Steve Quayle News Alerts

October 21, 2002

RICHMOND, Va. — Police searching for the Beltway Sniper surrounded a Virginia gas station Monday morning and towed away a white van.

Fox News learned that one man had been taken into custody. Other broadcast reports spoke of two men, but a witness mentioned only one. Police would not confirm that anyone had been detained.

A few minutes after the van was surrounded in Virginia, police at the sniper task force's headquarters in Rockville, Md., announced that they had received a message from the gunman and were preparing a response.

"[I] just want to ask the indulgence of the media that the message that needed to be delivered is that we are going to respond to a message that we have received," Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose, the leader of the investigation, said. "We'll respond later. We are preparing our response at this time."

Moose did not make any further comments, take any questions, explain his statement or specify whether the message was a new communication or the same one police discovered near the scene of the latest shooting.

Virginia police told reporters Monday morning that the van had been stopped along Broad St, a major commercial street in the Richmond suburbs.

"It was specific enough to be a suspect vehicle in all the cases," said Lt. Doug Goodman of the Hanover County Sheriff's Department.

Helicopter cameras showed police surrounding a white minivan with a roof rack parked at a drive-up phone booth at an Exxon station. A car-carrying truck loaded the van onto its flatbed at about 10 a.m. EDT and drove away.

A patrol officer on the scene told the Associated Press that the van was a Plymouth Voyager with temporary Virginia plates.

Reporters on the scene said that police and ATF agents arrested a man sitting in the van while he leaned out of the driver's window and talked on an outdoor telephone.

Witness Keith Underwood, who works for a car dealership next to the Exxon station, said police officers wearing bullet-proof vests and carrying military-style rifles converged on the off-white van around 8:30 a.m. EDT.

Underwood said they screamed at the person behind the wheel, yanked several times on the door and opened it, then went into the vehicle.

Underwood describes the van driver as non-white, but not black.

A man who works with Underwood, speaking to Fox News, identified the van as a 1994 or 1995 Plymouth Grand Voyager, white with gray underbody trim. Through binoculars, he said he could read the license plates as 30-day temporary Virginia tags.

The witness also said he saw a National Rifle Association bumper sticker on the van, and a dealer nameplate from a "Three Amigos Auto Sales."

Internet searches reveal two businesses named "Three Amigos Auto Sales" -- one in El Paso, Texas, and the other in Modesto, Calif.

Television camera close-ups showed what appeared to be a Mexican flag sticker in the bottom left corner of the van's rear window.

The police department of Henrico Co., Va., which adjoins Hanover County, planned a news conference for 1 p.m. EDT Monday afternoon.

The developments happened less than two days after authorities issued a plea to the person who left a note at the scene of a weekend shooting outside a Ponderosa restaurant in Ashland, Va., a few miles north of Richmond.

A 37-year-old man was critically wounded by a single shot to the abdomen in the restaurant's parking lot.

Police "want to talk to you," said Chief Moose, a leader in the investigation, to the gunman through the media at Sunday night press conference.

"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 provided. Thank you," Moose said.

Moose refused to elaborate or explain. But Officer Joyce Utter, a spokeswoman for the Montgomery County police, told reporters that Moose's statement "should make complete sense" to the person who left the message.

"That is the only person Chief Moose wants to talk to," Utter said.

The message was relatively long and was found in the woods behind the restaurant, the Richmond Times-Dispatch reported Monday, quoting unidentified law enforcement sources. The report also said police have found more than one tarot card during the investigation.

A tarot death card was found Oct. 7 outside a Bowie middle school where the sniper wounded a 13-year-old boy, a law enforcement source has said. It had the words "Dear Policeman, I am God" written on it.

In other developments:

-- France has alerted Interpol about a French army deserter who is known as a marksman and is missing in North America. A Defense Ministry spokesman said there was speculation of a link to the sniper investigation.

-- Matthew M. Dowdy, who was accused of lying to police by describing a cream-colored van with a burned-out taillight at the scene of last week's shooting in Falls Church, was denied bail during a hearing Monday.

On Sunday night, surgeons managed to remove the bullet from the man shot in Ashland and gave it to authorities for testing.

The victim, whose name has not been released, remained in critical condition early Monday after six hours of surgery over the weekend. Doctors were cautiously optimistic about his recovery, but said he would need more surgery.

"These are very serious injuries and he will have a bumpy road, but in the end, I think he will come through," Dr. Rao Ivatury, director of trauma at MCV Hospitals, said Monday. He said doctors had to remove his spleen and parts of his pancreas and stomach, adding that the bullet "almost ripped his stomach apart."

If the latest attack is linked -- and police are operating under the assumption it was -- it would break the longest lull between shootings, about five days, and be the farthest point from Washington yet.

Previously, the longest distance from Washington that the sniper had struck was Spotsylvania County, about 50 miles south of Washington. Ashland is about 85 miles south of Washington.

Eleven shootings, beginning the evening of Oct. 2, have been credited to the sniper. Nine people have died.

School officials in the Ashland and Richmond areas of Virginia decided to close Monday, keeping more than 200,000 public students out of class "based on the volume of parent and community concern."

In Ashland, Randolph-Macon College also announced it would cancel classes on Monday. The school, with 1,100 students, is about a mile from the latest shooting.

"We've been in close contact with local law enforcement agencies, and basically we're following their advice," said college spokeswoman Anne Marie Lauranzon.

Former FBI profiler Clinton Van Zandt said Saturday's shooting, if related, could show the killer's approach is changing in response to law enforcement tactics.

For instance, reports last week that military surveillance planes would be used in the Washington suburbs probably prompted the sniper to move farther away, he said.

Since much had been made about the weekend lulls, "I think he reacted to that," Van Zandt said.

The most recent confirmed sniper attack was last Monday night's slaying of FBI analyst Linda Franklin outside a Home Depot store in Falls Church.

Police said the latest victim and his wife were traveling and stopped in Ashland for gas and food. His wife told authorities the shot sounded like a car backfiring and said her husband took about three steps before collapsing.

Through the hospital, the wife released a statement Monday saying the caring and prayers she and her husband have received "have been a bright ray of hope and comfort."

"Please pray also for the attacker and that no one else is hurt," she added.

Residents were on edge in Ashland, a town of about 6,500. At the Virginia Center Commons mall, about seven miles from the shooting, a normally busy food court sat half-empty Sunday. Shopper Nancy Elrod said she almost had been too afraid to come.

"We certainly felt sorry about all the people up north who were nervous and now it's down here and we're nervous too," said Elrod, 45.

Authorities in Maryland on Sunday continued to test a shell casing found in a white rental truck to determine if it could be linked to the sniper attacks. Police said it would be at least Monday before they could announce whether the casing is connected to the shootings.

A source close to the investigation, however, said Sunday that "it has nothing to do with this case."

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, would not confirm reports that the shell was .30-caliber, a different size from the sniper's bullets, but said: "It's got caliber problems, it's got age problems."

The shell casing was found in a car seized at a rental agency near Dulles International Airport in Virginia, authorities said.

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,66206,00.html