FBI office in S.L. purrs along under agent Fuhrman

You can't stick any Joe Schmo driver behind the wheel of a Ferrari racing car, the FBI's Chip Burrus says.

And if the FBI's Salt Lake City field office is the Ferrari, you need a guy like Tim Fuhrman to be your driver.

"You have to have a lot of experience," Burrus said. "You have to have time in a car like this."

Burrus should know. He was Fuhrman's predecessor in Salt Lake City, leaving the post early last year. He and Fuhrman have known each other since they were assigned to FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., about 15 years ago.

Now, Fuhrman is the special agent in charge, or SAC, of the Salt Lake City office. It's the FBI's second-largest geographically, covering about 315,000 square miles in Utah, Idaho and Montana. That's about one-tenth of the United States.

Burrus left the Salt Lake office for national headquarters where he is deputy assistant director in the bureau's criminal investigative division.

When Fuhrman arrived in Salt Lake City for his promotion in April, he was soon thrown into the investigation for two missing Idaho children, Dylan and Shasta Groene. And though Fuhrman wasn't the lead investigator on the case, it was his job to oversee the FBI operations and the assistance the agency rendered to local law enforcement.

Three people were found dead in a Coeur d'Alene, Idaho, home in May 2005, but Dylan, 9, and Shasta, 8, were missing. Shasta was found July 2 at a Coeur d'Alene Denny's restaurant with Joseph Edward Duncan III. Dylan's remains were found July 5 in Montana, bringing the investigation to a conclusion that was both fruitful and saddening.

"I'm disappointed we didn't recover both children (alive)," Fuhrman said.

Duncan's trial is scheduled to begin April 4 in Idaho.

The Groene case was just the latest in a number of notorious crimes that have peppered the Intermountain West's past.

In 1988, Addam Swapp bombed an LDS stake center in Kamas in retaliation for the death of his father-in-law, John Singer. Later, a 13-day standoff at the Singer farm resulted in the death of a Utah Department of Corrections officer.

More recently, the disappearance of Kiplyn Davis, the Ruby Ridge standoff in Idaho and the kidnapping and return of Elizabeth Smart have made headlines.

The FBI has been involved in investigating each crime.