"The Beltway Snipers": The FULL MK Confidential Series

Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at noon east. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's weekend mega episode. Today we are bringing you the entire MK Confidential series on the Beltway snipers. Going deep into the background of each of the two snipers who terrorized the Washington, D.C. area for weeks. And we will talk about what ultimately happened to each one of them. All five episodes in one. Enjoy. This is a gripping story. It is Wednesday night, 6 p.m., October 2nd, 2002, in the parking lot of a shopper's food warehouse on Randolph Road in Wheaton, Maryland. A comfortable night. A comfortable inner suburb just north of Washington, D.C. It looks like every other grocery store lot in America at the end of a workday. Scattered cars and shopping carts. People loading kids and groceries. The autumn sky going dark over the storefronts. A gray pickup truck with an American flag on its antenna pulls into the lot and parks. A man in a business suit and tie climbs out after a long day. A grocery list in his pocket. He's only stopping in for a minute. His wife is in the car. His name is James Martin. He is 55, an analyst at the government's Weather and Ocean Agency. He grew up poor in the Midwest, served in Vietnam, and now he has a house in the suburbs. His wife, Billie, teaches Sunday school. Together, they have an 11-year-old son named Ben. Martin mentors inner-city kids. Tonight, he is picking up sodas and snacks for his church youth group because this store has the best prices. He shops. He shuts the driver door and starts across the asphalt toward the sliding doors. There is a muffled pop flat and far away with no crack to it. The kind of noise a person might take for a truck tire blowing out a few streets over. James Martin falls where he stands. It happens in the blink of an eye. There is a small entry hole. One bullet goes into his back and tears out the front of his chest. He is dead almost before the sound finishes traveling. No one sees the shooter or the gun or even the direction where the shot came from. A few parking spaces away, a woman named Kimberly Sadelson is loading groceries into her Honda with her 5-year-old son beside her. She hears the boom, sees the man go down, and takes out her phone. She dials 911, still not totally sure what she's seeing. Across the road, a Montgomery County police officer named Alan Felsen hears it too. He is in his unmarked cruiser and his summer uniform, black shorts and a polo shirt with police across the back. He's pulling out of the district station that happens to sit directly across the street. The sound does not quite register as a gunshot. It is missing the sharp crack of a firearm. He looks toward the shopper's lot and sees nothing. No people running, no screaming. He wants to go home. He wonders if someone dropped a loaded pallet over at the garden store. Then he swings the cruiser around and finds a parking lot full of people standing frozen in place. He calls out the window. What happened? What's going on here? No one answers. And then, out of the corner of his eye, he sees a man on the ground. He grabs his radio. Break, break, break, he says, to cut through the other traffic. I'm at Shopper's Food Warehouse on Randolph. I've got the sound of a shot. One down, one down. Felsen cuts through the crowd and kneels beside James Martin. Martin's shirt and suit coat are soaked through with blood. There is no pulse, and he is not breathing. Felsen is a former volunteer firefighter, so he pulls on latex gloves and starts chest compressions, and it is instantly a bloody business. A woman steps out of the crowd and asks if she can help. By pure chance, she is a friend of Felsen's. A volunteer. A volunteer EMT named Marjorie Fisk, and she runs for the first aid bag she keeps in her car. A nurse appears out of the crowd and cuts open Martin's shirt. Underneath, there is blood everywhere and a hole in his chest. The three of them work on him on the pavement while his blood runs out across the lot. The paramedics arrive and take over, and after a while, they stop too. They lay a sheet over James Martin, lying on his back in the soft light of the evening. With his shoes and his hands sticking out the edges, Marjorie Fisk steps back, shaken, and asks if she can go. No one can say where that shot came from. Officer Felsen stands in the lot afterward and tries to make it add up, and he cannot make sense of it. A man walking across a parking lot. A gunshot. The man goes down with a wound clean through him. Martin still has his wallet. Nobody saw an argument, a getaway car, or anyone even holding a gun. No robbery, no carjacking. The only explanation that seems even remotely possible is an accident. Somewhere nearby, someone fires a rifle. The bullet travels farther than intended, and by terrible chance, it finds James Martin. What else could it have been? He has no idea. This is only the beginning. Forty minutes early. Earlier, in another shopping center a few miles up the road, a bullet shattered the front window of a Michael's craft store, striking an illuminated number five hanging over one of the checkout lanes, almost seven feet in the air. No one was hit. At the time, it looked like vandalism. Maybe a stray round from a gang gunfire, or just random. Now, at the Shopper's Food Warehouse on Randolph Road, Montgomery County's brand-new police spokeswoman, Nancy Demm, reaches her boss, Police Chief Charles Moose, on her phone. She has been on the job a matter of hours. "I don't know what we have here," Demm tells him, "but it is different from your regular homicide." The man on the ground seems nice and normal, ordinary, government ID. He has not been robbed. Demm tells the chief that the shots had come from a distance, and she has already sent the forensic officers over to the Michael's craft store to find out whether these two shootings are real. are connected. They are. That bullet through the craft store window was the first shot fired in a DC area shooting spree no one yet knows has begun. James Martin is its first victim. The shots come barely a year after two planes came out of a clear September sky and hit the Twin Towers and a third hit the Pentagon. It has been just over a year since the anthrax letters that killed five injured dozens and frightened millions of Americans came through the mail. So when a man is shot dead in a grocery lot for no reason anyone can find, another natural worry is terrorism. And sure enough, what begins in this parking lot will terrorize four million people for three long weeks. It will empty gas stations, lock schoolhouse doors, and perch officers with rifles up on interstate overpasses. But it is not the kind of terror the country expects. It's not radical Islam. It's not Al-Qaeda. There's no manifesto. They will later find out it's two people in an old car. And James Martin lying dead on the asphalt at two minutes past 6 p.m. on an ordinary Wednesday is only the beginning of the rampage near DC. By the end of the next day, Thursday, five more people will be dead. I'm James Martin. I'll see you next time. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. The morning of Thursday, October 3rd, is cool with a nice breeze. It's rush hour in Washington, D.C., and the roads into the Capitol are already jammed. 103.5 WTOP Radio. Traffic and weather together on the 8s. 66 westbound from Falls Church out to Gainesville. It's crazy talk, I tell you, crazy. Kettleworth Avenue southbound. We had an accident earlier this morning at Pennsylvania Avenue. For about 90 minutes, the region has no idea that anything unusual is underway. At 7.41 a.m. in the White Flint area of Rockville, Maryland, a landscaper named James Buchanan, who everyone calls Sonny, is mowing a small patch of grass behind a car dealership. He is 39 years old. He is the son of a retired Montgomery County policeman, and he has a fiancée. Buchanan recently moved his landscaping business across the river into Virginia, but he still comes back to Maryland once a week to mow the Fitzgerald Auto Mall as a favor to its owner. He is pushing a green lawn boy mower with a cloth catcher his back to the road. He stops for a sip of water, and then over the noise of the mower and the traffic, there is a single loud crack. A block away, a man named Rick Tyner, is driving to work with his wife. Tyner saw combat in Vietnam, and he knows that sound. That was a rifle shot, he tells her. In the dealership lot, the mechanics look look up to see Sonny Buchanan staggering toward them, clutching his chest and gasping. Behind him, the mower is still running, rolling on across the grass with no one to steer it. Buchanan makes it a couple hundred feet, then goes down on his face. A parts manager named Jim King gets on the line to 911 and tells the dispatcher the only thing that makes any sense to him. There is nothing wrong with the mower. Buchanan is rushed to the trauma unit at Suburban Hospital, where a surgeon named Jim Robey is waiting. Buchanan's heart has already stopped, so Robey works fast, opening his chest with a 16-inch cut and cranking the ribs apart to get to the heart. He finds a heart that is practically empty of blood. And a chest cavity drained nearly dry. He bled more than anyone I have ever seen, one of the medics later says. Robey has been told this is some sort of freak lawnmower accident, and finding nothing he can fix, he sews the man back up, believing it. Then a nurse standing by asks the question that will change the morning. Jim, she says, do you think this could be a gunshot wound? They roll Buchanan over, and there it is. A hole in his back, smaller than the head of a pen. By now a police officer at the hospital has grown suspicious. She called her supervisor. Her supervisor calls major crimes. And word reaches the office of the county state's attorney, where a veteran prosecutor hears the story of the landscaper and his lawnmower, and thinks, no, the lawnmower did not do that. Thirty-one minutes after Buchanan is shot, about seven minutes later, he comes out of the car, and he's lying on the ground, and he's looking at the camera, and he's looking at the camera, about six miles away, a taxi driver named Premkumar Wallaker pulls into a mobile gas station to fill his tank. He needs gas. He also wants some gum and lottery tickets. The station in Aspen Hill, Maryland, is a half block from the Michael's Crafts store where the front window got shot out the previous day. He is 54 from Pune, India, and he drives for a company called Presidential Cab. He usually starts his shift around noon. This morning, he clocked in early so he could get off early and get home to his wife and kids for the afternoon. He attends a Seventh-day Adventist church and has been married to his wife for 25 years. The sign on the roof of his cab reads, of all things, call 911. That is his cab company's number. You dial 911 taxi to order a ride. He is standing at the gas pump when the show begins. He is standing at the gas pump At the next pump island, a doctor named Caroline Namro, who has just dropped her older children at school and still has her two-year-old buckled in the back of her van, hears the bang. She looks up to see Wallaker walking toward her with a startled look on his face. Call an ambulance, he says. Then he collapses beside her van, leaving a long smear of his blood down the side of her passenger door. Namro grabs her phone and calls 911. Namro gets down on the concrete and does what she can, starting chest compressions, then mouth-to-mouth. Wallaker is bleeding heavily from his side, the blood pooling on the ground. In the middle of her rescue efforts, the victim vomits, his airway closes, and Dr. Namro cannot clear it. Premkumar Wallaker dies at the pump. At 8.37, 25 minutes later, a 34-year-old woman named Sarah Ramos is sitting on a bench outside a post office beside the Leisure World retirement community. She was a law student once back in El Salvador. Now she cleans houses and cleans the streets of El Salvador. She is a law student, to keep the family afloat. She came to America with her husband, a college teacher there, and their little boy, and it did not go the way they hoped. Her husband could not find work teaching and grew depressed. This morning, she took the bus and is waiting on the bench for the woman whose house she is going to clean. She is reading her head down, her purse beside her. She never sees the car at the far edge of the lot. A single rifle bullet enters the top of her skull and exits the back of her neck and carries on through the restaurant window behind her. Her book is still open in her lap when it fills with blood. At 9.58 a.m., an hour and 21 minutes later, a 25-year-old woman named Lori Ann Lewis Rivera, a nanny who moved to Maryland from Idaho, is at a shell station in Kensington cleaning out her employer's minivan. She is a large, gentle young woman whose, blonde hair is so pale, it looks nearly white. She has just switched on the vacuum to suck up Cheerios off the floorboard when the bullet hits her in the back. A firefighter runs over from a station across the street and starts CPR on Lori Ann. A county police officer pulls up, then a second one, Richard Grapes, and Grapes goes to his car for a 12-gauge shotgun and a heavy ballistic shield, and he kneels down with it between the open lot and the people bent over the dying woman. Because by now, they understand. Whoever is doing this is still out there somewhere, and he could be lining up the rescuers next. The detective who takes the Kensington scene is Terry Ryan, out of Montgomery County Major Crimes. Was an incident involving a young woman in her 20s, a mother? Mr. Rivera was vacuuming her van, which was parked just beyond here, at a coin vacuum that's still here. Mr. Rivera, Lori Ann's husband, was contacted. He came to the scene. I had to notify him of his wife's death. I could just see the emotion. I mean, he was grieving himself. He said, "What do I tell my kid?" Lori Ann is taken to Suburban Hospital to Dr. Roby's team, the second one of these shooting victims they have seen before 10:00 this morning. This time, they know what they are looking for. This wound is in the exact same place as with Sonny Buchanan, the man mowing the lawn, Roby says. Someone is just picking people off. Roby has already called his wife and told her to get off the streets. Four people in two hours and 17 minutes, a landscaper on a mower, a cab driver getting gas, a woman sitting on a bench reading, and a nanny vacuuming a van. Count James Martin from Shoppers Parking Lot the night before, and it is five dead in 16 hours. woman, an Indian man, a Salvadoran woman. Different ages, different jobs, different corners of the same suburban county. The only thing the five of them have in common is that each was, for one second, exposed, standing still out in the open. And no one ever sees who does it. There's no muzzle flash anyone can point to, no figure running, no window rolled down. Each shot comes from somewhere out past the edge of the lot, a tree line, a passing car. And by the time anyone looks, there is nothing there at all. The detective who was assigned to the James Martin killing, the first murder in this spree, Patrick McNerney, is home when his sister, a local TV news editor, calls to say there has been a shooting at a gas station up the road. Anything odd about it? He asks her. People heard a loud bang, she says. He is already heading out the door. At Suburban Hospital, a major crimes corporal named Gene Curtis has the second victim, Sonny Buchanan's body, unzipped from its bag, and he does not need a medical examiner to tell him what he's looking at. This kind of wound, he tells the doctors, goes in small and comes out big. "How many of these are we going to have?" he thinks. "Maybe the next one will be a cop." By now, the police are chasing the cases faster than they can work them. The detectives still writing up James Martin's death at the Wheaton Shoppers parking lot from last night get the calls from Rockville, then Aspen Hill, then Kensington. A fresh body every half hour, all inside a few square miles. At the hospitals, the same trauma teams that took Buchanan and Wallacher in the morning are bracing for the next body. And it is not over. Around 9:00 p.m., two people are loading a car outside a restaurant. The car is parked in a restaurant called the Tropicana on Georgia Avenue just inside Washington, D.C., a few blocks below the Maryland line. The woman is named Gail Howard, and she owns the place. She is walking the night's receipts out to her car. The man is Carl Largy, one of her employees, and he is out in the lot with a cigarette, keeping an eye on people. And I am. things. It's very dark. The nearest streetlight is flickering on and off. The morning's killings have been on every television in the region all day. Gail Howard is wary of crossing the open lot. Parked on the side street near them is an old dark car with tinted windows. Its back end turned toward Georgia Avenue. They notice it and think nothing of it. Then there is a loud boom. It could be a blown tire or a car backfiring. Out on Georgia Avenue, a city bus screeches to a stop. Carl tells Gail it was either the bus or a gunshot. Loud but strangely muffled. A few seconds later, the old dark car slides away down Kalmia Street with its lights off. Look at the idiot with his lights off, Carl says. They finish loading up and Gail gets in her own car and drives home. Carl stays behind. For minutes, the corner is lit up with police lights and an ambulance and word travels that a man is dead. Five minutes later, Gail's phone rings. It's Carl. Guess what, he says. It was a gunshot. That night's killing crosses the district line. A block away on the southeast corner of Georgia Avenue and Kalmia Road, a 72-year-old man is lying on the pavement. His name is Pascal Charleau. He left Haiti for America many years ago. He is a carpenter, a man who can build anything. He and his disabled wife share a row home with lawn chairs and potted plants on the front porch and out back he keeps a garden of tomatoes and bell peppers. He loves to walk but tonight he has taken the bus home. He gets off and is standing under a streetlight waiting to cross to his house. Pascal is gazing up at the stars and he raises his right hand toward his chin when the bullet comes. It goes through his palm and blows a two-inch hole in his hand before it punches into his chest below the left collarbone. It shatters his collarbone and ribs, tearing open veins and arteries. Pascal Charleau goes down on the corner. Seventy-two years of life and it ends like this. He is the sixth person killed in a little over twenty-four hours. The man handling all of this is the chief of the Montgomery County Maryland Police. police, a career officer named Charles Moose. He is 49. He originally wanted to become a lawyer, got sidetracked, and decided to give the police department a try. Before he knew it, he started climbing the ranks, getting decorations and a doctorate along the way. He is a big proponent of active listening, but he also battles a white-hot temper, and there are stories about it. He's gone to anger management counseling. By the end of that first day, Moose is looking at six people shot dead across Montgomery County and the district. No motive, no suspect, no witness who can describe a shooter. Not even a bullet or a shell casing his investigators can recover in one piece. Assistant Chief of Police Deirdre Walker would later tell the Discovery Channel that it seemed to be an impossible task. We had no physical description. We had no good eyewitnesses. How do you draw up a plan to find a ghost? Moose drives himself down to the mobile station crime scene where Premkumar Wallaker died. But instead of pulling in, he tucks his car into a mall lot across the street, gets out, and stands there watching. He wants to see the situation from a distance. Standing there in the sun, a thought settles on Moose that he cannot shake, that the man who did this could be out here right now. He's not going to be able to escape. He's not going not a lot of evidence. There's no indication at this point that these individuals know each other. There's no indication that any of these individuals had any kind of conflict with anyone. It is a string of murders growing into a public emergency because it means there is no way to guess who comes next. It comes down to one thing only, where you happen to be standing when the trigger is pulled. The law enforcement response builds fast because it has to. Within a day, the case has outgrown the Montgomery County Police and the big agencies pour in. The FBI, the ATF, the Maryland State Police, the Secret Service. A task force forms around Chief Moose and grows until it fills whole buildings. They wire in banks of telephones and open a tip line, and the tips come in by the thousands. Every one of them run down. Before long, it is the largest manhunt of its kind that the country has seen. Thousands of officers from dozens of communities have been killed. The police have been trying to find out who the and still, day after day, nothing. Helicopters crisscross the county overhead. When a shooting comes in, police flip on their lights and sirens, throw up roadblocks and stop cars for miles, and time after time come up with nothing in the way of clues. The officers who work it take it personally because it is terrorizing the neighborhoods where they live, where their families live. It affects our families the same as everybody else, and we all swore an oath to protect the citizens of Maryland, and by God, that's what we were going to do, no matter if it killed us to do it. And for a major American city, the seat of the federal government, this changes how that city does life day to day. Gas stations hang tarps and bedsheets between the gas pumps and the road, so a driver can fill the tank behind a curtain. People pump gas crouched down, ducking below the roofline of the city. Schools pull the shades and cancel recess. The high school football games and the track meets are called off, and the local soccer league cancels its practices. Shoppers cross the lot to their cars at a fast, weaving walk because someone has decided that a zigzagging target is harder to hit, and no one can prove them wrong. Children are walked from the school bus to the door in clusters while the teachers surround them and scan the tree lines. Ministers rewrite their Sunday sermons. The malls empty out. And along the roads where people were shot, the shops watch their customers disappear. They were just picking people at random. If you were out there where they could get to you, you were gone. What the person or people who did this have done without demanding a single thing is make the most ordinary acts of the day, buying groceries, filling the gas tank, waiting for a bus. Walking a child into school feel dangerous. The public looks to authority for answers. The Montgomery County police have some, but not many. Chief Moose begins holding nightly press briefings. How many dead? Who were they and where? But the crucial questions, why and why them, cannot yet be answered. The chief reflects on this years later to the team behind Real Stories. The worst thing about the case was that all of the victims were chosen at random. So consequently everyone in the community felt like a potential target. The man behind the rifle becomes known as the sniper and he haunts every shadow in and around DC. Investigators, the public, and the media all make the same fundamental assumption that steers them down the wrong path from the start. Snipers typically work alone, out of practicality and generalization. work alone, out of practicality and generally personality. This sniper, they will eventually learn, is not one man, but two. And this is also not the first time they have killed together. Their story begins long before the Maryland parking lots, on the other side of the country. At the start of 2002, a 41-year-old Army veteran named John Allen Muhammad lives in the suburbs of Tacoma, Washington. A Jamaican teenager named Lee Boyd Malvo lives with him. Muhammad has spent nearly two decades in uniform, becoming an expert marksman with the M-16 during his service in the Army. Malvo has zero military experience. He is a slight 5'5", 17-year-old who speaks with a Caribbean accent. They regard and refer to each other as father and son, both directly and to anyone who asks. Muhammad met the boy in the Caribbean a few years ago, took him in when he had nobody. How exactly that happened is its own story, but that's for the next episode. Muhammad has a nickname for the teenager, which only the two of them know, his little sniper. Malvo wears it proudly, even sporting a black t-shirt with the word sniper printed across the front. Muhammad trains Malvo to shoot a rifle in a friend's backyard. They use a Bushmaster XM-15, an AR-15-style rifle chambered in.223. It's a semi-automatic civilian version of the M-16 that Muhammad used in the Army. Muhammad walks the rifle out of a Tacoma gun store stolen. The store assumed it had been sold and did not realize for three months that the rifle was actually stolen. Muhammad and Malvo practiced firing round after round into a tree stump. That's actually where the killings start. Washington State, not near Washington, D.C., and we'll go through the names and the stories this week. The shootings are scattered across different cities, different police departments, different case files. It is not until they reach the nation's capital that the crimes become so close and frequent that authorities are able to connect them. Before it is over, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo will be tied to some 15 killings around the country. Ten of the dead will fall here in these three weeks around Washington, D.C. A year after 9-11, Americans are still on the lookout for terror. By the night of October 2, 2002, the next terror attack is already in motion. But it is not in the sky, and it is not in the mail. It is out on the road in an old sedan that nobody thinks to stop. Next time on MK Confidential, how the sniper duo came to be. Before he was one half of America's most feared sniper team, how the man who became John Allen Muhammad lost his own children, and raised a lonely boy from Jamaica to be his little sniper. Something wakes her. She looks at the clock on the bedside table, 1.37. She rolls over on her back and looks up at the ceiling, listening. Half asleep, she tries to think. She knows the sound, but is she imagining it tonight? She listens hard. Has he come back? What is he doing? It is the middle of the night in a house in Tacoma, Washington in the winter of 2000. Her name is Mildred Muhammad, and her marriage is over. She has flushed both of her wedding rings down the toilet. Her soon-to-be ex-husband moved out a few months back, but he still has a key, and he keeps visiting in the middle of the night. She is listening for the sound of the key turning in the front door lock, and then. it does. The door opens. Mildred later describes the man in the doorway to investigation discovery. She sees him coming. The bathroom light is on for the kids. She sees his body cross the light, about to enter her bedroom doorway, and shuts her eyes. Then he is standing at the foot of her bed, watching her. She thinks of a thing he said to her once. That when a man hits a woman, it means he has lost all respect for her, and that after that, it would be easy to kill her. Her spirit tells her to be still, pretend to be asleep. Her heart is pumping against the sheets. She knows he is doing this on purpose. He plans everything, but she does not know what his plan is for her, so she tries to just breathe normally. Her spirit says, be still. She wants to squint and see his face, but she knows he will see the whites of her eyes. He comes around the bedside and leans over her, listening to her breathe. He walks around her for two or three more minutes. She keeps hearing her spirit say, be still. She does not flinch or move a muscle until he is gone. He finally crosses her room and tiptoes out of the house, closing the front door behind him. Her spirit guides her through, and she believes that is why she is still alive. She lies in the dark until morning, then picks up the phone. So Mildred changes the locks. A new lock can keep a man out of the house, but it cannot change who he is. Two years later, almost 3,000 miles from Tacoma, the man who stood over her bed in the dark begins killing strangers in the suburbs of Washington, D.C., people with nothing in common but the ground they are standing on. Ten of them will be dead in three weeks, each one dropped by a single shot no one sees or hears in time. And Mildred Muhammad, who fled across the country and hides in a Maryland suburb outside of Washington, D.C., will become convinced that all of it, every random body, is chosen to bury the one murderer. that matters. Hers. Before John Allen Muhammad was half of the D.C. sniper team, he was a soldier for 17 years, a husband and a father of five. Tonight, we go back to the beginning. He is not born John Muhammad. He is born John Allen Williams in New Orleans. On the last day of 1960, his father is a railroad porter, a job that keeps him on the road and mostly away from home. His mother, Mertis, gets sick with breast cancer and moves her five children home to Baton Rouge to be near family. John is only three years old when she passes away. He is raised by his aunts in a black enclave on the edge of the city that the people there called Scotland Town. Journalist John Williams is a journalist and journalist. He is a journalist and journalist. John's award covers the story of the D.C. snipers for the Washington Times. He believes this part of John's life is key to his transformation into a cold-blooded killer. Here's what he tells the history series Born to Kill. He was very affected by his mother dying when he was very young, and he was also picked on a lot as a kid by relatives. And I think he went through his entire life feeling like he was never recognized for his potential. At 17, John Williams enlists in the Louisiana Army National Guard. Jerry O'Neill cuts his hair for 11 years and remembers no great enthusiasm for the work. He speaks to Born to Kill as well. He didn't like being in the military. It was something that he committed himself to doing. And at the time, I think it provided a living for him and his family. It is August of 1978. What begins as a six-year hitch turns into a, a career of nearly two decades. He starts as a carpenter and a welder in a unit that repairs buildings. He goes from Fort Lewis, just south of Tacoma, to Germany, and from Germany to Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War with the 64th Engineer Company, inspecting and destroying Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of chemical weapons. Mildred's brother, Michael Jones, describes that side of him this way to Investigation Discovery. John was a combat engineer. He can be shot at their minds. That is a very stressful job. But he was an expert marksman with the M-16. That was the rifle at that time. A 1982 note in his file praises his initiative and his results. But that same year, he is court-martialed. The charges are a strange little bundle. Disobeying an order, striking a sergeant, taking another man's tape measure, and briefly going AWOL. Two charges are dropped. He is fined $100 and receives a suspended jail sentence. He later steals an M-16 from the armory and hides it in a dormitory. No charges are filed for that. Out in the Saudi desert in early 1991, a higher-ranking sergeant named Kip Berenson chews John out one day for sleeping in a sleeping bag. Berenson will remember the look John gave him as the stare of death. Then, in the middle of the night in February, a thermite grenade lights up the inside of a tent where a dozen soldiers are asleep, throwing heat, fire, and sparks, which could easily light the ammo. There is a scramble in the dark, and everyone gets out. Berenson does not think this is an accident. An army captain says the pin to the grenade was found near John's bunk. The military police come, and John Williams is led away in handcuffs. And then, nothing. No record of any discipline in his file. He is apparently cleared. Or is he? Mildred remembers the grenade incident, or at least John's version of it, a bit differently. She later retells the story to the podcast Monster DC Sniper. In front of others, and he felt humiliated. That soldier, that night, was in charge of the explosives. John went, snuck into that area, and stole a grenade. He threw the grenade in the tent and jumped into his sleeping bag. The grenade went off. He was accused of trying to get back at that soldier that challenged him in front of the other soldiers. They put him in a dungeon. They hogtied him and left him there. And when he comes back, he's not the same person. In 1992, stationed in Germany, a very pregnant Mildred visits a hairdresser who will change her life. The hairdresser is astonished that Mildred does not know the name Louis Farrakhan and sends her home with two videotapes. By Mildred's account, John watches them with rapture, saying, that's right, that's right. By the time they finish both tapes, Mildred's worldview is shattered. She resolves to question everything she has been taught for the rest of her life. John resolves to find Farrakhan when they return to the States. Both are now very interested in Islam. In January of 1993, John gets into the face of another soldier, a man who happens to be named Lee, and says, brother to brother, back off or you will be the first slaughtered. There is no place that your family will be safe and the people that are supporting you will go down also. This I promise you. A report is written up and filed, and that appears to have been the end of it. No arrest, no charge, nothing in his record. The next year, in 1994, the army gives John Allen Williams an honorable discharge. The family moves back to Tacoma and joins a mosque. Mildred describes it as building her relationship with God. John joined, but not for the same reasons. John joined the mosque not to be a man of God. He joined because he felt that is what was needed to control, to control me. In October 1995, John goes to the Million Man March and takes the pledge every man there takes, never to raise a hand with a knife or a gun against any member of his family or any human being. He comes home kinder and gentler to Mildred's relief. It doesn't last. Mildred joins the Nation of Islam in January 1996, and John returns to his old habits. Money goes missing from the mechanic business as they run together. There are nights out with other women. When Mildred confronts him more than once, she remembers him saying, "It's all mind over matter, Mildred. "I don't mind because you don't matter." It is Friday, October 4th, 2002. In the suburbs north of Washington, D.C., a killer has already shot six people dead, all strangers, each dropped by a single rifle shot. Not one witness has been able to describe the man who killed them. And at 2:30 that afternoon, 75 miles south of the first killings, a 43-year-old mother of two named Caroline Sewell will be the next to fall. Sewell walks out of a Michael's craft store at the Spotsylvania Mall in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She shops there all the time. She is loading packages into her minivan, moving back and forth between the cart and the van. Behind her, a couple named Alex and Doris Jones pull up their car and wait, blinker flashing, because they want her parking space. Just as Caroline closes the rear hatch, Alex hears a loud pop and sees Caroline drop. "I've been shot," she screams. Alex jumps out of his car and rushes over. He starts yelling for help. And then, standing over her in the open parking lot, something clicks in Alex's brain. If the rifleman could see Caroline, he can see Alex, too, and his wife. He runs back to his car, and tells Doris to get down. Alex ducks low behind the wheel himself and drives toward the far side of a nearby furniture store out of the line of fire. On his way out of that parking lot, a car pulls out ahead of him. It is a dark, older car with New Jersey plates, and the back window is covered over with something so that he cannot see inside of it. Alex thinks the car looks out of place, and he says so out loud to Doris, who is crouching down in the back, and never sees the vehicle. Someone in the lot calls 911. "Yes, I am in front of Michael's, and somebody's out here who needs some help." "Okay, what's going on?" "I'm not sure. There was a loud crack, and she said she needs help, and she's lying down." "Do you think she's injured, or. " "Uh, yeah, definitely injured." "She hurt herself?" "I'm not sure." "That way?" "There was a loud. No, it looks like she's been shot." "She's been shot, yeah." "She's been shot, okay." "I'll have to come back and get my son out of the car." The bullet has gone in through the raised hatch of the van, it has struck Caroline in the lower back, and come out beneath her right breast. She is rushed to Mary Washington Hospital, then flown by helicopter to Fairfax. Against the odds, she will live. Until now, this killing spree has stayed close to Washington, in the Maryland suburbs, and the district, itself. Now it has jumped south into Virginia, and the shooting zone is a 75-mile corridor running more than halfway to Richmond. Late that night, the ATF analyzes the ballistics from the first six shootings. They identify the caliber.223, one of the most popular in the country, and more importantly, they conclude that the bullet fragments they have recovered were indeed fired from the same rifle. The shootings are connected, even if the victims, themselves, are not. The ballistics lab confirms the bullet from Caroline's van matches the others. One rifle. A beltway killing spree is on the move. And what every trooper going out on the road is told to look for is a white van. After Sarah Ramos was killed, a lovely former law student who was shot in the head while sitting on a bench reading, a landscaper working nearby saw a white box truck speeding by. A dent in the back. Two men inside. He never saw it fire a shot, but it is the only description anyone has. So it becomes the description. Maryland alone has more than 70,000 white vans. Police stop as many of them as they can find, which means that of every vehicle on the road that October, the safest one to be driving may be an old blue Chevy Caprice. Nineteen years earlier, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, John Williams is a handsome 22-year-old who is known for keeping his word and who knows exactly what to say to a woman. John meets Mildred Roselle in the fall of 1983. Right away, John tells her he has two sons, but that he is not married. At one point, he looks her straight in the eyes and says, "I'm looking for someone to share my life." Mildred thinks, "I finally found a man." It turns out John has two sons by two different women. He married the second one in 1981 and remains married to her when he meets Mildred. Her name is Carol. They live in a trailer outside town with their son, Lindberg. Carol will one day describe her husband as a "militaristic control nut." He will describe her as "bolemic." Mildred finds out the truth roughly two months into dating John, and she confronts him. He begs her to wait for him. She agrees to remain friends, and he confides in her. But Mildred says he doesn't want to be with her, and he wants her to be with him. Mildred says he doesn't want to be with her, and he wants her to be with him, but he doesn't want to be with him. Mildred says he doesn't want to be with him, but he doesn't want to be with him. He says he doesn't want to be with him. He says he doesn't want to be with him, but he doesn't want to be with him. She explains how and why years later to A&E. and their business advisor, and eventually, Mildred's closest friend. They have a second business in Tacoma, too. A man named Felix teaches martial arts. John runs the business end, and Mildred keeps the books. The family rents a small home with a one-car garage on South Ainsworth Street, two blocks from a city park with a spring-fed lake. For a while, a neighbor describes them as a model family. To people outside the family, John is charming. But inside the home, Mildred learns to be afraid. She later describes him toying with her mind. One particular morning, I was at work. He walked in, and he said, I want a divorce. And I looked at him, and somebody just stabbed me. And I panicked. I went home, and I was crying. Then John says, no, I was just playing. I just wanted to see your reaction. A dress vanishes, and he suggests she never had it. A jacket turns up shredded, and he wonders why she would accuse him. Then he blames their little boy. He volunteers to fix a broken deadbolt, the same lock he jammed on purpose. He changes the phone number to the house and does not tell her. He needles her until she is shouting, and then John goes quiet, asking herself, softly, why she's so upset and what he could possibly have said. He would say, I'm your God. You do what I tell you to do. I'm the God in this house. Mildred points to one night in the summer of 1997 as a dark turning point in their marriage. John's son from his first marriage, 13-year-old Lindbergh, has come from Louisiana to visit. As the summer ends, John decides he is not sending the boy back home. He says he believes Lindbergh, is being abused, and he hires a lawyer and goes to court. A Tacoma judge orders John and Mildred to send the boy home. They buy him a plane ticket. The night before Lindbergh's flight home, Mildred finds John packing a duffel bag as long as a twin bed. I'm running away with Lindbergh, he says. Mildred tells him there's a court order and that he cannot do this. John pauses. Mildred is not convinced he'll do the right thing. She takes Lindbergh, and her own three children with John, into the second bedroom. She locks the door and sits on the floor with her back against the door until morning. By daylight, John has realized he's lost this fight. He joins Mildred in the car driving Lindbergh to the airport. No one speaks. They walk the boy all the way to the gate and watch his plane take off. The moment its wheels leave the runway, John turns sharply and walks away. In the car, he says one thing to Mildred, you didn't have my back. That, Mildred says, is when the relationship changed forever. The marriage fully breaks down by the spring of 2000. John has moved out, they've been separated for months, and he is tapping her phone lines, falsely accusing Mildred of having an affair. At one point after he and Mildred have separated, John shows up to see their son who is sick. Mildred will not let him in. She's scared of him. He shoves the door so hard that Mildred is thrown to the floor. John is in a state of shock. He's in a state of shock. She jumps up and takes a swing at him, misses. She is shocked at her own actions. She sees the expression on his face and thinks, he is going to kill me. A few days later, John comes back to the house. He is nicely dressed in a shirt and tie. He says he wants to talk and they step out to the garage. As he speaks, she sees the cold fury in his eyes. He told me, you have become my enemy. And as my enemy, I will kill you. John has always told Mildred that his word is his bond. She believes him. Mildred goes straight away to the police department and fills out the four-page form asking for a restraining order. Crying so hard, her tears drip onto the pages. On the day of the hearing, her legs shake as she walks into the building. She stands where she can watch every door. And in her mind, she plans an escape route. But John does not show up. The judge reads the forms she filled out and says, you need to get away from this guy. Yes, sir, she says. I'm trying. With that, the judge grants Mildred a lifetime protection order. Even so, Mildred later agrees to let John see his children. On Monday, March 27, 2000, John calls and asks to take the children to an arcade. Mildred agrees on one condition. All three have to be home by 2 p.m. John agrees. 5.30 comes and the children are not home. John calls later in the evening. He says there's a new plan with the children. Then another after that. They do not come home that night. They will not come home for 17 months. I called the police and they said, sorry, there's nothing we can do. He has just as much right to the children as you do. And they left. Within a day, with $521 emptied out of the children's own bank accounts, a man named Thomas Allen Lee, a.k.a. John Williams, is on a plane to the Caribbean with his three kids, also now with new names. They land in Antigua on the 28th of March with false Wyoming identification. Antigua is a small island in the Caribbean, and there John Williams is on a plane to the Caribbean with his three kids. He lands in Antigua on the 28th of March with his three kids. He goes into business selling forged papers to people trying to reach America. A passport, a birth certificate, a social security number, a visa. Antiguan authorities will later estimate he made more than $60,000 with the scheme. To the families who take him in, what is visible is a devoted father, a man who checks his children's schoolwork, and takes them to the beach. But the people around him start noticing something strange. The children answer to different names on different days. Part of John's business is getting his customers onto flights into the United States. He buys their tickets himself, sometimes thousands of dollars worth at a time. An American Airlines ticket agent catches on to the scheme. On March 11th, 2001, John tries to buy yet another ticket for a customer under a false name. The airline calls the police. Officers come to the airport. The airline calls and search John. They find a forged Washington state driver's license and a Florida birth certificate. John is arrested and jailed at police headquarters in the Antigua capital city of St. John's. Two days later, he escapes. According to government reports, there's a gross lack of security, and John's escape amounts to simply walking out of the police station. The arrest does not slow John's forgery business a beat. He recruits a teenage boy whom he met on the Antigua to help keep the business running. John leaves the island often. He is escorting his customers into the United States, routing them through Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, posing as a family member. Every day, this teenage assistant walks 12 miles from St. John's to a safe house where John has moved the children. The boy gives them four hours of lessons and then takes them to the park. The boy's name is Leboid Malvo. John Allen Williams, meanwhile, has gone back to Tacoma, Washington. On April 23, 2001, he walks into a Pierce County district court in Tacoma, Washington and petitions to officially change his name. Okay, Mr. Williams, you're petitioning to have your name changed? Yes, ma'am. What is your current legal name? My current legal name is John Allen. Okay, and what is the new name by which you wish to be known? John Allen Muhammad. And why do you desire to be known by this new name? For our religion purpose. Are you changing your name for any other reason? No, ma'am. Are you changing your name to defraud or mislead any person or creditor? No, ma'am. Are you involved in any legal proceeding other than this name change? No, ma'am. And have you ever been convicted of a felony? No, ma'am. Are you under supervision of any probation department that requires you to report a change of address? No, ma'am. I'll go ahead and grant your name change then. Thank you. John laughs aloud at how simple the process is. The next day, the state of Washington issues him a driver's license in the name of John Allen Muhammad. A month later, he flies back to Antigua using his new legal name and checks into a beach resort. On October 6, 2002, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose walks up to the microphones with the cameras rolling, trying to put the public's fears at ease. He points out a pattern in the shooter's targets thus far. None of the victims have been of anything close to school age. None of the locations are close to the schools. So please continue with that day. I think the school kids are safe. The next morning, that all changes. Iron Brown has been banned from his school bus for three days for eating Twizzlers. He is 13 years old, an eighth grader at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland. And on the morning of Monday, October 7th, he is not sure whether the three days are up or not. So his aunt Tanya drives him to school. She's a nurse at Children's Hospital in Washington. Washington. At 8.09 a.m., they pull into the driveway and Iron gets out, his backpack over a white football jersey. As his aunt begins to pull away, she hears a boom and a child scream, and then Iron shouting, Antonia. She stops and looks back. Iron is on the ground. A single.223 caliber round has hit Iron in the upper left of his abdomen, tearing through a lung, his spleen, stomach, liver, and pancreas. A teacher standing in the doorway runs to him. What's wrong, the teacher says. I've been shot. Are you kidding? He is not kidding. His aunt has backed the car up by now. Iron gets to his feet, tells her again that he's been shot, and she can see the blood on his shirt. He walks back to the car himself and gets in. His aunt buckles his seatbelt, dials 911, and drives. By that evening, the story is on every channel. In the country, the boy suffered a wound consistent with a high-powered rifle. After several hours of surgery, he is critical but stable. The surgeon who operates on him is Dr. Martin Eichelberger, chief of pediatric surgery at Children's National. They open Iron's chest. They treat the injured left lung, take out his smashed spleen, repair a nicked pancreas and a lacerated stomach. And then with the ATF waiting outside the operating room, Eichelberger is able to get him out of the hospital. He is able to get him out of the hospital. Martin Eichelberger looks at the X-ray and puts a finger on the boy's chest wall. And I looked at the X-ray and put my finger down where I thought the bullet was. And yes, I could palpate it with my finger. I was able to pull out this bullet. I gave it specifically to Dr. Newman, who gave it to a specific person to make sure that that chain of evidence was kept intact. Iron Brown lives. Barely. The detectives hunting the shooters are now certain they are watching the news. David Reichenbaugh is a lieutenant with the Maryland State Police, running criminal intelligence on the case. He describes that day years later to Investigation Discovery. Chief Moose was trying to set parents at ease, but the snipers were listening to every word that the media was putting out there. And I believe they heard Chief Moose say that the children would be safe. And they took that as a challenge. That afternoon, Chief Moose walks back out to the cameras. A tear runs down the chief's face on live television. A stranger watching from across the country puts up $50,000 of his own money toward catching whoever did this. Miles away, Mildred Muhammad hears about the boy the same way everyone else does. I thought about his mom. How she must. Being in so much pain, I was really sad for him and his family. No one is sure where the shot that hit Iron came from. So the U.S. Marshals bring in a dog. His name is Beacon. He is half black lab and half golden retriever. And he flunked out of guide dog school before somebody trained him to sniff explosives. Beacon and his handler, Deputy Marshal Michael Pio, go into the dense woods north of the school with three SWAT officers guarding them. Pio is ducking through the underbrush when one of the SWAT officers calls out, "Hey, look at your dog." Beacon is standing up on his hind legs with his nose against a tree branch. Then he sits down, which is how he says, "Yes." Pio identifies this tree as the perfect spot to take the shot on Iron Brown. And the ground is disturbed as though someone had lain there a while, waiting. Prince George's County brings in a bloodhound named Ms. Beacon. She takes a trail out of the woods along the tennis court into a parking lot and stops. That is where the scent ends. So police walk the trail again slowly. An ATF agent sees something in the underbrush. It is the death card from the Rider Waite tarot deck. A skeleton in black armor on a white horse. The Roman numeral 13 at the top and the word death along the bottom. Written on the front in blue ink is the phrase, "Call me God." On the back, three more messages. At the top, "For you, Mr. Police." In the middle, code, "Call me God." And at the bottom, a warning, "Do not release to the press." Drew Tracy, the assistant chief of the Montgomery County Police, describes it this way. It was almost like a calling card saying that it's us again, and we did it. At that point in time, they did not ask for anything, and that's a scary situation. They put the card in an evidence bag. Then they hold the bag open and let the bloodhound smell the inside of it. She traces the scent along the same trail as before. Officers find a.223 caliber rifle casing nearby. This is from their guy. The tarot card marks the first time the shooters spoke directly to the police, but it certainly would not be the last. A cryptic message from the killer, or killers, as more shots ring out across D.C. How the twisted relationship between Muhammad and Malvo evolves into a lethal partnership. That's next time on MK Confidential. It is a drizzly Saturday evening in Tacoma, Washington, February 16, 2002. On the corner of East 34th Street and East Roosevelt Avenue, there is a pale yellow house that looks out over the city's dockyards, the Puyallup River, and the fog sitting on Commencement Bay. The porch faces the street and the city spread out below it. Beside the front door, a small sign reads, "Please Remove Shoes." This house belongs to a U.S. Army soldier named Joseph Nichols and his wife, Issa. Neither of them is home. Issa has gone to collect their 13-year-old children. However, she says, she is going to collect her 13-year-old daughter, Tamara, from a sleepover. The only people in the house are Nichols' 21-year-old niece, Kenia Cook, who lives here with her aunt and uncle, and Kenia's 6-month-old daughter, Angelea. There is food on the stove. Upstairs the baby is lying on a towel on a bed. It's nearly bath time. At about 7 o'clock, the doorbell rings. Kenia comes downstairs in a shirt, jeans, and socks. The porch light is on, throwing light onto the front steps, under the overhang that keeps whoever is standing out there dry. But it is dark, and the window set into the front door is a long, narrow strip of cut glass. It's hard to see anything through it. Everyone who knows Kenia Cook says the same thing about her. She is careful. She would never open that door to a stranger. So she has a reason. Maybe it's her estranged boyfriend, who came by the house earlier in the day. Or maybe through that narrow strip of glass, whoever is out there simply looks like a kid from the neighborhood. Kenia opens the front door and looks out onto Roosevelt Avenue. A single bullet goes through the thin bone just below her left eye and lodges at the base of her skull. She goes down in the foyer. And then? Nothing happens. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing. Nothing happens. The ejected shell casing lies on the floor beside her. Upstairs, the baby is still on her towel waiting to be washed. In the kitchen, the food is still on the stove. A few minutes later, headlights turn into the driveway. Issa Nichols stays in the car to pull it into the garage. Her daughter gets out and walks around to the front of the home to go in the front door and open the garage from the inside. The front door is wide open, which is odd. A second later, the 13-year-old is running back to the car. Mommy, she screams, mommy, hurry. Police look at Kenya's boyfriend first because he had been at the house earlier the same day. They bring him in, they question him, then they let him go. After that, there is nowhere to go. There was a young woman dead in a foyer. A glass casing on the floor and a doorbell that rang. The case is cold right from the start. Issa Nichols has the blood cleaned out of the foyer. Her husband installs a camera above the front door. There are no viable clues to go on. For eight months, nobody knows who fired that shot. But there would be more. Many more. The person who rang Kenya Cook's doorbell is Leboyd Malvo. He is 16 years old, two days away from his 17th birthday. How did this teenager end up on that doorstep? And the question that has never been settled about him, not in a courtroom, not in the 20 years since, how much of what he did was his to choose? He's born in Kingston, Jamaica, on the 18th of February, 1985. His father is Leslie Malvo, a brick mason who went as far as the sixth grade. He has other children by other women, which in Jamaica at the time is neither unusual nor a point of conversation. Of all his children, Leslie says Lee looks the most like him. His mother is Una James, a She is 20 when she has him. As a girl, she walked miles to find her own father and ask him to pay for her schooling, and he said no. What she wants for her son is the education she was refused. Leslie, the father, is the soft one. The boy says he wants to be a pilot, so his dad folds him a paper plane, and the two of them fly it around the furniture carefully so as not to break anything. When the boy does break his mother's porcelain vase and hears her shriek his name from the other room, it's Leslie who steps in front of him. Leave the boy alone, he says. I broke it. He takes his son everywhere. He calls him Little Man. Una is the hard one. Playing is an interruption of studying, and by his father's account, when Leslie is not there, she beats Malvo. In 1988, Leslie takes a masonry contract in Grand Cayman, six months at a stretch. He sends money home twice a month and opens a savings account because he's going to buy them a house. He never does. In August of 1990, Una empties the account, packs up the entire house, and moves the boy somewhere she is fairly sure Leslie will not find them. But Leslie does find them, in the summer of 1991, and he brings two flight jackets, covered in military tags because he remembered his son wants to be a pilot. And then he goes away for good. Malvo is only five. Malvo is nine the first time his mother leaves him. She boards him with the woman he met the day before. This is the first of many separations. Over the next five years, Malvo is handed from one household to another. When he's ten, he goes looking for his father, finds him, and asks if he can stay. Leslie tells him no. Malvo believes the real reason was the woman with whom his father was living, who treated Malvo like an intrusion. Through all of it, Malvo is consistently on the honor roll at school. In January of 1999, Malvo's mother leaves Jamaica for the Caribbean island of Antigua in the care of a friend and then of a teacher. She sends for him to join her in the summer of 1999. He is fourteen when he reaches Antigua, and his mother is the only one who is able to find him. In the early days of October 2000, in St. John's, the capital of Antigua, there is an electronics shop called Zaza Yellows where the neighborhood kids go to use the computers and play video games. Malvo goes there. The place is usually crowded so mostly he finds a corner and watches other people play. And on several Fridays, he notices a father and a son. They're playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, which is a software-based game, and they're laughing. The boy is flying from the outside view, and his father says, "Nice scenery, but remind me not to fly with you." Malvo stands in the corner and watches them. He's now fifteen years old. Malvo says later the level of trust, their open camaraderie, and the communication between them was something he had always dreamed of, but until then had never experienced, not since his mom first took him away from his dad. Malvo admires the father in that shop. Everyone straightens up. He talks to children the way he talks to adults. When someone speaks to him, he lets them finish. He repeats back what they said to make sure he understood, and only then does he answer. Malvo's mother, who is trying to get to America, hears there's an American on the island who sells visas. She takes her son with her to the address on Rose Street. The American turns out to be the man from Zaza Yellows who was so good with his own son. His name is John Allen Muhammad. He is a United States Army veteran. He lives on Antigua with his three children, and he sells forged papers to people trying to reach America. While his mother negotiates, Malvo gets to know Muhammad's son. The boy's name is John Jr., and his nickname is Little Man, the same name Leslie Malvo used to call his son in Kingston before any of this. "Little Man and I hit it off," Malvo writes in his journal, "when we learned we both wanted to be pilots." Una buys her papers, memorizes her cover story, and flies to the United States. She tells her son Malvo that she will send for him to come to the United States when she has the money. She pays for the rest of the term at his school, covers two months' rent, and leaves him to fend for himself. In Antigua, he has literally no one. He is 15, a few months later, alone in the house. Lee Malvo gets sick. It's a recurrence of the rheumatic fever he had as a child. His joints ache. His tonsils swell shut. For two days, he cannot get out of bed to call anybody or even feed himself. By Malvo's own account given years later, prepared with his defense team, he describes what happened next, quote, "Then Mr. Muhammad came by one day and found the back door slightly ajar. Upon entering, he saw me in bed, sweating and almost delirious with fever. He lifted me out of bed and carried me out in his arms, because I was too weak to walk. He took me to the doctor, and then to his place of residence. I was fed with fluids and soup. What was truly amazing was that he spent a lot of time ensuring that I was okay, and he never asked for payment." After that, they go everywhere together. Carmeta Alboros, the social worker who later worked on Malvo's defense, describes them as "disciple and goon." The first time they meet, they talk to each other. Malvo tells him about his father, his mother, and the beatings. Muhammad tells him they did not meet by coincidence. They met by destiny. He starts introducing Malvo as his son, and Malvo starts calling him "Dad." Muhammad teaches him to speak with an American accent. On his 16th birthday, he takes them shopping and replaces his entire wardrobe. He takes him to a tailor. He has him measured for three suits. One woman who watched them in Antigua says Muhammad treated Malvo "like a little soldier, yes sir, no sir, like he was in the army." Malvo will later say these were "the happiest days of his life." On the last day of May 2001, Lee Malvo enters the United States, flying out of Antigua with Muhammad and Muhammad's three children under a name that is not his. He travels as Lindbergh-Williams, Muhammad's son by his first marriage. He is handed over to his mother Una, now in Florida. He registers at a high school in Fort Myers and starts earning A's and B's. And in October, he runs. He leaves before dawn, takes a bus west, and gets off in Bellingham, Washington, fifteen miles from the Canadian border. He's running toward a man who six weeks earlier walked out of a Tacoma courtroom without his own children. In August, Muhammad heads to see his mother and his mother-in-law. Muhammad had applied for food stamps in Washington State and filled in his children's real names. The names flagged in a state system. That led back to his ex-wife Mildred, who had legal custody and a restraining order against Muhammad. On the fourth of September, a court commissioner in Pierce County hands all three children back to their mother. There is tape of the hearing. So the children just have a missing. The whereabouts were never known by mother. That's why the court did not respond. You never responded to the published summons for divorce. So are you telling me the reason why I don't have my children and it won't be to keep my children because I don't have the proper paperwork yet? No, I'm saying that you've been divorced. The court has entered orders that mother had sole residential placement, care and custody of the children. And that you get no visitation at present without further court order. So I understand I'm not able to see my children. Mildred takes the three of them and disappears to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. John Muhammad has a name for that day. He calls it his own September 11th. So when the boy gets off the bus in Bellingham, he finds Muhammad now childless and living in a Christian homeless shelter called the Lighthouse Mission. They sign in under the last name Thomas. One resident leader tells authorities that Muhammad put the word out that he wanted his wife killed. He wanted it secret and anonymous. He talked about shooting her from a car. He talked about making a silencer out of a coke bottle. And he talked about cutting a gun port into the vehicle. In February of 2002, Muhammad and Malvo move into an apartment near a golf course in Tacoma. It belongs to a man named Earl Dancy, who works at the Seattle Tacoma Airport. Dancy has things Muhammad wants. A Chinese-made version of the AK-47. A Winchester with a scope. A Remington.308 hunting rifle. A.44 Magnum revolver. A.22 pistol. And a compact SIG Sauer.45. Dancy gives them the run of the apartment and free use of the guns. Why would he do that? Years later, Dancy explains it in the documentary series Born to Kill. Very manipulative. He gains your confidence. He gains your trust. Once he comes up with your trust, he'll use it to his advantage. They take the guns out to the Tacoma Sportsman's Club, and Dancy notices that Muhammad is obsessed with the boy's marksmanship he coaches him he brags about how well he's coming along and when malvo makes a mistake muhammad makes him run laps and do push-ups malvo always obeys the targets are paper men here's dancy again as a period of time they would bring targets to me and the targets were better getting better and better and actually one where target was actually dead shot cinemas two weeks after he first takes the boy to a range muhammad hands him a gift it's a t-shirt with the word sniper across the front he tells malvo he won it in a sniper competition in the 90s malvo wears it muhammad tells earl dancy that he qualified as a sniper in the army he's telling dancy other things too that his ex-wife and one of her friends conspired to take his children and that he's going to get them for it he has dancy sit down at his computer and search for mildred muhammad on the internet dancy finds her she's in the washington dc area which brings us back to a doorbell in tacoma shortly before a cross-country journey will begin authorities believe that on the drizzly evening of february 16 2002 it was lee boyd malvo who borrowed dancy's compact sig sauer 45 and carried it across town to the corner of east 34th and east roosevelt by malvo's own account given years later to his defense team muhammad spends the weeks beforehand making sure the boy is ready failure is not an option your pace must be certain he tells him like a man who knows where he's going then he drives malvo to the home before he lets him out of the car he makes him say the plan out loud he drives malvo to the home before he lets him out of the car he makes him say the plan out loud knock on the door ask for isa if it's isa good if it's not say you have a message for her and then use this isa nichols whose home this is used to manage the muhammad's books she became mildred's close friend and testified for her during the custody fight isa is one of the people muhammad blames for the loss of his children but she isn't home her niece is kenya cook answers the door she's 21 and has nothing to do with muhammad's custody fight she tells lee boyd malvo where her aunt has gone he shoots her anyway by his account he runs to a phone booth sweating and crying muhammad pulls up and malvo gets in i watched you muhammad tells him you did perfect then he hands the boy a wallet with a new id card in it malvo reads the name on it john lee muhammad lee boyd malvo no longer exists muhammad says and starts the engine malvo says he stood in the shower for hours and couldn't get clean that muhammad got impatient and knocked on the bathroom door and that the knocking on the door was the worst part two days later it's his 17th birthday muhammad takes him to the mall and buys him slacks shirts ties cufflinks and sneakers and he takes him bowling and then to the movies the film is john q with denzel washington a man's son needs a heart operation he cannot pay for so he takes an emergency room hostage and while they are bowling malvo will later say muhammad lectures him on the importance of a man doing whatever he has to to save his children a man's son needs a heart operation he cannot pay for so he takes an emergency room hostage and while they are bowling malvo will later say muhammad lectures him on the importance of a man doing whatever he has to to save his children a month later they're in arizona on the 19th of march at a golf course in tucson a 60 year old at a golf course in tucson a 60 year old at a golf course in tucson a 60 year old frozen foods salesman named jerry ray taylor frozen foods salesman named jerry ray taylor frozen foods salesman named jerry ray taylor is practicing his game after lunch is practicing his game after lunch is practicing his game after lunch he goes down on the course shot in the he goes down on the course shot in the he goes down on the course shot in the back whoever shot him drags his body back whoever shot him drags his body back whoever shot him drags his body into the underbrush appears to have into the underbrush appears to have into the underbrush appears to have pulled out jerry's wallet but leaves it pulled out jerry's wallet but leaves it pulled out jerry's wallet but leaves it next to him the cash and cards still next to him the cash and cards still next to him the cash and cards still inside inside inside and that is how it goes for seven months and that is how it goes for seven months and that is how it goes for seven months a murder in one state then a bus ticket a murder in one state then a bus ticket a murder in one state then a bus ticket then a murder in another one under a then a murder in another one under a then a murder in another one under a different name in a jurisdiction that has different name in a jurisdiction that has different name in a jurisdiction that has never heard of the last one never heard of the last one never heard of the last one september 5th 2002 half past 10 at night september 5th 2002 half past 10 at night september 5th 2002 half past 10 at night a strip mall in clinton maryland a strip mall in clinton maryland a strip mall in clinton maryland restaurant owner paul larufa has just restaurant owner paul larufa has just restaurant owner paul larufa has just closed for the night closed for the night closed for the night he walks out across the lot with an he walks out across the lot with an he walks out across the lot with an employee and a customer carrying a black employee and a customer carrying a black employee and a customer carrying a black leather briefcase with about 3 500 leather briefcase with about 3 500 leather briefcase with about 3 500 in it and a laptop he opens the back in it and a laptop he opens the back in it and a laptop he opens the back door of his green chrysler puts them door of his green chrysler puts them door of his green chrysler puts them both on the seat and gets in the driver's both on the seat and gets in the driver's both on the seat and gets in the driver's seat seat seat there is a shadow at the driver's side there is a shadow at the driver's side there is a shadow at the driver's side window a small figure he will say window a small figure he will say window a small figure he will say then the window comes apart and bullets then the window comes apart and bullets then the window comes apart and bullets go into his arm and his chest and his go into his arm and his chest and his side go into his arm and his chest and his side and as he leans away from it someone and as he leans away from it someone and as he leans away from it someone yanks open the back door of his car and yanks open the back door of his car and yanks open the back door of his car and lifts the briefcase and the laptop off lifts the briefcase and the laptop off lifts the briefcase and the laptop off of the seat of the seat of the seat larufa gets his door open and staggers larufa gets his door open and staggers larufa gets his door open and staggers out onto the lot out onto the lot out onto the lot shouting for someone to call 911 telling shouting for someone to call 911 telling shouting for someone to call 911 telling himself over and over that he is not himself over and over that he is not himself over and over that he is not going to die in this parking lot going to die in this parking lot going to die in this parking lot and he doesn't he's been shot five or and he doesn't he's been shot five or and he doesn't he's been shot five or six times but he lives six times but he lives six times but he lives that 3500 that 3500 that 3500 pays for what comes next pays for what comes next pays for what comes next on september 21st outside a liquor on september 21st outside a liquor on september 21st outside a liquor store in montgomery alabama store in montgomery alabama store in montgomery alabama a manager named claudine parker is a manager named claudine parker is a manager named claudine parker is charged officers are close enough to charged officers are close enough to charged officers are close enough to hear it hear it hear it they chase a man and he gets away and they chase a man and he gets away and they chase a man and he gets away and on the ground where he ran they find on the ground where he ran they find on the ground where he ran they find something and they bag it and they file something and they bag it and they file something and they bag it and they file it away it away it away two days later in baton rouge louisiana two days later in baton rouge louisiana two days later in baton rouge louisiana a woman named pong eam ballinger blocks a woman named pong eam ballinger blocks a woman named pong eam ballinger blocks up the beauty supply store where she up the beauty supply store where she up the beauty supply store where she works and reaches her car with her keys works and reaches her car with her keys works and reaches her car with her keys in her hand in her hand in her hand she is killed by a single shot to the she is killed by a single shot to the she is killed by a single shot to the head head head a few blocks from that strip mall in a few blocks from that strip mall in a few blocks from that strip mall in clinton maryland where paul larufa was clinton maryland where paul larufa was clinton maryland where paul larufa was shot and his shot and his shot and his thirty five hundred dollars were stolen thirty five hundred dollars were stolen thirty five hundred dollars were stolen there is a subdivision with streets there is a subdivision with streets there is a subdivision with streets named black willow and may apple and named black willow and may apple and named black willow and may apple and quiet brook lane quiet brook lane quiet brook lane living on quiet brook lane at september living on quiet brook lane at september living on quiet brook lane at september is the woman earl dancy found on the is the woman earl dancy found on the is the woman earl dancy found on the internet internet internet a 41 year old divorced mother of three a 41 year old divorced mother of three a 41 year old divorced mother of three who moved across the country from who moved across the country from who moved across the country from tacoma washington tacoma washington tacoma washington to get away from her husband her name to get away from her husband her name to get away from her husband her name is mildred muhammad robert holmes is mildred muhammad robert holmes is mildred muhammad robert holmes one of muhammad's oldest army friends one of muhammad's oldest army friends one of muhammad's oldest army friends would later say he believed mildred was would later say he believed mildred was would later say he believed mildred was always the real target always the real target always the real target my way of thinking was uh mildred was my way of thinking was uh mildred was my way of thinking was uh mildred was the target in the mission the target in the mission the target in the mission because if if it was just to terrorize because if if it was just to terrorize because if if it was just to terrorize people or to kill people even people or to kill people even people or to kill people even that could have been done anywhere if that could have been done anywhere if that could have been done anywhere if you kill 10 people and she's one of the you kill 10 people and she's one of the you kill 10 people and she's one of the 10 10 10 there's less likely i mean there's still there's less likely i mean there's still there's less likely i mean there's still a chance that you're going to get caught a chance that you're going to get caught a chance that you're going to get caught but it's less likely but it's less likely but it's less likely by the second week of october 11 people by the second week of october 11 people by the second week of october 11 people are dead in this killing spree are dead in this killing spree are dead in this killing spree six of them in the dc area this month six of them in the dc area this month six of them in the dc area this month two more shot and still alive and two more shot and still alive and two more shot and still alive and thousands of local and state police thousands of local and state police thousands of local and state police sheriffs deputies federal agents marshals sheriffs deputies federal agents marshals sheriffs deputies federal agents marshals and technicians are now hunting two men and technicians are now hunting two men and technicians are now hunting two men whom they still believe may be a single whom they still believe may be a single whom they still believe may be a single sniper in a white van sniper in a white van sniper in a white van roadblocks shut down interstates within roadblocks shut down interstates within roadblocks shut down interstates within minutes of each murder the task force minutes of each murder the task force minutes of each murder the task force knows that there's a rifle and there's a knows that there's a rifle and there's a knows that there's a rifle and there's a vehicle they know the crimes are vehicle they know the crimes are vehicle they know the crimes are connected by the same gun and that is it connected by the same gun and that is it connected by the same gun and that is it october 9th the next victim october 9th the next victim october 9th the next victim a 53 year old civil engineer named dean a 53 year old civil engineer named dean a 53 year old civil engineer named dean myers is working late at his office in myers is working late at his office in myers is working late at his office in manassas virginia because he works late manassas virginia because he works late manassas virginia because he works late almost every night almost every night almost every night he was drafted in 1969 and shot on a he was drafted in 1969 and shot on a he was drafted in 1969 and shot on a patrol north of saigon patrol north of saigon patrol north of saigon he came home with a purple heart and an he came home with a purple heart and an he came home with a purple heart and an arm that never fully worked again arm that never fully worked again arm that never fully worked again a little after eight a colleague in the a little after eight a colleague in the a little after eight a colleague in the next cubicle says good night next cubicle says good night next cubicle says good night okay meyer says see you tomorrow okay meyer says see you tomorrow okay meyer says see you tomorrow meyers has a long drive and he needs gas meyers has a long drive and he needs gas meyers has a long drive and he needs gas he pulls his black mazda into the he pulls his black mazda into the he pulls his black mazda into the battlefield sunoco on sudley road battlefield sunoco on sudley road battlefield sunoco on sudley road he is standing in the white light of the he is standing in the white light of the he is standing in the white light of the pump island in the cold and the wet pump island in the cold and the wet pump island in the cold and the wet when a shot cracks and a 223 round out when a shot cracks and a 223 round out when a shot cracks and a 223 round out of a rifle very like the one he carried of a rifle very like the one he carried of a rifle very like the one he carried in vietnam hits him behind the left ear in vietnam hits him behind the left ear in vietnam hits him behind the left ear he is dead before he lands he is dead before he lands he is dead before he lands police seal the roads for miles they police seal the roads for miles they police seal the roads for miles they find nothing find nothing find nothing october 11th two days later a 53 year october 11th two days later a 53 year october 11th two days later a 53 year old businessman from philadelphia named old businessman from philadelphia named old businessman from philadelphia named kenneth bridges pulls off interstate 95 kenneth bridges pulls off interstate 95 kenneth bridges pulls off interstate 95 near fredericksburg virginia to fill his near fredericksburg virginia to fill his near fredericksburg virginia to fill his tank he has six children and everybody tank he has six children and everybody tank he has six children and everybody has warned him about this stretch of has warned him about this stretch of has warned him about this stretch of road road road he stops anyway kenneth calls his wife he stops anyway kenneth calls his wife he stops anyway kenneth calls his wife jocelyn from the pump island to tell her jocelyn from the pump island to tell her jocelyn from the pump island to tell her where he is where he is where he is she thinks about warning him one more she thinks about warning him one more she thinks about warning him one more time she doesn't time she doesn't time she doesn't he'll be out of there in a few minutes he'll be out of there in a few minutes he'll be out of there in a few minutes she thinks and there's a virginia state she thinks and there's a virginia state she thinks and there's a virginia state trooper 50 yards away working a fender trooper 50 yards away working a fender trooper 50 yards away working a fender bender bender bender surely no one would fire a rifle with a surely no one would fire a rifle with a surely no one would fire a rifle with a trooper standing right there trooper standing right there trooper standing right there at 9 28 a.m kenneth bridges puts the at 9 28 a.m kenneth bridges puts the at 9 28 a.m kenneth bridges puts the nozzle in his tank nozzle in his tank nozzle in his tank the trooper hears the shot runs to him the trooper hears the shot runs to him the trooper hears the shot runs to him and works on kenneth until the rescue and works on kenneth until the rescue and works on kenneth until the rescue squad arrives squad arrives squad arrives by then there is no pulse the trooper by then there is no pulse the trooper by then there is no pulse the trooper never sees a man with a rifle never sees a man with a rifle never sees a man with a rifle no one at that gas station does no one at that gas station does no one at that gas station does october 14th three days later Just before half past seven in the evening, Ted and Linda Franklin drive their red Mercury into the parking lot at the Home Depot in the Seven Corners Shopping Center near Falls Church, Virginia. Linda Franklin is 47 and an intelligence analyst at the FBI. She has recently had a double mastectomy and she's still in physical therapy. Her daughter is about to make her a grandmother. They spend an hour and a half inside buying shelves for a house they're about to move into. A little after nine, they wheel the cart out to the car. One of the shelves will not fit. It's too long for the trunk, so they put the back seat down and try to feed it through, which doesn't work either. Ted holds the cart to stop it from rolling while Linda tries to wrestle the shelf in through the passenger door. She's having trouble with it. Why don't you come and hold the cart, Ted says. I'll see if I can put it in. They switch places. As Ted is ducking in and out of the car with the shelf, he hears a loud noise and feels something spray across his face. He assumes the noise came from inside the store, where they're always dropping pallets. The spray is what gets his attention. When he turns around, his wife Linda is on the pavement. Inside the store, people are screaming. Employees are shouting at each other to shut the doors. Within minutes, the lot fills with police. No one standing in it can tell anybody where the shot came from. Malvo will tell investigators, years later, exactly where he had been lying. In the documentary series Born to Kill, ballistics expert Jeff Miller walks through that account. Malvo said that he was lying here in this parking lot, here at the community center, near this stairway. And while Mohammed was providing a lookout for him, he was able to look across this parking lot, across the highway and underneath the parking garage here at the Home Depot store. And Mr. and Mrs. Franklin were loading purchases into the back of their car. And the two of them were standing just underneath the home in the Home Depot store, about halfway through the parking lot. A bullet entered the left side of her head. And as it exited her head, it started to fragment inside and cause a very traumatic injury to her head. When Lee Malvo eventually goes on trial in Virginia, his defense is built by Carmetta Alvarez, who traveled to Jamaica and Antigua. And interviewed his family and by the psychologists who spent months with Malvo. They describe a course of instruction. The boy is given tapes and he listens to them nightly. And years later, he can still name them. Message to the Black Man. The Willie Lynch speech. Malcolm X played in question and answer sessions while riding along on Mohammed's rounds. And this is not only Malvo's account. On Antigua. The woman who first took Mohammed's family in had noticed Mohammed borrowing her CD player and playing tapes to his own children after they'd fallen asleep. Her daughter watched him do it. He was subliminally indoctrinating and hypnotizing them, she says. Dr. Dewey Cornell was Malvo's court-appointed psychologist. He spent 53 hours with Malvo, trying to understand his motivation. It really started to remind me very quickly of someone who was part of a. A political underground or maybe part of a cult movement who had been brainwashed or indoctrinated. Lee Malvo basically killed because John Mohammed wanted him to kill. The prosecution in Virginia argued the opposite. That Malvo was a willing and equal participant. And the investigators who have worked the case have never accepted the word brainwashing. They had witnesses who put the two of them apart, they said. Malvo had every opportunity to. Leave. Dr. Evan Nelson conducted a court-ordered sanity evaluation of Malvo for the prosecution. He interviewed Malvo and came to a very different conclusion. In my opinion, it wasn't brainwashing. This was a case of a young man who was eager to learn things and an older man who was eager to teach. So I think that young Mr. Malvo found somebody who he could idolize and adore and choose to follow as compared to being brainwashed. By the time the D.C. area shootings begin. Muhammad and Malvo are operating out of a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with more than 100,000 miles on it and New Jersey plates. They bought it for $250 from a used car lot in Trenton called, of all things, Sure Shot Auto Sales, with the money taken off of Paul LaRuffa's backseat. It is a former police cruiser and so unremarkable that police run its plates again and again during the spree. to bring it back clean. The backseat has been cut loose and re-hung so the seat back swings up on a hinge at the top like a hatch. And in the trunk lid, just above a license plate, there is a hole. A gun port. Inside the trunk they have built a small platform so the rifle's bipod stands at exactly the height of that hole. A man can lie flat on his stomach with his feet braced against the back of the front seat and point the muzzle forward. The gun port is a little bit more spacious than the front seat. In it, they announced that they will call the public telephone at the Ponderosa at 6 o'clock Sunday morning, and police should be standing there to take it. Jim Clemente and James Fitzgerald were in the room where the true profile of these killers begins to take shape. Both are retired FBI profilers. Fitz is also a forensic linguist. The agent who heard the phone ring from the parking lot is Tim Clemente, Jim's brother. By the middle of October 2002, the men doing the shooting have started to message the police. It starts 13 days before that phone rings with a card in the woods. October 7th, a 13-year-old boy named Iron Brown is dropped off at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in the middle of the night. He's in Bowie, Maryland, and is shot as he walks toward the door. He lives. Police follow the trajectory back into the tree line, where a U.S. Marshal Service dog stops at a fallen branch and sits. The ground there is flattened the way ground looks when someone has been lying on it. Cadets rake the area and turn up a spent.223 casing. Near it, an ATF agent finds a tarot card lying face-up in the brush. It is the death card. On the front is a skeleton in armor on a white horse carrying a black flag. Across the top, handwritten in blue ink, On the back, another handwritten message. For you, Mr. Police. And code CALLMEGOD. Do not release to the press. That's the entire message. The first and only real clues to the shooter's identity and his first known effort to communicate. 13 words. This may be 14. No one wants word of that card to leave this room. The lead homicide detective, Joseph Bergstrom, calls it an ace in the hole and warns a briefing of two dozen task force members that someone there might leak it. That night, on the 11 o'clock news, WUSA in Washington reports that a tarot card has been found at the school. The Washington Post has it, too. Both outlets get the wording wrong. It was a card from a fortune teller. It's a drawing deck that's known as the death card, with a note written on it. Dear Policeman, I am God. It's the latest chilling development in this chilling case and massive investigation. Which is not what the card said. And neither outlet initially reports the line that mattered most to the man who wrote it. Quote, do not release to the press. The next morning, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose walks out to the cameras. I have not received any message that the citizens of Montgomery County won't Channel 9 or the Washington Post or any other media outlet to solve this case. If they do, then let me know. We will go and do other police work and we will turn this case over to the media. But to date, the people in my community have asked the police department to work the case. So I beg of the media, let us do our job. Moose says later that much of the anger was an act. He assumed the men who. Left the card were watching. And he wanted them to see the leak had not come from him. Twelve days later, another communication. It arrives the same way. Someone has to be shot first. Saturday, October 19th. Jeff and Stephanie Hopper have been driving for nine days. He is 37, a computer consultant. They are driving from Melbourne, Florida, where they live, to Pennsylvania to see her sister. They've heard about the shooter along I-95 and are. Careful not to buy gas anywhere near Washington. So they stop in Ashland instead, a hundred miles south of D.C. The Hoppers have dinner at the Ponderosa, steak and salad. Just before 8 p.m., they walk out across the parking lot toward their white Cadillac holding hands. They both hear a loud noise. Stephanie thinks a car has backfired. Jeff puts his hand on his stomach, goes down slowly and says, I think I've been shot. She kneels over him. He says, I love you. She says, I love you. They say the Lord's Prayer together. Then she tries to dial 911 and cannot get her phone keypad unlocked, so she starts shouting at people in the lot to call. Ashland patrolman Tim Meacham is there in two minutes. He stops his cruiser at the end of the sidewalk so the car is between the Hoppers and the woods. Jeff was laying in the parking lot and Stephanie was sitting on the sidewalk. And she was holding pressure on his stomach. I told her that I need to verify the injury, so she lifted up the towel that she was holding on it. And I saw a hole about the size of a nickel in the top of the victim's stomach. Meacham says she was the calmest person he has ever seen at a scene like this. He tells her the thing to do with a bleed is to hold pressure, that it isn't rocket science. She starts laughing. So does her husband. She started to chuckle. The victim started to laugh. And at this point, I'm like, okay, can you guys let me in on the joke? Well, she was a rocket scientist for NASA. So me telling her that it wasn't rocket science, she kind of knew that already. The round has gone in under his sternum and come apart inside him. When the ambulance crew gets to him, they keep asking him how old he is. I'm 37, he tells them, and I hope to reach 38. He will. Behind the restaurant, there is a wooded lot. And it is complete. The plan is to wait for daylight. An ATF agent named Ray Neely argues against it. He has a yellow lab named Garrett who finds gunpowder and says the dog does not need to wait for daylight. The smell will never be stronger than it is right now. That's when I saw the rub mark. There was a small tree about maybe two inches in diameter with a small vine. And when I looked up that tree, it looked like someone had taken some type of hard object and leaned it up against that tree. And that created a rub mark. You wouldn't have that occurring in nature. You needed something hard pressing against it. And it was also in Lana's site, too, where the person was actually hit as he exited the Ponderosa. And so that rub mark was someone probably using that tree as a rifle rest. Twenty feet behind that tree, the dog sits. Sure enough, the bullet casing is lying on top of the leaves, clean. Then a Hanover County sergeant named James Sizemore. Sees something on a tree trunk, a Ziploc bag with a Halloween pattern on it, pinned up with two white thumbtacks. Folded inside is pink lined paper with stars stuck to it. A note, not read, but sent in for processing. Six hours later, the phone rings in the locked vestibule and no one answers it. Two pieces of paper delivered two weeks apart. Over the next four days, almost everything. The task force learns about these men comes out of those two documents and out of a room at Quantico where two profilers are arguing about them. James Fitzgerald has been waiting for a letter before there was one. We were trying to put the profile together for the week or so before. And I was telling people we're probably going to get a notification, a letter, a document somewhere. And sure enough, there is the tarot card. I actually wound up writing a four and a half page report along with two other profiles. Two filers in the unit just summarizing what we saw in that card alone. Four and a half pages out of 13 words. First page or so was the guy basically had it wrong. In tarot world, death means transition of some sort. Could be a job promotion, a move, something like that. Did not mean the cessation of life. So that was the first page. And then it was trifurcated for you, Mr. Police. It's some sort of a respectful deferential term. Maybe an older person. I actually did some search on the Internet. And there's some hip hop rap song references to that, Mr. Police. I was a police officer prior to the FBI and nobody ever called me that. Then the next line is call me God in quotation marks. And what the heck did they mean by that? I did some more research. There was a movie called Navy Seals starting starring Charlie Sheen back in the 80s. And the sniper on that team, his nickname was God because he had the power of life and death. But I focused on the word press. As opposed to media. And I summed up the end of it. It seems like using Mr. Police, someone deferential, hip hop related, maybe younger, using press, the older word, which is now media was more common. Perhaps the person is older. So the end was we have sort of a mix of personalities here. Fitz did not say two people. Not yet. He wrote that the card might have been made across two days in two moods. He also had to establish an approximate age. For the writer, an age can be difficult to tell in a forensic link. I'm asked to do that all the time in a forensic linguistic analysis. Give us the age of an individual. And, you know, some older people write in a very sophomoric sense. Some younger people can write in a very advanced, you know, seemingly educated or well-read sense. I think maybe 13 words, 14 words on that whole tarot card. And then the card itself told us a lot, even about the immaturity. Then he looked at punctuation. Why did he use? Why did he use quotation marks over call me God, then separate, do not release to the press? If anything, they could have been underlined or exclamation mark. It was this person's way of emphasizing something important to them. And again, what I did in the Unabombe case, I compared the Unabombe writings to the eventual writings of Ted Kaczynski, many people in between. But finally, with Ted Kaczynski, we could line up these unusual punctuation marks and other, you know, verb and noun phrases. And that's what I was hoping to do in this case. While Fitz worked on the language, Jim Clemente worked on the scenes. The choice of targets, the distances of the shots, the timing. When the first six one shots, one kill happened, we immediately felt that this is somebody who is a little older. They're not in their 20s. They're probably, they're most likely police or military trained because these are very efficient. And I know that sounds cold, but this is the way we analyze them. This is somebody who's sticking and running, sticking and running, sticking and running and being incredibly efficient all through that day. In other words, they didn't decompensate at all. They didn't have, you know, their their nerves get up and and it didn't interfere with the later killings in that same day. Clemente read the sniper as a disciplined adult. A man. A man who was trained to shoot and has killed before Fitz saw a child. I remember very clearly Fitz was sitting next to me in the profiling room at our at our roundtable where he said, look, there's such a dichotomy here between the actions because we're all saying that we profile the shootings. And this is somebody who has planned and executed these shootings flawlessly. Yet Fitz is saying, I'm seeing some younger kind of influences. In this in these notes. And I also remember Fitz, you saying that that Mr. Police is a line from from some Jamaican reggae songs. And and so that was the first time you mentioned that this person could have connections to Jamaica, Jamaica off a phrase on the back of a tarot card. And as we were arguing this out, everybody said, well, well, certainly this. Guy is in his late thirties or early forties because he must be police and military trained. But Fitz was saying, well, I don't know, based on these writings, he's either well, if he's a he's an adult, he's just barely an adult. But Fitz said, I think he's more like 15, 16 years old. And everybody said, that's impossible. There was one answer, though, that made both takes true. So I jumped in to back Fitz up and say, well, then either for the first time. We have a guy who is perfectly calm, cool and collected while he is planning and executing the shootings, but decompensates and communicates like a child. Or for the first time in U.S. history, we have a sniper team, one one old and one younger. But the profilers took issue with the idea of a team. In their experience, criminal snipers did not share control. But every single sniper case, criminal sniper case prior to this was alone. Actor and a white male. So that's where you get the statistics pushing in one direction. But Fitz stuck to his guns. I supported him and we eventually convinced the rest of the crew that this could be possible. They said snipers don't work well together because they have a God complex. And I said, well, if one of them is older and actually forcing his will on the younger one, then he is feeling fine because he's controlling the. Younger one and the younger one doesn't really have a say in it. And they're saying, ah, that doesn't make much sense. And I said, well, he could control him completely by sexually victimizing him. And lo and behold, I think it was 11 years later that that Malvo came out while he was in prison and said that Mohammed had been sexually victimizing him from almost from day one. That was a guess in a room in 2002 about two men no one had yet identified. Mohammed was. Never charged with abusing Malvo and he never answered that allegation. Then came Ashland and the bag on the tree. What Tim Clemente noticed first was the bag itself. My brother, Tim, was the one that found the note, the one at the steakhouse in Ashland, and he immediately they hadn't opened it up, but it was actually tacked to a tree in a baggie that was a Halloween baggie, like a kid's Halloween. And so right there, just from the outside of that, and then seeing through the baggie that there were little gold stars on it, it was it was like, what kind of a 45 year old is going to use this to communicate to law enforcement when we then discussed it with Fitz, he was he gave us a number of other indicators of youthfulness in this communications and that, you know, Mr. Police was kind of looking up to cops rather than, you know, scornfully. Looking down at them. You could read part of it through the plastic. Because it was a baggie that this note was contained in, you could see the front and the back of of the note. And my brother saw the lines. Your kids are not safe anywhere. Tim Clemente wanted to open it on the spot, preserve the evidence, but read it that night because he saw a clear threat to children in it. He was told, no, it was not an FBI case yet. And the man who could make that call was asleep. Somebody in the local department said, no, we're going to we're going to wait till my boss wakes up and then we'll let him make that decision. My brother really kind of tried a whole bunch of things to try to get them to open it immediately, but they did not do it. And the phone, he was there. The phone was inside the vestibule of the restaurant, which was which was still locked, but he heard the phone ring at six a.m. And he said. He said somebody should definitely get in there and answer it. And again, it was not our crime scene. They never actually opened up the letter until like noon Sunday when they finally got it to the lab. We missed a classic chance to actually have someone talk to talk to it, talk to the people that morning. And and it turns out there was an incoming call to that pay phone at six a.m. that no one ever picked up. And I as a linguist, I just always wanted to know. I just wondered what it would be like to have been on that call and we could have really narrowed down even where they came from. Fitz knows what the alternative looks like because he's watched the bureau do it once before on the kidnapping of Exxon executive Sidney Riso. Riso did not survive. But the way they caught the people who took him is the point. Agents in the newer division, there was about 100 of them all in cars. They went to every pay phone in like North Jersey and they sat on it. And sure enough, because they knew a call was coming in to some tip line somewhere. And sure enough, someone sees a guy get out of a car, a woman's in the car, makes the call and the case gets put together from there. They stopped the car and they were the they were the kidnappers. So that exactly could have been done overnight. They could have had they would have had, you know, eight six to eight hours to put agents around every phone booth. It wouldn't have been easy and they could have missed it. We're not denying that they could have made the arrest. We're not denying that they could have potentially right then and there and definitely saved a few more lives. When the letter is finally in hand, it runs four pages. It opens with the same three lines as the tarot card. Page two begins. We have tried to contact you to start negotiation. What follows is a numbered list of the calls they say they made and who took each one. An officer named Derek, a female officer at Rockville, the task force hotline, a priest. Even CNN, every one of them by the writer's account, told them to call a different number or hung up. These people took the calls for a hoax or a joke, according to the letter. So your failure to respond has cost you five lives, it accuses. Then the demand ten million dollars into a Bank of America account. The note promises to call police at six a.m. on Sunday at the Ponderosa Buffet and includes the phone number. They plan to call. The letter closes with an alternative. If catching them matters more than stopping the killing, then, quote, prepare you body bags. And underneath that, a postscript. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time. And a promise which Fitz has never forgotten. If we give you our word, then that is what takes place. Word is bond. Four pages was enough. Fitz noticed a conspiracy. A conspicuous missing letter. So at the time of the D.C. sniper case, I'm in my Georgetown master's program in linguistics. And I happen to be taking a course in sociolinguistics and we were studying U.S. dialects. And I was learning about, you know, Boston dialects, New York, Philadelphia, which is mine, other parts of the country. And I realized it's not all geographical, it's cultural. And here I notice on this letter and one of the one of the hallmarks, if you will, one of the features. Of black vernacular English is a name for it is a lot of black people spoken in writing. drop the S's on either possessive words or plural words. And here in this note, when the first two pages alone, this letter, I think there were four pages total, the person writes the word negotiation, should have been plural, demand should have been plural with an S, and $10 million, which of course should have been plural. And if it happened just once, okay, it's a typo. I mean, it was handwritten, but you know, a mistake. Second time, maybe. Third time, I said, we have dialect features here of a black person, most likely male. And I was the first one, and I know I talked to Jim Clemente about this, and I was the first one to say, "Jim, I think we've got a black guy. Let's go up to the task force and tell them." - That reading changed the profile. - We were very careful in how we worded the profile. That was to go out to the public. And we very purposefully said, "Historically speaking, snipers are white males acting on their own." However, and here's the caveat, we don't know if this person exactly fits that historical matching in this particular case. And years later, I'd be hearing, "Oh, the FBI had it wrong. They said it was a white guy in the beginning." We technically didn't, but you have to be careful when you put these profiles together. We don't want investigators or the public ruling out someone if they think they have good evidence otherwise, and they don't make the phone call. - So the Bureau hedged in writing on purpose, and the country heard "white man, white van," and stopped listening. The men doing the shooting had been trying to get somebody on the phone for two weeks. Now they're asking the police to take their call at the Ponderosa so they can ensure the message gets through. Before any of the notes, one of the snipers called a priest. - There was an even more detailed conversation where Muhammad, apparently, was a priest. He had apparently, earlier, had made a phone call to a priest. It was basically claiming the responsibility for the shootings outside of D.C., but also claiming responsibility for a shooting down south. - Malvo and Muhammad apparently chose the priest specifically because he would not record their conversation, but they hoped he would go to the police. He did not. Investigators found him while chasing down the note left, and the Ponderosa. For the moment, the detail about the shooting down south goes nowhere. The profilers had warned Chief Moose from the beginning about being careful on camera. - We told Chief Moose immediately that snipers have a God complex. Do not challenge them, because you will see them try to prove it. But he said at the end, "The streets are safe, your schools are safe." So the next day, they shot a child on his way into school. That child was Irene Brown. But by the end of the month, the men who shot him were writing the chief's lines, and Fitz could watch it happen. - Chief Moose was supposed to say something like, "We have the snipers in a noose." With an unusual N-U-E-S-E, I believe, spelling of the word noose. So they were definitely playing games at the end. I'm saying they, now we were sure that there was more than one person. And now they're trying to have the chief of police, you know, at their beck and call and making these particular statements. - And underneath all of it, from the very first day, Fitz had a suspicion about what the shootings were actually for. - I was giving a tour of the FBI Academy, just a real quick aside that day, to some journalists and their partners. And we walk out, and CNN, when they used to do news back then, they were covering the story as we're walking out the lobby. And the journalist said, you know, "Fitz, what's going on here, what's happening?" I said, "I don't know, this is new to me too, but I've learned sometimes that when multiple people are killed, it's designed to hide the one target that is really the person who the shooter or the murderer wants to dead." And it turns out, and Jim and I can discuss that later, that's exactly what the case was here. - Clemente has a phrase for how a killer is made. He says, "Genetics loads the gun, personality aims it, and experience pulls the trigger." In Muhammad's case, the experience, he points to, is a custody fight. - I would say his wife, getting custody of the kids and keeping them away from him. I mean, he tried to hunt them down. He tried to hunt her down. In the end, his actual motive in this case was to shoot a number of other people, make it look like there's some wild, crazed killer out there, and then shoot her as part of this, and then maybe shoot some more people and then disappear. But as a result, the children's mother would be dead, and he felt he would get custody. That was his ultimate goal, to win custody from her by killing her. - Except Mildred will not be killed. Her best friend, Issa's niece, is murdered. But Muhammad never takes a shot at Mildred or her house on Quiet Brook Lane. Still, Muhammad has a plan, which is why he wanted Malvo. - He literally murdered people out of convenience. He murdered other people to try to cover his crime of intending to murder his wife. I'm gonna make a master plan. I'm gonna grab a kid out of a shelter and groom him and force him and victimize him into a position where he's going to help me because you always need a getaway driver if you're gonna be shooting from the back of a car. - The country was still looking for a white van, and the woman these two profilers believe the sniper ultimately meant to kill is living on the other side of Washington from the shootings in Clinton, Maryland, calling the police about a dark Chevrolet that kept parking within sight of her house. On the morning of October 11th, a woman getting a ride to work notices a dark car parked at the end of her cul-de-sac, two men in it. As they drive past, the driver stares at the woman. His passenger raises a newspaper over his face. She calls 911 from her coworker's phone and reports a late model Caprice or Impala, New Jersey plates, two men inside. The officer promises to send someone. Days later, she learns that several of her neighbors have seen the same car parked in different spots, always facing her house. Her name is Mildred Muhammad. Hers is not the only report that went nowhere. A week earlier, a woman is shot outside a Michael's craft store in Spotsylvania County, Virginia. Jim Clemente and his wife, Wendy and his brother, Tim, are not assigned to the shooting, but they drive out to it from home to help. - We get there and I go to the sheriff and I said, "Uh, you know, were there any witnesses?" And he said, "No, nobody saw anything." And I said, "Look, this is by the mall. There's 3,000 cars here in the parking lot. Somebody saw something." He said, "Well, one 19-year-old kid who was like a drug addict said he saw a black guy in a dark sedan peeling out." And he said, "That's where the shot came from." And I said, "Great. Did you put that out on an APB?" He said, "No, I put out the APB on the white van." - Sunday morning, October 20th, three hours and 40 minutes after a Ponderosa phone rang and rang in Ashland, Virginia, with no one picking up. At 20 minutes to 10, a caller dials the FBI hotline from a convenience store in Richmond. "Don't talk," he says. "Just listen." "Call me God." I left a note at the back of the Ponderosa. "Be there for a call." A call in 10 minutes. The people taking hotline calls have no idea about a Ponderosa letter or what was in it. 10 minutes comes and goes with no contact. That night, Chief Moose, who has now read the sniper's letter, goes on television and does something no police chief wants to do. He answers. "To the person who left us a message at the Ponderosa last night, you gave us a telephone number. We do want to talk to you. Call us at the number you provided." At 7:57 a.m., the phone rings. It's Lee Malveaux. "Is this the Ponderosa?" "Um, who is this?" "Don't say anything. Just listen." Malveaux holds up a tape recorder to the receiver. The actual recording is garbled and distorted, but investigators eventually transcribed it. Quote, "Dearest police, call me God. Five red stars, you have our turn. They are non-negotiable. If you choose option one, you will hold a press conference stating to the media that you believe you have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose. Repeat every word exactly as you heard it. If you choose option two, be sure to remember, he will not deviate. P.S., your children are not safe." Malveaux hangs up. Thirty-eight seconds. Within the hour, a tactical team takes down a white van at an Exxon station in Richmond, pulling two men onto the pavement in front of the cameras. One of the men inside had been using the payphone when Malveaux's call came in. The men on the pavement are Mexican nationals who have nothing to do with any of it. The call to the Ponderosa had come from a second payphone on the other side of that same gas station. Malveaux and Muhammad escape. Malveaux later to investigators, "I saw the Mexicans get stopped. I watched it, but I wasn't in the car." The task force played the 38 seconds over and over and over again. One agent thought the voice sounded Hispanic, another guessed Asian. One said it sounds like a kid. An ATF negotiator named Peter Mangan thought it sounded Caribbean, maybe Jamaican, he said, which is where Fitz had landed two weeks earlier off of four words on a tarot card. Mangan ran the phrase, duck in a noose, past a Jamaican-born ATF agent named Mark Peterkin, who had never heard the phrase in his life. Peterkin looked at him. There are no ducks in Jamaica. Tuesday, October 22nd, 5.55 in the morning, still dark, Aspen Hill, Maryland. Conrad Johnson is 35 and has driven a bus for 10 years. Everyone calls him CJ, 6'2", 250 pounds, shaved head, goatee, two diamond earrings. He has a trainee riding with him that morning. They had breakfast on the bus. The doors are open. Across the lot, there's a basketball court, and past that, woods. Johnson kicks some trash out of the front door, comes back up the steps, and sets his coffee down on the change box. He is standing in the doorway of his own bus with the lights on behind him. At 5.55 a.m., a shot from the tree line. CJ is flown to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda. He is awake, sitting up, but the round has destroyed most of his liver. He dies on the operating table at 9.26 that morning. That afternoon, 50 feet into the woods, a search line finds a Ziploc bag on a broken branch. Inside it, a second Ziploc bag. Inside that, a note with, with red stars on it. For you, Mr. Police, call me God. You did not respond to the message. You departed from what we told you to say, and you departed from the time. Your incompetence has cost you another life. Moose had not done what the snipers requested. Hold a press conference saying he had caught the sniper like a duck in a noose. Now the snipers lay CJ's death at his feet. Late that afternoon, Moose walks out and reads the threat from the original Ponderosa letter out loud, word for word, because the alternative is pretending he has not seen it. We recognize the concerns of the community and therefore are going to provide the exact language in the message that pertains to the threat. Back inside headquarters, Moose tells one of his captains, that was the hardest thing he's ever done. We're saying we can't do our job, he says. We're supposed to keep people safe, and we can't. By the night of October 22nd, the two men in the FBI profiler room believe the person writing these notes may be young, may be black, may have some tie to the Caribbean, and may not be alone. They're getting closer, but still they don't have a name. There is something about the bus driver, Conrad Johnson, that does not come out for years. CJ was born in Jamaica. His mother came to the U.S. and left him behind with an aunt when he was just two years old. He joined his mom in America when he was about 10. His mother's name is Sonia Wills. She says Conrad was the kind of boy who brought other boys home, the ones he thought needed somewhere to be. He was a caretaker. In the midst of the shootings, there was a woman on his route who was frightened. To get on the bus. He used to stop the bus, get off, walk her out from behind a tree, and put her on board. Whenever he got to that spot, he would get off the bus and go get her on behind a tree and escort her to the bus, telling her, don't worry, you're safe with me. They have to get to me before they can get to you. The boy in the woods that morning taking aim at CJ was 17. Born in Jamaica, left behind by his mother, and raised by other people. Years later, Sonia Wills says to the social worker working on Lee Malvo's defense, if only Malvo had looked my son in the face before he killed him, he would have seen the perfect father for whom he had been searching. Police still do not have a name. The clue that gives them one has been sitting in an evidence room in Alabama for a month. That's next time on MKComics. Be Confidential. and she is in her last pay period before retirement. Next month, she is supposed to start coaching tennis at Alabama State. Behind her is Kelly Adams, 24, a clerk, newly married, with a new baby. Kelly doesn't hear anything. She will describe it as being electrocuted. A single rifle round comes in under her jaw from the left, goes through, and shatters the window beside the door. She goes down. Claudine Parker backs away, and for a moment, one of the store's pillars stands between her and the shooter. Then she backs out from behind it, and she is shot through the shoulder blade, and does not move again. Kelly Adams tells police what she can see from the ground. Thin, black legs, shorts, somebody standing over her, pointing a small silver revolver at her head. And then the person just turns and runs off. Two Montgomery patrol officers on a routine patrol, are close enough to hear the shots. They pull in and see a young black man with a medium afro behind the pillar, going through a purse. The young man runs. One officer stays with the women. The other goes after him, chasing him over a fence, and then another, and loses him. And somewhere in that chase, the runner drops something. There is a gun show in town that weekend, so it could belong to anybody. Two detectives bag it anyway. It's a catalog. A paper magazine full of rifle accessories from a company called ArmaLite. Claudine Parker will never coach at Alabama State. She dies in surgery about three hours later. Kelly Adams lives. She will have 31 operations in the next five years, and a permanent implant to manage the pain. The gun magazine goes to the lab, and it gives up 36 clean fingerprints, all from the same person. Montgomery P.D. runs them locally, then through the state system, then through neighboring Georgia. Nothing comes back. Investigators take that to mean whoever handled the catalog has never been arrested as an adult. For a month, the answer to the D.C. sniper case sits in an evidence room in Alabama, and no one in the world knows it. By the middle of October 2002, Malvo and Muhammad have been trying for days to get police to take them seriously. Hotline operators screen them out. Calls drop. People were not listening to us, Malvo says later. So they offer proof. A crime only the men doing the shooting could know about. They pick Alabama because they believe it is safe. As far as they know, the police in Montgomery have nothing. The next call comes with something interesting. Something in it that only the killers could know. A call comes into police headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and gets transferred to an officer named Derek Beliles. Shut up and listen, the caller says, and don't ask any questions. The caller, almost certainly Malvo, says he knows who is responsible for the recent D.C. area shootings, but first he wants Beliles to verify something. Call the police in Montgomery, Alabama, he says. Ask about a liquor store. He says he knows who is responsible for the shooting. both pointing at the same town. The tell that the caller was actually at the physical location is a street name. Their shooting didn't happen on Ann Street, as the caller claimed. It happened on Zelda Road. Ann Street is the exit off the interstate, a block away. The lieutenant who worked that case, Michael Merrick, says nobody who lives in Montgomery would ever call it an Ann Street shooting. Someone who came off the highway would. So a Montgomery County, Maryland police commander named Drew Tracy gets an Alabama detective on the phone and asks the obvious question. Is there anything that can help us? He says, the only thing we have is a magazine. And I said, a magazine? You mean magazine from a weapon? He goes, a paper magazine. And he says, and this is where it went, clicked with me just like that. And I said, oh my God, we might have something here. The prints off that catalog cannot be transcribed. Transmitted electronically. In 2002, Alabama is one of many states not wired into the FBI's National Fingerprint Database. So somebody has to carry the prints by hand. On Monday, October 21st, an FBI agent from Alabama carries them onto a plane to Washington, D.C., along with the bullet fragments. When an examiner runs the Alabama prints through the federal fingerprint system, a name comes back. Here's FBI Supervisory Special Agent Lindner. Linda Hooper to the Monster, D.C. Sniper podcast. And that print was for Lee Boyd Malveaux. And he was 17 years old. Ten months earlier in Washington state, the Jamaican teenager was picked up as an illegal immigrant and fingerprinted by Border Patrol. The print gives them the boy. And as Fitz told me, once they had the boy, they had the man too. They took him to the FBI. They ran him across the hall. The whole, you know, spectrum of fingerprints. And they found immigration fingerprints from Lee Boyd Malveaux, who was like 15, 16 when he came to this country from Jamaica. And they wound up contacting whoever knew him. Oh, he's with this guy named John Muhammad. That same morning, across the country in Tacoma, Washington, investigators finally knock on Robert Holmes' door. Holmes is Muhammad's old army friend, who has spent a week trying to get someone at the FBI to take him seriously. About his friend, he says, John, about the Bushmaster, about the boy John called his little sniper. Now someone does. By Wednesday, October 23rd, the task force has two names, a photograph off a California driver's license and a car, a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, dark blue, New Jersey plates, NDA21Z. That plate has been run through police computers, repeatedly over the prior three weeks, and handed back clean every single time. At 10 minutes to midnight on Wednesday, police chief Charles Moose steps up to the microphones and announces a federal arrest warrant for John Allen Muhammad on a firearms charge. He is careful. He says the charge has nothing to do with the shootings, that Muhammad may be traveling with an unnamed juvenile. He does not give out the plate number. He doesn't have to. It has been on television for an hour already, leaked out of police radio traffic and running across the bottom of TV screens across the country. Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenbaugh is out distributing wanted posters when word comes over the radio that the Chevy Caprice has been found. It's at the South Mountain Westbound Welcome Center rest area on Interstate 70 in Western Maryland, right near South Mountain State Park. Reichenbaugh, is 35 miles out, and he is about to be the highest-ranking officer on that scene. He gets his duty officer at the Maryland State Police barracks in Frederick on the radio and asks how many troopers he has. Two, says the sergeant. Maybe one or two more out of Hagerstown. Send everyone you've got, Reichenbaugh says. Have them meet me at the entrance to the rest area and tell them to come in silent. He gets there with three men, two troopers, and one sheriff's deputy. They are armed with handguns and a shotgun against a rifle that goes through body armor. He decides the four of them cannot rush that car. So he seals the car in instead. He shuts down I-70 in both directions, telling drivers there has been a bad accident. He posts a canine handler with orders to treat anyone who walks out of that rest area as the sniper. He blocks the entrance ramp with a patrol car. Then he goes looking for something bigger to put across that exit. We had a couple of truck drivers start to come out to leave. And I asked them if they wanted to be good Americans. And it was like, well, yeah, troop, what do you need? I said, well, we got the snipers in the rest area. And I said, can you throw your truck across this exit so that that car cannot get out of here? Reichenbaugh calls a friend in the Secret Service. And 30 seconds later, by presidential authority, the airspace over Frederick County is closed to news helicopters. Inside the Caprice, Muhammad is asleep across the backseat. Malvo is in the front, his head down by the steering wheel. He is supposed to be keeping watch. Asked later why he thinks they were caught, he tells his interrogators it was his own laziness, his lack of discipline, that he departed from something he knew worked, he says, for five minutes of pleasure, for five minutes of sleep. By 3:30 AM, a 19-man tactical team has assembled at the bottom of the wooded hill behind the rest stop. County officers, state troopers, and FBI hostage rescue operators. Six of them will approach the car. They rehearse it once in a McDonald's parking lot down the road. Then they come up through the trees and stop at two oaks, 20 yards out. After three weeks of false alarms, not one man in that tree line is seen. No one is certain there is anyone in this car at all. The team leader holds up three fingers and counts down. Three, two, one. They cross the open ground, take out the driver's front window and the passenger rear window with spring-loaded batons, and light up the inside of the car with the lights on their weapons. FBI, police, hands up. Malvo's pulled out the front door. Muhammad sits up in the backseat. Muhammad stands up in the back with his hands raised and is taken out the other side. A trooper covers the trunk while another gets the keys because nobody knows what is in there. Clear. It takes about 30 seconds. Nobody fires a shot. Drew Tracy, the Montgomery County commander who helped assemble the assault team, is standing by the tree line. And I start walking from the wood line. I see like a glistening of like light. And when I looked down, the glistening was Malvo. Malvo was on the ground, face down, handcuffed. And what happened is when they breached the tempered windows, the glass got in his hair and it hit the light. And he didn't say one word. Malvo is five foot five. Reichenbaugh, standing over him on the pavement, writes later what went through his head. Christ, he's just a kid. It is shaking so badly a trooper has to hold him still to get the cuffs on. They put the two of them in separate cars and drive them off the mountain to a state police barracks. Fitz is asleep in Maryland when the phone rings. He was arrested at 3.30 in the morning. And I get a call. I was staying up in Maryland then. And they said, hey, can you go to a state police barracks? They arrested the two snipers. I'll be there. So this is before GPS. I had a map my way there on my own, which I got there. And I walk into this dark state police barracks, kind of in the middle of nowhere, not a big building, a couple marked cars out there and one or two others, no media, which was a good sign. He knocks. He shows his credentials. They buzz me in the first door, buzz me in the second door. And it's all dark. It's like a one-story building. And I look down the hallway about 30 feet ahead of me. There's a state trooper in uniform running full speed, you know, left to right. What the hell? So I didn't pull my gun out. I know there's other officers around, but my hand is on. My gun. And next thing you know, there's another trooper closer to me, another hallway. He's running right to left, looking for something. And I finally see a trooper comes up to me. I said, FBI, what's going on? The kid escaped. The manhunt has been officially over for a couple of hours. Next time you hear a big bang on the ground, we got him. He's over here. And it turns out they put Malvo in a room. He may have been handcuffed in front, which you never do. Always behind. And they didn't handcuff him. They put him to the bar on the wall. And somehow he used that bar, climbed up into the ceiling, and he actually crawled about 50 feet over the, you know, the drop ceiling until finally he reached a weak spot and fell down on the ground. He was fine. But they got him up, handcuffed him again, put him in the room, and he never escaped again. Back on the mountain, nobody can search the car without a warrant. It is finally signed at 5.55 in the morning. When they get inside, an FBI SWAT team notices the back seat looks wrong. The cushion has been altered so it swings up at the top. a hatch. They lift it. Behind it, held in place with a bungee cord, is a Bushmaster rifle. The bipod is folded under the barrel, and there is a live round in the chamber. An ATF ballistics man puts on gloves and clears the weapon. And I'll never forget, as long as I live, the noise of when the lab guy cocked that round out of that rifle, and seeing it spinning around in a circle in the air, and the tinkle that it made when it hit the parking lot. Later that day, the ATF's chief firearms examiner test fires the Bushmaster into a water tank and puts the recovered bullets under a microscope beside the fragments taken out of the victims. It matches 11 of the 14 shooting scenes in the region. One person is not watching any of it from home. The evening comes. And before the arrest, ATF agents knock on a door on quiet Brook Lane in Clinton, Maryland, and ask Mildred Muhammad to come down to the police station and answer some questions. Here is Mildred. The way I found out that it was John was when ATF knocked on my door and said that they were going to name John as the sniper. And so they asked me, well, do you think that he would do something like this? And I was like, well, I don't know. I said, well, why would you think that? I said, well, he said he could take a small city, terrorize it. They would think it would be a group of people and it would only be me. She has watched the same coverage as everyone else for three weeks. Two of the shootings happened within a few miles of her own home. Mildred Muhammad and her three children are moved into protective custody that night to a hotel her sister and brother-in-law go to. She gets the children to sleep. Then she goes into the bathroom and turns on the water so they will not hear her. She sits down on the floor with a pillow and sobs into it. What Mildred Muhammad believes and has said publicly and consistently ever since is that she was the point of all of it. That he came to Washington to kill her and needed her death to look random so that he could collect his children. No court has ever ruled on that. Prosecutors did not have to prove why he did it. Afterward, Mildred tells A&E, people who find out who she is tell her it is her fault. At that time, they told me that. You should have seen it coming or. No, if I would have stayed with him, then he just would have killed me. If I would have stayed on the West Coast, then the people on the East Coast would still be alive. How dare I bring this drama into a quiet community? And how dare I call. me and my children victims when neither of us were killed? I was blamed because they couldn't get to John. Now comes the question of who gets to put Malvo and Muhammad on trial. Montgomery County, Maryland wants the case. So do two federal prosecutor's offices and the Virginia counties where people were shot. Six of the ten dead are Maryland's. On November 7, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft sends both men to Virginia. The first prosecutions, he says. Should go where the law and the facts are best and the toughest sentences are available. In Maryland, a defendant who is under 18 at the time he committed the murder cannot be sentenced to death. Same for federal court. But in Virginia, in 2002, the floor is 16. Muhammad will be tried in Prince William County for the murder of Dean Myers. Malvo in Fairfax County for Linda Franklin. Both trials are moved to the far southeastern. corner of the state because the defense argued that no one near Washington could possibly sit on that jury with fairness. John Muhammad's trial opens in Virginia Beach in October 2003. On the first morning, he takes the case away from his lawyers and tells the judge he will represent himself. His argument to the jury is one simple question. Whoever saw him fire a rifle? Nobody. No witness in the case puts the weapon. in Muhammad's hands. Then he begins cross-examining victims of the attacks. Among them, Paul LaRuffa. Shot five times in his own car outside his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland. In the robbery that paid for that Chevy Caprice. So, talk about crazy circumstances and weird events in your life. I was being questioned by the guy who tried to kill me. He wasn't the guy that pulled the trigger, but he was the brains behind it. After two days, Muhammad hands the case back to his attorneys. The prosecution's answer is that it does not matter whose finger was on the trigger. Virginia charges Muhammad under an anti-terrorism law written after September 11th, which requires only that a jury find the killing was part of an act intended to intimidate a civilian population. On November 17th, 2003, the jury convicts him on all counts. A week later, the same jury. recommends death. Months later, the judge accepts the recommendation and formally sentences Muhammad to die. Lee Malvo's trial runs at the same time, an hour down the road in Chesapeake, Virginia. He pleads not guilty, and his lawyers give notice that they will argue insanity. That Muhammad indoctrinated him so completely, he could not tell right from wrong. One lawyer puts it more plainly later. The whole point. was to keep Malvo off of death row. And it works. The jury convicts him, but spares his life. Life without parole. The following year, Malvo pleads guilty in Spotsylvania County, Virginia, to killing Kenneth Bridges and shooting Caroline Sewell, and gets two more life sentences. In May 2006, Maryland finally gets its turn. John Muhammad goes on trial in Rockville for the six murders committed in Montgomery County. And this time, the state has a witness it did not have in Virginia back in 2003. Lee Malvo testifies against John Muhammad. Malvo is now 21, and he testifies for the better part of two days. He tells the jury the shootings were only phase one. Phase two was bombs. On schools, on school buses, in children's hospitals. Why children, the prosecutor asks him. For the sheer truth. The sheer terror of it, Malvo answers, quoting Muhammad. The worst thing you can do to people is take aim at their children. He says Muhammad picked the targets, and picked who fired. He says he fired three of the shots himself, and Muhammad fired the rest. Malvo tells the jury about that night in Ashland, Virginia, when he says he shot the man outside the steakhouse, the one married to the rocket scientist, and kept his cool. He didn't crack. You were calm, Muhammad. Muhammad told him, I've created a monster. The prosecutor, Catherine Winfrey, asks him why he agreed to testify. I want to tell the truth, and I think he is a coward, Malvo says. Malvo then turns his head and looks directly at John Muhammad. You took me into your house, he says, and you made me a monster. The next morning, John Muhammad stands up to cross-examine Malvo. Malvo. It goes on for several hours. John is representing himself again. He keeps addressing Lee Malvo as son, or Lee, during the cross-examination. Malvo interrupts. I would prefer you address me by my name, he says. I'm not doing it intentionally, Muhammad protests. I apologize, Mr. Malvo. A few questions later, he does it again. Son, he says. I mean, Mr. Malvo. Muhammad asks Malvo about a day in Antietam, when John's son, Little John, and his girlfriend, Andrea, went into the water and started drowning. John was off the island, and Malvo went in after them, saving them both. Then John asks, Son, I mean, Mr. Malvo, isn't it true that if the roles were turned, and Lee boy Malvo was in that water, that John Allen Muhammad would have gotten him? The prosecutors object. The judge sustains it. Malvo. Malvo is not allowed to answer. When Muhammad is finished, prosecutor Catherine Winfrey gets back up and asks Malvo one question. What was the difference in how Mr. Muhammad treated you and his children, she asks. Mr. Muhammad did not use any of his children to murder other people, says Malvo. On May 30th, 2006, John Muhammad is convicted of six more first-degree murders. The jury gives him, six consecutive life sentences on top of the death sentence already awaiting him in Virginia. In November 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court rejects John Allen Muhammad's last petition, and the governor of Virginia refuses him clemency. The execution is set for the evening of November 10th at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jarrett, Virginia. John walks into the execution chamber at two minutes to nine. He was allowed to choose the method of his execution. But never made a choice. So under Virginia state law, the method defaults to lethal injection. He has declined. a spiritual advisor. The execution of John Allen Muhammad has been carried out under the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia. Death was pronounced at 9 11 p.m. 9 11. There were no complications. Mr. Muhammad was asked if he wished to make a last statement. He did not acknowledge this or make any statement whatsoever. Muhammad apparently watched as the injection was administered, tilted his head to the right, and stayed that way. He was 48. Lee Malvo sits in a cell. In the years after the trials, the U.S. Supreme Court decides a run of cases about minors who commit adult crimes, concluding that a defendant who was a juvenile at the time of the crime cannot be sentenced to life without parole, and that holding reaches backward, which reopened Lee Malvo's sentences. It's own law in response, making him eligible for parole. But Virginia's parole board refused to release him, calling him a risk to the community. Maryland is where the law gets strange. Its highest court has ruled that Malvo's six Maryland life sentences were imposed unconstitutionally, and that he is owed a new sentencing hearing. But officials in Virginia refuse to hand him over. So a state Supreme Court has ordered a hearing that cannot happen, and Lee Boyd Malvo, is 41 years old, in a Virginia prison, serving 10 life sentences, in a state that cannot mandate no parole ever, but that is not inclined to entertain the possibility of ever setting this guy loose. In 2012, he gave an interview to the Washington Post. I stole people's lives. I did someone else's bidding just because they said so. I mean, that is the definition of a monster. Six months after testifying against Muhammad, Lee Malvo pleads guilty to the six Montgomery County murders and comes back to the same courthouse to be sentenced. Malvo stands up and reads out the six names. Then he talks to the families sitting in that room. I'm sorry, grieved, and ashamed of what I've done to the families and friends, he says. His voice breaks. I know that I destroyed many dreams and many more lives, and that each of you relive this every morning, every birthday, every anniversary, every time you look in your children's eyes. He adds, I accept responsibility for killing your mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, wife, husband, and friend. Then he says, Malvo says something about the last man he killed, the bus driver, CJ, in the doorway of his own bus at 5:55 in the morning. I thought of his sons, Malvo says, who just for once would like to play basketball with their father, just one more time to see his face. Then that bus driver, Conrad Johnson's mother, Sonya Wills, stands up. She looks at the young man who shot him. I must say, for the past four years, I have says. Right now, I, Conrad's mother, forgive you. I have to, my dear. I can't go on hating you. That won't bring Conrad back. Paul LaRuffa spent three days on a breathing machine after Malvo shot him outside of his restaurant. Both of his lungs collapsed. He still has bullet fragments inside of him. And until the morning the snipers were caught, the shooting haunted his nightmares. You can't turn it off. You can't make it stop. It just happens. Happened every night. When Muhammad's execution date is set, some of the victims and their families make plans to be in the room. LaRuffa does not. He explains why to the podcast Monster, DC Sniper. I don't have a need to see him die. And I don't want him to take another day out of my life. I'm sorry at any depth, but I think if anybody deserves the death penalty, it was him. Then there is the boy, Malvo. Here's LaRuffa again. I can say I've forgiven him, but it doesn't mean what he did was okay with me. I think he's responsible for what he did. I get the feeling he feels he has to pay a price for it. Has he paid enough of a price? I don't think so. 15 dead, eight more injured. So much pain, so much sadness. The justice system gave the victims all it could. Then it was up to them to keep living. And they did. Paul LaRuffa worked to reform youth sentencing laws to prevent young offenders from getting life sentences without the chance of parole. Mildred Muhammad went on to dedicate her life to helping abuse victims, becoming a global speaker, an author, an educator on the signs of invisible abuse, such as coercive control. And Iren Brown, the 13-year-old shot in the gut by Malvo, still has permanent nerve damage from the bullet Muhammad had directed be aimed at the child's head. Multiple surgeries, a medically induced coma, and 20 years later, Iren told NBC News he lives with anxiety now from the shooting, but that the shooting has given his life perspective. He's deeply grateful to be alive and in the way that he's living. He's a man of his word. And that only great tragedy can offer a person sees each day as a truly precious gift. 24 years ago, still recovering from his injuries, Iren showed the same resilience of spirit. When asked that December what he wanted for Christmas, he told the reporters, I already have enough to be happy. I'm Megyn Kelly. This is MK Confidential. Thank you.