The Beltway Snipers: Trained to Kill— Ep. 3 | MK Confidential

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0:35That's why Grooms is my go-to. It's one daily pack of gummies covering my greens, vitamins, and minerals. Plus, it has six grams of prebiotic fiber, which is more than two cups of broccoli. No mixing powders, no giant pills, no hassle. I just rip open the pack and I'm done. They taste good and make it easy to stay on top of my health, even when life gets busy. Save up to 52 % off with code podcast at Grooms.co. That's code podcast at G-R-U-N-S dot C-O. It is a drizzly Saturday evening in Tacoma, Washington, February 16, 2002. On the corner of East 34th Street and East Roosevelt Avenue, there is a pale yellow house that looks out over the city's dockyards, the Puyallup River, and the fog sitting on Commencement Bay.

1:18The porch faces the street and the city spread out below it. Beside the front door, a small sign reads, Please remove shoes. This house belongs to a U.S. Army soldier named Joseph Nichols and his wife, Issa. Neither of them is home. Issa has gone to collect their 13-year-old daughter, Tamara, from a sleepover. The only people in the house are the Nichols' 21-year-old niece, Kenya Cook, who lives here with her aunt and uncle, and Kenya's six-month-old daughter, Angelia. There is food on the stove. Upstairs, the baby is lying on a towel on a bed. It's nearly bath time. At about seven o 'clock, the doorbell rings.

2:03Kenya comes downstairs in a shirt, jeans, and socks. The porch light is on, throwing light onto the front steps under the overhang that keeps whoever is standing out there dry. But it is dark, and the window set into the front door is a long, narrow strip of cut glass, it's hard to see anything through it. Everyone who knows Kenya Cook says the same thing about her. She is careful. She would never open that door to a stranger. So she has a reason. Maybe it's her estranged boyfriend who came by the house earlier in the day. Or maybe through that narrow strip of glass, whoever is out there simply looks like a kid from the neighborhood.

2:45Kenya opens the front door and looks out onto Roosevelt Avenue. A single bullet goes through the thin bone just below her left eye and lodges at the base of her skull. She goes down in the foyer. And then nothing happens. The ejected shell casing lies on the floor beside her. Upstairs, the baby is still on her towel waiting to be washed. In the kitchen, the food is still on the stove. A few minutes later, headlights turn into the driveway. Issa Nichols stays in the car to pull it into the garage. Her daughter gets out and walks around to the front of the home to go in the front door and open the garage from the inside.

3:26The front door is wide open, which is odd. A second later, the 13-year-old is running back to the car. Mommy, she screams. Mommy, hurry. Police look at Kenya's boyfriend first because he had been at the house earlier the same day. They bring him in. They question him. Then they let him go. After that, there is nowhere to go. There was a young woman dead in a foyer, a brass casing on the floor, and a doorbell that rang. The case is cold right from the start. Issa Nichols has the blood cleaned out of the foyer. Her husband installs a camera above the front door. There are no viable clues to go on.

4:10For eight months, nobody knows who fired that shot, but there would be more, many more. I'm Megan Kelly, and this is MK Confidential.

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5:33That's HomeTitleLock.com promo code Megan or use the link in the description. The person who rang Kenya Cook's doorbell is Leiboyd Malvo. He is 16 years old, two days away from his 17th birthday. How did this teenager end up on that doorstep? And the question that has never been settled about him, not in a courtroom, not in the 20 years since, how much of what he did was his to choose? He's born in Kingston, Jamaica on the 18th of February, 1985. His father is Leslie Malvo, a brick mason who went as far as the sixth grade. He has other children by other women, which in Jamaica at the time is neither unusual nor a point of conversation.

6:22Of all his children, Leslie says Lee looks the most like him. His mother is Una James. She is 20 when she has him. As a girl, she walked miles to find her own father and ask him to pay for her schooling, and he said no. What she wants for her son is the education she was refused. Leslie, the father, is the soft one. The boy says he wants to be a pilot, so his dad folds him a paper plane, and the two of them fly it around the furniture carefully so as not to break anything. When the boy does break his mother's porcelain vase and hears her shriek his name from the other room, It's Leslie who steps in front of him.

7:03Leave the boy alone, he says. I broke it. He takes his son everywhere. He calls him Little Man. Una is the hard one. Playing is an interruption of studying. And by his father's account, when Leslie is not there, she beats Malvo. In 1988, Leslie takes a masonry contract in Grand Cayman. Six months at a stretch. He sends money home twice a month and opens a savings account. because he's going to buy them a house. He never does. In August of 1990, Una empties the account, packs up the entire house, and moves the boys somewhere she is fairly sure Leslie will not find them. But Leslie does find them in the summer of 1991, and he brings two flight jackets covered in military tags because he remembered his son wants to be a pilot.

7:56And then he goes away for good. Malvo is only five. Malvo is nine the first time his mother leaves him. She boards him with a woman he met the day before. This is the first of many separations. Over the next five years, Malvo is handed from one household to another. When he's 10, he goes looking for his father, finds him, and asks if he can stay. Leslie tells him no. Malvo believes the real reason was the woman with whom his father was living, who treated Malvo like an intrusion. Through all of it, Malvo is consistently on the honor roll at school. In January of 1999, Malvo's mother leaves Jamaica for the Caribbean island of Antigua in the care of a friend and then of a teacher.

8:47She sends for him to join her in the summer of 1999. He is 14 when he reaches Antigua, and his mother is the only person he knows on the Island. In the early days of October 2000, in St. John's, the capital of Antigua, there is an electronics shop called Zaza Yellows, where the neighborhood kids go to use the computers and play video games. Malvo goes there. The place is usually crowded, so mostly he finds a corner and watches other people play. And on several Fridays, he notices a father and a son. They're playing Microsoft Flight Simulator, and they're laughing. The boy is flying from the outside view, and his father says, nice scenery, but remind me not to fly with you.

9:33Malvo stands in the corner and watches them. He's now 15 years old. Malvo says later the level of trust, their open camaraderie, and the communication between them was something he had always dreamed of, but until then had never experienced, not since his mom first took him away from his dad. Malvo admires the father in that shop. When he walks in, everyone straightens up. He talks to children the way he talks to adults. When someone speaks to him, he lets them finish. He repeats back what they said to make sure he understood, and only then does he answer. Malvo's mother, who is trying to get to America, hears there's an American on the island who sells visas.

10:14She takes her son with her to the address on Rose Street. The American turns out to be the man from Zaza Yellows, who was so good with his own son. His name is John Allen Muhammad. He is a United States Army veteran. He lives on Antigua with his three children, and he sells forged papers to people trying to reach America. While his mother negotiates, Malvo gets to know Muhammad's son. The boy's name is John Jr., and his nickname is Little Man. The same name Leslie Malvo used to call his son in Kingston before any of this. Little Man and I hit it off, Malvo writes in his journal, when we learned we both wanted to be pilots.

10:59Una buys her papers, memorizes her cover story, and flies to the United States. She tells her son Malvo that she will send for him to come to the United States when she has the money. She pays for the rest of the term at his school, covers two months rent, and leaves him to fend for himself. In Antigua, he has literally no one. He is 15. A few months later, alone in the house, Lee Malvo gets sick. It's a recurrence of the rheumatic fever he had as a child. His joints ache, his tonsils swell shut. For two days, he cannot get out of bed to call anybody or even feed himself. By Malvo's own account given years later prepared with his defense team, he describes what happened next, quote, then Mr.

11:47Muhammad came by one day and found the back door slightly ajar. Upon entering, he saw me in bed, sweating and almost delirious with fever. He lifted me out of bed and carried me out in his arms because I was too weak to walk. He took me to the doctor and then to his place of residence. I was fed with fluids and soup. What was truly amazing was that he spent a lot of time ensuring that I was okay and he never asked for payment. After that, they go everywhere together. Carmeta Albaros, the social worker who later worked on Malvo's defense, describes them as disciple and guru. Muhammad talks, Malvo listens.

12:28Malvo tells him about his father, his mother, and the beatings. Muhammad tells him they did not meet by coincidence. They met by destiny. He starts introducing Malvo as his son, and Malvo starts calling him dad. Muhammad teaches him to speak with an American accent. On his 16th birthday, he takes them shopping and replaces his entire wardrobe. He takes him to a tailor and has him measured for three suits. One woman who watched them in Antigua says Muhammad treated Malvo like a little soldier. Yes, sir. No, sir. Like he was in the army. Malvo will later say these were the happiest days of his life.

13:09On the last day of May 2001, Lee Malvo enters the United States, flying out of Antigua with Muhammad and Muhammad's three children under a name that is not his. He travels as Lindbergh Williams, Muhammad's son, by his first marriage. He is handed over to his mother, Una, now in Florida. He registers at a high school in Fort Myers and starts earning A's and B's. And in October, he runs. He leaves before dawn, takes a bus west, and gets off in Bellingham, Washington, 15 miles from the Canadian border. He's running toward a man who six weeks earlier walked out of a Tacoma courtroom without his own children.

13:52In August, Muhammad had applied for food stamps in Washington state and filled in his children's real names, the names flagged in a state system. That led back to his ex-wife, Mildred, who had legal custody and a restraining order against Muhammad. On the 4th of September, a court commissioner in Pierce County hands all three children back to their mother. There is tape of the hearing. So the children must have a missing, The whereabouts were never known by mother. That's why the court apparently issued the writ. You never 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 children because I don't have the proper paperwork yet?

14:33No, I'm saying that you've been divorced. The court has entered orders that mother had sole residential placement, care and custody of the children, and that you get no visitation at present without further court order. So I understand I'm not able to see my children. Mildred takes the three of them and disappears to the suburbs of Washington, D.C. John Muhammad has a name for that day. He calls it his own September 11th. So when the boy gets off the bus in Bellingham, he finds Muhammad now childless and living in a Christian homeless shelter called the Lighthouse Mission. They sign in under the last name Thomas.

15:14One resident leader tells authorities that Muhammad put the word out that he wanted his wife killed. He wanted it secret and anonymous. He talked about shooting her from a car. He talked about making a silencer out of a Coke bottle. And he talked about cutting a gun port into the vehicle. In February of 2002, Muhammad and Malvo move into an apartment near a golf course in Tacoma. It belongs to a man named Earl Dancy, who works at the Seattle-Tacoma Airport. Dancy has things Muhammad wants. A Chinese-made version of the AK-47, a Winchester with a scope, a Remington.308 hunting rifle, a.44 Magnum revolver, a.22 pistol, and a compact Sig Sauer.45.

16:04Dancy gives them the run of the apartment and free use of the guns. Why would he do that? Years later, Dancy explains it in the documentary series Born to Kill. Very manipulative. He gains your confidence. He gains your trust. Once he comfortable your trust, he'll use it to his advantage. They take the guns out to the Tacoma Sportsman's Club, and Dancy notices that Muhammad is obsessed with the boy's marksmanship. He coaches him. He brags about how well he's coming along. And when Malvo makes a mistake, Muhammad makes him run laps and do push-ups. Malvo always obeys. The targets are paper men.

16:45Here's Dancy again. At a period of time, they would bring targets to me. And the targets were getting better and better. And actually one where the target was actually dead shot, sent him ass. Two weeks after he first takes the boy to a range, Muhammad hands him a gift. It's a t-shirt with the word sniper across the front. He tells Malvo he won it in a sniper competition in the 90s. Malva wears it. Muhammad tells Earl Dancy that he qualified as a sniper in the army. He's telling Dancy other things, too. That his ex-wife and one of her friends conspired to take his children and that he's going to get them for it.

17:27He has Dancy sit down at his computer and search for Mildred Muhammad on the internet. Dancy finds her. She's in the Washington, D.C. area, which brings us back to a doorbell in Tacoma shortly before a cross-country journey will begin. Everybody'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.

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18:43Hey, you're... Yeah. Buying a car online on AutoTrader? Really? But unlike other sites, you can start online, test drive with a local dealer, then finish online or at the dealership. Cool. Enjoy. Buy your car online on AutoTrader. Really. Authorities believe that on the drizzly evening of February 16, 2002, it was Lee Boyd Malvo who borrowed Earl Dancy's compact Sig Sauer 45 and carried it across town to the corner of East 34th and East Roosevelt. By Malvo's own account, given years later to his defense team, Muhammad spends the weeks beforehand making sure the boy is ready. Failure is not an option.

19:25Your pace must be certain, he tells him, like a man who knows where he's going. Then he drives Malvo to the home. Before he lets him out of the car, he makes him say the plan out loud. Knock on the door. Ask for Issa. If it's Issa, good. If it's not, say you have a message for her. And then use this. Issa Nichols, whose home this is, used to manage the Mohammeds' books. She became Mildred's close friend and testified for her during the custody fight. Issa is one of the people Mohammed blames for the loss of his children. But she isn't home. Her niece is. Kenya Cook answers the door. She's 21 and has nothing to do with Mohammed's custody fight.

20:13She tells Leboid Malvo where her aunt has gone. He shoots her anyway. By his account, he runs to a phone booth, sweating and crying. Mohamed pulls up and Malvo gets in. I watched you, Mohamed tells him. You did perfect. Then he hands the boy a wallet with a new ID card in it. Malvo reads the name on it, John Lee Mohamed. Lee Boyd Malvo no longer exists, Mohamed says, and starts the engine. Malvo says he stood in the shower for hours and couldn't get clean, that Mohammed got impatient and knocked on the bathroom door, and that the knocking on the door was the worst part. Two days later, it's his 17th birthday.

21:01Mohammed takes him to the mall and buys him slacks, shirts, ties, cufflinks, and sneakers. And he takes him bowling and then to the movies. The film is John Q with Denzel Washington. A man's son needs a heart operation he cannot pay for, so he takes an emergency room hostage. And while they are bowling, Malvo will later say, Mohamed lectures him on the importance of a man doing whatever he has to to save his children. A month later, they're in Arizona. On the 19th of March, at a golf course in Tucson, a 60-year-old frozen foods salesman named Jerry Ray Taylor is practicing his game after lunch.

21:47He goes down on the course, shot in the back. Whoever shot him drags his body into the underbrush, appears to have pulled out Jerry's wallet, but leaves it next to him, the cash and cards still inside. And that is how it goes for seven months. A murder in one state, then a bus ticket, then a murder in another one under a different name in a jurisdiction that has never heard of the last one. September 5th, 2002, half past 10 at night, a strip mall in Clinton, Maryland. Restaurant owner Paul LaRuffa has just closed for the night. He walks out across the lot with an employee and a customer carrying a black leather briefcase with about$3 ,500 in it and a laptop.

22:36He opens the back door of his green Chrysler, puts them both on the seat, and gets in the driver's seat. There is a shadow at the driver's side window, a small figure, he will say. Then the window comes apart, and bullets go into his arm and his chest and his side, and as he leans away from it, someone yanks open the back door of his car and lifts the briefcase and the laptop off of the seat. La Ruffa gets his door open and staggers out onto the lot, shouting for someone to call 911, telling himself over and over that he is not going to die in this parking lot. And he doesn't. He's been shot five or six times, but he lives.

23:19That$3 ,500 pays for what comes next. On September 21st, outside a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama, a manager named Claudine Parker is shot dead. The 24-year-old cashier Kelly Adams is also shot through the neck and lives. Officers are close enough to hear it. They chase a man and he gets away. And on the ground where he ran, they find something and they bag it and they file it away. Two days later in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, a woman named Hong Eam Ballinger locks up the beauty supply store where she works and reaches her car with her keys in her hand. She is killed by a single shot to the head.

24:05A few blocks from that strip mall in Clinton, Maryland, where Paul LaRuffa was shot and his$3 ,500 were stolen, there is a subdivision with streets named Black Willow and Mayapple and Quiet Brook Lane. Living on Quiet Brook Lane that September is the woman Earl Dancy found on the internet, a 41-year-old divorced mother of three who moved across the country from Tacoma, Washington to get away from her husband. Her name is Mildred Muhammad. Robert Holmes, one of Muhammad's oldest army friends, would later say he believed Mildred was always the real target. My way of thinking was Mildred was the target in the mission.

24:50Because if it was just to terrorize people or to kill people even, that could have been done anywhere. If you kill 10 people and she's one of the 10, then it's less likely. I mean, there's still a chance that you're going to get caught, but it's less likely. By the second week of October, 11 people are dead in this killing spree. Six of them in the D.C. area this month. Two more shot and still alive, and thousands of local and state police, sheriffs' deputies, federal agents, marshals, and technicians are now hunting two men, whom they still believe may be a single sniper in a white van. Roadblocks shut down interstates within minutes of each murder.

25:34The task force knows that there's a rifle and there's a vehicle. They know the crimes are connected by the same gun, and that is it. October 9th, the next victim. A 53-year-old civil engineer named Dean Myers is working late at his office in Manassas, Virginia because he works late almost every night. He was drafted in 1969 and shot on a patrol north of Saigon. He came home with a purple heart and an arm that never fully worked again. A little after eight, a colleague in the next cubicle says goodnight. Okay, Myers says, see you tomorrow. Myers has a long drive and he needs gas. He pulls his black Mazda into the battlefield Sunoco on Sudley Road.

26:19He is standing in the white light of the pump island in the cold and the wet when a shot cracks and a.223 round out of a rifle, very like the one he carried in Vietnam, hits him behind the left ear. He is dead before he lands. Police seal the roads for miles. They find nothing. October 11th, two days later, a 53-year-old businessman from Philadelphia named Kenneth Bridges pulls off Interstate 95 near Fredericksburg, Virginia to fill his tank. He has six children, and everybody has warned him about this stretch of road. He stops anyway. Kenneth calls his wife Jocelyn from the Pump Island to tell her where he is.

27:03She thinks about warning him one more time. She doesn't. He'll be out of there in a few minutes, she thinks, and there's a Virginia State trooper 50 yards away working a fender bender. Surely no one would fire a rifle with a trooper standing right there. At 9.28 a.m., Kenneth Bridges puts the nozzle in his tank. The trooper hears the shot, runs to him, and works on Kenneth until the rescue squad arrives. By them, there is no pulse. The trooper never sees a man with a rifle. No one at that gas station does. October 14th, three days later, just before half past seven in the evening, Ted and Linda Franklin drive their red mercury into the parking lot at the Home Depot in the Seven Corners shopping center near Falls Church, Virginia.

27:52Linda Franklin is 47 and an intelligence analyst at the FBI. She has recently had a double mastectomy, and she's still in physical therapy. Her daughter is about to make her a grandmother. They spend an hour and a half inside buying shelves for a house they're about to move into. A little after nine, they wheel the cart out to the car. One of the shelves will not fit. It's too long for the trunk, so they put the back seat down and try to feed it through, which doesn't work either. Ted holds the cart to stop it from rolling, while Linda tries to wrestle the shelf in through the passenger door. She's having trouble with it.

28:31Why don't you come and hold the cart, Ted says. I'll see if I can put it in. They switch places. As Ted is ducking in and out of the car with the shelf, he hears a loud noise and feels something spray across his face. He assumes the noise came from inside the store where they're always dropping pallets. The spray is what gets his attention. When he turns around, his wife Linda is on the pavement. Inside the store, people are screaming. Employees are shouting at each other to shut the doors. Within minutes, the lot fills with police. No one standing in it can tell anybody where the shot came from.