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October nineteenth, eight pm, Ashland, Virginia, thirty seven year old Jeffrey Hopper was walking with his wife Stephanie. They were in the parking lot outside of Ponderosa Steakhouse when a shot rang out from the woods. Tim Meechim was the first officer on the scene.
In two thousand and two, I was a patrol officer at the Ashlan Police Department.
We're walking in the parking lot of the Ponderosa, right, so put me back in the time in space, walk me through it.
I had received a call for a stolen or lost cell phone, so I was taking that report a couple miles south of here and he was asking, you know, what have you heard about this whole sniper thing. And I was like, you know, I've heard as much as you have. I get the news. And he looked at me and says it wouldn't it be something if that guy came here? And he had just finished saying that when dispatch handed me the call and they said respond
to eight seventeen England Street for a possible shooting. I looked at him, like, no way, and the look on his face was priceless. Yet I just like, oh my gosh, what did I just do to you?
I marked and.
Route told him I was on my way. They said, we've had one call, got a mail down in the parking lot at the Ponderosa. I asked him if there's any other information, and they said, no new calls, no new information. And that's when I'd called the sergeant on the radio and I said, we may want to consider starting the response plan. When I arrived, our victim was laying in the parking lot and his wife was sitting on the sidewalk and had her husband's head in her lap.
I pulled past them right to the end of the sidewalk here and my car acted as a shield between the woods and the hoppers.
So instinctively, you just pull your car into a position that sets up a barrier between the wooded area and potentially more victims.
Yes, 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 needed to verify the injury. So she lifted up the towel that she was holding on him, and I saw a pole about the size of a nickel in the top of the victim's stomach. I feel somebody tapped me on the shoulder. I wasn't expecting anybody. Turn around. A guy standing there little bit more than me. He had a chain around
his neck and he reached into his shirt. He pulled it out and it was a New York Police Department badge. He says, I'm retired. What do you need? If there was somebody still here, I wanted them to think that we were searching for them. I asked him to use the spotlight on my car to pan back and forth across the woods, and I showed him where the shotgun release was in my car and told him that hey, if shots fired, sin led that way.
There is a ruthless person on the loose.
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things.
They killed the five people in one day and then went on the rampage for the next month.
It is quite a mystery.
The police say they have never had a crime quite like this.
Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going to go right straight through our bulletproof vest, the.
White bag, my heart radio, and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster DC Sniper. Jeff and Stephanie describe the two of them and how they were working through this very serious situation together.
She was the calmest person I'd ever seen on any type of major scene like this. And when you have somebody that's bleeding internally like that, their heart rate is up, their blood pressures up, it can make them bleed out a little bit faster. But Jeff was laying there just staying really calm. I told her, I said, okay, the best thing to do for a bleed is just a hold pressure, and it's not rocket science. She started to chuckle. The victims started to laugh, 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 me telling her that it was in rocket science, she kind of knew that already. They actually told me that they we in Pennsylvania visiting family. Intentionally, they didn't stop in Maryland, d C. Or Northern Virginia because the shootings and they felt like if they stopped closer to Richmond that it would be safer. So the ambulance when they come up one scene normally wait until law enforcement can make sure
the scene is safe for them to enter. I couldn't do that, so we came up with a different plan for them to come in.
And pick up Jeff.
I got my shotgun. I told the driver of the ambulance to stay in the driver's seat. I had the crew of the ambulance come out of the back of the ambulance. I had them park right behind my car, bumping or bumper so that the ambulance itself was also some type of barricade. They get Jeff on the stretcher, they put him in the ambulance, and we get them out onto England Street and tell them to take the shoulder of the Interstate ninety five because we'd shut it down.
By eight point thirty, the victim was arriving at the hospital, and police across this area had activated a coordinated tactical response, a plan put in play just last week in the event of a suspected sniper attack.
Very quickly, traffic was brought to a complete stop.
That's retired Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenball.
Ordinarily, if you do that, you've got phone calls going to politicians. Hey, what's going on while the road's blocked. I can't get home, I can't go about my business. But believe it or not, at this point, the public was completely on board with law enforcement. They were in fear. They wanted just stopped as badly as we did.
The roadblocks turned up nothing. The sniper had vanished once again, but there was good news thanks to the efforts of first responders. Jeffrey Hopper survived the attack.
Once we got jeff in the ambulance, we got the crime scene tape out, and we just right in front of the Ponderosa, right on England Street. We taped from one side of the building to the other. From that point, it seemed like every three letter agency in the federal government was starting to show up. I had FBI show up, I had a ATF show up.
One of those ATF agents was Ray Neely.
I'm a normal special agent. Well, I'm at a relatively normal special agent. You know, I'm so used to hanging around law enforcement. Special agents are kind of a dome a dozen and I was based out of Washington, so it's not very impressive in that particular area anyway.
Ray Neely was a canine handler for the ATF in.
Two thousand and two during the sniper investigation, I handled a dog named Garrett. He was a yellow Lab at that point, he was about seven years old. We use the term explosive detection canines. That's their official title, and
the public ulder sere them called bomb dogs. It's been estimated that there's over nineteen thousand different types of explosive formulations, but generally they can be broken down into seven families, so as long as you train across those seven families, the dogs can then fine firearms as well as explosives.
On the night of October nineteenth, after Jeffrey Hopper was shot, the ATF sent Ray Nearly to investigate the woods outside the Ponderosa.
When we arrived that evening, it was actually kind of a balmy night, and not because we're working in low light. The human search was really not going to be effective, so they were going to wait till daybreak. I talked to the people on scene and said, hey, it's best that we deploy this evening. The dog doesn't need daylight to work, and the odor cennature is stronger now than it's going to be tomorrow morning. There was a wooded
lot behind the ponderosa. It's all pitch black dark. When any human or animals move through wooded areas, they typically go to the area of least resistance. It's called lines of drift. If there's briers that people are gonna avoid, that they're going to go a different path. And so in this particular wooded area, I saw maybe three or four of these little breaks in the woodline. You know, there were animal trails or maybe kids played in those woods.
So I was going to search those first, and then if that failed, then I would start doing more of a gritted search. It was only on my second path of least resistance that I saw the dog change behaviored. The dog started tracking until he went to a particular spot, and then he alerted me. Whatever with my flashlight and examined the area where he looked, and that's when I
saw the rub mark. There was a small tree about maybe two inches in diameter with a small VND and when I looked up that tree, it looked like someone had taken some type of hard objects and leaned it up against that tree, and that created a rub mark. You wouldn't have that occurring in nature. You needed something hard pressing against it. And it was also in line of sight too where the person was actually hit as he exited the ponderosa, and so that rub mark was
someone probably using that tree as a rifle rest. I knew that the type of rifle more than likely would eject that shellcase into the right rear, so I deployed the dog off to my right rear, you know, hoping to find that shellcasing again. I saw it in a change of behavior. Now he's going directly to source. It was probably twenty feet away, and when he alerted this time, I went over with my flashlight. Those shellcasings can disappear in the ground pretty quick, the leaves have fallen off
the trees at that point. But I actually saw the shellcasing. It was sitting right on top, you know, pristine. But to the rear of where the shellcasing was found, there was some type of message attached to a tree.
In the woods outside the Ponderosa Steakhouse atf Agent ray Neely found a spent shell casing along with another clue, one that would prove vital to solving the case.
There was a message that was attached to a tree.
Investigators found a ziploc bag pinned to a tree with two thumbtacks, and inside there was a letter. Investigators wanted to read the note, but they couldn't just open the bag at the crime scene and risk contaminating the evidence.
An FBI helicopter was brought in that evening to take that piece of evidence directly to the lab they would be looking for DNA any fingerprints.
The letter arrived at the lab the next morning, Sunday, October twentieth. When investigators finally opened it, they were shocked by what they found. Here's Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenbach again.
The snipers did not want the press notified about this, and for the first time, we were actually successful in preventing that. There was a couple significant things about this note. The first one was it was handwritten, and within a few hours the handwriting on the tarot card that had been found a few days before was matched, so we knew we had the same individual, and any thought that it was organized terrorism pretty much got shot down and went out the window. The note had little red stars.
And when I say stars, if you've ever had a child that went to a daycare and they bring their papers home and they did something great, The teachers put little silvery or gold or the red stars on top of their papers. That's what I'm talking about. And no self respecting terrorists is going to do that. Number one. Number two, we finally get a demand.
Here's what the snipers wrote in the.
Letter for you, mister police, call me God, do not release to the press. We have tried to contact you to start negotiation, but the incompetence of your forces these people to our call for a hoax or a joke.
The letter then lifted five people the sniper had contacted.
One Montgomery Police officer Derek two, Rockville Police Department female officer, three Task Force FBI female for priest at Ashland, five CNN, Washington DC. These people took our call for a hoax or joke, So your failure to respond has cost you five lives. If stopping the killing is more important than catching us now, then you will accept our demands, which are non negotiable. Option one, you will place ten million dollars in a Bank of America account.
The letter then listed the information for a credit card which belonged to a woman named Jill Lynn Farrell, and then it went on.
We will have unlimited withdrawal at any atm worldwide. You will activate the bank account, credit card and pin number at six am Sunday morning. We will We'll contact you at Ponderouso Buffet, Ashland, Virginia telephone number. You have until nine am Monday morning to complete transaction. Try to catch us withdrawing at least you will have less body bags. But option two if trying to catch us now is more important than prepare your body bags. If we give
you our word, that is what takes place. Word is bond ps. Your children are not safe anywhere, at any time.
The letter was a bombshell, and it left investigators with a slew of new questions. Was all this killing just about money? And if the snipers themselves had called into the tip lines and had been ignored, what other tips might have slipped through the cracks. But the letter did provide some major leads, like a list of people the sniper had called law enforcement would need to interview those people, and investigators needed to find the credit card owner, Jill
Lynn Ferrell. How is she connected to the snipers? Most importantly, though, the snipers wanted to talk and police were eager to get them on the line. But there was a problem. The letter said the snipers would call the Ponderosi Steakhouse at six am, but by the time the police read the letter, they'd already missed the deadline. So Chief Moose reached out to the snipers the only way he knew how, through the media.
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 called us at the number you provided.
Police had the phone company redirect the Ponderosa's number to align In their command center. There, an FBI negotiator sat and waited, hoping the snipers would call. Meanwhile, agents were adding up a track. They mapped out all of the payphones in the Richmond area and stationed police officers at
locations nearby those phones, but out of sight. Police were ready to trace the sniper's call, identify which phone it came from, and then swarm that area with officers back at the command center, the phone began to ring.
Hello.
All okay, let me give you a new number.
Can okay, what are you calling for? Can alone?
This is the only way to remind it called them Pepty Direct. Your Pepty Direct Sales will be contacting you shortly, but today murder.
After dozens of false alarms, the next morning, on Monday, October twenty first, at seven fifty seven am, the sniper's call finally came.
Hello Hello.
The sniper then held the tape recorder up to the payphone and hit play through the phone. The audio was distorted and unintelligible. The call lasted just thirty eight seconds, but for some reason, the negotiator didn't alert others about the call for another six minutes.
I'm pay, I'm lipay.
US marshals traced the call to a payphone just outside an Exon station in West Richmond at eight oh seven, now a full ten minutes after the sniper's call. The marshals notified local FBI of the address, and the traps sprung into motion. Don Nielsen worked just down the street from the Exxon where the snipers made the call. He saw the takedown happen.
Part of my job in the morning. I got there early and you know, turned down the lights, made coffee for the customers, and that's when I saw everything going on right out in front of the dealership. I just opened the front door and this guy going like halt with a serious look on his face, and his hand went up like don't come out here. So I thought, ooh, okay. There were three or four cars out there and all this commotion, you know, undercovered type guys swat guys loading
shotguns and ars. They were putting on vests, and I imagine they weren't putting on to go hunting, so I'd imagine they were armored vests. Everybody's eyes were right up the hill at the van and that drive buck phone. When they started moving themselves up the hill, we moved to the very cornermost office to see what was going on.
I just remember seeing these guys rushing up there. They ran up the hill and they grew open the doors, and they grabbed some people out of the van and threw them on the park lit They handcuffed these guys and moved them over to the grassy area. Later that day, there was news media everywhere.
This morning, at approximately eight thirty five am, two male subjects were taken into custody by the members of the Richmond Area Task Force at param Road in Broad Street, which is basically right behind us. Those two individuals are being questioned at this time.
Police began interrogating the two suspects. The first, Edgar Rivera Garcia, had been sitting in a white mini van and talking on a drive through payphone. He claimed he was a carpenter from Mexico. The other men, Jose Morales, had been walking through the gas station's parking lot when police showed up. Neither could provide valid identification. As police interrogated Garcia and Morales, agents from the Task Force were listening to the recorded
call over and over. They painstakingly decipher the sniper's call word by word. It referred to the demand from the Ponderosa letter option one to put ten million dollars on an ATM card or option two the killings would continue. Here's what they transcribed.
Dearest 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 noose. Repeat every word exactly as you heard it. If you choose option two, be sure to remember we will not deviate ps. Your children are not safe.
The call had to be from the killer. Nothing from the Ponderosa letter had leaked, but the caller knew about the red stars, the two options, and there to children. That was definitely one of the snipers.
On the line.
Later that day, Richmond Police held another press.
Conference based on information we received this morning. Two men were detained and questioned by local and federal authorities. These men had been turned over to representatives of the Immigration and Naturalization Services for further action.
Garcia and Morales weren't the snipers. The police had arrested the wrong guys. The task force had learned that there was a second payphone on the other side of the gas station, and the sniper's call had come in from that other phone. By the time police had showed up, the snipers were already gone. They had come so close to catching them, but the trap had failed. That afternoon, Chief Moves again communicated to the snipers through a press conference.
I would like to start with another message. 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.
The police were trying to re establish communication with the snipers, but they were also trying to buy time. That's because they've been following up on other leads from the letter. Here's David Reichenball right now.
We've got a whole bunch of leads that we can work on, and they were running those leads down. Those were our red hot leads. They want ten million dollars on this ATM card, and the ATM card belonged to a lady, a bus driver.
This is Jill Lynn Farroh, retired Greyhound bus driver. In October two thousand and two, my supervisor said, I must call this telephone number immediately. The FBI needs to speak to me. And I got completely shocked and surprised, but I called and FBI agent mac Rominger said, yes, I need to speak to you upon arrival and flagstaff tonight. And then I had the next three hours to wonder what in the world was going on with FBI agents. It was just, you know, very concerned.
What did I do.
Well? It could be anything. What did I do? The agents met me at the Greyhound bus Termalin Flagstaff at the bottom of the steps of my bus and they said, please follow us into the driver lounge and they said please sit down. I said, gentlemen, I've been sitting all day. To mind if I stand up? And what is this about? They asked, do you remember the day your credentials went me? And my mind instantly flashed back to that day, and I told them everything. It seemed like a typical day.
I go no Gallus to Tucson, and then I loaded the local local bus to Phoenix, Arizona, and then I continue on from Phoenix to flag Staff. I then took my luggage off the bus and went into the Flagstaff bus driver lounge and I'm going through my items in my little suitcase and discovered my entire Union Pacific little black pouch was missing, my driver's license, credit cards, whatever that was missing. And I started calling everybody, shutting everything down regarding credit cards.
She canceled all of her cards except for one, her Bank of America visa card.
That was the only one I didn't call in about because I did not know I had it. A few weeks later, a call from Bank of America told me they had shut down and canceled that card due to fraudulent use. The card was used one time only for twelve dollars and one cent at a gas station in Tacomo, Washington.
Investigators now knew the credit card mentioned in the letter had been stolen in Arizona and used in Washington State. Those were now places of interest. Agents were also following up on the five phone calls that the sniper had mentioned in the letter. The letter mentioned a call to a priest in Ashland. It turned out there was only one Catholic church in the city. Police went there and
spoke to the pastor, William Sullivan. Sullivan said he had received a strange call from a man with an accident he couldn't place. The man on the phone claimed he knew who the sniper was and rambled to Sullivan about a liquor store robbery in Montgomery. The man went on and on, but Sullivan didn't take it seriously. He thought it was just someone with a big imagination who'd watched too much about the Snipers on TV. The task force tracked down two of the other calls that were mentioned
in the letter. One had come into the Rockville Police Department, and another to the man the snipers had described as Officer Derek. As it turned out, Montgomery County Public Information Officer Derrick Beliles had received a strange call a few days earlier.
During the sniper crisis, we received a tremendous amount of phone calls. All the phone calls from people who wanted to talk to Chief Moose were forwarded to the media office, where I answered the phone. My name is Derek Lliles, and back in two thousand and two, I was a public information officer for the Montgomery County Police when the FBI came to question me. I didn't know if I'd done something right or something wrong, but I went over
to talk to him. On my way out of the building, I ran into Chief Moose, who said, thank you for what you've done. I really appreciate everything you're doing. And I didn't know if that was my goodbye speech or whether it was something else. I had no idea. All I know is that the FBI wanted to talk to me over at the task Force. When I got over to the Sniper task Force, I met with a number of people. The ATF wanted me to come out to
their van that was parked outside. Once I got in there, they put headphones on me and said, just listen and tell us what you think. And I listened to the phone call that was recorded by the Rockfield City Police.
Good boy, what are the people that are causing the killing of your ears?
Terrified it?
Sir?
Call me God, do not released the press.
He called you three.
Times before trying.
You've got no response.
People have died, sir, an Montgomery County. Please hotline or not. That's the game of corner if you like the number.
The dispatcher, though, was not the person to give that information, so she did the right thing and told him to call the Sniper Task Force, and that caller got angry and got frustrated and hung up. I listened to that phone call and they asked me did I recognize anything? And I said, that's exactly the same voice that I had heard on my phone call, the same tone, the
same inflection, the same emphasis on certain words. The task force sat me down in a room surrounded by everybody, and they wanted to know what I had heard and who I thought the sniper might be. And I told him the information, and I also told them that it sounded like the voice of a young black male. That really startled him because all of the profilers had said he's probably an adult male with military history and all
those types of things. So they were intrigued by why I thought it sounded like a young black male, and they just threw a lot of questions at me as I told my story over and over again.
The phone call to Officer Derek Beliles wasn't recorded, but this is his recollection of the call.
He said, shut up and listen. I've got some information about some of your snipers, but first I need you to verify some information. So he wanted me to look at an incident that had occurred in Montgomery, Alabama and tell him what I knew about it. As he spoke to me, he was very insistent and told me to get the information for him. I told him my name was Officer Derek because I didn't want to use my
last name. I asked him to call me back in About an hour or so after I got the phone call, the detectives there told me that there had been a shooting in Montgomery, Alabama by a liquor store, where two women coming out of the store were shot and a black male was seen running from the scene of the accident. When he did call back about an hour and a half later, I told him what I had learned, and then said, what can you tell me about our snipers?
How can you help me after I've helped you? And he said that it wasn't easy for him to talk right there because he had to find a telephone, that there was no cameras watching or anything like that. And that phone call came to an abrupt end when the operator came on saying to continue this call, please deposit more coins, and then the call abruptly stopped. At that point, the Sniper Task Force took this information and followed it up, and the pieces began to fall into place.
Next time on Monster DC Sniper.
The Alabama incident is interesting.
Ten days before shots were fired in Maryland, two clerks shot outside the ABC Beverage store in Montgomery, Alabama.
He was behind one of the pillars of the business, rummaging going through a purse. The first victims of the serial sniper may have been eight hundred miles south of the Washington belt Way.
You know, we gotta push with everything we got because we don't know how long these resources are going to last. I mean, we had close to four hundred FBI agents atf and I know there's a limitation to that.
All this is happening, if not in days, it's happening in hours, and now we had a very very clear suspect to pursue.
By name, Monster d C Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris and produced by iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of iHeartRadio, alongside producers Trevor Young, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thine. Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Stedman and Christina Dana. Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set.
If you haven't already, be sure to check bick out the first two seasons, Atlanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have questions or comments, email us at Monster at iHeartMedia dot com, or you can call us at one eight three, three, two, eight five six six sixty seven. Thanks for listening,