Ex-wife of D.C. Sniper speaks (Fort Lee, New Jersey)

Mildred Muhammad is one of my great heroes, a true survivor.

Like the recent daddy killer in southern California who murdered eight people at a salon because he was miffed over child custody, JOHN MUHAMMAD's violence couldn't be contained to just his family. Eventually many others were slaughtered to satisfy Daddy's blood lust and elusive quest for control.

Evidence from the trial demonstrated that the sniper killings were just a diversion from Muhammad's true goal: to kill his ex-wife and regain control of their children. And there is evidence that at least one fathers rights group provided him with assistance too. Though this is usually hushed up in the mass media.

And note how the FBI put this woman's in danger....

http://progress-index.com/news/ex-wife-of-d-c-sniper-i-just-sat-on-the-floor-and-screamed-1.1217503#axzz1agrT2Trl

Ex-wife of D.C. Sniper: "I just sat on the floor and screamed"by markus schmidt (staff writer)

Published: October 13, 2011

FORT LEE - For nine years, fear was Mildred Muhammad's closest companion. Every day, she feared that her ex-husband would find her and her children.

"He was going to shoot me in the head, because I was his enemy," she said about the man who was her husband for 12 years and who was the father of her three children - John Muhammad, also known as the D.C. Sniper. The man executed two years ago for the indiscriminate killing of at least 10 innocent people in 2002 that sent waves of fear among residents of Virginia, Maryland and Washington, D.C.

Yesterday, Mildred Muhammad was a special guest at a Domestic Violence Awareness Month event at the Regimental Club at Fort Lee, hosted by the Army Community Service's Family Advocacy Program.

While her former husband had randomly selected his victims before he killed them, she was his victim at home - a victim of domestic abuse and sudden outbreaks of violence. And to this day, Mildred Muhammad believes that John's and his young partner Lee Boyd Malvo's killing spree only served one purpose - to delude his plan to eventually kill her and take back their children.

Muhammad is a small woman with a shy smile. But when she begins to speak, a fire begins to flicker in her eyes. No doubt, she has told her story of survival countless times. And it is her story that makes her big.

When Mildred first met John Muhammad, she was 23 years old, still living at home with her mother. It was easy for John to win her over. They both had grown up without fathers, and John's mother had died of breast cancer when he was only 5. As a child, John had suffered physical abuse from an uncle. He was charming, handsome and always knew the right thing to say.

They soon became a couple and got married. John, who was born John Allen Williams, later took the name Muhammad, after joining the Nation of Islam. In the mid-1980s, he had volunteered for active duty in the military and qualified with the M-16, the Army's standard infantry rifle, earning the Expert Rifleman's Badge.

In the late 1980s, the couple lived in Germany, where John was based. When Iraqi dictator Saddam Hussein invaded Kuweit, he was sent to Saudi Arabia, from where he would soon leave to Iraq, fighting in Operation Desert Storm. "Like all soldiers, John had been trained well," Mildred said. "But no soldier has a clue what it is like in a war zone until he actually goes there."

John returned back to Germany after only three months in combat because of a shoulder injury he sustained when he was accidentally struck by the gun of a tank.

But the man who came home to Mildred was a different man.

"Before he went to Saudi, John was a very popular guy, everyone liked him, he was the life of a party," Mildred said. "But the man whom I married is still over there, because the man who came back was somebody else. I don't know what happened to him while he was there."

John mostly sat in a corner, often for hours, without saying a word. When he was deployed to California, things got worse. The change within him was now also visible on the outside. "He stopped wearing clothes with colors and he kept a crew cut," Mildred said. Diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder, he was discharged in 1994.

"We started our own company, and things were going good for a while," Mildred said. But when she discovered his constant womanizing, Mildred filed for divorce in 1999.

It was the beginning of the abuse at home.

"There was a time when I sat on my bed all night, ready to protect my family from him," Mildred said. Even after he had moved out, John tried to change the phone number and the locks in their home. He would enter her home at night and walk around her bed while she pretended to be asleep. He would try to use the children to get through to her.

One day, he told Mildred something that would haunt her forever.

"He said that I was now his enemy and that he would kill me, and that I would not raise my children without him," she said.

While friends and even her own brother didn't take the threat seriously, Mildred knew that John meant what he said. She filed for a life-long restraining order.

But she still wanted her three children to have a father in their lives. "I was hoping that someone could fix him, because he was crazy," she said. "I just wanted my life back. I wanted to go on like it was before."

One weekend, after a visitation, John did not return their children to Mildred as planned. After a few days, she called police for help but was told that there was nothing they could do. "We had no parental plan, so he was legally entitled to keep the children," she said. "The window of opportunity between divorce and custody dates is when most children are taken."

Mildred started a search for her children that would last 18 months. Little did she know that her former husband had brought them to the Carribean island Antigua, where he is believed to have engaged in credit card and immigration fraud activities.

Worn out from the stress, Mildred suffered a nervous breakdown. In her hospital room, she received a call from John. "We had a casual conversation, and I asked him to bring my children back," Mildred said. John's response: "You can't always get what you want in life."

Mildred's situation seemed hopeless. "I had two choices, to go back and die, or never see my children again," she said.

While looking for her children, Mildred lived in constant fear that her ex-husband would find and kill her. "I had to disconnect from everybody I know," she said. "I changed my name and I changed locations, because I was terrified of John. I knew what he could do."

Mildred learned to live on the edge. "I knew he was going to kill me with a headshot, because that's how he was trained. So I always closed the curtains, never stood close to a window." Whenever she entered a public building, she first tried to locate all exits and possible escape routes. Eventually, she moved to a women's shelter and began to study law to initiate the legal process to get her children back.

When the F.B.I. offered to help her find her children, Mildred turned the offer down. "They wanted to put me in the middle of a parking lot and use me as a decoy, because they knew that he was coming to get me," she said, shaking her head.

In August 2001, Mildred got the call that her children were found near the Canadian border. When she first spoke to them on the phone, she was overwhelmed by emotion. "I had not heard their voices in 18 months," she said. "My youngest daughter told me that she was now 9 years old and that she believed I had forgotten her birthday."

To finalize the custody ruling, Mildred had to face her ex-husband in court. "I was so scared," she said. "It was just John, my attorney and me, and I was sure he was going to try to kill me. By the time you think about it, he's done it - he's going to snap my neck."

After the judge ordered John to sign away his custody rights, Mildred was reunited with her children. "I hardly could see them through my tears," she said.

At her new home in Maryland, Mildred and her children still had to live with the fear that he might come back to kill her.

When she first heard of the Beltway Sniper attacks in October 2002, Mildred had no idea that her former husband could be behind these crimes.

For three weeks, John and Malvo terrorized the Capital Beltway area from Maryland down the Interstate 95 corridor to Ashland, killing 10 people and injuring three critically. They fired the deadly shots from the trunk of a 1990 Chevrolet Caprice sedan. Apparently, they had begun their murder spree in Louisiana and Alabama.

"Just like everybody else in those weeks, I was looking out for two Caucasians in a white van," Mildred said, referring to media and police reports from that time. But she also continued to look out for Muhammad, not aware that he was the man behind the sniper attacks.

On Oct. 11, Mildred and one of her co-workers noticed a car parked outside her workplace. It was a Chevrolet Caprice sedan, with New Jersey license plates. "As we walked by, the driver, a young African-American, looked at us, and the passenger hid his face behind a newspaper," she said.

They could do little more but call police about the suspicious incident, which they did not connect to the sniper attacks.

Almost two weeks later, police came to pick up Mildred at her house. "Three officers kept asking me questions about a shooting in Nevada, but I didn't know what this was about," she said. "They showed me a letter that they had found in a tree near the one of the sniper attacks and asked if I could identify the handwriting."

Eventually, the investigators put their cards on the table. "They told me that they were going to name my ex-husband as the sniper," Mildred said.

While she was shocked and in tears, Mildred did not doubt for a second that John was able to kill innocent victims indiscriminately. She remembered one evening, when they were still married and were watching a movie. "John suddenly told me that he could take a whole city out if he wanted to, and that nobody would notice that it was just a single man," she said. When Mildred asked him what he meant by that, he didn't answer.

Investigators also told her that they believed she was the intended target in the killing spree. "They said that he wanted to kill me so he could take custody of the kids," she said. In his trial, the judge later ruled that there was insufficient evidence to support this argument.

Mildred let police take her into protective custody. "They took us to a hotel. I still don't know where," she remembered. "We turned on the TV and it was the first time that I saw John there." Mildred walked to the TV and touched her former husband's face. "What's happening to you," she whispered.

With the children crying, Mildred locked herself in the bathroom. "I just sat on the floor and screamed," she said.

Muhammad and Malvo were arrested the next day, after a passerby had found them sleeping in their car at a rest stop off of Interstate 70 near Myersville, Md.

"Before they let us out of protective custody, police made us pay our dinner bill, which was $273.45," Mildred said. "Then all this stuff started coming out about John."

For their children, it seeing their father face multiple murder charges wasn't the only ordeal. They were also shocked to find out that Malvo had been Muhammad's partner - a young man whom they had come to love like a brother in the 18 months they were on the run with their father. "Lee was looking for a father figure, and John introduced him to our children as their big brother," Mildred said. "They were best friends." Malvo is serving six life terms in a Virginia prison with no chance of parole.

Mildred testified against John in the sentencing phase of his trial. "The jury said that they gave him the death penalty because they didn't want him to finish what he started - to kill me," she said.

John was exectuted Nov. 10, 2009, at Greensville Correctional Center in Jarratt, just 30 minutes south of Petersburg.

"When he was executed, one of my daughters broke down to cry," Mildred said. "I cradled her and she looked me in the eye, looking for something," she said. "But there was nothing there, no compassion, no feeling. When she noticed that, she stopped crying."

Mildred Muhammad has made peace with her former husband's hatred towards her, long before he was executed. All three children attended their father's funeral. But Mildred did not go. "Many in his family are against me. They even told my children that it is my fault that their father was executed," she said.

Today, Mildred is a motivational speaker and national spokesperson against domestic violence. She has authored books and appeared on national television. Her children are now young adults and she is proud of them. "My two girls sing opera in five languages," she said.

They still talk about their father and they continue to ask questions. "I told my children that I would always answer all their questions about their dad's actions, and I told them that they have a right to love him and pray for him," Mildred said. "And I will always tell them the truth about what happened, even if it makes me look bad."

Because talking is understanding, and understanding is healing. Mildred knows that. "I will not allow my kids to fail in life because their dad is the D.C. Sniper," she said.