The Beltway Snipers: The Last Shot — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

0:00Ever walk past a place for rent and wish you could just take a peek inside? Maybe even explore the layout. Envision the natural light streaming through the windows. Or plan where your vinyl record collection would go. At Apartments.com, you can. With tools like their 3D virtual tours, you can see the exact unit you could be living in. Really envision yourself in your new home with Apartments.com. The place to find a place. Celsius Spritz Vibe Summer Edition is here. Meet the new sparkling limoncello twist flavor, inspired by the vibrant, refreshing flavors of summer in Italy. With crisp limoncello flavor and a subtle twist of sweetness, it's the perfect way to bring a little Italian-inspired energy wherever the season takes you.

0:42Whether you're soaking up the sun, chasing your next adventure, or making the most of every summer moment, Spritz Vibe Summer Edition is ready to refresh your routine. Go find your Spritz Vibe before summer ends. September 21st, 2002, 11 days before James Martin is shot crossing a grocery store parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland, when the country learns the word sniper. Montgomery, Alabama, closing time on Zelda Road outside a liquor store. Two women are locking up. Claudine Parker is 52. She is the store's business manager, and she is in her last pay period before retirement. Next month, she is supposed to start coaching tennis at Alabama State.

1:26Behind her is Kelly Adams, 24, a clerk, newly married, with a new baby. Kelly doesn't hear anything. She will describe it as being electrocuted. A single rifle round comes in under her jaw from the left, goes through, and shatters the window beside the door. She goes down. Claudine Parker backs away, and for a moment, one of the store's pillars stands between her and the shooter. Then she backs out from behind it, and she is shot through the shoulder blade and does not move again. Kelly Adams tells police what she can see from the ground. Thin, black legs, shorts, somebody standing over her, pointing a small silver revolver at her head.

2:11And then the person just turns and runs off. Two Montgomery patrol officers on a routine patrol are close enough to hear the shots. They pull in and see a young black man with a medium afro behind the pillar going through a purse. The young man runs. One officer stays with the women. The other goes after him, chasing him over a fence and then another and loses him. And somewhere in that chase, the runner drops something. There is a gun show in town that weekend, so it could belong to anybody. Two detectives bag it anyway. It's a catalog, a paper magazine full of rifle accessories from a company called Armalite.

2:54Claudine Parker will never coach at Alabama State. She dies in surgery about three hours later. Kelly Adams lives. She will have 31 operations in the next five years and a permanent implant to manage the pain. The gun magazine goes to the lab, and it gives up 36 clean fingerprints, all from the same person. Montgomery PD runs them locally, then through the state system, then through neighboring Georgia. Nothing comes back. Investigators take that to mean whoever handled the catalog has never been arrested as an adult. For a month, the answer to the D.C. sniper case sits in an evidence room in Alabama, and no one in the world knows it.

3:40I'm Megan Kelly and this is MK Confidential.

3:48Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results can be so dramatic. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. But what if you're looking to lose weight but are not interested in painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those intense side effects. That's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called Lean, and the results could be remarkable. Lean says the studied ingredients in their product have been shown to lower your blood sugar, burn fat by converting it into energy, and curb your appetite and cravings so you are not as hungry.

4:20But listen, Lean is not for the casual dieter with only a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition created Lean for frustrated dieters with 10 or more pounds to lose. You could get started with 20 % off and free rush shipping, adding lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Visit take lean.com and enter Kelly for your discount. That's promo code Kelly at take lean.com. By the middle of October, 2002, Malvo and Muhammad have been trying for days to get police to take them seriously. Hotline operators screen them out. Calls drop. People were not listening to us, Malvo says later.

4:59So they offer proof. A crime only the men doing the shooting could know about. They pick Alabama because they believe it is safe. As far as they know, the police in Montgomery have nothing. The next call comes with something in it that only the killers could know. A call comes into police headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and gets transferred to an officer named Derek Beliles. Shut up and listen, the caller says, and don't ask any questions. The caller, almost certainly Malvo, says he knows who is responsible for the recent D.C. area shootings, but first he wants Beliles to verify something.

5:39Call the police in Montgomery, Alabama, he says. Ask about a liquor store holdup on Ann Street back in September, where two women were shot. James Fitzgerald, the FBI forensic linguist from Episode 4, has spent two weeks studying these men. The fact that they had to brag about that they killed someone in Montgomery, Alabama, that was a real big clue. And we contacted the Montgomery, Alabama PD. They even told us, this is one of the phone calls, well, if you don't think we're legit, they already killed six people in one day, on October 2nd. but they somehow still had to, and this is mostly John Muhammad, again, the adult, they had to sort of brag about things.

6:20Well, we robbed a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama. You know, check that out. Beliles makes the call. Four hours later, the killers reach a priest in Ashland, Virginia, and tell him the same thing. And when the letter they leave in the woods behind the Ponderosa is finally read, it complains about an officer named Derek and about a priest. Two calls, both pointing at the same town. The tell that the caller was actually at the physical location is a street name. Their shooting didn't happen on Ann Street, as the caller claimed. It happened on Zelda Road. Ann Street is the exit off the interstate a block away.

7:01The lieutenant who worked that case, Michael Merrick, says nobody who lives in Montgomery would ever call it an Ann Street shooting. Someone who came off the highway would. So a Montgomery County, Maryland police commander named Drew Tracy gets an Alabama detective on the phone and asks the obvious question. Is there anything that can help us? He says, the only thing we have is a magazine. And I said, a magazine? You mean magazine from a weapon? He goes, a 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.

7:40The prints off that catalog cannot be transmitted electronically. In 2002, Alabama is one of many states not wired into the FBI's National Fingerprint Database. So somebody has to carry the prints by hand. On Monday, October 21st, an FBI agent from Alabama carries them onto a plane to Washington, D.C., along with the bullet fragments. When an examiner runs the Alabama prints through the federal fingerprint system, a name comes back. Here's FBI Supervisory Special Agent Linda Hooper to the Monster DC Sniper podcast. And that print was for Lee Boyd Malveaux, and he was 17 years old. Ten months earlier in Washington state, the Jamaican teenager was picked up as an illegal immigrant and fingerprinted by Border Patrol.

8:32The print gives them the boy, And as Fitz told me, once they had the boy, they had the man too. They took him to the FBI. They ran him across the whole spectrum of fingerprints. And they found immigration fingerprints from Lee Boyd Malvo, who was like 15, 16 when he came to this country, from Jamaica. And they wound up contacting whoever knew him. Oh, he's with this guy named John Muhammad. That same morning, across the country in Tacoma, Washington, investigators finally knock on Robert Holmes' door. Holmes is Muhammad's old army friend who has spent a week trying to get someone at the FBI to take him seriously.

9:12About his friend John. About the Bushmaster. About the boy John called his little sniper. Now someone does. By Wednesday, October 23rd, the task force has two names. a photograph off a California driver's license, and a car. A 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, dark blue New Jersey plates, NDA21Z. That plate has been run through police computers repeatedly over the prior three weeks and handed back clean every single time. At 10 minutes to midnight on Wednesday, police chief Charles Moose steps up to the microphones and announces a federal arrest warrant for John Allen Muhammad on a firearms charge. He is careful.

10:03He says the charge has nothing to do with the shootings, that Muhammad may be traveling with an unnamed juvenile. He does not give out the plate number. He doesn't have to. It has been on television for an hour already, leaked out of police radio traffic and running across the bottom of TV screens across the country. Maryland State Police Lieutenant David Reichenbaugh is out distributing wanted posters when word comes over the radio that the Chevy Caprice has been found. It's at the South Mountain Westbound Welcome Center rest area on Interstate 70 in Western Maryland, right near South Mountain State Park.

10:42Reichenbaugh is 35 miles out, and he is about to be the highest-ranking officer on that scene. He gets his duty officer at the Maryland State Police Barracks in Frederick on the radio and asks how many troopers he has. Two, says the sergeant, maybe one or two more out of Hagerstown. Send everyone you've got, Reichenbaugh says. Have them meet me at the entrance to the rest area and tell them to come in silent. He gets there with three men, two troopers, and one sheriff's deputy. They are armed with handguns and a shotgun against a rifle that goes through body armor. He decides the four of them cannot rush that car, so he seals the car in instead.

11:27He shuts down I-70 in both directions, telling drivers there has been a bad accident. He posts a canine handler with orders to treat anyone who walks out of that rest area as the sniper. He blocks the entrance ramp with a patrol car. Then he goes looking for something bigger to put across that exit. We had a couple of truck drivers start to come out to leave, and I asked them if they wanted to be good Americans. And it was like, well, yeah, troop, what do you need? I said, well, we got the snipers in the rest area. I said, can you throw your truck across this exit so that that car cannot get out of here?

12:05Reichenbach calls a friend in the Secret Service, and 30 seconds later by presidential authority, the airspace over Frederick County is closed to news helicopters. Inside the Caprice, Muhammad is asleep across the back seat. Malvo is in the front, his head down by the steering wheel. He is supposed to be keeping watch. Asked later why he thinks they were caught, he tells his interrogators it was his own laziness, his lack of discipline, that he departed from something he knew worked, he says, for five minutes of pleasure, for five minutes of sleep. By 3.30 a.m., a 19-man tactical team has assembled at the bottom of the wooded hill behind the rest stop.

12:51County officers, state troopers, and FBI hostage rescue operators, six of them will approach the car. They rehearse it once in a McDonald's parking lot down the road. Then they come up through the trees and stop at two oaks, 20 yards out. After three weeks of false alarms, not one man in that tree line is certain there is anyone in this car at all. The team leader holds up three fingers and counts down. Three, two, one. They cross the open ground, take out the driver's front window and the passenger rear window with spring-loaded batons and light up the inside of the car with the lights on their weapons.

13:35FBI, police, hands up. Malvos pulled out the front door. Muhammad sits up in the back with his hands raised and is taken out the other side. A trooper covers the trunk while another gets the keys because nobody knows what is in there. Clear. It takes about 30 seconds. Nobody fires a shot. Drew Tracy, the Montgomery County commander who helped assemble the assault team, is standing by the tree line. And I start walking from the wood line. I see like a glistening of like light. And when I look down, the glistening was Malvo. Malvo was on the ground, face down, handcuffed. And what happened is when they breached the tempered windows, the glass got in his hair and it hit the light.

14:28and he didn't say one word. Malvo is five foot five. Reichenbaugh, standing over him on the pavement, writes later what went through his head. Christ, he's just a kid. Muhammad is shaking so badly a trooper has to hold him still to get the cuffs on. They put the two of them in separate cars and drive them off the mountain to a state police barracks. Fitz is asleep in Maryland when the phone rings. He was arrested at 3.30 in the morning, and I get a call. I was staying up in Maryland then, and they said, hey, can you go to a state police barracks? They arrested the two snipers. I'll be there. So this is before GPS.

15:05I had to map my way there on my own, which I got there, and I walk into this dark state police barracks, kind of in the middle of nowhere, not a big building, a couple marked cars out there, and then one or two others, no media, which was a good sign. He knocks. He shows his credentials. They buzz me in the first door, buzzed me in the second door, and it's all dark. It's like a one-story building. And I looked down the hallway about 30 feet ahead of me. There's a state trooper in uniform running full speed, you know, left to right. What the hell? So I didn't pull my gun out because I know there's other officers around, but my hand is on my gun.

15:41And next thing you know, there's another trooper closer to me, another hallway. He's running right to left looking for something. And I finally see a trooper comes up there. I said, FBI, what's going on? The kid escaped. The manhunt has been officially over for a couple of hours. Next time you hear a big bang on the ground, we got him, he's over here. And it turns out they put Malvo in a room. He may have been handcuffed in front, which you never do, always behind. And they didn't handcuff him to the bar on the wall. And somehow he used that bar, climbed up into the ceiling, and he actually crawled about 50 feet over the, you know, the drop ceiling until finally he reached a weak spot and fell down on the ground.

16:25He was fine, but they got him up, handcuffed him again, put him in the room, and he never escaped again. Back on the mountain, nobody can search the car without a warrant. It is finally signed at 5.55 in the morning. When they get inside, an FBI SWAT leader notices the back seat looks wrong. The cushion has been altered so it swings up at the top like a hatch. They lift it. Behind it, held in place with a bungee cord, is a Bushmaster rifle. A lot of skincare makes big promises but often under delivers. But one skin is different. In fact, they never set out to become a skincare company at all. It was founded by four PhD longevity scientists who spent over 10 years researching skin aging and testing more than 900 novel peptides before developing OS01.

17:17It's their proprietary peptide designed to address a leading driver of visible skin aging. That research is the foundation of every one skin product, helping support smoother looking skin, a more even tone and radiance and visibly fewer fine lines. And the results are backed by four peer-reviewed clinical studies and more than 10 ,000 five-star reviews. Born from over 10 years of longevity research, OneSkin is helping you unlock your healthiest skin now and as you age. For a limited time, try OneSkin with 15 % off using the code Megan at oneskin.co slash Megan. oneskin.co slash Megan. That's 15 % off oneskin.co with code Megan.

18:05After you purchase, support our show and tell them we sent you and then enjoy this beautiful product. If you're like me, you have a lot of things on your mind, work things, family things, what's for dinner things. So here's one last thing to think about protecting your engine. Just swing by your local take five for an oil change and ask for Pennzoil Platinum full synthetic motor oil. It helps protect against wear, keeps your engine running clean, and gives you the kind of peace of mind you don't have to overthink. Just remember one thing, ask for Pennzoil Platinum by name at your local Take-5.

18:38Pennzoil, long may we drive. The bipod is folded under the barrel and there is a live round in the chamber. An ATF ballistics man puts on gloves and clears the weapon. And I'll never forget, as long as I live, the noise of when the lab guy cocked that round out of that rifle and seeing it spinning around in a circle in the air and the tinkle that it made when it hit the parking lot. Later that day, the ATF's chief firearms examiner test fires the Bushmaster into a water tank and puts the recovered bullets under a microscope beside the fragments taken out of the victims. It matches 11 of the 14 shooting scenes in the region.

19:24One person is not watching any of it from home. The evening before the arrest, ATF agents knock on a door on quiet Brook Lane in Clinton, Maryland, and ask Mildred Muhammad to come down to the police station and answer some questions. Here is Mildred. The way I found out that it was John was when ATF knocked on my door and said that they were gonna name John as the sniper. And so they asked me, well, do you think that he would do something like this? And I was like, well, I don't, yeah. I said, well, why would you think that? I said, well, he said he could take a small city, terrorize it. They would think it would be a group of people and it would only be She has watched the same coverage as everyone else for three weeks.

20:16Two of the shootings happened within a few miles of her own home. Mildred Mohammed and her three children are moved into protective custody that night to a hotel her sister and brother-in-law go to. She gets the children to sleep, then she goes into the bathroom and turns on the water so they will not hear her. She sits down on the floor with a pillow and sobs into it. What Mildred Mohammed believes and has said publicly and consistently ever since is that she was the point of all of it, that he came to Washington to kill her and needed her death to look random so that he could collect his children.

20:56No court has ever ruled on that. Prosecutors did not have to prove why he did it. Afterward, Mildred tells A &E people who find out who she is tell her it is her fault. At that time, they told me that... You should have seen it coming? No, if I would have stayed with him, then he just would have killed me. If I would have stayed on the West Coast, then the people on the East Coast would still be alive. How dare I bring this drama into a quiet community? And how dare I call me and my children victims when neither of us were killed? I was blamed because they couldn't get to John. Now comes the question of who gets to put Malvo and Muhammad on trial.

21:40Montgomery County, Maryland wants the case. So do two federal prosecutors' offices and the Virginia counties where people were shot. Six of the ten dead are Maryland's. On November 7, 2002, Attorney General John Ashcroft sends both men to Virginia. The first prosecutions, he says, should go where the law and the facts are best and the toughest sentences are available. In Maryland, a defendant who is under 18 at the time he committed the murder cannot be sentenced to death. Same for federal court. But in Virginia in 2002, the floor is 16. Muhammad will be tried in Prince William County for the murder of Dean Myers.

22:23Malvo in Fairfax County for Linda Franklin. Both trials are moved to the far southeastern corner of the state because the defense argued that no one near Washington could possibly sit on that jury with fairness. John Muhammad's trial opens in Virginia Beach in October 2003. On the first morning, he takes the case away from his lawyers and tells the judge he will represent himself. His argument to the jury is one simple question. Whoever saw him fire a rifle? Nobody. No witness in the case puts the weapon in Muhammad's hands. Then he begins cross-examining victims of the attacks. Among them, Paul LaRuffa, shot five times in his own car outside his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland, in the robbery that paid for that Chevy Caprice.

23:14So, talk about crazy circumstances and weird events in your life. I was being questioned by the guy who tried to kill me. He wasn't the guy that pulled the trigger, but he was the brains behind it. After two days, Mohammed hands the case back to his attorneys. The prosecution's answer is that it does not matter whose finger was on the trigger. Virginia charges Mohammed under an anti-terrorism law written after September 11th, which requires only that a jury find the killing was part of an act intended to intimidate a civilian population. On November 17, 2003, the jury convicts him on all counts.

23:56A week later, the same jury recommends death. Months later, the judge accepts the recommendation and formally sentences Muhammad to die. Lee Malvo's trial runs at the same time, an hour down the road in Chesapeake, Virginia. He pleads not guilty, and his lawyers give notice that they will argue insanity, that Muhammad indoctrinated him so completely he could not tell right from wrong. One lawyer puts it more plainly later. The whole point was to keep Malvo off of death row. And it works. The jury convicts him, but spares his life. Life without parole. The following year, Malvo pleads guilty in Spotsylvania County, Virginia.

24:42to killing Kenneth Bridges and shooting Caroline Sewell and gets two more life sentences. In May 2006, Maryland finally gets its turn. John Muhammad goes on trial in Rockville for the six murders committed in Montgomery County. And this time the state has a witness it did not have in Virginia back in 2003. Lee Malvo testifies against John Muhammad. Malvo is now 21 and he testifies for the better part of two days. He tells the jury the shootings were only phase one. Phase two was bombs on schools, on school buses, in children's hospitals. Why children, the prosecutor asks him. For the sheer terror of it, Malvo answers, quoting Muhammad.

25:31The worst thing you can do to people is take aim at their children. He says Muhammad picked the targets and picked who fired. He says he fired three of the shots himself and Muhammad fired the rest. Malvo tells the jury about that night in Ashland, Virginia, when he says he shot the man outside the steakhouse, the one married to the rocket scientist, and kept his cool. He didn't crack. You were calm, Muhammad told him. I've created a monster. The prosecutor, Catherine Winfrey, asks him why he agreed to testify. I want to tell the truth, and I think he is a coward, Malvo says. Malvo then turns his head and looks directly at John Muhammad.

26:16You took me into your house, he says, and you made me a monster. The next morning, John Muhammad stands up to cross-examine Malvo. It goes on for several hours. John is representing himself again. He keeps addressing Lee Malvo as son or Lee during the cross-examination. Malvo interrupts. I would prefer you address me by my name, he says. I'm not doing it intentionally, Muhammad protests. I apologize, Mr. Malvo. A few questions later, he does it again. Son, he says. I mean, Mr. Malvo. Muhammad asks Malvo about a day in Antigua when John's son, Little John, and his girlfriend, Andrea, went into the water and started drowning.

27:04John was off the island, and Malvo went in after them, saving them both. Then John asks, son, I mean Mr. Malvo, isn't it true that if the roles were turned and Lee Boy Malvo was in that water, that John Allen Muhammad would have gotten him? The prosecutors object. The judge sustains it. Malvo is not allowed to answer. When Mohammed is finished, prosecutor Catherine Winfrey gets back up and asks Malvo one question. What was the difference in how Mr. Mohammed treated you and his children, she asks. Mr. Mohammed did not use any of his children to murder other people, says Malvo. On May 30, 2006, John Muhammad is convicted of six more first-degree murders.

27:55The jury gives him six consecutive life sentences on top of the death sentence already awaiting him in Virginia. In November 2009, the U.S. Supreme Court rejects John Allen Muhammad's last petition, and the governor of Virginia refuses him clemency. The execution is set for the evening of November 10 at the Greensville Correctional Center, in Jarrett, Virginia. John walks into the execution chamber at two minutes to nine. He was allowed to choose the method of his execution, but never made a choice. So under Virginia state law, the method defaults to lethal injection. He has declined a spiritual advisor.