'Hallelujah' exclaims one victim
By Zach Taylor
Tribune-Star
After a morning of yard work, Florence Rogers turned on her TV and heard some unexpected but welcome news: A judge had denied Oklahoma City bomber Timothy McVeigh's petition to delay his execution.
"I'm excited that it's finally going to happen," said the 65-year-old Rogers, who survived the 1995 blast. "I think it is probably time to execute him I just want it all to go away."
McVeigh took one step closer to death on Wednesday after U.S. District Court Judge Richard Matsch denied the stay of execution, set to take place Monday at the federal prison in Terre Haute.
U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft postponed McVeigh's original May 16 execution date after the FBI disclosed it had failed to give McVeigh's attorneys more than 4,000 pages of documents collected during the bombing investigation.
But Matsch ruled Wednesday that nothing in those documents would justify delaying McVeigh's execution any longer.
"Hallelujah," bombing victim Susan Walton exclaimed. "It's pretty surprising. All the experts were predicting they would suspend it. I'm glad that it is going forward."
Walton, whose injuries included a skull fracture and severe nerve damage, said she had prepared for a lengthy delay of the execution.
Walton said Ashcroft was "very generous" in postponing the original execution date "and Mr. McVeigh has confessed, so it's kind of a moot point what else they find."
Raymond Washburn, who was blinded in the bombing, also is ready for the whole thing to be over.
"The longer we keep him alive, the more it's going to cost the taxpayers. All we're doing to people who are on death row is keeping them alive with our tax dollars," he said.
Still, not all those who suffered losses in the bombing are looking forward to McVeigh's death.
Jannie Coverdale, who lost two grandsons in the explosion, said the execution should be postponed because, she believes, more can be learned about the details surrounding the bombing.
"I think there are other people involved in the bombing, and I'm so afraid that once Tim is executed, all of this will be swept under the rug and we'll never hear of it again," she said. "We had a lot of witnesses who saw Tim McVeigh that morning. Not one said they saw Tim McVeigh by himself."
McVeigh's attorneys also have suggested that other people might have been involved, even though McVeigh denies it and, after his trial, confessed to blowing up the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people.
Jim Denny, whose two children were injured in the bombing, thinks McVeigh's attorneys will fight the decision as far as they can.
"Nothing in this case could surprise me. I'm beyond surprises," Denny said. "I think Judge Matsch looked at what was fact and what was fiction [in the documents] and determined that the majority of it was fiction.
"But, I think [McVeigh's lawyers] will go to the Supreme Court," he said. "They're doing their job - I hope no one holds that against them But when you have a person who's been found guilty and then he comes out in a book and admits his guilt, it's pretty dang hard to mount a defense.
"Monday will not be a happy day," he said. "It's never a happy day when somebody's life is taken, not even Tim McVeigh's. But it sure shows that our system works and it works well."
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