BY SONJA BARISIC, The Associated Press
CHESAPEAKE, Va. (AP) -- Teenage sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo bragged about his marksmanship during a police interview but said he couldn’t have pulled off last fall’s Washington-area shooting spree without help from John Allen Muhammad, who acted as his spotter.
“It’s a team, a team, team, team,” Malvo said in a tape of the interrogation played Friday for jurors in his capital murder trial.
Meanwhile, another jury in Virginia Beach spent nearly four hours deliberating whether Muhammad should be put to death for orchestrating the sniper rampage. They asked what they should do if unable to reach a unanimous decision.
“We have spent six weeks. ... I would simply urge you to continue your deliberations,” Circuit Judge LeRoy F. Millette Jr. told the jury.
If the jury does not unanimously decide on the death penalty, Muhammad will automatically receive life in prison. The jury is to return Monday.
Muhammad was convicted this week of two capital murder charges in the Oct. 9, 2002, death of Dean Harold Meyers, one of 16 people shot -- 13 fatally -- during the sniper spree.
In the tape played for jurors in Chesapeake, Malvo refused to tell police whether most of the shootings were done in or out of Muhammad’s car, which prosecutors say was outfitted as a sniper’s nest.
“That’s for you to figure out,” he said. He later boasted, “I can hit you in the head from the car or I can hit you in the head from outside.”
Malvo, speaking confidently at times and rambling at others, also said he and Muhammad selected targets in places with white vans nearby because they knew police and the public were on the lookout for such a vehicle.
He said he and Muhammad even returned to some of the crime scenes to watch police at work.
“Once you locked onto a vehicle, we made sure that vehicle was there. Made sure we were around them. People are just going to lock onto them,” Malvo, then 17, told a detective on the tape.
The conversation with Fairfax County homicide detective June Boyle marks the longest, most detailed account from Malvo about the sniper spree. The interrogation began on the afternoon of Nov. 7, 2002, two weeks after Malvo and Muhammad were arrested at a rest stop in a dark blue 1990 Chevrolet Caprice.
Malvo also discussed the shootings with a detective in Prince William County and a guard at a Baltimore jail, but those conversations were not as in-depth. In all, Malvo talked to Boyle about nine of the Washington-area shootings.
Malvo’s lawyers do not dispute that he took part in the sniper attacks, but they contend he was brainwashed by Muhammad and is innocent by reason of insanity. After court Friday, defense attorney Craig Cooley said the Boyle interrogation has several “inaccuracies” and was done when Malvo “was still very much under the indoctrination of John Muhammad.”
Malvo is on trial for the Oct. 14, 2002, shooting death of Linda Franklin at a Home Depot. On the tape, Malvo laughed as he talked about shooting Franklin after she walked into “the zone.”
Boyle testified that when she asked Malvo about the Meyers shooting, he laughed and said, “He was hit good. Dead immediately.”
On the tape, Malvo said that the morning after he shot Franklin, he returned to the Home Depot so he could watch police work the crime scene. “Like in all your roadblocks, I leave and get back inside the roadblock,” he said.
Malvo also told police that the shootings were carefully planned, even to the point of leaving notes for police beforehand. He described leaving the weapon behind in “all kind of places” after the shootings, thinking that police would not look in the most obvious places, then retrieving it later.
Malvo said he believed that if the shootings had continued, the National Guard would have been brought in, creating a “military siege.” He said that would have hurt the economy and forced the government to pay the $10 million the snipers had demanded.