Disturbing History - The Oklahoma City Bombing

Episode Date: August 21, 2026

78 minutes after the front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building came off, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper named Charles Hanger pulled over a yellow Mercury on Interstate 35 because there was no license plate on the back bumper.He wasn't looking for a bomber. He was running hard toward a wreck scene he'd worked in the dark the Sunday before, and he'd already been ordered to Oklahoma City and then told to turn around. Ten minutes later he had Timothy McVeigh handcuffed in the front seat of his patrol car on a tag violation and a concealed weapon charge, and neither man on that shoulder had any reason to connect it to what had happened 80 miles south.Almost everybody knows the outline of this case, and almost all of it is true, which is what makes it unusual. The wrong man didn't go to prison. The evidence against Timothy McVeigh is about as complete as any case Brian has ever read — a partial VIN stamped on a truck axle found 575 feet from the crater, a fingerprint on a fertilizer receipt, six months of calls consolidated onto one prepaid card under a false name, a motel register signed in his own handwriting. But the summary most people carry around makes a movement look like a man, and it leaves out most of what's actually in the file. The two years between Ruby Ridge in August 1992 and Waco in April 1993 that built an American militia movement almost from nothing. A journalism student from Southern Methodist who interviewed McVeigh outside the Branch Davidian siege in March 1993, got his real name, and kept the clipping until it became evidence. 4,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate bought for cash under an alias in McPherson, Kansas, on September 30 and October 18, 1994. A racing fuel salesman who heard a stranger at a Kansas drag strip ask for the two chemicals that make a bomb and had nowhere to take it.A gun dealer's robbery in Royal, Arkansas, on November 5, 1994, that funded the plot and produced two witnesses the defense took apart on the stand. And the Fortiers in Kingman, Arizona, who watched McVeigh lay soup cans out on their living room floor in a triangle to show them how the barrels would sit in the truck, then went about their lives for five months.Then the parts that never closed. Tom Kessinger conceded he'd described the wrong man as John Doe No. 2 and never conceded there wasn't one, and Eldon Elliott and Vicki Beemer kept believing two men walked into that shop on April 17. Somebody used a calling card registered in a false name to call a white separatist compound in eastern Oklahoma on April 5, 1995, and ask for its German chief of security, while an ATF informant living inside that compound was reporting talk of bombing federal buildings around the April 19 anniversary of Waco. A paramilitary group in the Arkansas Ozarks had put the same building on a target list in October 1983, and one of the men behind that plan was executed by the state of Arkansas roughly 12 hours after it came down. A cooperating bank robber tied to that compound was found hanged in a Kentucky cell on July 12, 1996, nine days after pleading guilty.Brian also takes the technical objections head-on, because they come up in every conversation about this case and most people have never heard the answers — what the seismographs actually recorded and how the May 23, 1995 demolition of the building settled it, what the FEMA engineers found when they traced the collapse column by column, and why a transfer girder is the reason 168 people died instead of a dozen.  The government's own failures get the same treatment, including the April 1997 Justice Department Inspector General finding that the FBI Laboratory's explosives report reached conclusions incriminating the defendants without a scientific basis, and more than 3,100 pages of case file the Bureau couldn't locate until six days before it executed a man on June 11, 2001.None of that makes Timothy McVeigh innocent. All of it makes the story bigger than him.Email BrianJoin Our FREE NewsletterGet Brian's Books Leave Us A VoicemailVisit Our WebsiteHave a forgotten historical mystery, disturbing event, unsolved crime, or hidden conspiracy you think deserves investigation?Send your suggestions to [e-mail] History is a dark history podcast exploring unsolved mysteries, secret societies, historical conspiracies, lost civilizations, and the shadowy stories buried beneath the surface of the past.Follow the show and enable automatic downloads so you never miss a deep dive into history’s most unsettling secrets.Because sometimes the truth is darker than fiction.

Some stories were never meant to be told. Others were buried on purpose. This podcast digs them all up. Disturbing history peels back the layers of the past to uncover the strange, the sinister, and the stories that were never supposed to survive. From shadowy presidential secrets to government experiments that sound more like fiction than fact,

this is history they hoped you'd forget. I'm Brian, investigator, author, and your guide through the dark corner of our collective memory. Each week I'll narrate some of the most chilling and little-known tales from history that will make you question everything you thought you knew. And here's the twist.

Sometimes the history is disturbing to us. And sometimes, we have to disturb history itself, just to get to the truth. If you like your facts with the side of fear, if you're not afraid to pull at threads, others leave alone. You're in the right place. History isn't just written by the victors.

victors. Sometimes, it's rewritten by the disturbed. At a little before 20 past 10 on the morning of April 19, 1995, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper named Charles Hanger was doing 90-something miles an hour up Interstate 35 without his lights on. And the reason he was in a hurry had nothing to do with a bombing. He'd heard about the bombing. He'd been at the Samaran Turnpike headquarters when it came over, and they'd turned on the television, and then Pawnee headquarters called and told him to get down to Oklahoma City and help. He made it about two exits south before the radio came back and told him to disregard that and stay in his own county.

So now he was headed north instead, running hard, because he'd worked a wreck near Billings the previous Sunday in the dark, and he wanted to see the scene in daylight before somebody sent him south again. He was in the left lane going around an old yellow mercury when he noticed there was nothing on the back bumper. He slowed, dropped in behind it, and pulled it over between the middle. mile marker 202 and 203. The driver got out and walked back to meet him, which is not what most people do. He was polite about it. He said he'd just bought the car and hadn't gotten a tag yet,

and he had no bill of sale and no insurance. Then Hanger saw a bulge under his jacket, and 10 minutes later, a 26-year-old man was sitting handcuffed in the front seat of a patrol car with a glock and a knife and a spare magazine locked in the trunk behind him. He gave his name as Timothy James McVeigh. 78 minutes earlier and 80 miles south, the front of a federal building had come off, and neither man standing on that shoulder had any reason on earth to connect the two things. Here's the problem with this story, and it's the reason I wanted to do it. Almost everybody knows the outline.

There was a young Gulf War veteran named Timothy McVeigh. He hated the government over Waco. He built a fertilizer bomb, parked it in front of a federal building on the second anniversary. Killed 168 people, including 19 children, got caught by a lucky traffic stop, and was executed. Terry Nichols helped and got life. Almost all of that is true, which makes this different from most of the stories I do. The wrong man did not go to prison. The evidence against Timothy McVeigh is about as complete as any case I've ever read.

But that summary makes a movement look like a man, and it leaves out most of what's actually in the file. The traffic stop didn't solve this. A piece of truck axle solved it, with a partial number stamped on it, found 575 feet from the crater, and it broke the case inside about a day. The traffic stop is the part everybody tells because it feels like Providence. The axle is a manufacturer's precaution and a police technician with a pen. The plan also didn't come out of nowhere. The building McVeigh chose had appeared on a target list in October of

1983, drawn up by men from a paramilitary group in the Arkansas Ozarks, one of whom was executed by the state of Arkansas about 12 hours after the building came down. And the government's own conduct in this case has three holes in it that nobody has ever filled. An ATF informant was inside a white separatist compound in eastern Oklahoma before the bombing. Reporting talk of attacks on federal buildings, and somebody using McVeigh's prepaid calling card called that compound two weeks out and asked for the chief of security. The Justice Department's inspector general later found the FBI Laboratories' explosives report reached conclusions incriminating the defendants without the science to back them. And six days before the execution, the Bureau

admitted it had thousands of pages of its own file that the defense had never seen. None of that makes McVeigh innocent. It makes the story bigger than him. So let's start with why 1995, because the date is not incidental. The American militia movement did not exist in any organized form in 1991. By 1995, it existed in most states in the country. Two events built it, and they built it fast. The first was Ruby Ridge in August of 1992 in northern Idaho. A federal firearms case against a man named Randy Weaver went sideways into a standoff at a remote cabin, and by the end of it, a deputy United States Marshal was dead. A 14-year-old boy had been shot in the back, and Weaver's wife had been shot in the head by an FBI sniper while she stood in a doorway,

holding an infant. The rules of engagement used at Ruby Ridge were later condemned in the Justice Department's own internal review. That's not a fringe characterization. That's the government's finding about itself. The second started in February of 1993 outside Waco, Texas. A raid by the ATF on the branched Davidian property went wrong before it started, and four federal agents and six members of the group were killed on the first day. A 51-day siege followed. On April 19, 1993, a tear gas assault ended with the buildings burning and about 76 people dead inside, more than 20 of them children. Neither of those justifies anything that came after. What they did was enormous all the same, to a specific,

population of Americans who were already inclined to believe the federal government was preparing to disarm them. Within two years, there were militia units drilling in a dozen states, and a circuit of gun shows and shortwave programs and photocopied newsletters, carrying the same handful of stories back and forth until they hardened into scripture. Timothy McVeigh was on that circuit. He drove down to Waco during the siege in March of 1993 and sat on the hood of his car at a spot down the road where onlookers gathered, selling bumper stickers out of the trunk. A journalism student from Southern Methodist University named Michelle Rauch interviewed him there for her campus paper. He gave her his real name. He talked about the government coming for people's guns. She kept the clipping. Two years

later, it was evidence. That's the document I keep going back to in this file. It puts him on the record, under his own name, standing outside the thing he later said drove him, 25 months before he did it. There's no ambiguity in it and no way to explain it away. And the government has it because a college student in Texas didn't throw out her clip file. Now the men, because you can't understand the shape of this without understanding that one of them was very good at being a soldier, and the other one was good at almost nothing. Timothy McVeigh was born in April of 1968 in Lockport, New York,

and grew up in Pendleton, outside Buffalo. His parents separated when he was 10, and he stayed with his family. father. His IQ tested well above average. Teachers and classmates described a quiet, intelligent kid who liked computers and liked guns. And there is nothing in his childhood record that predicts any of this, which is inconvenient for anybody who wants a clean explanation. He enlisted in 1988 and turned out to be excellent at it. Top scoring gunner with the 25-millimeter cannon on a Bradley fighting vehicle with the first infantry division out of Fort Riley, Kansas. He made sergeant. He deployed to the Gulf and came home with a bronze star. At basic training at Fort Benning, he'd met a man 13 years older than him

named Terry Nichols. And later at Fort Riley, the two of them met a soldier from Arizona named Michael Fortier. Everything else in this story runs out of those two introductions. There's a shadow across the good soldier record. Reporters who went to Fort Riley in the weeks after the bombing came back, with accounts from men who'd served under him. Once he made sergeant, they said, he handed the worst details to black soldiers and used slurs, and there was talk around the base that he was a racist. In his own account years later,

he described his first day of the ground war. He said he killed an Iraqi soldier at long range with cannon fire and celebrated it. He said he was disturbed afterward by orders regarding surrendering prisoners and by what he saw on the road out of Kuwait City. Right after the Gulf, he went to Fort Bragg for Special Forces assessment and selection. He was gone in about two days. Everybody wants that to be the turn, and we can't even agree on what happened.

McVeigh said he was out of shape after months in the desert, that a rucksack march hurt more than it should have, and that he knew he couldn't hack it. So he quit. Some accounts say an injury. The New York Times reported in 1995 that he'd been found psychologically unsuitable. Three different stories about the same. two days, and I've stopped trying to reconcile them, because plenty of men wash out of selection

and go home and sell insurance for 40 years. He took his discharge on the last day of 1991, went home, worked as a security guard around Buffalo, and wrote a letter to the local paper in Lockport, asking whether the country would have to shed blood to reform the current system. He said he hoped it wouldn't come to that. Then he said, but it might. Then he started moving. One shows through the Midwest and the South, living out of a car, selling surplus gear and ammunition and flare guns and books. One of the books was a novel called The Turner Diaries, published under a pen name by a man named William Pierce, who ran an outfit called The National Alliance.

It's a race war fantasy, and in it, the narrator loads a truck with ammonium nitrate and fuel oil and destroys the FBI headquarters in the morning, when the building is full. McVeigh sold it off his table. He mailed copies to relatives. Prosecutors put pages of it in front of a jury in Denver. Terry Nichols is harder, and that's part of why people are still arguing about him 30 years later. Born in 1955 in Lapeer, Michigan. Tried farming and lost money at it.

Tried real estate? Worked a grain elevator. People who knew him describe a capable man who couldn't make anything hold. He enlisted in his early 30s, which is unusual enough that it stood out in the barrens. and he didn't finish. Hardship discharge after about a year. By the early 90s, he was deep into the tax protest and common law court material moving through that world.

He wrote his county clerk renouncing his citizenship. He filed papers declaring himself outside federal jurisdiction. When a bank came after him over a credit card debt, he fought it in court on the theory that the money the bank loaned him hadn't been real money to begin with. McVeigh had a functioning ideology and a plan. Nichols had a grievance and a filing cabinet. The government's theory was that Nichols did the work and McVeigh did the thinking, and both juries that heard the evidence essentially agreed.

What convicted them was paperwork. On the 30th of September 1994, a man walked into the Mid-Kansas Cooperative in McPherson, Kansas, and bought 40-50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer and paid cash. He gave the name Mike Havens. On the 18th of October, same buyer, another 2,000 pounds, 4,000 pounds total. Nobody blinks at that. It's Kansas in the fall, and ammonium nitrate is a farm product. What made it evidence was that seven months later, three days after the bombing,

agents searching Terry Nichols' house in Harrington, Kansas, found a receipt from one of those purchases with Timothy McVeigh's fingerprint on it. Around the 1st of October, somebody drilled the locks off an explosives magazine at a mark Martin Marietta Rock Quarry near Marion, Kansas, and took seven cases of a water gel explosive called Tovex in a box of non-electric blasting caps. Nichols later admitted he was part of that. On the 21st of October at the Texas Motorplex Drag Strip and Ennis Texas south of Dallas, a man approached a traveling salesman for VP Racing Fuels named Tim Chambers and bought three drums of nitram methane for about $3,000 in cash. Then came back 45,000.

minutes later in a faded pickup with a camper shell to load them. Nitromathane is what top fuel cars burn. It's also extremely effective if what you want to do is make fertilizer detonate. Chambers testified at Nichols trial that the buyer was McVeigh. There's a second fuel salesman in this story who I think about a lot. A man named Glenn Tipton testified that he'd been approached at a race in Kansas by a man asking about both nitro- methane and anhydrous hydrazo. Tepton said that in all his years selling fuel at tracks, that was the only time anybody had asked him about both. Prosecutors asked him what happens if you combine them.

He said you'd create a bomb. They rented storage lockers across Kansas under false names and spread the material around. And the calls that arranged nearly all of it to fertilizer suppliers and racing fuel distributors and chemical companies and truck rental agencies went out on a prepaid calling card issued in the name Darrell Bridges, ordered through an advertisement in a fringe political paper called the Spotlight. The card was supposed to keep the calls from being traced back to him. Instead, it put six months of them into a single indexed billing record with his own alias at the top. And when investigators pulled the call detail, they had a map of the entire preparation.

Dates, times, numbers dialed, going back months. Then there's the money. And the money involves a robbery. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. On the 5th of November, 1994, a gun dealer and collector named Roger Moore was at his place near Royal Arkansas when a masked man put a gun on him, ordered him down, bound him with duct tape, and blindfolded him, and spent about 90 minutes going through the house. Whoever it was left with more than 60 rifles and pistols, gold coins, silver bars, and $8,500 in cash, loaded into Moore's own truck. The loss was reported at somewhere between $60,000 and $63,000. Moore knew McVeigh from the Gun Show circuit, and McVe had stayed at his house, so he was familiar

with the layout and what was in it. When Moore reported it to the county sheriff, he named McVeigh as somebody who might be aggravated with him. He also said he was certain the man in the mask, wasn't McVe. The government's theory was that Nichols did it, that McVeigh set it up, and that the proceeds finance the bomb. Property from Moore's house turned up in Nichols' possession, including firearms and safe deposit box keys. Nichols eventually admitted to the Bureau that he'd committed the robbery to finance the bombing. But Moore was a rough witness and his partner Karen Anderson was rougher. Nichols' attorney Michael Tagar got Anderson to admit on the stand that after the first inventory of stolen items didn't match Moore's $63,000 of insurance coverage.

She helped him draw up a second list with higher values on some of the guns. Tagar also established that one gun on the stolen list had been legally bought by Nichols in Michigan, and there was a letter Moore had written to McVeigh shortly before the bombing full of New World Order language. Moore testified he was writing what he thought McVe wanted to hear and denied flatly that he was talking about any plot. Moore was never charged. He's always denied involvement. There's one more thing about that house. In 2005, 10 years after the bombing, based on statements Nichols made from prison,

agents went back to his old place in Harrington and found blasting caps and explosive material buried in a crawl space that nobody had checked in 1995. The largest domestic terrorism investigation in the country's history to that point had searched that house in April of 95 and left explosives under the floor for a decade. Then there are the Fortiers. Michael Fortier had served with McVeigh at Fort Riley and lived in Kingman, Arizona, with his wife, Lori.

McVey stayed with them off and on while he was drifting, and he told them what he was going to do. Michael testified that McVeigh laid soup cans out on their living room floor in a triangle to show him how he intended to arrange the barrels in the cargo box so the blast would be shaped forward. He testified that McVeigh drew him a diagram of the truck, the barrels and the fusing system, and told him he'd use a rider truck. He testified that in December of 1994, the two of them drove to Oklahoma City together,

that McVe pointed out the Murrah building, and that McVeigh showed him where he intended to park. Lori testified that she laminated a South Dakota driver's license with McVe's photograph on it and the name Robert Kling. That's the license he handed across the counter at the truck rental in April. Michael also admitted he'd handled bomb components and split the money from selling the guns taken in Arkansas. So there were at least four people who knew this was coming, and two of them spent the five months before it happened, living an ordinary life in Kingman, Arizona. Michael Fortier pleaded guilty to failing to report the plot, lying to federal agents, and transporting stolen firearms. In May of 1998, Judge Thomas Van Beber sentenced him to 12 years and a $200,000,

fine, less than the 17 and a half he was facing, because his testimony had helped convict McVeigh. He served about 85% and walked out in January of 2006 into the witness protection program. Lorry Fortier was given immunity and never charged with anything at all. That's still a sore point for a lot of the families, and I understand why. But the fact is, prosecutors needed the story about the license, from the only person who could tell it. April 14th, McVeigh bought a 1977 mercury marquee. He got it from a Firestone dealer in Junction City, Kansas, for around $250, a yellow four door with a primer spot on the rear quarter panel. He never bothered to put a license plate on it. That same day, he checked into room 25 at the

Dreamland Motel a few miles up the freeway, and he signed the register with his own name. April 16th, Easter Sunday. He drove the mercury to Oklahoma City and left it in an alley a few blocks from the Murrah building with a handwritten note on it as his way out. Nichols drove him back to Kansas. Nichols acknowledged the trip and said he didn't know what it was for. April 17th at 19 minutes past four in the afternoon, he picked up a 20-foot rider truck from Elliott's body shop in Junction City as Robert Kling, and on the form he wrote that he needed it for a four-day trip to Omaha. April 18th at Geary Lake State Park in Kansas, the bomb got built. bags of fertilizer opened and dumped into 55-gallon plastic barrels.

Nitromathane and diesel poured in. The whole thing mixed. The barrels braced in a triangle in the cargo box, fuse run forward into the cab. Roughly 4,800 pounds when it was done. Geary Lake is also where the timeline gets thin. The mixing argument has been made at trial and in print ever since, and it's an argument about labor. 40 bags of fertilizer opened by hand.

Four thousand pounds of it moved into barrels. Fuel measured in and stirred through. Then the barrels braced upright in a cargo box. All of it in the open at a state park with a boat ramp and other people around. Nichols' defense put on testimony that the work was too much for two men in the hours available. Prosecutors argued the timeline held. The jury went with the government and nothing in the physical evidence settles the labor question either way. The morning of the 19th, he drove the loaded truck about 78 miles south

into Oklahoma City. By his own account, given years afterward, he lit a five-minute fuse coming into downtown and a two-minute fuse as he turned onto Fifth Street. He pulled into the passenger drop-off lane on the north side of the building, locked the truck, and started walking toward the alley where the mercury was waiting. The Alfred Murrah Federal Building was nine stories of reinforced concrete and granite, opened in 1977, named for a federal appeals judge from Oklahoma. The whole north face was a wall of glass above a wide plaza, and the drop-off lane ran right along the base of it. Inside were regional offices for social security, housing and urban development, the Secret Service, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the ATF,

the Veterans Administration, a federal credit union, and military recruiting stations. Around 550 people worked there, plus whoever came in that morning to do business. And on a Wednesday at 9 in the morning, a Social Security office has a waiting room full of people getting cards for their babies. On the second floor, directly above where the truck was parked, was a daycare center called America's kids. There were 21 children in it. At two minutes past nine, the bomb went off. The blast destroyed three ground floor columns on the north face. Above the third floor, those columns fed their load into what engineers call a transfer girder,

a heavy horizontal beam that lets a building carry fewer columns at street level and more of them higher up. It's an ordinary design choice and it was legal and it was common. When the girder lost the columns under it, the girder failed and everything hanging off it came down. 4% of the building's floor area was destroyed by the blast itself. Another 42% came down in the collapse that followed. Roughly a third of the building was gone. 163 people died in the building. Five died outside it.

684 were injured. 19 of the dead were children, and 15 of those were in the daycare. Six of those 21 children lived. The first radio traffic went out as a natural gas explosion. That's what everybody assumed for a few minutes, until somebody got close enough to see the crater in the street. Amy Downs was 28 and worked as a teller at the credit union on the third floor. She fell three floors still strapped into her office chair

and ended up upside down under about 10 feet of rubble between two slabs of concrete. Rescuers eventually spotted her hand sticking out of the debris, and then somebody called out that there might be a second device, and the whole rescue pulled back, and she lay there alone in the dark for close to an hour before they came back for her. They pulled her out after six and a half hours. 18 of the credit union's 33 employees were killed, including her best friend and the co-worker who'd been sitting beside her when it went off.

Dana Bradley had gone to the Social Security office that morning with her mother, her sister, and her two small children to get a card for the baby. She ended up trapped in the lower level with a slab across her right leg and about six inches of cold water rising around her. Engineers on scene believed the structure above the rescue team was about to come down. Two Oklahoma City surgeons, David Tuggle and Andy Sullivan, crawled in through a hole in the wreckage, and Sullivan took her leg off at the knee with almost no equipment

in a space he could barely get his arms into. Her mother died. So did her three-year-old daughter, Peachland, and her three-month-old son, Gabrion. Her sister was injured and lived. Rebecca Anderson was a 37-year-old practical nurse at a nursing center in Midwest City. She wasn't on duty and wasn't part of any organized response. She heard the blast, drove downtown, and walked into help.

She was hit in the head by falling debris, and she died four days later. Bailey Alman had turned one year old the day before. Her skull was fractured and she died instantly. The last person brought out alive was a 15-year-old girl named Brandy Ligons, who'd gone downtown with a friend to get social security cards. By her account, she was in there something like 13 hours. After her, everyone that came out of the pile came out dead. For about two days, most of the country was looking in the wrong direction,

and it cost people who had nothing to do with any of it. A witness reported seeing two Middle Eastern men run from the building and get into a brown pickup a few minutes before the blast. The Bureau put out a lookout. The media broadcast it. And for roughly 48 hours, a great many Americans, in newsrooms and in government and at kitchen tables, were certain this was Middle Eastern terrorism, because the World Trade Center had been bombed two years earlier, and that was the shape the thing was expected to take.

An Oklahoma City man named Abraham Ahmad flew out of Will Rogers World Airport that same day to visit family in Jordan. He was pulled off his flight in London, questioned, sent back to Chicago, questioned again, strip search. and held before they let him go without charging him with anything. He was an Arab-American man who happened to buy a plane ticket out of Oklahoma City on the 19th of April. Mosques in the city reported broken windows and threatening calls in the weeks following the bombing. By the 21st, the whole theory was gone, and what ended it was a piece of steel. Investigators were looking for the vehicle from the first hours, because in a blast that size, the bomb vehicle doesn't vanish. It comes apart and the pieces travel.

They found a rear axle housing about 575 feet from the crater, sitting outside the Regency Tower apartments, which happens to be the same building McVeigh had parked his getaway car near. An Oklahoma City police technician named Mike McPherson copied a partial vehicle identification number off it onto the back of a business card, because that's what he had on him. That partial number went through the National Insurance Crime Bureau and came back as a 1993 Ford 20-foot box truck

registered to Ryder in Miami, and Ryder traced it to Elliott's body shop in Junction City, Kansas, leased out on the 17th of April. An agent was standing in that body shop interviewing people by the afternoon of the bombing. The owner Eldon Elliott, an employee named Vicki Beamer who'd processed the contract, and a mechanic named Tom Kessinger,

who'd been sitting in the office watching. All described the renter of the truck, A forensic artist flew in from Washington that night and sat down with Kessinger, and out of that session came the two composite drawings that were on every television in America by the weekend. One was a young white man with a short military haircut. The other was a shorter, heavier man and a ball cap. Agents walked those sketches through every business and motel around Junction City, and at the Dreamland, Lee McGowan looked at the first one and said she'd rented room 25 to that man

and pulled the register with Tim McVeigh's name on it. Somebody ran the name on the 21st. It came back to a man sitting in a jail cell in Perry, Oklahoma, arrested 78 minutes after the explosion on a tag violation and a gun charge. Still there, because the court calendar had run long. He was scheduled to go in front of a judge and would almost certainly have made Bond and walked out the door. The second sketch came mainly from Kessinger,

and it's the reason every alternative account of this case exists. He told the Bureau that two men had come into the shop, and he described the second one specifically. Black T-shirt, jeans, ball cap that was royal blue in front and white in back. Tattoo on the upper left arm. The Bureau chased that man across the country and then overseas for a year. In May, agents went back to Elliot's and pulled every rental agreement from that period and found that the day after the Kling rental, an Army sergeant named Michael Hurtig had come in to rent a truck accompanied by a friend,

a private named Todd Bunting. Bunting was stocky. Bunting wore a ball cap. Bunting had a tattoo on his upper left arm. The conclusion was that Kessinger had merged two consecutive days into one memory, and that's a real and well-documented phenomenon. Memory doesn't file itself by date. Two customers on two days become one memory carrying two faces. Kessinger agreed a year and a half later that he'd been wrong about the description.

He did not agree there had been no second man. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. At Nichols' state trial in 2004, he testified that he'd made a mistake describing John Doe number two, that he still believed McVeigh had been accompanied by somebody, and that he'd only ever gotten a side view anyway. And according to the government's own brief, Elliot and Beamer both continued to believe two men came into that shop on the 17th.

Then there are the people downtown. Several reported seeing the rider truck with two men in the cab that morning. A young man named Mike Maraz, who worked at a tire shop, said the driver of a rider truck stopped and asked him for directions to Fifth and Harvey, and that there was a passenger sitting next to him. Dana Bradley from underneath the wreckage described a truck pulling up and men getting out, just moments before the blast. The federal indictment charged McVeigh and Nichols and, in its own language, others unknown.

That phrase was never withdrawn. on. McVeigh at the end of his life insisted he was alone in that truck and that he wanted the credit for it. Either that's true, or he was covering for somebody on his way out. Whether somebody else helped is a completely separate question from whether those two did it, and I've watched 30 years of people treat them as one question. The physical case against McVeigh and Nichols doesn't depend on the answer either way, which brings us to a place in eastern Oklahoma called Elohim City. It sits near Muldrow, right up against the Arkansas line. It was founded in the early 70s by a Christian identity preacher named Robert Miller, and by the 90s it functioned as a gathering point and a way

station for people in the white separatist movement, including men wanted elsewhere. The chief of security there was a German national named Andrea Strasmeier, whose father had been a senior figure in a German political party. I have never seen an adequate explanation of what a man with that background was doing running security on a compound in eastern Oklahoma, and the vacuum has been filled for 30 years with speculation that he was an intelligence asset for somebody. There's never been proof of it. He acknowledged meeting McVeigh at a Tulsa gun show and talking anti-government tactics with him. He denied any involvement in the bombing. The Bureau questioned him only briefly. He was never charged and he left the country for Germany. Also in that orbit was a man

named Dennis Mon, who was active in a group called White Aryan Resistance, and the ATF had a paid informant working that world. Her name was Carol Howe. She was a young woman from Tulsa, and she was embedded there from roughly October of 1994 into early 1995. Howe reported to her handlers that Mon and Strassmere had discussed bombing federal buildings, including the Murrah building specifically, and that there was talk about something big around the April 19th anniversary of Waco. Federal investigators later established that a call was placed to the Elohim City telephone number on the 5th of April, 1995, two weeks before the bombing, on a calling card registered in a false name, and that whoever placed it asked for Strassmere. Nobody there claims to have taken it.

McVeigh also picked up traffic citations within a few miles of the place. So there's a phone record, there's geography, and there's a paid federal informant who says the subject came up in her presence, in advance, with the right target and the right date. What there isn't, in any court record or any completed investigation, is evidence that anybody at Elohim City helped build or deliver that bomb. Carol Howe was later charged in an unrelated bomb threat case and acquitted. Her reporting became the centerpiece of the defense theory at McVeigh's trial, and Judge Richard match limited how much of it the jury heard on the grounds that it didn't connect to the crime charged. As a ruling on evidence law, he was probably right. It also meant that almost none of it

was set out loud in a courtroom. Running alongside all of this is a string of bank robberies. Between roughly 1992 and 1996, a crew hit 22 banks across seven Midwestern states and took something in the neighborhood of a quarter of a million dollars. They wore masks, some of the sometimes novelty masks, and left fake bombs behind to slow down pursuit. They called themselves the Aryan Republican Army. The leaders were Peter Langan and Richard Guthrie, and the members included a young man named Michael Brescia, who lived at Elohim City and reportedly roomed with Strassmere.

A criminologist named Mark Hamm wrote a book arguing this crew financed and possibly supported the bombing. Reporters including J.D. Cash and Roger Charles worked the same ground for years, and the author Andrew Gumbull went back over much of it later. Some witnesses that were shown the second composite drawing said it looked like Brescia. Guthrie was arrested outside Cincinnati in January of 1996, gave up Langen within days, and agreed to cooperate. In early July, he pleaded guilty to 19 robberies. Nine days later, on the 12th of July, guards found him hanged in his cell in a Kentucky jail with a bed sheet around

his neck. It was ruled a suicide. He was awaiting sentencing. He was reportedly writing a book about the group, and by several accounts he was scheduled to give a television interview the following day. Langen went to prison for life. Members of that crew have denied any part in Oklahoma City. At the end of October in 1983, a paramilitary group in the Arkansas Ozarks called the covenant, the sword, and the arm of the Lord discussed attacking the Alfred Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City. According to the federal prosecutor Stephen Snyder, the plan was to park a van or a trailer in front of the building and blow it up with rockets set off by a timer. That surfaced at a sedition trial in Fort Smith in 1988, where the group's founder, James Ellison, testified for the

government. Ellison said that in October of 1983, a man named Richard Wayne Snell and an associate asked him to design a rocket launcher that could destroy those buildings from a distance, and that Snell drove him to some of the buildings and asked him to go inside and look them over. Ellison's testimony at trial didn't name which building. Snyder confirmed later that it was the federal building in Oklahoma City. The attack never happened. By one account, Snell dropped it after a rocket launcher he was practicing with, blew up in his hands, and he took that as a sign. Two years later on the 19th of April, 1985, 200 state and federal officers surrounded the group's compound on Bull Shoals Lake.

The siege ended a few days later when Robert Miller, the man from Elohim City, talked Ellison into surrendering. Snell went to prison for two murders. In November of 1983, he shot a pawn shop owner in Texarkana, named William Stump, because he believed Stump was Jewish. Stump was Episcopalian. In June of 1984, he shot and killed a black Arkansas state trooper named Lewis Bryant during a traffic stop and was run down and wounded in a gun battle at Broken Bow, Oklahoma. He got life for Bryant and a death sentence for stump.

The state of Arkansas executed Richard Wayne Snell at around 9 o'clock on the evening of April 19, 1995, roughly 12 hours after the building came down. His body was claimed by people connected to Elohim City, where Miller had been his spiritual advice. and that's where he's buried. That does not establish that the bombing was timed to the execution. April 19th was already carrying a lot of freight. It's the second anniversary of Waco. It's the anniversary of Lexington and Concord. It's the anniversary of the raid on Snell's own compound.

McVeigh said Waco was the reason, repeatedly, to multiple people. Snell had also predicted there'd be a bombing on the day of his execution, and an Arkansas prison official reported that he watched the coverage and laughed. Those accounts have been repeated so many times they've accumulated details nobody can trace to a name source. What stands is that the same building appeared on a target list 12 years earlier, drawn up by men from the same movement, and one of them died by lethal injection on the night it fell. I don't have an explanation that connects those two facts, and I've never been able to file it under coincidence either.

There's one more theory in this case, and it did lasting damage to a specific man. Seven weeks after the bombing, a television reporter in Oklahoma City named Jana Davis, working for KFOR, began broadcasting reports suggesting a Middle Eastern connection and pointing at a former Iraqi soldier working locally as a restaurant employee. The station didn't name him and blurred his face. He came forward himself in June and identified himself as Hussein al-Husaini. He said he was at work when the bomb went off and denied knowing McBay. He sued for liable in state court and dropped it after 19 months.

He refiled in federal court and in November of 1999, Judge Timothy Leonard dismissed it. And the Tenth Circuit affirmed in 2003, finding the defendants had not recklessly disregarded the truth. No court has ever found that Hussein al-Husani participated in a mass murder. Federal investigators looked at the material and never developed a case. from it. He was never charged with anything, and he has spent his adult life carrying an accusation no prosecutor ever brought. Investigators also went hard at Terry Nichols' repeated trips to the Philippines, and whether he crossed paths there, with anyone connected to the plots, Romsey Yusuf was running out of Manila in that period. Nichols was there at overlapping times.

More than one agency examined it. No connection was ever established. The trials went to Denver. Judge Richard Match ruled in 1996 that neither man could get an impartial jury anywhere in Oklahoma and moved the case. That was deeply unpopular with the families, and Match absorbed a lot of anger for it, and he also ran a trial that lawyers on both sides describe as tightly and fairly controlled. He severed the defendants and sent McVeigh first. McVeigh's lead attorney was Stephen Jones, an Oklahoma lawyer with a long history of taking unpopular clients. The lead prosecutor was Joseph Hartsler. The guilt phase ran 23 days.

The government put on the axle, the fingerprint on the fertilizer receipt, the calling card records, the storage lockers, the motel register, the false license, plastic barrel fragments from the debris that matched barrels from Nichols' garage, the mercury and everything in it, and the 40A's. They also called McVeigh's younger sister Jennifer, who testified under an immunity agreement about letters he'd sent to, including one telling her something big was coming, and she should watch the news. The defense had two prongs, attacked the forensics, and argued there was a wider conspiracy

the government chose not to chase. In April of 1997, in the middle of all this, the Justice Department's Inspector General published its investigation into the FBI Laboratory. It had been opened after a supervisory special agent and chemist named Frederick Whitehurst went to them with allegations about the lab's work across a series of major cases. On the 9th of January, 1996, Whitehurst had sent the Inspector General a 30-page letter specifically about the Oklahoma City Explosives Report. That report was written by Explosives Unit Examiner David Williams dated September 5, 1995. The Inspector General found it contained several serious flaws.

Williams had offered an unjustified opinion on the voluminous. velocity of detonation of the main charge. His categorical identification of the main charge as ammonium nitrate and fuel oil was inappropriate given the scientific evidence available to him. And Williams had repeatedly reached conclusions incriminating the defendants without a scientific basis, in places reasoning backward from evidence associated with the suspects, rather than forward from the physical evidence. The Inspector General also faulted the unit chief for approving conclusions he himself couldn't support. There's a second layer that only surfaced years later.

Another lab examiner, Stephen Burmeister, had told the Inspector General in 1995 that colleagues did shoddy work on the McVeigh case, then retracted several of those statements before testifying as a prosecution witness. In 2001, days before the execution, lawyers for some FBI lab employees wrote to the Attorney General,

alleging Burmeister may have been pressured into false testimony. No action was taken and it was never disclosed to McVeigh's lawyers. It came out during Nichols' state trial in 2004. The Bureau's lab director said Burmeister corrected himself because he'd realized his earlier statements were imprecise. The jury convicted anyway. And the structure of the case is why. It never depended on the laboratory. It depended on receipts, phone records, a fingerprint, a motel register, a stamped axle, and two witnesses who'd watched the plan get laid out on their living room floor with soup cans. Throw the entire lab report out, and the verdict is the same. The jury convicted McVeigh on all 11 counts on the 2nd of June, 1997. Conspiracy to use a weapon

of mass destruction. Use of a weapon of mass destruction. Destruction by explosive of a federal building. And eight counts of first-degree murder. One for each federal. law enforcement officer killed because federal law at the time confined prosecutors to charging murder only in the deaths of federal officers. 168 people were killed and the United States could charge murder for eight of them. On the 13th, the jury returned a sentence of death. Nichols was tried separately that fall. His jury came back on the 23rd of December, 1997, and convicted him of conspiracy and of eight counts of involuntary manslaughter. It acquitted. him of the bombing counts themselves.

And it deadlocked on death, so Match gave him life without parole. What that verdict says is that the jury believed Nichols helped build the device and didn't believe the government had proved what he knew and intended on the morning of the 19th. Then Oklahoma took its turn. Stay tuned for more disturbing history. We'll be back after these messages. District Attorney Bob Macy filed 163 state counts, covering the 160 people

the federal case couldn't reach, plus an unborn child. The trial went to McAllister in Pittsburgh County in front of Judge Stephen Taylor. On the 26th of May, 2004, the jury took about five hours and convicted Nichols on 161 counts of first-degree murder, plus arson and conspiracy. It deadlocked on death again, and Taylor gave him 161 consecutive life sentences. Nichols has since admitted to the Bureau and to his own family that he helped build the bomb. He's at the Federal Supermax in Florence, Colorado. Judge Taylor wrote recently that he has no doubt Nichols and McVeigh were the sole actors in this crime, and he heard more of the evidence than almost anyone alive.

Timothy McVeigh was executed at the Federal Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana, on the morning of the 11th of June, 2001. The warden pronounced him dead at 14 minutes past seven. He was 33. It was the first federal execution carried out in this country since 1963. Ten victims and family members watched from the witness room, along with ten members of the press and four people he'd invited. Another 232 survivors and relatives watched a closed circuit feed 620 miles away in Oklahoma City

at the Federal Transfer Center. He made no spoken final statement. What he handed over was a copy of a poem called Invictus, Written in the 1800s by an Englishman named William Ernest Henley, the one that ends with the lines about being the master of your fate and the captain of your soul. He wrote it out by hand and signed it, and he didn't put Henley's name anywhere on it. In dozens of hours of interviews with the Buffalo reporters, Lou Michelle and Dan Herbeck, he described the children who died as collateral damage.

He'd used that phrase in letters before. It's military vocabulary. He'd been a soldier, and he was still speaking. the language he learned there six years later, about 19 kids. Those interviews are the closest thing to a confession in his own words that exists. They're also the account of a condemned man who chose his own interviewers and wanted his version in print at the end of his life. The Oklahoma City National Memorial opened on the footprint five years later on the 19th of April, 2000. There's a reflecting pool where Fifth Street used to run and a bronze gate at either

end of it, one marked 901 and the other 903. So the whole site sits inside that one minute. On the lawn, there are 168 chairs of bronze and stone, set in nine rows corresponding to the floor each person was found on, each one standing on a glass base, with a name etched into it. 19 of the chairs are small. Granite salvaged out of the north and east walls carries the names of more than 600 survivors. Up on the rise, there's an American Elm that used to shade the gravel parking lot across the street. The blast burned it, stripped it, and drove debris down into the trunk, and crews wanted to cut it down to recover the evidence out of the wood. They didn't. It's still standing, and the

memorial collects seed off it every year and grows saplings from it. So here's where 30 years of this leaves us. The axle number. The fingerprint on the fertilizer receipt. The calling card records. the storage lockers, the false license, the motel register in his own handwriting, the barrel fragments, the shirt he was arrested in, with Abraham Lincoln on the front and the line about the tree of liberty on the back,

which a prosecutor read out loud to a jury from the witness stand, and a business card Charles Hanger found on the floorboard of his patrol car three days later in McVeigh's own handwriting, which both sides stipulated to, that said TNT at $5 a state, need more. Terry Nichols built it with him. Two juries said so on two separate records, and Nichols has since said so himself. What never got answered is a lot narrower than the arguments people usually have about this case, and I want to leave you with the actual list

rather than the shouting. Nobody has settled whether two men could mix and load 4,000 pounds of material in one afternoon at a public lake in daylight, and the people who said they couldn't are still saying it. Nobody has identified who used a calling card in a false name to call a compound in eastern Oklahoma two weeks out and ask for the German. Nobody has explained why that same building had already appeared on a target list in 1983, written by men out of the same movement, one of whom was executed the night it came down. Nobody has explained why an ATF informant reporting talk of bombing federal buildings around the anniversary of Waco produced nothing at all. None of that makes Timothy McVeigh innocent.

What it does is make the version of this story that most people carry around smaller than the thing that actually happened. One angry veteran with a rented truck is a story you can close the file on. A movement that spent two years telling itself out loud and in public that a building full of social security clerks and toddlers was a legitimate target is not. I spent 16 years carrying a badge. and what stays with me about this file is how little of it was hidden. A man bought two tons of fertilizer for cash and nobody asked. A racing fuel salesman in Kansas heard a stranger ask for the two chemicals that make a bomb

and had nowhere to take it. Four people knew what was coming and two of them went about their lives in Arizona for five months. The Bureau had a paid informant inside a compound where people were talking about this with the right target and the right anniversary and it went into a file drill. drawer. Every one of those was a place where somebody could have stopped it, and the system had no way to hear it. Which brings me back to a stretch of Interstate 35. Charles Hanger stayed in Oklahoma law enforcement and was later elected sheriff of Noble County. For 30 years now, he's told anybody who asked that what he did that morning is what troopers do every day, and there's a sign on the

highway near Perry, at Mile Marker 202, with his name on it. He wrote the arrest up that afternoon on a courthouse computer, five or six feet from the booking counter, while the television in that room played coverage of the building coming down. The man he'd arrested watched some of it, looked away for some of it, and never said a word about it. Hanger typed four charges onto the affidavit, transporting a loaded firearm, unlawfully carrying a weapon, no proof of insurance, and no tag on the back of the car, which is the only reason any of the rest of it happened. is out