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

by Wendy S. Painting

Colbern, the son of a U.S. Army Reserve Colonel and Department of Corrections dentist, was remembered by his former classmates and high school physics teacher in Oxnard, California as a highly intelligent, nerdy loner who, even as a teenager, was obsessed with guns, snakes, chemistry and bomb making. One high school friend recounted how Colbern, whom he said had a hard time controlling his temper during their Dungeons and Dragons games, would often practice building and detonating ammonium nitrate bombs in the desert. After graduating high school in 1978, Colbern attended UCLA where he studied chemistry. Dan Mauck (name changed) told the FBI that he met Colbern in 1984, when they were both graduate students at UCLA. Although they became friends, Mauck began to suspect Colbern was stealing chemicals from the lab, including ammonium nitrate and told his supervisor and other professors about it. They did nothing and even warned him to “leave it alone.” Mauck said Colbern was “very anti-Semitic” and believed Jews ran the world as part of a U.N. conspiracy. A man he worked with later said, “He was a Nazi.” Colbern’s uncle told the FBI that his nephew was a paranoid schizophrenic who was capable of participating in a bombing and, in fact, he had always worried that someday his nephew would end up being a “mad bomber.”