John Allen Muhammad: Who Really Made the D.C. Sniper?

John Allen Muhammad

UPDATE: 11/10/09

When I think of John Allen Muhammad, who died today at 9:11 p.m. at Greensville Correctional Center on Tuesday for one of the most eerie killing sprees in the nation's history, the word pathology comes to mind.

Not so much in the sense that he was convicted of killing 10 people in the 2002 Beltway Sniper attacks, which terrorized the Washington area for about a month. And not so much in the sense that he brought in to his employ a young, impressionable teenaged Lee Boyd Malvo as a sort of twisted Robin to his vicious Batman. And not even in that a nation still reeling from the 9/11 attacks on the World Trade Center and more locally, the Pentagon, was placed in more fear from a seemingly uncatchable gunman.

The real pathology is that our nation, our culture, seems to constantly produce people like this and makes me wonder which is crazier: the pathological gunman or the society that produces him.

Muhammad was once a Nation of Islam convert, that fell in to more extremist ideology sometime after joining. It is unclear, though, whether he garnered a misinterpreted jihadist idea that infects so many fundamentalist terrorists all over the world while he was in the Nation or after he left. All that really matters is that he gained that ideology, and that was a recipe for disaster.

He was married, first to ex-wife Carol, with whom he had a son, but they divorced due to an affair he was having; and later had three children by his second wife, Mildred. But that relationship turned into an abusive one that drove her to flee for her safety. After their divorce he took their children to Antigua, but authorities returned them to their mother. She now says she doesn't feel anything for him, but worries about what her children are going through.

By the time he reached Antigua, about 10 years ago, he was looking for an accomplice, perhaps a young person who he could play a father's role for, and he found that in Malvo. But still they were no danger to the world around them. Yet.

We may never know the specifics of Muhammad and Malvo's conversations or if anyone was instructing them. We do know that Muhammad learned how to shoot a weapon in the Louisiana National Guard and qualified as an expert rifle shooter before he came home from the First Gulf War. Maybe he passed that knowledge down to his young adoptive ward.

What is clear is that at some point after Sept. 11, 2001, these two decided to go in to the domestic terror business at a time when the nation was most fragile. The plot was almost perfect, as Malvo, who is now serving a life sentence, later explained that the plan was to kill six white people a day for 30 days.

Muhammad is clearly one of those nuts with a gun I always complain about--that the gun lobby consistently defends until they kill someone...and then are nowhere to be found, but this isn't about the NRA. This is about a society that can produce a John Allen Muhammad or a Timothy McVeigh or a Dennis Rader (the BTK killer) or a Jefferey Dahmer or a Ted Bundy.

If America is this great place, then what is it about us that keeps on producing the Eric Harrises and Dyland Kleibolds of the world? Perhaps under our guise of a more perfect union, and a model society, there is something that is functionally dysfunctional about us.

The same attitude that lets people stand by while as many as 20 people rape a teenaged girl, but obsesses over the non-news of a boy whose parents fake the loss of their son in a makeshift weather balloon, is really why we come up with people like this...like the song says, "Everybody Wants to Be Somebody."

John Allen Muhammad did not make the choice between lethal injection or electrocution, so the state chose lethal injection for him. He failed to win a stay of execution from the Supreme Court on Monday, although his defense attorneys did make an appeal for clemency, which would lessen his punishment. Va. Governor Tim Kaine released a statement on Tuesday, though, saying he would not intervene with the execution proceedings.

Muhammad is said to have died without uttering a word--no final statements for himself or his family. I don't think Muhammad took his last breath thinking about the victims of his spot-on shooting skills or the families he affected. He, like so many other serial killers, probably expired thinking that somehow he did the right thing.

But so many others at that moment will be thinking of James Martin, 55; James Buchanan, 39; Premkumar Walekar, 54; Sarah Ramos, 34; Lori Ann Lewis-Rivera, 25; Pascal Charlot 72; Dean Harold Meyers, 53; Kenneth Bridges, 53; Linda Franklin, 47; and Conrad Johnson 35.