Celebrated FBI Agent Will Retire Haunted by Those Who Got Away

In 1997, a few weeks after capturing the CIA killer in Pakistan, Garrett was back home working the triple slaying at a Georgetown area Starbucks, which appeared to be a robbery that went bad.

He teamed up with Jim Trainum, a skilled D.C. police detective. They played good cop-bad cop with suspect Carl Cooper, with whom they had spoken but had not arrested. Cooper hated Trainum and talked of harming him.

But not Garrett.

"He ain't never disrespected me or my wife," Cooper said in a conversation that was taped secretly by investigators. "I kind of like" him, Cooper said, describing the agent as "cool."

In the end, after a cat-and-mouse game of more than a year, Cooper confessed. He was sentenced to life in prison without parole.

"We would have never solved the Starbucks case if it hadn't been for Brad Garrett's abilities and energy," Trainum said. "He taught me so much. He spoiled me. He's the person you want to have on every case."

In the summer of 2001, Garrett entered the Levy case, and shortly after the Washington area sniper suspects were arrested in October 2002, Garrett and a Fairfax County detective met with Lee Boyd Malvo.

"I couldn't get him to look at me," Garrett said. "He kept looking over the top of me."

So Garrett tried to engage the teenager. "We started talking about movies, the Mel Gibson movie 'We Were Soldiers,' " Garrett said. "And he eventually . . . said [that] as they were driving away from the shooting at Home Depot, they were watching 'We Were Soldiers' on a DVD in this car.

"The movie he latched [onto] the most was 'The Matrix,' and the only thing he would say about what had occurred was, 'It's all about 'The Matrix.' "

Then the teenager who had been taught how to shoot guns by John Allen Muhammad laid out the details of their deadly spree.

For all of Garrett's successes, other cases fill his brain, including the Levy case and the 1999 slayings of an Iraqi, Fuad K. Taima, his wife, Dorothy, and 16-year-old son, Leith.

But perhaps the one that haunts him most deeply is the killing of Kieuoanh Thi "Nina" Nguyen, 35, and her son Ryobi, 2. Mother and child were kidnapped from their Franconia home in November 1995. A ransom demand was made by phone from the home to the husband, who was in Vietnam on business, but no further contact was made.

About six months later, a fisherman found a trash can in a Springfield pond. Inside, the mother and son were bound and gagged, facing each other.

"It's an image you can't get out of your mind," Garrett said.

What does such a storied ex-FBI agent do for an encore? Garrett plans to start an investigative consulting business.

But he'll miss being an agent.

"There's a tremendous intensity working these cases," he said. "It becomes addictive to a certain extent. I'm sure for a period of time I'll feel a tremendous loss."