McVeigh Team Starts by Zeroing In on Stray Leg

The defense in the Oklahoma City bombing trial opened its case Thursday with suggestions that a never-identified left leg recovered from the blast site may have belonged to the real bomber. Two witnesses also testified that they saw a Ryder truck at suspect Timothy J. McVeigh’s motel the day before prosecutors have alleged that he rented the vehicle.

Defense attorneys also presented two other witnesses who said they saw McVeigh’s alleged getaway car and noticed that the rear license plate was firmly attached--a hint that someone may have removed it in order to make sure McVeigh was arrested after the bombing.

After enduring four weeks of often flawless government evidence, the defense appears to be attempting to show that someone other than McVeigh killed 168 people and injured more than 500 others in the April 19, 1995, bombing of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. Or, at the least, McVeigh’s attorneys are trying to suggest that he was set up by others to take the fall in what became the worst terrorist attack in America.

Lead defense attorney Stephen Jones has promised that he will prove his client not guilty.

On Thursday, he called to the witness stand Herta King, a Junction City, Kan., resident whose son, David, was living at the Dreamland Motel. She testified that she visited him there on Easter Sunday, April 16, and saw a large Ryder rental truck.

This conflicts with the government’s theory that McVeigh did not rent the Ryder truck supposedly used in the bombing until Monday, April 17.

“I saw a yellow Ryder truck sitting right there,” she said. “I couldn’t see my son’s car because the yellow Ryder truck blocked my view.”

And, she added, “there’s no question in my mind it was Easter Sunday.”

Next up was Renda Truong, 19, who also visited the motel that Sunday and said she too saw the Ryder truck. She said she asked the motel manager “if somebody was moving.”

Lenard and Diana White, a married couple from Cheney, Kan., testified about staying at the motel and seeing McVeigh’s 1977 Mercury Marquis parked there. They both noticed an Arizona license plate.

“It wasn’t tilted or cocked or anything else,” Lenard White said. “It was nice and solid.”

Added Diana White: “It looked like it was on there perfect.”

That testimony could prove critical because McVeigh was arrested a little over an hour after the bombing when a state trooper noticed he was driving without a license plate.

Also taking the stand for the defense was Dr. Frederick Jordan, the Oklahoma state medical examiner. He testified that a single left leg was recovered from the bomb debris that did not match any of the 168 bodies. The leg was recovered in May 1995, after the blown-out building had been imploded by safety workers.

Jordan said DNA testing of the leg was inconclusive because of its condition. And he said the leg could have belonged to a short female, although he was not scientifically certain. “We had one left leg and we do not know where it belongs,” he said.

He was followed by Dr. Thomas Marshall, a prominent British pathologist who has done post-mortem examinations after dozens of bombings in Northern Ireland.

In one specific case, Marshall said, a man carried a bomb into a shed and it then exploded. Authorities found eight male bodies but nine penises. Marshall concluded that the man carrying the bomb must have been disintegrated by the bomb, and that only his penis was recovered.

Marshall used that analogy to explain that he believes the left leg found at the Murrah bomb site represents a 169th fatality. Because only a leg was recovered, he said, the person the leg belonged to was most likely killed while standing close to the Ryder truck, “if not inside it.”

“This is an extra left leg,” Marshall said. “Until shown otherwise, this must be an extra victim.

“And to be disintegrated so completely, you have to be near the bomb.”

Jones was trying to suggest that someone other than McVeigh was killed at the epicenter of the bomb after parking the truck in front of the Murrah building.

But Pat Ryan, the U.S. attorney in Oklahoma City, asked under cross-examination if it wasn’t possible that the person was standing somewhere else and that the force of the blast threw the leg to the front of the building.

Marshall stuck to his hypothesis, saying that if the person was farther from the truck at the time of the explosion, “we would have found more of the body.”

He also noted that an FBI canvass of homeless shelters and other locations never turned up a missing person after the bombing. “When nobody is missing, it reinforces the notion that the person was involved in the bombing,” he said.

Also testifying was Jeff Davis, who delivered a Chinese food order of moo goo gai pan to Room 25 at the Dreamland Motel, where McVeigh was registered. But he said another man--not McVeigh--was there.

Asked under cross-examination by prosecutor Larry Mackey if he was “100% sure” that he did not see McVeigh there, Davis answered: “For my memory, I have never seen him, no.”

Vicki Beemer, an employee at the Junction City truck agency, recalled that McVeigh rented the Ryder truck with a second man who has never been found, and who today is remembered simply as John Doe No. 2.

“They both walked out the door at the same time,” she said.