Conspiracy in Perry, Oklahoma
By Wendy S. Painting
January 7, 2009
(Perry, Oklahoma. Picture by Wendy S. Painting December 2008)

On December 27th while at the airport, returning from a research trip from Texas and Oklahoma, I received a call from a friend who said he had just turned on the television and saw something he thought would be of interest to me. He excitedly told me that the FBI had just released a surveillance tape, long held in secrecy, to the Oklahoma City National Memorial commemorating the 1995 bombing of the Murrah federal building which killed at least 168 people. For unknown reasons this video was never released to the public, was not allowed in the three bombing trials of Terry Nichols or Timothy McVeigh and remained in the sole custody of the FBI until now. A spokesperson for the memorial said that the video will help to tell the story of the bombing more completely. I had just returned from Perry, Oklahoma where the footage was taken, a few days before learning of the release of the tape. My reasons for going to Perry were also to tell the story of the Oklahoma City bombing more fully, and an exploration of Perry seemed to be one of the ways to do this.

The video was taken 75 minutes after the blast Oklahoma City. In the aftermath of the bombing, as Oklahomans were reeling from the horrendous shock of the unimaginable carnage, Oklahoma Highway Patrol Trooper Charlie Hangar pulled over twenty six year old Timothy McVeigh. McVeigh was driving a yellow Mercury Marquis on I-35 outside Perry, Oklahoma and away from Oklahoma City. Hangar had originally pulled McVeigh over for driving without a rear license plate but when he confronted McVeigh, Hangar said he noticed a bulge under McVeigh’s jacket. When asked if he was carrying a weapon, McVeigh admitted that he was carrying a loaded .45- caliber Glock handgun. McVeigh’s New York concealed firearm permit was not valid in Oklahoma so Hangar arrested him on a concealed weapon charge.

The day of the bombing, the FBI would release sketches of a John Doe #1, who resembled McVeigh, and a John Doe #2, who had much darker features and was shorter than JD#1. Two days later, as McVeigh waited to be arraigned in the Noble County jail in Perry, it was realized that he matched the description of John Doe #1. Furthermore, a VIN number found on an axle of the Ryder at the blast site would connect McVeigh to the rental of the truck in Kansas two days previous. On Friday, April 21, authorities would locate McVeigh who was still awaiting arraignment in Perry and America watched while McVeigh affected a ‘thousand yard stare’ as he was led, shackled, out of the Noble County Perry jail and into federal custody. Eventually though, the FBI would claim that there never was a John Doe #2, despite scores of witnesses to the contrary.

They had their man, but there were certain issues which would linger in the minds of victims, family members and the public for years to come concerning the FBI’s claim as to how the bombing had been executed. Originally, Trooper Hangar had told the media that there was a brown truck following behind the yellow Mercury when he pulled McVeigh over. Despite the fact that McVeigh was said to have rented the truck and delivered the bomb to the Murrah building without help, many people reported to the FBI that they had seen a brown pickup truck with the Ryder as well as a yellow Mercury the morning of the bombing, and in the few days leading up to it. There remains speculation that the missing portion of the tape may show some of these other vehicles.

Yet, according to the McVeigh trial transcripts, when asked if it was his usual practice to start the dash cam every time he got out of his car for a stop, Hangar said that this particular time he just “didn't feel like it was necessary” to record the whole transaction but that after McVeigh was taken into the patrol car, Hangar felt that he should turn on his camera to record the reading of McVeigh’s Miranda rights. Hangar said that the camera was recording during the entire drive back to the jail cell but he later realized that he had pushed the wrong buttons and did not record audio of the arrest. Hangar said in court that he never got a chance to review the whole tape, because it was confiscated by the FBI on the 27th. The newly released video tape is taken from Hangars dashboard camera and is 28 minutes long. Despite it being called evidence of justice, the video which shows Hangar searching the Mercury fails to show McVeigh, nor does it record the conversation between Hangar and McVeigh, before or after the arrest.

The search warrants for the car itself remained sealed by the court and prosecutors failed to comply with discovery requirements during the trials, refusing to give the tape to the defense and causing them to file a motion for discovery. In June of 1995 a journalist filed a Freedom of Information Act request for the tape but was denied. When McVeigh’s attorney was able to question Hangar in court about the brown pickup truck which was ahead of the McVeigh’s yellow Mercury, the prosecutors objected and finally Hangar said he could not say for sure whether of not there was a brown truck that morning. When it was realized that Hangar had just taken the worst domestic terrorist of the day into custody, one would think that not only would he have given the FBI the tape immediately, but would also have watched the recording himself, if only because of the sheer abnormality of the situation.

But McVeigh’s connections to Perry begin prior to his arrest on April 19, 1995. The calling used by McVeigh and Nichols in the years preceding the bombing would later used by the FBI as evidence against them in the trials, yet a reading of the official story excludes the fact that calls were made to Parry from the calling card as early as January 1994. Other sources had previously reported to the FBI and local police that McVeigh had been in Perry often and at least one man had in fact, reported to the FBI that the Ryder left from Perry early the morning of the 19th.

Additionally, According to one FBI memo, a woman who worked at a gas station in the small town reported to the FBI that on the 17th a yellow Ryder with two men had stopped at her place of employment. One of the men she described matched the description of John Doe 2. On April 18, the night before the bombing, the owners of a Steakhouse located along IH 35 in Perry said that McVeigh and a stocky companion came into the restaurant around 7 PM. The owners reported that there was a yellow Ryder truck in the parking lot at the time. Later, after the bombing, one of the customers who had been present at that time called the FBI and reported the sighting. Officially though, the Ryder truck which was involved in the bombing was said to be in Kansas at these times, being transformed into a weapon of mass destruction near a remote lake. As an exceptional soldier as McVeigh was said to have been, it still boggles the mind how he could have driven all of these vehicles at once.

After McVeigh’s arrest he attempted to make several calls from the Perry jailhouse, yet later a Perry official would claim that that the phone in the jail cell had not been working that night. Phone records for a payphone in an ice cream store in Perry were subpoenaed by the FBI for the date of April 19th. The results of this subpoena remain unknown, but it is possible that McVeigh was calling someone at this location or that calls were being made in connection to the bombing, from this location. Brent Goad, a bail bondsman in Pawnee, Oklahoma had received a call from McVeigh. McVeigh told Goad, “I have to get out of here man” and claimed that a friend and the friends father would be able to cosign the bail bond in person. Goad told him that there was nothing that could be done until bail was set.
Enter in the mystery of Gary Land and Robert Jacks.

In November of 1994 three men came into a real estate office in Missouri, near the Ozark Mountains claiming that wanted to buy land which had caves. Two of the men were identified later as McVeigh and Nichols but the third identified himself to the real estate agent as Robert Jacks. It was Jacks, the agent says, who did all the talking while the man who called himself Tim McVeigh sat in the car most of the time, except to come into the office briefly. The real estate agent said that Jacks “seemed to be the one that was in control and in charge of what was going on.” This Jacks also resembled the sketch of John Doe #2.

On April 20, ten hours after McVeigh’s arrest in Perry on the 19th, the two men, Land and Jacks checked into a motel in Perry. The men checked out after only a couple of hours. The owners of the motel were questioned by the FBI concerning the men, but it is unknown what they told the FBI. The two men had been in Perry at the same time that jailers there said McVeigh had been making collect calls from his cell. During preparation for the trial of McVeigh the defense noted in an internal memo that a camera on a Wal-Mart in Perry would reveal possible co-conspirators. It is unknown what was found, if anything, on these tapes or others surveillance tapes from Perry, or even whether or not the defense was ever able to obtain them at all.

When the FBI searched the diary of Terry Nichols wife, Marife, they found the name Jacks, spelled in various ways, inside of it. Furthermore, in the months before the bombing Gary Land and Robert Jacks had both been staying at a motel in Kingman, Arizona at the same time that McVeigh was registered at two hotels next door to them. Later when the FBI searched McVeigh’s post office box in Kingman they found an envelope addressed to “Robert Jacques” from Newsweek. Land and Jacks were taken into custody briefly but were released immediately and nothing more was heard from or about them. Why all three men seemed to have travel the country together has never been sufficiently explained.

A spokesperson for the OKC memorial said that the video shows that Hangar, who is now Sherriff of Noble County, “got all the pieces he needed that day.” However, among all those pieces which this video tape supposedly ‘gets,’ the most important piece which would have shown the actual arrest of McVeigh, or the presence of McVeigh in Hangars car is mysteriously absent. The spokesperson says also that the video should help to erase conspiracy theories from the minds of the public and that the tape is valuable because “seeing that justice was served makes people have a sense of pride, that good overcame evil.” One woman, however, who lost her two young grandchildren in the bombing and who has tirelessly searched for answers ever since, said to me recently that this video tape does not show anything that hasn’t been seen before, “It doesn’t prove anything and it will take something I have never seen before to convince me that there was no conspiracy.” The problem here is that despite the statements of the memorial, justice has never truly been achieved for those whose lives were irrevocably affected by the bombing and there is nothing in this tape which would indicate that it was.

There is a fear that this tape and the reality behind it will become just another Zapruder film mystery lost to the annuals of history and swallowed by the ‘security’ apparatus of the state, much like the footage taken from outside the Murrah building on April 19th which still remains hidden from the victims and public, or like the video footage of the airplane which was said to have hit the Pentagon. Dismissing ‘conspiracy theories’ in the minds of the public would seem an easy task for those who have the power to do it, with the simple release of these tapes like these in a timely manner. As with the few frames released from the Pentagon from September 11th, this new ‘revelation’ in the OKC case only seems to support the opinion that there are still massive lies, cover-ups and corruption surrounding the murders in Oklahoma City that day.