BY PGF
2 years ago
On October 24, 2002, a Muslim and his younger accomplice were finally caught.
How it began
The murders that shocked the nation’s capital and the nation itself had started three weeks earlier.
On October 2, 2002, a sniper’s bullet struck down a 55-year-old man in a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland. By 10 o’clock the next morning, four more people within a few miles of each other had been similarly murdered.
The attacks were soon linked, and a massive multi-agency investigation was launched.
The case was led by the Montgomery County (Maryland) Police Department, headed by Chief Charles Moose, with the FBI and many other law enforcement agencies playing a supporting role. Chief Moose had specifically requested our help through a federal law on serial killings.
Within days, the FBI alone had some 400 agents around the country working the case. We had set up a toll-free number to collect tips from the public, with teams of new agents in training helping to work the hotline. Our evidence experts were asked to digitally map many of the evolving crime scenes, and our behavioral analysts helped prepare a profile of the shooter for investigators. We had also set up a Joint Operations Center to help Montgomery County investigators run the case.
The idea of sniping from a mobile platform, never in the same place twice, is rather clever. They never switched vehicles and only slightly varied their routine, however.
A rolling sniper’s nest
On the morning of October 24, the hunt for the snipers quickly came to an end, when a team of Maryland State Police, Montgomery County SWAT officers, and special agents from our Hostage Rescue Team arrested the sleeping John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo without a struggle.
Just a few hours earlier, at approximately 11:45 p.m., their dark blue 1990 Chevy Caprice with its New Jersey license plate had been spotted at a rest stop parking lot off I-70 in Maryland. Within the hour, law enforcement swarmed the scene, setting up a perimeter to check out any movements and make sure there’d be no escape.
What evidence experts from the FBI and other police forces found there was both revealing and shocking. The car had a hole cut in the trunk near the license plate so that shots could be fired from within the vehicle. It was, in effect, a rolling sniper’s nest.
Also found in the car were:
- The Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle that had been used in each attack;
- A rifle’s scope for taking aim and a tripod to steady the shots;
- A backseat that had the sheet metal removed between the passenger compartment and the trunk, enabling the shooter to get into the trunk from inside the car;
- The Chevy Caprice owner’s manual with—the FBI Laboratory later detected—written impressions of the one of the demand notes;
- The digital voice recorder used by both Malvo and Muhammad to make extortion demands;
- A laptop stolen from one of the victims containing maps of the shooting sites and getaway routes from some of the crime scenes; and
- Maps, walkie-talkies, and many more items.
I worked in DC at the time and took public transit every morning during these several weeks.
In August, A Maryland court ordered Malvo, now 37, resentenced.
