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Friday, November 08, 2002 - 12:00 a.m. Pacific

By David Heath and Susan Kelleher Seattle Times staff reporter Greg Cooper

The FBI's sophisticated program for identifying serial killers might have cut short the snipers' deadly spree in the Washington, D.C.-area — if police had actually used it.

But local police departments failed to enter information about unsolved murders into the computerized system, known as ViCAP, according to the FBI and police in several states.

If used properly, the Violent Criminal Apprehension Program could have linked a series of September liquor-store shootings and robberies — four over eight days — to the sniper suspects, said retired FBI supervisor Greg Cooper, who ran the ViCAP program from 1991 to 1995.

Facts about ViCAP

• It's a crime-analysis tool that helps investigators solve crimes by comparing facts about similar cases entered into the database from jurisdictions around the U.S.

• Police are not required to participate in most states. About 500 of the nation's 17,000 law-enforcement agencies — among them Chicago, Kansas City, Los Angeles, Detroit and Philadelphia — enter case information.

• ViCAP can track homicide victims, suspects, evidence and modus operandi.

• Washington state runs its own tracking system, HITS, but feeds certain cases into ViCAP. He believes ViCAP would have helped police apprehend suspects John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo before the October sniper slayings — saving lives and preventing weeks of paralyzing anguish in the nation's capital.

"It's a travesty," Cooper said.

Police agencies send crime data to the FBI's ViCAP on a standardized form that includes up to 93 pieces of information about an unsolved crime: age, race and other details about the victim, weapon, caliber of gun, time of day, method of attack, eyewitness accounts, location and so on.

The ViCAP database analyzes the information, looking for patterns that can link crimes. Or it can be queried by detectives.

For example, an investigator in Montgomery, Ala., could have checked the ViCAP database for all liquor-store holdups in which a .22-caliber handgun was carried or used by a pair of black men.

But such efforts often do little good, Cooper said, since only a fraction of the police agencies send information about their unsolved crimes to the FBI. Only three states — Alaska, New York and New Jersey — require police to enter unsolved murders into ViCAP. About 500 of 17,000 local law-enforcement agencies participate, the FBI said yesterday.

Cooper said some police departments feel overburdened, or don't know about the program, or don't realize its value.

Once a suspect is arrested, ViCAP can be used to link other unsolved crimes, said the FBI's Arthur Grovner, unit chief of ViCAP in Quantico, Va.

Lee Boyd Malvo But of the 20 shootings and slayings believed to be the work of the two sniper suspects — in Washington, Arizona, Louisiana, Georgia, Alabama, Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia — none was linked to the crime spree by ViCAP.

Some of the 20 have been connected to Muhammad and Malvo because people called police.

In Baton Rouge, La., Hong Ballenger was shot and killed coming out of a beauty shop Sept. 23. The next month, her husband, James, called Baton Rouge police to tell them he thought her slaying might be related to the sniper killings.

Ballenger said police turned him away. "They said it wasn't the same MO and they had other leads. They said they didn't have ballistics."

He called the FBI hotline with the same tip, which eventually connected his wife's killing to the two snipers by ballistics.

The sniper shootings were ultimately cracked by clues the suspects dropped in a telephone call to police, hinting at the Alabama liquor-store holdup. Police recovered a fingerprint at the scene and identified it as Malvo's.

Ballistics tests showed the gun used in that killing was the same used in the killings in Maryland. The pair were arrested soon after that.

John Allen Muhammad Since the arrests, police have been looking for other possible slayings linked to the sniper killings. But in each of those cases so far, ViCAP has been useless because its data are incomplete.

In Tucson, Ariz., police believe that 60-year-old Jerry Taylor was a victim of the sniper suspects. He was shot and killed while playing golf March 19. A police spokeswoman said the murder wasn't entered into ViCAP.

FBI agents and the Sniper Task Force made the link to Muhammad earlier this month when they discovered that he and Malvo were in Tucson visiting Muhammad's sister in mid-March.

The FBI developed ViCAP in the 1980s. In 1994, Congress passed a bill that gave $20 million to improve it.

Each year in the United States there are roughly 20,000 unsolved murders, missing persons and unidentified bodies, ideal candidates for inclusion in ViCAP. Last year, however, only 5,186 new cases were added to ViCAP, the FBI said.

So far this year, just 1,261 cases have been added.

Given how few unsolved murders are entered into the system, Cooper said, "The surprising aspect of it is that there are a number of cases that have been solved from it."

A high-profile example is the apprehension of Rafael Resendez-Ramirez, the "Railroad Killer." ViCAP linked him to killings in Texas and Kentucky after searching for cases of homeless men killed in railroad yards.

In Washington, information on an unsolved Tacoma killing that later was linked to the sniper suspects had earlier been entered into Washington's HITS program. HITS is much like ViCAP and run by the Attorney General's Office. The office only transfers cases into ViCAP that meet the FBI criteria for tracking, and officials would not say if the shooting of Keenya Cook met those criteria.

Unlike the FBI's ViCAP, the HITS program — Homicide Investigation Tracking System — records all cases of homicide, sexual assault and missing persons with suspicious circumstances.

Cooperation in the program is voluntary, but the state pays six investigators to collect data from more than 300 law-enforcement agencies statewide, and to spot potential cases in newspapers.

As of last week, the system held 5,048 homicide records from Washington state, starting in the early 1980s, of which 1,372 are unsolved.

"We have 100 percent compliance," said John Turner, chief criminal investigator for the state Attorney General's Office.

-- Anonymous, November 08, 2002