The Megyn Kelly Show - August 21, 2026


The Beltway Snipers： ＂Call Me God＂ — Ep. 4 ｜ MK Confidential


Episode Stats


Length

41 minutes

Words per minute

160.65

Word count

6,672

Sentence count

477

Harmful content

Misogyny

2

sentences flagged

Toxicity

8

sentences flagged

Hate speech

6

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:00:58.580 play responsibly. Six o'clock in the morning, Sunday, October 20th, 2002, Ashland, Virginia,
00:01:06.380 about a block and a half off Interstate 95. The Ponderosa Steakhouse is closed and dark.
00:01:12.740 It has been closed since the night before when a man was shot in its parking lot. The lot is
00:01:18.460 still taped off as a crime scene. Inside, in the hall by the front doors, there is a public
00:01:23.700 telephone. At exactly 6 a.m., it rings. One of the men standing outside is an FBI agent. He hears the
00:01:32.280 phone ringing inside the locked building and says somebody should get in there and answer it. No one
00:01:38.360 does. It is not his crime scene. His hands are tied. The phone continues ringing, then stops.
00:01:46.240 six hours earlier around midnight in the woods behind that restaurant investigators find a
00:01:54.640 plastic sandwich bag tacked to a tree with two white thumbtacks it looks like a halloween bag
00:02:01.060 the kind of child takes trick-or-treating folded inside it is a letter written on pink paper
00:02:07.520 with stars stuck to it investigators bag it unopened it goes to a lab in the morning
00:02:14.480 and is finally read around noon.
00:02:18.020 The letter is handwritten, and there are detailed instructions.
00:02:22.260 It's from the snipers who have been terrorizing Washington, D.C. for nearly three weeks.
00:02:27.460 In it, they announce that they will call the public telephone at the Ponderosa at 6 o'clock Sunday morning,
00:02:34.040 and police should be standing there to take it.
00:02:37.700 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:04:01.280 this beautiful product. Jim Clemente and James Fitzgerald were in the room where the true profile
00:04:07.820 of these killers begins to take shape. Both are retired FBI profilers. Fitz is also a forensic
00:04:15.100 linguist. The agent who heard the phone ring from the parking lot is Tim Clemente, Jim's brother.
00:04:22.100 By the middle of October 2002, the men doing the shooting have started to message the police.
00:04:28.220 It starts 13 days before that phone rings with a card in the woods.
00:04:33.940 October 7th, a 13-year-old boy named Iron Brown is dropped off at Benjamin Tasker Middle School
00:04:40.380 in Bowie, Maryland, and is shot as he walks toward the door. He lives.
00:04:46.040 Police follow the trajectory back into the tree line, where a U.S. Marshals Service dog stops at
00:04:51.420 a fallen branch and sits. The ground there is flattened, the way ground looks when someone
00:04:56.680 has been lying on it. Cadets rake the area and turn up a spent 223 casing. Near it, an ATF agent
00:05:04.240 finds a tarot card lying face up in the brush. It is the death card. On the front is a skeleton in
00:05:11.760 armor on a white horse carrying a black flag. Across the top, handwritten in blue ink,
00:05:17.960 call me God. On the back another handwritten message for you Mr. Police and code call me God
00:05:27.680 do not release to the press. That's the entire message. The first and only real clues to the
00:05:35.380 shooter's identity and his first known effort to communicate. 13 words maybe 14. No one wants word
00:05:43.200 of that card to leave this room. The lead homicide detective, Joseph Bergstrom, calls it an ace in
00:05:49.140 the hole and warns a briefing of two dozen task force members that someone there might leak it.
00:05:55.580 That night on the 11 o'clock news, WUSA in Washington reports that a tarot card has been
00:06:01.880 found at the school. The Washington Post has it too. Both outlets get the wording wrong.
00:06:07.840 It was a card from a fortune-telling deck that's known as the death card, with a note written on it,
00:06:14.360 Dear Policeman, I am God.
00:06:16.520 It's the latest chilling development in this chilling case and massive investigation.
00:06:22.500 Dear Policeman, I am God, which is not what the card said.
00:06:27.220 And neither outlet initially reports the line that mattered most to the man who wrote it.
00:06:31.820 Quote, do not release to the press.
00:06:34.800 The next morning, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose walks out to the cameras.
00:06:39.880 I have not received any message that the citizens of Montgomery County
00:06:44.120 won't Channel 9 or The Washington Post or any other media outlet to solve this case.
00:06:50.180 If they do, then let me know.
00:06:52.240 We will go and do other police work and we will turn this case over to the media.
00:06:56.640 But to date, the people in my community have asked the police department to work the case.
00:07:01.900 So I beg of the media, let us do our job.
00:07:05.460 Moose says later that much of the anger was an act.
00:07:08.840 He assumed the men who left the card were watching,
00:07:11.780 and he wanted them to see the leak had not come from him.
00:07:15.240 Twelve days later, another communication.
00:07:18.560 It arrives the same way. 0.99
00:07:20.800 Someone has to be shot first. 0.98
00:07:23.580 Saturday, October 19th.
00:07:26.060 Jeff and Stephanie Hopper have been driving for nine days.
00:07:29.260 He is 37, a computer consultant.
00:07:31.900 They are driving from Melbourne, Florida, where they live, to Pennsylvania to see her sister.
00:07:37.260 They've heard about the shooter along I-95 and are careful not to buy gas anywhere near Washington,
00:07:43.580 so they stop in Ashland instead, 100 miles south of D.C.
00:07:48.800 The hoppers have dinner at the Ponderosa, steak and salad.
00:07:53.480 Just before 8 p.m., they walk out across the parking lot toward their white Cadillac holding hands. 0.51
00:07:59.120 They both hear a loud noise.
00:08:01.460 Stephanie thinks a car has backfired.
00:08:04.300 Jeff puts his hand on his stomach, goes down slowly and says,
00:08:08.860 I think I've been shot.
00:08:11.060 She kneels over him.
00:08:12.880 He says, I love you.
00:08:14.260 She says, I love you.
00:08:16.140 They say the Lord's Prayer together.
00:08:18.440 Then she tries to dial 911 and cannot get her phone keypad unlocked,
00:08:22.900 so she starts shouting at people in the lot to call.
00:08:26.800 Ashlyn Patrolman Tim Meacham is there in two minutes.
00:08:30.280 He stops his cruiser at the end of the sidewalk
00:08:32.240 so the car is between the hoppers and the woods.
00:08:35.240 Jeff was laying in the parking lot
00:08:37.040 and Stephanie was sitting on the sidewalk
00:08:39.440 and she was holding pressure on his stomach.
00:08:43.140 I told her that I need to verify the injury
00:08:45.540 so she lifted up the towel that she was holding on it
00:08:48.020 and I saw a pole about the size of a nickel 0.67
00:08:50.980 in the top of the victim's stomach.
00:08:53.720 Meacham says she was the calmest person
00:08:55.820 he has ever seen at a scene like this.
00:08:58.760 He tells her the thing to do with a bleed is to hold pressure, that it isn't rocket science.
00:09:04.580 She starts laughing. So does her husband.
00:09:07.520 She started to chuckle. The victim started to laugh.
00:09:10.660 And at this point, I'm like, OK, can you guys let me in on the joke?
00:09:15.060 Well, she was a rocket scientist for NASA.
00:09:17.900 So me telling her there wasn't rocket science, she kind of knew that already.
00:09:23.120 The round has gone in under his sternum and come apart inside him.
00:09:27.280 When the ambulance crew gets to him, they keep asking him how old he is.
00:09:31.840 I'm 37, he tells them, and I hope to reach 38.
00:09:35.760 He will.
00:09:37.580 Behind the restaurant, there is a wooded lot and it is completely dark.
00:09:41.500 The plan is to wait for daylight.
00:09:43.820 An ATF agent named Ray Neely argues against it.
00:09:47.280 He has a yellow lab named Garrett who finds gunpowder
00:09:50.180 and says the dog does not need to wait for daylight.
00:09:52.560 The smell will never be stronger than it is right now.
00:09:56.160 And that's when I saw the rub mark.
00:09:58.640 There was a small tree, about maybe two inches in diameter, with a small vine.
00:10:04.140 And when I looked up that tree, it looked like someone had taken some type of hard object
00:10:08.580 and leaned it up against that tree, and that created a rub mark.
00:10:12.700 You wouldn't have that occurring in nature.
00:10:14.760 You needed something hard pressing against it.
00:10:17.380 And it was also in Lana's sight, too, where the person was actually hit as he exited the Ponderosa.
00:10:23.580 And so that rubbed mark was someone probably using that tree as a right for rest.
00:10:28.940 20 feet behind that tree, the dog sits.
00:10:32.480 Sure enough, the bullet casing is lying on top of the leaves, clean.
00:10:37.200 Then a Hanover County sergeant named James Sizemore sees something on a tree trunk,
00:10:42.620 a Ziploc bag with a Halloween pattern on it, pinned up with two white thumbtacks.
00:10:48.580 Folded inside is pink-lined paper with stars stuck to it.
00:10:53.580 a note, not read, but sent in for processing. Six hours later, the phone rings in the locked
00:11:00.920 vestibule and no one answers it. Two pieces of paper delivered two weeks apart. Over the next
00:11:08.300 four days, almost everything the task force learns about these men comes out of those two documents
00:11:13.980 and out of a room at Quantico where two profilers are arguing about them.
00:11:18.640 James Fitzgerald has been waiting for a letter before there was one.
00:11:23.560 We were trying to put the profile together for the week or so before,
00:11:27.180 and I was telling people we're probably going to get a notification,
00:11:30.100 a letter, a document somewhere, and sure enough, there is the tarot card.
00:11:34.920 I actually wound up writing a four-and-a-half-page report
00:11:37.520 along with two other profilers in the unit,
00:11:41.020 just summarizing what we saw in that card alone.
00:11:44.480 Four-and-a-half pages out of 13 words.
00:11:47.280 The 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.
00:12:08.160 I actually did some search on the internet, and there's some hip-hop rap song references to that Mr. Police, and I was a police officer prior to the FBI, and nobody ever called me that.
00:12:18.620 Then the next line is, call me God in quotation marks, and what the heck did they mean by that?
00:12:24.740 I did some more research.
00:12:26.260 There was a movie called Navy Seal 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.
00:12:37.400 But I focused on the word press as opposed to media, and I summed up the end of it.
00:12:42.560 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.
00:12:52.800 Perhaps the person is older.
00:12:54.920 So the end was we have sort of a mix of personalities here.
00:12:59.500 Fitz did not say two people, not yet.
00:13:02.080 He wrote that the card might have been made across two days in two moods.
00:13:07.400 He also had to establish an approximate age for the writer.
00:13:10.560 An age can be difficult to tell in a forensic, I'm asked to do that all the time in a forensic
00:13:14.600 linguistic analysis, give us the age of an individual.
00:13:17.800 And, you know, some older people write in a very sophomoric sense.
00:13:21.780 Some younger people can write in a very advanced, you know, seemingly educated or well-read
00:13:26.860 sense.
00:13:27.780 I think maybe 13 words, 14 words on that whole tarot card.
00:13:32.680 And the card itself told us a lot, even about the immaturity.
00:13:36.480 Then he looked at punctuation.
00:13:38.840 Why did he use quotation marks over call me God, then separate do not release to the press?
00:13:44.560 If anything, they could have been underlined or exclamation mark.
00:13:48.100 It was this person's way of emphasizing something important to them.
00:13:52.480 And again, what I did in the Unabom case, I compared the Unabom writings to the eventual writings of Ted Kaczynski, many people in between.
00:14:00.540 But finally, with Ted Kaczynski, we could line up these unusual punctuation marks and other, you know, verb and noun phrases.
00:14:08.080 And that's what I was hoping to do in this case.
00:14:10.440 While Fitz worked on the language, Jim Clemente worked on the scenes.
00:14:15.180 The choice of targets, the distances of the shots, the timing.
00:14:18.920 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 kills.
00:14:40.940 And I know that sounds cold, but this is the way we analyze them.
00:14:45.280 This is somebody who's sticking and running, sticking and running, sticking and running,
00:14:49.500 and being incredibly efficient all through that day.
00:14:55.400 In other words, they didn't decompensate at all.
00:14:57.660 They didn't have, you know, their nerves get up,
00:15:01.460 and it didn't interfere with the later killings in that same day.
00:15:06.800 Clemente read the sniper as a disciplined adult,
00:15:09.360 a man who was trained to shoot and has killed before.
00:15:13.740 Fitz saw a child.
00:15:15.960 I remember very clearly Fitz was sitting next to me
00:15:18.620 in the profiling room at our round table
00:15:21.880 where he said, look, there's such a dichotomy here
00:15:25.120 between the actions,
00:15:26.880 because we're all saying that we profile the shootings,
00:15:29.720 and this is somebody who has planned
00:15:31.180 and executed these shootings flawlessly.
00:15:34.900 Yet Fitz is saying,
00:15:36.100 And I'm seeing some younger kind of influences in these notes.
00:15:42.420 And I also remember, Fitz, you saying that Mr. Police is a line from some Jamaican reggae songs.
00:15:54.440 And so that was the first time you mentioned that this person could have connections to Jamaica.
00:16:00.660 Jamaica, off a phrase on the back of a tarot card.
00:16:03.960 and as we were arguing this out everybody said well well certainly this guy is in his late 30s
00:16:12.240 or early 40s because he must be police and military trained but Fitz was saying well I
00:16:18.820 don't know based on these writings he's either well if he's a he's an adult he's just barely an
00:16:25.720 adult but Fitz said I think he's more like 15 16 years old and everybody said that's impossible
00:16:31.820 There was one answer, though, that made both takes true.
00:16:35.460 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 old and one younger.
00:16:56.480 But the profilers took issue with the idea of a team.
00:17:00.620 In their experience, criminal snipers did not share control.
00:17:04.320 But every single sniper case, criminal sniper case prior to this was a lone actor and a white male.
00:17:12.680 So that's where you get the statistics pushing in one direction.
00:17:16.940 But Fitz stuck to his guns. I supported him.
00:17:20.480 And we eventually convinced the rest of the crew that this could be possible.
00:17:25.720 They said, snipers don't work well together because they have a God complex.
00:17:29.560 And I said, well, if one of them's older and actually forcing his will on the younger one,
00:17:35.280 then he is feeling fine because he's controlling the younger one,
00:17:40.580 and the younger one doesn't really have a say in it.
00:17:42.520 And they're saying, ah, that doesn't make much sense.
00:17:44.660 And I said, well, he could control him completely by sexually victimizing him.
00:17:49.860 And lo and behold, I think it was 11 years later that Malvo came out while he was in prison
00:17:57.520 and said that Mohammed had been sexually victimizing him from almost from day one.
00:18:02.440 That was a guess in a room in 2002 about two men no one had yet identified.
00:18:09.180 Mohammed was never charged with abusing Malvo, and he never answered that allegation.
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00:20:00.320 ontario only please play responsibly then came ashland and the bag on the tree what tim clementi
00:20:07.900 noticed first was the bag itself. My brother, Tim, was the one that found the note, the one at the
00:20:14.700 steakhouse in Ashland. And he immediately, they hadn't opened it up, but it was actually
00:20:20.720 tacked to a tree in a baggie that was a Halloween baggie, like a kid's Halloween trick-or-treat
00:20:28.160 baggie. And so right there, just from the outside of that, and then seeing through the baggie that
00:20:33.840 there were little gold stars on it it was it was like what kind of a 45 year old is gonna use this
00:20:41.580 to communicate to law enforcement when we then discussed it with Fitz he was he gave us a number
00:20:48.160 of other indicators of youthfulness in this communications and that you know Mr. Police
00:20:53.420 was kind of looking up to cops rather than you know scornfully looking down at them you could
00:20:59.320 read part of it through the plastic. Because it was a baggie that this note was contained in,
00:21:05.560 you could see the front and the back of the note. And my brother saw the lines,
00:21:12.240 your kids are not safe anywhere. Tim Clemente wanted to open it on the spot,
00:21:17.840 preserve the evidence, but read it that night because he saw a clear threat to children in it.
00:21:23.140 he was told no it was not an fbi case yet and the man who could make that call was asleep
00:21:30.060 somebody in the local department said no we're gonna we're gonna wait till the my boss wakes up
00:21:36.800 and then uh we'll let him make that decision my brother really kind of tried a whole bunch of
00:21:43.060 things to try to get them to open it immediately but they did not do it and the phone he was there
00:21:48.740 The phone was inside the vestibule of the restaurant, which was still locked.
00:21:54.280 But he heard the phone ring at 6 a.m.
00:21:56.820 And he said, somebody should definitely get in there and answer it.
00:22:00.360 And again, it was not our crime scene.
00:22:03.760 They never actually opened up the letter until like noon Sunday when they finally got it to the lab.
00:22:09.160 We missed a classic chance to actually have someone talk to it, talk to the people that morning.
00:22:16.980 And it turns out there was an incoming call to that pay phone at 6 a.m. that no one ever picked up.
00:22:25.440 And as a linguist, I just always wonder what it would be like to have been on that call.
00:22:29.500 We could have really narrowed down even where they came from.
00:22:32.640 Fitz knows what the alternative looks like because he's watched the Bureau do it once before.
00:22:37.620 On the kidnapping of Exxon executive Sidney Riso.
00:22:41.540 Riso did not survive, but the way they caught the people who took him is the point.
00:22:46.560 Agents in the Newark division, there was about 100 of them, all in cars.
00:22:51.980 They went to every payphone in like North Jersey, and they sat on it.
00:22:57.840 And sure enough, because they knew a call was coming in to some tip line somewhere,
00:23:02.660 and sure enough, someone sees a guy get out of a car, a woman's in the car,
00:23:07.460 makes the call, and the case gets put together from there.
00:23:09.880 They stop the car, and they were the kidnappers.
00:23:12.760 So that exactly could have been done.
00:23:15.020 overnight they could have had, they would have had, you know, eight, six to eight hours to put
00:23:19.680 agents around every phone booth. It wouldn't have been easy and they could have missed it. We're
00:23:24.680 not denying that. They could have made the arrest potentially right then and there and definitely
00:23:29.360 saved a few more lives. When the letter is finally in hand, it runs four pages. It opens with the
00:23:36.160 same three lines as the tarot card. Page two begins, we have tried to contact you to start
00:23:41.860 negotiation. What follows is a numbered list of the calls they say they made and who took each
00:23:48.320 one. An officer named Derek, a female officer at Rockville, the task force hotline, a priest,
00:23:56.640 even CNN. Every one of them by the writer's account told them to call a different number
00:24:02.340 or hung up. These people took the calls for a hoax or a joke, according to the letter.
00:24:08.120 so your failure to respond has cost you five lives, it accuses. Then the demand,
00:24:15.380 $10 million into a Bank of America account. The note promises to call police at 6 a.m. on Sunday
00:24:22.640 at the Ponderosa buffet and includes the phone number they plan to call. The letter closes with
00:24:28.460 an alternative. If catching them matters more than stopping the killing, then, quote, prepare
00:24:35.280 you body bags. And underneath that, a postscript. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.
00:24:43.840 And a promise, which Fitz has never forgotten. If we give you our word, then that is what takes
00:24:50.060 place. Word is bond. Four pages was enough. Fitz noticed a conspicuous missing letter.
00:24:58.240 So at the time of the D.C. sniper case, I'm in my Georgetown master's program in linguistics,
00:25:03.560 And I happened to be taking a course in sociolinguistics, and we were studying U.S. dialects.
00:25:09.960 And I was learning about, you know, Boston dialects, New York, Philadelphia, which is mine, other parts of the country.
00:25:17.120 And I realized it's not all geographical, it's cultural.
00:25:20.340 And here I notice on this letter, and one of the hallmarks, if you will, one of the features of Black vernacular English, there's a name for it,
00:25:28.600 is a lot of black people spoken in writing drop the s's on either possessive words or plural words
00:25:36.760 and here in this note when the first two pages alone this letter i think there were four pages
00:25:41.400 total uh the person writes the word negotiation should have been plural demand should have been
00:25:48.040 plural with an s and 10 million dollar which of course should have been plural and if it happened
00:25:54.440 just once okay it's a typo i mean it was handwritten but you know a mistake second time
00:25:59.720 maybe third time i said we have dialect features here of a of a black person most likely male and
00:26:07.560 i was the first one and i know i talked to jim clementi about this and i was the first one to
00:26:12.360 say jim i think we got a black dot let's go up to the task force and tell them that reading changed
00:26:17.400 the profile we were very careful in how we worded the profile uh that was to go out to the public
00:26:23.640 And we very purposefully said, historically speaking, snipers are white males acting on their own.
00:26:32.160 However, and here's the caveat, we don't know if this person exactly fits that, you know, that historical matching in this particular case.
00:26:42.460 And years later, I'd be hearing, oh, the FBI had it wrong.
00:26:45.400 They said it was a white guy in the beginning.
00:26:47.940 We technically didn't, but that's, you have to be careful when you put these profiles together.
00:26:52.360 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.
00:27:00.420 So the Bureau hedged in writing on purpose, and the country heard white man, white van, and stopped listening.
00:27:08.420 The men doing the shooting had been trying to get somebody on the phone for two weeks.
00:27:13.260 Now they're asking the police to take their call at the Ponderosa so they can ensure the message gets through.
00:27:20.540 Before any of the notes, one of the snipers called a priest.
00:27:23.940 There was an even more detailed conversation where Muhammad apparently earlier had made a phone call to a priest.
00:27:34.580 It was basically claiming the responsibility for the shootings outside of D.C., but also claiming responsibility for shooting down south.
00:27:45.640 Malvo and Mohamed apparently chose the priest
00:27:48.100 specifically because he would not record their conversation,
00:27:51.520 but they hoped he would go to the police.
00:27:54.580 He did not.
00:27:56.080 Investigators found him while chasing down the note left behind the Ponderosa.
00:28:00.240 For the moment, the detail about the shooting down south goes nowhere.
00:28:05.280 The profilers had warned Chief Moose from the beginning
00:28:08.960 about being careful on camera.
00:28:11.620 We told Chief Moose immediately that snipers have a God complex.
00:28:16.280 Do not challenge them because you will see them try to prove it.
00:28:20.860 But he said at the end, the streets are safe, your schools are safe.
00:28:24.460 So the next day, they shot a child on his way into school.
00:28:28.800 That child was Iron Brown.
00:28:31.840 But by the end of the month, the men who shot him were writing the chief's lines
00:28:35.580 and Fitz could watch it happen.
00:28:38.240 Chief Moose was supposed to say something like,
00:28:41.180 we have the snipers in a noose with an unusual N-U-E-S-E, I believe, spelling of the word noose.
00:28:49.120 So they were definitely playing games at the end.
00:28:51.420 I'm saying they now, we were sure that there was more than one person.
00:28:55.780 And now they're trying to have the chief of police, you know,
00:28:58.460 at their beck and call and making these particular statements.
00:29:02.640 And underneath all of it from the very first day,
00:29:05.700 Fitz had a suspicion about what the shootings were actually for.
00:29:10.000 I was giving a tour of the FBI, kind of just a real quick aside that day,
00:29:13.280 to some journalists and their partners.
00:29:15.280 And we walk out, and CNN, when they used to do news back then,
00:29:18.180 they were covering the story as we're walking out the lobby.
00:29:21.380 And the journalist said, you know, Fitz, what's going on here? What's happening?
00:29:25.000 I said, I don't know. This is new to me, too.
00:29:26.500 But I've learned sometimes that when multiple people are killed,
00:29:30.060 it's designed to hide the one target that is really the person who the shooter or the murderer
00:29:36.280 wants the dead. And it turns out, and Jim and I can discuss that later, that's exactly what the
00:29:41.520 case was here. Clemente has a phrase for how a killer is made. He says genetics loads the gun,
00:29:47.800 personality aims it, and experience pulls the trigger. In Mohammed's case, the experience he
00:29:53.640 points to, is a custody fight. I would say his wife getting custody of the kids and keeping them 0.96
00:30:00.700 away from him. I mean, he tried to hunt them down. He tried to hunt her down. In the end,
00:30:06.760 his actual motive in this case was to shoot a number of other people, make it look like there's 0.99
00:30:14.040 some wild crazed killer out there, and then shoot her as part of this, and then maybe shoot some 0.99
00:30:21.480 more people and then disappear. But as a result, the children's mother would be dead and he felt 1.00
00:30:28.440 he would get custody. That was his ultimate goal, to win custody from her by killing her. 0.99
00:30:35.200 Except Mildred will not be killed. Her best friend, Issa's niece, is murdered. But Muhammad
00:30:41.260 never takes a shot at Mildred or her house on Quiet Brook Lane. Still, Muhammad has a plan, 0.97
00:30:48.440 which is why he wanted Malvo. 1.00
00:30:50.900 He literally murdered people out of convenience.
00:30:56.040 He murdered other people to try to cover his crime
00:30:59.600 of intending to murder his wife.
00:31:02.320 I'm going to make a master plan. 0.98
00:31:04.220 I'm going to grab a kid out of a shelter
00:31:06.900 and groom him and force him and victimize him 0.98
00:31:12.520 into a position where he's going to help me
00:31:15.020 because you always need a getaway driver
00:31:18.360 if you're going to be shooting from the back of a car.
00:31:21.940 The country was still looking for a white van, 0.51
00:31:24.300 and the woman these two profilers believe the sniper ultimately meant to kill
00:31:28.260 is living on the other side of Washington from the shootings in Clinton, Maryland,
00:31:32.860 calling the police about a dark Chevrolet that kept parking within sight of her house.
00:31:38.520 On the morning of October 11th, a woman getting a ride to work notices a dark car
00:31:43.300 parked at the end of her cul-de-sac, two men in it.
00:31:46.520 As they drive past, the driver stares at the woman.
00:31:49.940 His passenger raises a newspaper over his face.
00:31:54.140 She calls 911 from her co-worker's phone and reports a late model Caprice or Impala, New Jersey plates, two men inside.
00:32:02.720 The officer promises to send someone.
00:32:05.780 Days later, she learns that several of her neighbors have seen the same car, parked in different spots, always facing her house.
00:32:13.680 Her name is Mildred Muhammad.
00:32:16.520 Hers is not the only report that went nowhere.
00:32:19.720 A week earlier, a woman is shot outside a Michael's Craft store in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.
00:32:26.480 Jim Clemente and his brother Tim are not assigned to the shooting, but they drive out to it from home to help.
00:32:32.360 We get there, and I go to the sheriff, and I said, you know, were there any witnesses?
00:32:38.920 And he said, no, nobody saw anything.
00:32:40.980 And I said, look, this is by the mall.
00:32:43.000 There's 3,000 cars here in the parking lot.
00:32:45.360 Somebody saw something.
00:32:46.520 He said, well, one 19-year-old kid who was like a drug addict
00:32:49.760 said he saw a black guy in a dark sedan peeling out,
00:32:54.000 and he said that's where the shot came from.
00:32:56.280 And I said, great, did you put that out on APB?
00:32:58.760 He said, no, I put out the APB on the white van.
00:33:03.000 Sunday morning, October 20th,
00:33:05.100 three hours and 40 minutes after a Ponderosa phone rang
00:33:08.580 and rang in Ashland, Virginia, with no one picking up.
00:33:12.680 At 20 minutes to 10, a caller dials the FBI hotline
00:33:16.300 from a convenience store in Richmond. Don't talk, he says, just listen. Call me God. I left a note
00:33:24.080 at the back of the Ponderosa. Be there for a call in 10 minutes. The people taking hotline calls have
00:33:30.900 no idea about a Ponderosa letter or what was in it. 10 minutes comes and goes with no contact.
00:33:38.540 That night, Chief Moose, who has now read the sniper's letter, goes on television and does
00:33:43.820 something no police chief wants to do. He answers. To the person who left us a message at the Ponderosa
00:33:51.540 last night, you gave us a telephone number. We do want to talk to you. Call us at the number you
00:33:58.900 provided. At 7.57 a.m., the phone rings. It's Lee Malvo. Is this the Ponderosa? Um, who is this?
00:34:07.040 Don't say anything. Just listen. Malvo holds up a tape recorder to the receiver. The actual
00:34:13.000 recording is garbled and distorted, but investigators eventually transcribed it.
00:34:18.340 Quote,
00:34:43.000 sure to remember, he will not deviate. P.S. Your children are not safe. Malvo hangs up. 38 seconds.
00:34:52.240 Within the hour, a tactical team takes down a white van at an Exxon station in Richmond,
00:34:57.920 pulling two men onto the pavement in front of the cameras. One of the men inside had been using the
00:35:02.880 payphone when Malvo's call came in. The men on the pavement are Mexican nationals who have nothing 1.00
00:35:08.880 to do with any of it. The call to the Ponderosa had come from a second payphone on the other side
00:35:14.900 of that same gas station. Malvo and Mohamed escape. Malvo later to investigators, I saw the Mexicans
00:35:22.680 get stopped. I watched it, but I wasn't in the car. The task force played the 38 seconds over
00:35:30.040 and over and over again. One agent thought the voice sounded Hispanic. Another guest Asian. One
00:35:36.740 said it sounds like a kid. An ATF negotiator named Peter Mangan thought it sounded Caribbean,
00:35:43.760 maybe Jamaican, he said, which is where Fitz had landed two weeks earlier off of four words on a
00:35:50.520 tarot card. Mangan ran the phrase duck in a noose past a Jamaican-born ATF agent named Mark
00:35:58.440 Peterkin, who had never heard the phrase in his life. Peterkin looked at him. There are no ducks
00:36:04.840 in Jamaica. Tuesday, October 22nd, 5.55 in the morning, still dark, Aspen Hill, Maryland.
00:36:13.940 Conrad Johnson is 35 and has driven a bus for 10 years. Everyone calls him CJ. Six foot two,
00:36:21.240 250 pounds, shaved head, goatee, two diamond earrings. He has a trainee riding with him
00:36:27.580 that morning. They had breakfast on the bus. The doors are open. Across the lot, there's a
00:36:33.560 basketball court, and past that, Woods. Johnson kicks some trash out of the front door, comes back
00:36:40.280 up the steps, and sets his coffee down on the change box. He is standing in the doorway of his
00:36:46.220 own bus with the lights on behind him. At 5.55 a.m., a shot from the treeline.
00:37:03.560 C.J. has flown to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda.
00:37:11.380 He is awake, sitting up, but the round has destroyed most of his liver.
00:37:16.300 He dies on the operating table at 9.26 that morning.
00:37:20.120 That afternoon, 50 feet into the woods, a search line finds a Ziploc bag on a broken branch.
00:37:27.620 Inside it, a second Ziploc bag.
00:37:30.220 Inside that, a note with red stars on it.
00:37:33.560 For you, Mr. Police, call me God. Do not release to the press. You did not respond to the message.
00:37:41.060 You departed from what we told you to say, and you departed from the time. Your incompetence
00:37:46.620 has cost you another life. Moose had not done what the snipers requested. Hold a press conference 0.52
00:37:53.480 saying he had caught the sniper like a duck in a noose. Now the snipers lay CJ's death at his
00:38:00.620 feet. Late that afternoon, Moose walks out and reads the threat from the original Ponderosa
00:38:05.860 letter out loud, word for word, because the alternative is pretending he has not seen it.
00:38:12.080 We recognize the concerns of the community and therefore are going to provide the exact language
00:38:18.800 in the message that pertains to the threat. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.
00:38:27.960 Back inside headquarters, Moose tells one of his captains
00:38:31.020 that was the hardest thing he's ever done.
00:38:34.220 We're saying we can't do our job, he says.
00:38:36.720 We're supposed to keep people safe, and we can't.
00:38:41.700 By the night of October 22nd, the two men in the FBI profiler room
00:38:45.820 believe the person writing these notes may be young, may be black,
00:38:49.840 may have some tie to the Caribbean, and may not be alone.
00:38:54.200 They're getting closer.
00:38:55.740 But still, they don't have a name.
00:38:58.600 There is something about the bus driver, Conrad Johnson, that does not come out for years.
00:39:03.880 CJ was born in Jamaica.
00:39:06.200 His mother came to the U.S. and left him behind with an aunt when he was just two years old.
00:39:11.720 He joined his mom in America when he was about 10.
00:39:14.960 His mother's name is Sonia Wills.
00:39:17.700 She says Conrad was the kind of boy who brought other boys home,
00:39:21.620 the ones he thought needed somewhere to be.
00:39:24.260 He was a caretaker.
00:39:26.240 In the midst of the shootings,
00:39:28.140 there was a woman on his route
00:39:29.700 who was frightened to get on the bus.
00:39:32.640 He used to stop the bus, get off,
00:39:34.960 walk her out from behind a tree,
00:39:36.920 and put her on board.
00:39:38.600 Whenever he got to that spot,
00:39:40.880 he would get off the bus
00:39:42.360 and go get her
00:39:44.320 on behind a tree and escort her to the bus,
00:39:48.840 telling her,
00:39:49.700 don't worry you're safe with me they have to get to me before they can get to you the boy in the
00:39:57.100 woods that morning taking aim at CJ was 17 born in Jamaica left behind by his mother and raised by
00:40:04.900 other people years later Sonia Wills says to the social worker working on Lee Malvo's defense
00:40:10.660 if only Malvo had looked my son in the face before he killed him he would have seen the perfect father
00:40:16.660 for whom he had been searching.
00:40:20.100 Police still do not have a name.
00:40:22.760 The clue that gives them one
00:40:24.040 has been sitting in an evidence room in Alabama for a month.
00:40:28.780 That's next time on MK Confidential.
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