Risky game of cat and mouse unfolds on live TV

THE hunt for the Washington area sniper has become perhaps the ultimate TV reality show.

Investigators are engaged in an extraordinary effort to communicate via live television with a killer whose face and name they don’t know.

But he knows them. He’s watching every day on television, investigators believe. It’s like playing poker with an executioner who is standing behind a one-way mirror.

Such communication is both rare and risky for police. Serial killers rarely communicate with police, and when they do, they are usually not looking to get caught. They are looking for headlines, for notoriety, for their place in history. It is a declaration of superiority, a catch-me-if-you-can taunt.

“He wants to get credit for the work he's done,” said Carl Klockars, a criminologist at the University of Delaware.

David Berkowitz, the ‘Son of Sam’ killer who fatally shot six people in New York in 1976-77, sent letters to police and the media. After he was caught, he told police he had revelled in the fame it brought him. Jack the Ripper, perhaps history’s most notorious serial killer, sent hundreds of boasting letters to Scotland Yard, deriding investigators as inept.

“I keep on hearing the police have caught me but they won’t fix me just yet,” he wrote. “I have laughed when they look so clever and talk about being on the right track. I am down on whores and I shant quit ripping them till I do get buckled.”

On Monday, Berkowitz, who is serving a life sentence in New York, sent a three-page commentary on the sniper shootings to Rita Cosby of Fox News. He suggested several theories and dismissed the field of criminal profiling as “practically useless”.

“It is odd though, but for more than a week now I feel that I have been feeling this person’s anger and rage towards law enforcement. From the beginning, this person, whether he is a lone gunman or a member of a terrorist group is not shooting at people because he has anything against them, but rather that his rage is directed at someone or something else,” Berkowitz wrote.

What’s unprecedented about the sniper case is the extraordinary effort investigators are making to talk to the sniper on live TV. The stakes are high, and the pressure on law enforcement is showing.

Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose’s recent public demeanour is a clear sign of how much the stakes have escalated in the days since a message, believed to be from the sniper, was found at the scene of the Saturday night shooting in Ashland, Virginia.

Gone are Moose’s rambling and emotional news briefings, during which he would rail against the media or speak mournfully of the shootings.

On Sunday night, when Moose delivered his first televised message to the sniper, he clearly had a new purpose. He was brief and to the point and gave a precisely worded statement that a spokesman later explained would be understood by the intended recipient: “You gave us a telephone number. We do want to talk to you. Call us at the number you provided,” Chief Moose said.

Investigators believe the killer phoned police directly but used a voice-disguising device. Chief Moose urged the sniper to “call back”.

“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,” Chief Moose said.

It was the third time in two days that Chief Moose has tried to communicate with the sniper blamed for killing nine people and wounding three others since October 2.

He first sought contact on Sunday after a handwritten note was found behind the restaurant where the latest sniper victim was shot on Saturday. That note “hinted at a demand for money” and threatened “more killing” law enforcement sources told CNN.

The sources said authorities were comparing the letter and the handwriting to a message on a tarot card found near a Maryland school where a 13-year-old boy was critically wounded on October 7. That message said,

“Dear Mr Policeman, I am God”.

The handwriting, at least initially, did not appear to match, the sources said.

Chief Moose’s plea for the sniper to call came hours after police descended on a white Plymouth van at a phone booth near Richmond, Virginia.

Police had staked out the booth after receiving the message believed to be from the sniper. Investigators said privately that they feared the developments with the white van (the occupants had nothing to do with the shootings) could hurt the negotiations.

“'This is a highly interactive process with the killer and the media and the public,” said Mike Rustigan, a criminologist at San Francisco State University. “He’s not giving us too much, yet he can’t shut down the media.”

One senior federal law enforcement official said that investigators had not ruled out the possibility of a second shooter and that there has been much discussion about the sniper’s timing in opening a dialogue.

“Is this a decision he just came to,” the official said, “or was this the plan all along?”

Establishing a dialogue with the sniper may offer investigators their best hope to catch him. Police have attempted to communicate with serial killers in the past but have not had much success.

Jack the Ripper was never caught. Nor was the ‘Zodiac’ killer, who terrorised the San Francisco Bay Area in the late 1960s and early 1970s and claimed to have killed 37 people. Zodiac wrote 21 letters to newspapers, providing details only the killer could have known and challenging police to find him.

Berkowitz bragged in one of his letters: “Please inform all the detectives working on the case that I wish them the best of luck. Keep ‘em digging, drive on, think positive, get off your butts, knock on coffins.” But the letters did not lead investigators to him. He was arrested because a parking ticket placed his car at the scene of his last murder.

There are exceptions. Theodore Kaczynski, the ‘Unabomber’, was caught when his 35,000-word manifesto, which he had sent to The Washington Post and The New York Times, was recognised by his brother, who turned him in.

Efforts to negotiate publicly are so uncommon that investigators are moving onto unpredictable ground.

“We simply don't have enough of these kind of offenders to draw any conclusions on what they might do,” said Sam Walker, a criminologist at the University of Nebraska. As investigators take the next steps toward dialogue, they’re very aware how unpredictable this undertaking is.

“When the message from the sniper was relayed Sunday night, many of the experts were saying, ‘This is the break we needed’,” said James Alan Fox, a criminologist at Northeastern University in Boston. “No, it’s not. This is him attempting to call the shots. It’s calculated to benefit him, not to benefit us.”