HEADLINERS: TIMOTHY MCVEIGH

TIMOTHY MCVEIGH A gung-ho former soldier is charged with the worst act of home-grown terrorism in the U.S.

TERRORISTS SUCCEED BY REMAINING FACELESS. THEIR very anonymity allows them to move unnoticed among and around the people they plan, for reasons of their own, to maim or murder. But terrorists also occasionally get caught, although often, alas, after they have done their worst. And then the sight of their faces only deepens the mystery of their actions.

The world first caught sight of Timothy McVeigh on April 21, 1995. Shackled and escorted past the press and an angry crowd–McVeigh later told interviewers he had expected at that moment to be shot–he had just been charged as a suspect in the worst single instance of domestic terrorism in U.S. history: the bombing two days earlier of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. The horribly ravaged and hollowed- out structure–a giant wedding cake smashed by a malevolent fist–had become a national monument to loss. The final death toll: 169, including 19 children, most of whom had been dropped off at a day-care center shortly before the blast.

Who was the accused, this Timothy McVeigh? What kind of person would park a rented truck filled with several thousand pounds of explosives next to a building busy with the early-morning comings and goings of innocent people? Federal investigators and journalists quickly began digging into McVeigh’s past, looking for pieces of the appalling Oklahoma City puzzle. Not surprisingly, the fragments did not fit together in a way that would convincingly explain a monstrous deed.

McVeigh grew up in Pendleton, New York, a town of 5,010 some 15 miles east of Niagara Falls. His parents divorced when he was 10; he and one sister stayed with his father, another sister stayed with his mother. McVeigh’s high school teachers and classmates remember him as intelligent (his IQ is a well-above-average 125), an excellent student in subjects that interested him and a quiet but friendly companion. His final grade-point ranking was not quite high enough to qualify him for a course in computer programming that he hoped to take, and he eventually enlisted in the U.S. Army. He served in the 1991 Gulf War as a Bradley fighting vehicle gunner and immediately thereafter volunteered for the Special Forces (Green Beret) qualification course at Fort Bragg, North Carolina. But he didn’t make the grade and left the Army in 1ate 1991 with sergeant’s rank and an honorable discharge.

Then began a strange period of drifting that led, prosecutors charge, toward Oklahoma City. In the military, McVeigh had become close friends with Terry L. Nichols, who was later to be charged as an accomplice in the bombing; after leaving the service, McVeigh moved to the Dexter, Michigan, farm owned by Terry’s older brother James. Neighbors later reported that explosions had been set off outside the farmhouse. People who met McVeigh during this time noticed that he always carried a weapon. Some witnesses claim that he became involved in the notorious Michigan militias, ad-hoc paramilitary groups preaching armed resistance to the Federal Government.

McVeigh has claimed he visited the Branch Davidian compound near Waco during the federal siege that ended in fire and death on April 19, 1993, exactly two years before the Oklahoma City bombing. “It was very poorly handled,” he says. Was it Waco that set him off on a path through Arizona and on to Kansas, where he allegedly rented the Ryder truck that carried the bomb, and then to Oklahoma City, where eyewitnesses saw him on the morning of the explosion? Will his trial, sometime in 1996, exonerate him? And if not, will it somehow make comprehensible the mind behind that blank, ordinary face; a mind that led a man to slaughter strangers?

–By Paul Gray