The Megyn Kelly Show - August 19, 2026


The Beltway Snipers： The Soldier — Ep. 2 ｜ MK Confidential


Episode Stats


Length

37 minutes

Words per minute

150.59

Word count

5,656

Sentence count

464

Harmful content

Misogyny

9

sentences flagged

Toxicity

5

sentences flagged

Hate speech

7

sentences flagged


Transcript

Transcript generated with Whisper (turbo).
Misogyny classifications generated with MilaNLProc/bert-base-uncased-ear-misogyny .
Toxicity classifications generated with s-nlp/roberta_toxicity_classifier .
Hate speech classifications generated with facebook/roberta-hate-speech-dynabench-r4-target .
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00:01:00.000 Something wakes her. She looks at the clock on the bedside table, 1.37. She rolls over on her back and looks up at the ceiling, listening. Half asleep, she tries to think. She knows the sound, but is she imagining it tonight? She listens hard. Has he come back to the house? What is he doing?
00:01:21.440 It is the middle of the night in a house in Tacoma, Washington in the winter of 2000.
00:01:27.160 Her name is Mildred Muhammad, and her marriage is over.
00:01:31.680 She has flushed both of her wedding rings down the toilet.
00:01:35.180 Her soon-to-be ex-husband moved out a few months back, but he still has a key, and he
00:01:40.260 keeps visiting in the middle of the night.
00:01:43.140 She is listening for the sound of the key turning in the front door lock, and then it
00:01:48.840 does.
00:01:50.180 The door opens.
00:01:51.860 Mildred later describes the man in the doorway to Investigation Discovery.
00:01:56.040 The man that I married became a complete stranger.
00:02:01.580 He was full of rage.
00:02:04.440 I was terrified.
00:02:07.360 She sees him coming.
00:02:08.840 The bathroom light is on for the kids.
00:02:10.800 She sees his body cross the light, about to enter her bedroom doorway, and shuts her eyes.
00:02:17.040 Then he is standing at the foot of her bed.
00:02:19.260 watching her. She thinks of a thing he said to her once, that when a man hits a woman,
00:02:25.700 it means he has lost all respect for her, and that after that it would be easy to kill her.
00:02:31.280 Her spirit tells her to be still, pretend to be asleep. Her heart is pumping against the sheets. 0.98
00:02:38.060 She knows he is doing this on purpose. He plans everything, but she does not know what his plan
00:02:43.340 is for her, so she tries to just breathe normally. Her spirit says, be still. She wants to squint
00:02:51.520 and see his face, but she knows he will see the whites of her eyes. He comes around the
00:02:56.820 bedside and leans over her, listening to her breathe. He walks around her for two or three
00:03:02.900 more minutes. She keeps hearing her spirit say, be still. She does not flinch or move a muscle
00:03:09.040 until he is gone. He finally crosses her room and tiptoes out of the house, closing the front door
00:03:15.600 behind him. Her spirit guides her through, and she believes that is why she is still alive.
00:03:21.980 She lies in the dark until morning, then picks up the phone. So the next day, I called the locksmith
00:03:30.180 to get the locks changed. So Mildred changes the locks. A new lock can keep a man out of the house. 1.00
00:03:39.040 but it cannot change who he is.
00:03:41.440 Two years later, almost 3,000 miles from Tacoma,
00:03:45.220 the man who stood over her bed in the dark
00:03:47.620 begins killing strangers in the suburbs of Washington, D.C.,
00:03:51.700 people with nothing in common but the ground they are standing on. 0.98
00:03:56.020 Ten of them will be dead in three weeks,
00:03:59.020 each one dropped by a single shot no one sees or hears in time.
00:04:03.940 And Mildred Mohammed, who fled across the country
00:04:07.720 and hides in a Maryland suburb outside of Washington, D.C., 0.90
00:04:12.000 will become convinced that all of it, every random body,
00:04:16.520 is chosen to bury the one murder that matters, hers.
00:04:21.980 Before John Allen Muhammad was half of the D.C. sniper team,
00:04:26.100 he was a soldier for 17 years, a husband and a father of five.
00:04:32.080 Tonight, we go back to the beginning.
00:04:35.040 I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:05:58.640 product. He is not born John Muhammad. He is born John Allen Williams in New Orleans on the last
00:06:07.320 day of 1960. His father is a railroad porter, a job that keeps him on the road and mostly away
00:06:14.240 from home. His mother, Murtis, gets sick with breast cancer and moves her five children home
00:06:19.820 to Baton Rouge to be near family. John is only three years old when she passes away. He is
00:06:27.020 raised by his aunts in a black enclave on the edge of the city that the people there called
00:06:32.940 Scotland Town. Journalist John Ward covers the story of the D.C. snipers for The Washington
00:06:39.320 Times. He believes this part of John's life is key to his transformation into a cold-blooded
00:06:45.460 killer. Here's what he tells the history series, Born to Kill. He was very affected by his mother
00:06:51.700 dying when he was very young. And he was also picked on a lot as a kid by relatives. And I
00:06:59.980 think he went through his entire life feeling like he was never recognized for his potential.
00:07:05.580 At 17, John Williams enlists in the Louisiana Army National Guard. Jerry O'Neill cuts his hair
00:07:12.220 for 11 years and remembers no great enthusiasm for the work.
00:07:16.720 He speaks to Born to Kill as well.
00:07:19.840 He didn't like being in the military.
00:07:22.040 It was something that he had committed himself to doing.
00:07:24.880 And at the time, I think it provided living for him and his family.
00:07:29.620 It is August of 1978.
00:07:32.540 What begins as a six-year hitch turns into a career of nearly two decades.
00:07:37.560 He starts as a carpenter and a welder in a unit that repairs buildings. 0.52
00:07:42.220 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.
00:07:57.220 Mildred's brother, Michael Jones, describes that side of him this way to Investigation Discovery.
00:08:03.380 John was a combat engineer. He can be shot at their minds. That is a very stressful job. 0.97
00:08:10.760 But he was an expert marksman with the M16 that was the rifle at that time.
00:08:19.640 A 1982 note in his file praises his initiative and his results.
00:08:25.380 But that same year, he is court-martialed.
00:08:28.300 The charges are a strange little bundle, disobeying an order, striking a sergeant, taking another man's tape measure, and briefly going AWOL.
00:08:39.480 Two charges are dropped.
00:08:40.820 He is fined $100 and receives a suspended jail sentence.
00:08:45.160 He later steals an M-16 from the armory and hides it in a dormitory.
00:08:49.880 No charges are filed for that.
00:08:52.160 Out in the Saudi desert in early 1991, a higher-ranking sergeant named Kip Berenson
00:08:59.180 chews John out one day for sleeping in another soldier's sleeping bag.
00:09:03.840 Berenson will remember the look John gave him as the stare of death.
00:09:08.720 Then, in the middle of the night in February, a thermite grenade lights up the inside of a tent
00:09:14.600 where a dozen soldiers are asleep, throwing heat, fire, and sparks, which could easily light the
00:09:21.020 ammo. There is a scramble in the dark, and everyone gets out. Berenson does not think
00:09:27.080 this is an accident. An army captain says the pin to the grenade was found near John's bunk.
00:09:33.340 The military police come, and John Williams is led away in handcuffs.
00:09:38.720 And then nothing, no record of any discipline in his file.
00:09:44.260 He is apparently cleared, or is he?
00:09:48.460 Mildred remembers the grenade incident, or at least John's version of it, a bit differently.
00:09:54.320 She later retells the story to the podcast Monster DC Sniper.
00:09:58.820 A soldier challenged him in front of others, and he felt humiliated.
00:10:05.460 That soldier, that knight, was in charge of the explosives.
00:10:14.080 John went, snuck into that area, and stole a grenade.
00:10:19.600 He threw the grenade in the tent and jumped into his sleeping bag.
00:10:29.460 The grenade went off.
00:10:31.060 He was accused of trying to get back at that soldier
00:10:39.700 that challenged him in front of the other soldiers.
00:10:44.780 They put him in a dungeon.
00:10:48.500 They hogtied him and left him there.
00:10:52.820 And when he comes back, it's not the same person.
00:10:56.320 in 1992 stationed in Germany a very pregnant Mildred visits a hairdresser who will change
00:11:04.820 her life the hairdresser is astonished that Mildred does not know the name Louis Farrakhan
00:11:10.680 and sends her home with two videotapes by Mildred's account John watches them with rapture
00:11:16.660 saying that's right that's right by the time they finish both tapes Mildred's worldview
00:11:22.340 is shattered. She resolves to question everything she has been taught for the rest of her life.
00:11:28.800 John resolves to find Farrakhan when they return to the States. Both are now very interested in
00:11:34.140 Islam. In January of 1993, John gets into the face of another soldier, a man who happens to
00:11:41.080 be named Lee, and says, brother to brother, back off or you will be the first slaughtered. There
00:11:47.560 is no place that your family will be safe and the people that are supporting you will go down
00:11:52.260 also this i promise you a report is written up and filed and that appears to have been the end
00:11:58.980 of it no arrest no charge nothing in his record the next year in 1994 the army gives john allen
00:12:07.140 williams an honorable discharge the family moves back to tacoma and joins a mosque
00:12:13.620 mildred describes it as building her relationship with god john joined but not for the same reasons
00:12:22.260 John joined the mosque not to be a man of God.
00:12:27.700 He joined because he felt that is what was needed to control me. 0.96
00:12:36.140 In October 1995, John goes to the Million Man March and takes the pledge every man there takes,
00:12:43.660 never to raise a hand with a knife or a gun against any member of his family or any human being.
00:12:50.540 He comes home kinder and gentler to Mildred's relief.
00:12:55.100 It doesn't last.
00:12:56.760 Mildred joins the Nation of Islam in January 1996,
00:13:00.180 and John returns to his old habits.
00:13:03.240 Money goes missing from the mechanic business they run together. 0.65
00:13:06.580 There are nights out with other women.
00:13:09.260 When Mildred confronts him more than once,
00:13:11.580 she remembers him saying,
00:13:13.380 It's all mind over matter, Mildred.
00:13:15.420 I don't mind, because you don't matter.
00:13:18.520 It is Friday, October 4, 2002.
00:13:22.440 In the suburbs north of Washington, D.C., a killer has already shot six people dead,
00:13:27.940 all strangers, each dropped by a single rifle shot.
00:13:31.920 Not one witness has been able to describe the man who killed them.
00:13:35.480 And at 2.30 that afternoon, 75 miles south of the first killings,
00:13:40.540 a 43-year-old mother of two named Caroline Sewell will be the next to fall. 0.76
00:13:46.520 Sewell walks out of a Michaels Craft store at the Spotsylvania Mall in Fredericksburg, Virginia. 0.98
00:13:52.820 She shops there all the time.
00:13:54.900 She is loading packages into her minivan, moving back and forth between the cart and the van.
00:14:00.000 Behind her, a couple named Alex and Doris Jones pull up their car and wait, blinker flashing because they want her parking space.
00:14:08.380 Just as Caroline closes the rear hatch, Alex hears a loud pop and sees Caroline drop.
00:14:15.560 I've been shot, she screams. Alex jumps out of his car and rushes over. He starts yelling for help.
00:14:23.360 And then, standing over her in the open parking lot, something clicks in Alex's brain. If the
00:14:29.320 rifleman could see Caroline, he can see Alex, too, and his wife. He runs back to his car and tells
00:14:35.840 Doris to get down. Alex ducks low behind the wheel himself and drives toward the far side of a nearby
00:14:42.500 furniture store out of the line of fire on his way out of that parking lot a car pulls out ahead
00:14:49.380 of him it is a dark older car with new jersey plates and the back window is covered over with
00:14:55.220 something so that he cannot see inside of it alex thinks the car looks out of place and he says so
00:15:01.700 out loud to doris who is crouching down in the back seat and never sees the vehicle someone in
00:15:08.420 the lot calls 9-1-1.
00:15:38.420 I hope they come back and get my son out of a car.
00:15:41.600 The bullet has gone in through the raised hatch of the van.
00:15:45.460 It has struck Caroline in the lower back and come out beneath her right breast.
00:15:50.580 She is rushed to Mary Washington Hospital, then flown by helicopter to Fairfax.
00:15:56.020 Against the odds, she will live.
00:15:58.340 Until now, this killing spree has stayed close to Washington, in the Maryland suburbs, and the district itself.
00:16:05.040 Now it has jumped south into Virginia, and the shooting zone is a 75-mile corridor running
00:16:11.860 more than halfway to Richmond. Late that night, the ATF analyzes the ballistics from the first
00:16:18.220 six shootings. They identify the caliber .223, one of the most popular in the country,
00:16:24.220 and more importantly, they conclude that the bullet fragments they have recovered
00:16:27.900 were indeed fired from the same rifle. The shootings are connected, even if the victims
00:16:34.100 themselves are not the ballistics lab confirms the bullet from caroline's van matches the others
00:16:41.860 one rifle beltway killing spree is on the move and what every trooper going out on the road is told
00:16:49.220 to look for is a white van after sarah ramos was killed a lovely former law student who was shot
00:16:56.580 in the head while sitting on a bench reading a landscaper working nearby saw a white box truck
00:17:02.980 speeding by a dent in the back two men inside he never saw it fire a shot but it is the only
00:17:09.540 description anyone has so it becomes the description maryland alone has more than 70 000
00:17:17.060 white vans police stop as many of them as they can find which means that of every vehicle on
00:17:23.220 the road that october the safest one to be driving may be an old blue chevy caprice
00:17:29.220 Nineteen years earlier, in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, John Williams is a handsome 22-year-old who is
00:17:37.560 known for keeping his word and who knows exactly what to say to a woman. John meets Mildred
00:17:43.580 Rizal in the fall of 1983. Right away, John tells her he has two sons, but that he is not married.
00:17:51.480 At one point, he looks her straight in the eyes and says, I'm looking for someone to share my
00:17:56.080 life. Mildred thinks, I finally found a man. It turns out John has two sons by two different
00:18:03.520 women. He married the second one in 1981 and remains married to her when he meets Mildred.
00:18:10.420 Her name is Carol. They live in a trailer outside town with their son, Lindbergh. Carol will one
00:18:16.740 day describe her husband as a militaristic control nut. He will describe her as bulimic.
00:18:23.180 Mildred finds out the truth, roughly two months into dating John, and she confronts him.
00:18:28.860 He begs her to wait for him.
00:18:30.900 She agrees to remain friends, and he confides in her something humiliating.
00:18:35.820 John cannot read.
00:18:37.960 All he can write is his name, and nobody knows.
00:18:41.240 He says he developed a photographic memory and would find an excuse to get friends to read things out loud to him.
00:18:48.540 John is a sergeant in the Army National Guard,
00:18:51.180 serving one weekend a month.
00:18:52.940 To join the regular Army,
00:18:55.100 he has to sit for a battery of written tests.
00:18:58.760 Mildred sees reading as a massive obstacle in John's life,
00:19:02.060 and she helps him.
00:19:03.800 She explains how and why years later to A&E.
00:19:07.180 I was happy.
00:19:09.320 He was trying to get into the military,
00:19:14.220 but he couldn't read.
00:19:16.200 So I taught him how to read so that he was able to be accepted.
00:19:22.600 And that's when he moved to Washington State and asked me to come with him.
00:19:28.120 John sends Mildred a letter from Washington.
00:19:30.860 I can't do this without you. Just come.
00:19:34.340 Inside the envelope is an airline ticket.
00:19:36.740 And so Mildred goes.
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00:20:57.080 John divorces Carol in 1987 and marries Mildred the next year.
00:21:02.680 They have three children, a boy everyone calls little John, and two girls, Selena and Taliba.
00:21:10.380 They settle in Tacoma in 1994.
00:21:13.720 With $10,000 borrowed from their neighbors, they star a mobile car repair business called Express Car slash Truck Mechanic, Inc.
00:21:22.920 Mildred is listed as the president.
00:21:24.600 John is the chief mechanic.
00:21:26.700 Their motto is, the future is here now.
00:21:30.120 What John cannot fix on site comes home with him.
00:21:33.240 Soon the yard fills up with broken down cars, bumpers, and engine parts.
00:21:38.160 When they need an accountant, Mildred walks into a storefront in downtown Tacoma,
00:21:43.800 advertising tax and bookkeeping services. 0.99
00:21:46.520 The woman inside is Issa Nichols. 1.00
00:21:49.240 She and Mildred are roughly the same age and hit it off, 0.73
00:21:53.140 talking for two hours the first time they meet.
00:21:55.920 Issa becomes their bookkeeper and their business advisor and eventually Mildred's closest friend.
00:22:02.500 They have a second business in Tacoma, too.
00:22:05.520 A man named Felix teaches martial arts.
00:22:08.780 John runs the business end and Mildred keeps the books.
00:22:12.280 The family rents a small home with a one-car garage on South Ainsworth Street,
00:22:17.500 two blocks from a city park with a spring-fed lake.
00:22:20.400 For a while, a neighbor describes them as a model family.
00:22:23.620 To people outside the family, John is charming.
00:22:27.760 But inside the home, Mildred learns to be afraid.
00:22:31.060 She later describes him toying with her mind.
00:22:34.240 One particular morning, I was at work.
00:22:39.720 He walked in and he said, I want a divorce.
00:22:44.860 And I looked at him and it was like somebody just stabbed me.
00:22:51.140 And I panicked.
00:22:53.620 I went home, and I was crying.
00:22:58.400 Then John says, no, I was just playing.
00:23:01.280 I just wanted to see your reaction.
00:23:04.140 A dress vanishes, and he suggests she never had it.
00:23:08.320 A jacket turns up shredded, and he wonders why she would accuse him.
00:23:12.700 Then he blames their little boy.
00:23:14.800 He volunteers to fix a broken deadbolt, the same lock he jammed on purpose.
00:23:19.460 He changes the phone number to the house and does not tell her.
00:23:23.160 He needles her until she is shouting,
00:23:25.560 and then John goes quiet, asking her softly why she's so upset
00:23:29.200 and what he could possibly have said.
00:23:31.480 He would say, I'm your God.
00:23:34.600 You do what I tell you to do.
00:23:37.220 I'm the God in this house.
00:23:39.300 Mildred points to one night in the summer of 1997
00:23:42.020 as a dark turning point in their marriage.
00:23:45.440 John's son, from his first marriage, 13-year-old Lindbergh,
00:23:49.320 has come from Louisiana to visit.
00:23:51.040 As the summer ends, John decides he is not sending the boy back home.
00:23:56.580 He says he believes Lindbergh is being abused, and he hires a lawyer and goes to court.
00:24:01.980 A Tacoma judge orders John and Mildred to send the boy home.
00:24:06.200 They buy him a plane ticket.
00:24:08.160 The night before Lindbergh's flight home, Mildred finds John packing a duffel bag as long as a twin bed.
00:24:14.680 I'm running away with Lindbergh, he says.
00:24:16.800 Mildred tells him there's a court order and that he cannot do this.
00:24:21.040 John pauses. Mildred is not convinced he'll do the right thing. She takes Lindbergh and her own
00:24:28.160 three children with John into the second bedroom. She locks the door and sits on the floor with her
00:24:33.480 back against the door until morning. By daylight, John has realized he's lost this fight. He joins
00:24:40.520 Mildred in the car driving Lindbergh to the airport. No one speaks. They walk the boy all
00:24:46.560 the way to the gate and watch his plane take off. The moment its wheels leave the runway,
00:24:52.380 John turns sharply and walks away. In the car, he says one thing to Mildred,
00:24:57.820 you didn't have my back. That, Mildred says, is when the relationship changed forever.
00:25:04.820 The marriage fully breaks down by the spring of 2000. John has moved out, they've been separated
00:25:10.120 for months, and he is tapping her phone lines, falsely accusing Mildred of having an affair.
00:25:16.260 At one point after he and Mildred have separated, John shows up to see their son who is sick.
00:25:21.940 Mildred will not let him in. She's scared of him. He shoves the door so hard that Mildred
00:25:26.620 is thrown to the floor. She jumps up and takes a swing at him. Misses. She is shocked at her 1.00
00:25:32.400 own actions. She sees the expression on his face and thinks, he is going to kill me. 0.70
00:25:38.820 A few days later, John comes back to the house. He is nicely dressed in a shirt and tie. He says
00:25:44.880 he wants to talk and they step out to the garage. As he speaks, she sees the cold fury in his eyes.
00:25:52.580 He told me, you have become my enemy and as my enemy, I will kill you. John has always told 1.00
00:25:59.960 Mildred that his word is his bond. She believes him. Mildred goes straight away to the police
00:26:06.460 department and fills out the four-page form asking for a restraining order. Crying so hard,
00:26:13.680 Her tears drip onto the pages.
00:26:16.660 On the day of the hearing, her legs shake as she walks into the building.
00:26:20.480 She stands where she can watch every door, and in her mind, she plans an escape route.
00:26:26.380 But John does not show up.
00:26:28.400 The judge reads the forms she filled out and says,
00:26:31.780 You need to get away from this guy.
00:26:34.120 Yes, sir, she says.
00:26:35.680 I'm trying.
00:26:37.080 With that, the judge grants Mildred a lifetime protection order.
00:26:42.480 Even so, Mildred later agrees to let John see his children.
00:26:47.700 On Monday, March 27, 2000, John calls and asks to take the children to an arcade.
00:26:54.080 Mildred agrees on one condition.
00:26:56.180 All three have to be home by 5.30 for their grandmother's birthday dinner.
00:27:00.440 John agrees.
00:27:02.000 5.30 comes and the children are not home.
00:27:04.920 John calls later in the evening.
00:27:06.540 He says there's a new plan with the children.
00:27:09.360 Then another after that.
00:27:11.480 They do not come home that night.
00:27:13.360 They will not come home for 17 months.
00:27:17.100 I called the police and they said,
00:27:20.540 sorry, there's nothing we can do.
00:27:24.040 He has just as much a right to the children as you do.
00:27:28.080 And they left.
00:27:30.300 Within a day with $521 emptied
00:27:33.640 out of the children's own bank accounts,
00:27:35.940 a man named Thomas Allen Lee, AKA John Williams,
00:27:41.100 is on a plane to the Caribbean with his three kids, also now with new names.
00:27:46.940 They land in Antigua on the 28th of March with false Wyoming identification.
00:27:53.940 Antigua is a small island in the Caribbean,
00:27:55.920 and there John Williams goes into business selling forged papers to people trying to reach America.
00:28:03.480 A passport, a birth certificate, a social security number, a visa.
00:28:07.780 Antiguan authorities will later estimate he made more than $60,000 with the scheme.
00:28:13.380 To the families who take him in, what is visible is a devoted father,
00:28:17.440 a man who checks his children's schoolwork and takes them to the beach.
00:28:22.160 But the people around him start noticing something strange.
00:28:25.940 The children answer to different names on different days.
00:28:29.500 Part of John's business is getting his customers onto flights into the United States.
00:28:34.100 He buys their tickets himself, sometimes thousands of dollars worth at a time.
00:28:39.720 An American Airlines ticket agent catches on to the scheme.
00:28:43.540 On March 11, 2001, John tries to buy yet another ticket for a customer under a false name.
00:28:49.300 The airline calls the police.
00:28:51.420 Officers come to the airport and search John.
00:28:54.580 They find a forged Washington state driver's license and a Florida birth certificate.
00:28:59.900 John is arrested and jailed at police headquarters
00:29:02.480 in the Antigua capital city of St. John's.
00:29:06.600 Two days later, he escapes.
00:29:09.120 According to government reports, there's a gross lack of security,
00:29:12.080 and John's escape amounts to simply walking out of the police station.
00:29:16.660 The arrest does not slow John's forgery business a beat.
00:29:20.340 He recruits a teenage boy whom he met on Antigua
00:29:23.220 to help keep the business running.
00:29:25.840 John leaves the island often.
00:29:27.420 He is escorting his customers into the United States, routing them through Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands, posing as a family member.
00:29:36.760 Every day, this teenage assistant walks 12 miles from St. John's to a safe house where John has moved the children.
00:29:44.420 The boy gives them four hours of lessons and then takes them to the park.
00:29:49.000 The boy's name is Leiboyd Malvo.
00:29:52.400 John Allen Williams, meanwhile, has gone back to Tacoma, Washington.
00:29:56.160 On April 23, 2001, he walks into a Pierce County District Court in Tacoma, Washington
00:30:02.760 and petitions to officially change his name.
00:30:26.160 Perkins. Are you changing your name for any other reason? No, ma'am. Are you changing your name to
00:30:31.900 defraud or mislead any person or creditor? No, ma'am. Are you involved in any legal proceeding
00:30:36.700 other than this name change? No, ma'am. And have you ever been convicted of a felony? No, ma'am.
00:30:41.480 Are you under supervision of any probation department that requires you to report a change
00:30:45.380 of address? No, ma'am. I'll go ahead and grant your name change. Thank you. John laughs aloud
00:30:50.200 at how simple the process is. The next day, the state of Washington issues him a driver's license
00:30:55.640 in the name of John Allen Muhammad.
00:30:59.120 A month later, he flies back to Antigua
00:31:01.520 using his new legal name and checks into a beach resort.
00:31:06.820 On October 6th, 2002,
00:31:08.740 Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose
00:31:11.340 walks up to the microphones with the cameras rolling,
00:31:15.080 trying to put the public's fears at ease.
00:31:18.140 He points out a pattern in the shooter's targets thus far.
00:31:21.500 None of the victims have been of anything close to school age.
00:31:26.260 None of the locations are close to the schools.
00:31:28.680 So please continue with that day.
00:31:30.780 I think the school kids are safe.
00:31:32.820 The next morning, that all changes.
00:31:36.240 Iron Brown has been banned from his school bus for three days for eating Twizzlers.
00:31:41.520 He is 13 years old, an eighth grader at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland.
00:31:46.420 And on the morning of Monday, October 7th, he is not sure whether the three days are up or not.
00:31:52.620 So his Aunt Tanya drives him to school.
00:31:55.220 She's a nurse at Children's Hospital in Washington.
00:31:58.500 At 8.09 a.m., they pull into the driveway and Iron gets out, his backpack over a white football jersey.
00:32:06.120 As his aunt begins to pull away, she hears a boom and a child scream.
00:32:11.380 And then Iron shouting, Aunt Tanya.
00:32:15.000 She stops and looks back.
00:32:17.060 Iron is on the ground.
00:32:19.060 A single .223 caliber round has hit Iron in the upper left of his abdomen,
00:32:24.040 tearing through a lung, his spleen, stomach, liver, and pancreas.
00:32:29.540 A teacher standing in the doorway runs to him.
00:32:32.200 What's wrong?
00:32:32.740 The teacher says.
00:32:33.920 I've been shot.
00:32:35.240 Are you kidding?
00:32:36.640 He is not kidding.
00:32:38.000 His aunt has backed the car up by now.
00:32:41.160 Iron gets to his feet, tells her again that he's been shot,
00:32:44.800 and she can see the blood on his shirt.
00:32:47.180 He walks back to the car himself and gets in.
00:32:50.620 His aunt buckles his seatbelt, dials 911, and drives.
00:32:55.340 By that evening, the story is on every channel in the country.
00:32:59.320 The boy suffered a wound consistent with a high-powered rifle.
00:33:02.560 After several hours of surgery, he is critical but stable.
00:33:06.580 The surgeon who operates on him is Dr. Martin Eichelberger,
00:33:10.840 chief of pediatric surgery at Children's National.
00:33:14.220 They open Irons' chest, they treat the injured left lung,
00:33:18.060 take out his smashed spleen, repair a nicked pancreas and a lacerated stomach.
00:33:23.760 And then with the ATF waiting outside the operating room,
00:33:27.260 Eichelberger looks at the x-ray and puts a finger on the boy's chest wall.
00:33:30.860 And I looked at the x-ray and put my finger down where I thought the bullet was,
00:33:36.900 and yes, I could palpate it with my finger.
00:33:39.720 I was able to pull out this bullet.
00:33:42.140 I gave it specifically to Dr. Newman, who gave it to a specific person,
00:33:47.820 to make sure that that chain of evidence was kept intact.
00:33:52.000 Iron Brown lives. Barely. 0.93
00:33:55.500 The detectives hunting the shooters are now certain they are watching the news.
00:34:00.640 David Reichenbaugh is a lieutenant with the Maryland State Police,
00:34:04.500 running criminal intelligence on the case.
00:34:06.680 He describes that day years later to Investigation Discovery.
00:34:10.860 Chief Moose was trying to set parents at ease,
00:34:15.000 but the snipers were listening to every word that the media was putting out there.
00:34:20.860 And I believe they heard Chief Moose say that the children would be safe,
00:34:24.620 and they took that as a challenge.
00:34:26.760 That afternoon, Chief Moose walks back out to the cameras.
00:34:32.140 A tear runs down the chief's face on live television.
00:34:36.320 A stranger watching from across the country puts up $50,000 of his own money
00:34:41.160 toward catching whoever did this.
00:34:44.400 Miles away, Mildred Muhammad hears about the boy the same way everyone else does.
00:34:49.640 I thought about his mom, how she must be in so much pain.
00:34:54.880 I was really sad for him and his family.
00:34:58.300 No one is sure where the shot that hit iron came from. 0.61
00:35:01.920 So the U.S. Marshals bring in a dog.
00:35:04.640 His name is Beacon.
00:35:06.400 He is half Black Lab and half Golden Retriever,
00:35:09.420 and he flunked out of guide dog school
00:35:11.120 before somebody trained him to sniff explosives.
00:35:14.660 Beacon and his handler, Deputy Marshal Michael Pio,
00:35:18.440 go into the dense woods north of the school
00:35:21.340 with three SWAT officers guarding them.
00:35:24.240 Pio is ducking through the underbrush when one of the SWAT officers calls out,
00:35:28.680 Hey, look at your dog.
00:35:31.060 Beacon is standing up on his hind legs with his nose against a tree branch.
00:35:35.700 Then he sits down, which is how he says, Yes.
00:35:39.340 Pio identifies this tree as the perfect spot to take the shot on Iron Brown.
00:35:44.680 And the ground is disturbed as though someone had lain there a while waiting.
00:35:50.160 Prince George's County brings in a bloodhound named Miss Demeanor. 0.95
00:35:54.880 She takes a trail out of the woods, along the tennis court, into a parking lot and stops. 0.97
00:36:00.240 That is where the scent ends.
00:36:02.220 So police walk the trail again, slowly.
00:36:05.280 An ATF agent sees something in the underbrush.
00:36:07.780 It is the death card from the Rider-Waite tarot deck.
00:36:13.300 A skeleton in black armor on a white horse.
00:36:16.540 The Roman numeral 13 at the top and the word death along the bottom.
00:36:21.860 Written on the front in blue ink is the phrase, call me God.
00:36:26.600 On the back, three more messages.
00:36:29.160 At the top, for you, Mr. Police.
00:36:32.260 In the middle, code, call me God.
00:36:35.920 And at the bottom, a warning, do not release to the press.
00:36:40.320 Drew Tracy, the assistant chief of the Montgomery County Police, describes it this way.
00:36:44.360 It was almost like a calling card saying that it's us again, and we did it.
00:36:49.560 At that point in time, they did not ask for anything, and that's a scary situation.
00:36:54.880 They put the card in an evidence bag.
00:36:57.220 Then they hold the bag open and let the bloodhound smell the inside of it.
00:37:01.180 She traces the scent along the same trail as before.
00:37:05.080 Officers find a .223 caliber rifle casing nearby.
00:37:09.140 This is from their guy.
00:37:11.440 The tarot card marks the first time the shooters spoke directly to the police,
00:37:15.980 but it certainly would not be the last.
00:37:18.680 A cryptic message from the killer, or killers, as more shots ring out across D.C.
00:37:24.560 How the twisted relationship between Muhammad and Malvo evolves into a lethal partnership.
00:37:31.100 That's next time on MK Confidential.