How does a bright, popular, affectionate kid get turned into a killing machine? In Jamaica, Antigua, Washington State, and Virginia, the author uncovers a blend of emotional abandonment and psychological indoctrination that put 17-year-old Lee Malvo behind a rifle as John Muhammad’s partner in the 2002 Washington, D.C., sniper murders

The neighborhood isn’t one you’ll find in a Jamaica tourism brochure. But neither is Waltham Park—a lazy commercial and residential district in Jamaica’s capital of Kingston—the kind of place you’d expect to spawn one of America’s most reviled domestic terrorists.

“Ya, mon, this a good spot,” Leslie Malvo is saying. It’s a steamy May night, and I am seated curbside with Malvo, the 55-year-old father of convicted Washington, D.C.—area sniper Lee Boyd Malvo. In a hard half-light, thrown off by bare bulbs outside a crossroads café called the Inner City Pub, we’re both shiny with sweat in the night’s rich heat. Reggae spills from the bar’s open doors. Bicycles roll past.

“We used to sit here, Lee and me, so many, many nights,” Malvo says in a thick Jamaican accent. He’s short and solid, with close-cropped gray hair and a long, fine nose. His hands—especially his fingers—have been bent and mashed by years spent working as a mason around the Caribbean. These days, Malvo is a construction foreman in Kingston, but he retains his stone mover’s thick shoulders and heavily muscled forearms.

“When Lee was small, three going to four,” he says, “I came down to this intersection one day and bought him a three-wheeled bicycle from one of the shops. He could not ride it yet, so I tied a cord to the front of the bicycle. Then, every night, I’d pull him up the street to the ice-cream parlor over there . . . ” Malvo points across the road toward a brightly painted storefront called the Creamy Cabin, where children stand in line. “Every night, we would come down for cream after I got home from work and washed. And Lee would always eat his cone the same way. He’d eat the ice cream off the top, then he would bite off the bottom, so the cream would run down his arms and mess him up. And Lee would always look up at me, with his big eyes, and ask for another. So I’d buy one more, and we’d walk over here, to these tables, and play dominoes with my friends. That is my favorite memory of Lee. We did this hundreds of nights, when he was three, four, and five years old.”

Did Lee have a favorite flavor of ice cream?

Leslie Malvo smiles gently, savoring the memory. “Yes,” he says. “Grape nut. He loved grape-nut ice cream.”

Malvo stares down at his battered hands and smiles once again. “My Lee is a good boy,” he says. “He was always a polite, manageable boy. What a life, huh?”

When 19-year-old Lee Malvo recalls his favorite memory, he, too, is transported to this Waltham Park crossroads at twilight, or so he has told his psychologists, lawyers, and friends. From his cell at a “supermax” prison called Red Onion, in southwestern Virginia—a penitentiary designed in part for convicts serving life sentences without parole—he can still taste the ice cream, feel the stickiness of the tropical air, and hear the clicking of dominoes in the night. Both father and son know his life should have turned out differently.

In a partnership whose precise workings may never be known—and whose existence shattered dozens of lives—Malvo and another man he called “father,” John Allen Muhammad, were responsible for the series of shootings that terrorized the Washington, D.C., area for three weeks in October 2002. Ten people were killed by the duo; three more were seriously wounded. Most were the victims of bullets fired by a high-powered rifle hidden inside the trunk of a carefully modified Chevrolet Caprice. After Malvo and Muhammad were arrested, authorities came to believe that, in the previous eight months, they had been responsible for another five killings and four nonfatal shootings stretching across the breadth of the United States. The spree is believed to have begun in Tacoma, Washington, on February 16, 2002, when Malvo—as a rite of passage abetted by Muhammad—pointed a large-caliber pistol at a woman who answered her aunt’s front door; unprovoked and at point-blank range, he pulled the trigger, sending a bullet nearly half an inch in diameter through her right nostril and into her skull while her six-month-old baby cooed upstairs.