Behind The Killer Smiles

By Amanda Ripley

Each night the man and the boy sat hunched over the same table, playing chess in Stuart's Coffee House in the seaside town of Bellingham, Wash. sometimes they would play until midnight. The man, John Allen Muhammad, 41, did what little talking had to be done. The boy, 17-year-old Lee Malvo, listened. Whenever cafe employees intruded with small talk, he would glance to Muhammad, as if for permission, before answering. They drank only plain coffee, as the college students and patrons around them indulged in smoothies and tarts and poetry readings. And each game ended the same way: with Mhammad winning.

Everywhere they went last summer, people assumed the pair were father and son. It was a myth that Muhammad would actively perpetuate over the next several months as the two made their way across the country. He would also tell people he was a music producer or a fitness-club owner. In reality, Muhammad had had trouble finding work of late. And he had lost custody of four of his children in a series of noxious legal battles. But together with his imagination, his Army-style duffel bag and his well-mannered "son," Muhammad had apparently cobbled together a world for himself--one that, for a time at least, obeyed his will. "I always thought of them in an endearing way," Peter David, one of the coffee-shop workers would later say. "How often do you see a teenage son with his father? There was such respect."

It was deep within that concocted universe that Muhammad and Malvo slept in the early hours of Oct. 24, tucked into their blue Chevrolet Caprice with the sniper perch built into the trunk. They must have slept soundly, since they didn't hear federal agents and police creeping up on all sides, armed with submachine guns. Appropriately, they were seized in the same benign setting in which they had allegedly stalked their victims--a nondescript parking lot off a highway outside Washington. It is hard to imagine what castles of delusion came crashing down when the tactical team smashed in the windows of the Caprice and dragged the two out into the nighttime chill. The air was filled with screams, but witnesses could not discern if they emanated from the suspects or their captors.

Within 48 hours, the man and the boy would stand accused of one of the most terrifying murder rampages in the country's history, one that had led the White House to contemplate opening up military bases so children could go trick-or-treating in safety and that had induced otherwise rational residents to scurry in a zigzag formation across bland suburban parking lots. In three weeks, the case elicited 138,000 tip-line calls, seven times the number the Unabomber case yielded over 18 years. The 14 shots took 10 lives, though the tally may still not be complete. The FBI is investigating whether unsolved murders and petty thefts in other locales, from the West Coast to the South and up the Eastern Seaboard, may also be linked to the duo.

If John Allen Muhammad is convicted of these crimes, it will be a grim epilogue to a life spent groping for a narrative. First in the military and then in two marriages, Muhammad, a man who could be by turns charming and stern, seemed to find contentment just out ofreach. And each time he faced a loss, he would fight back--frantically, mercilessly--for control. Two ex-wives have accused him of taking their children over the years. A court granted one of his ex-wives a permanent restraining order after he allegedly threatened to kill her. Acquaintances say he manipulated those around him--none more so, it may turn out, than young Malvo.

It is unusual for serial killers to find partners. "In all the notorious serial or spree killings in the U.S., 20% or less are duos," says N.G. Berrill, a forensic psychiatrist who teaches at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York. "It's hard for them to find someone who shares the vision." But as a pair, the killers may have operated like one mind. "When we do see duos," Berrill says, the second person is "emotionally dominated by the person whose vision they're acting out."

Muhammad--then named John Allen Williams--tried on his first identity in his hometown of Scotlandville, a Mississippi River community in Baton Rouge, La. In high school he was a top football player, says James Johnson, an alumnus of the school who worked with the booster club. "I remember him as a good team player." After graduating in 1978, Williams enlisted in the Louisiana Army National Guard, working as a carpenter and welder in a unit that repaired buildings. Three years later, he married his high school sweetheart, Carol Kaglear, and they had a son, Lindbergh, whom he liked to show off to co-workers. "He had a million-dollar smile and was very outgoing," says Rafael Miranda, Muhammad's commander at the time. "I thought he was going to get promoted and maybe become a platoon sergeant."

Quickly, though, the well-ordered lifeshowed signs of strain. In 1982 he wasfined $100 for failing to show up forduty and was demoted one rank. In 1983 hewas fined again, this time for hitting anoncommissioned officer. "I saw flashes of anger," Miranda remembers. "Something was going on in his personal life."

In 1985 Muhammad made what would be one of many radical breaks from his life. He separated from Carol Williams, converted to Islam, left the National Guard and joined the Army. The job change even cut him loose from his hometown, sending him to Fort Lewis, Wash. Three years later, Muhammad had completely reinvented himself. He married Mildred Green, who had followed him from Louisiana. Both became members of the Nation of Islam and attended a Seattle mosque.

In 1990 Muhammad was sent abroad, first to Germany and then to the Middle East to support the Persian Gulf War. As part of a combat-engineer unit, it was Muhammad's job to help destroy bunkers at a military sitelater found to have stored chemical weapons. Although there is no conclusive evidence that the soldiers suffered ill health effects, the Pentagon did acknowledge in 1996 that soldiers from some units, including Muhammad's, may have been exposed to low levels of chemical agents. In 1992 he was sent back to the States.

Over the years Muhammad would beawarded a chestful of decorations for hismilitary service. But, says an Army official after reviewing Muhammad's personnel file, "all but one of them are basically awarded for just showing up." The exception is the Army Achievement Medal. Army officials have so far not been able to detail what he did to merit that decoration.

But one of Muhammad's greatest talents was rewarded in the military: his aim. He advanced through three levels of Army marksmanship with the standard M-16 rifle, reaching the "expert" level. "You have to be pretty good," recalls Tim O'Brien, a Vietnam veteran, prizewinning writer and author of the novel July, July. "I didn't get one. There's a lot of tension, and there's pressure, and you're shaking. You have a drill sergeant yelling in your ear, 'Shoot straight!'" The Bushmaster .223 rifle, which was found in Muhammad's trunk and has been linked by police to 11 of the 13 victims, is a civilian version of the M-16.

Perhaps out of frustration with his middling career, Muhammad left the army in 1994. Without the anchor of the service, his pursuits drifted. He and Felix Strozier, a martial arts teacher, opened a karate school. Muhammad promised to draw legions of Muslims to the school, Strozier says. But the crowds never arrived. In what would come to be something of a pattern, Muhammad also embellished his profile, bragging that he had been a special-forces member in the military, Strozier says. And he took an inappropriate interest in a young female student, showing up unannounced at her doorstep multiple times, Strozier says.

Muhammad's aggressive behavior with women turned menacing when children became involved, court documents show. While many serial killers are plagued by dysfunctional sexual urges, Muhammad seemed to be shadowed by a need to control the children in his life. In 1995 Muhammad did not return his son to his first wife after a scheduled visit, Carol Williams and her relatives have told reporters. She engaged in a legal battle to retrieve him from Washington State.

In 1999 Muhammad's second family also began to fissure. Mildred filed for divorce, and in March 2000 she was granted a restraining order against her husband. Not only did she complain that Muhammad had physically intimidated her, but she also said he claimed to have tapped her phones and said he was collecting information with which to ruin her. "I have had my phone number changed three times in five days," she wrote on a court form. "I am afraid of John. He is behaving very, very irrational."

Ten days later, Muhammad picked up their three children and vanished, according to court documents filed by Mildred. In Bellingham, Wash., 120 miles away, Muhammad jump-started yet another life. He reportedly enrolled the kids, two of them age 8, one age 10, in school using false names. In June he went to Antigua and successfully applied for a passport, using a birth certificate that may have been falsified, according to a spokesman for the Antigua Prime Minister's office.

About a year later, he changed his last name from Williams to Muhammad, citing religious reasons. Shortly thereafter, he returned to Antigua for a brief period, reportedly with the children. It was there that Muhammad may have first encountered Malvo.

At the end of that summer, though, Washington police somehow retrieved the children, and Mildred gained custody. She had not heard from them for more than a year, according to court filings. A Pierce County, Wash., court cut off all Muhammad's visitation rights.

The loss decimated Muhammad, says J. Mills, his lawyer from the custody dispute. Through what Mills terms "very sophisticated legal maneuvering," Mildred allegedly won custody without Muhammad's knowledge. "The system could do nothing to help John. He banged his head against the wall for three months with no success," says Mills. Eventually, after two custody hearings had to be canceled because Mildred could not be located, Mills says, Muhammad gave up. "That happens a lot. If the frustration level is high enough, some turn to violence."

At this crucial moment, just when Muhammad had lost his family, Malvo reappeared. Lee Malvo was born in Kingston, Jamaica, on Feb. 18, 1985, according to Jamaican documents. His father, Leslie Samuel Malvo, and half-brother, Rohan Malvo, who still live there, have appeared before the media, baffled and teary, to confirm that the boy did live there. But he left when he was 13. Rohan told reporters that his brother wasn't a bad or violent person. But he conceded to TIME that he hadn't seen his half-sibling in years: "It's been such a long time."

After Malvo left Jamaica, he and his mother may have gone to Antigua, though their exact route remains unclear. By August 2001, they were both living illegally in Fort Myers, Fla. After a short time, though, Malvo left his mother to live with Muhammad in Washington State. Starting in October 2001, Malvo and Muhammad slept on adjacent bunks at the Light House Mission, a shelter for the homeless in Bellingham. And Malvo briefly enrolled in school. Stacey Gugich, 18, a student at Whatcom Community College, was a classmate at Bellingham High School. She remembers a "really friendly guy" who was generous with his compliments. She also recalls that when the class worked on a essay about the Vietnam War, Malvo "seemed to know all the technical terms and strategies. He seemed to know what he was talking about when it came to warfare. He said his dad was in the Gulf War."

But in December Malvo's mother took a bus from Florida to Bellingham to find her son, says a Bellingham police spokesman, Detective Lieut. Dac Jamison. She asked the police for help. Simultaneously, the high school asked the police about Malvo's missing records, and the department referred the case to the Immigration and Naturalization Service. Muhammad and Malvo were briefly detained as illegal immigrants, then released to await a hearing. Malvo, however, continued to be seen at Muhammad's side around Bellingham.

Light House Mission resident manager Jerry Page says he became close to Muhammad around this period. "We used to sit and talk for hours about the Bible and the Muslim religion," says Page. "He said that he believed in [the Prophet] Muhammad and that everything we do on this earth has a cause and effect and also has an effect on other people." When he lost custody of his children, he put on a stoic face, Page says. "He said it wasn't meant for him to have them right now, and when the time came, the Lord would deliver them to him."

In the fall of 2001, now bereft of both a job and his children, Muhammad's behavior had become increasingly bizarre. In October Muhammad and Malvo began frequenting Stuart's Coffee House. Muhammad took an intense interest in a redheaded street guitarist named Hannah Parks, 20, and her son Jazz, 4. For three weeks he badgered Parks for her phone number and address, telling her he was a record producer and inviting her to come to New York with him. "He knew a lot about music. He offered to buy me a drink and showed me a fat wallet of money," Parks recalls. "I had a bad feeling about him. He took an interest in my son, and that freaked me out the most." He asked Jazz, who is half black, about his ethnicity. Parks told him not to question the boy again, and the relationship chilled. Says Parks: "He would sit there and watch me. He stopped saying hi, and he got grim. I'd wave, but he gave me the willies. I'd look over, and he'd stare at me."

In February Muhammad was arrested for shoplifting veggie burgers, steaks and tea worth a total of $27.37 from a Tacoma grocer. Two months later, he visited an old Army buddy, Robert Edward Holmes, who claims that Muhammad showed him two rifles and a book on silencers, according to the arrest warrant that the feds would later use to nab Muhammad. "Can you imagine the damage you would do if you could shoot with a silencer?" Muhammad allegedly asked Holmes.

Last summer Muhammad and Malvo left Washington for good and headed east. In July they showed up in Baton Rouge, surprising his ex-wife Carol. Later that summer he apparently tracked down Mildred despite a restraining order. Vincent Davis, 26, who lives in a town house adjacent to Mildred's, says he recalls seeing Muhammad talking to her in front of her home three or four months ago. One night more recently, during the weeks of the shootings, another neighbor, Steven Perry, 31, saw the blue Caprice parked outside Mildred's house with a figure reclining in the front seat. It appeared that Muhammad was making the rounds of all his lost homes. But it was the suburbs of Maryland, tantalizingly close to the children he had most recently lost, that Muhammad allegedly chose as his killing fields.

On Sept. 10, Muhammad bought the Caprice at a Trenton, N.J., auto dealer. "He was impatient. He talked back rude," says Fernando Maestre, 20, the salesman who dealt with Muhammad. Even though he didn't ask Muhammad why he was buying a car, Muhammad volunteered three different explanations, Maestre says. First he said he wanted it for his son; then he said it was for himself; and finally he said he wanted to use it as a taxi. "He didn't want us to find out a lot about him."

Less than two weeks later, the shootings began, starting in Alabama and then clustering around Washington. At least 10 times in three weeks, police ran a check on the Caprice's license-plate number but never found any reason to detain the man or the boy, according to the Washington Post. With each escape, the pair got bolder. In the sniper's letter to the police, after nine killings, the sudden demand for $10 million suggested a tone more giddy than calculated. The demand--to set up an account so the killers could withdraw the money from any ATM in the world with a stolen credit card in their possession--was "preposterous," says an investigator. "He's going to get out $300 a day in front of atm cameras? These are not some deep thinkers."

But if the goal was simply to torment the police and the public, to watch them quiver on live TV, the ploy worked. White House sources tell TIME that FBI profilers even went over the text of President Bush's remarks about the sniper last Wednesday to ensure that nothing in his speech would "goad" the shooter. (Bush had planned to mention all the resources that law-enforcement personnel were using to catch the sniper, but, says a senior White House aide, profilers vetoed that approach, thinking that it might tip off the sniper.) The alleged killers had even influenced the words of a President. But ripped from their mobile nest and stripped of their weapons, the suspects were left to contemplate the next chapter in a narrative no longer under their control. And by week's end, the only officials worrying over them were the ones arguing about who could prosecute them first. --Reported by Simon Crittle, Eric Roston, Elaine Shannon, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller, Michael Weisskopf/Washington, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami, Nadia Mustafa/Camden, Hilary Hylton/Baton Rouge, Margot Roosevelt/Bellingham, Nathan Thornburgh/Tacoma and Deirdre van Dyk/New York

With reporting by Simon Crittle, Eric Roston, Elaine Shannon, Mark Thompson, Douglas Waller, Michael Weisskopf/Washington, Jeanne DeQuine/Miami, Nadia Mustafa/Camden, Hilary Hylton/Baton Rouge, Margot Roosevelt/Bellingham, Nathan Thornburgh/Tacoma and Deirdre van Dyk/New