Story of a serial loser

John Muhammed is not so much a serial killer as a serial loser. He has spent much of his life drifting through jobs and marriages before ending up on the street with just a teenage boy and a high-powered rifle for company.

Even as a child in Baton Rouge, Louisiana, there was little stability. His father left home at an early age, with Muhammad, then called Williams, enlisting at 17 in the national guard. After striking an officer, he was given seven days in a military prison.

He enlisted in the US army in 1985, training as an engineer, and in the Gulf War he fixed vehicles and drove a water truck. He was discharged in 1995. If he had one skill it was as a marksman, winning the highest badge while at Fort Lewis in Tacoma, Washington state. He qualified using the M-16, the US army's standard-issue rifle - the Bushmaster, the weapon used in the sniper killings, is its civilian version.

In 1981 he married childhood sweetheart Carol Williams. They had a son, Lindbergh, but divorced in 1985. By then he had converted to Islam, changing his name to Muhammad.

In 1988 he married Mildred, with whom he had three children. These were probably the happiest years in Muhammad's life, in a modest house in the suburbs of Tacoma, south of Seattle.

But the relationship ran into trouble, with Mrs Muhammad filing for divorce four years ago. In March 2000 Muhammad collected the children from school and vanished, later enrolling them under false names at a school in Bellingham, near the Canadian border.

Sick with worry, his wife was admitted to hospital, later saying Muhammad had once threatened to kill her. A court awarded her sole custody.

Devastated by the loss of his family, Muhammad's life began a downward spiral. Several business ventures, including a karate school and car workshop, went bust.

He drifted to the streets of Bellingham, trying to sell frozen steaks to local restaurants. Last February he was arrested for shoplifting food.

Last year he joined up with John Lee Malvo, a Jamaican teenager living illegally in the US. Malvo, then 16, briefly attended a high school in Bellingham, where he claimed Muhammad was his stepfather. For a while the two lived in a homeless mission.

Last summer they arrived in Camden, New Jersey, an area plagued with drugs and violent crime.

On 10 September, the day before the World Trade Center attack, he paid about £150 for an elderly blue Caprice.

What happened after that is still unclear. A fellow resident at the mission remembers Muhammad making anti-America remarks.

Muhammad and Malvo are now being linked to the murder of a woman in an off-licence car park in Montgomery, Alabama.

FBI agents are also known to have visited a private paramilitary camp in the same area, used for training in urban combat and with links to Islamic fundamentalists groups.

Last month Muhammad moved to the Washington area. On 2 October the killings began.