The Road to Oklahoma City

As a reporter in the Oklahoma City area, I covered the events and proceedings surrounding the bombing for several news organizations, most prominently Reuters. I was on the site an hour after the explosion. In early spring 1996 I obtained a 66-page chronology confirming that Timothy McVeigh bombed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, specifying steps he says he took to execute the act. What follows is a narrative of the Oklahoma City bombing based on the document, which was assembled by Jones, Wyatt & Roberts, counsel for McVeigh. The summary document seems to be based on interviews with McVeigh, various research sources and investigative reports. Portions of this story appeared in March on Playboy's Web site. In the interim I have expanded on the online version, elucidating certain parts of McVeigh's account and addressing various inconsistencies.

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On April 18, 1995, five days before his 27th birthday, Tim McVeigh drove a yellow Ryder truck out of Kansas. He told his defense team that he pulled over at a rest stop on Highway 77, near Emporia. McVeigh wore sunglasses and had on a baseball cap over his buzz-cut reddish-brown hair. Under his jacket he carried a loaded semiautomatic Glock pistol in a shoulder holster.

McVeigh got out of the truck, unlocked the back door, slid it up and jumped in. He checked the load, a homemade bomb. The barrels, core and fuses hadn't shifted. He placed the truck's rental agreement and his fake ID into the middle of the high-yield section of the bomb. The tools used to make the bomb were already stashed there. He jumped out, then pulled down the door and locked it.

Late that night McVeigh reached the Blackwell exit of Interstate 35 near Ponca City, Oklahoma. He pulled into a truck parking lot so the truck could leak unnoticed onto the grass. The leak came from the load, not from the engine or fuel tank. Inside the truck was a mixture of 50-pound bags of fertilizer and 55-gallon barrels of nitromethane racing fuel. He walked into a motel to get a room, but apparently thought better of it and left. He went back to the truck and bedded down in its cab for the night. At seven A.M. he awoke and headed to Oklahoma City.

(According to my documentation, McVeigh mentions no accomplice in delivering the bomb. But his attorneys were skeptical, and when McVeigh took lie detector tests, he failed the parts that dealt with whether or not he had an accomplice that day in Oklahoma City.)

McVeigh told his interviewers that, as he reached Oklahoma City, he took I-35 to its junction with I-40, just southeast of downtown. He got on I-235 and turned off at the Harrison-4th Street exit, which took him into the heart of downtown, directly behind the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. (McVeigh said he and former Army buddy Michael Fortier had cased the building in December 1994.) That morning, he drove west past the back of the Murrah building and turned north on a one-way street. He then turned right at Fifth Street and pulled over at a tire store. According to one ATF mock-up, he next reached down and yanked a wire under the seat.

The wire went through a hole drilled between the cab and the cargo area, where the bomb sat. According to a government source involved in the investigation, the wire was possibly attached to a pull-cord detonator, which burns with a flash when activated. The detonator flared and lit the five-minute backup fuse.

When McVeigh did this, he was only a block from the front of the Murrah building. The action was irrevocable. Even if someone else had known what was about to happen, the explosion couldn't have been stopped. The fuse was burning in a locked truck, buried under tons of explosives, and could never be extinguished in time.

McVeigh drove the truck east to Fifth and Harvey, at the northwest corner of the building. The stoplight was red. While he waited for it to change, he reached down and pulled a second wire, the primary fuse. When the light turned green, he drove to the front of the Murrah building and parked.

McVeigh says that as he stopped the truck, his eyes met those of a woman coming down a set of steps into the building. She was white, in her mid-30s, with dirty-blonde hair.

He shut off the engine with the truck still in drive and set the parking brake. He took the key out of the ignition and dropped it behind the seat. Then he got out and locked the door behind him. McVeigh walked north across Fifth Street and through a parking lot adjacent to the Journal Record building. He believed no one had seen him except the woman. He crossed Robinson, walked to an alley behind the downtown YMCA, turned north and began jogging.

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The conference room at the El Reno Federal Correctional Institution, about 30 miles west of Oklahoma City, in which McVeigh and his defense team held their discussions was supposed to be clean of recording devices (except, of course, those used by defense attorneys and investigators). From the beginning, McVeigh's lead attorney, Stephen Jones, complained that some-one was bugging their conversations. He said McVeigh would give the defense information that could be known only to the team. Yet, when the defense would go to verify this information, Jones said, it would discover the FBI had left 15 minutes before its arrival. "I think you'll find wiretaps," Jones told me in 1995. "But they may be legal wiretaps."

The defense team officially complained to the federal district court in Oklahoma City, where the case was being handled. Although no public action was taken by the court, the incursions apparently stopped, and the defense continued its interrogations. McVeigh told the defense team about significant events in his life that led to the bombing of the Murrah building.

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McVeigh said his racist ideology was formed in 1987 and 1988 when he worked for Burke Armored Car in Buffalo, New York. There, his "views of the world expanded." Part of McVeigh's job was to deliver money to inner-city check-cashing establishments. McVeigh explained to his defense team that he would drive past a three-block line of black people "waiting for their welfare checks." McVeigh would push his way through the line, gun drawn, to deliver the money.

It was during this time that McVeigh "began to see why this race was given derogatory names," reads a document prepared by the defense team. "During the rest of the month he would drive by their houses and would see them always sitting on their porches waiting for their check, hence the name of porch monkey."

McVeigh fell in with "the survivalist crowd." A survivalist, said McVeigh, is "someone who is prepared to over-come any obstacle that may be thrown at them that is not part of daily life, including stockpiling food for disasters such as economic, natural or man-made. It would also include defense buildup of armaments, including guns and ammunition, and barter items such as toilet paper, food and bullets that you put aside in case the dollar broke down and was worth nothing."

McVeigh's interest in survivalism and racism led him to The Turner Diaries, a book written in 1978 by William Pierce (under the pseudonym Andrew MacDonald), an aide to American Nazi Party founder George Lincoln Rockwell. The book chronicles the fall of the U.S. into anarchy and details the overthrow of the government by heroic, racist revolutionaries. The Turner Diaries' preachy, alienated characters, shrill racism and revolutionary dogma struck a chord in McVeigh. "I read it as a gun rights book," he said. He would buy the book for $10 and sell it at gun shows for half the price, just to disseminate its message.

The fictional revolutionaries in the book rid the country of Jews, blacks and betrayers of the white race. In one scene the protagonist, Earl Turner, encounters dead men and women hanging from lampposts and trees: "There are many thousands of hanging female corpses like that in this city tonight. . . . They are the white women who were married to or living with blacks, with Jews, or with other nonwhite males."

The Turner Diaries has sold more than 200,000 copies. More significant in terms of the Oklahoma City bombing is the description of how an ammonium nitrate-heating oil bomb was made and used to blow up FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C.: "My day's work started a little before five o'clock yesterday, when I began helping Ed Sanders mix heating oil with the ammonium nitrate fertilizer in Unit 8's garage. . . . It took us nearly three hours to do all 44 sacks, and the work really wore me out." (In fact, photocopies of parts of The Turner Diaries were found in McVeigh's getaway car.)

McVeigh started to collect barrels of water in his basement to protect himself against unforeseen disaster. He took up shooting every day--sometimes practicing the entire day. He saved his money to buy land outside of town so he could practice shooting.

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In May 1988, at the age of 20, McVeigh joined the Army. (See Timothy McVeigh, Soldier in the October 1995 issue of Playboy.) McVeigh said that he was disillusioned with the "I am better than you because I have money" syndrome.

In the Army, McVeigh met Michael Fortier and Terry Nichols. Both men were later implicated in the Oklahoma bombing plot. Fortier, who had helped with the conspiracy, eventually turned state's evidence against McVeigh.

During the Gulf war McVeigh had been a leader of men, an ace gunner who was awarded a Bronze Star and a Combat Infantry Badge. But the war was soon over. McVeigh quit the Army on December 31, 1991, several months after he had washed out of a Special Forces training program. The perfect soldier had lost his opportunity to become a Green Beret, and the effect was devastating.

He returned home to New York State. From early 1992 to early 1993, he worked for Burns International Security in Buffalo and lived with his father. His anger, fueled by loneliness and by disappointment with his Army experience, began to weigh upon him. He started to collect weapons and strident antigovernment propaganda.

He told his defense team he experienced a "heightened sense of awareness of what the news was really saying." When he watched the TV news, he got angry at politicians for "mixing politics and the military," angry at the government for "strong-arming other countries" and angry at the "liberal mind-set that all things could be solved by discussion." Politicians did not want to face "tough questions or give tough answers, nor did they want to make tough decisions," said McVeigh. But then the government got tough at Ruby Ridge and at Waco. McVeigh described those incidents as "defining events" in his life.

In late 1992, before moving out of his father's house, McVeigh joined the Ku Klux Klan in Harrison, Arkansas. (continued on page 158) Oklahoma City (continued from page 72) Records indicate he obtained a KKK membership card.

McVeigh was living with his sister Patty and her family in Fort Lauderdale, Florida in early 1993. He claimed he worked briefly as an electrician. He also toured gun shows, selling weapons and military items. That was his main vocation until the day of the bombing.

McVeigh describes himself as depressed and frustrated during this time. Despite a two-week affair he claims to have had with a married woman shortly before leaving New York, McVeigh, according to investigators, had not "found a love in his life."

During a Miami gun show McVeigh met Roger Moore, a gun collector from Royal, Arkansas. Almost two years after their meeting, someone broke into Moore's house and stole $60,000 worth of guns, cash, coins and bullion. (McVeigh was reportedly at a gun show in Ohio at the time of the theft.) The government claims that McVeigh and Nichols "caused" the robbery in order to finance the bombing.

While McVeigh was in Florida, federal agents invaded the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas. When the first shoot-out was broadcast on CNN on February 28, 1993, McVeigh didn't hear the accompanying narration and didn't know the implications of what was happening. But he saw the footage of ATF agents climbing onto the roof and falling down as they were shot.

McVeigh recounts that he turned to Patty, who was watching the broadcast with him, and said, "Well, they must be doing something right. They are killing feds."

In March 1993 McVeigh went west to Arizona. On his way, he drove by Waco, where a standoff had developed between the Branch Davidians and the government. McVeigh approached a roadblock about five miles from the compound. He said that ATF agents and U.S. marshals would not let him pass. That they would block a "public road" infuriated him. Nationwide roadblocks and checkpoints were supposedly a sign that the New World Order was beginning its enslavement of the U.S. population. Internal passports--or even tattoos--would soon be required of travelers.

After a brief stay with Fortier in Kingman, Arizona, McVeigh went in the spring of 1993 to Decker, Michigan and joined his other Army buddy, Terry Nichols, and Terry's brother, James. According to McVeigh, the three stayed at Nichols' farm and discussed the Waco raid. They decided to go to Waco and start a rally. On April 19, as McVeigh was changing the oil in his car, James yelled from the house. The Branch Davidian compound had caught fire.

McVeigh watched the flames rise and consume nearly all the people inside. He watched the Branch Davidian flag catch fire and flutter away in ashes. His worst fears about the government were confirmed when the ATF raised its flag at half-mast over the smoldering ruins.

McVeigh said the decision to "go on the offensive" was made before August 1994. A bomb would be made. Roger Moore's house would be burglarized to finance the building of the bomb. (McVeigh cased Moore's house in September.) By the end of September, McVeigh had more than 4000 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer in various storage facilities. Nitromethane racing fuel was bought from several racetracks. (According to the defense document, at one racetrack in Texas McVeigh said he bought three drums of nitromethane for $900 cash per drum. The seller didn't ask for a name. McVeigh claims to have found the source for nitromethane by hanging around funny-car pit areas. He was also offered 55-gallon drums of the fuel for $1000 a drum from a source in Manhattan, Kansas.) He obtained plastic barrels in Florence, Kansas: six black ones with full-size lids, six white ones with smaller lids and one blue barrel. The white barrels were free at the Hills-boro Milk Co-op and the black ones cost $12 each. That fall McVeigh and Terry Nichols also allegedly broke into a Martin Marietta quarry in Marion, Kansas and stole 300 sticks of dynamite and 600 blasting caps.

McVeigh drove to Arizona in October with the stolen explosives, but Fortier hadn't yet rented a storage shed for them--a job he had apparently agreed to do. As a result, McVeigh had to find someplace else to store them.

There was a strong kinship between McVeigh, his dropout Army buddy and his wife, Lori. McVeigh spent Thanks-giving 1989 at Fortier's house, meeting Fortier's mother, Irene. McVeigh lived with the Fortiers off and on for more than a year. According to McVeigh, they did drugs together on a regular basis, including crystal meth and pot.

In May and August 1994, McVeigh claims he set off small bombs with Lori and Mike Fortier in the Arizona desert. In July 1994 McVeigh had been best man at Mike and Lori's wedding. Lori supposedly became angry with McVeigh in August 1994 when McVeigh sold $180 worth of explosives to Mike, so McVeigh spent some time with Terry Nichols in Kansas, buying fertilizer.

In mid-December 1994 McVeigh and Fortier left Kingman for Council Grove, Kansas, the location of one of their storage sheds. They decided to take a side tour to Oklahoma City to check out the Murrah building.

McVeigh told investigators he had already decided against placing a bomb in Kansas City or in Little Rock. He and Nichols looked for a federal building in Dallas while buying nitromethane at a racetrack, but the phone book showed no single federal building. They selected Oklahoma City instead.

McVeigh and Fortier drove around the Murrah building twice, then went through a side alley and parked in the lot across the street. They sat there and stared at the nine-story structure. Fortier told McVeigh the elevator shaft would keep the building from collapsing completely. They spoke for a few minutes, but McVeigh's friend became nervous. "Let's leave," Fortier said, and they did.

They returned to Kansas and rented a gray sedan (McVeigh says it was a Chevy Caprice, but other sources indicate it was a Ford Crown Victoria) at the airport in Manhattan for Fortier to drive home in. They took the car to the Council Grove storage shed and packed up 30 stolen guns. McVeigh told Fortier he could keep 50 percent of the profit. They parted, McVeigh going to a friend's house in Michigan and Fortier going back to Kingman in the rental car. As McVeigh headed to Michigan, his car--carrying the blasting caps in the trunk--was rear-ended. The caps didn't explode.

Back in Arizona, as the date selected for the bombing got closer, McVeigh says Fortier became reluctant to participate. Finally, on April 5, 1995, the two drove into the desert to talk. Fortier told McVeigh he couldn't go through with the bombing. McVeigh kept to his plan and returned to Kansas.

On April 13, 1995, as McVeigh was driving to Geary State Fishing Lake in Kansas in order to find a place to build the bomb, the Pontiac station wagon he had bought from James Nichols blew a head gasket. McVeigh remained one night at Geary, then managed to get the car to a garage the next day. At Tom Manning's Firestone in Junction City he traded the Pontiac, plus $250, for the 1977 yellow Mercury Marquis that would be the getaway car. He switched license plates, screwing his original one on the Marquis "nice and solid, two screws right on top," he said.

On April 15 McVeigh paid for the Ryder truck he would use in the bombing, then drove the Marquis to Oklahoma City on Easter Sunday, April 16. He was, according to the document, followed by Terry Nichols in an unspecified vehicle. He parked the car at a parking lot he had picked out previously.

When he dropped off the car, he took the license plate off the rear bumper (Oklahoma doesn't require front plates), then backed the car close to a wall. He left a note inside the front windshield, covering the vehicle identification number on the dash, asking that the car not be towed. Nichols wasn't there, so McVeigh walked up the street toward the Murrah building. At NW Sixth and Broadway, the document claims McVeigh saw Nichols. Nichols stopped in the middle of the street, picked up McVeigh and drove him back to Kansas. The document also notes that the two stopped at a McDonald's in Arkansas City, Kansas.

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Early on the morning of the 18th, McVeigh waited for Nichols in Herington, Kansas, but Nichols didn't show. McVeigh drove to the storage shed and began to load the empty barrels. Then he loaded seven boxes of gel, which weighed 50 pounds each. McVeigh had loaded 20 50-pound bags of fertilizer by 6:30 A.M., when Nichols drove up. Nichols wanted to wait until sunrise to finish, but McVeigh said no. Nichols helped McVeigh load 70 50-pound bags of fertilizer and three 55-gallon drums of nitromethane. McVeigh then drove the Ryder truck to Geary Lake. Nichols arrived separately and the two began to mix the components: seven 50-pound bags of fertilizer and seven 20-pound buckets of nitromethane for each 55-gallon drum. They weighed the buckets on a bathroom scale. According to the document, a couple arrived with their boat about ten A.M. approximately 50 yards from where McVeigh and Nichols were preparing the bomb. The couple stayed for an hour trying to decide whether or not to put their boat in the water.

When they finished, Nichols nailed down the barrel lids and McVeigh changed clothes and gave Nichols his dirty clothes to dispose of. Nichols also took the 90 empty fertilizer bags. The rest of the tools were placed in with the bomb. Nichols shook McVeigh's hand and wished him luck. At noon, according to the document, McVeigh drove the truck out of the park.

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McVeigh says that he was about 20 feet behind the YMCA on Robinson, almost to the parking lot, when the bomb went off at 9:02 A.M. on April 19. The explosion threw him against the wall of the building. He stepped over a fallen power line and continued down the alley, pulling out his earplugs as he did so. He was still wearing his baseball cap.

He crossed Broadway and continued east. Broken glass crunched beneath his feet. Nearly every window in downtown Oklahoma City was shattered. McVeigh crossed under the Santa Fe Railroad tracks that divide Oklahoma City's west side from its east side.

As he approached the building where he had parked his car, McVeigh met a mail delivery man who looked at him and said: "Man, for a second I thought that was us that blew up."

"Yeah, so did I," McVeigh said. He walked on and passed another building, where the owner of a shop stood looking at his shattered storefront. Finally McVeigh reached his car.

He checked the Mercury over, unlocked it and got in. He put the key in the ignition and tried to start it. The motor hesitated for half a minute before it started. McVeigh sat calmly for another half a minute, hearing the sirens of police cars responding to the explosion. He slid the transmission into drive. But it didn't catch at first. He hit the gas, and the transmission caught. By his account, he drove out of the lot and through the alley to Eighth and Oklahoma. At Broadway and NW Seventh Street he had to wait for police cars to pass. He went up Broadway to NW Tenth. He crossed over the highway. Then he pulled out onto I-235. He headed north on 235 to I-35 and was on his way back to Kansas.

Shortly after ten A.M. an Oklahoma state trooper came flying up behind McVeigh. When he got beside McVeigh, he slowed down. Then the police cruiser slowed further and the officer turned on his overhead lights. McVeigh pulled over and rolled down his window. But the trooper motioned McVeigh to come back. McVeigh walked to the cruiser.

Trooper Charlie Hanger asked McVeigh a few questions. At one point McVeigh said he was driving cross-country. Hanger thought it odd that McVeigh was wearing a jacket. Then Hanger noticed a bulge under the jacket.

"You don't have to worry about it," McVeigh said. Hanger put a gun to McVeigh's head, then disarmed him, read him his Miranda rights, handcuffed him and transported him to the Noble County jail in Perry, Oklahoma.

He was arrested on a misdemeanor charge for carrying a concealed weapon. But that was all McVeigh had done at that point, as far as Hanger could tell. The officer booked him in around 11 A.M. McVeigh still had the earplugs in his possession when he was arrested.

McVeigh's name came up on the national crime index computer. The record showed he'd recently been booked into jail. McVeigh was minutes away from being released when the call came in from the ATF.

McVeigh was perhaps tripped up by his paranoia. Had he not taken off that license plate (presumably he did it so his car wouldn't be identified at the crime scene), he probably would not have been pulled over. He told investigators the Mercury's plate was left in a storage locker with some other items, including a sleeping bag, a rucksack and a rifle. The plate was supposed to be a signal, McVeigh said. If after a certain point it was still there, he was either caught or dead. If the plate was gone, he had gotten away.

Although the other items were found, the license plate never was.

McVeigh had loaded 20 50-pound bags of fertilizer by 6:30 A.M., when Nichols drove up.