In Ohio, a Fear That Hits Home

Then, on Nov. 25, came a spate of gunfire: a Coca-Cola truck, another SUV, both of which came after the 10 a.m. shooting of Gail Knisley, who was riding in a friend's car as they finished some Christmas shopping and started home, when they got lost along I-270. Both women heard a pop and -- according to the police report -- Knisley looked up and asked "What was that?"

The police found it impossible to determine the exact location of each shooting. Many took place on rural roads, around I-270. Thus far, nine of the shootings have been linked to the same weapon, which the authorities have declined to identify.

That the shooter chose Etna, the township that abuts Pataskala, when most of his previous shootings had occurred 43 miles away in the Grove City-Obetz area, stunned many. "The most action taking place in Etna is at the Dairy Queen," says Nojonen. "Either A, he wants to get caught, or B, he doesn't think he ever will."

Pataskala and Etna have the weathered-farm-community look that, no matter how hard Hollywood tries, it cannot duplicate. Old buildings, clapboard storefronts, the curved road leading into town. There is little doubt among the locals that for someone to come here and fire a gun and calmly get away, he'd have to know the terrain quite well.

"He checks them all out," Larry Patrick, manager for Etna Towing, says of the shooter and his decisions on which roads to travel. "He's got his route scoped out before he does it."

Jim Scheider, a fireman who was working part time in Etna on his day off, was standing in line at the Dairy Queen. Someone ordered a strawberry shake. Someone else ordered burgers to go. "Originally," Scheider says of the shootings, "I thought it was all an accident. Then you thought it was some nut case just shooting at cars. But then, he didn't let it go."

An eerie tableau was being repeatedly enacted on the interstate: Men and women in police jackets, twirling lights, hunched shoulders, and people peering closely into a car with bullet holes.

Fear was descending like daylight across the flat landscape, through the naked tree branches, beneath the bright blue sky.

Frighteningly Familiar

This is what happens to a community with a sniper on the loose: People hunch down. They change their route to work. They speculate and theorize. Strangers become suspects.

A law enforcement figure rises into a mesmerizing and bewitching limelight. A career in the making, or beginning to fall. In the Washington area, it was Charles Moose, chief of police in Montgomery County, a thick-shouldered man with intense eyes. He faced the cameras, pleading with the sniper, giving what little information he could. In the end, he became a kind of cult figure, with a book deal, a movie, and a cool walk away from his job over the ethics of the book deal.

The Moose counterpart in Columbus would be Steve Martin, chief deputy of the Franklin County Sheriff's Department. He holds news conferences on Fridays, the spokesman for a task force that includes the Secret Service, the state highway patrol, the FBI and six county sheriff's departments. He gives out little information, he doesn't sit for interviews, he's as behind the scenes as Moose was in front of them. But there he is, a face on the screen. A man with a bushy mustache and a perpetual worried look in his eyes.

In both places, lights go out for a family or families, and a community suddenly gets a whole biographical treatment of a life, a life that might have gone on quietly and anonymously. Gail Knisley, a grandmother and homemaker, hated driving in and around the Columbus area because of all the traffic. Knisley, who had worked as a bookkeeper for her husband's car dealership before it closed, had recently celebrated her 43rd wedding anniversary. She and her husband, Ronny, had traveled out to Vegas to mark the occasion. She was known for cooking lavish Italian meals.

And for now, she is the equivalent of James D. Martin, 55, the first to die in the Washington-area sniper shootings on Oct. 2, 2002, and James L. "Sonny" Buchanan, 39, the second to die, on Oct 3, a merciless day that included four other killings. For now, she is like all 10 of those shot to death in the D.C. area, a soul loved and gone. Killed by an unseen gun.

This is what has happened in both locales: Bullets were aimed at schoolchildren, as if the snipers had decided to cut at the very bone of civilization -- the kids, the future.