(c) 2009, The Washington Post copyright 2009, The Washington Post MOUNTAIN HOME, Idaho -- The setting sun is streaming in the living room window of Marion Lewis' house as he puts aside his cigarette and starts telling the story of the day his daughter was murdered. He is 57, a bulky, balding man sitting in his stocking feet. He has a brown bandana around his neck, gray hair tied in a pony tail, and his glasses and a pack of cheap Seneca cigarettes are stuffed in his shirt pocket. He shoos away his two beagles, who retreat out the dog door. He remembers the day, Oct. 3, 2002, when Lori Lewis Rivera was shot to death by the D.C. snipers at a gas station in Kensington, Md. Two thousand miles away, her father was oblivious, out in the wilderness running a giant rock-crushing machine. Lewis stares at the floor as he recalls it, kneading his beefy hands and wiping away tears with his fingers. He can still hear the phone ringing and ringing back at the motel where he was staying that day, as he stood in the shower washing off the grime and wondering who could be calling. Seven years since the sniper duo of John Allen Muhammad and Lee Boyd Malvo went on a homicidal rampage across the Washington area, their work still torments the families it touched. But at 9 p.m. Tuesday, if all goes as scheduled, Muhammad, the mastermind, is to be executed in Virginia by injection -- bringing closure, justice and finality, victims' friends and families say, to a saga that haunts the community still. Malvo is serving a life term in prison without the possibility of parole. 'I don't have any doubt that I could pull the switch or push the plunger myself,' Lewis said. Between Oct. 2 and Oct. 24, 2002, when they were captured, Muhammad, then 41, a former U.S. Army soldier from Louisiana, and Malvo, his 17-year-old sidekick, terrorized the Washington region, shooting and killing people at random from the cover of their battered car. Thirteen people were shot, 10 fatally. Their deadliest period was a 27-hour stretch spanning Oct. 2 and 3, in which six people were murdered within a few miles of each other in Washington and suburban Montgomery County, Md. Four more were slain and three more were wounded over the next two weeks. Five others had been killed and four others wounded by the pair, authorities think, in shootings across the country during the eight months leading up to the final bloodletting. One of those killed on Oct. 3 was Lori Lewis Rivera, a 25-year-old nanny and mother. She was vacuuming her employer's minivan at a Shell station when she was shot in the back. The bullet fragmented inside, destroying her left lung. Now, her father wants to watch Muhammad's execution in the death chamber of Greensville Correctional Center, near Jarratt, south of Richmond. Technically, Muhammad is being executed for the Oct. 9 murder of Dean Meyers, 53, a civil engineer from Gaithersburg, Md., who was shot while buying gas near Manassas, Va. Lewis and his former son-in-law, Nelson Rivera, plan to travel to Virginia this week to witness the execution. (In the seven years since the shootings, Rivera has moved to California and remarried, and he has two more children.) 'I want to see what he made me see,' Lewis said. 'He forced us to look at our little girl laying in a coffin. I want to see justice done. I want to seem him take a last breath. ... I want to be able to describe it to the rest of the family.' Rivera said: 'I want to see if he has any remorse, if he feels sorry about what he did. He doesn't have to tell me, `I'm sorry.' ... He needs to be sorry and repent himself for what he did. ... I want to see in his face, if he fears to die, because he didn't give any chance to those victims, not a little bit of a chance. ... 'My wife took the (baby) car seat out of the van and put it on top of the vacuum and they still killed her.' Officials said last week that what witnesses will see is Muhammad strapped to a metal gurney. He will be wearing flip-flops, denim pants and a special short-sleeved denim shirt to allow technicians to attach a heart monitor and two intravenous lines -- one for each arm -- through which the deadly drugs will be administered. Muhammad will first receive thiopental sodium, which will put him to sleep, then pancuronium bromide, to stop his breathing, then potassium chloride, to stop his heart. Death normally occurs in seven to 15 minutes, officials said. Virginia corrections officials won't say how many victims' families plan on attending Tuesday's scheduled execution, but several besides Lewis are expected. Still, other victims' relatives, such as Jocelyn Bridges of Philadelphia, whose husband, Kenneth, 53, was gunned down Oct. 11 at a gas station near Massaponax, Va., don't want to revisit past anguish. 'I would like to be moving forward with my life,' the mother of six said last week. 'That has nothing to do with forward motion. That's a snapshot in time. My life is a moving train. It's moving forward. I learned that from my husband ... got a train to keep moving on. 'I don't have to go back and rent or borrow or go to any more nightmares.' James Ballenger, whose wife, Hong Im Ballenger, was slain by the snipers in a Sept. 23, 2002, robbery outside her Baton Rouge., La., beauty shop, went further. 'I don't want nothing to do with it anymore,' he said last week by phone. 'I'm remarried. I'm done with everything.' But Lewis, an unemployed construction worker whose bum left leg forces him to sit or squat instead of stand for long periods, is elated that he will be able to witness Muhammad's death. 'He's dying for the murder of our daughter and I'm still alive,' he said. Lewis said he would favor a more 'gruesome' method of execution. 'Let's give the guillotine a shot,' he said. Lewis said Lori's death came on a day that still haunts him. 'I was working on a portable rock crusher,' he said. 'We were out in the middle of nowhere. ... We came off the highway and run back into the desert. Because of the remoteness and because we worked as many hours as we could a day, we didn't get back into the hotel until about 6:30 or 7 that evening. 'Running a rock crusher is pretty dusty work,' he said. 'First thing you do when you get back to wherever you're staying at is you get down and you get a shower. I was in the shower, and the phone just kept ringing and ringing and ringing. When I got out, it was my wife telling me my daughter had been murdered.' He paused. 'I broke down for a bit,' he said. 'Talked to my wife for a little bit. I got off the phone.' The Lewises brought Lori's body home to Idaho and buried her in Mountain View Cemetery, just across American Legion Boulevard from where she had lived and gone to high school. Over her grave they placed a gray tombstone etched with a motif her sister had drawn for Lori's wedding invitations. It depicts a storybook castle, with pennants flying and a horse-drawn carriage approaching on a winding path. 'It's the fairy tale,' Lewis said in the cemetery one evening last week. As he prepared to journey to Muhammad's execution, he said his life has not been drastically different in the seven years since his daughter's death, except for one thing. A few years ago, he was out of work and got hired to run a rock-crushing machine. It was a good job but brought back terrible memories. 'I was reliving that night every day,' he said. He lasted only two weeks. 'I couldn't do it,' he said. 