Without Vengeance Father Of Bombing Victim Stands Up To Death Penalty

It takes a lot to surprise an experienced journalist.

But Bud Welch managed the trick.

He did it early last spring, just a short time before Timothy McVeigh went on trial for bombing the federal building in Oklahoma City.

Welch, a 58-year-old owner of an Oklahoma City service station, was talking to an Associated Press reporter. Standing next to what is known as the Survivor Tree, an elm that survived the bombing even though heavily damaged, Welch was revealing his feelings concerning the death of his daughter.

Julie Marie Welch, 23, was one of the 1995 bombing’s 168 victims.

“The interview was over,” Welch recalls. “She had turned off her tape recorder, and we were just standing there chatting, and she said, ‘Well, Bud, I’ll bet you’ll be glad when these guys are tried and executed.’”

Welch says he paused a moment before answering.

“And I said, ‘Well, I don’t want to see them executed.’”

This is how he was quoted in a later story: “I have examined my conscience. I have examined it time and time again. The thing I would like people in this country to do is examine their consciences very deeply and try to see the spiritual side of life, the fact that every human being, even Timothy McVeigh, has a soul.”

Welch, who will talk about his experience at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Gonzaga University’s COG, remembers that the reporter “looked at me like I had just lost my mind.”

He says he receives such looks regularly “because we assume in this country that everyone is vindictive and wants additional bloodshed.”

Welch stands out because he wants no such thing.

Welch’s daughter and 167 others were killed by a bomb placed in a truck parked on the street in front of the federal building. A translator for Social Security, Julie Welch had worked in the building for just seven months.

Though the bombing took place Wednesday morning, her body wasn’t discovered until Saturday. Even now, her father doesn’t know exactly how she died.

“I think that probably Julie was killed by the collapse of the building,” he says, “but I don’t know. The blast may have killed her because they think that her body had been blown a short distance.”

Timothy McVeigh was convicted of the crime and has been sentenced to death. Terry Nichols was found guilty of conspiracy and involuntary manslaughter and is facing a life sentence.

If Welch had his way, neither man would be executed. But don’t assume that he is, he says, “soft on crime.” His choice, he explained during a recent telephone interview, would be for McVeigh and Nichols to spend the rest of their lives in prison.

“And I truly mean the rest of their lives,” he says. “And I do mean both of them, because I think they’re both as guilty as can be.”

Welch knows that his is a minority view. One Harris poll indicated that some 64 percent of the nation wants McVeigh to die. In 1997 alone, 74 people were executed in the United States, more than half of them in Texas, a total that the New York Times calls “a modern record.”

Television and newspaper reports have carried numerous comments from death-penalty advocates, many of whom feel justice was denied by the jury in Nichols’ trial.

Welch knows how they feel. For a short time after the explosion, he agreed with them. Forgetting his lifelong objection to capital punishment, he, too, wanted to see the bombers killed.

“If I had known that they were guilty,” Welch says, “I would have wanted to hang them then.”

“Of course,” he adds, “that’s why family members and survivors don’t serve on juries.”

It was a slow process, but Welch regained his composure. The change occurred, he explained, when he remembered his dead daughter’s feelings on the matter.

“She was opposed to it, also,” he said. “Julie was a very devout Catholic, especially the last two years of her life.”

It was that devotion that led her to say things such as, “The death penalty has no social value at all. All it does is teach our children to hate.”

Welch’s initial anti-death penalty statement was picked up by the national press, and he’s gone on to write commentary pieces both for Time and Newsweek magazines. As a result, he’s become a convenient target.

“Early on I had some darts thrown at me,” he says, recalling one man who identified himself as being from Fort Worth, Texas. “He accused me of being a fraud, and he said that I couldn’t love my daughter because I didn’t believe in the death penalty, which made me feel really bad at the time. It put me in tears.”

But Welch has had support, too, both from family members of other murder victims, and from anti-capital punishment activists such as Sister Helen Prejean, author of “Dead Man Walking.”

Not that he really needs it. Welch calls capital punishment nothing less than mob justice. And, he says, “We don’t need mob justice because there is no justice in the mob.”

He can quote Gandhi. “I think Gandhi put it best when he said, ‘An eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind.’ I truly believe that,” Welch says.

Mostly, though, he talks about his own struggle.

Before the bombing, he says, people would rebut his anti-death penalty stand by saying, “I just hope a violent crime doesn’t happen to one of your family members. You’ll change your mind.”

“And, of course, for a while they were correct,” Welch says. “I did change my mind. But that change was through rage. And through vengeance. I just don’t see how vengeance can help someone heal.”

Ultimately, Welch finds solace in the memory of his daughter.

“I’ll never get over Julie,” he says. “That’s just not in the cards. I wish it were. But as far as the vengeance part of it is concerned, I think that would make it even more difficult to have to deal with it on a daily basis.”

, DataTimes ILLUSTRATION: Color Photo

MEMO: This sidebar appeared with the story: A look back Bud Welch, whose 23-year-old daughter was killed in the 1995 bombing of the Oklahoma City federal building, will speak at 7:30 p.m. Tuesday in Gonzaga University’s COG, at the corner of Dakota and Desmet. Welch’s talk is titled “Rage, Pain, Vengeance and Forgiveness: A Father’s Aftermath of the Oklahoma City Bombing.” There is a $3 suggested donation.