Jury to Hear, See Oklahoma Blast Terror

OKLAHOMA CITY —  In what was seen before as a largely circumstantial case, the federal government has obtained photographic and recorded evidence in the Oklahoma City bombing that evokes vivid images of the blast last April and brings to graphic life the horror of the terrorist attack.

A surveillance camera near the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building filmed a Ryder rental truck not only headed for the building but pausing long enough for someone inside to set the triggering process for a bomb concealed in the cargo area.

And an audio recording of a routine government hearing underway across the street captured not only the initial, deafening concussion of the blast but the terror that followed as people scrambled for their lives in what moments before had been a typical Wednesday morning in the American heartland.

The photographs and audiotape are emerging as key components in the government’s case against Timothy J. McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols--two former Army friends who shared an interest in pyrotechnics and a hatred of the federal government.

This kind of dramatic, sensory evidence could help prosecutors move their case beyond one focusing largely on circumstantial clues suggesting that McVeigh and Nichols conspired together to plan and carry out the attack on the Murrah building.

In the absence of eyewitnesses, it could allow the government to place jurors at the scene of the devastation, re-creating first the Ryder truck’s chilling drive toward the building, then the roar of the blast and the screams of “Oh God! Oh God!” as people tried to save themselves.

“You’ve got to get past the minutiae of mountains of evidence to get to the level the jury can grasp,” said a federal source close to the investigation. “That sound [of the bomb going off] will be something a jury can accept and relate to. Pictures and sounds are worth a thousand words.”

Anger at Ground Zero

Today, much of the sorrow and grief from the bombing has given way in Oklahoma City to anger toward those thought responsible. A growing knot of victims and their families and friends are voicing the deep fury felt in this community.

“Everybody I know, they talk about hanging this guy [McVeigh] from every part of his body,” said Barbara Williams, whose husband, Steve, was among the dead. “They talk about blowing him up. You wouldn’t believe some of the things people are saying.”

After eight months of exhaustive investigation, during which federal agents conducted more than 10,500 interviews and spent more than $20 million, the outlines of the trial that is to culminate the episode are now starting to emerge.

And with the proceeding expected to begin sometime in 1996, at a site yet to be decided, the evidence being assembled and the courtroom maneuvering underway presage a legal collision worthy of the largest case of its kind in U.S. history.

On the government’s side, the case is taking shape as a colossus of circumstantial and technical evidence, brought together in the most exhaustive criminal dragnet since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy in 1963.

Acquaintances of McVeigh and Nichols are providing accounts of the two men’s strong antigovernment views, nurtured during and after their time in the Army. Documents show the purchase of supplies and materials that could have been used in a truck bomb. And clerks and retail personnel relate the movements of a man identified as McVeigh through the Southwest and Midwest in the weeks and days before the crime.

The government also has compelled the cooperation of a key witness, Michael Fortier, who allegedly had knowledge of a plot. And it has obtained an extensive collection of letters written by McVeigh that reflects his virulent sentiments in his own words.

For the defense, the case is coalescing into a tenacious assault on gaps in the government’s scenario of events and the suspects’ actions, along with alternative explanations for what happened. In the parsing of witnesses’ words and laboratory conclusions, defense attorneys likely will follow strategies employed with notable success in other major trials in recent years, including the O.J. Simpson murder case last year.

Defense attorneys are focusing particular investigative efforts on the conflicting evidence about the existence of another possible participant, dubbed John Doe No. 2. They also plan to explore questions about the discovery of the leg of an unknown black woman in the wreckage--a person that they suggest might have been the real bomber.

Stephen Jones, who represents McVeigh, said in an interview that he has already been able to discard an insanity defense as an option for his client. It is now all but certain that McVeigh will take the witness stand to testify in his own behalf, Jones said.

“He’s competent,” Jones said. “He has no mental defect that would in any way constitute a defense. In fact, I don’t see any evidence of psychosis or sexual dysfunction or perversion or anything of that type.”

Jones said he is preparing a defense that will capitalize on the wording in the indictment that lists “others unknown” as potential codefendants, arguing that McVeigh and Nichols alone could not have prepared, financed and carried out a crime of a magnitude normally associated with large groups of international terrorists.

In the end, he said, he will show reasonable doubt that McVeigh masterminded the plot and delivered the bomb that killed 169 people and injured more than 600 others.

Also, Jones is trying to remake his client’s image, particularly to soften the chilling picture of McVeigh that has been broadcast and reproduced repeatedly on television and other media as he was escorted out of a small-town Oklahoma jail two days after the bombing.

“He’s not,” Jones said, “the wild-eyed, cold-staring, Boris Karloff-type figure that you saw exit the courthouse in Perry.”

Indeed, in his federal prison cell in El Reno, Okla., McVeigh looks younger than his 27 years. He shows no sign of a beard. His lanky frame is slightly giving way to a potbelly and prison pallor.

To visitors he makes light attempts at humor. Only when discussion turns to international events, such as the deployment of U.S. troops in Bosnia, does he give any hint that bitter emotions lie beneath his otherwise pleasant demeanor. If he is kept away from that kind of discussion, jurors could easily regard him as a nonthreatening boy next door.

Michael E. Tigar, the attorney for Nichols, also has sought to recast his client’s image, describing him as a family man who was at home in Kansas at the time of the bombing and who promptly turned himself in when he heard his name broadcast in connection with the case.

Tigar also has suggested that while Nichols and McVeigh once were friends, the pair had a falling out and that Nichols may have been unwittingly manipulated by McVeigh.

Grim Calculation

“This is a very quiet, respectful, polite, hard-working man who does not have any prior arrests, convictions or even an act of meanness in his 40 years,” Ronald G. Woods, another member of Nichols’ defense team, said at a hearing.

Whether the defense can raise enough doubt, or the government can dispel it, will not be known for months. But the photographic and tape-recorded evidence will leave no doubt for the jury about the horror or the grim calculation of what happened at 9:02 a.m. on April 19.

The surveillance camera was mounted in the front lobby of the Regency Apartments building, situated diagonally across 5th Street from the Murrah building. Making still photographs every few seconds with a digital time counter, the camera first catches a bright yellow Ryder truck at 8:56:50 a.m.

The truck then suddenly stops in the middle of 5th Street for almost 30 seconds. It finally moves again, and is last seen in the photos at 8:57:17.

No one can be seen inside the truck, primarily because of the glare from the sun as the camera points out through the lobby windows.

Ryder Truck’s Pause

Witnesses have identified McVeigh as renting a Ryder truck in Kansas before the attack. But Jones, asked to comment on the effect of the photographs on his case, said it does “nothing” to prove McVeigh drove the truck or was even inside. As for the truck’s pause less than a block from the Murrah building, Jones said it could merely mean that “whoever” was in the truck simply stopped to wait for the perfect parking spot, rather than to prepare the fuse for detonation as the government suspects.

The audiotape is from a recording of a regulatory board hearing inside the Oklahoma Water Resources Building, situated directly across 5th Street from the federal building. So heavy was the destruction in the immediate area that the water building today stands as a blown-out shell. About 70 people were inside the building at 9:02 a.m. All were injured or severely traumatized. Two died.

The tape begins with the hearing getting underway. Against a background of mumbled conversation in the room, a woman--apparently presiding over the session--begins describing the hearing agenda. “In regards to this proceeding,” the woman says, “there are four elements I need to receive information on. . . .”

‘Oh God! Oh God!”

Suddenly there is one long, extended roar, followed by what seem to be two shorter sounds that could be subsequent explosions or falling debris.

Next comes a series of screams.

One woman: “Oh God! Oh God!”

Second woman: “Everybody, let’s get out of here! Out!”

Third woman: “Watch the electricity lines! Watch the lines! Watch the lines! Out the back door! All the way to the back! Everybody! Hurry!”

The photos and tape are gripping but they do not provide specific, conclusive evidence of the defendants’ guilt. Meanwhile, the government still must deal with questions over John Doe No. 2 and the unidentified leg.

U.S. Atty. Patrick M. Ryan in Oklahoma City announced recently that the federal grand jury here will keep open its review of the bombing through July 1 in order to receive any other evidence that emerges on these questions or others. Several witnesses, including an attendant at the Ryder rental agency, described an unknown man in McVeigh’s company, but some investigators now believe that the witness accounts may be mistaken.

Ryan said this about John Doe No. 2: “We don’t know if he exists. Or if he exists, who he is.”

As for the leg, does it point to another shadowy figure in the bombing?

“We’re going to have to fight that demon in court,” one government source said. “The fact that the FBI worked so hard to identify that limb shows it has to belong to a bad person, or at least that’s what the defense will argue in claiming McVeigh and Nichols are not the main players.”

Leads Went Nowhere

Equally frustrating for federal investigators is the fact that many of the leads on possible suspects, while initially promising, went nowhere. For instance:

* Jeffrey Aaron Martin of Kingman, Ariz., ran a tattoo parlor near a security office where McVeigh once worked. He also attended the same high school as Fortier, the former friend of McVeigh and Nichols who has pleaded guilty to unrelated charges in the bombing.

Martin was considered a John Doe No. 2 look-alike and his name was included for weeks on FBI fingerprint lists. Today, he has left Kingman and is in hiding to avoid being hounded by federal agents.

“He doesn’t have guns. He wasn’t in the Army. He doesn’t hate the government,” said his mother, Christine Martin, also of Kingman. “But because he had a tattoo parlor and because his shop was close to where McVeigh had been, they assumed he had something to do with it.”

* Roger Barnett of Spiro, Okla., served in the Army with McVeigh. He was also once suspected of being John Doe No. 2 and of participating in an alleged Arkansas robbery that may have helped finance the bombing plot.

Barnett declined to discuss his experiences with the FBI, although family members said he has been cleared in lie-detector tests. “The whole thing has been a nightmare,” said his mother, Betty Barnett, also of Spiro.

* A man claiming to be a gun enthusiast from Michigan was arrested for a brief time at a railroad junction in France shortly after the bombing. Although some American tourists saw him and insisted that he was a dead ringer for the composite sketch of John Doe No. 2, French government officials said he ultimately was released.

“Twenty percent of our time is spent on trial preparation, and 80% on whatever the conspiracy du jour is,” said one federal source, explaining how the last nine months have gone.

Just as the government has faced its obstacles, defense attorneys have also struggled to counter potentially damaging developments about their clients.

Most notable for McVeigh are 80 letters that he wrote to a longtime friend in upstate New York in the years before the bombing. The letters showcase his transformation from an average young man to one who grew to detest the government.

McVeigh’s Views

In addition, prosecutors have located an audiotape of McVeigh that was secretly made by a co-worker in New York. Recorded by a colleague at a private security firm where the two worked, McVeigh can be heard decrying everything from income taxes to the Federal Reserve system.

Defense attorneys for both McVeigh and Nichols are strongly suggesting separate trials for their clients.

They are also fighting vigorously in pretrial proceedings to support their portrayal of their clients as law-abiding men who are only being prosecuted because of their affinity for guns and revulsion of the federal government.

A transcript of one closed-door meeting with prosecutors showed the intensity of the clash.

“You know the number of guns that he had,” Joseph Hartzler, the special prosecutor here, said about Nichols.

“Surely the fact that he had guns that he sells at gun shows does not incriminate him in a bombing case,” Woods said.

“Let’s assume they were stolen guns,” Hartzler said.

“So?” Woods said. “How does that incriminate him in a bombing case even if they were stolen guns?”

“Well,” Hartzler said, “it certainly paints a different picture of the law-abiding citizen that you’ve painted.”

Nichols has adjusted poorly to jail life. His attorneys have said that he has swung back and forth between high and low emotional points, and government records show that he has been prone to tears.

At court hearings, he dresses in casual jackets and slacks, sitting straight but betraying no emotion. His look is not frightening but frightened.

Often, his Michigan relatives come to court to offer support. After one recent hearing, his brother, James D. Nichols of Decker, Mich., once a material witness in the case, lashed out at the government.

“All three of us were set up,” he said, complaining that agents unfairly targeted him, his brother and McVeigh. “The government interviews everybody. Believe me. They don’t let anybody alone.”

But here in Oklahoma City, where the leveled corner of 5th and Harvey streets serves as a stark monument to the bombing and where almost everyone, it seems, knows someone touched by the tragedy, the impatience for a reckoning is growing.

Jannie Coverdale, a Regency Apartments resident who lost her two young grandsons in the blast, declared: “They [the defendants] should be killed. And not with a lethal injection. But in the same way they killed my grandchildren. . . . Hatred is in my heart.”

Barbara Williams, who wrote to McVeigh demanding an explanation, said: “I asked him, ‘Why? Why? Could you tell me why? What is it you believe in so strongly that you could murder so many people?’ ”