On the morning of October 3, 2002, in the Maryland suburbs of Washington, five people were shot dead in a little over two hours by someone they never saw. James L. "Sonny" Buchanan, thirty-nine, who did landscaping work, was mowing the grass at the Fitzgerald Auto Mall on Rockville Pike at 7:41. At 8:12 Premkumar Walekar, fifty-four, a part-time taxi driver, was killed pumping gas into his cab at a Mobil station in Aspen Hill; it was his twenty-fifth wedding anniversary. At 8:37 Sarah Ramos, thirty-four, a housekeeper and babysitter, was shot as she sat on a bench outside the Leisure World shopping center reading a book, having just got off a bus. At 9:58 Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, twenty-five, a nanny, was killed while vacuuming her van at a Shell station in Kensington. That night at about 9:20, across the line in the District of Columbia, Pascal Charlot, seventy-two, a retired carpenter, was shot walking on Georgia Avenue at Kalmia Road, and died within the hour.
It had started the evening before. At 5:20 on October 2 a bullet came through the window of a Michaels craft store in Aspen Hill and narrowly missed a cashier, Ann Chapman. About an hour later James D. Martin, fifty-five, a program analyst at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, was shot dead in the parking lot of a Shoppers Food Warehouse in Wheaton, where he had gone to buy groceries for his church. No one connected the two until the next morning's killings, each done with a single bullet fired from a distance by someone who then vanished.
For three weeks the Washington region lived with the fear that anyone could be next. The Montgomery County police chief, Charles Moose, put schools on a code blue alert, and school systems across the area kept children indoors with no recess or outdoor games. Gas stations hung tarps to screen their pumps; people crouched as they filled their cars, or sat in them and waited. On October 4 Caroline Seawell, forty-three, was shot in the chest and survived as she loaded her minivan outside another Michaels store, at the Spotsylvania Mall in Virginia. On the morning of October 7 a thirteen-year-old boy, Iran Brown, was shot in the chest as he arrived at Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland. He spent eight weeks in the hospital and later testified at Muhammad's trial.
Near the school the police found a shell casing and a tarot card, the Death card. On the front was written "Call me God." On the back, on three lines: "For you mr. Police." "Code: 'Call me God'." "Do not release to the press." The police tried to keep it quiet; within a day a local television station and then The Washington Post had reported it.
On October 9 at 8:18 in the evening Dean Harold Meyers, fifty-three, a civil engineer and Vietnam veteran, was killed pumping gas at a Sunoco station on Sudley Road near Manassas, Virginia. On the morning of October 11 Kenneth Bridges, fifty-three, a businessman, was shot at an Exxon station off Interstate 95 in Spotsylvania County near Fredericksburg. At 9:15 on the night of October 14 Linda Franklin, forty-seven, an FBI intelligence analyst from Arlington, was shot in the head in the covered parking lot of a Home Depot at the Seven Corners Shopping Center in Fairfax County. A man named Matthew Dowdy told police he had seen the shooting; he had been inside the store at the time, and he was later convicted of interfering with the investigation.
On October 19 at 8:00 in the evening Jeffrey Hopper, thirty-seven, was shot in a parking lot near a Ponderosa steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia, about ninety miles south of Washington. His wife, Stephanie, called out to passersby, who phoned for an ambulance, and he survived. In the woods nearby investigators found a four-page letter demanding $10 million, to be paid onto a Visa card, and threatening children. Two days later Richmond-area police arrested two men beside a white van at a gas station; they were undocumented immigrants with no connection to the shootings, and they were handed to immigration authorities and deported.
At 5:56 on the morning of October 22, Conrad Johnson, a Ride On bus driver and father of two from Oxon Hill, was shot as he stood on the top step inside his bus on Grand Pre Road in Aspen Hill, and died at a hospital in Bethesda. Most accounts give his age as thirty-five; at least one gives forty. He was the last to die. That day Chief Moose released a line from one of the shooter's letters: "Your children are not safe, anywhere, at any time."
The shooters were John Allen Muhammad, forty-one, and Lee Boyd Malvo, seventeen. Muhammad was born John Allen Williams in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, on December 31, 1960, to Ernest and Eva Williams. The family moved to New Orleans when his mother was found to have breast cancer, and she died when he was three. His father left soon afterward, and he was raised mostly by his maternal grandfather and an aunt.
In August 1978 he joined the Louisiana Army National Guard as a combat engineer, and on November 6, 1985, he transferred to the regular Army, where he trained as a mechanic, truck driver and metalworker and qualified as an expert with the M16 rifle, the highest of the Army's three basic marksmanship grades. In 1991 he served in the Gulf War with a company that dismantled Iraqi chemical rockets. He left the Army with an honorable discharge as a sergeant on April 26, 1994, after sixteen years.
He had joined the Nation of Islam in 1987, at twenty-six, and helped with security at the Million Man March in 1995; the organization's leader, Louis Farrakhan, later distanced himself from the shootings. Muhammad was twice divorced. His second former wife, Mildred Muhammad, obtained a restraining order against him, alleging abuse, and he lost custody of their three children. In 1999 he took the children to Antigua, where he appears to have used credit card and immigration document fraud, and there he became close to Malvo, a Jamaican boy of about fifteen who had been sent to live on the island. Malvo came to regard him as a father. The two later lived together for about a year in Tacoma, Washington, where Malvo used the name John Lee Malvo. Williams took the name John Allen Muhammad in October 2001. Because of the restraining order and his record of domestic battery, he could not legally own a gun, and Malvo, a minor, could not buy one.
The Washington shootings came at the end of a year of killing. On February 16, 2002, Keenya Nicole Cook, twenty-one, was shot at the front door of her aunt's home in Tacoma; the aunt, Isa Nichols, was a friend of Mildred Muhammad's and had encouraged her to seek a divorce. On March 19 Jerry Taylor, sixty, was killed by a single long-range shot to the chest while practicing chip shots on a golf course in Tucson, Arizona, near where Muhammad's sister lived and while he was visiting her. On September 21 Million A. Woldemariam, forty-one, was shot in the head and back with a .22 pistol while helping close a liquor store in Atlanta, and nineteen hours later in Montgomery, Alabama, Claudine Parker, fifty-two, a liquor store clerk, was shot dead in a robbery and her coworker Kellie Adams, twenty-four, was shot through the neck and survived. On September 23 Hong Im Ballenger, forty-five, was shot in the head with a Bushmaster rifle in Baton Rouge.
Others that year were shot and lived: John Gaeta, fifty-one, in Hammond, Louisiana, on August 1, as he changed a tire that had been slashed, who played dead while his wallet was taken; Paul LaRuffa, fifty-five, shot six times while locking up his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland, on September 5, whose laptop was later found in Muhammad's car; Rupinder "Benny" Oberoi, twenty-two, outside a liquor store in Silver Spring on September 14; and Muhammad Rashid, closing a liquor store in Brandywine, Maryland, the next night, who later identified Malvo in court. The two were also suspects in the killing of Billy Gene Dillon, thirty-seven, in Denton County, Texas, on May 27. The published totals of the dead run from sixteen to seventeen, and Malvo later claimed more.
The case broke on a boast. One of the shooters told the police to look at a liquor store robbery and killing in Montgomery, Alabama. That was the Claudine Parker shooting, and at the scene one of the robbers had dropped a gun magazine. The fingerprints on it were Malvo's, which were on file with immigration authorities, and Malvo was known to live with Muhammad. The link was made on October 17. From Muhammad the investigators found the car: a blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, a former undercover police car from Bordentown, New Jersey, which he had bought in New Jersey on September 11, 2002.
On October 23 the police put out the car's make, model and license plate and asked the public to look for it. That day ballistics confirmed Conrad Johnson as the tenth death, and officers with metal detectors searched a yard in Takoma Park for bullets and took away a tree stump they believed had been used for target practice. Chief Moose, reading words the sniper had demanded, told reporters: "We have caught the sniper like a duck in a noose."
Just after midnight on October 24, a refrigerator mechanic named Whitney Donahue called 911 from a rest stop off Interstate 70 near Myersville, Maryland, to say the Caprice was parked there. The first trooper to arrive, D. Wayne Smith of the Maryland State Police, blocked the exit with his unmarked car set sideways between two tractor-trailers; as more troopers came they sealed both ramps, and when a trucker named Ron Lantz tried to leave, they used his rig in place of the police car to finish the roadblock. Tactical officers found Muhammad and Malvo asleep in the car and arrested them on federal weapons charges. Most accounts give the time as 3:19; some give 3:30.
In a bag in the car was a Bushmaster XM-15 .223 rifle with a bipod and a holographic sight. It had been stolen from Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, where Muhammad had practiced; Malvo told investigators he shoplifted it. Ballistics tied it to eleven of fourteen shootings in the Washington series. The back seat had been rigged so a man could crawl into the trunk and lie prone, and a small hole had been cut near the license plate to shoot through. Prosecutors called the car a rolling sniper's nest. Also in the car was a laptop with maps marking the shooting scenes.
Maryland wanted to try him first, since most of the killings had happened there. The United States attorney general, John Ashcroft, sent the case instead to Paul Ebert, the Commonwealth's Attorney for Prince William County, Virginia, whose state was seen as more likely to impose death. On October 28, 2002, a Prince William grand jury indicted Muhammad for the murder of Dean Meyers on two capital theories, murder in an act of terrorism and the murder of more than one person within three years, along with conspiracy and illegal use of a firearm. The trial was moved about two hundred miles to Virginia Beach. It opened in October 2003, and Muhammad was allowed to act as his own lawyer, then took his lawyers back after his opening statement.
The prosecution called more than 130 witnesses and put in more than 400 pieces of evidence: the rifle, the car, the laptop, witnesses who placed Muhammad across the street from one shooting and his car near others, and a recorded call to a police tip line in which a man, whose voice a detective identified as Muhammad's, demanded money to stop the shootings. Malvo's fingerprints were on the rifle and Muhammad's DNA was found on it. The defense argued that under Virginia's triggerman rule he could not be sentenced to death unless he had fired the shot that killed Meyers, and no witness saw him do it. Prosecutors had also argued before trial that the whole series was cover for killing Mildred Muhammad, who has said she believed she was the target, but the judge, LeRoy F. Millette Jr., would not let the jury hear that theory, finding the link had not been established.
On November 17, 2003, the jury convicted him on all four counts. After five hours of deliberation over two days it unanimously recommended death, and on March 9, 2004, the judge imposed it. On April 22, 2005, the Supreme Court of Virginia affirmed the sentence, holding that he could be put to death because the murder was part of an act of terrorism and rejecting the triggerman argument. "With calculation, extensive planning, premeditation and ruthless disregard for life," Justice Donald W. Lemons wrote, "Muhammad carried out his cruel scheme of terror."
Muhammad fought extradition to Maryland and lost; a Virginia judge ordered it in August 2005. He represented himself at the Montgomery County trial in May 2006, and Malvo, who had waived extradition and was cooperating, testified against him. Muhammad cross-examined him. Malvo told the court that Muhammad had taken him into his home and made him into "a monster," that the plan had been to extort money from the government and set up a camp to train children to terrorize cities, and that Muhammad hated white people. On May 30, 2006, the jury convicted Muhammad of six counts of first degree murder, and on June 1 he was sentenced to six consecutive terms of life without parole. Alabama, Arizona, Louisiana and Washington State never tried him.
Muhammad maintained his innocence to the end. In May 2008 it came out that he had written to prosecutors asking them to help him end his appeals "so that you can murder this innocent black man." His lawyers had filed an appeal the month before citing evidence of brain damage, arguing that he had not been competent to make legal decisions and should not have been allowed to represent himself in Virginia.
On September 16, 2009, Judge Mary Grace O'Brien of the Prince William County Circuit Court set his execution for November 10. On November 9 the Supreme Court of the United States declined to review the case; Justice John Paul Stevens, joined by Justices Ruth Bader Ginsburg and Sonia Sotomayor, agreed with the denial but wrote that Virginia's haste "highlights once again the perversity of executing inmates before their appeals process has been fully concluded." Governor Tim Kaine refused clemency. The execution began at Greensville Correctional Center near Jarratt, Virginia, at 9:06 that night, and he was pronounced dead five minutes later. Asked for last words, he did not answer. Twenty-seven people, among them relatives of those killed, watched.
On January 16, 2003, families of several of those killed, among them the families of Hong Im Ballenger, Sonny Buchanan, Linda Franklin, Conrad Johnson, Sarah Ramos and Premkumar Walekar, and two survivors, Benny Oberoi and Iran Brown, sued Bull's Eye Shooter Supply, its owner, the rifle's maker, Bushmaster Firearms, and Muhammad and Malvo. That July the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives revoked the store's license. The suit was settled before trial in 2005: Bull's Eye paid $2 million and Bushmaster $500,000. Conrad Johnson's mother, Sonia Wills, said the family had joined to send a message, not for the money.
Malvo was convicted in Chesapeake, Virginia, on December 18, 2003, of the capital murder of Linda Franklin and sentenced to life without parole; in 2004 he entered an Alford plea in Spotsylvania County and received another life term, and in October 2006 he pleaded guilty to the six Maryland murders and was given six more. In May 2017 a federal judge overturned two of his Virginia life sentences under the Supreme Court's rulings on life without parole for juveniles. In 2020 Virginia made people serving life for crimes committed before eighteen eligible for parole after twenty years; the Virginia Parole Board turned him down on August 30, 2022, calling him a risk to the community. The same year Maryland's highest court ruled, four votes to three, that he must be resentenced there. In 2024 he was moved from Red Onion State Prison to Keen Mountain Correctional Center, a Montgomery County judge refused to vacate his Maryland convictions, and in August 2026 the Supreme Court of Maryland declined to hear his appeal over the delayed resentencing. He remains in prison in Virginia.