FALLS CHURCH, Va. — This time the roving sniper left more clues, with a number of witnesses getting a better, more chilling glimpse of him and his getaway van as they looked beyond his latest victim bleeding to death on the parking garage floor.
Law enforcement officials working on the massive manhunt for the highly elusive sniper marked qualified progress on Tuesday as they investigated his 11th shooting, the killing of a 47-year-old woman here on Monday night.
This time, officials said, there were more immediate witnesses than in previous killings, and the witnesses provided much more information, including license plate data noted as the gunman fled in the now familiar light-colored van reported at his last three slayings.
One government official described the closest, most stark sighting yet by a witness who reported seeing the gunman step brazenly from his van, about 90 feet from Linda Franklin and her husband, Ted, as the couple was loading shelving into their car after leaving the Home Depot store here at 9:15 Monday night.
“He had his choice and he took her,” the official recounted of the sniper’s taking aim, firing once and striking Franklin in the head, killing her instantly in the parking garage. The gunman then fled, once more successfully eluding an intense police dragnet activated soon after the shooting.
Hoping to prevent that from happening again, the Pentagon on Tuesday agreed to deploy secret surveillance planes to patrol the skies over the Washington area. The planes, which have sophisticated sensors, will be used to respond to future attacks.
On Tuesday morning, police confirmed that overnight ballistics tests had conclusively showed that Franklin, an analyst for the FBI who was not involved in the manhunt, was the ninth person killed by the roving suburban sniper.
In the two weeks of the sniper’s terrifying shooting spree, the slaying in this busy suburban bedroom community was the first time witnesses said they saw the actual shooting, police officials said. Witnesses offered enough partial glimpses of the fleeing sniper to allow a police sketch artist to attempt a composite drawing, according to knowledgeable detectives.
“We have been receiving quite a bit of information from witnesses,” the Fairfax County police chief, Thomas Manger, said at a news conference after a long night of interviews by investigators who were combing the scene.
Some bloodhounds sniffed for the sniper’s traces in the busy crossroads mall at Seven Corners Shopping Center. Others crawled in waves on hands and knees in the search for evidence.
“We’re confident that ultimately that information is going to lead us to an arrest,” Manger insisted, expressing guarded optimism about the witnesses.
“We have received license plate information from several witnesses,” Manger said, describing this as involving different information and different tags.