Crimes of the Century (2013–…): Season 1, Episode 1 - The DC Snipers - full transcript
911.
She's lying next
to the vacuum cleaner.
Some blood's coming out of
her nose and her mouth.
It was an unprecedented wave of terror that
struck in and around our nation's capital.
You had 9/11.
This is one year later.
Over 23 days, 10 people
are targeted for death.
There was always just
a single shot.
Montgomery County.
Somebody has been shot
down on our back lot.
He's bleeding real bad.
The victims are diverse.
Women, men, young, old,
black, white.
The motive is unknown.
We're not sure if we had
a terrorist operation.
The panic is escalating.
They were striking at
the heart of the suburbs.
The guy is dead.
And there was a white van
just went by.
Tomorrow I'm going to my
fourth funeral in four days.
People were dying. They were
dying right in front of us.
We can't be everywhere
all the time.
This, without a doubt, was the most
intense three weeks of my career.
It was one of
the biggest manhunts
in American history...
"The Hunt for the D.C. Snipers."
Next.
It's known as the Beltway, the growing
metropolis that surrounds our nation's capital.
Encompassing portions of
Maryland and Virginia,
the Beltway is a sprawl of
medium-and small-sized towns...
the kind of places where
indiscriminate violence is rare.
For area residents, October 2,
2002 began quietly enough.
Nationally the big news was a hurricane in
the Gulf of Mexico... Category-4 Hurricane.
And the build-up
to the invasion of Iraq.
Because we know the awful
nature of war.
But a very different
war was about to erupt.
I got a call from my deputy,
Lieutenant Phil Raum.
A 55-year-old man was
killed outside the store.
We had a gentleman who was shot in the
parking lot at the Shoppers Food Warehouse.
I asked him what kind was it.
Do we have a smoker?
Do we have an argument between two people
that we have an answer to it right away?
Barney Forsythe was the head of
Major Crimes for Montgomery county.
He said, "No, not really.
We had a loud bang."
It was directly across the
street from a police station.
In fact, the first police
officers to arrive on the scene
were those that heard the shot inside the
police station and walked across the street.
The victim is a 55-year-old government
analyst named James D. Martin.
Police have almost nothing
to go on.
Security cameras were
starting to become more popular.
We were, of course, hoping that that
was going to tell us something.
And, unfortunately, after we viewed it, the
only thing we saw was the poor man basically
getting shot and crumpling
to the ground.
We talked about the
unusual nature of that
particular murder.
The thing that bothered us
was that there was no obvious
reason for the shooting.
In Montgomery county, somebody being killed
with a rifle is something very unusual.
A single shot crashed
through a craft-store window.
No one was hit.
Oddly, less than an hour earlier, there had
been a random shot fired just a few miles away.
There were no injuries
and no clues.
We weren't really sure what
had we had at that point.
Tonight, the mystery remains.
That evening, the two shootings
were still just a local story.
The next morning,
everything changed.
- Montgomery county.
- Yes, ma'am.
I need police and ambulance.
- Okay. What's the problem?
- Somebody has been shot down
on our back lot.
He's down on the ground.
He's bleeding real bad.
We had a call for a subject
who had been out mowing a lawn.
The victim is
39-year-old Sonny Buchanan,
a landscaper.
Immediately, we were pretty sure it was going to
be related to the previous evening's shooting.
The two crime scenes
are just over four miles apart.
We're reasonably sure that they were parked
within several hundred yards of this location.
They managed to sight the victim
and take the shot.
30 minutes later,
the carnage continues.
What happened here
at the gas station?
I had to fill the car up
with gas.
There was a gentleman
filling his car.
It was a taxi.
And he looked at me,
and I looked at him,
and then I looked down for a split
second just to pick up my credit card,
and then
I heard a very loud bang.
The shot came from up here.
And then I looked up, and the taxi
driver was walking towards my car.
He said to me, "Call an
ambulance," and he collapsed.
I saw... a lot of blood.
The taxi driver is
54-year-old Prem Kumar Walekar.
The witness is Caroline Namrow,
an emergency-room doctor.
I realized that he was having something called
agonal breathing, which is the last breath.
When police arrive, Dr. Namrow
is performing CPR on a dead man.
I started to feel a little
worried when I saw everybody
with the bulletproof vests on
and I didn't have one.
We all thought that there was a possibility
that we could be targeted at that point.
I remember Chief Moose specifically
told me to get my vest on.
Let me now introduce our
Chief of Police, Charles Moose.
Charles?
- Thank you, sir.
We are doing everything in our power to control
our emotions as we deal with this situation.
The challenge is to be factual,
to be accurate,
to not get tunnel vision, to not go off on a
tangent, not put misinformation out there.
Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose
becomes the public face of the investigation.
But behind the scenes, Captain
Barney Forsythe takes the lead.
He was the right guy in the
right place at the right time.
As we were down here, there
was also a call coming out,
a person possibly committing suicide
about a mile north of here.
But this is no suicide.
It's murder.
And it's less than
two miles away.
Dead at the scene is
a 34-year-old babysitter
and housekeeper, Sarah Ramos.
Passersby thought she had
shot herself.
34-Year-Old Sarah Ramos was sitting on
a bench at a shopping center, reading.
It's another busy location,
another perplexing crime scene.
Three fatal shootings in less than
an hour in a four-mile radius.
We sensed they were related,
but knowing and proving that
they're related are certainly
two different things.
The rear of this parking lot
provides a very good area.
Take a shot... one shot, one
loud shot, one fatal shot.
And then move away without causing
a great deal of distraction.
A witness reports seeing a white
box truck fleeing the scene.
It's the first material clue
for investigators.
The investigation really,
really took on speed right here.
An hour and 20 minutes later, 5 1/2
miles away, Lori Ann Lewis Rivera
has stopped at a self-service gas station
vacuum stand to clean out her minivan.
Everyday people doing everyday
things usually are not the victims.
Rivera, mother of a young
daughter, is just 25 years old.
Just the enormity of this
huge sense of waste.
This child lost her mother.
Another murder...
again, a single shot.
Two people in a box-type truck
with a damaged tailgate.
So far they haven't found anybody, and that's
the situation as we know it right now out here.
It's quiet
for the next 12 hours.
Then, just a few blocks from the Montgomery
County line, one more shot shatters the night.
72-year-old Pascal Charlot, a retired
carpenter, dies at the scene.
Montgomery County, we average
about 20 homicides a year.
And we've had five of them in
the space of a 16-hour period.
If you look at the victims in the first day,
they were from all different aspects...
male, female, Indian, white,
Hispanic, black.
So, basically that's telling me
they're looking at random targets.
They're not predetermined
targets.
This is Americana, right?
Do they hate suburban America?
We couldn't figure out why
they were doing it,
but they were striking kind of
at the heart of the suburbs.
You had 9/11.
This is one year later.
At first we're not sure if we
had a terrorist operation.
There was no sense at all who was behind
this, who the next victim might be,
and when it would stop,
if it would stop.
We didn't know what the next
16 hours was going to bring.
The snipers began leaving notes.
It was sort of like getting
punched in the face.
An entire community of suburban
Maryland is living in fear.
As police spread out... A
massive manhunt is under way.
In a single day, the D.C. sniper murder spree
became the top story across the nation.
- ...still no clues.
- Police could not provide...
I don't know what the thought
process is, what the plan is.
But yes, people need to continue
with life.
It was really terrifying to be in an area
where there's a crazy person with a gun.
Suburban Maryland is living
in fear.
Fear was just... I mean,
not perception of fear.
This is reality fear.
A massive manhunt is under way with still
no clues as to who killed five people.
The reality was
they were mobile.
They were willing to go
anywhere at any time.
But who were they?
After six murders in 27 hours,
police had just one common thread.
It was a single shot, and it
was a very loud single shot.
Victim number seven, a 43-year-old mother of two,
is shot outside a second Michaels craft store,
more than 50 miles south of where the
previous attacks were clustered.
Police say that the bullet
passed through her body.
She is the first
victim to survive.
Is there any connection
between the shooting that
occurred in Virginia and the ones that
have occurred here in Montgomery county?
At this point, the fragments from
the shooting are in the lab,
and the comparison test is
being conducted right now.
By the second day, we had a good
idea of the type of caliber.
We were also able to tell that all the
shots were fired from the same weapon.
Maryland investigators
narrowing their search
to these weapons by starting
with the killer's bullets.
So, right away, just about within 24 hours, we
knew we were dealing with an assault rifle.
Have you seen anybody who may
have weapons similar to this?
Call Chief Moose and his
department on the hotline.
We had to look at the elevation
of how the round hit the body,
and we noticed that we did not
have a high entry elevation,
meaning being shot from a high angle... which
led us to believe they could be shooting
from a bench location, or we even
thought early they could be shooting
from a platform,
maybe like a van Or a truck.
The ballistics report provoked a
chilling conclusion for investigators.
They weren't dealing with just
any killer.
This was the work of a highly
motivated sniper.
I'm a trained sniper myself.
I went through sniper school.
Each one of these individuals
was shot with one rifle round,
which scared me.
The "Oh, shit" moment is when you realize
that this is not an ordinary investigation.
We knew that we had
a public-safety crisis.
The sniper realization
fueled even greater urgency.
The witness report of a white van Or truck
fleeing one of the early murder scenes
began to drive
the investigation.
We do have new information
now on the box truck.
It does have lettering.
Police say two lines of block lettering
on the side and on the back.
The media was basically
all over this story.
They say the vehicle has six
wheels, four wheels in the rear.
They may have spotted two people in a
box-type truck with a damaged tailgate.
And they started putting out white box
trucks or white box truck, white box truck.
The witness talked about
two people in it.
And groupthink took over.
Graphics will be available.
We think it will help people
prompt their memories.
White vans were everywhere.
There are white vans similar
to the other white van.
Then, all of a sudden, there
were millions of white vans,
and everybody would say, "Did
you see? I saw a white van."
Police say they're still
looking for a white box truck.
It got a life of its own that
it shouldn't have gotten.
Two men inside.
Unfortunately, it was the
only game in town at that point.
Lost in the hysteria of the white box-truck
lead was an alert put out by D.C. police
after the last shooting of the
previous day, October 3rd.
The homicide detectives
investigating the shootings
on Georgia avenue, just inside
the D.C. line,
had a description of a Chevy
Caprice leaving the scene.
It was not a big story.
It was kind of buried
in the news coverage.
The white-truck theory simply
dominated the discussion.
-ex-Military... along with media experts who
came forward with profiles of the sniper.
This has all the markings of
an all-American crime spree.
This is somebody who actually
is trying to taunt the nation.
The message is getting out
there that no one is safe.
Everyone thought it was
white guys.
White guys will be involved, just because that
seemed to be the predominant serial-killer motif.
You know what?
You want a profile?
Here's a guy who's going to
turn out, I believe,
to be a white, middle-aged male.
I'd be looking for an individual who
has a high degree of anxiety at work.
It was very bad for
the witness pollution.
There's a typology of mass murderer
called the pseudocommando.
We're still waiting on the
psychological-profile piece from the FBI.
We don't expect it will be exact, that
it will cause us to have tunnel vision.
Stand still, please.
Still, please!
To calm the public, satisfy the
media, and keep the facts straight,
Chief Moose, backed by members
of the Sniper Task Force,
holds daily press conferences...
one a day, every day.
I have to take some questions.
Early on we determined that the snipers were
listening to things that we were saying.
Several of us feared they were actually in the
background, watching these press conferences.
The question about the schools
and their status tomorrow.
School is going to open.
That decision clearly
has been made.
There is no reason to believe that the
shooter is targeting schoolchildren.
The public had been afraid
that their kids weren't safe.
So we said, "Okay,
we'll send police.
Every school in Montgomery
County had an officer at it.
A 13-year-old boy shot and wounded as he
arrives at his suburban Maryland school.
The eighth victim is a student at
Benjamin Tasker middle school.
He is critically wounded
but survives.
Right over there, right over my right
shoulder, is where the boy was shot.
The idea that a shooter would target an innocent
child on his way to school was alarming in a way
that the previous shootings
hadn't been.
What they're now saying is
that there is a connection
between the shooting here and
the other ones that have really
caused quite the jitters
throughout the Washington area.
The school shooting occurs 70-odd miles from the
previous shooting, in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
The sniper zone
seems to be growing.
Once again, witnesses report seeing
a white van leaving the scene.
It was a consistent detail that would
nearly untrack the entire investigation.
I think they were looking for, you
know, a white man in a box truck.
I don't think anyone was sort of expecting
that they were blacks, I think.
Well, if you are two black
guys in kind of a beat-up car
during this, no one
would ever notice you.
Only much later would anyone realize
that the witnesses and the media experts
were wrong on both
of the crucial points.
There was no box truck,
and the snipers were not white.
Six Dead Two wounded.
Millions terrorized.
Almost a week has passed since the D.C.
snipers first struck.
And now the school attack has
elevated the stakes dramatically.
Everybody working this detail knew
someone who was in the schools,
whether it was neighbors, whether it was
relatives, whether it was their own children,
and it was kind of like,
"Where arewe safe?"
Even though witnesses had reported
seeing a white van at the school,
authorities quickly determined that the
shot actually came from the adjacent woods.
Police find two pieces of evidence... a single
spent shell casing and a disturbing communiqué.
Our people recovered
a tarot card.
It was the death card.
Michael Bouchard believes the tarot card
confirmed that the snipers had listened
to the previous
press conference.
One of my words was, "I don't know why on God's
Earth somebody would do something like this."
And, sure enough, it said,
"Mr. Police, call me God.
Do not release to the press."
Word of the tarot card was closely guarded by
the sniper task force, but not closely enough.
It leaks on October 9th.
When the news media got a hold of the
tarot card and the information on it,
law enforcement
was extremely upset.
You really want to get that
piece of information and put it
out while we're still doing
this investigation?
There was some discussion amongst
all of us in the newsroom.
Do we report this or not?
I don't think there's anybody that hasn't
experienced the hindrance of leaks in the past.
We have not been thrown
off track.
They claim they shot other people because
we didn't do what they asked us to do.
Dean Myers, shot at this Manassas, Virginia,
gas station... Dean Harold Myers,
a civil engineer, is the ninth victim, shot
in the chest and killed while pumping gas
near Manassas, Virginia.
He was 53 years old.
In a parking lot across from the crime scene, a
police officer interviews potential witnesses.
One of them is a man driving the same
12-year-old Chevy Caprice that had been spotted
near the sixth murder scene.
When police wave him on,
they have no idea they've just
interviewed the sniper mastermind.
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were an
unlikely pair, joined by unlikely circumstances.
Muhammad, age 41,
was definitely the Alpha.
His devoted follower and more-than-willing
accomplice, Malvo, was just 17.
One of the things that struck me
was his devotion and commitment
to John Allen Muhammad,
who he referred to as "Dad."
Muhammad, a father of three,
was an ex-Army engineer
who received the normal
training in marksmanship.
He saw action in the first Gulf War
but returned home a changed man.
Desert Storm,
the first Iraq war,
flipped a switch
in John Muhammad.
To this day, his ex-wife
isn't sure what happened.
It was like his spirit
had been broken.
He looked like
just a broken man.
That's the man who
befriended Lee Malvo in 2000.
Muhammad met the teen while on a trip to Antigua,
where Malvo's mother had all but abandoned him.
Muhammad eventually brought Malvo to Tacoma,
Washington, as his informally adopted son.
His true personality, I think,
was a soft, warm, loving child.
It is very, very important that one recognize
that Lee did not attach to a killer.
He actually attached to a loving
and caring father.
At the time,
Muhammad was in a bitter
and complicated custody battle
for his own biological children,
whom he had stolen away
from his estranged wife.
When a Tacoma court gave her
full and permanent custody,
Muhammad vowed revenge.
The children were given to his wife, and he would
no longer have any connection with his children.
And he was outraged.
He said, "Do not raise
my children on your own.
You have become my enemy,
and as my enemy
I will kill you."
Did you believe him?
Totally.
The outrage became anger and hatred, fueling
an inner war against a racist society,
which Muhammad in turn
fed to young Lee Malvo.
He was being conditioned
to be a soldier.
We're talking about
a child soldier.
He was actually having Lee go to sleep
with taped extracts from The Art of War,"
from books talking about war
and revolution, et cetera.
And that was how he started
the whole brainwashing process.
The pair's murderous journey actually started
in Tacoma, nearly 3,000 miles from D.C.
At Muhammad's direction, Malvo
shot and killed the niece
of a woman who had testified against
Muhammad at the custody hearing.
Lee was trained not to feel.
Whenever he would feel, and Muhammad saw
that there was a flinch of feelings,
he would tell him to slap his
chest and say, "Heart, be still."
Heart, be still.
After a while, he didn't have to
tell him, "Heart, be still,"
because he had, if I could use
the word, monsterized him.
No one ever linked Muhammad and
Malvo to the girl's murder.
Now, eight months later, they're
driving around the nation's capital
in an old Chevy Caprice,
shooting innocent citizens
while everyone is looking for
a white man in a white truck.
Law enforcement knew that the
shooters had a distinct advantage.
I think to them it was
quite frustrating.
They all knew more people
were going to die.
We've just received
word of another shooting.
You know you just have to
keep plowing through.
In the parking lot.
You just cannot throw your hands up and walk
away and say, "Well, this is too hard."
You knew that as fast as they
were shooting people,
there would probably be another
one before we caught them.
As the D.C. sniper death toll mounted,
the public fear grew accordingly.
The attacks had completely altered
everyone's daily routine.
Millions of vehicles
on these roads every day.
Again, it's great video there.
Look at this. Look at that.
White van with a ladder on top.
Certainly the public
was on edge.
Parking your car and running
into the grocery store.
Ducking down next to your car
while you're putting gas in.
I'm not exaggerating.
People were zigzagging
through parking lots.
Who would have ever thought
you would do that?
Walking in a zigzag pattern when
you're going to fill up your tank?
We didn't go to parks. We didn't let the
kids play outside the front of the house.
You have an area around here
with several million people
who were basically held hostage
by who knows what.
From this point forward,
we sit and we wait.
Meanwhile, the
media continues to speculate
about the snipers, and the
snipers apparently continue to
monitor the press conferences
and the media.
It just got more huge,
more huge, more huge.
It was just monstrous.
I was being interviewed, and the newscaster asked,
"A lot of the information is that this person
is a trained military sniper."
Basically what I said is, "It doesn't take
a specialized expert to fire these shots."
The next victim was shot
in the head.
Officials here confirming
that a man was shot
in an Exxon station along
Route 1 here in Spotsylvania.
He died shortly after that.
Kenneth Bridges, a prominent social
activist and businessman from Philadelphia,
is the tenth victim,
the eighth to die.
He was shot while pumping gas.
A lot of these shootings, especially ones in
Virginia, would occur right off the Interstate.
So, one of the ideas that we had
was that if we get a shooting,
we're going to get on the
Interstate and do roadblocks.
Just stop everybody
as they come through.
It was a pretty drastic action.
I guess a little bit like looking
for a needle in a haystack.
But we needed to pull out
all the stops.
Among those stopped at one of the roadblocks,
a dark-blue Chevy Caprice carrying none other
than John Muhammad
and Lee Boyd Malvo.
Once more, the sniper car
is given a pass.
Their vehicle, which was
queried several times
by law enforcement over several days in
several states, was legally registered.
There was no warrants out for these
individuals at that point in time.
I don't know how anyone
could have stopped that vehicle
and known that it was
the sniper's vehicle.
Much later, when the authorities finally
get a look at the Chevy Caprice,
they are stunned
by what they find.
The vehicle had been utilized
in most of the shootings.
Outside it looks perfectly
ordinary.
Inside it's anything but.
The seat back would lift up, and
that's where the gun was stored.
It was a customized
killing machine.
And by lifting up the backseat, the
shooter could crawl into the trunk.
Darker-than-normal
tinting on the back windows.
They had cut an opening
in the trunk
above the license plate.
This is the view when
they pulled the trigger.
They could stick the barrel out of
the back of the trunk, fire a shot.
Nobody would see where the shot
came from.
At about 9:15 this evening, a female was
shot in the upper body in the parking garage
of the Home Depot
at Seven Corners.
She was pronounced dead
on the scene.
The victim is 47-year-old Linda Franklin,
shot while she and her husband loaded
packages into their car.
Franklin is an FBI analyst.
It's the first shooting in
Fairfax County, Virginia,
and takes place 50 miles from the previous
shooting, in Spotsylvania County.
A witness claims to have seen the
shooter flee the scene in a white van.
It's been determined through further investigation
that the information is not credible.
But the damage is done.
The sniper hotline, already inundated, is
again flooded with sightings of white vans.
I believe we got
over 115,000 tips.
16,000 of those were viable leads
that needed to be followed up on.
Almost lost among
all the phone calls
are several from the snipers
to the police.
They were calling
the task force.
They were calling Rockville City Police, and
they also called Montgomery County Police.
In one, the caller says, "We've called
three times trying to set up negotiations.
We've gotten no response.
People have died.
The lady didn't have to die."
I think they wanted to get
a message across to us.
The 12th victim and third to survive is
a 37-year-old musician from Florida.
He is shot outside a steakhouse
in Ashland, Virginia.
Once again, a white van is seen
leaving the area.
They used that
to their advantage.
They were looking to find a white box-truck-style
vehicle in close proximity to their shootings
because that would add
to their anonymity.
The snipers later confirmed that rather than
flee, they often stayed at the crime scenes.
They were very deliberate
about that.
They were going up, talking to
law-enforcement officials,
taunting them in the sense that, "Well, here
I am, and I'm the guy you're looking for."
Behind the steakhouse, in the woods,
police find a spent .223 shell
and another note from the snipers... a
four-page handwritten ransom letter.
In the letter, the snipers wrote, "If stopping
the killing is more important than catching us,
then you will accept our demand.
You will place $10 million
in a bank account."
I never thought
money was the motive.
I think that was just their arrogance to
see how far they could push the government
and see what they can
get us to do.
But there is a chilling postscript on the
note that gets everyone's attention.
Imagine being in a position where you're
responsible for the safety of your community,
and then somebody says,
"Your children aren't safe,"
and they've already got proof that
that's true, because they've shot one.
There's no playbook, there's no parenting guide
to tell your kids everything is going to be okay.
As the sniper crisis enters its third
week, nerves in the D.C. area are frayed.
Frustrations mount for police
and the media.
Sir, I appreciate the question, but I am
personally insulted if you would think that
I would withhold something from you or
anybody else that would keep you safe.
After a three-day lull,
the snipers strike again.
Conrad "C.J." Johnson, a 35-year-old Montgomery
County bus driver, is shot at his first stop.
Johnson is the 13th victim in
three weeks, the tenth to die.
Mr. Johnson had pulled up to this
location right directly across from us,
at which point he was shot
and killed almost instantly.
It was a single shot.
We know that the shot came back from the
wood line no more than 30 to 50 yards away.
As can you see, the forward-most bus up
there is the one where the shooting...
Johnson's death brings the entire
case home to Montgomery County.
I can remember just thinking,
"They're back."
Police find another
note in the woods.
We knew that if we could engage them,
we would be that much closer to them
either screwing up or making another
mistake that would help us catch them.
They did exactly what we asked
them to do.
They started writing us letters.
They started calling.
One of the phone calls basically told us we
needed to look at a robbery that had occurred
in Montgomery, Alabama.
The call, it later turned
out, was from Lee Boyd Malvo.
Was he just bragging or hoping
to get caught?
No one knows, but it was
a critical break.
He didn't identify himself
as the sniper.
He says, "You just got to look
at that."
I called Montgomery, Alabama.
I said, "Did you have a shooting
at a liquor store?"
And they said, "Yeah,
one individual was killed.
One was seriously wounded."
The only evidence
is a set of fingerprints.
They ran it against
the national database,
including immigration records,
and found Malvo's print.
Then, around the same time, we got a phone call
from a gentleman who lived out in Washington
who said we need to
take a look at these two guys,
and he named the two guys,
a Muhammad and Malvo.
And he said the kid's nickname
out here is "Sniper."
Sniper.
And all of a sudden, it all
started falling into place.
The tipster says the two practiced
shooting at a tree stump in his backyard.
ATF and FBI immediately send field
agents to retrieve the stump.
We asked our people to do it low-key,
keep it very quiet, don't tell anybody.
About an hour later, someone came into Chief
Moose's office and said, "Take a look on TV."
Agents from the FBI and ATF have
just finished up their search.
The helicopters and the
news media were out there
watching our people, in this
backyard in Tacoma, Washington.
A federal arrest warrant
has been issued
for John Allen Muhammad, also
known as John Allen Williams.
- The end came around 1:00 A.M. - At a rest stop
outside Frederick, Maryland, about 50 miles
northwest of Washington.
A sharp-eyed motorist who'd
heard the police lookout just
over an hour earlier spotted the blue 1990
Chevrolet Caprice with two men sleeping inside.
It was a six-person
assault element.
We had three on the driver's side,
three on the passenger side.
They assaulted, boom, and pulled both individuals
out, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo,
in less than three seconds.
I looked down, and I saw Lee Boyd Malvo, and
you could see the sweat coming down his face.
And this is a cold
October night.
And you could see
he was just scared.
And then John Muhammad was on the
other side, and he was more defiant.
Police lined up in a cold rain to say that after
three weeks they believe they caught the snipers
and found the gun.
Sir, we feel very positive
about being here.
We have the weapon.
It is off the street.
Apprehended, 41-year-old John Allen
Muhammad, a Gulf War Army veteran,
and 17-year-old
John Lee Malvo.
Muhammad's ex-wife, Mildred, who had moved
to the D.C. area almost two years earlier,
was stunned when she saw
his face on television.
I walked over to the screen and put my hand
on it and said, "What happened to you?"
A motorist called state police... Two
individuals were taken into custody.
We can only hope this is the end
of it, but we don't know that yet.
Local, state, and federal
prosecutors
are meeting to discuss charges
and some jurisdictional issues.
For the residents of Washington,
D.C., and the Beltway,
three weeks of living on edge
in constant fear is over.
Everyone was so glad it was over,
and this mayhem had stopped.
But there was also a lot of, like,
confusion of who these two guys were.
You know, they weren't what
people were expecting.
Guess you all thought
I was finished.
The confusion is compounded by disbelief
as other disturbing revelations emerge
about John Muhammad
and Lee Malvo.
The two snipers are eventually
connected to dozens of shootings
and robberies in at least
five different states.
They killed people in Washington, worked
their way, I think, through Texas
down to Louisiana and Alabama.
I think they were in Georgia.
So it's not just
the homicides here.
John Muhammad is clearly the mastermind, but
people are stunned to find out his accomplice,
Lee Boyd Malvo,
is just a 17-year-old boy.
It was a huge sense of horror that such
a young person could have been involved
in such horrendous crimes.
That was very shocking.
I guess you shake your head a little bit,
and you think, "What could bring a person
to do something like this?"
It's complex for Malvo.
He was a teen when he met Muhammad,
and he was in dire straits.
He was suicidal.
He was very unhappy
with his family situation.
He did not have a father figure in his
life and was desperately seeking one.
Muhammad filled all of those
needs for Malvo.
Lee was told that the shootings
were designed to create a society,
a society of 70 boys and 70 girls that Mr.
Muhammad was going to be lord over,
and Lee would be one
of his soldiers.
And he really believed that.
He was so enamored of
John Allen Muhammad
that he would have done
anything.
And what Muhammad was asking him to do
was kill over and over and over again.
- Lee Boyd Malvo?
- Yes, sir.
Two years after the shooting, Lee Boyd Malvo
was convicted on two counts of capital murder.
He was sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
Three years later, he wrote from his cell, "I'm
still grappling with shame, guilt, remorse,
and my own healing, if that
will ever be possible."
As for John Allen Muhammad, he, too,
was convicted of capital murder.
The sentence?
Death by lethal injection.
His own motive for the killing
spree remains a mystery.
All we know about Muhammad's
approach to these shootings
is largely what other people
have theorized,
because Muhammad never really
explained why it happened.
There are theories that he was
randomly shooting people in that
area so that perhaps he could
kill his ex-wife and then swoop
in as the grieving ex-husband and
take the children away and disappear.
If he wanted to kill her,
he could kill her randomly.
I don't think that had anything
to do with it.
I was fearful for my life, but I never, ever
thought that he would go to this length...
never. Ever.
It still boggles my mind.
And yet it made some sense
to you.
Because we were watching
a movie.
I don't remember the name of it, but he said,
"I could take a small city, terrorize it.
They would think it would be a group
of people, and it would only be me."
At 9:06 P.M. on November 10, 2009,
John Allen Muhammad was executed.
His final meal included chicken
with red sauce and strawberry cake.
Mr. Muhammad was asked if he
wished to make a last statement.
He did not acknowledge us or
make any statement whatsoever.
He seemed very unemotional.
Hello, everyone.
I'm still on death row,
fighting.
Prior to his execution, however,
Muhammad didspeak.
This short video was made after
his conviction and aired on CNN
in 2007.
It included what seemed to be
an oddly upbeat farewell.
Thank you for your patience and kindness and
your sacrifice that you all always made.
Peace.
And may God be with you all.
Thank you.
We will never forget.
We will never know their pain, and we
only wish that we could have stopped this
to reduce the number of victims.
She's lying next
to the vacuum cleaner.
Some blood's coming out of
her nose and her mouth.
It was an unprecedented wave of terror that
struck in and around our nation's capital.
You had 9/11.
This is one year later.
Over 23 days, 10 people
are targeted for death.
There was always just
a single shot.
Montgomery County.
Somebody has been shot
down on our back lot.
He's bleeding real bad.
The victims are diverse.
Women, men, young, old,
black, white.
The motive is unknown.
We're not sure if we had
a terrorist operation.
The panic is escalating.
They were striking at
the heart of the suburbs.
The guy is dead.
And there was a white van
just went by.
Tomorrow I'm going to my
fourth funeral in four days.
People were dying. They were
dying right in front of us.
We can't be everywhere
all the time.
This, without a doubt, was the most
intense three weeks of my career.
It was one of
the biggest manhunts
in American history...
"The Hunt for the D.C. Snipers."
Next.
It's known as the Beltway, the growing
metropolis that surrounds our nation's capital.
Encompassing portions of
Maryland and Virginia,
the Beltway is a sprawl of
medium-and small-sized towns...
the kind of places where
indiscriminate violence is rare.
For area residents, October 2,
2002 began quietly enough.
Nationally the big news was a hurricane in
the Gulf of Mexico... Category-4 Hurricane.
And the build-up
to the invasion of Iraq.
Because we know the awful
nature of war.
But a very different
war was about to erupt.
I got a call from my deputy,
Lieutenant Phil Raum.
A 55-year-old man was
killed outside the store.
We had a gentleman who was shot in the
parking lot at the Shoppers Food Warehouse.
I asked him what kind was it.
Do we have a smoker?
Do we have an argument between two people
that we have an answer to it right away?
Barney Forsythe was the head of
Major Crimes for Montgomery county.
He said, "No, not really.
We had a loud bang."
It was directly across the
street from a police station.
In fact, the first police
officers to arrive on the scene
were those that heard the shot inside the
police station and walked across the street.
The victim is a 55-year-old government
analyst named James D. Martin.
Police have almost nothing
to go on.
Security cameras were
starting to become more popular.
We were, of course, hoping that that
was going to tell us something.
And, unfortunately, after we viewed it, the
only thing we saw was the poor man basically
getting shot and crumpling
to the ground.
We talked about the
unusual nature of that
particular murder.
The thing that bothered us
was that there was no obvious
reason for the shooting.
In Montgomery county, somebody being killed
with a rifle is something very unusual.
A single shot crashed
through a craft-store window.
No one was hit.
Oddly, less than an hour earlier, there had
been a random shot fired just a few miles away.
There were no injuries
and no clues.
We weren't really sure what
had we had at that point.
Tonight, the mystery remains.
That evening, the two shootings
were still just a local story.
The next morning,
everything changed.
- Montgomery county.
- Yes, ma'am.
I need police and ambulance.
- Okay. What's the problem?
- Somebody has been shot down
on our back lot.
He's down on the ground.
He's bleeding real bad.
We had a call for a subject
who had been out mowing a lawn.
The victim is
39-year-old Sonny Buchanan,
a landscaper.
Immediately, we were pretty sure it was going to
be related to the previous evening's shooting.
The two crime scenes
are just over four miles apart.
We're reasonably sure that they were parked
within several hundred yards of this location.
They managed to sight the victim
and take the shot.
30 minutes later,
the carnage continues.
What happened here
at the gas station?
I had to fill the car up
with gas.
There was a gentleman
filling his car.
It was a taxi.
And he looked at me,
and I looked at him,
and then I looked down for a split
second just to pick up my credit card,
and then
I heard a very loud bang.
The shot came from up here.
And then I looked up, and the taxi
driver was walking towards my car.
He said to me, "Call an
ambulance," and he collapsed.
I saw... a lot of blood.
The taxi driver is
54-year-old Prem Kumar Walekar.
The witness is Caroline Namrow,
an emergency-room doctor.
I realized that he was having something called
agonal breathing, which is the last breath.
When police arrive, Dr. Namrow
is performing CPR on a dead man.
I started to feel a little
worried when I saw everybody
with the bulletproof vests on
and I didn't have one.
We all thought that there was a possibility
that we could be targeted at that point.
I remember Chief Moose specifically
told me to get my vest on.
Let me now introduce our
Chief of Police, Charles Moose.
Charles?
- Thank you, sir.
We are doing everything in our power to control
our emotions as we deal with this situation.
The challenge is to be factual,
to be accurate,
to not get tunnel vision, to not go off on a
tangent, not put misinformation out there.
Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose
becomes the public face of the investigation.
But behind the scenes, Captain
Barney Forsythe takes the lead.
He was the right guy in the
right place at the right time.
As we were down here, there
was also a call coming out,
a person possibly committing suicide
about a mile north of here.
But this is no suicide.
It's murder.
And it's less than
two miles away.
Dead at the scene is
a 34-year-old babysitter
and housekeeper, Sarah Ramos.
Passersby thought she had
shot herself.
34-Year-Old Sarah Ramos was sitting on
a bench at a shopping center, reading.
It's another busy location,
another perplexing crime scene.
Three fatal shootings in less than
an hour in a four-mile radius.
We sensed they were related,
but knowing and proving that
they're related are certainly
two different things.
The rear of this parking lot
provides a very good area.
Take a shot... one shot, one
loud shot, one fatal shot.
And then move away without causing
a great deal of distraction.
A witness reports seeing a white
box truck fleeing the scene.
It's the first material clue
for investigators.
The investigation really,
really took on speed right here.
An hour and 20 minutes later, 5 1/2
miles away, Lori Ann Lewis Rivera
has stopped at a self-service gas station
vacuum stand to clean out her minivan.
Everyday people doing everyday
things usually are not the victims.
Rivera, mother of a young
daughter, is just 25 years old.
Just the enormity of this
huge sense of waste.
This child lost her mother.
Another murder...
again, a single shot.
Two people in a box-type truck
with a damaged tailgate.
So far they haven't found anybody, and that's
the situation as we know it right now out here.
It's quiet
for the next 12 hours.
Then, just a few blocks from the Montgomery
County line, one more shot shatters the night.
72-year-old Pascal Charlot, a retired
carpenter, dies at the scene.
Montgomery County, we average
about 20 homicides a year.
And we've had five of them in
the space of a 16-hour period.
If you look at the victims in the first day,
they were from all different aspects...
male, female, Indian, white,
Hispanic, black.
So, basically that's telling me
they're looking at random targets.
They're not predetermined
targets.
This is Americana, right?
Do they hate suburban America?
We couldn't figure out why
they were doing it,
but they were striking kind of
at the heart of the suburbs.
You had 9/11.
This is one year later.
At first we're not sure if we
had a terrorist operation.
There was no sense at all who was behind
this, who the next victim might be,
and when it would stop,
if it would stop.
We didn't know what the next
16 hours was going to bring.
The snipers began leaving notes.
It was sort of like getting
punched in the face.
An entire community of suburban
Maryland is living in fear.
As police spread out... A
massive manhunt is under way.
In a single day, the D.C. sniper murder spree
became the top story across the nation.
- ...still no clues.
- Police could not provide...
I don't know what the thought
process is, what the plan is.
But yes, people need to continue
with life.
It was really terrifying to be in an area
where there's a crazy person with a gun.
Suburban Maryland is living
in fear.
Fear was just... I mean,
not perception of fear.
This is reality fear.
A massive manhunt is under way with still
no clues as to who killed five people.
The reality was
they were mobile.
They were willing to go
anywhere at any time.
But who were they?
After six murders in 27 hours,
police had just one common thread.
It was a single shot, and it
was a very loud single shot.
Victim number seven, a 43-year-old mother of two,
is shot outside a second Michaels craft store,
more than 50 miles south of where the
previous attacks were clustered.
Police say that the bullet
passed through her body.
She is the first
victim to survive.
Is there any connection
between the shooting that
occurred in Virginia and the ones that
have occurred here in Montgomery county?
At this point, the fragments from
the shooting are in the lab,
and the comparison test is
being conducted right now.
By the second day, we had a good
idea of the type of caliber.
We were also able to tell that all the
shots were fired from the same weapon.
Maryland investigators
narrowing their search
to these weapons by starting
with the killer's bullets.
So, right away, just about within 24 hours, we
knew we were dealing with an assault rifle.
Have you seen anybody who may
have weapons similar to this?
Call Chief Moose and his
department on the hotline.
We had to look at the elevation
of how the round hit the body,
and we noticed that we did not
have a high entry elevation,
meaning being shot from a high angle... which
led us to believe they could be shooting
from a bench location, or we even
thought early they could be shooting
from a platform,
maybe like a van Or a truck.
The ballistics report provoked a
chilling conclusion for investigators.
They weren't dealing with just
any killer.
This was the work of a highly
motivated sniper.
I'm a trained sniper myself.
I went through sniper school.
Each one of these individuals
was shot with one rifle round,
which scared me.
The "Oh, shit" moment is when you realize
that this is not an ordinary investigation.
We knew that we had
a public-safety crisis.
The sniper realization
fueled even greater urgency.
The witness report of a white van Or truck
fleeing one of the early murder scenes
began to drive
the investigation.
We do have new information
now on the box truck.
It does have lettering.
Police say two lines of block lettering
on the side and on the back.
The media was basically
all over this story.
They say the vehicle has six
wheels, four wheels in the rear.
They may have spotted two people in a
box-type truck with a damaged tailgate.
And they started putting out white box
trucks or white box truck, white box truck.
The witness talked about
two people in it.
And groupthink took over.
Graphics will be available.
We think it will help people
prompt their memories.
White vans were everywhere.
There are white vans similar
to the other white van.
Then, all of a sudden, there
were millions of white vans,
and everybody would say, "Did
you see? I saw a white van."
Police say they're still
looking for a white box truck.
It got a life of its own that
it shouldn't have gotten.
Two men inside.
Unfortunately, it was the
only game in town at that point.
Lost in the hysteria of the white box-truck
lead was an alert put out by D.C. police
after the last shooting of the
previous day, October 3rd.
The homicide detectives
investigating the shootings
on Georgia avenue, just inside
the D.C. line,
had a description of a Chevy
Caprice leaving the scene.
It was not a big story.
It was kind of buried
in the news coverage.
The white-truck theory simply
dominated the discussion.
-ex-Military... along with media experts who
came forward with profiles of the sniper.
This has all the markings of
an all-American crime spree.
This is somebody who actually
is trying to taunt the nation.
The message is getting out
there that no one is safe.
Everyone thought it was
white guys.
White guys will be involved, just because that
seemed to be the predominant serial-killer motif.
You know what?
You want a profile?
Here's a guy who's going to
turn out, I believe,
to be a white, middle-aged male.
I'd be looking for an individual who
has a high degree of anxiety at work.
It was very bad for
the witness pollution.
There's a typology of mass murderer
called the pseudocommando.
We're still waiting on the
psychological-profile piece from the FBI.
We don't expect it will be exact, that
it will cause us to have tunnel vision.
Stand still, please.
Still, please!
To calm the public, satisfy the
media, and keep the facts straight,
Chief Moose, backed by members
of the Sniper Task Force,
holds daily press conferences...
one a day, every day.
I have to take some questions.
Early on we determined that the snipers were
listening to things that we were saying.
Several of us feared they were actually in the
background, watching these press conferences.
The question about the schools
and their status tomorrow.
School is going to open.
That decision clearly
has been made.
There is no reason to believe that the
shooter is targeting schoolchildren.
The public had been afraid
that their kids weren't safe.
So we said, "Okay,
we'll send police.
Every school in Montgomery
County had an officer at it.
A 13-year-old boy shot and wounded as he
arrives at his suburban Maryland school.
The eighth victim is a student at
Benjamin Tasker middle school.
He is critically wounded
but survives.
Right over there, right over my right
shoulder, is where the boy was shot.
The idea that a shooter would target an innocent
child on his way to school was alarming in a way
that the previous shootings
hadn't been.
What they're now saying is
that there is a connection
between the shooting here and
the other ones that have really
caused quite the jitters
throughout the Washington area.
The school shooting occurs 70-odd miles from the
previous shooting, in Fredericksburg, Virginia.
The sniper zone
seems to be growing.
Once again, witnesses report seeing
a white van leaving the scene.
It was a consistent detail that would
nearly untrack the entire investigation.
I think they were looking for, you
know, a white man in a box truck.
I don't think anyone was sort of expecting
that they were blacks, I think.
Well, if you are two black
guys in kind of a beat-up car
during this, no one
would ever notice you.
Only much later would anyone realize
that the witnesses and the media experts
were wrong on both
of the crucial points.
There was no box truck,
and the snipers were not white.
Six Dead Two wounded.
Millions terrorized.
Almost a week has passed since the D.C.
snipers first struck.
And now the school attack has
elevated the stakes dramatically.
Everybody working this detail knew
someone who was in the schools,
whether it was neighbors, whether it was
relatives, whether it was their own children,
and it was kind of like,
"Where arewe safe?"
Even though witnesses had reported
seeing a white van at the school,
authorities quickly determined that the
shot actually came from the adjacent woods.
Police find two pieces of evidence... a single
spent shell casing and a disturbing communiqué.
Our people recovered
a tarot card.
It was the death card.
Michael Bouchard believes the tarot card
confirmed that the snipers had listened
to the previous
press conference.
One of my words was, "I don't know why on God's
Earth somebody would do something like this."
And, sure enough, it said,
"Mr. Police, call me God.
Do not release to the press."
Word of the tarot card was closely guarded by
the sniper task force, but not closely enough.
It leaks on October 9th.
When the news media got a hold of the
tarot card and the information on it,
law enforcement
was extremely upset.
You really want to get that
piece of information and put it
out while we're still doing
this investigation?
There was some discussion amongst
all of us in the newsroom.
Do we report this or not?
I don't think there's anybody that hasn't
experienced the hindrance of leaks in the past.
We have not been thrown
off track.
They claim they shot other people because
we didn't do what they asked us to do.
Dean Myers, shot at this Manassas, Virginia,
gas station... Dean Harold Myers,
a civil engineer, is the ninth victim, shot
in the chest and killed while pumping gas
near Manassas, Virginia.
He was 53 years old.
In a parking lot across from the crime scene, a
police officer interviews potential witnesses.
One of them is a man driving the same
12-year-old Chevy Caprice that had been spotted
near the sixth murder scene.
When police wave him on,
they have no idea they've just
interviewed the sniper mastermind.
John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo were an
unlikely pair, joined by unlikely circumstances.
Muhammad, age 41,
was definitely the Alpha.
His devoted follower and more-than-willing
accomplice, Malvo, was just 17.
One of the things that struck me
was his devotion and commitment
to John Allen Muhammad,
who he referred to as "Dad."
Muhammad, a father of three,
was an ex-Army engineer
who received the normal
training in marksmanship.
He saw action in the first Gulf War
but returned home a changed man.
Desert Storm,
the first Iraq war,
flipped a switch
in John Muhammad.
To this day, his ex-wife
isn't sure what happened.
It was like his spirit
had been broken.
He looked like
just a broken man.
That's the man who
befriended Lee Malvo in 2000.
Muhammad met the teen while on a trip to Antigua,
where Malvo's mother had all but abandoned him.
Muhammad eventually brought Malvo to Tacoma,
Washington, as his informally adopted son.
His true personality, I think,
was a soft, warm, loving child.
It is very, very important that one recognize
that Lee did not attach to a killer.
He actually attached to a loving
and caring father.
At the time,
Muhammad was in a bitter
and complicated custody battle
for his own biological children,
whom he had stolen away
from his estranged wife.
When a Tacoma court gave her
full and permanent custody,
Muhammad vowed revenge.
The children were given to his wife, and he would
no longer have any connection with his children.
And he was outraged.
He said, "Do not raise
my children on your own.
You have become my enemy,
and as my enemy
I will kill you."
Did you believe him?
Totally.
The outrage became anger and hatred, fueling
an inner war against a racist society,
which Muhammad in turn
fed to young Lee Malvo.
He was being conditioned
to be a soldier.
We're talking about
a child soldier.
He was actually having Lee go to sleep
with taped extracts from The Art of War,"
from books talking about war
and revolution, et cetera.
And that was how he started
the whole brainwashing process.
The pair's murderous journey actually started
in Tacoma, nearly 3,000 miles from D.C.
At Muhammad's direction, Malvo
shot and killed the niece
of a woman who had testified against
Muhammad at the custody hearing.
Lee was trained not to feel.
Whenever he would feel, and Muhammad saw
that there was a flinch of feelings,
he would tell him to slap his
chest and say, "Heart, be still."
Heart, be still.
After a while, he didn't have to
tell him, "Heart, be still,"
because he had, if I could use
the word, monsterized him.
No one ever linked Muhammad and
Malvo to the girl's murder.
Now, eight months later, they're
driving around the nation's capital
in an old Chevy Caprice,
shooting innocent citizens
while everyone is looking for
a white man in a white truck.
Law enforcement knew that the
shooters had a distinct advantage.
I think to them it was
quite frustrating.
They all knew more people
were going to die.
We've just received
word of another shooting.
You know you just have to
keep plowing through.
In the parking lot.
You just cannot throw your hands up and walk
away and say, "Well, this is too hard."
You knew that as fast as they
were shooting people,
there would probably be another
one before we caught them.
As the D.C. sniper death toll mounted,
the public fear grew accordingly.
The attacks had completely altered
everyone's daily routine.
Millions of vehicles
on these roads every day.
Again, it's great video there.
Look at this. Look at that.
White van with a ladder on top.
Certainly the public
was on edge.
Parking your car and running
into the grocery store.
Ducking down next to your car
while you're putting gas in.
I'm not exaggerating.
People were zigzagging
through parking lots.
Who would have ever thought
you would do that?
Walking in a zigzag pattern when
you're going to fill up your tank?
We didn't go to parks. We didn't let the
kids play outside the front of the house.
You have an area around here
with several million people
who were basically held hostage
by who knows what.
From this point forward,
we sit and we wait.
Meanwhile, the
media continues to speculate
about the snipers, and the
snipers apparently continue to
monitor the press conferences
and the media.
It just got more huge,
more huge, more huge.
It was just monstrous.
I was being interviewed, and the newscaster asked,
"A lot of the information is that this person
is a trained military sniper."
Basically what I said is, "It doesn't take
a specialized expert to fire these shots."
The next victim was shot
in the head.
Officials here confirming
that a man was shot
in an Exxon station along
Route 1 here in Spotsylvania.
He died shortly after that.
Kenneth Bridges, a prominent social
activist and businessman from Philadelphia,
is the tenth victim,
the eighth to die.
He was shot while pumping gas.
A lot of these shootings, especially ones in
Virginia, would occur right off the Interstate.
So, one of the ideas that we had
was that if we get a shooting,
we're going to get on the
Interstate and do roadblocks.
Just stop everybody
as they come through.
It was a pretty drastic action.
I guess a little bit like looking
for a needle in a haystack.
But we needed to pull out
all the stops.
Among those stopped at one of the roadblocks,
a dark-blue Chevy Caprice carrying none other
than John Muhammad
and Lee Boyd Malvo.
Once more, the sniper car
is given a pass.
Their vehicle, which was
queried several times
by law enforcement over several days in
several states, was legally registered.
There was no warrants out for these
individuals at that point in time.
I don't know how anyone
could have stopped that vehicle
and known that it was
the sniper's vehicle.
Much later, when the authorities finally
get a look at the Chevy Caprice,
they are stunned
by what they find.
The vehicle had been utilized
in most of the shootings.
Outside it looks perfectly
ordinary.
Inside it's anything but.
The seat back would lift up, and
that's where the gun was stored.
It was a customized
killing machine.
And by lifting up the backseat, the
shooter could crawl into the trunk.
Darker-than-normal
tinting on the back windows.
They had cut an opening
in the trunk
above the license plate.
This is the view when
they pulled the trigger.
They could stick the barrel out of
the back of the trunk, fire a shot.
Nobody would see where the shot
came from.
At about 9:15 this evening, a female was
shot in the upper body in the parking garage
of the Home Depot
at Seven Corners.
She was pronounced dead
on the scene.
The victim is 47-year-old Linda Franklin,
shot while she and her husband loaded
packages into their car.
Franklin is an FBI analyst.
It's the first shooting in
Fairfax County, Virginia,
and takes place 50 miles from the previous
shooting, in Spotsylvania County.
A witness claims to have seen the
shooter flee the scene in a white van.
It's been determined through further investigation
that the information is not credible.
But the damage is done.
The sniper hotline, already inundated, is
again flooded with sightings of white vans.
I believe we got
over 115,000 tips.
16,000 of those were viable leads
that needed to be followed up on.
Almost lost among
all the phone calls
are several from the snipers
to the police.
They were calling
the task force.
They were calling Rockville City Police, and
they also called Montgomery County Police.
In one, the caller says, "We've called
three times trying to set up negotiations.
We've gotten no response.
People have died.
The lady didn't have to die."
I think they wanted to get
a message across to us.
The 12th victim and third to survive is
a 37-year-old musician from Florida.
He is shot outside a steakhouse
in Ashland, Virginia.
Once again, a white van is seen
leaving the area.
They used that
to their advantage.
They were looking to find a white box-truck-style
vehicle in close proximity to their shootings
because that would add
to their anonymity.
The snipers later confirmed that rather than
flee, they often stayed at the crime scenes.
They were very deliberate
about that.
They were going up, talking to
law-enforcement officials,
taunting them in the sense that, "Well, here
I am, and I'm the guy you're looking for."
Behind the steakhouse, in the woods,
police find a spent .223 shell
and another note from the snipers... a
four-page handwritten ransom letter.
In the letter, the snipers wrote, "If stopping
the killing is more important than catching us,
then you will accept our demand.
You will place $10 million
in a bank account."
I never thought
money was the motive.
I think that was just their arrogance to
see how far they could push the government
and see what they can
get us to do.
But there is a chilling postscript on the
note that gets everyone's attention.
Imagine being in a position where you're
responsible for the safety of your community,
and then somebody says,
"Your children aren't safe,"
and they've already got proof that
that's true, because they've shot one.
There's no playbook, there's no parenting guide
to tell your kids everything is going to be okay.
As the sniper crisis enters its third
week, nerves in the D.C. area are frayed.
Frustrations mount for police
and the media.
Sir, I appreciate the question, but I am
personally insulted if you would think that
I would withhold something from you or
anybody else that would keep you safe.
After a three-day lull,
the snipers strike again.
Conrad "C.J." Johnson, a 35-year-old Montgomery
County bus driver, is shot at his first stop.
Johnson is the 13th victim in
three weeks, the tenth to die.
Mr. Johnson had pulled up to this
location right directly across from us,
at which point he was shot
and killed almost instantly.
It was a single shot.
We know that the shot came back from the
wood line no more than 30 to 50 yards away.
As can you see, the forward-most bus up
there is the one where the shooting...
Johnson's death brings the entire
case home to Montgomery County.
I can remember just thinking,
"They're back."
Police find another
note in the woods.
We knew that if we could engage them,
we would be that much closer to them
either screwing up or making another
mistake that would help us catch them.
They did exactly what we asked
them to do.
They started writing us letters.
They started calling.
One of the phone calls basically told us we
needed to look at a robbery that had occurred
in Montgomery, Alabama.
The call, it later turned
out, was from Lee Boyd Malvo.
Was he just bragging or hoping
to get caught?
No one knows, but it was
a critical break.
He didn't identify himself
as the sniper.
He says, "You just got to look
at that."
I called Montgomery, Alabama.
I said, "Did you have a shooting
at a liquor store?"
And they said, "Yeah,
one individual was killed.
One was seriously wounded."
The only evidence
is a set of fingerprints.
They ran it against
the national database,
including immigration records,
and found Malvo's print.
Then, around the same time, we got a phone call
from a gentleman who lived out in Washington
who said we need to
take a look at these two guys,
and he named the two guys,
a Muhammad and Malvo.
And he said the kid's nickname
out here is "Sniper."
Sniper.
And all of a sudden, it all
started falling into place.
The tipster says the two practiced
shooting at a tree stump in his backyard.
ATF and FBI immediately send field
agents to retrieve the stump.
We asked our people to do it low-key,
keep it very quiet, don't tell anybody.
About an hour later, someone came into Chief
Moose's office and said, "Take a look on TV."
Agents from the FBI and ATF have
just finished up their search.
The helicopters and the
news media were out there
watching our people, in this
backyard in Tacoma, Washington.
A federal arrest warrant
has been issued
for John Allen Muhammad, also
known as John Allen Williams.
- The end came around 1:00 A.M. - At a rest stop
outside Frederick, Maryland, about 50 miles
northwest of Washington.
A sharp-eyed motorist who'd
heard the police lookout just
over an hour earlier spotted the blue 1990
Chevrolet Caprice with two men sleeping inside.
It was a six-person
assault element.
We had three on the driver's side,
three on the passenger side.
They assaulted, boom, and pulled both individuals
out, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo,
in less than three seconds.
I looked down, and I saw Lee Boyd Malvo, and
you could see the sweat coming down his face.
And this is a cold
October night.
And you could see
he was just scared.
And then John Muhammad was on the
other side, and he was more defiant.
Police lined up in a cold rain to say that after
three weeks they believe they caught the snipers
and found the gun.
Sir, we feel very positive
about being here.
We have the weapon.
It is off the street.
Apprehended, 41-year-old John Allen
Muhammad, a Gulf War Army veteran,
and 17-year-old
John Lee Malvo.
Muhammad's ex-wife, Mildred, who had moved
to the D.C. area almost two years earlier,
was stunned when she saw
his face on television.
I walked over to the screen and put my hand
on it and said, "What happened to you?"
A motorist called state police... Two
individuals were taken into custody.
We can only hope this is the end
of it, but we don't know that yet.
Local, state, and federal
prosecutors
are meeting to discuss charges
and some jurisdictional issues.
For the residents of Washington,
D.C., and the Beltway,
three weeks of living on edge
in constant fear is over.
Everyone was so glad it was over,
and this mayhem had stopped.
But there was also a lot of, like,
confusion of who these two guys were.
You know, they weren't what
people were expecting.
Guess you all thought
I was finished.
The confusion is compounded by disbelief
as other disturbing revelations emerge
about John Muhammad
and Lee Malvo.
The two snipers are eventually
connected to dozens of shootings
and robberies in at least
five different states.
They killed people in Washington, worked
their way, I think, through Texas
down to Louisiana and Alabama.
I think they were in Georgia.
So it's not just
the homicides here.
John Muhammad is clearly the mastermind, but
people are stunned to find out his accomplice,
Lee Boyd Malvo,
is just a 17-year-old boy.
It was a huge sense of horror that such
a young person could have been involved
in such horrendous crimes.
That was very shocking.
I guess you shake your head a little bit,
and you think, "What could bring a person
to do something like this?"
It's complex for Malvo.
He was a teen when he met Muhammad,
and he was in dire straits.
He was suicidal.
He was very unhappy
with his family situation.
He did not have a father figure in his
life and was desperately seeking one.
Muhammad filled all of those
needs for Malvo.
Lee was told that the shootings
were designed to create a society,
a society of 70 boys and 70 girls that Mr.
Muhammad was going to be lord over,
and Lee would be one
of his soldiers.
And he really believed that.
He was so enamored of
John Allen Muhammad
that he would have done
anything.
And what Muhammad was asking him to do
was kill over and over and over again.
- Lee Boyd Malvo?
- Yes, sir.
Two years after the shooting, Lee Boyd Malvo
was convicted on two counts of capital murder.
He was sentenced to life in prison
without the possibility of parole.
Three years later, he wrote from his cell, "I'm
still grappling with shame, guilt, remorse,
and my own healing, if that
will ever be possible."
As for John Allen Muhammad, he, too,
was convicted of capital murder.
The sentence?
Death by lethal injection.
His own motive for the killing
spree remains a mystery.
All we know about Muhammad's
approach to these shootings
is largely what other people
have theorized,
because Muhammad never really
explained why it happened.
There are theories that he was
randomly shooting people in that
area so that perhaps he could
kill his ex-wife and then swoop
in as the grieving ex-husband and
take the children away and disappear.
If he wanted to kill her,
he could kill her randomly.
I don't think that had anything
to do with it.
I was fearful for my life, but I never, ever
thought that he would go to this length...
never. Ever.
It still boggles my mind.
And yet it made some sense
to you.
Because we were watching
a movie.
I don't remember the name of it, but he said,
"I could take a small city, terrorize it.
They would think it would be a group
of people, and it would only be me."
At 9:06 P.M. on November 10, 2009,
John Allen Muhammad was executed.
His final meal included chicken
with red sauce and strawberry cake.
Mr. Muhammad was asked if he
wished to make a last statement.
He did not acknowledge us or
make any statement whatsoever.
He seemed very unemotional.
Hello, everyone.
I'm still on death row,
fighting.
Prior to his execution, however,
Muhammad didspeak.
This short video was made after
his conviction and aired on CNN
in 2007.
It included what seemed to be
an oddly upbeat farewell.
Thank you for your patience and kindness and
your sacrifice that you all always made.
Peace.
And may God be with you all.
Thank you.
We will never forget.
We will never know their pain, and we
only wish that we could have stopped this
to reduce the number of victims.