FOR MUCH OF LAST WEDNESDAY, TERRY LYNN Nichols busied himself with a few simple chores around his newly purchased two-bedroom house. He asked to borrow Etta Mae Hartke's ladder so that he could fix a loose metal vent on the roof. "I said it was O.K., if he put the ladder back," Hartke, 76, recalls. "When I looked, it was back where it was supposed to be." He had cable television installed, telling the Cablevision worker he was glad the TV was finally hooked up so he could "keep up with the Oklahoma bombing." And one of the last times any of Nichols' neighbors in the small farming town of Herington, Kansas, saw him, the dark-haired 40-year-old was tending to the small front yard outside the faded blue house with the white shutters. "He was spreading fertilizer on the lawn with his bare hands," says the person who lives directly across the tree-lined street. "I thought it was peculiar."
A few hours later, Nichols climbed into his blue GMC 4 x 4 with its AMERICAN AND PROUD decal on the rear window, and drove 10 blocks to the police station to meet with officers. Within minutes, word spread through the town of 3,000 that a man who may have been involved in the Oklahoma City bombing was in the hands of Herington's five-man police department. Farmers in mud-caked boots, some holding small children in their arms, planted themselves across from the police station and stared mutely. Students just let out of school arrived and stood in clusters six deep. Some climbed into the beds of pickup trucks to get a better view. "Bring him out," they chanted. "Kill the creep."
At the same time, 200 miles away in Perry, Oklahoma, another restive crowd had gathered. When choppers started dropping down a few blocks from the town square, the word ricocheted fast from courthouse to post office to school: one Timothy James McVeigh, wanted in connection with the bombing in Oklahoma City, was somehow in their jail, right here on the fourth floor of the Noble County Courthouse. Said David Deken, 17, who was in English class when he heard the news: "We were just saying a few minutes before that these guys better not set foot in Perry, and suddenly, well, here he is." As the blank-faced, orange-clad McVeigh was led out through the crowd in leg irons and handcuffs, cries of "Baby killer!" tore the air.
Such rage may only deepen in the days and weeks to come, as more is learned about these men and their involvement in the nation's worst terrorist action ever, a crime that last week had left an official toll of 65 adults and 13 children dead and at least 100 still missing in the rubble of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. Although Nichols and his brother James are being held as material witnesses, their friend and associate McVeigh was charged, under Title 18 of U.S. Code, Section 844, with bombing a government building. According to the complaint filed by the FBI on Friday night, McVeigh was known by a co-worker to hold "extreme right-wing views ... and was particularly agitated about the conduct of the Federal Government at Waco, Texas, in 1993"--so agitated, in fact, that he had visited the site. Indeed, as more details emerge, April 19--the date of last week's bombing and the anniversary of the apocalyptic fire at the Branch Davidian compound in Waco-has only gained in infamy, intricately bound as it is to the mythologies of homegrown zealots like McVeigh.