Headline Archives |
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A BYTE OUT OF HISTORY The Beltway Snipers, Part 1 |
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10/22/07 | |||||
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 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. Timeline of Terror 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:
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. Read part two of the series, which retraces law enforcement’s collective steps in tracking down the snipers, including the FBI’s multi-faceted role. |