John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo spend three weeks in October 2002 shooting strangers at gas stations, bus stops, and a school entrance around Washington, DC, killing ten people and wounding three more. The film follows the investigators trying to stop them while the case plays out on live television and more than five million residents in the DC metro area change how they walk to their cars and pump their gas. It reconstructs the shootings chronologically, from the first killings in Maryland through the manhunt that eventually traces the pair to a modified Chevrolet Caprice rigged with a firing hole in the trunk. Investigators and reporters describe the pressure of a serial case unfolding in real time, with no clear pattern connecting victims and a public growing more frightened by the day. The account stays close to the timeline of the crimes and the manhunt rather than psychological theorizing, ending with the arrest that finally closed the case.