Federal Bureau Of Investigation

A decorated Burbank Police Department sergeant who was named in an FBI probe shot and killed himself on a residential street corner Thursday, authorities said. Burbank police responding to a "shots fired" call about 11:40 a.m. near North Sunset Canyon Drive at East Harvard Road found Neil Thomas Gunn, 50, dead of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Police officials called the death of the 22-year veteran "a devastating tragedy" and said the investigation into what led to the suicide would be handled by the neighboring Glendale Police Department.

The Chicago Mercantile Exchange announced creation of a panel Wednesday to strengthen control over transactions as a federal grand jury convened to hear allegations of fraud in the financial futures industry. "It matters not whether this investigation involves one member, or many members, of the exchanges," said Leo Melamed, chairman of the Merc's executive committee and special counsel to the exchange's board of governors.

The FBI has hit a major hang-up in its wiretapping surveillance program: failing to pay its phone bills on time. Facing tens of thousands of dollars in unpaid bills, telephone companies have cut off FBI wiretaps used to eavesdrop on suspected criminals, a Justice Department audit released Thursday shows. In one office, unpaid costs for wiretaps from one phone company totaled $66,000.

The FBI is conducting 14 criminal investigations of mortgage lenders and the firms that turned their high-risk loans into complex securities that have left investors worldwide with huge losses, a top official at the federal agency said Tuesday.

WASHINGTON -- The FBI opened an investigation Thursday into whether Roger Clemens lied before Congress, the first step toward a possible perjury trial in which the government would face the burden of proving Clemens not only failed to tell the truth under oath but did so intentionally. The announcement came one day after Congress asked the Justice Department to examine whether the seven-time Cy Young Award winner lied when he testified he had never used steroids or human growth hormone.

The FBI is submitting nearly 40% fewer criminal investigations to the Justice Department for prosecution than it did two decades ago, a study indicated Thursday. The bureau has focused on terrorism investigations in recent years. Other federal agencies also heavily engaged in white-collar criminal investigations are showing similar changes, said the study by the Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, a private group at Syracuse University.

After a search that has lasted more than 36 years, all of the evidence in the case of the legendary outlaw known as D.B. Cooper fits easily into an inconspicuous box, carried comfortably under the arm of FBI agent Larry Carr. He is the newest in a line of about a dozen agents assigned to the case since 1971, when Cooper hijacked a passenger jet and bailed out over Clark County, Wash., with $200,000 in $20 bills. When the last agent moved on six months ago, Carr requested to take the case.

Police found the naked body of Diana Sylvester near her Christmas tree. The 22-year-old San Francisco nurse had been sexually assaulted and stabbed in the heart. She lay on her back, her neck laced with scratches and her mouth open as if frozen in a scream. For more than three decades, Sylvester's slaying went unsolved.

The Federal Bureau of Investigation has ordered more than two dozen of its field offices to stop probing some financial crimes to focus on a surge in sub-prime mortgage fraud. Kenneth Kaiser, chief of the bureau's criminal investigative division, issued the directive late last week in a video conference call with the heads of 26 offices in areas where mortgage crime is rampant, said Bill Carter, an FBI spokesman in Washington.

ABOUT THIS SERIES This is the second in a series of occasional articles that will examine how DNA evidence is transforming criminal justice. -- State crime lab analyst Kathryn Troyer was running tests on Arizona's DNA database when she stumbled across two felons with remarkably similar genetic profiles. The men matched at nine of the 13 locations on chromosomes, or loci, commonly used to distinguish people.