You're Wrong About - D.C. Snipers Part 4

Episode Date: March 23, 2020

In the final chapter of our series on the D.C. sniper attacks, Mike finally tells Sarah about the D.C. sniper attacks. Digressions include “The Abyss,” Ed Rooney and Jack the Ripper. We begin the episode with an update on our quarantine plans. Sarah misremembers the name of the TV show she was on.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

The other thing about like being in my parents' house is that I'm like, okay, I have been deprived of choices to kind of a liberating degree. And now it's like, I have to focus on research and fiber art. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we're having an epidemic. Oh my God. Oh, that's everywhere though. That's every show. Oh, Sarah.

All right. See, all right, I've got it. Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we're in a blanket fort with you. Oh, that's nice. I mean, because it's topical and also evergreen. Yeah, I turned it around. I am Michael Hobbs. I'm a reporter for The Huffington Post. I'm Sarah Marshall.

I'm working on a book about the satanic panic. And we are on Patreon at patreon.com slash You're Wrong About. But we also know that times are very weird right now and very tough. And so we just wanted to say at the top of the show that we realized there's lots of other things that need your money right now and that you might not have as much money as you did a month ago. And we just wanted to say that as always, you can support or not support the show for any reason you want and you don't owe us anything.

And we get it if people want to give their money to different things right now. Or need to. Yeah. So we just wanted to say that we get it and it's not a big deal if you can't support us right now and say something, Sarah. I don't know. I'm rambling now. You're being more sincere than you feel comfortable with.

I know. I have to stop. Yeah. Well, we just wanted to tell you that, I mean, what we've been talking about because basically, okay, Mike texted me a couple of days ago and was like, I don't think we should stop putting out the show. And I was like, I'm horrified by the implication that we might have ever stopped putting out the show.

That's not what I texted you, but okay. Well, my brain went to a weird place and I was like, this is all I have right now. I have nothing but the show. That's not what I said. What did he say? Because apparently I really like to get to a weird area. What did he say? You texted me and you said we should start doing a bunch of different kinds

of content because people are trapped inside. And so we should be people's blanket fort buddies during this quarantine period. And I said, that sounds great. No matter what, we definitely shouldn't stop doing the show. Yeah. I was prepared to get freaked out about something and apparently it was bad. Yeah. And in my head, I heard that very sweet.

I took that to mean, yeah, I was thinking about stopping doing the show, but I think we should move forward after all. I was like, oh my gosh. And then you had to reassure me about it again like a day later. Yes. But no, he never said that and he was misremembered by me. What I want to do and what we've been talking about doing is trying to be more there for you in a time when you might need even more than usual the company of the disembodied voices

that come out of your phone. So here we are. Yeah, we don't know what form this is going to take. We're still working on it, but we are looking forward to keeping you company. That's all we can say right now, but we're excited about it. That makes it sound overly mysterious. Like we're going to come in through the chimney like an owl and Harry Potter. I mean, I think it's not going to be that exciting, but we want to do like more

in different kinds of episodes and just like try some fun stuff and some random ideas and just treat this as a kind of, I mean, it will be exciting. I take it back. It is exciting. We're going to have fun. Yeah. With the show and we would love your suggestions about how we can better keep you company. Yeah.

And you guys have been there for us and so we're going to try to be there for you during this time of anxiety and boredom. We were also talking about how we wanted to offer you some counter-programming that would help you escape your day-to-day anxieties for a while, but I feel like we're not really, this is not an improvement, the world that we're taking people into probably. I mean, it's a different kind of anxiety. Yeah.

It's a different kind of terror. Yes. It's old anxieties. That's always fun. And so what are we talking about today? And so yes, we are back to the final chapter of the DC Snipers series. Yes. We're finally at the denowment.

It's pronounced denowment. I just want all of our listeners to know that I hear it and I don't. It just sounds like an ice cream flavor to me. So can you catch us up with where we were with Lee and John when we left? Got like a month ago now or something. So when we last left them, they had completed this campaign of robberies and murders and had raised sufficient funds to buy themselves the equipment they needed, which was the car and the gun to carry out the DC Sniper murders.

And so we have left them as they are poised to do that. Yes. Imagine them in the famous blue Caprice on their way to Washington, D.C. to start carrying out this master plan of theirs. But before we get back to John and Lee, I actually want to talk about Mildred because Mildred has been absent from this story for a couple episodes now and we miss her. Yes, exactly.

And one of the things we briefly touched on a couple episodes ago was that she had no idea any of this was going on. So she took the kids from John in August of 2001. She moved back to D.C. with the kids. She lived her life. She was trying to rebuild her family. She's gotten a job at a domestic violence organization at this point. She's a single mom.

She's not making a ton of money. She's not really thinking all that much about what John is doing. She has no idea he's linked up with this random kid from Jamaica. And when the DC Sniper shootings start, she doesn't think it's him. And she only figures out what's happening when somebody knocks on her door. She opens the door and it's an ATF agent. And he starts asking her about John and he says, you didn't realize that a bunch of the shootings were within three miles of your house.

These shootings are all over where you live. And she had no idea. Again, you don't think like this is this many meters from my house. This is this many miles from my house. She's not like drawing red lines with yarn on chalkboard. So she has not put it together at all. And he asks her, do you think your ex-husband is capable of carrying out the sniper attacks, the kind that you've been reading about in the newspaper.

And she immediately says yes. But so what she talks about is, you know, when he was abusing her, nobody listened to her. Everyone minimized it. Everyone told her to go back to him. And once the actual details of the sniper attacks and the motivation of the sniper attacks are public, the same thing happens. So she talks about talking to one of her neighbors who, of course, had no idea. And they're chatting at the mailbox or whatever.

And she mentions, you know, I'm having a really tough week because it turns out my ex-husband is the DC sniper that everybody's been afraid of. And that's incredible openness. I know. And, you know, she's talking about how the media is contacting her and they're offering her money and people are trying to give her book deals and stuff like that. And her neighbor says, well, you know, whatever you do with all of this money,

you should make sure to give it to the victims. And this is so much about where Mildred is and how far she's come that she immediately says, I'm one of the victims. Yeah. Yes. She's patient zero. Exactly. And so this is something that she ends up having to explain to people over and over again.

Do people accuse her of profiting off of her husband's crimes? Actually, weirdly, no, because she waits years and years and years to speak publicly. It's really interesting. She says that she's not really ready to do it. She does. This is really infuriating. She actually accepts an interview for the National Enquirer because they offer to pay her $65,000 to tell her story.

And then she gets there and she sits down and then they're like, okay, so when did Louis Farrakhan tell your ex-husband to do the DC sniper shootings? And she's like, uh, that's not really. And they're like, did they were not on speaking terms? Yeah. And basically this interviewer is like, uh, we don't want to hear about any of this domestic violence stuff. Why don't you just tell us about the Farrakhan stuff?

Oh my God. And she tries to explain and they basically say, well, look, if you're not going to play ball, we're not going to pay you. Yeah. So she just walks out of the interview. She's also contacted by Good Morning America who wants to interview her about her experience, about John's motivation, et cetera. And she says, look, the only way I'm going to do this is if you make at least

half of the interview about domestic abuse. I am an advocate for domestic abuse victims. I'm an advocate for people, especially who have not experienced violence in abusive relationships. Most domestic abuse is not violent. Actually, I want to raise awareness of this issue. They say, yeah, we're totally on board with that. We'll bring you up.

You can talk about John. You can talk about the problems with the abuse system. She gets there and they don't ask her one question about abuse. This is what she writes in her book. I was supposed to be asked questions regarding domestic violence and I wasn't. I was trying to maintain my composure as I answered each question, trying not to burst into tears. It was a live show and I felt everyone was watching to see if I would cry or show

some type of emotion to indicate I had not recovered from the ordeal. I had not recovered, but I wasn't going to let the world witness that. And so the National Enquirer never pays her. She does a couple of these little interviews where she's treated terribly and she basically decides, fuck it, I'm not going to do this anymore. And so we don't really hear from her as members of the public until John and Lee's trial. That's the first time we can really start to hear any of this from her perspective and it's just completely absent from the narrative for years until her book comes out.

Yeah. And I feel like it really speaks to the myth that the person at the center of the media frenzy is somehow controlling it. Yeah. That when you hear about someone who tried to at all steer the ride that they were on when they were picked up by that frenzy and be like, I actually want to talk about this thing or like I'll do an interview, but I have these quite reasonable terms, you know, what happens to them when they do that?

Like I think it to me really serves as very strong evidence against the idea that the person who's on the cover of the magazine has any control over how they're photographed or talked about what they're being shown as a symbol of. So here we are finally at the actual DC sniper shootings. This is what this show has been claiming to be about this entire time. And then taking everyone on this wild log ride through the land of grinding domestic abuse and psychological warfare. Yeah, we're finally at the suspenseful true crimey part

and I'm going to go through it as fast as I can with a minimum of suspense and excitement. Exactly. Yes. So I think the main you're wrong about of this story and the sort of counter narrative to the five true crimey books that I've read about this now is the typical narrative of the DC sniper shootings is that they're sort of one step ahead of the police at every moment. But another way of telling it is that they are wildly incompetent and the police are very far behind them most of the time and catch them through a lucky break.

I love it when the story is told that way. It seems like the killer is on the loose and the police are always one step behind being outfoxed and outwitted stories. The stories that we receive that way publicly often seem to be of the latter kind, don't they? Once we get down to the facts, it's almost like the police benefit from the public imagination conceiving serial killers is brilliant and manipulative because that means that the police can still be completely competent, really smart, not making mistakes, not behaving inefficiently.

You can't be faulted for failing to catch a genius and you can't be told that you should have tried harder, can you? And so the DC sniper shootings begin on October 2nd, 2002. But I just want to say where we are on October 2nd, 2002, how many times John has already been reported to the police? So we've had 18 months of Mildred screaming about how John presents a danger to her and others. We've got the lifetime restraining order against him that she's now filed. John and Lee have an arrest warrant for shoplifting outside of Seattle in 2002.

They shoplifted some frozen steaks and were later busted selling them in the parking lot. Oh, that's so brazen. Just sell them in a different parking lot. I know. Just any other parking lot. Al Archer, the director of this homeless shelter where they've been staying, has reported them to the FBI. One of the guys who John has been doing day labor for has also reported him to the FBI. In these liquor store robberies they've been doing the last two weeks,

two times witnesses have said they saw a dark Chevy Caprice with tinted windows driving away from the scene. So we've also got that. And during the sniper shootings, the cops will pull over and run John's plates nine times. Oh, my God. I feel like Ed Rooney going nine times, nine times. That's so many times. So I just want to be very clear about the fact that there are already very loud awuga noises and very bad information sharing. Nine times.

Nine times during the shootings. That's just during. There's already four other times they've been pulled over before this. That does not make anyone involved in law enforcement look good. Yes. This car also like this car is extremely suspicious. It's like an old beater of a cop car with super duper tinted windows and a 41 year old man and a 17 year old boy getting out of it. And it's like filled with food wrappers and stuff.

It's like a bizarro blues brothers, isn't it? Like these two loner misfits driving an old cop car around. Right. So the actual sniper shootings begin at 5.20 p.m. on October 2nd of 2002 when a bullet flies through the window of a Michaels craft store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. So nobody is hit, but one of the clerks feels like a whoosh in her hair as something goes by and she hears the gunshot outside. There is no place that seems more primed for uneventfulness than a Michaels craft store.

And so the way that they do it is a little bit weird. So their M.O. is one of them will park the car and they'll get into the back of it in the sort of they've drilled this hole through the back where they can poke the gun barrel through and they can see out the site. And then the other one will go closer to where the victim will be. So into the parking lot into the store wherever and we'll check for witnesses because they don't have a silencer. And so they don't want to have a situation where there's a big loud boom.

25 people look toward this car where there's the boom. Somebody sees it, grabs the license plate. Do they not have a silencer because they know that they need one but they just like are disorganized and didn't buy one? Yeah, there's a there's an extremely tedious subplot to all of the true crime books about John's quest to get a silencer. I actually really want to know about that. Apparently there's like technical reasons why they're difficult to fit on whatever gun this is

or like he tries to make one for months. He tries to get his like gun nut friends to get him one but like the parts don't come from South Korea or something. I love that this is a detail of this crime story too that it's like because I just I hate any time a story lends itself to sort of like the killer is supposed to be this fascinating like sophisticated somehow extra human type person. And it's like, no, it's like someone trying to assemble a grill.

Like they just keep getting along parts and they try to make their own and they couldn't and it's like such a suburban dad comedy of errors. Right. And it's also very like me doing DIY stuff where you have all these schemes. You try to figure it out and then at a certain point you're like, fuck it, we'll just go without it. Right. Right.

Like they spend nine months getting the silencer and they're just like, it's too much of a hassle. Never mind. We'll just do it anyway. Yeah, which also is interesting, right? Because he's like the silencer is pretty important. Oh, yeah. Like it's one of the most important elements of this whole thing.

So the fact that he's like, fuck it, we'll do it live. What is that? Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is it just goes to John's inability to plan stuff. Yeah. So basically this is their M.O. So they've decided to start this entire plan to put it into motion. And what ends up happening is the number of shootings they carry out is of

course much smaller than the number of shootings they try. Because what happens is they'll pull into a parking lot, they'll look around, they'll send John or Lee into the parking lot to sort of scope it out. How many people are around? And then eventually they don't end up giving the signal because like there's just too many people or someone is kind of looking at the Caprice or there's a cop nearby on the corner that they can see. And so they kind of give up.

So according to Lee, Lee describes this entire spree in his book. He described that before they go to this Michaels, they had stopped by like four other places and this was like their third or fourth stop. And they just sort of like, fuck it, they did it and then they left. And then their first victim is a guy named James D. Martin and he's a program analyst for the Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And they do like John has part of his whole weird ideology is hatred of the government. But of course he has no idea that this is a government employee.

And later on he'll kill somebody who works for the FBI, but he also doesn't know that she works for the FBI. Right. He's just like in an area with a high concentration of government workers and he happens to get lucky at times. Yeah. And the detail that really gets to me from one of these true crime accounts is that James Martin, the first victim, it's not clear

if he ever heard the shot that killed him. This was one of those ones where he was just walking around and then he just collapsed to the ground. And so we don't know how much of Lee's account to believe. So throughout all of this, some of the logistics match up, but then a lot of the logistics don't. So for any one of these shootings, it's never quite clear who has the walkie talkie and who is in the back of the car.

So in Lee's account, they switch back and forth kind of willy nilly. And we as outsiders just literally have no idea who did what. And so that's the first killing. That's the thing that sets all of this off. And this is also the beginning of Lee and John's pattern that the greatest life-saving thing throughout this killing spree is laziness and traffic. They set out to kill five, six, seven people every day. Like that's their plan is sort of almost one an hour, drive somewhere,

shoot, drive somewhere, shoot. Oh my God. And it happens again and again that they get stuck in traffic because they don't want to have the shootings too close to each other. And then over and over again, they plan to do a bunch of them. And they're just like, I don't know, man, we already did two. Let's go. I'm tired.

It's like very, it's like very like you're in your thirties and you're like, yeah, we were going to have like a big birthday party and we were going to go out and it was going to be so fun. And then at like nine, you're like, I don't know, guys. Or just like when you have a day of errands and you're going to go to like Home Depot and Ikea and you're going to get lunch. And then like you finish at Ikea and you're just like, I who cares? Yeah.

Again, like it's just so human and it's also so mundane. Like serial killers can't beat traffic. Yeah. You know, and Beltway traffic is terrible. Yes. And so apparently, according to Lee, this is basically what John says is that after these first two shootings, he's like, you know, it's been a big day. We've been driving since three in the morning.

He says we got a big day ahead of us tomorrow. Let's turn it. Let's go home and play video games. Yeah. And so I think what they do is it's not clear where they're sleeping for most of these nights. Some nights they just sleep in the car at a rest stop. Some nights they go to homeless shelters.

So they basically just decide to turn in at the end of these two shots. And so the next the next day is when most of the country finds out about the sniper shootings. The next day, October 3rd of 2002, they shoot five people. Wow. This is the only day that they actually reach their goal of how many people they want to shoot. It makes them look ridiculous.

And it also is makes the whole picture darker to me to think of them like treating this like getting their steps in on a fit bed. Yeah. Yeah. And so they begin very early in the morning. They begin the first guy they kill is named James Buchanan. He's a landscaper. He's mowing a lawn and at 741 a.m.

He is shot by them across the street. It's not a very crowded area. And when he finally gets to the hospital, they call it an industrial accident. What? Yeah. They think it's like the blade of the lawnmower came off or something. If you don't have any reason to think it was a sniper shooting, why would you even include that in a list of possibilities?

I guess. Yeah. You're like, well, this was the sharpest thing near you. Yeah. Yeah. And so about 30 minutes later, they kill a guy named Prem Kumar Walikar, who's a cab driver. He's one of the first people killed pumping gas.

And so around half an hour later, they kill a woman named Sarah Ramos, who is a law student in Silver Spring, Maryland, and also does house cleaning. And so she's sitting on a bench waiting for her boss to pick her up and take her to a house cleaning job when Lee says that he shoots her in the head. So I guess like workers who are either out doing their jobs or on their way to the work, like just people at their jobs and people getting to their jobs. And it's like mostly low income workers that are like starting the day early on their commute.

Yeah. Right. Again, this is not John's ideology of like, let's kill the evil head of society, white people. It's just like a cab driver. Yeah. This has nothing to do with ideology at all. And then about an hour later, they kill a woman named Lori Ann Lewis Rivera,

who's a nanny who is vacuuming her car. This is like as bad as it gets. This is four shootings, four killings right in a row and all of them before 10 a.m. Wow. So already cops are starting to realize that these are connected to each other and connected to the shootings the previous night in Montgomery County, Maryland, and after they kill Lori Ann Lewis Rivera, John and Lee take a lunch

break. They only eat one meal a day. So they go to a Jamaican restaurant. They are also at this point, they are pulled over between the morning time shootings and the evening shootings. Wow. Again, plates are checked. Nobody does anything.

John is using his real driver's license. He's not using an alias or a fake ID. So they run John Allen, Mohammed, don't find anything, have a nice night. And then at 9.15 p.m. So the only shooting that happens at night, they kill a guy named Pascal Charleau, who's 72 years old. His wife has dementia and he spends a lot of his time taking care of her and he often takes breaks to kind of walk around the neighborhood and clear his head.

And so he's on one of these breaks and he gets to an intersection. And this is from Lee's biography when he's waiting at the intersection for anybody to arrive. Soon it was 9 p.m. According to Malvo, Mohammed was aggravated by the fact that there always seemed to be someone sitting in a vehicle way too close to where they parked. Driving up Georgia Avenue toward Maryland, Mohammed was adamant there must be one shot tonight.

Then he smiled. They parked behind a Jamaican restaurant where they had eaten. Across the street was a laundromat that Mohammed intended to shoot at, but instead he decided to shoot the first person who came to the street crossing the intersection. Malvo saw that Mohammed was set. No one was in the restaurant parking lot. Malvo saw an elderly black man at the crossing.

However, before he could complete the usual prompt, his ears were ringing from the blast of the shot. The man fell holding his chest. After that, it seems they went to the YMCA and just sort of hung out for a while before they went and slept in the car. Okay. And so what's really interesting to me is how quickly the panic happens. I mean, like marketing wise, it was a savvy move, one of their only savvy

moves to do all of these murders in such a cluster at the same time when they began. Because you can imagine if there's one shooting a day, it would take a couple days for the public to really get nervous about this. Which is really depressing. Which is gross. And yet true thing. Yes.

But yeah, and also that if you shoot five people in one day, then the public has no reason to believe that there will not continue to be in a definite number of days where the same thing happens. Exactly. And you've proved that you're capable of escalation. So yeah, I mean, great job at terrorizing the public. They figured it out. It's like the last smart thing they'll do.

This is also very early. This is the first time we get a glimpse of the white van. We get reports from witnesses at two of these shootings that right after they happened, they saw a white van pulling out, sort of peeling out of a parking lot nearby. And so this becomes one of the primary mistakes that police make is that for the next two weeks, they are on a one note manhunt for somebody in a white van.

Oh, I feel like this happens fairly often where there will be someone who the police are looking for and there will be eyewitness accounts that name the wrong kind of car. What turns out to be the wrong car, but it's like one fairly specific kind of car the police are looking for. And they're like, great. That's it. That's the one thing we're going to look for.

We're going to ignore everything else. I don't know. Like cars leave parking lots all the time. Like these are kind of high traffic areas where this is happening. Yeah. Yeah. And can we talk about white van items because this connects to human trafficking and I'm sure a lot of other stuff too.

Yes. So once I started reading books about this case, I remember I stood on an intersection and just counted the white vans and I invite you to do this. It's like easily one in eight cars on the road is a white van. Especially during working hours. Yes. You know, when glaciers and roofers and plumbers and caterers. I mean, so many jobs when just like people are going from job to job.

I mean, it's just it's a huge percentage of I think midday weekday traffic. And also, I mean, they're they mostly have men inside of them, right? So we're trained probably pretty reasonably to fear violence from men more than violence from women. They're also they're oftentimes parked in odd places. They're parked in alleys. They're parked behind stores. They're parked in residential areas.

Yeah. There's sort of there's something that can be sort of suspicious about them because they're always parked in kind of incongruous places. And yet they really are ubiquitous. I mean, you don't realize that you probably see 200 white vans every single day without even thinking about it. And also one of the things that I think people find worrying about them or potentially sinister about them is that they don't have windows typically.

Yes. Which is because they're trafficking people. Why? Why? Because they're carrying around like ladders and equipment and things that are either highly valuable and that they don't want stolen or that could just be hazardous to have jostling around. Yeah.

And you know, one of the big missed opportunities here is that first of all, the police did not know this. I don't know, but I imagine that a lot of people after crimes like this, say I saw a white van doing X, Y, Z because there's a lot of white vans. Well, and also if one person says, oh, I saw a white van leaving the parking lot in a hurry, then if you were also a witness and the police are like, did you see a white van? Even if you didn't, you could probably, it would be very reasonable to assume

that you did or to be like, oh yeah, I think I remember that or like, that sounds right. Yeah. This is, I think, exactly the kind of piece of evidence that can very easily snowball into a consensus with like nothing behind it. Yeah. And so what's really interesting is what we find out at John's trial. Once they're putting together all of the evidence of John's guilt,

we find out that there's actually two witnesses that saw a blue Caprice at this shooting. Which is a much more specific kind of car. Yes. That right after they heard a loud bang, they saw a blue Caprice with its lights off drive slowly out of a parking lot. And one of them did report it to the cops. One of them didn't because by that point, the cops had already announced that

they were looking for a white van on TV. Right. So they're like, well, my thing doesn't matter. Yeah. And so this is the kind of the weird circular thing that happens with these like all points bulletins about white vans is that this happens over and over again that people like, I saw this dark car, but like, I guess they're just looking for white vans.

So I'm not going to call it in. Right. And like they know best. There's also, there's a couple of really interesting law review articles about how easy it became in the DC area at this time to get warrants for white vans. Oh, no. Oh, no. So what started happening is that the cops just started using this as a license

to pull over anybody in a white van and pull them out of the van, put them on the ground and then search the white van. Oh, no. So searching a white van is like shooting a squirrel. It's just like, have fun. And there's also, there's also links to the other thing that police do at this time very early. They set up a tip line.

So in the first press conference, which is actually in the afternoon of the day of the shooting, so before the guy is shot at night, they have a press conference where they announced we're opening up a tip line and call us. And you know, if you know anything about these shooters, please let us know. And it will eventually get, I believe it's a hundred thousand tips. Oh my God. And how many people do they have sorting through that and what kind of system

do they have for that? I guess cannot imagine managing that amount of information. Well, this is the thing. It's actually kind of interesting and like to give the cops like some sort of cat and mouse credit. Some cat points, if you will. Most crimes that they're investigating, there's an absence of information. And one of the things that makes this one so hard is that there's just an avalanche

of information. That what starts happening almost immediately is that you get a huge number of women calling in and saying, my ex-husband is really scary and he has a lot of guns. And then the police are like, oh snap. It turns out there's like a lot of guys whose wives are like, well, I'm not saying he is, but the thought has crossed my mind. It's, I mean, ideally you would treat this information as like, we didn't go out looking for statistics on scary husbands and the general population, but now we

have them. Well, also, I mean, because it's so easy to get warrants at this time, they'll send SWAT teams to these dude's house and they'll break in and do the whole SWAT team raid thing. And then they'll look around and they'll be like, well, yeah, they have a lot of guns but not the kind of caliber gun that we're looking for. And like, sorry, he's an abusive husband, but he's not the DZ Sniper. So tip of the hat, good luck out there.

I mean, this is like a lot of the tips that come in are actually pretty good tips, but there's nothing specific that you can get people on. Right. Well, they're like, well, this guy seems iffy, but you know, we're looking for a different guy right now. Yeah. And so this is also the time when schools start canceling lunches outside. They start canceling recess.

I mean, this is only day one, but the schools are already pretty much on lockdown and people are really freaking out about this. I do, once again, I'm really shocked that this is not, that this hasn't made a bigger impression on serial killer media, I guess, or sort of the public imagination because like, my God, have there been so many fictionalized Ted Bundy's Ted Bundy is like the Star Wars of serial killers, basically. And I mean, it's weird to feel like it's unfair that something isn't being cynically capitalized on in a way that's bad for society, but like, it does feel

racially unjust because like, how often does a serial killer terrorize a city in this way? Like, it just doesn't happen anymore. It happened with son of Sam. It happened with Ted Bundy, but like, this is a very rare occurrence. Oh, yeah. I'm trapped in this weird bind where I'm like, why aren't the DC snipers more iconic serial killers?

And I'm like, I mean, we shouldn't have iconic serial killers. And the whole thing of having them is like wrong and weird and speaks to our screwed up priorities as a nation. But if we must have them, then why, why are we excluding, you know, these two men who did every single serial killer thing except to be white and middle class and come from suburban homes? Right, right. And so according to Lee, the next day, they end up just driving around and

looking for places to shoot people, but they don't find any. There's too much traffic. There's too many people. There's too many witnesses. And so at 2 30 p.m. that day, they end up shooting a woman named Carolyn Sewell in the parking lot of another Michaels craft store. So again, we have one witness says they saw a white van. Another witness says they saw a blue Caprice.

The police emphasize one and kind of ignore the other. And so the next day is when the police announced at this press conference that they're putting cops around the schools and that, you know, a lot of parents, of course, are freaking out about this. And so they say, like, no matter what, the children are going to be safe. And two days later is when John and Lee shoot a child. Oh, boy. So the school they choose is called Bend Tasker Middle School.

It's in Bowie, Maryland. And one of the interesting aspects of this is that most of the police that were placed around schools were placed around whiter and more affluent schools. It's almost like, despite the fact that John is a crazy serial killer, he still has a point kind of. Yes. Like even John can grasp that something is a rye in this country. I looked this up online and I don't know what the demographics were in 2002,

but the demographics now is that it's 87 percent non-white kids and the kid they shoot is a non-white kid. And so we don't know if they chose the school because there weren't cops there or if they chose the school because whatever, it was close to the rest stop where they were sleeping. We have no way of knowing, but we do know that there weren't cops there. And so this kid, Iran Brown, he's 13 years old. He's living with his aunt and uncle at the time because his parents want to

get him away from bad kids that he's been hanging out with apparently. And they think sending him to the Maryland suburbs is going to be good for him. And his aunt, Tanya drives him to school and she gets there in the morning and he gets out of the car. She starts driving away and in the rear view mirror, she can see him crumple to the ground. Oh my God. He gets shot in the stomach.

And so she comes back around with the car or she gets him into the car. She's trying to get him to an emergency room. She's calling 911 on her phone as she's driving. The traffic is too bad and he ends up living. They eventually transfer him to the hospital, but he, you know, he was shot in the stomach. He has profound injuries from this and he's also someone that doesn't give interviews. He doesn't want to be contacted.

He doesn't want to be a part of this story. And so I don't really know what's going on with him now. But the really chilling thing about this is that the original plan, what John sent Lee to the school to do was to kill 10 kids. Oh my God. He gave him 10 bullets and there's apparently a wooded area above the school and he said, don't come back to me until all the bullets are gone. And so Lee went up there.

He was supposed to wait for school buses to come and the school, he was supposed to get the kids as they were kind of all coming out of the school buses, but because all of the parents are so paranoid now, the parents are driving their kids. And so there's not that many kids on the school buses. So the kids are coming in like this trickle rather than this crowd. And so according to Lee, that's why he only shot one kid is because there just wasn't the critical mass for him to take more than one shot.

He also might have just like chickened out or not wanted to do it and use that as an excuse. Yeah, but I think that would sound better. And I think it's interesting that he's self-reporting, like presumably in his book. Like, yeah, and I would have, but I couldn't, you know. Yes. It doesn't make him look good to be like, I was going to kill more people,

but I couldn't logistically. Right. Like if you were trying to lie, like anything else. Yeah. Okay. But also I also want to say at this point, it is my personal theory. And I'm just, you know, I'm a woman in a closet advancing a personal theory with nothing to back it up.

But that said, I feel like John is much more interested in manipulating and abusing someone into becoming his killer for hire than he is and actually killing people. Like I think the power trip of making Lee do all these things seems to be more gratifying to him than killing people himself because if we're to believe Lee at all, which I'm pretty inclined to do and also if we're going to kind of take the, what we know about John's laziness as, as you know, part of this picture, then like it seems perfectly reasonable

to me to believe that he's not carrying out these killings. The point to him is ordering them and watching them be done and knowing they're being done for him by this person who he has destroyed. That's plausible to me. It's also plausible to me that there's other things about him that Lee isn't telling us and that, you know, we're not getting the complete picture too, but it's also plausible to me that that is a huge component of this, that he loves the domination that he gets over Lee.

And this is also the point where he makes Lee drop the first tarot card. What tarot card is it? And is it a writer weight deck? I have no idea. I did not. This is another like the silencer. This is another rabbit hole. I did not go down.

Okay. But apparently tarot decks have different cards and one of them is a death card. Apparently tarot decks have different cards. I mean, I don't know. I don't know the whole tarot card thing. I feel like my woundness has like failed to enter your life at all. Let me.

Okay. No, I have something. I copy pasted something from one of these books. I don't, I don't know which book it's from. The one novel left was the so-called death card on the front was a skeleton and armor riding a white horse and carrying a black flag. The horse's reins were decorated with skulls and crossbones across the bottom of the card was the word death.

What's funny to me about this is that it shows that John is so basic because like everyone who's like mildly knowledgeable about tarot knows that death is actually complicated card and getting it can be really auspicious. I feel like, oh, like I'm moving on from like a complex period of my life that needs to die or something like that. But like the 10 of swords is like a very scary card and it would have been way cooler if he'd left that. So it's just, he's such a dilettante, you know.

I thought you were going to say that he's basic because he left the death card. It's just a little obvious. Well, that too. It's super obvious and it's also like, it's like Hannibal Lecter instead of being like, ta Hannibal being like, I'm a murderer. You know, it's just like, yeah, we gotta, you're a serial killer. And this is part of the thing of was John really doing this or was John

doing this to create a myth of a serial killer to make it look like Mildred got killed by one? I think he was like, what would a classic serial killer do? Yeah. Right? Like the plan though is he's like, I'm obviously we're not serial killers because creating the illusion of a serial killer by killing a bunch of strangers serially, right?

But is that what he's saying to himself? We don't know. I mean, we have one unreliable narrator and none unreliable narrator from John. Right. Who knows? And so across the card at the top, they've written call me God. Oh, God.

And then on the back, they write for you, Mr. Police and then do not release to the press. Once again, it's like, that could be his authentic writings or it could be he like learned about Jack the Ripper and was like, yeah, that's the tone. I want to say. Yeah. And so despite the warning, do not release to the press. Somebody leaks it to the press almost immediately and it's on the news

that night and it's really here after the kid gets shot and the tarot card that the panic just explodes. I bet. My God. And this is when people stop getting gas or start driving farther away to get gas. People are apparently using their shopping carts as a shield. Wow.

When they sort of go from the store to their car. I bet some people are driving to like Delaware to do errands. I bet Delaware is like, come to me. A lot of the restaurants at the time take away their outdoor tables and shares. Some a lot of restaurants went out of business because people didn't want to go to dinner. They just wanted to get pizza delivery. So pizza delivery business, like I don't know if it was double, but it went way up.

Domino's also had a record breaking day during the Bronco chase. Yeah. There's eventually 1300 reporters from national and local outlets in D.C. covering this and this is for three entire weeks. Wow. This is a quote from a mother who sort of sums up the feelings of dread that start to take over this entire region at this point. She says, I can usually separate myself from the bad things that happen to other

people as if I'm watching a bad movie. Not this time. The sniper makes me feel like a walking breathing target all the time. She routinely grabbed a paper bag to steady her breathing and peered into wooded areas as she drove looking all around her. Everyone I know feels this way. She said, we all dive into our cars from the grocery store parking lot. We all feed our kids sandwiches or cereal instead of running out to the

store to get food for dinner. We all feel a sense of relief when the sniper strikes because on some level we know where he is and we can feel safe for at least an hour or two. And we all feel guilty for feeling that way. And so, you know, it's a time with a lot of anxiety and it's also a time of a lot of generosity. They talk about how the school bus drivers and the school crossing guards, you know, the people that stand there with flags and help kids cross the street.

Those people stopped calling in sick. They actually had a higher attendance than they did normally because people wanted to help kids get to school safely. A lot of the counties started putting out volunteers for parents and other adults to walk kids to school and sort of be there. And they got 1200 applications within like the first hour that the phone lines were open. I think it's always fascinating just to see periods of time when the normal

rules of life are suspended and when people feel imperiled. That doesn't remind me of anything happening right now at all. No, nothing at all. No, it's just it's interesting as an abstract concept. Yes. And something that hypothetically I imagine could also bring out the best of us if we allow it to. Yeah.

Anyway. Anyway, this is also the period when the media, I mean, this is when it really becomes a national story, like a national obsession. And this is when the media starts having to fill 24 hours a day of airtime above the DC sniper case in which not terribly much is happening. Does Alan Dershowitz get involved? He does. And so one of the mistakes that police make or I don't even really know if

this is a mistake. You can tell me, but one of the things that happens is, of course, nobody knows anything about motive at this point. There's no pattern to the shootings. There's no pattern to the victims. There's no pattern to anything. So you can literally any explanation fits because there's not enough information to say we can rule this out.

You can't do victimology. Yeah. And so what always happens is, you know, the police officers and cheese of police, you know, there's eight different jurisdictions involved. So there's a lot of people to interview, but none of them can actually say anything because first of all, they don't have any information because they have no leads at this point other than the white van. So they're like white van, white van, white van.

And even if they did have leads, they couldn't tell the press about them. So what happens is these people come on and they'll say what was already widely known. There's been this many victims. We know these victims. We know this caliber of the rifle, et cetera. And then the hosts of these shows would say, well, you know, do you think this is radical Islamic terrorism?

And then the answer that they always gave was we're not ruling anything out. We're not ruling anything out. Right. Because they're not. Which literally is true. They weren't ruling anything out. Yeah. But that sounds to people kind of like, eh, probably.

Or I think it could potentially sound to people like if you're turning on the news and if you're kind of primed to believe that this kind of thing is, which we were at the time. Oh, yeah. 13 months after 9-11. We actually were primed to think of this as terrorism. And anthrax. I remember when the anthrax attacks started, which we should definitely do a

show about. Oh, yeah. I remember, I mean, I was 13. So like I wasn't the most logical thinker, but I remember feeling there was a cultural tide and I was in it of like, oh, yeah, this is related. This is like an ongoing attack on the United States by terrorists. And 9-11 was the start of it. And there's going to be more stuff.

Yeah. And there kind of wasn't, but we were really waiting for the other shoe to drop for a while there in 2002 was right when we were at the highest alert. So I think the feeling that like we were just so much readyer to believe that it was Islamic terrorism than that it was just a disorganized pair of emotionally shattered people. Yeah. Yeah.

Yeah. You know, in the media, because there was no reliable information coming out and there's not much to say about these shootings, you just have to fill the airtime. Right. You just have to keep going. Yeah. And so, you know, you have terrorism experts showing up on the news and you have, I mean, you just have a lot of people talking who didn't know anything.

And they're like, we can't talk about other stuff. I can't come back. I don't know how it works. And also the shootings are down to like one every two days at this point. So they're not five a day where there's new things coming out. It's they've kind of slowed to a trickle. They're repeating the same things for like 48 hours in a row, which means like the made up stuff gets repeated.

Exactly. Yeah. And so the next time they have something to actually talk about is on October 9th, when Dean Myers is another person shot at a gas station in Manassas, Virginia. And this is the murder that John will eventually be executed for. This is also the first, but not only shooting where right after the shooting, the cops locked down all of the roads in and out. I mean, they've got this whole protocol now where as soon as there's a sniper shooting,

they basically put like a under the dome style ring around the shooting area and then just pull over everybody trying to get in or out of that ring. And so when John and Lee are leaving this ring after the shooting, they stop by a cop. The cop sort of leans in and says, what are you guys doing here? And they're like, oh, yeah, just hanging out. And then he's like, all right, have a great day guys. Okay. Here's a question.

What are the police looking for white vans? I mean, I guess you don't have enough manpower for like this area with thousands of cars in it, probably. I mean, I guess I'm being unreasonable, but it's really frustrating. Well, that's the thing. I mean, you know, you don't want to go too hard on the cops. No, they don't do this every day. Like they deal with normal crimes usually.

Yeah. And these are like, these are like beat cops too, right? Like to have an army of cops fan out across a huge area and interview every single person in a car, you just don't have enough skilled people to do like an interrogation of every single person. So it's basically like, you know, entering Canada or something, it's like, unless you seem super sketchy after the first three or four minutes, there's not a lot they can do. Right.

But they have been getting reports about a blue Caprice. Yeah. The less charitable explanation is that they had gotten many reports of a blue Caprice at this point. And so the idea that they would be asking many more questions or maybe checking the trunk or whatever of people in blue Caprices is not completely unreasonable. I mean, they were doing that for white vans. Right. It's not like you can go stand on your street and count the blue Caprices going by.

Exactly. So it is a little weird that they didn't push harder on this. Yeah. It's frustrating. I mean, it speaks to me of tunnel vision, which I think is just a common thing for anyone who's trying to solve a problem. Like we tend to seize fairly early on something that seems probable and then ignore like other like likely but less likely possibilities.

And so even worse, two days later, a guy named Kenneth Bridges is shot in Fredericksburg, Virginia and there's a cop 50 feet away just kind of randomly, coincidentally was on a traffic stop. Oh boy. And he hears this boom and he sees this dude fall over and he doesn't really know what to do because he's just one cop, right? And so what he says later is he was looking for a white van. So immediately after he hears the shot, he starts scanning the area for if there's any

white vans. Yeah. Because he's like, I have like 30 seconds in which to be useful. I'm going to cling to the one thing that I've been told to look for. Yeah. Yeah. And so again, you know, these shootings keep happening. Three days later, a woman named Linda Franklin is killed in Falls Church, Virginia in a

Home Depot parking lot. And this one actually makes everything worse because she is shot. Her husband sees her get shot. It's awful. And some guy who was shopping in the store who wasn't even in the parking lot for whatever reason tells the cops that he saw somebody get out of a white van, put a rifle to his shoulder, shoot someone, get back into the van and drive away. Which is also weird because that doesn't match anything the cops have heard about any of

these other shootings that anyone got out of a car was visible to anyone at any time. So it's extra frustrating that they were like, well, I mean, you haven't told me but I presume that they were like, all right. Yeah. Oh, yeah. I mean, they basically spend, it takes them two or three days to figure out that this is false, that the only way they figure out that it's false is that they spot him on security camera footage inside the store.

And so then they're like, hang on a minute, wait a sec. But then this is also another one where somebody reports a blue, maybe Chevy Caprice at the crime scene. But because they spend so many days on this white van lead, they sort of by the time they realize that this guy's lying, they never kind of return to the lead about the Caprice. So they're like, oh, well, yeah, it turns out it's not the white van, but like we still know it's a white van. So we're going to keep looking for a white van.

Right. Like this hasn't challenged our assumption that it's a white van. Yeah. And so it's also around this time that Lee basically has a breakdown. So the first thing that he's really haunted by is that apparently when he shot this woman in the head, her husband looked at him. So her husband heard the shot and his, his eyes went toward where the shot was and Lee says that, you know, through the car or whatever, he could see this guy's eyes looking at him.

Wow. And he starts to get bad dreams and he says for weeks afterwards, he gets bad dreams. It's amazing that he's that fragile, right? Like he's, he's carrying out these killings like this zombie and then it's like someone makes eye contact with him. Yeah. And he's like, oh, oh no. Yeah.

These are people and it's like, yeah, like you're very capable of realizing that you just been trained not to. He's still in there somewhere. Yeah. The sort of sweet, smart kid is still there somewhere. And so he says that he starts throwing up in the mornings a lot. He says that if he catches a glimpse of himself in a mirror, he'll get nauseous. And this is also around the time that John asked him to kill a pregnant woman.

Oh my God. This was part of John's plan from the beginning that he wanted it to be as, as disturbing as possible. Like this is why he wanted to kill cops. He wanted to make it seem like total societal breakdown. And so he parks outside of a McDonald's and he tells Lee, don't come back. Don't stop until you shoot a pregnant woman. And so according to Lee, he sits there for like four hours just watching people come

in and out, no pregnant people come in or out. And so he just sort of gives up and John yells at him. And so this is, this is from his biography. As soon as I sat down, he asked, what happened? None didn't show up, sir. You mean to tell me you did not have one shot? There were targets everywhere, but your request was specific, sir. We're behind in numbers, Lee.

It doesn't matter. Oh my God. And so the, the sort of the third thing that pushes him over the edge is that at this time they're hanging out in Baltimore a lot and scoping out locations for this sort of phase two, phase three thing where they want to blow up a bunch of school buses. So he's now shooting more people, shooting a pregnant woman and planning this explosion at a funeral for a cop. John's plan is like more cinematic than any.

Yeah. Like he's the most cinematic serial killer I've ever heard of actually, like based on what he wanted to do. Like he's really, he's like Bane or something. And so John says to him, you can leave if you want, but disunity means death. And then Lee says in his biography, all those mantras he'd taught me, he's proven his sincerity by living up to them. Your work is your life.

So you want nothing? I shake my head. He looks me over from head to toe. You're pitiful. Get out. Leave. I grabbed some jeans, t-shirt and my boots, stuffed them in a duffel bag and exited the car.

I sat on the curb watching the Caprice get smaller and smaller as it drove away. I sat with my head between my knees. Slowly I began to cry then to outright sob. And then this is Karmita describing what Malbo's going through. Malbo cannot recall how long he sat there sobbing before he heard a car stop in front of him. He looked up and saw the big blue door of the Caprice swing open. No, no, no, don't get in.

He blinked rapidly and began to dry his tears. He recalled that Muhammad looked at him the way you would look at a piece of shit that you quickly sidestepped. Then staring down at him, Muhammad asked him sharply, are you done yet? Malbo nodded yes. Are you goddamn sure? Again, Malbo nodded yes. Get in, he finally said.

Oh my God. I feel like it shows the extent to which people can destroy each other with their emotions. It seems like he knows he hates what he's doing. He knows he can't stand to go on with it. And yet it's like he can't let that go. He can't be abandoned. He has to just keep doing it. He has to just keep killing.

And what else is there too, right? When you think about this kid with a double bag on the side of the road, what's he going to go to like a homeless shelter? He's never even been to DC before. He doesn't know where he is. He's in the random suburbs. Like he has nothing, no one else. Right.

So he's really seeing this as his only option emotionally, but also just logistically. I mean, he can't escape this person. He doesn't know what else to do. I feel like his only option is to like go live in the forest or something. And like, there are a number of so few Falcons in the area for one thing, you know, to capture and train. So we should, I mean, we should be clear. Like this is all from Lee's account.

We don't know how much of this account to believe. But according to him, he has a real mental breakdown at this point. Right. And so this is finally the part where we get to the thing that we have both been wanting to talk about since this series began, that we finally get to the criminal profilers. So what's amazing about this, and I feel like we've completely forgotten about this is that people hated the investigators. The investigators were really unpopular at the time.

Really? Like with the public or what? Yes, because we're now two weeks into this and they have no leads. They have nothing. The only thing they have is literally the white van. And we know now that's not even true. They have less than nothing. Like think about it.

They don't, they don't know if these people are from DC or from somewhere else. They don't know if it's one person or five people. They don't know if it's political or not. They don't know anything. They have no suspects. They have no leads. They have hundreds of thousands of calls to this tip line, but there's so much information coming in that they don't know what is relevant and what isn't.

So basically they have zero leads. And so one of the things that leads them to use criminal profilers is because that's all they have. They have nothing else. Right. So one of these government reports that I found says these are all of the investigators that are working on this case right now. Let me list these for you.

454 ATF agents, 59 ATF inspectors, 9 K9 hindlers, 101 support staff for laboratory, computer and intelligence work, 50 special agents from the US Secret Service, 600 FBI agents. The US Custom Service had provided two A star light lift helicopters with 20 person flight teams, as well as the on demand use of a Black Hawk helicopter. That's, that's like what, like 1500 people? Like how many people is that total? And that's not even counting the local people.

That's only the federal people. Oh my God. Yeah. That's astounding. And so as early as day two, the FBI has assigned profilers to this case. They're like, all right, profilers, it's your time to shine. Yeah. And so this drives me nuts.

They put together a five page profile, which is still secret. So we still do not know what was in there. There are press reports that say that it predicted a lone single white male in the mold of Ted Kozinski and Timothy McVeigh. So that's all we know about the official profile. And we don't know anything else about there, about the profiling. We also know that they brought in somebody called a geo profiler to look at the pattern of the locations to try to find out where people do crimes, I guess.

And one of the quotes from this geo profiler is, this is a preview of what we will learn in the next few minutes. Crimes occur fairly close to the offender's home, but not too close. They're like the porridge that Goldilocks take. So that's amazing. I want to be very clear that it's not clear how much the cops were affected by criminal profilers. We don't know.

It could be a lot. It could be a little. I would also say, though, that having come this far, I can't fault the profilers that much in a way because the serial killer in the story actually is functioning the way that serial killers do in media because he's like, he is out foxing the profilers and he's like kind of doing an impression of a Ted Kaczynski type or a hillside strangler, someone who's kind of, you know, playing cat and mouse a little bit and communicating with the authorities. He's behaving in a pretty meta way.

I think because he's forcing someone else to be a serial killer. So he has like a weird relationship to the crime. He's like a showrunner of his murders. Oh my God. But I mean, I don't want to blame the cops too much for the profilers. We simply don't know. But the place where the profilers were and where they really affected the discourse on this and the sort of social construction of the DC snipers was in all these hours of TV

that the networks had to fill. So there are two extremely good articles on the failure of criminal profilers in this case. One in the Columbia Journalism Review and one in the Baltimore Sun where they collated all of the predictions that the profilers made on TV. And then they went back and asked them about them afterwards, which is just like a dope methodology. That sounds like a really good supercut also. This is the supercut that I'm about to give you.

Oh my God. I'm so excited. So first of all, a lot of the profilers thought that it was significant that the shootings happened on weekdays. They're like, this is a weekend warrior. He has a day job. And then there was a shooting on a weekend. And so they didn't really matter anymore.

Almost all of them unanimously said that it was white males. I guess, yeah, they're like, well, most serial killers that we pay attention to are white males. So we think this guy is or what? Well, I mean, this is the whole issue with profiling, right? Is that you're only basing it on the profiles of the people you catch. Yeah. And on the very small, very small sample size.

Yeah. So here's the medley of all of the bad predictions. Bo Dietl, a retired New York City homicide detective, said he believed two white teenagers brainwashed by video games had styled themselves after Columbine shooters Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold. There's probably two skinny kids out there who've made a pact with each other. Dietl told the New York Times. And you know what?

He could have been right. There are no bad ideas in brainstorming. Sure. And you're like, let's make a bingo card and let's put Columbine two on there. Right. James Allen Fox and Northeastern University criminal justice professor said in the same article, it's probably just some introverted guy living by himself, working by himself, moving out the ultimate fantasy.

Blaming introverts. Fox's colleague, Jack Levin, a criminologist, told Larry King on October 18th during one of six appearances on King's show. He's probably a middle-aged guy. Truth is, he has other responsibilities in his life. He may be married. He may be playing with his children, watching football on Sunday, or he may have a part-time job.

Okay. And so when these reporters go back and point out to these people that like you were telling the public completely wrong information and just blindly speculating live on TV for hours and hours, the first reaction that they have, and I kind of love this, is that a lot of the profilers try to defend themselves. So one of them named Clinton Van Zandt said that he was correct that he predicted the shooters probably had honed their skills through practice. He's like, you know, I was right about that one.

It's kind of hard to hone your skill any other way. I think this one is a useful explanation of what profiling is and, you know, my problems with it. This is one named Candice DeLong who's also a retired FBI agent. So she had originally told the New York Times during the sniper shootings that she saw the sniper as into the stealth ninja stuff, walking around with a swagger, used to bossing people around, maybe a fireman or a construction worker. And then later when sort of asked to defend herself, she says, although the suspects were

neither construction workers nor firemen, DeLong says she correctly envisioned a macho profession because Muhammad had been a soldier. I mean, this is my whole thing, is that she says something kind of specific. It's maybe a fireman or a construction worker. It turns out to not be either one of those, but then she still says, well, I was right because it's a soldier. Right. She's like, no, no, I've expanded the category of my prediction and it's different from

the thing I said before. Right. Yeah. Being a good detective or being a good profiler in a way is like being a good tarot card reader because their job is to cook up a bunch of theories and some of them will be right and they have gotten significant things right and they've also gotten many more things wrong because that's, you come up with the right answer by coming up with a ton of possible answers and the only way that gets problematic is if you are selling those possibilities

or other people are selling those possible answers, it's like, this is what's going on and people have the capacity to know things this way and it's like, no, it's guessing. It's educated guessing. Well, yeah. I mean, ultimately you can blame it more on the networks than on the profilers themselves in some ways, right? Because it's like the issue is ultimately who is chosen to go on these shows. And how is their testimony being sold?

Yeah. I mean, one of them that I think this is really useful, one of them says that he actually, he was invited on MSNBC so many times that he started to feel uncomfortable about it and he got back to them and was like, look, I'm going on your show a lot. Like I really don't think that you're serving the public very well by having somebody like me on. You can have other people on or just cover a different news story and according to him, the MSNBC producer was like, look, if we don't get you, we're going to get somebody else.

And so to me, that's a chicken shit defense for yourself doing something bad, right? I'm like, if it wasn't me, you can literally defend any behavior on that basis. But I think he's also probably right that if he hadn't gone on, they would have had somebody else on. I'm sure he is. And I think you can also tell yourself in those circumstances, you can be like, well, I'm not super comfortable with this, but like, I can try and do a good job and do this more responsibly than maybe someone else would, which is how I felt about that oxygen show

I was on Ice Cold Justice with iced tea. Oh yeah. That's on your LinkedIn profile. This could be my Tinder profile. So here's the part where we get to the break in the case. Okay. Amazing. Again, we're going to have the unintentional comedy that happens within very sad stories.

So John and Lee have been trying to get through to the cops for weeks. John's entire plan depends on getting through to the cops and getting this sort of negotiation going, that he has to establish himself as a serial killer and he wants money, right? Like part of this is him getting a ransom of $10 million. Right. So on October 11th, they start calling this tip line and calling up and saying like, we're the DC Snipers. We want to engage in negotiations with you.

Hello, DC Snipers calling. Yes. But the problem is, first of all, I can't get through because the line is busy. Oh my God. Oh, this is so dumb. Secondly, the cops are getting hundreds of calls saying, I'm the DC Sniper. Oh no. Oh, they didn't predict this.

I'm sure John was like, and I'll immediately be like, yes. Oh my God. You know, he thinks he's going to be like John Doe showing up at the police station in seven. Yeah. But instead, they call one of these police departments, they call the Rockville City Police Department and they're like, hello, this is the DC Sniper. These are our demands.

And then this receptionist is just like, yeah, this is the city police department. You're going to call a county police department if you're the sniper. So she just sends them, like press one if you're the DC Sniper basically. I mean, according to her, she was getting like 25 to 50 of these a day. Yeah. They also try calling the public information officer, the communications department basically of one of these police departments. It's like they're trying to like get a permit to dig or something.

Yeah. They're like, who do we want to in city government about being the DC Sniper? And so they call this public information officer, but they're at a pay phone and they forget to put in enough coins. Oh my God. I'm the DC Sniper. Don't you know who? And this guy apparently is just like, huh, that was weird.

Crazy day. So in their desperation, I don't know who I think it's John that has this idea. This is like the stupidest idea. They come up with this idea of calling a priest and then asking the priest to call the cops because they think they're not getting through because like they're not whatever respected enough or something. So what happens is they go to the YMCA, they ask around like, what's the biggest Catholic church in the area?

And they're like, St. Stephens or whatever it is, Lee calls the priest and the priest picks up. He's like, hi, I'm the DC Sniper. I am God. He says all this kind of like stuff that, that John has scripted him to say. And then he says, call the cops, tell them the DC Snipers want to get in touch with them. And if they don't believe us that we're the DC Snipers, tell them to look into a shooting in Montgomery, Alabama, because remember they shot two people in Montgomery, Alabama.

That was where Kelly Adams got shot in the jawbone. And this is their plan to get the cops to take them seriously is to say, here's another crime that we've committed. We're linking ourselves to this crime that the cops probably aren't looking into because they're not linking this to the DC Snipers. So this is their like identification or their like social security number to say, you should take us seriously. Well, and I also, I would just assume I would be like, you know what, I've learned some

stuff in movies about how hard it is to trace a phone call, but I'm going to assume that if I like open a line of communication with the police and like with a federal task force of over a thousand people, which I probably know, and I'm like, hey, I'm the serial killer you're looking for. And I'm going to say things that kind of prove I really am that person. And I don't think you're going to find me through this avenue of contact I'm opening. Like that's wild that he assumes that they're not. I mean, I would really, is it crazy for me to be judgey and say I would exercise more

caution than that? Well, but this is, I mean, this is the whole thing of like, is this a criminal mastermind? Right. No. Or is this someone who like really was not thinking this plan through at all? Yeah, no, because this is a bad idea. Yeah, you're giving them more clues because they had nothing. And now you're giving like, they know they're going to know so much about you from the first second you start talking to them.

Exactly. However, the priest thinks that it's a prank call and he doesn't tell the cops. So nothing comes of that. So essentially the only way that they have of getting the cops attention is to kill someone again, because nothing else is working. That's really it's that looks bad. It's bad. I think that that looks bad for the cops, that the serial killers are earnestly attempting

to get their attention and just can't. And they're like, well, we got to kill someone else. And so on October 19th, this is their second to last shooting. They shoot a guy named Jeffrey Hopper as he's coming out of the Ponderosa steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia. And so luckily he ends up living after the shooting police find a note that finally has logistics for how they can get in touch with Lee and John. It's a handwritten note.

It's four pages long. And a lot of it is Lee and John complaining about all of the times they've tried to get in touch with the cops and haven't been able to get through. Justifiably so. So they list all of the phone calls. They list the nine phone calls that they've made to the police. So it's like a bad Yelp review. If I were the police and I were reading this, I would be like, yeah, this is a realistic

grievance. We should have some ability to like, yeah. It's also amazing. They make all these demands about $10 million in the credit card account, et cetera, et cetera. And they say, failure to comply with these demands by 6 a.m. tomorrow morning will result in another death. And the cops don't find it until 9 a.m. the next morning.

So the deadline is already passed. So the true crime books say, some of them say that it was found, but it wasn't quote unquote processed by then. I don't know what to believe. I don't know what processed means, because probably like the first thing that you would do when you find it is read it. Is read it. I know.

This is why I think they didn't find it and they're trying to cover their asses. I have no evidence for this. So I should say very clearly. This is your Nancy Grace moment. Yeah. I also don't know what processed means. The only thing I can think of is maybe they didn't open the envelope and still test until testing it for anthrax or something like that.

Maybe. Right. Or like fingerprinting the envelope and stuff like that. Yeah. John and Lee also make a number of other logistical blunders in this note that the first thing is they're demanding $10 million be transferred into this account onto a credit card. And so first of all, this is the credit card that they stole from the Greyhound bus driver in Arizona, which the cops know because it's been reported stolen.

And they know that it was a driver that drove from Arizona to Bellingham. So that gives them two more pieces of information about the killers. Like everything they do, every demand they make, they create data points. Yes. It's extremely dumb. And they say like their whole plan is to get $10 million transfer onto this card and then they'll just withdraw it as cash from wherever they want. That's not even how credit cards work.

Yeah, exactly. And they can only get $300 a day. So like when the cops are looking at this, they're like, is their plan to get $300 a day of their $10 million ransom? Like is this actually their plan? And then it's like they have to get on the phone with a credit card company and be like, hey, we're the GC Snipers. We need to raise our withdrawal limit.

And then apparently because the cops missed the deadline, Lee then has to call them and say, you guys missed the deadline. So John and Lee basically set it up so that they say, we're going to call you at the Ponderosa Steakhouse at this time. OK. And they missed the deadline. The cops aren't there at the deadline, but then they end up calling the Ponderosa Steakhouse later. And the cops have already set it up so that it automatically routes to like the

whatever headquarters task force thing. So finally, they are in touch with the DC Snipers on the phone. But they're calling on a pay phone with a really bad connection. It's like a bad Skype call. So they're like, give us $10 million. And the cops are like, what? Give you what? 10 what?

Where? That's the whole call. So they can't actually communicate. I really appreciate that this is like, that John is trying to be the cinematic serial killer. And now he's being undermined by all the little problems in daily life that serial killers and media are so above. Like I imagine if like having Spacey in seven, you know, he's trying to carry out one of these elaborate murders and then like he can't get the right equipment.

And he's like, oh, I tried to special order this thing I need for this torture I'm doing. And it doesn't come from Thailand yet. And so after this phone call, they don't really have any meaningful conversation. The police trace John and Lee's call back to an Exxon station where there's a pay phone. This is the phone that Lee and John called from. And so they trace it back. They see that there's a white van parked near the pay phone. I feel like about the police and the white van, the way you feel about a friend who's

like pursuing a guy who you're just like, oh my God, just move on. Like this is not a guy. Yeah, it's just like, okay, I do not want to hear about another white van. Well, what ends up happening is, you know, hundreds of these cops to send on this pay phone like, hey, we got him white van, pay phone done. Oh no. Turns out it's two random undocumented immigrant guys from Mexico and Guatemala and they get deported.

Oh my God. So it's like this weird asterisk and all this is that like there's this day of jubilation of like, yeah, we got it, two men, white van they called. And then you can only imagine what this interrogation was like. I think that's the most embarrassing thing that's happened yet in this investigation. Yeah. And so three days after that is their final murder. This is when they shoot Conrad Johnson, this guy who's also a Jamaican immigrant who we

talked about in episode two. Lee's description of this appears to be wrong. Lee says in his book that they're driving around and they find a bus stop and Conrad is a bus driver. And so they shoot him as he's sort of pulling up to this bus stop, it's actually a bus depot like where the buses park kind of overnight before you start your shift. So there's a lot of these weird little details that are off in Lee's account that always make me kind of like, huh, what's what's going on here?

It's a weird detail to get wrong. And so there's another note on the grassy knoll above where Conrad Johnson is shot. The note says your incompetence has cost you another life. And again, they shut down all the roads, again, they don't find any evidence of the snipers. However, as all of this is going on, the police have been investigating this lead in Montgomery, Alabama, that in the background, they've gone to Alabama, they've talked to the investigators there, they've gotten a partial fingerprint off of this gun magazine, remember that fell out of Lee's pocket as he was running away.

The Alabama authorities have already run that in all the databases and come back totally empty. However, they haven't run it against the immigration database. And so if you recall, when Lee and his mother were arrested by the INS in Bellingham and taken to immigrant detention, they were fingerprinted. And so the minute the FBI runs that against the INS database, then they come back with, hey, Lee Boyd Melvo. And then they send people to Bellingham to start asking around.

And of course, immediately they go to Lighthouse Mission, they find out, hey, he's been hanging out with this guy named John Muhammad. Then they start looking into John Muhammad. And remember their army buddy in Tacoma, Robert Holmes, who was like a friend of theirs but got sort of increasingly creeped out by John, he called the cops October 15th during the sniper attacks and was basically like, look, I don't know if this means anything, but like there's a buddy of mine who acts really weird and used to be doing a ton of sniper training and he walked around with his random 17 year old kid who had a t-shirt that said Sniper

on it for like a long time. Wow. Just thought I'd let you know. So once, because they have this tip database, all 100,000 of tips have been logged according to location. So they do have them on file and are able to refer back to them. So then they can go back to Robert Holmes and be like, give us some more information on this guy.

But from there, it's basically just falling dominoes, right? That the minute it leads you to John, that leads you to Mildred and that leads you to the restraining order that leads you to, oh, hey, she's outside of DC. And then all of them, that gives you all of this other information about like, okay, now we've got connections between this kid and this random guy, John. And so what's interesting again is there isn't really any probable cause to arrest John at this point because all they have is a tip from this priest who says, some random person called me on the phone and said, look into Montgomery, Alabama.

That's it. This isn't necessarily the DC Sniper. They don't know this is the DC Sniper at this point, right? So what they have to do to get an arrest warrant to arrest John is they have to use the restraining order that Mildred has because he has a lifetime restraining order and the fact that there's a record of him buying a gun in Bellingham, Washington, which you're not allowed to do if somebody has a restraining order against you. So this is where people finally contact Mildred and people finally get interested in the domestic

abuse aspect of the case because they can use the restraining order to get a excuse to arrest John and interrogate him. And this is where she says, why are you only talking to me now? Exactly. Yeah. And so this is kind of, this is lights out. I mean, they start looking at John Moore, they find out that he registered the blue Caprice in New Jersey under his real name, which is also like not criminal mastermind

thing to do at all. So they've now got the name of John, the name of Lee, the make and model of the car and the license plate of the car. And so they tell the press, we're looking for two people, we've got two people of interest. We don't want to say that they're snipers, but we're very interested in them. We're not going to release the make and model of the car. We're not going to release the license plate. Everybody calm down.

And then on the radio scanner, how they communicate with each other, they're like, it's a blue Caprice. Here's the license plate number. And so all the, all the press is listening to the scanners all the time now anyway. So like within minutes, it's first Fox News and then everybody else is like, Fox News is now reporting that this is the license plate number. And then it's everywhere. I feel like that could have created a mob.

You know, like people had spotted him in a highly populated area. And so the guy that eventually calls them in, he hears on talk radio the name of the car and the license plate number and he writes the license plate number down because it's like so important to him like, Hey, in case I ever see this, pulls into a rest stop and he sees a Caprice like, Hey, that's the Caprice and he's like, Hey, that's the license plate number. Wow. And I love the, the weird irony of this that the guy that calls in the tip that leads to

the arrest of John and Lee is in a white van. He's not like a refrigeration specialist or like a bunch of random equipment in the back. He's like, finally, our long national nightmare is over as white van drivers. And so he stays on the phone with the cops for three hours as they're planning, like, how do we do this? Wow. Then the cops get there.

They, there's a bunch of truckers in the rest stop. They ask the truckers to pull their trucks across the road so that Lee and John can't leave. This is very dramatic. Oh yeah. I mean, this is like, you know, the end of a three week long manhunt, a lot of these cops haven't slept in days. I mean, this is all the like mages pregnant stuff that I've been skipping in this episode,

but like all the cops are totally at the end of their rope and really want this to be the sniper. Yeah. And so they see John and Lee sleeping in the car. So they're just sleeping, they're just asleep the whole time and all this is being done around them. Lee was supposed to stay up and keep watch, but he fell asleep. This is just like two dudes sleeping in a car in the seats for a client.

And so one of these troopers walks up to the car, breaks the passenger side window, throws in a flash grenade. Wow. And so they really explode, explode, but it just makes like a bright light and a really loud noise. It's just super disorienting. And they reach in, they grab Lee, they grab John, they pull him both out. And basically for the first like 30 minutes, nobody thinks they're the snipers.

Really? Yeah. They're like, ah, shit. We just got these two like homeless guys. It's clear they haven't showered in a couple of days. Well, but why is that mutually exclusive? Well, think about it. What have we been?

What have we learned about serial killers? What have we been seeing on TV? Right. They're all white geniuses. Yeah. And also we've got these two loser dudes wearing like stinky jeans in like this gross car full of like Wendy's wrappers and like dumb books. Clear they're living in the car and it's like, ah, we're not looking for these losers.

We're looking for like a fancy guys. Yeah. And so it's only once they finally start searching the car, they find the gun, they find everything out the laptop. Wow. All this other like extremely promising circumstantial evidence that it's like, oh yeah, these are definitely snipers. It's like what mental image did you have?

Yeah. Same people. And so that's, that's it. That's the arrest. That's not the end of the show. But yeah, that's the DC sniper text. That's this section of the story. And I think before we move on to the interrogations and the trials, it's worth noting that just

as a story, the cops and robbers cat and mouse section of the DC sniper text is not all that interesting. If you think about it, it's basically the cops spent the first two weeks of this crime chasing down the wrong lead that they were focused on the white vans. And then at the beginning of the third week, the snipers essentially gave themselves up. They gave the cops a clue to who they were. So this wasn't really solved through any particular ingenuity by the police. Like they weren't looking into the Alabama shooting anyway.

They weren't saying, look, let's look into all of the other sniper style attacks that happened in America in the previous year and see if they're connected. No, they basically got this clue that fell into their lap and they chased it down. So I don't want to sort of take anything away from the police that really did work very hard on this. Yeah. But it's mostly John and Lee's mistake that solved this crime. I mean, it's interesting to me that they did create the situation where they inevitably

got taken in because I do feel like it's possible that John, not, I don't think in a way he was consciously aware of, I don't think he would admit this to himself, but I can see him on some level being like, I'm tired of doing this. Yeah. And then it's interesting that they did this before they went through with trying to kill Mildred. Like what does that say to you? I mean, it's a thing.

They shot 13 people and killed 10. And so if their plan was just to kill Mildred, they would have probably done it somewhere in there, right? Right. Or like he was established that there's a serial killer within the first four or five killings. Yeah. Yeah.

There's something else going on there. I think that was his plan. But I also think that he's a person who's never been capable of sticking to a plan his whole life and he's someone who changes his plans on the fly and he's someone who's extremely impulsive and selfish and he really goes by his moods much more than anything else in ways that he's not capable of admitting to himself, right? I mean, as we discussed, he has this whole facts and logic ideology, but he's driven 100% by resentment and by how he feels at any given moment.

And so I can see him concocting this big plan to kill Mildred with all of this subterfuge and then just kind of not feel like it, right? I mean... Or be like, oh, I like being a serial killer and terrorizing a large metropolitan area. Let's do that for a while. Sure. In the same way, he has this plan every single day to kill five people and then after lunch, he's like, oh, I'm a little tired, let's go to the YMCA and he doesn't do it.

And then it's more like the describing of the plans maybe matters more than the carrying out of the plans. Yeah. And so there's also something interesting even in the concept of what is his motivation here because obviously his motivation is Mildred. I mean, that's the precipitating event, but then on another level, maybe he never would have gone through with it. Or like the fact that having, you know, surrendering his children made him feel powerless and so

he decided that she was his target. And then I can see also, you know, having this feeling of powerlessness and then going on this killing spree and then being like, oh, this is satisfying my feeling of powerlessness. I'm going to focus on that for a while. Yeah. Yeah. But it's just his trauma combined with mental illness, combined with frustration that his life hadn't turned out the way that it wanted to.

And he had this one figure that he was able to blame for all of it and that annihilating her would somehow redeem him, I guess. Right. And then he would also put off doing that because once you have killed her and realized that you don't feel different and you don't feel better than like you can't do it again. Yeah. And there was no indication through all these crimes that he ever tried to contact Mildred. He wasn't calling her or, you know, calling her and hanging up that we know of.

He wasn't showing up outside her house. He never tried to contact her to like, you know, plead with her to give back the kids. Like during these shootings, it's not clear whether he was driven by that anymore. So even determining what is his motivation and like, did he even have a motivation is really tricky. Yeah. Or did he know what it was? Yeah.

He was after they were arrested. So they both go into interrogation. They, of course, go into separate interrogations. John says a couple statements. They sort of ask him like, hey, buddy, what's your deal? Hey, buddy. And then he, you know, he tells them like his life story and it's interesting the things that he embellishes.

He's like, oh yeah, you know, I used to work, used to be in the army, moved my kids to Antigua. You know, I had a big condo on the beach there and then, you know, kind of keeps on describing it. And it's like, it's just such a weird lie in the middle of everything else. Yeah. I guess you and yourself seem more affluent than you were in Antigua. Like it's, it's classic John, right? That he's just like, he can't not exaggerate things even in a situation where like it doesn't

matter at this point. Well, I guess that like he's always describing himself as he wishes to be and in this situation. It's like, that's, that's what I want my life to have been. Yeah. So that's what I'll describe. So John doesn't really say anything in the interrogations because he lawyers up really quickly. And there's some really interesting stuff from Lee.

So when they bring in Lee, first of all, he tries to escape. First thing he does, they take him to the sort of temporary interrogation facility, whatever. He breaks a leg off of a table. He climbs up. He tries to get out the ceiling. They stop him from doing that. They kind of bring him down. He soils himself.

They have to find a shower for him and some clothes. And then it's just very clear from the descriptions of this interrogation that he's like deeply mentally ill and traumatized. And so this is an excerpt from the Sniper Book. Malva refused to say anything, running his fingers along his lips as if zipping them closed. But in a bizarre pantomime, he responded by using hand signs nodding his head and drawing imaginary shapes in the air and on the table.

To the detectives, it seemed as if Malva was playing a game. For the most part, he seemed cocky as if he was enjoying himself. Ryan, that's the investigator, Ryan told Malva that a lot of evidence had been found at the scene of the Conrad Johnson murder. This would later say it included the duffel bag, an earplug, and clear plastic goggles. Ryan told Malva that it looked as if something had happened that had caused him to leave things behind at the scene. Malva nodded again and his eyes filled with tears.

Malva then grasped the collar of the coveralls and began to rock in his chair. This is a quote from the officer who actually interrogated him. His rambling rhetoric was often times interrupted with, sorry, dad. When I asked what he was sorry for, his face fell and with eyes downcast, he responded that he fell asleep. At this point, he just feels bad that it was his watch that he was supposed to stay up and he fell asleep. And John's going to be mad at him.

Yeah. He comes off to the interrogators as kind of flighty and kind of spacey and they can't really figure out whether he's smart or dumb, but then he's very careful not to incriminate John. In all of his statements, he talks about how terrible he is, about how he did the shootings, he confesses to them, he talks about them in detail, but whenever they say, did he tell you to, what about him? Where was he?

He refuses to answer and gets really vague. So in some ways he's very emotionally driven and then in some ways you can tell that he's calculating this, that he's not going to tell them anything about John. And so there's then a couple of months of really gross jurisdictional wrangling because every prosecutor in every jurisdiction wants to prosecute the DC snipers. This is a career making case. So they have a big game of cornhole to see who gets to do it. I would just love to see like four guys named Jeremy squaring off with bracketed fisty

cuffs to decide who gets to prosecute this. And then this is the statement about two weeks after the end of the DC sniper shootings. This is the statement from Attorney General Joan Ashcroft, who basically steps in and just says they're going to be tried separately, two separate trials, two separate counties, both in Virginia. And so this is from the New York Times. He said the venues were picked because they have the best law, the best facts and the best range of available penalties.

Virginia also has executed more people than any other state except Texas and is one of the few states that permits the execution of juveniles. Oh good. Mohamed Amalbo have each been charged with capital murder under a statute that makes it a capital offense to kill more than once within three years. They have also been charged with violating Virginia's new anti-terrorism law that makes it a capital offense to intimidate the public and coerce a government. So this is an anti-terrorism law that was passed in the wake of 9-11 that has never

been used before. What I find impressive about all this is that they had this buffet of crimes taking place in states, including Georgia and Alabama, and they were like, no, let's take him to Virginia. Yeah. And it worked. So the trial is the longest trial in the history of Virginia, apparently it took six weeks.

John's trial? Six weeks. That's our longest trial. I guess. At the time anyway. I feel like California is over there, like, must be nice. And it's actually, I mean, this is a very difficult thing to talk about. I feel like we had this thing where most of the miscarriages of justice that we talk about

are about innocent people. And John's trial was bullshit. Oh yeah. You can have, listen. I am the first to jump on the bandwagon of arguing that you can be ill-served by our legal system and your trial can be a miscarriage of justice and you can be obviously guilty. Yeah. And I think we certainly pay more attention to cases in which someone who's obviously

or quite probably innocent is convicted, but I don't think that those are really where the numbers are. Yeah. Like I think there are a lot of those cases. I think that they deserve all the attention we can possibly give them. But I also think the majority of miscarriages of justice in our American legal system have to do with people who did do something, not receiving due process. That matters also.

Yeah. And so the problems with this case are huge. First of all, they let John represent himself. Oh no. I have no idea why people are allowed to do that. It seems like something that would have made sense in 1780, but really doesn't today. Well, I mean, there's also the issue of John's mental capacity, right? So they don't allow any information into the trial about his mental health.

So a lot of his appeals later are about, was this guy fit to represent himself? Like did he really understand what was going on? Because he's been diagnosed paranoid schizophrenic. He has head trauma. It's not clear he understood the implications of this. And that's only one of the minor errors in the case, but there's also this terrorism statute, which has never been used before, is essentially it's the perfect way of polluting the jury pool.

Because this terrorism statute, it's basically designed for if you're a member of whatever Al-Qaeda, you planned to blow up a school bus, somebody else does it. So you're not actually there, but you directed it, you helped, you planned it. You can get the death penalty if you were part of planning it, even if you didn't actually press the detonator or whatever. That's the purpose of this law. And so this is the law that they use to try John, because there's no evidence that John actually killed anybody.

Okay. That's interesting. So it's like terrorism as a way of bringing in conspiracy charges. Well, what the appeals in John's case end up noting, because there's an appeal that's filed after his conviction with, I think it's like 114 errors that were made during the trial, some of which I find more convincing than others, frankly, but the issue with statutes like this is because you're defining terrorism as a thing that intimidates the public. And so the public is the real victim.

That's basically the argument that you're making. But then when you go out and try to find a jury pool, the problem is that so much of John's trial was basically about telling the jurors, don't you remember when your soccer games were canceled? Don't you remember how afraid you were that they're using the jury as victims of the crime? Wow. The jury is finding in favor of their own victimhood. Exactly, which is just, it's like this mobius strip of easy convictions.

That's a weird area, because the jury is not, I think it's inappropriate for jurors to see themselves as victims of the defendant that they are, and who's guilt they are deciding. Yes. Right? So I don't know if you ever could have gotten an impartial jury for this trial ever, but still, I mean, to then add on top of that, you, it's up to you as a member of the public who's been harmed to deliver justice. And you know, what's interesting is they only charge him with one murder, right?

It's only this guy, Dean Myers, who was killed in Virginia that they're trying him for. However, they spend this entire six weeks because John essentially amounts to no defense. He only calls a couple of witnesses. He doesn't understand how the law works. Because his own lawyer is incompetent to perform the duties of a defendant, probably. Exactly. So it's basically a six week long show trial of how many crimes he's committed and how bad he is.

So they bring in, they bring in the Kenya cook killing. They bring in the liquor store robberies. They bring in all of the other sniper shootings. They bring in his entire life story. They spend six weeks telling them about basically everything wrong he's ever done in his life. All of which are like, as we've covered on the show are true. But it's like, you know, maybe focus on this one murder that you have that was terrible in its own right.

You have plenty of evidence to convict him of the murder related charge that you've landed on. Like just focus on that. Yeah. And also, I mean, the only people that are actually putting him at the scene of the crime are two witnesses who say they saw a blue Chevy Caprice near the crime. So they have a weak case for that particular murder and they have to just bring in all this extraneous stuff.

Yeah. They just throw in frosting on what they've got. And of course, he has no capacity. I mean, is he objecting to anything? Is he doing anything in his own interest? No. Because he doesn't know what he's doing whenever he cross-examines witnesses, the professional lawyers, the prosecutors will file objections over and over and over again, and then the

judge will typically sustain them because John doesn't know what he's allowed to do on cross-examination and not. And even if he did know what he was allowed to do, they would still be doing that and it would be a matter of him having to, you know, do this like professionally or something to be able to keep his composure. So what's weird is, I mean, there's also, there's just no evidence that he pulled the trigger at all. Right.

There's terrorism laws, it's own strange beast, but it's also just odd to have a murder trial at which there's no evidence that he's actually pulled the trigger. We don't know if he was in the car, was he out of the car with a walkie-talkie. I mean, what I'm curious about is, like, if someone were to try and prosecute him for what he did to Lee, would there be significant charges there? Would it be worth seeking them? Well, it's also very odd and I think a really big structural weakness of the criminal justice system that while they're prosecuting this trial where they're saying, John was the mastermind,

John killed all these people, John killed Kenya Cook, John killed everybody, one county over in Lee's trial, they're saying, John didn't do anything. Lee was the mastermind. Lee did everything. They're calling Lee the mastermind? Yeah. The teenager? Yes, because Lee is mounting a defense basis of insanity that he was indoctrinated.

So he is arguing, I should be not guilty because I was indoctrinated by somebody else. So the state is saying, John didn't indoctrinate you in one trial and they're saying, John indoctrinated somebody else in another trial at the same time. So it's like, I guess, want like a Ron Howard-narrated supercut of all this where like, we have these two prosecutions adjacent to each other, which are based on diametrically opposed arguments. Exactly. And they both work. They're both convicted.

I don't think that they should go free, but like, I just think that it's, you know, you should be able to convict someone of what they've actually done using actual evidence. It's not necessary to convict him of things he didn't do. Like you can just convict him of the crimes he did commit. Yeah, he did really bad stuff. It's fine. Like why do you have to play dirty when you already have so much going for you? That's the thing.

I mean, there's no scenario in which he would have been not guilty, right? I mean, there's a question over the death penalty, but there's also just the basic fair trial. Like you want people to be tried for the things that they did and you also want facts to be established. They didn't really establish very much. I mean, this is why we still know so little about John now is because none of the evidence of domestic abuse was able to be brought at trial.

Because they were trying him as a terrorist and it was not relevant to the case they were making. Yeah, they couldn't, they couldn't bring it in because then it would imply that his motivation, if there's any motivation other than terrorism. Oh, would imply he has non-terrorist motives, so they're actually, you know, hiding relevant aspects of the truth from the jurors. So that's fantastic. And also Lee can't testify because Lee has confessed to all the shootings.

Right. So Lee is saying that it was me, John didn't do anything. I think that a trial where you're like actively trying to hide the truth. Not great. Yeah, it's not, you know, I think I would hope that like as you're prosecuting this, you would have a moment of being like, are we the baddies? If his crimes don't fit a death penalty charge, then like we can just content ourselves with life in prison.

Like I, I'm never going to understand then, you know, the sense of need for the death penalty. So I'm, I'm missing something here, but I'm not fond of this. And also once all these appeals start to come up from John, they then try him for the six murders that took place in Maryland to make the case more watertight. But to make it so like there's no point in appealing anymore because he's just going to have a life sentence in Maryland as well. Right.

So like, why bother? Yeah. So in 2006, they try him in Maryland for the other six. It's a very fast trial. It's like the jury deliberates for something like five hours and they convict him again. Does he have a lawyer in that trial? No. And I think his, his mind has deteriorated more.

I think he, his closing argument is three hours and 20 minutes long and it's just like a rant about like the CIA framed me and the DNA evidence was fake and, you know, the whole world is against me. I mean, it's just like rant. And eventually, I guess the judge stops him and after three and a half hours, the judge is like, that's enough, John. You're just not making any sense, you know, because like he has lawyers, they're making legal arguments for him in documents, but it's like the minute you talk to actual John,

the guy's just living in this complete fantasy world. It's not clear at that point if he knows he's lying. It's just like, you know, you should be able to convict someone without them not having a lawyer and there's, there's nothing for him to torpedo here. He could have the best possible representation and I'm sure he would have gotten the death penalty anyway. So I don't know why we couldn't have just done this fairly. Yeah.

And so John is executed on November 10th, 2009. There's a bunch of appeals, but I've read a bunch of them. The judges are basically just like LOL nice try. Like nobody takes seriously any of the procedural problems with this trial because they're basically like, well, we all know you did it. Like this is absurd. Like this is a joke. And what's, I mean, after doing all the work I did on white collar crime and all of the

procedural things that rich, white, nonviolent offenders use to get their convictions overturned, it's actually an interesting case study in the ways that when we're sure of someone's guilt and when we're sure of the harm that someone has done like John Allen Muhammad, we're fine with saying, fuck the procedures, fuck due process, fuck a fair trial. You did it. Why get bogged down in this technical stuff? And then when it comes to like CEOs, we're like, oh, we couldn't possibly let these procedural things go by.

I mean, it's like, you know what, both of these things can be true. Like he can be guilty and he can have a point. Yeah. You know, even if you don't care what happens to John Allen Muhammad or whether he lives or dies or how, having bad law on the books affects everyone who comes after. Yeah. Yeah. And it could be you.

Dun, dun, dun. Gung, gung. So I'm going to end with Lee's trial or trials. Lee attempts a defense where he admits to doing all of the killings, but he pleads insanity by reason of indoctrination. Which based on what we've heard, I would say is a pretty reasonable defense. Well, I mean, I have been reading up on this defense. It has, according to a 2010 article, it had never been used successfully.

I don't know if it's been used successfully since then. What did that like? How does, how is it defined legally as a concept? Well, it's basically you're not able to differentiate between right and wrong because you've internalized somebody else's definitions of right and wrong so strongly that you have lost any sense of your own selfhood. It's essentially the same principle they use when they talk about child soldiers. So experts that testified his trial said that he lost all sense of morality, all sense of

identity and became little more than an extension of Mr. Muhammad's ego. And so they, I think it's like 40 different experts testify at his trial about brainwashing as a concept and about everything that was done to Lee, all of the abuse that he suffered, the trauma, all of the internalization, the weird stuff about the bad nutrition that he had, all of the things that broke down all of his psychological defenses to someone like John. And the prosecution's case is essentially that because Lee was suicidal during the sniper attacks, that proves that he knew that what he was doing was wrong.

It's an interesting argument. It's basically that like, Lee felt bad and you don't feel bad about something unless you know it's wrong. And so therefore he knew it was wrong. Therefore he wasn't indoctrinated. I mean, I feel like my view of it is that he did understand it was wrong, but he also felt deprived of any kind of choice or agency. Yeah.

He didn't see any other option other than doing the wrong thing. But the problem with that is that then you're admitting that he knows what the right thing is. Right? Powerlessness is not the same as lack of knowledge. And so I think this is one of the reasons why this defense is so difficult is because most people know what right and wrong is. It's just they can't actuate that view.

And that's basically where Lee was. And he was also a fucking juvenile for most of us too. I mean, there's also the idea of, indoctrination would be hard if he was like 24, but the fact that we're talking about a 15 to 17 year old kid makes me anyway slightly more open to this, that we're not talking about somebody with like a fully formed set of morality or like emotional defenses against somebody like John. And so he's also convicted. He gets a life sentence.

And then since then he's been appealing. There's been all this stuff happening very recently about whether or not he's eligible for parole. The Supreme Court said that juveniles shouldn't be sentenced to life without parole. And that was going to go to the Supreme Court. But then Virginia just passed a law saying that from now on, all people who committed crimes when they were juveniles must be eligible for parole. So Lee is technically eligible for parole in either 2022 or 2024 depending on like which

account you read, but then he's also convicted in Maryland. So if he was ever actually going to go free, they would also have to get him parole in Maryland. So it's not clear what's going to happen. And then we found out, I hate this because things are happening now and I hate talking about stuff that happens now on this show. I know me too. It's terrible.

It's like people are like, I can't wait for your coronavirus episode. It's like, yes. And you can expect it in 18 years. I know. Seriously. And this morning, this morning, somebody sent us a link that he just got married in prison and we just found out the identity of his bride is this some lady who's like a very wealthy but like very far left like social justice person.

And like, I don't know. He's married. Carmita was at his wedding. He appears to be happy. This other person, the person that he's married, I don't really know anything about her. And like in general, I just think that if people are happy in their relationships, it's none of my business. So I really have like no, I have like no thoughts on, on that aspect at all.

I'm picturing you with like your hands up like, ah, don't come at me. Do you feel like you're being called on to like talk about Lee Boyd Malvo's marriage? To like weigh in. I don't want to weigh in. It seems fine. He seems like we have very incomplete information right now and he seems fine. Oh yeah. And so I want to end with this one last moment from Carmita's book that really stuck with

me about the person that Lee is now and sort of how we feel about this entire case. First of all, I really like this quote from Mildred that Mildred has shown a lot of grace toward Lee because her children, they remember Lee from Antigua. He was like a big brother to them. And so she has been involved with his family, with his trial. She's been kind of around him and she knows him. And so what she says as John is executed in 2009, they asked her about Lee and she says, I think he was a victim.

He was a kid looking for a parent coming under John's control was a gradual thing. I understand how that can happen. I'm like, if anybody can understand how it happens, it's Mildred. And so Carmita, this author who spent months interviewing Lee and years researching his life and she went down to Jamaica and interviewed all these friends of his and people that he knew growing up, when she interviewed, she interviewed 40 people and all of them, she asked them to record a video message to Lee with their memories of him. So she talks to Simone and she talks to his best friends from school and she talks to

his old principals and Miss Maxwell. And so they all record these little video messages about him. And so about halfway through his trial in prison, she's able to play this entire video for him. And so this is a little excerpt from it. As the video was played, Malvo saw for himself that he was not a piece of garbage that was thrown aside. He was loved and engendered much admiration for many people.

He watched with delight and listened to his schoolmates speak lovingly for him. He pointed out places that he'd frequented as a child. As his teachers talked about him and his helpfulness, he acknowledged that he derived much satisfaction from helping and sharing. The high point of his viewing was when he heard his Aunt Marie sing for him the hymn, Great is Thy Faithfulness. As his aunt's voice echoed in that tiny interview room, Malvo began to sing along with her. His voice started as a whisper then reached a crescendo.

Suddenly his face crumbled and his body trembled with sobs. It was as though he was tearfully finding a reconnection to his Jamaican roots and to the Christian faith he knew before Muhammad took over his life. I made a promise to myself at age 11 that never again would I cry like this. And now you have made me break that promise, he said. And it's just, I find that a really complex emotional moment. This is someone who was sent to prison for something that was really awful. And he did things that are completely inexcusable.

And in prison, he's had calls with a lot of the victims and victims' families. And there is someone still in there that seems like this sweet kid that he was before Una and John made him the person that he was. And so I sort of tear up reading that, but then I also tear up hearing people talk about what they've gone through since they were shot by Lee. Right? Like I think all of those things are true. The fact that pain creates pain doesn't mean that these forms of trauma have to compete

with each other or compete for our attention or for our care. I think we can let all of this in. I think we're strong enough for that. Yeah. And so that's our story. That's the end of our DC Snipers series. Wow. You don't need questions.

I mean, I just can't believe that we're done. Right? Yeah. I look forward to 2037 when we're done with the OJ Simpson series. As we both collect our social security checks. Boy. I feel like we need some closure. I feel like I did when I finished watching the abyss that directors cut.

Oh my God. And I was like, what do I do now? I didn't know independently how central a part of the story abuse would be. I'm also not surprised by it. And I feel like I think what I'm going to remember about all of this, like these whole, however many hours of narrative that we've done is the shirt story. Like if I want to describe everything we've talked about to someone in a nutshell, to me that's the shirt story.

And then it's like by what you pick to represent something long and complicated, you're showing yourself what you deem to be the core of it. And I think for me, it's, you know, how could this happen? How could these many people be murdered? What would cause someone to destroy this many human lives? And there are many possibilities. And the one that we find here is, you know, there was a child with a love void and a manipulative narcissist who was perfectly positioned to take advantage of that.

And you see, you know, these ingredients meeting each other. And to me, just like the key part of all that that like made Lee hackable the way that he was and like that made all this happen is just like the emotional desolation that is described by shirt story. Like if you were to give someone, if someone were like, tell me about the last four part podcast series you did. If you had like 45 seconds and you were at a loud party and you were like, it's about X, X and Y.

First of all, it would stand at least six feet away. Secondly, I mean, a big thing is what you said a couple of episodes ago is that we have this idea that there's like, we couldn't possibly explain what's in the mind of a killer and how the great mystery of the mastermind who brings the society to its knees. And then oftentimes there is a pretty simple answer behind it. And it is oftentimes some version of like they had a really shitty childhood. And that's about it. It's going to be something we already know the answer to, but we'd rather keep asking

the question than deal with the answer. And because the implications of the answer are that humanity is a very fragile thing and that human beings can fairly easily become dangerous to themselves or each other in a great many ways. The things that break us are the things that we wish weren't capable of breaking us, but they are. So we can't argue with that. So that's our lesson to you at the end of 300 hours of this.

I think this was a very comforting program. Did I stutter? Yeah. I think that's the biggest take away. Find the Alevias. Yes. And like be the Alevia you wish to be in the world. Boom.