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Evidence of McVeigh's admiration for a novel called The Turner Diaries, published in 1978, will aid the prosecution's effort to portray him as a hate-filled radical. The book, a favorite of far-right groups, tells the story of a group of white supremacists who blow up FBI headquarters in Washington at 9:15 one morning--almost exactly the same time of the Oklahoma City bombing. The Turner Diaries oozes invective against blacks and Jews. "We have allowed a diabolically clever, alien minority to put chains on our souls and our minds," a passage reads. "Why didn't we roast them over bonfires at every street corner in America? Why didn't we make a final end to this obnoxious and eternally pushy clan, this pestilence from the sewers of the East...?"
McVeigh was such an eager evangelist for The Turner Diaries that he handed it out to friends and sold it at gun shows--often at a loss. The government will probably present testimony by Fortier and McVeigh's sister to confirm this zeal and may argue that McVeigh thought the book provided a model for how he might retaliate against the government for its Waco raid. For example, the bomb the narrator builds is, like the one used on the Murrah building, made out of ammonium nitrate mixed with heating oil and is loaded into a truck.
Letters and testimony by friends will show the defendant's growing paranoia about the government and his bitterness toward it. A revealing set of documents was found in the car McVeigh was driving when he was arrested after the bombing. One item is a commentary by John Locke, which McVeigh copied by hand, asserting that a man has a right to kill someone who would take away his liberty; another is a photocopy of a passage from The Turner Diaries that says the purpose of the fictional bombing was to wake up America.
CASING THE MURRAH
If prosecutors show that the destruction of the Murrah building followed logically from the workings of McVeigh's mind, they will have done part of their job, but a much more important task will remain--proving that he physically committed the crime. The government hopes to convince the jury of a basic narrative that runs like this: by the fall of 1994 McVeigh and Nichols had begun collecting the fertilizer and other materials necessary to make a large bomb. In December McVeigh and Fortier inspected the Murrah building, which McVeigh had chosen as the target. A few months later, on April 14, McVeigh registered at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City, Kansas. On the same day, he bought a 1977 Mercury and reserved a Ryder truck. He stayed at the motel for four nights and was seen coming and going in a truck. During that period, he and Nichols constructed the bomb. In the meantime, McVeigh parked the Mercury near the Murrah building, and Nichols took him back to the Dreamland. On the morning of April 19, McVeigh drove the truck to the building and detonated the bomb at 9:02 a.m. He raced to the Mercury and headed out of town on the Interstate.