Putting Parenting on Trial at a DC Sniper Trial

During the fall of 2002, with the country jittery over threats of terrorist attacks, people in the nation’s capital, surrounding suburbs, and outlying towns were being subjected to actual acts of domestic terror. A sniper was picking off individuals at gas pumps and mall parking lots in a recklessly random fashion that left no one feeling secure. Psychics, amateur sleuths, media and mental-health oracles filled the vacuum of information with a collective portrait of a mastermind criminal, middle-aged and white, a loner with a likely grievance against the government or corporate world, someone very much like Hannibal Lecter, driving a white van. In the end, as an officer quipped, it wasn’t a white guy in a van, but two black guys in a blue Chevy Caprice. By then there had been thirteen shootings and ten deaths. The suspects, John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo, were tried and convicted of capital murder the following year. While Muhammad’s legal strategy of innocence was thumbed-down by the jury, Malvo’s insanity plea was more ingenious. His attorneys had “in effect, put parenting on trial” (Serge F. Kovaleski, “Malvo’s Mother Defends Strict Parenting, Beatings,” Washington Post [December 14, 2003], p. C1).

The trial testimony peeled off layer upon layer of the 18-year-old shootist’s troubled childhood. Though not always corroborated and in plac-

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es disputed, the following narrative emerges. Native to Jamaica, Malvo’s mother Una James took the boy from his father at age five and, as she moved around seeking employment, would leave him with various relatives, friends, and at age nine, even strangers. She beat him repeatedly with belts and broomsticks for minor misbehaviors. At age 12, his mother gave him a beating after learning that he was about to hang himself. Although she has denied this beating, she admits others. “Like my mother did to me, I used to flog him with a belt to discipline him,” adding, “In Jamaica, we beat people who are rude. In America, it’s an abuse” (Kovaleski, “Strict Parenting”, pp. C1, C6). “Harsher forms of discipline” and “more autocratic parenting styles” are the norm among African Caribbean families. (“African American and African Caribbean Fathers,” Jaipaul L. Roopnarine, in Michael E. Lamb, ed., The Role of the Father in Child Development [Hoboken: Wiley, 2004], p. 76.) In the pecking order of abuse, Malvo was humiliated by school bullies and vented his rage against stray cats, which he hunted with a sling-shot. Malvo’s father, a farm laborer who did not take an interest in his son, conforms to the African Caribbean macho model of “early and frequent heterosexual activity with several partners either serially or concurrently,” with the “number of offspring” as “tangible proof of the man’s virility” (Roopnarine, “Caribbean,” p. 75).

Persian Gulf War veteran John Muhammad came into Una James’ life in connection with a false passport scheme to let her emigrate. In 1999, Muhammad was living in Antigua with his three children, and often seeing them together left Malvo feeling jealous. Muhammad, who had “kidnapped” the children, was locked into a bitter custody battle and would soon lose rights to his ex-wife, recently moved to Maryland. An intense bond was formed along these emotional fault-lines by Muhammad and Malvo, who had again been left behind by his mother. Muhammad’s words, “You’re my son,” “instantly warmed” Malvo (Tom Jackman, “Malvo Killed to Please Muhammad, Court Told,” Washington Post [December 10, 2003]:B1,B4). Diane H. Schetsky, a forensic psychiatrist, testified that Malvo “merged” with Muhammad to the extent that “they were one and the same” (Jackman, “Killed”:B4). After a few months Malvo converted to Islam, and Muhammad mentored the 15-year-old youth along military lines: taking him to target practice, giving him laps and pushups for poor performance. Malvo wore a black tee-shirt from a shooting club with the word “SNIPER” across the front (Sari Horwitz and Michael E. Ruane, Sniper [New York: Random House, 2003], p. 52).

Prosecutors countered that not every child who is dealt bad parenting turns into a serial killer and presented intercepted prison writings that portrayed the defendant as crafty and calculating. It turned out that he had a history of petty crimes and scams; currently he was advising another inmate on faking his feelings while planning for escape. He is now seen as sociopathic or as suffering from a dissociative disorder. There is also paranoid grandiosity in his screed to “destroy” America and wistful fantasy in his shared scheme to extract several million dollars from the government to enable him and Muhammad to found a utopian colony in Canada. It was this scheme that apparently fueled the sniper killings. The jury found him not insane by reason of parental abandonment and abuse, but trial experts speculated that this testimony may have helped spare him the death penalty. The pathway from his childhood deficits and trauma to his adolescent crime wave was no doubt long and winding, no doubt leaving him susceptible to the manipulations of Muhammad, who had his own issues over parenting. A psychologist’s report not used in the trial, concluded Muhammad “endured several traumas as a child: [at age three], his mother died of cancer, his father abandoned him, unloving caretakers beat him often” (Josh White, “Early Trauma Altered Sniper, Psychologist Says,” Washington Post [February 10, 2004]:B3). Thus his remarks at sentencing about having had a wonderful childhood are strangely dissociated. To his friends he could be erratic as well as supportive and kind. To his beleaguered defense attorneys, he could be charming and even humorous. Both he and Malvo seemed capable of evoking different personae as circumstances changed.

Equally feasible, they were prone to identity-altering anxieties. Yet at various points along the way, a degree of choice should be granted to both killers; and parenting, if not decisive, factors in to the total equation. For it may be inferred that on deeper levels, the absences and failures of good-enough caregivers leave fissures in the psyche which are filled in with fantasies of rage, revenge, and magical self-regeneration. So well-fitted to Muhammad’s own inner reality, the movie Savior (1998) was viewed often enough to be known by heart. In it, “Dennis Quaid plays an American whose family is killed in a Muslim terrorist bombing in Paris. He avenges them by slaughtering people in a local mosque, and then winds up as a mer-

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cenary and a sniper in Bosnia. But, in the end, he is redeemed by nurturing an infant born to a raped Serbian refugee” (Horwitz, Sniper, p. 46). In this variant on classical American fantasies of rebirth-through-violence, Muhammad’s and Malvo’s needs fuse in the image of self-reparenting. Toward this overarching ideal, all else is subordinated—and permitted.

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