October 9, 5:30 a.m. The day started out very much like the last several days had. It felt as though we had been working this case forever, but it had been only seven days. Once again, I was up early and out of the house. Traffic was very light—unusual for a Wednesday. I found myself staring intently at every white van or box truck that I passed. A number of them were sporting disabled-vehicle tags on the back. The uniformed cops were stopping the same vehicles time after time, so they had started attaching disabled-vehicle tags to the rear of the vans and trucks so other troopers or officers would know that the vehicle had already been stopped and checked.
As I headed to work, I wondered if we were spending too much time focusing on white vans and box trucks. Case Explorer had been making matches based on the data sets we had collected. The majority of the leads we had generated through the link analysis program had involved white vans or trucks—yet none of the leads we had passed on to the field investigators for follow-up had produced anything of use. Yes, we had identified a lot of people with felony records who were in violation of the law because they possessed firearms, primarily .223-caliber rifles, but that alone wasn’t helping us in this particular case.
We had found several people with felony records who owned or drove white vans or trucks and were also members of known outlaw motorcycle clubs or other criminal enterprises; those people were under around-the-clock police surveillance. So far, though, none of that had produced anything concrete. I’d had my doubts from the start that the shootings had anything to do with outlaw motorcycle clubs. They’ll go after one another, or after other groups because of a bad drug deal or a bar fight or some other perceived slight, but rarely do they harm an uninvolved passerby, unless by accident. If this had been club related, there would have been other evidence at the scene to suggest so. The same could be said for involvement of any of the known street gangs in the Capital area. After spending years on the street working undercover, we investigators had any number of confidential informants. Not one of them was able to provide any relevant information to the state police or any other agency. We seemed to be chasing ghosts. All of this fed into the fear that this was some organized and well-financed terrorist cell—or worse, a complete off-the-grid lone wolf who was kill-for-thrill motivated. Since no overseas organization was laying claim to the shootings, they were looking more and more like the work of a lone wolf.
Informants weren’t protecting anyone, not with a reward that was well into six figures. If there was useful information to be had out there, we would have heard about it. And I had checked with every one of my old informants from my narcotics days, plus new sources from the criminal intelligence side. All the experienced investigators working this case, along with just about every detective in Maryland, was doing the same thing, and there was nothing on the street to help us.
I made it to the JOC well before 7 a.m. and was briefed by a tired and haggard-looking Detective Sergeant Cornwell.
“You need to get out of here, go home and get some rest,” I said.
“No, I’m good,” he said, unconvincingly. Like me, he was in this case with both feet. “We got more data sets loaded onto Case Explorer,” he continued. “We’ve collected terminated employee files from Michaels, and sign-in logs from surrounding rifle ranges. The team spent the night typing these into the system. And the coders have developed bridges that will link Case Explorer with the criminal records and DMV files from Maryland, Virginia, and D.C. They’re working out the bugs, but we should be up and running on that soon.”
“How’s it going with Rapid Start?”
“We’re online, but we’re not sure if all of the tips are coming in from Virginia, since they set up their own joint command center.” The frustration was evident in his voice.
“I know, but look what you’ve accomplished in just a few days. Hell, what we’ve done as a team.” I was trying to convince both Dan and myself. “Getting data from reluctant sources, getting other agencies to follow our protocol—that’s out of our control. All we can do is voice our concerns and whine and complain to Captain McAndrew and let him try to fight those battles on our behalf. We have to stay focused on our mission.”
But what if we had the wrong mission? I thought. What if all we were doing was blowing smoke up our own asses? I knew I couldn’t think that way. But, still, the thought was there, lurking in the back of my mind.
We headed into the briefing together. The troopers and analysts from the night shift, as well as the day shift team, had assembled. I brought up the van. “We’re focused on a white van, and we’ve gone seven days straight looking into every white van out there. But what if they’re not in a white van? If not, how do we find them?” The problem, we debated, was that in every shooting, witnesses reported seeing a white van or box truck, or both, either right before or right after the shooting. We couldn’t discount that. But the investigation turning up nothing at all just didn’t add up.
During the morning press conference, an angry Chief Moose addressed the collected press, admonishing them over the leaked tarot card and saying that he was very sure the public didn’t want Channel 9 or the Washington Post to lead this investigation. Beyond that, there was nothing new to tell them. We were no closer to solving this case than we had been the day this all started. Nerves were frayed, and the TV talking heads were giving the efforts of this task force a severe public beating.
We in the intelligence group kept our collective efforts focused on the job at hand. We were beginning to doubt that we would be able to contribute anything of substance to this investigation, but we had to keep trying. We had collected more than 140 data sets, ranging from small lists of people who had recently purchased .223-caliber ammunition to extremely large data sets of everyone in three states with a felony record, and that was subdivided into crimes of violence or crimes of violence in which a firearm had been used.
At 8:18 that night, I was pulling out of the parking lot when word came over the police radio: a man named Dean Myers had become the snipers’ latest target when he was shot and killed as he filled his car with gasoline at a Sunoco station just off I-95 in Manassas, Virginia. Nobody heard the shot that killed Myers, but once again witnesses reported seeing a white van occupied by two men leaving the area. Just like the movie Groundhog Day, in which the main character wakes up every morning to repeat what had happened the day before, this was becoming the real-life nightmare that we were living in. And we couldn’t seem to stop it from happening.
An all-points bulletin was issued for the white van, which was described as possibly being a Dodge Caravan. The Virginia State Police and the Prince William County sheriff’s department quickly moved to secure ramps on and off I-95. Roadblocks were established quickly in an effort to try trapping the snipers. Yet none of the roadblocks or dragnets resulted in any viable suspects or additional information.
More than three hundred investigators and just as many members of the press converged on the crime scene. The Prince William County sheriff’s department now joined the investigation and the task force. There is nothing that three hundred investigators at a crime scene can do other than cause additional confusion and possibly damage the crime scene. Besides, as I figured out very early in my career, the bad guys are no longer at the crime scene, so it’s best to expend our energy looking for them someplace else. But I knew that this mass rush to the crime scene was as much about frustration as it was about trying to help. I also knew that the task force leadership would have to take steps to ensure there was one team of crime-scene investigators and evidence-collection people responding to, and in charge of, this and any future shootings.
There was nothing further I could do at the JOC that night. As much as I wanted to turn around and help with this, it wouldn’t have served any purpose for me, or anybody from my team, to run to Manassas. We would only be getting in the way. We needed to stick with our mission of trying to develop leads based on the more than eight thousand tips that had come in.
But as I left the center and headed for home, I couldn’t stop thinking about all those cops flooding the crime scene. We needed to be looking at this case differently. And we needed to be using all the cops on the street in a much more efficient manner.