Washington, DC: Sniper’s ex-wife says his real aim was to kill her

By FRANK GREEN
Published: October 29, 2009

In October 2002, the shots came from out of nowhere, as seemingly random as they were cold-blooded, leaving 10 dead, three wounded, and millions of people frightened.
John Allen Muhammad, now at the Greensville Correctional Center awaiting a scheduled Nov. 10 execution, remains an enigma who might take the motives behind the attacks with him to the grave.
In 2003, a jury agreed with prosecutors that the Muhammad-led sniper shootings were terrorist acts that sowed fear from suburban Maryland to the Richmond area in an effort to extort $10 million from the government.
Now, a memoir released this month by Muhammad's ex-wife says his crimes were a smokescreen -- that his real aim was to kill her, make the slaying appear random, and then win back their three children he once had abducted.
Dr. Park Dietz, a forensic psychiatrist and the expert hired by the state to conduct a pretrial psychiatric evaluation of Muhammad, agrees with the motive theory outlined in "Scared Silent" by Mildred Muhammad.
"My theory about Muhammad was that his intent was to kill his wife to gain cus tody of his children, and that the other shootings were designed to provide him cover so that he wouldn't be suspected when she became one of the sniper victims," Dietz said in a recent telephone interview.
Dietz had access to information about the case that never was made public, but he did not testify. Because Muhammad refused to let Dietz interview him, the judge did not permit Muhammad to introduce evidence from psychiatric experts, either.
Papers filed in a federal appeals court this year raise the question of whether Muhammad had any coherent plan. A defense psychiatrist who met Muhammad in 2003 concluded that while he could "show a superficial brightness," she believed he was not competent to stand trial because of his delusional and paranoid statements.
An MRI brain scan and other test results submitted with the same appeal -- which Muhammad lost -- purportedly show he has brain damage and neurological deficits.
Muhammad and his young protégé, Lee Boyd Malvo, are the only people convicted of capital murder under Virginia's anti-terrorism law enacted after the attacks of Sept. 11, 2001. Malvo, just 17 when the shootings took place, was sentenced to four life terms and is being held in Red Onion State Prison in Wise County.
Muhammad was sentenced to die for the Oct. 9, 2002, slaying of Dean Meyers, 53, shot to death at a gas station near Manassas.
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Prince William County Commonwealth's Attorney Paul Ebert, who won the death sentence against Muhammad, said this week that Muhammad "probably had a lot of different motives, but nobody'll ever know except for him."
Ebert said Muhammad well may have planned eventually to kill his ex-wife.
"I think he certainly was capable of killing her and, of course . . . he said he was going to kill her." Ebert said Muhammad might have headed to the Washington, D.C., area from Washington state, where he was living at the time, because she was in Maryland.
Mildred Muhammad moved to Maryland after John Muhammad abducted the couple's children from her home in Tacoma, Wash., in March 2000. He kept them for 17 months and at one point took them to Antigua, where they met Malvo.
In August 2001, Muhammad and the children were found in Washington state. Mildred Muhammad won custody of the children and, with the blessing of the court, she fled back to Clinton, Md., with the children on Sept. 5, 2001.
Still in Washington state, Muhammad was able to find them. He and Malvo traveled across the country, and by September 2002, they were in Clinton, where authorities believe Malvo wounded a restaurateur during a robbery. In October, they launched the sniper attacks in Maryland, Washington and Virginia.
But after the wounding of a Florida motorist in Ashland by Malvo and Muhammad, police recovered a note thumb-tacked to a tree that included a demand for $10 million to stop the shootings.
Ebert's theory is that Muhammad and Malvo began by robbing people -- a restaurant owner in Clinton and a beauty shop manager in Baton Rouge, La., in September 2002. After they saw all the terror they were creating, they decided to try to make money with the extortion scheme.
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Dietz, president of Park Dietz & Associates in California, a professor at the University of California at Los Angeles and a former professor at the University of Virginia School of Law, has worked with the FBI Forensic Science Unit for 30 years.
"A very large focus of my work has been mass murder, serial murder and what is sometimes called 'spree killings,' and, I also happened to be the government's psychiatric expert on the Muhammad case," he said.
Dietz believes Muhammad is a rare type of serial killer.
"Only a few cases are known in which the serial killing was primarily designed as a cover for one targeted homicide in the cluster," he said.
One of them occurred in the Seattle area in 1986, when Stella Nickell killed her husband with cyanide-laced Excedrin capsules to collect $176,000 in life insurance.
In an attempt to make it appear that a serial killer was loose in the community, Nickell tampered with other Excedrin bottles, which she placed in a store. One woman died because of the tampering.
In 1988, Nickell became the first person convicted under federal product-tampering laws enacted after the 1982 Chicago Tylenol murders. She was sentenced to 90 years.
"To this day I believe that Muhammad's crimes were leading up to the murder of his wife to gain custody of his children," Dietz said.
Richmond lawyer Craig S. Cooley, who represented Malvo, also believes Muhammad's real motive was to kill his ex-wife.
"I think that is clearly what was intended, but that was never made known to Lee [Malvo]," said Cooley, who added that Muhammad told Malvo that the killings were part of an implausible plan to extort the $10 million and found a utopian society in Canada.
Muhammad was a mentor and father figure to Malvo, whom he met in Antigua in 2001 when Malvo was 15.
The pair were spotted seven times near the house where Mildred Muhammad lived during the time the sniper shootings were taking place that October, Cooley said.
Cooley said the sniper victims represented almost every demographic group -- except for African-American females. If Mildred Muhammad were killed, John Muhammad believed he would not be a suspect because it would appear she was just another random victim of the sniper, Cooley argues.
"That way, he would have gotten his children back and the children would have never known that he had hurt their mother," Cooley said.
Both Cooley and Ebert said Malvo maintained that Muhammad never told him that Mildred Muhammad was an intended victim.
"I think, frankly, after he killed Mildred he'd kill Lee," Cooley said. "Lee would have been the only person that could have ever spilled the beans to the kids."

Contact Frank Green at (804) 649-6340 or fgreen@timesdispatch.com .