You're listening to Law and Order Criminal Justice System, a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart podcasts.

In the criminal justice System, landmark trials transcend the courtroom to reshape the law.

The brave many women who investigate and prosecute these cases are part of a select group that has defined American history.

These are their stories.

April nineteen ninety three, Waco, Texas.

On a dusty stretch of Texas Prairie, the FBI had the Branch Davidian compound surrounded.

What began as a raid by the ATF based on firearms allegations, resulted in a shootout that left four agents and six Branch Davidians dead.

The resulting standoff between federal agents and the eighty six people that remained inside had already lasted well over a month.

The impasse was front page news.

Many days had been spent hoping for a breakthrough that never seemed to materialize.

One instance, they said stand by surrender is imminent.

So we waited, and we waited.

Eventually the team leader called command and said, hey, what about this imminent surrender?

They said, oh, no, negotiations broke down quite some time ago.

Never mind, some people came out, but most stayed inside, defiant, scared, or both.

Amongst the eighty six people that remained were children.

As negotiations waned, one of the last little girls was let out.

One of our HRT operators brought her to me in a Bradley fighting vehicle.

Little blondhaired girl, Blue Eye carried her over to a health and Human services worker, and that was the last child that got out alive.

As the days passed, negotiations continued to stall.

Law enforcement grew increasingly worried about the children's safety, about the violence that might soon erupt.

The decision was made in Washington to introduce tear gas.

HRT was enclose trying to rescue some of the people.

One lady came out and then actually went back inside.

These folks did not intend to surrender.

Moments later, the compound's fate was sealed.

The Davidians set three simultaneous fires inside the compound and it erupted.

That fire spread so rapidly there was a strong, strong wind that fueled the fire.

By the time it was finally out, nothing recognizable remained.

These are horrific scenes.

The compound was destroyed.

It was raised to.

The ground inside the after myth told a grim story.

There was a concrete room.

The walls were just lined with long gun but that's where most of the remains that the women and children were found.

Those that died from the burns or smoke inhalation.

It was something that you really can't unsee.

Outside.

The lengthy standoff had drawn crowds of onlookers.

There were significant number of protesters.

The anti government faction held signs.

They shouted about government overreach.

They were there because of Waco, but also because it was right on the back of Ruby Ridge, another recent government standoff that started with a warrant and ended in bloodshed.

Amongst the protesters was a man whose name would soon be known around the world.

A Gulf War veteran radicalized by anti government beliefs, he was already plotting and his rage would soon boil over.

His name was Timothy McVay.

Well, get out to LaGuardia Airport.

There's been a bombing.

There was a thirty two foot crater in front of what was left of the building.

I was trying to figure out am I dead?

Am I alive?

Where am I?

I'm Anisee and NICOLASI.

That's why terrorism works.

It doesn't care who you are.

From Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts.

This is Law and Order criminal justice system.

Terrorism can be measured in many ways, in the scale of destruction, the lives it claims, or in the story of a single person who survived it.

For Amy Down's that story began far from bombs or national headlines.

She lived in Oklahoma City, though it hadn't been part of her plan.

I had plunked out of college because I couldn't pass a math class.

My sister lived in Oklahoma City, and she said, you know, you just need a fresh start, come move here, and so I did.

A move offered a change of scenery.

Amy still had to figure out what came next, starting with how to support herself.

With my amazing math skills.

I thought I would apply for a job as a teller at this credit union that was inside the federal building in downtown Oklahoma City.

Amy got the job.

Her new office was located in the Alfred pi Mura Building in downtown Oklahoma City, a neighborhood that at the time didn't exactly buzz with energy.

It was a federal building.

It kind of looks like nineteen seventies or sixties, even orange, a lot of orange, and I was on the third floor of this nine story building, just very plain building.

Inside it housed a patchwork of federal offices and services.

Social Security was on the first floor.

There was hud ATF a law enforcement agency secret service.

We had a daycare on the second floor.

My office was on the third floor, front and center of the building, at just a few feet from the front glass windows.

Amy gradually moved her way up.

I had worked as a teller for many years and had just gotten the job in the Visa credit card department, hosting credit card payments and working up loan applications for people who wanted a credit card.

After years of feeling stuck in college disappointments, her life was starting to move forward.

Until Wednesday, April nineteenth, nineteen ninety five.

Amy remembers it like it was yesterday.

It was a really beautiful spring morning, and I was super excited because I was getting ready to move into my very first house.

She clocked in early.

Her official workday began at eight am.

I was running around talking to all my friends at work, showing them pictures of the house, just super excited.

Also, there was Amy's best friend Sonya.

She was getting ready to go to her first supervisor meeting.

She was showing us what she had picked out to wear.

She had picked out a power suit.

It was supposed to be this bold color that it exuded confidence, but she had picked a bright yellow suit.

So she was suddenly having some panic that, in her words, I just looked like a big old yellow sunflower.

And so we were all telling her she looked great, She's gonna do awesome.

You know, go to the meeting.

You got this.

The energy in the room was upbeat, friends supporting each other, sharing small moments before the day settled in.

So I headed off to my desk.

We'll begin working.

One of my coworkers, who was seven months pregnant, sat down right beside me to ask me something, and I was signing on my computer and doing a couple of things before I turned to say, hey, what do you need.

I'm not sure if the words ever even came out of my mouth or not.

That's when the bomb went off.

It was this extremely loud roaring in my head that was so loud it was just distorted.

I couldn't even really make out the sound, and I could hear screaming all around and this popping noise.

I thought maybe I had been shot in the back of the head.

The terror mounted from there.

And I could feel a rushing sensation like I was falling.

Then all of a sudden, everything was quiet.

There was no more screaming, no more noise.

Everything was pitch black, and I could not move.

That had fallen three floors, was buried under about ten feet of brubble, upside down, still in my desk chair.

I couldn't move and I couldn't see anything.

Amy was alive, at least for the moment.

The third and the fourth floors broke off and I fell with the rubble.

But those floors wedged in a way that it protected me.

They formed a V and I somehow was wedged in it, and the rubble filled in around it and everything.

But somehow I was in a pocket that was protected.

The silence around her was.

I was screaming for help, but there was no answer, no reply.

I was trying to figure out maybe am I dead?

Am I alive?

Where am I?

Then through the rubble, a faint sound broke through.

I could hear a siren going off in the distance, and I remember thinking, hey, I'm still alive.

The shockwave of the blast was already rippling across the city.

It was a tremendous roar.

FBI Special Agent Barry Black felt it from miles away.

I was seven linear miles from downtown Oklahoma City.

It registered three point two on the Richter scale, like an earthquake.

Whatever had happened downtown was serious enough to trigger a federal response.

My pager went off, and the encrypted FBI radio in my vehicle it started to chatter.

But a large vehicle boorn ied was not the first thought, so we were told federal building had been damaged, a plane crash or a gas main explosion.

Barry knew the area well.

He'd been there since he'd entered the Bureau as a field agent, starting with fraud investigations and financial crimes, but he'd always wanted to be closer to the action.

He soon got his wish.

His first major deployment had been the Branch Davidian standoff in Waco, Texas, which you heard about at the top of this episode.

I was in the compound as the firefighters were putting out that blaze.

Once things settled down, I saw a new group come in that I didn't recognize I saw.

I asked one of them, what do you guys do?

He said, well, we're FBI bomb technicians.

They're only about two hundred and twenty at any one time in the world, and I was fascinated.

After returning to Oklahoma City, Barry moved from money cases to bombs.

I was able to get into the Hazard's Device's school in nineteen ninety four, and it was fifty three weeks after I finished bomb school that the Muraor Building was bombed.

That was my first bombing case.

As soon as he got the call, a feeling of dread to go over Barry.

He knew the Federal building all too well.

My wife, she was a federal employee and she was in the building.

I didn't know where she was.

So before nine point thirty, I pulled my little Olsmobile up on the curb as close as I could get without getting into the debris field.

It was obviously there had been an explosion.

It was work, yes, but at the moment it was also his family.

Before he could do anything else, Barry needed to find his wife.

As I started that walk about the perimeter, I was looking for her.

I asked one of the court security officers if he had seen her, and he said, oh, yeah, I've seen her.

She's fine.

It took more than an hour before he actually heard from her.

She paged me and had left a message that she had left the mirror building at nine o'clock.

The blast was at nine oh two.

A mere two minutes from death.

There are churches on either side, she said.

She remembered the church bells were ringing nine o'clock.

She drove right in front of the bomb, got over to I thirty five.

When the detonation occurred and the overpressure moved her car.

She was okay.

Others weren't so lucky.

Barry's thoughts shifted to the work he had in front of him.

Almost immediately.

He could see the unique signature of explosives.

When there's a detonation, the atmosphere is compressed, it sort of pushes everything out spherically, and the cars in the parking lot that were burning had been pushed back from that overpressure.

The street signs had been wrapped around the poles they were on.

The magnitude of this case was apparent from the beginning.

The scale of the destruction was shocking.

It was like something I had never seen before.

Clearly it was a large vehicle born ied truck bomb.

There was a thirty two foot crater in front of what was left of the building.

It's a nine story building which is effectively gone.

The back wall and most of the east and west walls were still standing, but the building was gutted.

Fires were burning across the street the thermal effect of a device that large set cars on fire.

Three hundred buildings in the shrounding area had been damaged.

Glass was broken in about a twelve block radius.

It was unbelievable.

There were walking, wounded people trapped in the building.

The building was unstable, and in those early moments, absolute chaos.

The people come first, right, so search and rescue, firefighters.

They were getting people out anyway they.

Could, people like Amy, who was literally suspended upside down in the rubble.

It was about forty five minutes before I heard voices and I heard a man saying, split up, let's look for the daycare babies.

I started screaming, and he said, I hear you, I hear you, child.

How old are you?

And I remember kind of not answering right away because I thought if I told him I was twenty eight, he wasn't going to come get me, but I said, I'm sorry, I'm twenty eight.

He said that's okay, and he starts screaming.

We have a live one.

We have a live one.

He said, we can't see you.

We have to follow this sound of your voice.

Stay with us.

Amy kept calling out, desperately hoping they'd reach her in time, but the building was extremely unstable, still claiming lives even as rescue efforts began.

Police officer good friend of mine.

He was in the building talking to a man that had been trapped.

There's a big semicircular bite that was taken right out of the middle.

He was talking to him across that chasm and said, hey, we're going to get a ladder.

We're going to put it across.

We'll come and get you.

As he's having that conversation, more debris felt he killed the man he was talking to.

No one was safe, including first responders.

There was a nurse that self deployed.

She came on her day off entered the building, was killed by falling debris.

Amy kept calling.

I kept talking and he got closer and my right hand was sticking out of the side of the rebel pile.

So I could wave that hand around a little bit, but that was it.

I could not move my hands.

I couldn't move anything, and they came across my hand.

Rescue felt just seconds away.

I thought, one, two, three, he's going to pull me up and out.

But that isn't what happened.

I heard a lot of commotion, people screaming and yelling there's another bomb, there's another bomb, Get out now.

One man was yelling, there's another bomb.

It's going to be worse than the first.

Let's go, and they were very panic.

Amy felt hope slipping away.

I then realized what the situation was, and my rescuers were trying to talk over all this, saying Amy, we need to get some more hydraulic equipment.

We're going to be right back.

But I could hear I knew.

I just told him my name over and over again, and to tell my family I love them because I knew this was it.

So with that they were.

Gone alone in the dark, the silence began to feel final.

That was the worst part, the moment when I realized my life was over and I was only twenty eight, thinking I've never even lived and I'm getting ready to die, and I began experiencing basically what you would describe as life flashing before your eyes.

As Amy greeb for the life she thought she'd never know, her mind began to race.

All of a sudden with this realization that it's over, this is it.

I was just thinking about if I had a second chance, how my life would be different.

And I wished I would have been more intentional and lived with purpose, and really regretting some relationships that I had let fall by the wayside.

I was wishing that I had stayed closer to friends and family.

Amy's will to live took over.

I was praying and begging God for this another chance.

It just felt too soon for it to all be over.

I remember resigning myself to the fact that, you know, okay, the sit this is it.

You know, just praying, and I remember even singing what is sing?

It was just a praise and worship song that we used to sing growing up at church, and I felt peace.

No second bomb went off, Rescue workers returned.

They came right back after that second bomb, scared and continued working.

Digging through whatever was keeping her trapped.

I knew there was an emergency position on standby talking about imputating my leg.

I was upside down in the remopile so that my leg was at the top.

That's how they could see the leg.

So I started telling them, hey, if you guys need to cut my leg off, if you need to cut something off, you need to do it.

As her desperation grew, first responders were made level headed.

Finally they said, okay, we're going to count the third pull.

This is probably going to hurt.

They came to three, and they pulled, and I came out from into the rubble for the first time, and it did hurt.

Every nerve came alive at that point, but for the first time I was free.

As she emerged, the shock was just beginning.

I could look around and I remember thinking, this isn't real.

I'm in a movie.

This is not real.

I could not believe what I was seeing with my eyes.

It was just utter destruction, just complete war zone.

As she tried to comprehend what she was seeing, Amy was taken from what was left up the building.

They put me on the back of a gurney and took me out of the back of what was once the building.

I remember looking up at the sky and it had been this beautiful spring morning earlier.

A morning that now felt like another lifetime.

Everything had changed.

It looked like it was the middle of winter.

It was completely dark gray, it was starting to rain.

It was cold.

But I will never forget taking that first breath of fresh air.

I remember promising God, I'll never live my life the same.

A federal office building in Oklahoma City lies in ruins tonight, and here's the very latest.

At least twenty six people were killed.

That includes twelve children trapped inside a daycare center.

But the death toll is expected to swell because there were still three hundred people unaccounted for.

Amy Downs had miraculously survived, but the trauma had just begun.

There were quite a few people who did not make it that were near me.

Rescuers were overwhelmed as they raced against the clock.

Lives hung in the balance.

They faced impossible choices.

There was a victim who was in the building with her kids and mom, All of them had been killed.

She was trapped and this doctor had to amputate her leg with no anesthesia just to extricate her.

He had to finish that procedure with his pocket knife because his tools had become so dull.

It was a horrific scene.

All this in the first hours after the bombing.

Sirens wailed as Amy was taken to the hospital.

Rescuers were still pulling survivors from the wreckage and recovering the debt.

At the same time, investigators were already unseene trying to answer the question at the forefront of everyone's mind, who did this and how?

There were over a million, eight thousand man hours expended during the course of this investigation.

A lot of it happens at the same time, so we had teams of people from all over the country, highly trained urban search and rescue folks, bomb techs, each working there on discipline.

One of the investigators who arrived to help wasn't even in the same time zone when the bomb went off.

I was in Sakura, Mexico, to duplicate and test the ninety three Trade Center device.

If that voice sounds familiar, it's because Dave Williams, a former FBI examiner, was in our last episode.

He was one of those tasked with investigating the nineteen ninety three bombing of the World Trade Center that April morning.

Dave's assignment was controlled detonation in a test field, but within minutes he was headed to the real thing, and the order came from the top.

We are sending the world's finest investigators to solve these murders.

Let there be no room for doubt.

We will find the people who did this.

When we do, justice will be swift, certain, and severe.

Bill Clinton, who was the president at the time, said Dave Williams.

He said, I want him to run this one.

Not too often that you're being handpicked by the President of the United States to run an investigation.

Right as first responders continue to go through the wreckage, law enforcement's strong response was clear.

The United States will not tolerate it, and I will not allow the people of this country to be intimidated by evil cowards.

These people are killers.

Dave got to work as soon as he arrived.

The devastation was obvious, but within it we're also clues.

We ended up parking about five or six blocks away and had to walk in because of the debris that was all over the road.

That's when I start formulating what was my device, what kind of explosives.

On the walk in, there was a taxicab garage that was completely collapsed from ground vibration.

As he surveyed the scene, Dave began to identify the bomb itself.

It would help direct the investigation.

I said, looks to be about four thousand pounds of an anphotype explosive, So was ammonium nitrate fertilizer with fuel oil.

That in itself is an indicator.

They had to gather this fertilizer, so that's going to leave a trail somewhere and you just can't put a match to enlighten it or put a fuse in it.

So you need another explosive in there to initiate the detonation of the anfo itself.

And it's given our investigators something to look for it.

They also began finding small pieces of blue and white plastic.

They were identified as barrel parts about fifty gallons, and the energetic event appeared on those plastic fragments to come from the inside to the outside.

So logic dictates that the explosives were placed in barrels in a V formation to tackle that corner of the mirror building.

While Dave was focusing on the bomb, Barry was working on what carried it.

Early after the blast, a deputy sheriff called me over to what I call the rear end differential housing or the rear axle of a truck.

It was a critical fine.

Reports say the FBI is putting together pieces of a truck they think carried the bomb.

Some parts were found two blocks away.

It was twisted.

It weighed about three hundred pounds and was blown about six hundred feet.

It had clearly been very close to the seat of the blast.

This deputy wiped some grease away and revealed an alpha numeric string, which is a confidential vehicle identification number.

With the then number in hand, the investigation kicked into high gear.

It was traced to Ford.

Ford said they had built it for Right Rental company.

Writer Rental said that was one of their trucks and it belonged to a place called Elliott's Body Shop in Junction City, Kansas.

So we sent folks to Junction City.

At the body shop, the owner gave them more than they'd expected.

Eldon Elliott said.

A man called in said his name was Robert Kling, and he wanted to run truck.

Mister Elliot said, well, you have to come in and give a deposit.

So a guy claiming to be Robert Kling came in the next day paid cash in full for a rental.

Now they needed to put up face to the name.

Back then, there were no digital cameras, so we sent a sketch artist up and got a sketch of who.

We knew to be John Doe number one.

Soon came another lead.

Elliot recalled when this Robert Kling came to pick up the truck, there was a second man in the shop.

We got a description of him, and that's where we got the sketches of John Doe one, John Doe two and the name of Kling, and things really.

Took off at that point.

Authority's next turn to the public for help.

There's the international wanted poster, the Faces of Terror.

These are the two men suspected of renting the truck that was used in the bombing.

There's a number to call if you recognize them, and there's a two million dollar reward if they're caught and convicted.

Their respond was immediate and overwhelming.

Both of those sketches resulted in over fifteen thousand individual leads of people thinking they recognized them.

Most went nowhere, but among the tips came a name that would soon be infamous.

One call particularly came in from a security guard in upstate New York.

They said he recognized number one as a man named Tim McVeagh that he had worked with at Burned Security.

A second win Is also identified Timothy McVeigh as the man in the John Doe sketch.

A lady at the Dreamland Motel she said, yep, I recognize number one as well.

He was driving an old yellow car signed in under the name of Timothy mcveay.

He rented the room number twenty five and was there by himself used an address in Decora, Michigan, and she said I later saw him in a large yellow rider truck.

Within hours, the man believed to have rented the truck that carried in the bomb had been identified.

The dots were being necked it fast and furiously.

So as it turns out, the Chinese takeout place had delivered Moo Goo Guy pan to room number twenty five, but it was delivered to a man named Robert Kling, so we knew now that Kling and McVay were probably the same person.

Then came another stroke of luck.

On an otherwise dark, dark day that.

Night, the night of April twenty, we did what's called an offline in cic search of computer search through an FBI database to see if anybody in law enforcement had had any contact with somebody named Timothy McVay, and we discovered that a Oklahoma Highway Patrol trooper had stopped and arrested a man named Tim McVay about ninety minutes after the bombing, about ninety miles north of the city, and he was sitting in jail in Perry, Oklahoma.

The response was swift.

We got a helicopter and flew up, put the helicopter down on the highway.

The car was still there, so I seized that yellow mercury.

When the rest of the team took custody of McVay.

A case that could have stretched for months or even years was coming together in less than forty eight hours, and we.

Were looking for him by name the early morning of the twenty first.

You know, it took ten years to find Ben Lauden.

I think we would have found him eventually, but the fact that he was sitting in jail ninety miles from us was fortuitous.

Charges were prepared and filed.

Director Free and I have just spoken with the President and I am pleased to announce that one of the individuals believed to be responsible for Wednesday's terrible attack on the murror of federal building in Oklahoma City has been arrested.

Timothy McVeigh, aged twenty seven, who we previously call John Doe Number one, the man with the light brown crew cut, was arrested by local authorities on a traffic violation about sixty miles from Oklahoma City on Wednesday morning.

McVeigh didn't have a criminal record or known ties to a extreamist groups.

On paper, he wasn't an obvious aspect, but soon the pieces started to click together.

As we dug a little deeper, we found that he had actually been interviewed at Waco.

He was handing out anti government bumper stickers and such, which is obviously his First Amendment right to do.

Not illegal, but it was telling His presence at Waco placed him in the orbit of anti government sentiment that could have potentially led to this horrific act.

Investigators dug deeper into McVeigh.

That Decker, Michigan address turned out to be a farmhouse belonging to Terry Nichols and James Nichols.

We executed a search warrant up in Decker, talked to all the neighbors.

They said, yep, Terry Nichols is a good friend of a man named Tim McVay.

They're up here a lot.

We heard explosions on the farm.

Simultaneously.

The deep dive into McVeigh showed he had been in the military, so we looked at all of his army buddies, included Terry Nichols and a man named Michael forty A.

Clues from the farm in mcveigh's passed tightened the focus of the investigation.

At that point, Terry Nichols was a person of interest and we had him under what we call overt surveillance.

We wanted him to know he was being watched.

The pressure worked.

He actually surrendered himself about three o'clock the same day we arrested.

McVeigh.

Had seen that coverage for.

A crime that shook the nation.

The suspects hadn't gone far and they hadn't been hard to find.

With both men in custody, the question became, where did they get the materials that were able to level a building.

We executed a search warrant at Terry nichols home in Harrington, Kansas.

Dave was there when they swept through the house lo and behold.

In Terry Nichols's master bedroom at his farm in Kansas, in an ash tray is a receipt from mid co Op where it says fifty pounds with X.

Number of dollars referring to fifty pound bags of fertilizer going to co op.

They said, yeah, that's for two thousand pounds of ammonium nitrate fertilizer, and it was like the Kinzu knife commercial.

The clerk there said, but wait, that's not all.

I have another receipt for another two thousand pounds, So.

That's four thousand pounds the estimated size of the bomb.

Of course that's only half the equation, but we also need the fuel to make.

AFO, and that piece two didn't take long to uncover.

We found a prepaid calling card and you could almost match the Yellow Pages to calls to chemical companies and barrel companies.

They had purchased nitromethane, which is racecar fuel, and Enus Texas.

They posed as motorcycle racers, so they had the fuel, They had the ammonium nitrate in about the proportions we anticipated, but.

They still needed one more compan to complete the bomb and folk.

It does not want to explode very readily.

It needs what's called a booster.

So you can make a high explosive booster, which is very dangerous, or you can steal it.

And if you are in the business of say mining or run a quarry, if your explosives are lost or stolen, you have to report those.

I went through the stolen explosive reports around Harrington, Kansas and found that Martin Marriyett, a quarry, had reported a theft of about five hundred pounds of high explosives the previous fall.

Local authorities said that.

The explosive magazine had originally had five padlocks on it, and four the locks were taken during the theft, but one had been dropped and that secured his evidence by the local police.

So we secured that lock and sent it to our laboratory along with a drill and some drill bits that we recovered at Terry Nichols home.

And forensics gave them the answer they were waiting for.

The tool mark examiner took that cruttle bit and was able to make an impression and a piece of lead and identify it as a positive match to the drill bit that drilled that lock to the exclusion of all other drill bits in the known universe at pretty damning evidence.

It was a match.

The investigation into Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols uncovered a mountain of evidence at lightning speed, and while law enforcement was building their case, rescue crews worked around the clock, first to save the living, then to recover the dead.

The incredible devastation would be with them for the rest of their lives.

For Dave Williams, there was one portion of the blast site that he will never forget.

I walked into the MCA caddy corner from the Murrow building, walked down a hallway and I could see blood spatter from four feet down.

It was a daycare center, and I walked into that room, fifteen foot tall, glass windows, half inch thick fragments everywhere.

In that room, I see teddy bears with glass stuck in the chocolate melcaf open cookies on the table.

That comes back to me quite often.

Incredibly, every child who'd been in the YMCA survived, but other children who'd been in the Murrow building did not.

Nineteen children were killed in the bombing, most of them had been in its daycare center.

The overall toll was staggering.

One hundred and sixty eight people died, among them federal workers, military veterans, parents, grandparents, and the children.

It remains the deadliest act of domestic terrorism in American history.

In the days that followed, Oklahoma City began to grasp how much they had lost.

Families stood vigil at hospitals while other people grieved.

For survivor Amy downs the terror of being trapped beneath the rubble would actually pale in comparison to the pain that came next.

The hardest was the grief losing all these people and not understanding you know why I was still there.

As the days passed, the names of those that had survived and died continued to grow.

Many remained unaccounted for.

Loved ones of the missing looked to Amy and other survivors for answers.

The phone calls from the family members asking if I remember what they were wearing that day at work because they were trying to identify their bodies and find them.

There was a sea of them, but I do remember one in particular was one of my friends that I had been showing pictures of the house too that morning, her family called asking if I remember what she had on, and I could not remember what she had on, and I had looked at her.

I was talking to her about my house, but I didn't pay attention to what she had on.

And that really was very hard.

Amy lost co workers and some of her closest friends.

My best friend at work, Sonya, in her bright yellow suit you know, was killed.

She had two year old and three year old baby girls at home, and Robin, who was seven months pregnant, sitting next to me, was killed.

As the shock and sorrow took over Oklahoma City, its citizens found strength in each other.

There was kindness that was coming out.

There was community surfacing.

I remember the day I found out they found me his body.

This was eight days after the bobbing.

I was crying.

It was the middle of the day.

I looked out of the window of this hospital.

On the highway below.

Every car was driving with their headlights on.

It was such a.

Small expression, but also so powerful because of what was going on behind the scenes.

All the people that were coming forward to help, to donate, putting the differences aside, to come together to unite in the face of evil.

We called the Oaklahoma standard.

It was pretty cool.

A mid the morning, Amy found a reason to keep moving.

The building may have collapsed, but the institutions inside it needed.

To go on the handful of us that did survive, it was very important to us that this little credit union continued.

We felt like that if our low credit union merged or went away, that it meant evil one.

So we were determined that we were going to come back strong.

But Amy and the small group that remained would have to start from scratch.

They had no building and barely a functioning staff, but what they did have was a mission and the drive.

The support they received from their commune unity was incredible.

We didn't have any employees because the handful that were left were either hospitalized or traumatized.

So another competitor credit union called and asked what I needed help with, and I said, I need the visa payments picked up.

They need to be posted, you know, And they just started helping me.

We opened up forty eight hours later in a competitor's office with not even our employees, but with other employees from other competitor credit unions.

So the credit union industry showed up for us in a big way.

In those early months work offered refuge from the grief.

Every day the office would be filled with people from the building coming to the Credit Union just to see other people.

So it sort of became a meet up place to connect and get news of how people were doing, and what hospitals people were in, and things like that.

We were working through our grief together as a.

Community, and the Credit Union they'd rebuilt, it flourished.

Not only do we survive it, we actually came back stronger.

We really did.

While survivors like Amy navigated their way towards some version of normal, federal prosecutors were already assembling the early outlines of their case.

Justice wouldn't bring back what was lost, but it would speak for those who no longer could.

The arraignment occurred just two days after the bombing.

McVeigh wore an orange jumpsuit and showed no emotion.

The charges were read aloud malicious destruction of federal property by means of an explosive, a capital offense.

He pled not guilty.

The man accused of killing one hundred and sixty eight people had been caught, but his motivation was still unclear.

To understand Timothy mcveigh's resentment and rage and why he chose the Murrow building.

You have to rewind.

Mcdagh left Desert Storm and decided that he wanted to go special forces with the Army, and the Army said, listen, you're a good soldier, but psychological profile suggests you wouldn't be a good team player.

So he took an honorable discharge and was not gamefully employed and blamed that snub on the US government.

That grievance deepened as national headlines brought new fuel with events like Ruby Ridge.

There was a man, Randy Weaver, who had a warrant outstanding, and there was a US Marshall's team there to affect and arrest.

There was a gunfight, It was decided that the FBI should come in, so hostage rescue team was deployed, and there was an errant shot by an HRT sniper that inadvertently killed Randy Weaver's wife, which of course is horrible.

That was a major event for some people that lean in certain directions.

Then there was Waco.

Waco was kind of the final straw for McVeigh.

To McVeigh and others who shared his anti government perspective.

Ruby Ridge and Waco were proofed the federal government was willing to kill its own citizens, and after each incident, is belief that armed resistance was justified and necessary multiplied.

He blamed the FBI for the death of the children in the Davidian compound, So he wants to target the FBI office in Oklahoma City, but it was a standalone building and it wasn't a good target.

So since ATF was involved with Waco, he looked for their building and found that it was a much better target.

But that reasoning only accounted for a part of his planning.

When McVeigh was in the army, he became disenchanted with the mission.

There was a book called The Turner Diaries, which is a work of fiction, but it starts with a large vehicle born ied destroying FBI headquarters, killing a bunch of people, and starting a revolution.

That book meant a lot to him.

He would recommend it to friends.

The Turner Diaries was the same book that inspired the orders Robert Matthews to act in the nineteen eighties, and it now guided McVeigh down to the location, the timing, and even the victims.

He knew the daycare center was there.

He knew ATF was directly above where he's going to park the truck, and Dea was up there, and he said the kids were a bonus being that close to ATF.

They weren't collateral damage.

It was intentional.

McVeigh believed this single act of mass murder would spark something even larger.

The primary goal was to start a revolution, which failed.

I mean he destroyed the building, he killed one hundred and sixty eight people, but he failed in what he wanted to do, which is violent overthrow of our government.

Two years later, the trial against Timothy McVeigh would be one of the most high profile domestic terrorism cases in American history.

The trial was moved from Oklahoma City to Denver, Colorado.

There was a concern that finding an impartial jury there would be nearly impossible.

After weeks of testimony, it took jurors less than twenty four hours to reach their verdict.

Timothy McVeigh was found guilty on all accounts.

Terry Nichols was tried separately and also convicted.

He was sentenced to life in prison.

Amy Downs wanted to avoid the trial at all costs.

The anxiety and the reminders that brought with it were too much, but when she heard the jury had reached a verdict, she couldn't stay away.

Even though I had said I didn't want anything to do with the trial, something happened inside of me when I heard the verdict came in and I ran ran from my hotel to that court in downtown Denver so that I could be in the courtroom.

And I heard that verdict and it was so powerful.

I never could have imagined that it would have been that powerful to hear that guilty verdict, but it was.

It was like a collective audible sigh of relief, like somebody had let air out of attire.

Is the only way I had describe it.

And we went out of the side try to avoid the media of the building, to the Catholic church next door.

That was like our safe room.

Then the prosecution team did not take any interviews.

They came straight into this room and we're all just It's a mixture of applause, laughter, crying, and the priests come in with champagne on platters.

I'll never forget it.

It was like a very difficult chapter had just been finished.

The jury recommended the death penalty.

Timothy McVeigh was executed by lethal injection in June of two th and one.

It marked the first federal execution in the United States in nearly four decades.

Even until the very end, McVeigh showed no remorse.

With the trial behind her, amy found a new lease on life.

It started with a blank sheet of paper.

I wrote down, I want to go back to school.

It really bothered me that I had not gotten that degree.

So my first step was find a college that will take my zero point five zero grade point average.

So I had to find a college and take a bunch of basket weaving classes to get my grade point average up so that I could go to a reputable college so that I could continue my education.

Eventually got my degree in organizational leadership and eventually got my master's.

But the place where it all began, her Credit Union, was still at the center of her life.

The question now wasn't just whether she could rise within it, it was whether she could lead it.

When my CEO was getting ready to retire, the board of directors had been thinking about hiring somebody from the outside because I'd never been a CEO, and they also remembered me as that twenty one year old teller who couldn't balance a cash stower.

So I'm trying to prove to them that I'm now a grown woman who has the education, who has everything, and I can do it.

Never forget the day they called me into the boardroom and they said, we've made a decision.

We are not going to go externally.

You've been selected to become the next CEO.

And so, with my current CEO's support in all of her mentorship, she left and then I stepped into the role.

That is an amazing accomplishment to me, Like I'm smiling ear to ear just for that, and I'm not negating all the things out led you there, but that's just amazing.

And especially because I still don't do math very well, I still like math.

We have more in common than I thought.

Amy had reached the top of the ladder.

In the years that followed, she decided to share her story.

I wrote a book called Hope is a Verb, My Journey of Impossible Transformation.

And the reason that I wrote it was because I remember thinking, maybe this is sort of that way that I can help someone and it will encourage them to know that they're going to get through their situation, and not only get through it, but it's possible to get through it and actually have a life that they love again.

One day.

You may not have the situation in my mind that's in the news and is dramatic, but all of us at some point face something that we feel victimized by and we have to figure out how to move forward.

Amy hopes to help others find their own in her strength.

There is a Greek philosopher named ethic Titus.

Epic Titius is given credit for the quote, it's not so much what happens to you, but how you choose to respond to it that matters.

And that is true because we are all going to have things happen in our life that are out of our control, that are bad.

But you always have control of a response.

Even in the moments where I was buried alive, I couldn't move, I couldn't do anything.

I had my mind, I could think, I could get my mind on something different.

I could control that.

Next time.

On Law and Order Criminal Justice System.

Government officials say they have uncovered a terror plot to attack New York City's John F.

Kennedy International Airport.

When Russell Lfritez talked about the plot, he just had this passion in his voice that gave you chills that he really wanted to do something.

He just had this hatred on the edge of JFK.

There's tanks and tanks of aviation fuel.

A primary motivation was there was a conflict going on between the United States and the Musslim world and.

There would be something that was bigger than nine to eleven.

Law and Order Criminal Justice System is a production of Wolf Entertainment and iHeart Podcasts.

Our host is Anna Sega Nicolaze.

The show was written by Cooper Mall, executive produced by Dick Wolf, Elliot Wolf and Stephen Michael at Wolf Entertainment on behalf of iHeart Podcasts.

Executive producers Trevor Young and Matt Frederick, with supervising producer Chandler Mays and producer Jesse Funk.

This season is executive produced by Anna Sega Nicolazi.

Our researchers are Luke Stantz and Carolyn Tolmidge.

Editing and sound designed by Trevor Young and Jesse Funk.

Original music by John O'Hara, Original theme by Mike Post with additional music by Steve Moore and additional voice over by me Steve Zernkelton Special.

Thanks to Fox five in New York for providing archival material for the show.

For more podcasts from My Heart in Wolf Entertainment, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your favorite shows.

Thanks for listening.