Lee Boyd Malvo was identified as a juvenile illegal alien, born February 18, 1985, in Kingston, Jamaica. His print had been identified through the Citizenship and Immigration fingerprint database. Malvo had been deported to his native Jamaica seven years prior. He was now seventeen years old.
Additional information and pictures of the suspect were immediately requested from immigration officials, and an FBI investigative team was dispatched to Montgomery, Alabama, to collect any additional information and to start following leads from there. Now we had something to help us link the leads provided by the killers in their letter. We started with the credit card they wanted to use to get their $10 million. Credit cards are easily traced because of the electronic footprint they leave everywhere they are used. The owner of the card turned out to be a long-distance bus driver. When questioned, she said the card had been stolen from her the previous March while she was driving the bus through Arizona.
Now we had the beginnings of a trail. We knew the killers had been in Arizona and Montgomery, Alabama. The investigative team went into a full-court press, tracking Lee Boyd Malvo to find out who he was, where he had been, and whom he was traveling with. Over the next several days, the FBI and investigators from the SNIPMUR task force would pursue multiple leads and conduct extensive interviews all over the country.
We would discover that Lee Boyd Malvo was traveling with a person who was believed to be some sort of mentor to him. John Allen Muhammad had befriended young Malvo and had, according to some accounts, taken Malvo under his wing—sometimes even referring to Malvo as his son. Muhammad, who was born John Allen Williams in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on December 31, 1960, was a former soldier who had made it to the rank of sergeant. His military career was average at best, and he possessed no particular skills that would raise any eyebrows or alarms.
Muhammad was tracked to the state of Washington, near Tacoma. He had been married to a Mildred Muhammad, who had divorced him and taken the kids into hiding. Ironically, she had moved with the children to Maryland—a fact that Muhammad was unaware of. Mildred may have been in hiding for good reason. In February 2002, Keenya Cook was shot and killed when she answered the front door to her Tacoma home. That homicide remained unsolved—there was no clear motive for the crime. But as the pieces of this case began to fit together, we discovered that Keenya Cook was a friend of Muhammad’s ex-wife Mildred. She was believed to be the person who had helped Mildred take the kids and disappear to Maryland.
That was just the start of what we were uncovering about Muhammad and Malvo. They were tracked to a former residence, also near Tacoma, where the two had lived together. Neighbors told investigators that Muhammad and Malvo had spent time firing some sort of rifle into a stump in the backyard. Further investigation found that, during their travels, Muhammad and Malvo had purchased a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle from a gun shop in California. Investigators, armed with search-and-seizure warrants, went to their former house near Tacoma and removed the stump from the property for examination. Bullets were dug out of the stump.
Another thing investigators uncovered: In late 2001, John Muhammad had bought an old Caprice, with well over one hundred thousand miles on it, from an auto sales dealer in Trenton, New Jersey. He registered the car in his name and, according to New Jersey DMV records, was displaying current New Jersey tags—NDA-21Z. Now that we knew what trail to follow, the task force was all over it.
October 20, 2002, Sunday. For the first time in eighteen days, this didn’t feel like just another day of beating our heads against the wall. The investigation had gone from frustration to a frenzy of activity, and I finally felt we were on the right track. I now had confidence that we would soon bring this case to a close and put a stop to the shootings and killings. Since we were now aware of the snipers’ attempt to contact the task force, all call centers had been put on full alert, with instructions to immediately put through to the JOC any call from a caller identifying himself as the sniper. That meant we would chase any such call, even if it later turned out to be a dead end.
As the snipers had indicated in their letter, early that Sunday morning the joint operations center had received a call traced to a public telephone at a gas station not far from the Ponderosa Steak House. The callers, who identified themselves as the snipers, were checking in—they wanted to make sure the police had found their note.
This was it. Since the existence of the letter had successfully been kept from the press, we knew it had to be the snipers. Police units quickly converged on the area where the call had originated; ironically, they found a white van with three people in it sitting near the public phone. A few short minutes of excitement and anxiety later, we determined that these weren’t our snipers. The three guys in the van had nothing to do with the case; they had simply stopped at the gas station near the bank of public phones. Unfortunately, they hadn’t seen anyone using the phones.
On Sunday afternoon, Chief Moose, in an effort to get the snipers to make direct contact with the task force—and hopefully to set another trap—met with the media camped in front of police headquarters. Speaking directly to the snipers through the media, Chief Moose said, “The person you called could not hear everything that you said. The audio was unclear, and we want to get it right. Call us back so that we can clearly understand.”
Then, trying to prevent another shooting and to gain trust with the snipers, he repeated their words from the letter: “Word is bond.” The media, suspecting something significant had happened or was about to happen, peppered the chief with questions concerning what he had just said on camera. The chief didn’t bite. Instead, he said, several times, that it would be “inappropriate” to comment on the ongoing investigation, and ended the press conference.
We watched the coverage with considerable amusement, as the media launched into an orgy of speculation. TV anchors accused the police of “using” the media, and the views expressed ranged from outrage to justification that the media should be used to help capture the criminals. “Finally,” I said to Cornwell, “those TV bastards are getting a taste of their own medicine. Now maybe they might actually be useful.”
“Yeah,” said Cornwell, “like lipstick on a pig.” We both laughed. It was the first time in quite a while that we had been able to let loose and really laugh.
No matter what opinion the media took of their usefulness or their being used, they all paraded the usual host of experts in front of the cameras—retired military generals, retired FBI agents, retired homicide detectives from New York and LA, and, of course, psychologists. Every one of them was trying to “explain” what the task force was doing. Despite being entertaining to those of us on the inside of the investigation, all this press coverage did nothing to lessen the pressure we were under.
While we felt closer than ever to the finish line, we also knew we were still too damned far from it. Few of us wanted to leave the center to get a sandwich, let alone to go home for a shower, a change of clothes, or a night’s rest. We had come this far and wanted to be present when the end came. After eighteen days, we were like bloodhounds that had finally found the scent.
It was a giant leap to finally have a couple of names and, very soon, faces, but that was only a first step. It was still a massive operation to find those two faces among the millions of people living, working, and traveling through two states and the city of Washington. We worked through the night, poring again over reams of information that we had already reviewed, looking for any reference to the two names we had, or to the Caprice.
Now we could use that license plate number to try to connect Muhammad and Malvo to each shooting. As I had said in the meeting, every good cop runs license plate checks on cars that catch his eye for one reason or another, and now data on those plate checks from the various systems had been converted to a format that Case Explorer could work with. Over Sunday and into Monday, we ran the search for common tag numbers that police had seen and checked on around each shooting.
Monday, October 21, 5:56 a.m. While we dug through information and ran our Case Explorer search, other investigative teams, including uniformed officers and troopers on the road, fanned out across the region in anticipation of the killers’ calling again. If they did, we hoped the call could be traced a little quicker, giving our teams in the field a better chance to collar the snipers.
In the meantime, Conrad Johnson was preparing his Ride-On Bus for his daily run. He was sitting in the parked bus along a pull-off in Silver Spring, Maryland, in Montgomery County, the second bus in a line of several buses. It was 5:56 a.m., and in a few minutes, he would begin his morning route. Then a shot rang out from a wooded area next to where his bus was parked. A bullet flew through the open bus door and struck Johnson, killing him instantly.
Police units responded quickly, and a perimeter was established around the scene within minutes. Other bus drivers and witnesses reported seeing a masked man running through the woods in the direction the shot had come from and into an apartment complex on the other side of the wooded lot. Police descended on the woods and the apartment complex, searching the hundreds of apartments in the multi-building complex. But once again the snipers had slipped away.
Not without leaving something behind, however: another letter was found in the woods. Just like the last letter, this one was in a plastic bag and was covered with little red star stickers. The letter was short, direct, and angry in tone: For You Mr. Police Call me God do not release to the press. It also contained the same ominous warning as the last letter: your children are not safe.
This letter clearly indicated that the killers were pissed at the police. They demanded respect: Can you hear us now! Do not play these Childish games with us. You know our demands next person (your choice) Thank you.