What is he doing? Hanger wondered.24
McVeigh, according to his biographers, was weighing options. Holstered beneath his windbreaker was a Glock semiautomatic pistol. McVeigh considered drawing the handgun and shooting the trooper on the side of the highway. Had Hanger been a federal agent, McVeigh would probably have opened fire, the biographers wrote. “But McVeigh had a grudging respect for local and state cops and sheriffs, and their right to do their jobs. . . . He would not draw his gun on this officer of the law.”25
Hanger shouted again, “Driver, step out of the car.” With this, McVeigh slid out of the car and walked toward Hanger, who stepped around his open car door. They met between the two cars. “The reason I have stopped you is because you don’t have a tag on your car,” Hanger said. McVeigh cast a glance at the rear bumper, where the license plate should have been. “I knew I did not have a tag,” he told Hanger. “I just recently purchased this and I haven’t had time . . . to purchase a tag.”
Odd, Hanger thought: Why would he look at the bumper if he knew he had no license plate?
The driver had no bill of sale and no proof of insurance. As wretched as it was, Hanger was beginning to think the Mercury might have been stolen.
“Well, do you have a driver’s license?” Hanger asked.
McVeigh said yes, and he reached for the billfold in a back pocket of his jeans. As he turned, the windbreaker tightened across his chest and Hanger could make out a bulge near McVeigh’s left arm.
McVeigh gave Hanger the driver’s license, which the trooper tucked into his gun belt. “Now,” he said, “I want you to take both hands and I want you to slowly unzip your jacket, and I want you to slowly pull it back so I can look under it.”
As McVeigh unzipped the windbreaker, he looked at Hanger and said, “I have a weapon.”
With that, Hanger grabbed the jacket bulge and spun McVeigh around. The trooper pulled his handgun and held it to the back of McVeigh’s head. “Raise your hands,” he ordered, “and walk to the trunk of your car.”
McVeigh told the trooper as they walked, “My weapon is loaded.” Hanger nudged his handgun to the back of McVeigh’s head. “So is mine.”
He spread McVeigh on the trunk and pulled back his windbreaker. McVeigh was carrying his Glock in what Hanger recognized as a suicide holster—the barrel pointed upward, toward the armpit. Hanger realized why McVeigh had told him the gun was loaded: he feared it would discharge accidentally while Hanger gripped it tightly.
Hanger tossed the Glock to the shoulder of the highway. He did the same for a sheathed knife McVeigh had clipped to his belt. McVeigh was handcuffed and seated in the cruiser. Hanger retrieved the weapons and unloaded the Glock. In the chamber was a Black Talon, a bullet known as a cop-killer.26
The trooper did not associate McVeigh with the bombing in Oklahoma City and might have let him go with a ticket, if not for the concealed handgun. Hanger drove the handcuffed McVeigh to Perry, Oklahoma, seat of Noble County, and booked him on the concealed weapon charge and on three other misdemeanors.
McVeigh spent two days in jail in Perry. Normally, he would have been arraigned on the day after his arrest. But the local judge, Dan G. Allen, had cleared his docket that day for a divorce case. And the day after that, Allen’s son missed a bus to a band excursion in Stillwater, Oklahoma. So the judge had to drive the boy to the outing, which meant Allen was late arriving that morning, again delaying McVeigh’s arraignment.27
By then, federal authorities had tracked McVeigh to the jail in Perry. Key to their doing so was the rear axle of the Ryder truck in which McVeigh had packed the bomb. The explosion blew apart the truck, sending the axle skyward, spinning like a boomerang.28 It landed some 200 yards away, striking a small red Ford before clanging into the street. Etched on the axle was the truck’s identification number, which authorities traced to Ryder headquarters in Florida. They quickly learned that the bomb truck had been rented at Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas, to a “Robert Kling,” one of McVeigh’s several aliases. The body shop owner and two employees described “Kling” to FBI agents and, from their descriptions, a composite sketch was prepared. It looked much like McVeigh.
That’s what the owner of the Dreamland Hotel in Junction City told investigators when they visited her. McVeigh had stayed at the Dreamland four nights, registering in his own name and giving an address in Decker, Michigan. Agents ran McVeigh’s name through the National Crime Information Center database—and learned that Hanger had done the same two days before.29
That McVeigh was still in jail on April 21 was a stroke of good fortune. Divine intervention, Hanger later would say. The judge was about to convene McVeigh’s arraignment, which promised to be a routine hearing for a first-time offender. That meant McVeigh was about twenty minutes from being set free on bail when federal authorities called, asking that a hold be placed on him.30 Word spread quickly that a suspect in the bombing had been tracked down and was in custody in Perry. Some 300 people soon gathered outside the Noble County jail, waiting for federal agents and police to lead McVeigh from the building and into a waiting van. He was wearing an orange jumpsuit and was manacled at the hands and feet. His pinched features, military-style haircut, and the hint of fear that played across his face gave McVeigh an odd resemblance to a possum. He seemed to be surveying the buildings nearby for snipers. Shouts rose from the crowd: “Murderer!” “Killer!”31
The first public glimpse of McVeigh in custody was disconcerting: the bombing suspect was a white American, not a foreigner.32 He clearly was not of Middle Eastern descent. For the two days after the attack, the prevailing presumption had been that Middle Eastern terrorists blew up the Murrah Building. The U.S. news media rode that angle hard, and they were wrong, a telling example of how news reports in the first hours and days after a disaster can be terribly misleading. It is a vulnerability the news media seldom seem to anticipate, or to learn from.33
Rumor and extravagant conjecture had swirled in Oklahoma City in the bombing’s wake. Stephen Sloan of the University of Oklahoma, a terrorism expert who lived just blocks from the Murrah Building, was thrust into sudden prominence. He recalled being approached that day by an African-American journalist who said she heard the attack had been committed by “a black Muslim group.” Sloan also said he took a call from a West Coast radio station inquiring whether it was possible the CIA was involved in the bombing.34
But suspicions fell most decidedly on Middle East terrorism, as speculation congealed with rumor into what seemed to be a plausible and urgent narrative.35 Sloan, himself, went on CNN that night to say: “I think there’s a real possibility that it was a Middle Eastern group” that attacked the Murrah Building.36 Connie Chung, who was in her final weeks as a CBS News anchor,37 declared at the outset of a special report from Oklahoma City that night: “This is the deadliest terror attack on U.S. soil ever. A U.S. government source has told CBS News that it has Middle East terrorism written all over it.”38 On ABC News, the network’s national security correspondent, John McWethy, reported that “if you talk to intelligence sources and to law enforcement officials, they all say . . . that this particular bombing probably has roots in the Middle East.”39 On CNN earlier in the day, news anchor Frank Sesno said: “We have been told that a number of extremist Islamic groups have been traced to the Oklahoma area, and while there is no specific link yet [to the bombing], I’ve been told that they are among those who are being looked at very, very closely.”40
The news media leaned heavily that day on familiar points of reference—on roughly similar cases of spectacular terrorism that had targeted the United States or American interests abroad. Among them were the terrorist attack that had killed six people at the World Trade Center in February 1993 and the truck bombing at the Marine Corps barracks in Lebanon in October 1983. The devastated Murrah Building bore visual similarities to the facade of the U.S. embassy in Beirut after it was bombed in April 1983. Beirut was an angle not lost on journalists. A Wall S
treet Journal story likened the attack in Oklahoma City to a “Beirut-style car bombing.”41 The Daily Oklahoman said the glass and debris littering the city’s streets brought to mind “Bosnia or Beirut, not Oklahoma City.”42
The suspected Middle Eastern connection was not a matter of invention by journalists.43 Their sources bore no small measure of blame. Notable in this respect were the FBI officials who put out word on the day of the bombing that they were looking for three suspects, at least one of whom was believed to be of “Middle Eastern descent.”44 A USA Today report said that was the “only hard lead” to emerge on the day of the bombing.45 The Oklahoma Highway Patrol issued an all-points bulletin for the trio, which was thought to have escaped the city in a brown pickup truck with tinted windows.46 Charles Hanger, the trooper who arrested McVeigh, was sent to Interstate 35 to watch for suspects in the pickup truck. Hanger said he spent “a considerable amount of time” out there, but saw no pickup truck that matched the description he had been given.47
Later, CNN aired the names of three men of Middle Eastern descent who had been detained for questioning. Their names were flashed on the screen beneath the logo: “Bombing in Oklahoma City.”48 It turned out they were wanted for questioning in an immigration matter unrelated to the bombing.
The most stupefying, Kafkaesque encounter with fate on the day of the bombing was that of Ibrahim Abdullah Hassan Ahmad, a Jordanian-American. On the morning of the bombing, Ahmad had set out from Oklahoma City to travel by way of Chicago and Rome to Jordan, where he planned to visit his ailing grandfather and other relatives. Ahmad, who had lived in Oklahoma City for thirteen years, said he was unaware of the bombing until he reached Chicago, where customs agents confronted and detained him. FBI agents questioned him at length about his American citizenship, his religious practices, and his acquaintances with Muslims in Oklahoma City. His luggage, which went on to Rome, stirred suspicions, too: in it, he had packed electronic devices such as a telephone-fax machine and a video-cassette recorder, items that typically are expensive in Jordan. His luggage also contained wires and tools, which also raised suspicions. Eventually, Ahmad was permitted to resume his trip. Before leaving Chicago, he said, authorities at the airport apologized to him for his inconvenience.49 Ahmad had missed his flight to Rome, so he was routed through Heathrow airport in London.
At Heathrow, Ahmad was detained again, strip-searched, and questioned for four to five hours. “I was treated like a dog,” Ahmad said.50 He was marched in handcuffs through the airport and put aboard a flight to Washington, D.C. His flight was met at Dulles International Airport outside Washington by federal agents who whisked him away in a van with darkened windows. He was read Miranda rights, and he “really freaked out,” he later said. “I thought ‘this is it, they are going to frame me for the Oklahoma City bombing.’”51 Word soon leaked that Ahmad was being questioned by authorities. Back in Oklahoma City, trash was dumped on his front yard, he said, and insults were shouted at his family, who took refuge with friends. Ahmad was set free on April 21, 1995, the day federal authorities took McVeigh into custody.
The arrest of McVeigh and reports that he nursed grudges against the federal government opened a fresh vein of speculation in the news media. Suspicions about a Middle East connection were supplanted by speculation about a conspiracy of far-right-wing militia mistrustful of the federal government. A New York Times report said as much, four days after the bombing: “Federal investigators said they believed there was a broader plot behind the bombing and were searching for evidence of a conspiracy hatched by several self-styled militiamen who oppose gun laws, income taxes and other forms of government control.”52 The Times returned to that theme a few days later, in a news report that declared:
Whoever blew up the Federal building in Oklahoma City used tactics that are strikingly similar to those urged by far-right advocates of “leaderless resistance” against the Government, according to civil liberties experts who keep track of militant groups. The idea was developed by two former leaders of the Ku Klux Klan and has been promoted by some of the self-styled citizen militias that have sprung up across the county. “Leaderless resistance” refers to the need to keep the planning of terrorist attacks confined to individuals or very small groups to prevent infiltration by the police.53
The militia connection was at best tenuous. Although McVeigh harbored extreme, antigovernment views, he never was conclusively linked to antigovernment militias. He certainly was neither a leader of, nor an activist in, such extremist groups.54 McVeigh insisted that he, alone, had rented the truck in which he built the bomb; that he, alone, had driven the truck to the Murrah Building; and that he, alone, knew when the attack would be carried out. His accomplices were Nichols and, less centrally, Michael Fortier, another Army buddy who lived in Arizona and who knew generally about McVeigh’s plans.
Nichols and Fortier were supporting cast, McVeigh insisted, and federal agents found both of them quickly. The belief that the conspiracy was small and amateurish rested on more than McVeigh’s word: investigators had pieced together what amounted to a diary of the bomb plot, in the form of records of telephone calls that McVeigh and Nichols had placed in developing their plans.55 They placed the calls using a debit card obtained using false names. And the nearly 700 calls they charged to the debit card revealed no compelling evidence of conspirators other than McVeigh, Nichols, and Fortier.56
But suspicions of a wider and more ominous conspiracy have never fallen away.57 They endure in part because of the desperate search after the bombing for a suspected accomplice who, the authorities eventually concluded, was a mirage. The suspected accomplice was neither Terry Nichols nor Michael Fortier. He was known as John Doe No. 2, and he owed his existence to a succession of three artists’ sketches drawn for the FBI in the days after the bombing. The first sketch was drawn April 20, 1995, based on recollections of the owner, the clerk, and the mechanic at Elliott’s Body Shop in Junction City, where McVeigh had rented the truck. He did so under the alias “Robert Kling.” Their descriptions of “Kling” were turned into a sketch of John Doe No. 1, which resembled McVeigh. “Kling,” they told investigators, was accompanied by a man who had lurked in the background. The body shop mechanic, Tom Kessinger, said he had the best look at John Doe No. 2 and recalled him as a beefy guy with dark hair and a tattoo showing on one arm.
The sketch of John Doe No. 1 helped authorities determine that “Kling” was McVeigh and led them to the Noble County jail. The release of the sketch of John Doe No. 2 brought an avalanche of tips—and to the arrests of at least a dozen men—including a fugitive in Arizona, an Army deserter in California, a drifter in Missouri,58 and an Australian tourist who was held at gunpoint in Canada.59 None of them was the elusive suspect, and the manhunt came up empty.
As it turned out, the FBI’s sketchwork was inexact and misleading. As Peter Carlson of the Washington Post later reported, Kessinger, the mechanic, never saw John Doe No. 2 from the front. Yet the sketch the FBI produced was a front view. Kessinger remembered John Doe No. 2 wearing a baseball cap; the FBI sketch showed him hatless.60 A second sketch was produced, this one showing a cap atop John Doe No. 2. Not long afterward, authorities released a third sketch of John Doe No. 2, this one showing him in profile. But by then the first sketches of John Doe No. 2—showing him glowering and face-on—had been burned into the public’s consciousness.61
The third sketch showed John Doe No. 2 in a cap emblazoned with a vivid flame-like or zig-zag design, not unlike the logo of the Carolina Panthers, a new team in the National Football League. Todd Bunting, a twenty-three-year-old Army private stationed at Fort Riley, Kansas, had such a hat. And he had been at Elliott’s Body Shop almost exactly twenty-four hours after McVeigh was there.62 Bunting went there with a friend, Army Sergeant Michael Hertig, who rented a Ryder truck for a move to Georgia. Bunting and Hertig were off-duty and wearing civilian clothes. Bunting had a tattoo on his arm, and he wore his Carolina Panthers cap.
The FBI fo
und and questioned Bunting and Hertig, and theorized that Kessinger, the mechanic, had confused McVeigh’s visit with that of Bunting and Hertig a day later, a phenomenon known as “unconscious transference.”63 Kessinger ultimately acknowledged as much after being shown photographs of Bunting wearing the Carolina Panthers cap and clothing he wore that day. John Doe No. 2, the FBI concluded, was Todd Bunting—and Bunting had nothing to do with the Oklahoma City bombing.64 The FBI’s theory explained away McVeigh’s purported sidekick when he rented the truck. But it by no means did away with John Doe No. 2.65 His specter surfaced conspicuously at Terry Nichols’s trial in federal court in late 1997.
Nichols was tried separately from McVeigh, who was convicted by a federal jury and later sentenced to death. At trial, one of Nichols’s lawyers, Ron Woods, claimed that authorities had nabbed the wrong suspect, that the shadowy John Doe No. 2 was McVeigh’s real accomplice.66 Prosecutors dismissed the John Doe No. 2 defense strategy as a red herring. But Nichols’s lawyers sowed enough doubt at the trial to win something of a split verdict from the jury: he was convicted of conspiring with McVeigh and of eight counts of involuntary manslaughter, but he was acquitted of more serious charges of using a weapon of mass destruction. Nichols was sentenced to life imprisonment.67
The unending speculation about John Doe No. 2—and the notion that unpunished conspirators were still at large—led in 1997 to the empanelling of a grand jury in Oklahoma City. The grand jury took testimony over eighteen months and, in the end, endorsed the FBI theory that John Doe No. 2 was Todd Bunting and that Bunting had no connection to McVeigh or the Murrah Building bombing. In its report, the grand jury went to lengths to underscore just how improbable John Doe No. 2 was, and how erratic and uneven the witness descriptions of him really were. The grand jury said twenty-six witnesses testified that they had seen someone resembling the phantom suspect—but the witness accounts differed dramatically. Based on those accounts, the grand jury said, John Doe No. 2 ranged in height from 5-feet-3 to 6-feet-3. He weighed anywhere from 140 pounds to 210 pounds. He was slim, stocky, skinny, or muscular in build. He was white. Or Hispanic. Or Middle Eastern. Or Asian. His complexion was white, or olive, or dark. His hair color was dark blond, or red, or brown, or black. He wore a crew cut. Or his hair was two inches long. Or he wore his hair shoulder-length. He had a moustache. Or no facial hair.68 The sightings of the presumptive John Doe No. 2 varied that much.
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