FBI: Lost in Yosemite

The FBI should be reexamining its every action in the Yosemite National Park murders. More than a month ago, agents investigating the deaths of three women visitors expressed confidence that the killers were among a band of methamphetamine users in the Central Valley and were in jail on other charges. Then another woman, a young park naturalist, died horribly, and all four killings were swiftly tied to a different suspect, a motel handyman under the investigators’ noses.

There were more than 50 FBI agents on the case in March, four weeks after the disappearance from a Yosemite-area lodge of Carole Sund, her daughter and a teenage friend from Argentina. By June, after the bodies were found far from the park, an elaborate scenario involving multiple killers had been hatched. Investigators told reporters about two key pieces of evidence: what turned out to be a shaky, partial confession by one of the men already in jail and FBI laboratory results tying fibers found near one victim to fibers in two suspects’ vehicles.

It would be easy to shift all responsibility onto the crime lab, which was shaken up in 1997 after investigators found a shocking lack of professionalism. Evidence in both the O.J. Simpson murder case and the World Trade Center bombing had been discredited. Now, two years later, the lab’s certainty about its fiber evidence might have kept agents pointed in a wrong direction.

But the agency needs to ask wider questions. Did FBI agents cooperate fully and as equals with locals who know the scene and deal more regularly with homicides? Were agents under pressure to get results because of the case’s high media profile and the frightening resonance for Yosemite tourists, particularly women? Did that goad agents into erroneously identifying suspects? This case seems too close to the FBI’s misidentification of a security guard as the prime suspect in the 1996 Atlanta Olympics bombing.

Granted, it is notoriously hard to catch serial killers--think of Milwaukee police so blinded to the possibilities that they returned a naked, bleeding teenager to Jeffrey Dahmer’s fatal embrace after Dahmer said that the boy had run out on him in a lovers’ spat. Or of Leonard Lake and his accomplice, Charles Ng, who killed a dozen victims in their Northern California torture chamber in 1984 and ’85 before Lake was serendipitously arrested for shoplifting.

The FBI seems to be unusually reflective about its apparent wrong turns in the Yosemite cases. Now, the agency needs to make a tough case study of its and others’ behavior and to correct flawed policies, bringing something useful out of its circuitous hunt for justice for the murdered women.