Trooper’s Vigilance Led to Arrest of Blast Suspect : Bombing: Charlie Hanger’s suspicions about the man he nabbed during a traffic stop turned out to be justified.

Bad luck dogged bombing suspect Timothy McVeigh as he drove north toward the Kansas border on Wednesday morning in a battered yellow Mercury Marquis with a rusted bumper and no license plate. Bad luck’s name was Trooper Charlie Hanger.

Hanger, a 22-year veteran of the Oklahoma Highway Patrol, is a road hawk--the sort of alert patrolman who takes his job so seriously that everyone in his hometown has either been stopped by him or knows someone who has.

“I don’t think there’s a fun-loving person in this county who hasn’t looked up at Charlie from the driver’s seat at some point in their life,” said Marty Casteel, 38, a farmer. “He’s a fair man, mind you, but he’s a ticket-writing machine.”

It was Hanger’s long experience with traffic violators--and a little gut suspicion--that led to the arrest of the suspect in the Oklahoma City bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Even President Clinton made an unnamed reference to the 42-year-old, baby-faced trooper whose wife said proudly that he “was just doing his job.”

“He’s an unassuming man, damn it, but he’s our hero,” said Dave Fleming, an air-conditioning man who has worked in Hanger’s home and taken “my share of tickets.”

People here try to avoid highway encounters with Hanger. But even when they have them, Fleming said, “we know he’ll give us a fair shake. Sometimes he gives you warnings, sometimes you get a ticket. It’s the law that counts.”

“This is a man,” added Casteel, “who drives all the way to Oklahoma City at 65 m.p.h., not a mile more. Highway law is the Lord’s law to Charlie Hanger.”

A hunting and fishing enthusiast, Hanger is known around Perry as a “good community man,” the sort who pitches in at church charity functions and devotedly watches his daughters play at local softball games.

“He’s a good trooper and a good husband,” wife Nancy said. “He gives his all in everything he does.”

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Hanger was patrolling Interstate 35 in his black-and-white at 10:20 a.m. Wednesday--about an hour and 15 minutes after the explosion ripped through the federal building--when he saw the rattling Marquis heading north. There was no license plate under the bumper, only a rotting, blackened frame.

According to Noble County Assistant Dist. Atty. Mark Gibson, Hanger pulled the car over and asked the driver, McVeigh, where he was going. Hunched up in a jacket, McVeigh said he was on a cross-country trip and planned to drive 10 hours or so--a statement that made Trooper Hanger suspicious.

“He knows that most people will take off their jacket when they drive long distance,” Gibson said. “That shows you the kind of experience he has out on the highway.”

When the suspect leaned to get his wallet, Hanger saw a bulge in his jacket. The trooper then put his gun against McVeigh’s head and ordered him out of the car. It was a prescient move. Inside the jacket was a 9-millimeter semiautomatic Glock pistol, fully loaded with deadly, impact-expanding Black Talon bullets.

McVeigh was arrested on five misdemeanors, including weapons charges.

During the trip to Perry in the back of the cruiser and later in the jail, McVeigh stayed calm. “He was never the least bit nervous, concerned. He was as cool as he could be,” Gibson said.

McVeigh, however, nearly got away. According to two lawyers who read the arrest report, an arraignment Thursday was postponed a day because the judge was tied up in a divorce proceeding.

“He came desperately close to making bail,” Gibson said.

“It was just a matter of circumstance and luck that he hadn’t been released yet,” said Vicky Beier, a lawyer in this town of 6,000. Beier does not represent McVeigh, who did not have an attorney Friday afternoon.

Noble County Sheriff Jerry Cook said that McVeigh was “out of the cell en route to the courtroom when I received word.”

“If he did have anything to do with (the bombing) I can’t tell you how bad I’d have felt. We were going by what the law says, but it would have been hard to live with,” Cook said.

Bail would have been easy to post if the judge had had a chance to set it, Cook said. A typical bail is $500 and McVeigh had $255 on him and the nearest bail bondsman was only about 30 minutes away.

As McVeigh sat in the Noble County jail awaiting a bond hearing, Charlie Hanger stewed at home. He told Nancy, a local bank teller, that something seemed odd about the man he had arrested.

“Charlie was just curious about him,” Nancy Hanger said. “He kept wondering if there was something else about him.”

On Wednesday, Hanger wondered aloud to Gibson whether the suspect in their jail might have some connection to the bombing. Gibson, however, did not share that suspicion. “We just missed the connection,” he admitted later.

But on Thursday morning, Charlie Hanger’s gnawing policeman’s intuition proved right.

Just an hour before Gibson planned to release McVeigh on bond, FBI officials called with news that he was a suspect--tipped off by a Social Security number that Hanger had transmitted into the national police crime computer files when he ran a records check on McVeigh on Wednesday morning from his patrol car.

When she heard Thursday afternoon that her husband may have played a role in cracking the bombing case, Nancy Hanger hurried over to the county courthouse to find Charlie. It was his day off, but he was there anyway, silent and somber in the hallway, wearing the same stern face he shows to speeders.

But as she approached, Trooper Charlie Hanger let it out for a brief moment. His grim roadside scowl creased into a beaming smile.