Shooting at petrol station takes sniper toll to seven

The Washington area sniper cast a shadow of fear still wider yesterday when police confirmed that the murder of a motorist at a petrol station in Virginia was the seventh fatal attack on random victims in eight days.

Dean Harold Meyers, 53, was shot dead just after he had filled up his car at a Sunoco station in Manassas, close to the highway leading west from Washington, on Wednesday evening.

Police announced last night that the results of examination of the bullet showed Mr Meyers' death was connected to the earlier shootings. Like the other victims, Mr Meyers was struck by a single bullet in the upper part of his body.

A witness has said he saw a white van leaving the crime scene shortly after 8pm ­ a description similar to the white box van seen at one of last week's attacks.

"It's a minivan but instead of windows around the side, it's solid. We don't know about windows in the back," Sergeant Kim Chinn, of Prince William County police, said of the vehicle at Manassas. It resembled a Dodge Caravan, she said. How many people were in the van was unclear.

Two of the earlier victims were shot when they were on garage forecourts, open spaces offering the sort of long sightlines favoured by the killer.

With the confirmation that Wednesday's attack is the latest in the series of random shootings, the sniper is now known to have in a sense encircled the capital, adding to the fears of residents.

The first five murders were in the space of 16 hours on 2 and 3 October, in Montgomery County, Maryland, immediately north of Washington. On the evening of 3 October, only hours after the fifth murder, a man was killed in northern Washington DC.

In the next attack, a woman was shot and wounded in a shopping mall near Fredericksburg, 50 miles to the south. Then on Monday, a 13-year-boy was shot and badly wounded as he was arriving at school with his aunt at Bowie, Maryland, to the east of the capital ­ an attack that led schools in the area to impose heavy security measures. Yesterday he was said to be in a stable but critical condition after surgery.

The gunman (or a "copycat" goaded to emulate him) has now struck in the west.

Despite thousands of leads, the drafting in of hundreds of agents from the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, and a reward standing well over $300,000 (£200,000), the police are struggling to crack the case.

The best lead was a tarot card found where the sniper laid in wait for the schoolboy on Monday. The inscription on it, a mocking "Mister Policeman: I am God," recalls the modus operandi of earlier serial killers, such as David Berkowitz, who killed six people in New York in 1977and sent letters to the media signed "Son of Sam".

Another serial killer, Theodore Kaczynski, the "Unabomber", taunted the FBI and persuaded The Washington Post and The New York Times to publish his 35,000-word manifesto. That document, and the psychological clues in it that were recognised by a brother, proved Kaczynski's downfall in 1996. Six years on, investigators hope that the tarot card does the same for the Washington area killer.

The most frightening element of the Washington case is that ­ unlike the Unabomber, who chose most of his targets among businessmen or academics ­ the sniper is killing at random. His victims are apparently unconnected, male and female, of different races, people going about their daily business who happened to be in the wrong place at the wrong time.

Police are using geographical and psychological profiling to help the search, examining the crime scenes to try to detect a pattern. But because the Manassas murder does belong to the series, the killer has made the authorities' task even harder by spreading his work wider across the map.