Prosecutors: Malvo confessed to slaying of Keenya Cook in Tacoma
During cross-examination today, prosecutor Robert F. Horan Jr. said Malvo committed his first killing at Muhammad's bidding just 10 weeks after he ran away from his mother. Malvo confessed to the Feb. 16, 2002, slaying of Keenya Cook in Tacoma, saying he walked up to her house and shot her in the face at point-blank range.
"By February 16 he goes out and shoots a woman he doesn't even know in the face and kills her," Horan said in questioning the defense psychologist. "And it is your testimony he did this because he was indoctrinated by Muhammad?"
Psychologist Dewey Cornell said Malvo wanted to please Muhammad and that Cook's killing served as Malvo's first test that he would do Muhammad's bidding.
The series of sniper attacks that killed 10 people in the Washington, D.C., suburbs happened eight months later, in October 2002.
Also today, Cornell acknowledged that he did not mention any specific diagnosis in a mental health report to the court on Malvo.
Cornell had testified yesterday that he diagnosed Malvo with a dissociative disorder, a mental illness that involves losing touch with reality. Cornell said in the September report only that Malvo suffered from "extreme mental and emotional disturbance."
Malvo's lawyers are pursuing an insanity defense, saying the teenager was so indoctrinated by Muhammad that he no longer knew right from wrong.
Cornell told Horan on that Virginia law dictates the contents of the report he made in September, and that his diagnosis was not appropriate for that report.
Yesterday, Cornell testified that Malvo told him he was the spotter — not the shooter — in all of the sniper shootings except the last one.
That contradicted a confession to police in which Malvo, laughing at times, said he was the triggerman in all of the shootings. Jurors previously listened to the audiotape of that confession.
Cornell interviewed Malvo in jail more than 20 times since February. Malvo initially defended Muhammad but, after several months, said he realized that Muhammad had manipulated him, Cornell said.
"He realized he was an expendable person" to Muhammad, Cornell said, recalling that Malvo wondered: "If I was doing right, why did God let it stop?"
Cornell said Malvo had been instructed to claim responsibility for the killings to spare Muhammad.
Muhammad spent months preparing Malvo for a mission by controlling Malvo's diet and exercise, telling him that blacks were oppressed by the white government, teaching him to fire weapons and isolating him from family and friends, Cornell said.
There was a lot of mystery about what Malvo was being trained to do, Cornell said, but it was clear that Muhammad wanted to regain custody of his three children, who were living with Muhammad's ex-wife in the Washington suburbs, and that Muhammad wanted money from the federal government to fund his vision of a new Utopian society.
Then, while visiting Muhammad's family in Louisiana in August 2002, Malvo was finally told "that they were going to carry out a sniper plan to start shooting people, one after another," Cornell said.
Cornell also testified about Malvo's intense interest in the film "The Matrix," which Malvo watched more than 100 times — including just before Franklin's shooting.
Defense lawyers played a brief clip from the movie, in which the character played by Keanu Reeves guns down guards in a building lobby. Jurors also saw clips of several sniper video games that Malvo had played.