November 3, 2002

The Mentor and the Disciple: How Sniper Suspects Bonded

It was late this summer, just before school started, when John Muhammad and Lee Malvo showed up at Todd Paulson's auto repair shop in Tacoma, Wash., a place of worn and rusty vehicles from another era.

Mr. Muhammad did the talking. Mr. Malvo listened attentively, not interrupting. That description of their interaction, and their strange bond, echoes many of the accounts now being given of the two in the wake of the monthlong spree of shootings they are accused of committing.

Mr. Muhammad said he was the brother of Robert E. Holmes, a mechanic who had once rented space there. That raised eyebrows since most everyone knew Mr. Holmes's only brother to be dead.

Mr. Muhammad had his eye on a white Lincoln Continental with black leather seats. The car, a 1965 sedan, was in good condition for its years, but Mr. Muhammad seemed interested in only one thing.

"He wanted to know how big the trunk was," said Maria Patino, who answers the telephone at the shop.

For three days, Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo dropped by but, at $2,500, finally concluded the car was out of reach. Within days, they would buy a car on the other side of the country for $250. The authorities say they converted its big trunk into a sniper's lair that they used in some of the assaults that killed 10 and wounded 3 in three weeks of terror in the Washington, D.C., area.

In the car, law enforcement officials said, the men plotted their deadly work and spread murder across 1,000 miles of the East. It was in the car, a battered 1990 Chevrolet Caprice, that they slept and ate and scoped out their attacks. They were also arrested in the car, sleeping at a highway rest area in Maryland.

The bond of the two men — the older in command, the younger attentive and submissive — began two years ago on the Caribbean island of Antigua, to which Mr. Muhammad had abducted his three children from a failed marriage and where Mr. Malvo arrived with a mother who would later leave him behind. But it was forged in western Washington, where Mr. Muhammad was left alone after his wife, who accused him of terrorizing her, went to court and retrieved the children, and where Mr. Malvo told his mother that he had chosen a new parent figure.

That new parent instructed the teenager about what to eat, when to speak and, investigators suspect, how to shoot a gun. Mr. Muhammad was such a dominant figure in the younger man's life that he would not even let Mr. Malvo win a game of chess.

"It was like he was ruling him," said Sharon Douglas, a receptionist at the Silver Spring, Md., Y.M.C.A. that the two frequented at the height of the killing spree.

Workouts were always a part of their lives. Just hours after a bus driver was shot and killed, Mr. Muhammad was seen furiously swimming laps in the Y.M.C.A. pool while the teenager he called "son" pounded away on an exercise bicycle in a heavy camouflage jacket. "When they walked in, the boy was always two steps behind; when the man stopped, the boy stopped," Mrs. Douglas remembered. "It was the weirdest thing. If that man had told him to stop breathing, the boy would have stopped right there and turned into a puff of smoke."

A law enforcement official in Maryland, who watched interrogations of Mr. Malvo by closed-circuit television, said his loyalty to Mr. Muhammad was unbreakable. The teenager refused to answer questions, and when interrogators left the room, he tried to escape through the tiles in the ceiling.

When caught, Mr. Malvo reacted like the frightened 17-year-old he undoubtedly was. He wet himself.

A forensic psychologist who has advised Maryland law enforcement officials on the killings suggested that Mr. Muhammad's hold on Mr. Malvo should be viewed against the failed relationships with his children.

Last December, Mr. Malvo was taken away from Mr. Muhammad by the Immigration and Naturalization Service on immigration violations. Though they would be reunited in January, Mr. Malvo was scheduled to face a deportation hearing later this month. The thought of losing Mr. Malvo, "the child who chose him as opposed to the child he had to chase," the forensic psychologist said, might have been the final trigger for the horrible rampage that ensued.

The Meeting
Deception and Trouble on a Caribbean Island

John Muhammad's life in Antigua began with a lie. When he and his three children stepped off a flight from Puerto Rico on March 28, 2000, he called himself Thomas Lee. He had crudely designed fake birth certificates, the authorities say.

In the 14 months he spent on the Caribbean island, people who knew him said, he sold others false birth certificates and passports to enter the United States and Canada. A government source said he even suggested kidnapping the prime minister of Antigua.

But Janet Kellman, a hotel worker who took the family into her home on the recommendation of a mutual acquaintance, did not need to look at his papers to suspect her guest was hiding something. All who remembered him on the island call Mr. Muhammad a doting father. Ms. Kellman, though, believed the children, the object of almost obsessive behavior by Mr. Muhammad, had been abducted. In fact, their mother, Mr. Muhammad's estranged wife, Mildred, even spoke to a private detective in Tacoma about trying to find them.

Lee Malvo had barely seen his father for years when he left his native Jamaica and arrived in Antigua, almost a year before Mr. Muhammad. His mother, Una James, had settled there some months earlier, in January 1999. Soon he would see little of her too.

Ms. James was in search of opportunity and men who would help her, Antiguans whom she met would later say. Acquaintances said she wanted the best for her son, but she sometimes left the boy in the care of relatives when she was in Jamaica.

As Mr. Muhammad was clinging to his children on Antigua while on the run, Ms. James dashed off from the island around May 2000, leaving her son, then 15, alone inside a flimsy house she had rented.

Sometime around the summer of 2000, Mr. Malvo appears to have befriended Mr. Muhammad. Kithlyn Nedd, one of Mr. Muhammad's housemates after Ms. Kellman asked him to leave, said Ms. James got a false birth certificate from Mr. Muhammad before she illegally entered the United States.

Before she left, Ms. James, who sold refreshments and food from a street stand, had enrolled her son in a Seventh-day Adventist school. At the school, Mr. Malvo's classmates remembered him as always ready to answer a teacher's question or ace an exam. He befriended a group of boys who wanted to become navy pilots.

But the only thing that came from the blue was his announcement, sometime before students lost track of him in the fall of 2000, that he had converted to Islam.

"He pops up and said he was a Muslim, and that he was reading Muslim books," said a classmate, Rodney Brooks. "I asked him if he was crazy."

At that time, Mr. Muhammad, who changed his name from John Allen Williams last year after converting to Islam in 1985, had found refuge at a house in which a dozen people crammed in three bedrooms. He had enrolled his children, Selena, now 10, Taliba, 9, and John Jr., 12, in the Greensville Primary School next door, and would drop in on them as many as four times a day to hug them.

Mr. Nedd said Mr. Malvo arrived at the Muhammad home around the spring of 2001. The boy spoke little and often deferred to Mr. Muhammad, whom he called Dad.

March 10, 2001, proved to be the unraveling of Mr. Muhammad's time in Antigua. He was detained after he checked into the airport with false travel documents that he handed off to another man.

Police Commissioner Trueheart Smith said Mr. Muhammad was detained overnight, but walked out of the station before he could be questioned. The incident could explain why he and his children suddenly moved out of the house around May 2001.

By September, Mr. Malvo had enrolled in high school in Fort Myers, Fla., where his mother had settled. In October, he left, soon to join Mr. Muhammad.

The Bonding
Beginning a Routine and Winning Loyalty

Not long before Lee Malvo arrived for the first time at a homeless mission in Bellingham, Wash., the Rev. Al Archer had been composing a letter on his computer. It was October 2001, and Mr. Archer, the director of the Lighthouse Mission, was about to go on vacation. But John Muhammad had asked him for an urgent favor.

Mr. Muhammad had been living at the mission since August, when he had arrived in Bellingham with the children. His former wife, Mildred, had won custody of the children a year earlier when their divorce became final. The authorities showed up in late August, took them out of school and handed them back to their mother.

Mr. Muhammad wanted Mr. Archer to write him a letter of reference for a lawyer to help him fight for visitation rights. But instead of finishing the letter, Mr. Archer called the Federal Bureau of Investigation to say Mr. Muhammad might be linked to terrorism. Mr. Archer said his change of heart was difficult. But after Mr. Malvo arrived at the mission a few days later, any doubts were put to rest.

Despite Mr. Muhammad's armor of goodness, as Mr. Archer characterized the man's ability to charm and cajole, he already did not trust him. Now he saw the control Mr. Muhammad seemed to command over the young newcomer who was introduced as his son and he found it deeply troubling.

"It blew another hole in the armor," Mr. Archer said.

Mr. Malvo followed Mr. Muhammad incessantly. But while many found the relationship bizarre, the time they shared in western Washington seems to have cemented their bond.

If Mr. Muhammad were the general and Mr. Malvo his foot soldier, their months in western Washington were a rigorous basic training, where Mr. Malvo apparently became familiar with everything from marksmanship to shoplifting. It also was a time when Mr. Malvo's allegiance to Mr. Muhammad would be tested by the unexpected arrival of his mother.

One friend in Bellingham, Harjeet Singh, said the men's routine sometimes reminded him of the stories his uncle told about military preparations in India. "It was like they were toughening up for something or getting ready for a mission," Mr. Singh said. "My uncle used to talk about going without food, just like they did."

The two men were fitness fanatics, often visiting the Y.M.C.A. in downtown Bellingham twice a day. Mr. Muhammad was known to press 350 pounds, Mr. Singh said.

On some days, Mr. Singh said, an exhausted and hungry Mr. Malvo could be found sleeping in the back of the locker room. On a couple of occasions, Mr. Singh said he invited the two to his home for dinner. Mr. Singh said Mr. Muhammad did most of the talking, railing about American foreign policy toward the Middle East and once praising the fact that 19 hijackers on Sept. 11 were able to accomplish more than entire armies.

"He said America needed to learn this lesson a long time ago," Mr. Singh said.

Mr. Malvo occasionally joined in the talk but mostly he ate. "At one dinner, my wife made homemade pizzas," Mr. Singh said. "The boy ate one whole pizza by himself."

Last December, the teenager's mother, Ms. James, arrived at the mission from Florida looking for her son. Mr. Archer tried to help her persuade Mr. Malvo to leave Mr. Muhammad. Ms. James had come with five big cardboard boxes filled with household items. Mr. Archer said she wanted to set up house and reconcile with Mr. Malvo.

But Mr. Muhammad easily won the contest for Mr. Malvo's loyalty, though the teenager was taken from Bellingham with his mother on Dec. 19 when the I.N.S. determined that they were in the country illegally. They were released from detention on Jan. 25 pending a deportation hearing.

Within a week, Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo were back together, and if the police in Tacoma are correct, they were growing increasingly dangerous.

Even John S. Mills, the lawyer Mr. Muhammad had hired in the custody fight, said there was a change in January. Until then, Mr. Mills said, Mr. Muhammad was "an ordinary, unassuming guy" who wanted to use the courts to get back his kids. Then, he said, Mr. Muhammad "melted down."

A friend of Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo, whom the police have not identified, told the authorities that they frequently stayed with him in Tacoma between February and July and that they often borrowed his guns.

On Feb. 12, Mr. Muhammad was arrested at a store in Tacoma on a shoplifting charge along with a minor believed to have been Mr. Malvo. A few days later, the police said, one of the handguns they were known to borrow was used to kill Keenya Cook, the niece of a woman who had once kept the books for Mr. Muhammad's auto repair business.

Though no one has evidence, some of Ms. Cook's relatives suspect it was Mr. Malvo who actually pulled the trigger, perhaps as a rite of passage or an effort to please Mr. Muhammad. The woman's aunt had sided with Mildred Muhammad in the couple's custody dispute.

Mr. Muhammad gained his marksmanship skills in the Army, but it is unclear where Mr. Malvo learned to shoot. Just before the men were arrested last month, the authorities dug up a tree stump in the backyard of a home owned by Mr. Holmes, the man Mr. Muhammad had claimed as his brother when he tried to buy the Lincoln Continental in Tacoma.

Mr. Holmes occasionally allowed the men to spend the night, and some neighbors said they heard shooting in the backyard.

Mr. Holmes told law enforcement officials about his friends and their weapons.

F.B.I. agents last week seized records at the Tacoma Sportsmen's Club, a gun range open to the public. "We suspect they were out here, once for sure," the manager said.

It was at another gun establishment, Bull's Eye Shooter Supply in Tacoma, where federal authorities say the men acquired, perhaps in June, the Bushmaster rifle used in the sniper attacks.

In late July, Mr. Muhammad returned to his hometown of Baton Rouge, La. Many relatives had seen little of him since he left to join the Army in 1985, and some recalled that he looked worn and ragged. He introduced Mr. Malvo as a son, and bragged that he was a highly trained member of a paramilitary team on a government mission.

After a couple of weeks, the two returned to Tacoma, where they eyed the Lincoln, before hitting the road one last time.

The Attacks
A Base of Operations at a Suburban Gym

If there was one constant in their maddeningly itinerant lives over the last month or two, it was their workouts. Even during the height of the shooting spree, the two pumped iron, sweated in saunas and squeezed out set after set of push-ups. It was during these hours that Mr. Muhammad finished shaping Mr. Malvo in his own chiseled image.

When Mr. Muhammad first showed up at the Y.M.C.A. in Silver Spring, in the heart of Montgomery County, in early September, he looked like a smooth operator. He wore nylon sweat pants, "the kind that make noise when you walk," recalled Mrs. Douglas, the Y.M.C.A. receptionist. She said he toted a laptop computer and had a good-looking, well-behaved boy in his orbit. They were in perfect shape and radiated intensity.

Mr. Muhammad said he was a "businessman," and "he always acted like he wasn't playing," Mrs. Douglas said. He advanced with his chest out, his back perfectly straight. In high school, Mr. Muhammad was called Neckbone because his walk was so taut. He hadn't changed.

Their routine at the Y started in the free-weight room with its gleaming stacks of iron plates and 115-pound dumbbells; then they would run, bike or swim; then they would hit the saunas; then they'd shower and leave. They usually worked out for three hours.

It is not clear why they picked this gym, but it was just off the Beltway, the Interstate that loops around the Washington suburbs. There are several other Y.M.C.A.'s in the Washington area, though none near Clinton, Md., where Mr. Muhammad's ex-wife lived. Over the next few weeks, they went to the Y at least six times, and this gym became a base of operations, the closest thing they had to a home except for the car.

After charming the receptionist, Mr. Muhammad was allowed to make phone calls from the front desk. While he talked, Mr. Malvo sat by the window, writing in a notebook. They often watched television before heading off. Their comfort here may explain why so many people were killed in Montgomery County. About this time, Mr. Muhammad was seen hanging around the town house where his ex-wife lived. Clinton is a working-class suburb about 30 minutes from the Y.M.C.A.

One day toward summer's end, Robert Graves, who lives near Mildred Muhammad, was walking his dogs, Jazz and Precious, when he saw Mr. Muhammad playing with his children and some others in a park. It was boiling outside. Mr. Graves remembers Mr. Muhammad looking at him and saying, "Kind of hot out here for those dogs, isn't it?"

He was friendly and normal, though slightly out of place. Nobody in the neighborhood had ever seen him before. Mr. Malvo, it appears, was not with him. While Mr. Muhammad seems to have lingered in his ex-wife's neighborhood and even played with his children, he did not try to take them away. School officials said he never came by. The police have no record of trouble. Mildred Muhammad has since gone into hiding.

Sometime in mid-September, Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo disappeared. It was during this time that authorities say the two shot a man outside a supermarket in Wheaton, Md., on Sept. 14, killed a liquor store clerk in Montgomery, Ala., on Sept. 21 and a beauty parlor owner in Baton Rouge, La., on Sept. 23.

Their car was spotted in Gulfport, Miss., on Sept. 28.

The next sighting was in Fairfax, Va., on Oct. 1, the night before the violence split open. Fairfax police saw the blue Caprice in a parking lot near the same Home Depot where a woman would be shot in the head 13 days later. The two were probably scouting locations, authorities now say. But that was not known at the time. The license plate was run, the car was noted. But nothing else happened. It was simply a suspicious looking vehicle that ended up checking out.

A few nights later, Mr. Muhammad pulled into a strip mall in Baltimore. Eight people had been shot by now. Marty Ruby, a Subway employee, said Mr. Muhammad spoke softly when they met in the parking lot: "He said, `I'm so sorry for startling you. I was just wondering if I could sit here in the parking lot and rest. I'm from out of town. I've been driving all night.' "

Ms. Ruby saw that the Caprice was filled with cans, bottles and clothes. A laptop computer was on the front seat, its screen glowing. There was no sign of Mr. Malvo.

In the meantime, as the body count increased, the suburbs locked down and the manhunt intensified, Mr. Muhammad and Mr. Malvo kept returning to the Silver Spring Y.M.C.A. They acted exactly the same. Mrs. Douglas said Mr. Muhammad, a cut 6 feet 1 inches and 185 pounds, even flirted in the swimming pool one morning with a French woman, asking if he could swim in her lane and where she got her "cute accent."

"That's what's so weird about this thing," said Mrs. Douglas, 25. "After these guys supposedly killed people and had all of us terrified, they'd walk in here and be so normal. Just like, `Hey, how you doing?' "

On Oct. 16, the two worked out at a Y.M.C.A. in Ashland, Va., near Richmond. This was more than 100 miles away. They seemed to find Y's wherever they went. This day, though, they smelled horrible, one Y.M.C.A. member who encountered the pair said. The boy was not talking. The man was glowering. 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," remembered Jim Macy, 32, a sales manager in the area who shared the locker room with the two that day. "But at no point did I say to myself, `Gee, these guys are the snipers.' "

Three days later, across the street at a Ponderosa steakhouse, a man was shot in the stomach and critically wounded.

Mr. Malvo was completely under a spell by this point, the police say, fully engaged in the business of killing. It was he who wrote a threatening note that was left at the Ponderosa, according to Maryland officials' analysis of handwriting samples 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."

The police think Mr. Malvo made two of four phone calls to the authorities demanding a ransom and either he or Mr. Muhammad reached out to a priest in Ashland for help. Why the teenager and his Muslim mentor turned to a Roman Catholic priest as a go-between is yet another mystery.

The police also believe the teenager was pulling the trigger. The two had turned the trunk of the Chevy Caprice into a bona fide sniper's nest, with the back seat folding down and a hole drilled in the trunk to stick the rifle through. While the 5-foot-8 Mr. Malvo could lie back there, it's not clear if the bigger Mr. Muhammad could fit.

But despite all the attention the killings generated, the two never went underground.

On Oct. 22, hours after a bus driver was shot and killed in Aspen Hill, Md., Mr. Muhammad was seen swimming laps in the Y pool as Mr. Malvo pedaled on the exercise bicycle wearing a thick Army jacket. It looked a little weird, people now say. But at the time, no one cared.

The next day would be the last time the two would pump iron together. Maybe forever.

It was Wednesday, Oct. 23, 3 p.m. When they finished their body-building regimen, they asked Mrs. Douglas if they could watch TV somewhere in private. She told them to go to an exercise room. But a soap opera was on. Not the news, which 12 hours later would be broadcasting their capture.

Mr. Malvo drifted away to play basketball. Mr. Muhammad paced for a moment. Then he walked out, saying to Mrs. 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, the boy, who looked more like 15 than 17, Mrs. Douglas said, came peeling around the corner.

"That cute little boy was so scared that day," Mrs. 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."

Jayson Blair, Sarak Kershaw, Jim Yardley, Al Baker, Charlie LeDuff, Nick Madigan and Jo Thomas contributed to this article.