The Beltway Sniper Attacks
More than a decade after the brief reign of the Beltway Snipers most of the information about the case has been released into the public domain. There’s still a lot of confusion about exactly what the two perpetrators did and why. That’s understandable because it’s such a bizarre story and there are so many tangled threads involved.
This book will try to weave them into a picture that’s easier to understand.
This book will try to weave them into a picture that’s easier to understand.
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The Beltway Sniper Attacks PDF and ePub |
Excerpt
Introduction
The hidden marksman settled himself comfortably and relaxed, then methodically began to build up a stable fire position. His mind wandered slightly as he went through the old, well-drilled routine, back to summer days on the rifle ranges near Camp Beauregard. Lines of men on the firing point under the hot Louisiana sun, the sharp crack of M16 rifles, the patient instructions from range staff that turned to bellows of fury when a recruit did something stupid, the mingled smells of damp earth, hot oil and burned propellant. He patiently went through the lessons he’d learned there. He lined his body up with the target so no muscles would be straining to hold the rifle in the aim. He made sure his chest was free to expand without pressing on the ground and moving him. He shuffled his elbows until they sat firmly – a slight wobble would throw off his shot. Finally he raised the butt of the rifle into his shoulder and looked through the sight, making a few final tiny adjustments so the aiming mark settled on the target with no effort required.
It wasn’t a difficult shot; the target was just over a hundred yards away and standing almost completely still. There was no need to adjust for range or movement. He watched for a few moments, looking for signs of wind that might affect the flight of the bullet. There was nothing, not that any deflection would be significant at that range anyway. Still, he’d been trained to check and he relied on his training to make every shot count. He started to settle his breathing into a steady rhythm then quietly spoke to his spotter. From his carefully prepared hide he only had a narrow field of view and needed a final check that there were no threats in the area. The reply came back: Clear to fire. He breathed in and out a few more times, then on the last exhale held his breath half way out. The slight rise and fall of the sight stopped as his body settled into immobility. In a few seconds his muscles would start to shake as they were starved of oxygen but right now he had a brief window of utter stillness. His index finger began to tighten on the trigger, squeezing smoothly. Done properly the shot should almost come as a surprise. He concentrated on holding the red dot over the still-stationary target as the trigger pressure increased…
The rifle cracked, its light recoil barely jolting his body as the bullet left the barrel at over 3,000 feet per second. The muzzle jumped slightly then fell back, bringing the sight back onto target. That took less than half a second, but already the target was staggering from the impact. The marksman exulted for a moment – another enemy down! – but there was no time to hang around gloating. He snapped out a quick order to his spotter and the pair went into their familiar and well-drilled evasion maneuver.
This sounds like a well-planned military operation – but it wasn’t. It happened on a small-town street in Maryland. The victim wasn’t a terrorist commander or enemy general, but a 54-year-old taxi driver murdered as he pumped gas into his cab. The marksman wasn’t a Special Forces sniper, but a crazed veteran driven by a mix of racial hatred and warped religious zeal. By the time he shot Premkumar Walekar at a Mobil gas station he and his teenage disciple had already murdered eight other people and wounded a further seven. Seven more would be killed, and three injured, before the lethal spree was finally brought to an end. In total the shootings were spread over ten states and the capital district, and took place over a period of more than ten months, but the worst violence happened in a three-week rampage through Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C. – on October 3 alone there were five attacks, all of them fatal. Targeting was indiscriminate. The gunmen simply cruised around until they saw a potential victim or a firing point where they could lie up and wait for one. Not even the most twisted mind could claim that any of the victims had done anything to deserve being targeted – they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the carnage on October 3 a wave of panic swept the northeast corner of the USA, as people realized that any one of them could easily be the next to wander into the sights of the elusive killers.
Although the shootings didn’t show the long range and extreme skill expected of a military sniper they were still a long way from the typical gang-related drive-by or drunken dispute; most of the victims were felled by a single shot as they went unsuspecting about their business. When the press picked up on the fact that a series of killings was underway they quickly started to describe the killer as a sniper and, despite irritated grumblings from the real practitioners of that military black art, the name stuck. People in the USA don’t like feeling that they’re being stalked like targets in a war zone and the police launched an urgent manhunt. Eyewitness accounts confused them, though, and it took weeks to finally track down the killer and his assistant. Throughout those weeks the murders continued and the fear built steadily. For Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. it was one of the most traumatic periods in modern history.
More than a decade after the brief reign of the Beltway Snipers most of the information about the case has been released into the public domain. There’s still a lot of confusion about exactly what the two perpetrators did and why. That’s understandable because it’s such a bizarre story and there are so many tangled threads involved. This book will try to weave them into a picture that’s easier to understand.
Chapter 1: Trail of Terror
The crimes that became known as the Beltway Sniper killings took place in October 2002, but they were the culmination of a series of attacks that began months earlier in Tacoma, Washington.
In February of 2002 Tacoma resident Robert Holmes got a call from a friend, a man he knew from having served with him in the US Army. The friend, 41-year-old John Allen Muhammed, explained that he and another man needed a place to stay for a while; was there any spare room for them? Sure, he was told. He could stay for as long as he needed. Shortly after Muhammed arrived with a Jamaican teenager named Lee Boyd Malvo and the pair settled in to Tacoma.
Holmes’s personal firearm collection included a rifle and three handguns; through the early part of the year the three men practiced with the weapons at a range in Tacoma, usually as a group, and occasionally shot at a tree stump in Holmes’s yard. On occasion Muhammed asked if he could borrow one of the guns, sometimes a .44 Magnum revolver but usually a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Holmes cheerfully agreed. He had no idea what Muhammed really planned, or what he and Malvo were doing when they went out together.
Keenya Cook, a 21-year-old African-American mother, had recently escaped from an abusive relationship along with her six-month-old daughter Angeleah. She could have found herself an apartment easily enough; she managed a women’s fashion store, and was taking business courses to help with her plan of opening a restaurant, but the breakup of the relationship had been emotional and she was happier being around family for the moment. Now she was staying in Tacoma with her aunt, Isa Farrington-Nichols. She’d never even heard of John Allen Muhammed.
On February 16, 2002 Keenya was cooking dinner at her aunt’s home and, while it simmered, getting Angeleah ready for a bath.[i] She’d just got her daughter undressed when the doorbell rang. Leaving the baby in the bedroom she hurried to the door and swung it open. She was confronted by a young West Indian man she’d never seen before. A moment later a large handgun rose, obscuring her view of his face. Before she could react the .45 boomed once.
Keenya Cook’s death was probably mercifully swift. The Colt M1911A1 .45 pistol is a big, heavy handgun firing a big, heavy bullet. It’s obsolete as a military weapon because it performs badly against body armor and the magazine can only hold a small number of the big, fat rounds – seven, against the fifteen or so that’s normal in modern 9mm handguns – but it still packs a massive punch. Shot once in the face at point blank range she was most likely killed instantly. That’s some comfort, but not a lot. It certainly didn’t help Isa Farrington-Nichols much when she came home to find the front door open and her niece sprawled in a pool of blood, her face smashed by the bullet’s hammering impact. Inside the dinner was burning on the stove and Angeleah cried unattended in the bedroom.
Tacoma’s largest synagogue is Temple Beth El, a sprawling modern building on South 12th Street. On May 4 the custodian was doing his rounds when he noticed a hole in one of the walls. From its position he assumed it had been made when a door slammed open and the handle hit the plaster, but a few days later one of the community realized there were holes in several adjoining rooms as well. Puzzled, they started to search the damaged areas. Eventually they found the flattened remains of two heavy-caliber bullets. The police were called and an investigation launched; eventually the BATF were brought in. From interview responses and the physical evidence they were able to work out that sometime between May 1 and May 4 someone had fired two rounds at the building from a .44 Magnum handgun, probably from a passing vehicle, but there were no hints at who or why. It would be months before the mystery was solved. It’s still unknown whether Muhammed or Malvo fired those shots. It is certain that Malvo was the one who gunned down Keenya Cook. Muhammed, who had his own twisted reasons, had sent the teenager to Farrington-Nichols’ home as a test of obedience and loyalty.
[i] Washington Post, Dec 15, 2002; Before Area Sniper Attacks, Another Deadly Bullet Trail
http://research.lifeboat.com/sniper.htm
The hidden marksman settled himself comfortably and relaxed, then methodically began to build up a stable fire position. His mind wandered slightly as he went through the old, well-drilled routine, back to summer days on the rifle ranges near Camp Beauregard. Lines of men on the firing point under the hot Louisiana sun, the sharp crack of M16 rifles, the patient instructions from range staff that turned to bellows of fury when a recruit did something stupid, the mingled smells of damp earth, hot oil and burned propellant. He patiently went through the lessons he’d learned there. He lined his body up with the target so no muscles would be straining to hold the rifle in the aim. He made sure his chest was free to expand without pressing on the ground and moving him. He shuffled his elbows until they sat firmly – a slight wobble would throw off his shot. Finally he raised the butt of the rifle into his shoulder and looked through the sight, making a few final tiny adjustments so the aiming mark settled on the target with no effort required.
It wasn’t a difficult shot; the target was just over a hundred yards away and standing almost completely still. There was no need to adjust for range or movement. He watched for a few moments, looking for signs of wind that might affect the flight of the bullet. There was nothing, not that any deflection would be significant at that range anyway. Still, he’d been trained to check and he relied on his training to make every shot count. He started to settle his breathing into a steady rhythm then quietly spoke to his spotter. From his carefully prepared hide he only had a narrow field of view and needed a final check that there were no threats in the area. The reply came back: Clear to fire. He breathed in and out a few more times, then on the last exhale held his breath half way out. The slight rise and fall of the sight stopped as his body settled into immobility. In a few seconds his muscles would start to shake as they were starved of oxygen but right now he had a brief window of utter stillness. His index finger began to tighten on the trigger, squeezing smoothly. Done properly the shot should almost come as a surprise. He concentrated on holding the red dot over the still-stationary target as the trigger pressure increased…
The rifle cracked, its light recoil barely jolting his body as the bullet left the barrel at over 3,000 feet per second. The muzzle jumped slightly then fell back, bringing the sight back onto target. That took less than half a second, but already the target was staggering from the impact. The marksman exulted for a moment – another enemy down! – but there was no time to hang around gloating. He snapped out a quick order to his spotter and the pair went into their familiar and well-drilled evasion maneuver.
This sounds like a well-planned military operation – but it wasn’t. It happened on a small-town street in Maryland. The victim wasn’t a terrorist commander or enemy general, but a 54-year-old taxi driver murdered as he pumped gas into his cab. The marksman wasn’t a Special Forces sniper, but a crazed veteran driven by a mix of racial hatred and warped religious zeal. By the time he shot Premkumar Walekar at a Mobil gas station he and his teenage disciple had already murdered eight other people and wounded a further seven. Seven more would be killed, and three injured, before the lethal spree was finally brought to an end. In total the shootings were spread over ten states and the capital district, and took place over a period of more than ten months, but the worst violence happened in a three-week rampage through Maryland, Virginia and Washington D.C. – on October 3 alone there were five attacks, all of them fatal. Targeting was indiscriminate. The gunmen simply cruised around until they saw a potential victim or a firing point where they could lie up and wait for one. Not even the most twisted mind could claim that any of the victims had done anything to deserve being targeted – they were simply in the wrong place at the wrong time. After the carnage on October 3 a wave of panic swept the northeast corner of the USA, as people realized that any one of them could easily be the next to wander into the sights of the elusive killers.
Although the shootings didn’t show the long range and extreme skill expected of a military sniper they were still a long way from the typical gang-related drive-by or drunken dispute; most of the victims were felled by a single shot as they went unsuspecting about their business. When the press picked up on the fact that a series of killings was underway they quickly started to describe the killer as a sniper and, despite irritated grumblings from the real practitioners of that military black art, the name stuck. People in the USA don’t like feeling that they’re being stalked like targets in a war zone and the police launched an urgent manhunt. Eyewitness accounts confused them, though, and it took weeks to finally track down the killer and his assistant. Throughout those weeks the murders continued and the fear built steadily. For Maryland, Virginia and Washington, D.C. it was one of the most traumatic periods in modern history.
More than a decade after the brief reign of the Beltway Snipers most of the information about the case has been released into the public domain. There’s still a lot of confusion about exactly what the two perpetrators did and why. That’s understandable because it’s such a bizarre story and there are so many tangled threads involved. This book will try to weave them into a picture that’s easier to understand.
Chapter 1: Trail of Terror
The crimes that became known as the Beltway Sniper killings took place in October 2002, but they were the culmination of a series of attacks that began months earlier in Tacoma, Washington.
In February of 2002 Tacoma resident Robert Holmes got a call from a friend, a man he knew from having served with him in the US Army. The friend, 41-year-old John Allen Muhammed, explained that he and another man needed a place to stay for a while; was there any spare room for them? Sure, he was told. He could stay for as long as he needed. Shortly after Muhammed arrived with a Jamaican teenager named Lee Boyd Malvo and the pair settled in to Tacoma.
Holmes’s personal firearm collection included a rifle and three handguns; through the early part of the year the three men practiced with the weapons at a range in Tacoma, usually as a group, and occasionally shot at a tree stump in Holmes’s yard. On occasion Muhammed asked if he could borrow one of the guns, sometimes a .44 Magnum revolver but usually a .45-caliber semiautomatic pistol. Holmes cheerfully agreed. He had no idea what Muhammed really planned, or what he and Malvo were doing when they went out together.
Keenya Cook, a 21-year-old African-American mother, had recently escaped from an abusive relationship along with her six-month-old daughter Angeleah. She could have found herself an apartment easily enough; she managed a women’s fashion store, and was taking business courses to help with her plan of opening a restaurant, but the breakup of the relationship had been emotional and she was happier being around family for the moment. Now she was staying in Tacoma with her aunt, Isa Farrington-Nichols. She’d never even heard of John Allen Muhammed.
On February 16, 2002 Keenya was cooking dinner at her aunt’s home and, while it simmered, getting Angeleah ready for a bath.[i] She’d just got her daughter undressed when the doorbell rang. Leaving the baby in the bedroom she hurried to the door and swung it open. She was confronted by a young West Indian man she’d never seen before. A moment later a large handgun rose, obscuring her view of his face. Before she could react the .45 boomed once.
Keenya Cook’s death was probably mercifully swift. The Colt M1911A1 .45 pistol is a big, heavy handgun firing a big, heavy bullet. It’s obsolete as a military weapon because it performs badly against body armor and the magazine can only hold a small number of the big, fat rounds – seven, against the fifteen or so that’s normal in modern 9mm handguns – but it still packs a massive punch. Shot once in the face at point blank range she was most likely killed instantly. That’s some comfort, but not a lot. It certainly didn’t help Isa Farrington-Nichols much when she came home to find the front door open and her niece sprawled in a pool of blood, her face smashed by the bullet’s hammering impact. Inside the dinner was burning on the stove and Angeleah cried unattended in the bedroom.
Tacoma’s largest synagogue is Temple Beth El, a sprawling modern building on South 12th Street. On May 4 the custodian was doing his rounds when he noticed a hole in one of the walls. From its position he assumed it had been made when a door slammed open and the handle hit the plaster, but a few days later one of the community realized there were holes in several adjoining rooms as well. Puzzled, they started to search the damaged areas. Eventually they found the flattened remains of two heavy-caliber bullets. The police were called and an investigation launched; eventually the BATF were brought in. From interview responses and the physical evidence they were able to work out that sometime between May 1 and May 4 someone had fired two rounds at the building from a .44 Magnum handgun, probably from a passing vehicle, but there were no hints at who or why. It would be months before the mystery was solved. It’s still unknown whether Muhammed or Malvo fired those shots. It is certain that Malvo was the one who gunned down Keenya Cook. Muhammed, who had his own twisted reasons, had sent the teenager to Farrington-Nichols’ home as a test of obedience and loyalty.
[i] Washington Post, Dec 15, 2002; Before Area Sniper Attacks, Another Deadly Bullet Trail
http://research.lifeboat.com/sniper.htm
