The new VICE Documentary I, Sniper, is narrated by one of the D.C snipers, Lee Boyd Malvo.
In 2002 when Lee Boyd Malvo was 17-years-old, he and 41-year-old John Allen Muhammad terrorized the nation and Washington D.C. area by randomly shooting people on a 3-week killing spree. They killed 10 people in the D.C. area, along with 7 more people in Alabama, Arizona, California, Florida, Georgia, Louisiana, Maryland, Texas, Virginia, and Washington.
The duo shot and killed people as they were going about their everyday lives. The sniper attacks included a child shot at a middle school, a person mowing their lawn, an FBI agent leaving a home improvement store, people shopping at malls and grocery stores, and people pumping gas.
Relatives of the victims are interviewed as well as Paul LaRuffa, who was the first shooting victim and survived being shot 5 times by Malvo.
“As soon as I got in my car, the window next to me just exploded with the first shot, so the glass showered over me,” said LaRuffa. “There were four more shots, a total of five shots, and they all hit me.”
The D.C. snipers were caught on Oct. 24 after killing 10 people. Muhammad received a death sentence and was executed in 2009. Malvo is currently serving multiple life sentences in Virginia at the Red Onion State Prison.
Muhammad was a Gulf War veteran who had recently lost custody of his children to his ex-wife and hated the military and the country. Malvo was a Jamaican national who had been abused by his mother and abandoned by his father.
After meeting Muhammad on the Caribbean island of Antigua, the two developed a relationship that was deemed strange by those around the duo. When Muhammad brought Malvo to the States, he told people that Malvo was his son.
Malvo claimed that Muhammad molested him and molded him into a killer. He claims that the two had “exceptionally exciting” sex after shooting the victims.
“Muhammad was master puppeteer. I was an instrument,” he said. “The plan was psychological devastation,” added Malvo of Muhammad’s motive for the killings.
Filmmaker Mary-Jane Mitchell told 7News that Malvo spoke with her over a two-year period in 15-minute increments to tell his story due to prison rules.
“[Malvo] is looking back on it now as an adult, trying to understand what he was told as a teenager and try to unpick truth from fiction,” Mitchell said. “So I think a lot of it is still confusing to him, but he certainly is able to kind of explain as best as he understood it what the motivations were for John Muhammad.”
I, Sniper airs on Mondays on Vice.
