WASHINGTON (AP) - A lot of criminals had fathers who were never there for them. John Allen Muhammad was there for the teenager John Lee Malvo, fussing over his diet, directing him closely, acquaintances said, as a strict parent might do.

Theirs was a deadly bond, authorities believe.

Among all the possibilities mentioned by the multitude of crime historians and profilers and serial-murder scholars as to who might be behind the sniper assaults in the Washington area, a hit team made up of an adult and a teenage companion was never on the list.

Experts thought police were looking for a lone white gunman or perhaps a pair of well-trained killers, maybe even a terrorist or two. Many predicted it would all end with a bloody gunfight or a police sniper taking out the suburban sniper, if they got anyone at all.

Instead police found an Army veteran and a 17-year-old, both black, sleeping in a car at an interstate highway rest stop.

A senior law enforcement source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said police believe Malvo became an informal stepson to Muhammad because the older man had a relationship with the boy’s mother, and for a time the three lived in a family type arrangement.

“The boy eventually latched onto Muhammad,” the source said. “We don’t have evidence it was formalized but it was almost like an informal or common-law stepson.”

Muhammad was a controlling figure, not only to his alleged sniper partner but to his own four children, family members and other intimates said. They said he demanded they eat only certain things, and when his children from two ex-wives visited him, he did not willingly return them.

As in routine life, so too, perhaps, in crime.