Word: killers
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...victims were carrying out the banal tasks of everyday life, their last unremarkable moments juxtaposed with the killer's lightning brutality. Officials speculated thatthis could be a terrorist attack but searched in vain for any overt political message. The victims, if they were lined up side by side, would roughly resemble a random sampling of the Washington metropolitan area. They were white, black, Hispanic, Indian, male, female. There was a government analyst, a landscaper, a housekeeper, a nanny...
...indiscriminate shooting of strangers--and a twisted hunt for glory--has plenty of tragic precedent. But generalizations are hard to come by. Killers pick different victims and different M.O.s, depending on their motivation and mental state. In some cases, the victims fit some sort of pattern. Serial killer Joseph Paul Franklin, convicted of nine murders from 1977 to 1980, has said he was trying to start a race war by shooting African Americans and interracial couples. At the other end of the gory spectrum, notorious shooters like Texas tower sniper Charles Whitman initiate one uninterrupted orgy of violence--as opposed...
...creates a rainbow-hued map, with the crime scenes in lime and yellow zones, the perpetrator's likely home in bright red or orange and the least productive places to look in indigo. It's a tidy treasure map, but Rossmo concedes his program won't find a killer by itself. "There are only three ways you can solve a crime: physical evidence, eyewitnesses or a confession...
...360°, turning them back and forth like paired dancers beneath his eyepiece. After a long study, he pushes away from the table. It will take several hours for section chief Timothy J. Curtis, 46, to formally confirm the findings, but the outcome seems clear. The bullets match. The Beltway killer has struck again...
...there's any consolation for horrified Americans watching the drama of the sniper slayings unfold, it's that now, more than ever in history, officials have the skills to catch so slippery a killer. Even as the shooter--or shooters--taunted investigators by picking off more victims last week, authorities unleashed an unprecedented arsenal of tools to crack the case: geographic-profiling computers to try to pinpoint the killer's home, ballistics databases intended to link his unique bullet markings to other crimes and trace-substance technology to lift whatever clues (fingerprints, DNA) might adhere to a shell casing...