A Byte Out of History
The Beltway Snipers, Part 1
10/22/07
This blue 1990 Chevy Caprice was used as a rolling
sniper’s nest.
Five years ago this week—at 3:19 in the morning on
October 24, 2002, to be exact—we closed in on the
snipers who’d been terrorizing the Washington, D.C.,
area over the course of 23 long days.
During the month, 10 people had been randomly
gunned down and three critically injured while going
This blue 1990 Chevy Caprice was used about their everyday lives—mowing the lawn,
pumping gas, shopping, reading a book. Among the
as a rolling sniper’s nest.
victims was one of our own—FBI intelligence analyst
Linda Franklin, who was felled by a single bullet while leaving a home improvement store in
Virginia with her husband.
The massive investigation into the sniper attacks was led by the Montgomery County (Maryland)
Police Department, headed by Chief Charles Moose, with the FBI and many other law
enforcement agencies playing a supporting role. Chief Moose had specifically requested our help
through a federal law on serial killings.
That morning, the hunt for the snipers quickly came to an end, when a team of Maryland
State Police, Montgomery County SWAT officers, and agents from our Hostage Rescue Team
arrested the sleeping John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo without a struggle.
Timeline of Terror
October 2: Man killed while crossing a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland
October 3: Five more murders, four in Maryland and one in D.C.
October 4: Woman wounded while loading her van at Spotsylvania Mall
October 7: 13-year-old-boy wounded at a school in Bowie, Maryland
October 9: Man murdered near Manassas, Virginia, while pumping gas
October 11: Man shot dead near Fredericksburg, Virginia, while pumping gas
October 14: FBI analyst Linda Franklin killed near Falls Church, Virginia
October 19: Man wounded outside a steakhouse in Ashland, Virginia
October 22: A bus driver, the final victim, killed in Aspen Hill, Maryland
October 24: Muhammad and Malvo arrested in Maryland
Just a few hours earlier, at approximately
11:45 p.m., their dark blue 1990 Chevy
Caprice—bearing the New Jersey license
plate NDA-21Z, which had been widely
publicized on the news only hours earlier—
had been spotted at a rest stop parking lot
off I-70 in Maryland (see photos
right). Within the hour, law enforcement
swarmed the scene, setting up a perimeter to
check out any movements and make sure
there’d be no escape.
What evidence experts from the FBI and
other police forces found there was both
revealing and shocking. The car had a hole
cut in the trunk near the license plate (see
photo below, left) so that shots could be fired from within the vehicle. It was, in effect, a rolling
sniper’s nest.
Also found in the car were:
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The Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle that had been used in each attack;
A rifle’s scope for taking aim and a tripod to steady the shots;
A backseat that had the sheet metal removed between the passenger compartment and the
trunk, enabling the shooter to get into the trunk from inside the car (see photo below,
right);
The Chevy Caprice owner’s manual with—the FBI Laboratory later detected—written
impressions of the one of the demand notes;
The digital voice recorder used by both Malvo and Muhammad to make extortion
demands;
A laptop stolen from one of the victims containing maps of the shooting sites and
getaway routes from some of the crime scenes; and
Maps, walkie-talkies, and many more items.
You know the rest of the story. Both Malvo and Muhammad were convicted at trial or pled
guilty in multiple court cases in Maryland and Virginia. Both were sentenced to life without
parole; Muhammad also received the death penalty in Virginia.
A Byte Out of History
The Beltway Snipers, Part 2
10/24/07
It was just another fall evening in the nation’s capital—until a
sniper’s bullet struck down a 55-year-old man in a parking lot in
Wheaton, Maryland. By 10 o’clock the next morning—October 3,
2002—four more people within a few miles of each other had
been similarly murdered.
The attacks were soon linked, and a massive multi-agency
investigation was launched, led by the Montgomery County
Police Department in Maryland.
Within days, the FBI alone had some 400 agents around the
country working the case. We’d set up a toll-free number to
collect tips from the public, with teams of new agents in training
FBI evidence experts surveyed many
helping to work the hotline. Our evidence experts were asked to
crime scene sites like this one during
digitally map many of the evolving crime scenes, and our
the sniper case.
behavioral analysts helped prepare a profile of the shooter for
investigators. We’d also set up a Joint Operations Center to help Montgomery County investigators run
the case.
But the big break in the case came, ironically, from the snipers themselves.
On October 17, a caller claiming to be the sniper phoned in to say, in a bit of an investigative tease, that
he was responsible for the murder of two women (actually, only one was killed) during the robbery of a
liquor store in Montgomery, Alabama, a month earlier.
That set in motion a chain of events that led to the capture of John Muhammad and Lee Malvo four days
later, ending 23 days of random attacks in the Washington, D.C, area.
Here’s how the investigation played out:
 Investigators soon learned that a crime
similar to the one described in the call had
indeed taken place—and that fingerprint and
ballistic evidence were available from the
case.
 An agent from our office in Mobile gathered
that evidence and quickly flew to
Washington, D.C., arriving Monday evening,
October 21. While ATF handled the ballistic
evidence, we took the fingerprint evidence to
the FBI Laboratory (then located at our
Headquarters).
 The following morning, our fingerprint
database produced a match—a magazine
dropped at the crime scene bore the
fingerprints of Lee Boyd Malvo from a
previous arrest in Washington State. We now
had a suspect…
 The arrest record provided another
important lead, mentioning a man named
John Allen Muhammad. One of our agents
from Tacoma recognized the name from a tip
The snipers left Tarot “Death” cards like this one
called into that office on the case. A second
at some of the shooting sites. Note the words
suspect…
“Call me God” at the top.
 Our work with ATF agents revealed that
Muhammad had a Bushmaster .223 rifle in his possession, a federal violation since he’d been
served with a restraining order to stay away from his ex-wife. That enabled us to charge
him with federal weapons violations. And with Malvo clearly connected, the FBI and ATF jointly
obtained a federal material witness warrant for him. The legal papers were now in our hands…
 Meanwhile, on October 22, we searched our criminal records database and found that
Muhammad had registered a blue Chevy Caprice with the license plate of NDA-21Z in New
Jersey. That description was given to the news media and shared far and wide, leading to the
arrest of the two snipers.
That was the end of the attacks, but not our role in the case. We spent many more hours gathering
evidence and preparing it for court—work that ultimately paid off in the convictions of both Malvo and
Muhammad.