Original subtitles

-8 dead now, 2 injured.

The suspect still on the loose.

There is growing anxiety about when he'll strike again.

-You have someone who I worshipped,

who I was sexually involved with,

who I loved, who I needed,

and who knew how to pull all my strings.

I trusted him completely.

- 911? - My wife has been shot!

-She's shot in the head.

-They have the most definite, promising, concrete leads

that they have had at any point in this

two-week-old investigation.

An eyewitness who last night caught a glimpse of the killer,

his van, and the gun he may be using.

-That was love.

-After Linda Franklin's shooting, there's a five-day gap

with no shooting.

Sitting, just waiting,

and high anxiety for something to come in.

Hoping there's not another shooting.

Its a terrible feeling,

there's nothing we could do to move the ball forward,

and we didn't want them to do another shooting

to make the whole thing start again.

- Hello, this is a call from... - Lee Malvo.

- an inmate at the Virginia Department of Corrections,

Red Onion State Prison.

-41-year-old man, John Muhammad,

and a Jamaican-born teenager...

Sniper team that terrorized the Washington metropolitan area.

-19-11... I have one down, there's blood all over.

I'm at the Mobil gas station"

-...the most intense manhunts in American history.

-The serial killer hunting down random citizens.

-We have fear levels here that I think are higher

than they were after September 11th.

-Please let me go! Let me go past!"

-President Bush is talking about fighting Iraq,

and we have a warzone right here in this own country.

-Ohh, oh, man, oh, man.

-Sources tell NBC news that at least one witness spotted

the sniper inside the parking garage,

only 50 feet from the Franklins.

-The witness saw a cream-colored van, taillight out.

-If you know anybody that drives one of the vehicles

that might... You might suspect...

-Middle-Eastern male, dropped to one knee.

-Described as having olive or darker-colored skin.

-And he was able to accurately describe

the type of weapon used.

-The weapon was an AK-74 military assault rifle.

-I've been in law enforcement long enough to know

that that degree of detail is so rare,

and generally, when there is that much detail,

it's not true.

-Investigators probing the Falls Church shooting

are looking at surveillance tapes from Home Depot.

-And then there was really, really bad news.

You hear this scream.

"Oh, shit."

-We looked at the video tape from inside the store.

At the time of the shooting,

this witness had not even left the store.

So he was not out

in the parking lot when the shooting occurred.

-So, our ace, our crack, had just gone kaboom.

We went back to him and ended up charging him with lying.

-So, the folks who were leading the task force said

"Hey, why don't you come over and share this with the media?"

It's like they didn't want to share that news,

they wanted me to do it.

It's been determined through further investigation

that the information provided by one of the witnesses

at the scene of the shooting in the Home Depot

describing a cream-colored van with a malfunctioning taillight

is not credible.

-Their best witness from Monday night's shooting

was a phony witness

-Monday night's frantic search for a cream-colored van

with a burned-out taillight was a wild-goose chase,

and the AK-74 semi-automatic rifle,

that was a lie too.

-That little bit of hope we had with the witness information

just was so heartbreaking.

We really thought we were sent back to the... back to zero.

We don't have any more than we had before

except a little white van.

-The Capitol Area sniper has killed nine people.

A law-enforcement army is after the shooter, or shooters,

but so far none of the leads have paid off

in what seems to have been false information.

-We're traveling back. We had just spent

a really good vacation with my brothers and my dad.

And we were hungry, and a Ponderosa, you know,

big dinner sounded good.

-We were walking hand-in-hand,

talking, and had the very familiar conversation

of, "I love you." "No I love you more."

"I love you more." "I love you infinity plus one."

It was just being kids in love.

-I drove down from the entrance to the Ponderosa,

and I saw a woman sitting on the sidewalk

cradling a man's head in her lap.

I said, "What happened?"

She said, "I think my husband was shot."

I said, "Where did the shot come from?"

And she pointed straight down and said,

"it came from down there."

He's conscious. It's obvious that he's in some pain.

She had a cloth on her husband's stomach, and I said,

"I need to see the wound."

And she lifts up the cloth, and underneath the cloth,

there's this nickel-sized hole right in the top of his stomach.

And it started oozing blood, and I said,

"Okay, you... you can cover that back up.

You're doing the best thing that you can do for this.

It's pretty simple, it's not rocket science."

At that point, both the man

and the woman laughed a little bit.

And the man actually told me, that... he says,

"Well, that's funny because my wife's a rocket scientist."

And I looked at her, and she says,

"Yeah, I'm a rocket scientist."

-Jeff was starting to go into shock, and I told Jeff,

you know, "You're going into shock,

you need to stay with me, you need to stay awake.

You're going to want to go to sleep, you need to stay awake."

-I was pretty much convinced I was gonna die.

Stephanie was there with me, and I asked her to pray with me,

you know, just have peace with God,

and then... and then get on with whatever happened.

-He lost 75% of his stomach,

so they kind of sewed the pieces back together.

-I could've, you know, bled to death.

There's shrapnel that kind of went through and hit the liver

and a little bit in the intestine,

but I survived.

-The effect on our relationship is I'm...

I'm far more intentional about

making sure that she knows...

That she hears that I love her.

-I love you too.

-We continue to cover the story

of a shooting in Ashland, Virginia.

A 37-year-old man gunned down as he was leaving a restaurant.

Officers suspecting it could be the work

of the DC Area serial sniper.

-You think they're doing a good job here?

-They're doing a fantastic job from what we hear, and...

And obviously, as I said a moment ago,

there's a lot more that we're not hearing about.

-You don't have to be a rocket scientist

to figure out we don't have squat.

-I think the general feeling was,

"Man, something's gotta break, because we don't have anything."

Well, homicide cases are made

when there's just the tiniest little crack.

They just need a crack, and they fly through it.

The problem was having the patience

to wait for the crack to open,

knowing people were getting killed.

-Witnesses also said that they heard

a shot coming from the woods.

Is that right behind the restaurant?

-We're still trying to determine where the shot came from.

We have several witnesses who have indicated that they...

-We looked at where the victim was

and possible areas where the shot could have came from.

The trail I was following was probably 25,

30 yards into the woods.

I finally came upon a tree.

I looked up, there was a note pinned on the tree

in a clear sandwich bag.

It didn't appear to be there very long,

so I was quite certain

that it came from whoever did take that shot.

-The investigators notified us that they had found

a very significant piece of information.

It was a note left behind by the shooter.

It's printed.

It's not sophisticated looking or anything.

It has little stars around it and it says,

"For you, Mr. Police, call me God.

Do not release to the press."

-I thought, "Okay.

Now we are going to get them,

and we're going to get them sooner than later."

"If stopping the killing is more important than catching us now,

you will place $10 million

in Bank of America account."

-Part of me remembers thinking,

"Did you just make that up? Did you just decide now,

that since this is going so well

and I've got everybody's attention,

now I'm going to ask for money? Or was this all along for money,

and if it was, why not ask after the first shooting?"

-"We will have unlimited withdrawal

at any ATM worldwide."

-At the time, you could only draw like $200 from an ATM.

Like, what are you thinking?

It's going to take... how are you going to get $10 million

out of an ATM machine?

And by the way, every time you go to the ATM machine,

your picture is taken,

so are they real, you know, about this?

-We have tried to contact you to start negotiation

in Montgomery County, "Officer Derick."

-We're taking thousands of phone calls.

But that afternoon, October 18th at about 4:30

one of those phone calls really raised my suspicions.

When I picked up the phone, they said "Shut up and listen,

I've got some information about who your snipers are."

Good morning. Officer Baliles.

We weren't lucky to get a recording,

so I passed that information on to sniper investigation.

I wasn't aware of what they were doing as far

as any type of follow-up,

until two FBI agents showed up at my desk and told me

"Derek, we want you to come with us."

That was a scary feeling. I'd never had the FBI

telling me that type of thing before.

-They asked me to listen to a recording of the 911 call

that had come into a dispatch center three days previously.

They put headphones on me

and asked me to concentrate very carefully on it.

And they asked me, "Does that voice sound familiar?"

And I said "Yes, that's the same voice that I spoke to."

The investigators asked me, "What did they exactly say?"

And I told them, "The caller wanted me

to verify some information

about a crime that had occurred in Alabama."

-Attempted murder investigation

of black female Claudine Lee Parker,

along with white female Kellie Adams.

-I just remember seeing a really bright light

and then having, like, this, like, a ringing in my ears.

There was a flap of skin, a whole area here,

was laying down on my chest.

It was still connected, but barely,

and it was laying down on my chest.

And I could tell that there was something wrong with my jaw

because there was movement where they shouldn't be,

I couldn't talk.

-Claudine was closing up and getting ready to go to the game.

She was just excited about football.

She loved football.

They just said that she had been shot

and killed during a robbery.

I really didn't believe it.

I thought that Claudine was supposed to live forever.

She just enjoyed life.

-I would have been coming from this direction,

and the young man is going right behind the Krystal's.

I pulled into an alleyway

that was on the other side of the Krystal

to where I would encounter the suspect.

He then, of course, looked at me.

He turned, reversed direction, and then he started running,

I mean, basically until he... he hit a fence.

I started running after him, but unfortunately,

I lost sight of him.

Witnesses saw a blue Caprice that was waiting.

They saw the suspect jump into the blue Caprice

that subsequently took off.

-From where I am standing here,

this is the edge of the building.

The grass field that we are looking at.

He dropped a piece of evidence...

that turned out to be the owners' manual

for the Bushmaster rifle.

It had 36 fingerprints of identifiable quality

in that magazine.

The fingerprints were ran through the entire country.

It did not strike anyone.

It was very frustrating.

I just could not do anything more with what I had.

Now some weeks have gone by.

I received a call from a Sniper task force

in Washington, D.C.

They wanted all the elements of our case file

up at the task force.

And we delivered the gun catalog up

with the 36 fingerprints in it.

-Okay, now we got something.

This is what we've been waiting for,

something like this to happen.

I thought to myself at the time,

"That's the crack. Right there.

They made a mistake."

-In the letter left at the Ponderosa...

there's a second page with a postscript at the bottom.

It says, "Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time."

-Well, you know, fear, it is just

the most awesome emotion ever.

And so that note, it just... It just drives fear.

-It was a very chilling statement,

a heartless statement, because you already knew

that he had shot a child.

And it was basically to say your kids aren't safe... period.

-We will contact you at Ponderosa,

Ashland, Virginia buffet, telephone number.

-So far, we had shown zero capacity

to provide any protection to anyone.

There was a lot of concern that...

That there would be open anger

to not following their direction.

-I had gotten the Ponderosa line

redirected into the joint operations center.

My job was to trace the call.

It went from weeks of not having anything to go on,

and now the person that had been doing

this could be on the phone at any second.

-The hostage negotiator said, "He's on the phone."

And they showed me exactly which line he had called from.

It had come back from a pay phone at a gas station

in Richmond, Virginia.

-The, uh, law enforcement down there,

the people first to arrive reacted

how you would. They're going to respond

by trying to detain whoever was on the pay phone.

And it turns out that there was a white van.

-We see live on the television,

there's a take-down at a phone booth.

-Very deliberately looking at the van,

closing down the area here at Parham and Broad.

-And we're like, "Okay,

did they just arrest the shooter?

Why don't we know what's going on?"

-This Plymouth Voyager mini-van with temporary Virginia tags,

driven by a man who sources say made a call from a pay phone

believed to have been used by the sniper.

-It would seem, based on the police presence

that's still here, they have a very strong lead in this case.

-We just decided we are going to go out,

make our statement and our brief to the media.

So that if it's not them,

we're still establishing a rapport and open communication.

-I would like to start with a message.

The person you called could not hear everything that you said.

The audio was unclear.

And we want to get it right.

Call us back so that we can clearly understand.

-It would be inappropriate for me

to say anything about the investigation to you.

-Moose saw our role as doing as we're told.

You help get out the information that I give you

to help catch these people,

and I'll decide when it's given and how it's given.

Can you give us an update on what the status

is with regarding the investigation?

-Again, it would be inappropriate for me to...

-And I got news for you, that ain't the way it works.

-Chief Moose, you communicate with somebody,

I mean, something is going on. - It's like, "Come on, bro,

you have no new material here?"

We're listening to sources

saying there's more to this thing, you know,

don't play me for no fool. - Thank you very much.

-Chief, Chief, you've chosen to release very little.

-Ma'am, again, it would be inappropriate for me to...

-It's encouraging, I think, in some regards

that they're having a conversation with the guy,

and they think it's the guy, and they don't think there's two g...

I think that... don't you think that eliminates the two guys?

-It would be inappropriate for me

to comment at this time... - Comment at this juncture!

-There's almost a desperation on the part of law enforcement

to take this opportunity, if the shooter is serious.

If he's not, that puts us back to square one.

-Today, I think I finally realized

that the cops may not have that much.

- They don't. - I mean, if they've got to rely

on the media and the press and the TV,

God help them, you know?

That's the bottom line. That's it, man.

-There is someone out there killing people,

and we'd like your help.

-Investigators say as far as they can tell,

those two men seized by a SWAT team

at a pay-phone booth near Richmond, Virginia,

are not tied to the sniper.

-It has been a day of dramatic developments in the sniper case,

but by nightfall, it was the same unsettling story.

The sniper remains at large.

-I had gotten up in the morning, Conrad left out to go to work.

You know, we said our goodbyes, our love yous, um,

and he went on his day.

And I went back to sleep.

He picked a job that would provide,

more so, for his family,

and he was very well liked amongst his passengers.

I remember on one of my birthdays,

Conrad had the whole entire bus sing

"Happy Birthday" to me.

I was like, "Babe, really?"

But that was the cutest thing ever so, yeah,

I will always remember that.

-This is the WTOP radio network, WTOP Washington.

WTOP FM Warrington.

WXDR Frederick...

-Slow ride out of Silver Spring into Bethesda

begins just after Georgia Avenue.

-...construction ahead on the Outer Loop

right at the exit for 270 in the right lane.

If you stay with the Beltway past this point,

they're working again to...

-Another shooting in our area on a ride-on bus

in the Aspen Hill section of Montgomery County.

-The serial sniper may have struck again,

terrorizing the same Maryland community

that already buried five of its own.

-Back here in Montgomery County, right in the face of police.

-Aw, come on, man.

You know, we're... We're getting somewhere,

and they hit again and they're back

in Montgomery County.

It was kind of a real gut punch to everybody involved

and, you know, in many ways,

we're thinking, we're back to square one.

-The victim was shot as he stood

on the top step of a ride-on bus,

at Grand Pre Road and Georgia Avenue,

no word on his condition.

-When I turned the television on, um, the news was on.

- Again, back now looking live... - And it was a ride-on bus,

and it had police tape around it.

At that time...

At that time, I kept calling his phone,

and there was no answer. I called several times.

And, um, something was telling me it was him.

And then I received a call

basically telling me that, you know,

Conrad was at the hospital, he had been shot,

and I need to get to the hospital immediately.

-I get notified... We had another shooting.

It's ours. It's back in the county.

And when I arrived, of course the media already knew

that the shooting had taken place.

- Can you tell us what hospital? - On the sniper,

and why the chief didn't talk to us last night.

-They were amassed, and they had a million questions.

-Can you tell us if there were any witnesses that saw this?

-Was he getting on or getting off at that point?

-Do you have a description of the shooter or any vehicle?

-It was just extremely hectic.

-Investigators can be seen searching for clues

in the community park across from where the bus was parked.

-As we were coming up the Beltway,

as we got closer to the exit, it was gridlocked,

and I literally jumped out of my car,

ran down the, um... Down the ramp,

and there were police and machine guns.

I said, "I am Mrs. Johnson. I need to get to the hospital.

That was my husband that got shot."

And I went upstairs.

At the time, they kept telling us

he was still in surgery.

By this time, the word had traveled...

All of my family, his family,

close family friends, we were all in this one room.

The doctor came in and just told me

he did everything he could do.

He didn't make it.

-It's amazing to me

that somebody could actually shoot 13 people

without leaving any evidence behind, other than these notes.

-Where are we dropping the ball here?

Something's gotta give.

-We have something here. We've gotta really dig into this.

-A federal arrest warrant has been issued

for John Allen Muhammad.

He should be considered armed and dangerous,

and he may be in the company of a juvenile.

Subs extracted and de-HI'd by Peppe @ 2021