Experts Are at a Loss on Profile of Sniper

Is he a hunter gone mad? A schizophrenic with delusions of a direct line to God? A military marksman waging urban warfare on his countrymen? A terrorist? And whoever he is, is he working alone?

The science of U.S. law enforcement has had ample experience with murder, but the sniper who has terrorized the greater Washington area for a week, killing six and wounding two with single-shot precision, is confounding at least 195 of the nation’s finest.

And Wednesday night, investigators were seeking to determine if the sniper had struck again.

Police reported a man was shot to death at 8:18 p.m. at a service station north of Manassas, Va., 30 miles southwest of Washington.

“We have an adult male who was pumping gas who is deceased,” Prince William County Police spokesman Dennis Mangan said. “And that, at least on its surface, fits the pattern we’ve been seeing.”

But Mangan cautioned against making a firm link to the other shootings.

“It’s still in the earliest stages of investigation,” he said. “We don’t know exactly what we have yet.”

The victim, whose identity was not released Wednesday night, was standing beside the gas pump when he was hit, Mangan said. If a link is established to the other killings, it would be the third shooting to occur at a gas station.

Virginia State Police said two men were seen driving away in a white vehicle after the attack. A Maryland witness told police last week he saw two men in a white truck or van leaving the scene of a shooting outside a post office.

Dozens of police officers descended on the area, checking nearby motels and blocking traffic around the shooting scene. They were joined by investigators from the sniper task force who were dispatched from their Montgomery County, Md., headquarters, as were agents from the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Cpl. Rob Moroney of the Montgomery County Police Department, which is coordinating the investigation, said it was “too early to speculate” about whether this shooting is linked to the others.

There have been frustratingly few clues in the attacks. The latest is a Tarot card inscribed, “Dear policeman, I am God,” found near a shell casing 150 yards from the Maryland middle school where a 13-year-old boy was critically wounded Monday.

Voicing the challenge faced by investigators struggling to solve the series of crimes, Clint Van Zandt, a retired FBI official and an expert on criminal psychology, said: “I am a profiler, not a soothsayer. He is motivated, he is focused, he is reasonably intelligent for a predator. He is psychopathic and has no appreciation for the pain and consternation he is causing.”

A sniper as serial killer is not unprecedented, but cases that leave so little evidence and follow no pattern tend to stump even the best detectives, who now are turning to everything from psychological work-ups to combing blades of grass on their hands and knees.

With 1,600 “credible” leads and precious little hard evidence to go on, experts are attempting to build a profile of a killer who has managed to strike and vanish eight times in Maryland, the District of Columbia and Virginia--areas already under an unprecedented level of security since last year’s terrorist attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon.

Most serial killers prey on a particular type of victim--women, gay men, prostitutes--at a particular kind of site--lovers’ lanes, freeways, bars. But this one seems to have made a pattern out of randomness. His victims--black, white, Latino and Indian--have ranged in age from 13 to 72. He has no apparent personal contact with his prey, shooting people he likely has never met from distances that prohibit so much as a look into their eyes. His only consistent calling card is his weapon.

Except for a nighttime slaying of an elderly man on a Washington street corner and, if it is linked, this latest shooting, the killer has kept banker’s hours--a shooting spree in the mornings and afternoons late last week, off for the weekend, then back at 8:09 Monday morning.

Every tidbit of information has been seized upon by experts and lay people alike as a possible window into the mind of a maniac. Still, no single portrait emerges.

The chilling efficiency of the shootings and swift escapes has raised questions about whether the killer has had military or police training. His weapon of choice--linked in six of the eight shootings--is not the run-of-the-mill rifle Boy Scouts use to shoot tin cans, nor the .30-caliber model popular among hunters, but a .223-caliber known for high velocity and pinpoint accuracy at 500 yards.

“The weapon itself is indicative of a person on a power trip,” said Robert Ressler, a criminologist and former FBI profiler. “It’s a macho, civilian version of the military M-16. It appeals to the gun nuts and the paramilitary types, a favored symbolic expression of the authority and power these people are trying to obtain.”

Many serial killers kidnap, rape or otherwise interact with their victims. David Berkowitz--the “Son of Sam” killer who terrorized New York City in 1976 and 1977--focused on young women parked in lovers’ lanes.

“Berkowitz would come right up close and shoot,” recalled Fred Schwartz, who investigated the case for the Queens County, N.Y., district attorney’s office and is now a lawyer in Florida.

By contrast, the Washington-area shooter approaches his grisly task more like sport.

“This is hunting behavior,” said Reid Meloy, a San Diego forensic psychologist who profiled Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh for prosecutors. “That’s why it’s so frightening. The success of hunting is built on the premise of not alerting your target before you make the kill. This is planned, purposeful, and the act of killing is done with little emotion.”

The shootings seem to involve great calculation; matted grass found in the woods near the middle school indicates that the killer lay in wait. But the ability to vanish without being spotted even in populous suburbs suggests to some the work of a team, perhaps a mastermind with a partner at the ready for a quick getaway.

“You can’t just stick a rifle like this out of a window; it takes manipulation,” Ressler said. “He’s not pulling up and speeding off. The vehicle would almost have to be stopped to get that ... accuracy.”

But the skill of blending into an urban setting is also characteristic of military training, leading some investigators to wonder if this is an elite soldier gone off the rails. “Whoever it is, they’ve spent a lot of time looking down the sights of a rifle,” Van Zandt said.

Most experts lean toward the notion of a frustrated civilian enamored of the military and perhaps influenced by a “sniper culture” of books and videos that has emerged in recent years under the slogan “one shot, one kill,” said Tom Diaz, senior analyst at the Violence Policy Center in Washington, a gun-control advocacy group.

A point of agreement is that this killer is mentally ill. The Tarot card--sent to FBI forensics analysts for study--was seen as evidence of a damaged mind, perhaps weak and impotent in daily life.

“In the act of killing--particularly in a case where the person appears to have developed a taste for it--there is a sense that he does become godlike, because he does have the power of life and death,” Meloy said.

Typically, the urge to communicate with police grows, a move that can prove to be a killer’s undoing.

“The Achilles’ heel of an individual like this is typically his sense of impunity.... That’s what eventually brings him down,” Meloy said, citing the case of Unabomber Theodore J. Kaczynski, whose explosives sent through the mail killed three and injured 29 between 1978 and 1995. If Kaczynski had “kept bombing and didn’t send manifestos out to the newspapers, he might still be out there.”

One thing the shooter has yet to do is claim responsibility for the killings, leading some to discount the notion of foreign terrorists who seek to advance a broad agenda.

“This is small change for a terrorist,” criminologist Ressler said. “They look to disrupt the economy and commerce. There’s not enough bang for the buck here.”

Meanwhile, the Tarot card discovery prompted police to return to the earlier crime scenes, raking the areas for clues. Investigators were deluged with tips and chased some leads that went nowhere. At noon Wednesday, a heavily armed SWAT team fanned out into a wooded area near a Maryland elementary school after a neighbor reported seeing a man vanish into the forest carrying a long black bag. A search yielded nothing.

Indeed, one reason serial killers are so frustrating to law enforcement is they tend to operate outside of the world where police have their greatest resources: informants and eyewitnesses.

So police are continuing to turn to the public, urging residents to call in any noticeable change in behavior in those around them.

“It is information from another person that may close this investigation,” Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles A. Moose said.

If past killers have imparted any lesson, it’s that they can elude police for years. Ted Bundy confessed to killing 30 women and girls in seven states from 1973 to 1978 before he was caught and executed.

“Night Stalker” Richard Ramirez was convicted of 13 torture-murders in the L.A. area in 1984 and 1985; he remains on death row.

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Times staff writers Stephen Braun and Lisa Getter contributed to this report.