OKLAHOMA CITY: AFTER THE BOMB : Movie Role Model?

Could Timothy McVeigh, the Oklahoma City bombing suspect, be the second person to have taken inspiration for a violent act from a movie character portrayed by Robert De Niro? De Niro’s deranged Vietnam veteran Travis Bickle in “Taxi Driver” was a role model for John Hinckley, Hinckley said after attempting to assassinate former President Reagan in 1981. And reporters and others are speculating whether an alias police said was occaisionally used by McVeigh--”Terry Tuttle”--was based on Harry Tuttle, the rogue terrorist played by De Niro in the 1985 Orwellian fantasy “Brazil.” In the long dream sequence that ends the movie, Tuttle and a fed-up bureaucrat gleefully set off a bomb that obliterates a government building known as the Ministry of Information.

Toys Provide Grim Clues

As the tough task of identifying bodies continues, Ray Blakeney, director of operations for the Oklahoma state medical examiner, says that in half of the cases, identification has been made through dental records, and in the other half, by fingerprints. One method that is not being used, for humanitarian reasons, Blakeney said, is to ask relatives to look at the bodies. “That is the absolutely worst way of identification,” he said. In the case of a missing 4-year-old boy, a criminalist for the Oklahoma State Bureau of Investigation went to the child’s home and, with permission of his parents, dusted his Power Rangers toys and his plastic race cars for prints. Tom Howell said it was toughest task in his 15 years processing more than 500 bodies. He told the Dallas Morning News that he took the boy’s toys into his van to do the dusting so they would not have to watch him.