Seven years after he and his teenage sidekick terrorised the Washington area with a three-week killing spree using a high-powered rifle, John Allen Muhammad — the “Beltway sniper” — is due to be executed tonight by lethal injection.

The execution is reviving memories for the millions of people in Washington, Virginia and Maryland who spent October 2002 crouched in their cars as they pumped petrol, ducking and weaving across open spaces and running into schools with their children, glancing anxiously at nearby woods.

Muhammad, a former soldier and 41 at the time, and Lee Boyd Malvo, then 17, triggered the biggest manhunt in US history when, between October 2 and October 24, 2002, they killed ten people and wounded three, picking their victims at random and firing from the boot of a battered 1990 Chevy Caprice.

On two occasions they left handwritten notes at murder scenes on the Death tarot card, taunting police with the message “Call Me God”. After they shot Iran Brown, 13, as he walked into his Maryland school, they left a note in a plastic sandwich bag declaring: “Your children are not safe anywhere at any time.”

At 9pm tonight, at the Greensville Correctional Centre near Richmond, Virginia, barring a last-minute stay, Muhammad will be strapped to a metal gurney. Watching will be many relatives of his victims, some of whom have travelled from the other side of America to see him die.

He will be given a chance to say a few last words. Then technicians will attach a heart monitor to his chest and two intravenous lines, one into each arm, through which drugs will be administered to stop his breathing and his heart.

“I want to see what the expression on his face is,” said Nelson Rivera, whose wife, Lori Ann, was shot and killed as she vacuumed a van at a Maryland petrol station. “I want to see his face and see how he likes that.”

Malvo was spared the death penalty by a Virginia jury because he was a juvenile at the time of the killing spree. He is serving a life sentence without the chance of parole at a maximum security prison in Virginia.

The shootings, which consumed the Washington area until the pair were captured, began on October 2 when Muhammad and Malvo drove into the car park of a supermarket in north-western Washington. Peeking through a hole cut in the back of the vehicle they shot dead James Martin, a computer analyst.

The next day five more people were shot and killed, four within two hours.

Early on October 3 a landscape gardener was shot in a Maryland suburb near Washington, also with a .223-caliber bullet. Then a taxi driver was murdered at a nearby petrol station. Half an hour later a woman was killed as she sat reading on an outdoor bench. Within 90 minutes Mrs Lewis-Rivera was shot while she vacuumed the van.

At 9.15pm the snipers cut down Pascal Charlot, a 72-year-old retired carpenter, while he walked along a road in Washington. The next day Caroline Seawell was shot and wounded as she loaded her minivan in Fredericksburg, Virginia, 50 miles from Washington.

The unknown murderer quickly became known as the “Beltway sniper” because many of the murder scenes were close to the major ringroad around Washington known as the Beltway.

Fear gripped the Washington area. People stayed indoors. Many were too afraid to use petrol stations. Children were drilled in duck-and-cover techniques. Police believed wrongly that the culprits drove a white van — so thousands of white vans were stopped and searched.

On October 7 Iran Brown was shot in the stomach as he entered school. He survived.

There were three more fatal shootings in Virginia the next week, including Dean Meyers, 53, a Vietnam veteran and civil engineer shot in the head while filling up with petrol. It was Mr Meyers’s death that prosecutors used to send Muhammad to death row in November 2003.

By October 22 one more man had been wounded and another — a bus driver — murdered before the net closed. Muhammad rang police and asked them if they had investigated a shooting in Alabama in September 2002 — a crime he was responsible for.

Fingerprints at the scene were traced to Muhammad. Early on October 24 Muhammad and Malvo were arrested sleeping in their car at a roadside rest area.

Muhammad’s motives have never been clear, although his former wife — and some experts — believe that he planned to kill her, making her death look like one of the random victims.

Times Recommends

• Oprah Winfrey says goodbye to her talk show
• Focus on the big issues, not the bananas
• Václav Havel — symbol of national liberation