“If you’re black, you can’t get work as a serial killer even if you’re manifestly qualified.” Mike tells Sarah how a military veteran became an abuser, a murderer and, eventually, a footnote in his own crime spree. Digressions include Jim Jones, the Addams Family and “The Gillooly Gang.” The episode gets super dark about two-thirds in, but brightens just before the big twist. We describe—again, unfortunately—domestic abuse in great detail.
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Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
“If you’re black, you can’t get work as a serial killer even if you’re manifestly qualified.” Mike tells Sarah how a military veteran became an abuser, a murderer and, eventually, a footnote in his own crime spree. Digressions include Jim Jones, the Addams Family and “The Gillooly Gang.” The episode gets super dark about two-thirds in, but brightens just before the big twist. We describe—again, unfortunately—domestic abuse in great detail.
Continue reading →
Support us:
Subscribe on Patreon
Donate on Paypal
Buy cute merch
Where else to find us:
Sarah's other show, Why Are Dads
Mike's other show, Maintenance Phase
Sarah: I watched the little mermaid the other day for the first time since I was a kid and I was like, wait, did Ariel guests fall in love with the first human male she ever saw up close?
Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where there is one moral panic and a thousand doors. I plagiarized that line from a really wonderful piece by Helen Rosner. She wrote “there's only one olive garden, but it has a thousand doors”. And I've been thinking about that line ever since. And I would say that similar to that, and in an equally American way, there's only one moral panic, but it has a thousand doors. Is that true of this episode?
Mike: Not really. Because this was a moral panic that kind of people should have been panicked about, in some ways.
Sarah: Interesting. Okay. Well delete that. I thought I did a good job, but it doesn't matter.
Mike: I am Michael Hobbes. I'm a reporter for the Huffington Post.
Sarah: I'm Sarah Marshall. And I tried to do a tagline today, but I couldn’t. And about the Satanic Panic.
Mike: It was fine. And we are on Patreon patreon.com/you'rewrongabout, and lots of other places with links in the description.
Sarah: And we're learning about, you have been describing them as the DC snipers. I remember hearing the description beltway sniper when this happened, which I believe was when I was 13 years old.
Mike: 2002.
Sarah: A lot of things happened in America when I was 13 and 14. That was the season of September 11th and the anthrax scare and the beltway slash DC snipers. And I remember a feeling in white, suburban America at the time that this was all part of the same phenomenon, somehow.
Mike: Yeah, it was 13 months after 9/11 and anthrax. And I mean, the cops who investigated it talk about it as one of the most effective terror campaigns in US history. They essentially paralyzed an entire region. Gas stations were putting up tarps so nobody could see you getting gas because a lot of people had been shot at gas stations. Schools were having parents come and escort kids off the buses and form human shields. People were zigzagging through parking lots because a lot of people had been shot in parking lots. It was profound, the disruption that this caused. And what's really interesting is one of the cops whose book I'm reading says the blue Caprice cost them $250. And the gun, which they stole, would have cost them maybe 500, 800 bucks. And so this is an extremely cheap and extremely effective form of terrorism. And it's kind of amazing that it hasn't happened since, right. It's like less than a thousand bucks.
Sarah: It is frankly amazing. What is a blue Caprice?
Mike: Oh, it's the model of the Chevy that they were driving.
Sarah: Wow. A blue Caprice.
Mike: Yeah. And they modified it with a hole in the back so that they could shoot people out of the car and drive away directly, and it wouldn't be shells behind.
Sarah: Wow. And that's also a very simple, very kind of obvious, straightforward unflashy maneuver. Yeah.
Mike: And most of the killings were one shot. I mean, one of the really chilling things about it is there's one boom and then somebody falls down. It's not like a mass shooting where there's this sort of sense of chaos. It's just a pop and somebody falls down and nobody knows what happens until minutes later. Even the people who get shot talk about, I didn't know I was shot until a couple of minutes later, why is there blood coming out of my stomach? No one could figure out what was actually going on.
Sarah: Oh my God, that's terrifying. That's like a gangland hit being carried out, like just enthusiastic amateurs, I guess.
Mike: And that's why they kept shooting people at gas stations. Because when you're filling up your car, you tend to stand motionless. And so it's easy to hit people in that situation.
Sarah: I've never thought any of this through, I have not looked at any of this since it was in the news when I was a kid. And when I was a kid, I was just like, well, that's scary to me. I'm not going to pay much attention to this. I'm going to watch Law and Order now, thank you.
Mike: I read one study that showed that kids standardized test scores went down by five to 9% after the shootings. Kids who went to schools near the shootings, and the effect was larger in schools with higher, poor and minority populations. So it's actually given rise to this field of sort of collective trauma. The way that people are exposed to one of these large societal cultural events tends to harm people from marginalized communities who have higher levels of ambient stress, basically. One of these major acute stressors tends to affect them more than kids who live with both parents, who are more affluent, who just have more stable lives in general. And so there's all this literature about all the weird economic and social impacts of an event like this and they’re everywhere.
Sarah: So, I know that we've talked about how we've had many conversations where we say, now we don't want to be a true crime podcast… but… And then this topic has inspired several of those tiny now, do you want to talk about that?
Mike: Because you're doing this deep dive on OJ, I wanted to do some sort of counter-programming and do some short episodes, some nice breaks from the kind of thing that we're doing. And so a couple of weeks ago, I started reading up on the DC snipers.
Sarah: And you were like, this will be a fun break from the OJ Simpson trial. My name's Michael Hobbes. This is a fun break.
Mike: And then I started reading and there's a huge story here that hasn't been told. I mean, it's been sitting out in the open for a decade and nobody has been telling it.
Sarah: I just want to know where you think the story begins? Where do you want us to start?
Mike: Maybe you can tell me, what is your recollection of the actual events? What actually happened in October of 2000?
Sarah: I remember that multiple people in separate incidents were killed, apparently by a sniper in the DC area.
Mike: Virginia, Maryland, and DC. Yeah.
Sarah: And after relatively little time, two people were arrested and they were an adult man and a teenager, a teenage boy.
Mike: They were 17 and 41.
Sarah: And one of them had somewhere in his name, the name Muhammad. And I believe that there was a general sense, or I had a general sense, as a 14 year old white child in Portland, Oregon of, so terrorism then? Is that? And then my personal experience was just of not really seeing it in the news again. And there would be little blippi things, but not much attention, not much follow up. There wasn't the kind of continued interest in them that there was in other people who go to trial for murder.
Mike: This is perfectly setting up the kind of main point of this episode and also a huge spoiler that I want to skip to. One of the most interesting articles I came across actually is by a guy named Alan Branson at the University of Leicester in Britain who writes about the anonymity of black serial killers. One of the most interesting things about this case is that as it was happening, it was cast as either terrorism, sort of radical Islamic terrorism, or a serial killer who was killing people at random, for pleasure, for fun, for whatever his twisted motive was. But these were the two ways that we framed it. And a lot of the framing around this as it was happening was sort of this omniscient sort of, he's powerful, there's a cat and mouse game going on.
Sarah: Yeah. Because everyone spent the nineties watching Copycat over and over.
Mike: Yes. And a lot of the profilers, the FBI profilers were all saying, this is a white guy.
Sarah: Oh my God. It's a story where the FBI profilers were wildly wrong about something. I am so thrilled. My Christmas stocking has come early.
Mike: Then the minute we find out it's a middle-aged black dude and a black teenager. All of the interest evaporates and this doesn't get talked about sort of in the serial killer canon.
Sarah: Yeah, because we love our omniscient white serial killers because they give us an excuse to incarcerate everybody else. And it's actually a little bit painfully intersectional if we're talking about a black serial killer, I think. I think one of the gifts that the white serial killer and the archetype of the white serial killer gives us as Americans is a chance to be tough on crime in a way that we are allowed to feel is completely non-racist, which of course can never be true, but that's the fantasy.
Mike: And also, and this is what the author of this article says, too, that people have forgotten this now, but this is like classic serial killer movie stuff. So at one point, the DC snipers were leaving tarot cards near where they were shooting people.
Sarah: They were walking Copycat, too.
Mike: They left a handwritten letter, nailed to a tree near one of the crime scenes. One of the most chilling details is while this was going on, one of the police chiefs that was investigating this was kind of giving this public address. Like, we've had some shootings, but I just want to say to everybody, your children are safe. We're putting cops at schools, we're going to keep the kids safe. And then in the next couple of days, the next person they shot was a child. And so there was this back and forth between the cops and the snipers.
Sarah: Which is the dream. This is amazing. They're being the dream serial killer, right? They're like, we're leaving spooky little clues and cryptic notes. We're doing a greatest hits, Zodiac, Berkowitz thing for you we’re like playing a cat and mouse game with the authorities, like the night stalker. But God, so if you're black, apparently, you can't even get work as a serial killer, if you're manifestly qualified for that, that's really discouraging.
Mike: This is what I mean, first of all, I love this article because it's almost like a satire of woke discourse where it's like, you're erasing the work of black serial killers.
Sarah: I mean, making that argument right now. So that's me.
Mike: But what this guy says is it's about the ways that white criminals are allowed to have complex motivations and black criminals are only supposed to have simplistic motivations.
Sarah: Yes. And no one wants to study a black murderer as somehow more than human. We only want to do that with white men, clearly.
Mike: Yeah. I mean, this is what's so fascinating about this is that there is no biography of John Allen Muhammad, the mastermind of the killings. There's none. The only information I could get about him was from his wife's memoir.
Sarah: That's really amazing. That's amazing because the money in true crime as an industry, I mean, true crime media is a sow with many teats. It's amazing that no one tried to get in on this market. Not to sound as crass as possible, but everything else is being profited off of. So why not this?
Mike: There are almost a dozen books written about the manhunt, the three weeks when they were searching for the snipers.
Sarah: Right, right. Because then he can write about a bunch of white guys wearily stretching and they're in a van and they're drinking stale coffee and then their wife is at home and she's like, I know there's a serial killer, but I'm pregnant.
Mike: Yeah. And yet the person who carried out these attacks and his motives are completely unexplored. Yeah.
Sarah: Because Mag is pregnant, Mike.
Mike: So, yeah, so this is what we're going to do today. So in this episode, we're going to talk about John Allen Muhammad, who's the oldest of the shooters. Next episode we're going to talk about Lee Boyd Malvo, who's the younger of the shooters. And then we're going to talk about the manhunt in the third episode.
Sarah: All right. Muhammad Malvo. Manhunt. So yeah. Where do we begin? As you know, I always want to hear about someone's babyhood, if possible.
Mike: So most of this is drawn from Mildred Muhammad, who is John Allen Mohammed's ex-wife. She is one of the few people who's written a book about him. So I'm going to send you a picture and I want you to tell me what it shows. Got it?
Sarah: Yes. Oh, oh, wow. It looks like just a typical Sears portrait of the early nineties. They're doing that serious portrait thing where they're sitting in a little configuration. So mom's on the left. Dad's at the top. And then the two little kids are at the bottom and the right. And it's a toddler and a little baby. So I assume Mildred is on the left. She's smiling. She's wearing a tropical flower pattern shirt. And then the dad is at the top. He looks physically much bigger than everyone else.
Mike: Yeah, he's in shape.
Sarah: You know what he has, he has soft eyes. He looks like he's genuinely smiling in this picture.
Mike: It's a very convincingly happy portrait.
Sarah: Right, right. You would not want to throw it out. If you found this while you were Goodwill shopping, you would feel like it deserved to be back with the family that had taken it. That's how I would describe it.
Mike: Yeah. The moments. This is one of their happy moments. So we're going to start with Mildred Muhammad's going to the store. This is where she meets John. She is 23 years old. It is 1983 and it's Baton Rouge, Louisiana, which is where both of them live. So Mildred grows up in a conservative Christian House. Her father leaves when she's four, he dies when she's nine. And so she has no relationship with her father at all. She's raised by her mother. Most of her life at the time that she meets John is church and work. She has an admin position at the department of labor in Louisiana. She goes to church. She has her friends, but it's kind of a small life and she really wants to find a man to share the life with, but she has no relationship experience at all. She knows about romantic relationships from TV and movies, basically.
Sarah: So she's like Toni Collette at the start of a lot of movies.
Mike: Yes. She’s every Toni Collette movie. Yes. So she says much later in the book she recalls “when I was 16 years old, someone broke into our home and attempted, but did not succeed in raping me. My brother was present and too high to help me. I remember that it was my brother's friend who had broken into the house, a friend who had come over earlier to visit him, only to unlock the windows so he could get back in later. He had never been caught. It took me six months to sleep in my room again, until then I slept with my mother.” So what she talks about throughout this book is she's never felt safe. This is the end of her feeling secure in her own home and part of what she's searching for, and of course she doesn't realize this until decades later, is somebody to make her feel safe and secure. She just has this kind of sense of anxiety all the time.
Sarah: Is this going to be a story where a woman marries the first man who shows an interest in her?
Mike: Yeah… Unfortunately.
Sarah: Okay. Continue. Mildred’s going to the store.
Mike: Mildred’s going to the store. She sees a guy sort of making eyes at her and kind of flirtily looking at her. And then her friend who's in the store comes back and she's like, oh, that guy over there is looking at me. And then her friend goes, oh, that's John. Hey, John. And so he immediately just walked up to their car and said, hi, Mildred, I'm John, what are you doing tonight? And just goes straight in.
Sarah: She perhaps assumes that forwardness is the same thing as someone really liking her.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. She doesn't know how this works and she really likes the fact that he's very upfront about everything. So she agrees to a date. They go out and on their first date, he looks her in the eye and says, you know, I'm looking for someone to share my life with. I really want to get serious with somebody. And she is like, yeah, me too. Right. Cause that's what she wants. And so immediately they dive into this extremely intense relationship with each other.
Sarah: And they both, I mean, they're both telling the truth, I'm sure they both just really want a partner in their lives. And the problem is that if that's the main thing that you have in common, then you might not have other things in common.
Mike: Yeah. This is sort of the honeymoon period. I mean, as in so many eventually souring relationships, this becomes the period that both of them are aspiring to return to.
Sarah: Yeah. Which is the part where everything's new and you're just high off of each other all the time.
Mike: And so he picks her up from work and we'll just sort of start driving and she's like, where are we going? And he'll look in the backseat and there's two fishing poles and he's like, we're going to go fishing. And they catch fish in the river, and they fry up the fish in her mom's house. And he's great to her mom. He starts fixing stuff up in her house. It's this really nice period. He's treating her really well. And this is also the point where she starts to ask him about his past. She finds out that he grew up in Baton Rouge and partly in New Orleans. His mother is from Antigua. She dies of breast cancer when he's young. He tells her that he was five when she died.
She later speaks to his family members, and they say that he was two when she died. But whatever age he was, he was really attached to his mother. And it appears that she was holding him when she died. And he'll make these offhand comments. He never talks about his childhood, he's super guarded, but every once in a while, after they hang out with Mildred's mom, he'll make some comment like, I miss my mom. I wonder what it's like to have one. She has very traditional ideas about gender. So she says in the book, “When he said things like this, it always made me want to prove my love,” right, that she wants to take care of him. She also finds out that after his mom dies, he and his brothers and sisters, he has five brothers and sisters, go to live with relatives in Baton Rouge.
This is from a later court filing, this is from a court filing that John makes just before his execution in 2008. “The children moved into their grandparent’s three bedroom house, where they lived with 20 other people and were beaten, forced to eat black eyed peas separately from everyone else every night, prevented from entering the house during the day, and never told their birthdays until they were older. Their uncle, Felton Holiday, a reform school guard later convicted of battery with a dangerous weapon for beating a minor to death, constantly attacked them. Muhammad was allegedly forced to place his hand on a spark plug while his grandfather, Guy holiday, pulled the cord.”
Sarah: Wow. I don't even know what that would do to you. What? I mean, that seems really, really bad.
Mike: Yeah. It sounds like, I mean, she doesn't get very much detail on what actually happened to him, but it sounds like this was profoundly awful and something that he never wants to talk about. This is basically the only period of their relationship where he ever talks about his childhood, and they just leave it for the rest of the relationship. So she's two months into the relationship. They're getting more deeply attached to each other. It's going really well. She is hanging out with her friend Valina, who was her friend who was with her at the store that day. And they’re chatting and you know, how are things with John? How are things going? And she's like, oh, it's great. We're getting much more serious. I really like this guy. This could be the real thing. And Valina says, well, you should probably know that he's married.
Sarah: Oh, crap. Oh, John. Oh no.
Mike: He's married to a woman named Carol. He has two sons by two sons by two different women. This is interesting. Mildred says, you know, I had no way of knowing. He gave me his phone number, but I had never actually dialed it because he was always the one who called me. They both have very traditional ideas about gender, that it's always him who suggests dates for them.
Sarah: Interesting. Wow. You can see where those ideas about gender may have come from. How isn’t it nice if you never call a man, you also never ever find out he has a wife.
Mike: Right? So they basically have this conversation where she's like, oh, you're married. I found out. And he's like, well, you know, the marriage is breaking up and you know, you're the real one to me. We've already drifted apart. It's not even really a real marriage anymore. We're just staying together because of our son. And this is very indicative of the way that she is at this point. She says, “My girlfriends and I were indoctrinated to believe that men could do what they wanted and that a cheating man was not the same thing as a cheating woman. As long as the man was bringing the money home and taking care of the bills, everything else should be excused and forgiven. The woman was expected to keep quiet, cook, clean, take care of the children, and not cause any problems.” And so the way that she conceives of this is not that he's a prick and he's lying to her, the way that she conceives of it is, his wife must not be taking care of him enough. She says toward the end of her book, she says, “In retrospect, I can't help but notice how little anger I had at him for lying to me.”
Sarah: Yeah. I think it's also interesting to look at just how the small scale is the same as the large scale, right. And how having social ideas that allow women to completely avoid blaming men for what the men are doing and instead, skip straight over to blaming other women, allows men to kind of maintain complete control and complete discretion. I feel like so many of our ideas about gender are informed by this. How do we get women to just always blame other women for stuff? And then that's what a woman will be.
Mike: The only person who benefits from this conception is the man, right? The wife doesn't benefit from it. The girlfriend doesn't benefit from it. Both of them are blaming each other and the man gets to be this sort of act of God in between them who has no moral responsibility for any of his actions.
Sarah: No, the wife and the girlfriend are the velociraptor and the T-Rex at the end of Jurassic Park and the man is Sam Neil escaping the island.
Mike: This was also the conversation where he tells her that he can't read. At the time, he's in the national guard and he's kind of doing odd jobs, but he has gone through his entire life basically faking his way through academic institutions. He graduated from high school. So when she asks him, how did you do that? He basically just says, has a photographic memory and there's a couple of words that he's memorized and then he'll find excuses for other people to read things out loud to him. So he'll say, oh, I just like the way that it sounds. Do you mind reading that out loud to me? Or with road signs, he'll say, oh, sorry, there's something in my eye. Do you mind reading that road sign for me? He's gotten through his life like this and nobody else knows.
Sarah: How old is he at this point? Like 30.
Mike: He is 24. She is 23. He's 24.
Sarah: Wow. I feel like you have to be very intelligent to be able to get to the age of 24 and graduate high school and be employed and support a family without knowing how to read that whole time.
Mike: That was in my notes to tell you yes. Because to me, this is a sign of great intelligence and great manipulation.
Sarah: Yeah. Great ability to present a false front and that's amazing and sad.
Mike: It's really sad.
Sarah: It's sadly amazing. It's amazingly sad.
Mike: And it also explains so much of his personality too, that he spent essentially his entire childhood faking it with everybody and just constantly telling lies.
Sarah: When he wasn't being electrocuted.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. He also, there's also, he says in court filings later that there may have been brain damage from the abuse.
Sarah: Yeah. I would imagine an adult who's using that little restraint, there's the potential for at least a lot of head trauma among other things.
Mike: Yeah. The only hint of this is that he tells her I was in an accident, and I lost the ability to read. I think he's making that up, but there's probably some element of truth to that. That if you're a little kid and you're having beatings constantly at home, including in the head, you're probably not super attuned to the lessons at school that day.
Sarah: Or he could have brain damage that makes it very difficult to read, or he could be dyslexic and see that as a result of head trauma, I mean, who knows? I feel like people often will tell half-truths that are sort of the kind of felt reality to them of what they actually literally been through.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So what's amazing, and this says so much about Mildred, is that she spends the next two years teaching him how to read. She starts taking phonics classes at night so that she can be better at teaching him to read.
Sarah: Wow. Does she feel herself to be in love with him at this point? Or does she see this as her human obligation to him?
Mike: That's so fascinating to me about her. I've spent two weeks since I finished this book thinking about Mildred Muhammad and there's so much in here about how her greatest strength and her greatest weakness is how she projects herself into other people. So she sees him as having a need. He needs to learn how to read there's all these exams to get into the army and he needs to pass them. That's his need and so I have to help him with that need, but she never makes the step like, well, this is a random guy. I've only known this guy for two months. Why is it my job to do this? She never asked that question. She can't not put his needs first. Although what's kind of cool is that after this two year period, he passes all of his exams. He gets into the army. He gets stationed at Fort Lewis, which is in Tacoma, Washington about an hour south of Seattle. And she breaks up with him. She's like, I did what I had to do and good luck. Bye bye. So she puts him on a bus. He goes off to Fort Lewis and she's kind of like, okay, well now I can move on with my life. And a month later, she gets a letter saying, I want to leave my wife. I can't do this without you. Come join me. And there's a one-way plane ticket in the envelope.
Sarah: It's such a nineties movie, romantic move to be like, here's your plane ticket. Come see me when really, unless it's John Cusack doing it, you realize, oh shit, this person spent all this money on me. I have to fly to Tacoma now.
Mike: Oh, totally. Yeah. And this is, there's also an element of manipulation here too, right? He's going to be out a couple hundred bucks if she doesn't go. Yes. It's kind of a hostage situation. Although she does say one thing she notices about the letter that he sends her is that every word is spelled correctly.
Sarah: Oh, Mildred, Mildred. Just like a nice little detail, by the way, it's classic American serial killer to have some kind of Pacific Northwest connection. So he's really ticking all the boxes. I don't know what the FBI wants.
Mike: So this period where she moves to be with him at Fort Lewis is kind of another honeymoon period where he is training to become some sort of explosives mechanical expert guy. There's a lot of talk later that he's a marksman, that he's a sharpshooter and he does get some sort of certification and an M16, but it's the same certification that lots of people get. It's not a super expert certification. It's that he’s proficient.
Sarah: He's not like Oswald.
Mike: Yeah. And he doesn't show any particular aptitude or interest in marksmanship. He's much more interested in sort of how things work, how explosives work, how trucks work, working on engines and he likes taking things apart and putting them back together.
Sarah: And is he good at it? Is he a handy guy?
Mike: Yes. This is a really interesting period because he's really, really good at his job and he loves his job. So he gets up every morning and does a hundred push-ups and a hundred crunches. He sometimes sleeps in a tent in the backyard to sort of prepare for cold weather conditions in case he's stationed somewhere. He's mentoring other soldiers. So he sort of takes younger guys under his wing. There's something very appealing about him in this period, that he's taking his work really seriously. And he's really ambitious. He'll call her during the day and dictate memos with strategy. I need to get transferred to this base and then move into this position.
Sarah: It’s so romantic, he's dictating memos.
Mike: This is Hobbesian romance, I’m like, ooh memos!
Sarah: But yeah, I can see this being like, he suddenly is in this world that he's been wanting to be a part of for a long time. He's been spending two years learning how to read so he can take these exams and he's in this world of structure and rules which I can imagine being, you know, a really reassuring and exciting thing.
Mike: Yeah. And so all of a sudden, he has a sense of purpose that he's really never had in his life before. But at the same time, there's also some sort of little weird thing starting to happen, that he loves making plans, but he can't implement his plans. He keeps changing them all the time. They start arguing about weird stuff about what to watch on TV. He just sort of starts like pushing back at her on like little dumb things. And she's like, I don't really understand why this is happening. If she pushes back against him, if they have one of these fights, he will just not talk to her for days. This creates this pattern where he will basically pick a fight with her, she will push back on him a little bit, he'll get sullen and angry, and then she has to do something to make it up to him. So she starts making nice desserts or buying nice things for him at the store. She's the one that has to make these silent periods end.
Sarah: Which means that he is making her responsible for his behavior and his moods.
Mike: Yeah. And she's accepting that responsibility too.
Sarah: Yeah. Because when you begin and these behaviors, you don't think about them as escalating, you think about deescalating them, you don't think about how if you go in on this and are like, okay, yes, I tacitly agree that I take responsibility for ending the silent treatment. I take responsibility for your moods. You don't think about it in terms of, well, maybe now I'm enabling worse behavior and I'm going to find myself taking responsibility for greater abuse. You don't think about it that way at the beginning.
Mike: And also, she has no other comparison, right? She's not someone who knows very much about relationships. And as we talk about it in the show, so often there's so little pop culture, depictions of functioning, adult relationships and functioning adult conflict resolution.
Sarah: Yeah. Really just the Adams Family.
Mike: She has no idea that it's not normal to not talk to your partner for a couple of days. At one point he yells at her for taking too long to get her house keys out when they're coming home from some event, he's like, oh, why does it always take you so long? And then he sulks about it. And it's not normal, but she has no idea that it's not normal. Right. She's just like, oh, John is like that. And I should try to be quicker with my keys.
Sarah: Right. And you don't think about it as negotiable. You're like, well, this person is like this and they're the only person who has ever wanted me. So, yeah.
Mike: Yeah. And so she says in her book, she says, “I decided that he was just immature and if I gave him enough freedom, eventually he would grow up and become more of a family man.” So if I change, he'll get better. There's also some just weird passive aggressive shit that she'll buy nice plates or nice cups for the house and then if he doesn't like them, they'll just disappear. And she'll be like, uh, I just bought these nice China plates. And he's like, oh yeah, I haven’t seen those.
Sarah: What is he doing with them? Do we know?
Mike: It's not clear. She never finds out. But she starts just like going to Goodwill and getting stuff for 99 cents because it's all going to go missing anyway.
Sarah: Wow. What a weird thing to do to hide or destroy someone’s plates or do some third thing with them, I guess.
Mike: Right. And it happens at one point that she buys a shirt and then John is working on the car with the shirt that she just bought for herself.
Sarah: He's using it as a rag?
Mike: Yeah.
Sarah: Oh, that's really mean. That's really demeaning.
Mike: And it’s one of those things, she keeps asking him like, can you not do that? This is important to me. And then he'll either kind of gaslight her and be like, oh, I don't know. I don't see what the big deal is. It's just a shirt, blah, blah, blah. Or he'll just agree to it and not do it. He'd be like, oh, you're right. Yeah, you're right. I'll make sure not to do that again. And then, you know, two days later he just does the same kind of inconsiderate stuff again.
Sarah: Right. And the point is like proving to someone that their feelings don't matter.
Mike: Yeah, yeah. Yeah. But then, you know, in spite of these red flags, there's good times, too. And so in 1988, they got married. It's a small wedding. Neither one of their families are there. They just do it quietly. And this is an excerpt from this. “Before the wedding, I went to Michael's Craft Store to buy a bride and groom tier for the top of the cake, but they didn't have any specially for black people. I ended up purchasing the bride and groom separately and painted them black.” And then she says, “On October 2nd, 2002, when the DC sniper attacks began, and I read that the windows were shot out of a Michael's Craft Store in Maryland, where I lived, I remembered the bride and groom on my wedding cake. The sniper shot a woman in the parking lot of another Michael's Craft Store, this time in Virginia. I don't believe in coincidences. It didn't even occur to me that the shooter could be having some of the same memories as I did.” This is also the period where a) she gets pregnant. So 1989 a year after they got married, she got pregnant. b) he starts spending more time away from home and his excuses for spending time away from home get more and more janky. Sometimes he'll be like, oh, I'm going to the gym. And she's like, well, you were there for six hours yesterday, and now you're going again today.
Sarah: Can't skip leg day. Also maybe I'm having an affair.
Mike: Right? So the way that she sort of unravels all this, is at one point, she's buying lottery tickets at seven 11, and she drops them in the car, and she sort of reaches down to pick them up and she finds a comb, a silver comb in the car. And she's like, that is not mine. And then a couple days later, this is like such a nineties detail, she notices that John has come home from work, but then he's left again. This is in the evening. And so she picks up the phone and she hits re-dial and she hears a girl’s voice on the other end of the line, it's kind of like, hello. She's like, who is this? And the woman is like, who is this? And so what she figures out is that this is a woman named Danielle. She is 19 years old. She met John at the gym and they have been carrying on a relationship for six months.
Sarah: Oh no.
Mike: And this is also such a telling detail about Mildred that, because she always projected herself into other people's experiences, you know how I'm always talking on the show that when two people sort of should be allies and they end up hating each other it super bums me out. This is the opposite of that. Immediately. When she's talking to Danielle, she's like this poor girl. She's 19. She meets a nice guy at the gym. They're seeing each other. He says he wants to be serious. She had no idea I existed. There's no reason for me to be mad at this girl. And this girl must be really sad too. Right? She's finding out that her boyfriend is married.
Sarah: Mildred seems like a true Christian.
Mike: Right? Yeah. So she's like, well, Danielle, how about I pick you up and we confront him together?
Sarah: Oh my goodness.
Mike: Mildred drives over to Danielle's house, picks her up, and brings her back to the house. Mildred sends Danielle into the kitchen to wait. John comes home from wherever he is and he immediately says what's for dinner. This is their marriage in a nutshell, that Mildred has a full-time job at this point, by the way, she's got a job on the base.
Sarah: What's she doing?
Mike: She's doing some data entry stuff. But John expects her to do all of the cooking, all of the cleaning. He never helps out around the house. She's sort of in charge of the house. So he comes in, immediately asks what's for dinner. She said, Oh, it's on the stove. Why don't you head into the kitchen and see about it? And he walks into the kitchen. Mildred follows him. Danielle is standing in the kitchen.
Sarah: What's for dinner? Your girlfriend, that's who.
Mike: Yeah. So he immediately looks at Danielle and goes, what are you doing here? And so Mildred is like, oh, so you know this person and John's immediate response is like, no, I don't know her.
Sarah: I mean, it is what you think, but I can explain.
Mike: Yeah. And so you can see John's entire strategy breaking down.
Sarah: Because the strategy is deny, deny, deny.
Mike: It’s the one strategy where you cannot deny two separate people.
Sarah: Because she's standing in your kitchen. She got to the witness first ,is the issue John is facing here.
Mike: This is also, I love the way that reality provides like these weird moments of comic relief.
Sarah: Like Kato Kaelin.
Mike: If you were making a dark and gritty DC sniper movie, you would totally delete this detail. But at this moment, when the tension in this kitchen is boiling, a friend of John's stops by to pick up the lottery tickets that Mildred was buying for him.
Sarah: Well that's why you can't represent real life in gritty muted drama, because real life is tragic and hilarious in the same moment.
Mike: So this poor guy.
Sarah: Yeah. This poor, fucking guy, just wants his lotto tickets.
Mike: He’s like, hey guys!
Sarah: Heard you got some scratch it’s for me!
Mike: And then of course, Mildred is like, uhhhh. And John, because he can't not lie. He's like, oh, Hey James, everything's fine. Why don't you come in, hang out.
Sarah: Well, I can also see being him and being like James, stay for as long as possible. Why don't we all have oatmeal?
Mike: Poor James has no idea what to do. John is like, oh, this is fine. And Mildred is like, maybe you should leave now. They come to some compromise where John puts James in the living room and has him watching TV as the rest of this is playing out.
Sarah: And James is like, yes, Mrs. Castorini. I would love some oatmeal.
Mike: What they basically come to is some sort of ultimatum. Mildred basically says to him, I am pregnant with your child. You need to choose her or me. And this is what Danielle says too. We're not going to do this.
Sarah: They've come to a consensus. They're like John we've conferred. This is the deal. So the women are able to present a united front, essentially. That's amazing.
Mike: So John basically chooses Mildred and poor James drives Danielle home.
Sarah: Oh James.
Mike: And then Mildred is so mad at John that they basically spend the next three, four weeks, not speaking.
Sarah: Yeah. I mean, it's a lot of deceit to be carrying on a secret relationship for six months where you're essentially practicing bigamy. Right. Where he's spending all this time with Danielle and in her home, probably spending the night with her until she falls asleep and then creeping home to his wife. There's a lot of emotional deceit happening there. It's not just infidelity but just the fact that he was lying so profoundly to both of them.
Mike: Yeah. So they spend a couple of weeks living like roommates that dislike each other. She cooks him dinner every night, he comes home at 5:00 sharp.
Sarah: Of course she's still doing silent labor for him, even as she's like, I'm not talking to you, but obviously I'll still feed you all of your meals, which says so much about the relationship. She feels she has no choice in this at all. Right? She has to take care of him.
Mike: Yeah. And eventually she kind of breaks the silence and says, I'm mad, but I'm pregnant with your child. She reaches out her hand and she says, hello, I'm Mildred, what's your name? And he says, John, nice to meet you. And they sort of decide to kind of try again, start over.
Sarah: You can see how this is a tough dynamic here because Mildred's behavior suggests she's the kind of person who's always going to bend first. And because John's behavior kind of demands someone to act totally forgiving and she's actually the rare person who's capable of doing that. Yeah.
Mike: And she agrees to never speak about it again and they don't.
Sarah: Oh my God. Oh no. That's binding arbitration. And Mildred's problem is that she can do amazing things if she's working on someone else's behalf. But if her client is herself, she's like, oh it’s fine, okay.
Mike: Yeah. I know. I was reading this and just thinking, Mildred. So there's sort of this semi honeymoon period where they reconcile. He says that he's faithful to her. He comes home on time, et cetera. He eventually gets stationed in Germany. So they moved to Germany with the army. They're living on a base. Their son is born. They call him Little John. So they're raising Little John. In late 1990, John went to the first Iraq war. He goes to Saudi Arabia. He's stationed there. After three months, he comes home completely different. He's depressed. He's resentful. He can't sleep. He's angry at her. He's angry at the military. She doesn't know why. She starts, over months, finally probing him and trying to find out what actually happened.
The first explanation that he gives her is that US militarism is bullshit, basically. He says he's going over there and dismantling bombs that have USA on them. And it's like, we've sold these bombs to them and they're using them on civilians. And I'm here to save these civilians now, like this is dumb and weird. And so that sort of level one of the explanations, but it seems like it goes much deeper than this because he's never been particularly sort of interested in politics. So she's like, I think there's something else going on here. The deeper explanation that she gets is that he starts to experience racism when he's abroad.
He goes overseas and at this base in Saudi Arabia, he sees black soldiers being treated completely differently than white soldiers. He’s seeing them not getting promotions, he's feeling belittled. He actually tries to file a complaint over the racism that he's seeing, that they have like an equal opportunity body. He goes to them, planning to file a complaint. He says the night after his request is filed to file this complaint about racism, he is sleeping in the tent with 16 other guys. All of a sudden in the middle of the night, there's some sort of explosion in the tent and there's smoke and there's screaming and there's fire and nobody really knows what's going on. He, for some reason, can't get out of his sleeping bag, the zipper gets busted. And so one of his compatriots grabs him and sort of dragged him out of the tent. He finally cuts his way out of the sleeping bag, but nobody sort of realizes what actually happened. And so almost immediately they accused John of doing it, of trying to blow up the tent.
Sarah: Why?
Mike: They say that they find a pin, a grenade pin near his bunk, but he says it wasn't him. And so they pull him out of this unit, they send him to another unit. They hog tie him and leave him in some sort of basement without food and water, they're basically subjecting him to torture. They take away his gas mask. In Mildred's bushy quotes in the saying, ”They tried to kill me, baby.” She says, after he finally tells her this story, she wakes up in the middle of the night and he's not there. And she walks out to the living room and he's crying into a pillow.
Sarah: It’s like he's being assaulted by a father figure yet again.
Mike: The twist of this, however, is that it's not clear how much of his description we should believe.
Sarah: Interesting. Interesting.
Mike: So what happens a couple of weeks later is she sort of pushes him to, well, you should make a deal out of this. She goes with him as he goes to see one of his commanding officers and sort of talk about this incident. They go into the guy's office, some super higher up. He has some report, an investigation report in front of him. And she's with John. And this commanding officer asked John, well, when the investigators came to you, why did you not speak to them? Why did you refuse to speak to the investigators? And then Mildred is like, investigators? You never told me there was an investigation and you never told me that you didn't participate in it. This commanding officer says to John in front of Mildred, look, man, what happened there? Just tell me what happened. And he just sits there silently. And then when they get in the car, she's like this doesn't make any sense, what happened? And he just says, you ask you many questions. And they never talk about it again.
Sarah: What do you think about that?
Mike: Well, I have looked into this and there's other documentation of what happened to him in the military. So he has a supervisor named Kit Berenson, who is quoted in a lot of articles about John that come out after the sniper attacks. And what Berenson says is that John was trying to kill himself and he set off the grenade in this tent to try to kill himself and all 16 other soldiers and there's some malfunction and that's why it didn't actually end up killing anybody.
Sarah: I mean, that's also certainly believable.
Mike: Yes. There's also an incident where an M16 goes missing and John is the one who finds it. He complained to Mildred that they're accusing me of hiding it myself. And I'm being prosecuted, blah, blah, blah. But then according to the military, he admitted to hiding it to frame another officer, but Mildred also points out that it's a little weird that there's no documentation of this in his military records at all. If you have a soldier in Saudi Arabia who tries to kill 16 other soldiers, you never send him for a psych evaluation. You never tried to stop him from getting honorably discharged three years later. There's no process to be like this guy's extremely troubled and he poses a danger to other people. Nothing.
Sarah: Yeah. It's weird for there to be no documentation of that at all. Unless people were just keeping really bad records as a role in these situations, which seems possible. I don't know. I've never been in the Gulf war.
Mike: I mean, I can see a scenario where all of this is true, but nobody writes it down. Or John's weird and everybody stays away from John, but we don't have any hard evidence. Also, it doesn't sound like John to confess to hiding the M16 to frame someone else because he confessed to nothing his whole life.
Sarah: That's interesting. Yeah.
Mike: Up until his execution, he claims that he didn't do the sniper attacks.
Sarah: Yeah. So if you have like, at best, a secondhand confession, that seems out of pattern.
Mike: And also, she's seen him cry on cue before, she's seen him manipulate people. So it's not out of the question that he made all this shit up to get sympathy from her. There's no scenario here that makes sense. And there's no scenario that, on its face, doesn't make sense either. It's just really, really murky.
Sarah: Right. You know, even people who know other people extremely well can't figure these things out. So why do we, as members of the public with six data points, think that we can narrow it down to the one correct outcome?
Mike: But whatever happened in Saudi Arabia, and we may never know, John focuses a lot of his increasing resentment and frustration at the military onto Mildred.
Sarah: Oh good.
Mike: He starts to criticize her parenting. He has this whole thing where Little John is a boy. So when Mildred picks him up and kisses him and says, I love you. He'll be like, he's a boy. He doesn't need that. What are you going to do to him? This is also a really important time because this is where they discover Islam.
Sarah: Huh? How does that happen?
Mike: So there's a Jamaican hairstylist at another military base that they go to cause they have better stores, so they go to Nuremberg. And this Jamaican hairstylist lady, they're chatting as she's doing Mildred’s hair. And they mentioned sort of this kind of racism that he's experiencing. And this hairstylist says, well, you know, you must know about the nation of Islam? You must know about Louis Farrakhan. And Mildred’s like, no, I've never heard of this guy. She gives her a bunch of these tapes, video tapes for them to play and then bring back the following weekend. And the tapes are all about the history of black people in America. They're about how civilized African societies were, how the justification for the Civil War that Mildred had always been told was a lie, reconstruction. There's all this sort of questioning of history. And so she's grown up in a religious tradition and an academic tradition that is really about sort of getting information and absorbing it.
And so to her, the revelation isn’t only the information that they're providing, but also that you can question stuff. They also both really respond to this idea that black people need to make their own institutions. And that it's not about being accepted by white people, it's about creating self-esteem and black institutions, institutions within the black community that can be really enriching. And John loves this stuff. He's like, yep. I don't want to be in the military because it's a white institution. So it's actually better for me to focus on myself. This kind of feeds John's alienation from the military.
Sarah: Aside from the spousal abuse, this could all be going in a positive direction, but I know it's not.
Mike: Mildred actually gets much more into Islam than John does. There's a lot of stuff after the shootings that are like, he's a radical Islamic, whatever. And he does go to the Million Man March, actually, and this is much later, but he's like, I'm going to respect women. I'm going to sort of be this traditional caretaker kind of role in the family, that lasts like two weeks and then he goes back to his normal stuff. But for her, it's a great sense of self-esteem right. It's a way of using these very traditional ideas to start to understand the kind of abuse that she's suffering. Right. Because she thinks, well, John's supposed to be taking care of me and he's not right. She doesn't come to it from a 2019 radical, egalitarian, perspective. She comes to it from like a 1950s gender perspective of, I'm doing my part. I'm cooking and cleaning. He is not doing his part.
Sarah: I mean, as long as you get there, it doesn't matter what vehicle you take.
Mike: The last thing that happens before they leave Germany is their second child is born. A daughter named Selena. And after Selena is born, Mildred has some complications. She sort of passes out. She has to go back to the hospital.
Sarah: Oh no. John has to clean things.
Mike: That night, John shows up at the hospital and it's just really cold and really mean to her. And he's, yeah, I guess I can get the kids and bring them to see you. And she's like, well, they're actually not allowed in this wing of the hospital. And he's like, okay. And he just leaves. Do you want to guess why he's mad at her?
Sarah: Because he has to take care of the kids and do all the household stuff that she normally does and he's mad.
Mike: Yeah. Literally. This is OJ stuff, right? It's, I'm the only person that matters and you're not doing what you're supposed to do. That’s it.
Sarah: And it's just, do you literally not see that I am in the hospital, I cannot leave the hospital. Maybe I can't walk, maybe I could die, but you're upset because you have to wash a plate. It's just such soloistic behavior.
Mike: Yeah. She talks about how from that day forward, she doesn't tell him when she has the flu or when she's sick, because he's going to make a thing about it. So she just sort of keeps going.
Sarah: Why is this a show about a world where no one cares if women have the flu?
Mike: Right? God. So in 1992, they moved. Back to the U.S. they're at a place called Fort Ord, California. And so far, John has been abusive and problematic, but this is the part where we get some sort of little weird serial killer-y details. They're testing out nannies. They're trying to get childcare for their kids when they get to California. So they go to one woman's house, and they're sort of chatting with her. How long have you been looking after kids? Normal stuff. And so as they're sort of getting to the point where, oh yeah, let's sign some papers and like start on Monday. John looks at this woman, narrows his eyes and says, if anything happens to my children, I'm coming after you.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: And Mildred is sitting there and apparently this poor nanny is like, bye bye. I'm not going to deal with you people. Goodbye. And there's another one where they're also interviewing a childcare provider and John leaves a tape recorder at her house for 24 hours to see sort of the kind of person she really is.
Sarah: So that would be more menacing if George Costanza hadn't done it, but it's still very menacing. And again, it's proof that you have no concept of other people's privacy or boundaries or safety or anything like that.
Mike: Yeah. He also starts wearing only black. He gives away all of his clothes with colors on them.
Sarah: Is it because he became a goth? Was it the goth movement that was responsible for violence? According to Diane Sawyer.
Mike: There's also this really weird thing where he comes home one day from the salvation army with this guy, with him. And he's like, this is Steven. He doesn't have anywhere to live. He's going to move in with us. Mildred says, well, my mother is ill, and my mother has just moved into our tiny two-bedroom home that we share with two kids. So there's now an entire three generational family living in a not super big place. And you're now bringing home someone who you met today. I'm not great with this. And he just says too bad. He's staying. And so again, this random dude moves in with them. They start doing weird shit where they'll dress in all black and go out on night bike rides with big duffel bags.
Sarah: Him and Steven?
Mike: Yeah. With Steven. So, eventually Mildred figures out that what they were doing was casing some part of the military base, where they were trying to steal explosives.
Sarah: Interesting.
Mike: And that apparently, she overhears this years later, John telling a friend, so he could also be lying, right. That they were trying to get these explosives. And basically when the time came, John was going to distract all these soldiers, Return of the Jedi style and Steven was supposed to go up and steal all the explosives. And I guess Steven just chickened out.
Sarah: Well justifiably so, I might add.
Mike: Good choices, Steven. Those were good choices.
Sarah: Ah, right. So he's engaging in more high risk behavior.
Mike: Yeah. Oh yeah. I mean, this is troubling even without the abuse. This is very weird, troubling stuff. So in 1993, their third child was born. So he also starts doing this thing where it's very, just sort of like reply-guy thing where he'll kind of pick fights but pretend that he's not. So she says in her book, “a simple question, like, how was your day, could trigger the following sort of conversation. He says, why are you asking? I answer, well, you look upset. He says, what makes you think I'm upset? And then she says, well, the look on your face. And he says, well, you're interpreting things wrong.”
Sarah: He just makes every interaction unpleasant in some way.
Mike: Yes and in this way like she's saying, I am interpreting your emotions because of what is on your face, a normal thing that humans do. And he's like, oh, you think you can see what I feel?
Sarah: He's like, what gives you the right to notice my feelings?
Mike: Right? Their son, John Little John, is diagnosed with asthma. And he thinks that she shouldn't give John the medication because it's weakness and its vulnerability and she's sort of contributing to his emasculation, blah, blah, blah, something.
Sarah: He thinks that the way to raise big, strong, healthy boys is to have them run around with untreated asthma never being told anyone loves them. I don't know. I mean, I'm no expert, but I disagree.
Mike: This is awful. When she goes into labor, it's a month early. Early in the morning she wakes John up saying, I'm pretty sure I'm going into labor. And he's like, I want to keep sleeping. It's probably not labor. And she's like, I've done this. It's labor. And then he basically is like, fine.
Sarah: You can see it in a very literal way how according to his own understanding of the world, his desires supersede what's happening in her life. He's like, no, no, you can't be in labor because I am sleepy.
Mike: Yeah. Cause like my snooze alarm hasn't gone off yet. There's also a really interesting insight during this period of sort of how she came to these beliefs because now that her mother is living with them, her mother is very traditional. So her mother sort of sees the abuse and sees how John treats her, but never blames John for it. It's always sort of, why isn't she taking better care of John? So in her book she says, “When I was cooking dinner one night, John began complaining about something and I started to cry. My mother must have heard me. She came into the kitchen, Mildred, you stop crying right now, she said. You suck up those tears and you pray, you don't let him know that he's upsetting you, and you do whatever you have to do to keep this family together.” So that's the information that she's getting.
Sarah: Suck up those tears. The ability of family members to put up with abuse that they're witnessing is like the ability of the American public to tolerate wrongful convictions. We're like, well, judges always made good choices. A man wouldn't abuse you if you hadn't failed him in some way. The system must be just, I can't live in a world where it's not. So maybe it's your fault.
Mike: Yeah. Yeah. So as all this is happening, they get transferred back to Fort Lewis. So they go back to Tacoma, Washington, they end up getting a house off of the base. And in 1994, John was honorably discharged. And because he's like the DC sniper, everybody wants to see something meaningful and him getting discharged from the military. Right? Maybe he's crazy and they found out blah, blah, blah. No, he just served his term and then he left. It's fine. There's no story there.
Sarah: Right. It's actually more interesting that he was able to just be in the military and leave for unremarkable reasons.
Mike: Yes. And what most people say afterwards, because of course there's interviews with everybody who's ever known this guy, they all say that he was fine in those years in the military, but you could kind of tell that he was like a bit checked out. He was competent. And there were a couple of these incidents of him being really bitter and kind of letting his rage start to show, but mostly he was a proficient but unremarkable soldier overall. So what's interesting is after he leaves the military, they come up with what I think is actually a pretty good business model. He becomes a mobile car mechanic. So if you're having car trouble, instead of going to the shop, he will come to your house and work on your car at your house.
Sarah: Yeah. That's very smart. Especially because that's something people procrastinate about. Yeah. That's a very good idea.
Mike: It's a really good idea. And also, you know, they don't have any overhead, right? They're not paying rent. So the business model is, he'll go out to fix people's cars and she is in charge of all the business stuff. So she advertises, she sets up appointments. If he's at one person's house and another appointment comes in and she'll page him and then he'll call her back on the person's phone and she'd be like, okay, your next appointment is 1234 Elm Street, go there next. And he's like, okay. So that's how he kind of stays out all day. And so it's successful enough, Mildred starts doing all this stuff with paperwork of getting larger contracts. So eventually she gets a procurement contract for the government in Tacoma. She has to fill out all this paperwork and get a business license and she's quite good at this stuff.
Sarah: Yeah. Good job Mildred.
Mike: And so she also hires a woman named Isa Nichols, who is kind of like a business accounting consultant, MBA type person who starts helping them with, you know, this is the paperwork you need to file. This is the budget you need to keep. And so what starts to happen is as Mildred is getting better at business practices, she's going to networking meetings to get up business, hand out business cards and stuff like that. John starts to get more resentful. He's like, well, why do you get to go to the business meetings? Why do I have to fix the cars?
Sarah: Because she's good at something and she's getting attention. And she has a role in the community, and he can't let her have that.
Mike: So this Isa Nichols lady starts telling them basic stuff. She's like, well, you need to put all of your cash flow, because a lot of times they get paid in cash, you need to put all of it into a bank account so you can track your revenue and expenditures, right, to see if you're profitable and then you can start to make budgets. And John does the thing where he's like, yeah, that sounds great. And then the minute Isa leaves the room, he just doesn't do it. He considers the cash that he gets his money, right? He's like, oh, I fix somebody's car. And they gave me a hundred dollars. So that's my $100 dollars. Why would I give it to you? Why would I give it to the bank account? It's mine. And so Mildred is constantly harping on him to be like, we need to know what we earned today.
Sarah: And you're running a business. You have other people who are working with you and dependent on you. So you need to treat it as a business. We're not just here to help you.
Mike: Yes. And so at the same time, he starts tracking Mildred spending. So he only gives her $200 for groceries. And he's so deliberate about it, getting receipts and stuff. She starts taking a calculator with her to the store to make sure she doesn't go over. Right. He's totally freewheeling. He tries to open a karate school at some point and gives away thousands. Super impulsive. Doesn't think anything through. And then with Mildred, he's like, oh, this is $201. I need you to account for why that's over.
Sarah: By the way, I'm starting a dojo.
Mike: Yeah, exactly. And because he's so likable, because he's so charismatic, he's really popular. The business is actually going well. There's a couple of snags. One woman threatens to sue them saying that John is trying to trade mechanic work for sexual favors. He starts staying out later and he'll be leaving the house after dinner and be like, oh yeah, I've gotten to a point to fix someone's car. And Mildred’s like, I make the appointments, you don't have an appointment. And who gets their car fixed at 9:00 PM?
Sarah: Lonely women.
Mike: In her book, she talks about it. Yeah, you know what? It was really fucking obvious that he was cheating on me. I'm not dumb. Of course I know this. But I've got three kids at home. I'm working more than full-time to keep this business afloat. Our mother's living with us. Our mom has been diagnosed with diabetes. I'm keeping the house clean. I'm doing all the cooking. I'm just too busy to make a thing out of it.
Sarah: It's just so annoying because the time he spent cheating on her was among many other things, time that he could have spent cleaning.
Mike: Or literally doing anything. Doing the bare minimum.
Sarah: Time enough to sleep with people, time enough to sweep with people.
Mike: This is also the part where we get some foreshadowing of what happens later. Remember his son with Carol, with his first wife? His name's Lindbergh. He came to stay with them in the summer of 1997.
Sarah: So now they have four kids.
Mike: So now they have four kids living in this tiny home. Mildred, as she's gotten more interested in Islam is trying to show more grace to other people. And so she's actually written a letter to Carol apologizing.
Sarah: Oh, Mildred.
Mike: So this kid Lindbergh comes and he's a nice kid. They hang out all summer. He gets along really well with the younger kids, all is going well. And then when it's sort of time for him to leave, John, all of a sudden says that he's staying. He's being abused at home. And Mildred's like, he hasn't mentioned that to me. I haven't seen any signs of abuse. John gets an attorney and tries to sue for custody. But basically the attorney is just like you can't just do that. You need evidence of abuse. You can't just take someone away from their mother when you haven't seen this kid in 10 years. And so there's a court order that John, no, John has to return the child to Carol back in Louisiana. And this is a Monday or whatever. And they get a flight for Lindbergh on Thursday.
And Wednesday night, Mildred comes home, and John is packing. And she's like, what are you doing? And he's like, me and Lindbergh are going to get out of here. He's being abused. I have to save him. And Mildred's like, sorry, excuse me? You have three children. You are the breadwinner for this family. You are not leaving. What is your plan? You're just going to go off the grid with this child who you don't know. What are you talking about? And so she basically locks herself in the same room as Lindbergh that night, protects him, then drives them to the airport the next morning.
Sarah: And presumably she doesn't believe the abuse claims.
Mike: This is the thing. So Lindbergh eventually testifies at Lee Boyd Malvo trial and says, this is evidence that John has brainwashed Lee Malvo, because Lindbergh says, my dad convinced me I was abused, and it took me six months after I went home to my non abusive mom to believe that I wasn't being abused. I mean, this is his weird superpower. He can just convince people of anything.
Sarah: It starts with a G and ends with gaslighting. And specifically pretty unworldly people. You can see how he's gravitating towards women with very little life experience, very little experience with men. And now children because the women aren't pliant enough anymore, maybe.
Mike: These are the last days of the marriage. The abuse just gets more and more obnoxious. She talks about how John wants to move to a different city and kind of start a new life. So she's like, okay, let's make a pros and cons list. So she gets out a piece of paper and writes pros on one side and cons on the other, puts a line down the middle and she's like, okay, what are the pros and cons? And John says, well, the line’s crooked, the line is not straight. And she's like, well, that's not the, it's not a big deal. And then he's like, no, no, get another piece of paper. And then he's like, no, no, that line's not straight either.
Sarah: Really filling out the con list. That's amazing.
Mike: It's so difficult to talk about this kind of abuse, right? Because it's an avalanche of this kind of shit, right? This is her home life now, just nothing she does is right. She says, “during this period, it was becoming more and more apparent that John was involved with another woman and that she was influencing how he treated me”. So later on during the trial, we hear from a woman that says that she had a seven year affair with John during this period. Mildred says “he was rarely home, but the minute he walked through the door, he would take charge. If I was in the kitchen making lasagna, he would come in and start adding ingredients that I never used.”
Sarah: Why does he have to fuck with lasagna? Lasagna is innocent.
Mike: “The house could be immaculate, but he would start commenting on how I could do things differently or better. He didn't want the children to spend too much time in front of the television. So if they were watching something when he came in, he would turn it off saying that I was letting them watch too much TV.” It's just this kind of shit. Right. Just give me a break, dude.
Sarah: And you know, what's amazing too, is that we are conditioned to not see this behavior as in and of itself, abusive. Because the whole model of the nuclear family is that each man will have no emotional support whatsoever, no baseline of emotional intelligence, therapy for men is still a stigmatized concept. He can do whatever he wants, basically. He has to do something pretty awful for us to be, maybe you shouldn't be able to do whatever you want. And so I think that so many people grew up in households like this and don't think of their childhood as having been abusive.
Mike: Yeah. And this is something she talks about a lot now that, you know, the vast majority of abusive relationships are not physically abusive. And so one of the things that makes this so hard is, you know, the minute she starts describing this abuse to anyone else, oftentimes, what happens is they talk to John and then John says, she's crazy. She's hysterical. She's made up all this stuff. And so there's a point where Mildred goes to a guy at their mosque and finally opens up about this abuse that she's been so afraid to talk about. And the guy goes and talks to John, and he basically tells him the same facts, right. Well, yeah, Mildred did draw a crooked line down the list of pros and cons, but like, I was just joking. That's not abusive. I was just saying, ha ha, you could draw a straighter line. And she's built it up into this thing. And she's completely hysterical. She's made this thing about me attacking her.
Sarah: Nicole hit me.
Mike: Right. It's the perfect form of abuse to both sides. Right. It's so easy for him to describe this as her being crazy.
Sarah: Yeah. And also because if you're just constantly criticizing, constantly belittling someone, everything they do, they do wrong, then they can't tell someone about an individual incident and convey what it feels like. It's like it really defies description.
Mike: Yeah, totally. She essentially has one friend at this point. It's this woman named Olivia, who she knows from her mosque, who is sort of her one friend that is separate from John. And after she goes to the mosque to tell this guy about the abuse, and then he goes to John, John, first of all, he says to her, let me tell you something, nobody is going to listen to you. I have this all wrapped up. So he's basically threatening her and saying no matter who you tell, I'm going to do the same thing again. And so he starts telling, preemptively, all of their mutual friends, you know, my wife came up with this weird thing that like I'm abusing her. So that by the time she tells them, yeah, they're already thinking, well, John already said she's kind of hysterical.
Sarah: And as we've discussed many times before, in the media, as with marriages, whoever tells their side of the story first tends to be believed.
Mike: I mean, one thing I also can't get over is that John is the one who suggests a divorce.
Sarah: Huh? That is a twist.
Mike: So she's at the shop, she's doing paperwork. He sits down and he says, I think we should get divorced. It's not working. Despite everything, despite how badly things are going, she immediately starts crying. She's absolutely devastated.
Sarah: Because also she's done so much work and she's tried so hard and now he's the one who's rejecting her. Yeah. And so it was so interesting, so she sort of spends the rest of the afternoon driving around kind of thinking about it. And she eventually comes to the decision that, you know what, maybe it's better for us. When she's thinking about this in her head, it's really interesting in her book, she sees it as his perspective. She's like, well, John will still be able to see the kids. I’ll still be able to run the business for John so he can keep earning income. So even in this, she's putting him first and is basically saying like, well, maybe your divorce won't be so bad for John.
Sarah: Well, if that's the way you have to think about it.
Mike: This is what I was thinking too, whatever works, Mildred. Whatever gets you out of there, Mildred.
Sarah: Whatever gets you out of there. Yeah.
Mike: What's fascinating is she comes home and he's at home and he says, you know, have you thought any more about what I said? And she's like, you know what. I think you're right. I think we should do it. And he turns white.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: He goes, divorce? What do you mean? And then he says, well, that's not what I want. So according to her book, she says, “I had done my thinking and praying and felt stronger than I had earlier in the day. I don't want to be with anybody who doesn't want to be with me, I said. That's not it, John said. I just wanted to scare you.”
Sarah: What?!
Mike: Yes. I mean, this is what's so great. He tries to call Mulligan. She starts going to the library after work to sort out her legal options.
Sarah: Because he's put the idea in her head now, it's been real to her for a few hours and maybe it felt pretty good.
Mike: Yes. So she actually, after a couple of weeks of doing this, comes back and she's like, I want you to move out. And he agrees, he moves into a hotel room. And so this goes on for a couple of weeks. This is like the most infuriating part of the story. There's an old friend of his, an old military friend who's coming to Fort Lewis and John's like, oh, do you mind if my buddy stays with us? And she's like, oh, whatever, because she knows this guy too. And then. he's like, well, you know, one thing, he doesn't know we're separated. So when he's staying with us, I'm just going to stay there at night until he goes to bed and then I'll go sleep in the hotel room and then I'll get there in the morning before he wakes up. That way he won't know that we're separated. And so Mildred is like, ugh, whatever. So they do this ridiculous charade for three or four days. Eventually their friend, who's not an idiot, figures this out and is like, something is happening. And Mildred is like, yeah, we're actually separated. Sorry, I know it's weird. And he kind of talks her out of it. He's like, oh, you guys are so great. Have you really done everything? Can't you make it work?
Sarah: She prayed! Let her. Just, ah!
Mike: So she agrees to go see a counselor.
Sarah: Sometimes people do decide to throw away a relationship without thinking about it enough. But I feel like the norm is people staying too long in bad relationships. I don't know if it's ever appropriate, if a woman's like, yeah, I'm sure I'm done with this marriage, to be like, no! How do you know?
Mike: Right. And it's always a version of like, give him another chance.
Sarah: Ignore how you feel. Yeah.
Mike: Yeah. So they start seeing a therapist. She tells the therapist everything. He sits there and doesn't really apologize and kind of gas lights. This is an incredible twist. Later on, Mildred finds out that the therapist has started dating John. So this is how good this guy is at manipulating people.
Sarah: He does have a very high rate of success, it would seem. His numbers are really quite good.
Mike: Yeah. It's unbelievable. And imagine a therapist who sits there, listens to Mildred crying as she describes the conditions that she's living in, and then six months later, this guy seems fine.
Sarah: Yeah. You know, you're never going to make lasagna in front of this man. On some level.
Mike: And then again, and Mildred talks in her book about, I can't be mad at this woman. John's really good at manipulating.
Sarah: Yeah. And she's right. Why would she be mad at anyone except John, which is also a problem area for her. But you know, she's not going to get there any faster by being mad at other people.
Mike: Yeah. Throughout this book, I find this so moving, the way that she really demonstrates a lot of grace. Over and over again, people who harm her, she looks at them and says, well I can't really blame them. John was manipulative. She eventually forgives Lee Boyd Malvo, she testifies at Lee Boyd Malvo’s trial.
Sarah: That is classic Mildred.
Mike: I don't know. We should all look at the world the way that Mildred does.
Sarah: We should all look at the world the way that Mildred does and also fuse it with the belief that we ourselves are worth a damn. And then things would be pretty good.
Mike: So this is nuts. At the urging of this therapist, John comes home.
Sarah: Are she and John having an affair at this point?
Mike: Not yet. That is much later.
Sarah: So before his affair with the therapist.
Mike: The plan was to do a test run weekend. Let's try getting back together. Let's see how it goes. So John comes over on a Friday night, they spend a lovely weekend together. It's a nice family weekend. And on Monday they go back to the therapist and John says, I'm not ready to come home. I had to make sure we were making the best decision, and this is it. Mildred is just like, all right, I'm done. We're not going to do this ever again.
Sarah: The thing about incredibly patient people is that they do seem to often reach a true breaking point, right? They will tough it out for a long time, but when they're done, they're done.
Mike: Yeah. And she says “I was finished. I'd had enough. I didn't want to be married to John for one more minute. What I wanted was for him to pack up his madness and go. I tried to speak in a confident tone that would convince him. You just wanted to see if you could pull me toward you, I said. But as of today, you have to go.”
Sarah: I'm tired of being a game to you.
Mike: Yeah. And so this is it. It sticks. Do you want to guess how John reacts to this?
Sarah: By trying to reconcile for real?
Mike: Yeah. He buys her things. And then when that doesn't work, he gets vindictive.
Sarah: Welcome to You're Wrong About, the show where we describe the same marriage over with eerie similarity.
Mike: So this is where it gets really ugly. He changes her phone number five times.
Sarah: Oh my God. With or without her knowledge?
Mike: Without that means her friends can't call her, her work can't call her. And if she's out, she can't call home to see how the kids are. And she sort of pleads with John. Our son has asthma. I need to be able to call home. And then he just plays dumb, oh, I didn't even know about changing the number.
Sarah: We've already decided it's unmanly to have asthma.
Mike: I mean, exactly. And he reduces the amount of money she gets for food from $200 a month to $50 a month.
Sarah: Oh my God.
Mike: This is a woman with three young children and a diabetic mother. $50 a month.
Sarah: Yeah. He's practicing Jonestown strategies where I'm so desperate to keep you under my control. I must limit your calories.
Mike: Yes. She tries to get food stamps, but because they're still married, his income counts against hers. And so she can't get food stamps.
Sarah: Because food stamps don't allow for the budgetary issues of spousal abuse.
Mike: And so she just stops eating. Her kids notice that she doesn't eat with them at dinner anymore and they sort of ask, and she says, I'm doing this for spiritual reasons. I'm fasting. I've listened to a million podcast interviews with her. She's fascinating. She talks about how she kind of did think of it as a spiritual thing. This is how she got through this period. This is a spiritual test, right?
Sarah: I mean if you're not in control of the situation anyway. I can see it giving you the strength to endure it, to see it that way.
Mike: I want to read you this little part. It's kind of long, but bear with me. “One day there was a knock at the door. I looked out to see who it was and saw my friend, Olivia”
Sarah: This is Olivia from the mosque?
Mike: Yeah. “I didn’t want to let her in the house. She would look around and I was ashamed of what she would find. When I finally opened the door, I stepped outside to greet her.’ Okay. Tell me what's going on’, she said. ‘No, no one would believe me’. ‘Try me’, Olivia said. I told her everything that had happened between me and John. ‘Okay. I've heard enough,’ she said. She walked into the kitchen and looked in the cabinets. Then she looked in the refrigerator.
There wasn't much in either place. She looked at me and I put my head down, ‘get your scarf,’ she said, ‘we're going to the store’. ‘Olivia, you don't have to do that,’ I said. ‘Did I stutter?’ She asked. I laughed and said, ‘okay’. ‘Bring the children so we can give your mom a break’, she said. Then she went into my mom's room and took her order for what she wanted to eat. First, Olivia took us to the grocery store. ‘Okay. Chica, get whatever you need.’ ‘Olivia, that's going to be a lot’, I warned. ‘Did I stutter?’ She asked again. I filled two baskets with food. After the store, Olivia took me and the children to a restaurant. When we finished eating, she ordered my mom's food. The children were happy and laughing. You don't leave a friend like that, which is why Olivia is still my best friend.”
Sarah: Well I'm very anxious now, did John do anything to the groceries?
Mike: No, no, but you're right. He comes over after this to give her the 50 bucks for next month's food and he sees the cupboards full, and he decides that she's cheating on him. So this then escalates the abuse. He still has keys to their house, so he starts showing up there at night. Once she sort of wakes up as she's sleeping and he's standing at the foot of her bed, and she just pretends to be asleep until he leaves. He also comes over one night and when she's like, “Hey, what are you doing here?” He's like, oh, just stopping by seeing the kids. As if it's totally normal. And she's like, that isn't really how this works. And she tries to push the door closed. He then shoves the door open and pushes through and then starts looking through the house to see if there's a man there. She actually calls the cops after he does this. They got there after he had already left. And she's like, well, what can I do? And they're like, well, you're married to this guy and his name was on the lease. So we can't really do anything.
Sarah: Which is amazing because he's still behaving threateningly towards her. It’s not as if she's saying the house feels scared, you know. Why does his name being on the lease have anything to do with the fact that he's threatening her?
Mike: And there's no physical abuse.
Sarah: He's just controlling her life and restricting her calories and standing over her bed while she's sleeping. Why can't we recognize that as abusive behavior? So one of the key paragraphs in this chapter of her book, she says, “A few days later after the situation had calmed down, John came over again. He was nicely dressed and wearing a shirt and tie. He said he wanted to talk to me, so we went into the garage. As he spoke, I saw the cold fury in his eyes. You and Olivia are not going to raise my children, he said. You have become my enemy, and as my enemy, I will kill you.”
Sarah: Do you remember how OJ would talk so much about Faye Resnick, even when it was pretty irrelevant. He talked a lot about Faye when the police questioned him. I think it's because if you sense that someone else is empowering the person who you are trying to control, you're going to direct a lot of aggression at them. And I think that was Faye. And I think that was Olivia, right?
Mike: That’s why dictators always shut down the churches because it's a separate form of power. It's a separate form of information. And so you don't want them to have any source of trust or self-esteem in their lives.
Sarah: So Faye Resnick is the Catholic church and the Soviet Union.
Mike: Yes. And so, because Mildred is just super sick of his shit by this point, she's like, right. She goes straight to the police department and fills out a restraining order. She goes to court, she gets, I believe it's one of the first lifetime restraining orders that that judge has ever given out. So as all this is happening, they're trying to work out some sort of arrangement for custody of the kids. So they decide on every other weekend, John will get them, and they don't really write this down. They just sort of handshake-y kind of agreement. They find a friend of his who's going to shuttle the kids back and forth, so they don't have to be in each other's presence because of the restraining order.
First weekend went fine. He takes the kids Friday, brings him back Sunday. No big deal. The second weekend rolls around. She tells the friend to make sure the kids are back by 5:30 on Sunday, because it's my mom's birthday. We're going to do a whole big thing. Just make sure they're back by 5:30 on Sunday. Weekend’s fine, she's a little trepidatious. She's paging him. He's calling back. Things are kind of normal. 5:30 on Sunday rolls around. The friend shows up at her door and gives her a note. It's a note from Taleeba, her youngest daughter. And it's a note that says, happy birthday, grandma. I love you. And she's like, okay, but where's John, where's the kids. And this friend is just like, you need to call him. I can't be in the middle of this. Just call him. She starts frantically paging him. He calls her back and he's like, weirdly casual about it. We're at an electronic store in Seattle. I'll have them back in 45 minutes and then two hours goes by and then she pages him again and he's like, oh yeah, sorry, we got distracted at an arcade. We'll be back soon. And they never come back.
So a week goes by, she goes to their school in desperation to look for them. Maybe there's been some mistake and they've been in school this whole time. She's totally desperate. And the teacher is like, you need to go home and call the cops. She calls the cops. They come and they take a report. But because there's no official custodial arrangement, there's no paperwork, this isn't kidnapping because he hasn't violated any written documentation.
Sarah: Do remember what percentage of kidnappings are committed by non-custodial parents?
Mike: Hundreds of thousands a year. This is how kids get kidnapped. Although it's an interesting thing because sometimes the kids are kidnapped by the abusive parent and sometimes the kids are kidnapped to get the kids away from an abusive parent.
Sarah: And it's still illegally kidnapping.
Mike: It's a very murky issue, but like these kinds of cases, exactly this case, is way more common than any of this sex trafficking, stranger danger stuff.
Sarah: It makes sense that the vast majority of cases where somebody wants to take a kid, they want to take that kid, not for the value of their kid-ness or for their own kind of random deviant purposes, but because it’s that particular kid. And he had to take the kids away because he'd lost control over her. And I mean, you can see the ambulatory logic of that.
Mike: So she talks about sort of living in this silent house with her mom and how devastated she is. He's emptied the bank accounts. She starts looking around for jobs. She's barely eating, the rent is due, her entire life is falling apart. And so at one point a postman comes and she's signing for a package, and she just passes out, flops to the ground, and they take her to the hospital. She needs a blood transfusion. It's not clear what sort of condition she had other than just an explosion of stress.
Sarah: $50 a week grocery-itis.
Mike: When she's in the hospital, she's there for a couple of days. On the third day, John calls her in the hospital. So someone is reporting back to John what's going on. And so he calls her in the hospital. This is from her book. “How are you doing? He said, as if nothing was wrong and we were having a regular conversation. I'm good. How are you doing? I asked, speaking calmly. How's mom? I was still calm. I said, she's fine. I paused. And then asked, why don't you let the children call me? We don't always get what we want, do we, he yelled.
Sarah: Oh my God. Oh no.
Mike: I understood what John was saying. For years when his angry reaction was totally inappropriate, I had to read between the lines to interpret what he was really saying. So there, lying in the hospital. He was saying that I had a choice. I could go back to him and die, or I could hang up and never see the children again. I did the only thing I believed I could, if I ever stood a chance of seeing my children again, I hung up the phone and screamed.” And so the same day that he calls the hospital, he also calls her mother and makes a death threat.
Sarah: Oh, my God. Her sick, diabetic mom.
Mike: Yes. And threatened to kill her. Yeah. If she keeps looking for him. And so what's really interesting is that now that there's a death threat, the system starts working for her.
Sarah: Oh, Jesus Christ. That's the magic button. They're like, oh, a death threat? Oh, that's one of the things on our lists. Geez.
Mike: All of a sudden, protective custody is on the table. They transfer her to a women's shelter called Phoebe's House.
Sarah: Where Lisa Kudrow brings you toast.
Mike: And it's kind of funny. They're checking her in and they're like, well, you know, we're going to put you in hiding, you need to pick a new name, a new identity. What do you want your new name to be? And she just sort of looks around and she's like, what's the name of this place again? And they're like, Phoebe's house. And she's like, Phoebe. Yeah, I'll be whatever, sure why not. So all the other women at the shelter called her Phoebe from now on. And what's really interesting is that even at the shelter, this is not a form of abuse that people are set up to deal with because this isn't a domestic abuse shelter, it's a women's shelter. So most of the people that are there are women who have just gotten out of prison. They're women who have just gotten out of detox and they're sort of using this transitional housing until they find a place.
Sarah: So there's no trauma specific services right.
Mike: There are, but it's a little patchy and it's not people that are super well-trained. So, you know, other people are saying like, you know, I just got out of jail for years. I've been doing heroin for years. And they're like, well, what are you doing here? And she's like, my husband called me and threatened to kill me. And then there is this kind of sense of like, oh okay. You’re not really here for the same reasons as everybody else. She also gets a reputation as someone who's antisocial because she can't be near any of the windows. There's a sort of outdoor area with a barbecue thing and she won't go out there cause she's afraid John is going to shoot her from the rooftops.
Sarah: Which is, considering his later activities, an extremely justified fear.
Mike: Even in this house, everybody in the house knows what John looks like, because they're like, you know, watch out for this guy. If you ever see this guy, like let Phoebe know as soon as possible. And one of them spots John standing across the street. Also in her first couple of months at the shelter, somebody calls in a fire, the fire department shows up and says like, well, someone called and said, there's a fire at Phoebe's house. So we need everybody to evacuate. And so she just hides under a fucking bed and is like, I don't even care if it is a fire I'm hiding under the bed. I’m not going outside.
Sarah: Fuck it. I'd rather die in a fire than have John find me again.
Mike: Yeah. And so, I mean, this is really when Mildred starts the healing process and sort of realizes and starts unraveling what has happened to her over the 10 years of this marriage. So much of this is breaking down all of these assumptions that she's not good enough, right. Or that she had done something to make him take the kids. And so this is a really interesting passage that she says, “My grief for my children was intensified by my disappointment in people who did not believe me when I said John was going to kill me. Some people blame me for my predicament. Some said it was my fault since I let John walk all over me, others said it was my fault since I didn't let him walk over me enough. Some people said I should have been tougher and should not have allowed him to take the children on weekends. Others said, I should go back to him and give him one more chance. Everyone had a different idea about how I had brought this on myself and what I should be doing.”
And so a big part of the last part of this book is her getting angry. I did nothing wrong and like that's okay. And so the one thing she can do is she starts taking paralegal courses at night. And so she starts figuring out what paperwork I need to file to make the system work for me. Right. Because right now, John has given back the kids, we are not divorced. There's nothing anyone can do, even if he gets pulled over by the cops or arrested or whatever else. And so she does all the legal courses. She does all these domestic violence advocate courses. So she starts to learn how domestic violence works. She starts working at the YWCA on a domestic abuse hotline and she starts representing victims in court. She finally gets official custody of the kids.
Cause there's a whole paperwork process. You need to go through to get an official custody order saying she has custody. If John is arrested, the cops should know that he does not have custody of these kids so in case he gets picked up anywhere. She somehow does a divorce, gets a divorce without him. There's some legal process to do this based on the restraining order, based on the kidnapping, based on everything else. She also starts representing the other women in the shelter in their court cases. So she gets hired, she's the first person that the shelter has ever hired as a legal counselor, for all of the other women that are living there. They'll come to her with their cases, and she'll give them legal advice and, you know, probation violations or housing assistance, or sort of whatever they need. She's really, really good at navigating the system.
Sarah: It seems like a good job for her.
Mike: Oh yeah. And this is what she still does now. She's a domestic violence advocate. She gives talks. She's all over YouTube. This has become a career for her. So at this point, this is when she decides to move on. She has hired a million PIs now that she has an income. She has a cousin in Louisiana. Who's a detective and she's had him run records and try to figure out where John is with the kids. And he basically says that the trail has gone cold. There's no information at all, which usually means it's amazing that someone has left the country. Her mother, meanwhile, has moved in with her sister in Clinton, Maryland, just outside of DC, foreshadowing. And her mother's health is failing. And so her sister says, hey, can you move back here to be with me and mom? And she's been at the shelter for more than a year. She's sort of built up this new life and this new identity for her. She's like, yeah, I think I can keep looking for my kids. I can leave forwarding information. I can make sure that they can find me in case they come back, but it's time for me to move on.
Sarah: And I don't think my kids are in Washington state. Probably.
Mike: They could be literally anywhere. Yeah. And so this is one of the farewell notes that she gets from somebody at the shelter. “Hi Phoebe. Girl, once you got your strength back, you went online and enrolled in paralegal courses. You did your divorce, you got your list of all the schools around Washington state, stuffed envelopes and mailed them everywhere looking for your babies. It breaks my heart just thinking about everything, but you held on. I know you had your moments up in your room. I think even that made you stronger. The unconditional love and faith that you have in God who heard and answered your prayers. You became resident staff. You were so inspirational to the clients, they all loved you. You put on your sunglasses and disguised yourself to speak to the city council at the public meeting downtown. I wish I had that tape. You helped me more than you know, even with what you are going through. You're stronger than you know. Looking at the picture of you passing out the gifts during Christmas, you didn't care much about yourself. It just made you happy seeing everyone else happy. God bless you and your family, Doris.” And so when she leaves the shelter, all 17 of the women that are staying there come with her to the airport to say goodbye.
Sarah: They must've needed like two vans. Why do we never hear from people like Doris on the nightly news? And this is part of the story. This is newsworthy.
Mike: Absolutely. I mean, think about the strength of this woman, right? She's still in hiding. Think about her putting on her sunglasses and going to a city council meeting, right? Think about her going to court to defend someone else who's going through the abuse that she faced and risking experiencing more abuse by leaving the house. Right.
Sarah: And Doris appreciates her. Doris knows.
Mike: Yeah, they all do
Sarah: You’re making me cry in retaliation for the Paula episode. You're like, I'll get her.
Mike: I made all this up. None of this. There is no Mildred.
Sarah: It’s all been a long con.
Mike: You were just saying, why don't we make statues to people like Paula Barbieri’s mom, who raise their kids while in abusive marriages and put them in beauty pageants and put on their sunglasses and go to the city and just the amount of strength that categorically uncelebrated people in society exhibit, people like Phoebe, exhibit is like, there's nothing in American society as it exists that tells us we need to like look for and celebrate these people because we're so dependent on them just quietly holding the entire world together. I don't like that.
Mike: I want her to just get like a million dollars and for like my tax money to go to that. That would be the most just outcome for all of this.
Sarah: All of our tax money, ideally. I concur.
Mike: We're going to leave motored here. Next episode we're going to talk about where John went with the kids. But for now I want to end with talking about the fact that the DC sniper case is a case of domestic abuse and not just the fact that John was an abusive husband, the shootings were planned and made to seem random so he could get away with killing Mildred.
Sarah: Oh my God. I never knew that. I've never heard that before. Oh, my God. Why wasn't that- *incongruent speech*.
Mike: Right! This is why I was so bursting to do this episode early. Cause that's the sound I've been making for days.
Sarah: So like the terrorism case of my youth was a domestic abuse case all along.
Mike: Yeah. And their first killing, do you remember Isa Nichols, the business manager. They went to her house, knocked on her door. She was at the store, her niece Kenya opened the door and they shot her in the head. That’s their first killing.
Sarah: She just wanted them to be responsible with their small business finances.
Mike: And that was retaliation because Isa had chosen Mildred in this abuse situation.
Sarah: So are you saying that as soon as we understood this case well enough to know that it was not a white America is under siege, case, but a one black woman who's a victim of decades of domestic abuse is being targeted and this is all about her. This is all about his pursuit of controlling her and terrorizing her. And as soon as we realized that was what it really was, we were like, oh. I don't like stories that I'm not in.
Mike: This is from one of the books, one of the 12 books by the investigators that did the manhunt. “When we were questioning John, we asked him why he did the shootings. The first thing he said was its Mildred's fault.” And also the entire killings were planned after he figured out from a father's rights group where Mildred was living. He went to a father's rights group in Tacoma and told them that she took the kids. They did no background checks on him whatsoever.
Sarah: The phrase ‘a father's rights group in Tacoma’ does not bode particularly well, does it.
Mike: If they’re guest starring in your story, it's not a good story. But they went to Marilyn. They staked out her apartment, Lee Malvo at one point, knocked on her door and answered it. And he made something up, do you have directions? What time is it, something, just to see that it was her. And then they went to New Jersey and bought the Chevy Caprice and came back to DC.
Sarah: Huh. How were they traveling before? Do they have a different car?
Mike: Greyhounds.
Sarah: Oh, greyhounds. Okay. Oh, just like the glulam gang.
Mike: And it's also really important too, that we know how much police incompetence related to domestic abuse plays into this. So the restraining order that she filed against John, when he first threatened her, wasn't entered into a federal database until they had arrested John for the sniper shootings.
Sarah: I feel like the horse is out of the barn at that point.
Mike: Well, this is the thing. When they arrested him, the only evidence they had linking him to the shootings was that he was in a car. Somebody had reported a blue Chevy Caprice with this license plate number at the scene, but that's not great evidence, that witness could be mistaken.
Sarah: No, that's very sketchy.
Mike: So the only way they could hold him was they needed an excuse. And so they cast around and they find, oh, there's this restraining order in Washington.
Sarah: So essentially, it's something that they only take seriously if they want to hold someone without probable cause for a different crime.
Sarah: That's great.
Mike: They actually pulled John over in Gig Harbor, about 45 minutes away from Tacoma, and they didn't stop him because the custody order that Mildred had gotten wasn't in the computer. They ran the plate, and they were like, well, nothing outstanding, no big deal. He's got all his kids in the car.
Sarah: So they could have returned her kids to her months and months earlier.
Mike: Yes. And before the sniper shootings, John and Lee Malvo were pulled over by police three different times and let go every single time. This was before the shootings and during the shootings.
Sarah: During, during?
Mike: Yes. If they had gotten a hit for this guy kidnapping his kids, they would not have had the opportunity to commit the sniper shootings. Another reason why this has kind of been buried is because evidence of domestic abuse was not allowed in John's trial because then he wouldn't have been able to get the death penalty. Yes. So they tried it as a terrorism case.
Sarah: Because they want to do apply the death penalty? Why?
Mike: Mildred did not testify at his trial. She only testified at Lee Malvo’s trial. Mildred actually later gets a reputation as a difficult witness by the cops because when they're investigating John, they're calling her all the time for details. When did you get this? And what's this paperwork? Every single phone call, she says, I've been calling you for years. I have been calling you and getting you to listen to me, this man poses a danger to me and other people, and you haven't listened. And all of a sudden you want to make it about, oh, we're saving everybody. We're finally going to keep you safe. And now you’re interested.
Sarah: And they don't like her behaving with anything other than gratitude and submission. It's almost familiar.
Mike: And so this is kind of my revelation on all this that this is kind of a mixture of Mildred's theory of the crime and my personal theory of the crime. There's also the option that all this serial killer stuff, the tarot card, the notes to the police, that was faked to make it look like a serial killer.
Sarah: Oh my God. Wow.
Mike: Right. A great way to frame someone for another murder is to invent a serial killer.
Sarah: Hannibal Lector also recommends that if you want to kill someone you know for personal reasons, you should kill random people as well. Then the authorities want, assume a link between you and the victim that is really the one you're after the whole time. He is following the advice of serial killer media. So nineties.
Mike: I think it's really important to also stress that there's very good evidence for this theory, but there's also very good evidence against this theory.
Sarah: Right. You know, I mean, you don't kill - how many people that he killed?
Mike: Well it depends on how many people you count, but 17.
Sarah: You don't have to kill 17 people to establish a pattern. I mean, clearly there was a lot going on.
Mike: Exactly. And so there's this kind of serial killer explanation for this. He loved doing it. There's the terrorism explanation for this, that, he wanted to bring America to its knees, but the serial killer motivation, there's also very good evidence against that and the terrorism motivation, there's also very good evidence against that. So of all the explanations, there's good evidence for them and there's good evidence against them.
Sarah: A white guy in Canada killed three women and they made a movie about him with a guy from Supernatural. I just don't get it.
Mike: But we don't want to be sort of too, ‘you're wrong about it-y and just say that this is what it was and everybody's completely wrong. But I also think that it's really worth taking this explanation seriously.
Sarah: Well, don't you think that it's possible to introduce another explanation without voiding the first?
Mike: Yeah. Totally. I think that's where after the next two episodes we're going to land. I just think that as starting principles, the most convincing and the most complete account of this crime is that it's a domestic abuse crime, that he wants to assassinate his wife.
Sarah: Right. And then it's a lot of other things too, but that it starts as domestic abuse. And that domestic abuse seems to be the driving force here.
Mike: And a woman who was screaming for everyone around her to take her seriously and nobody did.
Sarah: Yes. And we just have this thing of, how will we find the serial killers while everyone needs to give their saliva to a database, I guess. And what if we just listened to women, if only for a day?
Mike: Yeah. One of the things I want to end with, I've been listening to all these podcasts interviews with Mildred all week where she's told the story of her relationship to John in kind of soundbite form so many times that she's very good at it. She kind of recites the details and the timeline. And you can tell she's sort of done it so many times that she's kind of going through the same story over and over again. And then she was doing some NPR interview and there's kind of more kind of back and forth. And this guy asks her, when we're talking about domestic abuse victims, generally, why do people stay? And then you can hear Mildred kind of break character. And she's like, you know what? I do this all the time. Everybody wants to know why do victims stay? Why do they stay? Why do they stay? No one ever asks me, why do abusers abuse? That's not the question we're interested in answering. Right? It's always the psychological stuff with the victims. When, I'm sorry, what is the psychology of somebody who does this over and over again and gets away with it? And so she says like, yes, of course my own psychology was contributing to the reason why I stayed, but you know another really big reason why I stayed, where was I going to go? Right. I had three young children. I had no source of income. I don't have friends with a wing of their house that my entire family can move in. The reason why victims stay is because for a lot of victims, the safest thing is for them to stay, right? Is that even if it's unsafe, it's safer to them than sleeping outside, then taking their children out of the home with nowhere to take them. The shelters are full, the transitional housing it's full Right. You keep wanting to understand the psychology of this, but there's not much we can do as a society about the psychology. We can do something about just giving people options. I was going to add the F word to that, but Mildred would never use the f word.
Sarah: Your mom will be happy about Mildred’s influence on you.
Mike: What do you think about all that?
Sarah: I agree. I agree with Mildred. I mean, and also like who the fuck cares what I think? Let's just listen to Mildred. She knows. That's what I think. Let's listen to Mildred.
Mike: So now you understand why I have been like this all week, wanting to tell you, wanting to tell anyone that will listen.
Sarah: I know that you've just been almost vibrating with excitement about telling me this and now I understand why. And I'm, I'm... God. When can we record again?
Mike: All week I'll see friends and they're like, Hey, how's your day been? And I'm like, well. And they're like, are we going to talk about Mildred Mohammad again? I'm like, yes.
Sarah: That's how people feel about man and the OJ Simpson trial.
Mike: I know we're both like this now.
Sarah: All I ever talk about anymore.
Mike: Unbelievable. We're both insufferable in the same ways. I hope that our listeners have something to be insufferable about this week.
Sarah: No matter what it is, just something.
Mike: Yes. Find the Mildred's, listen to the Mildred's.
Sarah: Lift the Mildred's up.
Mike: Give the Mildred's a million dollars. Michael Hobbes, 2020.