Almost two decades before the pandemic hit in 2020, there was another massive lockdown — one that shut down businesses, closed schools, canceled sports, disrupted the economy, and drove many of the Washington, DC, region’s residents to hide behind closed doors.
But this wasn’t a deadly virus. For 20 days in October of 2002 — 20 years ago — Lee Boyd Malvo, then 17, and his mentor, John Allen Muhammad, then 41, killed and wounded everyday people as they put groceries in their cars, mowed lawns, pumped gas, visited the post office, and performed other mundane chores. People like Linda Franklin of Arlington, an FBI intelligence analyst, who was murdered while she loaded her car at the Home Depot parking lot in Seven Corners, as her husband looked on.
Law enforcement — including the FBI and every police agency in the area — was stumped before they finally found Malvo and Muhammad asleep in their car near Myersville, Maryland, on October 24. The crimes were so indiscriminate that they could not figure out who was killing all these people, much less why it was happening. The perpetrator was shooting as many as four victims in a day, with a high-powered rifle, most of the time in broad daylight.
Officers were enraged by the taunting clues the killers left behind: the “Death” Tarot card inscribed “Call me God,” bogus ransom letters, and rambling phone calls warning of future victims.
Mass fear spread across the region: The feeling for many was, “I’m next.” Hotlines lit up with tips, many of them bogus. Desperate for business, service stations, a frequent target, covered their pumps with tarps to hide customers as they pumped gas. When witnesses reported a mysterious “white box truck” near one of the crime scenes, suddenly every contractor with a white van was pulled over and investigated. A major movie, Phone Booth, was shelved until 2003 because it involved seemingly random violence and would have intensified the fear.
The shooter got the nickname Beltway Sniper at the time, but the crimes covered a much larger area, from Ashland, Virginia, in the south, to Silver Spring, Maryland, in the north.
The killings ranged far beyond the DMV, too. On February 16, 2002, Malvo gunned down 21-year-old Keenya Nicole Cook at her front door in Tacoma, Washington. In all, Malvo and Muhammad reportedly killed 17 unsuspecting victims and wounded another 10, in the DC area and across the country.
Malvo and Muhammad eluded law enforcement for a long time because their method of killing was so diabolical: The back seat and trunk of the 1990 blue Chevrolet Caprice they drove were modified so one of them could shoot their Bushmaster XM-15 semi-automatic .223 caliber rifle — fixed with a holographic sight — from a hole near the license plate.
Eventually, a team of Maryland State Police, Montgomery County SWAT officers, and special agents from the FBI’s Hostage Rescue team found the pair at a Myersville rest stop in late October. They were tried and convicted, first in Virginia, then in Maryland, in the fall of 2003. Muhammad was sentenced to death. He was executed in Virginia on November 10, 2009. Malvo was sentenced to life in prison and is currently serving at Red Onion State Prison in Wise County.
There are many hypotheses about the motives of the deadly sniper attacks, the main one being that they were orchestrated in order to get revenge on Muhammad’s second ex-wife, Mildred Muhammad. But no matter what the reason, these tragedies left a somber impact on our area for years to come.
There is a memorial to the victims at Brookside Gardens in Wheaton, Maryland.
For a full timeline of the DC Sniper case, click here.
Feature image: John Allen Muhammad (middle) and Lee Boyd Malvo were apprehended on Oct. 24, 2002. Both were charged with capital murder. (REUTERS / Reuters Photographer – stock.adobe.com)
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