Twenty years since the Beltway sniper shootings paralyzed the D.C. region, law enforcement members who worked at the time still vividly remember those weeks of terror and the pressure they felt not only to catch the killers, but to reassure an anxious public.
John Allen Muhammad, 41, an ex-military member, trained 17-year-old Lee Boyd Malvo to become a sniper assassin. The two men shot and killed 10 people and wounded three others over a three-week span in October 2002.
"It’s profound the level of damage that they did. They tore apart families that will never be able to repair the pain and hurt that they've been through," U.S. Capitol Police Chief Tom Manger said. At the time of the sniper attacks, Manger was chief of police for the Fairfax County Police Department.
The snipers' killing machine was a 1990 Chevy Caprice. They cut a slit in the back of the trunk, put a glove in the slit and Malvo would lie on his stomach in the trunk and place the barrel of the gun in the glove before firing.
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After they eventually captured Muhammad and Malvo, federal agents took their gun and the Chevy Caprice to shooting scenes to see how the killers carried out the attacks.
The car, the gun, photos of the agents' reenactments and some disturbing drawings from Malvo’s notebook are now at the National Law Enforcement Museum in D.C.
"It’s important to have a place. It's important to be reminded how we came together to overcome that event," said Tom Canavan, with the National Law Enforcement Museum.
Many people involved in the search for the snipers have vivid memories of what happened 20 years ago.
"People were terribly frightened. Parents were calling - 'Is it safe for my child to go to school?' People were scared to fill up a tank of gas or go to the grocery store," said Paul Starks, who was on the Montgomery County SWAT team at the time.
Four people were shot and killed in Montgomery County, Maryland, in one day. A man cutting grass in Rockville, a cab driver getting gas in Aspen Hill, a house keeper sitting on a bench at a shopping center and a woman vacuuming out her car at a gas station in Kensington were all killed in a span of less than three hours.
At the time, no one knew where the shots came from or what was going on. Homicide detectives wore flack vests as they worked the scene looking for clues and information.
At at least one of the scenes, a witness reported seeing a white box truck speeding away.
"The biggest damage that it did was the fact that it gave everybody tunnel vision that they were only looking for the white box truck, a white van, and that just wasn’t as solid a lead as every body thought it might have been," Manger said.
The snipers shot and wounded a 13-year-old student Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland. They left behind the Tarot card with the message: "For you Mr. Police. Call me God. Do not release to the press."
The snipers appeared to bait the cops at times, making threats like a note that said, "Your children are not safe anytime, anywhere."
"You have asked us to say, 'we have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose,'" Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose once said at a news conference.
As time went on, investigators gathered fingerprints, ballistic evidence and tips from near and far to identify Lee Boyd Malvo as a suspect, which led police to Muhammad and a lookout for the blue Chevy Caprice.
A trucker called 911 when he spotted the car at a rest stop in Myersville, Maryland.
Jeff Nyce was a SWAT team leader involved in the takedown when police converged on the Chevy Caprice.
"A citizen asked me, they said, 'Why didn’t you shoot the bastards?' I had that asked several times since I was the designated shooter. I said, 'Unlike Malvo and Muhammad, we are all men of conscience. That’s the difference between them and us," Nyce said.
Muhammad was executed in 2009. Malvo was sentenced to life, and he has since tried to appeal that sentence. Virginia denied parole to Malvo in September, ruling that he is still a risk to the community.
"The things that he did, the pain that he caused people, the impacts that these things had on so many people’s lives - I do think we're all safer with him behind bars," Manger said.
