Just after 9:00 A.M. on April 19, Stanley Brown was standing at his office window at the Oklahoma Military Academy, admiring his view of the city. The air was cool, the sky a pristine blue, and it promised to be a beautiful spring day.
That was when the detonation hit him. “You could feel the blast,” he said. “It nearly blew my hat off.” Some of the ceiling tiles in his office smashed to the floor, and he looked out and saw a large plume of smoke rising from the high-rise buildings three miles to the south. Major Brown was a Vietnam War veteran, a major in the Oklahoma National Guard, and a senior member of the Oklahoma County Sheriff’s Office bomb squad. “You see that plume of smoke,” he said, “and you know damn well, everybody needs to get their balls wrapped up and go.”
He and another National Guard major ran for his pickup to head downtown. As he later wrote in a meticulous chronology, he felt a pair of explosions, which made him think there had been not one but two bombs.
AT THE FEDERAL COURTHOUSE, GARY KNIGHT OF THE OKLAHOMA CITY police thought he was experiencing an earthquake. He was in a soundproof, windowless courtroom on the first floor, watching his pregnant wife at work as she called a defense witness in a civil suit against four of Knight’s OCPD colleagues. He couldn’t hear a lot at first, but he certainly felt the initial jolt, which was like being rear-ended in a car.
The shaking grew ever stronger, the fluorescent lights swung dangerously, and ceiling tiles tumbled down. Gary Purcell, the trial judge, brought down his gavel. “Gentlemen,” he said, “I believe that was a bomb.”
The corridors outside were thick with smoke. People yelped and stumbled from the jury rooms on the outer side of the courthouse, where the plate glass had imploded. On his way out, Knight saw a U.S. marshal shepherding people out even though he was covered in blood and glass fragments. “At first I thought it was our building,” Knight said. “The federal courthouse handled big interstate drug cases, and I thought someone had put a bomb in the courthouse.” Only when he stepped outside and saw that the back of the Murrah Building was shattered did he understand which building had been hit.
BERTHA NICHOLS BARELY MADE IT THROUGH THE DOOR OF THE REGENCY Towers apartments when the force of the detonation spun her around and knocked her more or less into the arms of her husband, Richard. He was a maintenance man, and his first reaction was to think the Regency’s boilers had blown. Then he remembered that their eight-year-old nephew Chad was still strapped into the backseat of their bright red Ford Festiva. They both dashed outside to retrieve him.
The Nicholses walked into a gust of flying glass and debris. Bertha ducked into the backseat and started tugging on the seat belt to pry Chad free. Richard might have joined her in the effort, but he heard an extraordinary whirring sound coming from the direction of the Murrah Building and turned to look. “I seen this humongous object coming to us out the air. And it was spinning like a boomerang. And you could hear this ‘woo-woo-woo-woo’ noise,” he later testified.
Nichols was looking at the 250-pound rear axle from the Ryder truck, and it was hurtling directly toward him. “Get down!” he screamed.
He reached into the car and pushed his wife down onto the floorboard. The axle hit the windshield on the passenger side, throwing the vehicle back several feet. Nichols lost his grip on his wife, and on the car itself, which jerked violently past his outstretched hands. He ran back to where it came to a halt on the sidewalk. “I grabbed my wife,” he said, “and I grabbed Chad, and I kind of hovered over them like an old mother hen.” Somehow, they all escaped serious injury.
MAJOR BROWN ARRIVED AT THE MURRAH BUILDING ELEVEN MINUTES after the explosion and found a scene he described as “pure hell.” Bodies and body parts were visible everywhere, along with office furniture and reams of paper spilling out over the wreckage. Screams punctured the dust-choked air, and many of the cars along Fifth Street and in the Journal Record parking lot were on fire. The sidewalks were buckled and the parking meters either twisted or plucked out of the ground. Brown smelled the distinctive odor of ammonium nitrate, mingled with the dust and smoke.
Brown immediately worried that another bomb might be ready to explode once the rescue workers, news reporters, and political leaders arrived on the scene. It was what his training had taught him to expect. Some of the firefighters and doctors and nurses gathered around and asked him what he thought, and he told them he didn’t have a good feeling at all. For the next several hours, Brown half-expected to be blown to smithereens.
GLENN WILBURN, WHO HAD BEEN PLAYING WITH HIS GRANDCHILDREN less than two hours earlier, raced to the Murrah Building as soon as he realized it had been hit. He felt the low rumble of the blast from his office building, eighteen blocks away, and was on his way up to the roof for a better view when he learned that the explosion was right next to Chase and Colton’s day-care center.
“It was kinda eerie going downtown,” he later recalled. “It’s a heavy business district, and there was no traffic. It was like everything had frozen in the city.” There was no way of getting close to the Murrah Building, so he parked four blocks away and started running. He came to the crest of a hill, and the full horror of the explosion came into view.
“I knew then that our boys were dead,” he said. “There was no way they could have survived, just from looking at the scene. Where our boys were was nothing but a big pancake of rubble.”
TWENTY-ONE INFANTS, TODDLERS, AND PRESCHOOLERS HAD BEEN dropped off at the America’s Kids day care that morning. Three teachers were also on duty; a fourth had called in sick. The numbers might have been much higher, but three weeks earlier there had been a controversial change of management. Danielle Hunt, the popular, outgoing day-care operator and director, had been pushed out before the end of her contract to make way for a rival who was friends with an assistant building manager. Many parents were uncomfortable; they didn’t know anything about the new operator, and they weren’t happy that the young woman she appointed to run the center, Dana Cooper, was still a year from finishing her early childhood education degree.
Many parents had pulled their children out in protest and sent them elsewhere—an extraordinary stroke of good fortune. When the bomb exploded, one teacher was putting the infants down for a nap right next to the windows overlooking Fifth Street. Another was leading the older children in a round of “I Love You, You Love Me,” from Barney, which was everyone’s favorite television program.
Nobody near the windows stood a chance. The infants were killed instantly, and most of the others, including Dana Cooper and the two other teachers, perished as soon as the building collapsed. The six children who survived were all on the south side of the facility. Two of them, a sparky pair of red-headed toddler siblings named Rebecca and Brandon Denny, had gone to the front door to wait for a muffin delivery man, who arrived every day at 9:00 A.M. The muffin man saved their lives—although Brandon, then three years old, suffered severe head injuries and went on to have four brain surgeries.
Three more children under the age of five died in the building, all of them accompanying parents or grandparents to the ground-floor Social Security Administration office, where the worst of the death and destruction was concentrated. The visitors and government workers who crowded into the SSA’s marble-floored office space on the building’s north side had nowhere to escape. Those who were not skewered by flying glass, or flung against the workstations or the walls, were buried under nine floors of rubble when the side of the building came down. Forty people died in this place alone, almost a quarter of the total, and many others suffered horrific injuries. Daina Bradley, the young African-American mother who saw Timothy McVeigh’s companion through the plate-glass windows moments before the detonation, heard her two small children screaming as the floor gave way and large slabs of concrete pounded down around her. She ended up trapped in the basement for hours in a pool of frigid water, her left arm pinned behind her head and her right leg wedged beneath a giant concrete boulder. Another large lump of concrete was perched directly above her face and might have killed her if it had fallen just a few more inches. Her sister, Falesha, lay nearby, her head badly injured. For a while, they could hear each other moaning. Bradley’s mother and both her children perished.
The injuries and trauma suffered throughout the building were almost beyond description. In some cases, bodies were literally shredded, or crushed under falling concrete, or impaled on filing cabinets or pieces of flying structural steel rebar. According to the Oklahoma City Fire Department rescue operations chief, who witnessed the horrors firsthand, some people were blown fifty feet through six masonry block walls. Limbs were severed and blown off. One of the dead toddlers was decapitated; another was found with the top of his skull sheared off. A Hyundai car emblem was embedded in someone’s brain.
In the fifth-floor customs office, a forty-four-year-old secretary named Priscilla Salyers tumbled more than five floors until her body was pressed between slabs of broken concrete. Her head and face were clamped so tight she could not separate her teeth wide enough to spit out her gum. In the gloom she scrabbled around with the one part of her body she could move, her left hand, until she felt something. It was a hand. She squeezed and tugged it closer, only to realize that it was stone-cold and attached only to a forearm severed at the elbow. Still, she did not let go. She was too shocked to feel the horror of the moment. As the hours passed and she waited in growing desperation for the rescue she fervently hoped would come, that disembodied hand made her feel oddly comforted and less alone.
Salyers and the others most directly impacted by the bombing bore no responsibility for the government operations at Waco or Ruby Ridge, or any other paramilitary offensive that might have spurred McVeigh and his coconspirators into action. The employees in the Social Security office, and the Federal Employees Credit Union, and the Housing and Urban Development offices, were poorly paid bureaucrats trying to make ends meet, as were many of the people they were servicing. They posed no threat to the Patriot Movement’s gun rights, or to their civil liberties, or to their freedom to establish churches preaching the supremacy of the white race. More than 80 percent of the deaths—138 out of 168—were entirely unrelated to law enforcement, the military, or even tax collecting. The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, which was most likely at the top of the bombers’ target list, did not suffer a single fatality. Neither the IRS nor the FBI had any presence in the building. Even on McVeigh’s terms, the bombing was notable only for its gratuitous carnage or, to use the chilling military term he preferred, “collateral damage.”
THE ALFRED P. MURRAH BUILDING WAS NOT A PARTICULARLY strong structure, nor was it as well-protected as it should have been. At the time of its opening, in 1977, the otherwise unimaginative nine-story block of steel-reinforced concrete and glass gained attention and praise for its energy efficiency, particularly during air-conditioning season. Nothing was especially wrong with its construction—all follow-up studies agreed it had been built to specification—but neither was anything especially right.
The columns were reinforced by relatively fragile single-lengths of steel rebar. After the bombing, a study sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency concluded that reinforcing the columns with hoop steel instead would have probably prevented the catastrophic pancaking effect on the building’s north side. Had the Murrah been built to the specifications standard in earthquake zones, it probably would not have collapsed at all, mitigating about 80 percent of the damage and saving 80–90 percent of the lives lost. The cost of such additional reinforcement would have been negligible, about one-eighth of 1 percent of the overall construction budget.
One-eighth of 1 percent of $14 million, the price tag for the whole building, comes to about $18,000. That was less than the planners spent on drawing up their budget, an amount so small it would have caused barely a hiccough in the approval process. For $18,000, the federal government could have spared the country its worst single trauma since Pearl Harbor. The bombing would have still been a tremendous shock, and some of the injuries just as horrific. The property damage would have been almost as extensive. But the death toll would have been limited to just fifteen or twenty people.
The Ryder truck, of course, should never have been able to get so close to the building. In the years since, especially after 9/11, it has become standard for federal buildings and law enforcement agencies to be scrupulously well-guarded, with concrete barriers and other obstacles keeping vehicles at a safe distance. But even in the 1990s, federal building management agencies were well aware of the dangers, and how to address them.
In 1988, the National Research Council, part of the National Academy of Sciences, outlined the basics in a widely distributed but little-read report on improving structural integrity, establishing secure site perimeters, and deploying appropriately trained security staff to ward off risks and identify suspect characters. The NRC’s report highlighted the risk of an explosive-laden vehicle, and even suggested that one of the first things to do after receiving a threat was to close any on-site day-care centers.
The Murrah Building was targeted, in part, because it complied with none of these recommendations, unlike federal buildings in Dallas or Omaha, which McVeigh and his friends also cased. It never had more than one guard on duty, a subcontractor who worked for a private security outfit rather than the government. And the Murrah Building, along with the federal courthouse and the Old Post Office court building immediately to the south, went unguarded altogether for five hours out of every twenty-four.
In hindsight, one can appreciate how nonsensical it was to assume, as some people clearly did, that because the Murrah Building received no specific threats it was not in danger. For two years before the bombing, the ATF had received agency-wide threats over Ruby Ridge and Waco, suggesting—as one of the lead authors of the National Research Council study argued—that the day care should have been moved to a different building. “I was disappointed they couldn’t adopt some of the things we recommended,” John Pignato, author of the NRC study, told the Kansas City Star a week after the bombing. “I’m not saying we could have saved everybody, but I certainly think we could have contributed to some (lives) saved.”
Some people, however, were keenly aware of the potential threat. Early in 1995, Magistrate Judge Ronald Howland of the Oklahoma City federal bench met with Tom Hunt, the head of Federal Protective Service, to discuss vulnerabilities at all three downtown federal buildings. “I’ve always been a security guy,” Howland explained. “I just felt we needed better security.” His two specific concerns were the five-hour gap in security coverage on weekdays, and the alley between the federal courthouse and Old Post Office Building, where judges drove in on their way to a dedicated underground parking area. What would happen, Judge Howland asked, if some unauthorized person drove into that alley? What would happen if someone tried to blow up the place?
“Judge,” Hunt replied, “I have asked everybody. I’ve asked my agency, I’ve asked the Marshals and the GSA [General Services Administration]. I’ve asked agencies with offices in the Murrah Building to pay for additional security.” No one, he said, was willing to put up the funds. “Even my own bosses said, don’t ask again.”
In February 1995, Hunt was asked for a risk assessment on the Oklahoma City buildings under his jurisdiction. This resulted in a document cataloguing the security holes, along with a list of suggested remedies. But his bosses didn’t want to hear this. “They told me, you have to realize the United States has not had that many terrorist attacks,” Hunt said. “Everybody wanted a federal building that was really open to the public, because of the Social Security office and army recruiting and HUD in there. They wanted an atmosphere that said, come on in and do business with us.”
Hunt was told to rewrite his assessment to say everything was fine as it was. To his enduring chagrin, he did as he was told—not explicitly endorsing anything other than the alarm system, but not openly criticizing anything, either. “I changed it and signed it,” he said. “I should have put a page in there saying I was signing it under duress, or something to that effect…When that bomb went off I thought, oh man, they’re going to put me in a cell.” He might not have achieved anything by protesting more than he did, but he has never stopped asking what he might have done differently.
Hunt was never called to account for the bombing, no doubt because his bosses knew the efforts he’d made to beef up security. But those same bosses seemed worried about what he might reveal to the media. For weeks, they sent him on out-of-town work trips, to Brownsville to help investigate a murder, to Houston to do a risk assessment on the Johnson Space Center, to the Virgin Islands and New Mexico. “I said, why are you sending me to all these places? I’ve got a bombing,” Hunt recalled. “My agency wanted me out of the way.”
The mistrust did not end after Hunt retired in 1999. The day after he left, he said, GSA employees came to his office with bolt cutters to cut the locks off his filing cabinets. He was sure they were looking for his Murrah Building files. He had taken everything home for safekeeping. He knew private lawsuits would try to pin blame on one branch of government or another. “I was not going to leave it to others to say I had nothing to do with this,” he said.
FEW ISSUES ABOUT THE BOMBING GENERATED AS MUCH INTEREST, OR misunderstanding, as the question of whether there was more than one explosion. Major Brown of the National Guard felt a double thump from three miles away, as did some survivors inside the Murrah Building. Most persuasive were seismographic readings done by the earthquake monitoring systems administered by the Oklahoma Geological Survey at the University of Oklahoma in Norman, fifteen miles south of the bomb site, which showed an initial jolt, or cluster of jolts, right around 9:02 A.M.; then a second set between seven and eleven seconds later.
For several weeks after the bombing, Raymon L. Brown of the OGS maintained that based strictly on geological data, there were probably “two events”—in other words, two bombs. Other experts, including Thomas Holzer of the U.S. Geological Survey, disagreed. Dr. Brown eventually changed his mind, stating that there were other plausible explanations for the data he had collected. By that time, though, all sorts of wild theories were running loose.
By the end of July, retired air force general Benton K. Partin sent a report to Congress, asserting that the Ryder truck bomb alone could not have caused all the damage, and that additional explosive charges must have been strapped to the pillars inside the building. General Partin made some elementary mistakes, including an overestimation of the strength of the concrete pillars and a failure to appreciate the power of gravity to pull down part of the building once key support columns had been weakened. But these flaws in Partin’s findings did not stop a number of paranoid antigovernment activists from accepting this and further alleging that the government itself had brought down the building—for political reasons too far removed from reality to be worth dissecting here.
What really happened was this: when the ammonium nitrate barrels ignited, a vast initial shock wave expanded outward in all directions, shattering windows, smashing into cars parked on the street, and ripping into the guts of the Murrah Building. Brute force is the signature of this kind of explosive; ammonium nitrate won’t set fire to a building necessarily, but it will generate a destructive blast that can rip off facades and roofs, shatter walls and internal supports, and create conditions for a partial or total structural collapse.
The first wave was followed by a second one, known as the negative blast-pressure wave, so called because it is caused by air rushing to fill the vacuum created by the initial explosion. Rick Sherrow, who spent three decades as an explosives expert with the ATF, gave an authoritative explanation of the phenomenon when he wrote up his independent inquiries for Soldier of Fortune magazine. “During an explosive detonation,” he wrote, “large quantities of expanding gases are forced outward in the form of a positive-pressure wave. This creates a vacuum behind them. As the pressure of this wave dissipates, a negative-pressure wave is formed by gases (and debris) being sucked into this vacuum. This negative wave often is powerful enough to cause additional damage, in some cases finishing off what had just been weakened by the positive wave.”
In other words, if the initial blast had not already sheared or shattered the three main support columns of the building on its own, the negative blast-pressure wave might have done so. Add to that a likely reverberation or tamping effect from the surrounding buildings, and it’s easy to understand why those columns on the north side gave way. The second series of jolts recorded by Dr. Brown could have been the negative blast wave, or the collapse of the building, or some combination of the two.
McVeigh and his coconspirators probably knew nothing about negative blast-pressure waves, or the other likely effects of detonating a truck bomb. And it is unlikely that they studied the structural defects of the Murrah Building, or knew about the relative fragility of the reinforced concrete. Dave Hollaway, the curiously well-informed deputy director of the CAUSE Foundation, did not hesitate to acknowledge that the bombers blundered their way to notoriety. “They got lucky because the bomb knocked the face of the building off,” said Hollaway, who had some explosives knowledge from his army days. “Often, it’s the collapsing of the air back in that does most of the damage. When it blew off…it set up a fanning wave, which shattered the pillars on one side of the building…. That’s what resulted in the multiple damage. That was just lucky.”
THE BOMBERS’ LUCK WAS A NIGHTMARE FOR RESCUE WORKERS DIGGING their way into the bowels of the building. Lumps of concrete were still tumbling from the wreckage, and large slabs hung precariously by what looked like thin threads of rebar, causing minute-by-minute concern about the safety of the firemen, police, nurses, and doctors. The largest slab, a 32,000-pound monster, became known as the “Mother Slab,” or the “Slab from Hell.” The basement area where most of the victims were trapped was dank and slowly filled with frigid water from the ruptured pipes. The rescuers named it “the Pit.”
A kind of frenzy gripped everyone involved. The rescuers became as uncertain as the survivors that they would get out alive, and their nerves worked on them in strange and unpredictable ways. At one point, a group of workers digging through the rubble of mangled cabinets and desks began to find large quantities of money which they gave to FBI special agent Franklin Alexander for safekeeping. At first, Alexander shoved these bills into the cargo pockets of his fatigue pants, for lack of a better place, before he woke up to reality and told his fellow rescuers: “Forget about the money, it doesn’t matter right now. Look for people!”
John Avera, an Oklahoma City police sergeant, broke down several times when the FBI interviewed him about his experiences in the building. He was asked about the friends and colleagues he had encountered, and about the people he had helped, but he was unable to visualize any of them clearly. “There were a lot of bodies. I remember seeing lots of torsos,” he said, in a daze. “But I just can’t remember their faces.”
One victim he saw had literally been scalped—the rolls of skin and blood hanging down from his bare skull. As Avera pushed deeper into the Pit, he was hit on the shoulder by a piece of falling debris and had trouble moving his neck. His T-shirt and jeans were covered in blood; the dust penetrated his lungs and made his breathing labored. Every few minutes, he had to wipe his glasses clean from the dust and spray from broken water pipes. He tried removing his glasses, but that didn’t work, either.
Then he came across Baylee Almon, a baby from the day-care center, who had celebrated her first birthday just the day before. He did not know if she was alive or dead. Her clothes and shoes had been shredded; she was wearing only her white ankle socks. He picked her up and thought her neck was broken. He cradled her so he would not inflict any further head or neck damage, and listened for any sign of breathing. There was none.
Soon, a photograph of a lifeless Baylee being carried out of the Murrah Building by a gentle giant of a firefighter would become the iconic image of the bombing, a moment captured by two amateur photographers whose work would be published on the front pages of newspapers and magazines around the world. But finding that firefighter was no easy task.
Avera ran outside with the baby and tried to hand her off to a nurse or doctor. Everyone he approached told him to find someone else. Nobody, it seems, could bear to hold the dead child, much less face the prospect of handing her over to her devastated parents. Avera couldn’t understand it. Finally, Chris Fields of the Oklahoma City Fire Department came up to him, rather than waiting to be asked, and scooped up Baylee’s remains as though it was the most natural thing in the world.
THE FIRST ASSUMPTION ABOUT THE BOMBING WAS THAT IT WAS THE work of Middle Eastern extremists. In some cases, the assumption prompted hysterical reactions directed at Muslims generally. “Shoot them now, before they get us,” wrote Jeff Kamen of New York Newsday. But spring 1995 was also a period of heightened “chatter” from Middle Eastern groups threatening the United States, not least because Ramzi Yousef, the mastermind behind the 1993 attack on the World Trade Center in New York, had recently been arrested in Pakistan and extradited to the United States.
A few weeks earlier, the federal judiciary had received a stark security warning, not about the radical far right, or the anniversary of Waco, but a fatwa issued by Iranian extremists against the U.S. Marshals Service and the buildings it was charged with protecting. (This was perhaps one reason Judge Purcell so quickly believed the rumbling in his soundproof courtroom was a bomb.) The grievance resulted from an episode during the World Trade Center bombing trial, when a deputy marshal accidentally stepped on a copy of the Koran in a courtroom scuffle. There was no indication that Oklahoma City was likely to be singled out for attack, and one of Purcell’s colleagues said the briefing was mostly about preventing intruders from bursting into the building to create a hostage-type situation.
The Middle Eastern theme dominated cable news coverage for the first several hours. One of the earliest eyewitness reports spoke of three Arabs driving away from the bomb site. A local Jordanian-American, Abraham Ahmad, shot to the top of the suspect list because he fit an eyewitness description and was booked on a flight to Italy directly after the explosion. Ahmad was grilled by customs officials in Chicago, then intercepted when he reached London and sent back to Washington for questioning by the FBI. His luggage traveled on to Rome, where local police pulled it apart on arrival.
The government took no chances with anyone else, checking and double-checking passports at Will Rogers International Airport in Oklahoma City and assigning a dozen Arabic-language translators to decipher surveillance traffic. The translators were kept on even after it became clear this was a domestic attack, to the irritation of the Pentagon, which had loaned them to the FBI.
The real experts, those federal and local law enforcement agents with direct experience of the radical right, were never in doubt about the true nature of what had happened. About an hour after the bombing, Oklahoma’s police and fire chiefs were standing on the north side of Fifth Street with the assistant city manager and Bob Ricks, the special agent in charge of the FBI’s Oklahoma City office. They were contemplating the ghastly scene when Ricks, unprompted, looked at the others and said, “This is the anniversary of Waco.”
As the FBI’s public face throughout the fifty-one-day Branch Davidian siege two years earlier, Ricks well knew the fury it unleashed. Militia groups had attacked him in their newsletters, and he was already wondering if the bomb had been meant for him.
A similar gut feeling gripped one of Ricks’s longest-standing FBI colleagues, Danny Coulson, just recently appointed as special agent in charge of the Dallas office. Coulson knew the legacy of Jim Ellison and Wayne Snell from his time in charge of the bureau’s Hostage Rescue Team. Exactly ten years earlier, on April 19, 1985, Coulson ordered the HRT to move in on a heavily armed religious compound in rural Arkansas run by Ellison under the name of the Covenant, the Sword, and the Arm of the Lord. The four-day siege ended without a shot being fired, largely thanks to Coulson’s patience and the intervention of Robert Millar, the patriarch of Elohim City, who acted as a go-between and induced Ellison to surrender peacefully.
Coulson later wrote that when he heard about the bombing, he grabbed his weapons and drove as fast as he could through a driving rainstorm up I-35 to Oklahoma City. On his way, he received a phone call from Rita Braver, a correspondent with CBS.
“Everybody in Washington is saying it’s Middle Eastern,” she said. “Do you think that’s right?”
“No it’s not. It’s a Bubba job.”
“It looks like all the other truck bombings coming out of the Middle East,” Braver persisted.
“It’s Bubbas,” Coulson said. “It’s April 19.”
TIM MCVEIGH MADE A REMARKABLY CLEAN GETAWAY, THOUGH ANY number of things could have gone wrong for him. The Mercury was leaking oil. It had a lousy transmission, a questionable battery, and a broken fuel gauge. On its rear was a large primer stain, making it easy to spot if anyone decided it was suspicious. McVeigh’s task was to navigate his way out of the city without being spotted by the police officers, firefighters, and volunteer rescue workers rushing in the opposite direction. He could have broken down or been stopped at any moment.
McVeigh’s only mistake was not having a license plate for the back of the Mercury Marquis. After months of planning, it was extraordinary that McVeigh could have slipped up over something so elementary. It is a wrinkle in the story that has generated endless theories but almost no cogent explanations. The FBI scoured the streets looking for the license plate; and at least two witnesses reported seeing it hanging by a single bolt in the days leading up to the bombing. But the feds found nothing. Later, McVeigh said he removed the plate when he stashed the car in an alley on April 16, presumably because he did not want an overcurious cop or traffic warden to trace the car back to him. But he never explained why he didn’t reattach it.
The government ascribed the oversight to recklessness or simple incompetence. But when McVeigh bought the Mercury five days earlier in Junction City—to replace a Pontiac station wagon with a blown head gasket—he had taken care to switch his Arizona plates to the new car, even though they were the wrong plates. “Nice and solid, two screws right on top,” he told one of his defense lawyers shortly after his arrest. At least on April 14, it was very important to him not to drive around without plates.
The best way to understand the scenario is if McVeigh was not alone. Everything he did up to the moment he drove away from the Murrah Building suggests the Mercury was intended not as a getaway vehicle but rather as a “drop car”—a vehicle to carry him a short distance away before being ditched. That, in turn, implies that he was expecting a ride the rest of the way.
On the front passenger seat he left a sealed envelope stuffed with documents describing the motivation for the bombing, a collection that acted both as a manifesto and as a signature taking responsibility for the carnage. They included a historical article on the battle of Lexington and Concord, provocative quotes from Samuel Adams, Patrick Henry, Thomas Jefferson, and Winston Churchill; a copy of the Declaration of Independence, on the back of which McVeigh had scrawled: “Obey the Constitution of the United States, and we won’t shoot you”; a chunky paragraph from John Locke arguing for the legitimacy of war against those who would take away our liberty; and a long passage from The Turner Diaries, in which the narrator justifies the car bomb attack on FBI headquarters as a message to the “politicians and the bureaucrats” that they can run but not hide.
Had these documents been discovered in an empty car, they would have generated endless speculation and analysis in the media, as McVeigh later said he hoped they would. If he was planning to drive the Mercury just a short distance, it becomes more understandable that he would not want to spend more than a few hundred dollars on it. He needed to transfer the Pontiac’s license plates for the trip down from Junction City so nobody would stop him en route. Equally, it made sense to remove the license plates when he stashed the car, so nobody could easily link him to the Mercury while it sat unattended for three days. McVeigh left a note under the windshield: “Not abandoned. Please do not tow. Will move by April 23. (Needs battery & cable.)” And he put a piece of tissue paper over the gas cap to alert him if someone had tried to siphon off any fuel. According to Terry Nichols, who accompanied McVeigh to Oklahoma City on Easter Sunday, he had the Arizona license plate in his hand when they rode back to Kansas. When Nichols asked why he had unscrewed it from the Mercury, McVeigh said he didn’t want it stolen.
After the bombing, the car’s ownership was bound to be traced through the VIN number, which was clearly visible through the windshield. Since McVeigh could easily have bought a drop car under an assumed name, at a dealership where he would not be recognized (unlike the one in Junction City, where he knew the owner), we must assume he wanted this to happen. One suspects his real desire was to enjoy the public notoriety associated with the bombing while living the life of a full-time outlaw and, perhaps, planning and carrying out other attacks. That’s what Earl Turner did in The Turner Diaries. And it was something he more or less announced in a letter to his sister Jennifer, eighteen months or so before the bombing. “If someone does start looking for me,” he wrote, “(I have ‘ears’ all over the country), that’s when I disappear…. Believe me, if that necessity ever comes to pass, it will be very difficult for anyone to find me.”
Another reason to believe the Mercury was meant as a drop car was that McVeigh had another vehicle. This was not discussed at trial, or disclosed to the news media at the time. But on January 4, 1995, McVeigh bought a ten-year-old Ford Ranger pickup truck in Michigan. The FBI’s records say nothing more about it—where it was kept, what kind of condition it was in, whether it was ever recovered—but this could have been the vehicle McVeigh intended to use after he made his getaway from Oklahoma City.
SOMETHING CLEARLY WENT WRONG WITH THE “DROP CAR” PLAN, BECAUSE McVeigh ended up driving the Mercury out of Oklahoma City and another sixty miles to the north. Perhaps he panicked and felt there was no time to stop and switch cars. Or a fight broke out between McVeigh and his companions. The FBI came to believe McVeigh wanted to kill the kids in the day-care center as revenge for the children who perished at Waco. Did the others, believing they were targeting the federal courthouse, try to stop him? Or did they abandon him once they saw the scale of the slaughter they had perpetrated?
In McVeigh’s account, he walked alone from the Ryder truck through a maze of back alleys as the fuse wire burned toward detonation point. He was just past the YMCA, kitty-corner from the north entrance to the Murrah Building, when the explosion rocked everything around him. He dodged a severed power line whipping dangerously in his direction, hopped out of the way of a tumbling pile of bricks, shrugged at a woman coming out of a shop, swapped glances with a couple standing forlornly in front of a shattered storefront, and exchanged a line of conversation with a private mail deliveryman on his rounds.
“Man,” McVeigh reported the man saying, “for a second I thought that was us that blew up.”
“Yeah, so did I,” McVeigh said he replied.
McVeigh walked to his car in an alley off Eighth Street, checked his gas tank, and tried several times to start the Mercury. It coughed and sputtered but would not engage. Just as he was about to give up, it kicked into gear. He navigated the one-way system on to Broadway, which runs parallel to I-235, paused as a fleet of police cars and fire engines hared toward downtown, and turned north onto the freeway back to Kansas.
None of the bystanders McVeigh described has ever been traced—one of many problems with his account. The Mercury was probably parked much closer to the Ryder truck, as discussed in the last chapter. In the minutes after the explosion, two more eyewitnesses saw McVeigh and the muscular, olive-skinned character in an alley a block and a half southeast of the Murrah Building—a different direction from the one in McVeigh’s version. Germaine Johnston, a Housing and Urban Development worker who was hit in the head by flying glass and debris, staggered out on her own and thought immediately of walking to her husband’s office to tell him she was all right. On her way, she saw a man she later identified as McVeigh, as well as a second, shorter, darker man. She said they were standing next to a yellow Mercury just like one she and her husband had once owned.
“What happened?” the McVeigh figure asked.
Johnston told him.
“A lot of people killed?”
“I don’t know,” she responded weakly. Johnston was thrown by the question, because he seemed entirely indifferent to the fact that she was bleeding from the head, caked in concrete dust, and wet from the ruptured pipes that had sprayed her on her way out of the office. “I thought he was going to ask me if he could help me, or if I was okay, or something,” Johnston recounted. “Several people had already done that.”
Later, Johnston realized something else noteworthy. At the spot where she talked to the McVeigh figure, the alley had a clear view of the Murrah Building. A few yards farther back or forward, the building would have been obscured.
AT A DINGY MOTEL OUTSIDE SPOKANE, WASHINGTON, A TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD skinhead named Chevie Kehoe banged on the door of the manager’s living quarters and insisted he turn on the television.
Kehoe was then at the dawn of a criminal career that would send him on a vicious cross-country robbing, bombing, and killing spree. Lately he had been living on and off at the Shadows Motel and RV Park, which he used as a gathering point for fellow neo-Nazis and skinheads who wanted to build an Aryan paradise in the Pacific Northwest. The manager, Jeff Brown, was more or less a friend who chose to turn a blind eye to gunshots or loud pops coming from Kehoe’s quarters. “Bud,” as Brown called Kehoe, would experiment with small explosives and blasting caps in his room, setting them off inside the pages of motel phone books. In addition to a library of do-it-yourself guerrilla warfare manuals, Kehoe kept an arsenal of shoulder weapons and explosives, including a supply of fertilizer, mothballs, and black powder, which he would cook up into homemade bombs.
Brown was asleep when he heard the banging at his door. Kehoe was yelling for him to turn the TV on to CNN. “Ten minutes later,” Brown told a newspaper reporter, “the news is breaking there was a bomb going off in Oklahoma City.”
Kehoe looked thrilled. “It’s about time,” he said.
Several days earlier, Kehoe told Brown that something would happen on April 19 to “wake people up.” “I look back on it,” Brown said, “and he obviously knew about it beforehand.”
Kehoe moved in the same circles as Tim McVeigh. Both traveled the gun-show circuit and dropped in on radical communities around the country. In the months before the bombing, Chevie and his younger brother Cheyne spent extended periods at Elohim City, taking shooting lessons from Andreas Strassmeir and participating in discussions on how to bring down the government. A former associate of Chevie’s, who accompanied him twice to Elohim City, later told the feds he remembered a conversation in late 1994 about a “delivery” that needed to be made very soon. Despite repeated inquiries, Kehoe refused to explain what this delivery was.
WAYNE SNELL HAD A RESTLESS NIGHT. HE ROSE AT 1:45 A.M., PUTTING on his day clothes and monitoring the television outside his death row cell, which was kept on at his request. Between news bulletins, he sat at his desk and wrote. At 4:00 A.M., he ordered a hearty breakfast of eggs, chicken sausage, grits, biscuits, and gravy, which put him to sleep for an hour or so. He woke in time to watch the 6:00 A.M. news, before dozing off again. Much of the local coverage was about Snell’s execution scheduled for 9:00 P.M. that night. He seemed pleased that the tone was not unduly negative. At this stage, he still had his final appeals pending and was hoping for a last-minute reprieve.
Once news from Oklahoma City broke, Snell’s guards noticed an immediate change in demeanor. He chuckled, nodded in approval, and seemed to find a renewed inner calm. He spent much of his last day writing and munching on sunflower seeds. In the afternoon, for his final meal, he downed six pieces of fried crappie, hushpuppies with buttermilk, a salad with blue-cheese dressing, and three-quarters of a large white onion.
According to his lawyer, Jeffrey Rosenzweig, Snell had misgivings about the way the bombing was carried out. He reportedly told his attorney that a professional bombing crew, the sort he associated with during his criminal heyday, would never have targeted children. It is impossible to know if this was a genuine reservation, or a way of distancing himself a little. The bombing certainly did not dampen Snell’s revolutionary spirit—quite the contrary. As he was strapped down and wheeled into the death chamber, he issued a final statement that spooked everyone who heard it.
“Governor Tucker,” he said, “look over your shoulder. Justice is on the way. I wouldn’t trade places with you or any of your political cronies. Hell has victory. I am at peace.”
OTHER MEMBERS OF THE RADICAL FAR RIGHT WERE UNHAPPY WITH the bombing, understanding that it would not be a catalyst to additional antigovernment action so much as a huge screeching brake. Some of McVeigh’s fellow revolutionaries were disgusted by the deaths of blameless civilians. Even those who did not fault the bombing’s morality still attacked its operational stupidity. Kale Kelly, an Aryan Nations adherent and antigovernment revolutionary, said bluntly that McVeigh should have killed more federal agents and fewer innocents. Andreas Strassmeir, who acknowledged knowing and liking McVeigh, thought a bomb was the wrong weapon and a public office building the wrong target. “The whole militia movement basically died that night,” Strassmeir said many years later. “Whatever he did achieve worked against anything he believed in.”
Some of the statements coming out of the Patriot Movement were, of course, self-serving. Nobody wanted to catch heat from the vast government investigation—least of all Strassmeir, who later came under close scrutiny as a possible suspect. But the reactions were also unmistakably tinged with contempt, if not anger, toward McVeigh. “Didn’t he case the place?” Strassmeir asked incredulously. “You’re talking about a public building. Even Tim knew not everyone in there was a murderous BATF agent. You can’t be that dumb.”
Some people dropped hints that McVeigh had unilaterally changed the intended plan, or that the attack was much more vicious than they had been led to believe ahead of time. One was Jack Oliphant, a one-armed World War II veteran who led the Arizona Patriot Movement and almost certainly knew McVeigh from his time in the dusty desert town of Kingman. A couple of weeks before the bombing, one of Oliphant’s neighbors overheard him saying that “something big” would happen before the end of the month. In one of many newspaper interviews after the bombing, Oliphant said: “The bastard has put the Patriot movement back 30 years…. If he’d blown up a federal building at night, he’d be a hero.” Another hint came from a white supremacist prison gang leader named Bobby Joe Farrington, who told the FBI that McVeigh’s job had been to blow up the federal courthouse as part of a national campaign against judges who displeased the movement. Farrington said he had met McVeigh, whom he knew as “Sergeant Mac,” and could only conclude he was an idiot who had “fucked it up.”
ABOUT AN HOUR AFTER THE EXPLOSION, A TALL, ATHLETIC MAN WITH a goatee, wearing blue jeans, a ball cap, and a blue windbreaker, made a dramatic appearance at a shattered window on the Murrah Building’s ninth floor. To his left was a makeshift sign on which he had scrawled ATF - TRAPPED - NINTH FLOOR. In his right hand was a small lockbox.
Special Agent Luke Franey said he had been on the phone with an ATF colleague when he felt the walls and ceiling falling in. He could hear screams from the Drug Enforcement Administration next door. A gust of air pressure flung him out of his chair and into a hallway, where he landed, covered in rubble. He may or may not have lost consciousness, but after checking himself for injuries—and finding nothing but “minor scrapes and cuts”—he kicked and chopped his way through a wall, only to realize with horror that the DEA’s part of the building was gone. Then he went to his fellow agents’ desks, scooped up as many documents and keepsakes as he could find and put them in the lockbox he held up in the window. He also picked up his own children’s savings bonds and some family photographs.
Franey told this story for years afterward, but something about it did not add up. On his way out of the building, he said, he broke through three Sheetrock walls with his bare hands and climbed down an outside ledge at a perilous forty-five-degree angle before descending a blood-smeared staircase. His hands were banged up, and he said he had them bandaged as soon as he could. He also had a cut on his head.
Yet in a video shot later that morning, Franey’s hands are not bandaged, and he can be seen vigorously shaking hands with Bob Heady, the commander of the sheriff’s office bomb squad, with no obvious discomfort. There are no cuts on his head, or any other indication of bodily injury. While other survivors were caked in dust and grime, his face and clothes remained clean.
Danny Coulson of the FBI, who helped gather the physical evidence during the first week of the investigation, said he had no problem climbing up the southeastern staircase and walking into the remains of the ATF office without jumping onto ledges or clambering across broken Sheetrock. Franey’s ATF colleague Harry Eberhardt concurred, saying the route “was used many times by searchers and other agents.” Even John Magaw, the ATF director, made little attempt to defend Franey when asked about him in 2009. “He sometimes overstates things,” Magaw said. “I think people who have worked with him have learned to take these things with a grain of salt.”
What really happened? Did Franey enter the building after the bombing on a sensitive mission to retrieve documents, or weapons? Magaw said he did not know but did not rule it out. If Franey was in radio contact with his colleagues, as he said, why make such a spectacle of his presence?
Franey was not the only ATF agent with a questionable story that morning. His boss, Alex McCauley, the ATF’s resident agent in charge in Oklahoma City, claimed he was in an elevator when the explosion occurred. He said that he and DEA agent Dave Schickedanz went into free fall, plunging from the eighth floor to the third. Three times, with smoke wafting in, they tried and failed to open the elevator doors. On the fourth try, they squeezed themselves out to the third floor and made their way to a stairwell, bringing ten or fifteen other survivors with them. When they realized the stairwell had crumbled, they used a bedsheet as a rope to shimmy down toward a “chain of rescuers,” who brought them all to safety.
This story was circulated in an ATF news release and repeated in court by Joe Hartzler, McVeigh’s chief government prosecutor. But two technicians working for the Midwest Elevator Company—Duane James and Oscar Johnson—challenged it. They were on the scene within minutes to see if anyone had been trapped. Nobody was, and the technicians said there was no way any of the elevators could have free-fallen. Each elevator had a mechanical brake at the top that would freeze the hoist ropes, and there was another brake beneath each elevator car in case the ropes got cut. None of these backup systems was even activated; the ropes were all intact.
The technicians said McCauley and Schickedanz probably slid no more than four or five feet as the emergency brake came on. “If you fell six floors and it was a free fall,” James said, “it would be like jumping out of a six-story building. I’d ask ’em how long they were in the hospital and how lucky they were to survive.”
The elevator story became a public relations nightmare for the ATF, and almost certainly factored in the decision to transfer McCauley quietly out of Oklahoma City in the summer of 1995. He left the ATF shortly after.
At the time of the bombing, the ATF was fighting for its survival because of the Waco disaster, and one of John Magaw’s main goals was to restore its public image. He saw the bombing as an opportunity to paint the agency in heroic colors, and his staff was irresistibly drawn to Franey and McCauley’s gritty survival stories. But the holes in those stories did the ATF real damage, because they eroded the agency’s credibility within the bombing task force and spawned all sorts of wild theories on the media fringes and on the Internet. To the extent that the ATF jumped on the stories as publicity material, they backfired. When Magaw was asked in a 2010 interview about the photograph of Franey in the ninth-floor window, he responded: “I wonder if that was one of the pictures that was staged.” The picture was, in fact, taken by a local news photographer unstaged. But Magaw’s response might have given away more than he meant to.
TIM MCVEIGH WAS CRUISING SMOOTHLY TOWARD THE KANSAS border. A few miles past the tiny town of Perry, he saw a highway patrol trooper’s vehicle roaring up behind him at more than ninety miles per hour. The trooper, Charlie Hanger, was on his way to help a distressed motorist. He had been called to Oklahoma City earlier that morning, only to be turned around and told to return to regular patrolling duties. The Mercury was sticking to the speed limit, and Hanger might not have noticed it at all, if the large patch of primer on the left rear panel had not guided his eye to the missing license plate. He was a gruff, no-nonsense trooper who had cruised up and down Oklahoma’s highways for nineteen years, and he rarely missed a driver committing an obvious infraction. He slowed as he fell in behind the Mercury, took a second look at the back bumper, and turned on his siren.
McVeigh had to think fast. He had a loaded Glock pistol in his pocket, as well as a backup ammunition clip on his belt, so he could easily take care of Hanger if he wanted. But what was worse for him: a dead cop and a race to stay ahead of a multistate manhunt, or the inconvenience of a traffic ticket or two?
In McVeigh’s own account, he decided to spare Hanger because he was a state trooper, not a federal officer. But the decision cannot have been made calmly. A calm man would have stayed put, using the time Hanger took to lean into his window to decide whether to hand over his license or put a bullet in the trooper’s brain. McVeigh, oddly, decided to step out of the car right away.
Hanger wasn’t taking any chances. Two weeks earlier, on this same stretch of road, a driver had fired at one of Hanger’s highway patrol colleagues. So he crouched behind his open door for cover, waiting until he could see McVeigh’s hands, before moving forward.
Hanger told McVeigh why he’d been stopped and asked for a bill of sale to prove the Mercury was his; McVeigh said the dealer was still filling out the paperwork. Hanger expressed some skepticism. When McVeigh was asked for his driver’s license, he reached into his back pocket, revealing a suspicious bulge under the armpit of his windbreaker. Hanger took the license, ordered McVeigh to lift up both hands, and told him to unzip his jacket very slowly.
“I have a gun,” McVeigh conceded.
Hanger pressed his left hand against the bulge in McVeigh’s jacket and used his right hand to push the barrel of his own pistol directly against McVeigh’s head.
“Get your hands up and turn around,” he said. He frog-marched McVeigh to the back of the Mercury and spread-eagled him across the trunk.
McVeigh complied, and told him: “My weapon is loaded.”
Hanger responded: “So is mine.”
Hanger lifted the Glock out of McVeigh’s pocket and threw it onto the shoulder. McVeigh told the trooper about the ammunition clip and a knife in his jacket. Hanger took both and threw them on the shoulder also. Then he handcuffed McVeigh, pushed his gun against McVeigh’s back, and walked him back to his vehicle.
“You know that one wrong move on your part could have gotten you shot,” Hanger told him.
McVeigh shrugged. “It’s possible.”
Hanger wanted to establish just how tough a customer he was dealing with. McVeigh sought to minimize the concealed weapon, saying he had a permit for one in New York. But Hanger was hardly reassured by a Black Talon “cop killer” bullet he found inside the Glock. Was the gun or car stolen? McVeigh had no registration papers or proof of insurance.
The trooper radioed in the Mercury’s VIN number and the Glock’s registration number; both were clean. He also asked the dispatcher to run a check on McVeigh, to see if he had prior arrests or outstanding warrants. He did not.
McVeigh seemed resigned to spending a day or two in jail. If he was lucky, he could arrange bail and still vanish underground before anyone associated him with the bombing. It certainly helped that Hanger had not touched the sealed white envelope on the passenger seat. When they left for the Noble County lockup, it stayed where it was.
They talked briefly on the twenty-minute ride into Perry. McVeigh was anxious to get his Glock back; Hanger said he’d have to sort that out with the court. McVeigh asked Hanger what kind of service pistol he was carrying—it was a SIG 228—and even dared him to drive his car faster. Hanger didn’t take the bait, but took comfort in the jocular tone. McVeigh felt calmer, too: although his wrists were cuffed and he was heading into custody, nobody was yet associating him with the bloodshed in Oklahoma City.
SHORTLY AFTER 10:30 A.M., AS MCVEIGH WAS BEING BOOKED, THE Oklahoma City Fire Department announced the discovery of another bomb at the Murrah Building. Word spread that it might be bigger than the first—exactly what Stanley Brown had dreaded all morning. On Fifth Street, where Brown was stationed, the reaction was pure panic. People sprinted as fast as they could across the Robinson intersection and over a small hill. Firefighters stopped some of them and asked where the secondary device might be, but nobody could say.
Brown was amazed to see Bob Heady, the commander of his own bomb squad unit, running away with the crowd. Before Brown had time to think, he was running after him. “I had to tackle his ass,” Brown said. Heady came crashing to the ground.
“Bob,” Brown cried, “you’re the goddamn bomb squad!”
Heady was not pleased, but Brown talked him out of jumping back up and making another run for it. “I couldn’t understand it,” Brown recounted. “I mean, he’s a Vietnam veteran. Maybe I was dumb as dirt but my attitude was, we needed to be there.”
Inside the building, and especially in the Pit, where collapsed floors had ensnared the largest number of victims, the rescue workers did not know how to break the news that they were being ordered out. A suburban fire crew had been sitting with Daina Bradley while she was pinned down in six inches of freezing water. She begged them not to go. They did not know what to say, and neither did Mike Shannon, head of the fire department’s rescue operations. “If she were my wife, I would not have wanted her to be left alone,” Shannon later wrote. He crawled into the hole where Bradley lay, removed his helmet, and offered up a prayer. When a deputy came to retrieve him, he told Bradley the team would be back with better tools and equipment, a white lie designed to make her feel a little better.
It has never been proven that there was a valid reason for the bomb scare. Shannon was told a device was found on a staircase, but none was ever identified. Danny Defenbaugh, a senior FBI agent who was not in Oklahoma City on April 19 but later headed up the investigation, heard that the scare was triggered by a gas leak. To complicate matters, the FBI received calls that two possible bombers were running away from the scene. The “bombers,” Defenbaugh said, turned out to be technicians from the Oklahoma Gas & Electric Company, who were there to cut off the building’s gas supply.
A more sinister explanation, which federal and local authorities have tried to deny over the years, was that the evacuation was ordered to recover ordinance and weaponry that government agencies were storing illegally in the building.
When Don Browning, a dog handler with the Oklahoma City police, was ordered out, he met a woman wearing a red jacket from either the ATF or the FBI, who told him the building had been secured so the feds could recover some crucial “files.” Browning immediately suspected the “files” were ordinance and weaponry. When he entered the building the first time, he recognized boxes of small arms ammunition and blocks of C-4 plastic explosive. “I’m real familiar with C-4,” Browning explained. He would not be the last person to tell a similar story.
Randy Yount, the state park ranger, was part of a group of rescue workers led down to the basement by an ATF agent. They pried open a door and had to remove large chunks of concrete before going further. He thought they were on a straightforward rescue mission until he and the others were led into a concrete-walled room packed with rifles, pistols, hand grenades, plastic explosives, and “thousands and thousands” of ammunition rounds. The ATF supervisor, whom Yount did not know, referred to this material as “evidence.” Yount remembered him saying: “There are some things here that we need to get out of the building…. If anybody has a problem with not talking about what you are fixing to do, you are welcome to leave. Nobody will hold it against you or reprimand you.” They all stayed, carrying the crates to the plaza area on the south side of the building and loading them into white vans so they could be taken to a secure storage facility.
Nobody in authority has ever fully confirmed this account. Oklahoma Highway Patrol officer Shane Slovacek later told the FBI he knew of an ATF vault full of confiscated weapons and small-arms ammunition, some of which turned up in the debris. The sheriff’s department video—the one capturing Luke Franey’s unbandaged hands—included footage of rescue workers lifting semiautomatic weapons out of the rubble. Yet another witness, an elevator company inspector named Virgil Steele, said in a sworn statement that he had helped the ATF carry out a vast assortment of weapons and materiel, including AR-15 and M-16 assault rifles, handguns, thousands of rounds of ammunition, hand grenades, C-4, and at least three “antitank missiles or shoulder/hip–type rocket launchers.”
John Magaw, the ATF director, confirmed that the 10:30 A.M. alert was really about weapons and explosive materials that belonged to government agencies. He remembered that agents recovered two black cases containing high-powered weapons that morning; they had been stored either in the ATF office or the Secret Service office, both on the ninth floor.
The interruption lasted forty-five minutes. In his handwritten journal, Stanley Brown noted that the fire department made great efforts to figure out what triggered the bomb scare, without success. John Haynie, the head of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol’s tactical team, reported much the same. He had made repeated efforts to find out who raised the alarm, but he never found anybody—“or, at least, no one who would admit it.”
AT AROUND 11:00 A.M., CHARLIE HANGER ESCORTED TIM MCVEIGH up to the fourth-floor booking area inside the Noble County courthouse. A television set was on, with uninterrupted coverage of the bombing. Hanger exchanged expressions of dismay with Marsha Moritz, the employee processing the jail admissions. McVeigh said nothing, and did not react. He glanced at the television a few times, but mostly he looked away.
Hanger cited McVeigh on four charges: transporting a loaded firearm in a motor vehicle, unlawfully carrying a weapon, failure to display a current number plate, and failure to maintain proof of liability insurance. Moritz asked McVeigh to take off his jacket and empty his pockets. He was carrying two commemorative Revolutionary War coins, a spare pair of earplugs, some aspirin, four .45-caliber bullets, and $255 in cash. Most striking to her was his T-shirt. The front had a picture of Abraham Lincoln and the words SIC SEMPER TYRANNIS, which John Wilkes Booth shouted after delivering the fatal gunshot. “Thus ever to tyrants.” The back showed a tree and the Thomas Jefferson quote: THE TREE OF LIBERTY MUST BE REFRESHED FROM TIME TO TIME WITH THE BLOOD OF PATRIOTS AND TYRANTS.
Moritz took mug shots and asked McVeigh some routine questions, which he answered willingly until she requested the name of his closest family member. McVeigh acted as if he hadn’t heard. So she asked again. Hanger walked over to the booking counter as a precaution. Moritz explained that she wanted a name only for emergencies; she was not going to contact McVeigh’s family to tell them he had been arrested.
Hanger remembered McVeigh’s Michigan driver’s license and asked about the address listed on it: 3616 N. Van Dyke Road, in the tiny farming town of Decker. “Who lives there?” he asked.
McVeigh said it was a place where he had stayed a number of times, and that it belonged to the brother of a friend he met in the military.
“Well,” Moritz suggested, “do you want to use that?”
McVeigh agreed, and offered up the name James Nichols. He had been using the address for several days, ensuring that any law enforcement interest would lead to one, if not both Nichols brothers. The Nicholses themselves later saw this as one of a number of signs that he had set them up as fall guys. Many in the Patriot Movement later credited McVeigh with a certain nobility for keeping his mouth shut and denying the existence of a broader conspiracy, but on the day of his arrest he didn’t hesitate to lead law enforcement straight to two of his best friends.
Moritz and Hanger had no way of grasping this and saw no reason to suspect that this calm, well-spoken young man had anything to do with the ghastly images on TV. At most, they were aware of something a little off. After McVeigh was escorted to his jail cell, Moritz said to Hanger: “Wasn’t that a strange T-shirt that he had on?”
“What do you mean?” Hanger asked.
“Well, it had a strange saying on it,” she said.
“Well,” he responded, “I didn’t read it.”
BACK IN OKLAHOMA CITY, CHARLIE HANGER’S BOSSES IN THE HIGHWAY PATROL picked up on McVeigh’s arrest within a couple of hours, because they were interested in anyone who had been stopped in the immediate aftermath of the bombing. OHP passed on the information to the governor’s office, and Dennis Dutsch, the governor’s security chief, tried to alert the FBI.
The FBI agent Dutsch spoke to, though, told him flatly he was not interested. “We don’t have anybody in custody,” he insisted. Dutsch never got the agent’s name, but he understood his message. “What he was saying was, we’re doing our job. Stay out of it,” Dutsch said.
And so McVeigh went undiscovered by the feds for another forty-eight hours.
SHORTLY AFTER THE EVACUATION ORDER WAS RESCINDED, DR. ANDY Sullivan received a call at the Oklahoma City Children’s Hospital. The rescuers needed an orthopedic surgeon to help extricate a woman trapped under a pile of rubble and Sullivan, the orthopedics chair at the University of Oklahoma medical school, was the man for the job. Sullivan knew he was risking his life, so he took off his wedding ring and removed the wallet from his trouser pocket. If he died, he wanted his wife and sons to have these as keepsakes.
Sullivan arrived with a rudimentary amputation kit including scalpels, a saw, various tourniquets, anesthetics, and tranquilizers. A fire crew led him and his fellow surgeon David Tuggle to the Pit, where Daina Bradley was lying. She was breathing only with great difficulty and her skin was dust-gray. Just getting close was a challenge. Tuggle was too large to climb into the space where she was trapped; Sullivan, who was shorter, could do so only after a firefighter hacked off a jutting piece of metal. Even then he had to crawl in, military combat–style, and lie on top of her with his feet pointing up toward her face.
Sullivan began experimenting with a nylon rope he planned to use as a tourniquet only to be interrupted by another evacuation order. The firefighters told the doctors they had to leave immediately.
“Don’t leave me, don’t leave me!” Bradley screamed. “I’m going to die!”
“It was gut-wrenching,” Sullivan said. “You don’t leave somebody that’s going to die.” But they had to anyway.
THE NEW EVACUATION WAS PROMPTED BY THE DISCOVERY OF A BOX, eighteen inches square and three feet deep, which was marked “Class A Explosives.” Rescue workers discovered it in the rubble of the day-care center. The sheriff’s department bomb technicians thought it was a rocket-propelled grenade launcher, but actually it was an antitank TOW missile, which had tumbled out of a fifth-floor vault belonging to U.S. Customs.
The missile’s warhead was empty, but it still qualified as a destructive device under the National Firearms Act, because it contained rocket fuel. “It’s an extremely dangerous weapon [even] without the warhead,” said Bob Sanders, a former assistant director of the ATF. “Possession of a TOW missile is perfectly lawful for a law enforcement agency…but storage in a public building is against public safety and against the law.”
As the FBI later established, customs had no paperwork on it. The agency had obtained three inert TOW missiles from the Anniston Army Depot in Alabama in the late 1980s for use in a sting operation, but the official documentation showed that all three had been returned. So there was no ready explanation of what this missile was doing in the Murrah Building at all.
The sheriff’s department and highway patrol transported it safely down a fire truck ladder and into the secure trailer tank of the sheriff’s office bomb squad truck. Oddly, when Bob Heady, the bomb squad chief, filed his report, he wrote that the missile arrived at the sheriff’s department safe storage facility at 11:00 A.M., more than three hours earlier than the actual time.
This could have been a mistake, but it also suggested, erroneously, that the TOW missile was the cause of the first evacuation order—the one for which nobody would take responsibility. By the time the federal trials were over in the late 1990s, this revised order of events had become received wisdom, stated as fact by the FBI and the media.
But we know from Stanley Brown’s contemporaneous notes, from an exhaustive account written by Mike Shannon of the Oklahoma City Fire Department, from John Haynie’s statements to the FBI, and from other witnesses, that the TOW missile was discovered between 1:30 P.M. and 1:45 P.M. and removed about twenty minutes later.
Heady did another odd thing: As soon as he learned that Stanley Brown was taking notes for a journal, he ordered him to put them in a safe and never take them out again. When Brown was asked why he thought Heady would issue such an order, he said: “I don’t know. Bob’s a squirrelly man.”
But Brown did as he was told and did not show the notes to anyone for fifteen years.
WHILE DR. SULLIVAN AND DR. TUGGLE WERE WAITING FOR THE ALL-CLEAR, they created a plan to extricate Daina Bradley. They knew they had to be quick, and they also knew they could not risk administering an anesthetic given her weakened state. The most they could offer was a tranquilizer to help her forget the ordeal once it was over. It was a grim prospect. They needed her to remain fully conscious while they hacked off her leg under the worst of circumstances.
When they first shared their plan with her, she cried and shook her head in disbelief, saying she couldn’t tolerate the pain. They told her that if they couldn’t cut off her leg, they would have to leave, because the building was in danger of collapsing at any moment. Slowly, she changed her mind. Sullivan had almost no room to maneuver in the confined space and realized he could not cut through her calf bones, as he would have preferred. He would have to cut through the ligaments in her knee, greatly increasing the risk that she would bleed to death. He had to do this with his left hand, even though he was right-handed. The only light would be from the lamp on his fire-rescue helmet.
“I don’t know if I can do this,” he told his colleague.
“You’ve got to,” Tuggle replied.
Tuggle crawled next to Bradley and administered the tranquilizer to her neck. Sullivan thought about his wife and children, as well as Bradley, and offered up a prayer for all of them. Then he set to work. A fireman was perched above him, his hands checking for tremors in the concrete crushing Bradley’s leg. If he felt anything, he was to get Sullivan and Tuggle out immediately, regardless of the condition of the patient. The fireman also had a harness attached to Bradley so he could pull her out as soon as the operation was over.
Sullivan plunged the first of his scalpels into Bradley’s flesh, the single hardest act of his medical career. “She started kicking and screaming, so I had to more or less pin her free left leg against the wall while using my left hand,” Sullivan said. He desperately wanted the operation to go quickly, but he broke his first blade, then a second, then a third, and a fourth. He could not properly see what he was doing, and Bradley did not stop yowling.
At one point, he cut into a large vein and thought he had severed an artery. Eventually, the flow of blood ceased, and he continued. Twice, he thought he had finished when he hadn’t. “We’d pull her out, and she was still attached, and she would scream,” Sullivan said.
By then he was out of surgical blades, and had to use his pocket knife to sever the last pieces of flesh from Bradley’s thigh stump. As soon as Sullivan was done, he rolled out of the hole and let the others take over. A dozen men pulled Bradley onto a spine board to transport her to the hospital. An ambulance arrived, later than expected, and the two doctors made frantic efforts to keep the patient alive as they drove to the University Hospital. “She kept lapsing into unconsciousness,” Sullivan said. “And so we’d scream at her and shout at her and slap her and try to do anything we could to keep her breathing.”
They succeeded. Bradley survived.