In the fall of 2002, Washington DC and surrounding suburbs were paralysed by a terrifying wave of random shootings from a sniper’s rifle, lasting over 23 days. Ten people were killed in this attack on the American capital, three others critically injured. This was an America still in shock just a year after 9/11 – but the sickeningly real possibility of sudden death on the street took public fear to an unprecedented level. The perpetrators were a Gulf War veteran, John Muhammad, and a Jamaican teenage boy, Lee Malvo, picking off their victims one by one from inside the trunk of a blue Chevy Caprice.

Now, in an six-hour television event, alongside the investigators, survivors and victims’ families, Malvo recounts his story in a series of phone calls, conducted over two years from his Supermax cell at Red Onion State prison in Virginia, where he is in solitary confinement. From his childhood of deprivation in Jamaica to the murders in forensic detail, this definitive account of an iconic American crime story examines how Malvo came to be a mass murderer at the age of just seventeen.