Independent Perspective News

BY JEFF GLASSER

When the deadly rampage of alleged snipers John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo came to a stunning end last week, the massive police task force that worked round the clock got a well-deserved round of applause. But experts say the postmortems will also reveal tantalizing missed opportunities and bureaucratic snafus–as well as a host of lessons learned from the investigation's failures andits successes.

Authorities say serial killers who move around expose a basic weakness in American law enforcement–there are some 19,000 different departments nationwide. In the sniper case, a patchwork of 13 local and federal law enforcement entities struggled to coordinate their pursuit of a duo whose alleged crimes spread across six counties in two states and the District of Columbia. "We don't have a system in place to deal with a serial killer like this," says David Schertler, who prosecuted homicide cases for the U.S. attorney's office in Washington, D.C.

Agencies that guard their territory like independent grand duchies duplicated witness interviews, according to a source close to the investigation. Instead of answering to a single chain of command, the investigators took their marching orders from respective supervisors. "One more week and you would have seen a major overhaul of the operation," says Vernon Geberth, a former New York City detective who teaches homicide investigation techniques.

The problem was compounded by out-of-date computers; the FBI's Rapid Start system was cynically labeled "Rapid Stop," according to published reports. "The 'Rapid Start' system is . . . not meant to handle this kind of volume," says former cop John Cohen, now a law-enforcement consultant.

Information overload. The processing of tips from the public also became a nightmare; authorities had to set up an 800 number tip line in Montgomery County because 911 lines were overwhelmed. Instead of staffing it with professionals, the FBI had trainees answer the phones; the sniper complained in a note that initially the call takers did not take him seriously during a key October 17 exchange and five other calls. "We need to make it easier for people to get through to authorities," says Cohen. Federal officials countered that it was hard to sort the real from the phony when they were logging 400 calls an hour and asserted that more experienced investigators were needed in the field.

The dizzying array of law enforcement databases proved both a blessing and a curse. A key break in the case was provided by a federal database that contained a fingerprint of Malvo obtained by the Immigration and Naturalization Service; that matched a latent print from the Montgomery, Ala., liquor store killing, but local police who first investigated that case didn't have quick or ready access to that database. Similar concerns were raised following 9/11. In April, the president of the International Association of Chiefs of Police complained that the design of the federal databases "has the effect of limiting the ability of state and local law enforcement agencies to access vital information."

By contrast, there was lots of information from witnesses and "profilers," but much of it turned out to be erroneous. Candice DeLong, a retired FBI profiler, notes that profiling is "an art as well as a science," but the public may have been swayed by profilers saying that the culprit was likely to be a single, white loner. Similarly, early witness statements caused authorities to focus on a white van or box truck. On October 12, Washington, D.C., Police Chief Charles Ramsey said a Chevrolet Caprice was also being sought, but Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose downplayed the Caprice the next day.

Some experts did give Moose and the task force high marks for their use of the press. "They did a great job drawing out the dialogue with the sniper," says Louis Hennessy, former head of the homicide unit for the Washington, D.C., police. "The information helped . . . capture the suspects." But task force investigators initially didn't want the description and license-plate number of the suspects' vehicle released; it leaked out anyway, and a truck driver alerted police to the car's location. "To be blunt," says the source close to the investigation, "if the [trucker] didn't hear the newscast about plates, those guys could still be out on the road."