For weeks, it seemed to investigators - and the public anxiously tracking their progress - that they were a long way from catching the serial sniper who struck 13 times and somehow managed to elude capture.
Amid the horror of shooting scenes, there were no witnesses, no accounts of a killer's face, no definitive sightings of a getaway car. Each time, as police roadblocks and dragnets shut down highways and disrupted the most densely populated areas of the Washington region, the shadowy killer seemed to just vanish.
Only now do authorities realize how close they might have been on multiple occasions to stopping the killing earlier, or preventing it entirely. All along, it is becoming clear, suspects John Allen Muhammad, 41, and Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, were just beyond the authorities' grasp - in one instance literally so, by the distance of a few feet from a pursuing police officer.
The missed opportunities stretch back nearly a year. Some resulted from bureaucratic delays, some from the judgments of individual police officers and some from the suspects' astonishing good luck.
Yesterday, authorities played down the missed chances.
"Everyone wishes that these two had been brought into custody sooner; for three weeks, we said, 'We hope today's the day,'" said Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan. "We're just thankful we were able to make these arrests."
Throughout the rampage, police and experts alike marveled at the sniper's ability to evade capture, attributing it to Houdini-like talents of escape.
In fact, the suspects now in custody made repeated stumbles, the largest of which was what eventually resulted in their arrests: a boastful phone call that led police to an earlier crime and their identities.
But that call came after nine killings - and after repeatedly missing the suspects:
In December, a domestic dispute in Bellingham, Wash., alerted immigration authorities to Malvo and his mother, Jamaicans who had illegally entered the country in Florida, said immigration officials. But, under immigration law, the two were allowed to stay in the country until a hearing on the charges.
That deportation hearing was repeatedly postponed, because of Immigration and Naturalization Service backlogs and because of at least one request for a delay by the pair or their attorneys, said INS spokesman William Strassberger.
The hearing was most recently scheduled for next month - 11 months after the original charges.
Immigration officials acknowledge that the situation should have been handled more quickly, but said the agency should be commended for having collected what proved to be a key clue in the case - Malvo's fingerprint, taken as part of the INS proceeding.
"The INS did a good job," said Benedict Ferro, the former regional INS director in Baltimore. "That was the fingerprint that solved the case."
He conceded, however, that "it's outrageous" that Malvo was allowed to stay in the country for nearly a year.
The high-powered rifle used in the shootings was sold to the suspects sometime this summer, police believe - even though a court order against Muhammad barred him from owning a gun under federal law.
Yesterday, authorities were still trying to determine how Muhammad was able to purchase the gun, a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle that has been linked by ballistics to the shootings.
For the second straight day, agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms spent hours studying records at Bull's Eye Shooter Supply, a gun shop in Tacoma, Wash., and interviewing the owner, who told The Tacoma News Tribune that there was a "pretty good likelihood" that Muhammad bought the gun at his store.
Washington state and county officials said yesterday that under their system, the protective order brought against Muhammad by his wife at the time would have entered the state and federal databases for background checks the moment it was served to Muhammad in March 2000.
The order was made permanent at their subsequent divorce, forbidding Muhammad to own a gun.
Under federal law, a Washington gun dealer must run a background check with the National Instant Criminal Background Check System before selling a rifle, said Lt. Sean Hartsock, a commander at the Washington State Patrol. (Handgun sales also require checks with the state database, he said.)
Bull's Eye sits in an industrial neighborhood just north of downtown Tacoma, with a huge mural of a mad bull painted on its side with the slogan "Stop in and shoot the bull."
Yesterday, owner Brian Borgelt, 38, a former Army sniper trainer, told The Sun that agents were having trouble confirming where Muhammad bought the gun because Borgelt's records are not computerized.
He said he hated the thought that he might have sold the gun, which went on the market in June for between $800 and $1,200, to Muhammad.
"We come in here every day thinking we represent something good, and now we're somehow unintentionally related to that guy?" said Borgelt, speaking in an office filled with pistols, antique rifles and swords as gunfire crackled in the store's indoor target range. "How the hell did that happen?"
Also this summer, the FBI in Washington state interviewed a witness who claimed that Muhammad was trying to obtain a silencer for a gun and once spoke of killing police officers, the Associated Press reported last night.
Unsure about the credibility of the witness, Harjee Singh of Bellingham, the FBI decided not to interview Muhammad, a law enforcement official told the Associated Press.
Instead, the FBI decided that the silencer matter was better left to the ATF and that the threats better left for local police, the official said.
ATF Special Agent Patrick Berarducci said last night that his agency heard about Muhammad only in a casual conversation with police in Bellingham, where Muhammad briefly lived.
"I raised the red flag three months ago," Singh told the Associated Press.
A police officer came within two steps of grabbing one of the suspects in a chase across rain-slicked streets after a double shooting in Alabama on Sept. 21, only to have him slip away, says John Wilson, chief of police in Montgomery, Ala. Wilson said yesterday that the officer, Dwight Johnson, now says the man he was chasing was Muhammad - not Malvo, as police believed earlier in the week.
Johnson heard the gunshots outside a Montgomery liquor store but didn't realize while he was chasing the suspect that the shots had killed one woman and injured another. He briefly considered shooting the suspect but decided against it and lost the suspect when he clambered across a deep culvert, police said.
Two weeks later, the shooting started in Maryland.
Johnson "actually shuddered when he saw the picture" of Muhammad this week, Wilson said yesterday. "He said, 'That's the man I saw.'"
A fingerprint on an assault rifle brochure found at the scene of the Alabama shooting was not submitted for possible matches in a federal database until this week. Only then did authorities develop the link between the suspects and the Alabama crime, which they were tipped off to by the sniper's boastful phone call Oct. 17, in which he bragged to them about a shooting in "Montgomery."
Sgt. Scott Martino of the Montgomery Police Department said yesterday that the fingerprint was first submitted to the Alabama Department of Investigation and run through a database of fingerprints from Southeastern states. That is the usual procedure, he said, since most Montgomery crimes are committed by residents of the region.
It was not until Oct. 21 - the very day, he says, that the print came back negative from the regional database - that federal investigators, acting on the boastful call, requested the fingerprint. They ran it through the federal database, which turned up a link to Malvo, who had been fingerprinted for the immigration violation.
That link proved the biggest break in the case, leading police to Tacoma and Muhammad. But it came after nine killings.
Martino told The Sun yesterday that even if his department had sent the print straight to the federal database, it might have had to wait weeks before being processed.
"If none of the other information [from the sniper shootings] had come to light, and had we sent them prints from our murder scene, you can just imagine how many prints are sent to them from murders around the country," Martino said. "Crime usually happens in our own back yard, so we're going to check locally first."
Montgomery County and District of Columbia police recorded the license plate of the suspects' blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice for possible traffic violations on the first two days of the shootings in Maryland and Washington, but issued no tickets because the tags turned up clean in computer checks.
The Caprice's repeated encounters with traffic police suggest that the suspects were not being as careful to avoid attention as one would expect. Investigators yesterday defended the decisions not to further pursue the traffic violations.
FBI Special Agent Gary M. Bald, who leads the bureau's Baltimore office, told The Sun yesterday that minor traffic violations generally don't yield the kind of information to suggest that someone is a suspected serial killer - it's not a situation "where they see a .223 [rifle] sitting on the seat next to the driver," he said.
"Suppose I was walking down the street and this guy opens the door for me as I'm getting something to eat - should I put my hands on him right there?" Bald said. "You have to have more than just being clairvoyant."
A witness reported seeing a dark-colored Caprice with its lights off leaving the nighttime scene of the Oct. 3 killing of Pascal Charlot in Northwest Washington.
But police placed more credence on reports of a white van or white truck at a Montgomery County shooting earlier that day, and continued to focus on that vehicle description for the next three weeks.
During that time, they set up roadblocks in which only white vans and trucks were searched while other vehicles cruised past.
Law enforcement sources say they emphasized the reports of a white van or truck because those reports seemed more consistent than the conflicting accounts they received about the Caprice.
Duncan, the county executive, defended the police handling of the Caprice sighting, saying that it was taken seriously even though the sniper task force in Montgomery County didn't widely broadcast it to the public.
"I was aware there was a lookout for that. I was aware that the D.C. police had asked for information on that Caprice and that they reissued it several days later," Duncan said. "The D.C. police were talking about that Caprice."
Finally, early in the morning of Oct. 8, about 16 hours after the sniper shot a 13-year-old boy as he was entering his Bowie school, a Baltimore patrol officer came upon Muhammad sleeping in his car in the Remington neighborhood.
The officer questioned Muhammad about the discrepancy between his New Jersey tags and his Washington state driver's license, but Muhammad told him he was a soldier driving from Virginia to New Jersey, records and sources indicate.
Muhammad asked the officer for directions to Interstate 95 and drove off.
A day later, the sniper killed a man at a gas station in Manassas, Va.
Asked about the missed opportunities, Duncan said yesterday that more people might have died if investigators hadn't succeeded in rapidly putting together clues this week.
"You know what? There's a family that's going to sit down for a happy Thanksgiving dinner because we caught these guys," he said.
"Some family or families out there would have suffered the loss of a loved one if we hadn't made these arrests."
Sun staff writers Del Quentin Wilber, Laura Sullivan, Stephen Kiehl and Walter F. Roche Jr. contributed to this article.