D.C. Sniper Muhammad Executed in 2009; Malvo Sentenced to Life

On November 10, 2009, John Allen Muhammad was executed by lethal injection in Virginia. Nearly seven years earlier, he and Lee Boyd Malvo had terrorized the Washington, D.C. region for three weeks, leaving ten people dead and three wounded. The execution ended one chapter of a case that still haunts the communities where ordinary errands turned fatal.

The attacks began on October 2, 2002, when a man was shot and killed in a parking lot in Wheaton, Maryland. At first, police thought it was a robbery. But over the following weeks, more shootings occurred across Maryland, Virginia, and Washington, D.C. The victims were people going about daily life—mowing a lawn, pumping gas, loading groceries, walking to school. The randomness and the long-range gunfire made the pattern clear: this was a spree, not a series of isolated crimes.

The investigation initially struggled. The shooter used a high-powered rifle from a distance, leaving little forensic evidence at the scenes. A tarot card found at one crime scene was widely reported to have been left by the shooters. Ballistics later linked the shootings to a Bushmaster .223-caliber rifle. A witness reported seeing a white van at one scene, but the actual vehicle turned out to be a blue Chevrolet Caprice. That mistaken lead caused police to stop and search hundreds of similar vans, delaying the identification of the real car.

A breakthrough came when police received a phone call from a person claiming to be the shooter. Then, a fingerprint found on a magazine at a crime scene proved crucial. On October 24, 2002, a truck driver tipped police to a car parked at a rest stop off Interstate 70 near Myersville, Maryland. Inside the car, officers found the rifle, a scope, and other equipment. Muhammad and Malvo were arrested.