By Blaine Harden
Washington Post Staff Writer
Tuesday, October 17, 2006; A03

SEATTLE -- Alone in the basement of his house and sitting in front his computer monitor, Thomas C. Wales was shot to death here five years ago. An assistant U.S. attorney, he specialized in prosecuting white-collar crime and was an ardent advocate of gun control.

The shooter stood in Wales's back yard at 10:40 p.m., fired several times through a window and disappeared. It may have been the first time in U.S. history that a federal prosecutor was killed in the line of duty.

But after interviewing more than 4,000 people in all 50 states and half a dozen countries, after chasing down about 1,800 silver gun barrels of a kind that ballistics experts say was affixed to the shooter's pistol and after abruptly transferring control of the investigation out of the Seattle office of the FBI, law enforcement officials still cannot say for certain whether Wales was killed because he was a prosecutor.

Instead, to mark the fifth anniversary of the crime, an FBI task force leader insisted last week that the case has not gone cold, and authorities released for the first time a composite sketch of a "person of some interest" who was seen wandering around Wales's neighborhood on Seattle's Queen Anne Hill before the killing.

For reasons not explained, the existence of the wandering stranger -- whose presence had been reported to police weeks before the Oct. 11, 2001, killing -- did not find its way to the FBI task force until about three years after Wales was shot.

Having failed over the past few years to find that man while keeping the hunt quiet, the FBI recently handed out a two-year-old sketch and asked for the public's help in finding a slim white man in his early 40s with black hair, tobacco-stained teeth and perhaps a ponytail.

The bureau also asked for help in finding a person who mailed a curiously literate letter this January from Las Vegas. Using crisp, crime-novel prose that echoes the smart-guy style of Elmore Leonard, the writer confessed to killing Wales in a murder-for-hire deal.

"OK, so I was broke and between jobs," the letter begins. "I got an anonymous call offering [dollar figure redacted by the FBI] to shoot the guy, so I drove to Seattle to do the job."

An FBI behavioral analyst said that while the murder scenario described in the letter was "made up," the writer is "relatively well-educated and well-read" and could be the killer or could know him.

Finally, the FBI asked for help in tracking down about 1,800 more silver pistol barrels of the kind that was screwed into the Makarov pistol used to shoot Wales. The bureau says that about 3,600 of the barrels are known to have been sold in the United States, but it has found only about half of them.

"We will not give up," Robert Jordan, special agent in charge of the FBI office in Portland, Ore., said at a news conference in the federal courthouse in downtown Seattle.

Jordan stressed, using the same words twice, that the Wales case "remains a very significant investigation."

That emphasis comes on the heels of what appears to have been a manpower dispute in the inquiry. In May, an FBI supervisor in Seattle reduced by two the number of agents assigned to the case. In June, after reports of squabbling inside the bureau, the case was shifted to the FBI's Portland office and beefed up with more investigators.

An important thread -- one that investigators declined to talk about last week -- is the nearly five-year-old inquiry into the activities of a Seattle-based commercial airline pilot who has been described in local newspapers as the prime suspect.

In an apparently preemptive media offensive that was published in the Seattle Post-Intelligencer on the morning of the FBI news conference, the pilot -- whose name has not been made public because he has not been charged -- complained through his attorney about the aggressive behavior of law enforcement authorities.

"This is Richard Jewell all over again," Larry Setchell, the lawyer, told the newspaper, alluding to the man who was falsely accused of the bombing at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta.

Setchell declined to comment, except to confirm the accuracy of the details concerning his client that were published in the Seattle newspaper.

The most curious of those details is the presence of the pilot in Las Vegas in January when the murder-for-hire letter was mailed.

Setchell said that the pilot was there by coincidence, on a layover, and that he plans to turn over handwriting samples to the FBI in the coming week to show that he did not write the letter.

Since the killing, the pilot's home reportedly has been searched three times, and federal agents have seized his cars and many of his belongings. US Airways reportedly grounded the pilot for several weeks after it was notified that he was a subject of interest in the inquiry.

Early in 2001, before the killing, the pilot was one of several people Wales investigated in connection with illegally modifying a surplus military helicopter for civilian use. The charges were dropped, but only after the pilot spent more than $100,000 in legal fees, Setchell told the Post-Intelligencer.

Setchell said that the pilot felt "profound frustration" over the investigation but that he did not blame Wales.

Asked at the news conference about the status of the investigation against the pilot, the FBI's Jordan said only: "When the investigation reaches the point where we have probable cause to arrest someone, we speak with an indictment."