INTRODUCTION My name is Charles A. Moose. I have been a police officer, at the writing of this book, for more than twenty-eight years. That's more than half of my life. It's the only real job I've ever had. I didn't start out wanting to be a police officer. In the town where I grew up, at the time when I grew up-in Lexington, North Carolina, in the 1950s and 1960s-all a young black man wanted from the police was to be left alone. I was afraid of them. I never had any interaction with them. I was never arrested, or even harassed. That's because I knew enough to stay away from all the places where I'd run into them. I wasn't a criminal. My family wasn't victimized by criminals. I didn't go near the Do Drop Inn, which was a nightclub in our part of town, where the criminals hung out, so I didn't see firsthand any of the arrests that I heard about taking place there. I didn't know the police. I never met a police officer or a sheriff. But I knew they were bad. I believed they were associated with the Ku Klux Klan. I believed they beat up black people, and put them in jail, and worse. I believed they were involved in cross burnings and lynchings. I believed they made up cases, falsified evidence and told lies. If you were black, and you were arrested, God help you. When I was a senior in college, I started planning to go to law school. I still had no contact with the police, and I didn't know anything about the law, but I knew which side I wanted to be on: I wanted to be on the side of the people defending themselves against the police. So I took a class in criminology. I thought it would help me be a better defense attorney. Then I got tricked into meeting a recruiter from the Portland Police Bureau in Oregon. One of my professors told me he'd let me skip a test if I went and met with the recruiter. I was always eager to skip a test, so I went. I met the recruiter and took a qualifying examination. I passed. That led to my being offered a job. I took the job, thinking only that it would give me a perspective on the police that would be useful for my work as a defense attorney. It was a look at the inside. I'd see how the police made up cases, falsified evidence and stretched the facts. I was hired by the Portland Police Bureau on an eighteen-month probation, which was standard for all new recruits. This meant going to the police academy, getting trained, being partnered with another officer, then learning how to be a patrol officer on your own. I told myself I would do the eighteen months. Then it would be on my résumé. I would have the credit for becoming a police officer. But something unexpected happened to me. As a police officer, I got a close look at crime, and the people doing the crime and the people being victimized by crime. I saw people taking advantage of other people. I saw people hurting other people. I didn't see the police hurting them, even though I didn't see the police doing all that much to help them, either. And I saw that I had the opportunity to do something about that. The power goes out in a thunderstorm, and you're driving by the JCPenney in your district. You find the back door kicked in. Inside, you find people stealing everything in sight. You get a call on a "rape in progress." You go in, and find a guy who's been raping and beating an old woman, and he's running out the back door. You get a child abuse call, and find someone who's been trying to have sex with babies. You get a call on a burglary, and the victim is a poor black woman. This isn't some rich suburban family, where the thief has stolen the woman's diamonds and pearls. It's a poor black woman who lives in government housing, and the thief has stolen her cheap costume jewelry and her TV set and her food stamps. And here was the big surprise to me: The people doing this terrible stuff were black people. It was real black-on-black crime. It's not what I thought. It wasn't black people being victimized by the police. It was black people being victimized by criminals, and the criminals were black people, too. The crime was very real to me. These were innocent people, and they were being hurt. Two things became apparent to me, right away. First, these people looked like me, and they needed help. Second, the police were not the bad guys. The criminals were the bad guys. But the police were not working very hard in the black community. Someone needed to help these people, and the police were not really doing all they could. There was a sense, at that time, in that city, that black people must want the environment they lived in-because they kept living there. It was an awakening for me. The way I had been seeing the world was wrong. I made a decision. I told myself that I was not going to make up anything. I was not going to falsify any evidence. I was going to make arrests, and I was going to make them solid, and I was going to make them on really bad people who needed to be put away. I decided to be the best police officer I could be, and see what happened. What happened was I stayed in Portland. I stayed a police officer. I became a sergeant, then a lieutenant, then a captain, then a deputy chief, then the police chief. I was the police chief for six years. I left the job to move to Maryland, to become chief of police for the Montgomery County Police Department. I had been there more than three years when the serial sniper started shooting. I became the head of the task force whose job was to capture the killer. This book is the story of how I got from the beginning to the end of that journey. It's the story of how a black boy from the segregated Deep South became the police chief of two predominantly white communities. It's the story of how a person raised in a town where a black man could be beaten or killed for even looking at a white woman could grow up to be happily married to a white woman. It's the story of how a rookie police recruit with no plans to become a police officer became the head of the largest single manhunt in American police history. It's the story of how I went from being lionized for helping bring the snipers to justice to being vilified for writing a book about it. It's the story of the changes-the changes in me, the changes in law enforcement, the changes in my country-that made this journey possible. 1. This Doesn't Happen Here I was in my office, at the Rockville, Maryland, headquarters of the Montgomery County Police Department, when the first call came in. It appeared to be a homicide. The call came in from Captain Barney Forsythe, who was a thirty-year veteran of the police force and the director of the major crimes unit, at around 6:30 P.M. "Chief, we have a homicide," he said. "And it's a little out of the ordinary." It was Wednesday, October 2, 2002. I got a second call a few minutes later from the media office, from Captain Nancy Demme, a veteran undercover plainclothes officer whom I had recently made the public information officer for the force. The few known facts were the same. A middle-aged white man had been shot once in the back, in the parking lot of the Shoppers Food Warehouse, in the community of Wheaton, at 2201 Randolph Road. There were no witnesses. There were no suspects. The shooting had taken place at 6:02 P.M. It sounded strange. We don't get a lot of murders in Montgomery County, especially compared to Portland. That was a city of five hundred thousand residents, with a murder count that ran as high as seventy killings a year. Montgomery County was almost twice that population, and rarely had more than fifteen killings a year. Besides that, the details were unusual for Montgomery County. We don't get many killings on the street. We don't have drive-by shootings. There have been bodies dumped in the street, in the night, and found in the early morning hours. But for someone to be shot, in public, on the street like that-that was strange. I asked Captain Forsythe the usual questions. Did anybody see anything? Was there some kind of a fight? Did we have anybody in custody? Did we know the guy? In other words, was there a criminal record or profile of the victim? The answer to all those questions was "No." He added one unusual detail. He said it appeared that a rifle had been used-a high-powered rifle. There was one additionally unusual factor. Forty-five minutes earlier that evening there had been an incident near the Shoppers Food Warehouse. Two miles away, and less than an hour before, someone had shot a bullet through the plate glass windows into a Michael's craft store, at the Northgate Shopping Center, at 3800 Aspen Hill Road. No one was injured. The call on the shooting had come in just before the call from the Shoppers Food Warehouse. There didn't appear to be any connection. The shooting at Shoppers was so near the District 4 police station that two police officers heard the sound of a shot fired and responded on foot. One of the officers got to the victim and began CPR-to no avail. They had the location roped off and secured within minutes. Forsythe got the call not long after, from his deputy, Lieutenant Phil Raum, who told him there was a homicide. Forsythe asked a series of questions: Was it a smoker?-his slang expression for "smoking gun." Raum said it was not a smoker. "Was it a robbery?" Raum said it wasn't. "Was it a carjacking?" Raum said it wasn't. "Was it a domestic dispute?" Raum said it wasn't. Forsythe said, "I'm on my way." One of my assistant chiefs had already been at the scene. John King had spent the day at the FBI National Academy in Quantico, Virginia. He was there as part of an eleven-week training program the bureau does for a select group of police officers. It's the same program I'd participated in as a lieutenant from Portland. King had come home for the evening to see his family-he and his wife and three children live in the Montgomery County town of Damascus- and was driving back to Quantico. For sentimental reasons, he decided to swing by the Wheaton station, where he had been district commander. He saw the police tape and the police cars with their lights on, and stopped to find out what had happened. King headed on to Quantico. Forsythe made sure investiga- tors jumped on everything available from the Shoppers shooting- interviewing witnesses, store employees, family members, friends and colleagues-and decided to check out the shooting at Michael's. In my phone conversation with Captain Demme, she told me she had been visiting with a friend from the force who was laid up with a bad knee when she got the page on the Shoppers shooting. She rushed to the scene, met with the few reporters who were covering the shooting, and then called me. She said, "I don't know what we have here, but it's different from your regular homicide." She told me the victim appeared to be a nice, normal, middle-aged guy. He had his sleeves rolled up and his tie loosened, and his company I.D. badge pinned to his shirt, and his lunch box was sitting on the passenger seat, like he was just going home after work. She told me the victim had not been robbed, and that the shots came from a distance. The officers who heard them said they sounded like a truck tire blowing up. She told me the forensics officers were going to the Michael's store to see if there was any connection between the two shootings. I went back to my paperwork. That evening I had more than usual. My wife, Sandy, and I were leaving town the following day for a national police conference in Minneapolis. I was going to be on the Major City Chiefs roundtable, and in a Civil Rights Committee meeting. If there was time, I was also going to get tickets to a Minnesota Twins play-off game. I would be gone from Thursday to Sunday, so there was a lot to do before I went home for the night. I left the station around eight o'clock. My mind was at ease. My only concern that night was getting home in time to pack, and getting up early enough in the morning to get Sandy to the airport for her flight. There had already been one change in our original plan. We were supposed to fly out together Thursday morning. But early in the week I had been informed that one of our officers, Corporal William Foust, had died of a heart attack the previous weekend, while attending a wedding. He was to be buried Thursday. I immediately changed my flight. Sandy would leave early Thursday morning. I would stay behind, to attend Corporal Foust's funeral, and then join Sandy in Minneapolis in the late afternoon. I had a little anxiety about the funeral. I had only been in Montgomery County for three and a half years. I didn't know all the officers personally. I didn't really know this officer very well. I didn't know who his close friends were. I had never met his family. Foust was a motor officer- he rode a police motorcycle. Forsythe had been his commander, at the District 3 station in Silver Spring. I knew that many of the people most affected by his death would be his colleagues on the motor division, and that they would be riding their motorcycles as escorts to the motorcade after the funeral. Over the years, I have been to a lot of funerals for fallen police officers. The police in attendance are often very emotional. I was worried how they'd hold up. It was only about a ten-minute drive from the station to the condominium we had bought in Gaithersburg, Maryland. When I got home, I told Sandy about my day, including the killing at the Shoppers Food Warehouse. It wasn't because it was so unusual. I always told Sandy about my day, every day-not every fact, or every detail, but a recap of the big events. She's a lawyer. She's been around police almost her entire working life. She wants to know what's going on. I told her the murder was a little strange. We didn't dwell on it. We spent the evening talking about a house we had wanted to build. Our three-thousand-square-foot "traditional," with a wide, wooden front porch and gabled windows on the second floor, was going up just a few blocks from our condominium. We had to discuss some details about that-what kind of tile should go in the master bathroom, or what kind of light fixture should go in the living room. It was going to be a $500,000 home. That meant $500,000 worth of details to decide. We were talking about the garage apartment we wanted to include for my son, David. He was twenty-two years old that fall, and had just begun his junior year at Howard University in Washington, D.C. He'd been living with us since September 2001-the first time I had lived with my son in many, many years. Our relationship was growing into something strong and new. Sandy and I wanted to make a place that would be comfortable for him. About eleven o'clock that night, the phone rang. It was Captain Forsythe. He was calling to tell me what they had on the Shoppers shooting. They had no good witnesses. They had no criminal background on the victim. They had done all they could for the night, and had no place else to go. During the hours since the first call had come in, there had been few people on the street. A lot of the businesses were closed. There weren't that many possible witnesses to interview. He did tell me that he had seen a very clear videotape, taken by a store security camera mounted outside the store, that showed the victim at the moment of the shooting. He had been walking from his car toward the store. Two other people were visible in the frame. The victim just dropped-bang, like that, shot from behind. Forsythe said the investigators were guessing the victim was shot with a high-powered rifle, from some distance away. There was a small entrance wound, and a large exit wound. He also told me he and Lieutenant Raum had been over to the Michael's location. The store was closed, but they found the place where the bullet had hit the glass, and they could see into the store enough to follow the trajectory of the bullet. It had struck one of the lighted signs over the cashier's aisles. The sign for cashier number five had a hole shot through it. Forsythe told me he had no evidence to support this, but he assumed the two incidents were probably related. Lieutenant Raum had also called Assistant Chief Dee Walker, the third of the three assistant chiefs, around the same time. As head of the ISB, or investigative services bureau, Assistant Chief Walker was in charge of major crimes, family crimes, drug crimes, auto theft, special investigations, vice and intelligence. She oversaw about two hundred officers. She listened to Raum's report and thought, This doesn't happen here. Maybe it's a drug deal, or a gambling debt. Maybe it's a hit. Maybe the guy was having an affair. But this is weird. Later, when she learned about the Michael's shooting, that introduced what she called "the first hint of the randomness." That made it weirder. The investigators were going to start again in the morning, but they wanted to let me know I could stand down. Captain Forsythe knew I was leaving town. He wanted me to know the case was in good hands. Going to sleep, I thought this shooting might turn out to be one of those that is hard to figure out, and one that might take a while. With most homicides, everything happens in those first few hours. Everything is wrapped up quickly. The detectives run really hard for the first eight to ten hours-when everything is still hot. That doesn't mean they solve the killing right away. But that's when you have the best chance to get witnesses, to get evidence, to build the case. That first eight to ten hours is also the time when most murderers give themselves away. Killing a human being is generally so personal, and so emotional, that when someone does that they usually have trouble following their routine. They have trouble appearing normal. They may have blood on their clothing. They may be emotionally overwrought. They may not go home. They may show up at their favorite bar, acting strange. People who know them will know something is wrong. If you've had a terrible fight at work, or at home, someone who knows you is going to know about that. Then, if the person you had the fight with turns up dead, they're going to have an idea what happened. And they're going to call the police. But when there's nothing-no crime scene, no evidence at the crime scene, no witnesses at the crime scene, no way of guessing a motive-that's going to take a little more time to figure out. I thought this might be one of those. That's what I went to bed thinking about. I thought, Tomorrow morning the detectives will find a witness, and this will start to make more sense. I remember thinking that night about a killing we had in Portland. A man had walked into an office one morning and started yelling about robbing the place. Then he had gone over to this one female employee and shot her. He said something else about money and left. It didn't make any sense. The office was a charitable organization designed to help underprivileged children get access to better health care, schooling and after-school programs. Who would rob a charitable organization? In the daytime? For a while, we thought maybe it was an attempt on Ron Herndon, the black activist who was running the organization at that time. We thought the killing might be racially motivated. Then we discovered an insurance angle. The dead employee's husband had taken out a large insurance policy on her. He had hired someone to go into her place of business and stage a robbery, and kill her for the insurance money. It took a while to clear that up. I thought this shooting might be something similar. Sandy and I were at Baltimore Washington International Airport at six the next morning. I had picked up a copy of the Washington Post on the way. I remember telling Sandy it was strange, and sad, that a man could be shot down on the streets of Montgomery County and not even get a mention in the morning paper. I pulled the big black Crown Victoria to the curb-that is the police chief's car in Montgomery County-and got Sandy's bags out. I kissed Sandy good-bye and told her I'd see her in Minneapolis. I drove myself back to the police station. My schedule for the previous day had been busy. I was out of the house before 7:00 A.M. By 8:00 I was at Rolling Terrace Elementary School, in Takoma Park, for a "Safe Walk to School" presentation. At 9:00 A.M. I was back at the station to conduct interviews at 9:30, 10:00, 10:45 and 11:30, meeting with candidates for promotion. We were about to promote some people into lieutenant and captain positions. I had to conduct a brief interview with each of them. At 1:00 I was at a quarterly police/fire meeting. At 2:00 I had attended the graduation of a K-9 class, held at the police academy out on the Great Seneca Highway. That evening there had been a "viewing," or a wake, for Corporal Foust, at the Hines-Rinaldi Funeral Home, in Silver Spring. Captain King had come up from Quantico, in part to attend it, so I knew that police management had been represented. I was planning to attend the funeral, rather than the wake, and it was scheduled to take place at the same location, at 10:00 A.M. the following morning. The burial would take place at the Gates of Heaven cemetery, also in Silver Spring. I had already arranged to drive out there with one of my assistant chiefs, Bill O'Toole. The plan was to meet at the station, dress for the funeral, and go from there. I always go to work in my street clothes. I change into the uniform in my office. The so- called "uniform of the day" is tan slacks and tan shirt. (The K-9 officers and the SWAT officers have a black uniform of the day.) I also wear a black tie with my uniform, most days. There are two small gold stars on my collar. Most of the police chiefs in Maryland are called "Colonel." They wear gold eagles on their lapels. Each of them has a deputy chief called "Lieutenant Colonel." Below the deputy chief, in Montgomery County, were three assistant chiefs, who were called "Major." This was a merit job, but not exactly: You had to take an exam to become a major. But I found that some of the majors had not been selected for promotion by following that process. They had filed grievances, and won their grievances, and become majors that way. I wasn't too wild about that, or the title of Colonel. I used to get memos addressed to "Colonel Moose, Chief of Police," which was like having two titles where only one was needed. "Chief" was good. I had become accustomed to it in Portland. More important, though, I didn't like the structure of one deputy chief and three assistant chiefs. When I got there, Montgomery County had one lieutenant colonel, who managed three majors, who managed the three main bureaus-management services, field services and investigative services. I thought that having a number two person created a layer between me and the people managing the bureaus, and I wanted more direct access to them. I felt it was important to flatten the top of the organization, and make it more of a team structure. So I instituted some changes. I retired the lieutenant colonel/deputy chief position. I took over appointment of the assistant chiefs. To signify these changes, I retired the eagles, and took two gold stars for myself, and gave each of the assistant chiefs one gold star. Somehow, because we live in such a military area- Andrews Air Force base is nearby, as are Bolling AFB, Fort Detrick, the Pentagon-the star looks more like a military rank. The chief of police in Washington's Metropolitan Police Department wears four stars. I wonder if anyone calls him "General." No one calls me "General." But at least no one calls me "Colonel" anymore, either. For me and many of my officers, the uniform also includes a T-shirt and, over that, the body armor vest. In summer the uniform shirt is short-sleeved. In winter, it's long-sleeved. All ranks have a dress uniform. That's what I started putting on for the funeral. It's the tan slack and tan shirt, under a green coat. That's what you call the uniform, in fact-"green coat." All officers from lieutenant and above wear the same coat for formal events. Officers below lieutenant wear the same uniform but with a Sam Browne leather belt. I got dressed and put on a weapon just the same. I always wear a weapon, no matter what clothes I'm wearing. That morning, I put my Smith & Wesson 9mm into a belt holster. For the regular uniform, I'd carry the standard Berreta 9mm, which is a little bigger and bulkier than the Smith & Wesson. That's what I wear to work most Mondays-the Smith & Wesson, under a dark suit. That's because I teach courses in criminology on Monday evenings at Montgomery College. I wear a dark suit to the station, change into the tan uniform of the day, and then change back into the suit in the evening before I go out to teach. I wear the slimmer Smith & Wesson, so it doesn't stick out of my suit coat. I had finished dressing. I was standing at my desk going through papers. The only things on my mind were getting through the funeral and getting to the airport. I was confident, having stayed late the night before, that the department would be in fine shape for a few days without me watching over it. Then the call came in-first from Captain Demme, in the media division, and second from Assistant Chief O'Toole. A man had been killed. He was mowing the lawn in front of the Colonial Dodge car dealership at the Fitzgerald Auto Mall, on the Rockville Pike, in Bethesda. He was pushing the lawnmower, and then he just dropped, with a deep wound in the upper body. It was 7:41 A.M. At first it wasn't clear what had happened. The call came in as a shooting, but there was a competing theory that something went wrong with the lawn mower-that it blew up, or that the mower blade kicked up something that hit the victim. That sort of resonated for me. When I was about eight years old I was in the yard watching my brother David mow the lawn. I was envious. I wished I was old enough to run the lawn mower. He was running it over the grass when suddenly he screamed and fell down. There was blood pouring out of his leg. He didn't know what had happened, but he was in terrible pain. We got him to the hospital. He had to undergo surgery to remove what turned out to be a length of wire coat hanger-picked up by the lawn mower and spun out with such force that pieces of it pierced his leg. For years afterward my brother kept a little baby food jar in his room in which was the piece of the coat hanger they'd removed from his leg. The lawn mower theory made sense to me as a possibility, as it did to some of the others. Captain Demme had received a page that morning as she was getting ready to leave home. She was putting on her dress green uniform for the funeral of Corporal Foust when the first one came in. It was a lawn mower accident. She figured it was one of those ride-on lawn mowers, with a gas engine, and it had exploded and caught fire. The two calls, from Demme and O'Toole, contained the same information. But I was glad to get both calls. This is a system of redundancy I used in Portland and instituted in Montgomery County. It's my way of making sure that I always know what's going on. If one side forgets, or thinks the other side is calling, I still get the information. And this way, I get two sets of facts. Sometimes one side knows something the other doesn't, so I get the complete picture. This morning, the complete picture wasn't very complete. An ambulance was on the way. We didn't have much information. There were no witnesses. No one saw or heard anything. The victim had no criminal record. It was just a guy cutting grass who fell over dead. Just like last night it was a guy in a grocery store parking lot who fell over dead. I remember thinking, This is strange. We got murders weeks apart, or even months apart. Two men being shot like that, in less than twenty-four hours, that was strange. But there was no connection, in my mind, or in anyone else's. I was assured that people from the major crimes unit were on it. Because of the shooting the night before, a lot of people had come in early to get working on that. So we had people assembled, even before 8 A.M., and ready to go. I went back to my paperwork. I had asked the media office what they were planning to do. I wanted to know more details about the Fitzgerald Auto Mall shooting. In my experience, you have to get the media questions answered fast. You have to know what the crime scene looks like, how public it is, whether it's a volatile situation, whether it's a low-key situation, and is the media on it yet. That's partly because the answers to those questions will determine how fast you have to move and with how many officers. If there is a shooting in a house on a dead-end street, you have a lot more time than if you have a shooting in front of a liquor store on a busy street. In that case, you'll have people standing around who threaten to contaminate your crime scene. You'll have witnesses who will walk off before you get a chance to interview them. You may have other problems, too. In Portland, we had instances of gang shootings where members of a rival gang might show up. This could turn volatile, and involve more killing. You have to know how public the crime scene is, and who's there, and what the mood is, before you start dispatching teams of officers. You have to be cognizant of what you're going to tell the public, too. You don't want people to be afraid. You want maximum disclosure, with minimum delay, but you want the message to be the correct one. You want to be able to say to people, in essence, "You are not in danger." That morning, I had no reason to think anyone was in danger. So far, it was off the routine, but it wasn't unmanageable. I wasn't worried about how the major crimes guys or the media office people were going to handle it. Especially the media office. We had a good relationship with the press. This was the result of some hard work on our part. When I arrived in Montgomery County-and it's one of the main reasons I was hired to be the chief in Montgomery County-the department was near the end of a three-year Department of Justice (DOJ) investigation. It had begun as a "pattern and practice" investigation, looking into complaints of police profiling and brutality. The investigation turned up no pattern of brutality, but it did demonstrate there was a pattern of African-Americans receiving more than their fair share of traffic stops and traffic tickets. This was during a time when there was a heightened consciousness about racism and racial profiling in police departments all over the country. The Montgomery police took quite a beating from the press. In the end, an agreement was reached with the DOJ. The police would make improvements in its internal affairs division, make improvements in its training procedures and hire a monitor to make sure the improvements were being instituted. And the police would also collect and analyze all its traffic ticket data-to demonstrate that there was no racial profiling there. Every patrol officer was given a hand-held computer, and told to record the race, sex and age of every motorist stopped, questioned or ticketed. It turned out to be a little redundant, because later that year the Maryland legislature passed a law requiring all Maryland police departments to collect traffic stop data for the same reason. But we continued with the program, which was the most inclusive ever conducted. This had strained the police department's relations with the media. When I arrived, I made changes to address that problem. I took the corporal who was in charge of media relations and replaced him with a lieutenant. Shortly after, I upgraded the position to a captain's position. I told all the officers to forget the department policy on not talking to the press. I told the media office I wanted us to take charge of the story of our department, and that I wanted them to generate at least one press release a day that told the story of a police department doing a good job. I told them that it might happen that none of these press releases would wind up being a story, but that at the end of the year I wanted there to be a big stack of press releases showing what a good job the police officers were doing. It worked. We got a lot of positive stories. Police officers started being treated like heroes. Whenever one of them was profiled, I'd have copies of the stories made and framed, and I'd hold a little ceremony to present the officer with the framed copy. The officers always acted like this was stupid, like they didn't even want the copy at all. We didn't hang them up in the station and the officers never hung them up in their offices. But I've been to their homes. I see these framed stories, on the walls. I've been to their mother's homes. They have two copies on the walls. So I know this was a good idea. By this time the DOJ review was over. The Montgomery County police had nothing to hide, nothing to apologize for, nothing to worry about. We were doing a good job. There was no reason to think this second shooting wouldn't be wrapped up pretty soon. In my office, I was listening to the activity on the police radio. There was no massive call-out-to bring in officers who are not on duty. The dispatch stuff was going to uniformed officers. They were setting up a perimeter around the auto mall. They had an ambulance going there. It was a routine response to an incident of this nature. I wasn't worried about leaving town. I wasn't worried about having to be at a funeral. I wasn't thinking about calling my boss, the county executive. That's how relatively routine this seemed- unfortunate and tragic, for the people involved, but relatively routine. If it had not been, I would have been on the phone, scrambling to change my flight plans and making an emergency call to my boss. At some point I walked over to the media office to see how things were going. There wasn't much new information. The lawn mower was a big, powerful Lawn Boy. The guy doing the mowing was James L. Buchanan. He was thirty-nine, and a landscaper, a Maryland man who had recently moved to Virginia but returned to Maryland to help his dad build a house. He came into Bethesda once a week, as a favor to Dottie Fitzgerald, the owner of the auto mall. We later learned he was the son of a former Montgomery County police officer. He was known as "Sonny." Sonny had stopped for a sip of water right before he fell. He clutched his chest and began to stumble toward the auto mall. He'd walked almost two hundred feet before dropping. The first person to get to him was Al Briggs, a service director at the auto mall. The 911 operator who took the call heard a voice saying, "This guy with a lawn mower did something, man. It chopped him up. He's bleeding real bad." It turned out he had a wound to his stomach "as wide as a coffee cup," one witness would later say. By then we had gotten a little more information on the previous night's death, too. The victim was James D. Martin, fifty-five, father of an eleven-year-old son and a program analyst at a lab in D.C. He had just gotten out of his car and was on his way into the Shoppers Food Warehouse. The shot that killed him came less than an hour, it had been established, after the shot that was fired into the nearby Michael's craft store. Then the next call came in. There had been another shooting, at a Mobil gas station in the Aspen Hill section of Rockville, at 4100 Aspen Hill Road-just three blocks down the road from the Michael's shooting the night before, and less than three miles from the spot where Sonny Buchanan died. A man was pumping gas, and he just fell over. And died. Assistant Chief Bill O'Toole came in just then. He had come through the back door of the police station, and had run into Barney Forsythe outside the major crimes room. Forsythe, seeing O'Toole in his green suit, said to him, "You might want to forget about the funeral." O'Toole said he'd already heard about the guy with the lawnmower. Forsythe told him, "It's not that. There's been a shooting at a gas station." O'Toole is a real Irishman, and looks the part. He has bright red hair and wears a mustache on a handsome face that often looks a little flushed, like he's a bit embarrassed. At that moment, he looked more flushed than usual. O'Toole and Forsythe had already spoken with Assistant Chief Walker. She had come into work early, and was getting ready to go to the funeral, when she heard about the Mobil shooting. She told them she was probably going to miss the funeral, and headed over to the Aspen Hill area right away. That's very much in keeping with Assistant Chief Walker's background and personality. She's a career police officer. She went to work for the Montgomery County Police Department six months out of college, in 1985, and never worked anywhere else. She carries herself like a career cop, too-trim build, little or no makeup, hair cut short and combed straight back, a no- nonsense, no-excess look about everything she does. Walker got into a car and went through the rush hour traffic "lights and siren," she remembered later. It was the only way to get through the traffic, she thought, and not spend a half an hour fighting her way to the scene. O'Toole suggested that I go on to the funeral alone. He and Forsythe told me what they knew about the Mobil shooting. Then I turned to Captain Barney Forsythe. He's more senior in age and experience than O'Toole. He's also a no-nonsense guy, a real straight cop, who wears his gray- white hair combed straight back in a kind of fifties style. I asked him to remind his people to put on their vests-the bulletproof body armor I'm always telling all my officers to wear-and then said that I was going to ride down to the crime scene, too. This was not typical for me. I don't go out to crime scenes. I have police officers, detectives, investigators, captains and assistant chiefs to go out to crime scenes. They are all professionals. They know how to do their jobs, probably better than I know how to do their jobs. If I show up at the crime scene, I just get in the way most of the time and waste the officers' time by getting them to answer questions that don't need asking, while they're trying to do their work. But this felt different. I'm not sure why. I didn't think it was the beginning of some big crime spree. I did not know we were seeing the work of a serial killer. I certainly did not think this was the start of the largest manhunt in American police history. But this was three deaths, three unusual deaths, in one night and one morning. I went back into my office and began to change clothes, mostly because I needed to put on the body armor. I don't wear the vest when I'm in the formal uniform. But I've made a big deal to my officers about wearing the vest whenever they're in the field, and I wanted to make sure I was setting the right example. I told my aide, "We may have to miss the funeral." The Mobil station was only a short drive from the Rockville headquarters of the Montgomery County Police Department. I got into the black Crown Victoria and drove myself down. When I got there, though, instead of pulling into the gas station, I parked across the street. I snuck my car in a mini-mall parking lot with a bunch of other cars. I wanted some perspective. I wanted to see what the scene looked like from a distance. I just wanted to be there, and see it, and feel it, and kind of not be there. I didn't want to get in the officers' way. And I didn't want to start any kind of panic. You see the police chief showing up at a crime scene, that sends a message. I didn't have any message to send. It was only eight-thirty in the morning, but it was already starting to warm up. I could feel it was going to be a very hot day. There was a little breeze blowing. The trees had started to change color. This is what they call Indian Summer in that part of the country-warm and dry, with the fall already coming on. I remember thinking how normal everything looked. The traffic was heavy with people going to work. There were people on the street. There were people waiting for a bus. No one was panicking. The responding officers had closed the gas station. An ambulance had taken the body away. There was yellow police tape around the perimeter. There were probably three or four police cars already on the scene. But it was not getting much attention. I found myself standing next to Detective Terry Ryan. He's a burly plainclothes detective. He was wearing slacks and a shirt-and the vest. This was odd. The plainclothes guys, almost as a point of pride, never wear the body armor. I remember wondering what that meant, if he knew something I didn't know that was making him take extra precaution. I found out later that Captain Walker had issued an order, from the car, as she went "lights and siren" down to the crime scene: "No investigator is allowed to respond to the Mobil station without a vest on." She was already thinking about the implications of a sniper with a high-powered rifle, and she wanted her people protected. Detective Ryan didn't know anything special. We stood for a while talking. Or rather he was talking, and I was listening. You can't learn anything from talking. Besides, I didn't want to contaminate the officers' ideas by sharing my thoughts, any more than I would want to contaminate a crime scene with my fingerprints. I asked questions. What do you have? What do you think? What is the common theme here? What are the possible connections? What is the possible motive? Do we have any witnesses? Did anyone hear or see anything? And, of course, I was wondering, Can we solve this? Is this over? Obviously there are things you can rule out, right from the start. One of my concerns, as a police chief, is always whether any officers are involved. We knew that wasn't the case. We also knew it was not a question of killings taking place during the commission of some other kind of crime. The victims all had their wallets. They weren't being robbed. And they weren't famous people. It's not like they were all senators or congressmen or something, even though we had a lot of those living in Montgomery County. So it was probably not a question of kidnapping, or extortion, or anything like that. The other thing we knew, straight off, was that these weren't family killings. They weren't domestic disputes, or some kind of simple disagreement with a friend or even a stranger. We had enough witnesses to know that no one had come up and started yelling and then pulled out a gun and shot someone. That's often the case. Killings are emotional, and volatile, and personal, most of the time. It's two guys at a bar trying to date the same girl. It's a guy who gets fired from his job and comes back to shoot his boss. It's a wife who thinks her husband is cheating. It's a crook trying to rob a drug dealer, or a john trying to kill a prostitute. And almost always someone has heard something. Someone has seen something. It was very unusual for us to experience a murder in Montgomery County that occurred with no clues or witnesses, and that went unsolved. So the absence of information here was all the more alarming. It's important, on several levels, for us to know what someone has seen or heard. First of all, that's often the beginning of the investigation. You establish a relationship between the victim and the suspect, and you start to know where to look for the suspect. You also could make a guess about whether there would be any other victims. If a man kills his wife and his children at home and then leaves, and you know there are other children in school or something, you might want to do something about locating those other children. You also can prepare to make some kind of statement to the public. Through the media, you are going to want to minimize panic, and let people know they are not in danger. If it's two guys fighting over a girl at some bar, the average person can say, "I wasn't in that bar trying to date that girl. I'm okay." If it's a family matter, the average person can say, "It's a personal thing. My children are safe." I didn't have any theories. Detective Ryan didn't have any theories. I remember having a very unsettling thought, as I stood there: What if the guy is watching me, right now? I didn't feel afraid. I didn't think of myself as a target. I remember thinking the guy could be observing this all, right now, and really enjoying himself. O'Toole told me later that he'd had the same idea. He was thinking about arsonists, and how they often light a fire, disappear, and then come back to watch the firefighters try to extinguish their blaze. He was wondering whether the sniper was standing around someplace watching us clean up his mess. Captain Walker was thinking the same thing. She had been the commander of the Wheaton station, right across the street from the Shoppers Food Warehouse. She had a cousin who lives right around the corner from there, and who walks with her children to do her marketing at the Shoppers Food Warehouse. She had a sister with children who go to Rockville schools. And Captain Walker, unlike most of my people, was born and raised in Montgomery County. She was very conscious of being a target herself, she said, but she was even more conscious of her family members being exposed and in danger. The crime scene in the gas station, from our perspective, didn't yield much. At some point, I went across the street to take a closer look. The gas station was locked down. The officers had all the gas station employees and some of the customers locked down, too. They were in the gas station office and the repair bay, being questioned. The dark gray taxicab that belonged to the victim was just sitting there. There wasn't much in the way of blood or anything. There wasn't much to see. There wasn't much information, either. The victim was a male in his fifties. He bought a lottery ticket, a pack of Juicy Fruit gum and $5 worth of gas for his taxi. He went outside and started pumping. There was a bang, which one of the mechanics said sounded like a car backfire. The cabdriver clutched his side and leaned over against the passenger door of another customer's silver minivan, smearing blood on it. The victim called out for help, and then fell to the ground. There was a doctor in the gas station at the time, pumping gas. The doctor tried to help the victim. There was nothing to be done. The victim was unresponsive. The first responding officer was one of our people, Corporal Paul Kukucka. He was in his patrol car, stopped at the intersection in front of the Mobil station, when the shooting occurred. He had not seen a suspect, and did not see the victim as he was shot. Now he was inside, talking to the gas station customers. Unfortunately, he had not learned much. But the media was starting to arrive. One news crew had parked its van and was already setting up on the sidewalk. I knew something was going to have to be said pretty quickly. I didn't know what there was to say. In my head, I was sure this was going to end soon. I was still thinking that we were going to find a witness, very shortly, who saw something. We would establish a connection between the victims. We would find out they all worked at the same place, or drank at the same place, or belonged to the same health club, or dated the same girl, or something. Or we would learn that this was all a bizarre coincidence. Either that or, I was beginning to think, the person responsible for the shootings was insane. The killer was freaking out, having some kind of complete breakdown. If that were the case, then we would find this person very shortly. He couldn't freak out like that for very long and not draw attention to himself. Whoever it was would turn up. His family would notice something. His boss would notice something. Some citizen would notice something. Because this person had flipped, and when you flip you can't control that. I was thinking, the next thing we're going to hear is there is a person sitting on a corner somewhere with a gun in his mouth. We'll get there in time to see the person commit suicide. Or we'll get there in time to stop him from committing suicide. It would be bizarre, but it would be over. I was confident that I would be able to tell the media, "We can take care of this." The next call we got was not about a guy on a corner with a gun in his mouth. The next call was about another shooting. A Hispanic woman had died, sitting on a bus-stop bench, in front of a post office and a Crisp and Juicy chicken restaurant, across the street from Leisure World, in Silver Spring, at 3701 Rossmoor Boulevard. This was, again, only a few miles away. The first report, probably based on the first 911 call, indicated this was a possible suicide. The victim had what appeared to be a gunshot wound to the head. It appeared to be self-inflicted. She was waiting for a bus and reading a book. No one ran up to her. No one was sitting on the bench with her. There were no witnesses with anything to offer. It was not quite 8:40 A.M. There had been four killings in sixteen hours. I made the decision, right away, not to go to the Leisure World crime scene. I had to do something else. I had to be the police chief. By late morning we made the decision to set up a command center there, using the command bus in the Aspen Hill area. Captain Forsythe, in response to the first shooting, had already issued an order to have the command bus sent down to the Mobil station location. He and Assistant Chief Walker had arranged to have it parked behind a Home Depot. Assistant Chief Walker's plan was to place it in a location that would offer the media and the police officers maximum cover and security. I didn't like that idea so much. I wanted the police to have maximum visibility, not maximum security. The security was for the citizens. Plus I knew the media would never participate. They have to set up their stuff where they can take pictures of an interview and also take pictures of the crime scene. They wouldn't be able to see the crime scene from behind the Home Depot. I told Assistant Chief Walker, "We're not worrying about protecting the police. We're worrying about protecting the public. Get the command bus out into an open location." Next to the Mobil station, where the cabdriver was shot, was a Korean Baptist Church. I sent an officer to see whether we would be allowed to move in and use their parking lot, and to find out whether they had bathrooms, telephones, electrical connections and other things we would need to create a field headquarters. When it was clear that we could use the facility, I requested the command vehicle be brought into the parking lot. The command vehicle is a kind of bus, turned into a mobile police station. It has a conference room at one end and office space at the other, and it's equipped with telephones, fax machines, internet hookups, televisions and so on. This would be the home base for the investigation. There was a lot of work to be done in it already. I was meeting with my assistant chiefs. I was meeting with the forensics people. I was on the phone to Doug Duncan, the county executive, which in Maryland is the equivalent at the county level to the mayor-he's the guy that hires and fires the police chief, for example-telling him what we knew. He had been out of town, and he wanted to know whether he should come home. I told him, "We have a mess here. It's not an impossible situation, but it's a difficult situation, and it's going to take some serious police work." I gave him all the facts I had. I told him it would be helpful if he came home, at once. When I finished with that, I went again to speak with my media people and my other staff. I needed to know how many units we could get into the Aspen Hill area. I didn't think we could protect anyone if there were more shootings-because there were just too many people on the street, and too much going on, for it to be possible to prevent them from being targeted-but I did think that more visibility on the street might serve as a deterrent. I needed to know how many of those units we could get into the area without causing a scheduling crunch for the next day. I wanted as many units as possible, but I didn't want to exhaust our resources all at once. I needed to know what the forensics guys were thinking, how many teams they had available, and whether they'd need more. I needed someone to notify the forensics lab at the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms in Rockville that we would need their services. In other words, there was a lot to be done. And nothing was going right. The command vehicle kept breaking down. The electricity went out. The air-conditioning went out. The day was very hot, by now, and we had to go out and find a shade tree or some other cool place to work every time the bus broke down. By then, we had received more information on the Leisure World shooting. It was not a suicide. There was no handgun or other weapon found anywhere near the body. We knew it was a homicide. We didn't have witnesses yet, but we knew it was probably going to be connected. Then there was another shooting. It came in over the radio as a "possible 0-100." That's police talk for a homicide. The shooting occurred at 9:58 A.M., at a Shell station at 10515 Connecticut Avenue in Kensington, Maryland-less than one mile from where we were standing, in the parking lot of the Mobil station. The victim was a twenty-five-year-old white woman. She was shot once, in the upper back, while vacuuming the floor of her minivan. Witnesses said she fell to the ground, blood pouring out of her nose and mouth. Captain Demme remembered later that we all stood there staring at each other for quite a while, as we listened to this report come over the radio. Captain Demme is not easily ruffled. She's a law school graduate who worked in private practice before she returned to police work. She's very tough and very firm-despite the blond hair she keeps tied up under her police officer's hat-and doesn't take any nonsense from anyone. But at that moment she looked stunned. Assistant Chief O'Toole would later use the word "surreal." That's a good word. We were hearing these voices come over the police radio. What we were hearing just didn't seem possible. I was standing there. Demme and O'Toole were standing with me. Sergeant Roger Thomson, another career police officer, was there with us. These announcements would come in. We'd look at each other. There was nothing to say. None of us had any experience with anything like this. It felt like we were sort of suspended in time. And every few minutes, the radio would crackle again and there would be another victim. What we were hearing almost didn't make sense. O'Toole got out a notebook and began making a map, trying to figure out what kind of route the killer would have had to take to get from one shooting scene to the next. So far, the killings were very localized, and all centered on the Aspen Hill area. So we had every reason to think the next shooting, should there be another, would take place fairly close by. Thomson was a real veteran cop. He had spent most of his career working homicide. He had been to the most gruesome crime scenes. He had had to be professional under the most trying circumstances. I had never seen him show the slightest emotion on the job. And yet this morning he looked unnerved. I am sure he would have said the same thing about O'Toole and me. We all probably looked uncertain, and off-balance, because we were. I told O'Toole we should start concentrating on establishing a connection between the victims. That would be the place the investigation could begin to make sense of who was being killed, which might explain who was doing the killing, which might explain why, and which might point ahead to more possible targets. At this point it didn't even occur to me to go to the new crime scene. I knew there was nothing for me to contribute there. I understood by now that this was the work of a serial sniper. I suspected that the victims were not connected by anything but their availability as targets. I didn't say this out loud. I couldn't announce it. But I knew. I continued to set up the command center and oversee the scheduling of my officers. The Shell station was locked down. The witnesses were interviewed. The family of the victim would be interviewed. The body would be removed and taken to a hospital. The medical examiner would get the evidence. There was nothing I could do for the victim. There was plenty I could do at the command vehicle. Throughout the day Thursday, I continued to bring more visible units into the Aspen Hill area. As the hours passed, more manpower was becoming available. Police officers started hearing things, on their radios or from the media. A lot of them left the funeral for our fallen officer and came directly into the station, without being asked. They just started showing up, even though some of them were not scheduled to work for another couple of days, and asking where they could be assigned. We were also getting calls from the Maryland State Police, wanting to know how many troopers we needed, and where we needed them deployed. I also ramped up our tactical capacity. I was still convinced at that time that this was someone who was going to show his hand very shortly, that day or the next day. This person had gone berserk. We had to have the capacity ready to confront him, and take him out, as soon as he showed himself. I was moving up the SWAT officers and equipment. I had helicopters in the air for flyover surveillance. I was bringing up officers who had long guns, with more firepower. The regular officers have 9mm handguns, and some have shotguns, but now we needed long guns-and the people who knew how to use them. If this person was flipping out, and was going to be holed up somewhere, we needed sniper teams to take him out from a distance. We also needed negotiators. We needed an armored personnel carrier. All that equipment had to be moved into the area. We were also spending a lot of energy scheduling officers for the next day. We wanted visible patrols out, especially around schools, so we had to make certain we had the manpower for that, and that we didn't exhaust our staffing options on the first day. We also started doing low-altitude helicopter flyovers at the schools, partly in case there was a sniper lurking in the woods, but largely because we wanted the community to see that we were there. In the command vehicle that Thursday afternoon there was a lot of back and forth between me and the assistant chiefs about why this was all occurring. We were asking each other whether there could be a racial connection, whether this could be some kind of hate crime. That all fell apart pretty quickly, because no one could find the common thread. Here were two white guys getting shot. Then there was a man who was originally from India. The fourth victim was originally from El Salvador. The fifth victim was white. It was difficult to argue that there was a racial or religious or ethnic thread suitable for a race or hate crime. Another theory that fell apart pretty quickly was the terrorist theory. In the very beginning, perhaps because the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon were still so fresh in everyone's mind, and because of the anthrax scare that followed- with anthrax and other strange powders appearing in mail sent to Washington, D.C., offices like those of Senator Tom Daschle and newsman Tom Brokaw-some of our people started thinking the killings might be the work of terrorists. It seemed to me that the FBI people, particularly, were interested in developing this theory. We had an additional reason to consider this. That morning, while we were all at the command vehicle, Captain Forsythe had received an intelligence briefing from the FBI or the ATF (Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms). The briefing was a warning that the agency had received intelligence that Al Qaeda operatives were being trained to assassinate members of the U.S. Senate and Congress in the metropolitan Washington, D.C., area-on golf courses. Forsythe brought the briefing to me and said, "I just want to alert you to this." I didn't see the connection. The victims weren't senators or congressmen. They weren't celebrities or rich people. They didn't seem likely targets for anyone with a financial or political motive. I didn't rule the terrorism angle out, but I didn't make it a priority, either. Most of our investigative energy that first day was focused on the idea that someone must have had some beef with someone, and that the connection must be through some association- work, neighborhood, PTA, something-that would become visible if we could connect the victims to each other. We were eager to know what that something was. If we learned that, then we could learn why the shootings were occurring. If we knew why, that would lead us to the perpetrator, and perhaps even tell us where to look for the next victim. We could bring some peace of mind to the community, as well. If there was a pattern, and it didn't fit them, they might not feel so frightened. More information continued to come in from the earlier crime scenes. The woman gunned down on the bus bench near Leisure World was named Sarah Ramos. She was a part-time baby- sitter and housekeeper. She had a seven-year-old son. She was shot once, in the head. The bullet passed through her head and shattered the window of the storefront behind her. She didn't even fall over. A witness described her, in death, as "just sitting there." One witness, who was inside an adjacent place of business, reported hearing a "popping" sound. The second woman shot was Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera. She was married, and had a daughter, and worked as a nanny. She had moved to Silver Spring six years ago, from Idaho. She had removed her child's car seat from her purple minivan and was vacuuming the floor when she was killed. We learned more about Premkumar Walekar, the taxi driver shot at the Mobil station, too. He lived in Olney, Maryland. He had a wife and two children. He usually went to work around noon, driving a shift for Presidential Cab. But today he had started work early, so he could get off early and spend the afternoon with his family. In what I thought was a kind of eerie detail, the sign on the top of his taxi read "Call 911." That's because you dialed "911-TAXI" to order a cab from his company. At some point, I overheard Bill O'Toole say, "Hey. It's been an hour. We haven't had a shooting in over an hour." I remember thinking how weird that was, that we should be happy not to have had any new shootings in an hour. That's how under siege we felt, that first morning. Later in the day, O'Toole noted again that it had been five hours since the last shooting. It felt like such a break. By Thursday afternoon, too, we had our first clue. A witness was absolutely certain he had seen a white van or box truck leaving the scene of the Ramos shooting across from Leisure World. At first the information was a little uncertain. The witness was Spanish-speaking, and it wasn't clear that the person interviewing him spoke Spanish fluently. So we had to find a fluent Spanish speaker to go back and talk to the witness. We found one, a Wheaton station crime analyst named John Desoulas who Forsythe remembered spoke Spanish. Desoulas got the witness to confirm that he had seen this white box truck, or van, in the vicinity. He didn't say, as was later reported, that he saw someone shooting out of the box truck. Just that he had seen it. We didn't want to make too much of it, but it was a possible lead, in a situation where we didn't have that many leads. The white box truck lead didn't add much. We didn't have a license plate number on the vehicle. We didn't have age, facial characteristics, hair or even race on the driver. It might be one guy. It might be two guys. All we had was a white box truck. We tried to get that out there, that afternoon, through the media. And maybe we all began to obsess on it. Assistant Chief O'Toole told me later that as we stood out there by the Mobil station taking in this information about the truck, he was watching the intersection in front of us. It was still rush hour. The streets were filled. And he said, "All I could see was white box trucks. Everywhere I looked, there were white box trucks. How were we ever going to find the needle in that haystack?" We later learned, from the Ford company, that the company had sold more than fifty thousand Econoline vans in the Washington, D.C., area over the last decade. The first press briefing was held Thursday morning. It went very badly. Captain Nancy Demme led the briefing, standing on the sidewalk near the Mobil station crime scene. The reporters pressed in on her so aggressively that she was backed up to the edge of the sidewalk, and then onto the curb, and then into the street. Captain Demme later said the reporters looked scared, or nervous, as if they were afraid they might become targets of the next shooting. As a group, they were like a mob. They pressed forward, pushing Captain Demme off the sidewalk and into the street. And there was a lot of traffic moving down the street. It wasn't safe. One of the reporters actually said, "Back off! You're going to get her killed!" I had assigned Captain Demme to the media position almost a month earlier. But she had several projects she felt obliged to finish with the undercover work she was doing. So she actually hadn't taken over the position until October 2. That afternoon-just two hours before James Martin would be shot down at Shoppers Food Warehouse-I sat down with her and told her what my expectations were. I shared with her my theories on how to keep the press happy and still do your job at the same time. I told her I had two rules: feed them material for stories, or they'll go find or invent material on their own, and use maximum disclosure with minimum delay, so they feel you are keeping them abreast of everything as it happens. I specifically told Captain Demme that she was going to be the one doing all the press interface, and that she'd be the person the public associated with our police department. I said, "I want you out there ninety percent of the time. They're only going to see my face ten percent of the time. And when they see my face, they're going to know it's very serious, or very bad." Well, this was serious and bad. I took Captain Demme aside afterward and told her that while I always wanted her to be the face of the police department during regular, ordinary police business, this was no longer regular or ordinary. I wanted the people of Montgomery County to see the police chief out there, to know that the police chief was responding. She said, "Chief, I think your ten percent is about to kick in." I didn't think I'd be bullied by the media the way she'd been. So, at my first press briefing, I tried to establish some ground rules. When I came out, practically before I even introduced myself, I laid down the first ground rule. I told the media that I was going to read a statement, that I was going to give them all the information we had at that time, and then I was going to leave. I was not going to take questions, because I was already going to give them all the information that we had. And my ground rule was this: I said, "After that, I'm going to walk away. And I don't want any of you guys to try and make me look like an asshole, by calling out questions and film me leaving and make it look like I'm running away. Don't make me look like an asshole." What I didn't know was that the cameras were already running while I made this speech. I found out later that some of the stations ran this more or less in its entirety. When the press conference tape was played on the news that night, a lot of my officers at the station saw it. Someone told me later that they applauded. Someone shouted out, "Way to go, Chief! Somebody finally told them!" The Washington Post reported the following day that I had used "profanity." I probably should have said, "Please don't make me look uncooperative." But that wasn't what I meant. I meant, "Don't make me look like an asshole." So that's what I said. Sometime that afternoon, through one of the press briefings, I made the decision to ask people to start phoning in anything they'd seen that seemed suspicious. Even though it was not the way you usually go about it, I asked people to phone 911, if they'd seen a white box truck, if they'd seen any suspicious behavior. I asked them to try to think, if they were in the vicinity of any of the shootings, of what they might have seen or heard. Usually you would wait to do this until you had time to set up a hot-line number and get it staffed. We were working on that- trying to find volunteers, trying to round up retired police officers-but we hadn't got it set up yet. And this was all breaking so fast, and we had so little information, that I just didn't think we could afford to wait. By the end of the day, the 911 people were starting to get inundated with calls. Most of it was nothing. But the system was working. We were getting leads. We were getting tips. We were assigning these to investigating officers. They were running down the most promising ones. The investigation was under way. By nighttime, I was starting to wonder whether this thing was over. The last shooting, at the Shell station, had been at 9:58 A.M. We'd had an entire day, and nothing else had happened. That created two contradictory feelings. I was afraid there would be more shootings. And I was afraid there wouldn't be any more shootings. It sounds weird to say that, but I knew that if there weren't any more shootings there wouldn't be any more evidence-and without more evidence we were going to have a hell of a hard time finding out who was doing the killings. Of course I didn't want anyone else to be hurt, but I knew that if the shootings just ended, like that, we might never catch the person responsible. I was hoping for time. I knew I didn't have much information. It was going to take time to do the investigating. I was still hopeful. I knew I had great people doing the investigation. One of them was going to catch a break. I hoped that the shootings would stop for long enough that we could crack this thing and make an arrest before anyone else was hurt. But I also knew that if there was another shooting, that would increase the chance that someone would see something, and that would increase the body of evidence, which would give the investigators a better chance to catch a break. My great fear was that the person responsible for this would be arrested for doing something else. He'd get picked up on some warrant or something, in some other jurisdiction, and he'd go to jail for two months. The shootings would stop. We wouldn't be able to solve the crime. Then he'd be out on the street in two months and the killings would start again. I had a lot of this kind of anxiety in my head. Sometime late in the day I also had a couple of conversations with my wife. Sandy had landed in Minneapolis and been picked up by a car. She had started chatting with the driver. He asked where she was from. She said she was from Montgomery County, Maryland. "Oh yeah," the driver said. "That's where they just had all those killings." Sandy corrected him. She said it had just been one killing, the night before. The driver said, "No. I mean all the killings today." He told her what he knew. Sandy said, "Take me back to the airport." It took her all day and well into the night to get home. There was no direct flight back. She had to book something that took her through St. Louis. There were delays. We talked a couple of times on the phone. She told me she had already spoken to my son David, and that he'd agreed to pick her up at the airport when her flight got in around midnight. I was trying to wrap it up for the day. I had held several press briefings. I had met with the county executive. He and I had briefed Constance Morella, the congresswoman from our district. I had made the scheduling assignments for the next day. And then we got the call. There had been another shooting. A man in his sixties or seventies was crossing a street in Washington, D.C., just over the Montgomery County line. He stopped or slowed down to light a cigarette. He fell to the ground- shot once, fatally, in the upper chest. And immediately following the shooting, we had a suspect. Or a suspect vehicle. A car had run a red light, very near the shooting location. When police gave chase, the driver sped off. Police pursued him into Montgomery County, where our officers became involved. By the time the driver was apprehended, some of the officers had concluded he must be connected to the D.C. shooting-which might make him the serial sniper. He wasn't. He had run the red light and then tried to run from the police because he had an expired driver's license, or something stupid like that. He was not connected to the shootings in any way. So much for our first suspect. We were back where we started. Only now we had another police agency involved. We now were running the risk that the chain of evidence would be broken, if the MPD decided to pursue this shooting as an individual case. They might take their evidence to a different forensics lab. They might not want to cooperate. This could complicate things. The details that came in on the shooting in the District did not clarify the situation much. The victim was a seventy-two-year-old retired carpenter, originally from Haiti, named Pascal Charlot. He was a walker. Neighbors said he went out walking daily on Georgia and Connecticut Avenues, in the area around his home. Reports from the hospital showed the bullet that killed him went through his chest-after first passing through his hand. Maybe he was reaching up for the cigarette, or waving to an acquaintance. We didn't have a suspect. But we had caught a break. The ATF had brought canine units to the scene. These are specially trained dogs capable of detecting various kinds of explosives. When a rifle is fired, for example, gunpowder is expelled on the shell casing and through the ejection port where the shell leaves the rifle. This is a minute amount of gunpowder, not visible to the eye, but the dogs can pick it up. The ATF keeps teams of these dogs all around the country. They have thirty agents specially trained to handle the dogs, and they have forty local police agencies around the country who've been given trained dogs in exchange for their availability during a crisis. Michael Bouchard, special agent in charge of the Baltimore field office of the ATF, had sent down a team of dogs earlier in the day. In this case, the dogs "alerted" on a wall that surrounded a parking lot near the shooting scene. There wasn't any evidence on or near the wall, but we had for the first time a clear picture of where the shooter had been standing, or lying down, when he took his shot. From that, we could start to get a clearer picture of what kind of weapon he was using and what degree of expertise he had. There was not much other information available, but one witness described seeing a dark- colored car leaving the scene. The witness later said the car was a burgundy Chevrolet Caprice. Washington, D.C., police would eventually locate this car. It had been abandoned, and burned out, and had no connection to the sniper. There was more confusion the next day. After initially deciding to handle the forensics investigation themselves, the MPD people finally agreed to work with us, and let the forensics evidence be handled by the ATF people in Rockville. This was a great relief. We now wouldn't run the risk of breaking the chain of evidence-if the shootings were all connected-by having different pieces of evidence handled by different labs. But then the forensics evidence got lost. Somehow the team of people driving the evidence from Washington into Montgomery County took a wrong turn, or a shortcut, and they got lost. And for two hours no one could find them. We were feeling a great deal of pressure. We didn't know when the next shooting was coming, or where, or how many there would be after that. We had a serial killer on our hands, and we knew he was going to strike again. We felt like every minute mattered. And now the evidence had disappeared in the Friday afternoon rush hour. It was just a little mistake. And, in the larger scope of things, two hours was nothing. But at the time it was incredibly frustrating. The location of this latest shooting told me that all our concentration on the Aspen Hill area might be a waste of time and manpower. This shooting wasn't that far into the District. In fact, it was so close to the line between D.C. and Montgomery County that the shooter might have been in Montgomery County, even while the victim was in D.C. But it was still not in the Aspen Hill area. And it was at night. And it was an elderly person. And, we learned later, he was a black man. So, again, there was nothing at all to connect this to anything else. There was no pattern. The randomness was so confusing. Part of what I was having such trouble with was the question of why the person doing this was choosing only one victim at a time. There had been multiple targets available, at each of the shooting locations. There were lots of people in the Shoppers parking lot. There were several customers in the two gas stations. There were plenty of pedestrians on the street in front of Leisure World. There were many other people walking down that street in D.C. The person doing the shooting was choosing one target, and firing one fatal round, and then moving away. I couldn't figure out why. These were the things on my mind that night. When I finally got home and got into bed, it wasn't for long. There had been some kind of mix-up. My son and my wife had not connected at the airport. The phone rang, and it was Sandy. I told her to sit tight. I got up, got dressed and made the thirty-minute drive out to BWI. Driving back in, I told Sandy everything I knew, and I shared with her some of the anxiety I was having. I didn't share this with anyone else. My police officers needed to know I was feeling optimistic and totally confident in their abilities. The people of Montgomery County needed to know I was feeling optimistic and totally certain that my officers were going to solve this crime. But privately I had real doubts about how all this was going to play out. Excerpted from Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Serial Sniper by Charles A. Moose, Charles Fleming All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
