Three calls put probe on track

It came down to three calls. One came from a man in Tacoma, Washington, who reported strange behaviour by a trigger-happy neighbour. One went to a sincere-sounding priest near Richmond, Virginia. And one, police said, came from the sniper himself. Within a week, John Allen Muhammad, 41, and John Lee Malvo, 17, were arrested, ending three weeks of futile dragnets and false leads.

Blacks take killer identity personally

WASHINGTON: In the Black community, the good news came first and the bad news a half-beat later. 8216;8216;Did you hear?8217;8217; huddled office-workers and shocked e-mail buddies said to one another: It was a revelation few expected: the two suspects in the Washington sniper killings are not disenchanted White men. Many Blacks 8212; from average citizens to influential leaders 8212; took the news personally. LATWP

Once, on Oct 8, with six dead and two wounded already, police found Muhammad asleep at the wheel of a car on a North Baltimore side street. They let him go with just a warning, even though five days earlier, a witness had reported seeing a similar Chevrolet Caprice leave the scene of another shooting.

Things began changing before the last two shootings when the calls started. The most telling, perhaps, came on Oct 17. A man called the police claiming to be the Washington sniper, sounding agitated and wanting to be taken seriously.

A day later, Rev. William Sullivan of Ashland, Virginia, received a similar call from two men, mentioning a killing in Alabama. Sullivan did not know he spoke to the snipers.

On the following Sunday morning, after a sniper shooting in Ashland, Sullivan was met at his church by investigators and he told them of the phone call. That same day, Montgomery police chief J.H. Wilson got to know of a call from the task force in Washington, wanting to know if there were any recent unsolved killings in Montgomery. Wilson and his detectives had a case in mind 8212; on Sept 21, a gunman had slain a woman and wounded another outside a liquor store near Interstate 85. They had some physical evidence, a fingerprint. FBI agents flew to Alabama on Monday. By Wednesday, they had hit upon something. They ran the fingerprint through national databases and eventually matched it to a teenager in Bellingham, Washington.

The fingerprint belonged to Malvo, his prints were in a national database because on Dec 18, Malvo and his mother had had a run-in with local authorities, who had turned them over to the INS office in Seattle.

The trail was now hot. A Tacoma resident called the task force to report about someone named Muhammad and another nicknamed 8216;8216;sniper8217;8217;. The tip took on new currency as investigators found a note tacked to a tree in Ashland. Contained in the note was a demand for 10 million and had a bank account number. The account was traced to a lost ATM card in Arizona. LATWP