Oklahoma City bomber Timothy J. McVeigh told me he did not know what he would encounter on the other side, once the chemicals from the lethal injection killed him.
But on the chance the Pendleton native had an express ticket to hell, he defiantly said he would be in the company of many generals and world leaders who murdered their opposition.
As the first and only journalist to repeatedly interview McVeigh face to face, my job was to keep him talking.
My colleague Dan Herbeck and I needed every scintilla of his thought process, no matter how outrageous, so that we could provide a window into the worst domestic terrorist in U.S. history. We were working on writing a book, “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing.”
Time was sh
McVeigh had a date with the executioner. He had been convicted of delivering a homemade, 7,000-pound truck bomb that killed 168 innocent people and wounded
more than 800 in and around the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.
For days, I sat across from McVeigh at the “super-max” prison in Colorado and later on death row in Indiana as he methodically explained his reasoning for the bombing.
He never showed any emotions for the victims, except flashes of anger and profanity.
How dare they call him a coward for lighting the bomb’s two fuses and walking away? McVeigh repeatedly assured me that if the fuses failed to ignite the bomb, he would have returned and shot it at close range with his handgun, sealing his own fate.
It wasn’t easy sitting in a chair across from McVeigh, in a bunker-like concrete cubicle, separated by a thick sheet of Plexiglas with a circular steel vent in its center to allow for our exchange of words.
But as a journalist, it was more than merely my job.
When McVeigh had asked his father, Bill, if he knew of a journalist who could tell his story, my name was suggested.
I lived in rural Niagara County 15 minutes from Bill McVeigh’s house and would often stop to say hello, long after other reporters had lost interest. A tall man who is painfully shy, Bill and I often discussed our common love of vegetable gardening. His son’s name rarely came up.
When Dan and I did write stories about McVeigh or his family, we remembered that they, too, were entitled to fair treatment.
McVeigh had received countless letters from journalists at much bigger newspapers than The Buffalo News, but he was unimpressed with their typed requests beneath fancy letterheads.
After Bill suggested my name, McVeigh sent me a letter asking if I would be interested in writing a book on his life.
And so began an exchange of several letters before our first set of in-person interviews.
Unlike other reporters, I wrote my letters in long hand and on cheap yellow legal pad paper. To solidify our connection, I shared details of my life with him.
I was married and had three kids. My boys and I were active in Cub Scouts. McVeigh, a survivalist, loved the outdoors and shared tips for camping out.
It was mundane yet meaningful enough to unlock the prison doors within a couple of months.
When I said I wanted to include Dan in helping write the book, I explained that there was a lot of ground to cover before the execution. Dan is a great journalist and a guy I would trust my life with.
Tim had served in the Army during the First Gulf War in Iraq and had “battle buddies” to whom he had entrusted his life.
I believe he viewed Dan as my battle buddy. In time, Dan would also sit down with McVeigh for an interview and regularly correspond in letters.
As a civilian, McVeigh was on the side of militias. The enemy was the U.S. government because of the role of federal agents at Ruby Ridge and Waco. In both those events, civilians had been killed.
It soon became clear to me that McVeigh had two sides. There was the friendly, boyish Tim who would go on about the Buffalo Bills or his love of his grandfather who taught him about guns.
But when he discussed how he carried out the bombing, he was a military tactician, hiding or lacking any compassion for those he had blown up. If anything, he took pride in what he had done.
In that prison cubicle, only a few feet away from McVeigh, I sometimes felt like I had stepped into an alternate universe. Was I really hearing this? But there I was sitting and nodding, while my soul ached.
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