The Beltway Snipers: The Soldier — Ep. 2 | MK Confidential

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Something wakes her. She looks at the clock on the bedside table, 137. She rolls over on her back and looks up at the ceiling, listening.

“Half asleep, she tries to think, she knows the sound, but is she imagining it tonight? She listens hard, as he come back to the house, what is he doing?”

It is the middle of the night in a house in Tacoma, Washington, in the winter of 2000. Her name is Mildred Muhammad and her marriage is over. She has flushed both of her wedding rings down the toilet. Her soon to be ex-husband moved out a few months back, but he still has a key, and he keeps visiting in the middle of the night. She is listening for the sound of the key turning in the front door lock, and then it does. The door opens. Mildred later describes the man in the doorway to investigation discovery.

The man that I married became a complete stranger. He was full of rage. I was terrified.

“She sees him coming. The bathroom light is on for the kids. She sees his body cross the light, about to enter her bedroom doorway and shut her eyes.”

Then he is standing at the foot of her bed, watching her. She thinks of a thing he said to her once, that when a man hits a woman, it means he has lost all respect for her, and that after that it would be easy to kill her. Her spirit tells her to be still, pretend to be asleep. Her heart is pumping against the sheets. She knows he is doing this on purpose. He plans everything, but she does not know what his plan is for her, so she tries to just breathe normally. Her spirit says, "He's still." She wants to squint and see his face, but she knows he will see the whites of her eyes. He comes around the bedside and leans over her, listening to her breathe.

He walks around her for two or three more minutes. She keeps hearing her spirit say, "Be still." She does not flinch or move a muscle until he is gone.

He finally crosses her room and tipped toes out of the house, closing the front door behind him. Her spirit guides her through, and she believes that is why she is still alive.

She lies in the dark until morning, then picks up the phone. So, the next day, I called the locksmith to get the locks changed. So, Mildred changes the locks. A new lock can keep a man out of the house, but it cannot change who he is. Two years later, almost 3,000 miles from Tacoma, the man who stood over her bed in the dark begins killing strangers in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. People with nothing in common, but the ground they are standing on. Ten of them will be dead in three weeks. Each one dropped by a single shot, no one sees or hears in time.

And Mildred Muhammad, who fled across the country and hides in a Maryland suburb outside of Washington, D.C., will become convinced that all of it, every random body is chosen to bury the one murder that matters. Hers. Before John Allen Muhammad was half of the D.C. sniper team, he was a soldier for 17 years, a husband and a father of five. Tonight, we go back to the beginning. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK confidential.

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John is only three years old when she passes away. He is raised by his aunts in a black on-clave on the edge of the city that the people they are called Scotland town.

“Journalist John Ward covers the story of the DC snipers for the Washington Times. He believes this part of John's life is key to his transformation into a cold-blooded killer.”

Here's what he tells the history series, born to kill. He was very affected by his mother dying when he was very young and he was also picked on a lot as a kid by relatives.

And I think he went through his entire life feeling like he was never recognized for his potential. At 17 John Williams enlists in the Louisiana Army National Guard, Gerry O'Neal cuts his hair for 11 years and remembers no great enthusiasm for the work. He speaks to born to kill as well. He didn't like being in the military. It was something that he committed himself to doing and at the time I think it provided a living for him and his family. It is August of 1978. What begins is a six-year hitch turns into a career of nearly two decades. He starts as a carpenter and a welder in a unit that repairs buildings.

“He goes from Fort Lewis just south of Tacoma to Germany and from Germany to Saudi Arabia for the Gulf War with the 64th engineer company, inspecting and destroying Saddam Hussein's stockpiles of chemical weapons.”

Meldred's brother Michael Jones describes that side of him this way to investigation discovery.

John was a combat engineer. He can be shot at their minds. That is a very stressful job. But he was an expert, Moxman with the M16. That was the rifle at that time. A 1982 note in his file praises his initiative and his results. But that same year he is court-martialed. The charges are a strange little bundle, disobeying and order, striking a sergeant taking another man's tape measure and briefly going a wall. Two charges are dropped. He is fined $100 and receives a suspended jail sentence.

He later steals an M16 from the Armory and hides it in a dormitory. No charges are filed for that. Out in the Saudi desert in early 1991, a higher ranking sergeant named Kip Barrensen choose John at one day for sleeping in another soldier's sleeping bag. Barrensen will remember the look John gave him as the stare of death. Then in the middle of the night in February, a thermite grenade lights up the inside of a tent where a dozen soldiers are asleep, throwing heat, fire and sparks which could easily light the ammo.

There is a scramble in the dark and everyone gets out. Barrensen does not think this is an accident. An army captain says the pin to the grenade was found near John's bunk. The military police come and John Williams is led away in handcuffs.

“And then nothing. No record of any discipline in his file. He is apparently cleared or is he?”

Mildred remembers the grenade incident or at least John's version of it a bit differently. She later retails the story to the podcast Monster DC sniper. A soldier challenged him in front of others and he felt humiliated. That soldier that night was in charge of the explosives.

The grenade went off. He was accused of trying to get back at that soldier that challenged him in front of the others.

“Of the others soldiers. They put him in a dungeon. They hogtied him and left him there.”

And when he comes back, it's not the same person. In 1992, stationed in Germany, a very pregnant Mildred visits a hairdresser who will change her life. The hairdresser is astonished that Mildred does not know the name Lewis Ferrican and sends her home with two video tapes. By Mildred's account, John watches them with rapture saying, "That's right. That's right." By the time they finish both tapes, Mildred's worldview is shattered. She resolves to question everything she has been taught for the rest of her life.

“John resolves to find Ferrican when they return to the states. Both are now very interested in Islam.”

In January of 1993, John gets into the face of another soldier, a man who happens to be named Lee, and says, "Brother to brother, back off, or you will be the first slaughtered.

There is no place that your family will be safe, and the people that are supporting you will go down also. This, I promise you." A report is written up and filed, and that appears to have been the end of it. No arrest, no charge, nothing in his record. The next year in 1994, the Army gives John LM Williams an honorable discharge. The family moves back to Tacoma and joins a mosque. Mildred describes it as building her relationship with God.

“John joined, but not for their same reasons.”

John joined the mosque, not to be a man of God, he joined, because he felt that is what was needed to control me. In October 1995, John goes to the Million Man March, and takes the pledge every man there takes.

Never to raise a hand with a knife or a gun against any member of his family, or any human being. He comes home, kinder, and gentler to Mildred's relief.

It doesn't last. Mildred joins the nation of Islam in January 1996, and John returns to his old habits. Money goes missing from the mechanic business they run together. There are nights out with other women. When Mildred confronts him more than once, she remembers him saying, "It's all mind over matter, Mildred. I don't mind, because you don't matter." It is Friday, October 4, 2002. In the suburbs, North of Washington, DC, a killer has already shot six people dead. All strangers each dropped by a single rifle shot.

Not one witness has been able to describe the man who killed them. And at 2.30 that afternoon, 75 miles south of the first killings, a 43-year-old mother of two named Caroline Cwell, will be the next to fall. Cwell walks out of a Michael's craft store at the Spotselvania Mall in Fredericksburg, Virginia. She shops there all the time. She is loading packages into her minivan, moving back and forth between the cart and the van. Behind her, a couple named Alex and Doris Jones pull up their car and wait, blink her flashing because they want her parking space.

Just as Caroline closes the rear hatch, Alex hears a loud pop and sees Caroline drop. "I've been shot," she screams. Alex jumps out of his car and rushes over. He starts yelling for help. And then standing over her in the open parking lot, something clicks in Alex's brain. If the rifleman could see Caroline, he can see Alex too and his wife. He runs back to his car and tells Doris to get down. Alex ducks low behind the wheel himself and drives toward the far side of a nearby furniture store out of the line of fire.

On his way out of that parking lot, a car pulls out ahead of him. It is a dark older car with New Jersey plates and the back window is covered over with something so that he cannot see inside of it.

Alex thinks the car looks out of place and he says so out loud to Doris, who is crouching down in the back seat and never sees the vehicle.

Someone in the lot calls 911. Yes, I am in front of Michael's and somebody's out here who needs some help.

I'm not sure. There was a loud crack and she said she needs help.

She's lying down. I don't see anything. I'm injured or... Yeah, I definitely injured. See her herself.

I'm not sure why. So we're going out. No, it looks like she's been shot.

“She's been shot. Yeah, she was shot. Okay.”

I hope they come back and get my son out of a car. The bullet has gone in through the raised hatch of the van. It has struck Caroline in the lower back and come out beneath her right breast. She is rushed to Mary Washington Hospital. Then flown by helicopter to Fairfax.

Against the odds, she will live until now. This killing spree has stayed close to Washington in the Maryland suburbs and the district itself. Now it has jumped south into Virginia and the shooting zone is a 75-mile quarter

running more than halfway to Richmond. Late that night, the ATF analyzes the ballistics from the first six shootings. They identify the caliber 223, one of the most popular in the country. And more importantly, they conclude that the bullet fragments they have recovered were indeed fired from the same rifle.

The shootings are connected, even if the victims themselves are not. The ballistics lab confirms the bullet from Caroline's van matches the others. One rifle. Beltway killing spree is on the move.

“And what every trooper going out on the road is told to look for is a white van.”

After Sarah Ramos was killed, a lovely former law student who was shot in the head while sitting on a bench reading, a landscape or working nearby saw a white box truck speeding by, a dent in the back to men inside.

He never saw it fire a shot,

but it is the only description anyone has. So it becomes the description. Maryland alone has more than 70,000 white vans. Police stop as many of them as they can find, which means that of every vehicle on the road that October,

the safest one to be driving, may be an old blue Chevy Caprice. 19 years earlier in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, John Williams is a handsome 22-year-old who is known for keeping his word, and who knows exactly what to say to a woman.

John meets Milderit Resell in the fall of 1983. Right away, John tells her he has two sons, but that he is not married. At one point, he looks her straight in the eyes and says, "I'm looking for someone to share my life.

Milderit thinks I finally found a man."

It turns out John has two sons by two different women. He married the second one in 1981, and remains married to her when he meets Milderit. Her name is Carol. They live in a trailer outside town with her son, Lynburg.

Carol will one day describe her husband as a militaristic control nut. He will describe her as bulimic. Elderit finds out the truth, roughly two months into dating John, and she confronts him.

He begs her to wait for him. She agrees to remain friends, and he confides in her something humiliating. John cannot read. All he can write is his name, and nobody knows.

He says he developed a photographic memory, and would find and excuse to get friends to read things out loud to him. John is a sergeant in the Army National Guard serving one weekend a month. To join the regular Army, he has to sit for a battery of written tests. Milderit sees reading as a massive obstacle in John's life,

and she helps him. She explains how and why years later to A&E. "I was happy." He was trying to get into the military, but he couldn't read.

So I taught him how to read, so that he was able to be accepted, and that's when he moved to Washington State, and asked me to come with him. John sends Milderit a letter from Washington.

I can't do this without you. Just come inside the envelope is an airline ticket, and so, Milderit goes,

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Aqua True even comes with a 30-day best tasting water guarantee. That's aquatru.com, AQU-A, TRU.com, promo code MKC. John Devors' Carol in 1987, and Mary's Mildred the next year. They have three children, a boy, everyone calls Little John, and two girls, Selena, and Taliba.

They settle into coma in 1994, with $10,000 borrowed from their neighbors, they star a mobile car repair business called Express Cars/Truck Mechanic Inc. Mildred is listed as the president, John is the chief mechanic.

Their motto is, "The future is here now."

“What John cannot fix on site comes home with him.”

Soon the yard fills up with broken-down cars, bumpers, and engine parts. When they need an accountant, Mildred walks into a storefront in downtown to coma, advertising tax and bookkeeping services. The woman inside is Issa Nichols. She and Mildred are roughly the same age and hit it off,

talking for two hours the first time they meet.

Issa becomes their bookkeeper, and their business advisor, and eventually, Mildred's closest friend. They have a second business in Tacoma, too. A man named Felix teaches martial arts. John runs the business end, and Mildred keeps the books.

The family rents a small home with a one-car garage on South Ainsworth Street, two blocks from a city park with a spring-fed lake. For a while, a neighbor describes them as a model family. To people outside the family, John is charming, but inside the home, Mildred learns to be afraid.

“She later describes him, "Toying with her mind."”

One particular morning, I was at work. He walked in and he said, "I want to divorce." And I looked at him and just said, "Somebody just stabbed me." And I panicked. I went home and I was crying. Then John says, "No, I was just playing.

I just wanted to see your reaction."

Address vanishes, and he suggests she never had it.

A jacket turns up shredded, and he wonders why she would accuse him. Then he blames their little boy. He volunteers to fix a broken deadbolt, the same lucky jammed on purpose. He changes the phone number to the house and does not tell her. He needles her until she is shouting,

and then John goes quiet, asking her softly why she so upset, and what he could possibly have said. He would say, "I'm your God. You do what I tell you to do. I'm the God in His house." Mildred points to one night in the summer of 1997

as a dark turning point in their marriage. John's son, from his first marriage, 13-year-old Lindberg, has come from Louisiana to visit. As the summer ends, John decides he is not sending the boy back home. He says he believes Lindberg is being abused,

and he hires a lawyer and goes to court. A Tacoma judge orders John and Mildred to send the boy home. They buy him a plane ticket. The night before Lindberg's flight home, Mildred finds John packing a duffel bag as long as a twin bed.

"I'm running away with Lindberg," he says. Mildred tells him there's a court order and that he cannot do this. John pauses. Mildred is not convinced he'll do the right thing. She takes Lindberg and her own three children with John

into the second bedroom. She locks the door

and sits on the floor with her back against the door until morning. By daylight, John has realized he's lost this fight. He joins Mildred in the car driving Lindberg to the airport. No one speaks. They walk the boy all the way to the gate and watch his plane take off.

The moment its wheels leave the runway, John turns sharply and walks away. In the car he says one thing to Mildred, you didn't have my back. That Mildred says is when the relationship changed forever.

The marriage fully breaks down by the spring of 2000. John has moved out, they've been separated from months, and he is tapping her phone lines, falsely accusing Mildred of having an affair.

John shows up to see their son who is sick.

“Mildred will not let him in. She's scared of him.”

He shoves the door so hard that Mildred is thrown to the floor. She jumps up and takes a swing at him. Mrs. She has shocked at her own actions. She sees the expression on his face and thinks he is going to kill me. A few days later, John comes back to the house.

He is nicely dressed in a shirt and tie. He says he wants to talk and they step out to the garage. As he speaks, she sees the cold fury in his eyes. He told me, you have become my enemy, and as my enemy, I will kill you.

John has always told Mildred that his word is his bond.

She believes him. Mildred goes straight away to the police department and fills out the four-page form, asking for a restraining order, trying so hard, her tears drip onto the pages. On the day of the hearing, her legs shake as she walks into the building.

She stands where she can watch every door,

“and in her mind she plans and escape route.”

But John does not show up. The judge reads the forms that she filled out and says, "You need to get away from this guy. Yes, sir," she says. "I'm trying."

With that, the judge grants Mildred a lifetime protection order. Even so, Mildred later agrees to let John see his children.

On Monday, March 27th, 2000, John calls and asks to take the children to an arcade.

Mildred agrees on one condition. All three have to be home by 530 for their grandmother's birthday dinner. John agrees, 530 comes and the children are not home. John calls later in the evening. He says there's a new plan with the children.

Then, another after that, they do not come home that night. They will not come home for 17 months. "I call the police," and he said, "I'm sorry. It's nothing we can do."

“"He has just says much right to the children I should do."”

"And they left." Within a day with $521 emptied out of the children's own bank accounts, a man named Thomas Allen Lee, aka John Williams,

is on a plane to the Caribbean with his three kids,

also now with new names. They land in Antiga on the 28th of March with false Wyoming identification. Antiga is a small island in the Caribbean, and their John Williams goes into business, selling forged papers to people trying to reach America.

A passport, a birth certificate, a social security number, a visa. Antiga authorities will later estimate he made more than $60,000 with the scheme. To the families who take him in, what is visible is a devoted father, a man who checks his children's schoolwork, and takes them to the beach.

But the people around him start noticing something strange. The children answer two different names on different days. Part of John's business is getting his customers onto flights into the United States. He buys their tickets himself, sometimes thousands of dollars worth at a time.

An American Airlines ticket agent catches onto the scheme. On March 11, 2001, John tries to buy yet another ticket for a customer under a false name. The airline calls the police. Officers come to the airport and search John. They find a forged Washington state driver's license, and a Florida birth certificate.

John is arrested and jailed at police headquarters in the Antiga capital city of St. John's. Two days later, he escapes. According to government reports, there's a gross lack of security, and John's escape amounts to simply walking out of the police station.

The arrest does not slow John's forgery business a beat. He recruits a teenage boy whom he met on Antiga to help keep the business running. John leaves the island often. He is escorting his customers into the United States, routing them through Puerto Rico and the Virgin Islands,

posing as a family member. Every day, this teenage assistant walks 12 miles from St. John's to a safe house, where John has moved the children. The boy gives them four hours of lessons, and then takes them to the park.

The boy's name is Lee Boyd, Melville. John Allen Williams, meanwhile, has gone back to Tacoma, Washington. On April 23, 2001, he walks into a Pierce County District Court into coma, Washington,

and petitions to officially change his name. Okay, Mr. Williams. We're just thinking to have your name change. Just that. What is your current legal name?

My current legal name is John Allen Williams.

And what is the new name by which you wish to be known?

John Allen, my home.

“And why do you desire to be known by this new name?”

For a religion purpose. Are you changing your name for any other reason? Come on. Are you changing your name to deep broader misnading person or creditor? No, no.

I involved in any legal proceeding other than this name change. And have you ever been convicted of a felony? No, no. Are you under supervision of any probation department that requires you to report a change of interest?

How could we have your name changed? John laughs aloud at how simple the process is.

The next day, the state of Washington issues him a driver's license

in the name of John Allen Muhammad. A month later, he flies back to Antiga using his new legal name and checks into a beach resort. On October 6, 2002,

“Montgomery County Police Chief Charles Moose walks up to the microphones”

with the cameras rolling trying to put the public's fears at ease. He points out a pattern in the shooter's targets thus far. None of the victims have been of anything close to school age. None of the locations are close to the schools. So please continue with that day.

I think the school kids are safe. The next morning, that all changes. Iron Brown has been banned from his school bus for three days for eating twizzlers. He is 13 years old, an eighth grader at Benjamin Tasker Middle School

in Bowie, Maryland. And on the morning of Monday, October 7th, he is not sure whether the three days are up or not. So his Antania drives him to school. She's a nurse at Children's Hospital in Washington.

At 809 AM, they pull into the driveway and Iron gets out, his backpack over a white football jersey. As his Ant begins to pull away, she hears a boon and a child scream, and then Iron shouting. Antania, she stops and looks back.

Iron is on the ground. A single 2-2-3 caliber round has hit Iron in the upper left of his abdomen, tearing through a lung, his spleen, stomach, liver, and pancreas. A teacher standing in the doorway runs to him. What's wrong the teacher says?

I've been shot. Are you kidding? He is not kidding. His Ant has back to the car up by now. Iron gets to his feet.

Tells her again that he's been shot. And she can see the blood on his shirt. He walks back to the car himself and gets in. His Ant buckles his seat belt dials 9-1-1 and drives.

By that evening, the story is on every channel in the country. The boy suffered a wound consistent with a high-powered rifle.

After several hours of surgery, he is critical but stable.

The surgeon who operates on him is Dr. Martin Eichelberger, Chief of Pediatric Surgery at Children's National. They open Iron's chest. They treat the injured left lung. Take out his smashed spleen.

Repair a nicked pancreas and elacerated stomach. And then with the ATF waiting outside the operating room. Eichelberger looks at the x-ray and puts a finger on the boy's chest wall. And I look at the x-ray and put my finger down where I thought the bullet was. And yes, I could palpate it with my finger.

I was able to pull out this bullet. I gave it specifically to Dr. Newman, who gave it to a specific person to make sure that that chain of evidence was kept intact. Iron Brown lives barely. The detectives hunting the shooters are now certain they are watching the news.

David Reckonbaugh is a lieutenant with the Maryland State Police, running criminal intelligence on the case. He describes that day years later to investigation discovery. Chief Mus was trying to set parents at ease. But the snipers were listening to every word that the media was putting out there.

“And I believe they heard Chief Mus say that the children would be safe.”

And they took that as a challenge. That afternoon, Chief Mus walks back out to the cameras. A tear runs down the chief's face on live television. A stranger watching from across the country puts up $50,000 of his own money toward catching whoever did this.

Miles away, Mildred Muhammad hears about the boy the same way everyone else does. I thought about his mom how she must be in so much pain. I was really sad for him and his family. No one is sure where the shot that hit Iron came from. So the US marshals bring in a dog.

His name is Beacon. He is half black lab and half golden retriever. And he flunked out of guide dog school before somebody trained him to sniff explosives. Beacon and his handler, deputy marshal Michael Pio, go into the dense woods north of the school

Pio is ducking through the underbrush when one of the swat officers calls out.

Hey, look at your dog.

“Beacon is standing up on his hide legs with his nose against a tree branch.”

Then he sits down, which is how he says yes.

Pio identifies this tree as the perfect spot to take the shot

on Iron Brown and the ground is disturbed as though someone had lain there a while waiting. Prince George's county brings in a bloodhound named Miss Deminer.

“She takes a trail out of the woods along the tennis court into a parking lot and stops.”

That is where the scent ends. So police walk the trail again slowly and ATF agencies something in the underbrush. It is the death card from the writer-weight tarot deck, a skeleton in black armor on a white horse. The Roman numeral 13 at the top and the word death along the bottom.

“Written on the front in blue ink is the phrase Call Me God.”

On the back three more messages at the top for you, Mr. Police. In the middle, code Call Me God and at the bottom a warning, do not release to the press. Drew Tracy, the assistant chief of the Montgomery County police describes it this way. It was almost like a calling card saying that it's us again and we did it. At that point in time they did not ask for anything and that's a scary situation.

They put the card in an evidence bag, then they hold the bag open and let the bloodhound smell the inside of it. She traces the scent along the same trail as before. Officers find a 2-2-3 caliber rifle casing nearby. This is from their guy.

The tarot card marks the first time the shooters spoke directly to the police but it certainly would not be the last.

A cryptic message from the killer or killers as more shots ring out across DC. How the twisted relationship between Muhammad and Malvo evolves into a lethal partnership. That's next time on MK Confidential.