"Frankly Larry, I Don't Know a Damn Thing..."
Published October 21, 2002
Want to know why I haven't said anything about the sniper yet? Well, other than the fact that my daughter, my sister and her family, and my wife's sister and her family are all in the area and I live with a dull fear in the back of my skull every moment, what is there to say? I want the person caught and disposed of yesterday - everything else is just idle speculation:
- Hour after hour, day after day, they fill the airwaves with chatter about someone that no one knows.
Never have so many said so much that could be so wrong.
They are the sniper experts, the former this and that - detectives and profilers, psychologists and pathologists - who feel perfectly comfortable analyzing the motives and thinking and lifestyle of the man who is terrorizing the Washington suburbs. If he is a man. And if he's just one person.
How do they do it? Telepathy? Tarot cards?
And why do anchors insist on asking them questions about the mystery shooter that no can answer?
Events keep proving them wrong - they kept dwelling on the significance of the killer taking off weekends, until the shooting in Ashland, Va. Saturday night - but that doesn't deter them. They were back on the air within minutes.
These guests must be smarter than anyone can imagine. Let's start our review with Fox News.
Forensic pathologist Cyril Wecht: "Well, I think this person is, obviously, a pretty disturbed individual, psychotic but well controlled."
Fox's Alan Colmes: "Jack Trimarco, will this person strike again?"
Trimarco: "He'll strike again. Hopefully, he won't kill again, but he will be apprehended or killed, or, as I said, turn the gun on himself at the scene of his last shooting."
Former D.C. detective Howard Miller: "When he's not killing, he's reading about himself in the paper, he's watching the news, and he's getting the notoriety that he's perhaps never had in his life."
Former FBI man William Daly: "This person now is, I believe, addicted to the coverage, addicted to this method of behavior. . . . I think he's sitting on his couch, on the end of his bed, on - you know, on his Lazy Boy watching us and saying, 'Look at what I have. Helicopters in the air. I have police running around. I have SWAT teams.'"
- "Frankly Larry, I Don't Know a Damn Thing..."
- Published: October 21, 2002
- Type:
- Section: Video
- Filed Under: Video: News, Video: Television
- Writer: Eric Olsen
- Eric Olsen's BC Writer page
- Eric Olsen's personal site
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Truth is so much stranger than fiction. You can't make this stuff up. It would be rippingly hilarious if it weren't so macabre.