n the month before the sniper attacks that left 10 dead and terrorized the Washington area, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo are believed to have killed or wounded seven people in four states.

But because they kept on the move and the police gave only routine attention to what seemed like run-of-the-mill crimes, investigators say, Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo were able to slip through the cracks, gaps and blind spots where jurisdictions meet and crime-fighting databases end. As a result, investigators did not even realize that this two-month shooting rampage was going on until it was half over, when, the authorities say, the two men began concentrating their lethal aim on the Washington metropolitan area on Oct. 2.

Advertisement

An examination of the seven shootings that preceded the sniper attacks in the Washington area highlights the limitations of law enforcement, particularly when low-profile crimes do not generate the sort of frenzied, all-points response that took place in October:

•An incomplete computer system run by the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms made it impossible to connect bullets fired in three shootings in Maryland and Georgia in September.

•A less-than-exhaustive search of a killing scene in Alabama failed to turn up the revolver that had been fired in those three shootings.

•A shortage of crime-laboratory technicians caused a 27-day delay in checking what turned out to be a crucial fingerprint from the Alabama crime scene.

•An incomplete national crime database had no information about Mr. Muhammad, even though there was a warrant for his arrest on a February shoplifting charge. So the police officers who stopped his blue Chevrolet Caprice three times in the five days before shootings started in the Washington area had no reason to detain him.

"It was almost as if these guys operated knowing that if they crossed state and local jurisdictional lines there would be no way we would put the clues together," one senior law enforcement official in Maryland said. "We have been praised for our cooperation, but the sniper investigation highlights many more missteps by law enforcement than it does brilliant moves."

On Sept. 5, the police in Clinton, Md., recovered a .22-caliber bullet after Paul LaRuffa, 55, was shot six times and robbed of $3,000 as he left his pizzeria. Mr. LaRuffa later said he had seen a shadow and heard gunshots.

The Prince George's County police sent the bullet to a county ballistics laboratory, a local law enforcement official said, and experts there entered its digital image into a database maintained by the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.

That database, the Integrated Ballistic Identification System, known as IBIS, allows technicians to find links among crimes by comparing bullets and casings found at crime scenes or test-fired from recovered weapons. It has made more than 5,000 matches since its debut in 1993, according to the bureau.

When a bullet was recovered after Muhammad Rashid was shot and robbed while closing a liquor store in nearby Brandywine, Md., on Sept. 15, investigators experts say they used IBIS to link it to the gun used to shoot Mr. LaRuffa 10 days earlier.

But the trail was lost there.

Just after midnight on Sept. 21, Million Waldemariam, 41, was fatally shot outside an Atlanta liquor store as he went to check on two men who were sitting outside in a dark-colored car. A bullet was recovered in an autopsy.

In theory, that .22 slug might have been enough to alert the authorities that there was a gunman on an interstate spree in a dark sedan.

But the Georgia Bureau of Investigation crime laboratory does not run .22-caliber weapons and ammunition through IBIS. John C. Bankhead, a spokesman for the bureau, said examiners considered the system ineffective with such small-caliber weapons. Officials at the federal firearms bureau dispute this.

Regardless, even IBIS would not have matched the Atlanta bullet to the bullets in Maryland, officials say. While the system is being expanded, nationwide searches of the database are still about five months away, said Patti L. Galupo, director of the unit that oversees IBIS.

For now, those ballistics databases that are running include information from only a few states at a time: Georgia, Alabama and Florida, for example, or Mississippi, Louisiana and Arkansas.

"It's not an acceptable fact of life," said John C. Killorin, the special agent in charge of the federal firearms bureau in Atlanta. "The whole point here is to get to a national system, so then the machine would have identified Muhammad and Malvo's pattern of activity, not the investigators. The role of the system is to make cartridges, bullets and shell casings into informants."

Of course, had any other evidence suggested a link among the Atlanta and Maryland shootings, Mr. Killorin said, a special search of the IBIS database could have been arranged.

"I can do that if I make it happen," Mr. Killorin said. "What we're trying to build is a system that routinely makes it happen."

Just 20 hours after Mr. Waldemariam was killed outside the liquor store in Atlanta, two people were shot at a liquor store in Montgomery, Ala. The manager, Claudine Parker, 52, was killed, and a co-worker, Kellie Adams, 24, was wounded as they closed up about 7:30 p.m. on Sept. 21. Police officers who arrived moments later said they had seen a man standing over the women with a handgun, but he got away.

The gun, a North American Arms .22 revolver, was not found until Oct. 30, a week after Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo were arrested. A property owner said he had stumbled across it under a pile of leaves, the police said. Only then did investigators link the gun, and Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo, to the earlier shootings in September.

It is not known whether the revolver was fired in the Montgomery shooting. The sole bullet recovered from that shooting was at first thought to be a .22. But experts who analyzed it after Mr. Muhammad's and Mr. Malvo's arrests said it had come from the same .223-caliber Bushmaster rifle used in the sniper attacks.

Joe Saloom, a firearms examiner for the Alabama Department of Forensic Sciences in Montgomery, said the slug was not entered into IBIS at the time because his laboratory had not yet installed the system.

The clue that ultimately cracked the sniper case was also recovered the day of the Montgomery shootings. It was a fingerprint lifted from a magazine a young man had been seen carrying near the store. The print was sent to the Alabama State Police crime laboratory three days later but sat there for 27 days while the office's four overworked fingerprint examiners slogged through a backlog of evidence, said Capt. Hugh McCall, a laboratory spokesman.

When they finally got to it, they ran the print through a database covering only Alabama and neighboring states — standard operating procedure, said Sgt. Scott Martino of the Montgomery police, because "most crime happens in your own backyard." He added, "We had no way of knowing that these guys were the same ones who were shooting people in Washington."

Had the fingerprint been run through the Federal Bureau of Investigation's national database, investigators say, the police would have matched it to one taken from Mr. Malvo in December, when immigration officers detained him in Bellingham, Wash. An address check would have shown that Mr. Malvo had been living with Mr. Muhammad, officials said. A further check would have found that Mr. Muhammad had recently bought the blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice in which the two suspects were later arrested — after its plates had been routinely checked by the police no fewer than 11 times.

All this information was put together, investigators say, only after the suspects themselves called the police in the Washington area and referred to a shooting in Montgomery.

The Montgomery officer who chased the suspect on foot described being blocked at one point by a blue sedan, said the Montgomery police chief, John Wilson. But unaware that two men in a dark sedan had earlier shot someone outside a store in Atlanta, the police thought it belonged to a passer-by, Chief Wilson said.

His department was not the only one to lose sight of the blue car. In fact, one witness provided its make and model to Maryland authorities in mid-September.

About 10:30 p.m. on Sept. 14, Rupinder Oberoi, 22 was shot outside the liquor store where he worked in Silver Spring, Md. The Montgomery County police did not recover enough ballistics evidence for a full analysis, but a witness said he had seen a dark-colored Caprice slowly leaving the parking lot after the shooting.

After the sniper attacks began on Oct. 2 in the Washington area, the witness's family again went to the police with his account of a Caprice. But when reporters asked about a potential link with the shooting of Mr. Oberoi, members of the sniper task force played down the possibility. They were focused on reports of a white van, which proved misleading.

On Sept. 23, two days after the shootings in Atlanta and Montgomery, Hong Im Ballenger, 45, was shot and killed outside her beauty supply store in Baton Rouge, La., Mr. Muhammad's hometown. A witness heard a shot and saw a man later identified as Mr. Malvo running with Ms. Ballenger's purse, the police said. Another witness later described seeing Mr. Malvo get into an old blue sedan driven by someone else.

The bullet recovered from Ms. Ballenger, however, was not sent to the Louisiana state crime laboratory for analysis until after Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo were arrested. It was then linked to the Bushmaster, leading Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo to be charged with Ms. Ballenger's killing, as they have been with the Montgomery shootings.

A Baton Rouge police spokesman, Cpl. Don Kelly, said detectives there did not routinely send bullets or shell casings for ballistics tests unless they already had a weapon to match them to, or another reason to suspect a link to other crimes, so as not to overwhelm the Louisiana state crime laboratory's experts.

"People are always surprised when we can't do something," Corporal Kelly said, "but we work in the real world with real budgets."

Real budgets are also at the bottom of why a misdemeanor shoplifting charge in February against Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo in Tacoma, Wash., was not entered into the National Crime Information Center's database, which police officers across the country can check from their patrol cars. Tacoma officials said the police typically entered charges only in felony cases, because extradition could be too expensive a proposition for a misdemeanor.

After the Baton Rouge shooting, Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo repeatedly eluded the grasp of the police. On Sept. 28, officers in Gulfport, Miss., ran a check on the Caprice's license plate while the car sat empty in a parking lot. The plates were checked again in Fairfax, Va., on Oct. 1, and in Silver Spring, Md., the afternoon of Oct. 2, five hours before the first sniper attack.

The elusiveness of the two men is galling but understandable, a senior federal investigator in the sniper case said.

"Shootings in front of liquor stores are all too commonplace," the investigator said. "So for one to stand out, something needs to be unique. To connect the dots, first you need more than one dot to connect. But there really wasn't anything that stood out about any of those crimes."

2 Are Cleared in Killings
BATON ROUGE, La., Nov. 28 (AP) — DNA evidence has cleared the two sniper defendants in the killings of three Baton Rouge women, the police say. Samples taken from Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo did not match DNA left in the killings, a police spokeswoman said.