January 30, 2020 • 29 mins
On October 21st, authorities connect the D.C. Sniper attacks to a liquor store robbery in Alabama. And police find a fingerprint.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster DZ Sniper, a production of iHeart 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.
(00:24):
Ten days before shots were fired in Maryland, the first
victims of the serial Sniper may have been eight hundred
miles south of the Washington Beltway. September one, two two, Montgomery, Alabama.
It all started with a call that had gone out
in relation to a robbery at the liquor store. My
(00:46):
name is James Gray Boys. I currently am the chief
of Police at Alabama State University. At that time, I
was a lieutenant with the Montgomery Police Department. I started
rolling towards that air area when I heard the call
go out. Originally it had been reported as a robbery,
so it was until I started respondents seeing that I
(01:08):
learned that it actually was a robbery with a homicide.
When I responded the area, it really was chaotic. You
have so many people running around. One individual as a
security guard, who ran up to my car and started
pointing down an alleyway and started talking about the suspect
(01:29):
running in that direction. So I basically drove down that alleyway,
and that was when I actually ended up running into
one of the suspects in the case. I saw a
person running as if they're running away, and I basically
hollered at him stop. He actually doubles back and then
starts jumping fences. I'd get out of my car and
(01:51):
chase the subject on foot. The problem with fences is
that when somebody goes over a fence, you can't just
blindly go over the fence because they could be waiting
on the other side to ambush you. You have to
at least slow down and stop and make sure you're clear.
All of that slows you down. Unfortunately, it's a residential area,
(02:11):
so you can't just start shooting to try to hit
somebody running from you because one of your rounds could
go into a house. So you really have to keep
trying to catch up to the person. The guy was
in great shape, he was very very fast, and he
was really getting very far ahead of me. Unfortunately I
(02:32):
lost sight of him and we basically just start saturating
the area and started looking for the subject. There is
a ruthless person on the loose. What a 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
(02:53):
next month. It is quite a mystery. The police say
they have never had a crime quite like this. Be care.
These guys are using weapons that are going to go
right straight through our bullet proof that from My Heart
radio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster DC sniper. After
(03:17):
the Ponderosa shooting, the task force was following a lead
from a note they'd found in the woods. The note
mentioned a call to Officer Derek Beliles. Bliles had received
a strange phone call. The caller said he knew who
the snipers were, and then asked Bliles to look up
a liquor store robbery that took place in Montgomery, Alabama.
(03:39):
Investigators learned that a shooting had occurred there on September one,
ten days before the attacks began in d C. That night,
when officers arrived at the crime scene, they chased after
a suspect but couldn't catch him. Michael Myrick was the
police lieutenant in charge. I was on call and received
notice that a shooting had a herd on Zelda Road
(04:01):
outside of the ABC Liquor store. The two employees were
locking up the store when it was believed a robbery
took place. Ms. Kelly Adams was one of the cashier's clerks.
This was her job, is how she was paying the
bills and getting through life and starting life with a
new husband and a new baby. She was locking up
the store for the night and they have a little
(04:21):
checklist on their clipboard. Ms. Adams said that everything was
like clockwork and as she was closing the store, they
both had to exit at the same time. Claudi and
Parker was the business manager, and as they were waiting outside,
Miss Adams was behind Ms Parker. Miss Parker was turning
the keys in the in the door and Miss Adams
(04:42):
said she did not hear anything, but she felt like
she was electrocuted. She said, I even thought I was tazed.
I just felt this flash of electricity run through me.
And she was shot directly underneath the jawline um from
the left side, and the projectile just caused massive tissue
damage to the skin and neck underneath her jaw and
the jaw itself. The projectile most certainly proceeded through her
(05:06):
body and struck the window next to the door and
shattered that window. She said, then I fell to the ground,
and then she said, I don't know what happened to Claudine.
What happened. Miss Claudine Parker would have most likely seen
Kelly shot. We don't know if she went down to
try to help her or anything. However, we are certain
(05:29):
that she would have backed up and backed away from
what was happening. And as she's backing away, she's actually
behind one of the pillars of the business. She's actually
protected by that pillar. Well. As she continued to back up,
she moves out of the line of sight of the
pillar and then she is shot in the shoulder blade.
(05:52):
It caused massive damage when the bullet exploded inside her
body and she collapsed immediately. We know that Ms. Parker
did not crawl, did not move, She did not get
up and run. Because of the damage to her vertebrae
that the fragmentation caused, she was unable to even breathe
on her own. Later, Miss Adams looked up and she
(06:14):
said she saw very slender, skinny, black legs. She said
the person was wearing shorts, standing above me, pointing a
gun at my head, a small silver revolver, and Miss
Adams does not remember much after that, but she said
the person just left, just ran off. Kelly Adams, the
(06:41):
store clerk, survived the attack. The bullet went in right here,
skirted across there, and came out in front of my face.
The store manager, Claudine Parker, wasn't as lucky as Claudine
Parker was immediately taken to Jackson Hospital, which is the
nearest hospital there, and she died in surgery. From what
(07:03):
we gathered from her family, she was a very, very
good athlete. She was a semi pro tennis player at
one point. Unfortunately, she was in her last pay period
before she was going to retire and become the tennis
coach at Alabama State University, and she was playing on
doing that the next month before she was killed. I
(07:23):
felt very sorry for the families. This was the shooting
that just continued to haunt them. I mean, Miss Adams
has had I believe, over twenty surgeries to repair just
continued infections and and just continued problems that she's had.
The Parker family is always reminded that their loved one
has gone. This particular scene was atypical in the sense
(07:50):
that had occurred right when two police officers were on
routine patrol. They actually heard the gunshots, tried to locate
where they were coming from, and then they saw the
two victims, and they immediately pulled the patrol car to
where the two victims were on the ground, and our
patrol officers saw a young black mail with a medium afro.
He was behind one of the pillars of the business
(08:12):
of rummaging, going through a purse. As they pulled into
the parking lot from the traffic way, the subject looked
at them from behind the pillar and took off running.
One of our officers stayed with the victims, and the
second officer engaged in foot pursuit. The subject running dropped
what was later determined to be an armylike gun catalog.
He pursued him went over the fence as a gated complex,
(08:35):
and he chased him as far as he could until
he was out of sight, and then uh multiple units
of responding trying to locate the subject that was running,
but were unable to do so. That subject, then we
know later had to have come out in a particular area.
An eyewitnessed citizen saw the subject, this young blackmail, getting
into the back of a caprice. That caprice then drove
(08:57):
out of the area. But because the subject got into
the back of the caprice, we knew we had a driver,
so we had a second subject. I was dispatched to
the scene as the case agent. Most of the time,
by the time the homicide unit is called in or
members of the scene is secured, they're just kind of
waiting for us to do our initials. We need to
get into witness interviews, and we need to start locating
(09:19):
evidence that is not just in plain sight. One of
the things that I saw when I arrived on scene
was the significant, significant blood trail from where the victim
was being treated, so I knew this was not just
a typical shooting just from the where the scene was.
Kelly Adams, the surviving victim, said she had seen someone
(09:41):
standing over her with a silver revolver, but strangely, her
wounds hadn't come from a handgun entirely, too much tissue
damage for that to be a handgun. A handgun fires
a heavy bullet, it does not have a lot of
horsepowder as opposed to a rifle. Where your your velocity
is such a issue. So when we saw the injuries
(10:02):
to Kelly Adam's jawline, all the massive damage underneath her
neck where she was shot, a handgun projectile does not
do that. By examining the wounds and bullet fragments, investigators
determined that the shots had come from a rifle. But
that wasn't the only odd thing about the case. Lieutenant
Myrick says, the crime just didn't make sense as a robbery.
(10:23):
There was no need for this type of violence. For
the night deposit in any business, point your gun, demand
the property, to get the property, flee the scene. So
that immediately was odd to us. And also, the ABC
liquor store was a state run liquor store and they
do not get robbed. They made a policy that they
secured the knight's deposit and a safe. They did not
(10:46):
want the employees to leave the business with any amount
of cash. Bottom line to that is, the ABC stores
just did not get robbed. So for someone to rob
the employees as they closed, coupled with the fact that
you were right by the interstate, we just knew that
wasn't a typical local offender. We were just trying to
find any possible lead we could, as in any case.
(11:07):
So this gets into homicide one oh one. Here we
had a couple of people turn in folks they were
mad at That always happens. You get a lot of
folks who provide information that they believe is helpful. It's
just inaccurate information, and we would pursue those interviews, but
they of course led us to nothing. We had no
local leads at all within the first you know, two hours,
(11:28):
just nothing at all. But what officers did have was
evidence like the arm a light gun catalog the suspect
that dropped during the chase. It was a magazine full
of information about rifles and firearm accessories. We recovered thirty
six usable identifiable fingerprints within the gun catalog, and we
(11:50):
have a fingerprint on a brown paper bag from the
liquor store that is all of the same fingerprint person.
We just don't know who it is. If you run
your fingerprints local leave, you run your fingerprints through the
state system, you run your fingerprints through a regional system,
that's just progression. It takes four hours to get a
fingerprint hit, not something that flashes up on the screen
and seconds as TV shows indicate, and when we did
(12:13):
not get any hits, they ran them through the national
system and still received a negative identification as that it's
called a negative I D. When you start doing that,
you're generally thinking that this is someone who's either a
never been fingerprinted or b is a juvenile. On the
fingerprints are not in these adult systems. We thought, well,
(12:37):
if that was a juvenile, this could have been somebody
who just simply came in off the interstate committed this robbery.
They are juvenile, so they're not in the system, and
we really have a tough case. We really have something
that's gonna be very difficult to solve Locally. The case
had gone cold, but soon there'd be an unexpected break
(12:57):
in both the Alabama shooting and the DC sniper case.
(13:23):
A month now had passed since the Alabama shooting, and
the case was still cold Up in d C. Investigators
were now two and a half weeks into their hunt
for the snipers, and retired Montgomery County Police Commander Drew
Tracy worried they weren't making progress fast enough. My day
was I was up three thirty in the morning. I
grabbed something, probably a protein smoothie, and then I'm driving
(13:48):
because I have to give a briefing at five am
in the morning, and I remember grabbing a Washington Post
and it was talking about several serial killings and how
long it took, you know, son of Sam. I think
it took months to catch him, and he was providing
information on a regular basis. And then you had the
b t K Killer and he wasn't court at that time.
(14:08):
I think the Green River killer was just caught. And
I looked at the period of time it takes to
catch some of these individuals, and I said, we can't
sustain this, and it got my head saying, you know,
we gotta push with everything we got because we don't
know how long these resources are gonna last. I mean,
we had close to FBI agents assisting us a t F.
(14:28):
We had local law enforcement, We had volunteers, We had
people we were telling to stand in front of our
school systems that could be victims. We had helicopter pilots.
We had a lot of things going. And I know
there's a limitation to that. So all these things are
kind of taking a heavy weight on the task Force
and people involved. Drew Tracy was exhausted from working over time,
(14:52):
but motivated, motivated to catch the snipers before resources ran out,
motivated to prevent any more sense the shootings, and motivated
by a promising lead. After the task force had learned
about the sniper's call to Officer Derek Beliles, Drew Tracy
was assigned to investigate that lead. I actually called Montgomery,
(15:16):
Alabama myself, and I asked if I could speak to
one of the detectives involved, Johnny. I'm sitting at the
house on a Sunday afternoon watching the NASCAR races everybody
does here, and I get a call from someone from
the Sniper Task Force. One of the units within that
task force had followed a lead there would be snipers
(15:38):
called the Montgomery County p i O officer and said
that they did the shooting on Ann Street in Alabama.
So I remember talking to the detective. I wanted to
get a good feel for were these individuals who called,
are they really involved or is it just something to
just throw us off track? And he told me it
(15:58):
was a robbery. So a little bit of the wind
was coming out of my sales because every one of
the situations we had in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, c it
was not a robbery. What's so intriguing to me is
that they said the shooting was on Ann Street. And
I said, Ann Street is the exit from which you
exit the interstate. That's the Ann Street exit. However, at
(16:21):
the bottom of that exit, if you turn left, you're
on Zelda Road. I said, there would be no way
that someone in town would attribute that shooting to Ann
Street that was actually on Zelda Road. Everybody knows Ann
Street and everybody knows Zelda Road. I asked if there
was any evidence in the case, you know, ballistics and
everything else. He says, the only thing we have is
a magazine. And I said a magazine, you mean magazine
(16:43):
from a weapon. He goes gay paper magazine and he says,
and this is where it went clicked with me, just
like that, and I said, oh my god, we might
have something here. He said it was an armor light catalog. Well,
for my training from being on SWAT, I knew what
armor light was. They produced things that you could put
(17:05):
on your rifle, you know, armor light a R. They
sell stuff for an A R fifteen and make our fifteen.
So when I heard that, we got an FBI agent
from Mobile, Alabama to grab that catalog, especially to Margaret
Faulkner came and gathered the information from our case, some
of the events the transported up to the Sniper task Force,
(17:26):
and Margaret Faulkner being at the task force, she said,
have we ran these fingerprints? Have we ran them in
every known database federal or otherwise. FBI in Washington, d C.
Did a more thorough search because they have access to
bigger databases for fingerprints. They ran it through every alphabet
(17:46):
soup database that they had and when they sat down,
they said, well, the only one that we have not
run it through his I N S. And they said,
what's running through I and S? And that's when we
got a hit on a fingerprint. The FBI found a
match for the fingerprints from the Alabama crime scene unexpectedly
in a database run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
(18:09):
We're I N S and that print was first Lee
Boyd Malvo and he was seventeen years old. This is
Linda Hooper. I was supervisory special Agent of the FBI
at the time of the Sniper investigation, and so I
asked the fingerprint lab, did you run that print for
(18:31):
driver's licenses? I figured seventeen the guy probably has a
driver's license. He said, yeah, we ran him in every state.
He doesn't have a driver's license. The only thing we
could come up with was that he was referenced and
an I n S file out of Tacoma, Washington. Well,
as soon as we found out that his name was
(18:52):
referenced in an I n S file, we went to
I N S and we had them pull the file
so we could see what was in it. It turned
out that Lee Boyd Malvo, the seventeen year old whose
fingerprints had been found on the gun catalog in Alabama,
was originally from Jamaica. Malvo had been fingerprinted in Washington
(19:12):
State in December two thousand one, when he and his mother,
Una James were arrested. Lee Boyd Malvo had been staying
at a homeless shelter with a forty year old man
named John Mohammed. Police were called when Malvo's mother, Una James,
got into an argument with Johnny. She'd showed up at
the shelter and said John had kidnapped her son. Because
(19:36):
Mohammed was not related to Malbo, police returned him to Una. However,
when neither Una or Lee Boyd Malvo could provide any
sort of identification. Police contacted Border patrol and the mother
and son were arrested on suspicion of having entered the
country illegally. Now ten months later, the fingerprints from Malvo's
(19:59):
arrested Washington State match the ones from the Alabama crime scene.
Here's retired Montgomery Police Lieutenant Michael Myrick again. How did
Lee Malville from an I n S arrest in Tacoma,
Washington connect to a shooting in Montgomery, Alabama with a
rifle off of the belt Way, which is what they
have in d C. You know, how is all that happening?
(20:21):
We have a lead, we can at least solve one
case in Alabama from this information. Is that going to
be connected to the sniper shooting. I've got no idea
if that's the situation at all. Well, at the same time,
a man in Tacoma, Washington called the task force and
he said that he had had a friend that had
left the area that was a very militant person, very
(20:43):
upset with his domestic situation. And he says the guy
was very dangerous. He described as just being very very
unhappy with life. And he said it just bothers me
that all this is happening. My friend's ex wife lives
in the DC area. His name's John Mohammed. The tip
(21:04):
was about a man named John Mohammed, the same name
as the man involved in the custody dispute over Lee
Boyd Malvo, and the tipster had called from Washington State,
where Lee Boyd Malvo was arrested. He says, nothing for nothing,
but I'm just, you know, just gonna let y'all know.
Don't want to sit on this information. And he said, uh.
He left with a with an a R fifteen Bushmaster
(21:27):
rifle and he mentions how it is extremely important to
John Mohammed to get a silence sir for a our
style weapon, and that he had a young man with
him that he called sniper. And he said they talked
about snipers and they played sniper games. And he said,
(21:48):
you know, I just want to pass his information on. Well,
now we had a very very clear suspect to pursue
by name. Investigators now had two strong suspects, Lee Boyd
(22:12):
Malvo and John Mohammed in Malvo's case. The letter the
snipers left outside the Ponda Rosa had led investigators to
Derek Beliles, who in turn directed them to the Alabama shooting,
and fingerprints from that crime scene matched Lee Boyd Malva.
They'd come across John Mohammed's name from two different directions.
(22:33):
The I and S report connected Mohammed to Malvo, and
then his name came up again on a tip line call.
Drew Tracy was a trained sniper himself, so he wasn't
surprised that there could be two suspects working together. Back
in three I first became involved as a SWAT team
member and one of the most important pieces of the
(22:56):
training in a vital part was going to snipers over school.
And it's two words is sniper an observer. So you're
trained as a marksman and you're also trained as an observer.
Your main job being a sniper observer is observing. You
have to put yourself in a position you're not seeing,
you have to utilize a different type of optics, and
you have to provide good, steady and specific information to
(23:20):
your team. And the reasoning for a team aspect and
deployment is you can't constantly be behind the optics of
a gun for an extended period of time, so you
wanted to have to train people that would exchange positions.
One could be the observer while the other one sets
up their rifle so they're ready to take a shot.
So it can make sense for there to be two
(23:42):
perpetrators working together, with one acting as the sniper and
the other observing, picking targets and letting the sniper know
when there weren't any witnesses nearby. The tip line caller
had also said that John Mohammed owned a Bushmaster rifle
and a R style way that fires two to three rounds,
(24:02):
the same type of bullets used in the Alabama and
DC shootings. Bushmaster XM fifteen E two s is basically
an assault rifle. It's a high velocity round thirty feet
per second, so it has the capability of being pretty
consistent within three hundred yards. And I went to basically
(24:23):
every scene in the Washington d C. Area, and I
think the longest one was about a haren't thirty yards
utilizing the site system with training, these shots are I
wouldn't say easy, but they're capable with that weapon and
a small amount of training. And the a R fifteen
(24:43):
style assault rifle that John Mohammed was reported to have
was capable of much more than firing single shots at
a long range. It's a semi automatic rifle that can
fire up to forty five rounds a minute. If you
look at the latest active shooter situations in our tree,
you'll see an A R fifteen as being the weapon
of choice. It has the capability of doing great damage.
(25:07):
Law enforcement also carries an a R for patrol nowadays.
But it's interesting many law enforcement departments in this country
switched over to a rifle program because of October two
thousand two, the DC sniper incident. And if you think
about it, if you're a patrol with a limited shotgun
or a handgun, you're not going to have the capability
(25:28):
to go against a rifle threat. One of the things
that kind of scared me each one of these situations
was one shot. It wasn't the second shot. There was
one shot, which led me to believe it was military training.
So that greatly concerned me. And if you think about it,
(25:49):
one shot, what is that showing? One shot is telling
me that they're in control, and that scared us, and
it scared me. Who were John Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo?
And how was this forty year old American connected to
(26:11):
a seventeen year old Jamaican Boy. Investigators needed to find
out as much about them as possible, and if they
were the snipers, investigators needed to find them fast before
they killed. Again. Here's former FBI agent Linda Hooper again.
(26:32):
So we were putting together a lot of information on
these two individuals. It certainly looked like they were two
viable suspects in this case, but we had no information
that they were in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, d C.
Area at all. Well, when we were investigating John Mohammed,
(26:53):
we discovered that he was divorced and his wife, she
had a restraining order against him. I found out that
she was living in the area, and so I sent
two people over to interview her. Me and my children
were having dinner and FBI knock on my door and
(27:14):
they said, so, when was the last time you've seen
John Alan Mohammed, and my palms began sweating. I am
Mildred Mohammed, I'm an award winning global keynote speaker, and
(27:35):
my former husband was John Ali Mohammed, whom you all
know to be the DC Sniper. Next time on Monster
DC Sniper, we'll explore the back stories of John Mohammed
and Lee boyd Malva. Everybody loved John because he was jovial.
(27:59):
He was that guy. He would be gone. She had
a list where he was supposed to go for the day,
and then she started getting phone calls him not being there.
I misread his character. You know, he has a good
slide and a bad slide. He was accused of trying
to kill of the soldiers. You know, I think that
(28:22):
they kept a lot of this shit. He was going
to kill me and it was going to be a headshot,
and I could not get anybody to believe me. Monster
(28:42):
DC Sniper is a 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
iHeart Radio, alongside producers Trevor Young, ben Kiebrick, and Josh Thayne.
Been Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf
(29:03):
of Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Steadman and Christina Dana.
Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you
haven't already, be sure to check out the first two seasons,
Atlanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer If you have
questions or comments, email us at monster at iHeart media
(29:23):
dot com, or you can call us at one eight
three three to eight five six six six seven. Thanks
for listening.
Welcome to Monster DZ Sniper, a production of iHeart 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.
(00:24):
Ten days before shots were fired in Maryland, the first
victims of the serial Sniper may have been eight hundred
miles south of the Washington Beltway. September one, two two, Montgomery, Alabama.
It all started with a call that had gone out
in relation to a robbery at the liquor store. My
(00:46):
name is James Gray Boys. I currently am the chief
of Police at Alabama State University. At that time, I
was a lieutenant with the Montgomery Police Department. I started
rolling towards that air area when I heard the call
go out. Originally it had been reported as a robbery,
so it was until I started respondents seeing that I
(01:08):
learned that it actually was a robbery with a homicide.
When I responded the area, it really was chaotic. You
have so many people running around. One individual as a
security guard, who ran up to my car and started
pointing down an alleyway and started talking about the suspect
(01:29):
running in that direction. So I basically drove down that alleyway,
and that was when I actually ended up running into
one of the suspects in the case. I saw a
person running as if they're running away, and I basically
hollered at him stop. He actually doubles back and then
starts jumping fences. I'd get out of my car and
(01:51):
chase the subject on foot. The problem with fences is
that when somebody goes over a fence, you can't just
blindly go over the fence because they could be waiting
on the other side to ambush you. You have to
at least slow down and stop and make sure you're clear.
All of that slows you down. Unfortunately, it's a residential area,
(02:11):
so you can't just start shooting to try to hit
somebody running from you because one of your rounds could
go into a house. So you really have to keep
trying to catch up to the person. The guy was
in great shape, he was very very fast, and he
was really getting very far ahead of me. Unfortunately I
(02:32):
lost sight of him and we basically just start saturating
the area and started looking for the subject. There is
a ruthless person on the loose. What a 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
(02:53):
next month. It is quite a mystery. The police say
they have never had a crime quite like this. Be care.
These guys are using weapons that are going to go
right straight through our bullet proof that from My Heart
radio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster DC sniper. After
(03:17):
the Ponderosa shooting, the task force was following a lead
from a note they'd found in the woods. The note
mentioned a call to Officer Derek Beliles. Bliles had received
a strange phone call. The caller said he knew who
the snipers were, and then asked Bliles to look up
a liquor store robbery that took place in Montgomery, Alabama.
(03:39):
Investigators learned that a shooting had occurred there on September one,
ten days before the attacks began in d C. That night,
when officers arrived at the crime scene, they chased after
a suspect but couldn't catch him. Michael Myrick was the
police lieutenant in charge. I was on call and received
notice that a shooting had a herd on Zelda Road
(04:01):
outside of the ABC Liquor store. The two employees were
locking up the store when it was believed a robbery
took place. Ms. Kelly Adams was one of the cashier's clerks.
This was her job, is how she was paying the
bills and getting through life and starting life with a
new husband and a new baby. She was locking up
the store for the night and they have a little
(04:21):
checklist on their clipboard. Ms. Adams said that everything was
like clockwork and as she was closing the store, they
both had to exit at the same time. Claudi and
Parker was the business manager, and as they were waiting outside,
Miss Adams was behind Ms Parker. Miss Parker was turning
the keys in the in the door and Miss Adams
(04:42):
said she did not hear anything, but she felt like
she was electrocuted. She said, I even thought I was tazed.
I just felt this flash of electricity run through me.
And she was shot directly underneath the jawline um from
the left side, and the projectile just caused massive tissue
damage to the skin and neck underneath her jaw and
the jaw itself. The projectile most certainly proceeded through her
(05:06):
body and struck the window next to the door and
shattered that window. She said, then I fell to the ground,
and then she said, I don't know what happened to Claudine.
What happened. Miss Claudine Parker would have most likely seen
Kelly shot. We don't know if she went down to
try to help her or anything. However, we are certain
(05:29):
that she would have backed up and backed away from
what was happening. And as she's backing away, she's actually
behind one of the pillars of the business. She's actually
protected by that pillar. Well. As she continued to back up,
she moves out of the line of sight of the
pillar and then she is shot in the shoulder blade.
(05:52):
It caused massive damage when the bullet exploded inside her
body and she collapsed immediately. We know that Ms. Parker
did not crawl, did not move, She did not get
up and run. Because of the damage to her vertebrae
that the fragmentation caused, she was unable to even breathe
on her own. Later, Miss Adams looked up and she
(06:14):
said she saw very slender, skinny, black legs. She said
the person was wearing shorts, standing above me, pointing a
gun at my head, a small silver revolver, and Miss
Adams does not remember much after that, but she said
the person just left, just ran off. Kelly Adams, the
(06:41):
store clerk, survived the attack. The bullet went in right here,
skirted across there, and came out in front of my face.
The store manager, Claudine Parker, wasn't as lucky as Claudine
Parker was immediately taken to Jackson Hospital, which is the
nearest hospital there, and she died in surgery. From what
(07:03):
we gathered from her family, she was a very, very
good athlete. She was a semi pro tennis player at
one point. Unfortunately, she was in her last pay period
before she was going to retire and become the tennis
coach at Alabama State University, and she was playing on
doing that the next month before she was killed. I
(07:23):
felt very sorry for the families. This was the shooting
that just continued to haunt them. I mean, Miss Adams
has had I believe, over twenty surgeries to repair just
continued infections and and just continued problems that she's had.
The Parker family is always reminded that their loved one
has gone. This particular scene was atypical in the sense
(07:50):
that had occurred right when two police officers were on
routine patrol. They actually heard the gunshots, tried to locate
where they were coming from, and then they saw the
two victims, and they immediately pulled the patrol car to
where the two victims were on the ground, and our
patrol officers saw a young black mail with a medium afro.
He was behind one of the pillars of the business
(08:12):
of rummaging, going through a purse. As they pulled into
the parking lot from the traffic way, the subject looked
at them from behind the pillar and took off running.
One of our officers stayed with the victims, and the
second officer engaged in foot pursuit. The subject running dropped
what was later determined to be an armylike gun catalog.
He pursued him went over the fence as a gated complex,
(08:35):
and he chased him as far as he could until
he was out of sight, and then uh multiple units
of responding trying to locate the subject that was running,
but were unable to do so. That subject, then we
know later had to have come out in a particular area.
An eyewitnessed citizen saw the subject, this young blackmail, getting
into the back of a caprice. That caprice then drove
(08:57):
out of the area. But because the subject got into
the back of the caprice, we knew we had a driver,
so we had a second subject. I was dispatched to
the scene as the case agent. Most of the time,
by the time the homicide unit is called in or
members of the scene is secured, they're just kind of
waiting for us to do our initials. We need to
get into witness interviews, and we need to start locating
(09:19):
evidence that is not just in plain sight. One of
the things that I saw when I arrived on scene
was the significant, significant blood trail from where the victim
was being treated, so I knew this was not just
a typical shooting just from the where the scene was.
Kelly Adams, the surviving victim, said she had seen someone
(09:41):
standing over her with a silver revolver, but strangely, her
wounds hadn't come from a handgun entirely, too much tissue
damage for that to be a handgun. A handgun fires
a heavy bullet, it does not have a lot of
horsepowder as opposed to a rifle. Where your your velocity
is such a issue. So when we saw the injuries
(10:02):
to Kelly Adam's jawline, all the massive damage underneath her
neck where she was shot, a handgun projectile does not
do that. By examining the wounds and bullet fragments, investigators
determined that the shots had come from a rifle. But
that wasn't the only odd thing about the case. Lieutenant
Myrick says, the crime just didn't make sense as a robbery.
(10:23):
There was no need for this type of violence. For
the night deposit in any business, point your gun, demand
the property, to get the property, flee the scene. So
that immediately was odd to us. And also, the ABC
liquor store was a state run liquor store and they
do not get robbed. They made a policy that they
secured the knight's deposit and a safe. They did not
(10:46):
want the employees to leave the business with any amount
of cash. Bottom line to that is, the ABC stores
just did not get robbed. So for someone to rob
the employees as they closed, coupled with the fact that
you were right by the interstate, we just knew that
wasn't a typical local offender. We were just trying to
find any possible lead we could, as in any case.
(11:07):
So this gets into homicide one oh one. Here we
had a couple of people turn in folks they were
mad at That always happens. You get a lot of
folks who provide information that they believe is helpful. It's
just inaccurate information, and we would pursue those interviews, but
they of course led us to nothing. We had no
local leads at all within the first you know, two hours,
(11:28):
just nothing at all. But what officers did have was
evidence like the arm a light gun catalog the suspect
that dropped during the chase. It was a magazine full
of information about rifles and firearm accessories. We recovered thirty
six usable identifiable fingerprints within the gun catalog, and we
(11:50):
have a fingerprint on a brown paper bag from the
liquor store that is all of the same fingerprint person.
We just don't know who it is. If you run
your fingerprints local leave, you run your fingerprints through the
state system, you run your fingerprints through a regional system,
that's just progression. It takes four hours to get a
fingerprint hit, not something that flashes up on the screen
and seconds as TV shows indicate, and when we did
(12:13):
not get any hits, they ran them through the national
system and still received a negative identification as that it's
called a negative I D. When you start doing that,
you're generally thinking that this is someone who's either a
never been fingerprinted or b is a juvenile. On the
fingerprints are not in these adult systems. We thought, well,
(12:37):
if that was a juvenile, this could have been somebody
who just simply came in off the interstate committed this robbery.
They are juvenile, so they're not in the system, and
we really have a tough case. We really have something
that's gonna be very difficult to solve Locally. The case
had gone cold, but soon there'd be an unexpected break
(12:57):
in both the Alabama shooting and the DC sniper case.
(13:23):
A month now had passed since the Alabama shooting, and
the case was still cold Up in d C. Investigators
were now two and a half weeks into their hunt
for the snipers, and retired Montgomery County Police Commander Drew
Tracy worried they weren't making progress fast enough. My day
was I was up three thirty in the morning. I
grabbed something, probably a protein smoothie, and then I'm driving
(13:48):
because I have to give a briefing at five am
in the morning, and I remember grabbing a Washington Post
and it was talking about several serial killings and how
long it took, you know, son of Sam. I think
it took months to catch him, and he was providing
information on a regular basis. And then you had the
b t K Killer and he wasn't court at that time.
(14:08):
I think the Green River killer was just caught. And
I looked at the period of time it takes to
catch some of these individuals, and I said, we can't
sustain this, and it got my head saying, you know,
we gotta push with everything we got because we don't
know how long these resources are gonna last. I mean,
we had close to FBI agents assisting us a t F.
(14:28):
We had local law enforcement, We had volunteers, We had
people we were telling to stand in front of our
school systems that could be victims. We had helicopter pilots.
We had a lot of things going. And I know
there's a limitation to that. So all these things are
kind of taking a heavy weight on the task Force
and people involved. Drew Tracy was exhausted from working over time,
(14:52):
but motivated, motivated to catch the snipers before resources ran out,
motivated to prevent any more sense the shootings, and motivated
by a promising lead. After the task force had learned
about the sniper's call to Officer Derek Beliles, Drew Tracy
was assigned to investigate that lead. I actually called Montgomery,
(15:16):
Alabama myself, and I asked if I could speak to
one of the detectives involved, Johnny. I'm sitting at the
house on a Sunday afternoon watching the NASCAR races everybody
does here, and I get a call from someone from
the Sniper Task Force. One of the units within that
task force had followed a lead there would be snipers
(15:38):
called the Montgomery County p i O officer and said
that they did the shooting on Ann Street in Alabama.
So I remember talking to the detective. I wanted to
get a good feel for were these individuals who called,
are they really involved or is it just something to
just throw us off track? And he told me it
(15:58):
was a robbery. So a little bit of the wind
was coming out of my sales because every one of
the situations we had in Maryland, Virginia, Washington, c it
was not a robbery. What's so intriguing to me is
that they said the shooting was on Ann Street. And
I said, Ann Street is the exit from which you
exit the interstate. That's the Ann Street exit. However, at
(16:21):
the bottom of that exit, if you turn left, you're
on Zelda Road. I said, there would be no way
that someone in town would attribute that shooting to Ann
Street that was actually on Zelda Road. Everybody knows Ann
Street and everybody knows Zelda Road. I asked if there
was any evidence in the case, you know, ballistics and
everything else. He says, the only thing we have is
a magazine. And I said a magazine, you mean magazine
(16:43):
from a weapon. He goes gay paper magazine and he says,
and this is where it went clicked with me, just
like that, and I said, oh my god, we might
have something here. He said it was an armor light catalog. Well,
for my training from being on SWAT, I knew what
armor light was. They produced things that you could put
(17:05):
on your rifle, you know, armor light a R. They
sell stuff for an A R fifteen and make our fifteen.
So when I heard that, we got an FBI agent
from Mobile, Alabama to grab that catalog, especially to Margaret
Faulkner came and gathered the information from our case, some
of the events the transported up to the Sniper task Force,
(17:26):
and Margaret Faulkner being at the task force, she said,
have we ran these fingerprints? Have we ran them in
every known database federal or otherwise. FBI in Washington, d C.
Did a more thorough search because they have access to
bigger databases for fingerprints. They ran it through every alphabet
(17:46):
soup database that they had and when they sat down,
they said, well, the only one that we have not
run it through his I N S. And they said,
what's running through I and S? And that's when we
got a hit on a fingerprint. The FBI found a
match for the fingerprints from the Alabama crime scene unexpectedly
in a database run by the Immigration and Naturalization Service.
(18:09):
We're I N S and that print was first Lee
Boyd Malvo and he was seventeen years old. This is
Linda Hooper. I was supervisory special Agent of the FBI
at the time of the Sniper investigation, and so I
asked the fingerprint lab, did you run that print for
(18:31):
driver's licenses? I figured seventeen the guy probably has a
driver's license. He said, yeah, we ran him in every state.
He doesn't have a driver's license. The only thing we
could come up with was that he was referenced and
an I n S file out of Tacoma, Washington. Well,
as soon as we found out that his name was
(18:52):
referenced in an I n S file, we went to
I N S and we had them pull the file
so we could see what was in it. It turned
out that Lee Boyd Malvo, the seventeen year old whose
fingerprints had been found on the gun catalog in Alabama,
was originally from Jamaica. Malvo had been fingerprinted in Washington
(19:12):
State in December two thousand one, when he and his mother,
Una James were arrested. Lee Boyd Malvo had been staying
at a homeless shelter with a forty year old man
named John Mohammed. Police were called when Malvo's mother, Una James,
got into an argument with Johnny. She'd showed up at
the shelter and said John had kidnapped her son. Because
(19:36):
Mohammed was not related to Malbo, police returned him to Una. However,
when neither Una or Lee Boyd Malvo could provide any
sort of identification. Police contacted Border patrol and the mother
and son were arrested on suspicion of having entered the
country illegally. Now ten months later, the fingerprints from Malvo's
(19:59):
arrested Washington State match the ones from the Alabama crime scene.
Here's retired Montgomery Police Lieutenant Michael Myrick again. How did
Lee Malville from an I n S arrest in Tacoma,
Washington connect to a shooting in Montgomery, Alabama with a
rifle off of the belt Way, which is what they
have in d C. You know, how is all that happening?
(20:21):
We have a lead, we can at least solve one
case in Alabama from this information. Is that going to
be connected to the sniper shooting. I've got no idea
if that's the situation at all. Well, at the same time,
a man in Tacoma, Washington called the task force and
he said that he had had a friend that had
left the area that was a very militant person, very
(20:43):
upset with his domestic situation. And he says the guy
was very dangerous. He described as just being very very
unhappy with life. And he said it just bothers me
that all this is happening. My friend's ex wife lives
in the DC area. His name's John Mohammed. The tip
(21:04):
was about a man named John Mohammed, the same name
as the man involved in the custody dispute over Lee
Boyd Malvo, and the tipster had called from Washington State,
where Lee Boyd Malvo was arrested. He says, nothing for nothing,
but I'm just, you know, just gonna let y'all know.
Don't want to sit on this information. And he said, uh.
He left with a with an a R fifteen Bushmaster
(21:27):
rifle and he mentions how it is extremely important to
John Mohammed to get a silence sir for a our
style weapon, and that he had a young man with
him that he called sniper. And he said they talked
about snipers and they played sniper games. And he said,
(21:48):
you know, I just want to pass his information on. Well,
now we had a very very clear suspect to pursue
by name. Investigators now had two strong suspects, Lee Boyd
(22:12):
Malvo and John Mohammed in Malvo's case. The letter the
snipers left outside the Ponda Rosa had led investigators to
Derek Beliles, who in turn directed them to the Alabama shooting,
and fingerprints from that crime scene matched Lee Boyd Malva.
They'd come across John Mohammed's name from two different directions.
(22:33):
The I and S report connected Mohammed to Malvo, and
then his name came up again on a tip line call.
Drew Tracy was a trained sniper himself, so he wasn't
surprised that there could be two suspects working together. Back
in three I first became involved as a SWAT team
member and one of the most important pieces of the
(22:56):
training in a vital part was going to snipers over school.
And it's two words is sniper an observer. So you're
trained as a marksman and you're also trained as an observer.
Your main job being a sniper observer is observing. You
have to put yourself in a position you're not seeing,
you have to utilize a different type of optics, and
you have to provide good, steady and specific information to
(23:20):
your team. And the reasoning for a team aspect and
deployment is you can't constantly be behind the optics of
a gun for an extended period of time, so you
wanted to have to train people that would exchange positions.
One could be the observer while the other one sets
up their rifle so they're ready to take a shot.
So it can make sense for there to be two
(23:42):
perpetrators working together, with one acting as the sniper and
the other observing, picking targets and letting the sniper know
when there weren't any witnesses nearby. The tip line caller
had also said that John Mohammed owned a Bushmaster rifle
and a R style way that fires two to three rounds,
(24:02):
the same type of bullets used in the Alabama and
DC shootings. Bushmaster XM fifteen E two s is basically
an assault rifle. It's a high velocity round thirty feet
per second, so it has the capability of being pretty
consistent within three hundred yards. And I went to basically
(24:23):
every scene in the Washington d C. Area, and I
think the longest one was about a haren't thirty yards
utilizing the site system with training, these shots are I
wouldn't say easy, but they're capable with that weapon and
a small amount of training. And the a R fifteen
(24:43):
style assault rifle that John Mohammed was reported to have
was capable of much more than firing single shots at
a long range. It's a semi automatic rifle that can
fire up to forty five rounds a minute. If you
look at the latest active shooter situations in our tree,
you'll see an A R fifteen as being the weapon
of choice. It has the capability of doing great damage.
(25:07):
Law enforcement also carries an a R for patrol nowadays.
But it's interesting many law enforcement departments in this country
switched over to a rifle program because of October two
thousand two, the DC sniper incident. And if you think
about it, if you're a patrol with a limited shotgun
or a handgun, you're not going to have the capability
(25:28):
to go against a rifle threat. One of the things
that kind of scared me each one of these situations
was one shot. It wasn't the second shot. There was
one shot, which led me to believe it was military training.
So that greatly concerned me. And if you think about it,
(25:49):
one shot, what is that showing? One shot is telling
me that they're in control, and that scared us, and
it scared me. Who were John Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo?
And how was this forty year old American connected to
(26:11):
a seventeen year old Jamaican Boy. Investigators needed to find
out as much about them as possible, and if they
were the snipers, investigators needed to find them fast before
they killed. Again. Here's former FBI agent Linda Hooper again.
(26:32):
So we were putting together a lot of information on
these two individuals. It certainly looked like they were two
viable suspects in this case, but we had no information
that they were in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, d C.
Area at all. Well, when we were investigating John Mohammed,
(26:53):
we discovered that he was divorced and his wife, she
had a restraining order against him. I found out that
she was living in the area, and so I sent
two people over to interview her. Me and my children
were having dinner and FBI knock on my door and
(27:14):
they said, so, when was the last time you've seen
John Alan Mohammed, and my palms began sweating. I am
Mildred Mohammed, I'm an award winning global keynote speaker, and
(27:35):
my former husband was John Ali Mohammed, whom you all
know to be the DC Sniper. Next time on Monster
DC Sniper, we'll explore the back stories of John Mohammed
and Lee boyd Malva. Everybody loved John because he was jovial.
(27:59):
He was that guy. He would be gone. She had
a list where he was supposed to go for the day,
and then she started getting phone calls him not being there.
I misread his character. You know, he has a good
slide and a bad slide. He was accused of trying
to kill of the soldiers. You know, I think that
(28:22):
they kept a lot of this shit. He was going
to kill me and it was going to be a headshot,
and I could not get anybody to believe me. Monster
(28:42):
DC Sniper is a 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
iHeart Radio, alongside producers Trevor Young, ben Kiebrick, and Josh Thayne.
Been Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf
(29:03):
of Tenderfoot TV alongside producers Meredith Steadman and Christina Dana.
Original music is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you
haven't already, be sure to check out the first two seasons,
Atlanta Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer If you have
questions or comments, email us at monster at iHeart media
(29:23):
dot com, or you can call us at one eight
three three to eight five six six six seven. Thanks
for listening.
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