October 11, 9:30 a.m. Kenneth Bridges was pumping gas into his car at an Exxon station just off I-95 in Fredericksburg when he was struck and killed by a sniper’s bullet. Just a few hundred yards away, a uniformed Virginia state trooper was working an accident on the side of the road. Hearing the shot, he rushed to the scene, but there was nothing he could do. Once again, witnesses reported seeing a white van with two men inside leaving the area and heading for I-95.
Acting on a response plan they had worked out prior to the shooting, Virginia authorities shut down both Route 1 and I-95. Since I-95 is the major north–south highway on the East Coast, the resulting traffic jam was instant and massive.
Ordinarily, any police activity that resulted in the closing of I-95 anywhere between New York City and Richmond would cause a public uproar, and the telephones of politicians would be screaming with complaints. In this case, there were very few objections from the public. People were scared, and they looked to the police to catch the killers and put a stop to this nightmare. Yet it was a fruitless effort—the roadblocks and searches didn’t provide any additional leads or information. Once again, the police were focused on a white van.
Within minutes of the latest shooting, the media swarmed to the scene. Media outlets from around the world were tuned to police radio communications, meaning that any police response or effort was immediately reported. Traffic reports were broadcasting locations of roadblocks. It doesn’t take a genius to figure out that the killers were likely listening, and so knew which routes to avoid.
Back at the operations center, a hundred or so of us watched the news reports and live coverage from the scene. There didn’t seem to be anything that any of us could do to help, a truly frustrating feeling. We were generating leads with the information we had, but were we wasting our time? There was no way of knowing the answer to that until the snipers were caught, which we all knew would happen sooner or later. My only question was, how many more people would have to die before we ran these monsters to ground?
One thing that struck me about this most recent shooting was that a state trooper was standing outside his patrol car less than fifty yards from the scene of Bridges’s death. The shooters had to have seen the trooper. He would have been an easy target and an obvious opportunity for them, so why didn’t they shoot him? Was the shooting of a citizen right under the noses of the police a message? Were they saying, “Look at us, we can kill who we want, when we want, even with the police standing nearby, and there’s nothing you can do to stop us”? Or were they afraid to take on a police officer, who could shoot back? I think it was a combination. They liked to play God, and they chose a cowardly method—content to hide and shoot unarmed people who were powerless to fight back. Either way, it was a brazen act to shoot someone with a trooper so close by.
This thought actually gave me hope. The snipers were starting to get comfortable with what they were doing. It’s one hell of a thing when the loss of a person’s life gave me hope of finding these bastards, but comfort means mistakes. And mistakes meant that, sooner or later, we would get a break in the case. When a mistake did come, we needed to be on guard and looking for it.
When the preplanned roadblocks failed to turn up anything, I felt more strongly than ever that we were looking for the wrong vehicle. The roadblock searches had gone on for hours, and thousands of vehicles had been vetted, but once again the snipers simply merged back into the masses. They were hiding in plain sight, and we needed to get that tag check information from the various states and get it downloaded into Case Explorer, and it couldn’t happen fast enough. The requests had been made, and the states and D.C. system administrators were working as quickly as possible to cull the requested information from their systems. Our HIDTA programmers were going at it nonstop, determined to make this work.
But our people were wearing out. We had been working around the clock for more than nine days. Besides getting little sleep, the troopers and civilian personnel under my command weren’t eating well. They were stopping long enough to grab something off the catering table in the hallway and fill their coffee cups yet again. There was just so much work to do—the number of tips that had come in over the numerous tip lines was now well into five figures. We had generated more than one hundred of what we considered “hot leads,” each of which required our analysts to do complete background checks on the subject of the lead—and doing it in a few hours, not the usual two weeks of database searches and analysis such checks normally required.
The idle chat during breaks had stopped. There were no longer conversations concerning our kids, our families, our favorite restaurants. The pressure was mounting in all of us, right up to Captain McAndrew and me. It was the kind of pressure that can result in mistakes, and we couldn’t afford that. We could not have our people so exhausted that they made poor decisions, or failed to notice something that was out of place.
It was time to order people to go home, take a day off, think about something other than this damn case. We all wanted to keep going until the killers were off the street, but this was no longer a sprint, it was a marathon. We had to be smart about how we used our team. We had to keep everybody fresh. Now more than ever, we needed them to be at their best.
So over the weekend of October 12–13, we ordered our troopers, civilian analysts, and programmers to take a day off. No more working longer than eight to ten hours a day, either. With no new weekend shootings—so far—we were able to take a few deep breaths and review what we had already done in such a short period of time. The goal was to tighten our processes and tie up loose ends left from the frenetic first few days.
I didn’t take any days off, but I did limit myself to eight-hour shifts. I was able to go home, get some rest, spend some time with my family, and get a few good home-cooked meals. I hate to admit it, but I hadn’t realized how important all of that was until this case came along. When I was in narcotics, I worked crazy hours and long shifts that sometimes had me in the field for three days at a stretch. I didn’t think anything about it then, but I was younger, and there wasn’t the same amount of pressure. Not like this.
But by Sunday evening, day eleven of the case, I was feeling rejuvenated, and my resolve was back full force. Though we had nothing new to hang our hats on, everybody’s outlook had improved. What we didn’t know, however, was that over the weekend Chief Ramsey of the Metro police had said in a scheduled press conference that his department was still interested in finding the older model burgundy Caprice that had been reported in a shooting in the city. Once again, that information never got passed to the Intelligence Division. No one working in or around the joint operations center knew about it. I’m not saying there was intentional withholding of information by any of the police agencies involved; the problem was just the sheer magnitude of the investigation. This case was like a centipede. It had a hundred legs, but too many of them were marching in different directions.
So, now, was the media. When there is nothing new to report, the press becomes more aggressive. Reporters were now beginning to follow investigators. At least that confusion was funny. We amused ourselves by gathering in a group at the lobby door just before leaving. This would get the press’s attention. Then we would all run out, jump in our cars, and speed out of the parking lot in different directions. It never failed; heading out of the lot, I would look in the rearview mirror and see several press people running to their cars. It was fun watching them try to figure out which one of us to follow. On this particular Sunday evening, a reporter tailed me some thirty miles from Montgomery County well into Frederick County before finally figuring out that I wasn’t running a hot lead; I was simply heading home.