Malvo Guilty of Capital Murder

Sniper Trial Jury to Choose Sentence of Life or Death

CHESAPEAKE, Va., Dec. 18 — A jury convicted Lee Boyd Malvo on Thursday for his role in last year’s sniper shootings — finding that he fired the shot that killed FBI analyst Linda Franklin as part of a terror plot — and now will decide whether he deserves to be executed.

Eight women and four men deliberated for nearly 14 hours over two days before reaching a verdict at 4:15 p.m. Malvo, 18, remained seated with his arms folded on the defense table and stared straight ahead without emotion as a clerk announced the decision: guilty of capital murder as an act of terrorism for killing Franklin and demanding $10 million from the government, and guilty of capital murder for killing more than one person in three years.

The jury came to the same verdict as did a Virginia Beach panel last month in the trial of Malvo’s co-conspirator, John Allen Muhammad, 42. That jury sentenced Muhammad to death on both counts, finding that he was the mastermind of the violent rampage that took 10 lives in the Washington area October 2002. Malvo’s jury may now impose a sentence of death or of life in prison.

Lawyers presented two theories of the case to the jury, both revolving around Malvo’s own words. Prosecutors said Malvo’s statements to jail guards and police in the weeks after his arrest were the admissions of a sane, efficient killer. The defense said that the confessions were the words of an insane, brainwashed teenager and that his subsequent claim — that Muhammad did nearly all the shooting — was the true story.

Ultimately, the jury believed the prosecution.

Malvo’s words as they emerged at the trial revealed the relationship between the two snipers and provided a backdrop to the three-week rampage that terrified the Washington region. Malvo said they hoped to use the $10 million payment to begin a utopian society with young boys and girls. His interviews, drawings and letters had stark racial overtones. Muhammad and Malvo are black; the sniper victims were of various races and ethnic backgrounds.

Fairfax County prosecutors will begin presenting witnesses Friday to argue that Malvo’s crimes were so vile or his potential for future violence so high that he must be put to death. The jury also will hear from family members of some of the 10 people shot to death in the region in October 2002, including Franklin’s husband, William “Ted” Franklin.

Ted Franklin watched every day of the nearly six-week trial from the second row of the courtroom gallery, as did Linda Franklin’s two adult children. Neither they nor other victims’ relatives reacted visibly to the verdict. Franklin’s family members declined to comment.

By convicting Malvo of the multiple murder count, the jury also found that he killed Dean H. Meyers in Prince William County on Oct. 9, 2002. Meyers’s brother Bob Meyers said afterward, “We are extremely pleased with the verdict, believe that justice has been served, and we appreciate the opportunity now to move into the sentencing phase.”

Neither the prosecutors nor the defense attorneys commented Thursday. They are under a gag order until the trial is over.

Prince William Commonwealth’s Attorney Paul B. Ebert, who successfully prosecuted Muhammad in Meyers’s death, said he believed the guilty verdicts confirmed the state’s theory about the sniper shootings: that Muhammad and Malvo were equal parts of a machine designed to kill people and terrorize the region.

“Malvo was a member of the killing team,” Ebert said, invoking the term he used frequently to describe the snipers to the jury. Although Ebert and his assistants consistently characterized Malvo as subservient and deferential to Muhammad, Ebert said Malvo’s actions since his arrest show that he was trying to escape responsibility. Although Muhammad barely spoke to investigators and his jailers, Malvo told detailed stories to police and then pulled an about-face with his defense experts.

“He was more manipulative after his arrest,” Ebert said. “He tried to hoodwink the jury.”

In his closing argument Tuesday, defense attorney Michael S. Arif told the jury that Malvo had only recently begun to realize how he was manipulated by Muhammad and that the teenager did not deserve the same penalty. “Adding another life to that pile of death does not solve anything,” Arif said. “It doesn’t bring anyone back. It’s just revenge.”

But Fairfax Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. said in his summation: “It’s hard to envision how human beings could be that foul and that mean to just shoot people on the streets, people with no connection, none whatsoever to the killing. Of course, that’s what they did with Linda Franklin.”

He noted that Malvo specifically took responsibility for the slayings of Franklin and Meyers. In fact, to find Malvo guilty of the capital charge of killing more than one person, jurors had to find that he was the triggerman in Franklin’s death. And, Horan reminded the jury, there was corroborating physical evidence: Malvo’s fingerprints and skin cells were on the Bushmaster rifle used to kill the sniper victims, and defense experts acknowledge that Malvo wrote the notes demanding $10 million in exchange for an end to the killing.

Horan will start the penalty phase Friday with his opening statement, and he has said his case would last slightly more than a day. Ted Franklin’s testimony about the impact of his wife’s death may be augmented by a recording of the 911 call he placed to police Oct. 14, 2002. The wrenching tape of Franklin’s trauma was not allowed as evidence in the guilt phase of the trial but may be ruled admissible in the penalty phase.

Malvo’s attorneys will counter with testimony from the teenager’s family and friends as they try to persuade the jury to spare his life. The lawyers have said their “mitigation” case will take most of a day, with witnesses coming from as far as Jamaica and Washington state.

Fairfax Circuit Court Judge Jane Marum Roush has said the trial will recess after Tuesday for the remainder of Christmas week. If the jurors have not ruled by the end of that day, deliberations on Malvo’s sentence will resume Dec. 29.

Malvo’s attorneys, by employing an insanity defense for the teenager, were able to weave a detailed account of Malvo’s short but tumultuous life — a story that otherwise could have been told only in compressed form in the sentencing phase. Prosecutors objected repeatedly, but the defense largely achieved its goal of explaining Malvo’s role in the sniper shootings with a “Yes, but” theory: Yes, Malvo was present at every shooting, but only because he had been made into a puppet by Muhammad.

Defense attorneys gambled that by revealing virtually every aspect of Malvo’s relationship with Muhammad, they would demonstrate that he could not possibly be responsible for his actions. The gamble is not yet lost as the jury could still sentence Malvo to life in prison.

The defense revealed stacks of new information about Malvo’s life and his relationship with Muhammad. The jury, and the public, learned that Malvo lived in a seemingly contented nuclear family with his mother, Una James, and his father, Leslie Malvo, until he was 5. Then his mother, suspecting his father of infidelity, whisked the boy from his Kingston home into the northern hills of Jamaica and more than a decade of transience.

Malvo moved from one home to another, staying with friends or relatives of his mother’s and attending 10 schools in nine years while his mother worked on other islands. Although James declined to testify, various guardians and teachers said Malvo was an obedient boy and good student. He bonded with numerous parent figures, but his mother would reappear annually to take him somewhere else.

Malvo told numerous mental health experts that during his childhood, he stole from his mother, shoplifted comic books, pilfered and resold compact discs and killed feral cats. He told one examiner that he had a temper that would snap and that he would fight other youngsters. Horan said that was the behavior of an incipient killer.

The defense also put a spin on the Muhammad saga, arguing that the older man’s relationship with the youth was like a polluted river overwhelming a pristine stream. Muhammad spent 15 years in the military, married and divorced twice and converted to Islam. He was portrayed as an embittered man who was accused of attacking his superiors during the Persian Gulf War, who failed at two businesses and who lost custody of his five children with three mothers.

Muhammad and Malvo met on the island of Antigua in October 2000 in an electronics shop, where Muhammad’s children and Malvo went to play video games. Malvo again attached himself to a father figure, his attorneys said, this one described as a “pied piper to children.”

When Muhammad was arrested on charges of running a smuggling scheme in February 2001, Malvo took over the business and supervised Muhammad’s three youngest children. In May 2001, Muhammad took his children and Malvo to the United States. Muhammad lost custody of his children four months later, and his attorneys said he persuaded Malvo to join him in Washington state with the promise he would adopt the teenager, then 16.

Witnesses said Muhammad placed Malvo on a strict regimen of exercise, a vegetarian diet, weapons training and radical readings about Islam and black nationalism.

When Malvo was assigned to be prosecuted first by Fairfax County, he agreed to speak with investigators and provided a detailed, tape-recorded confession, admitting that he had shot Franklin and Meyers as well as others. In his jail cell, he cranked out pages of angry drawings and writings, praising terrorists and expressing regret only that his mission of fomenting revolution had been stopped.

But after seven months in jail, Malvo reportedly changed. He told his attorneys and mental health examiners of Muhammad’s ultimate motive for the shootings: to launch a utopian community in Canada, financed with the $10 million from the sniper attacks, populated by 140 black children.

He also said he had not shot Franklin or Meyers. He said he had shot only bus driver Conrad E. Johnson, the last of the 13 Washington area sniper victims.

But Horan dropped a final trump card this week: a set of letters written after Malvo’s supposed extraction from Muhammad’s spell. Written to another inmate in late summer or early fall, the letters discussed escaping jail, obtaining guns and dreaming of Muhammad. They were very similar to his earlier writings.

Horan said the “new Malvo” was no different from the “old Malvo.”

Staff writer Josh White in Washington contributed to this report.

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