Nichols Was ‘Scared’ at Surrender, Wife Testifies

With her husband sitting silently in the courtroom, the wife of Oklahoma City bombing defendant Terry L. Nichols described Friday why he surrendered to authorities in the worst mass murder in the United States.

“He was scared,” Marife Torres Nichols said of her husband. “He was pale. He was just anxious to know what was going on, why his name was on the news.”

She added that when she and her husband stepped into the Herington, Kan., police station two days after the bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, her husband walked up to the deputy police chief and announced: “I’m supposed to be armed and dangerous. You want to search me?”

Mrs. Nichols, 23, was called as a witness by her husband’s defense lawyers, who in this weeklong pretrial hearing in Denver are seeking to prove that the government manipulated the Nichols couple and held them against their wills. The defense lawyers want U.S. District Judge Richard P. Matsch not only to throw out the evidence seized in the Nichols’ home, but also to bar a lengthy series of statements that Nichols gave the FBI before being told he was going to be arrested.

In her testimony, Mrs. Nichols also said that the FBI held her incognito for 37 days in eight cities, constantly shuffling her around the Midwest and talking her into signing consent forms for search warrants that the government now claims unearthed important evidence implicating her husband in the bombing.

Inside their garage, for instance, the FBI found components that they believe were used to help make the truck bomb, including four large white barrels and a diesel fuel meter.

They also discovered hidden under her mattress $5,000 in cash plus nine gold coins and three silver coins that her husband had given her, she said. For months, the government kept the money to test it for fingerprints belonging to the bombing case’s co-defendant, Timothy J. McVeigh.

The witness, a native of the Philippines, told how she was shepherded from motel room to motel room and how the agents kept coming back to her with more search warrant requests for everything from the family vacuum cleaner to a food mixer that she said her husband had used “to grind up ammonium nitrate fertilizer.”

“I felt like I had a right not to sign any” of the search warrant consents, she said. “But I just wanted to cooperate. So I could go home soon to the Philippines.”

The April 19, 1995, blast at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building killed 168 people and injured more than 600. Two days afterward, with television news reporting that McVeigh had been arrested in Perry, Okla., the Nicholses and their year-old daughter, Nicole, left their Herington home and drove to the local police station.

They were immediately surrounded by FBI agents.

Mrs. Nichols said she did not understand everything the government officials were telling her nor did she fully comprehend all the legal forms they were asking her to sign. She said that she only wanted to return to her house in Herington and then to fly home to her parents in the Philippines.

She complained that the FBI secretly tape-recorded her telephone conversations with her husband and his father. And she recalled one phone call in which she was talking to her sister in California when her sister’s employer suddenly grabbed the phone and demanded to know whether Terry Nichols was guilty.

“No,” she told him. “I think he’s innocent.”

Under sometimes aggressive cross-examination by Assistant U.S. Atty. Larry Mackey, Mrs. Nichols acknowledged that the FBI agents treated her well during the 37 days she was with them. She said that she had no money until her cash was returned to her and that none of her family or her husband’s relatives had tried to help her after the bombing.

She repeatedly admitted to Mackey that it was primarily the $5,000 in cash that she wanted. “The priority in my mind was the money,” she said.

She said she even would make herself cry in front of the agents to try to convince them to return her money.

When Mackey asked her if she “ever shed a tear” for those killed and hurt in the bombing, Nichols’ defense lawyers immediately objected and Matsch ordered her not to answer.

Mackey also introduced greeting cards that Mrs. Nichols sent to some of the agents, thanking them for their help during the weeks after her husband’s arrest. In one card to an older agent, whom she likened to a father figure, she wrote that she and her daughter “will always” think fondly of him. “We will love you like a parent,” she wrote.