Lou Michel recalls without hesitation the moment on a May day in 1999 when Timothy McVeigh delivered a soliloquy so dark, so chilling that the hair rose on the back of the veteran reporter’s neck.
By JULIE DELCOUR World Staff Writer
Published: 4/18/2010 2:23 AM
Lou Michel recalls without hesitation the moment on a May day in 1999 when Timothy McVeigh delivered a soliloquy so dark, so chilling that the hair rose on the back of the veteran reporter’s neck.
Caught in the act of being himself, nothing else McVeigh would say during a 45-hour confession matched that moment for defining America’s worst mass murderer.
“I’ve heard your stories many times before,” McVeigh began, as if speaking directly to the survivors of the Oklahoma City bombing rather than into the tape recorder of his biographer.
“The specific details may be unique, but the truth is you’re not the first mother to lose her kid. You’re not the first grandparent to lose a granddaughter or a grandson. I’ll use the phrase…and it may sound cold but…it’s the truth: Get over it.”
On what will be the 15th anniversary of the bombing, what sets most Americans — and particularly Oklahomans — apart from McVeigh is not that they’ve had to move forward from the April 19, 1995, tragedy but that they will never “get over it.”
Monday night, MSNBC will air “The McVeigh Tapes: Confessions of an American Terrorist.” The two-hour documentary is based on recordings made by Michel and fellow Buffalo (N.Y.) News reporter Dan Herbeck inside prison walls for “American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh & The Oklahoma City Bombing.” Their 2001 book is the only authorized biography of McVeigh, whose actions killed 168 people, including 19 children, and injured 500 others.
The decision to watch the documentary is a matter of personal choice premised on whether the public cares to learn anything more of the story told, for the first time, by the terrorist himself. From that perspective, the documentary is not redundant to the $82 million investigation and federal trial that proved McVeigh’s guilt and led to his execution on June 11, 2001.
Rather, it is the first oral blueprint of the worst act of domestic terrorism on U.S. soil, a crime confession delivered as boastfully yet as clinically as if he had planned the perfect vacation rather than mass murder.
“I take full responsibility for all my actions and for who I am. I am not looking in any way, shape or form to blame anything on my parents or my upbringing.”
The chilling narrative, as MSNBC’s Rachel Maddow observes, is a cautionary tale, instructive during an era when extremist anti-government anger once again is seeping out of that subculture.
McVeigh claims to have been of clear mind when he planned and perpetrated his crime.
“A shrink would conclude, I’m not sure if they use the word psychopath or sociopath … (as having) no respect for human life. Far from that, I have great respect, but I also realize my nature as a human being and that human beings kill. This was something that I saw as a larger good…throughout the history of mankind, people have killed for what they believed was the greater good….Sometimes killing is accepted.”
McVeigh’s retaliatory act for the government’s siege on the Branch Davidian compound in Waco, Texas, which ended April 19, 1993, could have occurred elsewhere. But McVeigh settled on Oklahoma City because it met two criteria: vulnerable but isolated from other buildings to minimize collateral damage and two law enforcement agencies were in the building.
Oklahoma City was not chosen, as many believed, because McVeigh thought a former government spokesman at Waco was housed in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Instead:
“The building was chosen out of a phone book, looking in the blue pages and looking under law enforcement agencies. If you look under DEA, U.S. Marshal, ATF…If they start giving the same address you know they’re all in one building.”
McVeigh chose the attack date, he said, because April 19 carried great personal significance. It was the day in 1775 that “the shot heard round the world” was fired sparking the Revolutionary War. It also was the date, after a 51-day standoff, that 76 Branch Davidians died at Waco. McVeigh had visited there only weeks before.
His decision to take action came in the Michigan home of his co-conspirator Terry Nichols as they viewed the siege’s end.
“I’m watching flames lick out windows and…tanks ram walls. And…tears started coming down my cheeks….(I) just stood there in stunned silence. ‘What is this? What has America become?’… That scene burned into my memory. I’m emotional right now as I talk about it. I felt absolute rage.”
McVeigh said that from that time forward, his mission became clear, that he would marshal skills he learned as an Army sergeant in the Gulf War to strike back.
“With Oklahoma City being a counterattack I was only fighting by the rules of engagement that were introduced by the aggressor. Waco started this war. Hopefully, Oklahoma City would end it.”
Through computerized recreations, the documentary follows McVeigh in the moments leading up to the 9:02 a.m. bombing.
“You’ve got this adrenalin pumping but you force yourself to stay calm and not be noticed. I pulled up to the stoplight and lit the main fuse, which was approximately two minutes. You can see the ridiculous nature of someone calling me a coward, with a 7,000-pound bomb fuse burning at my back. I lit the two-minute fuse at the stoplight, and I swear to God that was the longest stoplight I ever sat at in my life. I’m thinking, ‘O.K., it’s lit. Green, green and then what? A minute, thirty?’
“I pulled up to the building, pulled the parking brake and turned (the truck) off, and then I made sure my door was locked and stepped out, walked across the street. Mission was accomplished. I knew it was accomplished, and it was over.”
But it was only beginning for many.
The documentary reveals the horror, the injuries, the loss experienced by survivors of the equivalent of a magnitude 3 earthquake. As with McVeigh, they too get a voice.
Credit union worker Patti Hall describes her crushed body, the 16 surgeries and re-learning how to walk and to talk.
Susan Urbach shows the scars on her face and recalls the 4 feet of stitches she needed after her window shattered in the Journal Record Building across the street from the Murrah.
Jannie Coverdale speaks of her two grandsons lost in the second-floor day care; Aaron would be 20 now, and Elijah, 17.
She speaks of “screaming at God,” of wishing that McVeigh would have apologized but that he never did.
“It took me a long time to get over some of that anger….You just don’t murder little kids. Sometimes I cry during the day, something is going to remind you of the bombing and then you’re… right back where you were on April 19, 1995. We don’t ever get too far from there.”