On a sticky August night last year, a sleep-deprived John Allen Muhammad seemed weighed down by regrets.
As he and his cousin Edward Holiday rode through Baton Rouge toward the neighborhood where they had grown up, he lowered his head and let the worries tumble out.
"Man, I wish I had stayed with my first wife," Muhammad told Holiday. "I'm so disappointed in myself. Things just didn't work out. I'm ashamed of myself. . . . I wouldn't be in the situation I'm in now."
Muhammad seemed ready to expand on his troubles when Holiday turned on the radio.
"I had never seen him pity himself like that," Holiday said. "I was scared he would tell me what was wrong. I didn't want to know."
Barely a month later, prosecutors allege, Muhammad captained a killing team that terrorized the Washington region with calculated shootings that left 10 people dead and three others wounded over the course of three weeks.
As Muhammad prepared to go on trial this week in Virginia Beach in the shooting death of one of them, Dean H. Meyers, scores of his friends, family and business associates looked back on his life and described a man who was unraveling as the shootings began.
Muhammad, 42, the accused mastermind of the attacks, had botched every aspect of his life, they said -- able in the end to squeeze all his possessions into a couple of duffle bags.
In the two dozen years before his arrest, his troubles mounted like some kind of prolonged torture. He failed at every major role he undertook -- soldier, husband, father, businessman. Even his mistresses eventually rejected him.
His military comrades witnessed flashes of his intense anger. But with others, he stifled his frustrations and cloaked his shortcomings with elaborate deceptions, propping up his personal life with lies. He portrayed himself as a devoted family man yet abducted his children and convinced them it was "not safe" to call their mother. He was a mechanic pretending he owned health spas and lavish homes in the Caribbean.
Sometimes he insisted he was working undercover for the government. A keen observer, he pounced on others' weaknesses, boasting about having people under this thumb. In him, people saw what he wanted them to see. He seemed to have total control. Then he lost custody of his children. It was a defeat he could not bear.
The arc of Muhammad's life that has emerged from the interviews followed a predictable pattern: promising beginnings, rising doubts, then failure.
In the end, even his lies had lost their power. As he traveled from coast to coast, his life was crumbling at every stop. The once confident and cocky Muhammad became a homeless drifter, droning on and on about guns. By the time the shootings started, he had nothing to lose, his friends said.
"He wanted to be something," said Felix Strozier, Muhammad's partner in a failed karate business in Tacoma, Wash. "He spent all that time in the military and came out to be a car mechanic. He felt he could have been doing something better. I think he was tired of being a loser. I think he just wanted a way out."
Early Privations
John Williams, as he was known as a boy, grew up outside Baton Rouge in a poor, black section of Scotlandville known as The Field. In his neighborhood, such life-altering changes as steady employment, crime-free streets and integration arrived slowly and only after the community had paid a heavy price.
His mother died when he was 3, and Muhammad and his four siblings were reared by their grandfather Guy Holiday, whose modest home on Avenue A sometimes housed 10 children. His father died when he was 10.
During his boyhood, Muhammad usually watched trouble from the sidelines. He was the big brother for a passel of cousins, egging them on in fights, covering their backs when they vandalized bicycles.
In high school, he was a loner, a tennis player in a school that worshiped the football team. After graduating in 1978, he joined the Louisiana National Guard. Even then, he showed signs of being unable to hold it together -- he was court-martialed after he struck a sergeant.
But seven years later, that did not stop him from enlisting in the Army, where he ended up in the combat engineers as a mechanic and driver. He told people that he wanted to build a career in the military, that the Army was a way out of the impoverished, crime-ridden neighborhood where he grew up.
At first, he seemed to have it all together. His appearance made a strong first impression.
"When I first laid eyes on John Williams, I said, 'Thank God, I finally got me a decent NCO,' " said Jack Reckler, first sergeant with the 84th Engineers Company in Germany, where Muhammad landed in advance of the 1991 Persian Gulf War. "He looked crisp, pressed, spit shaven, high and tight."
Muhammad landed in a unit with simmering racial tensions. Some black soldiers grumbled about a good-old-boy network that passed them over. Some whites accused the black soldiers of playing the race card.
Muhammad was one of those who complained most loudly and frequently, his platoon leaders said. He became known as an instigator who strutted around carrying a copy of "The Autobiography of Malcolm X." In the mess hall, he huddled with young black soldiers.
"He was the ringleader, really," said Larry Kinde, then a captain in the unit who tried to engage Muhammad in discussions of race and Islam.
Eddie Wadlington, then a sergeant major at regimental headquarters, periodically checked into Muhammad's complaints.
"He complained about the command and the unit," Wadlington said. "He felt some of the folks were prejudiced. Everything with Williams revolved around African Americans. His logic was: The black soldier was not being treated fairly."
But Wadlington, who is black, never found anyone to support Muhammad's accusations. Many of the complaints, he said, grew out of a poor understanding of the promotion process.
Although a sergeant, Muhammad never advanced beyond the grade of E-5, low for a soldier of his tenure. He also had problems with his performance.
Though he looked buff, on physical tests his sit-ups, push-ups and running time were average. He had poor math skills and could not do the basic calculations required in demolition work. He never came up for promotion, Wadlington said.
Whether it was because he complained or because he wanted to keep those who disagreed with him on edge, Muhammad's name became synonymous with trouble.
Sometimes, it was over petty acts. Kip Berentson, his platoon sergeant, said Muhammad routinely snubbed the unit's executive officer by declining to salute, and he once refused to wear his military ribbons with his dress greens.
After the company went to Saudi Arabia, and a week before it pushed into Iraq for the ground phase of the Gulf War, soldiers in a 20-man tent leapt off their cots when someone threw a thermite grenade that exploded. Bullets from ammunition pouches were zinging around the tent. The grenade, which burns at 4,000 degrees and can melt steel, started a fire that was lapping at cots and rucksacks, consuming boots and canteens. Muhammad stood over the fire throwing sand on it. Other soldiers stomped the fire out.
The Criminal Investigations Division was called. Rick Martin, then a captain who was the unit's executive officer, recalled that the grenade pin was traced to Muhammad, and the grenade had been lobbed across the tent from the direction of his cot.
"The problem was, we couldn't prove it," said Col. Steve Robinette, the unit commander.
Nevertheless, Muhammad was taken away in handcuffs and was not with his company in Iraq.
"After the grenade, we had to guard him," Reckler said. "We did not want his platoon people shooting him in the middle of the night."
Parallel Worlds
When Muhammad returned from Saudi Arabia in 1992, he was angry and so withdrawn that his second wife, Mildred Muhammad, said he spent evenings sitting on the couch in silence. Eventually, he told her that he wanted out of the military. His dream ended when he left the service two years later.
From 1990 to 1993, Mildred and John Muhammad had three children. He told friends -- sometimes strangers, too -- that he lived for those kids. When they were born, he had fallen asleep rocking them in his arms. As they grew, he had studied their faces as they slept, trying to picture their futures. John Jr. wanted to be a pilot. Salena adored dancing. And Taalibah would be his little track star.
Muhammad, too, had ambitions. He opened an automobile repair business in Tacoma. His wife managed the paperwork, and he repaired cars at customers' homes. He showed up with uniforms so clean, hands so free of grease that he looked like a soldier reporting for inspection.
Within two years, according to Mildred Muhammad, the business brought in $100,000. But Muhammad wanted more. With a partner, he opened a karate school.
In his private life, Muhammad created parallel worlds with two women -- his girlfriend and his wife. He treated one like a queen and drove the other to consider suicide.
His girlfriend, a petite, blue-eyed Tacoma nurse, met Muhammad when he repaired her car. She spoke on condition of anonymity because she wanted to avoid media attention. Muhammad told her he was divorced, and she assumed she "was his one and only."
"He was tall and slender and muscular, and he was pleasing to the eye," said the nurse, a single mother. "I don't think there was a woman who would deny that. He has been compared to Denzel," a reference to actor Denzel Washington.
They exercised together and turned dining out into culinary adventures. He told her that he wanted to open a health club, where he could teach people proper exercise and cooking techniques.
Muhammad called the nurse's home his haven, and at times, she wondered why he needed one. In their seven-year relationship, which ended last year, she never visited him at his home. And she is still haunted by odd comments Muhammad made about race and murder.
Once, as they watched a movie about a serial killer, Muhammad said, "You'll find that serial killers are almost all white people." On another occasion, after they discussed serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer, he said, "A brother is not going to cut up people or dismember them."
But she said that she never checked up on him and that he showed her respect. With her, Muhammad could invent the life he wanted. He revised his childhood, spinning stories about living in a big Baton Rouge home, riding to church in a limousine and learning to cook in a fancy family-owned restaurant.
Around her, he sometimes acted vulnerable.
Early in their relationship, a tearful Muhammad told the nurse that his sister Odessa Newell was a pilot and had been in a plane crash. He said she seriously injured her back and died in a hospital. Muhammad even said his wife had been jealous of his close relationship with Odessa.
"He told me how he heard her [Mildred Muhammad] laughing on the phone about Odessa's passing, and it broke his heart," the nurse said.
But all of it was a lie. His sister was alive, and Muhammad visited her last year.
Across town, Mildred Muhammad, a soft-spoken, graceful woman, still saw evidence of the anger Muhammad displayed when he returned from the military. She had once admired him for being a man of his word; now, she was convinced he was cheating on her. He disappeared on weekdays and in the middle of the night.
By 1999, her 11-year marriage seemed little more than a convenience, a way for Muhammad to remain close to the children. Mildred Muhammad said she became a victim of her husband's mind games. He taunted her, calling her a bad mother, a bad Muslim and a bad business manager. When she complained, he threatened divorce.
For a time, she contemplated suicide. Then, she broke his hold. She demanded the divorce. "It shook him, because he was using it as a threat to control me," Mildred Muhammad said.
Unable to persuade his wife to stay, Muhammad warned her that he would not allow her to raise the children and threatened to kill her, she said.
Then, he plotted his escape.
He closed the auto repair business, emptied the family's bank account and left his wife a used Jaguar but no rent money. He took the children on an outing and did not bring them back. Instead, he gave them aliases and secretly took them on a plane ride.
"He was good at psychological warfare," Mildred Muhammad said.
She accused Muhammad of abducting the children. She did not see them for 18 months. During that time, she said, she talked to Muhammad only once, by telephone. He had called her.
"Where are the children?" Mildred Muhammad asked.
"You don't need to know that," Muhammad replied.
"Why don't you let them call me," she pleaded.
"We don't always get what we want," he said.
A Young Protege
Muhammad and the children landed on the Caribbean island of Antigua in March 2000 and found a hideout in Eupersia Douglas's cramped rental house, at times home to 11 adults and children.
During the 14 months that he lived on the island, his search for a new life took on a frantic pace. He moved about like a scavenger with a deadline, quickly latching onto anybody and any scheme that came his way. He found Jamaicans interested in moving to the United States and sold them forged identification documents and plane tickets, according to Antiguan authorities, who concluded that Muhammad's forgery scheme made him at least $60,000.
Muhammad met Lee Boyd Malvo, then 16, when he supplied Malvo's mother with forged documents that took her to Florida. Muhammad left his three children with Douglas for days and weeks at a time but still found time for Malvo, a precocious youth yearning for a father figure.
Malvo began mimicking Muhammad's American accent, pretending he had been born in the United States. He told the Douglas family that he was going to become a soldier, just like John.
"He said he read books about Islam when he was small and wanted to get into Islam because it was the best religion," Douglas said. "He said he didn't have anyone to guide him into it until he met John."
In time, Malvo called Muhammad dad.
Muhammad often flew back to Tacoma, where he pressed his card-playing buddies to help him find Mildred Muhammad and dropped hints of his involvement in secret activities.
He boasted about working for the government, telling wild secret-agent stories so far-fetched that his friends dismissed them or changed the subject.
By early 2001, Robert Holmes, a friend for 17 years, was concerned. "He should have thought that some of the things he was saying could get him arrested, if anybody talked about it," Holmes said.
Lavada Colon, another Muhammad girlfriend in Tacoma, once saw him pull out driver's licenses from four states -- each with a different name.
Colon, then 34 and a self-described party girl, had been dating Muhammad since the winter of 2000. Sassy and street-savvy, Colon said she figured Muhammad was lying about most things. When she met him, he wore fetching double-breasted suits and drove a gold Lexus.
One day, he pulled out a wad of several thousand dollars that he claimed was counterfeit and asked if she knew someone who worked in a bank. He told Colon that he wanted to deposit $10,000 in counterfeit bills into an account and then withdraw $10,000. He said he had done it before.
Colon said she flatly refused to listen to any more of the scheme.
There was other odd behavior. At a homeless shelter in Bellingham, Wash., Muhammad pulled a string of pearls out of a duffle bag and told a staff member that they were not only real, but worth $45,000.
Holmes wondered whether his friend had had a nervous breakdown. He also feared there might be another explanation.
"It was like he tried to do things right, and when that didn't work out, he figured he could do things illegally," Holmes said.
An Excruciating Loss
By August 2001, Muhammad and his children had moved from Antigua into Bellingham's Lighthouse Mission, a homeless shelter. Muhammad had enrolled the children in school and meticulously sought services for them -- free clothes, public assistance, housing. No detail escaped him. After shelter meals, he would reach into his briefcase and hand each child a toothbrush.
But now that the children were in the United States, Mildred Muhammad fought to get them back, prompting the social services agency to take them away.
It jarred Muhammad. The moment he received the first message about the kids, he rushed to the Whatcom County Sheriff's Office in Bellingham. He stood in the lobby demanding answers. Why had the department taken his three children? How was he supposed to get them back?
Detective Tom McCarthy firmly explained that the children would remain with child protective services until Muhammad and his ex-wife could resolve a custody issue.
Tacoma judges eventually granted custody to Mildred Muhammad and allowed her to bring them to Maryland without telling Muhammad when or where.
The nurse Muhammad dated had never seen him so distraught.
"The man could not sleep. He could not eat," she said. "I would wake up, and he was sitting on the couch crying. I would wake up, and he would be looking out the window crying. He kept saying, 'I miss my children, I need my children. I want to be with my children.' "
That October, six weeks after Mildred Muhammad took the children away, Muhammad arrived at the Bellingham shelter with a different focus: Lee Boyd Malvo, the teenager who had run away from his mother in Florida to join him.
They called themselves father and son, regularly slipping into the empty chapel to talk for hours. In conversations, Malvo sometimes looked to Muhammad before answering. He rarely talked to anyone in Muhammad's absence. Muhammad even assigned him reading.
'My Mission Is Complete'
Muhammad sometimes had a rifle when he visited Holmes in Tacoma. One day, Muhammad mentioned his ex-wife.
"I found Mildred." Holmes recalled him saying. "She's in the D.C. area. It is just a matter of pinpointing her." Holmes, aware of his friend's bitterness about losing his children, considered the rifle and questioned Muhammad.
"You're not going to hurt Mildred?" Holmes said.
"I'm not going to do anything to her," Muhammad replied.
On Jan. 24, 2002, Muhammad wrote his goals on a Lighthouse Mission form: Short-term goal, reuniting with the children. Long-term goal, raising them.
Two days later, Muhammad received a telephone call from someone whose voice Jerry Page, a mission employee, did not recognize.
"My mission is complete. I can leave now," Muhammad told Page after he hung up.
The call remains a mystery. Two things are clear: Muhammad packed his bags that night and never returned, and in the coming months, Muhammad grew increasingly frayed as he approached friends and acquaintances about guns and silencers.
"Can I get one of your guns?" Muhammad asked Colon after learning that she had spent time at a Tacoma shooting range. She quickly told him no.
About the same time, Muhammad showed up at Holmes's home with Malvo and introduced him as "Sniper." And according to authorities, Muhammad and Malvo stayed with a friend, who lent them a .45-caliber pistol.
Authorities later identified that gun as the weapon someone used Feb. 16, 2002, to kill Keenya Cook, the niece of a woman who had sided with Mildred Muhammad during the child custody battle.
That June, Muhammad visited Holmes and tested a homemade silencer. Holmes said he fired into a tree stump in the back yard and commented, "Can you imagine the damage you could do if you could shoot with a silencer?"
By the time Muhammad reached Baton Rouge in August, his life had become as distorted as images in a carnival house mirror. He had a divorce he never wanted and lost the children he had vowed to keep. The nurse had ended their relationship.
The man who "wanted to be something" in life had become a homeless drifter.
With Malvo at his side, Muhammad stumbled around his boyhood neighborhood, trying to sound important. He showed one cousin a rifle, droning on about being on a secret mission with Malvo as a highly trained member of his team. Muhammad, wearing a dingy white T-shirt and black exercise pants, had stopped changing clothes, would not shower, did not comb his hair. Yet he stood in front of a map at his uncle's house and claimed to own homes in Jamaica, Tacoma and the Bahamas.
In his cousin Holiday's truck that warm August night, Muhammad engaged in a rare attempt to tell the whole truth. But Holiday, who had idolized his cousin since childhood, did not want to listen. "I was thinking the next time I see him, he'll have it together," Holiday said.
The time for regrets had passed. Mildred Muhammad and prosecutors believe that Muhammad decided to come to the Washington area to find his ex-wife and implement a deadly plan of revenge.
And Muhammad, a man never known for spontaneity, methodically set out collecting what he needed as if checking off items on a grocery list. A car was crucial.
When he walked into Sure Shot Auto Sales in Trenton, N.J., the first week in September, he said he was looking for a car for his son. Owner Christopher Okupski thought the old, beat-up Caprice that Muhammad singled out was an odd choice for a teenager. "It was a bomb," he said of the 1990 vehicle that had been sitting on the lot for months. But Muhammad paid him $250 for it.
Okupski handed the keys to Muhammad, who opened the door, checked out the interior and walked around to the rear. He opened the trunk and lay down on his back inside. At 6 feet 1, Muhammad's legs dangled over the trunk while he checked out its dimensions.
