A tip from a truck driver led police to a parked Chevrolet Caprice — what they found inside

A truck driver made a call on October 24, 2002.

The tip led police to a rest stop on Interstate 70 near Myersville, Maryland.

Parked there was a blue Chevrolet Caprice.

Inside the car, officers found a Bushmaster XM-15 .223-caliber rifle.

The car had been modified.

A hole had been cut in the trunk, allowing a shooter to fire from inside without being seen.

The region had been hunting for a sniper for weeks.

Shootings had struck gas stations, parking lots, and other public places across Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

Schools had closed. People crouched behind their cars while pumping gas.

Then a single tip brought the hunt to a parked car.

Who was in that car?

How did one tip end it?

The truck driver's identity is not in the record.

The exact wording of the tip is not in the record either.

What is documented is this: a witness at a shooting in Ashland, Virginia, on October 19 reported seeing a white van.

The actual vehicle was a blue Chevrolet Caprice.

The white van was a witness error.

It was not the vehicle used.

The tip came anyway.

It pointed to the Caprice.

Inside the trunk was the rifle.

The rifle would later be linked by ballistics to several of the shootings.

That would require evidence, and the evidence was in the car.

One tip, one parked car, one rifle.

The rest of the story was still ahead.

THE FIRST SHOT

Between October 2 and October 24, 2002, a series of shootings occurred across Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C.

The first attack was on October 2, when a man was killed in a grocery store parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland.

Over the following weeks, ten more people were killed and three wounded in seemingly random shootings at gas stations, parking lots, and other public places.

The attacks terrorized the region.

Schools closed.

People crouched behind cars while pumping gas.

No one knew where the next shot would come from.

No one knew why.

No one knew who.

The record does not name the individual victims in this article; the names are excluded.

What remains is the pattern: a man in a parking lot, a woman at a gas station, a bus driver on a highway.

Each shooting was public.

Each was sudden.

Each left a body and a crowd of witnesses who saw nothing useful.

Police had little to go on, with shootings occurring in different jurisdictions.

A white van was reported at one scene in Ashland, Virginia.