The Megyn Kelly Show - ＂The Beltway Snipers＂： The FULL MK Confidential Series

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00:01:25.460 out. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show, live on Sirius XM Channel 111 every weekday at

00:01:31.560 New East. Hey everyone, I'm Megyn Kelly. Welcome to The Megyn Kelly Show and today's weekend

00:01:42.420 mega episode. Today, we are bringing you the entire MK Confidential series on the Beltway

00:01:48.960 Snipers, going deep into the background of each of the two snipers who terrorized the

00:01:55.140 Washington, D.C. area for weeks. And we will talk about what ultimately happened to each one of them.

00:02:02.520 All five episodes in one. Enjoy. This is a gripping story.

00:02:08.580 It is Wednesday night, 6 p.m., October 2nd, 2002, in the parking lot of a shopper's food warehouse

00:02:15.720 on Randolph Road in Wheaton, Maryland, a comfortable inner suburb just north of Washington, D.C.

00:02:22.920 It looks like every other grocery store lot in America at the end of a workday.

00:02:26.780 Scattered cars and shopping carts, people loading kids and groceries,

00:02:31.480 the autumn sky going dark over the storefronts.

00:02:34.940 A gray pickup truck with an American flag on its antenna pulls into the lot and parks.

00:02:41.020 A man in a business suit and tie climbs out after a long day, a grocery list in his pocket.

00:02:47.140 He's only stopping in for a minute.

00:02:49.640 His name is James Martin.

00:02:51.980 He is 55, an analyst at the government's Weather and Ocean Agency.

00:02:57.140 He grew up poor in the Midwest, served in Vietnam, and now he has a house in the suburbs.

00:03:03.720 His wife, Billie, teaches Sunday school.

00:03:05.940 Together, they have an 11-year-old son named Ben.

00:03:09.760 Martin mentors inner-city kids.

00:03:12.300 Tonight, he is picking up sodas and snacks for his church youth group, because this store has the best prices.

00:03:18.460 He shuts the driver door and starts across the asphalt toward the sliding doors.

00:03:24.480 There is a muffled pop, flat and far away, with no crack to it,

00:03:28.660 the kind of noise a person might take for a truck tire blowing out a few streets over.

00:03:33.640 James Martin falls where he stands.

00:03:36.900 It happens in the blink of an eye.

00:03:39.320 There is a small entry hole.

00:03:41.320 One bullet goes into his back and tears out the front of his chest.

00:03:46.300 He is dead almost before the sound finishes traveling.

00:03:49.740 No one sees the shooter or the gun or even the direction where the shot came from.

00:03:55.360 A few parking spaces away, a woman named Kimberly Sadelson is loading groceries into her Honda with her five-year-old son beside her.

00:04:03.880 She hears the boom, sees the man go down, and takes out her phone.

00:04:08.280 She dials 911, still not totally sure what she's seeing.

00:04:12.100 I'm at Stopperfield Warehouse on Randolph Road, and a man just fell in the parking lot.

00:04:16.880 There was a loud noise, but we're not sure if he was shot.

00:04:19.720 Across the road, a Montgomery County police officer named Alan Felson hears it too.

00:04:25.080 He is in his unmarked cruiser and his summer uniform, black shorts and a polo shirt with police across the back.

00:04:32.840 He's pulling out of the district station that happens to sit directly across the street.

00:04:37.680 The sound does not quite register as a gunshot.

00:04:40.700 It is missing the sharp crack of a firearm.

00:04:44.320 He looks toward the shopper's lot and sees nothing.

00:04:47.180 No people running, no screaming.

00:04:49.500 He wonders if someone dropped a loaded pallet over at the garden store.

00:04:53.940 Then he swings the cruiser around and finds a parking lot full of people standing frozen in place.

00:05:00.040 He calls out the window.

00:05:01.360 What happened?

00:05:02.480 What's going on here?

00:05:04.080 No one answers.

00:05:05.360 And then out of the corner of his eye, he sees a man on the ground.

00:05:10.700 He grabs his radio.

00:05:12.520 Break, break, break, he says, to cut through the other traffic.

00:05:15.860 I'm at Shopper's Food Warehouse on Randolph.

00:05:18.220 I've got the sound of a shot.

00:05:19.620 One down, one down.

00:05:22.180 Felsen cuts through the crowd and kneels beside James Martin.

00:05:26.040 Martin's shirt and suit coat are soaked through with blood.

00:05:29.420 There is no pulse, and he is not breathing.

00:05:32.440 Felsen is a former volunteer firefighter, so he pulls on latex gloves and starts chest compressions,

00:05:38.220 and it is instantly a bloody business.

00:05:42.140 A woman steps out of the crowd and asks if she can help.

00:05:46.000 By pure chance, she is a friend of Felsen's,

00:05:48.820 a volunteer EMT named Marjorie Fisk,

00:05:52.340 and she runs for the first aid bag she keeps in her car.

00:05:55.840 A nurse appears out of the crowd and cuts open Martin's shirt.

00:06:00.100 Underneath, there is blood everywhere and a hole in his chest.

00:06:03.820 The three of them work on him, on the pavement,

00:06:06.680 while his blood runs out across the lot.

00:06:09.380 The paramedics arrive and take over,

00:06:11.680 and after a while, they stop too.

00:06:15.080 They lay a sheet over James Martin,

00:06:17.560 lying on his back in the soft light of the evening,

00:06:20.400 with his shoes and his hands sticking out the edges.

00:06:24.100 Marjorie Fisk steps back, shaken,

00:06:27.060 and asks if she can go.

00:06:29.380 No one can say where that shot came from.

00:06:32.800 Officer Felsen stands in the lot afterward

00:06:35.020 and tries to make it add up.

00:06:36.680 and he cannot make sense of it. A man walking across a parking lot. A gunshot. The man goes

00:06:44.480 down with a wound clean through him. Martin still has his wallet. Nobody saw an argument,

00:06:50.620 a getaway car, or anyone even holding a gun. No robbery, no carjacking. The only explanation

00:06:58.840 that seems even remotely possible is an accident. Somewhere nearby, someone fires a rifle. The

00:07:06.320 bullet travels farther than intended and by terrible chance, it finds James Martin. What

00:07:12.180 else could it have been? He has no idea. This is only the beginning. 40 minutes earlier, in another

00:07:20.080 shopping center a few miles up the road, a bullet shattered the front window of a Michael's Craft

00:07:25.340 store, striking an illuminated number five hanging over one of the checkout lanes, almost seven feet

00:07:32.120 in the air. No one was hit. At the time, it looked like vandalism, maybe a stray round from a gang

00:07:39.380 gunfire or just random. Now at the Shoppers Food Warehouse on Randolph Road, Montgomery County's

00:07:46.580 brand new police spokeswoman, Captain Nancy Dem, reaches her boss, Police Chief Charles Moose,

00:07:53.380 on her phone. She has been on the job a matter of hours. I don't know what we have here, Dem tells

00:07:59.720 but it is different from your regular homicide the man on the ground seems nice and normal

00:08:05.900 ordinary government id he has not been robbed dem tells the chief that the shots had come from

00:08:12.260 a distance and she has already sent the forensic officers over to the michael's craft store to

00:08:17.220 find out whether these two shootings are connected they are that bullet through the craft store

00:08:23.940 window was the first shot fired in a D.C. area shooting spree no one yet knows has begun. James

00:08:31.360 Martin is its first victim. The shots come barely a year after two planes came out of a clear

00:08:38.120 September sky and hit the Twin Towers and a third hit the Pentagon. It has been just over a year

00:08:44.400 since the anthrax letters that killed five injured dozens and frightened millions of Americans came

00:08:50.500 through the mail. So when a man is shot dead in a grocery lot for no reason anyone can find,

00:08:57.060 another natural worry is terrorism. And sure enough, what begins in this parking lot will

00:09:03.340 terrorize 4 million people for three long weeks. It will empty gas stations, lock schoolhouse doors,

00:09:11.340 and perch officers with rifles up on interstate overpasses. But it is not the kind of terror the

00:09:17.780 expects. It's not radical Islam. It's not Al Qaeda. There's no manifesto. They will later find

00:09:26.180 out. It's two people in an old car. And James Martin lying dead on the asphalt at two minutes

00:09:33.860 past 6 p.m. on an ordinary Wednesday is only the beginning of the rampage near D.C. By the end of

00:09:41.180 the next day, Thursday, five more people will be dead. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:09:53.220 The morning of Thursday, October 3rd, is cool with a nice breeze. It's rush hour in Washington,

00:09:59.740 D.C., and the roads into the Capitol are already jammed. 103.5 WTOP Radio. Traffic and weather

00:10:07.160 together on the 8th. 66 westbound from Falls Church out to Gainesville. It's crazy talk,

00:10:13.000 I tell you, crazy. Kettleworth Avenue southbound. We had an accident earlier this morning at

00:10:17.440 Pennsylvania Avenue. For about 90 minutes, the region has no idea that anything unusual is

00:10:23.580 underway. At 7.41 a.m. in the White Flint area of Rockville, Maryland, a landscaper named James

00:10:32.040 buchanan who everyone calls sunny is mowing a small patch of grass behind a car dealership

00:10:37.960 he is 39 years old he is the son of a retired montgomery county policeman and he has a fiance

00:10:45.080 buchanan recently moved his landscaping business across the river into virginia

00:10:50.920 but he still comes back to maryland once a week to mow the fitzgerald auto mall

00:10:54.920 as a favor to its owner he is pushing a green lawn boy mower with a cloth catcher

00:11:01.160 his back to the road. He stops for a sip of water. And then, over the noise of the mower and the

00:11:07.780 traffic, there is a single loud crack. A block away, a man named Rick Tyner is driving to work

00:11:16.600 with his wife. Tyner saw combat in Vietnam, and he knows that sound. That was a rifle shot, he tells

00:11:23.160 her. In the dealership lot, the mechanics look up to see Sonny Buchanan staggering toward them,

00:11:29.020 clutching his chest and gasping behind him the mower is still running rolling on across the

00:11:35.820 grass with no one to steer it buchanan makes it a couple hundred feet then goes down on his face

00:11:42.040 a parts manager named jim king gets on the line to 9-1-1 and tells the dispatcher the

00:11:48.280 only thing that makes any sense to him uh this guy's lung or did something man that chopped him

00:11:54.160 He's bleeding real bad. He's down and out.

00:11:57.540 There is nothing wrong with the mower.

00:12:00.500 Buchanan is rushed to the trauma unit at Suburban Hospital,

00:12:03.940 where a surgeon named Jim Roby is waiting.

00:12:08.060 Buchanan's heart has already stopped,

00:12:10.480 so Roby works fast, opening his chest with a 16-inch cut

00:12:14.020 and cranking the ribs apart to get to the heart.

00:12:17.120 He finds a heart that is practically empty of blood

00:12:20.120 and a chest cavity drained nearly dry.

00:12:23.720 He bled more than anyone I have ever seen, one of the medics later says.

00:12:28.800 Roby has been told this is some sort of freak lawnmower accident,

00:12:33.520 and finding nothing he can fix, he sews the man back up, believing it.

00:12:38.920 Then a nurse standing by asks the question that will change the morning.

00:12:43.760 Jim, she says, do you think this could be a gunshot wound?

00:12:47.640 They roll Buchanan over, and there it is.

00:12:50.220 a hole in his back smaller than the head of a pen. By now, a police officer at the hospital

00:12:56.980 has grown suspicious. She called her supervisor. Her supervisor calls major crimes. And word

00:13:03.820 reaches the office of the county state's attorney, where a veteran prosecutor hears the story of the

00:13:09.120 landscaper and his lawnmower and thinks, no, the lawnmower did not do that. 31 minutes after

00:13:18.020 Buchanan is shot about six miles away. A taxi driver named Premkumar Wallaker pulls into a

00:13:25.460 mobile gas station to fill his tank. He needs gas. He also wants some gum and lottery tickets.

00:13:32.380 The station in Aspen Hill, Maryland is a half block from the Michaels Crafts store where the

00:13:37.800 front window got shot out the previous day. He is 54 from Pune, India, and he drives for a company

00:13:44.840 called Presidential Cab. He usually starts his shift around noon. This morning, he clocked in

00:13:50.640 early so he could get off early and get home to his wife and kids for the afternoon. He attends

00:13:55.960 a Seventh-day Adventist church and has been married to his wife for 25 years. The sign on

00:14:02.960 the roof of his cab reads, of all things, call 911. That is his cab company's number. You dial

00:14:10.640 911 taxi to order a ride. He is standing at the gas pump when the shot comes. At the next pump

00:14:18.040 island, a doctor named Caroline Namro, who has just dropped her older children at school and

00:14:23.860 still has her two-year-old buckled in the back of her van, hears the bang. She looks up to see

00:14:30.040 Wallacher walking toward her with a startled look on his face. Call an ambulance, he says.

00:14:35.900 Then he collapses beside her van,

00:14:38.480 leaving a long smear of his blood down the side of her passenger door.

00:14:42.900 Namro grabs her phone and calls 911.

00:14:46.180 Oh, my God.

00:14:47.300 Ma'am, listen to me.

00:14:49.660 What is wrong?

00:14:51.300 A man is being killed in front of me.

00:14:53.300 How is he being killed in front of you?

00:14:55.080 I'm a shot.

00:14:56.760 Namro gets down on the concrete and does what she can,

00:14:59.980 starting chest compressions, then mouth to mouth.

00:15:03.360 Wallacher is bleeding heavily from his side, the blood pooling on the ground.

00:15:07.600 It started over there, went over there, and the guy's laying on the ground,

00:15:10.480 blood all over the side of the van, he's laying on the ground,

00:15:13.480 gasping for air, and the lady, she's standing there shaking, she was trying to help him.

00:15:17.640 In the middle of her rescue efforts, the victim vomits, his airway closes,

00:15:22.760 and Dr. Namro cannot clear it.

00:15:25.420 Kremkumar Wallacher dies at the pump.

00:15:27.800 at 8 37 25 minutes later a 34 year old woman named sarah ramos is sitting on a bench outside a post

00:15:37.140 office beside the leisure world retirement community she was a law student once back in

00:15:43.280 el salvador now she cleans houses to keep the family afloat she came to america with her husband

00:15:49.820 a college teacher there and their little boy and it did not go the way they hoped

00:15:55.680 Her husband could not find work teaching and grew depressed.

00:15:59.500 This morning she took the bus and is waiting on the bench for the woman whose house she is going to clean.

00:16:05.580 She is reading, her head down, her purse beside her.

00:16:09.520 She never sees the car at the far edge of the lot.

00:16:12.380 A single rifle bullet enters the top of her skull and exits the back of her neck

00:16:17.640 and carries on through the restaurant window behind her.

00:16:21.720 Her book is still open in her lap when it fills with blood.

00:16:25.260 At 9.58 a.m., an hour and 21 minutes later, a 25-year-old woman named Lori Ann Lewis Rivera,

00:16:34.240 a nanny who moved to Maryland from Idaho, is at a shell station in Kensington cleaning out her employer's minivan.

00:16:42.120 She is a large, gentle young woman whose blonde hair is so pale it looks nearly white.

00:16:48.740 She has just switched on the vacuum to suck up Cheerios off the floorboard

00:16:52.660 when the bullet hits her in the back.

00:16:55.320 It was like a bomb.

00:16:56.980 Yeah, but it wasn't a bomb. I mean, it was like that kind of noise.

00:16:59.200 Was it like a gunshot, maybe?

00:17:01.340 A firefighter runs over from a station across the street and starts CPR on Lorian.

00:17:06.660 A county police officer pulls up, then a second one, Richard Grapes.

00:17:11.280 And Grapes goes to his car for a 12-gauge shotgun and a heavy ballistic shield.

00:17:15.900 and he kneels down with it between the open lot

00:17:18.520 and the people bent over the dying woman.

00:17:21.000 Because by now, they understand.

00:17:24.100 Whoever is doing this is still out there somewhere

00:17:26.820 and he could be lining up the rescuers next.

00:17:30.200 The detective who takes the Kensington scene

00:17:32.780 is Terry Ryan out of Montgomery County Major Crimes.

00:17:37.760 It was an incident involving a young woman in her 20s, a mother.

00:17:41.900 Ms. Rivera was vacuuming her van, which was parked just beyond here,

00:17:50.060 at a coin vacuum that's still here.

00:17:55.660 Mr. Rivera, Lorian's husband, was contacted.

00:18:04.860 He came to the scene. I had to notify him of his wife's death.

00:18:11.900 I could just see the emotion. I mean, he was grieving himself. He said, what do I tell my kid?

00:18:19.440 Lorianne is taken to Suburban Hospital to Dr. Roby's team, the second one of these shooting

00:18:24.860 victims they have seen before 10 this morning. This time, they know what they are looking for.

00:18:31.180 This wound is in the exact same place as with Sonny Buchanan, the man mowing the lawn, Roby says.

00:18:38.560 Someone is just picking people off.

00:18:41.080 Roby has already called his wife and told her to get off the streets.

00:18:45.260 Four people in two hours and 17 minutes.

00:18:48.860 A landscaper on a mower, a cab driver getting gas,

00:18:53.800 a woman sitting on a bench reading, and a nanny vacuuming a van.

00:18:58.880 Count James Martin from Shopper's Parking Lot the night before,

00:19:02.980 and it is five dead in 16 hours.

00:19:06.280 They do not line up.

00:19:07.820 Two white men, a white woman, an Indian man, a Salvadoran woman.

00:19:13.600 Different ages, different jobs, different corners of the same suburban county.

00:19:18.340 The only thing the five of them have in common is that each was, for one second, exposed, standing still out in the open.

00:19:28.720 And no one ever sees who does it.

00:19:31.260 There's no muzzle flash anyone can point to, no figure running, no window rolled down.

00:19:37.280 Each shot comes from somewhere out past the edge of the lot, a tree line, a passing car,

00:19:43.140 and by the time anyone looks, there is nothing there at all.

00:19:46.660 The detective who was assigned to the James Martin killing, the first murder in this spree,

00:19:52.820 Patrick McNerney, is home when his sister, a local TV news editor, calls to say there

00:19:59.080 has been a shooting at a gas station up the road.

00:20:01.780 Anything odd about it?

00:20:03.220 He asks her.

00:20:04.580 People heard a loud bang, she says.

00:20:06.340 he is already heading out the door. At Suburban Hospital, a major crimes corporal named Gene

00:20:12.660 Curtis has the second victim, Sonny Buchanan's, body unzipped from its bag, and he does not need

00:20:18.940 a medical examiner to tell him what he's looking at. This kind of wound, he tells the doctors,

00:20:24.320 goes in small and comes out big. How many of these are we going to have, he thinks.

00:20:29.460 Maybe the next one will be a cop. By now, the police are chasing the cases faster than they

00:20:35.180 can work them. The detectives still writing up James Martin's death at the Wheaton shopper's

00:20:40.260 parking lot from last night get the calls from Rockville, then Aspen Hill, then Kensington,

00:20:45.920 a fresh body every half hour, all inside a few square miles. At the hospitals, the same trauma

00:20:52.780 teams that took Buchanan and Wallacher in the morning are bracing for the next body. And it is

00:20:58.640 not over. Around nine o'clock p.m., two people are loading a car outside a restaurant called

00:21:05.900 the Tropicana on Georgia Avenue just inside Washington, D.C., a few blocks below the Maryland

00:21:11.900 line. The woman is named Gail Howard, and she owns the place. She is walking the night's receipts

00:21:18.280 out to her car. The man is Carl Largy, one of her employees, and he is out in the lot with a

00:21:24.760 cigarette, keeping an eye on things. It's very dark. The nearest streetlight is flickering on

00:21:29.900 and off. The morning's killings have been on every television in the region all day. Gail Howard is

00:21:36.560 wary of crossing the open lot. Parked on the side street near them is an old dark car with tinted

00:21:43.100 windows. Its back end turned toward Georgia Avenue. They notice it and think nothing of it.

00:21:49.560 Then there is a loud boom. It could be a blown tire or a car backfiring. Out on Georgia Avenue,

00:21:57.740 a city bus screeches to a stop. Carl tells Gail it was either the bus or a gunshot,

00:22:04.500 loud but strangely muffled. A few seconds later, the old dark car slides away,

00:22:10.180 down Kalmia Street with its lights off. Look at the idiot with his lights off, Carl says.

00:22:15.640 They finish loading up, and Gail gets in her own car and drives home.

00:22:20.640 Carl stays behind.

00:22:23.160 Within minutes, the corner is lit up with police lights and an ambulance, and word travels that a man is dead.

00:22:30.300 Five minutes later, Gail's phone rings. It's Carl. Guess what, he says. It was a gunshot.

00:22:36.640 That night's killing crosses the district line.

00:22:39.260 A block away, on the southeast corner of Georgia Avenue and Kalmia Road, a 72-year-old man is lying on the pavement.

00:22:48.080 His name is Pascal Charleau.

00:22:50.660 He left Haiti for America many years ago.

00:22:54.340 He is a carpenter, a man who can build anything.

00:22:57.620 He and his disabled wife share a row home with lawn chairs and potted plants on the front porch.

00:23:03.860 And out back, he keeps a garden of tomatoes and bell peppers.

00:23:07.540 He loves to walk, but tonight he has taken the bus home.

00:23:10.840 He gets off and is standing under a streetlight, waiting to cross to his house.

00:23:16.020 Pascal is gazing up at the stars, and he raises his right hand toward his chin when the bullet comes.

00:23:22.720 It goes through his palm and blows a two-inch hole in his hand before it punches into his chest below the left collarbone.

00:23:31.240 It shatters his collarbone and ribs, tearing open veins and arteries.

00:23:37.180 Pascal Charleau goes down on the corner.

00:23:40.380 72 years of life, and it ends like this.

00:23:44.580 He is the sixth person killed in a little over 24 hours.

00:23:48.920 The man handling all of this is the chief of the Montgomery County Maryland Police,

00:23:54.280 a career officer named Charles Moose.

00:23:57.040 He is 49.

00:23:58.440 He originally wanted to become a lawyer,

00:24:01.500 got sidetracked and decided to give the police department a try.

00:24:05.440 Before he knew it, he started climbing the ranks,

00:24:07.480 getting decorations and a doctorate along the way.

00:24:10.760 He is a big proponent of active listening,

00:24:13.780 but he also battles a white-hot temper,

00:24:16.740 and there are stories about it.

00:24:18.480 He's gone to anger management counseling.

00:24:21.020 By the end of that first day,

00:24:22.780 Moose is looking at six people shot dead

00:24:25.240 across Montgomery County and the district.

00:24:28.120 No motive, no suspect, no witness who can describe a shooter.

00:24:33.620 Not even a bullet or a shell casing his investigators can recover in one piece.

00:24:38.260 Assistant Chief of Police Deirdre Walker would later tell the Discovery Channel

00:24:42.020 that it seemed to be an impossible task.

00:24:45.960 We had no physical description.

00:24:49.020 We had no good eyewitnesses.

00:24:51.140 How do you draw up a plan to find a ghost?

00:24:55.340 Moose drives himself down to the mobile station crime scene,

00:24:58.480 where Premkumar Wallachar died.

00:25:01.140 But instead of pulling in, he tucks his car into a mall lot across the street,

00:25:05.680 gets out, and stands there, watching.

00:25:08.660 He wants to see the situation from a distance.

00:25:12.060 Standing there in the sun, a thought settles on Moose that he cannot shake.

00:25:17.580 That the man who did this could be out here right now, close by, watching him back.

00:25:24.500 By then, investigators are convinced the shootings are connected.

00:25:29.260 That is the worst possible news for a public already terrorized by anthrax and 9-11.

00:25:35.520 Moose says as much to the press.

00:25:38.020 Here he is on Fox 5 on October 3, 2002.

00:25:41.960 We strongly feel that all of these are connected.

00:25:45.340 Certainly, the weaponry seems to be very similar.

00:25:49.080 Not a lot of evidence.

00:25:50.800 There's no indication at this point that these individuals know each other.

00:25:54.640 There's no indication that any of these individuals had any kind of conflict with anyone.

00:25:58.420 It is a string of murders growing into a public emergency because it means there is no way to guess who comes next.

00:26:06.460 It comes down to one thing only, where you happen to be standing when the trigger is pulled.

00:26:11.940 The law enforcement response builds fast because it has to.

00:26:15.880 Within a day, the case has outgrown the Montgomery County police and the big agencies pour in.

00:26:21.220 The FBI, the ATF, the Maryland State Police, the Secret Service.

00:26:25.500 A task force forms around Chief Moose and grows until it fills whole buildings.

00:26:31.600 They wire in banks of telephones and open a tip line, and the tips come in by the thousands.

00:26:37.300 Every one of them run down.

00:26:39.480 Before long, it is the largest manhunt of its kind that the country has seen.

00:26:44.800 Thousands of officers from dozens of agencies and still, day after day, nothing.

00:26:52.440 Helicopters crisscross the county overhead.

00:26:55.240 When a shooting comes in, police flip on their lights and sirens,

00:26:58.400 throw up roadblocks and stop cars for miles,

00:27:01.160 and time after time come up with nothing in the way of clues.

00:27:05.660 The officers who work it take it personally

00:27:07.840 because it is terrorizing the neighborhoods where they live,

00:27:11.820 where their families live.

00:27:13.240 It affects our families the same as everybody else.

00:27:17.000 And we all swore an oath to protect the citizens of Maryland.

00:27:22.100 And by God, that's what we were going to do,

00:27:23.960 no matter if it killed us, to do it.

00:27:26.080 And for a major American city,

00:27:28.420 the seat of the federal government,

00:27:30.360 this changes how that city does life day to day.

00:27:34.300 Gas stations hang tarps and bedsheets

00:27:37.080 between the gas pumps and the road

00:27:39.080 so a driver can fill the tank behind a curtain.

00:27:42.640 People pump gas crouched down,

00:27:44.940 ducking below the roofline of their cars.

00:27:47.920 Schools pull the shades and cancel recess.

00:27:51.060 The high school football games

00:27:52.300 and the track meets are called off and the local soccer league cancels its practices. Shoppers

00:27:58.420 cross the lot to their cars at a fast weaving walk because someone has decided that a zigzagging

00:28:03.620 target is harder to hit and no one can prove them wrong. Children are walked from the school bus to

00:28:09.920 the door in clusters while the teachers surround them and scan the tree lines. Ministers rewrite

00:28:16.240 their Sunday sermons. The malls empty out and along the roads where people were shot, the shops

00:28:22.280 watch their customers disappear.

00:28:25.180 They were just picking people at random.

00:28:27.960 If you were out there where they could get to you,

00:28:30.940 you were gone.

00:28:32.440 What the person or people who did this have done

00:28:36.120 without demanding a single thing

00:28:38.260 is make the most ordinary acts of the day,

00:28:42.120 buying groceries, filling the gas tank,

00:28:44.900 waiting for a bus, walking a child into school,

00:28:48.800 feel dangerous.

00:28:50.500 The public looks to authority for answers.

00:28:53.240 The Montgomery County Police have some, but not many.

00:28:57.880 Chief Moose begins holding nightly press briefings.

00:29:00.820 How many dead? Who were they? And where?

00:29:04.080 But the crucial questions, why and why them, cannot yet be answered.

00:29:10.400 The chief reflects on this years later to the team behind Real Stories.

00:29:15.340 The worst thing about the case was that all of the victims were chosen.

00:29:19.620 at random. So consequently, everyone in the community felt like a potential target.

00:29:25.900 The man behind the rifle becomes known as the sniper, and he haunts every shadow in and around

00:29:32.420 D.C. Investigators, the public, and the media all make the same fundamental assumption that steers

00:29:39.860 them down the wrong path from the start. Snipers typically work alone, out of practicality and

00:29:46.120 generally, personality. This sniper, they will eventually learn, is not one man, but two. And

00:29:54.600 this is also not the first time they have killed together. Their story begins long before the

00:30:00.880 Maryland parking lots, on the other side of the country. At the start of 2002, a 41-year-old Army

00:30:07.980 veteran named John Allen Muhammad lives in the suburbs of Tacoma, Washington. A Jamaican teenager

00:30:14.860 named Lee Boyd Malvo lives with him.

00:30:18.200 Mohamed has spent nearly two decades in uniform,

00:30:21.580 becoming an expert marksman with the M-16

00:30:24.260 during his service in the army.

00:30:26.520 Malvo has zero military experience.

00:30:29.360 He is a slight 5'5", 17-year-old

00:30:32.260 who speaks with a Caribbean accent.

00:30:34.900 They regard and refer to each other as father and son,

00:30:39.060 both directly and to anyone who asks.

00:30:41.860 Mohamed met the boy in the Caribbean a few years ago.

00:30:44.860 took him in when he had nobody.

00:30:47.660 How exactly that happened is its own story,

00:30:50.800 but that's for the next episode.

00:30:53.220 Mohamed has a nickname for the teenager,

00:30:55.580 which only the two of them know,

00:30:58.120 his little sniper.

00:30:59.980 Malvo wears it proudly,

00:31:01.340 even sporting a black t-shirt

00:31:02.760 with the word sniper printed across the front.

00:31:07.000 Mohamed trains Malvo to shoot a rifle

00:31:09.420 in a friend's backyard.

00:31:11.820 They use a Bushmaster XM-15,

00:31:14.160 an AR-15-style rifle chambered in .223.

00:31:18.560 It's a semi-automatic civilian version of the M-16 that Muhammad used in the Army.

00:31:24.180 Muhammad walks the rifle out of a Tacoma gun store, stolen.

00:31:28.220 The store assumed it had been sold,

00:31:30.780 and did not realize for three months that the rifle was actually stolen.

00:31:35.200 Muhammad and Malvo practice firing round after round into a tree stump.

00:31:40.180 That's actually where the killings start.

00:31:42.240 Washington State, not near Washington, D.C., and we'll go through the names and the stories

00:31:48.700 this week. The shootings are scattered across different cities, different police departments,

00:31:54.760 different case files. It is not until they reach the nation's capital that the crimes become so

00:31:59.920 close and frequent that authorities are able to connect them. Before it is over, John Muhammad

00:32:06.920 and Leboid Malvo will be tied to some 15 killings around the country. Ten of the dead will fall here

00:32:14.240 in these three weeks around Washington, D.C. A year after 9-11, Americans are still on the

00:32:21.920 lookout for terror. By the night of October 2, 2002, the next terror attack is already in motion.

00:32:29.860 But it is not in the sky, and it is not in the mail. It is out on the road in an old sedan

00:32:35.880 that nobody thinks to stop next time on mk confidential how the sniper duo came to be

00:32:43.160 before he was one half of america's most feared sniper team how the man who became

00:32:49.060 john allen muhammad lost his own children and raised a lonely boy from jamaica to be his little

00:32:56.160 sniper. Something wakes her. She looks at the clock on the bedside table, 1.37. She rolls over

00:33:10.780 on her back and looks up at the ceiling, listening. Half asleep, she tries to think. She knows the

00:33:16.700 sound, but is she imagining it tonight? She listens hard. Has he come back to the house?

00:33:22.960 What is he doing? It is the middle of the night in a house in Tacoma, Washington in the winter

00:33:29.180 of 2000. Her name is Mildred Muhammad, and her marriage is over. She has flushed both of her

00:33:36.780 wedding rings down the toilet. Her soon-to-be ex-husband moved out a few months back, but he

00:33:42.260 still has a key, and he keeps visiting in the middle of the night. She is listening for the

00:33:48.420 sound of the key turning in the front door lock. And then it does. The door opens. Mildred later

00:33:56.100 describes the man in the doorway to Investigation Discovery. The man that I married became a

00:34:02.660 complete stranger. He was full of rage. I was terrified. She sees him coming. The bathroom

00:34:12.880 light is on for the kids. She sees his body cross the light, about to enter her bedroom doorway,

00:34:18.420 and shuts her eyes. Then he is standing at the foot of her bed, watching her. She thinks of a

00:34:25.640 thing he said to her once, that when a man hits a woman, it means he has lost all respect for her,

00:34:31.680 and that after that it would be easy to kill her. Her spirit tells her to be still, pretend to be

00:34:38.080 asleep. Her heart is pumping against the sheets. She knows he is doing this on purpose. He plans

00:34:44.620 everything, but she does not know what his plan is for her, so she tries to just breathe normally.

00:34:50.980 Her spirit says, be still. She wants to squint and see his face, but she knows he will see the

00:34:57.920 whites of her eyes. He comes around the bedside and leans over her, listening to her breathe.

00:35:04.680 He walks around her for two or three more minutes. She keeps hearing her spirit say,

00:35:09.620 be still. She does not flinch or move a muscle until he is gone. He finally crosses her room

00:35:16.120 and tiptoes out of the house, closing the front door behind him. Her spirit guides her through,

00:35:22.660 and she believes that is why she is still alive. She lies in the dark until morning,

00:35:27.840 then picks up the phone. So the next day, I called the locksmith to get the locks changed.

00:35:35.680 so mildred changes the locks a new lock can keep a man out of the house but it cannot change who

00:35:43.820 he is two years later almost 3 000 miles from tacoma the man who stood over her bed in the

00:35:50.940 dark begins killing strangers in the suburbs of washington dc people with nothing in common but

00:35:57.500 the ground they are standing on 10 of them will be dead in three weeks each one dropped by a single

00:36:04.200 shot no one sees or hears in time. And Mildred Muhammad, who fled across the country and hides

00:36:12.000 in a Maryland suburb outside of Washington, D.C., will become convinced that all of it,

00:36:18.360 every random body, is chosen to bury the one murder that matters, hers.

00:36:25.560 Before John Allen Muhammad was half of the D.C. sniper team, he was a soldier for 17 years,

00:36:32.420 a husband, and a father of five. Tonight, we go back to the beginning.

00:36:38.660 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

00:36:46.580 He is not born John Muhammad. He is born John Allen Williams in New Orleans on the last day

00:36:53.620 of 1960. His father is a railroad porter, a job that keeps him on the road and mostly away from

00:37:00.540 home. His mother, Mertes, gets sick with breast cancer and moves her five children home to Baton

00:37:06.440 Rouge to be near family. John is only three years old when she passes away. He is raised by his

00:37:13.900 aunts in a black enclave on the edge of the city that the people there called Scotland Town.

00:37:21.480 Journalist John Ward covers the story of the D.C. snipers for The Washington Times. He believes

00:37:27.120 this part of John's life is key to his transformation into a cold-blooded killer.

00:37:32.680 Here's what he tells the history series Born to Kill.

00:37:36.280 He was very affected by his mother dying when he was very young, and he was also picked

00:37:42.460 on a lot as a kid by relatives.

00:37:45.860 And I think he went through his entire life feeling like he was never recognized for his

00:37:50.800 potential.

00:37:51.220 At 17, John Williams enlists in the Louisiana Army National Guard.

00:37:56.800 Jerry O'Neill cuts his hair for 11 years and remembers no great enthusiasm for the work.

00:38:02.820 He speaks to Born to Kill as well.

00:38:05.800 He didn't like being in the military. It was something that he had committed himself to doing.

00:38:11.160 And at the time, I think it provided living for him and his family.

00:38:16.080 It is August of 1978. What begins as a six-year hitch turns into a career of nearly two decades.

00:38:23.580 He starts as a carpenter and a welder in a unit that repairs buildings.

00:38:27.760 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.

00:38:43.300 Mildred's brother, Michael Jones, describes that side of him this way to Investigation Discovery.

00:38:48.680 John was a combat engineer. He can be shot at their minds. That is a very stressful job.

00:38:57.780 But he was an expert marksman with the M16. That was the rifle at that time.

00:39:06.040 A 1982 note in his file praises his initiative and his results. But that same year,

00:39:12.560 he is court-martialed. The charges are a strange little bundle, disobeying an order, striking a

00:39:20.360 sergeant, taking another man's tape measure, and briefly going AWOL. Two charges are dropped. He

00:39:27.000 is fined $100 and receives a suspended jail sentence. He later steals an M-16 from the

00:39:33.280 armory and hides it in a dormitory. No charges are filed for that. Out in the Saudi desert in early

00:39:40.360 1991, a higher-ranking sergeant named Kip Berenson chews John out one day for sleeping

00:39:47.560 in another soldier's sleeping bag. Berenson will remember the look John gave him as the

00:39:52.940 stare of death. Then, in the middle of the night in February, a thermite grenade lights

00:39:59.340 up the inside of a tent where a dozen soldiers are asleep, throwing heat, fire, and sparks,

00:40:05.060 which could easily light the ammo. There is a scramble in the dark, and everyone gets out.

00:40:11.880 Berenson does not think this is an accident. An army captain says the pin to the grenade was found

00:40:18.060 near John's bunk. The military police come, and John Williams is led away in handcuffs.

00:40:25.140 And then, nothing. No record of any discipline in his file. He is apparently cleared. Or is he?

00:40:34.560 Mildred remembers the grenade incident, or at least John's version of it, a bit differently.

00:40:40.420 She later retells the story to the podcast Monster DC Sniper.

00:40:44.920 A soldier challenged him in front of others, and he felt humiliated.

00:40:52.680 That soldier, that night, was in charge of the explosives.

00:40:59.520 John went, snuck into that area, and stole a grenade.

00:41:06.600 He threw the grenade in the tent and jumped into his sleeping bag.

00:41:15.560 The grenade went off.

00:41:17.140 He was accused of trying to get back at that soldier

00:41:25.780 that challenged him in front of the other soldiers.

00:41:30.820 They put him in a dungeon.

00:41:34.360 They hogtied him and left him there.

00:41:38.920 And when he comes back, it's not the same person.

00:41:42.420 in 1992 stationed in germany a very pregnant mildred visits a hairdresser who will change

00:41:50.920 her life the hairdresser is astonished that mildred does not know the name lewis farrakhan

00:41:56.780 and sends her home with two videotapes by mildred's account john watches them with rapture

00:42:02.780 saying that's right that's right by the time they finish both tapes mildred's worldview

00:42:08.440 is shattered. She resolves to question everything she has been taught for the rest of her life.

00:42:14.900 John resolves to find Farrakhan when they return to the States. Both are now very interested in

00:42:20.240 Islam. In January of 1993, John gets into the face of another soldier, a man who happens to

00:42:27.180 be named Lee, and says, brother to brother, back off or you will be the first slaughtered. There

00:42:33.660 is no place that your family will be safe and the people that are supporting you will go down

00:42:38.360 also, this I promise you. A report is written up and filed, and that appears to have been the end

00:42:45.160 of it. No arrest, no charge, nothing in his record. The next year, in 1994, the Army gives

00:42:52.660 John Allen Williams an honorable discharge. The family moves back to Tacoma and joins a mosque.

00:42:59.860 Mildred describes it as building her relationship with God.

00:43:02.940 john joined but not for the same reasons john joined the mosque not to be a man of god he

00:43:13.980 joined because he felt that is what was needed to control me in october 1995 john goes to the

00:43:25.720 million man march and takes the pledge every man there takes never to raise a hand with a knife

00:43:31.400 or a gun against any member of his family or any human being. He comes home kinder and gentler

00:43:38.680 to Mildred's relief. It doesn't last. Mildred joins the Nation of Islam in January 1996,

00:43:46.260 and John returns to his old habits. Money goes missing from the mechanic business they run

00:43:51.720 together. There are nights out with other women. When Mildred confronts him more than once,

00:43:57.680 she remembers him saying, it's all mind over matter, Mildred. I don't mind because you don't

00:44:03.500 matter. It is Friday, October 4th, 2002. In the suburbs north of Washington, D.C., a killer has

00:44:11.600 already shot six people dead, all strangers, each dropped by a single rifle shot. Not one witness

00:44:18.720 has been able to describe the man who killed them. And at 2.30 that afternoon, 75 miles south of the

00:44:25.260 first killings, a 43-year-old mother of two named Caroline Sewell will be the next to fall.

00:44:32.620 Sewell walks out of a Michael's Craft store at the Spotsylvania Mall in Fredericksburg,

00:44:37.980 Virginia. She shops there all the time. She is loading packages into her minivan,

00:44:43.260 moving back and forth between the cart and the van. Behind her, a couple named Alex and Doris

00:44:48.660 Jones pull up their car and wait, blinker flashing because they want her parking space.

00:44:54.180 Just as Caroline closes the rear hatch, Alex hears a loud pop and sees Caroline drop.

00:45:02.200 I've been shot, she screams. Alex jumps out of his car and rushes over. He starts yelling for help.

00:45:09.520 And then, standing over her in the open parking lot, something clicks in Alex's brain. If the

00:45:15.420 rifleman could see Caroline, he can see Alex, too, and his wife. He runs back to his car and tells

00:45:21.940 Doris to get down. Alex ducks low behind the wheel himself and drives toward the far side of

00:45:28.220 a nearby furniture store out of the line of fire. On his way out of that parking lot, a car pulls

00:45:34.860 out ahead of him. It is a dark older car with New Jersey plates and the back window is covered over

00:45:41.080 with something so that he cannot see inside of it. Alex thinks the car looks out of place and he says

00:45:47.560 so out loud to Doris, who is crouching down in the back seat

00:45:51.900 and never sees the vehicle.

00:45:54.100 Someone in the lot calls 911.

00:45:56.720 Yes, I am in front of Michael's,

00:45:58.880 and somebody's out here who needs some help.

00:46:01.240 OK, what's going on?

00:46:02.440 I'm not sure.

00:46:03.560 There was a loud crack, and she said she needs help.

00:46:07.060 And she's lying down.

00:46:10.120 Do you think she's injured, or?

00:46:13.040 Yeah, definitely injured.

00:46:14.320 She hurt herself?

00:46:15.840 I'm not sure.

00:46:16.800 The bullet has gone in through the raised hatch of the van.

00:46:30.980 It has struck Caroline in the lower back and come out beneath her right breast.

00:46:36.700 She is rushed to Mary Washington Hospital, then flown by helicopter to Fairfax.

00:46:42.120 Against the odds, she will live.

00:46:44.420 Until now, this killing spree has stayed close to Washington, in the Maryland suburbs, and the district itself.

00:46:51.660 Now it has jumped south into Virginia, and the shooting zone is a 75-mile corridor running more than halfway to Richmond.

00:47:00.600 Late that night, the ATF analyzes the ballistics from the first six shootings.

00:47:06.100 They identify the caliber .223, one of the most popular in the country.

00:47:09.800 and more importantly, they conclude that the bullet fragments they have recovered

00:47:14.000 were indeed fired from the same rifle. The shootings are connected, even if the victims

00:47:20.200 themselves are not. The ballistics lab confirms the bullet from Caroline's van matches the others.

00:47:28.040 One rifle. Beltway killing spree is on the move. And what every trooper going out on the road is

00:47:35.060 told to look for is a white van. After Sarah Ramos was killed, a lovely former law student who was

00:47:42.320 shot in the head while sitting on a bench reading, a landscaper working nearby saw a white box truck

00:47:49.120 speeding by, a dent in the back, two men inside. He never saw it fire a shot, but it is the only

00:47:55.700 description anyone has, so it becomes the description. Maryland alone has more than 70,000

00:48:02.980 white vans. Police stop as many of them as they can find, which means that of every vehicle on

00:48:09.480 the road that October, the safest one to be driving may be an old blue Chevy Caprice.

00:48:16.520 Nineteen years earlier, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, John Williams is a handsome 22-year-old who is

00:48:23.660 known for keeping his word and who knows exactly what to say to a woman. John meets Mildred

00:48:29.680 Roselle in the fall of 1983. Right away, John tells her he has two sons, but that he is not

00:48:36.620 married. At one point, he looks her straight in the eyes and says, I'm looking for someone to

00:48:41.800 share my life. Mildred thinks I finally found a man. It turns out John has two sons by two

00:48:49.320 different women. He married the second one in 1981 and remains married to her when he meets

00:48:55.280 Mildred. Her name is Carol. They live in a trailer outside town with their son, Lindbergh. Carol will

00:49:02.600 one day describe her husband as a militaristic control nut. He will describe her as bulimic.

00:49:09.260 Mildred finds out the truth roughly two months into dating John, and she confronts him. He begs

00:49:15.380 her to wait for him. She agrees to remain friends, and he confides in her something humiliating.

00:49:21.920 John cannot read.

00:49:24.080 All he can write is his name, and nobody knows.

00:49:27.760 He says he developed a photographic memory

00:49:29.700 and would find an excuse to get friends to read things out loud to him.

00:49:34.620 John is a sergeant in the Army National Guard,

00:49:37.280 serving one weekend a month.

00:49:39.300 To join the regular army, he has to sit for a battery of written tests.

00:49:44.580 Mildred sees reading as a massive obstacle in John's life, and she helps him.

00:49:49.340 She explains how and why years later to A&E.

00:49:53.780 I was happy.

00:49:56.000 He was trying to get into the military, but he couldn't read.

00:50:02.200 So I taught him how to read so that he was able to be accepted.

00:50:08.700 And that's when he moved to Washington State and asked me to come with him.

00:50:14.140 John sends Mildred a letter from Washington.

00:50:16.220 I can't do this without you.

00:50:18.240 Just come. Inside the envelope is an airline ticket. And so Mildred goes.

00:50:26.140 John divorces Carol in 1987 and marries Mildred the next year. They have three children,

00:50:32.920 a boy everyone calls little John and two girls, Selena and Taliba. They settle in Tacoma in 1994.

00:50:41.300 With $10,000 borrowed from their neighbors, they star a mobile car repair business called Express Car Slash Truck Mechanic, Inc.

00:50:51.460 Mildred is listed as the president. John is the chief mechanic.

00:50:55.140 Their motto is, the future is here now.

00:50:58.580 What John cannot fix on site comes home with him.

00:51:01.700 Soon the yard fills up with broken down cars, bumpers, and engine parts.

00:51:05.860 When they need an accountant, Mildred walks into a storefront in downtown Tacoma, advertising tax and bookkeeping services.

00:51:15.020 The woman inside is Issa Nichols.

00:51:18.040 She and Mildred are roughly the same age and hit it off, talking for two hours the first time they meet.

00:51:24.340 Issa becomes their bookkeeper and their business advisor and eventually Mildred's closest friend.

00:51:30.940 They have a second business in Tacoma, too.

00:51:33.920 A man named Felix teaches martial arts.

00:51:37.220 John runs the business end, and Mildred keeps the books.

00:51:40.680 The family rents a small home with a one-car garage on South Ainsworth Street,

00:51:45.940 two blocks from a city park with a spring-fed lake.

00:51:48.840 For a while, a neighbor describes them as a model family.

00:51:52.520 To people outside the family, John is charming.

00:51:56.200 But inside the home, Mildred learns to be afraid.

00:51:59.500 She later describes him toying with her mind.

00:52:02.800 One particular morning, I was at work.

00:52:08.060 He walked in and he said, I want a divorce.

00:52:13.300 And I looked at him and it was like somebody just stabbed me.

00:52:19.720 And I panicked.

00:52:23.080 I went home and I was crying.

00:52:26.880 Then John says, no, I was just playing.

00:52:29.740 I just wanted to see your reaction.

00:52:32.120 A dress vanishes, and he suggests she never had it.

00:52:36.780 A jacket turns up shredded, and he wonders why she would accuse him.

00:52:41.160 Then he blames their little boy.

00:52:43.260 He volunteers to fix a broken deadbolt, the same lock he jammed on purpose.

00:52:47.940 He changes the phone number to the house and does not tell her.

00:52:51.580 He needles her until she is shouting, and then John goes quiet,

00:52:55.620 asking her softly why she's so upset and what he could possibly have said.

00:52:59.660 He would say, I'm your God. You do what I tell you to do. I'm the God in this house.

00:53:07.740 Mildred points to one night in the summer of 1997 as a dark turning point in their marriage.

00:53:13.900 John's son, from his first marriage, 13-year-old Lindbergh, has come from Louisiana to visit.

00:53:20.240 As the summer ends, John decides he is not sending the boy back home.

00:53:25.040 He says he believes Lindbergh is being abused, and he hires a lawyer and goes to court.

00:53:30.420 A Tacoma judge orders John and Mildred to send the boy home.

00:53:34.640 They buy him a plane ticket.

00:53:36.600 The night before Lindbergh's flight home, Mildred finds John packing a duffel bag as

00:53:41.400 long as a twin bed.

00:53:43.080 I'm running away with Lindbergh, he says.

00:53:45.500 Mildred tells him there's a court order and that he cannot do this.

00:53:49.500 John pauses.

00:53:51.600 Mildred is not convinced he'll do the right thing.

00:53:54.280 She takes Lindbergh and her own three children with John into the second bedroom.

00:53:59.540 She locks the door and sits on the floor with her back against the door until morning.

00:54:04.600 By daylight, John has realized he's lost this fight.

00:54:08.520 He joins Mildred in the car driving Lindbergh to the airport.

00:54:12.480 No one speaks.

00:54:13.960 They walk the boy all the way to the gate and watch his plane take off.

00:54:17.960 The moment its wheels leave the runway, John turns sharply and walks away.

00:54:23.760 In the car, he says one thing to Mildred,

00:54:26.300 you didn't have my back.

00:54:28.500 That, Mildred says, is when the relationship changed forever.

00:54:33.160 The marriage fully breaks down by the spring of 2000.

00:54:36.600 John has moved out, they've been separated for months,

00:54:39.420 and he is tapping her phone lines,

00:54:41.740 falsely accusing Mildred of having an affair.

00:54:44.400 At one point after he and Mildred have separated,

00:54:47.660 John shows up to see their son, who is sick.

00:54:50.380 Mildred will not let him in.

00:54:52.040 She's scared of him.

00:54:53.060 He shoves the door so hard that Mildred is thrown to the floor.

00:54:56.560 She jumps up and takes a swing at him.

00:54:59.080 Misses.

00:54:59.940 She is shocked at her own actions.

00:55:02.120 She sees the expression on his face and thinks,

00:55:04.940 he is going to kill me.

00:55:07.180 A few days later, John comes back to the house.

00:55:10.140 He is nicely dressed in a shirt and tie.

00:55:13.020 He says he wants to talk and they step out to the garage.

00:55:16.180 As he speaks, she sees the cold fury in his eyes.

00:55:19.600 he told me you have become my enemy and as my enemy i will kill you john has always told

00:55:28.400 mildred that his word is his bond she believes him mildred goes straight away to the police

00:55:34.920 department and fills out the four-page form asking for a restraining order crying so hard

00:55:41.540 her tears drip onto the pages on the day of the hearing her legs shake as she walks into the

00:55:48.000 building. She stands where she can watch every door, and in her mind, she plans an escape route.

00:55:54.800 But John does not show up. The judge reads the forms she filled out and says,

00:56:00.240 you need to get away from this guy. Yes, sir, she says. I'm trying. With that, the judge grants

00:56:07.240 Mildred a lifetime protection order. Even so, Mildred later agrees to let John see his children.

00:56:15.160 On Monday, March 27, 2000, John calls and asks to take the children to an arcade.

00:56:22.520 Mildred agrees on one condition.

00:56:24.640 All three have to be home by 5.30 for their grandmother's birthday dinner.

00:56:28.900 John agrees.

00:56:30.440 5.30 comes and the children are not home.

00:56:33.380 John calls later in the evening.

00:56:35.420 He says there's a new plan with the children.

00:56:37.780 Then another after that.

00:56:39.720 They do not come home that night.

00:56:41.720 They will not come home for 17 months.

00:56:44.280 I called the police and they said, sorry, there's nothing we can do.

00:56:52.420 He has just as much a right to the children as you do.

00:56:56.220 And they left.

00:56:58.300 Within a day with $521 emptied out of the children's own bank accounts,

00:57:04.380 a man named Thomas Allen Lee, a.k.a. John Williams,

00:57:09.500 is on a plane to the Caribbean with his three kids,

00:57:12.340 also now with new names. They land in Antigua on the 28th of March with false Wyoming identification.

00:57:22.400 Antigua is a small island in the Caribbean, and there John Williams goes into business selling

00:57:28.120 forged papers to people trying to reach America. A passport, a birth certificate, a social security

00:57:34.600 number, a visa. Antiguan authorities will later estimate he made more than $60,000 with the scheme.

00:57:41.740 To the families who take him in, what is visible is a devoted father,

00:57:46.460 a man who checks his children's schoolwork and takes them to the beach.

00:57:50.600 But the people around him start noticing something strange.

00:57:54.380 The children answer to different names on different days.

00:57:57.960 Part of John's business is getting his customers onto flights into the United States.

00:58:03.240 He buys their tickets himself, sometimes thousands of dollars worth at a time.

00:58:08.100 An American Airlines ticket agent catches on to the scheme.

00:58:11.980 On March 11, 2001, John tries to buy yet another ticket for a customer under a false name.

00:58:17.700 The airline calls the police.

00:58:19.880 Officers come to the airport and search John.

00:58:22.540 They find a forged Washington state driver's license and a Florida birth certificate.

00:58:28.400 John is arrested and jailed at police headquarters in the Antigua capital city of St. John's.

00:58:35.160 Two days later, he escapes.

00:58:37.500 According to government reports, there's a gross lack of security,

00:58:40.540 and John's escape amounts to simply walking out of the police station.

00:58:45.100 The arrest does not slow John's forgery business a beat.

00:58:48.780 He recruits a teenage boy whom he met on Antigua to help keep the business running.

00:58:54.300 John leaves the island often.

00:58:56.600 He is escorting his customers into the United States,

00:59:00.000 routing them through Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, posing as a family member.

00:59:05.220 Every day, this teenage assistant walks 12 miles from St. John's to a safe house where John has moved the children.

00:59:12.880 The boy gives them four hours of lessons and then takes them to the park.

00:59:17.540 The boy's name is Leiboyd Malvo.

00:59:20.900 John Allen Williams, meanwhile, has gone back to Tacoma, Washington.

00:59:24.600 On April 23, 2001, he walks into a Pierce County District Court in Tacoma, Washington and petitions to officially change his name.

00:59:34.540 okay mr. Williams you seem to have your name changed just what is your current

00:59:40.940 legal name I currently legal name John Allen okay and what is the new name by

00:59:48.060 which you wish to be known John Allen Muhammad and why do you desire to be

00:59:52.340 known by this new name for our religion purpose are you changing your name for

00:59:56.720 any other reason no man are you changing your name to defraud or mislead any

01:00:01.520 person or creditor? No, ma'am. Are you involved in any legal proceeding other than this name

01:00:06.000 change? No, ma'am. And have you ever been convicted of a felony? No, ma'am. Are you

01:00:10.300 under supervision of any probation department that requires you to report a change of address?

01:00:14.340 No, ma'am. I'll go ahead and grant your name change. Thank you. John laughs aloud at how

01:00:19.180 simple the process is. The next day, the state of Washington issues him a driver's license

01:00:24.100 in the name of John Allen Muhammad. A month later, he flies back to Antigua using his

01:00:30.700 new legal name and checks into a beach resort.

01:00:34.740 On October 6th, 2002, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose walks up to the microphones

01:00:41.640 with the cameras rolling, trying to put the public's fears at ease.

01:00:46.600 He points out a pattern in the shooter's targets thus far.

01:00:50.560 None of the victims have been of anything close to school age.

01:00:54.700 None of the locations are close to the schools.

01:00:57.080 So please continue with that day.

01:00:58.880 I think the school kids are safe.

01:01:01.280 The next morning, that all changes.

01:01:04.680 Iron Brown has been banned from his school bus for three days for eating Twizzlers.

01:01:09.980 He is 13 years old, an eighth grader at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland.

01:01:15.440 And on the morning of Monday, October 7th, he is not sure whether the three days are up or not.

01:01:20.960 So his Aunt Tanya drives him to school.

01:01:23.620 She's a nurse at Children's Hospital in Washington.

01:01:26.200 At 8.09 a.m., they pull into the driveway, and Iron gets out, his backpack over a white football jersey.

01:01:34.640 As his aunt begins to pull away, she hears a boom and a child scream, and then Iron shouting,

01:01:42.000 Aunt Tanya.

01:01:43.420 She stops and looks back.

01:01:45.500 Iron is on the ground.

01:01:47.460 A single .223 caliber round has hit Iron in the upper left of his abdomen,

01:01:51.920 tearing through a lung, his spleen, stomach, liver, and pancreas. A teacher standing in the

01:01:59.220 doorway runs to him. What's wrong? The teacher says. I've been shot. Are you kidding? He is not

01:02:05.760 kidding. His aunt has backed the car up by now. Iron gets to his feet, tells her again that he's

01:02:12.300 been shot, and she can see the blood on his shirt. He walks back to the car himself and gets in.

01:02:19.080 His aunt buckles his seatbelt, dials 911, and drives.

01:02:23.780 By that evening, the story is on every channel in the country.

01:02:27.780 The boy suffered a wound consistent with a high-powered rifle.

01:02:31.020 After several hours of surgery, he is critical but stable.

01:02:35.080 The surgeon who operates on him is Dr. Martin Eichelberger,

01:02:39.380 chief of pediatric surgery at Children's National.

01:02:42.380 They open Iron's chest, they treat the injured left lung,

01:02:46.200 take out his smashed spleen, repair a nicked pancreas and a lacerated stomach.

01:02:52.220 And then with the ATF waiting outside the operating room,

01:02:55.720 Eichelberger looks at the x-ray and puts a finger on the boy's chest wall.

01:02:59.800 And I looked at the x-ray and put my finger down where I thought the bullet was,

01:03:05.340 and yes, I could palpate it with my finger.

01:03:07.980 I was able to pull out this bullet.

01:03:10.160 I gave it specifically to Dr. Newman, who gave it to a specific person.

01:03:16.200 to make sure that that chain of evidence was kept intact iron brown lives barely the detectives

01:03:24.920 hunting the shooters are now certain they are watching the news david reichenbaugh is a

01:03:30.600 lieutenant with the maryland state police running criminal intelligence on the case

01:03:35.160 he describes that day years later to investigation discovery chief moose was trying to set parents

01:03:42.360 at ease but the snipers were listening to every word that the media was putting out there and i

01:03:49.560 believe they heard chief moose say that the children would be safe and they took that as a

01:03:54.760 challenge that afternoon chief moose walks back out to the cameras a tear runs down the chief's

01:04:02.360 face on live television a stranger watching from across the country puts up fifty thousand dollars

01:04:08.760 of his own money toward catching whoever did this. Miles away, Mildred Muhammad hears about the boy

01:04:15.860 the same way everyone else does. I thought about his mom, how she must be in so much pain. I was

01:04:23.940 really sad for him and his family. No one is sure where the shot that hit Iron came from.

01:04:30.380 So the U.S. Marshals bring in a dog. His name is Beacon. He is half Black Lab and half Golden

01:04:36.940 retriever, and he flunked out of guide dog school before somebody trained him to sniff

01:04:41.400 explosives. Beacon and his handler, Deputy Marshal Michael Pio, go into the dense woods

01:04:48.800 north of the school with three SWAT officers guarding them. Pio is ducking through the

01:04:53.800 underbrush when one of the SWAT officers calls out, hey, look at your dog. Beacon is standing

01:05:00.380 up on his hind legs with his nose against a tree branch. Then he sits down, which is how he says

01:05:06.240 yes. Pio identifies this tree as the perfect spot to take the shot on Iron Brown, and the ground is

01:05:14.540 disturbed as though someone had lain there a while, waiting. Prince George's County brings in a

01:05:20.360 bloodhound named Miss Demeanor. She takes a trail out of the woods, along the tennis court, into a

01:05:26.760 parking lot, and stops. That is where the scent ends. So police walk the trail again, slowly. An

01:05:33.880 ATF agent sees something in the underbrush. It is the death card from the Rider Waite tarot deck.

01:05:41.740 A skeleton in black armor on a white horse. The Roman numeral 13 at the top and the word death

01:05:48.440 along the bottom. Written on the front in blue ink is the phrase, call me God. On the back,

01:05:55.800 three more messages. At the top, for you, Mr. Police. In the middle, code, call me God.

01:06:03.880 And at the bottom, a warning. Do not release to the press.

01:06:08.760 Drew Tracy, the assistant chief of the Montgomery County Police, describes it this way.

01:06:13.240 It was almost like a calling card saying that it's us again and we did it.

01:06:17.960 At that point in time, they did not ask for anything. And that's a scary situation.

01:06:23.320 They put the card in an evidence bag. Then they hold the bag open and let the bloodhound smell the inside of it.

01:06:29.640 She traces the scent along the same trail as before.

01:06:33.300 Officers find a .223 caliber rifle casing nearby.

01:06:37.740 This is from their guy.

01:06:39.900 The tarot card marks the first time the shooters spoke directly to the police,

01:06:44.440 but it certainly would not be the last.

01:06:47.140 A cryptic message from the killer, or killers, as more shots ring out across D.C.

01:06:52.980 How the twisted relationship between Muhammad and Malvo evolves into a lethal partnership.

01:06:59.500 That's next time on MK Confidential.

01:07:02.420 It is a drizzly Saturday evening in Tacoma, Washington, February 16th, 2002.

01:07:13.100 On the corner of East 34th Street and East Roosevelt Avenue,

01:07:18.100 there is a pale yellow house that looks out over the city's dockyards,

01:07:22.220 the Puyallup River, and the fog sitting on Commencement Bay.

01:07:26.540 The porch faces the street and the city spread out below it.

01:07:30.160 Beside the front door, a small sign reads,

01:07:32.100 please remove shoes. This house belongs to a U.S. Army soldier named Joseph Nichols and his wife,

01:07:39.760 Issa. Neither of them is home. Issa has gone to collect their 13-year-old daughter, Tamara,

01:07:46.540 from a sleepover. The only people in the house are the Nichols' 21-year-old niece, Kenya Cook,

01:07:54.420 who lives here with her aunt and uncle, and Kenya's six-month-old daughter, Angelia.

01:07:59.480 There is food on the stove. Upstairs, the baby is lying on a towel on a bed. It's nearly bath

01:08:06.520 time. At about seven o'clock, the doorbell rings. Kenya comes downstairs in a shirt, jeans, and

01:08:13.680 socks. The porch light is on, throwing light onto the front steps under the overhang that keeps

01:08:20.080 whoever is standing out there dry. But it is dark, and the window set into the front door is a long,

01:08:26.820 narrow strip of cut glass, it's hard to see anything through it. Everyone who knows Kenya

01:08:32.920 Cook says the same thing about her. She is careful. She would never open that door to a stranger.

01:08:39.260 So she has a reason. Maybe it's her estranged boyfriend who came by the house earlier in the

01:08:45.720 day. Or maybe through that narrow strip of glass, whoever is out there simply looks like a kid from

01:08:51.940 the neighborhood. Kenya opens the front door and looks out onto Roosevelt Avenue. A single bullet

01:08:58.900 goes through the thin bone just below her left eye and lodges at the base of her skull. She goes

01:09:05.620 down in the foyer. And then nothing happens. The ejected shell casing lies on the floor beside her.

01:09:14.560 Upstairs, the baby is still on her towel waiting to be washed. In the kitchen, the food is still

01:09:19.620 on the stove. A few minutes later, headlights turn into the driveway. Issa Nichols stays in the car

01:09:26.520 to pull it into the garage. Her daughter gets out and walks around to the front of the home

01:09:31.100 to go in the front door and open the garage from the inside. The front door is wide open,

01:09:37.820 which is odd. A second later, the 13-year-old is running back to the car. Mommy, she screams,

01:09:44.700 Mommy, hurry. Police look at Kenya's boyfriend first, because he had been at the house earlier

01:09:51.680 the same day. They bring him in, they question him, then they let him go. After that, there is

01:09:57.800 nowhere to go. There was a young woman dead in a foyer, a brass casing on the floor, and a doorbell

01:10:05.340 that rang. The case is cold right from the start. Issa Nichols has the blood cleaned out of the

01:10:12.260 foyer. Her husband installs a camera above the front door. There are no viable clues to go on.

01:10:19.320 For eight months, nobody knows who fired that shot, but there would be more, many more.

01:10:27.140 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

01:10:34.660 The person who rang Kenya Cook's doorbell is Leiboyd Malvo. He is 16 years old,

01:10:41.520 two days away from his 17th birthday. How did this teenager end up on that doorstep?

01:10:48.460 And the question that has never been settled about him, not in a courtroom, not in the 20 years since,

01:10:54.320 how much of what he did was his to choose? He's born in Kingston, Jamaica, on the 18th of February,

01:11:03.060 1985. His father is Leslie Malvo, a brick mason who went as far as the sixth grade.

01:11:11.520 He has other children, by other women, which in Jamaica at the time is neither unusual nor

01:11:16.980 a point of conversation. Of all his children, Leslie says Lee looks the most like him.

01:11:23.440 His mother is Una James. She is 20 when she has him. As a girl, she walked miles to find her own

01:11:30.600 father and asked him to pay for her schooling, and he said no. What she wants for her son is

01:11:36.260 the education she was refused. Leslie, the father, is the soft one. The boy says he wants to be a

01:11:44.220 pilot, so his dad folds him a paper plane and the two of them fly it around the furniture carefully

01:11:50.040 so as not to break anything. When the boy does break his mother's porcelain vase and hears her

01:11:55.380 shriek his name from the other room, it's Leslie who steps in front of him. Leave the boy alone,

01:12:00.840 he says, I broke it. He takes his son everywhere. He calls him little man. Una is the hard one.

01:12:09.480 Playing is an interruption of studying. And by his father's account, when Leslie is not there,

01:12:15.020 she beats Malvo. In 1988, Leslie takes a masonry contract in Grand Cayman, six months at a stretch.

01:12:23.620 He sends money home twice a month and opens a savings account because he's going to buy them

01:12:28.680 a house. He never does. In August of 1990, Una empties the account, packs up the entire house,

01:12:36.740 and moves the boys somewhere she is fairly sure Leslie will not find them. But Leslie does find

01:12:42.840 them in the summer of 1991, and he brings two flight jackets covered in military tags because

01:12:49.720 he remembered his son wants to be a pilot. And then he goes away for good. Malvo is only five.

01:12:58.680 Malvo is nine, the first time his mother leaves him.

01:13:02.240 She boards him with a woman he met the day before.

01:13:05.020 This is the first of many separations.

01:13:08.280 Over the next five years, Malvo is handed from one household to another.

01:13:12.760 When he's 10, he goes looking for his father,

01:13:15.460 finds him, and asks if he can stay.

01:13:18.980 Leslie tells him no.

01:13:21.420 Malvo believes the real reason was the woman with whom his father was living,

01:13:25.160 who treated Malvo like an intrusion.

01:13:28.200 Through all of it, Malvo is consistently on the honor roll at school.

01:13:32.880 In January of 1999, Malvo's mother leaves Jamaica for the Caribbean island of Antigua

01:13:40.080 in the care of a friend and then of a teacher.

01:13:44.260 She sends for him to join her in the summer of 1999.

01:13:47.760 He is 14 when he reaches Antigua, and his mother is the only person he knows on the island.

01:13:52.780 In the early days of October 2000, in St. John's, the capital of Antigua, there is an

01:14:00.400 electronics shop called Zaza Yellows, where the neighborhood kids go to use the computers

01:14:05.240 and play video games.

01:14:07.680 Malvo goes there.

01:14:09.220 The place is usually crowded, so mostly he finds a corner and watches other people play.

01:14:13.840 And on several Fridays, he notices a father and a son.

01:14:18.000 They're playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, and they're laughing.

01:14:22.780 The boy is flying from the outside view and his father says, nice scenery, but remind me not to

01:14:28.040 fly with you. Malvo stands in the corner and watches them. He's now 15 years old. Malvo says

01:14:35.120 later the level of trust, their open camaraderie, and the communication between them was something

01:14:40.180 he had always dreamed of, but until then had never experienced, not since his mom first took

01:14:45.720 him away from his dad. Malvo admires the father in that shop. When he walks in, everyone straightens

01:14:51.780 up. He talks to children the way he talks to adults. When someone speaks to him, he lets

01:14:56.900 them finish. He repeats back what they said to make sure he understood, and only then does he

01:15:01.780 answer. Malvo's mother, who is trying to get to America, hears there's an American on the island

01:15:08.720 who sells visas. She takes her son with her to the address on Rose Street. The American turns out to

01:15:15.720 be the man from Zaza Yellows, who was so good with his own son. His name is John Allen Muhammad.

01:15:23.800 He is a United States Army veteran. He lives on Antigua with his three children, and he sells

01:15:29.680 forged papers to people trying to reach America. While his mother negotiates, Malvo gets to know

01:15:36.040 Muhammad's son. The boy's name is John Jr., and his nickname is Little Man. The same name Leslie

01:15:43.220 Malvo used to call his son in Kingston before any of this. Little man and I hit it off, Malvo writes

01:15:50.620 in his journal, when we learned we both wanted to be pilots. Una buys her papers, memorizes her

01:15:57.720 cover story, and flies to the United States. She tells her son Malvo that she will send for him

01:16:03.700 to come to the United States when she has the money. She pays for the rest of the term at his

01:16:08.620 school, covers two months' rent, and leaves him to fend for himself. In Antigua, he has literally

01:16:15.120 no one. He is 15. A few months later, alone in the house, Lee Malvo gets sick. It's a recurrence

01:16:24.060 of the rheumatic fever he had as a child. His joints ache. His tonsils swell shut. For two days,

01:16:31.200 he cannot get out of bed to call anybody or even feed himself. By Malvo's own account given years

01:16:37.300 later prepared with his defense team, he describes what happened next, quote, then Mr. Muhammad came

01:16:43.580 by one day and found the back door slightly ajar. Upon entering, he saw me in bed, sweating and

01:16:49.880 almost delirious with fever. He lifted me out of bed and carried me out in his arms because I was

01:16:56.260 too weak to walk. He took me to the doctor and then to his place of residence. I was fed with

01:17:02.040 fluids, and soup. What was truly amazing was that he spent a lot of time ensuring that

01:17:07.060 I was okay, and he never asked for payment. After that, they go everywhere together.

01:17:13.780 Carmeta Albaros, the social worker who later worked on Malvo's defense,

01:17:18.560 describes them as disciple and guru. Muhammad talks, Malvo listens. Malvo tells him about his

01:17:26.040 father, his mother, and the beatings. Muhammad tells him they did not meet by coincidence.

01:17:32.240 They met by destiny. He starts introducing Malvo as his son, and Malvo starts calling him dad.

01:17:40.000 Muhammad teaches him to speak with an American accent. On his 16th birthday, he takes them

01:17:45.520 shopping and replaces his entire wardrobe. He takes him to a tailor and has him measured for

01:17:51.340 three suits. One woman who watched them in Antigua says Muhammad treated Malvo like a little soldier,

01:17:57.660 yes sir, no sir, like he was in the army. Malvo will later say these were the happiest days of

01:18:04.180 his life. On the last day of May 2001, Lee Malvo enters the United States, flying out of Antigua

01:18:11.820 with Muhammad and Muhammad's three children under a name that is not his. He travels as Lindbergh

01:18:19.040 Williams, Muhammad's son, by his first marriage. He is handed over to his mother, Una, now in

01:18:25.760 Florida. He registers at a high school in Fort Myers and starts earning A's and B's. And in

01:18:32.180 October, he runs. He leaves before dawn, takes a bus west, and gets off in Bellingham, Washington,

01:18:39.080 15 miles from the Canadian border. He's running toward a man who six weeks earlier

01:18:44.040 walked out of a Tacoma courtroom without his own children.

01:18:48.600 In August, Muhammad had applied for food stamps in Washington State

01:18:52.340 and filled in his children's real names, the names flagged in a state system.

01:18:57.400 That led back to his ex-wife, Mildred,

01:19:00.260 who had legal custody and a restraining order against Muhammad.

01:19:04.700 On the 4th of September, a court commissioner in Pierce County

01:19:07.720 hands all three children back to their mother.

01:19:10.820 There is tape of the hearing.

01:19:13.160 So the children were never missing?

01:19:14.740 The whereabouts were never known by mother.

01:19:16.700 That's why the court apparently issued the writ.

01:19:19.660 You never responded to the published summons for divorce.

01:19:23.400 So are you telling me the reason why I don't have my children

01:19:26.240 won't be to keep my children because I don't have the proper paperwork yet?

01:19:30.020 No, I'm saying that you've been divorced.

01:19:32.220 The court has entered orders that mother had sole residential placement,

01:19:35.920 care and custody of the children,

01:19:37.540 and that you get no visitation at present without further court orders.

01:19:42.640 So I understand I'm not able to see my children.

01:19:47.000 Mildred takes the three of them and disappears to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.

01:19:52.420 John Muhammad has a name for that day.

01:19:55.280 He calls it his own September 11th.

01:19:58.140 So when the boy gets off the bus in Bellingham,

01:20:01.200 he finds Muhammad now childless and living in a Christian homeless shelter

01:20:05.360 called the Lighthouse Mission.

01:20:07.540 They sign in under the last name Thomas.

01:20:10.800 One resident leader tells authorities that Muhammad put the word out that he wanted his wife killed.

01:20:17.120 He wanted it secret and anonymous.

01:20:19.460 He talked about shooting her from a car.

01:20:22.120 He talked about making a silencer out of a Coke bottle.

01:20:26.100 Then he talked about cutting a gun port into the vehicle.

01:20:30.140 In February of 2002, Muhammad and Malvo move into an apartment near a golf course in Tacoma.

01:20:36.880 It belongs to a man named Earl Dancy, who works at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.

01:20:43.960 Dancy has things Mohammed wants.

01:20:46.460 A Chinese-made version of the AK-47, a Winchester with a scope, a Remington .308 hunting rifle,

01:20:54.280 a .44 Magnum revolver, a .22 pistol, and a compact Sig Sauer .45.

01:21:00.860 Dancy gives them the run of the apartment and free use of the guns.

01:21:05.220 Why would he do that?

01:21:06.880 Years later, Dancy explains it in the documentary series, Born to Kill.

01:21:13.020 Very manipulative. He gains your confidence. He gains your trust.

01:21:16.860 Once he comfortable your trust, he'll use it to his advantage.

01:21:20.200 They take the guns out to the Tacoma Sportsman's Club,

01:21:24.000 and Dancy notices that Muhammad is obsessed with the boy's marksmanship.

01:21:28.180 He coaches him. He brags about how well he's coming along.

01:21:31.640 And when Malvo makes a mistake, Muhammad makes him run laps and do push-ups.

01:21:37.520 Malvo always obeys.

01:21:39.780 The targets are paper men.

01:21:42.060 Here's Dancy again.

01:21:43.680 At a period of time, they would bring targets to me.

01:21:46.660 And the targets were getting better and better.

01:21:49.240 And actually one where the target was actually dead shot, center mass.

01:21:54.100 Two weeks after he first takes the boy to a range, Muhammad hands him a gift.

01:21:58.500 It's a t-shirt with the word sniper across the front.

01:22:02.880 He tells Malvo he won it in a sniper competition in the 90s.

01:22:06.880 Malva wears it. Muhammad tells Earl Dancy that he qualified as a sniper in the army.

01:22:13.360 He's telling Dancy other things, too. That his ex-wife and one of her friends conspired to take

01:22:20.160 his children and that he's going to get them for it. He has Dancy sit down at his computer and

01:22:26.640 search for Mildred Muhammad on the internet. Dancy finds her. She's in the Washington, D.C. area,

01:22:33.660 Which brings us back to a doorbell in Tacoma, shortly before a cross-country journey will begin.

01:22:42.260 Authorities believe that on the drizzly evening of February 16, 2002, it was Lee Boyd Malvo who borrowed Earl Dancy's compact Sig Sauer 45 and carried it across town to the corner of East 34th and East Roosevelt.

01:22:59.300 By Malvo's own account, given years later to his defense team,

01:23:03.760 Mohamed spends the weeks beforehand making sure the boy is ready.

01:23:08.300 Failure is not an option.

01:23:10.220 Your pace must be certain, he tells him, like a man who knows where he's going.

01:23:14.880 Then he drives Malvo to the home.

01:23:17.480 Before he lets him out of the car, he makes him say the plan out loud.

01:23:21.220 Knock on the door.

01:23:22.420 Ask for Issa.

01:23:24.360 If it's Issa, good.

01:23:26.240 If it's not, say you have a message for her.

01:23:28.760 and then use this. Issa Nichols, whose home this is, used to manage the Mohammeds' books.

01:23:37.080 She became Mildred's close friend and testified for her during the custody fight. Issa is one

01:23:43.580 of the people Mohammed blames for the loss of his children, but she isn't home. Her niece is.

01:23:51.840 Kenya Cook answers the door. She's 21 and has nothing to do with Mohammed's custody fight.

01:23:58.760 She tells Lee Boyd Malvo where her aunt has gone.

01:24:02.580 He shoots her anyway.

01:24:04.700 By his account, he runs to a phone booth, sweating and crying.

01:24:09.420 Muhammad pulls up and Malvo gets in.

01:24:12.720 I watched you, Muhammad tells him.

01:24:14.780 You did perfect.

01:24:17.080 Then he hands the boy a wallet with a new ID card in it.

01:24:21.140 Malvo reads the name on it.

01:24:22.960 John Lee Muhammad.

01:24:24.980 Lee Boyd Malvo no longer exists, Muhammad says.

01:24:28.760 and starts the engine. Malvo says he stood in the shower for hours and couldn't get clean,

01:24:35.900 that Mohammed got impatient and knocked on the bathroom door, and that the knocking on the door

01:24:40.360 was the worst part. Two days later, it's his 17th birthday. Mohammed takes him to the mall

01:24:48.320 and buys him slacks, shirts, ties, cufflinks, and sneakers. Then he takes him bowling and then to

01:24:55.660 the movies. The film is John Q with Denzel Washington. A man's son needs a heart operation

01:25:02.400 he cannot pay for, so he takes an emergency room hostage. And while they are bowling, Malvo will

01:25:09.120 later say, Mohamed lectures him on the importance of a man doing whatever he has to to save his

01:25:16.800 children. A month later, they're in Arizona. On the 19th of March, at a golf course in Tucson,

01:25:24.960 a 60-year-old frozen foods salesman named Jerry Ray Taylor is practicing his game after lunch.

01:25:32.220 He goes down on the course, shot in the back. Whoever shot him drags his body into the underbrush,

01:25:38.860 appears to have pulled out Jerry's wallet, but leaves it next to him, the cash and cards still

01:25:44.540 inside. And that is how it goes for seven months. A murder in one state, then a bus ticket, then a

01:25:53.000 murder in another one under a different name in a jurisdiction that has never heard of the last one.

01:26:00.400 September 5th, 2002, half past 10 at night, a strip mall in Clinton, Maryland. Restaurant owner

01:26:08.220 Paul LaRuffa has just closed for the night. He walks out across the lot with an employee

01:26:14.360 and a customer carrying a black leather briefcase with about $3,500 in it and a laptop. He opens the

01:26:22.120 back door of his green Chrysler, puts them both on the seat, and gets in the driver's seat. There

01:26:27.940 is a shadow at the driver's side window, a small figure, he will say. Then the window comes apart

01:26:34.300 and bullets go into his arm and his chest and his side. And as he leans away from it, someone yanks

01:26:41.320 open the back door of his car and lifts the briefcase and the laptop off of the seat.

01:26:47.600 La Ruffa gets his door open and staggers out onto the lot, shouting for someone to call 9-1-1,

01:26:53.600 telling himself over and over that he is not going to die in this parking lot. And he doesn't.

01:27:00.340 He's been shot five or six times, but he lives. That $3,500 pays for what comes next.

01:27:09.700 On September 21st, outside a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama, a manager named Claudine

01:27:16.720 Parker is shot dead. The 24-year-old cashier, Kelly Adams, is also shot through the neck and

01:27:23.280 lives. Officers are close enough to hear it. They chase a man and he gets away. And on the ground

01:27:30.400 where he ran, they find something and they bag it and they file it away. Two days later in Baton

01:27:37.920 Rouge, Louisiana, a woman named Hong Im Ballinger locks up the beauty supply store where she works

01:27:43.960 and reaches her car with her keys in her hand. She is killed by a single shot to the head.

01:27:50.760 A few blocks from that strip mall in Clinton, Maryland, where Paul LaRuffa was shot and his

01:27:55.360 $3,500 were stolen, there is a subdivision with streets named Black Willow and Mayapple

01:28:02.280 and Quiet Brook Lane.

01:28:05.080 Living on Quiet Brook Lane that September

01:28:07.560 is the woman Earl Dancy found on the internet.

01:28:11.840 A 41-year-old divorced mother of three

01:28:14.240 who moved across the country from Tacoma, Washington

01:28:17.300 to get away from her husband.

01:28:20.180 Her name is Mildred Muhammad.

01:28:23.440 Robert Holmes, one of Muhammad's oldest army friends,

01:28:26.560 would later say he believed Mildred was always the real target.

01:28:31.820 My way of thinking was Mildred was the target in the mission.

01:28:35.860 Because if it was just to terrorize people or to kill people even, that could have been done anywhere.

01:28:41.980 If you kill 10 people and she's one of the 10, then it's less likely.

01:28:47.420 I mean, there's still a chance that you're going to get caught, but it's less likely.

01:28:50.740 By the second week of October, 11 people are dead in this killing spree.

01:28:55.820 Six of them in the D.C. area this month.

01:28:59.260 Two more shot and still alive, and thousands of local and state police,

01:29:04.480 sheriffs, deputies, federal agents, marshals, and technicians are now hunting two men,

01:29:10.440 whom they still believe may be a single sniper in a white van.

01:29:15.260 Roadblocks shut down interstates within minutes of each murder.

01:29:19.020 The task force knows that there's a rifle and there's a vehicle.

01:29:23.180 They know the crimes are connected by the same gun, and that is it.

01:29:27.420 October 9th, the next victim.

01:29:30.100 A 53-year-old civil engineer named Dean Myers

01:29:32.940 is working late at his office in Manassas, Virginia

01:29:36.160 because he works late almost every night.

01:29:38.880 He was drafted in 1969 and shot on a patrol north of Saigon.

01:29:43.820 He came home with a purple heart

01:29:45.460 and an arm that never fully worked again.

01:29:48.940 A little after eight,

01:29:50.020 a colleague in the next cubicle says goodnight.

01:29:52.960 Okay, Myers says, see you tomorrow.

01:29:56.520 Myers has a long drive and he needs gas. He pulls his black Mazda into the battlefield

01:30:02.420 Sunoco on Sudley Road. He is standing in the white light of the pump island in the cold and

01:30:08.420 the wet when a shot cracks and a .223 round out of a rifle, very like the one he carried in Vietnam,

01:30:16.120 hits him behind the left ear. He is dead before he lands. Police seal the roads for miles.

01:30:22.740 They find nothing. October 11th, two days later, a 53-year-old businessman from Philadelphia named

01:30:31.060 Kenneth Bridges pulls off Interstate 95 near Fredericksburg, Virginia to fill his tank.

01:30:37.860 He has six children, and everybody has warned him about this stretch of road. He stops anyway.

01:30:44.820 Kenneth calls his wife Jocelyn from the Pump Island to tell her where he is.

01:30:48.980 She thinks about warning him one more time.

01:30:51.660 She doesn't.

01:30:53.100 He'll be out of there in a few minutes, she thinks,

01:30:55.260 and there's a Virginia State trooper 50 yards away working a fender bender.

01:30:59.580 Surely no one would fire a rifle with a trooper standing right there.

01:31:03.580 At 9.28 a.m., Kenneth Bridges puts the nozzle in his tank.

01:31:08.240 The trooper hears the shot, runs to him,

01:31:11.540 and works on Kenneth until the rescue squad arrives.

01:31:14.520 By then, there is no pulse.

01:31:17.080 The trooper never sees a man with a rifle.

01:31:20.100 No one at that gas station does.

01:31:23.320 October 14th, three days later.

01:31:26.540 Just before half past seven in the evening,

01:31:28.880 Ted and Linda Franklin drive their red mercury into the parking lot

01:31:32.440 at the Home Depot in the Seven Corners Shopping Center near Falls Church, Virginia.

01:31:37.860 Linda Franklin is 47 and an intelligence analyst at the FBI.

01:31:42.540 eye. She has recently had a double mastectomy, and she's still in physical therapy. Her daughter

01:31:48.580 is about to make her a grandmother. They spend an hour and a half inside buying shelves for a house

01:31:54.440 they're about to move into. A little after nine, they wheel the cart out to the car.

01:31:59.840 One of the shelves will not fit. It's too long for the trunk, so they put the back seat down

01:32:04.740 and try to feed it through, which doesn't work either. Ted holds the cart to stop it from rolling,

01:32:09.960 while Linda tries to wrestle the shelf in through the passenger door.

01:32:14.440 She's having trouble with it.

01:32:16.420 Why don't you come and hold the cart, Ted says.

01:32:19.240 I'll see if I can put it in.

01:32:21.340 They switch places.

01:32:23.060 As Ted is ducking in and out of the car with the shelf,

01:32:26.500 he hears a loud noise and feels something spray across his face.

01:32:31.940 He assumes the noise came from inside the store,

01:32:34.620 where they're always dropping pallets.

01:32:37.100 The spray is what gets his attention.

01:32:39.680 When he turns around, his wife, Linda, is on the pavement.

01:32:44.120 Inside the store, people are screaming.

01:32:46.860 Employees are shouting at each other to shut the doors.

01:32:49.980 Within minutes, the lot fills with police.

01:32:53.180 No one standing in it can tell anybody where the shot came from.

01:32:57.700 Malvo will tell investigators years later exactly where he had been lying.

01:33:01.980 In the documentary series Born to Kill, ballistics expert Jeff Miller walks through that account.

01:33:08.840 Malvo said that he was lying here in this parking lot here at the community center near this stairway.

01:33:14.840 And while Mohammed was providing a lookout for him, he was able to look across this parking lot, across the highway,

01:33:22.840 and underneath the parking garage here at the Home Depot store.

01:33:25.840 And Mr. and Mrs. Franklin were loading purchases into the back of their car,

01:33:30.840 and the two of them were standing just underneath the home in the Home Depot store about halfway through the parking lot.

01:33:37.840 The bullet entered the left side of her head, and as it exited her head, it started to fragment inside and caused a very traumatic injury to her head.

01:33:46.640 When Lee Malvo eventually goes on trial in Virginia, his defense is built by Carmeta Alvarez, who traveled to Jamaica and Antigua and interviewed his family, and by the psychologists, who spent months with Malvo.

01:34:01.400 They describe a course of instruction.

01:34:04.340 The boy is given tapes, and he listens to them nightly.

01:34:08.400 And years later, he can still name them.

01:34:10.800 Message to the Black Man, the Willie Lynch speech.

01:34:14.420 Malcolm X played in question-and-answer sessions while riding along on Muhammad's rounds.

01:34:20.720 And this is not only Malvo's account.

01:34:23.880 On Antigua, the woman who first took Muhammad's family in had noticed Muhammad borrowing her CD player

01:34:29.980 and playing tapes to his own children after they'd fallen asleep.

01:34:33.600 Her daughter watched him do it.

01:34:36.160 He was subliminally indoctrinating and hypnotizing them, she says.

01:34:41.380 Dr. Dewey Cornell was Malvo's court-appointed psychologist.

01:34:45.320 He spent 53 hours with Malvo, trying to understand his motivation.

01:34:50.060 It really started to remind me very quickly of someone who was part of a political underground

01:34:56.300 or maybe part of a cult movement who had been brainwashed or indoctrinated.

01:35:03.360 Lee Malvo basically killed because John Muhammad wanted him to kill.

01:35:07.160 The prosecution in Virginia argued the opposite, that Malvo was a willing and equal participant,

01:35:14.300 and the investigators who have worked the case have never accepted the word brainwashing.

01:35:19.200 They had witnesses who put the two of them apart, they said. Malvo had every opportunity to leave.

01:35:26.000 Dr. Evan Nelson conducted a court-ordered sanity evaluation of Malvo for the prosecution.

01:35:32.080 He interviewed Malvo and came to a very different conclusion.

01:35:36.040 In my opinion, it wasn't brainwashing.

01:35:38.100 This was the case of a young man who was eager to learn things

01:35:41.240 and an older man who was eager to teach.

01:35:43.740 So I think that young Mr. Malvo found somebody who he could idolize

01:35:47.940 and adore and choose to follow as compared to being brainwashed.

01:35:52.240 By the time the D.C. area shootings begin,

01:35:55.540 Mohamed and Malvo are operating out of a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice

01:36:00.680 with more than 100,000 miles on it and New Jersey plates. They bought it for $250 from a used car

01:36:08.300 lot in Trenton called, of all things, Sure Shot Auto Sales, with the money taken off of Paul

01:36:15.420 LaRufa's back seat. It is a former police cruiser and so unremarkable that police run its plates

01:36:21.820 again and again during the spree and keep handing it back clean. The back seat has been cut loose

01:36:28.380 and re-hung so the seat back swings up on a hinge at the top like a hatch. And in the trunk lid,

01:36:36.180 just above a license plate, there is a hole, a gun port. Inside the trunk, they have built a

01:36:42.660 small platform so the rifle's bipod stands at exactly the height of that hole. A man can lie

01:36:49.240 flat on his stomach with his feet braced against the back of the front seat and point the muzzle

01:36:54.740 through the port in the trunk. From outside, no one sees a shooter. They see a parked car with

01:37:00.980 tinted windows. The trunk lid only has to open two inches to allow the shooter to aim. The car

01:37:08.000 simply drives away. The setup was not invented on the road halfway through a killing spree.

01:37:14.260 It was designed out loud in a homeless shelter in Bellingham, Washington, a year earlier by a man

01:37:21.020 explaining how he intended to shoot his wife and get away with it. By the middle of October,

01:37:27.900 the task force is enormous, and it is looking for the wrong man. The profile television keeps

01:37:34.140 repeating is a lone gunman, white, military-trained, angry, driving a white van. But at Quantico,

01:37:42.980 in a room where FBI profilers are arguing about this case around a table, two of them are studying

01:37:49.440 something the shooters left behind earlier in the spree. A tarot card with a handwritten message

01:37:56.400 for the police. And they aren't seeing that man at all. One is Supervisory Special Agent Jim

01:38:03.640 Clemente. The other is his colleague, James Fitzgerald, or Fitz, who's been building a new

01:38:09.440 discipline inside the Bureau called Forensic Linguistics, which looks at what a person's

01:38:14.740 word choice reveals about them. When Jim Clemente sat down with me, he described that room.

01:38:21.680 He says, this is for you, Mr. Police, as if he's looking up to the police.

01:38:25.880 If this guy is an adult, he's just barely adult, but I'm thinking he's younger.

01:38:31.280 Nobody in that room wants to hear it. The shooting is too disciplined. It's too well-planned,

01:38:36.840 professionally executed to have been done by a kid, which leaves Clemente with two options,

01:38:42.700 and he puts them both on the table.

01:38:45.380 Either we have a situation

01:38:47.480 where we have a 45-year-old man

01:38:50.780 who's incredibly experienced,

01:38:52.380 who's incredibly great at planning

01:38:53.760 and executing these shootings,

01:38:54.980 but he decompensates when he's communicating with us

01:38:59.060 and he acts like a teenager

01:39:01.160 or for the first time in U.S. criminal history,

01:39:05.620 we have a sniper team and everybody blew up.

01:39:08.020 No, snipers don't play well with each other.

01:39:10.400 They don't, they work alone.

01:39:11.800 But Clemente and Fitzgerald have a different idea.

01:39:15.960 They think this is a pair.

01:39:18.620 One old enough to plan it all, one young enough to communicate like a child.

01:39:24.060 Next time on MK Confidential, Clemente and Fitz back together again.

01:39:30.280 An exclusive MK Confidential interview.

01:39:32.920 Plus the haunting words, call me God.

01:39:36.600 Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.

01:39:40.060 A police chief negotiating with a killer through a bank of microphones, a whole country watching the wrong vehicle, and a letter nailed to a tree behind a steakhouse that finally tells the task force what these two men actually want.

01:39:59.660 Six o'clock in the morning, Sunday, October 20th, 2002, Ashland, Virginia, about a block and a half off Interstate 95.

01:40:08.960 The Ponderosa Steakhouse is closed and dark.

01:40:12.280 It has been closed since the night before when a man was shot in its parking lot.

01:40:17.440 The lot is still taped off as a crime scene.

01:40:20.160 Inside, in the hall by the front doors, there is a public telephone.

01:40:24.600 At exactly 6 a.m., it rings.

01:40:27.520 One of the men standing outside is an FBI agent.

01:40:30.820 He hears the phone ringing inside the locked building and says,

01:40:34.680 somebody should get in there and answer it.

01:40:36.540 No one does. It is not his crime scene. His hands are tied. The phone continues ringing, then stops.

01:40:47.380 Six hours earlier, around midnight, in the woods behind that restaurant, investigators find a

01:40:54.120 plastic sandwich bag tacked to a tree with two white thumbtacks. It looks like a Halloween bag,

01:41:00.540 the kind of child takes trick-or-treating. Folded inside it is a letter written on pink paper

01:41:07.000 with stars stuck to it. Investigators bag it unopened. It goes to a lab in the morning

01:41:13.960 and is finally read around noon. The letter is handwritten and there are detailed instructions.

01:41:21.660 It's from the snipers who have been terrorizing Washington, D.C. for nearly three weeks.

01:41:25.940 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.

01:41:37.180 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

01:41:44.520 Jim Clemente and James Fitzgerald were in the room where the true profile of these killers begins to take shape.

01:41:52.300 Both are retired FBI profilers.

01:41:55.300 Fitz is also a forensic linguist.

01:41:57.060 The agent who heard the phone ring from the parking lot is Tim Clemente, Jim's brother.

01:42:03.580 By the middle of October 2002, the men doing the shooting have started to message the police.

01:42:09.560 It starts 13 days before that phone rings with a card in the woods.

01:42:15.100 October 7th, a 13-year-old boy named Iron Brown is dropped off at Benjamin Tasker Middle School

01:42:21.740 in Bowie, Maryland, and is shot as he walks toward the door. He lives. Police follow the trajectory

01:42:28.640 back into the treeline, where a U.S. Marshals Service dog stops at a fallen branch and sits.

01:42:34.980 The ground there is flattened the way ground looks when someone has been lying on it.

01:42:39.960 Cadets rake the area and turn up a spent .223 casing.

01:42:44.280 Near it, an ATF agent finds a tarot card lying face up in the brush.

01:42:49.740 It is the death card.

01:42:51.620 On the front is a skeleton in armor on a white horse carrying a black flag.

01:42:56.780 Across the top, handwritten in blue ink,

01:42:59.600 Call Me God.

01:43:01.340 On the back, another handwritten message.

01:43:04.480 For you, Mr. Police.

01:43:06.120 and code, call me God, do not release to the press. That's the entire message. The first and

01:43:15.280 only real clues to the shooter's identity and his first known effort to communicate. 13 words,

01:43:21.660 maybe 14. No one wants word of that card to leave this room. The lead homicide detective,

01:43:28.300 Joseph Bergstrom, calls it an ace in the hole and warns a briefing of two dozen task force members

01:43:33.440 that someone there might leak it.

01:43:36.900 That night on the 11 o'clock news,

01:43:40.100 WUSA in Washington reports that a tarot card has been found at the school.

01:43:45.080 The Washington Post has it too.

01:43:47.360 Both outlets get the wording wrong.

01:43:49.800 It was a card from a fortune-telling deck that's known as the death card

01:43:54.020 with a note written on it,

01:43:55.720 Dear Policeman, I am God.

01:43:57.660 It's the latest chilling development in this chilling case and massive investigation.

01:44:03.440 Dear Policeman, I am God, which is not what the card said.

01:44:08.580 And neither outlet initially reports the line that mattered most to the man who wrote it.

01:44:13.200 Quote, do not release to the press.

01:44:15.940 The next morning, Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose walks out to the cameras.

01:44:21.200 I have not received any message that the citizens of Montgomery County

01:44:25.480 want Channel 9 or The Washington Post or any other media outlet to solve this case.

01:44:31.540 If they do, then let me know.

01:44:33.600 We will go and do other police work, and we will turn this case over to the media.

01:44:38.360 But to date, the people in my community have asked the police department to work the case.

01:44:43.260 So I beg of the media, let us do our job.

01:44:46.820 Moose says later that much of the anger was an act.

01:44:50.200 He assumed the men who left the card were watching,

01:44:53.240 and he wanted them to see the leak had not come from him.

01:44:56.640 Twelve days later, another communication.

01:44:59.920 It arrives the same way.

01:45:02.160 Someone has to be shot first.

01:45:04.800 Saturday, October 19th.

01:45:07.280 Jeff and Stephanie Hopper have been driving for nine days.

01:45:11.120 He is 37, a computer consultant.

01:45:13.820 They are driving from Melbourne, Florida, where they live, to Pennsylvania to see her sister.

01:45:18.820 They've heard about the shooter along I-95 and are careful not to buy gas anywhere near Washington.

01:45:24.640 so they stop in Ashland instead, a hundred miles south of D.C.

01:45:30.080 The hoppers have dinner at the Ponderosa, steak and salad.

01:45:34.840 Just before 8 p.m., they walk out across the parking lot toward their white Cadillac holding hands.

01:45:40.500 They both hear a loud noise.

01:45:42.820 Stephanie thinks a car has backfired.

01:45:45.680 Jeff puts his hand on his stomach, goes down slowly and says,

01:45:50.240 I think I've been shot.

01:45:52.400 She kneels over him.

01:45:54.300 He says, I love you.

01:45:55.640 She says, I love you.

01:45:57.520 They say the Lord's Prayer together.

01:46:00.180 Then she tries to dial 911 and cannot get her phone keypad unlocked,

01:46:04.220 so she starts shouting at people in the lot to call.

01:46:08.160 Ashlyn patrolman Tim Meacham is there in two minutes.

01:46:11.640 He stops his cruiser at the end of the sidewalk,

01:46:13.780 so the car is between the hoppers and the woods.

01:46:16.420 Jeff was laying in the parking lot, and Stephanie was sitting on the sidewalk.

01:46:20.800 and she was holding pressure on his stomach.

01:46:24.500 I told her that I need to verify the injury,

01:46:27.220 so she lifted up the towel that she was holding on it

01:46:29.380 and I saw a hole about the size of a nickel

01:46:32.340 in the top of the victim's stomach.

01:46:35.080 Meacham says she was the calmest person

01:46:37.180 he has ever seen at a scene like this.

01:46:40.120 He tells her the thing to do with a bleed

01:46:41.900 is to hold pressure, that it isn't rocket science.

01:46:45.940 She starts laughing, so does her husband.

01:46:48.880 She started to chuckle.

01:46:50.240 The victim started to laugh.

01:46:52.040 And at this point, I'm like, okay, can you guys let me in on the joke?

01:46:56.400 Well, she was a rocket scientist for NASA.

01:46:59.700 So me telling her that it wasn't rocket science, she kind of knew that already.

01:47:04.220 The round has gone in under his sternum and come apart inside him.

01:47:08.200 When the ambulance crew gets to him, they keep asking him how old he is.

01:47:13.120 I'm 37, he tells them, and I hope to reach 38.

01:47:17.120 He will.

01:47:18.720 Behind the restaurant, there is a wooded lot and it is completely dark.

01:47:22.940 The plan is to wait for daylight.

01:47:25.200 An ATF agent named Ray Neely argues against it.

01:47:28.700 He has a yellow lab named Garrett who finds gunpowder and says the dog does not need to wait for daylight.

01:47:34.220 The smell will never be stronger than it is right now.

01:47:37.580 That's when I saw the rub mark.

01:47:40.040 There was a small tree about maybe two inches in diameter with a small vine.

01:47:44.980 And when I looked up that tree, it looked like someone had taken some type of hard object

01:47:49.980 and leaned it up against that tree, and that created a rub mark.

01:47:54.100 You wouldn't have that occurring in nature.

01:47:56.140 You needed something hard pressing against it.

01:47:59.180 And it was also in Lana's sight, too, where the person was actually hit as he exited the Ponderosa.

01:48:05.560 And so that rub mark was someone probably using that tree as a right for rest.

01:48:10.220 Twenty feet behind that tree, the dog sits.

01:48:13.680 Sure enough, the bullet casing is lying on top of the leaves, clean.

01:48:18.120 Then a Hanover County sergeant named James Sizemore sees something on a tree trunk,

01:48:23.980 a Ziploc bag with a Halloween pattern on it, pinned up with two white thumbtacks.

01:48:30.300 Folded inside is pink-lined paper with stars stuck to it, a note, not read, but sent in for processing.

01:48:39.760 Six hours later, the phone rings in the locked vestibule, and no one answers it.

01:48:45.480 Two pieces of paper delivered two weeks apart.

01:48:49.140 Over the next four days, almost everything the task force learns about these men

01:48:53.280 comes out of those two documents and out of a room at Quantico

01:48:57.020 where two profilers are arguing about them.

01:49:01.400 James Fitzgerald has been waiting for a letter before there was one.

01:49:04.940 We were trying to put the profile together for the week or so before,

01:49:08.280 and I was telling people, we're probably going to get a notification, a letter, a document somewhere.

01:49:13.600 And sure enough, there is the tarot card.

01:49:16.300 I actually wound up writing a four and a half page report along with two other profilers in the unit,

01:49:22.380 just summarizing what we saw in that card alone.

01:49:25.840 Four and a half pages out of 13 words.

01:49:29.000 First page or so was the guy basically had it wrong.

01:49:32.820 In tarot world, death means transition of some sort.

01:49:35.880 It could be a job promotion, a move, something like that, did not mean the cessation of life.

01:49:40.580 So that was the first page.

01:49:41.860 And then it was trifurcated for you, Mr. Police.

01:49:45.560 It's some sort of a respectful deferential term, maybe an older person.

01:49:49.620 I actually did some search on the Internet, and there's some hip-hop rap song references to that Mr. Police.

01:49:55.640 And I was a police officer prior to the FBI, and nobody ever called me that.

01:49:59.980 Then the next line is, call me God in quotation marks.

01:50:03.780 And what the heck did they mean by that?

01:50:06.100 I did some more research.

01:50:07.260 There was a movie called Navy Seal starring Charlie Sheen back in the 80s.

01:50:12.600 And the sniper on that team, his nickname was God because he had the power of life and death.

01:50:19.100 But I focused on the word press as opposed to media.

01:50:22.560 And I summed up the end of it.

01:50:23.920 It seems like using Mr. Police, someone deferential, hip hop related, maybe younger, using press,

01:50:30.660 the older word, which is now media was more common, perhaps the person is older. So the end

01:50:37.340 was we have sort of a mix of personalities here. Fitz did not say two people. Not yet. He wrote

01:50:44.240 that the card might have been made across two days in two moods. He also had to establish an

01:50:50.060 approximate age for the writer. An age can be difficult to tell in a forensic, I'm asked to do

01:50:54.900 that all the time in a forensic linguistic analysis. Give us the age of an individual and

01:50:59.660 And, you know, some older people write in a very sophomoric sense.

01:51:03.120 Some younger people can write in a very advanced, you know, seemingly educated or well-read sense.

01:51:09.140 I think maybe 13 words, 14 words on that whole tarot card.

01:51:14.040 And the card itself told us a lot, even about the immaturity.

01:51:17.840 Then he looked at punctuation.

01:51:19.960 Why did he use quotation marks over call me God, then separate do not release to the press?

01:51:25.920 If anything, they could have been underlined or exclamation mark.

01:51:28.940 It was this person's way of emphasizing something important to them.

01:51:34.360 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.

01:51:42.300 But finally, with Ted Kaczynski, we could line up these unusual punctuation marks and other, you know, verb and noun phrases.

01:51:49.460 And that's what I was hoping to do in this case.

01:51:51.880 While Fitz worked on the language, Jim Clemente worked on the scenes.

01:51:55.920 The choice of targets, the distances of the shots, the timing.

01:52:00.820 When the first six one-shots, one-kill happened,

01:52:06.140 we immediately felt that this is somebody who is a little older.

01:52:11.760 They're not in their 20s.

01:52:13.500 They're probably, they're most likely police or military trained

01:52:18.220 because these are very efficient kills.

01:52:22.360 And I know that sounds cold, but this is the way we analyze them.

01:52:26.640 This is somebody who's sticking and running, sticking and running, sticking and running,

01:52:30.880 and being incredibly efficient all through that day.

01:52:36.780 In other words, they didn't decompensate at all.

01:52:39.020 They didn't have, you know, their nerves get up,

01:52:42.840 and it didn't interfere with the later killings in that same day.

01:52:48.160 Clemente read the sniper as a disciplined adult,

01:52:51.240 a man who was trained to shoot and has killed before.

01:52:55.060 Fitz saw a child.

01:52:57.060 I remember very clearly Fitz was sitting next to me in the profiling room at our roundtable,

01:53:03.380 where he said, look, there's such a dichotomy here between the actions,

01:53:08.200 because we're all saying that we profile the shootings,

01:53:10.700 and this is somebody who has planned and executed these shootings flawlessly.

01:53:15.880 Yet Fitz is saying, I'm seeing some younger kind of influences in these notes.

01:53:24.040 And I also remember, Fitz, you saying that Mr. Police is a line from some Jamaican reggae songs.

01:53:35.820 And so that was the first time you mentioned that this person could have connections to Jamaica.

01:53:41.820 Jamaica, off a phrase on the back of a tarot card.

01:53:45.880 And as we were arguing this out, everybody said, well, certainly this guy is in his late 30s or early 40s because he must be police and military trained.

01:53:58.180 But Fitz was saying, well, I don't know, based on these writings, he's either, well, if he's an adult, he's just barely an adult.

01:54:07.580 But Fitz said, I think he's more like 15, 16 years old.

01:54:11.260 And everybody said that's impossible.

01:54:13.280 There was one answer, though, that made both takes true.

01:54:17.120 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.

01:54:32.200 Or for the first time in U.S. history, we have a sniper team, one old and one younger.

01:54:38.420 But the profilers took issue with the idea of a team.

01:54:41.320 In their experience, criminal snipers did not share control.

01:54:45.260 But every single sniper case, criminal sniper case prior to this was a lone actor and a white male.

01:54:54.040 So that's where you get the statistics pushing in one direction.

01:54:58.300 But Fitz stuck to his guns. I supported him.

01:55:02.000 And we eventually convinced the rest of the crew that this could be possible.

01:55:07.240 They said snipers don't work well together because they have a God complex.

01:55:10.720 And I said, well, if one of them's 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.

01:55:23.860 And they're saying, ah, that doesn't make much sense.

01:55:26.020 And I said, well, he could control him completely by sexually victimizing him.

01:55:31.220 And lo and behold, I think it was 11 years later that Malvo came out while he was in prison

01:55:38.900 and said that Muhammad had been sexually victimizing him from almost from day one.

01:55:43.800 That was a guess in a room in 2002 about two men no one had yet identified.

01:55:50.560 Muhammad was never charged with abusing Malvo, and he never answered that allegation.

01:55:57.240 Then came Ashland and the bag on the tree.

01:56:00.220 What Tim Clemente noticed first was the bag itself.

01:56:04.020 My brother Tim was the one that found the note, the one at the steakhouse in Ashland.

01:56:10.820 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 trick-or-treat baggie.

01:56:22.280 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 like, what kind of a 45-year-old is going to use this to communicate to law enforcement?

01:56:37.020 When we then discussed it with Fitz, he gave us a number of other indicators of youthfulness in this communications.

01:56:45.760 And that, you know, Mr. Police was kind of looking up to cops rather than, you know, scornfully looking down at them.

01:56:52.580 You could read part of it through the plastic.

01:56:55.180 Because it was a baggie that this note was contained in, you could see the front and the back of the note.

01:57:02.700 And my brother saw the lines, your kids are not safe anywhere.

01:57:09.020 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.

01:57:17.520 He was told no, it was not an FBI case yet.

01:57:21.180 And the man who could make that call was asleep.

01:57:23.680 somebody in the local department said no we're gonna we're gonna wait till the my boss wakes up

01:57:30.460 and then uh we'll let him make that decision my brother really kind of tried a whole bunch of

01:57:36.720 things to try to get them to open it immediately but they did not do it and the phone he was there

01:57:42.380 the phone was inside the vestibule of the restaurant which was which was still locked

01:57:47.320 but he heard the phone ring at 6 a.m and he said somebody should definitely get in there and answer

01:57:53.540 it and again it was not our crime scene they never actually opened up the letter until like noon

01:58:00.420 sunday when they finally got it to the lab we missed a classic chance to actually have someone

01:58:06.500 talk to talk to it talk to the people that morning and and and it turns out there was

01:58:13.460 an incoming call to that pay phone at 6 a.m that no one ever picked up and i've as a linguist i

01:58:20.500 I just always wondered what it would be like to have been on that call and we could have

01:58:23.500 really narrowed down even where they came from.

01:58:26.280 Fitz knows what the alternative looks like because he's watched the Bureau do it once

01:58:30.240 before on the kidnapping of Exxon executive Sidney Riso.

01:58:35.040 Riso did not survive, but the way they caught the people who took him is the point.

01:58:40.240 Agents in the Newark division, there was about 100 of them, all in cars.

01:58:45.180 they went to every pay phone uh in like north jersey and they sat on it and sure enough because

01:58:52.700 they knew a call was coming in to some tip line somewhere and sure enough someone sees a guy get

01:58:59.560 out of a car a woman's in the car makes the call and the case gets put together from there they

01:59:03.600 stop the car and they were the they were the kidnappers so that exactly could have been done

01:59:08.660 overnight they could have had they would have had you know eight six to eight hours to put agents

01:59:13.760 around every phone booth. It wouldn't have been easy and they could have missed it. We're not

01:59:18.500 denying that. They could have made the arrest potentially right then and there and definitely

01:59:23.020 saved a few more lives. When the letter is finally in hand, it runs four pages. It opens with the

01:59:29.800 same three lines as the tarot card. Page two begins, we have tried to contact you to start

01:59:35.500 negotiation. What follows is a numbered list of the calls they say they made and who took each

01:59:41.960 one. An officer named Derek, a female officer at Rockville, the task force hotline, a priest,

01:59:50.260 even CNN. Every one of them, by the writer's account, told them to call a different number

01:59:55.980 or hung up. These people took the calls for a hoax or a joke, according to the letter.

02:00:02.420 So your failure to respond has cost you five lives, it accuses. Then the demand. Ten million

02:00:09.660 dollars into a Bank of America account. The note promises to call police at 6 a.m. on Sunday at the

02:00:16.820 Ponderosa buffet and includes the phone number they plan to call. The letter closes with an

02:00:22.400 alternative. If catching them matters more than stopping the killing, then, quote, prepare you

02:00:29.440 body bags. And underneath that, a postscript. Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.

02:00:36.860 And a promise, which Fitz has never forgotten.

02:00:41.120 If we give you our word, then that is what takes place.

02:00:44.620 Word is bond.

02:00:46.540 Four pages was enough.

02:00:48.480 Fitz noticed a conspicuous missing letter.

02:00:51.880 So at the time of the D.C. sniper case, I'm in my Georgetown master's program in linguistics,

02:00:57.400 and I happened to be taking a course in sociolinguistics, and we were studying U.S. dialects.

02:01:03.240 And I was learning about, you know, Boston dialects, New York, Philadelphia, which is mine, other parts of the country.

02:01:10.920 And I realized it's not all geographical, it's cultural.

02:01:14.000 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,

02:01:22.320 is a lot of Black people spoken in writing drop the S's on either possessive words or plural words.

02:01:29.780 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.

02:01:40.520 Demand should have been plural with an S and $10 million, which, of course, should have been plural.

02:01:47.620 And if it happened just once, OK, it's a typo.

02:01:49.940 I mean, it was handwritten, but, you know, a mistake.

02:01:52.300 Second time, maybe third time, I said, we have dialect features here of a black person, most likely male.

02:02:01.020 And I was the first one. And I know I talked to Jim Clemente about this.

02:02:05.040 And I was the first one to say, Jim, I think we've got a black guy.

02:02:07.920 Let's go up to the task force and tell them.

02:02:10.000 That reading changed the profile.

02:02:12.360 We were very careful in how we worded the profile.

02:02:15.320 That was to go out to the public.

02:02:16.980 And we very purposefully said, historically speaking, snipers are white males acting on their own.

02:02:25.800 However, and here's the caveat, we don't know if this person exactly fits that historical matching in this particular case.

02:02:36.300 And years later, I'd be hearing, oh, the FBI had it wrong.

02:02:39.000 They said it was a white guy in the beginning.

02:02:41.320 We technically didn't, but you have to be careful when you put these profiles together.

02:02:46.000 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.

02:02:54.060 So the Bureau hedged in writing on purpose, and the country heard white man, white van, and stopped listening.

02:03:02.040 The men doing the shooting had been trying to get somebody on the phone for two weeks.

02:03:06.900 Now they're asking the police to take their call at the Ponderosa so they can ensure the message gets through.

02:03:14.180 Before any of the notes, one of the snipers called a priest.

02:03:17.580 There was an even more detailed conversation where Muhammad, apparently earlier, had made a phone call to a priest.

02:03:28.220 It was basically claiming the responsibility for the shootings outside of D.C., but also claiming responsibility for a shooting down south.

02:03:39.300 Malvo and Mohamed apparently chose the priest specifically because he would not record their conversation,

02:03:45.140 but they hoped he would go to the police.

02:03:48.220 He did not.

02:03:49.740 Investigators found him while chasing down the note left behind the Ponderosa.

02:03:53.920 For the moment, the detail about the shooting down south goes nowhere.

02:03:58.920 The profilers had warned Chief Moose from the beginning about being careful on camera.

02:04:05.280 We told Chief Moose immediately that snipers have a God complex.

02:04:09.940 Do not challenge them because you will see them try to prove it.

02:04:14.520 But he said at the end, the streets are safe, your schools are safe.

02:04:18.140 So the next day, they shot a child on his way into school.

02:04:22.440 That child was Iron Brown.

02:04:25.500 But by the end of the month, the men who shot him were writing the chief's lines,

02:04:29.720 and Fitz could watch it happen.

02:04:31.880 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.

02:04:42.800 So they were definitely playing games at the end.

02:04:45.080 I'm saying they now, we were sure that there was more than one person.

02:04:49.420 And now they're trying to have the chief of police, you know, at their beck and call and making these particular statements.

02:04:56.360 And underneath all of it from the very first day, Fitz had a suspicion about what the shootings were actually for.

02:05:03.640 I was giving a tour of the FBI, kind of just a real quick aside that day to some journalists and their partners.

02:05:08.920 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.

02:05:15.080 And the journalist said, you know, Fitz, what's going on here? What's happening?

02:05:18.660 I said, I don't know. This is new to me, too.

02:05:20.140 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 the dead.

02:05:30.920 And it turns out, and Jim and I can discuss that later, that's exactly what the case was here.

02:05:36.400 Clemente has a phrase for how a killer is made.

02:05:39.140 He says genetics loads the gun, personality aims it, and experience pulls the trigger.

02:05:45.100 In Mohammed's case, the experience he points to is a custody fight.

02:05:49.820 I would say his wife getting custody of the kids and keeping them away from him.

02:05:55.420 I mean, he tried to hunt them down.

02:05:57.420 He tried to hunt her down.

02:05:58.760 In the end, his actual motive in this case was to shoot a number of other people,

02:06:06.760 make it look like there's some wild, crazed killer out there,

02:06:09.920 and then shoot her as part of this,

02:06:13.080 and then maybe shoot some more people and then disappear.

02:06:16.680 But as a result, the children's mother would be dead, and he felt he would get custody.

02:06:23.580 That was his ultimate goal, to win custody from her by killing her.

02:06:28.840 Except Mildred will not be killed.

02:06:31.280 Her best friend, Issa's niece, is murdered.

02:06:34.380 But Mohamed never takes a shot at Mildred or her house on Quiet Brook Lane.

02:06:40.160 Still, Mohamed has a plan, which is why he wanted Malvo.

02:06:44.700 He literally murdered people out of convenience.

02:06:49.540 He murdered other people to try to cover his crime of intending to murder his wife.

02:06:55.980 I'm going to make a master plan.

02:06:57.480 I'm going to 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.

02:07:08.660 because you always need a getaway driver

02:07:12.000 if you're going to be shooting from the back of a car.

02:07:15.560 The country was still looking for a white van,

02:07:18.280 and the woman these two profilers believe the sniper ultimately meant to kill

02:07:21.920 is living on the other side of Washington from the shootings in Clinton, Maryland,

02:07:26.520 calling the police about a dark Chevrolet that kept parking within sight of her house.

02:07:32.140 On the morning of October 11th,

02:07:34.080 A woman getting a ride to work notices a dark car parked at the end of her cul-de-sac.

02:07:39.380 Two men in it.

02:07:40.880 As they drive past, the driver stares at the woman.

02:07:43.580 His passenger raises a newspaper over his face.

02:07:47.320 She calls 911 from her co-worker's phone and reports a late model Caprice or Impala, New Jersey plates, two men inside.

02:07:56.380 The officer promises to send someone.

02:07:59.140 Days later, she learns that several of her neighbors have seen the same car,

02:08:03.420 parked in different spots, always facing her house.

02:08:07.340 Her name is Mildred Muhammad.

02:08:10.140 Hers is not the only report that went nowhere.

02:08:13.360 A week earlier, a woman is shot outside a Michael's Craft store in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.

02:08:20.120 Jim Clemente and his brother Tim are not assigned to the shooting,

02:08:23.600 but they drive out to it from home to help.

02:08:25.680 we get there and I go to the sheriff and I said uh you know were there any witnesses and he said

02:08:33.200 no nobody saw anything and I said look this is by the mall there's 3,000 cars here in the parking

02:08:38.640 lot somebody saw something he said well one 19 year old kid who's like a drug addict said he saw

02:08:44.040 a black guy in a in a dark sedan peeling out and he said that's where the shot came from

02:08:49.400 and I said great did you put that out on APB he said no I put out the APB on the white van

02:08:56.440 Sunday morning, October 20th, three hours and 40 minutes after a Ponderosa phone rang and rang

02:09:03.000 in Ashland, Virginia, with no one picking up. At 20 minutes to 10, a caller dials the FBI hotline

02:09:09.940 from a convenience store in Richmond. Don't talk, he says, just listen. Call me God. I left a note

02:09:17.740 at the back of the Ponderosa. Be there for a call in 10 minutes. The people taking hotline calls have

02:09:24.540 no idea about a Ponderosa letter or what was in it. Ten minutes comes and goes with no contact.

02:09:32.180 That night, Chief Moose, who has now read the sniper's letter, goes on television and does

02:09:37.460 something no police chief wants to do. He answers. To the person who left us a message at the Ponderosa

02:09:45.180 last night, you gave us a telephone number. We do want to talk to you. Call us at the number you

02:09:52.560 provided. At 7.57 a.m., the phone rings. It's Lee Malvo. Is this the Ponderosa? Um, who is this?

02:10:00.680 Don't say anything. Just listen. Malvo holds up a tape recorder to the receiver. The actual

02:10:06.660 recording is garbled and distorted, but investigators eventually transcribed it. Quote,

02:10:12.680 Dearest police, call me God. Do not release to the press. Five red stars, you have our terms.

02:10:20.400 They are non-negotiable. If you choose option one, you will hold a press conference stating

02:10:26.000 to the media that you believe you have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose. Repeat every word

02:10:32.420 exactly as you heard it. If you choose option two, be sure to remember he will not deviate.

02:10:39.540 P.S. Your children are not safe. Malvo hangs up. 38 seconds. Within the hour, a tactical team

02:10:47.980 takes down a white van at an Exxon station in Richmond, pulling two men onto the pavement in

02:10:53.400 front of the cameras. One of the men inside had been using the payphone when Malvo's call came

02:10:58.500 in. The men on the pavement are Mexican nationals who have nothing to do with any of it. The call

02:11:04.440 to the Ponderosa had come from a second payphone on the other side of that same gas station. Malvo

02:11:10.660 and Mohamed escape. Malvo later to investigators, I saw the Mexicans get stopped. I watched it,

02:11:18.680 but I wasn't in the car. The task force played the 38 seconds over and over and over again.

02:11:26.040 One agent thought the voice sounded Hispanic. Another guessed Asian. One said it sounds like

02:11:31.340 a kid. An ATF negotiator named Peter Mangan thought it sounded Caribbean, maybe Jamaican,

02:11:38.480 he said, which is where Fitz had landed two weeks earlier off of four words on a tarot card.

02:11:45.960 Mangan ran the phrase duck in a noose past a Jamaican-born ATF agent named Mark Peterkin,

02:11:52.820 who had never heard the phrase in his life. Peterkin looked at him. There are no ducks in Jamaica.

02:12:00.940 Tuesday, October 22nd, 5.55 in the morning, still dark, Aspen Hill, Maryland. Conrad Johnson

02:12:08.380 is 35 and has driven a bus for 10 years. Everyone calls him CJ. Six foot two, 250 pounds, shaved

02:12:16.800 head, goatee, two diamond earrings. He has a trainee riding with him that morning. They

02:12:22.880 had breakfast on the bus. The doors are open. Across the lot, there's a basketball court

02:12:28.060 and past that, Woods. Johnson kicks some trash out of the front door, comes back up the steps

02:12:34.580 and sets his coffee down on the change box.

02:12:38.140 He is standing in the doorway of his own bus with the lights on behind him.

02:12:43.080 At 5.55 a.m., a shot from the treeline.

02:13:01.240 CJ has flown to Suburban Hospital in Bethesda.

02:13:04.580 He is awake, sitting up, but the round has destroyed most of his liver.

02:13:09.960 He dies on the operating table at 9.26 that morning.

02:13:13.840 That afternoon, 50 feet into the woods, a search line finds a Ziploc bag on a broken branch.

02:13:21.260 Inside it, a second Ziploc bag.

02:13:23.860 Inside that, a note with red stars on it.

02:13:27.320 For you, Mr. Police, call me God, do not release to the press.

02:13:32.180 You did not respond to the message.

02:13:34.580 You departed from what we told you to say, and you departed from the time.

02:13:39.360 Your incompetence has cost you another life.

02:13:43.420 Moose had not done what the snipers requested,

02:13:46.280 pulled a press conference saying he had caught the sniper like a duck in a noose.

02:13:51.200 Now the snipers lay CJ's death at his feet.

02:13:55.640 Late that afternoon, Moose walks out and reads the threat from the original Ponderosa letter out loud,

02:14:00.460 word for word, because the alternative is pretending he has not seen it.

02:14:06.040 We recognize the concerns of the community and therefore are going to provide the exact

02:14:11.920 language in the message that pertains to the threat. Your children are not safe anywhere

02:14:19.280 at any time. Back inside headquarters, Moose tells one of his captains that was the hardest

02:14:25.800 thing he's ever done. We're saying we can't do our job, he says. We're supposed to keep people

02:14:31.620 safe. And we can't. By the night of October 22nd, the two men in the FBI profiler room believe the

02:14:39.960 person writing these notes may be young, may be black, may have some tie to the Caribbean,

02:14:45.720 and may not be alone. They're getting closer. But still, they don't have a name.

02:14:52.320 There is something about the bus driver, Conrad Johnson, that does not come out for years.

02:14:57.520 CJ was born in Jamaica.

02:14:59.860 His mother came to the U.S. and left him behind with an aunt when he was just two years old.

02:15:05.380 He joined his mom in America when he was about 10.

02:15:08.600 His mother's name is Sonia Wills.

02:15:11.000 She says Conrad was the kind of boy who brought other boys home, the ones he thought needed somewhere to be.

02:15:17.960 He was a caretaker.

02:15:18.860 In the midst of the shootings, there was a woman on his route who was frightened to get on the bus.

02:15:26.320 He used to stop the bus, get off, walk her out from behind a tree, and put her on board.

02:15:32.160 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,

02:15:42.560 Telling her, don't worry, you're safe with me.

02:15:46.320 They have to get to me before they can get to you.

02:15:49.760 The boy in the woods that morning, taking aim at CJ, was 17, born in Jamaica,

02:15:56.180 left behind by his mother, and raised by other people.

02:15:59.780 Years later, Sonia Wills says to the social worker working on Lee Malvo's defense,

02:16:05.040 if only Malvo had looked my son in the face before he killed him,

02:16:08.240 he would have seen the perfect father for whom he had been searching.

02:16:13.600 Police still do not have a name. The clue that gives them one has been sitting in an evidence

02:16:19.520 room in Alabama for a month. That's next time on MK Confidential.

02:16:30.920 September 21st, 2002. 11 days before James Martin is shot crossing a grocery store parking lot in

02:16:38.120 Wheaton, Maryland, when the country learns the word sniper. Montgomery, Alabama. Closing time

02:16:45.140 on Zelda Road outside a liquor store. Two women are locking up. Claudine Parker is 52. She is the

02:16:53.140 store's business manager, and she is in her last pay period before retirement. Next month, she is

02:16:58.980 supposed to start coaching tennis at Alabama State. Behind her is Kelly Adams, 24, a clerk,

02:17:06.520 newly married, with a new baby. Kelly doesn't hear anything. She will describe it as being

02:17:13.060 electrocuted. A single rifle round comes in under her jaw from the left, goes through,

02:17:19.560 and shatters the window beside the door. She goes down. Claudine Parker backs away,

02:17:25.340 and for a moment, one of the store's pillars stands between her and the shooter.

02:17:30.000 Then she backs out from behind it, and she is shot through the shoulder blade and does not move again.

02:17:36.000 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.

02:17:51.120 Two Montgomery patrol officers on a routine patrol are close enough to hear the shots.

02:17:56.560 They pull in and see a young black man with a medium afro behind the pillar going through a

02:18:01.980 purse. The young man runs. One officer stays with the women. The other goes after him,

02:18:08.020 chasing him over a fence and then another and loses him. And somewhere in that chase,

02:18:13.900 the runner drops something. There is a gun show in town that weekend, so it could belong to

02:18:19.520 anybody. Two detectives bag it anyway. It's a catalog, a paper magazine full of rifle accessories

02:18:27.000 from a company called Armalite. Claudine Parker will never coach at Alabama State. She dies in

02:18:34.500 surgery about three hours later. Kelly Adams lives. She will have 31 operations in the next

02:18:41.400 five years and a permanent implant to manage the pain. The gun magazine goes to the lab

02:18:47.840 and it gives up 36 clean fingerprints all from the same person. Montgomery PD runs them locally,

02:18:55.720 then through the state system, then through neighboring Georgia. Nothing comes back.

02:19:00.900 Investigators take that to mean whoever handled the catalog has never been arrested as an adult.

02:19:06.740 For a month, the answer to the DC sniper case sits in an evidence room in Alabama

02:19:12.420 and no one in the world knows it.

02:19:16.000 I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential.

02:19:24.180 By the middle of October 2002,

02:19:27.160 Malvo and Mohamed have been trying for days

02:19:29.300 to get police to take them seriously.

02:19:31.780 Hotline operators screen them out.

02:19:34.040 Calls drop.

02:19:35.380 People were not listening to us, Malvo says later.

02:19:38.700 So they offer proof.

02:19:40.980 A crime only the men doing the shooting could know about.

02:19:44.360 They pick Alabama because they believe it is safe.

02:19:48.180 As far as they know, the police in Montgomery have nothing.

02:19:51.800 The next call comes with something in it that only the killers could know.

02:19:56.120 A call comes into police headquarters in Rockville, Maryland,

02:19:59.640 and gets transferred to an officer named Derek Beliles.

02:20:04.020 Shut up and listen, the caller says, and don't ask any questions.

02:20:08.020 The caller, almost certainly Malvo, says he knows who is responsible for the recent D.C. area shootings.

02:20:15.200 But first, he wants Belial's to verify something.

02:20:18.740 Call the police in Montgomery, Alabama, he says.

02:20:22.060 Ask about a liquor store holdup on Ann Street back in September where two women were shot.

02:20:28.320 James Fitzgerald, the FBI forensic linguist from Episode 4, has spent two weeks studying these men.

02:20:35.000 The fact that they had a brag about that they killed someone in Montgomery, Alabama, that was a real big clue.

02:20:43.320 And we contacted the Montgomery, Alabama PD.

02:20:46.660 They even told us, this is one of the phone calls.

02:20:49.040 Well, if you don't think we're legit, they already killed six people in one day, on October 2nd.

02:20:53.380 But they somehow still had to, and this is mostly John Muhammad, again, the adult, they had to sort of brag about things.

02:20:59.340 Well, we robbed a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama.

02:21:02.400 You know, check that out.

02:21:03.120 The Liles makes the call. Four hours later, the killers reach a priest in Ashland, Virginia and

02:21:10.520 tell him the same thing. And when the letter they leave in the woods behind the Ponderosa is finally

02:21:16.180 read, it complains about an officer named Derek and about a priest. Two calls, both pointing at

02:21:24.340 the same town. The tell that the caller was actually at the physical location is a street

02:21:30.740 name. Their shooting didn't happen on Ann Street, as the caller claimed. It happened on Zelda Road.

02:21:37.400 Ann Street is the exit off the interstate a block away. The lieutenant who worked that case,

02:21:43.140 Michael Merrick, says nobody who lives in Montgomery would ever call it an Ann Street

02:21:48.460 shooting. Someone who came off the highway would. So a Montgomery County, Maryland police commander

02:21:55.180 named Drew Tracy gets an Alabama detective on the phone and asks the obvious question,

02:22:01.280 is there anything that could help us? He says, the only thing we have is a magazine.

02:22:06.440 And I said, a magazine? You mean magazine from a weapon? He goes, like a paper magazine.

02:22:13.500 And he says, and this is where it went, clicked with me just like that. And I said,

02:22:17.880 oh my God, we might have something here. The prints off that catalog cannot be transmitted

02:22:22.960 electronically. In 2002, Alabama is one of many states not wired into the FBI's national fingerprint

02:22:29.780 database, so somebody has to carry the prints by hand. On Monday, October 21st, an FBI agent from

02:22:37.340 Alabama carries them onto a plane to Washington, D.C., along with the bullet fragments. When an

02:22:44.000 examiner runs the Alabama prints through the federal fingerprint system, a name comes back.

02:22:50.020 Here's FBI Supervisory Special Agent Linda Hooper to the Monster DC Sniper podcast.

02:22:56.780 And that print was for Lee Boyd Malveaux, and he was 17 years old.

02:23:02.880 Ten months earlier in Washington state, the Jamaican teenager was picked up as an illegal immigrant and fingerprinted by Border Patrol.

02:23:11.480 The print gives them the boy.

02:23:14.340 And as Fitz told me, once they had the boy, they had the man too.

02:23:19.320 They took him to the FBI. They ran him across the whole, you know, spectrum of fingerprints.

02:23:24.900 And they found immigration fingerprints from Lee Boyd Malvo, who was like 15, 16 when he came to this country from Jamaica.

02:23:32.020 And they wound up contacting whoever knew him. Oh, he's with this guy named John Muhammad.

02:23:36.940 That same morning across the country in Tacoma, Washington, investigators finally knock on Robert Holmes' door.

02:23:44.980 Holmes is Muhammad's old army friend who has spent a week trying to get someone at the FBI

02:23:49.840 to take him seriously. About his friend John. About the Bushmaster. About the boy John called

02:23:57.120 his little sniper. Now someone does. By Wednesday, October 23rd, the task force has two names. A

02:24:06.760 photograph off a California driver's license and a car. A 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, dark blue

02:24:14.880 New Jersey plates, NDA-21Z. That plate has been run through police computers repeatedly over the

02:24:23.840 prior three weeks and handed back clean every single time. At 10 minutes to midnight on Wednesday,

02:24:31.160 police chief Charles Moose steps up to the microphones and announces a federal arrest

02:24:36.360 warrant for John Allen Muhammad on a firearms charge. He is careful. He says the charge has

02:24:43.480 nothing to do with the shootings, that Muhammad may be traveling with an unnamed juvenile. He

02:24:49.800 does not give out the plate number. He doesn't have to. It has been on television for an hour

02:24:55.240 already, leaked out of police radio traffic and running across the bottom of TV screens

02:25:00.340 across the country. Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenbaugh is out distributing

02:25:05.940 wanted posters when word comes over the radio that the Chevy Caprice has been found. It's at

02:25:12.440 the South Mountain Westbound Welcome Center rest area on Interstate 70 in Western Maryland right

02:25:19.080 near South Mountain State Park. Reichenbaugh is 35 miles out and he is about to be the highest

02:25:26.020 ranking officer on that scene. He gets his duty officer at the Maryland State Police Barracks in

02:25:31.900 Frederick on the radio and asks how many troopers he has. Two, says the sergeant. Maybe one or two

02:25:39.660 more out of Hagerstown. Send everyone you've got, Reichenbaugh says. Have them meet me at the

02:25:45.900 entrance to the rest area and tell them to come in silent. He gets there with three men, two troopers,

02:25:52.460 and one sheriff's deputy. They are armed with handguns and a shotgun against a rifle that

02:25:58.700 goes through body armor. He decides the four of them cannot rush that car, so he seals the car in

02:26:05.380 instead. He shuts down I-70 in both directions, telling drivers there has been a bad accident.

02:26:12.740 He posts a K-9 handler with orders to treat anyone who walks out of that rest area as

02:26:17.720 the sniper. He blocks the entrance ramp with a patrol car. Then he goes looking for something

02:26:23.640 bigger to put across that exit. We had a couple of truck drivers start to come out to leave,

02:26:29.600 and I asked them if they wanted to be good Americans. And it was like, well, yeah, troop,

02:26:34.480 what do you need? I said, well, we got the snipers in the rest area. I said, can you throw your truck

02:26:39.700 across this exit so that that car cannot get out of here? Reichenbach calls a friend in the Secret

02:26:46.080 service. And 30 seconds later, by presidential authority, the airspace over Frederick County

02:26:51.880 is closed to news helicopters. Inside the caprice, Mohammed is asleep across the back seat.

02:26:59.860 Malvo is in the front, his head down by the steering wheel. He is supposed to be keeping

02:27:05.280 watch. Asked later why he thinks they were caught, he tells his interrogators it was his own laziness,

02:27:12.460 his lack of discipline, that he departed from something he knew worked, he says, for five

02:27:18.580 minutes of pleasure, for five minutes of sleep. By 3.30 a.m., a 19-man tactical team has assembled

02:27:27.740 at the bottom of the wooded hill behind the rest stop. County officers, state troopers,

02:27:33.200 and FBI hostage rescue operators. Six of them will approach the car. They rehearse it once

02:27:39.460 in a McDonald's parking lot down the road. Then they come up through the trees and stop at two

02:27:45.420 oaks 20 yards out. After three weeks of false alarms, not one man in that tree line is certain

02:27:52.540 there is anyone in this car at all. The team leader holds up three fingers and counts down.

02:28:00.040 Three, two, one. They cross the open ground, take out the driver's front window and the passenger

02:28:08.060 rear window with spring-loaded batons and light up the inside of the car with the lights on their

02:28:13.700 weapons. FBI, police, hands up. Malvos pulled out the front door. Muhammad sits up in the back with

02:28:22.560 his hands raised and is taken out the other side. A trooper covers the trunk while another gets the

02:28:28.100 keys because nobody knows what is in there. Clear. It takes about 30 seconds. Nobody fires a shot.

02:28:37.880 Drew Tracy, the Montgomery County commander who helped assemble the assault team, is standing by the tree line.

02:28:44.320 And I start walking from the wood line.

02:28:46.700 I see like a glistening of like light.

02:28:51.400 And when I look down, the glistening was Malvo.

02:28:55.240 Malvo was on the ground, face down, handcuffed.

02:28:59.500 And what happened is when they breached the tempered windows, the glass got in his hair and it hit the light.

02:29:07.080 and he didn't say one word.

02:29:09.860 Malvo is 5'5".

02:29:12.340 Reichenbaugh, standing over him on the pavement,

02:29:14.960 writes later what went through his head.

02:29:17.180 Christ, he's just a kid.

02:29:20.200 Muhammad is shaking so badly a trooper has to hold him still to get the cuffs on.

02:29:25.460 They put the two of them in separate cars

02:29:27.400 and drive them off the mountain to a state police barracks.

02:29:30.740 Fitz is asleep in Maryland when the phone rings.

02:29:33.520 He was arrested at 3.30 in the morning,

02:29:35.360 and I get a call. I was staying up in Maryland then, and they said, hey, can you go to a state

02:29:39.420 police barracks? They arrested the two snipers. I'll be there. So this is before GPS. I had to

02:29:45.120 map my way there on my own, which I got there. And I walk into this dark state police barracks,

02:29:50.480 kind of in the middle of nowhere, not a big building, a couple marked cars out there and

02:29:54.640 one or two others, no media, which was a good sign. He knocks. He shows his credentials.

02:30:00.120 They buzz me in the first door, buzz me in the second door, and it's all dark.

02:30:05.280 It's like a one-story building.

02:30:06.780 And I look down the hallway about 30 feet ahead of me.

02:30:10.080 There's a state trooper in uniform running full speed, you know, left to right.

02:30:15.340 What the hell?

02:30:16.660 So I didn't pull my gun out because I know there's other officers around, but my hand is on my gun.

02:30:20.880 And next thing you know, there's another trooper closer to me, another hallway.

02:30:24.620 He's running right to left looking for something.

02:30:28.000 And I finally see a trooper comes up to him.

02:30:30.020 I said, FBI, what's going on?

02:30:31.940 The kid escaped.

02:30:33.380 The manhunt has been officially over for a couple of hours.

02:30:37.520 Next time you hear a big bang on the ground, we got him.

02:30:40.180 He's over here.

02:30:42.260 And it turns out they put Malvo in a room.

02:30:46.060 He may have been handcuffed in front, which you never do, always behind.

02:30:49.200 And they didn't handcuff him to the bar on the wall.

02:30:51.900 And somehow he used that bar, climbed up into the ceiling.

02:30:54.800 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.

02:31:04.420 He was fine. But they got him up, handcuffed him again, put him in the room, and he never escaped again.

02:31:11.160 Back on the mountain, nobody can search the car without a warrant.

02:31:14.840 It is finally signed at 5.55 in the morning.

02:31:18.400 When they get inside, an FBI SWAT leader notices the back seat looks wrong.

02:31:22.880 The cushion has been altered so it swings up at the top like a hatch.

02:31:27.660 They lift it.

02:31:28.820 Behind it, held in place with a bungee cord, is a Bushmaster rifle.

02:31:34.000 The bipod is folded under the barrel and there is a live round in the chamber.

02:31:39.220 An ATF ballistics man puts on gloves and clears the weapon.

02:31:43.500 And I'll never forget, as long as I live, the noise of when the lab guy cocked that round out of that rifle

02:31:51.680 and seeing it spinning around in a circle in the air

02:31:55.240 and the tinkle that it made when it hit the parking lot.

02:31:59.240 Later that day, the ATF's chief firearms examiner

02:32:02.020 test fires the Bushmaster into a water tank

02:32:04.760 and puts the recovered bullets under a microscope

02:32:07.340 beside the fragments taken out of the victims.

02:32:11.420 It matches 11 of the 14 shooting scenes in the region.

02:32:16.380 One person is not watching any of it from home.

02:32:20.440 The evening before the arrest, ATF agents knock on a door on Quiet Brook Lane in Clinton, Maryland,

02:32:27.580 and ask Mildred Muhammad to come down to the police station and answer some questions.

02:32:33.440 Here is Mildred.

02:32:34.380 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.

02:32:44.660 And so they asked me, well, do you think that he would do something like this?

02:32:49.340 And I was like, well, I don't, yeah.

02:32:53.660 I said, well, why would you think that?

02:32:55.460 I said, well, he said he could take a small city, terrorize it.

02:32:59.960 They would think it would be a group of people and it would only be me.

02:33:03.780 She has watched the same coverage as everyone else for three weeks.

02:33:08.140 Two of the shootings happened within a few miles of her own home.

02:33:12.700 Mildred Mohammed and her three children are moved into protective custody that night

02:33:16.620 to a hotel her sister and brother-in-law go to. She gets the children to sleep, then she goes

02:33:23.300 into the bathroom and turns on the water so they will not hear her. She sits down on the floor with

02:33:28.940 a pillow and sobs into it. What Mildred Muhammad believes and has said publicly and consistently

02:33:35.760 ever since is that she was the point of all of it, that he came to Washington to kill her and

02:33:43.720 needed her death to look random so that he could collect his children. No court has ever ruled on

02:33:49.780 that. Prosecutors did not have to prove why he did it. Afterward, Mildred tells A&E people who

02:33:57.160 find out who she is tell her it is her fault. At that time, they told me that you should have seen

02:34:04.640 it coming. If I would have stayed with him, then he just would have killed me. If I would have

02:34:09.340 stayed on the West Coast, then the people on the East Coast would still be alive.

02:34:14.420 How dare I bring this drama into a quiet community? And how dare I call me and my

02:34:20.780 children victims when neither of us were killed? I was blamed because they couldn't get to John.

02:34:26.760 Now comes the question of who gets to put Malvo and Mohamed on trial. Montgomery County,

02:34:32.740 Maryland wants the case. So did two federal prosecutors' offices and the Virginia counties

02:34:38.180 where people were shot. Six of the 10 dead are Maryland's. On November 7th, 2002, Attorney General

02:34:45.420 John Ashcroft sends both men to Virginia. The first prosecutions, he says, should go where the law

02:34:52.080 and the facts are best and the toughest sentences are available. In Maryland, a defendant who is

02:34:58.600 under 18 at the time he committed the murder cannot be sentenced to death. Same for federal

02:35:04.280 Court, but in Virginia in 2002, the floor is 16. Muhammad will be tried in Prince William County

02:35:12.540 for the murder of Dean Myers, Malvo in Fairfax County for Linda Franklin. Both trials are moved

02:35:19.100 to the far southeastern corner of the state because the defense argued that no one near

02:35:24.320 Washington could possibly sit on that jury with fairness. John Muhammad's trial opens in Virginia

02:35:31.120 Beach in October 2003. On the first morning, he takes the case away from his lawyers and tells

02:35:37.600 the judge he will represent himself. His argument to the jury is one simple question. Whoever saw

02:35:45.080 him fire a rifle? Nobody. No witness in the case puts the weapon in Muhammad's hands. Then he

02:35:53.080 begins cross-examining victims of the attacks. Among them, Paul LaRuffa, shot five times in his

02:36:00.140 own car outside his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland, in the robbery that paid for that

02:36:04.900 Chevy Caprice. So, talk about crazy circumstances and weird events in your life. I was being

02:36:13.280 questioned by the guy who tried to kill me. He wasn't the guy that pulled the trigger, but

02:36:17.760 he was the brains behind it. After two days, Muhammad hands the case back to his attorneys.

02:36:24.340 The prosecution's answer is that it does not matter whose finger was on the trigger. Virginia

02:36:30.040 charges Muhammad under an anti-terrorism law written after September 11th, which requires

02:36:35.660 only that a jury find the killing was part of an act intended to intimidate a civilian population.

02:36:42.400 On November 17th, 2003, the jury convicts him on all counts. A week later, the same jury recommends

02:36:50.460 death. Months later, the judge accepts the recommendation and formally sentences Muhammad

02:36:57.080 to die. Lee Malvo's trial runs at the same time, an hour down the road in Chesapeake, Virginia.

02:37:05.060 He pleads not guilty, and his lawyers give notice that they will argue insanity, that Muhammad

02:37:11.260 indoctrinated him so completely he could not tell right from wrong. One lawyer puts it more plainly

02:37:18.120 later, the whole point was to keep Malvo off of death row. And it works. The jury convicts him,

02:37:25.560 but spares his life, life without parole. The following year, Malvo pleads guilty in

02:37:32.500 Spotsylvania County, Virginia to killing Kenneth Bridges and shooting Caroline Sewell and gets

02:37:38.300 two more life sentences. In May 2006, Maryland finally gets its turn. John Muhammad goes on

02:37:46.180 trial in Rockville for the six murders committed in Montgomery County. And this time the state

02:37:51.580 has a witness it did not have in Virginia back in 2003. Lee Malvo testifies against John Muhammad.

02:38:00.840 Malvo is now 21, and he testifies for the better part of two days. He tells the jury the shootings

02:38:07.800 were only phase one. Phase two was bombs on schools, on school buses, in children's hospitals.

02:38:16.280 Why children, the prosecutor asks him.

02:38:19.320 For the sheer terror of it, Malvo answers, quoting Muhammad.

02:38:23.320 The worst thing you can do to people is take aim at their children.

02:38:27.980 He says Muhammad picked the targets and picked who fired.

02:38:31.620 He says he fired three of the shots himself and Muhammad fired the rest.

02:38:36.560 Malvo tells the jury about that night in Ashland, Virginia,

02:38:40.220 when he says he shot the man outside the steakhouse,

02:38:42.940 the one married to the rocket scientist, and kept his cool. He didn't crack.

02:38:48.880 You were calm, Mohammed told him. I've created a monster. The prosecutor, Catherine Winfrey,

02:38:55.540 asks him why he agreed to testify. I want to tell the truth, and I think he is a coward,

02:39:02.160 Malvo says. Malvo then turns his head and looks directly at John Mohammed.

02:39:07.440 You took me into your house, he says, and you made me a monster.

02:39:13.360 The next morning, John Muhammad stands up to cross-examine Malvo.

02:39:18.120 It goes on for several hours.

02:39:20.700 John is representing himself again.

02:39:23.080 He keeps addressing Lee Malvo as son or Lee during the cross-examination.

02:39:29.600 Malvo interrupts.

02:39:30.680 I would prefer you address me by my name, he says.

02:39:33.760 I'm not doing it intentionally, Muhammad protests.

02:39:36.740 I apologize, Mr. Malvo. A few questions later, he does it again. Son, he says. I mean, Mr. Malvo.

02:39:45.980 Muhammad asks Malvo about a day in Antigua when John's son, Little John, and his girlfriend,

02:39:52.180 Andrea, went into the water and started drowning. John was off the island, and Malvo went in after

02:39:58.680 them, saving them both. Then John asks, Son, I mean, Mr. Malvo, isn't it true that if the

02:40:06.620 rolls were turned, and Lee Boy Malvo was in that water, that John Allen Muhammad would have gotten

02:40:12.700 him. The prosecutors object. The judge sustains it. Malvo is not allowed to answer. When Muhammad

02:40:21.160 is finished, Prosecutor Catherine Winfrey gets back up and asks Malvo one question.

02:40:27.980 What was the difference in how Mr. Muhammad treated you and his children, she asks. Mr.

02:40:34.400 Muhammad did not use any of his children to murder other people, says Malvo. On May 30th, 2006,

02:40:43.400 John Muhammad is convicted of six more first-degree murders. The jury gives him six consecutive life

02:40:49.260 sentences on top of the death sentence already awaiting him in Virginia. In November 2009,

02:40:56.860 the U.S. Supreme Court rejects John Allen Muhammad's last petition, and the governor of

02:41:01.880 Virginia refuses him clemency. The execution is set for the evening of November 10th at the

02:41:08.100 Greensville Correctional Center in Jarrett, Virginia. John walks into the execution chamber

02:41:13.460 at two minutes to nine. He was allowed to choose the method of his execution, but never made a

02:41:20.000 choice. So under Virginia state law, the method defaults to lethal injection. He has declined

02:41:25.980 a spiritual advisor. The execution of John Allen Muhammad has been carried out under the laws of

02:41:33.200 the Commonwealth of Virginia. Death was pronounced at 9 11 p.m. 9 11. There were no complications.

02:41:41.580 Mr. Muhammad was asked if he wished to make a last statement. He did not acknowledge this or

02:41:47.640 make any statement whatsoever. Muhammad apparently watched as the injection was administered,

02:41:53.400 tilted his head to the right, and stayed that way.

02:41:57.040 He was 48.

02:41:59.540 Lee Malvo sits in a cell.

02:42:02.120 In the years after the trials, the U.S. Supreme Court decides

02:42:05.200 a run of cases about minors who commit adult crimes,

02:42:09.000 concluding that a defendant who was a juvenile at the time of the crime

02:42:12.360 cannot be sentenced to life without parole,

02:42:15.800 and that holding reaches backward,

02:42:18.480 which reopened Lee Malvo's sentences.

02:42:21.860 Virginia rewrote its own law in response, making him eligible for parole.

02:42:26.900 But Virginia's parole board refused to release him, calling him a risk to the community.

02:42:33.100 Maryland is where the law gets strange.

02:42:35.540 Its highest court has ruled that Malvo's six Maryland life sentences were imposed unconstitutionally

02:42:41.300 and that he is owed a new sentencing hearing, but officials in Virginia refused to hand him over.

02:42:48.220 So a state Supreme Court has ordered a hearing that cannot happen.

02:42:52.200 And Lee Boyd Malvo is 41 years old in a Virginia prison serving 10 life sentences

02:42:58.320 in a state that cannot mandate no parole ever,

02:43:02.300 but that is not inclined to entertain the possibility of ever setting this guy loose.

02:43:08.200 In 2012, he gave an interview to The Washington Post.

02:43:12.000 I mean, I was a monster.

02:43:14.440 If you look up the definition, I mean, that's what a monster is.

02:43:20.680 I was a ghoul. I was a thief. I stole people's lives.

02:43:25.300 And I did someone else's bidding just because they said so.

02:43:31.380 I mean, that is the definition of a monster.

02:43:34.400 Six months after testifying against Mohammed, Lee Malvo pleads guilty to the six Montgomery County murders

02:43:41.360 and comes back to the same courthouse to be sentenced.

02:43:45.420 Malvo stands up and reads out the six names.

02:43:48.820 Then he talks to the families sitting in that room.

02:43:52.580 I'm truly sorry, grieved, and ashamed of what I've done to the families and friends, he says.

02:43:57.860 His voice breaks.

02:43:59.600 I know that I destroyed many dreams and many more lives,

02:44:02.960 and that each of you relive this every morning, every birthday, every anniversary,

02:44:08.820 every time you look in your children's eyes.

02:44:10.620 He adds, I accept responsibility for killing your mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, wife, husband, and friend.

02:44:22.340 Then he 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.

02:44:31.680 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.

02:44:41.380 Then that bus driver, Conrad Johnson's mother, Sonia Wills, stands up.

02:44:47.000 She looks at the young man who shot him.

02:44:49.800 I must say, for the past four years, I have hated you, she says.

02:44:53.880 Right now, I, Conrad's mother, forgive you.

02:44:58.040 I have to, my dear.

02:45:00.180 I can't go on hating you.

02:45:02.460 That won't bring Conrad back.

02:45:03.980 Paul LaRuffa spent three days on a breathing machine after Malvo shot him outside of his

02:45:10.540 restaurant. Both of his lungs collapsed. He still has bullet fragments inside of him.

02:45:16.140 And until the morning the snipers were caught, the shooting haunted his nightmares.

02:45:20.380 You can't turn it off. You can't make it stop. It just happens. It happened every night.

02:45:26.020 When Mohammed's execution date is set, some of the victims and their families make plans to be

02:45:31.180 in the room. LaRuffa does not. He explains why to the podcast Monster DC Sniper. I don't have a

02:45:39.820 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,

02:45:48.540 but I think if anybody deserves the death penalty, it was him. Then there is the boy, Malvo.

02:45:56.900 Here's LaRuffa again.

02:45:58.540 I can say I've forgiven him, but it doesn't mean what he did was okay with me.

02:46:04.300 I think he's responsible for what he did.

02:46:07.800 I get the feeling he feels he has to pay a price for it.

02:46:11.740 Has he paid enough of a price?

02:46:13.420 I don't think so.

02:46:15.020 Fifteen dead.

02:46:16.640 Eight more injured.

02:46:18.220 So much pain.

02:46:19.720 So much sadness.

02:46:21.700 The justice system gave the victims all it could.

02:46:24.660 then it was up to them to keep living. And they did. Paul LaRuffa worked to reform youth

02:46:31.940 sentencing laws to prevent young offenders from getting life sentences without the chance of

02:46:36.800 parole. Mildred Mohammed went on to dedicate her life to helping abuse victims, becoming a global

02:46:43.440 speaker, an author, an educator on the signs of invisible abuse, such as coercive control and

02:46:50.320 stalking. And Irene Brown, the 13-year-old shot in the gut by Malvo, still has permanent nerve

02:46:57.640 damage from the bullet Mohammed had directed be aimed at the child's head. Multiple surgeries,

02:47:04.840 a medically induced coma, and 20 years later, Irene told NBC News he lives with anxiety now

02:47:11.620 from the shooting, but that the shooting has given his life perspective. He's deeply grateful

02:47:17.800 to be alive, and in the way that only great tragedy can offer a person,

02:47:22.620 sees each day as a truly precious gift. 24 years ago, still recovering from his injuries,

02:47:29.800 Iron showed the same resilience of spirit. When asked that December what he wanted for Christmas,

02:47:37.000 he told the reporters, I already have enough to be happy.

02:47:42.680 I'm Megan Kelly. This is MK Confidential.

02:47:47.800 You

The Megyn Kelly Show - September 06, 2026

＂The Beltway Snipers＂： The FULL MK Confidential Series

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