Buffalo, N.Y. — A remorseless Timothy McVeigh calls the children killed in the Oklahoma City bombing "collateral damage," regretting only that their deaths detracted from his bid to avenge Waco and Ruby Ridge, according to a new book.
Details in the book mark the first time McVeigh has publicly and explicitly admitted to the crime and given his reasons for the attack.
Timothy McVeigh
"I understand what they felt in Oklahoma City. I have no sympathy for them," McVeigh told the authors of "American Terrorist: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing." He had no control over the book's content.
McVeigh told Lou Michel and Dan Herbeck, reporters for The Buffalo News, he did not know there was a day-care center inside the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, the authors said on Thursday's broadcast of "PrimeTime Thursday."
"I recognized beforehand that someone might be ... bringing their kid to work," McVeigh said, according to the ABC broadcast. "However, if I had known there was an entire day care center, it might have given me pause to switch targets. That's a large amount of collateral damage."
Michel said McVeigh's only regret was that the children's deaths proved to be a public relations nightmare that undercut his cause.
CNN on Wednesday quoted Danny Defenbaugh, the FBI's lead investigator in the case, saying he had no doubt McVeigh knew before the bombing that children would be among his victims.
"No matter what and how you go by that building, if you look at the building, you're going to see all the little cut-out hands, all the little apples and flowers showing that there's a kindergarten there that there are children in that building," Defenbaugh said.
Defenbaugh also said that within days of the Oklahoma City bombing, the FBI found evidence that McVeigh had considered other attacks in Denver and Omaha, Neb., CNN reported.
The April 19, 1995, bombing killed 168 people, 19 of them children. McVeigh, 32, is scheduled to be executed May 16.
McVeigh told the authors he was disappointed when part of the building remained standing after his 7,000-pound bomb went off. "Damn, I didn't knock the building down. I didn't take it down," he said. He said he was the sole architect of the plan, resorting to threats against Terry Nichols' family when his Army buddy hesitated before helping to load the explosives into the rental truck.
In 75 hours of prison interviews with the Buffalo reporters beginning in May 1999, McVeigh, who was raised in Pendleton, outside Buffalo, got choked up while talking about killing a gopher in a field, but never expressed remorse for the bombing.
However, he had been brought to tears two years earlier while watching the disaster at the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Tex. He was in the living room of Nichols' Michigan home when the compound burned to the ground during an assault by federal agents, killing about 80 members of the cult.
McVeigh, a model soldier, had left the Army disillusioned, unable to live with the thought that he was an ally of "the biggest bully in the world, the U.S. government," Herbeck said. When Congress banned certain assault weapons, "I snapped," McVeigh said.
McVeigh told the authors he knew he would get caught and even anticipated execution as a form of "state-assisted suicide." Yet he worried initially about snipers as he was being charged.
"He was ready to die but not at that moment he wanted to make sure that his full message got out first," Herbeck said.
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