'Call us back,' police plead with the sniper

WASHINGTON -- Police hunting for the ghostly Washington-area sniper conducted a delicate, coded public dialogue Monday, spurred by a threatening letter left at the scene of his latest shooting.

Authorities said they had been in halting telephone contact with the presumed sniper at least twice since a letter was found near the Ashland shooting scene, and Montgomery County police Chief Charles Moose asked Monday for another chance to talk.

"The person you called could not hear everything you said," Moose said in a veiled televised plea. "The audio was unclear and we could not get it right. Call us back so that we can clearly understand."

Moose and other investigators would not divulge their discussions with the suspected killer. But the Washington Post reported that at least once, the male voice said, "I am God."

Several officials and former police investigators described the hidden dialogue as a fragile dance designed to draw the sniper out and learn more about his mental state, while scrutinizing his letter for any traces of physical evidence that might be used to track him down.

Police began delivering a series of tantalizing messages through the media after they found what several law enforcement officials described as a handwritten letter found in dense woods behind a Ponderosa steakhouse parking lot about 50 feet from where the latest victim fell in an Ashland, Va., the Washington Post and Los Angeles Times reported.

Federal officials said a man presumed to be the killer called the FBI's sniper tip hotline in Washington soon after the shooting and said he had left a note.

Federal agents said that the letter was "very lengthy" and poorly worded, bordering on broken English, the Los Angeles Times said.

Authorities also said the letter contained unspecified threatening language about children -- a warning that appeared to have played a role in prompting school officials in Richmond and surrounding suburbs to cancel classes Monday and again today, according to the newspaper.

Officials expressed confidence that they are communicating with the sniper who has killed nine people and wounded three since Oct. 2 because information either in the phone calls or the letter indicates intimate knowledge of the tarot card left Oct. 7 at a shooting scene in Bowie, Md.

Moose's direct appeal Monday came on a whirlwind day of highs and lows in the investigation. Early in the day, authorities in suburban Richmond, Va., detained two men and seized a white van. But they later determined that the men had nothing to do with the shootings.

But the most drama came from Moose, who has been the leader of the task force investigating the shootings.

The tired-looking police chief's veiled messages were the only public hints of an exceptional, behind-the-scenes conversation that appeared to be under way. Although the secretive messages broadcast on live television were not very enlightening to most listeners, police said they would make sense to whomever Moose was addressing.

One of the calls from the sniper came Monday morning and was traced to an area along Broad Street in Henrico County near an Exxon gas station, officials said.

Police were staking out the area, and shortly after 8:30 a.m., a white Plymouth Voyager with a luggage rack pulled up and began idling within arm's reach of the receiver of a single telephone directly in front of the gas station.

Police in bulletproof vests and carrying assault-style weapons rushed the vehicle and dragged out a man. Police also detained a second man.

Authorities said one was a 24-year-old Mexican and the other a 35-year-old Guatemalan who are in the United States illegally.

They were turned over to the Immigration and Naturalization Service and probably would be deported.

Police also announced that ballistics tests confirmed that a 37-year-old man traveling through Ashland on Saturday was the sniper's 12th victim. He remained in critical but stable condition at a Richmond hospital Monday after having his spleen and parts of his pancreas and stomach removed.

The Post reported that investigators also found a shell casing near the Ponderosa that matched the shell casing found at the Bowie shooting, which wounded a 13-year-old boy. It was the only other known attack in which the shooter left a message and a shell casing. Police found a tarot card there with the message, "Dear Policeman, I am God."

In other developments:

-- Linda Franklin, 47, whom the sniper killed outside a Home Depot in Falls Church on Oct. 14, was laid to rest.

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