Lee Boyd Malvo

Lee Boyd Malvo (born February 18, 1985), also known as John Lee Malvo, is a convicted murderer who, along with John Allen Muhammad, committed murders in connection with the Beltway sniper attacks in the Washington Metropolitan Area over a three-week period in October 2002. Currently, he is serving multiple life sentences at Red Onion State Prison in Virginia, a supermax prison. Muhammad was executed in 2009. Although the two men's actions were classified by the media as psychopathy attributable to serial killer characteristics, researchers have debated whether or not their psychopathy meets this classification or that of spree killing. In 2012, Malvo claimed that he was sexually abused by Muhammad.

The Beltway sniper attacks turned out to be only the latest of a series of shootings across the United States connected to these individuals which began on the West Coast. Muhammad had befriended the juvenile Malvo, and had enlisted him in the attacks. According to Craig Cooley, one of Malvo's defense attorneys, Malvo believed Muhammad when he told him that the $10 million ransom sought from the US government to stop the sniper killings would be used to establish a Utopian society for one hundred and forty homeless black children on a Canadian compound.

Malvo and his mother, Una Sceon James, first met John Allen Muhammad in Antigua and Barbuda around 1999, where Una and Muhammad developed a strong friendship. Later, Una left Antigua for Fort Myers, Florida, using false documents. She left her son with Muhammad, reportedly planning to have him follow her later. Malvo arrived illegally in Miami in 2001 and, in December of that year, he and his mother were apprehended by the Border Patrol in Bellingham, Washington. (His mother was deported back to Jamaica from the U.S. on December 15, 2002 in the aftermath of the D.C. area sniper shootings.) In January 2002, Malvo was released on a $1,500 bond. Malvo caught up with Muhammad soon after. In 2002, Malvo traveled to Bellingham, Washington, where he lived in a homeless shelter with Muhammad and enrolled in Bellingham High School with Muhammad falsely listed as his father, but he did not make any friends, according to his classmates. While in the Tacoma, Washington area, according to his statements to investigators, Malvo shoplifted the Bushmaster XM-15 from Bull's Eye Shooter Supply, and practiced his marksmanship on the Bull's Eye firing range adjacent to the gun shop. Under federal laws, neither was legally allowed to purchase or possess guns, with both classified as prohibited persons under the Gun Control Act of 1968.