John Allen Muhammad

• 1. Introduction

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  John Allen Muhammad was pronounced dead at 9:11 p.m. on the 10th of November 2009. The place was the Greensville Correctional Center, near Jarratt, Virginia.

  Seven years earlier, in 2002, shootings attributed to him and a young partner named Lee Boyd Malvo had frightened the Washington area. Their arrest ended the attacks, but it opened a much longer series of questions.

  Who was Muhammad before the shootings? Prosecutors, defense lawyers and Malvo himself gave different accounts of what he wanted. And why did one of the most closely watched trials of the decade turn on whether he had personally pulled a trigger?

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• 2. Faith and Family

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  John Allen Muhammad was born John Allen Williams on the 31st of December 1960 in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, to Ernest and Eva Williams. The family moved to New Orleans after Eva was diagnosed with breast cancer. She died when her son was three years old. His father left soon afterward, and a maternal grandfather and an aunt raised the boy.

  In 1987, at the age of 26, Williams joined the Nation of Islam. In 1995 he helped provide security for the Million Man March. Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan has publicly distanced himself and his organization from the D.C. sniper attacks.

  In 1999, Williams kidnapped his children and took them to Antigua, where he apparently committed credit card and immigration document fraud. During that time he grew close to Lee Boyd Malvo, a Jamaican child who would later act as his partner in the killings. In October 2001, Williams changed his name to John Allen Muhammad.

  Mildred Muhammad was his second ex-wife, and he had been divorced twice. She sought and received a restraining order, alleging abuse. Muhammad was then arrested on federal charges of possessing a weapon in violation of that order. The Lautenberg Amendment to the Gun Control Act of 1968 bars people under such orders from buying or having guns. Her name would come up again in the courtrooms that followed.

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• 3. Army Years

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  In August 1978, Muhammad enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard at Baton Rouge as a combat engineer. On the 6th of November 1985 he moved to the Regular Army. There he trained as a mechanic, a truck driver and a specialist metalworker.

  The M16, the Army's standard rifle, was the weapon on which he qualified. He earned the Expert Rifleman's Badge, the highest of the Army's three levels of basic marksmanship.

  His first tour was with the 15th Engineer Battalion at Fort Lewis in 1985. In 1991 he served in the Gulf War with a company that dismantled Iraqi chemical warfare rockets. That service brought him the Southwest Asia Service Medal and two Kuwait Liberation Medals, one from Saudi Arabia and one from Kuwait. In 1992 he was at Fort Ord, California, with the 13th Engineers. By 1993 he was back at Fort Lewis with the 14th Engineer Battalion.

  On the 26th of April 1994, Muhammad received an honorable discharge as a sergeant after 16 years of service. His other awards included the Army Service Ribbon, the National Defense Service Medal, the Overseas Ribbon, the Noncommissioned Officers Professional Development Ribbon and the Army Achievement Medal. Eight years after that discharge, investigators would find a rifle in his car.

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• 4. Tracing the Car

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  Between February and September 2002, a series of shootings across ten states killed seven people. The attackers then shifted to the Washington metropolitan area. There the D.C. sniper shootings claimed ten more victims before the arrests.

  A note left at one of the shootings, by either Muhammad or Malvo, pointed police toward a liquor store robbery-murder in Montgomery, Alabama. Investigators at that scene found a dropped magazine carrying fingerprints. Those prints belonged to Malvo, whose fingerprints were on file with the INS and who was known to spend time with Muhammad.

  In Tacoma, Washington, Malvo and Muhammad had lived together for around a year, and Malvo had used the alias John Lee Malvo. Once Muhammad was identified, police learned that he had bought a former police car in New Jersey on the 11th of September 2002. It was a blue Chevrolet Caprice.

  Police broadcast a public lookout for that car. It was spotted parked at an Interstate 70 rest stop in Myersville, Maryland, and Muhammad and Malvo were arrested. Muhammad was captured in Maryland on the 24th of October 2002. What investigators found inside that car would become the heart of the case against him.

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• 5. Plans and Motives

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  Prosecutors in Virginia said the shootings were part of a plot to extort $10 million from local and state governments. They also argued that the attacks were meant to kill his ex-wife and regain custody of his children. The judge ruled that the evidence was insufficient to support that second claim.

  After the arrest, authorities said Muhammad had admitted that he admired Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda and approved of the September 11 attacks. Malvo later testified that Muhammad had taught him to expect that money from an extortion attempt would pay for "a camp in Canada where homeless children would be trained as terrorists."

  Malvo's fullest account came in Maryland in May 2006, during two days of testimony at Muhammad's trial there. After psychological counseling, he admitted he had lied at the earlier Virginia trial when he claimed to be the trigger man in every shooting. He said he lied to save Muhammad from a death sentence. Malvo believed he would escape the death penalty because he was a minor.

  Phase one of the plan, Malvo said, was careful preparation around the D.C. area. The two men mapped and rehearsed their locations so that each shooting could be followed by a quick exit along a set route. Muhammad's goal was to kill six white people a day for 30 days. Malvo said this phase went wrong because of heavy traffic, poor shooting angles and a lack of clear getaway routes.

  Phase two was meant to take place in Baltimore, but it was never carried out. Malvo described it as starting with the killing of a pregnant woman. Next would come the killing of a Baltimore police officer, followed by explosive devices packed with shrapnel at the officer's funeral. The devices were meant to kill police officers attending.

  Phase three was to start during phase two. Muhammad intended to extort millions of dollars from the United States government. The money would fund a trip to Canada, with stops at YMCAs and orphanages to recruit boys with no parents or guidance. In Canada he would train them with weapons and send them across the country to carry out mass shootings. Malvo gave this account in 2006, but Muhammad's first trial, in Virginia, had been held three years earlier.

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• 6. Two States, Two Verdicts

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  Maryland wanted to try Muhammad first, but United States attorney general John Ashcroft had other plans. He reassigned the case to Paul Ebert, the Commonwealth's Attorney for Prince William County, Virginia. Virginia was viewed as more likely to impose a death sentence, and it allowed the death penalty for juveniles.

  In October 2003, Muhammad went on trial for the murder of Dean Meyers. The killing took place in Prince William County, near the city of Manassas. The trial was moved to Virginia Beach, approximately 200 miles away. Muhammad was granted the right to represent himself and dismissed his lawyers. He returned to having legal representation immediately after his opening statement.

  The charges were murder, terrorism, conspiracy and the illegal use of a firearm. The terrorism charge required prosecutors to prove at least two shootings in a three-year period. Prosecutors said they would make the case for 16 shootings allegedly involving Muhammad.

  The prosecution called more than 130 witnesses and introduced more than 400 pieces of evidence. A rifle found in his car was linked by ballistics tests to eight of the 10 killings in the Washington area, plus two others in Louisiana and Alabama. The car had been modified so that a sniper could fire from inside the trunk. A laptop in the car held maps with icons marking the shooting scenes. A recorded call to a police hotline, in a voice a detective identified as Muhammad's, demanded money in exchange for stopping the shootings.

  The defense asked the court to drop the capital murder charges for lack of direct evidence. Malvo's fingerprints were on the Bushmaster rifle in the car, and Muhammad's DNA was found on it. Even so, the defense argued that Virginia's "trigger-man law" barred a death sentence unless Muhammad himself pulled the trigger. No witness testified that they saw him do so.

  On the 17th of November 2003, Muhammad was convicted on all four counts. These were capital murder for the shooting of Meyers, capital murder under Virginia's antiterrorism statute, conspiracy to commit murder, and illegal use of a firearm. After five hours of deliberation over two days, the jury unanimously recommended death. On the 9th of March 2004, a Virginia judge agreed and sentenced him to die.

  On the 22nd of April 2005, the Virginia Supreme Court affirmed the sentence. It held that he could be put to death because the murder was part of an act of terrorism, and it rejected the trigger-man argument. Justice Donald W. Lemons said, "With calculation, extensive planning, premeditation and ruthless disregard for life, Muhammad carried out his cruel scheme of terror."

  In May 2005, Maryland and Virginia agreed to allow his extradition. He was held at the maximum security Sussex I State Prison near Waverly, Virginia, which houses the state's male death row inmates. In August 2005 he was extradited to Montgomery County, Maryland. On the 30th of May 2006, a Maryland jury found him guilty of six counts of murder. On the 1st of June 2006, he received six consecutive life terms without possibility of parole.

  Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana and Washington state did not move to try him, given his Virginia death sentence. In 2006, Malvo confessed that the pair had also killed 14 victims in California, Arizona and Texas. Malvo received life without parole, later commuted to life with parole. Muhammad's own lawyers now turned to a different question: whether he should ever have been allowed to defend himself.

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• 7. Final Appeals and Execution

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

  On the 16th of September 2009, Prince William County Circuit Court Judge Mary Grace O'Brien set his execution for the 10th of November 2009. On the 9th of November, the U.S. Supreme Court denied his petition for review. Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, wrote separately. He said Virginia's rush to set an execution date "highlights once again the perversity of executing inmates before their appeals process has been fully concluded." The three still agreed that the appeal should not be heard. Appeals in Muhammad's other cases remained pending when he died.

  Hours before the scheduled execution, Virginia Governor Tim Kaine denied the clemency pleas made by Muhammad's attorneys. At the time, Virginia law let a person convicted of capital murder choose between lethal injection and electrocution. Muhammad declined to choose, so the law selected lethal injection for him. He accepted the offer of a last meal, which was chicken, red sauce and cake.

  The execution began at 9 p.m. EST. The lethal injection process started at 9:06 p.m. Muhammad declined to make a final statement. His body was cremated, and the ashes were given to his son in Louisiana.

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• 8. Courts and Cameras

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  In 2003, the Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence named Malvo and Muhammad in a civil lawsuit. It was filed on behalf of two seriously wounded victims and the families of some of those murdered. Both men were believed to be indigent. Co-defendants Bull's Eye Shooter Supply and Bushmaster Firearms, Inc. contributed to a landmark $2.5 million out-of-court settlement in late 2004.

  Actor Bobby Hosea played Muhammad in the 2003 film D.C. Sniper: 23 Days of Fear. Ken Foree took the role in the 2010 film D.C. Sniper, and Isaiah Washington played him in the 2013 film Blue Caprice. The most recent portrayal, in the 2020 series I, Sniper, is anonymous.

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