01:00):
A call in the evening on October ninth from a
source saying, you need to get out to Manassas. There's
been another one.
Speaker 5 (01:10):
This is Washington Post reporter Josh White.
Speaker 4 (01:13):
There was nothing more than that. I was given a location.
I knew the area, so I knew that they would
have shut down the intersection right by the gas station.
So I went past the gas station, got off onto
a side road and came up the back way, and
I thought, well, if you wanted to get a really
good view of the crime scene, you would go up
(01:33):
onto this hill. There was a Bob Evans that overlooked
the gas station from across the road. Standing there on
that hill and looking down at that crime scene, it
was lit up at night. Somebody standing there would have
been framed fully in light. It's like a lit up
target with a million access points. They had shut down
the parking lot and they were interviewing everyone who was leaving.
(01:56):
I drove up and I got into an adjacent parking lot,
and I walked right to where I thought.
Speaker 5 (02:00):
Would be the best view.
Speaker 4 (02:01):
That, too, was something that the snipers realized that that
was the best view of that gas station view because
I'm fairly certain I stood directly next to the vehicle
that they had been using to kill tons and tons
of people facing the gas station below.
Speaker 1 (02:19):
There is a ruthless person on the loose.
Speaker 6 (02:22):
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Speaker 5 (02:30):
They killed the five people in one day and then
went on the rampage for the next month.
Speaker 7 (02:35):
It is quite a mystery.
Speaker 5 (02:36):
The police say they have never had a crime quite
like this.
Speaker 8 (02:40):
Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going
to go right straight through our bulletproof vests.
Speaker 9 (02:45):
The white.
Speaker 5 (02:48):
From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is monster DC sniper.
Speaker 10 (03:01):
Nine sniper attacks in eight days have the Washington metropolitan
area on high alert. Since last Wednesday, seven people have
been killed and two wounded. One was a thirteen year
old boy who was critically wounded at a Maryland middle school.
The latest shooting took place just after eight o'clock last night,
about thirty miles west of Washington, d C.
Speaker 5 (03:24):
October ninth, two thousand and two. It has now been
a full week since the spree of sniper killings began
in the DC metro area. Most of the attacks had
taken place in Maryland, except for one shooting at a
Michael's Inspontsylvania, Virginia, but now the snipers were on the move.
Speaker 11 (03:42):
On October ninth, the week following the Montgomery County shootings,
a man who worked in an office building in Manassas
was out pumping gas not too far from where he
worked got named Dean Myers.
Speaker 5 (03:54):
This is Dave Statner, reporter for Channel nine News.
Speaker 11 (03:58):
He's on Sudley Road and Saint Prince William County, Virginia,
and he's just pumping gas and shot and killed.
Speaker 5 (04:05):
Bob Myers. The victim's brother, spoke about the shooting at
a press conference.
Speaker 12 (04:11):
I would like to know the reason that would help me,
but I recognize that whatever reason it is, it won't
be a good one.
Speaker 5 (04:21):
This attack sent a ripple through the region. It was
the third shooting to take place at a gas station.
As Channel nine reporter Dave Stander points out, now the
people of Virginia had a lot to worry about.
Speaker 11 (04:35):
This is where you're really starting to notice how cautious
people are filling up with gasoline. People are being extremely
cautious and once again, like the people the first day
we knew about this, the woman vacuuming our car, the
taxi driver who's pumping gas. This happened to Dean Myers.
He's filling up with gasoline. So now the real focus
is what do I do when I'm pumping gas. I
have to get gasoline from my car. There are gas
(04:57):
stations that are starting to put up barricade or harps
to block your people are ducking around the other side
of their vehicle, or putting the nozzle into their vehicle
and walking away from the vehicle, trying to get some
sort of cover. So people are clearly scared filling up
with gasoline, and this shooting of Dean Myers just added
to that fear.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
Who could have imagined that somewhere as mundane as a
gas station could become the impetus for such crippling fear.
I visited the Sonoco station in Manassas, Virginia, where Dean
Myers was killed, and the scene brought back some vivid
memories from that October in two thousand and two. Maybe
one of the indelible images that I have in my
(05:40):
mind from those days. I mean, it really is of
seeing the blue tarp that was serving as a bit
of a barrier protecting people. So people are pumping gas
and they're essentially under around behind this blue tarp. And
the other thing I recall is hearing stories of cops
being asked by folks who needed a fill. Hey, I'll
(06:03):
give you some extra money to fill up my gas
tank because I'm so afraid. I'm afraid to do it myself,
Would you take this extra twenty to fill up my
gas tank? That sort of speaks to how much fear
there was at the time. I think the other thing
that we can't imagine today someone getting away with all
of these episodes, all of these attacks and not clearly
(06:26):
being established on some kind of surveillance cameras, some kind
of CCTV. In two thousand nineteen, come on, you couldn't
even attempt something like what we're talking about now shooting
someone dead in a Sunoco gas station. But we're talking
about two thousand and two. We're also talking post nine
to eleven, so you're talking about putting more of those
(06:49):
systems in place.
Speaker 13 (06:50):
At that point, we still have officers at the scene
searching for evidence, going over it iculously.
Speaker 5 (07:01):
Police believed they were on the sniper's trail. At a
press conference following the Dean Meyer shooting, officials revealed what
type of vehicle they thought the snipers were using.
Speaker 7 (07:11):
The only information we have on a possible vehicle was
a white mini van described as a panel vehicle, meaning
it had only front passenger windows.
Speaker 13 (07:22):
The rest was solid.
Speaker 5 (07:24):
Officials thought the snipers might still be in the area,
so police set up roadblocks on the streets near the
crime scene. Nearby parking lots were shut down. No one
was allowed to leave. Hundreds of people were stopped and questioned,
but no suspects were detained. Officer Stephen Bailey's job was
to scout the Bob Evans parking lot for potential witnesses.
(07:46):
He remembers approaching one specific vehicle. The driver inside said
he was on vacation. This man also said he'd been
directed into the parking lot by another officer. Bailey said
the man was quote very polite and very courteous, and
so with no reason to detain him, Bailey let the
(08:07):
man leave. It would be months later that Officer Bailey
had a terrible realization the man he met that day
was the killer they were looking for.
Speaker 4 (08:18):
I think that, in a lot of ways is a
microcosm of the challenge that was facing everybody.
Speaker 5 (08:24):
This is Washington Post reporter Josh White. He told the
story of standing near the killer's vehicle at the beginning
of the episode, but like Officer Stephen Bailey, he didn't
think anything of it.
Speaker 14 (08:35):
At the time.
Speaker 4 (08:36):
Nobody knew who they were looking for, nobody knew what
vehicle to look for. Nobody knew the mechanism of the shooting.
Was it coming from a car, was it coming from outside. Ultimately,
when they found the vehicle, it was obvious to everyone
why the vehicle was so difficult to detect. It was
an engineered killing machine. It was built in a way
(08:56):
to avoid detection. It was altered in a way that
if you you were to walk right up to it,
you wouldn't think twice. It wouldn't strike you externally as
anything to worry about. I thought, I don't know how
they're ever going to catch this person. It really showed
the vulnerability. It showed that if somebody wants to go
after someone who they have no connection to, randomly in
(09:18):
a metropolitan area, that's millions of people, what's stopping them?
Speaker 15 (09:22):
For me?
Speaker 4 (09:23):
That was one of the scariest moments. That shooting highlighted
how difficult this all was and how frightening it all was.
Speaker 5 (09:31):
This shooting also marked another major shift in the case,
one that greatly raised the stakes for the snipers.
Speaker 4 (09:39):
They I think unbeknownst to them, obviously, they had committed
a crime in a county that had one of the
more aggressive prosecutors from a capital punishment perspective, Paul Ebert, do.
Speaker 16 (09:56):
You a distinction, but not unusual occasions happened.
Speaker 5 (10:01):
This is Paul Ebert, Virginia's longest serving prosecutor. I spoke
with him at his office in Prince William County. He
remembers when Dean Meyers was shot in his district.
Speaker 16 (10:11):
My daughter had strange enough about a half a block
where it has happened. When it happened, you out a bank.
I went to the scene. I got normally do on
a murder case. We don't have that many murders. It
helps me to be able to visualize what's going on.
A lot of press, a lot of people. The body
was gone, chucked around. Of course, it was pretty ivous
(10:32):
that the snipers had done this before, the history leading
up to it, and he I had no idea if
and when would ever get the case try. I talked
with a couple of reporters that I knew, and I
did say that if this is a sniper, it looks
like it is just a death case. Absolute some kind
of a great mitigating factor. It was a capitol case.
Speaker 5 (10:56):
Paul Elbert was issuing a direct threat to the snipers.
We went on television that day to say that quote
this case, if I have anything to do with it,
will be prosecuted in this jurisdiction to the full extent
of the law. Ebert has sentenced more inmates to death
row than any other Virginia prosecutor. So if the sniper
(11:16):
was following the news, they would have known that if caught,
they would eventually face the death penalty. The snipers weren't
(11:39):
done in Virginia, as the area was still reeling from
the death of Dean Harold Myers. Tragedy struck once more.
Channel nine reporter Dave's Statter was there on.
Speaker 11 (11:51):
The morning of October eleventh, two days after Dean Myers
has shot pumping guests in the Monastass area of Virginia.
Further south, in the Vicksburg area, there's another man shot,
fifty three year old Kenneth Bridges. He's shot dead pumping
gasoline at Nexxon station. This is just off Interstate ninety five,
of heavily traveled roadway between Richmond and Washington, this portion
(12:15):
of I ninety five. We worked our way down there
to just off the highway, and it was difficult getting
to that scene. The traffic was just horrendous because the
roadway was shut down just off I ninety five. Police
were probably stopping vehicles coming and going. As we're traveling
down to the scene, we're being passed by convoys of
federal agents heading down there and police from other jurisdictions
(12:37):
trying to get through the same traffic, but they at
least have lights in siren. We finally went onto some
alternate routes and work away up to the scene and
we see police. There's tons of police there. We get
there and here we are watching now, which to us
is almost eerie and bizarre. Yet another person pumping gasoline,
(12:58):
shot dead, doing what we all do every day, and
the tension is continuing to grow.
Speaker 5 (13:05):
Shortly after the crime scene was secured, Virginia Police held
a press conference. They described how they responded and what
they were searching for.
Speaker 17 (13:15):
We are looking for a white van that may had
a ladder rack on top of it. We do not,
in our stress, we do not know if it was
involved in the shooting or not. It was seen in
the area by several people, and we do want to
talk to those people. We had a Virginia State Trooper uniform.
Trooper was across the street from the shooting work in
the traffic accident. He heard the shots. He ran directly
(13:37):
across the street and rendered aid through the victim until
the rescue squad arrived. Once at the hospital, the victim
was pronounced dead.
Speaker 5 (13:47):
The victim, Kenneth Bridges, was a family man. He had
six children and the wife of twenty five years.
Speaker 6 (13:54):
Obviously, everyone was devastated at this horrendous act. In this
horrendous event, losing a loving, hunt husband and a strong, giving,
caring father. Since that time, however, I have seen the
family become stronger and stronger as the hours go by.
Speaker 5 (14:11):
Bridges was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had just been passing
through the DC area when his life was tragically cut short.
Friends say Bridges was a pillar of his community. He
co founded Mata, a nonprofit company which fosters black owned businesses.
Speaker 18 (14:27):
I'm telling you this was a near perfect man who
loved his family, who loved his people. Kenny was a visionary,
a man with great purpose, single minded purpose that he
had built his entire world around. Ken Bridges has infected
thousands and thousands of people all across the country with
(14:47):
this vision.
Speaker 5 (14:48):
Of his The impacts of the d C sniper attacks
were spreading further and further. Families and communities all across
the country had now been affected in various perable ways.
Speaker 11 (15:02):
We're realizing that this thing is not getting smaller, it's
not getting narrower, it's getting larger.
Speaker 5 (15:10):
This is Channel nine reporter Dave's statter again.
Speaker 11 (15:13):
All along this ninety five Carter people are being attacked.
We see it in Montgomery County, Maryland, Prince George's County, Maryland.
We're still trying to figure out what's going on, Why
is this happening. We're talking to police every day, and
it was clear they were having a bit of a
time making sense of why these attacks were occurring at
these locations, and that just really added to the fear
(15:33):
of everybody because nobody could make clear sense of it.
Speaker 5 (15:38):
By this point, ten people had been shot for what
seemed like no reason, and the public had very little
information to go on. All anyone knew was to be
on the lookout for a white van or white box truck.
The public was losing confidence in law enforcement's abilities. Police
were under tremendous pressure to catch these killers. Things seemed
(16:00):
to be working, So what was their plan?
Speaker 12 (16:05):
We had strategies, I mean, I started out and I
had a mission.
Speaker 5 (16:10):
This is Drew Tracy, retired Assistant Chief of Police from
Montgomery County.
Speaker 12 (16:15):
We had to protect our first responders, we had to
protect the citizens, but we also had to have that
investigative role and that ability to stop what was going on,
and that was our mission.
Speaker 5 (16:28):
But how would they find the shooters? Tracy says they
employed a tactic known as a drag net. It starts
with police creating a large perimeter around a crime scene
to ensnare any potential suspects.
Speaker 12 (16:40):
We actually had circles that we put on a map,
so if a shooting went out, we knew that vehicle
could only go in fifteen or twenty minutes so far,
so we tried to slow things down, slow it by
slowing traffic almost type of roadblocks. And what we did
is we had immediate action teams.
Speaker 11 (17:00):
We need to be on.
Speaker 12 (17:01):
Scene in two to three minutes of any critical incident
or possible incident. Then we worked on predetermined roles. I
went over a game plan and showed if the shooting
is within this district, here's everybody's predetermined location they had
to go to.
Speaker 19 (17:18):
And then what we would do.
Speaker 12 (17:19):
Is bring in their support we'd get plane closed units
who look like normal people try to get closer in
to try to pick out a suspect or a vehicle.
So then we could bring in the tactical officers and
utilize the takedown in a safe way, so we wouldn't
put people in danger. The thing that I think was well,
(17:40):
I know for a fact, was really holding us back
is we didn't get good suspect information. They would put
out multiple lookouts because people would just scatter from a
certain area and you had vehicles going in every direction
and no one knew exactly if one was involved or not.
So we had a pretty good game plan, but the
problem was we aren't being provided good intelligence and suspect
(18:04):
information from lookout that hurt us.
Speaker 5 (18:08):
One incident directly after the shooting of Kenneth Bridges highlights
this issue. Police searched nearby motels looking for a suspect.
They had a somewhat fuzzy picture of the suspect from
a security camera and with a description from that, police
detained and questioned a man at one of the motels,
but it was quickly the termed he wasn't the sniper,
(18:28):
and so by the end of the day, no viable
suspects have been arrested. As the shooting spread further from DC,
(18:51):
nearby jurisdictions were biding their time, fearful that at any
moment an attack what happen in their area.
Speaker 19 (18:58):
I was absolutely sure that we were going to get
a shooting. My name is Bruce Gooth. I'm a retired
lieutenant from Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia. Fairfax is
four hundred square miles by one point two million people,
and I was sure we were going to get hit
sooner or later. Sure enough, on October fourteenth, one of
(19:22):
my guys who was working called me on my cellphone
and said, Hey, I think we just had a sniper
shooting down at the Home Depot, which is the False
Church area of Fairfax County, which is right at the
border of Arlington County in Fairfax County. He said that
a woman had been shot in the head underneath the
parking garage.
Speaker 5 (19:41):
The victim was forty seven year old FBI analyst Linda Franklin.
She was loading shopping bags into the trunk of her
car right before she was shot. Linda was with her husband,
Ted Franklin, who then called nine to one to one
in distress. A warning The following audio could be upsetting
to some listeners.
Speaker 2 (20:13):
Where are you at and with the home people.
Speaker 3 (20:17):
Un roughed.
Speaker 2 (20:24):
You had shot? Was shot? Two shot of the hood.
Speaker 19 (20:36):
So I got in my car and I drove down
to Falls Church. I was one of the first detectives there.
My first memory was the smell of diesel diesel fuel
from the ambulance. There was an ambulance parked underneath the
parking garage. Inside the ambulance was mister Franklin. They had
put him in there. Obviously he was quite distraught. It
(20:59):
was adistrophic head injury that he witnessed, and he had
been spattered with blood.
Speaker 5 (21:07):
General nine reporter Dave Statter also rushed to the scene.
Speaker 11 (21:12):
After a long day of working on the sniper case
on October fourteenth, my Patrick goes off. It's my colleague
Greg geis telling me there's a shooting right up the
street at the home depot at the top of our street.
I race up to the top of the street in
my car, come into the shopping center and apparently I
came in from the opposite side of police and fire,
(21:32):
and I go into this covered parking area outside the
home depot and I'm pull up and I see a
grocery cart and it's full of stuff. And I look
down from that grocery cart and there's a woman's body
lying on the pavement. Her head is covered with some
kind of yellow sheet, and I realized, well, I'm way
too close, and I immediately pull out to just outside
(21:53):
the covered area and there are police running with police
tape to secure the scene. I pulled out my home
video camera and you see in my first video the
ambulance pull up and go up to look at Miss
Franklin's body, and the next thing I see are police
(22:17):
officers running with their guns drawn across Route fifty, a
six lane highway, to an apartment complex across the street
where there's a white vehicle that looks sort of like
a box truck. They have their guns drawn on what
turned out to be painters who were coming out of
the apartment building, and they put their hands up immediately.
Speaker 5 (22:37):
The painters were just in the wrong place at the
wrong time, so police let them go.
Speaker 11 (22:43):
We were reporting. I went live on the air with
a phone report because I didn't have a live TV
truck with me and no other crews were there. We
broke into coverage with what appeared to be another shooting.
Police obviously had a plan for the next shooting. They
shut down a good portion of the Capitol Beltway that
brings Washingrington, DC. They wanted to make sure that they
could get the vehicle, and the lookout that they knew
(23:04):
they were looking for that evening was a white box truck.
They shut down Route fifty, they shut down four ninety
ninety five, and it created an enormous traffic gym that evening.
Speaker 5 (23:14):
According to Virginia Detective Bruce Gooth, it was quickly clear
to them that this was a sniper shooting, and they
had limited time to catch the vehicle before it was
too late.
Speaker 19 (23:24):
I don't think there was a soul in law enforcement
that didn't think for a second that it wasn't them.
It was clear that it was a somewhat long range shot.
We had our SWAT team put a perimeter up around
where we were to kind of protect us while we
were working a crime scene. We had pre planned that.
Speaker 5 (23:44):
Once again, the night ended with no real suspects, but
perhaps for the first time, law enforcement had a viable
witness who said he'd seen not just a vehicle but
the actual shooter. The witness was a man named Matthew Dowdy.
Speaker 19 (23:59):
And he just described a vehicle and he said the
guy was leaning out like on the driver's side mirror.
He saw the rifle, saw the shot go off. He
was inside the parking lot. This guy we had to
investigate and had two detectives take him back to the
station and get a statement from him. You know, that
was the first lead where someone had actually seen somebody.
(24:23):
That next day after the murder, we had a debrief
with Montgomery County and all the other jurisdictions.
Speaker 5 (24:30):
Virginia officials shared the specific details of Matthew Dowdy's story.
He said he saw an olive skinned man step out
of a cream colored van. The man then shot Franklin
with an AK assault rifle. Dowdy said. The man then
got back into the van and drove away. Dowdy described
the vehicle as a Chevy astro van with a broken
(24:50):
tail light.
Speaker 19 (24:53):
I'll never forget this Chief Moose ten minutes into when
we were trying to get everybody settled in, and he
waved me over. He sat down and he goes, you
are absolutely nuts for having this meeting and putting out
all you're going to put out, you know, as much
as everybody's leaking, all this stuff is going to get
out that there's a witness. And I said, well, you
(25:13):
know that that's just the way it is, because I'm
not holding back information from other homicide detectives. And you know,
we'll take our lumps. If it leaks, it leaks, and
you know, we'll deal with it. But I'll never forget
him shaking his head like you're crazy. But we made
up our mind. You know, we were going to share
whatever we had with surely the homicide detectives that we
(25:36):
were dealing with, and they had helped us in the
past with other cases, so there are people I could trust.
Speaker 5 (25:43):
This incident was especially puzzling to investigators. Had the snipers
specifically targeted an FBI agent. If so, was this shooting
some sort of message sent to law enforcement that not
even they were safe. Up to this point, there had
been nothing to suggest that these attacks were anything but random,
(26:04):
but now investigators were unsure. On top of all this,
the witness, Matthew Dowdie, described the suspect as an olive
skinned man with an ak. This reinforced the notion that
the snipers were potentially terrorists from the Middle East, but
profilers had determined by this point that that was incredibly unlikely.
(26:25):
So what was going on here?
Speaker 11 (26:27):
My thought process was maybe different than some others. What's
going through my mind not what I'm reporting, but what
I'm thinking clearly at that time is that this is
some sort of international terrorism, because what I'm rickly realizing
is that with a few bullets and a vehicle, somebody
is shutting down commerce in the area, panicking hordes of
(26:48):
people in and around the nation's capital. And I'm thinking,
here we are, year ofter nine to eleven, this is
likely some sort of international terrorism. That's just a gut
I had from watching it. You know, if you live
in Israel or a place where there's lots of bombings
and car bombs and bombs on buses and in restaurants,
you'll live a certain way and you're used to it.
(27:09):
We're not used to that in the Washington area, where
there's a lot of random shootings where people are just
shot doing their routine business. So it's just going through
my mind, what an unusual way to shut us down
and to really impact us.
Speaker 5 (27:24):
Channel nine reporter Dave Stanner kept up with the Linda
Franklin story for the next few days, hoping that the
witness identification might lead to a break in the case.
Speaker 11 (27:34):
The next morning, they continued doing the lookouts for the
white van, more stopping of white vans white box trucks,
but they find out soon that the information they got
was bad.
Speaker 20 (27:45):
In suburban Virginia Today where the killer last struck, a
frantic search for clues touched off by a phony witness's
confession last night, but his story that he'd seen the killer,
his van his gun was all a lie, and Task
Force leader Chief Charles Moose was especially worried about that.
Speaker 15 (28:02):
Maybe we didn't hear from some people because they saw
that picture and they said the person I was thinking
about doesn't have one.
Speaker 7 (28:09):
It ohs.
Speaker 11 (28:11):
You can see in the back of my video a
gentleman in the video that I didn't realize who he
was till later. This a guy named Matthew Dowdy. He
was thirty seven years old at the time, and Matthew
Daddy said he witnessed the shooting of Linda Franklin at
the home depot and what he said was a white
box truck sped from the scene. Police investigated further Matthew
(28:32):
Dowdy's claim, and what they determined was that Matthew Doddy,
thanks to security camera video, they could tell was still
inside the store when Linda Franklin was shot. He was
not outside the store in the parking lot area where
this occurred, in the covered parking area, and they quickly
discounted his information. Matthew Dowddy. They also found out how
to long criminal record. He like others, had heard of
(28:52):
the white box truck in the news. It was prominently
out there, and thought he went and interjected himself in
the case he did it, I don't know other than
I'm sure he didn't have a lot of love for
police because he had a long criminal record and actually
had escaped from jail or prison many years earlier in
another charge. Not too long after the shooting of Linda Franklin,
(29:13):
the police chief of Fairfax County, Tom Manger, held a
press conference and said they had the wrong information, made
it very clear that they were charging this person who
gave him the wrong information. Apologized for letting the public
in on this information and it was a bit of
a setback for this case. An interesting note about Matthew
(29:34):
Dowdy About two years later and a mile and a
half away, he murdered and raped a woman at a
motel in the city of False Church, Virginia, and was
arrested and convicted for that murder. So his criminal activity
continued after providing bogus information to police at the Home
Depot shooting.
Speaker 5 (29:52):
Following this incident, journalist and police alank began to doubt
earlier witness accounts. What if the first description of a
white box truck was false and police were on a
wild goose chase. Some experts came forward with ideas.
Speaker 9 (30:08):
At the time of the DC sniper case. I was
following the events just as anyone else was. I tended
to look at them a little bit differently, I think
because I've been doing this research. My name is Gary Wells.
I'm a professor of psychology at Iowa State University, and
(30:33):
my main line of study is the reliability of eyewitnesses.
So I'm looking at it differently, and I'm looking for
what are witnesses going to be able to tell? Really,
people process a lot less information than we think. When
they scan in their environment, They're really only taking in
(30:54):
a very small fraction of information. They get the sense
that they're seeing everything, when in fact there's being very little,
and so therefore a lot doesn't get stored. Moreover, we
now know that memory changes some over time. You take
in new information and you kind of stick it in
with what you remembered, and now you've got a new memory.
(31:18):
So I guess my biggest interest and concern was how
the investigators of the DC sniper shootings were proceeding here.
And I was particularly concerned about this relatively early report
about a white truck or a white man. The reason
(31:39):
I was concerned about that was because I thought it
was premature. I didn't think that law enforcement, under the circumstances,
should have given much credibility to that report. Somehow, the
investigators decided to release that information and in effect sort
of say we're looking for a white van. I think
(32:01):
that was a huge mistake. There's two reasons to really
be concerned about that. One is that you're creating a
situation in which it's very difficult for law enforcement to
win this game. If it was a white van, then
(32:21):
you can pretty much guarantee that this person's going to
switch vehicles because oh, they're onto the white van. We
can't do that. If on the other hand, it wasn't
the white van that gives a lot to cover a
lot of comfort to the shooters, because it's sort of like,
h they have no idea what they're looking at, right,
(32:42):
So you just gave them permission to continue with their
standard mo because everybody's looking for a white van. From
a witness perspective, it's a particularly bad thing to do,
because it turns out I did a little bit of
homework the time to find out that white vans are
(33:03):
pretty close to the most common vehicle on the road
in urban environments. And the reason they are is because
they're so often used as service vehicles. So you know,
those appliance repair men and those roofers and those plumbers
and all these companies are driving all over the place
(33:24):
in white vans. So what happens then is as soon
as you discover there's been a shooting and you look around,
you'll always see a white van. So of course, the
next shooting, white van, next shooting, somebody reports white van.
Of course, somebody's always going to report a white van
in any urban setting. You're taking away their opportunity to
(33:46):
see anything other than a white van at that point,
and everybody knew to be looking for that. I think
that was that was a pretty bad mistake.
Speaker 5 (33:56):
But if not a white van or white box truck,
than what had police seen any other vehicles at the
crime scenes?
Speaker 14 (34:05):
You know, I'll never understand that. How did they rule
out all other vehicles and they being police department's, FBI officials, everyone.
Speaker 5 (34:15):
This is Greg Geiss, a photographer and videographer for Channel
nine News. On October third, the second day of the shootings.
Greg was covering the attacks.
Speaker 14 (34:26):
I was with reporter Gary Reels. We're driving southbound on
Connecticut Avenue. I kept the fire and EMS dispatch channels
locked on several different radios. And what will stick with
me forever are two different police officers in two different
cars key their mic and say, you know, I see
(34:48):
this dark colored crown Fit or Capri, sort of an
old police looking vehicle driving with the lights on, heading north.
And I turned to the right and said to Gary Reels,
I wonder if the sniper's driving a war wagon or
a hoopdie. A war wagon being a term used for
(35:08):
old cars that are sometimes used in gang like violence
by some of what at the time were called cruise
in the Washington area and a hooptie being just an
old junk car that are often used sometimes by folks
who've stolen a car for joy ride or somebody who's
using a stolen vehicle to commit a crime. I left
(35:30):
that evening with a feeling that in some way, a dark,
older model police style Sa'dan may have been involved in
these crimes. The powers that be arrived at the fact
that they're looking for a white box truck. I never
bought into that. Everything I heard indicated a dark, old
(35:54):
model Sedan, and we would engage in conversation different officers
in myself and I would relay that story about the
border vehicles that I heard from Metropolitan Police in Washington,
and the cops were perplexed that they never got that information.
They never heard the nu odds of the cops king
their mic and if you will, flashing a lookout for
(36:18):
what they viewed were suspicious vehicles leaving a scene.
Speaker 5 (36:22):
In a press conference, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose
conceited maybe the white box truck identification was a misfire.
Speaker 15 (36:33):
It's not beyond any reality that the person our people
involved in this would have numerous vehicles that they could
be using.
Speaker 5 (36:41):
If law enforcement had missed the drop on other suspect vehicles.
What else could they have missed? Little did they know
the shooters had actually been trying to contact them for
the past week. The day after the Lend of Franklin shooting,
the police in Rockville, Maryland got a phone call from
the snipers. Good point, what are the people that are
(37:02):
causing the killing of your ear?
Speaker 3 (37:05):
The terrified, it said, call me God, do not release the.
Speaker 5 (37:09):
Press next time on Monster DC sniper.
Speaker 11 (37:16):
The first time that this area so far south has
been brought into what seems to be another case of
a serial sniper attack.
Speaker 15 (37:24):
When I arrived, our victim was laying in the parking
lot and his wife was sitting on the sidewalk and
had her husband's head and her lap.
Speaker 12 (37:33):
To the rear of where the showcasing was found, there
was some type of message that was attached to a tree.
Speaker 1 (37:39):
Do not release to the press five red stars.
Speaker 11 (37:43):
You have our turns.
Speaker 1 (37:44):
They are non negotiable.
Speaker 8 (37:46):
No self respecting terrorists is going to do that. Number one,
number two We finally get a demand.
Speaker 20 (37:53):
At that point the Sniper Task Force took this information
and followed it up, and the pieces began to fall
into Place.
Speaker 1 (38:05):
Monster d C 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
(38:26):
of 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,
(38:47):
or you can call us at one eight three, three,
two eight five six six sixty seven. Thanks for listening.
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