The Megyn Kelly Show - August 20, 2026


The Beltway Snipers： Trained to Kill— Ep. 3 ｜ MK Confidential


Episode Stats


Length

35 minutes

Words per minute

158.74

Word count

5,642

Sentence count

438

Harmful content

Misogyny

5

sentences flagged

Toxicity

6

sentences flagged

Hate speech

10

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 .
00:00:00.000 order up thank you no no no oh come on this is not happening turn off the water where's the
00:00:11.820 shut off the pipe there there gosh it's everywhere are we covered for this don't know don't worry
00:00:22.240 a licensed dd insurance advisor can help you get the right insurance coverage to protect your
00:00:26.820 business. It's how we're making insurance more human. It is a drizzly Saturday evening in Tacoma,
00:00:33.100 Washington, February 16th, 2002. On the corner of East 34th Street and East Roosevelt Avenue,
00:00:40.800 there is a pale yellow house that looks out over the city's dockyards, the Puyallup River,
00:00:46.720 and the fog sitting on Commencement Bay. The porch faces the street and the city spread out below it.
00:00:53.040 Beside the front door, a small sign reads,
00:00:55.200 Please remove shoes.
00:00:57.640 This house belongs to a U.S. Army soldier
00:01:00.060 named Joseph Nichols and his wife, Issa.
00:01:03.820 Neither of them is home.
00:01:05.700 Issa has gone to collect their 13-year-old daughter, Tamara, from a sleepover.
00:01:10.860 The only people in the house are the Nichols' 21-year-old niece,
00:01:16.160 Kenya Cook, who lives here with her aunt and uncle,
00:01:19.000 and Kenia's six-month-old daughter, Angelia.
00:01:23.080 There is food on the stove.
00:01:25.580 Upstairs, the baby is lying on a towel on a bed.
00:01:28.740 It's nearly bath time.
00:01:30.640 At about seven o'clock, the doorbell rings.
00:01:34.180 Kenia comes downstairs in a shirt, jeans, and socks.
00:01:37.340 The porch light is on,
00:01:39.380 throwing light onto the front steps under the overhang
00:01:42.100 that keeps whoever is standing out there dry.
00:01:45.560 But it is dark,
00:01:46.620 and the window set into the front door is a long narrow strip of cut glass. It's hard to see
00:01:52.720 anything through it. Everyone who knows Kenya Cook says the same thing about her. She is careful.
00:01:59.500 She would never open that door to a stranger. So she has a reason. Maybe it's her estranged
00:02:06.040 boyfriend who came by the house earlier in the day. Or maybe through that narrow strip of glass
00:02:11.800 whoever is out there simply looks like a kid from the neighborhood.
00:02:16.500 Kenya opens the front door and looks out onto Roosevelt Avenue. 0.96
00:02:20.680 A single bullet goes through the thin bone just below her left eye 0.86
00:02:24.620 and lodges at the base of her skull.
00:02:28.160 She goes down in the foyer.
00:02:30.260 And then, nothing happens.
00:02:33.640 The ejected shell casing lies on the floor beside her.
00:02:37.460 Upstairs, the baby is still on her towel waiting to be washed.
00:02:40.600 In the kitchen, the food is still on the stove. A few minutes later, headlights turn into the
00:02:46.500 driveway. Issa Nichols stays in the car to pull it into the garage. Her daughter gets out and
00:02:52.640 walks around to the front of the home to go in the front door and open the garage from the inside.
00:02:58.020 The front door is wide open, which is odd. A second later, the 13-year-old is running back
00:03:05.420 to the car. Mommy, she screams. Mommy, hurry. Police look at Kenya's boyfriend first because
00:03:13.300 he had been at the house earlier the same day. They bring him in. They question him.
00:03:17.940 Then they let him go. After that, there is nowhere to go. There was a young woman dead
00:03:24.040 in a foyer, a brass casing on the floor, and a doorbell that rang. The case is cold right
00:03:31.300 from the start. Issa Nichols has the blood cleaned out of the foyer. Her husband installs a camera
00:03:37.680 above the front door. There are no viable clues to go on. For eight months, nobody knows who fired
00:03:44.960 that shot. But there would be more. Many more. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.
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00:05:04.800 HomeTitleLock.com promo code Megan or use the link in the description. The person who rang
00:05:11.200 Kenya Cook's doorbell is Lee Boyd Malvo. He is 16 years old, two days away from his 17th birthday.
00:05:20.140 How did this teenager end up on that doorstep? And the question that has never been settled
00:05:25.420 about him, not in a courtroom, not in the 20 years since, how much of what he did was his to choose?
00:05:33.920 He's born in Kingston, Jamaica, on the 18th of February, 1985.
00:05:39.820 His father is Leslie Malvo, a brick mason who went as far as the sixth grade.
00:05:46.580 He has other children, other women, which in Jamaica at the time is neither unusual nor a point of conversation.
00:05:53.940 Of all his children, Leslie says Lee looks the most like him.
00:05:58.360 His mother is Una James.
00:06:00.680 She is 20 when she has him. As a girl, she walked miles to find her own father and ask him to pay
00:06:07.100 for her schooling, and he said no. What she wants for her son is the education she was refused.
00:06:14.400 Leslie, the father, is the soft one. The boy says he wants to be a pilot, so his dad folds him a
00:06:21.600 paper plane, and the two of them fly it around the furniture carefully so as not to break anything.
00:06:27.180 When the boy does break his mother's porcelain vase
00:06:29.480 and hears her shriek his name from the other room,
00:06:32.680 it's Leslie who steps in front of him.
00:06:35.080 Leave the boy alone, he says.
00:06:36.280 I broke it.
00:06:37.600 He takes his son everywhere.
00:06:39.460 He calls him Little Man.
00:06:42.160 Una is the hard one.
00:06:44.440 Playing is an interruption of studying.
00:06:47.020 And by his father's account, when Leslie is not there,
00:06:49.560 she beats Malvo.
00:06:51.800 In 1988, Leslie takes a masonry contract in Grand Cayman.
00:06:56.480 six months at a stretch. He sends money home twice a month and opens a savings account
00:07:01.680 because he's going to buy them a house. He never does. In August of 1990, Una empties the account,
00:07:09.920 packs up the entire house, and moves the boys somewhere she is fairly sure Leslie will not
00:07:15.640 find them. But Leslie does find them in the summer of 1991, and he brings two flight jackets
00:07:22.480 covered in military tags because he remembered his son wants to be a pilot.
00:07:28.080 And then he goes away for good.
00:07:31.280 Malvo is only five.
00:07:33.780 Malvo is nine the first time his mother leaves him.
00:07:37.220 She boards him with a woman he met the day before.
00:07:39.980 This is the first of many separations.
00:07:42.840 Over the next five years, Malvo is handed from one household to another.
00:07:46.940 When he's 10, he goes looking for his father, finds him, and asks if he can stay.
00:07:53.940 Leslie tells him no.
00:07:56.420 Malvo believes the real reason was the woman with whom his father was living,
00:08:00.400 who treated Malvo like an intrusion.
00:08:03.180 Through all of it, Malvo is consistently on the honor roll at school.
00:08:08.060 In January of 1999, Malvo's mother leaves Jamaica for the Caribbean island of Antigua
00:08:15.060 in the care of a friend, and then of a teacher. She sends for him to join her in the summer of
00:08:21.460 1999. He is 14 when he reaches Antigua, and his mother is the only person he knows on the island.
00:08:28.720 In the early days of October 2000, in St. John's, the capital of Antigua, there is an electronics
00:08:35.940 shop called Zaza Yellows, where the neighborhood kids go to use the computers and play video games.
00:08:42.420 Malvo goes there. The place is usually crowded, so mostly he finds a corner and watches other
00:08:47.560 people play. And on several Fridays, he notices a father and a son. They're playing Microsoft
00:08:54.680 Flight Simulator, and they're laughing. The boy is flying from the outside view, and his father
00:09:00.560 says, nice scenery, but remind me not to fly with you. Malvo stands in the corner and watches them.
00:09:07.020 He's now 15 years old.
00:09:09.540 Malvo says later the level of trust, their open camaraderie, and the communication between them
00:09:14.320 was something he had always dreamed of, but until then had never experienced,
00:09:18.900 not since his mom first took him away from his dad.
00:09:22.520 Malvo admires the father in that shop.
00:09:25.060 When he walks in, everyone straightens up.
00:09:27.520 He talks to children the way he talks to adults.
00:09:29.980 When someone speaks to him, he lets them finish.
00:09:32.600 He repeats back what they said to make sure he understood.
00:09:35.020 and only then does he answer. Malvo's mother, who is trying to get to America,
00:09:41.920 hears there's an American on the island who sells visas. She takes her son with her to the address
00:09:46.960 on Rose Street. The American turns out to be the man from Zaza Yellows, who was so good with his
00:09:54.760 own son. His name is John Allen Muhammad. He is a United States Army veteran. He lives on Antigua
00:10:02.420 with his three children, and he sells forged papers to people trying to reach America. 0.82
00:10:07.960 While his mother negotiates, Malvo gets to know Muhammad's son. The boy's name is John Jr.,
00:10:14.140 and his nickname is Little Man. The same name Leslie Malvo used to call his son in Kingston
00:10:20.980 before any of this. Little Man and I hit it off, Malvo writes in his journal,
00:10:26.140 when we learned we both wanted to be pilots. Una buys her papers, memorizes her cover story,
00:10:33.680 and flies to the United States. She tells her son Malvo that she will send for him to come to the
00:10:39.600 United States when she has the money. She pays for the rest of the term at his school, covers two
00:10:44.800 rent, and leaves him to fend for himself. In Antigua, he has literally no one. He is 15. A few
00:10:53.140 months later, alone in the house, Lee Malvo gets sick. It's a recurrence of the rheumatic fever he
00:11:00.180 had as a child. His joints ache, his tonsils swell shut. For two days, he cannot get out of bed to
00:11:07.720 call anybody or even feed himself. By Malvo's own account given years later, prepared with his
00:11:13.480 defense team, he describes what happened next, quote, then Mr. Muhammad came by one day and found
00:11:20.020 the back door slightly ajar. Upon entering, he saw me in bed, sweating and almost delirious with
00:11:26.180 fever. He lifted me out of bed and carried me out in his arms because I was too weak to walk.
00:11:32.840 He took me to the doctor and then to his place of residence. I was fed with fluids and soup.
00:11:38.880 What was truly amazing was that he spent a lot of time ensuring that I was okay and he never
00:11:44.100 asked for payment. After that, they go everywhere together. Carmeta Albaros, the social worker who
00:11:51.080 later worked on Malvo's defense, describes them as disciple and guru. Muhammad talks, Malvo listens.
00:11:59.640 Malvo tells him about his father, his mother, and the beatings. Muhammad tells him they did not meet
00:12:05.940 by coincidence. They met by destiny. He starts introducing Malvo as his son, and Malvo starts
00:12:12.720 calling him dad. Mohammed teaches him to speak with an American accent. On his 16th birthday,
00:12:20.020 he takes them shopping and replaces his entire wardrobe. He takes him to a tailor and has him
00:12:25.680 measured for three suits. One woman who watched them in Antigua says Mohammed treated Malvo
00:12:30.900 like a little soldier. Yes, sir. No, sir. Like he was in the army. Malvo will later say these were
00:12:37.940 the happiest days of his life. On the last day of May 2001, Lee Malvo enters the United States,
00:12:45.680 flying out of Antigua with Muhammad and Muhammad's three children under a name that is not his.
00:12:52.400 He travels as Lindbergh Williams, Muhammad's son by his first marriage. He is handed over to his
00:12:59.280 mother, Una, now in Florida. He registers at a high school in Fort Myers and starts earning A's
00:13:05.400 and bees. And in October, he runs. He leaves before dawn, takes a bus west, and gets off in
00:13:12.800 Bellingham, Washington, 15 miles from the Canadian border. He's running toward a man who six weeks
00:13:18.600 earlier walked out of a Tacoma courtroom without his own children. In August, Mohammed had applied
00:13:25.340 for food stamps in Washington state and filled in his children's real names, the names flagged
00:13:31.260 in a state system. That led back to his ex-wife, Mildred, who had legal custody and a restraining
00:13:37.500 order against Muhammad. On the 4th of September, a court commissioner in Pierce County hands all
00:13:43.280 three children back to their mother. There is tape of the hearing. So the children was ever missing.
00:13:49.780 The whereabouts were never known by mother. That's why the court apparently issued the
00:13:53.500 writ. You never responded to the published summons for divorce. So are you telling me the reason why
00:14:00.300 I don't have my children and it won't be to keep my children because I don't have the proper
00:14:03.660 paperwork yet. No, I'm saying that you've been divorced. The court has entered orders that
00:14:08.840 mother had sole residential placement, care and custody of the children, and that you get
00:14:13.340 no visitation at present without further court order. So I understand I'm not able to see my
00:14:21.080 children. Mildred takes the three of them and disappears to the suburbs of Washington, D.C.
00:14:27.500 John Muhammad has a name for that day.
00:14:30.200 He calls it his own September 11th.
00:14:32.740 So when the boy gets off the bus in Bellingham, he finds Muhammad now childless and living 0.71
00:14:38.660 in a Christian homeless shelter called the Lighthouse Mission. 0.69
00:14:42.580 They sign in under the last name Thomas.
00:14:46.160 One resident leader tells authorities that Muhammad put the word out that he wanted his
00:14:50.260 wife killed.
00:14:52.060 He wanted it secret and anonymous. 0.95
00:14:53.620 He talked about shooting her from a car. 0.51
00:14:57.280 He talked about making a silencer out of a Coke bottle. 0.82
00:15:01.100 Then he talked about cutting a gun port into the vehicle.
00:15:05.500 In February of 2002, Muhammad and Malvo move into an apartment near a golf course in Tacoma.
00:15:12.460 It belongs to a man named Earl Dancy, who works at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport.
00:15:18.600 Dancy has things Muhammad wants.
00:15:20.720 a Chinese-made version of the AK-47, a Winchester with a scope, a Remington .308 hunting rifle,
00:15:29.260 a .44 Magnum revolver, a .22 pistol, and a compact Sig Sauer .45. Dancy gives them the run of the
00:15:37.160 apartment and free use of the guns. Why would he do that? Years later, Dancy explains it in the
00:15:44.880 documentary series Born to Kill. Very manipulative. He gains your confidence. He gains your trust.
00:15:51.860 Once he comfortable with your trust, he'll use it to his advantage. They take the guns out to the
00:15:57.040 Tacoma Sportsman's Club, and Dancy notices that Muhammad is obsessed with the boy's marksmanship.
00:16:03.300 He coaches him. He brags about how well he's coming along. And when Malvo makes a mistake,
00:16:09.000 Mohamed makes him run laps and do push-ups.
00:16:12.500 Malvo always obeys. 1.00
00:16:14.720 The targets are paper men. 0.99
00:16:17.020 Here's Dancy again. 0.99
00:16:18.600 At a period of time, they would bring targets to me.
00:16:21.620 And the targets were getting better and better.
00:16:24.200 And actually one where the target was actually dead shot, 0.99
00:16:28.200 sent him ass. 0.98
00:16:28.820 Two weeks after he first takes the boy to a range, 1.00
00:16:31.920 Mohamed hands him a gift.
00:16:33.860 It's a T-shirt with the word sniper across the front.
00:16:37.840 He tells Malvo he won it in a sniper competition in the 90s.
00:16:42.120 Malvo wears it.
00:16:43.840 Muhammad tells Earl Dancy that he qualified as a sniper in the army.
00:16:48.360 He's telling Dancy other things, too. 0.60
00:16:50.900 That his ex-wife and one of her friends conspired to take his children and that he's going to get them for it.
00:16:58.540 He has Dancy sit down at his computer and search for Mildred Muhammad on the internet.
00:17:05.280 Dancy finds her.
00:17:06.600 She's in the Washington, D.C. area, which brings us back to a doorbell in Tacoma, shortly
00:17:12.480 before a cross-country journey will begin.
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00:18:13.140 Authorities believe that on the drizzly evening of February 16th, 2002, it was Lee Boyd Malvo
00:18:20.500 who borrowed Earl Dancy's compact Sig Sauer 45 and carried it across town to the corner
00:18:26.840 of East 34th and East Roosevelt. By Malvo's own account, given years later to his defense team,
00:18:34.580 Muhammad spends the weeks beforehand making sure the boy is ready. Failure is not an option.
00:18:41.040 Your pace must be certain, he tells him, like a man who knows where he's going.
00:18:45.720 Then he drives Malvo to the home. Before he lets him out of the car, he makes him say the plan
00:18:51.060 out loud. Knock on the door. Ask for Issa. If it's Issa, good. If it's not, say you have a
00:18:58.640 message for her and then use this. Issa Nichols, whose home this is, used to manage the Mohammeds 0.99
00:19:06.540 books. She became Mildred's close friend and testified for her during the custody fight.
00:19:13.740 Issa is one of the people Mohammed blames for the loss of his children, but she isn't home.
00:19:20.340 Her niece is.
00:19:22.660 Kenya Cook answers the door.
00:19:25.000 She's 21 and has nothing to do with Muhammad's custody fight.
00:19:29.600 She tells Lee Boyd Malvo where her aunt has gone.
00:19:33.380 He shoots her anyway.
00:19:35.480 By his account, he runs to a phone booth, sweating and crying.
00:19:40.240 Muhammad pulls up and Malvo gets in.
00:19:43.600 I watched you, Muhammad tells him. 0.99
00:19:45.600 You did perfect.
00:19:47.840 Then he hands the boy a wallet with a new ID card in it.
00:19:51.980 Malvo reads the name on it, John Lee Muhammad.
00:19:56.280 Lee Boyd Malvo no longer exists, Muhammad says, and starts the engine.
00:20:01.900 Malvo says he stood in the shower for hours and couldn't get clean.
00:20:06.360 That Muhammad got impatient and knocked on the bathroom door,
00:20:09.760 and that the knocking on the door was the worst part.
00:20:13.480 Two days later, it's his 17th birthday.
00:20:17.800 Muhammad takes him to the mall and buys him slacks, shirts, ties, cufflinks, and sneakers.
00:20:23.880 And he takes him bowling and then to the movies. 0.52
00:20:27.980 The film is John Q with Denzel Washington.
00:20:31.420 A man's son needs a heart operation he cannot pay for, so he takes an emergency room hostage.
00:20:37.300 And while they are bowling, Malvo will later say,
00:20:40.620 Muhammad lectures him on the importance of a man doing whatever he has to to save his children.
00:20:49.020 A month later, they're in Arizona. On the 19th of March, at a golf course in Tucson,
00:20:55.800 a 60-year-old frozen foods salesman named Jerry Ray Taylor is practicing his game after lunch.
00:21:03.020 He goes down on the course, shot in the back. Whoever shot him drags his body into the underbrush,
00:21:09.240 appears to have pulled out Jerry's wallet, but leaves it next to him, the cash and cards still
00:21:15.380 inside. And that is how it goes for seven months. A murder in one state, then a bus ticket, then a
00:21:23.820 murder in another one under a different name in a jurisdiction that has never heard of the last one.
00:21:31.220 September 5th, 2002, half past 10 at night, a strip mall in Clinton, Maryland. Restaurant owner
00:21:39.020 Paul LaRuffa has just closed for the night. He walks out across the lot with an employee
00:21:45.180 and a customer carrying a black leather briefcase with about $3,500 in it and a laptop. He opens
00:21:52.780 the back door of his green Chrysler, puts them both on the seat, and gets in the driver's seat.
00:21:58.640 There is a shadow at the driver's side window, a small figure, he will say. Then the window comes
00:22:04.740 apart and bullets go into his arm and his chest and his side. And as he leans away from it,
00:22:11.540 someone yanks open the back door of his car and lifts the briefcase and the laptop off of the
00:22:17.020 seat. La Ruffa gets his door open and staggers out onto the lot, shouting for someone to call
00:22:23.440 911, telling himself over and over that he is not going to die in this parking lot. And he doesn't.
00:22:31.260 He's been shot five or six times, but he lives.
00:22:35.940 That $3,500 pays for what comes next.
00:22:40.900 On September 21st, outside a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama, a manager named Claudine Parker is shot dead.
00:22:49.360 The 24-year-old cashier, Kelly Adams, is also shot through the neck and lives.
00:22:55.360 Officers are close enough to hear it.
00:22:57.860 They chase a man and he gets away.
00:22:59.560 and on the ground where he ran, they find something and they bag it and they file it away. 1.00
00:23:07.240 Two days later in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a woman named Hong Im Ballinger locks up the beauty 0.71
00:23:13.340 supply store where she works and reaches her car with her keys in her hand. She is killed by a 0.89
00:23:19.320 single shot to the head. A few blocks from that strip mall in Clinton, Maryland, where Paul LaRuffa
00:23:25.260 was shot and his $3,500 were stolen, there is a subdivision with streets named Black Willow
00:23:32.040 and Mayapple and Quiet Brook Lane. Living on Quiet Brook Lane that September is the woman
00:23:39.660 Earl Dancy found on the internet, a 41-year-old divorced mother of three who moved across the
00:23:46.520 country from Tacoma, Washington to get away from her husband. Her name is Mildred Muhammad.
00:23:54.100 Robert Holmes, one of Muhammad's oldest army friends, would later say he believed Mildred was always the real target.
00:24:02.500 My way of thinking was Mildred was the target in the mission.
00:24:06.680 Because if it was just to terrorize people or to kill people even, that could have been done anywhere.
00:24:12.820 If you kill 10 people and she's one of the 10, then it's less likely.
00:24:18.280 I mean, there's still a chance that you're going to get caught, but it's less likely.
00:24:21.440 By the second week of October, 11 people are dead in this killing spree, six of them in the D.C. area this month.
00:24:30.080 Two more shot and still alive, and thousands of local and state police, sheriffs, deputies, federal agents, marshals, and technicians are now hunting two men, whom they still believe may be a single sniper in a white van.
00:24:46.080 Roadblocks shut down interstates within minutes of each murder.
00:24:50.340 The task force knows that there's a rifle and there's a vehicle.
00:24:54.000 They know the crimes are connected by the same gun, and that is it.
00:24:58.240 October 9th, the next victim.
00:25:00.940 A 53-year-old civil engineer named Dean Myers is working late at his office in Manassas, Virginia,
00:25:07.340 because he works late almost every night.
00:25:09.420 He was drafted in 1969 and shot on a patrol north of Saigon.
00:25:14.720 He came home with a purple heart and an arm that never fully worked again.
00:25:19.440 A little after eight, a colleague in the next cubicle says good night.
00:25:23.800 Okay, Myers says. See you tomorrow.
00:25:27.600 Myers has a long drive, and he needs gas.
00:25:30.940 He pulls his black Mazda into the battlefield Sunoco on Sudley Road.
00:25:35.580 He is standing in the white light of the Pump Island, in the cold and the wet,
00:25:40.120 when a shot cracks and a .223 round out of a rifle,
00:25:44.120 very like the one he carried in Vietnam, hits him behind the left ear.
00:25:49.440 he is dead before he lands. Police seal the roads for miles. They find nothing. October 11th,
00:25:57.620 two days later, a 53-year-old businessman from Philadelphia named Kenneth Bridges pulls off
00:26:03.980 Interstate 95 near Fredericksburg, Virginia to fill his tank. He has six children and everybody
00:26:10.880 has warned him about this stretch of road. He stops anyway. Kenneth calls his wife Jocelyn
00:26:16.960 from the Pump Island to tell her where he is. She thinks about warning him one more time.
00:26:22.420 She doesn't. He'll be out of there in a few minutes, she thinks, and there's a Virginia
00:26:26.960 State trooper 50 yards away working a fender bender. Surely no one would fire a rifle with
00:26:32.280 a trooper standing right there. At 9.28 a.m., Kenneth Bridges puts the nozzle in his tank.
00:26:39.080 The trooper hears the shot, runs to him, and works on Kenneth until the rescue squad arrives.
00:26:45.800 By them, there is no pulse.
00:26:47.900 The trooper never sees a man with a rifle.
00:26:50.920 No one at that gas station does.
00:26:54.140 October 14th, three days later, just before half past seven in the evening,
00:26:59.700 Ted and Linda Franklin drive their red mercury into the parking lot
00:27:03.260 at the Home Depot in the Seven Corners Shopping Center near Falls Church, Virginia.
00:27:08.680 Linda Franklin is 47 and an intelligence analyst at the FBI.
00:27:13.380 she has recently had a double mastectomy and she's still in physical therapy her daughter is about to
00:27:20.140 make her a grandmother they spend an hour and a half inside buying shelves for a house they're
00:27:25.820 about to move into a little after nine they wheel the cart out to the car one of the shelves will
00:27:31.560 not fit it's too long for the trunk so they put the back seat down and try to feed it through which
00:27:36.900 doesn't work either ted holds the cart to stop it from rolling while linda tries to wrestle the
00:27:42.760 shelf in through the passenger door. She's having trouble with it. Why don't you come and hold the
00:27:48.340 cart, Ted says. I'll see if I can put it in. They switch places. As Ted is ducking in and out of the
00:27:56.060 car with the shelf, he hears a loud noise and feels something spray across his face. He assumes the
00:28:03.480 noise came from inside the store, where they're always dropping pallets. The spray is what gets
00:28:09.100 his attention. When he turns around, his wife Linda is on the pavement. Inside the store,
00:28:16.000 people are screaming. Employees are shouting at each other to shut the doors. Within minutes,
00:28:21.760 the lot fills with police. No one standing in it can tell anybody where the shot came from.
00:28:28.540 Malvo will tell investigators years later exactly where he had been lying. In the documentary
00:28:34.460 series Born to Kill, ballistics expert Jeff Miller walks through that account. Malvo said that he was
00:28:41.860 lying here in this parking lot here at the community center near the stairway. And while
00:28:46.680 Mohamed was providing a lookout for him, he was able to look across this parking lot, across the
00:28:52.900 highway, and underneath the parking garage here at the Home Depot store. And Mr. and Mrs. Franklin
00:28:58.140 were loading purchases into the back of their car, and the two of them were standing just
00:29:03.920 underneath the home in the Home Depot store, about halfway through the parking lot. Bullet
00:29:09.120 entered the left side of her head, and as it exited her head, it started to fragment inside
00:29:14.240 and caused a very traumatic injury to her head. When Lee Malvo eventually goes on trial in
00:29:20.340 Virginia, his defense is built by Carmeta Alvarez, who traveled to Jamaica and Antigua and interviewed
00:29:27.260 his family and by the psychologists who spent months with Malvo. They describe a course of
00:29:33.760 instruction. The boy is given tapes and he listens to them nightly and years later he can still name
00:29:40.840 them. Message to the black man, the Willie Lynch speech, Malcolm X played in question and answer
00:29:47.760 sessions while riding along on Muhammad's rounds. And this is not only Malvo's account. On Antigua,
00:29:55.400 the woman who first took Muhammad's family in, had noticed Muhammad borrowing her CD player
00:30:00.820 and playing tapes to his own children after they'd fallen asleep. Her daughter watched him do it.
00:30:06.980 He was subliminally indoctrinating and hypnotizing them, she says. Dr. Dewey Cornell was Malvo's
00:30:14.140 court-appointed psychologist. He spent 53 hours with Malvo, trying to understand his motivation.
00:30:20.300 It really started to remind me very quickly of someone who was part of a political underground or maybe part of a cult movement who had been brainwashed or indoctrinated.
00:30:34.220 Lee Malvo basically killed because John Muhammad wanted him to kill.
00:30:38.000 The prosecution in Virginia argued the opposite, that Malvo was a willing and equal participant.
00:30:45.020 And the investigators who have worked the case have never accepted the word brainwashing.
00:30:50.140 They had witnesses who put the two of them apart, they said.
00:30:53.600 Malvo had every opportunity to leave.
00:30:56.840 Dr. Evan Nelson conducted a court-ordered sanity evaluation of Malvo for the prosecution.
00:31:02.920 He interviewed Malvo and came to a very different conclusion.
00:31:06.700 In my opinion, it wasn't brainwashing.
00:31:08.780 This was a case of a young man who was eager to learn things and an older man who was eager to teach.
00:31:14.120 So I think that young Mr. Malvo found somebody who he could idolize and adore and choose to follow as compared to being brainwashed.
00:31:23.300 By the time the D.C. area shootings begin, Muhammad and Malvo are operating out of a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with more than 100,000 miles on it and New Jersey plates.
00:31:35.260 They bought it for $250 from a used car lot in Trenton called, of all things, Sure Shot Auto Sales.
00:31:44.120 with the money taken off of Paul LaRufa's back seat. It is a former police cruiser and so
00:31:50.520 unremarkable that police run its plates again and again during the spree and keep handing it back
00:31:56.080 clean. The back seat has been cut loose and rehung so the seat back swings up on a hinge at the top
00:32:03.360 like a hatch. And in the trunk lid, just above a license plate, there is a hole, a gun port.
00:32:11.780 Inside the trunk, they have built a small platform
00:32:14.220 so the rifle's bipod stands at exactly the height of that hole.
00:32:19.240 A man can lie flat on his stomach
00:32:21.060 with his feet braced against the back of the front seat
00:32:24.240 and point the muzzle through the port in the trunk.
00:32:27.520 From outside, no one sees a shooter.
00:32:30.420 They see a parked car with tinted windows.
00:32:33.140 The trunk lid only has to open two inches
00:32:36.260 to allow the shooter to aim.
00:32:38.440 The car simply drives away.
00:32:40.920 The setup was not invented on the road halfway through a killing spree.
00:32:45.100 It was designed out loud in a homeless shelter in Bellingham, Washington,
00:32:49.480 a year earlier by a man explaining how he intended to shoot his wife and get away with it.
00:32:57.160 By the middle of October, the task force is enormous, and it is looking for the wrong man.
00:33:03.520 The profile television keeps repeating is a lone gunman, white, military-trained, angry,
00:33:09.800 driving a white van. But at Quantico, in a room where FBI profilers are arguing about this case
00:33:17.540 around a table, two of them are studying something the shooters left behind earlier in the spree.
00:33:24.760 A tarot card with a handwritten message for the police. And they aren't seeing that man at all.
00:33:32.180 One is Supervisory Special Agent Jim Clemente. The other is his colleague, James Fitzgerald,
00:33:37.900 or FITS, who's been building a new discipline inside the bureau called forensic linguistics,
00:33:43.840 which looks at what a person's word choice reveals about them. When Jim Clemente sat down with me,
00:33:50.800 he described that room. He says, this is for you, Mr. Police, as if he's looking up to the police.
00:33:56.620 If this guy is an adult, he's just barely adult, but I'm thinking he's younger.
00:34:02.100 Nobody in that room wants to hear it. The shooting is too disciplined. It's too well-planned,
00:34:07.460 professionally executed to have been done by a kid, which leaves Clemente with two options,
00:34:13.960 and he puts them both on the table. Either we have a situation where we have a 45-year-old
00:34:21.320 man who's incredibly experienced, who's incredibly great at planning and executing these shootings,
00:34:25.800 but he decompensates when he's communicating with us, and he acts like a teenager,
00:34:31.980 Or, for the first time in U.S. criminal history, we have a sniper team.
00:34:37.700 And everybody blew up.
00:34:38.840 No, snipers don't play well with each other.
00:34:41.220 They don't.
00:34:41.820 They work alone.
00:34:43.100 But Clemente and Fitzgerald have a different idea.
00:34:46.720 They think this is a pair.
00:34:49.400 One old enough to plan it all.
00:34:51.240 One young enough to communicate like a child.
00:34:54.860 Next time on MK Confidential, Clemente and Fitz back together again.
00:35:00.560 An exclusive MK Confidential interview, plus the haunting words,
00:35:06.180 call me God, your children are not safe anywhere at any time.
00:35:11.540 A police chief negotiating with a killer through a bank of microphones,
00:35:16.020 a whole country watching the wrong vehicle,
00:35:18.940 and a letter nailed to a tree behind a steakhouse
00:35:21.900 that finally tells the task force what these two men actually want.
00:35:30.560 You