The Voices of Serial Killers

by Christopher Berry-Dee

  Nebraska State Patrol Sergeant Lynn Williams, who stayed at the crime scene, reports:We secured the area, and then our major concern was obviously the gathering of evidence, so we collected the trooper’s service pistol, his duty gun belt, spent shell casings, and we also took 35mm photographs and videotaped the scene.

  Moses had fired several bullets. The reflective police crest on the officer’s car was one of the few things visible on the dark prairie, and that took a direct hit. The bullet that had passed through the door of the trooper’s patrol car had struck him in the abdomen, piercing his bulletproof vest, as well as traveling through his body. It was obvious that the weapon was a high-powered rifle, so we were looking for something like an assault rifle . . . something large-bore, high-powered.

  Police took the spent rifle slugs to their ballistics lab, where technicians measured the size, weight, and metal composition of the bullets. They were, indeed, high-velocity rounds, probably fired from a 7.62mm SKS military semi-automatic carbine; with a ten-round clip, an effective range up to 433 yards and a muzzle velocity of 2,149 feet per second, this was deadly weaponry designed for use in war.

  Trooper Crymble and Deputy McKnight were taken to the Great Plains Regional Medical Center in North Platte. Crymble’s condition was listed as serious, but he stabilized in the ICU. Deputy McKnight was transported to Omaha for reconstruction on his hand.

  Police Emergency Bulletin

  Suspect, Charles Lannis Moses, Jr., was last seen traveling southbound on Highway 25. Moses is a white male, 31-years-old, 5’9”, 150 lbs., with brown hair and brown eyes. He is unshaven with a goatee and mustache. He was wearing a light-colored heavy winter jacket and blue jeans. He was last seen driving a maroon 1995 Chevy short box 4x4 pickup. The pickup has a Texas license number 2TCB58. Moses is wanted in Texas for probation violation, possession of a prohibited weapon (illegal explosives).

  Anyone who sees Moses, or the maroon pickup, should contact authorities immediately. Citizens should not try to make contact with Moses. He is armed and extremely dangerous.

  —Nebraska State Police

  Because the case involved the shooting of two law-enforcement officers, the FBI was recruited to help capture Moses. Special FBI Agent Ron Raywalt took the assignment, later recalling, “Our caseload, primarily, is in the area of white-collar crime, and it is not very common that we get called in to assist in investigations of violent criminal activity.”

  Nevertheless, Raywalt pulled together what he needed to obtain a federal arrest warrant against Moses, and in this particular case he anticipated that Moses would flee Nebraska.

  Hoping to catch Moses before he left the Cornhusker State, the authorities set up a command center at a police barracks. Officers from virtually every law-enforcement agency in the state shared information on Moses. Several had had run-ins with him before in connection with clandestine methamphetamine labs, and they knew that he had a history of using abandoned farmsteads, not only for manufacturing the drug but for living and hiding as well. So, the cops targeted those areas to search, and hundreds of police and FBI agents started looking for any sign of Moses and his maroon pickup truck in the sprawling, rural landscape. Finding him would not be easy.

  Monday, February 14, 2000, Dickens, Lincoln County, Nebraska, and 30 miles south of the shoot-out: Around mid-morning, a young farmer found tire tracks leading to his garage. His parents’ car was usually inside, but it was gone. In its place was a maroon pickup. The farmer recognized it from the television news, and investigators soon confirmed that it belonged to Charles Lannis Moses. Bullet holes showed that officers had hit the vehicle when returning fire.

  Nebraska State Patrol Sergeant Lynn Williams reports:The license plate we were looking for was still displayed on the vehicle registered to Mr. Moses. It had evidence that it had been shot at. The bullet holes were in the back portion of the cab. They had shattered the back window. Some of them had lodged in the dash of the cab, and others had passed out through the front windshield.

  Charles Lannis Moses to the author:Over 140 bullet holes were in my truck, and I survived. I was driving through many gauntlets with a barrage of bullets whizzing by. Oh! What a rush.

  Police also found blood. Moses had been wounded by at least one of the shots fired at his truck. But if he was injured, meth was the perfect drug to ensure that he would remain alert, pain-free, and aggressive so he could keep on running.

  Lynn Williams said:There was a tremendous amount of paraphernalia located in his pickup that deals with cooking and/or manufacturing methamphetamine. Moses virtually had a lab in the back of his truck. We also found survival gear, police radios and scanners, and weapons in the cab. What we didn’t find was the high-powered assault rifle used to shoot the two police officers.

  Ogallala (pop. 4,950), Keith County, Nebraska: An hour after the pickup was found, nearly 60 miles northwest in Ogallala, a state patrolman responded to a 911 call from a man who said that he was an acquaintance of Charles Moses. The man said that he had seen the fugitive 15 minutes earlier. Moses had spoken to him at a rest area, and he was driving a vehicle that fitted the description of the vehicle missing from the farm in Dickens. The man told the officers that while he and Moses talked, a news flash on the car radio reported that police were looking for Moses and the vehicle he was driving. Moses then panicked and sped off. The man said that he had waited 15 minutes before reporting the incident because he was afraid of Moses. He knew from the radio warning that the fugitive was armed and dangerous, so he feared for his own safety.

  Now, police were worried that Moses would change vehicles yet again to throw them off his trail.

  Paxton (pop. 614), Keith County, Nebraska: Two hours after this sighting, and 20 miles west of a rest area in the village of Paxton, 48-year-old farmer Robert Sedlacek found fresh tire tracks outside a house on his land. He stopped to check them out because he knew the place was empty. Then he telephoned his son-in-law, Paul Fisher, to ask if anyone had been to the property. Paul answered, “No,” but explained that he had heard reports of a dangerous fugitive in the area. He told Robert to get out of the place immediately.

  On the other end of the phone, the farmer could then be heard talking to somebody. “I heard my father-in-law say: ‘What are you doing here?’ ” Fisher recalled. “Then there was a gunshot . . . then silence.”

  Charles Moses had claimed his first murder victim. The fugitive was still on the run, but now more desperate and deadly than ever.

  Just 36 hours after Moses had seriously wounded two police officers, a homicide investigation was started. Investigators now had to piece together the murder from the crime-scene clues.

  Based on this evidence, Sergeant Lynn Williams believed that Charles Moses was the killer:We had learned that the victim had driven a 1999 blue pickup, with the Nebraska license plate, 21-3428, onto his farmland to check on tire tracks he’d observed. He surprised Moses, who also acted with surprise and shot him. He dragged the farmer out of his vehicle, then climbed in and Moses fled the scene.

  Behind a barn on the property, investigators located the car that had been stolen from Dickens. It had been hastily abandoned and partly covered with a tarpaulin and branches. In the back seat, officers discovered chemicals, knives, and several firearms. Troopers also found tire tracks from Sedlacek’s pickup and broken glass on the side of the driveway. It appeared as if the driver’s window had been shot out.

  FBI Special Agent Ron Raywalt knew that this was an important clue: I anticipated that Moses would try and use a defense, stating that he was returning fire from someone shooting at him. I knew that I could determine how many shots were fired and the direction that the shots originated from.

  When a high-speed projectile hits a piece of glass and the glass breaks, physical characteristics are left in the glass. This answers questions for the crime scene investigator. It tells him which bullet hit first and the direction of travel the bullet took.

  Moses had been desperate to switch vehic
les once he knew the police were onto him. Investigators had found the victim’s ID but could not find the mobile phone he was using when he was shot. The cops now believed that his killer had it with him in the farmer’s blue truck.

  Investigators issued an alert for the stolen vehicle and worked to track the cell phone’s signal. When switched on, cell phones constantly search for the nearest transmission/receiver mast to use. Police can flag a specific phone number and learn which tower is serving it. They can then narrow down the location of the phone.

  Two hours after the farmer’s murder, a cell tower in Oshkosh, Nevada, picked up the signal from the missing phone, but before the police could respond the phone went dead. Moses had heard the phone ring and thrown it out of the truck.

  The FBI had also been studying the glass fragments from the crime scene and had determined that only one bullet had been fired from outside the truck, and it had gone straight through the victim and out of the opposite side of the vehicle. This was not self-defense, this was murder. Charles Moses was crisscrossing the state, armed and out of control.

  Nebraska, just east of the Wyoming border: That evening an elderly woman was enjoying a quiet evening at home when she heard someone breaking in. She could hear an intruder walking through her house toward her bedroom. It was too late to escape, so she did her best to hide. Someone was rifling through her drawers and cupboards. She had heard about the fugitive on TV, and she feared for her life; then, moments later, the intruder left. The woman rushed to a neighbor’s house, where she called the police. She told them what had happened but that she hadn’t seen the intruder’s face. Tire tracks matching those from Robert Sedlacek’s stolen truck were found outside the house, and there were bits of glass near the left tire track. They had come from the driver’s window, which investigators believed Moses had shot out while killing the farmer.

  The local police immediately contacted the FBI with their findings. The FBI, in turn, notified the Wyoming authorities that a cold-blooded killer might be heading their way. The search for Charles Lannis Moses had become the largest manhunt in Nebraska’s history.

  Tuesday, February 15, 2000, Lusk (pop. 1504), Wyoming: The small town of Lusk is about 20 miles from the Nebraska border, and Lusk Police Department Chief Cary Gill received the FBI’s “Wanted” bulletin. Chief Gill says, “That morning we heard about Charles Moses from our dispatch. He was driving a Nebraska-plated pickup, blue, and he could be headed in any direction.”

  The media alerted the public thata dangerous fugitive could be loose in the area, and, at around 1 p.m., the publicity paid off. Says Chief Gill: A caller reported that the blue pickup was at the south-end corner of “The Outpost” truck stop in Lusk. I went with Assistant Chief Dusty Chrisman, and there were several vehicles in the parking lot that fit the description. We knew that one of them might conceal the dangerous suspect and we were looking at license plates. Then we spotted one that matched the description. We decided to block him off if we could.

  Someone was inside the truck, but the officers couldn’t tell if it was Moses. The driver’s side window appeared to be missing. If it was Moses, he might have finally come down after a long methamphetamine binge, exhausted.

  Chief Gill called for backup and waited for other units to arrive. Then the driver woke up, but Assistant Chief Chrisman’s view was obscured; he wasn’t exactly sure it was Moses, so he couldn’t risk firing his sidearm. It now meant another yet another chase as Moses fired up the engine and tore out. He headed north along Main Street through the town’s business district, and there was the very real fear of losing the fugitive at the town’s limits as he headed along Highway 85.

  Although the officers were in hot pursuit, Moses got away from them after careening onto a ranch road, where the two-wheel-drive cruisers could only bounce and skid along, while the 4x4 could go almost anywhere. Driving like a man possessed, Moses sped up over an old dam into pastures where the Niobrara County cops couldn’t chase him.

  Sheriff Samuel Reed suggested cutting off a ten-mile area in an attempt to trap Moses: “The perimeter was a very large area. It kinda sat in the middle of three major highways, an’ we had another county road that kind of of dissected it in in the middle.”

  Every law enforcement officer in the vicinity manned roadblocks to look for Moses. The media warned the public to keep away from him, while cops visited people living in the cordoned-off area, asking them to call police at the first sign of any suspicious activity. Sheriff Reed:I had a very deep concern and I knew that if we didn’t apprehend Moses before dark, we could have a terrible, terrible time finding him. I knew the rancher people who lived there. I was very, very concerned for their safety if he entered a house at gunpoint, holding them hostage, shooting them and taking their vehicle and leaving the area.

  Although Moses was effectively confined within the ten-mile area, it was too dangerous for officers to go in on foot, for they would be vulnerable to ambush or sniper attack, as Sheriff Reed explained:For officers to go in would have been extremely difficult. There are a lot of pine trees, deep draws, and ravines. It would have been very, very difficult to go in there and find himin the dark, almost impossible.

  FBI Special Agent Ron Raywalt assisted the Wyoming authorities by contacting Nebraska Governor Mike Johanns, who authorized the immediate use of two unarmed National Guard UH-60 Black Hawk helicopters to survey the state highways and rural roads, trying to locate the vehicle Moses was driving.

  The choppers wheeled and clattered overhead, and the observers soon spotted the truck. It looked like it was stuck in a muddy ravine. A SWAT team was sent in. They knew that the hunted man was armed with a high-powered semi-automatic assault rifle. The elite cops had to move cautiously. The dangerous, drugged up killer could be behind any rock or tree.

  Straight from a scene in Rambo, the authorities positioned themselves among boulders and scrub above the truck, but they couldn’t see Charles Moses. They feared that he might be watching them—that he had already zeroed in on them, his finger caressing the trigger, just waiting for that first clean shot.

  The SWAT team started at the truck after firing a “flash-bang” to stun anyone nearby. Moses wasn’t there. Fanning out, a cop discovered boot prints in the mud, and the officers began to follow them, but among the trees, and without a tracker dog to sniff Moses out, the trail went cold.

  That night, Moses would surface yet again. He had wrecked the truck at the top of a steep slope. It had come to a stop, engine running, against a huge granite boulder, and now the vehicle was balanced precariously with only a tree preventing it from plunging into the small ravine. When he climbed out, Charlie slipped. He plunged down the steep slope, like a ball in a pinball machine:I hit a rock, bounced off a tree . . . rolling . . . turning . . . flying . . . sliding, and finally I hit the bottom of the ravine with a hard and abrupt thud. I looked up at my truck just hanging there over the edge, almost in thin air. The front bumper hung to a tree and the back bumper was wedged against a hard granite rock. My head hurt, my body was pretty fucked up. Nothing seemed to be broken.

  I had torn loose the bandage on my arm. My wound was bleeding pretty good an’ I could feel the sticky blood running down my arm. It didn’t take long to soak my jacket. I climbed back up that wintry hill of ice, snow, rock, and tree, back to the truck. I managed to climb back inside, grab what I could of my provisions . . . everything was pretty much on the front floorboard of the passenger side. So I had to climb over the seat and console, hoping the whole time I don’t dislodge the truck.

  I gathered what I can, drop it outta the door as I climb back out. The engine is still racing, and I’m thinking, “are you gonna blow or not?” Then pretty much the same way as before I go down the slope again. I get to the bottom, gather up my stuff: sporting scope, scanner, bottle of coke, couple packs of Marlboros, shells, and a blanket. My 357 was in my pocket; my rifle was somewhere in the snow. I found it . . . cleaned the barrel. Then I rolled all the stuff into the blanket, pick
ed up my dope case, put on my hat, and began to hike away from the truck. I had to put as much distance between [me and] that crash scene as I could.

  At the bottom of the ravine ran a river, which was pretty much empty except for where I needed to be. So, I walked through the river, ice, snow and gravel for several miles. I’m a sitting duck out here . . . no cover at all.

  Bzzzz . . . I hear an airplane flying over pretty low. I get up next to the bank and try to blend in best I can. It flies over. Chop, chop, I hear the rotor blades of a Huey. I quickly take off running. Just around the next bend . . . my sanctuary . . . a huge evergreen tree right in the middle of the riverbed. Boy, I ran over to it, climbed up and covered myself with the branches, careful to conceal my whole body the best I could. A few more minutes . . . here comes the chopper flying about 50 feet above the ground. A man was hanging out strapped to the helicopter and holding onto a big machine gun. A .50 cal, I presume, an’ he’s looking all over for me. I stayed under cover and hid all the while they searched with a couple helicopters and two or three planes.

  It was now getting dark, so Moses felt it was safe enough to leave his hideout and move on, but his rolled-up blanket had come undone, and his supplies and dope were missing. He needed his dope. He started to panic, asking himself how was he to keep going?