|
m typo corrs; removed inaccurate link (went to a tagged W copyright violation page for a different David Hoffman; expanded bibliog. info.
|
m →Death: Fix bad markup.
|
||
| Line 27: | Line 27: | ||
His death sentence was delayed pending an appeal.{{fact}} One of his appeals made it to the [[Supreme Court of the United States]], which denied [[certiorari]] on [[March 8]], [[1999]].{{fact}} He was ultimately executed by lethal injection at 7:00 a.m. on [[June 11]], [[2001]], at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in [[Terre Haute, Indiana]].{{fact}} He had dropped all of his existing appeals, while presenting no reason for doing so.{{fact}} He was 33 years old. |
His death sentence was delayed pending an appeal.{{fact}} One of his appeals made it to the [[Supreme Court of the United States]], which denied [[certiorari]] on [[March 8]], [[1999]].{{fact}} He was ultimately executed by lethal injection at 7:00 a.m. on [[June 11]], [[2001]], at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in [[Terre Haute, Indiana]].{{fact}} He had dropped all of his existing appeals, while presenting no reason for doing so.{{fact}} He was 33 years old. |
||
McVeigh invited California conductor/composer David Woodard to perform a prequiem (a Mass for those who are about to die) on the eve of his execution, and he had also requested a Catholic chaplain.{{fact}} '' |
McVeigh invited California conductor/composer David Woodard to perform a prequiem (a Mass for those who are about to die) on the eve of his execution, and he had also requested a Catholic chaplain.{{fact}} ''[[Ave atque vale|Ave Atque Vale]]'' was performed under Woodard's baton by a local brass choir at St. Margaret Mary Church, located near the Terre Haute penitentiary, at 7:00 p.m. on [[June 10]], to a listenership that included the entirety of the next morning's witnesses.{{fact}} McVeigh chose [[William Ernest Henley]]'s poem "[[Invictus]]" as his final statement.{{fact}} His final meal consisted of 2 pints of [[Ben and Jerry]]'s mint chocolate chip ice cream. McVeigh's execution was the first of a convicted criminal by the U.S. federal government since the execution of [[Victor Feguer]] in Iowa on [[March 15]], [[1963]]. {{fact}} |
||
His body was disposed of by cremation in the retort at Mattox Ryan Funeral home in Terre Haute under the direction of funeral director Kevin Nickles.{{fact}} The cremated remains were then given to his lawyer for disposition.{{fact}} McVeigh's remains were scattered in an undisclosed location.{{fact}} |
His body was disposed of by cremation in the retort at Mattox Ryan Funeral home in Terre Haute under the direction of funeral director Kevin Nickles.{{fact}} The cremated remains were then given to his lawyer for disposition.{{fact}} McVeigh's remains were scattered in an undisclosed location.{{fact}} |
||
 |
This article does not cite any sources. Please help improve this articlebyadding citations to reliable sources. Unsourced material may be challenged and removed.
Find sources: "Timothy McVeigh" – news · newspapers · books · scholar · JSTOR (Learn how and when to remove this message) |
Timothy James McVeigh (April 23, 1968 – June 11, 2001) was an American citizen and decorated veteran of the U.S. Army convicted of multiple murders and executed as a result of his actions resulting in the April 19, 1995 Oklahoma City bombing, generally described as the most deadly and harmful incident of domestic terrorism in U.S. history. 167 people died and hundreds more were injured and when a truck loaded with improvised explosives was detonated in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building as federal offices began business for the day.[citation needed] A 168th victim, a rescue worker, died later when a large piece of concrete crushed him.[citation needed]
Most accounts say the ANFO explosive device, arranged in the back of a rented Ryder truck, contained about 5,000 pounds (2,300 kg) of ammonium nitrate, an agricultural fertilizer, and nitromethane, an explosive motor-racing fuel.[citation needed] Prosecutors said McVeigh strode away from the truck after he ignited a timed fuse from the front of the truck.[citation needed] Although a day care center was located on the ground floor of the building, it is disputed whether or not McVeigh knew about it or purposely targeted children.[citation needed] Prison interviews with McVeigh, however, suggest that, even if he did not know about the location of the day care center populated by children beforehand and even if he had learned about it after the bombing, he would have dismissed the children's deaths and/or injuries as merely necessary collateral damage.[citation needed]
McVeigh was a self-described libertarian [1] and an anti-government extremist, with a long background in the survivalist movement. He frequently quoted and alluded approvingly to the controversial novel The Turner Diaries, which describes acts of terrorism similar to the crimes that he was convicted of perpetrating.[citation needed] Photocopies of pages sixty-one and sixty-two of The Turner Diaries were found in an envelope inside McVeigh's car.[citation needed] These pages depicted a fictitious mortar attack upon the U.S. Capitol in Washington.[citation needed]
McVeigh was born in Western New York State in Pendleton (near Buffalo) to an Irish-American Catholic family.[citation needed] Ten years old when his parents divorced, McVeigh and his siblings lived with their father, a devout Catholic who often attended Daily Mass.[citation needed] Timothy McVeigh professed his present belief in "a God" in a recorded interview with Time Magazine[2] but expressed his wish to keep the details of his beliefs private.[citation needed] The Guardian reported that McVeigh wrote a letter claiming to be an agnostic [3], but no text of such a letter (or tangible proof of its existence) has been published or made public in any medium. McVeigh accepted the Sacrament of Extreme Unction from a priest of the Roman Catholic Church shortly before his death, and he had been visited by a priest during his time in prison.[4].
McVeigh graduated from a local public high school (Starpoint High School), and a few years later, in May 1988, he enlisted in the U.S. Army.[1]. He was a decorated veteran of the United States Army, having served in the Gulf War, where he was awarded a Bronze Star Medal.[citation needed] He had been a top scoring gunner with the 25 mm cannon of the lightly armored Bradley Fighting Vehicles used by the U.S. 1st Infantry Division to which he was assigned. He served at Fort Riley, Kansas, before Operation Desert Storm.[citation needed] His superiors and friends thought of him as a model soldier.[citation needed] At Fort Riley, McVeigh completed the Primary Leadership Development Course (PLDC), an Army school required for specialists and corporals to be promoted to sergeant.[citation needed] McVeigh had always wanted to join the Green Berets, the Army's Elite Special Forces.[citation needed] After his return from the war, he was given an opportunity to do this, but failed the grueling physical part of the indoctrination. McVeigh was devastated and decided to leave the Army.[citation needed]
Upon leaving the Army, McVeigh worked briefly near his native Pendleton as a security guard.[citation needed] But in the months before the Oklahoma City bombing in 1995, he eventually returned to Junction City, which is outside Fort Riley.[citation needed] His lifestyle grew increasingly transient. Prosecutors said he made the bomb at a lakeside campground near his old Army post.[citation needed]
Through its serial number, the FBI identified a rear axle as coming from a Ryder Rental Junction City agency truck.[citation needed] Workers at the agency assisted an FBI artist in creating a sketch of the renter who had used the alias Kling.[citation needed] The sketch was shown in the area and on the same day was identified by manager Lea McGown of the Dreamland Hotel as Timothy McVeigh.[citation needed]
Shortly after the bombing, while driving on I-35inNoble County, Oklahoma, near Perry, OK, McVeigh was stopped by Charles Hanger, an Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper from Pawnee, Oklahoma.[citation needed] Hanger had passed McVeigh's yellow Mercury Marquis and noticed it had no license plate.[citation needed] McVeigh was arrested for driving without a license plate and carrying and transporting a loaded firearm.[citation needed] Three days later, while still in jail, McVeigh was identified as the subject of the nationwide manhunt.[citation needed]
In a book based on interviews before his execution, American Terrorist, McVeigh stated he decapitated an Iraqi soldier with cannon fire on his first day in the war, and celebrated.[citation needed] But he said he later was shocked to be ordered to execute surrendering prisoners, and to see carnage on the road leaving Kuwait City after U.S. troops routed the Iraqi army.[citation needed] In interviews following the Oklahoma City bombing, McVeigh said he began harboring anti-government feelings during the Gulf War.[citation needed] Some[citation needed] question the veracity of this claim in light of McVeigh's attempts to become a Green Beret after returning from Iraq.
McVeigh claimed that the bombing was revenge for "what the U.S. government did at Waco and Ruby Ridge".[5] He visited Waco during the standoff, where he spoke to a news reporter about his anger over what was happening there.[6]
McVeigh was convicted on June 2, 1997 in a United States District Court for the murder of eight federal employees who died in the explosion.[citation needed] The same jury on June 13 recommended that McVeigh receive the death penalty (see [7]).[citation needed] The Justice Department brought federal charges on those few deaths to obtain a death penalty against McVeigh; they could not bring charges against McVeigh for most of the murders because those deaths fell under the jurisdiction of the state of Oklahoma.[citation needed]
His death sentence was delayed pending an appeal.[citation needed] One of his appeals made it to the Supreme Court of the United States, which denied certiorarionMarch 8, 1999.[citation needed] He was ultimately executed by lethal injection at 7:00 a.m. on June 11, 2001, at the U.S. Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana.[citation needed] He had dropped all of his existing appeals, while presenting no reason for doing so.[citation needed] He was 33 years old.
McVeigh invited California conductor/composer David Woodard to perform a prequiem (a Mass for those who are about to die) on the eve of his execution, and he had also requested a Catholic chaplain.[citation needed] Ave Atque Vale was performed under Woodard's baton by a local brass choir at St. Margaret Mary Church, located near the Terre Haute penitentiary, at 7:00 p.m. on June 10, to a listenership that included the entirety of the next morning's witnesses.[citation needed] McVeigh chose William Ernest Henley's poem "Invictus" as his final statement.[citation needed] His final meal consisted of 2 pints of Ben and Jerry's mint chocolate chip ice cream. McVeigh's execution was the first of a convicted criminal by the U.S. federal government since the execution of Victor Feguer in Iowa on March 15, 1963. [citation needed]
His body was disposed of by cremation in the retort at Mattox Ryan Funeral home in Terre Haute under the direction of funeral director Kevin Nickles.[citation needed] The cremated remains were then given to his lawyer for disposition.[citation needed] McVeigh's remains were scattered in an undisclosed location.[citation needed]
Convicted co-conspirator Terry Nichols was sentenced in federal court to life in prison for his role in the crime, but at Nichols' trial, testimony suggested McVeigh had several other accomplices.[citation needed]
Some writers[citation needed] suggested that seismographic records from a nearby research station shortly after the explosion indicated the possibility of multiple explosions, but other analysts[citation needed] suggest multiple readings within seconds indicate shock waves from collapse of the building.
In February 2004, the FBI announced it would review its investigation after learning that agents in the investigation of the MidWest Bank Robbers (an alleged Aryan-oriented gang) had turned up explosive caps of the same type that were used to trigger the bomb.[citation needed] There is no evidence that McVeigh was with members of the MidWest Bank RobbersatElohim City in northern Arkansas at a time shortly before the attack.[citation needed] Such rumors are founded on nothing more than an indication that McVeigh was in Arkansas at the time, having been issued a speeding ticket there.[citation needed] Shortly after the bombing, an ATF informant, Carolyn Howe, told reporters[citation needed] that she had warned her handlers in the weeks before the bombing that guests of Elohim City were planning a major bombing attack, but there is no established link to McVeigh.[citation needed]
Agents in 2004 expressed surprise that the bombing investigators had not been provided information from the MidWest Bank Robbers investigation.[citation needed] Shortly before McVeigh's June 2001 execution, evidence related to the Bank Robbers gang was presented to a court resulting in a delay of his scheduled execution by one week.[citation needed] McVeigh eventually declined any further delays, and maintained until his death that he had acted alone in the bombing.[citation needed]
Several residents of central Kansas, including real estate agent Georgia Rucker and a retired Army NCO testified at the Terry Nichols federal trial that they had seen two trucks at Geary State Lake where prosecutors alleged the bomb was assembled.[citation needed] The retired NCO said he visited the lake on April 18, 1995, but left after a group of surly men looked at him aggressively.[citation needed] The operator of Dreamland Motel testified that two Ryder trucks had been parked outside her Grandview Plaza motel where McVeigh stayed in Room 26 the weekend before the bombing.[citation needed]
Before his execution, some[citation needed] speculated McVeigh was framed, or that others were involved.
McVeigh's first trial attorney, Stephen Jones, wrote in a book, Others Unknown, about several other possible suspects, and continued to implicate Terry Nichols' brother, James, following McVeigh's execution.[citation needed] Jones suggested in his book on the case that Terry Nichols had crossed paths with suspected Islamic terrorists during his frequent visits to the Philippines before the attacks.[citation needed] Nichols' father-in-law at the time was a Philippine police officer who owned an apartment building often rented to Arabic-speaking students with alleged terrorist connections.[citation needed] Richard A. Clarke speculates on the improvement in Nichols's bomb-making techniques as a possible link to Philippines-based Islamist terrorists in Cebú and the southern islands, plus several telephone calls he made there long after he and his wife had come back to the U.S. together, in his 2004 account of the work he undertook for several administrations, Against All Enemies.[citation needed] McVeigh's defense attorneys suggested in a pretrial motion that the location and day of the attack indicated the possibility that those seeking revenge for the execution of Richard Snell[8], a man who first tried to bomb the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Buildingin1983 and was executed the same day as the Murrah building was destroyed, may have been involved.[citation needed] In presiding over the trial, however, Judge Matsch did not allow in defense arguments about there being a possible foreign conspiracy, such evidence could not be presented in court, and there remains no credible documented evidence of an Islamist link to the Oklahoma City bombings.[citation needed]
Various other analysts[citation needed] have suggested that the government was involved in a conspiracy behind the bombing, or that the government even planned the attack in order to justify persecuting right-wing organizations in a manner similar to Nazi prosecution of legislators after the Reichstag fire.[citation needed] Soon after the bombing an analysis by Brigadier General Benton K. Partin (Ret.) concluded that "the damage at the Murrah Federal Building is not the result of the truck bomb itself, but rather due to other factors such as locally placed charges within the building itself".[citation needed] Partin's report, released in the weeks following the bombing, was based on assumptions the bomb was fueled with diesel fuel, but did not account for the greater explosive strength of nitromethane in an improvised explosive device.[citation needed]
McVeigh himself instructed his lawyers to utilize the "necessity" defense and thus to argue that his bombing of the Murrah Federal Building was a justifiable response to what McVeigh believed were the crimes of the U.S. government at Waco, Texas, during the 51-day siege of the Branch Davidian complex that resulted in the death of 76 Branch Davidian members. [2] As part of his defense, McVeigh's lawyers showed the controversial video "WACO: THE BIG LIE" to the jury at his trial.[3]
