October 18, 1994: Oklahoma City Bombing Conspirators Buy Second Ton of Fertilizer for Bomb

Oklahoma City bombing conspirators Timothy McVeigh and Terry Nichols (see November 1991 - Summer 1992, September 13, 1994 and After, September 13, 1994, September 13, 1994, and 8:35 a.m. - 9:02 a.m. April 19, 1995) buy another ton of ammonium nitrate fertilizer from the Mid-Kansas Cooperative in McPherson, Kansas, under the alias “Mike Havens,” as they have done previously (see September 30, 1994), again paying $228.74 in cash and turning down the farmer’s tax exemption. FBI investigators will later unearth witnesses who believe they saw Nichols driving either a blue or brown pickup truck with a white camper shell; Nichols owns a blue pickup truck. One of those witnesses is manager Frederick Schlender Jr. Schlender will later recall Nichols’s truck, and call such a large purchase “somewhat unusual”; no customer, he will say, had ever bought so much fertilizer and paid cash for it. Schlender will say he operates the forklift to get the fertilizer into a trailer hitched to the back of the truck. [New York Times, 5/12/1995; PBS Frontline, 1/22/1996; Mickolus and Simmons, 6/1997, pp. 810; Washington Post, 12/24/1997; Serrano, 1998, pp. 93; Douglas O. Linder, 2001]