The Beltway Snipers: The Last Shot — Ep. 5 | MK Confidential

The Megyn Kelly Show - SiriusXM

This episode of MK Confidential explores the pivotal role of a forgotten evidence item—a paper magazine from ArmaLite—discovered in Montgomery, Alabama,

Key takeaways

• The discovery of a paper magazine with fingerprints in Montgomery, Alabama, was critical in identifying Lee Boyd Malvo through immigration records despite being initially overlooked.
• Malvo and Muhammad used psychological manipulation by making specific, verifiable claims about an obscure crime to prove their credibility to law enforcement.

Main topics

• The D.C. sniper attacks of 2002
• The role of forensic evidence in solving cold cases

Notable quotes

"You can't turn it off. You can't make it stop. It just happens. Happened every night."

Conclusion

The capture of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo marked the end of a national terror campaign, but the true legacy

Transcript preview

Speaker 2 (0:00) September 21st, 2002. 11 days before James Martin is shot crossing a grocery store parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland, when the country learns the word sniper. Montgomery, Alabama. Closing time on Zelda Road outside a liquor store. Two women are locking up. Claudine Parker is 52. She is the store's business manager, and she is in her last pay period before retirement. Next month, she is supposed to start coaching tennis at Alabama State. Behind her is Kelly Adams, 24, a clerk, newly married, with a new baby. Kelly doesn't hear anything. She will describe it as being electrocuted. A single rifle round comes in under her jaw from the left, goes through, and shatters the window beside the door. She goes down. Claudine Parker backs away. and for a moment, one of the store's pillars stands between her and the shooter. Then she backs out from behind it, and she is shot through the shoulder blade and does not move again. Kelly Adams tells police what she can see from the ground. Thin black legs, shorts, somebody standing over her, pointing a small silver revolver at her head. And then the person just turns and runs off. Two Montgomery patrol officers on a routine patrol are close enough to hear the shots. They pull in and see a young black man with a medium afro behind the pillar going through a purse. The young man runs. One officer stays with the women. The other goes after him, chasing him over a fence and then another and loses him. And somewhere in that chase, the runner drops something. There is a gun show in town that weekend, so it could belong to anybody. Two detectives bag it anyway. It's a catalog, a paper magazine full of rifle accessories from a company called ArmaLite. Claudine Parker will never coach at Alabama State. She dies in surgery about three hours later. Kelly Adams lives. She will have 31 operations in the next five years and a permanent implant to manage the pain. The gun magazine goes to the lab and it gives up 36 clean fingerprints, all from the same person. Montgomery PD runs them locally, then through the state system, then through neighboring Georgia. Nothing comes back. Investigators take that to mean whoever handled the catalog has never been arrested as an adult. For a month, the answer to the D.C. sniper case sits in an evidence room in Alabama, and no one in the world knows it. I'm Megyn Kelly, and this is MK Confidential. Speaker 2 (2:52) Everybody's talking about weight loss injections because the results can be so dramatic. They work by lowering blood sugar and reducing appetite. But what if you're looking to lose weight but are not interested in painful weekly injections, especially when you hear about some of those intense side effects? That's why doctors created a weight loss supplement called Lean, and the results could be remarkable. Lean says the studied ingredients in their product have been shown to lower your blood sugar, burn fat by converting it into energy, and curb your appetite and cravings so you are not as hungry. But listen, lean is not for the casual dieter with only a few pounds to lose. The doctors at Brickhouse Nutrition created lean for frustrated dieters with 10 or more pounds to lose. You could get started with 20 % off and free rush shipping, adding lean to your healthy diet and exercise plan. Visit TakeLean.com and enter Kelly for your discount. That's promo code Kelly at take lean.com. By the middle of October 2002, Malvo and Muhammad have been trying for days to get police to take them seriously. Hotline operators screen them out. Calls drop. People were not listening to us, Malvo says later. So they offer proof. A crime only the men doing the shooting could know about. They pick Alabama because they believe it is safe. As far as they know, the police in Montgomery have nothing. The next call comes with something in it that only the killers could know. A call comes into police headquarters in Rockville, Maryland, and gets transferred to an officer named Derek Beliles. Shut up and listen, the caller says, and don't ask any questions. The caller, almost certainly Malvo, says he knows who is responsible for the recent D.C. area shootings, but first he wants Beliles to verify something. Call the police in Montgomery, Alabama, he says. Ask about a liquor store holdup on Ann Street back in September where two women were shot. James Fitzgerald, the FBI forensic linguist from episode four, has spent two weeks studying these men. Speaker 6 (5:00) The fact that they had a brag about that they killed someone in Montgomery, Alabama, that was a real big clue. And we contacted the Montgomery, Alabama PD. They even told us, this is one of the phone calls, well, if you don't think we're legit, they already killed six people in one day, on October 2nd. But they somehow still had to, and this is mostly John Muhammad. Again, the adult, they had to sort of brag about things. Well, we killed, we robbed a liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama. You know, check that out. Speaker 2 (5:28) Beliles makes the call. Four hours later, the killers reach a priest in Ashland, Virginia, and tell him the same thing. And when the letter they leave in the woods behind the Ponderosa is finally read, it complains about an officer named Derek and about a priest. Two calls, both pointing at the same town. The tell that the caller was actually at the physical location is a street name. Their shooting didn't happen on Ann Street, as the caller claimed. happened on Zelda Road. Ann Street is the exit off the interstate a block away. The lieutenant who worked that case, Michael Merrick, says nobody who lives in Montgomery would ever call it an Ann Street shooting. Someone who came off the highway would. So a Montgomery County, Maryland police commander named Drew Tracy gets an Alabama detective on the phone and asks the obvious question. Is there anything that can help us? He Speaker 3 (6:28) says the only thing we have is a magazine. And I said, a magazine? You mean magazine from a weapon? He goes, a paper magazine. And he says, and this is where it went, clicked with me just like that. And I said, oh my God, we might have something here. Speaker 2 (6:45) The prints off that catalog cannot be transmitted electronically. In 2002, Alabama is one of many states not wired into the FBI's National Fingerprint Database. So somebody has to carry the prints by hand. On Monday, October 21st, an FBI agent from Alabama carries them onto a plane to Washington, D.C., along with the bullet fragments. When an examiner runs the Alabama prints through the federal fingerprint system, a name comes back. Here's FBI Supervisory Special Agent Linda Hooper to the Monster, D.C. Sniper podcast. Speaker 1 (7:24) Boyd Malveaux, and he was 17 years old. Speaker 2 (7:27) Ten months earlier in Washington state, the Jamaican teenager was picked up as an illegal immigrant and fingerprinted by Border Patrol. The print gives them the boy. And as Fitz told me, once they had the boy, they had the man too. Speaker 6 (7:44) They took him to the FBI. They ran him across the whole spectrum of fingerprints, and they found immigration fingerprints. from Lee Boyd Malvo, who was like 15, 16 when he came to this country from Jamaica. And they wound up contacting whoever knew him. Oh, he's with this guy named John Muhammad. Speaker 2 (8:01) That same morning, across the country in Tacoma, Washington, investigators finally knock on Robert Holmes' door. Holmes is Muhammad's old army friend who has spent a week trying to get someone at the FBI to take him seriously