In Search of John Doe No. 2: The Story the Feds Never Told About the Oklahoma City Bombing
by James Ridgeway
Mother Jones
Federal officials insist that the Oklahoma City bombing case was solved a decade ago. But a Salt Lake City lawyer in search of his brother’s killers has dug up some remarkable clues—on cross-dressing bank robbers, the FBI, and the mysterious third man.
KENNEY TRENTADUE was driving a 1986 Chevy pickup when he was pulled over at the Mexican border on his way home to San Diego on June 10, 1995. He was dark-haired, 5 feet 8 inches, and well muscled, a former athlete who had picked up construction work after he quit robbing banks. His left forearm bore a dragon tattoo. Highway patrol officers ran his license and found that it had been suspended, and that he was wanted for parole violations. After two months in jail in San Diego, Trentadue was shipped, on August 18, to a prison in Oklahoma City for a hearing on the parole violations. The move placed Kenney in close proximity to the most famous federal prisoner in America. In one way or another, it also sealed his fate.
Four months earlier, another car had been stopped by a state trooper, some 80 miles north of Oklahoma City. It was 10:20 a.m. on April 19, 1995, and much of the country was still waking up to the enormity of what had happened earlier that morning, when an explosives-laden Ryder truck gutted the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma City, killing 168 people. The driver of the 1977 Mercury Marquis was arrested for carrying a concealed weapon and driving without tags. He gave his name as Timothy McVeigh. Two days later McVeigh was identified as the John Doe No. 1 wanted in the bombing, and fellow antigovernment extremist Terry Nichols turned himself in to police. They were indicted on August 10, and federal authorities said they had their men. But there were many who didn’t buy the tidy closure.
A sprawling Great Plains town known for its tornadoes, Oklahoma City was already the center of a swirl of theories about the crime, all of them insisting that the two men could not have acted alone. Some refused to give up on the idea of Middle Eastern terrorists, speculating about a plot headed by Saddam Hussein; others suspected an inside job by the feds. Some simply stuck to the far more plausible conviction that there were coconspirators not yet apprehended. After all, immediately following the bombing, law enforcement had been searching furiously for a man whom numerous sources said they saw with McVeigh, and who by some accounts was seen walking away from the Ryder truck—the character whose police composite sketch became known around the world as John Doe No. 2. According to the police description, this man was about 5 feet 9, muscular, and dark-haired. By some accounts, he drove an older model pickup truck and had a dragon tattooed on his left forearm.
Read the rest of the article here.
Editor’s note from 911truth.org-
Thanks to Mother Jones for this excellent article, and for making the related documents available online at their site. Thanks also to James Ridgway (and research assistants) for this excellent investigating reporting. Oklahoma City … 9/11 … Jessica Lynch … Abu Ghraib … Patrick Tillman … anything else being covered up? A little more of this kind of muckraking would be welcome!
This morning, Amy Goodman conducted a brief interview with Jesse Trentadue and James Ridgway on Democracy Now!Transcript here.
Update 8/3: “Antiwar Radio: Scott Horton Interviews James Ridgeway”. Listen to mp3 here.
On this, the 13th anniversary of the tragic events of the Oklahoma City Bombing, Visibility 9-11 welcomes researcher, activist, and documentary film producer Chris Emery. On April 19, 1995 multiple bombs virtually destroyed the Alfred P. Murrah federal building in downtown Oklahoma City killing 169 men, women and children and wounded scores of others. Just as with the events of September 11th, 2001, the official story of what really happened in OKC has been proven to be a falsehood by Chris and his colleagues at the Oklahoma City Bombing Investigation Committee.
