The Beltway Snipers: "Call Me God" — Ep. 4 | MK Confidential

The Megyn Kelly Show - SiriusXM

This episode of MK Confidential explores the chilling case of the Beltway Snipers, focusing on the psychological and investigative breakthroughs during the 2002

Key takeaways

• The tarot card's message 'Call Me God' was not just a boast but a psychological tactic designed to provoke fear and assert control.
• Forensic linguistics played a crucial role in profiling the shooters, with analysts deducing age, possible background, and even cultural ties from word choice and punctuation.

Main topics

• The Beltway Snipers case
• Forensic profiling and behavioral analysis

Notable quotes

"Call Me God" – the handwritten message on a tarot card found at a shooting scene.

Conclusion

The episode concludes with the realization that critical clues were buried in plain sight—linguistic patterns,

Transcript preview

Speaker 7 (0:00) Six o'clock in the morning, Sunday, October 20th, 2002, Ashland, Virginia, about a block and a half off Interstate 95. The Ponderosa Steakhouse is closed and dark. It has been closed since the night before when a man was shot in its parking lot. The lot is still taped off as a crime scene. Inside, in the hall by the front doors, there is a public telephone. At exactly 6 a.m., it rings. One of the men standing outside is an FBI agent. He hears the phone ringing inside the locked building and says somebody should get in there and answer it. No one does. It is not his crime scene. His hands are tied. The phone continues ringing, then stops. Speaker 7 (0:47) Six hours earlier, around midnight, in the woods behind that restaurant, investigators find a plastic sandwich bag tacked to a tree with two white thumbtacks. It looks like a Halloween bag, the kind a child takes trick-or-treating. Folded inside it is a letter written on pink paper with stars stuck to it. Investigators bag it unopened. It goes to a lab in the morning and is finally read around noon. The letter is handwritten and there are detailed instructions. It's from the snipers who have been terrorizing Washington, D.C. for nearly three weeks. In it, they announced that they will call the public telephone at the Ponderosa at 6 o'clock Sunday morning and police should be standing there to take it. I'm Megyn Kelly and this is MK Confidential. Speaker 7 (1:45) A lot of skincare makes big promises, but often under delivers. But one skin is different. In fact, they never set out to become a skincare company at all. It was founded by four PhD longevity scientists who spent over 10 years researching skin aging and testing more than 900 novel peptides before developing OS01. It's their proprietary peptide designed to address a leading driver of visible skin aging. That research is the foundation of every One Skin product, helping support smoother-looking skin, a more even tone and radiance, and visibly fewer fine lines. And the results are backed by four peer-reviewed clinical studies and more than 10,000 five-star reviews. Born from over 10 years of longevity research, One Skin is helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15 % off using the code Megan at OneSkin.co slash Megan. OneSkin.co slash Megan. That's 15 % off. OneSkin.co with code Megan. After you purchase, support our show and tell them we sent you and then enjoy this beautiful product. Jim Clemente and James Fitzgerald were in the room where the true profile of these killers begins to take shape. Both are retired FBI profilers. Fitz is also a forensic linguist. The agent who heard the phone ring from the parking lot is Tim Clemente, Jim's brother. By the middle of October 2002, the men doing the shooting have started to message the police. It starts 13 days before that phone rings with a card in the woods. October 7th, a 13-year-old boy named Iron Brown is dropped off at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland, and is shot as he walks toward the door. He lives. Police follow the trajectory back into the tree line, where a U.S. Marshals Service dog stops at a fallen branch and sits. The ground there is flattened the way ground looks when someone has been lying on it. Cadets rake the area and turn up a spent .223 casing. Near it, an ATF agent finds a tarot card lying face up in the brush. It is the death card. On the front is a skeleton in armor on a white horse carrying a black flag. Across the top, handwritten in blue ink, Call Me God. On the back, another handwritten message. For you, Mr. Police. And code CALLMEGOD. Do not release to the press. That's the entire message. The first and only real clues to the shooter's identity and his first known effort to communicate. 13 words, maybe 14. No one wants word of that card to leave this room. The lead homicide detective, Joseph Bergstrom, calls it an ace in the hole and warns a briefing of two dozen task force members that someone there might leak it. That night on the 11 o'clock news, WUSA in Washington reports that a tarot card has been found at the school. The Washington Post has it too. Both outlets get the wording wrong. Speaker 6 (5:07) It was a Speaker 7 (5:08) card from a fortune-telling Speaker 6 (5:10) deck that's known as the death card with a note written on it. Dear Policeman, I am God. It's the latest chilling development in this chilling case and Speaker 7 (5:20) massive investigation. Dear Policeman. I am God, which is not what the card said. And neither outlet initially reports the line that mattered most to the man who wrote it. Quote, do not release to the press. The next morning, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose walks out to the cameras. Speaker 5 (5:39) I have not received any message that the citizens of Montgomery County want Channel 9 or the Washington Post or any other media outlet to solve this case. If they do, then let me know. We will go and do other police work and we will turn this case over to the media. But to date, the people in my community have asked the police department to work the case. So I beg of the media, let us do our job. Speaker 7 (6:04) Moose says later that much of the anger was an act. He assumed the men who left the card were watching and he wanted them to see the leak had not come from him. Twelve days later, another communication. It arrives the same way. Someone has to be shot first. Saturday, October 19th. Jeff and Stephanie Hopper have been driving for nine days. He is 37, a computer consultant. They are driving from Melbourne, Florida, where they live, to Pennsylvania to see her sister. They've heard about the shooter along I-95 and are careful not to buy gas anywhere near Washington. So they stop in Ashland instead, 100 miles south of D.C. The Hoppers have dinner at the Ponderosa, steak and salad. Just before 8 p.m., they walk out across the parking lot toward their white Cadillac holding hands. They both hear a loud noise. Stephanie thinks a car has backfired. Jeff puts his hand on his stomach, goes down slowly and says, I think I've been shot. She kneels over him. He says, I love you. She says, I love you. They say the Lord's Prayer together. And she tries to dial 911 and cannot get her phone keypad unlocked, so she starts shouting at people in the lot to call. Ashland patrolman Tim Meacham is there in two minutes. He stops his cruiser at the end of the sidewalk so the car is between the hoppers and the woods. Speaker 6 (7:34) 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 need to verify the injury so she lifted up the towel that she was holding on him and I saw a hole about the size of a nickel in the top of the victim's stomach. Speaker 7 (7:53) Meacham says she was the calmest person he has ever seen at a scene like this. He tells her the thing to do with a bleed is to hold pressure, that it isn't rocket science. She starts laughing. So does her husband. She started to chuckle. The victim started to laugh. Speaker 6 (8:10) And at this point, I'm like, OK, can you guys let me in on the joke? Well, she was a rocket scientist for NASA. So me telling her there wasn't rocket science, she kind of knew that already. Speaker 7 (8:22) The round has gone in under his sternum and come apart inside him. When the ambulance crew gets to him, they keep asking him how old he is. I'm 37, he tells them, and I hope to reach 38. He will. Behind the restaurant, there is a wooded lot and it is completely dark. The plan is to wait for daylight. An ATF agent named Ray Neely argues against it. He has a yellow lab named Garrett who finds gunpowder and says the dog does not need to wait for daylight. The smell will never be stronger than it is right now. Speaker 1 (8:55) That's when I saw the rub mark. There was a small tree about maybe two inches in diameter with a small vine. And when I looked up that tree. It looked like someone had taken some type of hard object 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 Lana's site, 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. Speaker 7 (9:28) Twenty feet behind that tree, the dog sits. Sure enough, the bullet casing is lying on top of the leaves, clean. Then a Hanover County sergeant named James Sizemore sees something on a tree trunk, a Ziploc bag with a Halloween pattern on it, pinned up with two white thumbtacks. Folded inside is pink-lined paper with stars stuck to it, a note, not read, but sent in for processing. Six hours