D.C. Snipers Part 2

Sarah: I bet the ASMR community would really like to have a You're Wrong About mouth sounds outtakes reel.

Welcome to You're Wrong About, the podcast that you need therapy to get through. 

Mike: Oh, Jesus. 

Sarah: Did you see that on Twitter the other day? One of our wonderful listeners said that they were a big fan of our Anna Nicole Smith episode, but that they needed therapy to get through it.

Mike: Oh god. I mean, I guess that's a good thing, right?

Sarah: I think it's neutral. I think it speaks to, just think about what your tastes are and if that's not what you want, then that's okay. 

Mike: And if you need to take a break and be in therapy for seven years and return, that's fine. 

Sarah: We've been making the show for less than two years, so I don't think that exact scenario is what played out, but...

Mike: 18 months. I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.

Sarah: And I'm Sarah Marshall and I'm researching a book on the Satanic Panic. 

Mike: And we are on Patreon at patreon.com/yourewrongabout. 

Sarah: And we have some tote bags that we're going to sell you about how capitalism is bad, because life is an ironic trifle.

Mike: It’s going to be all goth merged from now on. 

Sarah:  We’re going to do black light posters next. Because I'm ready. 

Mike: And today we're talking about the DC Sniper part 2. 

Sarah: I have no idea where any of this is going. I'm completely lost and you're going to have to take me to the next thing, because I don't even know what question to ask you. I guess we should start by talking about what we talked about last week.

Mike: Do you want to catch us up?

Sarah: Yes. So last week we talked about the life of Mildred Muhammad and going to the store one day and meeting a guy named John, and the relationship becoming abusive and the abuse increasing and his control of her increasing. And then we talked about John kidnapping the kids that he and Mildred had together, and that he did not have custody of the kids, and her searching for them and having absolutely no luck in her efforts to find them and living in a women's shelter as she got her life back together after John kidnapped their children.

Mike: And what do you remember from the DC sniper shootings about Lee Boyd Malvo, his accomplice? 

Sarah: All I know is that he was much younger. That he was, you said in the last episode, he was a 17 year old boy. 

Mike: When John was 41. 

Sarah: Yeah. Yeah. And I wish I could remember if I was surprised when I found out that one of the perpetrators was a teenager.

Mike: So before we start, I want to make a kind of meta comment on this episode, is that okay: 

Sarah: I don't even know what a meta comment is, so sure.

Mike: So my meta comment for this episode is that everything that happens from now on basically, everyone is an unreliable narrator. 

Sarah: It's like a Flannery O'Connor novella.

Mike: When Lee Malvo is arrested in 2002, when they find out that he and John are the ones doing the sniper shootings, he confesses to all of them. He says I did 100% of the shootings. And then nine months later he said, the only reason he said that was because he wanted to spare John the death penalty. And so he was so kind of brainwashed, indoctrinated by John at that point that he just took all of the responsibility for everything so that John would get off free.

Sarah: And I can see a 17 year old believing that the same way that Joey Buttafuco was known to say to Amy Fisher, according to her memoir, “Kids, don't go to jail”, which she believed.

Mike: Yeah. And he's so brainwashed at that point that he introduces himself to police officers as John Lee Mohammed. Their identities are so fused that it's not clear if he sort of knows the difference between the story he's telling and reality.

Sarah: Did John Muhammad have the tiniest cult that we've ever seen? This seems like a cult of one.

Mike: Yeah. It’s a single serving cult. It's like a sugar packet. Yeah. In 2006, three years later, Lee confessed to four extra murders and said that on the way to DC, before the sniper shootings, they killed a bunch of extra people. Then this is kind of a weird detail: in 2010, he did an interview with William Shatner. 

Sarah: What? Are you one-upping me for celebrity cameos? William Shatner? Why?

Mike: Yes. In the 2000s, William Shatner had a show on A&E called Aftermath. The show had a pretty good idea, it was returning to historical events that have been mis-remembered by the population and telling them in their true form. I can almost imagine that as some sort of audio series

Sarah: Did we steal William Shatner’s idea? 

Mike: It's extremely possible. And on that show, Lee says that he killed 42 people, which no one has ever been able to verify. 

Sarah: Those are Henry Lee Lucas numbers. 

Mike:  Shatner doesn't push them for specifics. It's only a 20 minute long interview, 

Sarah: Right? They want to say that he killed 42 people. They don't want to do an episode where it’s like, we really don't know. Because that’s hard to do a promo with. 

Mike: And a lot of these murders that he's confessing to some of them, it's not clear that there's even a body. 

Sarah: And is he confessing to known murders that are open cases, or does he say, I killed someone of this age and in this location at this time and they match it to something? 

Mike: Both. He confesses to a murder in LA that nobody has been able to find an unsolved murder during that time period in LA it's just, we killed someone. It could mean that they killed a homeless person or killed somebody where it looks like it was something natural. And then there's others that he confesses to where it's people that were shot from far away with a rifle, but there's no evidence. One of them is in Clearwater, Florida, and there's no evidence that Lee and John were in Clearwater, Florida at that time. There's another one in Texas where there's no bus tickets or any other record that they were in Texas. It's just someone who got shot with a gun from far away. 

There's also 2012, because of the 10 year anniversary of the shootings, he does a three hour long interview with the Washington Post in which they specifically asked him, was there ever any sexual contact between you and John? And he says, no, no, no nothing. Then the next day he gives an interview to Matt Lauer on the today show. And he says that John was molesting him the entire time. And so what you find over and over again in this story is you find different versions of the truth, both of which sound plausible. It's plausible to me that there would be sexual abuse and he wouldn't come forward about it. This is something that we're extremely familiar with on this show. But then it also sounds plausible to me that he just responds to a question and spins this story because there's no other evidence of John sexually abusing anybody. And there's no evidence from Mildred's book of this. No one else has come forward. No one else has described anything borderline from John. And so the idea that he could be making that up is plausible. And the idea that he's not making that up is plausible, too. 

Sarah: Or the idea that he feels like maybe this didn't literally happen, but I need to express a degree of control that he had over me that I have not been able to adequately express by talking about emotional abuse or whatever else was going on. 

Mike: I don't want to come down on either side of either version of the story. 

Sarah: Yeah, well how could we possibly know? None of us will ever know. 

Mike: And this is one of the things that I think is, to not make this entire episode super tedious of me saying, this timeline is wrong or like this fact is disputed, I just want to sort of get out of the way now that all of the information we know about Lee Boyd Malvo comes essentially from a single book that's written by a woman called Carmita Alvarez who's a former social worker. She's Jamaican and Lee's Jamaican as well. And so she starts speaking in Patois to him and they get really close. They spent hundreds of hours together, but it's also really notable that Carmita Alvarez is a mitigation consultant hired by his legal team because his legal team is now in an ongoing legal case about juveniles and life imprisonment that is going to be heard by the Supreme Court. 

Sarah: When is that going to happen? Do we know?

Mike: This year. Do we know this year? 

Sarah: We're finally doing a current event. First time! I knew it would happen.

Mike: And so there's no evidence in this book that Carmita has made anything up or that she's acting unethically in any way, but you have to acknowledge her structural incentives, right? Her structural incentive is to identify mitigating factors for his crimes.

Sarah: Can you talk about what mitigating factors are actually for people who don't sit around, thinking about legal stuff all day?

Mike: I feel like you would know this better than I would. 

Sarah: My understanding of it is that if you're a mitigation specialist, your job is to talk to people who know or have insight into the life of this person and to try and humanize them, you know? Yes, they did these things, but if you look at everything that they've experienced and what has been steering them towards this fate, maybe you will be able to show mercy to them. 

Mike: Yeah,  exactly. And so, because Carmita is a mitigation specialist for Lee, she's not interested in John at all. So there's very little information in this book about John. She doesn't interview Mildred. 

Sarah: That’s interesting because John is such, I would imagine, would be such a big part of the mitigation of Lee's crimes because he's, I would imagine from all the Criminal Minds I've been watching, the dominant party in this unsub team.

Mike: Yeah. And another structural weakness in the information that we have about Lee is that Carmita is also not interested in the crimes. 

Sarah: Because you don't want to talk about the crimes, so much. 

Mike: Exactly. And so this book has massive inconsistencies, that Lee says that he's in Louisiana until September 24th, but the first shooting related to the sniper tax is on September 5th, around DC. He says they bought the blue Caprice in October. They actually bought it in September. There are tons of these little facts related to the crimes that are totally unconscious. 

Sarah: Yeah, so it’s worth noting that she's not on a fact finding mission. She is, but she's not on a logistical fact-finding mission. The details of the crime aren't the goal of this. 

Mike: So the narrative kind of breaks down. And what you have is Lee's recollections of the crimes that don't really match reality and don't match sort of the paperwork and the records we have.

Sarah: o we have this weird collage, this is an interesting story for the lack of perspective from directly within it. 

Mike: Yeah. I just want to be really transparent about that. I've read five books about this now, and I'm trying to put together the narrative in a chronological order, but things are all over the map, like different. There are different dates for when people arrive in different countries. Things are in the wrong order. 

Sarah: I mean, even with OJ, there's a fair amount of inconsistency. Different sources are saying different things. It's really about something substantial. But even something as obsessive really ironed out as the OJ Simpson trial in which everything that happened was recorded. And there's still a wild amount of inconsistency. This is the caveat for any story we tell, to an extent. It's just really obvious in this case, which is good. Because it's the obvious cases that make us realize how common this kind of inconsistency is.

Mike: Yeah. The whole time I've been researching this, I've been having this kind of, uhhhh.  

Sarah: You’ve been very uncomfortable for a while.

Mike: I don't want to stop us every two minutes to be like, oh, the government of Antigua says it's May 20th, but Mildred says it's May 22nd. I don't want to do that 50 times this episode. So I'm mostly just going to try to kind of go with what my gut tells me is the most convincing version of the narrative. 

Sarah: Okay. And be like, here's what I think is probably as close to the objective truth as we can get based on my own reckoning. 

Mike: Yes. As so many of the subjects of our shows, we're doing our best. I'm doing my best to put this together in order. That's all I can vouch for. 

Sarah: I hope people are picturing just two Kato Kaelin’s recording this show.

Mike: One of the things that we should start with is that one area where there is a blanket inconsistency between biographies and journalistic investigations and the manhunt books is that Lee Malvo had a horrific childhood. And in the same way that the portrait of abuse that we had last episode where it wasn't physical abuse was different from the narrative, we're sort of used to hearing, Lee's narrative is also different in that his father was a source of love and protection in his life, and his mother was a force of violence and terror in his life, consistently. 

This is an excerpt from Carmita's biography of Lee. Lee's mother is named Una. “Stacy Anne, Lee's cousin, observed Una beating Malvo. He could not have been more than six years old. Una was hitting him all over his body with a belt, and despite the fact that his nose was bleeding, Una did not stop. Marie recalled her daughter running to her to tell her that Una was murdering Lee, but when she went to leave the shop and try to stop the beating, Una turned on her and she had to leave.” 

So there's this dynamic in the house where his father is taking him out to play. His father is taking him on bike rides. His father is taking him out for ice cream. Which according to Carmita, this is not something super normal for Jamaica where it's a relatively patriarchal society and men are not expected to spend a lot of time with their sons. 

We have Lee's father, Leslie, who is uncommonly gentle and sort of this counteracting force to his mother, who's capricious and cruel. And Carmita even mentioned this in her book. She interviewed Una, Lee's mother, quite a few times. “In many of my interactions with Una James, I have experienced her moods myself. We could be having a reasonable discussion and then without warning, she would spring to her feet and begin railing against everything and everyone around her, including me. She would lash out at the government for not stepping in to get Malvo away from Muhammad. Then in the same sentence, she would lash out at Malvo, blaming him for the problem she faced and stating that she wished she had aborted him.”

Sarah: Wow. So just anger, looking at something to be directed at, basically. 

Mike: These big mood swings. So one of the most consistent features of Lee's childhood is inconsistency. She'll be nice to him. He'll ask her a question, you know, the way kids do, like why is the sky blue, whatever. And they'll be having a perfectly nice conversation. And then he'll ask another question and she'll be like, why are you so stupid? And she'll hit him in the head and send him to his room without eating. There's no way to predict these things. There's an incident where he wants to become an artist. And his mom was like, yeah, sure. That sounds great. She buys him all these colored pencils. She buys some paper, he's drawing when he's a kid, he's eight or nine. 

And then one day she comes home, and she says, “Being an artist is stupid. You should be a doctor instead”. And she takes away all of his drawing supplies and paper and stuff. This is kind of what he comes to expect in his life, that there's never going to be any emotional consistency. So when he's six, his parents break up, his dad has gotten a job in the Cayman islands. 

Sarah: No dad, don't go. 

Mike: I know. And he's spending more time away. And Lee's mother becomes convinced that he's cheating on her and they start fighting more. Apparently, this culminates, they have a huge fight about why are you cheating on me? She says he's gambling away all of their money, which I think is partly true, actually, that he does have a gambling problem. But they have this big fight in which he hits Lee's mother, and she picks up a machete and chases him out of the house.

Sarah: I just thought that at least she didn't kill him with the machete. And then I was like, no one's childhood biography should involve the phrase, ‘at least she didn't kill him with a machete.’ Right? That shouldn't be the, at least of your life. 

Mike: So basically, Leslie, Lee's father, leaves and moves to a different part of Kingston. And so he spends all of his time at this point, just waiting for the holidays because that's the only time that he sees his father, once a year when his dad comes back. “Although Una asked Malvo what was wrong, she would not listen to his explanation. He recalled that whenever he explained that he just wanted to have his father around, his mother would slap him across the face angrily for even mentioning it. He felt despair. He was unable to understand why his father had not yet returned to save him. Early depression had begun to set in.” This part sucks, but we have to do it.

Sarah: Okay. I got a blanket so I can be nice and cozy while you break my heart.

Mike: I'm sorry. I want to say that oh, it's going to get better, but no, it does not get better. It's just a really dark story all the way through. 

Sarah: Of course it’s not going to get better because we know that the end game is that he becomes a serial killer, or at least a helper of a serial killer, unclear, but yeah. So we're just going to get to the end and that's the goal here. Nothing is going to get better. That's the point. That's what we're learning.

Mike: He's eight years old at this point. Basically the only friend that he has is this stray cat, which starts coming to the house. So he starts taking care of this cat. He names it Charlie. 

Sarah: Oh God, I'm not going to like where this is going.

Mike: I know I had to cut out a couple of lines because it gets really bad. Malvo recalls that Charlie urinated on the bed. Una screamed like Malvo had never heard her scream before. Then he recalled she hit him in the head until he bled. She insisted that he get rid of the cat and threatened that she would not stop beating him until Charlie was gone. He recalled feeling tremendous anger toward his mother, but he was not able to lash out at her. Malvo recalled that he got Charlie, placed him on the steps, and hit him with a broom. Malvo said that whenever Charlie returned to the house, he had to hit him with a broom until he went away. 

After the cat stopped coming to the house, Malvo, who had been potty trained from when he was one year old, began to wet the bed regularly. We also get the inevitable hint that Una grew up in a house just like this. 

So after Carmita tells the story of the stray cat, she says, “Significant as well is that Malvo was unaware of the memories his cat stirred for his mother. Marie Lawrence, Una’s sister, remembered that she and Una had shared a cat as children. They were very poor and could not afford regular toys, so despite their father's objection, they got a stray cat. Their father's reason for not wanting a cat in the house stemmed from folklore, that cats are like vampires and suck the blood of children. Thus, they had to hide the animal from their father. When their father found it in the home, he killed it. We cried so hard because we really loved the cat, Marie recalled.” And there's other hints too that Una  grew up in a house exactly like this. 

Sarah: And that's how you learn how to take care of a child, if that's how you're raised. And if you don't have the emotional resources to question that or heal.

Mike: This is just the echo of abuse that we see in so many stories. 

Sarah: Right. This is why trauma is hereditary. Yeah. 

Mike: Yeah. And so what happens now, this is when Lee is nine. There begins this pattern where his mom keeps trying to leave to get him a better life. So what happens is she immigrated to a place called St. Martin, which is a tourist island, two hours flight away, where there's higher paying jobs. And she just leaves Lee with a neighbor. And she’s just like, I’ll send back money every month. Can you take care of my son? Here’s money for food. And this happens a number of times that she convinces us kind of a random person to take Lee and then she promises to send money back. And then after a couple of months, the money stops. So whoever Lee is with starts either abusing him or sort of making him work off the debt. 

Sarah: This is awful, by the way, this is reading like a Charles Dickens novel.

Mike: I keep thinking of a Series of Unfortunate Events, where it's like a new thing happens and you're like, everything's going to be fun and then it ends up worse. Right. 

Sarah: And then once he learned the pattern, you're like, great, what new trauma will this spring? Because this is kind of the cyclical nature of trauma too. That of course his mother, who is that parenting is going to put him in situations that will lead to further suffering for him.

Mike: Yeah, absolutely.  First, he's with this woman whose husband is really abusive to him. Then he moves in with Una's sister. Things are going fine for a while. Then apparently there's an incident where he goes to a community center, and he gets in a debate with other boys. Lee wants to go to flight school because his father gave him a flight jacket when he was a kid. And so he's become sort of fixated on becoming a pilot. And he's reading books about flying and aircraft and stuff at night. And so apparently, he's at this community center and a debate breaks out, the way that it does among boys. This plane is faster than this other plane. The kinds of things that kids did before the internet.

Sarah: Bears, beats, Battlestar Galactica. 

Mike: Exactly. That basically begins this argument against the other boys, cause he's such a nerd about airplanes. And then these other boys are bigger than him. And so they beat him up and they make him walk home naked. They steal all of his clothes. This is awful. He gets home and then Una’s sister and her husband smack him around for going to the community center in the first place. They were like, well, you shouldn't have been there. You should have come home after school anyway. And then he tells his mom I don't want to live with them anymore because this is a nightmare. And then his mom beats him because, why are you complaining about this? And now it's a big hassle for me. 

This is the Series of Unfortunate Events style narrative of everything in his life that everything makes everything else worse. So after that, he ends up moving in with a woman named Simone Powell. Who's 21 years old. She's a school teacher. She's the daughter of Una's aunt, so her cousin, I think that makes her. 

Sarah: Oh yeah, she's his second or first cousin once removed, something. Is that it? It doesn't matter. 

Mike: They’re related. Yeah. And this is maybe the first positive caretaker that he's had in his life. He's keeping a journal at the time. And so this is what he writes, “Simone has a parenting style that was the complete opposite of any approach I had ever encountered. We sat down and she asked me what I expected from her. She saw the look of astonishment on my face. Then she explained that she had certain expectations of me and vice versa. She did not believe in corporal punishment, and she would not engage in it. She said things to me that I never thought I would hear. When I was wrong, she explained where I was wrong. When I did well, she commended me on how well I had been doing. She gave me as much time as I needed to question her and I, in turn, actually comprehended what she was saying.” 

Sarah: How old was he at this point?

Mike: He's 11 now.

Sarah:  Wow. So he's been through a lot in this five-year long, because it's been five years since his dad left. So he has this love void of almost half his life too. 

Mike: Just some level of consistency in parenting and some level of emotional adulthood around him where, Hey, we're going to come up with a deal and when you do this, I'm going to punish you, but I'm going to be nice to you when you get good grades or whatever. And like he's never had that level of consistency in his life before. He's also an extremely good student at one of his elementary schools. He's literally the top student. 

When Carmita goes to Jamaica to interview his former teachers, one of them, in 2003, is still using a chart that Lee made in her class because the graphic was so good. And also all of the teachers say that he's wildly intelligent and just a nice kid. As soon as he finishes his homework, he'll walk around and help out all the other kids. Not in a ‘I'm smarter than you, braggy’ kind of way, but in a ‘hey, how can I chip in?’ He's just the sweetest kid. 

And so he's at this dumb prep school at the time. For the first time in his life, he's not getting good grades. And he doesn't really like the kids and the kids don't really like him and it's far away. And so Simone is a school teacher. So Simone moves him to the school where it's 10 minute walk away. They walk to school together in the morning. He can hang out with her during the day. He starts getting straight A's again. And you just know where this is going. 

That one night Simone gets a knock on the door. And it's Lee's mother and she storms into the house and says, “Why did you steal my son? Why have you taken my son away from me?” Even though she's not living in the country, she's gotten it in her head that moving him from this prep school to this slightly more modest school is some sort of betrayal and that she has to take Lee back. 

Sarah: She sees it as something that a parent does because if you're someone's mother, then you are the person who knows what school they should be at. You can see where that reaction comes from and then, and how nothing good can come of it.

Mike: And then it metastasizes into this big, ugly thing. Apparently, she's storming around Simone's house and saying, look how small his room is and look how dirty his clothes are and look at the way that he's living, why didn't you tell me you were moving him to a different school? And Simone says, I didn't have an address for you. There was no way for me to notify you. 

Sarah: You created a situation where your child would bond with someone else and now you can't stand it. 

Mike: Yeah. And you stopped sending money months ago. And what's really interesting and I think like I see everything in the story as a metaphor, but this is just such a perfect metaphor that immediately, as soon as there's that knock on the door, Lee understands that his mother is going to take him away. Simone keeps trying to apply logic to the situation. She's like, no, no, no, no. Once we explain that we tried contacting her and we couldn't and your grades are really good, she'll be fine with this. It's working well. She's appealing to reality, right? She's like, no, this is objectively good and soon she will see that this is objectively good. 

Sarah: The jury will understand the DNA evidence.

Mike: Exactly. And so Lee understands how his mom works. He's like, no, it doesn't matter what's true. It doesn't matter what the reality is. All that matters is her emotional state.

Sarah: And she doesn't hear what you're saying. She knows how what you're saying makes her feel, and that's what we're dealing with.

Mike: And so Carmita actually goes to Jamaica and interviews Simone about this entire experience. And this is from her book. “Malvo told her that he wanted to be with his mother, and he would never need her again. It was like a stab in my heart, she said, I could not believe it was the same child that I had grown to love saying those hurtful things. Unknown to Simone, Malvo denounced her because he was forced to by his mother.”

Sarah:  Right away. Oh, bud.

Mike: I know. “He packed his clothes, but he left one item, a favorite shirt, among her clothes. I left that shirt, which was my favorite, hoping that she would understand, he said.

Sarah: It’s like Brokeback Mountain. The only real love in this life is just somewhere all alone, smelling a shirt.

Mike: “Simone recalled finding the shirt among her dirty laundry but thought that it was just left by mistake. Not until years later, during the course of my investigation, did she learn why Malvo had left it behind. Simone recalled that after Una removed Malvo, Simone sought counseling to deal with what she saw as a rejection of everything she had done for him. She remarked that it was so painful for her that she vowed not to have children of her own.”

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Mike: “The next time Simone saw Malvo was in court when she went to testify on his behalf.” 

Sarah:  I know that there are so many kinds of sadness in the world, and there's so much happening at any given second, but that shirt story.

Mike: It sucks, dude.

Sarah: And that being all he can do and her not understanding what's happening, it might be the saddest thing I have ever heard. At this moment, that certainly feels true to me. The fact that there's so much actual love there and that the circumstances are so awful that they take away the ability to express it. And then there's this tiny spark that can escape and then it just has to die. It’s too much.

Mike: It's too much. Yeah. And so Una takes them away from Simone and puts them in a boarding school, puts him back in this preppy school where he's not getting as good  grades.

Sarah: Well, boarding school is always good news. Only good things happen there. 

Mike: Although, weirdly the boarding school, because you expect it to be super bad, but the boarding school is actually fine. It's just that he doesn't know anybody. All the other kids are going home on weekends to see their families and he doesn't have anywhere to go. So the owner of the boarding school talks about him just sort of sitting and looking out the window all day. 

Sarah: Yeah. That's like the story of the young Scrooge. Charles Dickens was good at knowing how you don't need to have a one-to-one ratio of pain to meanness for it to make sense. Cause in the Christmas Carol, you know what made Scrooge this way, everyone else went home for Christmas and he had to read.

Mike: So after six months, a year at the boarding school, his mom gets deported from St. Martin. She gets caught there and comes back to Jamaica. 

Sarah: What has she been doing? Do we know what she's been doing for work there? 

Mike: Her argument in all of the interviews that she's given about him is that everything she was doing, she was doing for him. So she works her ass off. She owned a restaurant at one point. She's selling juices on the street to tourists. She really does work her ass off. And her whole thing is that I wanted him to have a good education. She says all of the discipline, all of the pushing him to be in this prep school was all so that he could sort of get out of the situation that she was in, of just constant toil and constantly being on the hustle to try to get out of poverty.

Sarah: Yeah, sure. 

Mike: Don't hit your kid, 

Sarah: You can be a good entrepreneur and a bad parent, and you can care about your child in a way that leaves you still, without the ability to do day to day parenting in a way that is helpful or safe for them. And also that, you know, looking back over like a bundle of potential regrets that you have and to look at everything that has happened and been like, well, I was doing everything altruistically. 

Mike: Eventually, she comes back to Jamaica. She takes them out of the boarding school, and he moves in with her. She starts building a home. There's a point where she finds a box in his room of love letters to his girlfriend. 

Sarah: How old is he? 

Mike: He's 13 at this point. And he has a really cute relationship with this girl that they're holding hands. They've had this whole thing where they're going to save themselves for marriage. They're both Christians and they're like, we want to have a peer relationship. So this entire relationship appears to consist of writing cute notes and holding hands. It doesn't seem like much else is going on. And Una finds the cards and immediately goes into a rage that he's never seen before because you know, why are you writing her cards and you never wrote to  me when I was in St. Martin.

Sarah: What? What? And again people didn't always have an address for her, right. He wouldn't have been able to do that. 

Mike: And also, she's super mean. It's not as if he called her, she'd be like, “Oh, hey sweetie, how was your day?” Of course, he doesn't call her, right. She's abandoned him in this random boarding school or with abusive families that he barely knows. 

Sarah: There's an accident trend we're noticing here about the kind of volatility of people who on some level know they've fucked up a relationship beyond repair and are like, no, that can't happen. I have to force it to not happen somehow by ruining it further. 

Mike: How dare you respond reasonably to the situation that I've created? And so after she finds these cards, she beats him with a belt so bad that he falls unconscious. One of the neighbors has to come and pull her off of him and he just wakes up in the bed the next day. He doesn't even remember the beating stopping.

Sarah: That’s so horrible to think about. 

Mike: Yeah. This is where Carmita in the book, and also various psychologists, court appointed psychologists say, this is where he really starts dissociating. And so this is from a psychologist that examined him as part of his trial. “From that point on, Malvo kept to himself. He said that he fell into a kind of melancholy mood and went with the flow. If his mother was in a good mood and detected a change in his attitude, she would hug him and ask him what was wrong? Why was he not talking? However, a couple of hours later, she would tell him that he was the worst thing that had ever happened to her. He remembered that simple conversations ended up with his being struck because he did not answer in time. The beatings were relentless, and after a while, he did not even feel the blows, he just removed himself.” 

Another thing that his teachers and his friends start to say at this point is that it's impossible to tell at any time what Lee thinks or feels, because he starts bending himself to the emotional needs of other people. So if somebody else is mad, he'll act mad with them. Yeah, that's bullshit. If they're really happy, he'll be their jubilant friends. In interviews with his teachers, Carmita finds again and again, people are like, you couldn't tell he was feeling because he had to know how you were feeling first and then he would reflect it back to you. It's sort of like, what do you need me to be? And I think that's a symptom of growing up with this hurricane of a mother where he never knows what her emotional state is and so he just has to bend to it at all times. 

Sarah: Yeah. And then if going into a situation with your own mood already in place, that would be a very dangerous thing to do because you don't know if that's going to upset her. And then if that happens, God help you. And so you just have to wait to get a sense of where she's coming from and then do your best to appease that. And then if you learn how to do that, in your most essential and first and most fundamental relationship, then of course, you're going to be likely to do that with everyone else.

Mike: Absolutely. Yeah. And this is something that characterizes him for the rest of his life and it's the same dynamic that he has with John too, that we've seen from Mildred, that John has this emotional volatility where you can never tell what he's going to do from minute to minute. And this is something that makes Lee feel like he's at home.

Sarah: Yeah. Or as Tonya Harding once said, my mom hit me, and she loved me. Jeff hits me. He loves me. It's just the way life goes. Yeah. That was what she knew, abusive relationships. That was her experience of relationships to a tremendous extent.

Mike: Yeah, that's Lee's experience of love. So at this point he makes a kind of a half-hearted effort to kill himself. He says, Hey mom, you're not going to need to bother with me anymore. And then he wanders outside and makes a noose for himself on a tree. She pulls him down. And then of course slaps him for ruining her day or whatever. She eventually leaves for Antigua, which is another sort of touristy island that is more affluent than Jamaica. So she's going to go there and try to earn more money. She leaves him again with a nice lady, there's this teacher at school named Ms. Maxwell who sees what's going on with him and sees how smart and nice he is and is like, why don't you move in with me instead of going back to this boarding house. 

And so Carmita, of course, interviewed her. “Winsa Maxwell begins tearing up as she talks about her time with Lee. In the summer of 1999, I remember saying to him, would you like to move in with me and my family? And he said, really miss? I could see in his eyes he was very excited. And I took him in food, clothes, everything. We were speaking about adopting him.” And he gets close to her husband, who's a really nice guy. They're growing vegetables in the backyard. They're relatively affluent apparently. And they live in a pretty big house. He has a room to himself and just as he's settling in, his mom writes to them and says he has to move to Antigua with me. So again, Ms. Maxwell, the next time she sees Lee is when he's in prison for the DC sniper shootings. And this also appears in Carmita’s book, that she actually flies up there to spend time with him.  

Sarah: I want a movie about all of these poor mother figures of this boy, going to Washington to have to see this child that they almost had a chance to permanently intervene in his life, and then having to  probably not be able to talk to him except behind glass. There's your stomach happening that we don't hear about. Wow.

Mike: So this is from Carmita’s  book. “He shared with his former teacher that John Mohammed's hold on him did not begin in the United States, but earlier in Antigua. He recalled the moment when Muhammad told him three words that he longed to hear from his parents, but never did, ‘good job son’.

Sarah: By the way, where's his dad? Has he lost touch with him? What’s going on? 

Mike:  So this is one of the saddest things about this, that his dad is in Jamaica this whole time. And Una has asked the father if he can take Lee, but he says, no, I'm in and out of the Cayman islands too much. Again, he's from a poor country, he's trying to earn more money. And so he's working his ass off and he's in another country a lot. Lee's suspicion is that his girlfriend doesn't want a kid in the house and doesn't want to compete with him. It's not clear what evidence there is for that. 

Before he leaves for Antigua, he goes looking for his father. He knows the place where his father hangs out. He goes to the park where his dad plays dominoes and apparently just sort of shows up one day and says, “Hi dad”. And his dad is really happy to see him and introduce him, Hey, this is my son. Isn't he a great kid? To the other guys at the park. And then Lee doesn't really have the courage to ask his dad, Hey, can I move in with you? And his father doesn't really have the courage to just let him. And so they just kind of make small talk and then he wanders away. 

One thing that’s really interesting, Vanity Fair interviews the father in, I believe it's 2004, for this article. “He admits that after several years on his own, he didn't want to engage Una again. If he allowed Lee to move back in with him, she would have become a regular part of his life. And so he doesn't want to have this woman in his life anymore. 

Sarah: And also that you would be able to tell yourself, I'm sure the situation is fine for him. What I can't see, I don't know about, maybe. 

Mike: Yeah. And also, I think he's acting pretty selfishly, right? He leaves his son with this woman that he knows is abusive. He's seen literally the scars on his son. And so it's a pretty chicken shit thing to do. Carmita interviews him too. And she says, “At our meeting, Leslie's eyes were red from crying. He recounted the first five years of his life with Malvo and Una. Ma'am, my boy was a good boy until that man took him over. It's that man, why my son did this, he said. As he spoke, he clenched his fists and every vein in his face stood out. He asked for a few minutes to control his emotion and then he broke down and sobbed.” So he did a really chicken shit thing. And it sounds like he's felt really, really, really bad about it for the right.

Sarah: Yeah. I think it can also be hard as a kid to have the knowledge or the feeling that someone does love you, that you do have positive experiences with this kind of parental figure or a literal parent, but that love is somehow not enough for them to meaningfully intervene in your life. I feel like that can feel worse at times, it's like tantalizingly almost there. And you're like, if you're not this wildly unstable person, and if you are capable of loving me consistently, then why have you been here this whole time? And you haven't done anything about any of this? Why am I not worth that? 

Mike: it creates this weird mix of yearning and anger where Lee misses his father and wants a father in his life, obviously, but also fuck you, dad, you left me, you left me in this nightmare for years. And so he experiences this as this huge rejection and he wants his father back, but he's also deeply, deeply angry at his father. These two things are with him for the rest of his life. So before we go to Antigua, I just want to do a little interlude.

Sarah:  I'm ready. It's cold here. 

Mike: The last person killed in these sniper attacks is named Conrad Johnson. And in all of Lee's various tellings, confessions, un-confessions, versions of this, he admits that he killed Conrad. He's very consistent about this. And one of the sorts of cosmically sad things about this is that Conrad, who was a bus driver in DC at the time when he was shot, is a Jamaican immigrant. His mother left Jamaica, moved to the United States, left him with his aunt. 

And this is an excerpt from one of the manhunt books that we'll talk about more in the next episode. “Conrad joined her when he was about 10 years old. According to his mother, Sonia Will's. a more loving child you could not find. Ms. Wills said that, although she had five children, she was mother to many because Conrad was the kind of child who would bring home boys he felt needed the sense of direction she was able to impart. Conrad was married and had two children of his own. He was a loving husband and father to his family and a wonderful son, his mother said. She later told me if only Malvo had looked Conrad in the face before he had killed him, he would have seen the perfect father he had been searching for.” And it just sucks. It's two people reaching across this horrible divide at each other. 

Sarah:  Yeah. And also that's the whole point of sniping, right? It’s that you're doing it from a great distance. And then if you're doing this in a non-military fashion, but as a murderer, then that has to do with not wanting to see the face of the person, I would imagine.

Mike: I know. And  not wanting to consider how things would have been different if he'd come across Conrad instead of John. So anyway, just a little cosmic, sad, sliding doors, Michael Hobbes cry machine at the end of that. 

Sarah: You love sliding doors. You talk about sliding doors a lot. 

Mike: So now we're going to go to Antigua and we're going to switch perspectives to John. Do you want to catch us up on where John was last time we saw him?

Sarah: Yeah, he had taken their three children for a custodial visit, was it a day visit or a weekend?

Mike: Weekend.

Sarah: And then when he was going to return them, he, much like Bob Shapiro bringing OJ into custody was like, ah, we're going to be an hour late. We're going to be two hours late. And then disappeared. We know that from Mildred's perspective, John and the children have vanished and that she is searching for them, but we don't know where they've gone. And yeah, that's where we've gotten.

Mike: It appears that when she paged John and he said oh, I'm at an electronic store, we'll be back in five minutes. They were at the airport, and he was putting the kids on a plane to Antigua. 

Sarah: So custodial trafficking, if you will?

Mike: It's a family kidnapping. As we mentioned in the last episode, hundreds of thousands of these happen every year. It's the most common way that children are kidnapped.

Sarah: So John is probably at the airport when he's calling, Mildred's saying we will be back soon. I'm at an electronics store. I'm looking at a TV right now. 

Mike: Yeah. And I said wrong last episode. I said that John's mother was from Antigua. This is something that shows up in press reports and in various books about these crimes, John's mother was not from Antigua. It's actually completely random that he went to Antigua. The only reason he went to Antigua and not whatever Belgium or some other place-

Sarah: You’re the only one who wants to go on vacation in Belgium.

Mike: True. He had a friend in Tacoma whose car he had fixed, whose cousin was a travel agent in Antigua and was like, “Yeah, she can get you deals on plane tickets, and it seems like you can stay with her for a while because she has a spare room. So you and your kids can fly down there.” And John says, “Okay. So let's go.”

Sarah:  It's happenstance. He doesn't care about Antigua. 

Mike: But what happens once he gets there is he starts forging documents. Apparently, he got into this by trying to forge birth certificates for his kids so he could fly with them. He's been planning this kidnapping for a while. 

Sarah: Tell me about the flying documents. So did he need birth certificates so that he could get passports for them? Or what was that?

Mike: What appears to be the case is that he started looking into this when he wanted to get his kids out of the country without anybody knowing, right. Getting them flying on fake names so his wife wouldn't be able to see the records of where they had flown to. 

And then it seems to be that once he realized basically how easy it was, he started doing it as a business model, because the minute he gets to Antigua, he starts setting up this business where there's a ton of Jamaican immigrants in Antigua who want to come to the United states. And so he can somehow get us birth certificates, US IDs, and he forges them IDs. And then they fly through Puerto Rico or Guam where a lot of the border guards don't speak English as a first language. And so people with Jamaican accents can get through and be like, oh yeah, I'm from Detroit. I was born there. And the people who speak Spanish as a first language can't tell that you're covering up a Jamaican accent. They're, oh yeah, sounds good. And so the government of Antigua actually put together a task force report on John's business model and the consensus is that he was super shitty. He was really bad at this.

Sarah:  At forging?

Mike: Yeah. He tries to get a job in Antigua as a high school track coach and he forges a letter of recommendation from an Olympic runner. And apparently, it's just cartoonishly bad. The quote unquote signature of this Olympian is just like a child’s scrawl of just printing out his name.

Sarah: If you want to be convincing, you can just do a scribble. That's more believable. Come on. 

Mike: But once he realized how basically easy this is, he started selling US identities to Jamaicans for $1000 to $3,000. 

Sarah: Wow. That's a lot of money. Yeah, jeez. 

Mike: Yeah. The way that he gets a passport for himself and his kids from Antigua is he enrolled his kids at a school in Antigua and immediately starts dating the principal and convinces her, after only knowing him for two months to sign an affidavit., saying that she's known him for two years and vouching for him. There's a teacher at the school and he charms her and gets the information of her mother, birth date, whatever, and puts it on a birth certificate, a fake birth certificate for himself. 

Sarah: He has quite an effect on women. What is the basis of this? Does he have a gland? That emits a pheromone or something like that? As you just talked about with OJ Simpson, I feel like this might have something to do with it, if you are constantly looking for marks, you will find them. And then the same kind of simple things will tend to work on a lot of people. And also maybe it speaks to how women are socialized. It's amazing that he's so reliably able to get what he needs out of women.

Mike: People on the island talk about him as you know, he's fit. He's attractive.

Sarah: Is he handsome? Yeah. I was just going to ask.

Mike: Yeah. First of all, before they know his name, they call him the runner because he runs in booty shorts wearing nothing else, goes jogging every morning. And so people see there's this fit dude jogging around the island and he sort of becomes known. And then as he starts going into shops, chatting with people, he's really charming. He's this military guy, he spins this whole yarn about how he's like a military dad with a background in Antigua, whatever.

Sarah: Oh. So he tells people his mother is from Antigua. And that's the source of that?

Mike: Yeah, that’s why he’s there. A lot of people on the island talk about there being no signs that he was a weirdo. He was a nice guy. He was great. We loved him. We didn't see any bitterness. We didn't see any resentment. This was when he was still capable of hiding that stuff.

Sarah: Yeah. And also that he would do well in relatively superficial relationships and kind of acquaintance type community stuff, you know? Because people often talk about serial killers being paradoxically good neighbors. Yeah, if you interact with someone at a mailbox, there's not a lot of margin for things to get complicated, and intimacy is what breeds complexity. But also that here he is, and he has, I think possibly,  a sense of a fresh start and would be in the best possible frame of mine for a little while, although who knows how good that is.

Mike: Yeah, it does start to fall apart because at the same time, once he sort of establishes himself in Antigua, he starts flying back and forth to Tacoma. So this is when he shows up outside the shelter to harass Mildred. 

Sarah: He's like, got to make a business trip to go threaten your mom's life. Be good.

Mike:  And he's leaving the kids with kind of random people for weeks at a time. The kids are just expected to sort of go to school, but he's not being a responsible father at this point. And he does have a weird thing with kids. A lot of people on the island talk about him as having this kind of military vibe. And so as he walks into stores and stuff, he'll talk to the kids and be like, stand at attention, son. And if kids mess up and be like, he'll be like drop and give me 50,  in this kind of joke-y sort of way. But also, he seems kind of fixated on people's kids. 

Sarah: But also if you make the same joke constantly, then it's kind of a tell.

Mike: Yeah. When he eventually goes back to the United States with Lee, he tells a bunch of people, Hey, do you want me to take your son with me? I can bring him back. I can get him a US passport. And people are like, no, I don't, I don't want to give my son to a random person. He does have a weird thing with recruiting kids. And I don't know ig that has anything to do with the accusation of sexual abuse or if that's just he sees them as vulnerable and easy to take advantage of. 

Sarah: Right. And he could see how the latter could be true without the former, but if both were true, then  they would be related 

Mike: I’m going to show you something now. So I'm sending you a picture of Lee at this age. This is Lee at age 14.

Sarah:  14. That’s young.

Mike: Did you see it? 

Sarah: First of all, this looks like it could have been taken in 1930. 

Mike: I know, right? Yeah. It's black and white and it's kind of faded. 

Sarah: Yeah. He looks pretty small. He looks like a skinny kid. He does not look like  a strapping adolescent. He's wearing dress pants with a knife crease in the front, and then they're belted and kind of cinched. They look like they're a little bit too big for him. And then a shirt that also looks too big for him. 

Mike: It's like how everybody dressed in the nineties.

Sarah: But it looks like these clothes are for a bigger person and they're like blousing out around him. He's holding a book. 

Mike: This is a school uniform.

 Sarah: Yeah. And he's just looking at the camera, just kind of dead on into it. With kind of a lack of expression. It's the look that you would give if someone called your name and you happen to look at the lens right as the picture was taken, there's no sense of like him conveying any emotion or anything being conveyed to him.

Mike: Yeah. And he just looks so young. I just can't get over it.

Sarah: He looks so young, he looks very small. He looks very childlike. He doesn't look like an adolescent. He looks like a child. Yeah. 

Mike: And when you think about it, in two years, this guy is going to be in the back of a trunk of a car shooting random people. This is a child.

Sarah: Yeah. He has little Oxford shoes.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So since Lee has moved to Antigua, he's been there about nine months by the time he meets John. He moves there. He moves in with his mother and you will extremely believe this, she leaves almost immediately. She moves back to St. Martin.

Sarah: Shocker. It's a pattern, it's like she has to reassure herself that she still has him and then she goes away 

Mike: She leaves him in like the backyard shack where they're living. She stops paying the electricity bills. She stops paying the rent. So his landlord is trying to kick him out, this a 14 year old boy, this is the boy, the picture.  

Sarah: Children should not have landlords to whom they have to answer. That's a belief of mine.

Mike: He talks about sort of like slinking around, so the landlord won't see him. He kind of sneaks into the house and out. He mostly sleeps in an abandoned house because it's next to a streetlight and he can read by the light. He doesn't tell any of the kids at school. None of the kids at school know that he's basically just staying in a cinder block square. I don't know where he's showering, but he's showing up to school in his uniform, holding it together. But then behind the scenes he's shoplifting CDs, and then copying them and selling the copies for money. That's how he's getting by. 

Sarah: That’s really smart to figure out. If I were 14 years old and taking care of myself, I don't think I would come up with that.

Mike: He’s getting by and just before he meets John, Una moves back to Antigua. He and his mom move in with this guy named Thomas. Apparently, Thomas is a nice guy. Whenever you see nice men in the story, it's like, yes, thank God. He's helping them set up an import export business for clothes. Una will fly to St. Martin, buy a bunch of clothes, and then come back to Antigua and sell them, which apparently is doing well. 

So just before he meets John, things are starting to look up, he's on an upswing. And so he meets John in an electronic store. John is there with his son, Little John, who is 11 at the time, and they're playing on a flight simulator. And of course, because Lee wants to become a pilot, he sort of sits there fixated by this man and this boy and he’s treating his son really well. 

Sarah: OJ put cream on me, and he didn't try to make a move. 

Mike: And his mom is now trying to move to the United States. She hears rumors that John can get her papers to the United States. So they go over. Una says, we need to stop by this guy's house that might be able to get me papers to the United States. They show up. And it's John, the guy that Lee has seen in the electronic store. 

Sarah: It's so weird thinking about knowing all that we know about both these people thinking about them meeting. It feels like WrestleMania, you know. In one corner, the really mean mom and in the other corner, this really mean husband.

Mike: So John sets Una up with papers to the United States. And as this process is happening, Lee starts just going over to John's house to hang out. This is like classic Una, in December of 2000, she told both Thomas and Lee, oh, I got to go to St. Martin and I'm going to buy a bunch of clothes. These are routine trips that she makes. She was like, yeah, I got to go to St. Martins tomorrow. And then a couple days go by, they don't hear anything, and then she calls and says, I'm in Florida, I've moved here. And so okay, okay Una, great. 

Sarah: What are we supposed to do with that?

Mike: And so Lee is now living in the home with this guy, Thomas who's dating his mom, but his mom has gone and lied to him about it. And so after a couple of days, probably because of the stress, he ends up getting rheumatic fever, which apparently just sucks, is just awful. He's bed ridden.

Sarah: What is it? What are the symptoms? What, what are your rheum’s? 

Mike: Apparently your joints, every joint in your body hurts. And you just have a terrible fever.

Sarah: There are many joints in your body. That's so many places to hurt. 

Mike: So John stops by Lee's house and sort of sees him in this state and apparently just lifts him up and carries him outside, puts them in a cab and says, you're coming to my place until you're better. And so for the next couple of days, you know, this is the honeymoon period of their relationship. John is a really positive influence in Lee's life. They start hanging out more. He eventually moves in with John just because there's nowhere really else for him. John is no more random of a dude than this guy, Thomas that he's living with anyway. So he's like, I might as well live in this other room. 

Sarah: Right. His whole life has been a succession of random caregivers. 

Mike: So he's like, yeah, sure. I'll move in with you guys. 

Sarah: But it's not like this is a red flag. 

Mike: So this is the description from the book. “After this rescue, Lee and John went everywhere together, they were like disciple and guru, Muhammad spoke and Malvo listened. Finally Malvo had found someone in whom he could confide. He shared his life story, how his mother had taken him away from his father when he was young and how that left a void in his life. He recalled how Mohamad listened intently, Malvo told of his father's refusal to take him when he wanted a place to stay. He shared with Mohammad the brutal beatings that he'd suffered and that he felt unloved and abandoned. Malvo heard of Muhammad's abandonment by his father and loss of his mother. Mohammad related that he too had been raised in an abusive environment by his grandfather.” And this part is like super infuriating. “And he suffered a similar fate as Leslie, his wife cheated on him and took all his money, destroying the business they had built together.” He was like, fuck you. 

Sarah: John, tell the truth part. That's fine.

Mike:  I fucked up. 

Sarah: But of course he has to tell himself  that Mildred is doing all this office stuff to him and he's only responding to get his, I don't even know what, but I know, I feel based on everything we've seen of him so far in this wildly counterfactual behavior that he is expressing what feels like an emotional truth to him. Cause how dare Mildred have any agency? How dare she survive him? How dare she escape him? If that's not what he wants. That's a betrayal. Right. 

Mike: And also cheated on him, which there's no evidence of. And took all his money. He took all of her money. 

Sarah: Yeah. And who's the one who's cheating in that relationship? Who's the one who's like having an affair with their therapist and started dojo on the spur of the moment?

Mike: It's just pure resentment, right. He thinks of himself as the wronged party. So this is when Lee and John get really close. They almost immediately start referring to each other as father and son. He starts taking care of John's kids. They're 11, 8, and 9 at this point. And so Lee starts helping out with cooking. He starts taking kids to the movies. He really does become part of this family almost immediately. 

Sarah: Yeah. Well, and you can see him being really ready to join a family. And as soon as one appears where there's a spot for him, snatching that up. Got to strike while the family's hot. 

Mike: So he really, this is the first, the closest thing to a family he’s ever gotten.

Sarah: This is what happens when people join cults. If you've never been part of something and if you've never been embraced by a community or by a family and you are then that's so incredibly powerful and that's so hard to leave, even if bad stuff starts happening.

Mike:  One thing that’s so interesting. The ideology that we'll eventually curdle into, we have to kill everybody, starts out as this ideology of personal empowerment. So almost immediately as Lee and John start forming a relationship, John starts delivering these lectures about, you have to train your body, train your mind, you have to read things, go to the library. You have to do a hundred pushups every day. There's this kind of personal betterment, self-help book kind of thing that will eventually be extremely ugly. But at this point it’s kind of like, sure. It's just boys being boys.

Sarah: That’s why you're not going to catch me doing pushups, slippery slope to serial murder.

Mike: So this is from the vanity fair article. “As every ground force general knows, the most malleable killing machine on earth may be a teenage boy desperately needing to belong to something greater. Beginning of January of 2001, John Muhammad and Lee Malvo began to explore just how malleable the 15 year old Malvo was. At first, aside from Malvo’s early and easy conversion to Mohammed's version of Islam, the goal of their work together was these simple, quiet human quest for personal righteousness and improvement. They never talked to violence. The lessons being taught and learned were about honor and discipline and personal virtue.”

Sarah: So he has this like personal philosophy, and he wants a disciple. And what is his personal version of Islam by the way? Tell me about that. 

Mike: It's very picky and choosy. Because it's like a terror attack, his relationship with Islam of course gets scrutinized by the media more than anything else.

Sarah: That’s all I ever heard about, certainly when this was in the news.

Mike: It’s obviously a huge part of his identity, right? He changed his last name to Muhammad for a reason. But they go to the library, they read up on Buddhism, they go to the Baha’i Center, they're reading up on Hinduism. They're kind of doing this grab bag thing. And Mildred says that his version of Islam, one of the reasons he was into it was because he thought that it gave him a reason to control her because he thought it was going to be that women should obey men. 

Sarah: That’s a big selling point for a lot of religions, as far as men are concerned. It really draws them in. 

Mike:  It's not clear that they're doing the five prayers a day. It's not clear they're doing Ramadan. John continues to drink alcohol throughout their relationship. It's not clear that John is using it to change his behavior at all. It seems that what he's doing is he's casting around for ammunition that feeds his resentments, the narrative of his life that he wants to tell, because they're not going to mosques at this time. They're not doing the stuff that you do if you're a devout Muslim. He's reading a lot and he's listening to a lot of tapes by Louis Farrakhan. He has this weird thing where he's obsessed with playing tapes at night. So he does this for his kids too, where he'll have an audio book of the autobiography of Malcolm X and he'll put headphones on them before they go to sleep and play it for them all night. He thinks that this is how people learn things.

Sarah:  That's weird. 

Mike: It’s weird, dude.

Sarah: That you subliminally give them...it's not the weirdest idea he's ever had, but it's pretty weird.

Mike: He later on makes Malvo read the entire Art of War out loud into a tape player and then plays the tape of himself, reading it.

Sarah: To me, that book, I don't associate it with people interested in violence. I associated with people interested in day trading. That’s just sad.

Mike: This honeymoon period ends when first John gets arrested in Antigua, where again, he's not that good at faking papers. One of his scams is he’ll go to the airport and show his ID and get the boarding pass, and then he'll give the boarding pass to somebody else because they don't check your ID again when you get on the flight. 

So at one point there's a stewardess. She lives in Antigua and she's like, oh, I know John. I see he's on the manifest. And he's sitting in seat 7A and then she goes over to seat 7A and it's some random lady. These are not watertight plans that John is coming up with at this point. So eventually this sort of stuff starts to pile up. The authorities arrest him. He  spends two weeks in jail and then he somehow escapes by just walking out one day. In this government taskforce, they don't want to say, because the Antiguan government doesn't want to admit how incompetent they were basically. But it seems like one guy was just late for work that day and then there was only one person working in the entire jail and just like forgot to lock his cell after him or something. It was something really janky and John just left. 

And later on, on one of these trips to the U S, he gets stopped by the U S authorities because he's trying to board a plane and they're like, you've been flagged at this point, and he can't fly anymore. So this is actually when he changes his name, there's actually something really interesting about this, that everyone talks about him changing his name as like some sign that he's just like super devout Muslim, but it seems like he actually did it so that he could get on a flight back to Antigua and get a new passport. He could have changed the last name to anything, and he changed it to Mohammad. So clearly that means something. But you often read in these old accounts that he and Mildred, together, changed their name when they found Islam and it's just not true. She changed her name to hide from him and he changed his name so that he could get on flights again. And it's a coincidence that they both changed their names to Mohammad. 

Sarah: Yeah. Cause I think that certainly based on the American narrative that we have had of these crimes so far, there's a distinct lean toward anything that can be interpreted as terrorism suggestive, or related. We're going to really focus on that. So just kind of putting all perspectives into it is important. 

Mike: But what's really interesting about this period is that when John disappears, Lee takes care of his kids. So it goes on for, I think it's almost a month that Lee is trying to continue the business. He's taking the kids to school.

Sarah: This poor kid. He's like Anne of Green Gables or something. No one just wants him for him.

Mike: So this is when their little Antiguan adventure ends. John basically realizes the writing is on the wall for his business model, his time in Antigua, he changes his name. He flew back to Antigua on May 20th, 2001. And then a couple of days later, he takes the kids. He takes Lee. Lee flies on the name of Lindbergh, his son with his first wife, and they all fly to the US together. And one of the most amazing details about this is that they've only known each other for six months. 

Sarah: Which I'm sure is a long time actually by his standards, because how many good presences have been in his life for longer than that? 

Mike: He just gets on a plane with this essentially random guy because that's the least bad option at that point. 

Sarah: And without proper documentation, if he were to go off on his own, he's dependent. 

Mike: It's actually interesting thinking about  what did John want with Lee at this point?

Sarah: Right? What was his plan? What was he saying they were going to do? 

Mike: That's the thing. He doesn't have a plan at this point because he doesn't have the burning rage at Mildred that he eventually will have. 

Sarah: So you don't think he's motivated by wanting to settle a score with Mildred at this point?

Mike: Not yet. That’s the next chapter of the story. So we're going to now turn to Mildred's and catch up with Mildred. So where did we leave Mildred? Where is she?

Sarah: We heard about Mildred living in the women's shelter for I believe about a year. 

Mike: Yeah, I actually got a detail wrong in the last episode that I want to correct, I said she was there for more than a year. She was actually only there for 8 months.

Sarah: So she was at Phoebe's house for eight months and then she moved to the DC area. Is she in Maryland?

Mike: Yeah. She's in Clinton, Maryland? Yeah. 

Sarah: Okay. All right. So she moved in with her sister in Clinton, Maryland and is out of the shelter kind of back in a life more resembling what she knew before and focusing on looking for her kids basically. 

Mike: Yeah, and also just like picking up the pieces of her life. So at this point, she's gotten a job doing admin at a domestic violence NGO. So she's already moving into becoming a domestic violence advocate at this point. So this is an excerpt from her book. She says “It was 4:35 PM, August 31st, 2001. I was sitting at my sister's house in Maryland and writing in my journal when the phone rang. I answered. It was detective McCarthy. He said the words I had waited 18 months to hear, ‘Ms. Muhammad, we've got your children’.” What the detective tells her is that John left Antigua with the kids, he dropped Lee off in Florida. He then took the kids and went to Bellingham, Washington, which is a city very close to the Canadian border. And he almost immediately moved him and the kid into a homeless shelter called the Lighthouse Mission. The director of the Lighthouse Mission, a guy named Al Archer who becomes very important later, sort of was helping John out was like, oh, Hey, there's this guy with three kids. It's extremely rare for a father and three children to show up at a homeless shelter and need a room. So he's like, huh, this is kind of weird. He helps John enroll the kids at school.

Sarah:  Under their own names?

Mike: No. So John has enrolled the kids in schools in Bellingham under fake names. And when the director of this homeless shelter starts helping John fill out paperwork for food stamps, it's immediately flagged, simply because there's not that many men with three kids kind of bouncing around Washington state. And so, because Mildred is so good with the paperwork there’s a  flag on, this guy has kidnapped three children. If you see a man with three children, let somebody know and check it against this record, that Mildred has filed. So as soon as he applies for food stamps, then they start asking questions. 

Detective McCarthy goes to the kid's school, and he pulls them all into the principal's office. He says, Hey, what are your names? They give these random fake names. They're like Teresa and Andy. And then he sort of looks at them and he says, are those your real names? And there's this long pause and all three kids start crying and they're like those, aren't our real names.

Sarah: That’s the trafficking training. This is the one trafficking case we've ever encountered. Wow.

Mike: Immediately they transfer the kids to a child protective services agency in Tacoma. They find out that it's Mildred, they get Mildred's contact information. And so there's a book called Sniper that comes out in 2004 that interviews the detective. And so he tells the story of the phone call to Mildred from his perspective. He says, “He dialed the phone. Mrs. Mohammad picks up, he tells her the news. “They found my babies. They found my babies. She screamed. McCarthy put each of them on the line to talk to her. When he got back on the phone, she said, God bless you. God bless you.” 

And so there's a really cute conversation in Mildred's book where he puts the kids on the phone, and she talks to them. And so she's of course just doing all of this through tears at this point, she says “Taleeba got on the phone first. ‘Hi mommy’, she said. It was like a dream. I couldn't speak. I hadn't heard her voice in 18 months. ‘How are you doing?’ She asked. ‘I'm good’, I said. ‘You want to talk to my sister?’ Taleeba asked. I said, ‘Yes’. And she passed the phone to Selena. ‘Hi mommy, this is Selena. Guess what?’ ‘What honey?’ ‘I'm nine years old.’ ‘I know that honey’, I said, ‘What are you doing?’ ‘Eating cheese pizza’, she said. She sounded as happy as the little girl I remembered.”

Sarah: Oh my God. Unless it happens to us, we can't imagine not hearing our child's voice for 18 months. Right? 

Mike: She thought she was never going to hear from them again. And keep in mind, all she knows is that they're out of the country. She doesn't even have hints. They could be dead at this point. She doesn't know anything. And so she gets on a plane. There's a custody hearing the next day in Tacoma, so she talks about how she had to borrow money from friends to go to the airport and buy a super expensive next-day plane ticket to Tacoma, Washington. She gets there. It's the first time she's seen John in 18 months, too. Do you remember her friend, Isa Nichols? 

Sarah: Yes. The woman who worked with them when they had the, we come to you, the mobile mechanic place and who was said you should be following normal business practices for a small business. And he did not like that. Yeah. Someday we're going to do an episode, not about abusive relationships, I hope. But not today. 

Mike: This is infuriating. So this is from Mildred's book. They start the custody hearing. Mildred's sitting there with Isa and some people from Phoebe's house and some other sort of supporters. John is there alone. The judge says, “This is an emergency custody hearing. We are here to decide where the children of John and Milgard Williams will reside. ‘Judge, what is going on?’ John asked. He was talking in the voice I had heard so many times over the years, the sweet, innocent voice that convinces people he does not know what is happening when he knows exactly what is going on. ‘We are only here to decide who will have custody of the children’, the judge said. ‘Judge, I don't understand’, John said again. ‘She told me to take the children because she didn't want them anymore. She knew where I was. She could have contacted me at any time.’ I couldn't believe he had said that, but I shouldn't have been surprised. The judge explained to John that I had obtained a writ of habeas Corpus to have the children picked up when they were found. ‘Are you telling me I'm never going to see my children again, Judge?’ John asked. ‘Mr. Williams, you have to file your paperwork, because the only thing we are here to decide today is who gets the children. And according to the paperwork, I am awarding custody of the children to Mrs. Williams’, the judge responded.” 

Basically Mildred has filed paperwork saying she has the right to these kids, and you haven't filed any paperwork, so the children go to Mildred, that's it. 

Sarah: And how does he respond to this?

Mike: Not well. He kills a bunch of people in a sniper attack in DC, ultimately. This is where everything comes from. 

Sarah: So is this why he decides he has to kill Mildred? Because she's been given custody of the children?

Mike: Yeah. This is what really does is, she took the kids from me. It's an escalation of the version of this that he had already told Lee. She bankrupted me, she's cheating on me, she took away the kids and now she really took away the kids. He later refers to this as his 9/11. This becomes this huge fixation in his mind.

Sarah: That’s really amazing to describe that event as having that scale of importance in your life, because you're really saying there is before and there is after, and I was just living my life and then this horrific event just crashed into me. The level of innocence that you're claiming for yourself in that.

Mike: And of course no acknowledgement of his own part in this, right? Maybe I shouldn't have kidnapped the kids. 

Sarah: And then he just took the kids to Antigua, and she didn't know where they were, and he made it desperate against her mother. And he knows what went on in that marriage, even if he can't admit it to anyone or himself.

Mike: So the way that I think of this event is that it just plants this little, tiny seed that then becomes this massive Redwood of resentment. 

Sarah: So he's ready for something to catalyze this kind of reaction for him, is your read of it. That makes sense too. 

Mike: And so after this order comes down, it's a five minute hearing, right? She filed paperwork, you didn't, boom, she gets the kids. Mildred is slinking out of this courtroom with her friends around her because she does not want to bump into John. It’s the closest they found each other physically. And so apparently there's sort of an L shaped hallway and she's kind of at the elbow and she turns to her left and she sees John walking toward her determinately. And apparently, she just immediately kicks off her shoes and just runs down the other hallway. She's like, fuck this and just dashes out. And all the women with her dash out, too. All of them see John and they just run to the exit. And apparently as they all get to the end of the hall, she turns back, and John is looking at her and he mouthed the words. ‘Gotcha.’ 

Sarah: What? Like, I still have the power to terrify you. 

Mike: Yeah, it’s awful. And she just burst out the emergency exit. And she's like, take me to my kids. 

Sarah: Where are her kids during this? Are they being held by the family court?

Mike: Yeah, they’re at CPS. There's a CPS facility where they're being held, but it's in Tacoma. So she goes immediately and picks up the kids. So she goes to this facility, and she says, “right then I heard two high pitch voices, scream, mommy. I looked at the building and saw my girls running out the door toward me. I was crying so hard. I tried to see them, but I couldn't see clearly through the tears. Issa came over and told the children how long I had been looking for them. The girls cried and both kept saying, we missed you, mommy. We missed you. I hugged him and cried. I love you, I said. We love you too, Mommy, the girls screamed. In the car, Taeelba said, ``Mommy, Daddy said he was looking for you and couldn't find you.”

Sarah:  Oh my God.

Mike: Just to dwell on this for a second.

Sarah: Yeah, please let's dwell. We need to.

Mike: We have this sort of societal construction of parental kidnappings as if they don't matter. Right. There's real kidnapping, stranger danger kidnappings, and there's oh, there's a couple of whatever family, kidnappings, whatever. 

Sarah: We’re not willing to take seriously the things that happen within a family, which is very weird.

Mike: A lot of Mildred's book, most of the second half of Mildred's book, even before she gets to the actual sniper shootings, is about trying to put her family together. John only had the kids for 18 months, which in the course of a whole life is not a huge amount of time. 

Sarah: But if you're nine.

Mike: And they still kind of think that she left them. They think she might leave again because that's what John's been telling them the whole time. And so she talks about how her kids follow her to the bathroom and they'll kind of just look at her, sort of stare at her as she walks around the room. They don't want to let her out of their sight. And also her relationship with Little John, her oldest kid,  is never quite the same because he kind of resents her for taking him away from his dad.  He never quite gets over it. 

She has these conversations with him where she says, he left you with families that didn't treat you super well. He had you living in a homeless shelter. You didn't have toothbrushes and clothes when I found you. These were not good conditions, but it's still in there somewhere of, why did you take me away from dad? Everything was going fine. And so, the ripple effects of these kidnappings are really profound.

Sarah: Yes. And also, just the fact that there's the betrayal of someone taking your children to a place where you don't know where they are, or if they're safe or who they're with, or if you'll ever see them again. That itself has so much to think about. And then the fact of  you're back and you're reunited, and this is kind of the end of the story where if this were a TV movie, there would be like a freeze frame, and you’d be reunited and then there would be like a song by Peabo Bryson. 

But the real aftermath of it is that you've also suffered this betrayal of someone harming the trust that they have in you as their parents, that trust has been abused as well and that would be so painful. And also that you would have to just accept that things are different between us and we can't make them the way that they were and like we're going to heal, but it's different now. And just having to accept that, I think would be really hard.

Mike: There's this really heartbreaking scene where a couple months after she gets them back, they're back in DC at this point and they ask, “Are you and dad ever going to get back together?” And she has to sort of walk them through. She doesn't want to say anything negative about John. She doesn't want to do the kind of scorched earth stuff that John did to her. But also, she has to be really firm with them. “No, me and dad are never going to get back together.” And they were not under the impression that they had been kidnapped. The kids don't know that they were taken against her will.

Sarah: And has John said that Mildred just vanished and that he's looking for her and he can't find her?

Mike: It’s not clear what he told them about why he's in Antigua, but apparently, he told them consistently that your mommy knows where we are, and I don't know why she hasn't come yet. Your mommy loves you. It's weird that she hasn't written to you. It's weird that she hasn't come here. She knows where we are. He's done a lot of poisoning against her this year. It's not like this is a guy with a lot of tact. And so I just think it's worth taking really seriously the extent to which these family kidnappings are a real source of pain in people's lives for the parents and the kids.

Sarah: Yeah. And that there are certain forms of harm that a stranger cannot carry out as well as a family member. If you want to really passively destroy the trust between a mother and a child, there's nothing like a family member for doing that. There are certain crimes that I think are- I'm using the term crimes generally here, like emotional crimes, there's forms of abuse that can be carried out somewhat more powerfully by people who we trust. And we just have a hard time letting that into our world view. 

Mike: Yeah. And so after Mildred takes the kids with her, John does not know where they go. John does not know what her new name is. He starts searching around. He gets a lawyer and everyone in his life at this point says that this is a breaking point. So Robert Holmes, who's a friend of his in Tacoma, who eventually will call the FBI about John. This is from one of the news reports afterwards. “Says his longtime friend and army buddy Robert Holmes, I think after his kids got taken away, John had a nervous break. I'm not a professor or a doctor, but John changed in a million subtle ways after his kids were taken away. He'd spend all day, some days crying, all he could think of was getting his kids back.” There's also a guy named Earl Dancy who's this kind of dirt, baggy gun nut guy that they hang out with in Tacoma. This is from Mohammed's trial. “Dancy testified that Mohammad loved his children to death and was upset when Mildred Mohammad disappeared with them after she won custody. Asked about Muhammad's feelings toward his former wife, Dancy said, he said he loved her at one time, but that changed. He said she caused him to lose everything and that he was going to fix her.” So we've got this pain and anger starting to coagulate.

Sarah: This is just so similar to OJ and Nicole to me. And it's helpful because it's a different angle of what seems like a similar to me, what seems like a very similar situation where you are kind of sitting in the wreckage of all that you've done to your own life and everything that's ever happened to you and all this stuff that isn't your fault, but then that your life is and blaming it all on just your ex-wife. And somehow if you could destroy her, then you would be fine.

Mike: And so John moves back to belly. He moves back into the Lighthouse Mission shelter. In this angry, resentful state, he asks Lee to come and join him in Bellingham. 

Sarah: Where has Lee been before that?

Mike: Yes. So Lee is living with his mother in Fort Myers, Florida. When John dropped him off, there was kind of this battle of wills between John and his mother Una, where John was basically saying, Lee should come with me because I'm an American citizen and if I legally adopt Lee, then he can go to college. He can get all kinds of benefits that the United States offers. Whereas Una and Lee at this point are both undocumented immigrants. And so he's never going to have a secure existence with you. Why don't you let him come with me? And Una says, boys should be with their mother. There's no fucking way he's going with you. 

Sarah: This is one of the few moments when the immovable object that is Una is helpful in its ability to stop the unstoppable force that is John. Briefly.

Mike: So she wins the argument and Lee moves in with her. And so at this point it's been around six months that he's been living with her in Fort Myers, but every Friday at 4:00 PM, he and John talk on the phone. So they have stayed in pretty close contact. And in October of 2001, John asked Lee to come and join him. And so this is Lee's description of John asking him to join him in Bellingham. “I heard the tremor in his voice. Lee, they took the children. I was able to identify with that loss. I had never seen him indecisive, and I had never heard that much pain. He spoke to something in me, that void that yearned to be filled. I wanted to have a father love me like that. I wanted to know that someone cared as deeply. When he said he needed me to help him get back the children so we could once again be a family, it opened up the floodgates for the kid who ran away to his father five years earlier but was rejected.” He says, there's three reasons why he leaves Una to go join John. “First, Muhammad said he needed him to help get the children back. Second, Mohammad said he would help him get into college. Third, Mohammad seemed to Malvo to be far more logical than his fist shaking mother.”

Sarah: Right. And he also had a lifetime with his mother who observed her behavior and he's known John for six months.

Mike: Yeah. And John has not really been abusive to Lee. He's just told him to do a bunch of pushups, hang out and listen to tapes at night. John has never hit him. John has never been as inconsistent as Una has. 

Sarah: John has never forced him to beat a cat.

Mike: Yeah. There's so much horror in his relationship with Una. Yeah. So there's a weird detail here that I want to dwell on because I've been obsessed with it for more than a week now. So Lee tells the story of going to Bellingham from Florida twice to a court appointed psychologist. He says that Una actually wanted him to join John so much that she actually bought him the bus ticket to Bellingham. She then changed her mind and was like, no, no, you're not going to join him. But then he snuck into her room in the middle of the night, took the bus ticket and went to Bellingham. That's the story he tells the psychologist. To Carmita, who's writing the biography of him, he says he snuck out in the middle of the night, went to a payphone. He called John. John wired him money for a bus to get to Bellingham. And then John gave him these detailed instructions. He should book them under different names. Every layover he should stop for seven hours and change clothes, do this kind of secret agent stuff so that nobody could track his movements to Bellingham. 

So what's interesting to me about this is that there's two different stories, both of which are kind of specific, right? They're not just, I bought a bus ticket, and I went to Bellingham. They reveal something about character. And these are both people that trust him and that he trusts. This is a psychologist that he's been dozens of hours with. And this is Carmita who he also spent dozens of hours with. So these are two trusted people. And so to me, this explains a lot about his personality. Lee gives people what they want to hear, right. We've seen that he's emotionally malleable. And so it would not surprise me if he got a sense from the psychologist that he wanted to hear about Una, that he wanted to hear about his mother's capriciousness and that's why he took the bus ticket. And then maybe Carmita was asking him like a line of questioning about John. And so he put John at the center of that story and then constructed two pretty specific names, or just emphasized parts of narratives, you know, maybe both of them are true. Who knows.

Sarah: That makes sense to me. 

Mike: This is one of the things that makes it a very difficult crime to unravel and so difficult to find out what really happened because both of these stories are completely plausible.

Sarah: And the truth is based on the temperature of the room. 

Mike: Yeah. And so this to me explains a lot of the confessions that Lee does when he's in prison, the re confessions, the de-confessions, what he tells William Shatner. When he's first arrested for the DC sniper shootings, he confesses to all of the shootings, all 13, he then recants and says that he's only responsible for three of them. And to me I actually find it plausible that he did all the shootings, partly because John's control over him was so strong and just because he's smaller than John and he can fit in the back of the car more easily. 

Sarah: Based on everything we've heard about John to this point,  I'm no expert on him, but I have heard two hours’ worth of his behavior or something. He does not seem like someone who would be curled up, getting Charlie horses in the trunk of a car if he could make someone else do it. And that he wants to be the one who's cooking up the plans and doing this serial killer dojo with one student that he's running. And he's the boss. And the boss doesn't do the work. 

Mike: Yeah. And so we have no idea. We have no way of knowing whether Lee did all of the shootings or none of the shootings. And I think we'll probably never know simply because Lee is such an unreliable narrator of his own story. One of the things that I think is a really important detail of this is this woman Carmita, who's interviewing him as part of his defense team and then writes the biography of him, she talks about how within a couple of weeks of them forming their relationship, he starts calling her mom and he starts saying, I love you mom, in all of his letters. 

Sarah: So he's like a little subatomic particle looking for an atom to just woosh into. 

Mike: She talks about how he's so emotionally immature, even, you know, this is years after the crime took place.

Sarah:  Yeah. Prison doesn't mature people, interestingly 

Mike: But he doesn't know how to relate to people outside of this sort of totality rising frame, right? It's like, I don't know you or you're my mom. And so this is where I think we should leave this episode. Lee is on a bus to Bellingham, and like a lot of the people we've covered on their show, Lee is a person who is making an extremely bad decision for reasons that make perfect sense. At this point, John has not hinted that they're going to commit any violence. John has said we're going to get our kids back, but Lee has no idea. He doesn't find out for another nine months the extent of the actual plan that he signed up for. 

Sarah: How old is he at this point?

Mike: He’s 16. 

Sarah: Yeah. I think just also the desire, even if there are hints or even if there are things where he's like, oh, that doesn't feel great. The need to believe that this father figure who wants you and wants you because he knows that you're easy to manipulate and he can get what he wants out of you. But who cares? He wants you, someone wants you. You're not going to rumble that, right? It's going to have to be like pretty they had before I think you would even think about leaving that. Because your life is a tundra and this is a warm cabin. 

Mike: Well this insight gets to the slight twist at the end of this episode. So what we learned later is that John is full of shit. What we find out as more forensic evidence comes in and as the trials take place is that John was setting up Lee to take the fall for these crimes. Lee starts talking about whenever they're planning any of these crimes in the run-up to the sniper shootings, John always wore gloves when he handled any of the guns, any of the laptops, Lee didn't. When they are doing the shootings and they're dropping tarot cards and handwritten notes, he makes Lee write all the notes so that his handwriting will be on everything. He also makes Lee call the cops because there's this sort of cat and mouse back and forth thing where they're calling the cops and all of those phone calls are made by Lee. 

Sarah: Is his assumption that they're going to be looking for one person and they'll find Lee and be like, here's our one person. And then they just won't believe him about anything he said? That's actually one of his better plans in terms of plausibility.

Mike: And the reason why Lee confessed to all the murders when he was arrested was because John told him to. They had literally rehearsed what he should tell the police. 

Sarah: Why does that feel so bad to hear? Everything is already so terrible. That's really bad though. Of course he's doing this. I'm not surprised. There's no reason to be shocked by this, but it makes it all worse. It's one thing to kill 17 people, but it somehow is worse if you're then roping in this child and then making him take the fall for you. That makes it even worse somehow, which is amazing. Cause you really would think it couldn't get any worse, but it does. 

Mike: I want to stress just like we did in the last episode, that when we talk about John having plans, I think it's also worthwhile to remind ourselves that Mildred said last week, that John has a habit of making plans and never following through with them. And so I don't want us to fall back into this idea that like he's calculated, and he had every note of this planned out, like he was joker from the dark night or something, and we all played into his hands. This is a guy with a huge amount of trauma. He's got a huge amount of PTSD from whatever happened in the military. He's later diagnosed with paranoid schizophrenia. This is not someone who is orchestrating this whole thing from some sort of air traffic control tower. This is someone who makes these plans and just does things randomly. 

Sarah: Do you think we overestimate how difficult it is to murder people? Do you think we want to believe that serial killer is like a really skilled trade?

Mike: Well, I think this is why it's important to have sort of both of our little twists in our last two episodes leading into next episode where we're going to talk about the actual sniper shootings. And the actual events do not look like John's plans for the events. So I don't want to get into this overdetermined, it was a chess game the whole time, kind of thing. Because a lot of the stuff they end up doing is pretty dumb and not well thought through at all. 

Sarah: I always return to the Elle Woods argument, my version of it, which is, healthy people don't kill a bunch of people. They just don't. To be someone who's has a plan and they're firing on all cylinders, and they know what's going to happen in advance or they at least have everything kind of squared away, that suggests sanity to me. And I don't equate sanity with being a serial killer.

Mike: There’s this really interesting scene where Carmita, the woman who's writing this biography about Lee, she's interviewing him in prison, and she tries to confront him with the facts that this is all clearly full of shit. So she says “on my next visit to Malvo, I decided to engage him further about the motives for the killings. He had allowed himself to be convinced that the killings were to obtain money to build a utopian society with 70 boys and 70 girls. However, I and other members of the defense team felt that it was all a ruse for Muhammad to get his children. It seemed likely that Mohammed's wife would have become another victim of the shooting and Mohammed would have emerged as a grieving spouse who then regained custody of the children. Malvo would have become the fall guy and been directed to take his own. Malvo had already acknowledged that the only reason he had not done so was that Mohammad had not given him the order. However, when I presented that theory to Malvo, he scoffed at it. That's impossible. He loves Mildred. He would never kill her and furthermore, we knew where she lived. We watched her come and go. If he wanted to kill her, he could have done so many times. My dad respects women, he intoned. I reminded him that he was awaiting trial for the murder of Linda Franklin. He respects them, but then he kills them. I asked. Malvo was silent.” Aside from all the trauma, aside from everything else, he really doesn't have the intellectual maturity to see like this guy's full of shit. Everything he's saying, none of it's true. 

Sarah: Look at the things 16 year old’s believe. As we've been saying, a teenage boy being asked by someone who is an authority figure, who he calls his father, to take part in something bigger than himself and being sold this bill of goods and he's like, yeah. That's what people do with that age. That's literally what's happening. And so much of it comes down to what is offered to you, especially if nothing else is.

Mike: All I know is that it always starts with pushups. 

Sarah:  I feel like this has become a very anti exercise program, which is largely my fault, but...

Mike: Sit. It's all about sitting. Nothing ever happened to somebody who just stayed seated. 

Sarah: I mean, I'm fully reclining right now, and I feel pretty secure.