This letter provided us a wealth of information that could be quickly verified and followed up on. And ironically, for what seemed like the first time during the investigation, the press didn’t learn of the letter’s existence. In fact, few people within the task force knew about this letter, and even fewer knew what was in it.
Almost from the start, we had believed that these crimes weren’t committed by a single shooter. Now we had confirmation—they had referred to themselves as “us.” We also now could rest assured that this wasn’t an organized plot. The letter had included the childish red stars; no terrorist would pen a letter to the police and adorn it with stickers that undermined the seriousness of their message. Another clue to their lack of sophistication—the killers wanted $10 million deposited into a Visa credit card account. Even if we wanted to give these morons $10 million, there was no way it could be done on a credit card. The account holder’s name and account number in the letter also represented a very significant lead. A credit card meant there was an electronic trail associated with it. We figured that the card owner, Jill Lynn Farell, was a likely crime victim—possibly of a previous homicide not yet connected to the killers, or the victim of a theft or robbery. Either way, the card number could easily be traced to where it originated and where it had been used since it was stolen.
The calls referenced in the letter also proved to be of significant help. Just as we had feared, the killers’ calls to our task force hadn’t been properly entered into Rapid Start, but we had a good lead on their call to a priest in Ashland. Moving quickly, investigators were able to identify the priest and interview him. He said he had received a call from a man identifying himself as the sniper. The caller told the priest that the police should be looking in “Montgomery” at a “liquor store robbery.” The priest admitted that he hadn’t taken the call seriously and hadn’t reported it to authorities; he thought his caller was just another troubled soul wanting to confess his sins or get credit for being the Beltway sniper.
We didn’t blame him. As I said before, there are a lot of troubled souls out there looking for attention. Responding to these calls is like dealing with the man in the theater who habitually yells “fire.” After being fooled the first few times, people stop listening. Then when there really is a fire, nobody pays attention, and everybody burns to death. The priest should have called the police after his phone conversation with the man who turned out to be one of the snipers, but would we have picked up right away on this tip? Or would we have lumped it in with the thousands of other calls we would eventually need to get to?
After interviewing the priest, investigators turned their attention to Montgomery County. What would have been so significant about a liquor store robbery? There had been several liquor store robberies in the county, but, on the surface, none appeared to have any characteristics that would have matched with the sniper case.
I don’t know who realized it, but it soon dawned on investigators that they might be looking in the wrong “Montgomery”—maybe the snipers weren’t referring to Montgomery County, Maryland. So investigators began searching the national crime databases, homing in on other Montgomerys. Eventually they ran across a case that loosely fit the profile and style of the Beltway snipers: on September 21, 2002—less than two weeks before the first shooting through the window of that Michaels store in Maryland—a woman was shot in the face, execution style, as she exited a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama.
Digging deeper, investigators learned that the victim, an employee of the liquor store, was walking out of the store when she was approached by two unidentified black males. Without saying a word, one of the men pulled a pistol and shot her in the face. The bullet passed through the victim’s head and shattered the large front window of the liquor store. Clerks working inside reported seeing the men running from the scene. As they fled, they dropped the pistol, and other witnesses saw a folded magazine falling out of the pocket of one of the men.
Law enforcement in Montgomery, Alabama, never entered this case into the FBI’s VICAP database. A VICAP entry is voluntary on the part of investigating police agencies, and there can be any number of reasons for a particular case not being entered. Budgetary constraints always loom large, and voluntary programs such as VICAP are often sacrificed in favor of applying human resources to the demands of basic needs. But of course this was another missed opportunity. Early in the investigation, we had linked VICAP to Case Explorer. With our sketchy evidence on the sniper investigation, Case Explorer might never have made the link to that brutal murder in Alabama; we will never know. But if it had made that link, we would have saved at least twenty-four hours, and that could well have saved someone’s life. This is the kind of thing that eats at the soul of every investigator.
As crime scene techs worked the Alabama shooting site that night in September, they collected the gun and the magazine. There was nothing useful found on the gun—no prints or identifiers. But investigators were able to lift a single fingerprint from a page in a Guns & Ammo magazine the snipers had been looking through. This was a rare find. Despite popular belief, perpetuated by decades of crime and police dramas, criminals are rarely identified and crimes solved on the basis of one fingerprint. In fact, lifting good, usable prints at all is a huge challenge. Most of the time there are no usable prints because the criminals wear gloves. Or they slide their hands across objects, smearing the prints. Or the things they touch aren’t suitable for obtaining a clean print. But it just so happens that the glossy paper used to publish magazines is perfect for collecting fingerprint evidence.
So the evidence techs got lucky. But the next hurdle in using a fingerprint to identify a suspect is that the recovered print needs to match a set of prints that have already been entered in one of the many fingerprint files maintained at both the federal and state level. Anytime a person is arrested, a full set of fingerprints is saved on an FBI fingerprint card and submitted to the FBI lab in West Virginia. Criminal record checks through NCIC are based on forwarding fingerprint cards and arrest information to the FBI. If the suspect was never arrested or fingerprinted, your record check will hit a dead end.
In addition to the FBI system, every state has its own fingerprint database. Depending on the individual state laws and procedures, prints are kept for such transactions as gun purchases, handgun permits, and security clearances, as well as for job applications for teachers, day-care center operators, and child-care workers. Because these records aren’t related to a criminal offense, they are not kept in the FBI file. There are also other fingerprint databases, such as the one the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services maintains on illegal aliens or other noncitizens who have come in contact with Immigration.
At the time of their investigation into the liquor store murder, law enforcement in Montgomery, Alabama, ran the single lifted fingerprint from the Guns & Ammo magazine against the FBI database but did not receive a match. They didn’t go on to conduct a nationwide search, however, so their print remained on file only locally.
Now, because of the possibility that the Alabama case was related to the Beltway sniper case, we ran that lone print against all the fingerprint databases nationwide. It would take time for the computer system to return anything, of course, and then those records would have to be checked and verified by fingerprint comparison experts. But within a few hours we had a match. The task force had our first name. Eventually, we would have a face to go with it.