FOR A DECADE, Asst. U.S. Attorney for Seattle Thomas Wales' murder has been unsolved. Now, the FBI is about to announce a new initiative to bring his killer to justice. His specialty was banking and business fraud although cops won't say if his work had anything to do with his murder. What's known is this: On the night of Oct. 11, 2001 Wales was sitting at his computer in his home office in the basement of his Queen Anne neighborhood home. Someone with a handgun snuck up to the area carefully avoiding the security lights in his backyard and shot him in the neck, through a window. The shots were heard by a neighbor who called 911.The U.S. Attorney wasn't even supposed to be home. He was supposed to have dinner with his girlfriend but changed his plans at the last minute to work on a fundraising letter for an anti-gun group that he was president of. Insiders believe the 9/11 terrorist attacks may have hampered the probe with resources needed quickly being shuffled elsewhere.
Charles Mandingo said Wales' case may have gone cold because of the fevered politics of the time (has anything changed?) He told the SKY VALLEY CHRONICLE: “The F.B.I. gave the investigation the code name SEPROM—short for “Seattle prosecutor murder”—but the bureau set the reward for tips leading to a prosecution in the case at $25,000, which was widely regarded in Seattle as an insultingly small amount, and did not offer local investigators assistance from Washington, D.C. We put a lot of agents on the Wales case from the beginning.
"But we got no backfill from headquarters—that is, additional agents. In other major cases that headquarters really cared about, they’d say, ‘You’re not going to bleed resources, and you’ll get all the backfill you need.’ The feeling was that H.Q. was so preoccupied with 9/11 that they were neglecting the issue of whether it was fair to the office to have to put all its resources on the case without getting backfill."
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