OKLAHOMA TRAGEDY REVAMPED VICTIMS’ RIGHTS
Voices united, survivors and families stood up to demand their say in justice
When Timothy McVeigh detonated the 4,800pound fertilizer bomb at the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building ’s doorstep, he intended it to be a dramatic first shot in a citizens’ revolt against what he said was an oppressive government.
Indeed, the assault that left 168 dead was shocking in scope. As this community and the nation prepares to mark the 20th anniversary Sunday of what then was the deadliest terrorist attack on U.S. soil, its legacy lives in the re- sponse McVeigh never saw coming. Instead of revolt, the bombing joined an army of survivors and victims’ families in an unparalleled campaign that forever altered the landscape of victims’ rights in the USA.
When the trials of McVeigh and co-conspirator Terry Nichols moved from badly scarred Oklahoma City to Denver, the group sought and won an act of Congress to allow cameras in a federal courtroom to stream the proceedings via closed-circuit television back to an auditorium near the Oklahoma City airport.
“I immediately felt like something evil had happened. I thought all of Oklahoma City was gone; I thought a war had started.”
When McVeigh was convicted and sentenced to death, Oklahoma victims did one better. They convinced then-U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft to broadcast McVeigh’s execution at an Indiana federal prison back to Oklahoma where survivors and victims’ families wanted to see final justice for themselves.
Some of the concessions the Oklahoma City victims won served as a template when the prosecution of the 9/11 attacks moved to a courtroom in Virginia. They also informed the responses to virtually every other mass casualty event since, from Tucson to Boston.
“I remember the depth of feeling that people had,” Ashcroft said in an interview with USA TODAY, recalling an emotional meeting in 2001 with more than 100 Oklahoma victims to discuss the unprecedented closed-circuit broadcast of the execution.
“This was some years after the event. But there were wounds yet unhealed,” he said.
Melissa Houston, who emerged from the ruins of a neighboring building the morning of the blast, was one of those in need of healing. She found it in the vanguard of the victims’ group that sought change “within the framework of the government McVeigh sought to destroy.”
Her first post-bombing memory, after crawling from under a toppled bookcase, was the sudden emptiness in an office window that once framed a view of the Murrah building.
The shimmering glass façade was gone, pulled away by a force that caused Houston’s shoulderlength hair to stand on end before the young attorney was thrown to the floor and wedged under the broken shelving.
“I immediately felt like something evil had happened,” Houston said, recalling the moment two decades later. “I thought all of Oklahoma City was gone; I thought a war had started.
“You have to remember, this was an attack on our government, our way of life,” she said. “Some of us were still in shock. But our work gave us something to focus on, to hold on to.” AN UPHILL CAMPAIGN Lung disease limits Karen Howick’s energy. An oxygen tank is her constant companion. Yet 20 years ago, Howick was one of the most vocal, though unlikely, legal advocates for Oklahoma City’s post-bombing cause.
The attorney’s specialty was — and remains — business litigation, securities and oil and gas matters, all far removed from the daily grinder that is the federal criminal court system.
An inescapable truth pulled Howick into what would be a historic campaign for victims’ access to the trials of McVeigh and Nichols: The sheer scale of the tragedy ensured virtually everyone in Oklahoma City had some connection to a victim or survivor.
Howick’s link was her secretary, Rhonda Bartlebaugh, who lost a sister in the blast. Because the trials had been moved to Denver — a concession to the open wound in Oklahoma City — Bartlebaugh and others feared they would be barred from participating without some kind of television broadcast of the proceedings. The attorney was enlisted to help. “I wasn’t doing it for the publicity,” Howick said. “This thing sort of became a mission.”
At the start, the mission seemed nearly impossible.
Federal courts barred cameras. Defense attorneys opposed any broadcast. In the constellation of arguments in opposition, none spoke louder than the unflattering shadow cast by the O.J. Simpson murder trial. The nationally broadcast spectacle had become must-see television for all of the reasons motorists stop to view wreckage on the highway. “The bad taste of the O.J. case was in everybody’s mouth,” Howick said.
The lobbying effort, though, never slowed.
Members of the Oklahoma congressional delegation and much of the state government backed the idea until it was memorialized in federal law when President Clinton signed the Anti-Terrorism and Effective Death Penalty Act a little more than a year after the attack.
The landmark legislation limited federal appeals of death penalty cases, a provision strongly backed by survivors and victims’ family members, including Diane Leonard and Glenn Seidl, whose spouses worked for the U.S. Secret Service and perished in the attack.
The following year, Clinton signed the Victim Rights Clarification Act, which dropped prohi- bitions on victims’ family members or survivors from attending court proceedings if they were scheduled to provide statements at sentencing hearings.
Two months before McVeigh’s execution, Ashcroft approved the closed-circuit broadcast of the lethal injection.
Stephen Jones, McVeigh’s lead attorney during the trial, acknowledged that the campaigns waged by Oklahoma victims “accelerated” the national movement, though he objected to some of the group’s pursuits. He did not represent McVeigh during the execution phase, but he was especially opposed to the broadcast of the lethal injection, despite its limited audience.
“It was an act of barbarism,” Jones said, describing it as akin to “hanging people in the town square.”
“It was,” he said, “a bridge too far.” VICTIMS’ SERVICES GROW The high-profile legislation and executive decisions were only parts of an infrastructure that emerged to assist survivors and victims’ families in the aftermath of the Oklahoma bombing.
Within 24 hours of the attack, authorities scrambled to organize a family services center at a church, walled off from the news media and the rest of the general public. Victims’ family members could find counseling, mental health assistance and the privacy needed for medical examiners to perform the grim task of death notifications.
Because nothing compared to the scale of the unfolding tragedy, service providers met needs by borrowing strategies from past responses to tornadoes and the Edmond, Okla., post office shooting in 1986 that left 14 dead.
“When the bombing happened, victims’ rights and services were a shell,” said Mary Jo Speaker, a Justice Department victim specialist who was involved in the earliest assistance efforts in Oklahoma City.
The movement of the trials of McVeigh and Nichols, from Oklahoma to Denver, offered another challenge altogether.
In addition to the closed-circuit broadcast of the trials, provided exclusively for survivors and victims’ families, the Justice Department tapped emergency federal funds to operate a weekly shuttle between Oklahoma City and Denver. It allowed for 10 family members, chosen by lottery, to attend the court proceedings for a week, their airfare, lodging and meals included.
Many of the services are now standard in the federal government’s response to mass casualty incidents.
“Oklahoma City set the initial bar for all the incidents that followed,” Speaker said. TWO PATHS TO PEACE Unfathomable loss is what will forever connect them to April 19, 1995.
Jannie Coverdale’s two grandsons, Aaron, 5, and Elijah, 2, were among the 19 children who perished in the Murrah Building ’s day care center. Bud Welch still remembers the exact spot where his 23-year-old daughter, Julie, parked her car that morning before reporting to work in the building ’s Social Security Administration offices where she died.
Though the pain of that day remains vivid for both, Coverdale and Welch set out on much different paths in search of justice.
Consumed with rage, Coverdale devoted much of her energy to the pursuit of quick convictions and swift executions, harboring little doubt early on that McVeigh and Nichols were responsible for the deaths of her grandchildren and the 166 others.
She joined the successful campaigns to restrict death penalty appeals. She attended the emotional meeting with the attorney general where she and others urged approval of the closed-circuit broadcast of McVeigh’s execution. She spoke to whoever would listen.
“I was so angry,” Coverdale said, seated at her kitchen table, clutching a cup of coffee. “I wanted him (McVeigh) to know that I wanted to sit and watch him die. I wanted him to live in agony like we did.”
Welch struggled in the early weeks and months to find his voice. Though he was long opposed to the death penalty, the pain of his loss briefly boiled over.
“The first month after the bombing, I just wanted the bastards fried,” Welch recalled.
Then came a string of dark months. He worried that he was becoming an alcoholic. “My head was splitting,” he said.
Nine months later, on a cold day in January while visiting the bomb site, Welch said he suddenly summoned the energy to shake the paralysis that had become his life. “What I was doing was not working.”
The anger gradually subsided. Then a memory of his daughter as an ardent death penalty opponent began to grow.
Twenty years later, Welch has become one of the most vocal opponents of the death penalty in the country and often speaks to abolitionist groups abroad.
Perhaps more remarkable is a continuing friendship with McVeigh’s father, Bill, whom he met 1998.
“If Julie was living now, she would be 43,” Welch said. “But in my mind, she will always be 23. And when I speak (against the death penalty), it’s like I keep her alive inside.”
Coverdale, too, has come full circle in a sense. Though she is proud of what the survivors and victims’ families accomplished, she said the broadcast of McVeigh’s execution left her “unsatisfied, dead inside.”
The anger has faded in the passing years.
When Nichols avoided the death penalty in a separate state trial in 2004, Coverdale moved on. She has reached out to Nichols, who is serving a life prison sentence, and occasionally exchanges letters and holiday cards with him.
“There has been enough killing,” she said.
Melissa Houston, bombing survivor