Apr 99

Views expressed are those of the authors, not necessarily of the AFSC.

Revenge and hate is what resulted in the death of 167 people"

Excerpts from a talk by Murder Victims Families for Reconciliation member Bud Welch at a Human Rights Initiative lunch at the Kennedy School of Government in Cambridge, MA, March 16, 1999.

I'm going to tell you briefly about myself. I'm the third oldest of eight children, raised on a dairy farm in central Oklahoma. I've run a gasoline service station for 34 years. I lived a quiet, unassuming life until April 19, 1995 when my daughter Julie Marie was killed in the Oklahoma City Bombing....All my life, I had always opposed the death penalty. My entire family has, even going back to my grandparents....

Well, after Tim McVeigh bombed the Oklahoma City Federal Building, the rage, the revenge, the hate-you can't think of enough adjectives to describe what I felt like. I did change my mind about the death penalty. After McVeigh and Nichols had been charged -I mean, Fry the Bastards. We didn't need a trial, a trial was simply a delay. That was my feeling, that was my emotion. You've heard people speak of temporary insanity, and you've heard people trying to use it, lawyers try to use it in court. Temporary insanity is real, it exists, I can assure you. I've lived it-I lived about five weeks of it. You no doubt probably saw at some point McVeigh or Nichols being rushed from an automobile to a building, bulletproof vests on, and the reason that the police do this is because people like me will kill them....

I went down to the bomb site. Across the street there's an old American elm tree, the only living thing left there. All the survivors had been relocated, all the dead had been buried, and just one thing survived the bombing, and its that old American elm. Its said to have come up from a seedling about the turn of the century, about 1900. That tree is older than the state of Oklahoma.... But I went down and stood under that tree one cold day in January. I was watching the people walk the fence-there's a chain link fence that surrounds the footprint of the building....There's thousands of people who walk past every day. I kept looking at those people, just kind of watching them and I was in deep pain, because this was nine months after the bombing. I'm drinking too much, I'm smoking three packs of cigarettes a day....

But I had this anguish about what was going to happen. The trials hadn't even begun yet, and I went to asking myself, once they're tried and executed, what then? How's that going to help me? It isn't going to bring Julie back....I realized that its all about revenge and hate. And revenge and hate is why Julie and 167 others are dead today. That was McVeigh and Nichol's revenge and hate for the Federal Government, for Waco, for Ruby Ridge, whatever other cause they felt justified what they did. After I was able to get that revenge and hate out of my system, I made a statement to an Associated Press reporter one day, that I did not believe in the death penalty. This after a long conversation of bragging on my child, telling what a wonderful daughter she was, how close we were, but yet-in the same breath-I told her that I didn't want her killer killed. The reporter's moth_-it didn't fly open, but it was almost as if it had, because she couldn't imagine how I could be so close to this child and not want her killers killed....I guess I didn't realize it was that unique in this country to be a victim's family member and not want the killers executed....

I saw Bill McVeigh, Tim's father, on television a few weeks after the bombing....He was working in his flowerbed....I saw him look into the television camera for a few seconds, and I saw a deep pain in a father's eye that probably none of you could have even recognized. I could because I was living that pain....

[Later, Welch arranges to visit Bill McVeigh.] Anyway I went up and knocked on the door, he came to the door, and I introduced myself. I asked him, I said, "I understand that you have a large garden in your backyard," and that excited him. He said, "Oh, yeah, would you like to see it?" This just put relief all over me, because I knew this was gonna be some common ground. I knew what big gardens were all about, there was 10 of us in the family in Central Oklahoma, and we always had a big garden. I hoed gardens every year when I was a child. So, we spent the first half-hour in that garden getting to know one another. We went into the house, spent about an hour and a half in the house visiting at the kitchen table. His 23-year-old daughter Jennifer was there. As I walked in the kitchen I noticed a photograph I noticed this photo of Tim. I knew that I had to comment on it at some point, so finally I looked at it and I said, "God, what a good looking kid." And Bill says to me, "That's Tim's high school graduation picture." By Bill's own admission, he has a difficult time showing emotion, he has all his life, he told me that when we were in the garden. And then I saw a big tear roll out of his right eye. He's a big guy, he's about 6'2'', 6'3'', and I saw love in a father's eyes, at that moment, for his son, that was absolutely incredible. And I know without a doubt that Bill McVeigh loves his son more today that he did four years ago. Because we, as parents, have a way of loving our children more the more they need us....

Tim's guilt or innocence never came up, that was not my purpose in going there. I didn't have to have Bill McVeigh look me in the eye and say, "I'm sorry my son killed your daughter." I didn't have to hear that. But I was able to tell him that I truly understood the pain that he was going through, and that he-as I-was a victim of what happened in Oklahoma City....after our hour and a half long visit, I got up from the kitchen table and Jennifer came from the other end of the table, and gave me a hug, and we cried, and we sobbed, and I was able to hold her face in my hands and tell her, "Honey, the three of us are in this for the rest of our lives. And we can make the most of it if we choose. I don't want your brother to die. And I will do everything in my power to prevent it...."

When I got home I sat in the living room and sobbed, and sobbed, and made a total ass out of myself for an hour. I honestly did....But I have never felt closer to God in my life than I did at that moment, once I was through that sobbing, because I felt like there was this load taken completely off my shoulders....

These people-the people that are pro-death penalty-if you can get them privately, and if they will be honest with you, they'll admit that it is not a deterrent, that it really is all about a popularity poll. We shouldn't be killing people because of a popularity poll. In this country, we take on the easy ones, we kill the easy ones. That's all we kill are the easy ones. We put about 1% of the murderers on death row in this country, and those are mainly poor people. They're all poor. There's 159 people on death row in Oklahoma today. Not a one of those-not a single one-paid for their own defense....