Late this summer, John Allen Muhammad and John Lee Malvo appeared at Todd Paulson’s auto repair shop in Tacoma, Wash. Muhammad did the talking. Malvo listened attentively and did not interrupt.
Muhammad had his eye on a white 1965 Lincoln Continental sedan. It was in good condition for its years, but Muhammad seemed interested only in the size of the trunk. Muhammad and Malvo decided that the $2,500 car was out of reach.
Less than two weeks later, they would buy a different car on the other side of the country for $250. Authorities say they converted its big trunk into a sniper’s lair they used in some of the assaults that killed or wounded more than a dozen people in the Washington area.
Interviews with law-enforcement officials and people who have known the two indicate that the scene of the failed negotiations for the Lincoln was a familiar one, with the 17-year-old Malvo standing silent and the 41-year-old Muhammad taking the lead. Muhammad instructed the teenager about what to eat, when to speak and, investigators suspect, how to shoot a gun.
“It was like he was ruling him,” said Sharon Douglas, a receptionist at the YMCA in Silver Spring, Md., which the two frequented during the height of the sniper rampage.
Doing laps, lifting weights
Workouts were the one constant in their lives. Just hours after a bus driver was shot and killed, Muhammad was seen doing laps in the YMCA pool while nearby the teenager he called “son” pounded away on an exercise bicycle.
“When they walked in, the boy was always two steps behind. When the man stopped, the boy stopped,” Douglas said. “It was the weirdest thing.”
The two also worked out in Bellingham, Wash., where they lived in the Lighthouse Mission for a time in late 2001 and early 2002, and often visited the downtown YMCA twice a day.
Muhammad was known to press 350 pounds, said Harjeet Singh, a local friend.
When Muhammad first appeared at the YMCA in Silver Spring in early September, he looked like a smooth operator. Douglas said he toted a laptop computer and had a good-looking, well-behaved boy in his orbit. The two were in perfect shape.
Their routine at the Y started in the free-weight room with its stacks of iron plates and 115-pound dumbbells; then they would run, bike or swim; then they would hit the saunas, shower and leave. They usually worked out for three hours.
Over the next few weeks, they went to the Y at least six times, and this gym became a base of operations. Muhammad even was allowed to make phone calls from the front desk.
`Something just wasn’t right’
About mid-September, Muhammad and Malvo disappeared. It was during this time that authorities say the two killed a liquor store clerk in Montgomery, Ala., on Sept. 21 and a beauty parlor owner in Baton Rouge, La., on Sept. 23.
In October, as the body count of sniper victims increased, Muhammad and Malvo kept returning to the Silver Spring YMCA. They acted exactly the same.
On Oct. 16, they worked out at a YMCA in Ashland, Va. This day, though, they smelled horrible, one YMCA member said. They had dirty bags with them and looked homeless.
“I had a feeling that something just wasn’t right about the situation, but I couldn’t put my finger on it,” recalled Jim Macy, who shared the locker room with them that day.
Three days later, across the street at a steakhouse, a man was shot in the stomach and critically wounded.
Malvo was completely under a spell by this point, police say, fully engaged in the business of killing. It was he who wrote a threatening note that was left at the restaurant, according to handwriting samples taken from school assignments. He was also the one who scribbled on a tarot card “Call me God.” This message, dropped at the scene of an earlier shooting, was originally reported as “I am God.”
Police think it was Malvo who made two of four phone calls to authorities demanding a ransom. Police also believe Malvo was pulling the trigger.
On Wednesday, Oct. 23, after they finished their body-building regimen at the Silver Spring Y, Malvo drifted away to play basketball. Muhammad shortly departed, saying to Douglas, should “my son ask where I’m going, tell him I got a toothache and I’ll be in the car.”
Five minutes later, Douglas said, Malvo came peeling around the corner.
“That cute little boy was so scared that day,” Douglas remembered. “The older man had barely left him and he comes running out, eyes all big. He had no idea where his father went. You would have thought he’d been abandoned.”
