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For 18 unforgettable days, he struck fear into the heart of every man, woman and child living in Washington DC, effectively paralysing the U.S. capital.
All outdoor sporting events were cancelled; shoppers ran zigzag from their vehicles to the supermarkets; motorists cowered behind their cars as they pumped petrol, never knowing whether they might be next in the telescopic sights of his high-powered rifle.
In all, 13 seemingly random victims were picked off in those grim autumn days of 2002, only three of whom survived.
But for the warped former U.S. Army marksman who staged this act of mass slaughter, the so-called Washington Sniper, today is pay-back time after his final appeal was refused by the Supreme Court yesterday.
Barring some last-minute stay of execution, at 9.30pm, John Allen Muhammad will be killed by lethal injection at a prison in Virginia, closing the book on one of the most nightmarish and perplexing episodes in American criminal history.
Every spectator seat in the death chamber will be filled, for many of his victims' relatives have declared their determination to stare into the sniper's eyes as he dies.
Yet one question remains unanswered: why did Muhammad do it?
His legal team argues that he was mentally ill at the time of his murderous rampage, a condition exacerbated by Gulf War syndrome.
It's an intriguing defence, all the more so at a time when America is reeling from the killing spree of another hardline Muslim serviceman at Fort Hood army base in Texas.
But as his final hours approach, the sniper's former wife, Mildred Muhammad, has advanced a different and altogether more extraordinary theory about his motivation.
In a sensational new book, she claims her ex-husband shot all those people simply to lay the ground for another murder - her own - so that he could regain custody of their three children.
After their bitter divorce, some three years before the shootings, Mrs Muhammad was awarded custody of their son, John, now 19, and daughters Salena, 17, and Taalibah, 16.
It was in his determination to get them back once and for all, she says, that he hatched his twisted plot.
By murdering a great number of people all around her home, just outside Washington, he would make the authorities believe that a serial killer was on the loose.
'He was trying to place me in the middle of all these killings, so that when he finally took me out, the police would think I was just another sniper victim,' Mrs Muhammad told me.
'It might sound bizarre and far-fetched, but not if you knew John Muhammad.
'You have to remember that he was trained in psychological warfare in the army, and he was prepared to do anything to get what he wanted.
'That means all those innocent people were killed just because he was trying to kill me. I still have a hard time living with that. I constantly blank out of my mind the number of people who died in my name.'
Seven years on, Mrs Muhammad is embittered that American society refuses to regard her as one of her ex-husband's victims.
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