You're Wrong About - D.C. Snipers Part 2

Episode Date: February 3, 2020

Mike tells Sarah how a nice Jamaican kid became the disciple of a mean American adult. Digressions include Tonya Harding (of course), “Sliding Doors” (again) and Anne of Green Gables (Sarah has an English degree). Mildred re-appears just after the hour mark. We are unable to conceive of a content warning comprehensive enough for all the horrors contained in this episode. There is less crying in this episode than the last in this series, but only slightly. Continue reading →Support us:Subscribe on PatreonDonate on PaypalBuy cute merchWhere else to find us: Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads Mike's other show, Maintenance PhaseSupport the show

I bet the ASMR community would really like to have like a you're wrong about mouth sounds out takes real Welcome to your wrong about the podcast that you need therapy to get through Jesus did you see that on twitter the other day? No one of our wonderful listeners said that they were a big fan of our Ann and Nicole Smith episode, but that they needed Therapy to get through it. Oh god. I mean, I guess that's a good thing, right? It's I think it's neutral I think it speaks to you know, just think about what your tastes are and And if that's not what you want then then that's okay And if you need to take a break and be in therapy for seven years and return that's fine

I mean we've been making the show for less than two years. So I don't think that exact scenario is what played out But 18 months sure I am Michael Hobbs. I am a reporter for the Huffington Post and I'm sarah marshall And I'm researching a book on the satanic panic and we are on patreon at patreon.com slash you're wrong about And we have some tote bags that we are going to sell you about how capitalism is bad because Life is an ironic trifle. It's going to be all goth merch from now on. This is where we're going to do black light posters next Yes, because I'm ready and today we're talking about the dc sniper part two I have no idea where any of this is going

I I'm I'm completely lost and you are gonna have to Take me to the next thing because I don't even know what question to ask you I guess we should start by talking about what we talked about last week. Yeah, do you want to catch us up? Yes, so last week we talked about the life of mildrid Muhammad And going to the store one day and meeting a guy named john and the relationship becoming abusive and the abuse Increasing and his control of her increasing And then we talked about john

Kidnapping the kids that he and mildrid had together and that he did not have custody of and her searching for them and having absolutely no luck In her efforts to find them And living in a women's shelter as she Got her life back together after john kidnapping their children And what do you remember from the dc sniper shootings about lee boyd malvo? He's a accomplice. I mean all I know is that he was much younger that he was a You said in the last episode. He was a 17 year old boy. Yeah, and when john was 41. Yeah

Yeah, and I wish I could remember if I was surprised when I found out that one of the Perpetrators was a teenager. So before we start I want to make a kind of meta comment on this episode. Is that okay? I don't even know what a meta comment is. So Sure, so my meta comment for this episode is that everything that happens from now on basically Everyone is an unreliable narrator It's like a flannery o'connor novella When lee malvo is arrested in 2002 right, you know when they find out that he and john are the ones doing the Sniper shootings. He confesses to all of them. He says I did 100 of the shootings

And then nine months later. He says the only reason he said that was because he wanted to spare john the death penalty And so he was so kind of brainwashed indoctrinated by john at that point That he just took all of the responsibility for everything so that john would get off Free and I can see a 17 year old believing that the same way that joey Butifuco was known to say to amy fischer according to her memoir kids don't go to jail Which she believed yeah, and he's so brainwashed at that point that he introduces himself to police officers as john lee mohammed Wow, wow their identities are so fused that it's not clear if he sort of knows the difference between

The story he's telling in reality. Did john mohammed have the tiniest cult that we've ever seen I mean this seems like a cult of one. Yeah, it's a single serving cult. It's like a sugar packet. Yeah And then in 2006 three years later lee confesses to four extra murders And says that sort of on the way to dc before the sniper shootings They killed a bunch of extra people Then this is kind of a weird detail in 2010. He does an interview with William shatner. What? Yes. What are you one upping me for a celebrity cameo? Is this what this is?

William shatner. Yes. Why in the 2000s? William shatner had a show on a and e called aftermath The show had a pretty good idea. It was returning to historical events that have been Misremembered by the population and telling them in their true form. Oh I can almost imagine it as some sort of audio series did we just steal William shatner's idea? It's it's extremely possible Wow, and on that show lee says that he killed 42 people Huh, which is no one has ever been able to verify those are henry lee lucas numbers Yeah, you know shatner doesn't push him for specifics. It's only a 20 minute long interview, right?

They want to say that he killed 42 people. Yeah, they don't want to do an episode that's like We really don't know because that's hard to do a promo with and a lot of these murders that he's confessing to Some of them it's not clear if there's even a body And is he confessing to known murders that are like open cases or does he say like I killed someone of this age? And in this location at this time and they match it to something both He's he confesses to a murder in la that nobody has been able to find an you know an unsolved murder during that time period in la It's just we killed someone It could mean that they killed a homeless person or killed somebody where it looks like it was

Something natural. Yeah, and then there's others that he confesses to where it's people that were shot from far away With a rifle, but there's no evidence like one of them is in clearwater florida And there's no evidence that lee and john were in clearwater florida at that time There's another one in texas where there's no sort of bus tickets or any other record that they were in texas It's just someone who got shot with a gun from far away There's also in 2012 he does because it's the 10 year anniversary of the shootings He does a three hour long interview with the washington post In which they specifically ask him

Was there ever any sexual contact between you and john and he says no no no nothing Then the next day he gives an interview to matt lauer on the today show and he says that john was molesting him the entire time And so what you find over and over again in this story is You find different versions of the truth both of which sound plausible Yeah, like it's plausible to me that there would be sexual abuse and he wouldn't come forward about it This is something that we're extremely familiar with on the show But then it also sounds plausible to me that he just responds to a question And he just sort of spins this story because there's there's no other evidence of john

Sexually abusing anybody and there's no evidence from mildred's book of this Like no one else has come forward no one else has described anything borderline from john And so the idea that he could be Making that up is plausible and the idea that he's not making that up is plausible too Right or the idea that he feels like maybe this didn't literally happen But I need to express a degree of control that he had over me Then I have not been able to adequately express by talking about emotional abuse or whatever else was going on I don't want to like come down on either side of or either version of the story

Well, how could we possibly know exactly? I mean, none of us will ever know and this is one of the things that I think is To not make this entire episode super tedious of me saying like this timeline is wrong or like this fact is disputed I just want to sort of get out of the way now that all of the information we know about liboyd malvo comes essentially from a single book That's written by a woman called karmita alboros. Who's a former social worker? She's jamaican and li is jamaican as well. And so she starts speaking in patois to him and they get really close They spend hundreds of hours together but it's also

really notable that karmita alboros is a mitigation consultant hired by his legal team Because his legal team is now in a ongoing legal case About sort of juveniles and life imprisonment that is going to be heard by the supreme court When is that going to happen? Do we know this year? We're finally doing a current event. I know this time I knew it would happen And so there's no evidence in this book that karmita has made anything up or that she's acted unethically in any way But you have to acknowledge her structural

Incentives right her structural incentive is to identify mitigating factors for his crimes Can you talk about what mitigating factors are actually for people who don't sit around thinking about legal stuff all day? I feel like you would know this better than I would my understanding of it is that if you're a mitigation specialist Your job is to talk to people who know or have insight into the life Of this person and to try and humanize them You know, yes, they did these things But if you look at everything that they've experienced and and what has been Searing them towards this fate. Maybe you will be able to show mercy to them. Yeah, exactly

And so because karmita is a mitigation specialist for lee She's not interested in john at all. So there's very little information in this book about john She doesn't interview mildred. I mean, that's interesting because john is such I would imagine would be such a big part of the mitigation of lee's crimes because he's I would imagine from all the criminal minds. I've been watching the dominant party in this unsub team Absolutely, yeah And another structural weakness in the information that we have about lee is that karmita is also not interested in the crimes Because you don't want to talk about the crimes

So much exactly and so yeah, this book has massive inconsistencies that lee says that he's in louisiana until september 24th But the first shooting related to the sniper tax is on september 5th around dc He says they bought the blue caprice in october. They actually bought it in september. I mean, there's tons of these Little facts related to the crimes that are totally inconsistent. Yeah, so it's worth noting that she's not on a fact finding mission Yeah, I mean she is but like she's not on a logistical fact finding mission like the Details of the crime aren't the goal of this. Yeah And so the narrative kind of breaks down and what you have is lee's Recollections of the crimes

That don't really match reality and don't match sort of the paperwork and the the records that we have So we have like this weird collot like this is an interesting story for the lack of Perspective from directly within it. Yeah, I just want to be really transparent about that that I've read five books about this now and i'm trying to put together the narrative in a Chronological order, but things are all over the map like different. There's different dates for when people arrive in different countries Things are in the wrong order. I mean even with okay. There's a fair amount of inconsistency like people different sources are saying different things It's really about something substantial Yeah, yeah, but even something as obsessively ironed out

As the okay simpson trial in which everything that happened was recorded And there's still a wild amount of inconsistency. This is the caveat for any story we tell To that extent it's just really obvious in this case Which is good because we it's the obvious cases that make us realize how common this kind of inconsistency is I just I mean the whole time i've been researching this i've been having this kind of like You've been very uncomfortable for a while, huh? And also i'm i don't want to stop us every two minutes to be like Oh, the government of antigua says it's may 20th, but mildred says it's may 22nd

Like i don't want to i don't want to do that 50 times this episode So like i'm mostly just gonna try to kind of go with what my gut tells me is the most convincing version of the narrative Okay, and be like here's what i think is is probably like as close to the objective truth as we can get based on my own Reckoning yes as so many of the subjects of our shows. We're doing our best. I'm doing my best to put this together in order That's all I can that's all I can vouch for. I hope that people are picturing just two kato kalins recording this show But one of the things that's that we should start with is that one area where there is blanket consistency between biographies and journalistic investigations and the manhunt books is that

Lee malvo had a horrific childhood And in the same way that the portrait of abuse that we had last episode where it wasn't physical abuse Was different than the narrative we're sort of used to hearing Lee's narrative is also different in that his father Was a source of love and protection in his life and his mother Was a force of violence and terror in his life consistently This is a excerpt from karmita's biography of lee lee's mother is named una

Stacy ann lee's cousin observed una beating malvo. He could not have been more than six years old Una was hitting him all over his body with a belt and despite the fact that malvo's nose was bleeding Una did not stop Marie recalled her daughter running to her to tell her that una was murdering lee But when she went to leave the shop and try to stop the beating una turned on her and she had to leave so There's this dynamic in the house where his father is taking him out to play his father is taking him on bike rides His father is taking him out for ice cream, which according to karmita

This is not something super normal for jamaica where it's a relatively patriarchal society and men are not expected to spend a lot of time with their sons That we have lee's father leslie who is uncommonly Gentle and sort of this counteracting force to his mother Who's capricious and cruel and karmita even mentions this in her book This is she's interviewed una lee's mother quite a few times In many of my interactions with una james. I have experienced her moods myself We could be having a reasonable discussion and then without warning

She would spring to her feet and begin railing against everything and everyone around her including me She would lash out at the government for not stepping in to get malva away from muhammad Then in the same sentence, she would lash out at malva blaming him for the problems She faced and stating that she wished she had aborted him. Wow So just like anger looking at something to be directed at basically and also these these big mood swings So one of the most consistent Features of lee's childhood is inconsistency that she'll be nice to him He'll ask her question

You know the way kids do like why is the sky blue whatever and they'll be having a perfectly nice conversation And then he'll ask another question and she'll be like, why are you so stupid? And she'll hit him in the head and send him to his room without eating There's no way to predict these things There's an incident where he wants to become an artist and his mom is like, yeah, sure that sounds great She buys him all these colored pencils. She buys him paper. He's drawing when he's a kid He's like eight or nine and then one day she comes home and she just says being an artist is stupid You should be a doctor instead and she takes away all of his drawing supplies and paper and stuff

Oh my god This is kind of what he comes to expect in his life that there's never going to be any emotional consistency Yeah, so when he's six his parents break up His dad has gotten a job in the cayman islands. No dad. Don't go. I know and he's spending more time away And lee's mother becomes convinced that he's cheating on her And they start fighting more apparently this culminates in they have a huge fight about why are you cheating on me? She says he's gambling away all of their money

Which I think is partly true actually that he does have a gambling problem But they have this big fight in which he hits lee's mother and she picks up a machete and chases him out of a house I just thought at least she didn't kill him with the machete And then I was like no one's childhood biography should involve the phrase at least she didn't kill him Right true like that shouldn't be the at least of your life Yeah, and so basically he leslie lee's father leaves moves to a different part of kingston And so he spends all of his time at this point just waiting for the holidays Because that's the only time that he sees his father is once a year when his dad comes back

Although una asked malva what was wrong. She would not listen to his explanation He recalled that whenever he explained that he just wanted to have his father around His mother would slap him across the face angrily for even mentioning it He felt despair He was unable to understand why his father had not yet returned to save him early depression had begun to set in This is uh this part sucks, but we have to do it. Okay I got a blanket so I can be nice and cozy while you break my heart I'm sorry. I I want to say that like oh, it's gonna get better, but no it does not get better

It's just a really dark story all the way through of course It's not gonna get better because we know that the end game is that he becomes a serial killer Yes, or at least a helper of a serial killer unclear, but like yeah Yeah, so like we're just gonna we're just gonna get to the end and that's the goal here. Nothing is gonna get better That's the point. That's what we're learning. Yeah, he's eight years old at this point Basically the only Friend that he has is this stray cat which starts coming to the house. So he starts taking care of this cat He names it charlie. Oh god. I'm not gonna like where this is. I know I know I know

I had to cut out a couple lines because it gets really bad Malvo recall that charlie urinated on the bed Una screamed like malvo had never heard her scream before then he recalled she hit him in the head until he bled She insisted that he get rid of the cat and threatened that she would not stop beating him until charlie was gone He recalled feeling tremendous anger toward his mother, but he was not able to lash out at her Malvo recalled that he got charlie placed him on the steps and hit him with a broom Malvo said that whenever charlie returned to the house, he had to hit him until he went away After the cat stopped coming to the house malvo who had been potty trained from when he was one year old began to wet the bed regularly

Oh god We also get the inevitable Hint that una grew up in a house just like this So after carmena tells the story of the stray cat. She says Significant as well is that malvo was unaware of the memories his cat stirred for his mother Marie laurence una's sister remembered that she and una had shared a cat as children They were very poor and could not afford regular toys. So despite their father's objection. They got a stray cat Their father's reason for not wanting a cat in the house stemmed from folklore that cats are like vampires and suck the blood of children

Thus they had to hide the animal from their father when their father found it in the home He killed it We cried so hard because we really loved the cat Marie recalled And there's other hints too that una grew up in a house exactly like this Well, I mean that's and that's how you learn how to take care of a child if that's how you're raised And and if you don't have the emotional resources to question that or or heal This is just like the echo of abuse that we see in so many stories, right? Right. This is why trauma is hereditary. Yeah. Yeah And so what happens now? This is when lee is nine

There begins this pattern where his mom Keeps trying to leave to get him a better life So what happens is she emigrates to a place called st. Martin, which is like a tourist island two hours flight away where there's higher paying jobs and She just leaves lee with a neighbor and is just like I'll send back money every month. Can you take care of my son? here's you know, here's money for food and This happens a number of times that she convinces kind of a random person to take lee And then you know, she promises to send money back and then after a couple of months the money stops

So whoever lee is with starts either Abusing him or sort of making him work off the debt. This is awful. By the way This is like reading like a charles dickens novel. Yeah, it's like I keep thinking of a series of unfortunate events where It's like a new thing happens and you're like everything's gonna be fun and then it ends up worse Right. And then once you learn the pattern, you're like great. What new trauma will this bring? Yeah, because this is kind of the cyclical nature of trauma too that like of course his mother who is Bad at parenting is going to give him, you know, put him in situations that will lead to further suffering for him Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. First. He's with this woman whose husband is really abusive to him

Then he moves in with una's sister Things are going fine for a while then Apparently there's an incident where he goes to a community center and he gets in like a debate with other boys lee wants to go to flight school because his father gave him a flight jacket when he was a kid And so he's become sort of fixated on becoming a pilot And he's like reading books about flying and aircraft and stuff at night And so apparently he's at this community center and there's like a debate breaks out Like the way that it does among boys like this plane is faster than this other plane

Like the kinds of things that kids get about before the internet. Yes fairs beats. Yes. Yeah, battle star galactica. Exactly And so he basically like wins this argument against the other boys because he's he's such a nerd about airplanes And then these other boys are bigger than him And so they beat him up and they make him walk home naked. They steal all of his clothes Jesus This is awful. He gets home and then una's sister And her husband smack him around for going to the community center in the first place They were like, well, you shouldn't have been there. You should have come home after school anyway

God And then he tells his mom like I don't want to live with them anymore because this is a nightmare And then his mom beats him because why are you complaining about this? And now it's a big hassle for me. Oh my god This is the series of unfortunate events style narrative of everything in his life that just everything makes everything else worse So after that he ends up moving in with a woman named Simone Powell who's 21 years old. She's a school teacher She's the daughter of una's aunt So his cousin I think that makes her he's unis. Yeah, she's his second or first cousin once removed First remove something. Is that it? It doesn't matter. They're related

Yeah, and this is like maybe the first positive Caretaker that he's had in his life He's keeping a journal at the time And so this is what he writes Simone had a parenting style that was the complete opposite of any approach I had ever encountered we sat down and she asked me what I expected from her She saw the look of astonishment on my face Then she explained that she had certain expectations of me and vice versa She did not believe in corporal punishment and she would not engage in it

She said things to me that I never thought I would hear when I was wrong She explained where I was wrong when I did well. She commended me on how well I had been doing She gave me as much time as I needed to question her and I in turn actually comprehended what she was saying How old is he at this point? He's 11 now. Wow. So he's been through A lot in like this five year long like because it's been five years since his dad left So this like yeah, love void of almost half his life too And he finally has some level of consistency in parenting and some level of just Emotional adulthood around him where like hey, we're gonna come up with a deal and when you do this

I'm gonna punish you but I'm gonna be nice to you when you you know get good grades or whatever And like he's never had that level of consistency in his life before He's also an extremely good student at one of his elementary schools He's literally the the top student when karmita goes to jamaica to interview his former teachers One of them in 2003 Is still using a chart that lee made in her class because the graphic was so good And also all of his teachers say that he's wildly intelligent and Just like a nice kid that as soon as he finishes his homework

He'll walk around and help out all the other kids not in a like I'm smarter than you braggy kind of way, but in like hey, how can I chip in? he's just like the sweetest kid and so He's at this like dumb prep school at the time that like he's not for the first time in his life He's not getting good grades and he doesn't really like the kids and the kids aren't really like him and it's far away And so simone is a school teacher So simone moves him to the school where it's like 10 minutes to walk away They walk to school together in the morning so he can hang out with her during the day

He starts getting straight a's again And you just know where like where this is going That one night simone gets a knock on the door And it's lee's mother And she storms into the house and says why did you steal my son? Why have you taken my son away from me? And so even though she's not living in the country She's gotten it in her head that like moving him From this prep school to this slightly more modest school is some sort of betrayal

And that she has to take lee back Well, like she sees it as something that a parent does because if you're someone's mother then you are the person Who knows what school they should be at. I mean, but you can see where that reaction comes from and then And how nothing good can come of it. Yeah, and then it metastasizes into this big ugly thing that Apparently she's storming around simone's house and sort of look look how small his room is and look how dirty his clothes are And look at the way that he's living and you know, why didn't you tell me you were moving him to a different school? And simone is like I didn't have an address for you There was no way for me to notify you

You created a situation where your child would bond with someone else and now you can't stand it Yeah, and yeah, you've stopped sending money months ago And what's really interesting and I think like I I see everything in the story is a metaphor But this is just such a perfect metaphor that you know immediately as soon as there's that knock on the door lee understands That his mother is going to take him away. Yeah simone keeps trying to Apply logic to the situation. She's like no no no once we explain that we tried contacting her and we couldn't and your grades are really good She'll be fine with this like it's it's it's working well like she's she's appealing to reality

Right, she's like no this is this is objectively good and soon she will see that this is objectively good The jury will understand the dna evidence. Yeah, exactly And so lee understands how his mom works. He's like no, it doesn't matter what's true Yeah, it doesn't matter what the reality is all that matters is her emotional state And she doesn't hear what you're saying. She knows yeah how what you're saying makes her feel Exactly what we're dealing with and so karmita actually goes to jamaica and interviews simone about this entire experience And this is from her book malvo told her that he wanted to be with his mother and he would never need her again It was like a stab in my heart. She said I could not believe it was the same child that I had grown to love

Saying those hurtful things Unknown to simone malvo denounced her because he was forced to by his mother Right away airbud. I know He packed his clothes, but he left one item a favorite shirt among her clothes I left that shirt, which was my favorite hoping that she would understand. He said it's like broke back mountain The only real love in this life is just like someone All alone smelling a shirt Simone recalled finding the shirt among her dirty laundry, but thought that it was just left by mistake

Not until years later during the course of my investigation. Did she learn why malvo had left it behind? Wow, Simone recalled that after una removed malvo Simone sought counseling to deal with what she saw as a rejection of everything she had done for him She remarked that it was so painful for her that she vowed not to have children of her own Oh my god The next time simone saw malvo was in court when she went to testify on his behalf. Oh That I know that there are so many kinds of sadness in the world and there's so much happening at any given second, but

That shirt story it sucks dude and like that being all he can do and her not understanding what's happening It's like I know it might be the saddest thing I have ever heard I know like at this moment that certainly feels true to me. I mean, you know, it's it's uh, because the fact that like there's so much actual love there and that the circumstances are so Awful that they yeah take away the ability to express it and then there's this like tiny spark that can escape And then it just has to die. Yeah, it's too much. It's too much. Yeah, and so Una takes him away from Simone and puts him in a boarding school puts him back in this

Preppy school where he's not getting as good a grades. Well boarding school is always good news only good things happen there Although weirdly the boarding school because you expect it to be super bad, but the boarding school is actually fine It's just that he doesn't know anybody all the other kids are going home on weekends to see their families And he doesn't have anywhere to go So the owner of the boarding school talks about him just sort of sitting and looking out the window all day Yeah, that's like the story of the young Scrooge Charles Dickens was good at knowing how like you don't need to have like a one-to-one ratio of Pain to meanness for it to make sense because like in the christmas carol

It's like, you know what made Scrooge this way everyone else went home for christmas and he had to read. Yeah So after six months a year at the boarding school his mom gets deported from st. Martin She gets caught there and comes back to Jamaica. What has she been doing? Do we know what she's been doing for work there? It's actually like some of this is Like her argument in all of the interviews that she's given about him is that Everything she was doing she was doing for him. So she works her ass off like she she owns a restaurant at one point She's selling juices on the street to tourists She's I mean she she really does work her ass off and her whole thing is that I wanted him to have a good education

She says all of the discipline all of the you know Pushing him to be in this prep school was all so that he could sort of get out of the situation That she was in of just constant toil and constantly being on the hustle to try to get out of poverty. Yeah Sure, I mean Right like you can you can be a good entrepreneur and a bad parent and you can care about your child in a way that leaves you Still without the ability to Do day to day parenting in a way that is helpful or safe for them

And also that you know looking back over like a very you know a bundle of potential regrets that you have Yeah, you know just look at everything that has happened and been like well I was doing everything altruistically and so Eventually she comes back to Jamaica. She takes him out of the boarding school and he moves in with her She starts building a home There's a point where she finds a box in his room of love letters to his girlfriend How old is he? He's 13 at this point and he has like a really cute relationship with this girl that they're holding hands

They've had this whole thing where they're going to save themselves for marriage like they're both Christians And they're like we want to have a pure relationship So this entire relationship appears to consist of writing cute notes and holding hands Like it doesn't seem like much else is going on and una finds the cards And immediately goes into a rage like he's never seen before because you know Why are you writing her cards and you never wrote me when I was in st. Martin? Yeah, what? And again like people didn't always have an address for her right like he wouldn't have been able to do that And also she's super mean and it's not it's not like if he called her she'd be like oh, hey, sweetie

How was your day like of course he doesn't call her right? She's abandoned him in this random boarding school or with like abusive families that he barely knows There's an accidental trend we're noticing here about the kind of volatility of people who on some level know they've like fucked up A relationship beyond repair and are like no that can't happen right? I have to force it to not happen somehow by Ruining it further. Yeah, and like how dare you respond reasonably to the situation that I've created Yes, and so After she finds these cards She beats him with a belt so bad that he falls unconscious

That one of the neighbors has to come and pull her off of him and he just wakes up in the bed the next day Like he doesn't even remember the beating stopping. That's so horrible to think about. Yeah, and so This is where Carmita in the book and also various psychologists court-appointed psychologists say This is where he really starts dissociating. Yeah, and so this is from a psychologist that Examined him as part of his trial From that point on Malvo kept to himself He said that he fell into a kind of melancholy mood and went with the flow

If his mother was in a good mood and detected a change in his attitude, she would hug him and ask him what was wrong Why was he not talking? However, a couple hours later, she would tell him that he was the worst thing that had ever happened to her He remembered that simple conversations ended up with his being struck because he did not answer in time The beatings were relentless and after a while he did not even feel the blows. He just removed himself Another thing that his teachers and his friends start to say at this point is that it's impossible to tell at any time what Lee thinks or feels

Because he starts bending himself to the emotional needs of other people So if somebody else is mad, he'll sort of act mad with them. Like, yeah, that's bullshit If they're really happy, he'll be like their jubilant friend In interviews with his teachers, Carmita finds again and again That people are like you couldn't tell he was feeling because he had to know how you were feeling first And then he would reflect it back to you It's sort of like what do you need me to be and I think yeah, that's a symptom of growing up with this Hurricane of a mother where he never knows what her emotional state is and so he just has to bend to it at all times

Yeah, and then and if going into a situation with your own mood already in place like that would be a very dangerous thing to do Because you don't know if that's gonna upset her and then if that happens god help you Yeah, and so you just have to wait to get a sense of where she's coming from and then do your best to appease that And then if you learn how to do that In your most essential, you know in first and most fundamental relationship Then like of course you're gonna be likely to do that with everyone else. Absolutely. Yeah And this I mean this is something that characterizes him for the rest of his life And it's it's the same dynamic that he has with john too that we've seen from mildred

That john has this emotional volatility where you can never tell what he's gonna do for minute to minute Yeah, and this is something that makes lee feel like he's at home. Yeah, or as tania harding once said My mom hit me and she loved me. Jeff hits me. He loves me. It's just the way life goes. Yeah, that was what she knew Yeah was abusive relationships like that that was her experience of relationships to a tremendous extent Yeah, that's that's lee's experience of love so At this point, he makes a kind of a half-hearted effort to kill himself He says hey mom, you're not gonna need to bother him with me anymore

And then he wanders outside and makes a noose for himself on a tree She pulls him down And then of course slaps him for you know ruining her day or whatever She eventually again, she she leaves for antiqua Which is another sort of touristy island that is more affluent than jamaica So she's gonna go there and try to earn more money She leaves him With again like a nice lady like there's this teacher at school named miss maxwell

Who sees what's going on with him and sees how smart and nice he is and is like Why don't you move in with me instead of going back to this boarding house? And so karmita, of course interviewed her When some maxwell begins tearing up as she talks about her time with lee in the summer of 1999 I remember saying to him would you like to move in with me and my family and he said really miss I could see in his eyes. He was very excited and I took him in food clothes everything We were speaking about adopting him and he gets close to her husband. Who's a really nice guy They're growing vegetables in the backyard

They're relatively affluent apparently and they live in like a pretty big house. He has a room to himself and Just as he's settling in his mom writes to them and says he has to move to antiqua with me So again, miss maxwell the next time she sees lee is when he's in prison for the dc sniper shootings and This also appears in karmita's book that she actually flies up there to spend time with him I want a movie about all of these poor Mother figures of this boy Going to washington to have to see this child that they almost

You know had a chance to permanently intervene in the life of and then having to you know Probably not being able to talk to him except behind glass. I mean, it's yeah, that's incredibly There's just so much happening that we don't hear about I know Wow, so this is from this is from karmita's book He shared with his former teacher that john muhammad's hold on him did not begin in the united states But earlier in antiqua He recalled a moment when muhammad told him three words that he longed to hear from his parents but never did Good job son

By the way, where's his dad has he Lost touch with him. What's going on? So this is one of the saddest things about this that his dad is in Jamaica this whole time Yeah, and una has asked the father if he can take lee But he says no i'm i'm in and out of the cayman islands too much again. He's from a poor country He's trying to earn more money and so he's working his ass off and he's in another country a lot Lee's suspicion is that his girlfriend doesn't want a kid in the house and doesn't want to compete with him

It's not clear sort of what evidence there is for that Before he leaves for antiqua He goes looking for his father. He knows the place where his father hangs out He goes to the park where his dad plays dominoes And apparently just sort of shows up one day and is like hi dad and And his dad is you know really happy to see him and like introduces him like hey, this is my son Isn't he a great kid to the other guys at the park and then

Lee doesn't really have the courage to ask his dad like hey, can I move in with you? And his father doesn't really have the courage to just let him and so they just kind of make small talk And then he wanders away One of this really interesting vanity fair interviews the father in i believe it's 2004 for this article He admits that after several years on his own He didn't want to engage una again if he allowed lee to move back in with him. She would have become a regular part of his life And so He doesn't want to have this woman in his life anymore. Yeah, and also that you would be able to tell yourself

I'm sure the situation is fine for him. You know what I can't see. I don't know about maybe Yeah, and also, I mean, I think he's acting pretty selfishly, right? I mean he's lee leaves his son Yes with this woman that he knows is abuse like he's seen literally the scars on his son And so it's a pretty chicken shit thing to do Carmita interviews him too and she says at our meeting leslie's eyes were read from crying He recounted the first five years of his life with malvo and una Ma'am, my boy was a good boy until that man took him over. It's that man. Why my son did this he said As he spoke he clenched his fists and every vein in his face stood out

He asked for a few minutes to control his emotion and then he broke down and sobbed So he did a really chicken shit thing and he it sounds like he's felt really really really bad about it for the rest of his life Yeah, I think it can also be hard as a kid to have the knowledge or the feeling that Someone does love you that you do have, you know positive Experiences with this kind of parental figure or a literal parent But that that love is somehow not enough for them to immediately intervene in your life Yeah, I feel like that can feel worse at times that it's like tantalizingly almost There and you're like if you're not this like wildly unstable person

And if you are capable of loving me consistently then like why have you been here this whole time and you haven't Done anything about any of this like why am I not worth that? And also lee, I mean it creates this weird mix of yearning and anger Where lee misses his father and wants a father in his life, obviously But also like fuck you dad. You left me. You left me in this nightmare for years And so yes, he he experiences this is this huge rejection and he wants his father back But he's also deeply deeply angry at his father right these two things are with him for the rest of his life Yeah, so before we go to antigua. I just want to do a little interlude. I'm ready. It's cold here

The last person killed in the sniper attacks is named conrad johnson And in all of lee's various tellings confessions unconfessions versions of this He admits that he killed conrad. He's he's very consistent on this and one of the sort of cosmically sad things about this is that conrad who is a Bus driver in dc at the time when he shot is a jamaican immigrant his mother left jamaica moved to the united states left him with his aunt And this is an excerpt from one of the manhunt books that we'll talk about more next episode Conrad joined her when he was about 10 years old According to his mother sonia wills a more loving child you could not find

Miss wills said that although she had five children She was mother to many because conrad was the kind of child who would bring home boys He felt needed the sense of direction. She was able to impart Conrad was married and had two children of his own He was a loving husband and father to his family and a wonderful son his mother said She later told me if only malvo had looked conrad in the face before he had killed him He would have seen the perfect father. He had been searching for And it just sucks. It's like yeah two people reaching across this horrible divided each other

Yeah, and also that you know, that's the whole point of Sniping right is that you're doing it from a great distance And then if you're doing this, you know as a in a non militaristic fashion But as as a murderer then that has to do with not wanting to see the face of the person I would imagine I don't know and not and not wanting to consider how things would have been different You know if he'd come across conrad instead of john Yeah, so anyway, just a little cosmic sad sliding doors michael hobbs cry machine at the end of that You love sliding doors. You talk about sliding doors a lot

So now we're going to go to antigua and we're going to switch perspectives to john Okay, do you want to catch us up on like where john was last time we saw him? Yeah, he had taken their three children for a custodial visit like a Was it a day visit or a weekend weekend that they were doing weekend visit? And then when he was going to return them he much like bob Shapiro bringing oj into custody was like, uh Just what we're going to be an hour late. We're going to be two hours late and then Disappeared right we know that from milderth's perspective john and the children have vanished and that she is searching for them but we don't know where they've gone and

Yeah, that's that's where we've got so it appears That when she paged john and he said like oh i'm at an electronic store. We'll be back in 45 minutes They were at the airport. Oh and he was putting the kids on a plane to antigua So custodial trafficking if you if you will, I mean, it's a family kidnapping Yeah, I mean as we mentioned last episode like hundreds of thousands of these happen every year It's it's the most common way that children are kidnapped. Yeah So john is probably at the airport when he's calling milderth saying we will be back soon. I'm at an electronics store I'm looking at a tv right now. Yeah, and I said something wrong last episode

I said that john's mother was from antigua This is something that shows up in press reports And in various books about these crimes john's mother was not from antigua. It's actually completely random That he went to antigua the only reason he went to antigua and not whatever belgium or some other place You're the only one who wants to go on vacation in belgium True He had a friend in tecoma whose car he had fixed whose cousin Was a travel agent in antigua and was like, yeah, she didn't get you deals on plane tickets and like

It seems like you can stay with her for a while because she has a spare room So like you and your kids can fly down there and john's like, yeah, okay, so it's just it's happenstance Yeah, like he he doesn't care about antigua But what happens once he gets there is he starts forging documents Apparently he got into this by trying to forge birth certificates for his kids So he could fly with them like he's been planning this kidnapping for a while Wait, what tell me about the dot the flying documents So did he need birth certificates so that he could get

Passports for them or what it what was that? So what appears to be the case is that he started looking into this When he wanted to get his kids out of the country without anybody knowing right like getting them flying on fake names So his wife wouldn't be able to see see the records of where they had flown to and then It seems to be that once he realized basically how easy it was He started doing it as a business model because The minute he gets to antigua He starts setting up this business where there's a ton of jamaican immigrants in antigua who want to come to the united states

and so he can somehow Get us birth certificates us id's And he forges them id's and then they fly through Puerto Rico or Guam Where a lot of the border guards don't speak english as a first language and so people with jamaican accents Can get through like oh, yeah, i'm from Detroit. I was born there and the People who speak spanish as a first language like can't tell that you're covering up a jamaican accents They're like, oh, yeah, sounds good And so right the government of antigua actually put together a task force report on john's business model

And the consensus is that he was super shitty like he wasn't really bad at this like at forging Yeah, I mean he okay He tries to get a job in antigua as a high school track coach and he forges a letter of recommendation From a olympic runner And apparently it's just like cartoonishly bad like the quote unquote signature of this olympian It's just like a child's scrawl Of just printing out his name. Yeah, like if you want to be convincing you can just do a scribble like that's more believable Yeah, come on

But once he realizes how basically easy this is he starts selling us identities to jamaicans for $1,000 to $3,000 Wow, that's a lot of money Yeah, yeah, geez and the way that he gets a passport for himself and his kids from antigua is He enrolls his kids at a school in antigua and immediately starts dating the principal And convinces her after only knowing him for two months to sign an affidavit Saying that she's known him for two years and like vouching for him There's a teacher at the school and he charms her and gets the information of her mother Like birth date whatever and puts it on a birth certificate a fake birth certificate for himself

He has quite an effect on women like what is the basis of this? Does he have a gland? That emits a pheromone or something like that like as we just talked about with oj simpson I feel like this might have something to do with if you are constantly Looking for marks you will find them And then you know the same kind of simple things will tend to work on a lot of people And also maybe it speaks to how women are socialized. It's amazing that he's so reliably able to get what he needs out of women I mean people on the island talk about him as you know, he's fit. He's attractive. Is he handsome? Yeah, I was just gonna ask

Yeah, I mean he they first of all before they know his name they call him the runner because he runs in Booty shorts wearing nothing else like goes jogging every morning. And so people see like there's this fit dude jogging around the island and He sort of becomes known and then you know as he starts going into shops chatting with people He's really charming. Like he's he's this military guy. He spins this whole yarn about how he's like a military dad With a background in antiqua, whatever. Oh, so he tells people his mother is from antiqua and that's the source of that So that's what that's why he says he's there I mean a lot of people on the island talk about like there were no signs that he was a weirdo It was like he was a nice guy. He was great. We loved him. Like we didn't see any bitterness

We didn't see any resentment. This was when he was still capable of hiding that stuff Well, yeah, and also that he would you know do well in relatively superficial relationships and kind of acquaintance type Community stuff, you know, because people often talk about serial killers being paradoxically good neighbors And it's like yeah, like if you interact with someone at a mailbox like there's not a lot of margin for things to get complicated, you know and intimacy is what breeds complexity But also that you know here he is and he has I think possibly maybe a sense of like a fresh start and like Yeah, you know would would be in in the best possible frame of mind for a little while

Although who knows how how good that is. Yeah I mean it does start to fall apart because at the same time once he sort of establishes himself in Antigua He starts flying back and forth to Tacoma So this is when he shows up outside the shelter to harass Mildred He's like gotta make a business trip to go threaten your mom's life. Yeah, like be good And he's leaving the kids with kind of random people and for like weeks at a time The kids are just expected to sort of go to school But he's not like he's not being a responsible father at this point

Yeah, and he does have like a weird thing with kids a lot of people on the island Talk about him as being he has this kind of military vibe And so as he like walks into stores and stuff He'll talk to the kids and be like stand at attention son And if kids mess up he'll be like he'll be like drop and give me 50 like in this kind of jokey sort of way But also like he seems kind of like fixated on people's kids But also if you make the same joke constantly then it's kind of a tell Yeah

Yeah, and when Eventually when he goes back to the United States with Lee He tells a bunch of people Hey, do you want me to take your son with me like I can bring him back I can get him a us passport and people are like No, I don't I don't want to give my son to a random person Like he does have a weird thing with like kind of recruiting kids And I don't know if like that has anything to do with the accusation of sexual abuse

Or if that's just like he sees them as vulnerable and easy to take advantage of right And you could see how the latter could be true without the former, but if both were true then Yeah, you know, they would be related. I'm going to show you something now Okay, so I'm sending you a picture of lee at this age. This is lee at age 14 14 that's young. Do you see it? Oh wow I mean first of all, this looks like it could have been taken in 1930. I know right. Yeah, it's black and white And it's kind of like faded. Yeah And so he's he looks pretty small. Yeah, he looks like a skinny kid. He does not look like a strapping adolescent

He's wearing dress pants with a knife crease in the front And then they're belted and kind of cinched they look like they're a little bit too big for him And then a shirt that also looks too big for him. It's like how everybody dressed in the 90s But it's like it looks like these clothes are for a bigger person. Yeah, and they're like blousing out around him He's holding a book. This is school uniform. Yeah. Yeah, and he's Yeah, I just looking at the camera. I just kind of like dead on into it just like with kind of a lack of Expression, it's the look that you would give if someone called your name and you like happen to look at the lens Right as the picture was taken like there's no sense of like him conveying any emotion or anything being conveyed to him

And he just looks so young. I just can't get over how he looks so young He looks very small. He looks very childlike. He doesn't look like an adolescent. He looks like a child Yeah, and when you think about in two years, this guy is going to be in the back of a trunk of a car Shooting random people. It's like this is a child. Yeah, I mean he has little Oxford shoes. Yeah. Yeah So since Lee has moved to Antigua, he's been there about nine months by the time he meets John He moves there. He moves in with his mother and you will extremely believe this. She leaves almost immediately She moves back to st. Martin shocker. I mean, it's like a pattern. It's like she has to reassure herself that She still has him and then she she goes away again. She basically leaves him in like the backyard shack

Where they're living She stops paying the electricity bills She stops paying the rent. So his landlord is trying to kick him out This is a 14 year old boy. Like this is the boy we see in the picture. Yeah, children should not have landlords to whom They have to answer that's a belief of mine. He talks about sort of like slinking around So the landlord won't see him like he kind of sneaks into the house and out He mostly sleeps in an abandoned house Because it's next to a street light and he can read by the light

He doesn't tell any of the kids at school like none of the kids at school Know that he's basically just staying in like a cinder block square I don't know where he's showering But like he's showing up to school in his uniform seat like holding it together But then behind the scenes He's shoplifting CDs and then copying them and selling the copies for money. Like that's how he's getting by That's really smart to figure. I mean if I were 14 years old and taking care of myself I don't think it would come off with that. He's getting by

And just before he meets john una moves back to Antigua He and his mom move in with this guy named thomas into apparently thomas is like a nice guy like whenever you see nice Men in the story. It's like yes. Thank god He's helping them set up like an import-export business for clothes that Una will fly to st martin buy a bunch of clothes and then come back to antigua and sell them Which apparently is like doing well So just before he meets john things are starting to look up like he's on an upswing

And so he meets john in an electronic store john is there with his son little john who is 11 at the time And they're playing on a flight simulator and of course because lee wants to become a pilot He sort of sits there fixated by this man and this boy and he's treating his son really well Okay, put cream on me and he didn't try to make a move. Yeah, exactly And his mom is now trying to move to the united states She hears rumors that john can get her papers to the united states So they go over una's like hey, let's let's you know We need to stop by this guy's house that might be able to get me papers to the united states

They show up and it's john like the guy that lee has seen in the electronic store It's so weird thinking about Knowing all that we know about both these people thinking about the meeting. I know It feels like wrestlemania, you know of like in one corner. They really mean mom And in the other corner this really mean husband And so john sets una up with papers to the united states And as this process is happening lee starts just going over to john's house to hang out This is this is like classic una that in december of 2000

She tells both thomas and lee. Oh, I got to go to st martin I'm gonna buy a bunch of clothes come like this is these are routine trips that she makes She's like, yeah, I got to go to st martin's tomorrow And then a couple days go by they don't hear anything and then she calls and says i'm in florida I've moved here and so like Okay, una great. What what are we supposed to do with that? And so lee is now living in the home with this guy thomas who's dating his mom

But his mom is gone and lied to him about it. And so after a couple days Probably because of the stress he ends up getting rheumatic fever Which apparently just sucks like is just awful. He's bedridden. What is it? What are the symptoms? What what are your room? Rumors apparently it's like your joints like every joint in your body hurts and you just have like a terrible fever There are so many joints in your body. That's so many places to hurt So john stops by lee's house and sort of sees him in this state and apparently just like lifts him up And carries him outside puts him in a cab and says you've come into my place until you're better

And so For the next couple days, you know, this is the honeymoon period of their relationship that John is a really positive influence in lee's life. They start hanging out more He eventually moves in with john just because like there's no or really else for him Like john is no more random of a dude than this guy thomas that he's living with anyway So he's like i might as well live with his other random dude, right? I mean his whole life has been a succession of random caregivers. Yeah, so he's like, yeah, sure I'll move in with you guys. So it's not like this is a red flag. Here's a description from the book

After this rescue lee and john went everywhere together They were like disciple and guru mohammad spoke and malvo listened Finally malvo had found someone in whom he could confide He shared his life story how his mother had taken him away from his father when he was young and how that left a void in his life He recalled how mohammad listened intently malvo told of his father's refusal to take him when he wanted a place to stay He shared with mohammad the brutal beatings that he'd suffered and that he felt unloved and abandoned Malvo heard of mohammad's abandonment by his father and loss of his mother mohammad related that he too had been raised in an abusive environment by his grandfather

And this part is like super infuriating And he suffered a similar fate as leslie his wife cheated on him and took all his money destroying the business they had built together It's like Fuck you john like just tell the truth part. Yeah, that's fine I fucked up But of course he has to tell himself that right that mildred is you know doing all this office stuff to him and he's only responding Yeah

You know to to get his I don't even know what but I I know that I feel like based on everything We've seen of him so far in this just like wildly counterfactual behavior that like he is expressing what feels Like an emotional truth to him because how dare mildred have any agency how dare she survive him How dare she escape him if that's not what he wants like that's a betrayal, right? And also like cheated on him, which there's no evidence of it took all his money. He took all of her money Yeah, who's the one who's cheating in that role? Who's the one who's like having an affair with their therapist and started a dojo

On the spur of the moment It's just pure resentment, right that like he thinks of himself as the wronged party Yeah, so This is when lee and john get really close. They almost immediately start referring to each other as father and son He starts taking care of john's kids. They're 11 eight and nine at this point and so Lee starts helping out with cooking. He starts taking kids to the movies He really does become part of this family almost immediately Yeah, well, you can see him being really ready to join a family and as soon as one appears where there's a spot for him

Like snatching that up. Yeah got a strike while the family's hot So he really I mean this is the first this is the closest thing to a family has he's ever got This is what happens when people join cults like if you've never been part of something and if you've never been Embraced by a community or by a family and you are then like that's so incredibly powerful and that's so hard to leave Even if that stuff starts happening one thing that's so interesting is this The ideology that will eventually Curdle into we have to kill everybody starts out as this ideology of personal empowerment

So almost immediately as lee and john start forming a relationship john starts delivering these lectures about You know, you have to train your body train your mind. You have to read things go to the library You have to do a hundred push-ups every day. I mean, there's there's this kind of Personal betterment self-help book kind of thing that will eventually be Extremely ugly, but at this point is kind of like sure. It's just boys being boys So you're not going to catch me doing push-ups Slippery slope to serial murder So this is this is from the vanity fair article

As every ground force general knows the most malleable killing machine on earth Maybe a teenage boy desperately needing to belong to something greater beginning in january of 2001 John muhammad and lee malvo began to explore just how malleable the 15 year old malvo was At first aside from malvo's early and easy conversion to muhammad's version of islam The goal of their work together was the simple quiet human quest for personal righteousness and improvement They never talked violence the lessons being taught and learned were about honor and discipline and personal virtue So like he has this like personal philosophy and he wants a disciple

And what is his personal version of islam by the way? Tell me about that. I mean, it's it's very pick and choosey I mean there's because it's like a terror attack His relationship with islam of course gets scrutinized by the media more than anything else I mean, that's all I ever heard about. Yes, certainly when this was in the news It's obviously a huge part of his identity, right? Like he changed his last name to muhammad for a reason But they're also, you know lee talks about them. They go to the library. They read up on buddhism They go to the bahai center They're reading up on hinduism like they're kind of doing this grab bag thing and

mildred says That his version of islam one of the reasons he was into it was because he thought that it gave him a reason to Control her because he thought it was going to be like women should obey men That's a big selling point for a lot of religions as far as men are concerned It really draws them in and he's not I mean It's not clear that they're doing the five prayers a day. It's not clear. They're doing ramadan John continues to drink alcohol throughout their relationship So it's not it's not clear that john is like using it to change his behavior at all

It seems like what he's doing is he's casting around for ammunition That feeds his resentments his the narrative of his life that he wants to tell because they're not Going to mosques at this time. They're not like they're not doing the stuff that you do if you're a devout muslim It's just he's reading a lot. He's listening to a lot of tapes by luis ferrican He has this weird thing where he's obsessed with playing tapes at night So he does this for his kids too Where he'll have like an audiobook of like the autobiography of malcom x and he'll put Headphones on them before they go to sleep and play it for them all night. Like he he thinks that like wow

This is how people learn things. That's weird. It's weird, dude That you like subliminally give them. I mean, it's not the weirdest idea. He's ever had but yeah, it's pretty weird He later on makes malvo read the entire the art of war out loud Into a tape player and then play himself the tape of himself reading it to me like that book I don't associate it with people interested in violence. I associate it with people interested in day trading That's just sad the whole thing this this this honeymoon period ends when First john gets arrested in antigua where again, he's not that good at like faking papers Like one one of his games is he'll go to the airport and show his id and get the boarding pass

And then he'll give the boarding pass to somebody else because you know, they don't like check your Id again when you get on the flight, right? So at one point there's a stewardess She lives in antigua and she's like, oh, I know john I see he's on the manifest and he's sitting in like seat 7a and then she goes over to seat 7a and it's a random lady These are these are not like watertight plans that john is coming up with at this point So eventually this sort of stuff starts to pile up the authorities arrest him He he spends two weeks in jail and then he somehow escapes by just like walking out one day that like In this government task force report

They don't want to say because like the antigua government doesn't want to admit like how Incompetent they were basically But it seems like one guy was just late for work that day And then there was only one person working in the entire jail and just like forgot to lock his cell after him or something Like it was something like Really janky and john just left. Oh boy. And later on on one of these trips to the us He gets stopped by the us authorities because he's trying to board a plane and they're like You know, you've been flagged at this point and he can't fly anymore

So this is actually when he changes his name There's actually something really interesting about this that Everyone talks about him changing his name is like some sign that he's this like super devout muslim But it seems like he actually did it so that he could get on a flight back to antigua and get a new passport I mean, he could have changed his last name to anything and he changed it to mohammed So clearly that means something But like you often read in these old accounts that he and mildred together Change their name when they found islam and it's just not true

She changed her name To hide from him and he changed his name So that he could get on flights again And it's a coincidence that they both changed their names to mohammed Yeah, because I think that certainly based on the american narrative that we have had of these crimes so far We there's a distinct lean toward anything that can be interpreted as Terrorism suggestive or related like we're gonna really Focus on that. So I guess kind of putting all the all perspective possible into it. I think is important

Yeah, but what's really interesting about this period is that when john disappears lee takes care of his kids So it goes on for I think it's almost a month. Wow lee is like trying to continue the business He's taking the kids to school this poor kid. He's like ann of green gables or something Yes, no one just wants him for him And so this is when their little Antiguan adventure ends that john basically Realizes the writing is on the wall for his business model his time in antigua

He changes his name. He flies back to antigua on may 20th of 2001 And then a couple days later. He takes the kids He takes lee lee flies on the name of lindberg his son with his first wife And they all fly to the u.s Together and one of the most amazing details about this Is that they've only known each other for six months, which I'm sure is a long time actually by his standards How many good Presences have been in his life for longer than that and it just seems he just gets on a plane with this essentially random guy

Because that's the least bad option at that point and with without proper documentation If he were to go off on his own like he's dependent I mean, it's it's actually interesting thinking about what what did john want with lee at this point, right? What was his plan like what was he saying they were going to do that's the thing He doesn't have a he doesn't have a plan at this point because He he doesn't have the burning rage at mildred that he eventually will have so you don't think he's motivated by Wanting to settle a score with mildred at this point not yet Okay, interesting, but that's the next chapter of the story. Oh god

So we're gonna now turn to mildred and catch up with mildred So, yeah, where did we leave mildred? Where is she? Well, we heard about mildred living in the women's shelter Or I believe about a year. Yeah, I actually got a detail wrong last episode that I want to collect I said she was there for more than a year. She was actually only there for eight months So she was at febe's house for eight months and then she moves to to the bc area. Yeah, is she in maryland? Yeah, she's in clinton maryland. Yeah, okay. Yeah, all right. So she moves in with her sister in clinton maryland And is out of the shelter kind of back in a life more resembling what she knew before and

And focusing on looking for her kids basically. Yeah, and also just like picking up the pieces of her life So at this point she's gotten a job Doing admin at a domestic violence NGO So she's already moving into becoming a domestic violence advocate at this point So this is an excerpt from her book She says it was 4 35 p.m. August 31st 2001 I was sitting at my sister's house in maryland and writing in my journal when the phone rang I answered it was detective mccarthy. He said the words. I had waited 18 months to hear miss muhammad. We've got your children

Wow, what the detective tells her is that john left antigua with the kids He dropped lee off in florida He then took the kids and went to bellingham washington, which is a city up very close to the canadian border And he almost immediately moved him and the kids into a homeless shelter called the lighthouse mission The director of the lighthouse mission a guy named al archer who becomes very important later Sort of was helping john out was like, oh, hey, there's this guy with three kids Like it's extremely rare for a father and three children to show up at a homeless shelter and need a room

So he's like, huh, this is kind of weird He helps john enroll the kids at school under their own names. No, so john has enrolled the kids in schools in bellingham under fake names and When the director of this homeless shelter starts helping john fill out paperwork for food stamps It's immediately flagged simply because there's not that many Men with three kids kind of bouncing around washington state And so because mildred is so good with the paperwork. There's a flag on

This guy has kidnapped three children if you see a man with three children Let somebody know and check it against this record that mildred has filed So as soon as he applies for food stamps, then they start asking questions Detective mccarthy goes to the kids school And he pulls them all into the principal's office. He says, hey, what are your names? They give these random fake names. They're like charisa and andy and then He sort of looks at them

And he says are those your real names? And there's this long pause and all three kids start crying and they're like those aren't our real names That's the trafficking training, right? This is like the one Trafficking case we've ever encountered. Yes. Wow. So basically immediately they Transfer the kids to a child protective services agency in tecoma. They find out that it's mildred They get mildred's contact information And so in there's a book called sniper that comes out in 2004 that interviews the detective And so he tells the story of the phone called to mildred from his perspective

He says he dialed the phone. Mrs. Muhammad picked up. He tells her the news They found my babies. They found my babies. She screamed McCarthy put each of them on the line to talk to her when he got back on the phone. She said god bless you. God bless you And so there's a really there's a really cute conversation In mildred's book where he puts the kids on the phone and she talks to them And so like she's of course just like doing all of this through tears at this point She says to liba got on the phone first. Hi mommy. She said it was like a dream. I couldn't speak I hadn't heard her voice in 18 months. Oh my god. How are you doing? She asked

I'm good. I said You want to talk to my sister to liba asked? I said yes And she passed the phone to selena. Hi mommy. This is selena. Guess what what honey? I'm nine years old I know that honey. I said, what are you doing eating cheese pizza? She said she sounded as happy as the little girl I remembered Right Unless it happens to us. We can't imagine not hearing um our child's voice for 18 months Right. This is what she's you know, she she thought she was never gonna hear from them again

And I mean keep in mind she also all she knows is that they're out of the country She doesn't even have like hints like they could be dead at this point. Like she doesn't know anything And so she gets on a plane the there's a custody hearing the next day in dakoma So she talks about how she has to borrow money from friends to go to the airport and buy a super expensive next day plane ticket to dakoma washington She gets there. It's the first time she's seen john in 18 months too. Wow. Do you remember her friend isa nichols? Yes, the woman who he who worked with them when they had the we come to you the mobile Mechanic place. Yeah, and who was like you should be following

Normal business practices for a small business and he did not like that. Yeah. Yeah, someday We're gonna do an episode not about abusive relationships. I hope But not today So this is infuriating. So this is for millard's book They start the custody hearing millard's sitting there with isa and some people from phoebe's house and some other sort of supporters john is there alone The judge says this is an emergency custody hearing We are here to decide where the children of john and millard will reside Judge what is going on john asked he was talking in the voice

I had heard so many times over the years the sweet innocent voice that convinces people He does not know what is happening when he knows exactly what is going on We are only here to decide who will have custody of the children the judge said Judge I don't understand john said again. She told me to take the children because she didn't want them anymore She knew where I was she could have contacted me at any time I couldn't believe he had said that but I shouldn't have been surprised The judge explained to john that I had obtained a writ of habeas corpus to have the children picked up when they were found Are you telling me? I'm never going to see my children again judge john asked

Mr. Williams You have to file your paperwork because the only thing we are here to decide today is who gets the children And according to the paperwork. I am awarding custody of the children to mrs. Williams the judge responded Basically millard has filed paperwork saying she has the right to these kids and you don't and you haven't filed any paperwork So the children go to millard. That's it. And how does he respond to this? Not well I mean he kills a bunch of people in a sniper attack in dc. Ultimately. I mean, this is Everything comes from this. So is this what he decides he needs to get?

This is why he decides he has to kill millard because she's been giving custody of the children This is what this is what really does is that she took the kids from me You know, it's it's it's an escalation of the version of this that he had already told lee that you know, she bankrupted me She's cheating on me. She took away the kids and now she really took away the kids And so He he later refers to this as his 9 11. What this becomes this huge fixation in his mind That's really amazing to describe that event as having that scale of importance in your life Because you're really saying like there is before and there is after and I was just living my life and then this

Horrific event just crashed into me. I mean the level of innocence that you're claiming for yourself in that And of course no acknowledgement of his own part in this right like Maybe I shouldn't have kidnapped the kids And then he just took the kids to antique what and she didn't know where the and he made a death threat against her mother And like he knows what went on in that marriage even if he can't admit it to anyone or himself And so the way that I think of this event is that it it just plants this little tiny seed Right that then becomes this massive Redwood of resentment. So it's like he's ready for something to

Adolize this kind of reaction and then is your is your rate of it that makes sense too. And so After this order comes down. I mean it's like a five minute hearing right? It's like she filed paperwork. You didn't boom She gets the kids You know Mildred is sort of slinking out of this courtroom with her friends around her because she does not want to bump into John right it's the closest they send each other physically and so Apparently there's sort of an L shaped hallway and she's kind of at the elbow and She turns to her left and she sees John walking toward her

Like determinately And apparently she just immediately kicks off her shoes and just runs down the other hallway. She's like fuck this and just like Dashes out and all the women with her dad They're just like all of them see John and they just like run to the exit And apparently as they all get to the end of the hall She turns back and John is looking at her and he mouths the words. Gotcha What yeah, like I'm still I still have the power to terrify you

Yeah, it's awful and she just bursts out the emergency exit and she's like take me to my kids Yeah, where are her kids during this? Are they being held by the family court? Yeah, they're they're at cps There's like a cps facility where they're being held. Okay, but it's in Tacoma. So she goes immediately and picks up the kids So she goes to this facility and she says Right then I heard two high pitched voices scream mommy I looked at the building and saw my girls running out the door toward me. I was crying so hard I tried to see them, but I couldn't see clearly through the tears Issa came over and told the children how long I had been looking for them. The girls cried and both kept saying we missed you mommy

We missed you. I hugged them and cried. I love you. I said We love you too. Mommy the girl screamed In the car to liba said mommy daddy said he was looking for you and couldn't find you Oh my god And I mean just to like dwell on this for a second. Yeah, please let's dwell We need to we we have this sort of societal construction of parental kidnappings as if they don't matter, right? There's like yeah, there's real kidnapping stranger danger kidnappings and there's like a couple whatever family kidnappings Whatever we're not willing to take seriously the things that happen within a family

Which is very weird and it's you know a lot of Mildred's book this whole like most of the second half of Mildred's book even before she gets the actual sniper shootings Is about trying to put her family together that john only had the kids for 18 months, right? Which in the course of a whole life is not a huge amount of time But if you're nine, yeah, and they still kind of think that she left them They they think she might leave again because that's what john's been telling them the whole time And so she talks about how her kids follow her to the bathroom And they'll kind of just look at her sort of stare at her as she walks around the room

They don't want to let her out of their sight and also Her relationship with john her her oldest kid little john Is never quite the same because he kind of resents her for taking him away from his dad That he never quite gets over it that you know, she has these conversations with him where she's like, you know He left you with families that didn't treat you super well He had you living in a homeless shelter You know, you you didn't have like toothbrushes and clothes when I found you like these were not good conditions But it's still in there somewhere of why did you take me away from dad?

Everything was going fine. And so the the ripple effects of these kidnappings are really profound Yeah Yes, and also I guess the fact that you know, I mean there's The betrayal of someone taking your children to a place where you don't know where they are If they're safe or who they're with or if you'll ever see them again I mean that itself is so much to think about and then The fact of you know, you're back and you're reunited and this is kind of the end of the story where like if this were a tv Movie, there would be like a freeze frame

And then there would be like a song by pibo brison But the real aftermath of it is that you've also suffered this betrayal of like someone is Harming the trust that they have in you as their parent that trust has been abused as well and like that would be So painful and also that you would have to just accept like you know Things are different between us and we can't make them the way that they were and like we're gonna heal But like it's it's different now. I mean and just Having to accept that I think would be really hard

And there's this really heartbreaking scene where a couple months after she gets them back They're back in dc at this point And they ask are you and dad ever going to get back together? And she has to sort of walk them through I mean she doesn't want to say anything negative about john She doesn't want to do the kind of scorched earth stuff that john did to her But also she has to be really firm with them That no we and dad are never going to get back together and they were not Under the impression that they had been kidnapped like the kids don't know that they were taken against her will

And has john said that mildred just Vanished and that he's looking for her and he can't find her It's not clear what he told them about why he's in antigua But apparently he told them consistently that like your mommy knows where we are And I don't know why she hasn't come yet. It's very yeah, your mommy loves you. It's weird that she hasn't written you It's weird that she hasn't come here. She knows where we are He's done a lot of poisoning them against her in this year. It's not like this is a guy with a lot of tact And so I just think it's it's worth taking really seriously the extent to which these family kidnappings are a real

source of pain in people's lives for the parents and the kids yeah, and that like there are certain forms of harm that a A stranger cannot carry out as well as a family member like if you want to like really Passively destroy the trust between a mother and a child like yeah There's nothing like a family member for doing that, you know, that's there are certain crimes that I think are I'm using the term crimes generally here like emotional crimes There's forms of abuse that can be carried out So much more powerfully by people who we trust

Yeah, and we just have a hard time letting that into our world view. Yeah, and so After mildred takes the kids with her. John does not know where they go. John does not know what her new name is He starts searching around he gets a lawyer and Everyone in his life at this point says that this is a breaking point So Robert Holmes, who's a friend of his in Tacoma who eventually will call the FBI about john This is from one of the news reports afterwards says his longtime friend and army buddy Robert Holmes I think after his kids got taken away. John had a nervous breakdown I'm not a professor or a doctor, but john changed in a million subtle ways after his kids were taken away

He'd spend all days some days crying all he could think of was getting his kids back There's also a guy named Earl dancy who's this kind of dirt baggy gunnut guy that they hang out with in Tacoma This is from Muhammad's trial Dancy testified that Muhammad loved his children to death and was upset when mildred Muhammad disappeared with them after she won custody Asked about Muhammad's feelings toward his former wife. Dancy said he said he loved her at one time But that changed he said she caused him to lose everything and that he was going to fix her Oh my god, so we've got this pain and anger Starting to coagulate. This is just so similar to oj and nicole to me

And it's helpful because it's you know a different angle of what seems like a similar To me what seems like a very similar situation where you are kind of sitting in the wreckage of like all that you've done to your own life And everything that's ever happened to you and all this stuff that you know, that isn't your fault But then you know that your life is and blaming it all On just your ex-wife You know and yeah somehow If you could destroy her then like you would be fine. Yeah, and so john moves back to bellingham He moves back into the lighthouse mission shelter

in this fugue angry resentful state he Asks lee to come and join him in bellingham. Where wait, where has lee been before that? Yeah, so lee lee is living with his mother in fort meyers florida You know when john dropped him off there was kind of this battle of wills between john and his mother una Where john was basically saying lee should come with me because i'm an american citizen And if i legally adopt lee then he can go to college He can get all kinds of benefits that the united states offers

Whereas una and lee at this point are both undocumented immigrants And so he's never gonna have a secure existence with you Why don't you let him come with me? And una says boy should be with their mother. There's no fucking way. He's going with you This is one of the few moments when the immovable object that is una is helpful and its ability to stop the unstoppable force that is john Yeah, briefly. Yeah, so she she wins the argument and lee moves in with her And so at this point it's been around six months that he's been living with her in fort meyers But every friday at 4 p.m. He and john talk on the phone

So they have stayed in pretty close contact and in october of 2001 john asked lee to come and join him And so this is lee's description of john asking him to join him in bellingham I heard the tremor in his voice lee. They took the children. I was able to identify with that loss I had never seen him indecisive and I had never heard that much pain He spoke to something in me that void that yearned to be filled. I wanted to have a father love me like that I wanted to know that someone cared as deeply for me When he said he needed me to help him get back the children so we could once again be a family

It opened up the floodgates for the kid who ran away to his father five years earlier, but was rejected He says there's three reasons why he leaves una to go join john First mohammed said he needed him to help get the children back Second mohammed said he would help him get into college Third mohammed seemed to melville to be far more logical than his fist shaking mother Yeah, right and I mean he also has a lifetime with his mother to observe her behavior and he's known john for six months Yeah, and john has not really been abusive to lee. He's just been like Do a bunch of push-ups hang out and listen to tapes at night like john has never hit him

John has never john has not been as inconsistent as una has john has never forced him to beat a cat Yeah, I mean like there's so much horror in his relationship with una. Yeah So There's a weird detail here that I want to dwell on because I've been obsessed with it for More than a week now. Okay. So lee tells the story of going to bellingham from florida twice To a court-appointed psychologist He says that una actually wanted him to join john So much that she actually bought him the bus ticket to bellingham

She then changed her mind and was like, no, no, you're not going to join him But then he snuck into her room in the middle of the night took the bus ticket and went to bellingham That's the story he tells the psychologist To karmita who's writing the biography of him He says he snuck out in the middle of the night went to a payphone He called john john wired him money for a bus ticket to bellingham And then john gave him these detailed instructions of he should book them under different names Every layover he should stop for like seven hours and change clothes do this kind of secret agent stuff

So that nobody could track his movements to bellingham So what's interesting to me about this is that there's two different stories both of which are kind of specific Right, they're not just like I bought a bus ticket and I went to bellingham. They reveal something about character And these are both people that trust him and that he trusts right that this is a psychologist that he spent dozens of hours with And this is karmita who he also spent dozens of hours with so these are two trusted people and so To me this explains a lot about his personality That lee gives people what they want to hear right that we've seen that he's emotionally malleable

And so it would not surprise me if he got a sense From the psychologist that he wanted to hear about una that he wanted to hear about his mother's capriciousness And that's why he took the bus ticket and then maybe karmita Was asking him like a line of questioning about john and so he put john at the center of that story And then constructed two pretty specific narratives or just emphasized parts of narratives You know, maybe both of them are true. Who knows that makes sense to me Like this is one of the things that makes it a very difficult crime to unravel and also Difficult to find out what really happened because both of these stories are completely plausible

And the truth is based on the temperature of the room. Yeah And so this to me explains a lot of the Confessions that lee does when he's in prison the re confessions the d confessions what he tells to william shatner That when he's first arrested for the dc sniper shootings, he confesses to all of the shootings all 13 He then recants and says that he's only responsible for three of them And to me I actually find it plausible that he did all the shootings Partly because john's control over him was so strong and just he's smaller than john

And he can fit in the back of the car more easily and john doesn't seem like he I mean based on everything we've heard about him to this point, you know I'm no expert on him, but I have heard like two hours worth of his behavior with his something And uh, yeah, he does not seem like someone who would be Curled up like getting charlie horses in the trunk of a car if he could make someone else do it Yeah, and he and that he wants to be the one who's cooking up the plans and doing this like

serial killer dojo with one student that he's running and he's the boss and like the boss doesn't do the work Yeah, yeah, and so yeah, we have we have no idea We have no way of knowing whether lee did all of the shootings or none of the shootings And I think we'll probably never know simply because lee is such an unreliable narrator of his own story I mean one of the things that I think is a really important detail of this is that this woman karmita Who's interviewing him as part of his defense team and then writes the biography of him She talks about how within a couple weeks of them forming their relationship He starts calling her mom and he starts saying i love you mom in all of his letters

So he's like a little he's like a subatomic particle looking for an atom to just like woosh into Yeah, I mean she talks about how He's sort of so emotionally immature even you know, this is years after the crimes take place Yeah, prison doesn't mature people interestingly. Yeah But he doesn't know how to relate to people outside of this sort of totalitizing frame, right? It's like I don't know you or You're my mom. Yeah, and so this is where I think we should leave this episode lee is on a bus to bellingham

And like a lot of the people we've covered on this show lee is a person who is making an extremely bad decision For reasons that make perfect sense. Yeah at this point John has not hinted that they're going to commit any violence john has said we're going to get our kids back But lee has no idea he doesn't find out for another nine months The extent of the actual plan that he's signed up for how old is he at this point? He's 16 Yeah, I mean I think just also the desire like even if there are our hints or even if there are things that he's like Oh, that doesn't feel great The need to believe that like this father figure who like wants you and like wants you because you know

He knows that you're easy to manipulate and he can get what he wants out of you But like who cares he wants you someone wants you like You're not going to rumble that right like it's going to have to be like pretty bad before I think you would even think about Leaving that because it's like, you know Your life is a tundra and this is a warm cabin. Well, this insight gets to the slight twist at the end of this episode so

What we learn later is that John is full of shit What we find out as more forensic evidence comes in and as the trials take place is that John was setting up lee to take the fall for these crimes. Oh my god Lee starts talking about whenever they're planning any of these crimes in the run-up to the sniper shootings John always wore gloves when he handled any of the guns any of the laptops lee didn't When they were doing the shootings and they're dropping tarot cards and handwritten notes

He makes lee write all the notes so that his handwriting will be on everything He also makes lee call the cops because there's this sort of cat and mouse back and forth thing Where they're calling the cops and all of those phone calls are made by lee Is his assumption that they're going to be looking for one person And they'll find lee and be like here's our one person and then they just won't believe him about anything He said, I mean, that's actually one of his better plans in terms of plausibility and the reason why lee confessed to all the murders when he was arrested was because john told him to They had literally rehearsed what he should tell the police. Why does that feel so bad to hear?

Like everything is already so terrible. Why does that I know? Uh, that's really bad though. That's like I mean, of course he's doing this. I'm not surprised. It's not There's no reason to be shocked by this but it's just it makes it all worse Like it's one thing to To kill 17 people But it somehow is worse if you're then like roping in this child and then making him take the fall for you Like that makes it even worse somehow which is amazing because he really would think it couldn't

Couldn't get any worse, but it does but I think I mean I want to stress just like we did last episode that when we talk about john having plans I think it's also Worth while to remind ourselves that mildred said last week that john has a habit of making plans and never following through with them And so right I don't want us to fall back into this idea that like he's calculated and you know He had every note of this planned out like he was joker from the dark night or something And we all played into his hands. This is a guy with a huge amount of trauma He's got a huge amount of ptsd from whatever happened in the military

He's later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This is not someone who is orchestrating this whole thing from some sort of Air traffic control tower. This is someone who makes these plans and just does things randomly Do you think we overestimate how difficult it is to murder people? Like do you think we want to believe that serial killer is like a really skilled trade? Well, I mean, I think this is why it's important to have sort of both of our little twists in our last two episodes Leading into next episode where we're going to talk about the actual sniper shootings And the actual events do not look like john's plans for the events

So I don't want to get into this over determined Like it was a chess game the whole time kind of thing because a lot of the stuff they end up doing is pretty dumb And like not well thought through at all. I always return to the l woods argument my version of it, which is, you know Healthy people don't kill a bunch of people They just don't right to be like someone who's has a plan and they're firing on all cylinders And they you know, they they know what's going to happen in advance or they at least have everything kind of squared away Like that suggests sanity. Yeah to me. Yeah, and like I don't equate sanity with being a serial killer There's this really interesting scene where karmita the woman who's writing this biography about li she's interviewing him in prison

And she tries to confront him with the fact that this is all clearly full of shit So she says on my next visit to malvo. I decided to engage him further about the motives for the killings He had allowed himself to be convinced that the killings were to obtain money to build a utopian society with 70 boys and 70 girls However, I and other members of the defense team felt that it was all a ruse for muhammad to get his children It seemed likely that muhammad's wife would have become another victims of the shooting And muhammad would have emerged as the grieving spouse who then regained custody of the children Malvo would have become the fall guy and been directed to take his own life Malvo had already acknowledged that the only reason he had not done so

Was that muhammad had not given him the order However, when I presented that theory to malvo, he scoffed at it. That's impossible. He loves meldred He would never kill her and furthermore. We knew where she lived. We watched her come and go If he wanted to kill her he could have done so many times My dad respects women he intoned I reminded him that he was awaiting trial for the murder of lynda franklin. He respects them But then he kills them. I asked malvo was silent I mean, you know, aside from all the trauma aside from everything else. He really doesn't have the intellectual

maturity to see Like this guy's full of shit like everything he's saying. None of it's true. Look at the thing 16 year olds believe. I mean as we've been saying A teenage boy being asked by someone who is an authority figure who he calls his father To take part in something bigger than himself and being sold this bill of goods and he's like, yeah Yeah, that's what people do at that age. That's literally what that age. That's what happens So it how much of it comes down to what what is offered to you, especially if nothing else is All I know is that it always starts with push-ups

I feel like this has become a very anti exercise program, which is largely my fault, but Sit it's all about sitting. Nothing ever happened to somebody who just stayed seated. I mean, I'm fully reclining right now