Impulse Debated in Sniper Case

CHESAPEAKE, Va. —  Using military lingo, sniper suspect Lee Boyd Malvo told a psychiatrist, he gave the signal over a walkie-talkie: “Mobile One, you have a go,” indicating to his accomplice that a potential victim had entered the killing zone. Moments later, a 47-year-old FBI analyst lay dead.

Linda Franklin, loading her car in a Home Depot parking lot, was the ninth of 10 random murder victims in the October 2002 sniper attacks that terrorized the nation’s capital. Malvo 18, could face the death penalty if convicted in her death.

“That’s what his job was. He was a soldier, a spotter,” Dr. Neil Blumberg -- a Maryland forensic psychiatrist who interviewed Malvo for the defense -- said Thursday. But Blumberg also said Malvo was legally insane at the time of the sniper attacks because he had been brainwashed by John Allen Muhammad, 42, who was found guilty of capital murder in a trial last month.

Malvo’s court-appointed attorney, Craig Cooley, said the defense would wrap up its case when the trial reconvened Monday. After the prosecution calls rebuttal witnesses and both sides deliver their closing arguments, the case is to go to the jury, probably late next week.

Blumberg was one of seven mental health experts Cooley called to support Malvo’s plea of not guilty by reason of insanity. To reach that verdict, the jurors must be convinced that the defendant couldn’t tell right from wrong and did not understand the consequences of his actions.

Two psychiatrists and a psychologist testifying for the defense have said Malvo suffered from dissociative disorder, which leaves a person out of touch with reality. It qualifies as a mental disease in Virginia.

Blumberg said Malvo was “unable to resist the impulse to commit the offense” that took Franklin’s life. “From Day One,” he added, “I thought he met the legal criteria for being legally insane in Virginia.”

But prosecutor Robert Horan challenged that assessment, saying there was nothing impulsive in the actions of someone who scouted out an assassination site, used binoculars to identify a victim and gave his triggerman the go-ahead. He said the fact that Malvo contemplated suicide during the murderous cross-country journey with Muhammad -- as he has told psychiatrists he did -- confirmed he was “fully aware he was doing something terribly wrong.”

What Malvo has told Blumberg and other mental health experts in jailhouse interviews differs dramatically from three taped confessions given to law enforcement officers shortly after he and Muhammad were arrested Oct. 24, 2002.

In the tapes, which were played for jurors, Malvo said he was the triggerman, not the spotter, in the 10 sniper murders. He bragged about making “head shots,” joked with his interrogators, and spoke proudly about his and Muhammad’s prowess in selecting attack sites that provided safe avenues of escape.

“His behavior [in interrogations with investigators] was bizarre,” said Dr. Diane Schetky, a psychiatrist who evaluates the legal sanity of defendants in Maine’s court system.

“It was totally inappropriate to the context of the situation. He was laughing, being silly, childlike ... and displaying a pathological loyalty to Mr. Muhammad -- to the extent that, when the investigator suggested the person doing the shooting might take the rap, he confessed readily that he pulled the trigger in all of the cases.”