Speaker 1: Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of iHeart Radio
Speaker 1: and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this
Speaker 1: podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals
Speaker 1: participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: Saying somebody got shot as fire Personnaco.
Speaker 3: Okay, somebody got shrial, but I did playing there man.
Speaker 3: He's laying on the car and there was a white
Speaker 3: man just went by with two guys in it. The
Speaker 3: man just went gone, now walk forward. We did not
Speaker 3: the two thirty two thirty four went out a whitey. Okay,
Speaker 3: well there go, there's.
Speaker 2: A going down thirty color chwards your distraction. I'll go
Speaker 2: with sixty four, okay. Sean taken information the asters all
Speaker 2: the way. I'm the possibatoration.
Speaker 4: A call in the evening on October ninth from a
Speaker 4: source saying, you need to get out to Manassas. There's
Speaker 4: been another one.
Speaker 5: This is Washington Post reporter Josh White.
Speaker 4: There was nothing more than that. I was given a location.
Speaker 4: I knew the area, so I knew that they would
Speaker 4: have shut down the intersection right by the gas station.
Speaker 4: So I went past the gas station, got off onto
Speaker 4: a side road and came up the back way, and
Speaker 4: I thought, well, if you wanted to get a really
Speaker 4: good view of the crime scene, you would go up
Speaker 4: onto this hill. There was a Bob Evans that overlooked
Speaker 4: the gas station from across the road. Standing there on
Speaker 4: that hill and looking down at that crime scene, it
Speaker 4: was lit up at night. Somebody standing there would have
Speaker 4: been framed fully in light. It's like a lit up
Speaker 4: target with a million access points. They had shut down
Speaker 4: the parking lot and they were interviewing everyone who was leaving.
Speaker 4: I drove up and I got into an adjacent parking lot,
Speaker 4: and I walked right to where I thought.
Speaker 5: Would be the best view.
Speaker 4: That, too, was something that the snipers realized that that
Speaker 4: was the best view of that gas station view because
Speaker 4: I'm fairly certain I stood directly next to the vehicle
Speaker 4: that they had been using to kill tons and tons
Speaker 4: of people facing the gas station below.
Speaker 1: There is a ruthless person on the loose.
Speaker 6: What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
Speaker 6: of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Speaker 5: They killed the five people in one day and then
Speaker 5: went on the rampage for the next month.
Speaker 7: It is quite a mystery.
Speaker 5: The police say they have never had a crime quite
Speaker 5: like this.
Speaker 8: Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going
Speaker 8: to go right straight through our bulletproof vests.
Speaker 9: The white.
Speaker 5: From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is monster DC sniper.
Speaker 10: Nine sniper attacks in eight days have the Washington metropolitan
Speaker 10: area on high alert. Since last Wednesday, seven people have
Speaker 10: been killed and two wounded. One was a thirteen year
Speaker 10: old boy who was critically wounded at a Maryland middle school.
Speaker 10: The latest shooting took place just after eight o'clock last night,
Speaker 10: about thirty miles west of Washington, d C.
Speaker 5: October ninth, two thousand and two. It has now been
Speaker 5: a full week since the spree of sniper killings began
Speaker 5: in the DC metro area. Most of the attacks had
Speaker 5: taken place in Maryland, except for one shooting at a
Speaker 5: Michael's Inspontsylvania, Virginia, but now the snipers were on the move.
Speaker 11: On October ninth, the week following the Montgomery County shootings,
Speaker 11: a man who worked in an office building in Manassas
Speaker 11: was out pumping gas not too far from where he
Speaker 11: worked got named Dean Myers.
Speaker 5: This is Dave Statner, reporter for Channel nine News.
Speaker 11: He's on Sudley Road and Saint Prince William County, Virginia,
Speaker 11: and he's just pumping gas and shot and killed.
Speaker 5: Bob Myers. The victim's brother, spoke about the shooting at
Speaker 5: a press conference.
Speaker 12: I would like to know the reason that would help me,
Speaker 12: but I recognize that whatever reason it is, it won't
Speaker 12: be a good one.
Speaker 5: This attack sent a ripple through the region. It was
Speaker 5: the third shooting to take place at a gas station.
Speaker 5: As Channel nine reporter Dave Stander points out, now the
Speaker 5: people of Virginia had a lot to worry about.
Speaker 11: This is where you're really starting to notice how cautious
Speaker 11: people are filling up with gasoline. People are being extremely
Speaker 11: cautious and once again, like the people the first day
Speaker 11: we knew about this, the woman vacuuming our car, the
Speaker 11: taxi driver who's pumping gas. This happened to Dean Myers.
Speaker 11: He's filling up with gasoline. So now the real focus
Speaker 11: is what do I do when I'm pumping gas. I
Speaker 11: have to get gasoline from my car. There are gas
Speaker 11: stations that are starting to put up barricade or harps
Speaker 11: to block your people are ducking around the other side
Speaker 11: of their vehicle, or putting the nozzle into their vehicle
Speaker 11: and walking away from the vehicle, trying to get some
Speaker 11: sort of cover. So people are clearly scared filling up
Speaker 11: with gasoline, and this shooting of Dean Myers just added
Speaker 11: to that fear.
Speaker 5: Who could have imagined that somewhere as mundane as a
Speaker 5: gas station could become the impetus for such crippling fear.
Speaker 5: I visited the Sonoco station in Manassas, Virginia, where Dean
Speaker 5: Myers was killed, and the scene brought back some vivid
Speaker 5: memories from that October in two thousand and two. Maybe
Speaker 5: one of the indelible images that I have in my
Speaker 5: mind from those days. I mean, it really is of
Speaker 5: seeing the blue tarp that was serving as a bit
Speaker 5: of a barrier protecting people. So people are pumping gas
Speaker 5: and they're essentially under around behind this blue tarp. And
Speaker 5: the other thing I recall is hearing stories of cops
Speaker 5: being asked by folks who needed a fill. Hey, I'll
Speaker 5: give you some extra money to fill up my gas
Speaker 5: tank because I'm so afraid. I'm afraid to do it myself,
Speaker 5: Would you take this extra twenty to fill up my
Speaker 5: gas tank? That sort of speaks to how much fear
Speaker 5: there was at the time. I think the other thing
Speaker 5: that we can't imagine today someone getting away with all
Speaker 5: of these episodes, all of these attacks and not clearly
Speaker 5: being established on some kind of surveillance cameras, some kind
Speaker 5: of CCTV. In two thousand nineteen, come on, you couldn't
Speaker 5: even attempt something like what we're talking about now shooting
Speaker 5: someone dead in a Sunoco gas station. But we're talking
Speaker 5: about two thousand and two. We're also talking post nine
Speaker 5: to eleven, so you're talking about putting more of those
Speaker 5: systems in place.
Speaker 13: At that point, we still have officers at the scene
Speaker 13: searching for evidence, going over it iculously.
Speaker 5: Police believed they were on the sniper's trail. At a
Speaker 5: press conference following the Dean Meyer shooting, officials revealed what
Speaker 5: type of vehicle they thought the snipers were using.
Speaker 7: The only information we have on a possible vehicle was
Speaker 7: a white mini van described as a panel vehicle, meaning
Speaker 7: it had only front passenger windows.
Speaker 13: The rest was solid.
Speaker 5: Officials thought the snipers might still be in the area,
Speaker 5: so police set up roadblocks on the streets near the
Speaker 5: crime scene. Nearby parking lots were shut down. No one
Speaker 5: was allowed to leave. Hundreds of people were stopped and questioned,
Speaker 5: but no suspects were detained. Officer Stephen Bailey's job was
Speaker 5: to scout the Bob Evans parking lot for potential witnesses.
Speaker 5: He remembers approaching one specific vehicle. The driver inside said
Speaker 5: he was on vacation. This man also said he'd been
Speaker 5: directed into the parking lot by another officer. Bailey said
Speaker 5: the man was quote very polite and very courteous, and
Speaker 5: so with no reason to detain him, Bailey let the
Speaker 5: man leave. It would be months later that Officer Bailey
Speaker 5: had a terrible realization the man he met that day
Speaker 5: was the killer they were looking for.
Speaker 4: I think that, in a lot of ways is a
Speaker 4: microcosm of the challenge that was facing everybody.
Speaker 5: This is Washington Post reporter Josh White. He told the
Speaker 5: story of standing near the killer's vehicle at the beginning
Speaker 5: of the episode, but like Officer Stephen Bailey, he didn't
Speaker 5: think anything of it.
Speaker 14: At the time.
Speaker 4: Nobody knew who they were looking for, nobody knew what
Speaker 4: vehicle to look for. Nobody knew the mechanism of the shooting.
Speaker 4: Was it coming from a car, was it coming from outside. Ultimately,
Speaker 4: when they found the vehicle, it was obvious to everyone
Speaker 4: why the vehicle was so difficult to detect. It was
Speaker 4: an engineered killing machine. It was built in a way
Speaker 4: to avoid detection. It was altered in a way that
Speaker 4: if you you were to walk right up to it,
Speaker 4: you wouldn't think twice. It wouldn't strike you externally as
Speaker 4: anything to worry about. I thought, I don't know how
Speaker 4: they're ever going to catch this person. It really showed
Speaker 4: the vulnerability. It showed that if somebody wants to go
Speaker 4: after someone who they have no connection to, randomly in
Speaker 4: a metropolitan area, that's millions of people, what's stopping them?
Speaker 15: For me?
Speaker 4: That was one of the scariest moments. That shooting highlighted
Speaker 4: how difficult this all was and how frightening it all was.
Speaker 5: This shooting also marked another major shift in the case,
Speaker 5: one that greatly raised the stakes for the snipers.
Speaker 4: They I think unbeknownst to them, obviously, they had committed
Speaker 4: a crime in a county that had one of the
Speaker 4: more aggressive prosecutors from a capital punishment perspective, Paul Ebert, do.
Speaker 16: You a distinction, but not unusual occasions happened.
Speaker 5: This is Paul Ebert, Virginia's longest serving prosecutor. I spoke
Speaker 5: with him at his office in Prince William County. He
Speaker 5: remembers when Dean Meyers was shot in his district.
Speaker 16: My daughter had strange enough about a half a block
Speaker 16: where it has happened. When it happened, you out a bank.
Speaker 16: I went to the scene. I got normally do on
Speaker 16: a murder case. We don't have that many murders. It
Speaker 16: helps me to be able to visualize what's going on.
Speaker 16: A lot of press, a lot of people. The body
Speaker 16: was gone, chucked around. Of course, it was pretty ivous
Speaker 16: that the snipers had done this before, the history leading
Speaker 16: up to it, and he I had no idea if
Speaker 16: and when would ever get the case try. I talked
Speaker 16: with a couple of reporters that I knew, and I
Speaker 16: did say that if this is a sniper, it looks
Speaker 16: like it is just a death case. Absolute some kind
Speaker 16: of a great mitigating factor. It was a capitol case.
Speaker 5: Paul Elbert was issuing a direct threat to the snipers.
Speaker 5: We went on television that day to say that quote
Speaker 5: this case, if I have anything to do with it,
Speaker 5: will be prosecuted in this jurisdiction to the full extent
Speaker 5: of the law. Ebert has sentenced more inmates to death
Speaker 5: row than any other Virginia prosecutor. So if the sniper
Speaker 5: was following the news, they would have known that if caught,
Speaker 5: they would eventually face the death penalty. The snipers weren't
Speaker 5: done in Virginia, as the area was still reeling from
Speaker 5: the death of Dean Harold Myers. Tragedy struck once more.
Speaker 5: Channel nine reporter Dave's Statter was there on.
Speaker 11: The morning of October eleventh, two days after Dean Myers
Speaker 11: has shot pumping guests in the Monastass area of Virginia.
Speaker 11: Further south, in the Vicksburg area, there's another man shot,
Speaker 11: fifty three year old Kenneth Bridges. He's shot dead pumping
Speaker 11: gasoline at Nexxon station. This is just off Interstate ninety five,
Speaker 11: of heavily traveled roadway between Richmond and Washington, this portion
Speaker 11: of I ninety five. We worked our way down there
Speaker 11: to just off the highway, and it was difficult getting
Speaker 11: to that scene. The traffic was just horrendous because the
Speaker 11: roadway was shut down just off I ninety five. Police
Speaker 11: were probably stopping vehicles coming and going. As we're traveling
Speaker 11: down to the scene, we're being passed by convoys of
Speaker 11: federal agents heading down there and police from other jurisdictions
Speaker 11: trying to get through the same traffic, but they at
Speaker 11: least have lights in siren. We finally went onto some
Speaker 11: alternate routes and work away up to the scene and
Speaker 11: we see police. There's tons of police there. We get
Speaker 11: there and here we are watching now, which to us
Speaker 11: is almost eerie and bizarre. Yet another person pumping gasoline,
Speaker 11: shot dead, doing what we all do every day, and
Speaker 11: the tension is continuing to grow.
Speaker 5: Shortly after the crime scene was secured, Virginia Police held
Speaker 5: a press conference. They described how they responded and what
Speaker 5: they were searching for.
Speaker 17: We are looking for a white van that may had
Speaker 17: a ladder rack on top of it. We do not,
Speaker 17: in our stress, we do not know if it was
Speaker 17: involved in the shooting or not. It was seen in
Speaker 17: the area by several people, and we do want to
Speaker 17: talk to those people. We had a Virginia State Trooper uniform.
Speaker 17: Trooper was across the street from the shooting work in
Speaker 17: the traffic accident. He heard the shots. He ran directly
Speaker 17: across the street and rendered aid through the victim until
Speaker 17: the rescue squad arrived. Once at the hospital, the victim
Speaker 17: was pronounced dead.
Speaker 5: The victim, Kenneth Bridges, was a family man. He had
Speaker 5: six children and the wife of twenty five years.
Speaker 6: Obviously, everyone was devastated at this horrendous act. In this
Speaker 6: horrendous event, losing a loving, hunt husband and a strong, giving,
Speaker 6: caring father. Since that time, however, I have seen the
Speaker 6: family become stronger and stronger as the hours go by.
Speaker 5: Bridges was from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. He had just been passing
Speaker 5: through the DC area when his life was tragically cut short.
Speaker 5: Friends say Bridges was a pillar of his community. He
Speaker 5: co founded Mata, a nonprofit company which fosters black owned businesses.
Speaker 18: I'm telling you this was a near perfect man who
Speaker 18: loved his family, who loved his people. Kenny was a visionary,
Speaker 18: a man with great purpose, single minded purpose that he
Speaker 18: had built his entire world around. Ken Bridges has infected
Speaker 18: thousands and thousands of people all across the country with
Speaker 18: this vision.
Speaker 5: Of his The impacts of the d C sniper attacks
Speaker 5: were spreading further and further. Families and communities all across
Speaker 5: the country had now been affected in various perable ways.
Speaker 11: We're realizing that this thing is not getting smaller, it's
Speaker 11: not getting narrower, it's getting larger.
Speaker 5: This is Channel nine reporter Dave's statter again.
Speaker 11: All along this ninety five Carter people are being attacked.
Speaker 11: We see it in Montgomery County, Maryland, Prince George's County, Maryland.
Speaker 11: We're still trying to figure out what's going on, Why
Speaker 11: is this happening. We're talking to police every day, and
Speaker 11: it was clear they were having a bit of a
Speaker 11: time making sense of why these attacks were occurring at
Speaker 11: these locations, and that just really added to the fear
Speaker 11: of everybody because nobody could make clear sense of it.
Speaker 5: By this point, ten people had been shot for what
Speaker 5: seemed like no reason, and the public had very little
Speaker 5: information to go on. All anyone knew was to be
Speaker 5: on the lookout for a white van or white box truck.
Speaker 5: The public was losing confidence in law enforcement's abilities. Police
Speaker 5: were under tremendous pressure to catch these killers. Things seemed
Speaker 5: to be working, So what was their plan?
Speaker 12: We had strategies, I mean, I started out and I
Speaker 12: had a mission.
Speaker 5: This is Drew Tracy, retired Assistant Chief of Police from
Speaker 5: Montgomery County.
Speaker 12: We had to protect our first responders, we had to
Speaker 12: protect the citizens, but we also had to have that
Speaker 12: investigative role and that ability to stop what was going on,
Speaker 12: and that was our mission.
Speaker 5: But how would they find the shooters? Tracy says they
Speaker 5: employed a tactic known as a drag net. It starts
Speaker 5: with police creating a large perimeter around a crime scene
Speaker 5: to ensnare any potential suspects.
Speaker 12: We actually had circles that we put on a map,
Speaker 12: so if a shooting went out, we knew that vehicle
Speaker 12: could only go in fifteen or twenty minutes so far,
Speaker 12: so we tried to slow things down, slow it by
Speaker 12: slowing traffic almost type of roadblocks. And what we did
Speaker 12: is we had immediate action teams.
Speaker 11: We need to be on.
Speaker 12: Scene in two to three minutes of any critical incident
Speaker 12: or possible incident. Then we worked on predetermined roles. I
Speaker 12: went over a game plan and showed if the shooting
Speaker 12: is within this district, here's everybody's predetermined location they had
Speaker 12: to go to.
Speaker 19: And then what we would do.
Speaker 12: Is bring in their support we'd get plane closed units
Speaker 12: who look like normal people try to get closer in
Speaker 12: to try to pick out a suspect or a vehicle.
Speaker 12: So then we could bring in the tactical officers and
Speaker 12: utilize the takedown in a safe way, so we wouldn't
Speaker 12: put people in danger. The thing that I think was well,
Speaker 12: I know for a fact, was really holding us back
Speaker 12: is we didn't get good suspect information. They would put
Speaker 12: out multiple lookouts because people would just scatter from a
Speaker 12: certain area and you had vehicles going in every direction
Speaker 12: and no one knew exactly if one was involved or not.
Speaker 12: So we had a pretty good game plan, but the
Speaker 12: problem was we aren't being provided good intelligence and suspect
Speaker 12: information from lookout that hurt us.
Speaker 5: One incident directly after the shooting of Kenneth Bridges highlights
Speaker 5: this issue. Police searched nearby motels looking for a suspect.
Speaker 5: They had a somewhat fuzzy picture of the suspect from
Speaker 5: a security camera and with a description from that, police
Speaker 5: detained and questioned a man at one of the motels,
Speaker 5: but it was quickly the termed he wasn't the sniper,
Speaker 5: and so by the end of the day, no viable
Speaker 5: suspects have been arrested. As the shooting spread further from DC,
Speaker 5: nearby jurisdictions were biding their time, fearful that at any
Speaker 5: moment an attack what happen in their area.
Speaker 19: I was absolutely sure that we were going to get
Speaker 19: a shooting. My name is Bruce Gooth. I'm a retired
Speaker 19: lieutenant from Fairfax County Police Department in Virginia. Fairfax is
Speaker 19: four hundred square miles by one point two million people,
Speaker 19: and I was sure we were going to get hit
Speaker 19: sooner or later. Sure enough, on October fourteenth, one of
Speaker 19: my guys who was working called me on my cellphone
Speaker 19: and said, Hey, I think we just had a sniper
Speaker 19: shooting down at the Home Depot, which is the False
Speaker 19: Church area of Fairfax County, which is right at the
Speaker 19: border of Arlington County in Fairfax County. He said that
Speaker 19: a woman had been shot in the head underneath the
Speaker 19: parking garage.
Speaker 5: The victim was forty seven year old FBI analyst Linda Franklin.
Speaker 5: She was loading shopping bags into the trunk of her
Speaker 5: car right before she was shot. Linda was with her husband,
Speaker 5: Ted Franklin, who then called nine to one to one
Speaker 5: in distress. A warning The following audio could be upsetting
Speaker 5: to some listeners.
Speaker 2: Where are you at and with the home people.
Speaker 3: Un roughed.
Speaker 2: You had shot? Was shot? Two shot of the hood.
Speaker 19: So I got in my car and I drove down
Speaker 19: to Falls Church. I was one of the first detectives there.
Speaker 19: My first memory was the smell of diesel diesel fuel
Speaker 19: from the ambulance. There was an ambulance parked underneath the
Speaker 19: parking garage. Inside the ambulance was mister Franklin. They had
Speaker 19: put him in there. Obviously he was quite distraught. It
Speaker 19: was adistrophic head injury that he witnessed, and he had
Speaker 19: been spattered with blood.
Speaker 5: General nine reporter Dave Statter also rushed to the scene.
Speaker 11: After a long day of working on the sniper case
Speaker 11: on October fourteenth, my Patrick goes off. It's my colleague
Speaker 11: Greg geis telling me there's a shooting right up the
Speaker 11: street at the home depot at the top of our street.
Speaker 11: I race up to the top of the street in
Speaker 11: my car, come into the shopping center and apparently I
Speaker 11: came in from the opposite side of police and fire,
Speaker 11: and I go into this covered parking area outside the
Speaker 11: home depot and I'm pull up and I see a
Speaker 11: grocery cart and it's full of stuff. And I look
Speaker 11: down from that grocery cart and there's a woman's body
Speaker 11: lying on the pavement. Her head is covered with some
Speaker 11: kind of yellow sheet, and I realized, well, I'm way
Speaker 11: too close, and I immediately pull out to just outside
Speaker 11: the covered area and there are police running with police
Speaker 11: tape to secure the scene. I pulled out my home
Speaker 11: video camera and you see in my first video the
Speaker 11: ambulance pull up and go up to look at Miss
Speaker 11: Franklin's body, and the next thing I see are police
Speaker 11: officers running with their guns drawn across Route fifty, a
Speaker 11: six lane highway, to an apartment complex across the street
Speaker 11: where there's a white vehicle that looks sort of like
Speaker 11: a box truck. They have their guns drawn on what
Speaker 11: turned out to be painters who were coming out of
Speaker 11: the apartment building, and they put their hands up immediately.
Speaker 5: The painters were just in the wrong place at the
Speaker 5: wrong time, so police let them go.
Speaker 11: We were reporting. I went live on the air with
Speaker 11: a phone report because I didn't have a live TV
Speaker 11: truck with me and no other crews were there. We
Speaker 11: broke into coverage with what appeared to be another shooting.
Speaker 11: Police obviously had a plan for the next shooting. They
Speaker 11: shut down a good portion of the Capitol Beltway that
Speaker 11: brings Washingrington, DC. They wanted to make sure that they
Speaker 11: could get the vehicle, and the lookout that they knew
Speaker 11: they were looking for that evening was a white box truck.
Speaker 11: They shut down Route fifty, they shut down four ninety
Speaker 11: ninety five, and it created an enormous traffic gym that evening.
Speaker 5: According to Virginia Detective Bruce Gooth, it was quickly clear
Speaker 5: to them that this was a sniper shooting, and they
Speaker 5: had limited time to catch the vehicle before it was
Speaker 5: too late.
Speaker 19: I don't think there was a soul in law enforcement
Speaker 19: that didn't think for a second that it wasn't them.
Speaker 19: It was clear that it was a somewhat long range shot.
Speaker 19: We had our SWAT team put a perimeter up around
Speaker 19: where we were to kind of protect us while we
Speaker 19: were working a crime scene. We had pre planned that.
Speaker 5: Once again, the night ended with no real suspects, but
Speaker 5: perhaps for the first time, law enforcement had a viable
Speaker 5: witness who said he'd seen not just a vehicle but
Speaker 5: the actual shooter. The witness was a man named Matthew Dowdy.
Speaker 19: And he just described a vehicle and he said the
Speaker 19: guy was leaning out like on the driver's side mirror.
Speaker 19: He saw the rifle, saw the shot go off. He
Speaker 19: was inside the parking lot. This guy we had to
Speaker 19: investigate and had two detectives take him back to the
Speaker 19: station and get a statement from him. You know, that
Speaker 19: was the first lead where someone had actually seen somebody.
Speaker 19: That next day after the murder, we had a debrief
Speaker 19: with Montgomery County and all the other jurisdictions.
Speaker 5: Virginia officials shared the specific details of Matthew Dowdy's story.
Speaker 5: He said he saw an olive skinned man step out
Speaker 5: of a cream colored van. The man then shot Franklin
Speaker 5: with an AK assault rifle. Dowdy said. The man then
Speaker 5: got back into the van and drove away. Dowdy described
Speaker 5: the vehicle as a Chevy astro van with a broken
Speaker 5: tail light.
Speaker 19: I'll never forget this Chief Moose ten minutes into when
Speaker 19: we were trying to get everybody settled in, and he
Speaker 19: waved me over. He sat down and he goes, you
Speaker 19: are absolutely nuts for having this meeting and putting out
Speaker 19: all you're going to put out, you know, as much
Speaker 19: as everybody's leaking, all this stuff is going to get
Speaker 19: out that there's a witness. And I said, well, you
Speaker 19: know that that's just the way it is, because I'm
Speaker 19: not holding back information from other homicide detectives. And you know,
Speaker 19: we'll take our lumps. If it leaks, it leaks, and
Speaker 19: you know, we'll deal with it. But I'll never forget
Speaker 19: him shaking his head like you're crazy. But we made
Speaker 19: up our mind. You know, we were going to share
Speaker 19: whatever we had with surely the homicide detectives that we
Speaker 19: were dealing with, and they had helped us in the
Speaker 19: past with other cases, so there are people I could trust.
Speaker 5: This incident was especially puzzling to investigators. Had the snipers
Speaker 5: specifically targeted an FBI agent. If so, was this shooting
Speaker 5: some sort of message sent to law enforcement that not
Speaker 5: even they were safe. Up to this point, there had
Speaker 5: been nothing to suggest that these attacks were anything but random,
Speaker 5: but now investigators were unsure. On top of all this,
Speaker 5: the witness, Matthew Dowdie, described the suspect as an olive
Speaker 5: skinned man with an ak. This reinforced the notion that
Speaker 5: the snipers were potentially terrorists from the Middle East, but
Speaker 5: profilers had determined by this point that that was incredibly unlikely.
Speaker 5: So what was going on here?
Speaker 11: My thought process was maybe different than some others. What's
Speaker 11: going through my mind not what I'm reporting, but what
Speaker 11: I'm thinking clearly at that time is that this is
Speaker 11: some sort of international terrorism, because what I'm rickly realizing
Speaker 11: is that with a few bullets and a vehicle, somebody
Speaker 11: is shutting down commerce in the area, panicking hordes of
Speaker 11: people in and around the nation's capital. And I'm thinking,
Speaker 11: here we are, year ofter nine to eleven, this is
Speaker 11: likely some sort of international terrorism. That's just a gut
Speaker 11: I had from watching it. You know, if you live
Speaker 11: in Israel or a place where there's lots of bombings
Speaker 11: and car bombs and bombs on buses and in restaurants,
Speaker 11: you'll live a certain way and you're used to it.
Speaker 11: We're not used to that in the Washington area, where
Speaker 11: there's a lot of random shootings where people are just
Speaker 11: shot doing their routine business. So it's just going through
Speaker 11: my mind, what an unusual way to shut us down
Speaker 11: and to really impact us.
Speaker 5: Channel nine reporter Dave Stanner kept up with the Linda
Speaker 5: Franklin story for the next few days, hoping that the
Speaker 5: witness identification might lead to a break in the case.
Speaker 11: The next morning, they continued doing the lookouts for the
Speaker 11: white van, more stopping of white vans white box trucks,
Speaker 11: but they find out soon that the information they got
Speaker 11: was bad.
Speaker 20: In suburban Virginia Today where the killer last struck, a
Speaker 20: frantic search for clues touched off by a phony witness's
Speaker 20: confession last night, but his story that he'd seen the killer,
Speaker 20: his van his gun was all a lie, and Task
Speaker 20: Force leader Chief Charles Moose was especially worried about that.
Speaker 15: Maybe we didn't hear from some people because they saw
Speaker 15: that picture and they said the person I was thinking
Speaker 15: about doesn't have one.
Speaker 7: It ohs.
Speaker 11: You can see in the back of my video a
Speaker 11: gentleman in the video that I didn't realize who he
Speaker 11: was till later. This a guy named Matthew Dowdy. He
Speaker 11: was thirty seven years old at the time, and Matthew
Speaker 11: Daddy said he witnessed the shooting of Linda Franklin at
Speaker 11: the home depot and what he said was a white
Speaker 11: box truck sped from the scene. Police investigated further Matthew
Speaker 11: Dowdy's claim, and what they determined was that Matthew Doddy,
Speaker 11: thanks to security camera video, they could tell was still
Speaker 11: inside the store when Linda Franklin was shot. He was
Speaker 11: not outside the store in the parking lot area where
Speaker 11: this occurred, in the covered parking area, and they quickly
Speaker 11: discounted his information. Matthew Dowddy. They also found out how
Speaker 11: to long criminal record. He like others, had heard of
Speaker 11: the white box truck in the news. It was prominently
Speaker 11: out there, and thought he went and interjected himself in
Speaker 11: the case he did it, I don't know other than
Speaker 11: I'm sure he didn't have a lot of love for
Speaker 11: police because he had a long criminal record and actually
Speaker 11: had escaped from jail or prison many years earlier in
Speaker 11: another charge. Not too long after the shooting of Linda Franklin,
Speaker 11: the police chief of Fairfax County, Tom Manger, held a
Speaker 11: press conference and said they had the wrong information, made
Speaker 11: it very clear that they were charging this person who
Speaker 11: gave him the wrong information. Apologized for letting the public
Speaker 11: in on this information and it was a bit of
Speaker 11: a setback for this case. An interesting note about Matthew
Speaker 11: Dowdy About two years later and a mile and a
Speaker 11: half away, he murdered and raped a woman at a
Speaker 11: motel in the city of False Church, Virginia, and was
Speaker 11: arrested and convicted for that murder. So his criminal activity
Speaker 11: continued after providing bogus information to police at the Home
Speaker 11: Depot shooting.
Speaker 5: Following this incident, journalist and police alank began to doubt
Speaker 5: earlier witness accounts. What if the first description of a
Speaker 5: white box truck was false and police were on a
Speaker 5: wild goose chase. Some experts came forward with ideas.
Speaker 9: At the time of the DC sniper case. I was
Speaker 9: following the events just as anyone else was. I tended
Speaker 9: to look at them a little bit differently, I think
Speaker 9: because I've been doing this research. My name is Gary Wells.
Speaker 9: I'm a professor of psychology at Iowa State University, and
Speaker 9: my main line of study is the reliability of eyewitnesses.
Speaker 9: So I'm looking at it differently, and I'm looking for
Speaker 9: what are witnesses going to be able to tell? Really,
Speaker 9: people process a lot less information than we think. When
Speaker 9: they scan in their environment, They're really only taking in
Speaker 9: a very small fraction of information. They get the sense
Speaker 9: that they're seeing everything, when in fact there's being very little,
Speaker 9: and so therefore a lot doesn't get stored. Moreover, we
Speaker 9: now know that memory changes some over time. You take
Speaker 9: in new information and you kind of stick it in
Speaker 9: with what you remembered, and now you've got a new memory.
Speaker 9: So I guess my biggest interest and concern was how
Speaker 9: the investigators of the DC sniper shootings were proceeding here.
Speaker 9: And I was particularly concerned about this relatively early report
Speaker 9: about a white truck or a white man. The reason
Speaker 9: I was concerned about that was because I thought it
Speaker 9: was premature. I didn't think that law enforcement, under the circumstances,
Speaker 9: should have given much credibility to that report. Somehow, the
Speaker 9: investigators decided to release that information and in effect sort
Speaker 9: of say we're looking for a white van. I think
Speaker 9: that was a huge mistake. There's two reasons to really
Speaker 9: be concerned about that. One is that you're creating a
Speaker 9: situation in which it's very difficult for law enforcement to
Speaker 9: win this game. If it was a white van, then
Speaker 9: you can pretty much guarantee that this person's going to
Speaker 9: switch vehicles because oh, they're onto the white van. We
Speaker 9: can't do that. If on the other hand, it wasn't
Speaker 9: the white van that gives a lot to cover a
Speaker 9: lot of comfort to the shooters, because it's sort of like,
Speaker 9: h they have no idea what they're looking at, right,
Speaker 9: So you just gave them permission to continue with their
Speaker 9: standard mo because everybody's looking for a white van. From
Speaker 9: a witness perspective, it's a particularly bad thing to do,
Speaker 9: because it turns out I did a little bit of
Speaker 9: homework the time to find out that white vans are
Speaker 9: pretty close to the most common vehicle on the road
Speaker 9: in urban environments. And the reason they are is because
Speaker 9: they're so often used as service vehicles. So you know,
Speaker 9: those appliance repair men and those roofers and those plumbers
Speaker 9: and all these companies are driving all over the place
Speaker 9: in white vans. So what happens then is as soon
Speaker 9: as you discover there's been a shooting and you look around,
Speaker 9: you'll always see a white van. So of course, the
Speaker 9: next shooting, white van, next shooting, somebody reports white van.
Speaker 9: Of course, somebody's always going to report a white van
Speaker 9: in any urban setting. You're taking away their opportunity to
Speaker 9: see anything other than a white van at that point,
Speaker 9: and everybody knew to be looking for that. I think
Speaker 9: that was that was a pretty bad mistake.
Speaker 5: But if not a white van or white box truck,
Speaker 5: than what had police seen any other vehicles at the
Speaker 5: crime scenes?
Speaker 14: You know, I'll never understand that. How did they rule
Speaker 14: out all other vehicles and they being police department's, FBI officials, everyone.
Speaker 5: This is Greg Geiss, a photographer and videographer for Channel
Speaker 5: nine News. On October third, the second day of the shootings.
Speaker 5: Greg was covering the attacks.
Speaker 14: I was with reporter Gary Reels. We're driving southbound on
Speaker 14: Connecticut Avenue. I kept the fire and EMS dispatch channels
Speaker 14: locked on several different radios. And what will stick with
Speaker 14: me forever are two different police officers in two different
Speaker 14: cars key their mic and say, you know, I see
Speaker 14: this dark colored crown Fit or Capri, sort of an
Speaker 14: old police looking vehicle driving with the lights on, heading north.
Speaker 14: And I turned to the right and said to Gary Reels,
Speaker 14: I wonder if the sniper's driving a war wagon or
Speaker 14: a hoopdie. A war wagon being a term used for
Speaker 14: old cars that are sometimes used in gang like violence
Speaker 14: by some of what at the time were called cruise
Speaker 14: in the Washington area and a hooptie being just an
Speaker 14: old junk car that are often used sometimes by folks
Speaker 14: who've stolen a car for joy ride or somebody who's
Speaker 14: using a stolen vehicle to commit a crime. I left
Speaker 14: that evening with a feeling that in some way, a dark,
Speaker 14: older model police style Sa'dan may have been involved in
Speaker 14: these crimes. The powers that be arrived at the fact
Speaker 14: that they're looking for a white box truck. I never
Speaker 14: bought into that. Everything I heard indicated a dark, old
Speaker 14: model Sedan, and we would engage in conversation different officers
Speaker 14: in myself and I would relay that story about the
Speaker 14: border vehicles that I heard from Metropolitan Police in Washington,
Speaker 14: and the cops were perplexed that they never got that information.
Speaker 14: They never heard the nu odds of the cops king
Speaker 14: their mic and if you will, flashing a lookout for
Speaker 14: what they viewed were suspicious vehicles leaving a scene.
Speaker 5: In a press conference, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose
Speaker 5: conceited maybe the white box truck identification was a misfire.
Speaker 15: It's not beyond any reality that the person our people
Speaker 15: involved in this would have numerous vehicles that they could
Speaker 15: be using.
Speaker 5: If law enforcement had missed the drop on other suspect vehicles.
Speaker 5: What else could they have missed? Little did they know
Speaker 5: the shooters had actually been trying to contact them for
Speaker 5: the past week. The day after the Lend of Franklin shooting,
Speaker 5: the police in Rockville, Maryland got a phone call from
Speaker 5: the snipers. Good point, what are the people that are
Speaker 5: causing the killing of your ear?
Speaker 3: The terrified, it said, call me God, do not release the.
Speaker 5: Press next time on Monster DC sniper.
Speaker 11: The first time that this area so far south has
Speaker 11: been brought into what seems to be another case of
Speaker 11: a serial sniper attack.
Speaker 15: When I arrived, our victim was laying in the parking
Speaker 15: lot and his wife was sitting on the sidewalk and
Speaker 15: had her husband's head and her lap.
Speaker 12: To the rear of where the showcasing was found, there
Speaker 12: was some type of message that was attached to a tree.
Speaker 1: Do not release to the press five red stars.
Speaker 11: You have our turns.
Speaker 1: They are non negotiable.
Speaker 8: No self respecting terrorists is going to do that. Number one,
Speaker 8: number two We finally get a demand.
Speaker 20: At that point the Sniper Task Force took this information
Speaker 20: and followed it up, and the pieces began to fall
Speaker 20: into Place.
Speaker 1: Monster d C Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted
Speaker 1: by Tony Harris and produced by iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV.
Speaker 1: Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf
Speaker 1: of iHeartRadio, alongside producers Trevor Young, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain.
Speaker 1: Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf
Speaker 1: of Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Stedman and Christina Dana.
Speaker 1: Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you
Speaker 1: haven't already, be sure to check out the first two seasons,
Speaker 1: Atlanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have
Speaker 1: questions or comments, email us at Monster at iHeartMedia dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can call us at one eight three, three,
Speaker 1: two eight five six six sixty seven. Thanks for listening.