John Allen Muhammad [7]

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When you meet someone for the first time, you always put your best foot forward. You don't want that person to know all of your flaws, and you don't want them to think badly about you because you're really interested in that person, and you hide it as long as you can. I am Mildred Muhammad. I'm an award winning global keynote speaker, and my former husband was John Ala Mohammad, whom you all know to be the DC Sniper. Everybody

There is a ruthless person on the loose.

What unerves this community the most is the randomness of the murders, ordinary people doing ordinary things. They killed the five people in one day and then went on the rampage for the next month.

It is quite a mystery.

The police say they have never had a crime quite like this.

Be careful, these guys are using weapons that are going to go right straight through our bulletproof vests.

From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is monster DC Sniper. On the morning of October twenty second, two thousand and two, Leise found the names of their first real suspects in the DC Sniper case. Authorities connected the snipers to a Montgomery, Alabama liquor store shooting. At that crime scene, police found a fingerprint. The FBI then matched the fingerprint to a seventeen year old Jamaican boy named Lee Boyd Malvo. He'd been arrested in Washington State in two thousand and one

I was walking to the store and my friend Valina picked me up and she said, where are you going? Said, I'm going to the store for my mom. And so we pulled up at the corner store. She went in and she came out with these two guys. When upumas John and he put his head through the driver's side window and said, what is your name? I said? Mildred said, I'm John. Would you like to go out tonight? I said, I need to check my schedule. I didn't have a schedule.

What were the qualities of the man that you found attractive?

Well, he had a beautiful smile, he was jovial, funny. He said what he meant, and he meant what he said, and that's something that most men don't do.

Mildred had grown up without a father and had never had a serious boyfriend. Most of her ideas about relationships came from TV and movies. John was romantic and said all the right things.

About six months in, my friend Elena came over and she said, so, how are you and John? I said, are we good? She said, so?

You know?

He married right? What?

It turns out that John was already married to a woman named Carol and they had a son named Lindburgh.

It was devastating for me to find out that he was married. But I knew I had to stay away from him. I said, okay, I'm got to break that off. So finally I did. But then he came back and said, I have some terrible news to tell you. I say, what's that? He said, I can't read, and he couldn't. All he could do was write his name. So he had adapted as an adult to not being able to read. His whole family didn't know he couldn't read. Nobody knew he couldn't read.

Mildred felt that John, who in many ways was closed off, was finally opening up to her. She cared deeply about John and wanted to help him.

He said, well, I want to go back in the military. So I taught him how to read enough to pass the test to be reinstated in active duty. And after he passed the test, I say we're done.

John enlisted in the Army and was stationed in Fort Lewis, Washington. There, John qualified as an expert with an M sixteen, the army's standard infantry rifle. That rating is the Army's highest of three levels of marksmanship for a typical soldier.

So he left went to Fort Lewis, and he wrote me a letter and said, hey, I can't do this without you. I'll do whatever it takes for you to.

Be with me.

Just come, and he sent an airline ticket and I left.

You love this man.

I did, absolutely, with all of my heart. I did, and I wanted to build a life with him. And about three months later he got a divorce and then we got married. It was a sunny day, was and Grace Chapel ahead on a white dress. He was in dress blues ceremonial uniform for military.

Two years later, in January nineteen ninety, John and Mildred had their first child, John Junior. A little less than a year after that, John was deployed to Saudi Arabia for Operation Desert Storm. He worked as a combat engineer and metal worker, and it was here that Williams was said to have thrown a grenade into the tent of a fellow soldier.

So they came and brought in investigators. The commander had us to come to his office.

John had his own side of the story. According to that account, John had previously approached an officer with complaints of racism from white soldiers. John says those soldiers felt the need to retaliate, so they created a phony grin a story to blame on him, and then his punishment. He was hogtied and humiliated.

And the commander said to John, we investigated your allegations. However, when the investigators came to ask you questions, you didn't answer them. I didn't know that, he said, so, Sarga Williams, why didn't you answer those questions? And John looked at him and said, permission to be released. Commander said, permission granted, and we got up and we left.

After the commander released him from the meeting, John stopped talking about the incident. The military didn't keep any records of the event, so all they had to go on were conflicting stories. No official charges were ever made in the case. At first, Mildred believed John's side of the story. She trusted her husband, but years later, after she saw what John was capable of, she came to believe that the other story was true, that John had in fact tried to get back at a fellow soldier using a

With it.

After Desert Storm, Mildred says John was a changed man.

He was no longer jovial. He didn't want to have those long conversations anymore. He was just cutting dry. How you doing fine, We'll job to nothing. All soldiers had come back from a war zone, they always go to a hospital first to just do a whole physical, just before they released them back to their base. All I learned was that he was diagnosed with PTSD.

At that point in time, post traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, was not a commonly understood. PTSD can occur after a traumatic experience. It can cause flashbacks of the trauma and create a heightened sense of fear, and it can make people feel depressed or detached. Many who experience PTSD also become irritable, aggressive, or distrustful of others, which can lead to social isolation.

The only person he opened up to was our son, so when he came home, he just went immediately to play with him. Most of his interactions was with our son. But then his behavior became to be obsessive. So I would buy dishes, silverware. He'd break all the dishes except for three three plates, three saucers, three bowls. Well, I finally asked them, so why do you keep breaking all this stuff? Because this does not make sense. He said, well, we don't need anybody else over here. It's just the

Mildred says John's erratic moods took a huge mental toll on her. She was already raising a child and working full time, and she was trying to cope with John's strange behavior, but it was becoming harder and harder. Still. He had never turned his anger towards her directly until one afternoon when they went to a nearby park.

And this park you could rent a boat. I said, you know, I want to get a boat so little John can ride in the boat and see what that's like. He turned to me with the coldest look in his eyes, was just empty, and he said, we're not going to do that. Scared me and I just shut down. It was painful the way he looked at me and talked to me. He never done that before ever. So we went home and I went straight to the bathroom and locked the door, and I stayed in there all day.

How did John respond? How did you respond to John?

He waited until that morning and came and apologized to me and said he didn't know what came over him, and he was really sorry. I said, don't you ever ever talk to me like that again.

The relationship normalized for a while. It was now early in nineteen ninety three, and the family was back in Tacoma, Washington. They'd had a daughter, Selena, and Mildred was pregnant with their second daughter, Taliba. On the surface, things look calm, but John was growing more disillusioned with the military, and he'd gotten into trouble again.

John was brought up on charges for threatening to kill his first sergeant. He told the first sergeant, I'll kill you, your wife, and everybody in their line. He had an attorney, military attorney. We went in to talk to her about the case, and as they're talking, she looks at me and she says, you don't know anything that's going on, do you? I say no, am I done? And so she asked him, why haven't you told your wife what's

According to Mildred.

What turned the case was the defense attorney was asking the first sergeant what happened and he couldn't recall, and so the verdict came back not guilty. John was happy. He said he knew that he was not going to be found guilty, and he apologized for not telling me about the whole case, but he said, because you were pregnant with Taliba, and I didn't want those emotions to affect our child.

Eventually, in nineteen ninety four, John was honorably discharged from the military. During this period, John and Mildred had also been introduced to the name of Islam. The Nation is an African American religious and political group based on the Muslim faith. It was started in the nineteen thirties and then was popularized by Malcolm X and Muhammad Ali. Mildred converted first in nineteen ninety six and John followed in

Everyone has their own spiritual path, and that was the one that I chose because I needed clarity on who God is, where is my position, who I am, and where I needed to be and the type of mother that I wanted to be to my children. So with him join us a year later, then that was just what he decided to do. And then he would go to the brother's meetings and do what they do.

After John left the military, he needed work. They decided to use John's background fixing vehicles in the military to start a unique auto mechanic business. Instead of operating from a shop, John would go directly to the customer's car. He would either work on it there or take it back to his home garage. The business started off well, but John and Mildred needed help with the bookkeeping.

I was working one day and a woman walks through my door. Her name was Mildred Muhammad.

She was the.

Spouse of John Muhammad. They just converted from Williams to muhammad.

Is and Nichols ran a business development at accounting company. Mildred saw an ad for it and sought her out specifically.

I would say probably an hour and a half. In two our meeting for the first time, she wanted to do business with me. They had started a business of repairing cars. The second meeting was to do more of an intake with them, and so her husband was present at our second meeting.

This is when Isa met John for the first time.

And he walked in the door. He was very tall, quite handsome, and had a very hard handshake, very direct look you straight in the eye. Short haircut, you can tell he had been in the military. Very polite, called me sister, which is a term of endearment in the black community. He was very glad to meet me. He was very glad to be doing business with another sister. Mildred Muhammad was the administrator. She was the one who would be dispatching and taking the calls for services, and

But soon Isa began to notice things about John and Mildred's relationship, strange things. And the summer of nineteen ninety seven, John's son from his previous marriage, Lindbergh, came to visit Tacoma from Louisiana.

He didn't want to return home. He said there was abuse in different things and he was afraid to go back home. Mildred talked to me about it in terms of what should she do, and I said, you're going to have to send him back to his mother.

Mildred says John was adamant that they keep Lindbergh. John was worried that Lindbergh really was being abused in Louisiana, so he got a lawyer and went to court, hoping to gain custody of Lindberg.

And I said to him, what you're doing is wrong. Carol was calling and he wouldn't talk to her. I said, you need to talk to her. This is not your decision to make on your own, and you need to get some background as to what is really happening with Lindberg.

But when John went to court, the judge in Washington said that he didn't have jurisdiction, and so John had to send Lindbergh back home.

So that night I came back from a mosque meeting and John had this huge scuffle bag as long as a twin bed packing. John, Selena, and Taliba were just sitting on a bed and Limbert too, And I said, so what's going on here? He said, well, I'm running with Lynn. No you're not. Why would you need to run with Lynn because he's being abused and I need to protect him. I say, but the judge said, he needs to go home tomorrow, and you're gonna run with him and leave me and the children destitute. Is that

The incident with Lindbergh was just the beginning. Soon other people began to notice odd things about John and Mildred's relationship.

They didn't fight a lot, but they did fight. Sure, there was a couple of times that it would be right there and you would just kind of hear the attitude in the voices.

This is Felix Strojer in Tacoma. He and John had opened a martial arts business together. Felix was the martial artist and John was the businessman. Mildred helped out with the bookkeeping, so Felix regularly saw the couple interact.

You know, I think that they kept a lot of this stuff hit. I knew that they had problems, but not to the extent that it went it went too far.

Despite the tension with Mildred, Felix says that John loved his kids more than anything.

I remember one of them he would always have in his arms. Any little kid sometime will start to play in class or something. But the thing is all John would have to do is just look their eyes just had to meet a little John knew to just get it together. I never seen him spank him or anything, but when I did see the eye contact, I knew that it had been some work to make that happen. You know, little kids, they have to learn to look for that look. But I think he had a good

But Felix says that John also had a darker side. On one occasion, Felix noticed that John had taken a liking to a young female student, and then she stopped coming to class, presumably to avoid John. Even still, Felix says that John would go over to her house.

This might have been something that I should have paid attention to, because if I remember right, it was almost like in a stalking way. I believe that she said that he would show up when he wanted to. That was a problem. I misread his character. He had some issues.

Those issues would become consistent and soon escalate even further. Here's Icea Nichols again.

After the third year of being their client, it became apparent to me that there were some tensions going on with John and Mildrid. Through the business. There were calls from clients that John was missing appointments. Milder didn't know his whereabouts, why he was missing appointments. He would be gone. She had a list where he was supposed to go for the day, and then she started getting phone calls him not being there, then waiting for him to rive.

Mildred wasn't comfortable talking to the young woman who made these claims, so Mildred asked her friend Stanley to go investigate for her.

So he went and talk to the young lady and she said that John had been over there all the time, spent Christmas, in Thanksgiving, and even the little boy, who was I think three or four knew him. He came back to me, he says, so, Mildred, this is what I found out. So what we're going to do? I said, well, what we're going to do is we want to confront John because I still got a on his business.

So Mildred finally approached John and he said.

Oh, she's lying, She's this, she's that. But I didn't believe him. I asked him for a divorce. I said, you acting free, you may as well be free.

They agreed to separate, but John didn't want a divorce, and although they hadn't settled on rules for seeing the kids, John moved out.

Of the house, but he still had a key to the house, so he would come in in the middle of the night. I could hear the key going in the door. He would walk back to the bedroom. So I opened my eye to a slither. Watch him walk into the room from one side of the bed to the other, lean over to listen to me breathe stand up and leave out of the room. He did that three times. The third time, Taliba woke up and said Daddy, and he picks her up and says, here's Taliba, and

Even though they were separated, Mildred and John tried to make the mechanic business work, but soon it began to fall apart. Here's Ion Nichols again.

I got a call from Mildred. She wanted to inform me that they were no longer be able to afford to utilize my services anymore. I felt really sad. She says, we're not making the money. She says, I don't know where John is half the time. She's told me that he sometimes will leave for two three days. I don't have any more control, and so she didn't know how the business would survive without John.

Mildred says the mechanic business was no longer important to John. All he cared about was getting back into the house and back into the family, and he was determined. On one faithful night, Mildred learned how dangerous her husband truly was.

He came over and said, we need to talk. My brother was there, so I felt I was safe. We go into garage, so he says, you are not going to raise my children by yourself. John said you have become my enemy, and as my enemy, I will kill you. I said, well, I've been sleeping with the enemy all this time. What else you're gonna do? He charges at me. I ran around him into the house where my brother was and he leaves and I tell my brother. I said, John's going to kill me. It's going to kill me.

Mildred was thoroughly terrified of John. She went to the courthouse the next morning to get a restraining order against him.

Judge say, you really need to get away from this guy. I say, your honor, I am really trying to do that. He saw the escalation in how dangerous John was for me, and he gave me a lifetime restraining order, but still had to have visitation with the children. So we had to set up for someone to pick up the children and take them to John and bring them back, and so we found somebody to do that. The first weekend went fine. Second weekend was my mom's birthday, March to twenty seven, I.

Said Nichols dropped in that evening to see Mildred and to tell her mother Happy birthday.

I expect to see the children. I expected to see Mom. I expected to see John. When I got there, the children weren't there. John wasn't there. Mildred's mother was in the back room, and her brother was there, who was a truck driver and he was in town. So I got in and I took my shoes off, and I said, Hey, how's it going. She's like, well, it's my mom's birthday and we're waiting on John to bring the children back.

Mildred was getting worried. The children were supposed to be home hours ago and she hadn't heard from John.

We didn't have cell phones back then like we do now. We had pagers. So I'm blown up his pager seven point thirty. He calls. My son is on the line. I said to asks your dad, what time are you coming home? Say mom? Dad said we'll be there in an hour. I said, where are you anyway? He said, well,

She hung up that phone and she looked at me and she said something is wrong. Something is wrong, and she began to pace back and forth. I know now that something really is wrong because of what she just shared with me. I stayed at their house till ten o'clock, almost eleven o'clock, Mildred's making phone calls asking people have they seen John and the children. I go home. I call her one more time before I got ready to go to bed. I lived there, and she says no,

The children never came home that night. The next morning, Mildred started calling around looking for them.

So I'm thinking maybe he took the children to school. Because it's a Monday. Went to the school. I talked to secretary. She said, no, Mammy, your children have not checked in. She looked at me because every time they saw me I was smiling. I wasn't smiling. I said, this was Mohammy, what's the matter. And it was the first time I cried. I say, John took the children, and she said, let's go in the bathroom, wash your face, go home, call the police.

Mildred did go home, and her mom was waiting for her, hoping for some good news.

And when she saw me come around the corner without my children, she let out a scream. I had never heard my mother's scream before, and I ran to her before she hit the ground because she was she was going there, and she said, he took out babies.

He took us babies.

I said, I know mine, So what are we gonna do? I said, I don't know, but I'm gonna do something. So I called the police.

They took a report. She gave them pictures of her children. John had taken the children and vanished.

The police told Mildred that since John had shared custody of the children, the incident couldn't be filed as a kidnapping. John had just as much right to the kids as she did, and that meant there would be no criminal investigation.

She's learning all of this, and she aspirally emotionally every day because she doesn't know where her babies are. Then John began to call her, and he began in this crazy, diabolical take me back or you won't never see the children. That's when it began. She would plead John, please just bring the children back, and he would constantly hold those children and threatened that she would never see the children again if she didn't take him back. Over time, we

Mildred says she got so depressed that she lost all desire to eat.

I was eating half a slice of bread and crushed ice. That was it, just enough to sustain me. I was signing for a package from my mom on Mother's Day and.

I passed out. Shortly thereafter, ISA got a phone call.

And it's from Mildred's mon and Mildred's mom says that Mildred's in the hospital and if I could go and check on Mildred for her. I go, and Mildred's in the emergency room. I walk into the room and I see Mildred and I grab her hand and she opens her eyes. She looks at me, and she starts apologizing to me. She starts crying, saying she's sorry. I tried to take care of myself. I tried because those are

Mildred was in her lowest place. She hadn't seen or heard from her children in nearly two months, and she was about to learn that her life was in serious danger.

My mother called the hospital shortly thereafter and told them that John just called her and said he was on his way to the hospital to kill me. A social worker came and said, you can't go back home because we have to put you in hiding so that John will not find and kill you. So they waited till it got dark, brought me to close, took me out of the back door of the hospital. They told me I needed to slouch down in the car so no

Mildred made it safely to a shelter. She stayed there for a few months before relocating to Maryland to stay with some family. It appeared as though John was nowhere to be found, So where was he and where were the children? It seemed like nobody knew, But thousands of miles away someone did know. The Jamaican boy whose fingerprints had been found during the Sniper investigation, Lee boyd Malvo.

He gave me his time.

He was consistent, even though the consistency was maive.

He was consistent.

Next time on Monster DC Sniper.

This is a very rare time where you're able to understand how an individual develops from the day he's born to the day he was arrested for one of the most sensational crimes of modern time.

All over the world, who are fatherless, who are not in school, who have no role model, who feel like they have no purpose, it's so easy for a gang leader or even an organization like Isis to recruit and to give them a sense of purpose.

He didn't have his parents, he didn't have any structure, and all he had was instability.

I mean, I have no one.

If I off of a bridge that they know and get them.

So it probably had a traumatic impact on him knowing that this was going to be how my life is.

I'm going to.

Find a way because if I don't find a way.

I'm let.

Monster DC Sniper is a fifteen episode podcast hosted by Tony Harris and produced by iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. Matt Frederick and Alex Williams are executive producers on behalf of iHeart Radio, alongside producers Trevor Young, ben Keebrick, and Josh Thain. Payne Lindsay and Donald Albright are executive producers on behalf of Tenderfoot TV, alongside producers Meredith Stedman and Christina Dana.