When error compounded terror in hunt for Washington sniper

By ROGER FRANKLIN

It's a funny thing about Washington, how the most obvious things often go unnoticed. To the locals, the Washington Monument is just a spike in the skyline, not a towering phallic tribute to the Father of the Country. The seat of American democracy? Well, D.C. residents will point to Capitol Hill, not the lobbying firms on K St, which visitors with favours to buy recognise as the true seat of power and influence.

And then there is the problem with murders and murderers.

Start with the infamous inability of the local police to find slain congressional aide Chandra Levy, whose bones remained undiscovered for 12 months in the very same park to which she was known to have been heading on the morning she disappeared.

Three times police combed the preserve, yet it was a spring stroller who eventually stumbled on her fate.

And now there is a new example of blinkered vision to ponder: the strange case of Beltway Sniper John Allan Muhammad, who might still be out there potting shoppers and schoolboys if investigators had not inadvertently released a description of his car, which for reasons best known to themselves they would have preferred to keep under wraps.

Fortunately, a passing truck driver spotted the vehicle, summoned cops and blocked any possible escape with his rig. Of course the driver wasn't a local, which explains why he had the wits so rarely found in Washington's permanent residents.

Now, as the panic recedes and rival jurisdictions vie to stage Muhammad's trial and execution, there is time to ponder how so many experts could have been so wrong and with so few apologies.

From profilers to the press to the police, error compounded terror.

Start with the profilers, those soothsayers of the psychological arts without whom few TV whodunits dare to go to air these days. You know the sort: the victim is found facing north, trussed with reef knots and stabbed three times in the heart.

"Ah-ha!" exclaims the forensic shrink as a soundtrack suggestive of turning wheels tinkles in the background. "What we're looking for is a former sea scout who failed medical school and rejects the theological relevance of the Trinity." By the time the credits roll, the scriptwriters have made it so, all neat and pat.

Real life is different. At the profilers' confident urging, the police concentrated their efforts on a red-neck loner from Central Casting, the gun nut with the beer belly and the truck - a white box one in this case rather than the standard-issue pickup - whose appearance in any B-grade movie signals that the hero is about to get the beating he will avenge in the final reel.

From there, as the tally of victims grew larger and the panic spread, mistakes multiplied by an order of magnitude.

The profilers' notional Billy Bob Bubba was said to be acting alone. In fact he wasn't, since he had the help of 17-year-old sidekick John Malvo.

He was a frustrated heterosexual, they explained, his preference for a rifle an obvious substitute for deficient manhood. Maybe so, but pictures of the pair - the older man's arm around his cherubic "stepson" - have to make you wonder.

Then there was the pattern of the killings, which the profilers saw as the product of an above-average IQ, a steady job as a deliveryman, a stable home and a well-tuned TV set.

Wrong. Wrong. Wrong. Wrong.

Smart? Hardly. The semi-literate notes Muhammad left at several of his murders were blotted with careless fingerprints. As for the home and the TV set, he was living in his car.

The stable job that had allowed him to master his hunting ground's escape routes? Actually, he was both unemployed and a new arrival, having followed a circuitous path all the way from Washington State on the Pacific Coast.

The white truck and the van with roof racks? Total nonsense. The murdermobile was a clapped-out sedan bought for US$280 ($577).

Asked to support their suppositions, the profilers invoked "statistical probability", since the majority of snipers were white guys. Duly reported in the press, it became an article of faith.

Except it, too, demanded the moulding of facts to fancy. According to the FBI, 55 per cent of snipers are white. Yes, it's a majority, but only just.

Had authorities not taken the experts' word, Muhammad might have been arrested much sooner. Eleven times his clapped-out Chevrolet Caprice was spotted near murder scenes, and three times he was stopped and questioned.

One witness even reported a crouching black passenger in a magenta car that was seen fleeing a murder scene with its lights out. In the dark, she mistook the colour, but if police had not been so sure their quarry was white, it would have been a key clue. Instead the information was discarded.

Now that Washington school students have returned to their playgrounds, there is an understandable reluctance to keep the focus on all the things that went wrong. That's a pity - perhaps a tragic one, since Muhammad's motive remains moot.

The prevailing wisdom now says that the US$10 million he demanded to end his spree was the crux of the case. Take that wisdom for what it's worth, but there is ample reason to suspect another case of that selective Washington blindness.

Two of Muhammad's acquaintances on the West Coast reported him to the FBI as a suspected terrorist. Others wondered where a man living in a homeless shelter found the cash to take periodic flights to unnamed foreign lands.

And if extortion was his goal, why did he go to the trouble of shooting up a Washington State synagogue? And why travel 4800km to inflict terror on Washington rather than, say, Seattle?

Maybe he's not an Islamic terrorist, freelance or otherwise. Maybe the cash he flashed at the doss house really did come from smuggling illegal aliens into the US, as the latest theory posits.

But unless these questions of motive are exhaustively investigated, the case can never really be closed. Even the most blinkered expert can surely see that - although not perhaps in Washington.

Further reading:
The Washington sniper

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