Clues Sought in Details From McVeigh’s Arrest : Bombing: From a traffic stop in Oklahoma, to his first talk with Feds, statements and actions are studied.

In his first meeting with government agents after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, Timothy J. McVeigh blurted out a statement that investigators believe further incriminates him in the worst terrorist attack ever to take place on U.S. soil.

McVeigh was being held in the tiny Noble County Jail in Perry, Okla., on a routine traffic charge when FBI agents paid him a visit two days after the April 19 bombing.

Did he know why they had come, they asked, according to documents in the case. “Yes,” McVeigh replied. “That thing in Oklahoma City, I guess.”

Until that moment, McVeigh had not been told that he was a suspect in the case, the FBI contends.

It was April 21, and what had begun as a massive FBI manhunt for suspected international terrorists had quickly and surprisingly moved to McVeigh’s jail cell door, only an hour’s drive away from the blast site.

As word spread that a suspect had been found, a crowd of 300 people, seething over the deaths of scores of innocent people in the bombing, ringed the jail. The crowd grew restless; McVeigh grew nervous. He told the agents he feared an assassin might be waiting for him outside, a “Jack Ruby.” He began throwing what law enforcement officers described as a tantrum.

“Everybody’s out there,” he said, worrying he might be shot. “I’m getting kind of paranoid now. . . . I might be Lee Harvey Oswald Jr.”

He asked the agents to take him out of the jail through the roof. They refused. And when he was finally escorted outside, grim-faced and wearing a bright orange jailhouse jumpsuit, the whole world saw the face of America’s most-wanted man.

For the first time, through FBI reports, government search warrants, the sheriff’s logs and jail booking cards, as well as more than a dozen witness statements and interviews, a full picture has emerged of the eventful 48 hours from the time McVeigh was stopped by an unsuspecting law enforcement officer for driving without a license plate to the moment when FBI agents James L. Norman Jr. and Floyd M. Zimms arrived at the Noble County Jail.

The records have remained confidential since the bombing, many of them ordered sealed under a protective order issued by a federal judge.

Obtained by The Times, they reveal a McVeigh sharply different from the one sources had earlier portrayed. He was not the silent soldier who gave jailers only his “name, rank and serial number.” Rather, he was often polite. And smooth.

He lost his composure only at the end, when a phalanx of federal agents and government helicopters descended on Perry.

The two-day period began with McVeigh trying to schmooze with the highway patrol trooper who stopped him, talking about guns and tales of his Army life during the Persian Gulf War.

After his arrest, he often slept restlessly in his cell above the county courthouse--if he slept at all. But just moments before the FBI’s arrival, he was all-smiles as he was about to appear at a bail hearing that almost certainly would have led to his release.

Some strong impressions remained with the jail staff.

The booking clerk was surprised by his courteousness. “He was so polite and he was just so relaxed,” remembered Marsha Moritz. “He was not nervous like a lot of the prisoners when they’re fingerprinted.”

Trustee Carl Hyatt remembered that McVeigh--the man who authorities contend killed 169 people in the bombing--nonchalantly lunched on a bologna sandwich from the jail kitchen just two hours after the blast.

Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Charles J. Hanger told the FBI that he stopped McVeigh at 10:20 a.m., just short of 80 minutes after the bomb went off in Oklahoma City. McVeigh was headed north on Interstate 35, driving a yellow 1977 Mercury Marquis with no license plate.

McVeigh was the first to step from his car. He was 26 then; four days away from his next birthday. The trooper also got out of his police cruiser, activating a videotape camera that recorded the arrest.

McVeigh took out a nylon camouflage wallet, removed his driver’s license and handed it to Hanger.

“At this point,” FBI reports say, “Hanger noticed a bulge in McVeigh’s jacket, under his left arm, and immediately told McVeigh to slowly use both hands and open his jacket for him.”

“I have a gun,” McVeigh told the trooper.

He opened his jacket. A .45-caliber Glock military assault pistol, Model 21, with a Black Talon impact-expanding bullet in the chamber, was hanging in a shoulder holster. The clip in the pistol was loaded with 13 rounds of hard-ball, or high velocity, ammunition. Another clip carried another 13 rounds.

“He [Hanger] immediately grabbed the pistol in the holster while drawing his own weapon,” the FBI reports said. He tossed the Glock and the ammunition onto the ground, along with a large fixed-blade knife that McVeigh carried in a brown-leather sheath on his belt.

Hanger handcuffed him. He warned McVeigh that, armed as he was, he might have been shot. “McVeigh responded that he felt he had the right to possess a gun to protect himself and had a permit to carry it in New York.”

The trooper began to copy down the serial number of the Glock when McVeigh told him it was VM769. “Close,” Hanger said, according to the reports. The actual number was VW769.

Hanger pointed out to McVeigh that most people don’t know the serial numbers on their guns. “I do,” McVeigh said.

McVeigh also “consistently asked” what was going to happen to his Glock, saying it was worth about $800. And he asked Hanger about his own gun. A Sig 228, the trooper said. “Oh,” McVeigh said, “a 9-millimeter.”

He told Hanger that “he had spent four years in the military and had been honorably discharged approximately one year ago.” In truth, he had left the Army 3 1/2 years earlier.

“He claimed to have been involved in Operation Desert Storm in the Persian Gulf and was living off the money he had saved while in the military,” the reports say. “McVeigh further claimed he had also been living at the Michigan address on his driver’s license with either a Jerry or Terry Nichols, who was the brother of a friend with whom he had been living in the military.”

In truth, he had lived in Decker, Mich., with James D. Nichols, the brother of Terry L. Nichols, who eventually would become his co-defendant in the bombing case.

McVeigh told Hanger he was moving to Arkansas, that he had “taken one load of his belongings there” and was now returning for another. The Mercury was empty, including the trunk. McVeigh was wearing a blue lightweight jacket and high-top combat boots with olive green wool socks. Hanger thought the attire odd for a long-distance trip, the reports said.

According to the FBI reports, and contrary to what McVeigh told Newsweek magazine in his only media interview, McVeigh and Hanger never discussed the bombing.

Moritz booked him in at the jail at 11:05 a.m. that Wednesday. Assigned Prisoner No. 95-057, he was charged with unlawfully carrying a weapon, transporting a loaded firearm in a vehicle, failing to display a license tag and having no insurance.

“When do I go to court?” he asked Moritz. “When do I go to court?”

She said he asked for the name of a relative to put on the booking card. He hesitated. She pressed him. He gave them the name of James Nichols and the address of Nichols’ farm in Decker. “But he didn’t claim he was a relative,” she said. “He just claimed that’s somebody to call in case of an emergency.”

He was taken to his cell above the courthouse. Lunch was ready: a bologna sandwich, potato chips, tea. Hyatt, the trustee, watched him casually eat, then slide into the jailhouse routine.

He made just two phone calls over the next two days. One to a bail-bondsman in Stillwater, Okla. It is unclear whom he called the second time. On Wednesday dinner was goulash and corn bread. Thursday’s breakfast was oatmeal with raisins. Showers were Thursday night. There was no TV, only radio. And the radio sitting on a jailhouse shelf constantly broadcast news of the bombing.

At that point, no one seemed to think for a moment that McVeigh might have been involved in the blast. And nowhere in the reports and interviews does anyone even hint that he confessed or took any responsibility for the bombing.

Jack Branson, a jailer, said McVeigh “certainly was a model prisoner.”

John Seward, an inmate in for burglary, said he asked McVeigh about his family.

“He said he burned them bridges before he got out of the service,” Seward said. “He told me that his mom was still alive, but he didn’t know where she was.”

(McVeigh’s parents were divorced. After his mother moved to Florida, he was raised by his father in Pendleton, N.Y.)

He talked about Army life at Ft. Benning, Ga., and Ft. Riley, Kan. He talked about Desert Storm. He talked about being “over there in the sand,” Seward said.

At night, “he would act like he went to sleep . . . but he didn’t sleep at all,” Seward said. “When they took him out of here, he had them black bags underneath his eyes.”

On Thursday, McVeigh’s bail hearing was delayed for a day when Judge Dan Allen became tied up in a complicated divorce case. On Friday morning, things were running late again. McVeigh was brought down for his court hearing about 10:30 a.m. He waited for his turn with Dana Charise Haynes, a female inmate from Kansas City.

“Then they came and got him and took him back upstairs and locked him back up,” she said. “That’s all I know. And then everybody kept saying he was the bomber.”

Moments earlier, Sheriff Jerry Cook had taken a call from an agent of the federal Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms, inquiring whether they had McVeigh in custody. They did. Cook told jailer Farrell Stanley to put McVeigh on a federal hold.

Cook escorted McVeigh back to the jail. “Do you have any idea when I’ll be going to court?” McVeigh asked. “No, it’ll be sometime today,” the sheriff said.

The sheriff said he then cut off the jail phone lines and set up a security perimeter around the building. Now his office phones were ringing incessantly. By noon, the FBI had arrived at his jail. Two government helicopters had landed in Perry.

McVeigh was brought back down from his cell to meet the agents. After telling them he knew they wanted to talk about “that thing in Oklahoma City, I guess,” he cut off any more questions. He wanted a lawyer.

He was advised of his rights. He gave his name, age and other routine personal information. He balked at telling his place of birth. “I will just give you general physical information,” he said.

They told him he would be flown to Oklahoma City. He said he was concerned about “my safety.” Asked what he meant, McVeigh said, “you remember what happened with Jack Ruby.”

But, the FBI reports say, “he was told that enough people had already been killed and hurt in the bombing itself, and no one was interested in anyone else getting hurt or killed, including himself, and he would be well-guarded.”

The FBI placed him under arrest for the bombing. They fingerprinted him. They took his mattress cover and blanket; his gun, knife and ammunition; even his jacket and his faded black jeans--all from the jail property locker. Later the government, with his consent, took hair samples from his head, forearms and pubic area. They took scrapings from under all of his fingernails--apparently in search of bomb residue.

Later, on the way back to his cell, he could see news reports on a nearby TV describing his arrest and the crowd massing outside the jail. But Cook said McVeigh never asked for a bulletproof vest, another claim McVeigh made in the Newsweek interview.

Back in his cell, McVeigh was losing his composure. He picked up the jail phone, but it was still dead. “He slammed it down like he was mad,” Stanley said.

He began to rant to Tiffany Valenzuela, a female inmate from Tulsa, Okla., in a nearby cell. “I don’t know what the deal is,” she remembered him saying. “After this sketch of the guy who bombed the federal building . . . they say it looks just like me. . . . But he’s got a double chin and bigger ears than I do. . . . That’s not me.”

He could see out a window but could not see the ground. He asked Valenzuela to “be my eyes” and peer down from her window to tell him what was happening. Were federal agents in suits and ties on the ground? On the roof?

In a statement to authorities, she said she told him to sit down, to calm down, to not be afraid, because “if you didn’t do anything” you shouldn’t be scared.

That bolstered him. “OK,” he said. “I’m not scared. I’m not scared right now.”