McFreedom

To misquote Spaceballs, "[G]ood will always triumph because evil is dumb." The previous link goes to the letter from the snipers, allegedly penned by the younger. A lot of articles I'd read had been spinning bizarre theories for the behavior of the police and the nature of the demands, but the reality is of course, simple - the snipers were incompetent. There were all sorts of ideas people had about what the "phone number" incident meant, but the bottom line was, the sniper said, "I'll call you at this number at this Ponderosa steakhouse at 6 AM on Sunday" - and got the number wrong. It wasn't connected. So the police had it connected and told him to "call them on the number you provided."

A lot of other people were speculating on what brilliant plan they had to untraceably access the $10 million they were asking for. Their brilliant plan? I'm speculating they stole a Platinum Visa card (as neither of them seems likely to have Platinum-level credit), but, however they got it, they instructed the police to "place ten million dollar [sic]" in the account associated with a Visa Platinum and requested that they "have unlimited withdra withdrawl [sic] at any atm world-wide." Which is just laughable. Even if it were possible to convince the bank or banks to go along, ATMs don't have all that much money in them. ATMs might have $36,000 when filled up, but that depletes quickly and on average if you emptied one, you'd get $18,000. That means to get your $10 million - even if any of this was even possible - you'd have to make 555 trips to the ATM. And you obviously couldn't go to the same one, twice - or even ones in the same city twice.

Of course, the best part of all this is that it was the snipers themselves who tipped off the cops - without them bragging about the Alabama murder, we'd still have the front-page CNN poll as "Should authorities pay the Washington-area sniper the money he demands?"