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For two days, authorities kept McVeigh in jail, not connecting their quiet, uncommunicative prisoner with the police sketch. No one inquired about the young man, who asked only when he would be getting out. Five minutes before he was due to go before the Noble County court on Friday morning, where he might have walked away on $500 bail, district attorney John Maddox received a call from the FBI telling him to hang onto the prisoner.
Few of the people who knew McVeigh from his hometown of Pendleton, New York, about 15 miles northeast of Niagara Falls, recognized him from the composite sketch. And some of his classmates and teachers from Starpoint High, where McVeigh graduated in 1986, would have nominated him as least likely to be the bomber. "He wasn't a troublemaker at all," says Wendy Stephany, while Cecelia M. Matyjas, his tenth-grade geometry teacher, remembers how "the kids used to pick on him." Schoolmates sarcastically voted the taciturn McVeigh "Most Talkative." Still, he showed initiative: he charged the neighborhood kids admission to a haunted house in his basement and ran small gambling casinos on his front lawn. One neighbor thought McVeigh "would go somewhere."
Those who came into contact with McVeigh more recently, however, tell a more disturbing tale. According to the Associated Press, he joined the Army after high school and served as a Bradley vehicle gunner and sergeant during the Gulf War. "He was a good soldier. If he was given a mission and a target, it's gone," said James Ives, another sergeant in McVeigh's Army infantry unit. He worked himself hard on his own time, hoping to qualify for the Army Special Forces. After he failed to make it, friends say, McVeigh, already a loner, became increasingly frustrated. His politics veered far rightward. He claimed that the Army had implanted a computer chip in his buttocks. He was distraught over the 1993 destruction of the Branch Davidian compound in Waco and, about that time, bought a TEC-9 semiautomatic assault weapon, a gun banned by law last year. Those who knew him in Michigan said McVeigh was always armed. But Linda Haner-Mele, 35, his supervisor at a security company in the Niagara Falls area, where he worked briefly, insists to Time, "He was a follower, not a leader. He'd do whatever you asked him, but he didn't have any ideas of his own. That's why I don't believe he could have set this all up."
John Doe No. 2, however, appears to be still at large. And Terry Nichols' role in the crime, if any, is still unclear. But Terry and his brother James do know McVeigh. According to residents of Decker, McVeigh spent some time in the area several months ago, living with James Nichols in his neat, two-story, white frame farmhouse. According to Randy Izydorek, 26, a neighbor and acquaintance of the Nichols', McVeigh "deals in guns and goes to a lot of gun shows. My dad and I have seen his car loaded down with them a couple of times." McVeigh, say officials, may have met Terry Nichols while in the Army.