Oklahoma City LP: What the Investigation Missed--and Why It Still Matters

On April 19, 1995, Timothy McVeigh drove into Oklahoma City in a rented Ryder truck and detonated a deadly fertilizer bomb, obliterating one-third of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building and killing 168 people. McVeigh claimed he conspired only with his old army buddy Terry Nichols, who had helped him make the bomb the day before. At least officially, the government believed him. But McVeigh's was just one version of events, and much of it was wrong.

In Oklahoma City, veteran investigative journalists Andrew Gumbel and Roger G. Charles puncture the myth about what happened on that day. Working with unprecedented access to government documents, a voluminous correspondence with Terry Nichols, and more than 150 interviews with those immediately involved, Gumbel and Charles demonstrate how much was missed beyond the guilt of the two principal defendants: in particular, the dysfunction within the country's law enforcement agencies and the unanswered question of who inspired the plot and who else might have been involved.