Posted on 10/25/2002 10:40:27 PM PDT by kattracks
Text transcribed from a letter found near the Ashland, Va., Ponderosa restaurant where a man was shot and wounded Oct. 19. The four-page letter, including a brief introductory page, was reproduced on The Washington Post's Web site.
(2 stars)
For you Mr. Police
"Call me God"
Do not release to the Press
(3 stars)
For you Mr. Police
"Call me God."
Do not release to the press
We have tried to contact you to start negotiation, But the incompitence of your forces in
(i) Mongomery Police "Officer Derick" at 240-773-5000 Friday.
(ii) Rockville Police Dept. "female officer" at 301-309-3100.
(iii) Task force "FBI" "female" at 1888-324-8800 (four times)
(iv) priest at ashland
(v) CNN Washington DC at (blacked out)
These people took of call for a Hoax or Joke, so your failure to respond has cost you five lives.
If stopping the killing is more important than catching us now, then you will accept our demand which are non-negotiable.
(i) You will place ten million dollar in Bank of america account no. (blacked out)
Pin no. (blacked out)
activation date (blacked out)
Exp. date (blacked out)
Name: (blacked out)
member since (blacked out)
Platinum Visa Account
We will have unlimited withdrawl at any atm world-wide.
You will activate the bank account, credit card, and Pin number.
We will contact you at Ponderosa (asland, VA) Buffet tel (pound sign): (blacked out) 6:00 am Sunday morning.
You have until 9:00 a.m. Monday morning to complete transaction.
"Try to catch us withdrawing at least you will have less body bags."
(But)
(ii) If trying to catch us now more important then prepare you body bags.
If we give you our word that is what takes place
"Word is Bond."
P.S. your children are not safe anywhere at any time.
Copyright 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
What worked, what didn't in sniper investigation
By STEPHEN MANNING
The Associated Press
10/26/02 12:33 AM
ROCKVILLE, Md. (AP) -- The white truck turned out to be a blue Chevrolet Caprice. Instead of a lone male suspect, there are two. And trying to pinpoint the sniper's home through "geographic profiling" proved worthless, because the pair lived out of their car.
Despite the huge commitment of people and the sophisticated methods employed, the hunt for the Washington-area sniper illustrated the limits of human perception and how easily one false step early on can become magnified.
It also proved the value of the most basic investigative method of all -- a tip.
Montgomery Police Chief Charles Moose had repeatedly said a tip would solve the case, pleading with people to search their memories for something suspicious and call the tip line. And it was a series of tips, including sightings of the suspects' car, that helped police break the case.
John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, are being held as prime suspects in the slayings of 10 people and the wounding of three over the past three weeks in Maryland, Virginia and Washington. They were captured Thursday after a frustrating, three-week manhunt.
With each slaying, authorities gathered more evidence from witnesses, cryptic notes left by the killers and at least one shell casing. Not all evidence led authorities down the right path -- and some may have set the case back.
A letter left outside a Virginia steakhouse where a 37-year-old man was shot and wounded Oct. 19 began with a cover sheet that said "call me God" and demanded $10 million ransom in "unlimited withdrawal" around the world, law enforcement officials said Friday night.
"For you, Mr. Policeman. Call me God. Do not release to the press," says the letter, described by a federal law enforcement source familiar with the four-page document.
The letter, found wrapped in plastic and tacked to a tree, included a demand for $10 million, and gave the 16-digit account number and a PIN number for a stolen credit card. "We will have unlimited withdrawal at any ATM worldwide," the letter says.
The letter rails against operators of the sniper telephone tip line, which at one or both of the suspects called at least six times, police say. It describes the operators as incompetent and says officials took the calls "for a hoax or a joke."
The letter, reproduced on The Washington Post's Web site Friday night, says, "your failure to respond has cost you five lives."
The day after four people were gunned down Oct. 3 in Montgomery County, Md., police hunted for a white box truck that a witness said left one of the crime scenes. Witnesses also reported a white van with a ladder rack leaving an Oct. 11 shooting in Virginia. Police later put out composite photos of both.
As a result, police were flooded with reports of white van and box truck sightings after shootings. And police with guns drawn pulled over white trucks and vans at roadblocks.
It turned out there was no white truck or white van, investigators said. The two suspects were in a blue car.
The witness "tunnel vision" effect is common in major investigations when police put out vehicle descriptions, said Tod W. Burke, a criminologist at Radford University in Virginia. Although police asked the public not to focus on trucks and vans, even officers were affected.
"You notice how many vans with ladders were pulled over," Burke said. "They fell into it a bit."
It may have cost lives. On Oct. 8, a Baltimore police officer approached the suspects' blue 1990 Caprice and found Muhammad sleeping in the vehicle, according to the FBI. Muhammad told the officer he was traveling. And police, looking for a white van, did not detain him.
In addition, a dark, older-model Chevrolet Caprice was seen leaving the area of an Oct. 3 shooting in Washington with its lights off, Washington Police Chief Charles Ramsey said. But that information was not publicized widely until more than a week later.
The case was also hurt by a witness who allegedly lied, saying he saw a man fire an AK-74 at a Home Depot in Virginia on Oct. 14 and leave in a cream-colored van. Police released the information, only to retract it the next day. The witness, Matthew M. Dowdy, was charged with obstructing justice.
Although Moose said the attacks could be the work of more than one person, many profilers and criminologists theorized the crimes were the work of a lone gunman -- an image that took hold with the public. And while some witnesses claimed to have seen two gunmen, others reported seeing just one.
Early in the investigation, police tried to find the killers through geographic profiling, a computerized mapping system that can pinpoint a suspect's home or area of operation using evidence and crime locations.
But the shootings eventually covered an 80-mile wide swath of the Washington region, as far south as Richmond. And Malvo and Muhammad appear to have been sleeping in their car, according to investigators.
"We saw the limits of geographic profiling done in Montgomery County when they struck in Virginia," said Northeastern University criminologist James Alan Fox. "After that, it was out the window."
Ultimately, it was the tip line that helped police solve the case. The line, staffed by the FBI, handled more than 70,000 calls during the investigation, including several allegedly from the suspects themselves.
Investigators believe the two called the tip line several times, and once told authorities to check out a shooting in "Montgomery." That eventually led police to Montgomery, Ala., where they matched a fingerprint from a Sept. 21 liquor store shooting to Malvo.
Fox credited Moose's negotiations, often done through cryptic statements the chief made on television, with goading the suspects into revealing themselves.
"The police were tipped off by the killers, but they also had a role in it," he said.
--------
AP Writer Curt Anderson in Washington contributed to this report.
Copyright 2002 Associated Press. All rights reserved.
And they ain't white guys, CNNABCFOXCBSMSNBC, are they?
So CNN blew it too.
So CNN blew it too.
Uh, that would be "CNN Washington DC at 202-898-7900".
The black out doesn't really work. If you download the pdf images of the letter from the Washington Post's site, you will notice that images are first painted on the screen minus the redactions. Then a short time later, the blackout is drawn.
To trigger repaints, view the file in Acrobat Reader and operate the magnifying glass icon on an area that has been redacted (hold down ctrl to reduce when the image gets too big).
For advanced users: Read the pdf into GhostScript, save it as Postscript (print to a file using the 'pswrite' device), then edit the Postscript and remove the rectangle drawing code towards the bottom of the file. Finally, display the edited Postscript in GhostScript. If you do it right, the redactions will be gone. Tee hee hee....
By the way, the $10m credit card is a Visa (it's everywhere a sniper wants to be) expiring 09/04, and its owner has been a member since 1974.
If you load the PDF letter into the full version of Adobe Acrobat (the editor, not the reader), you can just use the Text Touchup tool to select, right click, and delete the blackouts.
It takes about 10 seconds to get rid of them.
Anti-profiling costs lives.
I am guessing that Muhammad did not know about Malvo's fingerprinting by the INS. Without that there is no tie.
Bob Novak had some inside information. He knew about the blue Caprice and asked the police if they could run with it. The police told him to kill the story.
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.