WILLIAM SPENGLER
(WEBSTER, N.Y.) — The ex-con
turned sniper who killed two firefighters wanted to make sure his goodbye note
was legible, typing out his desire to “do what I like doing best, killing
people” before setting the house where he lived with his sister ablaze, police
say.
Police Chief Gerald Pickering said Tuesday that the 62-year-old loner, William
Spengler, brought plenty of ammunition with him for three weapons including a
military-style assault rifle as he set out on a quest to burn down his
neighborhood just before sunrise on Christmas Eve.
And when firefighters arrived
to stop him, he unleashed a torrent of bullets, shattering the windshield of
the fire truck that volunteer firefighter and police Lt. Michael Chiapperini,
43, drove to the scene.
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Fellow firefighter Tomasz Kaczowka, 19, who worked as a
911 dispatcher, was killed as well.
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Two other firefighters were
struck by bullets, one in the pelvis and the other in the chest and knee. They
remained hospitalized in stable condition and were expected to survive.
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On Tuesday, investigators
found a body in the Spengler home, presumably that of the sister a neighbor
said Spengler hated: 67-year-old Cheryl Spengler.
Spengler’s penchant for death
had surfaced before. He served 17 years in prison for manslaughter in the 1980
hammer slaying of his grandmother.
But his intent was
unmistakable when he left his flaming home carrying a pump-action shotgun, a
.38-caliber revolver and a .223-caliber semiautomatic Bushmaster rifle with
flash suppression, the same make and caliber weapon used in the elementary
school massacre in Newtown, Conn., that killed 26.
“He was equipped to go to war, kill innocent people,” the chief
said of a felon who wasn’t allowed to possess weapons because of his criminal
past. It was not clear how he got them.
The assault rifle was
believed to be the weapon that struck down the firefighters. He then killed
himself as seven houses burned on a sliver of land along Lake Ontario. His body
was not found on a nearby beach until hours afterwards.
The motive was left unclear
as well, Pickering said, even as authorities began analyzing a two- to
three-page typewritten rambling note Spengler left behind.
He declined to reveal the
note’s full content or say where it was found. He read only one chilling line:
“I still have to get ready to see how much of the neighborhood I can burn down,
and do what I like doing best, killing people.”
Pickering added: “There was
some rambling in there and some intelligence we need to follow up on.”
It remained unknown what set
Spengler off but a next-door neighbor, Roger Vercruysse, noted that he loved
his mother, Arline, who died in October after living in the house in a
neighborhood of seasonal and year-round homes across the road from a lakeshore
popular with recreational boaters.
Pickering said it was unclear
whether the person believed to be Spengler’s sister died before or during the
fire.
“It was a raging inferno in there,” Pickering said.
As Pickering described it and
as emergency radio communications on the scene showed, the heavily armed
Spengler took a position behind a small hill by the house as four firefighters
arrived after 5:30 a.m. to extinguish the fire: two on a fire truck; two in
their own vehicles.
Several firefighters went
beneath the truck to shield themselves as an off-duty police officer who came
to the scene pulled his vehicle alongside the truck to try to shield them,
authorities said.
The first police officer who
arrived chased and exchanged shots with Spengler, recounting it later over his
police radio.
“I could see the muzzle blasts comin’ at me. … I fired four shots
at him. I thought he went down,” the officer said.
At another point, he said: “I
don’t know if I hit him or not. He’s by a tree. … He was movin’ eastbound on
the berm when I was firing shots.” Pickering portrayed the officer as a hero
who saved many lives.
The audio posted on the
website RadioReference.com also has someone reporting “firefighters are down”
and saying “got to be rifle or shotgun — high-powered … semi or fully auto.”
Spengler had been charged
with murder in his grandmother’s death but pleaded guilty to a reduced charge
of manslaughter, apparently to spare his family a trial. After he was freed
from prison, Spengler had lived a quiet life on Lake Road on a narrow peninsula
where Irondequoit Bay meets Lake Ontario.
That ended when he left his
burning home Monday morning, armed with his weapons, a lot of ammunition and a
measure of hate.
“I’m not sure we’ll ever know what was going through his mind,”
Pickering said.
The murderer rising
with the light killeth the poor and needy, and in the night is as a thief.
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And I will set the
Egyptians against the Egyptians: and they shall fight every one against his
brother, and every one against his neighbour;
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Thy terribleness
hath deceived thee, [and] the pride of thine heart, O thou that dwellest in
the clefts of the rock, that holdest the height of the hill: though thou
shouldest make thy nest as high as the eagle, I will bring thee down from
thence, saith the LORD.
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Ye are of [your]
father the devil, and the lusts of your father ye will do. He was a murderer
from the beginning, and abode not in the truth, because there is no truth in
him. When he speaketh a lie, he speaketh of his own: for he is a liar, and
the father of it.
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