Hunt for 2nd Suspect Heats Up; Storm Slows Search for Victims : Bombing: Investigators target at least four states, while FBI arrests James and Terry Nichols as material witnesses. Death toll grows to 78; up to 150 still missing in Oklahoma City rubble. Rain, wind lash rescuers.

Law enforcement agencies pressed a nationwide manhunt Saturday for the second “John Doe” suspect in the deadly bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City as two other men, brothers James and Terry Nichols, were formally arrested as material witnesses.

The identity of the square-jawed man portrayed in a composite sketch released one day after Wednesday’s car-bombing remained unknown, but officials said an intensive effort was under way to apprehend him and perhaps additional suspects as well.

“We have at least one, and there could be others,” said Weldon Kennedy, the FBI’s special agent in charge of the investigation.

Federal agents fanned out through at least four states, looking for evidence and witnesses that would either lead to additional arrests or bolster their case against Timothy J. McVeigh, who has been charged in the bombing.

In the rain-soaked rubble of the nine-story office building in Oklahoma City, with as many as 150 people unaccounted for, search parties working in a raw chill continued the grim and dangerous task of picking their way through blocks of concrete, twisted beams and other rubble in the wrenching campaign to locate bodies.

The confirmed death toll reached 78, with little hope remaining that anyone else would be found alive in the devastated building.

More than two blocks away, a one-story building that may have been weakened by Wednesday’s blast collapsed Saturday morning. Three people inside escaped without injury.

Fighting a wind-chill of 20 degrees, in rain that increased the risk that the listing slabs of concrete would collapse on them, rescue teams worked in two-hour shifts. As bodies caught in the slick maze of dangling metal and crushed walls began to decay, their locations were marked with the spray-painted initials DB .

To rally flagging spirits, Assistant Fire Chief Jon Hansen held up a toy fire engine and urged his team on: “Think about what it would be like to find a child alive in there.”

But no one has been pulled out alive since Wednesday evening, about 15 hours after the explosion.

As the parallel searches for victims and perpetrators moved forward, other law enforcement officials focused on the painstaking task of assembling the case for prosecution.

Legal papers prepared by the FBI presented the Nichols brothers as material witnesses--figures who are not charged in the crime, but whose future testimony is important and who are considered sufficiently likely to flee that their testimony cannot be assured unless they are kept in custody.

Officials said the two Nichols brothers were linked to radical right-wing paramilitary organizations, some of whose members had advocated violence against federal authorities. They also said that McVeigh, who has been charged in the bombing after his arrest by federal authorities Friday and who turns 27 today, was closely associated with James Nichols.

In a hearing before U.S. District Judge Monti L. Bellot in Wichita, Kan., Terry Nichols was ordered held as a witness. An additional hearing is planned for Thursday to determine whether he should be moved to Oklahoma City, where a federal grand jury is expected to take up the case.

Asked by the judge if he had had enough time with his lawyers, Nichols responded: “I don’t know if I ever will. It’s all a jumble to me.”

James Nichols was taken into custody at his home in Decker, Mich., Friday night as a material witness and spent the night at the Sanilac County Jail, county sheriff’s deputies said. Federal officials transferred him to Detroit on Saturday. He was ordered held, and a hearing is scheduled for Tuesday to determine if he will be moved to Oklahoma.

With one suspect, McVeigh, under arrest at the El Reno Federal Correctional Center near Oklahoma City, the FBI had two primary missions:

* Identifying, and then finding, the second man who is believed to have rented a 1993 Ford van with McVeigh from the Ryder Rental Co. franchise in Junction City, Kan. Authorities say the vehicle was used to deliver 1,000 to 1,200 pounds of explosives, a catastrophic mixture of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil, to the front of the federal building Wednesday morning.

* Searching in such disparate locations as upstate New York, Michigan, Kansas and Arizona--all sites lived in or visited recently by the Nichols brothers and McVeigh--for pieces of evidence they can connect to the case.

In Arizona, federal officials expanded their search in the high desert surrounding Kingman, where McVeigh lived briefly in 1994. Law enforcement agents had initially searched at the trailer park where McVeigh lived, but by Saturday had significantly expanded their search.

Several agents descended on a house on McVicar Avenue that was frequented by Nichols when he lived there. The house, according to one federal source, was thought to be a gathering point for men who had formed an anti-government militia unit. One resident was a veteran who had served with McVeigh in the Army. The residents, a man and a woman, were questioned but not arrested.

The area around Kingman has been a scene of activity by paramilitary groups similar to those in Michigan to which federal officials have said the Nichols brothers were linked.

The massive search in the four states began on Wednesday, after federal agents retrieved an axle from the Ford van that had been thrown two blocks by the force of the explosion. From the axle, the agents obtained the van’s vehicle identification number and traced it to the Ryder franchise, Elliot’s Body Shop. On Thursday, after interviewing the rental agent, federal authorities circulated a composite drawing of two men, identified as John Doe No. 1 and John Doe No. 2.

The drawing led them to McVeigh. Held in the fourth-floor jail atop the Noble County Courthouse in Perry, Okla., 63 miles north of Oklahoma City, since about 1 1/2 hours after the explosion, he had been taken into custody after he was stopped for driving a vehicle without a license plate and was discovered to be carrying a Glock 9-millimeter semiautomatic pistol and a six-inch straight-blade knife. He was identified as John Doe No. 1.

But the identification and whereabouts of the second suspect, John Doe No. 2, who was briefly thought to have been James Nichols or perhaps his brother, Terry, remained a mystery throughout Saturday.

“We are not working on the assumption that either one of them is John Doe No. 2,” Carl Stern, the Justice Department’s director of public affairs, said of the Nichols brothers. But, Stern acknowledged, “we have not flatly ruled that out.”

In both Herington, Kan., and Las Vegas, Nev., residents said they recognized the widely circulated FBI composite sketch of “John Doe No. 2” as being as a man they remembered as Terry Nichols. But officials said they continued to have reasons to doubt that the identification was accurate.

Both President Clinton and Atty. Gen. Janet Reno have said the government will seek the death penalty for anyone convicted of the bombing. The charge on which McVeigh was arraigned late Friday--destruction of a federal building--carries the death penalty when victims are killed.

While federal officials said they were searching aggressively for the second suspect, that search was largely invisible. The search, said one source familiar with the investigation, was being conducted by reviewing written records, to try to identify the suspect, rather than sending search teams to look for an individual.

This would suggest that the investigators were some distance from their quarry, and while they may have some clues about him, they are uncertain not only where to look for the suspect but who he actually is.

One federal source said the suspect, pictured in a composite drawing and accompanying description as a square-jawed, white man with thick lips and a full head of hair, had engaged in specific activities, which he would not disclose, that led investigators to believe he was connected to the case.

“There’s a trail. He didn’t come and go without leaving a trail,” he said.

The FBI, joined by other federal agents and state police, concentrated their searches in Decker, Mich., where James Nichols lives at the intersection of Michigan 53 and Deckerville Road, and in Herington, Kan., where Terry Nichols has been in the process of buying a house into which he moved about one month ago. But agents also went to work in Pendleton, N.Y., outside of Buffalo, visiting the home where McVeigh was raised after his parents were divorced and where his father still lives, and in Kingman, Ariz., the last known address for McVeigh, at 1711 Stockton Hill Road.

In Decker, 70 miles north of Detroit, about 100 federal and state law enforcement officers moved throughout the property, working in and around the white frame house, a barn and other buildings--the center of an organic farm James Nichols operated, apparently without great success--as they collected potential bits of evidence.

The work began Friday afternoon and continued into the night and throughout Saturday. One agent of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms was overheard telling his wife by telephone that the search could last another two days.

Agents climbed ladders to examine the farm’s three large metal silos while others led dogs trained to sniff out explosives.

For the past two years, according to neighbors, the farm has been the site of explosions and experiments with homemade bombs, in which fertilizers and fuel were packed into milk containers. And according to an FBI affidavit, a relative of James Nichols said she had heard that he had been involved in constructing bombs and that he possessed large quantities of fuel oil and fertilizer, which federal bomb experts believe to have been the ingredients in the Oklahoma City bomb.

While the search continued on Saturday, county sheriff’s deputies blocked all approaches to the property, and traffic built up among farmers’ muddy fields as spectators, some equipped with field glasses, stared at the Nichols property in the distance.

In Herington, Kan., the investigators secured an area around Terry Lynn Nichols’ home, where he lives with a woman whom neighbors took to be his wife and a girl who appeared to be about 3 years old.

Nichols had turned himself over to the police late Friday, reportedly after hearing a televised report that he was wanted for questioning in connection with the bombing. According to one local business owner, FBI agents said Nichols had been under surveillance by agents before he surrendered.

The investigators expanded their search to an area reaching about two blocks from the home, and also examined the contents of trash cans at Surplus City, a local business which sells carpet and secondhand equipment. An FBI agent was overheard saying that Nichols had been seen by agents in the vicinity of the store during the hours before he turned himself in.

Officers appeared to be searching for ammonium nitrate sacks that might have been discarded before Nichols arrived at the police station for questioning Friday evening.

In addition, authorities secured a storage locker in an industrial park on the southern edge of Herington. At least a dozen FBI investigators scooped up samples of soil at the entrance to the locker and placed the samples in evidence bags. They also made plaster casts of tire prints in front of the locker and photographed the grounds surrounding it.

About 6 p.m., a large, six-wheeled Army truck arrived and soldiers unloaded what appeared to be the makings of a large canvas tent--an indication that the FBI was building an operations base in front of the locker as the skies darkened and snow was forecast. Late in the day, officers set up a second tent near Nichols’ garage.

The Paper Trail

The trail allegedly connecting the suspects to the bombing was nearly lost in the first day and a half after the tragedy. Although the Oklahoma authorities had McVeigh in custody within 90 minutes of the blast Wednesday morning, they did not realize until Friday just who he was. Arresting officer Charlie Hanger, a highway patrolman, and Noble County Assistant Dist. Atty. Mark Gibson initially didn’t consider the possibility.

“For the first 24 hours, the APB (all-points bulletin) indicated that the suspects were of Mideastern descent,” Gibson recalled. But even after composite drawings of the two suspects were released Thursday afternoon, no bells went off. McVeigh had his hair cut after renting the Ryder truck on Monday, so his crew-cut in the composite was longer and he looked younger in the drawing, Gibson added.

It was not until Friday when McVeigh was due for a hearing, where Gibson planned to ask for $500 bail, that an ATF agent from Oklahoma City called the Perry County sheriff to ask if they had McVeigh in custody and “got real excited” when Sheriff Jerry Cook said yes.

Ironically, the FBI agent leading the team that rushed by helicopter to Perry, Danny Coulson, was the original head of the FBI’s hostage rescue team, which played a key role in Waco.

With McVeigh under arrest, a slim trail of documents presented by the FBI--affidavits filed in court to justify its questioning of the Nichols brothers--offered the initial outline of the case that federal authorities are trying to build.

According to an affidavit submitted to U.S. Magistrate Ronald L. Howland in Oklahoma City on Friday by FBI agent Henry C. Gibbons, a 26-year veteran of the bureau, FBI agents interviewed the Ryder rental agents at the body shop in Junction City, Kan., on the day of the explosion, learning that two people had rented the truck on Monday.

The person who signed the rental agreement identified himself as Bob Kling, with a Social Security number of 962-42-9694, and a South Dakota driver’s license, YF942A6. He listed his home address as 428 Malt Drive, Redfield, S.D., and listed his destination as 428 Maple Dr., Omaha, Neb.

“Subsequent investigation conducted by the FBI determined all this information to be bogus,” Gibbons said in the affidavit.

On Thursday, one day after the blast, the Ryder rental agent was contacted again and helped in creating the composite drawings.

The composite drawings were shown to employees of various motels and commercial establishments in the Junction City, Kan., vicinity. Employees of the Dreamland Motel in Junction City told the FBI that a person resembling John Doe No. 1 had stayed at the motel from April 14 through Tuesday, the day before the explosion.

He registered under the name of Tim McVeigh and listed his automobile, bearing an Arizona license plate with an illegible plate number. He provided a Michigan address on North Van Dyke Road in Decker, Mich., and was seen driving a 1970s-vintage Mercury.

Further investigation shows that the property on North Van Dyke Road “is associated with James Douglas Nichols and his brother Terry Lynn Nichols,” the affidavit said. The property is described as a working farm. Terry Nichols formerly resided in Marion, Kan., about one hour from Junction City, the document said.

Gibbons, in a second affidavit, said a relative of James Nichols reported that Terry Nichols was in Decker, Mich., around April 7 visiting his brother and that he may have been accompanied by McVeigh. The relative, whose name was not given in the document, said the two brothers are “former members of the Michigan Militia, a right-wing organization which had engaged in extensive military training.”

Gibbons also said in the document that FBI bomb expert James T. Thurman said an explosive device similar to the one that caused the explosion “would necessarily have involved the efforts of more than one person.”

“James Nichols’ association with Tim McVeigh, a person involved in such a heinous crime, and his involvement in construction of bombs, indicates that his testimony cannot be secured through the issuance of subpoena,” Gibbons stated. This means he must be arrested as a material witness, rather than be given a subpoena and be expected to turn up on his own.

The Political Link

Clinton, who declared today a national day of mourning and who will attend a memorial service in Oklahoma City during the day, delivered his weekly radio address from the Oval Office with an audience of nearly two dozen children, seated on the carpet, and their parents who work for the federal government.

With television cameras present, he sought to calm the fears of children who may have been upset by the blast, and by its destruction of a day-care center, where at least 13 children, and probably many more, were killed. The bodies of seven child victims have been identified and six more unidentified children’s bodies have been recovered, according to Ray Blakeney, director of operations for the Oklahoma state medical examiner’s office.

In his speech, Clinton said: “I have promised every child, every parent, every person in America that when we catch the people who did this, we will make sure that they can never hurt another child again. Ever.”

It is time for the country to overcome its prejudices, and respect diversity, so people do not develop “this crazy attitude that it’s OK to hurt people you never even knew.”

Clinton was joined by his wife, Hillary, who offered this message: “There are many more good people in the world than those who are bad or evil.”

In the Republican response, Oklahoma Gov. Frank Keating, a former FBI agent, praised Clinton and thanked those who helped after the disaster. “When Americans are threatened, when we hurt and need help, political differences and distance no longer matter,” he said.

Earlier in the day, House Speaker Newt Gingrich visited the bombing site, touring it at 4 a.m.

In response to a suggestion made by the President n that the children of the nation write to the children of Oklahoma City, officials announced that letters may be sent to: Rick Moore, assistant to the mayor, 200 N. Walker, Suite 302, Oklahoma City, Okla. 73102.

Times staff writers Stephen Braun in Perry, Okla., Louis Sahagun in Herington, Kan., Glenn Bunting in Decker, Mich., and Robin Wright in Washington contributed to this story.

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