|
CAROLYN THOMPSON, ASSOCIATED PRESS
PENDLETON, N.Y.
(http://www.criminalprofiling.com) - For more than five years, Bill McVeigh had a flicker of doubt about his son's involvement in the Oklahoma City bombing. That flicker died last December when he sat across from his son during a prison visit.
"He said, `Dad, I did what I had to do, and I'm sorry what I put you through,'" Bill McVeigh recalled Wednesday during an interview at his Pendleton home, near Buffalo. "That's the first time I was sure."
On May 16, Timothy McVeigh, 33, will be executed at the federal prison in Terre Haute, Ind., for the April 19, 1995, bombing that killed 168 people. It was the deadliest act of terrorism on U.S. soil.
The elder McVeigh has said he will honor his son's request and not witness the execution. Bill McVeigh said neither he nor any other family member will go to Terre Haute.
On Wednesday, Bill McVeigh spoke of his final visit with his son on April 10, on death row. He said he was disappointed - but not surprised - that his son would not apologize for the crime.
"It's a tough thing to say, but he still thinks he did the right thing. That's why he's not apologizing," Bill McVeigh said.
He talks candidly about the son he still loves. It is "Timmy" that he will remember, the one home movies show being pulled on a wagon behind his father's tractor, the boy who played at the nearby Erie Canal and had perfect attendance through high school. "Not Tim, the guy who bombed the Murrah building," McVeigh said.
That Tim seemed to emerge in 1994, the year following the federal raid on the Branch Davidian compound near Waco, Texas, which left some 80 people dead. During last month's visit, Timothy McVeigh told his father that Waco was "the final straw" preceding the bombing.
The elder McVeigh said there will always be questions he will want to ask his son, things he will want to say. He hopes for a final telephone call from death row but doubts it will come. Timothy McVeigh would not even have agreed to the April 10 visit were it not for his sister, Jennifer.
Bill McVeigh went with a list of questions for his son: among them, would Tim apologize?
"He said, 'Dad, it would make a lot of people happy if I apologize, but I'm not going to lie,'" Bill McVeigh said. "It didn't surprise me at all, but I had to hear it from him."
There was no hug goodbye.
"He had the chance and he turned it down before we got there," McVeigh said. "I don't think he's a hugger, first of all."
"I would have. Jennifer wanted to."
A retired autoworker who has always lived within five miles of his current home in upstate New York, McVeigh has said he never thought much about capital punishment until his son faced a death sentence. He said he does not favor the death penalty.
About 30 people will witness the execution in person and nearly 300 may watch via closed-circuit television in Oklahoma City. Bill McVeigh will not be among them. Timothy McVeigh did not ask him to come.
"If he wanted us to go, I don't think I could go anyhow," he said. "It's my feeling (Tim) just didn't want to put us through the trouble.
"My feeling is, I just don't want to see my son die."
|
