The Serial Killers: A Study in the Psychology of Violence (61 page)

On 19 October, the sniper attacked what was to be his last victim.
A 37-year-old man was shot once in the stomach as he left a restaurant in the town of Ashland, 70 miles south of Washington.
He suffered severe damage to his internal organs, but survived.

Suspicion that the sniper might be an Islamic terrorist seemed partly scotched by the bizarre tarot card note left at a crime scene: no radical Moslem would claim to be ‘God’, not even in jest.
More evidence to this effect came in the form of a letter found at the Ashland crime scene.
The writer again referred to himself as God, and accused the police of incompetence – adding that it was their fault that five people had had to die.
Presumably this indicated that he had expected to be caught after the first two days of his killing spree.
The letter demanded a $10 million ransom to stop the killings and added chillingly: ‘Your children are not safe anywhere or at anytime.’ So, the sniper was apparently a murderous extortionist, not an Islamic terrorist.

By this stage the police were, understandably, becoming desperate.
In an attempt to pacify the sniper they even complied with a bizarre demand he had made.
A police spokesman read the statement ‘we’ve caught the sniper like a duck in a noose’ on national television.
This was a cryptic reference to a folk tale in which an overconfident rabbit tried to catch a duck, but ended up noosed itself.
The sniper evidently wanted the authorities to feel that they were his playthings as much as his murder victims were.

Then, on 24 October, the police caught him . . .
or rather, them.
There turned out to be two perpetrators working together: John Allen Muhammad, aged 41, and John Lee Malvo, aged 17, the older Afro-American, the younger Afro-Jamaican.
A member of the public had noticed a car parked for a long time in a road stop on the Virginia Interstate Route 70, and had become suspicious.
The police were informed and investigated as a matter of routine – having little thought that they were about to catch the Washington Sniper.
Muhammad and Malvo were found fast asleep in the car, but fortunately the officers did not simply move them on.
Closer inspection of the vehicle showed that it had been modified to allow a man to lie inside it and to aim a rifle while remaining unseen.

Muhammad, who seems to have done all the actual killing, turned out to have been an ex-US Army soldier who had served in the 1992 Gulf War and had subsequently converted to Islam.
Lee Malvo was a Jamaican who lived with Muhammad and evidently regarded the older man as a father figure (nobody has ever suggested there was a sexual relationship between the pair).
Both were convicted of murder, extortion and terrorism charges in 2003.
Muhammad was sentenced to death and Malvo to life imprisonment without chance of parole.

Malvo originally claimed to have been the sole killer – called the ‘triggerman’ in Virginia state law – but later retracted this confession, admitting that he had only made it to move the potential death sentence onto his own shoulders.
This was rather less heroic than it at first sounds because, being a minor at the time of the killings, he was much less likely to actually be executed.

Malvo also claimed that Muhammad was a convert to the Nation of Islam – an Islamic black separatist movement – and had told him that the killings were solely to extort money from the white-dominated US government.
This money, he went on, would be used to fund a separate nation that could be populated solely by young black people (and the middle-aged Muhammad himself, presumably).

The fact that such a goal was patently impossible – given international law, the certain tracing of the extortion money and numerous laws that protect young people of all races – suggests that Muhammad was spinning a tale to his young friend to justify his urge to kill.
It seems certain that Muhammad was simply a serial killer – a man addicted to murder.
Support for this explanation came when it was suggested that the Washington DC killings had not been his first.
Investigating police believed that Muhammad was responsible for several as yet unsolved murders.

Bibliography

All His Father’s Sins
(The Gallego Case), Ray Biondi and Walt Hecox, Prima Publishing Co., 1988.

Federal Bureau of Investigation:
Criminal Investigation
.

Analysis/Sexual Homicide
, 1985 (Law Enforcement Bulletins, 1980, 1985, 1986).

The Boston Strangler
, Gerold Frank, New American Library, 1966.

Before I Kill More
(The Heirens Case), Lucy Freeman, Award Books, 1955.

The Trial of Brady and Hindley
, edited by Jonathan Goodman, David and Charles, 1973.

Killing for Company
(Nilsen), Brian Masters, Jonathan Cape, 1985.

The Nilsen File
, Brian McConnel and Douglas Bence, Futura Macdonald, London 1983.

Serial Killers: The Growing Menace
, Joel Norris, Doubleday, New York, 1988.

Killer, A Journal of Murder
(the Autobiography of Carl Panzram), edited by James E.
Gaddis and James O.
Long, Macmillans, New York, 1970.

Sexual Homicide, Patterns and Motives
, Robert K.
Ressler, Ann W.
Burgess and John E.
Douglas, Lexington Books, 1988.

The Want-Ad Killer
(Carignan), Ann Rule, New American Library.

The Stranger Beside Me
(Bundy), Ann Rule, W.
W.
Norton and Co., New York, 1980.

Encyclopaedia of Murder
, Colin Wilson and Pat Pitman, Arthur Barker, 1961.

Encyclopaedia of Modern Murder
, Colin Wilson and Donald Seaman, Arthur Barker, 1983, and Pan Books, 1989.

Written in Blood, A History of Forensic Detection
, Colin Wilson, Equation Books, 1989.

Jack the Ripper: Summing Up and Verdict
, Colin Wilson and Robin Odell, Bantam Books, 1987.

Human Nature Stained
, Colin Wilson, Pauper’s Press, 1991.

The Existential Study of Modern Murder
, Jeffrey Smalldon, Pauper’s Press, 1991.

Illustrations

(Unless otherwise indicated, all photographs are reproduced courtesy of Associated Press.)

Harvey Murray Glatman, a Californian strangler

Charles Manson (
authors’ collection
)

George Metesky, the ‘Mad Bomber’ of New York City

Richard Ramirez, alias ‘the Night Stalker’ (
authors’ collection
)

Robert Diaz, a Los Angeles ‘medical’ serial killer

John Wayne Gacy, a homosexual serial killer (
authors’ collection
)

David Berkowitz, the ‘Son of Sam’ (
authors’ collection
)

Albert DeSalvo, the Boston Strangler

Ted Bundy, a Peeping Tom serial killer

Cameron Hooker, a psychopath described as ‘an accident of internal wiring’

Charles Ng

Ed Kemper, a necrophiliac lust killer (
authors’ collection
)

Members of the FBI’s renowned ‘A Team’ (
authors’ collection
)