October 19, a Saturday, the seventeenth day of the nightmare. We were into our fifth day without a shooting, but the fear was still through the roof. Citizens were clearly altering their lives and staying out of view unless absolutely necessary. At the joint operations center, the lack of a shooting had a perverse, inverse effect: what if the killers had decided to stop their rampage? After our last witness had been discredited and locked up for filing a false report, the collective mood and morale of the task force were noticeably slipping.
Even the catered food reflected the dismal atmosphere—hot food like lasagna, spaghetti, and fried chicken had been replaced by skimpy sandwiches, small bags of chips, and off-brand cans of soda. The provisions were also indicative of our financial situation, of course; with each passing day, the resources needed to keep this massive investigative team together became that much further stretched.
But just as another frustrating, unproductive day turned into evening, Jeffrey Hopper was shot in the stomach as he and his wife came out of a Ponderosa Steakhouse restaurant just off I-95 in Ashland, Virginia. The shooting occurred at 7:19 p.m.—a little past dusk.
The steak house property consisted of a one-story building with a large parking lot wrapping the entire structure. There was outside lighting, though it was dim at best. But the Ponderosa Steakhouse had a feature that made the snipers’ act easy. Behind the restaurant’s parking area was a large wooded lot where the shot had come from. While Hopper would survive his injuries, neither he nor his wife saw anybody at the time of the shooting, and there was nothing suspicious to alert them.
Once again the Virginia State Police and the local sheriff’s department quickly secured the area, setting up roadblocks and checkpoints all along not just I-95, but also Route 1, which is a heavily traveled option to the frequently congested interstate. As usual, traffic flow soon came to a virtual stop and resulted in massive traffic jams in all directions.
At the operations center, we continued working the leads that were being spit out of Case Explorer while also remaining glued to the live TV coverage. Just as they had with roadblocks after the previous shooting, the news crews were showing helicopter views of the massive traffic jams and were telling the public—along with the snipers—how to avoid the roadblocks and checkpoints. We watched, shaking our heads at the foolish media. More than one investigator shouted a few choice words at the TV. Yet there was nothing that could be done about the news coverage. The task force investigators were going to have to rely on the leadership to manage the press.
I called Captain McAndrew and briefed him on what we knew, which was exactly what anyone sitting in front of a TV set knew. McAndrew said he would see if he could get the latest information directly from Captain Forsyth; maybe there was something we could get a jump on that might start us down a new path.
And in fact this shooting would turn out to be different from the previous ones. After seventeen days, we were about to get the break we had been waiting for.
The crime scene investigative team swarmed the area surrounding the Ponderosa Steak House and quickly determined that the shot had come from a hiding place in the tree line at the rear of the restaurant. The location was a perfect sniper position. It was nestled in the woods well back from the parking lot, protecting the shooter from sight; but it also offered a clear view of the parking lot. The sniper had an unobstructed shooting lane directly to the spot where Hopper stood when he was hit.
Within minutes, investigators found a spent shell casing from the .223-caliber sniper rifle, which ultimately proved to be a Bushmaster assault-style rifle with a folding bipod barrel rest and optic sight system. And in a clear, zipped plastic bag tacked to the tree where the shooter had rested the rifle to take aim, the snipers had left the police a letter. Following evidence protocol, investigators carefully removed the bag from the tree, leaving the letter inside. The letter was then taken to the FBI forensics lab, where it was carefully removed from the plastic bag and examined for fingerprints before being read. This delayed our ability to read the letter right away, but it was the proper way to handle the evidence. Since we had nothing to indicate who the snipers were, we needed to go by the book—no quick examination of the letter would be done until we could do so under proper lab conditions, and when fingerprint evidence could be collected without fear of contamination. If this was the break in the case we had needed, we damn sure weren’t going to get careless and screw it up.
This letter to the police was much more detailed than their previous communication, and that was the mistake that would finally allow us to put names to these killers. We also learned something from the form of the letter—the message was hand printed on lined, wide-rule notepaper, and affixed to the cover page were red star-shaped stickers like those a kindergarten teacher would dispense as a reward.
Once again it was clear that the snipers wanted the police to know they believed they had power over life and death. The god complex ran so deeply that they repeated the words “Call me God” in quotation marks on the first page of the letter. They also reiterated their warning not to release this letter to the press. The rest of the first page was devoted to calling out what they said was the incompetence of the police and the task force.
One disturbing revelation was that they had repeatedly phoned the task force and had finally spoken to someone on their fourth try. We knew we had a problem because of the heavy volume of calls coming in—there simply weren’t enough lines to handle the traffic, and callers would get a busy signal. This problem had been acknowledged several times at public news conferences, and the public had been encouraged to keep on trying until the call went through and was answered. As the investigation progressed, additional phone numbers and hot lines were added almost daily to keep up with the call volume. This in turn hampered our ability to enter the info into Rapid Start and then into Case Explorer for analysis. As we had feared, some calls were going unlogged or were being lost in the system’s inability to keep up.
Also, our trained call takers knew very little about the investigation beyond what everybody had gleaned from the media, so they were at a disadvantage in knowing when to be alert to something of interest a caller was telling them over the phone. It was just impossible to provide all those concerned with all the details they truly needed.
Besides calling the tip line, the snipers reported having called a priest in Ashland, Virginia, but the priest didn’t take their call seriously. They had also called D.C. Metropolitan Police. On the first page of their letter they said that law enforcement’s “failure to respond has cost you five lives.” Once again, they were blaming us for their killings. To the cops reading this, it was like having salt rubbed into an open wound. Their words sent me into hyper drive. I damn sure wasn’t going to quit until the case either was solved or killed me. As I looked into the faces of the team around me, I knew I wasn’t alone.
On page two, they switched from telling us how incompetent we were to demanding money. They wanted $10 million. In order to stop the killing, we were to deposit that amount into a Bank of America platinum Visa account in the name of Jill Lynn Farell, for which the killers provided the account number and PIN. The account was to be activated so that they could access it from anywhere in the world. The terms, they said, were not negotiable. We were given until 9 a.m. Monday to complete the transaction.
On page three, the snipers said they would call us Sunday morning at six to confirm that their terms were acceptable. Once again, they placed the blame for any future killings on the police.
They closed their letter with a postscript: P.S. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.