While alleged sniper John Allen Muhammad repeatedly confounded police attempts to catch him during three weeks of random murders, he also defied many criminal profilers’ efforts to describe him.
“Everybody was off-base on this, including me,” said Scott Thornsley, professor of criminal justice at Pennsylvania’s Mansfield University and a specialist on serial killers. “The issue is that he deviated in almost every aspect.”
What Muhammad, 41, a former Army sergeant and marksman, deviated from is an array of physical, social and behavioral characteristics, often shared by serial murderers, which have been compiled from studies of past cases.
As a result, criminologists, psychologists, sociologists and others who seek to create profiles of such killers generally portrayed the sniper as a white male, probably in his 30s or 40s, who was a loner with weapons training in his background. Many also suspected he might be a government worker.
Few of those experts said they expected the sniper to look or act like suspect Muhammad: an unemployed black man, working with a teenage boy, making fairly frequent efforts to communicate with law enforcement and demanding $10 million.
Muhammad does appear to meet some profile characteristics, including “[sex], age, firearms training and some previous relationship with the American federal government,” said Franklin Zimring, a law professor and criminologist at the University of California at Berkeley.
3 key deviations
While many serial killers are alienated and angry, the Washington-area sniper broke the “rules” of the murderous genre in ways that surprised and baffled many of those who study such crimes.
Reid Meloy, a forensic psychologist at the University of California at San Diego and author of the professional handbook “Violence Risk and Threat Assessment,” has evaluated many serial killers but, like others in his field, found the sniper’s pattern of behavior atypical in three aspects: the demand for money, the killing of victims at a distance and the varied pace of the shootings.
“The ransom note was highly unusual,” he said. “The dynamics of the serial killer as he kills will change according to the intensity of the pursuit, his levels of gratification, degrees to which his attention-seeking and desire to kill are satisfied. So, along those lines, there could be a point in time, and it could have occurred in this case, where the serial murderers were looking for a way of escaping–and money, of course, would allow that.”
Thornsley said the demand for money “completely dumbfounded me.” He said he believes it was the sniper’s aim “to shock the conscience of the United States” by, in effect, asking the country to reward him to stop killing.
“It is the icing on the cake,” Thornsley said. “He was so egotistical and arrogant that he thought he could get away with this and the money too.”
Jack Levin, director of the Brudnick Center on Violence and Conflict at Northeastern University in Boston, initially thought the money demand was an afterthought as well, but has since changed his mind.
“This may have been a profit-motivated crime from the beginning,” he said. “I didn’t think so at the time, but it seems that these killers had a plan to make $10 million fast.
“They were telling the truth when they said to Chief Moose that they had tried desperately to get through to him on the tip line,” he said, referring to Montgomery County, Md., Police Chief Charles Moose. “But when they were blown off by the operators, they decided to continue killing until they were taken seriously.”
The fact that Muhammad, and his suspected accomplice, John Lee Malvo, 17, allegedly killed them all from a distance and chose them randomly also is unusual among serial killers.
“Most serial killers use their hands, or they’re up close and personal,” said Levin. “Most of them are sexual sadists. They use sex as a vehicle to satisfy their desire for dominance and control. For them, killing is an end in itself because it makes them feel so good.
“It wasn’t the killing per se that made him feel good, it was what happened afterward and what he might be able to get from the killing later on.”
`A larger relationship’
“The whole point here is that victim selection wasn’t primary. This wasn’t about killing people as an end in itself,” said Berkeley’s Zimring. “It wasn’t between him and the particular victims. That was part of conducting a larger relationship with the public he was trying to scare and law-enforcement and media figures.”
Meloy found the varied pace of the killings–first many quickly in different locations, then individuals at a slower rate–also remarkable.
“The initial acceleration of the killing in the form of a spree homicide and then the deceleration into a serial homicide is very unusual,” he said.
Thornsley agreed. “He was a hybrid between a serial and spree killer,” he said. “A serial killer will engage in planning and fantasy. He will kill somebody and, after the kill, he’ll go home, put his feet up and say, `That was a very good kill. How can I do it better?’ He is definitely one who enjoys the moment and wants to get away and makes great efforts to get away.
“A spree killer, on the other hand, is somebody who kills somebody, quickly leaves the area and doesn’t have time to savor and enjoy the moment,” he said. “He simply leaves quickly and kills again.”
Little surprise over race
Unlike many of the pundits on television, Meloy and other scientists were not particularly surprised that Muhammad and Malvo are black. Most serial killers are white, because the population is about 70 percent white. But about 13 percent to 16 percent of them are African-Americans–slightly above the 12 percent that blacks represent in the general population.
“Race just follows demographics, so mistakes are made when people have not followed the research and they attempt to simplify it for entertainment or speculation purposes,” Meloy said. “And that’s what I think we’ve been seeing.”
Thornsley pointed out that although there have been several notable black serial killers, few receive the national publicity that white killers do.
Although this case undoubtedly will be heavily studied, its idiosyncrasies probably will not force criminology texts to be rewritten, according to most scientists interviewed.
“I don’t think there is a lot of formal theory that’s taken seriously, so there aren’t that many canons out there that need revision,” Zimring said.
“To the extent that people were self-announced experts on serial killers, there will be a brief interlude of humility before the spins are put on the facts in this case and the amendments are put on the theories,” he said. “And then they’ll emerge as being able to explain everything again.”
