Sniper Has a Message for Police

Police made a cryptic public appeal Sunday night to the rifle-toting sniper who has terrorized Washington’s suburbs after a telephone number and message were found at the scene of a weekend shooting in rural Virginia.

“To the person who left us a message at the Ponderosa last night,” Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles A. Moose read from a prepared statement, “you gave us a telephone number. We do want to talk to you. Call us at the number you provided.” Then Moose turned his back on reporters and withdrew without answering questions.

Investigators believe the message was left by the sniper, and the chief’s words were intended as a direct response to the gunman, an official familiar with the investigation said.

The Saturday night attack outside a Ponderosa steakhouse here left a 37-year-old man clinging to life with a bullet in his belly. Law enforcement officials quickly acknowledged that the unidentified man was probably the latest victim of the unknown gunman. Late into the night and throughout the day Sunday, hundreds of weary investigators continued to hunt through the thick woods on the hem of Interstate 95 here, desperate for clues in the one-shot assaults that appear to have spread from the Maryland suburbs deep into the rural farmland of Virginia.

Moose’s statement was the first hint that new evidence has turned up in the ongoing hunt for the sniper -- and also was the first time that police openly have reached out through the media to communicate with the gunman. “I would like for the media to carry this point, carry it clearly and carry it often,” Moose said.

In the anxious days since a bullet punched through the front window of a Maryland craft shop Oct. 2, nine people have died and two more have been wounded by the sniper. Over the weeks, a sort of public tug of war has unfurled involving the elusive sniper, the investigators on his trail and the journalists covering the pursuit. This is a tricky game for police, who depend on tips from an informed public -- but struggle against information leaks that show their hand or, worse, spur the sniper to attack.

When news reports assured parents that schools were still safe, the sniper gunned down a 13-year-old in front of a middle school. When observers noted publicly that nobody had been shot at night, the sniper waited until after sundown to attack. After the school shooting, police found the death card of a fortune teller’s Tarot deck with a note scrawled on its face: “Dear policeman, I am God.”

“This guy, these guys or this guy and his girl are interactive terrorists,” former FBI profiler Clinton Van Zandt told Associated Press. “They are interacting with law enforcement through the media.”

If the sniper is responsible for the Saturday attack, he is branching out from the ring of suburbs that were his customary hunting ground. It will also mark the first time he has struck on a weekend.

The victim has undergone two surgeries, and late Sunday doctors removed the bullet that could provide a ballistic link to the sniper. But batteries of agents from the sniper task force already had questioned witnesses and combed the woods behind the parking lot where the diner was shot at his wife’s side.

“We are acting as if it is [another sniper shooting] and we will continue in that mode until we find out it is not,” said Col. V. Stuart Cook of the Hanover County Sheriff’s Department.

All the earmarks were there: One bullet. A parking lot near the highway. An unseen gunman who opened fire -- and disappeared. This time, the target was an out-of-state traveler who had pulled off the interstate to refuel his car and sit down for dinner. Fed and rested, he and his wife were headed for the car when the shot rang out.

Robert Gwathmey, 45, was staying the night at a nearby motel. He was outside smoking a cigarette when he was startled by a loud noise from the direction of the Ponderosa, “like the sound you hear when one of those big Dumpsters drops,” he said. Minutes later, the wail of sirens filled the night, and Gwathmey watched police maneuver large tractor-trailer rigs onto the I-95 ramp to block cars from reaching the highway. “I’ve never seen this many cop cars in my life,” he said.

A sharp boom is a common characteristic of guns that fire the .223-caliber rounds favored by the killer, firearms experts said. “The sound is relatively loud, even though the recoil from the gun is pretty minimal,” said Jim Pasco, a former federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms deputy director who is executive director of the National Fraternal Order of Police.

Minutes after the man collapsed on the blacktop, police and sheriff’s deputies plunged into the dense stand of maples, pines and green birch that rises behind the restaurant’s parking lot. Within two hours, they were joined by ATF agents and dogs sensitive to trace amounts of gunpowder.

The forest is a tangle of trees and trails cut by a wide brook. Beyond the tree line, workers have cleared a wide swath of trees to make way for a Wal-Mart Supercenter.

A plan to shut down all the major nearby highways went into effect 10 minutes after the shooting, city of Ashland spokesman Jim Perdue said. But residents said anybody familiar with the turf could make his way back to the highway in five minutes or less. “It wouldn’t be that hard to get away,” said Greg Puryear, who works in a filling station across the road from the eatery. “You wouldn’t know it by looking from here, but you could do it.”

Light rain fell on and off all night Saturday, and Hanover County Sheriff’s Lt. Doug Goodman said investigators planned to inspect a muddy field beyond the tree line for tire tracks and footprints. “Even if it’s a tire impression, it might show up on the muddy road,” he said. As Sunday dragged on, investigators slashed down yellow tape and withdrew from the woods and parking lots, but a police line still roped off the fields.

Sniper attacks seemed an improbable worry in this bucolic town of Victorian houses and aged oaks, a place that has dubbed itself “the center of the universe” and prides itself on neighbors being able to leave their front doors unlocked. With a single gunshot, Washington’s woes have spread down I-95 into the rolling forests, soybean farms and tomato fields that mark the beginning of the South.

Nobody in Ashland has been murdered since February. When suburban Washington schools scouted for playing fields out of the sniper’s reach, they chose Ashland as a host town for displaced matches.

“People don’t even speed here, because they say the police would write their own grandmothers a ticket,” said Brenda Harring, a 36-year-old resident who snapped souvenir photographs of investigators Sunday. “To see this in Ashland -- this just feels surreal.”

On Sunday, worried residents clumped across the street from the steakhouse, talking quietly and shaking their heads. Mayor Angela LaCombe drove back to town from Norfolk, Va., in such a panic that she crashed her van into a parking garage pillar.

“We’re kind of like Mayberry,” said Vice Mayor Faye Prichard, referring to the setting of the folksy TV sitcom that starred Andy Griffith.

Meanwhile, detectives swept through the motels along England Road, rousing potential witnesses from their beds. Gwathmey said detectives asked him whether he had noticed any suspicious guests in the motel. They also wanted to know whether he had seen a white box truck or a white van -- vehicles that police have sought in connection with the slayings. “I see them on the road everywhere,” Gwathmey said, “but there weren’t any parked around here.”

The wounded man endured three hours of surgery Saturday night at the Medical College of Virginia Hospital in Richmond to stanch heavy internal bleeding. Doctors had to remove part of the man’s stomach, along with half of his pancreas and his spleen. He underwent a second operation late Sunday.

“The prognosis is still guarded,” said Dr. Rao Ivatury, the hospital’s director of trauma and critical care. “But since he is a very healthy man and he is very young, the chances are fair to good, I would say.”

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Times staff writer Lisa Getter contributed to this report.