The Mammoth Book of New Csi (50 page)
A 10.28 a.m., it was reported that there might be another explosive device in the debris. Rescue crews and volunteers fled the scene. The police evacuated an area of four blocks. The police then seized the chance to secure an inner crime scene perimeter one block around the Murrah Building. Forty minutes later an outer perimeter was established several blocks further out. When no bomb was found, rescue operations resumed at 11.25 a.m. By then the police limited access to essential rescue, medical and construction workers, along with law enforcement personnel.
The FBI assumed jurisdiction over the crime scene, the collection of evidence and criminal investigation. Meanwhile, detectives began arriving at the command post. They attempted to locate and interview any person who may have been a witness to the explosion. They also searched the immediate area in an effort to locate surveillance cameras and went around the hospitals to locate and interview the injured. Five detectives were assigned to phone lines to gather information from the public calling to provide details on suspects. The Oklahoma City Police Department also assigned officers to liaise with the FBI and US Attorney’s office.
Technical investigation officers arrived with the crime scene van. They brought with them all available crime scene tape, latex gloves, cameras, film and other supplies, such as disinfectant soaps and evidence bags. One entered the building to help rescue the children while others taped off the area and established a triage area. Photolab personnel began photographing the area and aerials shots were taken from a helicopter within the first hour. Technical investigations personnel were also assigned to the temporary morgue where they fingerprinted and photographed the victims. Some went to the homes of suspected victims to collect fingerprints for comparison. Over 1,100 photographs were taken.
The command post was moved several times, ending up in the parking lot of One Bell Central when Southwest Bell provided the command team with all the landlines from its building.
Sniffer dogs searched the rubble and specialist listening gear that could detect a human heartbeat was brought in. Every so often, the site would fall silent in an effort to locate anyone still living. The listening gear found one buried woman, Dana Bradley, as she cried for help. For five hours the twenty-year-old lay bleeding in a foot of water with her leg pinned under a pile of shattered concrete. It could not be shifted. The rest of the building threatened to collapse. Its shaking had already temporarily driven the rescue workers from the scene once. Dr Gary Massad then faced a terrible choice. He had either to amputate her leg or let her bleed to death. Worse, as an anaesthetic could induce a fatal coma, the amputation would have to be done while Dana was fully conscious.
Dana Bradley survived. She was dragged from the ruins and rushed to hospital. But she had lost more than part of her leg as a result of the bombing; she also lost her mother and two young children.
At 4.30 p.m., President Clinton held a press conference in Washington, DC, and declared the bomb site and its surroundings a Federal Disaster Area. He mobilized the National Guard. That Sunday, he attended a memorial service in the State Fairgrounds Arena and the police went on a recruitment drive. On Monday, 24 April, the police began releasing vehicles and personal effects from within the outer perimeter. Business owners were allowed limited access to survey damage and to begin repairs. The Oklahoma City Police Department and the FBI issued over 20,000 assorted access passes and released 432 vehicles from within the perimeter. Auto-theft investigators were brought in to identify the eighty-six cars destroyed by the blast and the ensuing fires.
Rescue and recovery work had to be halted several times as high winds threatened to topple damaged buildings. But over the next seventeen days, rescue crews sifted through the debris to remove rubble in search of victims. As bodies were located, police and personnel from the medical examiner’s office placed them in the temporary morgue. Later, they were transported to the State Medical Examiner’s Office for identification. There, teams of technical investigation personnel used fingerprints, DNA profiling, X-rays, and medical and dental records. Of the 168 dead, 109 were identified by fingerprints.
Between 19 April and 5 May, 165 bodies were recovered. The Murrah Building was demolished by implosion on 23 May. The bodies of another three victims were recovered on 29 May from an area deemed to be too unstable for recovery while the building still stood. Then on 30 May, a severed leg was found, leading investigators to believe there may be one more victim. It was eventually identified as the leg of Lakesha Levy, a female member of the Air Force who had been killed in the bombing. Levy’s coffin had to be reopened so that her leg could replace another unmatched leg that had been buried with her remains. The unmatched leg had been embalmed, so it was impossible to identify the leg’s real owner. Meanwhile, forensic teams from the FBI and Oklahoma City Police Department bomb technicians moved in to shift over 460 tons of debris, looking for crime scene evidence.
Some 238 personnel from the Oklahoma City Police Department were on duty at the site each day, along with 258 officials from seventy-three municipal agencies, eight sheriffs’ departments, eight different state agencies and the National Guard.
Fifty-two persons were arrested on or near the site between 19 April and 5 May, mostly on misdemeanour charges including public drunkenness, trespassing, obstructing officers, traffic offences, curfew violations, outstanding warrants and one theft. Those arrested included several representatives of the media caught trespassing in unauthorized areas.
Twenty Oklahoma City police officers were injured in the incident, though only three were hospitalized. The remainder were treated and released or filed an injury report to document their exposure to smoke, dust and asbestos. Two officers were involved in vehicle accidents while responding to the incident. Following the demolition of the Murrah Building, one bomb technician was sent to hospital to be treated for stress and chest pains. To manage the Oklahoma City crime scene, the police put in 47,821 work hours, costing $1,122,726.
While the forensic teams went about the business of collecting crime scene evidence, there was no great mystery as to who had committed the crime. The man who had planted the bomb was in custody within ninety minutes. He had been arrested by veteran Oklahoma patrol officer Trooper Charlie Hanger on an entirely different matter. After the bombing, Hanger had initially been ordered to Oklahoma City, but was then told to stay on his normal patrol in Noble County. He was about 75 miles (120 km) away, near Perry, Oklahoma, when he saw a yellow 1977 Mercury Grand Marquis without any licence plates.
Hanger pulled the car over. In it was Timothy McVeigh. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of Abraham Lincoln on it and the words “
sic semper tyrannis
” – “thus always to tyrants”. This is the state motto of Virginia and were also the words John Wilkes Booth shouted after he shot Lincoln. On the back, it had a picture of a tree watered by droplets of blood and a quote from Thomas Jefferson: “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.”
Hanger asked McVeigh why he had no licence plates. McVeigh said he had just bought the car. He had no bill of sale or insurance, explaining that they had been posted to his home address. But he did have a driver’s licence. It carried the address of James Nichols in Decker, Michigan.
The officer then noticed that McVeigh had a gun under his jacket. He pulled out his own pistol and confiscated McVeigh’s 9 mm Glock, along with a knife and an ammunition clip. McVeigh complained that he had a licence to carry a concealed weapon. Hanger pointed out that McVeigh’s New York licence was not valid in Oklahoma. He handcuffed McVeigh and put him in the back of his patrol car. He then searched McVeigh’s car and found a commentary by seventeenth-century English philosopher John Locke, copied by hand, asserting that a man has a right to kill anyone who would take away his liberty. Along with it was a photocopy of a passage from
The Turner Diaries
, a novel written by William Luther Pierce, founder of the white nationalist organization National Alliance, under the pseudonym Andrew Macdonald. A favourite of the far right, the book tells the story of white supremacists who blow up the FBI headquarters in Washington, DC, with a truck bomb one morning at 9.15, as part of a war to overthrow the federal government and exterminate African-Americans, Jews and “race traitors”. The passage photocopied said the purpose of the fictional bombing was to wake up America.
Hanger then drove McVeigh to Noble County jail in Perry. On the way, McVeigh managed to hide a business card belonging to military-supply dealer Dave Paulson. On the back, McVeigh had written “TNT $5/stick need more” and “Call after 01 May, see if I can get some.”
At Noble County jail, McVeigh was charged with four misdemeanours – failing to display current licence plates, failing to carry proof of insurance, unlawfully carrying a weapon and transporting a loaded firearm in a motor vehicle. Normally, these charges would have been dealt with quickly and McVeigh would have been out on bail. But the local judge was tied up in a protracted divorce case and his bail hearing was held over until 21 April.
The FBI profilers got to work, trying to work out who the bombers might be. The United States was unused to acts of domestic terrorism. Their first thought was that the culprits were the group of Islamic terrorists who had tried to blow up the World Trade Center in New York two years earlier. Another possibility was that the bomb had been planted by a drugs cartel and was aimed at the Drugs Enforcement Administration that had an office in the Murrah Building. Psychological profiler Clinton R.Van Zandt had been an FBI negotiator at the siege in Waco, Texas, where David Koresh and the Branch Davidians held off the federal authorities for fifty days. Van Zandt noticed that the day of the bombing, 19 April 1995, was two years to the day since the siege had ended with a fire and firefight that killed seventy-six people, including more than twenty children. Terrorism expert Louis R. Mizell Jr also noted that the date was the anniversary of the Battles of Lexington and Concord, the first military engagements of the American Revolutionary War, commemorated as Patriot’s Day and revered by the growing militia movement. And 19 April 1995 itself was the day that white supremacist Richard Snell was executed for the murder of a pawn-shop owner who he believed to be Jewish. He also killed black Arkansas State Trooper Louis P. Bryant. It is also alleged that he plotted to blow up a gas pipeline near Fulton, Arkansas, and the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City.
Meanwhile, crime scene evidence came into play. When the truck exploded, the rear axle flew through the air and crashed into the hood of a Ford Festiva belonging to Richard Nichols, injuring his wife and nephew. The vehicle identification number on the axle and remnants of the licence place found on the mangled bumper led agents to Elliott’s Body Shop, a Ryder Rental outlet in Junction City, Kansas. The truck had been rented to one Robert Kling. This was the name of a soldier who McVeigh had known in the army.
Eldon Elliott, the owner of Elliot’s Body Shop, helped sketch artists produce two drawings – one of the man who rented the truck, the second of another man who had been in the rental office at the same time. The picture of the man calling himself Kling was recognized by Lea McGown, the manager of the Dreamland motel. She said he had arrived in a yellow Marquis. Later, he had parked a large Ryder truck in the motel’s parking lot and he had signed in under the name Timothy McVeigh. It was odd that McVeigh signed in under his real name when he had hired the truck under an alias, but McGown had an explanation. The motel was used by prostitutes and their customers, and she had learnt how to spot men who signed in under a false name.
“People are so used to signing their own name,” she said, “that when they go to sign a phoney name, they almost always go to write, and then look up for a moment as if to remember the new name they want to use. That’s what he did, and when he looked up I started talking to him, and it threw him.”
McVeigh had also given the address of James Nichols’s farm in Decker that was on his driver’s licence – and was now on the charge sheet at police station in Perry. The connection was made by the computer at the National Crime Information Center in Washington, DC, and soon FBI agents were on their way to Perry by helicopter.
Although McVeigh was the subject of a nationwide manhunt, his hearing on the gun charges were scheduled for that day – and he may well have been released. McVeigh was waiting outside the courtroom when the Sheriff Jerry Cook got a message that he was wanted for the Oklahoma City bombing. Officers simply led him back to his cell, saying: “The judge isn’t ready for you.”
Back in his cell, another prisoner asked McVeigh if he was the bomber. McVeigh ignored the question. Soon, he was taken to a room where two FBI special agents awaited. Special Agent Floyd Zims said: “You may have some information about the bombing. I’m going to read you your rights.”
McVeigh asked for a lawyer. Meanwhile, a hostile crowd gathered outside. McVeigh’s request for a bulletproof vest was denied. FBI agents obtained a warrant to search the home of McVeigh’s father. As the address given on his driver’s licence was that of James Nichols in Decker, Michigan, the FBI began looking for Nichols and his brother Terry, another former soldier that McVeigh had met in the army. Hearing that the FBI was after him, Terry Nichols turned himself into the police station in Herington, Kansas.
Searching Terry Nichols’s home, the FBI found blasting caps and ammonium nitrate, a fertilizer often used in home-made bombs. There were also barrels made of the same plastic as fragments found at the crime scene, a drill that was shown to have been used to drill out a lock on a quarry from which explosives had been stolen, thirty-three firearms and telephone cards that McVeigh had used when shopping for bomb-marking equipment, along with books on making bombs and a copy of
Hunter
, another novel by William Luther Pierce, where a lone hunter murders interracial couples and Jews. FBI agents also found a map of Oklahoma City, marked with the place McVeigh had left his getaway car. James Nichols was also arrested, but released after thirty-two days due to lack of evidence. He was indicted on charges that he had helped his brother and McVeigh detonate a small test explosion on his farm. These indictments were eventually dismissed.
