June 28, 1996: Defense Moves to Throw Out Much of Evidence against Oklahoma City Bombing Co-Conspirator

Lawyers for accused Oklahoma City bombing conspirator Terry Nichols (see 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995, July 11-13, 1995, and August 10, 1995) ask the court to throw out evidence garnered against their client. Their reason: his wife, Marife Nichols, now claims she did not understand her legal rights at the time she let federal agents search her family’s home and car in Herington, Kansas. Investigators found a receipt for 2,000 pounds of ammonium nitrate, the fertilizer used in the bomb, bearing the fingerprints of Nichols’s co-conspirator Timothy McVeigh (see May 1, 1995), guns stolen in a robbery investigators believed was carried out to finance the bombing (see Before July 3, 1995), and other evidence. Nichols’s lawyer Michael Tigar says, “All consents obtained from Mrs. Nichols were tainted by oppression, coercion, intimidation, and duress.” Marife Nichols now says she spoke with FBI agents for about six hours once she and her husband went to the police station. She says she tried to cooperate with the agents because she wanted to end the questioning and go home. One of the agents, Eugene N. Thomeczek, “told me I had to tell the truth,” she says, and the other told her that if she answered, “Mr. Thomeczek will not ask questions again and again.” She says she could not go home, in part because her house was being searched, and later because she feared being harassed by reporters. She says she also wanted to retrieve $5,000 in currency, and nine gold and three silver coins she had hidden in the box springs of her mattress. All were kept in evidence and later returned to her. She and her daughter Nicole were taken to a hotel, and over the next 37 days they were moved from one hotel to another. During that time, she learned she was pregnant with her son Christian. “I felt confused,” she says. “I didn’t know what to do.” She says she did not realize that wives do not have to testify against their husbands and that she had the right to a lawyer. The lawyers also want to throw out Terry Nichols’s statements he made to the FBI during nine hours of questioning after he took his wife and young daughter to the Herington Public Safety Building (see 3:15 p.m. and After, April 21-22, 1995). Nichols was not adequately appraised of his rights, Tigar argues, and says that the information gleaned from Nichols during the interview was obtained through illegal coercion. All information obtained from Terry Nichols, Tigar argues, is “fruit of a poisoned tree” and must be thrown out. Nichols had agreed from the outset to speak to FBI agents without a lawyer present. [New York Times, 6/29/1996; Serrano, 1998, pp. 256-257] Judge Richard P. Matsch will not throw out the evidence (see August 14, 1996), saying that defense allegations of “coercion” and duplicity are false. [New York Times, 8/15/1996]