Pair Had Little in Life Besides Each Other

Even here, the two men stuck out: The sometime-hobo with easy money and sharp dress who dragged an Army duffel around with him. He had a companion, a Jamaican teen who kept his mouth shut and his eyes low. They spoke little and failed much, this pair of drifters who slept under the watchful gaze of an oil painting of Jesus in a shelter near the port.

Their story began here, on these hills of cedar and fir that slope off toward Canada, in this town of hippies and fishermen and vagrants. A local bartender calls Bellingham “a mecca for people who want to be as far away as possible from where they’re from.” The pair’s journey ended when they were arrested, accused of pulling off a string of sniper shootings that laced the nation’s capital with fear throughout October.

They’d been on the run as long as they’d known each other, and over time they became inseparable: a man who’d lost his children; a boy who’d been abandoned by his parents. They just barely got by on the fringes of America, so alone they took to calling themselves father and son. It was last summer when they set off from this sleepy town on a slow cross-country descent into disaster, much of which is still a mystery. By the time they left, they didn’t have much to lose.

John Allen Muhammad was a former soldier who’d gone to war but earned no glory, who couldn’t keep a job or a wife, who flailed through the court system in a desperate -- and unsuccessful -- struggle to reclaim custody of his three children. He ended up sleeping with them on the floor of an old stone shelter, and eventually lost them for good when his terrified ex-wife spirited them across the country to Maryland.

“Here’s a guy, he’s living in homeless shelters, his marriage has disintegrated, his kids have vanished and the courts won’t help him,” said John Mills, a custody lawyer who took Muhammad’s case without charge. “All of those factors combine to disintegrate people.”

Lee Boyd Malvo was born of a teenage mother in Jamaica’s slums and was remembered by teachers as a sweet, disheveled child who seemed to have been abandoned by his parents. He sneaked through this country’s back door in the belly of a cargo ship when he was 14 years old, landed in Florida, then drifted to Washington, a clever, shy teen who wanted badly to go to school. He was turned away from public schools because he had no transcript. He was locked up by immigration authorities. Finally, he was turned loose and ordered to appear at a hearing this autumn. His days in America were likely to run out soon. He had one friend in the world -- Muhammad.

*

Kingston, Jamaica, was a savage maze of murder in 1985. Drug gangs ruled the streets in neighborhoods so heavily armed they were officially dubbed “garrisons.” It was in February that year that 19-year-old Una James checked into the Jubilee Hospital to give birth to a baby boy named Lee Boyd Malvo.

The father was builder Leslie Samuel Malvo, 39 -- more than twice her age. He went on to marry twice and father several children. A man of close-cropped salt-and-pepper hair and mustache, he blames James for their son’s misfortune.

“She’s a very bad woman, a very bad woman,” he said, switching between English and Jamaican patois. “If she never move out and leave, this wouldn’t happen.”

The young Malvo drifted north and found a home with an aunt in the green hills of northern Jamaica. Slowly, the boy became more disheveled, and said he couldn’t do homework because his aunt made him work.

Winsome Maxwell stepped in and took Malvo into her family. “I don’t think he was getting any attention at all,” the teacher said. “I took him because he had nowhere else to go. He was getting very quiet, his hair and clothes unkempt.”

It is unclear where the paths of Malvo and Muhammad first crossed, but it was probably in Antigua, where Muhammad and his three children fled in 2000 to escape the cacophony of the bitter custody dispute. A Persian Gulf War veteran, Muhammad was discharged from the Army and separated from his second wife. He had a handful of failed businesses under his belt. He lied about his mother to get an Antiguan passport.

Malvo apparently passed through Antigua too. His mother was working there -- she’d come to Jamaica once to visit her boy “and cried and cried and cried,” Maxwell recalled. Staff at St. John’s Seventh-day Adventist School told the Antigua Sun newspaper that the young Jamaican studied there for a time. A security guard remembered seeing Muhammad and Malvo at the hotel spa of the Jolly Beach Hotel.

Muhammad later told his lawyer he couldn’t make a go of it in Antigua. The phone lines and computers were behind the times, he complained, so his vague notion of opening another business fell apart. Dispirited, he made his way back to Tacoma, Wash., holed up with some friends from the mosque and eventually wound up in Bellingham. There, he and his three children shared a hallway in the Lighthouse Mission with Felix, the shelter cat.

“There wasn’t any compelling reason,” said Mills, the lawyer. “He was just freeloading in Tacoma, so he moved up there.”

In the fall of 2001, Muhammad lost custody of his children, and their mother took them. Muhammad was heartbroken. He spent months asking friends and acquaintances where they’d gone. He couldn’t find them.

It was during those days that Malvo appeared at his side. The two became fixtures at the mission. They were arrested one day, charged with shoplifting groceries.

Malvo enrolled in Bellingham High School. He was an eager student -- he had an uncanny knowledge of military history, told everybody his father fought in the Gulf War and helped one of his classmates study for a citizenship class. None of the kids knew he slept in the shelter.

*

It was dinnertime in the shelter cafeteria, and Malvo was basking in a rare moment of easy chatter. He cracked a joke, the staff broke up and laughter rang from the round table. Then Muhammad slid into a chair, put down his plate and shot an icy look across the table.

At that moment, manager Ray Reublin glanced up.

“Muhammad gave him that look like your mother gives you when you say something wrong, and he just clammed up like that,” Reublin said, snapping his fingers. “And I just thought, ‘Wow, that’s domination right there. That’s serious control.’ ”

Muhammad was doing maintenance work for minimum wage at an apartment complex north of town when he befriended a local woman. She drove him around a bit, and he tinkered with her car. But the friendship soon soured.

His story didn’t make any sense, she told her family. He was a hard-luck drifter with money, a man who could pick up and fly to the Caribbean whenever he got the inclination. She stopped seeing him and told her family she’d called authorities to tell them she suspected he was involved in some sort of illegal activity.

She wasn’t the only one asking questions. These were the days after Sept. 11, 2001, and people were generally jumpy. The director of the shelter has said that he, too, phoned authorities to tell them he suspected Muhammad might have links to some illicit group.

“He was rather secretive about his past and present,” administrative assistant James Milton said. “He was closed-mouthed. He didn’t have a visible source of income, but he was able to travel at a moment’s notice.”

Some nights, Muhammad kept his mouth shut in the coffee shop, hunched over the chessboard. Other times he held forth, bragged to the artists and students that he was a music producer with big connections in New York City. He flashed a wallet stuffed with cash. He criticized the government.

Everywhere he went, Muhammad carried an Army duffel bag. He even dragged it into the bathroom with him. And every time he wandered up the road for coffee, Malvo tagged along.

One day, real estate agent Greg Grant hired a man from the downtown shelter to do landscaping work. A well-spoken stranger climbed into the passenger seat and introduced himself as a teacher from Jamaica. He’d been through a messy divorce and fallen on tough times, he said. He had to hang around Bellingham to settle custody woes. One morning he brought along a boy of about 11 and introduced the child as his son.

“He seemed really glad the kid was here, and I’d have said this was a very loving relationship,” Grant said. “This guy was a marvelous worker, well read, a great conversationalist, well groomed, well educated.”

But Grant, too, was troubled. One day, Muhammad hinted that he needed a ride to the airport in Seattle. He was selling a house in the Caribbean, Muhammad explained, and had to fly there to sign some documents.

“I said, ‘Look, I’m a real estate agent, and that’s what Fed Ex is for. You don’t have to go there,’ ” Grant said. “He insisted he did. I thought it was weird.”

*

It was a hot summer day when Muhammad came home to Baton Rouge, La. He came tapping on Yvonne Bradford’s door, Malvo at his side. He put his arms around her. “How are you, Auntie?” he said.

She hadn’t set eyes on him in years. She’d watched him grow up, though, after his mother died of cancer and her children were sent up from New Orleans. His name was John Williams, and he was one of 11 children raised in a white frame bungalow with yellow trim. They slept two or three to a bed, anywhere they could find space for a weary body. They ate the butter beans, okra and tomatoes they grew out back.

When he resurfaced in Louisiana late last summer, Muhammad looked skinny but healthy. He told everybody Malvo was his son and explained that he’d wanted to show the boy where he came from.

Malvo was polite, and spoke in a soft accent of “where I come from,” a home he didn’t name where children were paddled and wore uniforms. He sat down with a teenage “cousin” and marveled over the music videos on television. “He said he didn’t get to watch them where he was from,” cousin Sharon Holiday said. “He was interested in basketball and politics.”

The pair toted crackers and smoked salmon in a rucksack, and generally turned down the food the family tried to press upon them. They said they were vegetarians, and they led the Baptist family to understand that the dietary restrictions were part of Muhammad’s conversion to Islam. Malvo told one relative he couldn’t eat anything with feet.

One afternoon, Malvo slipped outside to shoot baskets with Travis Bradford, a cousin of Muhammad’s. He told the other boy the cross-country tour was a graduation present.

“I told him, ‘You’re one of the most mannerable kids I’ve seen in a long time,’ ” Yvonne Bradford said. “He said, ‘Yes, ma’am.’ ”

The last night in Baton Rouge, Malvo and Muhammad ate a supper of fish sticks and fruit juice at Holiday’s house. Then they went into the front room and fell asleep on the couch. When morning broke, Holiday drove them to the bus station downtown. They climbed down to the street. They said their goodbyes. And then they were gone.

They never said where they were headed.

Days later, on Sept. 11, Muhammad turned up in New Jersey. He’d bought a blue Chevrolet Caprice in Trenton, and had it registered in Camden.

*

It was a sultry Saturday night on the outskirts of Montgomery, Ala., and Kitty Simpson was sipping a glass of wine in her friend’s shop when the noise startled her to her feet. Bang! It sounded like somebody had crashed a car into one of the brick pillars out front. Simpson dashed to the door, then stopped short. Two women were lying on the blacktop parking lot. A strange man stood over their bodies.

Simpson wasn’t the only one who heard the gunshots outside ABC Beverages. A pair of police officers sped to the parking lot to find the liquor store employees felled by gunfire. A man stooped over them, rummaging through their purses. He glanced up, saw the police and took off running.

The younger officer dashed after him. They pounded over a ditch and down Zelda Road, dodged through the traffic, sprinted past a string of fast-food restaurants. The officer reached out, almost grabbed the suspect but missed. A blue sedan veered between the two men. The stranger put his hands on the car. Later, when investigators went hunting for the vehicle in hopes of finding a fingerprint, it was gone.

Somewhere near Wendy’s, at the edge of Interstate 85, the stranger melted into the maze of traffic, freeway and lawns. It was Sept. 21, less than two weeks before the first shot was fired by the Beltway sniper.

Later, the police would recognize the man they had chased through Montgomery as Muhammad.

The women had been shot at close range as they left the liquor store. One of them died; the other took a bullet in the base of the skull but lived.

“Be safe,” reads a sign at the liquor store. “Don’t drink and drive. God bless America.”

From a magazine dropped on the liquor store parking lot, investigators lifted a single fingerprint. It belonged to Malvo.

*

It was still dark on the morning of Oct. 24 when authorities stole into the Maryland rest stop and swarmed the Caprice. Muhammad and Malvo were sleeping in the car. Bleary and matted, they were arrested.

It had been 22 days of fear in the schoolyards and streets of Washington and the surrounding areas. A metropolitan region of 5 million people had come, almost overnight, to regard the act of walking outside as a perilous endeavor. Everybody had been waiting, angrily, desperately, for the sniper to be caught.

It was dark outside by the time Yvonne Bradford’s son rapped on her bedroom door in Baton Rouge.

“They know who the sniper is,” she remembers him saying. “It’s our John.”

“What John?” she asked.

“Our John,” he said.

She turned on the television. The picture settled into focus. Muhammad’s face glowed on the screen. She would sit there all night, staring at the television until the sun rose.

“I was appalled. I said, ‘It can’t be John,’ ” Bradford said. “A boy who grew up like John to do something like this. This is like a nightmare.”

*

Times staff writers Ken Ellingwood, Eric Slater, Peter Y. Hong and Mark Fineman and researchers Lianne Hart and Lynn Marshall contributed to this report.