October 14, 8:00 a.m., Monday. During a daily White House press briefing, President Bush’s press secretary was asked about the sniper investigation. He said that the president was receiving daily briefings on the investigation, and that the White House was in constant contact with both federal and local law enforcement agencies. The press secretary emphasized that the president was very concerned.
We of course appreciated the president’s interest in the case. The White House had been very supportive of our efforts and had seen to it that the full measure of federal resources was available to us. But of course presidential concern comes with a full measure of pressure as well. I had experienced pressure from elected officials to solve a case before, on other investigations. But there’s nothing like pressure emanating from the White House. That produces a whole new level of stress.
So it was doubly dismaying that, at very nearly the same moment the press secretary was speaking, tragedy struck again. This time it was one of our own who fell victim to the sniper’s bullet. FBI analyst Linda Franklin was with her husband at a Falls Church, Virginia, Home Depot and was loading her purchases into the back of her car. She was struck with a bullet from the same .223-caliber rifle, killing her instantly.
We had feared that a trooper or fellow officer would be targeted, but Franklin hadn’t been involved in the sniper investigation, and none of the analysts working with us knew her. When she was shot, she wasn’t wearing anything that would have identified her as FBI. Though we would go on to investigate any possible connection or motive that would have explained Franklin’s being specifically targeted, the shooting appeared to be just as random as all the others. The snipers seemed to have killed a member of the law enforcement family without realizing it.
The location for this shooting was the most populated and crowded area yet. It was a bright, early fall morning, and there were other customers and employees walking in and out of the store, and plenty of parked vehicles in the parking lot. As police responded to the scene, roadblocks were quickly established. A witness told the police that he had seen the shooters. He described them as two white males driving a white van. His story was believable—his description of the vehicle matched previous descriptions, and the way he described the two white males fit the profile that had been broadcast and rebroadcast a hundred times over the past twelve days. Once again, the entire investigative team refocused on this mysterious white van. Several teams of investigators spent the next four days following up on the eyewitness account.
Yet only after the entire investigation was totally sidetracked did the truth come out. Under intense scrutiny, the witness admitted that he didn’t see a thing. He admitted to doing it for the attention; he had just wanted to help. His help ended in his arrest for making a false statement and a false report to a police officer.
This really was nothing new and shouldn’t have been a surprise to any of us. False reports and false leads from attention seekers happen quite often in high-profile cases. But the worst thing about attention-seeker statements is that their false leads eat up valuable police time and resources, giving the killers just that much more time to plot their next move.
Once we discounted the false witness, we were back where we had been before the Franklin killing. Other than the matching bullet, there simply was nothing in the form of evidence that could point this investigation in the right direction. Video cameras in and around the store and parking lot once again provided nothing of value. How could these killers stay so invisible?
The next four days were quiet, no additional shootings. Unfortunately, during that time we were unable to make any relevant progress. Following various leads, we had uncovered a multitude of other criminal offenses, but none had provided anything useful to the case we were trying to solve. While no one ever said it out loud, I know there was an underlying fear growing within the JOC: Maybe we’ll never find the killers. What if they just stopped their killing and melted back into the population as easily as they had emerged? It wouldn’t be the first time a psychopath serial killer had simply vanished, only to pop up years later in another city on the opposite side of the country.
One morning during the four-day reprieve, I took a break from the center along with Detective Sergeant Cornwell and a couple of civilian analysts. Our goal was to find some decent breakfast—we had just about had it with the cold cereal and Pop Tarts on the hallway catering tables. All of us had worked late the night before, and I had come back in early. It was obvious to me that the group needed to get out of the operations center and step away from the case for a while.
We got into my unmarked car and drove onto Rockville Pike, the main north-south drag in Montgomery County. On a normal weekday morning around 9 a.m., we should have had a hard time navigating through heavy morning traffic. Rockville Pike is lined with shopping centers, businesses, corporations, convenience stores, gas stations, and restaurants and is typically very, very busy. But now, as we headed to a nearby Denny’s, the street was eerily quiet. Few people were out, other than patrol cars and the occasional delivery truck. It reminded me of the streets of an abandoned city in a zombie movie.
I pulled into the parking lot. A car and a truck were parked around the side, with no other cars in the lot. The restaurant blinds were drawn, and the place looked closed. Usually there were people sitting outside on the park benches waiting for a table, but not today. As I pulled into a parking space, I saw the Venetian blinds move in one of the windows. A young woman peeked out between the blinds. “What the hell?” I said, looking at Cornwell. “Has the entire region been paralyzed to the point that a chain restaurant is afraid to open?”
Cornwell looked out the window warily. “I don’t know,” he said. “But I’ve never seen anything like this before.” He paused. “If we step out of this car, we’re likely targets.”
I exhaled hard. “Screw this,” I said. “You can’t live in fear, and you can’t live forever,” and I stepped out from behind the wheel of the car. I must admit that I was instantly scanning for anything that wasn’t right—a glint of sun off a rifle scope, a door or trunk lid that wasn’t completely closed. Anything. The hair was raised on the back of my neck.
The blinds closed, and I imagine the young woman must have been relieved when she saw us get out. I was in civilian business attire, my tie slightly loose around my neck, the top button of my shirt unbuttoned—but I was wearing a black raid-style jacket with the word POLICE boldly printed in a silver fluorescent material across my chest and back, and the state police patch was sewn on the top of each sleeve at the shoulder. The jacket covered my holstered .40-caliber Beretta sidearm. Cornwell was dressed similarly, except his tie was properly tight to his collar, and his top button was buttoned. Dan was always much more squared away than I was. He had come into the state police the same way we all had, but he was a technology guy and had begun his police career as a flight paramedic on one of our helicopters. He didn’t have a lot of street or investigative experience, and he always made sure he looked good. As for me, fourteen years of working undercover in blue jeans, T-shirts, and baseball caps had clearly and permanently taken the shine off. I kept telling Dan that if he continued hanging out with me, I was sure that that state police polish of his would scuff up a bit.
The four of us walked into the restaurant. We were the only customers. Besides us, there were two waitresses and one cook in the entire place. The waitress who greeted us was about twenty-five years old. The look of relief on her face was evident.
“Not too busy today?” I asked.
“Just a few customers,” she said. “I was afraid to come in to work, but I had to.”
“Boss make you?”
“Single mom. I need the money.”
She said that she and the other workers had closed all the blinds so the snipers couldn’t see who was in the restaurant, or where they were. This was the first time that it had hit home to me personally how much of an effect the snipers were having on our entire community. Sure, I had seen the TV news reports about people crawling on their bellies while they put gas in their cars, but this was the first time I had stood face to face with a resident who was in fear.
While it was nice to get away from the operations center and enjoy some fresh, hot food, the four of us ate in silence. We weren’t in the mood for small talk, and the outing did nothing to help us put the investigation out of our minds. In fact it was just the opposite. By the time we had finished eating, my temper was near the boiling point. How dare these bastards hide in the bushes behind rifle sights? How dare they do this to our community—and, for that matter, to our country? Our system felt truly fragile. The police are the thin blue line, but that line felt kind of threadbare at the moment.
On the way back to the operations center, I gave my friend Lieutenant Tom Chase of the Frederick City Police Department a call. I brought him up to speed on everything I knew, which wasn’t much.
“Nothing new here, either,” Chase said.
“Still,” I said, “I can’t help thinking these fuckers are laying their heads north of where the shootings are going down.”
“So that would land them somewhere in Frederick County?”
“That’s what I think. They started their killing in Montgomery County, then moved south into the District of Columbia before moving even farther south into Virginia. Then they moved back up I-95 and east into Prince George’s County, where they shot the kid. It only makes sense that they would lie low in the direction where they haven’t caused any trouble. Beyond what the FBI profilers have put out, that’s where I’m at.”
“I have to agree,” Chase said. “Any word on the vehicle?”
“Nothing. Just that damn white van or truck we’ve been chasing with no luck. Honestly? I think we have the wrong vehicle. They may be gutless rat bastards, but they would have to be complete idiots to still be in that fucking white van—if they were ever in one in the first place. We would’ve turned something up by now. But this trail is too cold. These fuckers are street smart, Tom, and they have the cops chasing their own tails. And they’re getting off on this shit.”
“Yet everyone’s reporting it,” Chase said.
“Exactly. Even the public is on high alert. So why would they stay in a vehicle that’s the most sought-after van in the country? It would take extreme stupidity . . . or extreme arrogance.”
I told him about the emerging god complex that was manifesting as this thing progressed. “But the god complex that the killers obviously have might make them appear a little crazy, but not totally stupid,” I added. “If they were stupid, what are we?”
I filled Chase in on our lead-production process, which had smoothed out considerably during the lull from the killings. We were still several days behind because of the sheer number of tips, but Case Explorer was working well, and we were successfully able to do the link analysis, matching names and information from the tips calls with criminal records, gun ownership, vehicle registration information, and other factors that fit our parameters.
I hung up as we pulled into the operations center parking lot. I couldn’t help feeling a little depressed about what I had just told Chase. After all this time, and all we had done, there was still nothing positive that we could take out of it. The one bright spot was that the requested information concerning the police checks on vehicle tags was beginning to come in. The tech guys were working hard on converting the data into a usable format for Case Explorer, and Case Explorer was being adapted to analyze the data on the search pattern of one, three, and five miles out from each shooting, occurring from an hour before to an hour after each shooting.
That was a real challenge for the programmers, and they were getting close. I’m not a computer guy, and I don’t know anything about the technical details of what they were doing, but even I knew that this should usually take months, if not years, to develop. These guys were doing it in less than a week. I worried about how long our programmers could hold up under this kind of pressure, with all the hours they were putting in and all the caffeine, candy bars, and sodas they were consuming. But they showed no signs of giving up, or quitting. At the moment, they were our best shot at getting to the bottom of this.