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While members of the prosecution team are convinced they have a powerful case, they know the jury is still likely to wonder whether Nichols and McVeigh had accomplices. Just who was John Doe 2, the dark-haired man who may have been with McVeigh when he rented the Ryder van? And among the many sightings of McVeigh, some are of no help to the prosecution. Mike Moroz, an employee at a service station in Oklahoma City, says that moments before the explosion McVeigh and another man pulled up to ask directions, which would be odd if the pair had studied the building frequently in advance, as the prosecutors allege. Jones claims that on April 19 there were as many as three Ryder trucks in Oklahoma City and that the one McVeigh was driving may not have been the one involved in the blast.
Jones has it in mind, however, to do much more than point up a few conflicts in the testimony about trucks. This week U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch, who is presiding over the case, will hold a hearing to rule on a defense request that the government turn over a mountain of classified information that was gathered right after the blast. Jones says he needs to see all the data the government gathered about possible foreign terrorist involvement. Prosecutors warn that granting the request could delay the trial for years. In the immediate aftermath of the bombing, every intelligence officer and law-enforcement agent in the U.S. and around the world was checking up on groups under their surveillance. The information pipeline to Washington was clogged with tips leading nowhere.
Or everywhere. Jones sees a complicated plot with tentacles stretching around the world, a scenario suitable for Oliver Stone's next big picture about the Big Picture. Jones starts from the assumption that McVeigh and Nichols could not by themselves have built an ammonium nitrate bomb as powerful as the one that demolished the nine-story Murrah building.
Who, then, were their associates? One key to the answer, Jones thinks, is a white supremacist named Richard Wayne Snell. On the evening of the Oklahoma bombing, Snell was executed in Arkansas for the 1983 killing of a pawnbroker he mistakenly believed to be Jewish. In the early 1980s Snell and some associates conspired to blow up the Murrah building. His last words before his death were, "Look over your shoulder; justice is coming." Aha! says Jones. "Why would Snell think that unless he knew? One hypothesis is that a group of people decided to give the old man a going-away gift. Just blow up the building that he had wanted to blow up."
Snell's words might seem more prophetic if the blast had not happened 12 hours before he died. In any event, what would connect McVeigh to Snell's avengers? For that, Jones reaches to Andreas Strassmeir, 36, the ultra-right offspring of a politically prominent German family. In 1988 he came to the U.S. to indulge his fascination with the Civil War, racial politics and guns. In 1991 Strassmeir began to live on and off in Elohim City, a far-right religious community in eastern Oklahoma, where patriarch Robert G. Millar preaches his own variation of white-separatist ideology (northern Europeans are the real chosen people, with a "divine right to authority," and so on). Millar acted as Snell's "spiritual adviser" on death row. After Snell's execution, his body was brought back to Elohim City for burial.