McVeigh Admitted Guilt to Legal Team, Report Says

Timothy J. McVeigh told his defense team that he alone drove the Ryder truck in the Oklahoma City bombing and decided on a daytime attack to ensure a “body count,” the Dallas Morning News reported Friday.

According to confidential notes of jailhouse interviews with a defense team member, McVeigh also described how he and Terry L. Nichols assembled the bomb and financed the attack with a series of robberies, the paper said.

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

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

Late Friday, Ralph Langer, the newspaper’s executive vice president and editor, said the story was not a hoax.

“We would not publish a story that we did not have an extremely high degree of confidence in the reporting, in the documents and in the research,” Langer said.

Jones accused the paper 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 Morning News 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 outside the courthouse in Denver.

He called the Morning News “the most irresponsible paper in the country,” claimed the notes were either faked or stolen, and compared the report to the “Hitler’s diary” hoax. But he said he didn’t plan any legal action against the paper.

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

Langer said the newspaper obtained the documents legally and denied that it rushed the story to the Internet to avoid a court order barring it from publishing the story.

“We put the story on the Web site because it was, in our view, extraordinarily important, and we got the story finished this afternoon and we felt we ought to publish, so we published,” Langer said.

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.

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.

When prosecutors and Nichols’ attorney, Michael E. Tigar, were contacted for comment, they declined to provide any.

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.

The government has estimated that about 4,800 pounds of fertilizer went into the bomb, but McVeigh reportedly told the interviewer the device was built with 5,400 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer--purchased for $540--blended with about $3,000 worth of high-powered racing fuel.

“Mr. McVeigh states that 108 50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer were mixed with the nitro fuel purchased by Terry Nichols,” the interviewer wrote.

Friday’s report wasn’t the first to suggest McVeigh has admitted to the bombing. A month after the April 19, 1995, attack, the New York Times reported that he had acknowledged responsibility for the blast to two people--not named in the article--who had visited him in prison.

Also, the Daily Oklahoman reported in June 1995 that McVeigh had confessed to one of its sources.