The Mammoth Book of New Csi (51 page)

McVeigh was brought to trial on 24 April 1997. Forensic experts showed that traces of nitroglycerin and pentaerythritol tetranitrate, or PETN, an explosive used in detonator cord, had been found on McVeigh’s clothes after his arrest. Prosecutors also presented evidence to show how, in the months before the bomb exploded, McVeigh set out to gather materials for it.

Frederick Alan Schlender, the manager of the Mid-Kansas Coop in McPherson, Kansas, testified that on 30 September 1994 someone resembling Terry Nichols had bought forty 50 lb (23 kg) bags of ammonium nitrate and another 50 lb bag on 18 October – over a ton in all. Schlender testified that the man “said he was a wheat farmer. It was an unusual transaction. It wasn’t common for someone to buy a ton of ammonium nitrate.”

When FBI agents searched Nichols’s home in Herington, they found a receipt for one of the purchases. It had McVeigh’s fingerprint on it. Prosecutors produced a handwritten note McVeigh left on the Marquis saying it had a bad battery when he had parked it in downtown Oklahoma City as his getaway car, ensuring that no one would tow it.

However, the prosecution produced no witnesses who had seen McVeigh in downtown Oklahoma City on the day of the bombing or making the bomb. The most damning witness against McVeigh was Michael Fortier, another buddy from McVeigh’s army days. Fortier knew of McVeigh’s plans, even making a reconnaissance trip to the Murrah Building in December 1994 when Christmas decorations hung outside the day-care centre. In the end, he refused to join the plot, but was sentenced to twelve years’ imprisonment for failing to inform the authorities. Fortier’s wife Lori, who also knew of the plot and made the fake South Dakota driver’s licence McVeigh had used to rent the truck, also testified against McVeigh in exchange for immunity from prosecution.

McVeigh had visited Waco during the siege of the Branch Davidians in 1993, handing out anti-government leaflets and bumper stickers bearing messages such as “Politicians Love Gun Control”, “Fear the Government That Fears Your Gun” and “A Man With a Gun Is A Citizen, A Man Without A Gun Is A Subject”. It was alleged that the breaking of the siege by officers from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, and Firearms (BATF) sent McVeigh over the edge.

“He thought the [B]ATF agents, whom he blamed for the Waco tragedy, had their offices in that building,” said the prosecutor Joseph Hartzler. “As it turns out, he was wrong.”

But there was another reason he decided to bomb the Murrah Building.

“And second, he described that building as, quote, ‘an easy target’,” said Hartzler.

Testimony showed that McVeigh had also mixed in the same circles as Richard Snell, who was executed by lethal injection in Arkansas on the day of the bombing, and may well have known him.

The defence attorney Robert Nigh attempted to humanize McVeigh by introducing testimony about his war record. As the lead gunner in a Bradley Fighting Vehicle, he had won the Bronze Star during Operation Desert Storm in 1991. However, not all his service reflected well on him. He bragged that he had knocked an Iraqi soldier’s head off his shoulders like a cue ball. After the Gulf War, McVeigh signed up for a twenty-one-day try-out for the Green Berets. He left after just two days.

The defence also used crime scene evidence, suggesting that the unmatched leg belonged to the mastermind who had planted the bomb. The medical examiner’s report described it as a male leg clothed in dark socks and a size 7½ military boot closed with a strap used by soldiers to fold their trousers into their boot-tops. The DNA of the leg did not match that of the seven dead who were found missing left legs. Since then the leg had undergone intensive forensic investigation by podiatrists, anthropologists and other experts the FBI had brought to Oklahoma.

The medical examiner had initially said that there was a 75 per cent probability that the leg was a man’s, but test results proved otherwise.

“DNA analysis by the FBI has shown conclusively that the left leg is not male but female,” Dr Fred D. Jordan, chief medical examiner for Oklahoma, said. He reported hair analysis by the FBI had shown that the victim was black. Tests indicated the woman’s height to be about 5 ft 5 in. (1.65 m) and that she was between sixteen and thirty years old. The report also said that blue fragments that had been found embedded in the leg were of a blue plastic similar to that of the barrels the bombers had packed with the ammonium nitrate and fuel oil they had used as an explosive.

The defence also called Dr Frederic Whitehurst, the whistle-blower who condemned the work of Thomas Thurman in the Lockerbie case. He testified that the FBI’s investigation of the bomb site and other key evidence had been sloppy.

Nevertheless, on 2 June 1997, McVeigh was found guilty on all eleven counts of conspiracy and murder – the US Department of Justice could only charge McVeigh for causing the deaths of the eight federal officers who died in the Oklahoma City bombing. The murder of the other 160 dead fell until the jurisdiction of the state of Oklahoma. As McVeigh was sentenced to death, the state of Oklahoma did not bring charges.

McVeigh was sent to the new Supermax prison at Florence, Colorado, where he shared a wing with Ted Kaczynski, the “Unabomber”, who was serving four life sentences, and Ramzi Yousef, who masterminded the 1993 World Trade Center bombing that had killed six and injured over a hundred. Yousef had been in the Philippines at the same time as Nichols, leading some to believe that the two terrorist incidents were linked. In jail, Yousef made attempts to convert McVeigh to Islam.

On 26 April 2001, McVeigh wrote a letter to Fox News explaining why he had bombed the Murrah Building in Oklahoma City. He also gave extensive interviews to journalists Michel Lou and Dan Herbeck, which they used as the basis for their book,
American Terrorist
, again leaving no doubt that McVeigh was responsible for the outrage. In a letter to the
Buffalo News
published the day before he died, he said: “I am sorry these people had to lose their lives,” he wrote. “But that’s the nature of the beast. It’s understood going in what the human toll will be.”

He also denied that there was a mastermind behind the plot.

“For those diehard conspiracy theorists who will refuse to believe this, I turn the tables and say: show me where I needed anyone else,” McVeigh wrote. “Financing? Logistics? Specialized tech skills? Brainpower? Strategy? Show me where I needed a dark, mysterious ‘Mr X’!”

Then at 7 a.m. on 11 June 2001, Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection at the US Federal Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. In 1997, President Clinton had signed into law a bill preventing him, or anyone else convicted of the bombing, from being buried in a military cemetery. His body was cremated and his ashes scattered.

Terry Nichols also stood trial in a federal court. Although he was at home in Kansas when the bomb went off, he had robbed an Arkansas gun dealer McVeigh had befriended at gun shows to bankroll the bombing and had helped McVeigh prepare the bomb. His wife Marife testified that Nichols had travelled to Oklahoma City three days before the bombing, supporting the prosecution’s contention that Nichols had helped McVeigh stash the getaway car. She also failed to provide an alibi for him on 18 April, the day the government alleged he helped McVeigh build the truck bomb at Geary Lake fishing park near Herington. A mail-order bride from the Philippines, Marife had arrived in the United States pregnant with another man’s child. Two years later, the child was found dead with a plastic bag over his head at the Nichols’ family farmhouse in Michigan. The death was ruled an accident.

After six days deliberation, the jury found Nichols guilty of one count of conspiracy to use a weapon of mass destruction, a capital offence, and eight counts of involuntary manslaughter as he had not actually detonated the bomb and no one had positively identified him as the purchaser of the ammonium nitrate. Unlike McVeigh, he had shown some signs of remorse and the defence argued that he had withdrawn from the plot before the bombing.

Nevertheless, he was sentenced to life without possibility of parole and sent to the Supermax prison at Florence, Colorado. Again, in a federal court, he had only stood trial for the murder of federal officials. He then faced a state trial for 160 capital counts of first-degree murder, one count of foetal homicide, first-degree arson and conspiracy. He was convicted on all counts, but the jury failed to reach a unanimous verdict on imposing the death penalty after he claimed he had converted to Christianity. Nichols was sentenced to another 161 life terms without the possibility of parole, along with thirty-five years for first-degree arson and ten years for conspiracy. He was also ordered to pay compensation to the victims and fines that will never be paid. His wife divorced him and returned to the Philippines with their children.

O
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19 S
EPTEMBER
1991, two German hikers came across a curious crime scene high in the Alps between Austria and Italy. They found a mummified body sticking out of the glacier. At first, it was thought to be a modern corpse, but when it was taken to the morgue in Innsbruck it was found to be 5,300 years old. The iceman was soon given the name Ötzi after Ötz valley where he was discovered. On further examination, he was found to have an arrow head in his back and it became clear that he had been murdered. This made the murder of Ötzi the coldest of cold cases.

The dead man was about forty-five years old. Once around 5 ft 5 in. (1.65 m) tall and weighing 110 lbs (50 kg), when he was found he had shrunk to 5 ft 2 in. (1.57 m) and 84 lbs (38 kg). He also appeared to have been scalped. He had a full head of hair, but it was not attached to his head. There was probably nothing sinister about this. It appeared to have been caused by the action of freezing.

From the enamel of his well-preserved teeth, it was possible to deduce the minerals in the water he drank and the composition of the earth where his food was grown. These clues showed that he had been born and brought up in the Eisack Valley, near the present-day village of Velturno in the Italian Tyrol. When he grew up, he went to live in the Venosta Valley some 36 miles (60 km) to the west.

The bones of his legs indicated that he frequently made long walks over extremely hilly terrain. Some of his clothing had been preserved. His shoes were waterproof and made of various animal skins. The wide soles, seemingly made for walking on snow, were made from cow’s leather; the instep from deer. The uppers were also made from domesticated cattle. There was fur on the outside and the shoe laced up. Dried tree bark and grass were stuffed inside for warmth. He had a goatskin loincloth, sheepskin leggings and a coat made from goatskin. These were sewn together with sinew. His leather belt had a pouch on it containing a bone awl, a scraper, a flint flake, which could have been used as a primitive knife, and dried fungus. He also had a bearskin cap with two leather straps and was carrying a mat woven from swamp grass that it is thought he used to protect himself from rain or snow.

As some of the clothes he wore came from domesticated animals, it is thought that he was a herdsman rather than a hunter. The cow’s leather came from ancient cattle that used to migrate across that region of the Alps. However, he was also a man of some social significance as he had with him a precious copper axe made a thousand years before archaeologists had previously thought man had discovered copper.

Ötzi was also carrying a flint-tipped dagger and a little fire-starting kit – a birch-bark container holding embers wrapped in maple leaves, flint and pyrite for creating sparks, and so-called tinder fungus. However, he was curiously poorly armed to set off into the mountainous wilderness miles to the north of his home. Twelve of the fourteen arrows in his deerskin quiver were half-finished. The other two, which had arrow heads and fletching (stabilizing fins), were broken. And he was carrying a roughly shaped piece of yew 6 ft (1.83 m) long, thought to be an unfinished longbow that had yet to be notched and strung. A bowstring was found in the quiver, along with a tool made from an antler thought to have been used for sharpening arrow points. This led to speculation that he had left home in a hurry.

When he was first found, it was thought that he had slipped and frozen to death in the snow. There was also speculation that he had been the victim of a ritual sacrifice – perhaps to placate the gods that sent an asteroid crashing into what is now Austria around 3,000 BC. Then an X-ray found a dense triangular shadow in his left shoulder.

Ötzi was moved from Innsbruck to the South Tyrol Museum of Archaeology in Bolzano when a survey showed that he been found 101 yards (92.56 m) on the Italian side of the border. The body was housed in a custom-built refrigerator to stop him thawing out. In 2005, after the hospital in Bolzano had acquired a new high-resolution, multi-slice CT scanner, his body was put on a special foam mattress, covered in ice and insulating blankets, and rushed by ambulance to hospital. After the ten-minute ride he was swiftly scanned and returned to his fridge. They could not risk him defrosting.

The scans showed a sharpened piece of stone, probably flint, that had made a ½ in. (1.2 cm) gash in his left subclavian artery. This is the main circulatory pipeline carrying fresh oxygenated blood from the heart to the left arm. Uncontrolled bleeding would have led to a rapid death. There was a small tear in his coat that corresponded with the entry point.

The position of the arrow head indicated that his attacker was behind and below him. It was a shot that prehistoric hunters would use to bring down game. The arrow went clean through the bone and severed the artery. Immediately, blood would have gushed out, filling the space between the shoulder blade and the ribs. Ötzi would have suffered haemorrhagic shock. His heart would have started to race and he would have been drenched in sweat, even in the cold at 10,000 ft (3,000 m) above sea level. In a matter of minutes, he would have collapsed, lost consciousness and bled to death.

The wound indicates that he had been killed deliberately. Given that he had left home in something of a hurry, he seems to have been on the run from his killers. It seems that this was not his first run-in with them. There was a deep gash on his hand that had been inflicted some days earlier and was beginning to heal. He was carrying a type of fungus known to have antibacterial properties.