The mystery of John Doe No. 2 (Video Camera Recorded John Doe No. 2)

The main thing Joann Van Buren says she remembers about Timothy McVeigh is the $50 bill he wanted her to break. That, and the two men who accompanied him.

One day before he tore a hole in the nation's psyche with the bomb that destroyed Oklahoma City's Murrah Federal Building, McVeigh, Van Buren says, pulled up to the little Subway sandwich shop where she worked in Junction City, Kansas, driving the yellow Ryder truck that would contain the bomb.

Van Buren didn't pay any particular attention to them at first. Another clerk waited on the men, but when they tried to pay for their meal with a large bill, she took notice.

"As soon as the $50 bill came up, I had to go to the safe to get the change," says Van Buren today. "And when I gave them the change and they got their sandwiches, I remember them going back over to the corner, sitting down. And when they left, I remember three people getting into the truck. There were three people at the table."

The clerks she worked with later told FBI agents that two of the men matched the descriptions of McVeigh and his cohort, Terry Nichols. The third was a shorter, dark-haired and muscular man with an olive complexion: a perfect fit for the figure destined to be known as John Doe 2.

Luckily, the Subway shop actually had a video camera recording that day's events. When Van Buren contacted the FBI, agents interviewed everyone working in the shop on April 18. And when they were done, they confiscated the video recorded that day.

But if that tape showed a third co-conspirator with McVeigh and Nichols, no one outside the FBI can say. No one beyond the agency ever saw it. In the waning days of Nichols' trial, his defense attorneys discovered the details of Van Buren's story -- which had only been described in generic terms in the FBI's report, omitting her contention that two men accompanied McVeigh -- along with information contained in some 43,000 other "lead sheets" that the FBI until then had failed to turn over to them.

Michael Tigar, who led the Nichols defense, tried in 1999 to use the FBI's failures to produce all relevant documents to gain a new trial for his client. But U.S. District Judge Richard Matsch refused, saying the withheld material would not have altered the trial's outcome.

He likely was right. In fact, Nichols' jury had already refused to give him the death penalty largely because of some jurors' belief that more people were involved in the bombing than merely McVeigh, Nichols and Michael and Lori Fortier, the Arizona couple who were acquaintances with the two men and who were the prosecution's chief witnesses. That belief is also shared by thousands of conspiracy theorists who remain convinced the whole truth about the Oklahoma City bombing has not been told. Nichols' verdict stands as nearly the sole validation that the bombing may not have been the product of two lone bombers.

And when the FBI admitted it had failed to turn over another 3,100 documents to defense attorneys, fresh fuel was thrown onto those fires. McVeigh's execution was delayed a month as lawyers for both men started combing through the withheld information to see if it might give them an opportunity to overturn at least their sentences, if not their convictions. His execution is now scheduled for Monday.

But just as he hovered in the background of numerous eyewitness accounts like Joann Van Buren's, the figure of John Doe No. 2 almost certainly lurks within those withheld documents -- and he will continue to haunt the Oklahoma City case after McVeigh is executed. And, in an era that has seen more FBI foul-ups than any other time in history, the bureau's inability to explain away the repeated accounts of additional participants in the bombings has raised legitimate questions about the quality of its own investigation -- as well as fueled thoughts of larger conspiracies that will live beyond McVeigh.....

Even the simplest investigations of seemingly straightforward crimes -- let alone a massively complex one like the Oklahoma City case, in which some 35,000 witnesses were interviewed -- can be complicated by the randomness and unrelated coincidences of real life. An unattached stranger who wanders onto a scene at some point can become a suspected accomplice for no reason other than bad timing.

The FBI has maintained that coincidence is the best way to explain John Doe No. 2, whose character sketch was drawn mainly from the account of an eyewitness at the Junction City shop where the Ryder truck was rented. That witness, the FBI says, mixed up his recollections and mistakenly identified a man who came in the next day to rent a truck -- a 23-year-old soldier named Todd Bunting -- as an accomplice of McVeigh's. Bunting, who was cleared of any connection to the crime, vaguely resembled the composite drawing and wore clothes similar to those in the drawing, including a Carolina Panthers ball cap.

There is a kind of logic to the FBI's conclusion. The Oklahoma City case was anything but straightforward, and the agency was hit with a near-apocalyptic flood of tips about the possible perpetrators of the bombing. The vast majority of them turned into time-wasting dead ends and wild goose chases, and the investigators were forced to turn to Occam's Razor -- the maxim that the simplest explanation for a mystery is most often the correct one -- to shave down the possibilities.

McVeigh, a dead ringer for the John Doe No. 1 sketch, had been captured, and Terry Nichols (who looked nothing like John Doe No. 2) had turned himself in to authorities. The Fortiers were quickly tracked down and confessed to their relatively minor roles in the bombing as sympathizers who gave McVeigh a temporary base of operations and listened avidly as he planned the attack. And though there was no shortage of theories about the identity of Doe No. 2, no one who resembled him emerged as a possible co-conspirator.

Ultimately, investigators were forced to conclude that John Doe No. 2 was a phantom who never really existed. And that was the case they chose to take to the courts in their prosecutions of McVeigh and Nichols.

"There's nothing there," says FBI spokesman Steven Berry. "It's a case where every avenue we went down, there's nothing there. And we're certainly not going to get behind it and say there's something there or put it out that there is something when there's nothing there. It's chasing ghosts."

Indeed, McVeigh himself steadfastly denies there was any John Doe No. 2. He told the authors of "American Terrorist" that he and Nichols alone had built and detonated the bomb and vehemently denied that anyone else had been involved. He also denied the existence of Doe No. 2 in a May 2 letter to the Houston Chronicle.

But even McVeigh's own trial attorney, Stephen Jones, never believed him on this count. Jones believes McVeigh had substantial motive to lie about the involvement of others: For one, it covers the tracks of his cohorts, and it heightens his own role in the drama. Certainly "American Terrorist" captures McVeigh's desire for martyrdom -- he manipulated his appeals to expedite his execution -- and admitting anyone else into the scenario would certainly diminish his starring role.

Jones also told reporters that McVeigh failed a lie-detector test when asked about John Doe No. 2. And McVeigh, he says, frequently covered up any traces of potential co-conspirators. Once he insisted he had not accompanied Nichols to a farm co-op to buy ammonium nitrate, but after learning that a clerk at the store identified Nichols and said there was a second man with him, McVeigh flip-flopped, telling Jones he had been the man there after all. The clerk, on the other hand, insisted that it hadn't been McVeigh.

But when Jones' defense team attempted to track down Doe No. 2, it ran into the same dead ends as the FBI. Nonetheless, Jones himself came to believe McVeigh was associated with a gang of white supremacists operating out of an enclave in rural Missouri called Elohim City.

That theory is also a favorite of conspiracists who see the Oklahoma City investigation as a massive coverup. Many of them go well beyond Jones' relatively modest conjectures about the nature of the bombing to argue that the government itself was somehow involved in the bombing, as part of its plan to discredit the militia movement. The theory that McVeigh was set up looms large in the voluminous conspiracy theories that are the metier of the far-right Patriot movement. The Militia of Montana, for instance, continues to claim that there was a second blast -- a charge set by federal agents, they say -- recorded within seconds of the truck bomb (there was not; the seismic reports that form the basis of this claim actually recorded the impact of the mass of debris from the Murrah Building hitting the ground).

Others argue that a bomb made of ammonium nitrate and fuel oil could not have delivered enough force to cause the extraordinary damage of the Oklahoma City blast, and cite a study at a federal laboratory as proof. They are right. But then, the explosion set off by McVeigh actually was a high-octane mix of jet fuel and fertilizer, and the Murrah damage was entirely consistent with the force of that kind of bomb.

The theories that have gained the most currency among the conspiracy set are traceable to an Oklahoma journalist named J.D. Cash, who has built a minor career out of linking McVeigh's activities back to Elohim City and other violent supremacist factions. The core of Cash's theories revolve around McVeigh's connections to a handful of people at Elohim City who shared anti-government (and deeply racist) views, suggesting that McVeigh and his co-conspirators were actually dupes of a federal informant acting as an agent provocateur.

However, Cash's theories crumble in the face of a careful examination of the facts of the case. Cash makes much of the shadowy presence of a German neo-Nazi named Andreas Strassmeier and McVeigh's attempts to contact him at Elohim City in the days before the bombing. But Strassmeier had little contact with McVeigh and was nowhere near any of the activities that produced the bomb, and he steadfastly denies any connection. Cash's chief witness, an ex-debutante turned white-power pinup girl named Carol Howe who eventually worked as a Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms informant, has constantly changed her story in a way seeming to indicate that she was tailoring it to suit the needs of the conspiracists who promoted her tale.

These theories reached a kind of apex in the work of a British journalist named Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, whose 1997 book, "The Secret Life of Bill Clinton," postulated that the former president covered up the government's complicity in the bombing as part of a larger career of perfidy that included drug-running and murder. Though Evans-Pritchard's work gained some favor among mainstream conservatives -- Robert Novak, for instance, wrote a column extolling his theories -- nearly every aspect of "Secret Life" has been roundly debunked.

Cash's work surfaced again recently as a source for a report by the British newspaper The Guardian that linked McVeigh's activities to those of the Aryan Republican Army, a gang of Midwestern bank robbers whose whereabouts eerily paralleled those of McVeigh at key moments in the run-up to the bombing. However, like nearly everything proceeding from Cash, the piece was built on a fabric of coincidence and speculation.

Indeed, there has been no shortage of candidates for the identity of John Doe No. 2, but nearly all of them lead to the same kind of factual dead ends. And it is precisely those failures that tend to bolster the government's contention that the man in the sketch never existed as an actual conspirator in the bombing.

But the FBI's explanation of the John Doe No. 2 theories is nearly as full of holes as the conspiracists' scenarios -- or at least, it leaves dangling a long list of unanswered questions. When it is examined, a troubling portrait emerges of an agency eager to tailor its investigation for the purposes of prosecuting a criminal case, rather than doggedly seeking out the truth.....

McVeigh essentially committed a form of suicide, because he insisted that there be no appeal of his death penalty conviction. The reason so many killers sit on death row for years is because of the various automatic appeals on up the food chain of courts. McVeigh exhibited all the earmarks of a zealot, much like the Islamist radicals.

Remember that, after it came out in the spring of 2001 that the FBI and DOJ had been concealing so much evidence, McVeigh authorized his lawyers to seek a stay of execution and a new trial. The DOJ did grant a month's stay, but then refused to delay any longer. I think that the new evidence was sufficient to justify a new sentencing phase, if not a whole new trial. But what was really strange was that the month did not allow McVeigh's lawyers and the courts to make a proper study of the new evidence, such as to allow them at least to make a reasoned judgment on whether to grant a new sentencing phase. The haste in executing McVeigh was, in my opinion, a gross miscarriage of justice.

Ah - "the discerning."

The "discerning" are waiting to see if GW will actually reduce government, reign in the afore-mentioned agencies who have spun out of control and force government to respect our rights.

The "discerning" note postive steps by GW and also note some troubling tendancies and decidedly non-conservative actions.

The "Discerning" note that blind trust in any politician is dangerous.

The "Discerning" note that there are those on this forum who are blindly following GW and attack immediately anyone who is "discerning."

Attacking the commander-in-chief during a war for the survival of our way of life and freedoms has always been seen by discerning observers as self-defeating. No one is speaking about blindly following but what he has had to move to the center because the dumbassed American people in their cupidity and greed will not remove enough RATS to give him any room to manuever. He could barely manage a tax break even when the evidence is overwhelming that cuts increase revenues and cause the rich to pay more because of RAT stupidity. He is not the president of the right alone but must address the issues of all the people. There is no more conservative alternative to Bush. That is a fact and must be faced. Just as it is a fact that the American people are in no way shape or form conservative.

What election did you watch? The one I saw had Bush barely staving off an outright mediaRAT theft of the election on a par with the Boss Tweed, Boss Platt, Boss Hague, Boss Daley election chicanery of the past.

Bush barely won and now must take steps to maximize his reelection FOR THE SAKE OF THE COUNTRY. This means neutralizing his opponents by co-opting their programs and removing their issues. While it is not expected that everyone can understand this I am surprised that you seem to miss such an obvious point.

Do officers just ask you to tell what you saw "what was he wearing? What caught your attention?" or do they ask you leading questions "was he wearing/driving, did he have a..."?

If all of the information in the interview comes from the witness, the FBI should have no problem with the witness videotaping the deposition for safekeeping. I'd also force them to get a judge to order me to surrender a tape before I made my own copy of any surveilence/security cam footage.

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