Psychologist Discounts Malvo Insanity Claim

Sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo was volatile and hot-tempered but was not insane during the random shootings that killed 10 people in the Washington, D.C., area last year, a clinical psychologist testified Monday.

Stanton Samenow, testifying during the prosecution’s rebuttal, told jurors that Malvo “was nobody’s fool” and knew “exactly what he was doing” in the three-week spree of deadly attacks. He said his eight interviews with Malvo in jail convinced him that the teenager had no mental disorder that would qualify as insanity.

Samenow’s assessment contradicted the centerpiece of Malvo’s defense. Half a dozen other mental-health experts testified earlier that Malvo, 18, had been brainwashed and indoctrinated by his accomplice, John Allen Muhammad, 42, and was temporarily insane.

Malvo’s attorneys have not denied that he participated in the sniper attacks.

The defense rested its case Monday after calling more than 40 witnesses over 11 days. Closing arguments are scheduled for today.

Malvo has been charged with one of the murders, that of Linda Franklin, 47, an FBI analyst who was shot in a Home Depot parking lot.

As Malvo sat next to his attorneys doodling on a scratch pad, Samenow described the Jamaican-born defendant as a calculating, disciplined youth who, he said, started as a petty criminal and ended up as a serial killer, “zoning out” so he could murder without emotion or remorse.

“Zoning out,” Samenow said Malvo told him, “means cutting out any disagreeable emotions or thoughts in order to do what you have to do. In fact, he said, there was no right or wrong. It didn’t exist. He said, ‘This [the sniper attacks] is just a mission.’ ”

The psychologists who testified for the defense contended Malvo suffered from dissociative disorder, which leaves a patient out of touch with reality. Samenow disagreed. He said Malvo contemplated suicide during the course of a murderous cross-country journey he made with Muhammad and at one point packed his duffle bag, intending to leave Muhammad, because he understood the consequences of his actions.

“I asked him, ‘Why didn’t you go?’ ” Samenow said. “He said, ‘I don’t know. For some reason I talked myself out of it.’ This wasn’t unusual. He’s been doing this all his life. He cases out his environment, and he deals with it.”

During Samenow’s testimony, the prosecution entered into evidence a letter Malvo had written an inmate known as Pacman in the Fairfax County, Va., jail. In it, Malvo advised, “Get them [the guards] to think you’re somebody you’re not. My strategy works because my enemy does not know me.... I play the stupid fool. Everybody underestimates me.”

Malvo confessed to investigators that he was the triggerman in all 10 Washington-area killings in October 2002. He later recanted in interviews with psychologists retained by the defense to assess his mental health.

In the prosecution’s rebuttal Monday, Commonwealth Atty. Robert Horan laid out his strategy to convince jurors Malvo manipulated and lied to the defense’s mental-health experts.

The case is expected to go this week to the jury, which could recommend the death penalty. A different jury found Muhammad guilty of capital murder last month after a separate monthlong trial in nearby Virginia Beach.