“Hoping to reassure an anxious public, Maryland's two senators and Montgomery's county executive yesterday again touted the partnership forged during this crisis by more than a dozen local, state and federal law enforcement agencies.
Behind the scenes at command central, however, interviews with leading investigators suggest that while some aspects of the massive effort are working well, others are fraught with the same turf battles, politics, leaks and confusion that historically have characterized manhunts of this size.
"It's a total bureaucracy, with guys who have never worked a homicide wanting to know every little detail," said one Prince George's County detective. "We have all these hurdles to jump, just a lot of BS to wade through." "In some instances, there is duplication of work, and it's just a mess," a Montgomery officer said. "It's not a situation that's presented in the press conferences."
Local leaders often are leery of relinquishing control over cases to federal counterparts. In this instance, however, the federal agencies were involved from the start. Monday night, Moose made it official with a letter to U.S. Attorney General John D. Ashcroft.
His action came after Rep. Constance A. Morella (R-Md.) contacted Montgomery County Executive Douglas M. Duncan (D) to suggest that the FBI take the lead because the killer had crossed state lines. Duncan dismissed that as inappropriate and unnecessary.
Just hours later, in an announcement that was mostly symbolic, he and Moose invoked a federal serial killer statute to formally request the FBI's investigative assistance. In return, federal authorities continue to stress, as Sen. Barbara A. Mikulski (D-Md.) did yesterday, that the locals are in charge.
"It's important that our community realize that this is formalized, it's not ad hoc," Moose said yesterday. "That's comforting to people."
Still, cooperation doesn't always mean agreement. Federal investigators and at least one local detective have different thoughts about the sniper's position during the District's fatal shooting -- with federal agents focusing on a stone wall and the detective believing the gunman fired from a car, a source said.
Meanwhile, possible leads phoned in to the local departments, which have no easy way to share that information, are being handled differently, depending on the jurisdiction.
In Montgomery, tip takers use FBI forms and computer software to categorize and distribute information to investigators. In Prince George's, an operator takes handwritten notes and walks them down the hall to the homicide division. The other day, Police Chief Gerald M. Wilson compiled a summary of the leads his department had received and hand-delivered it and a case file to Montgomery.
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The more agencies, the more likely it is that information some may want to keep secret will leak out. Wilson has held his own news conferences, releasing much more information than Moose about evidence found at the scene of Monday's shooting at a Bowie middle school.
Prince George's police found the tarot card hours after the attack but didn't share its discovery with Montgomery counterparts until Tuesday, according to sources. After a reporter was tipped, an angry Moose vowed to find the person responsible. He reconsidered, saying it would waste time and be counterproductive.
"Quite frankly, one part of the team thinks the other part of the team did it," a clearly frustrated Moose said at a news conference.
If the crimes were to expand into additional states, experts say, it might warrant the FBI taking the lead role. "We're bordering on that right now," said James K. Kallstrom, who headed the FBI's New York field office in the mid-1990s. "At some point in time, this is no longer the domain of local county executives and police chiefs."