The nation yearned for a glint of logic to explain Timothy McVeigh’s wayward war against the federal government. But McVeigh lived his last seconds cryptic and detached, the way he led most of his troubled adult life.
Strapped to the execution table Monday and swaddled in a white sheet up to his chest, McVeigh, 33, peered into rooms containing witnesses to his death, seemingly intent only on showing no emotion, witnesses said.
He pointedly nodded at reporters in one witness room, and squinted at the tinted glass that kept him from seeing the faces of the relatives of his victims. On the other side of that window, Peggy Broxterman held up against the glass a photo of her murdered son, Paul, 42. Kay Ice Fulton, sister of slain customs agent Paul Ice, also 42, made the same gesture.
Wishing McVeigh could somehow hear, Broxterman said she called out, “You son of a bitch.”
Paul Howell, father of bombing victim Karan Shepherd, waited for some measure of remorse. An unqualified apology. Even a sad nod.
“We didn’t get anything from his face,” Howell said. “His facial expressions were just about as calm as could be.”
McVeigh had that blank look many times in his life, including days during his 1997 trial when husbands and wives, mothers and fathers spoke of sleepless nights and purposeless lives without loved ones.
The nation’s worst mass murderer had no last words, instead releasing a handwritten copy of the 1875 poem “Invictus,” by English poet William Ernest Henley. Its title is Latin for “unconquered.”
“I have not winced nor cried aloud,” the poem’s second verse read. “Under the bludgeonings of chance, my head is bloody, but unbowed.”
At 7:10 a.m. the lethal series of drugs dripped into an intravenous tube inserted in his right leg. Three drugs were used: sodium pentothal to sedate him, pancuronium bromide to arrest his breathing and potassium chloride to stop his heart.
McVeigh, staring into a video camera broadcasting his death to 232 survivors and victims’ relatives in Oklahoma City, drew two breaths. His eyes rolled back slightly.
Four minutes later, Warden Harley Lappin pronounced McVeigh dead, ending the first federal execution in 38 years.
“Pursuant to the sentence of the United States District Court in the District of Colorado, Timothy James McVeigh has been executed by lethal injection,” Lappin later told reporters.
Body cremated
Afterward, McVeigh’s body was taken to a local funeral home where he was cremated and his ashes given to one of his attorneys.
President Bush said the execution was an act of justice, not vengeance. “Final punishment of the guilty cannot alone bring peace to the innocent,” he said. “It cannot recover the loss or balance the scales, and it is not meant to do so.
“Today every living person who was hurt by the evil done in Oklahoma City can rest in the knowledge that there has been a reckoning.”
The execution closed a sad chapter in America’s history. The bombing of the Murrah Federal Building on April 19, 1995, killed 168 people, including 19 children. Many survivors were maimed for life. Some became so severely depressed they lost or quit jobs.
But McVeigh’s bombing also gave this country a vulnerability it had not known. America had a homegrown terrorist, and he came from suburbia in upstate New York.
More Top Picks Best Vibrating Alarm Clocks For Deep Sleepers
In the aftermath of McVeigh’s execution, many questions remain unanswered.
The FBI, already reeling from embarrassing gaffes in a string of highly public cases, bungled this case so badly that McVeigh’s execution was delayed for nearly a month.
The agency withheld 4,400 documents that McVeigh’s defense team should have seen before his 1997 trial but never did. Though a top FBI agent discovered the mistake in December, he waited until days before McVeigh’s scheduled May 16 execution to inform his superiors. The depths of the agency’s problems and what the remedy should be remain to be seen.
“That is the unanswered issue in this case,” said lawyer Chris Tritico, a member of McVeigh’s defense team. “Why did the FBI keep those documents from us?”
McVeigh has insisted he acted alone the day he parked his rented truck in front of the Murrah building and, with a cigarette lighter, lit the fuse to a 7,000-pound homemade bomb. But the specter of a possible accomplice has haunted the case from the start; eyewitnesses claim they saw McVeigh walking with another man just after the bombing.
Still, federal investigators are convinced the witness accounts are wrong and “John Doe No. 2” does not exist. The theory re-emerged with the FBI’s error because many of the tips in those files related to John Doe No. 2, but none of those tips warranted follow-up, investigators said.
The biggest enigma was McVeigh. As a Desert Storm soldier he was decorated for killing two Iraqi soldiers with a single blast from his Bradley fighting vehicle.
A socially awkward boy who coped poorly with school bullying, McVeigh grew up fancying himself as the champion of the underdog. And yet, when he set out to avenge the federal siege on David Koresh’s compound in Waco, Texas, that ended in the deaths of about 80 Branch Davidians, he chose an act he knew would kill scores of innocent victims.
He recently claimed he did not know there was a day-care center on the Murrah building’s second floor. But in the weeks after the bombing, he told his defense team’s psychiatrist that he saw cribs behind the black-tinted glass of the building on the day before the blast. Later, he called the children “collateral damage.”
Terre Haute, a city of 60,000 people chosen as the site for the federal government’s execution chamber because of its central location, dutifully played host to 1,400 members of the media, who came from as far away as Japan and Germany.
As many as 1,000 police were deployed this weekend, in part in anticipation of the legions of demonstrators expected to arrive. But by nightfall Sunday only about 200 had gathered at the prison, most opposed to the death penalty.
168-minute prayer
Shortly after dawn, a group of capital punishment opponents sat or kneeled in a circle on dewy grass and, candles in hand, prayed for 168 minutes to represent the 168 victims of the bombing. And they prayed for McVeigh.
Through the weekend and up until his final breath, McVeigh cooperated with prison officials. Early Sunday when Lappin discussed with McVeigh the drugs that were going to be used and what they did to his body, McVeigh listened “cordially,” prison officials said.
McVeigh was given the last rites by prison chaplain Frank Roof, according to Rev. Ron Ashmore of St. Margaret Mary Church, who had met with McVeigh over the last year.
“Tim was raised Catholic,” Ashmore said. “He knows when you ask for that, it’s like saying, `I’m sorry for everything I’ve done Lord. Please love me.”‘
Before the execution, Lappin read the crimes for which McVeigh was convicted and sentenced to death.
When the curtain opened to the green-tiled death chamber, McVeigh was already strapped onto the execution gurney.
He appeared thinner. His light-brown hair was closely cropped. Gazing into each witness room window, McVeigh made eye contact with his lawyers, Nathan Chambers and Robert Nigh, then moved on to the media room, where he nodded deliberately at each of the 10 reporters.
Inside the victim witness room, victim relatives and survivors embraced. Howell said he felt relief. Susan Ashford, who survived the blast uninjured, said she felt “elated.”
Afterward, Broxterman talked of her son, a husband and father of three who was beginning his third day at work in the building as a criminal federal housing investigator when the bomb exploded.
His body wasn’t found for 13 days. McVeigh died peacefully, Broxterman said, a contrast that bothered her. But not enough to embitter her on a day when justice, as far as she was concerned, had taken place.