Sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad. Photo / Getty Images
Sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad. Photo / Getty Images
A liquor store. On their front door step. In the parking lot of a home renovation store.
In 2002, a terrifying spate of shootings saw 10 people killed and three injured while they were going about their everyday lives.
There seemed to be no rhyme or reason to the indiscriminate sniper attacks. The victims ranged in age from 13 to 72 and were white, African-American and Latino.
From October 2 until October 24 of that year, the Washington DC area was nearly paralysed by this horrifying spate of seemingly random killings, as innocent people were picked off by an unknown shooter doing the most mundane of daily activities.
Terror spread across the region, leaving millions of people afraid to do the simplest things such as crossing the street, buying petrol or going to the supermarket.
When the elusive men behind this reign of terror were finally arrested, the United States capital breathed an immense sigh of relief. But the story of why a Jamaican teenager and a 41-year-old former soldier and con artist undertook this dark odyssey remains strange and frightening to this day.
JAMAICAN ROOTS
When John Allen Mohammed arrived in the Caribbean in 1999, he was on the run.
A former army veteran, he had served for 17 years and taken part in the first Gulf War. However, after his wife Mildred had been granted custody of their three children during their divorce, he had instead spirited them away to the island of Antigua.
Lee Boyd Malvo had attended numerous schools as his mother searched for work by the time he arrived in Antigua. Born in Kingston in Jamaica, he was by all accounts an intelligent boy but had had very little stability in his young life.
How Mohammed and Malvo came to know one another remains a mystery. What is known is that the older man soon started to look after the teenage boy, who looked upon him as a father.
"The groundwork was laid in Antigua because I leaned on him, I trusted him," Malvo told the Washington Post in an extraordinary interview. "I was unable to distinguish between Mohammad the father I had wanted and Mohammad the nervous wreck that was just falling to pieces. He understood exactly how to motivate me by giving approval or denying approval.
"It's very subtle. It wasn't violent at all. It's like what a pimp does to a woman."
Acussed sniper John Lee Malvo. Photo / Gettty Images
In 2001, first Mohammed helped Malvo's mother enter the United States using forged paperwork, before he, his three children and Malvo followed. After a brief stint with his mother in Florida, Malvo headed to join his "dad" in Washington state.
When Mohammed tried to enrol his children in a local school, authorities were alerted and the kids removed to live with their mother who moved across the entire country to the state of Maryland, to elude her ex.
Mohammed and Malvo made a strange pair, sleeping on couches or in homeless shelters, and followed a strict written schedule that the elder had written, which included lengthy workout sessions, daily "training missions" – including one that saw Malvo chained to a tree in the snow for hours – along with extensive shooting practice.
Daily, Malvo would go to a gun range, for up to 12 hours at a time, where he learned how to use dozens of different weapons.
"It was a military mission," Malvo has said of that time "He told me to do something, and I did it. After a certain point, he didn't have to say anything. He would just look at me, and I understood.
"Every day there was something to do, something to focus on, in order to get me to that state of emotional numbness in which he could just say, 'Do' and it immediately happened," he said. "There was no hesitation. There was no thought. There was no moral compunction.
"There was no interference. He said 'Jump' and it was, 'How high?' … It was a systematic process until he got me where he needed me to be. Day in, day out, he controlled what I read, what I did, what I ate, my itinerary, when I slept."
(In 2012, Malvo claimed that Mohammed had sexually abused him from the age of 15 until they were arrested two years later. "I felt a sense of shame, and I just said, 'That's just something that I'd never tell anyone.' And to a certain extent, up until that point, I really couldn't handle it," he told the Today show).
BEGINNING OF THE END
The first person to fall victim to Mohammed and Malvo was 21-year-old Kenya Cook in Tacoma, Washington. The reason she died? Having fled an abusive relationship, she was staying with her aunt along with her six-month-old baby.
Cook's aunt Isa just happened to be a friend of Mohammed's ex-wife Mildred, and had encouraged her to get a divorce.
Malvo shot Cook point-blank when she answered the door on February 16, 2002, her death a rite of passage that Mohammed had ordained. Later, he threw up and struggled with his grief.
For the next eight months, the duo travelled across the US, leaving a spate of robberies and murders in their wake. By the time the duo arrived in the Washington DC region, they had left six people dead and others injured in Arizona, Louisiana, Georgia and Alabama.
Mohammed and Malvo began their campaign of fear on October 2 in Maryland, killing 55-year-old James Martin in the car park of a supermarket.
The next day, four more people would be murdered in two hours. James Buchanan, 39, was shot while mowing a lawn at a car dealership; Premkumar Walekar, 54, was killed while putting gas into the taxi he drove part-time; Sarah Ramos, 34, was shot at the post office; Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, 25 was killed at a Shell petrol station while vacuuming her car; and then lastly Pascal Charlot, 72, was murdered as he walked along the street.
The next morning, in Virginia, Caroline Seawell, 43, was shot while loading groceries into her car but survived.
The police knew they had a serial killer on their hands.
TERROR CAMPAIGN
By now, this spate of seemingly random deaths had garnered national and international news coverage. Those living in the area were gripped by fear that stepping out of their front doors could sign their death warrant.
"(People) were scared every minute of their lives that they were outside of their homes and even some people when they were in their homes," Washington Post reporter Josh White, who covered the case at the time, recalled this week while speaking to the Post Reports podcast.
"I know people who were pulling the drapes in front of their kitchen sink window because they were afraid they might be washing dishes and someone would shoot them through the window.
"People were running in parking lots in zigzag patterns. They were cancelling football practices and games. They were cancelling recess. They were putting up blue tarps to protect people as they pumped gas. It was pervasive.
"The fact nobody knew what was happening or what would happen next I think was the most terrifying thing. The odds of being a victim were quite low but every one of the victims were just going about their normal lives when it happened."
White also said that journalists who were covering the shootings feared they could become a target.
"Everybody thought that they could be the next victim including the reporters who were going to each scene," White said.
"As I went to each of the shooting scenes, the reporters who were there often talked about the idea that we thought at some point the shooters were going to go out in a blaze of glory and attack everybody at one of these scenes and authorities were prepared for that."
The youngest person to come into the crosshairs of Mohammed and Malvo was 13-year-old Iran Brown. Having been kicked off the school bus for eating sweets, his aunt instead drove him to school on October 7. As he got out of her car he was hit, the round hitting him in the chest.
"I put my book bag down and I got shot," Brown would later testify.
Sniper shooting victim Iran Brown testifies during the trial of Washington area sniper suspect John Allen Muhammad. Photo / Getty Images
His aunt, a nurse, put pressure on the wound as blood spread across his chest. Miraculously, doctors were able to save Brown's life.
Malvo later revealed the one shooting that haunted him was the death of FBI agent Linda Franklin in the car park of a Home Depot store. She was killed on October 14 while her husband Ted Franklin looked on.
Malvo told The Washington Post in 2012: "It is the worst sort of pain I have ever seen in my life. His eyes … Words do not possess the depth in which to fully convey that emotion and what I felt when I saw it … You feel like the worst piece of scum on the planet."
"There is no feeling," Malvo said. "At that point in time, I had been desensitised. I'd been killing people for months, if not a whole year, day in and day out. In the midst of the task, there is no feeling … It got to a point where I'd get in a zone.
"I was a monster," Malvo said. "If you look up the definition, that's what a monster is. I was a ghoul. I was a thief. I stole people's lives. I did someone else's bidding just because they said so … There is no rhyme or reason or sense."
'I AM GOD'
Two days after Brown's shooting, police found the death card from a set of Tarot cards near Iran Brown's school on which it had written on the front "I am God". At several other crime scenes, notes written by Malvo had been left, including one that said "Your children are not safe anywhere, at any time" while others demanded money to stop their rampage.
According to Dr Dewey Cornell, Malvo's court-appointed psychologist, "They were going to extort $10 million from the US government by randomly killing people in and around the Washington, DC, area."
The money was to serve a bizarre purpose.
"They would buy a big compound in Canada or Africa and start a utopian community of 70 black boys and 70 black girls," Cornell has said. "All of them would be educated in the proper ways of Islam and honour, and then, upon maturity, they would go back into the world and change it for the better."
However, others have suggested that Mohammed and Malvo were being driven by one goal: to murder Mildred Mohammed and to get away with it.
Reverend Al Archer who knew Mohammed and Malvo before their murder spree began has told Vanity Fair: "I think eventually, whether they ever got that money or not, they were going to kill Mildred Mohammed as the last victim, throw her in with all the other dead, and that way John would get his kids back. In the end, I think that was the bigger plan."
It is a theory that Mildred, who had been abused by Mohammed for much of their 12-year marriage, supports.
She told NPR she believes that with her dead, Mohammed would have been able to regain custody of his children and would have received compensation for her death. "His endgame scenario was to come in as the grieving father," Mildred has said. "He maybe would have been called father of the year."
It was a strange remark in a phone "diatribe" Malvo delivered to the police that helped catch them. Not only did the caller have an accent, but he told police they should "take him seriously" and "check with the people in Montgomery".
For weeks, police, the FBI and agents from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives (ATF) had struggled to make any real progress. Initial reports that a white van had been seen near several attacks led authorities to waste time chasing down similar vehicles.
However, Malvo's call was a game changer. When law enforcement looked into similar crimes, they discovered that a month earlier in Montgomery, Alabama there had been a robbery and shooting at a liquor store during which 21-year-old cashier Keenya Nicole Cook had been killed. Malvo had dropped a magazine at the scene with his fingerprint on it. When police followed that up they found it belonged to a Jamaican illegal immigrant named Lee Boyd Malvo. The net was tightening.
On October 22, bus driver Conrad Jones, 35, was fatally shot as he stood on bus steps, the last victim of Malvo and Mohammed's rampage. (In the intervening days Dean Harold Meyers, 53 and Kenneth Bridges, 53, had both been killed at petrol stations).
By now, the police knew that the killers were travelling in a blue Chevrolet Caprice.
On October 24, police were tipped off that just such a vehicle was parked at a rest stop where Mohammed and Malvo were inside, sleeping. A SWAT team was called in and the pair were arrested. After three weeks of fear and 13 shootings, finally, they had their men.
BEHIND BARS
After their arrests, police discovered a stolen Bushmaster .223-caliber weapon and bipod in their car, which would later be forensically tied to 11 shootings. Police also finally understood how Malvo and Mohammed had been able to undertake their spree, undetected.
The pair had cut a small hole in the boot of the vehicle and had modified the car to allow them access to the boot by removing a back seat. In each attack, one of them would be able to access the boot from inside the car, then lie on their stomach and take aim at victims up to 90m away without being seen.
While Malvo initially claimed that he had pulled the trigger each time in an attempt to save Mohammed from the death penalty, he later admitted they had both killed.
FBI agent Brad Garrett who worked on the case at the time has said: "When we interviewed him (Malvo), our belief was that he was under the spell of Mohammad and that would wear off as time went on" and that law enforcement "knew that he was covering for Mohammad".
Mohammed was ultimately found guilty of seven counts of murder and sentenced to death. He was killed by lethal injection in 2009.
Malvo was given multiple life sentences without parole.
However, 17 years on, Malvo is back in the headlines, with his case to have his sentence reviewed currently being heard by the US Supreme Court.
In recent years, 23 states plus the District of Columbia have gotten rid of life without parole for juveniles. Malvo's legal team is hoping to have his sentence re-evaluated.
Even if the court did find in his favour, it is highly unlikely that Malvo would ever be freed.
However, his case does have significant implications for the 60 people serving life sentences without parole who were convicted when they were under the age of 18 who had not been granted new sentencing hearings, the New York Times reports. A decision is expected sometime next year.
Police Chief Charlie T. Deane who worked on the case opined in 2009: "The sad thing is, the biggest lesson from this is that two fools with a rifle can put an entire region of the country in a state of absolute fear."
