Lori Fortier, one of the government's star witnesses against Timothy McVeigh, told a federal district court jury on Tuesday that one night in early October 1994, McVeigh sat in the living room of her trailer in Kingman, Ariz., and said he was going to blow up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City.
"He drew a diagram, just a box," she said, "and he filled the box with circles representing barrels."The box, she said, represented the truck he would park in front of the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building because "it was an easy target." And he said the bomb would be made from barrels filled with ammonium nitrate and anhydrous hydrazine, she testified. She said she remembered the names of the chemicals because McVeigh borrowed her dictionary the next day to look them up.
She also said McVeigh was angry at the federal government for the deaths of the Branch Davidians in the confrontation near Waco, Texas, and picked the Federal Building in Oklahoma City because he thought some of the law-enforcement agents involved in the Waco raid worked there.
Fortier has not spoken publicly before and is testifying under a grant of immunity at the trial of McVeigh, who faces conspiracy and murder charges in the destruction of the Federal Building in Oklahoma City on April 19, 1995. Fortier's husband was McVeigh's roommate in the Army and later one of his closest friends. Fortier has pleaded guilty to federal weapons charges and to failing to inform law enforcement officials about a bombing plot. He is expected to testify later in the trial.
The Fortiers also knew Terry Nichols, who has also been charged in the bombing and will be tried after McVeigh.
On Tuesday, as Lori Fortier answered questions from the lead prosecutor, Joseph Hartzler, she told the jury that Nichols had helped McVeigh commit several robberies to acquire money and materials for use in the bombing. But, she said, at the last moment McVeigh told her and her husband that, "Terry wanted out and Terry did not want to mix the bomb."
Speaking in a monotone and showing no emotion, Lori Fortier told the jury that McVeigh came to visit in March 1993.
"Waco had just started," she said, referring to the siege by federal law-enforcement agents at the Branch Davidian compound. "He was very upset. He thought it was wrong. He said the government should have walked up and knocked, not raided it."
In February 1994, Lori Fortier told the jury, McVeigh moved to a house near Kingman.
"One day, me and Michael went to Tim's home," she said. "He was finishing a pipe bomb. He asked us to go to the mountains to blow it off." The three of them went to Union Pass, hiked into the mountains, put the bomb under a boulder and set it off, she said.
Later that year, McVeigh was at the Fortiers' house when he said for the first time that he wanted to blow up a federal building but did not say which one. "I think Michael told him he was crazy," Lori Fortier testified.