Victims of McVeigh Seek to Bear Witness

Diane Leonard lost her husband and turned her pain into counseling other victims. Bud Welch became an outspoken opponent of capital punishment and does not wish death for Timothy J. McVeigh for killing his daughter.

But unlike the hundreds of those injured and the families of those killed in the Oklahoma City bombing, Kathy Wilburn has gone far afield on her journey mourning her two grandsons.

She has hugged McVeigh’s father in New York and wept with the wife of Michael Fortier in Arizona, the drug dealer who could have stopped the bombing. “A person’s worst mistakes do not always define that person as a whole,” Fortier later wrote her, seeking forgiveness.

On Tuesday, Atty. Gen. John Ashcroft will visit Oklahoma City on a mission that would make King Solomon hesitate. Ashcroft must determine how to apportion just eight seats at McVeigh’s execution among 250 relatives and survivors who believe seeing it will help to cleanse their grief.

Whatever Ashcroft decides, the anguish will go on, because each of the more than 500 people who were injured and the relatives of the 168 killed in the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building blast here on April 19, 1995, has been changed in ways that nothing can erase.

Wilburn, for her part, has never believed McVeigh and Terry L. Nichols conspired alone in the bombing. She has visited the sites where they bought the bomb ingredients and the storage lockers where it was kept.

She has toured the lake in Kansas where the dynamite was attached to the ammonium nitrate, slept in the motel room where McVeigh spent his last night of freedom and knocked on the doors of white supremacy compounds from Oklahoma to Idaho.

She also has received some 100 cards and letters from Nichols, the man who was at McVeigh’s side up until the bombing.

Writing from prison about his newfound religion, Nichols, a former atheist serving a life sentence, told Wilburn, “I wish I would have known these truths myself years ago. For it would have prevented me from making numerous mistakes over the years.

“But,” he added, “that’s the past, and no one can change it.”

The letters to Wilburn from the two men are remarkable because Fortier has said nothing publicly beyond his court testimony, and Nichols has remained silent both during his federal trial and now as he awaits a second trial on state capital murder charges in Oklahoma City.

“What drives me?” asked Wilburn, whose grandsons Chase Smith, 3, and Colton Smith, 2, died in the explosion. “The need to know the truth.”

She does not want the government to execute McVeigh, as planned for May 16. “I believe that when he dies, so dies the truth,” she said.

And yet she hopes to get one of the eight seats for victims to watch the execution. “I lost two grandchildren. Don’t I deserve to see it?” she asks.

Of some 2,000 people classified as “official victims,” 250 have said they want be in the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Ind., to peer through the glass as the thus-far unrepentant McVeigh is given a fatal dose of potassium chloride that stops his heart.

Ashcroft will determine how to pick eight people from that list but won’t specifically pick the individuals. For those who don’t get in, Ashcroft may allow closed-circuit viewings of the execution either here or in Terre Haute. He is unlikely to announce his decision Tuesday.

For Wilburn, however Ashcroft decides, her quest will go on.

She began her journey with her husband, Glenn, neither of them believing that two Army veterans like McVeigh and Nichols could have pulled off the worst act of terrorism in America. When Glenn died of pancreatic cancer in the summer of 1997, just after McVeigh’s trial, she pushed onward.

Sometimes with a video camera, sometimes with a notebook and pencil, often suspecting the government itself knew the bombing was being planned, the determined woman trudged on.

She visited the Ryder rental agency in Junction City, Kan., where the owner, Eldon Elliott, still insisted that another man, known only as “John Doe No. 2,” was with McVeigh the day he rented the bomb truck.

She stayed nearby at the Dreamland Motel, a low-rent stop on the interstate. She even rented Room 25, where McVeigh stayed in the days before the bombing. The room was “really creepy,” she said; she left the light on at night.

“Have you ever been to the Dreamland?” she said. “It had chenille bedsheets and an old shag carpet.”

She talked to proprietor Lea McGown, who told her about seeing other people darting in and out of McVeigh’s room at night.

She went to Elohim City, Okla., and visited the far-right, anti-government compound run by the Rev. Robert Millar, which McVeigh had telephoned before the bombing and to which some believe he was headed afterward.

She said she was escorted to religious services, where the “Iron Cross Band” played hymns and guards displayed sidearms. Millar introduced her as “the ATF’s worst nightmare,” she said, a reference to the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms that led the 1993 raid at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas. ATF agents working in the federal building were McVeigh’s primary targets in the bombing.

Wilburn went north to Hayden Lake, Idaho, and another anti-government, racist stronghold there. Richard Butler, leader of the Aryan Nations, also had her attend church services.

She entered as church members wiped their feet on a Jewish flag on the floor. The men wore brown shirts and guns on their hips. A bust of Adolf Hitler hung in the sanctuary.

They sang “Amazing Grace” and gave the Nazi salute, and Butler delivered a sobering sermon about McVeigh. “One man’s terrorist is another man’s freedom fighter,” he said. “Timothy McVeigh is a great man and a martyr for the cause.”

In Kingman, Ariz., she had dinner with Lori Fortier, the wife of Michael Fortier, McVeigh’s friend who could have stopped the bombing. They hugged and cried, and Wilburn showed her pictures of her dead grandsons. She told Lori that the day she first heard McVeigh’s name, they were picking out a casket for the little boys to share.

Lori told how her life was miserable too, how her children were laughed at in school, how she could not join the PTA or take part in other community activities.

That night Wilburn wrote Fortier in prison, offering her prayers to his family. He wrote back, telling her not to distrust the government.

“I don’t know what you have uncovered,” he said about her journey. “But I have faith that the feds have uncovered everything, and I do not believe they would cover anything up.”

She went to upstate New York and had lunch with Bill McVeigh. So shy was Timothy’s father that he could hardly express himself. He did manage to tell her stories about his “Timmy” growing up near Niagara Falls.

“He got tears in his eyes,” she recalled. “I hugged him and said, ‘I’m very sorry for your loss too.’ ”

She has never connected with his son but has managed to reach Nichols. She keeps his cards and letters in a large white binder. Some letters go on for pages.

The first was a handmade card; he drew a rabbit smelling a tulip. “We all feel your loss, as well as for the others,” Nichols wrote.

Unlike McVeigh, Nichols was sentenced to life with no parole. Soon he began to tell her more. Once noting that his birthday is April 1, he wrote, “I’m the biggest fool of all.”

Later, in a breakthrough letter, he began, “This is really the first time I’ve ever written or spoken about Tim McVeigh to anyone, except my lawyers.

“I’m not writing this letter in any way to judge, accuse, condemn or blame Tim for anything, for I believe that’s God’s domain. Neither am I defending him in any way.”

He told her about McVeigh and the Unabomber, Theodore J. Kaczynski. All three once were housed in a Colorado prison.

“All they ever wanted out of life was the freedom to live their own lives however they chose to,” he wrote.

He added that the New Testament “clearly declares that we are to obey our government” and that “I truly believe that both Tim and Ted have not come to recognize the true root cause of the problem.

“It’s deeper than technology or the government. The true problem is their heart. They are both lost spiritually.”

Kathy Wilburn keeps writing Nichols.

“Who’s got more information about the Oklahoma City bombing than Terry Nichols?” she asked.

“Someday, I think Terry will tell me everything.”