Investigators soon learned that a crime similar to the one described in the call had indeed taken place-and that fingerprint and ballistic evidence were available from the case.That set in motion a chain of events that led to the capture of a pair of snipers. On October 17, a caller claiming to be the sniper phoned in to say, in a bit of an investigative tease, that he was responsible for the murder of two women (actually, only one was killed) during the robbery of a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama, a month earlier. The big break in the case came, ironically, from the snipers themselves. Within days, the FBI alone had some 400 agents around the country working the case. We had set up a toll-free number to collect tips from the public, with teams of new agents in training helping to work the hotline. Our evidence experts were asked to digitally map many of the evolving crime scenes, and our behavioral analysts helped prepare a profile of the shooter for investigators. We had also set up a Joint Operations Center to help Montgomery County investigators run the case. The case was led by the Montgomery County (Maryland) Police Department, headed by Chief Charles Moose, with the FBI and many other law enforcement agencies playing a supporting role. Chief Moose had specifically requested our help through a federal law on serial killings. The attacks were soon linked, and a massive multi-agency investigation was launched. By 10 o’clock the next morning, four more people within a few miles of each other had been similarly murdered. On October 2, 2002, a sniper’s bullet struck down a 55-year-old man in a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland. The murders that shocked the nation’s capital and the nation itself had started three weeks earlier.
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