Lee Boyd Malvo [8]

Welcome to Monster d C Sniper, a production of iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. The views and opinions expressed in this podcast are solely those of the podcast author or individuals participating in the podcast, and do not represent those of iHeartMedia, Tenderfoot TV, or their employees. Listener discretion is advised.

Three weeks into the d C Sniper investigation, police connected a fingerprint from an Alabama crime scene to two names, John Alan Mohammed and Lee Boyd Malvo. Last episode, we explored mohammed story. After his wife asked for a divorce, he disappeared with his three children. This episode, Who was Lee Boyd Malvo, the seventeen year old from Jamaica and how was he connected to Mohammed? At the time, investigators were stumped, but years later we finally started to get

Dire the d C Snipers sa verbatim transcript from Lee Boyd Malvo word for word. 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 our modern time. The takeaway from it is not the grisly nature of what happened at the end, but what led him to that. Lee Boyd Malvel was born February eighteen, nineteen eighty five, in Kingston, Jamaica. He was born to

Lee remembers his father, Leslie, as kind and permissive. Lee says he spent his early years on a tricycle, and Leslie would pull him through the neighborhood by a rope tied to the tricycles handlebars. Lee's mother, Una, on the other hand, was the disciplinarian.

Una was very strict in many ways. She would be calm, cool and collected one moment, and then violent the next.

Lee told me only that when his mother got angry, she would sometimes beat him to the point of drawing blood.

At the same time, she did care for him, and she did provide for the family, but she was gone most of the time, so it would not be unusual for Lee to be fending for himself at a very young age. One day, while she was out at work, he was left alone, and he was awfully young. He was five six years old. She had some jade figurines that she kept around the house. They were small, trivial

I a break one of these things, and I'm I'm crying.

Before she comes from he was expecting a beating. He knew she was going to hit him and hit him hard.

After hour, she sheltered me and charged Dowary.

She came home in a rage and was about to well off on Lee and his father stepped in.

And eat grabbed me up. He said, this is the person.

This is the thing that can be replate each or not.

You know, this is a thing pointing to the object, and this is your son, and you need to be able to separate those two right now. Whether that message rang true with Una remains unclear.

My father was like to go.

Get He was my protect because he would always know what to do or what to say in those moments.

It really stuck with him that this is what a father does. A father protects his child. And he had some fond memories of his father until eventually his father left him, and that's when things started to go sour.

There is a ruthless person on the loose.

What unnerves 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.

The white bag.

From iHeartRadio and Tenderfoot TV. This is Monster DC Sniper criminologist Anthony Meoli has made a career of interviewing some of America's most heinous criminals.

I literally have spoken or written to over three hundred serial killers. What I find most interesting about them is that they are people. I don't harp on the horrific nature of their crimes, but rather try to learn who they were and how the crimes came about.

Me only says people often completely write off killers it's just evil people or monsters. But he thinks that's a mistake.

As soon as we find out who did it, we can't get enough of how evil or how monstrous this person is without understanding what it was that brought the person to that particular moment in time. Unfortunately, they are not monsters, they are not some mystical beasts. Unfortunately, these are human beings with human DNA, and we have to

As a criminologist, me only thinks that if we want to prevent these sorts of crimes from happening in the future, we need to understand the people that commit them and examine their lives. That's why he's corresponded with so many serial killers. Meoldi was particularly interested to speak with Lee Boyd Malvoe. He first wrotally in two thousand and three, but starting a correspondence proved challenging.

Letters that I sent would be mailed back and saying the inmate is not here. So it took a while, and it wasn't until May of two thousand and five where I received his first letter. What was interesting was it was a two page letter, handwritten in black ink. Normally, it takes a long time for many of these individuals to trust others.

But Meoldi says Lee's first letter to him was different.

It was very personal. I think that's what struck me. He even left the letter by saying, wherever you want to go from here, I'm willing to go with you. So that's sort of where it all began. We were corresponding one to two letters a week. We did that for about four years, and then I had the ability to speak to him on the phone. My first phone call with him was in twenty ten. It struck me

To during these years of communicating back and forth. Meoli says Lee asked him to help edit and publish his autobiography. Meoli agreed.

What came across with Lee Boyd Malvo's intellect, his ability to jump from topic to topic. He knew anything and everything about anything related to the weather, It could be related to inmate rights, it could be related to racial tensions. And that was one dynamic that we talked a lot about. As a Caucasian male, obviously we came from two different worlds.

Zara Burden is a journalist and host of the Jamaican news program eighteen Degrees North. She was also interested in understanding Lee Boyd Malbose.

Roots oh Well.

First interview back in twenty thirteen was an interview with Lee Boyd Malville.

He agreed to.

Do the interview, he said, because it was allowing him to speak to his Jamaican people. You know, it's a strange kind of thing. Jimmy cons are four jamay cns. We coss each other on this rock, but we back the best of us and we disagreees together the worst of us. It was important for us to understand host somebody raised on our soil could leave here and go to the United States, where most Jamaicans go to become prosperous, and he instead of going that route, he instead chose

That was the big question.

He explained. Violence was something that occurred constantly.

This is criminologist Anthony Meoli again.

So there would often be one or two parents on a whole block watching fifteen twenty kids.

Yes, an aunt might be present, but is that aunt going to give as much attention as a mom would, is that uncle going to have enough energy to take care and discipline that child in the right way? Sometimes yes, sometimes known.

Often the only way, sadly, to keep them in line was to know that if they did something in bed while, a beating was coming. And so it wasn't uncommon for Lee to see violence or to experience violence.

In his autobiography, Lie says one time, when he was around five, his father brought home a paycheck that was short on cash. His mother suspected he was cheating on her and accused him of giving the money to another woman. This led to an argument, which escalated into a violent fight.

Here's Lee, I'm never driving a qualification.

My dad basically felt that my mother's departured Pteropie.

Lee says that two days later he was sitting on a bed watching his dad clean a mirror on the bedroom dresser when his mother snuck up from.

Behind my mom to chop the pand off of the ship.

His mom had picked up a machete and was about to attack his father from behind when Lee yells out to his father charged.

A vote, and that's when he fell the reflection in the mirror.

He turned it she missed his rich but she basically filled off the entire film.

Una strikes Leslie's thumb and nearly severs his thumb with the machete.

He was hard on his hand because I mean this my mother is my father's those.

Lee was very emotional from that moment because he was too young to know what it meant to have an infidelity. He had no idea what that was, but he knew that his mother and his father had severe arguments to the points where his mother would be willing to almost kill his father. So he saw violence at a very early age and continued to do so for many years.

They always in fight that it does this the uncle my mom called it, she re least.

About the time.

Eventually, Una had had enough of Leslie's infidel with various women on the island, and she told Leslie to decide whether to be with her or to move on to the other women.

He used to work with Kyan Island as a contract to make a whole deal and stuff like that, and one occasion when he left worked up my mom she did again, so she decided she moved out the house and his Disappearod didn't tell anyone.

He didn't know where to find them.

Lisa has Buna packed up all their things and emptied out the bank accounts. She left with Lee to start a new life and didn't tell Leslie where they'd gone.

And this left Lee pretty much without a father from about the age of nine.

He did find them after a couple of months. I think to a certain extent, he took it out on me.

Didn't want to do after that or have anything to do with me.

He just pretty much abandoned me.

Here's journalist Zara Burden again.

His father was absent for or a large part, and emotionally that created a void. There's a lot of hurt for youngsters in Jamaica. A lot of it is based on absent parents that allow predators to come and pray, whether it's sexually, emotionally or recruiting in gangs, youths in this country, in Jamaica, youths all over the world 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

After leaving Leslie, Una struggled to make ends meet. She moved with Lee to Endeavor, a rural town north of Kingston, where they lived in a small home.

It was pretty much a shock. It was just enough to get by. They suffered to often have proper plumbing. Una did not have the money to fix things.

Despite being strapped for cash, Una was able to get alane and open a small grocery store.

It was a sundry shop, so to say.

UNA's store went well until a power outage ruined all of the refrigerated goods. She didn't have enough money saved to restock the inventory, so she was forced to close the store and unable to find work and Endeavor, she and Lee moved back to Kingston. For Lee, this was the first of many moves.

In Jamaica, it's not uncommon for people to be somewhat transient. In the let's say late eighties early nineties, work was very hard to come by, especially for a woman who was not building homes or something or doing labor, so it was not uncommon for Una to look for work at various places and move around so that she could support the two of.

Them, And according to Lee, his mother would do whatever it took to get what she needed.

When she purchased a home, she knew that one of the men who was selling the land was prone to drinking alcohol, and she waited until he was inebriated and he signed over another acre for a relatively paltry sum to Una so that she could have more land. She was a smart woman in knowing what she needed to do in order to get things done.

And that often meant moving for work. Me Only says Lee bounced around fifteen to twenty times in his adolescence. Sometimes she took Lee with her, other times she left him with family and friends.

In many cases, Lee would refer to the family as cousins. They may not have been cousins legally, but just friends who his mom would leave him with and then she would be gone for several months. So yes, he would be completely abandoned, if you will, by today's standards, while his mom looked for more steady work, and this was at the unfortunate negative impact to Lee's life.

There's a huge problem in this country where barrel kids are concerned, they're called barrel kids. Baryl just means that your parents, to show love and affection, will send a barrel filled with good is, with school products, with whatever is necessary to allow you to have things.

Journalist Zara Burton says that many times parents seek better opportunities abroad, but they can't take their families with him.

Jamaica is a tough spot to earn a dollar, I'm telling you, And so you get an opportunity to go to the States to earn a doll you're going to take it. For a lot of Jamaicans, Kman Turks and Caicos Bahamas. Those are the hot spots where we go to for better economic opportunity. But guess what, sometimes your status there ain't fully started, and so you're there kind of illegally overstay your visa and you're working, and all you can to show you love is to get on Skype, get on the phone.

And cene barrel.

But invariably some of them are not being supervised in their homes and so there definitely is a deficit in their emotional development, their ability to be disciplined the way that it manifests in this country is our crime level, which remains extremely high compared to maybe other populations that are similar in size.

Jamaica's homicide rate consistently ranks as one of the highest in the world.

The most brutal individuals sometimes on the street creating havoc are the teens because they've been recruited the wrong people are there to pick up the slack where parenting has failed.

Over the next few years, Lee bounced between relatives apartments. According to me only Lee jumped around anywhere from fifteen to twenty times during that period.

His biggest struggle in life was between the ages of five and nine. Those were the times where he had moved from various places and he had seen a lot of violence, experienced a lot of violence, so it made it very difficult for him to understand what life really looked like as he approached his early teen years.

I remember I was sitting down writing my journal and I said, I.

Mean, I have no one.

Even if I walk off a bridge, they no one get the flu is cold life of power. And I decided that I would never cry, and I would never complain about anything. I'm going to find a way he could be I don't find a way a law.

He did not have the stability that most children need during the formative years of his life. At the most, he had nothing. He didn't have his parents, he didn't have any structure, and all he had was instability. So it probably had a traumatic impact on him, knowing that this was going to be how my life is. It's going to be a tumultuous, violent life that I'm going to live, and he started to develop a lot of anger inside himself.

Around this time, Lee went searching for his father in Kingston the way Lee remembers it. He eventually found Leslie walking down the street. Lee told him that Una had left him behind to go work on another island, hoping that his father would take him in.

Well, I went to see it.

He was looking at Faith like I'm happy to see, but why are you here? I mean I could kill that five minutes earlier. He did not terrify eat if I was safe, I mean none of that. He couldn't find me, he had all these accuses. He gave me some buff fear and arm put me on my way.

I gave it to a ball and Lee took that as I think that's it. With my father. That's about the only acknowledgment I'm going to get.

When later asked about the incident, Lee's father said he didn't take him in because he didn't want to re engage with Una. Leslie Malvo wouldn't see his son again until he was an adult. Despite all these challenges, Lee worked hard at school. He was intelligent and made good grades, and although she was gone for long stretches of time, Lee's mother watched closely over his performance in school.

He can be terrified to go home because as soon as I go over here by name to door.

I honestly think that Lee, if there was a word for it, I think Lee was more of an academic really than he gave himself credit for it. He knew that his mom expected one hundred percent. Anything under one hundred percent he was going to get punished. He would often sit outside the home waiting to go inside and be.

Petrified the going I didn't didn't want to go home, but if An nacked to go home, so I went home.

She was waiting for me.

She had a if every thick never built.

He explained that for every incorrect answer he got, he would receive three blows from a belt. If he got ten incorrect answers for the day, he would get hit thirty times. He knew that because he knew if he had a bad day or a bad grade on his paper, what was going to happen when those doors opened?

I mean everywhere, faith back, he everwhere. I kept looking at her in the eye.

Pages would not cry.

He just kept going and going. There was a look on her face that was.

A look of hate.

When Lee was about twelve, his mom left Kingston again for work on another island, so he went to live with a teacher who he called Aunt Simon.

Had a much more humanistic approach. She would sit down and tell Lee exactly what she expected of him. Lee was sort of shocked. She treated him almost like a young adult. She always would encourage Lee, explain to Lee the things that he did well and the things that he needed to work on. She didn't raise her voice at him, which was something that he hadn't really experienced before. That separated her from Una. In Lee's mind, he didn't have to worry about that beating formula of three times

Me Only says that Lee was often very affected by small things, words, gestures, with the tone of a person's voice.

He even spoke about the most simple phrase that an simone would say. She would say good morning, Lee, and that would mean the world to him because he didn't get that from his mom. He did not get that from Leslie. He got that from a woman who he really barely knew at that time, and yet she was willing to take him in as her son. His life looked much more like a regular child. He was now experiencing the ability to play with board games. She would read Bible lessons to him, she would show him how

But it wouldn't last. Eventually, Una showed up at Simone's house and demanded that Lee come back and live with her.

When it came to a head to where he had to choose between Aunt Simone and his mother, he really didn't have a choice because he was still a minor. Una had the final say because she was, you know, his mother, and unfortunately he had to leave. There's nothing Aunt Simone could do about it. She couldn't protect him anymore, you know. Reluctantly she had to give him up.

Una came to realize how much happier Lee had felt without her. She resented him for wanting to stay with Simone instead of coming back to live with her.

So once he was reunited with Una, he would face daily beating, sometimes twice a day, just simply for no reason at all. So now it had escalated with the violence at home. It went from being a good morning with Aunt Simone to an unknown, hellish day with his own mother.

Eventually, Lee reached his breaking point.

I decided open a film work help and I a makeshift will walk down to the Mangua tree and it does to an myself.

The suicide attempt with Lee occurred, according to him, around age thirteen. He had been on a farm with Una and a caretaker who lived on this farm. He went up in a tree and sat there for quite some time, debating what is his life going to be like? If my life is going to be like this for the rest of my life, I don't want to live it. So he finally decided that he is going to take his life. When he made the knot placed it around his neck, he yelled his mom's name as loud as

The worst state that was two days later he beat me too, He would piece ama, He pointed to the truth, until he's going to.

Your fuck himself.

But he said, for whatever reason, he had even lost the courage to attempt suicide again. He just couldn't do it anymore.

Lee had no one, He had lost on Simon, and both of his parents had given up on him. But he was about to meet the man who would take on the role of his new father. When Lee was fifteen, he and Una moved to the island of Antigua. Lee says that Antigua brought more of the same verbal and physical abuse. Meanwhile, his mother had started a new business there, but not long after moving to Antigua, Una took another job on a different island. She left Lee alone there

My mother actually prepared me for this by leaving me alone for many times.

I had time to practice.

I mean, I learned how to help. I take an empty famous.

The throne, go out to the beach and make some jerk chicken fill it. I'd pull it, cans and bottle. I pretty much bee whatever I had to.

In Antigua, Lee had to walk several miles to school each day. He passed by the Zaza Electronics store. On one occasion he stopped in inside. A tall man was watching his young son play a flight simulator video game on one of the store's computers. They both had America in accents and were joking around and laughing. Lee was not used to seeing this kind of affection between a father and son.

I wanted that relationship I wanted to be a father like him. He was confident.

I mean, there were not a lot of fathers there with yourself. A score of things about him that were different than I admired.

And I just founded what from a difference. I actually never spoke to him.

That man was John Muhammad. It was here in Antigua that John had run away from Tacoma, Washington, with his three children in tow. John had originally heard of the island from an acquaintance in Tacoma. That man had a cousin who worked in Antiqua as a travel agent. John thought he could start a new life there with his kids, and so they moved there in March of two thousand.

John was sort of the pied piper of many children on the island. He was known for doing good things for kids. He had money that others did not on the island was something that Lee sort of looked up to. But what we learned is that John's money was not necessarily legal. What he was doing was illegally importing goods, services, and even people into the United States.

John had created a business of smuggling Caribbean islanders into America. He would help them forge passports and ensure travel to the Florida coast, and in the year two thousand, one of John's new clients was Una, Lee's mother.

A lot of people don't understand that John actually got Una into the United States. There was a presumed relationship as far as whether or not it was a sexual one that I'm not quite sure.

He made it for like three He made it in September and the three weeks later in October she was in the US.

Una left Lee behind and got a job at a restaurant in Fort Myers, Florida. She promised to bring him to America when she had more money, but eventually Una stopped sending rent for Lee to live on, so he was forced to move into a run down shack behind the house where they'd been staying. Things only got worse for Lee. In November of two thousand, he fell ill with rheumatic fever. Lying alone, sick in the dark, Lee

Mohammed, if he gets across the border with your children, there will be nothing we can do.

So are you telling me the reason why I don't have my children and won't way to keep my children because I don't have the proper paperwork.

Again, if we do not address the systemic failures that occurred in this case, it's entirely likely that there are all kinds of John Mohammad's out there wandering the streets.

See that needs killed myself over and over.

He told me, the old person has to die.

Lee Marville has to die because Lee Marvell.

Cannot do this.

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 iHeartRadio, 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. Original