It is Wednesday night 6 p.
on Randolph Road in Wheaton, Maryland, a comfortable inner suburb just north of Washington,
“D.C. It looks like every other grocery store lot in America at the end of a workday,”
scattered cars and shopping carts, people loading kids and groceries, the autumn sky going dark over the storefronts. A great pickup truck with an American flag on its antenna pulls into the lot in parks, a man in the business suit and tie climbs out after a long day, a grocery list in his pocket. He's only stopping in for a minute. His name is James Martin. He is 55, an analyst at the government's weather and ocean agency. He grew up four in the Midwest, served in Vietnam, and now he
has a house in the suburbs. His wife Billy teaches Sunday school, together they have an 11-year-old
son named Ben. Martin mentors inner city kids. Tonight he is picking up sodas and snacks for
his church youth group because this store has the best prices. He shuts the driver door and starts
“across the asphalt toward the sliding doors. There is a muffled pop, flat and far away with no”
crack to it. Kind of noise a person might take for a truck tire blowing out a few streets over. James Martin falls where he stands. It happens in the blink of an eye. There is a small entry hole, one bullet goes into his back and tears out the front of his chest. He is dead almost before the sound finishes traveling. No one sees the shooter or the gun or even the direction where the shot came from. A few parking spaces away, a woman named Kimberly Sadelson is loading groceries
into her honduct with her five-year-old son beside her. She hears the boom, sees the man go down, and takes out her phone. She dials 911 still not totally sure what she's seeing. Across the road, a Montgomery County police officer named Alan Felsen hears it too. He is in
“his unmarked cruiser and his summer uniform, black shorts and a polo shirt with police across the”
back. He's pulling out of the district station that happens to sit directly across the street. The sound does not quite register as a gunshot. It is missing the sharp crack of a firearm. He looks toward the shoppers lot and sees nothing. No people running, no screaming. He wonders if someone dropped a loaded pallet over at the garden store. Then he swings the cruiser around and finds a parking lot full of people standing frozen in place.
He calls out the window what happened. What's going on here? No one answers. And then out of the corner of his eye, he sees a man on the ground. He grabs his radio. "Break, break, break," he says to cut through the other traffic. "I'm at shoppers food warehouse on Randolph. I've got the sound of a shot, one down, one down." Felsen cuts through the crowd and kneels beside James Martin.
Martin's shirt and suit coat are soaked through with blood. There is no pulse, and he is not breathing. Felsen is a former volunteer firefighter so he pulls on latex gloves and starts chest compressions, and it is instantly a bloody business. A woman steps out of the crowd and asks if she can help. By pure chance she is a friend of Felsen's, a volunteer EMT named Marjorie Fisk,
and she runs for the first aid bag she keeps in her car. A nurse appears out of the crowd and cuts
open Martin's shirt. Underneath there is blood everywhere and a hole in his chest. The three of them work on him on the pavement while his blood runs out across the lot. The paramedics arrive and take over, and after a while, they stop too. They lay a sheet over James Martin, lying on his back in the soft light of the evening, with his shoes and his hands sticking out the edges. Marjorie Fisk steps back, shaken,
and asks if she can go. No one can say where that shot came from. Officer Felsen stands in the lot afterward and tries to make it add up, and he cannot make sense of it. A man walking across a parking lot, a gunshot, the man goes down with a wound clean through him. Martin still has his wallet. Nobody saw an argument, a getaway car, or anyone even holding a gun. No robbery, no car jacking. The only explanation that seems even remotely possible
is an accident. Somewhere nearby, someone fires a rifle, the bullet travels farther than intended and by terrible chance, it finds James Martin. What else could it have been?
He has no idea.
40 minutes earlier, in another shopping center, a few miles up the road, a bullet shattered the front
“window of a Michael's craft store, striking and illuminated number 5 hanging over one of the checkout”
lanes, almost 7 feet in the air. No one was hit. At the time, it looked like vandalism. Maybe a stray round from a gang, gunfire, or just random. Now at the shoppers food warehouse on Randall Road Montgomery County's brand new police spokeswoman, Captain Nancy Demm, reaches her boss, police chief Charles Moose on her phone. She has been on the job a matter of hours. I don't know what we have here, Demm tells him, but it is different from your regular homicide.
The man on the ground seems nice and normal, ordinary government ID. He has not been robbed.
Demm tells the chief that the shots had come from a distance, and she has already sent the
forensic officers over to the Michael's craft store to find out whether these two shootings are connected.
“They are. That bullet through the craft store window was the first shot fired in a DC area”
shooting spree. No one yet knows has begun. James Martin is its first victim. The shots come barely a year after two planes came out of a clear September sky and hit the twin towers and a third hit the Pentagon. It has been just over a year since the anthrax letters that killed 5 injured dozens and frightened millions of Americans came through the mail. So when a man is shot dead in a grocery lot for no reason anyone can find, another natural worry
is terrorism. And sure enough, what begins in this parking lot will terrorize 4 million people
for three long weeks. It will empty gas stations, lock schoolhouse doors, and perch officers with rifles up on interstate overpasses. But it is not the kind of terror the country expects. It's not radical Islam. It's not al-Qaeda. There's no manifesto. They will later find out. It's two people in an old car. And James Martin lying dead on the asphalt at two minutes past six PM on an ordinary Wednesday is only the beginning of the rampage near DC. By the end of the next
day, Thursday, 5 more people will be dead. I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential. Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results can be so dramatic. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. But what if you're looking to lose weight but are not interested in painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those intense
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For about 90 minutes, the region has no idea that anything unusual is underway. At 7.41 AM in the white-flint area of Rockville, Maryland, a landscape-or-named James Buchanan, who everyone calls sunny, is mowing a small patch of grass behind a car dealership. He is 39 years old. He is the son of a retired Montgomery County policemen, and he has a fiance. You can and recently moved his landscaping business across the river
into Virginia, but he still comes back to Maryland once a week to mow the Fitzgerald Auto Mall as a favor to its owner. He is pushing a green lawn-boy mower with a cloth catcher his back to the road. He stops for a sip of water. And then over the noise of the mower and the traffic, there is a single loud crack. A block away, a man named Rick Tiner, is driving to work with his wife. Tiner saw combat in Vietnam and he knows that sound.
That was a rifle shot he tells her.
sunny Buchanan staggering toward them, clutching his chest and gasping. Behind him, the mower is still
running, rolling on across the grass with no one to steer it. Buchanan makes it a couple hundred feet, then goes down on his face. A parts manager named Jim King gets on the line to 911 and tells
“the dispatcher the only thing that makes any sense to him. There's got one or did something and”
it chop him off. He's bleeding real bad. He's down and out. There is nothing wrong with the mower. Buchanan is rushed to the trauma unit at suburban hospital where a surgeon named Jim Roby is waiting. Buchanan's heart has already stopped, so Roby works fast opening his chest with a 16 inch cut and cranking the ribs apart to get to the heart. He finds a heart that is practically empty of blood
and a chest cavity drained nearly dry. He blood more than anyone I have ever seen one of the
medics later says. Roby has been told this is some sort of freak lawn mower accident and finding nothing he can fix. He shows the man back up believing it. Then a nurse standing by asks the question that will change the morning. Jim, as she says, do you think this could be a gunshot wound?
“They roll Buchanan over and there it is, a hole in his back smaller than the head of a pen.”
By now a police officer at the hospital has grown suspicious. She called her supervisor. Her supervisor calls major crimes. And word reaches the office of the county state's attorney where a veteran prosecutor hears the story of the landscape and his lawn mower and thinks no, the lawn mower did not do that. 31 minutes after Buchanan is shot about six miles away. A taxi driver named Premcomar Wollaker pulls into a mobile gas station to fill his tank. He needs gas. He also wants
some gum and lottery tickets. The station in Aspenhill, Maryland is a half block from the Michael's craft store where the front window got shot out the previous day. He is 54 from Pune, India and he drives for a company called Presidential CAD. He usually starts his shift around noon. This
“morning he clocked in early so he could get off early and get home to his wife and kids for the afternoon.”
He attends a seventh day Adventist church and has been married to his wife for 25 years. The sign on the roof of his cab reads of all things called 911. That is his cab company's number Yadial 911 taxi to order a ride. He is standing at the gas pump when the shot comes. At the next pump island, a doctor named Caroline Nemrow, who has just dropped her older children at school and still has her two-year-old a buckled in the back of her van. Here's the bang.
She looks up to see Wollaker walking toward her with a startled look on his face. Call an ambulance, he says. And he collapses, he side her van, leaving a long smear of his blood down the side of her passenger door. Nemrow grabs her phone and calls 911. Well, listen to me. He is a wall, another big cloud of motherly. How is it being killed and hurt?
Nemrow gets down on the concrete and does what she can, starting chest compressions then mouth to mouth. Wollaker is bleeding heavily from his side, the blood pooling on the ground. It started over there. I went over there and the guys laying on the ground, blood all over the side of the van. He's laying on the ground. Gasping for air and the ladies, she's standing there shaking and she's trying to help you. In the middle of her rescue efforts,
the victim vomits, his airway closes, and Dr. Nemrow cannot clear it. Cremcomar Wollaker dies at the pump. At 8.37-25 minutes later, a 34-year-old woman named Sarah Ramos is sitting on a bench outside a post office beside the leisure world retirement community. She was a law student once back in El Salvador. Now she cleans houses to keep the family afloat. She came to America with her husband, a college teacher there, and their little boy,
and it did not go the way they hoped. Her husband could not find work, teaching, and grew to press. This morning, she took the bus and is waiting on the bench for the woman who's house. She is going to clean. She is reading her head down her purse beside her.
She never sees the car at the far edge of the lot. A single rifle bullet enters the top of her
skull and exits the back of her neck and carries on through the restaurant window behind her.
Her book is still open in her lap when it fills with blood.
a 25-year-old woman named Lori Ann Lewis Rivera, a nanny who moved to Maryland from Idaho,
“is at a shell station in Kensington cleaning out her employer's minivan.”
She is a large, gentle young woman whose blonde hair is so pale, it looks nearly white. She has just switched on the vacuum to suck up Cheerios off the floorboard when the bullet hits her in the back. A firefighter runs over from a station across the street and starts CPR on Lori Ann.
A county police officer pulls up, then a second one, Richard Grape's, and Grape's goes to his
car for a 12-gauge shotgun and a heavy ballistic shield. And he kneels down with it between the open lot and the people bent over the dying woman. Because by now, they understand. Whoever is doing this is still out there somewhere and he could be lining up the rescuers next.
“The detective who takes the Kensington scene is Terry Ryan out of Montgomery County major crimes.”
With an incident involved in a young woman in her 20s, a mother. Ms. Rivera was vacuuming her van, which was part just beyond here at a coin vacuum that's still here. Mr. Rivera. Lori Ann's husband was contacted. He came to the scene. I had to notify him of his white step. I could just see the emotion. I mean, he was grieving himself. He said, "What do I tell my kid?"
Lori Ann has taken to suburban hospital to Dr. Robes' team. The second one of these shooting
victims, they have seen before 10 this morning. This time, they know what they are looking for. This wound is in the exact same place, as with Sonny Buchanan. The man mowing the lawn, Robes says. Someone is just picking people off. Robes has already called his wife and told her to get off the streets. AI can clone your voice, forge your signature, even create fake documents that fool experts, and criminals are using these tools right now to potentially steal from you. How? It's called
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from shoppers parking lot the night before and it is five dead in 16 hours. They do not line up. Two white men, a white woman and Indian man, a Salvadoran woman. Different ages, different jobs,
“different corners of the same suburban county. The only thing the five of them have in common is that”
each was or one second exposed standing still out in the open. And no one ever sees who does it. There's no muzzle flash, anyone can point to no figure running, no window rolled down. Each shot comes from somewhere out past the edge of the lot, a tree line, a passing car, and by the time anyone looks, there is nothing there at all. The detective who was assigned to the James Martin killing, the first murder in this spree, Patrick McNerny, is home when his sister,
a local TV news editor, calls to say there has been a shooting at a gas station up the road. Anything odd about it? He asks her. People heard aloud bang, she says. He is already heading out the door. At suburban hospital a major crime's corporal named Jean Curtis has the second victim,
Sonny Buchanan's body unzipped from its bag, and he does not need a medical e...
him what he's looking at. This kind of wound he tells the doctors goes in small and comes out big.
“How many of these are we going to have, he thinks? Maybe the next one will be a cop.”
By now the police are chasing the cases faster than they can work them. The detectives still writing up James Martin's death at the Wheaton Shoppers parking lot from last night. Get the calls from Rockville, then Aspen Hill, then Kensington, a fresh body every half hour, all inside a few square miles. At the hospitals the same trauma teams that took Buchanan and Wolliger in the morning are bracing for the next body, and it is not over.
Around 9 o'clock PM, two people are loading a car outside a restaurant called the Tropicana
on Georgia Avenue just inside Washington, D.C., a few blocks below the Maryland line.
The woman is named Gail Howard, and she owns the place. She is walking the night's receipts
“out to her car. The man is Carl Largi, one of her employees, and he is out in the lot with a”
cigarette keeping an eye on things. He's very dark, and your street light is flickering on and off. The morning's killings have been on every television in the region all day. Gail Howard is wary of crossing the open lot. Parked on the side street near them is an old dark car with tinted windows. It's back and turned toward Georgia Avenue. They notice it and think nothing of it. Then there is a loud boom. It could be a blown tire or a car backfiring.
Out on Georgia Avenue, a city bus screeches to a stop. Carl tells Gail, it was either the bus or a gunshot, loud, but strangely muffled. A few seconds later, the old dark car slides away, down, called me a street, with its lights off. Look at the idiot with his lights off, Carl says. They finish loading up, and Gail gets in her own car and drives home. Carl stays behind. Within minutes, the corner is lit up with police lights and an ambulance and word travels
“that a man is dead. Five minutes later, Gail's phone rings, it's Carl. Guess what he says?”
It was a gunshot. That night's killing crosses the district line. A block away on the southeast corner of Georgia Avenue and Calmea Road, a 72-year-old man is lying on the pavement. His name is Pascal Sharlow. He left Haiti for America many years ago. He is a carpenter, a man who can build anything. He and his disabled wife share a row home, with lawn shares, and potted plants on the front porch, and out back he keeps a garden of tomatoes and bell peppers.
He loves to walk, but tonight he is taking the bus home. He gets off in a standing, under a street light, waiting to cross to his house. Pascal is gazing up at the stars, and he raises his right hand toward his chin when the bullet comes. It goes through his palm and blows a two-inch hole in his hand before it punches into his chest below the left collarbone. It shatters his collarbone and ribs, tearing open veins and arteries. Pascal Sharlow goes down
on the corner, 72 years of life, and it ends like this. He is the sixth person killed in a little over 24 hours. The man handling all of this is the chief of the Montgomery County Merrillan Police, a career officer named Charles Moose. He is 49. He originally wanted to become a lawyer. Got side tracked and decided to give the police department a try. Before he knew it, he started climbing the ranks, getting decorations and a doctorate along the way. He is a big proponent of
active listening, but he also battles a white hot temper, and there are stories about it. He's
gone to anger management counseling. By the end of that first day, Moose is looking at six people
shot dead across Montgomery County and the district. No motive, no suspect, no witness who can describe a shooter. Not even a bullet or a shell casing his investigators can recover in one piece. Assistant Chief of Police, Deirdre Walker, would later tell the discovery channel that it seemed to be an impossible task. We had no physical description. We had no good eyewitnesses. How do you draw up a plan to find a ghost? Moose drives himself down to the mobile
station crime scene, where from Kumar Wollocker died. But instead of pulling in, he tucks his car into a mall lot across the street, gets out and stands there, watching. He wants to see the situation from a distance, standing there in the sun, a thought settles on Moose that he cannot shake.
The man who did this could be out here right now, close by, watching him back.
By then, investigators are convinced the shootings are connected. That is the worst possible news
for a public already terrorized by anthrax in 9/11. Moose says as much to the press. Here he is on Fox 5 on October 3rd, 2002. We strongly feel that all of these are connected. Certainly, the weapon tree seems to be very similar, not a lot of evidence. There's no indication at this point that these individuals know each other. There's no indication that any of these individuals had any kind of conflict with anyone. It is a string of murders growing into a public
emergency because it means there is no way to guess who comes next. It comes down to one thing only, where you happen to be standing when the trigger is pulled. The law enforcement response builds fast because it has to. Within a day, the case has outgrown the Montgomery County police and the
“big agencies pour in the FBI, the ATF, the Maryland State Police, the Secret Service,”
a task force forms around Chief Moose and grows until it fills whole buildings. They wire in banks of telephones and open a tip line and the tips come in by the thousands. Every one of them run down. Before long, it is the largest man hunt of its kind that the country has seen. Thousands of officers from dozens of agencies and still, day after day, nothing. Helicopters crisscross the county overhead. When a shooting comes in, police flip on their
lights and sirens, throw up roadblocks and stop cars from miles and time after time come up with nothing in the way of clues. The officers who work at take it personally because it is terrorizing the neighborhoods where they live, where their families live. It affects our families the same as everybody else. And we all swore a girth oath to protect the citizens of Maryland
“and by God that's what we were going to do, no matter if it killed us to do it.”
And for a major American city, the seat of the federal government, this changes how that city does life day-to-day. Gas stations hang tarps and bedsheets between the gas pumps and the road, so a driver can fill the tank behind a curtain. People pump gas crouched down, ducking below the roofline of their cars. Schools pull the shades and cancel recess. The high school football games and the track meets are called off, and the local soccer league
cancels its practices. Shoppers cross the lot to their cars at a fast weaving walk because someone has decided that a zigzagging target is harder to hit and no one can prove them wrong. Children are walked from the school bus to the door in clusters while the teachers surround them and scan the tree lines. Ministers rewrite their Sunday sermons, the malls empty out, and along the roads where people were shot, the shops, watch their customers disappear.
There were just picking people at random. If you were out there where they could get to, you were gone. What the person or people who did this have done without demanding a single thing is make the most ordinary acts of the day, buying groceries, filling the gas tank, waiting for a bus, walking a child into school, feel dangerous. The public looks to authority for answers, the Montgomery County Police have some, but not many. Chief Moose begins holding
nightly press briefings. How many dead, who were they, and where, but the crucial questions,
why, and why them cannot yet be answered. The chief reflects on this years later to the team
“behind real stories. The worst thing about the case was that all of the victims were chosen”
at random. So consequently, everyone in the community felt like a potential target. The man behind the rifle becomes known as the sniper, and he haunts every shadow in and around DC. Investigators, the public, and the media all make the same fundamental assumption that steers them down the wrong path from the start. Snipers typically work alone, out of practicality and generally personality. This sniper, they will eventually learn,
is not one man, but two. And this is also not the first time they have killed together.
Their story begins long before the Maryland parking lots, on the other side of the country. At the start of 2002, a 41-year-old Army veteran named John Allen Muhammad, lives in the suburbs of Tacoma, Washington. A Jamaican teenager named Lee Boyd Malvo lives with him.
Muhammad has spent nearly two decades in uniform, becoming an expert marksman...
during his service in the Army. Malvo has zero military experience. He is a slight 5-foot 5-17-year-old
“who speaks with a Caribbean accent. They regard and refer to each other as Father and Son,”
both directly and to anyone who asks. Muhammad met the boy in the Caribbean a few years ago took him in when he had nobody. How exactly that happened is its own story, but that's for the next
episode. Muhammad has a nickname for the teenager, which only the two of them know. His little sniper.
“Malvo wears it proudly, even sporting a black t-shirt with the word sniper, printed across the front.”
Muhammad trains Malvo to shoot a rifle in a friend's backyard. They use a bushmaster XM-15, an AR-15-style rifle, chambered in 223. It's a semi-automatic civilian version of the M-16 that Muhammad used in the Army.
Muhammad walks the rifle out of a Tacoma gun store, stolen. The store assumed it had been sold,
“and did not realize for three months that the rifle was actually stolen.”
Muhammad and Malvo practiced firing round after round into a tree stump. That's actually where the killings start. Washington State, not near Washington DC, and will go through the names and the stories this week. The shootings are scattered across different cities, different police departments, different case files. It is not until they reach the nation's capital that the crimes become so close and frequent that authorities are able to connect them.
Before it is over, John Muhammad and Lee Boyd, Malvo will be tied to some 15 killings around the country. Ten of the dead will fall here in these three weeks around Washington DC. A year after 9/11, Americans are still on the lookout for terror. By the night of October 2, 2002, the next terror attack is already in motion. But it is not in the sky, and it is not in the mail. It is out on the road in an old sedan that nobody thinks to stop.
Next time, on MK confidential, how the sniper duo came to be. Before he was one half of America's most feared sniper team, how the man who became John Allen Muhammad lost his own children and raised a lonely boy from Jamaica to be his little sniper.
