The D.C. snipers fatally shot people in the midst of the mundane — while pumping gas, mowing the lawn, and reading on a bench.
In three weeks, almost 24 years ago, they terrorized the capital region, killing 10 and wounding three.
A new exhibit at the National Law Enforcement Museum captures the terror of those October days and tells the stories of the people charged with ending it.
Montgomery County was the epicenter of the bloodshed. During 27 hours, the snipers killed five people in the county and a sixth just over the border in Washington, D.C.
In Prince George’s, the snipers shot a 13-year-old boy in the chest as he walked to school, but he survived.
Charles Moose, then head of the Montgomery County Police Department, was the face of the manhunt, one of the largest in American history. His updates on the case topped newscasts throughout the world.
“Without Warning: Ending the Terror of the D.C. Snipers” opened last week at the downtown D.C. museum. It honors the victims and chronicles the police work that culminated in the arrest of a man and his then-17-year-old accomplice at an Interstate 70 rest stop.
Sniper John Allen Muhammad, a former Army sergeant who returned angry and confused from the 1991 Gulf War, was executed in Virginia in 2009. He was convicted in Prince William County, Virginia, and in Montgomery County of sniper killings. His ex-wife testified that he went on the killing spree as part of a plan to kill her and regain custody of their children.
Lee Boyd Malvo, now 41, is still imprisoned in the state. He has been seeking to be resentenced in the six killings to which he pleaded guilty in Maryland.
Chief Moose died in 2021. He is memorialized in the exhibit, numerous profiles and a 2003 television movie in which he is played by Charles Dutton.
But many more law enforcement officers and those in the courts who worked on the case can recall it in vivid detail. The Banner asked four of them — including current Montgomery County State’s Attorney John McCarthy and Montgomery Police Chief Marc Yamada — to share their memories.
The prosecutor
“Nobody was safe,” said McCarthy, then a deputy in the office he now runs. In 2002, he gave legal guidance to investigators searching for the snipers.
“If you lived here — you lived in fear,” he said.
There were no eyewitnesses to the first two homicides, McCarthy recalled, leading investigators to believe that the gunshots were fired from a high-caliber weapon from a distance. Though no one said they saw the shootings, they had been loud enough to hear.
No motive could be discerned, and anxiety ran high. The D.C. snipers attacked only 13 months after the deadliest terrorist attack in the nation’s history.
“It was not lost on anybody when this happened, there was a great fear that not only was this a serial killing, there was some thought that this might be a terrorist attack because of 9/11,” McCarthy said.
During one of the first media briefings on the case, held outside what was then Montgomery County Police headquarters in Rockville, McCarthy said he noticed that investigators themselves seemed vulnerable to an ambush.
“I said, ‘We’re out of our freaking minds. Anybody could position themselves on top of any of these buildings and pick us off.’”
In subsequent outdoor press conferences, he said, police positioned sharpshooters for protection.
The captain
Those first killings blindsided Barney Forsythe, who was months short of retirement as the head of the MPD’s Major Crimes Division, which oversaw homicide investigations.
“One of the first things we have to do is take care of these crime scenes. And all of a sudden, we have five of them,” he said. “You’re going, ‘What the heck just happened?’”
Right away, Forsythe said, he asked for help from the FBI, which gave the department access to new technology that digitized tips from the public.
“We were literally handwriting leads,” he said. “These leads are coming in hand over fist. We can’t get off the phones quick enough.”
The operation quickly expanded into a task force and included officers from the Maryland State Police, FBI, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives, and the U.S. Marshals Service — 19 local, state and federal agencies in total.
A Rockville office building served as the task force’s headquarters. Investigators worked around the clock, with Forsythe charged with coordinating the agencies’ work and updating Moose.
The detective
Montgomery County Assistant Chief Darren Francke, now the department’s chief of patrol, was in 2002 assigned to work in Silver Spring on burglaries, robberies and shootings — but nothing that resulted in death.
With his colleagues working overtime on the sniper case, his bosses told him to investigate the murder of 34-year-old Sarah Ramos, a babysitter and cleaning woman who was shot in the head as she sat on a bench reading at Leisure World‘s shopping center.
Ramos was the fourth person killed by the snipers, but it wasn’t clear at first that her death was tied to the others.
But soon after, Francke was chasing leads called in to the hotline set up for the sniper cases. One tip, about the suspects working out of a “white box truck” reportedly seen near where Ramos was killed, led investigators astray.
Police put the public on guard, and more tips poured in about trucks that fit the description. But the snipers’ nest, Francke and the nation would soon learn, was a modified blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, now part of the museum’s exhibit.
“We went down this rabbit hole with this white box truck,” Francke said. The directive was, “You got to find that white box truck.”
For the rest of his career, Francke said, he’s reminded himself to investigate with an open mind. “Don’t white box truck it,” he says.
To celebrate the capture of the snipers, Francke and his wife went out to breakfast and passed a sign thanking police that was hanging n an I-270 overpass.
“That still resonates with me,” he said, fighting back tears.
The undercover corporal
Montgomery County Police placed Yamada — then a corporal and now chief of the department — on a special-assignment team during the sniper attacks.
He worked plainclothes in an unmarked vehicle and positioned it along I-95 and I-270 and other county roads, on the lookout for a white box truck.
Yamada said he felt especially nervous when pumping gas because four of the 10 murder victims were killed at gas stations.
He advised his family to “zigzag a little bit” when walking in a parking lot to make themselves a harder target for a shooter.
“It was things that you never thought about before because people were being hunted,” he said.
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