Free A Death in Wichita by Stephen Singular Page B

imagined that someone really was listening, and said aloud that her husband was out of control and needed to be stopped before it was too late. Nobody responded to her pleas. Instead, she received calls from Scott’s political and religious allies at all hours of the day.
    “After speaking with me,” she says, “most of these people realized that I wasn’t the person my husband had told them I was. I wasn’t a monster. They were calling because they were worried that he might try to kill me. They said that he was upset with me for not believing as he did or allowing him to be the head of household or man of the house. I was warned repeatedly that he had a rifle with a long-range sight on it. I tried to talk about this with some of his family members, but they didn’t want to hear it.”
    When Scott asked if he could bring home a couple of his buddies to live with them, Lindsey said no. He was increasingly manic—not sleeping or eating much, and reading more about the coming End Times, when the earth would reach a devastating climax and only those saved by Jesus would escape into heaven. The fire at Waco had put the far-right extremists on alert and convinced many that the Apocalypse was at hand. Roeder was expanding his contacts inside that underground, associating with Mark Koernke, a prominent Michigan militia activist who in 2001 would be sentenced to three to seven years for resisting arrest and assaulting the police. Roeder had hooked up with the Unorganized Kansas Militia, led by Morris Wilson and now conducting maneuvers in the woods. Some of its members were connected with Terry Nichols, who’d joined forces with Timothy McVeigh, and in the spring of 1995, the word moving through the Midwest’s radical circles was that “Timmy V was gonna go smoke some Okies.”
    McVeigh and Nichols had met in the late 1980s in army basic training. Both were angered by the 1992 FBI standoff with Randy Weaver at Ruby Ridge, Idaho, which had left Weaver’s son, Sammy, dead. They were further outraged the next year by the siege at Waco. McVeigh had visited the Branch Davidian compound during the standoff and after seventy-six people had lost their lives. Like the men who’d murdered Alan Berg, McVeigh was very familiar with the violent fantasy novel The Turner Diaries , peddling it at gun shows. One chapter outlined how a truck holding a homemade bomb was detonated in front of FBI headquarters in Washington at 9:15 on a weekday morning. Seven hundred people died in the fictional carnage.
    “It is a heavy burden of responsibility for us to bear,” said the book’s protagonist, Earl Turner, “since most of the victims of our bomb were only pawns who were no more committed to the sick philosophy or the racially destructive goals of the System than we are. But there is no way we can destroy the System without hurting many thousands of innocent people…. And if we don’t destroy the System before it destroys us…our whole race will die.”
    On September 30, 1994, Nichols went to the Mid-Kansas Coop in McPherson and bought forty 50-pound bags of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, a vast amount by the standards of local famers. He bought one more bag for good measure. On April 14, 1995, McVeigh paid for a room at the Dreamland Motel in Junction City in eastern Kansas. Using the alias Robert D. Kling he rented a Ryder truck, and on April 16 he and Nichols drove to Oklahoma City and planted a getaway car a few blocks from the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building. They went back to Herington, Kansas, and loaded the Ryder truck with fertilizer, fuses, and other bomb-making materials. On April 19, McVeigh exploded the truck outside the Murrah building and killed 168 men, women, and children.
    At McVeigh’s 1997 federal trial in Denver, the witness Charles Farley testified that he saw several men near the loaded Ryder truck outside Junction City on April 18, 1995. Farley confirmed a photo of one man, later identified as Morris Wilson, the