Last week Malvo appeared in shackles, looking bewildered, scared and very young, before a Fairfax County, Va., judge. The judge ruled that Malvo, who will turn 18 next month, should be tried for murder not as a juvenile, but as an adult. The ruling means that Malvo could face the death penalty for his role in the sniper shootings of 21 people (14 deaths) in six states and the District of Columbia. According to law- enforcement leaks to newspaper reporters, Malvo has confessed that on several occasions he was the triggerman. The evidence presented last week in court, including threatening phone calls and fingerprints on the sniper’s rifle, strongly suggests that Malvo was at the very least an active accomplice of the older Muhammad, 42. The more perplexing question is how a boy allegedly became a coldblooded assassin before he even became a man.
The simplest answer may come from Malvo’s aunt Marie Lawrence, who described her family’s curse. “We don’t know what is father love,” she told NEWSWEEK. Of course, millions of lost boys and girls do not know their fathers, and relatively few wind up as teenage murderers. Yet throw in a mother who repeatedly left the child on his own, large doses of gangsta culture and the manipulations of the Big Brother from hell, and it’s possible to see how a once polite, studious child became a monster’s apprentice. If one could write a life plan for becoming alienated and violent, the course of Malvo’s upbringing, reconstructed by a team of NEWSWEEK reporters, would serve as a blueprint.
Born poor on the island of Jamaica, Lee Malvo was abandoned by his father as a young boy, just as his mother had been abandoned by her father. Una James, in her own way, tried to care for her son, Lee. But hustling to make some money and get ahead in the world, she kept on moving and leaving her young boy behind. Worse, she actively tried to keep him from finding a surrogate parent. “She never left him with anyone for long because he bonded easily,” says Malvo’s aunt Semone Powell. “Una was afraid that he would no longer see her as his mother if he got too close to anyone.” So while Una went to Antigua to look for work, little Lee was shuffled between boardinghouses and relatives, never settling anywhere for long.
Una arrived in Antigua in 1999 with a hundred dollars. “She was prepared to stoop to conquer,” says A. William Archibald, a local lawyer who briefly hired Una to clean up after some construction workers fixing his roof. “Her big obsession was getting something back to Jamaica for the boy. She was in it for Una and the little boy. That’s all she had.” Selling Guinness beer and barbecue chicken from a roadside stand, she sought boyfriends who had cash. “If you had something, she liked you a little better,” says Archibald. At one point, when she was dating her landlord’s boyfriend, she slept with a knife under her pillow. Archibald recalls telling her, “You’re either going to end up very rich–or very dead.”
And yet she was able to scrounge enough money to take Lee to live with her in a run-down shack and to send him to a Seventh-day Adventist church school for a $230 fee. Each day she meticulously ironed Lee’s crisp white short-sleeved shirt, khaki pants and blue plaid tie. Lee seemed reasonably content. A bright student, he was “always polite, always smiling,” according to a local librarian. His mother could be strict. “She’d bust his a– if she spoke to him and he didn’t answer properly,” says one of Una’s ex-boyfriends, who lived with the two for a time. But “you could see that he loved her,” says the boyfriend, who wishes to remain anonymous. “They were like brother and sister, very close, like peas in a pod. Nothing came between them.”
That is, until Una moved out again, this time to chase the American Dream to Florida. She told her son that she would send him money and bring him to America whenever she could. But the money never seemed to come, and Malvo, 14, was left alone in their old shack in Antigua. He did have a small TV, on which he watched movies. One of his favorites, according to a friend, Junior Phillip, was “Belly,” starring DMX, a hard-core rapper who is covered with tattoos, keeps a pit bull and begins his songs with lyrics like “The born loser not because I choose to be/But because of all the bad s–t happens to me.” Lee was captivated by the gangsta world of pain and abuse, but he also liked mournful love songs. When he listened to “Un-Break My Heart” by Toni Braxton (“Un-break my heart/Say you’ll love me again/Undo this hurt you caused/When you walked out the door”), Lee started “singing and jumping all over the place,” says Phillip. “He was quiet, then burst.”
Lee began to act out in other ways. When the landlord cut off his electricity because the rent was unpaid, Lee began smashing basketball-size holes in the walls. On the playground, he was awkward and rough, and, on at least one occasion, vicious. According to Keithlyn Nedd, a housemate, Lee struck a child with a four-foot galvanized pipe over some petty argument. “He knocked him out cold,” says Nedd.
While she was gone, Una left Lee to his own devices, and John Muhammad stepped into the void. A down-on-his-luck gulf-war vet from Washington state, the moody, cunning Muhammad had snatched his three children from his estranged wife in 2000 and moved to Antigua, where he apparently tried to make money by scamming phony documents. It seems that Una paid Muhammad for some fake travel papers to the United States. Muhammad agreed to handle Una’s checks to Lee, but he may have withheld them or somehow cashed them for himself. (Una declined to be interviewed for this story.)
Lee began coming by Muhammad’s house–every day–to ask if Muhammad had heard from his mother. A martinet, Muhammad appeared to see in Lee a creature he could mold and control. Lee was more than willing. Lee called him “Dad” and shed his Jamaican accent to sound more like Muhammad did. He dropped the Bible and began reading the Qu’ran. Muhammad introduced Lee to other reading material: gun magazines. “He started to get fascinated with Muhammad’s books,” says Nedd. “He was like a little scholar.” Soon, Lee and Muhammad seemed inseparable, praying, reading, jogging and taking target practice together. When Muhammad wasn’t looking, Lee beat up his real children.
Lee had not forgotten his actual parent. When Muhammad and his children returned to the United States from Antigua, Lee came, too, and reunited with his mother in Florida. He found her living with a friend. Lee could still play the good son, but his anger was rising. Lee briefly enrolled in Cypress Lake High School, where he took AP classes, earned A’s and B’s, and impressed teachers with his “artistic” handwriting (which police say would later be used to craft death threats and extortion demands during the Washington sniper siege). He was quiet and polite with teachers, but on the street, he posed as a thug, trash-talking and showing off a photo of himself holding a gold and silver gun. He announced that he wanted to kill someone. “He was hanging out with guys that don’t care about life anymore,” says Robert Young, 18. “He talked about killing people… but I didn’t think he’d do it for real.”
And then he was gone again, off to Washington state to find the only man who seemed to want his loyalty and affection, John Muhammad. They lived in a homeless shelter, shot guns and worked out every day, preparing to make Muhammad’s increasingly lurid fantasies into bloody reality. Muhammad took over Lee’s life in every way, feeding him with as many as 70 pills a day, food supplements of various kinds, including something called Great Plains Bentonite Detox, which uses an active ingredient of cat litter to “detoxify” one’s bowels. Lee grew increasingly submissive, as well as handy with a rifle. When, after a few months, Una showed up in Bellingham to reclaim her son, Lee slipped away to rejoin Muhammad. He had finally found a father.
