D.C. sniper attacks

• 1. Introduction

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  The D.C. sniper attacks began, for the people living through them, with a shot through a shop window. At 5:20 p.m. on Wednesday the 2nd of October 2002, a bullet passed through the glass of a Michaels craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. It narrowly missed a cashier named Ann Chapman. Because nobody was hurt, the shot was taken for something random, and no serious alarm was raised. About an hour later, James Martin, a 55-year-old program analyst at NOAA, was shot and killed in the parking lot of a grocery store in Wheaton. Over the following three weeks, ordinary errands across the District of Columbia, Maryland and Virginia became dangerous. Who was behind the shootings, and why did the police search so long for the wrong vehicle? What did the shooter's strange messages mean? And what was the plan that investigators only fully understood in a courtroom years later? The answers begin well before that Wednesday, in a different part of the country.

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• 2. Before the Beltway

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  John Allen Muhammad was 41 years old and Lee Boyd Malvo was 17 when the two men began killing together from a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan. Across ten months they killed 15 people and wounded 8 others. The October shootings alone took ten lives and critically wounded three more, while the earlier attacks in several states killed five and injured five. The Caprice had once served as an undercover police car in Bordentown, New Jersey.

  The weapon was a stolen Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic rifle in .223 caliber, fitted with a Bushnell holographic sight effective up to 300 meters. The car itself had been rebuilt as what investigators called a rolling sniper's nest. The back seat was altered so a person could crawl into the trunk, lie flat, and fire through a small hole near the license plate.

  On the 16th of February 2002-21-year-old Keenya Nicole Cook was shot and killed by Malvo at her aunt's front door in Tacoma, Washington. The aunt, Isa Nichols, was a good friend of Muhammad's ex-wife Mildred and had encouraged her to seek a divorce. On the 19th of March, 60-year-old Jerry Taylor died from a single long-range shot to the chest while practicing chip shots on a golf course in Tucson, Arizona. Muhammad's sister lived near that course, and he was visiting her at the time.

  On the 1st of August, 51-year-old John Gaeta was changing a tire that Malvo had slashed in a parking lot in Hammond, Louisiana. Malvo shot him in the neck, and the bullet exited through his back. Gaeta pretended to be dead while his wallet was taken, then ran to a service station and was released from a hospital within an hour.

  September brought a faster pace. On the 5th of September at 10:30 p.m., Paul LaRuffa, a 55-year-old pizzeria owner, was shot six times at close range while locking up his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland. He survived, and his laptop was later found in Muhammad's car. Nine days later, 22-year-old Rupinder "Benny" Oberoi was shot in the back outside the Hillandale Beer & Wine liquor store in Silver Spring and survived. The next day, Muhammad Rashid was shot while closing Three Roads Liquors in Brandywine, Maryland. He later identified Malvo as the shooter in court.

  Just after midnight on the 21st of September, 41-year-old Million A. Woldemariam was fatally shot in the head and back with a .22-caliber pistol in Atlanta, Georgia. He had been helping close a Sammy's Package Store. Nineteen hours later, Claudine Parker, a 52-year-old liquor store clerk in Montgomery, Alabama, was shot and killed during a robbery. Her coworker Kellie Adams, 24, was critically wounded by a shot through the neck but survived. On the 23rd of September, 45-year-old Hong Im Ballenger was shot in the head and killed with a Bushmaster rifle in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. Evidence from the Alabama scene would eventually name both suspects, though that link was not made for almost four weeks.

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• 3. Three Weeks of Shootings

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  At 7:41 on the morning of the 3rd of October, James L. Buchanan, a 39-year-old landscaper known as "Sonny," was shot dead while mowing grass at the Fitzgerald Auto Malls near Rockville, Maryland. At 8:12 a.m., Prem Kumar Walekar, a 54-year-old part-time taxi driver, was killed while pumping gasoline at a Mobil station at Aspen Hill Road and Connecticut Avenue. At 8:37 a.m., Sarah Ramos, a 34-year-old babysitter and housekeeper, was killed on a bench at the Leisure World Shopping Center in Norbeck. She had just stepped off a bus and was reading a book. At 9:58 a.m., 25-year-old Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera was killed while vacuuming her Plymouth Grand Voyager at a Shell station in Kensington, Maryland.

  At 9:20 that night, the shooter struck again in the District of Columbia. Pascal Charlot, a 72-year-old retired carpenter, was walking on Georgia Avenue at Kalmia Road when he was shot. He died less than an hour later. Every victim had been killed by one bullet fired from a distance, and the killers disappeared each time. No one had recognized this pattern until after that day.

  On the 4th of October at 2:30 p.m., Caroline Seawell, a 43-year-old homemaker, was shot and wounded in the chest in the parking lot of another Michaels store, at Spotsylvania Mall in Virginia. She was loading purchases into her minivan. The shooters were now covering a wider area and leaving two or three days between attacks. The weekend passed quietly, but when school resumed, so did the shootings.

  On the 7th of October at 8:09 a.m., 13-year-old Iran Brown was shot in the chest as he arrived at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland. He survived and later testified at Muhammad's trial. On the 9th of October at 8:18 p.m., Dean Harold Meyers, a 53-year-old civil engineer, was shot dead while pumping gasoline at a Sunoco station near Manassas, Virginia. Two days later at 9:30 a.m., Kenneth Bridges, a 53-year-old businessman, was shot dead at an Exxon station off Interstate 95 near Fredericksburg. On the 14th of October at 9:15 p.m., Linda Franklin, an FBI intelligence analyst, was shot dead in a covered parking lot at a Home Depot at Seven Corners, just outside Falls Church.

  After five quiet days, the shooter struck at 8:00 p.m. on the 19th of October, about 90 miles south of Washington in Ashland, Virginia. Jeffrey Hopper, 37, was shot in a parking lot near a Ponderosa Steakhouse. His wife Stephanie called out to passersby, who phoned for an ambulance, and he survived at VCU Medical Center. On the 22nd of October at 5:56 a.m., Conrad Johnson, a 35-year-old Ride On bus driver, was shot while standing on the steps of his bus on Grand Pre Road in Aspen Hill. He died of his injuries.

  No shots were fired on the 23rd of October. Ballistics experts confirmed Johnson as the tenth fatality, and in a yard in Takoma Park, police swept the ground with metal detectors for bullets or casings. They seized a tree stump believed to have been used for target practice.

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• 4. A Region in Fear

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  At a press conference during the first wave of shootings, Montgomery County police chief Charles Moose told parents that schools were on a code blue alert, with children kept indoors. He insisted the schools were safe. Many parents collected their children early and refused to let them ride buses or walk home. Public schools in Montgomery County and the District of Columbia, along with private schools, went into lockdown. There was no recess and no outdoor physical education.

  The press soon followed. Within the first 15 hours of the spree, seven people had been shot, six of them fatally, and North American media devoted extensive coverage to the story. By the middle of October, every news television network was broadcasting live from the aftermath of each attack, sometimes for hours. The show America's Most Wanted gave an entire episode to the shooters in hope of helping to catch them. Much of the coverage in The New York Times was written by Jayson Blair and was later found to be fabricated. The scandal led to the resignations of the paper's two top editors, Howell Raines and Gerald Boyd.

  At gas stations, where many shootings had taken place, drivers kept moving around their cars to present smaller targets. Some crouched while pumping, others waited inside their vehicles, and stations hung tarps to hide customers. Many people with access chose to fuel up at the National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, feeling safer behind its guarded fence. The White House, the U.S. Capitol, the Supreme Court building and the memorials on the National Mall all received heightened security. For the duration of the attacks, United States Senate pages traveled to and from the Capitol under driven police escort and could not leave their residence hall except for work. Early reports of a white van or box truck made drivers of such vehicles objects of suspicion.

  Once the shooter's threat against children became public, school groups curtailed field trips and outdoor athletics. After the Ponderosa shooting, school districts including Henrico County and Hanover County closed for the day. Other schools, such as the MJBHA, canceled all outdoor activities after the shooting at the Connecticut and Aspen Hill intersection. Some changed their after-school pickup routines to keep children in the open for as little time as possible, and extra police officers were placed in schools. Even Hollywood felt the pressure: Joel Schumacher's film Phone Booth, judged potentially upsetting, had its release pushed back to April 2003.

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• 5. Messages and Missed Chances

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  At Benjamin Tasker Middle School, investigators found a shell casing and a Tarot card, the Death card. On its front were the words "Call me God." On the back, on three separate lines, were the words "For you mr. Police." "Code: 'Call me God'." "Do not release to the press." Police tried to honor that request, but WUSA-TV and then The Washington Post made the details public just one day later. The phrase was often misquoted as "I am God" or something similar. Tarot cards were left at several scenes as calling cards.

  Later scenes brought long handwritten notes sealed in plastic bags. One rambling note, a four-page letter found in the woods near the Ashland shooting, demanded $10,000,000 and threatened the lives of children in the area. On the 22nd of October, Chief Moose released part of a letter that declared, "Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time." The shooter also tried to open a dialogue, and Moose relayed cryptic replies through the media. On the 23rd of October he said, "You have asked us to say, 'We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose.'" That phrasing may refer to a Cherokee fable.

  A telephone call from the shooter was traced to a pay phone at a gas station in Henrico County, Virginia. Police missed the caller by a matter of minutes and instead detained the occupants of a van at another pay phone at the same intersection. On that call, the sniper boasted of his cleverness and mentioned an unsolved murder in "Montgomery." Investigators identified it as the liquor store shooting in Montgomery, Alabama. On the 17th of October, authorities announced that Malvo's fingerprint from the Bowie school grounds matched one lifted at the Alabama scene. The FBI could name him because he had been fingerprinted in an earlier arrest in Washington state. Digging into his background revealed close ties to John Allen Muhammad.

  Meanwhile, early witnesses had described a white box truck with dark lettering and two men inside, speeding away from the Leisure World shopping center. Police across Maryland pulled over white vans and trucks, and they first believed a .223 rifle was used in every murder. After the Washington shooting, witnesses began describing a blue Chevrolet Caprice instead. By Friday night, the 4th of October, forensic tests tied seven shootings from the 2nd and 3rd to the same gun. The Montgomery County Police Department led the investigation publicly, assisted by the ATF, the US Marshals Service, the FBI, the U.S. Secret Service, the Virginia Department of Transportation and local departments. Police cordoned off roads and inspected drivers, halting traffic for hours, while hotlines were flooded with tips.

  The Caprice had been closer than anyone realized. Its New Jersey license plate had been checked by radio patrol cars several times near shooting locations, but police computers showed no link to any crime. On the 3rd of October, Washington police stopped the car for running two stop signs, two hours before Charlot was shot. On the 8th of October, Baltimore officers found a dark blue Caprice parked near the Jones Falls Expressway at 28th Street with a person sleeping inside. They were troubled that the driver's license was from Washington state while the car was registered in New Jersey, but they neither questioned the occupants extensively nor searched the vehicle.

  Other leads went wrong. After the Home Depot shooting, a witness gave police what seemed a very good lead, but he had actually been inside the store and was lying. Matthew Dowdy was convicted of interfering with the investigation. On the 21st of October, police in the Richmond area arrested two men outside a gas station, one with a white van. The men were undocumented immigrants with no connection to the shooter. They were subjected to cavity searches, held in federal custody, and then deported by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.

  Behind the scenes, federal authorities were developing leads in Washington state, Alabama and New Jersey. They learned that Muhammad's ex-wife, who held a protective order against him, lived in Clinton, Maryland, near the Capital Beltway. They also traced a car purchase he had made in New Jersey. Around midnight on the 24th of October, officials issued an alert to the public to watch for a dark blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with New Jersey plates.

  Within minutes, refrigerator mechanic Whitney Donahue called 911 from a rest stop off Interstate 70 near Myersville, Maryland. He had spotted a car matching the description. Trooper First Class D. Wayne Smith of the Maryland State Police arrived first and used his light blue unmarked car to block the exit, parked sideways between two tractor-trailers. As more troopers arrived, they sealed both the entrance and exit ramps without the suspects noticing. When truck driver Ron Lantz tried to leave, troopers commandeered his tractor-trailer to replace the police car at the roadblock. At 3:19 a.m., SWAT officers found Muhammad and Malvo sleeping in the Caprice and arrested them on federal weapons charges. A stolen Bushmaster .223 rifle and a bipod were in a bag in the car. Ballistics tests later linked that rifle to 11 of the 14 shootings, including one in which nobody was hurt.

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• 6. Motive and Plan

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  Mildred Muhammad, the second ex-wife of John Allen Muhammad, has said that when police first approached her, an officer asked, "Ms. Muhammad, didn't you know you were the target?" In pre-trial motions, prosecutors and investigators suggested she was exactly that. Muhammad felt she had estranged him from his children, and he had earlier threatened her. Under this theory, the other shootings were a cover, because police would not look hard at an estranged ex-husband if she seemed to be one random victim of a serial killer. He frequented her neighborhood during the attacks, and some incidents happened nearby. But Judge LeRoy F. Millette Jr. barred prosecutors from presenting the theory at trial, ruling that the link had not been firmly established.

  While in prison, Malvo wrote erratic diatribes about what he called his "jihad" against the United States. "I have been accused on my mission. Allah knows I'm gonna suffer now," he wrote. His writings and drawings featured Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein alongside characters from the film series The Matrix, and they were dismissed as immaterial. Some investigators reportedly said they had all but ruled out terrorist ties or political ideology. Even so, in at least one of the murder trials, a Virginia court found Muhammad guilty of killing "pursuant to the direction or order" of terrorism.

  In May 2006, in John Allen Muhammad's trial in Montgomery County, Maryland, Malvo spent two days on the witness stand and confessed to the 17 murders. He said that the aim of the spree was to kidnap children and extort money from the government, and to "set up a camp to train children how to terrorize cities," with the ultimate goal of "shutting things down" across the United States. He testified that Muhammad was driven by hatred of white people and believed "the white man is the devil." By Malvo's account, Muhammad planned to kill six white people a day for thirty days and wanted pregnant white women to be among the targets. After extensive psychological counseling, Malvo also admitted he had lied at the earlier Virginia trial, where he claimed to have been the trigger man for every shooting. He said he did that to protect Muhammad from a death sentence, since executing a minor was harder, and wanted to let the families hear the full story.

  Malvo described a plan in three phases across the Washington and Baltimore areas. Phase One meant mapping and rehearsing locations so the pair could escape by a set route after each shooting. It faltered because of heavy traffic and the lack of clear shots or getaways. Phase Two, in Baltimore, was close to being carried out. It began with shooting a pregnant woman in the stomach, then killing a Baltimore police officer. At the officer's funeral, they planned to detonate several improvised explosives packed with shrapnel, aiming to kill many of the police who would attend.

  Phase Three was to run alongside or just after Phase Two. It involved extorting several million dollars from the United States government to fund a journey north to Canada. On the way, they would visit YMCAs and orphanages to recruit young black boys with no parents or guidance, and Muhammad believed he could act as a father figure as he had with Malvo. In Canada he would train them in weapons and stealth, then send them out to carry out coordinated mass shootings in other American cities. Malvo said the intent was to deepen the chaos the country was already feeling after 9/11.

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• 7. Trials and Execution

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  In the autumn of 2003, in the Virginia cities of Chesapeake and Virginia Beach, Muhammad and Malvo stood trial after defense attorneys won changes of venue. Both courts sat more than 100 miles from the closest alleged attack, in Ashland. Each man was found guilty of murder and weapons charges for killings of two Virginia victims. Muhammad's jury recommended death. Malvo's jury recommended life in prison without parole, and the judges agreed in both cases.

  Before those trials, Chief Moose had gone on a publicity tour for his book on the investigation, appearing on Dateline NBC, The Today Show and The Tonight Show. Assistant Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney James Willett told The Washington Post, "Personally, I don't understand why someone who's been in law enforcement his whole life would potentially damage our case or compromise a jury pool by doing this."

  In October 2004, Malvo pleaded guilty in Spotsylvania County to another murder and accepted life without parole, avoiding any chance of a death sentence. The Prince William County prosecutor had held off on capital charges against him while the U.S. Supreme Court weighed whether juveniles could be executed. In March 2005, the Court ruled in Roper v. Simmons that the Eighth Amendment bars execution for crimes committed under the age of 18. Malvo had been 17 at the time of the attacks. By then he was 20 and held at Virginia's Red Onion State Prison in Pound, so Prince William County dropped its charges. Prosecutors in Maryland, Louisiana and Alabama still wanted to try both men.

  On the 22nd of April 2005, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed Muhammad's death sentence, finding that the murder was part of an act of terrorism. That reasoning rested on the handwritten note demanding $10 million. The court also rejected a defense argument that he could not be executed because he was not the triggerman. Justice Donald Lemons wrote that Muhammad had "randomly selected innocent victims" and, "with calculation, extensive planning, premeditation and ruthless disregard for life," carried out a "cruel scheme of terror."

  In May 2005, Virginia and Maryland agreed that Maryland could proceed, since the most shootings had happened there. Malvo waived extradition and reportedly was willing to cooperate. Muhammad fought it, but a Virginia judge ordered his extradition in August 2005. On the 30th of May 2006, a Maryland jury found Muhammad guilty of six counts of murder, and on the 1st of June he received six consecutive life terms without parole. Malvo pleaded guilty to six murders in Maryland and received six consecutive life terms. In 2017, his sentence in Virginia was overturned on appeal.

  On the 6th of May 2008, it emerged that Muhammad had written to prosecutors asking for help ending his appeals "so that you can murder this innocent black man." An appeal his lawyers filed that April cited evidence of brain damage that might make him incompetent to make legal decisions. It also argued he should not have been allowed to represent himself at his Virginia trial.

  On the 16th of September 2009, circuit court judge Mary Grace O'Brien set his execution by lethal injection for the 10th of November. His lawyers petitioned the U.S. Supreme Court for a stay and asked Virginia Governor Tim Kaine for clemency. Both requests were denied. The procedure began at 9:06 p.m. at the Greensville Correctional Center near Jarratt, Virginia, and Muhammad was pronounced dead five minutes later. Asked for last words, he made no reply. Twenty-seven people watched, including family members of victims.

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• 8. Lawsuit and Legacy

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  The Seattle Times reported on the 20th of April 2003 that Muhammad had honed his marksmanship at the firing range of Bull's Eye Shooter Supply. The paper also reported that Malvo told investigators he shoplifted the 35-inch carbine from the "supposedly secure store." According to ATF officials, the store and its owners had a long history of firearms sales and records violations, with a file 283 pages thick. In July 2003, the ATF revoked the federal firearms license of owner Brian Borgelt, a former staff sergeant with the U.S. Army Rangers. Later that month he transferred the store to a friend while keeping the building and the shooting gallery next door.

  On the 16th of January 2003, the Brady Center's Legal Action Project filed a civil lawsuit for families of many victims and two survivors, Benny Oberoi and 13-year-old Iran Brown. The defendants were Bull's Eye, Bushmaster Firearms, Inc. of Windham, Maine, Borgelt, Muhammad and Malvo. Muhammad had a record of domestic battery and Malvo was a minor, so both were legally barred from buying firearms. The suit alleged that the dealer could not account for hundreds of guns received in the years before the attacks. It also claimed Bushmaster kept supplying Bull's Eye despite knowing of its record-keeping violations.

  The parties settled before the April 2005 trial date. Bull's Eye paid $2 million and Bushmaster paid $500,000, and Bushmaster agreed to educate its dealers about safer business practices. Bushmaster said it settled because of mounting legal fees and shrinking insurance money. Sonia Wills, mother of victim Conrad Johnson, told WTOP radio that her family joined the suit to send a message. "I think a message was delivered that you should be responsible and accountable for the actions of irresponsible people when you make these guns and put them in their hands," she said.

  A memorial to the victims stands at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland, and another was built in 2014 in the government plaza of Rockville. The attacks also left a trail across screens. The broadcast of the CSI: Miami episode "Kill Zone," about a sniper who kills three random rush-hour victims, was postponed until November 2002 because it resembled the real events too closely. USA Network aired the television movie D.C. Sniper: 23 Days of Fear in October 2003. The 2013 film Blue Caprice explored the relationship between Muhammad and Malvo. The 2008 documentary The D.C. Sniper's Wife told the story through Mildred Muhammad, who in 2015 appeared on Monster in My Family, meeting survivors and victims' relatives.

  In 2020, the podcast You're Wrong About devoted a four-part series to the case, and the podcast Monster covered it in its third season. On the 23rd of June 2023, Netflix aired an episode of Catching Killers titled "Trained to Kill: The DC Sniper."

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