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Beltway Snipers
At 3:19 in the morning on October 24, 2002, to be exact—the FBI
closed in on the snipers and their 1990 Chevy Caprice.

During the month, 10 people had been randomly gunned down and
three critically injured while going about their everyday
lives—mowing the lawn, pumping gas, shopping, reading a book.
Among the 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.

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:

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;
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.
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.

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

Breaking the Case

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 helping to work the hotline. Our evidence experts were
asked to digitally map many of the evolving crime scenes, and
our 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 called into that office on the
case. A second suspect…
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.

https://www.fbi.gov/history/famous-cases/beltway-snipers
 

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