Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols faced three trials and a vast FBI investigation β but many details of their attack remain unexplained.
T wenty years ago, on 19 April , a disaffected veteran named Timothy McVeigh drove a Ryder truck stuffed with explosives into downtown Oklahoma City and destroyed a federal office building, killing people, including 19 children, and maiming hundreds of others. That much we know. We also know that, within 90 minutes of the bombing, McVeigh was pulled over near the Kansas border and arrested, alone, at the wheel of a glaringly improbable getaway car, an ancient, spluttering rust bucket of a Mercury sedan with no licence plates, which made him a sitting duck for any passing highway patrolman.
How could such a callous, carefully planned attack have come to such an incongruously slapdash end? After a vast investigation headed by the FBI , three trials mounted against McVeigh and his co-conspirator, Terry Nichols, and an avalanche of court documents, there is still no definitive answer to that question. The plea fell largely on deaf ears. Neither received more than rudimentary explosives training when they served together in the Army, and their early experiments with smaller devices were haphazard at best.
Rather, it does the opposite. Obvious suspects were offered deals by government prosecutors, usually but not always in exchange for their testimony. Others slithered down the priority list until they were lost or forgotten. Half a dozen rightwing radicals fingered as possible suspects by government informants or by fellow anti-government warriors were not questioned about the bombing, even when it became clear they had lied about their whereabouts on 19 April.
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In , the FBI and the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms ATF were both monitoring the radical far right, but trust between the two was at rock bottom following a disastrous ATF raid two years earlier on a religious compound outside Waco, Texas, and an ensuing FBI-led siege that ended with the place burning to the ground.
