Customer Reviews

Three Weeks in October: The Manhunt for the Serial Sniper

5 star:		(9)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(5)
1 star:		(39)

 

 

I live in the Washington, DC area and remember all the details of the sniper case. I was pregnant at the time and terrified. I found this book to be choppy and repetitive. He says the same things over and over again - in the next sentence, paragaph, page, chapter, over and over again. He often writes in phrases instead of full sentences. It's the way he might speak, but it doesn't read well. There are a few grammatical errors and a mention of a "Washington Wizards hockey game" - it's a basketball team!

There were no major secrets revealed about the investigation. Everything had made it out into the press. He doesn't even seem to reveal his thoughts as surprises unfolded, saying that it wasn't his place at times. To his credit, he does seem honest about his feelings for the most part. I just felt that he left out his unique perspective on the most interesting aspects of the investigation.

The chapters alternate between his life and the investigation. It's effective. The race issue seems to come up in every part of his life, and I'm sure it is always a factor (I too am a minority) but for all of his accomplishments (which he's not shy about telling!) I would have liked for him to put the racial aspect in a more positive light, than with the bitterness alternating with ambivalence that I found through most of the book.

Self-serving and, above all else, boring. Moose provides precious little insight into crimes that terrorized a city and the nation. It is hard to imagine someone not being able to tell a compelling story about the shootings, but somehow he does. Moose is as adept an author as he was a public spokesperson during the crisis. Save your time reading "Three Weeks in October" and simply pat the former police chief on the back, though you'll have to wait for him to stop doing it himself - which is all Moose's 335 pages add up to.

As someone who was directly affected by the sniper shootings (I live in Hanover County, Virginia, where the Ashland shooting took place) I found this book pathetic and Chief Moose even more so. Moose fails to admit fault for just about anything and blames race for everything. Further, it is extremely obvious this book was rushed to print as there were glaring errors in it which a little research would have corrected. First, I had a good laugh when Moose discussed the white, good old boy, southern police here in the Richmond area and how they were prejudiced against a black northern police chief. The Richmond city police department is led by Chief Andre Parker, a black man who was hired from Illinois. In fact, the last 3 police chiefs in Richmond have been black and a white person has not held the position in about 20 years. Sheriff Stewart Cook of Hanover County was the voice of the combined law enforcement effort here in the area, but he worked very closely with Chief Parker as well as the other chiefs in our area to protect the citizenry.

Also, Moose says Ashland is south of Richmond. Ashland is about 20 miles north of the city of Richmond.

This book is like Moose's handling of the sniper incident. Full of mistakes, ineptitude and a rewriting of history. Moose bungled the investigation so badly that the police, ATF, and FBI in Virginia had no choice but to try and tackle the task on their own. Moose's abuse of the media to get his name and face on TV caused deaths rather than prevented them.

The worst thing about the book is when anything negative happens to Moose, he constantly screams racism rather than accepting responsibility for his own shortcomings and moving on. Even the back of the book jacket starts off with how he was born a black boy in the segregated South. This from a man with a checkered past of his own on race relations.

Chief Moose, get over it and move on. The best thing you did was leave your position so that competent leadership could hopefully prevail.

I remember those weeks in October very clearly: the news reports, the anxiety, the anticipation, the hopefulness that the perpetrators would be caught or taken down. The fact that Maryland has some of the most stringent gun control laws in the nation was ironic, as well.

In this reader's opinion, Charles Moose did nothing but hurt the investigation. He initially ignored early eyewitness testimony and gave a 'look out' only for white males in a white delivery box van of varying descriptions. Thanks to this initial denial of evidence, Malvo and Muhammed slipped through checkpoints at least once, despite the suspicious cutouts in the trunk of their blue sedan.

The cracking of case, despite Moose's claims, did not come at his hands, but at the hands of a courageous citizen (a truck driver) who had listened to the late-breaking media leak that the suspects were black males driving a blue, older-model sedan. A whopping two hours later, the shooters were caught.

An Army vet, Steve Cribbin, was a witness to the first Beltway sniper shooting: "I told a cop I was in my car waiting to go to work [outside Papa John's Pizza in Aspen Hill, Md], just resting, and I heard a gunshot, and being I was in the military, I knew it was a rifle. It didn't sound like a backfire," said Cribbin during an interview. "And I looked around and said, 'Man, where in the hell did that come from?' The next thing I know I see a car driving out, and it was, like, a dark blue Thunderbird or an old cop car, with a couple of black guys giving high-fives and driving away."

The detective that took his statement was Montgomery County Detective Chris Homrock. Finally, days later (and several killings later), the multi-agency sniper task force, headed by Moose, sent out a homicide detective to field-interrogate Cribbin about his prior statements. The detective, according to Cribbin, was suspicious of his testimony and tried to talk him out of his statements, asking, "How do you know it's black people?" Cribbin, while uncertain of the car make, was certain of the driver & passenger as it was still light out when he saw them.

As later reported, Moose refused to give out physical descriptions of the suspects until very late in the investigation because he said he didn't want to "paint some group." One Montgomery County PD detective said Moose was worried about patrol officers "stopping every black in Montgomery County. Of course, it was OK to stop every white in a white box truck."

Moose has a race-obsessed past, taking advantage of innocent situations and screeching "racism" or "discrimination" at the slightest question or inconvenience, then attempting to settle the proceeding suit for large sums of money. One known "successful" case was with the Marriott Corporation (for $200k). He fought furiously against the Montgomery County PD to get them to allow him to write and sell this book, despite longstanding ethics regulations preventing him from profiting from his job as police chief. In fact, because of the timing of the release (the start of the trial), the prosecution's case could have been jeopardized. Despite the Montgomery County ethics board's unanimous ruling against its release, Moose ignored them and released it anyway, and (he and his wife) then hurled reckless charges of racism at county employees.

He says in his book that "We must all be social engineers" and admits to having "complicated" feelings about Muhammad and Malvo because they are black. His greed and racial-blinders may have cost some people their lives. Thankfully this book did not jeopardize the trial.

Do not give this man any more money. ...

This book explains why it took so long to catch the sniper from the last paragraph on page 221 through page 223. Incompetence. The rest is a lot of whining by Moose. On page 226 he complains about how "inconvenient" it is to change out of uniform before going home although that is not required. Later he admits he was stopped for speeding and that his wife has been stopped multiple times! Great behavior for a chief of police. He is "victimized" by racial profiling. Hey so is every black person in this country. On page 288 he says Bush made a congratulatory phone call on the capture of the snipers. Moose whines that Bush should have made a personal visit. He left his job so he could write this book. Maybe that's a good thing. I must get the Horwitz book now to read the real story.

Mr. Moose provides a sad reflection on this terrible reign of terror. Possibly if he invested more time in the writing of the book, some meaningful passages and information may have been included within the book's covers. If only to question his blind response to those first witnesses who reported the dark sedan and it's passengers leaving the scene of the first shooting, or of the near universal disrespect of his fellow officers.The book is poorly developed and written as shown by its ranking of appr. 7500 on the Amazon list today. Mr. Moose might do well to examine
his inner self, rather than write of his imagined leadership.

Having lived in the area during the shootings...this book was terrible.

This "Chief" did not "solve" anything. The suspects were stopped numerous times, but he was too busy focusing on suspects that perhaps looked different, or more what he wanted them to look like.

He is extrememly self-serving, and honestly wasn't very articulate (as people often say) or organized while dealing with the media...he was hostile and not very likeable actually. Not sure what the big deal with this guy is.

Like most people in the Washington DC area, those three weeks in October were an amazing and difficult time for me. When I saw Chief Moose on television during the investigation I had the same initial reaction pretty much everyone else did. While he lacked the smooth slickness of a man accustomed to being in the limelight, he came across as a strong leader and a truly dedicated public servant. Boy, did this guy have me fooled, and would I eventually feel like a sucker for it.

It's pretty clear now that inside this brave and dedicated exterior lies a man full of anger and personal demons. Right up to the very final minutes of the investigation, he either knowingly and deliberately misled the public as to the true nature of the assailants, or he was so blinded by his own personal prejudices that he simply could not face up to the evidence that was plainly in front of his face. In either case, such a man isn't fit to run Mayberry's police department, much less one of a large suburban county. Some cursory research into his past will show a long history of problems, caused in no small part by a giant racial chip on his shoulder. And in the end, his inability to abide by the rules set by his bosses led this dedicated public servant to dump his entire career in order to make a quick buck, which led to the book you're reading about here.

Don't let this con-artist dupe you yet another time. If you absolutely must read it then check it out of the library, but don't reward this guy financially after what he did.

Former Montgomery County police chief Moose may have been the face of the investigation but certainly wasn't the brains. Quick to cash in on tragedy and ten deaths, he showed who he really is. I am a Montgomery County Police officer with over 20 years of proud service to my community. My brother and sister officers patrolled the streets during the dangerous days while Moose, a four year MCP officer, hid in front of the cameras assuring residents that they and their children were safe, ignoring credible police information about the Chevy Caprice. We seek no reward and are still here serving the community while Mr. Moose goes around the country peddling his dull, whiny news book.
Let us not forget that it was Mr. Moose and his media savy boss who assured the community that their children were safe. That was a few days before the snipers shot a kid in Bowie. Some comfort. The value of the book is that it shows how anyone with an "opportunity" as Moose said, the media, blood, death, and tragedy can go from obscurity to fame without substance in the minds of those poor little who need to watch fewer soap operas and get a life.

Reading this book reminded me what it was like raising my hyperactive, hypersensitive nephew- he whined from the day he left the womb and hasn't stopped feeling sorry for himself since. Charles A. Moose's lukewarm regurgitation of the events through which all of us in the DC Metro region suffered, is not only a missed opportunity to redeem himself for his foibles during those tense three weeks, but in addition it serves to insult fellow law enforcement officers, the press, victim's families and the public at large. It doesn't take much research to realize that this is a person with a permanent chip on his shoulder and perhaps someone to be ignored at all costs. A better representation of what these three weeks entailed for people in that region of the country, will probably come from one of the several OTHER books about to be released on this subject. The quality of writing wasn't worthy of this Montgomery College student's time.