Lee Boyd Malvo

• 1. Introduction

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  Lee Boyd Malvo was 17 years old when he took part in the D.C. sniper attacks, a run of murders that terrorized the Washington metropolitan area for three weeks in October 2002. He was a Jamaican teenager, and his partner in the killings was a man named John Allen Muhammad. Those three weeks were the last stretch of a longer trail of shootings that had begun on the West Coast and crossed the country. Almost everything that followed in Malvo's life has turned on a single number, his age. Juries, state judges, a federal appeals court and the Supreme Court of the United States were all drawn into arguing about what a boy of 17 can be held to answer for. This documentary asks how a teenager from the Caribbean came to stand beside Muhammad at all. It asks what Malvo believed he was helping to build, and what the two men actually planned. And it asks why, long after his sentencing, his case kept returning to the courts.

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• 2. Childhood Between Islands

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  Lee Boyd Malvo was born on the 18th of February 1985 in Kingston, Jamaica. His father, Leslie Malvo, worked as a mason, and his mother, Una James, was a seamstress. The couple never married.

  In 1990, when Lee was five, Una left Leslie. She took her son to the hill town of Endeavour, where her sister Marie Lawrence took them in for almost a year. The pair then returned to Kingston and later lived in St. Martin. At nine, Lee was sent back to his aunt Marie, again for almost a year. After he passed his sixth grade exams, he was sent to York Castle High School.

  Religion marked his teenage years. In 1999, at the age of 14, he was baptized into the Seventh-day Adventist Church by a Jamaican pastor named Lorenzo King. That same year he moved to Antigua to be with his mother. He enrolled at the Antigua and Barbuda Seventh-day Adventist School, where he earned good grades and won a school award in the 100 meter run.

  Antigua is also where his mother formed a strong friendship, around 1999, with a man named John Allen Muhammad.

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• 3. Under Muhammad's Influence

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  Una left Antigua for Fort Myers, Florida, travelling on false documents, and she left her son in Muhammad's care. She was reportedly planning to have him follow her later. In March 2001, Muhammad converted Malvo to Islam. He also cut the boy off from his mother.

  Later in 2001, Malvo arrived illegally in Miami. In December of that year, the Border Patrol apprehended him and his mother in Bellingham, Washington. In January 2002 he was released on a $1,500 bond. He then lived with Muhammad in a homeless shelter in Bellingham. Malvo enrolled at Bellingham High School, with Muhammad falsely listed as his father. According to his classmates, he made no friends.

  Near Tacoma, Washington, Malvo told investigators, he shoplifted a Bushmaster XM-15 rifle from a store called Bull's Eye Shooter Supply. He then practiced his marksmanship on the firing range next door to the shop. Under the Gun Control Act of 1968, both he and Muhammad were classified as prohibited persons, barred from buying or owning guns.

  That gun shop and the rifle's maker would later answer for it in court. In 2003, the Legal Action Project of the Brady Center to Prevent Gun Violence sued Malvo and Muhammad on behalf of two seriously wounded victims and the families of some of those murdered. Bull's Eye Shooter Supply and Bushmaster Firearms were named as co-defendants. They contributed to a landmark out-of-court settlement of $2.5 million in late 2004.

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• 4. The Three Phases

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  In May 2006, Malvo took the witness stand at Muhammad's trial in Montgomery County, Maryland. Over two days he described the shootings in detail. He also corrected the record. After his arrest, he had told investigators that he was the triggerman in every shooting. After extensive counseling, he admitted that this had been a lie. He said he made the claim to shield Muhammad from the death penalty, which would have been harder to impose for murders committed by a minor. Execution for a crime committed by a minor has since been declared unconstitutional. Of his own conduct, he said, "I'm not proud of myself. I'm just trying to make amends."

  Muhammad's plan, as Malvo laid it out, had three phases spread across the Washington, D.C. and Baltimore areas. Phase One was meticulous preparation. The two men mapped and rehearsed their locations around the D.C. area. After each shooting, they could then leave quickly along a predetermined path and move on to the next spot. Muhammad's goal for this phase was to kill six white people a day for 30 days. Malvo said it did not go as planned, because heavy traffic and the lack of a clear shot or getaway interfered at various locations.

  Phase Two was set for Baltimore. Malvo said it came close to being carried out but never was. It would have opened with the killing of a pregnant woman by a shot to the abdomen. Next would come the shooting of a Baltimore police officer. At the officer's funeral, the pair intended to plant several improvised explosive devices, expecting many police officers to attend. More bombs were to go off as ambulances arrived at the scene.

  Phase Three was to follow immediately. The pair would extort several million dollars from the U.S. government. That money would finance a larger scheme: traveling north into Canada, recruiting other effectively orphaned boys, training them in weapons and stealth, and sending them out to commit shootings across the country.

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• 5. Defense and Verdict

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  Linda Franklin, an FBI analyst, was the victim at the center of Virginia's case against Malvo. Federal charges against him had been dropped, and he was transferred to Virginia custody and held in jail in Fairfax County. Virginia charged him with two capital crimes. One was Franklin's murder "in the commission of an act of terrorism," a phrase added to Virginia law after the September 11 attacks. The other was the murder of more than one person in a three-year period. A charge of unlawful use of a firearm in Franklin's killing was added to these.

  Malvo's first lawyer was a Fairfax attorney, Michael Arif, joined by Thomas B. Walsh and Mark J. Petrovich. Craig Cooley, a prominent Richmond attorney, was appointed later and took a leadership role. Pre-trial publicity had saturated the whole Washington area, so a change of venue was granted. The trial moved more than 150 miles, to Chesapeake, Virginia.

  The defense pleaded not guilty by reason of insanity to every charge, arguing that Muhammad had held Malvo under complete control. A psychiatric witness testified that Muhammad, a member of the Nation of Islam, had convinced Malvo that the proceeds of an extortion attempt would start a new nation of only pure black young people somewhere in Canada. Cooley put numbers on the promise. Malvo believed, he said, that a $10 million ransom demanded from the U.S. government would build a Utopian society for 140 homeless Black children on a Canadian compound.

  Cooley also blamed entertainment. During the trial he said violent video games had contributed significantly to Malvo's state of mind and his willingness to kill. "He's trained and desensitized with video games, computer games, to train him to shoot human forms over and over," Cooley said.

  Sociologists Lawrence Kutner and Cheryl K. Olson disagreed in their book Grand Theft Childhood. They argued that other factors mattered far more. In court, they noted, Malvo admitted practicing with a real gun on paper plates that represented human heads. They also pointed to his long history of antisocial and criminal behavior, including torturing small animals, which they called one of the best predictors of future violent crime.

  On the 18th of December 2003, after nearly 14 hours of deliberation, the jury convicted Malvo on both capital charges. On the 23rd of December it recommended life in prison without the possibility of parole, and on the 10th of March 2004 he was sentenced to exactly that.

  A second Virginia case ended by agreement. On the 26th of October 2004, to avoid a possible death penalty, Malvo entered an Alford plea. In that kind of plea, a defendant does not admit guilt but accepts that the evidence could convict him. It covered the murder of Kenneth Bridges and the attempted murder of Caroline Seawell in Spotsylvania County. He also pleaded guilty to two firearms charges and agreed not to appeal the Franklin conviction. The sentence was life without parole for the murder, plus eight years for the weapons charges.

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• 6. A Map of Death Penalties

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  Maryland, where the two suspects were arrested, applied its death penalty only to people who were adults when they committed their crimes. Virginia had also allowed it for offenders who were juveniles at the time. That difference was the main reason the suspects were sent to Virginia first, because a death sentence there was more likely to end in an execution. Maryland later abolished its death penalty, in 2013.

  On the 1st of March 2005, the Supreme Court decided Roper v. Simmons. It held that the Eighth Amendment prohibits executing anyone for crimes committed before the age of 18. A prosecutor in Prince William County, Virginia, had said he would wait for that ruling before deciding whether to bring more capital charges. Afterward, the county's prosecutors chose not to pursue them. Malvo could still, in principle, be extradited to Alabama, Louisiana and other states for prosecution.

  In May 2005, Virginia and Maryland agreed that Maryland could begin prosecuting some of its pending charges. Malvo was extradited to Montgomery County, Maryland, under heavy security.

  On the 16th of June 2006, Malvo told authorities that he and Muhammad were guilty of four more shootings in 2002. A man was killed in Los Angeles, California, during a robbery in February or March. On the 18th of May, a 76-year-old man survived a shooting at a golf course in Clearwater, Florida. On the 27th of May, a man was shot to death while doing yard work in Denton, Texas. On the 1st of August, 54-year-old John Gaeta survived being shot during a robbery outside a shopping mall near Baton Rouge, Louisiana.

  On the 10th of October 2006, Malvo pleaded guilty to the six murders he faced in Maryland. On the 26th of October, he told police that he and Muhammad had killed Jerry Taylor, aged 60, as Taylor practiced chip shots on a golf course in Tucson, Arizona, in March 2002. Taylor died from a single gunshot fired at long range. Tucson detectives interviewed Malvo about the killing but did not disclose their findings.

  On the 8th of November 2006, Malvo was sentenced to six consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole.

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• 7. Remorse and Reputation

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  On the 2nd of October 2007, Malvo telephoned Cheryll Witz, the daughter of one of his victims, to apologize. In a letter dated the 21st of February 2010, he apologized to John C. Gaeta for shooting him. "I am truly sorry for the pain I caused you and your loved ones. I was relieved to hear that you suffered no paralyzing injuries and that you are alive," he wrote.

  On the 29th of July 2011, a circuit judge in Wise County, Virginia, denied Malvo's petition to change his name. He had argued that he would be safer if fellow inmates did not know his real name, given his notoriety.

  In September 2012, Malvo, then 27, gave a lengthy interview to The Washington Post. "I was a monster. 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," he said. On the 24th of October 2012, in an interview with Matt Lauer, he said that John Muhammad had sexually abused him.

  Until mid 2024, Malvo was held at Red Onion State Prison as Virginia Department of Corrections inmate 1180834. Around June 2024 he moved from that supermax prison to Keen Mountain Correctional Center, which has slightly lower security.

  Filmmakers have also portrayed him. Trent Cameron played Malvo in the 2003 TV film D.C. Sniper: 23 Days of Fear. Tory N. Thompson played him in the 2010 film D.C. Sniper, and Tequan Richmond in the 2013 film Blue Caprice. He is also portrayed in the 2020 TV series I, Sniper.

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• 8. Juvenile Sentencing Reconsidered

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  On the 26th of May 2017, a federal district court judge in Virginia overturned Malvo's sentences of life without parole. The judge ruled them unconstitutional under Miller v. Alabama, citing his age at the time of the killings.

  That ruling reached only so far. On the 16th of August 2017, Robert Greenberg, a circuit court judge in Montgomery County, Maryland, decided it did not apply to the Maryland cases, because life without parole was not a mandatory sentence there. He wrote that the six consecutive sentences were imposed after "a full consideration of Defendant's physical, mental, and emotional state." The original sentencing judge, he added, had "considered all relevant factors at play," and the plain import of his words was that Malvo was "irreparably corrupted."

  On the 21st of June 2018, the United States Court of Appeals for the Fourth Circuit unanimously upheld the lower court's decision on the Virginia sentences. Judge Paul V. Niemeyer wrote that Malvo now had "the retroactive benefit of new constitutional rules that treat juveniles differently for sentencing." A spokesperson for Virginia Attorney General Mark Herring first said the office was weighing a full rehearing or an appeal to the Supreme Court. On the 29th of June 2018, Herring said his office would seek Supreme Court review. On the 18th of March 2019, the court granted certiorari, meaning it agreed to hear the case. It heard arguments on the 16th of October 2019.

  On the 24th of February 2020, Malvo asked the Supreme Court to dismiss his appeal as moot. Virginia had changed its law so that anyone sentenced to life as a juvenile who had served 20 years could be considered for early release. Malvo became eligible for parole consideration in Virginia in 2022. His life sentences in Maryland were not affected, and he began trying to appeal those as well.

  On the 10th of March 2020, his adviser Carmeta Albarus announced that Malvo had married in a ceremony at Red Onion State Prison.

  In April 2021, Maryland banned life sentences for juveniles. Malvo sued for relief, and the Maryland Court of Appeals agreed to review his case, with oral arguments beginning in February 2022. On the 26th of August 2022, that court ordered a resentencing for Malvo in order to comply with the Supreme Court. Four days later, the Virginia parole board denied him parole. On the 13th of March 2024, a Maryland judge considered how and when Malvo would be transferred for the new sentencing.

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