AI Summary
5 min readLate on the night of October 19, 2002, a plastic sandwich bag with a Halloween pattern was found tacked to a tree behind a Ponderosa Steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia. Inside was a letter on pink paper with gold stars stuck to it. It contained instructions for a phone call to the restaurant's payphone at 6 a.m. the next morning. An FBI agent heard that phone ring from the parking lot, but no one had the authority to open the locked building. The call went unanswered. That missed connection is the hinge point of the fourth episode of The Beltway Snipers: "Call Me God" on MK Confidential, which traces how two profilers, working from a handful of words and a hunch, began to understand that the Washington, D.C. sniper was not one man but two—and that the person writing the notes might be nothing like the person pulling the trigger.
The Tarot Card and the First Profile
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What you'll learn
- 1 MK Confidential: The Beltway Snipers — "Call Me God" Ep. 4
- 2 Timestamped Outline
- 3 (01:00) **The Ponderosa Phone Call** - The sniper's planned 6 AM call to a payphone at the Ashland, Virginia Ponderosa goes unanswered because the building is locked and no one can get inside
- 4 (04:03) **Two Profilers Enter the Room** - Jim Clemente and James Fitzgerald (Fitz) begin analyzing the case, each seeing different things in the evidence
- 5 (05:18) **The Tarot Card's 13 Words** - Fitz writes a 4.5-page analysis of the tarot card alone, finding contradictions and clues in the language
- 6 (06:34) **Chief Moose's Calculated Anger** - Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose publicly scolds the media for leaking, but later admits it was a performance for the killers
- 7 (07:18) **The Ponderosa Shooting** - Jeff Hopper is shot in the parking lot after dinner, and his wife Stephanie's remarkable calm saves his life
+ Full timestamped outline available in the app
Show Notes
“MK Confidential” opens on the early morning stillness of October 20, 2022. The Ponderosa Steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia, is about 100 miles south of the nation’s capital. This far outside the Beltway, a couple on travel felt safely out of reach of the D.C. sniper; they were not. Now, the restaurant payphone rings, and rings, then goes silent.
Megyn Kelly hosts retired FBI Supervisory Special Agents and profilers Jim Clemente and James Fitzgerald for an exclusive MK Confidential interview. Together, they examine the shooting that took place the night before, in the Ponderosa parking lot, and the letter that the sniper left behind. Analyzing the killers’ word choice and crime scene setup, Clemente and Fitz redirect the working profile of the sniper from a lone white man in a white van, to a pair of black men — one older, one younger.
The revised profile helps investigators narrow in on the truth, as they hunt for the man – now, man — terrorizing D.C. residents into zig-zagging through parking lots for safety. The case becomes a race for communication, and against the clock. This is Episode 4 of the Beltway Snipers story.
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