The Beltway Snipers: "Call Me God" — Ep. 4 | MK Confidential

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1:17The lot is still taped off as a crime scene. Inside, in the hall by the front doors, there is a public telephone. At exactly 6 a.m., it rings. One of the men standing outside is an FBI agent. He hears the phone ringing inside the locked building and says, somebody should get in there and answer it. No one does. It is not his crime scene. His hands are tied. The phone continues ringing, then stops. Six hours earlier, around midnight, in the woods behind that restaurant, investigators find a plastic sandwich bag tacked to a tree with two white thumbtacks. It looks like a Halloween bag, the kind a child takes trick-or-treating.

2:04Folded inside it is a letter written on pink paper with stars stuck to it. Investigators bag it unopened. It goes to a lab in the morning and is finally read around noon. The letter is handwritten and there are detailed instructions. It's from the snipers who have been terrorizing Washington, D.C. for nearly three weeks. In it, they announced that they will call the public telephone at the Ponderosa at six o 'clock Sunday morning, and police should be standing there to take it. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

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3:32Born from over 10 years of longevity research, One Skin is helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try One Skin with 15 % off using the code Megan at oneskin.co slash Megan. oneskin.co slash Megan. That's 15 % off. oneskin.co with code Megan. After you purchase, support our show and tell them we sent you and then enjoy this beautiful product. Jim Clemente and James Fitzgerald were in the room where the true profile of these killers begins to take shape. Both are retired FBI profilers. Fitz is also a forensic linguist. The agent who heard the phone ring from the parking lot is Tim Clemente, Jim's brother.

4:21By the middle of October 2002, the men doing the shooting have started to message the police. It starts 13 days before that phone rings with a card in the woods. October 7th, a 13-year-old boy named Iron Brown is dropped off at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland, and is shot as he walks toward the door. He lives. Police follow the trajectory back into the tree line, where a U.S. Marshals Service dog stops at a fallen branch and sits. The ground there is flattened the way ground looks when someone has been lying on it. Cadets rake the area and turn up a spent 223 casing. Near it, an ATF agent finds a tarot card lying face up in the brush.

5:08It is the death card. On the front is a skeleton in armor on a white horse carrying a black flag. Across the top, handwritten in blue ink, Call Me God. On the back, another handwritten message, For You, Mr. Police. And code, Call Me God. Do not release to the press. That's the entire message. The first and only real clues to the shooter's identity and his first known effort to communicate. 13 words, maybe 14. No one wants word of that card to leave this room. The lead homicide detective, Joseph Bergstrom, calls it an ace in the hole and warns a briefing of two dozen task force members that someone there might leak it.

5:55That night on the 11 o 'clock news, WUSA in Washington reports that a tarot card has been found at the school. The Washington Post has it too. Both outlets get the wording wrong. It was a card from a fortune telling deck that's known as the death card with a note written on it. Dear Policeman, I am God. It's the latest chilling development in this chilling case and massive investigation. Dear Policeman, I am God, which is not what the card said. And neither outlet initially reports the line that mattered most to the man who wrote it. Quote, do not release to the press. The next morning, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose walks out to the cameras.

6:39I have not received any message that the citizens of Montgomery County want Channel 9 or the Washington Post or any other media outlet to solve this case. If they do, then let me know. We will go and do other police work and we will turn this case over to the media. But to date, the people in my community have asked the police department to work the case. So I beg of the media, let us do our job. Moose says later that much of the anger was an act. He assumed the men who left the card were watching and he wanted them to see the leak had not come from him. Twelve days later, another communication.

7:18It arrives the same way. Someone has to be shot first. Saturday, October 19th. Jeff and Stephanie Hopper have been driving for nine days. He is 37, a computer consultant. They are driving from Melbourne, Florida, where they live, to Pennsylvania to see her sister. They've heard about the shooter along I-95 and are careful not to buy gas anywhere near Washington, so they stop in Ashland instead, 100 miles south of D.C. The hoppers have dinner at the Ponderosa, steak and salad. Just before 8 p.m., they walk out across the parking lot toward their white Cadillac holding hands. They both hear a loud noise.

8:01Stephanie thinks a car has backfired. Jeff puts his hand on his stomach, goes down slowly and says, I think I've been shot. She kneels over him. He says, I love you. She says, I love you. They say the Lord's Prayer together. Then she tries to dial 911 and cannot get her phone keypad unlocked, so she starts shouting at people in the lot to call. Ashland Patrolman Tim Meacham is there in two minutes. He stops his cruiser at the end of the sidewalk so the car is between the hoppers and the woods. Jeff was laying in the parking lot and Stephanie was sitting on the sidewalk and she was holding pressure on his stomach.

8:42I told her that I need to verify the injury so she lifted up the towel that she was holding on it and I saw a pole about the size of a nickel in the top of the victim's stomach. Meacham says she was the calmest person he has ever seen at a scene like this. He tells her the thing to do with a bleed is to hold pressure that it isn't rocket science. She starts laughing. So does her husband. She started to chuckle. The victim started to laugh. And at this point, I'm like, OK, can you guys let me in on the joke? Well, she was a rocket scientist for NASA. So me telling her that it wasn't rocket science, she kind of knew that already.

9:22The round has gone in under his sternum and come apart inside him. When the ambulance crew gets to him, they keep asking him how old he is. I'm 37, he tells them, and I hope to reach 38. He will. Behind the restaurant, there is a wooded lot and it is completely dark. The plan is to wait for daylight. An ATF agent named Ray Neely argues against it. He has a yellow lab named Garrett, who finds gunpowder, and says the dog does not need to wait for daylight. The smell will never be stronger than it is right now. That's when I saw the rub mark. There was a small tree about maybe two inches in diameter with a small vine.

10:03And when I looked up that tree, it looked like someone had taken some type of hard object and leaned it up against that tree. And that created a rub mark. You wouldn't have that occurring in nature. You needed something hard pressing against it. And it was also in Lana's sight too, where the person was actually hit as he exited the Ponderosa. And so that rubbed mark was someone probably using that tree as a right for rest. 20 feet behind that tree, the dog sits. Sure enough, the bullet casing is lying on top of the leaves, clean. Then a Hanover County sergeant named James Sizemore sees something on a tree trunk, a Ziploc bag with a Halloween pattern on it, pinned up with two white thumbtacks.

10:48Folded inside is pink-lined paper with stars stuck to it, a note, not read, but sent in for processing. Six hours later, the phone rings in the locked vestibule, and no one answers it. Two pieces of paper delivered two weeks apart. Over the next four days, almost everything the task force learns about these men comes out of those two documents and out of a room at Quantico where two profilers are arguing about them. James Fitzgerald has been waiting for a letter before there was one. We were trying to put the profile together for the week or so before, and I was telling people we're probably going to get a notification, a letter, a document somewhere, and sure enough, there is the tarot card.

11:34I actually wound up writing a four-and-a-half-page report along with two other profilers in the unit just summarizing what we saw in that card alone. Four and a half pages out of 13 words.

12:14And I was a police officer prior to the FBI, and nobody ever called me that. Then the next line is, call me God in quotation marks. And what the heck did they mean by that? I did some more research. There was a movie called Navy SEALs, starring Charlie Sheen back in the 80s. And the sniper on that team, his nickname was God, because he had the power of life and death. But I focused on the word press as opposed to media. And I summed up the end of it. It seems like using Mr. Police, someone deferential, hip hop related, maybe younger, using press, the older word, which is now media was more common.

12:52Perhaps the person is older. So the end was we have sort of a mix of personalities here. Fitz did not say two people. Not yet. He wrote that the card might have been made across two days in two moods. He also had to establish an approximate age for the writer. An age can be difficult to tell in a forensic, I'm asked to do that all the time in a forensic linguistic analysis. Give us the age of an individual and, you know, some older people write in a very sophomoric sense. Some younger people can write in a very advanced, you know, seemingly educated or well-read sense. I think maybe 13 words, 14 words on that whole tarot card.

13:32And the card itself told us a lot, even about the immaturity. Then he looked at punctuation. Why did he use quotation marks over call me God, then separate do not release to the press? If anything, they could have been underlined or exclamation mark. It was this person's way of emphasizing something important to them. And again, what I did in the Unabom case, I compared the Unabom writings to the eventual writings of Ted Kaczynski, many people in between. But finally, with Ted Kaczynski, we could line up these unusual punctuation marks and other verb and noun phrases. And that's what I was hoping to do in this case.

14:10While Fitz worked on the language, Jim Clemente worked on the scenes. The choice of targets, the distances of the shots, the timing. When the first six one-shots, one-kill happened, we immediately felt that this is somebody who is a little older. They're not in their 20s. They're probably, they're most likely police or military trained because these are very efficient kills. And I know that sounds cold, but this is the way we analyze them. This is somebody who's sticking and running, sticking and running, sticking and running, and being incredibly efficient all through that day. In other words, they didn't decompensate at all.

14:57They didn't have their nerves get up, and it didn't interfere with the later killings in that same day. Clemente read the sniper as a disciplined adult, a man who was trained to shoot and has killed before. Fitz saw a child. I remember very clearly Fitz was sitting next to me in the profiling room at our roundtable, where he said, look, there's such a dichotomy here between the actions, because we're all saying that we profile the shootings, and this is somebody who has planned and executed these shootings flawlessly. Yet Fitz is saying, I'm seeing some younger kind of influences in these notes.

15:42And I also remember, Fitz, you saying that Mr. Police is a line from some Jamaican reggae songs. And so that was the first time you mentioned that this person could have connections to Jamaica. Jamaica, off a phrase on the back of a tarot card. And as we were arguing this out, everybody said, well, certainly this guy is in his late 30s or early 40s because he must be police and military trained. But Fitz was saying, well, I don't know, based on these writings, he's either, well, if he's an adult, he's just barely an adult. But Fitz said, I think he's more like 15, 16 years old. And everybody said that's impossible.

16:31There was one answer, though, that made both takes true. So I jumped in to back Fitz up and say, well, then either for the first time we have a guy who is perfectly calm, cool and collected while he is planning and executing the shootings, but decompensates and communicates like a child. Or for the first time in U.S. history, we have a sniper team, one old and one younger. But the profilers took issue with the idea of a team. In their experience, criminal snipers did not share control.

17:30well, if one of them's older and actually forcing his will on the younger one, then he is feeling fine because he's controlling the younger one and the younger one doesn't really have a say in it. And they're saying, ah, that doesn't make much sense. And I said, well, he could control him completely by sexually victimizing him. And lo and behold, I think it was 11 years later that that Malvo came out while he was in prison and said that Mohammed had been sexually victimizing him from almost from day one. That was a guess in a room in 2002 about two men no one had yet identified. Mohammed was never charged with abusing Malvo, and he never answered that allegation.

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20:06What Tim Clemente noticed first was the bag itself. my brother tim was the one that found the note the the one at the uh steakhouse in ashland and he immediately they hadn't opened it up but it was actually tacked to a tree in a baggie that was a halloween baggie like a kid's halloween trick-or-treat baggie and so right there just from the outside of that and then seeing through the baggie that there were little gold stars on it It was like, what kind of a 45-year-old is going to use this to communicate to law enforcement? When we then discussed it with Fitz, he gave us a number of other indicators of youthfulness in this communications.

20:51And that, you know, Mr. Police was kind of looking up to cops rather than, you know, scornfully looking down at them. You could read part of it through the plastic. Because it was a baggie that this note was contained in, you could see the front and the back of the note. And my brother saw the lines, your kids are not safe anywhere. Tim Clemente wanted to open it on the spot, preserve the evidence, but read it that night because he saw a clear threat to children in it. He was told no, it was not an FBI case yet. And the man who could make that call was asleep. somebody in the local department said no we're gonna we're gonna wait till the my boss wakes up and then uh we'll let him make that decision my brother really kind of tried a whole bunch of things to try to get them to open it immediately but they did not do it and the phone he was there the phone was inside the vestibule of the restaurant which was which was still locked but he heard the phone ring at 6 a.m and he said somebody should definitely get in there and answer it and again it was not our crime scene.

22:02They never actually opened up the letter until like noon Sunday when they finally got it to the lab. We missed a classic chance to actually have someone talk to talk to it, talk to the people that morning and and and and it turns out there was an incoming call to that pay phone at 6 a.m that no one ever picked up and I've as a linguist I I just always wonder what it would be like to have been on that call and we could have really narrowed down even where they came from. Fitz knows what the alternative looks like because he's watched the Bureau do it once before. On the kidnapping of Exxon executive Sidney Riso.

22:40Riso did not survive, but the way they caught the people who took him is the point. Agents in the Newark division, there was about 100 of them all in cars. They went to every pay phone in like North Jersey and they sat on it. And sure enough, because they knew a call was coming in to some tip line somewhere. And sure enough, someone sees a guy get out of a car, a woman's in the car, makes the call and the case gets put together from there. They stop the car and they were they were the kidnappers. So that exactly could have been done overnight. night. They would have had six to eight hours to put agents around every phone booth.

23:21It wouldn't have been easy, and they could have missed it. We're not denying that. They could have made the arrest potentially right then and there and definitely saved a few more lives. When the letter is finally in hand, it runs four pages. It opens with the same three lines as the tarot card. Page two begins, we have tried to contact you to start negotiation. What follows is a numbered list of the calls they say they made and who took each one. An officer named Derek, a female officer at Rockville, the task force hotline, a priest, even CNN. Every one of them by the writer's account told them to call a different number or hung up.

24:03These people took the calls for a hoax or a joke, according to the letter. so your failure to respond has cost you five lives, it accuses. Then the demand, $10 million into a Bank of America account. The note promises to call police at 6 a.m. on Sunday at the Ponderosa buffet and includes the phone number they plan to call. The letter closes with an alternative. If catching them matters more than stopping the killing, then, quote, prepare you body bags. And underneath that, a postscript. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time. And a promise, which Fitz has never forgotten. If we give you our word, then that is what takes place.

24:50Word is bond. Four pages was enough. Fitz noticed a conspicuous missing letter. So at the time of the D.C. sniper case, I'm in my Georgetown master's program in linguistics, and I happened to be taking a course in sociolinguistics and we were studying U.S. dialects. And I was learning about, you know, Boston dialects, New York, Philadelphia, which is mine, other parts of the country. And I realized it's not all geographical, it's cultural. And here I noticed on this letter, and one of the hallmarks, if you will, one of the features of Black vernacular English, there's a name for it, is a lot of Black people spoken in writing drop the S's on either possessive words or plural words.

25:35And here in this note, when the first two pages alone, this letter, I think there were four pages total, the person writes the word negotiation, should have been plural, demand should have been plural with an S, and$10 million, which of course should have been plural. And if it happened just once, okay, it's a typo. I mean, it was handwritten, but you know, a mistake. Second time, maybe third time I said, we have dialect features here of a black person, most likely male. And I was the first one. And I know I talked to Jim Clemente about this. And I was the first one to say, Jim, I think we got a black guy.

26:13Let's go up to the task force and tell them. That reading changed the profile. We were very careful in how we worded the profile. That was to go out to the public. And we very purposefully said, historically speaking, snipers are white males acting on their own. However, and here's the caveat, we don't know if this person exactly fits that historical matching in this particular case. And years later, I'd be hearing, oh, the FBI had it wrong. They said it was a white guy in the beginning. We technically didn't, but you have to be careful when you put these profiles together. We don't want investigators or the public ruling out someone if they think they have good evidence otherwise, and they don't make the phone call.

26:59So the Bureau hedged in writing on purpose, and the country heard white man, white van, and stopped listening. The men doing the shooting had been trying to get somebody on the phone for two weeks. Now they're asking the police to take their call at the Ponderosa so they can ensure the message gets through. Before any of the notes one of the snipers called a priest. There was an even more detailed conversation where Mohammed apparently earlier had made a phone call to a priest. It was basically claiming the responsibility for the shootings outside of D.C., but also claiming responsibility for shooting down south.

27:44Malvo and Mohammed apparently chose the priest specifically because he would not record their conversation, but they hoped he would go to the police. He did not. Investigators found him while chasing down the note left behind the Ponderosa. For the moment, the detail about the shooting down south goes nowhere. The profilers had warned Chief Moose from the beginning about being careful on camera. We told Chief Moose immediately that snipers have a God complex. Do not challenge them because you will see them try to prove it. But he said at the end, the streets are safe. Your schools are safe. So the next day, they shot a child on his way into school.

28:27That child was Iron Brown. But by the end of the month, the men who shot him were writing the chief's lines and Fitz could watch it happen. Chief Moose was supposed to say something like, we have the snipers in a noose with an unusual N-U-E-S-E, I believe, spelling of the word noose. So they were definitely playing games at the end. I'm saying they now, we were sure that there was more than one person. And now they're trying to have the chief of police, you know, at their beck and call and making these particular statements. And underneath all of it, from the very first day, Fitz had a suspicion about what the shootings were actually for.