Sniper Suspects Slipped Past Authorities Time and Again

By Stephen Braun and Mark Fineman

Nov. 30, 2002 12 AM PT

Times Staff Writers

WASHINGTON — Bound together on their relentless 18-month odyssey across the country, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo moved like ghosts through the American system, skirting past authorities every time they ran into trouble.

The vast network of federal and local agencies responsible for maintaining public order lost sight of the perturbed Gulf War veteran and the Jamaican teenager the same way thousands of common criminals and illegal immigrants are left to vanish each day into the underground.

Some failures were outright human error. But many were the familiar structural shortcomings that plague bureaucracies in a democratic society -- the inevitable minor breakdowns that occur in institutions that rarely operate at peak efficiency. Overburdened officials missed cues, hampered by poor communication among agencies. Government inquiries moved slowly or sputtered out. Technology failed to perform as promised.

In many instances, authorities appeared to have done their best as they wrestled with warnings about the two drifters charged in the sniper attacks that killed 10 people, left three critically wounded and traumatized Washington’s suburbs last month. But bad luck and poor timing often intervened.

“It was like one of those connect-the-dot paintings,” said James Cavanaugh, a veteran U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms supervisor involved in the sniper task force investigation. “We had single dots, but you need a whole bunch of dots to figure out what picture you’ve got.”

A low-level State Department alert that might have thwarted them at the Canadian border was not passed on to proper authorities, allowing the suspects to slip into the country. Police and federal agents in Washington state failed to pursue warnings about Muhammad from suspicious acquaintances. Malvo was able to stay on with Muhammad even after immigration agents determined the Jamaican teenager was in the U.S. illegally.

Even before the three-week spate of shootings, evidence found at an Alabama crime scene was not compared quickly to federal databases that might have led to the two suspects. And as the shootings mounted, Muhammad and Malvo surfaced repeatedly in front of an army of investigators, but remained anonymous until their own brazen mistakes finally tripped them up.

Concerned that the sniper case has exposed bureaucratic flaws that might be exploited by terrorists, some federal and local police and government agencies are now considering some fine-tuning, sobered by the human wreckage attributed to two penniless drifters, a telescope-equipped rifle and a $250 junker sedan allegedly converted into a rolling sniper’s nest.

“The worry here is that we might see the same sort of multi-state crime wave repeated, not so much by organized terrorists, but by random sympathizers,” said a Justice Department official.

Changes Doubtful

But criminal justice experts who have examined the performance of public agencies in their pursuit of elusive killers doubt there will be widespread changes. Unlike the public outcry that followed the televised horrors of Sept. 11, the serial sniper killings traumatized a region, not a nation -- and the Washington area’s sense of urgency faded soon after the suspects’ Oct. 24 arrests.

“There’s a lot of second-guessing and Monday-morning quarterbacking and pointing to the mistakes that were made -- and there are some,” said James Alan Fox, an analyst of serial killings and professor of criminal justice at Northeastern University in Boston.

Government agencies may weed out common criminals before they transform into serial killers. But no bureaucracy is prescient: “Were it not for that rampage and the many [Muhammad] allegedly killed,” Fox said, “he would just be a run-of-the-mill crook who falls through the cracks.”

The falling began nearly two years ago. Even before Muhammad and Malvo left Antigua for the United States last year, U.S. officials had reason to stop them at the border. But a series of breakdowns in communications among agencies responsible for monitoring traffic into the U.S. allowed the future sniper suspects to make their way to Washington state, where the cross-country murder binge allegedly began.

Muhammad had been living in Antigua since March 28, 2000. He had flown there with his three children. All were using fake names after Muhammad’s bitter falling out with his wife, Mildred, in Washington state.

Settling in a shack on the tourist resort island, Muhammad began using forged papers to smuggle illegal immigrants into the United States. Among those Muhammad supplied with phony documents, Antiguan and U.S. authorities said, was Una James, Malvo’s Jamaican-born mother.

John Fuller, an Antiguan lawyer heading up that nation’s investigation into Muhammad’s activities there, said the sniper suspect was “a serial forger” whose crude computer-generated documents should have been red flags to U.S. officials.

The Odyssey Begins

There were only fitful warnings, quickly buried by bureaucracy. In March 2001, Muhammad was detained at the airport by Antiguan police after he allegedly tried to smuggle out a Jamaican national but escaped from custody before he could be charged. Julie Ryder, a U.S. consular agent on the island, alerted the U.S. Embassy in Barbados to Muhammad’s activities, and that warning was passed on to the State Department’s Diplomatic Security Service for investigation.

There was no immediate follow-through. A State Department official said that without overwhelming proof that Muhammad was involved in massive document forging or illegal smuggling schemes, his case was not a high priority at the time. The Sept. 11 terrorist attacks have since made porous border checkpoints a top concern, prompting officials to scrutinize travel documents more closely.

But the March 2001 alert about Muhammad’s Antiguan detention was not enough for State Department investigators to press for a warrant from the Justice Department, the State official said. “Diplomatic Security would have [had] to investigate further,” he said.

State officials also did not add Muhammad’s name to the Treasury Enforcement Communications System, a database used by the Immigration and Naturalization Service and other federal agencies to scan at airports and border points for undesirables. The two agencies usually coordinate, but the Muhammad probe was at too early a stage, the State Department official said.

As a result, immigration officials knew nothing of Ryder’s alert when Muhammad flew into Miami International Airport on April 14, 2001. Muhammad was questioned by INS anti-smuggling investigators after officials noticed he was traveling with two Jamaican women and a child.

The Jamaicans were quickly deported under INS “expedited removal” provisions, a Justice official said. INS investigators were concerned enough about Muhammad’s activities, the official said, to contact the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami for guidance.

An assistant prosecutor declined to pursue charges, the Justice official said, and Muhammad was released. But Jacqueline Becerra, a spokeswoman for the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami, said there is no evidence the INS referred the case for prosecution.

A month later, Muhammad again set out for the United States from Antigua, this time with his children and Malvo in tow. On May 31, they joined crowds of Memorial Day arrivals in Puerto Rico at San Juan’s Marin airport. Muhammad passed through without trouble. So did Malvo, who authorities said was posing with a forged birth certificate as Lindbergh Williams, Muhammad’s son by a previous marriage when living in Louisiana.

An INS official said the agency’s border agents had little time to examine Malvo’s documents. The INS agents were working quickly under a federal law that mandated travelers could not wait for more than 45 minutes in line -- a requirement repealed after the Sept. 11 attacks.

“No system is foolproof,” said an INS official. “There are people out there who will always attempt to exploit the system.”

Splintered Family

Once in the U.S., Malvo joined his mother, Una James, in Fort Myers, Fla., while Muhammad returned to Washington state. By year’s end, Muhammad’s family life was in tatters. After Muhammad’s children were found staying with him in a homeless shelter in Bellingham, Wash., child welfare officials returned them to his ex-wife. His only consolation was the arrival of Malvo, now a runaway.

Their budding companionship was threatened in December 2001 by the intervention of police and immigration authorities. After arriving in Bellingham, Wash., by bus, James asked police to help her find her runaway son. Police turned Malvo over to child protection officials, who reunited him with James on the condition they return to Florida.

But four days later, a Bellingham High School official noticed Malvo was back in class. Alarmed, the official contacted Border Patrol agents. Rounding up Malvo and James, INS officials fingerprinted them, a routine procedure that later proved crucial in connecting Malvo to the sniper killings.

The pair lied to Border Patrol agents, saying they had stowed away to Florida on a cargo boat, then changed their story, claiming they had paid a smuggler to sneak them into the U.S.

Conservative critics of INS policy and some Border Patrol agents have seized on Malvo’s case as an example of the agency’s inefficiency. Malvo and his mother, they said, should have been quickly deported as stowaways.

Rich Pierce, a Border Patrol agent in Tampa, Fla., and vice president of the agents’ National Border Patrol Council, criticized the INS for lax deportation policies. But Pierce also noted that the agency’s “expedited removal” is allowed only when illegal immigrants are caught near their port of entry. And INS officials said the pair’s changing stories tied their hands, forcing delays while they sought lawyers.

James was freed after she posted $1,500 bond in January, and Malvo was released in her custody. They were ordered to return for a closed-door hearing, which was repeatedly delayed. At the hearing finally held in Seattle last week, an immigration judge ordered James deported. Malvo, who like Muhammad is being held by Virginia authorities in the sniper killings, did not attend.

An INS official insisted that Malvo “was treated as the system would treat any individual. I would dispute an assertion that Malvo slipped through a crack.”

But within days, the boy had fled from his mother again, rejoining Muhammad in the Bellingham shelter. As Muhammad found odd jobs around town, his brooding chatter about buying silencers and killing police frightened some acquaintances into contacting police and federal agents.

Calls Unanswered

Al Archer, director of the Light House Mission, where Muhammad and Malvo stayed, said he told the FBI’s Seattle office about suspicions that Muhammad’s frequent travels might indicate a terrorist connection. Archer said he never heard back from the bureau. ATF officials were also tipped off that Muhammad had asked a gunsmith to illegally file down a rifle barrel. But after the gunsmith told an ATF agent he did not know Muhammad’s name, the agency lost interest.

In June 2002, Harjeet Singh, a man who had befriended Muhammad, told police the former Army veteran had talked admiringly of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks, asked for help in making a silencer and confessed an urge to “shoot a police officer,” then plant a bomb at the funeral.

Two Bellingham officers and an FBI agent met with Singh, but again nothing came of it. “Including me, five people from Bellingham told the FBI about him, but they never did anything,” Singh said.

FBI officials say they referred the case to the Seattle ATF office because of possible firearm violations. Martha Tebbenkamp, the ATF’s spokeswoman in Seattle, said her office “never got any kind of a formal referral about Muhammad from the Bellingham Police Department or any other law-enforcement agency.” The only informal contacts, she said, came “over coffee or during a meeting” with police and FBI agents.

By summer, it no longer mattered. Muhammad and Malvo were on the road, heading east through a drifter’s landscape of highway rest stops and YMCAs. They were allegedly armed with a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle that had disappeared from the shelf of a Tacoma, Wash., gun shop. After the sniper suspects were captured, ATF agents spent eight days inspecting the shop’s sales records but were unable to find any documentation of the weapon’s sale. The gun shop later filed a police report claiming the gun had been stolen -- unnoticed -- from a display rack.

Authorities now say the rifle and a .22 Magnum handgun were used in a string of killings and robberies spanning from Maryland to the Deep South. On Sept. 21, the sniper suspects allegedly killed a man at an Atlanta liquor store. Hours later, one woman was killed and another was wounded at a Montgomery, Ala., liquor store. On Sept. 24, a beauty supplier was slain as she left her shop in Baton Rouge, La., Muhammad’s childhood home.

Detectives pursued each killing as a local crime, unaware of the links to crimes in neighboring states. But the suspects stumbled during the slaying of Claudine Parker, a Montgomery liquor store clerk, authorities said. A patrolman saw a youth later identified as Malvo standing over Parker’s body. And police recovered .223-caliber fragments and a magazine page bearing a fingerprint -- key evidence that would help link Malvo, then Muhammad, to the sniper slayings.

Alabama forensics examiners spent a futile month examining the fingerprint and bullet fragments. Evidence technicians at the Alabama Bureau of Investigation compared the single print from the liquor store killing with thousands filed on index cards at the bureau’s Auburn headquarters. But the bureau found nothing because its database is “primarily Alabama crimes,” said spokeswoman Dee Dee Sharp.

The FBI has built a massive forensics database over the last decade, offering states the ability to find millions of possible matches. The bureau’s Automated Fingerprint Information System provides more than 44 million fingerprints on its database. Daunted by high costs of the technology and hesitating to commit manpower, only 19 states have so far tapped into the FBI system, said FBI spokesman Paul Bresson.

Alabama officials did not send the Montgomery liquor store print on to the FBI, convinced that most of their forensic leads are found within their own files. Some law enforcement authorities suggest that this failure prevented Montgomery police from focusing earlier on Malvo as a possible suspect in the Sept. 21 slaying. The FBI’s database contained Malvo’s INS fingerprints -- and technicians probably would have made the match with the print recovered from the Montgomery crime scene.

Officials with the Alabama bureau insisted they were employing normal procedure. “Everybody’s following their own protocol,” Sharp said.

Alabama officials also did not tap into the ATF’s National Integrated Ballistic Information Network, a database containing nearly 900,000 images of bullets and cartridges from crime scenes nationwide.

Computer Idle

F. Taylor Noggle, interim director of Alabama’s Bureau of Forensic Sciences, said his agency looked at only state ballistics files but “didn’t have anything in our database that matched.” Alabama had a network machine in its Birmingham office, but it wasn’t up and running, Noggle said, because state technicians were still learning how to use it.

Alabama authorities did send the Montgomery fragments to federal officials once sniper task force investigators suspected their cases were linked. But even then, technicians could not make a match until Muhammad and Malvo were arrested and their rifle was test-fired.

The test-firing was the pivotal moment, sniper task force investigators say, when they knew they had their suspects. They had spent three weeks searching desperately for the killers, unaware that Muhammad’s car -- a battered 1990 Chevrolet Caprice bought in New Jersey in September -- had been repeatedly spotted by police.

Police who noticed it ran computer checks on the car 10 times between Oct. 2, the night of the first shooting into a Michaels crafts store, and the suspects’ Oct. 24 capture.

“The car was screaming: ‘Stop me,’ ” said a federal investigator. “It’s dilapidated. It’s got Jersey tags. It’s got a homemade window tint.” And several officers told investigators they were suspicious because they had recognized the vehicle as a converted police car.

Each time they scanned the Caprice, police were provided information from Maryland motor vehicle records and the FBI’s National Crime Information Center files, a database of 12 systems scanning criminal histories, vehicles and weapons.

But the tag checks found nothing useful, authorities said. There were no roadway violations. Muhammad’s Antiguan detention was not serious enough to warrant inclusion. A Washington state shoplifting arrest was too insignificant for storage, FBI officials say. And a Washington state restraining order barring him from stalking his ex-wife and children was not available, FBI officials said, because such orders are not a regular feature of the system.

Without a file that provided “probable cause” to search Muhammad’s Caprice, police did not stop or search the car, letting it drive off again and again.

“Those officers were clearly paying attention,” said Gary M. Bald, an FBI special agent from Baltimore who headed the bureau’s massive task force contingent. “They just didn’t realize what they were looking at.”

At least one witness had accurately described the blue Caprice at a Virginia shooting scene in a Fredericksburg mall on Oct. 4. Spotsylvania County Sheriff Ronald Knight said the witness insisted to investigators that he had spotted “a Caprice, dark-colored, either blue or black.”

The report was forwarded to the task force but went unheeded. The lookout was for white box trucks or vans. Another witness had seen a Caprice “driving away slowly” from a sniper murder scene the night before in Washington, D.C. But that car was described as burgundy-colored, said D.C. Metropolitan Police spokesman Joe Gentile. D.C. detectives mistakenly searched for that Caprice, finding only a “burned-out burgundy Plymouth,” Gentile said.

“If the witnesses had the colors right, we might have got this thing wrapped up weeks earlier,” a federal investigator said. “But you’re only as good as the information you get. We just didn’t have enough.”

Reports that the killers were unable to get through on FBI-run police tip lines prompted bureau Director Robert S. Mueller III to order a review of the training given to his phone-answering teams.

But one federal investigator said the killers also hung up on dispatchers several times, apparently fearing their calls would be traced. One call from the killers suddenly clicked off, the investigator said, because “one of those geniuses ran out of quarters.”

The FBI and other federal agencies are also planning reviews of their handling of the sniper case. And some state governments are showing a new surge of interest in hooking up to the ATF ballistics system and the FBI’s fingerprint databases, Bresson and other officials said.

In the suburban Washington epicenter where six residents were slain, Montgomery County Executive Douglas Duncan has asked aides to look into devising a system that police could use to learn quickly if suspect vehicles are repeatedly scanned by patrol car computers.

Law enforcement officials said they doubted such a system would have made a difference during the sniper killings. Investigators would likely have been deluged with the names of scores of motorists whose cars provoked repeated tag checks by police, Bald said.

But Duncan said he intends to pursue a warning system to “make sure that if someone’s tag gets rung up time after time, it triggers somewhere in our database so police can take a closer look at that person. That clearly didn’t happen this time.”

Times staff writers Ken Ellingwood, Scott Martelle, Patrick McDonnell, Judy Pasternak and Ralph Vartabedian contributed to this report.