BATON ROUGE, La. - It was almost 7 p.m. when the phone rang, and Hong Im Ballenger should have been home from her shift at the Beauty Depot. Come quickly, a co-worker told James Ballenger. There was an accident.

Ballenger climbed into his gray pickup. He rushed to the store his wife had managed for almost a year, where she sold shampoos and barrettes and fished out change from her own wallet if a customer came up short. As he drove, he prayed.

Whatever had happened, he thought, they would be OK. They had been married for 20 years. They had raised three sons and built a life together as odd transplants to the Gulf Coast, the Army veteran from the Midwest and the woman he fell in love with while he was stationed in Korea.

In the parking lot outside the worn beauty supply store on the edge of Louisiana's capital city, James Ballenger learned there was no accident. His wife had been shot in the head just after she locked up the store and walked to her car. The gunman had grabbed her purse, and witnesses had caught a glimpse of a young man running, of a dark blue sedan idling nearby.

It was Sept. 23, and James Ballenger had no idea who could have killed his wife or what those clues meant. Nor did he know of the sad company he soon would have.

Investigators now think Hong Im Ballenger's killing was part of a first wave of shootings by the two men charged in the sniper-style slayings that terrified the Washington, D.C., region for three weeks in October.

John Allen Muhammad, 41, and Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, are charged or suspected in at least eight shootings before the October rampage began. The earlier shootings happened across six states and left five people dead and four wounded, beginning in Washington state in February and ending with the shooting outside the Beauty Depot at 6:35 p.m. Sept. 23.

No one suspected that the scattered killings were related. They seemed likely to end up unnoticed and unsolved, like so many homicides in so many places. Instead, they emerged as possible pieces in a deadly cross-country puzzle and suggested a crime wave that started far earlier and reached wider than first imagined.

To the victims' families, each potential link to the snipers offers a measure of relief even as they are resigned to the idea that the attacks near the nation's capital will continue to dominate the attention of prosecutors and police. Muhammad and Malvo, they know, are unlikely to ever stand trial in each of their towns.

"I just need to know that they are the ones that killed my dad, and then I will be satisfied with that," said Cheryll Witz, whose father was killed as he practiced his golf swing in Tucson, Ariz. The killing bears striking similarities to the later sniper attacks, but so far it has not been conclusively linked.

'Still big news to me'

In Baton Rouge, James Ballenger said that as the brazen, random sniper attacks unfolded on the cable news channels, he knew in an instant that his wife's death was somehow part of the pattern.

"I know it was big news up there, but my wife's death was still big news to me here," Ballenger said last week as he sat on his couch, framed photographs of Hong Im lined up on the coffee table and television set. "I knew the shootings that were going on, the people that were dying, it was part of it."

"God just put it on my heart," he said. "I said, 'I know the sniper's the one that did it.'"

Ballenger, 55, who retired from the Army's Fort Polk base near Baton Rouge after exactly 20 years and five days of service, is a devout Christian. He learned from his wife to lean heavily on his faith. In the weeks after her death, it seemed there was nowhere else to turn.

He went to church. He returned, after a week's leave, to the job making doughnuts that he had begun just a month before the shooting. He made sure the couple's youngest son, 10-year-old Joshua, trundled off to fifth grade each morning and made his grade-school football practices and games.

Teahouse encounter

In his mind, he replayed again and again meeting Hong Im outside a Korean teahouse. How he and a friend asked her for directions to a nearby movie house, then invited her along.

Inside the theater, the young soldier had put his hand on the pretty girl's knee. She promptly removed it. He tried to casually reach his arm around her shoulder. She backhanded him across the face.

He met her at the teahouse the next day. He met her family. They stumbled through the language barrier, each clutching a small, red leather-bound Korean-English Conversational Dictionary, flipping through the pages to find the right words.

"She got my attention good," Ballenger said. "There we were - I don't speak Korean, she didn't know English. But we figured each other out."

In the United States, they settled in Baton Rouge. Hong Im helped raise Ballenger's son from his first marriage, and the couple had two boys of their own, Jimmy, now 20, and Joshua.

They made a home in the Pecue Mobile Home Estates, a tidy trailer park just outside the city limits. Four years ago, they opened a snowball stand, selling syrupy slushes and grilling hamburgers. But the hours were long and the work hard. A year ago, they closed the stand, and Hong Im, 45, took a job as the manager at the Beauty Depot.

Putting clues together

Ballenger had believed for weeks that his wife's killing outside the shop was tied to the sniper attacks in Washington. But it wasn't until Muhammad and Malvo were arrested Oct. 24 that the clues began to make sense.

The pair were arrested at a Maryland rest area as they slept in the blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice that Muhammad had bought in New Jersey in early September - perhaps the idling blue sedan. The men's mug shots flashed on television - the witnesses who were nearby when Hong Im was killed said the young one, the small one, looked familiar.

Letting police know

Ballenger went to the Baton Rouge police. At first, the detectives working on his wife's killing were dismissive. None of the Washington-area attacks was an apparent robbery. Each had been at a distance.

Ballenger called the FBI. He told them he thought his wife's death was related to the sniper attacks, just as a liquor store robbery in Montgomery, Ala., had appeared unconnected at first but then provided crucial links - a fingerprint that matched Malvo's and a witness who identified Muhammad.

Within a week, ballistics evidence showed that the same Bushmaster XM-15 .223-caliber rifle believed to have been used in the Maryland and Virginia attacks also was used to kill Hong Im Ballenger.

Evidence links killings

Across the country, investigators retracing the path of Muhammad and Malvo found a similar bloody trail. In Tacoma, Wash., where the two men had lived early this year, ballistics evidence linked the killing in February of 21-year-old Keenya Cook to the two men.

In Atlanta, police connected a Sept. 21 early-morning shooting outside Sammy's package store to a handgun also linked to the liquor store robbery in Montgomery, 16 hours later and 150 miles away. Million Waldemariam, a 41-year-old Ethiopian immigrant, was shot and killed just after midnight when he went outside the liquor store to check on a suspicious car.

In Tucson, police are reviewing the mysterious shooting at a golf course in March. Food salesman Jerry Ray Taylor was shot from a distance, his body dragged off the course and crudely buried under a pile of leaves.

Police said last week that ballistics evidence showed that the rifle used in the sniper attacks was not the weapon that killed Taylor. But Muhammad and Malvo were in Tucson at the time, visiting one of Muhammad's sisters, and that offered a new opening to a case that had largely gone cold.

'Just fell in their laps'

"You know, they had said they were working on certain things, but as far as I know, there was nothing substantial at all, and then this just fell in their lap," Witz said.

There is little pattern in the first wave of shootings. Some were apparent robberies, suggesting that the shooters were intent on grabbing cash to fuel their travels. In each of the attacks, though, the victim was shot going about ordinary, everyday tasks - much like the sniper slayings that would follow in October.

Hong Im Ballenger was locking up the beauty supply shop at 6:30 p.m., just as she did most days. It was a job she liked, and it enabled her to put away money each week for the trip she planned to make with her sister next summer to Korea.

The trip would have been the first time Hong Im had returned to Korea since immigrating in the early 1980s, and her family said she planned to go back as a U.S. citizen. In the hours after work, after dinner and after church, she studied English and American history and prepared for her citizenship test.

"I keep saying, 'Why my sister? Why did you know she was there?'" said Kwang Szuszka, who followed her older sisters to the states while their parents and four brothers remained in Korea. "I know there were so many people who were killed, but why my sister?"

Muhammad and Malvo are each charged with first-degree murder in Baton Rouge, the town where Muhammad grew up and where the two had returned to visit this fall.

But they will face their first trials in Virginia, and if they are sentenced to death, it is possible that other jurisdictions will not go through the expense and ordeal of trying the men again.

Justice in Virginia would be justice all the same, Szuszka said, as long as both men face execution.

'Piece of mind'

To James Ballenger, the debate over venue and punishment holds little attraction. He does not plan to attend the trials. Although he will not fight it, Ballenger said his religious beliefs mean he cannot endorse the death penalty.

It is enough, Ballenger said, that the men who he knew had killed Hong Im are caught.

"I hate what they did to my wife, don't get me wrong," he said as he touched the silver frame around the couple's wedding photograph. "But I've got peace of mind and peace of heart now, knowing that they're behind bars, and they're going to be behind bars for a long time."