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When John Allen Muhammad was convicted last month, it still wasn't clear what had turned a seemingly ordinary pair into a sniper team who, authorities say, staged 20 shootings across seven states, killing 15 people and wounding seven. "We don't know what made them take the final leap," a member of the prosecution team said.
But in the last week, with confessed accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo's trial here nearing its final phase, a clearer picture of the itinerant gunmen has emerged -- along with a possible motive laid out by Malvo.
The "mission," said one of the many mental-health experts who have conducted jailhouse interviews with Malvo, 18, was to incite a racial revolution over the "continued oppression of black people" and to set up a utopian black colony in Canada based on racial and social justice.
In August 2002, psychiatrist Dewey Cornell testified, Muhammad reportedly told Malvo that "they were going to carry out a sniper plan, to start shooting people one after the other." No court testimony indicated why Muhammad or Malvo thought such attacks would spark a revolution.
In the months preceding Muhammad's comment, various defense witnesses said the 42-year-old Army veteran had indoctrinated Malvo into sharing his rage over white American society. He had taken the teenager on trips across the country to speak with blacks in slums and homeless shelters. He had Malvo listen to tapes of anti- American speeches, using headphones to deliver the message even while the teenager slept.
Malvo has said, according to court testimony, that he was put through rigorous training: Muhammad reportedly taught him how to shoot, gave him violent video games to play, lectured him on Islam, put him on a strict vegetarian diet laced with vitamin pills and globs of honey, and once tied him to a tree so the youth could prove his toughness.
In the end, mental-health experts for the defense said, Muhammad owned Malvo's mind.
Dewey, who spent 54 hours interviewing Malvo, said the teen told him that "white people are devils." Malvo, he added, "came to believe there would be a revolution."
From the time of their chance meeting in an electronics shop on the Caribbean island of Antigua in late 2000,...