Criminal Minds (18 page)

In 1977 Bianchi drifted to Los Angeles, where his older cousin, Angelo Buono Jr., lived. Bianchi was no prize, but Buono was even worse. Also born in Rochester, on October 5, 1934, by age fourteen he was bragging to friends about his rapes. He hated women, but he married several in order to have sex with them and get them pregnant. In each marriage he fathered more children, seemingly all for the purposes of abusing them physically and sexually. His idol was rapist Caryl Chessman, and he later adopted one of Chessman’s favorite techniques: posing as a police officer. Even before Buono started killing, he was very familiar with the inside of a jail cell.

Bianchi and Buono were awful individuals, but when they got together they were even worse.

When Bianchi arrived in Los Angeles, Buono seemed like quite the successful ladies’ man. Somehow, in spite of his personality, Buono was surrounded by a bevy of underage girls. The cousins came up with the idea of using the threat of physical violence to coerce girls to work for them as prostitutes. It worked for a while with two girls, until one found somebody bigger than Buono and the other ran away.

Bianchi and Buono tried abducting more girls, and they bought a “trick list” from a prostitute that turned out to be phony. When they found out it was a fake, they raped and strangled the hooker who had sold it to them. This was their first murder, but it was far from their last. The victim’s naked body showed up near Forest Lawn Cemetery on October 17, 1977. Two more prostitutes, one of them only fifteen, met their ends at the cousins’ hands in the next few weeks.

The next five victims were found during Thanksgiving week, and the cousins had shifted their focus; they were no longer killing prostitutes, or people whom they had previously known. The first two victims, also raped and strangled, were twelve- and fourteen-year-old girls who were last seen getting off their school bus and who had no connection to the cousins’ lifestyle. The third proved to be a woman who had been missing since early November. The fourth and the fifth showed signs of torture. Another teenage prostitute’s body turned up after that, and then a final victim was found in the trunk of her own car after it had been rolled off a cliff.

In 1978, Bianchi moved to Bellingham, Washington, to be with his girlfriend and their infant son. While he was there, working as a security guard, he tried his hand at solo murder. He strangled two women and was arrested almost immediately. The police there put two and two together, and, knowing that Bianchi had lived in Los Angeles, they contacted the Hillside Stranglers task force.

The various agencies that were involved amassed the evidence, and after Bianchi’s attempt at an insanity defense failed, he took a plea deal: confess and testify against Buono, and he would get life with a possibility of parole, served in California instead of Washington. He reneged on the testimony, contradicting himself, and is currently serving his life sentence in Washington. Buono was sentenced to life in California, but he died of a heart attack on September 21, 2002.

 

 

JUST AS DES PLAINES
, Illinois, is terrorized by a sniper in “L.D.S.K.” (106), which is FBI parlance for “long-distance serial killer,” so was the Greater Washington, D.C., area in the autumn of 2002.

The Beltway Snipers actually used a different MO in their first documented attacks. On September 5, 2002, Paul LaRuffa closed his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland, and carried his laptop computer and a bank deposit to his car. While he sat behind the wheel, someone shot him six times but failed to kill him. Someone he described as “a kid” ran up to the car and snatched the laptop and the deposit bags. The bags and the laptop case were discovered six weeks later. Clothing found nearby held the DNA of Lee Boyd Malvo, a seventeen-year-old. Had the items been found right away, the Beltway Snipers might never have become national news, and eleven other people might have lived.

Ten days later, also in Clinton, Muhammad Rashid, the proprietor of Three Roads Liquor, was attacked while locking up his store. Someone later identified as Malvo shot him in the stomach. Rashid survived.

On September 21, twelve hours away, in Montgomery, Alabama, Claudine Parker and Kellie Adams were closing the Zelda Road ABC Liquor Store when they were both shot. Parker died from her wounds, but Adams survived, badly injured. The Beltway Snipers had killed their first victim. A police car arrived while two men, later identified as Malvo and his companion, John Allen Muhammad, forty-one, were rummaging through the women’s purses. The police chased Muhammad and Malvo, but they escaped.

On September 23, Hong Im Ballenger, who managed a store called Beauty Depot in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, was shot in the head while walking to her car after closing the store. Malvo was observed grabbing Ballenger’s purse. She died from her gunshot wound.

So far, these had seemingly been random robbery-murders, widely scattered and with no reason to link them beyond the common MO. On October 2, that all changed, and the nation became aware of the Beltway Snipers at last.

On that autumn evening, at 5:20 p.m., a shot smashed the window of a Michaels Craft Store in Aspen Hill, Maryland. No one was hurt in that shooting, but at 6:30 p.m., James Martin, a government program analyst, was shot and killed in the parking lot of a supermarket in nearby Wheaton.

The next morning, four people in the area were shot and killed, each outside: at a gas station, mowing a lawn, sitting on a bench. After that bloody morning, the snipers rested, but they went out again after dark, killing one more victim. Each of the day’s murders was accomplished with a single shot from some distance away.

The next day, the shooters struck outside another Michaels Craft Store, this one at the Spotsylvania Mall outside Fredericksburg, Virginia. The snipers shot Caroline Seawell in the parking lot; she survived. The authorities had already connected the Maryland sniper attacks and determined that the bullet fragments were all from high-intensity .223 caliber bullets. The same was true of the Virginia attack.

After lying low for a couple of days, Muhammad and Malvo attacked again on October 7, shooting thirteen-year-old Iran Brown as he arrived at his middle school. Brown survived and was able to testify at Muhammad’s trial.

This time, the snipers left a message near the scene—the tarot card Death with “Call me God” written on the front and “For you mr. Police. Code: ‘Call me God’. Do not release to the press” on the back.

The law enforcement response was massive. Coming just one year after 9/11 and the subsequent anthrax attacks, the shootings were considered to be the possible work of a terrorist cell. More than four hundred agents from the FBI; the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms; and the Secret Service; as well as police officers from every jurisdiction where the shootings took place all worked under the command of the Montgomery County Police Department and its chief, Charles Moose, who later wrote a book about the weeks of terror.

By October 22, the Beltway Snipers had shot five more people, including FBI analyst Linda Franklin, who was killed in Falls Church, Virginia. Only one of the five victims survived.

In the woods near one shooting site, the authorities found evidence galore: a shell casing, a candy wrapper with DNA from Muhammad and Malvo on it, and a plastic bag that contained a long handwritten note demanding a payoff of ten million dollars to stop the killing.

Phone calls had started coming in from someone who knew the words written on the tarot card. One of those calls, which the FBI referred to as an “investigative tease,” led to the break that the authorities needed. This call referred to the shootings in Montgomery, Alabama. The FBI learned that a fingerprint was found on an arms catalog that had been dropped at the scene. That fingerprint had not yet been analyzed, but the bureau matched it to Malvo, who had been arrested previously in the state of Washington. That arrest report also contained a reference to John Muhammad.

Investigators swarmed the Muhammad home in Tacoma, Washington, and found a tree stump that had been used for target practice. The .223 caliber bullets embedded in the stump were all too familiar.

The FBI discovered that Muhammad owned a Chevrolet Caprice, a former police car with almost 150,000 miles on it. The car’s description and license plate number were broadcast, and the car was spotted in a rest stop off I-70 near Myersville, Maryland. Law enforcement officials flooded the area and apprehended Muhammad and Malvo, asleep in the car.

Inside the vehicle, they found a Bushmaster .223 caliber semiautomatic rifle, a bipod, and other items connecting the men to the slayings. The car had been modified so that someone could enter the trunk from the rear seat, and a hole had been cut near the license plate so that the rifle’s barrel could poke through without being seen. The Caprice had become a mobile sniper station, just like the vehicle in “L.D.S.K.”

The reign of terror had come to an end, but big questions remained. Who were these people, and why had they done it? Muhammad and Malvo had questionable pasts. Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran, trained in the military as a mechanic, a truck driver, and a metalworker. He had earned the Expert Rifleman’s Badge, the highest level of marksmanship for basic soldiers. During his military career, he had joined the Nation of Islam. He had been born John Allen Williams in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, but had changed his name in April 2001 to John Allen Muhammad.

His second wife, Mildred Williams, had been granted a restraining order against him after he abducted their three children and threatened her with bodily harm. She claimed that he could make anything into a weapon and that she feared for her life. Ultimately, she believed the murders were all about her—that Muhammad intended to kill her and make it appear that she was another random victim of the spree. She had moved to the Beltway area to be far away from Tacoma, where Muhammad lived, but she believed that he knew where she had gone.

Muhammad met Malvo in Antigua, where he dated the boy’s mother. Although there was never any legal or blood relationship between the two men, Malvo became close to Muhammad and referred to the older man as his father. He and his mother were Jamaican citizens, in the United States illegally.

The real motive for the attacks has never been definitively stated. Malvo, when not citing Islamic jihad or the movie
The Matrix
, said it was all part of a campaign to terrorize the nation while recruiting an army of boys and young men who would accompany them to Canada for training and then be sent back into the United States to carry out the same type of random attacks.

Initially, Malvo took credit for all the murders, then admitted that he had done so only because it was harder to sentence a teenager to death. In fact, he was not sentenced to death; he received several consecutive life sentences without the possibility of parole. After the sentencing, Malvo revealed that the pair had committed four earlier shootings that killed two people between March and August 2002.

John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection on November 10, 2009.

 

 

APRIL 19 AND 20
are dates with a considerable amount of bloodshed attached to them. Adolf Hitler was born on April 20, 1889. On April 19, 1993, the siege at the Branch Davidian Compound in Waco, Texas, ended in a cataclysmic fire, and at least seventy-four lives were lost. On that date two years later, 168 people died in Timothy McVeigh’s bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. And on April 20, 1999—in celebration of the 110th anniversary of Hitler ’s birth, but probably with those other occasions in mind—Eric Harris, eighteen, and Dylan Klebold, seventeen, brought firearms and explosives into Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado, where both were students, and opened fire on their classmates, the staff, and the police.

For an hour, beginning at 11:10 a.m., Harris and Klebold terrorized the school, firing semiautomatic weapons and shotguns and throwing pipe bombs and Molotov cocktails. They brought larger bombs to school as well; their original plan was to detonate two large bombs that would blow up the cafeteria and the library and then to shoot students as they fled the building. When those bombs didn’t detonate, Harris and Klebold instead entered the school building and did their killing up close.