When Roger Moore was asked by investigators about his relationship with Tim McVeigh, he described it as a catalogue of disappointments and betrayals. Moore had welcomed the young man into the gun-show business, he said; he had fed him, let him share hotel rooms, and invited him to the ranch in Arkansas. In return, McVeigh sponged off him, embarrassed him in public, stole his idea for converting flare guns into rudimentary rocket-launchers, and set him up for a robbery in which Moore lost tens of thousands of dollars’ worth of cash, precious stones, and firearms, as well as personal keepsakes—rare curios from his travels and a .22 Hornet Winchester rifle given to him by his father—which no amount of money could replace.
As FBI agents broadened their investigation, they understood that Moore and his girlfriend, Karen Anderson, had played down both the number of times they had met McVeigh and the length of their encounters. The couple described big, blow-up arguments, including one at the Soldier of Fortune Convention in Las Vegas in 1993, in which McVeigh got into Moore’s face “like a top sergeant” before storming out. But they offered no explanation of why they continued to extend invitations to him. This seemed particularly puzzling, since the couple was intensely private and had offered hospitality to only three or four other people in their ten years in Arkansas.
Moore described McVeigh as paranoid to the point of instability. On an April 1994 visit, he had insisted on sleeping near a window with his Glock .45 under his pillow. He spent hours feeding bullets into his Ruger mini-30 and cranking them out again on Moore’s gravel driveway, apparently convinced that the government was after him and likely to pounce at any moment. Such bizarre behavior did not deter Moore from continuing to write to McVeigh and, as we have seen, using a near-impenetrable private language to convey sensitive information.
In the run-up to the trials, the government largely accepted Roger Moore’s account and groomed him as a prosecution witness. But the government’s own information, along with previously unpublished research by defense investigators and a firsthand account from Terry Nichols, all suggest that Moore could as easily have been a participant in the plot, not only facilitating the supposed robbery but also offering valuable instruction on bomb-building.
Moore and Anderson said the April 1994 visit was McVeigh’s last, but McVeigh’s defense team later obtained information suggesting that he returned once or twice more that summer to pick up batches of Kinestik, a binary explosive kit whose components were ammonium nitrate and nitromethane—the very ingredients later used to blow up the Murrah Building. Moore, according to this information (later deemed genuine by McVeigh in his interviews with Michel and Herbeck), had cases of the stuff and did not sell it “to just anybody.” Terry Nichols said Kinestik packs supplied by Moore were used as boosters for the ammonium nitrate barrels he and McVeigh mixed at Geary Lake. According to Nichols, Moore also gave McVeigh blasting caps and cannon fuse.
Nichols is not a neutral source, of course. Since 2005, when he first started talking about his own role in the bomb plot, he has pushed to have Moore arrested and prosecuted as a coconspirator. He told the FBI they could find Moore’s fingerprints on a box of nitromethane tubes, originally components from Kinestik kits, which were hidden beneath his house in Herington. When Nichols’s accusations first surfaced, Moore not only denied any wrongdoing; he accused Nichols of acquiring the Kinestik himself because he was an “angry man” with his own agenda. The FBI found fingerprint traces on the box Nichols was talking about, but they did not test them for almost three years and then concluded that the prints were unreadable.
McVeigh certainly obtained Kinestik from somewhere. He told Michel and Herbeck he possessed “a couple of small cylinders,” one filled with white powder and the other a red liquid—an exact description of Kinestik, even if he chose not to call it that. (The white powder would have been the ammonium nitrate, the red liquid nitromethane.) According to Nichols, McVeigh had bragged about having Kinestik since mid-1993; in September 1994, they detonated a kit in a creekbed in Kansas.
We also know that, before then, McVeigh’s trials with explosives had come to naught. Afterward was a different story.
BY THE SUMMER OF 1994, TERRY NICHOLS WAS WORKING AS A FARMHAND outside Marion, Kansas. The work was tough and offered little financial reward. And it did nothing to improve his marriage: Marife had taken Nicole back to the Philippines earlier in the year, and was planning to attend college there in the fall. Nichols still dreamed of starting a blueberry farm and settling down properly, but he had hardly shaken off the radical antigovernment ideology he developed in Michigan. One of the first things he did when he moved to Kansas was to walk into the local county clerk’s office and, using a lot of the pseudo-legal language he learned from Ralph Daigle, renounce his U.S. citizenship. The clerk remembered him as polite but “not friendly.”
One day, McVeigh showed up on one of his frenetic cross-country road trips and suggested they go full-time into the gun-show business together. Immediately, McVeigh suggested buying fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate, ostensibly to sell to survivalists and homemade explosives enthusiasts. Nichols paid no attention to this red flag. Following McVeigh appealed to his romantic spirit of rebellion, and he gave his employer a month’s notice.
Nichols had about $12,000 in cash, from the sale of a farm he and Lana had owned, plus another $12–15,000 in gold coins he bought with the proceeds of his credit-card scams. He turned almost all of it over to McVeigh, who assured him he would get it all back once the business was up and running. McVeigh, though, wanted the money to purchase bomb components. He was essentially leeching off Nichols and relying on his naive willingness to do whatever he was told.
McVeigh didn’t just take Nichols’s money. He also slept with his wife over several days in September 1994, while Nichols was still working in the fields and she was preparing to leave for the Philippines. McVeigh’s motivation—absolute ownership over Nichols—was a lot clearer than Marife’s. She later said McVeigh had simply “taken over,” helping himself to her like he did to everything else. Nichols concurred: “McV was clearly in the mind-set of using everything I had—my home, my phone, my food, my truck, my trust, myself, and even my wife! And [he] did it all as a means of setting me up to take the fall as part of his goal to achieve his mission.”
Nichols, though, did not know how to resist McVeigh’s demands, and McVeigh seemed to derive sadistic pleasure from pushing him ever further. Prosecutors would later argue that Nichols unambiguously crossed the line between coercion and cooperating with McVeigh, but the evidence suggests that he did not always understand the difference. One day McVeigh wanted to demonstrate what it was like to be shot at, as he had been in the Gulf War. So he took Nichols into the fields, told him to crouch behind a big rock, and opened fire, most likely with his Ruger assault rifle. “When I count, you roll,” he ordered. Nichols was terrified, but did exactly as commanded.
INVESTIGATORS WORKING FOR THE NICHOLS DEFENSE TEAM SPENT two years unearthing everything they could about Roger Moore. And the more they dug, the more bewilderingly complex the man became. He had spent years working for the federal government he later professed to hate, first for the Social Security Administration in Iowa, and then for the air force. In the 1960s, he and his wife, Carol, had jobs and top-secret security clearances at North American Aviation. From there, they moved to Florida, where they made a fortune in the boat-building business, cashing out in 1977 to settle into a long retirement.
The impression Moore gave to his neighbors and acquaintances in Arkansas was of an angry, suspicious, conspiracy-spewing, tight-fisted gun nut who did not know how to make friends or observe basic rules of civility. He would fire high-powered rifle-rounds and mortars on his ranch after dark, which even in rural Arkansas was regarded as eccentric. Once, he let off a smoke bomb and knocked one of his neighbors unconscious for twenty minutes. He never apologized.
His aversion to having people in the house went back at least to 1986, when a housekeeper ran off with thousands of dollars in cash, and a friend he and Anderson invited to house-sit committed suicide in their garage. He didn’t even like attending gun shows much. Bill Stoneman, a local gunsmith, who was the closest thing Moore had to a best friend, said Moore usually let Karen Anderson go by herself so he could stay home with the horses, ducks, geese, parrots, and cats. When he did tag along, Anderson would lug all the gear and do most of the selling. “I hate this shit,” Moore himself acknowledged to defense investigator Roland Leeds. “It bores me to death.”
Still, rumors about Moore abounded. Some of the more fantastical—and unverified—stories that circulated after the bombing suggested he might have taught sabotage techniques for the CIA at the Camp Peary military base in Virginia, or had been a participant in the Reagan administration’s illicit efforts to sell arms to the Nicaraguan contras, or had manufactured pontoon boats used by the CIA to mine three Nicaraguan ports in 1984, or had funneled information to the government on Barry Seal, a former CIA pilot who organized drug transports to Central America from Mena, Arkansas, not far from Moore’s ranch.
The Nichols team did not know what to make of such stories, but they found more reasons of their own to question Moore’s connections and activities. Despite his background as a successful businessman, and the existence of at least two bank accounts in his name, they found he had almost no credit history. They never figured out why. They also puzzled over a line Moore had given to Rodney Bowers of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette shortly after his first FBI interviews became public.
“Whatever I was doing for the FBI,” Moore said, “is fucked up, because they blew my cover.” Bowers later told defense investigators that Moore had called him in a fury when he saw this quoted in the paper. But he would not elaborate on what he meant.
FBI AGENTS WITH THE BOMBING TASK FORCE ALSO FOUND REASONS to raise questions about Moore’s past. They learned that, in 1988, he was caught up in an FBI sting operation, code-name Operation Punchout, which tracked the theft of equipment and supplies from Hill Air Force Base near Salt Lake City. Items as big as F-16 engines—worth about $2 million each—were disappearing and ending up in the hands of private military surplus dealers. So the FBI set up a fake storefront staffed by a team of undercover agents and handed out flyers at gun shows to lure the thieves into doing business with them. Among the first people to respond to the flyers were Roger and Carol Moore.
Hidden cameras recorded the Moores as they sold $2,100 worth of .223-caliber ammunition and said they could also come up with explosives and a large number of bootlegged porn videos. The agents asked about their suppliers and they said they were plugged into an “underground” network.
A major investigation appeared to be warranted, but none ever took place. The ammunition rounds the Moores sold were reloads, which made it less likely they had been stolen from the air force. The FBI did not pursue this or any other angle, according to the available records, so the U.S. attorney in Salt Lake City had no grounds to prosecute. A member of the Arkansas State Police Intelligence Unit later said he and a Garland County police lieutenant had looked into the porn distribution issue and could not substantiate it. Oddly, the Garland County Sheriff’s Department kept no paperwork on the investigation and, when asked, said there was none.
Moore caught another lucky break in 1989. Using his gun-show alias Robert Miller, he struck a deal with a man in Florida, who said he wanted a hundred pounds of C-4 plastic explosive. They exchanged addresses and phone numbers, and Moore said he would send the C-4 by UPS once he was home in Arkansas. But the man was an undercover informant for the ATF, and he passed Moore’s personal information to his handlers. Then something strange happened. The same Arkansas State Police Intelligence Unit officer who found no evidence of wrongdoing in the porn investigation started to pursue a different Robert Miller, a young gangbanger involved in drugs and sex crimes. The officer, Don Birdsong, said he never received Moore’s contact details or other information that would have told him he should have been looking for a middle-aged arms dealer.
Four years later, the ATF was on Moore’s tail again, this time in response to an alert that Moore and Anderson were selling incendiary ammunition rounds and flares to an ex-convict in Oregon. Federal law forbade out-of-state sales to anyone without a federal firearms license, much less a convicted arsonist and attempted murderer who could not legally buy weaponry at all. The ATF considered bringing a case but ultimately decided not to.
Did this history of abortive investigations indicate that Moore enjoyed special protection? Bill Buford, the head of the ATF in Arkansas in the early 1990s, did not exclude it. He cited other possible reasons—evidence rules and gun lobby pressure not to enforce federal firearms license regulations—why the two ATF-related cases did not go forward. Buford would not confirm that the ATF faced political obstacles beyond these procedural difficulties. But he also did not deny it.
ON SEPTEMBER 13, 1994, PRESIDENT CLINTON APPROVED A TEN-YEAR assault weapons ban, and McVeigh wondered if he hadn’t been plunged into the opening chapter of The Turner Diaries, in which passage of a repressive new gun law inspires the beginnings of a white supremacist resistance movement. Nichols said McVeigh experienced the weapons ban as a “prophecy…coming true before his very eyes.” There and then, McVeigh started driving around Kansas looking for bags of ammonium nitrate. He needed eighty or ninety bags for his bomb, but he never found more than a few at a time. Nichols chalked this up to McVeigh’s “city mind,” and told him to go to a farm co-op. He even told McVeigh how to look one up in the yellow pages.
They ended up going together to the Mid-Kansas Co-op in McPherson, immediately after Nichols finished his last day’s work on the farm. But McVeigh had apparently decided he did not want to be seen making the purchase. As they were approaching the co-op, he jumped out of Nichols’s pickup, saying he needed to make some phone calls. Nichols bought forty fifty-pound bags of ammonium nitrate on his own, in cash, and told the salesman, Rick Schlender, that he was planning to spread them on some freshly planted wheat fields.
Schlender found that odd, because the weather was not good for planting and most wheat farmers used liquid fertilizer. Schlender had no strong memory of the man—or men—who made this purchase; he told the FBI he remembered two of them. Since it was raining, Nichols bought a light-colored camper shell to fit over his truck bed—a feature many witnesses would pick up in the months to come.
He and McVeigh dumped the ammonium nitrate in a storage locker in Herington, where Nichols had originally intended to store his furniture. Now he noticed that McVeigh had not rented the space in his name, as he requested, but under the alias Shawn Rivers. It was another warning sign about McVeigh’s intentions that he failed to pick up on until much later.
That night, McVeigh pushed Nichols further into criminality by suggesting they scope out a nearby mining quarry and take whatever explosives they could find, just for fun. McVeigh presented it as something similar to his misadventure with Fortier at the National Guard armory in Kingman. But, this time, he and Nichols conducted a thorough reconnaissance and made plans to come back the next night. They brought Nichols’s Makita drill to break the padlocks and took care to park McVeigh’s Chevy a quarter-mile away on the far side of a field.
They hauled away enough material to build several large bombs: 299 sticks of Tovex, 544 electric blasting caps, and 93 lengths of Primadet shock tube fitted with nonelectric caps. Even now, Nichols would not see what trouble McVeigh was leading him into. “I was in denial that this one act would suck me into worse things that McVeigh had up his sleeve,” he wrote in 2010.
They were remarkably lucky they weren’t caught. A trucker named Craig Knoche usually parked his vehicle outside the quarry at midnight so he could catch a few hours’ sleep before loading up in the morning. That Saturday, though, he was out late and did not pull in until about 4:00 A.M. He spotted lights from a stationary vehicle half a mile away, but nodded off to sleep when he saw no signs of people moving about. When the local sheriff, Ed Davis, investigated, he found four padlocks missing but recovered a fifth, which had been drilled through and abandoned—possibly because McVeigh and Nichols heard the truck coming.
Sheriff Davis drew up a list of suspects, but Nichols and McVeigh would not have crossed his radar, because they did not have criminal records. Besides, Nichols and McVeigh were gone the next day—off to Arizona with eight and a half boxes of Tovex beneath Nichols’s camper shell and the blasting caps in the trunk of McVeigh’s Spectrum. Any obvious trace in Marion County was gone with them.
IN OCTOBER 1993, ROGER MOORE WAS SLUNG IN JAIL IN WAGONER, OKLAHOMA, for pulling a loaded gun during a road-rage incident. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol could never prove that Moore opened fire, as the occupants of the other vehicle alleged. But they still charged him with illegal possession—of the gun, and of “controlled dangerous substances” they found in his car.
As soon as Karen Anderson heard, back in Hot Springs, she started digging for $50,000 in cash she had buried at the ranch and sped to Oklahoma to bail him out. She tried to hand the money in great wads to the sheriff’s office, but the desk officer wouldn’t accept it and sent her to a bail bond agency across the street. Anderson befriended the agent, and was soon in touch with the best-connected lawyer in town, Richard McLaughlin. Soon after, Moore walked away with just $303 in fines and court costs.
The story might have ended there, except that six months after the Oklahoma City bombing Moore reappeared in McLaughlin’s office and complained he had been overcharged. He was so obnoxious that McLaughlin lost his temper and told Moore he hoped the FBI indicted him for the bombing. Moore said the feds would not touch him, “because he was a protected government witness.” McLaughlin either missed the significance of this or did not believe it. Instead, he accused Moore of financing the bombing. Moore, in McLaughlin’s account, “got a funny look on his face.” Sensing that things were about to get violent, McLaughlin reached for his gun, pointed it at his client, and told him to get out. He kept an eye on Moore all the way to the parking lot.
When McLaughlin told this story to Moore’s bail agent, Dianna Sanders Burk, he heard an even stranger one in return. In April 1995, right after the bombing, Burk learned that Moore had been trying to reach her to get someone out of jail. In fact, he drove to Wagoner just to see her. She had sold her business by then and did not see him or speak to him for several days. They maintained regular contact over the next few months, and Burk became ever more intrigued when Moore started talking about his friend Tim McVeigh, who he said was “not a bad guy” but had been set up by the feds.
Even before she swapped notes with McLaughlin, Burk became convinced that Moore had come looking for her in April to bail McVeigh out of the Noble County jail.
BACK IN KINGMAN, MCVEIGH AND NICHOLS COULD NOT WAIT TO test their new explosives, so they went to the desert to detonate an improvised ammonium nitrate and nitromethane device inside a gallon milk jug. It did not work. Nichols thought McVeigh did not allow enough time for the liquid to soak in. McVeigh was too embarrassed to talk about it, and just kept experimenting. A few days later, he went back to the desert alone and this time, he said, the mixture blew without a hitch.
McVeigh used some of the new materials that he and Nichols had stolen from the quarry, but the bulk of the Tovex and blasting caps were now in a storage unit in Kingman, which McVeigh rented as soon as he arrived. Then, on October 11, McVeigh called Nichols back from Las Vegas, where he was visiting Josh, and insisted they move the blasting caps—just the caps—right away to a new storage unit 140 miles away in Flagstaff. Ostensibly, McVeigh did this to spread the risk of discovery, but Nichols said there might have been another purpose. “McVeigh had to hand about half of those blasting caps off to someone,” he said, “because only about half were ever recovered.” The FBI never looked into it, because they never knew about the Flagstaff storage locker; Nichols did not disclose this until 2007.
On October 16, the tension between the two men exploded into open animosity. They were driving from a gun show in Colorado Springs back to Kansas when McVeigh gave the order to buy a second ton of ammonium nitrate. Nichols asked what it was for, then tried to say no when McVeigh spelled it out for him. “He became very angry,” Nichols recounted. “As he spoke, he shifted his body, turning toward me a bit, lifted up his left arm over the top of the seat back, which caused his plaid flannel shirt to swing back…, and exposed his Glock .45 handgun.”
McVeigh said he knew where Nichols’s son Josh lived, where his brother James lived, where his mother lived, and would have no problem “eliminating them” if necessary. If he even suspected Nichols of running to the authorities, he would put a bullet in his head. “No one is going to stop me carrying out my plans,” he said.
This was the turning point, Nichols said, the moment when he finally understood how much trouble he was in. But he was too scared by McVeigh’s volcanic moods and too confused to know how to back out. So he kept doing as he was told.
The next day, McVeigh extended the contract on the Herington storage locker, still using his alias Shawn Rivers, and told Nichols it was no longer available for his furniture. Nichols found another space and lugged his things without a protest. A day later, Nichols bought the second ton of fertilizer at the Mid-Kansas Co-op.
Next, McVeigh demanded another $4,000 to pay for the rest of the bomb components. Nichols said the only way he could get the money was to sell off part of his gold coin collection. McVeigh ordered him to do it and accompanied him to his coin dealer in Wichita to make sure it happened.
So it went with the rest of the shopping spree. When McVeigh and Nichols visited a stock-car race south of Dallas the next weekend, they had no problem acquiring three fifty-five-gallon barrels of nitromethane; the salesman was happy to take the cash—Nichols’s cash—and ask no questions. That left just a dozen barrels to complete the bomb components. McVeigh was so particular about what he wanted that it took almost a week of driving around Kansas to find them. They eventually picked up six refurbished black steel barrels with removable lids from a recycling center, and six white plastic barrels from a dairy processing plant. The total cost of all twelve: just $54.
McVeigh and Nichols stored everything in the Herington locker and headed back to Kingman. Despite Mike Fortier’s later testimony, it seems unlikely McVeigh had picked out a specific date or target city yet. Nichols was sure he was planning a bombing for Thanksgiving, Christmas, or New Year’s. Either way, his intention was set. He told Fortier he intended to inflict mass casualties, which he rationalized by likening his targets to storm troopers in Star Wars. “They may be individually innocent,” he said, “but they are guilty because they work for the Evil Empire.”
Nichols headed back to Las Vegas to visit Josh, and to put some distance between himself and McVeigh’s plans, but within days McVeigh was ordering him to come back to Kingman again. McVeigh was going to New York because his grandfather just died and he wanted to give Nichols instructions before he left. Nichols was afraid of what those would entail, so he blew off the meeting and headed to Kansas where he did not think he could be discovered.
To his astonishment, McVeigh showed up the next morning at the Geary Lake camping ground where he had pitched his tent—a favorite spot that was probably not all that difficult to guess—and told him the new assignment had to do with “Bob from Arkansas.” Nichols thought McVeigh was going to suggest bringing Roger Moore into their gun-show business; he had mentioned in the past that “Bob” was interested in providing sale items to help get them going.
But McVeigh had a completely different proposal. “We are going to rob him,” he said. Or, more specifically, Nichols was going to rob him. “It will be much easier than you think,” McVeigh said. “He will be like a kitten and give you absolutely no trouble at all. Just trust me.”
ON THE MORNING OF SATURDAY, NOVEMBER 5, ROGER MOORE WAS wandering out to feed the animals when a masked man pointing a pistol-grip shotgun ordered him to lie flat on the ground. Soon he was lying trussed up on the living-room couch while the intruder picked the house clean. Nichols, who carried out the robbery, felt it was all too easy and couldn’t help wondering if it had been prearranged with Moore’s consent. He was not the only one who thought the whole thing stank.
Moore told many different versions of the story, and they all begged a lot of questions. According to most of his accounts, he was initially immobilized with plastic police ties but successfully sweet-talked the gunman into replacing them with duct tape, because they were cutting off the blood circulation to his hands. The unusually indulgent robber was also thoughtful enough to leave an opened penknife on an end table next to the couch, enabling him to slice through his bonds once the robbery was over. Moore described the intruder as a ruthless Special Forces type, but the man’s behavior seemed neither ruthless nor especially careful. Beyond the penknife, he also left a loaded stainless-steel revolver sitting in a magazine box just a few feet from his purported victim.
Moore said the robber took more than seventy firearms, but the insurance adjuster noticed that the closets where the guns were supposedly kept were too small to hold that many. Bill Stoneman told investigators that Moore and Anderson usually kept their cash and jewelry buried on the property, but the robber found silver and gold coins and bullion, precious, and semiprecious stones, pre-Columbian jade from Costa Rica, and close to $9,000 in cash all lying openly around the house.
Moore’s uncanny memory of the robber’s appearance was also suspect. In his court testimony, he described a swarthy man, just under six feet tall, who stank like a “pig yard” and was wearing a black serge ski mask with generous eye and mouth openings, and unusual gray Israeli combat boots. Terry Nichols later contradicted this by saying he wore 1990s-era camouflage gear, ordinary brown jersey gloves, and standard-issue black boots. He had a nylon stocking over his head, not a ski mask, with holes cut out for his eyes and his glasses perched on top.
“My glasses on the outside should have been obvious to Moore, but he never describes the robber as wearing glasses,” Nichols wrote in 2010. Nichols’s lawyers suggested in court that Moore had taken his description of the black mask from a photograph on a gun-show flyer, which the FBI found in his van.
If Moore’s description was wrong, could it have been an attempt to protect Nichols, or to incriminate someone else? Richard Guthrie, the Aryan Republican Army bank robber, was one of the few people on the radical right who had a pair of Israeli combat boots and he was also known to neglect his personal hygiene. Had he done something to anger Moore? Intriguingly a Robert Miller driver’s license and several Kinestik packs were recovered after Guthrie and Pete Langan, his fellow ARA ringleader, were arrested in early 1996. But the FBI never made serious inquiries into this link.
MCVEIGH TOLD NICHOLS THAT ROBBING MOORE WOULD BE HIS reward for fronting so much money over the previous two months. All McVeigh wanted were the guns and a $2,000 cut of the cash; Nichols was welcome to the rest. In the run-up to the robbery, McVeigh told Nichols with great precision where to find everything—including Moore’s camper van, which was parked by the back door for easy loading. McVeigh said the robbery had to take place on November 5, because Karen Anderson would be away at a gun show—something she had told almost nobody, according to an interview she later gave the FBI. McVeigh also knew that Moore would walk out of the house around 9:00 A.M.
Nichols found everything as McVeigh described, except the cash, which was not in a filing cabinet but—even more obviously—on Moore’s desk. Nichols, ever the stickler for following instructions, had to ask Moore for help locating it, prompting a sarcastic comeback from Moore. He took nothing of value from Anderson’s room, as instructed, although he did help himself to two pillowcases to carry some smaller items, and removed the quilt from her bed so he would have something to cover the loot in the back of Moore’s camper van. The quilt later showed up on the Nicholses’ bed in Herington.
ROGER MOORE’S NEIGHBOR VERTA “PUDGE” POWELL THOUGHT HE was playacting from the moment he rang her doorbell and said he had been robbed. His phone lines had been cut, and he barged past her, demanding to use the phone. She glowered when she saw a revolver sticking out of his sweatpants.
Pudge said Moore talked in a suspiciously low voice on his calls. When her husband came home, they found out Moore had not even phoned the police. Moore said something about the government trying to shut down a movement he was leading and suggested he had been robbed to keep him “in check.” When the sheriffs arrived, at Powell’s insistence, they asked Powell if he thought the robbery was genuine. He, like the rest of the family, did not believe any of it.
Farmers Insurance was also skeptical. The company adjuster handling Moore’s claim thought the story sounded like a “rehearsed script.” He would have launched a full investigation, but the caps on Moore’s policy left more than 90 percent of his claim uncovered. Quibbling over a $5,900 settlement was not worth the company’s time, so he let it go unchallenged.
Moore had no apparent problem with the money—he had deliberately underinsured himself because he didn’t want anyone, even his insurance company, to know how many valuables he kept on his property. But he was oddly upset not to have the robbery investigated. He made an angry phone call to his insurance agent and told her daughter, who answered the phone, he would “smear [her] all over the counter.”
ON THE EVENING OF THE ROBBERY, MCVEIGH CALLED MICHAEL FORTIER and told him that “Terry did Bob.” He also advised him to watch his back. “He thought that Bob would send private investigators out to Arizona to look for him,” Fortier later testified. “And if those investigators would be in Kingman, they would find me, because I’m associated with Tim.”
Curiously, McVeigh knew all about the robbery before Nichols had a chance to tell him. The Daryl Bridges records show that Nichols did not call McVeigh that day; Nichols said he did not contact McVeigh until Monday, November 7, after he had dumped the robbery loot in a new storage locker in Council Grove, Kansas.
If Nichols did not tell McVeigh the robbery had gone off smoothly, then someone else must have, possibly Moore himself. McVeigh was at a gun show in Akron, Ohio, and not easy to reach, but he could have waited by a pay phone at a prearranged hour, or used an intermediary at the gun show to take a message for him. The FBI preferred to believe that the phone call to the Fortiers did not take place until several days later—even though it is in the Bridges records at 8:09 P.M. Eastern Time on November 5.
ONCE NICHOLS HAD SECURED THE GUNS, HE DROVE TO LAS VEGAS with the rest of the stolen goods. He had decided he wouldn’t tell anyone where he had stashed everything; he had a feeling that if McVeigh found out, the loot would not remain his for long, But he found himself telling McVeigh about the guns anyway as soon as he was asked. He was angry with himself about that, and determined not to let anything else elude his grasp.
Nichols’s plan was to fly to the Philippines and stay until the New Year so he could not be blamed for any catastrophes over the holidays. The Philippines was not exactly a risk-free destination; he was deathly afraid of Marife’s ex-boyfriend, and far from convinced that Marife still wanted to be married to him. But that was a chance he would have to take.
He arrived at Lana Padilla’s house beside himself with paranoia. He was terrified about being drawn into a criminal conspiracy and did not know how to share his troubles without burdening Lana or Josh with guilty knowledge. Lana thought his strange behavior was a sign of suicidal depression. Nichols had been out of touch for the second half of October, and while he hadn’t told Lana about quitting his farm job, she suspected it, because he was no longer answering his phone there. Eventually, she sent a note to his post office box in Kansas, which said: “Call me. It’s urgent. We need to talk about Josh.”
Nichols needed to devote some proper time to his son, so he postponed his flight to the Philippines until November 22—the anniversary of Jason’s death—and started planning the disposal of his property in case he didn’t make it out of Southeast Asia alive. In context, the “Go for it!” note from Nichols to McVeigh takes on new, or at least more shaded, meanings. This phrase follows on from a paragraph describing locker #37 in Council Grove, the one with Moore’s guns in it. Nichols explained—and it seems plausible—that the line “As for heat, none that I know of” refers to the Moore robbery, not the purchase of bomb components. And “Your on your own, go for it!!” could mean: if I’m out of the picture (because I’m dead), take the guns and do what you will with them.
Nichols barely made it out of the country. As he boarded the first leg of his flight, from Las Vegas to Los Angeles, a security guard spotted a stun gun in his hand luggage. He had packed two as gifts for Marife’s family. Although carrying an offensive weapon on a passenger aircraft was a federal offense, the episode was treated, amazingly, as no big deal. Nichols repacked the stun guns in his checked luggage and was allowed to proceed.
ONCE MCVEIGH REALIZED NICHOLS WAS OUT OF THE COUNTRY, HE turned to his other best friend, Michael Fortier, and used the loot from the Moore robbery as leverage to try to talk him into helping carry out the bombing.
His promise of a $10,000 payday certainly concentrated the Fortiers’ minds. Lori ironed the plastic cover on McVeigh’s fake Robert Kling ID and disguised the blasting caps from the quarry robbery by wrapping them in Christmas paper. According to Lori, McVeigh also performed a little demonstration, taking a pile of soup cans from the Fortiers’ kitchen cupboard and arranging them into the configuration he had in mind for the ammonium nitrate and nitromethane barrels. The prosecution used this story at McVeigh’s trial to show a high degree of premeditation, but there are grounds to doubt its veracity. When Michael Fortier was asked on the witness stand if Lori had told him the story before she shared it with the FBI, he said she had not.
Either way, McVeigh lured Michael Fortier into traveling with him to Kansas and Oklahoma with two boxes of blasting caps in the trunk. But he could not convince him to carry out the bombing then and there. A frustrated McVeigh drove on to Michigan, but on the way, his car was hit hard from the rear on the I-90 highway. “In ½ a second,” he later wrote, with his customary blend of fact and self-dramatization, “I restarted the car, floored it and popped the clutch.” With his front wheels spinning and his back wheels dragging against the smashed fender, he maneuvered himself out of danger in the nick of time.
The stark reality, not lost on McVeigh, was that the thump could have set off one or more of the blasting caps and blown him to smithereens. By the time McVeigh wrote about the accident—to Roger Moore, of all people—he had convinced himself that the accident was intentional, most likely the work of a government agent. “This makes me real nervous. Has anyone else had anything happen to them?” he asked in his letter, dated January 10, 1995.
Why was Moore still corresponding with the man he saw as the lead suspect in the robbery? Moore said he wanted to draw McVeigh back to the ranch and confront him face-to-face. “I could kill that motherfucker for robbing me,” Moore later railed to a defense investigator. “I didn’t need this.” The surviving correspondence, however, suggests that Moore and McVeigh were on remarkably good terms, writing cryptically but unmistakably about starting a revolution against the government. “The important thing is to be as effective as possible,” Moore wrote in the letter recovered from McVeigh’s mail drop after the bombing. Was he really just talking about recovering his guns?
AFTER THE BOMBING AND THE INITIAL ROUND OF INTERVIEWS, the FBI assigned Mark Jessie, an agent out of the Hot Springs office, to keep an eye on Moore. But Moore did not get along with Jessie, and he was replaced with a softer agent, Floyd Hays, who struck up an unlikely friendship with Moore that earned him repeated—and unheard of—invitations to the ranch. “Roger was a person who wanted everyone to like him,” Hays said years later. “He was a little bit different. But he was not a mean guy or a bad guy.”
This was hardly conventional wisdom in Hot Springs. But it was not an uncommon view in the FBI, where Moore was being considered as a prosecution witness, and any suspicions about him were increasingly viewed as an inconvenience. Jon Hersley, an agent from Oklahoma City who helped interview Moore and Anderson and later helped prepare the case for trial, believed everything Moore said and, in a book he cowrote, argued that Moore’s association with McVeigh was the consequence of an overly trusting nature. “Moore had learned over the years that being in the gun-show business meant meeting all kinds of people,” Hersley wrote. “Some were wonderful—and there were some whose intentions were not so noble.” Somehow, Roger Moore had morphed into a poor, fragile flower of a man. “He was nervous about being suspected,” Hays concurred, “almost to the point of crying.” Within months, all investigative interest in him evaporated.
NARROWING THE INVESTIGATION’S FOCUS WAS NOT MET WITH UNIVERSAL approval, even within the government. “There was intense discussion inside the prosecution team, in terms of…whether McVeigh and Nichols were the only two responsible,” said Larry Mackey, one of the prosecutors most open to new avenues of investigation. Some of Mackey’s colleagues were willing to give up on John Doe Two and accept the Todd Bunting theory, while others remained skeptical. Some were intrigued by Robert Jacques. The possible link to the bank robberies grew more enticing after a newspaper article about the Murrah Building bomb was left at the scene of an ARA heist in Missouri in August 1995.
John Magaw, the ATF director, spent the summer expecting Roger Moore to be indicted, along with at least one or two others. “Any investigative effort worth its salt would have pursued it, and pursued it hard,” he said of Moore. “That may be one of the people I felt all along was culpable—involved in one way or another.”
Broadening the investigation’s focus, however, became unlikely once the Fortiers struck a deal on August 4 to testify against McVeigh and Nichols. Michael Fortier pled guilty to charges of transporting and selling stolen weapons and failing to alert the authorities to the bombing in advance. In exchange, the government promised to go easy on his sentence, provided he held up his side of the bargain on the witness stand. Lori Fortier, who was four months pregnant, was given immunity.
The indictment, which appeared six days later, set the start of the conspiracy at September 13, 1994, but did not explain why. This led to speculation in some quarters that the date was somehow connected to Elohim City, because McVeigh checked out of a nearby motel in eastern Oklahoma that morning. The date, though, had nothing to do with the evidence. It was the day President Clinton signed the Violent Crime Control and Law Enforcement Act, which first introduced the death penalty for using, or conspiring to use, a weapon of mass destruction. Prosecutors worried that if they put the start of the conspiracy any sooner, the capital charges might get thrown out. It didn’t mean that evidence before that date was inadmissible; plenty was admitted, in both trials. It was a technicality—“legally relevant,” in Mackey’s words, “but factually irrelevant.”
The indictment was not entirely blind to the continuing investigation and referred to “others unknown” besides McVeigh and Nichols. But it did not point fingers at anybody else by name. It was, in essence, a promissory note on the outcome of further investigation, which never materialized.