Jerry Taylor was a golfer and it wasn’t surprising that he would be practicing his chip shots on a sunny March afternoon at Tucson’s local course.
Unfortunately, the 60-year old frozen food salesman was not as mild-mannered as he thought. There lurked in the desert around the practice range a man looking through the scope of a powerful rifle.
Poor Jerry didn’t stand a chance. His back was hit by the bullet and he instantly died.
The assailant pulled his body 15 feet to conceal it behind mesquite trees, then went through his pockets and found his wallet. He then threw the wallet away, without taking $15.
Taylor’s murder might have gone down in history as just another statistic in a country which records thousands of fatal shootings every year if it hadn’t later come to light that he was a victim of a psychopath who went on to gain infamy as the Washington Sniper.
Now Taylor’s story — and those of the sniper’s other 16 victims — is being told in an unforgettable new documentary series by Channel 4 to be screened tomorrow night.
Lee Malvo (17 years old) and John Allen Muhammad (19th century Gulf War veteran and US soldier) gunned down 13 Washingtonians in an indiscriminate attack during a rampage that took place October 2002.
I, Sniper, The Washington Killers offers a behind-the-scenes look at the murderous trip made by the sniper with his accomplice. This culminated into one of the most horrific killing sprees ever recorded in U.S. Criminal History.
The ferocious rampage of the terrorists sparked an enormous manhunt that paralysed Washington DC for nearly a year. It was just one year since 9/11. This terrorized every woman, man and child.
John Muhammad (a Gulf War vet) and Lee Malvo, his teenage accomplice, terrorized the American capital. They indiscriminately killed 13 people with their Bushmaster rifles from the trunk of their cars for three weeks.
Six-part big-budget television series, which took more than 4 years to make and included interviews with 300 people, revealed for the first-time that these men had been gay lovers. The motivation for the killings was the older man’s obsession with getting revenge on his ex-wife for his defeat in a custody battle.
Nearly 20 years have passed since Washington’s snipers took America hostage. Muhammad, an African American man, was killed by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Centre, Virginia, on November 10, 2009.
Malvo is currently 36 and serving life sentences in Red Onion State’s supermax prison Red Onion State. He agreed to an interview for this series.
Both were raised in dysfunctional homes by their aunts. After his mother died from cancer, Muhammad was found holding on to her body. Malvo’s Jamaican parents Leslie (Antigua) abandoned him. Malvo made his living selling bootleg CDs.
View of the hole in the trunk of the Chevy Caprice 1990, allegedly used for the shooting of 2002.
Muhammad joined the U.S. military and rose to the rank sergeant. However, he became involved in the Nation Of Islam black nationalist group. According to Mildred his second wife and mother to his children, Muhammad was changed by the Gulf War.
‘I believe something happened in Desert Storm,’ she tells the film-makers.
After 14 years of marriage the couple split in 1999. He was aggressive and his constant womanizing drove him away.
Muhammad took his three children hostage and fled to Antigua in the next year. The police finally caught him after he had returned to America to live in Bellingham (a Washington city near the border with Canada).
A subsequent court hearing on September 4, 2001 — in which Muhammad discovered Mildred had divorced him in his absence — granted his ex-wife full custody of their children and proved the catalyst for his murder spree.
Mildred attended court with their former accountant, Isa Nichols, who had become a close friend, and it was Isa’s niece who became the snipers’ first victim.
Muhammad, who was then 15 years old, had already recruited Lee Malvo as his accomplice in crime. He had first met Lee in Antigua.
John Allen Muhammad pictured arriving for a pre-trial hearing at the Prince William Circuit Court in Manassas, Virginia, in November 2002
On Muhammad’s advice, Malvo read military and history books, and listened to speeches by Nation of Islam leader Louis Farrakhan and Muslim minister Malcolm X.
The unlikely couple began a relationship. As Malvo told the film-makers: ‘I just said, you know: “I go that way.” And he understood what I meant. Then he says: “I have the same inclination; I experimented in the military.” I kissed him, and that’s how it started.’
Given that Malvo was under the age of consent, however, Muhammad’s actions amounted to statutory rape.
The older man — who had earned his Expert Rifleman’s Badge in the army — began training his protege to become a sniper, taking him to a shooting range, and working out with him at the YMCA to get him into peak physical shape.
Malvo’s mother, Una, had not given up on him, however, and she arrived in Washington two months later in search of her son.
The teenager was apprehended by Border Patrol at the YMCA and, before returning him to his mother’s custody, immigration officers took his fingerprints and entered them into their database. His downfall would be due to these fingerprints.
However, Mrs Malvo was unable to keep her son safe for very long. Soon, he was reunited again with Muhammad, and on February 16, 2002 at 7 p.m., he claimed his first victim.
Malvo (now 36) is serving multiple life sentences at Red Onion State’s supermax prison Red Onion State. Malvo agreed to being interviewed for the series.
Isa Nichols’s niece, Keenya, a 21-year-old mother of one, who lived with her aunt in Tacoma, Washington, was shot at point-blank range as she opened their front door.
At first, neither the police — nor Nichols — connected the murder to her friendship with Muhammad’s ex-wife and they had no reason to believe it marked the start of vicious cycle of random violence in which a total of 17 people would be shot dead and six wounded.
Malvo understood that the die was already cast. ‘That was just the beginning,’ he reveals dispassionately in the documentary. ‘And once that ball starts rolling down the mountain, there’s no stopping it.’
Malvo says that Muhammad’s idea was to carry out so many random murders, that no one could link him with his ex-wife when he finally did it.
Their utter lack of belonging to a society they felt was failing them is what drove their petty cruelty. They were bitter about their poverty and were irritated by the racist incidents they’d encountered.
‘He [Muhammad] really hated the country,’ says Malvo. ‘It was a calculated, unremitting rage. He felt hate. Hatred is not the right word. He blamed everyone, including the white man. He wanted to terrorise the nation.’
That summer, the two shooters bought a blue Chevrolet Caprice, removing the back rest so that Malvo could hide in the boot, and cutting a hole in the boot through which to fire the rifle they had stolen from the Bull’s Eye Shooting Range in Tacoma, Washington.
In this undated photo, you can see the Bushmaster XM-15 civil version of M-16’s military assault rifle.
In the following months, the snipers would travel the country shooting and wounding strangers. On September 21, however, they committed their first fatal error. After firing at two women walking to their cars from Krystal’s off-licence in Montgomery, Alabama, they fled the scene — but Malvo had left behind vital evidence.
‘It turned out to be the owner’s manual for the Bushmaster rifle,’ says Montgomery detective Mike Myrick. ‘It had 36 fingerprints of identifiable quality. They ran the fingerprints through all of America and it didn’t strike anybody. It was very frustrating.’
On October 2, eleven days later, the snipers entered the capital and began their terror reign in suburban Montgomery County, just outside of Washington DC.
After a ‘trial run’ that evening, in which they killed a man outside a food store, they went to bed.
On October 3, Muhammad and Malvo killed five people and put the city on high alert. It was after they’d killed their fifth victim of the day, 72-year-old Pascal Charlot, who was shot while standing in the street, that the police missed their first real opportunity to catch the snipers.
An eyewitness’s early accounts included descriptions of an unidentified white pickup truck speeding past the scene with dark lettering. So, when a witness described a different vehicle — a dark-coloured Chevy Caprice — they failed to follow up on the tip.
Another woman was shot and seriously injured by them on October 4. But it was their next attack that ramped up fears across the nation — the shooting of schoolboy Iran Brown, on October 7, as he walked into Benjamin Tasker Middle School in Bowie, Maryland. ‘When you involve innocent children in a wave of homicide shootings, you’ve crossed a line,’ says Ed Clarke, head of security at Montgomery County Schools.
‘I think it was a cold and calculated message to say: “You haven’t been able to stop us and now we are going after children.”’
Amazingly, the 13 year old survived despite having a hole through his stomach, an injured liver, and a damaged pancreas.
However, the murderers were getting complacent.
Two opportunities were missed by police to stop the rampage in the days that followed. At 3am on October 8, Baltimore officer Jim Snyder stopped the killers in a parking lot, confirmed Muhammad’s driving licence and wrote down the car registration number, but had no grounds on which to detain them.
Steve Bailey was again questioned by the rookie cop at Manassas Fuel Station in Manassas Virginia. He had just witnessed war veteran Dean Meyers being murdered. Bailey then let go.
‘We were looking for a white van with ladder racks, driven by a white male who’d already left the scene,’ says Bailey. ‘So, I didn’t write down any of his information. I requested him to be safe while driving. The families feel let down. We had them and — my mistake — I felt like I let them go.’
Eight days later, there was yet another chance to apprehend the suspects after Robert Holmes, an army buddy of Muhammad’s, called the FBI and told them he thought his friend was the sniper.
Muhammad and Malvo had previously visited Malvo in Tacoma, where they practiced target shooting. However, it took the FBI five days to interview him.
The snipers played cat and mouse while investigators were busy calling them, asking them questions about the investigation and demanding $10 million to stop the murders. They also left notes for their pursuers.
On October 23, police finally made it possible.
During one call to the police, Malvo — in order to prove he was one of the snipers — tipped them off about the shooting of the two women at Krystal’s off-licence, not realising that they had his fingerprint-laden gun manual.
The police matched the ballistics of the Washington attack to the Alabama shootings and ran fingerprints against an immigration database. They found a match. ‘That’s when we started to piece things together,’ explains U.S. William Sorukas, chief investigator for Marshals Service, is the man behind this.
‘I saw references within that record to John Allen Muhammad . . . And in one of those reports, Lee Malvo was referenced as Muhammad’s son.’
Robert Holmes was finally interviewed at home by the FBI. The FBI removed a stump from his yard to conduct forensic tests.
FBI special agent Todd Bakken recalls: ‘The DC sniper taskforce were trying to dig up as much information they could about John Muhammad. I heard the name and I said: “Hey I received a call the other day regarding that, on the tip line, from Robert Holmes.”
‘It became very urgent that we contact him, so I called Mr Holmes into the office, and from that point on, things went at 100 miles an hour.’
Montgomery Police Chief Charles Moose issued a nationwide alert on a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice with New Jersey license plate NDA-21Z at 11.45pm.
Whitney Donahue, a supermarket refrigeration technician, spotted the vehicle in Frederick County’s parking lot at 1am. She was 50 miles away from Washington DC and called 911.
To coordinate the arrest, two Swat commanders flew by helicopter immediately. They approached the car slowly and took advantage of the cover provided by the trees, knowing that they would be spotted.
Muhammad and Malvo fell asleep in the car and were pulled out without any fight. Their arrest was made at 3:19 AM.
Washington was filled with joy upon hearing that the men were captured. It had suffered so much fear that it had never felt safe to live again.
n I: Sniper: Tonight’s Washington Killers premieres on Channel 4 @ 10pm.