20-04-2025
30 years later, letters to the US&J offer insight into Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City bombing
Thirty years ago today, what was then the worst act of domestic terrorism in American history shook the nation to its core.
It was an act that appeared to have been foretold, a little more than three years earlier, in a letter to the editor of the Lockport Union-Sun & Journal.
The letter arrived in early February 1992, written by a young man named Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was from Pendleton, a town of about 6,000 people on the southern edge of Niagara County.
Pendleton was, and is still, a quiet, mostly rural community, not a hotbed of hate. But McVeigh's letter screeched with anger and rage towards the U.S. government.
The managing editor of the US&J decided to print the McVeigh letter because, in the words of an unidentified former employee of the paper, 'We have a longstanding policy; we print every letter.' The letter appeared in the paper's print edition on Feb. 11, 1992.
None of the editors at that time found the anti-government screed to be a cause for alarm. No one saw it as a canary in a terrorist coal mine.
Only three years later would then-managing editor Dan Kane re-read McVeigh's letter, and a second one sent in March 1992, and call them 'chilling.'
'There was one paragraph in particular that made my heart stop a little bit,' Kane told a reporter from the Los Angeles Times. 'It was the one that said: 'shed blood.' After Oklahoma City, I certainly look at it as a sort of eerie and prophetic statement.'
It was three years later, at 9:02 a.m. on April 19, 1995, that McVeigh would trigger the detonator on a massive truck bomb parked in front of the nine-story Alfred P. Murrah Federal Office Building in Oklahoma City. The force of the explosion obliterated the building, killing 168 people, many of them children, and wounding 680 others, many of them severely.
Inside the building were the offices of 14 federal agencies, including the Social Security Administration, the Drug Enforcement Administration, the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco & Firearms, recruiting stations for the U.S. Army and Marine Corps, and a child daycare center.
The explosion devastated a 16-block area of downtown Oklahoma City, destroying or damaging 324 other buildings and causing an estimated $652 million worth of damage.
HINDSIGHT
Thomas Beilein served as the Niagara County Sheriff for almost 15 years, from 1994 to 2008.
He says with 20-20 hindsight, McVeigh's writings should have been a warning.
'I think if that letter came today, the newspaper would want to contact authorities and let them know this looks dangerous,' Beilein said. 'Especially with what happened 30 years ago.'
McVeigh was a decorated Army vet who had served in the Gulf War. In his first letter, published Feb. 11, 1992, he wrote in revolutionary terms.
'What is it going to take to open up the eyes of our elected officials? AMERICA IS IN SERIOUS DECLINE,' McVeigh wrote. 'We have no proverbial tea to dump; should we instead sink a ship full of Japanese imports?'
The unidentified US&J employee who spoke with the LA Times reporter said letters like McVeigh's were not uncommon in the early 1990s.
'We have a fair amount of that kind of mail, and it's probably encouraged because we allow it (to be published),' the employee told the Times reporter, David Willman.
McVeigh's two rambling letters were discovered after the Oklahoma City bombing when a reader called the paper to say he remembered having read letters to the editor signed by Tim McVeigh.
'Is a civil war imminent? Do we have to shed blood to reform the current system?', McVeigh asked in his first letter. 'I hope it doesn't come to that! But it might.'
Beilein said he finds McVeigh's views from more than 30 years ago eerily similar to political rhetoric being used in the United States today.
'It's a reflection on the state of our nation,' the former sheriff said. 'Look at the reactions to the school shootings that have taken place (since the Oklahoma City bombing). Are they really any different? Are the school shooters any different than Tim McVeigh?'
PROPHECY
McVeigh's letters revealed a young man who deeply distrusted the federal government and who, after his discharge from the Army, had drifted into the growing militia movement of the early 1990s. He would regularly attend gun shows where he would pass out leaflets that repeated right-wing militia talking points, and he hawked copies of his favorite book, The Turner Diaries.
The Turner Diaries was a 1978 novel that depicted a violent revolution in the U.S. that leads to the overthrow of the federal government, a nuclear war and, ultimately, a race war. In his first letter, McVeigh referenced a race war.
'Racism on the rise? You had better believe it!,' he wrote. 'At a point when the world has seen communism falter as an imperfect system to manage people; democracy seems to be heading down the same road. Maybe we have to combine ideologies to achieve the perfect utopian government.'
McVeigh's letters also contained a list of government grievances as common in conservative media today as they were then.
'Crime is out of control. Criminals have no fear of punishment. Prisons are overcrowded so they know they will not be imprisoned long,' McVeigh predicted. 'Taxes are a joke. Regardless of what a political candidate 'promises,' they will increase. More taxes are always the answer to government mismanagement. They mess up, we suffer. Taxes are reaching cataclysmic levels, with no slowdown in sight.'
Finally, McVeigh made it clear in his writing that if something didn't change, the American middle class, which he believed represented him and his family, would disappear.
'Politicians are further eroding the 'American Dream' by passing laws which are supposed to be a 'quick fix,' when all they are really designed for is to get the official reelected,' he wrote. 'These laws tend to 'dilute' a problem for a while, until the problem comes roaring back in a worsened form. (Much like a strain of bacteria will alter itself to defeat a known medication.)'
A SECOND LETTER
McVeigh wrote to the US&J again in March 1992. This time he seemed focused less on politics and more on issues of life and death.
The letter, published on March 10, 1992, attacked veganism, while speculating on how killing prey in the wild is preferable to meat processing. McVeigh wrote of the 'clean, merciful shot' taken by a hunter so that the prey 'dies in his own environment, quick and unexpected.'
He compared that to the slaughter of cattle. Which, he wrote, had 'less dignity.'
'Would you rather die while living happily or die while leading a miserable life, you tell me which is more 'humane'? ' McVeigh wrote.
Not long after McVeigh's arrest for the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI came calling for the original copies of his two letters to the US&J. The federal agents also sought a third letter, written by his sister Jennifer in early 1995.
Published by the US&J on March 10, 1995, Jennifer McVeigh's letter railed against 'communism, gun control, permissive sex and the L.A. riots.'
She also referenced the August 1992 confrontation in Idaho between federal agents and a survivalist named Randall Weaver, and the 1993 siege by federal agents of the weapons-filled compound of the Branch Davidians sect near Waco, Texas. That siege ended in the deaths of 86 people.
In a perhaps eerie echo of her brother, Jennifer McVeigh also predicted the coming of an America ruled by 'a single authoritarian dictatorship.'
After taking the letters, federal prosecutors subpoenaed Kane to testify before the federal grand jury in Oklahoma City that would indict McVeigh and his co-conspirator Terry Nichols.
TRIAL AND CONVICTION
Beilein said he vividly remembers the phone call he received from federal agents, telling him they identified McVeigh as the Oklahoma City bomber.
'It was shocking,' he said. 'You knew (the bombing) was horrific and what made it worse was this was someone who grew up in our backyard.'
The FBI asked Beilein what his investigators might know about McVeigh and suggested that he send deputies to McVeigh's family home in Pendleton, 'to see what was there and protect the occupants from possible retaliation.' What Beilein's deputies found was a gaggle of reporters.
'It was something we weren't used to,' Beilein said. 'There were satellite trucks up and down the road. The whole country was focused on Tim McVeigh.'
Just over two years after the bombing, on April 24, 1997, McVeigh's trial, on 11 counts of murder and related charges, began in U.S. District Court in Denver.
The case had been moved there from Oklahoma City over fair trial concerns. Nichols would be tried later both in federal court and Oklahoma state courts.
McVeigh's trial featured 137 witnesses, including McVeigh's sister, and lasted roughly five weeks. A jury found him guilty on all counts.
Following a hearing, U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch found factors sufficient to sentence McVeigh to death. The execution was set to take place at the United States Penitentiary at Terre Haute, Indiana.
THE EXECUTION
Former Niagara Gazette reporter Valerie Pillo was sent to Terre Haute to cover the execution. She had been involved in the paper's coverage of McVeigh in the aftermath of the bombing and during the trial.
Pillo was also one of a small group of journalists who regularly attempted to speak to McVeigh's father. William 'Bill' McVeigh spoke, on the record, to only one reporter, who became a family spokesman while still covering the story and later wrote a book about McVeigh.
For Pillo, her contact with Bill McVeigh consisted of what she called 'talks in the garden.'
Bill McVeigh was known to be an avid gardener. Pillo said he would sometimes welcome a few reporters he had grown to know to chat while he gardened.
'I think what happened was a complete shock to Bill,' Pillo said. 'He didn't want the spotlight. He didn't know how to handle it and didn't want to handle it.'
McVeigh even questioned Pillo's motivations in visiting him.
'He said, 'Are you only coming over here 'cause you want to interview me?'' Pillo recalled.
As his son's execution day drew nearer, Pillo had more 'talks in the garden' with Bill McVeigh.
'There were some victim families who had reached out to (Bill) and they were very gracious,' Pillo said he had told her. 'Several became friends with him in their shared grief.'
Bill McVeigh told Pillo he would not attend his son's execution. He said those were 'Tim's wishes' and he would instead visit relatives in North Carolina.
'Why would I go to that?' she said McVeigh asked her.
And the bomber's father didn't like it when Pillo told him she would be covering the execution.
'He wasn't happy I was going,' she remembered. 'He said, 'Why are you going? Why do you have to be there?''
The execution took place on June 11, 2001, just three months before America would be shaken to its core again by the foreign terrorist attacks of 9/11.
LESSONS
Three decades later, Beilein still struggles to find lessons learned from the Oklahoma City bombing and the life of Tim McVeigh.
'I don't think America took too many lessons away from this,' he said. 'To some people and groups, McVeigh is considered a martyr and that just encourages others.'
And the long-time lawman said if McVeigh were still alive, he thinks the son of Pendleton would be thriving in the America of 2025.
'It wouldn't have surprised me at all if Tim McVeigh would have been at (the insurrection at the U.S. Capitol on) Jan. 6 or be a member of the Proud Boys. He was just a cold-blooded killer with no motive.'
