The Oklahoma City Bombing, Part 2

Summary

Small Town Dicks
Episode: The Oklahoma City Bombing, Part 2
Host: Yeardley Smith with Dan, Dave, Paul Holes
Guest: Retired FBI Agent Scott Crabtree
Date: June 26, 2026

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Episode Overview

Part two of the Oklahoma City Bombing trilogy dives deep into the investigative breakthroughs following the 1995 attack on the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. The episode follows retired FBI agent Scott Crabtree as he recounts the critical “gumshoe” detective work that led to the identification and capture of the bombers, Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols. This narrative brings listeners into the high-pressure, detail-oriented environment of the early investigation, emphasizing the unique challenges, pivotal moments, and reliance on old-school detective work rather than advanced forensics.

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Key Discussion Points and Insights

1. The Importance and Pitfalls of Eyewitness Sketches

• [03:31] The team receives not just one, but two sketches from witnesses—the infamous “John Doe #1” (McVeigh) and “John Doe #2.”
• [03:43] Scott Crabtree: “Tom's John Doe number two caused us a lot of investigative work...come to find out weeks later happened to be somebody that had nothing to do with anything.”
• The erroneous “John Doe #2” leads to significant wasted resources and demonstrates the double-edged sword of eyewitness testimony.

2. Canvassing and Old-Fashioned Detective Work

• [05:54] Crabtree organizes a multidisciplinary team to canvas Junction City, Kansas, including local police and Army CID, due to limited FBI manpower.
• Team conducts exhaustive door-to-door questioning with composite sketches.
• [07:37] Breakthrough comes when the owner of the Dreamland Motel recognizes McVeigh, confirming his true identity and address.

3. Piecing Together McVeigh's Trail and Mistakes

• [07:35] Odd decision by McVeigh to use both his real name and an alias (“Robert Kling”) confuses investigators but ultimately helps tie evidence together.
• Notable Quote:
  • [08:04] Yeardley Smith: “Cause criminals make mistakes, that's why. Because there are very few perfect crimes, if any.”

4. Gumshoe Work Over Forensics

• [09:03] Paul Holes: “This is good old fashioned gumshoe detective work here...very rarely do you see investigators putting forth this type of gumshoe investigative work.”
• Emphasizes that the composite sketch approach was more fundamental than forensic breakthroughs, especially in this era.

5. Unraveling the Nichols Connection

• [12:47] Investigators track McVeigh’s provided address to a family farm linked to James and Terry Nichols in Michigan.
• The Nichols brothers and McVeigh were known to local law enforcement and rumored to be involved with the anti-government Michigan Militia.
• [14:25] The Nichols name surfaces for the first time in the case as a result of good local police work.

6. Arrests: Moments of Near-Miss and Serendipity

• [17:31] McVeigh is found in custody in Perry, Oklahoma, after a routine traffic stop 75 minutes post-bombing—arrested for no license plate and illegal possession of a firearm, nearly being released before the FBI intervenes.
• [22:37] Terry Nichols, after learning police are after him, turns himself in at the Harrington police station, rather than risk a confrontation reminiscent of Waco.

Notable Moment:

• [20:05] Scott Crabtree: “This guy is living in my grandfather’s old home...I heard you say this. Is that right? She said, no, no, it’s Second Street. I said, oh, geez, thank God.”
  • Reveals Crabtree’s personal connection to the case geography and the small-town interconnectedness.

7. The Nichols Interview: Strategy and Mindset

• [25:45] Nichols consents to searches and sits for a 6.5-hour interview with Crabtree and team.
• [26:02] Yeardley Smith: “If someone’s sitting me down and talking to me for six and a half hours straight, I’m like, oh, something is wrong."
• [26:29] Crabtree’s strategy is to let Nichols talk, then poke holes in inconsistencies—typical fraud interview techniques.

8. Nichols’ Rationalizations and Key Revelations

• Nichols tries to distance himself from McVeigh, presents intricate but implausible alibis, and admits to anti-government attitudes, questionable firearms activities, and mixing with militia groups.
• [29:58] McVeigh’s motivation for the bombing is discussed—Waco as a central stimulus.
• Nichols attempts to maintain he was unaware of McVeigh’s true intentions.

9. Bomb Construction Details and Cover-Up Attempts

• Crabtree questions Nichols about bomb-making knowledge, ammonium nitrate acquisition, and suspicious activities like dumping fertilizer (“so thick it looked like it was snowing”) before the search.
• [39:28] Crabtree: “He had bags of ammonium nitrate, and he didn’t want to be found with them...He labeled the product ‘ground zero.’”

10. Investigative Frustrations

• [37:05] FBI policy at the time prohibits audio/video recording of interviews, making the documentation less vivid.
• [35:32] After a break, Nichols minimizes McVeigh’s capacity to have committed the bombing.

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Notable Quotes and Memorable Moments

On Mistaken Identity and Investigation Drift:

• [04:15] Yeardley Smith: “Oh, that poor guy.” (On the innocent man who became “John Doe #2”)

On the Value of Classic Detective Work:

• [09:03] Paul Holes: “To be frank...today, very rarely do you see investigators putting forth this type of gumshoe investigative work.”

On Nichols’ Mindset:

• [26:02] Yeardley Smith: “If someone’s sitting me down and talking to me for six and a half hours straight, I’m like, oh, something is wrong.”

On Confronting Nichols:

• [37:17] Scott Crabtree: “You would have been very easily able to see how deceptive he was being and how his story flipped and how his tone changed.”

On Nichols’ Efforts to Cover Up Evidence:

• [39:28] Crabtree: “What’s this deal about you spreading all this ammonium nitrate on your lawn? He said, ‘Well, I knew anybody that had ammonium nitrate would be a subject in this case.’”

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Timestamps of Important Segments

• [03:31]: Introduction of eyewitness sketches
• [07:37]: Motel owner identifies McVeigh, tying him to the bombing
• [12:47]: Nichols family and militia ties come into play
• [17:31]: McVeigh discovered in Perry, Oklahoma jail, almost released
• [22:37]: Nichols’ near-escape and voluntary surrender at local PD
• [25:45]: Nichols’ extended interview strategy explained
• [26:29]: Crabtree’s interview ‘poking holes’ tactic
• [39:28]: Confrontation about ammonium nitrate
• [42:26]: Details of storage shed and bomb component logistics

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Episode Tone

The tone is methodical, tense, and at times deeply personal, emphasizing the dogged, patient work required to break such a monumental case. There’s a clear appreciation for “old-school” police methods and candid acknowledgment of investigative errors and near-misses. Humor and empathy surface in the hosts’ and Crabtree’s reflections, contrasting with the grim nature of the crime and investigation.

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Summary Takeaway

This episode paints a vivid and suspenseful portrait of a historic investigation’s critical turning points—grounded in determined, methodical, and sometimes improvisational police work. From misdirection and mistaken identities to breakneck canvassing, personal connections, and crucial suspect interviews, the episode is a testament to the power and necessity of gut instincts and local knowledge in unraveling a complex case when technological solutions are limited or unavailable.

Transcript

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[Yardley Smith]

Hey Small Town fam, It's Yardley. I want to remind you that if you want access to bonus episodes and regular episodes a day early and ad free and our community forum and other behind the scenes goodies, you gotta go to smalltowndicks.com superfam and then in the top right hand corner, hit that little tab that says join. And then listen to the end of today's episode for a sneak peek at today's new bonus episode. Hey Small town fam. It's Yardley. How are you guys? I'm so happy you're here. So this is part two of our three part series on the Oklahoma City bombing. If you've missed part one, you should definitely go back and listen to that episode before you land here. On April 19, 1995, a truck bomb destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City. In part one, we learned that investigators had recovered a partial VIN number from a piece of the truck's axle and determined that the vehicle had been rented out of a body shop in Junction City, Kansas. Retired FBI agent Scott Crabtree, who's our guest for this trilogy, is sent to Junction City to interview everyone at that body shop and arrange for these witnesses to sit down with an FBI sketch artist in hopes that they can begin to identify the perpetrators of the bombing. Here is the Oklahoma City Bombing, part two. Hi there, I'm Yardley.

[Scott Crabtree]

I'm Dan.

[Dave]

I'm Dave.

[Paul]

And I'm Paul.

[Yardley Smith]

And this is Small Town Dicks.

[Dan]

Dave and I are identical twins and

[Dave]

retired detectives from Small Town usa.

[Paul]

And I'm a veteran cold case investigator who helped catch the Golden State Killer using a revolutionary DNA tool.

[Dan]

Between the three of us, we've investigated thousands of crimes, from petty theft to sexual assault, child abuse to murder.

[Dave]

Each case we cover is told by the detective who investigated it, offering a rare personal account of how they solved the crime.

[Paul]

Names, places and certain details have been changed to protect the privacy of victims and their families.

[Dan]

And although we're aware that some of our listeners may be familiar with these cases, we ask you to Please join us in continuing to protect the true identities of those involved out of respect

[Dave]

for what they've been through.

[Paul]

Thank you.

[Yardley Smith]

Alrighty. So when we left off, the sketch artist said everything was good. He got a good sketch, but there wasn't just one sketch. Right. There were actually two.

[Scott Crabtree]

Correct. The sketch ended up being McVeigh. We called John Doe number one. Tom also provided information on a sketch of somebody that came to be known as John Doe number two. And earlier, I talked about how eyewitness testimony can be both good and bad. Tom's John Doe number two caused us a lot of investigative work. And I'll take the blame for it because I'm the one that took the interview and I'm the one that had Tom describe it. But the John Doe number two, we come to find out weeks later happened to be somebody that had nothing to do with anything.

[Yardley Smith]

Oh, that poor guy.

[Scott Crabtree]

Yeah. We spent a lot of resources running that down. And I forget the number of leads that we got on this investigation. Probably a third of those leads that came in were people that were saying they saw John Doe, too.

[Dan]

I would imagine for you, Scott, you're compiling information and you're taking witness statements, and you check this address in Redfield, South Dakota, and Omaha, and they're both bunk addresses. Everything that you're compiling and I would imagine where you're interpreting this evidence, saying who. Whoever this is, is really trying to cover up their tracks and where they're going.

[Scott Crabtree]

Absolutely, no doubt.

[Dan]

So you're like, this is the guy. This is one of the guys. This is definitely a suspect.

[Scott Crabtree]

Well, that's why I thought it's so important that we got the sketches, because these other things weren't going to work. There might be prints on the documents, but that was a. Maybe our best chance to be able to identify this person at all was going to be through a sketch and a canvas. And so that's where I turned all my attention to. Once I had both sketches in hand and released all the witnesses, my next task was cobble together, like, five different teams to divide up the Junction City, Fort Riley, Grand View area. So basically got a map from CID and kind of broke it into four quadrants. The bureau sent me one agent out of Topeka to help, so I had to rustle up nine other people from cid, the Junction City county sheriff's Office, Grandview Plaza police department. So 90% of my canvas team don't belong to the bureau. You know, they're worried about a sketch artist not belonging to the bureau. I would think they Would have wanted to have agents to be part of

[Yardley Smith]

this campus, you would think. And Scott, are you gonna go with this group of nine literally knocking on doors and saying, have you seen this person in the sketch?

[Scott Crabtree]

That's what we did. So I had all the people show up about 1 o'. Clock. We made multiple copies of the sketches to give to everybody. Everybody assigned themselves. Okay, you're from this area, Grandview Plaza. You take Grandview Plaza. You guys split up. Junction City. This is that kind of outside. You guys do the cid. You take care of the stuff on base. So we kind of got it as logical as we could. They basically went door to door. Hotels, restaurants, anything, any place that we thought somebody might have had some contact with these guys. And I said, you know, come back at like 4:30 and let's talk about what we discovered. So about 4:30, they all show back up. We had a lot of sightings. People said, yeah, I think I saw him in here, McDonald's last week. Or I thought I saw him here at this place and that kind of stuff. And all the sightings that we had that kind of feedback on were all for John Doe 1. Made me wonder, well, does this guy look like every other army guy that's here at Fort Riley? And is this why we're getting all these hits back, or is this just a damn good sketch that we got lucky on? So we're going around and finally we get to the team that stopped by the dream unknown tail. And it just so happened that the owner recognized him and she immediately identified him as Tim McVeigh. She went and got the car to use for registration. It has his true name on it. There was some thought that he had to use his true name because he might have stayed there before. But for whatever reason, he'd used his true name. And he also put a home address in Decker, Michigan. And then he listed that he was driving a yellowish Mercury vehicle. So by Sunday, the owner doesn't see the Mercury anymore.

[Yardley Smith]

This is the hotel owner.

[Scott Crabtree]

Yes, she doesn't see the Mercury anymore. But Monday afternoon sees McVeigh with a rider truck. Now, later on, we found out why McVeigh was there. He had ordered some Chinese food from a restaurant and had actually used the name of Robert Kling, which just basically cements that Kling is McVeigh. I don't know why he did that. He stayed in the hotel under his true name. Why would you then throw another wrench in the operation? But again, it was another piece of information. We had to time into the rental because he was using that name.

[Yardley Smith]

Cause criminals make mistakes, that's why. Because there are very few perfect crimes, if any.

[Scott Crabtree]

There are. Some of these things, like I said, probably seem very well thought out, like not providing all the information. But you can't speculate that maybe they'll find a vin number off the truck you blow up. And thankfully, they did.

[Dave]

So this effort in the middle of kansas, that's the team that's responsible for tracking down timothy mcveigh's name. Finally, we've tied the truck to a person, and now we actually have somewhere to look.

[Scott Crabtree]

Correct.

[Dave]

Nice work. I mean, honestly, really good work.

[Scott Crabtree]

Well, thank you. I'm sure anybody in law enforcement, if you're trying to find somebody, none of this is rocket science. I mean, you're just taking the next logical step. I said I was very lucky that I didn't have other people telling me what to do. This took me to the next door, and I opened that next door. One thing after another, they progressed. It progressed very quickly because I was able to stay at it. Just keep pushing and everything like that. Yeah, we got pretty lucky up to that point.

[Paul]

Hey, Scott. You know, first, I didn't know how mcveigh's name ultimately was found in this investigation. So I'm stunned to hear that it was a result of the composite from the witness at the shop where the truck was rented from. But I want to point out and explicitly state this is that this is good old fashioned gum shoe detective work here. I'm thinking, okay, latents and advanced FBI latent print technology would have gotten something off the documents or contact DNA, even though this is 1995. And just to think that you got a sketch artist, you knocked on doors, and you found the right person who says, I know who that is. This is something that could have been done back in the 1940s, and that's how they did it back in the 1940s. And to be frank, you know, today, very rarely do you see investigators putting forth this type of gumshoe investigative work. It gets sent off to the lab, and then it's pending until the lab results come back. So this is just underscoring, you know, when you think about the foundation of this thrust of the investigation. You have the truck axle. I will tell you that those experts who are evaluating that truck axle will say that was at the center of the explosion. And they will be able to do that based off of blast effects and forensic testing for explosives and everything else. In part, the location of where the axle was found, because it was. It Was thrown a distance away.

[Scott Crabtree]

Right.

[Paul]

But then you go and it's rented out of this collision shop, and it's got this Robert kling, who's using false addresses. So that's what we call a clue. And pretty soon now you get the mcveigh name Based off of a composite sketch, and everything is starting to cross check. I would say at this stage in the investigation, There is sufficient information for an affidavit, you know, in terms of being able to get this guy into custody, at least for an interview. But I also would imagine that there's sufficient information at this point where the FBI should be descending on junction city and wherever this mcveigh has been in order to try to find him.

[Scott Crabtree]

Well, they do, but not yet.

[Paul]

Okay.

[Scott Crabtree]

It's funny you talk about just gumshoe work, As I was fortunate to the degree that a lot of my work up until then had been white collar, but having been in a couple of small resident agencies Where I had to work everything and had to have a broad spectrum of different types of cases where you do these different kind of things, that I actually had that experience to kind of leverage as to what I should do. If I'd been nothing but work bank fraud for 13 years up until the point that happened and then got this call, I don't know that I would have been quite as adamant about what needed to be done.

[Dan]

Now you've got mcveigh's name. We know that he's used this kling name also as an alias. I would imagine you guys are scouring dmv records, Trying to find him in a dmv so you can get a photo and see if it matches this composite.

[Scott Crabtree]

Well, that's where we go from there. As soon as we get this roundtable done and everybody produces their information and gives it all to me, they all go home. So it's my job at that point saying, okay, what are the next leads I should do? What's the next things I should follow up on, and what paper do I need to do to kind of document this? Because all these places that saw McVeigh are going to need to be recontacted with agents in the future. And as we really kind of nail this down and turn over every rock, first thing I did was called detroit, Michigan, and said, I've got an address in your division, and this is the

[Yardley Smith]

address mcveigh left with the hotel.

[Scott Crabtree]

Right. So I said, can you contact local law enforcement and see if they know anything about the address? And so with that information being provided to headquarters who started running the McVeigh name every which way they could. We were kind of on our way at that point. The Detroit office got back to me a few hours later and said, yeah, that address is basically a farm, and it belongs to the Nichols family, primarily to James Nichols, who happened to be the brother of Terry Nichols. And Tim McVeigh had actually been somebody that law enforcement there was aware of. He had frequented that farm. So now we've tied those guys all in there. We have some feedback from the local law enforcement that one or more of these people might have been involved in the Michigan Militia. I've jumped into conclusions back there as an investigator, but when I hear Michigan Militia, they're generally anti government. They said we'd have reports of little explosions on that farm all the time. Jeepers, I'm not sure what that means, but sounds to me like maybe they're experimenting. So I figured, like, all right, we're on the right path here.

[Yardley Smith]

Scott, this is the first time you're hearing about any of the Nichols. Right. So we know now, obviously, in hindsight, that Terry Nichols was involved in Oklahoma City bombing. But at this point, when you learn of who's at that farm, you're like. Like, this is the first time these people are popping up on my radar. Is that so?

[Scott Crabtree]

It is. It's the first time I'd heard their name, first time anybody at the bureau had heard their name. But again, with the information that we got from local law enforcement, I think Detroit decided to move forward pretty quickly with it. I talked to Army CID again and said, okay, now I can get you to quit looking at every person that's ever rented a truck to leave from here. And now I've got names I can actually give you. Can you tell me anything about Tim McVeigh, Terry Nichols, or James Nichols? So with that, they set off into their files of everybody that's ever been assigned there before. So time to do paperwork all night. I finally take a little bit of a break to meet my wife, have dinner. She brings me some more clothes because I can see that this is not going to end up in a day or two. She brings me the paper for the last couple days so I could kind of see what's going on, because, again, I've got no outside input. I'm not watching tv, I'm not hearing anything on radio, not seeing a paper or anything. Having heard the Michigan Militia mentioned from the Detroit office, it kind of caused me a little bit of concern because we lived out in the country, you

[Yardley Smith]

and your wife did wife and three

[Scott Crabtree]

kids live out in the middle of nowhere? And it's very dark and quiet. So I told her, would you have one of your brothers come down and stay with you for a few days? As mourning came about, the detroit office actually executed a search warrant at the nichols farm. I was watching it on tv, actually. There was a TV that they had, one of the offices. And they said, you need to come look at this. And I said, oh, okay. So I said, what's going on? I said, I have no idea. They must have more information than I do, Because I don't have enough to do a search warrant on somebody's house right now. About that same time, a couple things happened. CID staff was able to locate a company photo from Fort Riley in 1988 that had both terry nichols and tim mcveigh in the photo. So we placed them there in the area together seven years earlier. So terry nichols is probably somebody we want to find.

[Yardley Smith]

And now that you've zeroed in on a second suspect, do you get any help from the FBI?

[Scott Crabtree]

Well, on Friday, they decided to send the cavalry out. I had supervisors and managers and agents show up. It became chaos. And all I was doing was briefing new people as they came in. Kind of lost track of what I was trying to do. I documented the people that we'd had the contact with that said they thought they saw mcveigh in junction city. So we were able to start giving people leads to go back out and do that. But about that same time, we got a call from headquarters where they said that one of their analysts overnight had done an offline search in ncic. Traditionally, ncic is something that if you're out on the road in your car, you, want to see if there's a want or a warrant or something on somebody or a vehicle or something like that. You can run it through there, and you'll get an instant response.

[Yardley Smith]

And what does the acronym stand for?

[Scott Crabtree]

National crime information center. Most law enforcement people have dealt with it at one point or another. One of the different offline databases they have Is basically incarcerations. So people that have been put into a jail. And it just so happened that there had been an update in that particular database since Wednesday, and they were able to find that tim mcveigh was presently in custody in perry, oklahoma.

[Yardley Smith]

Oh, thank God.

[Scott Crabtree]

We immediately had the oklahoma city office go up to perry and basically call them and say, don't let him out. We're coming to get him. But he was literally in front of the judge Getting ready to be bailed out for what? Well, he had been stopped about 75 minutes after the bombing, because maybe he's a mastermind criminal, but he did not have a license plate on his car. And a trooper that patrolled that particular part of the highway is pretty much a stickler right here. And he saw that and pulled him over. So McVeigh gets out of the car, and he did something to indicate that he had a firearm. And with that, the trooper basically drew down on him and said, you have no right to be carrying a firearm. So he was arrested for having a firearm without any kind of permit. So he takes McVeigh, books him. Now we've got McVeigh in the courthouse jail in Perry, Oklahoma, since probably 11 or 11:30 Wednesday, watching the news coverage with other people in the jail. He was supposed to go before the judge on Thursday to get bailed out, but there was a snafu in the judge's schedule, and he couldn't come in on Thursday. So that kept McVeigh there one more day. So then on Friday, he's standing there getting ready to get his time in front of the judge. They get the call, do not let him go. He's the person we're looking for for the bombing. It was that close to him being back in his car, going who knows where. They took him into federal custody and then flew him down to Oklahoma City. So with that, everybody's fairly jubilant, okay, we have the guy that did the bombing. So then at that point, everybody's attention kind of turns to, okay, let's figure out who Terry Nichols is. And we were able to find his ex wife, who then lived in Las Vegas. So Las Vegas went out to talk to her, and she was providing information. She gave Nichols address down in Harrington.

[Yardley Smith]

Oh, so Nichols actually lives in Harrington, Kansas. He doesn't live in Michigan?

[Scott Crabtree]

Correct.

[Yardley Smith]

And, Scott, isn't that where you're from, Harrington?

[Scott Crabtree]

It is. It's my hometown. Now, the idea was to get eyes on Nichols and surveilling while we're trying to gather information to see if we can put any kind of a warrant together. That goes on for the next couple hours. Then that afternoon, Janet Reno does a press conference. Director Freeh and I have just spoken with the president, and I am pleased to announce that one of the individuals believed to be responsible for. For Wednesday's terrible attack on the Murrah federal building in Oklahoma City has been arrested.

[Yardley Smith]

So Janet Reno is talking about Timothy McVeigh, and now you're still looking for Nichols?

[Scott Crabtree]

Yes, and a few minutes Later, I got a call from an old family friend. She was a real estate agent from Harrington. She called me and said, hey, I know where Terry's at. I just sold him a house here in Harrington a month ago, and this is the address he's at. Oh, okay. The address she gives me, at least I hear her say, is 109south seventh in Harrington. Which means nothing to anyone else, but probably me, because it happens to be the property that used to belong to my grandfather. And I'm thinking, you gotta be kidding me. This guy is living in my grandfather's old home. So I shook it off for a second. Okay, Okay. I heard you say this. Is that right? She said, no, no, it's Second Street. I said, oh, geez, thank God. Okay. So I went over and told the people that were manning the R deals. I said, this is the address of the house. And she says, okay, we had 901south second. But 901south second doesn't exist in Harrington, Kansas. That would put it so far south of town. It's in the Town Creek. Have him go to 109south second, and they'll find him there. So the surveillance team finally found it. So within a little while, Nichols comes out of his house with his wife and daughter. They get in his truck, and unfortunately, where our guys had set up to do the surveillance was down the street. Nichols backed out and came down the street. So he drove right by him as they were sitting there. So here you've got two white guys that look square, like FBI agents or law enforcement sitting in a car on the street that would never have people like that. And I'm sure that triggered Nichols to wonder, what the hell's going on? So instead of going on down to the next major road, he made kind of a right and kind of zigzag through the neighborhood. And they eventually ended up following him. But he's within 50 yards, 60 yards of being out of town. We had had a surveillance team in Wichita that had been helping on a case down there, and they'd been redirected to Harrington. Fortunately, a couple of them came pulling into town right as Nichols was getting ready to be out of town, and that immediately caused him to stop and pull into a business there right at the edge of town. And he got out of his truck and stood for a second or two and then got back in his truck and then reversed course and drove all the way back through Harrington to the southeast corner of town and went to the Harrington Department of Public Safety, where went inside and basically Said, I've heard my name on the radio. I want to know why people are looking for me.

[Yardley Smith]

Wow. So Nichols turns himself in.

[Scott Crabtree]

Right. So with that, our surveillance team had kind of followed and wondered what to do. We didn't know who Terry Nichols was. Did he take an explosive inside? Is he holding somebody hostage? So we were able to determine by talking to somebody inside the police department that there was nothing going on. He was just in there. He asked them initially, what are you looking for me for? And unfortunately, these guys were just doing surveillance. They had no details of the case, so they couldn't give him a really good answer. They said, let's sit down and talk a minute. Are you willing to talk to us? And he said he would be. So the chief police there set up an area down in the basement for those guys to go ahead and start conducting the interview of Nichols. So we get that information that he's inside the PD and he's agreed to do an interview. At that point, I kind of hear this and said, great. So the two people we think are involved, one's in custody in Oklahoma, another has basically turned himself in and is giving an interview at this moment. So I kind of saw this as, hey, this might be a chance for me to say, you know what, I'm going to take a break for a little while. So I went over and talked to my supervisor and said, hey, I've been up since Wednesday morning at 6. I'm very tired. Can I go home and get some sleep? And yeah, he said, that's fine, yes, get out of here. We've got enough people here now to do this that you don't have to worry about. So as I'm talking to him, one of the other senior agents in Wichita comes up and here's what I'm trying to do. And he basically says, you can't let him go. He says, Scott knows more about this case than anybody else. He knows Harrington. You can't let him go home now. He needs to be in on the interview. And I kind of look at him with side eye and say, what are you doing to me? Okay, fine. So I said, if you'll drive me, I'll go to Harrington. So we went out, hopped in his car and he took me down to Harrington. And again, it's one of those times where it's probably normally a 45 minute trip. You made it in about 25. I was probably dozing in and out at that point, so I didn't really notice too much. So as we get into Harrington and We get close to the police department, it's already chaos there. It's a small town. It's probably got somewhere between 2500 and 3000 people.

[Yardley Smith]

Oh, really small.

[Scott Crabtree]

Yeah. Nothing happens in Harrington, so I think probably everybody in Harrington was down crowded around Harrington Department of Public Safety. So we had a hard time even getting into the garage where they keep the fire trucks to even get inside. We then got some briefs from the people that were on site about what was happening and what conversations had taken place. Dan, the agent that had driven me down there, we both headed downstairs and said, hey, Scott's here, and he's going to end up taking over this interview, and we want to go ahead and make sure we make a smooth transition here. So Dan and I sat down with Steve and Jack, who were already doing the interview. Steve had already taken notes, and I didn't want to switch notes. In the middle of the interview. I said, why don't we have Steve read his notes aloud that he's got so far? So that way, Dan and I come up to speed on what's been said. And this would also give Nichols a chance to say, I never said that, or, you got that wrong. So that took probably 30 minutes or so. And Nichols, surprisingly, had nothing to correct. They asked him for some consent to searches for his vehicle and his house. He signed those, and they took those back upstairs. And then from there, Steve and I did the interview for the rest of that period for another hour or so.

[Yardley Smith]

How long did that interview end up being in total?

[Scott Crabtree]

I mean, we talked to him for probably six and a half hours.

[Yardley Smith]

Holy shit. I gotta tell you, if somebody's sitting me down and talking to me for six and a half hours straight, I'm like, oh, something is wrong. Oh, my God.

[Scott Crabtree]

I think that tells you a little bit about his mindset. I think he thought his best hope was to try to put distance between him and McVeigh and come up with a story that would cover him for being involved in any of the details. And that's pretty much what this interview started as, is he basically laid out things that he thought he could talk about but wouldn't really put the crosshairs on him.

[Yardley Smith]

I see. So what's your strategy in questioning Nichols?

[Scott Crabtree]

I just basically asked him questions to kind of make him document his story. I mean, if he said, we did this, I said, where did you do it? When did you do it? What was the name of the place? I mean, I tried to get as much detail from him as I could. So we could either Go out and prove that he's full of it, or he, in fact, is telling us the truth. So this became more of like a fraud interview because he was trying to tell the story, and I was trying to poke holes in it, Catching him in things that, one, we could either show you lied to us, or two, if he did give us something that was the truth, we could take it out and prove that that's exactly what happened. And that would help at some point. Either way, it helps us. So I was just happy to take whatever he was willing to share with us. One of the first things that he said was that he had gone down to get McVeigh in Oklahoma City on Sunday. He's bringing McVeigh back from essentially leaving the getaway car down there. And he had told me, his wife, that he was going to go get McVeigh in Omaha, not Oklahoma City.

[Yardley Smith]

So Marifee is Terry Nichols current wife who lives with him in Harrington.

[Scott Crabtree]

Right after he'd seen all the law enforcement coming into town, one of the first things he does when he gets back in the car is tells her, hey, you know what, Mary Faye, I lied to you. McVeigh called on Sunday. He had me go get him in Oklahoma City, not Omaha. Now, there was really no reason for him to tell her that anyway. Why not tell her Oklahoma City? It would have meant nothing to her. But now he had to go damage control. And I think his thought at that point was, I need to address this, because if the agents upstairs are told omaha, and we ask him, why did you lie to your wife? That's going to make him look even worse. So that's one of the first things he tried to do, was to try

[Dave]

to own that, get out in front of it.

[Yardley Smith]

Right.

[Dave]

Scott, I'm curious. During the interview with Terry Nichols, what was his reaction to seeing this bomb and all the damage and what had happened in Oklahoma City? What was his opinion on it?

[Scott Crabtree]

He certainly didn't relay anything that, like, he was taken back by it or how disgusting it was or any of that kind of stuff. On Thursday, he went and bought a number of newspapers and went down to the cable office to have cable installed. Because he was wanting to know what was going on, I think. So while he was in the cable office, he said that's the first time he saw what was going on. It's funny. On Friday, when he's driving around supposedly doing errands and that kind of stuff, he says he hears his name on the radio. His first thought is, I need to go down to the police department and turn myself in because I don't want another Waco situation. I don't know what he meant by that. Like, if we tried to arrest him in his house, would there be a siege? Or was he just throwing out Waco for the sake of saying Waco? One of the things we got from him were statements that could show his mindset at the time and that could have been potentially damaging to him. Like, he was very open about the fact that he didn't like the US Government. He says he doesn't have a Social Security number, doesn't believe in it, doesn't believe he has to pay taxes. Says he and McVeigh both sell guns at gun shows, but neither of them have a federal firearm license. So he's given all these obscure reasons, and here's a loophole, and here's what we use, and here's why we don't think we have to. I'm not an ATF expert, but I don't think that's true. I don't think you can just move guns around the country to different gun shows and sell them whoever you want, you know, something like that. But anyway, that was kind of his. His belief. He said that. On the trip back from Oklahoma City with McVeigh on Sunday, McVeigh tells him, you're going to see something big in the future. And he says, I asked him, what do you mean? You going to rob a bank? And he goes, no, you're just going to see something big. And they said they discussed the Waco incident, and Waco was a big stimulus for McVeigh to want to carry this out.

[Yardley Smith]

Terry and McVeigh discussed Waco.

[Scott Crabtree]

Yes. In the truck on the way back from Oklahoma City on Sunday, Nichols tries to make it sound like, yeah, yeah, I remember that. That's two or three years ago now, Right? Or something like that. And he says, well, it's. Oh, no, it's two years ago. Like, very concrete, that he knew exactly what it was. So, you know, Nichols was playing like, oh, yeah, okay, I know it's there, but I don't even remember how long ago that was. He was always trying to deflect it. And we keep pushing him on these details of this stuff, and at one point, he says, I get really sleepy, tired when I'm driving, so sometimes I just kind of zone out.

[Dave]

Scott, do you think that he's trying to stay out of a conspiracy charge?

[Scott Crabtree]

Absolutely. It's obvious that's what he's doing. His whole story about getting McVeigh in Oklahoma City on Sunday. It's the crux of what we got from him about their recent contact. So on Sunday, he allegedly gets a call from McVeigh who says, I'm in Oklahoma city. You'd asked me to pick up your TV from your ex wife in Las Vegas and I'm bringing it to you. My vehicle is having problems, so if you want your tv, you got to come down here and pick me up. So this is his reason why I've got to leave. Easter Sunday, middle of the afternoon, supposedly, McVeigh is in downtown Oklahoma city. I can tell you that in downtown Oklahoma city on Easter afternoon, you're not going to find people to help you fix your car if you're downtown, near federal buildings, near office buildings on a Sunday evening. I question that a lot about the whole story. Plus, well, just the fact that the car that McVeigh was caught in on Wednesday was the car that he'd been seen with at the dreamland hotel as late as Saturday. I mean, the whole concept of them trying to say that this wasn't a drop off the getaway car made absolutely no sense. I tried very hard to push him on some of these things, but I didn't want to get to the point where I was so accusatory that he might stop talking. So it's kind of like, what can I get him to admit to, what can I talk him into a corner on and then provide other information to him that shows him that I can't continue with this line of argument because we know better. There was a lot of times I'd have liked to just said, hey, Terry, you're full of it. This is not what happened. As long as he was willing to sit there and think he was doing a great job talking himself out of it, I was going to let him have that delusion. Now, I had no control over when we took breaks. So right at the end of that session, I ask him, do you think McVeigh could have done this? And right as he's getting ready to answer, Jack and Dan come downstairs and say, the bosses want you to take a break. I don't think. You gotta be kidding me.

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[Dave]

Scott, let me ask you. You're in the room, you know the rhythm of how everything's going. You've got a feel for how the interview's going. And the interruption occurs right at a critical moment without them understanding the dynamics of what happens in an interview room, that it ebbs and flows. And there are times where I'm like, now's a good time to take a break. But there are other times where you're like, under no circumstances do I want any interruption.

[Scott Crabtree]

Yeah, I want to pin him down on this, but like I said, that was kind of the order. So Dan and Jack stay with Nichols for the break, and unfortunately he engaged them in conversation, so they were essentially gathering information from him, too. We tried our best when we would cross each other in the stairs for them to relay stuff to us, but there was so much input coming in, like, okay, we got this out of Memphis, we got this out of Minneapolis. Use it if you need it, but I just want you to know it type stuff. So after the first break, you know, one of the last things I tell Steve before we go down is we've got a story down pretty well. That's what I want you to do. Now, Steve is make sure any change in his story as the interview goes on that you can tell when it happened and where it happened. Because I want to show that this guy's story is going to migrate because it's going to. Like I said, if Steve didn't hear it, it didn't get into his notes. And we didn't have that as reference when we were later getting the search warrant. And if I didn't hear it and Steve didn't hear it or I heard it, and amongst a million other things in my head, it is now at this point fairly baked from being up 60 some hours, it was going to get missed. So anyway, we went back down and immediately followed up on that question that Nichols didn't answer to, but seemed like he was going to right before he left.

[Yardley Smith]

And the question you asked Terry is, do you think Tim could have done this?

[Scott Crabtree]

Right. His response, which was typical of what he did early in the interview, was, I don't see why he would have done it, because he was just headed to see his family back east, and he's getting ready to inherit a lot of money. So it makes no sense. Now I'm thinking, what do either of those have to do with whether or not he could have or would ever wanted to do this bombing? But that was the kind of responses we got from him.

[Dave]

I mean, I've done interviews, I'm sure Dan has done interviews where you get in the room and within a few minutes you have a fairly clear understanding that you're not going to get a confession. So this interview is them feeling you out for information, seeing what, you know, the turn as the investigator for me in those situations turned from, well, I'm not going to get a confession. So now I'm just going to focus. Focus on trying to catch inconsistencies or, you know, these things that make absolutely no sense, that if you put in front of a jury, they go, come on.

[Scott Crabtree]

That was my hope. The interview up until Heading to Harrington was pretty much a traditional fugitive interview. But as soon as I went in the room with Nichols, it kind of switched to being like one of the interviews I've done in my fraud cases. I did so many subject interviews in New York City. These guys are all thinking that they can talk their way out of anything. So basically, this whole idea of, I'm going to let you talk, I'm going to follow up, I'm going to pin you down, I'm going to twist you into a place where you can't defend yourself anymore. I was very paranoid that I was asking questions too fast for the guy that was taking the notes to keep up with me.

[Yardley Smith]

And the interview is not recorded either on video or audio.

[Scott Crabtree]

The Bureau's stance at that time is they don't audio record or video record interviews. Really, it was in the handbook. No way I can say this now. I wish that had been audio recorded.

[Yardley Smith]

Exactly.

[Scott Crabtree]

You would have been very easily able to see how deceptive he was being and how his story flipped and how his tone changed. But we tried to convey it in a 302 document, which is what we call a summary of one of our interviews, but you don't capture that audio recording of how that thing went would have been, I think, extremely Helpful. As the night went on, Nichols was much more willing to separate himself from agve. I think as he felt the walls kind of close in, you know, he started saying, well, mcveigh's kind of a loner, and we don't really talk to each other that much anymore. We don't have the same relationship anymore. Again, trying to create distance from where mcveigh was, Nichols said mcveigh corrected him to say that the waco incident had happened two years earlier. To at the end of the interview, saying, oh, yeah, mcveigh was tremendously hyped about waco, and whenever you talked about it, he would just get intense. We also talked to Nichols about making bombs. If you act kind of like you don't know what they're talking about, like you don't understand, you're not smart enough, you can get them to explain things to you that they normally, in a million years, wouldn't want to say. So I said, well, okay, you guys talk about bombs all the time. Do you think mcveigh knows more about bombs than you? Do you think he could do it? Do you think he's smarter than you? Do you think he could put the bomb together? Maybe you wouldn't know how to do it? You got a little defensive. No, no, we know the same now. We know the same thing. The thought of mcveigh was smarter than him kind of rubbed him wrong. So I said, okay, I'll take that. So you're saying mcveigh could have done it, and you're saying you guys know the same thing. So as far as I'm concerned, now, it's a matter of intent. So I felt pretty comfortable that at that point, Nichols was there, he was involved, he knew what was going on and everything else. As we talked to him about how to build bombs and stuff, we got into the ammonium nitrate conversation during one of our breaks. The agents that were near his house had done a canvas of the neighborhood, and they'd found somebody. And she said, I'm watching Nichols out in his front yard putting on fertilizer. Ammonium nitrate on his yard, so thick that it looked like it was snowing, because he had bags of ammonium nitrate, and he didn't want to be found with them. So we questioned him about it. I said, taylor, what's this deal about you spreading all this ammonium nitrate on your lawn? He said, well, I knew anybody that had ammonium nitrate would be a subject in this case. I said, you got to be kidding me, Terry, come on. You got to be kidding me.

[Dave]

You live in the middle of farm country.

[Scott Crabtree]

Everybody has ammonium nitrate here. What are you talking about? And he said, don't. Anybody that has ammonium nitrate is going to be a subject in this case. What do you say to that? I can't believe what you're saying, but if that's your position, okay, that's fine. I think at that point, he figured out he had already signed a consent to search for his house. He had bought some ammonia nitrate kind of more recently, and he had little plastic bottles for it. And he said it was plant food, but he labeled the product ground zero. So it's like, okay, that's an interesting name to pick for plant food. You know, what does this really mean? And again, he doesn't have answers. And a couple of times during the interview, it's like a question like that, and you can just see it's kind of like a deer in the headlights. After about 30 seconds, I said, terry, you got to answer me. Answer me. I'm asking you a yes or no question. You know, why you did this. You've done it in the last month. And he just a blank stare.

[Dave]

Did you get the impression that they were testing out mixes of info?

[Scott Crabtree]

Yeah, I think they did. They say that they're setting explosions off on their farm, which sounds to me like they could be experimenting. I mean, he talked about the fact that they would buy books and review literature together and talk to other people at gun shows to talk about what's the right mix, what's the best way to do this. I think it's just to show that, hey, this is so widespread. Everybody talks about this. Everybody knows this. I mean, me knowing it, me doing this is no big deal. I mean, it very much is effort to downplay what was going on. One thing he said repeatedly through the later parts of the interview was, I hope that anybody doing a search of my property can tell the difference between cleaning solvents and bomb components. Obviously, I think he's just hoping that if we see something that maybe it's marginal or something, we'll give him the break on it. But the things we found in his house, blasting caps and barrels in his garage that resembled the barrels that the people in Oklahoma City thought were what held the explosives.

[Yardley Smith]

And what did you find out about the day McVeigh and Nichols actually built the bomb?

[Scott Crabtree]

Well, on that Tuesday, which is when we think they mixed the bomb. Terry's story was, I gave McVeigh my truck. He dropped me off at a place on Fort Riley, and I told him to come Back and get me. Four hours later, McVay comes to get me. He tells me, hey, I've got a rifle and a rucksack in a storage shed in Harrington, and if I don't get back to get it, would you pick it up for me? This is late in the interview, so I said, did you pick it up for him? He says, yeah, I went and picked it up for him yesterday, which was Thursday, the day after the bombing. So I said, how do you know McVeigh still hadn't come back through to pick it up? How did you know to pick it up? He says, well, I just felt like I needed to pick it up and bring it back to my house. If you want to go with that story, that's fine. It makes no sense at all. The storage shed happened to be one where we got a search for that was where the majority of the ammonium nitrate had been stored. And it just showed that Nichols had access to that storage shed without McVay being present. So the fact that there were bomb components in that storage shed and Nichols had access to it, again, in my mind. Okay, so how distant is he from this?

[Paul]

It's got that storage shed. Is that in junction city?

[Scott Crabtree]

No, it's in Harrington.

[Paul]

Oh, it's in Harrington. Okay, so McVeigh rents the truck and takes that down to Harrington, where they outfit it to do the bombing.

[Scott Crabtree]

Yeah, they pick up their components, which I think bulk of it, were probably stored in that storage shed, and then they go to another location to mix the bomb. Later in the interview, I said, you know, we've got McVeigh in custody down in Oklahoma City. He's talking to our people down there, and I think maybe you should be a little bit nervous.

[Yardley Smith]

Oh, wow. All right, let's put a pin in it here for today. And we will be back next week with the conclusion of Scott's story and. And the conclusion of season 18. Now for a sneak peek at today's new bonus episode.

[Dave]

I tell dispatch it was dawn at the time. Dispatcher Dawn. I remember calling her and saying, hey, will you call this person on a landline and tell them that a detective is headed out from the station and should be at her house within the next 10 to 15 minutes with a subpoena and just let her know that I'm coming. And I said, she's gonna say, oh, okay. And then she's gonna hastily get off the phone, and hopefully she's gonna get in her car and take off. So she's not home when the subpoena service hits, right? And that's exactly what happened, except you were already there. So I just followed her until I got PC for a traffic stop, flipped my lights on and said, hey, I'm not gonna write you a ticket. Here's your subpoena.

[Yardley Smith]

To listen to today's bonus episode and access hundreds more, go to smalltowndicks.com superfam and hit that little join button. Small Town Dicks was created by detectives Dan and Dave. The podcast is produced by Jessica Halsted and me, Yardley Smith. Our senior editor is Soren Bajan and our editor is Christina Bracamontes. Our associate producers are the real Nick Smitty and Erin Gaynor. Logan Heftel is our production manager. Our books are Cooked and Cats Wrangled by Ben Cornwell. And our social media maven is Monica Scott. It would make our day if you became a member of our Small Town Fam by following us on Facebook, Instagram and YouTube. Atmaltowndicks, we love hearing from you. Oh, our groovy theme song was composed by John Forrest. Also, if you'd like to support the making of this podcast, go to smalltowndicks.com superfam and hit that little join button there. For a small subscription fee, you'll find exclusive content you can't get anywhere else. The transcripts of this podcast are thanks to Speech Docs and they can be found on our website, smalltowndicks.com thank you Speechdocs for this wonderful service. Small Town dicks is an audio 99 production. Small town fam. Thanks for listening. Nobody is better than you.