coverage was mcveigh walking out of that building, refusing to look down, and, you know, with 1,000-yard stare. there were steps leading out of the courthouse. i had to concentrate on where those steps would be without dipping my head down, because people would take dipping my head down as a sign of defeat or something. i m in leg chains, and if you ve ever tried walking in them and your extraordinary is too long, you ll fall down. i think the overall visceral action is that looks like the kid down the block. how could he have done what he did. outside the courthouse mcveigh comes face-to-face with a crowd that grows unruly. it was hard to pick out individual things, because they were all yelling at one, but i do distinctly remember one i heard, look over here [ muted ], look me in the face, and my immediate thought was i m not going to give you the pleasure of looking over there.
you can be happy. i ll be happy. mcveigh was done with life. this was his ultimate statement. i knew i was there to get a confession from him. i learned to put in check on anything that comes out of my mouth, but today i m deciding basically that we ve got to lay down the record as it is. up to this point, mcveigh had said nothing publicly about his involvement in the bombing. but with a death sentence approaching, mcveigh chooses to trust lou michel and wastes little time getting to the core of the story. he begins by describing what drove him to choose the murrah building as his target. there had to be at least two law enforcement agencies in the building. criteria was vulnerable, but isolated from other buildings so you minimize collateral damage. i didn t have the ability to scope out every federal building in the nation, but i did scope out a number so i could pick the best out among those.
without pretending i m not, pretending to be worried about being arrested. that s when he caught his first glimpse of the murrah building, and his first reaction was, damn, i didn t take the building completely down. so he s got that in his memory when he goes up to the holding cell. mcveigh was just wondering, do they know i m involved with the bombing? i don t think they know. he sits in that jail waiting to see if they re going to figure it out or not, but, you know, he s not going to help them. in a way i think what s really going on is mcveigh does essentially plan on being caught. he wants the credit for this. he wants to be the oklahoma city bomber, but he s not going to help them at all. it s some kind of weird game he s playing with law enforcement. he waits that first day to be identified, but nothing happens. meanwhile, the hunt for the bomber is on.
the atf, fbi, didn t matter. anybody who carried a gun, carried a badge, had the ability to knock down your door, take away your personal possessions, incarcerate you. anybody like that, to him, became the enemy. the building was chosen out of a phone book, looking in the blue pages and looking under law enforcement agencies. if you look under dea and u.s. marshal, atf, if they started giving the same address, you know they re all in one building. i think that what most people probably have not realized is how very carefully some of the details of this were planned out and for how long he had really been thinking about how to carry this off. mcveigh s plan requires the acquisition of thousands of pounds of materiels, all needing
explosives, ready to ignite. he had initially intended to bomb the building at about 11:00 in the morning, but he finally decides at the very last minute, despite all his talk about how he had ever detail of the plan worked out, he decides he has to go right away, there s too much of a chance of being caught. he actually leaves at about 7:00 in the morning. mcveigh carefully pulls the truck on the highway, heading south on i-35 toward oklahoma city. i believe he was getting antsy and didn t want to take any chances. he was probably worried that somebody might blow the whistle on him. he had the whole route mapped out from previous trips to oklahoma city.