October 21, Monday, 8 a.m. The letter didn’t come as a surprise to any of us working on the task force. The snipers were trying to show us that they were in charge. They were angry that their deadline had passed without their stolen credit card being activated so they could access their $10 million. They wanted us to know that the killing of Conrad Johnson was the result of our refusal to show them respect or to bow to their demands. Now they repeated those demands and said, essentially, that the next victim was up to us—and their postscript indicated that they would target another child. The stakes in this case were already the highest of any investigation I had ever been involved in. And after more than twenty years in law enforcement, I knew that the snipers’ letter would have the opposite effect of what they intended. Troopers do not bow to threats.
In an effort to prevent what we all feared was about to happen, Chief Moose once again conducted a press conference in front of his headquarters in Rockville. Not surprisingly, the press was all over the killing of Conrad Johnson. News crews were closely monitoring the comings and goings of cops in and about the operations center, and they could tell something was happening. Cops were coming, but not leaving. There wasn’t the usual smaller number of personnel at night.
Visibly exhausted and emotional, Chief Moose once again spoke directly to the snipers, using the mass media coverage as a communications tool. He played to their god complex, and he tried to de-escalate the anger that was expressed in their latest letter. He announced to the public that he could not assure the safety of anybody.
Watching his press conference, I felt sorry for Moose. How does any law enforcement officer stand in front of the media and tell the public—which he, like all of us, had taken a solemn oath to defend and protect—that they were not safe, that he could not assure their safety? It’s our job to make the public feel safe. Of course we know we can’t possibly protect every single person, but it’s still a very bitter pill for a police chief to have to go on live television and admit it. Chief Moose did what he needed to do, though: he needed to placate the killers and hopefully stop them—or at least delay them—from killing again. He was buying us time.
And maybe it would be enough. By now Case Explorer had created another lead for us. During seven of the shootings, a blue Caprice with New Jersey tags NDA-21Z had been spotted within a five-mile radius of the crime scenes and within an hour before or after the shootings. My hunch that cops had seen these guys and run the tags had been correct. The snipers had drawn the suspicions of police. But since the tags had come back valid, with no wants or warrants, there was no reason to stop them. We were all looking for a white van or truck, not a blue Caprice. That’s how the snipers had been able to drive through the roadblocks and lookouts unchallenged.
The reports of a Caprice, which had been mentioned at two of the shootings, had never made it to our radar. In hindsight, that looms as a huge mistake. The problem was partly that the investigation spanned two states and the District of Columbia, and information sharing back then was nothing like it is today. But we can’t discount our own culpability. We had become blindly focused on a white van or truck, convinced that all those witnesses who had kept reporting such vehicles had to be right.
Now that we could put that Caprice at or around several of the shooting scenes, however, we began conducting further record checks to see if this tag had been run by any other police officer, anywhere, at any time. Sure enough, during the first week of the shooting spree a Baltimore City Police officer had spotted the car parked in an alley in Baltimore with two people in it. The officer had run the tag because where the car was parked and the two people in it seemed suspicious. But the vehicle had checked out as properly registered and not reported stolen, and a routine ID check showed that neither occupant was wanted for anything. So the officer shooed them out of the alley, and the killers went on their way. This also confirmed my suspicion that while they were doing their killing in Montgomery and Prince George’s County in Maryland, in D.C., and in Northern Virginia, they were lying low in the opposite direction. Since they had been rousted once in Baltimore, I was convinced that they were now in my neighborhood—Frederick County.
By Tuesday morning, the bullets removed from the stump in Washington State had been matched ballistically to the rifle used in the killings in the D.C. Metro area. Plus, we were working at placing the blue Caprice at or near the scene of the shootings, and we were still waiting final confirmation on the fingerprint match from Alabama. The task force, as a whole, was working all across the country to firm up what we suspected. We wanted enough evidence and probable cause to seek these guys out and legally take them into custody.
But we had to be especially careful to make sure our evidence had been collected properly and examined thoroughly, and that an ironclad chain of custody for that evidence was maintained. Everything had to survive any legal challenge that some defense attorney down the road might mount. Evidence collected in the field and analyzed over weeks could come down to collection and storage methods. Since evidence was coming in from all over the country, primary investigators needed to mount a coordinated effort that was documented in a meticulously detailed and straightforward manner. That takes time. It’s easy, as an investigator, to want to go, go, go, especially under the pressure of trying to prevent further killing. But speed could also hurt us. Everything had to be done correctly so that when we did get them, we could get them off the street forever, guilty beyond any reasonable doubt.
In the afternoon, Chief Moose again took center stage at another news conference, still trying to buy us the time we needed to firm up our case. He released the postscript of the first letter: “your children are not safe any time or anywhere.” Public fear grew. Meanwhile, the press didn’t understand what Moose was trying to do. A few wondered if the police were now being played like puppets by the killers. Little did they know that Chief Moose’s words were the result of much discussion and many years of law-enforcement training. Experts deeply involved in the investigation, including profilers, were advising the chief on what he should and shouldn’t say.
Meanwhile, inside the JOC, tensions were rising. That is natural as a case comes close to conclusion. Of course there’s excitement, but sometimes emotions take a negative turn. That was clear during a meeting in a conference room at the JOC later that day. Most of us there had been in this room more than we had been home in the last three weeks. Like the hastily assembled operations center itself, the men and women in the room looked like a mixed bag of doughnuts. Some were in business attire; the FBI agents had their jackets on and their ties straight. Detectives from the Montgomery County Police Department were jacketless, as was I. Our ties were hanging loose, with the top buttons of our shirts unbuttoned. Several in the room wore black BDUs (battle dress uniforms) and were fully armed, with tactical holsters and boots.
Despite how we looked as a group, all of us had one thing in common: we were exhausted. We, along with some nine hundred other cops, had spent the better part of twenty-two days, most of us working sixteen- to eighteen-hour days, using our collective experience, energy, and tenacity in an effort to identify and bring to justice the Beltway snipers. This new task force had come together and was working as a cohesive unit.
Up until this moment.
The purpose of this meeting of the task force leadership was to make sure that our information was correct and to form a plan. After twenty-two days of intense investigation, we now knew who the killers were. We had names, and we had a vehicle license number. It was go time.
My eyes were glazing over. I was tired, but that wasn’t it. I couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Two federal agents, who oversaw their respective agencies (FBI and ATF), were arguing over who was going to release the information or BOLO. I looked at Captain Bernie Forysth, Montgomery County Police Department, the lead investigator for the case. I knew what he was thinking—how could we have come so far so well and now be arguing over who gets to appear before the sea of media waiting outside the joint operations center? We had known it was coming—how could it not? This was a high-profile case. Egos were taking over. Now, as we were closing in, the agencies were wrestling for control.
There is a long-standing joke among local and state law enforcement about the FBI: Three K-9 officers and their K-9 partners are standing in front of a residence preparing to serve a search-and-seizure warrant. One officer is a county officer and his dog, one officer is a state trooper and his dog, and the third is a federal agent and his dog.
The county guy says to the other two, “Watch this.” He sends his dog into the house and you hear cussing and screaming and furniture crashing. After a few minutes, the dog comes out and throws a package containing a kilo of cocaine at his handler’s feet. The deputy says, “What do you think about that?”
“That’s very good,” says the trooper, “but watch this.” He sends his dog into the same house and you hear more cussing, screaming, and crashing furniture. After a few minutes, the dog comes out of the house and gently lays an explosive device at the feet of the trooper. The trooper says, “Now what do you think about that?”
The federal agent looks at the other two and says, “That’s nothing, watch this.” His dog walks over and screws the other two dogs, then puts out a press release.
I used to find that joke hilarious, but somehow it didn’t seem so funny now.
Late in the afternoon Chief Moose addressed the snipers in a third press conference of that very busy day. “We have researched the options you stated,” he said, “and found it is not possible electronically to comply in the manner that you requested. However, we remain open and ready to talk to you about the options you have mentioned. It is important that we do this without anyone else getting hurt. Call us at the same number you used before to obtain the eight hundred number that you have requested. If you would feel more comfortable, a private post office box or another secure method could be provided. You indicated that this is about more than violence. We are waiting to hear from you.”
Chief Moose was doing his best to make the snipers believe they were in control—that they were eventually going to get their $10 million. The thinking was that if we could buy just a little more time, we could get these guys. But we also knew that if they went off the rails in anger, more people were going to die in the process.
As the twentieth day of the investigation slowly turned into the twenty-first day, none of us working the intelligence side of the case had gone home for three days. As viable information became available, we picked up our pace. None of us wanted this investigation to fail because the intelligence group had dropped the ball. There was no way in hell I would quit or stop longer than to go to the bathroom, and nobody on my team would quit either.
I remember looking at Detective Sergeant Cornwell. “Dan,” I said, “you look like hell.”
“You don’t look any better than I do,” he said. “I know you’re not going home, so I’m not, either.”
I had been sending people home over the past several days only to see them back a few hours later, bent over their computers reviewing leads and evaluating what Case Explorer was spitting out. These cops, troopers, agents, and civilian analysts who had come together for this case were giving it everything they had. They were unsung heroes—they and the other nine-hundred-plus people working on this case. Whether we met with success or failure, I was damn proud to be part of this group.
But there comes a point when working without rest brings diminishing results. We had reached that point, and productivity was slipping. On October 23 at 1 a.m., Detective Sergeant Cornwell, Captain McAndrew, and I ordered everybody on duty to go home for a few hours, get some sleep, and be back in the morning ready to go for what we all hoped was the final push. We now had an idea of who the killers were and what they might be driving. We needed to turn that idea into proof.
Then we had to go out there and find what rock these scumbags were hiding under before even more people were killed.
The losses so far were already unacceptable, and even though we had sent our people home, I didn’t plan to go. But Captain McAndrew had other ideas. He knew me about as well as anybody else on the MSP. “You really need to go home,” he said. “And if nothing else, do everybody a favor and take a shower.”