Gun Dealer, Other Witnesses Testify Mcveigh Eager To Buy Bomb Parts
A Virginia gun dealer testified Thursday at the Oklahoma City bombing trial that six months before the blast, Timothy McVeigh was so eager to buy detonation cord, used to ignite explosives, that he offered to drive from Arizona to Virginia to pick it up.
The dealer was one of 14 prosecution witnesses who took the stand at the federal trial of McVeigh, who is charged with murder and conspiracy in the attack on April 19, 1995, on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City that took 168 lives. His co-defendant, Terry Nichols, will stand trial later.
The testimony Thursday focused on what the prosecution has described as McVeigh’s efforts to assemble the components of the bomb. Several witnesses also indicated that McVeigh had been thinking about explosives and a civil war for a long time.
Kyle Kraus, McVeigh’s second cousin, testified that he was a high school senior in the fall of 1991 when McVeigh mailed him a copy of “The Turner Diaries,” the novel that prosecutors say served as the ideological blueprint for the bombing. On Thursday the prosecution introduced that novel as its Exhibit No. 1.
Kraus said McVeigh was stationed with the Army in Kansas at that time, but came home for Christmas and asked his cousin what he thought of the book, which opens with the truck bombing of the Federal Bureau of Investigation headquarters in Washington by a revolutionary group.
He replied that it was “very powerful” and “would be very, you know, very frightening if it really did come to this,” Kraus testified. And he added that McVeigh said then that “if the government continued its stronghold,” the country could face “a civil war.”
Dana Rogers, finance director of Paladin Press, a Colorado mail-order house, told the jury that McVeigh had ordered several books about weapons and explosives, including “Homemade C4,” by Ragnar Benson, bought in May 1993.
Rogers read the jury a description of the book from the publishing house’s catalogue: “Serious survivors knew that the day may come when they need something more powerful than commercial dynamite or common improvised explosives. For blowing bridges, shattering steel, and derailing tanks, they need C-4.”
Gregory Pfaff, who now owns a delicatessen in Harrisonburg, Va., but once traveled to gun shows to sell “special application ammunition,” including tracers and pre-fragmented bullets, told the jury he met McVeigh several times in 1992 at gun shows in Pennsylvania and New York.
In September or October of 1994, Pfaff said, McVeigh called him and “asked if I could get him detonation cord.”
Pfaff said that he did not sell detonation cord, a highly regulated item, but did not want to offend McVeigh. So Pfaff said he told McVeigh that it could not be shipped in the United States. Then, he said, McVeigh offered to come to Virginia from Arizona to pick it up.
Pfaff said he told McVeigh that “it was an awful long way to drive” but that McVeigh “said it didn’t matter, that he needed it bad.”
The sale never took place.