The Long and Winding Road

An Angry Telephone Call Provided One Crucial Clue. The first real break in the sniper case came last Thursday in an angry phone call from a man claiming responsibility for a murder-robbery in Montgomery, Ala. By Eric Lichtblau and Don Van Natta Jr.. [New York Times: NYT HomePage]

Today has been filled with good new about the sniper case, and everyone is spending a lot of time patting themselves and each other on the back.  But just wait, in a couple of days the criticism will start - did the police do all they could? Did the media say or do enough or too much? Should some clues have been recognized as important long before they were?

The story of how the pieces fell together is interesting, if a bit convoluted. The first piece of the solution came about on October 8th when a policeman in Baltimore noticed a man sleeping in his car - a blue Chevy Caprice - and made note of the car and its license plate.  At the time, no one recognized the car as being significant.  I suspect this will be the point over which there will be the most fingerpointing - people saying that he should have realized at that point what he had, thus ending the killings nearly 2 weeks before he was actually caught.  Unless there is other information I'm not aware of, however, I don't see that the office can be faulted.  There had, early on, been one report - one - of a dark Chevy Caprice being seen at one of the crime scened, but by the 8th, the focus for a possible vehicle had shifted to a white van or white box truck.  Add to that the conventional wisdom (and stated by profilers) that the suspect would be a white make in his 20's or 30's, and I think it's understandable why a cop might not have been overly suspicious of a black man in his 40's in a dark Caprice.

The next "break" in the case came once the police and the sniper began their odd communication. Apparently, the sniper called the police but the operator initially thought he was a crank caller.  He told her to check "Montgomery" if they wanted to verify that he was who he said he was, but since much of the killing had taken place in Montgomery County, MD, they cops didn't initially realize what the caller was referring to.  And interesting detail that the article provides is how the cops finally became aware of what it was the caller was referring to:  Apparently feeling that the police weren't taking him terribly seriously, he placed calls to two priests to see if he could get them to give a message to the police.  In an interesting bit of irony, the police contacted one of those churches the day after they received the call as they thought the killer might be a parishoner (though I've yet to find out why that is).  In the process of discussing that possibility, the Monsingior told the police of the call he had received, which specified that the police should be checking in Montgomery, Alabama.

Once they called law enforcement officials in Alabama, they learned of a shooting that had taken place there in late September, and that there had been an unidentified fingerprint found at the scene.  The local police in Alabama did not have access to the federal fingerprint files, and so they weren't able to make a match, but the federal officers working on the sniper case did, and traced the fingerprint to to the 17-year-old suspect.  That is what led them to search the home in Tacoma. 

As they gathered more information about the sniper, one of the things that cropped up was the description and license number of the car from back on October 8th.  Once the police scanners and news media began broadcasting that number it was essentially just a matter of time.  At 3am, a trucker pulled into a rest stop, noticed the car, realized the license number was a match and called the police.

While I still think the media has spent far too much time on this story and too much time in not only useless, but - as we can now see, misleading - speculation, I do have to give them props for having gotten that license plate number out.  That made it possible for the trucker to realize that he had found the car and facilitated the arrest of the suspects.

I have to wonder, though, if we hadn't been hearing so much about the "standard" profile of a serial killer, or speculation on what the killer might be like, if people would have been more open to a wider range of possible suspects that could have ended the killings sooner. I think one big quesation that will need to be answered is how the "white van/truck" became so much a focus of the investigation.  I suspect that because white vans and trucks are rather popular, and becuase the media had made several mentions of a white van or truck that witnesses were somewhat primed to see a white van, so if, in the confusion after the shooting, a white van happened to be in the area (which isn't that unlikely an occurrance), people would remember it.

Hopefully, this will be the end of the matter, and there are no other people out there who were part of the killings.  And hopefully, as the post-mortem is done on how the investigation - and, just as importantly, the coverage of the investigation - was handled, both law enforcement and the media will learn the kinds of lessons that can help catch the next person who goes on a killing spree even faster.