Six years ago Timothy McVeigh killed 168 people when he blew up the Alfred P Murrah building in Oklahoma City. Now it is his turn to die. His namesake, Tracey McVeigh, travels to his hometown to investigate the making of the US’s greatest mass murderer
On Monday Timothy James McVeigh celebrated his 33rd birthday. He spent it as he has spent the past six years on a slow countdown to death. The United States’s most infamous man has less than three weeks left until what he anticipates will be his “greatest moment’ when, on May 16, he will be the first federal, as opposed to state, prisoner to be executed in the US for 37 years.
Much effort has gone into ensuring the Oklahoma City bomber is dispatched efficiently in what will be a showcase execution.
The death chamber at Indiana’s Terre Haute penitentiary is new, the table to which he will be strapped has never been used, and the white sheet that will shroud his gangly form is in its sealed, cellophane wrapper. Warden Harley Leppin personally rang through the order for the lethal chemical solutions that will be pumped into McVeigh’s veins. Leppin has also determined the last words McVeigh will hear. An official will check the Velcro straps and the intravenous line before stepping back and saying: “We are ready” the signal to a volunteer hidden behind a screen to send the drugs on their deadly journey to para-lyse McVeigh’s heart.
Prisoner 12076-064 is making his own plans. He has chosen the witnesses he wants by his side. He has taken great care choosing his last words, but is still mulling over his last meal.
Oblivious to the desert climate outside in his air-conditioned cell, McVeigh devours every line written about him and causes close to him, and watches TV news programmes endlessly. He subscribes to hundreds of publications, from the right-wing Patriot Report and The Spotlight to gun, car and basketball magazines. McVeigh’s team is the Buffalo Bulls, and even during intensive interviews, he has been known to switch the conversation to their latest successes.
Basketball is a big game in his native New York State, and Bulls pennants still hang in his old room at the small McVeigh home in the rural town of Pendleton. When I visited, there was quite a crowd of locals escaping the blizzard outside in diner near to where McVeigh’s father Bill still lives. The deceptively named Brauer Cocktail Bar and Inn is lively with beer-bellied men in greasy baseball caps who fall from their bar stools to offer the “lady a seat”. The winner buys me a beer.
They are used to talking about McVeigh round here, but prefer to discuss their own shooting prowess or rant about crippling government taxes. Bill Kelly (58) talks of rising crime: “Better be paranoid than a victim,” he says slapping his shoulder holster. “I was in the army, too. Sure, they teach you to kill and, sure, the government would make me wanna kill someone sometimes, but there is no excuse for killing all them people, no way.”
The baseball caps nod. “He’s flaky and I don’t believe that he’s got such a good family because that boy had no discipline, had no respect,” chips in the bartender.
When I leave someone grabs my hand and asks my name. I tell him and the bar falls silent: “Holy shit!” says Kelly. The McVeigh name is not a common one in the US.
It is odd chasing the story of a man sharing my family name, my Irish roots and even the blue eyes that are my family characteristic. But then I join the struggle endured by hundreds of Americans who have spent six years trying to come to terms with why their relatives died on a bright spring day that should have been like any other.
Only now, four years after the trial, is the full extent of what McVeigh intended becoming clear when, on April 19 1995, he parked a rental truck filled with homemade explosives outside a nine-storey building. McVeigh killed 168 people in Oklahoma City that day. Nineteen of them were children, whose lives he referred to as “collateral damage”. He wanted a federal target, and the Alfred P Murrah building not only had a Secret Service office but also an office housing agents of his truest enemy the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (BATF).
Oklahoma City was also where Bob Ricks was based. It was Ricks who had been in charge at Waco, the scene of a botched raid by BATF on April 19 1993, which resulted in the deaths of 60 men, women and children, followers of David Koresh’s Branch Davidian cult.
The storming of Waco outraged McVeigh, and together with two like-minded army buddies, Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, he was looking for a way to make his anger felt and to encourage, he hoped, a right-wing uprising. He chose the second anniversary of Waco as the date.
For a blueprint for the attack, McVeigh had a book. The Turner Diaries is a fantasy of hate about a bombing of a Washington federal building in which 800 people die. The fictional blast is justified in detail: “The real value of all our attacks today lies in the psychological impact, not in the immediate casualties,” it reads.
Today the author, William Pierce, backs his most notorious fan: “I intended people to be inspired,” he says, adding that he did not regret what happened in Oklahoma. “McVeigh was reacting to what he saw as tyrannical behaviour by the government. In a society that alienates people and makes them feel they no longer have a role.”
McVeigh wavered over taking “civilian” or non-government-employed lives. He switched his target from a larger government office block to the Alfred P Murrah building because, he claims, he saw a florist shop on the first floor. He insists he never, in four visits, spotted the day-care centre on the same floor. And the man whose only emotion during his trial was when he wept over his lawyer’s description of the deaths of children at Waco declares that if he had, he would have changed his target.
Now awaiting death, McVeigh says he is unafraid, that he doesn’t believe in heaven and hell. “If I’m wrong then I’ll adapt, improvise and overcome,” he says. “But if there is a hell, then I’ll be in good company with a lot of fighter pilots who also had to bomb innocents to win the war.”
In the weeks before his execution McVeigh’s first admission of guilt has been forthcoming, as has his claim that he deliberately set out to be caught. Much has been made of the fact that within 80 minutes of the bomb exploding, McVeigh was picked up for a traffic violation by state trooper Charlie Hanger, who had no idea that a building had just been destroyed some kilometres away.
On the passenger seat of McVeigh’s car was a big folder stuffed with right-wing literature. He hoped this would be released to the media and his political message would get out immediately, but Hanger left the envelope and took him in on charges of carrying a concealed weapon. It was to be three days before the FBI realised the man they were looking for was sitting in a county jail just a few kilometres from where rescue workers were still pulling bodies from the wreckage.
Those who had encouraged him in his plot, Fortier and Nichols, were safely at home with their respective alibis. A fourth man whom some witnesses claimed to have seen in the city with McVeigh has never been traced and the FBI says it is confident he does not exist.
The truth will never be known, because McVeigh wants full credit for the detonation even if he admits Nichols helped build the oil-and-fertiliser bomb and Fortier helped him case the building.
“McVeigh deliberately drove his getaway car away from the scene of the blast with no licence plate,” says Lou Michel, one of two newspaper reporters who have conducted exhaustive interviews for their book, An American Terrorist.
“He had really hoped for a shootout with the FBI,” Michel says. “For Tim, dying is part of the adventure. He’s had a death wish for a long time now and, although he rejects this idea, he wants to become a martyr to right-wing causes.”
It has always puzzled investigators why McVeigh would leave such a trail behind him, including using his own name at a motel the night before the blast and using the same card when ordering the fertiliser and fuel.
“I have never caught Tim out on a lie,” insists Michel. “Strange as that may sound, he is very proud of what he has done. Talking of it, he has the enthusiasm of a high-school kid describing a science project he has just completed.”
Michel quotes McVeigh as telling him: “Because the truth is, I blew up the Murrah building and isn’t it kind of scary that one man could reap this kind of hell?”
What McVeigh is not keen to talk about is his family. He comes from good, solid pioneer stock. His forefather, Edward McVeigh, left Porta-down, Northern Ireland, for the New World in 1866 and earned a reputation as a stockman in Niagara County, a short drive from where the family now lives. Another McVeigh left Portadown around the same time my own ancestor this time for Scotland. But as the family divided, its ethics of hard work and the importance of family stuck.
McVeigh’s father Bill was a manual worker for Harrisons a General Motors-owned firm and the biggest employer in the area for 37 years before his retirement a few years back. His own father had worked there and got him the job.
McVeigh’s dad has much in common with my own. A working family man whose quiet intelligence and good humour gives him a certain dignity. What Bill wanted he worked for, taking overtime and night shifts to raise extra cash for his growing family. American workplaces allow employees little time off, and with his vivacious wife Mildred “Mickey” Hill often away from home pursuing her career as a travel agent, the pair had little time together. It was often a struggle to make sure one was there for their children, Patty, Tim and Jennifer.
After McVeigh’s arrest, Mickey wrote a letter to the media distancing herself from her son, but later stood up for him in court and visited him in prison. She is now having treatment for mental-health problems.
But back in 1978 Mickey left Tim and his father, taking the girls to a new life in Florida. Tim, a bullied 10-year-old who found it hard to make friends, stayed. Father and son had to leave the family’s four-bedroom home. The new house, where Bill still lives, is barely as big as the three-door garages that stand next to the houses around here, but the pair dug in a full-sized flagpole and the stars and stripes fluttered high.
Bill is a tall man, quiet and polite, who has carried on his life as before his son’s arrest. His friends and his priest agree that he’s a “good man”.
“What he did was a terrible, unimaginable thing, what he did was absolutely wrong, and I don’t understand it or know how anyone could do it, but I love my son,” he says. He falters on more searching questions; he’s still looking for answers of his own. This is, after all, a man who fretted about the fact he could not mow his lawn while confined to his house by the FBI for 10 days after the bombing.
One neighbour tells me: “We stick up for Bill. It was shocking to hear the Oklahoma City bomber was one of our own, but as I said to Bill, we don’t choose our children and we don’t make ’em what they are.”
Joel Daniels served as a solicitor to McVeigh’s sister Jennifer when the FBI forced her to testify against her brother the siblings had exchanged letters detailing the right-wing views they shared. “The bombing greatly upset this country,” Daniels says. “I was shocked when I heard this was a boy from my home town. But I don’t think his growing up here had anything to do with it. I wouldn’t describe this as a hotbed of radical right-wing politics. I like Jennifer and Bill … and I know they felt badly for those people. They are distraught at the death penalty being imposed.”
Bill will honour his son’s request not to attend the execution and may go to church on May 16. “Bill isn’t too good at communicating his feelings,” says his friend, Father Paul Belzer of the Catholic Church of the Good Shepherd in Tonawanda Creek Road. “He is a thick-skinned man in many ways. No one knows what happened to Tim, but it certainly didn’t come from his family. When he went into the army was surely where the damage was done. This was a normal boy we had here. He liked playing basketball, he came to church picnics.”
“The army was a right-wing finishing school for Tim,” says Michel. “It taught him to separate his emotions from his actions and the motto Tim remembers was: ‘Blood makes the grass grow greener.’ After the Gulf War, he became indifferent to life. This is the man who told me: ‘I understand what they felt in Oklahoma City. I have no sympathy for them.”‘
Lack of remorse is unfathomable for the victims’ relatives and the survivors in Oklahoma City who have pinned their efforts on the capital punishment for McVeigh leading to “closure” for their grief. Almost 300 have asked to be present at the execution, although only a handful can be accommodated. The names will be picked out of a hat and the remainder will watch on closed-circuit television.
Bud Welch, whose daughter Julie died in the blast, will be there although his vocal opposition to capital punishment has set him apart from the majority of relatives who have campaigned hard to speed up the appeals process to ensure McVeigh’s death comes sooner rather than later.
“I will be there, but I won’t be waving any placard. The death of this man will be a private moment for me, and a very sad one. I don’t think his death is going to help anyone or bring anyone back. If we accept state killing, we accept killing,” he says.
But in Oklahoma City there will be flag waving and even a few parties. After all, this is the city that flew in the jury that condemned McVeigh to death and paid for their VIP tour as a show of thanks.
Last month President George W Bush came here to open the new Memorial Centre at the site where the Alfred P Murrah building once stood. The content of the museum is heavy with religious music and iconography as suits an overwhelmingly Christian community, though among the exhibits of rubble and bloodied clothing is a platform given to the political fight to speed up McVeigh’s execution. The overall sentiment gets somewhat lost as the queues of tourists file in, and it is hard to gain a sense of the tragedy. It is only outside that one can gaze at the buildings around and try to imagine what it must have been like when hell ripped this community apart and orphaned 200 children.
The people here are hospitable and too polite to look askance at my name. Even Jennifer McVeigh’s solicitor tells how, when they came to Oklahoma City to a courtroom whose windows were blown out by the blast, they were treated with courtesy. “The hospitality was unflagging, even though everyone knew exactly who we were,” says Daniels.
But this is also a community that wants McVeigh’s head and now also the life of at least one of the other two men implicated in the bombing: the state is set to spend about $5-million on trying to get the life sentence of Nichols upped to death. Nichols was convicted of conspiring in the bombing in 1998 in a federal trial. But despite a guarantee that he will never leave jail, Oklahoma is going ahead with a second trial later this year to try to have him executed. The third man involved, Fortier, received 14 years after striking an immunity deal with the FBI to give evidence against McVeigh.
McVeigh has a huge stack of mail to get through. Along with the hate mail, he has had at least four proposals of marriage not bad for a man who showed little interest in women. By some perverse twist, the US federal authorities make a condemned prisoner’s last three days his most isolated. Without distraction, it is hoped, the prisoner will reflect on his crimes and finally give the US what it craves repentance.
Last month a born-again Christian sparked a security alert when he drove into the prison compound unchallenged. “I’ve just found Jesus and I wanted to give McVeigh a Bible so he could find him, too,” he explained.
Terre Haute prison is gearing up for further security alerts on May 16. Schools are closed for the day, the skies will be dotted with police and media helicopters and there have been estimates of 2000 media personnel.
In Oklahoma City, the long winter is over. The air is warm and green shoots are showing in the street verges. Just a 24 hours’ drive north in Pendleton, New York, a father sits in his armchair and looks out of the window to his garden, where the snow is starting to shrink back and where a pole which once flew the American flag now rusts. And Bill McVeigh waits for the thaw.