John Allen Muhammad [07]

Police finally have names in the D.C. Sniper case. So who is John Allen Muhammad? [This episode contains stories of domestic abuse. If you or someone you know may be experiencing domestic abuse, you can call the domestic violence hotline at 1-800-799-7233 or visit the website thehotline.org.]

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster DZ Sniper, a production of I Heart
Radio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in
this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or
individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those
of I Heart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. This
episode contains stories of domestic abuse. If you are someone

(00:21):
you know maybe experiencing domestic abuse, you can call the
Domestic Violence Hotline at one eight hundred seven nine nine
seven two three three, or visit the website the hotline
dot org. Listener discretion is advised when you meet someone

(00:43):
for the first time, you always put your best foot forward.
You don't want that person to know all of your flaws,
and you don't want them to think badly about you
because you're really interested in that person, and you hide
it as long as you can. I am Mildred Mohammed.
I'm an award winning global keynote speaker, and my former

(01:07):
husband was John Ali Mohammed, whom you all know to
be the DC Sniper. Everybody loved John because he was jovial.
He was that guy, that guy of if you needed something,
go to John. But he was not one to show
his emotions, so we're not showing his emotions. It was

(01:29):
difficult for people to read him, to understand exactly what
was going on with him. I believe he was always
that type of person that blew up. He was just
very good at concealing it. I believe going to Saudi
only intensify that to a whole different level. He received

(01:54):
artists to go to Desert Storm for the war, but
he comes back three months later because because he received
an injury. But then other stories began to come forward.
He was accused um trying to kill other soldiers. John

(02:16):
was a sergeant over a unit. A soldier challenged him
in front of others, and he felt humiliated. That soldier
that night was in charge of the explosives. John went
snuck into that area and stole a grenade. He threw

(02:41):
the grenade in the tent and jumped into his sleeping bag.
The grenade went off. He was accused of trying to
get back at that soldier that challenged him in front

(03:02):
of the other soldiers. They put him in a dungeon.
They hog tied him and left him there. And when
he comes back, it's not the same person. There is
a ruthless person on the loose. What un nerves this
community the most is the randomness of the murders, ordinary

(03:26):
people doing ordinary things. They killed the five people in
one day and then went on the rampage for the
next month. It is quite a mystery. The police say
they have never had a crime quite like this. Be careful,
these guys are using weapons that are gonna go right
straight through our bulletproof vest. From my Heart Radio and

(03:47):
Tenderfoot TV, this is monster DC Sniper. On the morning
of October two, these found the names of their first
real suspects in the DC sniper case. Authorities connected the
snipers to a Montgomery, Alabama liquor store shooting. At that

(04:10):
crime scene, police found a fingerprint. The FBI then matched
the fingerprint to a seventeen year old Jamaican boy named
Lee Boyd Malvo. He had been arrested in Washington State
in two thousand one on suspicions of illegal immigration. The
arrest report also listed another name, John Alan Mohammed. That

(04:33):
name set off alarm bells for police. Someone in Washington
State had called in a tip about a John Mohammed,
saying he might be involved in the DC sniper attacks.
So now Lee Boyd Malvo and John Mohammed were prime suspects.
Police quickly learned all they could about the pair, and

(04:54):
here's what they discovered. John Mohammed was born John Williams
on Year's Eve nineteen sixty and grew up in Baton Rouge, Louisiana.
In the fall of when Williams was twenty two, he
met a young woman named Mildred Green. Mildred was twenty three,
the next cheerleader and devout Baptist who lived with her mom.

(05:19):
I was walking to the store and my friend Valina
picked me up and she said, where are you going to?
I'm going to the store for my mom. And so
we pulled up at the corner store. She went in
and she came out with these two guys blewing up
and was John. And he put his head through the

(05:41):
driver's side window and said, what is your name? I said?
Mildred said, I'm John. Would you like to go out tonight?
I said, I need to check my schedule, and in
our schedule I'm available at about seven. I said, okay,
I'll be able to pick you up. We went over
to Southern University. There was a couple of area over

(06:01):
by the river, Mississippi River, and we were just talking
and he says, so, are you saying it about it?
Said no, He said why not? So I'm waiting for
the right man to show up. He said, well he
just did. He said okay, So he dropped me off
at home, and then the next day he called and
so we just started talking and hanging out. He was

(06:22):
a welder, and excellent welder. What were the qualities of
the man that you found attractive? Well, he had a
beautiful smile, he was jovial, funny. He said what he meant,
and he meant what he said, and that's something that
most men don't do. Mildred had grown up without a
father and had never had a serious boyfriend. Most of

(06:44):
her ideas about relationships came from TV and movies. John
was romantic and said all the right things. About six
months in, my friend Valina came over and she said, so,
hw are you and John? I said, how We're good?
She said it? So you know he married? Right? What?
It turns out that John was already married to a

(07:07):
woman named Carol and they had a son named Lindbergh.
It was devastating for me to find out that he
was married but I knew I had to stay away
from him. I said, okay, I'm gonna break that off.
So finally I did. But then he came back and said,

(07:27):
I have some terrible news to tell you. Said, what's that?
He said, I can't read, and he couldn't. All he
could do is write his name. So he had adapted
as an adult to not being able to read. His
whole family didn't know he couldn't read. Nobody knew he
couldn't read. Mildred felt that John, who in many ways

(07:48):
was closed off, was finally opening up to her. She
cared deeply about John and wanted to help him. He said, well,
I want to go back in the military. So I
taught him how to eat enough to pass the test
to be reinstated in active duty. And after he passed
the test and say we're done, John enlisted in the

(08:11):
Army and was stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington. There John
qualified as an expert with an M sixteen, the army
standard infantry rifle. That rating is the Army's highest of
three levels of marksmanship for a typical soldier. So he
left went to Fort Louis, and he wrote me a
letter and said Hey, I can't do this without you.

(08:34):
I'll do whatever it takes for you to be with me.
Just come, and he sent an airline ticket and I left.
You love this man, I did absolutely with all of
my heart. I did, and I wanted to build a
life with him. And about three months later he got
a divorce and then we got married. It was a

(08:58):
sunny day. We was in Grace Chapel ahead on a
white dress. He was in dress blues ceremonial uniform for military.
Two years later, in January, John and Mildred had their
first child, John Jr. A little less than a year

(09:21):
after that, John was deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation
Desert Storm. He worked as a combat engineer and metal worker,
and it was here that Williams was said to have
thrown a grenade into the tent of a fellow soldier.
So they came and brought in investigators. The commander had

(09:42):
us to come to his office. John had his own
side of the story. According to that account, John had
previously approached an officer with complaints of racism from white soldiers.
John says those soldiers felt the need to retaliate, so
they created a phony age story to blame on him
and then his punishment. He was hog tied and humiliated,

(10:06):
and the commander said to John, we investigated your allegations. However,
when the investigators came to ask you questions, you didn't
answer them. I didn't know that, He said, soul Sarga Williams,
Why didn't you answer those questions? And John looked at

(10:30):
him and said, permission to be released. Commander said, permission granted,
and we got up and we left. After the commander
released him from the meeting, John stopped talking about the incident.
The military didn't keep any records of the event, so
all they had to go on were conflicting stories. No

(10:53):
official charges were ever made in the case. At first,
Mildred believed John's side of the story. She trusted her husband,
but years later, after she saw what John was capable of,
she came to believe that the other story was true,
that John had in fact tried to get back at
a fellow soldier using a thermite grenade. The issue fizzled out,

(11:18):
and John continued to serve in the military, but he
was growing disillusioned with it. After Desert Storm, Mildred says
John was a changed man. He was no longer jovial.
He didn't want to have those long conversations anymore. He
was just cut and dry. How are you doing fine?
Which up to nothing. All soldiers had come back from

(11:40):
a war zone, they always go to a hospital first
to just do a whole physical, just before they released
them back to their base. All I learned was that
he was diagnosed with PTSD. At that point in time,
post traumatic stress disorder or PTSD, was not a commonly
understood candition. PTSD can occur after a traumatic experience. It

(12:05):
can cause flashbacks of the trauma and create a heightened
sense of fear, and it can make people feel depressed
or detached. Many who experience PTSD also become irritable, aggressive,
or distrustful of others, which can lead to social isolation.
The only person he opened up to was our sun,
so when he came home, he just went immediately to

(12:27):
play with him. Most of his interactions was with our son.
But then his behavior became to be obsessive. So I
would buy dishes silver ware, he'd break all the dishes
except for three three plates, three saucers, three bowls. Well,
I finally asked them, so why do you keep breaking

(12:48):
all this stuff, because does that makeing sense? He said, well,
we don't need anybody else over here, sister three of us.
I said, but what if we have a party or
a company. We're not having a party and we're not
having a company. Mildred says John's erratic moods took a
huge mental toll on her. She was already raising a
child and working full time, and she was trying to

(13:08):
cope with John's strange behavior, but it was becoming harder
and harder. Still. He had never turned his anger towards
her directly until one afternoon when they went to a
nearby park. And this park you could rent a boat.
I said, you know, I want to get a boat

(13:29):
so little John can ride in the boat and see
what that's like. He turned to me with the coldest
look in his eyes, is just empty, and he said,
we're not going to do that. Scared me and I
just shut down. It was painful the way he looked

(13:52):
at me and talked to me. He had never done
it before ever. So we went home and I went
straight to the bathroom. Me locked the door and I
stayed in there all day. I didn't get anything to eat.
I didn't get anything to drink. I was so hurt.
I was just devastated. I was hurt. I could hear

(14:14):
little John at the door, crying, Mommy, please come out, Mommy,
please come out. I drew a bath, I said, in
the tub. And so when I finally did come out,
he was sleeping on the floor right by the door,
and he woke up and looked at me. He said, Immy,
you're okay. I'm saying, Mommy's fine. Now say mommy's scared me.
I said, don't ever be scared of me. I just

(14:36):
needed some time to myself. How did John respond? How
did you respond to your hurt? He waited until that
morning and came and apologized to me, said he didn't
know what came over him, and he was really sorry.
I said, don't you ever ever talk to me like
that again. The relationship normalized for a while. It was

(15:13):
now early in and the family was back in Tacoma, Washington.
They'd had a daughter, Selena, and Mildred was pregnant with
their second daughter, Taliba. On the surface, things look calm,
but John was growing more disillusioned with the military and
he'd gotten into trouble again. John was brought up on

(15:36):
charges for threatening to kill his first sergeant. He told
the first sergeant, I'll kill you, your wife and everybody
in their line. He had an attorney, military attorney. We
went in to talk to her about the case, and
as they're talking, she looks at me and she said,

(15:57):
you don't know anything that's going on, do you? I
said no, I am I done. And so she asked him,
why haven't you told your wife what's going on with
this case? He said, because she's a part of the
establishment and she doesn't have my back. What has she
done to make you feel that way? And he said nothing,
I just don't want her to enough. According to Mildred,

(16:18):
what turned the case was the defense attorney was asking
the first sergeant what happened, and he couldn't recall, and
so the verdict came back not guilty. John was happy.
He said he knew that he was not going to
be found guilty, and he apologized for not telling me

(16:39):
about the whole case, but he said, because you were
pregnant with Taliba, and I didn't want those emotions to
affect our child. Eventually, John was honorably discharged from the military.
During this period, John and Mildred had also been introduced

(16:59):
to Theation of Islam. The Nation is an African American
religious and political group based on the Muslim faith. It
was started in the nineteen thirties and then was popularized
by Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Mildred converted first in
and John followed in. The Nation of Islam has been

(17:20):
heavily criticized for promoting anti white and anti Semitic ideology,
but Mildred says the Nation does not teach people to
hate those of other races or beliefs. Rather, it helped
her understand her role as a black woman in society,
and it gave her greater insight into the Bible and
the Koran. Everyone has their own spiritual path, and that

(17:42):
was the one that I chose because I needed clarity
on who God is, where is my position, who I am,
and where I needed to be in the type of
mother that I wanted to be to my children. So
with him join a year later than that was just
what he decided to do, and then he would go

(18:05):
to the Brothers meetings and do what they do. After
John left the military, he needed work. They decided to
use John's background fixing vehicles in the military to start
a unique auto mechanic business. Instead of operating from a shop,
John would go directly to the customer's car. He would

(18:25):
either work on it there or take it back to
his home garage. The business started off well, but John
and Mildred needed help with the bookkeeping. I was working
one day and a woman walks through my door. Her
name was Mildred Mohammed. She was the spouse of John Mohammed.
They just converted from Williams to Mohammed. Ice and Nichols

(18:48):
ran a business development at accounting company. Mildred saw an
ad for it and sought her out specifically, I would
say pute an hour and a half into our meeting
for the first time, she wanted to do business with me.
They had started a business of repairing cars. The second

(19:09):
meeting was to do more of an intake with them,
and so her husband was present at our second meeting.
This is when Issa met John for the first time,
and he walked in the door. He was very tall,
quite handsome and had a very hard handshake, very direct,
look you straight in the eye, short haircut. You can

(19:30):
tell he had been in the military. Very polite, called
me sister, which is a term of endearment in the
black community. He was very glad to meet me. He
was very glad to be doing business with another sister.
Mildik Mohammed was the administrator. She was the one who
would be dispatching and taking the calls for services, and

(19:51):
John would go out and do the work. Mildid and
I usually were the ones talking. We became friends, more
so in John and I. We had some commonalities. Her
husband was stationed at Fort Lewis, My husband was stationed
at Fort Louis. She related to her husband. She was

(20:11):
very respectful. She was very humble with him. He referred
to her as you know, his wife, his loving wife.
Very promising in the beginning, but soon I SA began
to notice things about John and Mildred's relationship, strange things.
In the summer, John's son from his previous marriage, Lindbergh,

(20:36):
came to visit Tacoma from Louisiana. He didn't want to
return home. He said there was abuse in different things
and he was afraid to go back home. Mildred talked
to me about it in terms of what should she do,
and I said, you gonna have to send him back
to his mother. Mildred says, John was adamant that they
keep Lindburgh. John was worried that Lindbergh really was being

(20:59):
abused in Louisiana, so he got a lawyer and went
to court, hoping to gain custody of Lindburg. And I
said to him, what you're doing is wrong. Carol was
calling and he wouldn't talk to her. I said, you
need to talk to her. This is not your decision
to make on your own, and you need to get

(21:19):
some background as to what is really happening with Lindburgh.
But when John went to court, the judge in Washington
said that he didn't have jurisdiction, and so John had
to send Lindbergh back home. So that night I came
back from a mosque meeting and John had this huge

(21:42):
guffle bag as long as a twin bed packing. John,
Selena and Talibo were just sitting on a bed and
Lindberg two And I said, so, what's what's going on here?
He said, well, I'm running with Lynn. No you're not.
Why would you need to run with Lynn because he's

(22:05):
been abused and I need to protect him, I say,
but the judge said, he needs to go home. Tomorrow,
and you're gonna run with him and leave me and
the children destitute. Is that what you're telling me? Well,
I just need to protect my son and say no,

(22:27):
you need to take land back, and he's leaving tomorrow.
So I took Lynn and the children. We went in
the second bedroom and I locked the door, and I
packed lens back and I sat on the floor with
my back to the door so that he could not

(22:49):
get in. And when daylight came, we all got dressed
and we got in the car and John was sitting
on the sofa, and when we passed by, I said,
are you coming to the airport to see your son off?
And he said yeah. So I drove. The children were

(23:11):
in the back, laughing and talking with Lynn, and the
whole time he's just looking straight ahead. So we checked
him in. We walked him to the gate and we
watched the plane take off, and John did a right face,
just like he was in the military, just the right face,

(23:31):
and walked off. And when we got back in the
car and he said you didn't have my back, I said,
I was not about to watch you take Limberd away
from her for no reason. And that is when the

(23:52):
relationship changed. The incident with Lindberg was just the beginning.
Soon other people began to notice odd things about John
and Mildred's relationship. They didn't fight a lot, but they
did fight. Sure, there was a couple of times that

(24:12):
it would be right there and you would just kind
of hear the attitude in the voices. This is Felix
Stroosure in Tacoma. He and John had opened a martial
arts business together. Felix was the martial artist and John
was the businessman. Mildred helped out with the bookkeeping, so
Felix regularly saw the couple interact. You know, I think

(24:36):
that they kept a lot of this stuff hit. I
knew that they had problems, but not to the git
that it went. It went too far. Despite the tension
with Mildred, Felix says that John loved his kids more

(24:57):
than anything. I remember one of them he would always
have in his arms. Any little kid sometime will start
to play in class or something. But the thing is
all John would have to do is just look. Their
eyes just had to meet, and little John knew to

(25:17):
just get it together. I've never seen him spank him
or anything, but when I did see the eye contact.
I knew that it had been some work to make
that happen. You know, little kids, they have to learn
to look for that look. But I think he had
a good relationship with him. He loved him. But Felix

(25:43):
says that John also had a darker sign. On one occasion,
Felix noticed that John had taken a liking to a
young female student, and then she stopped coming to class,
presumably to avoid John. Even still, Felix has that John
would go over to her house. This might have been
something that I should have paid attention to, because if

(26:07):
I remember right, it was almost like in a stocking way.
I believe that she said that he would show up
when he wanted to. That was a problem. I misread
his character. He had some issues. Those issues would become

(26:29):
consistent and soon escalate even further. Here's Ice and Nichols again.
After the third year of being their clients, it became
apparent to me that there were some tensions going on
with John and Mildred. Through the business. There were calls

(26:53):
from clients that John was missing appointments. Mildia didn't know
his whereabouts, why he was missing appointments. He would be gone.
She had a list where he was supposed to go
for the day, and then she started getting phone calls
of him not being there, then waiting for him to drive.

(27:15):
All of this information I got from Mildred telling me
about calls she received. One of those calls was from
a woman who wanted to speak to the owner. The
woman told Mildred that she wanted to report inappropriate sexual
advances made to her from John for repair of the car.

(27:43):
So there there's an indudication that there's infidelity. This woman
is calling saying that John is making sexual advances toward
her in lieu of payment. She reaches out to me
because she trust is me. I'm her business consultant. This
is a business issue. And she was like, well what

(28:04):
do I do? This is serious, And I said, well,
you have to talk to your husband. You have to
make him aware of this client calling with this information.
For Mildred, this is her husband, father of her children.
She's devastated. She didn't know how to handle it. She
she emotionally reached out to me because she was hurt

(28:27):
and because she also as a businesswoman, had to respond
to this woman. Mildred wasn't comfortable talking to the young
woman who made these claims, so Mildred asked her friend
Stanley to go investigate for her. So he went to
talk to the young lady and she said that John
had been over there all the time, spent Christmas and Thanksgiving,
and even the little boy, who was I think three

(28:49):
or four knew him. He came back to me, he said, so, Mildred,
and this is what I found out. So what we're
gonna do. I say, well, what we're gonna do is
we want to confront John because I still gotta on
his business. So Mildred finally approached John and he said, oh,
she's lying, she's there, She's that. But I didn't believe him.

(29:10):
I asked him for a divorce. I said, you acting free,
you may as well be free. They agreed to separate,
but John didn't want a divorce, and although they hadn't
settled on rules for seeing the kids, John moved out
of the house, but he still had a key to
the house, so he would come in in the middle

(29:31):
of the night. I could hear the key going in
the door. He would walk back to the bedroom side.
Opened my eye to a slither. Watch him walk into
the room from one side of the bed to the
other lean over to listen to me breathe, stand up

(29:53):
and leave out of the rock. He did that three times.
The third time, Taliba woke up and said Daddy, and
he picks her up and says, here's Taliba, and then
he leaves. So that's when I decided to get the
locks changed. Even though they were separated, Mildred and John

(30:20):
tried to make the mechanic business work, but soon it
began to fall apart. Here's Ice and Nichols again. I
got a call from Mildred. She wanted to inform me
that they were no longer be able to afford to
utilize my services anymore. I felt really sad. She says,

(30:42):
we're not making the money. She says, I don't know
where John is half the tie. She's told me that
he sometimes will leave for two or three days. I
don't have any more control, and so she didn't know
how the business would survive without John. M m Mildred

(31:21):
says the mechanic business was no longer important to John.
All he cared about was getting back into the house
and back into the family, and he was determined. On
one faithful night, Mildred learned how dangerous her husband truly was.
He came over and said, we need to talk. My

(31:43):
brother was there, so I felt I was safe. We're
going to garage. So he says, you are not going
to raise my children by yourself. John said you have
become my enemy, and as my enemy, I will kill you.

(32:04):
I said, well, I've been sleeping with the enemy all
this time. What else you gonna do? He charges at me.
I ran around him into the house where my brother
was and he leaves and I tell my brother. I said,
John's gonna kill me. He's gonna kill me. He said, girl,
John not gonna kill you. I never went to my

(32:26):
brother again for help because he didn't believe me. John's
model was one shot, one kill to the head, never
leave an enemy behind. He was a man of his word.
He was going to kill me, and it was going
to be a head shot, and he was going to

(32:49):
bury me where no one would be able to find me.
And I could not get anybody to believe me. Nobody.
Mildred was thoroughly terrified of John. She went to the

(33:11):
courthouse the next morning to get a restraining order against him.
Judge say, you really need to get away from this guy.
I say, your honor. I am really trying to do that.
He saw the escalation and how dangerous John was for me,
and he gave me a lifetime restraint in order, but

(33:33):
still had to have visitation with the children. So we
had to set up for someone to pick up the children,
take them to John, and bring them back, and so
we found somebody to do that. The first weekend went fine.
Second weekend was my mom's birthday, March to I said.

(33:54):
Nichols dropped in that evening to see Mildred and to
tell her mother Happy birthday. I expected to see the children.
I expected to see mom. I expected to see John.
When I got there, the children weren't there. John wasn't there.
Mildred's mother was in the back room, and her brother

(34:15):
was there, who was a truck driver and he was
in town. So I got in and I took my
shoes off, and I said, hey, how's it going. She's like, well,
it's my mom's birthday and we're waiting on John to
bring the children back. They should have been back by now.
And I said, okay, So you know, I kick off
my shoes and I sit on the couch and I
wait with her. When her brother left she sits down,

(34:39):
and she tells me at that time that they were separated.
She told me that John would come and get the
children on the weekend, and she told me that she
was filing for a divorce. She told me she had
problems because John was trying to get back with her,

(35:03):
meaning to stop her filing of the divorce. She shared
with me times that he was angry and forced his
way into the house. Time had went by. It is
six o'clock. I've been there a couple of hours, and

(35:23):
then just at that point, I feel attention. Mildred was
getting worried. The children were supposed to be home hours
ago and she hadn't heard from John. We didn't have
cell phones back then like we do now. We had pages.
So I'm blowing up his pager. Seven thirty he calls,
My son is on the line. I said to extra Dad,

(35:46):
what time are you coming home? Say mom? Dad say,
will be there in an hour. I say, where are
you anyway? He said, well, we're at Kmart, which was
literally fifteen minutes away. When a thirty comes to no children,
blowing up his page drinking at eleven thirty five pm,
he calls and he says we're en route from Seattle.

(36:11):
Will be there shortly. She hung up that phone and
she looked at me and she said, something is wrong.
Something is wrong, and she began to pace back and forth.
I know now that something really is wrong because of
what she just shared with me. I stayed at their

(36:32):
house till ten o'clock, almost eleven o'clock. Mildred's making phone
calls asking people have they seen John and the children.
I go home. I called her one more time before
I got ready to go to bed. I laid there.
She says, no, she says, my children are gone. I
see what do you mean? She said, my children are gone.

(36:55):
He took them. The children never came home that night.
The next morning, Mildred started calling around looking for them.
So I'm thinking maybe he took the children to school.
Because it's a mother. I went to the school. I
talked to secretary. She said, no, ma'am, your children have
not checked in. She looked at me because every time

(37:17):
they saw me, I was smiling. I wasn't smiling because mommy,
what's the matter. And it was the first time I cried.
I said John took the children, and she said, let's
go in the bathroom. Wash your face, go home, call
the police. Mildred did go home, and her mom was
waiting for her, hoping for some good news. And when

(37:39):
she saw me come around the corner without my children,
she let out a scream. I had never heard my
mother scream before, and I ran to her before she
hit the ground because she was she was going there
and she said, he took our babies. It took babies.

(38:00):
I said, I know, Mom, So what are we gonna do?
I said, I don't know, but I'm gonna do something.
So I called a police. They took a report. She
gave him pictures of her children. John had taken the
children and vanished. The police told Mildred that since John

(38:23):
had shared custody of the children, the incident couldn't be
filed as a kidnapping. John had just as much right
to the kids as she did, and that meant there
would be no criminal investigation. She's learning all of this,
and she is spiraling emotionally every day because she doesn't
know where her babies are. Then John began to call her,

(38:46):
and he began in this crazy, diabolical take me back
or you will never see the children. That's when it began.
She would plead job, please just bring the children back,
and he would constantly hold those children and threatened that
she would never see the children again if she didn't

(39:08):
take him back. Over time, we find out that this
was strategic. John had taken money out of the accounts,
emptied the mouth, emptied the children savings. Accounts out that
he had actually planned this, and here he has the money,
he has the children, and she has nothing. Mildred says

(39:35):
she got so depressed that she lost all desire to eat.
I was eating a half a slice of bread and
crushed ice. That was it, just enough to sustain me.
I was signing for a package from my mom on
Mother's Day and I passed up. Shortly thereafter, I got

(39:57):
a phone call and it's from Mildred's other and Mildred's
mom says that Mildred's in the hospital and if I
could go and check on Mildred for her. I go,
and Mildred's in the emergency room. I walk into the
room and I see Mildred and I grabbed her hand

(40:20):
and she opens her eyes. She looks at me and
she starts apologizing to me. She starts crying, saying she's sorry.
I tried to take care of myself. I tried because
those are the things that I would talk to her about.
It's like, where are you gonna be when the children
are found? Are you gonna be in the psych ward?

(40:42):
She just was surviving. The phone rings. Mildred answers the
phone and it's John. Mildred is hooked up to ivs
and monitors and it's John on the phone. She's screaming,
let me see the children. John, please don't take the children.
He's saying, take me back if I don't get to

(41:06):
come back home, you don't get to see the children.
And she's screaming and she's begging, and all of a
sudden she flips out. The I v s are coming
out of her arms. The monitors are going crazy beeping
and stuff, and the staff comes into the room. I'm
backed up against the corner while they work on her

(41:27):
and calm her down. They end up giving her a
sedative and she finally is sedated enough where she's not
kicking and screaming, and they have to put those things
back in her arm because she had pulled him out.
She was so scared. Mildred was in her lowest place.

(41:48):
She hadn't seen or heard from her children in nearly
two months, and she was about to learn that her
life was in serious danger. My mother called the hospital
shortly thereafter and told them that John just called her
and said he was on his way to the hospital

(42:09):
to kill me. A social worker came and said, you
can't go back home because we have to put you
in hiding so that John will not find and kill you.
So they waited till it got dark, brought me to close,
took me out of the back door of the hospital.

(42:33):
They told me I needed to slouch down in the
car so no one could see that I was in
the car. But I watched the rooftops and I was
watching the open windows because I knew it was gonna
be a head shot, just as sure as I'm sitting
here talking to you, I knew it was gonna be
a head shot. Mildred made it safely to a shelter.

(42:57):
She stayed there for a few months before relocating to
Maryland to stay with some family. It appeared as though
John was nowhere to be found. So where was he
and where were the children? It seemed like nobody knew,
but thousands of miles away, someone did know the Jamaican
boy whose fingerprints had been found during the Sniper investigation,

(43:21):
Lee boyd Malvo. He gave me his time. He was consistent,
even though the consistency was mad. If he was consistent
next time. On Monster d C Sniper, this is a

(43:44):
very rare time where you're able to understand how an
individual develops from the day he's born to the day
he was arrested for one of the most sensational crimes
of modern time. It's all over the world who are fatherless,
who are not in school, who have no role model,

(44:06):
who feel like they have no purpose. It's so easy
for a gang leader or even an organization like Isis
to recruit and to give them a sense of purpose.
He didn't have his parents, he didn't have any structure,
and all he had was instability. I mean, I have
no one. So it probably had a traumatic impact on him,

(44:33):
knowing that this was going to be how my life is.
I'm going to find a way, because if I don't
find a way, I'm Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen
episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris and produced by iHeart

(44:54):
Radio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are
executive producers on behalf of I Heart Radio, alongside producers
Trevor Young, ben Kiebrick, and Josh than Payne. Lindsay and
Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV
alongside producers Meredith Steadman and Christina Dana. Original music is

(45:14):
by Makeup and Vanity Set. The audio you heard of
Lee Boyd Malvo in this episode comes from a two
thousand twelve interview by journalist Josh White. That audio was
provided courtesy of The Washington Post. If you haven't already,
be sure to check out the first two seasons at
Lanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have
questions or comments, email us at Monster at iHeart media

(45:38):
dot com, or you can call us at one eight
three three to eight five six six six seven. Thanks
for listening.