The White Van [04]

On October 9th, the sniper targets Virginia. And the hunt for a white van intensifies.

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Episode Transcript

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 Heeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. Shall say somebody got shot as okay, child,

(00:30):
they did play it there man, he's laying on the car.
I know. The white band just went bar with two
guards in it. The man just went barging out forward.
Did all the two trey flowing out a white man? Okay,
well there you go there going down, very cool. Trying
to extraction what pick before typing information loss all the

(00:57):
way on. I a call in the evening on October
nine from a source saying you need to get out
to Manassas. There's been another one. This is Washington Post
reporter Josh White. There was nothing more than that. I
was given a location. I knew the area, so I

(01:17):
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 onto this hill. There was a Bob
Evans that overlooked the gas station from across the road.

(01:38):
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 and light. It's like
a lid up target with a million access points. They
had shut down the parking lot and they were interviewing
everyone who was leaving. I drove up and I got
into an adjacent parking lot, and I walked right to

(01:59):
where I thought would be the best view. That too,
was something that the snipers realized that that was the
best view of that gas station, 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. There is a ruthless person on

(02:21):
the loose. What I nerves this community the most is
the randomness of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things.
They killed 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 gonna go right straight through our

(02:44):
bulletproof vest. From My Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This
is Monster DC Sniper. Nine sniper attacks in eight days
have the Washington metropolitan area on high alert. Since last Wednesday,

(03:09):
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. October nine, two thousand two. It has now
been a full week since the spree of sniper killings

(03:29):
began in the d C metro area. Most of the
attacks have taken place in Maryland, except for one shooting
at a Michael's in Spotsylvania, Virginia. But now the snipers
were on the move. On October nine, the week following
the Montgomery County shootings, a man who worked in an
office building in Manassas was out pumping gas not too

(03:51):
far from where he worked. Got named Dan Myers. This
is Dave Stader, reporter for Channel nine News. Is. On
Sudday were Odins and Prince William County Virginia and he's
just pumping gas and shot and killed. Bob Myers, the
victim's brother, spoke about the shooting at a press conference.
I would like to know the reason that would help me,

(04:15):
but I recognize that whatever reason it is, it won't
be a good one. 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 Standard
points out, now the people of Virginia had a lot
to worry about. This is where you're really starting to

(04:37):
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.

(04:57):
There are gas stations that are starting to put up
barricade sort of tarps 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. Who could have

(05:20):
imagined that somewhere as mundane as a gas station could
become the impetus for such crippling fear. I visited the
Sonocco station in Manassas, Virginia where Dean Myers was killed,
and the scene brought back some vivid memories from that
October in two thousand two. Maybe one of the indelible
images that I have in my mind from those days.

(05:41):
I mean it really is of of seeing the blue
tart 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 tart. And the other thing
I recall is hearing stories of cops being asked by
folks who needed to fill Hey, I'll give you some

(06:03):
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 of all of these attacks and not clearly being

(06:27):
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 Sinocco gas station. But we're talking about two
thousand two. We're also talking post nine eleven, so you're

(06:48):
talking about putting more of those systems in place. At
that point, we still have officers at the scene searching
for evidence, going over it. Very mit piculously. Police believed
they were on the snipers trail. At a press conference
following the Dean Meyer shooting, officials revealed what type of

(07:08):
vehicle they thought the snipers were using. The only information
we have on a possible vehicle was a white minivan
described as a panel vehicle meeting. It had only front
passenger windows. The rest was solid. Officials thought the snipers
might still be in the area, so police had up
roadblocks on the streets near the crime scene. Nearby parking

(07:31):
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. He remembers approaching
one specific vehicle. The driver inside said he was on vacation.

(07:53):
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 man leave. It would
be months later that Officer Bailey had a terrible realization

(08:13):
the man he met that day was the killer they
were looking for. I think that, in a lot of ways,
is a microcosm of the challenge that was facing everybody.
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

(08:34):
think anything of it at the time. Nobody knew who
they were looking for, Nobody knew what vehicle to look for,
nobody knew the mechanism of the shooting was a coming
from a car, was a 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 to

(08:56):
avoid detection. It was altered in a way that if
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 a metropolitan area,

(09:19):
there's millions of people, what's stopping them? For me? That
was one of the scariest moments. That shooting highlighted how
difficult this all was and how frightening it all was.
This shooting also marked another major shift in the case,
one that greatly raised the stakes for the snipers. They think,

(09:40):
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. It's a distinction,
but on usucation major diction, this is Paul Ebert, Virginia's

(10:03):
longest serving prosecutor. I spoke with him at his office
in Prince William County. He remembers when Dean Myers was
shot in his district, my daughter had just strange enough
and better at half a block. Where has happened? When
it happens you at a bank. I went to the scene.
I got no himan doing a murder case. We don't
have that many murders. It helps me to be able

(10:24):
to visualize what's going on. A lot of press, a
lot of people. The body was gone chucked around. Of course,
prety ivous that the snipers had done this, because history
leading up to it any I had no idea if
and when would ever get the case. Try and I
talked a couple of reporters that I knew, and I

(10:44):
did say that if this is a sniper, it looks
like it is just a death case. Absently some common
great mitigating factor, it was a capital case. Paul Ebert
was issuing a direct threat to the snipers. He went
on television that day to say that quote, this case,
if I have anything to do with it, will be

(11:06):
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 was following the news,
they would have known that if caught, they would eventually
face the death penalty. The snipers weren't done in Virginia,

(11:41):
as the area was still reeling from the death of
Dean Harold Myers. Tragedy struck once more. Channel nine reporter
Dave Stater was there in the morning of October, two
days after Dean Myers is shot pumping guests in the
Monascessary of Virginia. Further south, in the Fredericksburg area, there's

(12:01):
another man's shot, year old Kenneth Bridges. He's shot dead
pumping gas lead an next on station. This is just
off Interstate heavily traveled roadway between Richmond and Washington this
portion of 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

(12:24):
down just off. 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. Trying to get through the same traffic,
but they at least have lights and siren. We finally
went on to some alternate routes and work our way

(12:44):
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 erie and bizarre.
Yet another person pumping gasolene shot dead, doing what we
all do every day, and the tension is continuing to grow.

(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. We are looking for a white
van that may had a ladder rack on top of it.
We do not not stress. We do not know if
it was involved in the shooting and not. It was
seen in the area by several people, and we do

(13:27):
want to talk to those 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 across the street and rendered aid to
the victim until the rescue squad arrived. Once at the hospital,
the victim was pronounced dead. The victim, Kenneth Bridges was

(13:49):
a family man. He had six children and a wife
of twenty five years. Obviously, everyone was devastated at this
horrendous act and this horrendous event, losing a loving 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. Bridges was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He

(14:13):
had just been passing through the DC area when his
life was tragically cut short. Friends save Bridges was a
pillar of his community. He co founded Mata, a nonprofit
company which fosters black owned businesses. I'm telling you, this
was a mere perfect man who loved his family, who
loved his people. Kenny was a visionary, a man with

(14:35):
great purpose, single minded purpose that he had built his
entire world around. Kim Bridges hasn't infected thousands and thousands
of people all across the country with this vision of his.
The impacts of the DC sniper attacks were spreading further
and further. Families and communities all across the country had

(14:57):
now been affected in various horrible ways. We're realizing that
this thing is not getting smaller, it's not getting narrower,
it's getting larger. This is Channel nine reporter Dave Statter again,
all along this Carter people are being attacked. We see
it in Montgomery County, Maryland, Prince George's County, Maryland. We're

(15:20):
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 of everybody
because nobody could make clear sense of it. By this point,
ten people had been shot for what seemed like no reason,

(15:43):
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 enforcements abilities. Police were under tremendous
pressure to catch these killers, but not things seem to
be working. So what was their plan? We had strategies.

(16:06):
I mean I started out and I had a mission.
This is Drew Tracy, retired Assistant Chief of Police for
Montgomery County. 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. But how

(16:28):
would they find the shooters? Tracy says they employed a
tactic known as a dragnet. It starts with police creating
a large perimeter around a crime scene to ensnare any
potential suspects. We actually had circles that we put it
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,

(16:52):
slow it by slowing traffic almost type of roadblocks. And
what we did is we had immediate action teams. We
need to be on 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

(17:15):
predetermined location they had to go to. And then what
we would do is bring in air support. We'd get plain,
closed units who look like normal people, try to get
closer int 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

(17:35):
we wouldn't put people in danger. The thing that I
think was well, 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

(17:56):
game plan, but the problem was we are being provided
good intelligence and suspect information from lookout that hurt us.
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

(18:18):
a security camera, and with the description from that, police
detained and questioned a man at one of the motels,
but it was quickly the term that he wasn't the sniper,
and so by the end of the day, no viable
suspects have been arrested. As the shooting spread further from

(18:50):
d C, nearby jurisdictions were biding their time, fearful that
at any moment an attack would happen in their area.
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 d square miles at one point two million people,

(19:14):
and I was sure we were going to get hit
sooner or later. Sure enough, on October four, one of
my guys who was working called me on my cell
phone 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

(19:36):
that a woman had been shot in ahead underneath the
parking garage. 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 in
distress a warning the following audio could be upsetting to

(19:58):
some listeners. Where are you at the home? People? People

(20:24):
shot weren't even shot. So I got in my car
and I drove down to False Church. I was one
of the first detectives there. My first memory was the

(20:46):
smell of diesel diesel fuel from the ambulance. There was
an ambulance parked underneath the parking garage. Inside the ambulance
was Mr Franklin. They had put him in there. Obviously
he was quite distraught. It was a astrophic head injury
that he witnessed, and he had been spattered with blood.

(21:07):
Channel nine reporter Dave Stanner also rushed to the scene.
After a long day of working on the sniper case
in October, my Patrick goes off, it's my colleague Greg
Guys 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

(21:29):
came in from the opposite side of police and fire
and go into this covered parking area outside the home
depot and I'm pull up and I see a grocery
card and it's full of stuff. And I looked down
from that grocery card 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,

(21:51):
and I immediately pull out to just outside the covered
area and they're a police running with police tape to
secure the scene. I 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.

(22:15):
And the next thing I see our police 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,

(22:35):
and they put their hands up immediately. The painters were
just in the wrong place at the wrong time, so
police let them go. 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

(22:56):
the next shooting. They shut down a good portion of
the Capital Beltway that brings wash Ington, d C. They
wanted to make sure that they could get the vehicle
and the lookout that they knew they were looking for.
That evening was a white box truck. They shut down
Route fifty. They shut down and it created an enormous
traffic gym that evening. According to Virginia Detective Bruce Gooth,

(23:17):
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. I don't think there
was a soul in law enforcement that didn't think for
a second then 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

(23:39):
to kind of protect us while we were working a
crime scene. We had pre playing that 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, and he

(23:59):
just gribed 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 taken back to the station and get
a statement from him. You know, that was the first
lead where someone had actually seen somebody. That next day

(24:24):
after the murder, we had a debrief with Montgomery County
and all the other jurisdictions. Virginia officials shared the specific
details of Matthew dowdy 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 doubt.
He said. The man then got back into the van

(24:45):
and drove away. Dowdy described the vehicle as a Chevy
astro van with a broken tail line. I'll never forget this.
Chief moose ten minutes into where 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 gonna put out.

(25:07):
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 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
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,

(25:32):
we were going to share whatever we had with surely
the homicide detectives that we were dealing with, and they
had helped us in the past with other cases, so
there are people I could trust. This incident was especially
puzzling to investigators. Had the sniper specifically targeted and FBI agent.
If so, was this shooting some sort of message sent

(25:55):
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, but now investigators were unsure.
On top of all this, the witness, Matthew Dowdy, described
this suspect as an olive skinned man with an a king.
This reinforced the notion that the snipers were potentially terrorists

(26:18):
from the Middle East, but profilers had determined by this
point that that was incredibly unlikely. So what was going
on here? 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 weickly

(26:39):
realizing is that with a few bullets and a vehicle,
somebody is shutting down commerce in the area, panicking hordes
of people in and around the nation's capital. And I'm thinking,
here we are, year after nine 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

(27:00):
Israel or a place where there's lots of bombings and
car bombs and bombs on buses and in restaurants, you
live a certain way and you're used to it. 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

(27:22):
really impact us. Channel nine reporter Dave Standard 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. The next morning, that continued doing the
lookouts for the white van, more stopping of white vans,
white box strukes, but they find out soon that the

(27:42):
information they got was bad. In suburban Virginia today where
the killer last struck a frantic search for clues, touched
off by a phony witness's confession last night that 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. Maybe we didn't hear

(28:03):
from some people because they saw that picture and they
said the person I was thinking about doesn't have one.
It owes. 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 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

(28:26):
white box truck sped from the scene. Police investigated further
Matthew Daddy's claim, and what they determined was that Matthew Daddy,
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 Daddy They also found out how

(28:49):
a long criminal record. He like others, had heard of
the white box truck and the news it was prominently
out there and thought he wouldn't interject himself in the case.
Why he did, and 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.

(29:11):
Not too long after the shooting of Linda Franklin, 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 Dowddy.

(29:34):
About two years later, in a mile and a half away,
he murdered and raped a woman at a motel in
the city of Falls 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.
Following this incident, journalist and police at length began to

(29:55):
doubt earlier witness accounts. What are the first description of
a white box truck was false and police were on
a wild goose chase. Some experts came forward with ideas.
At the time of the d C sniper case. I
was following the events just as anyone else was. I

(30:18):
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 my main line of study is the reliability of
eye witnesses. So I'm looking at it differently, and I'm

(30:40):
looking for what are witnesses going to be able to tell? Really,
people process a lot less information than we think. When
they scanning in their environment, they're really only taking in
a very small fraction of information. They get the sense
that they're seeing everything, when in fact there's being very little,

(31:01):
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.
So I guess my biggest interest and concern was how

(31:22):
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 white van. The reason I
was concerned about that was because I thought it was premature.

(31:43):
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 that
was a huge mistake. There's two reasons to really be

(32:06):
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 you
can pretty much guarantee that this person is going to
switch vehicles because they're they're oh, they're onto the white van.

(32:28):
We can't do that. If, on the other hand, it
wasn't a white van, that gives a lot of cover,
a lot of comfort to the shooters because it's sort
of like they have no idea what they're looking at, right,
so you just gave them permission to continue with their
standard m O. Because everybody's looking for a white van.

(32:50):
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
pretty close to the most common vehicle on the road
in urban environments. And the reason they are is because

(33:11):
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
in white vans. So what happens then is as soon
as you discover there's been a shooting and you look around,

(33:31):
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 be reporter white van.
In any urban setting. You're taking away their opportunity to
see anything other than a white van at that point,
and everybody knew to be looking for that. I think

(33:52):
that was that was a pretty bad mistake. But if
not a white van or white box truck, than what
had police seen any other vehicles at the crime scenes?
You know, I'll never understand that. How did they rule
out all other vehicles? And they being police departments, FBI officials,

(34:14):
everyone This is Greg Geiss, a photographer and videographer for
Channel nine News. On October three, the second day of
the shootings, Greg was covering the attacks. I was with
reporter Gary Reels. We're driving southbound on Connecticut Avenue. I
kept the fire and E M S dispatch channels locked

(34:36):
on several different radios. And what will stick with me
forever are two different police officers in two different cars,
Keither Mike and say, you know, I see this dark
colored Crown Fick or Capri, sort of an old police
looking vehicle driving with those lights on, heading north. And

(34:57):
I turned to the right and said to reporter Gary Reels,
I wonder if the snipers driving a war wagon or
a hoopedie, a war wagon being a term used for
old cars that are sometimes used in gang like violence
by some of what at the time are called cruise
in the Washington area. And I hoped he being just

(35:19):
an old junk car that are often used sometimes by
folks who have stolen a car for joy ride or
somebody who's using a stolen vehicle to commit a crime.
I left that evening with the feeling that in some way,
a dark, older model police style Saedan may have been

(35:40):
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 model Sedan, and we would engage in conversation different
officers in myself and I would relay that story about

(36:02):
the order vehicles that I heard from Metropolitan Police in Washington,
and the cops were perplexed that they never got that information.
They never heard the new odds of the cops king there,
Mike and if you will, flashing a lookout for what
they viewed were suspicious vehicles leaving a scene. In a

(36:22):
press conference, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose conceded, maybe
the white box truck identification was a misfire. It's not
beyond any reality that the person our people involved in
this would have numerous vehicles that they could be using.
If law enforcement had missed the drop on other suspect vehicles,

(36:45):
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 Linda Franklin shooting,
the police in Rockville, Maryland, got a phone call from
the snipers joint where the people are calling it said,

(37:07):
call me gun, do not release the press next time.
On Monster DC Sniper, the first time that this area
so far south has been brought into what seems to
be another case of a serial sniper attack. When I arrived,
our victim was laying in the parking lot and his

(37:28):
wife was sitting on the sidewalk and had her husband's
head in her law. To the rear of where the
showcasing was found, there was some type of message that
was attached to a tree. Do not release to the press.
Five red stars. You have her terms, They're non negotiable.
No self respecting terrorists is gonna do that. Number one,

(37:50):
number two, We finally get a demand. At that point,
the Sniper Task Force took this information and followed it up,
and the pieces began to fall into place. Monster DC
Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris
and produced by iHeart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick

(38:14):
and Alex Williams 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

(38:35):
haven't already, be sure to check out the first two seasons,
Atlanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have
questions or comments, email us at Monster at i heeart
media dot com, or you can call us at one
eight three three to five six six six seven. Thanks
for listening.