Addicted: Obsessed With Killing?

Throughout the Washington area, patrol cars guard the freeways; police stop white trucks and vans, and millions of people take an extra glance before stepping outside.

After a four-day lull, people now almost expect the sniper to kill again. According to Dr. Alen Salerian, they are probably right. Susan Spencer reports.

"He doesn't' have any control over it now," says Salerian, formerly chief forensic psychiatrist for the FBI. "Even if he says he doesn't want to do it, it's almost like a heroin fix. He has to do it. He's going to take the risk because he's craving for the blood."

The person or persons called the sniper has killed nine times, often from long distances. He has used .223 caliber bullets.

"It is a very mean bullet," says Rob Hathaway of the Rhode Island Crime Lab. "It does a lot of damage. It's a very light bullet and has a tendency, once it strikes something, to start tumbling and do severe damage."

The shooter has used them sparingly, one per victim. Investigators have found no link at all among those killed.

Andrea Walekar's 54-year-old father Prenkumar was the third to die.

"I can't believe he's not here, he's going to miss so many things, like my wedding, and grandchildren," Andrea says.

As few others can, Jean Paxton understands what Andrea means.

"I've been praying a lot for those families. I pray for strength and courage for them to face each day," says Paxton, who lives in Bannock, Ohio.

In November 1990, her son Jamie, 21, was deer hunting when he was shot and killed by a sniper named Thomas Lee Dillon, who operated from 1989 to 1992 in rural Ohio. His methods were hauntingly familiar.

Dillon's killing ground was the countryside, not suburbia, but he also was a good shot. He, too, hunted random victims and carefully took his shell casings with him. He confessed to five murders, but is suspected of more.

"We knew nothing," says Paxton. "We knew absolutely nothing. They said there was no witness, no weapon, no motive. That's all they could tell us."

Dillon felt an apparent need to explain himself. In a letter sent to a local paper a year before his arrest, he gave answers to some of the same question being asked now: Why does a serial killer kill?

Dillon wrote of a "compulsion that has taken over my life." He signed the letter "The Murderer of Jamie Paxton."

"Like many of Dillon's statements, that's one that I think needs to be taken with a grain of salt," says psychologist Jeffrey Smalldon, who interviewed Dillon extensively. But Smalldon agrees that serial killers like Dillon are a lot like addicts needing a fix.

"You have to have more and more intensity, more and more risk, more and more stimulation. That's why in so many of these cases of serial murder, as the series of murder progresses, the behavior become more brazen," he says.

Salerian agrees: "The more he's doing it, the more he's losing control."

As the Washington-area killer showed with his tarot card proclaiming, "I Am God," Dillon, too, had a need to challenge authority.

In the letter, he wrote: "The motive for the murder was the murder itself… with no motive, no weapon and no witnesses, you could not possibly solve this crime."

"These are people driven by tremendous needs for recognition. They're very narcissistic," says Smalldon. "One of the things he would say most frequently is, 'You know, aren't I in a lot of different ways, a puzzle. Aren't I hard to understand?'"

Actually Dillon was ordinary: a family man, and 20-year employee of the local water department.

But many knew that he loved shooting things, including cows, small animals even people's pets. His spree ended when a friend tipped police off. A gun was found and ballistics came up with a match. He is now serving five life terms.

In Maryland, the Walekars hope that the sniper's addiction to killing soon will be his undoing.

"I'm very optimistic that the end is near," says Andrea Walekar. "He's now in a feeding frenzy and he's going to make more mistakes."