Legwork, Missteps on Sniper’s Trail

The faces were always there, their gazes unavoidable.

For three weeks, police detectives and federal agents searching for the deadly Washington sniper were haunted by the grainy photographs left on a white mat board inside their command post. The faces belonged to the victims, placed as a silent shrine in full view of every weary investigator who approached the nerve center of the task force’s suburban Washington headquarters.

They were there to goad the searchers on, bringing the victims to life for hundreds of investigators who knew them only in death. But the faces also mocked the investigators.

“It kept eating away at us when a new face went up on that board,” said Montgomery County, Md., Assistant Police Chief Dee Walker. “But all that time, it kept a little fire lit in the backs of our minds. That’s what kept a lot of us going, remembering who we were there for.”

Even after John Allen Muhammad, 41, and Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, were arrested Thursday in the murder spree that turned everyday life in the Washington suburbs into a landscape of surreal dread, those 13 faces -- 10 dead and three wounded -- remained as a grim reminder of the sniper’s ability to kill and kill again.

The largest serial murder manhunt in recent memory took three nerve-racking weeks to track down a roving team of killers whose rampage around Washington’s Beltway deviated from any of the standard criminal patterns known to veteran investigators. Despite throwing 2,000 officials into the breach, the investigation was repeatedly stymied by suspects whose moves were as jumbled as the trash-littered back seat of the blue Chevrolet Caprice that police say they transformed into a rolling sniper’s nest.

At times, the dragnet was racked by missed opportunities and infighting. A Baltimore policeman questioned the two men but turned them loose because he had no way of recognizing them. A Virginia sheriff agonized over a witness’ suspicion of a 1990 Caprice; the report, which did not jibe with stories of white vans and box trucks, ended up being filed away. Federal agents rushing to search for clues after one shooting were momentarily held off by local police. Even one of the killers left a letter berating the police for “incompitence” after he was hung up on six times by tip-line operators who could not winnow the wheat from the chaff.

Officials at the center of the massive operation and on its fringes, however, came away from the manhunt impressed with the task force’s ability to run down even the most obscure leads and keep nearly two dozen suspects under 24-hour surveillance at the same time.

But for all the massive government resources, overwhelming numbers and sheer persistence, the investigation turned on the suspects’ own missteps, which gave investigators the final critical links to close in on them.

“These guys failed at pretty much everything they did,” said one senior federal law enforcement official on the task force. “They were hard to come to grips with because they were only efficient at two things: killing and getting away. And eventually, they failed at that.”

Leads Still Turning Up

Even with the suspects held in a Baltimore detention center, authorities said their investigation continues to turn up new leads. Among them:

* Federal forensic experts are analyzing a laptop computer that was found inside the Caprice seized when the two men were arrested at a rural Maryland rest area on Thursday. Investigators hope to learn more about the pair’s motives by downloading the computer’s files.

* Law enforcement officials now suspect that a Sept. 14 rifle shooting at a Montgomery County shopping center was a prelude to the killings that began on Oct. 3. Task force officials had earlier said ballistics tests of bullet fragments found after the wounding of a liquor store employee there were inconclusive. But a senior federal official said Saturday that “we’re pretty sure it’s the work of the same guys.”

* FBI officials in Philadelphia said Saturday that Nathanel O. Osbourne, a Jamaican national who was co-owner of the Caprice used by the sniper suspects, had been arrested in Flint, Mich. Investigators want to know if Osbourne had any role in aiding Muhammad and Malvo.

Despite frustration about failing to end the murder spree sooner, federal agents and police detectives who worked inside the massive law enforcement hierarchy chipped away with every available resource, improvising when nothing else worked.

Montgomery County police officers were told at morning roll calls to approach people at 7-Elevens and ask if they had information or knew witnesses. FBI and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms negotiators carefully crafted public communiques used by Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose to appeal to the killers -- attempts to quell the killers’ homicidal urges while federal agents worked behind the scenes to swab their letters for fingerprints and DNA samples and tap the pay phones they used.

“They had to rewrite the book as they went along,” said an admiring Douglas M. Duncan, the Montgomery County executive whose region of 800,000 people was shattered by six murders -- five in a single day.

Assistant Chief Walker was on duty the morning the first alerts came in from Aspen Hill, the suburban community of rolling hills and strip malls racked by the sniper’s bloody first day of violence. As she huddled with detectives, Walker, 41, an 18-year-veteran, knew instantly that police were dealing with a crime spree unlike anything they had experienced.

By day’s end, after five more people had died and the killers remained free, it was apparent no other American community had either.

“It just didn’t fit with anything we’d ever seen,” Walker said.

In fact, there had been a similar shooting on Sept. 14, in Silver Spring, Md. But detectives were uncertain at the time whether the wounding of a liquor store employee there had been deliberate or was a misfire.

County police moved quickly, sending teams of detectives to each new murder site. The county’s prosecutor, State’s Atty. Douglas F. Gansler, sent his own top deputies, Katherine Winfree and John McCarthy, to the crime scenes.

The prosecutors were startled by the killer’s ability to “kill randomly and methodically at the same time,” Gansler recalled. Duncan was in a meeting of public officials in Chicago when Moose paged him. “We’ve got three dead,” Moose told him. Leaving the meeting, Duncan got another call. Four dead. In the cab to the airport, the cell buzzed again. A fifth had died.

“What in the world is this?” Duncan recalls thinking. “It was absolutely bizarre, horrifying.”

Already, stunned witnesses were telling Montgomery County’s beleaguered detectives that they had seen a white box truck drive off from one of the Connecticut Avenue crime scenes. After more questioning sessions over the next several days, detectives came up with white box truck sightings at three murder sites.

But that first day, police had to make a hasty decision on whether it was worth putting out an alert for the truck based on the single witness sighting. Walker said she was well aware of the “possible pollution” that might result.

But it was all they had to go on. Investigators said witnesses -- surprised by the sound of gunfire at many of the crime scenes -- provided chaotic accounts that frustrated detectives.

Normally, witnesses look for the weapon. But there was none to be seen. Investigators say the suspects hid in the trunk of their blue Caprice, firing through a punched-out hole. Many witnesses mistook the sound of gunfire for a car backfiring.

A Mysterious Caprice

The immediate obsession with white box trucks -- and later, white vans -- repeatedly obscured what later turned out to be solid leads. At least 10 times after the first spate of killings in Montgomery County, police sighted the Caprice near the shooting scenes and ran its license number against computer files but came up empty.

Sometime on Oct. 3, after the sniper had already killed five Montgomery County residents, a D.C. officer ran the license tag on the Caprice “several hours before the homicide here in the city,” said D.C. Metropolitan Police Sgt. Joe Gentile. “Nothing came back on the tags.”

At 9:15 that night, Pascal Charlot, 72, was shot in the chest as he stood on a street corner, blocks from the Montgomery County line. Nearby, a witness spotted a Caprice, its lights off.

The next day, the Caprice was spotted again by a witness near where a woman was wounded by rifle fire outside a Michaels craft store in Fredericksburg, Va.

The sketchy description languished on an interview sheet, alone among the flurry of white vehicle sightings. “Everyone was keyed in on this white van,” said Spotsylvania County Sheriff Ronald Knight. “The problem is, they’re everywhere.”

When Kenneth Bridges was gunned down on Oct. 11, Knight had just deviated from his normal patrol route, which would have taken him right past the gas station where the sniper struck. Instead, Knight arrived five minutes after the shooting, too late to see the Caprice “probably driving slowly away.”

Two days after the first Spotsylania shooting, a Baltimore policeman noticed a Caprice parked in a gas station lot.

He took Muhammad’s name down and logged it into a database of police contacts. But no alarm bells sounded, and soon the Caprice was gone.

Walker and other task force officials acknowledge the close calls that could have cracked the case -- but they also sympathize with a “cop who was just doing his job. He had limited information and no probable cause to arrest them.”

The next day, the sniper wounded a 13-year-old boy outside a middle school in Bowie, Md. The attack put the city on warning that all residents, even children, were fair game.

Even as ATF officials verified that the youth was the sniper’s latest victim, the task force was in full swing. Teams of FBI field agents drove from Baltimore and profilers arrived from the bureau’s Quantico, Va., lab. ATF forensics experts moved in to supervise crime scene searches and search firearms records. The task force set up first in Montgomery police headquarters, then in a field office down the street. As more agents arrived, officials blocked off floor after floor. A command structure fell into place.

Moose, FBI Special Agent Gary M. Bald and ATF Agent Michael Bouchard were the public faces of the investigation. Working behind them was another trio: Montgomery County Major Crimes Capt. Bernard Forsythe, FBI Assistant Special Agent Steve Wiley and his ATF counterpart, James Cavanaugh. They were the day-to-day supervisors who sorted through the information flow from field agents and dispatched teams to the latest shooting scenes.

Agencies Cooperate

The three agencies worked together fairly smoothly.

But there were sparks between Maryland officials and their Virginia counterparts. When FBI and ATF teams converged Oct. 14 on a Home Depot parking lot where FBI analyst Linda Franklin lay mortally wounded, the federal agents were held back for several minutes by Fairfax County, Va., police who insisted they would manage their own crime scene, recalled task force officials.

Fairfax County Police Chief Tom Manger said the momentary chaos “wasn’t unique to our scene.” Within minutes, more than 200 federal agents and task force officials swarmed onto the murder site.

“There wasn’t anything for them all to do,” Manger said. “Someone had to run the scene.”

FBI and ATF negotiators began playing a critical role soon after police found a tarot card -- with its death skeleton and “I am God” message -- at the middle school crime scene.

“It was clear by then we were dealing with someone who was pretty delusional,” said one investigator, “but what his delusion was wasn’t as important as the fact that he was trying to communicate with us.”

At the same time, even as they readied well-practiced strategies, investigators were startled by the killer’s constant evolution. “It didn’t fit the traditional or even the nontraditional models of a murder case,” Walker said. “It didn’t even fit the models of serial murders we were used to.”

The FBI and ATF profilers concluded that the task force was confronting a unique sort of threat.

“We felt we had some spree killers,” the investigator said. “Maybe two. The prevailing thought that it was a group of Columbine types” -- a reference to the high school killers who massacred students in a Denver suburb in 1999.

Only recently have investigators learned the squalid conditions that the suspects operated in. A sandwich shop employee who saw the Caprice just before it was stopped by the police officer in Baltimore peeked into the vehicle and saw a mound of dirty shirts in the back seat.

The suspects stayed at a YMCA in Richmond, one official said, the night before allegedly shooting a man in the parking lot of a Ponderosa steakhouse in Ashland, Va.

“They spent a lot of time sleeping at highway rest stops,” one investigator said.

The night of the Ashland shooting, police found a three-page note tacked to a tree where the shooter probably stood.

It was from the killers, a ranting diatribe laced with obscure references from the Five Stars, a reggae group, and demands for a $10-million ransom.

“These guys were making it up as they went along,” said one federal investigator.

The killers demanded that the ransom be placed in a Bank of America account or “prepare you body bags.” They threatened in a menacing postscript that “your children are not safe anywhere at any time.”

A Big Break

But the disordered minds of the killers also tightened the police noose around them. Astonishingly, the killers jotted down the names of police operators they had called and even referred to a “priest at Ashland” they had called.

The Roman Catholic priest, Msgr. William Sullivan, was debriefed by FBI agents, a task force investigator said. They left with a crucial tip; during the bizarre, rambling phone conversation with the priest, the killer used his familiar “I am God” refrain, but also, oddly, mentioned Montgomery, Ala.

As investigators contacted Alabama authorities, then flew south to search through old murder cases, FBI and ATF negotiators tried to contact the killer and keep him talking long enough to trace his calls.

But the only phone call that came in was a chilling, garbled communication.

“It was incredibly amateurish,” said another federal official. “We could barely make out the words. ‘You didn’t do what I said. I tried to get with you. You got our letter and you do what we want.’ ”

Federal agents traced the call back to a phone booth at a Richmond gas station. Police set up surveillance nearby, but they had missed the killer by 10 minutes. When they swooped down on a white van parked by the phone, they netted only a pair of terrified Latin American immigrants.

Soon after detectives returned from Montgomery with a lead and a fingerprint from Malvo, the names of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo were scrawled on a chalkboard at the command post.

For two weeks, police commanders and federal supervisors had scrawled the names of the most compelling suspects on the board. At times there were as many as two dozen.

Some were “gun nuts,” said one investigator. Others had suspicious white vans and box trucks. Others were acting strangely. Some had been disappearing at the same time the killings occurred.

But most were eliminated soon after their names were posted. The day that Dean Harold Meyers was shot to death at a Manassas, Va., gas station, one federal investigator watched glumly as another walked up to the board and erased the names of nine suspects.

“You watch something like that and you feel pretty miserable,” the investigator said.

But by Thursday, the names had dwindled to two.

Dee Walker had spent all day telling herself not to get her hopes up. When she saw Capt. Forsythe, her top homicide man, Walker asked him: “How are you going to keep everyone on track if this one doesn’t pan out?”

“You just do,” Forsythe said.

Walker kept her emotion in check as the evening wore on.

“I wanted it to be over so bad, but I didn’t want to get my hopes up,” she said. “So many decent leads went up in smoke.”

Even when the two men were awakened at gunpoint in Myersville, Md., then hauled out of their Caprice and driven off to a Montgomery County jail, Walker refused to relax. It was only late Thursday, when ATF agents returned with ballistic test results that showed a telescope-equipped rifle found in the Caprice had been used in 11 of the shootings, that she finally let go.

She was not inside the command post when the word came. But Walker heard the staccato applause. It echoed down from the floor where the faces of the dead still kept watch.

“That’s when I knew it was over,” she said.