The Serial Killer Files (56 page)

Shortly after the publication of the press release—which included an FBI profile of the suspect—investigators were contacted by a man named Roger Fry. He told him the published description of the killer sounded a good deal like his old buddy, Thomas Dillon—a lifelong gun fanatic who enjoyed shooting animals and openly admired Ted Bundy. Dillon was put under surveillance. Eventually, he was tied to one of the murder weapons, a Mauser rifle he had sold off at a gun show. Shortly after his arrest, he confessed to three murders. “I have a major problem,” he declared. “I’m crazy. I want to kill.” Under a plea agreement, he was spared the death penalty and received a life sentence in prison with no chance of parole for 165 years.

For three weeks in the fall of 2002, the citizens of Washington, DC and surrounding communities—still recovering from the trauma of the 9/11 attacks a year earlier—found themselves once again in the grip of terror. This time, the enemy was an unseen sniper who killed at whim, then vanished without a trace.

The sheer randomness of the murders—which struck down men, women, and children as they went about their daily business—stirred up the public’s most primal anxieties, creating a sense that anyone was vulnerable to sudden violent death anywhere, at any time.

As the killings proceeded, the sniper began to leave taunting messages, as if daring the police to capture him. In the meantime, the nation watched in grim fascination, as the twenty-four/seven news coverage turned the tragedy into a macabre reality show: a true-life police melodrama that pitted the full resources of federal and local law enforcement agencies against a cunning and implacable psycho-killer.

The first shot missed its target—barely. At 5:20P.M. on Wednesday, October 2, a bullet from a high-powered rifle blew a hole through the window of a hobby shop in a run-down strip mall in Aspen Hill, Maryland, passing so close to the head of the cashier, Ann Chapman, that it grazed her hair. Just thirty-two minutes later, the sniper struck again. This time, he took closer aim. The victim was James Martin, a fifty-five-year-old family man, Civil War buff, and program analyst for the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. At 6:04P.M., as he walked across the parking lot toward a Wheaton Hills supermarket where he’d come to buy snacks for his son’s church group, Martin was killed with a .223-caliber slug to the back, becoming the sniper’s first fatality.

It wasn’t until the following morning—Thursday, October 3—that the police realized they had a full-blown crisis on their hands. In the span of slightly more than two hours, four people were shot dead by the sniper in different areas of suburban Maryland. James Buchanan, a thirty-nine-year-old landscaper, was killed at 7:41A.M. as he mowed a strip of grass outside a car dealership in Rockville. Premkumar Walekar, a fifty-four-year-old Indian émigré, was gunned down at 8:12A.M. as he filled up his taxicab at a Mobil station in Aspen Hill. Sarah Ramos, a thirty-four-year-old housecleaner, got shot at 8:37A.M. as she sat on a bench near a retirement community in Silver Spring. And Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, a twenty-five-year-old professional nanny, was murdered at 9:58A.M. as she vacuumed her minivan at a Shell station in Kensington. All the victims had been murdered close to major roadways. In each case, the faceless marksman had killed with a single shot before vanishing into the rush of the morning traffic.

That night, he claimed another life. At 9:15P.M., seventy-two-year-old Pascal Charlot, a father of five who spent much of his time caring for his Alzheimer’s-afflicted wife, was shot dead as he crossed the street near his home in northwest Washington, DC.

The shooter waited until the following afternoon before striking again. This time, he fired at a forty-three-year-old mother of two as she loaded packages into her minivan outside a crafts store in Fredericksburg, Virginia. The bullet hit her in the back and came out under her left breast. The woman—whose identity has never been made public—was one of the lucky few who survived.

Panic spread through the region. The simplest of tasks—shopping for groceries, gassing up a car, mowing a lawn—suddenly seemed fraught with peril. The job of reassuring the public—as well as coordinating the massive manhunt, while simultaneously dealing with the media, which had begun to set up a tent city outside headquarters—fell to Montgomery County police chief, Charles Moose. Moose reassured the parents of Maryland that there was no reason to keep their children home from school.

“We have no information that this has anything to do with schools,” he announced at a press conference.

“None of the victims has been anything close to school age. None of the locations are close to the schools… . I think the schoolkids are safe.”

At 8:09A.M. on Monday, October 7—as if in spiteful response to Chief Moose’s calming words—the sniper shot thirteen-year-old honors student Iran Brown in front of his middle school in Bowie, Maryland. If this heinous deed left any doubts that the sniper was a desperately sick individual, the item found by the police as they searched the schoolgrounds for clues dispelled them. The item was a tarot card depicting the figure of Death and inscribed with the handwritten message: “I am God.”

For another two weeks—despite the unprecedented efforts to identify the diabolical killer now dubbed the “Tarot Card Killer”—the sniper continued to strike with an impunity that endowed him with an aura of almost supernatural evil, and that undoubtedly reinforced his own megalomaniacal sense of power and superiority. Between October 9 and October 22, five more victims were shot. Dean Harold Myers, fifty-three-year-old design engineer and Vietnam vet, killed at the Battlefield Sunoco gas station in Manassas, Virginia. Kenneth Bridges, fifty-three-year-old father of six, killed at an Exxon station in Fredericksburg, Virginia. Linda Franklin, forty-seven-year-old mother of two and FBI analyst, killed in a Home Depot parking garage in Falls Church, Virginia. Jeffrey Hopper, thirty-seven-year-old Florida man, wounded outside a Ponderosa Steak House in Ashland, Virginia. Conrad Johnson, thirty-five-year-old bus driver, killed while standing on the top step of his idling bus near Silver Spring, Maryland.

During this period, the sniper left more taunting catch-me-if-you-can messages, as well as a blackmail demand for $10 million to be deposited in the account of a Visa bank card. The writer warned of more

“body bags” if the demand wasn’t met and added a chilling P.S.: “Your children aren’t safe anywhere at any time.”

In the meantime, the airwaves were full of pundits, profilers, and self-professed experts offering highly conjectural characterizations of the killer, nearly all of which proved wildly inaccurate. Some believed that the sniper was a deranged teenage gamer who, after honing his skills on Doom, had progressed from virtual victims to flesh-and-blood targets. Others proposed that he was a Special Forces sniper gone bad.

Some even speculated that he might be an al-Qaeda terrorist.

How exactly to classify the shooter was also a subject of debate. Was he a serial killer like Zodiac, driven by a sadistic need for power and the sheer pleasure of inflicting death? Or a spree killer like Versace-slayer Andrew Cunanan, a man at the end of his tether who had finally snapped and embarked on a rampage that was almost certain to end in his own death?

When the answer finally came, it caught everyone by surprise.

For one thing the sniper turned out to be—not the “well-organized white male” predicted by FBI profilers—but a team of two African-Americans: forty-one-year-old John Allen Muhammad and his juvenile sidekick, seventeen-year-old John Lee Malvo. For another, they were not driving the white box truck or van that investigators had been searching for since the start of the rampage, but rather a battered, blue Chevy Caprice.

The penniless pair were living in the car, whose trunk had been equipped with a small hole and converted into a mobile sniper’s nest. It later emerged that, during the shooters’ three-week reign of terror, the Caprice had been repeatedly stopped by police, generally for minor traffic infractions. On no fewer than ten separate occasions, authorities had run its license plate through the national police database, only to let the car and its drivers go on their way when the computerized check turned up nothing. Harsh criticism would eventually be leveled at the police for having allowed the killers to slip from their grasp so often during the manhunt.

Still, it was solid police work—along with the alleged killers’ own overweening egos—that led to the break in the case. Constantly needing to prove what big bad men they were, the shooters couldn’t resist bragging about their past criminal exploits, placing a phone call to Chief Moose’s office in which they revealed their involvement in an earlier robbery-murder at a Montgomery, Alabama, liquor store. After a second such call to a priest in Ashland, Virginia, the FBI contacted Alabama authorities, who immediately turned over a package of evidence from that crime. Among the items was a gun magazine dropped near the liquor store by one of the perpetrators. When fingerprints lifted from the magazine were run through a national database, they matched those of young Lee Malvo, who was linked to Muhammad.

Probing into the backgrounds of the oddly matched duo, investigators quickly placed them at the top of their suspect list, launching a hunt for the car they were now known to be driving. The end came just after 3:00A.M. on October 24, after the Caprice was spotted in a McDonald’s parking lot near a highway rest stop in Frederick, Maryland. Swooping down on the car, a small army of lawmen—local police SWAT teams, the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, and other state and federal paramilitary units—found the suspects dozing inside. Muhammad and Malvo surrendered so peacefully that, according to one official, “They practically slept through the takedown.”

In the aftermath of the ordeal, a picture emerged of the senior sniper suspect as a classic sociopath.

Effectively orphaned at three when his mother died of cancer and his father disappeared, Muhammad—born John Williams—was raised by an abusive grandfather who dealt out regular thrashings to the little boy. He grew up to be a lone wolf with a volatile temper and a powerful streak of arrogance. During a stint in the Louisiana National Guard after high school he was court-martialed twice, once for disobeying an order, the second time for striking a noncommissioned officer.

An inveterate ladies’ man, he moved from woman to woman, impregnating one girlfriend, who gave birth to a son, marrying another, who bore him a second son in 1982. When the marriage fell apart three years later, he joined the army and converted to Islam, taking the surname Muhammad. During his nine-year stint, he served in the first Gulf War, qualifying as a hand grenade expert and an M-16

marksmanship expert.

After leaving the service, nothing in his life went right. Every business scheme he tried fell apart, as did his second marriage. In late 1999—with failure piled upon failure and Muhammad becoming increasingly unstable and abusive—his wife filed for divorce and got a restraining order against him.

Shortly thereafter, he absconded with their three children to Antigua.

He remained there for slightly more than a year, supporting himself in various shady ways, including the sale of forged US travel documents. During this time, he struck up an intense mentoring relationship with Lee Malvo, a young man who had been raised by his divorced mother and was desperate for attention from a strong father figure. When Muhammad—unable to support his kids—returned them to the United States in May 2001, he brought Malvo with him.

Just three months after their return, Muhammad’s three children were taken away from him and put into protective custody. In September, his wife was granted full custody. She lost no time in moving them across the country to suburban Washington, DC.

Not long afterward, Muhammad seems to have snapped. An inordinately arrogant man whose life had come to nothing, he blamed everyone but himself for his failures. Seething with resentment at the society he could not manage to succeed in—and at the contented middle-class world that seemed to make a mockery of his own botched life—he was ready to use his army-honed skills to take his revenge.

Abetting him was the worshipful acolyte who, in a classic instance of a folieàdeux, came to share in his pathology.

The Beltway Snipers weren’t the first homicidal maniacs to leave a tarot-related “calling card” at a crime scene. In 1970, after slaughtering five people, a psychotic hippie named John Linley Frazier left a bizarre typewritten note at the victims’ home that ended by invoking four of the figures from the deck: halloween… . 1970

today world war 3 will begin as brought to you by the people of the free universe.

From this day forward any one and?/or company of persons who missuses the environment or destroys same will suffer the penalty of death by the people of the free universe.

I and my comrades from this day forth will fight until death or freedom, against anything or anyone who dose not support natural life on this planet, materialisum must die or mankind will.

There is a widespread notion—reinforced by countless movies in which the hero receives a steady stream of sneering messages from the psychopathic creep he’s chasing—that serial killers typically engage in taunting communications with authorities. Like many stereotypes, this one is mostly false.

However much satisfaction they may derive from outwitting the police, most serial killers have no desire to draw undue attention to themselves. Every time they get away with murder, they may exult in their sense of supposed superiority—their distorted idea of how much smarter and more cunning they are than other mere mortals. For the most part, however, they prefer to keep those feelings to themselves, without sending gloating letters or making boastful phone calls that sometimes offer an inadvertent clue to their whereabouts and might lead to their arrest.

Stereotypes, however, often contain an element of truth. In fact, there have been a number of notorious serial killers who took delight in thumbing their noses at authorities. For these psychopaths, taunting their pursuers and manipulating the media are an integral part of the criminal experience, adding to their sadistic fun and reinforcing their delusions of omnipotence.