Blood and Politics (80 page)

The possible involvement of “others unknown” did not lessen the guilt of Timothy McVeigh, the prosecution had argued. The jury agreed, and he was sentenced to death.
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With Timothy McVeigh on death row, the question now presented itself: Would Terry Nichols soon join him? When that trial began the following October, the public’s attention to bombing-related events had already dimmed. In part, the thirst for justice had been sated by McVeigh’s conviction earlier in the year. In addition, Nichols’s face and name were less well known than McVeigh’s. Instead of a televised “perp walk” in a prison orange jumpsuit, Nichols had quietly turned himself into the FBI for questioning.

Nichols also presented himself much differently from McVeigh. He seemed almost like a hapless character, blown by the winds of fate. He had fathered several children and joined the army only after a failed marriage. He had remarried and settled down in the village of Herington, Kansas, where his relationship to white nationalism was conflicted. On one hand, after his first marriage failed he had married a dark-skinned woman born in the Philippines, a union that would have placed Nichols in William Pierce’s “race traitor” category. On the other hand, Nichols had used the white citizenship theories of the Posse Comitatus and declared himself a “sovereign” citizen, in order to escape payment of a large outstanding debt. And like a Montana Freeman, Nichols had written a phony “fractional reserve check” when a court ordered him to pay the debt.
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While McVeigh had little association with these Posse Comitatus–style doctrines, and Nichols had never joined the Klan, these were differences that only proved that the white nationalist movement was broader than any one organization and that both men could find a home in its ranks.

In contrast with McVeigh’s attorney, Stephen Jones, who had never convincingly found a theme for his defense, Nichols’s attorney, Michael Tigar,
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stuck to a single refrain about the morning of April 19, 1995: Terry Nichols was absent from the scene of the crime. He was at home in Kansas, “building a life” with his new family, not in Oklahoma City, destroying the lives of others. It was a claim that Stephen Jones had not made about Tim McVeigh.
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While Jones had argued volubly that Elohim City was at the center of the bombing conspiracy, he had never called a witness from there to testify. Michael Tigar’s defense team called two, Joan Millar and Carol Howe.

The two women testified quite differently. Joan Millar, age fifty-six, mother of five, and a professionally trained nurse from Canada, had married into the family clan at Elohim City and remained a true believer in the particular blend of Christian Identity preached by the camp’s patriarch, Robert Millar.
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In contrast with Joan Millar’s years of tough backwoods living, Carol Howe, age twenty-six, had grown up on the high side of Tulsa society. The daughter of a prominent CEO, she spent a couple of youthful years as a white power skinhead.
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By Millar’s account, Elohim City was a “village” that eschewed violence and hot “antigovernment” rhetoric. Howe, on the other hand, painted it as a “compound” seething with aggression.
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Millar told the court that she had received a call in early April 1995 from a male she did not know. She testified that the caller said that he had met some of the young men from Elohim City at a gun show and would be in the area within the next couple of weeks, and he wanted to know if he could come and visit. Joan Millar’s testimony could have been the first to conclusively tie the Oklahoma City bombing to one of the many characters moving in and out of Elohim City. But it did not. According to phone records, the caller that day was definitely McVeigh. But if Joan Millar told the truth as she knew it, the two men had met in a gun show, a business card had exchanged hands, and that had been the end of it. The telephone records showed no other telephone contact between McVeigh and Elohim City.
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The defense also called Carol Howe, who told the jury that she had visited Elohim City on numerous occasions and had seen Tim McVeigh there in July 1994, talking with Andreas Strassmeir and one other man. If true, Howe’s testimony could have changed the arrangement of all the known facts in the bombing and implicated Strassmeir as well as several of his known off-camp comrades in a criminal conspiracy with McVeigh. But cross-examination by government prosecutors threw significant doubt upon her testimony. For example, Howe acknowledged that law enforcement officials had shown her pictures of McVeigh on April 21,
just two days after the bombing, but that she did not point to him as someone she had seen in any capacity and certainly not as a visitor to Elohim City. Three days later, however, after video footage of McVeigh had been burned into the national psyche, Howe told officials that she recognized McVeigh’s face, this time from a Klan rally—not at Elohim City. Only much later, after she learned that a possible connection between McVeigh and Elohim City was being explored, did Howe testify that she had seen him at the camp. It looked as if Howe rechiseled the facts to conform to whatever theory would do the most harm to her former comrades.
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Michael Tigar, like Stephen Jones before him, could not make a complete defense out of these tidbits of information.

The fifteen minutes of fame accorded Carol Howe pointed to a larger issue, the desperate need to fill the gaping holes in the federal prosecution of McVeigh and Nichols. John Doe Two had never been found. How the truck bomb had been constructed, as well as who helped mix the fertilizer and fuel oil, remained a mystery, as did other important parts of the bomb plot.
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Nevertheless, the federal jury convicted Nichols of conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter, a charge often used to convict drunk drivers involved in mortal accidents. They found him not guilty on two crucial counts, murder and using a truck bomb for murder. He was sentenced to life in prison.
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Terry Nichols would live, but Timothy McVeigh was executed at a federal penitentiary in Indiana on June 11, 2001.
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Yet the multiple conspiracy theories about the Oklahoma City bombing did not die with him, nor would the violent subculture that had produced the bombing in the first place.

In November 1997, even as the Nichols trial was in progress, a set of murders were committed by skinheads in Denver: First a twenty-five-year-old from a financially successful home stole a car and led police on a thirty-mile chase, before shooting and killing a police officer and then himself. Just days later a nineteen-year-old skin shot a Mauritanian immigrant waiting to take a bus to work at a local hotel. When a woman standing by came to aid the dying immigrant, the nineteen-year-old shot her also, leaving that young mother partially paralyzed.
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In addition to the unrelenting violence of skinheads and militiamen, a wing of the antiabortion movement continued to take up arms against women’s clinics and, in this case, gay people. On January 29, 1998, one week after the twenty-fifth anniversary of the
Roe v. Wade
Supreme Court decision, a bombing in Alabama repeated the malevolence, if not the size, of the murders in Oklahoma City. Placed outside the New
Woman All Women Health Care clinic in Birmingham, it blew a crater out at the entrance. A homemade antipersonnel bomb stuffed with nails, it killed an off-duty cop working as a security guard and permanently maimed a nurse. Unlike most of the anticlinic bomb attacks that preceded it, this bombing received extensive and prolonged media coverage.
The New York Times
called it “historic.”
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Doctors, nurses, and clinic personnel had already been shot to death in the war to end abortion, but this was the first fatal clinic bombing.

Federal agents immediately linked the Birmingham investigation to a set of cases in nearby Atlanta that remained painfully unsolved after almost two years. In July 1996 a forty-pound antipersonnel bomb had exploded in a crowded park during the Olympics. Nail shrapnel killed a bystander, another died soon after from heart failure, and another one hundred were wounded. The FBI completely bungled that investigation, falsely naming as a suspect a security guard who had volunteered some information at the time.
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In January 1997 a bomb tore into a women’s clinic in suburban Sandy Springs. No one was injured in the initial explosion, but a second device, loaded once again with nail shrapnel and timed for the arrival of police personnel, injured six. One month later, in February 1997, another bomb stuffed with nail shrapnel blasted an Atlanta nightclub favored by lesbian patrons and injured five. Investigators safely detonated a second bomb at the scene, aimed at rescue workers like those at the Sandy Springs clinic.

The first break in all four cases came in Birmingham. Passersby noticed a man leaving the area of the clinic take off a brown wig and drive away in a gray Nissan pickup truck with North Carolina tags. Authorities traced the truck to Eric Robert Rudolph, an otherwise unknown thirty-one-year-old. At the same time that agents were tracking Rudolph, regional media outlets received a letter purporting to be from a group calling itself the Army of God and claiming responsibility for the bomb.
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This letter closely resembled letters from the same putative Army of God that had been received in the Atlanta clinic and lesbian nightclub bombings. With its focus on abortion, a McVeigh-like invocation of Waco, and the call for death of the New World Order, this letter located its author at the juncture of white nationalism and antiabortion zealotry. Further, within days authorities found the truck, a trailer where Rudolph last lived, and a storage locker he had rented. Forensic evidence was also found, and the FBI named Rudolph a suspect in the Birmingham case within the week. Nevertheless, the FBI could not effect an arrest. Despite an intense manhunt involving one hundred agents, heat-seeking detection devices, helicopters, and all manner of technological wizardry, Rudolph eluded capture. Nine months later the feds indicted him in all
three of the Atlanta cases as well, but they still could not find him.
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After its successful conclusion of the Freemen siege in Montana in 1996, the FBI may have shed some of its image as “jack-booted” thugs, but the feds’ inability to track Rudolph or crack the mystery surrounding his Army of God revealed the large holes in its post–Oklahoma City crack-down.

Eric Rudolph had been raised in a household thick with Christian Identity. Born in 1966, young Eric lived his first years with four brothers and one sister in southern Florida. After his father died, mother Patricia moved her children several times. One stop was western Missouri, where Eric and a younger brother lived for several months in the early 1980s on the Church of Israel settlement run by Dan Gayman, a Christian Identity leader. Gayman promoted the two seed theory that Jews were literally (and biologically) of the devil. His theological influence then extended to several members of Robert Mathews’s Order, and Gayman received some of the stolen armored car money. Gayman eventually testified for the prosecution in the Fort Smith trial, and he returned ten thousand dollars of the loot. It is not known if Eric Rudolph actually met any of Mathews’s gang at that time, but deeds of their exploits filled the air that the impressionable postadolescent teenager breathed. At one point he even dated one of Gayman’s daughters for several months.
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Most of Eric’s youth was not spent in Missouri, however, but in Cherokee County, North Carolina, a mountainous area abutting the Nantahala National Forest, where Georgia and Tennessee meet North Carolina in the heart of Appalachia. The family settled again near a Christian Identity outpost, this one run by Nord Davis. Davis distributed Posse Comitatus–type materials in the early 1980s, and he also directly assisted anti-Communist Nicaraguan contras through an outfit known as Civilian Material Assistance, run by a former Klansman.
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Although Rudolph later claimed that he was not an Identity believer or a racist, his youthful immersion in the white supremacist movement undoubtedly helped him hear its call to arms.
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In 1986, Rudolph enlisted in the army, tried to qualify for the elite Special Forces but washed out, and was later discharged. He then returned to Cherokee County, worked part-time as a carpenter, and briefly trafficked in homegrown marijuana, according to ex-family members. Freed from the constraints of working a regular nine-to-five job, he also spent much of his time in the backwoods. He had hiked through the forests and explored caves and mountainsides while still a teenager. He obviously knew their secret places just the way an urban youth might
travel the narrow alleyways of his own neighborhood. Rudolph lived quietly in this underground economy while apparently preparing to do death to the New World Order. After the Birmingham bombing, as federal agents sent bloodhounds up his trail, Eric Robert Rudolph simply disappeared.

The search for Rudolph in 1998 soon turned into its own drama. He became the subject of a couple of laudatory country music songs, residents started sporting bumper stickers reading “Run Eric Run,” and the federals ran into a wall of silence.
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With television and newspaper attention drawn to the region, Bo Gritz also marched into the forest with his own band of searchers, hoping to reprise his great adventure, negotiating the surrender of Randy Weaver six years before. He spent a week with his posse, unsuccessfully beating the Appalachian bushes, and then retreated, as he had after his unsuccessful foray onto the Montana Freemen’s ranch.
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For the next five years, Eric Robert Rudolph defied capture, until a local policeman caught him in 2003, rummaging through a grocery Dumpster in Murphy, North Carolina. He pleaded guilty and was sentenced to life in prison without parole.
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