More than two weeks of frantic investigation and even more harried speculation have kicked up a storm of leads, theories, odd facts and false twists – a mountain of meaninglessness that may contain telling information if it ever gets sorted out.
“Yes, there is a pattern, but whether it’s one that can be easily discerned is another matter,” says Iain Murray, an authority on statistics. “We’re talking about human beings, and there’s always some sort of rationality behind them.
“Unless,” he went on, “he’s a dice man – deliberately being random by rolling dice and acting according to the roll.”
Certain noticeable patterns in the sniper case were thrown into question Saturday night when a man was shot and wounded outside a restaurant in Ashland, Va., near Richmond.
Police were not sure the attack was that of the sniper but assumed so. It would have been the sniper’s first shooting on a weekend, and it was much farther from Washington than the other attacks.
Ashland is about 90 miles south of Washington along Interstate 95; Fredericksburg, Va., where two shootings have happened, is in the same direction, about 50 miles from the capital.
The shooting had some trademarks of the sniper: a single shot from a distance, a commercial rather than strictly residential area, the apparently random choice of a victim, a quick getaway before roads were sealed.
Geographic profilers, who use computer grids and logic to try to determine where a serial killer lives or works based on where he attacks, have said the sniper must be following a geographical pattern because such killers do. It’s just that they don’t know what that pattern is.
Generally, they believe criminals of his type operate in an area familiar to them, but not too close. A geographical pattern was claimed by the man accused of putting 18 pipe bombs in rural mailboxes in May, wounding six people. He said he was trying to make a smiley face over five states.
In the sniper case, police have given the public little to go on.
“Eventually you fall back into a pattern,” said Tod W. Burke, a criminal justice scholar at Radford University in Virginia. “He’s trying his best not to create a pattern, but he’s got a pattern.”
The danger is being diverted by a wrong or nonexistent one.
Among the theories:
