In an interesting discussion tonight, Tessa asked me how I would "profile" the Washington Sniper Tarot Card Killer. It's of particular interest to us because the sniper is picking off people up and down the route we take to North Carolina - since 1985, we've most likely eaten, gassed up, or gone shopping at most of the places where people have been killed. I even wondered in the blog in May, during a particularly large burst of anxiety, if they could attack a backwater strip mall in Virginia (see picture if you click the link).
Now somebody has, and weirdly enough, it's a horrifyingly brilliant way to take America out of its game. Nothing gives off the sheen of safety more than the identical omnitopia of America's fast-food joints, Home Depots and acres of asphalt around strip malls, and now those havens even in the whitest of breads known as Northern Virginia – have been turned into hotbeds of fear.
That said, I don't think this guy is a terrorist. Here's my profile, and I'm perfectly content to be utterly mistaken:
He's an American citizen, not foreign-born, not Muslim, in his late-30s. He may have dark skin, but I think he's white. He lives in a place that is rural, but he has commuted to work along the I-95 corridor, and knows the back roads well. The rural nature of his home allows him space to practice marksmanship without too many intruders or eyebrows being raised say, one of the smaller towns along the Chesapeake Bay watershed where duck hunting requires patience and accuracy on long-range moving targets. He's been trained as a shooter, perhaps in the national guard or in some other militia, but it has been a while since he has been in any unit, and he wasn't ever in the actual Army.
His agenda is not political, he is neither Democrat or Republican to him, it's more spiritual (for lack of a better term). He views his relationship with the killings as a game between himself and the rest of the world – not a game between him and the police (or his victims). His dementia has compartmentalized his world to the point where the entirety of the D.C. area has adopted a personality to him. I think that's what he's fighting. He's sane enough to keep down a semi-regular job, probably one that he has recently quit – he has money saved up for this occasion.
Homelessness and general craziness – skyrocketed after the September 11 attacks in New York; you can see it in the newly-dispossessed crazies in the East Village. People who were teetering on the edge of mental health fell completely apart. I think the Sniper is one of those people, living in a world that is so impossibly fucked up, near the target of another possible terrorist attack (Washington) and over the last year, his cheese has slipped perilously off his cracker. He's way too much of a control freak to become homeless, so he gravitated towards a skill he has always had: marksmanship. I don't think he cares who his victims are, he decides when he finds the location. I think there is some meaning in his shooting a Ponderosa customer in the stomach and the gas pumpers in the head; I'm not sure what it is. I think he works alone. The presence of a Michael's craft store near every shooting is a coincidence; this man is a hunter, his white van is his duck blind, and although he is meticulous, he will make a grievous error in the next three shootings that will bring him down.
So that's what I think. And again, I'm more than willing to be wrong.
[click here to see how I did!]
Posted by at October 20, 2002 8:49 PM