FAIRFAX, Va. - Fairfax County Police Chief J. Thomas Manger dreaded the buzzing of his pager, fearing the next message would bring news that snipers terrifying the Washington region had finally struck his bustling suburb.
One night last month, the alert came - an apparent sniper attack at a Home Depot store in Falls Church - and the veteran police officer raced to the scene. He had supervised several serial rape cases, but nothing had prepared him or his department for this.
"We tried to manage the best we could," Manger said. "We began working at a fever pitch, yet it didn't seem like enough. What more could we do? People were afraid to get gas, go to the grocery store, go for a walk. We've never had cases like this, never had anything that affected the public like that. Even threats of terrorism didn't last as long as sniper case was lasting and affecting so many people so dramatically."
While Montgomery County Police Chief Charles A. Moose was the high-profile face of the investigation, the actions of Manger and other Virginia chiefs and their departments will be under close scrutiny in coming months as the two men charged in the attacks face trial in Fairfax and Prince William counties.
Among the 14 shooting incidents that began on Oct. 2 and ended three weeks later with the arrest of John Allen Muhammad, 41, and Lee Boyd Malvo, 17, three people were killed and two were seriously wounded in Virginia.
In a series of interviews, Virginia law enforcement officials spoke about their experiences during the three-week saga. They confronted obstacles such as a lying witness and misguided leads about white trucks, and felt deep disappointment when two suspects arrested at a phone booth turned out to be innocent immigrants.
Lesson from the past
Spotsylvania County Sheriff Ronald L. Knight was driving his patrol car about 2:30 p.m. on Oct. 4 when he received a radio call that was quite unusual for his quiet rural community of 90,000 people. A woman had been shot outside a Michaels craft store at Spotsylvania Mall off Interstate 95 near Fredericksburg.
"I didn't think lightning could be striking us again so quickly," the sheriff said.
Just a few months earlier, Knight and his deputies had solved the serial abduction and killing of three young girls, a case that had bedeviled investigators for more than five years.
Deputies began using left-over computers and software from that case to help track leads. They rekindled relationships with federal agents who assisted in the search for the girls' abductor.
Knight said his deputies also called upon deeper lessons they learned in investigating the deaths of Sofia Silva, 16, and two other girls.
"The Silva case had the ups and downs so much that we were about dried up of emotion," Knight said. "We were totally drained. It was a heavy burden to go through that again. But we learned not to give up. Somewhere along the line, you are going to get a break."
On Oct. 11, seven days after the woman was critically wounded by the sniper at Spotsylvania Mall, the gunmen returned to Knight's county - killing a 53-year-old man at a gas station in Massaponax.
A witness - perhaps looking for white vehicles after police had put out several public look-outs for white box trucks in recent days - reported seeing a white van with a ladder rack.
Spotsylvania County deputies and police from across the region launched their first massive effort to close down roads and highways to catch the gunmen. Police focused on white vans, pulling over hundreds on area roads.
But, as Knight now knows, the suspects were driving a blue Chevrolet Caprice. During the Silva investigation, deputies spent five years looking for a white pickup truck. It turned out the killer was driving a green sedan.
"Sometimes witnesses see some things that can be proven to be wrong," Knight said. "I'm sure people saw a white van. But we don't discredit people because of what they saw."
Frustrating setback
Three days later, on Oct. 14, the sniper struck at a Home Depot in Falls Church, Va., an unusual spot for an attack - far from Interstate 95 in an urban environment of congested roads that even Northern Virginia natives can have trouble negotiating.
Again, a witness saw a van with a ladder rack. But this time, a witness told detectives that he saw the shooting, saw a man step out of a cream-colored van and open fire. He gave an amazingly detailed description of the weapon - an AK-74 assault rifle.
In another case, Manger, the county police chief, might not have gone public with the vehicle description: a cream-colored van with a burned-out taillight. But Manger wanted millions of eyes searching for the van. He felt that outweighed alerting the snipers to the search.
"My decision at the time was that I would rather have everyone on the road, everyone in the public, looking for that burned-out taillight," Manger said. "It would only work until the bad guy hears it and fixes the light. But we put that out quickly enough that it would have been unlikely the guy could fix it."
But nobody spotted the van - for good reason. The witness had made up the story, and was later arrested. What had been the case's most promising, and detailed, lead dissolved before Manger's eyes.
"We were pretty disappointed," Manger said. "This was a big case, bigger than any I had previously worked. But I knew there were other leads being followed up. We weren't just putting all our eggs in that one basket."
But it was unclear where those leads would go. With each shooting, Manger and other chiefs felt the sharp pain of frustration - not only at finding another victim but also having to eliminate several potential suspects whom detectives had been secretly tailing.
"There were people we were focusing on that looked good," Manger said. "But I had to consciously tell myself to not get my hopes up."
A new clue
On Oct. 19, after a five-day lull, the snipers seriously wounded a man behind a Ponderosa restaurant in the small town of Ashland, Va.
But local police felt they were ready.
Ashland Police Chief Frederic Pleasants Jr. and Col. V. Stuart Cook, sheriff of surrounding Hanover County, had a plan that detailed road closures, roadblocks and check points and better ways to funnel resources into the crime scene.
"Ultimately, we thought this could happen to us," Cook said. "You need this kind of planning in place."
Police efforts were again foiled by erroneous reports of white vans. Despite that setback, they were optimistic by the time they went to bed that night. They had found their first significant clue that hinted at the snipers' potential identities, a note tacked to a tree near the shooting scene behind the restaurant. In the note, the snipers told police they would call them at a designated phone number.
When that call came on Monday morning, police traced it to a phone booth in nearby Henrico County. There, police spotted a man in a white van pulled up next to a pay telephone. Investigators saw another man at a pay phone across the street.
They arrested both. Immediately, everybody in the command post felt elated, said Hanover County Commonwealth Attorney Kirby H. Porter, who joined the investigation to give legal advice on search and arrest warrants.
"We thought we had them," Porter said.
But as the day progressed, police realized that the men were immigrants with no ties to the sniper attacks.
"For every problem, there was a counter theory that solved that problem," Porter said. "But just too much wasn't adding up. There was this huge sense of disappointment. We were close but so far. ... It was strange. One moment, you were in a room full of 50 people, then in a room full of 20 people, then in a room full of five people. Then, you were alone."
Exhilarated, exhausted
But the gunmen had made a critical mistake. They called police and bragged about a robbery and shooting in Montgomery, Ala., where police found a fingerprint near the crime scene. Investigators eventually linked that print to the two sniper suspects.
Even as police became more confident that Muhammad and Malvo were responsible for the attacks, law enforcement officials said they refused to allow their hopes to rise.
But when police arrested Muhammad and Malvo at a Frederick County rest stop and linked a rifle found in their car to many of the sniper shootings, the chiefs and sheriffs felt exhilaration, which was quickly replaced by exhaustion.
Said Knight, the sheriff of Spotsylvania County: "It was really nice to go home and be able to sleep for the first time in three weeks."