凉亭

 

 

At 3:19 in the morning on October 24, 2002, to be exact—we closed in on the snipers who’d been terrorizing the Washington, D.C., area over the course of 23 long days. 

During the month, 10 people had been randomly gunned down and three critically injured while going about their everyday lives—mowing the lawn, pumping gas, shopping, reading a book. Among the victims was one of our own—FBI intelligence analyst Linda Franklin, who was felled by a single bullet while leaving a home improvement store in Virginia with her husband. 

The massive investigation into the sniper attacks was led by the Montgomery County (Maryland) Police Department, headed by Chief Charles Moose, with the FBI and many other law enforcement agencies playing a supporting role. Chief Moose had specifically requested our help through a federal law on serial killings.

That morning, the hunt for the snipers quickly came to an end, when a team of Maryland State Police, Montgomery County SWAT officers, and agents from our Hostage Rescue Team arrested the sleeping John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo without a struggle.

Timeline of Terror

October 2:  Man killed while crossing a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland
October 3:  Five more murders, four in Maryland and one in D.C.
October 4:  Woman wounded while loading her van at Spotsylvania Mall
October 7:  13-year-old-boy wounded at a school in Bowie, Maryland
October 9:  Man murdered near Manassas, Virginia, while pumping gas
October 11:  Man shot dead near Fredericksburg, Virginia, while pumping gas
October 14:  FBI analyst Linda Franklin killed near Falls Church, Virginia
October 19:  Man wounded outside a steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia
October 22:  A bus driver, the final victim, killed in Aspen Hill, Maryland
October 24:  Muhammad and Malvo arrested in Maryland

Just a few hours earlier, at approximately 11:45 p.m., their dark blue 1990 Chevy Caprice—bearing the New Jersey license plate NDA-21Z, which had been widely publicized on the news only hours earlier—had been spotted at a rest stop parking lot off I-70 in Maryland (see photos right). Within the hour, law enforcement swarmed the scene, setting up a perimeter to check out any movements and make sure there’d be no escape. 

What evidence experts from the FBI and other police forces found there was both revealing and shocking. The car had a hole cut in the trunk near the license plate (see photo below, left) so that shots could be fired from within the vehicle. It was, in effect, a rolling sniper’s nest. 

Also found in the car were:

• The Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle that had been used in each attack;
• A rifle’s scope for taking aim and a tripod to steady the shots;
• A backseat that had the sheet metal removed between the passenger compartment and the trunk, enabling the shooter to get into the trunk from inside the car (see photo below, right);
• The Chevy Caprice owner’s manual with—the FBI Laboratory later detected—written impressions of the one of the demand notes;
• The digital voice recorder used by both Malvo and Muhammad to make extortion demands;
• A laptop stolen from one of the victims containing maps of the shooting sites and getaway routes from some of the crime scenes; and
• Maps, walkie-talkies, and many more items.

 

You know the rest of the story. Both Malvo and Muhammad were convicted at trial or pled guilty in multiple court cases in Maryland and Virginia.  Both were sentenced to life without parole; Muhammad also received the death penalty in Virginia.

It was just another fall evening in the nation’s capital—until a sniper’s bullet struck down a 55-year-old man in a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland. By 10 o’clock the next morning—October 3, 2002—four more people within a few miles of each other had been similarly murdered. 

The attacks were soon linked, and a massive multi-agency investigation was launched, led by the Montgomery County Police Department in Maryland. 

Within days, the FBI alone had some 400 agents around the country working the case. We’d set up a toll-free number to collect tips from the public, with teams of new agents in training helping to work the hotline. Our evidence experts were asked to digitally map many of the evolving crime scenes, and our behavioral analysts helped prepare a profile of the shooter for investigators. We’d also set up a Joint Operations Center to help Montgomery County investigators run the case.

But the big break in the case came, ironically, from the snipers themselves. 

On October 17, a caller claiming to be the sniper phoned in to say, in a bit of an investigative tease, that he was responsible for the murder of two women (actually, only one was killed) during the robbery of a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama, a month earlier. 

The snipers left Tarot "Death" cards like this one at some of the shooting sites. Note the words "Call me God" at the top.

Here’s how the investigation played out: 

• Investigators soon learned that a crime similar to the one described in the call had indeed taken place—and that fingerprint and ballistic evidence were available from the case. 
• An agent from our office in Mobile gathered that evidence and quickly flew to Washington, D.C., arriving Monday evening, October 21. While ATF handled the ballistic evidence, we took the fingerprint evidence to the FBI Laboratory (then located at our Headquarters). 
• The following morning, our fingerprint database produced a match—a magazine dropped at the crime scene bore the fingerprints of Lee Boyd Malvo from a previous arrest in Washington State. We now had a suspect…
• The arrest record provided another important lead, mentioning a man named John Allen Muhammad. One of our agents from Tacoma recognized the name from a tip called into that office on the case. A second suspect…
• Our work with ATF agents revealed that Muhammad had a Bushmaster .223 rifle in his possession, a federal violation since he’d been served with a restraining order to stay away from his ex-wife. That enabled us to charge him with federal weapons violations. And with Malvo clearly connected, the FBI and ATF jointly obtained a federal material witness warrant for him. The legal papers were now in our hands…
• Meanwhile, on October 22, we searched our criminal records database and found that Muhammad had registered a blue Chevy Caprice with the license plate of NDA-21Z in New Jersey. That description was given to the news media and shared far and wide, leading to the arrest of the two snipers.

That was the end of the attacks, but not our role in the case. We spent many more hours gathering evidence and preparing it for court—work that ultimately paid off in the convictions of both Malvo and Muhammad.

19世纪20年代的爱丁堡，崇尚科学，发明层出不断；然而，耀眼的光环后面，也隐藏了肮脏卑鄙的小秘密。这年，一连串残忍的谋杀案让全城上下为之震惊…死者一共有17人。6年之后，在同一地区，发现了17尊木制人偶。17起凶杀案，17个死亡木偶，这难道仅仅是巧合吗？而这17起凶案又源自何事呢？

小小的棺材揭露了一段罪恶的过去——在这片土地上，盗尸人与残忍的歹徒，推动了现代医学的一场革命。在案发当时，爱丁堡是公认的知识之都，在医学领域更是如此。19世纪，爱丁堡正处于开明进步的科学年代。爱丁堡大学被视为解剖学及外科手术发展的第一重镇。解剖学是一个新兴领域。而解剖者都是热衷于探索人体构造的医生。他们由此获知器官的运作原理，甚至，通过尸体解剖进行教学。人体解剖对于医学进步起到至为重要的作用，但是，可供医生合法解剖的只有死刑犯的尸体。被处以极刑的囚犯人数，无法满足解剖研究的需求……很快，一个新兴行业应运而生——盗墓。盗尸人挖开坟墓，偷走刚刚下葬的尸体，卖给爱丁堡的外科医生，医生将尸体用于解剖。他们通常都在夜间行动，溜进墓地，找出新坟，劈开棺材的顶端，然后拿绳子绕住尸体的胳膊，把尸体拖出来带走。

但渐渐的，人们加强了对墓地的守卫,提高了棺材的质量。这让盗尸人的成功率愈来愈低。而外科医生们依然需要大量的新鲜死尸，这种暴利制造了邪恶——连环杀手。既然无法成功盗墓，那就把活人变成死尸。可观的利润使得许多人铤而走险。1827年，当时著名的解剖学家诺克斯碰上了两个人，从他们那里得到了一具理想的尸体。诺克斯买下了尸体，并表示自己很乐意再见到他们。这两个人就是爱尔兰劳工，威廉·柏克与威廉·赫尔。威廉·赫尔是一名凶狠狡猾的投机分子，来到繁华的爱丁堡工作。他很快就发现了一个大有赚头的行当，还有一个合适的、无比天真的共犯威廉·柏克。卖出一具尸体，盗墓者可以赚到10个英镑。赫尔说服了柏克，他们能够一起发大财。于是爱丁堡最为恶名昭著的连环杀人案就此开始了。这两个人没有去挖掘坟墓，而是选择了一些可怜的对象下手。这些人被诱骗到赫尔的住处…之后被活活闷死。这对凶犯的杀人手法相当漂亮，在尸体上几乎不留痕迹。而那些受害者，都被他们认为是无依无靠、无足轻重的人。最初，柏克与赫尔是在爱丁堡最破落的下等街区寻找下手的对象，不久之后便开始定期作案了。他们疯狂地实施谋杀，一共卖出了17具尸体…这起案件后来成为有名的“西港谋杀案”，而所有尸体都被送上了野心家诺克斯的解剖台。

但在第一起谋杀发生1年之后，柏克与赫尔落入法网。检察官向赫尔提议担当控方证人，证明他那头脑简单的搭档有罪。赫尔接受了提议，然后逃之夭夭，留下毫不知情的柏克面对罪责。柏克对所有谋杀都供认不讳，但让公众感到震惊的，不仅仅是他供认的内容…案件记录显示，柏克极度自责。有人说，木偶也许是柏克自己做的。有些杀人犯其实想被人逮捕，他们感到罪孽深重，故意留下一些线索，好让自己最终被捉到。难道是羞愧和负疚，让柏克为17名死者刻出小小的纪念？既然知道让死者安息又何必作出如此罪恶的事呢？最接近的推论并不代表着事实，小小的木偶，会让人们记住一个连死者都不得安息的时代。而17个赎罪的木偶是不是能让死者安息呢？

就这样，杀人木偶带着它们的秘密、走进了坟墓。而留给人们的深思却还在时代中回荡。

 

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手记：联想到横沟笔下由利的一句话：计划性犯罪的存在，证明了社会秩序还维持在某种程度之上。反之，动荡社会本身对案件的反思也就不能从一个和平年代的角度去看。谋杀，是破坏人与人之间契约的一个大罪。但在这里，不加评说。寝食难安年代，只能说人人为了生存，只有铤而走险。