• Your one stop for college news and resources!
Campus News

D.C. sniper: "I was a monster"

Lee Boyd Malvo remembers his killings 10 years later

D.C. sniper Lee Boyd Malvo sits rotting away in a prison cell for crimes he committed ten years ago. One half of the D.C. sniper pair that terrorized the Washington area, Malvo was only 17-years-old when he and accomplice John Allen Muhammad plotted 13 attacks on unsuspecting civilians. Now, ten years later, Malvo, 27, feels remorse for his actions, calling himself a “monster.”

The D.C. snipers’ plan in 2002 was simple: raise hell. Malvo and Mohammad admitted their “real plan” to prosecutors after they were apprehended at a truck stop in Myersville, Md. What the snipers revealed can only be described as utterly horrifying.

The D.C. snipers broke up their plan into three phases. Phase one was to kill six white people a day for 30 days, but due to variables like traffic, lack of clear shot and getaway route, Malvo and Mohammad’s operation did not go as planned.

Phase two was to occur in Baltimore, where the snipers would initiate their plan by killing a pregnant woman by shooting her in the stomach. The next step would include the killing of a Baltimore police officer, and the subsequent detonation of explosives at the officer’s funeral service, to maximize city law enforcement casualties.

The third and final phase would include extorting several million dollars from the United States government, which the D.C. snipers would use to finance a recruitment operation to send out others to do their killing across the country.

Thankfully, Malvo’s and Mohammad’s plans never came to fruition as they had dreamed, though the pair still managed to terrorize the metropolitan area over the course of 21 days in October.

The D.C. snipers targeted 13 people, killing ten of them. They carefully planned each of their slayings, often attacking as snipers do from a distance. A quick pull of a trigger, a faint sound, a bleeding civilian and massive horror and confusion left in their wakes. Victims ranged from adults to even a 13-year-old the snipers wounded in front of a middle school.

Malvo displayed teenage arrogance when he was taken into custody, laughing about the death of a woman and placing his fingers to his head to show where the bullet had killed her. But now after ten years in a Virginia prison, incarcerated life has matured the 27-year-old killer.

“I was a monster,” Malvo said. “If you look up the definition, that’s what a monster is…I stole people’s lives.”

Malvo continues to remain in prison, serving a life sentence without parole. Mohammad, who was 42-years-old when the killings took place, was executed in 2009 by lethal injection at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, Virginia.

Previous ArticleNext Article