February 13, 2020 • 36 mins
After Police found a fingerprint at an Alabama crime scene, they got the name Lee Boyd Malvo. So who is this 17 year old from Jamaica?
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster d Z 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 iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. Three weeks into the d C Sniper investigation,
(00:24):
police connected a fingerprint from an Alabama crime scene to
two names, John Ali Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. Last episode,
we explored mohammed story. After his wife asked for a divorce,
he disappeared with his three children. This episode. Who was
Lee Boyd Malvo, the seventeen year old from Jamaica and
(00:46):
how was he connected to Mohammed? At the time, investigators
were stumped, but years later we finally started to get
the answers. Many of those answers came from the work
of criminologist and criminal profiler Anthony Meoli. Me only spent
nine years corresponding with Lee and listening to his side
of the story. Me Only recorded a series of phone
(01:10):
calls with Lee titled Interview with the DC Sniper, which
you will hear clips from throughout this episode. Lee also
wrote an autobiography, which me only helped edit and publish.
Dire The DC Snipers say, verbatim transcript from Lee Boyd Malvo,
word for word, this is a very rare time where
(01:31):
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 our modern time.
The takeaway from it is not the grizzly nature of
what happened at the end, but what led him to that.
(01:57):
Lee boy Malvo was born February eighteen in Kingston, Jamaica.
He was born to Leslie Malvo and Una James, his mother.
He took the name Malvo from his father, but they
were never formally married, at least according to Lee. At
the time Lee was born, his mom was twenty one
(02:18):
and his father was thirty seven, so there was a
sixteen year age gap in Kingston That wasn't tremendously unusual,
but that separation of age did lead to many differences
between how their relationship developed. Lee remembers his father, Leslie,
as kind and permissive. Lee says he spent his early
(02:40):
years on a tricycle and Leslie would pull him through
the neighborhood by a rope tied to the tricycles handlebars.
Lee's mother, Una, on the other hand, was the disciplinarian.
Una was very strict in many ways. She would be calm,
cool and collected one moment, and then violent the next.
(03:02):
Lee told me only that when his mother got angry,
she would sometimes beat him to the point of drawing blood.
At the same time, she did care for him, and
she did provide for the family, but she was gone
most of the time, so it would not be unusual
for Lee to be fending for himself at a very
young age. One day, while she was out at work,
(03:26):
he was left alone, and he was awfully young. He
was five six years old. She had some jade figurines
that she kept around the house. There were small, trivial
objects to some, but to her they meant something. He
was planing with an airplane and running around the house
and bumped into one of these jade figurines and it broke.
(03:51):
Before she comes from he was expecting a beating. He
knew she was going to hit him, and hit him hard.
You do how, She shouted me a charge of door.
She came home in a rage and was about to
wail off on Lee, and his father stepped in and
(04:15):
he grabbed me up. He said, this is the person.
This is the thing that can be replayed. You know,
this is a thing pointing to the object, and this
is your son, and you need to be able to
separate those two right now. Whether that message rang true
with Una remains unclear. My father was like, he was
(04:38):
my protected because people always know what to do or
what to say in those moments. It really stuck with
him that this is what a father does. A father
protects his child. And he had some fond memories of
his father until eventually his father left him, and that's
(04:59):
one thing started to go sour. There is a ruthless
person on the loose. What n nerves this community the
most is the randomness of the murders, ordinary 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
(05:20):
never had a crime quite like this. Be careful, these
guys are using weapons that are going to go right
straight through our bulletproof vest. From My Heart Radio and
Tenderfoot TV, this is monster, DC sniper criminologist Anthony Meolie
(05:42):
has made a career of interviewing some of America's most
heinous criminals. I literally have spoken or written to over
three serial killers. What I find most interesting about them
is that they are people. I don't harp on the
horrific nature of their crimes, but rather try to learn
who they were and how the crimes came about. Me
(06:04):
only says people often completely right off killers. It's just
evil people or monsters. But he thinks that's a mistake.
As soon as we find out who did it, we
can't get enough of how evil or how monstrous this
person is without understanding what it was that brought the
person to that particular moment in time. Unfortunately, they are
(06:26):
not monsters, they are not some mystical beasts. Unfortunately, these
are human beings with human DNA, and we have to
be willing to accept that and understand that. Just as
there are some fantastic human beings who do some incredible
things and change people's lives, there are other human beings
(06:47):
who go down a wrong path and take people's lives.
It's not to condone what they did. Make no mistake there.
It's not to condone at all what they did. As
a criminologist, me only thinks that if we want to
prevent these sorts of crimes from happening in the future,
we need to understand the people that commit them and
examine their lives. That's why he's corresponded with so many
(07:10):
serial killers. Meoli was particularly interested to speak with Lee
Boyd Malvo. He first wrote to Lee in two thousand three,
but starting a correspondence proved challenging. Letters that I sent
would be mailed back and saying the inmate is not here.
So it took a while, and it wasn't until May
of two thousand five where I received his first letter.
(07:33):
What was interesting was it was a two page letter,
handwritten in black ink. Normally it takes a long time
for many of these individuals to trust others, but me
Oli says Lee's first letter to him, it was different.
It was very personal. I think that's what struck me.
He even left the letter by saying, wherever you want
(07:56):
to go from here, I'm willing to go with you.
So that's sort of where it all began. We were
corresponding one to two letters a week. We did that
for about four years and then I had the ability
to speak to him on the phone. My first phone
call with him was in two thousand ten. It struck
(08:18):
me immediately how intelligent he actually was. His formal education
stopped far before college, but he was far more well
read than most of those who I knew who held
master's degrees. Maybe the single most well read individual out
of over three d inmates that I have written to
(08:40):
during these years of communicating back and forth. Me Only
says Lee asked him to help edit and publish his autobiography.
Me only agreed what came across with Lee Boyd Malvo's intellect,
his ability to jump from topic to topic. He knew
anything and everything about anything related to the weather, It
(09:01):
could be related to inmate rights, it could be related
to racial tensions, and that was one dynamic that we
talked a lot about. As a Caucasian male, obviously we
came from two different worlds. Zara Burden is a journalist
and host of the Jamaican news program eighteen Degrees North.
She was also interested in understanding Lee Boyd Malvo's roots.
(09:24):
Oh well. First interview back in two thousand thirteen was
an interview with Lee Boyd Malvo. He agreed to do
the interview, he said, because it was allowing him to
speak to his Jamaican people. You know, it's a strange
kind of thing. Jimmy cons are four jammy cons. We
cost each other on this rock, but we back the
(09:45):
best of us and we disgrace together the worst of us.
It was important for us to understand how somebody raised
on our soil could leave here and go to the
United States, where most Jamaicans go to become prosperous, and
he instead of going that route, he instead chose to
(10:08):
kill Americans. And we don't have any hate for Americans.
We love Americans in Jamaica. So why would you be
motivated to carry out such an atrocity on your fellow man?
That was the big question, he explained. Violence was something
that occurred constantly. This is criminologist Anthony me only again.
(10:33):
So there will often be one or two parents on
a whole block watching kids. Yes, and aunt might be present,
but is that aunt going to give as much attention
as a mom would? Is that uncle going to have
enough energy to take care and discipline that child in
the right way? Sometimes yes, sometimes known often the only way,
(10:56):
sadly to keep them in line was to know that
if they did something in bed well, a beating was coming,
and so it wasn't uncommon for Lee to see violence
or to experience violence. In his autobiography, Lie has one
time when he was around five, his father brought home
(11:16):
a paycheck that was short on cash. His mother suspected
he was cheating on her and accused him of giving
the money to another woman. This led to an argument,
which escalated into a violent fight. Here's Lee, I'm never
trading an occucation my dad departure. Lee says that two
(11:38):
days later, he was sitting on a bed watching his
dad clean a mirror on the bedroom dresser when his
mother snuck up from behind. My mom trying to chop
the band off with the ship. His mom had picked
up a machete and was about to attack his father
from behind, when Lee yells out to his father urge
(12:00):
of love, and that's when he fell the reflection of
the mirror he turned. She made, but she basically filled
all the entire phone. Una strikes Leslie's thumb and nearly
severs his thumb with the machete. He was hard on
his band because I mean, my money is my father
(12:20):
is though Lee was very emotional from that moment. Because
he was too young to know what it meant to
have an infidelity, he had no idea what that was,
but he knew that his mother and his father had
severe arguments to the points where his mother would be
willing to almost kill his father. So he saw violence
(12:44):
at a very early age and continued to do so
for many years. They always does the uncle I'm a
calling cheating about the time. Eventually, Una had had enough
of Leslie's infidel us with various women on the island,
and she told Leslie to decide whether to be with
(13:06):
her or to move on to the other women. She
used to work with camean island as a contract to
make a hotel and stuff like that, and one occasion
when he left worked up my mom that he could
she didn't get again, so she decided she moved out
the house for this parit didn't tell anyone, he didn't
know where to find them. Lisa has Una packed up
(13:27):
all their things and emptied out the bank accounts. She
left with Lee to start a new life and didn't
tell Leslie where they'd gone, and this left Lee pretty
much without a father. From about the age of nine.
He did find them after a couple of months. I
think to a certain expank, he took it out on me.
(13:49):
I didn't want to do after that or have anything
to do with He just pretty much abandoned me. Here's
journalist Zara Burdon again. His father was absent for or
a large part and emotionally that created a void. There's
a lot of hurt by youngsters in Jamaica. A lot
(14:11):
of it is based on absent parents that allow predators
to come and pray, whether it's sexually, emotionally or recruiting
in gangs, youths in this country, in Jamaica, youths all
over the world who have no role model, who feel
like they have no purpose. It's so easy for a
(14:32):
gang leader or even an organization like Isis to recruit
and to give them a sense of purpose. And so
it is so important that parents in Jamaica and the
world over ensure that the time is there, that the
investment is there and their children, and that when they
see them around that company, that they steer them in
(14:55):
a different direction. After leaving Leslie, Una struggled to make
(15:16):
ends meet. She moved with Lead to endeavor a rural
town north of Kingston, where they lived in a small home.
It was pretty much a shock. It was just enough
to get by. They suffered to often have proper plumbing.
Una did not have the money to fix things. Despite
(15:36):
being strapped for cash, Una was able to get alone
and open a small grocery store. It was a sundry shop,
so to say. Bunah's store went well until a power
outage ruined all of the refrigerated goods. She didn't have
enough money saved to restock the inventory, so she was
forced to close the store and unable to find work
(15:57):
and endeavor, she and Lee moved back to Kingston. For Lee,
this was the first of mini moves in Jamaica, it's
not uncommon for people to be somewhat transient. In the
let's say late eighties early nineties. Work was very hard
to come by, especially for a woman who was not
(16:17):
building homes or something or doing labor. So it was
not uncommon for Una to look for work at various
places and move around so that she could support the
two of them. And according to Lee, his mother would
do whatever it took to get what she needed. When
she purchased a home, she knew that one of the
(16:40):
men who was selling the land was prone to drinking alcohol,
and she waited until he was inebriated and he signed
over another acre for a relatively paltry sum to Una
so that she could have more land. She was a
smart woman in knowing what she needed to do in
(17:01):
order to get things done, and that often meant moving
for work. Me Only says Lee bounced around fifteen to
twenty times in his adolescence. Sometimes she took Lee with her,
other times she left him with family and friends. In
many cases, Lee would refer to the family as cousins.
They may not have been cousins legally, but just friends
(17:24):
who his mom would leave him with and then she
would be gone for several months. So yes, he would
be completely abandoned, if you will, by today's standards, while
his mom looked for more steady work, and this was
at the unfortunate negative impact to Lee's life. There's a
(17:49):
huge problem in this country where barrel kids are concerned.
You're called barrel kids. Barrel just means that your parents,
to show love and affection, will send a barrel filled
with goodies, with school products, with whatever is necessary to
allow you to have things. Journalist Zara Burton says that
(18:11):
many times parents seek better opportunities abroad, but they can't
take their families with him. Jamaica is a tough spot
to earn a dollar, I'm telling you. And so you
get an opportunity to go to the States to earn
a dollar, you're gonna take it. For a lot of Jamaicans,
Caman Turks and Caicus Bahamas, those are the hot spots
(18:35):
where we go to for better economic opportunity. But guess what,
sometimes your status there ain't fully started, and so you're
they're kind of illegally overstay visa and you're working, and
all you can do to show your love is to
get on Skype, get on the phone and send a barrel.
(18:55):
But invariably some of them are not being supervised in
their homes and so there definitely is a deficit in
their emotional development, their ability to be disciplined. The way
that it manifests in this country is our crime level,
which remains extremely high compared to maybe other populations that
(19:18):
are similar in size. Jamaica's homicide rate consistently ranks as
one of the highest in the world. The most brutal
individuals sometimes on the street creating havoc are the teens
because they've been recruited the wrong people are there to
pick up the slack where parenting has failed. Over the
(19:46):
next few years, Lee bounced between relatives apartments. According to
me only Lee jumped around anywhere from fifteen to twenty
times during that period. His biggest struggle in life was
between ages of five and nine. Those were the times
where he had moved from various places and he had
(20:07):
seen a lot of violence, experienced a lot of violence,
so it made it very difficult for him to understand
what life really looked like as he approached his early
teen years. I know were I was sitting down and
writing my job and I said, I mean I have
no one a birthday, this cold life of power, and
(20:31):
said I would never cry, and I would never complain
about anything. I'm gonna find a way because if I
don't find a way, I'm left. He did not have
the stability that most children need during the formative years
of his life. At the most, he had nothing. He
(20:51):
didn't have his parents, he didn't have any structure, and
all he had was instability. So it probably had a
traumatic impact on him. Knowing that this was going to
be how my life is. It's going to be a tumultuous,
violent life that I'm going to live, and he started
(21:12):
to develop a lot of anger inside himself. Around this time,
Lee went searching for his father in Kingston the way
Lee remembers it. He eventually found Leslie walking down the street.
Lee told him that Una had left him behind to
go work on another island, hoping that his father would
take him in. But I want to see it. He
(21:35):
has just looking at safe like I'm happy to see.
But why are you here? I mean I could kill
that five minutes earlier. He did not care if I eat,
if I was safe. I mean none of that. He
told he couldn't find me and all these cases. He
gave me some bucks here and put me on my way.
(21:55):
I gave it to a ball and Lee took that
as I think that's it with my father. That's about
the only acknowledgement I'm going to get. When later asked
about the incident, Lee's father said he didn't take him
in because he didn't want to re engage with Una Leslie.
(22:15):
Malvo wouldn't see his son again until he was an adult.
Despite all these challenges, Lee worked hard at school. He
was intelligent and made good grades, and although she was
gone for long stretches of time, Lee's mother watched closely
over his performance in school. I used to be terrified
(22:37):
to go home because I honestly think that Lee, if
there was a word for it, I think Lee was
more of an academic really than he gave himself credit
for it. He knew that his mom expected a anything
under a pent he was going to get punished, So
(22:59):
he would often sit outside the home waiting to go inside,
and he petrified the going. I didn't didn't want to
go home, but the mentioned that to go home, so
I went home. She would waiting for him. She had
this very thick lever bi. He explained that for every
incorrect answer he got, he would receive three blows from
(23:22):
a belt. If he got ten incorrect answers for the day,
he would get hit thirty times. He knew that because
he knew if he had a bad day or a
bad grade on his paper, what was going to happen
When those doors opened. New faced back to Nick everywhere.
I kept looking her in the I page would not cry.
He just kept going and going. There was a look
(23:45):
on her face that was a look at hate. When
Lee was about twelve, his mom left Kingston again for
work on another island, so he went to live with
a teacher who he called Aunt Simone. She had had
a much more humanistic approach. She would sit down and
tell Lee exactly what she expected of him. Lee was
(24:09):
sort of shocked. She treated him almost like a young adult.
She always would encourage Lee, explain to Lee the things
that he did well and the things that he needed
to work on. She didn't raise her voice at him,
which was something that he hadn't really experienced before. That
separated her from Una. In Lee's mind, he didn't have
(24:32):
to worry about that beating formula of three times a day.
There was no more verbal and physical abuse going on,
and Simone had intimate knowledge of the beatings that Lee
had taken because Lee had told her, and I think
in her own way, even though she wasn't his mother,
(24:52):
she knew that Una was not good for him at
that time in his life, so she did everything too
would protect him from going back to her by trying
to sort of say, I I got this, I can
take care of Lee. This was a time where he
finally had a little bit of love in his life.
(25:13):
Meoli says that Lee was often very affected by small things, words, gestures,
with the tone of a person's voice. He even spoke
about the most simple phrase that ant Simone would say.
She would say good morning, Lee, and that would mean
the world to him because he didn't get that from
(25:35):
his mom. He did not get that from Leslie. He
got that from a woman who he really barely knew
at that time, and yet she was willing to take
him in as her son. His life looked much more
like a regular child. He was now experiencing the ability
to to play with board games. She would read Bible
(25:57):
lessons to him, she would show him how to do homework.
She even showed him what he could be if he
did further education. But it wouldn't last. Eventually, Una showed
up at Simone's house and demanded that Lee come back
(26:17):
and live with her. When it came to a head
to where he had to choose between an Simone and
his mother, he really didn't have a choice because he
was still a minor. Una had the final say because
she was, you know, his mother, and unfortunately he had
to leave. There's nothing an Simone could do about it.
(26:39):
She couldn't protect him anymore, you know. Reluctantly she had
to give him up. Una came to realize how much
happier Lee had felt without her. She resented him for
wanting to stay with Simone instead of coming back to
live with her. So once he was reunited with Una,
he would face daily beating, sometimes twice a day, just
(27:02):
simply for no reason at all. So now it had
escalated with the violence at home. It went from being
a good morning with ant Simone to an unknown, hellish
day with his own mother. Eventually, Lee reached his breaking point.
I just over myself about and I makes you will
(27:26):
walk down to the languatory and it doesn't Manua. The
suicide attempt with Lee occurred, according to him, around age thirteen.
He had been on a farm with Una and a
caretaker who lived on this farm. He went up in
a tree and sat there for quite some time, debating
(27:49):
what is his life going to be like? If my
life is going to be like this for the rest
of my life, I don't want to live it. So
he finally decided that he was going to take his life.
When he made the knot placed it around his neck,
he yelled his mom's name as loud as he could.
He wanted to make sure that she saw him. He
(28:12):
wanted her to worry about him. He wanted to see
what look was on her face when she knew that
her son was about to take his life. And that's
a very telling moment because you would think that a
mom would have finally realized, wow, you know, look what
(28:33):
I've done to my son. But Una does not have
that inward looking moment, and her demeanor doesn't change a
whole lot. You know, she did say are you okay?
Do you want to talk? But I think the damage
was so far done. And the story, as he describes it,
(28:54):
was he let go of the tree and just as
the rope begins to tighten, the caretaker on the property
grabs him and make sure that it doesn't snap his neck.
They undo the rope and untie him, but he still
harbored that feeling that he was willing to take his life,
(29:14):
which is very significant. He had internalized the anger. He
didn't take it out on his mom. He didn't stab
or shoot his mother, He didn't stab or shoot anyone else.
He took it all out on himself. And from what
we know with child psychology. If a child is willing
(29:35):
to take their life at thirteam, they've suffered dramatic trauma
in order to come to that place, because that's a
very early age to grasp the idea that if I
jump off this branch and this rope titans, I'm dead.
(29:55):
And yet his mother was not really willing to change
her ways. The worst date that was two days later.
He really come to rede the little at the point
to the truth until he going to your fucking self.
He do, but he said, for whatever reason, he had
(30:16):
even lost the courage to attempt suicide again. He just
couldn't do it anymore. Lee had no one, He had
lost on Simone and both of his parents had given
up on him, But he was about to meet the
man who would take on the role of his new father.
(30:53):
When Lee was fifteen, he and Una moved to the
island of Antigua. Lie says that Antigua brought more of
the same verbal and physical abuse. Meanwhile, his mother had
started a new business there. But not long after moving
to Antigua, Una took another job on a different island.
(31:14):
She left Lee alone there for almost a year. He
had to steal and sell bootleg CDs to get by.
My mother actually prepared me for it by leaving me
alone so many times I had time to practice. I've
never learned out a help. I take an empty famous
duse rom going out to the beach and make a
jerk chicken um seven um. I pilate cans and bottles.
(31:37):
I pretty much peap whatever I had. In Antigua, Lee
had to walk several miles to school each day. He
passed by the Zaza Electronics store. On one occasion he
stopped in inside. A tall man was watching his young
son play a flight simulator video game on one of
the store's computers. They both had America in accents, and
(32:01):
we're joking around and laughing. Lee was not used to
seeing this kind of affection between a father and son.
I wanted that relationship. I wanted to be a father
like him. He's confident. I mean, there were not a
lot of Bob to be with your son. Just about
it that were different that admired, and I just I
just founded wor from Ad actually never spoke to him.
(32:24):
That man was John Mohammed. It was here in Antigua
that John had run away from Tacoma, Washington with his
three children in tow John had originally heard of the
island from an acquaintance in Tacoma. That man had a
cousin who worked in Antiqua as a travel agent. John
thought he could start a new life there with his kids,
(32:45):
and so they moved there in March of two thousand.
John was sort of the pied piper of many children
on the island. He was known for doing good things
for kids. He had money that others did not on
the island, and I was something that Lee sort of
looked up to. But what we learned is that John's
(33:05):
money was not necessarily legal. What he was doing was
illegally importing goods, services, and even people into the United States.
John had created a business of smuggling Caribbean islanders into America.
He would help them forge passports and ensure travel to
the Florida coast, and in the year two thousand, one
(33:27):
of John's new clients was Una, Lee's mother. A lot
of people don't understand that John actually got Una into
the United States. There was a presumed relationship as far
as whether or not it was a sexual one that
I'm not quite sure he made it for like three
(33:50):
comment September and over she would knew it. Una left
Lee behind mind and got a job at a restaurant
in Fort Myers, Florida, and she promised to bring him
to America when she had more money. But eventually Una
stopped sending rent for Lee to live on, so he
(34:13):
was forced to move into a run down shack behind
the house where they'd been staying. Things only got worse
for Lee. In November of two thousand, he fell ill
with rheumatic fever. Lying alone, sick in the dark, Lee
felt abused, abandoned, and completely resigned. And then, in the hot,
(34:37):
unforgiving darkness, a light burst through the door of the
shack opened. A tall man stepped inside. Then the man
came closer. He leaned down and grabbed Lee's hand. It
was the American man who smuggled his mother into the
United States, the same man he'd seen that day the
(35:00):
electronic shop playing with the son John Mohammed had come
for him next time on Monster DC Sniper Mohammed. If
he gets across the border with your children, there will
be nothing we can do. So are you telling me
(35:22):
the reason why I don't have my children? And it
won't be to keep my children because I don't have
the propit paperwork game. If we do not address the
systemic failures that occurred in this case, it's entirely likely
that there are all kinds of John Mohammed's out there
wandering the streets. Kill myself over and over. He told me,
(35:44):
the old person has to die, has to die because
cannot do this. Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen episode
podcast hosted by Tony Ris and produced by iHeart Radio
and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive
(36:06):
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 by Makeup
and Vanity Set. The audio of Lee Boyd Malvo you
(36:26):
heard in the Next Time segment comes from a two
thousand twelve interview by journalist Josh White and 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 i heeart media
dot com, or you can call us at one eight
(36:49):
three three to eight five six six six seven. Thanks
for listening.
Welcome to Monster d Z 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 iHeart Media, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener
discretion is advised. Three weeks into the d C Sniper investigation,
(00:24):
police connected a fingerprint from an Alabama crime scene to
two names, John Ali Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. Last episode,
we explored mohammed story. After his wife asked for a divorce,
he disappeared with his three children. This episode. Who was
Lee Boyd Malvo, the seventeen year old from Jamaica and
(00:46):
how was he connected to Mohammed? At the time, investigators
were stumped, but years later we finally started to get
the answers. Many of those answers came from the work
of criminologist and criminal profiler Anthony Meoli. Me only spent
nine years corresponding with Lee and listening to his side
of the story. Me Only recorded a series of phone
(01:10):
calls with Lee titled Interview with the DC Sniper, which
you will hear clips from throughout this episode. Lee also
wrote an autobiography, which me only helped edit and publish.
Dire The DC Snipers say, verbatim transcript from Lee Boyd Malvo,
word for word, this is a very rare time where
(01:31):
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 our modern time.
The takeaway from it is not the grizzly nature of
what happened at the end, but what led him to that.
(01:57):
Lee boy Malvo was born February eighteen in Kingston, Jamaica.
He was born to Leslie Malvo and Una James, his mother.
He took the name Malvo from his father, but they
were never formally married, at least according to Lee. At
the time Lee was born, his mom was twenty one
(02:18):
and his father was thirty seven, so there was a
sixteen year age gap in Kingston That wasn't tremendously unusual,
but that separation of age did lead to many differences
between how their relationship developed. Lee remembers his father, Leslie,
as kind and permissive. Lee says he spent his early
(02:40):
years on a tricycle and Leslie would pull him through
the neighborhood by a rope tied to the tricycles handlebars.
Lee's mother, Una, on the other hand, was the disciplinarian.
Una was very strict in many ways. She would be calm,
cool and collected one moment, and then violent the next.
(03:02):
Lee told me only that when his mother got angry,
she would sometimes beat him to the point of drawing blood.
At the same time, she did care for him, and
she did provide for the family, but she was gone
most of the time, so it would not be unusual
for Lee to be fending for himself at a very
young age. One day, while she was out at work,
(03:26):
he was left alone, and he was awfully young. He
was five six years old. She had some jade figurines
that she kept around the house. There were small, trivial
objects to some, but to her they meant something. He
was planing with an airplane and running around the house
and bumped into one of these jade figurines and it broke.
(03:51):
Before she comes from he was expecting a beating. He
knew she was going to hit him, and hit him hard.
You do how, She shouted me a charge of door.
She came home in a rage and was about to
wail off on Lee, and his father stepped in and
(04:15):
he grabbed me up. He said, this is the person.
This is the thing that can be replayed. You know,
this is a thing pointing to the object, and this
is your son, and you need to be able to
separate those two right now. Whether that message rang true
with Una remains unclear. My father was like, he was
(04:38):
my protected because people always know what to do or
what to say in those moments. It really stuck with
him that this is what a father does. A father
protects his child. And he had some fond memories of
his father until eventually his father left him, and that's
(04:59):
one thing started to go sour. There is a ruthless
person on the loose. What n nerves this community the
most is the randomness of the murders, ordinary 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
(05:20):
never had a crime quite like this. Be careful, these
guys are using weapons that are going to go right
straight through our bulletproof vest. From My Heart Radio and
Tenderfoot TV, this is monster, DC sniper criminologist Anthony Meolie
(05:42):
has made a career of interviewing some of America's most
heinous criminals. I literally have spoken or written to over
three serial killers. What I find most interesting about them
is that they are people. I don't harp on the
horrific nature of their crimes, but rather try to learn
who they were and how the crimes came about. Me
(06:04):
only says people often completely right off killers. It's just
evil people or monsters. But he thinks that's a mistake.
As soon as we find out who did it, we
can't get enough of how evil or how monstrous this
person is without understanding what it was that brought the
person to that particular moment in time. Unfortunately, they are
(06:26):
not monsters, they are not some mystical beasts. Unfortunately, these
are human beings with human DNA, and we have to
be willing to accept that and understand that. Just as
there are some fantastic human beings who do some incredible
things and change people's lives, there are other human beings
(06:47):
who go down a wrong path and take people's lives.
It's not to condone what they did. Make no mistake there.
It's not to condone at all what they did. As
a criminologist, me only thinks that if we want to
prevent these sorts of crimes from happening in the future,
we need to understand the people that commit them and
examine their lives. That's why he's corresponded with so many
(07:10):
serial killers. Meoli was particularly interested to speak with Lee
Boyd Malvo. He first wrote to Lee in two thousand three,
but starting a correspondence proved challenging. Letters that I sent
would be mailed back and saying the inmate is not here.
So it took a while, and it wasn't until May
of two thousand five where I received his first letter.
(07:33):
What was interesting was it was a two page letter,
handwritten in black ink. Normally it takes a long time
for many of these individuals to trust others, but me
Oli says Lee's first letter to him, it was different.
It was very personal. I think that's what struck me.
He even left the letter by saying, wherever you want
(07:56):
to go from here, I'm willing to go with you.
So that's sort of where it all began. We were
corresponding one to two letters a week. We did that
for about four years and then I had the ability
to speak to him on the phone. My first phone
call with him was in two thousand ten. It struck
(08:18):
me immediately how intelligent he actually was. His formal education
stopped far before college, but he was far more well
read than most of those who I knew who held
master's degrees. Maybe the single most well read individual out
of over three d inmates that I have written to
(08:40):
during these years of communicating back and forth. Me Only
says Lee asked him to help edit and publish his autobiography.
Me only agreed what came across with Lee Boyd Malvo's intellect,
his ability to jump from topic to topic. He knew
anything and everything about anything related to the weather, It
(09:01):
could be related to inmate rights, it could be related
to racial tensions, and that was one dynamic that we
talked a lot about. As a Caucasian male, obviously we
came from two different worlds. Zara Burden is a journalist
and host of the Jamaican news program eighteen Degrees North.
She was also interested in understanding Lee Boyd Malvo's roots.
(09:24):
Oh well. First interview back in two thousand thirteen was
an interview with Lee Boyd Malvo. He agreed to do
the interview, he said, because it was allowing him to
speak to his Jamaican people. You know, it's a strange
kind of thing. Jimmy cons are four jammy cons. We
cost each other on this rock, but we back the
(09:45):
best of us and we disgrace together the worst of us.
It was important for us to understand how somebody raised
on our soil could leave here and go to the
United States, where most Jamaicans go to become prosperous, and
he instead of going that route, he instead chose to
(10:08):
kill Americans. And we don't have any hate for Americans.
We love Americans in Jamaica. So why would you be
motivated to carry out such an atrocity on your fellow man?
That was the big question, he explained. Violence was something
that occurred constantly. This is criminologist Anthony me only again.
(10:33):
So there will often be one or two parents on
a whole block watching kids. Yes, and aunt might be present,
but is that aunt going to give as much attention
as a mom would? Is that uncle going to have
enough energy to take care and discipline that child in
the right way? Sometimes yes, sometimes known often the only way,
(10:56):
sadly to keep them in line was to know that
if they did something in bed well, a beating was coming,
and so it wasn't uncommon for Lee to see violence
or to experience violence. In his autobiography, Lie has one
time when he was around five, his father brought home
(11:16):
a paycheck that was short on cash. His mother suspected
he was cheating on her and accused him of giving
the money to another woman. This led to an argument,
which escalated into a violent fight. Here's Lee, I'm never
trading an occucation my dad departure. Lee says that two
(11:38):
days later, he was sitting on a bed watching his
dad clean a mirror on the bedroom dresser when his
mother snuck up from behind. My mom trying to chop
the band off with the ship. His mom had picked
up a machete and was about to attack his father
from behind, when Lee yells out to his father urge
(12:00):
of love, and that's when he fell the reflection of
the mirror he turned. She made, but she basically filled
all the entire phone. Una strikes Leslie's thumb and nearly
severs his thumb with the machete. He was hard on
his band because I mean, my money is my father
(12:20):
is though Lee was very emotional from that moment. Because
he was too young to know what it meant to
have an infidelity, he had no idea what that was,
but he knew that his mother and his father had
severe arguments to the points where his mother would be
willing to almost kill his father. So he saw violence
(12:44):
at a very early age and continued to do so
for many years. They always does the uncle I'm a
calling cheating about the time. Eventually, Una had had enough
of Leslie's infidel us with various women on the island,
and she told Leslie to decide whether to be with
(13:06):
her or to move on to the other women. She
used to work with camean island as a contract to
make a hotel and stuff like that, and one occasion
when he left worked up my mom that he could
she didn't get again, so she decided she moved out
the house for this parit didn't tell anyone, he didn't
know where to find them. Lisa has Una packed up
(13:27):
all their things and emptied out the bank accounts. She
left with Lee to start a new life and didn't
tell Leslie where they'd gone, and this left Lee pretty
much without a father. From about the age of nine.
He did find them after a couple of months. I
think to a certain expank, he took it out on me.
(13:49):
I didn't want to do after that or have anything
to do with He just pretty much abandoned me. Here's
journalist Zara Burdon again. His father was absent for or
a large part and emotionally that created a void. There's
a lot of hurt by youngsters in Jamaica. A lot
(14:11):
of it is based on absent parents that allow predators
to come and pray, whether it's sexually, emotionally or recruiting
in gangs, youths in this country, in Jamaica, youths all
over the world who have no role model, who feel
like they have no purpose. It's so easy for a
(14:32):
gang leader or even an organization like Isis to recruit
and to give them a sense of purpose. And so
it is so important that parents in Jamaica and the
world over ensure that the time is there, that the
investment is there and their children, and that when they
see them around that company, that they steer them in
(14:55):
a different direction. After leaving Leslie, Una struggled to make
(15:16):
ends meet. She moved with Lead to endeavor a rural
town north of Kingston, where they lived in a small home.
It was pretty much a shock. It was just enough
to get by. They suffered to often have proper plumbing.
Una did not have the money to fix things. Despite
(15:36):
being strapped for cash, Una was able to get alone
and open a small grocery store. It was a sundry shop,
so to say. Bunah's store went well until a power
outage ruined all of the refrigerated goods. She didn't have
enough money saved to restock the inventory, so she was
forced to close the store and unable to find work
(15:57):
and endeavor, she and Lee moved back to Kingston. For Lee,
this was the first of mini moves in Jamaica, it's
not uncommon for people to be somewhat transient. In the
let's say late eighties early nineties. Work was very hard
to come by, especially for a woman who was not
(16:17):
building homes or something or doing labor. So it was
not uncommon for Una to look for work at various
places and move around so that she could support the
two of them. And according to Lee, his mother would
do whatever it took to get what she needed. When
she purchased a home, she knew that one of the
(16:40):
men who was selling the land was prone to drinking alcohol,
and she waited until he was inebriated and he signed
over another acre for a relatively paltry sum to Una
so that she could have more land. She was a
smart woman in knowing what she needed to do in
(17:01):
order to get things done, and that often meant moving
for work. Me Only says Lee bounced around fifteen to
twenty times in his adolescence. Sometimes she took Lee with her,
other times she left him with family and friends. In
many cases, Lee would refer to the family as cousins.
They may not have been cousins legally, but just friends
(17:24):
who his mom would leave him with and then she
would be gone for several months. So yes, he would
be completely abandoned, if you will, by today's standards, while
his mom looked for more steady work, and this was
at the unfortunate negative impact to Lee's life. There's a
(17:49):
huge problem in this country where barrel kids are concerned.
You're called barrel kids. Barrel just means that your parents,
to show love and affection, will send a barrel filled
with goodies, with school products, with whatever is necessary to
allow you to have things. Journalist Zara Burton says that
(18:11):
many times parents seek better opportunities abroad, but they can't
take their families with him. Jamaica is a tough spot
to earn a dollar, I'm telling you. And so you
get an opportunity to go to the States to earn
a dollar, you're gonna take it. For a lot of Jamaicans,
Caman Turks and Caicus Bahamas, those are the hot spots
(18:35):
where we go to for better economic opportunity. But guess what,
sometimes your status there ain't fully started, and so you're
they're kind of illegally overstay visa and you're working, and
all you can do to show your love is to
get on Skype, get on the phone and send a barrel.
(18:55):
But invariably some of them are not being supervised in
their homes and so there definitely is a deficit in
their emotional development, their ability to be disciplined. The way
that it manifests in this country is our crime level,
which remains extremely high compared to maybe other populations that
(19:18):
are similar in size. Jamaica's homicide rate consistently ranks as
one of the highest in the world. The most brutal
individuals sometimes on the street creating havoc are the teens
because they've been recruited the wrong people are there to
pick up the slack where parenting has failed. Over the
(19:46):
next few years, Lee bounced between relatives apartments. According to
me only Lee jumped around anywhere from fifteen to twenty
times during that period. His biggest struggle in life was
between ages of five and nine. Those were the times
where he had moved from various places and he had
(20:07):
seen a lot of violence, experienced a lot of violence,
so it made it very difficult for him to understand
what life really looked like as he approached his early
teen years. I know were I was sitting down and
writing my job and I said, I mean I have
no one a birthday, this cold life of power, and
(20:31):
said I would never cry, and I would never complain
about anything. I'm gonna find a way because if I
don't find a way, I'm left. He did not have
the stability that most children need during the formative years
of his life. At the most, he had nothing. He
(20:51):
didn't have his parents, he didn't have any structure, and
all he had was instability. So it probably had a
traumatic impact on him. Knowing that this was going to
be how my life is. It's going to be a tumultuous,
violent life that I'm going to live, and he started
(21:12):
to develop a lot of anger inside himself. Around this time,
Lee went searching for his father in Kingston the way
Lee remembers it. He eventually found Leslie walking down the street.
Lee told him that Una had left him behind to
go work on another island, hoping that his father would
take him in. But I want to see it. He
(21:35):
has just looking at safe like I'm happy to see.
But why are you here? I mean I could kill
that five minutes earlier. He did not care if I eat,
if I was safe. I mean none of that. He
told he couldn't find me and all these cases. He
gave me some bucks here and put me on my way.
(21:55):
I gave it to a ball and Lee took that
as I think that's it with my father. That's about
the only acknowledgement I'm going to get. When later asked
about the incident, Lee's father said he didn't take him
in because he didn't want to re engage with Una Leslie.
(22:15):
Malvo wouldn't see his son again until he was an adult.
Despite all these challenges, Lee worked hard at school. He
was intelligent and made good grades, and although she was
gone for long stretches of time, Lee's mother watched closely
over his performance in school. I used to be terrified
(22:37):
to go home because I honestly think that Lee, if
there was a word for it, I think Lee was
more of an academic really than he gave himself credit
for it. He knew that his mom expected a anything
under a pent he was going to get punished, So
(22:59):
he would often sit outside the home waiting to go inside,
and he petrified the going. I didn't didn't want to
go home, but the mentioned that to go home, so
I went home. She would waiting for him. She had
this very thick lever bi. He explained that for every
incorrect answer he got, he would receive three blows from
(23:22):
a belt. If he got ten incorrect answers for the day,
he would get hit thirty times. He knew that because
he knew if he had a bad day or a
bad grade on his paper, what was going to happen
When those doors opened. New faced back to Nick everywhere.
I kept looking her in the I page would not cry.
He just kept going and going. There was a look
(23:45):
on her face that was a look at hate. When
Lee was about twelve, his mom left Kingston again for
work on another island, so he went to live with
a teacher who he called Aunt Simone. She had had
a much more humanistic approach. She would sit down and
tell Lee exactly what she expected of him. Lee was
(24:09):
sort of shocked. She treated him almost like a young adult.
She always would encourage Lee, explain to Lee the things
that he did well and the things that he needed
to work on. She didn't raise her voice at him,
which was something that he hadn't really experienced before. That
separated her from Una. In Lee's mind, he didn't have
(24:32):
to worry about that beating formula of three times a day.
There was no more verbal and physical abuse going on,
and Simone had intimate knowledge of the beatings that Lee
had taken because Lee had told her, and I think
in her own way, even though she wasn't his mother,
(24:52):
she knew that Una was not good for him at
that time in his life, so she did everything too
would protect him from going back to her by trying
to sort of say, I I got this, I can
take care of Lee. This was a time where he
finally had a little bit of love in his life.
(25:13):
Meoli says that Lee was often very affected by small things, words, gestures,
with the tone of a person's voice. He even spoke
about the most simple phrase that ant Simone would say.
She would say good morning, Lee, and that would mean
the world to him because he didn't get that from
(25:35):
his mom. He did not get that from Leslie. He
got that from a woman who he really barely knew
at that time, and yet she was willing to take
him in as her son. His life looked much more
like a regular child. He was now experiencing the ability
to to play with board games. She would read Bible
(25:57):
lessons to him, she would show him how to do homework.
She even showed him what he could be if he
did further education. But it wouldn't last. Eventually, Una showed
up at Simone's house and demanded that Lee come back
(26:17):
and live with her. When it came to a head
to where he had to choose between an Simone and
his mother, he really didn't have a choice because he
was still a minor. Una had the final say because
she was, you know, his mother, and unfortunately he had
to leave. There's nothing an Simone could do about it.
(26:39):
She couldn't protect him anymore, you know. Reluctantly she had
to give him up. Una came to realize how much
happier Lee had felt without her. She resented him for
wanting to stay with Simone instead of coming back to
live with her. So once he was reunited with Una,
he would face daily beating, sometimes twice a day, just
(27:02):
simply for no reason at all. So now it had
escalated with the violence at home. It went from being
a good morning with ant Simone to an unknown, hellish
day with his own mother. Eventually, Lee reached his breaking point.
I just over myself about and I makes you will
(27:26):
walk down to the languatory and it doesn't Manua. The
suicide attempt with Lee occurred, according to him, around age thirteen.
He had been on a farm with Una and a
caretaker who lived on this farm. He went up in
a tree and sat there for quite some time, debating
(27:49):
what is his life going to be like? If my
life is going to be like this for the rest
of my life, I don't want to live it. So
he finally decided that he was going to take his life.
When he made the knot placed it around his neck,
he yelled his mom's name as loud as he could.
He wanted to make sure that she saw him. He
(28:12):
wanted her to worry about him. He wanted to see
what look was on her face when she knew that
her son was about to take his life. And that's
a very telling moment because you would think that a
mom would have finally realized, wow, you know, look what
(28:33):
I've done to my son. But Una does not have
that inward looking moment, and her demeanor doesn't change a
whole lot. You know, she did say are you okay?
Do you want to talk? But I think the damage
was so far done. And the story, as he describes it,
(28:54):
was he let go of the tree and just as
the rope begins to tighten, the caretaker on the property
grabs him and make sure that it doesn't snap his neck.
They undo the rope and untie him, but he still
harbored that feeling that he was willing to take his life,
(29:14):
which is very significant. He had internalized the anger. He
didn't take it out on his mom. He didn't stab
or shoot his mother, He didn't stab or shoot anyone else.
He took it all out on himself. And from what
we know with child psychology. If a child is willing
(29:35):
to take their life at thirteam, they've suffered dramatic trauma
in order to come to that place, because that's a
very early age to grasp the idea that if I
jump off this branch and this rope titans, I'm dead.
(29:55):
And yet his mother was not really willing to change
her ways. The worst date that was two days later.
He really come to rede the little at the point
to the truth until he going to your fucking self.
He do, but he said, for whatever reason, he had
(30:16):
even lost the courage to attempt suicide again. He just
couldn't do it anymore. Lee had no one, He had
lost on Simone and both of his parents had given
up on him, But he was about to meet the
man who would take on the role of his new father.
(30:53):
When Lee was fifteen, he and Una moved to the
island of Antigua. Lie says that Antigua brought more of
the same verbal and physical abuse. Meanwhile, his mother had
started a new business there. But not long after moving
to Antigua, Una took another job on a different island.
(31:14):
She left Lee alone there for almost a year. He
had to steal and sell bootleg CDs to get by.
My mother actually prepared me for it by leaving me
alone so many times I had time to practice. I've
never learned out a help. I take an empty famous
duse rom going out to the beach and make a
jerk chicken um seven um. I pilate cans and bottles.
(31:37):
I pretty much peap whatever I had. In Antigua, Lee
had to walk several miles to school each day. He
passed by the Zaza Electronics store. On one occasion he
stopped in inside. A tall man was watching his young
son play a flight simulator video game on one of
the store's computers. They both had America in accents, and
(32:01):
we're joking around and laughing. Lee was not used to
seeing this kind of affection between a father and son.
I wanted that relationship. I wanted to be a father
like him. He's confident. I mean, there were not a
lot of Bob to be with your son. Just about
it that were different that admired, and I just I
just founded wor from Ad actually never spoke to him.
(32:24):
That man was John Mohammed. It was here in Antigua
that John had run away from Tacoma, Washington with his
three children in tow John had originally heard of the
island from an acquaintance in Tacoma. That man had a
cousin who worked in Antiqua as a travel agent. John
thought he could start a new life there with his kids,
(32:45):
and so they moved there in March of two thousand.
John was sort of the pied piper of many children
on the island. He was known for doing good things
for kids. He had money that others did not on
the island, and I was something that Lee sort of
looked up to. But what we learned is that John's
(33:05):
money was not necessarily legal. What he was doing was
illegally importing goods, services, and even people into the United States.
John had created a business of smuggling Caribbean islanders into America.
He would help them forge passports and ensure travel to
the Florida coast, and in the year two thousand, one
(33:27):
of John's new clients was Una, Lee's mother. A lot
of people don't understand that John actually got Una into
the United States. There was a presumed relationship as far
as whether or not it was a sexual one that
I'm not quite sure he made it for like three
(33:50):
comment September and over she would knew it. Una left
Lee behind mind and got a job at a restaurant
in Fort Myers, Florida, and she promised to bring him
to America when she had more money. But eventually Una
stopped sending rent for Lee to live on, so he
(34:13):
was forced to move into a run down shack behind
the house where they'd been staying. Things only got worse
for Lee. In November of two thousand, he fell ill
with rheumatic fever. Lying alone, sick in the dark, Lee
felt abused, abandoned, and completely resigned. And then, in the hot,
(34:37):
unforgiving darkness, a light burst through the door of the
shack opened. A tall man stepped inside. Then the man
came closer. He leaned down and grabbed Lee's hand. It
was the American man who smuggled his mother into the
United States, the same man he'd seen that day the
(35:00):
electronic shop playing with the son John Mohammed had come
for him next time on Monster DC Sniper Mohammed. If
he gets across the border with your children, there will
be nothing we can do. So are you telling me
(35:22):
the reason why I don't have my children? And it
won't be to keep my children because I don't have
the propit paperwork game. If we do not address the
systemic failures that occurred in this case, it's entirely likely
that there are all kinds of John Mohammed's out there
wandering the streets. Kill myself over and over. He told me,
(35:44):
the old person has to die, has to die because
cannot do this. Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen episode
podcast hosted by Tony Ris and produced by iHeart Radio
and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive
(36:06):
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 by Makeup
and Vanity Set. The audio of Lee Boyd Malvo you
(36:26):
heard in the Next Time segment comes from a two
thousand twelve interview by journalist Josh White and 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 i heeart media
dot com, or you can call us at one eight
(36:49):
three three to eight five six six six seven. Thanks
for listening.
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