Doomed to Fail - Ep 8 - Part 1: Terror in the Capital - The DC Snipers

Episode Date: November 27, 2023

It's re-release week 1! Buckle up for a heart-pounding journey back to 2002! 🎙️ We are re-releasing our episode on the infamous DC Snipers, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo.Brace yourself for a wild ride as we dive deep into this true crime thriller, exploring the twists, turns, and chilling legacy.#TrueCrimeRewind #DCSnipersReloaded #PodcastThrillsInstagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail]  Join our Founders Club on Patreon to get ad-free episodes for life! patreon.com/DoomedtoFailPodWe would love to hear from you! Please follow along! Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/doomedtofailpod/  Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/doomedtofailpod  Youtube:  https://www.youtube.com/@doomedtofailpod TikTok: https://www.tiktok.com/@doomed.to.fail.pod Email: [e-mail] 

My friends, Taylor from Doom to Fail. Today, we are re-releasing episode 8, part one about the D.C. snipers. I don't know if you are old enough to remember this, but it was crazy. There was a time in Maryland in the D.C. area where people were just getting randomly shot at the gas station and, you know, out in public in parking lots. And I wish that we have a good reason for why, but there's not a good reason, even after we know all the details. So please enjoy our episode. Let us know if you have a good reason. have any thoughts or questions or at Doomed to Fill a pod at gmail.com.

Thanks. In a matter of the people of the state of California versus Orenthal James Simpson, case number B-A-0196. And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country. Welcome to Doom to Fail, the podcast where I reveal a new issue I have every single week.

I'm Fars. I'm joined here by my co-host Taylor. Hi, Taylor. How are you? I'm doing well. How are you? You don't sound well. Yeah, I'm not. I think I have that respiratory virus RSV thing. And it's every week. There's there's something going on every single week. Two weeks ago, no electricity. A week ago in Florida. This week, RSV. Next week, I'll probably get hit by a truck. We'll see. But well yeah good times don't things come in threes maybe you're over it maybe that's it maybe that is it yeah that's a really good point yeah it's all it's all uphill from here i think you're fine yeah um so yeah on on that note uh i will say my drink for today is tea and honey because yes i need it

that's a good one that's good for you you do need that apologize i'm sniffling a little bit too so apologies for all the sniffles. Mine are allergy related, I think. But we're going to stuff full a lot during this episode, I imagine. So I know you're going to go first, but just to get us prepped, my drink is, once again, circling back to our episode one, we're going to go straight vodka because we're going to talk about some Russians. So we will get to it when we get to it, but I'll let you go first.

Lovely. And I'm going to start out. I think I can start out by saying congratulations to our good friends, Beth and Jay, who. I just saw that yesterday. Who are engaged. It seems like it's, it seems like it, I mean,

it's been a week, so it feels like it's public enough now to where we can actually say stuff. So congratulations, guys. Oh, congratulations. We love you guys so much.

So cool. That is going to be a fun, fun wedding. Oh my God. I can't wait. Yeah. So hold on. One sec,

Taylor. Okay. Fars is pausing to cough and go yell at his dog. That's what's happening right now. I'm looking at Fars. office he has a white chair which is a very very brave he's back and i'm back great okay i narrated while you were gone what'd you say you'll find out when you listen to it okay so

today's kind of a special episode on the true crime front because it's kind of a double whammy I'm going to be discussing two different types of relationships that were doomed to fail. One is a romantic relationship between our main antagonist of the story. And the other is a father-son type relationship that was also doomed to fail. Ooh. I know. I know. I like it.

The key that I'm going to go ahead. So sorry to interrupt you, Fars, but I forgot to tell you that I have a note for you. I know I'm personally not taking notes, but I have a note for me. just kidding um from my husband wanted to hear more of the of the gross stuff he said i want to hear the gross stuff so well unfortunately this one doesn't uh well then tell them to stay tuned next week's i have a pretty good one for next week this one's gonna be pretty like slap dash robbery style stuff going on so um that one me and you are aligned there okay cool so the key denominator of both of these failed relationships is a singular asshole

named John Allen Muhammad. Taylor, does that name ring a bell? No. Okay. Maybe later. You may also know them, him,

them by their media branded name, either the Beltway sniper or the D.C. sniper. You, okay, yes. Yeah. This is, this is such. That doesn't sound like slap dash robbery. It sounds like horrible.

I know, I know, but I didn't know how to, like, say it without giving away what this hobby is. Okay, great. You're great. So this one's like, this was like a super meaty topic. There's so many moving pieces to it. I could have probably researched this for like a solid week and still not have gotten to everything that was going on here. There's so many details.

A lot of things going on. People are moving between different states, different countries, different people coming in out of everybody's lives. I'm really doing like the top level version of this. I'm going to reference a podcast that was a part of my sources for this later on. It's called You're Wrong About. And I don't know if they're still active really because I know that there was like the team kind of stopped doing the shows together. Like I highly recommend checking them out, especially for their episodes on the DC Stiper case because they did it in I think it was four parts, probably some around eight to ten hours worth of content just on this. I'm going to wrap this up in 30 minutes.

so obviously there's a lot that i'm going to be leaving out so yeah i think i listened to an entire series called the dc sniper yeah yeah on you're wrong about no a different one like the podcast was like a called dc sniper it was like deep dive into it yeah so much so many details yeah exactly um so the other party to this crime was i'm just going to go ahead and call him a child his name is lee boyd malvo and i'll start at the top by addressing one part of this that based on how this was framed in the media so this was always framed in the media as terrorism I looked at the actual formal definition of terrorism and the definition of it is the intentional use of violence and fear to achieve political or ideological aims the events

were discussing started five months after September 11th so at that point nearly everything was called yeah if you remember Taylor like this was around the time that they anthrax thing was going on too yep everyone was scared i mean obviously you know i feel like that and then i had it i mean i was in i was in new york on 9-11 but i was in a bubble i was in college and i like didn't know anything about the world really and i hadn't even really like defined terrorism at all you know it wasn't aware of everything that's going out in the world until then you know so and then i was scared yeah yeah so i felt like i feel like i I feel like people were, like, telling me that, like, my guy friends were going to be drafted, you know, like, we were, there's all these rumors and, like, weird shit going on.

So, yeah, everything was terrorism then. I remember we talked about the, what, you being in New York on 9-11, you seem to have gotten exposure that me being in Texas definitely did not get. Yes. So that's awful in its own way. But the, I'm going to, I bring up the terrorism thing, because I'm going to, I'm going to put an alternate point. on this and say that it was not terrorism because this actually was not ideological or politically motivated in any way. We actually know why John in particular did what he did. And I'm going to frame this as John doing it because this is very Charles Mansonie where he like, he controlled things.

He was controlling a child. So like he was the antagonist in all of this. I'm going to get into his motives at the end, actually, because they're so stupid. It'll, it'll blow you away. I'm going to go through all this and then. you'll get to the motive and you'll say that was it that was the plan and just like all these people died for this it's going to be kind of shitty to say the other part of the whole terrorism piece was a it made better headlines and also they kind of had to call a terrorism because they really really really wanted

to put john to death when they caught him and they did spoiler alert so i mean it's been like 12, 10, 12 years. So if you don't know by now, John Allen Moham was put at death. That, well, also, never mind. I want to come back to it, but like, you, you keep going. That's a, that's a link between our, being put to death. There's a link between our stories today. So continue.

Yes. So I'm going to start with John. And I'm going to say that, like, as I was learning about this guy and reading about him, he really reminded me of Donald Trump. Like, in the sense that if he's not right, or if he, is challenged in any way he doesn't understand how to deal or cope with that like he just goes a mega ton on whatever is in his way like like taking a sharpie and changing the way path of a hurricane i was just talking about that last week when i was at that conference in florida and

i was like that was my favorite moment of the trump presidency like what are you talking about you don't know everything oh my god so but yeah totally i can't imagine how having someone like that like as your dad or as your husband like you'd just be like you just keep up yeah um and yeah like he goes he goes a megaton in any situation and there's a specific reason why he goes megaton in this situation in the in the in the dc beltway area this all goes over a span about eight months it actually doesn't even start in dc we'll get into like where it actually begins it culminates in dc and that's where we kind of we kind of referenced it that way um but much like every morning I cover, like I mentioned, the motivations on why he does what he does

turn out to be ultimately incredibly stupid and don't actually, he doesn't achieve his goals, which good, he shouldn't. Right. I'm not going to go much into John's early life other than some details that will become relevant later on. John was actually born with the last name, Williams. He changed his last name after joining the Nation of Islam. I should know, and I don't know if you know this Taylor but the nation of Islam is listed on the southern poverty laws website with a hate group designation. There's a lot of the material that I read out there that comes up later on in John's life as he becomes more and more indoctrinated that has to do with ethno purism. I don't know what you'd call it. Just like anti-race. It was it's all bad.

Like it's none of it's like, none of it's like, none of it activates like a mind that is like full of butterflies and you know rainbows like it cultivates a mind of like everybody's the enemy fuck everybody that's not me and i have a question that i feel like i don't want to make sound wrong but did he did that happen in prison i feel like it didn't okay because i feel like people convert to islam in prison and get radicalized no no this came about because of the second point i'm to bring up, which is his second wife, Mildred, who seems to be a great woman and she ran across the nation of Islam and really like the clean living aspect of it, less the ideological components of it and brought John into it as a result of that. Okay, cool. So yeah, the second point is that

he's been married and divorced twice and Mildred is the biggest focal point of this story. That's the second wife. Okay. And the last point that it's that John was in the military for a very long time and he was actually given multiple awards as an expert marksman. Oh. Yeah, not great for DC. Come in handy. Yeah, we'll see. So let's go ahead and circle back to wife number two. So let's look, talk about a tortured woman. Um, again, you're married to essentially Donald Trump, but like without the money. It's not. It's worth noting that most of what we know about John comes from Mildred. Like he's not very. loquacious as it comes to discussing his own life so we mostly know about her or him

through her in 1983 milder was living in baton Rouge louisiana she was 23 years old and working just going to church by all accounts she's kind of a simple person doesn't have much in the way of romantic relationship experience and it's at this time she beats john at a grocery store and john asks her out and when i was when i was single for like five minutes of my life if my friend told me to go to the grocery store and standing in the vegetable aisle to meet meat men. He was like, you'll know that they're responsible and that they care about themselves and that's the best place to find guys. Is that where you met Juan? It's not, but I don't think that's a terrible idea. It's weird. Standing there. How long are you standing there? I didn't do

it. I'm just saying that's not weird. I'm going to look at her. I'm going to look at a picture of Mildred. Mildred. Okay, continue. I see her. So at this point, John T. T. this up with her as wanting to jump straight into a relationship it kind of reminds me of like an old-timey courting thing where this was a date to marry thing and john basically teases us up that way from mildred as well she's not very experienced in relationships he kind of said let's just get serious so they get serious from what john did tell mildred over the course of their time together he didn't have an easy childhood his mom died when he was young and he went off to live with a grandfather who was apparently a piece of work he's a closed book from here on out he doesn't like

revisiting his past but given what we learned about his character later on all this kind of tracks shitty childhood there's a lot of details there but we'll just leave it at that okay so red flag number one as the relationship gets serious mildred learns that john is already married to someone named carroll boo he has two sons don't get this i don't maybe maybe i just don't have as much time as other people but carrying on one relationship is hard enough carrying a relationship with children is harder carrying a relationship with children and then a side relationship is how do you have the mental maybe i'm lazy that's what it is yeah no you need to really commit to it i think

is part of it yeah and is there like a what okay nowadays just for our list is there a way to check if someone's married I guess I feel like are people not telling people they're married like can do a full background check on someone when they pick you up with a grocery store I mean I would there's got to be other signs right is there an indentation on their wedding ring finger or Mildred yeah seriously yeah she learned all this through a friend she confronts John who explains the marriage was falling apart she buys it and the relationship carries on There's so many details between these two facts, all of which make Mildred sound like a saint and John like he should be very grateful to be with her. But whatever. She gets back with John. A lot of interesting things happen here. And then ultimately, Mildred breaks up with John. This is before they're married.

Oh, so they get married. So they get back together. Exactly. Yeah. Later, he convinced her to get back together. And then in 1988, they get married. So. Is he to get divorced?

yeah yeah the carol relationship ended however it ended okay so they're married now mildred is pregnant with john's child and learns that john is cheating on her with a 19 year old named daniel at this point john would be in his mid 30s yeah uh he's been apparently seeing her for six months again i don't understand how like god i'm just i don't am i like i'm doing things like how do you have the strength and the energy to do this and like and like planning a wedding in the middle of that it's also hard yeah doing a prenatal care it's a 19 year old so you know that it's probably not just like dinners every now and then you probably got to go to some shows like i don't get i don't get it

but Mildred learns about this and invites Danielle over to the house to confront John. There's a lot of details I'm glossing over. She doesn't invite her over. She goes and picks Daniel up. She goes over to the house, picks her up, brings her back to her house to confront John. Oh my God, I love Mildred. I'm also looking at her picture this whole time and she just looks awesome. So I'm just like imagining her being mad and she just looks so cool.

She has like a beautiful headscarf on and all of her photos. She looks, she just looks like a boss. She turns out okay, I think, at the end of the story. these pictures of her and so i'm just like yeah good on you meldrae yeah it's hilarious so like john comes home daniel is in the kitchen mildred is like what you know john's like what's like what's for dinner it's like go in the kitchen you'll find out you go to the kitchen and sees daniel this is incredible so also in the middle of all this one of john's friends james apparently he was supposed to go pick up lotto tickets for for james and so james came over to the

house in the middle of all this to pick up his lotto tickets he's sitting in the living room like i just keep picturing this guy james like what's going on like what the hell does walk into yeah he probably that he come over and gets like leftover dinner um anyways they hash us out john says i'm over it with daniel sorry daniel we have to break up because here's my six-month pregnant wife that i have to stick with um and then apparently james drives Daniel home what a day for James did he win the lottery is he doing okay we don't know I did think I was like this could actually be kind of a me cute if um James had capitalized on it but I guess so funny um anyways they end up having a kid his name is little John

little I know not little they later have a second child a daughter named Selena and in general it just seems like john mostly ignore the responsibilities of being a good husband and mildred kind of was on our own to raise the kids in mind the house because also throughout all this it seems like implicit that john is also just cheating on mildred constantly is my job so sort of sort of they start a business together where john's apparently really good with cars and he would just go around and fix cars but like that's also how he would end up being with women yeah i mean that's how you do it it's not that he's super human you just ignore your responsibilities and then during the work day while you're stopping by

multiple women's houses yeah there's also like just kind of hilarious but like weird side stories going on here about john's behavior so one time apparently he went to the salvation army and just brought home some random dude he befriended there and said that this guy's going to be living with him like weird it's it's sound i wrote down this sounds like something homer Simpson would do it kind of is though like he just shows up with some right um and so obviously it's kind of implicit at this point that john is in some capacity emotionally abusing mildred he seems like someone who just can't handle any lack of control but it's a weird kind of abuse it's not like physical beatings it's not like just constantly screaming at her it's just it's abuse done by henpecking these shit

out of her it was also like i said before like it's also clear like she's also where there's cheating going on to this time like he's doing everything to make her feel like a second-class citizen in her own home talking about everything the food how she raised the kids pretty much anything that would come up you'd find a reason to just critique her about it um-huh john suggests that they divorce at this point which by all accounts devastates mildred she's invested a lot in this yeah and she thinks about it and then ultimately decides yeah okay that's probably a good move we probably should probably should do this he didn't expect that he wanted her to say of course we're not going to like i love you you you're so great like again psychological BS yeah right uh doesn't

work so he they do some couples counseling and ultimately it's just decided that like this is a milder milder puts her foot down at this point is like i'm not doing this anymore we're 100% done. He does a bunch of shit because he lacks control. He does a bunch of shit to make the divorce as bad as possible for her, not providing enough support for the kids. And they also don't have a formal child custody arrangement in place. So they would just swap the kids back and forth. And there was a story here that John came to the house one day and saw the cupboards were full of food. And this might have been what set him off because he thought that she was sleeping with somebody else and that guy was providing for them because he wasn't because money that he was

providing wasn't enough to fill the covers full of food that was what happened one of her friends came over to the house and saw that mildred had lost a bunch of weight and was like we're handling this right now and went to the store and bought her whatever she needed that's what ended up happening yeah the idea is that the thought process was that he thought he thought he lost that other element of control over her which is like I can control how you can actually eat which is an insane way to think about humans and that's kind of what set him off so around this time she lets him have the kids for the regularly scheduled custody thing and he keeps them and at the same time empties their joint bank accounts completely oh no yeah i watched a recent unsolved mysteries i think

about um kids who are kidnapped by a parent and it was really sad you know like one parent just like takes the kids and leaves the country or just disappears and the other parent, you know, never finds them or knows where they are but can't go because it's dangerous and things like that. So super sad and scary. Yeah, apparently that's the most common way kids get kidnapped. I didn't know that. I was, I found out researching this. So there's a lot that goes on here around like John calling and harassing Mildred and yada, yada, yada, yada. Mildred ultimately, whatever, I'm not going to go into the details about. Ultimately, Milder decides that she has to go live in a woman's shelter. A, she has no money. And B, she

feels threatened by John in his existence. She ends up living under an assumed name and going to live in this shelter. All this is going on in Washington State. Okay. So at this, around this time, Mildred's mother gets a house in Maryland,

which, for those that aren't familiar with the geography of the area, D.C., Maryland, Virginia, it's all one thing. Like people who work in D.C. live in Maryland. they live in virginia they bounce from back and forth like it's basically like one giant metro area and it's just it's intentionally designed that way so that's a little bit of foreshadowing of what's going to come going back to john and the kids when john got custody that day he almost immediately

put them on a plane to antigua this will become relevant again shortly but the simplest version of what was going on here is that he put the kids on this plane they go to antigua and then he basically makes a living foraging documents for Jamaican immigrants who are trying to immigrate to the US and that's basically his life he just goes around forging documents taking care of the kids and that's kind of it for the time being okay so let's go ahead and segue to the other main character of the story enter lee boy malvo so lee that name is awesome by the way it is right i feel like melvo is it's a word melvo in harry potter somehow i feel like it's like someone's name or it's like Draco Malfoy moved around or it's like Tom Riddle or whatever just it feels very like a very

Harry Potter name it does I'm gonna I went down a rabbit hole in my mind of who that could have been um no he sounds like he designs very very nice like gator shoes you know yeah okay it's very cool name so lee was born in 1985 in jama to a woman named una una una was I mean I'm not going to go into a lot of details she sounds pretty shitty she sounds like a terrible mom just beat the hell out of this kid and just abandon him constantly you look at pictures of lee which i would encourage you to to try that um to me he just constantly has the eyes of like a scared kid like an unloved scared child there's a lot of bounce around that happens here una moves to st martin leaving lee at home with neighbor like he just abandoned constantly i mean

she's doing it to make money and support the family but like don't just leave your kid with them strangers there's there's weird stories that happen it's I mean I don't know I'll do this for one because he wants to know the gross stuff at one point Lee like the friend's a cat who comes over to the house and una makes him beat the cat because like he can't have a cat and then like he beats the cat until it's bloody and then the cat finally goes away and then anytime the cat came over he had to beat him like it's just why do this like what is terrible yeah um So long story short is that eventually between Jamaica, St. Martin, so on and so forth, Una and Lee end up in Antigua. Did you find a picture of Lee?

I did. Yes. What did you think? He just looks like, I mean, so many of the pictures, he's just like when, I guess when the trial was, it's just a kid, you know? And he just, he looks very sad. It just looks like a sad kid. Yeah. I know he does bad things, but he does look very sad. He looks, he makes me sad. Yeah. Same. yeah so like i said they ended up in antigua and all because of you know his job one make money

there um yeah i i wrote here that if this was like a movie or a story about animals written by disney lee would just be like a bastard how nobody would adopt at the shelter like he's just he just wants i don't know it it's it sucks so fortune is collide in antigua because una decides that she wants to immigrate to the U.S. and given John's side hustle or only hustle foraging documents, she takes Lee to see John. That's where the two come together for the very first time.

For whatever reason, Lee starts going over to John's to hang out and you know, it seems like it's a pretty tight-knit immigrant community there. Then it tells Lee at one point that she basically left. She left for Florida. It doesn't tell me, this is a pattern. Like she'll pick up the phone, call him. He doesn't see her for a couple of days.

And then she's like, I'm in another state and another country. John figures out what's going on and I don't know it seems like it's almost out of like altruism that he goes over there and tells Lee to pack his things and come stay with him so he finally gives him the thing that he wants that father figure so their dynamic is one where Lee kind of takes care of the house and the kids while John does whatever it is that he does so he kind of takes on like a housewife like approach to this like as an old year old or 12 year old no he's more old he would be like 13 14 I think but John being a military guy, he just has this military mindset of you have to be stern, strict, and discipline. I'll only bring it up because when you're an aimless kid, I can see why that personality type would be alluring. Yeah. You'd want someone who takes charge, gives you comfort and safety when your whole life has been abused and cast aside by everyone who should have loved you, right? Yeah, totally. So ultimately, John is arrested for forging documents.

John gets out of jail. by some accounts he literally just walks out because it's easy to live in antigua and then john the kids and lee all get on a plane with forged documents and head to the u.s so john takes the kids to bellingham washington and lee goes to florida be with una because una again and left to go to florida i've actually been to bellingham it is stunning it is one of it is so beautiful it is i don't what's this show I'm thinking about. Oh, my God. Andy Griffin, whatever that show.

Yeah, what's that show? Isn't it just Andy Griffith? Yeah, it's very small-towny. It's very small-town and pretty. Lots of breweries. The Pacific West loves their breweries. So John moves into a homeless shelter with the kids, which is noted as odd by anybody who observes us,

because for better or worse, homeless shelters don't really see a large influx of single men showing up with, like, a brood of children. Like, that's kind of red flaggy right there. Yeah. Mildred had obviously reportedly, the kid's missing. And so when John applies for food stamps, the system flags this. They become aware of, like, be on the lookout for a single guy with three kids.

Yeah. Investigators start digging into this. They interview the kids, and they end up giving their real names. And the jig is up, and Mildred is reunited with the kids finally. Oh, good. Yeah. So at this point, I promise I'm not going to go into a legal procedure this time. an emergency hearing is held for the custody of the kids which to me is the pivotal moment for

everything that happens hereafter the judge give mildred custody of the kids good yes john is pissed what did he expect for a guy who for a guy who needs control this was a massive massive breaking point yeah this moment is basically what leads to everything that comes next people who knew john would talk about how this moment is the moment that changed like he just stay up crying all night and like he just couldn't handle what was happening what the fuck did he think was going to happen oh you said like a great dad i mean person who just kidnapped your children he also thought he was a great husband despite him picking his wife to death so he didn't have the best logic no so yeah because at this point he viewed mildred as the one who made him kind of lose everything which like okay

what were her alternatives not to fight for her kids not to try and get them back safely yeah at this point john goes back to the homeless shelter and he calls lee because he's lost everything and he's just grappling trying to grasp for whatever he can he calls lee and tells him to come up to washington this happens in october of 2001 are you okay yeah yeah i'm just thinking continue what were you thinking when you're what why why why why Why did you ask me? I'm fine. I was just thinking about this. I was just thinking about, you know, that John, like, calling Lee for, like, helping you know, like, this is a grown-ass man, you know, who's, like, going through an emotional thing calling a teenager. it's fucking weird it's weird and like i just was thinking about that because i was like that like something that you teach your kids like grownups don't need kids for help you know

like if a grownup asks you for directions like they're trying to kidnap you grownups don't need kids for help like they can they can talk to other adults you know like they shouldn't have to be talked to a kid so yeah yeah you can identify it Lee would later mention that the pain he heard in john's voice about talking about his kids being taken away from him just kind of hit him a certain way like in a way that was like man i wish somebody cared about me that much right that kind of a thing so lee looked at his situation and his mom and the abuse he faced with her and then john who had never been mean to him and he made really the rational decision to leave his mom to go be with lee

in bellingham yeah the story is basically lee called john uh to wire him money for bus to get what John did to get him up to Washington from Florida. Yeah. So one thing I mentioned that podcast you're wrong about that I thought was really good was they mentioned how sometimes a person can make an extremely bad decision for reasons that make perfect sense. And that's. Yeah.

So this. I totally get why he did what he did. Absolutely. His mom was not nice to him. He doesn't have anything like solid in his life except this man who was nice to him. So Taylor, I'm going to side track. here. I've been in situations before where I knew that if I let something play out the way it seemed like it was going to play out, there would be dire consequences. But for anybody else

to care, the dire consequences would have to be realized as opposed to how do you take action before the thing you see playing out in your mind happens. I mean, you know, I'm not going to go into details about it here, but like I've definitely done things where it's like I knew that outcome was going to happen if I didn't take action, but I had no legal way of taking action. So I'm like, whatever, I'm just going to do whatever I got to do to make this thing not happen. And I thought about school shootings and how, you know, it's like, oh, well, my 18-year-old son who's a senior in high schools, he's legally, it's his problem.

right to have a bunch of guns and it's just like there's times when you can see the outcome in your mind and it is okay to be like fuck the law and what that guy's property rights are or what they're like any rights are like you know what's going to end up happening if you don't do something but like you don't in a lot of cases most people think they don't have a choice you got to wait until the horrible horrible thing happens then everybody else right right right that's what reminded me this i'm like there's so many people that came in and out of lee's life who could have like i don't care that she's your mom like fuck her parental rights like she's a horrible horrible mom who keeps abandoning you and you're clearly a shattered shell of a child

like just i'm gonna i'll just take the kid like i don't i don't know i don't know yeah it sucks i mean it feels like he well it feels like lee didn't have much of a chance because of that are and I don't know like I do know that I mean sometimes like even with like child custody things like you end up with a parent who's abusive or because they have you know more money or whatever in a better lawyer or something like that I mean it sounds like the best thing that happened for for John's kids is that they that milder got custody of them even though that is the thing that like sparked John kind of going over the edge I think it's still like good for the kids that they don't have to be with him anymore because he kidnapped them and imagine like who who who knows what he was telling them also like about their mother and about the government you know like who knows what he was like what he could have molded his kids to be yeah that was probably the same idea yeah well i bring it up here because going to the next part he's on his way to wash him this is kind of game over because this next section i headline brainwashing because at this point it's kind of like done like the the the cast has been done

died. Is that the word? No, the die has been cast. Thank you. You got to have your cake and eat it too. Eat your cake and have it too. You know, whatever. Cause, Kaczynski. Kaczynski. Yeah. Okay. So I think under any circumstance, a healthy human probably isn't wired to kill a person unprovoked there's a ton of brainwashing that starts happening here between john and lee like lee or john brainwashing lee there's also another part of this that struck me about how how much time matters depending on the age that you're at like i remember when i was in elementary school and thinking a year was the longest time i could possibly conceive of yeah you look at this situation like this is only like a year to a year and a half of lee's life but that's like a that means he's like a

fairly significant chunk like his relation with john is like a fairly significant chunk of his life so he listens to him so again like i hate to you know excuse find excuses for bad behavior but obviously i feel for lee given his background his impressionability is youth and the fact that he's just getting brainwashed by a psychopath essentially yeah 100% so during this time you know like i said john indoctrinates lee on nation of islam stuff like not like anything positive like all like the negative stuff around like supremacy and whatnot um they go to gun ranges and train his marksmanship quite a bit one detail that i that i read that was amazing was that john would put up uh targets that had lee's own face on them that he had to shoot

yeah that it's fucked up yeah yeah they start form this kind of father son bomb but it feels like kind of like an abusive father-son bond of like you have to listen unequivocally to what i tell you to do like there is no middle ground and he gets that like that's exactly what what lee becomes to him so let's get started with the crimes so like i said the shootings didn't actually start in dc they escalated to they escalated from murders in washington which is where lee and john are this time so back when washington state yeah exactly not dc so back when john was married to mildred mildred had a friend who stepped in and helped them with understanding basically like general accounting principles for businesses i have had a crash course

on this and can tell you that it's not fun but several things that i'll intuit from this experience having done it myself was it is a it's like being to explain like a toddler how basic finance works from somebody who actually understands it and i can imagine john having a woman step in and explain this stuff to him was emasculating in some capacity. Yeah, totally. And then later when the separation and custody battle was taking place, this woman took Mildred's side. So John had multiple reasons to, like he, it sounds like you really simmer on how much he hated this woman. Her name is Issa. I keep saying this woman. Her name's Issa Nichols. Okay. So in February of 2002, Lee was told to go to this woman's house

and shoot her in the head. Unfortunately, for everyone. ICE's niece, Kenya was at the house and opened the door. Lee shot her in the face and killed her. She was 21 years old. Yeah. Oh, no. Yeah.

Again, there's so many of these that I'm kind of just kind of just kind of list them off. Mm-hmm. Because it's just someone shows up, gets shot in the face. Someone shows like, it's just that over and over and over again. A month later, they go to Tucson, Arizona. A six-year-old man named Jerry Taylor was shot at long range on the golf course.

um we don't know for sure who did this but the reason it comes up is because lee and john were in Tucson at the time and john's sister lived near this golf course and so the idea was it had to be these guys in august a man named john gaeta was changing a tire that had been slashed by lee in a parking lot in Louisiana lee came up from behind and shot him in the neck the guy plays dead lee steals his shit and then the guy runs to seek help and he ultimately survives. September was a super busy month for them. The following is just bullet points.

It all happened in September. They shot a guy named Paul LaRufa, who was a pizzeria owner six times. He survived an employee at a liquor store named Benny was shot but survived. Another liquor store employee named Muhammad was shot and survived. A 41-year-old employee of another liquor store was shot. This one was actually killed.

They shot and killed someone named Hong M. Ballinger in Louisiana. They're just like going on a spree, right? just their berserker spree mode. So this leads us from September into October, which is when they enter the D.C. metro area. Again, all this is going to tie back to a motive, and it's all going to sound really stupid. At the start of October, a 55-year-old man named James Martin was shot and killed in a parking lot of a grocery store in Maryland.

The next day, four people were shot and killed within a two-hour window of time in one Maryland neighborhood, and another was killed in D.C. proper. all these shootings were done at distance with a high-powered rifle. At this point, John and Lee had moved into Virginia. They moved into that territory in that region. They shot a woman named Carolyn Sewell, who survived a shot to the chest somehow. They shot a 13-year-old on his way to middle school. They shot a man named Dean Harold Meyer while he was pumping gas.

They shot a businessman named Kenneth Bridges and killed him while he was also pumping gas. and they shot and killed an FBI analyst named Linda Franklin at a Home Depot parking lot. It's just spree. I think I like read some or saw something about this where more like a woman who was at the gas station and one of the guys was shot and she was like, it's so confusing because you're like what the hell is going on?

You know, it's like in the jerk when he's like it's cancer exploding. Do you remember that? Oh yes. Because I was trying to shoot him Because like you're like well Where is coming from? And then the woman that the story That's like I feel maybe one of those guys that was shot at the gas station

She was like she ran out to help him And she was like someone come help help me And everybody in the store was like no Because we know that And the police were like we're not coming because we know that like Someone is shooting randomly And they've already shot this place So they didn't want to come

But she was like trying to do it You're like because someone gets shot in front of you Just pumping gas you're like It takes you to like a different reality You're like what is happening? you know and you can just like be standing somewhere and get shot that's crazy yeah it's like anytime something happens that like breaks the matrix you're like yes yes yes like what's going on yeah so it took five days for them to take action again like for them to start doing this again

and on october 19 they shot a guy named geoffrey hooper in a parking lot of a steakhouse then two days later a bus driver was shot while just basically standing outside of the bus depot yeah yeah they're on a, I mean, but like, I hate to put it this way. Like, you're broke, you have no money. You live out of a car. I mean, this was probably the most exciting and interesting thing they could do all day is just go around finding people to shoot. Like, it's a horrible way to think about it. Totally. I mean, I'm going to probably, I don't know, I'll get to the motive, but I feel they probably felt like they were doing like something, right? It was incredibly stupid. I'm never going to lay off that. So you'll notice that, obviously, they're bouncing around quite.

a bit and obviously a bus wasn't going to keep working for them to get from place to place right at this point um it's worth discussing the blue caprice there's actually a movie about the shootings called just blue caprice that's the car yeah that's the car it's a Chevrolet it's a big old-timey clunky piece of shit it was a 1990s model um do you know what these look like i'm gonna look at it yeah yeah it's i don't know why but for some reason the car feels menacing to me it's almost like christine oh yeah oh i see it well i'm looking i obviously see this blue christ it does look like yeah i get it yeah i don't know that's an odd color i feel you don't see cars like that right so fun fact it used to be an undercover police car oh yeah before they

bought it so it was actually a strategically good buy for them because for one it was obviously cheap i mean look at you can tell it was cheap for another one it was a huge it was a huge for another one it was a huge vehicle yeah like i said like because they had no money they were living inside the car and then they would also just shoot people through a modified trunk that had a hole cut in it to allow a gun barrel to protrude oh how would you ever find them like i'm yeah that that is like it's so it is so random that you're like there there is no there's no rhyme or reason yeah yeah and look i i i hate to give kudos for this but this was actually like a a pretty smart move it means a bullet bullet casings never get lost right like you shoot it

stays in the car you're always hidden and you can make an incredibly quick getaway yeah the fact that it was a blue caprice was also kind of a problem for a while because when they shot that guy at the home depot the parking lot someone stupidly lied about what they saw they said they saw a white van flee the scene so police were on the lookout for a white van which like that's like one out of every five vehicles on the highway absolutely yeah that's i mean don't get into one we've already covered that but like but yeah why but that's wildly different than a blue caprice if you're looking for a white van you're not at all in my direction yeah yeah there's a sad story about how like at one point the police found two guys in a white van they were like we got the

guys we got the guys it turned out to be like two immigrants were illegal and they ended getting deport like some people just want to be a part of a story like they're such losers they want to be like close to a story so i saw something it's like you didn't see shit so let's get into the arrest so five days after that last shooting on october 24th the two were asleep in the car at a truck stop when police were tipped off by people who were at that stop i'm gonna i label this part i ns side quest because there is an i ns component of this that comes in handy I didn't mention this before, but at one point while John and Lee were at the homeless shelter

in Bellingham, Lee got picked up by the INS for being an illegal immigrant. And because of this, he had his fingerprints taken. Ooh. And one of the crime scenes early on when they weren't using the rifle or using like a handgun, he'd used a handgun, like a pistol, to shoot someone in a partial print

was found on the shell casing. Okay. They matched that against the INS database to Lee. So police go to his last known whereabouts, where he got picked up, which is what in Bellingham at his homeless shelter. And the guy who runs the shelter tells them all about John. So

they look him up and realize he had a vehicle registration in his name. Because that was another part that was stupid was like he had all this forged documentation, but he writes to the name. Yeah, like even I know not to do that. Right. If you don't have a forged documentation, move yourself at least. Yeah.

Yeah. So it all matched this blue caprice, which is the only way they kind of came off of the white man narrative. this info along with the car's license plate number is immediately disseminated throughout the DC metro area so DC Maryland Virginia all these folks had this information and it's obviously picked up on scanners by the media outlet and that's how people were able to identify this car in the license plate was because the media just spread this everywhere but do they think that they did do they know that they're the snipers or they're just trying to pick up Lee because of immigration no no they this is all tied to the sniping case they're like they're like there's some some correlation between these disparate murders i also didn't get into this but they started like doing this like btk thing of like leaving like you know tarot cards and like just yeah yeah yeah like tying it all together yeah like the wet bandits we know every house you guys hit because you have the you left the water on on every house yeah that's exactly what they're

they're going for so they get they're arrested without incident and i can only imagine when the the interior of this car smelled like. The trial began in 2003. John was found guilty and sentenced to death. Lee was also found guilty, but sentenced to life. He's a child. Well, other states were seeking the death penalty for Lee. But around this time, the Supreme Court had ruled in a case called Roper v. Simmons

that it was against the Eighth Amendment or the Eighth Amendment to execute someone for crimes they committed when they were under the age of 18. That took death off the table for Lee. So John was ultimately executed on November 10th of 2009. He made no final statement, and that was basically the end of his garbage life. One thing to note is that it actually does appear as though Lee did most, if not all, the murders. Hmm. That's why I said earlier, this is kind of like a Charles Manson situation. Like, John is the bad guy.

For sure. But he didn't actually do the thing. Interesting. Yeah. It's weird. Yeah, totally. totally the 18th amendment is prohibition this was the eighth amendment eighth amendment okay wait what's the eighth amendment cruel and unusual ah okay thank you

no yeah i get exactly exactly what you're saying like he was the masturbate kind of grooming this young man who obviously should you know killed a shit ton of people so yeah should be in jail but yeah exactly so lee lee is still in prison he is now 37 years old he has reached out to multiple family members of his victims and apologized for his behavior in 2020 he got married and he's been continued you yeah don't ladies there's plenty of non incarcerated people to marry just go to the produce section and find one to the grocery store find yourself a man and have one don't I mean regardless of his grooming or in his apologies like don't marry me in prison I won't send love to serial killers I don't know what the appeal is but yeah it goes out saying he's been denied parole

continuously and realistically he's probably just going to stay in jail forever so I kept teasing the motive Taylor what do you think the motive was I don't know fame guns to get his kids back So my guess is The motive was

He wanted to kill Mildred But he knew that if he went to kill Mildred They would know it was him Oh so he was killing other people So it would seem like a random thing Yeah Oh my gosh, it's so dumb Like he killed all these people

Or had them killed Just to circle back to Mildred And kill her eventually Oh my God And Mildred is fine She's thriving She's thriving Yeah

That is so dumb Those poor people. Yeah. So that's the story. Like I said, look, I think that on Mildred's front, learning that he's married after you've been dating, like, it was all a foregone conclusion that I thought, I think it was a foregone conclusion. This was, he was a psycho.

I mean, I just saying that naturally you've got to be a psycho to be able to carry on that kind of narcissistic behavior. Mm-hmm. And I think Lee was kind of just doomed from the jump. yeah definitely anyways that's my story hopefully my voice doesn't sound too

you sound great I don't think you do but that's super sad yeah I'm glad I could I'm glad I could I'm glad I get to you mom bump

so what do you have for today Thank you.