October 5, 5:30 a.m. It felt like my head had just hit the pillow when suddenly my alarm was buzzing. Not sure if I was waking from a bad dream, I rolled over and looked at the clock; it was blinking 5:30 a.m. Just over four hours of sleep. At first, I stared at the date on the clock—Saturday, the fifth. Saturday was supposed to be my day off. Why the hell was my alarm going off? We had family plans, but what were they? Whatever they were, they sure as hell didn’t involve getting up at 5:30 a.m. Jean wouldn’t have scheduled anything this damn early.
In time, the fog in my brain started to dissipate, and I remembered. I was to be at the Montgomery County Training Academy by 7 a.m. for a meeting with Captain McAndrew and Detective Sergeant Cornwell. We were assembling our intelligence and investigative team for the sniper case.
I was physically and mentally tired, but this was just the beginning. I dragged myself out of bed and headed for a quick shower. As I passed the TV, I clicked on the news, keeping the volume low so it wouldn’t wake Jean. Thankfully, there was nothing on the news that I didn’t already know about. By the time I got out of the shower and had dressed, Jean was up.
I never realized how much my job affected my wife until after I had retired and was able to talk to her about some of the things I had done during my career. She knew there were things that I wasn’t allowed to tell her. She also knew there were things that I wouldn’t tell her. She never pressed me for information. Because I valued the devotion, trust, and love we have, I wasn’t about to let what I did for a living come between us, as it had for so many troopers.
This case, however, was different. This case bothered me like no other case ever had, to my very core. I had seen people in unimaginable conditions—beaten severely, dead, decomposed. I had seen people whose heads had been blown off. I had interviewed women and children who had been brutally raped. I had seen just about every brutality that man can dish out to other human beings. I had interviewed killers and molesters, digging deep for the resolve needed to make them at ease enough with me to confess their crimes or just to tell me what had happened to them. In one case, I had to listen without reaction to one killer describe how much he enjoyed smashing a ten-year-old’s naked body and head into a concrete dugout wall at a local baseball field. To get the confession, I had to let him think that I fantasized about doing the same thing. I had to let him think that I secretly admired him.
I had pulled dead men, women, and children out of smashed cars. I had held hands with dying, drunken teenagers as they drew their last breath, just so they weren’t alone when they passed. I had held together the sliced-open head of a teenager until our state police helicopter could take her to the trauma center. Then I had to hug her mother, holding her hand, my uniform still covered in her daughter’s blood. None of that had ever bothered me like this case did.
Maybe it was because my teenage daughter lay just a few steps away, asleep in her room, maybe dreaming about cheerleading or having fun with her friends. Maybe it was knowing I couldn’t protect her from these predators lurking out there, waiting to strike again. I was torn between that type-A macho trooper supercop image that I had of myself and the reality of being a dad. How could I look at danger with defiance? How could I have a clue about how to protect my family—any family—from these scumbags when law enforcement from two states and the FBI didn’t know who they were or where they were?
Common sense told me the chance of these killers targeting my kid or my stepsons was remote. But the dad side of me was starting to fear it. What if they were outside my daughter’s school? What if they were across the parking lot or street from a gas station that Jean or one of the boys happened to stop at to get gas or a snack? I couldn’t be everywhere—as a cop, I knew that. Nor could I hit the street looking for the snipers while at the same time stay home and protect my family. Fear versus reality.
I shuddered. Mentally, I locked the fear away, then I strapped on my sidearm and checked: loaded with a full magazine and one in the chamber. I slipped my badge over my neck, the metal chain cold on my skin. Ready to go.
I kissed Jean goodbye. “I’m not sure when I’ll be home. Just keep Samantha home or inside. Don’t let her run around at the mall or anywhere in public with her friends.”
“Here’s your lunch,” Jean said. “And here’s something for the road.” She handed me a Pop Tart. Cop comfort food. God, I love this woman, I thought. She knows more about me than I do about myself.
I headed for the cruiser in the driveway. Before I got in, I took a deep breath of fresh air. The hunt for the Beltway snipers was on, in earnest. Today’s game plan: to turn from the hunted into the hunters.
At the academy, I was shown to a large classroom. This was the place we would call home until the joint operations center was up and running. The immediate problem was our location. We were separated from the focal point of the investigation, which was Montgomery County police headquarters. General communications would be an issue, not to mention keeping up with breaking leads. But we needed this space. We were just going to have to work through the communications issues for the time being.
The team was beginning to file in. I knew the analysts from my own agency and had briefly met the analysts from Montgomery County. A pair of analysts from the FBI and two or three analysts from ATF joined the team. After quick introductions, we began to settle in and take stock of what we had to work with. Next door there was a computer lab where Rapid Start had been deployed, and information from tip calls was already beginning to be loaded live. A backlog of tips had been gathered in several cardboard boxes and brought over to us from headquarters. We would have to load those into the system.
There was a quick learning and training session to familiarize us with Rapid Start. A normal formal training session for the program was about sixteen hours. We had about sixteen minutes. Sixteen hours was a luxury we couldn’t afford, when people were being murdered on a regular and random basis.
Each classroom had been equipped with at least two televisions tuned to local stations, Fox, and CNN. As much as I was beginning to loathe the media and the around-the-clock coverage of this case, while we were offsite at the academy classroom it was our best source of investigative information. As the case progressed, we had gotten used to hearing new information on the networks before getting any word from headquarters.
Still, we had Captain McAndrew as our liaison between headquarters and the academy. He was in charge of relaying information, bringing back new lead and tip sheets, and keeping us in the loop with the lead investigative team until we could all get over to the joint operations center.
After our crash course in Rapid Start, several of the analysts started entering leads into the system. The rest of us sat down in the classroom in front of a whiteboard. Time to figure out where to begin the hunt.
In the modern world, everybody leaves an electronic footprint. It’s now almost impossible to go completely off the grid. There are thousands of cameras everywhere, from store and parking lots to traffic cameras and ATM machines. There are license plate readers. And of course everyone uses credit cards, debit cards, commuter easy pass cards. Records are kept by every business on nearly every activity in our day. We were determined to take advantage of those records. Somewhere out there, the killers were leaving electronic bread crumbs. It was our job to look for them.
But where do we begin tracking the snipers in cyber world? We compiled a list. The obvious starting place: owners of white vans and white box trucks in three states. Stolen vehicle lists were something else we should look at; in fact we needed to recheck them at least twice a day. We also wanted to look at registered gun owners who had registered a .223-caliber weapon. We all knew that most criminals don’t register their weapons, and oftentimes the weapons they use are stolen. But we would have been remiss not to look. We needed to compile a list of all known felons in the same tristate region and D.C., and to collect VICAP (Violent Criminal Apprehension Program, a database run by the FBI) data and compare it to our growing list of data sets. We would look at all the sign-in lists at shooting ranges around the region.
We spent the entire weekend of October 5 and 6 brainstorming about where the snipers may have left tracks, and how to find those tracks. What about Michaels craft stores? Could the shooters be disgruntled present or former employees? Could they be connected to a contract that went bad, and the shootings in and around the stores were a sick effort to scare away customers? We were casting a very large net over two or three states and D.C. The trick was going to be casting a large enough net, but one that wasn’t so unreasonably large that the single footprint or lead would get lost among all the data collected. We had no other, easier alternative. The details were going to matter greatly.
By Sunday we were hopeful that the snipers had taken the weekend off, but we suspected the killing was going to continue. In fact, a part of us worried that the shootings would just stop cold and the killers would vanish. As perverse as it sounded, we almost needed more shootings in order to get more evidence and more clues so we could have a chance to catch the bastards. So far, we hadn’t slowed the killers at all. As the uniform presence and pressure increased, they had simply adapted and moved their killing zone farther south into the District and now Northern Virginia. All we could do was add more cops and spread the search over a larger area. As a task force, we were maxed out on uniformed cops. We were trying to plug leaks in the dam with as many fingers as we had. But with every shooting and every killing, the dam sprang more leaks.
There were now more than six hundred investigators assigned to the case, with additional federal resources on the way. We had between eight hundred and a thousand uniformed officers, troopers, and deputies on the street, all of them not only tending to their normal responsibilities, but also actively looking for the snipers. With our initial list of data sets complete, we sent the troopers assigned to the intelligence group out into the field to retrieve the data. Our next problem would be parsing that data when it came in. Information was likely going to come to us stored on access databases, spreadsheets, handwritten logs, and any number of software packages. Some info would be sent on CDs, some via e-mail data dumps. It was going to be a job just to get it all into a common format.
When it came to the technology involved in collecting all this data, most of us, including me, were ill prepared. I knew what I needed a computer to do, but I had no idea how to make that happen. The FBI gave us funding to purchase off-the-shelf servers and computer equipment. But we still needed expertise to make all this data work together. And we needed technology. Even if we knew how to do it manually, which we didn’t, too many civilians were paying with their lives for us to piss around trying to do this by hand.