Mcveigh Admits Oklahoma Bombing, Paper Says Timed Blast For High ‘Body Count’; Attorney Calls Paper Irresponsible

Timothy McVeigh told his defense team that he alone drove the Ryder truck in the Oklahoma City bombing, and decided on a daytime attack to ensure a “body count,” The Dallas Morning News reported Friday.

According to confidential notes of jail-house interviews with a defense team member, McVeigh also described how he and Terry Nichols assembled the bomb and financed the attack with a series of robberies, the paper said.

“I think it’s a hoax,” Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s attorney, told The Associated Press after the News made the story available on its World Wide Web site Friday.

Late Friday, Ralph Langer, the newspaper’s executive vice-president and editor, said the story was not a hoax.

Jones accused the paper of rushing the story onto the Internet out of fear that McVeigh’s defense would go to court in an attempt to stop publication.

He called the Morning News “the most irresponsible paper in the country,” claimed the notes were either faked or stolen, and compared the report to the “Hitler’s diary” hoax. But he said he didn’t plan any legal action against the paper.

Langer said the newspaper obtained the documents legally and denied that it rushed the story to the Internet to avoid a court order barring it from publishing the story.

The Morning News described the documents as summaries of meetings with McVeigh between July and December 1995 at El Reno Federal Correctional Institution in Oklahoma.

Because the reports were based on McVeigh’s meetings with a defense team member, they are not available to prosecutors and will probably never be introduced to the jury.

During one interview in July 1995, McVeigh was asked about an anti-government activist’s assertion that he would have been a hero if he had bombed the building at night when fewer people would have been killed, the reports said.

“Mr. McVeigh looked directly into my eyes and told me, ‘That would not have gotten the point across to the government. We needed a body count to make our point,’ ” the staff member wrote.

At another point, McVeigh disputed a waitress’s claim that she knew the identity of another man who actually drove the bomb truck, the paper said.

“Mr. McVeigh again insisted that he was the one who drove the Ryder truck,” the interviewer wrote.

Prosecutors and Nichols’ attorney, Michael Tigar, declined to comment.

McVeigh is scheduled to go on trial March 31 in Denver on murder and conspiracy charges. Nichols will be tried later. If convicted, they could receive the death penalty for the attack, which killed 168 people and injured more than 500.

The government has estimated that about 4,800 pounds of fertilizer went into the bomb, but McVeigh reportedly told the interviewer the device was built with 5,400 pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer - purchased for $540 - blended with about $3,000 worth of high-powered racing fuel.

McVeigh reportedly said they bankrolled the bombing in part with the November 1994 robbery of Arkansas gun dealer Roger Moore.