Prior to the Virginia shooting, I had been reassigned to the Montgomery County police headquarters. The infrastructure of the investigation was beginning to take shape. Tip calls were coming in by the hundreds and were already to the point of being unmanageable. I was put in charge of a team of troopers, along with state police civilian analysts and crime analysts from Montgomery County, to try to get a handle on the number of tips and leads that were coming in.
After the April 1995 Oklahoma City bombing killed 168 people and injured 650 more, the FBI developed a tip-tracking program called Rapid Start. It was designed to manage all the calls offering leads. Like this sniper case, the Oklahoma City bombing triggered thousands of calls and tips, flooding local and federal crime solvers and tip lines.
Tips come in from all sorts of people with all types of motives for making those calls. Some people may have seen something they thought was suspicious, or they may know somebody who could be responsible. We get calls from people who say that God has spoken to them, and, depending on how much media attention a case has drawn, we also hear from people who believe they have psychic skills and want to help us solve the case. Tip calls often come in from people who have a score to settle with a neighbor, an ex-spouse, a former employer. And then there are the calls from the people I call the “confessors.” As the sniper case grew ever bigger as a media story, we got more and more people calling to confess to all the shootings.
Whatever the motivation, police encourage these calls. Information about a crime is often difficult to find. Investigators never know which small piece of information, that by itself may appear unimportant, could turn a case around. Most homicides, robberies, and burglaries affect a small sphere of people, so because there are fewer calls, the tips received are easily managed. But when a big case comes along, complete with heavy press coverage, tips pour in by the thousands. In such a case, viable information can easily be lost or overlooked. To prevent that, every single tip must be recorded and evaluated to determine if it is (a) useful and (b) actionable. No tip is discarded; future evidence could benefit from something that seems unrelated today.
All of this takes people and time. All too often, however, law enforcement doesn’t have enough people to handle the volume of calls. In the sniper case, we had zero time. The snipers were still out there, still killing. And now the terror had expanded throughout the entire mid-Atlantic region.
Prior to Oklahoma City, the system for vetting information was nothing more than paper and pen and piles of tip sheets. Rapid Start was a major improvement for large-case management. Operators answering tip lines could enter the information directly into the program as the tips were received. The tips could then be numbered, tracked, and managed, with a clear log of what, if any, action was taken or required for each tip. Rapid Start also helped to ensure that nothing was lost. Even so, Rapid Start had its shortcomings. It was able to organize and store the information, but it didn’t have the ability to conduct link analysis. An investigator still had to manually go through the information received to determine if it had any relevance to the investigation.
Link analysis is simply what its name implies: linking bits of information, such as names, evidence, times, places, who was seen where and when, in relation to events that occurred around the time and place of each of the homicides and shootings. Were there common threads among all these events? Link analysis can be accomplished by a trained investigator or analyst, but it is impossible for one person to have access to thousands of pieces of information coming in twenty-four hours a day. Therefore, multiple analysts are required. Often, they are working independently from one another. More than one set of eyes and ears involved in the process lends itself to yet another problem.
Multiple analysts working a case often don’t know what information another analyst working the same case has. This lack of cohesion spreads as more tips come in and more analysts become involved. To avoid or prevent this, an investigative team or intelligence unit is brought in to coordinate information through a chain-of-command structure. Information and intelligence are vetted and assigned relevancy. One person or one small group will have knowledge of the case and will be in constant contact with the lead investigative team. That was my job, working along with Captain McAndrew.
Once Rapid Start was deployed in this case, all backlogged tips that had come in over the past thirty-plus hours were entered into the system, and all tip line and call center locations downloaded the Rapid Start program. But in time we started referring to it as Rapid Stop. Now, instead of our going out and looking for the proverbial needle in a haystack in multiple fields full of haystacks, those haystacks were being brought to us and dumped in our laps. But we still didn’t know if we had the right haystacks, or even the right field.
By late afternoon that October 4, the Montgomery County police headquarters was a mass of both cops and confusion. The headquarters simply wasn’t designed to house the two hundred to three hundred police officers and federal agents now packed into the offices and corridors. Any outsider looking in would have thought there was no order at all, nobody in charge, and that the police didn’t know what they were doing. But this investigation was roughly thirty-six hours old. Police operations in Montgomery County had gone from a relative normal operation to a command center with hundreds of agents from the FBI, the ATF, the U.S. Marshals Service, the Maryland State Police, and now the Virginia State Police. We had been thrown together to form what would become one of the most effective joint criminal investigative teams in U.S. history.
Although there had been casual relationships between law enforcement officers from the various agencies and departments, none of us had ever experienced this type of close working relationship. It crossed agency lines, which required that we trust one another. Were we ready for that?
The man in charge of making that happen was Captain Bernie Forsyth, the lead investigator. Forsyth, a senior veteran of the Montgomery County Police Department, was a longtime criminal investigator, and his reputation was outstanding. Patient yet determined, Forsyth was a perfect choice to lead the investigation. I had known him from my days working narcotics. Because narcotics, theft, and burglary cases frequently involve the same suspects committing crimes to fund their habits, Captain Forsyth and I had crossed paths several times over the years. He was a no-bullshit guy who cared about solving cases and getting bad guys off the street. I liked the guy—I was wired the same way.
But seeing him at headquarters that afternoon, I felt sorry for him. He looked shell-shocked, but determined. Cops like Bernie Forsyth are driven; they do this job so the shitheads and scumbags don’t win. When we win, we believe there is nothing our agency can’t handle. This case was different, though. This was uncharted territory. We felt blindfolded. It even felt different in the command center. Unlike many cases, when agencies tussle over who is in charge, none of us cared. We knew this was going to have to be a team effort.
By 6 p.m., there was no more news to report. Investigators from the Virginia State Police and the local sheriff’s department were still working the Seawell crime scene, but we were no closer to knowing who was responsible than we had been when this all had started. Because the case had jumped state lines, the media attention had mushroomed. TV trucks and news crews surrounded Montgomery police headquarters, and the case was now a constant topic of discussion on Fox and CNN. Plus, there was a growing concern that the media area surrounding police headquarters would be an excellent, easy target. We still didn’t know the snipers’ motivation. If the purpose was to cause panic, taking out a TV news personality would have served that purpose. Streets surrounding the headquarters were sealed off, and counter-sniper teams were deployed. Because local and state police forces were maxed out, this job fell on the U.S. Marshals Service.
That evening, Montgomery County police headquarters was a madhouse of cops in motion. Uniform officers were coming and going, and the growing investigative teams were elbow to elbow. Phones were ringing, and it was becoming more and more difficult to hear the voice on the other end of the line when you did answer the telephone. We needed more room and a quiet place where the intelligence team could work.
The federal agencies were already on it, trying to locate a space to rent. It had to accommodate one thousand officers and have conference rooms, space for working groups, and room for uniformed officers to be debriefed and assigned. Plus, we needed several hundred telephones with multiple lines and computers and office equipment. And we needed to eat—the space had to have a place to feed us, and somewhere for us to catch up on sleep.
All this had to happen quickly. The body bags were piling up at an unacceptable rate. We had no time to plan, design, and build the space. And forget about government procurement rules, which slowed the process considerably—we needed a space now.
As luck would have it, there was a multistory office building next to police headquarters with several floors vacant. This required a large amount of money, and that is where the FBI and their allied federal agencies excel. Compared to our own extremely limited state resources, and equally limited county resources, the feds had an open wallet. They funded the office space.
While the new space was being equipped, the intelligence group was moved out of police headquarters to the Montgomery County Police Training Academy several miles away. We were thankful to get out of the din that headquarters had become. At the academy, we had space. We set up in a large classroom and got ourselves organized.
After seventeen hours, I headed home about 10 p.m. At that moment I just wanted to get home, hug my wife, hug my daughter, and make sure my grown stepsons were okay. Then I wanted a shower and several hours of sleep. This wasn’t going to be a sprint to the finish. This was going to be a marathon. I just prayed the police would win in the end. Growing up watching shows like Adam 12, The FBI, and Walker, Texas Ranger, I had come to expect the good guys to win at the end of every show. So we had to win. We weren’t going to stop until the bad guys had been run to ground.