Manhunt: Inside Oklahoma City bombing
Welden L. Kennedy
Twisted MetalWithin hours of the explosion one of the most significant pieces of evidence in the investigation was found. The twisted rear axle assembly of a truck. It was about 650 feet away from the bomb site and had crashed into a car parked in front of an apartment house. Now, of course, it was lying in plain view out on the street, but it wasn't found immediately because the crime scene was a twenty-square-block area. There was evidence everywhere, including on top of buildings two and three blocks away. It was difficult in the early stages to determine what was and what was not significant.
However, we knew immediately that the axle was important to us. From that axle assembly we were able to determine the truck's serial number, or vehicle identification number (VIN), which enabled us to determine the manufacturer of the truck, Ford. The early discovery of this key piece of evidence was critical in speeding up the investigation.
Once we determined the maker of the truck it was very simple to go to Ford and ask who bought it. The Ford people were quick to tell us that the 1993 twenty-foot Ford truck had been sold to Ryder and it was a rental. Ryder? That immediately piqued our interest because Ryder was the same brand that had been used in the World Trade Center bombing in 1993 in New York City. Did this mean that the perpetrators were Middle Eastern? This was a thought that certainly ran through our heads. As we all now know, the bombers weren't Middle Eastern and the Ryder truck usage was merely coincidental, but at the time we figured that a connection could be a possibility.
We dispatched agents to Ryder headquarters in Miami, Florida, to investigate further. Though the truck had a Florida license plate, Ryder searched its computerized records to see if it could be traced to another part of the country. Bingo! The truck in question was from Elliott's Auto Body, a rental agency in Junction City, Kansas, where a "Robert Kling" had rented it on April 17 a little after 4:00 PM. On the surface this information may not sound like a big deal, but believe me, it was. Junction City is due north of Oklahoma City—244 miles and about a four-hour drive away by interstate highway. The proximity of the rental agency to the bombing site was very significant.
It didn't take us long to get our agents to Elliott's Auto Body. In fact, nothing in those first days seemed to take very long. That we were able to find the axle and connect it to Elliott's all within one day was extremely helpful to the success of the investigation. Once at Elliott's we interviewed the folks there, in addition to checking their records, to find out what happened to this truck. Right off the bat they were able to show us the paperwork about the rental. This "Robert Kling" supposedly lived in Idaho, but we quickly ascertained that this was a phony address. No driver's license existed in Idaho for Robert Kling. But in the course of our investigation, we wound up checking driver's license records in all fifty states. There wasn't a Robert Kling who came anywhere close to who we were looking for.
There we were, temporarily at a dead end. We knew what the truck was, we knew where it had been rented, but that was it. So we started interviews, very intensive interviews I should add, of the three people present at the truck rental center at the time of the Ryder rental to determine everything they knew. We flew in an artist to do an artist's conception drawing from recollections of the folks at the rental agency. It took a number of hours for the artist to produce likenesses of the two people who came to rent the truck. The result of the artist's work was an image of what we called Unknown Subjects (Unsubs) in the FBI lexicon. In this case, there were two images, and with Unsub #1, or John Doe #1, the image was very close, as it would turn out, to that of the actual bomber, Timothy McVeigh. Unsub #1, the primary person, was the one who actually went to the rental counter and rented the truck. Eldon Elliott, the owner, later testified that he remembered Timothy McVeigh's face because McVeigh, unlike most clients, had waived damage insurance on the vehicle.
(But a witness at the rental agency also remembered something else—McVeigh was accompanied by another man. As Simple Truths, the seminal book on the Oklahoma City bombing, describes it, the search for Unsub #2 would receive more public and media attention than anything else in the case.)
We now had the faces of the renters. Yes, the name could be a phony one, but having the face was a big deal. It was a surprise to some that the bombers looked like white male Americans, not Middle Easterners or of foreign descent. And from talking to the people at the truck rental counter, the main suspect, Unsub #1, sounded like somebody's next-door neighbor in Middle America. That was a surprise to many of us because with the World Trade Center bombing in recent memory, and with all the perpetrators in that crime being from the Middle East, many of us, including me, thought that these bombers could be from there as well.
At the time our details were not solid, obviously, but we thought the Unsub #1 was of medium build, 5' 10" or 5' 11", 180 to 185 pounds, with a light-brown crew cut, and possibly right-handed. We believed the second man, Unsub #2, also had a medium build, around 5' 9" or 5' 10", and about 175 to 180 pounds, with brown hair and a tattoo on his left arm. He was possibly a smoker. He was darker, but he didn't look Middle Eastern, either. This Unsub resembled a number of different suspects, including a solider from Ft. Riley, Kansas, who was at the rental office the next day.
We had two images to take to the American people and tell them as quickly as we could: "This is what we've learned so far and we need your help. We need you to help us identify who these people may be." The name Robert Kling might have been a phony one, but it gave us a bridge to connect with the next clue. To that end I went on national TV on Thursday afternoon, the day after the bombing, to do just that and released composite sketches of two men—labeled "John Doe #1" and "John Doe #2."
The world now was on notice that we had descriptions of people associated with the bombing. Not only that, but we were soliciting their assistance, to call 1-800-905-1514, with any leads. The phone number led to a bank of phones in Washington, D.C., manned by FBI agents and FBI operators. We knew that we would immediately start receiving phone calls and we were correct. We had tens of thousands of phone calls coming in. It certainly didn't hurt that right after my press conference Attorney General Janet Reno announced a $2 million reward for information leading to the bombers' arrest and conviction.
The vast majority of the calls turned out to be dead-end leads. With this kind of request for help you can imagine all the kinds of things that can happen. You have people who legitimately think they recognize a drawing as someone whom they knew or were associated with in the past. Unfortunately, you have some people who come forward with an ulterior motive. They call in about a former neighbor or former boyfriend or ex-husband, or whoever, just to cause problems for that individual. Keep in mind that we had to take every one of those leads and pursue it to the final degree. We had to find that person, interview him or her, and determine if the person had an alibi or was somehow connected or associated with this case. Also, remember that at this time we didn't know for certain whether the suspects were American or foreigners. And if they were American, they could have been aided by foreigners.
Even after we had released the sketches, there were a lot of theories and rumors about who might have been involved. There was talk of a possible third man, an Oklahoma resident named Abraham Ahmad, who had left Oklahoma on the day of the explosion. On his way to Amman, Jordan, he was stopped on a connecting leg of his trip in London for "acting nervous."
His luggage went on to Rome, where Italian officials said it contained wires and tools that, while they could be used in electronic repair, were also consistent with those used for explosives. Knowing that speculation of this kind was extremely premature, however, I was careful to insist to the press he was just a "possible witness" and not a suspect. After FBI interrogation, he was cleared.
At the same time, there was a spotlight on three Middle Eastern–looking men who had been arrested in Oklahoma and Texas. Though I didn't confirm at the time that we had arrested anyone in connection with the bombing, the three men were picked up Wednesday night. They were held on immigration charges after stopping an Oklahoma state trooper to ask directions on Wednesday, the same day as the bombing. The officer thought something about them was suspicious, so he wrote down their car's license plate number. That plate, however, turned out to be registered to a blue Chevrolet Cavalier rental car and not the vehicle they were driving—a huge red flag. The Cavalier was from National Car Rental at Dallas/Fort Worth International Airport and was rented by one of the men, a Queens, New York, cabdriver, who was originally from Pakistan. The rental car was later found with one of the men, parked right outside an Oklahoma City motel.
Needless to say, the men were heavily interrogated. Their Dallas apartment was searched and their property tested for explosives residue. In the end, though, they were found not to have anything to do with the case.
It's not surprising that there would have been suspicion about Middle Easterners. The bombing took place only two years after the World Trade Center bombing, in which a Ryder rental truck had also been used. Additionally, there were initial indications that the bomb was composed of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, called ANFO, which can be made with a mixture of fertilizers and kerosene. A homemade ANFO bomb was also used in the 1993 World Trade Center explosion. In the early 1990s ANFO, unfortunately, was quite popular. From 1990 to the end of 1994, there were eighteen ANFO bombings or attempted bombings in America, two of which were at Internal Revenue Service (IRS) facilities in Phoenix and Los Angeles. The one in LA involved a car bomb.
And then there was the question of motive. Among other ideas, we pursued the concept that the attack targeted the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration in Oklahoma, whose state headquarters had been on the seventh and ninth floors of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. And, indeed, in the attack several DEA employees were among the missing.
However, going by the sketches, we began to suspect even more strongly that the suspects could have had some connection to survivalist or extremist religious cults. We noted that the Oklahoma bombing took place exactly two years to the day after the Waco incident. In addition, the Oklahoma City incident happened on the same day that a member of another right-wing extremist group, the Order, was executed in Arkansas for the murder of a pawnshop owner whom he thought was Jewish.
We settled in at that point for what might have turned out to be a very long haul. After disseminating the drawings—the biggest thing we had to go on at that point—the next step was to go door-to-door, house-to-house, business-to-business in Junction City, Kansas, with these drawings.
Did anybody in the town, besides the people at the rental agency, recognize these people? If so, would they have any information that we could use? We would soon find out.
Don't Tread on Me
Once we focused on the town of Junction City, Kansas, it didn't take long before we found someone who would help our investigation. The manager of the Dreamland Motel on the edge of town, Lea McGown, recognized the man federal agents had only known as Robert Kling.
"That's Tim McVeigh," she said as soon as she saw the Kling drawing. Not only that, but he had parked a large yellow Ryder truck in the motel lot, which she remembered was the same color as the old Mercury Marquis he arrived in. She also gave the agents the address that he registered under at the motel.
This could be big. Of course, the name Robert Kling was phony, but this could be the lead we were hoping for.
We started the machinery. We ran the name and address through all the databases to see if anything came up. Sure enough, within a few hours it did. There was a match.
An ATF agent working in the Oklahoma City headquarters had run the name through the National Crime Information Center computer. A hit! The Oklahoma Highway Patrol had made an inquiry on that name on April 19—the day of the bombing. A few phone calls later and we realized that we might have just found our man.
An Oklahoma State trooper named Charlie Hanger had made the inquiry into McVeigh as part of a routine traffic stop on the interstate north of Oklahoma City in a town called Perry. Trooper Hanger was about seventy-five miles from the bombing site when, about an hour and a half after the explosion, he saw an old beat-up car driving without a license plate. He pulled over the garish 1977 Mercury Grand Marquis; the driver was pleasant enough when he got out to meet him. The driver, Timothy McVeigh, explained he'd just bought the car and that's why he didn't have the plate. When Hanger asked if he had insurance or registration, he said that because the car was newly purchased—although he didn't have any kind of receipt—all the documentation was being sent to his new address.
As he gave Trooper Hanger his driver's license, the officer saw that he did happen to be carrying something: a gun. The traffic violator was sporting a Glock semiautomatic pistol on a shoulder holster. He also had ith him an ammo clip and a knife.
Time for jail, Mr. McVeigh. He was escorted into Hanger's patrol car, after being ordered to leave his locked car by the side of the road. So, there it was—a nearly undisturbed crime scene. It was sort of like one of the Egyptian tombs. We caught quite a lucky break.
En route to the jail, Hanger had his dispatcher do a check on McVeigh's Michigan driver's license and the gun. The dispatcher came back to Hanger with some intriguing info: McVeigh's New York concealed weapon permit was not legal in Oklahoma. That was it—McVeigh was done. He was soon booked on four misdemeanor charges: unlawfully carrying a concealed weapon, transporting a loaded firearm in a motor vehicle, failing to display a current license plate, and failing to maintain proof of insurance.
•••••••••••
The ATF agent got some good news when he called the Noble County Jail to see if the inquiry on McVeigh had led to an actual booking. It had.
Our suspect was already in jail the whole time! Amazing. But, at the time of that phone call, he was about to be taken to a bond hearing.
Who would have ever guessed that something as routine as a traffic arrest would turn out to be so significant? Not only did we have a real name but we also had a real person—in jail already.
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