NO ONE IS SURE WHEN THE trial will begin. Maybe this fall, maybe early next year. First there are the months of pretrial motions. Depending on whether it's your side that makes them or theirs, the motions are either essential preliminaries or cynical delaying tactics. But as the nation marks the first anniversary of the Oklahoma City bombing, the locus of that bitter and confounding episode is shifting to the eventual trial scene in Denver. Since federal courts don't ordinarily permit cameras, some families of the victims who won't be making the almost 600-mile trip from Oklahoma City are petitioning for special closed-circuit coverage. The defendants, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols, were moved last month from Oklahoma to a medium-security prison about 16 miles from the Denver courthouse. McVeigh told TIME that he prefers the new accommodations.
Meanwhile, the ceaselessly humming brain center for McVeigh's defense is elsewhere still, in Enid, Oklahoma, 68 miles northwest of Oklahoma City. On the 11th floor of the Broadway Tower, the tallest building in Enid's unhurried downtown, are the offices of Stephen Jones, McVeigh's court-appointed attorney.
Though Jones likes to call himself a "county-seat" lawyer, he spent part of his career in New York (as a young lawyer working for Richard Nixon) and another part in Washington as a congressional aide. His thinking doesn't stop at the county line. Prosecutors, led by Special Assistant U.S. Attorney Joseph Hartzler, plan to lay the crime squarely at the feet of Nichols and McVeigh, two Army buddies immersed in the furies and paranoia of the extreme right wing. Jones plans to go global, arguing to the jury that his client is just a pawn in a conspiracy so vast that even he's not sure yet just what it is.
Outside the defense team, the common view is that the mind-boggling scope of the case is allowing Jones to fashion theories of whatever kind. Federal investigators have already turned over to the defense more than 21,000 witness statements, more than 400 hours of videotapes from various surveillance cameras and even satellite photographs of 20 sites in Oklahoma and Kansas that were taken by intelligence agencies. "It's the largest criminal investigation in the history of the U.S.," Jones points out. "Larger than Kennedy's death, larger than Oswald by any standard."
He means to make it even bigger. Over the past three months, Jones and a team of investigators have traveled in the U.S., Asia, the Middle East, Mexico and Europe to find evidence and experts of their own. (Because Jones is court-appointed, he conducts his research at the taxpayers' expense, just as the prosecution does. Records showing how much he has spent will remain sealed until after the trial.) What Jones is after is support for a conspiracy theory--or is it several theories?--in which Middle Eastern terrorists, German rightists and homegrown white supremacists are all brought onstage. And where Tim McVeigh gets lost in the crowd scenes. Jones appears to hope that he can persuade the jury that even if his client was involved with the crime, he bears diminished responsibility because he was no more than the triggerman in a larger plot.