On the morning of April 5, 1992, 10 days after the New Philadelphia meeting, another outdoorsman was found dead.  Gary Bradley, a 44-year-old steelworker with a wife and three children from Williamstown, West Virginia, had been shot in the back while fishing in Noble County, adjacent to Belmont County.  The serial killer had apparently struck again.

In early May, a secret five-county federal and local investigative task force was established.  The group met at the FBI field office in Columbus, where officers from each of the five counties presented details of their cases.  The so-called “Hannibal Lector Squad,” a group of three personality profilers from the FBI’s Behavioral Science Unit in Quantico, Virginia, formed a profile of the killer, concluding that he was “a white male over 30, a gun enthusiast, avid hunter and owned at least several weapons.  The killer would have above-average intelligence but was introverted and without many friends, and would resolve personal problems in a cowardly fashion.  He might have a drinking problem and engage in obscene telephone calls, arson fire and vandalism by shooting out windows or tires of vehicles.  He likely would take sadistic delight in mutilating and killing animals of all sorts.  Stressful events would trigger his criminal episodes, which usually would be committed while he is drunk.”  The killer, the profile said, “lived within easy driving distance of the slayings.”

Whoever killed the outdoorsmen "did it for his own satisfaction and pleasure," said Dr. Emanuel Tanay, a professor of psychiatry at Wayne State University in Detroit.  "If it's pleasurable to kill dogs and cats at random, the much better prey is humans. They’re a bigger trophy.  People enjoy killing.  Let's face it.  That's why they do it."

By mid-summer, the task force had investigated and ruled out at least 100 possible suspects, but they were not much closer to finding the killer.

On July 30, 1992, which would have been Jamie’s 23rd birthday, Jean Paxton sent another letter to the paper.  She described how she had baked her son’s favorite cake that day, “but Jamie wasn’t there to enjoy it.  There’s a small child in our family whose biggest worry was ‘who’s going to blow out the candles on Jamie’s cake?’…The next time there’s a birthday party in your family I hope you think of the cake on our table and know you are the reason Jamie wasn’t there to blow out the candles.” 

In August, investigators concluded that the killer was not going to risk sending in another letter himself and decided to go public.  In a press release to the media, they explained that they suspected a serial killer was hunting outdoorsman in a loose cluster of eastern Ohio counties.  The headline of the Saturday, August 22, edition of The Plain Dealer read, “Slayings linked in rural Ohio.”  The article stated that five sportsmen had been murdered, and investigators suspected a single serial sniper in their deaths.  The paper also included a copy of the FBI’s suspect profile.