Detectives Team Up in Search for Police Officer’s Killer : Task force: Nearly 40 investigators have been working together in the hunt for man who fatally shot Howard E. Dallies Jr. and wounded a guard.

The gunman’s eyes stare out from a poster on the wall as if surveying the very detectives who want so badly to catch him.

Police say the unidentified man in the computer-enhanced sketch, his long blond hair topped with a blue baseball cap, is a calculating killer who fatally shot Officer Howard E. Dallies Jr. . on March 9 and severely wounded Santa Ana security guard Rene Carpio in January.

The acne-scarred, young-looking man is also the reason the Garden Grove Police Department has formed the largest homicide task force ever in Orange County.

Since late March, nearly 40 investigators from seven county police departments have chased thousands of leads, poured over hundreds of crime reports and traveled to dozens of cities in their hunt for the man who gunned Dallies and then sped off on a stolen motorcycle.

The detectives have transformed a small room in an office building on Acacia Parkway where county transportation officials used to meet into the hub of their investigation.

After a recent 7 a.m. briefing, a group of investigators filed out the door to follow up on a new tip. Others began phoning contacts, double-checking case information on a computer and tediously sifting through reams of police reports on shootings and car thefts.

Police said the task force, which has cost about $325,000 in salaries and overtime pay, will continue indefinitely, but on a smaller scale.

Garden Grove officials decided they would gradually reduce the number of investigators in the task force to 13 starting next week.

If police have a major break in the case, they then will call back some of the detectives, officials said.

The time and emphasis given to the task force has been a worthy investment, police said, because of the gunman’s threat to officers and the public.

“Any time a public servant is killed, it’s basically society being attacked,” said Sgt. George Jaramillo. “We are dealing with a person who, if he is not stopped, may kill again and is a danger to society at large.”

The hunt, as it moves into its third month, has been filled with extraordinary anxiety, redundancy and anticipation, police said.

“Any time you have an investigation such as this, you have tremendous peaks and valleys,” said Chief Stanley L. Knee.

“On occasion, the name of an individual will come forth who fits the profile and so they begin to work diligently to complete the background and everyone gets cautiously excited about the potential (to solve the case). And then just as quickly as this individual surfaces, they will find he is no longer a suspect. He was in jail at the time of the shooting or he was out of town at the time of shooting.

“Suddenly, you have this anticipation that finally you are putting it together and suddenly it falls apart and you are back to square one. . . . It’s like seeing the light at the end of the tunnel, but the light does not seem to be getting any closer.”

But police said they are making progress.

“I think we’ve done an inordinate amount of work in a short period of time,” said Doug F. Morrill, one of two sergeants who oversee the daily operations of the investigative team, which is larger than some entire police departments in the county.

“We don’t have a suspect in custody and a lot of people would evaluate the task force on that factor,” he said. “But we went through an incredible amount of information and we are hopeful we will find the suspect.”

Police Department officials began discussing forming the task force about one week after the Dallies shooting.

The investigators, most with about 10 years investigative experience in homicide or narcotics, were divided into two-person teams and dispatched to work full time on an explosion of leads that emerged in the days immediately following the Dallies slaying, which came about two weeks after two Compton police officers were shot during a traffic stop.

Since then investigators have studied old shooting cases, looked at booking photos, conferred with police in several states, and examined fingerprints and other evidence taken from the residential block in north Garden Grove where Dallies was shot.

In late March, the task force connected the Dallies and Carpio attacks and started developing a sketch of the man believed responsible. Police call the sketch a major step in the investigation and they say the man should be considered a major threat.

“Based on FBI statistics,” said lead investigator Ron Shave, “if we don’t catch him he’ll kill again.”

Shave said: “We believe prior to both shootings, he thought through what he would do in order to escape. He’s calculated the cost and has determined how to handle the scene without alerting the victim he’s a danger.”