(sirens wailing)
(dramatic music)
Everybody in the entire Washington DC metropolitan area
was scared for their lives.
People are dying almost on a daily basis.
They left the tarot card,
they said in bold letters, "Call me God."
We didn't know anything about the criminal.
He was never seen, he was a ghost.
This person who was calm, cool, and collected.
And was able to plan and execute these shootings flawlessly.
It was the most terrifying event since 9/11.
I'm Tim Clemente, I'm a retired FBI special agent.
I was a counter terrorism agent,
and I also worked international narcotics.
I'm Jim Clemente, I'm a retired
supervisory special agent for the FBI,
and I was a profiler.
Not only were we both FBI agents, we're brothers.
Tim is a tactical sniper, counter terrorism agent.
He was a former cop.
He's very conservative, he's very tactical
and action oriented, and he's a thrill-seeker.
He's an adrenaline junky.
Jim, not so much.
He's more of a thinker, a pensive person.
He likes to get inside the heads of offenders
so he can learn from them, so he can try
and prevent others from following that same path,
and hopefully prevent those offenders from offending again.
So we're both at the Washington field office
for a period of time.
Then I moved up to the behavioral analysis unit,
which is down in Quantico, Virginia.
So we were both still in the area
when the DC Sniper case came out.
(serious music)
This is where the serial sniper
took his deadly shot on Monday night.
The beginning of a three week killing spree.
Police tracked down thousands of leads
in the hunt for the sniper.
I'm gonna wait inside.
You couldn't pump gas, you couldn't sit on a bus stop,
you couldn't clean your car at a car wash,
you couldn't go to school.
You couldn't go to the grocery store
without fearing that you were gonna get shot.
As he left the supermarket,
it looks like a random senseless murder.
People were ducking down, crawling into stores,
parking right next to the front door,
trying to hide their kids,
because everybody was a target.
Hurry up, get my gas, and get in my car,
and go where I'm going.
We tried to get a spot where maybe
he or she can't see us.
I look around before I get out of my car now.
Even though the FBI wasn't jumping in with both feet,
Tim and I did because it was in our own neighborhood.
And his wife was at the gas pump just minutes before
one of the guys was murdered there.
As an investigator, as an FBI agent,
I've worked in some of the most hostile places in the world.
What was different about this, in the DC Sniper case,
is that my family was in the hostile place,
and I couldn't keep them safe.
We can report a quiet night.
The Montgomery County Police have released
a composite drawing of--
This is an act of terror.
This is a terrorist group or an individual committing
terror acts, killing people randomly to terrify everyone.
And it was 100% effective.
This person, whoever was killing these people,
was methodical and never made a mistake
across six homicides in 27 hours.
That was a red flag to us.
It really stood out.
Something was different here,
we didn't know what it was yet.
They left the tarot card.
They said in bold letters, "Call me God."
And then on the back of it it said,
Code: Call me God.
When we got the tarot card it told us
a tremendous amount of information.
One, that they wanted to communicate.
Two, that they had a god complex.
And three, there was a duality there.
Because it said this is for you Mr. Police,
like they were looking up to the police.
At the same time they used the word,
do not release to the press.
And the press is a word that old-timers like me use.
Not younger people that would be looking up to the police.
So for the first time we had an indication
that there was two things going on.
Maybe somebody who was really good
at planning and executing shootings,
but who decompensated when writing.
Or, for the first time in US history,
we have a sniper team.
At one crime scene, on October 19th,
the Ponderosa steak house in Ashland, Virginia.
Hundreds of investigators descend on the scene
trying to find where the shot came from.
And we got on the scene and we said, okay,
we're gonna bring the scent that was collected
in Bowie, Maryland, on the tarot card and the shell casing.
Two separate scent pads, that are vacuumed off those,
collect human scent onto a gauze pad.
We're gonna present that to a bloodhound, Lucy,
and her handler, Billy Keff,
from the Long Beach Police Department.
We present the dog with one scent pad,
Lucy doesn't find a match for that scent here on this scene.
Okay.
We present the other scent pad,
Lucy makes a beeline across the parking lot.
And when we got to the woodline,
shined a flashlight down into the leaves,
and you can see the perfect layout
of where the sniper had lain.
And there's a pristine shell casing.
Then I shine my flashlight in further into the woods
and there's the note tacked to the tree,
about 15 feet away from this.
They had explained how in the past week or so
they had tried to communicate.
They had reached out to one police officer,
and then they called the 911 hotline,
and nobody believed them.
And they were upset about that.
(dramatic music)
Turned out there was a priest in Ashland, Virginia,
that had been contacted by one of the snipers.
And in it he talked about another shooting in Montgomery.
The immediate assumption first
was Montgomery County, Maryland.
It turns out there had been
a shooting in Montgomery, Alabama.
There was a piece of physical evidence
found at the crime scene that was a magazine,
that a thumbprint was found on.
We get the fingerprint processed,
comes back to an immigrant, a young immigrant boy
by the name of Lee Boyd Malvo,
that had come from the Caribbean into the United States.
Now we're looking at him.
And now we find out he was in the Pacific Northwest,
he had been befriended by a guy named John Muhammad.
So now we have Lee Boyd Malvo's fingerprint,
we have his identification, we identified John Muhammad.
We identify that they're in a blue Caprice
that they had purchased on September 11th of that year.
They bought the vehicle at this dealership,
Sure Shot, in Trenton, New Jersey.
This salesman remembers Muhammad.
I kinda got a weird gut feeling
that I should just, you know,
this guy doesn't want me to ask him any questions,
so it's none of my business.
He's just here to buy the car.
I'm just gonna sell him the car.
(serious music)
That description goes out, pictures of both men.
And an individual that was at a truck stop in Virginia
sees the blue Caprice, checks the license plate,
it matches, he sees the two guys sleeping inside
the car, so he notifies 911 right away.
(sirens wailing)
The police respond, they talk to a local trucker
who was at the truck stop, they convince him,
he agrees to park his truck at the exit to the truck stop
so that these guys wake up before
the responding tactical units can get there.
Flash bang grenades through the windows,
smashing the windows, yanking them out
in their slumber, handcuffing them, it's over in seconds.
And two of the most heinous killers in American history
were on their way to justice at that point.
Muhammad was training Malvo to become a killer.
And that's not something that's easily done.
To pull the trigger and take a life
is something that takes a lot of will.
And so we were trying to understand
how that happened and why it happened.
And that later was divulged by Malvo.
10 years later, he said that Muhammad
had taken him out of a men's shelter
and told him he was gonna be his father figure.
And instead, he started grooming him,
and then he started sexually molesting him.
The fact that Malvo was sexually victimized
does not excuse in any way the fact that
he participated in murdering and injuring other people.
(chiming music)
We wanna let the victims tell their stories,
the family members of victims tell their stories,
and the investigators tell their stories.
Because all of that is informing the public.
We're teamed up with Audible on this Audible original,
"Call Me God", because we wanna give
the victims and their families an opportunity
to tell the world in their own words
what they went through and how it affected them.
Because we wanna educate the general public
to help keep them safe.