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WEDNESDAY MARCH 19 2003
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-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- D.C. SNIPER TERROR Revealed: Secret sniper stake-out Moose sent team to Muhammad's ex-wife's home full day before releasing look-out
-------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Posted: March 19, 2003 9:02 p.m. Eastern
By Paul Sperry © 2003 WorldNetDaily.com
ROCKVILLE, MD. -- Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose secretly dispatched a team of undercover officers to stake out the home of alleged sniper John Lee Muhammad's ex-wife a full 24 hours before he released a physical description of the sniper suspects to police, WorldNetDaily has learned.
Chief Charles Moose
Moose, who is in a row with police union officials over withholding sniper information from patrol units, claimed last week that he did not have any "confirmed suspects" on Oct. 22, the day he ordered the stake-out.
Detectives here who worked on the sniper investigation, which was headed by Moose, say his statement is at odds with the facts.
On Oct. 22, two days before Muhammad and alleged co-conspirator Lee Boyd Malvo were finally arrested for the Beltway shootings, four undercover agents led by Sgt. Kirk Holub of the Montgomery County Police Special Investigations Division set up a stake-out at the Clinton, Md., home of Mildred Muhammad, Muhammad's ex-wife. She lived with her three children at her sister's white townhouse at 9815 Quiet Brook Lane.
They coordinated with the Prince Georges County Police Department, and were joined by an FBI sharp-shooter, sources say.
"Our orders were to call the task force if Muhammad showed up in the area, but if any action had to be taken, he [the FBI agent] was our sniper guy," an officer who went on the stake-out told WorldNetDaily.
He says the team met the FBI agent, who had special weapons in his car, at a 7-11 on Route 5 near the townhouse. The stake-out produced no sightings of Muhammad.
In a secret meeting held earlier that day at headquarters here, Moose's deputy Bill O'Toole briefed the team about the sniper suspects, sources say. He was joined by George Layton, the FBI's supervising agent on the sniper task force.
"They said they had two good suspects and wanted to send us down to Muhammad's ex-wife's house," said one of the undercover agents who attended the late-night meeting. "We were sworn to secrecy."
According to his notes of the briefing, O'Toole showed the team photos of both Muhammad and Malvo and revealed a wealth of background information on the two, including their alleged involvement in other murder cases and a description of Muhammad's Bushmaster rifle.
"They gave us height, weight, physicals and everything on both of them," he said.
"When we heard the evidence they had, we all looked at each other and said, 'This is them, this is them!'" he added.
Yet they were "sworn to secrecy," and Moose didn't release the be-on-the-look-out for Muhammad and Malvo for another 24 hours. Two hours later, they were caught.
Even then, there was hesitation. One investigator says he was ordered to return a wanted poster on the suspects that he'd picked up at the joint operations center here at about 10 p.m. on Oct. 23.
"It was handed to me, and then it was taken back, and I was told, 'Moose hasn't authorized this release yet,'" the detective said.
Investigators say releasing the look-out sooner on Muhammad and Malvo could have sped their capture. The two were arrested Oct. 24.
"I know that they had them as No. 1 suspects early on, on the 22nd, and possibly as early as the night of the 21st," said a Montgomery County Police detective who was closely involved in the investigation.
Moose, who did not respond to written requests for an interview, said in a statement posted on his website that he learned of no "confirmed suspects" by the close of the day on Oct. 22. That morning, bus driver Conrad Johnson was fatally wounded by the snipers in Aspen Hill, Md.
Police union officials complain, moreover, that Moose jeopardized the safety of his own police officers by withholding the suspect descriptions.
The look-out, when finally released, was posted on the department's "web board," which cannot be accessed from patrol cars. Moose declined to notify uniformed patrol officers about Muhammad and Malvo through radio channels or through their cruiser computers, called mobile data terminals, or MDTs.
He says he wanted to keep the information off the police radio because it was monitored by the media, and he feared media leaks.
But the media got a hold of the information anyway, and the leaks actually led to the capture of the sniper suspects, whose car was blocked in by a trucker at a Maryland highway rest stop.
Some detectives charge Moose's real motives for withholding the information were political.
"Moose failed to release the look-out for these guys once he officially had it, because he didn't want his officers stopping every black in Montgomery County," said a Montgomery County Police detective, who requested anonymity. "Of course, it was OK to stop every white in a white box truck."
Moose came to Maryland vowing to end black criminal profiling as he had in Portland, Ore. Before taking the job in 1999, he met with the local NAACP. The next year, he signed an agreement with the Clinton Justice Department to ban profiling in the county.
Previous stories:
Cops: Chief Moose withheld look-out on sniper suspects
Moose denies blocking police pay raise
Related column:
Race-conscious Moose may have cost lives
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Paul Sperry is Washington bureau chief for WorldNetDaily.
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