by Bill Wallace
It was ready by 18 April and they loaded it carefully onto the truck – one hundred and eight 50 pound bags of ammonium-nitrate fertiliser, three 55-gallon drums of liquid nitromethane, crates of an explosive called Tovex that was safer to transport and store than ordinary dynamite, seventeen bags of the explosive ANFO, mostly used in mining and quarrying, and shock tubes and cannon fuse to set off the explosion.
At Lake Geary County State Lake, they nailed boards to the floor of the back of the truck to hold the barrels in place. They mixed the deadly chemicals that made up the bomb and poured the liquid into the drums. They next arranged the barrels in the way that they hoped would lead to the most damage being done.
Holes drilled in the back wall of the truck’s cab would allow McVeigh to ignite the fuses but nothing was left to chance – a failsafe second fuse was provided in case the first failed. They changed one element of their plan. Originally, they were both going to drive the truck and position and ignite the bomb, but now they reasoned, it would be simpler if just one of them did it. McVeigh volunteered. Terry Nichols returned to Kansas, leaving McVeigh to drive back to Junction City where he decided on one more slight amendment to the plan, bringing forward the time at which the bomb would go off from 11 a.m. to 9 a.m. He believed it would be more effective as people arrived for work.
At 8.50 a.m. on 19 April – the anniversary of the 1993 siege at Waco in which David Koresh and seventy-four members of his Branch Davidian cult died, as well as the two hundred and twentieth anniversary of the Battle of Lexington and Concord, Timothy McVeigh drove the Ryder truck into Oklahoma City. At around 8.57 a.m., as the truck approached the Alfred P. Murrah Building, he lit the five-minute fuse. Three minutes later, at 9 a.m., he lit the two-minute fuse. He parked the truck in the building’s drop-off zone, unaware that it was directly below the building’s day centre that at that time was filled with children and employees arriving for the day. Not that he would have really cared, however. He switched off the engine, leapt from the cab and walked hurriedly away, making for the yellow Mercury. He had a couple of minutes to get out of range.
At 9.02 a.m., the truck exploded creating a huge crater 30-feet wide and 8-feet deep. The massive explosion had the desired effect, destroying a third of the concrete and glass structure and damaging or destroying three hundred and twenty-four nearby buildings. One hundred and sixty-eight people died in that dreadful moment – many of them killed by flying glass – and four hundred and fifty were injured. Among the dead were nineteen children who died as the bomb went off directly beneath them, ‘collateral damage’ to McVeigh, although he did later say that had he known the day centre was there, he might have changed the target.
McVeigh himself felt the power of the explosion as he ran towards the getaway car, being lifted off his feet by the blast. He jumped into the Mercury and drove out of the city, heading north, knowing that the emergency services were preoccupied with the mayhem back there and not interested in his car. However, as he headed north on Interstate 35, close to the town of Perry, an alert trooper noticed that the Mercury was missing its licence plates and stopped the car. McVeigh immediately informed the officer that he was in possession of a gun that was not licensed in Oklahoma – the officer could not fail to notice a bulge beneath his jacket – and he was arrested and charged with being in possession of a concealed weapon as well as for driving without licence plates.
Three days later, while in custody, he was identified by a clerk at the Dreamland Motel as Robert Kling, from a sketch created by the FBI from the description provided by workers at the Ryder agency. The truck had already been traced back there. They knew he was the Oklahoma City bomber.
Several days later, while desperate rescue efforts continued in Oklahoma City, Terry Nichols handed himself in. Incriminating material was found through-out his house when a search was carried out.
It was the largest crime task force assembled in the United States since the assassination of President John F. Kennedy. No fewer than nine hundred federal, state and local law enforcement officers participated, conducting 28,000 interviews and amassing an almost unmanageable 3.5 tons of evidence.
Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols and a man called Michael Fortier and his wife Lori were charged with the bombing.
It should have come as no surprise that Timothy McVeigh would end up in prison charged with perpetrating a vile act of revenge on authority. He had been fighting it all his life, a life dominated by guns and an obsessive sense of being constantly wronged and personally let down by the US Government.
The love of guns had been passed on to him by his grandfather, but to McVeigh guns were important. He believed in having one for every occasion, every purpose. He even thought as a kid that he might own a gunshop when he grew up. Although he might not have owned one, he certainly owned enough guns to open one. Essentially, however, he believed guns to be a tool of freedom, the means of overcoming adversity when societal breakdown finally arrived. With guns you could defend your supplies and destroy enemies. His views were so extreme that he resigned from the right-wing National Rifle Association which he believed to be too liberal.
McVeigh had been bullied at school, although he felt a certain sense of power when he would take a gun in to show off to the other kids. Ultimately, however, he was an introverted loner who found it hard to make friends. The only thing he excelled at was computing and he was already hacking into government computers at an early age.
Born into an Irish Catholic family in Pendleton, New York, his parents divorced when he was 10, while his sisters moved to Florida with their mother, he remained with his father, graduating from high school and working as a security guard before enlisting in the US Army. He was posted to Fort Riley in Kansas and when the first Gulf War broke out, was awarded a bronze star, serving as a gunner on a Bradley Fighting Vehicle with the 1st Infantry Division. It was his dream to join the Special Forces when he returned from Iraq, but his application was rejected on the grounds that he was not fit enough. He was disappointed and angry with the military. He left the Army, seething with indignation.
He found work as a security guard, but soon quit and hit the road, claiming that the Buffalo area was too liberal. He visited former Army colleagues and wrote numerous letters to newspapers, ranting about the amount of tax for which United States citizens were liable. In one he wrote about the inevitability of civil war in America and asked whether Americans were going to have to shed blood to reform the system. The level of violence he was anticipating began to escalate. To his mind only the shedding of blood would bring about the type of change he longed for.
His feelings of alienation and downright loneliness were exacerbated by his difficulties with women. He had only had one proper relationship in his life mainly because he found it almost impossible to communicate with the opposite sex. He became increasingly angry and dangerously frustrated. He took to gambling heavily but was not much good at that either, running up crippling debts on credit cards. To cap it all, he received a letter from the Army informing him that he had been overpaid $1,058 during his service and they wanted it back. He was incandescent with rage. ‘Go ahead,’ he wrote back to them, ‘take everything I own; take my dignity. Feel good as you grow fat and rich at my expense; sucking my tax dollars and property.’ He was furious with the injustice of it all.
When religious nut and cult leader, David Koresh holed up with his followers in a compound at Waco in 1993, and remained besieged by the FBI for fifty-one days, McVeigh was fascinated. He was so pleased that someone was at last making a stand against the system that he travelled to Waco to hand out pro-gun leaflets and bumper stickers outside the compound. He was later horrified when federal agents stormed the building and Koresh and his followers were all killed in the ensuing fire.
Meanwhile, he spent his life travelling the country, working at gun shows. His new obsession was an FBI marksman, Lon Horiuchi who had shot dead a woman, Vicki Weaver, at a siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho in 1992. When Horiuchi w
as acquitted of the manslaughter of Weaver, McVeigh wrote him hate mail. He handed out cards and leaflets about the incident at the gun shows he attended and when he was planning his major act of defiance, he wondered if it might be more satisfying to go after Horiuchi.
He lived in Arizona for a while, with Michael Fortier and his wife Lori, experimenting with drugs, before heading for the farm where his friend and future conspirator, Terry Nichols lived.
Meanwhile, his views were becoming increasingly extreme and his letters angrier. He wrote to the Bureau of Alcohol, Firearms and Tobacco:
ATF, all you tyrannical motherfuckers will swing in the wind one day for your treasonous actions against the Constitution of the United States. Remember the Nuremberg War Trials. But…but…but…I only followed orders…Die, you spineless cowardice bastards.
He was getting close to making it happen.
Terry Nichols, found guilty of conspiring to build a weapon of mass destruction and eight counts of involuntary manslaughter of federal officers, was sentenced to life imprisonment without possibility of parole. In 2004, he was found guilty of one hundred and sixty-one counts of first-degree murder. The jury could not agree to give him a death sentence and he received instead a life sentence for each murder. He is seeing out the rest of his life in the maximum-security Florence Federal Prison in Colorado where he alleges that others were involved who have never been charged.
Michael Fortier who helped McVeigh and Nichols to raise funds for the bombing by selling guns and who had also participated in surveying the doomed Alfred P. Murrah Building, made a plea bargain to testify against the others. He was sentenced to twelve years and on his release entered the US Government’s Witness Protection Programme, living under an assumed identity somewhere in the United States. His wife Lori was granted immunity from prosecution.
Timothy McVeigh was found guilty on eleven federal counts, including conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, use of a weapon of mass destruction, destruction by explosives and eight counts of first-degree murder. He was sentenced to death. McVeigh’s request for a nationally televised execution was denied, but to the end he remained upbeat, claiming callously that even after his execution the score would remain ‘168 to 1’ and that he would, therefore, have won.
He suddenly dropped all his appeals, without giving any reason, and an execution date was fixed for 16 May 2001. On 10 May, however, the FBI handed over to his attorneys thousands of documents that had previously been withheld. The execution was postponed for one month, the new date being 11 June.
On the eve of his execution, he invited a Californian composer, David Woodard to perform a pre-requiem, a Mass for those about to die and requested the presence of a Roman Catholic priest. His last meal consisted of two pints of mint chocolate chip ice cream and his final statement was Ernest Henley’s poem Invictus which ends:
It matters not how strait the gate
How charged with punishments the scroll
I am the master of my fate
I am the captain of my soul.
Timothy McVeigh died by lethal injection at 7.14 a.m. on 11 June 2001, the first convicted criminal to be executed by the federal government since 1963. A witness described him at the end as having a ‘totally expressionless, blank stare. He had a look of defiance and that if he could, he’d do it all over again.’
PART THREE: DEATH ROW USA
Ray Krone
Ray Krone was the one hundredth American to be exonerated from death row since the 1973 decision by the United States Supreme Court that the moratorium on executions could end. Sentenced to death in 1992, he was found guilty again at a retrial in 1994 and sentenced to forty-six years in prison. Then, in 2002, his innocence was proved by DNA testing and he was free to walk out of prison. His story is remarkable, especially as throughout he maintained an astonishing amount of dignity even when he had lost all trust in the justice system that had let him down so abominably. He was an innocent man who could well have been executed.
On the morning of 29 December 1991 the bloody, nude body of thirty-six-year-old Kimberly Ancona was found in the washroom of the CBS Lounge and Restaurant on 16th Street and Camelback Road in Phoenix of which she was the manager. She had been sexually molested and stabbed in the back several times. She had been viciously stabbed from behind and raped as her assailant held the knife to her throat to keep her quiet. It is likely that as the sexual assault was being carried out, she bled to death. There were fourteen size nine-and-a-half bloody shoe prints in the kitchen area leading to and from the place where her killer had found the knife. Apart from a drop of blood on Kimberly’s underwear, the blood all belonged to the victim and saliva found on her body suggested the perpetrator had the most common blood type. Investigators found no semen but, crucially, no DNA tests were performed. Kimberly had been bitten on the breast and the neck and it was on these bite-marks that police concentrated their efforts.
It emerged that Kimberly had told a friend that a man called Ray Krone, a regular at the bar who was a member of its darts and volleyball teams was going to help her close up that night. Officers visited Krone, an employee of the US Postal Service who had been born in 1974 and was a former US Air Force sergeant. He told them he had been at home in bed at the time of the murder, but they asked him to make an impression with his teeth on a piece of styrofoam so that they could compare his bite with the distinctive bite-marks on Kimberly Ancona’s body. He did as they asked and went home, expecting that to be the last he heard about it. But he had been injured in a car accident when younger and had undergone extensive jaw and dental surgery. Now one of his top front teeth protruded a little. He had a distinctive bite-mark and, according to the police, it was a match for the ones of Kimberly Ancona’s body.
They also found his telephone number in Ancona’s address book and it emerged that Krone had given her a lift to a party the previous Christmas. Ray Krone insisted, however, that there was nothing between them.
He was arrested and, to his stunned disbelief, charged with first-degree murder, in spite of the facts that his roommate told police that Krone was at home during the time the murder was committed; his shoe size was ten-and-a-half while bloody footprints in the bar were a size smaller; fingerprints found at the crime scene did not belong to him and body hair found on Kimberly Ancona was not his.
Unable to afford a private defence team, Krone relied on the public prosecutor. Consequently awarded $5,000 for his defence, their case, when it came to court early in 1992, was hurried and unprepared. Experts testified that the bite-marks were a perfect match for Ray Krone’s and just three- and-a-half days into the proceedings, the man the press had dubbed the ‘Snaggletooth Killer’ was found guilty of murder and kidnapping. Standing before the judge, he showed no remorse, as he said, ‘How can you show remorse for something you’re not guilty of?’ This lack of remorse contributed to him being sentenced to death, even though the trial judge noted there were lingering doubts about his guilt.
After three years on death row, watching fellow inmates being led away to their executions, Krone was granted a new trial on the grounds that some of the evidence about the bite-marks had only been disclosed to the defence by the prosecution a day before the trial started, breaching the rules regarding disclosure. The court should have granted a continu-ance or should have excluded the evidence.
Krone had learned his lesson first time round and this time his family remortgaged their house and cashed in their retirement funds while friends and family raised money in any way they could in order to enable him to hire a good private attorney and put up a proper defence. They found a man who believed in the case and took it on merely for expenses.
In February, 1996, the trial started. It lasted six-and-a-half weeks, introduced more than five hundred exhibits, and heard the testimony of more than thirty expert witnesses. Each day Ray felt more confident that his attorney was doing a good job and each day he felt he was a day closer to freedom. Finally, as the jury was sent out, he
felt sure justice was going to be done. Three-and-a-half days later they filed back in and delivered a shocking verdict. They had found him guilty again. Ray Krone was outraged and broken-hearted. He had still retained his faith in the system until that point but as he heard sobs coming from his mother and sister behind him in the courtroom and watched as the prosecution pumped the air and jumped up and down, ‘like they just won the big game,’ as he put it, his belief in justice oozed out of him.
His attorney spent the next three hours arguing for mitigation, bringing forward every single dubious element of the prosecution case and afterwards the judge did admit there remained residual and lingering doubt about Ray Krone’s guilt. Nonetheless, he had been found guilty and was sentenced to twenty-five years to life for the murder of Kimberly Ancona and twenty-one years to run consecutively for kidnap. It was a sentence of forty-six years in total, which meant Ray Krone would be eighty-one years old by the time he was released; it was as good as a death sentence. Few lived that long in America’s increasingly violent and harsh prison system.
In 2001, the Arizona State Legislature passed a new law making it easier for prisoners to request DNA testing if there were appropriate materials available, if it had never been tested before and could have a bearing on a case. In Krone’s case Kimberly Ancona’s trousers and underwear had never been tested and they were still available. The judge overruled objections by the prosecution and gave permission for DNA testing to be carried out.
It had also been learned that prior to the second trial, two of the country’s leading dental forensic experts had told the prosecuting attorney that there was no way that the teeth marks on the victim’s body had been made by Ray Krone. The attorney neglected to inform the defence about this and continued in spite of such evidence to seek the death penalty.