Sniper liked to control others: Son

Lindbergh Williams said he learned about indoctrination firsthand — from his father, John Allen Muhammad, the main accused in the Washington sniper killings case. When he was 11, Williams said on Tuesday, Muhammad convinced him that his mother was abusing him and he should never go near her again. ‘‘If you talk to him, he’ll take advantage of you,’’ Williams testified.

Williams was returned to his mother after a brief legal battle, but he said it took him months to get ‘‘decoded’’ from his father’s influence. The son, now 21, did not see his father again until 2002, when Muhammad had a new protege: Lee Boyd Malvo, then 17. Defence attorneys called Williams to the stand in Malvo’s murder trial to dramatise Muhammad’s powers of persuasion. They then called seven witnesses from Bellingham, Wash., who saw Malvo and Muhammad together in 2001 — and who characterised Muhammad to different extents as a trainer and Malvo as a trainee.

The testimony was part of the Malvo defence’s strategy to convince the jury that the teenager was temporarily insane as he was indoctrinated by Muhammad.

Lindbergh Williams testified: ‘‘He (Muhammad) had embedded inside my head (that) I didn’t want to go home; my mother was abusing me.’’ Commonwealth’s Attorney Robert F. Horan Jr. pointed out that the son had returned home, so he must have rejected his father’s overtures. But Lindbergh Williams disagreed. ‘‘After a while, I started believing him,’’ Williams said. Horan asked whether he thought he was returning to an abusive mother. ‘‘That’s what he had me thinking…. He was a manipulator. He was the type of person who, if he saw a weakness, he would take advantage of it.’’ — LAT-WP