Oklahoma City Bombing, 19 April 1995
On the morning of April 19, 1995, an ex-Army soldier and security guard named Timothy McVeigh parked a rented Ryder truck in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. He was about to commit mass murder.
Inside the vehicle was a powerful bomb made out of a deadly cocktail of agricultural fertilizer, diesel fuel, and other chemicals. McVeigh got out, locked the door, and headed towards his getaway car. He ignited one timed fuse, then another.
At precisely 9:02 a.m., the bomb exploded.
Within moments, the surrounding area looked like a war zone. A third of the building had been reduced to rubble, with many floors flattened like pancakes. Dozens of cars were incinerated and more than 300 nearby buildings were damaged or destroyed.
The human toll was still more devastating: 168 souls lost, including 19 children, with several hundred more injured.
It was the worst act of homegrown terrorism in the nation’s history.
Coming on the heels of the World Trade Center bombing in New York two years earlier, the media and many Americans immediately assumed that the attack was the handiwork of Middle Eastern terrorists. The FBI, meanwhile, quickly arrived at the scene and began supporting rescue efforts and investigating the facts. Beneath the pile of concrete and twisted steel were clues. And the FBI was determined to find them.
It didn’t take long. On April 20, the rear axle of the Ryder truck was located, which yielded a vehicle identification number that was traced to a body shop in Junction City, Kansas. Employees at the shop helped the FBI quickly put together a composite drawing of the man who had rented the van. Agents showed the drawing around town, and local hotel employees supplied a name: Tim McVeigh.
A quick call to the Bureau’s Criminal Justice Information Services Division in West Virginia on April 21 led to an astonishing discovery: McVeigh was already in jail. He’d been pulled over about 80 miles north of Oklahoma City by an observant Oklahoma State Trooper who noticed a missing license plate on his yellow Mercury Marquis. McVeigh had a concealed weapon and was arrested. It was just 90 minutes after the bombing.
McVeigh sketch and mugshot
From there, the evidence began adding up. Agents found traces of the chemicals used in the explosion on McVeigh’s clothes and a business card on which McVeigh had suspiciously scribbled, “TNT @ $5/stick, need more”. They learned about McVeigh’s extremist ideologies and his anger over the events at Waco two years earlier. They discovered that a friend of McVeigh’s named Terry Nichols helped build the bomb and that another man—Michael Fortier—was aware of the bomb plot.
The bombing was quickly solved, but the investigation turned out to be one of the most exhaustive in FBI history. No stone was left unturned to make sure every clue was found and all the culprits identified. By the time it was over, the Bureau had conducted more than 28,000 interviews, followed some 43,000 investigative leads, amassed three-and-a-half tons of evidence, and reviewed nearly a billion pieces of information.
Timothy McVeigh at Waco
In the end, the government that McVeigh hated and hoped to topple swiftly captured him and convincingly convicted both him and his co-conspirators.
Video Transcript:
Video Transcript
We found out that an Oklahoma highway patrol trooper had made an inquiry on Tim McVeigh within about 90 minutes of the bombing. So we had one of the people working on our taskforce, an ATF agent named Mark M. contact highway patrol and identify the person who’s badge number was in that inquiry.
Because when you make an inquiry you have to list an identifier for yourself as a law enforcement official. So he found out that that badge number belonged to a trooper named Charlie Hanger.
And so once we had Hanger’s name we had someone contact him and they found out that Hanger had been heading south toward Oklahoma City based on a highway patrol dispatcher call for all available troopers to head to Oklahoma City to assist. He had gotten a discontinue. He was about 62 miles north of Oklahoma City and he turned around in the median on Interstate 35 and as he is starting to head back north he is passed by this yellow Mercury Marquis that’s missing its rear license plate. And so he pulls that car over and the driver gets out of the car and Hanger has to order him to stay by the door of his car.
So Hanger gets out, tells the guy to back up toward him and as McVeigh is backing up toward him he notices that McVeigh has a bulge under his left jacket and he reaches out and grabs it and McVeigh says it’s a gun and it’s loaded and Hanger has his gun next to McVeigh’s head and says, “so is mine.” And he relieved McVeigh of his gun, which was loaded with those rounds that can shoot through an armored vest. Once he had that gun and a knife that McVeigh had hidden on his person, he took McVeigh into custody and took him to the Noble County jail in Perry, Oklahoma.
So our investigator asked Hanger what happened to him. He said, “I don’t know. He may still be in custody; he may not.” So one of our investigators contacted Sheriff Jerry Cook and talked to him and he said, “Well McVeigh is in custody, but he’s going to be released within probably an hour.” So we put a federal hold on him and at that point myself and several other agents got into a helicopter and flew up to Perry and when we got up there myself and another agent interviewed the different people that had been in McVeigh’s cell.
We were asking them questions. You know, “Has McVeigh say anything? Did he comment on the bombing or anything of that nature?” They said no he was just attentive to the radio that was giving updates on what was going on with the bombing investigation. Finally McVeigh was brought into an office that Sheriff Cook gave us and I asked McVeigh, I said, “Do you know why we are here?” He said, “That thing in Oklahoma City, I guess.” And I said what he meant by that? And he said “That bombing, I want an attorney.”
One of the really beneficial things of Trooper Hanger taking him into custody was the fact that when they lodged him in the Noble County jail, they collected all of his clothing and put it in paper bags. When we sent that clothing back to the FBI Laboratory and they did a chemical analysis test on the clothing, they determined that he was basically the explosive equivalent of a powdered sugar doughnut. He had PETN all over his clothing.
Five years after the bombing, I brought my wife and children to the dedication ceremony of the memorial. We could have gone in with Clinton, but we chose to go in with the victims and I wasn’t prepared for the emotional impact that hit me when we walked in there and I saw the people who had lost kids, putting stuffed animals and flowers on the little seats.
There’s big seats for adults and little seats for the kids. And when they went in there and put the stuffed animals and the flowers on the little seats, I couldn’t talk. I said I can’t talk and I just walked on the hill for a few minutes until I kind of composed myself. It was so sad what happened with those kids.
It’s still the defining moment in Oklahoma City. When you try to talk about when something happened—let’s see, that was before the bombing or that was after the bombing? It’s a measure of time like BC and AD. Throughout the country, news stories went in different directions and they didn’t keep having that, but in Oklahoma City they did.
Barry Black, Special Agent, Oklahoma City FBI
Barry Black recalls responding to the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City in 1995.
Video Transcript
You show up on the scene like that and clearly it’s huge. I was in Waco during the first Trade Center bombing. And as a bomb technician you kind of keep track of those sorts of things so this was clearly, from inception, a unique and major event. How it tied into McVeigh’s perception of Waco and linking those things together was unusual, which of course we learned later on. But the scope of it from the time I drove up was obvious.
I was there around 9:30 or 9:35. It was very early on. As I said, the fires were still burning. I remember a part of the site assessment was just to give a sense of what had gone on and you could still see people trapped on the upper floors of the building and of course the firefighters were putting the fires out and paramedics and ambulances. There were a lot of wounded people, walking wounded.
It’s emotional but there is a lot to do. And it’s not that you’re not empathetic or sympathetic but you have to sort of push through that to get to the job at hand. You know just like I can’t help somebody as a paramedic could or the firefighter apparatus so everybody has a specialty and you just have to rely on those other first responders that they are going to take care of their part and they will presume that I’m going to do my part.
We were on sight a lot. I remember the Red Cross would bring out something hot to eat on occasion because really it was difficult to leave. But it was almost like the world was going on outside that bubble. But my wife has told me that friends and people I haven’t heard from in a very long time would call the house just to see how she was doing, see how I was doing. There would be call on the media for boots or gloves and they would show up by the truckload.
There was a building not far from the Murrah Building that was full of supplies. And over the years, I’ve talked to some of the urban rescue folks that came in from other states and they remember today, 20 years later, that they couldn’t buy a cup of coffee. They would go into a restaurant to eat before trying to sleep for a little bit and they go to pay and they were told that someone has already paid for your meal or it’s on the house. It’s come to known now as the Oklahoma Standard that the way the community just turned out completely. It was moving.
People are used to thee one hour televisions shows where they solve complex crimes. This was just not the case. This involved 1,008,000 man-hours. It was 1,400 people working about 840 days to come up with the volume of information that went into the case.
Looking back over the 20 years, it was a very thorough and protracted investigation. I made three trips to Denver during the trial. You know it’s hard on your families, it’s hard on the victims, it’s hard on everybody.
I’m proud that things worked the way they should. The system was followed. Everybody got a fair trial. The jury did their job. The judge did his job. So things worked as they should.