D.C. Snipers Part 3

Mike: Why do we need a special day that we have with everyone else who's in a relationship in the country? It’s just annoying to get a restaurant reservation.

Sarah: Because the hetero patriarchy wants you to buy jewelry, you fucking idiot.

Welcome to you're wrong about where every horror story is also a tragedy. 

Mike: Okay. 

Sarah: Is that too obvious? Do we know that by now?

Mike: That wasn’t all that different of concepts. 

Sarah: Yes, they are. When people go see a Nightmare on Elm Street, they're not, they don't bring tissues. You don't see horror movies. 

Mike: That's true. The implication is that you're going to go to like, just have your heart pound. Not to come out thinking about early childhood development. 

Mike: Whereas we try to instill in our listeners a sense of shock and sadness. 

Sarah: Yeah, that's our personal brand. It's a show for sad people or people who don't feel they're sad enough already.

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

Sarah: I’m Sarah Marshall and I'm at work on a book on a satanic panic.

Mike: And we’re on Patreon at patreon.com/yourewrongabout , and our listeners have been creating a number of incredible designs, including one based on Calvin and Hobbes.

Sarah:  Where I am Hobbes. 

Mike: Yeah. And today we are embarking on part three of our deep dive into the DC Snipers. And I also, I feel a little bit weird about this episode because we're now entering like the true crime-iest part of this story. Which, as a person who doesn't actually listen to a lot of true crime stuff, we're getting into the part where we have to tell you facts rather than feelings. And I feel weird about it.

Sarah: I don’t know. I think that, like, this is a moment for us to think about what true crime has a history of meaning as a genre and also what it can be. At the end of the day, like if you're trying to describe crimes that took place in a factual manner than like, congratulations, it's true crime, you know. 

And I think that it doesn't have to hue to a certain aesthetic, but it's also interesting that we do have certain aesthetic expectations and genre expectations, but I mean like, what do you think true crime typically means or, or would typically mean in the context of what we're making?

Mike: Well, I mean, one thing that I think is really interesting is a lot of the comments that we've gotten on the first two episodes is that they're really depressing. 

Sarah: Yeah. They should be.

Mike:  Because they're a lot about abuse. They're about emotional abuse. They're about physical abuse. But I think it's very interesting in that, true crime stories don't oftentimes get coded as depressing, even though they're often about murders. 

Sarah: That is really interesting. 

Mike: Whereas I think when we're confronted with the reality of these murders, which is that they often do come from abuse, they come from things like head trauma. They come from things like mental illness and very sad upbringing stories. It's this reminder that like the actual, the origins of true crime can be very sad, but true crime narratives themselves aren't coded as sad. They're much more coded as suspenseful.

Sarah: I think they’re maybe coded as sad, but not depressing, which is an interesting distinction. Or like you can be like, wow, this is tragic. Like these poor people lost their lives. Like this murder tore apart this community, this is so tragic. But as someone who has consumed a lot of true crime media in her life and who got here through true crime media consumption, based on what I've consumed, the way a true crime story typically works is that there's a killer on the loose and he's striking these communities. And Betsy just had to walk two blocks, but she never made it. And her mother keeps her room just as it was. And it's so sad and you're reading it, you're like, this is so sad. And you identify with the victims, you identify with the family of the victims, you identify with the cops staying up late and like chomping down tums. 

And then they catch the guy, and you feel this catharsis. And there will be, you know, some kind of discussion of his character and how he got to be the way that he is, but it will be either overly reductive or overly enamored of the idea of like, well, it's a mystery and we'll never know. And we can't know why people are like this so the end and goodbye. If it's a paperback to ads for similar books. I think the goal of the true crime paperback, let's say, because that's what I was raised on, is to be this very emotional and emotionally engaging text, but also to have an exit, you know, to kind of exist as a capsule. And so you go in and it's scary and it's sad and you contemplate all this bad stuff. 

And then at the end, like order is restored and it's fine. And everything's fine. Yeah. So are you saying that maybe we're not going to offer any closure and that's going to suck for people?

Mike: I think that's a generalizable rule about the show.

Sarah: Yeah, that's fair.

Mike:  I think if you're here for closure, you should turn it off and leave a negative review.

Sarah:  Or you can just turn it off. You don't have to talk about my vocal fry, keeping you from emotional closure, although I'm sure it is. 

Mike: So that is my insufferable meta comment for this episode to start off with. To then do the thing that I feel weird about. One of the things that stuck out to me about this, because so much of this episode is going to be about John's weird ideology and the way that Lee kind of falls for his bullshit. I just want to read you this really interesting passage from a book called Sniper that's one of these sorts of manhunt, true crime-y, books that lists everything that was in their car when John and Lee were arrested.

Sarah:  I love it when there's a list of the objects found in a car or someone's house or something. Yeah. That's always so interesting.

Mike:  “In addition to the weapons and ammunition, these included violent video games, such as Tom Clancy's Ghost Recon, Desert Siege, and Halo: Combat Evolved, several books, including the Art of War, the I Ching, the Politics of Liberation and a Taste of Power. There were numerous DVDs, including episodes of Roots, plus the films, Stigmata, the Matrix Entrapment, and We Were Soldiers.”

Sarah:  Wow. Entrapment. My favorite movie from when I was 12.

Mike:  I, me too, “In addition to several CDs with music by Bob Marley, Tupac, and Lauren Hill, as well as Streets and Trips, 2002. There was also a laptop computer, a digital recorder, one half of a $50 bill and a Princeton review CD.” So I think when we're looking at John's ideology and the weird bouillabaisse of resentment and race war stuff, and men's rights stuff and personal empowerment, this is a pretty good encapsulation of it, right? That there's like violent video games and self-help books. And Bob Marley, like there's, it's just a very weird mix of stuff in here.

Sarah: It also seems on the face of it, like no more sinister than an itemized list of the things in my car right now. Because, as we all know, I have creative satanic panic books with me wherever I go.

Mike: There’s also a really interesting scene where Lee and John are about to take a long Greyhound ride. And John gives Lee this gift of a couple of CDs. And so he gives him three CDs. They are Tupac, Minister Farrakhan speaking at the Million Man March, and Tracy Chapman.

Sarah: Oh no! Is Fast Car on it? Whenever I hear that song now, I'm going to think of that. Because don't you feel like there's like this half-baked rhetoric, that's like kind of Farrakhan, kind of the Art of War, there's kind of a philosophy, but the real hook was just could belong to like literally anything bigger than yourself. Just come be with this one person. You got a fast car.

Mike:  And feel feelings.

Sarah:  And feel feelings. Yeah.

Mike: I can just imagine Tracy Chapman being contacted by the press after this and just being like, leave me out of this guy's like, I'm not, I'm not going to go in on this.  So anyway, this is the ideological pond that Lee is diving into. And do you want to catch us up on where we left Lee at the end of last episode? 

Sarah: Oh boy. So Lee Boyd Malvo grew up in Jamaica with a father who, I think when he was six, was basically not around and Lee's mom was very inconsistent and also seemed to have moods that really turned on a dime for whatever reason. And so she would be nurturing one moment and then fly into rages and be abusive the next. And it was impossible to predict why or when. And so he meets John when John has fled to Antigua with his children after he's snatched the children away from Mildred. And then Lee went to Florida after his mom moved there and John wanted him to come live in Bellingham, Washington with him, and Lee got there and became John's jedi.

Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So yeah, I mean, when we left Lee, he was on a bus to Bellingham from Florida.

Sarah:  Right. So he's on his way to Jedi school when we last saw him.

Mike:  Yeah. And the interesting thing about this period is that first of all, John has never been abusive to Lee. Right now, he's been a figure in his life that has told him a lot about personal empowerment, personal responsibility, they're doing pushups, but he hasn't shown any contempt for Lee. He hasn't been emotionally manipulative with Lee. And another interesting thing about this is he arrives in Bellingham on October 20th, 2001. He meets John in October of 2000, and the DC sniper attacks are in October of 2002. So this is almost exactly the halfway point of their relationship. And I mean, I still can't get over the fact that in this whole story, they only know each other for two years.

Sarah: Time  is different when you're a teenager, right? Like if you have two years with a teenager, like those are major years in their development. Like if I were immersed in a relationship for two years now,  I think it would be very unlikely to be able to have the same effect on me or to alter me as significantly as a two year long relationship could, if it started when I was 15 years old.

Mike: Totally. You're just such an emotional Petri dish at that point. 

Sarah:  Yeah. Teens are so vulnerable to being hacked, you know. 

Mike: Another really interesting thing about this period is that he doesn't know that there's any killing on the horizon. John has never hinted to him that they're going to kill people or that they're going to do any crime. Right? 

Sarah: If you're grooming someone to be like the submissive member of a serial killing team with you, you don't on day one, be like, now get ready to murder some people. It's the same as with telemarketing, you ease people into what you're going to make them do. 

Mike: I mean, the extent to which he knows what's going to happen is he knows that they're going to find out where Mildred lives. They're going to find out where the children go to school. They're going to pick up the kids on the way to school. They're going to drive them to Canada. And then they're going to start a flight school for homeless, wayward, abused kids, just like Lee. And of course, what we find out later is that this was never John's plan.

This was something that he was telling Lee to manipulate him into helping him carry out this plan. Because John doesn't give a shit about homeless kids in Canada, and he definitely doesn't give a shit about flight school, but he knows that one of the ways to get Lee to basically give up his own personality and sense of morality, is to make him think that he's doing something for the greater good, that you can rescue kids just like you. And that's what I'm offering you. So that's kind of what Lee thinks that he's signing up for.

Sarah:  Which once again, like if you're starting a cult, like a one that has more than one member, like this is a big selling point, greater good. You're part of something bigger than yourself. I think we also underrate how people can be drawn into something terrible because it initially appeals to their best selves.

Mike: Totally. So Lee arrives in Bellingham. He moves in with John at this homeless shelter called the Lighthouse Mission, which is run by a guy named Al Archer, who has already reported John to the FBI because he thinks John is extremely sketchy. So this is right after 9/11. Al Archer hears John talking about his wife and how he might want to kill his wife and how he has all these like vengeful ideas. He at one point defends the 9/11 hijackers. Basically saying like, well, America deserved it. And all of this is just ringing “ah ooga” noises for this Al Archer guy. And so he is one of many people to report John to the FBI and nothing comes of it. 

Sarah: Is the FBI being inundated with tips post 9/11. 

Mike: Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean also Archer hears Lee talking about he's going to be in flight school.

Sarah:  Right. A flight school is a really great, like under the radar thing to be talking about during this time.

Mike: In October of 2001. So this Al Archer guy is completely really skeptical of both of them. And also John immediately, as soon as he gets to Bellingham, starts introducing Lee as his son, which according to everyone is never all that convincing. Lee speaks with a Jamaican accent. And for people that know John, he's mentioned, oh, I have a son named Lindbergh. He lives in Louisiana. Lindbergh is in his early twenties at this point. 

So when Lee comes to Bellingham, he says, oh, hey, remember how I mentioned my son who lived in Louisiana, this is him. And then Lee opens his mouth, and he speaks with a pretty thick Jamaican accent, and he's clearly not in his early twenties. One of his friends refers to this as just John being John, like John always has weird schemes and like weird people that he's showing up with.

Sarah:  So he was like this dark Cramer where they're like ah, he’s saying it in Jamaican for some reason, classic John, I guess.

Mike: So what's really interesting about this period is that, almost as soon as he arrives in Bellingham, a routine form. So Lee starts attending Bellingham high school. John spends the day either doing day labor, if he can find it, or just drinking at this bar called the Waterfront, where if you get there early enough in the morning, Budweiser’s are $2. And because it's the Pacific Northwest, the same bar was also a hangout of Ted Bundy and the hillside strangler. So of course these, the owners of this bar are interviewed a million times in the Bellingham and national media later being like, yeah, we got another one. 

Sarah: Apparently serial killers love shitty beer. Wow. I'm not saying there's something about the Northwest and like a David Lynch, black lives, kind of a way. But like, I'm also saying that when I did see Twin Peaks for the first time as a teenager, I was like, yeah, someone gets it. 

Mike: Yeah. And so every afternoon after Lee is done with school and John has done moping around all day, they go and hang out at the YMCA. So they work out or play basketball or whatever, but they sort of kill time there for a couple hours. And then oftentimes after that, they'll go sit in a cafe and play chess or chat or whatever. And just again, kind of kill time because the shelter doesn't open until nine pm.

Sarah:  And is Lee ever, like, when are we going to start doing this flight school? 

Mike: I mean, I think that they're talking a lot about their plan in the same way we talked about the Columbine killers, is just kind of bonding over this plan. 

Sarah: They talk about, I mean, it's like the way people talk about going to Burning Man. Like even if you kind of know on some level that you're not going to, it's like fantasizing about a shared world you want to  make in the future is like a shared world right now for you to bond in. 

Mike: Yeah. And so on weekends almost immediately, they start going down to Tacoma, where of course John has a lot of friends because he used to live there and hanging out with this friend of John's named Earl Dancy, who's this sort of dirt baggy, gun nut guy that they have become friends with. And he starts taking them to shooting ranges every day over the weekends. 

What's really interesting is that, you know, they're spending all this time in shooting ranges, they start going to shooting ranges in Bellingham too, it becomes a huge part of their life. And yet John has never said like, we're going to kill people. So when Lee is like, uhhh,  you're talking about picking up the kids in a minivan outside of their school, so like, why are we doing all this gun stuff? This is from the biography of Lee, “Malvo remained curious as to why he had to learn how to shoot. Malvo said, Muhammad explained every young black man should learn to defend himself, shoot and practice lessons of how to succeed. Most importantly, he should know who he is, that he is a God, not God himself, but a God. And he must never forget the wailing of his forefathers and that bloodshed begets.”

Sarah: Hmm. You know, you're probably not moving in a good direction if you're being taught how to be a sniper under the guise of self-defense. 

Mike: And also, I mean, and also, he's shooting at photos of himself, right. They'll put a photo of himself on a tree. 

Sarah: Ooh, that's weird. I don't like that. 

Mike: It's like, why, why do I need to shoot at a picture of my face? Like, oh, self-defense.

Sarah: That is like classic cult activity, I got to say. That's not going anywhere good.

Mike:  I also think that, you know, this is very indicative of John's very weird ideology that, you know, why are we doing the shooting? Oh, it's self-defense. And then he goes on this completely non-sequitur rant about, you know, you should be a God and you should never forget the wailing of your forefathers and this sort of high in the sky philosophical stuff that really has nothing to do with self-defense and nothing to do with your day-to-day reality, but it's like bloodshed begets bloodshed? Sorry, what do you actually mean by that? But I don't, I don't think that Lee, like, I don't think he has that capacity. 

Sarah: And also if you are, if your life has been this love void as we've discussed, and then you find someone who wants you and like really wants you because they have a nefarious purpose for you, you know, if you start kind of seeing hints of that, I think it would be very hard to, you know, for all of the onus to be placed on you to be like, so what are we doing? What are we talking about? Like what is this? If we want to try and understand the situation by airlifting ourselves as we are now into it and thinking about what we would do, I think that's the wrong approach.

Mike: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The other thing they start doing during this period is they start committing crimes. And this becomes an important sort of piece of the escalation later that at first, they just start shoplifting. John starts stealing power tools and various, you know, engine clamps and wrenches and stuff from Walmart. And I mean, I think this is the perfect encapsulation of his ideology. I'm going to read you something from this book called Sniper. “Mohammed said that he was caught stealing lemon cookies at age seven, as a result, he said, he was beaten at the store and then later beaten at home by both grandparents. Mohammed said that his grandfather beat him, not because he stole, but because he was dumb enough to get caught. Muhammad recited his grandfather's instructions to use his head and think of the consequences and if he still decided to steal, he should figure out the best way to do so and not get caught. This was a lesson Muhammad indicated he was passing onto Malvo.” 

And so to me, this reveals that John's entire ideology is really just about selfishness. It's ‘I want to steal’, like there's no morality at play in the act of stealing. The only rule that you have to actually keep in mind is make sure you get away with it. You know, and I want to talk a little bit more about the ideology here, because what's really interesting and what characterizes John's ideology is that he's got all this resentment at sort of the man, like the system. He hates cops. He hates the government. The government sends people to war and they die, et cetera. But then he also hates poor people. They're staying at the homeless shelter, and he'll often tell Lee that like, you know, look at these insects, you know, they're mentally ill, they've all been arrested, they're using drugs. You can't let yourself become like this. It's not a sort of like the powerful versus the powerless thing. It's kind of like, everyone except for me and you is dumb and bad, right?

Sarah:  It's John's feelings.

Mike:  Yes. It's 100% John's feelings.

Sarah:  Yeah. Wouldn't it be great if all sort of like idealogue types were like, these are my feelings and they're not some kind of coherent little laid out master plan for how humanity works is because to behold my feelings, you know.

Mike: I mean there is something so interesting, in that his entire ideology is built around this rhetoric of facts and logic. And he's constantly telling Lee, like, you have to let go of your emotions. You have to let go of remorse. You have to uncouple your head from your heart. 

Sarah: Yeah. I was just going to say, do you think alt-right YouTubers are at all concerned because they sound exactly like that?

Mike: I mean it’s so fascinating how I think men especially can make their emotions invisible and can hide. They're extremely emotion-based, resentment, hurt based reasoning, behind I'm the logical one and everyone else around me is emotional. 

Sarah: Yeah. And this thing of like, I am so wound up about this thing because of logic. The amount of volatility that goes into like these loud, angry speeches about logic, like it's just fascinating. 

Mike: Yeah, but I mean, to me, this kind of ideology is very totalizing, or totalizing, that this is when John starts limiting Lee to one meal a day. Every morning for breakfast, they wake up at 6:00 AM and they take a bunch of nutritional supplements and drinking tea, and they don't eat anything until 6:00 PM, 7:00 PM. And during the day they're eating crackers and honey in these weird, nutritional goo, whatever, which they're probably shoplifting, cause that stuff's really expensive. 

There is something really interesting about how it's not just, these are political beliefs that you have to hold. It's something that has to take over your whole life, right? That these ideas also have to dictate how you eat. They have to dictate, you know, you get up early and do a bunch of pushups. They dictate what your hobbies are. They dictate how you dress. I mean, he casts all this as essential, right? That like, if you believe all this stuff that you're reading the Art of War, you have to also have this insane diet.

Sarah: The Art of War specifically says that you have to eat crackers all day. 

Mike: Yeah. You know, it's also very indicative to me, too, that it doesn't appear that John isn’t following this lifestyle either.

Sarah:  That's classic cult leader. 

Mike: Totally. That, you know, we're drinking tea and having these nutritional supplements in the morning, I send Lee off to school. And then I go drink beer in a bar and eat pretzels in the bar. What is the sort of purity logic behind that? 

Sarah: I don't know. Why was Jim Jones lying around drinking soda when he was making everyone, you know, work in the fields, 12 hours a day at Jones Town, same reason, whatever it was.

Mike: This is something that always bugs me because it always comes up in the more true crime-y versions of this narrative that Lee and John get obsessed with the Matrix.

Sarah:  Which is also a really great text to get your teenage disciple obsessed with. Because it's kind of making very explicit,  I think what John's pseudo philosophy is implying, which is like, what you think is the real world is not real and like take the red pill.

Mike:  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you're saying exactly what the psychological evaluations of Lee that are submitted to the court say too, that it's, it is the perfect movie because in that movie, you remember how it's okay to kill civilians? Because every civilian is a projection.

Sarah: Right. Because they're all just code.

Mike:  Yes. And so when you kill people in the Matrix, you're actually freeing them. 

Sarah: Yikes. 

Mike: I mean, I don't think that's in the matrix texts, but I think that John can present that to leave very convincing.

Sarah: Right. There's the Matrix. And then there's John's Matrix fan fiction. And out of that is birth to philosophy.

Mike:  Yeah. Yeah. And so I think it's really facile to be like the Matrix inspired the DC snipers because of course it's 100% their interpretation of that movie, not the movie itself. There's also a really interesting scene where John takes Lee to a soup kitchen, a Catholic soup kitchen, where a lot of homeless people are lining up around the block. And so this is from Lee's biography. This is Lee's account of what happened. “Malvo and Muhammad got up and joined the line and then Muhammad put on a demonstration. Malvo recalled how Mohammed incited the crowd, what the fuck is taking them so long? Muhammad bin turned to a man beside him. It was the same shit yesterday. Then Mohammad touched another shoulder every motherfucking day. These crackers tell us to line up in the fucking sun in the street like dogs, Malvo recalled that Mohammed went on like this until others in the line began to speak up. Because of Mohammed's antics, the line was slowing down and the pushing started. Malvo recalled an old man admonishing Muhammad to shut up for fear that the priest would turn them away. Fuck the priest, Muhammad told him. Muhammad saw an old lady at the door and said to her, who the fuck you looking at? Like that I'm black, but I ain't no dog. Malvo recalled that in about 15 minutes, the people were storming through the door, cursing, shouting, breaking chairs. and demanding that the old white people speed up.” And so they basically walk away from this chaos that they've created, “Mohammed and Malvo slipped away. And then Muhammad imparted yet another lecture. He pointed out that what he had demonstrated was a riot on a very small level. He went on to explain that impoverished people everywhere are like a nice powder keg waiting for a spark. They are already angry, and when the anger is brought to the surface, they will fight for anything. Mohammed then indicated that Malvo should be able to get people to the boiling point and then direct their aggression.”

Sarah: Which he has just demonstrated his own inability to do. 

Mike: Yeah. This also feeds his ideology that poor people are like sheep. It's not that the anger of the poor and the downtrodden can be used to overthrow the system, it can be used to destroy the poor as well. Like, what he wants is oblivion. He doesn't actually want to turn the anger of the poor into actual progress. He even tells Lee that sort of the reason why black people are downtrodden in America is because there's so much disunity among them. And because they can't organize and because they don't work hard enough. So even his racial resentment against white people, he constantly refers to America being in the middle of a race war. He doesn't actually take sides in the race war. He basically says that like, well, white people are evil and black people are lazy.

Sarah: I mean, do you think that John wants to kill?

Mike: I mean, he does. There's a really interesting scene where he takes Lee to a housing project, and he's sort of watching these black kids play basketball. And then of course, there's a cop car with a cop in it parked 10 feet away. And he's like, look at this cop, he's just waiting for these kids to do something. He's waiting for them to sell drugs. He's waiting for them to shoplift so that he can arrest them. Like the entire purpose of the police state is to lock up black people, which is like the kind of thing that you read in the Nation. Like this is not a completely bananas viewpoint.

Sarah: No, I say the same thing quite frequently.

Mike: Then he hands Lee a gun and he's like, now you know who your enemy is. Now you know what you need to do. And again, it's like this thing where he's got these sort of true premises, right? That like mass incarceration disproportionately affects black people. But then his conclusion from those premises is like, we must take up arms and kill white people and black people and cops and drug dealers.

Sarah:  I mean, it seems retconned, right. It feels like he has this need for destruction, and he's like, and it's for these reasons. And it's like, maybe John, like maybe you just want to kill people. But it's also really interesting to me that like, and much like Manson, I think he's like trying to inculcate this young, vulnerable disciple with this murderous rhetoric, but he might have not actually killed anyone himself. Like I know that's a big gray area, but like, it seems very possible that Lee actually pulled the trigger on every shooting. So like, what does it mean to want to kill people but not do it yourself? Like what is that? 

Mike: Well, I do think that your description of a cult leader rather than a serial killer is really useful because I do think cult leaders are characterized by kind of laziness and not wanting to do any of the work themselves. 

Sarah: And like maybe being more interested in exercising their power over other people by getting them to do extreme stuff for them. 

Mike: Right. And I mean, you know, we still don't know, you know, John may have committed some of the murders. John may have committed all of the murders. It's so difficult to believe anything in these accounts, but we do know that this ideology, a lot of it was really about manipulating Lee.

Sarah: And that Lee is clearly, that he's able to do with Lee what he wanted to do with Mildred, it seems too. That  here he has someone who's totally dependent on him and totally under his thumb.

Mike: And what’s really interesting is at this period too, as Lee is sort of getting deeper into this ideology, they're setting up this routine, they're going to the shooting range. John becomes more abusive. 

Sarah: Yeah. Cause it turns out in abusive relationships, like the abusive party, tends not to be like, you know what? Like, I'm happy with the degree of control that I feel I'm exerting over here right now. I feel satisfied. It has to get worse. 

Mike: Right. There's really interesting testimony by one of the baristas at this cafe that they hang out at all the time, where he sees them sitting there playing chess, talking for hours, he assumes that they're father and son, and he's really inspired by this relationship. He's like, wow, like I've never seen a father and son with such a great bond. And then, you know, you chat to the barista, whatever he comes over to their table at one point, and he's like, Hey kiddo, do you ever beat your old man at chess? And what he notices is that Malvo doesn't answer, Malvo looks at John and gets permission, and then he answers. There's also an incident where they're playing basketball at the Y and John goes up for a layup. Lee tries to swat the basketball out of his hand, but he misses, and he hits John sort of on the ear, on the neck, whatever, like the kind of thing that is annoying, but happens.

Sarah: Happens in sports. Yeah. 

Mike: And so on the next play, this is what Lee says in the biography that he eventually writes. “I grabbed him on his next drive. He swings and elbows me and my ribs, grabs my wrist and twists it, I'm on my knees in pain. Then he throws me about 10 feet. I'm in a pile on the floor holding my wrist.”

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Mike: “He looks at me with a hollow stare. I've never seen so much anger aimed at me before. I immediately asked what I did to make him so angry. He stared at me and then walked away.” 

And so this is from Carmita’s book when she's describing Lee's kind of psychological state. “In Malvo's mind, he was to blame for the abusive reaction because Mohammad could not have been wrong. Associated with the self-blame was the fear of being abandoned. He was totally dependent on Muhammad. He resolved that he would never disappoint Muhammad again. The basketball incident was the first time that Mohammed was physically abusive to Malvo. It was also the last, Malvo said. Whatever abuse that followed would be psychological. Mohamad only had to give Malvo the look and the boy would comply.” 

And so I do think that the dependence is a huge part of this, that Lee is an undocumented immigrant and the only, really the only relationship within his life now, because John has been so good at isolating him. He's not, you know, making friends at the shelter, he's not chatting with this barista, and he really has nobody else.

Sarah: Yeah. And also that, I mean that he's completely dependent on him financially and functionally. Right?

Mike:  Yeah. So into this brainwashing indoctrination period comes Lee's mother, Una. About two months after Lee runs away from his mom, his mom comes to Bellingham. She's somehow figured out that they're staying at this place called the Lighthouse Mission. She basically just shows up there and starts asking around like, have you seen my son. And this Archer guy who was of course deeply suspicious of John and Lee is like, thank God. Like I finally got some answers. So he helps Una look around Bellingham. He tells her to go to the police and have the police pick up Lee outside the YMCA. So they do, they pick up Lee at the YMCA. They bring him back to the Lighthouse Mission. He's reunited with his mom, but he's kind of like, he doesn't seem very warm. Like Al Archer says that it doesn't seem like a very warm reunion. He's kind of like, what are you doing here? 

Sarah: Yeah. I would also imagine that if I'm trying to completely indoctrinate a teenager into my bananas worldview, then setting up something to like further estrange him from his parent would also be part of that, for me.

Mike: Oh yeah. Yeah. And Lee basically goes with her to some motel room, but within a day, what happens is the cops in Bellingham report them to the INS. And what's really interesting is, you know, the INS comes to this motel room, they arrest Una, and then they go to the YMCA to pick up Lee because they know that he hangs out there. And they show up in the locker room. John and Lee are in the locker room changing and these INS agents get there. And so they ask Lee, you know, are you Lee Malvo? He says, yes. They say, you know, who's this guy like, are you with this adult? And Lee says, yes, I'm with John. And John immediately sells them out. John is just like, nope, I've never seen this kid before in my life. I have no idea who this kid is. Yeah, he just, we're just chatting in the locker room. 

Sarah: So disheartening when your cult leader has no fucking loyalty to you. It's like John, good, tiny cult members are not a dime a dozen like, you need this.

Mike: I know. So basically John is just like, I'm just a random guy in the locker room and they're like, okay, fair enough Mr. And they take me to immigrant detention. 

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Mike: And so this is where he gets very importantly fingerprinted. Apparently, according to Lee, they put Lee and his mother in the same cell in this immigrant detention facility in Seattle. And they don't speak for two days, and his mom realizes that he's slipping away. So it seems that she's not abusive to him there. And so for two days they don't speak. 

Then he gets transferred to an INS facility that's in Spokane. Although other accounts say that it's in a different part of Seattle, but then because WNA has, in the meantime, she's married a Haitian immigrant to the US. He has permanent residency and she's still waiting for her paperwork to come through, granting her permanent residency. She gets a lawyer, the lawyer communicates with the INS. It takes about a month for all of us to go through. But eventually they're like, yeah, your paperwork's coming through. You're married to an American. You're free. And so this is one of the stupidest decisions that Una has made. I don't know if it's Lee that convinces her or if she decides this herself, but Una decides, when they get released from this detention facility league, they’re flown back to Seattle. They're finally together again. And Una decides let's go back to Bellingham because you're enrolled in that school. 

Sarah: This attachment to school is like a weirdly consistent part of her decision-making, it's very interesting, I don't really know what to make of it. I mean, what do you think about that?

Mike: I mean,  I think it's huge, like a huge component of the story is that Una is from a developing country. And that for people trying to escape poverty, around the world, there's this myth that poor people don't care about education or ethnic minorities don't care about education. Like one of the most universal human traits, 98% of humanity, if you poll them, what is the one thing they want for their children? It is education. And especially people in developing countries because every poor person wants their kid to be less poor than they are. And education is the only reliable way to do that.

Sarah: And also everyone wants their child to do better than they did, even if it's in a very nebulous way. We can see that all the way up and Felicity Huffman land. 

Mike: Yes. So it's, it's, it's understandable that she wants to take him back to really the only form of stability in his life. But of course, the minute they get back to Bellingham, Lee runs away. He steals $30 from her purse. And he used it to buy a bus ticket to Tacoma because he knows John is there. Basically, there's a really interesting narrative here where I was thinking like, you could make a movie about Una, like searching for her son and trying to get her son away from John. Because at this point of the story, Una kind of becomes the hero. She also thinks that John is bad news. She wants to get her son away from John. And we know now that if she had succeeded, that would have been much better for the country and maybe John never would have done the sniper shootings at all if he didn't have this perfect accomplice. 

Sarah: And so for the second time, this is a story of women looking for their children frantically.

Mike: And also like a very complicated woman looking for her child too. Like we know if Lee had gone back with Una, he would have been subjected to the same abuse, right?

Sarah: Because once again, we're seeing that the choices for him are like between kinds of abuse and differently abusive situations.

Mike: Yes,  it's bad and worse. Those are his two choices. And so apparently Una spends months looking for him. There's an incident in March of 2002, two months later, where she's on the bus. It's not clear if this is in Tacoma or Bellingham, but she's on the bus. And she looks over and there's Lee and John sitting in the seats, sort of two rows back from her. And she yells to the bus driver, stop the bus, stop the bus. This is my son. And she goes up to Lee and she's like, you been, I haven't seen you. And Lee says, I'm sorry. I don't know you. I don't know this woman. Like, please keep driving the bus. I've never seen this woman before in my life. And John helps him. John is like, yes, I'm this boy's father. This is not his mother. I've never seen her before in my life either. And everyone on the bus, it's like, wow, this lady sure is weird. And then John and Lee get off the bus. And so the last time she sees him before court is this bus, you know, she's looking out the window and this bus is driving away and just leaving them on the side of the road. So it's, it's one of those sad moments that she created to a certain extent, right? I mean, it's sad to think about her receding into the distance in this bus, but it's also like, well, yeah, Lee did that. 

Sarah: Yeah. I mean, I think this is one of the elements of tragedy. Greek tragedy, and my understanding of it is like, it is very obvious that everyone involved is doing their best and that their best is decided by whatever fatal flaw they have. And we all have one, it's just a deeper and more realistic and I think much more depressing story in the end if you think about, you know, this was not based on one puppeteer having a master plan and everyone falling into his thrall. I mean, we have really a puppeteer figure in this story, but it's like, everything he's able to do is still based on where everyone else in this story is coming from. John is not orchestrating all of this. Like no one has that power. And this is, I mean, to me, this is one of the frustrating parts of the classic true crime trope, that we sort of elevate the killer to this sort of mastermind figure who made everything happen rather than, you know, parachuting into a complicated world and finding ways to wittingly and unwittingly capitalize on the weaknesses and tragedies of others.

Mike: Yeah. I mean, one of the interesting parallels with OJ, I feel like that's kind of partly what you're getting at, is that he's also very good at manipulating people and finding people who are vulnerable to his manipulation without necessarily realizing that's what he's doing. 

Sarah: Right. Yeah. I don't think that John is sitting around being like, yes, I really love these vulnerable  unworldly people, they’re great. You don't think about that yourself because it doesn't mesh well with a self-aggrandizing philosophy. 

Mike: Yeah. And so another really interesting parallel, you said something really interesting in our Kato Kaelin part two episode the other day, that you said one of the reasons why OJ may have committed his crime is he didn't have any other structure in his life.

Sarah: Right. That like, Kato is talking about just how bored he seems during the time that he's living in the guest house at Rockingham. 

Mike: And he has no other sense of purpose other than his resentment of Nicole. And what I think is really interesting in this period after John takes Lee away from Una is they're entering a period like this too, where Lee has now given up on school, John has realized, accurately, I think that stealing stuff is much more lucrative than working. So they don't have to really do very much during the day. And so they've, you know, they've already been spending almost all of their time together and now it's really every waking moment, they're together with nothing else to do. 

Sarah: Which we also really, we just count how strong of an effect that can have on you, just being continually in someone else's presence.

Mike: Yeah. They're living in Tacoma, every once in a while, they go back up to Bellingham, but it's for a day or two. They can't stay at the Lighthouse Mission anymore. A lot of the people in the homeless services sort of sector around Tacoma and Bellingham know them now. And Lee is paranoid about getting picked up by the INS again. So they're really trying to stay off the grid. 

So really, they're hanging out with this guy, Earl Dancy, and they're just playing video games all day and going to the shooting range. And every once in a while, doing some sort of petty, stealing frozen steaks from the grocery store type stuff. And so all they really have is this plan of theirs against Mildred and getting good at shooting people and this sort of ideological indoctrination, that’s their only real hobby now. So this is also the part, and I've really been looking forward to telling you about this part, because this is where we finally  meet John's girlfriend. So one of the people that they are staying with in Tacoma is a woman named Mary Marez who John has been dating since 1995, since he started  fixing her car when he was still together with Mildred. 

Sarah: Oh, this is one of the lonely women who needed her carpets in the middle of the night.

Mike: She's a really interesting figure in that she's a former nurse, she's divorced, she has a few kids, she's born and raised in Tacoma, she meets this nice guy. And she testifies at his trial that he was great to her. She never saw any signs of resentfulness, bitterness. He was never abusive. He was never, to her knowledge, manipulative. What she says at the trial is “John was a very considerate person, the strongest, most generous person I have ever known”. And she sort of breaks down on the stand talking about this and there's something really interesting about that, that it seems that he was a pretty positive guy in her life, and he was still capable, at that point of holding it all together. Of sort of hiding this deep well of resentment that was right beneath this nice guy exterior. 

Sarah: And which seems, I mean, this really speaks to our conversations about Paula Barbieri. During this pretrial stuff and pretrial publicity, she was very useful to the defense team as someone who could get up and go on TV and say, no, like I'm not scared of him. He's never been abusive to me. You know, and afford to believe her at all, she was telling the truth. I think there's something to be said for being the side piece of someone with major issues, because it's, you know, with OJ and also with John, we can say, well, yeah, like he wasn't directing that at you. And there were other people in his life and other relationships in his life that he seemed to be projecting that psychic baggage into. And yet at the same time, and maybe because those relationships had so much projected stuff and so many issues of his bound up in them, he was able to be, to freight other relationships with less baggage, maybe.

Mike: Yeah. And there's this really interesting passage in this Sniper book about her relationship with him. She says, “She heard about his battle with his wife and anguish over his missing children. He told her he had been devastated when his wife accused him of threatening her with violence. That was the lowest blow, he said. You know me, he told her. I would never, never raise my hand to a woman. His wife knew, he said that the way to hurt him the most was to keep the children away from him. The children were his world. He lived for them, and Mary knew that. From a drug store in Tacoma, she had wired him money when he had them in Antigua, losing the children, broke him. He seemed to care about everyone and rarely got angry. Sometimes he would stay with her for a while, a few days or a week. then he’d leave. She fell in love with him and dreamed that someday they might have a life together.”

Sarah: When they first get together, does she know that he's- I mean how early does she find out that he's married?

Mike: She knows immediately because they're kind of family friends, so he starts fixing her car. He starts being nice to her kids. He starts offering to fix her car for free. There's this really interesting scene in his trial where the lawyers are cross-examining her about her relationship to him because she characterizes him as a friend. She says, oh, we're always friends. And then they start pushing her and like, well, when did you start sleeping together? And did you love him or not? And so she's like crying on the stand and kind of trying to deny that they were in a relationship together. And I think part of that is like, she probably feels really bad that she was this naive. Right? If you know somebody and somebody is really important in your life and they go off and do something this horrific, you sort of feel like a fool, right? It's like falling for like a three-card Monte scam on the street or something. You're kind of like, oh, I can't believe I did that. It's this shameful thing. 

Sarah: Yeah. We like to believe that like someone who we know intimately that we should be able to just know the worst things that they're capable of, but I don't, I don't think that's true. 

Mike: Yeah. There's also a really interesting thing where Mary is white. And so when Lee meets Mary for the first time, they get off the bus and Mary meets them at the bus station, he's kind of like, Sorry? You’ve spent thousands of hours telling me how we're in a race war and white people are the worst and our whole sort of like holy war is against white people. You've been dating a white woman for seven years? Can you care to explain? 

Sarah: I want to guess. I feel like if I were John, I would kind of be like, no, I must keep having sex with this white devil to sharpen my revolutionary instincts and remind myself of how terrible white people are, so terrible. Their breasts, terrible. Got to check them again. What did he say?

Mike:  That is one tick, less chicken shit than John is. John, basically, he's like, yeah, yeah, you're right. I'm going to break up with her. He just kind of hand waves it away. Like, yeah. It's not real, like it's no. 

Sarah: It's whatever. Yeah. Don't worry about it.

Mike: But again there’s these little red flags that like John is full of shit, but again, Lee's 16. He doesn't have the tools to be like, sorry, this guy doesn't actually believe anything that he's telling me. 

Sarah: Right. I just, the desire, I mean, the desire to believe that like John has his act together. Why do people believe that their churches don't harbor abuse? Why do we believe that our jobs at start-ups make sense and are going towards a viable product? Like there's, there is so much plausible deniability that we allow to exist in our lives, where like we know on some level that if we open that door that's supposed to go to the control room that it would just be like a bunch of mops. And that's why we don't open it.

Mike:  So another thing that happens at this time because they have no structure in their life other than this plan that they're talking about, and this resentment that is getting fed every single day by having nothing else to do, the training that they're doing gets much more intense. So they're spending up to 12 hours a day at the shooting range. John starts doing this extremely weird shit where he will tie Lee shirtless to a tree and then leave him there for like six hours.

Sarah: Oh my God. 

Mike: This is in January, February, March. This is what Carmita says in her book. “Lee was so into the training and gaining Mohammed's respect that he wanted to be chained to the tree for hours. He wanted to prove how tough he was, how indestructible he was.” And they, I mean, this is also the period where they start to establish this pattern where John will sort of debrief. Like he'll send Lee on these weird missions. So they'll camp out in the woods and then he'll have Lee sneak up on other campers, like sort of crawl through the dirt silently. 

Sarah: That's very like the Manson family, like, as they were working their way up to committing murders, they would just quietly break into people's homes and move their furniture around. And they called it creepy crawling. It's very serious and dark, but it's like he couldn't have called it something less funny?

Mike:  I think it's part of this, he's indoctrinating Lee with all this sort of we're on a mission. We're secret agents. He's telling him all kinds of stories about what he did in the military, like, oh, I had to survive on my own in the woods and the military, which like, no, he didn't. He was in Saudi Arabia.

Sarah: Right? Where were these woods?

Mike: A really interesting thing at this time is that Earl Dancy later testifies that John is not a very good shot. At doing the sniping.

Sarah: It's great that, you know, the legacy of the DC snipers, as you know, includes the fact that the older, you know, mastermind of the operation was not very good at shooting. 

Mike: We have no idea how much to believe from Earl Dancy, but it's also more evidence that Lee may have been the one doing more of the sniper shootings simply because he might've been a better shot. We don't know. So in late January, in 2002, this is now 10 months before the sniper shootings in DC, is the first time John orders Lee to kill somebody. So in the end of January, they're hanging out in Bellingham. I don't really know why they're there that weekend. John spins him this whole yarn about how he's been casing this restaurant. And he knows that the manager of the restaurant comes out around 1:00 AM and she has a bag with her, with all of the cash for that night. Lee doesn't say this in his book, but I think this is probably someone that John was dating.

Sarah: Because he dated literally everyone.

Mike:  It's not clear that John has the discipline to sit outside of a restaurant. I mean, it would take weeks to figure out how much money, you wouldn't be able to determine that someone leaving at 1:00 AM is taking all the cash with them, unless you knew them somehow.  

Sarah: Right. It's just easier if you have some kind of inside knowledge of the situation. 

Mike: Yeah. And so this is my hunch, I have no direct evidence for this, but this was my hunch, is that it's somebody that he was dating. 

Sarah: This is your, like, you're choosing your one Nancy Grace moment of wildly throw out an unsupported theory. And this is the one you're choosing.

Mike:  I got to fill the 24 hour news cycle, Sarah, this is the only way to do it. Basically they pull up in a car outside of this parking lot, outside the restaurant at around midnight, and he says to Lee, you have to kill this lady and take her money. And here's a passage from Lee's biography. “Sir. Why are we doing this? I asked him, ‘Why are we doing this?’ Muhammad repeated his eyes pierced mine. You're being prepared. For what? I asked. He gave me that look ,and I realized that I screwed up. I looked at the ground. He hissed, where is your zeal now? He laughed, but then he got serious again. ‘Are you willing to do what it takes? Are you?’ ‘Yes, sir’. I responded. ‘Then do it’.” 

And so extremely, extremely, extremely fortuitously, this woman comes out of the restaurant around 1 am. She unlocks her car, she throws this kind of binder with all the cash in it on the passenger seat. She gets into the car and then she sort of goes, ah, she's forgotten something. And she goes back into the restaurant. And so, Lee with the gun in his hand, dashes up to the car, opens the passenger side door, grabs the portfolio, and runs away. Oh, nice thinking Lee. And so they get around a thousand dollars from this. This is when they start realizing that these forms of robberies are much more lucrative.

Sarah: Right. And I think of all the crackers you can buy with a thousand dollars.

Mike:  Yeah. I know. Although not that many supplements, actually. This also establishes their pattern of John doing this debrief with Lee afterwards, where he's like, okay, let's go over it. How did everybody do? This is part of his whole facts and logic thing, right. That we must perfect ourselves. We must become perfect machines. But what they really are is just an opportunity for him to criticize Lee for whatever minor imperfections there were in the crime that they commit.

Sarah: It’s  like, dude, do your own crimes. And then finally reveal that you're not very good at it. You know, this is like how my dad is about home repairs. 

Mike: And so John basically it's like, well, you know, the crime went fine. It ended up easier because we didn't have to kill her, but you know, the whining beforehand is really embarrassing. Let's cut back on the whining next time.

Sarah: Oh my God.

Mike:  Of course Lee is just like, yeah, you're right. I'm sorry.

Sarah: I just, like, he's like a mean gymnastics coach and it's like these robberies are like floor routines or something. It's like, oh, look at that. You stepped out of it there. Almost came off the mat. That's no good. Okay. 

Mike: And so after that sort of test run, two weeks later is when they commit their first murder, February 16th, 2000, to two days before Lee's 17th birthday. So this murder, I mean, we talked about it briefly in the first episode, but they're basically setting out to assassinate Isa Nichols, who was their business manager who sided with Mildred in the divorce. And John has been nursing his resentment of Isa Nichols for about eight months now, since he lost the children. And so he orders Lee to go up to her house, pull out a gun, and if it's her at the door, to shoot her without saying anything. And if it's not her to say, I have a message from John and then shoot her.

Sarah: Is this in broad daylight? When is this?

Mike:  This is at night. Oh, okay. You mentioned last time, Isa is at the store at the time. And her niece, Kenya Cook is changing her baby's diaper. 

Sarah: How old is Kenya? 

Mike: She’s 21. This is how Lee tells the story, “I got out of the car. I tuned into his voice in my head, remembering all the lessons, the preparation. Malvo be calm, the calm, cool and collected survive. Free your mind to the task at hand. Don't think it, become it.” This is all John garbage, right?

Sarah: Yeah. This is all like Nike commercials. 

Mike: “I rapped on the door. Good evening. Is Ms. Nichols in? I asked the young lady at the door. She seemed eager to talk, for she gave me a long answer, telling me Mrs. Nichols’ exact whereabouts. Well, I have a message for her, I say reaching into my paper bag. I turned my body so she can't see my hand. Lee, a voice in me said, don't, but the other voice, just as loudly said no, do it, do it. My eyes are watery. You can't face him unless you do this. The lady at the door inhaled, getting impatient. This is all happening in seconds. I put the gun to her face and in an instant, I saw not her, but my old self I hate. That scared, hurt self. That night, Lee Boyd Malvo took his last breath and died.  In an instant, she too, was gone.” 

And so from what we know of this crime, he shot her in the head and her baby starts crying upstairs and he runs away and nobody, you know, none of the neighbors, it all happens so fast. Nobody really sees anything. One of the really chilling things about this is one of the reasons this murder was never solved until after the DC sniper case is she also had an abusive boyfriend, apparently. And so when this 21 year old turns up dead, everyone just assumes I think very reasonably, that it must've been her abusive boyfriend.

Sarah: And then was he investigated and prosecuted?

Mike: He was investigated, but they never found him. I think he left the state. 

Sarah: Oh boy. It's like a testament to just the way crime functions, that it's a race to see, like who's going to kill a young woman first. Is it going to be her abusive boyfriend or ex, or is it going to be the abusive ex of her aunt's boss?

Mike: Also, it's very interesting to me that that detail only shows up in Mildred's book. I think Mildred, because Mildred centers abuse in the story, which I think she's completely right to do, also because she knows Eissa and she knows the story of this niece, Kenya. She's like, no, this is like, it's all wrapped up in abuse. 

Sarah: We need to sort of put this front and center and that gun targeting Eissa is an extension of his abuse of Mildred and his disproportionate rage coming to focus on like, you know, because his ex-wife is out of the picture. Like someone has to get it. And if it's not going to be her, it's going to be the woman who, you know, tried to support her when she disagreed with him about how to run their business. And if it's not going to be her, it's going to be whoever's in the house.  It's terrible. 

Mike: So Mildred talks about when she finds out about this, because of course Eissa calls her. They both think that it's the abusive ex. And so she doesn't see this as a warning sign that John's violence has escalated. She doesn't link it to John at all. And it's only after, you know, the FBI finally gets in touch with her, and this gets linked to the DC snipers that she realizes that it was John at the time. It's like, this is what abuse does to people.

Sarah: I’m just really, I think what's going to stick in my head about all this is like, Lee shows up and pulls the trigger and shoots Kenya and kills her. And then the baby starts crying. Like. 

Mike: And that's what Eissa finds when she comes back. 

Sarah: Oh my God. I know. Oh my God. 

Mike: That Isa comes back to the body of her niece and this sound of crying upstairs. And she immediately runs upstairs to get the baby and then finally starts putting together what happened. 

Sarah: I would just like to hit have like, as part of Sunday, a story where like one of the women in this narrative goes shopping and nothing terrible happens.

Mike: Bring back normal shopping. Yeah. What's really interesting is this is also on some level an active abuse of Lee, too.

Sarah: Oh yeah. Yeah. Because then once you've forced someone to kill, they're not coming back from that. John gets so much power from that.

Mike:  This is, this is a passage from Lee's biography, “As he walked away and began to run toward where he was to meet Muhammad, his thoughts were on the fact that he had just killed another human being. He was sweating. He soiled himself and silent tears rolled down his cheeks. As he reached a phone booth, Mohammed pulled up and he got in. I sat silently, he said, trying to hide my shaking hands. I watched you. You did perfect. He smiled, I returned his smile. Oh, don't worry. Everything will be alright, here. He handed me my wallet and a new ID. That is your new name. I read to myself, John Lee Muhammad. He looked at me with the deepest stare. Lee Boyd Malvo no longer exists. He started the engine and drove off.” 

And Lee talks about, I mean, you know, the, the real victim here is Kenya obviously, but it's interesting that Lee, there's like a period of two weeks where Lee is  vomiting constantly. Apparently when he gets back to Earl Dancy’s house, after committing this murder, he stays in the shower for hours, scrubbing himself over and over again. And of course they do a debrief where John is like, oh yeah, stop staying in the shower. Why do you feel bad? Like, you know, John's, of course chides him for this and doesn't accept it. Like, hey, maybe you did a really big thing. And so he feels very bad for what appears to be a very long time about this. 

Sarah: Yeah. Like you do when you kill someone. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean, it doesn't stop him from continuing to kill people and continuing to try to endear himself to John or prove himself John, or, you know, whatever's going on in his head at this point. It's not as simple as just, you know, he's a total sociopath at this point. 

Sarah: Yes. And I mean, I find it interesting that there's this idea that I've never understood, that like understanding the positions of the people who commit the crimes and their humanity and how they got to this place is somehow taking something away from the tragedy of the people that they have harmed, or they have killed. Because I think that like, like, do we take Kenya's death more seriously? Or do we mourn her more effectively if we're like, yeah. And then he killed her, and I bet he liked it. And I bet that all the showering was just a fake show of grief, and he found his vocation and he loved it and it was unambiguous. And uncomplex. How has that, how does that mean that we're respecting the loss of her life more deeply? I just don’t get that.

Mike: And so this is now the period. This drives me nuts that the period between when they kill Kenya cook and when they begin, the sniper shootings, is referred to by almost every account that you find, especially the shorter accounts as this sort of yada yada yada framing.

Sarah: They committed their first murder. They had the lobster bisque.

Mike: And there's this kind of thing of, you know, they committed this one crime and then, then there's just this avalanche of crime and then this crime spree culminates in DC at the end of it. Like, it's all kind of this run-up to the DC sniper shootings. But when you actually look into this, their first killing was on February 16th and the sniper shootings don't begin until October. This is an eight month period. I mean, this is almost a third of the time that they know each other. 

Sarah: This is the length of an entire viable pregnancy. 

Mike: Yeah. This is a long period, and they don't just like immediately leave Tacoma and sort of work their way to DC. No, they go places and they come back to Tacoma. And so the first thing that happens is they go visit John's sister in Arizona, on the way they take a bus down to LA and then over to, I believe she lives outside of Tucson. And so on this kind of couple day layover in LA, this is when Lee says that he killed someone, but LA authorities have never been able to find a body. They haven't been able to identify any murders that took place during that period. So it's still not clear whether he killed somebody in LA or not. But in Arizona, on March 19th, there is a guy named Jerry Taylor who is shot with a high powered rifle from far away. 

Sarah: I would imagine this is pretty rare, and that like the police and whatever jurisdiction are not seeing a ton of murders committed this way. 

Mike: Oh it’s extremely rare. I mean, there's a finite number of murders committed in the United States every year. I really cannot stress enough how rare it is for it not to be really obvious who did the shooting when somebody gets shot.

Sarah: Or how rare it is to be murdered by a stranger. 

Mike: Yes. So it's not common for people to be shot with high powered rifles from far away. And so this is one of the ones where we're pretty sure this one happened. There are witnesses that report people sort of coming out from the woods near this golf course and dragging him into the woods. Although very strangely, they didn't steal his cash or his credit cards.

Sarah: Wait, they shot him and then they dragged him into the woods? Wow. That's really weird. 

Mike: It’s also very weird that they didn't take his cash and credit cards because if they're in proximity to his body, like why wouldn't you? And also three days later, they steal a purse from a Greyhound bus driver. Like they're obviously in the market for cash and credit cards. 

Sarah: And then did Lee  go on to confess to something kind of matching the circumstance?

Mike:  According to some random college kids who they end up staying with in Bellingham later, Lee says we shot a Senator on a golf course, once. And these random college kids are like, whatever, like people say stuff and they don't really think anything of it. But of course later on the cops come to them and they tell the story. So that's some sort of contemporaneous, Lee admitting to this, which does indicate that they did do this. And the daughter of Jerry Taylor, whose name is Cheryl Shaw, because this is an unsolved murder for years. And she finds out about the DC sniper attacks. And it's like, this makes sense. Like, it's the same caliber of rifle apparently. And so she starts writing to Lee and saying like, look, I don't care if you get immunity or not, but I just want closure. I don't know who did this to my father. And not only does Lee admit to this, but he also gives her a call and they talk about it. 

So part of me feels like it's somewhat plausible because we know this about Lee, that he gives people what they want. It's somewhat plausible to me that he might've confessed to a murder that he didn't do. But it's also, I mean, these guys are the DC snipers. It's also pretty plausible that they killed somebody with a high powered rifle from far away. And also John's sister does live in that part of Arizona. It's like a mile away from his sister's house. The only thing that's out of pattern is that they didn't steal his credit cards and cash. So I think it's probably more likely that they actually did this.

Sarah:  Yeah. I mean, it's not as if he's confessing to something that has a completely different set of circumstances attached to it. And I can also see being in prison and being like, well, I want to do something good with my life and like bring closure to this person, even if it's not true. Like that's better than nothing. 

Mike: Right? So after they stay with John's sister for a couple of weeks, they commit the shooting, probably. They then leave Arizona and go back to Bellingham. On the bus on the way back to Bellingham, the driver puts her purse on her seat behind her and when she arrives in Bellingham, it's gone. And so what we find out later is that John and Lee took the purse. They use one of her credit cards to buy $12.01 worth of gas, and then the bank canceled the card because of algorithms. And what's really interesting is this is the card, later on, that they will ask the U.S. government to put $10 million on it as part of one of their rules and demands.

Sarah: That's such a Dr. Evil thing to do. I'm sorry. It's like so silly.

Mike: It's so, I mean, also the, the government is like, this is a weird thing to do. Like you're not even asking it for like an overseas bank account or something that's not traceable. 

Sarah: Right. Or like non-sequential bills. Come on.

Mike:  Yes. I know. 

Sarah: Watch a movie. 

Mike: Watch a movie. So anyway, they get back to Bellingham. They end up staying with these random college kids. And then the timeline, I mean this whole year of this quote unquote crime spree, the timeline is all over the place. There's a murder of a guy named Billy Jean Dylan in Denton, Texas on May 27th of this year. And Lee has not confessed to this one. The only evidence basically is that it was a guy shot with a high powered rifle and the crime was never solved. It's confirmed that somewhere in June, July, August, they spent a couple of weeks in Louisiana, just sort of catching up with people. And then by early August, they're back in Tacoma. And one of the reasons why I don't love this kind of crime spree framing is that this period in early August, when they're back in Tacoma, is really important because it's real like walls closing in time. Where Earl Dancy and John are having a falling out with each other at this point, over, apparently John May have slept with his wife.

Sarah: I mean, classic John, to be fair, like who didn't see that coming. 

Mike: Yeah. I mean, I guess all Earl is really admitting to that like John was hanging out at his house when he wasn't there and he asked John not to, but John did it anyway. And the movie Blue Caprice, which is based on the DC snipers and gets literally everything wrong, it says explicitly that he was sleeping with the wife. I have no idea what they're basing that on. 

Sarah: So it might've just been a false, I mean, Earl Dancy might just be tired of the guy. 

Mike: Yeah. And also John, John at this point is really losing his superpower. He can't hide the resentment anymore. So this is when he stays with this random cousin in Louisiana. He's like, oh, we're on a secret mission to steal a bunch of exclusives for the Pentagon. And then they sleep in the next day and they're playing video games. And they're just like, they don't seem very charming, and she lies apparently. And she was like, oh yeah, sorry. I have another friend sleeping here. You guys can't sleep here again tonight. He's losing his ability to charm people and his ability to cover up how off putting he is. It's like the end of Terminator 2 where he's like glitching out.

Sarah: Well, or like he's able to do well in these like short term relationships. And then the more people come to know him, the more they recognize hot air as hot air.

Mike: Yeah. And so I think that's probably partly what's happening with Earl Dancy, regardless of the wife stuff. I think it's just like, John's getting weirder. Apparently, the last interaction with John that he has is his rifle goes missing from his car in a Walmart parking lot. 

Sarah: Earl's does?

Mike:  Yeah. And it's not like his, his rifle is like sitting in the passenger seat visible. Right. It's like, you would have to know where it is, and John is one of the only people that knows where it is. And so, to me, this is like very reckless behavior, right? Of like someone who has been close to, to basically do something that ensures that that person's never going to want to speak to you again. So John is just like flailing and at this time also Mary breaks up with him.

Sarah: I mean, good for Mary.

Mike:  I mean, she does it in a very like early 2000’s way where she ends up spending a year in Colorado and then she moves back to Tacoma and she just doesn't tell John her new address or her new phone number. And this is before cell phones. Right. So like, if you didn't know somebody’s landline number or their address, that's basically it for the relationship. 

Sarah: They can't watch you watching your Instagram story.

Mike:  Yes. And so this interview that she gives to the people who wrote the sniper book, it says” later she would worry that she might have been a reason for what happened. What if she had still been his refuge, his place of peace?” You know, so basically, they're running out of time, places to stay in Tacoma, right. Because Dancy is getting sick of them. Mary has basically ghosted on him at this point. Robert Holmes is getting more and more sick of them, this is John's army buddies.

Sarah: And also, I feel like John has kind of a hair trigger for how he's seen by other people and having this thing of like his sort of local allies kind of being like, ah, we're kind of sick of your whole thing, take it somewhere else. Like I can imagine him becoming volatile more than usual about that.

Mike: I mean now, because the walls are closing in and he's losing option after option after option, it's sort of like, well stagnating and putting it off, kicking the can down the road, isn't really an option anymore. And so the first sign that we get that they are in DC, it appears they took a bus direct from Tacoma to DC, is on September 5th. This is a month before the sniper shootings begin. A guy named Paul LaRuffa is leaving his restaurant in Clinton, Maryland.

Sarah:  Which is where Mildred lives. 

Mike: Yes. And this is how he tells it. He says, “I owned a restaurant in Clinton, we closed at 10, and I left with two people around 10 20. I got in my car and shut the door. Seconds later, the driver's side window exploded. All I saw was a flash of light from a gun. Then it got quiet. I was bleeding out of my chest, and I said to my friend, dial 911. The shooter grabbed the briefcase and computer and ran it down the road. That was the start of the sniper. But we didn't know. There was $3,500 bucks in my briefcase from a receipt which ended up financing their operation. I've always said it didn't start in October. Some guy came up, shot me, and left me for dead. Lee later admitted it.” And so this is the first shooting. 

Sarah: This is their seed money. 

Mike: Yeah. And it's also important that it's in Clinton. So I think what probably happened is they went there to confirm that Mildred did indeed live there and then they left, and they went to Camden, New Jersey to buy a car so that they could come back.

Sarah:  Why did they go to Camden, New Jersey to do that? 

Mike: Because John, I mean, they’re couch surfing at this point, they're staying in homeless shelters. And John knows somebody from Antigua who he helped smuggle into the United States who lives in Camden, New Jersey. So they basically go there because they can crash on this guy's couch for a couple of days. And he shows them around used car dealerships. There's, you know, everybody's interviewed the used car dealer that sold him the Caprice. And he says, they came in four different times, and they told a different story every time. They're like, oh, I want to use it for a taxi or like, oh, I'm going to go on a road trip with my son. And this guy's like, whatever, it's a $250 car it's crappy. It's old. It has 150,000 miles on it. Like, whatever. He doesn't really think that much about it. 

Sarah: It's amazing to choose a car for your crime spree that could break down at any moment.

Mike: I think it's also because Chevy's are really big, and they could modify the trunk in the way that they wanted to know.

Sarah: I’m going to look up what a blue Caprice looks like. I have no mental image at all.

Mike:  It's like a cop car. It's a 1990 Caprice, if that helps. 

Sarah: All right. 1990. Oh yeah. It is a cop car, huh? Oh, wow. That is a big car. 

Mike: Yeah. This is basically a carnival cruise ship. 

Sarah: That's one of those cars where you like, see people deriving in eighties movies and you're like, wow, I'm so glad I didn't learn to drive back then. I mean, for a 1990 model, it's actually surprisingly boxy. Like it looks like it's an older model than it is. It looks pretty unwieldy. 

Mike: This is also weird falling apart, T 1000 glitching shit, where they register the car and apparently the guy in the registration office is a little salty or a little bit rude or whatever. Three minutes after they register the car in this office, an anonymous call from a payphone calls in a bomb threat against the motor vehicle office.

Sarah:  Mastermind, criminals that work here.

Mike: It's completely pointless, right? Because the car's already registered. 

Sarah: Like it's just spite it's just tender little feelings. 

Mike: Yeah. They get the car. They head back  down to DC. This is when they start scoping out Mildred much more deliberately. In the biography of Lee it says “Malvo recalled that Mohammad wanted to know who visited Mildred, where the kids went to school, where she worked. With Malvo beside him, he drove around looking for safe spots, using a laptop computer to map sites from Pennsylvania to Raleigh, North Carolina, which became their hub.” So basically, they're spending like days stalking Mildred. And what's interesting is Mildred's neighbors actually call the cops because they see this blue Caprice so much on their street. They're like, this is weird that there's this random old car we've never seen before that's around all of this time now. And do they know that she's vulnerable to stalking by her ex-husband and are they aware? Okay, they're just like, oh, this car, this person doesn't live here and they're here a lot. And this is a residential neighborhood.

Mike: And there's a period where Mildred is actually going out of her house and she sees this blue car, like in the driveway, sort of blocking the sidewalk. And she's like, well, that's weird. And she looks inside and there's a super young kid at the wheel. And then in the passenger seat is a guy reading a newspaper and she can't really see his face. But she doesn't call the cops. She doesn't do anything about it. She's just like, huh, that's weird. But it's clear from all evidence that they were casing Mildred for quite a long time.

Sarah:  It's interesting. Like to be surveilling someone and stalking someone for that long and like, almost like that's as much of the point as killing them. That like, I don't know. It seems like stocking and surveilling gives people a sense of power over the person that they're surveilling. Like maybe that was part of it too. It's all very weird. 

Mike: Yeah. And so on September 14th, this is four days after they registered the car. This is from the sniper book, “On September 14th, across the Potomac River in the Hillandale section of Silver Spring, Maryland, Ernie Zelcovich  and his employer Rupinder or Benny Oberoi were closing Zelcovich’s Hillandale beer and wine store for the evening. It was around 10 o'clock on a Saturday night. They were outside and Zelcovich was showing Oberoi how to lock up. Suddenly there was a boom. Oberoi thought it was a firecracker, Zelcovich thought that it was a backfire. In a second, Oberi was on the ground, pain filling the left side of his body, a tiny hole in his lower back. Zelcovich looked at the wound and said, you've been shot. In the parking lot of a nearby Safeway, an employee noticed an old dark car that might've been a Chevy Caprice pull out of the parking space and drive away. He told the police about it, but the feeling was that it was probably just a customer.” So this establishes a pattern of these random attacks happening, a witness saying I sure did see a blue Caprice and the cops saying, eh, doesn't seem relevant.

Sarah: And then is it a thing of like, are the hitting areas with different police jurisdictions? 

Mike: Yeah, I think at this point they're shooting people with a 22 and like people get shot with 22s. Like 22s are pretty common. Especially if it's outside of a liquor store at closing time, there's no reason to think like this could be a serial killer.

Sarah: Right. I mean, you automatically associate liquor stores with robberies, right? Like what word goes after a liquor store? Robbery. 

Mike: Yeah. And so one night later on September 15th in Brandywine, Maryland, which is sort of the next suburb over from Clinton, Maryland, it's about three miles away from Mildred's house. A guy named Mohammad Rasheed, who also works at a liquor store, is locking up for the night. And he turns around and he sees this teenager walking toward him, sort of Terminator style. And Lee just lifts up the gun and shoots him in the stomach and steals his wallet and runs away. 

And I mean, one of the things I think I just want to highlight here, is that if you look at the names of the people that are being shot, these are not white people. Like one of the huge incongruities between John's bullshit ideology and the actual acts that he commits is that including the DC sniper attacks and these attacks, it's like a really diverse cross section of Americans. This is not like getting revenge on white people. This is whoever's fucking convenient. 

So after that they work their way south. There are two Ethiopian immigrants in Atlanta who are both working. I was trying to reconcile all of these different accounts of this, you know, because you know, five different books have been written about this and I've got them all pasted into the same document. And these two Ethiopian immigrants are working at a store called Sammy's Package store. And then in other accounts it says they're working at a liquor store and, cause I'm like, I don't drink. I know nothing about liquor words. I was telling my boyfriend, like, this is bullshit, like in these accounts, just because they're Ethiopian immigrants, they're working at a liquor store, how dare they? And then my boyfriend, who's from Atlanta, is like a package store is a liquor store, Mike. No one is being shitty here. 

Sarah: And in Michigan, it's a party store.

Mike:  I'm learning so much from doing this show.

Sarah: You are, you're learning about this great country and all the weird stuff that we named things. Also in New England, it's a package store, which is very interesting. Yeah. I mean, at least in Massachusetts. Massachusetts and Georgia don't share a lot of nomenclature, but it's interesting that that's one of them. Yeah. It's a beautiful country, Mike.

Mike: And so there's one woman working at this liquor store whose name is Mimi Tedessie, and a friend of hers who doesn't work at the store, but is just coming by to help out, whose name is Million Woldemariam. And what they both notice is there's a car idling in the parking lot and they're like, huh, that's weird. And so Million says, I'm going to go outside and check on what it is, like this shouldn't stop us from closing up. And Mimi's like, this feels really weird to me. Like maybe you shouldn't go outside. And this is from the Sniper book, “But Million went back outside anyhow, to stand guard. He had been gone a few seconds when Mimi heard gunshots. She looked out the door and saw him collapsed in the rain. She saw nothing else. Million died 11 hours later at the Atlanta Medical Center. He had been shot twice in the upper back, just below the neck, and once in the back of the head. His wallet was missing. It looked as though someone had sneaked up on him, just as with Larussa and Rashid. And just as in their shootings, the bullet pieces picked from his wounds were small and probably from a 22 pistol.”

Sarah:  Hm. This is a weird M.O. also, because if they want to make it look like there's a serial killer, the thing to do would be to not take people's wallets and make it look like, you know, a theft motivated crime or a mugging gone wrong or something like that.

Mike: But I don't think this is the real plan, they're mostly flailing around and just trying to get money to keep themselves going. This isn't really part of much of a master plan at this point.

Sarah:  Right. And also like if the plan is to get Lee to kill a bunch of people so he gets used to it, I imagine that that’s part of it too. 

Mike: Yeah. And so the next day, or it's actually technically the same day because the previous shooting was after midnight, but the same day in Montgomery, Alabama in another liquor store, there's a woman named Claudine Parker and a woman named Kelly Adams, are working there and they're both walking out to their cars after their shift, and they hear two gunshots. Claudine was struck in the back by a bullet that severed, her spinal cord paralyzing her instantly and wreaking fatal internal injuries. Kelly, too, was rushed to Jackson Hospital where she underwent surgery and recovered. Montgomery police officers who were close enough to hear the shots arrived in seconds and saw a man with a handgun standing over the woman, going through their purses. They chased him, but the gunman vanished.” And so I found a really interesting interview with Kelly Adams, the woman who was shot and lived. This is just fascinating to me. I think we do this thing, especially with crimes like this, where we forget the people who are injured. Right. We always talk about the body count. Kelly got shot in the face. And so I've seen photos of her, and I looked into a bunch of interviews that she did, and you can see sort of over the years, she's gotten more and more surgeries to fix it, but like she has a giant scar basically on her jawbone. 

And this is totally fascinating. It's kind of a long excerpt, but I think it's worth going into in detail, “Adams told the Montgomery advertiser that she went through 30 surgeries in five years. She was diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder and hospitalized for psychological problems. Her marriage ended in divorce and her ex-husband got custody of her daughter. She says she still has night terrors about once a week, about a gunman chasing her and she struggles with anxiety. I almost never go out in public, Adam said. If I have to go to the grocery store, there's so much anxiety for me to get in and get out. I'm on medications and they keep me relaxed a little bit, but I'm still hypervigilant. Adams was invited to witness Mohammed's execution by lethal injection on November 10th, 2009. From the time I was shot, I wanted to be there, but I talked to friends who said it might not be best for my mental state. She said the same month, she went to work on a traveling carnival to try to get away from what happened. I figured it would be full of people who had no direction. And I had no direction, she told the advertiser. After 15 months, she found that wasn't the answer, she said. She's with a man she loves and sees her daughter about once a month. Right now it's as happy as I think I could be. I would be happier if my daughter could live with me, she said.”

Sarah:  Can we have an episode of this imaginary show about Kelly? Like just with the carnies, like just trying to heal. But also, it's like, there's an uncountable number of victims of any violent crime because there's the person who gets shot, there's the friends and family of that person, there's the community of that person. Like it just, it radiates out and these uncountable directions.

Mike: Right. So the other really important thing about this shooting in Montgomery, Alabama is that cops find a gun collector magazine, like one of these, I don't know if it's Guns and Ammo, but it's one of these magazines like Guns and Ammo. That apparently the killer had in his back pocket and fell out when he ran away, and they find a partial fingerprint on this magazine.

Sarah: Why do people insist on committing murders with things like loosely in their pockets the whole time? I just, it's not that I want people to be better at committing crimes, but it's just surprising. 

Mike: So on September 23rd, this is a week later, there's a woman named Hong Ballenger, who's the manager of a beauty shop in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. And so as she's getting into her car at night outside of the shop, she gets shot from a high powered rifle from long range. And so she is shot and killed. One of her fellow employees spots a “large, dark car, driven by a black man”, pull out of a vacant field around 75 yards away and then stop a block to the east. There it picked up another black man who was holding Ballenger’s purse. The car sped away. Police called out the bloodhounds, but they found nothing. Doctors removed pieces of the bullet from Ballenger’s body, they appeared to be from a .223 rifle round.”

Sarah:  Is this what they're going to continue to use? Or will they use something else later on? 

Mike: But this is the one, this is like the rifle they use for all the DC sniper shootings.

Sarah:  Okay. So this is on Friday the 13th, when Jason puts on a hockey mask and he's like, yeah, this is a good look for me. That bag over my head is not conveying what I wanted it to.

Mike: Three days later, a guy named Wright Williams is shot at his grocery store in Baton Rouge, and their last shooting in Baton Rouge is the last time they rob anybody. So from here on out, it's just shooting for shooting sake, they have enough money saved up, basically.

Sarah: I mean, if you shot in the neighborhood of 10 people, like I can see getting to the point where like you're acclimated to it, to some extent. Yeah. I wonder if that was part of the plan too, or it became part of the plan and if Lee's carrying out all or, or at least some of these, it's like, let's make sure my subordinate knows how to do what I'm going to tell him to do.

Mike: Right. Right. Yeah. And so far, I mean, according to witnesses, it looks like it's Lee doing all of these. So in this final period, the, you know, they, they hang out in Baton Rouge for a couple of days. There are other accounts of this that this actually takes place during their earlier trip to Louisiana. But at some point during their time in Louisiana, Lee learns about the plan. They're staying with a cousin of John, and John sort of takes him aside. 

And this is from an account written by a psychologist that spent hundreds of hours interviewing Lee in prison, “The plan, as Malvo recalled it, was to commit 25 murders per week for four weeks.  That would constitute phase one. The second phase would begin with the murder of a police officer. Then at the funeral, while hundreds of law enforcement officials attended, there would be a mass killing using homemade bombs”.

Sarah:  This is like in Columbine when the initial plan was that they were going to blow up the entire school and then shoot all survivors as they ran out. Because like the only thing that can make what actually happened seem like a relief in comparison.

Mike: I mean, John tells Lee all of this and he immediately decides to kill himself.

Sarah:  And presumably he understands that his role in this is like, I'm going to be killing the 25 people a week. I'm going to be doing all of this. 

Mike: Yeah. Yeah, this is from a sort of quasi suicide note that he writes. It's technically a note to Latoria, who is one of the cousins that he's gotten along with and he feels close to. And so this letter is later published in the Washington post. It says, “Why am I here? There seems for me no purpose. Everyone who has met me hates my guts, rambling. They consider my gibberish fake. I tried to be a friend, a brother, a lover, a man, and yet I've always failed. I've tried to treat women the way they should be treated, like the Queens they are. I play, joke, be stern, be appreciative, but receive the opposite in return. I only met one person who understands and appreciates me. I have a father who I know is going to have to kill me for a righteous society to prevail.”

Sarah:  Oh my God.

Mike: So on some level he knows that he's being used, and either he's going to end up confessing to these crimes, or John is going to ask him to kill himself, or John is going to kill him. He sees very clearly that this is not going to end well. And so he locks himself in the bathroom with one of these, you know, half dozen guns that they're traveling with. And according to one account, he puts the gun to his head, but he can't pull the trigger. And according to another account, he does a Russian roulette thing, where he puts one bullet in, spins the chamber and pulls the trigger, tries again, pulls the trigger, tries again, pulls the trigger. And after three times he gives up. Of those, I mean, these are both stories, various stories he's told over the years, but he's kind of, he's in full oblivion mode. 

So as he's sitting in there, this is from his biography, ”Lee, are you in there? I heard a voice. Yeah, I mumbled. It's Ed, my newly found cousin. Are you all right? I scrambled for a suitable lie. I... I need to take a leak. That's why I left early. Okay, he responded. I heard his footsteps retreating. I looked, there was blood on my t-shirt. Where did it come from? I checked my face in the mirror. Shit, my nostril.” 

And so, you know, from here on out is where we get to the sort of real DC sniper shootings. And Lee is just in total dissociative fugue. He's miserable, but he doesn't really know how to get any of this to stop. He doesn't know how to escape. He doesn't know who he is anymore because he's been, you know, he's killed, I think it's three or four people at this point ,have actually ended up dying and he's shot 10 or 11.

Sarah: And also probably he's not able to keep track of local news to find out how many people have survived and how you know.

Mike: So he's sort of become this killing machine. And the plan that they're sort of embarking on is this completely absurd plan that, even for what he's already done, is a huge escalation.

Sarah: I mean, I'm curious about his mindset at this point because it seems like, you know, if his gut says like, I want this to stop, I don't want to do this anymore. Therefore I have to kill myself and that this didn't stop because he wasn't able to pull the trigger. Yeah. I mean, that suggests that he doesn't feel capable of ending it by any other means, which like, there's a lot of reasons for that. Like if he goes to the police and like, he's so implicated in it all, then there's that as a deterrent. I've never been in this position. I don't know what it's like to be standing there looking in the mirror and being like, well, I've already shot 10 people. Like, does it matter if I just keep going? Like it does. But like in that mindset, are you able to conceive of yourself as having volition, of having agency over anything. Like if his first thought is like, I don't want to do this anymore. And the way to stop it is by killing myself. I mean, if that's your first thought then, like, are there any other ways out that you can conceive of in that state?

Mike: So, I mean, the first couple lines of that excerpt are important to me because you can hear him echoing what Una has told him his whole life. Everybody hates you. You try to be a man, you try to be a son. You failed at everything. 

Sarah: The only person who wants him wants him as long as you're killing people for him. 

Mike: There really is an echo here of the abuse that he's gotten from his mother, his whole life, and feeling rejected by his father. Like he's always felt really worthless and that's really the soil that has allowed John to take him to this place.

Sarah:  And not having other family members who could intervene and not having other stability. Yeah, it, it takes a village to raise a child and it turns out it can take only one very enthusiastic adult to help them down the path to serial murder.

Mike: Yeah. So how do you think we did, did we, did we engage in any true crime tropes?

Sarah:  Oh, I don't know. Like I, everything's a trope at this point. Right. I think that the aspects of true crime as a genre that are holding it back from doing what it's capable of is, you know, allowing itself to be messy and allowing itself to be complicated and allowing itself to leave questions unanswered and like bomb out the people who consume it. So I think we did a great job with that. I think everyone is pretty sad now. 

Mike: Well, I'm glad I have you here to tell me if I'm doing anything gross. 

Sarah: Sure. I mean, I will, but I think that we're talking about something that did take or destroy the lives of more people than we can count. And we should just feel weird about it. You know, like we've thought about it, and we've decided to turn the key and where we think that there's good stuff to be had and things to be learned from us undertaking this endeavor, but like, we don't have to feel great about it. That's fine. I don’t think we should feel great. 

Mike: Tagline. 

Sarah: Yeah. The show that promises to make you feel a little, like there's a little film on you. You're implicated. Congratulations. Yeah.

Mike: The most important thing is no matter what kinds of stories true crime media tells, they should always leave Tracy Chapman out of it.

Sarah:  Yes. Tracy deserves to be a part of lesbian road trip stories. That’s the America I want.