In Ohio, a Fear That Hits Home

"The bullet came through the front of the house, ricocheted right off that picture, and landed on the floor below the windowsill," he says. No one was home at the time. "I left at 10:45 Sunday night, November 30. My mom stopped over at 2 o'clock Monday afternoon. She thought I'd knocked a hole in the wall. I had been at my friend Scott's house, doing Christmas decorations. Soon as I came home I knew it was a bullet hole."

He exhales. The bird's causing a racket. The sun's streaming in from the window, which faces corn and soybean fields, which spread out just below I-270 .

He called the Obetz police when he noticed the bullet hole. They called the task force. Soon investigators were everywhere on his rental property. He told them about the nasty divorce he's going through. That raised a few eyebrows. But then the ballistics tests came back and the bullet was matched to the gun that killed Knisley.

"My mother lived with me at the time," he says. "She's got grandkids. They were always around. With the size of this property, the kids were always facing 270. My kids were here every other weekend."

Following the discovery of the bullet, they stayed away for two months.

"I still slept here that Monday night," he says. "The family was spooked. My sister came over and wanted my mom to leave."

His mother collects angel figurines, which are placed all around the house. Fitch believes the angels had a hand in saving him. "It was luck, luck and prayer that I wasn't here."

He exhales, the bird's whistling up a storm. "He almost got Tweety," Fitch says. Fitch used to work for the phone company, but hasn't in three years due to a disabling accident.

The shootings have ranged from Jeffersonville in the southwest to Etna in the east, a 70-mile stretch. Still, most have been on the southern rim of I-270, much closer to Columbus. "I think it was to throw them off," Fitch says of the Jeffersonville and Etna shootings. "The sniper has to know central Ohio. This person has got to know the back roads well. I hate to say this: He had to be somebody, well, like me. My name actually showed up on the tip line several times over."

He chuckles a hee-hee out from the cigarette smoke. Still, he had to sit through an interrogation. He says he was cleared, although the task force won't say who it has questioned or who has been removed from its list of suspects. "I don't drive. I don't own firearms. Don't even have a driver's license because of my disability."

He hasn't taken time to fix up the bullet hole, he says, because he'll be moving in a couple of months. "If he'd of hit three feet to the left," he says of the sniper, "he'd have hit the couch. And this couch is usually loaded with kids."

In the military Fitch took rifle training and calls himself a marksman. "If this guy were military trained -- like John Muhammad -- you'd have 24 killings. Obviously, he is a terrible shot."

The Killer's Turf

Tollgate Road, the location where the shooter was seen, is a flat, empty stretch of pavement. One could have several minutes of isolation before another car approaches. One could get off several rounds from a gun before vanishing into the browned landscape, as the shooter reportedly did.

A man in a big gas truck is making a delivery to a farm less than half a mile off. The afternoon sun is starting to set and the cold has turned bone chilling. There is a barn, but not an animal in sight.

The man's name is Brian McKnight and he works for Ohio Gas & Appliance, and both his wife and his father-in-law are worried sick that he is out here, upon the shooter's terrain.

"The day he did it, that Saturday, I saw sheriff's cruisers and thought someone was in trouble," says McKnight, 31. "There's some trailer parks down that way. By the time them choppers took off out of Columbus, that ol' boy could have been in Pickerington or Reynoldsburg. I run this area a lot. He's done his scouting before he goes out and does his thing."

Relatives have talked to McKnight about the gas he hauls, about bullets flying through the air. He understands the point they're trying to make. "If a bullet hits this," he says, pointing to the container, "it'd most likely bounce right off because of its round shape."

And then McKnight hops into his driver's seat, turns right out of the farm and goes by Tollgate Road, heading in the direction of I-270. The fields are cold and wet, the wind is whipping, and no one knows how the crops will rise this season.