The Beltway Snipers: A Trail of Victims Across the Nation
October 2002 heralded the beginning of a three-week murder spree that would terrorize citizens across the Washington Metropolitan Area. However, the Beltway snipers had already claimed several victims earlier that year, beginning in February. The pair killed and wounded so many innocents that they were not additionally tried for several cases that were uncovered beyond the October sniping spree, due to the preexisting severity of their sentences.
They left commuters with a lasting fear of stopping at gas stations and of prowling white vans, and their alleged plans to follow the ‘Phase One’ sniping spree were yet more heinous. Despite falling far short of their projected victim count, their damages were deeply significant. What was the ultimate story of Baton Rouge’s John Allen Muhammad and his young accomplice from Jamaica, Lee Boyd Malvo?
The true beginning, according to the Washington Post, was the murder of 21-year-old Keenya Cook in her Tacoma, WA home. It was February 16th, around 7PM, when she left her 6-month-old daughter upstairs and answered the door. She was shot with a .45, killed at once, for the loosest of connections: CNN states “[h]er aunt was a former friend of Muhammad’s ex-wife.” Malvo would eventually confess to shooting Cook under Muhammad’s orders. And the same pattern would repeat for the pair of shooters, a tightly-bonded strategy that would find them “charged or suspected in nine earlier shootings” across six states.
CNN lists many of these suspected victims. 60-year-old Jerry Taylor from Tucson, AZ followed Cook on March 19th, a murder Malvo would confess to in 2006. At the beginning of August was 58-year-old John Gaeta from Hammond, LA, who survived. Seven shootings throughout September killed Million Woldemariam in Atlanta, GA, and Claudine Parker in Montgomery, AL, and Hong Im Ballenger in Baton Rouge, LA.
Five, at least, survived. These were Paul LaRuffa, Rupinder Oberoi, Muhammad Rashid, Kellie Adams, and Wright Williams Jr. If Muhammad and Malvo had not been apprehended for the October shootings, these seemingly random victims would have been much harder to connect. As the Washington Post observes, they were killed hundreds of miles away from each other “in a nation where gun violence is endemic.” Each case appeared isolated and local.
It would all change in October. At this time, Muhammad was 41, and Malvo was just 17.
October 2nd: 55-year-old James D. Martin was fatally shot in a Wheaton, MD parking lot.
October 3rd: 39-year-old James L. Buchanan near Rockville, MD. And 54-year-old Premkumar Walekar in Aspen Hill, MD, while pumping gas at a station. And 34-year-old Sarah Ramos from Silver Spring, MD — the incident that led a witness to report the ultimately inaccurate rumor of a “white van or truck” transporting the shooters. 25-year-old Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera at another gas station in Kensington, MD. One more death came that night for 72-year-old Pascal Charlot in Washington, DC. Each was “killed by a single bullet fired from some distance.”
At this point, the FBI reports, connections between the killings were forming. Chief Charles Moose of the Montgomery County Police Department led the investigation, supported by the FBI and other law enforcement groups. Hundreds of agents were assigned to work the public tipline, digitally map the crime scenes, and profile the killer.
Their urgency was paramount. With the serial killers’ pattern realized, citizens of the Washington Metropolitan Area were panicking. School districts in Montgomery County and the District of Columbia cut outdoor recesses and gym classes for fear of targeting. And the shootings went on.
October 4th: 43-year-old Caroline Seawell was shot in a Fredericksburg, VA parking lot, but survived, leaving the hospital ten days later.
October 7th: 13-year-old Iran Brown was shot in the chest outside his middle school in Bowie, MD, but survived the serious wound.
October 9th: 53-year-old Dean Harold Meyers in Gaithersburg, MD, killed while pumping gas in Manassas, VA. On the same day, CNN reports, police discovered a clue the killers left near Iran Brown’s school: a Death tarot card with ‘Call me God’ written across the top.
October 11th: 53-year-old Kenneth Bridges, fatally shot at a gas station in Fredericksburg, VA.
October 14th: 47-year-old Linda Franklin was killed in a Falls Church, VA parking lot. The FBI observes that she was one of their own intelligence analysts, though Franklin was not on duty at the time.
October 17th: Though no new shootings occurred, the FBI reports they received a call that day from a man “claiming to be the sniper.” This caller goaded the agency by confessing to the murder of a woman one month earlier: Claudia Parker from Montgomery, Alabama. Once forensic details were checked out, this served to connect that case to the DC area shootings. The FBI found Lee Malvo’s fingerprints on a magazine at the Alabama location.
Connected to Malvo’s previous arrest record, Muhammad’s name came up as well. ATF agents identified the Bushmaster .223 rifle he had been using, which would allow the FBI to federally charge him. They obtained a federal material witness warrant for Malvo. But they still needed to find their suspects.
October 19th: 37-year-old Jeffrey Hopper was shot in an Ashland, VA parking lot, but survived surgery. Despite his distance from the DC epicenter, the ballistics were found to match the other shootings.
October 22nd: The final shooting targeted 35-year-old Conrad Johnson as he entered a bus in Aspen Hill, MD. He died in the hospital soon afterward.
That day, the FBI released the true description of the snipers’ vehicle: a blue Chevy Caprice, license plate NDA-21Z.
On October 24th, around 3:19AM, Montgomery County police officers responded to a tip and cornered Malvo and Muhammad in their car while they slept. They were arrested at a rest stop by Interstate 70 “without a struggle.” The horror of the past weeks would not subside so easily, but the killers had been stopped.
The matter of charging and sentencing the two killers prompted a legal debate, as it was unclear how many fatal shots had been Muhammad’s and how many were Malvo’s. On top of that, Malvo was still a minor. Muhammad ultimately received the death penalty, influenced partially by Malvo’s detailed testimony against him.
According to Malvo, as confessed in 2006, Muhammad’s true plan for ‘Phase One’ would have involved “kill[ing] six white people a day for 30 days,” but the pair was inhibited by traffic and the lack of clear escape routes. They never reached ‘Phase Two,’ which would have involved killing children with explosives on school buses, the shooting of a police officer, and a mass explosion to be set off at the officer’s funeral. Muhammad’s final step was allegedly a plan to “extort millions of dollars from the authorities” in order to set up a camp and train other boys to commit further shootings throughout the US.
Though he confessed to shooting three of the victims, Malvo received a stack of life sentences rather than the death penalty. His plea of ‘not guilty’ had hinged on the excuse of insanity, claiming he had been “under Muhammad’s complete control.”
“You took me into your house, and you made me a monster,” Malvo reportedly told Muhammad in court, when asked why he had chosen to testify against his former mentor.
Muhammad was executed on November 9th, 2009. Malvo, now 37, remains in prison without parole.
