SOMERSET MAUGHAM once said, "There is only one thing about which I am certain, and that is that there is very little about which one can be certain." But that's easy for Somerset Maugham to say. He never had to go on "Connie Chung Tonight" to play an expert on the Beltway Sniper.
For three weeks straight, until John Allen Muhammad and his sidekick John Lee Malvo were arrested on October 24, we listened to an endless cacophony of speculation, fabrication, and wild conjecture. In lapel mikes and pancake makeup, they went at it like a roomful of drunks playing darts blindfolded--the criminologists and journalists, the shrinks and psychological profilers, of whom those last have proven to be the phrenologists of the criminal science world.
Even at this early stage, with the bare minimum known about the two suspects, it seems the "experts" were wrong in nearly every respect: There was no lone shooter who drove a white van and resembled some ticked-off Caucasian amalgam of Charles Manson and Drew Carey. Prior to the arrest, columnist Michelle Malkin was nearly alone in raising a red flag on the white-guy theory, taking to task people like Brian Levin of the Center for the Study of Hate and Extremism, who confidently assumed that the killer was "kind of a wallpaper white male . . . who's getting back at society."
Likewise, the fine people of the Council on American-Islamic Relations, always good for laughs, wrongly insisted that the sniper couldn't be a Muslim. Writing "I
am God," they said, as the sniper did on the tarot card, would be an "unforgivable sin in Islam." Islamic devotees committing unforgivable sins. Imagine that.
Some of the speculative gaffes have been major, such as Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose's insisting that our children were "safe" at school just a few days before a 13-year-old was gunned down at his. But most of the claims have been small cheats. While we used to have to wait years for an imaginative artist to come around and novelize a true-crime scene (as in Truman Capote's "In Cold Blood"), chat-show regulars now do the same every night of the week. Using dramatic legerdemain, factual embroidery, even the killer's own unknowable interior monologues--whatever it takes--these analysts always appear to be 100 percent certain.
Take the oft-repeated, much-abused phrase "what the sniper wants." We know from police that the sniper wanted to be wired millions in cash. But he wanted so much more, say the experts. He wanted to be a "big-shot celebrity, . . . to feel powerful, but not necessarily by taking a life," Northeastern criminologist Jack Levin said of the man who took 10 lives. "He wants to be a cool, stealthy, feared person--but he's not," said Brent Turvey, author of "Criminal Profiling," as if the sniper had worn nerdy corduroys when they'd gone out partying together. Dr. Bob Gordon of the Wilmington Institute Network of Trial Science told CNN that the man who managed to avoid some of the most comprehensive dragnets in local law enforcement history "wants to be caught because he has a death wish." (When host Miles O'Brien halted him, saying, "That sounds like a bit of speculation," Gordon informed him it was "clinical speculation." "All right," said O'Brien, "clinical speculation, then. That's an interesting term.")
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