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Despite this and other areas of vulnerability, the prosecution still has the clear advantage. A TIME investigation based on court records and sources knowledgeable about the trial suggests the prosecutors have reason to be confident. The circumstantial evidence builds a rich, sturdy narrative. It takes only one person with reasonable doubt to hang a jury, but right now, the chances that the prosecution will win a conviction are good.
HATE AND PARANOIA
The government may devote as many as two weeks to illustrate McVeigh's mental world. It is important for the prosecutors to make the jurors feel they know McVeigh, know he was capable of great evil and know he had the motive to perpetrate such evil. To do that, they will recount his life as they see it.
McVeigh and his two sisters grew up in Pendleton, a small town in upstate New York. His father was employed by a company that made radiators; his mother was a travel agent. According to All-American Monster, a biography of McVeigh by a local newspaper reporter named Brandon Stickney, McVeigh's parents were often absent--his father worked nights and his mother led an active social life in the bars and bowling alleys of the area. When McVeigh was 18, his parents divorced and his mother moved to Florida. High school records obtained by TIME indicate that McVeigh was a bright student, and according to some classmates, he was outgoing and talkative. As a boy, McVeigh told TIME last year, he had a love of guns that was abnormal even in a community that took its hunting seriously. He would bring weapons to school and spend hours alone shooting at targets.
In 1988 he joined the Army, serving as a tank gunner. He became close friends with Terry Nichols and Michael Fortier, but otherwise kept to himself. Comrades remember that he talked paranoically about the Federal Government and the threat that it would take guns away from American citizens. In the Gulf War he made two clean kills, once knocking an enemy soldier's head off his shoulders like a cue ball. McVeigh bragged often about that shot. Then, on the second day of a 21-day tryout for the Green Berets, McVeigh quit, and soon left the Army altogether.
He drifted, living in motels, visiting Fortier and Nichols. According to Stickney, McVeigh took methamphetamines, and he began to frequent gun shows. The prosecution hopes to show that during that period he became more and more bitter about the Federal Government. When the FBI raided the Branch Davidian compound on April 19, 1993, precisely two years before the Oklahoma bombing, McVeigh was outraged. In March of 1993, he made a pilgrimage to Waco that, by chance, another visitor recorded on video. Sources tell TIME that photographs show McVeigh near Waco handing out bumper stickers that asked, IS YOUR CHURCH ATF APPROVED?