Muhammad was born John Allen Williams in Louisiana in 1960, served in the United States Army including in the Gulf War, and took the name Muhammad after converting to Islam. By 2002 he had lost custody of his children and was travelling with Lee Boyd Malvo, a Jamaican teenager he had met in Antigua and presented as his stepson.
They fitted a Chevrolet Caprice with a hole cut through the boot lid so that a rifle could be fired from inside the car while lying down. Between October 2 and October 22, 2002 they shot thirteen people in Maryland, Virginia and the District of Columbia, ten of whom died, chosen at random as they filled petrol tanks, loaded shopping or crossed car parks. The region effectively stopped: schools cancelled outdoor activity and drivers crouched at pumps.
Earlier shootings in Alabama, Louisiana, Arizona, Georgia and Washington state were subsequently connected to them, which is how the figure of seventeen in this roster is reached; the convictions concern the Washington-area killings.
They were arrested at a motorway rest stop in Maryland on October 24, 2002, asleep in the car.
Muhammad was convicted of capital murder in Virginia in 2003 and executed by lethal injection on November 10, 2009. Malvo, who was seventeen at the time, was sentenced to life without parole, and his sentences have since been reopened following the United States Supreme Court decisions restricting life without parole for juveniles.
The case is usually classed as a spree rather than a series, and it belongs in this archive as one: three weeks, one vehicle, no relationship of any kind between the killers and the dead.