January 23, 2020 • 32 mins
On October 19th, a victim survives another attack outside of a steakhouse. And police get a phone call from the sniper.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of I Heart
Radio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in
this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or
individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those
of I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. October eight p m Ashland, Virginia, thirty
(00:26):
seven year old Jeffrey Hopper was walking with his wife Stephanie.
They were in the parking lot outside of Ponderosa Steakhouse
when a shot rang out from the woods. Tim meet
Chum was the first officer on the scene. In two
thousand two, I was a patrol officer at the Ashland
(00:47):
Police Department. We're walking in the parking lot, Um, ponder
rosa right, so put me back and in the time
and space walk me through it. Um. I had received
a call for a stall on our lost cell phone,
so I was taking that report a couple of miles
south of here, and he was asking, you know, what
have you heard about this whole sniper thing. And I
(01:09):
was like, you know, I've heard as much as you have.
I get the news, and he looked at me says
it wouldn't it be something if that guy came here
And he had just finished saying that when dispatch handed
me the call and they said respond to eight seventeen
England Street for a possible shooting. I looked at him, like,
(01:30):
no way, And the look on his face was priceless,
you know, just like, oh my gosh, what did I
just do to you? I'm marked and route told him
I was on my way. They said, we've had one call.
I got a mail down in the parking lot at
the Ponderosa. I asked him if there's any other information,
and they said, no new calls, no new information. And
(01:50):
that's when I called the sergeant on the radio and
I said, we may want to consider starting the response plan.
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 in her lap. I pulled past
them right to the end of the sidewalk here and
(02:13):
my car acted as a shield between the woods and
the hoppers. So instinctively, you just pull your car into
a position that sets up a barrier between the wooded
area and potentially more victims. Yes, Jeff was laying in
the parking lot, and Stephanie was sitting on the sidewalk
(02:34):
and she was holding pressure on his stomach. I told
her that I needed to verify the injury. So she
lifted up the towel that she was holding on him,
and I saw a pole about the size of a
nickel in the top of the victim's stomach. I feel
somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I wasn't expecting anybody.
(02:58):
Turn around. A guy standing there as a little before
than me. He had a chain around his neck. He
reached into his shirt and he pulled it out and
it was New York Police Department badge. He says, I'm retired.
What do you need? If there was somebody still here,
I wanted them to think that we were searching for them.
I asked him to use the spotlight on my car
(03:19):
to pan back and forth across the woods, and I
showed him where the shotgun release was in my car
and told him that if shots were fired, soon led
that way. There is a ruthless person on the loose.
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
of the murders. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. They killed
(03:42):
the five people in one day and then went on
the rampage for the next month. It is quite a mystery.
The police say they have never had a crime quite
like this. Be careful, these guys are using weapons that
are going to go right straight through our bulletproof vest
of my herd radio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster
(04:04):
DC Sniper. Jeff and Stephanie describe the two of them
and how they were working through this very serious situation together.
She was the calmest person I've ever seen on any
type of major scene like this. And when you have
(04:25):
somebody that's bleeding internally like that, their heart rate is up,
their blood pressures up, they can make them bleed out
a little bit faster. But Jeff was laying there, just
staying really calm. I told her, I said, Okay, the
best thing to do for a bleed is just a
whole pressure and it's not rocket science. She started to chuckle.
The victims started to laugh, and at this point, I'm like, okay,
(04:48):
can you guys let me in on the joke. Well,
she was a rocket scientist for NASA, so me telling
her that it wasn't rocket science, she kind of knew
that already. And they actually told me that they in
Pennsylvania visiting family. Intentionally, they didn't stop in Maryland, d C.
Or Northern Virginia because the shootings and they felt like
if they stopped closer to Richmond that it would be safer.
(05:13):
So the ambulance when they come up on scene normally
wait until law enforcement can make sure the scene is
safe for them to enter. I couldn't do that, so
we came up with a different plan for them to
come in and pick up Jeff. I got my shotgun.
I told the driver of the amulants to stay in
the driver's seat. I had the crew of the amulants
to come out of the back of the amulants um
(05:35):
I had them parked right behind my car bumper or
bumper so that the ambulance itself was also some type
of barricade. They get Jeff on the stretcher, they put
him in the ambulance, and we get them out onto
England Street and tell them to take the shoulder of
Interstate because we shut it down. By eight thirty, the
victim was arriving at the hospital and police across this
(05:55):
area had activated a coordinated tactical response. A plan put
in play is just last week, in the event of
a suspected sniper attack, very quickly, traffic was brought to
a complete stop. That's retired Maryland's date Police Lieutenant David Reichenbaum. Ordinarily,
if you do that, you've got phone calls going to politicians. Hey,
(06:18):
what's what's going on? Why are the roads blocked? I
can't get home, I can't go about my business. But
believe it or not, at this point, the public was
completely on board with with law enforcement. They were in fear.
They wanted to stopped as badly as we did. The
roadblocks turned up nothing. The sniper had vanished once again,
but there was good news thanks to the efforts of
(06:40):
first responders. Jeffrey Hopper survived the attack. Once we got
jeff and the ambulance, we got the crime scene tape out,
and we just right in front of the Pontorosa, right
on England Street. We taped from one side of the
building to the other. From that point, it seemed like
every three letter agency in the federal government was starting
to show up. I had FBI show up, I had
(07:02):
a t F show up. One of those a t
F agents was Ray Neely. I'm a normal special agent.
Well I mean relatively normal special agent. Ye know, I'm
so used to hanging around law enforcement. Special agents are
kind of a dome a dozen and I was based
out of Washington, so it's not very impressive from that
particular area anyway. Ray Neely was a canine handler for
(07:27):
the A t F and two thousand two during the
sniper investigation, UH handled a dog named Garrett. He was
a yellow Lab at that point, he was about seven
years old. We use the term explosive Detection canins. That's
their official title, and the public yielder serum called bomb dogs.
It's been estimated that there's over nineteen thousand different types
(07:50):
of explosive formulations, but generally they can be broken down
into seven families, so as long as you train across
those seven families, that dogs can find farms as well
as exploses. On the night of October nine, after Jeffrey
Hopper was shot, the A t F sent Ray Nearly
to investigate the woods outside the ponder Rosa. When we
(08:13):
arrived that evening, it was actually kind of a balmy night,
and not because we're working in low light. The human
search was really not gonna be effective, so they were
gonna wait till daybreak. I talked to the people on
scene and said, hey, it's best that we deploy this evening.
The dog doesn't need daylight to work in the other
signature is stronger now that it's going to be tomorrow morning.
(08:37):
There was a wooded lot behind the ponderosa. It's all
pitch black dark. When any human or animals moved through
wooded areas, they typically go to the area of least resistance.
It's called lines of drift. If there's briers and people
are gonna avoid that, they're gonna go a different path.
And so in this particular wooded area, I saw maybe
(08:58):
three or four of these little breaks in the woodline.
You know, there were animal trails or maybe kids played
in those woods. So I was going to search those first,
and then if that failed, then I would start doing
more of a gritted search. It was only on my
second path of least resistance that I saw the dog
change behavior. The dog started tracking until he went to
(09:21):
a particular spot, and then he alerted me. I went
over it with my flashlight and examined the area where
he looked, and that's when I saw the rub mark.
There was a small tree about maybe two inches in
diameter with a small van And when I looked up
that tree, it looked like someone had taken some type
(09:42):
of hard objects and leaned it up against that tree,
and that created a rub mark. You wouldn't have that
occurring in nature. You needed something hard pressing against it.
And it was also when lane of sight to the
where the person was actually hit as he exited the ponderosa,
and so that rub mark was someone probably using that
tree as a rife arrest. I knew that the type
(10:05):
of rifle more than likely would reject that shell casing
to the right rear, so I deployed the dog off
to my right rear, you know, hoping to find that
shell casing again. I saw in change of behavior now
he's going directly to source. It was probably twenty feet away,
and when he alerted this time, I would open with
my flashlight. Those shell casings can disappear in the ground
(10:27):
pretty quick, the leaves have fallen off the trees at
that point. But I actually saw the shell casing. It
was sitting right on top, you know, pristine. But to
the rear of where the shellcasing was found, there was
some type of message attached to a tree in the
(11:00):
woods outside the ponder Rosa Steakhouse, a t F agent
Ray Neely found a spent shell casing along with another clue,
one that would prove vital to solving the case. There
was a message that was attached to a tree. Investigators
found a ziplock bag pinned to a tree with two
thumb tacks, and inside there was a letter. Investigators who
(11:23):
wanted to read the note, but they couldn't just open
the bag of the crime scene and risk contaminating the evidence.
An FBI helicopter was brought in that evening to take
that piece of evidence directly to the lab they would
be looking for DNA any fingerprints. The letter arrived at
the lab the next morning, Sunday, October. When investigators finally
(11:45):
opened it, they were shocked by what they found. Here's
Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenball again. The snipers did
not want the press notified about this, and for the
first time, we were actually successful in preventing that. There
was a couple of significant things about this note. The
first one was that was handwritten, and within a few
(12:07):
hours the handwriting on the tarot card that had been
found a few days before was matched so we knew
we had the same individual, and any thought that it
was organized terrorism pretty much got shot down and went
out the window. The note had little red stars. And
when I say stars, if you've ever had a child
that went to a daycare and they bring their papers
(12:29):
home and they did something great. The teachers put little
silvery or gold or the red stars on top of
their papers. That's what I'm talking about. And no self
respecting terrorists is gonna do that. Number one. Number two,
we finally get a demand. Here's what the snipers wrote
in the letter for you, Mr Police, call me God,
(12:51):
do not release to the press. We have tried to
contact you to start negotiation, but the incompetence of your forces,
these people took our call for a hoax or a joke.
The letter then listed five people the sniper had contacted.
One Montgomery Police officer Derek two Rockville Police Department female officer,
(13:14):
three Task Force FBI female for priest at Ashland, five CNN,
Washington d C. These people took our call for a
hoax or joke. So your failure to respond is cost
you five lives. If stopping the killing is more important
than catching us now, then you will accept our demands
(13:34):
which are non negotiable. Option one, you will place ten
million dollars in a Bank of America account. The letter
then listed the information for a credit card which belonged
to a woman named Jill Lynn Ferrell, and then it
went on, we will have unlimited withdrawal at any a
TM worldwide. You will activate the bank account, credit card
(13:55):
and pin number at six am Sunday morning. We will
contact you a Ponderosa Buffet, Ashland, Virginia telephone number. You
have until nine a m. Monday morning to complete transaction.
Try to catch us with drawing at least you will
have less body bags, but option to. If trying to
(14:17):
catch us now is more important, then prepare your body bags.
If we give you our word, that is what takes place.
Word is bond ps. Your children are not safe anywhere
at any time. The letter was a bombshell, and it
(14:41):
left investigators with a slew of new questions. Was all
this killing just about money? And if the snipers themselves
had called into the tip lines and had been ignored,
what other tips might have slipped through the cracks. But
the letter did provide some major leads, like a list
of people the sniper had called. Law enforcement would need
(15:01):
to interview those people, and investigators needed to find the
credit card owner, Jill Lynn Ferrell. How is she connected
to the snipers? Most importantly, though, the snipers wanted to
talk and police were eager to get them on the line.
But there was a problem. The letters said the snipers
would call the Ponderosa Steakhouse at six a m. But
(15:23):
by the time the police read the letter, they'd already
missed the deadline. So Chief Moose reached out to the
snipers the only way he knew how, through the media.
To the person who left us a message at the
Ponderosa last night, you gave us a telephone number. We
do want to talk to you. Call us at the
(15:44):
number you provided. Police had the phone company redirect the
Ponderosa's number to align in their command center. There, an
f behind negotiator sat and waited, hoping the snipers would
call Mean One. Agents were adding up a track. They've
mapped out all of the pay phones in the Richmond
area and stationed police officers at locations nearby those phones,
(16:08):
but out of sight. Police were ready to trace the
sniper's call, identify which phone it came from, and then
swarm that area. With officers back at the command center,
the phone began to ring. Let's okay, um, let me
(16:30):
give you a new number. Okay, who are you calling for?
This is to remind Pappy Direct. Your Pappy Direct Sales
Reproductive will be contacting you shortly, but today Burden. After
(16:54):
dozens of false alarms, the next morning, on Monday, October one,
at seven fifty seven am, the sniper's call finally came. Hello,
who is that? The sniper then held a tape recorder
up to the pay phone and hit play through the phone.
(17:18):
The audio was distorted and unintelligible. The call lasted just
thirty eight seconds, but for some reason, the negotiator didn't
alert others about the call for another six minutes. U S.
Marshals traced the call to a pay phone just outside
(17:41):
an Exxon station in West Richmond at eight oh seven,
now a full ten minutes after the sniper's call. The
marshals notified local FBI of the address, and the traps
sprung into motion. Don Nielsen worked just down the street
from the Exxon where the snipers made the call. He
saw the takedown happen. Part of my job in the morning.
(18:02):
I got there early and you know, turned down the lights,
made coffee for the customers, and that's when I saw
everything going on right out in front of the dealership.
I just opened the front door and there was this
guy going like halt with a serious look on his
face and his hand went up like don't come out here.
So I thought, oh, okay. There was three or four
(18:23):
cars out there and all this commotion. You know, undercover
type guys, guys loading shotguns, and they are as. They
were putting on vests, and I imagine they weren't putting
on to go hunting, so I'd imagine they were armored vests.
Everybody's eyes were right up the hill at the van
and that drive up phone. When they started moving theirselves
(18:45):
up the hill, we moved to the very cornermost office.
You see what was going on. I just remember seeing
these guys rushing up there. They ran up the hill
and they grew open the doors and they grabbed some
people out of the van and threw my the park line.
They handcuffed these guys and moved him over to the
(19:06):
grassy area. Later that day, there was news media everywhere.
This morning, in approximately thirty five am, two nail subjects
were taken into custody by the members of the Richmond
Area Task Force at param Road in Broad Street, which
is basically right behind us. Those two individuals are being
(19:29):
questioned at this time. Police began interrogating the two suspects.
The first, Edgar Rivera Garcia, had been sitting in a
white minivan and talking on a drive through pay phone.
He claimed he was a carpenter from Mexico. The other man,
Jose Morales, had been walking through the gas station's parking
lot when police showed up. Neither could provide valid identification.
(19:53):
As police interrogated Garcia and Morales, agents from the Task
Force were listening to the recorded call. Over and over.
They painstakingly decipher the sniper's call word by word. It
referred to the demand from the Ponderosa letter option one
to put ten million dollars on an a t M
card or option to the killings would continue. Here's what
(20:17):
they transcribed. Dearest police, call me God. Do not release
to the press five red stars. You have our terms.
They are non negotiable. If you choose option one, you
will hold a press conference dating to the media that
you believe you have caught the sniper. Like a duck
in a noose. Repeat every word exactly as you heard it.
(20:41):
If you choose option to be sure to remember we
will not deviate ps. Your children are not safe. The
call had to be from the killer, nothing from the ponderos.
A letter had leaked, but the caller knew about the
red stars, the two options, and there to children. That
(21:02):
was definitely one of the snipers on the line. Later
that day, Richmond Police held another press conference based on
information we received this morning. Two men were detained and
questioned by local and federal authorities. These men have been
turned over to representatives of the Immigration and Naturalization Services
(21:24):
for further action. Garcia and Morales weren't the snipers. The
police had arrested the wrong guys. The task force had
learned that there was a second pay phone on the
other side of the gas station, and the sniper's call
had come in from that other phone. By the time
police had showed up, the snipers were already gone. They
(21:45):
had come so close to catching them, but the trap
had failed. That afternoon, Chief Moves again communicated to the
snipers through a press conference. I would like to start
with a another message. The person you call could not
hear everything that you said. The audio was unclear, and
(22:07):
we want to get it right. Call us back so
that if we can clearly understand. The police were trying
to re establish communication with the snipers, but they were
also trying to buy time. That's because they've been following
up on other leads from the letter. Here's David Reichenball
right now. We've got a whole bunch of leads that
(22:28):
we can work on, and they were running those leads down.
Those were our red hot leads. They want ten million
dollars on this a t M card and the a
t M card belonged to a lady, a bus driver.
This is Jill Lynn Sharaoh, retired Greyhound bus driver. In
(22:50):
October two tho, my supervisor had said, I must call
this telephone number immediately. The FBI needs to speak to me.
And I could completely shocked and surprised, but I called
and FBI agent Nack Rominger said, yes, I need to
(23:11):
speak to you upon arrival and flagstaff tonight. And then
I had the next three hours to wonder what in
the world was going on with FBI agents. It was just,
you know, very concerned. What did I do? Oh, it
could have really anything. What did I do? The agents
(23:36):
met me at the Greyhound bus Terminlin Flagstaff at the
bottom of the steps of my bust and they said,
please follow us into the driver lounge and um, they said,
please sit down. I said, gentlemen, I've been sitting all
day to mond if I stand up? And what is
this about? They asked, do you remember the day your
(23:58):
credentials went sink? And my mind instantly flashed back to
that day, and I told them everything. It seemed like
a typical day. I go no Gallus to Tucson, and
then I load the local local bus to Phoenix, Arizona,
and then I continue on from Phoenix to Flagstaff. I
(24:22):
then took my luggage off the bus and went into
the Flagstaff bus driver lounge and I'm going through my
items in my little suitcase and discovered my entire Union
Pacific little black pouch was missing, my driver's license, credit cards,
whatever that was missing. And I started calling everybody, shutting
(24:47):
everything down. Regarding credit cards. She canceled all of her
cards except for one, her Bank of America visa card.
That was the only one I didn't call in about
because I did not know I had it. A few
weeks later, a call from Bank of America told me
they had shut down and canceled that card due to
(25:10):
fraudulent youth. The card was used one time only for
twelve dollars at one cent at a gas station into Coma. Washington.
(25:42):
Investigators now knew the credit card mentioned in the letter
had been stolen in Arizona and used in Washington State.
Those were now places of interest. Agents were also following
up on the five phone calls that the sniper had
mentioned in the letter. The letter mentioned a call to
a priest in Ashland. It turned out there was only
(26:03):
one Catholic church in the city. Police went there and
spoke to the pastor, William Sullivan. Sullivan said he had
received a strange call from a man with an accent
he could in place. The man on the phone claimed
he knew who the sniper was and rambled to Sullivan
about a liquor store robbery and Montgomery. The man went
on and on, but Sullivan didn't take it seriously. He
(26:24):
thought it was just someone with a big imagination who
had watched too much about the Snipers on TV. The
task force tracked down two of the other calls that
were mentioned in the letter. One had come into the
Rockville Police Department and another to the man the snipers
had described as Officer Derek. As it turned out, Montgomery
County Public Information Officer Derek Beliles had received a strange
(26:49):
call a few days earlier. During the sniper crisis, we
received a tremendous amount of phone calls. All the phone
calls from people who wanted to talk to Chief Moose
were forwarded to the media office, where I answered the phone.
My name is Derek Lyles, and back in two thousand
and two, I was a public information officer for the
Montgomery County Police when the FBI came to question me.
(27:12):
I didn't know if I'd done something right or something wrong,
but I went over to talk to him. On my
way out of the building, I ran into Chief Moose,
who said, thank you for what you've done. I really
appreciate everything you're doing. And uh. I didn't know if
that was my goodbye speech or whether it was something else.
I had no idea. All I know is that the
FBI wanted to talk to me over at the Task Force.
(27:34):
When I got over to the Sniper Task Force, I
met with a number of people. The A T F
wanted me to come out to their van that was
parked outside. Once I got in there, they put headphones
on me and said, just listen and tell us what
you think. And I listened to the phone call that
was recorded by the Rockville City Police. What are the
people are? Said? Call me gun, do not release the
(28:02):
press called me three times before trying to We've got
no responded. People have died Montgomery County to please highline.
We're not in. That's like the number. The dispatcher, though,
was not the person to give that information, so she
(28:22):
did the right thing and told him to call the
Sniper Task Force, and that caller got angry and got
frustrated and hung up. I listened to that phone call
and they asked me, did I recognize anything? And I said,
that's exactly the same voice that I had heard on
my phone call, the same tone, the same inflection, the
same emphasis on certain words. The task force sat me
(28:46):
down in a room surrounded by everybody, and they wanted
to know what I had heard and who I thought
the sniper might be. And I told him the information,
and I also told them that it sounded like the
voice of a young black male. That really startled him
because all of the profilers had said he probably an
adult male with military history and all those types of things.
(29:06):
So they were intrigued by why I thought it sounded
like a young black male, and they just threw a
lot of questions at me as I told my story
over and over again. The phone call to Officer Derek
Beliles wasn't recorded, but this is his recollection of the call.
He said, shut up and listened. I've got some information
about some of your snipers, but first I need you
(29:28):
to verify some information. So he wanted me to look
at an incident that had occurred in Montgomery, Alabama and
tell him what I knew about it. As he spoke
to me, he was very insistent and told me to
get the information for him. I told him my name
was Officer Derek because I didn't want to use my
last name. I asked him to call me back in
About an hour or so after I got the phone call,
(29:50):
the detectives there told me that there had been a
shooting in Montgomery, Alabama by the liquor store, where two
women coming out of the store were shot and a
black male was seen running from the scene of the accident.
When you did call back about an hour and a
half later. I told him what I had learned, and
then said, what can you tell me about our snipers?
How can you help me after I've helped you? And
(30:11):
he said that it wasn't easy for him to talk
right there because he had to find a telephone, that
there was no cameras watching or anything like that. And
that phone call came to an abrupt end when the
operator came on saying to continue this call, please deposit
more coins, and then the call abruptly stopped. At that point,
the Sniper Task Force took this information and followed it up,
(30:32):
and the pieces began to fall into place. Next time
on Monster DC Sniper. The Alabama incident is interesting. Ten
days before shots were fired in Maryland, two clerks shot
outside the ABC Beverage store in Montgomery, Alabama. He was
(30:56):
behind one of the pillars of the business, rummaging going
through a purse. The first victims of the serial sniper
may have been eight hundred miles south of the Washington Beltway.
You know, we gotta push with everything we got because
we don't know how long these resources are gonna last.
I mean, we got close to full d FBI agents
a t F and I know there's a limitation to that.
(31:16):
All this is happening, if not in days, it's happening
in hours, and now we had a very very clear
suspect to pursue. By name, 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
(31:38):
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,
(31:59):
be sure to show out the first two seasons at
Lenta 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 eight five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of I Heart
Radio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in
this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or
individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those
of I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. October eight p m Ashland, Virginia, thirty
(00:26):
seven year old Jeffrey Hopper was walking with his wife Stephanie.
They were in the parking lot outside of Ponderosa Steakhouse
when a shot rang out from the woods. Tim meet
Chum was the first officer on the scene. In two
thousand two, I was a patrol officer at the Ashland
(00:47):
Police Department. We're walking in the parking lot, Um, ponder
rosa right, so put me back and in the time
and space walk me through it. Um. I had received
a call for a stall on our lost cell phone,
so I was taking that report a couple of miles
south of here, and he was asking, you know, what
have you heard about this whole sniper thing. And I
(01:09):
was like, you know, I've heard as much as you have.
I get the news, and he looked at me says
it wouldn't it be something if that guy came here
And he had just finished saying that when dispatch handed
me the call and they said respond to eight seventeen
England Street for a possible shooting. I looked at him, like,
(01:30):
no way, And the look on his face was priceless,
you know, just like, oh my gosh, what did I
just do to you? I'm marked and route told him
I was on my way. They said, we've had one call.
I got a mail down in the parking lot at
the Ponderosa. I asked him if there's any other information,
and they said, no new calls, no new information. And
(01:50):
that's when I called the sergeant on the radio and
I said, we may want to consider starting the response plan.
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 in her lap. I pulled past
them right to the end of the sidewalk here and
(02:13):
my car acted as a shield between the woods and
the hoppers. So instinctively, you just pull your car into
a position that sets up a barrier between the wooded
area and potentially more victims. Yes, Jeff was laying in
the parking lot, and Stephanie was sitting on the sidewalk
(02:34):
and she was holding pressure on his stomach. I told
her that I needed to verify the injury. So she
lifted up the towel that she was holding on him,
and I saw a pole about the size of a
nickel in the top of the victim's stomach. I feel
somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I wasn't expecting anybody.
(02:58):
Turn around. A guy standing there as a little before
than me. He had a chain around his neck. He
reached into his shirt and he pulled it out and
it was New York Police Department badge. He says, I'm retired.
What do you need? If there was somebody still here,
I wanted them to think that we were searching for them.
I asked him to use the spotlight on my car
(03:19):
to pan back and forth across the woods, and I
showed him where the shotgun release was in my car
and told him that if shots were fired, soon led
that way. There is a ruthless person on the loose.
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
of the murders. Ordinary people doing ordinary things. They killed
(03:42):
the five people in one day and then went on
the rampage for the next month. It is quite a mystery.
The police say they have never had a crime quite
like this. Be careful, these guys are using weapons that
are going to go right straight through our bulletproof vest
of my herd radio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster
(04:04):
DC Sniper. Jeff and Stephanie describe the two of them
and how they were working through this very serious situation together.
She was the calmest person I've ever seen on any
type of major scene like this. And when you have
(04:25):
somebody that's bleeding internally like that, their heart rate is up,
their blood pressures up, they can make them bleed out
a little bit faster. But Jeff was laying there, just
staying really calm. I told her, I said, Okay, the
best thing to do for a bleed is just a
whole pressure and it's not rocket science. She started to chuckle.
The victims started to laugh, and at this point, I'm like, okay,
(04:48):
can you guys let me in on the joke. Well,
she was a rocket scientist for NASA, so me telling
her that it wasn't rocket science, she kind of knew
that already. And they actually told me that they in
Pennsylvania visiting family. Intentionally, they didn't stop in Maryland, d C.
Or Northern Virginia because the shootings and they felt like
if they stopped closer to Richmond that it would be safer.
(05:13):
So the ambulance when they come up on scene normally
wait until law enforcement can make sure the scene is
safe for them to enter. I couldn't do that, so
we came up with a different plan for them to
come in and pick up Jeff. I got my shotgun.
I told the driver of the amulants to stay in
the driver's seat. I had the crew of the amulants
to come out of the back of the amulants um
(05:35):
I had them parked right behind my car bumper or
bumper so that the ambulance itself was also some type
of barricade. They get Jeff on the stretcher, they put
him in the ambulance, and we get them out onto
England Street and tell them to take the shoulder of
Interstate because we shut it down. By eight thirty, the
victim was arriving at the hospital and police across this
(05:55):
area had activated a coordinated tactical response. A plan put
in play is just last week, in the event of
a suspected sniper attack, very quickly, traffic was brought to
a complete stop. That's retired Maryland's date Police Lieutenant David Reichenbaum. Ordinarily,
if you do that, you've got phone calls going to politicians. Hey,
(06:18):
what's what's going on? Why are the roads blocked? I
can't get home, I can't go about my business. But
believe it or not, at this point, the public was
completely on board with with law enforcement. They were in fear.
They wanted to stopped as badly as we did. The
roadblocks turned up nothing. The sniper had vanished once again,
but there was good news thanks to the efforts of
(06:40):
first responders. Jeffrey Hopper survived the attack. Once we got
jeff and the ambulance, we got the crime scene tape out,
and we just right in front of the Pontorosa, right
on England Street. We taped from one side of the
building to the other. From that point, it seemed like
every three letter agency in the federal government was starting
to show up. I had FBI show up, I had
(07:02):
a t F show up. One of those a t
F agents was Ray Neely. I'm a normal special agent.
Well I mean relatively normal special agent. Ye know, I'm
so used to hanging around law enforcement. Special agents are
kind of a dome a dozen and I was based
out of Washington, so it's not very impressive from that
particular area anyway. Ray Neely was a canine handler for
(07:27):
the A t F and two thousand two during the
sniper investigation, UH handled a dog named Garrett. He was
a yellow Lab at that point, he was about seven
years old. We use the term explosive Detection canins. That's
their official title, and the public yielder serum called bomb dogs.
It's been estimated that there's over nineteen thousand different types
(07:50):
of explosive formulations, but generally they can be broken down
into seven families, so as long as you train across
those seven families, that dogs can find farms as well
as exploses. On the night of October nine, after Jeffrey
Hopper was shot, the A t F sent Ray Nearly
to investigate the woods outside the ponder Rosa. When we
(08:13):
arrived that evening, it was actually kind of a balmy night,
and not because we're working in low light. The human
search was really not gonna be effective, so they were
gonna wait till daybreak. I talked to the people on
scene and said, hey, it's best that we deploy this evening.
The dog doesn't need daylight to work in the other
signature is stronger now that it's going to be tomorrow morning.
(08:37):
There was a wooded lot behind the ponderosa. It's all
pitch black dark. When any human or animals moved through
wooded areas, they typically go to the area of least resistance.
It's called lines of drift. If there's briers and people
are gonna avoid that, they're gonna go a different path.
And so in this particular wooded area, I saw maybe
(08:58):
three or four of these little breaks in the woodline.
You know, there were animal trails or maybe kids played
in those woods. So I was going to search those first,
and then if that failed, then I would start doing
more of a gritted search. It was only on my
second path of least resistance that I saw the dog
change behavior. The dog started tracking until he went to
(09:21):
a particular spot, and then he alerted me. I went
over it with my flashlight and examined the area where
he looked, and that's when I saw the rub mark.
There was a small tree about maybe two inches in
diameter with a small van And when I looked up
that tree, it looked like someone had taken some type
(09:42):
of hard objects and leaned it up against that tree,
and that created a rub mark. You wouldn't have that
occurring in nature. You needed something hard pressing against it.
And it was also when lane of sight to the
where the person was actually hit as he exited the ponderosa,
and so that rub mark was someone probably using that
tree as a rife arrest. I knew that the type
(10:05):
of rifle more than likely would reject that shell casing
to the right rear, so I deployed the dog off
to my right rear, you know, hoping to find that
shell casing again. I saw in change of behavior now
he's going directly to source. It was probably twenty feet away,
and when he alerted this time, I would open with
my flashlight. Those shell casings can disappear in the ground
(10:27):
pretty quick, the leaves have fallen off the trees at
that point. But I actually saw the shell casing. It
was sitting right on top, you know, pristine. But to
the rear of where the shellcasing was found, there was
some type of message attached to a tree in the
(11:00):
woods outside the ponder Rosa Steakhouse, a t F agent
Ray Neely found a spent shell casing along with another clue,
one that would prove vital to solving the case. There
was a message that was attached to a tree. Investigators
found a ziplock bag pinned to a tree with two
thumb tacks, and inside there was a letter. Investigators who
(11:23):
wanted to read the note, but they couldn't just open
the bag of the crime scene and risk contaminating the evidence.
An FBI helicopter was brought in that evening to take
that piece of evidence directly to the lab they would
be looking for DNA any fingerprints. The letter arrived at
the lab the next morning, Sunday, October. When investigators finally
(11:45):
opened it, they were shocked by what they found. Here's
Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenball again. The snipers did
not want the press notified about this, and for the
first time, we were actually successful in preventing that. There
was a couple of significant things about this note. The
first one was that was handwritten, and within a few
(12:07):
hours the handwriting on the tarot card that had been
found a few days before was matched so we knew
we had the same individual, and any thought that it
was organized terrorism pretty much got shot down and went
out the window. The note had little red stars. And
when I say stars, if you've ever had a child
that went to a daycare and they bring their papers
(12:29):
home and they did something great. The teachers put little
silvery or gold or the red stars on top of
their papers. That's what I'm talking about. And no self
respecting terrorists is gonna do that. Number one. Number two,
we finally get a demand. Here's what the snipers wrote
in the letter for you, Mr Police, call me God,
(12:51):
do not release to the press. We have tried to
contact you to start negotiation, but the incompetence of your forces,
these people took our call for a hoax or a joke.
The letter then listed five people the sniper had contacted.
One Montgomery Police officer Derek two Rockville Police Department female officer,
(13:14):
three Task Force FBI female for priest at Ashland, five CNN,
Washington d C. These people took our call for a
hoax or joke. So your failure to respond is cost
you five lives. If stopping the killing is more important
than catching us now, then you will accept our demands
(13:34):
which are non negotiable. Option one, you will place ten
million dollars in a Bank of America account. The letter
then listed the information for a credit card which belonged
to a woman named Jill Lynn Ferrell, and then it
went on, we will have unlimited withdrawal at any a
TM worldwide. You will activate the bank account, credit card
(13:55):
and pin number at six am Sunday morning. We will
contact you a Ponderosa Buffet, Ashland, Virginia telephone number. You
have until nine a m. Monday morning to complete transaction.
Try to catch us with drawing at least you will
have less body bags, but option to. If trying to
(14:17):
catch us now is more important, then prepare your body bags.
If we give you our word, that is what takes place.
Word is bond ps. Your children are not safe anywhere
at any time. The letter was a bombshell, and it
(14:41):
left investigators with a slew of new questions. Was all
this killing just about money? And if the snipers themselves
had called into the tip lines and had been ignored,
what other tips might have slipped through the cracks. But
the letter did provide some major leads, like a list
of people the sniper had called. Law enforcement would need
(15:01):
to interview those people, and investigators needed to find the
credit card owner, Jill Lynn Ferrell. How is she connected
to the snipers? Most importantly, though, the snipers wanted to
talk and police were eager to get them on the line.
But there was a problem. The letters said the snipers
would call the Ponderosa Steakhouse at six a m. But
(15:23):
by the time the police read the letter, they'd already
missed the deadline. So Chief Moose reached out to the
snipers the only way he knew how, through the media.
To the person who left us a message at the
Ponderosa last night, you gave us a telephone number. We
do want to talk to you. Call us at the
(15:44):
number you provided. Police had the phone company redirect the
Ponderosa's number to align in their command center. There, an
f behind negotiator sat and waited, hoping the snipers would
call Mean One. Agents were adding up a track. They've
mapped out all of the pay phones in the Richmond
area and stationed police officers at locations nearby those phones,
(16:08):
but out of sight. Police were ready to trace the
sniper's call, identify which phone it came from, and then
swarm that area. With officers back at the command center,
the phone began to ring. Let's okay, um, let me
(16:30):
give you a new number. Okay, who are you calling for?
This is to remind Pappy Direct. Your Pappy Direct Sales
Reproductive will be contacting you shortly, but today Burden. After
(16:54):
dozens of false alarms, the next morning, on Monday, October one,
at seven fifty seven am, the sniper's call finally came. Hello,
who is that? The sniper then held a tape recorder
up to the pay phone and hit play through the phone.
(17:18):
The audio was distorted and unintelligible. The call lasted just
thirty eight seconds, but for some reason, the negotiator didn't
alert others about the call for another six minutes. U S.
Marshals traced the call to a pay phone just outside
(17:41):
an Exxon station in West Richmond at eight oh seven,
now a full ten minutes after the sniper's call. The
marshals notified local FBI of the address, and the traps
sprung into motion. Don Nielsen worked just down the street
from the Exxon where the snipers made the call. He
saw the takedown happen. Part of my job in the morning.
(18:02):
I got there early and you know, turned down the lights,
made coffee for the customers, and that's when I saw
everything going on right out in front of the dealership.
I just opened the front door and there was this
guy going like halt with a serious look on his
face and his hand went up like don't come out here.
So I thought, oh, okay. There was three or four
(18:23):
cars out there and all this commotion. You know, undercover
type guys, guys loading shotguns, and they are as. They
were putting on vests, and I imagine they weren't putting
on to go hunting, so I'd imagine they were armored vests.
Everybody's eyes were right up the hill at the van
and that drive up phone. When they started moving theirselves
(18:45):
up the hill, we moved to the very cornermost office.
You see what was going on. I just remember seeing
these guys rushing up there. They ran up the hill
and they grew open the doors and they grabbed some
people out of the van and threw my the park line.
They handcuffed these guys and moved him over to the
(19:06):
grassy area. Later that day, there was news media everywhere.
This morning, in approximately thirty five am, two nail subjects
were taken into custody by the members of the Richmond
Area Task Force at param Road in Broad Street, which
is basically right behind us. Those two individuals are being
(19:29):
questioned at this time. Police began interrogating the two suspects.
The first, Edgar Rivera Garcia, had been sitting in a
white minivan and talking on a drive through pay phone.
He claimed he was a carpenter from Mexico. The other man,
Jose Morales, had been walking through the gas station's parking
lot when police showed up. Neither could provide valid identification.
(19:53):
As police interrogated Garcia and Morales, agents from the Task
Force were listening to the recorded call. Over and over.
They painstakingly decipher the sniper's call word by word. It
referred to the demand from the Ponderosa letter option one
to put ten million dollars on an a t M
card or option to the killings would continue. Here's what
(20:17):
they transcribed. Dearest police, call me God. Do not release
to the press five red stars. You have our terms.
They are non negotiable. If you choose option one, you
will hold a press conference dating to the media that
you believe you have caught the sniper. Like a duck
in a noose. Repeat every word exactly as you heard it.
(20:41):
If you choose option to be sure to remember we
will not deviate ps. Your children are not safe. The
call had to be from the killer, nothing from the ponderos.
A letter had leaked, but the caller knew about the
red stars, the two options, and there to children. That
(21:02):
was definitely one of the snipers on the line. Later
that day, Richmond Police held another press conference based on
information we received this morning. Two men were detained and
questioned by local and federal authorities. These men have been
turned over to representatives of the Immigration and Naturalization Services
(21:24):
for further action. Garcia and Morales weren't the snipers. The
police had arrested the wrong guys. The task force had
learned that there was a second pay phone on the
other side of the gas station, and the sniper's call
had come in from that other phone. By the time
police had showed up, the snipers were already gone. They
(21:45):
had come so close to catching them, but the trap
had failed. That afternoon, Chief Moves again communicated to the
snipers through a press conference. I would like to start
with a another message. The person you call could not
hear everything that you said. The audio was unclear, and
(22:07):
we want to get it right. Call us back so
that if we can clearly understand. The police were trying
to re establish communication with the snipers, but they were
also trying to buy time. That's because they've been following
up on other leads from the letter. Here's David Reichenball
right now. We've got a whole bunch of leads that
(22:28):
we can work on, and they were running those leads down.
Those were our red hot leads. They want ten million
dollars on this a t M card and the a
t M card belonged to a lady, a bus driver.
This is Jill Lynn Sharaoh, retired Greyhound bus driver. In
(22:50):
October two tho, my supervisor had said, I must call
this telephone number immediately. The FBI needs to speak to me.
And I could completely shocked and surprised, but I called
and FBI agent Nack Rominger said, yes, I need to
(23:11):
speak to you upon arrival and flagstaff tonight. And then
I had the next three hours to wonder what in
the world was going on with FBI agents. It was just,
you know, very concerned. What did I do? Oh, it
could have really anything. What did I do? The agents
(23:36):
met me at the Greyhound bus Terminlin Flagstaff at the
bottom of the steps of my bust and they said,
please follow us into the driver lounge and um, they said,
please sit down. I said, gentlemen, I've been sitting all
day to mond if I stand up? And what is
this about? They asked, do you remember the day your
(23:58):
credentials went sink? And my mind instantly flashed back to
that day, and I told them everything. It seemed like
a typical day. I go no Gallus to Tucson, and
then I load the local local bus to Phoenix, Arizona,
and then I continue on from Phoenix to Flagstaff. I
(24:22):
then took my luggage off the bus and went into
the Flagstaff bus driver lounge and I'm going through my
items in my little suitcase and discovered my entire Union
Pacific little black pouch was missing, my driver's license, credit cards,
whatever that was missing. And I started calling everybody, shutting
(24:47):
everything down. Regarding credit cards. She canceled all of her
cards except for one, her Bank of America visa card.
That was the only one I didn't call in about
because I did not know I had it. A few
weeks later, a call from Bank of America told me
they had shut down and canceled that card due to
(25:10):
fraudulent youth. The card was used one time only for
twelve dollars at one cent at a gas station into Coma. Washington.
(25:42):
Investigators now knew the credit card mentioned in the letter
had been stolen in Arizona and used in Washington State.
Those were now places of interest. Agents were also following
up on the five phone calls that the sniper had
mentioned in the letter. The letter mentioned a call to
a priest in Ashland. It turned out there was only
(26:03):
one Catholic church in the city. Police went there and
spoke to the pastor, William Sullivan. Sullivan said he had
received a strange call from a man with an accent
he could in place. The man on the phone claimed
he knew who the sniper was and rambled to Sullivan
about a liquor store robbery and Montgomery. The man went
on and on, but Sullivan didn't take it seriously. He
(26:24):
thought it was just someone with a big imagination who
had watched too much about the Snipers on TV. The
task force tracked down two of the other calls that
were mentioned in the letter. One had come into the
Rockville Police Department and another to the man the snipers
had described as Officer Derek. As it turned out, Montgomery
County Public Information Officer Derek Beliles had received a strange
(26:49):
call a few days earlier. During the sniper crisis, we
received a tremendous amount of phone calls. All the phone
calls from people who wanted to talk to Chief Moose
were forwarded to the media office, where I answered the phone.
My name is Derek Lyles, and back in two thousand
and two, I was a public information officer for the
Montgomery County Police when the FBI came to question me.
(27:12):
I didn't know if I'd done something right or something wrong,
but I went over to talk to him. On my
way out of the building, I ran into Chief Moose,
who said, thank you for what you've done. I really
appreciate everything you're doing. And uh. I didn't know if
that was my goodbye speech or whether it was something else.
I had no idea. All I know is that the
FBI wanted to talk to me over at the Task Force.
(27:34):
When I got over to the Sniper Task Force, I
met with a number of people. The A T F
wanted me to come out to their van that was
parked outside. Once I got in there, they put headphones
on me and said, just listen and tell us what
you think. And I listened to the phone call that
was recorded by the Rockville City Police. What are the
people are? Said? Call me gun, do not release the
(28:02):
press called me three times before trying to We've got
no responded. People have died Montgomery County to please highline.
We're not in. That's like the number. The dispatcher, though,
was not the person to give that information, so she
(28:22):
did the right thing and told him to call the
Sniper Task Force, and that caller got angry and got
frustrated and hung up. I listened to that phone call
and they asked me, did I recognize anything? And I said,
that's exactly the same voice that I had heard on
my phone call, the same tone, the same inflection, the
same emphasis on certain words. The task force sat me
(28:46):
down in a room surrounded by everybody, and they wanted
to know what I had heard and who I thought
the sniper might be. And I told him the information,
and I also told them that it sounded like the
voice of a young black male. That really startled him
because all of the profilers had said he probably an
adult male with military history and all those types of things.
(29:06):
So they were intrigued by why I thought it sounded
like a young black male, and they just threw a
lot of questions at me as I told my story
over and over again. The phone call to Officer Derek
Beliles wasn't recorded, but this is his recollection of the call.
He said, shut up and listened. I've got some information
about some of your snipers, but first I need you
(29:28):
to verify some information. So he wanted me to look
at an incident that had occurred in Montgomery, Alabama and
tell him what I knew about it. As he spoke
to me, he was very insistent and told me to
get the information for him. I told him my name
was Officer Derek because I didn't want to use my
last name. I asked him to call me back in
About an hour or so after I got the phone call,
(29:50):
the detectives there told me that there had been a
shooting in Montgomery, Alabama by the liquor store, where two
women coming out of the store were shot and a
black male was seen running from the scene of the accident.
When you did call back about an hour and a
half later. I told him what I had learned, and
then said, what can you tell me about our snipers?
How can you help me after I've helped you? And
(30:11):
he said that it wasn't easy for him to talk
right there because he had to find a telephone, that
there was no cameras watching or anything like that. And
that phone call came to an abrupt end when the
operator came on saying to continue this call, please deposit
more coins, and then the call abruptly stopped. At that point,
the Sniper Task Force took this information and followed it up,
(30:32):
and the pieces began to fall into place. Next time
on Monster DC Sniper. The Alabama incident is interesting. Ten
days before shots were fired in Maryland, two clerks shot
outside the ABC Beverage store in Montgomery, Alabama. He was
(30:56):
behind one of the pillars of the business, rummaging going
through a purse. The first victims of the serial sniper
may have been eight hundred miles south of the Washington Beltway.
You know, we gotta push with everything we got because
we don't know how long these resources are gonna last.
I mean, we got close to full d FBI agents
a t F and I know there's a limitation to that.
(31:16):
All this is happening, if not in days, it's happening
in hours, and now we had a very very clear
suspect to pursue. By name, 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
(31:38):
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,
(31:59):
be sure to show out the first two seasons at
Lenta 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 eight five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.
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