Ruling disappoints McVeigh's father
By Karin Grunden
Tribune-Star
He'd hoped the legal experts were right and his son would escape execution Monday.
But Bill McVeigh also couldn't get away from the "funny feeling" that U.S. District Court Judge Richard P. Matsch would prove them all wrong.
It turned out the father of convicted Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh was right.
A disappointed Bill McVeigh, surrounded by a half dozen reporters, watched the news on television at his Pendleton, N.Y., home Wednesday afternoon -- the news that Matsch would not delay Timothy McVeigh's execution.
"I don't know if it's really hit me yet," Bill McVeigh, a retired auto worker, said as he took a break from his yard work.
Last December, Timothy McVeigh, convicted of blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in 1995, decided to drop all his appeals and asked to be executed as soon as possible.
An execution date was set for May 16, but just days before McVeigh was to face death, the FBI admitted it had not disclosed evidence to McVeigh's lawyers.
That prompted Attorney General John Ashcroft to delay the execution until Monday and led McVeigh to authorize his attorneys to seek a delay in the execution based on the new evidence.
Despite the legal avenues that still exist, including an appeal today to the 10th Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals in Denver, Bill McVeigh does not believe any hope exists for a new trial for his son, whose bomb killed 168 people.
"It's going to happen sooner or later," Bill McVeigh said of the execution. "He knows it. We know it. Ninety-nine percent of the people in America know it."
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