April 30, 1995: Wife of Suspected Oklahoma City Bombing Conspirator Reassures Father-in-Law in Phone Conversation

Marife Nichols, the wife of suspected Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols (see April 30, 1995), is being held in FBI custody, ostensibly on a voluntary basis, though she will later contend she is being held against her will (see 3:15 p.m. and After, April 21-22, 1995). She is allowed to make phone calls. She calls Terry’s father Robert Nichols in Michigan, and has a conversation which is recorded by the FBI, apparently with her knowledge. Robert Nichols asks about his son James, currently in FBI custody as a third suspected conspirator (see April 25, 1995), along with his brother Terry and Timothy McVeigh (see April 21, 1995). Robert then asks Marife how she is doing, and how Nicole, the young daughter of Terry and Marife, is doing. She answers: “Oh, we’re doing fine. Everything is okay. I mean, they give us anything that we need here, and we’re fine.” She says she wants to return to her home country of the Philippines (see July - December 1990). “It would be a lot better for me to, uh, since you know I, I need to talk to my parents,” she says. “I wanted to go home, too. Uh, but I think they need to ask me a lot of, uh, questions about activities that we did ever since I got back here from Philippines.” Of her husband, she says: “I, I only talked to him once, on the telephone, and uh, he mainly just want me to go home. He, um, same as, as, you been watching the news?” Robert Nichols says he has, and she continues, “Yeah it’s, it’s all the same as, uh, James is, has, you know he’s just a material witness.” She asks if James has ever spoken to his father about any bombing plots, but Robert Nichols has no intention of passing along any potentially incriminating evidence against either of his sons. “No, it’s all news to me,” he says. Author Richard A. Serrano will later theorize that Marife is trying to flatter the FBI into letting her go with her repeated assurances that she and her daughter are being treated well. [Serrano, 1998, pp. 230-231]