By September 1993, McVeigh’s antigovernment fury had grabbed the attention of law enforcement. Operating under his alias Tim Tuttle, he was at the Crossroads of the West gun show in Phoenix, when Al Shearer, an undercover hate-crimes investigator with the Maricopa County Attorney’s Office, started up a conversation. McVeigh began telling him how to convert flares into rudimentary explosive shells and said: “It’s great for shooting down ATF helicopters.” Shearer was alarmed and called the local offices of both the ATF and FBI.
To his amazement, the feds said they couldn’t do anything because selling a flare gun was not illegal. Technically, this was correct, but after Waco the assumption was that the feds were more attuned to trouble from the radical right. As Shearer’s supervising attorney put it: “The issue wasn’t so much that this guy was trying to sell flare guns. It’s that he was a nut.”
It was, in retrospect, a tantalizing early opportunity to put McVeigh on the law enforcement radar. But Shearer’s instinct for danger was overlooked.
OKLAHOMA CITY WAS THE CASE DANNY COULSON HAD BEEN PREPARING for all his life. He knew his way around right-wing radicals. He had managed tricky arrests and potentially explosive stand-offs, had set up the FBI’s elite Hostage Rescue Team, and had a reputation for doggedly following leads, no matter how difficult or politically inconvenient. He knew Weldon Kennedy was about to be replaced and assumed he was in the running for his job. But, shortly after he left Kingman in early May, he was called off the case completely.
“I was absolutely shocked,” he said. “I should have been given the job of commander. I would have given the job to me.”
First Bob Ricks, then Joe Martinolich, and now Coulson: the body count of senior bureau figures was mounting. Coulson abilities were impressive, even if he was not a universally loved figure. His maverick streak, and periodic insistence that he knew better than his bosses, did not always sit well. And he was definitely no “Friend of Louie.”
Louis Freeh chose this same moment to appoint Larry Potts, one of his closest associates, as the bureau’s permanent deputy director—despite his controversial role in drafting and approving the rules of engagement at Ruby Ridge. Everybody thought Potts’s career would be stalled until the Justice Department finished its investigation and determined whether or not he was responsible for the shoot-to-kill policy that led to Vicki Weaver’s death. But Freeh believed the media was now distracted, and Potts was earning plaudits for his work directing the Oklahoma investigation’s day-to-day operations.
Freeh’s faith in Potts—stemming from their days working a mail-bombing case in Georgia in the late 1980s—was not misplaced. He was a bureau golden boy, an investigator of extraordinary talents with a glittering future. Still, Freeh had to expend much political capital to get his way. Congress had reacted poorly to an internal FBI investigation that rebuked Potts only for poor oversight at Ruby Ridge, and was considering hearings. And Jamie Gorelick, the tough-as-nails deputy attorney general, reacted to the proposed promotion with a flat no.
Freeh told Gorelick that if he did not get his way, relations between the Justice Department and the bureau would be irreparable. A game of political brinksmanship followed. The Justice Department had completed a report on Ruby Ridge in June 1994 in which it found that Potts and another senior FBI commander were responsible for drawing up the controversial rules of engagement; the report also found “numerous shortcomings” in the FBI’s oversight of the operation. This report was not made public, but releasing it was an option the Justice Department had up its sleeve. Freeh, meanwhile, knew that Potts had observed Gorelick and Janet Reno closely during Waco, when he served as the bureau’s liaison to the attorney general’s office. In the end, Reno blinked first, publicly praising Potts as “the very best the FBI has” and announcing the appointment herself at one of her regular post-bombing news briefings.
The Potts promotion created an immediate backlash. Gene Glenn, who had been the FBI’s on-scene commander at Ruby Ridge and was given a demotion and a fifteen-day suspension, complained to the Justice Department that he was being made the scapegoat even though Potts had conceived, drawn up, and approved the altered rules of engagement. Glenn accused the FBI’s internal investigators of asking skewed questions to reach predetermined conclusions, adding that they were more interested in protecting senior management than in unearthing the truth. Glenn’s reaction drew the ire of Freeh’s general counsel, Howard Shapiro, who called his allegations “absolutely irresponsible and destructive to the FBI” when the bureau was engaged in a vast criminal investigation. Shapiro was right that the controversy was a dangerous distraction from the Oklahoma City case. But the distraction originated with Louis Freeh.
Potts remained nominally in charge of the bombing investigation, but he spent most of the next six weeks fighting for his job and reputation. The Justice Department’s Office of Professional Responsibility opened an investigation into Glenn’s allegations, and an incandescent Republican majority in the House of Representatives monitored it all closely.
Over time, it became clear that the bombing investigation’s high points had already come and gone by May 3, 1995, the day the Potts furor broke. Individual street agents continued to do sterling work and make important breakthroughs, but for the institution it was all downhill from there.
RICK WAHL, THE ARMY SERGEANT WHO WENT FISHING AT GEARY LAKE on April 18 with his son, did not see the Ryder truck and pickup arrive or leave. Neither he nor a second witness who drove by, Bob Nelson, spotted anyone inside. So the feds set up a roadblock on Route 77, by the Geary Lake turnoff, and asked passing drivers if they had seen anything.
The results were notable, but not for reasons the government might have expected.
More than twenty witnesses said they had seen a moving truck at the lake, and at least five said they had seen it in the week before Easter as well as the Tuesday after. Georgia Rucker, a Herington real estate agent who helped Terry and Marife Nichols purchase their house on South Second Street, drove Route 77 twice a day to take her son to and from school. She saw a Ryder truck on Monday, April 10, and said it was still there on the next two days. She did not drive the route from Thursday to Monday. On Tuesday, April 18, she saw the truck shortly before 8:00 A.M.; but that afternoon it was gone. At times, Rucker saw the Ryder with other vehicles, but she could not recall what they looked like. Seeing the truck by the lakeshore was so odd, she and her son started to look out for it. “We joked that those people must have a real big fish to pack away,” she said.
James Sargent told a similar story. On April 10, he retired from the army and instantly went fishing at Geary Lake. He remembered the day clearly, down to the pear he brought for a snack. He arrived in the early afternoon and spotted a Ryder truck on the shore. After a couple of hours, he saw a white car and a rust-colored pickup drive up. He saw the Ryder again on April 11 and 12,, and he probably saw it on April 13, although he was not certain. Sargent said he enjoyed a drink or two on these outings, but he was also sure that alcohol had not distorted his memory. “It’s pretty hard for someone to forget something when they have seen it four days in a row,” he testified.
These accounts all bolstered the theory, which the FBI and prosecution considered, that a second Ryder truck was involved in the bombing. Lea McGown and her son Eric said they had seen McVeigh with a Ryder on Easter Sunday, more than twenty-four hours before the one used to destroy the Murrah Building was rented from Eldon Elliott’s. Other witnesses later came forward with similar stories, notably three dancers from a Tulsa strip club, whose voices were captured on a security tape on April 8 as they discussed an obnoxious client matching McVeigh’s description. “On April 19, 1995,” the client said, “you will remember me for the rest of your life.” A yellow moving truck was parked out back at the time. Now two new witnesses who seemed credible were talking about a Ryder truck popping up in the very place where McVeigh and Nichols would later mix the bomb.
What purpose could a second truck have served? Was it the bomb truck, but broke down or otherwise failed to meet the plotters’ requirements? Was it a decoy? In the end, the government chose not to address these questions. Some members of the prosecution thought they were too difficult to answer with any certainty; others were incensed that the FBI erected the roadblock at all, because it developed material they might now have to argue against in court. “It only undermines the proof,” one prosecutor said impatiently. “We already had Wahl. We didn’t need all this other junk.”
Bob Ricks, for one, disagreed with this vigorously; it was not enough to wish a difficult problem away. “Some things that were reported were obviously physically impossible,” he said, “but you have to weigh all of that…. That’s the nature of eyewitness testimony.
“The roadblock also led to people we believe were highly credible, who could give us valid descriptions of what was taking place there at Geary Lake. It doesn’t have to be consistent with the theory. What we are trying to find are the facts.”
This episode highlighted a growing tension between the Justice Department’s more aggressive lawyers and many of the task force’s top managers. While the prosecutors wanted to tie up loose ends and secure convictions, the FBI’s gut instinct was to keep digging and figure out what happened. The friction was not without its complexities: some prosecutors were more willing than others to let the case head in unforeseeable new directions, and some investigators were more fearless than others in standing up to the Justice Department’s pressure. On this, though, the hardliners prevailed: the second Ryder truck was soon dropped as a subject for investigation.
IN THE FALL OF 1993, MCVEIGH CONTINUED TO ATTEND GUN SHOWS and told his sister he was establishing a “network of friends.” It is likely that these included Richard Guthrie, the wild man of the Aryan Republican Army. Pete Langan later said that Guthrie met McVeigh on the gun-show circuit, and one plausible venue was a big show in Knob Creek, Kentucky, that October. McVeigh attended, and it would have been an easy commute for Guthrie from his hideout in Cincinnati. After the show, Guthrie and Langan made plans to rob an armored truck in the Fayetteville area in northwestern Arkansas. McVeigh’s previous work as a security guard on an armored truck made him the right sort for Langan and Guthrie to approach for help.
If McVeigh and Guthrie did not meet at a gun show, they could have been introduced by Thom Robb, a Ku Klux Klan leader based in Harrison, Arkansas, near Fayetteville. Guthrie was in regular contact with Robb from about 1992, and Nichols supplied evidence suggesting McVeigh knew him, too. When Nichols and McVeigh drove through Missouri and Arkansas in October, Nichols remembered being surprised by how well McVeigh knew the area, and how he talked about a KKK sign just north of town before they had driven past it. This was Robb’s property.
Nichols later claimed he made this trip because he was thinking of moving his family to the Ozarks, and he was looking for land suitable for a blueberry farm. But it is also remarkable how close they skirted to Elohim City, including one documented instance when McVeigh was pulled over and cited for illegal passing less than ten miles away. McVeigh had held on to Strassmeir’s business card after meeting him six months earlier. This was also the period when Mike Brescia, Kevin McCarthy, and Mark Thomas’s teenage son Nathan all moved to Elohim City—and all but Nathan would later be deeply involved with the Aryan Republican Army.
Nichols denied knowing these people, but he did suggest someone else that he and McVeigh met: George Eaton, who was friendly with the Elohimites and lived in the next town. Eaton was the publisher of the Patriot Report, which McVeigh and his sister Jennifer read enthusiastically. McVeigh mentioned Eaton as the two of them were driving around. Nichols added: “Tim definitely knew the area and some people who lived there.” McVeigh also described an ideal place, a “safe haven” where someone could lie low for a while. “This place was on the border of the Oklahoma and Arkansas state line,” Nichols recalled. This had to be a reference to Elohim City.
Eaton, Strassmeir, Brescia, Guthrie, Robb—all were plausible members of McVeigh’s “network of friends.” And, in the fall of 1993, they all had revolution on their minds.
IN ARIZONA, THE FBI WAS TOLD THAT STEVE COLBERN, A FEDERAL fugitive with a biochemistry degree and a fascination with explosives, kept a mailbox with the same service McVeigh used in Kingman. The tip was not correct, but by the time the FBI established that, it had learned that Colbern had been under ATF investigation for months, because he was suspected of possessing a .50-caliber Browning machine gun. And the more the FBI dug, the faster he shot up their suspect list.
The previous November, a Metropolitan Water District employee had found a mysterious note attached to a power utility pole near Needles, on the California-Arizona border. It was addressed to “S. C.” and appeared to be a recruitment letter. Its most inviting line was: “A man with nothing left to lose is a very dangerous man and his energy/anger can be focused toward a common/righteous goal.” It also included this line: “I’m not looking for talkers, I’m looking for fighters.”
When the FBI agents saw the note, they immediately recognized McVeigh’s handwriting and saw it was signed “Tim T.,” a shortened version of Tim Tuttle. Was “S.C.” Colbern? And, if so, had he joined McVeigh’s bomb plot? Colbern had the qualifications to build a bomb and, as the FBI soon learned, the ideological inclination as well.
The FBI soon learned, too, that in November 1994, one day before the robbery at Roger Moore’s ranch, Colbern was in Texarkana, no more than two hours’ drive from Moore’s property, and mailed a resignation letter to his boss at Cedars-Sinai hospital in Beverly Hills, California, where he did DNA research. Colbern also owned a 1975 brown Chevy pickup, the same vehicle associated with McVeigh multiple times on April 19.
The feds found Colbern’s pickup in Bullhead City, Arizona, in the yard of a double-wide vacation trailer belonging to his family. He lived there in the early 1990s with an Armenian wife he had since divorced. The neighbors said he was a freak in military fatigues, who lived in abject squalor and had snakes and other animals crawling all over the house.
The vehicle was not quite the jackpot the FBI had hoped for. It had not been driven in years, ruling it out as one of the vehicles seen in Oklahoma on April 19. But inside the car, the agents did find two bags of ammonium nitrate, one full and one glaringly empty.
BY LATE 1993, MCVEIGH HAD COME TO REGARD TERRY NICHOLS AS some combination of friend, ideological soul mate, and open-door hotelier. Nichols had a robot-like habit of doing whatever he was told, and McVeigh—like Joyce Nichols, Lana, and Ralph Daigle—took full advantage. Earlier in the year, when McVeigh was flitting between the Midwest and Arizona, he asked Nichols to drive to Pendleton, a ten-hour round-trip, and pick up his television set, a baseball glove, some cooking utensils, and a batch of sandbags. Nichols agreed without a murmur. Now McVeigh decided to base himself at the Decker farm, doing no more than occasional chores and begging off farmwork altogether, because, he said, the hay bothered his sinuses.
This arrangement came to a halt on November 22, when Marife found Jason, the Nicholses’ two-year-old son, unconscious on his bedroom floor with a plastic grocery bag over his head. At the time, Terry and Marife were preparing to move to Las Vegas. Marife immediately assumed that Jason had climbed out of his crib to play with some packing materials left in the middle of the room. Terry and James, she later recalled, were in the fields, and McVeigh was still asleep. She picked up Jason, removed the plastic bag, and banged frantically on McVeigh’s door. While McVeigh administered CPR, she ran out of the house screaming for her husband. Nothing, though, could revive the boy.
Local officials ruled Jason’s death an accident, as there was no evidence to suggest anything more sinister. But the medical examiner refused to talk to Terry and Marife after the funeral, and Marife was herself riddled with doubts, mostly about her husband. She was convinced that Terry told the 911 dispatcher about the plastic bag before she had a chance to tell him about it. And it was Terry who had insisted on storing the packing materials in Jason’s room. Had he harbored a plan to kill Jason? Was McVeigh in on it too?
Jason had been a cause for distress ever since Marife confessed to Terry in June 1991 that the child she was carrying had been conceived with her old boyfriend, Jojo Angelito Florita. She told Nichols it was too late for an abortion and would understand if he divorced her. Nichols chose to accept the circumstances, signed the birth certificate as Jason’s father, and, by all accounts, treated the boy lovingly enough. Marife later complained that other members of the Nichols family refused to accept Jason, and even told Terry to use cloth diapers on him, because the boy wasn’t good enough for disposable ones. Terry, for once, paid no attention.
After the bombing, the FBI reexamined Jason’s death, wondering if they could pin one more murder on McVeigh or Nichols. They suspected that McVeigh might have killed the boy in some grotesque experiment, to see if he could snuff out a child’s life, as he planned to do many times with the bomb. But, in the end, the feds found no more evidence than the county authorities.
Marife realized her initial suspicions might have been the result of shock, and the need to blame someone. But she found it impossible to trust her husband again. When Nichols purchased The Poisoner’s Handbook, she wondered whether he intended to murder her and Nicole to collect the life insurance. Bills from the hospital, the ambulance company, and the doctor who treated Jason kept arriving, and Nichols ignored them for so long they started coming in Marife’s name.
To escape their creditors, the Nicholses moved to Las Vegas at the turn of 1994. Yet Marife still felt trapped and desperate. Twice, she dreamed she was on a boat landing, walking toward a small craft containing the entire Nichols family, when she heard Jason’s voice begging her to go no farther. She could only interpret it as a warning from her dead son to get out of Terry Nichols’s life before it was too late.
THE EVIDENCE RECOVERY TEAMS AT THE MURRAH BUILDING HAD picked the place pretty much clean, but a huge pile of rubble, two stories high and thirty feet across, still covered one of the building’s key structural supports. It was impossible to tell how solid that support still was. Engineers warned that if the rubble pile was disturbed, the rest of the structure could tumble and bury everyone. The teams painted the pile red and left it alone; it became known as the red pyramid.
Right after the bombing, the White House had directed the General Services Administration to preserve and rebuild the building, as a gesture of defiance against those who had destroyed it. But that was no longer realistic. “More than once,” Weldon Kennedy remembered, “we had pretty serious thunderstorms and had to evacuate the building on the advice of the engineers.”
Demolition was the only option. The evidence teams wanted to sort through the red pyramid, but couldn’t as long as the building’s shell was still standing. The fire department was sure two or three more bodies remained buried, and pressure was mounting to pull them out. Criticism would later fly that, by knocking down the building, the task force was effectively burying evidence about the size and composition of the bomb. Actually, demolition was the only way to extract the remaining evidence.
From an investigative standpoint, the bomb site continued to be as chaotic as it had been in the first few days. For nearly two weeks, there were reports of government agents sneaking out automatic weapons, ammunition, and small packages that looked, to trained eyes, like C-4. Some reports were probably accurate; others were fueled by a mounting distrust pitting federal agencies against each other. “It was comical in a way, because the ATF didn’t want the Secret Service to see them remove things, and DEA didn’t want the others to know what they were doing,” Oscar Johnson, an elevator technician who stayed on site as a volunteer, recalled. “They all acted like little kids hiding stuff from each other.”
One senior ATF agent, Harry Eberhardt, was eventually asked to leave the task force, because Danny Defenbaugh, who arrived in Oklahoma at the end of April and soon took over from Weldon Kennedy, suspected he had entered the building without authorization to remove a possible weapon. “He had a device, and he went back into the building to get it,” Defenbaugh said. Eberhardt denied any wrongdoing and said he felt Defenbaugh victimized him because of an unconnected grievance between the FBI and the ATF. But Defenbaugh insisted: “He was seen, he lied about it, and then he was investigated.”
AMONG THOSE OPPOSED TO DEMOLISHING THE MURRAH BUILDING was Stephen Jones, the newly appointed chief defense counsel for Tim McVeigh. Jones was a loquacious Southern gentleman, an inveterate Anglophile, a man of breeding and eclectic tastes, and a wily, well-connected political operator with a residual admiration for Richard Nixon, for whom he had worked as a young man. He seemed an incongruous fit for McVeigh, with his blue-collar roots and spiky resentment of privilege in all forms. Sure enough, they got along horribly.
Jones was not McVeigh’s first choice. After his two court-appointed public defenders recused themselves, McVeigh wanted Gerry Spence, the flamboyant Wyoming lawyer who claimed he’d never lost a case and rubbed the government’s face in the dirt when he defended Randy Weaver. When Spence was ruled out—it is not clear if he said no or was never asked—McVeigh pursued Dick DeGuerin, a similarly flamboyant Texan who had represented David Koresh. But DeGuerin turned down the case as well. Representing the most hated man in America was not an assignment to take on lightly.
Jones got the job because he was law-school buddies with David Russell, the federal judge in charge of finding legal representation for McVeigh and Nichols, and also because he was brave, or rash, enough to take it on. Criminal defense was not his specialty, although he had worked more than two dozen capital cases over his career; he called himself a county-seat lawyer, occupied mostly with clients like a local religious college or his hometown newspaper, the Enid News and Eagle. Just prior to the bombing, he had served as special counsel to Frank Keating, the newly elected governor of Oklahoma and a former FBI agent. Jones and McVeigh were out of step immediately. “I haven’t been brainwashed,” McVeigh said at their first meeting. “I did this for the movement, and no one else paid for it.”
Jones was intending to base his defense on the existence of a broader conspiracy, in which McVeigh was just a bit player. But now his client was telling him he was not willing to go along with a search for coconspirators. It was a problem he would not resolve for as long as he was on the case.
Jones’s opening gambit in federal court, to forestall the demolition of the Murrah Building, was equally inauspicious. Every civic leader from the state congressional delegation to the mayor had endorsed the General Services Administration’s finding that the wreckage posed a significant safety hazard. Jones, though, described the building as “the single most important item of evidence in this case” and asked for time to conduct an independent analysis.
The request was granted, and demolition was postponed for almost two weeks so Jones could send in a bomb expert and a small team of lawyers. They found nothing. Staff for John Coyle, one of the public defenders who represented McVeigh for the first two weeks, felt a bittersweet twinge as they watched the new defense counsel go about his business. “You watch,” a Coyle clerk who knew Jones was overheard saying, “he’ll make it all about himself.” McVeigh certainly came to believe that he did.
DURING THE FIRST WEEK OF MAY, THE FBI BECAME CONVINCED that the second person at the Ryder truck rental was twelve-year-old Josh Nichols. The Oklahoma City command post even told division offices around the country to stop looking for anyone else. This made little sense, because Josh was not tied in any way to the acquisition of materials, and he had a rock-solid alibi for April 19. Even if he looked a little like the sketch of the second man seen at Eldon Elliott’s, he wouldn’t have gone there without his father, and Terry Nichols was not there. The FBI essentially mistook Josh’s knowledge of the bomb plot—of which there were many tantalizing clues—for actual criminal involvement.
Until he was confronted directly with his resemblance to the mystery co-conspirator on May 6, Josh had been willing to answer just about any question thrown at him. He even made phone calls to Agent Calhoun after hours to tell her what was on his mind. The FBI, though, preferred to ratchet up the pressure to see if Lana, Josh, or Terry might crack and disclose something new. But they didn’t; they just lawyered up.
Twice, agents asked Padilla to fly out to Oklahoma City to testify before the grand jury. The first trip was canceled at the last minute. The second time, there was still no grand jury hearing, only reporters and camera crews at the Oklahoma City airport, who had been tipped that Josh was now a John Doe Two suspect and ambushed her with questions. Padilla was appalled, but she still continued to cooperate. The FBI asked her to repack the bag Josh had taken to Kansas for his Easter trip, so the clothes could be tested for bomb-making residue. She did so, and they were clean. A few days later, the FBI asked her for every baseball cap in Josh’s collection so they could be compared to witness sightings of the cap worn by John Doe Two. Again, Padilla complied.
For about eight days, the FBI allowed the circus surrounding Josh to bring the hunt for John Doe Two to a complete standstill. According to the Secret Service, up to 150 new leads were held back from investigative field offices around the country. When it finally became clear, on May 11, that no joy was to be had from Josh, they were sent out again.
IN EARLY 1994, MCVEIGH PAID AN IMPROMPTU OVERNIGHT VISIT TO Karen Anderson at the Arkansas ranch while Roger Moore was in Florida for the winter. Anderson cooked him a steak, and they talked about Waco. But did something else happen? Anderson, in one of her early FBI interviews, said McVeigh slept in her bed that night. She quickly added that she moved to the other bedroom, the one usually occupied by Moore (they kept separate rooms). Hers was next to the bathroom and she thought McVeigh would be more comfortable there. But this was a rather odd explanation. Had she really given up her bedroom, the government wondered, or had she invited him to join her?
Anderson denied any such thing; she thought of McVeigh “as a son.” Still, many of McVeigh’s friends and acquaintances noticed a pattern: McVeigh would form strong, almost obsessive attachments to his closest male friends and then hit on their wives or girlfriends behind their backs.
A few months later, McVeigh began dropping in regularly on Michael Fortier’s then-fiancée Lori at the tanning salon where she worked. At the same time, McVeigh and Michael Fortier were so tight that Jim Rosencrans teased his neighbor about having a “second wife.” Rosencrans had a similar dynamic with McVeigh; his girlfriend Patty complained about being treated like a second-class citizen, but she also recalled a time Rosencrans walked in on one of her own conversations with McVeigh and accused him of making a move on her.
There are two schools of thought about McVeigh’s sexuality. The first says he was a highly ascetic person who sublimated whatever sexual energy he had into his war on the government. Sex either did not interest him or it scared him because he was unsuccessful at it. Much later, when he was on death row in Indiana, his fellow inmates nicknamed him “Virgin McVeigh.”
But there is also evidence he was highly interested in sex, and grabbed at it wherever he could. Beyond his flirtations, he almost certainly had a brief affair with Marife Nichols in the summer of 1994. Marife testified about it at trial, and Terry Nichols subsequently confirmed he had been betrayed by his wife and his best friend.
McVeigh seems to have viewed sex much as he viewed his need for food, as a craving to satisfy efficiently so he could get on with something more interesting. To stave off his appetite, he often resorted to military MREs, or Meals Ready to Eat; to assuage his interest in sex, he looked for people he could use quickly and discreetly.
Rosencrans told the FBI McVeigh was always talking about “getting a piece of ass” and was even willing to pay for it. Rosencrans described him as “a weird, quiet, and clean guy.”
ON MAY 10, A RURAL PROPERTY BROKER IN SOUTHWESTERN MISSOURI named Bill Maloney contacted the FBI and said he had met McVeigh, Nichols, and their presumed coconspirator. Maloney saw news reports about two drifters getting arrested thirty-five miles away in Carthage, Missouri, and recognized one of the names, Robert Jacks. The man he had met with McVeigh and Nichols was called Jacks, too, though he spelled it Jacques or Jocques. And he was very different from the drunken drifter—quickly dismissed as a suspect—who had been found with a bunch of discarded beer bottles and pizza boxes.
Maloney said that McVeigh had called the previous October from Kansas in response to an ad offering a forty-acre parcel “in the middle of nowhere.” Two weeks later—the date was later fixed as November 2—two men walked into Maloney’s office and introduced themselves as Jacques and Nichols. Someone had already made an offer on the forty-acre parcel, but Maloney offered them a larger one bordered on three sides by national forest. They were interested in that, too. After ten or fifteen minutes, a third man entered, wondering what was taking so long. The others called him Tim.
Maloney’s ability to recall the tiniest detail seemed almost too good to be true. He described, for example, how McVeigh was drawn to a green Remington shotgun shell on Maloney’s desk. Maloney said he used those to hunt coyotes, and McVeigh opened his mouth to laugh. Maloney recounted: “I could see a discolored eyetooth on the upper right side of his mouth. He had a filling showing through the enamel. I also remember that he had unusual hands that were deep set between the thumb and the forefinger. His hands looked like they could break if they were gripped very hard.”
Maloney was an ex-serviceman who had conducted eyewitness recall exercises with naval intelligence and was proud of his razor-sharp recall. He remembered that Jacques wore olive-colored hiking boots with little suction cups and cleats on the soles. Jacques, he said, was a muscular man with large biceps and a bulging neck, about five foot eleven, swarthy complexion, possibly American-Indian, with a tattoo on his left forearm showing wings or some other insignia. He also had an unusually pointed, narrow nose, unlike the sketch.
All three were military types, Maloney said, and carried themselves confidently. Their inquiries suggested they were looking for a place to hide, but they did not have a vehicle appropriate for the terrain, only an old sedan, which Maloney would later recall as a Chevy Monte Carlo. Maloney became suspicious enough that he asked Jacques to handle a brand-new topographical map of the area and then put it in his safe, in case the FBI ever needed fingerprints. He handed it to his first FBI interviewer.
Maloney’s uncanny command of detail was counterbalanced, over time, by indications that news reports were distorting his memory. Investigators did not know quite what to make of him. “Either Bill Maloney had fallen from the sky as a pure gift from the heavens, or he was completely certifiable,” said Jeanne Boylan, the sketch artist, who interviewed him and produced a John Doe Three drawing based on his recollections. It is curious that the description Boylan got from Maloney was an almost exact match for a sketch she developed from Debbie Nakanashi, a downtown post office worker injured in the explosion. Nakanashi remembered seeing a Jacques look-alike, complete with tattoo on his left arm, with a tall, wiry blond guy, not unlike McVeigh, a day or two before the bombing. Investigators also found the name “Jacques” scrawled, in a number of different spellings, in Marife Nichols’s address book. If Jacques was a phantom, he certainly had a way of popping up all over the place.
The easiest of Maloney’s observations to check was the discolored tooth. Bill Teater, an Oklahoma City–based FBI agent, looked up McVeigh’s military health records and discovered he had had a procedure, probably a root canal, on his right lateral incisor. A few weeks later, Teater observed McVeigh in person, when a gaggle of agents and lawyers met him at the federal courthouse in Oklahoma City, ostensibly to obtain handwriting samples. Teater’s job was to watch his mouth. “I got him to smile,” Teater recounted, “at which time I saw the tooth with a root canal.”
The Jacques investigation would go on for close to five years. It generated just enough promise to keep going: a pair of Jacques brothers who went to school with McVeigh; and a Robert Jacquez, now apparently dead, who once shared a mailbox with Jim Rosencrans in Odessa, Texas. But certain FBI agents and federal prosecutors, especially those who felt confident of where the case was going, suspected it might also be a colossal waste of time.
In the end, their biggest problem was not with Robert Jacques, whose existence remains a question, but with Danny Defenbaugh, the new task force leader, who kept Jacques on his priority list long after the prosecution team had lost interest. Defenbaugh, they felt, did not command the respect necessary to fulfill his responsibilities. He had spent most of his FBI career as a bomb technician, traveling the world to investigate attacks from Puerto Rico to Beirut. He had been in charge of violent crime investigations in Miami and had served as the number two in Mobile, Alabama. But he had never commanded a field division or occupied a high position in headquarters.
Most seriously, he was not seen as a leader with the authority to corral rival agencies, push for what he needed from his own bosses, and find a coherent path through a torrent of information. Defenbaugh was the straightest of straight arrows, but he was also impulsive, gruff, and had a volcanic temper. He made enemies as easily as he made friends, and freely acknowledged he was an investigator at heart, not a manager.
“The common view was that he was not the right choice that would get us to where we needed to be,” said one senior agent who might have expected the job for himself. Another overlooked candidate was blunter. “When I heard they’d made Defenbaugh commander, I just about crapped out,” he said. “He’s the last person I would have picked.” I. C. Smith, the top agent in Arkansas at the time, concurred that Defenbaugh was not highly regarded, and said: “The only thing he had going for him was that he was a butt-boy to Bear Bryant.” (Smith used the term “butt-boy” in a strictly figurative sense to imply that Defenbaugh did Bryant’s bidding in a sycophantic or servile way.) Bryant, the head of the National Security Division at headquarters, indeed became Defenbaugh’s champion and maintained close contact throughout the investigation.
Louis Freeh had already shown he was more interested in imposing his leadership stamp than in promoting harmony in the ranks. “My gut feeling is, they couldn’t control [Kennedy],” Smith said. “They wanted people there who were pliable.” Defenbaugh would defer to Bryant, because he did not have the political wherewithal to push his own agenda, and Bryant would make sure the task force did the director’s bidding. Defenbaugh all but acknowledged this when he characterized his role as “making a coordinating effort to make sure that certain things get done, that certain things do not fall through the cracks, that somebody doesn’t make an independent decision on their own that may or may not be approved by others.”
The result was that an enormous amount of energy was expended on certain investigative strands—beyond Robert Jacques, the FBI collected more than 13 million paper motel registration records—while other topics, such as Elohim City or Roger Moore, were not investigated enough because Defenbaugh did not have the clout to insist. Some people, including members of the prosecution team, accused him of overreaching when he tried to broaden the case in one direction or another, while others accused him of lacking the nerve to do what it took to find McVeigh’s coconspirators. The experience eventually left Defenbaugh burned and embittered.
“What they needed was a highly centralized investigation with clear lines of authority,” Smith observed. “It didn’t happen here.”
AFTER A WEEKLONG SEARCH, THE FEDS FOUND STEVE COLBERN IN the semi-abandoned mining town of Oatman, about twenty minutes west of Kingman, where he shared a filthy trailer with three other drifters and he manufactured crystal meth in an outhouse. At first, he denied knowing McVeigh or having any involvement in the bombing. But he broke down quickly, especially when pressed for an alibi for April 19. “If I, like, tell you everything I know, can I, like, make a deal and get a break on my charges?” he asked.
Since his arrest in California, Colbern had spent several months in the Arizona desert, including extended periods in abandoned mineshafts. Most likely, he had also been on the road in his red Volkswagen Bug, as attested by the Texarkana postmark on his resignation letter to Cedars-Sinai hospital. His whereabouts on April 19 were uncertain. Preston Haney, the owner of his trailer, said he had been holed up for days, watching television and subsisting on a diet of spaghetti, beans, and vitamins. But agents had also accumulated reasons to wonder if he was not hundreds of miles away with McVeigh. The day before his arrest, his most recent girlfriend, Barbara Harris, had produced a letter he wrote the previous fall—also postmarked Texarkana and dated November 4—in which he talked about his desire to avenge Waco. On the day of his arrest, the ATF showed his picture to Lynda Willoughby, the manager of the Mail Room on Stockton Hill Road, and she said she recognized him as someone who had come in to pick up McVeigh’s mail in the month before the bombing.
Extraordinarily, the FBI appeared indifferent to this information, disregarding not only the new leads from the ATF but also the unresolved question of the Browning machine gun.
Some iteration of the usual interagency rivalry was probably at work here. The FBI had a bombing to investigate, and apparently regarded the firearms violations as distractions from their goal of coaxing Colbern into talking about McVeigh. But they were also oddly quick in dismissing Colbern as a suspect, relying on information from Colbern’s uncle, a retired orthopedic surgeon from California, that he was a paranoid schizophrenic. But Dr. Edwin Colbern had said more than that: he also had been afraid, from the time Steve was a teenager, that his nephew would one day become a “mad bomber.”
Asked specifically about Oklahoma City, Dr. Colbern said he “believed Steven was capable of being involved.” The FBI not only disregarded this; the information was not handed over to the defense teams representing McVeigh and Nichols. “They even knew what Colbern smelled like,” Nichols’s lead defense lawyer, Michael Tigar, complained many years later, “but didn’t think to let us see the evidence against him.”
WHEN MICHAEL FORTIER HEARD ABOUT COLBERN’S ARREST, HE jumped into his Jeep Wrangler and drove over to one of the FBI agents keeping him under surveillance a block and a half away. Fortier passed him a Kit Kat candy wrapper, on which he had scrawled in block letters: “Heard about Caulbern [sic] on the news. Want see his picture. Maybe I could be of help.”
He also let the agent know he was at last willing to accept the government’s offer to consider a plea deal in exchange for his cooperation. “Talking to attorney today,” the Kit Kat wrapper added.
ON MAY 17, THE NEW YORK TIMES FEATURED A FRONT-PAGE STORY that said McVeigh had claimed responsibility for the bombing. For a man planning to plead not guilty in a death penalty case, it was not exactly ideal headline material. Many people assumed that prison guards at El Reno must have overheard something. But the source was McVeigh’s lawyer, Stephen Jones.
Jones had had a busy first week on the job. He initially wanted to strike a plea-bargain deal to save his client’s life. In his account, he lobbied for a meeting with Janet Reno, telling Justice Department officials he might be able to offer up John Doe Two if, in exchange, the government took the death penalty off the table. McVeigh never publicly acknowledged the existence of a John Doe Two, so we have only Jones’s word on that. In any event, McVeigh had an apparent change of heart and told Jones to cancel the meeting. “I would have argued for his life,” Jones said, “but he withdrew that authority.”
What McVeigh wanted, Jones said, was to plead a “necessity defense”—to admit his guilt but claim his actions were justified. Jones told him such a defense would never fly in court, but McVeigh would not accept his advice. Jones worried that McVeigh would make some glaringly public confession making him impossible to defend. And that was when the story appeared in the New York Times.
In the revised 2001 edition of his memoir Others Unknown, Jones acknowledged his responsibility for the leak but described it as a form of damage control, a way to satisfy McVeigh’s itch for notoriety while minimizing the risk that he would call 60 Minutes or ABC News and offer a lengthy, on-the-record disquisition. He and McVeigh discussed making a public admission but went back and forth on how it should be done. “It was incumbent on me,” Jones wrote, “to find a way to protect Tim and at the same time assuage his craving for fame.”
It was never clear how this protection was achieved by a front-page confession in the country’s most authoritative newspaper, but Jones insisted he had McVeigh’s full permission to speak to the Times. His book reproduces a letter of authorization initialed at every paragraph and signed by McVeigh on May 18—the day after the Times story appeared. Another lawyer on the defense team reported that Jones was very pleased with himself when he secured McVeigh’s signature. “Jones talked to Tim alone when he got that paper signed. He had a chalk-striped suit on,” the lawyer recalled. “He was patting the lapel of his suit and bragging…that he’d gotten it.”
Jones also wrote that he agreed to the leak on condition that McVeigh not do any leaking of his own. “I wanted his pledge,” he said. “No more.” But there was no evidence McVeigh had made any attempt to talk to the press, so the “no more” line is a little baffling. Rob Nigh, Jones’s number two on the defense team who got to know McVeigh better than anyone, directly contradicted Jones’s premise. “I don’t believe he [McVeigh] was itching to say anything,” Nigh said. “If he had been, he would have said it.”
Nigh also said McVeigh was not only interested in a necessity defense. He was also willing to sit back and say nothing, while the government struggled with the holes and contradictions in its evidence and—with luck—failed to prove its case, as was then happening in the O. J. Simpson trial in Los Angeles. “If you wanted to embarrass the federal government,” Nigh said in an indication of his client’s mind-set, “what better way than to be found not guilty?”
McVeigh later complained that Jones leaked the Times story entirely on his own. “S.J. gave that to ’em, my own attorney!” he told Michel and Herbeck. “I don’t get this. I tell my attorney something, and it goes into the newspaper.” When asked about this, Jones first offered no comment and then, a few days later, said he had McVeigh’s oral permission before speaking to the Times reporter. But the other member of Jones’s defense team questioned the accuracy of this, saying that Jones leaked the story by himself and sought permission only subsequently.
Jones, the lawyer said, was trying to push a different talking point in the Times story. “The strategy was to get out in front on the subject of the kids. That’s item number two in Tim’s sworn statement and also in [the] story. The line Stephen wanted to push was that McVeigh had been past the building but not in it, and didn’t know about the day-care center.” Sure enough, the Times reported that McVeigh had no idea there were kids in the building and was “surprised” to learn that many of them had been killed. In the authorization letter, which Jones drafted in his own handwriting, McVeigh signed off on a similar sentiment—“that I am saddened children were killed 4/19/95.”
This strategy would mean that, barely a week into his tenure as McVeigh’s lawyer, Jones had all but given up on seeking an acquittal and was now hoping to soften the public’s view of McVeigh by characterizing the children’s deaths as an unfortunate mistake.
Jones was certainly smart. If he had to cajole McVeigh into signing the authorization letter, he most likely appealed to McVeigh’s desire to protect his friends and coconspirators. McVeigh’s claim of sole responsibility sent a reassuring message to the people under the most pressure from the FBI. Jones wrote in his book that this was never explicitly discussed, but he acknowledged it might have been a motivator for McVeigh.
“If Mike and Lori Fortier and James and Terry Nichols knew he was not ‘ratting them out,’” he wrote, “they wouldn’t be inclined to turn against him.” They could also do what it took to limit their own exposure to prosecution, in the knowledge that they had McVeigh’s blessing and protection.
AFTER THE FBI BUGGED THE FORTIERS’ HOUSE AND PHONE, THEY overheard one indiscretion after another. Michael laughed at the idea of being called as a witness in federal court and said he would “sit there and pick my nose and flick it…and kind of wipe it on the judge’s desk.” He said he would sell his story to the tabloids, and bragged in the cockiest way imaginable about being “the key” the government needed to crack the case. Investigators found this insufferable, but they knew Fortier was right. They needed an insider to testify against McVeigh, and he was it.
Michael and Lori were taken to Oklahoma City and began providing rich and interesting material, though it was hard to tell how much of it was true. And the FBI seemed afraid to ask. They were interviewed together rather than separately, and afforded an hour of complete privacy to go over what they intended to say.
Fortier did most of the talking, focusing mainly on the trip he and McVeigh took to Oklahoma and Kansas in December 1994. McVeigh said he had a lot of guns to pick up in the Midwest, and Fortier was welcome to resell them for his own profit. The only thing McVeigh wanted in exchange was a wooden gun stock from Fortier’s collection. Fortier suspected something fishy, but McVeigh handed him an AR-15 rifle and said he could keep it as long as he accompanied him to retrieve the rest. The deal was on.
The guns were in Kansas, but McVeigh detoured to Oklahoma City to show Fortier a building he intended to blow up. Fortier said the target was tall, U-shaped, with glass frontage—an adequate description of the Murrah Building but one he could easily have picked up from the news after the bombing. Fortier said they did a quick drive-by and left—a statement contradictory to the eyewitness reports of McVeigh walking into the Murrah Building that same day and asking unusual questions.
The next day, Fortier rented a Crown Victoria sedan to transport the guns back to Arizona. They headed to a nearby storage locker—he did not remember the exact location—where McVeigh gave him twenty-five or thirty rifles and shotguns. Fortier asked where they’d come from, and McVeigh told him: “Bob in Arkansas.” Fortier asked if they were stolen, and McVeigh winked. Fortier did not take this entirely as a yes; he told the FBI he thought “Bob in Arkansas” was John Doe Two and that the guns somehow tied him and McVeigh together.
Fortier said that McVeigh repeatedly attempted to recruit him for the bombing. At one point he asked McVeigh why he was targeting Oklahoma City, and McVeigh answered: “Because it’s easy.” McVeigh asked what would persuade him to join the plot, and Fortier said he would not act until he saw a United Nations tank in his front yard.
Fortier and the prosecution team later agreed that the tank-in-the-front-yard conversation took place in August 1994. But if McVeigh had told him about the Oklahoma City plan then, why did Fortier characterize it as a revelation when they were en route to Kansas four months later? Fortier would acknowledge under cross-examination in the trial that he lied to the FBI that day. And the FBI did not call him on it.
BY THE SPRING OF 1994, MCVEIGH APPEARED TO BE LIVING A NORMAL life in Kingman, working a stockroom job at True Value Hardware, earning extra money as a gardener, and continuing to peddle his wares at gun shows. But this was all a cover for his true passion: heading out to the desert for target practice and trial runs with pipe bombs and other explosives.
He was putting himself through a rigorous training program for his future as an outlaw. Jim Rosencrans remembered several occasions when Lori Fortier drove her husband and McVeigh to the middle of nowhere and left them, with full backpacks and weapons over their shoulders, for two or three days at a time. Other times, they would all go out with Ruger mini-14s and Glocks and shoot the crap out of rocks and empty cans.
They also experimented with explosives but had little success. Their pipe bombs were not much better than giant firecrackers. Fortier testified that on one occasion McVeigh placed a large pipe bomb under a boulder, hoping it would split apart, but the boulder merely trembled and rolled a little.
McVeigh’s first forays into criminality were equally unimpressive. One night, he and Fortier headed to the National Guard armory to check a rumor that United Nations troops were massing in Kingman. When a diesel truck pulled in with its headlights blazing, they stole some tools from the undercarriage of two Humvees and fled. This was hardly the way to start a revolution.
Around this time, they met Walter “Mac” McCarty, a grizzled former marine who shared much of their antigovernment fervor. Fortier first spotted the pistol on McCarty’s hip as he was walking the aisles of True Value. Soon the three men were regularly discussing the Trilateral Commission and the New World Order and going to McCarty’s house for handgun shooting lessons. McCarty liked the young men, particularly McVeigh, but did not see them as sophisticated thinkers, or leaders. “They are both frustrated men and great brainwashing material, very impressionable,” he said after the bombing. “They remind me of recruits I had in boot camp. You could feed them, teach them the Marine Corps hymn, creeping and crawling and ‘yes sir, no sir,’ lull them into becoming fighting machines, and send them overseas to kill.”
Another person McVeigh almost certainly encountered—though both later denied it—was Jack Oliphant, the leader of a right-wing revolutionary gang called the Arizona Patriots, who attempted an armored car robbery in Nevada in the 1980s and plotted a string of bomb attacks across the Southwest. The Patriots were, in many ways, a knock-off of The Order, the notorious white supremacist gang from the Pacific Northwest, who pulled off a string of assassinations and a spectacular armored car robbery before going down in flames in a showdown with the FBI near Seattle in 1984. The worst damage Oliphant ever caused was to himself, shooting off his right arm in a misadventure with a shotgun. Still, his armored car robbery plan, involving a staged traffic accident and sleeping gas to neutralize the guards, earned him four years in prison.
Oliphant’s remote Hephzibah Ranch was a gathering spot for local skinheads and an ideal place for weapons or explosives training. The caretaker of the Lazy L ranch next door, Dyane Partridge, told the FBI after the bombing that she regularly heard gunfire, although no explosions. She also remembered seeing McVeigh, Nichols, and another man chop wood with Oliphant sometime during the winter of 1993–94. (Nichols had just moved to Las Vegas, ninety miles away.) She remembered the encounter because Oliphant had made it clear that she and her dog should not get too close.
When Oliphant’s wife, Margo, spoke with the FBI, she referred fondly to “Timmy,” leaving the interviewing agent skeptical of her claim that she did not know McVeigh. Oliphant kept a mailbox at the same office as McVeigh. And McVeigh acknowledged that one of his favorite shooting spots was right around the Oliphant ranch.
If McVeigh did, in fact, know Oliphant and sought to learn from him, the chances are he did not get too far. The Arizona Patriots veteran Tom Hoover described Oliphant’s crowd as “a ragtag bunch of dipshits from the weeds with shoulder weapons” and remembered only one explosives expert, a character named Lefty, who accidentally blew his thumb off while fooling around with a grenade.
The Fortiers’ social circle was no more promising for fomenting a bomb plot, because it was as much about crystal methamphetamine as it was about revolution. Jim Rosencrans told the FBI: “Getting high is the only thing left we can do in America.” While McVeigh used the drug himself, especially to stay awake on cross-country car journeys, he also understood that if he wanted to complete his mission, he would need to find other friends.
PERHAPS THE MOST INTERESTING THING STEVE COLBERN TOLD FEDERAL prosecutors was that he was put in touch with McVeigh by Roger Moore and Karen Anderson. Colbern was a regular customer of the couple’s ammunition business, the Candy Store, and in late 1994 he asked if they knew of a hard-core antigovernment group he could join. Anderson mentioned McVeigh by his alias Tim Tuttle, and gave Colbern his P.O. box number.
Colbern and McVeigh corresponded to set up first one, then another meeting, but McVeigh never showed. When Colbern learned—from Roger Moore—about the message McVeigh left on the power utility pole, he was too scared to pick it up. In the end, he said, he never met McVeigh, and gave up on the idea of joining a radical group.
The attorneys accepted this, despite the ATF’s evidence that Colbern and McVeigh were acquainted. This was likely influenced by Lori Fortier, who told the FBI three days earlier that McVeigh had not been interested in reaching out to Colbern. The prosecutors—led by Janet Reno’s top aide, Donna Bucella—either ignored or were never given the countervailing evidence. Dennis Malzac, one of Colbern’s roommates at the Oatman trailer, told the ATF he had heard Colbern talking about making an ammonium nitrate bomb and adding nitromethane to “step it up a little.” If the FBI had talked to Malzac, they might have pressured him to say what he told a California detective five years later—that a clean-cut man with blond hair and a military bearing had visited Colbern at the trailer a week or two before the bombing. Malzac was 90 percent sure the visitor was McVeigh. Around the same time, he remembered Colbern asking an odd question: he wondered how big a bomb it would take to destroy the federal building in Oklahoma City.
This material does not create a criminal case against Colbern, because he could have been interested in ammonium nitrate bombs independently of McVeigh, and Malzac could have been exaggerating or lying. But the FBI and the Justice Department did not pursue this, just as they did not pursue the possibility that Colbern owned an enormously dangerous 50-caliber machine gun. The deal that prompted Colbern’s release as a bombing suspect did not say anything about this gun, despite evidence he had bought ammunition for it from Moore and Anderson. The gun never came up in any of Colbern’s subsequent dealings with the criminal justice system, and was never recovered. Colbern’s lawyer, Richard Hanawalt, called it “the eight-hundred-pound elephant in the room.”
Colbern served less than four years for the charges arising from his 1994 arrest in California, and he was barely mentioned in any of the Oklahoma City bombing trials. According to Bob Sanders, a former deputy director of the ATF, Colbern could—and probably should—have been sentenced for life, given his serious weapons violations and links to McVeigh. “I’m very surprised,” Sanders said, “that this guy is walking the streets today.”
CAROL HOWE RETURNED TO ELOHIM CITY FOR THREE DAYS IN EARLY May and reported that someone there had talked about a “big secret” connected to the bombing. She had not been able to figure out what this secret was. As the government’s sole eyes and ears in the community, she was debriefed by both the ATF and the FBI in Oklahoma City—the FBI never produced a paper trail connected with the meeting—and then returned home.
Only on May 18, when she was formally reinstated as an ATF informant and paid $250, did she agree to have another go at penetrating the community. But she never made it back. Within days, Howe called her handler, Angela Finley, and said she’d received two separate warnings to stay away. The ATF later learned that Grandpa Millar had fingered Howe as a government snitch, a potential death sentence. They never sent her to Elohim City again.
MICHAEL TIGAR, THE LEAD COUNSEL APPOINTED TO REPRESENT Terry Nichols, won his client’s confidence with an immediate string of courtroom victories. Tigar was one of the more brilliant defense attorneys in the country—dogged, erudite, charming, and a scourge to underprepared prosecutors and law enforcement agents. On May 25, he poured out a torrent of indignation at the treatment not only of his client but also his client’s wife, who had been held in “protective custody” at a variety of motels in Kansas and Oklahoma for thirty-four days. Marife Nichols, he charged, was being kept “virtually incommunicado and without counsel” even though she was accused of no wrongdoing. She was interrogated continuously, denied access to her husband’s lawyers—never mind her husband—and subjected to search and seizure of her personal property, including her journal. Tigar said this was grossly unfair, and reflected the “lamentably thin” case against Terry Nichols.
Some of this was lawyerly bombast, calculated to secure his client’s cooperation as much as it was a shot at the Justice Department. But his description of Marife’s predicament was on point. Shortly after Nichols’s arrest, Marife learned she was pregnant, but did not dare tell her husband right away. She was still hoping to catch a flight to the Philippines on May 10. When that became impossible, she begged the FBI for the $5,000 they took from her bedsprings so she could make new plans to leave. They refused.
Once Tigar got involved, she and Nicole were allowed to visit Nichols. She was also given the $5,000 and allowed to book a flight to the Philippines. Still, she was mad that the FBI had transported her to Oklahoma City but now would not pay for a hotel or take her back to Kansas. She left a scathing voice-mail message with Gene Thomeczek, an FBI agent who had questioned her extensively back in Kansas. “I’m still in Oklahoma City and everything is going bad,” she said. “I mean, thanks a lot…for leaving me here. I just feel like, you know, this is a great time really. You really are a nice guy, but I can’t believe these people are doing this to me.”
She and Nicole flew to the Philippines the next day.
JUST AS THE FBI WAS TIRING OF THE HUNT FOR JOHN DOE TWO, AN army sergeant newly based in Fort Benning, Georgia, came forward with information suggesting he might never have existed. Sergeant Michael Hertig told agents that he and a friend had rented a Ryder truck from Eldon Elliott’s the day before the Oklahoma City bombing. He thought he should mention this, because his friend Todd Bunting looked a bit like John Doe Two and, at the time of the rental, was wearing a multicolored Carolina Panthers ball cap, not unlike the one in the composite sketch.
Agents viewed this as a near-providential answer to one of their biggest problems. The man calling himself Robert Kling had rented his Ryder truck on April 17, one day before Hertig and Bunting, and at almost exactly the same time in the afternoon. Had Tom Kessinger and his colleagues confused John Doe Two with Bunting, and, if so, did that mean McVeigh had come into the shop alone?
The FBI tracked down Private Bunting at Fort Riley, and he was indeed a plausible fit for the composite sketch—muscular, with tattoos on both biceps. Bunting said he was a smoker and might have lit up at the body shop, just as Vicki Beemer remembered. Bunting allowed the agents to photograph him wearing the Carolina Panthers hat and the same T-shirt he had worn on April 18 so they could gauge the precise way the tattoos jutted out from below the sleeve. The look was remarkably close to Tom Kessinger’s description.
After this, the FBI held firm to its belief that the events Kessinger and the others described seeing on April 17 had actually occurred a day later. The match was far from perfect. The body shop witnesses remembered John Doe Two being shorter than Kling, but Bunting was five foot ten, about the same height or slightly taller than Hertig. And Hertig did not look like John Doe One, because he had a bushy mustache on the day of the rental; Kling, everyone agreed, was clean-shaven. There were two other major flaws in the government’s theory. First, Eldon Elliott was away on the afternoon of April 18, so he could not have confused Bunting with the second man he saw accompanying Kling. Second, Vicki Beemer knew Michael Hertig and recognized him when he came in on April 18. For that reason, she was certain she did not confuse him with Kling.
What really happened? Tom Kessinger probably did confuse some of Todd Bunting’s features with what he remembered of John Doe Two—particularly the arm tattoo sticking out from beneath the sleeve of his T-shirt. But that did not mean he was wrong about his recollection of how many people came into the body shop on Monday, April 17.
Many people saw the Todd Bunting theory as a genuine breakthrough. Danny Coulson thought so at first, until he heard the objections raised by Elliott and Beemer and determined that the FBI was hiding the John Doe Two problem instead of getting to the bottom of it. “The bureau ended up undercutting its own witnesses,” Coulson said. “They wanted only one guy.” He felt this constituted a violation of the FBI’s fundamental mission. “If I was a commander and they were coming up with invented stuff,” he said, “I’d be pulling their tongues through their butts.”
Bunting caused some friction among the FBI’s higher-ups, too. I. C. Smith, back in Arkansas after his stint in Washington, remembered asking Bob Blitzer of the bureau’s counterterrorism section about “Unsub Number Two”—their term for John Doe Two—and being surprised when Blitzer said he did not exist. “Is the issue that he doesn’t exist,” Smith countered, “or that you couldn’t find him?”
MICHAEL FORTIER WAS BECOMING A REGULAR LAW ENFORCEMENT tour guide. He took the FBI to the storage locker where McVeigh had stashed blasting caps and other explosive components at the end of 1994, and showed them where he and McVeigh liked to camp and shoot. He also told them about a duffel bag full of supplies that McVeigh buried in the desert so he could hide out after the bombing.
The feds had a few theories on where McVeigh would have gone if he had not been arrested. The one that intrigued them most had him heading to a major airport, either in Wichita or Kansas City, and flying to Arizona—even though this would have forced McVeigh to go through airport security.
Fortier told the FBI he thought McVeigh had filled up several bags with food, money, guns, and ammunition, and stashed them all over the desert. And he mentioned one instance in which he had driven McVeigh into a box canyon and waited for an hour while his friend dumped a green duffel bag somewhere in the wilderness. The feds asked Fortier for directions, and started hunting. “We had the army, the FBI—every method known to man—searching by grid and by rock, but we never found that duffel bag,” Weldon Kennedy said. “I presume it’s still out there.”
Fortier could easily have fabricated the whole thing. But the FBI did not seem to consider that. “Why would Fortier make up a story like that?” Kennedy asked, years later. “There was no reason for him even to tell us that.” No reason—other than Fortier’s desire to tell the feds what they wanted to hear, and the pleasure he would get from wasting their time. The question of where McVeigh was heading after the bombing has never been resolved.
BEYOND THE JOHN DOE TWO DILEMMA, THE FBI HAD TO STRETCH the evidence to prove that McVeigh was John Doe One. Not only did they lack physical evidence putting him in the Junction City body shop, they could barely figure out how he arrived in time to sign the rental contract.
A video surveillance camera at a McDonald’s just over a mile away captured McVeigh at 3:57 P.M. on April 17, the day the Ryder truck was rented. McVeigh no longer had a car and, according to the government, was alone, so he presumably walked to Eldon Elliott’s, a good twenty minutes away. In the FBI’s narrative, he made it there in time to enter, introduce himself, and have Vicki Beemer print out the rental form, which was time-stamped at 4:19 P.M. It was raining at the time—a “light mist,” as Elliott later testified—but when Kling arrived at the body shop, he was dry. The FBI assigned an agent from the Kansas City bureau to reproduce McVeigh’s movements and see if he could make the journey in time. Agent Gary Witt left McDonald’s at 3:57—perhaps a touch earlier than McVeigh’s actual departure—and arrived at 4:16, with three minutes to spare. One can assume he didn’t dawdle; one of his colleagues conceded he walked “at a brisk pace.”
When McVeigh talked to Michel and Herbeck, he felt compelled to give a more elaborate explanation of how he got to Eldon Elliott’s. About three-quarters of the way there, he said, a young man pulled over and asked if he needed a ride. In the car, he “ran a hand through his brush cut, drying off his hair.” No man has ever come forward to match McVeigh’s account, and even the FBI gave it no credence. That leaves two other possible scenarios. Either McVeigh was not alone at the body shop, and was driven there by John Doe Two; or he never went at all, and John Doe One was an associate who looked a little like him but was shorter, with rougher skin and an odd way of chewing tobacco.
Most agreed that the best evidence tying McVeigh to the Ryder rental was not the eyewitness testimony, or the John Doe One sketch, but the name Kling, a known alias for which McVeigh had prepared a fake ID with the help of Lori Fortier’s typewriter and iron. But McVeigh could have given this ID to someone else so the rental could not be traced directly to either of them. College students, after all, lend their driver’s licenses—both real and fake ones—to underage friends. This would not be much different.
McVeigh left no fingerprints at Eldon Elliott’s, on the counter or on the rental form. And the handwriting on the rental papers was also inconclusive. A prominent handwriting expert consulted for this book said that the evidence presented at trial linking McVeigh to the Robert D. Kling signature was too weak to determine they were the same. Linda James, the president of the National Association of Document Examiners, said the signature was clearly disguised writing, and “only indications at most” suggested that the originator was McVeigh. Even the backward slant that had excited Agent Mark Bouton did not prove anything, she said, because seven out of eight people who disguise their writing—as was the case here—slant it in a different direction.
By early June 1995, the investigation was driven by two deeply flawed principles. The first was that the eyewitnesses were unreliable and could be dismissed if their contentions clashed with the government’s theory of the case. This became a circular argument, to the extent that testimony was then cherry-picked to reinforce a predetermined viewpoint. Of course, assessing eyewitnesses’ reliability is important, but there is little evidence it was done dispassionately or fairly in this case.
Prosecutor Scott Mendeloff gave a revealing illustration of the mind-set when he insisted that the Dreamland witnesses must have been mistaken about seeing a second Ryder. “They got their timing off,” he said. “There is no indication McVeigh rented a second truck. There’s one truck.” Perhaps the most instructive way to understand Mendeloff’s argument is to read his sentences in reverse, beginning with the last one. He started from the premise that there was only one truck—a notion that four eyewitnesses, interviewed separately, all challenged. Rather than allowing himself to challenge the premise, he challenged the eyewitnesses.
The second flawed principle was that the Daryl Bridges phone records could track anything and everything related to the bomb plot. Certainly, a lot of things could be—the hunt for bomb components, the attempt to secure help from people like Dave Paulsen, the frequency of communications between McVeigh and Nichols, and their movements around the country. But the phone records were elevated beyond an investigative tool. “There is absolutely, unequivocally, no way there could have been other conspirators, because the phone records would have shown that,” Weldon Kennedy argued. “We interviewed every single recipient of a phone call from Nichols or McVeigh.” Kennedy rejected the notion that Elohim City, for example, had not been properly investigated—he called the idea “bullshit.” “There was no extensive investigation of Elohim City,” he said, “because there was only one call there, which lasted a few seconds.”
This reliance on phone records lost sight of a number of things. First, the records could not identify who was making a call. (At least three people—McVeigh, Nichols, and Marife—had the PIN code, and they could have passed it to others.) Second, even though Nichols purchased the card, McVeigh could have used it to set his friend up as a fall guy. And, third, the dependence on the Bridges records assumes that McVeigh and Nichols had no other means of making phone calls away from home.
The last assumption seems particularly perilous. Roger Moore and Karen Anderson told the FBI about phone calls they received from McVeigh, none of which appeared on the Bridges records. Anderson testified, for example, that he phoned just hours ahead of his overnight visit in early 1994; it was not a Bridges call. Years later, Terry Nichols described how it was a constant source of irritation that McVeigh kept using the card, and he badgered him to get one of his own. According to Nichols, when they met in Kansas on April 14, 1995, McVeigh had obtained a prepaid debit card, and showed it to him to end the argument. There may have been other cards besides.
In June 1995, the investigation had been going just over a month and already, despite the FBI’s protestations about leaving no stone unturned, the shape of the government’s case was set. It was as notable for what it left out as it was for the oddly truncated version it presented as the whole story.