The Descent [09]

The fates of John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo are now intertwined. We trace the dark path they took that lead to the first murder.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster d Z Sniper, a production of I
Heart Radio and Tenderfoot t V. 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 t V, or
their employees. Listener discretion is advised. December two thousand, the

(00:22):
island of Antiqua, fifteen year old Lee Boy Malveaux lay
alone in bed in a dark shed. He shivered, sick
with rheumatic fever. He needed medicine, but didn't know how
to get it. He was all alone in a foreign country,
with no family and few friends. There was a knock

(00:43):
at the door. A man came in. It was John Mohammed,
the American, the man who had smuggled Lee's mother into
the United States. John had just come by to check
on the boy, who he knew was living alone, but
when he saw Lee's dire state, John brought him to
the doctor. Lee got an antibiotic shot and John stayed

(01:05):
with him while he recovered. Mohammed he stayed in the
entire pound of nursing back to health, and I told
him my entire life story, my parents, my situations while
I bounced around with myself. I told him everything. I
left nothing else because I trusted this guy. He gave
me his time. It's it's that simple. He was one

(01:29):
of the only people who listened. I leaved on him.
I trusted him. I did not trust my mom, I
did I didn't trust anyone else, but I trusted him.
Before long, Lee asked John if he could live with him.
John agreed, and Lee moved in with him and his children.
He was so desperate to have a father figure. My
name is Dr Jhonathan Harold mac I am a clinical

(01:51):
nurse psychologist. Very quickly now those starts calling Mohammed dad.
He said, everything that you've been taught from your religion,
your morals, your education, you've basically been brainwashed. And he
would explain to me a mixture of his worldview and

(02:12):
the nation of Islam. He posted a lot of things.
It certainly wasn't you know, standard collision. He would have
him listen to tapes even when he was falling asleep,
speeches and all sorts of stuff, thousands of hours, over
and over again, giving him subliminal suggestions that there is
essentially a war going on between blacks and white. There

(02:35):
is a ruthless person on the loose. What un 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 never had a crime quite like this.
Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going

(02:58):
to go right straight through our bullet proofs from My
Heart Radio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster d C Sniper.
Very quickly, when I met Mohamed, I assimilated everything about him.
At the beginning of two thousand one, after Lee had

(03:20):
moved in with John in Antigua, friends and teachers remember
seeing Lee change. His good grades began to slip. He
started bringing a Koran to his Christian high school and
arguing with other students about religion, and Lee also started
talking a lot about guns. I just became some wonder.
It was something I'm used to doing. I kept bouncing

(03:42):
around from home to home, place to place, and I
became what I call a change. Whoever I'm around, whoever
the authority is, I changed to suit that person. The
attachment to a mother or a father is really core
to developing a stable mentally health the adult. Dr Jonathan

(04:02):
Mack is a neural psychologist and co author of the
book The Making of Lee Boyd. Malvo. Max studied Lee's
life extensively. He thinks Lee's readiness to trust John was
due to an attachment disorder, a disorder and how kids
connect with adults. I felt that Malvo met the criteria
for disinhibited social engagement disorder. With disinhibited social engagement disorder,

(04:28):
kids are so desperate for a caregiver that they are
overly trusting of strangers. They will latch on to any
authority figure they can, ignoring signs that the adult might
not have their best interest at heart. If you look
at Malvo's history, his father in the first years of
his life was in his life, out of his life.
His mother was also in and out and had a

(04:51):
habit of shipping him off, and just as soon as
he was developing an attachment to the new people, he
was moved somewhere else. So the fact that Maldo had
so many broken attachments from so many of the people
that he lived with, he had the social disengagement disorder
and was basically ready to attach on to anyone. I

(05:13):
went to him because I felt alone in his world.
I assimilated everything about him, from his mannerisms, his religion.
I lost my accent. I just became someone different once
he gained my trust. That was the lost cost. Throughout

(05:40):
early two thousand one, John continued to forge documents and
helped smuggle people into the United States. On April fourteen,
John was detained at Miami International Airport. He'd flown there
from Antigua alongside two Jamaican women. The women were caught
presenting forged documents to customs agents, and the agents suspected

(06:04):
John was helping the two women enter the United States illegally.
They couldn't prove it, so they had to release John,
but they contacted Antiguan authorities and relayed their suspicions. Lie
says that John called him in a panic. John told
Lee to hide the kids and the cash that he
kept in the house. Lee took the children to John's

(06:27):
girlfriend's place, but when he went back to get the money,
it had already been seized by Antiguan authorities. Lie says
John lost at least one hundred sixty thou dollars Because
of the raid, John feared he would be arrested if
he returned to Antigua, so he decided to lay low
in the US. John instructed Lee, who was just sixteen

(06:49):
years old himself, to watch over his kids. John also
asked the Lee to help out with the business by
delivering fake birth certificates to clients. Lee dropped out of
school to help. John then traveled back to Washington State
and on April he legally changed his name from John
Williams to John Mohammed, perhaps to try to avoid raising

(07:13):
any red flags when he returned to Antigua. Okay, Mr Williams,
change me to have your name change. What is your
current legal name currently name John Allan, Okay? And what
is the new name by which you wish to be known,
John Alber Mohammed? And why do you desire to be

(07:34):
known by this new name for our religion? Are you
changing your name for any other reason? Are you changing
your name to defraud or mislead any person or creditor?
Are you involved in any legal proceeding other than this
name change? And have you ever been convicted of a felony?
Are you under supervision of any probation department? That requires

(07:55):
you to report a change of address head and grant
your name changed ring. While in Washington State, John also
visited Earl Dunce. I met John when I used to
work for Horizon Airlines. I was actually interested in a
printer that I saw at a store. This printer was
an ALPS M D five thousand series. Printer had a

(08:18):
big reputation during early nineties of making counterfeit money in
it views film as inking. So it was really expensive
printers I wouldn't afford at the time. And this cowork
of mine knew a friend Nick is getting So I
met John that way. John, what's really flash? He had
nice suits, he'd come different cars all the time, Jaguar Diamante.

(08:40):
He said, I can get the printer for you if
you can help me out. He want to know if
I can alter some documents because for hobby I do
graphics designs. Okay, so on the fair deal. So John
got it from me. I don't know how he got it.
He asked me to stand a birth certificate with his
name on it and asked me, it's like if I
can raise the name that was on the birthday. So

(09:04):
I used a simple program and compared to erased the
name and he hasn't got type another name. Okay, sure,
so he wanted me type I'm guessing could have been leaked.
You know. This is where I realized that he was
actually involved the smuggling people across the border. He was
charging thousands of buckshy I think maybe more on one.

(09:28):
John traveled back to Antigua with his new name and
altered documents in hand. When John returned to the island,
the government had already seized over a hundred and sixty
thousand dollars, but John did not scold Lee. This is
criminologist and co author of Lee Boyd Malbo's autobiography, Anthony Meoli.

(09:50):
When he got back, John pulled him tight, hugged him
and said, great job, son. And it was that very
moment that really s it defies their relationship. Lee said,
from that moment on, I was willing to do anything
for that man. A week and a half later, on May,

(10:13):
John returned to the United States with his three children
and Lee Boyd Malvill. They traveled through Puerto Rico to
Fort Myers, Florida, where Lee's mother was living and working
in a red lobster restaurant. Lie says that John was
planning on setting up a counterfeiting operation with friends from
the Caribbean. John wanted Lee to watch over the kids

(10:36):
while he traveled to get the equipment they needed to
print fake currency. According to Lee's diary, John asked Lee's
mother if the boy could continue staying with him, but
she was having none of it. Una thought John was
a bad influence on her son. Lee remembers his mother saying,
he is my child. What I eat, he eats. If

(10:57):
he cannot be satisfied with that, that greed will kill him.
She then looked at Lee and said, you met this
man no more than six months ago, and you've completely
forgotten where you come from. Reluctantly, John left Lee with
Una and disappeared again with his kids. Back in Washington State,

(11:34):
Mildred Mohammed was still searching for her children. It had
been fifteen months since she had seen or spoken to them.
Following her hospitalization, Mildred had moved into a women shelter
where her friend and former accountant is and Nichols volunteered.
Mildred took a paralegal course to learn about what legal
option she had to get her children back. She divorced

(11:56):
John in his absence and legally gained full custody of
the children. The problem was no one knew where they were,
so she also filed a writ of habeas corpus, which
meant that anywhere they found my children, they needed to
pick them up and bring them back to me. So
I had all of my paperwork notarized, and my sister

(12:19):
calls and says, Mama sick, can you come to Maryland.
I have not found my children, but I can wait
over there. Mildred moved to the town of Clinton and
Prince George's County, Maryland. Three more months passed without any
sign of the children. It was now August two thousand one,

(12:42):
and the shelter where Mildred had been staying got a call.
Her friend Isa Nichols was volunteering there when it happened.
We get a call and it is the Department of
Social Health Services in Bellingham, Washington. They're calling following up
an application ship for support that John had completed with

(13:03):
his three kids. Well, what John didn't know the three
kids were already in the system. John Mohammed had returned
to Washington State with his children and tried to register
them for welfare, but hath already suspected him of committing
welfare fraud, so they looked up the children's previously listed
contact information and tried calling Mildred at the shelter. I

(13:27):
get a call from the executive director of the shelter.
I was in and she said, Millie, I think we
found your children. You need to fact all of your
paperwork to Detective McCarthy. So I did that, followed up
with a phone call and said, did you get my paperwork?
She said yes, ma'am, I did. But Ms Mohammed, do

(13:50):
you know where we are? I say, you're in Bellingham, Washington.
He said, correct, but we're on the border of Canada.
If he gets across the border with your children, there
will be nothing we can do. I said, I appreciate

(14:11):
that information, but if you could just go get my children,
I would appreciate that too. August thirty one, four thirty pm.
He called. He said Ms Mohammed, we got your children.

(14:34):
I screamed, and my brother in law came downstairs. What's
going on? I said, they found my children. Can you
please talk to him. I'm running up and down the stairs,
running outside and in and he said, Meil, do you
want to talk to him. I stopped. I hadn't heard
their voices in eighteen months. So the first person I

(14:55):
talked to is Taliba and she says, hi, mommy. I said, hey,
how you doing? She said, I'm good. You want to
talk to my sister. Let's say yes, let me talk
to your sister. She said, hi mommy. I say, hey, honey.
She said guess what. I said, what honey, I'm nine
years old and you missed two birthdays. I said, oh,

(15:20):
I'm sorry. I'll make it up to you. I promise.
She said, okay, mommy, but John doesn't want to talk
to you because he's angry. I said, okay, that's fine.
So Detective McCarthy gets back on the phone and he said,
it's Mohammed. We need for you to come back to
Tacoma for any emergency custody. Hearing the mildrid flies out

(15:42):
the next day and she calls me up that next
morning and she says, will you go with me to
the courthouse? And I said sure. I didn't think anything
about it. You know, eighteen months have gone by. I
want to see the kids. I so went with me
to court and and we're standing in the hallway and

(16:03):
I said, oh my god, there's John. Mildid looks at John.
John stairs at Mildred. Mildred starts running and screaming. She's
just scared. She hasn't seen John in eighteen months. The
Sheriff's department is in the courthouse and they come out
and they get her and they put us in a
room somewhere until the court case. So we walk in

(16:28):
the courtroom and as soon as I get in the door,
I see John on the back road to the right side,
and I froze and I just remember feeling that I
was so scared. But he was just sitting there, just
on non shalant. And I used to say, Mildred, just breathe, breathe.
What do you mean, just breathe. Do you know how

(16:50):
fast this man can move? She said, Mildre, we just
have to breathe. So when calling her dad, she's holding
my hand. Were sitting by her attorney. They're going over
the paperwork and the judge is the gavel. Morning, please
be heeded. This is in ray the marriage of Mildred
Denise Williams, John Allen Williams Council, Your Heather Smith on

(17:14):
behalf of the petitioner. This is Mildred Williams. She is
present in the court. Let me swear both parties in
before it begins. Sir, if you raise your right hand,
ma'am you both so only swear from the name. Testimony
you're about to provide will be the truth, the whole truth,
and nothing but the truth. Yes, yes, sir, sir, what
is your name? S leagal name, John Alan Mohammad and
ma'am what is your name? But they said that we

(17:35):
needed to use the bank that we were married on
their death wife under Williams Council. You have I believe
a return on a rid of avieas corpus. I do
have a traditioner Dickey issued it back in June of
two thousand and this is the first contact with these
children since that time. Yes, it is your honor. The
divorce decree and a parenting plans were entered in October

(17:58):
of two thousand after the w That final parenting plan
gives who custody the children? All three children. Yes, can't
say something just moments. The concern I have right now
is I don't know who's got these children where they're at.
And speaking with Deputy right this morning, all they would
need with an order releasing the children from protective custody

(18:19):
to the mother's custody. Sir, would you like to say
you please tell me what's going on. There is a
parenting plan was entered by the court on October six,
two thousand. I was just trying to wear it. There
was an order of default taken against you because you
did not respond to the divorce summons that was published
against you. As part of that, mother obtained on her

(18:42):
own without the help of an attorney for rit of
avieus corpus, which allows her to have the physical possession
of the children. So the children have a mission the
whereabouts whenever known by mother. That's why the courts apparently
issued the writ univer responded to the published summons for divorce.
So are you telling me the reason why I don't
have my children? And it won't be to keep my

(19:03):
children because I don't have the profit paperwork. In no,
I'm saying that you've been divorced. The court has entered
orders that mother has sole residential placement, care and custody
of the children. And then you've got no visitation at
present without for the court order. So I'm not able
to see my children by virtue of the prior cord

(19:24):
or not today's court order. So if you believe that
the allegations are not valid, you should bring that to
the court's attention. All right. If you do not have
copies of the court orders, I said, guess that, sir.
You asked for copies of those documents so you can
look at them and reflect on what you'd like to
do next. Thank you, Thank you. John finds all of

(19:45):
that information out in the courtroom that day that he
is divorced with Milic and she has sole custody of
the children. He was so angry, he flipped. It was
that look that I will never forget. John leaves the courtroom.

(20:07):
We come out and we're standing against the wall, and
all of a sudden, I feel a presence and I
turned and it's John. I take off down the hallway,
My shoes go everywhere. Mildred takes off, sprinting down the corner.

(20:28):
I look up and John passes by me, heading towards Mildred.
He was just so focused, he just had this dead stare.
He was so angry. I looked back. John puts his
hand on the courtroom door, looks at me and says gotcha.

(20:50):
He turned around and he walked back the other direction,
and I was just up against the wall, hoping he
would see me. My attorney said, oh, hell no, we
gotta get out of here. I'm scared. I'm letting my
daughter know. Lock the doors, don't answer if anybody comes
to the door, because I figured he would probably come
there looking. So we take the stairs to go down

(21:14):
to the police station, and we explained to them what happened,
and can we please go out of their back door,
and saying no, me to go out the front door.
Just like everybody else, John was no joke. I believed

(21:43):
everything he said to me. He was gonna kill me.
It was gonna be a head shot, and he was
gonna bury me when nobody would be able to find me.
I was terrified, and the terror came because nobody believed me.
They thought I was being dramatic. Okay, they were actually
gonna let me die. And then what were they gonna say? Oh,

(22:04):
she was a good old girl, you know, she loved
the children. We did not see that coming, Yes you did.
When I hear people say that, oh I didn't see that,
Yes you did. Victims always give signs, They always tell somebody.
So we walk out of the court like a triangle
where everybody's watching each other's back. Get to the car.

(22:28):
I slouched down in the car so no one could
see that I was in the car. We go over
to the Department of Health and Human Resources because that's
where my children were, and the first person I see
is my son. He's tall, he's skinny, he trying to
wear afro, but it's in a dome, you know. And

(22:54):
I walk up to him and he got his pants
on his butt sagging gee whiz. And I should have said, honey,
I'm so glad to see you, but I'm pulling up
his pants saying it's this is gonna be an issue,
and he starts laughing. And then I hear my daughter's Mommy, Mommy, mommy,

(23:15):
they're coming down, and I'm just so overwhelmed. I'm crying
to right in my eyes. I can't see you. I
can't see you. And Selena said, Mommy, sayence, honey, Daddy
said he was looking for you but he couldn't find you.
I say, really, I was trying to find you, but

(23:37):
he changed your names, so you were looking for us. Absolutely, Mommy,
I just want to let you know that God answer
my prayer because I was praying, praying and praying for
him to send you back to me, and you're finally here.
I say, Honey, no one will have for take you

(24:01):
away from me again. Okay, okay. So we get in
the car and we drive over to the airport. Security
picked us up from the car, brought us to their
security office. Once the pilot was ready to go, security
took us to the plane. We landed. B w I

(24:25):
September two one. Did you speak to John again? Now?
Why would I? No? For real, why would I? Did
he ever try to reach out to you? He didn't
know where I was. I wasn't hiding. So the last
thing you remember hearing from John was got you. Yes.

(24:58):
One story is the John is just a psychotic killer.
I guess that's plausible. But the other story is that
he melted down under the pressure of not being ever
able to either see his kids or even get into
court to talk about seeing his kids. This is J. Mills,
a divorce attorney who took on John's case. At the
court hearing, the kids were turned over to Mildred. The

(25:21):
judge did that on a temporary basis, told John Mohammad
that he should come back and set up a hearing
to discuss the kids further, and so it was. It
was after that hearing where he lost the kids that
he came to see me. Mills didn't know much about
John's background. He thought John was just going through a
rough divorce. Mills actually felt sorry for John, so he

(25:43):
took on the case pro bono. He was a pretty normal,
routine sort of person, fairly focused. He wasn't very happy
about how things had turned out in court, but he
understood what had got on. The judge wasn't permanently depriving
him of contact with the kids. The judge wanted him
to set up a hearing to discuss what sort of

(26:04):
a parenting plan would be appropriate, and that's very routine.
I did set up a hearing which would require Mildred
to show up in court and then talk about the kids,
but we never had a court hearing because we can
never find Mildred. Mildred vanished with the kids. After I
had set up a couple of the hearings without being
able to serve Mildred with papers, I went to him

(26:27):
and said, look, let's find Mildred because I can set
up hearings all day, But what difference does it make
if we can never locate Mildred and so he set
off to do that. I have given this story to
other people, and sometimes the blowback is that I am
trying to justify what John did, or that I don't

(26:50):
think he's a bad guy. I mean, clearly, the guy
is a bad person with very very severe problems, and
I wouldn't try to justify that. But there's more to
this story. These preliminary decisions get made, and people freak
out about him because they're dealing with people's real personal
lives and their intimate relationships with kids. People who go
through the process get really disturbed by that. And I've

(27:14):
been involved in a number of cases where the end
result is shootings. Tacoma was fairly famous for an incident
where the chief of police shot his soon to be
ex wife and killed her. That was the chief of police, right,
so that guy must have had some degree of normal personality,
but then he lost it and he melted down, and

(27:35):
it's not uncommon for these things to result in a
lot of violence. One way to hopefully avoid that, if
it's possible, is to have people air their grievances in court,
win or lose, They've at least been able to tell
their story. Now, I'm not saying that that should require
Mildred to come stand with John by her side, But

(27:58):
John Mohammed's out there where there was some process that
could have played out where everybody could have had their
day in court, and he never did so. I again,
I've tried to make clear that I I think what
he did was horrific, and I think it's um it's
just evil stuff. But the kind of background story to

(28:19):
it that should be aired is that I think there
were ways that the system failed to diffuse that kind
of problem and instead of just sort of through gasoline
on a fire, if we do not address the systemic
failures that occurred in this case, I worry that there
are other people like that wandering the streets, and people

(28:42):
are gonna die if this problem isn't addressed in a
better way. Just a week after John lost the kids,
tragedy struck. Apparently a plane has just crashed into the
World Trade Center here in New New York City. It
happened just a few moments ago. I had been meeting

(29:03):
with John in my office when the World Trade center
was burning to the ground. He had no interest in
any of the politics. He wanted to see his kids.
John would later say that losing his kids was his
own personal nine eleven. It was surely a low point
in his life. He'd lost his money in the rate

(29:25):
in Antigua, he was living in a homeless shelter, and
now he'd lost his children. John's friend Robert Holmes, the
same friend who reported John to the FBI, says John
was devastated. Holmes told Vanity Fair in two thousand four, quote,
I think that after his kids got taken away, John
had a nervous breakdown. I'm not a professor or a doctor,

(29:48):
but John changed in a million subtle ways. He'd spent
all days, some days just crying. All he could think
of was getting his kids back back. In Fort Myers, Florida,
Lee Boyd Malvo was also struggling. He was trying to
adjust to yet another new living situation. Lee had enrolled

(30:10):
as a junior at Cyprus Lake High School. He was
getting good grades in his classes, but he was struggling
to navigate the American system. Lee wanted to go to
college and one day become an airline pilot, but he
didn't have the necessary documentation to sign up for the
S A T S, so he turned to John for help.

(30:30):
Una thought that John had been a bad influence on
her son and had forbiddenly from talking to him, But
on weeknights, while Una worked at Red Lobster, John would
secretly call I was unable to distinguish between Mohammed the
father I had wanted, and Mohammed and nervous wreck that
was just fall into pieces. John told Lee he could

(30:52):
get him into college, but John wanted something in return,
and he needed Lie to join him in Washington. John
wired leave money for greyhound tickets. Lee says that some
time late in two thousand one, after his mother fell asleep,
he packed up his clothes, a tennis racket, and a
portable CD player. He snuck out of the house at

(31:13):
four thirty am and got on a bus headed northwest.
Lee arrived in Bellingham, Washington a week later. When I
first of all did in Bellingham, he told me that
he's searching for the children. He said, in order to
get the children, we're gonna have to do whatever it takes.

(31:33):
I looked at him at my family, and he has
my sidneys, So I'm like, Okay, we're gonna do whatever
it takes. I didn't understand that that menu at the time.
I really did. In Bellingham, John introduced Lee to everyone
as his son. Lee stayed with John at the homeless
shelter and soon enrolled at Bellingham High School, but one

(31:56):
school was out for the day. Lee says, John was
in arch of his education, day in day out. He
controlled what I read, what I did when I read,
when I slept, in every single aspect from diets studies,
my activities, every single aspect and facet of my life.
And he didn't give me a time to rest. He

(32:18):
understood exactly how to motivate need by giving approval or
denying the prooval and the verse. He wasn't violent at all.
It was it means, it's like what the pimp does
to a woman. That's the best description I can offer.
Sometimes they'd leave the homeless shelter in Bellingham and stay
with John's friends in Tacoma. One friend they would often

(32:42):
visit was Earl Dante, the friend you heard from earlier
who photo shopped a birth certificate for John. John didn't
dress him as much anymore. He wasn't flash anymore. He
had come around her with a white truck. Now. One
time he talked to my door and had leave with him. Hey, Earl,
this is my son Lee. How you don't accessor trying
to be a nice After a while at Dantay's, Lee

(33:04):
says they would play video games and watch movies. They'd
watch some movies over and over. One favorite was The Matrix.
Another was Carlos Halfcock Marine Sniper. It was a sort
of instructional video with advice for snipers. Continue your training.
You cannot do it too much. You cannot do it

(33:26):
too much, So do it as much as you can.
Put all your men and body into a train. Train, train,
and John and Earl began giving Lee shooting lessons as well.
He had a friend Earl. He just said, I need
to go to the range and just tell early teach
me how to shoot. It's amazing how quickly I would
take among these things. I couldn't go as often as

(33:49):
he could because I had to work. He is a
I'm gonna ta you go into the range. It's okay.
I had a six hour forty five. I had a
smith and Western forty four coliber. I had a seven.
I had it Winchester to seventy and I had a
Remington's Model three eight series and cast back in Florida.

(34:15):
Lee's mom, Una James, had been searching for Lee since
he had left. Una page through her caller I D
and found a strange number. It was for a homeless
shelter in Washington State, and she had a feeling that
Lee might be staying there with John. So for weeks
she called the number but could never get through to
either of them. In an interview with Vanity Fair, Una

(34:38):
said that she kept calling. At one day finally she
heard John's voice on the other end. She demanded that
John Seddley back to her in Florida. She remembers John saying,
I have a job to do and I can't rely
on some cokehead to do it. Terrified of what that meant,
Una got on a Greyhound bus and headed for Washington State.

(35:00):
When Una arrived, she confronted John at the homeless shelter
and some one called the cops. When the cops arrived,
they reunited Lee and Una, but the cops suspected they
were both undocumented immigrants and reported them to Border Patrol.
They were arrested and finger printed. These were the finger
prints and the arrest report that would later supply authorities

(35:21):
with the names Lee Boyd Malvo and John Mohunted. Following
the arrest, Una and Lee were separated and detained. Then
on January twenty third, both were released into an ion
s safe house to await a deportation hearing. In an
interview at Vanity Fair, Una said that Lee told her mom,
we are being followed and if I don't go, they'll

(35:45):
kill you. Two days later, Lee climbed out of a
bathroom window and ran off. Lee ran back to John. Now.
Lee's grooming began in earnest. Lee says he and John
would go shooting for hours a day. He stand behind me.

(36:08):
He taught me through the process. He would explain to
me all the things that I hated about myself and
why this has to die. Lee Boyd Malvo says John
told him to visualize his own face onto the targets,
to imagine that with each shot he was destroying his
own weakness. He had killed myself over and over and

(36:31):
over and over. He told me, the old person have
to die. Lee Malvo has denied to Lee Malvo cannot
do this. Lie says they would go to nearby woods
and pretend they were hunting each other with sniper rifles
to practice stealth and camouflage techniques. Lie says that on

(36:52):
one of those outings, when it was snowing, John stripped
off Lee's shirt and chained him to a tree. John
left him there for hours and told him it was
an exercise to mentally harden him. It's like a woman
messing in the easy relationship. Someone looking from the outside
and said, man, they are the multiple opportunities. Why couldn't
she leave? Why she stayed for twenty years? It's not

(37:14):
that simple. The body is just obsessed. Once someone has emotionally,
they have your mind. Lee Boyd Malvo's training was almost over.
Soon John would give him his first real mission. Not
too far away. In Tacoma, Issa and Nichols had been

(37:36):
keeping in touch with Mildred Mohammed. We were having different conversations,
probably maybe once or twice a month. As she begins
to re establish her life after eighteen months without her children.
Issa was glad all the drama with John seemed to
be over and that the kids were back with their
mom My life was so intertwined with hers in terms

(37:57):
of her children and keeping her alive and keeping her safe.
Now I'm faced with where I left off in my life.
Asa had her own struggles at home. Her niece, Keenya Cook,
had just gotten out of an abusive relationship. Before they
had fought, but they had a baby. Now now she's
scared for the baby and she's decided to leave. And

(38:20):
I said, yes, I'll take her home. She can come
with me. So now I have her, her three month
old child, my teenage daughter who's now fourteen, and my husband,
and it's working. I'm very proud of her. She's enrolling
in school. She had gotten a job and got up

(38:41):
to a supervisory position, and the baby's thriving, and Keenya
saving money. She was helping me around the house and
we would go shopping together and different things of that nature.
And one day, February sixte two thousand and two, we
had went grocery shopping and I was gonna make some

(39:02):
chicken tacos that I do pretty good, and we forgot
the taco shells, and so I was going back to
the store. I told Kenya to watch the food in
the pot because I was boiling the chicken, and she said, okay, Auntie,
and I left and then my fourteen year old, who
was at a sleepover, decided she didn't want to stay,

(39:23):
so she called me and asked me to come pick
her up, and I did, and then we went to
the store. We were gone about an hour, maybe an
hour and a half, and I pull in and our
driveway remote control wasn't working. So I sent my daughter
into the house to open the garage door and I'm waiting.

(39:44):
Garage store doesn't open, and my daughter finally comes back
to the car and she's standing there and it's starting
the rain, and I said, hey, what are you doing.
My daughter has the look of trauma on her face.
I said, they girl, what is it? What's wrong? She
sent Mommy Kenya is lying on the floor and the

(40:06):
house is all smoky. So I go to the house
and just as she said, my niece was lying on
the floor in the doorway, and the house was covered
with smoke. The pot and its contents had disintegrated and melted.
And so somehow, by the grace of God, I was
able to get that stove turned off. With all of

(40:28):
that heat, my daughter standing in the doorway just staring.
I called night one one. I ran upstairs to check
on the baby, because I'm thinking that they had succumbed
to smoke in the lation. And so I ran upstairs
and the baby was on the edge of the bed.
All around her was the diaper, nighty warm bottle was
still there, and I didn't know if the baby was

(40:50):
alive or not. I didn't know if the baby was breathing,
and so I touched the baby gently and she jumps
up and she's screaming from where she left. So I
grabbed the baby diaper, took the baby downstairs, and handed
the baby to my daughter and told her to go
to the neighbors and went back to Kenya. And I

(41:14):
got over Kenya's body and I saw a little bullet
casey and a little hole in her face. I stayed there.
I had already called nine one one, and I can
hear the ambulance and the background there on their way,
and I'm talking to Kenya hanging there and I'm praying

(41:34):
and I'm telling her help us coming. And the ambulance
get there, and I'm sitting like on the step and
they come into the house and they get her body
and they pull her in from the fourier into the
living room where they start working on her, trying to
revive her. And they finally say she's gone. And I

(42:00):
just stared and looked in just dismay. I couldn't process
what they meant by saying she's gone. And uh, I
saw where Kenya's head had laid the bullet case and
was still there, and I just saw blood. The back
of her head had just been blown out. I just

(42:24):
went into a cold state. I was just on auto planet.
I was just following commands. According to Lee's autobiography, that
very same night, John Mohammed gave Lee his first test.

(42:47):
One night, He says, Okay, this is what I need
for you to do. There is a house in the hill.
I want you to go there. I want you to
do this. Atually talked to this post, Lee says, John
drove him to a house, ranting about politics and wars
and necessary sacrifices. John dropped Lee off and told him

(43:09):
he'd be watching. Lee was wearing a dark hoodie and
he was holding a brown paper bag. He tried to
calm himself as he walked up to the house. He
knocked on the door, and after a short delay, it opened.
A young woman greeted him. He said, good evening, is
missus Nicholls In. He remembered that she seemed lonely and

(43:30):
eager to talk. She gave him a long answer, explaining
that Issa was at home. John had prepared Lee for
this possibility. I have a message for her, Lee said.
He reached into the brown paper bag and pulled out
a forty five caliber pistol, one they'd borrowed from Earl Dancey.

(43:51):
John had told Lee to visualize his own face on
top of hers, just like in the Trainee. Here's what
Lee wrote about that moment in his autobiography, read by
a voice actor. A voice deep inside me said, don't, don't, don't,
I thought, Lee, you cannot face John unless you do this.

(44:16):
I pointed the forty caliber gun to her face, and
in an instant, I saw not her but me, my
old self that I hated, that scared hurt self. That night,
Lee boy Malvo died. I pulled the trigger. In an instant,
she too was gone. Next time, on Monster D C Sniper,

(44:49):
I was settin there's these helicopters flying all over the
Tacoma community. They are actually saying the DC Sniper it's
linked to Tacoma again. A notice found this time it's
an angry note. You did not respond to the message.
You departed from what we told you to say. Your

(45:10):
incompetence has cost you another life. We need to find
these guys, and we need to do it now. She's
got sources telling her that they're getting close, that they
have names, and that they have a vehicle that they're
looking for. By about nine thirty ten o'clock at night,
we had it. We knew who we were looking for,
we knew what they were in. We just didn't know

(45:31):
where to find them. When do we release the information
about the Caprice to the media. At least we're there
to see if John Wihama showed up. While we were
down there. We got a call on I seventy in
northern Maryland. They believe that the snipers are there and
they're waiting to move in. Monster DZ Sniper is a

(45:51):
fifteen episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris and produced by
iHeart 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 Thain. Payne Lindsay
and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV,

(46:11):
alongside producers Meredith Steadman and Christina Dana. Original music is
by Makeup and Vanity Set. This episode included segments of
a phone interview with Lee Boyd Malvo conducted by journalist
Josh White. This interview was from The Washington Post copyright
two thousand twelve the Washington Post. All rights reserved, used
under license. This episode also included a passage from Lee

(46:35):
Boyd Malvo's autobiography, The Diary of the DC Sniper, re
enacted by actor Alec Bay. This episode included a recorded
interview of Earl don Say provided by the Tucson Police Department.
Earl don Say was contacted by our team for this podcast,
but he did not respond for comment