Daily Mail
Jerry Taylor loved golf and so it was no surprise that one bright sunny afternoon in March 2002, he could be found practising his chip shots at his local course in Tucson, Arizona.
Unfortunately for the mild-mannered 60-year-old frozen food salesman, lurking in the desert surrounding the practice range was a man squinting through the sights of a high-powered rifle.
Poor Jerry didn’t stand a chance. The bullet hit him in the back and he died instantly.
His assailant dragged his body about 15 ft to hide it behind some mesquite bushes, went through his pockets to find his wallet and then, inexplicably, threw it away without removing the $15 it contained.
Taylor’s murder might have gone down in history as just another statistic in a country which records thousands of fatal shootings every year if it hadn’t later come to light that he was a victim of a psychopath who went on to gain infamy as the Washington Sniper.
Now Taylor’s story — and those of the sniper’s other 16 victims — is being told in an unforgettable new documentary series by Channel 4 to be screened tomorrow night.
I, Sniper: The Washington Killers takes a forensic look behind the scenes at the murderous road trip taken by the sniper and his accomplice, which culminated in one of the most traumatic killing sprees in U.S. criminal history.
Their merciless rampage sparked a massive manhunt, paralysing Washington DC just over a year after 9/11, striking fear into the heart of every man, woman and child.
For more than three weeks in October 2002, warped Gulf war veteran John Muhammad and his teenage accomplice Lee Malvo cowed the American capital and its suburbs as they indiscriminately shot 13 residents with their Bushmaster rifle from the boot of their car.
The big-budget six-part series, more than four years in the making and including interviews with up to 300 people, reveals for the first time that the two men were gay lovers. The motivation for the killings was the older man’s obsession with getting revenge on his ex-wife for his defeat in a custody battle.
It is now nearly 20 years since the Washington snipers held America hostage. Muhammad, a black American, was executed by lethal injection on November 10, 2009, at Greensville Correctional Centre in Virginia.
However, Malvo, now 36, is still serving multiple life sentences at the supermax prison Red Onion State, and he agreed to be interviewed at length for the series.
Both men came from dysfunctional families: Muhammad was raised by an aunt in Baton Rouge, Louisiana. He had been found clinging to the body of his mother after she died of cancer when he was three, while Malvo was abandoned by his Jamaican parents Leslie and Una on the Caribbean island of Antigua, where he scratched a living selling bootleg CDs.
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