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Crucial phone call { October 25 2002 } Original Source Link: (May no longer be active)
http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/25/national/25INQU.htmlhttp://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/25/national/25INQU.html
October 25, 2002
An Angry Telephone Call Provided One Crucial Clue
By ERIC LICHTBLAU and DON VAN NATTA Jr.
WASHINGTON, Oct. 24 — The first real break — the one that sent investigators scurrying from an Alabama liquor store to a backyard in Tacoma, Wash., and finally to a blue Chevrolet Caprice at a highway rest stop in Maryland — came on Oct. 17 in an angry telephone call from a man claiming to be the sniper.
Law enforcement officials say the man on the phone furiously insisted to a startled employee of the Montgomery County, Md., police, "I am God!" Then, according to notes that officials made of the three-minute call, he shouted: "Don't you know who you're dealing with? Just check out the murder-robbery in Montgomery if you don't believe me!"
The next night, last Friday, the man made at least two phone calls to priests — one in Ashland, Va., and the other in Bellingham, Wash. — in an effort to enlist a messenger to establish his credibility with the police, the officials say.
They say the caller told the priest in Ashland that investigators should check for a crime in Montgomery, this time specifying that he meant Montgomery, Ala. The priest thought the caller a crank, but investigators showed up on Sunday at his parish, where he recounted the odd conversation.
The authorities were baffled. After nine murders in two weeks, they certainly took the sniper seriously. But "why was he telling us this?" an F.B.I. official said today. "Did he want to get caught?"
Law enforcement officials contacted the police in Montgomery, Ala., and, sure enough, learned that there had been a murder and robbery at a liquor store there four weeks earlier.
"That," the F.B.I. official said, "was the real linchpin."
The lead got better: investigators were able to trace a latent unidentified fingerprint found on a gun magazine at the liquor store to a Jamaican-born 17-year-old, John Lee Malvo. The teenager had gotten into some scrapes with the law and with iimmigration officials while living last year in Bellingham, and the F.B.I. and the Immigration and Naturalization Service had his fingerprints on file. The fingerprints were in juvenile-crime records maintained in Washington State and in records of the immigration service; though federal agents had access to both, the Montgomery police had had access to neither.
Further, investigators found in court and investigative files earlier this week that the boy had been known to hang out with a former soldier named John Allen Muhammad, also known as John Williams, law-enforcement officials said. Mr. Muhammad was under a restraining order after reportedly threatening a former wife, and officials indicated today that there might also have been forensic evidence, taken from a letter left at the scene of one of the sniper shootings, that pointed to him.
Investigators were intrigued by the pair, and an inquiry that had moved at a frustratingly slow pace began to move into high gear early this week, officials said. While there had been six or seven other people under surveillance in the investigation, "these guys now moved up to the top tier," a senior law enforcement official recounted.
By Tuesday, officials had also traced Mr. Muhammad to a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice registered in his name in New Jersey. Chris Okupski, owner of Sure Shot Auto in Trenton, said today that the Caprice was a former undercover police car that he sold to Mr. Muhammad and another man, Nathaniel Osborne, for $250 in August 2001.
Police investigators in Maryland had been on the lookout for an early-model Caprice spotted near the scene of a shooting on Oct. 3, at the very outset of the sniper spree. But even many law enforcement officials had overlooked that sighting amid widespread alerts to be on the lookout for a white van or a white box truck seen near several shootings.
By Wednesday, federal officials had obtained a search warrant for a house where Mr. Muhammad had lived in Tacoma. The current occupant agreed to the search, so officials did not end up having to use the warrant, a Justice Department official said. Neighbors told investigators that they remembered having occasionally heard what sounded like shots from high-powered guns in the area late at night.
Combing over the backyard with metal detectors for much of the day on Wednesday, agents of the Federal Bureau of Investigation searched for bullets and shell casings in the lawn and sawed off a large tree trunk that they suspect Mr. Muhammad may have used for target practice. Television crews beaming the images live across the country looked on, as did shocked neighbors.
Still, law enforcement officials here appeared uncertain as of late Wednesday afternoon that they had the right suspect, and Justice Department officials say they were told that no imminent breaks were expected.
Similarly, a top F.B.I. official late Wednesday gave a senior Congressional staff member what began as a fairly routine update on the status of the investigation. But the official abruptly cut short the briefing, because, he said, he needed to brief the F.B.I. director, Robert S. Mueller III, on a breaking development in the case.
Just what that breaking development may have been is not yet known. Law enforcement officials would not say whether any ballistics results from the yard in Tacoma had increased their interest in Mr. Muhammad.
What is known, however, is that federal law enforcement officials in Washington decided late in the day Wednesday to obtain a warrant for Mr. Muhammad's arrest, alleging that he had violated the terms of a domestic restraining order by possessing a firearm while living in Washington State.
In their complaint, filed in a federal court in Seattle, the authorities laid out what they described as Mr. Muhammad's longstanding interest in guns. Among other things, he was said to have discussed ways of attaching a silencer to a rifle.
As midnight approached on Wednesday, the Montgomery County police chief, Charles A. Moose, was once again on national television, this time to announce that the police were very interested in speaking with Mr. Muhammad as part of their investigation.
Mr. Muhammad's photograph was quickly televised around the country, along with the number on his New Jersey license plate. In less than two hours, the police had another breakthrough: Ron Lantz, a driver at a rest stop off Interstate 70 near Frederick, Md., northwest of Washington, had spotted the Caprice and matched the tag number.
Tactical alert teams cleared the area and surrounded the car, waiting to move in. After three weeks of deadly violence, "we were expecting a shootout," an F.B.I. official said.
Instead, the police found Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo in the car asleep. The rifle that the police believe was used in the snipings lay in the back seat behind them. The struggle that many law enforcement officials had feared never materialized.
After mounting criticism over the pace and organization of the investigation in the last week, law enforcement officials said they took some satisfaction in knowing that old-fashioned "shoe leather" police work appeared to have cracked the case.
But the real satisfaction "comes in knowing that we're not going to lose any more people," an F.B.I. official said. "People have been working like crazy to resolve this, and that's been the driving force for us."
Law enforcement officials are nonetheless likely to receive intense scrutiny from Congressional officials over their handling of the case, and one question likely to come up is whether it took officials too long to identify Mr. Muhammad after getting their first indication a week ago about the Alabama murder-robbery. Congressional officials said other questions might center on whether the F.B.I. should have moved to take over formal control of the investigation and treat it as a terrorism investigation.
Although no evidence has emerged to suggest that Mr. Muhammad is linked to any known terrorist group, neighbors told the F.B.I. that he had made comments expressing support for the aims of the Sept. 11 hijackers, law enforcement officials said. Investigators are trying to determine whether he might have been driven by religious or ideological motives.
In the Roman Catholic Diocese of Richmond, Va., where the sniper badly wounded a man in Ashland last Saturday night, the Rev. Pasquale Apuzzo, secretary to the bishop, recounted yesterday the phone call, 24 hours before the shooting, that had proved so valuable.
The call, to Msgr. William Sullivan, pastor of St. Ann's Church in Ashland, was from an unidentified man. "He introduced himself with the phrase `I am God,' as we've heard so many times," Father Apuzzo said. The caller instructed Monsignor Sullivan to write down a message for the police.
The caller repeatedly said "Alabama, Montgomery, Alabama." But the call was garbled, and Monsignor Sullivan had a hard time understanding the message. Monsignor Sullivan believed it was a crank call, Father Apuzzo said.
On Sunday morning, investigators showed up at St. Ann's and asked to meet with Monsignor Sullivan. He had them wait while he said Mass, and then he spoke to them. They told him they had a reason to believe the sniper was a parishioner. What that reason was remains unclear, but Monsignor Sullivan said he did not think so, although he told them of the call.
The authorities interviewed him repeatedly on subsequent occasions, and had him listen to tape recordings — their origin is not known — to see if he could match them to the voice that he had heard in the call. Father Apuzzo said he did not know whether Monsignor Sullivan had made any such match.
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