Lawyer Says McVeigh Statement Not Confession

Timothy J. McVeigh’s lawyer acknowledged Monday that his files contain a report in which his client claimed responsibility for the Oklahoma City bombing, but attorney Stephen Jones flatly and angrily denied that it is a confession, as portrayed last week by a Dallas newspaper.

Instead, Jones asserted that the report is part of the defense team’s internal work product and is “not a legitimate defense document.” He said the defense fabricated the document to show to a potential witness who they feared was prone to violence, but who could help lead them to the real bomber.

In the document, according to the Dallas Morning News, McVeigh claimed that he alone carried out the April 1995 terrorist attack that killed 168 people at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

“We have located the document, but it is not a confession by Tim McVeigh,” Jones said in Denver, where his client is to go on trial in four weeks.

“Beyond that, the reasons for it, the use we made of it, how we used it, I cannot tell you. But when I say it is not a legitimate defense memorandum, what I mean by that is that it is not a confession by Tim McVeigh.”

Jones also charged that the Morning News, which broke its story Friday, stole the document in January as part of a computer break-in. He called for a federal criminal investigation of the matter.

Justice Department officials said they would not comment until they had received a formal complaint from Jones.

The newspaper, meanwhile, strongly denied wrongdoing.

Jones said that, because of the widespread media attention the report has gotten--at a time when 1,000 potential jurors are being summoned for McVeigh’s trial--he may ask that the scheduled March 31 start of the proceedings be delayed.

“My own gut reaction is that I think I’m going to have to ask for a continuance of 90 days,” he said. Prosecutors declined to respond to Jones’ suggestion that the trial might have to be postponed.

McVeigh was arrested a little more than an hour after the bombing because of a traffic offense. Two days later, he was taken into federal custody in the bombing and transported to a federal prison in El Reno, Okla.

It was there, according to the Dallas newspaper, that McVeigh allegedly told members of the defense team that he not only single-handedly delivered the truck bomb to the Murrah building but that he blew up the building during the daytime to ensure a maximum number of casualties.

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Quoting from the document, written by a defense team staff member, the newspaper said that a staff member asked why the bombing did not occur at night. The paper 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 newspaper first put its story on its Web page Friday afternoon, then published a fuller account on Saturday. Jones, responding Friday to the Web version, branded the story as a “hoax” and said that he knew nothing about any such document. But, after investigating the matter over the weekend, he said the document exists.

And Jones said that the Morning News reporter, Pete Slover, had “slipped up” in a conversation with him on Friday and “tried to make it look like” the document came from two people who have assisted the defense team, investigator Richard Reyna and lawyer and freelance reporter J.D. Cash.

Jones said that both Reyna and Cash were “familiar with the document” but that both denied giving the report to Slover.

Cash, through a statement made available Monday by the McCurtain Gazette newspaper in Idabel, Okla., also indicated that the document was fabricated for the purpose of gaining information from someone else who could help the defense. “It has long been our understanding that the so-called ‘McVeigh confession’ is a document prepared by a member of the defense team for a specific and limited purpose,” the Cash statement said.

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“It is also our understanding that the contents of that document are a mixture of fact and fantasy--purposely and skillfully created so as to allow a member of the McVeigh defense team the opportunity to gain access and information from a single source in [the] complex and sprawling investigation.”

Reyna was in Italy working on the case and could not be reached for comment.

Jones accused the Morning News of stealing from his computer system more than 25,000 pages of confidential defense materials. “It is not true that the 1st Amendment authorizes freedom of the press based on stolen documents,” Jones said.

Paul Watler, a Morning News attorney, denied that the paper obtained anything other than the one document.

“We have a relatively few number of pages,” Watler said. “And we have nothing further to report about the document that we have.”

Watler also strongly defended Slover, who, he said, obtained the document “lawfully and through routine news-gathering techniques.”