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| Timothy McVeigh, Terry Nichols, and Ramzi Yousef (Part 6) |
| 2004-03-22 |
| I wrote this. Part 1, Part 2, Part 3, Part 4, Part 5. Terry Nichols’ and first wife Lana divorced during the year December 1989 (the divorce became final on December 18). As part of the divorce process, he and Lana liquidated their property, and he received about $100,000 as his share. In late November 1989 he flew to Cebu City in the Philippines, for a visit arranged by a marriage-broker agency. He spent about three weeks in Cebu City meeting women through the agency and also, according to Lana, "meeting potential business partners." He returned to Cebu City for about a week in November 1990 in order to marry Marife. (Lana Padilla, By Blood Betrayed, Harpers, 1995; details about property settlement on page 196; quote about business partners on page 150.) During these first two visits, when he had a large amount of cash at his disposal and was expressing a desire to establish a business partnership, he certainly might have attracted the attention of various people in Cebu City. In some cases this attention might have persisted through the following years, especially since he and Marife returned to Cebu City several times. A likely locus of such attraction was the Starglad International Lumber Company, the very name of which indicates an ambition for foreign business partners. Nichols had worked as a carpenter in the United States and therefore might have had some ideas related to dealing in lumber. Marife’s family lived in an apartment over Starglad and used that company’s office phone for its own phone calls. When Nichols was in the United States and wanted to talk Marife or her family, he would call that phone. Another likely locus was a Cebu City boarding house owned by Marife’s cousin Ernesto Malaluan. Nichols apparently lived there on occasions when he visited Cebu City, and he also called to that number from the United States. Another phone number that was called belonged to a Cebu City resident named Naneth D. Jaraive. Of course, when Marife was in the United States, she (not Terry) might have initiated some of these phone calls. Terry and Marife moved back to the Cebu City in January 1993 with the intention of staying there permanently. During the previous month he and Marife had visited Timothy McVeigh at the latter’s home in New York. At about the same time that Terry and Marife moved to the Philippines, McVeigh quit his security-guard job and began to make his own living entirely as a dealer at gun shows. As Nichols considered his own business future in Cebu City in January 1993, he certainly would have been particularly interested in exploring contacts and opportunities related to dealing in weapons in the Philippines. By that time, too, Terry had become very vocal in his criticism of the United States government. He had publicly renounced his US citizenship and had declared various US legal institutions to be profoundly illegitimate. Despite their intention to stay in the Philippines, Terry and Marife returned to the United States already in February, moving back in with Terry’s brother James on a farm in Decker, Michigan. There, in April 1993, they were joined by McVeigh. During that period a lot of experiments with home-made bombs were conducted on the farm. In December 1993, Terry and Marife moved to Las Vegas, Nevada, and they maintained a residence there until April 1994. One purpose for that move was for Terry to spend more time with his son Joshua, who lived there with Terry’s ex-wife Lana. Because of this proximity, Lana had some knowledge of Terry’s activities during that period. She recalled in her book (page 170) that Terry did not really work in Las Vegas. Instead he basically commuted from Las Vegas to Junction City, Kansas, where (as she understood) he was organizing some kind of business dealing in "military hardware." In fact, by March 1994 he was living and working full-time on a farm in Marion, Kansas, while Marife continued to live in Las Vegas. In April Marife joined Terry in Marion. By August 1, 1994, Lana was told, Terry had accumulated $12,000 and had decided to move permanently to Cebu City, to where Marife had by then already returned and enrolled in college. On that date Terry, therefore, Terry gave his farmer boss a one-month notice that he would quit that job on September 1 (By Blood Betrayed, page 171). Marife did move back to Cebu City, and after she left McVeigh moved in with Nichols for a while in August. During that visit, Nichols and McVeigh decided to start a business together, selling merchandise at gun shows. Their major product, McVeigh later said, would be bags of ammonium nitrate for use in the manufacture of home-made bombs. Somehow, it seems, Nichols’ intention to move permanently to Cebu City fit with his plan to start this bomb-supply business with McVeigh. Nichols did quit his farm job on September 1, but he did not emigrate immediately to join Marife in Cebu City. It seems that the initial delay was caused by an opportunity for him and McVeigh to steal a large amount of explosive materials from a quarry in Marion. They stored these materials at a storage business in Herington, Kansas. The selection of this particular storage business was apparently related to a personal acquaintance between Nichols and a woman named Helen May Mitchell, who helped manage the business as a secondary job. Her primary job was to manage accounting books for the Clark Lumber Company in Herington. Since Mitchell knew Nichols, the storeroom for the stolen explosive materials was apparently rented not by Nichols, but by McVeigh, using the pseudonym Shawn Rivers. (Richard Serrano, One of Ours: Timothy McVeigh and the Oklahoma City Bombing (NY: Norton, 1998), page 92). Keeping in mind that Nichols at that time intended to return soon to Cebu City, in particular to a family that lived on top of the Starglad International Lumber Company, his apparent interest in the Clark Lumber Company is intriguing. Along these same lines, it is interesting to note that earlier that year, McVeigh settled for a while in Kingman, Arizona, and asked his friend Michael Fortier, to arrange a job at a True Value Hardware store, where Fortier worked in the bookkeeping department. Responding to McVeigh’s request, Fortier arranged for McVeigh to work for the store, specifically in its lumber department. McVeigh worked there for several weeks and then quit and left town. Eventually on November 22, 1994, Nichols flew from Las Vegas to Cebu City. His ex-wife Lana drove him to the airport. Lana later recounted in her book (page 3) that as she drove her ex-husband to the airport in Las Vegas that day, she wondered about his frequent trips to Cebu City. At that moment it seemed to her that Terry had been traveling there about four times a year, sometimes while Marife was residing in the United States. She wondered about the purposes and costs of these trips, but refrained from asking him any questions about this subject. Later that same day, Nichols called her from Las Angeles, where the flight had a stop-over. He now informed her that he had tried to carry a couple of stun guns onto the airplane but had been caught. He could have placed these guns into his checked-in luggage but instead attempted to bring them onto the airplane in his carry-on luggage. The airplane crew did allow him to board but temporarily confiscated the stun guns, promising to return them after the airplane arrived in the Philippines. For some reason, Terry wanted Lana to hear this information before his flight left Las Angeles for the Philippines (ibid). Later, Lana interpreted a series of events preceding Terry’s departure to conclude that he expected to die in the near future. Joshua was very upset, after a conversation with Terry, that he would never see his father again. Terry also left some secret instructions with Lana that would enable McVeigh to take possession of a truck and of the contents of a local storeroom if McVeigh showed up in Terry’s absence. Lana’s interpretation is not necessarily correct, though. Perhaps, more simply, Terry thought he was moving to Cebu City permanently. He would not be in the United States when McVeigh blew up the Oklahoma City federal building on April 19, 1995, but he was leaving some resources to help McVeigh escape after that explosion. Nichols, I think, simply intended to avoid the expected (by him) subsequent attention as he stayed far away in Cebu City. During the several days before Lana drove Terry to the airport, he had stayed in her home. Every morning McVeigh called at 7 a.m. and talked with him over the phone. Immediately after Nichols flew away, these morning phone calls ceased. About three weeks later, though, on December 16, McVeigh called again and asked Lana whether Terry had returned from Cebu City. She answered that he hadn’t and that she didn’t have a phone number for Terry but did have a mailing address, which she gave to McVeigh. Based on that phone call, McVeigh apparently determined that Nichols very likely would not be in the United States on April 19. Within a couple days after that phone call, Lana later read, McVeigh began calling around to other acquaintances to arrange for some transportation help in the coming months. McVeigh now expected that Nichols would still be away in the Philippines on April 19. In the meantime there would be no telephone communication between McVeigh and Nichols, but McVeigh would have Nichols’ mailing address, which was a post box. |
| Posted by:Mike Sylwester |