The American terrorist and me
In 1995 I drove to Buffalo to look into the past of Timothy McVeigh, who'd just blown up a building in Oklahoma and killed 168 people. In 2001 I flew to Oklahoma City on the day he was to be executed.
The news from Timothy McVeigh’s hometown
Pittsburgh Post-Gazette
April 29, 1995
I am a hired pen in a rented car, zeroing-in on the past of Tim McVeigh, America's alleged home-grown terrorist.
I have been commissioned by the mighty Los Angeles Times to rush to Pendleton, N.Y., near Buffalo, to scoop up some enlightening quotes or telling details about McVeigh’s growing up days.
Call it drive-by journalism.
As the sun sets two Saturdays ago I approach the center of Pendleton. An undefinable community of 5,010 souls, it is little more than a tangle of intersecting 45-m.p.h. country roads loosely lined with smallish brick and wood houses and barns.
Its only landmark is a water tower, which is stuck into the flat landscape like a huge vomit-green map pin. The tower looms over Brauer's restaurant/bar, where electronic video games and a juke box heavy with Garth Brooks CDs constitute the local entertainment industry.
New in town, I ask the woman working at Fred's Pizza about Tim McVeigh.
Marge Brauer says he grew up here and left at 19 for the Army. No troublemaker, no known girlfriend, he was a truly forgettable guy. I quote Marge: "He was there but nobody knew him. He was part of the woodwork."
What about Bill McVeigh, Tim's father?
Marge says everyone knows and likes him. I quote her: "If he went wrong, it wasn't his father's doing."
While in Fred's, an employee hands me the phone. It's an old McVeigh pal named Pat, and he's steamed.
The FBI had just questioned him and some of his friends — impolitely. "They’re trying to say I'm part of some revolution with McVeigh,” he said. “It's ridiculous."
Pat is too upset to talk any more, but says to meet him at Brauer's at 11. He wants to tell me things I should know.
Meanwhile, it's time for me to call the L.A. Times from my new Pendleton bureau office, the pay phone on the outside wall of the local convenience store/gas station/video store.
I give the editor the Marge quotes and describe the McVeigh house — including the colorful/ironic part about the half-masted American flag flapping in the wind at sunset.
Great, they say. They're thrilled. Now they can use a Pendleton dateline for their story in tomorrow's morning paper. For a national paper, that's worth paying a freelancer $200 for.
In Brauer's at 11 p.m., eternal frat-boy Pat plays spy games. After we exchange IDs, and he orders another vodka tonic, he tells me he's still too upset to talk. Call me tomorrow, he says.
Sunday morning and I'm off to 10 o'clock Mass at Good Shepherd Roman Catholic Church, in search of Father Belzer. He's a friend of the McVeighs and the closest thing CNN, the New York Times, tabloid TV shows like "American Journal" and I would ever get to a family spokesman.
After Mass I get a few pastorly quotes about how Tim McVeigh's father helps at Wednesday night bingo. Then I sit in my car, scribble eight Pulitzer-quality paragraphs into my notebook and head for my outdoor office.
At the convenience store I park next to a car that is, to the molecule, a duplicate of my white rented Pontiac Grand Am. "Huh," I say to my observant self. "What a coincidence."
I start to use the pay phone, but the young woman driving the other Grand Am is filling her tires with the air machine hanging two feet from my ear. It sounds like a jackhammer, so I stick my notebook under the phone and go to buy a candy bar.
When I return, the other Grand Am is driving off and — Hey! My official Professional Reporter's Notebook is missing. Gonzo. Disappeared. Not in my car. Not in the store. Not in the trash. Not over the fence.
Every scrap of local info I had is in that notebook. I can't even call the LA. Times to tell them I've blown it. My fevered but always fair and objective brain raced.
Did the FBI lift it? No.
Had Pat been tailing me? No.
That girl in the car must have taken it.
I'm trapped in a professional journalist's worst nightmare. I can't re-create all my notes and quotes. All I can do is find that Grand Am girl. I drive down the rural road I thought she took 10 minutes earlier, checking driveways as I go.
In less than a mile, I see her car next to a white house, do a U-turn, pull into the driveway and knock on the side door, wondering what gauge of shotgun her boyfriend will shoot me with.
No answer.
I go around to the front door and ring the bell three times. The door opens and the Grand Am girl appears with a porta-phone to her ear.
"Would you please give me the notebook you stole from me," I say as menacingly as any unarmed stranger can.
"Oh," she says, phone still glued to her ear, "was it yours?"
After disappearing for few seconds, she comes back and, talking on the phone all the while, she hands me my notebook and pen and closes the door. I am so happy I say nothing.
Two hours later I am halfway to Pittsburgh, my mission complete.
My hit-and-run investigation into Tim McVeigh's past had turned up no clues to explain how he became what he is now accused of being — the personification of American-made evil.
Even his 10th-grade English teacher, the one McVeigh listed in his yearbook as his favorite, had been of no help.
"He was 1,100 students ago," she said wearily, adding herself the list of Pendletonians who now know McVeigh the Monster far better than they ever knew the young man who once lived among them so invisibly.
And McVeigh's mysterious former pal Pat had been no great source either. When I called him for the last time, his mother said he had gone to baseball practice.
Based on what I saw in Pendleton, going to baseball practice is the kind of boring everyday American thing people do a lot of there, besides running off with other people's notebooks.
They don't teach hate speech in their high school. They don't hold adult education classes in bomb-making. They don't seem to do anything that turns little boys who put on carnivals in their backyards into mass murderers.
The national media invade Oklahoma City
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
May 12, 2001
OKLAHOMA CITY -- With a horde of TV and newspaper reporters encamped around the Oklahoma City National Memorial, the news spread quickly Friday that Timothy McVeigh's execution would be delayed.
The memorial, which includes a reflecting pool and a learning museum that details the story of the Oklahoma City bombing and its aftermath, is built on the former site of the Alfred P. Murrah Building, where 168 people died April 19, 1995.
On a typical day, about 2,500 visitors from around the world and friends and relatives of the dead and injured visit the somber, wind-whipped oasis in downtown Oklahoma City.
Two French college students at the memorial, Klervi Le Marre of Paris and Clarisse Tschannen of Avignon, had stopped in town to visit friends on their way to California.
They had never heard of the Oklahoma City bombing before, but they were eager to learn about it.
Among visitors from this area was Pete Bourns, 44, of the Oklahoma City suburb of Edmond. He knew eight people who were killed in the Murrah Building, all employees of the federal Department of Agriculture.
Bourns was showing the memorial to friends visiting from Houston.
'It's a solemn place,' he said upon seeing the memorial for the first time. 'For such an act of terrorism, it's as good as you can do.'
Yesterday, shortly after U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft announced that McVeigh's execution date had been moved from May 16 to June 11, reporters and photographers were scouring the grounds, looking for interview subjects.
Stephen Jones, McVeigh's original court-appointed lawyer, strode briskly past the reflecting pool as two TV news cameramen videotaped him. Carrying his book, 'Others Unknown,' Jones had a curbside date with a Fox News Channel reporter.
Jones, who was dismissed by McVeigh and who thinks there were others involved in the bombing, said the revelation that the FBI had not turned over all the evidence in the case 'lends credence to the idea that McVeigh didn't act alone.'
Survivors of the bombing, or relatives of those killed by it, were harder to find.
A woman who works in the newly opened museum's busy gift shop and had lost her adult daughter was not available, her boss said. Neither were any of the museum's volunteer docents who had lost relatives.
Nor was Paul Howell, a local man who also lost an adult daughter and was set to fly to Terre Haute, Ind., to be one of 10 witnesses present at McVeigh's execution.
Howell is a willing spokesman for the thoughts and feelings of the survivors, but apparently he was not at home. His phone's answering machine had 27 beeps, testimony to the fierce media demand for his reaction to the postponement.
A survivor of a victim who was making himself and his disappointment available to all media comers was Dan McKinney, 49, a housing inspector for the city. His wife Linda, 47, and his niece, Shelly, died in the explosion.
'Linda worked at Secret Service,' he said from beneath his broad cowboy hat. 'Shelly worked at DEA.'
McKinney and other survivors he talked to were sorely disappointed by the surprise delay in McVeigh's execution, which is 'something we've waited six years for,' he said.
'I'm angry, frustrated. I'm physically sick at my stomach.'
Oklahoma City’s National Memorial is a silent testament in a trying time
Bill Steigerwald
Pittsburgh Tribune-Review
May 12, 2001
OKLAHOMA CITY — In the six years since this capital city had a huge, bloody hole blown in its heart, two numbers — 168 and 9:02 -- have become wrenching state symbols.
People here know 168 refers to the tally of innocents who died when Timothy McVeigh's truck bomb ripped down the front third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
They also know that 9:02 a.m. is the instant the explosion occurred on April 19, 1995, when this flat, sprawling, sun-baked metropolis and its 1 million souls were changed forever.
Until Friday, there was another date that was going to have special meaning for Oklahomans — May 16, when McVeigh was to be executed in Terre Haute, Ind.
But Attorney General John Ashcroft rescheduled the execution for June 11 after the FBI acknowledged it had failed to turn over some 3,000 pages of documents to McVeigh's lawyers before his trial in 1997.
As McVeigh's case has moved through the federal justice system, the people whose bodies and spirits he hurt have been busy with something far more important than vengeance: creating the Oklahoma City National Memorial.
The memorial, dedicated April 19, 2000, is a solemn, emotionally powerful park and interactive learning museum built where the Murrah Building once stood.
The most arresting feature of the memorial is the Field of Empty Chairs, an arrangement of 168 bronze, stone and glass chairs. Each carries the name of a person killed in the blast.
Between Friday night and Saturday morning, when about 35 people visited, a stuffed teddy bear had been placed on W. Stephen Williams' chair. Nearby, a tiny 'Junior Nurse' statue sat on Rebecca Needham Anderson's chair.
As several hundred people roamed its wind-whipped grounds Thursday and Friday afternoon, the memorial was the busiest spot in a downtown eerily uncongested by pedestrians or cars.
Cynthia Lindley of Amarillo, Texas, was on her second visit.
'There's something that brings you back,' she said.' It's holy. It's almost like a church.'
Gene and Lois Patterson of Fort Myers, Fla., were being given a tour by their friend Stan Ellis, an Oklahoma City native who runs a self-storage facility.
Ellis has brought at least 12 out-of-town friends to the site, which he still finds deeply moving. He knew several of the dead.
'It's just something you never get over.'
Pat McKinney, 49, a city housing inspector, lost his wife, Linda, 47, and his niece, Shelly, in the bombing. He drives by the memorial at least once a day.
'I can gain a sense of peacefulness walking here,' he said. 'I can feel the presence of everybody. It's like they're just hovering, wanting to uplift anybody that walks on these grounds.'
Everyone agrees the memorial is a place of rest and peace, McKinney said, peering out from beneath his cowboy hat.
And while people who experienced the explosion or lost loved ones always will have a sense of sadness walking the grounds, he said, it was much worse before.
'After it happened,' he said, 'it would literally tear you up physically to see where the Murrah Building used to be. The ugliness of it. There's a beauty now that's been brought to it.'
McKinney looks at the memorial as a place to pay respect to the 168 who he says 'literally gave their lives to our country in peacetime.'
Today there is little evidence of the explosion.
The broad city street on which McVeigh parked his deadly Ryder truck has been closed off, leveled and covered with a lawn, walled terraces, a sprinkling of 15-foot trees and a long, shallow reflecting pool.
Two concrete block-monuments, sheathed in brass and bearing the times 9:01 and 9:03, bookend the pool.
Nearby, in what's left of the Oklahoma Journal Record Building, is the recently opened Memorial Center, which uses news reports and first-person accounts to tell the story of the bombing.
Large, craggy blocks of the Murrah Building's concrete foundation remain at the corners of the site, like ancient Roman ruins.
Granite salvaged from the rubble was used for a sidewalk. The names of hundreds of survivors are chiseled on a stone tablet.
In less permanent ways, thousands of mourners also have paid their respects.
Along the sidewalk on Harvey Street, a low cyclone fence about 100 yards long has been festooned with their humble offerings.
A mix of personalized mementos and commercial pop cultural artifacts, they are poignant, inane and profane all at once:
Stuffed rabbits, T-shirts, wreaths, artificial flowers. A Frisbee. Snoopy dogs, U.S. flags, refrigerator magnets. Sun-faded photographs of David Walker and Ann Leaz, who died in the bombing. Pens, scarves, ball caps, a Dallas Cowboys license plate. Prayer cards, poems, Bible verses. An 'NSync sticker. A yo-yo.
At 6:10 a.m. Saturday, as the 168 chairs glowed in the dark of predawn, the memorial's only visitors were five mallards tooling around in the reflecting pool.
Across Harvey Avenue, a crew from NBC's 'Saturday Weekend Today' show was using a satellite truck to send a live interview to New York of three people who survived the bombing or lost relatives in it.
Before McVeigh's execution was postponed, 98 satellite trucks had requested city permits to set up around the memorial.
One of those being interviewed was Paul Heath, a former psychologist for the U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs, who was in his fifth-floor office in the Murrah Building when McVeigh's truck exploded 65 feet below.
He was among only 14 of the building's 195 survivors who didn't have to go to a hospital.
Before his interview with CNN, Heath stood on the spot where the bomb had gouged a crater, reliving his harrowing experience.
After six years of being intimately involved in the tragedy, he also was able to provide details on everything from the victims to the planning of the memorial and McVeigh's pre-bombing scouting missions to the building -- which included the terrorist's chilling visit to Heath's office under the pretext of looking for a job.
According to Heath, survivors and families of victims will never get over the bombing.
'You'll learn to live with it,' he said, 'hopefully in a way that won't interfere with your everyday reality.'
Q&A: Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating
I interviewed Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, whose grandparents are from the Pittsburgh area, at a Saturday morning press conference on a sidewalk near the memorial.
Q: Were you personally disappointed by the decision Friday to postpone Timothy McVeigh's execution?
A: Yes, terribly disappointed, because it means more agony and more heartache for the families. It gives McVeigh an opportunity to leer at and mock us, to make fun of our tragedy. And that is an obscenity to Oklahoma City.
Q: How important is it to the people of the city and the state that McVeigh disappear from the scene — that he not be making headlines or making legal complications any more?
A: It is very important, because he represents an evil that defiled this city. He represents the death of 19 children and a total of 168 of our neighbors and friends. And he admitted it ... He is evil personified.