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April 19th, 1995 started as a clear, beautiful day.

To the people in Oklahoma City, it was just another Wednesday.

It began with doctors starting at the hospital.

It began with firemen showing up at the station.

Those people who within an hour, their lives would change forever.

At 8:57 Army veteran Timothy McVeigh pulled a rented truck up to the curb in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building.

He was about to commit mass murder.

Inside the vehicle was 5-thousand thousand pounds of explosives.

McVeigh ignited the fuse, got out, locked the door, and ran to the getaway car.

At 9:02… (Explosion) We could hear the blast when it happened.

And we went and looked out the window and we could see the smoke billowing up In a matter of seconds, the blast destroyed a third of the nine-story story building, killing 168 people, 19 were children... hundreds in the area were badly injured.

Doctors and nurses would literally run from the OU medical center, a mile away responding to this tragedy.

The FBI turned its full attention to Oklahoma City, and launched what remains the largest domestic terrorism case in the history of the United States… Oklahoma City Bombing: The Investigation.

I’m Tammy Payne in the TV9 Newsroom.

If you are anywhere downtown, you probably heard it and felt it.

An explosion of some kind downtown.

The blast registered 3.2 on the Richter scale.

Most of the windows downtown were shattered, covering the sidewalks and streets with broken glass.

Government paperwork rained down on the mass of walking wounded staggering into the daylight.

The thought in everyone’s mind, what happened and why?

We knew it was a tremendous explosion.

So we started immediately having agents respond to the downtown Oklahoma City area.

FBI bomb techs at their offices five miles away knew from the sound that it was a bomb.

In minutes, they arrived at the open pit filled with debris and bodies.

As firefighters and recovery crews pulled people from the rubble, investigators began looking for evidence.

The FBI received a great break in this investigation within an hour and a half of the bombing.

A deputy sheriff found an axle in front of the Regency Tower apartments.

When the rear axle assembly came flying through the air at that distance, and that weight, it crashed into the top of the red Ford Festiva on the hood, and it knocked the, the car plum up onto the curb.

We were able to trace that.

There is a partial vehicle identification number that was on the rear axle assembly.

It's PVA26077, I'll never forget that number, I don't think as long as I'm alive.

They determined that it was a Ford truck that it had been sold to the Ryder rental corporation.

Leads were immediately sent out to Miami to go to a Ryder corporation headquarters.

And from there they determined that it was indeed a 20-foot foot Ryder truck, 1993 Ford box truck, and that it had been leased out of Elliott's Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas on April the 17th, 1995, two days prior to the bombing.

We already had an agent at Elliott's body shop interviewing people by that mid-afternoon on the day of the bombing.

Investigators found the rental agreement with the name Robert Kling.

Agents interviewed the body shop owner, Eldon Elliott, the woman who rented the truck, Vicki Beamer and a mechanic, Tom Kessinger.

He put his date of birth as being born on April the 19th.

So that was starting to be a little bit of a clue because in the FBI, we realized it was April the 19th when the bomb exploded.

So we started thinking a little bit about the siege at Waco.

Tom Kessinger had probably the best recall of the individuals that had rented the truck.

We flew in a forensic artist from Washington DC, where late that night of the 19th, now into the morning of the 20th, he sat with Tom Kessinger and they came up with a composite.

The FBI released the two drawings, knowing that thousands of people would respond, most would go nowhere, but they felt they had no choice.

Sometimes the most mundane leads turn out to be the most productive.

And we had agents go to businesses in and around Elliott's body shop in Junction City, Kansas.

And so one such agent was Mark Bowden.

He went into a place called the Dreamland Motel, which was located, I believe, about 4.7 miles up the freeway from Elliott's body shop.

The Dreamland Motel was owned by a lady named Lea McGown The lady there says, “Oh yes, I rented room number 25 for the last two days to this guy.” The motel receipt was under the name of Timothy McVeigh and gave the address of 3616 North Van Dyke in Decker, Michigan.

The farm of a James Nichols.

He made a phone call to Hunam Palace, and ordered Chinese food.

An order for Moo goo gai pan was to be delivered to room 25 at the Dreamland Motel, which was where Tim McVeigh was staying.

By midnight, on the night of the bombing, the FBI knows that there's a guy named Tim McVeigh who used an alias of Robert Kling and that he and Terry Nichols in Kansas have some connection.

And they believe they are persons of interest in the bombing, but they really don't know where Tim McVeigh is.

78-minutes minutes after the bombing, 80-miles miles North on I-35 35 near Perry, Oklahoma, Highway Patrol Trooper Charlie Hanger made a traffic stop.

I'm traveling at a high rate of speed and I'm about a mile away from where I'm going to exit off to state highway-15 15 and I'm in the left lane and I passed this old yellow Mercury who is in the right lane.

He didn't have a license plate.

So I had to slow down and then change lanes and initiate my traffic stop.

I stood behind my open door and I yelled for the driver to get out.

He didn't immediately get out.

He opened the door and he turned and he sat on the side edge of the seat, looking out to the West instead of back to the south, to me.

He finally did stand up and began walking toward me.

And when he did that, I could see his hands were empty and I didn't feel there was a threat.

So I stepped from behind my open door and we met between the two vehicles.

Now he was wearing a lightweight windbreaker jacket and was just slightly zipped up at the bottom.

So the wind couldn't blow it open.

And he went to his right rear pocket to retrieve his billfold.

And when he did, it tightened that jacket up on the left side.

And I saw a bulge under that jacket that appeared to be a weapon.

So he produces a Michigan driver's license and I'm looking at it and it looks like the individual I'm talking to the picture.

And so I take that license and I stick it in my gun belt.

And I tell him, “I want you to take both hands.

And I want you to slowly unzip that jacket and slowly pull it back because I want to look under it.

He just starts to pull it back.

And he looks me right in the eye.

And he says, “I have a weapon.” I reached up and I grabbed the bulge on the outside of his jacket.

And I grabbed him and I'm telling him, you know, “Turn around and get your hands up.” And I drew my weapon and stuck it to the back of his head.

We're about halfway to the trunk of his car.

And he makes a statement to me that I think he's trying to intimidate me.

He said, “Well, my weapon is loaded” and I've still got a death grip on the outside of the jacket where his weapons at.

And I nudged him to the back of the head with the barrel with my pistol and I said, “Well, so is mine.” On the ride from the point of arrest to the jail.

We could still hear Oklahoma City headquarters in my unit, dispatching units downtown.

He made no comments.

The yellow Mercury had no radio, but there was a small TV in the Noble County Jail booking room.

When Charlie came in we just stood there and discussed it.

And Timothy McVeigh is standing there with us and he had no comment to make.

And he just looked at the TV, calm, didn't say a word about what was going on.

The fingerprinting stood out to me because his hands didn't sweat.

And he was, he was cool.

He was just not, he was not upset.

And he was seeing what we were seeing on the TV.

After taking his picture, Jailer Marsha Moritz took McVeigh’s clothing and personal effects.

The T-shirt shirt McVeigh was wearing tested positive for bomb residue.

On the front, was the phrase “Sic semper tyrannis.” Thus always to tyrants.

On the back a Thomas Jefferson quote, “The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants.” I always made a cursory search of my unit.

And I looked in the right rear floorboard behind where McVeigh had been sitting and I see a crumpled piece of paper and I picked it up and I began unraveling it, and it's a military business card to a military surplus store in Antigo, Wisconsin and on the back, it says, “Will need more TNT at $10 a stick.

Will contact you after May 1.” And so I took that and I placed that in an envelope and sealed it up as evidence and turned it over to the FBI.

In the FBI, we can run this database system called NCIC, the National Crime Information Center.

We can plug a person's name in there and find out whether or not that person's been arrested.

And sure enough, we found out that there was a Tim McVeigh that was, arrested close, in Perry, Oklahoma in Noble county on the morning of the bombing.

McVeigh was about to be released from jail when we found out where he was at through these online searches.

So a frantic call was made up to Nobel County like, you know, “Delay the hearings we’re on our way to get this guy” and they had a material witness warrant for him.

So we're feeling pretty confident now with the arrest of McVeigh that we've got at least one of the individuals that was responsible for the Oklahoma City bombing.

When investigators arrived McVeigh would not talk.

He gave basically name, rank and serial number type thing as a soldier type and then, and was never interviewed by the agents again.

The FBI was very concerned that let's don't have another Jack Ruby situation.

So the FBI moved very quickly to get Tim McVeigh out of the county jail.

There was a helicopter, a half a block away.

He was ferried to Tinker Air Force Base to a compound that was very secure.

The location that Charlie trooper hanger had arrested McVeigh was 78 miles from downtown Oklahoma City.

That was important to us because McVeigh was arrested at 10:20 that morning which was 78 minutes after the Oklahoma City bombing.

The next day, agents all over the country were interviewing his friends, family and members of his Army unit, trying to build a profile of McVeigh.

After being a very good soldier, a disciplined soldier who won a number of medals in the Persian Gulf War.

Okay.

But then he's mad at the government because of the Branch Davidian.

He believes he's Patrick Henry.

Tim McVeigh visited Waco and handed out pamphlets on a number of occasions.

And often in his speaking with friends and some of his writings, you know, Ruby Ridge, gun control, Waco were all very strong reactions from McVeigh and Nichols and their anti-government views.

He commonly used April 19th as his date of birth on any records he provided.

That date kept coming up.

He rented the Ryder truck on April 17th at 4:19 PM.

He thought after the Waco tragedy that the government was tyrannical.

And so he really believed that this would start an uprising.

So sometime in 1994, he starts formulating a plan to get back at the government.

Terry Nichols served in the same unit with McVeigh during the first Gulf War.

He was at his home in Herrington, Kansas when the media gave his name as a person of interest.

So Terry Nichols, he spotted the agents following him as he was attempting to leave town.

Terry Nichols ultimately gets concerned about it and drives to the Harrington Kansas police station, turns himself in and says, “I didn't have anything to do with it, but I know you're looking for me.” The smart guy figures, the best thing I can do is go turn myself in.

I don't want them hunting me down.

He thought he could talk his way out of this, and so the agents kept him talking and they did a stellar job because they talked to him for eight or nine hours.

And we got a lot of information out of those interviews.

He shifted blame to McVeigh during this interview without saying, I have knowledge that he really did this only suspicions.

And he, so he basically lied about some things that were really critical to his involvement.

There were search warrants issued for Terry Nichols house.

We found in his kitchen, in one of his kitchen cabinet drawers wrapped around some coins was the ammonium nitrate receipt showing that a guy named Mike Havens bought 2000 pounds of ammonium nitrate from Mid-Kansas Co-op, a farm supply store in central Kansas.

We identified that there had been two purchases of 2000 pounds of ammonium nitrate.

One was in September 30th, 1994.

Second one was on October 18th, 1994, both of them for 2000 pounds.

They had pretty high IQs but they weren't everyday criminals.

They weren't drug dealers, they weren't bank robbers.

They weren't kidnappers, they weren't car thieves, so they didn't have a background in conducting crimes.

We also found non-electric electric blasting caps in a box down in the basement that were identical to blasting caps that had been stolen from a quarry.

We found Terry Nichols using the last name Havens at other locations.

So now we really felt like we had Terry Nichols tied into the Oklahoma City bombing big time.

Let there be no mistake that Terry Nichols was the brains behind this.

He was the person that plotted it.

He was the person that egged McVeigh on to do it.

He just didn't want to be caught.

The FBI could never connect James Nichols to the bombing.

However, McVeigh and Nichols did include another member of their Army unit, Michael Fortier.

In March and the early part of April, McVeigh was living with the Fortiers’ in Kingman, Arizona.

And during that time, he took some soup cans out of Lori Fortier, Michael Fortier’s wife.

He took some soup cans out of her cupboard and put them down on the floor and was talking to her about how he was going to configure the bomb truck to blow up the Murrah building, to get the most impact he could get out of the explosion.

What is so sad is that at any time, Michael and Lori Fortier could have picked up the phone, called the FBI and prevented this tragedy.

Finding the axle and McVeigh’s arrest were major breaks, the next break was finding a long distance calling card at Terry Nichols house.

They thought to hide themselves from ever having phones or calls from their home numbers.

They buy in the name of Bridges, a calling card from a company called Spotlight.

They would go to a 7-11 and send money to the Spotlight address in Washington, D.C. occasionally.

We used the calling card to trace their movements, and then we used the tracing of those movements to show that they were in the same immediate areas where the bomb components were acquired at the very time the bomb components were acquired.

It also told us something else that was very, very important to us.

The only phone calls people that we saw using that calling card were Terry Nichols and Tim McVeigh.

I feel like that if there had been other people involved that McVeigh and Nichols would certainly have been using that calling card to correspond with those people.

On Easter Sunday, three days before the bombing, they stashed the yellow Mercury and parked it behind the downtown YMCA and then returned to mix the fuel and fertilizer in the bomb truck at Geary Lake in Kansas.

He drives to Oklahoma City, parks it in front of the Alfred P Murrah building at a few minutes before nine o'clock that morning.

The camera at Regency park that shows him five minutes before the bombing passing in front of the Regency tower apartments on 5th Street, he's parking.

He pulls in front of the fifth street entrance to the Murrah building and the rest is history.

Two days after April’s downtown bombing prime suspect Timothy McVeigh may have spoken words to federal investigators linking him to the crime.

The TV stations and radio stations stayed on the air 24-7 after the bombing with every possible detail.

And so there never could be a fair trial in Oklahoma City.

The Federal Judge Richard Matsch was selected to hold the trial in Denver, in federal court.

Michael Fortier cooperated and testified in exchange for a lighter sentence, his wife Lori was never charged.

Did that sit well with me to give him a deal like that?

No, it didn't.

He's despicable.

He's a despicable human being that could have stopped all of these people from being killed and he chose to do nothing about it.

He agreed to plead guilty to charges that would put him in prison for 12 years.

The Federal grand jury gave McVeigh the death penalty.

He was executed on June 11th, 2001.

And Nichols received life without parole.

At the time, Federal law only allowed Nichols and McVeigh to be convicted of murdering the eight law enforcement officers.

160 civilians were killed.

And the federal court did not have jurisdiction over those 160 counts of death and murder.

So the state court had jurisdiction.

Since every judge in Oklahoma County was affected personally by the bombing, they all recused themselves and the trial was moved to McAlester.

It's the biggest murder trial in the history of the United States.

To have 160 counts of murder in one trial.

It's never happened.

Nothing even close has ever happened before.

And the most emotional part, those 19 children.

Going through their autopsy and cause and manner of death.

It was a very emotional time, particularly for the jury.

Some days I don't know how anyone could keep a dry eye and the only ones that I know for sure that kept a dry eye were Terry Nichols and Tim McVeigh.

In 2004, the jury convicted Terry Nichols on 160 counts of first degree murder, but they could not agree on his sentence.

Seven jurors were in favor of the death penalty.

Five jurors were in favor of life without parole and jurors from both sides of that told me that the five who were in favor of life without parole considered life without parole to be a harsher sentence than the death penalty.

So then I sentenced him to 161 counts of life without parole.

Nichols is being held at a super maximum security prison near Florence, Colorado.

The defense wanted to present to the jury all these other theories that other people were involved, other people did it and so on.

I told the defense, ”If you have any” - these are legal terms that they understood.

“If you have any relevant, material, legally admissible under our rules of evidence, evidence of anybody else involved, I will admit it and I'll let the jury hear it.” There were the Elohim City connection, alleged, the Midwest bank robbers, Strassmeir and the Germans.

We even had a guy who said that he had a video tape of the explosion of the building blowing up and that it was an FBI videotape.

That the FBI knew this was going to happen.

All of this fell flat.

There was no admissible evidence of any of this.

The most persistent question about the bombing is “What happened to John Doe number two?” We didn't know who John Doe number two was, and we couldn't find him.

So that was getting pretty perplexing.

And by mid to late May, the Kansas City office decided, “Well, let's go back to Elliott's body shop and ask them to pull all rental agreements a month before the Oklahoma City bombing and even in some of the days after the bombing.” We found out that an individual identified as Michael Hertig had rented a Ryder truck on Tuesday afternoon.

McVeigh picked his truck up on Monday afternoon.

So they asked Michael Hertig, “Well, did anybody go with you when you picked up your truck?” And he said, “Yeah, another guy did accompany me in there to pick it up.” So the agents asked him, “Well, what's his name?” And he said, well, “It's Todd Bunting.

He's a friend of mine.

And he went with me.” And so they asked Hertig to give a description of Bunting.

And lo and behold, the description he gave of him was pretty similar to the description that Tom Kessinger gave of John Doe number two.

We made the decision to show Tom Kessinger, the photo of Todd Bunting.

And it was an immediate reaction from Tom Kessinger.

That's absolutely who I was drawing.

Bunting also had a tattoo and wore a Carolina Panthers baseball cap that matched the composite drawing.

So we felt very confident at this time that we had identified John Doe number two.

After reviewing 30,000 pieces of evidence, there is no doubt in my mind that Tim McVeigh and Terry Nichols, two former army soldiers committed this crime by themselves.

They only needed two people.

You didn't need more than two people to lift eighty 50 pound bags of fertilizer and some barrels and some racing fuel.

It only took two people.

The question often arises.

Did he know there was a daycare center on the second floor?

And I guarantee he absolutely did know.

He didn't care.

They chose Oklahoma City on purpose because it was the Heartland and part of the country that people didn't expect this to happen.

Instead of starting a revolution, the bombers brought Oklahomans together In the face of terror and tragedy.

The terrible loss that day can never be made whole, but the thousands of investigators that spent countless hours working the evidence believe that justice was served.

We feel like the American public can have a lot of confidence in the investigation we conducted and that we made sure that those people who were responsible for the planning and carrying out of the Oklahoma City bombing have been held accountable for it.