The Beltway Snipers: The Last Shot — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

Montgomery, Alabama, closing time on Zelda Road, outside a liquor store.

Two women are locking up. Claudine Parker is 52.

“She is the store's business manager, and she is in her last papyrid before retirement.”

Next month, she is supposed to start coaching tennis at Alabama State. Behind her is Kelly Adams, 24, a clerk, newly married with a new baby. Kelly doesn't hear anything. She will describe it as being electrocuted. A single rifle round comes in under her jaw from the left, goes through, and shatters

the window beside the door. She goes down. Nadine Parker backs away, and for a moment one of the store's pillars stands between her and the shooter. Then she backs out from behind it, and she is shot through the shoulder blade, and does not move again. Kelly Adams tells police what she can see from the ground.

Then black legs, shorts, somebody standing over her, pointing a small silver revolver at her head.

“And then the person just turns and runs off.”

Two Montgomery patrol officers on a routine patrol are close enough to hear the shots. They pull in and see a young black man with a medium afro behind the pillar, going through a purse. The young man runs, one officer stays with the women. The other goes after him, chasing him over a fence, and then another, and loses him. And somewhere in that chase, the runner drops something.

There is a gun show in town that weekend, so it could belong to anybody. Two detectives bag it anyway. It's a catalog. A paper magazine full of rifle accessories from a company called Arma Light.

Clawdine Parker will never coach an Alabama state.

She dies in surgery about three hours later. Kelly Adams lives. She will have 31 operations in the next five years, and a permanent implant to manage the pain. The gun magazine goes to the lab, and it gives up 36 clean fingerprints all from the same person. Montgomery PD runs them locally, then through the state system, then through neighboring Georgia.

Nothing comes back. Investigators take that to mean whoever handled the catalog has never been arrested as an adult. For a month, the answer to the DC sniper case sits in an evidence room in Alabama, and no one in the world knows it. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential.

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Visit TakeLeen.com and enter Kelly for your discount. That's Brickhouse.com at TakeLeen.com. By the middle of October 2002, Malvo and Mohammed have been trying for days to get police to take them seriously. Hotline operators screen them out, calls drop, people were not listening to us. Malvo says later.

So they offer proof. A crime only the men doing the shooting could know about. They pick Alabama because they believe it is safe. As far as they know, the police in Montgomery have nothing. The next call comes with something in it that only the killers could know.

A call comes into police headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and gets transferred to an officer named Derek Beliles. Shut up and listen, the caller says, and don't ask any questions. The caller, almost certainly Malvo, says he knows who is responsible for the recent DC area shootings.

But first, he wants Beliles to verify something.

Call the police in Montgomery, Alabama, he says. Ask about a liquor store hold up on Ann Street, back in September, where two women were shot. James Fitzgerald, the FBI forensic linguist from episode four, has spent two weeks studying these men.

That was a real big clue.

“And we contacted the Montgomery, Alabama, PD.”

They even told us, this is one of the phone calls. Well, if you don't think we're legit, they already killed six people in one day. But they somehow still had to, and this is mostly John Mulhamid. Again, the adult, they had to sort of brag about things. Well, we killed it.

We robbed the liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama. You know, check that out. Aliles makes the call. Four hours later, the killers reach a priest in Ashland, Virginia, and tell him the same thing.

And when the letter they leave in the woods behind the Ponderosa is finally read,

it complains about an officer named Derek and about a priest. Two calls, both pointing at the same town. The tell that the caller was actually at the physical location is a street name. Their shooting didn't happen on An Street, as the caller claimed. It happened on Zelda Road.

An Street is the exit off the interstate, a block away. The lieutenant who worked that case, Michael Merrick, says nobody who lives in Montgomery would ever call it an An Street shooting. Someone who came off the highway would. So, a Montgomery County Maryland Police Commander named Drew Tracy gets an Alabama detective on the phone and asks the obvious question. Is there anything that could help us?

“He says, the only thing we have is a magazine.”

And I said, a magazine, you mean magazine from a weapon. He goes a paper magazine. And he says, and this is where it went, clicked with me just like that. And I said, oh my God, we might have something here. The Prince of that catalog cannot be transmitted electronically.

In 2002, Alabama is one of many states not wired into the FBI's national fingerprint database. So somebody has to carry the Prince by hand. On Monday, October 21st, an FBI agent from Alabama carries them onto a plane to Washington, D.C. Along with the bullet fragments. When an examiner runs the Alabama Prince through the federal fingerprint system, a name comes back.

Here's FBI's supervisory special agent Linda Hooper to the monster DC sniper podcast. And that print was for Lee Boyd Malvo. And he was 17 years old.

“Ten months earlier in Washington state, the Jamaican teenager was picked up as an illegal immigrant”

and fingerprinted by Border Patrol. The print gives them the boy. And as Fitz told me, once they had the boy, they had the man too. They took him to the FBI. They ran him across the whole, you know, spectrum of fingerprints.

And they found immigration fingerprints from Lee Boyd Malvo. He was like 15, 16 when he came to this country from Jamaica. And they wound up contacting whoever knew him. Oh, he's with this guy named John Willhamad. That same morning across the country into coma, Washington.

Investigators finally knock on Robert Holmes's door.

Holmes is Muhammad's old army friend who has spent a week trying to get someone at the FBI to take him seriously. About his friend, John, about the bushmaster. About the boy, John called his little sniper. Now, someone does. By Wednesday, October 23rd, the task force has two names, a photograph of a California driver's license and a car.

A 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, Dark Blue, New Jersey Plates, NDA21Z. That plate has been run through police computers repeatedly over the prior three weeks and handed back clean every single time. At 10 minutes to midnight on Wednesday, police chief Charles Moose steps up to the microphones and announces a federal arrest warrant for John Allen Muhammad on a firearms charge. He is careful. He says the charge has nothing to do with the shootings that Muhammad may be traveling with an unnamed juvenile. He does not give out the plate number. He doesn't have to.

It has been on television for an hour already, leaked out of police radio traffic and running across the bottom of TV screens across the country. Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenbaugh is out distributing wanted posters when word comes over the radio that the Chevy Caprice has been found. It's at the South Mountain Westbound Welcome Center, REST area on Interstate 70 in Western Maryland, right near South Mountain State Park. Reichenbaugh is 35 miles out and he is about to be the highest ranking officer on that scene.

He gets his duty officer at the Maryland State Police Barracks in Frederick on the radio and asks how many troopers he has.

Send everyone you've got Reichenbaugh says have them meet me at the entrance to the REST area and tell them to come in silent.

He gets there with three men, two troopers and one sheriff's deputy. They are armed with handguns and a shotgun against a rifle that goes through body armor. He decides the four of them cannot rush that car. So he seals the car in instead. He shuts down i70 in both directions telling drivers there has been a bad accident. He posts a canine handler with orders to treat anyone who walks out of that REST area as the sniper. He blocks the entrance ramp with a patrol car. Then he goes looking for something bigger to put across that exit.

We had a couple of truck drivers start to come out to leave and I asked them if they wanted to be good Americans.

“And it was like, well yeah, true, what do you need?”

Say well we got the snipers in the REST area and I said can you throw your truck across this exit so that that car can not get out here. In Bob calls a friend in the secret service and 30 seconds later by presidential authority, the airspace over Frederick County is closed to news helicopters. Inside the Caprice, Muhammad is asleep across the back seat. Malvo is in the front, his head down by the steering wheel. He is supposed to be keeping watch. Asked later why he thinks they were caught. He tells his interrogators it was his own laziness, his lack of discipline. But he departed from something he knew worked. He says for five minutes of pleasure for five minutes of sleep.

By 330 AM, a 19-man tactical team has assembled at the bottom of the wooded hill behind the RESTOP. County officers, state troopers, and FBI hostage rescue operators. Six of them will approach the car.

“They rehearsed once in a McDonald's parking lot down the road. Then they come up through the trees and stop at two oaks, 20 yards out.”

After three weeks of false alarms, not one man in that tree line is certain there is anyone in this car at all. The team leader pulls up three fingers and counts down. Three, two, one. They cross the open ground, take out the driver's front window, and the passenger rear window with spring loaded batons, and light up the inside of the car with the lights on their weapons. FBI police hands up. Malvo's pulled out the front door, Muhammad sits up in the back with his hands raised and is taken out the other side.

A trooper covers the trunk while another gets the keys because nobody knows what is in there. Clear. It takes about 30 seconds. Nobody fires a shot. Drew Tracy, the Montgomery County commander, who helped assemble the assault team, is standing by the tree line. He is standing by the tree line. He is standing by the tree line. And what happened is when he breached the tempered windows, the glass got in his hair and it hit the light and he didn't say one word. Malvo is five foot five, right in Boston and over him on the pavement, right later what went through his head, Christ. He's just a kid.

He's so badly a trooper has to hold him still to get the cuffs on. They put the two of them in separate cars and drive them off the mountain to a state police barracks. Fits is asleep in Maryland when the phone rings.

“He was arrested at 3.30 in the morning and I get a call. I was staying up in Maryland then and they said, hey can you get a state police barracks?”

They arrested the two snipers. I'll be there. So this is before GPS. I had a map my way there on my own, which I got there. And I walk into this dark state police barracks kind of in the middle of nowhere, not a big building, a couple mark cars out there and then one or two others, no media, which was a good sign. He knocks. He shows his credentials.

They buzz me in the first door, buzz me in the second door and it's all dark. It's like a one story building.

And I looked down the hallway about 30 feet ahead of me. There's a state trooper in uniform running full speed. You know, left to right. What the hell? So I didn't pull my gun out because there's other officers around where my hand is on my gun. And next thing you know, there's another trooper closer to me, another hallway. He's running right to left. Looking for something. I finally see a trooper comes up to us at FBI. What's going on? The kid escaped. The man Hunt has been officially over for a couple of hours.

And it turns out they put Malvo in a room. He may have been handcuffed in front, which you never do, always behind.

“And they didn't handcuff him to the bar on the wall. And somehow he used that bar climbed up into the ceiling.”

And he actually crawled about 50 feet over the, you know, the drop ceiling until finally he reached a weak spot and fell down on the ground. He was fine. But they got him up handcuffed them again, put him in the room. And he never escaped again. Look on the mountain, nobody can search the car without a warrant. It is finally signed at 555 in the morning. When they get inside an FBI swat leader notices the back seat looks wrong. The cushion has been altered, so it swings up at the top like a hatch. They lift it behind it, held in place with a bungee cord is a bushmaster rifle.

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The bipod is folded under the barrel, and there is a live round in the chamber, an ATF ballistics man puts on gloves and clears the weapon.

“And I'll never forget as long as I live the noise of when the lab guy cocked that round out of that rifle and seeing it spinning around in a circle in the air and the tinkle that it made when it hit the parking lot.”

Later that day the ATF chief firearms examiner test fires the bushmaster into a water tank and puts the recovered bullets under a microscope beside the fragments taken out of the victims. It matches 11 of the 14 shooting scenes in the region. One person is not watching any of it from home. The evening before the arrest ATF agents knock on a door on quiet Brooklyn in Clinton, Maryland, an ask-mildred Muhammad to come down to the police station and answer some questions.

The way I found out that it was John was when ATF knocked on my door and said that they were going to name John as to sniper.

“And so they asked me, "Well, do you think that he would do something like this?"”

And I was like, "Well, I don't know." And I said, "Well, why would you think that?" I said, "Well, he said he could take a small city terrorize it. They would think it would be a group of people and it would only be me." She has watched the same coverage as everyone else for three weeks. Two of the shootings happened within a few miles of her own home. Muhammad and her three children are moved into protective custody that night to a hotel, her sister and brother-in-law go to.

She gets the children to sleep, then she goes into the bathroom and turns on the water so they will not hear her. She sits down on the floor with a pillow and sobs into it. What mildered Muhammad believes and has said publicly and consistently ever since is that she was the point of all of it that he came to Washington to kill her and needed her death to look random so that he could collect his children. No court has ever ruled on that.

Prosecutors did not have to prove why he did it. Afterwards, mildered tells Annie, "People who find out who she is, tell her, it is her fault." At that time, they told me that... You should have seen it common there. How dare I bring this drama into a quiet community and how dare I call me and my children victims when neither of us were killed.

Now comes the question of who gets to put Malvo and Muhammad on trial.

“On Gumbery County, Maryland once the case, so did two federal prosecutor's offices and the Virginia counties where people were shot.”

Six of the ten dead are Maryland's. On November 7th, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft sends both men to Virginia.

The first prosecutions he says should go where the law and the facts are best and the toughest sentences are available.

Maryland, a defendant who is under 18 at the time he committed the murder, cannot be sentenced to death. Same for federal court. But in Virginia in 2002, the floor is 16. Muhammad will be tried in Prince William County, where the murder of Dean Myers, Malvo and Fairfax County, for Linda Franklin. Both trials are moved to the far south eastern corner of the state because the defense argued that no one near Washington could possibly sit on that jury.

With fairness. John Muhammad's trial opens in Virginia Beach in October 2003.

“On the first morning, he takes the case away from his lawyers and tells the judge he will represent himself.”

His argument to the jury is one simple question, whoever saw him fire a rifle.

Nobody. No witness in the case puts the weapon in Muhammad's hands. Then he begins cross-examining victims of the attacks. Among them, Paul Larufa shot five times in his own car outside his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland, in the robbery that paid for that Chevy Caprice. So, talk about crazy circumstances and weird events in your life.

I was being questioned by the guy who tried to kill me. He wasn't a guy that pulled a trigger, but he was the brains behind it. After two days, Muhammad hands the case back to his attorneys. The prosecution's answer is that it does not matter whose finger was on the trigger. Virginia charges Muhammad under an anti-terrorism law written after September 11th,

which requires only that a jury find the killing was part of an act intended to intimidate a civilian population. On November 17, 2003, the jury convicts him on all counts. A week later, the same jury recommends death. Months later, the judge accepts the recommendation, and formally sentences Muhammad to die. Lee Malvo's trial runs at the same time, an hour down the road in Chesapeake, Virginia.

He pleads not guilty, and his lawyers give notice that they will argue insanity that Muhammad indoctrinated him so completely. He could not tell right from wrong. One lawyer puts it more plainly later. The whole point was to keep Malvo off of death row, and it works. The jury convicts him, but spares his life, life without parole.

The following year, Malvo pleads guilty in Spotsalvania County, Virginia, to killing Kenneth Bridges and shooting Caroline C. Well, and gets two more life sentences.

In May 2006, Maryland finally gets its turn.

John Muhammad goes on trial in Rockville for the six murders committed in Montgomery County, and this time the state has witnessed it did not have in Virginia back in 2003. Lee Malvo testifies against John Muhammad. Malvo is now 21, and he testifies for the better part of two days. He tells the jury the shootings were only phase one, phase two was bombs, unschooled buses,

and children's hospitals. Why children, the prosecutor asks him? For the sheer terror of it, Malvo answers, quoting Muhammad.

“The worst thing you can do to people is take aim at their children.”

He says, "Mahamid picked the targets and picked who fired." He says, "He fired three of the shots himself and Mahamid fired the rest." Malvo tells the jury about that night in Ashland, Virginia, when he says he shot the man outside the stake house, the one married to the rocket scientist, and kept his cool. He didn't crack.

You were calm, Mahamid told him, "I've created a monster." The prosecutor, Catherine Winfrey, asks him, "Why he agreed to testify?" I want to tell the truth, and I think he is a coward, Malvo says. Malvo then turns his head and looks directly at John Mahamid. "You took me into your house," he says, "and you made me a monster."

The next morning, John Mahamid stands up to cross examine, Malvo. It goes on for several hours. John is representing himself again. He keeps addressing Lee Malvo as son or Lee during the cross examination.

"I'm not doing it intentionally," Mahamid protests. "I apologize," Mr. Malvo.

“A few questions later, he does it again. "Son," he says. "I mean," Mr. Malvo.”

Mahamid asks Malvo about a day in Antiga, when John's son, little John, and his girlfriend Andrea, went into the water and started drowning. John was off the island, and Malvo went in after them, saving them both. Then John asks, "Son," I mean, Mr. Malvo. Isn't it true that if the roles were turned, and Lee Boy Malvo was in that water, that John Allen Mahamid would have gotten him?

The prosecutor's object, the judge sustains it. Malvo is not allowed to answer.

When Mahamid is finished, prosecutor Catherine Winfrey gets back up, and asks Malvo one question. "What was the difference in how Mr. Mahamid treated you and his children?" she asks.

“Mr. Mahamid did not use any of his children to murder other people, says Malvo.”

On May 30, 2006, John Mahamid is convicted of six more first-degree murders. The jury gives him six consecutive life sentences on top of the death sentence already awaiting him in Virginia. In November 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court rejects John Allen Mahamid's last petition, and the governor of Virginia refuses him clemency. The execution is set for the evening of November 10th at the Greensville Correctional Center in Jared Virginia.

John walks into the execution chamber at two minutes to nine.

He was allowed to choose the method of his execution, but never made a choice,

so under Virginia's state law the method defaults to lethal injection. He has declined a spiritual advisor.

“The execution of John Allen Mahamid has been carried out under the laws of the Commonwealth of Virginia.”

Death was pronounced at 9/11 PM. There were no complications. Mr. Mahamid was asked if he wished to make a last statement. He did not acknowledge this or make any statement whatsoever. Mahamid apparently watched as the injection was administered, tilted his head to the right and stayed that way.

He was 48. Lee Malvo sits in a cell. In the years after the trials, the U.S. Supreme Court decides a run of cases about minors who commit adult crimes, concluding that a defendant who was a juvenile at the time of the crime, not be sentenced to life without parole, and that holding reaches backward, which reopened Lee Malvo's sentences.

Virginia rewrote its own law in response, making him eligible for parole, but Virginia's parole board refused to release him, calling him a risk to the community. Maryland is where the law gets strange. Its highest court has ruled that Malvo's six Maryland life sentences were imposed unconstitutionally, and that he is owed a new sentencing hearing, but officials in Virginia refused to hand him over.

So a state Supreme Court has ordered a hearing that cannot happen, and Lee Boyd Malvo is 41 years old in a Virginia prison serving 10 life sentences in a state that cannot mandate no parole ever, but that is not inclined to entertain the possibility of ever setting this guy loose. In 2012, he gave an interview to the Washington Post. I mean, you know, I was a monster. If you look up the definition and the answer to the monster is I was a goot. I was a thief. I stole people's lives. I didn't turn off the bidding just because they said so. I mean, that is the definition of a monster.

Six months after testifying against Mohammed, the Malvo pleads guilty to the six Montgomery County murders and comes back to the same courthouse to be sentenced. Malvo stands up and reads out the six names. Then he talks to the families sitting in that room. I'm truly sorry, grieved, and ashamed of what I've done to the families and friends he says. His voice breaks. I know that I destroyed many dreams and many more lives, and that each of you relive this every morning, every birthday, every anniversary, every time you look in your children's eyes.

He adds, "I accept responsibility for killing your mother, father, sister, brother, son, daughter, wife, husband, and friend." Then he says something about the last man he killed, the bus driver CJ, in the doorway of his own bus at 555 in the morning.

Then that bus driver, Conrad Johnson's mother, Sonia Wills, stands up. She looks at the young man who shot him.

“"I must say, for the past four years, I have hated you," she says. "Right now, I, Conrad's mother, forgive you. I have to, my dear. I can't go on hating you. That won't bring Conrad back."”

Paula Rufus spent three days on a breathing machine after Malvo shot him outside of his restaurant, both of his lungs collapsed. He still has bullet fragments inside of him, and until the morning the snipers were caught, the shooting haunted his nightmares.

"You can't turn it off. You can't make it stop. It just happens. Happen every night."

When Muhammad's execution date is set, some of the victims and their families make plans to be in the room. Lerufus does not. He explains why to the podcast monster DC sniper.

“"I don't have a need to see him die, and I don't want him to take another day out of my life. I'm sorry at any death, but I think if anybody deserves the death penalty, it was him."”

"Then there is the boy, Malvo. Here's Lerufus again."

"I can say I've forgiven him, but it doesn't mean what he did was okay with me. I think he's responsible for what he did. I get the feeling he feels he has to pay a price for it.

“As he paid enough of a price, I don't think so." 15 dead, 8 more injured, so much pain, so much sadness. The justice system gave the victims all it could, then it was up to them to keep living, and they did.”

Paula Rufu worked to reform youth sentencing laws to prevent young offenders from getting life sentences without the chance of parole. It's becoming a global speaker and author and educator on the signs of invisible abuse such as coercive control and stalking. In Iron Brown, the 13 year old shot in the gut by Malvo still has permanent nerve damage from the bullet Muhammad had directed be aimed at the child's head. His surgeries, a medically induced coma, and 20 years later, Iron told NBC News, he lives with anxiety now from the shooting, but that the shooting has given his life perspective.

He's deeply grateful to be alive, and in the way that only great tragedy can offer a person sees each day as a truly precious gift. 24 years ago, still recovering from his injuries, Iron showed the same resilience of spirit. When asked that December, what he wanted for Christmas, he told the reporters, "I already have enough to be happy." I'm Megan Kelly, this is MK Confidential.