One day after McVeigh and Nichols were indicted, Larry Potts was booted out as deputy director of the FBI and Danny Coulson was dismissed as special agent in charge in Dallas. They and three other senior agents associated with Ruby Ridge were placed on indefinite administrative leave. They were never told why they were suspended, nor were they formally accused of anything—not even by the Justice Department, which continued to hold on to its 1994 report holding Potts jointly responsible for the change in the rules of engagement at Randy Weaver’s cabin. Over time, it became clear that their removal was Louie Freeh’s way of being seen to do something to address a scandal that refused to go away. But it also had a chilling effect on the bombing investigation.
“They took out my unit chief, my section chief, the assistant deputy, Danny [Coulson], and Larry Potts. I lost the next four levels above me,” said Horace Mewborn, an agent with the FBI’s domestic terrorism unit, who specialized in the radical far right. “I thought, God, this couldn’t happen at a worse time.”
Buck Revell, who had recently retired as associate deputy director, called it an unprecedented abuse of authority and said: “At least Senator Joe McCarthy confronted his victims with his misplaced suspicions, hearsay, and innuendo, and they had an opportunity to respond.”
Coulson and Potts were eventually absolved and allowed to retire. But for the next two years, they were forbidden to talk to each other—about Oklahoma City or anything else. Coulson never lost the feeling that parts of the bombing investigation were dropped when he and his colleagues were removed. “I’ve been involved in thousands of investigations, but I’ve never seen that before—that the bureau would shut down an investigation to focus guilt on one person,” he said. It was something that he and Potts would never have tolerated.
NICHOLS’S LAWYER, MICHAEL TIGAR, BELIEVED THE ONLY WAY TO guarantee a fair trial—to provide a “sanctuary in the jungle” for his client, as he put it—was to move proceedings out of Oklahoma. Wayne Alley, the Oklahoma City judge who had been assigned the case by lottery, did not agree, and would not recuse himself even when Tigar pointed out that his offices were right next to the Murrah Building and the windows of his chambers had shattered in the bombing. “I have experienced greater loss of courtroom time because of water leaks and utility failures,” Alley said.
Tigar found this response cavalier and irresponsible, and his fury only grew when Alley announced that the trial would take place in Lawton, a town a hundred miles from Oklahoma City, which presented considerable logistical and security challenges. Tigar won the argument: the Tenth Circuit appeals court moved the trial to Denver and assigned Richard Matsch, a judge with previous experience of trying right-wing revolutionaries, whom Tigar had wanted all along.
Tigar had to make this argument alone, though, because Stephen Jones did not want to ruffle judicial feathers in his home state and would not join him on the appeal. They argued about the reasons for years, but for Tigar, at least, this was the moment when their relationship soured decisively.
Tigar did not respect Jones, and Jones found Tigar to be insufferably sure of himself. To some extent, the tension reflected the conflicting interests of their clients: Tigar’s team argued that McVeigh had manipulated Nichols and set him up, while the McVeigh team portrayed Nichols as a conniver and a liar. But it also had to do with the differences in their assignments.
Tigar had the easier case. His client was not in Oklahoma City when the bomb went off, had voluntarily answered the FBI’s questions, and was now talking in great detail to his legal team. From the beginning, Tigar formulated the mantra he would take to court: that in April 1995 Terry Nichols had been building a life, not a bomb.
Jones, on the other hand, did not like or trust his client and was not sure he could construct a viable defense for someone who was both manifestly guilty and unwilling to tell his full story. “I could file all the procedural motions I wanted, but ultimately, when the trial started, I had nothing with which to defend him,” Jones later wrote. He became so exasperated he forced McVeigh to undergo a polygraph and tried to confront him over the signs of evasion he showed when he was asked about the involvement of others besides Nichols.
Jones took more pleasure in building relationships with news reporters, sharing his thoughts, and parts of the evidence, in exchange for any information or leads to witnesses they had. The strategy was unceasingly controversial, and at one early hearing, Judge Matsch rebuked Jones for trying the case in the press. “We don’t want to be talking about the evidence outside,” Matsch told him sternly. “It’s not productive.”
Jones understood he needed to court Matsch’s favor assiduously, and made every effort not to upset him again. But he never stopped talking, or sharing documents with the media.
IN LATE SUMMER 1995, GRANDPA MILLAR TOOK ANDREAS STRASSMEIR aside and told him he had to leave Elohim City immediately, because the feds were after him. A government informant had recently spotted Strassmeir at a gun show with an SKS rifle and revolver, and Millar had enough to worry about after the bombing without answering for Strassmeir’s illegal weapons. As Strassmeir and others later understood it, Millar reached an agreement with his law enforcement contacts that Elohim City would not be raided as long as he got rid of the troublesome German.
Strassmeir hitched a ride to Black Mountain, North Carolina, the new home of Kirk Lyons’s CAUSE Foundation, because he didn’t know where else to go. “I figured I would find a way to get back and straighten things out with Millar,” he said. “I had no alternative plan.”
But when he returned to Elohim City for his things, he found them either stuffed haphazardly in the back of his car, the Suburban he had bought from Scott Stedeford, or abandoned on a roadside. Strassmeir struggled to come to terms with the many ways that Elohim City rejected him or played him for a fool. Once he had left, Grandpa Millar and the other elders told the media that Strassmeir might well have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing. They repossessed the stone house Strassmeir thought he had bought. And he learned, much later, that the car he had purchased was “hot,” because Stedeford had used it in the bank robberies. He had even been the unwitting recipient of stolen money: a $100 bill Mike Brescia had given him as a thank-you for hosting Stedeford and McCarthy over Easter, which also came from a bank job.
“I’m over it now,” Strassmeir said fifteen years later, “but it took many, many years…. I got exiled from Paradise. The Garden of Eden is gone for me.”
THE FBI’s INTEREST IN ELOHIM CITY WAS SO LOW AFTER THE BOMBING that Millar came to them, not the other way around. He traveled to Oklahoma City in June 1995, after news stories began linking his community to the bomb plot, and seemed to work his way around every question the feds asked him. He remained entirely in the clear, in fact, until Richard Reyna, a defense investigator for McVeigh, started visiting Elohim City and learned it was Strassmeir McVeigh had asked for when he called on April 5.
Reyna’s motivation was straightforward: if he could incriminate Strassmeir, it might diminish his own client’s guilt. So he threw himself into the task, interviewing Strassmeir in Black Mountain and concluding that Strassmeir’s relationship with McVeigh extended well beyond the one meeting they both acknowledged in Tulsa in 1993. When Reyna made his next trip to Elohim City, Millar fueled his suspicions by telling him that Interpol was interested in Strassmeir. Strassmeir, he said, was either a German government agent, or McVeigh’s accomplice, or perhaps both. Reyna reported that Millar “did not think [Strassmeir] could orchestrate something so big such as the bombing in Oklahoma City, but…[he] could be depended upon to follow orders with precision.”
Kirk Lyons knew Strassmeir was in trouble, because reporters started calling him and asking about Reyna’s findings. The mounting suspicions dealt an immediate blow to the CAUSE Foundation’s credibility, especially its efforts to sue the government on behalf of some of the Waco survivors and family members, which had earned Lyons and Hollaway unprecedented mainstream respectability. The Strassmeir controversy “put the CAUSE Foundation out of business,” Lyons said. “If I ever committed actionable malpractice, it was allowing Andi to talk to Reyna.”
Shortly before Christmas, Strassmeir told Hollaway he had not only met McVeigh but owned his Gulf War field jacket. “Oh come on, Andi,” Hollaway remembered saying. Strassmeir became angry that his friend wouldn’t believe him, and pulled a duffel bag from his closet. “There it was,” Hollaway said, “with the insignia of the Big Red One on the frickin’ sleeve and the name McVeigh on the front.…I said, ‘Holy fuck!’ You can quote me on that. Holy fuck! I almost had a fucking heart attack.”
Lyons and Strassmeir insisted there was no McVeigh label on the jacket, but Hollaway was absolutely sure. “The only reason I was struck dumb was because it had the frickin’ name on it,” he said. “All sorts of things flew through my mind. I wondered, maybe he really was John Doe Two.” He said Lyons cut the tags off as a precaution. “I called Kirk right away,” Hollaway recalled. “Holy mackerel, man…. What are the odds, what are the frickin’ odds?”
Lyons and Hollaway realized that if reporters were asking questions, the FBI could not be far behind. When they received a tip, in mid-December, that Strassmeir was on a government watch list, they decided he needed to leave the country immediately, before a warrant went out for his arrest. One of their most loyal donors FedExed $7,000 overnight, and Lyons pulled Strassmeir out of the lunch shift at the Berliner Kindel restaurant, where he worked as a short-order cook. He was given just ten minutes to pack before Hollaway started driving him toward the Mexican border.
There was no time to formulate a plan. Strassmeir had recently obtained a valid passport, but it was an open question whether he could present his ID at any U.S. Customs post without risking arrest.
THE DEFENSE TEAMS STRUGGLED TO MAKE PROGRESS ON THE CASE, BECAUSE the government would not hand over its witness interview reports and other crucial discovery documents. In theory, the prosecution team had an “open file” policy, allowing the defense to look at anything, but over the first eight months the Jones and Tigar teams received only a handful of lab reports, without accompanying explanations. They tried to interview key witnesses themselves, only to learn that the FBI had issued instructions telling them not to talk. The government said repeatedly that it needed more time. Stephen Jones described the attitude as “the prosecutorial equivalent of ‘the check is in the mail.’”
In December 1995, Judge Matsch agreed the government needed to hand over material from the investigators more quickly and also catalogue and explain it. He would not tolerate an indiscriminate document dump, a “go fish” approach to discovery, which courts almost always frown upon.
The two sides hammered out a deal that should have clarified everyone’s responsibilities. Ron Woods, the chief negotiator for the defense and Tigar’s deputy on the Nichols team, had been an FBI agent and a federal prosecutor and knew the culture he was dealing with. He persuaded the government to hand over all its witness interview reports, with an index, all shorter investigative memos known as inserts, plus handwritten lead sheets and the agents’ original notes. This was far from usual practice in criminal cases, and the prosecution wanted to know what it could expect in return. Woods agreed the defense would hand over its own investigative reports—another departure from usual practice—except those on the defendants themselves and their families.
In January 1996, the government unloaded an initial eleven thousand FBI witness interview reports, or 302s. The number would eventually balloon to more than eighteen thousand, and the total number of discovery materials would rise to about a million pages. Still, defense lawyers never stopped feeling the government was holding out and noticed one thing after another that appeared to be missing. Early on, Jones had to badger the chief prosecuting attorney, Joseph Hartzler, for 302s on the body shop witnesses, the Fortiers, Lea McGown, and other key players. Later, there were complaints about missing documents on Elohim City, Steve Colbern, and witnesses who saw other people with McVeigh and Nichols. The delays and omissions were always most pronounced on the issue of possible coconspirators. “It’s about the worst I’ve ever seen,” said Rob Nigh, McVeigh’s number two lawyer, who had worked as a federal public defender before entering private practice. “It didn’t matter how specific we were, the government’s response was that everything had been provided.”
The government had its own pressures: an almost unimaginable avalanche of material, close public scrutiny of its every move, and a basic lack of experience in disclosing so much. The stakes were almost impossibly high. “If you convicted [McVeigh] but did not get the death penalty, that would not be okay,” prosecutor Scott Mendeloff said. “A lot of the victims were pinning some sense of resolution on us getting justice for this guy. We couldn’t lose this…. It was like a pressure cooker.”
Nigh acknowledged that, culturally, the disclosure requirements were difficult for the prosecution. But he and Ron Woods both expressed astonishment at how little the discovery agreement was respected. “We thought we were dealing with honorable people,” Woods said. When asked who was least honorable on the prosecution team, he answered, cautiously: “I think that Larry Mackey and Joe Hartzler were honorable people.”
BY THE TIME DANNY DEFENBAUGH BECAME INTERESTED IN ANDREAS STRASSMEIR, it was already too late. A report from the Southern Poverty Law Center, sent to the task force on December 21 from the FBI’s field office in Mobile, where Defenbaugh had recently been posted, described Strassmeir as an “associate” of McVeigh’s and also appeared to disclose—the redactions make it less than clear—that McVeigh visited Elohim City shortly before the bombing. But, by then, Strassmeir had already left Black Mountain.
Two weeks later, a second FBI report based on SPLC information reported that Strassmeir was now planning to leave the country via Mexico. The bureau issued an alert to the Immigration and Naturalization Service, urging them to arrest Strassmeir on sight. “Subject is possibly armed and may be dangerous,” it said. But Strassmeir slipped across the border anyway.
DAVE HOLLAWAY CALLED HIS ESCAPE PLAN OPERATION NACHT UND NEBEL—a Nazi-inspired name also used by President Nixon’s Plumbers. Hollaway thought it was a mistake to try to cross the border quickly, while any alert was at its highest. So he drove Strassmeir to Port Aransas, near Corpus Christi, and left him with a friend for Christmas while he returned to his children in Houston. Really, his plan was to have no solid plan at all.
Just after New Year’s, Hollaway persuaded Strassmeir to give an interview to Rick Sherrow, the former ATF agent turned reporter for Soldier of Fortune magazine. “I wanted something on the record that would show Andi was not involved in the bombing,” Hollaway explained. Sherrow did as asked, publishing his piece long after Strassmeir was gone, but he also took a photograph that was reproduced across the Internet and probably did more than anything to fuel the rumor that Strassmeir was John Doe Two. “It pissed me off that Sherrow was brought in,” Kirk Lyons said. “We never heard the end on that stinking picture.”
Strassmeir and Hollaway did not cross the border until mid-January 1996. They chose Nuevo Laredo, just 130 miles from Corpus Christi, but Hollaway decided that driving there would be too obvious. He told Strassmeir to book a plane ticket to join him in Houston, and then book another flight from Houston to Laredo. He also promised Strassmeir he wouldn’t need to present an ID on a domestic flight, which was not true, even in the pre-9/11 era. Strassmeir cursed Hollaway as he approached the ticket counter in Corpus but somehow managed to think on his feet. He had his host in Port Aransas, Claud Brown, purchase the ticket and walk with him through security, as though Brown were the traveler and he was a friend accompanying him to the gate. Strassmeir had to show his driver’s license but was not obliged to have a ticket to go with it. Once through the metal detectors, he took the ticket and traveled under Brown’s name, while Brown turned around and left. Strassmeir’s ID was not checked again.
In Laredo, he and Hollaway took a taxi from the airport and talked the driver into taking them through to Mexico. At the crossing, Strassmeir noticed no other taxis were in line and said he wanted to walk across the footbridge, leaving Hollaway to bluff his way past the border police. But Hollaway told him to stay put.
U.S. Customs immediately ordered everyone out of the car. Strassmeir and Hollaway were asked to produce their passports, and uniformed officers went through their luggage. “Shit,” Strassmeir thought, “we’re fucked.” The first thing that grabbed the officials’ attention were some charcoal pills Strassmeir had handy in case of diarrhea. Hollaway, being Hollaway, turned them into a joke. The officers were briefly charmed, taking him and Strassmeir for a harmless gay couple. Then they found a copy of Playboy in Strassmeir’s bag, they weren’t gay any more, and the mood turned.
Strassmeir shot a panicked look at Hollaway as if to ask, should I run for it? Hollaway shot a look back that said: relax. He later claimed he had known they would be all right, because Strassmeir’s name was spelled wrong in the FBI computer files. In fact, the INS alert had the spelling right, but in Strassmeir’s German passport the double “s” was rendered with the Germanic ß, which to American eyes would look like a capital B. Customs most likely ran a check on Andreas STRABMEIR and didn’t come up with anything. Their passports were returned, and they were waved through.
In Nuevo Laredo, they lingered just long enough to eat cabrito, the local goat specialty, then jumped on a bus to Monterrey, which was in turmoil, because the local drug lord’s lawyer had just been shot dead over lunch with the state police chief. The distraction was perfect for Hollaway and Strassmeir, who took two taxis to a fleapit hotel on the edge of town. Hollaway checked in regularly with Kirk Lyons, using an untraceable AT&T card. “We used the same codes that the French Resistance used in World War II,” Hollaway said. “If Kirk had said, ‘John has a long mustache,’ I would have hung up the phone and gone underground. If he said, ‘The chair is against the wall,’ it would have been really ugly. As it was, he just said, no developments.”
From Monterrey, Hollaway and Strassmeir flew to Mexico City, and Hollaway picked another fleapit. When Strassmeir protested—he called it “the crappiest hotel I’ve ever been in”—Hollaway spun the story that it was a former CIA safe house he frequented in the 1980s when he worked as a pilot making secret runs to Central America for the Nicaraguan contras. It is unclear if that story was true.
After two days, they flew to Cancun, then took an Air France flight to Paris, and from there the night train to Frankfurt. This was the most nerve-racking part of the trip, because the conductor collected their passports and did not return them until they were close to their destination. If Strassmeir’s name was on a watch list, he could be arrested on arrival. It was unlikely that Germany would apprehend one of its own citizens so quickly for crimes committed in the United States, even with an international warrant out for his arrest. But Hollaway and Strassmeir were too panicked to think this through clearly.
In Frankfurt, they were met by Strassmeir’s mother, who fed them at one family house and put them on a train to the principal Strassmeir residence in Berlin. Hollaway stayed for several more days, most of them in bed with the flu, before buying himself a plane ticket home. Strassmeir suspected Hollaway was just along for the ride, enjoying Berlin as the capper after Cancun and Paris. But Hollaway was also out of money for the return journey, and had to wait for Lyons to wire him more.
They never spoke again. Hollaway called Strassmeir an “ungrateful yahoo” who never appreciated how much time and money had gone into bailing him out of trouble. Strassmeir felt deeply nostalgic for Elohim City, but hardly gave Kirk and Dave another thought. “When I got back to Germany,” he said, “I dreamed of the hills of Oklahoma.” Knowing he would never go back, he reflected, was the greatest devastation of his life.
BY THE BEGINNING OF 1996, THE ARYAN REPUBLICAN ARMY WASN’T generating enough income from its robberies to justify the risk of being arrested or shot. The gang’s ambition to hold up an armored truck—where, in Richard Guthrie’s words, “the big bolitas were at”—had gone nowhere. They tried to expand, but their newest member, Michael Brescia (who had been Strassmeir’s Elohim City roommate), was thought to be a liability for mishandling a smoke grenade, and he was dropped almost as soon as he was recruited. Intriguingly, Brescia went by the alias “Tim,” which could have been a nod to McVeigh, if not also an acknowledgment that another “Tim” had helped the gang in the past.
The rest of the gang quickly turned on each other. Guthrie was marginalized because of his drinking and volatile behavior. McCarthy and Stedeford lost the will to carry on without Brescia, their friend and Nazi punk bandmate. Langan was torn between waging a revolutionary war and exploring his gender identity.
The final unraveling came when Guthrie tried to recruit an old friend from Cincinnati, Shawn Kenny, without realizing he was a government informant. As Guthrie drove to meet Kenny at a suburban Italian restaurant, he noticed a “secret admirer” on his tail and tried to get away. After a short chase, he slammed his Ford van, the Blitzenvagon, into a snowdrift and soon had a clutch of federal agents “piled on top of my back like they were tackling Joe Montana while he was throwing the winning touchdown in Super Bowl XXII.”
Within three days, Guthrie had led the feds to Langan. A posse of federal agents moved in on an ARA safe house in Columbus, Ohio, and pumped dozens of rounds of semiautomatic weapons fire into Langan’s white van. Amazingly, Langan survived; he had dived into a wooden toolbox in the back of the van and took no direct hits—although he had a shotgun shell pad lodged in his left cheek, and other injuries. When paramedics cut off his clothes to look for bullet wounds, they noticed his chest, legs, and pubic hair were shaved, his fingernails were two inches long, and his toenails bore traces of pink polish.
The Oklahoma bombing investigation showed little interest in Guthrie and Langan, which was surprising, given their earlier inquiries into McVeigh’s possible involvement in bank robberies. But they were also not properly briefed. They were not told, for example, about a batch of electric blasting caps wrapped in Christmas paper, which were recovered from the Columbus safe house. These would have triggered an immediate association with the Christmas-wrapped caps McVeigh had in his Spectrum when he was rear-ended in Michigan. But, as an FBI explosives expert later disclosed in court, the caps were destroyed by the Columbus Fire Department. Danny Defenbaugh did not learn this until eight years after the fact, and then only because a journalist told him. “I was definitely lied to,” he told Leslie Blade of Cincinnati CityBeat.
Other things Defenbaugh never saw from Columbus included a driver’s license for Bob Miller, Roger Moore’s gun-show alias, and video footage of several properties, which, according to Langan, included Moore’s and Anderson’s ranch. These things did not make a rock-solid case for the ARA’s association with McVeigh, but they cried out for further investigation. The bombing task force was never given the chance.
DEFENBAUGH WAS DETERMINED TO INTERROGATE STRASSMEIR, AND contacted the U.S. legal attaché in Germany about sending an FBI team to Berlin. But before he could obtain clearance, the FBI needed to alert Strassmeir about another issue—a death threat from Dennis Mahon—which slowed everything down and ultimately worked in Strassmeir’s favor.
Mahon had threatened to have Strassmeir kneecapped and executed, after being told by the amateur investigative reporter J. D. Cash that Strassmeir was a government informant. Cash’s assertion was little more than guesswork, a deliberate provocation intended primarily to elicit an unguarded reaction from Mahon. And he certainly got one. “Sweet Jesus I’m fucked!” Mahon exclaimed on hearing the news. He jumped on the phone, first to Mark Thomas and Mike Brescia to warn them, then to a neo-Nazi contact of his in Germany. Through his German-speaking twin brother, he said Strassmeir should be hunted down and forced to confess before being killed.
It is doubtful whether the Mahons’ interlocutor took this seriously. But Cash shared his interview notes with McVeigh’s defense team, and they notified the FBI. A day or two later, Strassmeir was summoned by the Bundeskriminalamt, the German equivalent of the FBI, who briefed him on the threat and indicated that the FBI wanted to talk to him about the bombing. Back in the United States, Kirk Lyons and Dave Hollaway decided the best way to ward off a full interrogation was to release a lengthy statement in Strassmeir’s defense. It worked. Somewhere between FBI headquarters and the Berlin embassy, Defenbaugh’s request for a sit-down interview was turned down.
Defenbaugh next heard about Strassmeir three months later, when he walked in on two federal prosecutors and an FBI agent on the phone to him in Germany. Defenbaugh had not been informed in advance, let alone asked for approval. He also understood this was not the full interrogation he intended, just a perfunctory walk-through of Strassmeir’s earlier written statement. Strassmeir later dismissed the interview as a “joke.” “They didn’t want to know anything,” he said.
There were other signs that some of Strassmeir’s official history in the United States was being rewritten. Two weeks before the prosecutors’ call, the State Department reissued a list it kept of his entries into the United States. The document incorrectly said he had come in on two separate tourist visas—in reality, he had a multiple-entry visa. And this version of the document also excised the intriguing code letters “A O,” which had previously appeared under the rubric “special status.” These had generated speculation that Strassmeir was under some sort of official protection; now they were gone.
The Justice Department never publicly acknowledged Defenbaugh’s suspicions about Strassmeir’s involvement in the bombing, and, shortly before McVeigh’s trial, flat-out denied their existence. “At no time,” prosecutor Beth Wilkinson wrote to Stephen Jones, “did the FBI consider Andreas Strassmeir…a subject of the Oklahoma City bombing investigation.”
AFTER MONTHS OF AGONIZING OVER A STRANGE DISCREPANCY IN ITS tally of severed body parts found in the rubble of the Murrah Building, the Oklahoma state medical examiner’s office realized it might have stumbled on evidence of a possible coconspirator among the dead. Early on, the office was at a loss to match a lower left leg, with a military boot attached, to any of the known victims. Extensive DNA testing revealed that the leg belonged to Lakesha Levy, a twenty-one-year-old air force recruit now buried in New Orleans. Levy had previously been matched with an entirely different left leg, whose provenance was now in question.
This was a professional embarrassment, but also an investigative conundrum. The authorities had one more left leg than they had right legs. Who could it belong to? Stephen Jones brought this problem to Dr. T. K. Marshall, the chief state pathologist for Northern Ireland, and Marshall told him that, in the Western world, there was no such thing as an unclaimed innocent victim. Marshall had seen dozens of cases of IRA “mules” who died when bombs exploded in their laps. This looked similar to him—a conspirator so close to the source of the blast that the rest of his body simply vaporized.
Lakesha Levy’s body was exhumed in February 1996, and the leg mistakenly associated with her analyzed by one of the country’s leading forensics experts, Dr. Clyde Snow. Snow concluded it probably belonged to a dark-skinned white man measuring five foot six, or a slightly shorter woman. The chief medical examiner later testified that his office never found a match, but two people closely involved in the investigation said this was not exactly right. The FBI was confident the leg belonged to a Secret Service agent named Cynthia Campbell Brown, but did not want her remains tested. Doing so could raise the question of whose leg she was buried with—and perhaps set off an uncontrollable chain reaction of exhumations and mistaken body-part reidentifications.
Dr. Snow said he was not told about Brown. He blamed the original mistake on the evidence recovery team, saying they disregarded instructions to bag every body part separately and just assumed that the leg found next to Lakesha Levy’s body must belong to her. A senior FBI source said this was far from the only such mistake. The FBI liaison to the medical examiner’s office was dismissed from the task force, because, the source said, it became impossible to present detailed body-part evidence at trial. If the extra leg did belong to a coconspirator, he was never investigated, much less identified.
AT THE END OF MARCH 1996, ANGIE FINLEY TOLD CAROL HOWE her identity had been compromised. An FBI agent forgot to redact her name in a debriefing document before releasing it to the McVeigh and Nichols defense teams, and now her life was in danger from the white supremacists whose confidences she had betrayed. Finley offered to put Howe up for the weekend, but she declined. She was far from sure the federal government had her best interests at heart.
Ever since her removal from the Elohim City beat in March 1995, the paperwork on Howe had been a study in contradictions. At first, the ATF declared her mentally incompetent, but two months later, when they needed her to go back to Elohim City to investigate the bombing, they said she was “stable and capable of working in this investigation.” In January 1996, Finley and her supervisor, Dave Roberts, wanted to remove Howe a second time, because they found her unreliable. But when her name leaked out, they switched gears again. “This informant,” Finley wrote, “has not been overly paranoid or fearful during undercover operations.”
Finley acknowledged in court that the reason she had said nice things about Howe in May 1995 was that she needed to write whatever it took to get her reinstated. Journalists and lawyers who championed Howe were equally suspicious that the negative assessment just two months earlier was prompted by a political decision to get her out of Elohim City as fast as possible.
With her name in the open, Howe started complaining about strange phone calls and people following her. Rather than trust the FBI or ATF, she associated herself ever more closely with the radical right—in an effort, she said, to rebuild her credibility. It was a highly dangerous game.
THE EVIDENCE RECOVERED FROM THE ARA SAFE HOUSE IN COLUMBUS revealed an interest in bomb-making going far beyond the hoax devices the gang liked to leave behind at bank robberies. It included pipe bombs, blasting caps, timers, switches, Semtex, nitromethane and Kinestik packs. But the FBI did not see this as evidence of a possible link with the Oklahoma City bombing until Pete Langan suggested it to them.
By the summer of 1996, Kevin McCarthy and Scott Stedeford were also in custody—they were traced through McCarthy’s uncle, a Philadelphia city policeman—and Langan was concerned about McCarthy testifying against him as part of a plea deal he had been offered. So Langan decided to throw a wrench into the government’s plans. He told Agent Ed Woods: “You’re going to have problems with your witnesses, because they have the blood of Oklahoma City on their hands.” Woods responded: “You certainly have my attention now.”
Langan was told that if he spilled everything he knew about the bombing, he could qualify for a plea deal, too. Langan, though, was suspicious; the negotiations broke down and the offer was withdrawn. In the end, the government chose not to question McCarthy’s credibility by looking into his alibi for April 19, 1995, or any of the other bombing-related “liabilities” Langan accused him of having. The immediate priority was to send Langan away for life, and they knew McCarthy could help them do that with his testimony. A fishing expedition to explore whether he played a role in the bombing conspiracy seemed too uncertain to be worth the risk.
The strategy for prosecuting the bank robberies became clear after Guthrie—the other key witness the government was grooming to testify against Langan—hanged himself in his jail cell in mid-July. Guthrie had described his crimes in extraordinary detail and given up his best friend, only to be told the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Cincinnati would still insist on him serving thirty years behind bars. Even the FBI agents who had questioned him found this a “draconian” decision. But the prosecutors were adamant. Guthrie reluctantly signed the plea deal, and immediately drafted suicide notes to his brother and his lawyer. He even went on a crash diet to minimize the risk of his noose snapping.
According to Matthew Moning of the Cincinnati Police Department, the FBI also questioned Guthrie about the bombing and threatened him with the death penalty if money from the robberies was ever tied to the financing of McVeigh’s plot. If the questioning was intended to shock Guthrie into making revelations, though, it did not work. Guthrie’s lawyer, Kelly Johnson, said his suicide had nothing to do with threats from the FBI. It was a “final tweak of the nose” at the government he despised. If he harbored any secrets, they died with him.
IN SEPTEMBER 1996, THE THREE WARD BROTHERS AND A FOURTH man were arrested in Oregon. A state trooper caught them filching gas from a service station, and soon established that they had stolen their car in northern Canada two days earlier. Too broke to make bail, they stewed in jail for four days, until an FBI agent turned up and interviewed Pete Ward—just Pete—about the Oklahoma City bombing. Within hours, all four were released.
The FBI agent, Kerry Larsen, did not explicitly deny paying the $60,000 in bail money, saying in an interview: “I don’t know anything about it.” (This was moments after his wife, who answered the phone, could be overheard saying: “Just tell him you don’t remember anything.”) Larsen was similarly cagey when asked if Pete Ward might have been recruited as an informant. “That would generate a lot of paperwork,” he said. Asked if that was a yes or a no, he responded: “I don’t want to get into who’s an informant and who’s not an informant.”
The FBI had grounds to be suspicious of all three Ward brothers. Carol Howe had named Pete and Tony as possible matches for John Does One and Two. Pete was a tobacco chewer, and Tom Kessinger, the mechanic at Eldon Elliott’s, said he remembered John Doe One chewing tobacco in an unusual way. Sonny had been brought to the attention of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol as a possible bombing suspect.
Pete Ward’s interview with Agent Larsen offered further leverage for the FBI, because it contained obvious contradictions with the known factual record—about the timing of his departure from Elohim City, about the number of weapons in the community, and about his grandfather, who he said was a retired FBI agent. But there is no evidence that the bureau challenged him on any of these things.
FOR MUCH OF 1996, STEPHEN JONES TRAVELED EXTENSIVELY, SEARCHING for expert witnesses and alternate explanations of who was behind the bombing. Some of these trips, like his visit to T. K. Marshall in Northern Ireland, led to witness appearances at trial. Jones argued that it was almost impossible to find qualified pathologists or bomb analysts in the United States willing to take the stand, because they either worked for federal law enforcement or would not help defend the country’s most notorious criminal.
Jones traveled to London (four times); to Northern Ireland, Wales, and Scotland; to Israel and Syria, Hong Kong and the Philippines. Sometimes he talked to obvious experts, like Dr. Jehuda Yinon, an Israeli bomb-trace analyst, who gave an authoritative critique of the FBI crime lab. Other choices were more difficult to understand, like the side trip he made to the Polish ambassador in Damascus, Stanislaw Pawlak, to ask about Terry Nichols’s contacts in the Philippines and the likelihood that he had met Ramzi Yousef. Pawlak was an odd man in an odd location for this, and none of the material about the Filipino terror connection—from him or anyone else—made it to open court. Jones himself likened the Filipino connection to the Virgin Mary’s “unrevealed third secret” in her apparition at Fatima, prompting his legal team to nickname his Far Eastern trips the “Fatima Project.”
Despite some complaints that he was globe-trotting at government expense, these trips did not cost a lot—around half a million dollars, out of $15 million in total defense expenditures—and were all approved by Judge Matsch. But it was not exactly clear what they achieved. One of Jones’s lawyers, Ann Bradley, flew to Amsterdam to chase a report that John Doe Two was in the custody of Dutch police. He was not. Jones acknowledged that a lot of what he learned was about global terrorism, not leads related to the Oklahoma bombing. He described Yitzhak Rabin’s former chief of staff, Amos Eilan, as being on the “must-see list,” without saying why. He described a contact at Israel’s National Police Headquarters as “someone who might have been of assistance to us.” In Hong Kong, he said he visited retired CIA operatives “who assisted.”
On the eve of McVeigh’s trial, Jones distilled much of what he had learned into a lengthy brief, called a writ of mandamus, in which he said a foreign power, probably Iraq, brought down the Murrah Building. This power, he went on, hired a Middle Eastern engineer with the skills to make a bomb that could be transported and detonated safely, and then contracted the job out to the American neo-Nazi movement. He also suggested the FBI was looking into a possible bombing suspect in the Philippines, whom it had not named but who had links to Ramzi Yousef. Jones wanted the government to produce more discovery material—on subjects including Elohim City, Carol Howe, Dennis Mahon, and Andreas Strassmeir—and the writ was no doubt written broadly to obtain the broadest possible results. It failed to do so.
The government’s chief prosecutor, Joseph Hartzler, had already spent months attacking people who peddled “wacky theories”—a line widely interpreted as an attack on Jones. Certainly, Hartzler was as anxious to bury some of the legitimate questions about the government’s role as he was to poke fun at the criticisms and alternate theories that clearly departed from plausible reality. But the more Jones chased seemingly incredible connections to the Middle East and other parts of the world, the easier Hartzler’s job became. The Nichols team, after all, did not travel the world in search of expert witnesses, or engage in learned conversations with ambassadors and far-flung university professors.
McVeigh made no secret of his disapproval, describing his attorney’s trips as “a waste of time, defense resources, and taxpayer money.”
THE PROSECUTION TEAM HAD ITS OWN DISAGREEMENTS AND STRONG personalities to contend with. Its members had fundamentally different views of the case—from the hawks, who wanted to paint McVeigh and Nichols every shade of black, to more subtle minds, who questioned the degree of Nichols’s guilt and wondered who else might be involved. They had one “knock-down, drag-out fight” over the fuel meter found in Terry Nichols’s garage, with one lawyer wanting to introduce it as evidence on the grounds that it could have been used to mix the bomb, and everyone else arguing that it was broken and proved nothing. And they fought again, in the fall of 1996, over the question of whether to hold separate trials for McVeigh and Nichols. “It was not a merry trial team,” one prosecutor said. “I was very proud of the job we did. We were very efficient. But it’s not like we had fun doing it.”
Instinctively, the prosecution preferred a single trial in which the guilt of one defendant could more easily spill over and taint the other. But Judge Matsch refused to admit Terry Nichols’s eight hours of voluntary questioning at the Herington police station as evidence unless the trials were separated. It would be wrong in a joint proceeding, the judge argued, not to give McVeigh’s lawyers the opportunity to question Nichols about what he said. But if Nichols did not take the stand, that would not be possible. Matsch offered the prosecution a choice: hold a single trial but omit the Herington testimony, or fall in line with the defense teams and agree to separation.
In the end they agreed to two trials. But it was a bitter argument, and years later Larry Mackey said they—and he personally—made the wrong decision. “If they had been tried together,” Mackey acknowledged, “Nichols would have been convicted by the first jury and executed.”
ON DECEMBER 13, 1996, THE FBI ARRESTED CAROL HOWE WITH her new boyfriend, James Viefhaus, and accused them of fomenting bomb plots at their Tulsa home. The agents did not appear to know that Howe had worked as a government informant, even though one of them was Angie Finley’s husband. They were responding to a telephone hotline message delivered by Viefhaus, which warned of bombs hitting fifteen American cities on December 15. When the FBI agents searched the house, they found bomb-making paraphernalia, including black powder, cannon fuse, and sections of pipe fitted with “nipples,” or connector pieces common in bomb assembly.
The arrests were understandable: Bill Morlin, an investigative reporter specializing in the radical right, alerted the FBI as soon as he heard the hotline message, which referred to the Oklahoma City bombing and said innocent civilians should be considered “expendable if necessary.” But the evidence was problematic, because the most sensitive materials were either given to Howe by Finley to help with her undercover investigations, or had been gathered by Howe as evidence for the ATF.
Viefhaus was indicted almost immediately on charges of making threats and possessing an unregistered explosive. Howe’s fate remained uncertain until March 1997, two weeks before the start of McVeigh’s trial. The decision to indict her, too, dealt a huge blow to her credibility as a would-be defense witness for McVeigh, and raised the question of whether the government had pressed charges expressly to keep her out of the bombing trial. The jury hearing her case could never shake this suspicion.
IN LATE 1996, DAVE HOLLAWAY FOUND AN AGITATED MICHAEL BRESCIA and his girlfriend holed up at his house, saying the feds were after him for a string of bank jobs. Hollaway wanted to know how many bank jobs he was talking about.
“I think the boys committed about twenty-six.”
“Twenty-six! How much did you make?”
“About nineteen hundred bucks.”
Hollaway was incredulous. “You could have worked at the CAUSE Foundation and made more money.”
The FBI had been sniffing around Brescia for months, asking questions about McVeigh’s April 5 phone call to Elohim City as well as the bank robberies. He had fled Elohim City after getting into a fistfight with one of the elders and was living back in Philadelphia, where he enrolled in night school and worked as a bookkeeper for a computer company in a bid for normality. But supporters of a militia leader from Alabama were waging a publicity campaign against him, based on his supposed resemblance to John Doe Two, and affixing UNWANTED BY THE FBI posters on telephone poles around Philadelphia.
Hollaway suggested he give himself up. Brescia understood, and did not resist when he was arrested in Philadelphia—on robbery charges only—on January 30, 1997. He later agreed to a plea deal under which he admitted participating in one bank robbery in Madison, Wisconsin, and helping to plan six others.
Also on January 30, Mark Thomas was arrested at his farmhouse near Allentown. He, too, seemed to be expecting the feds, and made sure the house was full of television cameras and journalists. “I was afraid,” he said, “if they didn’t know the cat was out of the bag, they might try to kill the cat.”
The FBI spent five hours searching Thomas’s farmhouse for weapons or explosives, but didn’t find anything. Thomas had an old blue bus concealed on the farm, where he stashed his explosives, weapons, and ammunition, but the FBI did not unearth it for another three months. They also failed to follow up on Thomas’s ex-girlfriend, Donna Marazoff, who had reported him boasting about blowing up a federal building during the day, or on Thomas’s allegation that Kevin McCarthy had “taken out the Murrah Building”—a line he said he heard from Richard Guthrie.
Michael Schwartz, one of the U.S. attorneys who prosecuted the ARA, said in an interview that he was sure the bank robbers and McVeigh had “at least crossed paths.” Why wasn’t this link investigated? Schwartz did not answer directly, saying only that if evidence had emerged of the ARA’s involvement in the bombing, they would surely have been prosecuted for it. His focus, though, had been elsewhere. “We went to bat for McCarthy at his sentencing,” he said, “because he had cooperated with the government in the investigation. He was instrumental in his cooperation, and he received a significant sentence reduction. Had he been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing, we would not have done any of that.”
The prosecutors felt no pressure, either, to explore Brescia’s resemblance to John Doe Two. One day before Brescia’s arrest, the Justice Department unsealed a brief laying out the Todd Bunting mistaken-identity theory and declaring, as a matter of public record, that John Doe Two did not exist.
MCVEIGH’S PROSECUTORS WERE NERVOUS ABOUT RELYING TOO HEAVILY on testimony from Jennifer McVeigh and the Fortiers, but many of the other witnesses either could not identify McVeigh or had seen things—extra conspirators, or more than one Ryder truck—that the government did not want mentioned on the stand. So the prosecutors, along with a handful of trusted FBI agents, set about making the problems go away.
They interviewed and reinterviewed witnesses, looking for weaknesses in their stories or ways to get them to change their minds. Lea McGown would not back down from her story that she had seen a second Ryder truck at the Dreamland Motel, but her son Eric conceded that his memory might not have been reliable. He took the stand; she did not. They could not sway Jeff Davis, the delivery boy who brought Chinese food to room 25 at the Dreamland on April 15 and was adamant someone other than McVeigh opened the door. The FBI thought Davis was being obstinate and grilled him for twelve hours over two days when he arrived in Denver for trial. But Davis insisted he saw a shorter, fuller-built man than McVeigh, with tousled hair and rounder facial features. He never testified.
Daina Bradley, the young woman who endured the most harrowing of rescues and lost her mother and two children, was a little easier to work with. She threatened to be a powerful defense witness because of her vivid physical description of a second man stepping out of the passenger side of the Ryder truck moments before the explosion. But she also remembered the truck being parked backward, against the one-way system, which had to be wrong—if only because it would have put the passenger side of the truck on the far side, as she looked out. This was a new observation; in her first two interviews right after the bombing, she made no mention of the incorrectly parked truck. But the prosecution ran with it, blaming her confusion on memory-loss problems associated with her medication.
They relied on similar inconsistencies to neutralize Bill Maloney, the Cassville real estate agent, who had been so precise about McVeigh’s discolored tooth and might conceivably persuade a jury that the mysterious Robert Jacques, with his take-charge demeanor, was the real bombing mastermind. Jon Hersley, the FBI case agent who worked most closely with the prosecution to prepare the case for trial, undermined Maloney by arguing that the vehicle Maloney said he spotted in November 1994 was “eerily similar” to the yellow Mercury McVeigh was arrested in—a vehicle McVeigh did not buy until five days before the bombing. Maloney even said the vehicle was a Mercury in his later interviews, reinforcing the impression that media coverage had scrambled his memory. Earlier, though, he had been sure it was a Chevy Monte Carlo.
Hersley was the prosecution’s go-to person to resolve many of the holes in the case. Notably, he and Scott Mendeloff made extensive efforts to convince Tom Kessinger that John Doe Two was a phantom. For close to two years, Kessinger would not budge from his contention that two people rented the Ryder truck on April 17. He could not have mistaken John Doe Two for Todd Bunting, he said, because Bunting’s face was wrong, and so was his Carolina Panthers hat. But Mendeloff and Hersley won him over—or wore him down. First, they convinced him the arms and the tattoo poking out from his left arm sleeve were the same as Bunting’s. Then they presented him with evidence that his recall in 1997 was inconsistent with what he told the FBI sketch artist on April 20, 1995. The face was Kessinger’s last line of resistance. “That’s him [Bunting]. I must have made a mistake,” Mendeloff remembered him saying.
Such methods were not universally condoned by the prosecution team. “My rule of thumb is, never trust an identification that got better over time,” Larry Mackey said. “I was far more ready to rely upon other evidence, without trying to hammer people.” Ironically, the government never called Tom Kessinger, because they knew he had a dubious past that could cloud his credibility, and they were also worried about how solid his identification of McVeigh as John Doe One really was. The main purpose of the Mendeloff-Hersley effort was to neutralize him as a potential witness for the defense, all the better to keep the John Doe Two issue out of the trial. When asked about this, Mackey would not criticize a colleague. But he did say: “I think it’s fair to say there was a lot of hammering. But I wasn’t the one on the other end of the hammer.”
Mackey was not the only one who felt uncomfortable. Danny Defenbaugh was appalled at Hersley, not least because, he said, Hersley often acted without his authority or approval. “We had to watch over Jon,” Defenbaugh said. “If the prosecution said, we want that leak covered, he’d do it. He’d go around trying to stop viable investigations, especially if they involved other people in the conspiracy. Every time we caught him, I had to bring him in the woodshed to paddle him. Then he’d go right back at it.”
Defenbaugh was not against going back over the evidence and plugging holes. He had a whole team he left behind in Oklahoma to take care of exactly that—making sure the FBI had an answer for any question that might come up in court, or in the media. But it was one thing to find answers, and another to distort the evidence, which he thought Hersley was doing. He was particularly exercised by Hersley’s characterization of the Cassville material. “It wouldn’t be the first time Mr. Hersley was inaccurate,” Defenbaugh thundered. “He wasn’t there, he didn’t investigate it, but he’s going to try to tell you that he did.”
Defenbaugh even accused one prosecutor, whom he would not name, of “trying to undermine the investigation.” Scott Mendeloff, speaking for all his colleagues, took vigorous issue with this. “What he is saying is categorically false,” Mendeloff said. “Nobody tried to shut down anything. We had every incentive to explore wherever the leads took us, and we did. And he wouldn’t know, because he was not involved in the day-to-day investigations I conducted with the case agents.”
No one on the prosecution team would say more on the record. Off the record, though, one of them pointed to a lack of respect for the FBI’s top investigator. “None of us did anything to undermine him,” he said of Defenbaugh. “We just didn’t want to work with him.”
ON FEBRUARY 28, 1997, THE DALLAS MORNING NEWS RAN A FRONT-PAGE story saying McVeigh had admitted responsibility for the bombing and took pride in the “body count” he had inflicted. Even more damaging, the source was a trove of documents the paper said had emanated from the defense team.
Stephen Jones learned about the piece shortly before it appeared on the newspaper’s Web site. He tried to scare the reporter, Pete Slover, into holding it, without success. He knew this story could render his client indefensible and he briefly contemplated filing a lawsuit against the paper. But he contented himself with a waiver from Judge Matsch allowing him to disregard a court-imposed gag order and defend himself in public.
It was not easy. First, Jones told the media that the Dallas Morning News had been the victim of a hoax. Then he changed tack and accused the newspaper of stealing documents—legitimate documents—thereby breaking numerous federal laws. In a third iteration, he announced that the Dallas Morning News had perpetrated both a hoax and a theft. The supposed confession, written up by one of Jones’s investigators, was a concocted document drawn up to secure some unspecified advantage with the radical far right and not, as he put it, a “legitimate defense memorandum.” The media’s response was unforgiving: the Rocky Mountain News accused Jones of weaving a “tangled web” that pushed against the limits of legal ethics.
The real story is not easy to discern. According to members of Jones’s team, Slover had swiped tens of thousands of documents off a defense investigator’s laptop. Either the investigator was careless, as one account had it, or he deliberately left a document on his computer for Slover to read while he left the room, never suspecting that Slover would download everything. It is also conceivable that the investigator or another member of the defense team gave Slover the files, inadvertently or otherwise. Jones later filed a bar complaint against Slover, who was a fully qualified lawyer in Texas as well as a news reporter, to press his contention that the documents were essentially stolen. But it was Slover who prevailed in the closed-door disciplinary hearing, suggesting he had done nothing seriously wrong.
It was also unclear to what extent the headline-grabbing McVeigh material was bogus. The most damning items in the Dallas Morning News piece came from write-ups of interviews McVeigh purportedly gave to Richard Reyna. But Reyna—according to both Jones and his number two, Rob Nigh—never spent time alone with McVeigh. The lawyers had no idea Reyna had written up these interviews until the leak fiasco broke.
Still, the defense had a secret it didn’t want revealed. McVeigh might not have told Reyna the killer line: “We needed a body count to make our point.” But he said something similar to Stuart Wright, a Waco expert from Lamar University in Texas, whom Jones had invited to talk to McVeigh on numerous occasions. When Wright asked why he blew up the building during the day, McVeigh answered: “Because in order to really get the attention of the government there has to be a body count.” Beyond its frankness, this was an almost exact echo of Jim Ellison’s rationale for attacking the Murrah Building in 1983.
Most likely, the rest of Reyna’s memos were based on real material, too, including an admission by McVeigh that he had purchased Kinestik from Roger Moore. McVeigh himself confirmed the veracity of the material in his interviews with Michel and Herbeck. “Behind the scenes, the thinking in the defense team was that these documents did have credibility, that this was real stuff,” Wright recalled. “Everything in that [Dallas Morning News] report looked spot-on to me.”
A few days later, with jury selection looming, the Playboy magazine Web site posted a detailed defense chronology of McVeigh’s movements, deepening the gloom in the McVeigh camp. The authenticity of the document was never questioned, although Jones argued it was out of date and far from definitive. Clearly, the defense had lost control of its confidential materials, and Judge Matsch indicated he was willing to give McVeigh a new legal team and a new trial. But McVeigh preferred to proceed, requesting only that the jury pool be expanded to lessen the potential impact of the leaks.
The McVeigh defense team would make further serious mistakes before the trial was over. But, to Jones, this was the moment the enterprise slipped “beyond redemption by even the most skilled of our craft.”