January 30, 2020 • 29 mins
On October 21st, authorities connect the D.C. Sniper attacks to a liquor store robbery in Alabama. And police find a fingerprint.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of iHeartRadio and
Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast
are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating
in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ten days before shots were fired in Maryland, the first
victims of the serial Sniper may have been eight hundred
miles south of the Washington Beltway.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
September twenty first, two thousand and two, Montgomery, Alabama.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
It all started with a call that had gone out
in relation to a robbery at the liquor store. My
name is James Gray Boyce. I currently am the chief
of Police at Alabama State University. At that time, I
was a lieutenant with the Montgomery Police Department. I started
rolling towards that air when I heard the call go out.
(01:02):
Originally it had been reported as a robbery, so it
wasn't until I started responding seeing that I learned that
it actually was a robbery with a homicide. When I
responded to the area, it really was chaotic. You have
so many people running around. One individual was a security
guard who ran up to my car and started pointing
(01:25):
down an alleyway and started talking about the suspect running
in that direction. So I basically drove down that alleyway,
and that was when I actually ended up running into
one of the suspects in the case. I saw a
person running as if they were running away, and I
basically hollered at him to stop. He actually doubles back
(01:46):
and then starts jumping fences. I'd get out of my
car chase the subject on foot. The problem with fences
is that when somebody goes over a fence, you can't
just blindly go over the fence because they could be
waiting on the other side to ambush you. You have
to at least slow down and stop and make sure
you're clear.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
All of that slows you down.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
Unfortunately, it's a residential area, so you can't just start
shooting to try to hit somebody running from you because
one of your rounds could go into a house. So
you really have to keep trying to catch up to
the person. The guy was in great shape, he was
very very fast, and he was really getting very far
ahead of me. Unfortunately I lost sight of him and
(02:34):
we basically just start saturating the area and started looking
for the subject.
Speaker 5 (02:39):
There is a ruthless person on the loose.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things. They killed
the five people in one day and then went on
the rampage for the next month.
Speaker 5 (02:54):
It is quite a mystery.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
The police say they have never had a crime quite
like this. Beekare these guys are using weapons that are
going to go right straight through our bulletproof vests.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is monster DC sniper.
After the Ponderosa shooting, the task force was following a
lead from a note they'd found in the woods. The
note mentioned a call to Officer Derek Beliles. Belliles had
(03:28):
received a strange phone call. The caller said he knew
who the snipers were, and then asked Beliles to look
up a liquor store robbery that took place in Montgomery, Alabama.
Investigators learned that a shooting had occurred there on September
twenty first, ten days before the attacks began in DC.
That night, when officers arrived at the crime scene, they
(03:50):
chased after a suspect but couldn't catch him. Michael Myrick
was the police lieutenant in charge.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I was on call and received notice that a shooting
had heard on Zelda Road outside of the ABC Liquor store.
The two employees were locking up the store when it
was believed a robbery took place. Miss Kelly Adams was
one of the cashier's clerks. This was her job, is
how she was paying the bills and getting through life
and starting life with a new husband and a new baby.
(04:19):
She was locking up the store for the night and
they have a little checklist on their clipboard. Miss Adams
said that everything was like clockwork and as she was
closing the store, they both had to exit at the
same time. Claudian Parker was the business manager and as
they were waiting outside, Miss Adams was behind Miss Parker.
Miss Parker was turning the keys in the door, and
(04:42):
Miss Adams said she did not hear anything, but she
felt like she was electrocuted. She said, I even thought
I was tased. I just felt this flash of electricity
run through me. She was shot directly underneath the jaw
line from the left side, and the projectile just caused
massive tissue damage to the skin and neck underneath her
jaw and the jaw itself. The projectile most certainly proceeded
(05:06):
through her body and struck the window next to the
door and shattered that window. She said, then I fell
to the ground, And then she said, I don't know
what happened to Claudine.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
What happened.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Miss Clauding Parker would have most likely seen Kelly shot.
We don't know if she went down to try to
help her or anything. However, we are certain that she
would have backed up and backed away from what was happening.
And if she's backing away, she's actually behind one of
the pillars of the business. She's actually protected by that pillar.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Well.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
As she continued to back up, she moves out of
the line of sight of the pillar, and then she
is shot in the shoulder blade. It caused massive damage
when the bullet exploded inside her body and she collapsed immediately.
We know that Miss Parker did not crawl, did not move,
(06:01):
She did not get up and run. Because of the
damage to her vertebrae that the fragmentation caused, she was
unable to even breathe on her own. Later, Miss Adams
looked up and she said she saw very slender, skinny
black legs. She said the person was wearing shorts, standing
(06:22):
above me, pointing a gun at my head, a small
silver revolver, and Miss Adams does not remember much after that,
but she said the person just left, just ran off.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Kelly Adams, the store clerk, survived the attack.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
The bullet went in right here, skirted across there, and came.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Out in front of my face.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
The store manager, Claudine Parker, wasn't as lucky as Clauding.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Parker was the immediately taken to Jackson Hospital, which is
the nearest hospital there, and she died in surgery. From
what we gathered from her family, she was a very
very good athlete. She was a semi pro tennis player
at one point. Unfortunately, she was in her last pay
period before she was going to retire and become the
tennis coach at Alabama State University, and she was planning
(07:18):
on doing that the next month before she was killed.
I felt very sorry for the families. This was the
shooting that just continued to haunt them. I mean, Miss
Adams has had I believe, over twenty surgeries to repair
just continued infections and just continued problems that she's had.
The Parker family is always reminded that their loved one
(07:41):
is gone. This particular scene was atypical in the sense
that had occurred right when two police officers were on
routine patrol. They actually heard the gunshots, tried to locate
where they were coming from, and then they saw the
two victims and they immediately pulled the patrol car to
(08:02):
where the two victims were on the ground, and our
patrol officers saw a young blackmail with a medium afro.
He was behind one of the pillars of the business,
rummaging going through a purse. As they pulled into the
parking lot from the trafficway, the subject looked at them
from behind the pillar and took off running. One of
(08:22):
our officers stayed with the victims and the second officer
engaged in foot pursuit. The subject running dropped what was
later determined to be an armalit gun catalog. He pursued
him went over the fence as a gated complex, and
he chased him as far as he could until he
was out of sight, and then multiple units responding trying
to locate the subject that was running, but were unable
to do so. That subject, then we know later had
(08:48):
to have come out in a particular area. An eyewitness
citizen saw the subject, this young blackmail, getting into the
back of a caprice. That caprice then drove out of
the area. But because the subject got into the back
of the caprice, we knew we had a driver, so
we had a second subject. I was dispatched to the
scene as the case agent. Most of the time, by
(09:09):
the time the homicide unit is called in or members
of the scene is secured, they're just kind of waiting
for us to do our initials. We need to get
into witness interviews, and we need to start located in
evidence that is not just in plain sight. One of
the things that I saw when I arrived on scene
was the significant, significant blood trail from where the victim
was being treated, So I knew this was not just
(09:32):
a typical shooting, just from the way the scene was.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Kelly Adams, the surviving victim, said she had seen someone
standing over her with a silver revolver, but strangely, her
wounds hadn't come from a.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Handgun entirely, too much tissue damage for that to be
a handgun. A handgun fire is a heavy bullet. It
does not have a lot of horsepower as opposed to
a rifle where your velocity is such an issue. So
when we saw the injuries to Kelly adams jawline, all
the massive damage underneath her neck where she was shot,
a handgun projectile does not do that.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
By examining the wounds and bullet fragments, investigators determined that
the shots had come from a rifle. But that wasn't
the only odd thing about the case. Lieutenant Myrick says,
the crime just didn't make sense as a robbery.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
There was no need for this type of violence for
the Knight deposit in any business, point your gun, demand
the property, get the property, flee the scene. So that
immediately was odd to us. And also, the ABC Liquor
store was a state run liquor store and they did
not get robbed. They made a policy that they secured
(10:43):
the Knight's deposit and is safe. They did not want
the employees to leave the business with any amount of cash.
Bottom line to that is, the ABC stores just did
not get robbed. So for someone to rob the employees
as they closed, coupled with the fact that you were
right by the interstate, we just knew that wasn't a
typical local offender. We were just trying to find any
(11:04):
possible lead we could, as in any case this gets
into homicide one oh one.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Here we had.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
A couple of people turn in folks they were mad
at That always happens. You get a lot of folks
who provide information that they believe is helpful. It's just
inaccurate information, and we would pursue those interviews, but they
of course led us to nothing. We had no local
leads at all within the first you know, forty eight
to seventy two hours, just nothing at all.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
But what officers did have was evidence like the ArmaLite
gun catalog the suspect had dropped during the chase. It
was a magazine full of information about rifles and firearm accessories.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
We recovered thirty six usable identifiable fingerprints within the gun catalog,
and we have a fingerprint on a brown paper bag
from the liquor store that is all with the same
fingerprint person. We just don't know who it is. You
run your fingerprints local, you run your fingerprints through the
state system, you run your fingerprints through a regional system.
That's just the progression. It takes four hours to get
(12:07):
a fingerprint hit, not something that flashes up on the
screen in seconds, as TV shows indicate, and when we
did not get any hits, they ran them through the
national system and still receiving a negative identification, as it's
called a negative ID. When you start doing that, you're
generally thinking that this is someone who's either a never
been fingerprinted or b is a juvenile. The fingerprints are
(12:30):
not in these adult systems. We thought, well, if that
was a juvenile, this could have been somebody who just
simply came in off the interstate committed this robbery. They
are juveniles, so they're not in the system, and we
really have a tough case. We really have something that's
going to be very difficult to solve. Locally.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
The case had gone cold, but soon there'd be an
unexpected break in both the Alabama shooting and the DC
sniper case. A month now had passed since the Alabama shooting,
(13:27):
and the case was still cold up in DC. Investigators
were now two and a half weeks into their hunt
for the snipers, and retired Montgomery County Police Commander Drew
Tracy worried they weren't making progress fast enough.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
My day was I was up three point thirty in
the morning. I grabbed something, probably a protein smoothie, and
then I'm driving because I have to give a briefing
at five am in the morning, and I remember grabbing
a Washington Post and it was talking about several serial
killings and how long it took. You know, son of Sam.
I think it took months to catch him, and he
(14:02):
was providing information on a regular basis. And then you
had the BTK killer and he wasn't caught at that time.
I think the Green River killer was just caught. And
I looked at the period of time it takes to
catch some of these individuals, and I said, we can't
sustain this, and it got my head saying, you know,
we got to push with everything we got because we
don't know how long these resources are going to last.
(14:24):
I mean, we had close to four hundred FBI agents
assisting us atf We had local law enforcement, We had volunteers,
We had people we were telling the stand in front
of our school systems that could be victims. We had
helicopter pilots. We had a lot of things going. And
I know there's a limitation to that. So all these
things had kind of taken heavy weight on the task
(14:46):
force and people involved.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Drew Tracy was exhausted from working overtime, but motivated, motivated
to catch the snipers before resources ran out, motivated to
prevent any more sense shootings, and motivated by a promising lead.
After the task force had learned about the sniper's call
to Officer Derek Belliles, Drew Tracy was assigned to investigate
(15:13):
that lead.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
I actually called Montgomery, Alabama myself, and I asked if
I could speak to one of the detectives involved, Johnny Benson.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
I'm sitting at the house on a Sunday afternoon watching
the NASCAR race as everybody does here, and I get
a call from someone from the Sniper Task Force. One
of the units within that task force had followed a
lead that would be snipers called the Montgomery County PIO
officer and said that they did the shooting on Ann
(15:43):
Street in Alabama.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
So I remember talking to the detective. I wanted to
get a good feel for were these individuals who called,
are they really involved or is it just something to
just throw us off track? And he told me it
was a robbery. So a little bit of the wind
was coming out of my sales because every one of
the situations we had in Maryland Virginia and Washington c
(16:08):
was not a robbery.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
What's so intriguing to me is that they said the
shooting was on Ann Street. And I said, Ann Street
is the exit from which you exit the interstate. That's
the Ann Street exit. However, at the bottom of that exit,
if you turn left, you're on Zelda Road. I said,
there would be no way that someone in town would
attribute that shooting to Anne Street. That was actually on
Zelda Road. Everybody knows Anne Street and everybody knows Zelda Road.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
I asked if there was any evidence in the case,
you know, ballistics and everything else. 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. He said it
(16:54):
was an armor light catalog. Well, for my training, you know,
from being on SWAT, I knew what armor light was.
They produced things that you could put on your rifle,
you know, armor light ar. They sell stuff for an
AR fifteen and make r fifteens. So when I heard that,
we got an FBI agent from Mobile, Alabama to grab
(17:17):
that catalog.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Especially to Margaret Faulkner, came and gathered the information from
our case. Some of the events then transported up to
the Sniper task Force, and Margaret Faulkner, being at the
task force, she said, have we ran these fingerprints? Have
we ran them in every known database federal or otherwise.
Speaker 5 (17:36):
FBI in Washington, d C. Did a more thorough search
because they have access to bigger databases for fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
They ran it through every alphabet soup database that they
had and when they sat down, they said, well, the
only one that we have not run it through was
I in S and they said, let's run them through irons.
Speaker 5 (17:56):
And that's when we got a hit on a fingerprint.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
The FBI found a match for the fingerprints from the
Alabama crime scene unexpectedly in a database run by the
Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Or i INS, and that print was for Lee Boyd
Malvo and he was seventeen years old. This is Linda Hooper.
I was a supervisory special agent of the FBI at
the time of the Sniper investigation, and so I asked
the fingerprint lab, did you run that print for driver's licenses.
(18:33):
I figured, seventeen, the guy probably has a driver's license.
He said, yeah. We ran him in every state. He
doesn't have a driver's license. The only thing we could
come up with was that he was referenced and ANS
file out of Tacoma, Washington. Well, as soon as we
found out that his name was referenced in ANS file,
(18:54):
we went to IF and we had them pull the
file so we could see what was in it.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
It turned out that Lee Boyd Malvo, the seventeen year
old whose fingerprints had been found on the gun catalog
in Alabama, was originally from Jamaica. Malvo had been fingerprinted
in Washington State in December two thousand and one, when
he and his mother, Una James were arrested. Lee Boyd
(19:20):
Malvo had been staying at a homeless shelter with a
forty year old man named John Mohammed. Police were called
when Malvo's mother, Una James, got into an argument with John.
She'd showed up at the shelter and said John had
kidnapped her son. Because Mohammed was not related to Malvo,
police returned him to Una. However, when neither Una or
(19:43):
Lee Boyd Malvo could provide any sort of identification. Police
contacted Border patrol and the mother and son were arrested
on suspicion of having entered the country illegally. Now ten
months later, the fingerprints from Malvo's arrested Washington State match
the ones from the Alabama crime scene. Here's retired Montgomery
(20:06):
Police Lieutenant Michael Myrick again.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
How did Lee Malville from an i ins arrest in Tacoma,
Washington connect to a shooting in Montgomery, Alabama with a
rifle off of the Beltway, which is what they have
in d C. How's all that happening. We have a lead,
we can at least solve one case in Alabama from
this information. Is that going to be connected to the
sniper shooting. I've got no idea if that's the situation
(20:29):
at all. Well, at the same time, a man in Tacoma,
Washington called the task force and he said that he
had had a friend that had left the area that
was a very militant person, very upset with his domestic situation.
And he says the guy was very dangerous. He described
(20:50):
as just being very very unhappy with life. And he
said it just bothers me that all this is happening.
My friend's ex wife lives in the DC area. His
name's John Mohammad.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
The tip was about a man named John Muhammad, the
same name as the man involved in the custody dispute
over Lee Boyd Malvie, and the tipster had called from
Washington State, where Lee Boyd Malvau was arrested.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
He says, nothing for nothing, but I'm just you know,
I just want to let y'all know. Don't want to
sit on this information. And he said he left with
an AR fifteen Bushmaster rifle.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
And he mentions how it was extremely important to John
Muhammad to get a silencer for an AR style weapon,
and that he had a young man with him that
he called sniper.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
And he said they talked about snipers and they played
sniper games. And he said, you know, I just want
to pass his information on. Well, now we had a
very very clear suspect to pursue by name.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Investigators now had two strong suspects, Lee Boyd Malvo and
John Muhammad. In Malvo's case, the letter the snipers left
outside the Ponderosa had led investigators to Derek Beliles, who
in turn directed them to the Alabama shooting and fingerprints
from that crime scene matched Lee Boyd Malva. They'd come
(22:30):
across John Muhammad's name from two different directions. The i
S report connected Mohammed to Malvo, and then his name
came up again on a tip line call. Drew Tracy
was a trained sniper himself, so he wasn't surprised that
there could be two suspects working together.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
Back in nineteen eighty three, I first became involved as
a SWAT team member and one of the most important
pieces of the training in a vital part was going
to Sniper observe school. And it's two words, a sniper
and an observer. So you're trained as a marksman and
you're also trained as an observer. Your main job being
(23:08):
a sniper observer is observing. You have to put yourself
in a position you're not seen. You have to utilize
a different type of optics, and you have to provide good,
steady and specific information to your team. And the reasoning
for a team aspect and deployment is you can't constantly
be behind the optics of a gun for an extended
(23:28):
period of time, so you want to have two trained
people that would exchange positions. One could be the observer
while the other one sets up their rifle so they're
ready to take a shot.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
So it could make sense for there to be two
perpetrators working together, but one acting as the sniper and
the other observing, picking targets and letting the sniper know
when there weren't any witnesses nearby. The tip line caller
had also said that John Mohammad owned a bush Master rifle,
an AR style only that fires two to three rounds,
(24:02):
the same type of bullets used in the Alabama and
DC shootings.
Speaker 5 (24:07):
Bushmaster XEM fifteen E twos is basically an assault rifle.
It's a high velocity round thirty two hundred feet per second,
so it has the capability of being pretty consistent within
three hundred yards. And I went to basically every scene
in the Washington DC area, and I think the longest
(24:27):
one was about to hard thirty yards utilizing the site system.
With training, these shots are I wouldn't say easy, but
they're capable with that weapon and a small amount of training.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
And the AR fifteen style assault rifle that John Muhammad
was reported to have was capable of much more than
firing single shots at a long range. It's a semi
automatic rifle that can fire up to forty five rounds
a minute.
Speaker 5 (24:56):
If you look at the latest active shooter situations in
our you'll see an AR fifteen as being the weapon
of choice. It has the capability of doing great damage.
Law enforcement also carries an AR for patrol nowadays. But
it's interesting many law enforcement departments in this country switched
over to a rifle program because of October two thousand
(25:19):
and two, the DC sniper incident. And if you think
about it, if you're in patrol with a limited shotgun
or a handgun, you're not going to have the capability
to go against a rifle threat. One of the things
that kind of scared me each one of these situations
was one shot. It wasn't the second shot, it was
(25:39):
one shot, which led me to believe it was military training.
So that greatly concerned me. And if you think about it,
one shot, what is that showing? One shot is telling
me that they're in control. And that scared us, and
(26:01):
it scared me.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Who were John Mohammad and Lee Boyd Malvo? And how
was this forty year old American connected to a seventeen
year old Jamaican boy. Investigators needed to find out as
much about them as possible, and if they were the sneipers,
investigators needed to find them fast before they killed. Again.
(26:29):
Here's former FBI agent Linda Hooper again.
Speaker 6 (26:32):
So we were putting together a lot of information on
these two individuals. It certainly looked like they were two
viable suspects in this case, but we had no information
that they were in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, DC area
at all. Well, when we were investigating John Mohammad, we
(26:53):
discovered that he was divorced and his wife, she had
a restraining order against him. I found out that she
was living in the area, and so I sent two
people over to interview her.
Speaker 7 (27:09):
Me and my children were having dinner and FBI knock
on my door and they said, so, when was the
last time you've seen John Alan Mohammad, and my palms
began sweating. I am Mildred Muhammad, I'm an award winning
(27:31):
global keynote speaker, and my former husband was John Ali Mohammad,
whom you all know to be the DC Sniper.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Next time, I'm Monster DC Sniper. We'll explore the backstories
of John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malva.
Speaker 7 (27:56):
Everybody loved John because he was jovial. He was that guy.
He would be gone. She had a list where he
was supposed to go for the day, and then she
started getting phone calls him not being there.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
I misread his character.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
You know, he has a good slide and a bad slide.
Speaker 7 (28:15):
He was accused of trying to kill O soldiers.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
You know, I think that they kept a lot of
the shit.
Speaker 7 (28:25):
He was going to kill me and it was going
to be a headshot, and I could not get anybody
to believe me.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by
Tony Harris and produced by iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt
Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of iHeartRadio,
alongside producers Trevor Young, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thin. Lindsay
and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot
(29:03):
TV alongside producers Meredith Stedman and Christina Dana. Original music
is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you haven't already,
be sure to check out the first two seasons, Atlanta
Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have questions
or comments, email us at Monster at iHeartMedia dot com,
(29:24):
or you can call us at one eight three three
two eight five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.
Welcome to Monster DC Sniper, a production of iHeartRadio and
Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast
are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating
in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia,
Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.
Speaker 2 (00:24):
Ten days before shots were fired in Maryland, the first
victims of the serial Sniper may have been eight hundred
miles south of the Washington Beltway.
Speaker 3 (00:34):
September twenty first, two thousand and two, Montgomery, Alabama.
Speaker 4 (00:40):
It all started with a call that had gone out
in relation to a robbery at the liquor store. My
name is James Gray Boyce. I currently am the chief
of Police at Alabama State University. At that time, I
was a lieutenant with the Montgomery Police Department. I started
rolling towards that air when I heard the call go out.
(01:02):
Originally it had been reported as a robbery, so it
wasn't until I started responding seeing that I learned that
it actually was a robbery with a homicide. When I
responded to the area, it really was chaotic. You have
so many people running around. One individual was a security
guard who ran up to my car and started pointing
(01:25):
down an alleyway and started talking about the suspect running
in that direction. So I basically drove down that alleyway,
and that was when I actually ended up running into
one of the suspects in the case. I saw a
person running as if they were running away, and I
basically hollered at him to stop. He actually doubles back
(01:46):
and then starts jumping fences. I'd get out of my
car chase the subject on foot. The problem with fences
is that when somebody goes over a fence, you can't
just blindly go over the fence because they could be
waiting on the other side to ambush you. You have
to at least slow down and stop and make sure
you're clear.
Speaker 3 (02:06):
All of that slows you down.
Speaker 4 (02:08):
Unfortunately, it's a residential area, so you can't just start
shooting to try to hit somebody running from you because
one of your rounds could go into a house. So
you really have to keep trying to catch up to
the person. The guy was in great shape, he was
very very fast, and he was really getting very far
ahead of me. Unfortunately I lost sight of him and
(02:34):
we basically just start saturating the area and started looking
for the subject.
Speaker 5 (02:39):
There is a ruthless person on the loose.
Speaker 3 (02:42):
What I nerves this community the most is the randomness
of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things. They killed
the five people in one day and then went on
the rampage for the next month.
Speaker 5 (02:54):
It is quite a mystery.
Speaker 2 (02:56):
The police say they have never had a crime quite
like this. Beekare these guys are using weapons that are
going to go right straight through our bulletproof vests.
Speaker 3 (03:07):
From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is monster DC sniper.
After the Ponderosa shooting, the task force was following a
lead from a note they'd found in the woods. The
note mentioned a call to Officer Derek Beliles. Belliles had
(03:28):
received a strange phone call. The caller said he knew
who the snipers were, and then asked Beliles to look
up a liquor store robbery that took place in Montgomery, Alabama.
Investigators learned that a shooting had occurred there on September
twenty first, ten days before the attacks began in DC.
That night, when officers arrived at the crime scene, they
(03:50):
chased after a suspect but couldn't catch him. Michael Myrick
was the police lieutenant in charge.
Speaker 2 (03:57):
I was on call and received notice that a shooting
had heard on Zelda Road outside of the ABC Liquor store.
The two employees were locking up the store when it
was believed a robbery took place. Miss Kelly Adams was
one of the cashier's clerks. This was her job, is
how she was paying the bills and getting through life
and starting life with a new husband and a new baby.
(04:19):
She was locking up the store for the night and
they have a little checklist on their clipboard. Miss Adams
said that everything was like clockwork and as she was
closing the store, they both had to exit at the
same time. Claudian Parker was the business manager and as
they were waiting outside, Miss Adams was behind Miss Parker.
Miss Parker was turning the keys in the door, and
(04:42):
Miss Adams said she did not hear anything, but she
felt like she was electrocuted. She said, I even thought
I was tased. I just felt this flash of electricity
run through me. She was shot directly underneath the jaw
line from the left side, and the projectile just caused
massive tissue damage to the skin and neck underneath her
jaw and the jaw itself. The projectile most certainly proceeded
(05:06):
through her body and struck the window next to the
door and shattered that window. She said, then I fell
to the ground, And then she said, I don't know
what happened to Claudine.
Speaker 5 (05:19):
What happened.
Speaker 2 (05:20):
Miss Clauding Parker would have most likely seen Kelly shot.
We don't know if she went down to try to
help her or anything. However, we are certain that she
would have backed up and backed away from what was happening.
And if she's backing away, she's actually behind one of
the pillars of the business. She's actually protected by that pillar.
Speaker 3 (05:40):
Well.
Speaker 2 (05:40):
As she continued to back up, she moves out of
the line of sight of the pillar, and then she
is shot in the shoulder blade. It caused massive damage
when the bullet exploded inside her body and she collapsed immediately.
We know that Miss Parker did not crawl, did not move,
(06:01):
She did not get up and run. Because of the
damage to her vertebrae that the fragmentation caused, she was
unable to even breathe on her own. Later, Miss Adams
looked up and she said she saw very slender, skinny
black legs. She said the person was wearing shorts, standing
(06:22):
above me, pointing a gun at my head, a small
silver revolver, and Miss Adams does not remember much after that,
but she said the person just left, just ran off.
Speaker 3 (06:40):
Kelly Adams, the store clerk, survived the attack.
Speaker 1 (06:44):
The bullet went in right here, skirted across there, and came.
Speaker 2 (06:48):
Out in front of my face.
Speaker 3 (06:50):
The store manager, Claudine Parker, wasn't as lucky as Clauding.
Speaker 2 (06:55):
Parker was the immediately taken to Jackson Hospital, which is
the nearest hospital there, and she died in surgery. From
what we gathered from her family, she was a very
very good athlete. She was a semi pro tennis player
at one point. Unfortunately, she was in her last pay
period before she was going to retire and become the
tennis coach at Alabama State University, and she was planning
(07:18):
on doing that the next month before she was killed.
I felt very sorry for the families. This was the
shooting that just continued to haunt them. I mean, Miss
Adams has had I believe, over twenty surgeries to repair
just continued infections and just continued problems that she's had.
The Parker family is always reminded that their loved one
(07:41):
is gone. This particular scene was atypical in the sense
that had occurred right when two police officers were on
routine patrol. They actually heard the gunshots, tried to locate
where they were coming from, and then they saw the
two victims and they immediately pulled the patrol car to
(08:02):
where the two victims were on the ground, and our
patrol officers saw a young blackmail with a medium afro.
He was behind one of the pillars of the business,
rummaging going through a purse. As they pulled into the
parking lot from the trafficway, the subject looked at them
from behind the pillar and took off running. One of
(08:22):
our officers stayed with the victims and the second officer
engaged in foot pursuit. The subject running dropped what was
later determined to be an armalit gun catalog. He pursued
him went over the fence as a gated complex, and
he chased him as far as he could until he
was out of sight, and then multiple units responding trying
to locate the subject that was running, but were unable
to do so. That subject, then we know later had
(08:48):
to have come out in a particular area. An eyewitness
citizen saw the subject, this young blackmail, getting into the
back of a caprice. That caprice then drove out of
the area. But because the subject got into the back
of the caprice, we knew we had a driver, so
we had a second subject. I was dispatched to the
scene as the case agent. Most of the time, by
(09:09):
the time the homicide unit is called in or members
of the scene is secured, they're just kind of waiting
for us to do our initials. We need to get
into witness interviews, and we need to start located in
evidence that is not just in plain sight. One of
the things that I saw when I arrived on scene
was the significant, significant blood trail from where the victim
was being treated, So I knew this was not just
(09:32):
a typical shooting, just from the way the scene was.
Speaker 3 (09:37):
Kelly Adams, the surviving victim, said she had seen someone
standing over her with a silver revolver, but strangely, her
wounds hadn't come from a.
Speaker 2 (09:47):
Handgun entirely, too much tissue damage for that to be
a handgun. A handgun fire is a heavy bullet. It
does not have a lot of horsepower as opposed to
a rifle where your velocity is such an issue. So
when we saw the injuries to Kelly adams jawline, all
the massive damage underneath her neck where she was shot,
a handgun projectile does not do that.
Speaker 3 (10:09):
By examining the wounds and bullet fragments, investigators determined that
the shots had come from a rifle. But that wasn't
the only odd thing about the case. Lieutenant Myrick says,
the crime just didn't make sense as a robbery.
Speaker 2 (10:23):
There was no need for this type of violence for
the Knight deposit in any business, point your gun, demand
the property, get the property, flee the scene. So that
immediately was odd to us. And also, the ABC Liquor
store was a state run liquor store and they did
not get robbed. They made a policy that they secured
(10:43):
the Knight's deposit and is safe. They did not want
the employees to leave the business with any amount of cash.
Bottom line to that is, the ABC stores just did
not get robbed. So for someone to rob the employees
as they closed, coupled with the fact that you were
right by the interstate, we just knew that wasn't a
typical local offender. We were just trying to find any
(11:04):
possible lead we could, as in any case this gets
into homicide one oh one.
Speaker 3 (11:09):
Here we had.
Speaker 2 (11:10):
A couple of people turn in folks they were mad
at That always happens. You get a lot of folks
who provide information that they believe is helpful. It's just
inaccurate information, and we would pursue those interviews, but they
of course led us to nothing. We had no local
leads at all within the first you know, forty eight
to seventy two hours, just nothing at all.
Speaker 3 (11:32):
But what officers did have was evidence like the ArmaLite
gun catalog the suspect had dropped during the chase. It
was a magazine full of information about rifles and firearm accessories.
Speaker 2 (11:45):
We recovered thirty six usable identifiable fingerprints within the gun catalog,
and we have a fingerprint on a brown paper bag
from the liquor store that is all with the same
fingerprint person. We just don't know who it is. You
run your fingerprints local, you run your fingerprints through the
state system, you run your fingerprints through a regional system.
That's just the progression. It takes four hours to get
(12:07):
a fingerprint hit, not something that flashes up on the
screen in seconds, as TV shows indicate, and when we
did not get any hits, they ran them through the
national system and still receiving a negative identification, as it's
called a negative ID. When you start doing that, you're
generally thinking that this is someone who's either a never
been fingerprinted or b is a juvenile. The fingerprints are
(12:30):
not in these adult systems. We thought, well, if that
was a juvenile, this could have been somebody who just
simply came in off the interstate committed this robbery. They
are juveniles, so they're not in the system, and we
really have a tough case. We really have something that's
going to be very difficult to solve. Locally.
Speaker 3 (12:52):
The case had gone cold, but soon there'd be an
unexpected break in both the Alabama shooting and the DC
sniper case. A month now had passed since the Alabama shooting,
(13:27):
and the case was still cold up in DC. Investigators
were now two and a half weeks into their hunt
for the snipers, and retired Montgomery County Police Commander Drew
Tracy worried they weren't making progress fast enough.
Speaker 5 (13:41):
My day was I was up three point thirty in
the morning. I grabbed something, probably a protein smoothie, and
then I'm driving because I have to give a briefing
at five am in the morning, and I remember grabbing
a Washington Post and it was talking about several serial
killings and how long it took. You know, son of Sam.
I think it took months to catch him, and he
(14:02):
was providing information on a regular basis. And then you
had the BTK killer and he wasn't caught at that time.
I think the Green River killer was just caught. And
I looked at the period of time it takes to
catch some of these individuals, and I said, we can't
sustain this, and it got my head saying, you know,
we got to push with everything we got because we
don't know how long these resources are going to last.
(14:24):
I mean, we had close to four hundred FBI agents
assisting us atf We had local law enforcement, We had volunteers,
We had people we were telling the stand in front
of our school systems that could be victims. We had
helicopter pilots. We had a lot of things going. And
I know there's a limitation to that. So all these
things had kind of taken heavy weight on the task
(14:46):
force and people involved.
Speaker 3 (14:49):
Drew Tracy was exhausted from working overtime, but motivated, motivated
to catch the snipers before resources ran out, motivated to
prevent any more sense shootings, and motivated by a promising lead.
After the task force had learned about the sniper's call
to Officer Derek Belliles, Drew Tracy was assigned to investigate
(15:13):
that lead.
Speaker 5 (15:15):
I actually called Montgomery, Alabama myself, and I asked if
I could speak to one of the detectives involved, Johnny Benson.
Speaker 2 (15:23):
I'm sitting at the house on a Sunday afternoon watching
the NASCAR race as everybody does here, and I get
a call from someone from the Sniper Task Force. One
of the units within that task force had followed a
lead that would be snipers called the Montgomery County PIO
officer and said that they did the shooting on Ann
(15:43):
Street in Alabama.
Speaker 5 (15:46):
So I remember talking to the detective. I wanted to
get a good feel for were these individuals who called,
are they really involved or is it just something to
just throw us off track? And he told me it
was a robbery. So a little bit of the wind
was coming out of my sales because every one of
the situations we had in Maryland Virginia and Washington c
(16:08):
was not a robbery.
Speaker 2 (16:10):
What's so intriguing to me is that they said the
shooting was on Ann Street. And I said, Ann Street
is the exit from which you exit the interstate. That's
the Ann Street exit. However, at the bottom of that exit,
if you turn left, you're on Zelda Road. I said,
there would be no way that someone in town would
attribute that shooting to Anne Street. That was actually on
Zelda Road. Everybody knows Anne Street and everybody knows Zelda Road.
Speaker 5 (16:34):
I asked if there was any evidence in the case,
you know, ballistics and everything else. 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. He said it
(16:54):
was an armor light catalog. Well, for my training, you know,
from being on SWAT, I knew what armor light was.
They produced things that you could put on your rifle,
you know, armor light ar. They sell stuff for an
AR fifteen and make r fifteens. So when I heard that,
we got an FBI agent from Mobile, Alabama to grab
(17:17):
that catalog.
Speaker 2 (17:19):
Especially to Margaret Faulkner, came and gathered the information from
our case. Some of the events then transported up to
the Sniper task Force, and Margaret Faulkner, being at the
task force, she said, have we ran these fingerprints? Have
we ran them in every known database federal or otherwise.
Speaker 5 (17:36):
FBI in Washington, d C. Did a more thorough search
because they have access to bigger databases for fingerprints.
Speaker 2 (17:45):
They ran it through every alphabet soup database that they
had and when they sat down, they said, well, the
only one that we have not run it through was
I in S and they said, let's run them through irons.
Speaker 5 (17:56):
And that's when we got a hit on a fingerprint.
Speaker 3 (17:59):
The FBI found a match for the fingerprints from the
Alabama crime scene unexpectedly in a database run by the
Immigration and Naturalization Service.
Speaker 6 (18:09):
Or i INS, and that print was for Lee Boyd
Malvo and he was seventeen years old. This is Linda Hooper.
I was a supervisory special agent of the FBI at
the time of the Sniper investigation, and so I asked
the fingerprint lab, did you run that print for driver's licenses.
(18:33):
I figured, seventeen, the guy probably has a driver's license.
He said, yeah. We ran him in every state. He
doesn't have a driver's license. The only thing we could
come up with was that he was referenced and ANS
file out of Tacoma, Washington. Well, as soon as we
found out that his name was referenced in ANS file,
(18:54):
we went to IF and we had them pull the
file so we could see what was in it.
Speaker 3 (18:59):
It turned out that Lee Boyd Malvo, the seventeen year
old whose fingerprints had been found on the gun catalog
in Alabama, was originally from Jamaica. Malvo had been fingerprinted
in Washington State in December two thousand and one, when
he and his mother, Una James were arrested. Lee Boyd
(19:20):
Malvo had been staying at a homeless shelter with a
forty year old man named John Mohammed. Police were called
when Malvo's mother, Una James, got into an argument with John.
She'd showed up at the shelter and said John had
kidnapped her son. Because Mohammed was not related to Malvo,
police returned him to Una. However, when neither Una or
(19:43):
Lee Boyd Malvo could provide any sort of identification. Police
contacted Border patrol and the mother and son were arrested
on suspicion of having entered the country illegally. Now ten
months later, the fingerprints from Malvo's arrested Washington State match
the ones from the Alabama crime scene. Here's retired Montgomery
(20:06):
Police Lieutenant Michael Myrick again.
Speaker 2 (20:08):
How did Lee Malville from an i ins arrest in Tacoma,
Washington connect to a shooting in Montgomery, Alabama with a
rifle off of the Beltway, which is what they have
in d C. How's all that happening. We have a lead,
we can at least solve one case in Alabama from
this information. Is that going to be connected to the
sniper shooting. I've got no idea if that's the situation
(20:29):
at all. Well, at the same time, a man in Tacoma,
Washington called the task force and he said that he
had had a friend that had left the area that
was a very militant person, very upset with his domestic situation.
And he says the guy was very dangerous. He described
(20:50):
as just being very very unhappy with life. And he
said it just bothers me that all this is happening.
My friend's ex wife lives in the DC area. His
name's John Mohammad.
Speaker 3 (21:04):
The tip was about a man named John Muhammad, the
same name as the man involved in the custody dispute
over Lee Boyd Malvie, and the tipster had called from
Washington State, where Lee Boyd Malvau was arrested.
Speaker 2 (21:18):
He says, nothing for nothing, but I'm just you know,
I just want to let y'all know. Don't want to
sit on this information. And he said he left with
an AR fifteen Bushmaster rifle.
Speaker 5 (21:29):
And he mentions how it was extremely important to John
Muhammad to get a silencer for an AR style weapon,
and that he had a young man with him that
he called sniper.
Speaker 2 (21:43):
And he said they talked about snipers and they played
sniper games. And he said, you know, I just want
to pass his information on. Well, now we had a
very very clear suspect to pursue by name.
Speaker 3 (22:08):
Investigators now had two strong suspects, Lee Boyd Malvo and
John Muhammad. In Malvo's case, the letter the snipers left
outside the Ponderosa had led investigators to Derek Beliles, who
in turn directed them to the Alabama shooting and fingerprints
from that crime scene matched Lee Boyd Malva. They'd come
(22:30):
across John Muhammad's name from two different directions. The i
S report connected Mohammed to Malvo, and then his name
came up again on a tip line call. Drew Tracy
was a trained sniper himself, so he wasn't surprised that
there could be two suspects working together.
Speaker 5 (22:48):
Back in nineteen eighty three, I first became involved as
a SWAT team member and one of the most important
pieces of the training in a vital part was going
to Sniper observe school. And it's two words, a sniper
and an observer. So you're trained as a marksman and
you're also trained as an observer. Your main job being
(23:08):
a sniper observer is observing. You have to put yourself
in a position you're not seen. You have to utilize
a different type of optics, and you have to provide good,
steady and specific information to your team. And the reasoning
for a team aspect and deployment is you can't constantly
be behind the optics of a gun for an extended
(23:28):
period of time, so you want to have two trained
people that would exchange positions. One could be the observer
while the other one sets up their rifle so they're
ready to take a shot.
Speaker 3 (23:40):
So it could make sense for there to be two
perpetrators working together, but one acting as the sniper and
the other observing, picking targets and letting the sniper know
when there weren't any witnesses nearby. The tip line caller
had also said that John Mohammad owned a bush Master rifle,
an AR style only that fires two to three rounds,
(24:02):
the same type of bullets used in the Alabama and
DC shootings.
Speaker 5 (24:07):
Bushmaster XEM fifteen E twos is basically an assault rifle.
It's a high velocity round thirty two hundred feet per second,
so it has the capability of being pretty consistent within
three hundred yards. And I went to basically every scene
in the Washington DC area, and I think the longest
(24:27):
one was about to hard thirty yards utilizing the site system.
With training, these shots are I wouldn't say easy, but
they're capable with that weapon and a small amount of training.
Speaker 3 (24:42):
And the AR fifteen style assault rifle that John Muhammad
was reported to have was capable of much more than
firing single shots at a long range. It's a semi
automatic rifle that can fire up to forty five rounds
a minute.
Speaker 5 (24:56):
If you look at the latest active shooter situations in
our you'll see an AR fifteen as being the weapon
of choice. It has the capability of doing great damage.
Law enforcement also carries an AR for patrol nowadays. But
it's interesting many law enforcement departments in this country switched
over to a rifle program because of October two thousand
(25:19):
and two, the DC sniper incident. And if you think
about it, if you're in patrol with a limited shotgun
or a handgun, you're not going to have the capability
to go against a rifle threat. One of the things
that kind of scared me each one of these situations
was one shot. It wasn't the second shot, it was
(25:39):
one shot, which led me to believe it was military training.
So that greatly concerned me. And if you think about it,
one shot, what is that showing? One shot is telling
me that they're in control. And that scared us, and
(26:01):
it scared me.
Speaker 3 (26:04):
Who were John Mohammad and Lee Boyd Malvo? And how
was this forty year old American connected to a seventeen
year old Jamaican boy. Investigators needed to find out as
much about them as possible, and if they were the sneipers,
investigators needed to find them fast before they killed. Again.
(26:29):
Here's former FBI agent Linda Hooper again.
Speaker 6 (26:32):
So we were putting together a lot of information on
these two individuals. It certainly looked like they were two
viable suspects in this case, but we had no information
that they were in Maryland, Virginia, or Washington, DC area
at all. Well, when we were investigating John Mohammad, we
(26:53):
discovered that he was divorced and his wife, she had
a restraining order against him. I found out that she
was living in the area, and so I sent two
people over to interview her.
Speaker 7 (27:09):
Me and my children were having dinner and FBI knock
on my door and they said, so, when was the
last time you've seen John Alan Mohammad, and my palms
began sweating. I am Mildred Muhammad, I'm an award winning
(27:31):
global keynote speaker, and my former husband was John Ali Mohammad,
whom you all know to be the DC Sniper.
Speaker 3 (27:48):
Next time, I'm Monster DC Sniper. We'll explore the backstories
of John Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malva.
Speaker 7 (27:56):
Everybody loved John because he was jovial. He was that guy.
He would be gone. She had a list where he
was supposed to go for the day, and then she
started getting phone calls him not being there.
Speaker 5 (28:09):
I misread his character.
Speaker 3 (28:12):
You know, he has a good slide and a bad slide.
Speaker 7 (28:15):
He was accused of trying to kill O soldiers.
Speaker 3 (28:21):
You know, I think that they kept a lot of
the shit.
Speaker 7 (28:25):
He was going to kill me and it was going
to be a headshot, and I could not get anybody
to believe me.
Speaker 1 (28:42):
Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by
Tony Harris and produced by iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt
Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of iHeartRadio,
alongside producers Trevor Young, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thin. Lindsay
and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot
(29:03):
TV alongside producers Meredith Stedman and Christina Dana. Original music
is by Makeup and Vanity Set. If you haven't already,
be sure to check out the first two seasons, Atlanta
Monster and Monster the Zodiac Killer. If you have questions
or comments, email us at Monster at iHeartMedia dot com,
(29:24):
or you can call us at one eight three three
two eight five six six six seven. Thanks for listening.
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