Menacing Note Heats Up Police Pursuit of Sniper

Police hunting for the ghostly Washington-area sniper conducted a delicate, coded public dialogue with him Monday, spurred by a threatening letter left at the scene of his most recent shooting.

The investigation lurched over a dizzying turn of events as heavily armed Virginia police swooped down on a white van during a morning stakeout at a Richmond gas station. For several tense hours, police raised hopes that the arrest of two men had finally ended the sniper’s rampage. But by day’s end, authorities concluded that the men had nothing to do with the case and turned them over to immigration officials.

Federal forensic analysts confirmed Monday that a highway traveler seriously wounded in a shooting in Ashland, Va., on Saturday night is the roving gunman’s 12th victim. Search teams found a note in dense woods near the shooting scene and investigators said the gunman appeared to be the author of the threatening screed, written in threadbare English.

The sniper’s latest victim, a 37-year-old man whose name has not been released, was in serious condition at the Medical College of Virginia Hospital after surgeons removed parts of his stomach, spleen and pancreas. Doctors also removed and gave police a .223-caliber bullet fragment that linked this shooting to the others in the Washington area. The sniper has killed nine people and wounded three since Oct. 2.

Signaling that authorities had been in halting telephone contact with the presumed sniper at least twice since the letter was found, Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles A. Moose asked for a third chance.

“The person you called could not hear everything you said,” Moose said in a televised plea late Monday afternoon. “The audio was unclear and we could not get it right. Call us back so that we can clearly understand.”

Moose and other investigators would not divulge their discussions with the killer. But several officials and former police investigators described the hidden dialogue as a fragile dance designed to draw the sniper out and learn more about his mental state, while scrutinizing his letter for any traces of physical evidence that might be used to track him down.

“They’re trying any way they can to kick this investigation up to the next level,” said Joe Vince, a former chief of the Crime Gun Analysis Branch at the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

Writer Makes Demands

The letter was found behind a Ponderosa steakhouse parking lot about 50 feet from where the victim fell. The note contained demands for dialogue with police and several threatening passages, said an official involved with the task force. Authorities were convinced soon after studying the letter that it was genuine and decided during a high-level meeting Sunday to open communications with him.

“They’re confident this is the guy,” the official said.

Federal agents said the letter was “very lengthy” and poorly worded, bordering on broken English. Officials would not speculate whether the wording indicated whether the writer was a native English speaker or foreign-born.

Authorities close to the task force also said the letter contained unspecified threatening language about children -- a warning that appeared to have played a role in prompting school officials in Richmond and surrounding suburbs to cancel classes Monday.

School superintendents in Chesterfield, Hanover and Henrico counties and the city of Richmond had said earlier in the day that a surge in calls from anxious parents after the Ashland shooting led to the move. “People are very concerned about how we can assure safety,” said Henrico Supt. Mark A. Edwards.

Federal officials said a man presumed to be the killer called the FBI’s sniper tip hotline in Washington soon after the shooting in the Ponderosa parking lot. The caller said he had left a note.

“The telephone call saying the note is there came after the shooting,” an FBI official said. “Whether the note was there beforehand is what they’re trying to ascertain.”

Officials have parceled out little about their dialogue. Montgomery County police spokeswoman Lucille Baur at one point canceled an appearance by Moose, saying police were at a “very sensitive stage of the investigation.”

“The real issue is they don’t want to put anything out there that would jeopardize this or tip the sniper to do something more,” the FBI official said. “If you make the wrong move, it could set him off. They don’t know what makes him tick.”

Former investigators who have been involved in similar back-channel communications with criminal suspects said task force officials can only improve the prospects of capture by drawing out the killer in talks.

“Any kind of contact we have with him is good,” said former FBI profiler Clint Van Zandt. “So many times we see a one-way taunting, and today there is some two-way communication going on. That’s very positive.”

Police found a tarot card with a skeletal image of death at an earlier shooting. On the card, dropped near a shell casing outside a Prince George’s County, Md., middle school where a 13-year-old student was wounded, was a message: “Dear Mr. Policeman, I am God.”

Even as police tried to draw the killer into conversation over the weekend, they also reportedly tried to trace the calls he made. At least one of those traces, an official said, led to the Richmond pay phone where police rousted two men at gunpoint Monday morning.

Moving at lightning speed, the stakeout at first seemed to have finally ended the killer’s 20-day rampage. Richmond SWAT officers armed with assault rifles and bulletproof vests dashed out from a car dealership parking lot and surrounded a white Plymouth minivan parked at a pay phone by an Exxon station shortly after 8 a.m.

Don Neilson, 49, a service manager at Royal Oldsmobile, was stunned to see police bolt from cars parked in the dealership’s lot and run toward the van. Within seconds, several officers pulled at the car’s passenger door while others aimed their rifles at a rear window. Finally, Neilson and others at the lot watched as one policeman reached inside the van and yanked the driver outside.

Tall and dark-skinned, the man was later identified as an undocumented immigrant. But for a moment, car salesman Jackie Liege thought Richmond police had finally ended the sniper’s reign of terror. “I saw the white van there and I thought, ‘Now maybe they’ve got the guy,’ ” he said.

But when service station owner Nizan Kahn saw the second man police had grabbed handcuffed inside a cruiser, he recognized him as a regular customer who bought cheap phone cards -- not the sniper.

“I didn’t think he was that kind of guy,” Kahn said.

Turned Over to INS

After hours of interrogation, Richmond police concluded that Kahn’s instinct was correct.

The two men, undocumented immigrants from Mexico and Guatemala, had made the mistake of driving a white van up to a phone booth being watched by police.

“It does appear that these individuals were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time,” said a federal law enforcement official.

The two men are being turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and will face deportation hearings, said INS spokesman Russ Bergeron. The men will be charged with INS violations, including being in the United States illegally, Bergeron said.

*

Times staff writers Mark Fineman and John Hendren reported from Richmond and Lisa Getter and Megan K. Stack reported from Washington.