McVeigh Told Legal Team He Acted Alone, Report Says

Timothy J. McVeigh told his defense team that he alone drove the Ryder truck in the Oklahoma City bombing and that he decided on a daytime attack to ensure a “body count,” according to a newspaper report that was quickly challenged by McVeigh’s attorney.

According to confidential notes of jailhouse interviews with a defense team member, McVeigh also described how he and Terry Nichols assembled the bomb and financed the attack with a series of robberies, the Dallas Morning News reported Friday.

“I think it’s a hoax,” Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s attorney, said after the newspaper made the story available on its World Wide Web site Friday afternoon.

Jones quickly called a closed-door meeting with prosecutors and U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch to complain about the report.

He accused the newspaper of rushing the story onto the Internet out of fear that McVeigh’s defense would go to court in an attempt to stop publication. He also claimed that the paper had been fooled by one of its critics.

“The source has a reason to dislike this newspaper, and the source has, in my opinion, used an intermediary and set this newspaper up,” Jones said afterward outside the courthouse in Denver.

He called the Morning News “the most irresponsible paper in America” and compared the report to the “Hitler’s diary” hoax that embarrassed the German magazine Der Spiegel.

“We’re not going to sue them because I can’t find anybody that believes them now or in the past,” Jones said.

Jones told the paper that the notes were either faked or stolen.

Ralph Langer, the newspaper’s executive vice president and editor, said the newspaper obtained the documents legally.

Later Friday, Langer was in a meeting and did not immediately return a call requesting reaction to Jones’ comments in Denver.

The Morning News described the documents as summaries of meetings with McVeigh between July and December 1995 at El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma.

Because the reports were based on McVeigh’s meetings with a defense team member, they are not available to prosecutors and will probably never be introduced to the jury.

During one interview in July 1995, McVeigh was asked about an anti-government activist’s assertion that he would have been a hero if he had bombed the building at night, when fewer people would have been killed, the reports said.

“Mr. McVeigh looked directly into my eyes and told me, ‘That would not have gotten the point across to the government. We needed a body count to make our point,’ ” the staff member wrote.

At another point, McVeigh disputed a waitress’ claim that she knew the identity of another man who actually drove the bomb truck, the paper said.

“Mr. McVeigh again insisted that he was the one who drove the Ryder truck,” the interviewer wrote. Prosecutors and Nichols’ attorney, Michael Tigar, declined to comment.

McVeigh is scheduled to go on trial March 31 in Denver on murder and conspiracy charges. Nichols will be tried later. If convicted, they could receive the death penalty for the attack, which killed 168 people and injured more than 500.

McVeigh said they bankrolled the bombing in part with the November 1994 robbery of Arkansas gun dealer Roger Moore.

“Mr. McVeigh stated that he laid out the plan and that Terry Nichols alone broke into Moore’s house and stole the weapons,” the report says.

McVeigh’s account of what was done with the Moore loot closely tracked a statement given in August 1995 by Michael Fortier, a former friend and now a key witness against him. Fortier pleaded guilty to helping transport the stolen weapons and failing to warn the government of the bomb plot.

McVeigh described how he and Fortier picked up the guns in Council Grove, Kan., where Nichols had stored them. He said Fortier took them to sell in Kingman, Ariz., where both men once lived.