Probe into massacre at Va. Tech continues

The Virginia State Police investigation of last year’s Virginia Tech massacre has filled about 300 3-inch-thick volumes, but it isn’t over yet.

Almost 19 months after Seung-Hui Cho killed 32 students and teachers and then shot himself, tips still are coming in, and police are following up on each one, state police spokeswoman Corinne Geller said yesterday.

She said police are looking for the hard drive to Cho’s computer, his cell phone and his wallet, hoping for clues.

The investigation into the worst mass shooting in modern U.S. history has a senior state police officer assigned to it, making weekly or biweekly reports to his superiors. Officers are plowing through Web sites and chat rooms, looking for any writing by Cho.

Geller said state police investigators are “99.9 percent sure” Cho did not confide in anyone about his plans to kill on April 16, 2007, but they want to be certain.

Police have found no link between Cho and any of his victims, but they’re still investigating to make certain of that as well.

A witness has led police to conclude that Cho did not follow his first victim into the West Ambler Johnston Hall dormitory that day but came in a different entrance, Geller said.

Geller said the case will remain open until the tips dry up and the investigators and their bosses reach the difficult point of saying they’ve found everything they think they can.

Investigators and experts have dug deep into the tapes and writings Cho mailed to NBC News on April 16, between the time he shot two in the dorm and killed 30 at Norris Hall, but they still can’t isolate what may have led Cho, who had a history of mental illness, to begin the shootings.

“We may never know for certain why he did what he did,“ Geller said. “Absolutely, it is frustrating for investigators when that happens.“

The amount of information the state police have gathered is unprecedented, Geller said.

The 300 volumes of reports and transcripts include more than 450 phone calls and more than 100 interviews. The phone calls alone took about a year to transcribe, Geller said.

Police at one point filled a tractor-trailer full of physical evidence, with many of the 500-plus items in it consisting of several elements—for example, a backpack and its contents count as one item. More than 165 investigators from 12 agencies have worked on the case.

State police looked in the van Cho rented for about a month before the massacre, looking for his hard drive, cell phone and wallet. But they did not do a forensic search because he returned the vehicle several days before April 16, Geller said. Three people rented the van between the time Cho returned it and the day of the massacre.

“They’ve scoured the entire campus, doing grid searches,“ she said, adding that police also went through trash cans, searched the muck at the bottom of the Duck Pond and examined a landfill.

Geller said that even when the investigation is closed, records will be stored so that the case can be quickly reopened if new tips come in.

As is standard practice for the state police, the records will not be made public, to ensure the integrity of the files and to protect witnesses who helped police—as well as to reassure those who, in different cases in the future, might be afraid to cooperate for fear their names would be made public, Geller said.

Victims’ families say the records should be part of an archive the state agreed to establish, especially because newly disclosed information has shown that a state panel report on the tragedy was incorrect on some critical points.