Sometime in mid-April 1995, Cliff Mogg and Dan Humphries, two bomb disposal experts from Kirtland Air Force Base in New Mexico, were ordered at short notice to drive more than five hundred miles across the Great Plains to Oklahoma City. The men do not appear to have been told much about their mission. When they arrived, they were put up in a nondescript chain hotel on the north side of town and ordered to stay put until told otherwise.
One day passed, then two, then three. Still they were told to keep to themselves.
Military explosives and ordinance disposal teams are often deployed to help protect high-level dignitaries, but Oklahoma City was expecting no such official visits in the latter half of April 1995. Mogg’s written orders from the 377th Air Base Wing designated him an explosive technical escort, and his brief included “emergency response to incidents involving DoD [Department of Defense] munitions/explosives/weapons systems.” Had the men been summoned to defuse a bomb?
If so, they were not given the chance. Just after 9:00 A.M. on April 19, a huge explosion ripped the heart out of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City, killing 168 people and injuring hundreds of others. Mogg and Humphries never came close to the truck carrying the bomb. They were not asked to help determine the cause of the explosion or to join the incipient criminal investigation.
Instead, with the city in chaos, they left Oklahoma City as mysteriously as they had arrived.
Years later, when he was no longer with the military, Cliff Mogg acknowledged the strange episode. “Yes,” he told the investigative reporter Don Devereux, demonstrating considerable surprise to have been tracked down, “I was there.”
Had there been a tip-off about the bombing, prompting the mission? Did the government try, and fail, to stop the explosion at the last minute? Mogg answered that it was not for him to say, and rushed to get off the phone.
EARLY ON APRIL 18, A LITTLE MORE THAN TWENTY-FOUR HOURS before the bombing, the Ryder truck that would later wreak such devastation was backed up against a storage locker on the edge of Herington, Kansas, more than 250 miles from Oklahoma City. A tall, wiry army veteran named Timothy McVeigh was loading fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate into the rear and quietly fuming. Terry Nichols, McVeigh’s best friend from the army, lived just a few minutes away. Nichols was almost never late, but he had not shown up at 6:00 A.M. as agreed.
The two men had once enjoyed a deep friendship, but lately it had degenerated into sour recrimination and mutual suspicion. Two days earlier, McVeigh had used explicit threats to strong-arm Nichols into driving to Oklahoma City to help him drop off a getaway car a few blocks from the Murrah Building. Should McVeigh drive over to Nichols’s house, brandish his Glock, and threaten his wife and infant daughter? They had acquired all the bomb components together and had committed at least two major robberies. They had more than enough guilty knowledge of each other’s activities to pose a real threat if one of them bailed.
McVeigh was determined not to back down. Months earlier, during the first of many bitter arguments, McVeigh had warned Nichols that he knew where his brother, ex-wife, and twelve-year-old son lived and would not hesitate to eliminate them. “No one,” he said, “is going to stop me from carrying out my plans.”
Nichols awoke at 5:30 A.M., with plenty of time to make the appointment, but he wanted to mull it over one more time. Later, he would remember wanting nothing to do with a bombing, certainly not one that would take dozens of innocent lives. He would say he didn’t know McVeigh’s target, or when he intended to strike. Nichols wanted to assume that McVeigh would bring down a federal government building only at night, when it was largely empty.
Nichols’s misgivings did not prompt him to do anything to stop the bomb plot. But he certainly had doubts about McVeigh. His friend, who came across to many people as jovial and easy to like, had been behaving erratically for months, partly under the influence of the crystal meth he used to fuel himself on his frequent cross-country car journeys. His temper had grown more volatile, the threats of violence more sinister. For a few weeks the previous summer, he even had a furtive sexual affair with Nichols’s Filipina wife, Marife—a dirty secret that spilled out only later. McVeigh was also showing signs of undisciplined thinking and impulsive decision-making. If he had a properly elaborated plan for building and delivering the bomb, Nichols did not know it. And did not want to know.
Still, Nichols calculated he was better off confronting McVeigh than risking the safety of his family at home. So he drove over to a Pizza Hut about a quarter of a mile from the storage locker, parked his GMC truck, and cut through two or three vacant lots. It was now 6:30 A.M., and, as he approached, he could see the rage in McVeigh’s face.
“You’re late,” McVeigh said coldly. “I’ve already got the truck half-loaded.”
“Hey,” Nichols responded, “why don’t we take a few minutes and discuss things?”
“There’s nothing to discuss,” McVeigh snapped. “It’s time for action.”
Nichols chose not to engage him further and helped load the rest of the fertilizer sacks.
Over the next hour, they moved most of the contents of the storage locker: three fifty-five-gallon barrels of nitromethane, about three hundred blasting caps, Tovex high explosive arranged in long skinny “sausages,” packets of a binary explosive called Kinestik, spools of shock tube and black-powder cannon fuse, some five-gallon measuring buckets, and a dozen empty fifty-five-gallon drums, half-metal and half-plastic, that would hold the components once they had all been assembled.
Nichols believed this was all he would have to do. But McVeigh asked him to follow behind the heavily laden Ryder truck for a few miles to make sure it was handling the road correctly. They rode north on Highway 77, back toward Junction City, where McVeigh had been staying. After about eight miles, McVeigh turned off unexpectedly at the entrance to Geary Lake State Park. Nichols followed McVeigh up a hill, and both men got out of their vehicles.
“What’s wrong?” Nichols asked. “Why are you up here?”
“We’re going to make the bomb here,” McVeigh announced, “and you’re going to help me.”
Nichols blanched. “You’re crazy! You’ve got a big bright yellow Ryder truck parked on top of a hill sticking out like a sore thumb for everyone to see. You may as well stick up a sign advertising what you are doing. Anyone on the highway can easily see you here as well.”
McVeigh responded: “Then we’ll move down near the lake and do it where we’re more concealed.”
Nichols made no further protest. He had a history of submitting to domineering figures in his life, of whom McVeigh was the latest and most dangerous. He had nothing to offer but quiet acquiescence. And so, the two men drove back down the hill and began the laborious business of building a five-thousand-pound weapon of mass destruction.
ON ARKANSAS’S DEATH ROW UNIT AN HOUR OUTSIDE LITTLE ROCK, A white supremacist double murderer named Richard Wayne Snell was counting down his final hours and scaring the daylights out of his guards. “Within the next ten days there will be hell to pay,” he predicted. Repeatedly, Snell talked about a bombing and told his guards that his execution date, April 19, would be a bad day for everyone.
Snell was a seasoned criminal, condemned for gunning down the only black state trooper in southwestern Arkansas during a routine traffic stop. He had joined the radical far-right in the early 1980s and thrown himself into a ragtag campaign to bring down the government with a wave of bombings, acts of sabotage, and assassinations. Most of these plots came to nothing, because of bad planning, poor weaponry, or wavering on the part of the plotters. He was regarded as the most dangerous of them; a week before, at a clemency hearing, he made approving reference to Hitler’s deputy, Rudolf Hess, and said he’d probably shoot the trooper all over again.
April 19 was an iconic day for the right. Not only was it Patriots’ Day, the anniversary of the “shot heard ’round the world” at the battle of Lexington and Concord in 1775; It also marked the two-year anniversary of the calamitous end to the Waco siege. The incident had triggered congressional hearings, official investigations, and political fallout for the Clinton administration. For the radical right, Waco was the moment when the much-detested federal government showed its true satanic colors. Putting Snell to death on the anniversary was a blatant provocation, if not also a call to arms.
Twelve years earlier, Snell and his associates had themselves planned to destroy the federal building in Oklahoma City. Their plan was to use missiles rather than a bomb; they gave up only after one of their homemade rockets blew up in the hands of their munitions expert. This was spelled out at the time by Snell’s closest associate, an egomaniac racist preacher and cult leader named Jim Ellison. “We need something with a large body count to make the government sit up and take notice,” Ellison told his followers. “I want the government to know that the right wing has spoken, that the Second American Revolution has begun.”
His words were later echoed almost exactly by a disenchanted army veteran seen by many in the movement as a younger Wayne Snell, someone with the same revolutionary fervor and fearless commitment. His name was Timothy James McVeigh.
ON APRIL 17 OR 18, CAPTAIN KARYN ARMSTRONG, A VETERINARIAN conducting research into respiratory illnesses at the Walter Reed army Institute of Research outside Washington, D.C., received an unusual phone call. The man said he was from the Pentagon but never properly identified himself. He wanted information on treating lung injuries caused by pressure waves from large explosions. Captain Armstrong said she was not qualified to reply, because she treated animals, not humans. When the man insisted, she suggested that he get in touch with her boss, Dr. Adolph Januszkiewicz.
Dr. Januszkiewicz, also a respiratory specialist, later spoke to someone claiming to be from either the Aberdeen Proving Ground in Maryland or from his own command at Fort Detrick—the doctor could not recall which. This person was also asking about blast injuries.
“They identified themselves as being the liaison at the Pentagon to the governor’s office of Oklahoma,” Captain Armstrong recalled. “They never left a name, they never left a phone number. They always called us, and neither of us were medical doctors. I’m a veterinarian and he’s a Ph.D.”
Armstrong and Januszkiewicz thought little of the incident until after the Oklahoma City bombing. Then, whenever the subject came up, someone would invariably start humming the Twilight Zone theme.
A NIGHT OR TWO BEFORE THOSE CALLS, A GOVERNMENT-CONTRACTED steam-generating plant in downtown Oklahoma City experienced a loud, but minor, blowout. Within minutes, the city police were pounding on the control room window and pummeling the duty manager with questions about a “major explosion and possible terrorist takeover of the building.” The manager had to talk them out of calling the bomb squad.
“I explained [that the] situation was under control and back to normal,” the manager later wrote in his duty log. “They said in the future to please pick a slower night for them for this to happen. He [unnamed police officer] said, y’all scared the SHIT out of the people in the hotel…. We blamed it on the full moon, laughed, and on their way they went.”
The hotel was, presumably, the one in the Convention Center right next to the Trigen plant. But the record does not explain why this night was so busy for the Oklahoma City Police Department. Explosions and terrorist attacks were not exactly commonplace in the heartland. At least one noteworthy alert, though, reached Oklahoma City over that Easter weekend. On Good Friday, someone from the FBI called the fire department and told them to watch out for suspicious people coming into town over the next few days.
After the bombing, the OCFD’s chief of operations, Charles Gaines, publicly denied he had received any alert, but he was contradicted by his head dispatcher. “That’s right,” the dispatcher, Harvey Weathers, said. “On Friday the 14th, Chief Gaines received a call from the FBI, and we were told to be on the alert for terrorist activity in the near future. I passed that information down the line.” There were no more specifics.
When Weathers’s account appeared in the media, the fire department brass changed their story and said an FBI agent had called with a generalized warning about a possible attack on an American city by Aum Shinrikyo, the Japanese group that had staged a sarin gas attack on the Tokyo subway three weeks earlier. But Weathers told the FBI that this version was not correct, either. “That call did come,” Weathers insisted. “A lot of people don’t want to get involved in this deal.”
TERRY NICHOLS WAS HAVING AN OUT-OF-BODY EXPERIENCE. HE AND McVeigh had spent several hours assembling the bomb when he felt himself floating in midair inside the cargo area of the Ryder truck, tilting forward and looking down at himself drawing nitromethane out of a barrel into a bucket. “How can I be a part of this?” he remembered thinking. Still, he kept working. When McVeigh and Nichols first pulled up to the edge of Geary Lake, McVeigh drew him into the back of the truck and rolled down the door completely. Nichols thought they needed more light and fresh air, and persuaded McVeigh to prop the back door open about a foot and open the passenger-side door.
Still, the quarters were maddeningly cramped. In Nichols’s account, McVeigh began to fill the fifty-five-gallon drums with ammonium nitrate. This should have been pretty straightforward, but the AN prills had absorbed moisture and stuck to each other in large, unwieldy clumps. They had to be pulled apart until they were small enough to shove into the barrels.
Nichols’s main job was to measure out twenty-pound quantities of nitromethane using a siphon pump, and add them to the ammonium nitrate in each barrel. He had to take care to spill as little as possible and minimize the liquid’s exposure to the air, because nitromethane evaporates very quickly. “Absolutely no mixing was done,” Nichols said. “The fertilizer went in a barrel first, then the fuel—that was it. No stirring, nothing.”
Occasionally, one of the men peered out of the truck to see if anybody was watching. At about 9:00 A.M., a car with a boat and trailer pulled into the park and stopped at the boat ramp about three hundred yards ahead of them. An off-duty soldier and his son got out and launched their boat to go fishing.
McVeigh closed the side door facing the lake, but kept opening it a crack to see what was happening. Once or twice he asked Nichols to look for him. A sharp wind was churning the lake, and after an hour the man and his son steered the boat back in and left. The fisherman, an army sergeant named Rick Wahl, was almost as alarmed by the seemingly abandoned Ryder truck as McVeigh and Nichols were by him. Wahl noted both the Ryder and Nichols’s GMC pickup and decided to keep a good distance. He even looked for a place to turn around quickly in case of trouble.
As McVeigh and Nichols were filling the eleventh barrel—the last one they would have space for, in Nichols’s version of events—their nitromethane supply ran out. Each one’s first impulse was to blame the other.
“Either your calculations are wrong, or this cheap scale is off,” Nichols said.
McVeigh asked if Nichols had any diesel fuel in his pickup.
“Only what I have in my tank,” Nichols said. The GMC held about twenty gallons, and it was nearly full.
“Go siphon out about ten gallons.”
“With what?” Nichols protested. The siphon he had been using for the nitromethane was too fat to fit in his fuel tank.
McVeigh produced a length of quarter-inch plastic tubing from Walmart, which Nichols eyed skeptically. “It’s going to take a long time with that small hose, and I don’t think it’s even long enough to work,” he said.
McVeigh had no time for grumbling. “Just do it.”
The tubing was crucially too short to reach the bottom of the bucket, and with the wind whipping erratically, some of the diesel spilled onto the ground, leaving a fuel mark later discovered by the FBI.
Once Nichols finished siphoning and filling the last barrel, McVeigh cut a slit into the side of the remaining ten or twelve bags of fertilizer, poured some of the diesel in, closed up the slits with duct tape, and then shook the bags around. He lined them along the driver’s side of the cargo hold to add to the bomb’s explosive punch.
There was little risk that the first eleven barrels of ammonium nitrate and nitromethane would not do the job by themselves. They added up to almost five thousand pounds of high explosive; as long as one of the barrels ignited successfully, it would set off a chain reaction and detonate the rest. But McVeigh preferred to err on the side of overkill. He, like Nichols, had received only rudimentary explosives training in the army and did not necessarily know better. Indeed, their lack of expertise raises the question of whether anybody, at Geary Lake or elsewhere, helped them put the device together. Both men later insisted they worked unaided. But the accounts that each of them gave are also riddled with puzzling inconsistencies.
On the technical details, McVeigh’s version is far skimpier than Nichols’s. One explosives expert suggested that by the time McVeigh agreed to discuss how he built the bomb, close to five years after the fact, he might simply have forgotten what he did, or perhaps never entirely knew. Nichols, though, remembered everything. That raises a broader issue of veracity, because it was supposedly McVeigh, according to both men, who did the brain work of wiring the bomb and constructing its boosters and detonators. What are the chances the master bomb-maker would turn out to be so clueless, or oddly forgetful?
There are two other possibilities. Either Nichols was the real bomb-maker but never wanted to embrace that dubious historical distinction—especially after McVeigh willingly claimed sole responsibility—or both men took their direction from someone else.
THE RADICAL FAR RIGHT NEVER FORGOT WAYNE SNELL’S 1983 PLOT to destroy the Murrah Building. “Blowing up a federal building…was not a novel idea,” said Jack Knox, an FBI agent who helped run down Snell and Ellison in the 1980s and was once on their assassination list. “It was floating around out there.”
One of Snell’s closest friends, Louis Beam, discussed bombing the Murrah Building as early as the mid-1980s. Beam was a veteran of the Texas Ku Klux Klan and a fearsomely talented public speaker, who repeatedly pressed his friends in the Aryan supremacy movement to wage an all-out war against the federal government. Two of Beam’s friends confirmed that, in the 1980s, he had talked with a Klan leader from Oklahoma about attacking the Murrah Building, although they were unsure who first proposed the idea. They were also certain that Beam and Snell both knew about the 1995 Oklahoma City bombing before it happened.
“Snell knew about the bombing,” Bruce Campbell, Beam’s confidant and fellow propagandist for the antigovernment cause, said in a 2009 interview. “Louis was very close to Snell.”
Cheri Seymour, an author and researcher into the radical far right who hosted Beam several times at her home, said Beam went to see Mary Snell three weeks before April 19 and gave her a message to pass on to her husband that “Armageddon was coming on the day of his death.” This meeting was later corroborated by an unconnected government informant.
Mary Snell gave plentiful indication that she knew—or hoped—something was up. “April 19,” she wrote in a letter to the Militia of Montana intended to whip up outrage in the run-up to her husband’s execution, “is the first day of a weeklong sacrificial preparation for the GRAND CLIMAX ceremony celebrated by those who follow the Luciferian religion.”
Was it possible that she or her husband were in on the bomb plot, or at least knew it was in the works? “I have no solid information,” said Bill Buford, the ATF’s top agent in Arkansas at the time of the bombing, “but the pieces fit together too neatly for him not to have known.”
The FBI never talked to Beam after the bombing, and conducted only one relatively perfunctory interview with Mary Snell. But they had plenty of information indicating that Beam knew about the bombing before it happened. A career criminal named Roy Byrd told the bureau from an Arizona prison about a phone conversation he had with Beam in the summer of 1994, in which Beam said that “something big” would happen in Oklahoma City, Denver, or Dallas on the anniversary of Waco. When Byrd asked what it was, Beam replied that it would be similar to the plot of a notorious underground novel, in which a band of white supremacists drives a truck loaded with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil into the basement of FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., and blows up the building. Byrd did not mention the novel by name, but he was clearly referring to The Turner Diaries, a cult book on the fringe of the gun-show circuit, written by one of America’s leading neo-Nazis, William Pierce. The Turner Diaries was Tim McVeigh’s favorite book.
According to Byrd, Beam did not mention anybody by name. He said only: “They’ve got some kid who’s going to do something.”
MCVEIGH WAS PROUD OF HIS BOMB DESIGN WHEN HE DESCRIBED IT to Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck of the Buffalo News, who interviewed him extensively on death row for their book American Terrorist. The main trigger for the blast, McVeigh said, was a bucketful of Tovex sausages he placed at the center of the barrels of fertilizer soaked in nitromethane. He ran two lengths of fuse cord from the truck’s cab into the cargo hold, via separate holes that Nichols drilled for him. He inserted the fuse ends into nonelectric blasting caps. He used duct tape to attach the blasting caps to lengths of shock tube, which snaked their way to the Tovex. McVeigh only needed to light the ends of the fuse cord inside the truck’s cabin and the bomb would ignite. The black-powder fuse burned at a rate of about thirty seconds per foot—he measured off a two-minute length and a second, five-minute length. The burning fuse would trigger the blasting caps, which would then ignite the shock tube, set off the Tovex, and—boom—the ammonium nitrate barrels would detonate in a split-second chain reaction.
This scheme was basically workable, according to experts who reviewed it, which helps explain why it has gone largely unchallenged since American Terrorist was first published in 2001. But it does raise some basic questions. McVeigh took particular pride in the two independent fuse lines, describing them as the “perfect redundancy.” He even described a third redundancy—a pile of explosives, which, he said, he kept at his feet. If all else failed, he intended to ignite them by firing his pistol.
This all sounds very meticulous, but to a seasoned bomb expert it comes across as faintly ridiculous. Pharis Williams, a veteran explosives expert and government consultant, said a professional bomb-maker would never rely on one central ignition point. “It would seem,” he said, “that someone who is proud of his redundancy would also boost every barrel.”
Indeed, Nichols’s version suggests this is exactly what they did. In his scheme, the two lines of fuse cord were connected to a single, central point where they were attached to a booster (the binary explosive Kinestik) as well as twelve separate lengths of Primadet shock tube. These Primadet tubes were then connected to each barrel, where they were attached to another Kinestik and a Tovex sausage via a prefitted nonelectric blasting cap. Nichols thus describes the bomb as having not one but a dozen ignition points, creating a dozen redundancies.
Nichols’s account is more convincing throughout. McVeigh made no mention of securing the barrels in the back of the truck, while Nichols describes how, at McVeigh’s direction, he cut and hammered down lengths of four-by-four wood beams so there would be no danger of the barrels shifting during transport. McVeigh neither describes nor names the Primadet, which he and Nichols had stolen in a quarry robbery months earlier. Instead McVeigh focuses on self-aggrandizing details that seem dubious at best—for example, how he considered closing the ends of the blasting caps with his bare teeth. McVeigh was a fanatical reader of The Turner Diaries and another novel by William Pierce, Hunter, and was no doubt familiar with a scene in the second book in which the warrior hero blows up a Mossad office in Virginia. The book describes him arranging barrels of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil around a single fifty-pound box of Tovex. Was this what McVeigh was thinking of when he gave his description of events at Geary Lake that April morning?
By midday, McVeigh and Nichols had finished. McVeigh suggested throwing the empty fertilizer bags into the back of the truck, but Nichols was concerned that some could survive the bombing and leave fingerprint traces. So he took the time to roll them into bundles, attach them with duct tape, and toss them in the back of his pickup truck. He also took his Makita drill, which he had used to bore holes for the cannon fuse, the siphon pump, and the bathroom scales. Everything else—the dolly they used to load the nitromethane; the empty nitromethane barrels; the last, unused white plastic barrel; their two five-gallon buckets; and a bunch of tools, including a hacksaw, hammer, left-over tubing, and pliers—was left in the back of the Ryder.
McVeigh closed the side and back doors and padlocked them. Then he sauntered to the lakeside to splash water on his face and hands, and slipped into a change of clothes.
The two men stared at each other one last time. McVeigh climbed into the truck, Nichols into his pickup. When they reached Highway 77, Nichols headed north toward the U.S. Army base at Fort Riley, where he would drop in on a military surplus auction. In his rearview mirror, he saw the Ryder truck retreat and vanish on its trip south.
IN THE REMOTE HILLS OF EASTERN OKLAHOMA, MANY OF THE MOST prominent members of a fringe religious community known as Elohim City spent April 18 on the move. The community’s figure-head, Robert “Grandpa” Millar, was getting ready to lead a group to Little Rock to protest Wayne Snell’s execution and to take his body back for burial. Millar was Snell’s spiritual adviser, a role he later insisted was not an endorsement of his criminal career but rather an expression of compassion. Millar liked to say that everybody came to him through Jesus, and he accepted them all.
In April 1995, Jesus had sent Millar quite the collection of odd-balls, dropouts, silver-tongued charlatans, and out-and-out criminals. They attended services in the igloo-like Elohim City church (Millar had an aversion to straight lines and right angles in buildings), camped out in an assortment of caravans, squat houses, and makeshift structures made of ammunition crates and bright orange polyurethane, showed off their collections of assault weapons, pistols, and black-powder explosives, and shared in the fear that the federal government would one day descend to kill them all.
Among the visitors was Mark Thomas, a neo-Nazi preacher who lived most of the year in abject squalor in rural Pennsylvania, where he sired a stream of children and plotted attacks on gas and electricity plants, railroads, and communications facilities. Thomas came to visit his sixteen-year-old son Nathan, who had been living at Elohim City on and off for two years and participated in perimeter security patrols. According to a government informant, Nathan bragged about converting his AK-47 assault rifle to full automatic and making homemade napalm. Two of Mark Thomas’s skinhead protégés from Pennsylvania, Scott Stedeford and Kevin McCarthy, visited for about a week; they were both members of a neo-Nazi punk band named Cyanide, along with a more permanent Elohim City resident, Michael Brescia, who had fallen into the same White Power scene in Philadelphia in the early 1990s.
Since the previous fall, Stedeford, McCarthy, and Thomas had been members of a white supremacist bank robbery gang that variously called itself the Company or the Aryan Republican Army. Stedeford had taken part in five robberies in Ohio, Iowa, and Missouri, netting more than $80,000; McCarthy had been in on four. Mark Thomas was not a direct participant, but he was heavily involved in planning and expanding the gang’s activities. The idea was to steal enough to finance a full-frontal assault on the federal government. Less than a month earlier, on March 29, the gang had hauled in $29,000 from a bank in Des Moines. Two days later, they elected to disband for four months—an unprecedented period of inactivity suggesting some side project involving one or more of them, or a compelling need to lay low for an extended time.
One might expect these men to stay around to pay homage to Wayne Snell, whom they regarded as a hero, but instead they rushed far away. Mark and Nathan Thomas left on Monday, April 17, for Allentown. That same day, Stedeford and McCarthy drove to Fort Smith, Arkansas, to buy a twelve-year-old Chevy Suburban, and did not return.
Most Elohim City residents lived simply and were mostly unaware of the criminal connections these people had in the wider world. The women concentrated on child-rearing and housework and were kept away from the business of the elders. The children, some the product of polygamous or even incestuous relationships, were home-schooled according to the community’s bizarre interpretation of Christianity, which held that white Americans were the true children of Israel, while Jews were the spawn of Satan and blacks even worse. Millar and his immediate family knew much more about their visitors’ revolutionary ambitions. And so did one of the more peculiar residents in the community, a gangly German named Andreas Strassmeir.
Strassmeir shared a small stone house with Mike Brescia, and hosted Stedeford and McCarthy over Easter. He had been in the army back in Germany, drifting into radical right-wing circles in the United States through his friendship with a white supremacist lawyer named Kirk Lyons. Lyons, in turn, was friendly with Millar, and entrusted Strassmeir to his care after the young German exhausted all other offers of hospitality. Strassmeir’s grandfather was said to have been one of the Nazi Party’s earliest members, with a membership card number lower than Hitler’s, while his father had been a prominent aide to Helmut Kohl, the German chancellor who oversaw reunification after the fall of the Berlin Wall. At Elohim City, Strassmeir ran the security detail, a platoon of teenagers and young men who marched around the four-hundred-acre compound with old SKS assault rifles loaded with cheap Chinese ammunition and low-budget Remington sniper rifles. Occasionally they sported bayonets, especially to scare outsiders.
Grandpa Millar liked Strassmeir and allowed him to live, as one of his friends put it, “in his fantasy world being field marshal of Elohim City.” Strassmeir’s relations with the other residents were significantly more strained. With his gawky manner, rigid Prussian upbringing, and foreign accent, he was never fully accepted. His abrasive intelligence rubbed people the wrong way, and he was a shambles of a human being—forever forgetting or breaking things, swearing and cursing.
One of Strassmeir’s best friends was Pete Ward, one of three brothers living at Elohim City, who had been brought up by Christian missionaries in Africa. Pete was not blessed with much initiative, and was known for following Strassmeir around like a puppy. His brothers, Tony and Sonny, got into trouble for stealing firewood and hitting up young women for money.
Just before the bombing, they and their parents and kid sister all disappeared from Elohim City without warning. Sonny was later reported to have spent several more days somewhere in Oklahoma before heading to Georgia. Most of the others took off for New Mexico. A Sunday-school teacher who taught the Wards’ little sister, Priscilla, later told the FBI that the girl had come to her, very upset, and indicated that something had happened but would not say what. “Everyone was shocked that they would leave so suddenly,” Kennilee Mooney, the teacher, told the FBI.
Years later, Strassmeir would deny there was anything strange about these multiple departures on the eve of the bombing. He felt protective toward his former friends and concocted a strange argument that their comings and goings meant nothing, because they were not living in the community at the time. “How can they leave if they were not there?” he asked.
This was, of course, a linguistic absurdity. The bank robbers, and the rest of them, were there, and they did leave.
Again, he insisted: “They did not leave, because they were not there.”
DAYS BEFORE MCVEIGH AND NICHOLS BUILT THEIR BOMB, Ken Stern of the American Jewish Committee issued a remarkably prescient report on the dangers of the country’s burgeoning militia movement. “Do not be surprised if there is militia activity next week in your area,” he wrote to AJC supporters on April 10. Stern had no special inside knowledge, but he and a group of other academics and professional hate-group watchers had been monitoring extremist newsletters and Internet chat rooms for months.
Stern’s warning was imprecise in that McVeigh and Nichols did not belong to a militia; they were too extreme for that. But he was absolutely correct when it came to gauging the degree of public anger and alienation from the federal government, and the risk that someone on the extremist fringe could resort to radical measures. The militia movement had been growing with a vengeance, a symptom of the rapidly changing times. On the heels of the dramatic collapse of family farming across the heartland in the 1980s had come recession and the rapid loss of defense-sector jobs at the end of the Cold War. Cheap immigrant labor was eroding the stability of many semiskilled and unskilled jobs. And under Bill Clinton, the first U.S. president in half a century not to have served in uniform, there was an unprecedented push toward gun control, first with the passage of the Brady Bill, which instituted the country’s first system of background checks on firearms purchases, and then with the 1994 assault weapons ban.
The majority of the disaffected people were not criminals; they wanted only to stand up for themselves and their gun rights. Two specific instances of catastrophic overreaching by federal law enforcement pushed the political temperature toward the boiling point, however. The first was the 1992 Ruby Ridge incident, in which a seemingly routine attempt to pressure a survivalist in Idaho into becoming a government informant degenerated into a ghastly mountainside shootout. And the second was the disastrously mishandled siege at Waco.
The militias started talking about federal law enforcement agents as the “shock troops” of a New World Order intent on stripping Americans of their rights. Wayne LaPierre, the head of the National Rifle Association, wrote a notorious fund-raising letter in which he denounced the feds as “jack-booted government thugs…wearing Nazi bucket helmets and black storm trooper uniforms to attack law-abiding citizens.” G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate-era presidential “plumber” turned radio host, encouraged listeners to open fire on agents of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, whose actions had initiated both the Ruby Ridge and the Waco disasters. “Don’t shoot at [their chests], because they got a vest on underneath that,” Liddy said. “Head shots. Head shots…Kill the sons of bitches!”
The militias, Stern wrote in his report, “constitute a new manifestation of violent hate-group activity” whose targets now included government employees. Some people, he said, were advocating killing, and he feared the threat was serious. He was right.
EARLY IN THE AFTERNOON OF APRIL 18, THE WHITE SUPREMACIST CAUSE Foundation received a baffling phone call at its North Carolina headquarters. CAUSE was a legal advocacy organization, and its name was an acronym for the five places in the world most heavily populated by white people—Canada, Australasia, the United States, South Africa, and Europe. Kirk Lyons, the man behind it, was a former personal litigation lawyer from Houston, who saw himself as the right wing’s answer to the ACLU; he defended the Ku Klux Klan’s free speech rights and made sure skinheads and neo-Nazis were prosecuted only for their criminal behavior, not their political beliefs.
Lyons, an amateur historian of the old Confederacy, was on his way to a Civil War reenactment when the call came in, so his friend and partner Dave Hollaway took it instead. The young man on the line didn’t give his name, and launched into a diatribe about a Waco lawsuit that CAUSE was pursuing at the time. The suit had not gone far enough, he said, and it was time to send the government a clear message.
“Usually people are ranting when they call,” Hollaway recalled, “but this guy was young and very clear in his message and tone. That set off a master warning light in my head. I said, ‘Let me give you some unsolicited legal advice. If I was your lawyer, I’d say you need to be careful about calling people up and making statements like that. You’re perilously close to the edge of your First Amendment rights.’”
Hollaway was a talker; CAUSE’s phone records show the call lasted eighteen minutes. He said there were three kinds of freedom in America—the ones guaranteed by the jury box, the ballot box, and the cartridge box. “Really,” Hollaway said, “you want to exhaust the first two before resorting to the last.”
Hollaway later told the FBI he was sure the caller was Tim McVeigh, taking time out from his final bomb preparations to sound off to someone he thought might be sympathetic.
BETWEEN HIS PARTING WITH TERRY NICHOLS AND THE EARLY MORNING of April 19, Timothy McVeigh was like a ghost, flitting from place to place across southern Kansas and northern Oklahoma. The phone call to the CAUSE Foundation was just one of many puzzles. After the bombing, people reported sightings of him at gas stations, in diners and restaurants; in company and alone; in the Ryder truck and in other vehicles entirely. He couldn’t possibly have been in all these places, nor could he have stomached the impressive diet of burritos, steaks, and hamburgers he was witnessed downing.
McVeigh gave a rudimentary account of his movements in one of his first interviews with his defense team. He avoided the main highway, I-35, he said, driving instead a few miles farther east, down Highway 77. Sometime in the afternoon of April 18, he stopped for gas. Later, he pulled over at a rest stop to check that the bomb barrels had not moved. He tossed his truck rental agreement and a fake ID into the back of the truck before closing it up again.
Once across the Oklahoma state line, he found a McDonald’s for dinner, then walked into a cheap chain hotel to rent a room but decided to spend the night in the truck instead. He said he was alone at all times.
Later, the FBI found witnesses who not only contradicted that, but said he might have been traveling in a convoy. It was often the same vehicles the witnesses cited: the Ryder truck, of course; McVeigh’s beat-up old yellow Mercury Marquis, which, in his account, he had stashed days earlier in downtown Oklahoma City; a white sedan; and a brown Chevy pickup.
An Oklahoma gas station attendant who said she served McVeigh remembered a companion with slicked-back black wavy hair. At a steakhouse in the small town of Perry that night, several customers spotted someone resembling McVeigh, and one of the owners also described a friend of his, standing six feet tall and weighing 260 pounds, with curly brown hair. On the morning of the bombing, the postmaster of the tiny town of Mulhall, not far from Perry, reported standing next to McVeigh and another man as they ordered coffee at Jackie’s Farmers Store.
Taken one by one, these stories are of dubious investigative value, and likely to be tainted by imperfect recall and the power of suggestion. Taken together, though, they make at least the beginnings of a case that Timothy McVeigh was not alone as he commandeered his weapon of mass destruction toward its target.
THE MORNING ROUTINE IN THE WILBURN HOUSEHOLD IN Oklahoma City was always chaotic. The three adults—Glenn, his wife Kathy, and Kathy’s daughter Edye—had jobs to run to, and it was a scramble to dress and feed Edye’s two boys, Chase, age three, and Colton, age two.
On April 19, Glenn was getting ready to leave with Kathy, when he noticed that Chase didn’t have his shoes on. He picked up the boy, plonked him on the wet bar, and fit first one shoe and then the other.
“You’re a good boy,” Glenn said as he kissed him on the forehead. “Paw-paw loves you.”
Chase was a big presence and a natural-born joker. Glenn stopped to notice how much he had grown over the previous couple of months. Kathy suggested playfully that they should trade Chase in for a girl named Shirley.
“I’m not Shirley!” Chase replied indignantly. The adults laughed.
Glenn and Kathy headed to the garage—it was up to Edye that morning to drive the boys to their day care on the second floor of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
“Bye, Shirley,” Kathy said.
“Don’t call me Shirley,” Chase said. He was half enjoying the joke and half bristling at it.
“Bye, Shirley. I won’t call you that,” Glenn said.
Those were the last words he ever said to his grandson.
“He was so funny,” Kathy later remembered. “He was such a funny little boy.”
APRIL 19 WAS A DESIGNATED TRAINING DAY FOR THE OKLAHOMA County Sheriff’s bomb squad, but they had no plans to come downtown. It was up to a deputy named Bill Grimsley to collect their truck at the county jail and drive it to their training area in the northeastern part of the city. He was not supposed to stop along the way; the truck had large lettering on the side that read BOMB SQUAD, and was apt to scare people.
But Grimsley made several stops, first at the county courthouse, where his day job was to supervise the security staff, and then at a McDonald’s, where he bought himself an Egg McMuffin. Naturally, he was seen. After the bombing many people became convinced that they had stumbled on some dark secret involving an attempt to stop the bombing at the eleventh hour. Some, like Norma Joslin, a clerk with the county court, worried they might be targeted for assassination if they revealed what they had witnessed; when Joslin was called before a grand jury in 1998, she insisted on being driven directly into an underground garage and escorted into the courtroom. The FBI was also curious, and grilled every bomb squad member over a period of months.
It didn’t help that the sheriff’s department put out a series of confusing, even contradictory, statements. First, officials denied the bomb truck had been downtown at all. Then they told at least one media outlet that the entire bomb squad had been training near the Murrah Building, wearing blue jeans instead of their uniforms. By the time they got around to the truth, few were inclined to believe it.
It was Grimsley himself who created much of the confusion. Worried he might get into trouble for disobeying the rules, he told his superiors he had driven the truck straight to the training facility. At first they chose to believe him. Then they tried to cover for him. “Bill was notorious for getting into little kinks like that,” said Kyle Kilgore, the bomb squad’s dog handler. “The only thing that saved us was that our bomb squad schedules are put in yearly, one year in advance.” Those schedules showed that April 19 was indeed a training day—just a bizarre coincidence.
THERE WERE OTHER, LESS FARCICAL STORIES OF UNUSUAL LAW ENFORCEMENT activity. Renee Cooper, a deputy clerk at the county courthouse, said she saw several men in dark jackets with bomb squad markings outside the federal courthouse at 8:00 A.M. Claude Criss, a private investigator, said he saw them, too, and they were rooting through the bushes. Debbie Nakanashi, a window clerk at the Center City Post Office across the street from the Murrah Building, indicated to a congressional investigator that she had seen sniffer dogs but was ordered by her superiors not to talk about them. According to Randy Yount, a state park ranger who helped with the rescue effort, explosives experts spent all night looking for a bomb in response to a warning that one had been planted inside the federal courthouse.
It is tempting to give credence to these reports, because they all center on the same location and suggest, however vaguely, that there was a tip-off. Throw in the mysterious air force EOD team and the FBI warning to the fire department, and we have multiple indications that some part of the government—perhaps more than one part—heard about a coming attack. Still, the accounts add up to a fractured picture at best. Nobody in authority has ever acknowledged having advance warning of a major explosion, and many agencies, particularly the FBI and ATF, have vehemently denied it.
If a bomb squad was out looking for a device, who could they have been? On the morning of April 19, the head of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol’s tactical team, John Haynie, was in Oklahoma City with a bomb truck, even though he was stationed in Ardmore, near the Texas border. Ostensibly, he was in town to run another training session—quite a coincidence. In 1998, Haynie told a grand jury that his session was called to hone his team’s surveillance skills. OHP time records, however, show that at least three of the team members who might have been expected to attend were off work or on vacation.
Could Haynie have been involved in a different operation, with the training session acting as a cover story? Haynie, exactly the sort of sure-footed senior officer people would turn to in a crisis, who had spent almost a decade tracking intelligence on Elohim City, refused to comment. “There’s no benefit that I can see to talking about anything to do with anything I’ve ever done,” he said.
A question also hangs over the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation, which brought three out-of-town agents into Oklahoma City on the evening before the bombing, for reasons it has never adequately explained. Rick Stephens, who came in from the Tulsa area, would not say if he or other OSBI agents had been forewarned of a bomb attack. “That’s been rumored for years,” he said. Invited to issue a categorical denial that the OSBI was responding to a threat, he said: “I won’t confirm or deny anything.”
THE RYDER TRUCK WAS FIRST SPOTTED IN DOWNTOWN OKLAHOMA City at around 8:00 A.M. At least two dozen eyewitnesses saw the truck over the next hour, many of them reporting that it was accompanied by a brown Chevy pickup, a white sedan, and an aging Mercury. These vehicles made themselves conspicuous in and around the Murrah Building, sometimes parked, sometimes driving, other times roaring into the building’s underground garage. McVeigh was seen in more than one of them, and always with at least one other person.
Years later, McVeigh told Michel and Herbeck, his prison interviewers, that he did not drive into Oklahoma City until 8:50 A.M. But an African-American commuter named Leonard Long spotted someone fitting his description—a “tall, slim, white man” with a dark ball cap worn backward—about fifty minutes earlier. McVeigh, Long said, was inside a brown pickup switching lanes at high speed near the Murrah Building. Long remembered the encounter because he narrowly avoided a collision and because the man next to McVeigh, a stocky, dark-complexioned man in a camouflage jacket, spewed racial insults at him.
Shortly after 8:00 A.M., an employee of the Kerr-McGee Oil Company saw two men walking away from the YMCA building, also on Fifth Street, toward a yellow Mercury parked in the oil company’s lot two blocks farther south. The men matched the description of McVeigh and his companion given by Leonard Long.
About half an hour later, Kyle Hunt, a banker, spotted a Ryder truck another block or so south of the Kerr-McGee building. Close behind was a four-door sedan with three men inside. “One of the men was looking up, straining his neck. The group looked lost,” Hunt later said. “As I pulled closer, the driver of the sedan warned me off. I got an icy-cold, go-to-hell look from the young man that I now know to be Timothy McVeigh. It was unnerving.”
Two more sightings seemed to confirm the bombing crew as lost, or at least at a loss. The first was at Johnny’s Tire Company, on a hill a few blocks northwest of the Murrah Building. Mike Moroz, a mechanic, told the FBI that two men in a Ryder truck pulled into the store and almost hit the flag banners hanging from a covered part of the forecourt. The driver, whom Moroz later identified as McVeigh, asked for directions to Northwest Fifth Street, the address of the Murrah Building. The man seemed confused, so Moroz invited him to step out of the truck and take a look down the hill at the one-way system. He was wearing a dark ball cap back to front with no hair showing.
Oddly, after the McVeigh figure told Moroz he knew where to go, he and his companion sat on the forecourt for several more minutes. Moroz and his manager wondered aloud what they were up to and joked that they should put up a sign outside, saying DIRECTIONS: $5. Finally, the truck moved on, taking a hard right and moving back downhill.
The second sighting was at a warehouse loading dock southeast of the Murrah Building in an industrial zone named Bricktown. David Snider, the warehouse foreman, was expecting a delivery and waved expectantly when he saw a Ryder truck rolling slowly toward him. The driver, he noticed, had a dark complexion, dark hair and mustache, and was wearing sunglasses. His passenger, who could have been McVeigh, had short, blond, military-style hair. “They were both looking in the side-view mirrors, and they looked like they were looking for an address,” Snider said. He quickly determined that they were not friendly, and he started yelling obscenities at them. The truck driver sped on.
Minutes later, James Linehan, a lawyer, encountered the yellow Mercury on the corner of Fourth and Robinson. He described the back of the car as “caked in Oklahoma dirt” and the license plate either obscured or missing. The time was exactly 8:38 A.M.; he was on his way to court and kept time on the clock of his black Jeep Cherokee. The Mercury was slowing to a crawl, so Linehan pulled out to overtake. But the yellow car abruptly edged over and almost pushed him into the oncoming lane. “I am thinking, basically, hey idiot, what are you doing?” Linehan recalled. “I don’t want your crappy yellow paint on my car.”
He got a good look at the driver, who was scrunched up over the steering wheel and looking up at the Murrah Building. He thought at the time it was a woman in a hooded top but wondered later if it was McVeigh in disguise. Then the Mercury made a sharp turn into the Murrah Building’s underground parking lot. Linehan saw it disappear and remembered thinking: “That car doesn’t belong in there.”
Danny Wilkerson, who ran the convenience store at the Regency Towers apartment building on Fifth Street, said a man strongly resembling Tim McVeigh walked in at around 8:40 A.M. and bought two Cokes and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes. (McVeigh was not a smoker.) Wilkerson noticed a Ryder truck parked outside and asked McVeigh if he was moving in. McVeigh said he was not. As he walked out, Wilkerson watched him and noticed a second man in the cab. Moments later, Wilkerson saw the Ryder truck again, this time on the far side of the street, pointing in the direction of the Murrah Building, a moment captured on one of the few pieces of video surveillance tape shown at McVeigh’s trial.
What did all these sightings mean? Officially, the FBI concluded they were the result of witness confusion, compounded by wall-to-wall news coverage. Not one of the eyewitnesses who saw McVeigh that morning was called to testify at trial, because the government determined that every one of them was wrong to say he was not alone. But as Danny Coulson, one of the FBI’s most experienced investigators, put it: “If only one person had seen it, or two or three…but twenty-four? Twenty-four people say, yes I saw him with someone else? That’s pretty powerful.”
Newly available information from law enforcement and from sources inside the radical right suggests Coulson was right to be skeptical of his bureau colleagues. Not only do these sources say that McVeigh had company on April 19. They also say that McVeigh and his coconspirators intended to drive the Ryder truck into the basement of the Murrah Building or the federal courthouse next door, but had to change plans in a hurry because the truck exceeded the height limit for the garage.
Dave Hollaway, of the CAUSE Foundation, was flabbergasted by what he saw as a lack of foresight. “They couldn’t get the truck into the parking garage, and that’s why there was all that turning and stopping,” he said. “The guys weren’t exactly the brightest bulbs on the tree…. If they had had any kind of guidance—if I’d been doing it—there would have been nothing left of the building.”
Several pieces of evidence fit the scenario. Five days before the bombing, Jane Graham, a union official with the Housing and Urban Development agency, spotted three men acting suspiciously in the underground garage and later came to believe they were sizing it up as part of the plot. James Linehan’s account of the morning of April 19 points to suspicious activity involving one or more vehicles tearing in or out of the garage. And there is no doubt: the height clearance on the garage was too low for McVeigh’s twenty-foot truck.
After the Ryder made a first pass at the Murrah Building, a number of people saw it trying to squeeze into an alley between the federal courthouse and the Old Post Office Building, which houses the bankruptcy court. The alley, however, was blocked by a large U.S. Marshals Service truck, and the Ryder truck backed out again. This was first reported in the late 1990s by a member of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol. But it has since been confirmed by two very well placed officials. The first of these was Tom Hunt, who in 1995 was the local head of the Federal Protective Service, with responsibility for the security of the courthouse complex and the Murrah Building. He personally knew the marshal’s deputy blocking the alley. “The Ryder could have gotten only partway through,” Hunt said. “I’m glad. I would have hated to see those judges get it that day.”
The second official was John Magaw, the director of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, who was privy to just about everything in the bomb investigation. Magaw acknowledged that McVeigh’s initial plans turned out to be “too difficult, or…would have drawn too much attention.” Magaw could not confirm the specifics, either on the garage or the alley, but he thought both scenarios were plausible. “[McVeigh] drove around and couldn’t find a place,” Magaw added. “Wherever he meant to put it was too tight—the truck wouldn’t fit. There was a piece of information about that…. If you have heard he intended to drive it into the garage, I wouldn’t argue with that.”
Thereafter, the truck and its occupants would have had to find a place to mark time while a new plan was formulated. Running into David Snider put the kibosh on dawdling in Bricktown. One reason for driving toward Johnny’s Tire Company could have been to take advantage of the higher ground to send or receive radio messages.
One can imagine the frenzy among the members of the bombing crew, as the clock ticked toward 9:00 A.M. The truck and its deadly load had been driving around Oklahoma City for close to half an hour, glaringly visible to dozens of witnesses, and they still had no firm idea what to do with it.
AT 9:32 A.M. EASTERN TIME, JAMES HOWARD MILLER PICKED UP the phone at the Department of Justice’s Executive Secretariat, where he worked as a secretary, and heard a man say a federal building had just blown up. “He’s saying he’s standing across the street, watching it,” he told two coworkers.
None of them believed it; Miller’s main job was to screen calls, and his phone extension was commonly referred to as the “nut line.”
Only later, once the news broke, did it dawn on him that 9:32 A.M. in Washington was 8:32 A.M. in Oklahoma. Nothing at that point had blown up yet; it seemed someone with a lot of inside knowledge had prank-called the federal government.
JUST ACROSS THE NATIONAL MALL, ANOTHER TEASER ARRIVED AT the offices of Republican congressman Steve Stockman of Texas. It was an unsigned, handwritten note, sent by fax, and written so obscurely that the staffer who first read it tossed it away. Later it was retrieved, and Stockman gave it to the FBI.
The one-page message came from the offices of Mark Koernke, a prominent Michigan Militia leader acquainted with McVeigh and Nichols. It read: “First update. Bldg 7 to 10 floors only military people on scene—BATF/FBI. Bomb threat received last week. Perpetrator unknown at this time. Oklahoma.” The word “Oklahoma” was underlined.
The most interesting thing about the message was the 8:59 A.M. time stamp. In both Michigan and Washington, that was more than an hour before the bomb went off. A staffer later said the fax machine had not been reset since daylight savings time began, so it really arrived at 9:59, or 8:59 in Oklahoma. That was still three minutes before the bomb went off. And even if that was inaccurate, and the fax came in just after the explosion, as the FBI later determined, it is still a mystery how Koernke’s people received the news so fast.
A FEW MINUTES BEFORE 9:00 A.M., MCVEIGH’S BACKUP PLAN WAS IN place. The bomb would be detonated in the handicapped parking spot on the Murrah Building’s north side. The configuration of the barrels—most likely designed with the intention of driving the force of the explosion into the underground garage’s key support pillars—would now concentrate the blast toward the building itself, rather than the street.
A few minutes before the explosion, according to several witnesses, somebody moved the yellow Mercury to within eighty feet of the detonation site, probably along the same side of Fifth Street as the Ryder truck. The brown Chevy pickup was on the other side of Fifth Street, in front of the Journal Record Building. Shortly after, someone with long blond hair—perhaps the same person seen by James Linehan at the wheel of the Mercury twenty minutes earlier—waved the Ryder truck into position. This time, it seems more certain that McVeigh was inside, with the swarthy John Doe seen repeatedly over the previous hour. They had already lit both fuses. They exited, each walking calmly toward one of the getaway vehicles.
Glenn Grossman, an employee of the Oklahoma Department of Securities, watched this scene unfold from his fourth-floor office inside the Journal Record Building. In the few minutes before 9:00 A.M., he looked out twice. The first time, he saw the Mercury parked in front of the Ryder truck. It caught his attention, because he used to own a 1978 Mercury Marquis and was familiar with the vehicle. The second time, the Ryder had pulled in front. Someone was standing by the driver’s side of the Mercury. On the sidewalk, a skinny woman with long blond hair was yelling and gesturing wildly at him. “They were together,” Grossman told the FBI, “and she was frantic about something.”
A different perspective on the same events was provided by Daina Bradley, a young African-American woman who was inside the Murrah Building visiting the first-floor Social Security office with her mother, sister, and two children. She and her sister saw the Ryder truck through the building’s plate-glass windows as it pulled up. She did not see who was driving, but she got a good view of the passenger as he climbed out, walked to the back of the truck, and then started walking forward again at high speed. “It was a olive-complexion man with short hair, curly, clean-cut,” she said at McVeigh’s trial. She said he was wearing a blue jacket, jeans, tennis shoes, and a white baseball cap with purple flames on the sides.
A third view was offered by a catering truck driver named Rodney Johnson, who had to swerve out of the way of two people stepping in front of him on Fifth Street. To his right, Johnson noticed the Ryder truck parked against the building. To his left, he saw the brown Chevy pickup. He later identified one of the people in front of him as McVeigh. The other man, he said, was stocky, with black hair, and wearing a jacket. “I expected them to make some kind of move once they saw the truck barreling down at them,” Johnson said. “They didn’t flinch one bit.”
At least two other witnesses claimed to be present as the cannon fuse cord burned down to detonation point. Leah Moore, a pedestrian who was walking on the north side of Fifth Street saw the Ryder truck in the handicapped zone and decided she would complain about it. Not far away from Moore, outside the YMCA building, seventy-year-old Levoid Jack Gage was waiting for a bus and noticed the Ryder truck and the brown pickup as he lit a cigarette. Both witnesses were lucky to survive.
This narrative of the final minutes could not be more different from the version presented in court. The government asserted, simply, that McVeigh lit one or both fuses while he was still driving the Ryder truck, and hopped out as soon as he parked in front of the Murrah Building. He was on his way to the Mercury, parked in an alley a few blocks away, when the bomb exploded. Nobody was with him. McVeigh offered a similar version in his prison interviews with Michel and Herbeck, describing how he popped in a pair of earplugs as he pulled the Ryder truck into position and walked purposefully behind the YMCA building at Fifth and Robinson to shield himself from the explosion.
The witnesses aren’t alone, though, in insisting that they saw what they saw. They are backed up by the government’s own contemporaneous documentation and by an account of the investigators’ assessment of events, which appeared in the Los Angeles Times six months after the bombing.
A minute-by-minute timeline of the first few weeks of the investigation compiled by the Secret Service makes clear that extensive efforts were made to match the testimony from Glenn Grossman and Daina Bradley with time-lapse calculations based on video surveillance footage recovered from the Regency Towers, half a block away. At this stage, the witness accounts were treated with the utmost seriousness. Both the Secret Service timeline and the Los Angeles Times report, published in October 1995, allude to the lapse between the last time the Ryder truck was captured on tape and the explosion, a period of just over three minutes. In the scenario described to Times reporters Rick Serrano and Ronald Ostrow, the fuses were lit before the Ryder truck came to a halt—just as McVeigh later told it—leaving about a minute between the time the truck was parked and the explosion.
McVeigh was soon at the wheel of the Mercury, driving north out of Oklahoma City and back toward Kansas. The brown Chevy pickup was seen leaving in the same direction, along with a white sedan similar to the one spotted close to the Ryder truck the day before. The bombers probably did not see the explosion, but they must have heard it and perhaps surveyed the damage it caused. A deafening rumble shook the entire city, a spasm of destructive violence like no other across the Great Plains.