Deadly Secrets

DEADLY SECRETS U.S. REP. DANA ROHRABACHER on his investigation: “It is astonishing that offi cials from the Department of Justice and other law enforcement agencies were unwilling to permit congressional investigators to question a former bank robber with a possible connection to a large-scale terrorist attack.” FORMER DEPUTY ASSISTANT FBI DIRECTOR DANNY COULSON: “We have victims here and victims’ families, and we don’t know the answers. And the answer is frankly a federal grand jury.” U.S. SEN. ORRIN HATCH on the Kenneth Trentadue mystery: “Somebody has not told the truth here and somebody is, in my opinion, covering up.” FEDERAL JUDGE DALE A. KIMBALL on the FBI’s conduct: “[W]hile the FBI’s failure to discover documents is not necessarily an indication of bad faith, it is puzzling that so many documents could be referenced but not produced.” FORENSIC PATHOLOGIST DR. T.K. MARSHALL on the “extra leg” recovered from the Murrah Building: “Th e working assumption has to be, until excluded, that the leg in question belonged to a bomber.” DEADLY SECRETS Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing D AVID PAUL HAMMER AuthorHouse™ 1663 Liberty Drive Bloomington, IN 47403 www.authorhouse.com Phone: 1-800-839-8640 © 2010 David Paul Hammer. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted by any means without the written permission of the author. First published by AuthorHouse 4/5/2010 ISBN: 978-1-4520-0364-1 (e) ISBN: 978-1-4520-0363-4 (sc) ISBN: 978-1-4520-0362-7 (hc) Library of Congress Control Number: 2010904034 Printed in the United States of America Bloomington, Indiana Th is book is printed on acid-free paper. Certain information and passages in this book was previously published and was copyrighted by David Paul Hammer and Jeff ery William Paul in 2004. Th at material is used here with permission. Cover photo: 2007 BBC documentary, Conspiracy Files — Oklahoma City Bombing. This book is dedicated to the memory of Kenneth Michael Trentadue and to the search for justice. Someone knows who killed Kenney. Kenneth Trentadue viivii The truth is rarely pure and never simple. — Oscar Wilde ix FOREWORD BY MARGARET ROBERTS xixi his remarkable book speaks for itself. But fi rst, a word about the author is in order. David Paul Hammer is a death row inmate. TCredibility is an issue. Back in the 1980s, I broke a story in Chicago about a death row inmate who claimed he was innocent. Most people who knew what I was working on laughed at me for being so naïve as to think the condemned man’s story was worth the enormous amount of time it consumed to investigate. Th e consensus was: Never believe a prisoner. Th ey’re all lying. Once the story was published, it won prizes in Chicago, and more importantly, infl uenced the Illinois Supreme Court to reconsider the condemned man’s case. Years later, other investigations exonerated him through DNA testing. He was innocent. Other men were proven to be the real murderers. Subsequently, Newsweek credited my reporting on that story with changing the death penalty debate in America. For me, the lesson learned was this: If something is true, even if it comes from death row, it is still the truth. For reasons that you will understand when you read the book, I can’t say that I know that David Hammer is telling the truth in this book. Only Hammer knows that. But xii I can say this: Th e astonishing story he says Timothy McVeigh told him is compelling. I can say Hammer’s story deserves careful consideration in light of what I regard as the hollow and unconvincing offi cial version of the Oklahoma City Bombing, as told by government prosecutors in the trials of McVeigh and his accomplice Terry Nichols. I’ve learned something else about journalism. Trust your gut. I know a lot about this fascinating and still mysterious case. I started digging into it back in 2005 as a producer for the TV crime show America’s Most Wanted. In the aftermath of the bombing, in 1995, an unidentifi ed suspect known as John Doe No. 2 had become, briefl y, the world’s most wanted man, an accomplice of McVeigh’s, known only from an FBI sketch, who was believed to have somehow escaped the dragnet that caught McVeigh and Nichols. But something didn’t ring right. In short order, the FBI suddenly and improbably canceled its global manhunt, calling John Doe No. 2 a case of eyewitness error. But meanwhile, at least a dozen honest citizens in Oklahoma City and Kansas—people with no apparent reason to lie—continued to insist they had seen the stocky, dark-haired man, who looked nothing like Nichols, with McVeigh. Th ese witnesses were not brought to court to testify for the prosecution. It was as if what they had seen had never happened. I kept digging. But I never imagined where this story would lead until I heard David Hammer’s account of his death row interviews with Timothy McVeigh. According to Hammer, McVeigh disclosed that he was not the mastermind of the bombing, but rather was an undercover government agent in a sting operation that targeted right- wing extremists. But evidently, something went terribly wrong: 168 innocent people wound up dead. All of this sounds far-fetched. McVeigh certainly had reasons to fabricate a tale of a malevolent government. But upon consideration, his story placed a compelling new light on the John Doe No. 2 mystery. In contrast to the government’s account—that McVeigh executed the elaborate delivery of the huge truck bomb single-handedly—McVeigh gave Hammer a much more logistically feasible account, that McVeigh had a support squad of accomplices on the ground in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. And he named names. xiii Th is book is by no means a mere recounting of prison talk, however. After McVeigh’s execution, Hammer, an inmate without ready access to a telephone, the Internet, or face-to-face interviews, undertook a Houdini-like feat: to investigate the validity of McVeigh’s story while locked behind bars. Th e result is an abundance of evidence, much of it developed through a dogged parallel investigation by another man on the outside, who is central to Hammer’s story. He is Jesse C. Trentadue, a lawyer who for many years has pursued the truth about the suspicious death of his brother, a prisoner in federal custody in Oklahoma City the summer after the bombing. Jesse Trentadue and Hammer have come to believe Kenneth Trentadue’s death was linked to a government cover-up of federal involvement in the bomb plot. I won’t spoil the book’s surprise ending, but suffi ce it to say, Hammer has far more to lose than gain by writing this story. Th e Federal Bureau of Prisons prohibits all media interviews with him. With a federal judge’s approval, he off ered to tell his story about the bombing by videotaped deposition. But the FBI sought and won an order from a higher court to keep Hammer off videotape. Why would the federal government go to such lengths just to keep an inmate from telling a story? One possible answer is that, against all odds, prison investigative journalist David Paul Hammer is getting close to deeply embarrassing truths regarding the Oklahoma City Bombing. For now, what is known is that, in the most devastating domestic terrorist strike ever on American soil, investigators didn’t seem to investigate every lead, and reporters, for the most part, didn’t report anything beyond the government’s narrative. And so, strangely, it now falls to David Paul Hammer to break the news from death row. Here is the news: Contrary to the spin of government insiders who have secrets to hide, the Oklahoma City Bombing case is not closed— not by a long shot. Terrorists who were never brought to justice for the bombing may still be out there. Th e death of Kenneth Trentadue, who may have been Victim No. 169, remains unsolved. Consider the evidence carefully in the story that follows. Th en you be the judge. xiv PREFACE xv stood at my cell door and watched as prison guards placed restraints on the most infamous Federal Death Row prisoner in history. Timothy I James McVeigh exited the deathwatch cell at 3:40 a.m. on Sunday, June 10, 2001. He was dressed in a pair of institutional khaki pants, a white T-shirt, socks and blue slip-on deck shoes. Two correctional offi cers escorted him. As McVeigh walked down the tier, our eyes met. He nodded once, maintaining his military bearing. I acknowledged him with a similar nod. No words were spoken, yet McVeigh’s meaning was clear to me: “Write the book. Expose the secrets.” Timothy McVeigh was only hours from being executed. Th is book is based upon my interactions with McVeigh during the 23 months we were housed together on death row at the United States Penitentiary in Terre Haute, Indiana. Th e book contains fi rsthand information and accounts provided to me by McVeigh. When McVeigh was executed, he took many secrets with him. Some of those secrets are contained in this book. In order to obtain them, I was required to barter with McVeigh and take on certain crucial legal issues – notably his desire to give up his appeals and advance his xvi execution date, and his desire not to have his body autopsied.

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