McVeigh, Timothy James (1968–2001)

Early Life

McVeigh grew up in the small, predominantly white, blue collar, and overwhelmingly Christian town of Lockport, outside Buffalo, New York. His parents separated when he was 11, and McVeigh lived with his father while his two sisters lived with his mother. At the age of 13, his grandfather gave him his first gun. When McVeigh graduated from high school, with honors, he was already a considerable gun enthusiast and budding survivalist.

After brief attendance at a business school, McVeigh joined the army in May 1988. He received basic training at Fort Benning, Georgia, where he befriended Terry Lynn Nichols and Michael Fortier, then joined the 1st Infantry Division at Fort Riley, Kansas. When the Gulf War broke out in 1990, McVeigh was deployed to the Gulf, where he was assigned to a Bradley Fighting Vehicle. He distinguished himself as the best shot in his platoon and was awarded a Bronze Star on his return. He was invited to join the Green Berets, but his brief three-day stint with that elite unit was followed by his resignation from the army after 43 months of service.

In 1993, McVeigh began to travel state-to-state selling antigovernment literature and survival items on the gun show circuit. He also traveled to Waco to protest the government siege of the Branch Davidian complex, believing that the members of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms (ATF) were violating the Davidians’ Second Amendment rights. McVeigh watched the final fiery standoff, on April 19, 1993, on television. This moment solidified McVeigh's hatred of the federal government and initiated his quest to stop [Page 381]the ATF.

Planning the Attack

Over the following months, as new gun laws further enraged McVeigh, he plotted to blow up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, which he mistakenly believed housed the ATF. His plan was taken almost directly from the plot of The Turner Diaries, a 1978 novel that described not only a full-scale race war, but also the plight of Earl Turner, who truck-bombed the FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., in protest of gun control laws. McVeigh had been pushing the book on family and friends since he first read it, just after high school.

Evidence and testimony later showed that McVeigh and his former army buddy, Terry Nichols, bought and stole bomb-making materials, including ammonium nitrate fertilizer and racing car fuel, and stored them in lockers rented under various aliases. McVeigh and Nichols also robbed a gun collector, Roger Moore, of guns, gold, silver, and jewels to fund their conspiracy. In December 1994, McVeigh drove Michael Fortier, another former army friend, past the Murrah Building, explaining his plans as well as his getaway route.

In early 1995, McVeigh and Nichols traveled to Kingman, Arizona, where Fortier lived with his wife, Lori. She later testified that McVeigh showed her how he planned to position the explosives, demonstrating with cans of soup. She also helped make the fake Robert Kling driver's license that McVeigh used. Within months, McVeigh would act on his plan: drive a rented truck filled with over 4,000 pounds of explosives to the Murrah Building on a workday morning, park it, and calmly walk away.

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