At Dunwoody Prep, forty-seven security cameras peered into almost every corner of the grounds. The day after the shooting, CDs of the footage from the two cameras with the best view of the scene—those trained on the parking lot—were submitted for analysis to Walter Pineda, a former Pinkerton detective who went on to start his own company, Video Enhancements, that specialized in analyzing security videos. He could adjust the contrast, color, and darkness of the moving images in the hope of getting a better view of the shooter. He could also lift the best images from multiple cameras and edit them together like a movie to provide a better sense of movement and time.
In this case he created an eerie sequence that began about an hour before the crime, when the van pulled into the parking lot at 8 a.m., left, then returned about an hour later. The effect implied that the shooter either was casing out the school, looking for the best location to kill, or had shown up at the wrong time, since the van went back to Rusty’s neighborhood then reappeared on the security footage at 9:10 a.m. Rusty’s Infiniti could be seen approaching the school, with Ian in the backseat and the van on his tail.
Nowhere in all the footage could any part of the actual murder be seen; it all occurred in a security camera blind spot. Nor could Pineda generate a better image of the shooter; in all the frames the assailant remained a bearded blur. But what did come through clearly—better than any of the descriptions provided by eyewitnesses—was the van. Witnesses had variously characterized it as a Chrysler, Kia, and Hyundai. Chief Grogan went public calling it a Dodge. It was silver or gray and probably new. The security cameras captured the van from different angles, the enhanced images providing police a strong hope of narrowing down the getaway vehicle.
Detective Thompson brought the photos to Chrysler, Honda, and Ford dealerships, but none said the van looked like one of theirs. A colleague, Officer Brian Tate, the policeman who had gotten the first call to the crime scene, suggested the van looked like a Kia. Looking at photos on the company’s website, Thompson compared the body shape, hubcaps, side-view mirrors, and lights. It all added up to a Kia Sedona, a family minivan. The general manager of a local Kia dealership examined the enhanced photos and confirmed that the murder van was in fact a 2011 Sedona, on the market for only weeks. A call to Kia headquarters found that sixteen hundred of those vans had been sold in the United States in black, burgundy, white, dark blue, light green, and silver. But only thirteen were sold in Georgia and South Carolina.
So began the time-consuming process of hunting down the van. Working off Kia’s list, police visited every buyer, then took pictures of the vans and checked alibis. All the Sedona owners were cleared.
But before police had to expand the search to other private buyers outside Georgia and South Carolina, Thompson got an idea. The enhanced photos from the security cameras revealed what looked like white stickers on the van’s windshield and driver’s-door window. A friend told Thompson that rental car agencies use window stickers with bar codes to keep track of their vehicles. Could the killer have rented the van?
Police refocused the search for 2011 Kia Sedonas sold as fleet vehicles to rental agencies in Georgia and North and South Carolina. This meant tracking down fewer vehicles than the more than nine hundred sold to private buyers outside Georgia. As investigators logged miles and hours tracking down vans, Thompson continued to chase leads to the tip line and from other law enforcement agencies and interviewing Rusty’s business associates and family members.
Adding to the workload was the fact that this was not the only murder investigation under way. Although the Sneiderman case attracted all the media attention, Dunwoody police actually had two other recent homicides. In July, an elderly couple’s bodies were found in the rubble of their home, apparently set on fire to conceal evidence of the murders.
“Certainly, there is pressure to bring some closure,” Chief Billy Grogan acknowledged to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution in December 2010. “But these incidents are not related, so there’s no need to believe that Dunwoody is not safe.” He urged residents to have reasonable expectations. “Just because we have the Dunwoody Police Department doesn’t mean crime is going to disappear,” he said. Sergeant Gary Cortellino attributed part of the problem to new apartment complexes going up—the newspaper noted that the slain-and-burned couple lived near a “cluster of apartments.”
In the past, a small department like Dunwoody’s could have reached out for help to the Georgia Bureau of Investigation, but the state police force had its own staffing issues. Two years into the recession, budget cuts, hiring freezes, and furloughs had trimmed the GBI’s head count to its lowest level in a decade. The GBI would be able to provide police lab support, but for more investigators on the ground, the Dunwoody Police Department would have to look elsewhere.
By mid-December, a month into the investigation, it was all hands on deck for the Sneiderman case, with supervisors like Lieutenant David Barnes, who headed the detectives, pitching in. The department finally got outside help from the DeKalb County District Attorney’s Office, which provided investigators to track down the van leads and perform other tasks. Sergeant Cortellino obtained a list of fleet Kia Sedonas sold in the Southeast, then sent word to all the rental agencies in the region to hold on to their rentals until police could go out and inspect them. For each Sedona that Cortellino found, DA investigator William Presnell would head to the lot and take a photograph for comparison.
When a Kia Sedona was returned to one Enterprise Rent-A-Car, Presnell headed out to take a look. The lot was located on Riverstone Parkway in Canton, twenty-five miles northwest of Dunwoody in the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains in the heart of Cherokee country. By the time Presnell got there, on December 14, the van had been rented out again. Presnell left his business card asking for a call when the van was returned. His phone rang a week later.
On December 21, he returned to the agency and saw the Sedona—silver with a sticker on the window—with South Carolina plates. The van looked like the one in the security video stills and was impounded. Forensic technicians conducted a thorough search, recovering small dark synthetic hairs. Working off Enterprise records obtained by subpoena, Thompson tracked down the people who rented the van over Halloween and asked if anybody had worn costume wigs or beards. They said they had not. The records showed that the van had been rented from another Enterprise Rent-A-Car agency in Marietta on November 17 and returned on November 18. The contact number was a cell phone.
Sergeant Gary Cortellino called it on December 26. Hemy Neuman answered.