Aberration in the Heartland of the Real: The Secret Lives of Timothy McVeigh

by Wendy S. Painting

A DOJ Inspector General’s (IG) inspection and Audit Report issued months earlier had strongly criticized the FBI’s Crime Laboratory for mishandling evidence in several high profile cases, including (but not limited to) the 1993 World Trade Center bombing, an assassination attempt on George H.W. Bush that same year, the 1995 investigation of ‘Unabomber’ Ted Kaczynski, and the Oklahoma City bombing. The IG initiated its investigation after the Supervisory Special Agent in the FBI Crime Lab, Frederick Whitehurst, PhD (considered the FBI’s most highly qualified bomb residue and explosives expert) went public with allegations about corrupt crime lab practices. The IG final report concluded, among other things, that the OKC bombing investigation was one of the most serious cases of evidence tampering that the IG had ever encountered and that the FBI crime lab had “repeatedly reached conclusions that incriminated the defendants without scientific basis.”78