Vester Lee Flanagan Stalked His Victims

The On-Air Shooter stalked his targets.

“Based on careful scrutiny of those writings and evidence seized from his apartment, it is apparent that Flanagan very closely identified with individuals who have committed domestic acts of violence and mass murder, as well as the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks on the U.S.,” a statement from the Franklin County Sheriff’s Office said, describing a large number of documents left behind by Vester Lee Flanagan II, the man who gunned down WDBJ reporter Alison Parker and cameraman Adam Ward.

Cops added that based on the evidence, the on-air murders were “well planned and premeditated.”

Two sources briefed on the investigation told The Post that police believed Flanagan had been keeping tabs on the pair for quite some time.

“We are considering that he stalked the two victims,” one source said.

They hadn’t heard from him for two years (and I still have not heard how he was supporting himself during that time). During that time, he was surveilling them, and planning their murders. These types of characters fear losing so greatly that they put far more effort and planning into their lunacy than you would ever believe.

There are different proficiencies of surveillance you might notice, if this is going on around you.

The lowest level of proficiency would involve a car (within visual contact on your route) turning off into a parking lot behind you, and parking in the same lot within ten seconds after you, probably a ways away, regardless of parking spot availability. The driver may even wait to get out until you have gone inside. That is so incompetent as to be almost harmless, though I would still make note of it, and passingly file away that I might have to kill whoever, whenever. This is a fully untrained, unprofessional individual, likely surveilling you for their own purposes.

A mid level of proficiency would involve the same car turning into a lot on the opposite side of the street, but with a sightline to your parking spot. This is a higher level of proficiency. If the driver gets out and nonchalantly goes into a store with a large window with a sightline to your position and the door you are going into, it is less likely to be surveillance, but if it is, it is a pro, probably not doing it for his own reasons.

In professional government or high-end private sector surveillance, with a team, you would be followed on the route by a single “command” car, which maintained visual contact with you and apprised the team of your movements. It would stay as far back as feasible, using cars between you as cover to obscure your sightline to them as best as possible, while still allowing their sightline to you. Such cars used to include a driver and navigator, however if run through a central radio control with overhead map and GPS monitoring, as happens today, control will usually fill the navigator function. There may still be an odd passenger here and there, as all teams need foot units on hand to drop off, but usually drivers will be alone.

Radio communications will often be run through a hidden “three wire” body rig, with hidden wireless earpiece and chest microphone, amplified for distance by hardware in the car. Surveillants are taught to hide their talking, sometimes by obscuring their mouth when talking (picking their nose, fake smoking a cigarette, rubbing an opposite eye, itching the opposite cheek, fake adjusting their rearview mirror so as to block the view of their face, etc), using ventriloquist techniques, or, in extreme cases, “clicking” to indicate they can’t talk, and can only answer yes/no questions with one or two clicks. Many will still, inexplicably, talk into their chests.

If there were “obstacles” such as traffic lights which you might make it through, but which would stop them and cause them to lose you, they will close that distance as you approach the obstacle, so as to not get caught at it as you speed away. They would even get right behind you if need be, depending on various factors (your priority, your training and hardness as a target, their need to remain covert, the importance of this specific follow, etc.).

Behind the command car is the backing car, which maintains a visual contact with the command car, but tries to stay far enough back that you cannot see it, and it cannot see you. After that, is the rest of the team. If you are on a route which has parallel streets that will allow travel at similar speeds, the rest of the team will probably spread out into a floating box, paralleling you on each side street according to calls from the command car, to reduce exposure and enhance control. Ideally, you will never have visual contact with more than one car at a time during the follow, and that car will be an unremarkable sedan that you can’t even see, due to an SUV blocking most of your view of it. Periodically, that car will turn off, and switch out with another car from the team. When mixed with normal traffic, it is nearly impossible to spot.

If you are on a highway which does not allow for a floating box, and where travel is so fast you would lose the team unless they were on the highway too, you will get a straight follow – the team will line up somewhere in traffic behind the backing car, and fully out of your view. Periodically the command car will take an off-ramp, hand command to the backing car, a new backing car will pull up behind the new command car, and the old command car will reenter the highway behind the team and out of your sight.

If you pass aggressively and speed on highways, the team may send a lead car ahead, and out of your view, to speed ahead of you and pickup any cops on radar duty. If they are lined up behind you on the highway, they don’t want you getting pulled over, and then seeing all of their cars drive by in a line, lest you recognize one of their cars later. One sign you may notice if you are under coverage is you never get tickets, because somebody has always been caught speeding just before you passed the speed trap, and thus the officer is busy with the ticket.

With this type of trained surveillance team, the procedure when a target pulls to a destination is for the command car to pass the parking lot you pull into. It will drive to the next intersection out of your sight, turn, stop, and take control of exit paths to help set up the static box to contain you at your destination. The backing car which you have not yet seen is what will pull off where you have, acquire a sightline to you and the entrance/exit to what building you enter, and take the trigger position that will alert the team to your departure.

It will probably pull into a parking lot across the street, or a lot next to the one you pulled into. It will choose a spot that is ideally out of the natural sightline you will have in front of you as you head to your car when you leave. If you exit a store and walk north to your car, the trigger will often be sitting to your south, ideally in another lot, with a sightline to both your car and the door, and probably with some form of cover between you and them. Obviously, choosing a parking spot in the back of the lot, which as you walk out places your back to all the places where they could set up their trigger, is ideal for them. Parking in such a way that they have only one trigger position outside of your sightline to take, and then scanning that area closely as you leave, or even driving by it as you leave – not so much.

The last form of surveillance that exists is a form which now predominates near major metropolitan areas, where a unit of several hundred or even a few thousand vehicles may be deployed daily, assigned sectors for passive mobile observation, and periodically assigned targets to cover as they pass through that sector.

With this type of sectored surveillance, any car can be directed from central control to come from any direction to anywhere with a sightline to you and the entrance to the building you enter. This can be nearly impossible to observe, with the best hope being a sloppy trigger position letting you see them paying attention as you exit. This new form of surveillance is why professional surveillance can be so difficult to spot today without knowing about counter-surveillance detection routes, and other detection methods.

In the case of Flanagan, his surveillance would probably have been amateurish, consisting of a specific car that they might have noticed repeatedly following their news vans around town and pulling off where they pulled off, or staking out areas they promo’d as future news stories and waiting for their arrival, or staking out their studio. You can see how being able to spot professional surveillance teams can make spotting amateurs so easy. What a professional leaves showing for a mere few seconds every hour, the amateur reveals blatantly every moment they operate.

If they were under such surveillance, one thing which would have helped Flanagan would have been their predictability. If criminals apply surveillance to you, the first goal will be to identify patterns. Routes you take predictably, places you frequent, times you are absent from a target location, times you are present, and weaknesses that are predictable. If you are not predictable, you thwart their objectives, stall their attack planning cycle, force them to continue their surveillance, and make it more difficult for them to hide the surveillance they are doing of you, since they need to orient it on the fly, and cannot lay out the best box positions, establish routes beforehand, or land at your destination before you get there.

If you also regularly incorporate surveillance detection measures into your activities, such as surveillance detection routes, you can make your follows a real nightmare for your adversary.

What Flanagan shows is that a low level of paranoia and surveillance awareness, combined with situational awareness and pattern recognition, is a low cost measure that could save anyone’s life, especially in the turbulent times that are coming. I’m sure two years after they ceased seeing this festering pile of rage around the office, nobody at that station could have imagined they were under any threat.

Sadly, the most devastating attacks always come out of the blue. The only way to shield against such attacks is to learn to employ unpredictability and passive surveillance awareness into your daily routine. Had they done this, it is possible somebody might have noticed that this character was paying attention to them, and they might have at least had a warning that problems were in the offing.

Be polite, be professional, have a back-up plan to kill everyone you meet, and be surveillance aware.

Apocalypse cometh™ – Be ready.