October 10, 7 a.m. As the sun came up, I headed south from Frederick County to Montgomery County and the joint operations center. After another night of little sleep, I was even more convinced that the snipers were laying their heads to the north in Frederick County, or maybe northeast toward Baltimore. There hadn’t been any killings or shootings in either of those directions. “Don’t shit where you sleep,” as the old saying goes. In my head, the snipers were avoiding committing any acts of violence where they slept. Again, trying to think like the killers—which is what I was trained to do—that’s the way I would have done it.
Also, I was convinced that we were looking for the wrong vehicle. Since day one, law enforcement throughout the entire region had been stopping and searching every white van or truck, along with anything that even remotely looked like that type of vehicle, and we had come up with nothing. If I were the snipers and I had started out driving a white van or truck and heard all the reports that the police were focusing on this type of vehicle, I would have ditched it for something else. We knew the snipers were watching and listening to news reports about the investigation, so there was no reason to believe they didn’t know we were in tunnel-vision mode looking for them in a white van or truck.
The problem was that after every shooting, including the one the night before when Dean Myers was killed, we had witnesses reporting seeing a white van. Was this because we had programmed the public into looking for white vans and that was all they noticed? It has been proven time and again that the observations of witnesses can be influenced by predisposed ideas and beliefs. The general public in the entire area was panicked. People were afraid for their children and themselves. They were getting a constant diet of information overload from every news channel or radio channel concerning this case. That was affecting everybody in the area in a personal way like no other case.
All the news channels had talked about was white vans and trucks. Pictures of white vans and trucks were plastered all over the newspapers. Before working this case, I had never noticed how many white vans and trucks are on the road. Once we all started looking, it seemed that every other damn vehicle was a white van or truck. It didn’t matter if you were patrolling the interstate or cruising through the business districts, white vans and box trucks where everywhere. Was it possible that the citizens who were our witnesses were predisposed to report white vans or trucks after every shooting? I wasn’t the only one thinking this way. Virginia State Police superintendent Gerald Massengill had suggested in a news conference after the Myers shooting that civilians and police should not focus only on white vans or trucks.
As I reported for duty that morning and received my briefing from Detective Sergeant Cornwell, I wasn’t surprised that there was nothing new to report. Despite the shooting the night before, the script had just been repeated. A man was killed with a sniper’s bullet, and other than the bullet matching other shootings and more sightings of a white van, there was no new evidence.
Following every shooting there was a new influx of tips and calls into the various call centers, and now those had to be vetted and entered into Rapid Start and then fed into Case Explorer. By now we had numerous people calling to confess to the crimes. These calls went immediately to the top of the list to be run down in the form of a lead. In murders that get a lot of public attention, there is usually at least one person who calls to confess, and while we do go through the tedious process of eliminating the person as a suspect, in most of these cases the tip could be discounted easily because the confessor simply didn’t have enough credible information to describe the crime. But the sniper case was off the charts. Nothing could be immediately dismissed. Since we didn’t have much evidence to point us in any direction, everything had to be given high priority—the callers saying that God had come to them in the night and told them who the shooters were, the callers fingering someone in their lives they didn’t like, the clairvoyants describing exactly what the killers looked like.
All of this, like the majority of tip calls, were what I call noise. The higher the case profile, the more noise that is generated. In the sniper case, it felt like we were sitting in a Ford Pinto with all the windows closed, and concert-quality speakers were blaring incoherent white noise at us at full volume. It was overwhelming. But each of us had to fight through it, eliminate the noise, and stay focused on the mission. This was one of the few times in my career that I felt the case was out of control and the bad guys were calling all the shots while spitting in our faces, and there was nothing we could do about it except wait for them to make a recognizable mistake.
But I had a strong, strong feeling that we weren’t looking in the right place or asking the right questions. Through my years of working the streets, both in and out of uniform, I learned firsthand about what we call a cop’s sixth sense or cop’s intuition. Most cops know when something just doesn’t feel right. It may not be something they can legally act on, but they can feel it nevertheless.
My wife still gets irritated with me when it kicks in unexpectedly. We’ll be out somewhere and she’ll tell me to stop staring at somebody across the restaurant or in a store, or at another car stopped next to us at a traffic light. “Stop staring,” she’ll say. “There’s nothing wrong with that guy—he’s just going about his business.” We laugh and move on, but that sense has kept me alive several times during my days in narcotics and working the road. I’ve learned to trust that little voice, the one every cop out there has. Right now in this case, I thought, we need to tap into those thousands of little voices if we’re going to catch these guys.
In the operations center that morning, I sat back in one of the dirty-beige office chairs, the seat lumpy on one side. The wheels squeaked in protest, worn out from years of use. As I listened to the morning chatter among the group, it hit me. I knew how we could harness the instincts of the cops on the street. Cops see things that a regular person never sees. A good cop sees everything, and we had a shitload of good cops on the street.
Over the years, I frequently worked as a road trooper on the other end of a BOLO broadcast. During those lookouts, even though I was focused on trying to find a specific subject or vehicle, something else would suddenly catch my attention, for whatever reason: that little voice. What I had noticed maybe didn’t fit what we were currently looking for, but I would call in the information to our police communication operator—the PCO—and ask for a records check. Usually I would ask them to run a check on a tag number, just to see whom the vehicle belonged to and if there were any warrants or lookouts associated with it. Most of the time when I called in those checks, it was simply because something about the vehicle or the person in it didn’t seem right to me.
When the PCO runs that tag through Maryland vehicle records or the National Crime Information Center database to check on the registered owner and stolen vehicle reports, a permanent record of that tag and inquiry remains in the system. This is useful for many reasons. One, the record associates the inquiry with the police officer who requested the information; if the trooper becomes the victim of a crime, we can go back and see the last vehicle check the trooper ran, which might help us determine what happened. This permanent record also helps prevent police officers from abusing their power. We are supposed to run vehicle registrations for legitimate police business only, and there is a broad spectrum of reasons constituting “police business.” But there are also reasons for running tags that would be considered abuses of power, such as to find out the name and address of a pretty girl or your ex-girlfriend—a severe offense that can get you fired. So the name association in this data is key: it ensures that an accurate audit of these records can be completed for every police officer who uses the system.
My thought was that such recordkeeping might just help us in the sniper case. I knew that all our cops were focused on looking for the killers in a white van or truck, but cops don’t stop noticing other things as well. They continued to run records checks of other vehicles that had caught their attention. As we brainstormed in our corner of the operations center, I asked the group of analysts, police officers, and three of our HIDTA computer programmers to think about how we could use that information.
One suggestion I had was to draw a circle on a map at one mile, three miles, and five miles around each of the shooting locations. Then we could look at the records within those circles to see what anomalies came up. I wanted to know every tag number that had been checked by every cop in the area during a given time frame, which we decided would be from one hour before to one hour after each of the shootings. That meant we would start within that one-mile circle and expand out as we were able to get the information.
It was a great idea, but it presented huge logistical roadblocks. Because we would be looking in such a wide area, we would need to cull the records of two state systems and the District of Columbia. We would also need the records from the NCIC database. This meant getting the cooperation from administrators of all those systems. The job was also likely to be costly, both in man-hours and in computer programs for extracting the requested information. If we were able to obtain the info, it would come to us in several different program formats that would have to be converted to computer language readable by Case Explorer. We would then use Case Explorer to search for any common vehicle tags that came up at all of these shooting locations using the time-and-area parameters that we had set.
It all seemed like a monumental undertaking. And we couldn’t just give up on the calls that were still flooding in. We had to keep that up, plus continue to review Case Explorer data being churned out daily—data that needed to be vetted and sent to the field investigators. How were we going to do all this? Where would the additional manpower come from? I didn’t have answers to those questions, but I knew it was time for us to think and act outside the box.
Leave it to the geeks. The HIDTA programmers had a solution in mind. They said if they could get clean data, they could write programming into Case Explorer that would allow us to run a pattern search. This meant we could search through all the tags in the various police systems and come up with those tags that matched in each of the given regions using the time frame of one hour before and one hour after each of the shootings.
Suddenly there was renewed energy in the room. The analysts went back to looking through and evaluating tips and matches that Case Explorer was already producing, and Captain McAndrew set out to make sure the various database authorities would provide us with the information we needed. The technical modifications wouldn’t happen overnight, and there were many problems that each of these system administrators would need to overcome, including their own security protocols. But with all the obstacles, Captain McAndrew was the right man to head the effort.
As a former Marine, McAndrew was a commander I would have followed to hell and back; I knew he would never order me to do something that he wasn’t willing to do himself. Back when I was under his command, we’d had several nose-to-nose arguments about the way things should be done, and though I was able to get him to wiggle some in each of those arguments, he was the captain; he always won. Now, while it was comforting to know that he was in charge, I also knew he felt his responsibility deeply, and I could only guess the toll this case was taking on him. Not that he showed it like the rest of us. After eight days of my working nearly around the clock, my shirt and pants weren’t always ironed, and my tie was loose around my neck. McAndrew looked like a Marine recruiting poster. His suit and tie always looked fresh and pressed. Detective Sergeant Cornwell, who was every bit as exhausted as I was, wondered out loud if McAndrew was spraying Scotch Guard on the inside of his suits. He never appeared to sweat.