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

The Ponderosa Statehouse is closed and dark.

“It has been closed since the night before when a man was shot in its parking lot.”

The lot is still taped off as a crime scene. Inside, in the hall by the front doors, there is a public telephone. At exactly 6am, it rings. One of the men standing outside is an FBI agent. Here's 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.

“6 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 of child takes trick or treating. Folded 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 6am, Sunday morning, and police should be standing there to take it. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential.

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Jim Clementi and James Fitzgerald were in the room where the true profile of these killers begins to take shape. Both are retired FBI profiles. Fitz is also a forensic linguist. The agent who heard the phone ring from the parking lot is Tim Clementi, Jim's brother. By 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 Irene 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. Marshall 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 2-2-3 casing.

Near it an ATF agent finds a tarot card lying face up in the brush. It 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 may be 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. That night, on the 11 o'clock news, W. USA and Washington reports that a tarot card has been found

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. "Do not release to the press." The next morning on Montgomery County Police Chief Charles moves walks out to the cameras. I have not received any message that the citizens of Montgomery County won't channel nine or to 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 today, 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 as leader 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.

12 days later, another communication. It 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 in our careful, not to buy gas anywhere near Washington. So they stop in Ashland instead, 100 miles south of DC. The hoppers have dinner at the Ponderosa, steak and salad. Just before 8pm, they walk out across

the parking lot toward their white Cadillac holding hands. They both hear a loud noise. Stephanie 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. And she tries to dial 911 and cannot get her phone keypad unlocked, so she starts shouting at people in the lot to call. Ashland Petrolman, 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.

I told her that I had to verify the injury, so she lifted up the towel that she was holding on it. And I saw a poll about 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's article”

staff. And at this point, I'm like, okay, can you guys let me in on the joke? Well, she was a rocket scientist for NASA, so if me telling her there wouldn't rocket science, she kind of knew that already. The 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. You 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 Nealy 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 rubmark. There was a small tree

about maybe two inches in diameter with a small lawn. 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 rubmark. You wouldn't have that occurring in nature. You needed something hard pressing against it. And it was also when Lana sighted to where the person was actually hit as he exited the upon Jerusalem. And so that rubmark was someone probably using that tree as a rifle rust. 20 feet behind

that tree, the dog sits. Sure enough, the bullet casing is lying on top of the leaves. Clean. Then a hand over county sergeant named James Sizemore sees something on a tree trunk, a ziplock bag with a Halloween pattern on it, pinned up with two white thumbtacks. Fold it inside is pink lined paper with stars stuck to it, a note, not red, but sent in for processing. Six hours later, the phone rings in the locked vestibule and no one answers it.

force learns about these men comes out of those two documents and out of a room at Quantico where

“two profiles 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 letter, a document somewhere, and sure enough, there is the taro card. I actually wound up writing a four-and-a-half page report along with two other profiles in the unit, just summarizing what we saw in that card alone.

Four-and-a-half pages out of 13 words. First page or so was the guy basically had it wrong,

taro in taro world death means transition of some sort, could be a job promotion, a move, something like that, did not mean the cessation of life. So that was the first page, and then it was try-for-cated for you, Mr. Police. It's some sort of a respectful, deferential term, maybe an older person. I actually did some search on the internet, and there's some hip hop, rap song references to that Mr. Police, and 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 starting 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, perhaps the person is older. So the end was, we have sort of a mix of personalities here. Fits did not say to people, not yet. He wrote that the card might have been made across two days in two moons. He also had to establish an approximate age for the writer. An age can be difficult to tell, and then a forensic link. I may have to do that all the time,

and a forensic link was taken out. It gives us the age of an individual, and some older people right in a very soft, a more extensive, younger people can write in a very advanced, you know, seemingly educated, or a well-read sense. I think maybe 13 words, 14 words, on that whole tarot card, and then the card itself told us a lot, even about the maturity. Then he looked at punctuation. Why did he use quotation marks over Call Me Guide, then separate, do not

release to the press? If anything, they could have been underlined or explanation mark. It was, I was this person's way of emphasizing something important to them. And again, if what I did in the Unibom case, I compared the Unibom writings to the eventual writings of Ted

Kizinski, many people in between, but finally with Ted Kizinski, we could line up these unusual

“punctuation marks and other, you know, firm and down phrases. And that's what I was hoping to do in this”

case. While fits worked on the language, Jim Clementi 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, and being incredibly efficient all through that day. In other words, they didn't decompensate at all, they didn't have, you know, their nerves get up and it didn't interfere with the later killings in that same day. Clementi read this sniper as a disciplined adult, a man who was trained to shoot and has killed

“before fits saw a child. I remember very clearly if it was sitting next to me in the profiling room”

at our round table 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 is planned and executed these shootings flawlessly. Yet fits is saying, "I'm seeing some younger kind of influences in these notes." And I also remember fits you saying that Mr. Police is lying from

from some Jamaican rigging songs. And so that was the first time you mentioned that this

person could have connections to Jamaica. Jamaica offers a phrase on the back of a tarot card.

30s or early 40s because he must be police and military trained." But fits was saying, "Well, I don't know, based on these writings, he's either, well, he's an adult, he's just barely an adult,

“but it fits said. I think he's more like 15, 16 years old." And everybody said, "That's impossible."”

There was one answer though that made both takes true. So I jumped in to back fits 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 decopid states and communicates like a child, or for the first time in U.S. history. We have a sniper team, one old, one older, one younger." But the profilers took issue with the idea of a team. In their experience, criminal snipers did not share a control. But every single sniper case, criminal sniper case prior to this, was a lone actor and a white male. So that's where you get the statistics pushing in one direction.

But fits stuck to his guns, I supported him, and we eventually convinced the rest of the crew that this could be possible. They said, snipers don't work well together because they have a god complex. And I said, "Well, if one of them is older, and actually forcing is well 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 lone behold, I think it”

was 11 years later, that that mouth-o came out while he was in prison and said that Muhammad 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. Muhammad was never charged with abusing mouth-o,

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Ben came Ashland, and the bag on the tree. What Tim Clementi noticed first was the bag itself.

My brother Tim was the one that found the note, the one at the steakhouse in Ashland, and he immediately, they hadn't opened it up, but it was actually tacked to a tree in a baggy that was a Halloween baggy, like a kid's Halloween trick or treat baggy. And so, right there, just from the outside of that, and then seeing through the baggy 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 FITs, he gave us a number of other indicators of youthfulness in this communications, and that 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 baggy 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 Clementi 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 a sleep. Somebody in the local department said, no, we're going to wait till my boss wakes up,

a bunch of things to try to get the, 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”

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. They 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 it turns out there was an incoming call to that payphone at 6 a.m. that no one ever picked up. And I, as a linguist, I just always wondered what it would be like to have been on that clock and we could have really narrowed down even where they came from. Fits knows what the alternative looks like,

because he's watched the bureau do it once before on the kidnapping of Exxon executive Sidney

“Reso. Reso did not survive, but the way they caught the people who took him is the point.”

Agents in the newer division, there was about a hundred of them all in cars. They went to every payphone 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 stopped the car, and they were the, they were the kidnappers. So that exactly could have been done overnight,

they could have had, they would have had, you know, eight, six to eight hours to put agents around every phone booth. And 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 say it 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. These people took the calls for a hoax or a joke, according to the letter. So your failure to respond has caused you five lives. It accuses. Then the demand, $10 million into a bank of America account, the note promises to call police

at six a.m. on Sunday at the Ponderosa buffet and includes the phone number they planned 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 post script, your children are not

safe anywhere at any time. And a promise which fits has never forgotten. If we give you our word,

then that is what takes place. Word is bond. Four pages was enough. Fits noticed a conspicuous missing letter. So at the time of the DC sniper case, I'm in my Georgetown Master's program in linguistics and I happen to be taking a course in social linguistics and we're studying U.S. dialects. And I was learning about Boston dialects, New York, Philadelphia, which is mine, other parts of the country. And I realize it's not all geographical. It's cultural.

And here I notice 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 and writing drop the S's on either possessive words or plural words. And here in this note, when the first two pages

“alone, this letter, I think there are 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, I 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 Clementi about this, and I was the first one that said, Jim, I think we got a black dot, let's go up to the task force and tell them. That reading changed the profile.

We were very careful on 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

they said it was a white guy in the beginning. We technically didn't, but that's, 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. So 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 Muhammad, 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.

“Malvo and Muhammad 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 worn 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. That child was iron brown. But by the end of the month, the men who shot him were writing the chief's lines and fits could watch it happen. Chief Moose was supposed to say something like we have

“the snipers in a noose with an unusual NUESC, 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 at their back and call and making

these particular statements. And underneath all of it from the very first day, fits had a

suspicion about what the shootings were actually for. I was getting a tour of the FBI, kind of just a real quick aside that day to some journalists and their partners. We walk out and see an end when they used to do news back then. They were covering the story as we're walking out the lobby. And the journalist fits, what's going on here? What's happening? I don't know, this is new to me, too. I've learned sometimes that when multiple people are killed,

it's designed to hide the one target that is really the person who the shooter or the murder or once the dead, and it turns out, and Jim and I can discuss that later, that's exactly what the case was here. Clementi has a phrase for how a killer is made. He says genetics loads the gun, personality aims it and experience pulls the trigger. In Muhammad's case, the experience he points to is a custody fight. I would say his wife getting custody of the kids and keeping them

away from him. I mean, he tried to hunt them down, he tried to hunt her down in the end. His actual motive in this case was to shoot a number of other people, make it look like there's some wild crazed killer out there, and then shoot her as part of this, and then maybe shoot some more people, and then disappear, but as a result, children's mother would be dead and he felt he would get custody. That was his ultimate goal to win custody from her by killing him. Except Mildred will not be

killed. Her best friend, Esa's niece, is murdered, but Muhammad never takes a shot at Mildred

or her house on quiet Brooklyn. Still, Muhammad has a plan, which is why he wanted Mildred. He literally murdered people out of convenience. He murdered other people to try to cover his crime of intending to murder his wife. I'm going to make a master plan. I'm going to grab a kid out of a shelter and groom him and force him and victimize him into a position where he's going to help me because you always need a getaway driver if you're going to be shooting from

the back of a car. The country was still looking for a white van, and the woman these two profilers believe this neighbor ultimately meant to kill is living on the other side of Washington from the shootings in Clinton, Maryland, calling the police about a dark Chevrolet that kept parking within sight of her house. On the morning of October 11, a woman getting a ride to work

driver's stairs at the woman, his passenger raises a newspaper over his face. She calls 911 from

“her co-workers phone and reports a late model Caprice or Impala, New Jersey Plates, two men inside,”

the officer promises to send someone. Days later she learns that several of her neighbors have

seen the same car parked in different spots, always facing her house. Her name is Mildred Muhammad.

Her is not the only report that went nowhere. A week earlier, a woman is shot outside a Michael's craft store in Spotsalvania County, Virginia. Jim Clemente and his brother Tim are not assigned to the shooting, but they drive out to it from home to help. We get there and I go to the sheriff and I said, "You know, were there any witnesses?" And he said, "No, nobody saw anything." And I said, "Look, this is by the mall. There's 3,000 cars here in the parking lot. Somebody saw

something." He said, "Well, 119-year-old kid was like a drug addict said he saw a black guy in a dark

“sedan peeling out and he said, "That's where the shot came from." And I said, "Great, did you put that”

out on an APB?" He said, "No, I put out the APB on the white van." Sunday morning, October 20th, three hours and 40 minutes after a ponderosa phone rang and rang in Ashland, Virginia, with no one picking up. At 20 minutes to 10, a collar dials the FBI hotline from a convenience store in Richmond. Don't talk, he says, "Just listen. Call me God. I left a note at the back of the ponderosa. Be there for a call in 10 minutes." The people taking hotline calls have no idea about a ponderosa

letter or what was in it. 10 minutes comes and goes with no contact. That night, Chief Moose, who has now read the sniper's letter, goes on television and does something no police chief wants to do. He answers. "To the person who left us a message at the ponderosa last night, you gave us a telephone number. We do want to talk to you, call us at the number you provide." At 7.57 AM, the phone rings. It's Lee Melvo. "It is ponderosa. I'm sorry. Don't say anything. Get this."

Melvo holds up a tape recorder to the receiver. The actual recording is garbled and distorted, but investigators eventually transcribed it. "Dearst police, call me God. Do not release to the press. Five red stars, you have our terms. They are non-negotiable. If you choose option one, you will hold a press conference stating to the media that you believe you have caught the sniper like a duck in a news. Repeat every word exactly as you heard it. If you choose option two,

“be sure to remember, he will not deviate. PS, your children are not safe. Melvo hangs up.”

38 seconds. Within the hour, a tactical team takes down a white van at an exon station in Richmond, pulling two men onto the pavement in front of the cameras. One of the men inside had been using the payphone when Melvo's call came in. The men on the pavement are Mexican nationals who have

nothing to do with any of it. The call to the ponderosa had come from a second payphone

on the other side of that same gas station, Melvo and Muhammad escape. Melvo later to investigators, I saw the Mexicans get stopped. I watched it, but I wasn't in the car. The task force played the 38 seconds over and over and over again. One agent thought the voice sounded his panic. Another guest, Asian, one said it sounds like a kid. An ATF negotiator named Peter Mangan thought it sounded Caribbean, maybe Jamaican, he said, which is where Fits had landed two weeks

earlier, off of four words on a tarot card. Mangan ran the phrase "duck in a news" past a

Jamaican-born ATF agent named Mark Peterkin, who had never heard the phrase in his life. Peter

kin looked at him. There are no ducks in Jamaica. Tuesday, October 22, 555 in the morning, still dark, Aspenhill, Maryland. Conrad Johnson is 35 and has driven a bus for 10 years. Everyone calls him CJ. Six foot two, 250 pounds, shaved head, go-ty, two diamond earrings. He has a trainee writing with him that morning. They had breakfast on the bus. The doors are open. Across the lot, there's a basketball court and past that woods. Johnson kicks some trash out of the front door, comes back

up the steps, and sets his coffee down on the change box. He is standing in the doorway of his own

Why is that post-bossing? Please see this chat for two minutes. Thanks for my plans here for

“please hurry up. I'm scared to see the set of hells from all the bugs. CJ is flown to suburban hospital”

in Bethesda. He is awake sitting up, but the round has destroyed most of his liver. He dies on the operating table at 9.26 that morning. That afternoon, 50 feet into the woods, a search line finds

a ziplock bag on a broken branch. Inside it, a second ziplock bag. Inside that, a note with red stars

on it. For you, Mr. Police, call me God. Do not release to the press. You did not respond to the message. You departed from what we told you to say and you departed from the time. Your incompetence has cost

“you another life. Moose had not done what this night was requested. Hold a press conference saying”

he had caught the sniper like a duck in a news. Now the snipers lay CJ's death at his feet.

Late that afternoon, Moose walks out and reads the threat from the original ponderosa letter out loud,

word for word, because the alternative is pretending he has not seen it. We recognize the concerns of the community and therefore are going to provide the exact language in the message that pertains to the threat. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.

“Back inside headquarters, Moose tells one of his captains that was the hardest thing he's ever done.”

We're saying we can't do our job, he says. We're supposed to keep people safe and we can't.

By the night of October 22, the two men in the FBI profile alone believe the person writing these notes may be young, may be black, may have some tied to the Caribbean, and may not be alone. They're getting closer, but still they don't have a name. There is something about the bus driver, Conrad Johnson, that does not come out for years. CJ was born in Jamaica. His mother came to the US and left him behind with an ant when he was just two years old. He joined his

mom in America when he was about ten. His mother's name is Sonya Wills. She says Conrad was the kind of boy who brought other boys home. The ones he thought needed somewhere to be. He was a caretaker and the midst of the shootings. There was a woman on his route who was frightened to get on the bus. He used to stop the bus get off, walk her out from behind a tree and put her on board. Whenever he got to that spot, he would get off the bus and go get her.

On behind a tree and a squirted to the bus, telling her, "Don't worry, you're safe with me. They have to get to me before they can get to you." The boy in the woods that morning taking aim at CJ was 17 born in Jamaica left behind by his mother and raised by other people. Years later, Sonya Wills says to the social worker, working on Lee Malvo's defense, "Fonly Malvo had looked my son in the face before he killed him. He would have seen the perfect

father for whom he had been searching." Police still do not have a name. The clue that gives them one has been sitting in an evidence room in Alabama for a month. That's next time on MK Confidential.