(Dark music)
Fred dinenage (narrates): October 3, 2002,
Montgomery county, Maryland, 7:41am,
39-year-old landscape gardener James 'Sonny' Buchanan
was cutting grass outside Fitzgerald auto malls
on rockville pike.
A single shot pierced the air...
..And Sonny fell to the ground.
They just killed a man and it's a game to them.
Right?
08:12am, cab driver prem Kumar walekar,
petrol station, Aspen hill,
a single bullet ripped through his body.
Man on phone: 911, it's emergency.
He's bleeding real bad.
Just ordinary folk like you and I going about our daily business.
08:37am, 34-year-old Sarah ramos shot dead,
sitting on a bench at leisure world shopping centre.
I need ambulance. Hurry!
It could have been anyone, anyone who can pull the trigger.
09:58am.
Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera,
vacuuming her car at a gas station in Kensington.
These are men who are high on killing,
high on shooting innocent people.
(Gunshots firing)
21:20, 72-year-old Pascal charlot
out walking in Washington DC, he was dead within the hour.
(Gunshot fires)
And if there was one single day
that transformed the nation's capital,
and sent a shiver down its spine, it was October 3, 2002.
This was only the beginning of a three-week reign of terror,
executed with deadly precision by John Allen Muhammad
and Lee Boyd malvo,
two of the world's most evil killers.
(Theme music)
October 2000, Caribbean island of Antigua,
after the breakdown of his second marriage
40-year-old John Allen Muhammad
kidnapped three of his young children
and fled to the island of Antigua,
where he met 14-year-old Lee Boyd malvo.
Lee Boyd was very smart in school, he was a good kid.
He enjoyed sports, he was a normal, average,
every day boy being raised by a single mother.
Muhammad looks at malvo and sees a young man
who hasn't got a father figure,
who doesn't really have an authority figure
in his life at all.
So, that's a role that he can step into
and he can start pulling his strings.
When Muhammad left Antigua malvo followed him.
And once malvo got across
and was on the mainland of the United States,
he reached out to Muhammad and wanted to come be with him.
By September 2001,
John Muhammad's life was crumbling around him,
he had two failed marriages
and had lost custody of his children.
Lee Boyd malvo was all he had left.
I think malvo was desperate to find a father figure.
I think he would have done anything that Muhammad suggested.
He was completely under Muhammad's spell,
but it wasn't that one was senior to the other.
Malvo may have been younger,
but he was every bit as determined to kill,
and to impress his father figure.
The pair went on a nine-month rampage across the United States,
robbing and killing at random
before executing their plan in the suburbs of Washington DC,
killing 17 people and leaving 13 injured.
Do I believe my father is a serial killer?
Yes, I believe John Muhammad
committed the crimes that he was accused of.
These killers' stories begin in 1960,
John Allen Muhammad was born John Allen Williams
on December 31 in New Orleans, Louisiana.
His mother died of breast cancer
when he was very young, around three-years-old.
And he was sent to Baton Rouge to live with his aunts
because his father just left.
His aunts had several children,
and John and his two brothers and two sisters
were raised by them in Baton Rouge.
John Muhammad's family was expected to do all of the chores in the home.
So, John grew up feeling pretty inadequate
from a very young age.
In 1978 Williams graduated from scotlandville high school
at the age of 17.
He joins the Louisiana national guard.
It gives him a kind of, rank, status, a bit of authority,
which in many ways appeals to him.
He is a man who likes to fit into hierarchies,
at least in his early years.
At the age of 20
John Williams fell in love with a girl called Carol,
and they married in 1981,
welcoming their son Lindbergh into the world the following year.
What kind of man was my father?
My father was a very stern man.
Very,
very confident man.
He was in the military,
he was the type of person if he said something...
You can bet that he was going to do whatever it takes to get...
Get that done.
After a few years though,
Carol started hearing rumours that John was seeing another woman.
At one point she went and knocked on this woman's door,
who lived in the same neighbourhood as they did,
and saw John sitting on the couch
and realised that her husband was cheating on her.
John's new girlfriend was Mildred.
His wife Carol made the decision to separate from her husband
and took their son Lindbergh with her.
In 1985, he decides,
when his first marriage is collapsing,
that he's going to convert to islam.
And I think this means a great deal to him,
and a couple of years later,
he joins the nation of islam run by Louis farrakhan,
for him, islam was very significant.
After facing disciplinary action
John Allen Williams left the Louisiana national guard
and in 1985 at the age of 25 enlisted in the us army.
In the same year, he was divorced from Carol
and moved in with Mildred, marrying in 1988.
Two years later he was deployed to the persian Gulf.
Williams thrived in the army
gaining the highest level of expert m16 marksmanship,
and was decorated for his service.
So, you have this period of calm in Williams' life
based in the us army.
And it's as if he's hanging onto the army
as his identity.
That is what makes John Williams work.
And for a long time, he really remains quite stable.
He isn't rushing off.
I think he likes the uniform.
I think he likes the identity, and I think he feels that,
"oh...
"I... I mean something now.
"I'm... I amount to something."
On April 26, 1994, at the age of 33
Williams was honourably discharged from the us army.
He was now living in Tacoma, Washington state
with Mildred and their three children.
He starts a couple of businesses,
neither of which really work, and they fall apart.
And his marriage to Mildred
isn't going terrifically well either.
They fought a lot and John was abusive to her
on numerous occasions and their...
Their relationship really went downhill.
He loved his children,
children were a very big part
of what he felt like his role in life was.
And so, he tried to be a good father to them,
and they did have a close relationship.
My mother raised me most of my life.
Me and my father spent a lot of time talking over the phone,
and then we had our summers
to where we will meet up with each other.
So, when I was younger,
we went to Washington for a summer
then my sixth-grade year going to seventh grade,
I went to Washington and spent a summer with him.
On one summer visit with his father,
Williams called his ex-wife Carol
and told her that Lindbergh wasn't returning home.
Carol ended up having to get a court order
to get Lindbergh back to Louisiana, and it took that whole summer.
During that period John tried to brainwash Lindbergh.
It was just one of those summers that I went down there,
and he was telling me things that at that moment
that I felt that he knew I wanted to hear,
to keep me away from my mother and keep me from going home.
In September 1999,
John Allen William's second marriage to Mildred
was falling apart and the couple separated.
Three months later Mildred filed for divorce
and custody of their three children.
That is a very big blow
to Williams and to his psyche.
You've already had this slightly frail psyche,
looking for identity.
He took some identity from being married
with three children.
He took some identity from having been in the army.
But now, he really is, in a sense, cut loose.
He is on his own and he doesn't know what to do.
So, if there is a trigger to the events that were to follow,
it is that divorce,
because then, Mildred applies for a restraining order,
making sure that Williams, to become John Muhammad,
cannot have any contact with her, or with their children.
After receiving the restraining order
Williams kidnapped his three children
and fled to the Caribbean island of Antigua,
where an unlikely friendship would have deadly consequences.
October 2000, Antigua,
John Allen Williams arrived on the island
with his three children.
They were welcomed into the local community
and Williams made a living forging illegal documents.
Soon after his arrival
he met and enlisted the help of a 14-year-old islander
called Lee Boyd malvo.
Lee Boyd malvo was born in Kingston, Jamaica in 1985.
His mother was una James,
she was not married to his father.
His father stuck around for a few years but then left,
so una raised Lee Boyd by herself.
They moved around a lot,
sometimes Barbados, sometimes Jamaica,
and eventually made their way to Antigua.
And I think right when Muhammad met malvo,
there was a bond,
and Muhammad used him to traffic
ah, fake birth certificates on the island,
just messenger type work and paid him a little bit.
Young Lee Boyd malvo had big dreams
of one day becoming a commercial airline pilot
and was a talented artist.
But the one thing that he does have some control over
is his schoolwork.
And I think this provides him with that consistency,
with that security, and that stability.
And he does incredibly well in school,
he gets good exam results,
he appears to be a really promising student.
Malvo's mother obtained fake documents
from Williams
and travelled to fort meyers, Florida looking for work.
Una James left Lee Boyd malvo with John Muhammad in Antigua
to watch him while she was gone.
And this was the moment
in which the father-son relationship
that lay at the heart of what was to come in the future,
began to form around the pair.
On may 24, 2001,
John Allen Williams, his children, and Lee Boyd malvo
also left Antigua for Florida.
Malvo travelled on forged documents.
He stayed with his mother in fort meyers
and Williams took his children
back to bellingham in Washington state.
While he was gone Mildred had been granted a no-fault divorce
and full custody of their three children.
The authorities were soon alerted of Williams return.
The children were seized and returned to their mother
who fled to the east coast and the suburbs of Washington DC.
Williams, now alone and homeless, moved into a shelter.
A month later Lee Boyd malvo turned up at the lighthouse mission.
John and Lee Boyd lived together in a homeless shelter
for many months,
and it was there that John really began...
Inserting his discipline into Lee Boyd's life.
Eventually John got a place and began training Lee Boyd
in the use of weaponry.
He started to cut malvo off from any others
who might have an influence over him.
And that is a key tactic of coercive and controlling behaviour.
You isolate your target from anybody
who might criticise the relationship that you have with them.
Muhammad did quite a lot of good things for malvo.
He made sure we went to school.
And in fact, at one point,
he registered him for school as his father,
actually cementing this concept of him being the father,
moulding his new son.
In October 2001,
in recognition of his islamic faith John Allen Williams
had officially changed his name to John Allen Muhammad.
He encouraged Lee Boyd to also learn about his version of islam.
John took Lee Boyd under his wing.
He had kidnapped his own son, Lindbergh,
and that hadn't worked out.
So, in Lee Boyd he saw the perfect venue
through which to, you know, achieve what he wanted to achieve in life.
They start shooting at tree stumps.
Malvo is very impressed by this.
And remember, he's 16.
He's very impressionable.
Lee Boyd was actually right
for the manipulation that John would do with him.
John controlled every aspect of his life,
what he ate, he exercised him rigorously.
John was a master marksman,
and he trained Lee Boyd to be a marksman.
Malvo's mother una James arrived in bellingham
in December 2001, to see her son.
They met at the lighthouse mission,
but someone had tipped off immigration services.
Both una and Lee Boyd were detained as illegal immigrants.
Before he could be deported malvo managed to run away,
and returned to John Muhammad.
What was it that...
Turned them from being...
An older man and a younger boy...
Into what was effectively a killing machine?
I think it started...
Because malvo wanted to prove to Williams,
that he was worthy of his respect.
I think that malvo,
always wanted to show the older man
that he was capable of living up to him.
February 16, 2002, Tacoma, Washington...
Lee Boyd malvo approached the house of isa Nichols
a friend of John Muhammad's ex-wife Mildred...
Her niece, keenya Nicole cook was visiting her aunt
with her baby daughter.
Keenya answered a knock at the front door.
Malvo shot the 21-year-old point blank.
He had killed for the first time, two days before his 17th birthday.
I absolutely believe that
John Allen Muhammad brainwashed Lee Boyd malvo.
I think...
Lee Boyd's life would have been totally different
had he never met John Muhammad.
I don't think he would have ever killed.
One month later march 19th in Tucson, Arizona,
60-year-old Jerry Taylor was on the golf course.
A long-range single shot to the chest killed him.
From march to August 2002 there were two more fatalities
and five serious injuries across several states.
The first proper killing
is almost certainly committed by malvo...
As a test from Muhammad.
"You've got to kill someone,
"so that I can see that you are worthy of my respect."
And the first string of shootings,
almost all are committed by malvo.
(Intense music)
September 5, 2002, Clinton, Maryland.
Restaurant owner Paul j laruffa
was carrying over $3,000 of cash
and a laptop inside his briefcase.
As he got in the car,
Lee Boyd malvo rushed up
and shot him six times through the window.
(Gunshots fires)
He emptied the briefcase, stole the cash
and fled with the laptop and his gun.
Miraculously Paul j laruffa survived.
Five days later with the cash stolen from laruffa,
Muhammad purchased a 1990 blue Chevy caprice
at sure shot auto sales in Trenton, New Jersey.
Apparently when Muhammad was purchasing
the Chevy caprice in New Jersey,
we learned from the salesman that
he did something very unusual that in 25 years
of being a car salesman had never been seen before
by this person.
He said that Muhammad opened the trunk
and climbed into the back of the trunk
and pulled the trunk covered down and said, "yeah, this will work."
September 15, Clinton Maryland...
September 21, Atlanta Georgia.
19 hours later,
a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama,
two women were gunned down
with a long-range high-powered rifle.
Malvo approached and rifled through their purses.
A police car spotted him and gave chase.
He ran, dropping a gun catalogue
and discarding a .22 calibre revolver.
Claudine Lee Parker died of her injuries
and Kelly Adams survived despite being shot through the neck.
Finally, September 23, Baton Rouge Louisiana...
(Gunshot fires)
In this first spree of killings,
they are moving location across states.
They weren't concentrating on one area.
And that made them incredibly difficult to track down,
because these apparently were random killings,
committed in different states.
How do you join the dots to that?
The answer is, you don't.
Between September 26 and October 2, 2002
there were no killings.
During this break
Muhammad and malvo modified their new Chevy caprice.
They drilled a hole in the trunk.
They used a glove to lay the barrel on...
Through the hole to extend the end of the rifle
through to the outside of the trunk.
And then they pulled the trunk almost closed
but left about an inch for visibility through their sight.
Satisfied with the modifications
they headed to the suburbs of Washington DC.
On October 2, 2002, at 5:30 in the afternoon,
a shot was fired through a craft store window,
narrowly missing the cashier.
(Gunshot fires)
That was the first
of the DC sniper shootings.
An hour later at 6:30, a man was killed by a rifle.
He was called James Martin.
The following day, October 3, 07:41,
James Sonny Buchanan was shot.
Mowing the lawn of an auto mall.
30 minutes later at a gas station in Aspen hill, prem Kumar walekar...
Leisure world shopping centre, Sarah ramos.
She was sitting on a bench reading a book.
That same morning...
Lori Ann Lewis Rivera, vacuuming her dodge minivan.
And then finally, on that day at 9:20 in the evening,
Pascal charlot, a retired carpenter, was shot...
(Gunshot fires)
..Walking along Georgia Avenue in Washington DC.
And if there was one single day
that transformed the nation's capital,
and sent a shiver down its spine, it was October 3, 2002.
October 3, Montgomery county, Maryland,
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd malvo
had brought terror to the suburbs of Washington DC.
Five people had been killed in less than 16 hours.
Ashan Benedict was a special agent
with the bureau of alcohol tobacco and firearms
assigned to the Washington field division.
At that time, you know, five people getting shot
in one day was very unusual, right?
Um, unfortunately, in today's day and age
you hear about it much more frequently.
But at that time, it definitely raised some eyebrows.
It definitely got law enforcement response generated.
The good thing about atf
is that we will respond to shooting...
As a matter of business practise.
Witness statements on October 3
detailed seeing a blue Chevy caprice
but it was not reported as acting suspiciously.
On that day at 7:00pm in the evening
the Chevy ran two stop signs near Washington DC
and was stopped by the police.
John Muhammad pulled over.
He had a valid licence.
He had a valid registration, and he was very respectful and...
And cordial to the officers when they stopped him.
These attacks came a year after 9/11,
and 9/11 cast a very long shadow over the us.
There was a real climate of fear, a real state of anxiety.
The nation was on a really high state
of alert at this time.
So, it's almost like the perfect opportunity
this window of time
for Muhammad and malvo to wreak utter destruction.
We're going to follow the evidence,
we're going to follow the science and the technology.
We had numerous shell casings recovered at all these scenes
and they all went to the atf national laboratory
in beltsville Maryland.
So, we ascertained very quickly
that the same gun was used to fire at different shooting scenes.
So, that science gave us a starting point.
We knew we had one shooter
or we had one gun utilised by several shooters potentially
and that honed in our investigative team.
Those bullets that we received
had six lands and grooves,
and they had a right twist on it.
And we can measure those land impressions,
each one of the six.
And we can measure each one of the groove impressions,
note the direction of twist,
and come up with a fair degree of accuracy,
the make and the model of the firearm
that fired that projectile.
The gun was identified as a bushmaster.223 calibre rifle,
not a weapon usually associated with a sniper.
(Gunshot fires)
You can go to gun shows and just buy it cash
and carry in some locations here in the us.
The ar style 15 firearm
was developed by the military
and it was a firearm they used in Vietnam.
It's not an unusual firearm.
In the states,
most of the mass shootings occur with this kind of rifle.
On October 4,
the following day to this outrageous attack
in Washington DC,
the pair moved their location.
And a woman, called Caroline seawell is shot
while she's loading her car, she, does however survive.
Forensic analysis from the crime scene
again determined that the bullet fragments came
from a .223 calibre bushmaster.
A blue Chevy caprice was also seen in the vicinity.
The tip-lines received thousands of calls
and witness sightings of a blue Chevy
were buried in the volume of information coming in.
Three days later on October 7,
Muhammad and malvo drove to a wooded area
close to Benjamin tasker middle school
in bowie Maryland.
One of them took a ball point pen
and wrote on a tarot card depicting death, "call me god."
On the back, they wrote, "for you, mr police.
"Code, call me god.
"Do not release to the press."
The card was placed in a plastic bag and attached to a tree.
They hunkered down in a makeshift blind and waited.
He's called Iran brown, and he's 13.
He's attending a middle school,
and he's been taken there by his aunt.
(Gunshot fires)
He fell to the ground with a single gunshot wound
to the chest, critically injured.
Now, all of our victims have been innocent,
have been defenceless.
But now we're stepping over the line,
because our children don't deserve this.
But it's after that shooting
that we get the first communication
between Muhammad and malvo and the authorities.
"Dear mr police."
It's...
It's a taunt.
It was leaked that it said, "I am god."
And in fact it said, "call me god."
So, anyone that called the tip line and said, I know somebody who says,
"I am god 10 times a day.
"I think you should look at him,"
we were able to eliminate
without spending too much time on it.
We were all in this together and what every agency had,
did the best of, they brought that best to the table
and said, "I will handle this."
Atf said,
"we are the federal firearms investigative agency
"for the United States, we will do the ballistics."
FBI will do fingerprinting.
The Montgomery county, prince George's county,
Virginia state authorities, they work crime scenes.
That's what they do well.
(Intense music)
On October 9 around 8.15 in the evening
53-year-old Dean meyers was filling his car
with at a sunoco gas station in manassas Virginia.
The blue Chevy caprice was parked in a lot across the street.
A single shot to the head killed meyers
as he stood at the gas pump.
With such a heightened state of alert
police were quickly at the scene.
The bullet recovered
was from a .223 calibre bushmaster rifle.
In the immediate aftermath of the shooting
Muhammad was interviewed in the parking lot but not detained.
Local news here in Washington is national news.
So, when you have a serial shooter
or shooters committing random acts of violence in the nation's capital
and its suburbs,
it captures the nation's attention very, very quickly.
All eyes were on Washington at that time.
It was like anybody else sitting at home,
watching CNN and...
You see one day it was a shooting somewhere.
And then you check back two, three days later
and it's another shooting and then it's another shooting,
so I was captivated and on alert like the rest of the world was.
So, I think there was a sense of satisfaction
on the part of the snipers
that they were able to create this sense of fear,
paralyse a community, paralyse the nation's capital,
the region, with one gun.
And so, but it wasn't enough for them.
I mean, they could've, you know, gone across the country and escaped,
but no, they kept at it.
It was a game of cat and mouse.
Seven dead in the DC suburbs and two more critically injured,
for Muhammad and malvo it wasn't enough.
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd malvo's killing spree
had gripped the entire nation.
No one in and around Washington DC felt safe.
Although their targets were random, the planning was not.
They were killing people
close to the exits and entrances of interstates,
so as they would shoot somebody
all they had to do was jump on the interstate
to go to their next destination,
and it made an easy escape route for them.
On October 11, 2002,
Kenneth Bridges is shot at an exxon station
in fredericksburg, Virginia.
And at that point,
some of the gas station owners on the east coast
begin to erect tarpaulins
so that their customers can drive in and fill up their cars
without fearing they're going to be targeted by a sniper.
That's how big an effect that Muhammad and malvo
have had on the whole area.
There was no connection between the victims.
The only connection was between the shootings themselves.
The ballistics, the evidence left behind,
the DNA, the fingerprints, the notes, that was the link.
October 14, Columbus day holiday,
47-year-old FBI analyst Linda Franklin
was shopping at a home depot with her husband.
From across the street,
malvo trained his sight on William Franklin.
At the last moment he switched targets
and pulled the trigger.
And she had her head blown off in front of her husband, literally.
And that reality and this...
The whole emotion of the gravity of that and the sadness...
I mean the 911 call that
mr Franklin made immediately following Linda Franklin
going down...
Is chilling, and I will never get that out of my head.
No one was standing around.
Folks were definitely on edge
and not looking to make themselves a target.
But the streets were just shut down.
The amount of traffic in the Washington region
is pretty heavy on a normal day.
But when you start shutting down roads around crime scenes
and on the beltway, it comes to an absolute crawl.
After the shooting of Linda Franklin
Muhammad and malvo laid low for five days.
During this period the task force caught a lucky break.
A fingerprint taken from a gun catalogue
found at a crime scene in Alabama on September 22
was a match to a print taken by immigration services
in bellingham, Washington state.
This information coincided with a call to the tip line
from a bellingham resident called Robert Holmes.
An army friend of John Allen Williams
who said, "I think this could be my friend
"and my co-worker in the army."
And he gave us that name.
And he said, incidentally,
he's recently been travelling with...
Someone I think is about 17, that he nicknamed 'sniper'.
The national motor vehicle title database
also revealed that John Allen Muhammad
had purchased a blue Chevy caprice on September 10, 2002,
in Trenton New Jersey.
It was very specific.
We had linked the shootings
to the robbery down in Alabama.
The forensics information came in, the DNA came in,
the fingerprints came in.
We were able to put that all together
and realise who we we're looking for.
So, now we had concrete information on the suspects,
and the vehicle we're looking for.
So, that happened in a blink of an eye
where we went from casting a wide net
to now, we know what we're looking for.
We're fishing with a spear.
On the evening of October 19,
malvo and Muhammad were concealed in the treeline
opposite the ponderosa steak house in Ashland Virginia, waiting.
They had tacked a handwritten five page note to a nearby tree.
The note was emblazoned with 13 red stars,
one for each kill.
Just before 8:00pm
37-year-old Jeffrey hopper left the steak house with his wife
and was shot in the stomach.
He was critically injured but alive.
The note basically demanded $10 million be put on a credit card,
which fortunately the criminals aren't as smart as they could be,
or it might be more difficult to catch them,
but they expected us to put $10 million on a credit card.
Muhammad asks for $10 million
for them to give themselves up,
so that they can found a school
for disadvantaged black children in Canada.
On October 22,
Muhammad and malvo waited across the street
from a bus stop in Montgomery county.
Another note was positioned in plain sight.
At 05:58am a bus driver was about to begin his daily route,
a single gunshot to the chest.
He died standing on the top step of his bus.
His name was Conrad, it was his first name.
The note in the bushes in the plastic bag,
not necessarily for its forensic value
but for the mere fact that they put it there.
They just killed a man and it's a game to them, right?
It was so upsetting to me to see that level of,
so casual about taking a life
and planting this note and going, "now, see if you can find me.
"Here's a little bit...
"Here's a little bit more."
On October 23,
the DC sniper task force released the licence plate
of the blue Chevy caprice
and descriptions of their primary suspects
to the national media.
Well, we wanted to use the media and the public
and law enforcement as a team, to find these suspects, right?
So, it wasn't a secret that we wanted to find them
but we need everybody's help to do that.
So, the only things that we were trying to keep,
um, kind of, close hold was we wanted to make sure
the information we're releasing to the public was accurate,
it was actionable and it was timely.
On October 23,
refrigerator repairman Whitney donahue
was driving home on the i-70 to Pennsylvania
when he heard a news report
releasing the details of the wanted suspects.
He made a note on his pay stub,
which was on his passenger seat
of the information of the car and wrote down the licence plate.
He pulled into a rest stop off of i-70.
And as soon as he got parked,
he observed a blue Chevy caprice.
It fit the description
of what he had just heard on the news.
He called 911.
And so he was very brave and got on his cb radio,
which is the ability to communicate with the truckers in the region.
And on his own,
he asked truckers to help block the entrance to the rest stop,
and the exit from the rest stop, with their 18 wheelers
so that these suspects wouldn't be able to escape by car.
Donahue confirmed the licence plate,
and that the vehicle was occupied to the police,
he waited and watched as law enforcement agents moved in.
The window was breached
because the door in the back was locked.
They were pulled out.
They were handcuffed and separated on the curb.
And immediately the first review of the car,
they were able to find the bushmaster
behind the back seat.
And it had one in the chamber ready to fire.
It was actually not in the safe mode.
So, a simple pull of the trigger,
and there would have been an incident.
And malvo said, "it's my fault.
"I fell asleep."
It was a huge relief,
and it was a sense of accomplishment and pride
not only for atf but for the entire taskforce team.
The nation's psyche was drawn to this investigation
because really it could be any one of us on any given day.
Three weeks of shootings,
of trying to find these people, bring them to justice,
get them off the street,
get the public safety aspect
back to where folks were comfortable in their communities.
Both men initially pled not guilty and faced years of litigation
for their multi-jurisdictional crimes.
In October 2003,
John Allen Muhammad was first brought to trial
in the state of Virginia for the murder of Dean Myers.
He was found guilty of capital murder
and in march 2004 sentenced to death by lethal injection.
Lee Boyd malvo was first brought to trial in 2003
in Virginia for the murder of Linda Franklin,
as a minor he did not face the death penalty.
Three years later in a surprise reversal,
malvo pleaded guilty and testified against Muhammad.
Malvo is currently serving ten consecutive life sentences
without parole
in red onion state prison in Virginia.
I don't hold him as responsible as I hold John Allen Muhammad,
because John Allen Muhammad took a teenager
who did not have a father from his home
and he manipulated him, he brainwashed him,
and he trained him to be a monster.
There isn't an ounce of me that thinks that
malvo was brainwashed by Muhammad.
I think that he was all in
and it was a very willing participant.
He was calculating and smart on choosing targets.
The teamwork was obviously very successful.
The prosecutors in Muhammad's trial
insisted that perhaps the motive
was that Muhammad wished to shoot his ex-wife,
second ex-wife, Mildred,
and he was using these shootings around Washington
as an excuse.
I've never believed it and I don't think it's true.
How could the person that at one point in time
I looked up to, commit these type of crimes,
what happened...
To lead up to these crimes?
What went so wrong to make you snap
and think this was the right decision,
to make these actions?
On November 10, 2009,
at greensville correctional centre in Virginia,
John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection.
At 09:11pm Muhammad was pronounced dead.
The only person he spoke to that night was his son Lindbergh.
The last words my father told me was, "be strong, black man".
That was his exact last words.
"Be strong, black man"
and he turned around and walked out the door
and never looked back.
What makes these two killers so despicable
is the fact that to be somebody they had to destroy other people.
They felt that to gain the respect
that they were entitled to and to gain the recognition,
they needed to go and harm and gun down
everyday people going about their business.
I remember seeing, again, his body outside that bus
and thinking to myself, you know, "this...
"This gentleman just went to work
"to take people about their day to day lives
"and that was taken from him
"and it was senselessly taken from him."
I am getting older, and I don't remember
what I had to eat yesterday for breakfast,
but I remember the dates, and the victims,
and the tragedy of this case with a snap of a finger.
So, I can't explain it.
It's deep.
17 people shot dead.
The largest serial killer manhunt
in the history of the United States had ended.
There was no pattern to the senseless killing,
there were no victim profiles.
They were all just ordinary folk living their lives,
going about their daily business
when they were targeted by, the beltway snipers,
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd malvo,
two of the world's most evil killers.
(Instrumental music)
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