Forgive Jesse Trentadue for empathizing with monsters like Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols.

Though he abhors that indiscriminate massacre of 168 people on April 19, 1995, Trentadue shares with its perpetrators a gutful of spite for the federal government. Asked what separates him from “right-wing whack jobs†bent on armed insurrection, he admits half-considering “Plan B†himself.

“I don’t wish the federal gov’ment of the United States anything but ill,†Trentadue grunts while rummaging his disarrayed downtown Salt Lake City law office for the paperwork to confirm his grievances aren’t the stuff of paranoia. And he’s got the paperwork in spades.

To bump into him on the street, the stubble-faced codger doesn’t look the part of a successful trial lawyer. He goes out in a Gatsby cap and thick, blurry spectacles, and he’s constantly puffing a stogie or gumming a wad of tobacco—sometimes simultaneously. “Only 9-year-old girls spit,†he mocks this reporter, a smokeless tobacco addict, for refusing to swallow.

The self-described “ignorant-ass hillbilly†dispensed with etiquette the day his brother’s body arrived at a California morgue. The government insisted Kenneth “Kenny†Trentadue committed suicide in federal prison. But evidence suggesting otherwise vanished, while much of that supporting the government’s theory was jiggered or plucked from thin air.

In trying to unravel the mystery, Jesse traced the loose threads to a band of government-hating, neo-Nazi bank robbers who may have played a part in planning, if not executing, the deadliest homegrown terrorist attack on U.S. soil. What’s more, he’s turned up a trove of official documents indicating the plot to bomb the Oklahoma City federal building unfolded under the government’s nose and, à la 9/11, could have been thwarted. Some survivors believe Jesse is their best chance of getting answers that the government either can’t, or won’t, provide.

Understand, where Jesse grew up, a 9-year-old hocking into a spittoon isn’t so far-fetched. Number 7, West Virginia, according to an asterisk on his resume, is a tiny coal-mining camp in the hills halfway between Horsepen, Va., and Cucumber, W.V. Jesse’s father went into the mine at age 15, his father’s father at 12 and grandpa Webb at a spry 6 years old.

“They had a sign there on the bathhouse reading, if the top is bad, meaning danger of a cave-in, you use men to move the car from the face to the main line, not an animal,†Jesse says. “If a miner gets killed, the company can hire another one. If a mule gets killed, the company has to pay for that.â€

Demand for coal plummeted after the Korean War, and the Lassaks, family friends from up the holler, were the first to pack up for Southern California on Mr. Lassaks’ prophesy of a “promised land.†Word soon made it back to the hills that Mrs. Lassak was going on a TV game show, Queen For a Day, where the woman with the saddest tale won a crown, a case of Chesterfield cigarettes and a washing machine. “She told a tragic Number 7 story about living in houses with dirt floors and eating fried potato peels, coons, groundhogs and squirrel, and she breaks the applause meter,†Jesse says. That was proof enough for the rest of Number 7, “and about the whole damned town moved up to Orange County.â€

A fortuitous football injury led Jesse to discover he had a God-given talent. “You’ll laugh when you look at me now, but I set the California mile record in high school.†It was good enough for a full-ride track scholarship to the University of Southern California, where Jesse went on to become an All-American.

Kenny, Jesse's younger brother by three years, showed even more promise as a distance runner, but a leg injury put an end to any notion of following in Jesse’s footsteps. Kenny dropped out of school and took up with some guys from the neighborhood. At 17, he enlisted in the Army, came out a junkie and knocked over some pharmacies.

Jesse graduated USC in 1969 and volunteered for a two-year stint in the Marine Corps before enrolling in law school. Dating back to the Civil War, it was understood that Trentadue men serve.

“Nobody in my family’s ever gonna pick up a rifle to defend this sumbitch again,†Jesse swears.

The early morning of Aug. 21, 1995, Jesse’s mother Wilma got a call from the U.S. Bureau of Prisons’ Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City. Kenny’s gone, the caller said, hanged himself in his cell with a bed-sheet noose at 3 a.m.

On that day, Jesse unknowingly pledged his remaining evenings, weekends and holidays to making the government answer for his brother’s death. To this day, the government is recalcitrant. Along the way, a prominent U.S. senator, Utah’s own Orrin Hatch, agreed the facts point to murder and cover-up. But after repeatedly vowing that the Senate Judiciary Committee, which he chaired until 2005, would force a thorough accounting of what went wrong and why, Hatch now defers to the very agencies Jesse believes dropped the ball—or drop-kicked the ball, as it were.

Though Jesse is almost resigned to never learning who killed Kenny, he forges on. As to the why, it’s a complicated matter of never saying die, exacting some retribution from the dodgy bureaus and holding out for a sliver of consolation if he can put the lie to the official story of the Oklahoma City bombing.

A-lot-a-killin’

In 1987, Kenny was paroled after serving six years of a 20-year federal term for robbing a savings and loan. Adjusting to life on the outside was difficult, Jesse says, but Kenny married, had a son, bought a home and found work in construction. A year later, though, he stopped reporting to his probation officer, Jesse says, in defiance of a no-alcohol provision added to his parole agreement.

Returning to San Diego from visiting in-laws in Mexico in June 1995, Kenny got hauled in at the border on suspicion of driving under the influence. He was turned over to U.S. Marshals and flown to the Federal Transfer Center in Oklahoma City to await his parole hearing. In his last conversations with family, Kenny seemed upbeat and eager to get back to the world.

“It’s looking pretty good,†he told Jesse less than 36 hours before his death, according to a Bureau of Prisons transcript of the call. “As far as violations, mine’s lightweight—just street violations, you know. How’s everyone?†And the conversation ended with Kenny telling his brother, “I’ll give you a yell back tomorrow night, OK?â€

But Kenny never called back. The next morning he was strip-searched, given a clean bill of health, transferred to the prison’s Special Housing Unit (SHU)—out of fear for his safety, the government maintains—and didn’t live through the night.

From that first phone call to Wilma, the government’s story didn’t add up. The caller, acting Warden Marie Carter, asked Wilma’s permission to cremate Kenny’s remains. When Wilma objected, saying Kenny’s wife and siblings needed to be consulted, Jesse says Carter expressed surprise that Kenny had family beyond a mother and sister. Perhaps owing to the confusion, throughout his stay at the transfer center, Kenny was listed as Vance Paul Brockway, an old alias from his stickup days.

The body was shipped home to Westminster, Calif., and met by Wilma, Kenny's wife Carmen and sister Donna Sweeney. A thick coat of mortician’s makeup couldn’t hide a gaping ear-to-throat gash, and by the time the women had Kenny undressed and washed, the scope of horror laid bare. They photographed three skull-deep scalp wounds, knuckles swollen and black, fingertip-sized bruises to the underside of one arm and contusions to his forehead, temple, eyelids, cheeks, nose, chin, wrist, buttocks and the soles of his feet.

“My brother was a tough man, but a good man: Never started a fight, but God he could finish one, and God it wouldn’t bother him to fight two or three.â€

With that, Jesse concludes Kenny “took a-lot-a-killin’.â€

Hatch Demands Answers

The Bureau of Prisons (BOP) immediately assumed an in-house inquiry. Later that day, the Oklahoma City FBI field office launched a decidedly casual homicide investigation, not so much as visiting the crime scene for at least a week, according to a 1999 review by the Department of Justice Office of Inspector General (OIG). Significant lapses were found in both agencies’ investigations—crucial evidence destroyed, altered or misplaced—but no foul play, the OIG said.

A federal grand jury found insufficient grounds to charge BOP personnel for murdering Kenny, as the family alleged. But Oklahoma U.S. District Judge Tim Leonard awarded the Trentadues $1.1 million in a 2001 civil judgment, finding the government’s actions amounted to intentional infliction of emotional distress.

“They’ll never pay,†Jesse casually predicts.

The family’s wrongful death claims were dismissed, paradoxically, due to lack of evidence. Nonetheless, the Trentadues poked so many holes in the government’s case that Leonard couldn’t resist a parting lecture to three BOP witnesses. A guard, a senior officer and a medic, Leonard wrote in his final judgment, “seemed unable to comprehend the importance of a truthful answer†from the time of Kenny’s death until trial.

But rather than indict three BOP employees and an FBI agent for making “false statements under oath,†as the OIG recommended, the Justice Department declined, opting to go after Jesse Trentadue instead.

According to FBI memos, the bureau opened criminal cases on Jesse Trentadue for suspected “obstruction of justice†on separate occasions in 1997 and 1999. In one document, the FBI indicates that Justice Department attorney Peter Schlossman, who represented the government in the Trentadues’ lawsuit and apparently instigated the FBI investigation, did so “solely in furtherance of a civil case.†The criminal case was shelved, with an FBI memo noting the OIG’s “highly critical†assessment of the FBI’s investigation into Kenny’s death as the reason.

City Weekly left messages at the press offices for both the FBI and the Justice Department’s Public Integrity Section, but neither responded to requests to discuss the case. For a point-by-point chronology of the government’s alleged malfeasance and nonfeasance, Jesse has posted the upshot of his decade-long battle online at DeathRowSpeaks.info/Trentadue/Trentadue.html.

Of innumerable curiosities, crime-scene photos and negatives went missing for years, including a crucial original Polaroid of the ligature marks on Kenny’s throat. Most of them turned up in government filing cabinets only after the Justice Department concluded its grand jury.

The BOP washed down Kenny’s blood-splattered cell before outside agencies could inspect it. And they painted over Kenny’s purported suicide note—“My mind’s no longer its friend,†scrawled in pencil on the cell wall—without reconciling three different official accounts of how it was signed.

Prison logs documenting inmate movements that night, an FBI evidence log, Kenny’s blood-soaked clothes and a videotape of guards’ initial entry into the cell don’t exist or disappeared, yet they are specifically referenced in government documents.

The author of a suicide-watch report admitted under cross-examination that he prepared it postmortem. One BOP transcript of a phone call has Kenny marveling at “that jet-age stuff,†while a subsequent iteration of the same conversation has him lamenting “that AIDS stuff.†(The government briefly floated the idea that Kenny killed himself over the disease, but he didn’t have it.)

A guard on duty the night Kenny died told a neighbor that he and other guards beat Kenny to death and staged the suicide. The guard initially denied the confession, but reversed himself after failing a polygraph, explaining to OIG investigators that he lied to impress his neighbor. The guard was not called before the grand jury.

Jesse Trentadue enlisted a powerful, yet ultimately impotent, ally in Sen. Orrin Hatch, who confronted then-Attorney General Janet Reno during a Senate hearing in 1997, saying it appeared someone “murdered†Kenny. Hatch also repeatedly promised a Senate Judiciary Committee inquiry which, unlike the Trentadues, could subpoena government witnesses and documents. “Congress isn’t going to go away,†Hatch insisted during an NBC Dateline segment. “We want answers to this.â€

But those hearings never came to pass because, as Hatch explained through a spokesperson recently, “It appeared very unlikely that such hearings would add materially to the multiple criminal investigations of the case … all of which concluded that [Kenny] Trentadue committed suicide and was not murdered.â€

To which Jesse responds: “It’s not his job to solve a murder. His job is to oversee the functioning of the FBI and the Department of Justice to make sure that they perform properly. He admits they screwed up everything and that’s what he should focus on.â€

No single element of Kenny’s ostensible suicide is more perplexing than then-Oklahoma Medical Examiner Fred Jordan’s three-year reluctance to rule it so. Once Jesse's fiercest ally, Jordan ultimately became a lynchpin for the government.

“I think that’s probably the most difficult investigation I have ever experienced—including the [Oklahoma City] bombing and including Katrina,†Jordan reflects by phone from West Poland, Maine. “If you go through all the reams of stuff on Kenneth Trentadue, you’ll find lie after lie after lie as far as I’m concerned from the federal government.â€

For going against the grain, the first-rate forensic pathologist and then-future president of the National Association of Medical Examiners was treated to what he describes as Mississippi Burning-style meddling and intimidation. The local FBI was, “in general, a bunch of toughs,†Jordan says, adding that the Justice Department harassed and pressured him to sign off on the suicide theory. He made no secret of requesting a “protective audit†from the IRS on account of the “friggen FBI … might want to frame me in one way or another,†and took to traveling rural Oklahoma with a gun in the car.

By July 1997, Jordan had lost all confidence in the FBI and BOP, and he questioned the Justice Department’s handling of the grand jury. “I feel it is very likely this man was killed,†he wrote in a memo to Kenny’s autopsy file.

Perhaps the most sobering assessment of the case came from Oklahoma Assistant Attorney General Patrick Crawley in a March 1998 letter to a Justice Department lawyer who deigned to query Jordan’s impartiality.

“In a succession of either illegal, negligent, or just plain stupid acts, your clients [the FBI and BOP] succeeded in derailing the medical examiner’s investigation and thereby may have obstructed justice in this case,†Crawley wrote.

But Jesse’s cause took a crushing setback later that year, when Jordan abruptly amended Kenny’s “unknown†manner of death to “suicide.â€

“I bear him no ill will,†says Jesse. “But he sure did piss backwards on us.â€

On the first score, the sentiment is mutual. Jordan regards Jesse as an “honest, intelligent, straightforward man with unquestioned integrity.†But he stresses he did not cave to government pressure—although Jesse can't see it any other way.

After the grand jury disbanded, Jordan explains, the Oklahoma County District Attorney’s Office took its own crack at the case. Two veteran Oklahoma City Police Department homicide detectives were assigned and, from past experience, Jordan trusted their work.

While acknowledging the rehash was essentially a “cold case†investigation, Jordan says he accepted its conclusion that “there was no evidence to suggest anything other than suicide.†He says the detectives interviewed numerous inmates who were on the SHU when Kenny died, and none recalled the kind of ruckus that would have accompanied the beating Jesse is convinced of.

Not only did another inmate hear the commotion that night, Jesse counters, but he suspects one Alden Gillis Baker was murdered for coming forward. Baker, serving a 22-year sentence for robbery, swore in a 1998 deposition that he heard Kenny crying out during an apparent scuffle, and that he saw guards enter the cell. “My life is put in jeopardy by me saying what I’m saying,†Baker also noted in the deposition. “Here in this prison … if something wants to be done to you, it can be done.†Shortly before trial, Baker was found in his cell hanging from a makeshift rope.

At that trial, Jordan’s testimony was unambiguous. “No, there is no evidence to substantiate beating or torture,†he said, adding that the findings of the Oklahoma City Police explained Kenny’s injuries. To Jesse, the police department’s theory of a frustratingly clumsy fit of suicidal rage defies credibility.

According to Tom Bevel, a retired Oklahoma City Police detective and crime-scene reconstruction expert, who articulated the theory at trial, Kenny braided the noose from torn strips of bed sheet and wove it through a ceiling vent. He then climbed atop the sink to hang himself, but “the ligature broke under his weight,†Bevel deduced. In falling, Kenny struck his head and perhaps his buttocks on the corner of a metal desk opposite the sink, and then “bounced off the desk with his body weight and inertia causing his head to next strike the wall.†Reeling on all fours, he raised up, again striking his head on a chair. Frustrated, he put off hanging, and “takes a tube of toothpaste and begins cutting his throat with the sharp crimped end.†That didn’t work, so he “reattached the broken ends of the torn sheet ligature,†and finished the job.

But three bombshell revelations at trial should have obliterated the hanging theory, Jesse says. For one, a guard who’d maintained under oath three previous times that he was among the first to enter Kenny’s cell, saw him hanging, saw guards cut him down, and videotaped it all, recanted under cross-examination. (Depending on which government expert is talking, the camera either malfunctioned or the tape was erased.) A fabric expert commissioned by the district attorney to inspect the noose testified that it showed no signs of being cut, as the government maintained, a conclusion also reached by the FBI crime lab, but never disclosed to Jesse until trial. And the “smoking fucking gun,†as he sees it, was a previously undisclosed photograph detailing the ligature marks around Kenny’s throat.

The zipper-like indentations indicate strangulation rather than hanging, Jesse believes. The distinct impressions are consistent with plastic zip ties used by guards to handcuff prisoners at the transfer center. And the positioning of the markings mid-throat rather than at the jaw line belie a full-body suspension, he says. Moreover, Kenny’s autopsy showed he had a fractured “hyoid bone,†a hallmark of strangulation, but very rare in hangings.

In a 2002 deposition for a libel lawsuit filed against Jesse Trentadue and Gentleman’s Quarterly magazine, Jordan’s testimony was more nuanced than at trial. He testified that he believed Kenny sustained injuries in an “altercation†shortly before his death, and the ligature marks—“what we call a patterned injuryâ€â€”“could†have been made by plastic ties. He also noted that, in his decades as a forensic pathologist, he was unsure if he’d ever seen a hyoid bone fractured as a result of hanging.

Asked which he thinks it is today, hanging or strangulation, Jordan doesn’t parse. “If I thought that this guy’s ligature mark had been made by the feds with plastic ligatures, do you think I would call that a suicide? No.†He maintains that his opinions have remained true to the evidence at hand and, for lingering doubts, “thank the goddamned federal government.â€

All Roads Lead to Elohim City

Jannie Coverdale’s grandsons were among 19 children killed in the Oklahoma City bombing. Elijah and Aaron would be 13 and 16, respectively, and Coverdale believes their deaths have earned her the right to a full accounting from the government. The 68-year-old retired municipal worker became dubious of the two-man conspiracy theory about six months after the bombing.

“But I was told by the U.S. attorney that if I attended the trials, I would have the answers to all of my questions,†Coverdale says. So she sat in on McVeigh’s trial and both of Nichols’. “By the time Terry Nichols’ trial was over, I had more questions.

“There were over 50 people that saw Timothy McVeigh in that Ryder truck leading up to the day of the bombing. Nobody saw Timothy McVeigh by himself. None of those witnesses were called to testify at either trial, not one.â€

Incredulous to this day, Coverdale has written to Sen. Hatch, whom she says assured there would be congressional hearings on the bombing. When none occurred, she says she wrote again but received no reply.

Flummoxed, Coverdale began writing Nichols in prison.

“Sometimes I get so darned angry, I feel like killing him,†she says of her unlikely pen pal. “But he has the answers to the questions I’m asking.†Coverdale says Nichols has indicated he and McVeigh didn't act alone, but he’s afraid to say more in any venue short of congressional hearings.

Barring hearings, Coverdale is convinced Jesse Trentadue is her last best hope.

A few months after Kenny died, Jesse says he received a bizarre call from an anonymous tipster. Paraphrasing, he says the caller told him Kenny fit the profile of a wanted bank robber intent on overthrowing the government, and the FBI killed him in an interrogation gone awry.

Jesse dismissed the heads-up as crazy talk until mid-1996, when he came across an article in the Los Angeles Times about the so-called “Midwestern Bank Bandits,†a white supremacist gang also known as the Aryan Republican Army (ARA). The gang was ultimately credited with 22 bank robberies across several states from 1994-96, the loot earmarked to fund a war against the federal government.

Intrigued, Jesse reported the coincidence to the FBI. He didn’t give it much more thought until 2001, when he says a confidential intermediary passed along a message from, of all people, the soon-to-be executed Timothy McVeigh. Jesse says the liaison told him McVeigh had seen a picture of Kenny, and the mad bomber was convinced the feds mistook Kenny for a man called Richard Lee Guthrie, one of the Midwestern Bank Bandits.

In 1996, Guthrie was arrested for the bank robberies and copped a plea deal with federal prosecutors. Later that year, awaiting sentencing, he told the Los Angeles Times he wanted to write a book that goes “a lot more deeper†into what the ARA was up to, offering, “It’ll all come out.†Early the next morning, he hanged himself with a bed sheet in a Kentucky jail cell.

Eerily similar “suicides†aside, Jesse didn’t make the connection between Kenny and the bombing until a dogged investigative journalist working at a rural Oklahoma newspaper helped him piece it together.

J.D. Cash was a middle-age real estate entrepreneur before the bombing. Every Oklahoman knew someone who died that day and, “for the sake of history,†Cash says, he determined to tell the story.

He caught on with the McCurtain Daily Gazette, and he’s since filed perhaps more stories on the bombing than anyone. To say nothing of the ubiquitous John Doe No. 2, mountains of evidence suggest—and Cash is convinced—Army buddies McVeigh and Nichols had more support. And he theorizes the government is still trying to hush up a botched sting operation.

Breaking story after story, Cash’s notepad kept pointing toward a white-supremacist compound in the far-eastern Oklahoma boonies called Elohim City, a way station for militant racists and Christian fundamentalists. Guthrie and the rest of the ARA soldiers, all since convicted in the bank robberies, bunked at the compound off and on, including just days before the bombing. The bandits’ ringleader, Peter “Commander Pedro†Langan, serving life for his role in the robberies, has offered to testify that members of his gang had a part in the bombing.

The Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms had an undercover informant at Elohim City, hatemonger-turned-crusader Carol Howe, who warned her handler months before of an imminent attack on a federal building. Howe’s handler even directed her to accompany the radicals, including German national Andreas Carl Strassmeir, as they scouted targets in Oklahoma City. When Howe went public more than a year after the bombing, she was indicted, and acquitted, for possessing bomb-making materials.

To Cash, Strassmeir, the compound’s security chief and ordnance expert, is the key to the conspiracy. ARA members lived with him while staying at Elohim City, and McVeigh called asking for him two days and two weeks before the bombing. McVeigh’s sister told the FBI that in November 1994, he gave her three $100 bills to be laundered, claiming the money was from a bank heist. A speeding ticket and a motel receipt put McVeigh within minutes of the remote compound months before the bombing. Strassmeir skipped the country by way of Mexico soon after the bombing, despite being wanted for overstaying his visa and despite FBI documents showing the government knew his whereabouts and route of departure.

In a 1996 exchange with British journalist Ambrose Evans-Pritchard, excerpted from his outwardly sensational book The Secret Life of Bill Clinton, Strassmeir doesn't dispel the intrigue.

“It’s obvious that [the bombing] was a government ‘op’ that went wrong, isn’t it?†Evans-Pritchard quoted Strassmeir, a former German Army intelligence officer, as saying during a series of long-distance interviews. “They were watching [McVeigh]—of course they were. … What they should have done is make an arrest while the bomb was still being made instead of waiting till the last moment for a publicity stunt.â€

Evans-Pritchard needled Strassmeir for more, according to the account, telling him there comes a time when the informant must come clean to save his own skin. “How can he?†Strassmeir reportedly shouted back. “What happens if it was a sting operation from the very beginning? What happens if it comes out that the plant was a provocateur?â€

After comparing notes in 2003, Cash and Jesse Trentadue agreed Kenny and Guthrie shared more in common than untimely ends. They were both bank robbers on the lam immediately after the bombing. They were about the same height, powerfully built, dark-complexioned and sported mustaches and serpent tattoos on their left forearms. Both men were fond of aliases, and Guthrie was thought to be hiding out in Canada or Mexico when Kenny was picked up at the border.

Jesse believes his brother was mistaken for Guthrie as a suspect in the bank robberies, if not the bombing, and beaten to death during a misguided interrogation. “Elohim City gets me the motive I never had,†he says.

Early on, the FBI chased down leads that ARA members were in on the bombing, “either directly or indirectly through conspiracy,†according to published reports, but that information wasn’t turned over to the defense in Nichols’ or McVeighs’ federal trials. Documents giving greater detail of those efforts have only recently surfaced, but with key names redacted.

In 2004, Jesse came into possession of two FBI teletypes disseminated by then-Director Louis Freeh which, although redacted, suggest the so-called “BOMBROB†and “OKBOMB†cases were inextricably linked. The August 1996 memo discusses six ARA members in conjunction with McVeigh, Elohim City and bank robbery proceeds. It notes that Guthrie and another person “admitted to paying [name redacted] money derived from bank robberies and identified [name redacted] as an accomplice in certain bank robberies.†It goes on to state, “if [name redacted] told the authorities that he received bank robbery money [name redacted] should face life in prison.â€

Another Freeh teletype from January 1996 discusses McVeigh’s call to Elohim City two weeks before the bombing, “a day that he was believed to have been attempting to recruit a second conspirator to assist in the OKBOMB attack.†As to McVeigh’s subsequent call to the compound, the memo notes, “[name redacted] allegedly has had a lengthy relationship with Timothy McVeigh.â€

Jesse’s money is on McVeigh and Strassmeir’s names filling in some spaces on both teletypes. After all, they fit perfectly. He filed a Freedom of Information request in 2004 for official copies. The FBI said they didn’t exist. But with the documents in hand when he sued in federal court, it wasn’t difficult for U.S. District Judge Dale Kimball, presiding from Salt Lake City, to determine the government didn’t look hard enough. In May 2005, Kimball ordered the government to turn over 17 responsive documents, un-redacted. The government nonetheless gave Jesse redacted copies and petitioned the court to reconsider and rescind the order. Kimball did just that in March, based on affidavits that the FBI had promised confidentiality to four sources referenced in the teletypes. However, Kimball ordered the government to do another search for documents regarding the Southern Poverty Law Center, which gathered intelligence on Elohim City after the bombing, and perhaps before, as a proxy for the government. Unless the FBI “discovers†more responsive documents, Jesse is effectively out of leads.

Wilma Trentadue’s congressman, Rep. Dana Rohrabacher, R-Calif., recently concluded a personal inquiry into reports of a wider Oklahoma City bombing conspiracy, even visiting Nichols in prison last year. Finding “ample reason to disbelieve the official version of this horrific crime,†in March, Rohrabacher wrote to Rep. Henry Hyde, R-Ill., requesting a hearing in the House Committee on International Relations to determine if foreign co-conspirators were overlooked or ignored. The congressman noted that a central thrust will be to determine exactly how McVeigh and Strassmeir were associated. But Jesse has learned in this campaign not to get up false hope.

Battle Fatigued

Avenging Kenny for 11 years has taken its toll.

“I’m weary,†Jesse sighs, and he looks it. “I truly haven’t had the opportunity to grieve for Kenny,†or for the others, he says.

“Lost my dad to black lung, but this hastened his death. My mother died here about three [months] ago, and I so wanted her to see the end of it.â€

Chuck Sampson, Jesse’s friend, legal partner and lawyer at the civil trial, died of cancer last year, never to see the judgment realized.

“It’s like in a war, there’s no time to step aside, you just push forward,†he says.

For the warrior, it all goes back to a little coal camp, Number 7, West Virginia, where the men had to kick harder than the mules …

“And if you kill a hillbilly, you better be prepared to kill his whole family back to third cousins, because they’re gonna fuckin’ get ya sooner or later.â€