Oklahoma City Bombing Victims

Case background and investigation

On the morning of April 19, 1995, at 9:02 a.m., a rented Ryder truck packed with roughly 4,800 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer mixed with nitromethane and diesel fuel detonated outside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in downtown Oklahoma City. The blast sheared away much of the building's north face, collapsed floors onto one another, and damaged or destroyed hundreds of surrounding structures. The attack killed 168 people, including 19 children, many of them in a day-care center on the second floor, and injured several hundred more. It was, at the time, the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in United States history and remains the deadliest carried out by American citizens.

The investigation moved with unusual speed. Within days, federal agents traced a vehicle axle bearing a serial number to the Ryder truck rented in Junction City, Kansas, and a composite sketch led to a motel registration linked to Timothy McVeigh, a 26-year-old Army veteran. McVeigh had already been arrested about 90 minutes after the bombing by an Oklahoma state trooper near Perry, Oklahoma, on unrelated charges of driving without a license plate and carrying a concealed weapon. He was identified and held as the bombing suspect just before his scheduled release. Investigators soon linked him to Terry Nichols, a former Army acquaintance, who surrendered to police in Herington, Kansas, on April 21, 1995.

Prosecutors described McVeigh as the principal planner and bomber, motivated by anti-government anger intensified by the 1993 federal siege at Waco, Texas, which had ended on the same April 19 date two years earlier. Nichols was accused of helping gather materials and assemble the bomb. A third associate, Michael Fortier, had advance knowledge of the plot and, with his wife Lori, became a key cooperating witness.

In federal court in Denver, McVeigh was convicted on June 2, 1997, of murder and conspiracy charges and was sentenced to death on June 13, 1997. He was executed by lethal injection at the U.S. Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana, on June 11, 2001, the first federal prisoner put to death since 1963. Terry Nichols was convicted in federal court in December 1997 of conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter and sentenced to life in prison without parole; a later Oklahoma state trial in 2004 convicted him on 161 counts of first-degree murder, adding additional life sentences. Michael Fortier pleaded guilty to lesser charges, including failing to warn authorities of the plot, and received a 12-year sentence in exchange for his testimony; he was released in 2006 and entered the witness protection program. Lori Fortier received immunity for her cooperation.

The site of the Murrah Building was transformed into the Oklahoma City National Memorial, dedicated on April 19, 2000, five years after the attack. Its Field of Empty Chairs holds 168 chairs, one for each victim, arranged by the floor on which they died. The case is legally closed, with all identified conspirators convicted; McVeigh executed, Nichols serving life, and Fortier having completed his sentence. Questions about whether others may have been involved have persisted among some researchers, but no additional prosecutions have resulted.