Each night the man and the boy sat hunched over the same table, playing chess in Stuart's Coffee House in the seaside town of Bellingham, Wash. sometimes they would play until midnight. The man, John Allen Muhammad, 41, did what little talking had to be done. The boy, 17-year-old Lee Malvo, listened. Whenever cafe employees intruded with small talk, he would glance to Muhammad, as if for permission, before answering. They drank only plain coffee, as the college students and patrons around them indulged in smoothies and tarts and poetry readings. And each game ended the same way: with Mhammad winning.
Everywhere they went last summer, people assumed the pair were father and son. It was a myth that Muhammad would actively perpetuate over the next several months as the two made their way across the country. He would also tell people he was a music producer or a fitness-club owner. In reality, Muhammad had had trouble finding work of late. And he had lost custody of four of his children in a series of noxious legal battles. But together with his imagination, his Army-style duffel bag and his well-mannered "son," Muhammad had apparently cobbled together a world for himself--one that, for a time at least, obeyed his will. "I always thought of them in an endearing way," Peter David, one of the coffee-shop workers would later say. "How often do you see a teenage son with his father? There was such respect."
It was deep within that concocted universe that Muhammad and Malvo slept in the early hours of Oct. 24, tucked into their blue Chevrolet Caprice with the sniper perch built into the trunk. They must have slept soundly, since they didn't hear federal agents and police creeping up on all sides, armed with submachine guns. Appropriately, they were seized in the same benign setting in which they had allegedly stalked their victims--a nondescript parking lot off a highway outside Washington. It is hard to imagine what castles of delusion came crashing down when the tactical team smashed in the windows of the Caprice and dragged the two out into the nighttime chill. The air was filled with screams, but witnesses could not discern if they emanated from the suspects or their captors.
Within 48 hours, the man and the boy would stand accused of one of the most terrifying murder rampages in the country's history, one that had led the White House to contemplate opening up military bases so children could go trick-or-treating in safety and that had induced otherwise rational residents to scurry in a zigzag formation across bland suburban parking lots. In three weeks, the case elicited 138,000 tip-line calls, seven times the number the Unabomber case yielded over 18 years. The 14 shots took 10 lives, though the tally may still not be complete. The FBI is investigating whether unsolved murders and petty thefts in other locales, from the West Coast to the South and up the Eastern Seaboard, may also be linked to the duo.