Gun Enthusiast’s Letter Triggers Questions About Bombing Role

A few days before the Oklahoma City bombing, Roger Moore took some lined paper and wrote a two-page letter to Timothy J. McVeigh.

They had met on the gun show circuit. They shared the same anti-government fervor. For a while, Moore had even shared his home with McVeigh on a rural Arkansas horse farm here.

“Tim,” he began, “I’m reading your letter and answering it ? for ?.”

Thus began the letter, written partly in code but nonetheless clear in much of its meaning.

He wrote about the New World Order, the 90% Solution, of a nation Better Dead Than Red--all buzzwords to far-right extremists who want to vanquish today’s government leaders and return power to the people.

“Plan is to bring the country down and have a few more things happen . . . “ he told McVeigh. “This is the only cause. But the important thing is to be as effective as possible.”

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A year after the bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, as the worst terrorist case in America now moves closer to trial, the peculiar role of Roger Moore remains one of its most curious mysteries.

Federal prosecutors believe that a $60,000 gun robbery at Moore’s farm establishes that McVeigh and co-defendant Terry L. Nichols acquired the financial means to purchase and store the fertilizer-and-fuel-oil bomb and ultimately deliver it to Oklahoma City last April 19.

But to defense attorneys, Moore’s role in this still-unfolding drama raises deep questions. How closely is Moore tied to McVeigh? Was the robbery a setup? Does Moore bear some responsibility for the bombing that killed 168 and injured another 600?

As for Moore--a 61-year-old self-made entrepreneur with a love for guns, the highway and his own self-importance--a review by The Times has turned up a surprising number of new episodes that suggest that his past could become an issue affecting his credibility if he testifies as a key trial witness, as is expected.

Along with the November 1994 robbery, there was another alleged heist at Moore’s home that remains unsolved. There are the mysterious suicides of two people who--like McVeigh--Moore invited to his farm.

And there is a 1993 shooting in which Moore was charged with blowing out the back window of an occupied car in Oklahoma. That incident left him so angry with law enforcement there that he openly vowed his hatred for Oklahoma.

Finally, there is the letter he wrote McVeigh, a copy of which was obtained by The Times. Depending on how you interpret its code words, Moore was either asking McVeigh’s help to solve the robbery or he was laying out an intricate plan for striking out against the federal government they both detested.

Moore said in an interview that his letter was nothing more than a ruse to trick McVeigh into returning to Arkansas. He wanted to confront him with his suspicion that he was behind the robbery. “That letter was a bait letter,” he insisted.

Throughout the interview, Moore ranged from charming to hostile, rambling about himself and his high IQ (137, he said), or cursing and lacing his comments with vulgarities.

He called collect from a public telephone, refusing to say where he was, boasting about his travels to gun shows--a drifter’s life that parallels McVeigh’s.

Asked why he wrote McVeigh to be as “effective as possible,” he answered by saying that the bombing certainly had the opposite result--turning the public against extremist groups and allowing Washington to propose new anti-crime legislation.

“If he wanted to be effective,” Moore said of McVeigh, “he certainly wasn’t.”

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“Blowing up a singular federal building doesn’t mean [anything],” he said. “He killed a few people. He scared the militias. He brought on the crime bill. That’s not being very effective. That’s being very effective for the other side.

“He did more damage to his cause than he possibly knows,” Moore said.

And yet Moore shares McVeigh’s views. Even in the letter, he proclaimed: “I’m the Serious Patriot.”

“A patriot,” he said in the interview, “is a person who loves his country. And I’m a patriot because I like this country.”

He said he divides his time between his friend, Karen Anderson, who lives on the farm, and his wife, Carol, who lives at his Florida home.

Anderson shares his passion for firearms. “I love my country,” she said in one of a series of separate interviews. “But I don’t trust my government.”

The couple met McVeigh at gun shows and target shoots around the nation. Moore, seeing himself in the role of father-mentor, was drawn to the seemingly lost youth.

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“He looked normal,” Moore recalled. “You’d never think anything else. Clean. Spit and polish. Talks nice. An absolute gentleman.”

Anderson remembered a darker side. McVeigh devoured Moore’s gun magazines. He seemed “very upset about all the kids at Waco” who were killed. Twice he stayed on the farm, working odd jobs. At night, she said, “he sat and listened to the shortwave radio with the headphones on.”

Then he would abruptly take off. “One day he was packing his car and just decided it was time to go,” Moore said. “He didn’t like long goodbyes.”

A large man, with curly, receding hair and a booming voice, Moore had put together a large collection of firearms and precious metals. Many of the weapons were family heirlooms.

On the morning of Nov. 5, 1994, while Anderson was away, he said, someone accosted him outside his door when he stepped out to feed the animals. He said the hooded assailant carried a pistol-grip shotgun with garrote wire, bound him with duct tape and then stole more than 60 firearms, gold bullion and silver bars.

Also taken was Moore’s van. Although the vehicle was later found, missing was Moore’s list of serial numbers for the guns that he said he kept in the glove compartment.

Authorities never solved the crime. Garland County Sheriff Larry Selig still has questions about it. But federal sources, who asked to remain anonymous, said they believe Moore.

The FBI has reported discovering Moore’s safe deposit box key at Nichols’ home. They also found one of his guns at a pawnshop in Kingman, Ariz., where McVeigh lived after leaving Arkansas.

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McVeigh’s attorneys have produced gun-show records and motel receipts that indicate he was in Akron, Ohio, on the morning Moore was being held up.

But Moore and Anderson think McVeigh had some involvement because he knew about the large gun collection from his visits there.

Anderson wrote McVeigh three letters in Kingman, offering to pay for his help in finding the robber. She said he wrote back, advising her to “put up surveillance cameras” and “military sensors you could set on the property.”

Finally, Moore wrote his letter to McVeigh. But it arrived after McVeigh left Kingman. The FBI found it inside McVeigh’s mail drop there after his arrest.

For Moore, the robbery was not his first encounter with authorities.

In 1986, he reported that a housekeeper had stolen $11,000 in cash that was bundled in bank packets. The woman was not apprehended. Officials said she later killed herself in Arizona.

That same year, a ranch hand asphyxiated himself in the farm garage while Moore and Anderson were away, according to police.

Ed Smith, a Garland County sheriff’s deputy who investigated these earlier incidents, said there also was a flurry of complaints from his neighbors about Moore shooting guns on his property, including automatic rifle fire and bullet tracers that lit up the night.

In 1993, he was arrested in Wagoner County, Okla., for shooting out the back window of a car carrying four people on the state turnpike.

Moore was returning from a Tulsa gun show. He was carrying nearly $3,850 in cash. Inside his car were two firearms and 23 different kinds of medications for everything from ulcers to infections to sleep disorders.

Learning of Moore’s arrest, Anderson chartered a plane in Arkansas and flew to Oklahoma with $50,000 in cash to post bail. Local authorities were astonished.

“We looked at all that money, and it would have taken us all day and all night to count it,” said Sheriff Elmer Shepherd.

So Moore posted bail through a local bondswoman, Dianna Sanders Burk. His local attorney, Richard McLaughlin, was besieged by letters of commendation for Moore.

The letters, written by people around the country, attested to Moore’s good reputation, saying that he held a master’s degree in business administration, had worked as a city manager in Iowa and had made a fortune building boats for the U.S. military during the Vietnam War.

He ultimately pleaded no contest to a reduced charge of transporting a loaded firearm and was fined $300 and court costs.

Last fall, Moore turned up again in Wagoner. He visited his lawyer’s office, the local prosecutor, even his bonds-woman, boasting about his role in the bombing case.

McLaughlin said Moore boasted that the FBI is “not going to do anything to me. I’m a protected witness.”