Speaker 1: Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of iHeartRadio and
Speaker 1: Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast
Speaker 1: are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating
Speaker 1: in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia,
Speaker 1: Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2: It was quite a warm morning.
Speaker 3: I drove my son to school with some other children.
Speaker 3: I dropped them off around eight o'clock and my two
Speaker 3: year old was still in the car, so he was in.
Speaker 2: A car seat. We were listening to children's music in
Speaker 2: the car on the radio.
Speaker 3: I went to the gas station and I stopped to
Speaker 3: pump gas. My name's dot Caroline Namo. I'm a pediatrician.
Speaker 3: I live in Silver Spring and Maryland. It was a
Speaker 3: lovely day. It was very warm, so I opened the windows.
Speaker 3: So as I rolled the windows down a bit, I
Speaker 3: turned and I looked to the right, and.
Speaker 2: There was a taxi and there was a gentleman who
Speaker 2: was filling his car with gas.
Speaker 3: But I thought it was unusual because he was filling
Speaker 3: the tank from underneath the license plate.
Speaker 2: Which I had never seen before.
Speaker 3: I looked at him for a few seconds and he
Speaker 3: looked up at me and we made eye contacts.
Speaker 2: I smile.
Speaker 3: I reached to get my purse to take out my
Speaker 3: credit card, and I heard a bang, and immediately in
Speaker 3: my head I thought there was a gunshot. But at
Speaker 3: the same time, I thought, no, why would there be
Speaker 3: a gunshot. It must be some sort of electrical problem,
Speaker 3: maybe with the car, and he was doing something weird
Speaker 3: and he shouldn't have been filling it from under the
Speaker 3: license plate, how strange.
Speaker 2: I looked up and he was walking towards my car.
Speaker 3: It was just a few paces and he looked in
Speaker 3: the passenger side and he said, call an ambulance, and
Speaker 3: he collapsed and I was shaking, so I immediately grabbed
Speaker 3: my phone, got out of the car and call nine
Speaker 3: one one, and I was totally in shock.
Speaker 4: By an ambula.
Speaker 5: I don't know.
Speaker 6: I don't think America has ever gone back to the
Speaker 6: way that it was before nine to eleven in the
Speaker 6: Anthrax attacks and the DC sniper. My name is Garrett Graff,
Speaker 6: and I'm a journalist and historian. It's really amazing looking
Speaker 6: back to the nineteen nineties today, really just how much
Speaker 6: simpler the issues on the table were.
Speaker 7: Governments, utilities, and companies all over the world are checking
Speaker 7: their computer systems to prevent a Why two came.
Speaker 6: Outdown Much of the country was really consumed by the
Speaker 6: impeachment of President Clinton in nineteen ninety eight. Actually, President
Speaker 6: Clinton was criticized for trying to distract from his impeachment
Speaker 6: troubles by attacking the training camps of al Qaeda. These
Speaker 6: were threats that the US was not focused that much on.
Speaker 6: As a country, the government, the National security apparatus was
Speaker 6: beginning to pay more attention to it.
Speaker 8: We must remember it is the obligation of America to
Speaker 8: help make the world more peaceful. As far as I'm concerned,
Speaker 8: it's an obligation of a commander in chief as well
Speaker 8: to understand, in order to keep the peace, we must
Speaker 8: rebuild the military power of the United States of America.
Speaker 6: The two thousand election at the time seemed incredibly vicious
Speaker 6: and partisan, and ultimately it was a vote of the
Speaker 6: Supreme Court that declared effectively George W. Bush the winner
Speaker 6: of Florida and thus the winner of the presidency. In
Speaker 6: many ways, Americans were beginning to lose trust in institutions
Speaker 6: as they were hit by various scandals and then of course,
Speaker 6: we didn't know either what came next.
Speaker 9: Apparently a plane has just crashed into the World Trade
Speaker 9: Center here in New York City. It happened just a
Speaker 9: few moments ago. Apparently we have very little information available.
Speaker 6: There weren't very many people who defaulted that morning to
Speaker 6: thinking it was terrorism at first, And I think one
Speaker 6: of the most remarkable things that you see on the
Speaker 6: morning of nine to eleven is just how innocent America
Speaker 6: truly was. President Bush continued with his morning reading to
Speaker 6: school children. Congress prepared to open for business that day
Speaker 6: after the first attacks, and even in New York City,
Speaker 6: you know, you saw people just continue their commune, thinking
Speaker 6: that they were going on to a relatively normal day
Speaker 6: at work.
Speaker 10: I heard of throwing worked up and there was a
Speaker 10: big qualifire. You could hear the fire engines and the.
Speaker 2: Emergency crews behind me.
Speaker 11: I've never seen.
Speaker 7: Any fire light in the air, and pieces of the
Speaker 7: building were flying down in tense smoke.
Speaker 10: It's horrible. I can't even describe it.
Speaker 6: As the morning of nine to eleven unfolded, it quickly
Speaker 6: became clear that this was a terrorist attack on not
Speaker 6: just New York City, but the wider country.
Speaker 12: This airplane that ran into the Pentagon.
Speaker 13: It happened within the hour.
Speaker 12: The plane sliced through the building, it.
Speaker 4: Came in and hit actually at about the first and
Speaker 4: second floors.
Speaker 6: We really didn't know how wide the attack actually would go,
Speaker 6: you know. Skyscrapers were evacuated in Boston, in Chicago and
Speaker 6: Los Angeles and other cities across the country as people
Speaker 6: feared that there could be more planes still in the sky.
Speaker 6: The fear was really that there would be a second
Speaker 6: wave of attacks. That sense of fear was certainly driven
Speaker 6: by the accelerating media culture as well.
Speaker 14: There are thousands of these terrorists in more than sixty countries.
Speaker 14: They are recruited from their own nations and neighborhoods and
Speaker 14: brought to camps in places like Afghanistan where they are
Speaker 14: trained in the tactics of terror.
Speaker 6: Unrelenting coverage contributed to this pervasive fear about whether we
Speaker 6: were safe living our daily lives. There was the expectation
Speaker 6: really that DC would be attacked again by Al Qaeda,
Speaker 6: by a car bomb, by more planes. There was a
Speaker 6: real fear about whether this was the day that the
Speaker 6: next shoe dropped.
Speaker 13: In the wake of nine to eleven, all of us
Speaker 13: living in the DC area were terrified, and we were
Speaker 13: all just waiting for the next horrific act of terror.
Speaker 13: I'm Tony Harris. In the fall of two thousand and two,
Speaker 13: I was working as a news anchor for Fox forty
Speaker 13: five in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland. On the morning
Speaker 13: of October third, reports began flooding our newsroom about random
Speaker 13: shootings in Montgomery County, Maryland.
Speaker 15: We do have five fatal shootings for no apparent reason,
Speaker 15: no robbery motive or anything like that. People who are
Speaker 15: just sort of out and about doing their normal task.
Speaker 11: You know, you think you're out here safe, and here's
Speaker 11: this woman coming out of this apparently the post office.
Speaker 16: And was just shot.
Speaker 13: The people of Maryland look through their televisions to journalists
Speaker 13: like me for answers, but we didn't have them.
Speaker 15: It is quite a mystery.
Speaker 13: The police say they have never.
Speaker 15: Had a crime quite like this in Montgomery County before.
Speaker 15: They are huddling together. They are trying now to figure
Speaker 15: out what's going on.
Speaker 13: And that terrible day was only the beginning. What emerged
Speaker 13: over the following weeks was one of the most disturbing
Speaker 13: crime sprees in the history of our country. But now
Speaker 13: eighteen years later, the Supreme Court will rule on the
Speaker 13: sniper's case, and the convicted killer could one day walk free.
Speaker 13: On this season of Monster, We're going to investigate the
Speaker 13: full DC sniper story because I want to find the
Speaker 13: answers to questions that have haunted me all these years.
Speaker 13: What was the killer's motive? And should they ever be
Speaker 13: given a second chance to fully understand, We have to
Speaker 13: go back to October second, two thousand and two, an
Speaker 13: average Wednesday and suburban Maryland.
Speaker 17: October second, two thousand and two was an unusually warm
Speaker 17: day for DC. I was working in the evening shift.
Speaker 17: You handle the routine calls. There several of us working.
Speaker 17: Everybody worked in a cubicle, nothing special really going on.
Speaker 17: It was in the early evening. The phone rang, and
Speaker 17: we don't have a secretary at night. So whoever picks
Speaker 17: up the phone, whatever's on the other end of it,
Speaker 17: you get it.
Speaker 13: This is Patrick McNerney, a former homicite detective with Montgomery
Speaker 13: County Police in Maryland.
Speaker 17: Was told by our communications center there had been a
Speaker 17: shooting murder, or as we call it, an one hundred
Speaker 17: in the Wheaton Glenmont District in the Shopper Sued Warehouse
Speaker 17: parking lot. So we're running lights and sirn over to
Speaker 17: the scene and took about fifteen minutes to get there.
Speaker 17: Were presented with a very large crowd in front of
Speaker 17: the Shopper Sued Warehouse.
Speaker 13: McNerney took charge of the crime scene. He locked the
Speaker 13: area down, began interviewing witnesses and tried to figure out
Speaker 13: what just happened.
Speaker 17: This could have and a robbery or somebody walked up
Speaker 17: to this guy and shot him. And then we still
Speaker 17: had to deal with why did it sound like a
Speaker 17: cannon going off? That was a report from the first
Speaker 17: officer who was actually sitting right across the street when
Speaker 17: the shooting took place.
Speaker 10: The sound I heard wasn't really to immediately recognized bile
Speaker 10: as a gunshot. It was just this enormously loud percussion.
Speaker 10: I'm Alan Felson. At the time, I was working for
Speaker 10: the Montgomery County Police Department. I was a bicycle patrol
Speaker 10: officer assigned to the Wheaton District. The police station is
Speaker 10: directly across the street from the Shopper's Food warehouse we
Speaker 10: were standing today, so that's where I was then.
Speaker 13: Felson was the first officer on the scene. He heard
Speaker 13: the shot and responded immediately, but it was already too late.
Speaker 13: The killer got away. How could a shooter pull this
Speaker 13: off in broad daylight, right next to a police station.
Speaker 13: I asked Felsen to meet me here and explain what
Speaker 13: he saw that day. So you're sitting there in your
Speaker 13: cruiser at that point, describe what happens and what you hear.
Speaker 10: There's a business right next door here called Country Board
Speaker 10: that's been here forever. They use forklifts and pallettes. They
Speaker 10: sell mulch and garden supplies, and I mean I almost
Speaker 10: thought that one of their eighteen wheelers had been knocked
Speaker 10: over something. It was this enormously loud percussion. So I
Speaker 10: did not immediately go, wow, that sounds like a rifle.
Speaker 10: It was just this really loud thunderclap kind of sound,
Speaker 10: so obviously drew everyone's attention in the police station. People
Speaker 10: heard it inside, because that's only, you know, one hundred
Speaker 10: hundred and fifty yards away. They came to the door and looked.
Speaker 13: Out it was that lamp.
Speaker 10: Yes, because I was directly across from the shoppishoot warehouse,
Speaker 10: I think I already saw that. The people in front
Speaker 10: of the store, were looking straight at the parking lot.
Speaker 10: From the store, I pulled out, flipped on the emergency
Speaker 10: lights on the car. It was probably less than a
Speaker 10: minute that it took me, you know, to drive there.
Speaker 10: But as soon as I pulled in, I can see
Speaker 10: that there's a man laying face down in the parking lot.
Speaker 10: So I pulled in and I just yelled that the
Speaker 10: people are staying there, did anyone see anything? And I
Speaker 10: just got kind of no reaction. Everyone was still just staring,
Speaker 10: I think. I then yelled to them, if you heard
Speaker 10: the shots, stay here, or if you saw anything, stay here,
Speaker 10: and then drove my car up the aisle closer to where.
Speaker 18: The victim was.
Speaker 10: So there's a light pole here, and the victim was
Speaker 10: on the pavement. He had blood on his chest and
Speaker 10: around his mouth. He had no pulse and wasn't breathing.
Speaker 10: I didn't expose the woond right away as he was
Speaker 10: in his chest. I saw the blood by his mouth,
Speaker 10: and I just went straight into CPR And by then
Speaker 10: other people are showing up because we are only about
Speaker 10: a you know, one hundred yards from the police station,
Speaker 10: and everything kind of happens in a blur at that point,
Speaker 10: if I knew that night what we knew thirty six
Speaker 10: hours later, I would have probably positioned my car better
Speaker 10: because I basically went right in the line of fire.
Speaker 10: They could have shot me and still gotten away. Again,
Speaker 10: at this point, we didn't know it was rifle. That
Speaker 10: realization only came when I went in with one of
Speaker 10: the homicide detectives to the Shoppers food warehouse and we
Speaker 10: reviewed their security footage.
Speaker 17: There's no audio on this surveillance, so we're just watching
Speaker 17: the quiet play of it.
Speaker 13: This is Patrick McNerney again, the Montgomery County homicide detective
Speaker 13: in charge of the crime scene. McNerney watched the victim's
Speaker 13: last moments caught by the security camera.
Speaker 17: And reviewing of the tape was he pulled into the
Speaker 17: parking lot in his truck, parked in a parking space,
Speaker 17: probably twenty spaces away from the store, gets out, walks,
Speaker 17: he takes five or six steps, and then he goes
Speaker 17: down and we see, you know, there's nobody standing near him.
Speaker 17: All right, So now we have to train our thinking.
Speaker 17: It's not a walk up and shoot. We're looking at
Speaker 17: a long range shot. Let's see if we can find
Speaker 17: a projectile which is truly the needle in the haystack
Speaker 17: at this point with all the residual trash, loose pebbles,
Speaker 17: stuff like that in the parking lot. Now we're even
Speaker 17: more concerned about cars riding through stuff getting caught into
Speaker 17: the treads because we don't want to miss anything. Fire
Speaker 17: rescue had already come in and determined that this person
Speaker 17: was deceased on the scene. A lot of people didn't
Speaker 17: see anything, but two or three people who were right there,
Speaker 17: right kind of close to where this person was shot.
Speaker 17: They were just walking and they heard the cannon and
Speaker 17: they saw this guy drop. They just went to hiding
Speaker 17: their cars. They had no idea what was going on.
Speaker 17: They quickly detected who was a shooting, saw this guy
Speaker 17: get down, and now they're scared for their life. My
Speaker 17: job is to to stop time as much as possible.
Speaker 17: Let's go back step by step on what happened. Where
Speaker 17: did this guy come from? Did somebody follow him in here?
Speaker 17: Was he having any issues with anybody? Did anybody hear
Speaker 17: any arguing, car horns beeping? Any reason why this event
Speaker 17: would have taken place. We found out that James Martin
Speaker 17: worked in downtown Silver Spring. Nice enough guy. People at
Speaker 17: work liked him. He's very quiet one son. He didn't
Speaker 17: live too far from where the store was. I believe
Speaker 17: it was his first time going to that store and
Speaker 17: he was just going to pick up some stuff for
Speaker 17: dinner on his way home.
Speaker 16: Jim was a really hard worker. He worked all through
Speaker 16: high school at a general store, and everyone loved him.
Speaker 16: He always believed in fairness. He always believed in things
Speaker 16: being done kindly and justly. That's the kind of person
Speaker 16: he was. He was wonderful brother. He was just a
Speaker 16: terrific uncle to my kids.
Speaker 13: Ola Martin Cooksley is James Martin's sister. She calls him Jim.
Speaker 13: The two of them grew up together in Missouri. They
Speaker 13: stayed close even after Jim moved to the DC area
Speaker 13: for work. It was late on October second when she
Speaker 13: got word of Jim's death.
Speaker 16: I was almost asleep that night. I had gone to
Speaker 16: bed and I was alone, and I had just begun
Speaker 16: to drift off when the phone rang. It was my
Speaker 16: sister in law and she said that Jim is dead.
Speaker 16: I said, did you have a heart attack, you know,
Speaker 16: because our dad had passed away with a heart attack,
Speaker 16: and she said, no, he's been shot. And nobody says
Speaker 16: they saw anything, and nobody knows anything. After she told
Speaker 16: me that and we hung up, I thought maybe I
Speaker 16: was still sleeping. I thought I was dreaming, and I
Speaker 16: spent that entire night thinking that I must be dreaming.
Speaker 16: Even for the next few days, I kind of felt
Speaker 16: like it was a nightmare, and I kept wishing I
Speaker 16: would wake up. It just seemed too unbelievable. In a way,
Speaker 16: it kind of kept bit as a buffer, because I
Speaker 16: didn't just go completely bonkers the way I probably would
Speaker 16: have if I hadn't thought it was a dream. I
Speaker 16: kept thinking, I'm going to wake up. But I also
Speaker 16: had this weird, strange feeling that something had gone horribly
Speaker 16: wrong in the universe because I had just always thought
Speaker 16: it Jim and I would be old people together. It
Speaker 16: just seemed so unbelievable and so wrong, and it just
Speaker 16: felt like something had hit the world and knocked it
Speaker 16: out of line or something.
Speaker 13: The death of Jane and Martin seemed utterly random, and
Speaker 13: investigators weren't sure what to make of it until they
Speaker 13: learned there had been another similar shooting less than an
Speaker 13: hour earlier at a Michael's craft store just miles up
Speaker 13: the Road.
Speaker 17: About forty five minutes prior to James Martin being shot.
Speaker 17: If you go north on Georgia Avenue, probably two or
Speaker 17: three miles, you get into an area it's called Aspen Hill,
Speaker 17: about half a block off Connecticut Avenue. There's a Michael's
Speaker 17: Craft Store.
Speaker 7: Sunny Police offer sixteenth you do la course, Hi, this
Speaker 7: is DEBI case the demander at the Michaels at Aston Hill,
Speaker 7: which you had somebody fire some sort of projectile through
Speaker 7: the window.
Speaker 4: Of the store.
Speaker 13: Detective Patrick McNerney also took charge of it.
Speaker 17: Was the people in the store who actually made the
Speaker 17: call because they could tell it was a bullet that
Speaker 17: came through the window. You're sitting there and you're just
Speaker 17: proceeding normally. Then all of a sudden, bam.
Speaker 18: Oh, there was a hole to our plateglass window. There
Speaker 18: was a loud popping sound. Whatever came through the window
Speaker 18: also went through a light here, and fortunately no one
Speaker 18: was struck.
Speaker 17: The shot rowed high and when it entered the glass
Speaker 17: in front of the Michaels, it hit one of those
Speaker 17: lane markers, you know, versus lane one, two three, hit
Speaker 17: one of those and kind of disintegrated and later was
Speaker 17: found in a pocket on a shelf behind that.
Speaker 18: It was only one shot so far.
Speaker 13: You So this is the Michaels Arts and Craft Store,
Speaker 13: and this is the location of the first rifle shot.
Speaker 13: They take off, they drive away, they head up the
Speaker 13: road two miles at the most, and that's when this
Speaker 13: story takes the horrible and gruesome turn. I've got to
Speaker 13: tell you, this is the most average strip mall in America,
Speaker 13: and I visited a thousand of them growing up in Maryland.
Speaker 13: That's what this place looks like. Non descript suburbia, that's
Speaker 13: what this is. So this is the kind of community
Speaker 13: where that would have been big news, the fact that
Speaker 13: someone fired a rifle shot through the window of a Michael's.
Speaker 13: That would have been huge news, and one of the
Speaker 13: newsrooms in either Baltimore or Washington would have been asking questions,
Speaker 13: is their connection? Come on, they're less than two miles apart.
Speaker 13: You've got a fatality. There's got to be a connection.
Speaker 17: You could really almost assume that they're connected, and ultimately
Speaker 17: they were.
Speaker 13: McNerney went back to take another look at the Shopper's
Speaker 13: food warehousehooting from earlier.
Speaker 17: We all kind of agreed, you know, this looks like
Speaker 17: a snipers a long shot. Nobody saw him. You heard it,
Speaker 17: But initially, there's no reason why somebody want to shoot
Speaker 17: this guy or want to shoot the other people we
Speaker 17: talked to in the parking lot who were kind of
Speaker 17: right there in that scope range. You know, why didn't
Speaker 17: he shoot them? And why him and not to her?
Speaker 17: And who knows? Our forensic team was there. I think
Speaker 17: our division captain had even come by. He usually came
Speaker 17: out and something was really kind of odd.
Speaker 19: My name is Bernard James Forsayth. At the time of
Speaker 19: this event, I was the director of the Major Crimes
Speaker 19: Division of the Montgomery County Police Department and my rank
Speaker 19: was Captain. Now, this is six o'clock in the afternoon,
Speaker 19: one of the busiest intersections of Montgomery County. It's somewhat
Speaker 19: unusual that you would have a shooting and nobody has
Speaker 19: seen anything. I called Chief Moose, which is part of
Speaker 19: our protocol, to let him know that we had had
Speaker 19: a shooting down there.
Speaker 13: Charles Moose was the chief of Police for Montgomery County.
Speaker 13: The two shootings so far fell under his jurisdiction.
Speaker 19: He asked me, he said, well, what do you think
Speaker 19: it is? I said, Chief at this point, we just
Speaker 19: don't really know. We just didn't know, you know, what
Speaker 19: had occurred. Probably the worst case scenario was a random
Speaker 19: shooting with no motive. It's very hard to connect randomness,
Speaker 19: that's what it amounts to.
Speaker 13: And with that, the bizarre events of Wednesday, October two
Speaker 13: came to an end. But this was just the beginning.
Speaker 13: The following day, on October third.
Speaker 19: I think it's fair to say all hell broke loose.
Speaker 18: Montgomery County.
Speaker 4: Oh, I guess we amias okay with the travel somebody's
Speaker 4: been shot down on our back.
Speaker 2: Lot, are they somebody is down on the ground.
Speaker 16: Okay?
Speaker 7: Did you see the person getting.
Speaker 4: Out up the top of the hill and somebody yelled
Speaker 4: up the calling ambulance.
Speaker 14: Came where they just sat.
Speaker 18: You know, yeah, we just heard the shot.
Speaker 19: I just briefed the chief as to what we were
Speaker 19: doing with regard to the shooting at the Shopper's food
Speaker 19: warehouse the night before, when these incidents started percolating into
Speaker 19: the office.
Speaker 16: Yeah, I'm being down right now.
Speaker 8: Okay, he's down on the ground.
Speaker 4: We got a crowd of people down here.
Speaker 9: Okay, can you ask of anybody's side.
Speaker 19: That gun shot one of them? Had to do with
Speaker 19: a lawnmower, and they were telling me that somebody was injured,
Speaker 19: but they weren't sure. They thought maybe a blade had
Speaker 19: flown off.
Speaker 16: Well, wasn't.
Speaker 8: A lawnmower blew up on?
Speaker 15: This guy's bleeding real bad?
Speaker 7: Okay?
Speaker 18: And is he breathing? Uh?
Speaker 4: Yeah, barely, He's sitting up lad and everything.
Speaker 20: It was a very tense time and a very life
Speaker 20: changing experience to feel that you walked away from something
Speaker 20: that possibly you shouldn't have. My name is Gary Lee Huss,
Speaker 20: fifty seven years old. I live in Damascus, Maryland.
Speaker 13: Huss was working at the Fitzgerald Automol in Rockville, Maryland.
Speaker 13: The first victim of October third was shot just outside
Speaker 13: this dealership.
Speaker 20: It's approximately, I want to say, right around seven point
Speaker 20: thirty a normal day, driving to work, and I saw
Speaker 20: my friend Sonny Buchanan. He maintained the landscaping for our
Speaker 20: dealership group.
Speaker 17: At that location.
Speaker 20: And I saw Sonny Buchanan with the lawnmower right on
Speaker 20: the curb. So I stopped my car and we spoke
Speaker 20: for a few minutes, just in general conversation, and I've
Speaker 20: proceeded back to my car, shut the door, and started
Speaker 20: to pull away. Is when I heard a loud bang,
Speaker 20: and I just thought it was a backfire from a car.
Speaker 20: I never even imagined that it could be anything else.
Speaker 20: Went ahead and parked my car and went in and
Speaker 20: started my day. As I sat at my desk, my
Speaker 20: staff members arrived into my office about a man bleeding
Speaker 20: on the back lot and finally went out to view
Speaker 20: because it was quite a crowd gathering from all of
Speaker 20: our employees at the dealership at that point, I was
Speaker 20: corralling my people back, not ever noticing it was my friend.
Speaker 20: I didn't even relate the two together, as I just
Speaker 20: saw him fifteen minutes prior standing upright and speaking with me.
Speaker 20: We eventually figured it was Sonny laying there on the
Speaker 20: ground and he was bleeding pretty profusely. He actually walked
Speaker 20: about fifty yards before he collapsed, quite a big distance
Speaker 20: uphill for the damage that was done to him that day.
Speaker 20: I assumed that the lawnmower disengaged in and piled him
Speaker 20: in some way. I went down to inspect the lawnmower
Speaker 20: to find the bag completely intact, the mower deck completely intact,
Speaker 20: and then flipping the mower over, the blades were all intact,
Speaker 20: so that ruled out that there was any cause from
Speaker 20: the lawnmower. The paramedics confirmed that it was a gunshot wound.
Speaker 20: We watched the paramedics try and revive Sonny and pretty
Speaker 20: much bled out on location. That day, we had somebody
Speaker 20: in the police department that was an associate and friend
Speaker 20: of ours telling us a little bit of information that
Speaker 20: there's a gunman out there, and it seemed like every
Speaker 20: hour there was another shooting. I assumed that it was
Speaker 20: a single gunman, but there was no method to the
Speaker 20: madness of what he was doing and who he was
Speaker 20: targeting at that point. Was I the target and he missed?
Speaker 20: And now I'm going to be the one that he's
Speaker 20: looking at. It changed my life that day. The two
Speaker 20: places you feel the safest are at home and at work,
Speaker 20: and one of those areas had been taken from me.
Speaker 13: James Sunny Buchanan, the first victim on October third, died
Speaker 13: of his wound. Montgomery County police were as baffled by
Speaker 13: this shooting as they had been the evening before, but
Speaker 13: they wouldn't have much time to think about it. Half
Speaker 13: an hour later, another victim would be shot at a
Speaker 13: twelve am, only thirty two minutes after Sunny Buchanan was shot.
Speaker 13: Police learned of another shooting mail me that was Caroline
Speaker 13: Namro from the very beginning of the episode. After pulling
Speaker 13: into a gas station, she heard a loud gunshot prim
Speaker 13: Kumar Wallacher then collapsed in front of her. She immediately
Speaker 13: called nine one one.
Speaker 2: As I was speaking to the nine one one people,
Speaker 2: I saw this police car.
Speaker 3: And I waved over to him, and I went over
Speaker 3: to the taxi driver at mister Wallaka. He was taking
Speaker 3: a few breaths. He was not verbal at that point.
Speaker 3: The last thing he said was when he looked at
Speaker 3: the window and he said, call an ambulance, and then
Speaker 3: he collapsed. I felt such panic as a physician because
Speaker 3: I felt helpless. I had no equipment, no monitor to
Speaker 3: put the person on, no oxygen, no suction. I'm used
Speaker 3: to having everything to hand. What focused me was as
Speaker 3: I spoke to myself in my head, you know you
Speaker 3: can do this.
Speaker 2: You know CPR, you're a doctor. I dropped to the floor.
Speaker 3: And tried to check for a pulse, and then the
Speaker 3: policeman appeared and I said, I'll do the mathter mouth part.
Speaker 3: You do the chest compressions. I started CPR and the
Speaker 3: policeman did assist me. I remember my hands were shaking
Speaker 3: as I was doing this.
Speaker 2: There was a lot of blood, and.
Speaker 3: I realized that he was stopping breathing. I couldn't feel
Speaker 3: a good pulse. I think I felt for a second
Speaker 3: or two, very very thready, thin, uneven pulse, and then
Speaker 3: it went away. Unfortunately, he vomited. By that point, two
Speaker 3: ambulances appeared and they parted on Connecticut Avenue, and I
Speaker 3: remember saying to the police, then, why are they not coming.
Speaker 3: I need to suction the airway. You can't do math
Speaker 3: and mouth if the airway's block. So I didn't understand
Speaker 3: why were they not getting out. Then the ambulance people
Speaker 3: did come out of the trucks, and they did come
Speaker 3: towards us. It was all a matter of minutes. Of course,
Speaker 3: at the time, it felt extremely prolonged for everybody to arrive,
Speaker 3: but I don't think it was. Then the ambulance people
Speaker 3: tried to intubate at the scene and put mister Wilker
Speaker 3: on a gurney, and then I just remember a lot
Speaker 3: of police presence and everything happened very first after that,
Speaker 3: and my husband had arrived and he'd been allowed to
Speaker 3: take my son, my two year old away, So I was.
Speaker 2: Very disturbed the whole day.
Speaker 3: It's horrific that somebody could murder somebody.
Speaker 2: Just awful, what a waste. And I was there.
Speaker 3: You know, you start to question, well, why was it
Speaker 3: him not me? Normally I part the car and I
Speaker 3: immediately get out of the car. But that day I
Speaker 3: paused for a few seconds because he was filling his
Speaker 3: gas tank from where the license plate was, and that
Speaker 3: had slowed me down, and that's why I didn't get out.
Speaker 13: Of the car.
Speaker 3: So that few seconds of delay made a difference to
Speaker 3: my life. I was the slightly blurrier object behind my windshield.
Speaker 2: The clearer shot was to the guy that was out
Speaker 2: of the car.
Speaker 3: But if I hadn't been nosy and looked over at him,
Speaker 3: Wow was he doing filling the car?
Speaker 2: That's really weird. Why is his gas tank there?
Speaker 3: I would have got out, you know, maybe it would
Speaker 3: have been a better shot to me so there, But
Speaker 3: you know, for the grace of God go I. That's
Speaker 3: a very shocking thought to be faced with your own mortality.
Speaker 13: Montgomery County police were starting to realize they had something
Speaker 13: big on their hands. At this gas station where prim
Speaker 13: Kamar Wallaker was shot, law enforcement held the first of
Speaker 13: many press conferences.
Speaker 5: We are presently making all of the notifications to the
Speaker 5: immediate family members. Our investigators are making that personal contact
Speaker 5: to all of those individuals.
Speaker 13: This is Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose. Since these
Speaker 13: shootings took place in his jurisdiction, Chief Moose was in
Speaker 13: charge of the investigation.
Speaker 5: We have a number of different resources that have been deployed. Clearly,
Speaker 5: we have a number of police officers on the street
Speaker 5: in uniform, in playing clothes. They are numerous traffic stops,
Speaker 5: numerous arrests occurring throughout the county. We're also putting together
Speaker 5: the last technical pieces of the hotline. We anticipate in
Speaker 5: the next couple hours coming back to you with that number.
Speaker 5: Would ask you as the media to please be very
Speaker 5: diligent in helping us get that number out, and I
Speaker 5: would anticipate at that same time that we would connect
Speaker 5: that hotline.
Speaker 17: To a reward.
Speaker 5: The FBI, atf US Marshals, and the Secret Service all
Speaker 5: involved in this investigation bringing resources to the table, bringing investigators,
Speaker 5: bringing experience to this situation that is very bizarre to
Speaker 5: all of us.
Speaker 6: The fear of these attacks, the fear spawned by these attacks,
Speaker 6: really rippled across the capital region and up and down
Speaker 6: the East Coast, whether you were an ordinary office worker,
Speaker 6: a school child, or a law enforcement official.
Speaker 13: This is journalist and historian Garrick Graff.
Speaker 6: In some ways, the fear was truly crippling at the
Speaker 6: time because what you had was, you know, we had
Speaker 6: been told for a year, since nine eleven, that more
Speaker 6: attacks were coming. We didn't know when, we didn't know
Speaker 6: what form they were going to take, and we didn't
Speaker 6: know how long the attacks would go on. Federal law
Speaker 6: enforcement and the intelligence agencies had been already operating at
Speaker 6: a crushing tempo in the wake of nine to eleven,
Speaker 6: and then along comes the DC Stiper and all of
Speaker 6: the country's worst fears are realized. The idea that these
Speaker 6: were ongoing attacks with very little information, carried out for
Speaker 6: no discernible purpose. This was, in some ways the worst
Speaker 6: case scenario for what we had all feared was coming
Speaker 6: after nine to eleven, as the Stiper attacks continued and spread,
Speaker 6: This was something that just altered the fabric of life
Speaker 6: in the Capitol. It was scary to be outside. It
Speaker 6: was scary to be on your daily commute. It was
Speaker 6: scary to go to the grocery store or fill up
Speaker 6: your car with gas. And then as the DC sniper
Speaker 6: case unfolded, that terror only grew.
Speaker 13: Even at my station in Baltimore. The paranoia and confusion
Speaker 13: was everywhere. No one knew when or where the snipers
Speaker 13: would strike next. It was a terrible feeling, one that
Speaker 13: stuck with us for weeks, and it's a feeling I'll
Speaker 13: never forget. Just when you thought it might be over,
Speaker 13: news would come in about another shooting. After law enforcement
Speaker 13: held their first press conference that day, on October third,
Speaker 13: the attacks continued. Just twenty five minutes after prim Kumar
Speaker 13: Wallaker was killed at a mobile gas station, another unsuspecting
Speaker 13: victim was shot only two miles away.
Speaker 11: We do see that there is a bullet hole just
Speaker 11: above the bench on the large window there. The woman,
Speaker 11: as we understand, was shot in the face, apparently as
Speaker 11: she was just sitting there.
Speaker 14: There is a ruthless person on the loose.
Speaker 11: What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
Speaker 11: of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things.
Speaker 10: All that the victims appeared to have had in common
Speaker 10: Each was shot to death by a single bullet.
Speaker 12: Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going
Speaker 12: to go right straight through our bulletproof ess.
Speaker 4: The massive man on continues, but police admit they don't
Speaker 4: know who are, what they're dealing with, or what their
Speaker 4: motive might be.
Speaker 9: The White.
Speaker 13: From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster DC Sniper
Speaker 13: this season on Monster DC Sniper.
Speaker 4: Police have had little to go on. Only one witness's
Speaker 4: description of two people in a white truck speeding away
Speaker 4: from one murders e.
Speaker 10: And he described the vehicle and he said guy was
Speaker 10: leaning out like on the driver's side mirror.
Speaker 1: That was the first lead where someone had actually seen somebody.
Speaker 13: More about that calling card.
Speaker 4: It was left at the scene of the most recent shooting.
Speaker 12: It was a card from a fortune telling deck that's
Speaker 12: known as the death card, with a note written on it,
Speaker 12: dear policeman, I am God.
Speaker 6: But they find out soon that the information they got
Speaker 6: was bad.
Speaker 8: FBI in Washington, DC did a more thorough search.
Speaker 16: And that's when we got a hit on a fingerprint.
Speaker 12: We just heard it on the local AM radio station.
Speaker 12: The snipers are in the rest area in Myersville, send
Speaker 12: everybody you got.
Speaker 13: If you understood the case, it was basically just two outcomes,
Speaker 13: death are life. That was it.
Speaker 1: His sentencing is not constitutionally acceptable.
Speaker 10: He has to be sentenced in a way that gives
Speaker 10: a jury the option.
Speaker 13: To go lower than that.
Speaker 12: He was a psychopathic, cold blooded killer that can never
Speaker 12: walk the street again.
Speaker 21: I do believe he was brainwashed, for lack of better term,
Speaker 21: I get the feeling he agrees he has to pay
Speaker 21: a price, but I don't know if he thinks he's
Speaker 21: already paid it or not. I don't know the answer
Speaker 21: to that, but I'd like to ask him.
Speaker 1: Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by
Speaker 1: Tony Harris and produced by iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt
Speaker 1: Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of iHeartRadio,
Speaker 1: alongside producers Trevor Young, Ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain. Payne
Speaker 1: Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of
Speaker 1: Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Stedman and Christina Dana. Original
Speaker 1: music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you haven't already,
Speaker 1: be sure to check out the first two seasons, Atlanta
Speaker 1: Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have questions
Speaker 1: or comments, email us at monster at iHeartMedia dot com,
Speaker 1: or you can call us at one one eight three
Speaker 1: three two eight five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.