McVeigh's Death Wish

by RUSSELL WATSON

Newsweek, April 9, 2001, page 44

The death penalty is an issue that provokes surprisingly little public debate in the United States, except when a celebrated murderer--or someone who may have been convicted wrongly--is up for execution. Then the controversy flares again, at least for a news cycle or two. But even staunch opponents of capital punishment may be willing to make an exception in the case of Timothy McVeigh, who is scheduled to die on May 16. McVeigh, now 32, was convicted of blowing up a government office building in Oklahoma City six years ago, killing 168 people, including 19 small children in a day-care center. It was the bloodiest act of terrorism in American history, and according to a new biography, McVeigh is not sorry for what he did. He dismisses the dead babies as mere "collateral damage" and brags that he timed the bomb to go off when the building was full of people. "I did it for the larger good," he declares. The authors of the book, Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, are newspaper reporters in Buffalo, New York, McVeigh's hometown. They interviewed him in prison for 75 hours all told, extracting his first public confession of guilt for the bombing. Their book, to be published in the United States this week, is called "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing." McVeigh confirms that the bombing was revenge for two lethal actions by the FBI: the fiery raid on the compound of the Branch Davidian sect in Waco, Texas, in 1993, in which about 80 people died, and a 1992 siege at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, in which the wife and son of a white separatist were killed. The U.S. government, says McVeigh, was a "bully" that had to be taught a lesson.

Although he had help in preparing the bomb (two accomplices were sentenced to prison), McVeigh insists he set it off all by himself. "It was my choice... to hit that building when it was full," he says. Borrowing a Jack Nicholson line from the film "A Few Good Men" (which he saw on cable TV in prison), he snarls at people who think he could not have acted alone. "You can't handle the truth," he says, "because the truth is, it was just me."

After his conviction, McVeigh was sent to a high-security prison in Colorado called Supermax. There he shared a special cellblock with three other mass murderers: Theodore Kaczynski, the technophobic Unabomber; Ramzi Ahmed Yousef, serving a 240-year sentence for his role in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center in New York City, and Luis Felipe, leader of a brutal street gang who allegedly ordered murders from a prison cell, including one beheading. One autograph seeker sent McVeigh a newspaper clipping with photographs of all four men. McVeigh cheerily wrote on it: "The A-Team! T.J.M."

The four killers took outdoor exercise in separate cages about 10 feet apart, which enabled them to talk. McVeigh got to know Kaczynski the best, exchanging philosophical views with the 57-year-old former scientist, whose mail bombs killed three people, earning him four consecutive life sentences. Later Kaczynski wrote an 11-page letter to Michel and Herbeck. In it, he says McVeigh "had excellent social skills" and ideas that "seemed rational and sensible." But the Unabomber quibbles with McVeigh's choice of target, which caused a large loss of life. "I will say that I think the bombing was a bad action," Kaczynski writes, "because it was unnecessarily inhumane."

McVeigh admits he didn't notice the day-care center located right above the spot where he parked his bomb-laden truck, the fuses already burning smokily. But he insists the government had to be defied. "Once you bloody the bully's nose," McVeigh says, "he's not coming back." Not that McVeigh dislikes children. In prison, he considered starting a family of his own by smuggling out some of his sperm for artificial insemination. He gave up the idea when he concluded that life in America "would be hell" for any child of his.

If it goes ahead as planned, McVeigh's execution will be the first by the federal government since 1963. (In the intervening years, hundreds of executions have been carried out by individual states, with Texas far ahead of the field.) McVeigh, a former soldier who fought in the Persian Gulf, says he is eager to die. He envisions his execution as "a deluxe suicide-by-cop package." He expects that families of his victims will press for his execution to be shown to them on closed-circuit television. "If they do that, I'm going to throw it back in their face," he says. "I'm going to demand they televise it nationally." McVeigh fancies himself dying on "60 Minutes" or CNN. He is annoyed that Congress will not allow him to be buried honorably in an armed-forces cemetery. He shows no sign of understanding the difference between fame and infamy.