He apparently just couldn't stop yakking - and that was his big mistake.
In the end, it was Kofi Apea Orleans-Lindsay's cellular phone, police sources say, that helped end the 13-day manhunt for the man accused in the killing of a Maryland state trooper.
The case of Orleans-Lindsay, who was captured early yesterday morning in Brooklyn, N.Y., after law enforcement officials homed in on his cell phone, illustrates the increasingly important role the device is playing in crime-fighting.
As law enforcement's interest in cell phones has grown, it has sparked a debate over privacy and the role of 80-year-old wiretap laws in a wireless age.
Federal and state officials who coordinated yesterday's arrest declined to say how they used Orleans-Lindsay's cell phone to find him, but cell phone industry officials and surveillance experts said a suspect's cell phone can help investigators in two ways.
Law enforcement agents armed with a court order can eavesdrop on all of a customer's phone calls, much as they do on a traditional telephone.
Typically, they do this with the cooperation of the cellular carriers, which can route a suspect's calls directly to "listening posts" set up in investigators' headquarters.
As more criminals use cell phones to conduct business, police overhear everything from tip-offs and confessions to a suspect's location.
Police routinely catch drug dealers and other criminals gabbing on their cell phones about sales figures, stash houses and even shootings.
It was an intercepted cell phone conversation, for example, that led police to Philadelphia and the men who killed Baltimore County police Sgt. Bruce A. Prothero at a Pikesville jewelry store in February.
Over the past two years, wiretaps on cell phones and pagers have outnumbered taps on conventional phones, according to the Administrative Office of the U.S. Courts.
In 1997, courts approved 206 wireless surveillance taps.
Last year, the number of wireless taps grew to 676, compared with 399 on regular phone lines.
Cell phones also offer investigators one other important piece of information for finding suspects on the run: their location.
"Just powering up your phone is all that's necessary," says Steve Uhrig, president of SWS Security, a Harford County manufacturer of surveillance equipment.
The ability to track a cell phone user's whereabouts has to do with the way a cell phone network operates.
